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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Today on the show, if it's Wednesday, our leader, Eric Adams, reporter, Liz Kim, will join us with excerpts and analysis from the mayor's weekly Tuesday news conference. Why do we do this? It's the only day each week that he allows journalists to ask questions on topics of their choice. One major focus today will be the mayor's new rules for when buses carrying asylum seekers from Texas may arrive in the city, and the way Texas governor Greg Abbott is flaunting those rules by having buses drop people just outside the city, mostly in Secaucus, and having them take the train into town, and Liz will take your calls.

Also today, some recent stories about artificial intelligence. Did you know that the New York Times last week filed a lawsuit against the makers of ChatGPT, accusing them of allowing its AI robots to plagiarize from The Times? Did you know that Michael Cohen, the former Trump attorney, now says he inadvertently filed false statements in a legal brief because the falsehoods were generated by AI and he didn't realize it? I didn't know lawyers use robots to write official legal filings, and Europe has jumped ahead of the United States with a new set of rules for how AI can and cannot be used.

We'll talk about those in what I think will be a very interesting AI catch-up segment made by me and other humans later in the show, and we'll invite your calls today on your plans this month or experiences in past years with a dry January abstention from alcohol. Did Dry January change your relationship with drinking overall? All that's coming up, and we start here.

Fred Kaplan, military and global affairs columnist for Slate, is here now to help us understand the change in Israel's approach to the war in Gaza and whether it will mean fewer civilian casualties, as the US has been pressing Israel for, and any more or less effectiveness in protecting Israel from future attacks by Hamas, which they pledged to try to carry out. This is happening even as the killing of a Hamas leader inside Lebanon is sparking fears that the Israel-Lebanon border might become a more active war zone, and we're not hearing much about the Israeli hostages in recent days, are we?

We'll also talk big picture about what comes next. Is this whole period since October leading to a revival of meaningful two-state solution talks or leading to something else? Part of this century-old conflict is about two peoples who can't figure out how to live together and can't figure out how to live apart. Fred Kaplan's column in Slate is called War Stories, and he's the author of many books, including his most recent, The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War. Fred, always good to have you. Welcome back to WNYC.

Fred: Sure, anytime.

Brian Lehrer: Let me read for you and our listeners part of a story from the Capitol Hill news organization The Hill out this morning and ask for your take. It says, "Israel is carrying out a significant shift in its military operation in the Gaza Strip, nearly three months into its war to defeat Hamas, as the Biden administration presses Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government to scale down its campaign." It says, "The Israeli Defense Forces announced this week its decision to withdraw and rotate out military units, reportedly amounting to five brigades or several thousand troops."

It says, "The move follows Israel's statements in recent weeks that it would move to a lower intensity phase of the conflict focused on targeted raids compared with a sweeping aerial and ground assault aimed at destroying Hamas military tunnels, rocket launchers, weapons caches, and command posts." That was all from The Hill, just published this morning. Fred, I'd like to ask you to explain as best you can that term, lower intensity. We've heard a lot from Biden administration officials recently. Can you begin to explain what lower intensity means and how that could translate into protecting civilians more?

Fred: I'll say what it could mean. We'll see what it actually does mean. Right now Israel has dropped, the estimate is about 2,000 bombs, and about 500 of those are 2,000-pound bombs, which are among the largest conventional bombs. They have what's called a lethal radius of about 400 yards. In other words, if you're standing 400 yards from a bomb like that, when it goes off, you're almost certainly going to be killed by it. Some of these bombs also burrow very deep, up to 20 feet deep, to get tunnels or something like that, and they can spew out the concrete or the steel rods or whatever by 1,200 feet.

In a place like Gaza, which has enormous population density, that can kill a lot of people. The figure is that about 20,000 people have died. Probably a quarter of those are not civilians, they're Hamas fighters, but still, 15,000, that's an extraordinary number of people. In two years of the Russia-Ukraine war, about 10,000 Ukrainian civilians have died, compared with 20,000 or 15,000 Gazan civilians in two months of fighting. Some of this has to do with the density of Gaza compared with the density of Ukraine, with the vulnerability of a lot of the buildings in Gaza, which collapse upon being hit compared with Ukraine, and also just the nature of the fight.

Israel has been bombing anything that looks like it might be a target used by Hamas, and this includes a lot of civilian structures where Hamas bases its fighters, its rocket launchers, its command sites. They've done this with very little sensitivity to civilians other than to warn them to evacuate ahead of time, which, in fairness, is a lot more than a lot of other countries do, but still, some of them don't get out in time. What they're going to do now, according to these reports, is to maybe use smaller bombs. There are 250 or 500-pound bombs that can have the same effect if they're accurate bombs. The lethal radius would be much-- It'd be more like 100 yards or even 50 yards instead of 400 yards.

They also, and this is something that's been suggested, send in more special operations on the ground instead of bombing from the air. Now, this will take longer. It might also lead to more casualties among Israeli soldiers, about 500 of whom have died in the fighting so far. That's a risk. You talk to experts in the law of war or military ethics or so forth, nobody has established a ratio for this, but you have to be willing to sacrifice a few more of your own soldiers in order to stop killing thousands of civilians who have no stake in the fight. Let me give you an example if I can just go on for one more minute.

Brian Lehrer: Please.

Fred: In the Afghanistan war, the US Afghanistan war, for a while, if an American soldier saw a sniper up on the roof of an apartment building, the inclination would be just to blow up the apartment building. When General McChrystal became the commanding general, and he placed much more emphasis on trying to avoid civilian casualties, he changed the rules of operation and said, "Okay, no, no, we have to send a team into the building or we have to send it to a roof next door."

In other words, to send a soldier on the ground. That might mean a couple of extra American soldiers getting killed, but that's the nature of war, and we need to do that instead of becoming liable for hundreds or even thousands of additional civilian casualties.

This is not without cost, and it might explain why, at least in the initial part of the war, Israel would have been more reluctant to do that, but now, probably when they have a better grasp of the battlefield, of where some of the Hamas leaders that they really want to go after, where they are, what the nature of the tunnels, which they've been able to discover and to probe, they have a better sense of what the battlefield looks like. Therefore, they can afford to make more precise, tailored, surgical strikes instead of just bombing an entire area where Hamas activity is going on.

Brian Lehrer: I see people are calling in on this, so let me make sure everybody has the phone number as we talk about best practices and what's actually happening in the war on Gaza to protect more civilians now. At least Israel says that's what it's going to do to de-intensify the war, which the Biden administration has been pushing them to do. Your questions or comments for Fred Kaplan, military affairs columnist for Slate, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text. We'll also get into early thoughts on what happens after this war or the immediate war in Gaza.

Fred, do you see evidence that the US is influencing Israeli military strategy now in the way you were just describing it? Previously, there had been words from Biden and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and others, but no accountability, if that's the right word, in terms of withdrawal of US aid or weapons or anything like that, leaving the US ineffectual even as our money and weapons are part of the Israeli war effort. Does that seem to have changed based on this announced change in strategy, US influence?

Fred: I think Biden's influence has been there from the beginning. Not from the very beginning, but from shortly after the beginning, since his first trip. I don't think you would have seen Israel opening up any humanitarian corridors. I don't think you would have seen the first deal where hostages were traded for prisoners. I don't think you would have negotiations, although indirect, between Israel and Hamas through Egypt and Qatar. I think all of that has come as a result of pressure from Biden.

Biden is walking a very narrow tightrope that I think a lot of people here don't understand. There was a lot of protests when he embraced Netanyahu in their first meeting, but I think he had to do that in order to then go into the cabinet meeting and press them to start thinking more about the day after the war and to push them to take better care to minimize civilian casualties. I think if he had gone in there just saying those things without first embracing Netanyahu and saying the United States stands behind Israel, I think he would have been ignored. I think he would have been dismissed. He had to play it both ways.

It's a good question, how much influence does he actually have? Does he really have leverage? He doesn't want to go to the point yet to say we're not going to send you any more weapons until you do this. I think he did stop a shipment of rifles of the sort, which were being handed out to radical settlers in the West Bank, but that's a pretty small gesture. We'll see what happens. That question is not completely answered yet, but I think it's almost undeniable that he has had significant influence so far.

Brian Lehrer: Here's a text message from a listener that says, "The Biden administration has not been pushing for deintensification. They're circumventing Congress to send weapons and money while knowing Israel is engaging in war crimes." How would you respond to that in terms of, from your reporter's vantage point, how much the Biden administration has actually been pushing for de-intensification even as what the listener writes is true to the extent that the Biden administration recently did go around Congress to send weapons and money while Congress was stuck on negotiations around that?

Fred: I think if you go back to Biden's first press conference right after the October 7th attacks, he said two things. He said, "We are standing with Israel. This kind of attack cannot stand." Then he said that Israel must take care to minimize civilian casualties in its response. That was at the first press conference. He's been saying that publicly and privately with steadily increasing emphasis ever since.

I think your caller is right that Israel has not been as responsive as Biden had hoped. Biden, Tony Blinken, and Jake Sullivan, the Secretary of State and National Security Adviser, have said this. I think that if Israel doesn't move to a lower intensity form of warfare in the coming days, I think they are risking some kind of cut-off, or at least-- Israel has lost a lot of its favor in the United States and elsewhere. I think they do have this heroic stance that, "Well, we've always had to go it alone. We'll go it alone again. The fact that all these protesters in the West aren't even giving us sympathy after what happened on October 7th tells us that we just need to go our own way."

To some degree they are right, but they are very dependent on the United States, especially for military aid, and even some economic support. Israel's whole survival, its existence, depends on a certain moral quality. If they give that up, they're giving up quite a lot. I think the future of Israel isn't so promising if they don't respond to some of this pressure.

Brian Lehrer: The Hill article that I cited from before describing this de-intensification plan, at least stated plan, quotes Seth Frantzman, an adjunct fellow in Israel with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based think tank, who says, "Hamas has been partly defeated. It makes sense that Israel would want to have some of these soldiers returning home to their families or for the economy." Do you agree with that analysis that Hamas has been partly defeated? Would you put it that way from what you know?

Fred: I think one would have to define some terms. I do think that Hamas would not have agreed to that four or five-day ceasefire with the exchange of hostages for prisoners if it hadn't come under intense military attack. I think those who say the two were linked are right. I think, judging just from even reports that are public, a lot of their senior commanders have been killed. Several others are on the run or in hiding. If that's what he means by they've been in partial defeat, okay.

I think what it doesn't mean is that the organization is on the verge of collapse and all Israel needs to do is a little bit more pushing for Hamas or something like it no longer to become a political or military force in Gaza. Perhaps that entire strategic goal is something that is impossible to achieve strictly on military grounds without doing immense damage that would just be completely unacceptable to almost anybody.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call from Gary in Little Ferry, New Jersey. Gary, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Gary: Thank you for taking my call. First of all, it's easy to criticize Israel in Washington, DC, or New York, thousands of miles away from the conflict. This portrayal of Palestinians as being totally innocent-- I have not heard one Palestinian criticize Hamas for October the 7th. They always come up, "Well, it's 75 years of occupation." Well, the whole 1948 war is being misinterpreted. It's one of the most courageous things. You have the soldiers who were victims of the Holocaust, the last people you think would be good soldiers fighting for their souls. Six Arab nations attacked Israel. The Palestinians could have had their own state. They turned it down.

This whole thing is so biased. I'm getting sick and tired of the media, which is supposedly run by Jews, but I don't see much sympathy for Israel's position in the media. I'm getting just tired of this BS.

Brian Lehrer: Should Israel not be held to certain standards of war when it says is the democracy in this case? Certainly, it was attacked on October 7th, and certainly, Palestinian forces have been rejectionist. Arab countries, like you say, in 1948, when there was the original Partition Plan, did not accept any version of it and went to war against Israel on its first day of existence as a country. That's all factual, but here we are right now with so many civilians being killed. Is it not legitimate in your view to ask the questions about what's going on on the ground right now, also in the name of the United States, which is doing so much to back the war, to at least raise the questions and have the conversations

Gary: In World War II, do we care about civilian casualties for Germans? Who were largely responsible for Hitler. The Palestinians are not being reasonable in any stretch of the imagination. There has to be some accountability on their end. I always hate to see human life lost. Sure. I'm sure there are some innocent people that are being killed by the Israelis, and that's a tragedy. This whole thing started with the rejectionist attitude of the Palestinians.

Brian Lehrer: Gary, thank you for your call. I appreciate it.

Fred: There's a lot. Can I address some of it?

Brian Lehrer: Yes, go ahead, Fred.

Fred: First of all, I share the caller's frustration on some of the coverage, especially the protests. It's absolutely true that the neighboring Arab countries have never cared about the Palestinians at all except to use as a rhetorical device for distracting attention from their own domestic failures and to beat up Israel. They've never offered the Palestinians anything. The Palestinians, they and the Kurds are among the most terribly treated people on the planet. The Palestinian leadership over the decades has been altering between corrupt and feeble, and often both.

It's a bit much to say that they're responsible for Hamas' behavior. Hamas, they won an election in 2006. It was a split vote. They didn't win a majority. The Fatah and Hamas almost split it, and then Hamas started assassinating all the Fatah leaders, and then they got evicted and escaped to the West Bank. There hasn't been an election since. There was a respectable poll done during the ceasefire, even after the Israeli bombing, less than 50% of residents of Gaza supported Hamas. It was up by only 3 or 4% since before the war. Support for Hamas went way up in the West Bank where Hamas doesn't rule anything. They don't know what it's like to live under Hamas.

There have been some video of residents and even a few disaffected former Hamas leaders blaming Hamas for what's going on. In terms of the civilian attacks on Germany during World War II, they did elect Hitler, but more than that, a lot of these international laws against civilian damage were written in 1949 in part in reaction to the immense civilian damage that was done against both Germany and Japan during World War II. I know that Netanyahu and others have said, "Well, America firebombed Tokyo into oblivion." Well, this isn't World War II. It's not even the same kind of existential fate that World War II was.

It's a complicated set of issues that the caller has raised, but I think it's going too far just to say, "Well, we can't really pay too much attention to civilian damage." I agree with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, who said that there is both a moral duty and a strategic imperative to minimize civilian casualties.

Brian Lehrer: When he talks about World War II and they didn't care about German civilian deaths in World War II, to some degree, that's true. I think you're familiar with the interviews that former defense secretary Robert McNamara gave in a film some years ago talking about what now is considered a war crime.

The bombing of Dresden, things like that. Similar things in Japan that at that time, maybe because there was no media, maybe because there was no reporting of the civilian casualties and nobody around to ask questions about what the limit should be, even in a just cause, whatever one considers a just cause, and realize Middle East is complex, that things have really changed since World War II and some top American generals involved in that war have come to regret some of the things that were done. Yes.

Fred: McNamara was crunching numbers for General Curtis LeMay, who was doing the firebombing of Japan. He said that LeMay said at the time that if we lose the war, we're all going to go up for war crimes in some court. That was even back in 1944, '45.

Brian Lehrer: I acknowledge the many texts coming in on both sides of this. It's so easy to just wallow, which I don't want to do, and all the polarization that exists around this topic. Somebody else writing, "Such a gross opinion from Gary." Somebody else writing, "Israel is being held to higher standards than any other government in an impossible situation." Another person writes, "Check, Gary, about 1948 war crimes please, meaning, even while the Arab states went to war against Israel, Israel was causing 700,000 Palestinian civilians to become refugees."

It's part of the complexity when we talk about the situation in the Israeli-Palestinian, the Israeli-Arab conflict, there's so much grievance on both sides, on all sides. People want to focus on the thing that seems to legitimize their interests and their aspirations, right?

Fred: Absolutely. Look, Israel is being held to a higher standard, and to some degree, that's appropriate. They're allies of the United States. They're a democracy. At the same time, it is a bit maddening that someone like Bashar Assad has killed 200,000 Arabs, all of them his own people, to the extent he regards them as his own people. There are no demonstrations in the street for Assad to to be held to account. There are no claims of solidarity with the Syrian masses. It is maddening in that regard.

Brian Lehrer: The caller asked basically, where are the Palestinians demonstrating against Hamas like some Israelis and some other Jews in the diaspora demonstrate against the way Israel is fighting? It's a political question. I guess it goes to the poll that you cited. I have your column on Slate on December 15th called Is Israel's war in Gaza strengthening Hamas? This was based on polling in both Gaza and the West Bank. Interestingly, Hamas did not have majority support in either area, but support appeared to be surging in the West Bank from 12% before the war to 44% now, in that poll that you cited.

If we take that as indicative, I'm sure it's very hard to conduct meaningful polling in the midst of the war, even though that was done during the ceasefire period, it would seem to indicate that Hamas only has minority support and it has not been increasing in Gaza while all these things have been going on. We don't hear about it. We don't hear about protests.

Fred: It's hard for anybody to protest when you're-- Supposedly 1.8 million out of Gaza's 2.5 million people have been displaced from their homes. They're living in shelters. They're living in tents. Given that a few days ago Hamas soldiers were firing on Gazan civilians who were rushing to get some food from the humanitarian convoys of trucks that were coming in because they wanted the food for themselves, under those circumstances, it's hard to see how one pulls off a meaningful protest.

In the West Bank, and I think this isn't written about enough, what some of the more radical settlers are doing in the West Bank is just appalling. Killing Palestinians who have nothing to do with the Hamas attack on October 7th, burning down their orchards, kicking them out of their houses, doing this and not facing the slightest bit of arrest or prosecution from the Israeli government. This kind of thing has been going on for a long time. Netanyahu, in particular, has been hugely expanding the number of housing permits in what is still regarded in international law as illegally occupied territory.

Biden, finally, a couple of weeks ago, put visa bans on many of the settlers doing this in the West Bank. They can't come to the United States. That's at least one thing. I think whatever one stance on what's going on with Israel versus Gaza, Hamas, I think that the behavior of the Israeli government in the West Bank is just something that's appalling. Also, again, using Secretary of Defense Austin's words, it's a strategic imperative not to do this sort of thing.

It just makes Israel look terrible in the eyes of the world. It makes it harder for those wanting to support Israel and who are in supporting of Israel's basic principles of existence. It's what the Jews would call a real shanda. It's a shame. It's a source of huge embarrassment.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue in a minute with Fred Kaplan, who writes the War Stories column on Slate, and look longer term at what might happen when the current war ends. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC, as we continue to discuss the military and the political situation around the war between Hamas and Israel with Fred Kaplan, who writes the War Stories column for Slate. Fred, let's talk about what you think the current war might lead to, bigger picture. I said in the intro that these two peoples, each with historic aspirations and grievances, have never figured out how to live together or to live apart.

Before October 7th, there was speculation that a rebellion might be on the horizon, not from Gaza, but from the West Bank, where Israeli settlement activity was continuing to expand and become more violent, as you were describing, as is still happening. What's the range of outcomes that this could all lead to, as far as you could tell?

Fred: Oh, boy. I think the range is probably as wide as you can imagine. In terms of likely outcomes, I was talking with a friend of mine who's a reporter in Israel and going through possible solutions. He said, half-jokingly, said, "The problem with you liberal globalists is that you think there always is a solution." There might not be a solution. If there is a solution, even for the short term, I think one thing that has to happen, and there are signs that it's beginning to happen, is that the neighboring Sunni Arab leaders have to get involved in it. As I said earlier, they have never wanted to get involved in this.

One firm condition of the Israel-Egypt peace treaty with Begin and Sadat was Sadat's insistence that Egypt wants absolutely nothing to do with the Palestinian problem. There has been a barrier on the Gaza-Egypt border that is just as firm and as long-standing as the one on the Gaza-Israel border. You don't see very many protests of Egypt these days. Now Egypt and Saudi Arabia, they've come up with this four-point plan involving hostage-prisoner trades and a ceasefire, and then Saudi is picking a new leader of the Palestinian Authority, and Egypt coordinating some security for Gaza. This is the first time they've even talked about this thing.

If it is going to actually happen, they're going to have to do more than just talk about it. Gaza has rejected this idea. I think if it's going to happen, it's going to have to be imposed. It's going to have to be imposed by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, maybe Jordan, and possibly the UN. I think that really is the only hope. I think another thing that must happen, and this almost certainly will happen as soon as the war is over, is the removal of Netanyahu. I think he only has something like 10% favorable rating in Israel right now.

If there were an election tomorrow, his Likud and further-right coalition would go down to ignominious defeat because he just doesn't have the legitimacy either within Israel or outside to start backing off some of the practices in the West Bank while also keeping security tight in Gaza. One interesting thing in that New York Times article recently about all the different failings of October 7th is that the Israeli army hasn't ever trained in territorial defense. They've never assumed that a force like Hamas would or could actually invade Israeli territory. They've only trained in offensive operations. That's got to change.

If you look at how hugely important and usually skillful Israeli intelligence has been in routing out enemies abroad or in the territories, and yet how hapless they were in dealing with an attack coming from one of their avowed enemies. All that has to change, and I don't think that Netanyahu is the leader to do that. I think many things in both attitude and practice have to change within Israel, within the Palestinians, and especially, especially the Sunni Arabs who rhetorically have supported the Palestinians and yet have arranged or were about to make treaties with Israel. They really do want to live in peace with Israel.

In fact, it's often said, and I thought from the beginning that one reason for the Hamas's attack was that they saw that the Saudis were about to initiate talks with Israel, meaning that the Palestinian issue was about to be not only ignored in fact, as it has been for years, but was going to be swept off the table completely, even rhetorically. As one of the Hamas leaders proudly said after the October 7th attack, is that we have succeeded because we have put the Palestinian issue back on the center of the table. Now the Arab countries have to be responsible in dealing with this.

Brian Lehrer: Esme in Brewster, New York, you're on WNYC. Hello, Esme.

Esme: Yes, it's Esme. Good morning.

Brian Lehrer: Good.

Esme: I am an African-American female. What happened on October 7th was wrong. I am a strong supporter of a separate Palestinian state. I am a strong supporter of Israel. What happened was wrong. There is no justification for that. How do you say anything to Israel about how far they're fighting to get their people back when you won't give their people back? There is nothing that justified it. Is there a problem? Absolutely. Should there have been a separate Palestinian state in the 1940s? I believe that in my soul, yes.

One thing that I learned from the Arab students who were in my engineering school was that they watched Martin Luther King Jr, they watched the African-American struggle, and they saw the similarity. They said they used that as a guide, and they blew that up completely for probably a generation. Israel now has a permanent excuse to not to trust Palestinians being too close to them. It's the same thing the Indigenous Americans went through. It's the same thing the African Americans are still going through. Why is no one learning from anyone else? I'll take a breath now with that.

Fred: I think I agree with everything that you said there.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Esme. Thank you very much. Fred, go ahead.

Fred: I think I agree with everything that you said. In terms of getting the hostages back, one part of the Egypt-Saudi formula was ceasefire and withdrawal in exchange for release of all the hostages. I think that probably does have to be one part of it. I think if there weren't hostages, many of them in these tunnels being kept, I think Israel's response would have been even more destructive. I think it would have been, and I'm not saying this is right, but I think they would have just done a lot more mass destruction than they even have, and Hamas knows this.

How do you get the hostages back? One way, I think is not to intensify the attacks. That's a way of getting more hostages killed, accidentally or as part of the attack. One thing that people like David Petraeus and others who were commanding the counterinsurgency effort, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, one thing they often said was that for every civilian you kill, you create a possible new terrorist. That person's cousin, or husband, or father, or son, or sister, or wife. They become, if not terrorists, then more supportive of the terrorists.

That's what Secretary Austin meant when he said minimizing civilian casualties is not just a moral duty, but a strategic imperative. Quite aside from morality. You're just making things harder on you. Israel is making things harder for its own security the more civilians that it kills. That's one of many dilemmas that they're facing at the time, but absolutely, I think-- Listen, again, talking with people in Israel, there is almost no support for a two-state solution right now. They see, for the first time, many of them, the Palestinians who have been living and working right next to them, want to kill them, want to slash their throats.

Before October 7th, there were 15,000 Gazans coming into Israel every day with work permits. Some of those people were among those who planned the attack. That's how they drew up the maps. They're not going to allow 15,000 Gazans to come into Israel anymore with work permits. As horribly treated as the West Bank Palestinians are, there's not going to be any great eagerness to consort with them in the streets as had happened before October 7th. This has created a terrible situation for both sides for everybody in the region.

Brian Lehrer: Right. We're obviously not going to solve the Middle East today as we begin to run out of time with Fred Kaplan, War Stories columnist from Slate. Let me follow up on what you just said and ask if there is a glimmer of hope, again, from both sides. We're trying to have conversations here that respect some of the obvious truths in front of our eyes, but also respect the complexities and the grievances and aspirations of Israelis and Palestinians. I'm sure we fall short in many ways, but we're trying to have honest, open, multisided, respectful conversations here.

When you talk about there being no appetite for a two-state solution among Israelis right now, in the pro-Palestinian protests that we've seen on college campuses and elsewhere in this country, we hear the term "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free." Setting aside whether that's an anti-Semitic phrase or not, that's subject to debate, they would say that what they're really after with that is a pluralistic democracy, one person, one vote, not a Jewish state anymore. That, of course, is completely unacceptable and a very threatening prospect for Israelis.

That's the ascertain pro-Palestinian one-state solution. We have the Netanyahu, one-state system that's in place right now, which is obviously an ongoing threat and not acceptable to Palestinians. I guess my final question for today is, can this war with the mass death and suffering among both peoples leave them exhausted enough to look for a new way forward toward two states?

Fred: I think from the Israeli point of view, Israelis cannot afford to look exhausted. I think there does have to be some multinational security apparatus that comes in just to create and sustain peace on the border to rebuild Gaza, which is going to be an incredible effort. Unless you just want to abandon the entire place, which some of the more right-wing parties to Netanyahu's coalition want to do. They want all the Gazans to go into the Sinai and to have Israel occupy the place. Well, that's not going to happen either.

Look, since total war could not be a solution, because that would cause the entire region to go up into flames, which could have catastrophic consequences globally, since that is not a solution, there must be a glimmer of hope. That glimmer of hope is the fact that the major Sunni Arab leaders want this thing to be settled. Their people are more pro-Palestinian and potentially radical than they are, so they can't just leave them in the dump, but they really do want to resume or begin normalizing relations with Israel as well, for a lot of reasons. Just in terms of the interests of the leaders in the region, I think there is a glimmer of hope. All parties must do things that they've never done before to enact them.

Brian Lehrer: Fred Kaplan's column in Slate is called War Stories. He's the author of many books, including his most recent The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War. Fred, thank you.

Fred: Sure. Thanks.

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

 

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