Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Let me begin today by simply saying it is so sad to watch this brutal conflict between two peoples who have each suffered so much throughout history, and for roughly 150 years now, have been fighting each other over who gets more land and more rights when they live on the land. The problem is there is no easy solution to the current conflict that respects both sides' aspirations and real historical grievances and victimizations and provide security from more October 7ths.

For Israelis, Hamas openly says they look forward to more of those, and for the Palestinians, no simple solution to immediate relief from the ongoing Israeli invasion, which has killed thousands in such a short time, as Israel responds to the Hamas attacks and torture and hostage-taking and ongoing threats and rejects calls for a ceasefire or even a pause, rejects even President Biden in that respect.

That's the urgent immediate life and death question, but there's also no easy solution to the Palestinians and the Israelis longer term desires, each for a secure state of their own given the power of the settlement movement driving Palestinians off the land at greater rates now, that on one side, and there's Hamas on the other. Both the settlement movement and Hamas rejecting a just and compassionate to all two-state solution. We could go through literally thousands of years of history in detail tracing how we got to this point from times before Christ, to the Holocaust, to the 56-year occupation. At least some of that is really worth doing, but not in this opening, I promise.

We could go down the litany of antisemitic and Islamophobic spikes in this country now from the Cornell student arrested for threatening to kill his Jewish classmates, to the person who actually did kill a six-year-old Palestinian American child in Illinois last month, to people who tear down photos of Israeli hostages, to the new bill introduced by Republican Congressman Ryan Zinke I was reading about. Have you heard this yet? A bill to revoke the visas of Palestinians who are in this country legally purely on the basis of their nationality or identity. It's like Trump's hateful Muslim ban reborn in the heart of the pen of Congressman Zinke, apparently. Maybe many of his constituents harbor those biases.

A CBS News poll finds 40% of Democrats say they have a lot of sympathy for both Israeli and Palestinian people, but only 15% of Republicans say they have a lot of sympathy for both, most only for Israelis. That question was asked about sympathy for the Palestinian people. It was put that way, not Hamas, and yet half the Republicans said they have little or no sympathy for Palestinian people. We could go through lots of things like those and get stuck forever on the unproductive question of which side is worse.

Let's talk to a global affairs journalist and opinion writer who I think has been publishing very thoughtful articles on Vox with openness to both peoples and a willingness to stick his neck out a little to propose some things that could come next. It's Zack Beauchamp, a senior correspondent at Vox, where his beat includes challenges to democracy in the United States and abroad. He was also the longtime host of Worldly, Vox's weekly podcast on foreign policy and international affairs.

Five years ago, he wrote an article comparing each side's version of a one-state solution. We'll talk about that. One of his recent articles is called What Israel should do now. Israel's current approach is clearly wrong. Here's a better way to fight Hamas and win, starts that article. Zack, thank you for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Zack Beauchamp: Oh, thank you for having me, Brian. I really appreciate the invitation.

Brian Lehrer: Near the beginning of your article on what Israel should do now, which is a few weeks old now, you acknowledge that Israel cannot do nothing. Governments have an obligation to protect their citizens, especially as they're still sifting through evidence of torture on October 7th among the 1,400 Israelis killed and hostages still languishing in Hamas captivity.

You accept that military action has to be part of the equation, but tomorrow is November 7th, one month since this all began, and the Palestinian death toll, by most media accounts, is now around 10,000. 10,000 people killed in just one month. You call the military activity indefensible. Again, that was even a few weeks ago. How do you begin the very fraught task of searching for a justifiable, but moral military response?

Zack Beauchamp: Well, I think the way to think about it is to start by identifying what are legitimate and feasible Israeli objectives in this conflict, because those are not necessarily overlapping categories. It's possible that Israel could, let's say, have a legitimate desire to wipe Hamas out, to destroy the group entirely, which I think they do, but that's also not really feasible for a lot of different reasons. The simplest one is that so long as there's one person waving a Hamas flag, Hamas still exists. The question is, how do you define destroying Hamas? The Israeli government has not come up with a very good justification or explanation as to what that means, what their endgame looks like.

I've been told repeatedly, and you can see this in the public coverage too, that the Israelis themselves don't know what they're trying to do, what they really want the end state to look like. To me, that is problem number one with the way that Israel's thinking about its ongoing military offensive in Gaza. They killed so many people. Many of them given the nature of where Hamas puts its weapons, which is in and of itself a war crime on Hamas' part, where their fighters are based, and so on. They are near families, near children. Entire families are being wiped out.

I don't think in most cases Israel is just trying to kill Palestinian civilians for the sake of killing Palestinian civilians. There's not really a lot of evidence of that. What they are doing is pursuing this maximalist goal of doing as much damage to Hamas as you can from the air without a ton of regard to the consequences for people who live there, which I think is very much indefensible, especially since the force is not being deployed in pursuit of a clear and feasible political objective.

The better step forward, and I've started to see evidence that the Biden administration is pushing on Israel to start doing this, is to define their endgame and limit the use of force as much as possible to narrowly pursue whatever this end goal is, defined in specific terms, with as few civilian casualties as possible. That's just not what they're doing right now.

Brian Lehrer: Well, you suggest in your article that what Israel should do is launch a targeted counter-terrorism operation aimed at Hamas leadership and the fighters directly involved in the October 7th attack, one that focuses on minimizing both civilian casualties and the scope of ground operations in Gaza. That is so much more easily said than done. How is that different from what Israel says it's doing, which they claim is only killing as many civilians as they need to get at that Hamas leadership who embed among civilians?

Zack Beauchamp: Basically the way to think about it is whether or not what you're attempting is regime change or not, I think is a way of describing it that is helpful and accessible to an American audience. That's functionally what Israel is doing right now. They have said their objective is the destruction of the Hamas regime in Gaza, basically, because Hamas was the ruling power in Gaza prior to this war. They want it to be over, for there to not be a Hamas government on their borders. To do that, you have to use force a lot more expansively, and just by necessity, you end up thinking about things in terms that justify a much wider scope of operations that kill many more civilians.

They're not just doing the bare minimum to attack Hamas high-value targets, the people who are in charge of, let's say, making bombs, planning attacks, organizing the high levels of the Hamas military wing, they're preparing for ground operations in the heart of Gaza's populated areas, in part, because what they want to do is root out the foundations of the Hamas government. That means you have to bomb in a much greater number of places and sometimes that means if you really are trying to soften the ground for your troops to minimize their own risk, that you're going to be a lot looser about how worried you are about civilians being in the area when you're hitting a target.

If Israel were to scale down its objectives and say, "Okay, our goal is to destroy Hamas," meaning destroy the people who specifically are responsible for the October 7th attack, but not to change the government in Gaza and work for a longer-term political solution that could address the threat of having a Hamas government on our border, which I agree from the Israeli point of view after October 7th is intolerable, that to me would be a much more defensible way of thinking about it that would involve, I think, fewer civilian casualties.

Brian Lehrer: We'll get to the political aspects as we go, but just stay on the military for now. I was interested in some articles over the weekend. A Wall Street Journal article started with the line, "The US and Israeli interests in the ongoing Middle East conflict are diverging in both the short and long term." The New York Times had one that Had the US asking Israel for very specific things if no pause per se to minimize Palestinian casualties like gathering more specific intelligence on the location of Hamas leaders before launching strikes, using smaller bombs to collapse the tunnels, and using Israel's ground troops to actually escort civilians away from military targets before striking them. Any reason to think that those things are doable or that Israel would agree to them?

Zack Beauchamp: That last one I don't think Israel will do, which I think is a testament to the problems with an extensive ground operation in Gaza in the first place. The Israeli military has a very high threshold for what they call force protection, which means how much risk you want to expose your soldiers to, versus how you balance their lives against civilians. If they're going to be doing a ground operation that puts their soldiers into say the heart of Gaza City and tries to keep them there for a while to root out Hamas and destroy its tunnels or whatever, they're not going to be escorting civilians out first.

Their objective is not going to be protecting the lives of the people there. It's going to be securing the territory and accomplishing whatever military tasks their commanders have ordered them to do and to try to-- they'll, I think in most cases, try to minimize civilian casualties, but the nature of that operation means they can't. They can't keep it to a number that would strike most people as morally acceptable. Moral failure so to speak is baked into the design of the operation.

When it comes to some of the other asks, I think those are somewhat more feasible. Smaller bombs in particular strikes me as something that the Israelis could do, especially if the US is willing to transfer additional weapons, precision-guided weapons, and smaller weapons that would be capable of doing that. The intelligence, the pause for intelligence gathering is something I recommended in my article, and I think the Israelis have been slower than I expected them to be, which would indicate that's exactly what they were doing.

I think they were quite concerned by the intelligence failures that went into October 7th to begin with. I'm not sure-- their troops are already in Gaza, from the maps that I've seen, they have a significant presence in the strip, which makes sense. It's not a territorially very big area, so once Israel entered, it wouldn't be very hard for them to get troops in there. I think it's a mix. It's interesting and I think it's good that the US administration is starting to put this kind of pressure on what the Israelis are doing because right now it strikes me their current strategy is not only morally indefensible, but likely self-defeating in strategic terms.

While the Biden administration I think was smart to support Israel in the immediate aftermath of October 7th, I think now they need to cash in the goodwill they bought there to try to pull the Israelis back from the brink that they're putting themselves in.

Brian Lehrer: Well, how much do you agree with the premise of The Wall Street Journal article that says US and Israeli interests are diverging in both the short term and the long term?

Zack Beauchamp: I think I am skeptical about how they define Israeli interests. When you say a country has an interest in X, do you mean that the government of that country has an interest in X or do you mean that if you look objectively, it would be good for the country for X to happen? I think that the article mostly uses it in the first sense, whereas I think in more objective terms, if you're not just looking at how the Netanyahu government defines Israel's interest, but what Israel's interests actually are, the US and Israel should be pretty closely aligned.

Both of them have a strong interest in Israel's security. Both of them have a strong interest in its international image not being irrevocably damaged. Both of them have a strong interest in minimizing Palestinian civilian suffering because if you inflict too much civilian suffering, that's going to increase support for Hamas. It'll show the Palestinians that you don't care about their lives and that violent resistance is the only defensible option for them to try to free themselves.

I'm not justifying that attitude. I'm merely saying as a descriptive matter of fact, that is what happens in this conflict. Violence begets violence, cycle of violence is a cliché, but it's true. It's really true in this context. In objective terms, the interests are well aligned. The problem is the Israeli government is not thinking objectively, and in a certain sense, it's not hard to fault them for that. Again, a lot of your listeners will probably remember what it was like in the United States after 9/11. It wasn't exactly a conducive environment for thoughtful policy debate.

Plus in Israel, you have elements of the government that are simply unreasonable, not just the far right extreme right really, members of the fringe of the coalition, but Netanyahu himself has become overwhelmingly preoccupied with staying out of jail. He is currently on trial on these very serious corruption charges and he has been thinking more about his own personal political self-interest than about what's good for Israel. That's not a subjective judgment, it's more or less a fact, well-established in reporting on the ground in Israel.

When you say the interests are diverging, I agree that Netanyahu's personal interests may be diverging from the United States', but Israel and the US I think are actually quite closely aligned in terms of how this should go. The question is really whether the Americans can get the Israeli leadership the responsible components of it to start seeing that.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we'll get to your calls eventually in this conversation with Zack Beauchamp who covers global affairs for Vox. I want to give out the phone number now so it's not just the people with the very strongest opinions who call in unsolicited as happens when we talk about the Middle East. Who wants to propose a long or short-term solution that respects the historical victimizations in a future with equal rights and security however you see that for Israelis and Palestinians alike? 212-433-WNYC. It's a big ask, I know, but the professionals aren't having any success, maybe the calling public can help. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text.

Zack, does the fact that you accept some kind of Israeli military action as appropriate mean that you are opposed to a ceasefire as those calling for a define that term, maybe as opposed to a pause to let humanitarian aid in and let people who want to leave out, President Biden at least makes a distinction between a ceasefire and a pause, but the demonstrations we're seeing around the world are calling for a ceasefire. Where are you on that scale?

Zack Beauchamp: I think pause is a much more reasonable ask at this point. I think that there have been some good interviews with Senator Bernie Sanders making the case for this distinction. Sanders has called for a pause but not a ceasefire. It's really credible coming from this very unimpeachable leftist credentials. He's speaking to his own people here and has gotten a lot of fire from it, but I think he's right. I think the reason why he's right is that Sanders has real insight into the Israeli mindset here into what happens to a country like that after an event like October 7th.

The answer, I can't tell you how many Israelis I've spoken to, even on the Israeli left, who have had this incredible sense of fear after the attacks. They didn't think anything like that was possible. Look, the reason that Israel exists as a state, it's number one priority is to protect Jews from the people who have been trying to kill them for as long as we, I'm speaking as a Jew here, as long as we have existed, pretty much. [unintelligible 00:18:42] is an exaggeration but not much.

It failed at that task. It allowed something that reminded many Israelis of Eastern European pogroms to happen on its own watch. They can't live in security when the country that's supposed to secure them from these things fails in those abject tasks. When a group that has promised, if you look at the statements of a Hamas spokesman, two, three, four more October 7th, as many as they need until they destroy Israel. Asking them to just unilaterally lay down arms without accomplishing some significant military degrading of Hamas is incentivizing Hamas to do this again.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and that goes to the next question I was going to ask, which is that traditionally, a ceasefire involves both parties in a war. There have been Israel-Hamas ceasefires before. I'm not sure it would mean that in this case because I guess Hamas wouldn't be a party to it in any real sense based on that statement that we've both cited now by a Hamas leader the other day, that they look forward to more October 7th, or do you think they might by releasing hostages perhaps or some other way? What they're saying doesn't sound consistent with the calls by pro-Palestinians for a cease-fire as we usually understand that term.

Zack Beauchamp: That's right. I think a lot of the discursive problem around this issue on the left, the activist left in particular, is confusing their vision of what the conflict is and how it should be resolved with Hamas's vision, which is very, very different. It's not a secular leftist group in the United States, it's not a secular leftist group in Europe, or even by Palestinian standards. They're extreme radical theocrats who run a brutal dictatorship in the Gaza Strip. Their goal is the destruction of Israel. If they were smarter and savvier about their PR, they would have tried to hide that in the aftermath of October 7th, but they weren't.

They had spokespeople out there who were saying what it appears they actually think. That has been clarifying for a lot of international observers. I think it helps understand why a pause, this terminology is weird, because normally you would call that a ceasefire, just a few days of respite before turning to war and the aftermath of a war, permanent to a peace treaty, but no one can imagine a peace treaty between Israel and Hamas, which is telling about the nature of this conflict. A pause in this case means a few days to deal with the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. I think that is a very reasonable demand because the humanitarian situation in Gaza is unbelievable.

Every report I hear from somebody who's in Gaza or has family who is in Gaza, each one had this unimaginable pile of human suffering, on top of all the horror just communicated by the sheer numbers. One statistic I saw today suggests that more civilians have been killed in less than a month since October 7th than in the entirety of Ukraine-Russia war, which has been ongoing since 2022. Again, that depends on whether certain statistics are accurate. You can quibble with that kind of thing.

The fact that we're even in that ballpark, given how horrible Russia's behavior has been in that war, is a testament to the scale of the crisis inside of Gaza, and the urgent need for Israel to allow more humanitarian aid in to end its policy of choking Gaza by limiting the flow of electricity and water and fuel into the strip. That kind of siege is just not morally defensible under, really, any feasible understanding of military ethics and international law. All of that is right.

You have to be able to hold in your head that at the same time as you think about the legitimate security needs of Israelis and the consequences of October 7th through Israeli life, not just the 1400 people killed and the over 200 who were captured by Hamas, but for an entire society to be threatened by a group that wants to do that, is vowing to do that again, and again and again right on their border, it's an intolerable threat. Something has to be done. Given the nature of the Hamas threat, part of the solution has to be military force. It can't be the only solution, but it needs to be part of it.

Brian Lehrer: Pulling out now to a longer-term political big picture, and listeners, be patient, we will get to some of your calls, you cite the work of Carnegie Mellon professor, Audrey Kurth Cronin, who studied 460, what I guess she calls terrorist groups, to figure out what caused their collapse. Did she write about anything that you think would most directly apply here?

Zack Beauchamp: One example that's helpful is something that doesn't really apply well here, because it illustrates the limits of military force, which is the Sri Lankan government's defeat of the Tamil Tiger militant group. That was done, accomplished primarily through military force, but it was also accomplished through unbelievable and sustained amounts of indiscriminate force, often targeting civilians, mass casualty operations by the government with no consequence for Tamil civilian life. It was very brutal and very ugly, and it took years.

One thing that Audrey told me on our phone call is Israel's uniquely ill-suited for that kind of operation being a democracy. The scale of force that it would need to do to wipe out Hamas in that fashion over the course of years, if you think what is happening now is bad, it could be so much worse. It could be worse even than the grinding, crushing long-term occupation of the West Bank, plus what's happening in Gaza right now. Truly that kind of solution is something that would shock the conscience, even of Israelis who are okay with the status quo.

If that's off the table, it means the only options that are left are political. There's a few different models. One of them is something that addresses the root cause of Hamas's support. Basically, some kind of agreement to create a Palestinian state. I think that's the most feasible one with the best chance of success for ultimately ending the incentive for Palestinians to support and tolerate this kind of violent activity. It's also very, very far off and it looks further off every day the more the violence happens.

In a world where the solution that is most likely to work, and is most feasible to implement is also the one that seems incredibly unlikely, it shows you, A, how intractable the situation has become, and B, why when we talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we're not talking about ideal or best or even good options, we're talking about bad versus less bad, in all cases. Now, the end game of two separate states for two separate peoples I think is a good one. That could end up producing actually good outcomes. To get there, it's going to be really, really, really, really hard.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a break here and when we come back, I want to ask you about reporting that you did five years ago, an article from 2018 of yours that I was reading on Vox that described each side's one-state solution, which we hear about these days more than any two-state solution, and also to talk about some terminology, some big words and phrases that get thrown around, genocide, ethnic cleansing, anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, from the river to the sea, and see if we can untangle some true meanings from political rhetoric in search of political advantage on any side that that rhetoric comes from.

We continue with Zack Beauchamp, who covers global affairs as a reporter and an opinion writer for Vox. We'll take some of your calls and texts. Stay with us. Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We continue now with Zack Beauchamp. By the way, if you're looking up his stuff, you would see his name and you would think, "Oh, that's Beauchamp," but it's pronounced Beauchamp. Right, Zack?

Zack Beauchamp: That's right. Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Zack Beauchamp, senior correspondent at Vox, where his beat includes challenges to democracy in the United States and abroad. He does reporting, he includes his opinions. He was also the longtime host of Worldly, Vox's weekly podcast on foreign policy and international affairs. Let me take a few of these callers because it's going to get us into the question of what kind of two-state solution, what kind of one-state solution each side is talking about.

Let's start with Saïd in the Bronx. Saïd, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in. Do I have the right line? Is this Saïd in the Bronx? Saïd once, Saïd twice. All right. I think we'll hear a similar thing from Ian in Bay Ridge. Ian, you're on WNYC. Do we have you? I think we have a phone problem.

Zack Beauchamp: Bad luck with the caller side.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Let's do this ourselves. Where do I want to start? Let's talk first about some terminology, as I said before the break we would do. I heard you on The New York Times Ezra Klein podcast, addressing the accusation by some these days, including some of our callers, that Israel is engaging in genocide. Now, I think of genocide as really trying to eradicate a gene pool like with the holocaust. You said that's not the right word for this, in your opinion.

I have to say, we're hearing it on the other side too. I saw both a Fox News headline this morning and a National Review headline this morning about Democrats pushing back on one member of Congress, Rashida Tlaib, what they call genocidal chants. That's the Right using the term genocide to accuse a Palestinian supporter just as we hear the Israelis accused of that. It refers to the chant Palestine will be free from the river to the sea. That big word is being used by both sides. As a global affairs reporter, I'm curious what your understanding is of the actual meaning of the word and how it applies or not in your opinion to any side in this conflict.

Zack Beauchamp: Genocide is one of those words that has a very particular meaning in international law and in the way we talk about the morality of war. It means the intentional extermination in part or in whole of an entire group defined in racial, religious, ethnic, so on terms. Basically, it means you're trying to wipe that group's existence out entirely. I see no evidence that's compelling just from the pattern of Israel's airstrikes, that that's what they're doing in Gaza. I see no evidence from the statements of Israeli leaders that what they are doing is currently genocidal.

There are people in the government who have said things that sound genocidal, and I want to draw this distinction here. Those people do not have power. They're not the people in charge of war policy, and they've been rebuked by other members of the government. That does not help the case, though, Israel's case. They're doing something really bad and it could end up being defined as ethnic cleansing if what they end up trying to do is to push large amounts of Gazans out of the Gaza Strip entirely. I think that's plausible.

Brian Lehrer: The West Bank. That's a story that is-

Zack Beauchamp: That's a separate conversation.

Brian Lehrer: -just starting to get more press, apparently, reportedly, by The Times and other news organizations, repeated acts of violence since October 7th at a heightened level by Israeli settlers at Palestinians who are not trying to harm them at the moment, in any way that's been reported, trying to basically intimidate them off the land. That could be considered, at least theoretically, as ethnic cleansing.

Zack Beauchamp: It could be, yes. I'm actually working on a story about this right now. I've heard some pretty harrowing stories from Palestinians that I know in the West Bank about what's happening there. Yes, I think those are certainly ethnic cleansing by settlers. The settlers' valid goal is ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. They want to take the land for themselves.

Either the Palestinians have to deal with being second-class citizens, that is to say apartheid, or they leave, which would be ethnic cleansing. That's to get to a question you alluded to earlier, that's the Israeli Rights' one-state endgame. Is they annex all the land, and then the Palestinians, except an apartheid status where they can't vote, because if they could vote, they could end the Jewish majority, or they leave and are ethnically cleansed from the land.

This was all laid out in the current Israeli finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, he wrote a 2017 paper called The Decisive Plan for Ending the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Israel's decisive plan is the actual quote. You can read it for yourself. He lays out a strategy that he has been implementing since getting certain powers to control West Bank operations when the government was formed in 2022, and then really started acting at the beginning of this year. He's been working towards de facto Israeli annexation of the West Bank in a variety of different ways.

That project, rather than being paused by the Gaza war, if you think it would, just to avoid further confrontation, potentially in flaming the West Bank, has accelerated in a lot of ways because the settlers are infuriated by what happened on October 7th, and they see themselves as having a green light, while the state is primarily distracted, to take the law into their own hands. That's a very, very, very, very disturbing development going on at the West Bank.

Brian Lehrer: Ethnic cleansing, arguably it's the implementation a day at a time of the Israeli Rights' one-state solution, but it's not genocide just to come full circle.

Zack Beauchamp: No. Correct. It's not. There are respected people who are making these claims that it potentially could amount to genocide. I think the more responsible ones are saying it's possible, there are warning signs that Israel might engage in genocide. I think that's true. I think it is very unlikely, basically because they're constrained to a significant degree by the United States from engaging in something that would qualify as a truly genocidal campaign. If the US is already uncomfortable with what's happening, escalation to genocide would lead to a disastrous rupture with an ally that they absolutely need for their warfighting capacities. I don't think that they, for that reason among others, wouldn't do that.

The case that they are actually currently engaging a genocide is not compelling to me, but that is not to be used as a way of minimizing what Israel is doing. It's not a defense of Israel to say that they are merely committing war crimes rather than genocide. It's just the thing about precision of terms, and it's this very uncomfortable thing where people get really hung up on linguistic definitions, as if what matters is whether you can call the murder of children genocide, or a war crime, as if that makes a material different from the fact that children are being killed.

It doesn't, really, but people get hung up on these terms basically to be able to see it as a win for your side. Somehow you can decisively vindicate the pro-Palestinian case, if you can argue that Israel is committing genocide, or you've defended Israel from its critics if you say it's not committing genocide. It all strikes me as this exercise that is missing the point, whereas the point is that there are hundreds of thousands of people, maybe even millions, who are suffering horribly right now, who are just in dire conditions, especially the two million roughly people who live in Gaza. We need to figure out what to do to help them right now, and to make sure that nothing like this ever happens again. That to me is the important question.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. I think we have our phone connectivity problem fixed. Let's try again for Saïd in the Bronx. Saïd, you're on WNYC, can you hear me now?

Saïd: Yes, I do.

Brian Lehrer: Hi, there.

Saïd: Thank you for taking my call. I thank you NPR for talking about this problem more openly than any other station and not being so partisan. I think that you cannot solve this problem without actually acknowledging what the root of the problem is, because everybody say that, "Oh, Jews, Muslims, Christians used to live in peace in Palestine just fine." The trouble started when one group claimed this land just for themselves and tried to push everybody out. As long as Israel carries that policy, there'll be never any peace. If Israel is really a democratic country, it should let the Palestinians go back to their home.

Now, they don't want to do this because they clearly say that letting the Palestinians back into their homes would make them majority again, and Israel would lose its Jewish character.

Brian Lehrer: Right, and you're talking about what's generally called the right of return, allowing the generations now of Palestinian refugees, many of whom became refugees around the time of the creation of the State of Israel in the late 1940s, to let all those descendants come back to the areas where they originally lived, and yes, that would certainly change the population balance in the country. Go ahead, Saïd, sorry.

Saïd: Yes, because if anybody supports return of Jews from anywhere in the world into Palestine, where they have never lived, they never even look like Abraham, they don't speak their language, and keep the Palestinians out from the land they have lived for millennia, it makes no sense, and anybody supports a free country everywhere else, but allows one group of people to practice their racial discrimination based on their religion is absurd.

Brian Lehrer: Do you think that, let's say, a Western-style pluralistic democracy, like we at least on paper have in this country, could work in that area without Jews as they would become the minority again, being discriminated against as they've been in almost every country throughout history that the Jews have lived in as a minority group?

Saïd: Absolutely, because I read a book on Jewish history by a writer-- I forgot his first name, but [unintelligible 00:38:46] even he admitted that if you impartially look at the history, Jews enjoyed the same freedom or more freedom in any Muslim countries than they ever enjoyed in Europe. You cannot just ignore the fact it was Romans who destroyed Jerusalem and sent the Jews in the diaspora, not Muslims.

Even now, until 1947, Jews live just fine in all the Arab countries, and if you talk about democracy, it's the UK and France who divided up the Middle East according to their wishes, and put their dictators and kings in its place, including the Turkish Saudi royal family, who were a bunch of [unintelligible 00:39:36] who actually do not live their lives according to Islamic rule.

Brian Lehrer: Saïd, I'm going to leave it there for time. I really appreciate your call. Zack, he articulates, I think fairly well, the pro-Palestinian version of a single-state solution. That's let's say the non overtly hostile version, which might really want to chase Jews into the sea, but this vision of a pluralistic democracy as a one-state solution, which maybe he romanticizes a little bit how good Jews had it as a minority under Muslim rule and the time of the Ottoman Empire or et cetera, but that's the vision. We were just talking about the Israeli Rights' version of a one-state solution. This is the pro-Palestinian version, at least in theory, of a just one-state solution. Correct?

Zack Beauchamp: That's right, but what I would emphasize is that it's the vision of some in the Palestinian side. It is not the universally agreed upon aspiration of the Palestinians as a collective group. If I recall from the last polling, more Palestinians supported a two-state solution than a one-state democratic solution. Also, I didn't see in the polling any results for a one-state solution that would not incorporate any elements of Israeli national identity or not provide equal rights to Jews. That is to say a one-state solution that is Palestine, but with no components of Israel and no protection for what would now be the Israeli Jewish minority, but that is Hamas's vision.

That's what they want. The question is, if you do try to move towards a single democratic state, I think there are lots and lots of problems to how to get there, but let's say you can pretend to imagine away all those problems, well, what do you do with the fact that people who believe the Hamas ideology still exists? Do you create a military that merges them with the IDF? It all exists in a world of happy abstraction divorced from the way the history has actually evolved with these two people.

I think your caller is right that there was a long history of Jewish coexistence with Muslims and happy coexistence in the Middle East, but it was not always the case that the point of the Zionist movement was to take all of the land and leave none for Palestinians. One of the most famous factoids brought up by the pro-Israel side that I think has some heft is Israelis accepted the UN partition plan that would've given Palestinians a state that was vastly larger than the West Bank and Gaza Strip actually, and the Arab sides rejected it.

Brian Lehrer: Originally, yes.

Zack Beauchamp: Which led to what Israelis called the War of Independence and Palestinians called the [unintelligible 00:42:42] their ethnic cleansing from a significant portion of the lands they inhabited beforehand. People endlessly debate the merits of those choices, of each of these individual choices and the things that go into them, but the reason that I actually don't have a lot of patience for the historical blame game is it gets us very far away from thinking through the solution to the problem right now. I think your caller was very thoughtful, in a lot of ways illustrated the problem.

When you start thinking about, well, what was happening, let's say in 10th-century Spain as it was ruled by the Muslim authorities, well, it doesn't tell you a lot about how Muslims and Jews relate to each other in the 21st century. You can't automatically snap back to something that was hundreds of years ago. There's so much history that's been built up and so much animosity on the two sides. They're trying to mash them together. God, the potential for civil war would be astronomically high, putting us into an even bloodier version of where we are right now. The way that one Israeli who I know, who's a peace activist, he really dedicated his life to try to preserve Palestinian rights.

He told me, it's funny, he's like, "A one-state solution is like a couple saying that they're having so many problems that instead of breaking up, they should get married." It doesn't make sense on face. It sounds good in theory, but the more that you think about it with the particularities of what would happen, the less it would seem like it would work.

Brian Lehrer: I was actually once in therapy, group therapy with a guy in the group who was having problems in his relationship, and he actually proposed, "If me and my girlfriend get married, then these problems will go away, right?" Everybody was like, "Oh, no." Anyway.

Zack Beauchamp: No. Exactly. It's just like that.

Brian Lehrer: Listener texts in response to the last caller, not surprising based on what the caller-- oh, no, no. Listener says, "Jews have been exiled from every single Muslim country they've ever lived in. That's ethnic cleansing. My family was all forced out of Iran for being Jews. Many of my friends' families were forced out of Iraq first." Again, not as a last word on that, but as part of the complexity, which is what we're trying to reflect here. One more call, Elena in Dunedin, Florida. You're on WNYC. Hi, Elena.

Elena: Hi. Thank you so much, Brian. Wow. Where do I start? First we have to talk about changing the media narrative. The expert general who was on PBS last week said they're playing right into the hands of pro-Hamas propaganda who want more Palestinian innocents to be killed, or they wouldn't be doing this.

You have to talk about what has unleashed the huge antisemitism that's now confused with anti-Israel sentiment in the world. You have to enlist the media to change this and not glorify these campus people who are talking about from the river to the sea, which is really where the genocide comes in. It does matter what language you use about numbers of children killed, which is all you ever see on the news. You were completely right. A negotiation needs both sides for a cease-fire. No one has mentioned at all releasing the hostages. They only talk about a cease-fire. There is a difference between a pause and a cease-fire.

To solve this, you also have to talk about the Arab countries. Why is it that they don't care at all about what happens to the innocent Palestinians and that they get shot if they want to oppose Hamas? One of the PBS news pieces last week was a general, a retired general saying this is Hamas propaganda for not calling out-- blaming Hamas for putting these civilians and shooting them if they want to evacuate from North to South Gaza.

On top of that, you've got-- I'm glad someone-- you did just have a text about the genocide in all the Arab countries and the exiles. You have to be careful what words you use. You're talking about bringing the whole world in on this. We have to pressure the Arab countries to take care of their own people. Who cares about the Palestinians? Not Hamas, that's for sure.

Brian Lehrer: Well, and there may be some generalizations, and Elena, we're going to leave it there with you for time there, and questions about the use of the term genocide in that call that we could get into, but we acknowledge where you're coming from, as with the other caller. I guess, and we're so far over time, Zack, we could go on with this conversation for hours and weeks and-

Zack Beauchamp: Of course.

Brian Lehrer: -millennia, unfortunately. To address one thing that Elena brought up with respect on the Palestinian side and the pro-Palestinian side, we hear from the river to the sea, Palestinians will be free. That's an anti-Zionist vision that can mean different things. One is pluralistic democracy with everyone having equal rights, at least as an abstract principle like we were talking about before, after the previous caller. Another is much more hostile to the Jewish people and really does become a form of antisemitism.

Zack Beauchamp: Brian--

Brian Lehrer: I wonder how you hear from the river to the sea and whether people can hear that or should hear that in your opinion in a complex way or multi-layered way.

Zack Beauchamp: I want to correct you there a little bit because you said from the river to the sea, Palestinians will be free. That's not actually the chant.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, it's Palestine will be free, right?

Zack Beauchamp: Which makes a material difference in this case, because if it's Palestinians will be free, well, there's all sorts of different arrangements that could be done to lead to the freedom for Palestinians, but if it's Palestine will be free from the river to the sea, that means all of the land, that's what from the river to the sea refers to. It's a call for the obliteration of Israel. Whether that means its replacement with a one-state democratic reality, which is possible. That's one thing. I think a lot of secular leftists in particular are saying that, but when a group like Hamas says it, that's not what it means. It means it will be Jew-free. It means that we will destroy what they call the Zionist entity and the people who support it.

It's a very context-dependent phrase. God, there are a few analogies that I've heard people use to the way that this term is being discussed, that a lot of the defenses of it are a little bit like saying the Confederate flag is heritage, not hate. I really like that as a comparison, not only because it troubles people, but also, it illustrates the problem with, yes, what you're saying, the phrase that you're saying, it may mean something specific to you, but the context from which it originated, from the extremes of the Palestinian groups that wanted to destroy Israel, it's one, and at least if not originated, it certainly was popularized by.

It has a meaning to the people who are on the receiving end of it that's really troubling. Which I see why people who are criticizing that chant are coming from, I really agree with them, I don't think it's a helpful slogan at all for pro-Palestinian protesters. At the same time, I really want to emphasize that being anti-Zionist is not the same thing as being anti-Semitic. Opposing the existence of basically some kind of ethnic state on principle, not just the Jewish one, but in general opposing the idea that there should be a state that gives certain privileges to certain groups and excludes others from having them, that's a perfectly consistent position that is not even remotely anti-Semitic.

There are ways in which anti-Zionism can become anti-Semitic, but it isn't theoretically or necessarily. There have been very prominent Jewish anti-Zionists. There's a huge debate about Zionism when Israel was being created or when there was the movement to create it during the Zionist movement. It wasn't universally agreed upon among Jews. This is so complicated and it's so full of moral nuance that everyone who wants to score an easy hit saying everyone who opposes Israel is anti-Semite or everyone who supports Israel wants the murder of Palestinian children, no, it's not like that.

I really encourage people to stop thinking in terms of being pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian. There's an extraordinary line in an interview with Der Spiegel, which is a German outlet with an Israeli and Palestinian friends, these two friends, both of their children were killed by the other side, and they've since become friends and talked to each other. Steven Spielberg now owns the rights to their film depiction, and in this new interview, the Israeli half, Rami Elhanan, is asked about people defining themselves as being completely behind the Israelis, completely behind the Palestinians.

He says, "This is not a football game where you need to embrace your team and be against the other team. We always say don't be pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian, be pro-peace, be against injustice. What's happening today is a bloodbath, an orgy of inhumanity in all its ugly forms. It really doesn't matter if a terrorist cuts the head off a baby or a pilot drops a one-ton bomb on a house full of civilians, the outcome is the same." That this man, whose daughter, his young daughter was murdered by terrorists is capable of this degree of moral perspective, this astonishing degree of moral universality, that's the standard I want to hold the rest of us to as well.

Brian Lehrer: Well, that's a good place to end. We're not going to solve the Middle East today, obviously, but hopefully, folks, we had a meaningful conversation as we've been trying to do on this show that acknowledges current realities and severe imbalances of power and suffering, but also respects both peoples who feel so aggrieved by actions in the name of the other. Zack Beauchamp from Vox, thank you very much for trying to do that kind of thing. We should come back and talk about how to revive the idea of a two-state solution that's acceptable to everybody that seems so far away right now. Thank you for this and thank you for your writing on Vox.

Zack Beauchamp: Thank you, Brian. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk and I'd love to talk again about that. It's a really important topic.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC, we turn the page. Much more to come.

 

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