Terrorism, Israel, and Dreams of Peace (with Haviv Rettig Gur)

Haviv Rettig Gur: Thank you. Thanks, Russ. It’s wonderful to be here.

Haviv Rettig Gur: Yeah. I mean, it really isn’t–it feels like an inflection point this moment. There’s also a very significant offensive by the Israeli army in Northern Gaza. There is serious talking in Lebanon and in Washington about the possibility of ending actually that conflict up in Lebanon. So, we really are–it feels–we are at a nexus of, you know, five different things.

The Iranian regime over the last month has been revealed to be much weaker than we all thought it was. That is a turning point that the Middle East will feel for decades, and we don’t yet know exactly what it means.

So, we are at a pivot.

It’s really a joke that every week in the Middle East is dramatic. I keep getting called by, you know, various news networks; and they say things like, ‘It’s been a dramatic week.’ And, I’m just, like, ‘I’m 15 years in this business. It’s all a dramatic week.’ The Chinese curse me: You live in interesting times. I don’t know if there is a Chinese curse or if it’s one of those sort of British imperial conventions; but there should be, there should be. It’s a terrible curse.

Haviv Rettig Gur: Yeah. Well, I argue: A lot of times in the coverage, a lot of times when people look at Israel from abroad, they see political rhetoric and they see momentary flash in the pan political rhetoric. Or, they do something even worse: Not worse because it’s immoral–although it is immoral–but worse because it’s also uninformative, which is they quote-mine. They go looking for: what do we think the Israelis think about the Palestinians? Or, what do we think the Palestinians think about the Israelis?

And, you just type into your web browser the right words: ‘Palestinian leadership Nazism,’ and you find just a long, rich, deep association of Palestinian leaders with outright blatent Nazism. And then, you conclude what you wanted to conclude in the first place, which is that Palestinian identity, nationalism, the Palestinian cause, is somehow fundamentally Nazi. Which is not true. It is not true. Palestinian ideological elites have often taken Nazi ideas, but fundamentally, the turn to the Germans was a turn away from British imperialism and part of that uprising.

And, there’s a tremendous amount of anti-Semitism. Hamas’s charter doesn’t just literally borrow language from Nazi ideology. It cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in that charter. And so, you have so much to hook onto.

But if you do hook onto that and assume that you’ve now understood the Palestinians, you’ll miss the deep story, the rich story. The reason that we have polls that tell us that Palestinians still now love and admire Hamas. And, the same Palestinians who tell us they love and admire Hamas also tell us they hate Hamas. They hate Hamas for destroying Gaza. They hate Hamas for being a theocratic tyranny that has ruined their existence and lives–by the way before the war and certainly after. They hate Hamas for stealing aid. They hate Hamas for this and for that.

And they absolutely admire Hamas for giving them a profound story of religious dignity that explains all of their suffering. And, there aren’t many other stories in their political life that do that.

And so, if you tackle the Palestinian national movement from this window of quote-mining and this very easy sort of association, you build out–intellectuals love to do this.

And, it’s why intellectuals are no fun at a party. They love to build out abstract constructs that kind of make sense to some piece of reality they know and then take that abstract construct and apply it to every other thing on Earth. [More to come, 6:01]

And, when all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail. And they do it here constantly.

Now, when that happens in reverse–when they do it to the Israelis–it’s basically the same phenomenon. They’ll find some racist quote in some Zionist text and say, ‘This is Zionism.’ And then, you say to them, ‘But, that was Zionism back when less than 2% of Jews actively participated in the Zionist movement. Why did the other 98% come around suddenly in the 1920s and 1930s?’

And they’ll say, ‘Don’t bother me. What are you, protecting racism? This is Zionism.’

And, there’s such a rich, like, Zionist debate. Herzl [Theodor Herzl] is a man who is–sometimes they borrow these little quotes from him, which are just 19th century Viennese intellectuals talking about the global south, so to speak. And, sometimes Herzl says things that would come out of absolutely every German language writer of the time.

But, Herzl’s very last testament to the Jews, the Altneuland, his utopian novel–it’s the last thing he gives us before he dies. The dramatic tension there is about Jews being racist in their new state, in their new mass society. They escaped the mass societies of Europe, these new nationalisms, and they escaped them because these new identities–these imagined identities–can’t contain minorities because minorities call into question the organic validity of the identities. And so, the Jews have to escape this. Zionism is an entire sociological analysis of modernity. It’s something much bigger than just Jewish nationalism.

And, then they arrive in the land of Israel and they establish their own mass society, their own nation-state. And, Herzl says, ‘Be wary of that same impulse because you will have it, too.’ And, in this novel, there is a rabbi who arises who wants to oppress the Arabs, and the Jews all vote not to. And, that’s what makes it utopian.

In other words, the racism of the Jews is something Herzl worries about. And yet they shrink him down to this tiny little pathetic thing by quote-mining.

So, so much of the discourse about this place is this cartoonicization of Israelis, cartoonicization of Palestinians. The people who think Palestinians are these perfect victims and their symbols are these inspiring symbols are racist against Palestinians. That, just because the Palestinians are ridiculously innocent and perfect and pure and lovable doesn’t mean that it’s not racism. And, ultimately just Westerners living out Western moral fantasies projected onto them.

So, in that kind of discourse–in that kind of world in which the debate over Israelis and Palestinians is so much a fight between these very dishonest ways of addressing these two groups, it’s hard to tell the real story.

And, the real story is very human and very reasonable. You have two peoples that have lived through a history that utterly validates their sense of what’s happening around them, but still results in radically different senses of what’s happening around them.

And, they don’t–you know, this isn’t–I’m not just talking about campus activists. I’m sorry, this sounds a little sort of cluttered or confused. It’s all going to make sense in just a minute. I hope.

But, this kind of shrinking us down to these very simplistic narratives that elites do in the West–primarily elites. You see in mainstream elites: John Kerry as Secretary of State, his very last speech as Secretary of State–people should look it up. It was essentially finger-wagging at the Israelis and the Palestinians, mostly at the Israelis. And, he says, ‘We all know how this ends. We all know what the peace looks like. Just do it. And, if you don’t do it, everything will fail. Everything will collapse.’

There’s this sense that the Israelis are either just foolish, stupid, or possibly malicious and evil, and that’s the explanation. It’s a moral judgment masquerading as an explanation.

And, there is a political, intellectual class in America that has lost the ability to distinguish between–too often–not everybody, obviously, but too often lost the ability to distinguish between moral judgment and actual diagnostic explanation. Israelis are not stupid. The reason Israelis can’t reach a peace with the Palestinians is because they know more than the Western critic, not less. And, the reason Palestinians can’t reach a peace with the Israelis is because they know more than the Westerners looking at them, not less than the Westerners looking at them.

And, when you really dig deep into these stories, you discover this vast–and frankly, even though we’re talking about very, very sad and tragic and painful things–beautiful stories and histories and narratives that ordinary people, good people learn and go through and adopt and think about themselves in their search for dignity, in their search for meaning, in their search for solidarity. They produce very bad outcomes and some very bad policies.

I try to talk about Israelis and Palestinians in their own terms and to try to convey why they’re not stupid, and why if you want to come and look at them and learn about them, and think about them, you actually have to learn them on their own terms. We have to crack that open. We have to tell that story. We have to dive into those weeds, because when you come out of the weeds on the other side, you suddenly see everything very different. And, you suddenly understand why a reasonable good person would reach the conclusion of the Israeli who says, ‘This is the only war available to us in Gaza.’ Or the Palestinian who says, ‘Gaza’s destruction was worth it.’

Those are not crazy, and those are not evil, and they make sense. And, by the way, they could still be utterly wrong and you could still have to oppose it, and you could still have to fight a war against it. But, they’re human and real, and meaningful, and serious, and not moral cartoons. Did that make sense? That was like a methodologic–

Haviv Rettig Gur: Okay. So, let me try to do the very thing–try to actually walk through this exercise of understanding.

There’s one statistic that I urge people to hold onto that when you unpack it, helps really reveal something profound about the Israeli sense of the Palestinian question and what the future holds and what options are available to Israelis when it comes to the Palestinians. And, that statistic is voter turnout in an election that we had 23 years ago, 2001.

And, before I tell you that turnout–and I hope nobody is looking it up too quickly–the reason that that collapse in turnout had a couple of different factors. But, the fundamental factor was a collapse in faith in politics: an absolutely unique moment in Israeli history in which faith in politics was shattered, still has not really recovered, and really reveals the–first of all–the influence that Palestinian actions have on Israelis and on Israeli politics. The immense influence.

And secondly, the Israeli belief–by the way, the belief of the Israeli left-winger, the liberal, the Progressive, even, who yearns for separation and a Palestinian state and an end to the occupation–the belief in how few options they actually have. And the belief that Palestinian politics reduce their options, not the Israeli political right.

I am not arguing that this is historical truth. I’m arguing that this is the lived experience of the mainstream of Israeli Jews.

Probably–I’m going to throw out there–I mean, I know a lot of polls over the years: I would say 80% of Israeli Jews would agree with the narrative I’m about to tell. There’s obviously, to the left of the mainstream, people who would disagree. And to the right who would disagree in other ways. Just like among the Palestinians, there are 11 narratives about what happens to them and what has happened to them. And, they’ve fought literal civil wars over those different narratives.

Start at 2001. Actually, let’s not start 2001: 2001 is that pivot. I want to start in the First Intifada. The First Intifada begins in 1987. There’s a car accident in the Gaza Strip: an Israeli military truck, I believe, crashes into a Palestinian private car and people in the private car are killed. And that incident sparks, catalyzes a whole series of riots and protests in Gaza that very quickly spread to the West Bank.

I am going to simplify, cartoonishly–there are libraries written about the First Intifada, the Second Intifada, the peace process–but, just to give people a sense of the Israeli-lived experience of this. These riots and protests spread throughout the cities and towns of Gaza and the West Bank very, very quickly. And, the Israeli civil society–civilian society, excuse me–experiences that very, very quickly, because, unlike the Americans or the British or the Australians, when our military deploys, it doesn’t deploy to the end of the world, right? It deploys an hour bus ride from home. And, our soldiers go home for the weekend to Mom’s dinner table. Right?

And, the First Intifada consisted of a whole range of different phenomenon and really complex and all layered in itself: terror attacks on sort of the clean FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] definition of what a terror attack is; and attacks, and reprisals, and Israeli crackdowns. And there was a whole big, vast, complex event that lasted five years.

But there’s a piece of it that is burned into the Israeli psyche. And, that is a big part of how Palestinians tell the story of that First Intifada. And that’s the piece that we call the Children of the Stones. The Children of the Stones are these literal kids. Right?

What sparked those protests? They weren’t actually cause–the reason wasn’t–the spark was the car accident, but the reason wasn’t the accident. The reason was 20 years of occupation. If you’re a Palestinian school child in 1987 and you live in Jenin, let’s say–in the Northern West Bank–and you come out of school and you’re walking home, the guy running traffic at the traffic circle is the Israeli infantryman.

I mean, the occupation, the military rule is deep within Palestinian society. It’s very close. And, if you’re that school child, it’s been 20 years. You’ve never known anything else. And, it shows no sign of going anywhere.

And so, this truly grassroots uprising, one of the really powerful images that come out of it are these Children of the Stones where these school kids pick up stones off the ground and throw them at the Israeli infantry. Inside these cities, inside these towns.

Now, those Israeli soldiers, that very first weekend of the First Intifada, went home to Shabbat dinner, at Mom’s dinner table. And their moms turned to them–I am only slightly dramatizing; I mean this quite literally–in tens of thousands of households all over Israel, their mothers turn to their soldiers, to their children, and they say to them, ‘What the hell is going on? I’m watching the news. This is headline news already.’ And, obviously, and for the next five years, it’s going to be every day’s headline news. ‘What the hell is going on? Are you safe? Are you okay?’

And those soldiers turn to their mothers and they say to them, ‘What am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to do, facing an 11-year-old boy throwing a rock at me? I’m the Israeli infantry. I’m trained to take the Syrian commando fortifications on the road to Damascus.’ In 1987, the Israeli army is still training its infantry, basically, to fight the 1973 War better. Which, in 1987 makes sense. ‘What am I supposed to do with an M-16 or a Galil rifle?’–which is kind of an Israeli copy of an AK-47 that we pretend we invented. I apologize. That was humorous.

But, the point is, ‘What am I supposed to do facing these kids?’

And, that experience–again, at a very simple level, because it was many things and it was very complex and it lasted a while–but that experience very, very quickly, forges a whole new Israeli left, a whole new Israeli left-wing consciousness.

It’s also a left that hungers for a new civic religion, for a new purpose, for a new ideology. Basically, because 1985 saw this radical economic revolution after eight years of triple-digit inflation. All of the old Socialist/Marxist institutions, the state-controlled industries, were basically dismantled. Monetary policy was actually made independent with the Bank of Israel law of 1985. There was this huge reform because of a massive financial crisis, monetary crisis, that shattered the Israeli economy. And, there weren’t a whole lot of Socialists left after 1985.

So, the Israeli left that had been this Socialist–right?–it was its civic religion. It was its belief. It had secularized for its Socialism, very quickly responded to the First Intifada by adopting the question of the occupation and ending the occupation and creating peace as a new civic religion. It took it in, this moral argument that it heard from Palestinian youngsters. It imbibed it very, very deeply. Within five years, 1992, Yitzhak Rabin is winning an election in which many, many people in the left are talking about: peace.

Rabin goes to Oslo with Yasser Arafat. In 1993 they sign a document that doesn’t have a lot of actual, actionable–it’s essentially a Declaration of Principles. I think that’s what it was called, the Declaration of Principles. It’s Oslo I, the Oslo Agreement. It’s really a declaration that they’re going to start working on a proper peace treaty.

1995, two years later, there’s already something called Oslo II, which is essentially a kind of treaty. It creates the Palestinian Authority. It establishes rules that give the Palestinian Authority great leeway in Palestinian population centers. It commits the Israelis and Palestinians to a five-year window for solving all the rest–you know, Jerusalem, refugees, holy sites, independence, borders, all the sticky hard stuff. And, the Knesset has to ratify it. There’s a vote. The Knesset ratifies it. Very close, but it does ratify it.

And then, in November of 1995, of course, Yitzhak Rabin is assassinated by an Israeli Jew–who kills him because of the peace process.

And now the left, which can win elections talking about peace, that left now has its martyr. And, the country is now heading into an election in 1996–when the Prime Minister is assassinated, the country goes to election. And, on the eve of the election–literally in the handful of days leading up to the election–Hamas detonates suicide bombings in Jerusalem.

It’s a very close race between Shimon Peres who replaced Rabin at the head of the Labour Party, who wants to continue the Oslo process.

And this new guy, this young guy from Likud, Benjamin Netanyahu, a whole new generation of Likud leaders who has argued that if you give guns to an arch-terrorist like Yasser Arafat, it will end badly.

On the eve of the election–in the days leading up to the election–there are suicide bombings in Jerusalem that tilt the election by a couple of points. Just tiny little margin from Peres to Netanyahu.

Netanyahu wins that election by the narrowest margin in the history of Israeli elections. I think it was 30,000 votes.

And, that’s the first moment when the Israeli left experiences Hamas not going to war against the occupation: going to war against the peace process.

Netanyahu wins that election. He has a government for the next three years. He does not advance the peace process. He actually signs the Wye River memorandum in 1998. That’s the last document signed by Israelis and Palestinians.

But, he does implement quite a bit of Rabin’s commitments. He pulls the army out of Jericho, and Gaza, and Hebron, and many different places; and he really begins the establishment of–as per the treaty Israel committed to–begins the establishment of the Palestinian Authority during his term.

In 1999, Netanyahu’s government falls. He’s deeply unpopular. A lot of pundits say, ‘We’ll never hear of Benjamin Netanyahu ever again,’ which is why you shouldn’t trust political pundits, obviously–other than myself who has never been wrong. But, I was in high school then, so I can mock them for their mistakes.

But, that government falls and the left now elect a new guy named Ehud Barak. Like Rabin, a former chief of staff of the army. In fact, far beyond Rabin, Barak is already talking about a much more significant independent Palestinian entity, that it’s clear to everybody, and I believe he even says it outright in a way that Rabin never did.

And we, to this day, there are debates. We don’t quite know what Rabin was thinking, and it’s possible that Rabin was testing the waters and he wasn’t sure how far he could go.

Barak is already talking about a Palestinian state. Barak wins that election talking about a Palestinian state. He goes to Camp David with Yasser Arafat and Bill Clinton, and they are negotiating shared sovereignty over the Temple Mount. They are negotiating borders. They’re negotiating land swaps. They are negotiating all kinds–everything. Everything difficult, they are negotiating at Camp David.

Then in the fall of 2000, the Second Intifada begins. Now the Palestinians get to name these things. So, the first one was an Intifada. The second one was an Intifada.

In the Israeli Jewish experience, these were opposite events. These were opposite events. Certainly on the left.

And, what do I mean by that? The Second Intifada consisted of 140 suicide bombings that blew up in Israeli cities over the course of three years.

I want listeners to try to imagine 140 suicide bombings on any issue that is a divisive culture war issue in their society. Imagine if a Mexican immigrant in America walks into a non-alcoholic bar–that’s a bar for teenagers; we have those–and detonates a shrapnel bomb that kills 24 kids. And leaves a video. And, in the video, that’s how we know they’re not mentally ill or just randomly homicidal. They’re terrorists. They left a video.

And, in the video, this person says–my immigration policy is not that great. Please don’t catch me on–I’m trying to cosplay a terrorist version of this, okay? But, let’s say it says: Donald Trump lost children in children’s prisons, and President Obama deported more people than the Republican Administration before or after. And President Biden didn’t solve anything while millions of people suffer in a terrible immigration policy. That’s the video. I, America am going to make you see. Boom. Okay?

Let’s imagine an event like that in American politics. The immediate aftershock of that event.

First of all, the conservative Republican response is very simple because it fits with their basic worldview, right? It’s not a challenge to write that tweet for Donald Trump. But, what’s the Progressive response to an event like that? What would that look like?

I submit to you that Progressives would be tormented. There would be 15 different responses. Some of them would be, ‘This guy is an evil murderer who made it harder to fix the immigration problem because of his own narcissism and psychopathy.’

Some of them would say, ‘Look, this is how bad it is that it would generate this kind of violence.’

There would be all kinds of different responses. And, when we’ve had in actual democracies, real examples of terrorism, right, along those fracture lines of culture wars, those are the kinds of responses you see.

But, fundamentally, Progressives would have a real problem with violence like that. And, the problem is that they agree with the video. But the guy just murdered children. What do you do when you agree with the video, but the guy murdered children?

Whatever that Progressive response is, now try to imagine the Progressive response when there’s another bombing a week later. And now try to imagine the Progressive response when there are three more a week after that. And, now try to imagine the Progressive discourse on immigration over the next month when there are 13 bombings. And, now try to imagine over three years, 140.

But, there is a point–I don’t know what that point is: I don’t know if it’s bombing three or bombing 30 or bombing 113–but there is a point where the Progressives of America say, ‘You know what? Let’s put a pin in this one and circle back 10 years from now, because you can’t even breathe. You cannot talk about it. All the air has been sucked out of the room.’

The Second Intifada’s 140 bombings shattered the Israeli political left. It hasn’t won an election since. And, it hasn’t won an election not because of the death toll–which was horrible–and not because they targeted children. My example of a non-alcoholic bar was the Dolphinarium bombing on the beach in Tel Aviv in 2001. It was because of the timing, and it was because of the story.

In the First Intifada in 1987, we understood–we, Israelis–what those kids were protesting. We knew exactly what they were protesting. What were they protesting in 2000? Thirteen years later, who is running traffic in Jenin as school kids walk home? The school kid who walked home past the Israeli infantryman in 1987 was now the officer running that traffic as part of the Palestinian police.

Bill Clinton was sitting there in Washington desperate–desperate–to fund this project. He had no other legacy. He had one other legacy and that made him more desperate to fund this project.

The Palestinians were getting everything handed to them–everything, on a silver platter–and it had cost the Israelis a murdered Prime Minister and an internal culture war; and it was happening.

And that’s when the Palestinian decision to launch the Second Intifada happened. There were no Israeli soldiers in any Palestinian city, town, or village when the bombings began in 2000.

And so, the great question Israelis ask–and they scream it silently into an echoing chasm of their own psyche; but it’s everywhere. It is the bedrock. You catch a cab in Jerusalem and you start talking to that cab driver about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict–and you can tackle it from the right and you can talk about terrorism; and you can tackle it from the left, you can talk about settlements–doesn’t matter how you talk about it. Three minutes in, you hit bedrock. And that bedrock is: What the hell was the Second Intifada about? What was it for? What was its purpose? Israelis know about the Second Intifada something that outsiders might have trouble seeing. It’s extremely difficult to recruit a thousand suicide bombers. 140 actually make it past the Israeli security services and blow up in Israeli cities. I’m giving a random sort of guesstimate that a thousand set out.

It’s extremely difficult to build those bombs. There was no YouTube and you couldn’t build those bombs at home from YouTube. These are shaped shrapnel explosions.

It’s difficult to recruit. Recruiting a suicide bomber, it’s–there’s an entire science. There’s tremendous amount of academic research on this, especially in the United States, and I don’t claim to know it very well. But I know enough of it, and I have learned from enough scholars who have studied it to know that first of all, suicide terrorism is a phenomenon that goes beyond Islam. There’s this image in the West that suicide terrorism is just a Muslim thing. It’s not. There have been Marxist suicide terrorists in the 20th century–

Haviv Rettig Gur: It’s big, it’s complex–anarchists. But there are certain characteristics that are almost universal in suicide terrorism.

For one thing, it’s not a function of desperation. The poorest people on earth–the most desperate people on earth–people on earth facing genocide don’t produce suicide terrorism. It is a function of redemption. It is a function of a redemptive ideology that seeks to shake the foundations of the existing order in order for that redemption to be able to peek through the cracks of the order that you produce. It is people who believe they are saving the world by murdering other people’s children.

And, how do you get people to believe they’re saving the world by murdering other people’s children? The answer basically is social capital. You need the investment of social groups, of your own social network. You need the investment of people of authority in your society.

In the Palestinian case–and again, this is a phenomenon far larger than Palestinians and Palestinians are not unique in this feature of the suicide terrorism–Hamas ran literal martyrdom classes in mosques in Gaza to try and recruit these kids, these teenagers and sometimes much older.

Haviv Rettig Gur: Israel absolutely still controls Gaza. It has pulled out of Palestinian towns and cities–

Haviv Rettig Gur: At this point. In those previous years, in literally the three years previous. And Palestinian Police now run the towns and cities.

But between the towns and cities and around the Israeli settlements, there is an Israeli military presence, absolutely.

The point is: you needed labs that could build these bombs. You needed recruitment networks. You needed people with social standing and authority and religious standing to validate the narrative that would allow this recruitment. You needed money. You needed bank accounts. You needed command and control. You needed people who can sneak a terrorist past Israeli security and Israeli intelligence. You needed, essentially, a guerrilla fighting force.

And so, the First Intifada was experienced by huge parts of Israeli society, enough to win an election as a bottom-up, grassroots, moral cry against something Israel was doing wrong.

The Second Intifada was experienced by that very same Israeli majority–and a much larger majority–as the exact opposite. Now that we were pulling out, now that we were negotiating the final status, now that the political system had managed–painfully, agonizingly–to make this argument and try and carry forward this agenda, now Palestinian ideological elites had turned on us in a vast massacre of our children, purposeful guerrilla warfare. And why? Make it make sense.

To this day, the Israeli left can’t explain to ordinary Israelis why the Second Intifada happened. And so nobody can make a credible case within Israeli Hebrew language politics that it won’t just happen again. That, everywhere we pull out of won’t simply result in the same bloodshed–disastrous, catastrophic bloodshed, if not worse.

The point about voter turnout in 2001 illustrates this. Israeli voter turnout before 2001 was incredibly high. I think it averaged 80% for 40 years. It never dropped below 78% or 77%. It went as high as 83, 84. Incredibly stable, incredibly high just for generations. And what’s amazing about that is: voter turnout is a signal, among other things, of faith in the political system and that the political system can hear me, that it can respond to my needs. Israelis voted in incredibly high numbers even when their government failed them disastrously–even in 1973, in the immediate aftermath of the 1973 war. Even in December 1973, there was an election, very high turnout, with people very angry at the government. Even when there was a massive dramatic shift in 1977 for the first time, the big Labor Party that had founded the state lost an election–29 years after founding the state–and went home quietly and peacefully; and Likud took over for the first time. And, the next election, massive voter turnout, just like the election before.

The 1976 war in Lebanon, the 1982 war in Lebanon–you could go back to 1967, 1973: there was a war in between 1967 and 1973 called the War of Attrition. Soldiers were dying every week on the Egyptian front.

Israeli history is, as we said at the beginning, interesting in the worst possible way. There’s a trauma every three, four years; and voter turnout never drops. Even in the late 1970s when you start to get triple digit inflation, year-on-year-on-year-on-year. You throw out the currency in 1980 and issue the shekel. You throw out the shekel in 1985 and issue the new shekel, just to try and get a handle on triple-digit inflation for half a generation. And, throughout all of that collapse–imagine, Russ, American politics. If inflation wasn’t 9% for part of 2023, which hurt everybody, but was 140%–imagine if everybody’s life savings were essentially wiped out in the course of a year and a half, what would happen to American voting patterns? Who would be elected? Well, that’s Israel for eight long years and voter turnout never drops.

And then, that’s the astonishing thing. You then get to 2001 and suddenly, I think the election before in 1999–people can look this up–but in 1999, I believe the election, the turnout was–Barak’s election–was 78 and a half, if I’m not mistaken. And then, it gets to 2001, overnight, literally in the 18 months of the Barak government, voter turnout drops 17 points to 62%. Overnight. And, it has not yet recovered to the lowest it had ever been before.

Haviv Rettig Gur: Even now, it’s below 77. Yeah, it went back up to 71 and down into the 60s. It hovers in that place, but it’s an entire sort of swath of the population lower.

Now, just to clarify, because these are complicated things. In 1992, the Knesset passed a separation of the vote for Prime Minister and the vote for Knesset Party. And, it was an experiment: direct election of Prime Minister. It was deemed a bad experiment that weakened prime ministers. It was supposed to strengthen prime ministers, but it in fact expanded–people then ended up voting one Prime Minister and then a different party; and it actually weakened prime ministers tremendously. And so, it was then reversed, I believe, in 2003 it was canceled, if I’m not mistaken.

And, 2001 was the very first time you had a Prime Ministerial election without a Parliamentary election. There was only that half of the election. And that might have caused some of it. But we also know that the shattering of–by the way, because the Barak government falls so dramatically as the bombings are blowing up in Israeli cities literally, and it keeps negotiating right up to the end because Barak is desperate to get some deal from the Palestinians and the worse things get–the more buses blow up in Jerusalem–the more he needs a deal. Otherwise, he’s just the man who brought the Second Intifada upon us. And so, he’s negotiating, and negotiating, and negotiating right up to the end, and then he finally agrees to resign.

But, there’s this great national emergency and the decision is made for various reasons not to have a full parliamentary vote, but to just have a Prime Ministerial vote and replace the Barak government. And that Prime Ministerial vote ushers in the first Sharon government in 2001.

And some people said, ‘Well, the collapse of 17 points in voter turnout, which never happened before for any reason, was a function of the separation of the vote for political party and the vote for Prime Minister.’ But, the next election two years later is a vote for both, and voter turnout is still 63. And, the next election it went up to 65, then down to 63 again. The next election, again–it never again will be a separate vote–and voter turnout doesn’t recover.

And so, two things shattered here. There’s a correlation, but the causation is the shattering of the Israeli belief that politics has answers. Why? Because Israelis still don’t know why the Second Intifada happened. Because everything they were told–the left had a fundamental basic story and the basic story–and this was the new religion of the left–and when Rabin was killed, the idea of Oslo actually went up in the polls because the left now had its martyr and its mobilizing sense of sacrifice.

Haviv Rettig Gur: He shouldn’t die for nothing.

Haviv Rettig Gur: Exactly. And, look what the other side was willing to do to stop it. And, there’s a taboo generally in Israeli culture, born in the refugee experience of Israeli immigration, that Jews don’t kill Jews. That, the Altalena is still remembered as a traumatic moment, this moment in 1948 where in order to consolidate the various Jewish militias into a single army of the state, Ben-Gurion actually ordered the opening fire on a right-wing militia’s gun-smuggling ship. And, that to this day is a memorial attended by a Prime Minister. Why? Because it’s a moment where Jews killed Jews right at the establishment of the state. That’s a taboo in Israeli society and Israeli political culture. And, it happened in 1995 and it strengthened the left.

And it all fed into this one story the left told for decades–certainly since 1987. A part of the left had been saying it for a long time and it really took over the entire left and became the left’s fundamental idea beginning in 1987. And, the idea was very simple and people will recognize it. It’s generally the liberal notion of the Western average liberal who looks at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The idea is the Palestinians are under military occupation. Right? They don’t elect the Israeli Military Governor of the West Bank who is the sovereign in the West Bank legally, right? So, that’s a moral debt that the Israelis owe the Palestinians. That’s not sustainable, that’s not permanent. You can’t just not give people suffrage.

And, then the left said: If we do give them this thing, that we owe them; this thing that we have to give them, it’s a debt. If we give them their independence from us, they will give us–the left argued, and I was a high schooler and passionately believed in this–if we give them this thing that we owe them, they will give us the only thing we need from them. Rabin called it security; Bill Clinton called it peace. Most Israelis just thought of it as quiet. I give them their independence, they give me quiet. That’s the deal.

As I pull out, Hamas in 1996 detonating those suicide bombings and handing the election to Netanyahu, Hamas in 2000–and not just Hamas: Arafat was a huge factor in this. But let’s just–it’s certainly the Hamas idea and Hamas was deeply, deeply involved in the Second Intifada and probably committed a lot of the worst of the attacks. But, that branch, that vision, that Islamist sort of restorationist Islamic ideology that produced those suicide bombings of the Second Intifada, they proved the left wrong. Everywhere I pull out of, they come for me to murder my children from that place.

Haviv Rettig Gur: No. I was a soldier in the Second Intifada. I was a soldier. I stood at a particular checkpoint, I remember, in the Northern West Bank, in the middle of the Second Intifada. This was a profoundly frustrating time because we were the soldiers who were supposed to stop all those suicide bombers. And, day after day, they blew up and reminded us that we were failing.

[WARNING: Gruesome description in next few paragraphs–Econlib Ed.] And, one day, a car arrives–a Palestinian vehicle arrives at the checkpoint and rushes the checkpoint. There’s a line of Palestinian cars getting checked and one car rushes up to the soldiers and detonates explosives. There was something like 50 kilos of TNT [trinitrotoluene] in the trunk.

The driver is a bomber. He has a belt on. His body, from the shockwave, flies out the front window. The bomb–his belt bomb–detonates, splitting his upper torso from his lower torso right in the air, right in front of the soldiers. They land in different parts of the road. [END WARNING]

And, everybody did everything right. And so, one soldier had shrapnel in his leg and everyone else came out of it okay. But, we stopped five bus bombings that day with that one car that didn’t feel like[?] he could get through us and so decided to try and blow up on us.

And, I stood there at that checkpoint, and I asked myself a great question that has really kind of guided my professional life ever since. And, that question was: What the hell is the Second Intifada about? What does this person think he just did? Is he stupid? Because I knew, or believed I knew, what was on offer. They could have everything. They had us eating out of the palms of their hands. If they made themselves the partner that half of Israeli politics was desperately invested in them being, the entire Western world would fund them forevermore; and they would have a polity that is more than anything they could possibly get in any other way.

And, so many arguments: I mean, there is no prosperous future for Palestinians except integration into the Israeli economy. There’s simply no other economy around they could integrate into that would be worth integrating into. If they’re cut off from the Israeli economy, they’re going to be a Somalia–best-case scenario–by the way, in their own separate state but deeply integrated. There’s so much here that they’re giving up and sacrificing by this need to murder us.

And, that’s when I got into these questions and began to actually ask and began to read and discover the Algeria Paradigm in which a lot of them live.

Haviv Rettig Gur: Right, a year ago–

Haviv Rettig Gur: I went looking for what drives–I literally just asked it very bluntly because it matters, so I don’t have time to be politically correct or polite: Are they stupid? What don’t they understand? Why do they think this is a good idea?

And, as I dug in deep to their narrative, I discovered, a). They’re not stupid. It’s old. These are old ideas. This is a 140-year discourse in Arabs–among Palestinian Arabs specifically; in the Arab world generally. And it’s still wrong. Even though it’s deep and old.

And, I built that out as–and by the way, I gave talks at Shalem College about sort of what I learned from that–but I went on that journey from that experience of the Second Intifada.

Haviv Rettig Gur: I can summarize it very briefly.

Haviv Rettig Gur: Basically, the story is Algeria. In 1954–really, truly, cartoonishly simple–Alistair Horne wrote–this British historian wrote–a magisterial history of the Algeria War, A Savage War for Peace, I believe it was called. I recommend it. There have been a thousand others. The Algeria War produced the Frantz Fanon literature and the anti-colonialist literature that is so very popular on college campuses–elite college campuses in the West today. You want to understand why kids are screaming at Columbia, ‘Decolonize Palestine,’ you need to go back to that Algeria War and you’ll understand it.

But, my point is the influence it had, not on Western elites, but on Palestinians. In 1954, the French had been colonizing Algeria since, I believe, 1830. They’d been there 124 years already. There were something like a million and a half French–European, white–citizens of France living in Algeria. They were legally constituted as a Département of the French Republic. They voted for Members of Parliament in Paris. And they, of course, didn’t give citizenship to the millions–I think it’s five or six million; it might be more than that–of Algerian Muslims in the country.

And in 1954, the Algerian Muslim organizations and groups and parties came together in a room and established the National Liberation Front. It’s a group of activists, and it slowly grew. It’s, again, a long story; I’m making it cartoonishly simple. I’m just giving people hooks on which to begin their journey of discovery. But, they found, in 1954, the National Liberation Front, the FLN [National Liberation Front]–which, the letters are flipped because it’s in French–and they embark on what is probably a paradigmatic–the paradigmatic–anticolonial war.

And an anti-colonial war, its fundamental strategy is pretty simple. Its fundamental strategy is the idea that a colonialist shows up in your country for some benefit. Let’s give that benefit the value X. The benefit, by the way, could be silver mines. It could be slaves. It could be the territory itself–just expansionism. It could be abstractions like the glory of empire. There are places the Portuguese conquered just in their competition with the Spanish, not because they cared. The British needed Egypt for the canal. It could be any reason that a powerful nation takes over some other territory. Give that benefit that the colonialist perceives the value of x.

How do you get rid of them?

And, the answer of the FLN and other anticolonial movements modeled on the FLN or that came before the FLN was very simple. You exact a cost that’s x+1. And, if the cost is x+1, they leave.

But of course, you are not responsible to the colonialist to be polite. You’re responsible to your children to be free as soon as possible.

So, you don’t exact a cost of x+1. It’s never x+1. The cost you try to exact is x+300. Because if the cost is x+300, the colonialist leaves sooner.

And so, anticolonial wars always tend to horrific brutality because of the x+300 logic. Not because colonized peoples are crueler than civilized Europeans or any of these kinds of ideas that percolated through the French discourse and other colonial discourses.

And, the FLN was brutal, horrific. The terror attacks, gunning down families on the beach, cutting off body parts of random victims, just bombings of cafes–it was a horrific, horrific terror war.

The French response, bless their hearts, managed to be even more horrific. The estimates of the civilian dead of the French bombings of the villages south of the coastal cities where the FLN would hide, probably one reasonable estimate is probably 500,000 dead Algerian civilians. Some ideological movements in Algeria argue that it was one and a half million, historians think [?].

Haviv Rettig Gur: It was a sarcastic remark, yes. The French response to the FLN was actually horrific. And, the FLN also, really importantly, to understand how this functions and how really smart the anticolonial struggle was, the strategy was: the FLN lost every single engagement in eight years and won the war, because the pressure that this war created–two things created pressure back in Paris. The first was the terrorism inflicted by the FLN and the second was the French cruelty that that terrorism drew in response. Fundamental to the FLN strategy was goading the French to be cruel to the Algerians. And, that toppled the Republic and brought in de Gaulle. That created really deeply revolutionary political change in the France. The profound influence that the FLN had on France itself–on the Metropole–was astonishing.

And, that war ends in 1962 with what is essentially a miracle in the experience of the Algerian Muslim community, which is to say: almost overnight a million people just get on a boat and leave, just like that. They got sick of it. They couldn’t do it. They couldn’t be killed and they certainly couldn’t kill anymore. And, their whole politics had restructured themselves; and the French Republic got out.

The PLO–the Palestine Liberation Organization–is established two years, I think less, I think about 18 months later in Cairo. There’s a lot of Arab League politics, there’s a lot of factions, there’s a lot of debates, there’s a lot of ideology. There’s a lot of Soviet Union. There’s a lot of complexity there that people–again, libraries have been written about. But, the fundamental story in that room was Algeria. Algeria becomes, in 1962, this touchstone of anticolonial–the third-world almost invents its identity based on that Algerian moment. And, when Arafat would go on to declare a Palestinian State in 1988, he did so in Algiers.

When Arafat, in 1974, gave a speech in the General Assembly talking about Zionism as colonialism, he was invited to speak by the President of the Assembly–who was the President of Algeria, who had been a major figure in the FLN. The connection is conscious.

And when the PLO is established in 1964, the PLO is established three years before there’s an Israeli occupation in the West Bank in Gaza. It’s not established to push back the Israeli occupation. There is a military occupation in Gaza in the West Bank, but they’re Jordanian and Egyptian; and that’s not something the Palestinians ever resisted or fought against; and in fact, the Palestinian elites accepted openly and officially. But, the 1964 establishment of the PLO was based on the idea that just as the Algerians had been able to kick out the French, so, too, Palestinians–using anticolonial methods–could kick out the Israelis. And, that’s really important to understand.

The French were strong. The French had been there a long time. The French were many. And those were reasons not to try. And, the Algerians proved that even though the Jews were strong, the Jews were many, and the Jews had been there a long time, it could still be done.

And so, this terror war–and after 1964, there’s the hijacking of airplanes, there’s massacres like the Ma’alot Massacre. Commandos of the PFLP [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine] come down from Lebanon, take over a school, and murder 22 kids. That kind of warfare is modeled on Algeria.

And, here’s where it gets interesting.

Let me just pause there for a second. I’m talking way too much. I apologize.

Haviv Rettig Gur: One of the really interesting arguments that come out of FLN strategy is an argument about the nature of power in a colonialist situation. The colonialist state, by definition, is powerful–right?–just because it’s a state that can project itself from its own land to another land. When I declare war on it, it gets more powerful, because it sees the crisis and it sends troops from the homeland to the colony. So, it’ll only ever get more powerful.

And, under the conditions of colonialist rule, I can never meet it in conventional war. I can never develop the industrial base to face its industrial base–because I’m colonized by it.

In other words, even best-case scenario that I could industrialize quickly if I chose to, I can’t under their control. So, the colonialists will only ever look powerful, and it will remain powerful, and it will remain powerful, and it will remain powerful, and it will remain powerful. And then it will collapse.

And I can’t, from the outside, see the collapse; but sometimes I get signals of weakness, signals of collapse that come from within the colonialist structure.

And, for example, sometimes the French asked for some kind of accommodation or a ceasefire. The FLN interpreted those attempts at some temporary halt of fighting, or something like that, as signals from within the colonialist structure of power as an internal weakness. What’s the theory of how the colonialist collapses? You cause them the x+1–you cause them more cost than the colony is worth. Because, a colonialist project fundamentally is an economic project or a power projection project; if you cost more than the value to the colonialist, they’ll ultimately roll it up and quit.

But also, you force them to do things they can’t explain. Their cruelty is critical to your strategy. And then eventually they don’t want to anymore. They don’t want to pay the cost–the moral cost, the political cost, the financial cost, the diplomatic cost–of maintaining that superstructure of power. And so, they collapse in six different ways and it happens all at once, and it happens from within, not from you.

That’s the FLN theory of how you destroy a powerful colonialist.

Haviv Rettig Gur: That’s what the Second Intifada was. That’s the point.

The Second Intifada was Palestinian terror organizations that modeled themselves on the FLN–the generation of Hamas leaders, of Fatah leaders, Arafat himself, who are leading the Palestinian cause in 2000. How did they interpret Oslo? How did they interpret the fact that Yitzhak Rabin in 1992–the Chief of Staff of the Israeli army in 1967, the conqueror of the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan and Sinai–he’s the one coming to the Palestinians and saying, ‘Let’s pull back. Let’s make some accommodation. Let’s end the occupation. Let’s create independence for you.’ And Barak, in 1999, running on an even larger, more magnanimous, more actual statehood platform–Barak, the most decorated soldier in the history of the Israeli military, Barak, the Chief of Staff of the Israeli–it matters that he came from within the military establishment to this Palestinian interpretation.

What is Oslo, if not signals from within the power structure that the power structure is caving? And, what does the FLN do when the power structure caves? It doubles down on its attacks because the fact that the French ask for a ceasefire means that they sense their vulnerability. That’s your only signal of vulnerability: you triple down on the attacks.

And so, what was the Second Intifada in the minds of the orchestrators of the Second Intifada? The First Intifada was bottom-up: Palestinian leaders were as surprised as the Israelis and they had to pivot to pretend to be in charge of it. The Second Intifada was a planned, organized, guerrilla-warfare project–really a campaign–with leaders, with bank accounts, with planners, with intelligence, with engineers.

The Second Intifada was the Palestinian political elite, raised on the ideas of Algeria, saying, ‘We’ve just gotten the signal; now we double-down.’ And, so, the height of peace was the moment to destroy the peace in 140 suicide bombings.

Haviv Rettig Gur: That is an extremely fair depiction of what most Israeli Jews think. Absolutely. Within Palestine society–

Haviv Rettig Gur: Yes. That’s really important. I want to make it very clear. The entirety of the narrative that I have tried to lay out and anything I say ahead of time, unless we say otherwise explicitly, is my attempt to portray as authentically and truly and empathetically as I know how the mainstream Israeli Jewish narrative.

There are, as we said, narratives among the Jewish left to the left of the mainstream and with the right to the right of the mainstream. They’re fascinating, they’re different. They have a lot of data points that they use to show that they are right and everybody else is wrong.

Among Israeli Arabs, there are many layers of identity. They consider themselves Palestinian and Arab and Israeli and Muslim, and many of them are Christian. And, they have five narratives amongst themselves, complex, layered. There’s a lot of Israeliness, deep Israeliness and identification with Israel, and Palestinianness and deep identification with the Palestinian situation and suffering and cause and identity.

And then, among Palestinians in the West Bank in Gaza there are another 11 narratives. It’s big, it’s complex. It’s a real living, breathing human society. All of us are real living, breathing human societies.

So, I want to just clarify–and it’s really important to–that what I’m trying to convey is what the mainstream–I estimated it at 80%; it really is a huge mainstream cohesive. Because the left collapsed in this story, it kind of joined the center that the right also kind of collapsed into and is 80% of the Israeli mainstream we have now. Excuse me.

Haviv Rettig Gur: Right. The left is more likely to balance the budget than the right, yes, in Israel, by far.

And, the best correlation I ever heard in the data was a study conducted I believe by the Israel Democracy Institute, of all the parties currently in the coalition and all the parties currently in the opposition. This was I believe a year ago or a year and a half ago. And, the closest correlation was religious observance.

Haviv Rettig Gur: Meaning the more religious you are, the more likely you are to be on the right. And, the less religious you are, the less likely you are to be on the right. And, that was a very, very high correlation.

And, there was also a correlation to Ashkenazi and Mizrahi–Jews from the European who tended to the left; there’s Jews from the Arab world and the Muslim world who tended to the right. There are a lot of different correlations.

The single best correlation for which way you voted was religious observance. And, make of that what you will. The culture that produces the Israeli right is a more religious culture. The culture that produces the Israeli left are more a secular one. That’s a lot of the energy also, those fears of treading on each other’s fundamental way of life is a lot of the energy behind the judicial reform fight of last year, which, if people remember about three Israels ago, that was the thing tearing us apart–right?–13 months ago.

So, yeah, the left-right distinction is very important.

I’ll also say there’s more diversity on the ground than you could possibly see from far away. For example, when Ariel Sharon in 2005 carried out the Gaza disengagement–pulled out of Gaza, to the last settler, to the last soldier, to the last inch–he offered money to people who would leave ahead of time. And, the Gaza settlers were considered very, very ideologically fervent. This was a group of 8,000 people who lived among a million and a half Palestinians at the time, and you had to have a lot of faith to think that that was somehow going to ever become Israel.

Even that group of deeply, deeply religiously believing–thinking that they’re part of a redemption of the land, that is the redemption of the people, and all of that–even with that ideology, half of the Gaza settlers took the money and left before the army went in and pulled the rest out.

And so, there is a willingness to compromise in places where you don’t expect. There is a disappointment with the Second Intifada, even on the right, that always opposed the Oslo Peace Process.

And I’ll give you an example. And, this is really important to understand, because for Israelis, the last test of Arab intentions–Palestinian intentions, and beyond Palestinian intentions, in Lebanon and elsewhere–wasn’t in 2000 or 2000-to-2003, the Second Intifada. The test continued. Because, who won that election in 2001 at the collapse of the left when 17 points of the electorate disappeared on us? A man named Ariel Sharon. He was the head of the opposition, head of the Likud Party at the time. And, Sharon is a former major-general–

Haviv Rettig Gur: controversial–on the right. A controversial fellow. A brilliant military commander in his past. And, Sharon becomes Prime Minister while buses are blowing up. I can’t convey the trauma of those years. A 7:30AM bus blowing up in Jerusalem is essentially a school bus blowing up. I mean, this was a horrific period. And, Sharon–

Haviv Rettig Gur: Yeah. It’s not literally a school bus. Many children–

Haviv Rettig Gur: I, as a child in Jerusalem, took the city bus to school. City buses are more reliable. I was often late out of the door. And, the school buses–the buses–the city buses that are blowing up in the morning in the city of Jerusalem in 2001 are full of kids.

And, so the idea that these attacks, it’s something–it’s a statistic. It’s a Wikipedia article. No. This is actually the lived experience of people convinced that the other side wants to mass murder our children, and they’re convinced of it because the other side tried to mass murder our children. And, that’s–

Haviv Rettig Gur: So, Ariel Sharon becomes Prime Minister under those conditions. And, there’s a debate in the Israeli strategic elite about what to do. And there’s actually a voice–coming out of army intelligence and some other places–that says that it’s not clear that we can stop it with military solutions. That you need a political solution. Because, in all the history of warfare, there has never been a guerrilla army based in a supportive civilian population that was defeated by any standing army. Now, standing armies don’t defeat guerrillas in support of civilian populations. That’s never happened, not since Alexander the Great. It was a whole discussion.

And Sharon’s answer to that was essentially, ‘I didn’t say it was possible. I just said we’re going to do it.’

And, this was my army; I was in the infantry in these years. The infantry carried out tremendous amount of urban warfare training. We tried to lock down as much as possible the pathways to Israel. I sat in many, many ambushes on the mountainsides of the West Bank at night, trying to catch the suicide bombers sneaking in the night through the valleys to get to Jerusalem, to get to Tel Aviv. The West Bank, people should remember, are the highlands overlooking all of our major cities. And, Israel is nine miles wide–without the West Bank–right in the middle of the country. So, it’s very close, it’s very intimate. I was an hour walk from the Green Line when I was laying those ambushes.

And, Sharon’s response actually is implemented in April of 2002 when there’s a particularly heinous bombing. I don’t know how to measure the heinousness of bombings; but this one, we call it to this day the Passover Massacre. This was a bomber who walked into the Park Hotel on the beach in Netanya on Passover Eve, when a couple hundred people were in a ballroom of the hotel celebrating the Passover Seder, many of them elderly. And, detonated his bomb, his shrapnel bomb. I believe the death toll was something like 30 people and many, many dozens wounded.

And, Sharon declared Operation Defensive Shield.

Defensive Shield was basically my war. In other words, every generation in Israel has its war. It’s one of these tragedies of the Israeli experience. My father was in the artillery on the southern Golan when the Syrians overran their positions, and he spent the first many hours of the war behind Syrian lines. Many of the men in his battalion–most of the men in his battalion–were killed in that first day. I did not have–

Haviv Rettig Gur: Right, right, right. In 1973. Thank you. I apologize. I’m used to talking to Israelis about this where a lot of the sort of background is obvious. [More to come, 1:17:29]