10/27/23: Martyrmade Host Is Israel's Gaza Invasion DOOMED?, Police Shut Down Jewish American Author's Book Tour

you're doing counterproductive. And we ran into that problem very early on in Iraq after the four Blackwater guys got lynched in Fallujah and Bush sent in the Marines and kind of gave him a broad mandate to go retaliate. And of course, if you tell Marines to go retaliate for something, they're going to strap on their helmets and go do it. And we destroyed that city and it created a lot of animosity in Iraq, so that by two thousand and six, the Iraqi government was not prepared

to allow us to do something like that again. And so my partner at Jako he led the seal unit that went into Ramadi with a totally different operational approach to counterinsurgency, where they went in blocked by block, worked with the individuals who lived in that city who were under siege by these mostly foreigny hottists, and actually won

them over in a long process. The difficulty the IDF's going to have is these are not foreign gie hottists who have come over and are oppressing the people of Gaza. These are representatives of the Gozen people themselves. However widespread their support for Hamas militancy may or may not be, these are their cousins and brothers, and so the Israelis are not going to be able to They're not going to be able to turn these people against their own in the same way we might have hoped to do

with the Hearts and Minds campaign. It's extremely difficult, you know, in two thousand and six and in twenty fourteen, people tend to have even a one sided perspective on how those conflicts went because at the end, Gazo was destroyed, Southern Lebanon was destroyed. The IDF had taken, you know, some casualties, but nothing that jumps off the page, and so it looks like it was just a one sided beatdown.

But that's actually not what happened. When the IDF went into Southern Lebanon in two thousand and six, they found that Hesbloh was prepared for that kind of a fight, and Hesbela innovated a lot of tactics. They got right up close and grabbed the belt buckle of the idea in order to mitigate Israel's close air support, their artillery, their rocket fire, things that Hesbela really didn't have any

ability to defend themselves against without air defense. Well, in twenty fourteen, nobody really thought that Hamas had that kind of military capability. After two thousand and six, I used to work in Israel a lot. I'd go there and work with the IDF on and contract personnel on their air defense issues. And after two thousand and six, they were never going to make that mistake again of underestimating Hesbola. They understood they were dealing with a real military threat.

But I always found in the ten years or so that I would go over there for work that they continued to underestimate Hamas. And even in twenty fourteen when they went in and had the exact same thing happened. Really Hamas employed the same tactics tunnels, pop up, ambushes, IEDs of course everywhere, and the Israelis got stalled in Gaza City and had a really hard time and they eventually just pulled back and kind of destroyed whole sections

of the city from the air. And that invited, you outrage among the people in Gaza, and it invited outrage in the international community. And so as we go into this situation, you know, those two experiences are definitely, I can tell you for a fact, are definitely front of mind for the Israelis and their military planners. A lot of their boosters overseas can raw raw the IDF and just sort of focus on their capabilities when they're at

full strength, and they are considerable. But the people who are actually planning this assault, they understand this is a very very risky operation is going to be very difficult.

to the other military personnel and contract personnel. And what I noticed over the course of the time I would go there, this was maybe from two thousand and seven until about twenty nineteen, is that the appetite for peace among the people I was talking to was getting smaller and smaller and smaller, and they were becoming much more radical, much more dehumanizing in their leanguth which toward the Palestinians, and much more convinced that there is no there's no

way forward in this situation other than violence. And that's very discouraging because you see that on display right now. And this is something that we've always seen with net and Yahoo's governments, you know where for years Israel look Israel for decades. People need to understand they've been they've been dealing with attacks, not at this scale of the one that recently happened, but just as brutal and just as savage. They've been dealing with this stuff for decades.

And we need to understand that over here. It is different than anything any other any Western country can really understand. Like when you go back to the late seventies and early eighties, these kind of brutal attacks, families killed, we're happening on a monthly basis, sometimes sometimes, and so we have to keep that in mind. And yet the Israeli governments back then, we're always they never looked at this as you know they would they would have targeted assassination

campaigns to go after PLO officials and militants. They would take out specific people who were planning attacks. This was an intelligence and special forces led situation. And ever since net Yahu's come in, he's just looked at the Palestinian issue as a job for the regular military. It's a

job for the artillery corps in the Air Force. And you just can't fight a war like this like that unless you're willing to go completely medieval in a way that is not it's not acceptable in the modern world, not if you want a seat at the table of modern first world countries. And it's the dilemma that Israel's in because the faction around net and Yahoo, you know, the very the very kind of dirty little secret, and it's not much of a secret. In Israel. People talk

about this much more openly. There's a lot of issues like this that people are actually more open and nuanced about in Israel than you find when you when you talk to a lot of their boosters overseas. Yeah, and that's you know, Look, I understand why people got upset when Israel came in for criticism so early after this attack, because I told Jacko when we were talking that Israel one of the problems that they had that they had to solve was that they're on the clock right now,

because what's going to happen is right now. Everybody is sympathetic toward the Israelis, but after a couple of weeks of only seeing Palestinian babies being pulled out of the rubble. Those memories are going to fade, and they're going to be replaced by these newer ones, and people are going to start to put pressure from around the world on

Israel to wrap this up. And Israel really didn't even get from the general public and in the rhetorical space even a week or two to really operate with impunity. And I think that's a step forward because of the way net Nyanghu's governments have acted in the past. But I understand you didn't want to hear any criticism of American foreign policy. On September twelfth, two thousand and one.

Half our country was looking to George Bush had a ninety percent approval rating, and we were looking to kick somebody's butt around the world. I understand that the feeling and the mentality, and yet no serious discussion of nine to eleven can happen without talking about America's imperial foreign policy, and no discussion of the Israel Palestine conflict or even the attack that happened recently. And I understand it's a tough needle to thread, but even of the attack recently.

No serious discussion could be had about that without coming back to one basic fact, and that is that millions of Palestinian people have lived under military occupation for almost six decades. That is not it is simply an untenable and unacceptable state of affairs that cannot go on. And everything else. That's the context that every discussion about this issue will eventually come back to. You know, these people are stateless refugees. They're subject to search and arrest without

due process. Their skies and their roads are patrolled by a foreign military. You just imagine that their lawful land, the land everybody agrees is theirs. You know, the whole international community in Israeli law as well, continues to be colonized by heavily armed, often hostile, and fanatical Israeli settlers. Most of those settlements, again are illegal even according to Israeli law, and yet they continue to expand, and Palestinians who resist their expansion end up on the business end

of the Israeli defense forces. Gaza is surrounded by a wall that is patrolled by remote controlled machine gun robots. And that's not I'm not joking that this is a reality. Surrounded by a wall patrolled by remote remotely controlled robot machine guns pointed inward toward the inmates. You know, Israel controls how much water, how much power, how much food and medicine and construction materials are allowed into Gaza. In twenty eighteen, thousands of unarmed Palestinian protesters were shot by

snipers for protesting too close to the border fence. The initial orders that the Israeli snipers had were shoot was shoot anybody who came within three hundred meters of the fence. Eventually they got reduced to one hundred meters, but thousands and thousands of people, unarmed people were shot. There are videos of there's a video of a man in a wheelchair being shot. There are kids, women, medical personnel, and so these are the things that these people are dealing with.

And you can say that the Palestinians deserve it, or the Israelis have no choice, anything you want. But when violence occurs, I think there is a sense in which the party that the power that is in charge of them, that the occupying power always bears at least some of the primary responsibility. And look, I'm not playing holier than now. Okay, my country America has destroyed whole nations for criminal reasons

in the last few decades. If Israel's occupation was ended, the settlers were repatriated to Israel, and the Palestinians formed a state along the borders agreed to by everyone except for Israel. Right now, maybe they would still be violent, and then we could have a totally different conversation, a

different conversation altogether. But that's not the situation. You know, in this reality, a superpower is keeping millions of stateless refugees under permanent military occupation, and that is the context in which everything else takes place, and discussions of the conflict will always come back to that basic fact as long as the occupation continues.

And that often means that when I talk about this issue, I'm coming off as if I'm one sidedly sympathetic to the Palestinians, and that's definitely not the case. Israel is a great country, Israel. These people carved a prosperous country that is safe even for their Arab residents, and is a pleasant place to live. If you had to live in the Middle East, Israel is probably the place most people would choose to go. And deserve a lot of credit for that. Is Rae israelis are great people, uh in.

Israel is a great country, and they're an ally of the United States. But because they are all of those things, that's why I care more about what they do and how they behave just you know, these are our guys, These are our these are our people, And you know, I cared a lot more about the Abu Gray prison torture scandal and the conduct of US troops there. Then I cared about the heinous behavior of al Qaeda in Iraq throughout the entire war, because those are my guys

and I and I the the israelis your book. You want to be part of the West, part of the civilized, democratic first World countries. There there you have to conduct yourself in a certain way. And I understand that you're in that that you're in a pretty unique situation. But that's the thing about principles is unique situations don't get to excuse them. Daryl.

the Iraq War went. And that's not to say that the United States, if we went into total war, you know, world War two mode, couldn't defeat Iran. Of course we could, but that's not really the it's not really a useful conversation. You know all of the bases in Kuwait and Kata and Bahrain that we used to stage our invasion of Iraq, where for six months, seven eight months ahead of time, we were flying in all our tanks and they're all sitting right there. Those are all within easy reach of

tens of thousands of Iranian missiles and rockets. They would all come under fire. The US embassy in Iraq would probably be overrun, the Saudi oil fields would probably would probably go up in flames, and the Gulf itself in the Straits of Hormuz would become unsafe for ship And this is a this is a nightmare scenario, and everybody needs to understand and that this is not something we should be looking forward to or cheering for at all.

believe they can accomplish that. As you and Jocko pointed out, their actions thus far are not really aimed at accomplishing that. I think what's happening now is more just about you know, retribution and giving the Israeli public what they want to

see as a result of Hamas's horrific attacks. Do you actually buy that they don't have a plan, because it's not like Netnyahu and his allies haven't had a lot of thoughts about what they would ideally like to do with regard to God, so what they would ideally like to do with the West Bank. It's not like they haven't laid out in detail how they would push Palestinians on their land or you know, subjugate them with a second class citizen status or you know, in prison in them, etcetera,

and completely annex their territory. And Netna, who was at the UN with a map of Israel that didn't include Gaza or the West Bank whatsoever. So do you think that they really are as clueless as they're kind of playing for the cameras right now?

to just ignore Gaza. He kind of looked at Hamas says, they could you know, they can pop up out of a tunnel somewhere and kidnap an Israeli soldier and we can deal with that, but they're not any kind of a of a large scale military threat that we really

have to take seriously. Net Yaho wanted to focus on the West Bank and expanding settlements and continuing to make the two state solution there untenable by creating facts on the ground, and he wanted to kind of ignore Gaza and there are you know, I'm sure you guys have talked about this in the past, but the faction around net and Yahoo has always been quite open, at least when they're talking to other Israelis about the fact that Hamas as an opponent of the two state solution, is

an unsavory ally of people like net Yahoo is, as much as they not saying they support these people or they're sending them weapons or anything like that. But you know, Benjamin net Yahoo to the Israeli Kanessi a quote from him, he said, anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas in transferring money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palacetine Indians in

the West Bank. It's impossible to reach an agreement with them. Everyone knows this, and he's talking about Hamas here, But we control the height of the flame. This is This is the way a lot of the people around net yah who look at Hamas, you know that, and and and others who are critical of Hamas, critical of net Yahu, like Ahud Barak, have have criticized the net yahou faction

for this position. And so in a lot of ways, I think just just just the same way that we have thought that we could get away with funding jihadist groups around the world to fight wars that the American people were not going to agree to UH to send American troops to go fight, and those groups eventually came you know, the Frankenstein's monster eventually turned on its creator and UH and and came back on us. There's an element of that with Hamas. You know, Hamas didn't arise

in a vacuum. And this is something that a lot of people don't understand. I think in the West is people think of this as like a centuries or millennia old religious war. And it is not this that makes it seem intractable, and it feeds people on both sides

who say there's no solution but violence. But I've got a photograph from a cafe in Jerusalem from nineteen thirteen, the year before the First World War started, and it's a picture of a band playing for the patrons in the cafe, and the band consists of two Muslims, a Jew, and a Christian. This is in nineteen thirteen, and this would not have been abnormal in nineteen thirteen. This conflict is only about a century old, and it is a

political conflict over disputed territory. That's it. We can bring all the religious considerations into it. Maybe that intensifies the complexity of the emotions relative to other disputes, but at the end of the day, it's a dispute between two groups of people laying claim to the same piece of land.

and information. I would love to have you back, and we just can't appreciate you enough.

could be your neighbors. And those are the people who are involved in this conflict. So, you know, the extremists in any conflict like this have a way of pulling everyone else down to their level. Don't let that be you great, fantastic point.

wall running through the middle. So this walled ghetto is partly inside the same city that I live in, and I would pass by it on a daily or weekly basis and hardly pay it any mind. And there was an enormous tragedy which I'll describe in a moment, that struck the members of this community, and after that I couldn't stop thinking about the parents and the children inside of it, and what a different life they live inside my same city. So that was kind of the emotional reason.

There was also a higher order reason that I wanted to write about something that happens all over the world, happens every day, a tragic car accident, and not to write about a war in Gaza or an invasion of Janine or something that is more naturally the subject of a journalist book, Because what I wanted was to draw our attention to the ordinary, everyday lives of Palestinians and Jews in this grossly unjust system that is continually leading

to more and more bloodshed. And my part of the desire to write this book came out of a frustration from seeing how the world turned its eyes to Israel Palestine only when we had a spike in violence, a war in Gaza. And when that happened, everybody would say, we need to have a ceasefire and restore calm. But what is the calm that we're restoring. The calm that we're restoring is a deeply, deeply unjust system where seven million Jews, seven million Palestinians all living under Israeli rule.

The vast majority of those Palestinians don't have basic civil rights. And I wanted to describe that system and what it's like to live in that system, and to understand that we can't call for a restoration of calm when there's a war in Gaza. We can't leave it at that. We need to address that system and to undo that injustice, which the United States is of course supporting. So the story that I tell is of a magic car accident

that happened just outside of Jerusalem. I tell the story of a man, Abid Salama, who lives in this world ghetto that I described. His community is called a Nata. Also within this world ghetto is the Shuafat refugee camp, and one night Abd's son Mihlad asks him to go and buy some treats for a kindergarten class trip that he's taking the next day. And the next morning there's a storm and me Lad boards his bus with his

kindergarten class. About fifty kindergarteners on this bus. On the other side of the wall is the Jewish settlement of Pisgatzaev, an East Jerusalem quote unquote neighborhood. Israel doesn't refer to the East Jerusalem settlements as settlements, and often the US also will refer to them as neighborhoods rather than settlements. But Pisgatzev is just on the other side of this wall.

Are playgrounds there that these kids could not go to because in this walled ghetto, half of the parents have a blue idea that allows them to enter Jerusalem, half of them have a green ida that prevents them from entering Jerusalem. And the kids on this bus couldn't just go to the nearby play area on the other side of the wall, so instead they followed this winding path of the wall to a distant play area near Rimala,

and as they passed a checkpoint. They were struck by a giant semi trailer, a semi trailer that was going back and forth from an East Jerusalem factory to a settlement quarry where it was picking up stones that would be brought to the factory. And these stones that are extracted illegally for the natural resources of the West Bank. They're used to pave the roads in Israel. And so

this semi trailer slams into the school bu us. The bus flips over, it catches fire, and who is left to deal with this bus in flames filled with kindergarteners are all of the Palestinian bystanders, most of whom who live on the other side of the wall. And the bystanders are trying to rescue these soot covered kids from this bus, and they're loading them into the backs of their private vehicles. And again, the people who live in this area, they have different colored IDs. Some have the

blue ID that lets them go to Jerusalem. Some have the green ID. And what happened was, if you had a blue ID and you put a kindergartener in the back seat of your car, you would drive off to the superior nearby hospitals in Jerusalem. And if you had a green id, you would take a kindergartener in the opposite direction toward Ramala or some went even to Nablus and Abed and other parents when they heard about the crash, they raced to the scene. The Israeli army had blocked

off the road wasn't letting cars pass. Abd got out of the car that he was riding in and started running toward the accident's site. He flagged down an army jeep, told them in Hebrew that his kid was on the bus.

They refused to give him a lift. Just a couple of minutes up the road, and he runs to the scene and he sees a crowd there, and he looks and he sees this burned out bus and no children anywhere, and he's asking where are the kids, and that he's told that they're in this Jerusalem hospital, in another Jerusalem hospital at the military base that's just a minute up the road, at a Ramala hospital. And he can't go to most of these places is he can't enter the

military base. He himself has a green ID. He can't go to Jerusalem to look for his kid, and so he winds up going to Ramala and I tell the story of this more than twenty four hour period where Abd is navigating this horrible bureaucracy on the worst day of his life to try and find his child child, his five year old son, Milad. And I also tell the story in the crash of other people whose lives

intersect on the day of the crash. A settler paramedic, a mother and doctor who works for unra, Palestinian doctor who helps pull kids off the bus. And you know, all of these people who are living in close proximity but living totally separate and unequal lives that collide on the day of this crash. And one of that may I'll just finished, which is one of the main tragedies of this book, is that the people on the other side of this wall live in a state of utter neglect.

And even in this walled ghetto where the parents and teachers live, you know, there are virtually no municipal services. People are forced to burn trash in the middle of the street. This is all happening just underneath the manicured grounds of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. You can be at this the most prestigious university in Israel, and look down on a checkpoint and parents and teachers waiting in

line to just go to their schools and work. And there is no infrastructure in this place, and no playground, no lanes in the road, not even a wide enough road for me to go in one direction and the bus to go in the other. On the main artery of this road, not a single atm and it's so bad that the emergency services even will be prevented from

entering without an army or police escort. And so the crash really embodied the utter neglect of this area and the very fact that all these bystanders were pulling these kids off and taking them themselves to the hospital, so that by the time the first Israeli firetruck arrived more than a half hour later, all the kids had been evacuated.

and reality of living under occupation. So to me, this is exactly the sort of story that people should be engaging with right now to understand the status quo reality outside of the current war that's being waged on Gaza. And yet talked us about the reception of the book, and I'll ast a very loaded question, how is the book promotion going at this point?

a hyper polarized and intolerant environment. And there had been groups that would have tried to cancel my events or to try and prevent me from speaking or from people hearing about the book prior to October seventh, and I think they wouldn't have had gotten much traction except on

the far right. Now after October seventh, they're succeeding. And so I have had multiple events canceled, I had the UK police shut down the biggest event of my book tour citing public safety, and an event at Conway Hall

in London. I have had synagogues cancel, a very progressive synagogue that they were co sponsored by progressive Jewish organizations that were involved in promoting the book and thought this was an important book for their constituency to read prior to October seventh, and now they just say we cannot,

we cannot do it. And I was going to speak at a Palestinian conference this weekend and the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights there was pressure put on the Hilton Hotel in Houston that was hosting them and they had to cancel the entire conference. I mean, left and right events are being canceled. Even reviews of the book are being held that are filed because it's their positive reviews. I'm told of a book that is sympathetically portraying the

lives of Palestinians under occupation. Now I should say also that what's really telling about this is that the book also portrays the lives of Jews, including settlers, sympathetically as well. I mean, I am trying to paint real human beings and show what their perspectives are and really put you in the shoes of Jews and Palestinians living in this place.

So when I was interviewed about the book prior to October seventh, there was an outlet that I really respect, Dawn Democracy for the Air of World Now that interviewed me in The interviewer asked me a series of questions about whether I had portrayed the Jewish settlers and therefore the settler movement too sympathetically. And for me, I was very happy to be asked that question. That was a victory because I wanted this book to be real and to really put you in the shoes of everybody there

and understand how they see the world. So the fact that a book that got asked that kind of question before October seventh is being the targeted for cancelation. And you know, I'm not the only one. So many Palestinian voices and even you know you've heard the story about MSNBC not allowing the three anchors who are most sympathetic to Palestinians to have their shows air in the normal way.

They used a pretext. But it is just a time of total intolerance and every Palestinian and in the US that I know says it feels like the days after nine to eleven or the lead up to the Iraq War.

is not like Gohamas Yay civilian death. I mean, they're really In my opinion, I'm in the midst of reading it, and I read the original essay that it was based on. There is nothing that should even be controversial because it really is, you know, a journal a narrative, but journalistic retelling of real events that happened with real human beings. One thing that I was curious about from your perspective. You know, you're an American, you're a Jew, you live

in Jerusalem. How easy is it living there to be oblivious to the lives of the Palestinians who are living just over the border in this walled ghetto.

And that's Jerusalem, where you're confronted with a large Palestinian population that's living in the same city. If you want to talk about tel Aviv and the greater tel Aviv area, you know that is an area with very very few Palestinians in it. And if you are a liberal living in tel Aviv, you can live your entire life not even thinking about the existence of an occupation. And it's

just a few miles away. So the whole system depends on your average Israeli being able to tune this out completely, including you know, really well meaning people who might be against the occupation. But if you make it so comfortable for everybody to be a part of the system, then the system can persist indefinitely.

more than an ocean away. And here you have twenty percent of the population of Israel proper with citizenship who are Palestinian and they are living right there in this country. And there are many people who will try to blame them, and and you know, the collective punishment of gosens for what Hamas did is something that everybody supporting now, but there will be also consequences for Palestinians who don't even live in Gaza, Palestinian citizens of Israel, Palestinians in the

West Bank. For the first time in my professional life, I can actually see a future that descends into Balkan style civil on civil conflict, and of course one party in that conflict will have all of the guns and all of the power. And so to answer your question, it you know, it is so mainstream to now talk about,

you know, wiping out Gaza. You have the center left president of the country, who is the former head of the center left Labor Party of Israel, in a speech prepared remarks, not off the cuff, there are no innocens in Gaza. I mean, it's it is unbelievab If that is what the left half of the spectrum in Israel is saying. You just cannot overstate the degree to which Israelis are in a deep, deep state of shock. Again because the system had protected them for so long, they

never expected this to happen. This is out of their worst nightmares and the consequences for Israeli psychology, Israeli society for the future of Israel Palestine are very far reaching and we're just at the very beginning of it.

colonizers win? And to me, you've had all this language from netnahu and his government of like, all right, we're just you know, we're going into Gaza and we don't even know what comes next. And I sort of think that's bullshit because it's not like they've been unclear about what their ideal goal for all of the occupied Palestinian territories,

including Gaza, would be. And that's complete annexation. I mean, a think tank with some ties to NETNYAHUO just put on a plan that laid on exactly how they would, you know, achieve this quote unquote final settlement solution, and so to me, it seems more likely that they know exactly what they want to do, they just don't want to say it publicly for fear of losing the support of the US or an attempt to try to save

face for the US and for President Biden. I wonder if you're reading it the same way.

shopping around this idea. And Blincoln made this statement after meeting with Ceci, saying explicitly, we have heard from our Arab partners that the idea of moving the Palestinians of Gaza into another country or into Sinai is a non starter,

and therefore we're not pursuing it. I mean, can you believe that the American Secretary of State is not taking a principled stand against the forcible transfer of two point three million innocent civilians to another country, and the US was actually attempting to facilitate that, and who knows what they were offering the Egyptians in order to absorb two point three million Palestinians. It is unthinkable that the US could could openly support such a thing, and so absolutely

that was Israel's hope. I don't think, I don't think that they can achieve it. I think they can. It's possible that the way that this war will evolve is that as Israeli ground troops go in and if they bomb a certain way and then they they bomb open essentially the border with Sinai, that you could have many Palestinians fleeing into Sinai. And the Egyptians will not like it. They will test the peace treaty between in Egypt and Israel,

but Egypt may not break it. They may have to swallow it at first and then push for those refugees to go back. But we know how that worked in nineteen forty eight. They never were permitted to go back. So that's clearly what Israel's you know, preference would be that the Palestinians of Gaza go to Egypt, I think it's very hard for them to achieve it. And their stated goal, if we forget about even what they're going to do with the Palestinian civilians of Gaza, their stated

goal with respect to Hamas is also almost impossible to achieve. Yeah, And so I think they really are at a loss for what to do. Because if they go in and they try and you know, blow up tunnels in Gaza, and they're going to go and you know, inch their way down and try and quote unquote eliminate Hamas, which is what they claim they want to do. This is a you know, movement that's deeply rooted in Palestinian society.

There is no way to actually eliminate Hamas. There is a way to kill many many Palestinians and many militants inside Hamas. And how they're going to end this without killing all of their hostages they're you know, over two hundred people being held hostage in Gaza is again another impossible task. What I'm told is that there that the scale of the killing on October seventh is so great that there is a totally new Israeli attitude towards hostages.

Gone is the day trading one thousand plus for one soldier. One thousand plus Palestinian prisoners for one soldier has happened with Gilad Shalit in twenty eleven. I believe it was. And now I think the attitude that some Israeli officials are expressing in private is this is such a priority for us, such a more important goal of actually eliminating Hamas, that that you know, essentially we're prepared to lose another two hundred I.

and Gaza who have already lost their lives. We've spoken with you know, we we've listened to the analysis of military experts who are involved in Iraq, involved in Afghanistan said, if your goal is actually elimination of Hamas and you want to do this counter insurgency type thing, stop bombing because you're going to need some cooperation from the local people. It's not going to be easy, you're going to suffer casualties,

et cetera. But what you're doing now is actually totally counterproductive to your stated goal and objective, which even and if you went about it in the way that these you know, military experts do, by the way, had to work out for us in I Rock and Afghanistan suggest

is likely, as you're suggesting an impossible task. And even if you were able to root out Hamas, given the blockade in the misery that's inflicted on Gaza on a regular basis, what kind of political structure and what kind of political ideology do you think is going to grow out of the ashes of Hamas is going to look very similar to what we already have. So with all that being said, Nathan, you know you have been you

are a student of this conflict. You wrote another book called The Only Language They Understand, talking about you know, flare ups of violence and how that has impacted set back, move forward, potential negotiations, potential compromises. You know, do you have any expectations for what the end of this looks like and where we end up after all of the dust and the misery and the death and the carnage is behind us.

there is no exit strategy. There is no plausible answer to how, if they really eliminate Hamas, how they're going to ever leave Gaza. Who's going to be in charge in Gaza. I lived in Gaza for you know, six weeks as the very beginning of my work with International Crisis Group, and the report that I wrote was about Salafi jihadi opposition to Hamas, and that was you know, in two thousand and ten, that that kind of opposition to Hamas, which is way to the right of where

Hamas is. You know, that's the kind of thing that could replace Hamas. And Israel cannot put the Palestinian authority in place on the back of Israeli tanks in Gaza. What what international force is going to agree to go and facilitate Israel's you know, occupation of Gaza. So I think Israel really is at a crossroads and it has no answer that its public is demanding something that it can't actually do, which is an extraordinarily dangerous situation.

So if hundreds of thousands or a million, or some huge chunk of the Palestinians of the two point three million Palestinians who live in Gaza are expelled, then I think you could imagine in Israel the annexation. But if there are two point three million Palestinians in Gaza, Israel has no interest in actually annexing that territory, and their model is something different, which is walling it off as actually, you know, the characters in my book. It's the same strategy.

You have a densely populated Palestinian area that you have no hope of settling with Jewish settlements. It's too dense, there isn't enough space, there would be too much resistance, it'd be too costly, and so what do you do. You wall it off. You segregate that population. So that's the strategy of Gaza, and that's increasingly the model that you see in the West Bank of these bantustans that are created there. So again, if they clear Gaza of many,

many Palestinians, annexation becomes a possibility. But without that, I think at most they would just add an nex you know, a portion of it, or declare that they've made a buffer zone that they're now occupying, and maybe they would say, you know, we'll leave when we get the hostages back, or something along those lines.

Jerusalem Tragedy. Tell people where they can find it, Nathan, and where they can find you.