The cost of starting a (losing) war - with Dr. Einat Wilf
Today we look back at the history of Palestinian violence against the Jews in Israel (and in the pre-state Yishuv) -- from the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1917 through the myriad efforts to establish a Palestinian Arab State alongside a Jewish State in the 1930s and the 40s. In our discussion today, we follow this pattern all the way through the Second Intifada in the early 2000s, and now today. Each time a war or wave of terror is launched, and Israel perseveres, the Palestinian leadership tries to dictate the terms of what comes next, as though they were the victors in this defensive war, rather than the aggressors and the defeated.
Why? And are we seeing that same mindset play out right now? Did Hamas actually think it would defeat Israel with this attack, and Israel would fold to its demands, or possibly even just disappear?
To help us understand this important history, Dr. Einat Wilf joins us. Einat was born and raised in Israel. She was an Intelligence Officer in the IDF. She has worked for McKinsey. She was Foreign Policy Advisor to Vice Prime Minister Shimon Peres and an advisor to Yossi Beilin, who was Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs.
Dr. Wilf was a member of the Israeli Parliament (the Knesset) in the early 2010s, where she served as Chair of the Education Committee and Member of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.
She has a BA from Harvard, an MBA from INSEAD in France, and a PhD in Political Science from the University of Cambridge. She was a Visiting Professor at Georgetown University and is a lecturer at Reichman University in Israel.
Einat is the author of seven books that explore key issues in Israeli society. “We Should All Be Zionists“, published in 2022, brings together her essays from the past four years on Israel, Zionism and the path to peace; and she co-authored “The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace”, which was published in 2020.
Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
[00:00:00] You know, over the years, I would meet with European diplomats on their funding of UNRWA, how it perpetuates the conflict. And they would say things like, Oh, the Palestinians know that they're not returning. It's just a bargaining chip. Like, you know, it's a delusion. And I was like, Oh, if there's anyone that's irrational in this conflict, it's us, not them.
They look at 7 million Jews struggling to survive amidst half a billion Arabs, 1. 5 billion Muslims, and they say to themselves, This is not going to last much longer, this Jewish experiment in self determination. One more generation, five more generations, we'll wait them out. Whenever the Arabs of this land could have had a moment when they said, you know what, this is not working out too well.
Maybe we should stop investing all our resources in getting rid of the Jewish state. Not a good use of our time. Every time that they could have had this moment, every Anti Zionist, anti Jewish ideology [00:01:00] of the moment rushes in to tell them, No, you're pure victims of a great evil, change nothing. You're responsible for nothing.
So they actually get that fuel to keep going. October 7th was minute by minute, the Palestinian vision of return. This is why there's so much exhilaration, thrill, because this is what they've been waiting for, groomed for. For decades, and they see it, and they could not be happier.
It's 11. 05pm on Wednesday, February 7th, here in Tel Aviv. And it's 4. 05pm on Wednesday, February 7th, in New York City. October 7th, 2023 was not the first war launched against Israel by the Palestinians, or even against Jews [00:02:00] in pre state Israel. If you go back to violence against the Jews in this area, From the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1917, through the myriad efforts to establish a Palestinian Arab state alongside a Jewish state, those efforts in the 1930s and the 1940s, you can follow a pattern all the way from then, through the Second Intifada, and now today.
Each time they launch a war and Israel perseveres, fighting defensively in that war, the Palestinians try to dictate the terms of what comes next, as though They were the victors in this defensive war, rather than the aggressors, and rather than the defeated. Why? And are we seeing that same mindset play out right now?
Did Hamas actually think it would defeat Israel with this attack, and that Israel would fold to its demands, or possibly even just disappear? To help us [00:03:00] understand this crucial history, which is crucial to understanding where we are today, Dr. Einat Wolf joins us here in Tel Aviv. Einat was born and raised in Jerusalem.
She now lives in Tel Aviv. She was an intelligence officer in the IDF. She has worked in the private sector for McKinsey, but most of her life was in politics and government and policy. and in the War of Ideas. She was foreign policy advisor to then Vice Prime Minister Shimon Peres. She was an advisor to Yossi Beilin, who was the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs under Shimon Peres.
She later ran for office in the Labor Party and served in the Knesset, Israel's parliament, in the early 2010s, where she served as chair of the Knesset Education Committee. and is a member of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. Einat has a B. A. from Harvard University, an M. B. A. from INSEAD in France, and a Ph.
D. [00:04:00] in Political Science from the University of Cambridge. She was a visiting professor at Georgetown University and a lecturer at Reichmann University here in Israel. Dr. Wilf is the author of seven books. that explore key issues in Israeli society. Her most recent book, which is most relevant to this conversation, she co authored.
It is called, The War of Return, How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace, which was published in 2020. It's quite a prescient book. We'll link to it in the show notes. Dr. Enot Wilf. on the cost of starting a losing war. This is Call Me Back.
And I'm pleased to welcome to this podcast for the first time, my friend, Enad Wilf, who lives here in Tel Aviv. We are here in Tel Aviv at the Startup Nation Central Headquarters at the podcasting [00:05:00] studio. We were going to do this virtually, but I'm glad we waited till I, I am here. Enad, before we start talking about what I wanted to talk to you about, I wanna spend just a couple minutes on your story, and I did a little bit of this in the introduction, 'cause you were in politics, you were in elected politics.
Mm-Hmm. . And then you joined the War of Ideas. You may someday go back to politics. Just walk us through your path, because I think it informs how you think about some of the issues we're talking about today. Certainly. And thank you for having me. Politically and socially, I grew up in the Israeli political left, the Labor Party.
And as soon as I was a young adult, I could vote. I voted, of course, for Rabin and Barak. And like many Israelis who came from the peace camp, I was euphoric in the nineties. I believe that the conflict was essentially quite simple, that it's about land. And I very much believed in the Compelling and simple idea of land for peace.[00:06:00]
If we could just, you know, give the land, you know, the, uh, Golan Heights to the Syrians and the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians who already gave the Sinai to the Egyptians, they'll just leave us alone. And we can finally end all this war and bloodshed. And like many from my background, I was euphoric in the nineties.
I thought we were on the verge of really a new Middle East. That was, uh, but it was very much a In 1967, interpretation of events that is in 1967, all these territories you're describing were were were taken over by Israel in a defensive war. And if we just went back to pre 1967 to like the world that existed between 1948, 1967.
Israel's enemies would no longer be its enemies. We could reach accommodations with all of them, and we could return to some normalcy. Precisely. And the idea was that before 67, they wouldn't make peace with us. But after they were defeated in 67, and we have all these territorial assets, [00:07:00] now they'll understand that there's no choice.
And we have those assets, and we can exchange them for peace. And I was thrilled when Ehud Barak went to Camp David in 2000 and put on the table a proposal that people forget today how far reaching it was, a fully sovereign Palestinian state ending the occupation, no settlements, they were either going to be dismantled or exchanged for equivalent land.
Redividing Jerusalem. Exactly. So the Palestinians would get a capital in Jerusalem. Precisely, including holy sites. People forget that even that part was going to be divided. And then I saw Arafat walking away from that in 2000. I saw Abu Mazen walking away from an even better proposal in some aspects by Olmert in 2008.
And I saw them walking away. I saw them not being criticized by their own people for walking away, not even some minor op ed in a London paper saying, Are you nuts? You know, we're on the verge [00:08:00] of getting everything we've wanted. Go back to the negotiating room. Get it for us. It was followed by massive violence.
Again, people forget, but in the years 2001, 2, 3, 4, before October 7th, this was the darkest time to live in Israel. There was a campaign of massacres, misnamed the Second Intifada. And like many Israelis, certainly the Land for Peace Israelis, the Peace Camp Israelis, we were looking at that and we're like, what's going on?
And what did the Palestinians actually want? Because they clearly don't want a state, and they clearly don't want an end to the occupation, and they clearly don't want an end to settlements and a capital in East Jerusalem because they could have had all that. And they repeatedly walk away from it and follow it up with violence.
So there must be something else going on. Okay, now, where are you? Professionally, at this point, are you in politics at this point? No. So when do you run for office? So this is the [00:09:00] first decade of the 2000s. I work at this time with Yossi Bailin, the architect of the Oslo Accords. Then Yossi Bailin, who was deputy foreign minister.
Yes. He was a Shimon Peres lieutenant, exactly, and he was really the architect of the Oslo peace process. Precisely. And I worked with him. I didn't know that. And then I worked with Shimon Peres for a few years, and then I began my path in politics. So I'm involved in the Labour Party. I'm not yet a member of Knesset.
I'll become a member in 2012. Ten at the end of this decade. But this is already a decade where I begin to transition and I begin to think something else is going on. I do the research that becomes the book The War of Return. I meet with Palestinians and I realize that they've always told us what they wanted.
We just didn't listen. Or when we listened, it sounded so outrageous that we didn't take it seriously. But they've always told us what they wanted. From the river from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. I was told you need to say which [00:10:00] river in which sea these days and, you know, Palestine will be free of what exactly of a sovereign Jewish state.
And to their credit, once I began to do the research and to have meetings, I realized that they've been very consistent and they've always said the same things and more important than saying they have always made decisions based on that idea. And we just didn't think it made sense. So we interpreted according to our wishful thinking, not to what they said.
Okay. So what I've been struck by since October 7th, and you and I talked about this offline, is there's now an open mindedness by a number of people who weren't paying attention before to start understanding some of these core issues that had been driving the conflict that many of us, I think, had sort of become numb to because.
We cared about these issues, we were informed about them, but they just, there were bigger fights to fight, people weren't paying attention, people rolled their eyes when you'd bring them up, and you wrote a whole [00:11:00] book about one of these issues, uh, which I want to talk about today, and it's got, uh, UNRWA, all these, some of these issues, and I think now for the first time people are scratching their heads saying, oh wow, these issues really do matter.
And they really do explain how we got here today, and I think that's what you're getting at. And obviously you're, a lot of your academic work has been devoted to that. I want to now really rewind the tape, really, really, really, really rewind the tape to the Ottoman Empire. Yes. Which was effectively the Turkish Empire that controlled much of this region.
Can you talk a little bit about what the population composition was of the Ottoman Empire? Certainly, and it's important to begin with the Ottoman Empire, and I have to share with you when I talk about the Ottoman Empire in my talks, I see everyone's eyes glaze over. Not, not this listenership. My listenership on the Ottoman Empire, you're like, it's like a good way to start the day.
Exactly, but I'm saying, but like, we can't understand anything without that. So the first thing to understand is really [00:12:00] throughout the 20th century. It's one political arc. We begin the 20th century when much of the earth is divided between empires, and we end the 20th century when much of the earth is divided between states.
And that's the political process of the 20th century. The Ottoman Empire, of course, is one of the biggest empires, is one of the biggest prizes, and it has A Jewish population. It is a multi ethnic empire, of course, a substantial Arab population, but Jewish and Kurdish and Armenian and Turks. And as the empire collapses at the end of World War One, there is this idea that empires will be replaced by states that represent nations.
That's the idea of self determination. And there's no question that the Jewish people are one of the people of the Ottoman Empire. And when some people talk about Israel and its size, and I always [00:13:00] say, look, if the Jews of the Ottoman Empire, just of the Ottoman Empire, would have received their fair share of the imperial lands of the empire based on their proportion of the population, the Jewish state would have been multiple times the size that it is today, five, six times the size that it is today.
And that is because there were Jews During the Ottoman Empire that lived all over the region, not just where we're sitting today in this area that is, you know, what we call pre state Palestine, but there were Jews in everywhere from North Africa, the Levant, Iraq. Of course, there's a continuous Jewish presence in this land all the time.
In this land, in this land, in the land of Israel, there's a continuous Jewish presence as empires come and go. But the vast majority of Jews going back to the Roman and Um, in the Ottoman Empire, even back to the Babylonian exile, those are Jewish communities that often predated the seventh century Arab and Muslim [00:14:00] conquests of the land.
That's how ancient those communities were. So the Ottoman Empire falls, and a bunch of countries are created basically with French and British diplomats sitting there with maps, Sykes Picot and others, penciling out new countries, the creation of new countries. There are Jewish populations in many of those countries that are created.
Yes. So basically what happens is after World War I, it's an interesting moment where the victorious South French and British, as far as they're concerned, they won World War I, and they want to expand their imperial lands. As far as the Americans are concerned, who are now appearing on the world stage.
They won World War One, and European imperialism has been the problem, and they want to end European imperialism. So, when the French and the British want to carve up the lands of the Ottoman Empire as imperial spoils, the Americans are saying, absolutely not. We are now building states based on the principle [00:15:00] of self determination for peoples.
And the tug of war between The former imperial powers in the rising America leads to a compromise, which is called the mandate system, the idea basically being the people of the Ottoman Empire, unlike Europe, are not ready yet for self determination. So the British and the French are going to be their tutors, right?
They're gonna be like a civilizing force. Exactly. Yeah. Now, of course, the British and the French look at it as Empire by any other name. The Americans view it as the process of ending the empire and creating self determination. There's no question that the people that deserve self determination in the lands are Arabs, Jews, Turks, Armenians, Kurds.
And after World War One, all of them are designated to have states. The Turks essentially rip apart their side. They do what they do to the Armenians. They do what they do to the [00:16:00] Kurds. And Turkey emerges as twice the size of what it was supposed to be. They essentially ignore the principle of self determination.
The Arabs have a similar attitude towards the Jews, but essentially the Arabs receive four mandates, Syria, Lebanon, which are French, Iraq, and Transjordan, which are English. And the Jews what's called the mandate for Palestine because at the time everyone understood that Palestine means Jewish. This is why when the League of Nations again, this is after World War One, there's going to be no more war.
We're going to have this international body. So The League of Nations basically entrusts Britain with the mandate. You know, people always say, Oh, Britain gave this land to a people who are not here. It's actually the opposite. The Jews were recognized as the people who have the right to self determination.
And the [00:17:00] Jews were the ones who basically legitimized British tutelage. So it's the other way around. So the League of Nations basically begins the mandate by saying, recognizing the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine. And it only makes sense that before the word was hijacked, everyone in the world understood this meant Jewish.
And this is why the next phrase is, therefore they will reconstitute their national home in this land. It was understood that the Jews are reconstituting themselves. In this land, which no one denied was theirs by historical and cultural connection. So, this is the system, but the system is based on the principle of self determination for the Jews in their ancestral homeland.
The Arabs get states, the Jews are supposed to get states, the Arabs are just not so happy about it. Okay, so if you can summarize the efforts made to address [00:18:00] statehood issues, both for Jews and for Arabs in this area from the fall of the Empire until November 30th, 1947. And we'll get to November 30th, 1947 in a moment.
'cause it's a very important date. But just generally for about those, you know, 30 some, 30 years, 25, 30 years. Describe the efforts made by the Peel Commission, the, these different efforts to, to try to address issues of statehood in this area. The Arab states essentially emerge Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon.
They emerge from this process. They're created. They're created and they emerge from this process of the mandate to become sovereign states. The only mandate which is not fulfilled. The only trust that is essentially betrayed is the British trust to the Jews. And the reason is, of course, Arab violence. As I said, the Turks prevented [00:19:00] the Armenians and the Kurds from exercising self determination, and that was Turkey.
The Arabs tried to do the same with the Jews. Why? A variety of reasons, but ultimately I would put 90 percent on the fact that at this point in history the Arabs have only known for the last 1400 years a certain kind of Jew. Meek, uh, powerless, stateless, exiled, and the national liberation movement of the Jews, The idea of self determination, Zionism, essentially challenges A 1400 year view of what is the proper role of the Jew.
And those kind of challenges to power structures, to hierarchies, are always met with violence. So the Arabs are essentially trying to put the Jews back into their proper place. Stateless, powerless, meek, the ones that can only be [00:20:00] defended at the mercy of the Arab and Muslim ruler, never by themselves, for themselves.
And of course, Zionism challenges that. Jews are saying, we're going to defend ourselves by ourselves. That's a massive challenge to the culture around them. So, Arab violence begins in its It's the Again, October 7th is of the same kind, it is barbaric, it is of that kind of intimate brutality that happens already beginning in the 1920s.
So you really see the versions of what we saw on October 7th back, back in the 1920s. Of course, of course. The Arabs of the land begin to violently react against the possibility of a Jewish state in any part of the British Mandate area. And we need to remember, unfortunately, that they were highly successful.
It's not sufficiently emphasized the extent to which Arab violence [00:21:00] prevented the State of Israel from emerging already in the 30s. A lot of people think of the state of Israel as a state of never again. Right, of a response to the Shoah, a response to the Holocaust. And I always say that the state of Israel was envisioned so that never at all.
The vision of Herzl was the ability to see it ahead of time and to establish the state before. So that it will be ready for that moment. When I studied at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, I'll never forget, I had this one professor, a professor of Jewish history, this line he said, he said, the Holocaust did not create the state of Israel.
The Holocaust slowed down the creation of the state of Israel. And I'll explain why, because Because of Arab violence and British imperial interests, the British essentially, throughout the 20s and 30s, begin to betray the trust that they received from the League of Nations to help the Jews achieve sovereignty.
And the biggest betrayal is the [00:22:00] closing down of of this embryonic Jewish state to Jewish immigration at the most dire moment in Jewish history. And Arab violence is actually responsible for the fact that hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Jews were condemned. to a genocide in Europe of what could have only been ethnic cleansing.
And the reason that we know that and we'll talk about it is that literally two decades later, even less, there's an ethnic cleansing of Jews from the entire Arab world. And the only difference is that now they have the state of Israel that is opening its borders. And it's gates to Jewish immigration, and that's what the Jews did not have in the thirties, even though they prepared it.
And the only thing that prevented the Jews from having their state in the thirties, as they should have, is Arab violence. And it is one of the biggest successes, because just like your professor said, After World [00:23:00] War II, after the Shoah, people think, Oh, a guilty Europe gave the Jews this land. No, it was exactly the opposite, except for the fact that no European felt guilty at that moment.
It's, there was an, a reigning sense among the Jews, certainly here in the Yishuv, in the pre state times, that there's not going to be a Jewish state, because there's no Jews. That was really the sense. And it is really through perseverance and remarkable diplomacy that the Jews are able to pick themselves up and to get recognition for a much truncated and smaller Jewish state in the lands that were previously supposed to be Um, all for a Jewish state, but now there's just not enough Jews.
So there's consideration for a Jewish state by the international authorities during this time before 1947. Can you just talk a little bit about those efforts? Because those efforts also involved creating an Arab state here. Certainly. [00:24:00] So as the British are responding to Arab violence, they're thinking, okay, we will, and they want to placate the Arabs.
That's the most important thing for the British in the thirties. And they think, okay. We'll give the Arabs a state and we'll give the Jews a teeny weeny weeny, essentially, city state around Tel Aviv, basically. They want to give them pretty much Tel Aviv as a state, and the Arabs reject that, too. Uh, this is the Peel Commission.
That's part of the response to the Arab violence, to the Arab revolt. So this is the 1930s. This is 1937. And basically, they say, Okay. The vast majority of this land between the river and the sea, that was supposed to be for the Jews. You know, we already created trans Jordan, which is 80% of the land that was taken away from the mandate for Palestine, and the rest was supposed to be Jewish.
And it's important to mention when the British tore off 80% of the mandate area to give it to trans Jordan, that's the moment when Jews were no [00:25:00] longer allowed in that land. So it was understood that west of the Jordan River. Is for the Jewish state. And again, because of our violence, there were just not enough Jews in time, but the Arabs rejected because they say not even the size of a post stamp.
I mean, literally, that's their quote. Yeah, yeah, like No Jewish state in any border in any size. People later are trying to revise and to say, Oh, the Arabs rejected the 1947 partition plan because it was not a fair division of the resources or the land. But there's actually zero evidence that they considered any division of the land fair.
They've made it very clear that Any Jewish state in any borders is illegitimate because that goes back to the fundamental issue. A Jewish state means sovereign, upright Jews who defend themselves by themselves, [00:26:00] and that's unacceptable. You have this quote in your book from Ernest Bevin, who is Foreign Secretary of the UK, who basically says, it's an amazing quote, and I don't have it in front of me, but he's I'll say it.
Okay. So as I was doing the research for the book, I came across the quote, and it became my favorite quote ever since, because Ernst Bevin, if you know anything about him, he did not like Jews, not friendly, yeah, not a fan, not a fan, and he goes to the British Parliament in February 47 to explain why Britain betrayed the mandate, and this is, by the way, this is why the mandate goes back to the United Nations, which is the heir of the League of Nations, and he has to explain why Britain fulfilled its mandate to the Arabs through Iraq and Transjordan, but not to the Jews.
And he says the following, His Majesty's government has come to the conclusion that the conflict in the land is irreconcilable. This is February 47. There's no settlements, there's no occupation, there's no refugees, there's no State of Israel yet, and already he [00:27:00] calls it irreconcilable. And he says, look, in this land, between the river and the sea, there are two groups, Jews and Arabs, so there's no question that those are the two collectives.
And he says each one of them has a top priority. The one thing they care about more than anything, he calls it the point of principle. And he says, for the Jews, the point of principle is to establish a state. So the Jews want a state. He says, for the Arabs, the point of principle is to prevent to the last the establishment of a Jewish state in any part of the land.
He's not saying the Jews want a state, the Arabs want a state, and we'd love the UN's help in drawing the border. He says, as a matter of top priority, The Jews want a state and the Arabs want the Jews not to have a state, by definition, irreconcilable. So, implicit in that is What I was struck when I was, I read that because what I thought was implicit in what he was saying was a core principle for the Jews is they want a state and then whatever you figure out for the [00:28:00] Arabs, that's fine.
Just figure it out for the Arabs. It'll be fine with us as long as we get our state. But the core principle for the Arabs was not whether or not they get a state. Their core principle was No Jewish state period full stop. This is before 1948. Yes, and that's their top priority, right? So first they want to make sure that the Jews don't have a state then everything else Okay, and as a result, this has been the best predictor of the behavior of both sides Since that moment, because the Jews want a state.
So they always make decisions that work in order to get a state and the Arabs want the Jews not to have a state. And as we'll discuss, we'll see that all their decisions are very consistent with that top priority. Okay, so I want to go to November 30th, 1947. Yes, the British are getting ready to wind down their Mandate.
Yes. And the U. N. Passes a resolution. You in Resolution 181 that says what? So resolution you basically because the [00:29:00] mandate goes back to the United Nations, they say, Look, uh, meaning the mandate is going to expire and they're turning back to the United and the British are saying to the U. N. You're in charge.
You're gonna be in charge. Exactly. You know, we we were the temporary carriers of this mandate. Take it back. We were not able to fulfill it, and you take it back. So the United Nations, uh, creates a whole committee, and ultimately they say, at the end of the day, the best thing is just to divide this land.
And they create a partition plan for a Jewish state and an Arab state. It's important to remember because that will be relevant to the present moment. One of the two states is Jewish. And the territory assigned to the Jewish state, it's one of my favorite things to look at, is essentially the Negev desert plus the lands that the Jews reclaimed from malaria in the early 20th century.
One of my favorite maps is to look at the maps of the incidents of malaria in Israel in the early 20th century and the partition map. [00:30:00] And what you see is what the Jews got is essentially the lands that they reclaimed from malaria. That was going to be the state of Israel. And the Arabs, true to their top priority, go to war because the Jews celebrate in the streets, right?
We all have those images of the Jews listening to the radio. Australia. Yes, right. And the vote in the UN, the vote in the United Nations on partition, and it's a very iconic moment for every Israeli growing up. The the Jews in Israel huddled by the radio waiting for the outcome of the vote. And when two thirds of the General Assembly approved partition, they go dancing in the streets, even though it's a truncated state and they don't get Judea, which is the cradle of Judaism, and they don't get Zion, Jerusalem, which is where Zionism comes from.
But even this truncated state is still a source of jubilation because it fulfills the [00:31:00] top priority of the Jews. of sovereignty of a state, however small, whatever territory, as long as we can be sovereign. And the Arabs reject partition and go to war because partition fails to fulfill their top priority of no Jewish state anywhere on the land.
And they're very clear about it. Okay. So there's this vote for partition. Yes. And then what happens in the 1947 to 48 period? Okay. So now we have a few months before the end of the British mandate, which ends on May between 14, 15 and midnight, the UN has already voted on, but the UN has already voted, voted for partition partition and now erupts essentially a civil war.
or a war between the Jews and the Arabs in the Mandate area as the British are winding down. But at this point, it's still a local war between the Jews and Arabs. And it's important to know, until March 1948, the Jews are losing. They essentially take a defensive position. They're trying to [00:32:00] protect the places where Jews live and they're losing and because they're losing the British and the Americans are in conversation around March 1948 to renew the mandate.
They're basically saying, Okay, this is not this is not going to work out. Well, let's renew the mandate. Ben Gurion, the head of the issue of the pre state years, understands that if the Jews will not be able to to sustain themselves militarily, they're not going to get their state. And they go on the offensive in April 1948.
And essentially in time for the British leaving, they're able to secure some of the territory for the Jewish state. Then the British leave. And when the British leave, Israel declares independence. So this is the British leave at midnight on May 14th, 1948. Yes. The British mandate is formally terminated.
Yeah. They're on the flag. They take down the Union Jack. They're out the door. Exactly. And now several Arab countries join the [00:33:00] Arabs The local Arabs in an onslaught on the newly declared Jewish state with the exact same goal. I mean, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, some Iraqi forces. Yeah, exactly. They all exactly on on May 14th, 1948.
Yeah. Beginning in May 15th the next day. Yes. And they are very clear about the fact that they are there to ensure that the Jewish state does not emerge and does not survive the onslaught. So Israel's fighting this war. What is happening during this whole time with the Arabs living here? I get that there are Arab armies invading.
This issue is disputed. There's, there are Arabs locally, I think some who are fighting with the Arab armies that have invaded. There are some Arabs that are fleeing. And there are some Arabs that the Yishuv, the Jewish community here, is encouraging to flee, or pushing out outright. So [00:34:00] can you break this down for me?
Certainly. Again, first, it's important to have the broader view. In the 20th century transition from empires to nation states, or states if they're not lucky, new borders are delineated. In the process of new borders being delineated, it's almost always a very bloody, violent process. And you have tens of millions of refugees being created as people flee across these newly created borders, typically to the side that is more ethnically similar to them.
You have this happening across Europe with the Germans and Poles and Ukrainians Italians and of course Turks and Greeks and Hindus and Muslims. And this is happening here. Already in November, December 1947, before the Arab onslaught, before the British leave, the top, uh, the most educated, the wealthiest of the Arabs in the land leave.
And we [00:35:00] see it everywhere. When there's war, the people who have money, the people who have assets, the people who have the ability to flee. They flee. This was devastating for the local Arabs because essentially the entire leadership, the entire educated class left within the first few weeks of the civil war situation between the Jews and Arabs.
Then with the Jewish offensive that begins in April 48, as I said, this is the moment that the Jews understand that they either win or there's no state. Then begins the process of also some expulsions. And people essentially also being pushed out, none of them, and that's important to mention, are what you call today ethnic cleansing, because Now there is this story that looks like this.
You know, if people you ask them what happened in 1948, this is their imagination. There was a peaceful state of Palestine, which was Arab and already [00:36:00] existed. And then evil, white, imperial Jews came came with a massive army that already 1948 possessed F 16s and tanks, and they rolled over the peaceful state of Palestine and, you know, ethnically cleansed the peaceful Palestinians who just lived there.
And I don't think I'm caricaturing too much how some people imagine what happened there. And this is why it's so important, and we included in the book, especially in English, descriptions of what the war was like. Brutal, existential, door to door, and with a clear declaration by the Arabs that they have no intention to allow the Jews to remain sovereign for a single moment, if they can help it.
So, In April 1948 begins the process that also includes expulsions, but they're always driven by a military idea because the notion is that Israel can [00:37:00] no longer be on the defensive. It needs to go out. And because this is essentially a civil war where the fighters are part of the population, there's no difference in places where The Arab population said, you know, we're good with the Jewish state.
We're not fighting. Those are places that nobody was hurt. You see it in Abu Ghosh today, but in places where there was fighting, Abu Ghosh is just outside of Jerusalem, and it's an Arab town. Yeah, and it's a very healthy civil relationship. And there was no fighting. So and the Arab community has very close relations with the Jewish communities that surround it.
Yeah, exactly. Ethnic cleansing is essentially when you do it. to people who are it's not in war. It's not in fighting. You do it because of their ethnicity, not because they're fighting. When people are expelled, it's because of a fighting war situation. And it's important to remember, this is incredibly normal in the course of war.
Certainly this kind of like [00:38:00] existential door to door village to village war, which was the Jewish Arab war. Between, uh, November 29th, 47, and until the Arab onslaught in, uh, May 15th. From May 15th on, you continue to have refugees as, you know, with people, war is coming close, they flee. And it's a combination of people fleeing, of some expulsions, and again, completely normal and war.
There is nothing unique in the war here compared to anything happening at this time as empires collapse and new nations are established. Okay, the war ends. The armistice agreements in 1949 reached with Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. At this point, how many Palestinian Arab refugees are there as a result of this war on the day the war ends, according to the U.
N. So they're still at this point called Arab refugees because the name Palestine has not yet been hijacked to the [00:39:00] Arab cause. They're called Arab refugees. There's about 700, 000 of them. There are estimates ranging from a low of 500, 000 to a high of 900, 000. The common and accepted estimate is around 700, 000.
And there are U. N. Papers. I've seen them from around that time that site around 700, 760, 000. Okay. And they are mostly in Gaza. the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, some in Iraq. And here, the Arab countries are actually a bit different. First of all, it's important, like you said, those are armistice agreement.
Those are not peace agreements, because the Arab countries are basically saying, we're stopping the fighting for now, you know, apropos everyone asking for a ceasefire. We're stopping the fighting for now. But we're not making peace because this Jewish state thing is still unacceptable. We're not recognizing the sovereignty of this Jewish.
We're just saying we're pausing the fighting for now. Precisely. [00:40:00] Now, Jordan, because it has a somewhat different history with the Jewish state, it's somewhat more acceptable of that idea, especially the Hashemites. The Hashemites are the family, the royal family in Transjordan, which is to this day, King Abdullah.
It's the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan. And after World War One, they, they somewhat, you know, they had some favorable ideas, uh, with the idea of a Jewish state still under Arab control, but it was mildly favorable. They are actually willing to make peace with the Jewish state at the end of the war. They annex the West Bank.
They naturalized the Arab refugees. And they do not demand anything from the Jewish state. They understand that the way you end war is wherever refugees are, is where they stay. So Jordan actually is willing to make peace and to naturalize the Arab refugees and make them citizens or residents of Jordan.
Exactly. It makes them citizens or subjects essentially of the kingdom of Jordan. But [00:41:00] the Jordanian king, Abdallah, is actually murdered by a Palestinian over that issue. So ever since the the Jordanians are kind of You know, jumpy and iffy on this issue. But Syria, Lebanon, Egypt with Gaza, they're very clear.
We are not settling the Arab refugees and the Arab refugees themselves. They're not some pawns. They refuse settlement, too, because they say if we're settled, the war is over. And that means that the Jewish state gets to stay. And that's unacceptable. So an Arab refugee in Syria or in Lebanon or any Egypt or and the same ethnicity, they're the same, right?
There are Arab Muslims who will not become naturalized in the country where they're now living. And then as we learn it, same thing applies to their Children and grandchildren. So can you explain that? Certainly. So what happens at this point is the refugee crisis across the world is massive. Again, this is post World War [00:42:00] II.
Empires collapse. New states are established. Borders are delineated. Tens of millions of people flee across borders and they're refugees. A lot of them are handled locally, without any assistance. Israel absorbs the Jewish refugees from the West Bank, from Gaza, from Jerusalem, from the Jewish Quarter. It absorbs the Jewish refugees who are ethnically cleansed from across the Arab world, partly in revenge for the establishment of the State of Israel.
They absorb all the Jewish refugees from Europe, from the displaced persons camps, and they do it without any international help. That's Israel and the Jewish refugees. Then you have other countries. Hindus and Muslims in India are ultimately absorbed. But In some places, a local agency is established in order to help the refugees be settled.
So in order to understand UNRWA, which is for the Arab refugees, [00:43:00] we should talk about UNCRA. So it's the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees, which also included the Jews, but again, Israel took care of them. So at about the same time, another agency is established called UNCRA.
the case for Korea for the Korean War and the refugees from the Korean War. And why is it a temporary agency like UNRWA? Because the idea is that you settle the refugees in a few short years and you move on, you close down and it's over. Refugee crisis were meant to be settled quickly and and be over.
And to be clear, legally, the idea is if a refugee is made a refugee, but it finds a home somewhere else. Yes. Then they're no longer a refugee. Of course. As a legal matter, they are there. Yeah. And there's no demand or priority that the only way for a refugee to stop being a refugee to go back to where they were.
Yeah, that's not the international standard. So 3. 1 million, even today, by the way, in recent times. So the Syrian civil war, you have [00:44:00] something like hundreds of thousands of refugees, close to half a million refugees, Bye bye. Later. Bye Bye bye. a sovereign Syria that they are given a home or naturalized somewhere else.
That's it. Yes, the general view and convention on refugees that applies to everyone in the world says, basically, there's three ways that refugees are settled in the places to which they fled, if they can go home, great, or in a third place. And all of these are equivalent. They're equally good ways of ending a refugee situation.
The entire Refugee Convention doesn't care who started what, who's to blame. It just cares about a person being able to start their new life. End of story. Somewhere. Somewhere. Yeah. Exactly. So the Koreans are settled 3. [00:45:00] 1 within a few short years with 3. 1 million Korean refugees. a few short years, a third of the budget of UNRWA, and look at South Korea today.
And then the commission's disbanded. And that's it. Ankara is closed. Right. It's temporary. Right. Huge success. Look at South Korea today. It could have been the Arabs, but no, the Arabs have UNRWA and they refuse to settle. They refuse to go the path of the Koreans and essentially they engage in a tug of war with the Americans and the British that are funding UNRWA at this point because they don't want to be settled.
And what they do is the British and the Americans want to close down UNRWA by the fifties, the end of the fifties, they're like, they look at Ankara, 1 million, they're like, this UNRWA is achieving nothing. It's useless. It hasn't settled one, one Arab refugee. So we're going to close it down. So there was no [00:46:00] question that UNRWA was a failed project.
This is the moment of the Eisenhower doctrine, oil, So the Arabs come to the Americans in a kind of mob style scene, which we describe in the book, and they say, You don't want to make another mistake. You made one mistake. You allowed a Jewish state to emerge. You're not going to close down UNRWA. So from the beginning, in the Arab mindset, UNRWA was the antidote to the existence of the Jewish state.
Keeping the Arab refugees from settling was the way to essentially send the message that the war in which the Jewish state declared independence was a bump in the road. It will be undone in time, you know, give us a little, you know, this, this is just something that's temporary and will be over soon enough.
And what the Arabs do with UNRWA is that they do three things that plague us to this day. The first is they make sure [00:47:00] that the agency is called. UNRWA, U N. It was going to be called Riwa or Nirwa. It's not really a U. N. body. It's a temporary instrument established by the General Assembly to solve a specific problem.
It's not a U. N. organ, but they wanted it to be called U. N. because in the Arab perspective and imagination, the U. N. created Israel. And the U. N. Is responsible for the refugees. It's certainly not the Jews who created Israel, and they have no responsibility for waging war against the Jewish state, a completely unnecessary war.
They could have had their own state, no refugees, no one displaced, living side by side with the Jewish state of Israel. But no, their top priority was no Jewish state. So they waged war. And they failed to achieve their goal. So and refugees were created, but in their imagination, they bear zero responsibility for that.
It's all on the UN. So they made sure it was called UNRWA. Then they made sure that when the UN [00:48:00] created the actual refugee agency, the UN High Commissioner for Refugee, they created a loophole for UNRWA because they understood very clearly that if the Arab refugees from the war will be treated like all of the refugees in the world.
And they looked at what the international standards were. They understood that within a few years there's going to be no Arab refugees and the Jewish state gets to stay and no, that's unacceptable. So they make sure that the UNHCR basically treats all refugees in the world except those who have an agency.
And then they make sure that UNRWA never closes so that the loophole is always maintained. And the refugee status applies to the descendants, multiple generation. Okay, so now that they've created this loophole and this little fiefdom, the Arabs essentially take over UNRWA. Beginning in the 60s, UNRWA essentially becomes a Palestinian organization.
It becomes the welfare, healthcare, education [00:49:00] system of the now increasingly known as Palestinians waiting to liberate Palestine from the river to the sea. And in the service of this perpetuation of the refugee status until the moment that the Jewish state is no more, until that moment, they begin to essentially inflate the number of refugees in a variety of ways.
The first is by creating a really bizarre definition of a refugee that is not the international definition, just about being two years in here and losing livelihood and That's not, you know, generally refugees. It's about personal persecution. Okay. So first they inflate the numbers by having a different definition.
They inflate the numbers by creating this hereditary status, which doesn't apply to any other refugee group and other refugee situations. The descendants of refugees can individually apply for a [00:50:00] dependent status. It's not a refugee status. It's a dependent. They have to be under 18, and the status personally has to justify it.
This kind of automatic generation after generation, no looking at personal situation. That's only for the Arab refugees. So bizarre definition. Jen. Perpetual, multi generational, uh, refugee hood, and another way of inflating the numbers is that they never ever take anyone off the rosters. So a huge number of the refugees are Jordanian citizens.
As we said, everywhere in the world, citizens of other countries are no longer refugees. But UNRWA doesn't have to abide by what's called the cessation clause, what ends the refugee status. So all the citizens of Jordan You know, those who are from this background are also registered as refugees from Palestine.
My favorite refugee is the multi millionaire, playboy, American citizen, [00:51:00] father of supermodels Gigi and Bella Hadid. He's an American citizen. He's not your vision of what a refugee is. But because he was registered by UNRWA, he was born in Syria, he remains on their roster forever. UNRRA never goes and checks whether refugees have better lives than now.
Are they settled somewhere else? Nope. It keeps them on the boat. Do they have citizenship of a new? He's a citizen of the United States. It doesn't care because for UNRRA, because it's been taken over by the Palestinians, there's only one thing that ends their refugee hood. No Jewish state. Anything else does not end their refugee status.
Now, parallel to this, there's something like 800, 000 to a million Jewish refugees who are forced to leave their homes in Arab countries. So talk about them and how their refugee status ended. Yes. So first of all, it's important to say the Arab refugees are created in the course of war where [00:52:00] they are part of the fighting side.
That's entirely normal. The Jews. Are ethnically cleansed from across the Arab world, defenseless Jews. They're trying to ethnically cleanse the Jews who stand up and have their defense. But defenseless Jews from communities again that predated Islam and the Arab conquest of the seventh century are ethnically cleansed essentially overnight, in large part in revenge for the establishment of the Jewish state in the name of anti Zionism, right?
And as Jews are ethnically cleansed, Arabs declare that they love Jews and they have nothing against Jews. It's only against Zionism. But the Jews are then, uh, blamed for having Zionist sympathies. And in that name, they're essentially ethnically cleansed from across the Arab world. Also, the rise of new states, the end of the colonial era in the Arab world, leads to the ethnic cleansing of Jews as it did in Europe.
[00:53:00] And the Jews find a home. In some other countries, but mostly in the state of Israel, which now exists and unlike the 1930s, exists, controls its borders and can open its borders and its gates to Jewish immigration. Israel absorbs hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from across the Arab world. And in parallel, just to understand the scale, in parallel, it absorbs the Jewish refugees again from the war, from the West Bank and Jerusalem and Gaza.
And from Europe and the displaced persons camps, it absorbs all of them without international assistance with a lot of Jewish world assistance, but without official international assistance. No, Anra. It's a remarkable story of Israel and doing that essentially within a decade. And they're all absorbed into the state of Israel.
And again, that's normal. A lot of countries absorb, and absorbed refugees that had a similar ethnic, national, [00:54:00] linguistic, religious makeup. That's very typical. Nowhere were countries receive refugees who belonged to a group that waged war. So a lot of people say, you know what, we don't care how the Arab refugees were created in war.
Israel should have taken them back. In saying that, Israel is asked to do what no country was asked to do at the time. It was clearly understood that if people belonged to a national ethnic linguistic religious group that just waged war, they were absorbed typically by the countries that had a similar ethnic makeup.
That was it. Yeah, especially if that country was the aggressor in that war. Yeah. And just waged a violent war and, you know, the notion that a country will be forced to receive a group that just waged war on it, I mean, it's nonsensical. And yet this was demanded of Israel. Okay, now I want to fast forward to the Six Day War, 1967.
A number of [00:55:00] these countries launch a war against Israel. And in that war, Israel is left with control of East Jerusalem, control of the West Bank, control of Gaza, control of the Golan Heights, and control of the Sinai. The U. N. Passes resolution, UN Security Council Resolution 242 that talks about the process, some sort of land for recognition, return of this land in recognition, and so long as Israel, return of territories, not all territories, return of territories to the Arab countries, and what effectively it means is Israel winds up now Assuming the occupation of what we'll call Palestinian Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank in place of other countries that had been occupying them, namely Jordan and Egypt respectively.
And Israel is in the context of a mutually agreed upon accommodation where these Arab countries recognize Israel's right to exist and provide security guarantees. There's a return of territories and there's language in there about quote unquote, a just [00:56:00] resolution. to the refugee problem or the refugee crisis.
So what is that about? What are they referring to there? Okay. So first, this is another great moment in what I call why the Jews could are never allowed to win. Essentially, as we saw already in the 20s and 30s. When Arabs are violent towards Jews, the tendency is to cave into their demands, such as closing the gates to Jewish immigration.
When the Jews begin to win, the response is always ceasefire. So this is what you have with the armistice agreements after, uh, 1948, 49, and in 67, you have the same pattern. You know, as we said, the Arab states after 48, 49 said, you know, this is a temporary pause. But the war, the bigger war against the existence of a Jewish state, that war continues.
That war continues on some level all the time, but it is essentially resumed in a big way in 67 under the ideology of Pan Arabism, the leadership of Nasser. Now we'll get rid. of the Jewish state. [00:57:00] And this time they fail even more spectacularly than they did in 48 49. And again, the call is ceasefire kind of, you know, stop, stop, you know, don't, don't continue.
And there's again, a refusal to acknowledge generally in diplomacy when one side wins decisively the path to peace. And, uh, Dr. Shani Moore wrote about it beautifully. The path to peace involves recognizing some of the wins. of the side that was victorious, except when it comes to the Jews and Israel. Nope.
You get nothing, and this has to go back, but, you know, this time you'll get peace. The Arab response is swift. They declare in Khartoum no to recognition, no to peace, no to negotiations. The idea of a just solution to the Arab refugee problem has become a key word. that confuses many in the West. When you hear [00:58:00] a just solution, you think, Okay, justice would be some form of compensation for lost livelihood and house.
And if that's the case, we need to discuss compensation for Jewish refugees. We need to discuss compensation for Jewish refugees across the Arab world, not just in Jerusalem and the West Bank. But people think a just solution to a refugee problem is getting them citizenship, getting them maybe some compensation if possible.
End of story. This is the vision of the Refugee Convention for everyone else. In the Arab telling, in the Palestinian telling, a just solution is only one. It's the solution that undoes the injustice, which is the existence of the Jewish state. So every time that we see in various documents a just solution to the Arab refugee problem, Westerners think Oh, it means one thing.
And for the Arab refugees, it means one [00:59:00] thing and one thing only their idea of what they call return. Now, a word about return. The idea of return is generally against the idea of ending wars. For the tens of millions of refugees after World War Two, the message was basically tough, tragic, sad. It was understood that return would be a continuation of the war by other means, which is exactly what the Arab refugees wanted, which is why they insisted on this idea of a right of return.
Now, there's no such right in international law, even Resolution 194, which they quote as if it gives it to them, does not give it, if only for the simple reason that General Assembly resolutions don't grant rights. A reminder also that the Arabs rejected that resolution because it was just part of a bigger process of making peace with the Jewish [01:00:00] state.
But there's actually no right of return for Arab refugees into the sovereign state of Israel and international law. It doesn't exist, but they believe they have it and they have made it into a tool and a mechanism of continuing the war. So the idea of justice return, no Jewish state are basically all synonyms.
Because I think what you do, I've been watching, you know, in how your thinking has been articulated in recent months, you draw a straight line, not a zigzaggy line, not an indirect line. You draw a straight line from the period that we began this conversation with, which was the fall of the Ottoman Empire and that several decades between the fall of the Ottoman Empire and 1947 and the partition plan being voted on by the UN, where there was a Jewish presence here and there was an Arab presence here.
And one side is saying, there's room for [01:01:00] both of us. We can both have our states. And the other side is saying, there's only room for one of us here and you can't be here. And as you watch the arguments and the debates and the violence of that period that you write about, you draw a direct line from that.
to October 7th, 2023. Can you explain that? Absolutely. There's no understanding October 7th without understanding the entire Palestinian ideology of no Jewish state of return of perpetual refugee dom. It all comes together in Gaza. Gaza, you can't understand Gaza and October 7th without knowing that the vast majority of Gaza's residents, about 75 percent are registered by UNRWA as refugees from Palestine.
This is by now a fifth generation of people who were born in Palestine, right? Whatever your political views, we can agree that the [01:02:00] Gaza Strip is Palestine, right? It's between the river and the sea. So. They have been born in Palestine. They have always lived in Palestine. And yet they are registered as refugees from Palestine, which would be nonsensical, unless you understand that from their perspective, the only Palestine that matters is from the river to the sea, where there's no Jewish state.
So you have three quarters of Gaza's residents being told day after day, generation after generation, Gaza is not your home. Don't treat it as your home. Your real home is where the Jewish state exists right now. And that's what you need to take back in their mind. So generation after generation is raised with the idea that they shouldn't be making their home in Gaza, but that their most noble goal.
is to liberate [01:03:00] the, from the river to the sea land, the mythological Palestine from the evil white settler European crusader Jews. And they are legitimized in that by an organization that has the letters U. N. Right. The Arabs were very far reaching and understanding the importance of that. It gets Western money.
So that must be just. This is a just cause. And As a result, when Israel leaves the Gaza Strip, it leaves 80 percent of it under the Gaza Accords in the 90s. The remaining 20 percent Israel leaves with the disengagement in 2005. And this is the first time that the Arabs of the land Contrary to all these fake disappearing maps, this is the first time that the Arabs of the land actually control territory.
Do they say to themselves, Finally, we got rid of the Jews and the settlers and [01:04:00] the occupation, and we are going to build a pearl, a Dubai on the Levant, a Singapore of the Mediterranean. What they say, excellent. We now control territory from which we can take back Palestine from the river to the sea. And I have by now books, essays, lectures that say the same thing to all the funders of UNRWA who believe that they're, you know, this is some innocent idea.
Tell them every dollar, every sack of cement that you are giving into Gaza, and I'm saying this for years. is guaranteed to go into building tunnels, is guaranteed to go into making Gaza into a formidable war machine because the people of Gaza don't think of Gaza as their home. They think of it literally as a launch pad.
And October 7th. Needs to be understood as the exercise of Palestinian [01:05:00] return return was never an innocent idea. If you look at the Arab texts from the early fifties, return was always a violent, triumphant idea. We are going to go back and essentially slaughter the Jews. This is how we take back Palestine.
This is how we liberate it. October 7th was, minute by minute, the Palestinian vision of return. This is why there's so much exhilaration, thrill, because this is what they've been waiting for, groomed for, for decades, and they see it, and they could not be happier. Interestingly, during that time that the Israel had left Gaza in 2005, until, well, up until, including through today, refugee, just the whole notion, refugee camps kept intact, the Jabalia refugee camp, which I visited in the late 90s.
They kept refugee camps in a region that they controlled. It's not like this whole idea that [01:06:00] there's still refugees in a place that you're saying they could have actually created a political sovereignty, a formal country. Anyways. Precisely, because it was never their goal. Right. Even more absurd. Under the areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority, supposedly the state of Palestine in the making.
A lot of countries recognize Palestine. So, a few years ago, the Pope visits, Prince William visits. On their itinerary, it says that they're visiting Palestine, right? It doesn't say, like, Occupy Tehran. It says they're visiting Palestine. So, in their mind, the Pope, Prince William are visiting a state where is the first place they're being taken to visit?
They're being taken to visit a refugee camp, which again, they're not refugees. It's not a camps. It's a permanent neighborhood looks in some cases better than a lot of neighborhoods in the Arab world. They are being, those guests visiting Palestine are being taken to visit a refugee camp in [01:07:00] Palestine.
Have they ever bothered to ask why, what's going on? But again, once you understand the Arab Palestinian mindset of no Jewish state, you understand that this is their top priority, going back to Bevan, then you understand that everything is mobilized for that, which is why in Gaza, they're going to. the neighborhoods, refugee camps.
The people in those neighborhoods will maintain the names, the streets, the towns of their families, five generation backs. The perpetrators, the planners of the October 7th massacre are Children of those camps of the unrest schools and Hamas is but the most recent iteration. The perpetrators of the massacre of the Israeli Olympics, the Israeli athletes in the Munich Olympics in 1972, their children of the UNRWA schools of the camps, because they have been groomed to [01:08:00] believe that there is no noble cause for their lives than liberating Palestine from a sovereign Jewish state.
My last question for you, Einat, one guest I've had on, Douglas Murray. Who has made the point that Israel is the only country, and you've made a version of this point, is the only country that's not allowed to win a war. The only country that's attacked and not allowed to win the war. It just has to, you know, reach some sort of ceasefire and the war has to end.
You know, any other country that's attacked, they're allowed to win the war. So that's one take and I agree with it. Another take by someone I don't typically agree with. At least on Israel side, we agree on some things, but, but not everything's free. Zakaria, who's a friend and he's made a point that I think is spot on, even though he's very critical of Israel generally, it was very critical of some Israeli policies.
He says the problem for the Palestinian position. is, they stay at a position of what they want, then they start a war, then they lose a war, and they don't understand that if there's to be a [01:09:00] negotiation with them, where their starting point was before they launched the war, the other side is not going to recognize as the starting point for after the war.
So the Palestinians are increasingly frustrated that their negotiating leverage is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking with each successive war that they start. And they're like, no, no, no, we're just going to pick up where we were before the war. And go back to the negotiating table and Israel and many in the West for that matter saying, no, no, no, no, no.
Circumstances have changed, and I'm looking now at the statements coming out of the Palestinian leadership after October 7th. Everyone from Yehia Sinwar, who is saying there's going to be many more October 7ths, this is just the beginning, to Khaled Machel, who's the, one of the leaders of the political wing of the, of Hamas internationally, who was just gave this television interview in Turkey where he said, it's absolutely the river to the sea.
There will be no two state solution. It's a one state solution. It's not just from the river to the sea. It's from Russia, Nicaragua, and the North to Eilat in the South. He screwed up by saying Eilat, which is kind of interesting, but he's basically saying it's the whole country. The whole countries are.
Abu Mazen, the head of the [01:10:00] Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, won't even condemn what Hamas did on October 7th, still monetarily rewards. Terrorists or the families of terrorists that murder Jews, those that return to the West Bank, name streets after them, indoctrinates children. Nothing has changed.
In other words, here we are even post October 7th, the worst massacre subjected to the Jewish people on a single day since the Holocaust, since the Shoah. Israel is of course going to respond. Of course there is going to be a war because the ceasefire that exists on October 6th certainly ended on October 7th.
And they're using the same declarations. And the same language and the same goals that they did before October 7th. And it's just, so this notion that this is just a perpetual situation. And I think what you're saying is. Many Israelis are waking up to this reality. There's still, there may be big political divides in this country on other issues, but on this issue, there's more or less a [01:11:00] consensus that sadly there's no way to win.
There's no way to persuade the other side and the international community that the circumstances are not going to be met along the lines that the Palestinian leadership claim that they want it to. So I'll be both darker and sunnier. Please. On the darker side. Yes, they have been consistent for a century, and it's actually quite rational.
You know, over the years, I would meet with European diplomats on their funding of UNRWA, how it perpetuates the conflict. And they would say things like, Oh, the Palestinians know that they're now returning. It's just a bargaining chip, like, you know, it's a delusion. And I was like, Oh, if there's anyone that's irrational in this conflict, It's us, not them.
They look at 7 million Jews struggling to survive amidst half a billion Arabs, 1. 5 billion Muslims, and they say to themselves, this is not going to last much longer, this Jewish experiment in self [01:12:00] determination. One more generation, five more generations, we'll wait them out. More than that, what they discovered in their battle against the Jews is that they have a massive asset.
Let's admit the truth. No one would have cared about the few million Arabs between the river and the sea if their enemies had not been the Jews. As a result, Every anti Jewish, anti Semitic, anti Zionist ideology in the last century adopted the Palestinian cause as the respectable mask for its anti Jewish ideology.
So the Nazis were the main backers of the Palestinians in the thirties and forties. And then it was the pan Arabists who made the Palestinians into a theology of their cause. And then it was in the sixties, seventies and eighties, the Soviets. Who launched this global anti Zionism campaign? And then in the nineties and early two thousands, it's the Sunni jihadists.
And now it's the Shiite jihadists and the ones I call the Western [01:13:00] communists. And they are all channeling their anti Jewish, anti Zionist, anti Semitic ideologies through the support of the Palestinian cause, which for the last century has been Formulated around no Jewish state, no sovereign Jews. So that's the very dark side.
And they're the ones that are always happy to rush in. Whenever the Arabs of this land could have had a moment when they said, You know what? This is not working out too well. Maybe we should stop investing all our resources in getting rid of the Jewish state. Not a good use of our time. Every time that they could have had this moment, Every anti Zionist, anti Jewish ideology of the moment rushes in to tell them, No, no, you're pure victims of a great evil, change nothing, you're responsible for nothing.
So they actually get that fuel to keep going. Where do I see the hope? [01:14:00] The hope is precisely in the transformation of the fundamental attitude towards Jewish sovereignty, because that's what's at the core of the conflict. When I give this talk and I say, look, the conflict at the end of the day is very simple.
It's when the Jews wanting a state and the Arabs not wanting the Jews not to have a state, right? Bevin, Zionism versus anti Zionism. No The Arabs not wanting the Jews to have a state. No Arab ever contradicts it. They will dig deeper. They're like, of course, you're a white settler, European murderers, blah.
But no one will say, what are you talking about? Our only problem is with the settlement or with Netanyahu. They always confirm. They might think that it's the right thing to do. They certainly think that it's the right thing to fight the Jewish state. But they don't dispute that this is what they're fighting.
So this is the thing that needs to change. The very Arab and Muslim attitude towards Jewish sovereignty. And this is where I begin [01:15:00] to see hope in kind of the Abraham Accords countries where I think what they're doing is much more important than high rises and sending female astronauts to space. I think they're engaged in nothing less than the transformation of the Arab and Muslim identity towards one that is modern, future looking, success oriented, tolerant.
And as part of that, I call us collateral benefit. We're not the central story here. They can look at the Jews and not say white European settler colonialist crusaders, which is just synonyms for foreign. They can look at us and say, Abraham, the Jews belong here by virtue of a history and a culture and a continuous relationship that is embedded in their culture.
And we as Arabs and Muslims have a history that recognizes that. And we can embrace them, and we can embrace Zionism, and we can embrace the state of Israel as the legitimate continuation of the historical connection between [01:16:00] the Jews and the land. That's where the hope is. First of all, I would normally say it's very un Jewish of you to end this on a hopeful note.
But I will also say since being here these last few days, I have been struck in the midst of all the horror and all the trauma that you do hear these kernels of hope about. Israel and Israel's future, and it's quite inspiring. And so it's fitting that you ended a rather depressing and dark, very dark conversation on this hopeful note.
Thank you for doing this. I hope to have you on again. We'll list your book in the show notes so people can order it. And great having you. Thank you. Thank you for having me.
That's our show for today. To keep up with A Not Wilf, you can find her on X at A Not Wilf, E I N A T W I L F. [01:17:00] And of course, I highly recommend her books, especially her most recent book called The War of Return, which we will link to in the show notes. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.