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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, again, everyone. Back with us now, David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker and host of The New Yorker Radio Hour, heard Saturday and Sunday on WNYC and public radio stations around the country. He's recently back from an intense reporting trip to Israel, which he's been covering for many years.

His article is called Israel's Zones of Denial. Amid national euphoria over the bombing of Iran and largely ignored devastation in Gaza, a question lurks: What is the country becoming? David, thanks as always for coming on. I don't think it's ever been to talk about the Middle East before, despite your long history covering it. It's usually more about domestic US Politics, which is usually more of our lane here, not international. Can you give our listeners a bit of your background on covering this?

David Remnick: I'd be happy to. I covered Moscow. I lived in Moscow for four years in the late '80s and early '90s. When I got to The New Yorker, I started making trips to Israel and Palestine with some frequency. Over the last, God, at least 25 years, I've been writing reporting pieces from there. I've never been posted there, but I've been there many, many times. It's a subject that's very close to me and very painful at the moment.

Brian Lehrer: I see you first profiled Benjamin Netanyahu in 1998.

David Remnick: That's right. In fact, Netanyahu obviously won't talk to me anymore after that profile. That profile was big news in Israel because I spoke at length with him and with Netanyahu's father and got a very deep sense of that family and their politics. I'm afraid that a lot of it has come to fruition now in the most tragic way.

Brian Lehrer: To the part of your subhead, citing the quote, largely ignored devastation in Gaza, you write in the article, "The horrific scale of suffering is nearly invisible in the Israeli media." Can you give us the lay of the land on that?

David Remnick: Sure. This has been going on now for the better part of two years. Well, it's been going on for a century, but beginning with the October 7th massacre attack and then the war that Israel has prosecuted in Gaza in the many, many months since. Needless to say, all the newspapers, all the television stations, and social media have been filled with all kinds of political news and news about hostages, and all of it legitimate. What's largely missing, and that may be changing at the moment, but what's largely been missing all these many months is a portrayal of Palestinian suffering within Gaza, which, of course, has been astonishing and on a grand scale. There are exceptions.

The newspaper Haaretz has covered this intensely and, to my mind, quite well for a long time. I have to say that because it's considered a left-wing paper, its influence in Israel has diminished as the country has moved to the right. Channel 12, which is the most watched television station, Palestinian suffering has been largely minimized, I have to say, tragically. Channel 14, which is the pro-Netanyahu, very, very right-wing TV station, is 10 times worse.

There are indications in the last few days that the anchor, Yonit Levi, on Channel 12, has shown signs of being more frank about this. Overall, the imagery of Palestinian suffering, which we see all the time, maybe not enough in some people's minds, but we do see it quite frequently, is not in the center of the consciousness of the Israeli public. When I was there, the so-called 12-Day War, having to do with Iran, had just concluded, and there was a sense, really, of "Let's concentrate on this victory and let's look away even more intensely from Gaza."

Brian Lehrer: You wrote that to look away as an act of both will and denialism. How much is that the source of your article's headline, Israel's Zones of Denial?

David Remnick: Well, it's at the center of it. You know, Israel is not unique in this sense. I think that if we're being critical of ourselves, and we always should be, you would say that during Vietnam, Iran, Afghanistan, for at least the most part, the suffering of the Vietnamese in the north or people in Iraq was not always at the center of our attention, and therefore it was easily overlooked. There was always the excuse of distance, however disgusting, but there is that. It's thousands and thousands of miles away. It's a cliche, and yet it can't be overstated how intimate the geography of this conflict is. Imagine sitting in Manhattan, imagine sitting in Queens, and this calamity was going on in Central New Jersey.

It's that far away. If you live in southern Israel, it's obviously a lot closer. I was having a conversation with Etgar Keret, who's a wonderful writer, a man of the left, and saying, people are eating ice cream cones on the Mediterranean beaches in Israel, and you can hear the horror going on in Gaza in terms of bombs and all the rest, depending on where you're sitting. There is no distance. It is right there. Yet, unless you are glued to social media and your algorithm is such that it's clued into what's going on in Gaza, there's a kind of willful ignorance on a lot of people.

Brian Lehrer: I'm glad you mentioned that one writer because I wanted to ask you anyway about the fact that part of your article is about the role of Israeli writers generally in times of crisis, "at the moral center of the nation," as you put it.

David Remnick: That's ancient history, I'm afraid. What I was referring to there is that there were voices in Israel of moral weight at the conclusion of the '67 war. The poet Natan Alterman gathered some poets and writers together, and they helped generate the Greater Israel Movement, which, of course, was pro-settler and-- They hadn't settled yet, but hanging on in the West Bank and Gaza.

Brian Lehrer: [unintelligible 00:08:05] annexing the West Bank. Right. No two-state solution.

David Remnick: At the same time, a young veteran, a very young novelist, named Amos Oz, wrote in a newspaper, now defunct, called Davar, basically saying that, "We have not conquered the West Bank, we now occupy it. This is going to be a tragedy if we continue to be an occupying power in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem as well." This emits an incredible euphoria of 1967, the Six-Day War.

His voice was a lonely voice. It became more prominent as time went by. You could include in that group of liberal writers, David Grossman, who's still with us, thankfully, or A. B. Yehoshua, who died some years ago. The influence of liberal voices like that, the influence of a liberal newspaper like Haaretz or the human rights organization B'Tselem is, I'm afraid, in the minds of most Israelis, marginal or disdained.

Brian Lehrer: Let me go one more step with you on Amos Oz and David Grossman and things they have written because I thought they were so profound and descriptive of the situation to this day in many ways. I'm curious if that's your impression, having just been there. The Oz quote from your article was that the Middle East would become an unending "battleground of two peoples, both fighting a fundamentally just war."

The one from Grossman, who has said since October 7th, on the one hand, that only when it comes to Israel is it acceptable to publicly demand the elimination of the state. He has also continued to say, as you say he has said for decades, that Israel has collective guilt, "for the thousands of children we have killed." Could you talk about what those two quotes represent, especially this idea of two peoples permanently fighting a fundamentally just war against each other, quoting Amos Oz?

David Remnick: Well, I think almost used to say that the problem with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is there's too much religion, too much passion, and too little geography. That Zionism, in his understanding, liberal Zionism was a guarantor. The creation of the State of Israel, better to say, was intended to provide for the first time in thousands of years, safety and liberty for a people that had been persecuted and wandering for half of forever, for 2000 years.

The Palestinians, of course, think in large measure, "Well, that's nice, but this is our land. We've been here for thousands of years as well." Believe me, I can almost hear your various listeners preparing counterarguments to all these sides because of the simplification I've just given. I totally understand that. However, I think that Amos Oz was saying that the only solution to this was a kind of separation, a two-state solution, which we've been talking about now for decades, and the prospects of which have never been so grim.

Brian Lehrer: That Amos Oz idea is a hard idea to sell. You were just indicating that the Jews have been persecuted everywhere for 2,000 years. Maybe one way to put it is they deserve a carve out a country where they were among the indigenous people originally, or there will be more holocausts and inquisitions, and pogroms.

David Remnick: I think it's fair to say that antisemitism does not require the calamity in Gaza. Antisemitism has been a pretty steady presence throughout history.

Brian Lehrer: At the same time, as the existence of that country, which may be a fair notion of a reparation, makes second-class citizens or worse among the people they moved in and put an ethno-national estate over. What happens is, and we certainly get this on our phones all the time, people tend to adamantly choose upsides, arguably, over one version of that morality or another.

David Remnick: Look, I understand the flaws of a two-state solution; however, I don't think Amos Oz saw a better idea. I don't think anybody's conceived of a better idea. There's a lot of talk now about a one-state solution, and they come from different directions. A one-state solution can mean the elimination of the Palestinians from the West Bank, the annexation, or the actual expulsion of Palestinians. That's one form of a one-state solution. Some people on the left think of a one-state solution in which everybody is a citizen from the river to the sea, to use that freighted phrase.

The disadvantages of that, to say the least, are also very obvious. That these are two peoples, that the odds of them living together in harmony and democracy and prosperity, one thinks of Bosnia, it's just impossible for most people to imagine. The tragedy is that there have been moments, historically, diplomatically, and so on, where there was a much greater chance at a formation of a two-state solution. It was far from perfect. People's motives were complicated. There's still debate over what happened at, say, Camp David in 2000 and under Ehud Olmert some years later, who screwed up, what opportunity, who walked away from what.

We can debate this, and I've heard, on your show, people debating it ad nauseam, and I totally understand it. Where we are now, it should be understood, is so horrific that the hardening and dominance of the right in Israel, the fracturing of that society, the 60,000 dead Palestinians in Gaza, hunger, trauma, that will have repercussions for generations. At the same time, in the West Bank, you see more and more violence, and it's countenanced by the government in Israel. The ramifications of all of this will not end when, God willing, this war stops. It should have stopped a long time ago.

Brian Lehrer: David Remnick is with us, editor of The New Yorker and host of The New Yorker Radio Hour. His extensive new article in The New Yorker is Israel's Zones of Denial. I feel like I spent half of yesterday reading your article. It's so long, but it was worth it.

David Remnick: I hope you were in an air-conditioned room.

Brian Lehrer: [laughs] I was. We can take some phone calls at 212-433-WNYC. Some calls or texts. 212-433-9692. To continue on this tough stuff, one of the most important and contentious questions is how much Israel is killing civilians on purpose for no other military reason than to terrorize or reduce the population. You write that "Often enough, the targets surpass understanding," like dropping a 500-pound bomb on a seaside cafe where more than 40 people were killed, including two prominent athletes and a well-known photojournalist. Israel, as you know, usually says Hamas fighters were perceived to be at the locations. What do you make of either that bombing in particular, since you wrote about it, or the pattern of targets that you wrote surpass understanding?

David Remnick: It's no question that in Gaza there are people that are aligned with Hamas to this day, that you would consider Hamas fighters or guerrilla fighters at this point. At what point does this end? In the history of warfare, civilians die, there's no question. We are at this point, and I more than understand. Somebody will raise quickly the fact that Hamas, which is an unspeakable organization to my mind, and built a landscape of military outposts and tunnels and embedded military in with civilian housing.

I understand all that. At what point do you stop killing people at such enormous rates? 18,000 children, at the very least, have been killed. Many of them, less than a year old. How is it possible that the ramifications of that human and politically and diplomatically aren't 10 times worse, and stopping this many, many months ago? I'm sure the IDF will have all kinds of reasons. "Soldier X or leader Y was near that cafe, and it's very tragic that the 40 people were killed, but that's what happens in war." To my mind, that is an absolutely immoral position to take, and it has been for a long, long time.

Brian Lehrer: I want to come back to the words that are used and debated to describe the military operation in Gaza. Obviously, there's the debate over the word genocide. There's the former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, now writing that explosive op ed recently, saying his country is committing war crimes. You quote the former Netanyahu Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon, calling it ethnic cleansing.

Do these terms matter, in your opinion? I often think the debate over the word genocide becomes a distraction for the sake of either vilifying or defending Israel as much as possible, conceptually, but then it's a distraction from the imperative to find a way to a ceasefire and stop the mass killing, no matter what you call it. How important do you think the debate over these terms is?

David Remnick: Well, one of the aspects of its importance is it gives you a sense of, first of all, look at who's using these words. This is not some extremist from Mars saying this. Honest Palestinians have been giving these names to what's been going on for a while. Now you're hearing a Holocaust scholar like Omer Bartov describe what's happening in genocidal terms. You're hearing human rights groups not only internationally, but in Israel, like B'Tselem describing this in those terms.

Brian Lehrer: That's a new thing this week that people may not have heard too. Israeli human rights groups, for the first time, have used the word genocide. According to the AP, I read their story on this, they are considered relatively fringy human rights groups in Israel, and yet at the same time--

David Remnick: Well, they're left wing, but at the same time, these are honest people.

Brian Lehrer: The AP also acknowledges that these groups coming out with that word shatters a taboo.

David Remnick: Well, look, who is going to say this that will convince people on the far right in Israel or here? Does it matter? I just don't know. Meanwhile, every single day, dozens of people are being killed. Every single day, people trying to get aid. The way this aid, the humanitarian aid system, has been constructed is a recipe for disaster. Everybody in international aid bureaucracy says this is just beyond out of control.

When I was in Israel, Haaretz published a piece, I think a now pretty well-known piece, describing Israeli soldiers shooting at Palestinians who are coming to get food and water. The sources for this piece were not "pick your vilified source." The sources for this piece were Israeli officers and soldiers, and reservists.

Brian Lehrer: That investigative report in Haaretz, as you say, quoted Israeli officers and soldiers who said Israeli soldiers stationed at food distribution sites had been ordered to shoot at Palestinians "to drive them away or disperse them, even though it was clear they posed no threat."

David Remnick: Netanyahu and his defense minister called this piece a blood libel and changed the subject, similarly to the other day, when posed with this business of hunger and starvation, which every health source in Gaza is reporting on, people that are both in the health bureaucracy in Gaza or foreigners who are working there. Netanyahu got up in front of a Christian group and said it's nonsense and just denies it.

Brian Lehrer: We'll play these two little clips that probably a lot of people have heard. We're going to play the Netanyahu clip first that you were just referring to. Here he is the other day.

Netanyahu: There is no policy of starvation in Gaza, and there is no starvation in Gaza.

Brian Lehrer: Then President Trump made news on Monday, saying this.

President Trump: We can save a lot of people. I mean, some of those kids are-- That's real starvation stuff. I see it. You can't fake that.

Brian Lehrer: David, journalistic credit to you because no other media source that I've seen has corroborated the Haaretz story about the shooting of civilians looking for food who posed no threat until you, when you wrote that a former security official you spoke to did not dispute the substance of the Haaretz report.

David Remnick: Look, people in the security establishment, and this has been going on for years, unfortunately, know, at firsthand, how untenable, how explosive occupation is and what it leads to. How it leads to not only the deaths and suffering of Palestinians, but the deaths of Israeli soldiers and the coarsening and the degradation of Israeli society. The answer to every question can't just be Benjamin Netanyahu.

We look at Donald Trump. Donald Trump finally, yesterday, recognized that there's hunger because he saw some pictures, God forbid, he reads some intelligence reports, or even the newspaper. This is the same Donald Trump who, quite a while back, got up, and thinking off the top of his head, so it would seem, basically said, "It wouldn't be such a great idea if all the Palestinians somehow left Gaza and we built lovely hotels along the beach there." This mattered. His words mattered.

It gave space for the Israeli government to start thinking in terms of forcing more and more people into small corners of Gaza or out of Gaza entirely. Now, I should also add that the Gaza Strip, which is not a very large piece of land, obviously, whole cities have been flattened, eliminated. That includes hospitals, schools, mosques. Many, many, many people are living in tents hand-to-mouth. When I say hand-to-mouth, what passes for food now, if they can manage it, is untenable.

Brian Lehrer: David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker. His new piece is called Israel's Zones of Denial. A listener writes, "Can David address the responsibility that Palestinians bear for the lack of two states living in peace next to each other?" David, I never want to overlook whatever role Hamas is actually playing in Gaza. You wrote in your article that the leader of Hamas on October 7th, Yahya Sinwar, who has since been killed in this war, had said, "We are ready to sacrifice 20,000, 30,000, 100,000."

You wrote that Sinwar knew October 7th could bring a war with horrifying casualties. You wrote that he had helped construct a militarized landscape of tunnels and outposts embedded in schools, homes, hospitals, and UN sites. "The suffering of Palestinian civilians wasn't merely a foreseeable consequence. It was an integral part of the strategy." Your words, an integral part of the strategy. Can you take us further into that?

David Remnick: I think it is one of the perversities. I should say to the reader, it's a totally legitimate question. A lot of it is answered in a previous piece I wrote, which was a profile of Yahya Sinwar, who was the leader of Gaza, who was instrumental in planning October 7th and also tried to get Hezbollah and Iran to participate more fully than they ended up doing in that attack. I have no illusions about Hamas. I've been to Gaza. I've interviewed leaders of Hamas, none of whom are alive any longer. I have no illusions about them ideologically; that, here and there, they may have offered a truce or a retreat, but that's purely tactical.

Strategically, what's stated in their original charter, which is a deeply anti-Semitic document, is that the state of Israel is untenable on those lands. I have no illusions about Hamas, but more than one thing can be true at a time. Part of the problem with the conversation. I wrote about Russia for years. I would write pieces for The New Yorker, earlier for the Washington Post, and 9 times out of 10, the reaction I would get is basically that that's really interesting.

On this subject, people have fierce opinions, points of views, and narratives. It's not always easy because of who we are and our own backgrounds and our own attachments to handle thinking painful realities in more than one at a time. I sympathize with that.

Brian Lehrer: Is what you see a pact of mutual assured destruction of Palestinian life? Like Israel wants to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza, thinking they deserve it, or that that will eliminate the threat of more October 7th coming from there. Hamas thinks it's the path to global revulsion with Israel and therefore the eventual abolition of Israel as a Jewish state. Neither leadership believes in a two-state solution. Despite being mortal enemies, they both see a strategic reason for the civilian horrors to continue to take place in Gaza. Is it that mutually perverse?

David Remnick: It's potentially that tragic, yes, of course. A lot depends on politics. Just as Americans say that this is the most important election of our time, and if you don't vote for so and so, you'll get so and so, and it'll be horrible as we're now experiencing, that's very much the case. If the worst tendencies in Israeli politics and Palestinian politics prevail, that's precisely what you get. That's precisely what you get. I am not saying that every Israeli is Itamar Ben Gvir or Smotrich or even Netanyahu.

Brian Lehrer: Who really are for a full expulsion, those first two you mentioned.

David Remnick: They absolutely do. They make no bones about it.

Brian Lehrer: There was, though, another Haaretz article that I read with a poll that found 82% of Israelis support the idea of expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza. Did you see that?

David Remnick: I did see that. Quite frankly, I don't know about the exactitude of that poll. I couldn't speak to it because, also, you have polls that want to get rid of Netanyahu. 70% of the country wants to get rid of Netanyahu.

Brian Lehrer: I apologize for breaking in. You were making a larger point.

David Remnick: Perhaps the most lasting image I'll take away from-- I've taken four trips since October 7th, and at the end of my first trip there, I was at a funeral. It was obviously within a week of October 7th. There were just an enormous number of funerals. There was a funeral taking place in southern Israel, not far from Gaza, of a family, three children, and the parents. They were all buried side by side. Who among us has experienced grief like that? People all came from this Kibbutz, Kfar Aza, and they watched. These are very intimate communities, so everybody knows everybody. I watched three children and their parents who had been found shot together in an embrace, a collective embrace.

They knew they were about to be killed, buried. Five wooden coffins go into the ground. Yet, at the same time, I was listening to the weeping, and I've never heard anything like it. The war had begun just a few miles away. The bombing had begun. What would come clear very, very soon is that many, many families, Palestinian families, whole families would be killed.

They, too, have intimate neighbors. They, too, have families. These are not Hamas. These are not soldiers. We have a writer that writes for us, a Palestinian writer, poet, Mosab Abu Toha. I don't think he'd mind me sharing this, but he sends me constant texts of whole families, relatives of his, friends of his, lost. We lose one person in our lives, and we are devastated. It changes our lives forever as it should. This is the level of tragedy. The level of intimacy, I think, is beyond imagining.

Brian Lehrer: Let me get one more listener in for you here. Maxine in Manhattan, you're on WNYC with David Remnick. Hi

Maxine: Thank you, Brian. David, I'm so sad to hear your conclusions and so aware of how correct they are. This is a threaten of a generation lost, not only on the Palestinian side, but certainly on the Israeli side. The young soldiers, the reservists, those whose funerals you did and didn't attend. Right now, more than 1500 people killed in Syria because they're Druze, for the same reason Hamas killed people in Israel, because they're Jews. Tzipi Livni, whose politics perhaps should have been the dominant politics, strongly believed in a democratic and Jewish state, emphasizing both a democratic state and a Jewish state.

That cannot be accomplished except by a two-state solution. In addition to accomplishing a two-state solution, you have to accomplish a difference in philosophy and education, in acceptance of the shared indigenous nature of our two peoples. The one thing you haven't mentioned in all of this conversation today is the hostages. The 20 we hope are alive, whatever's left of them, the kids who were taken from tanks, who have been two years in conditions that no one can even imagine. Where are they? Why is there not a quid pro quo [unintelligible 00:35:46]

David Remnick: I can't imagine the pain of the parents and the relatives and the friends of those hostages, much less the suffering of the hostages themselves. It is hard in any 15-minute conversation to make every point, so I'm glad you made that point because I join you in that. In fact, one of the pieces I wrote was called Hostages. I remember arriving in Israel and within 15 minutes, I was in front of the Kirya, the Defense Department building in downtown Tel Aviv, and there was a man sitting with a sign saying, "My family is hostage in Gaza." Three children and his wife. Now, luckily for him, his family was returned in that first hostage exchange a month after the war began.

I don't doubt that Joe Biden made mistakes in his time in office regarding this issue, but I do remember very, very distinctly, and maybe we can end on this. I do remember very distinctly Joe Biden did something unprecedented when October 7th happened. He got in Air Force One and he came directly to Israel. He did two things at once. He put his arms around Netanyahu, which I think was hard for some people to see, but he did it out of a sense of fellow feeling.

At the same time, he gave a speech and he said, "Don't act out of rage. The United States has acted out of rage in its recent history, and that came to a bad end." I think he was making a very direct reference there to Iraq, in particular, following 9/11. That counsel, that advice, was absolutely ignored by the Israeli government. Acting out of rage has led us here and to these funerals and to these hostages, to this grief and to this disaster.

Brian Lehrer: David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, host of The New Yorker Radio Hour. His new deeply reported piece is called Israel's Zones of Denial. Amid national euphoria over the bombing of Iran and largely ignored devastation in Gaza, a question lurks: What's the country becoming? David, thank you for sharing it with us.

David Remnick: It's good to talk to you, Brian.

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