--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from Saks Fifth Avenue. Fall is here. Might be time to find some nice new pieces you can wear again and again. With Saks Fifth Avenue, it can be a breeze to shop for your personal style, like maybe a relaxed Prada blazer or Gucci loafers that are great for both work and the weekend.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is very Sean. This is very Sean-coated. Gucci loafers. Saks says Saks makes shopping feel totally customized to you, whether that's from an in-store stylist or a visit to Saks.com, where they can show you just what you want to see. They say they'll even let you know when arrivals from your favorite designers are in or when something you've been eyeing is back in stock.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We connect what's happening in Washington to the rest of the globe. Expose corruption wherever we find it. And give first perspective on everything from wellness and soccer to culture, the climate and more. Read, watch and listen to The Guardian for free at theguardian.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Israel got a new prime minister this weekend, and we wanted to know what that means for the conflict between Israel and Palestine. So we asked Alison Kaplan-Summer. I'm a journalist for Haaretz. I live in a suburb of Tel Aviv called Renana, which also happens to be the hometown of Israel's new prime minister, Naftali Bennett.
--:-- Alison Kaplan-Summer: And he is refusing to move to the official prime minister's residence in Jerusalem. The new prime minister of Israel, Naftali Bennett, has chaired his first cabinet meeting and has promised to heal the country's rifts.
--:-- Alison Kaplan-Summer: This coalition contains parties with very, very different visions of what Israel should be and what kind of a solution there should be to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett, is on record as saying that he opposes a Palestinian state, that he believes in annexation of at least part of the West Bank immediately, and kind of a creeping annexation for the rest of the West Bank.
--:-- Alison Kaplan-Summer: He really sees the greater land of Israel as the ultimate ideal vision for the state. But this coalition also contains parties really to the very left of the Israeli spectrum, which believe very firmly in a two-state solution.
--:-- Alison Kaplan-Summer: To make things even more complicated, this is the first Israeli government coalition to include an Arab party, an Islamist Arab party, which obviously has its own point of view and feels very strongly about what kind of a state should or shouldn't exist in the land.
--:-- Alison Kaplan-Summer: So pretty much it's a stalemate. There's no way that these parties will ever agree on a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So it's hard to imagine anything except a maintenance of the status quo happening right now.
--:-- Alison Kaplan-Summer: And what exactly binds this coalition together if they can't see eye to eye on one of the most pressing issues they're facing? What brought this coalition together was one clear mission, which is the mission that they will always be able to point to that they accomplished.
--:-- Alison Kaplan-Summer: And that is after 12 years getting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu out of power. Netanyahu is accused of bribery, breach of trust and fraud. There are allegations of gifts from millionaire friends and that he sought regulatory favors for media tycoons in return for favorable coverage in the press.
--:-- Alison Kaplan-Summer: Both on the left and on the right, a majority of Israelis believed that his time has come, that he is not only indicted on charges, he is standing trial on corruption charges. He is very distracted by his personal woes.
--:-- Alison Kaplan-Summer: There was evidence through the COVID crisis and other political crises that his prime consideration was his own political survival and his political survival in order to guarantee a legal advantage in his cases.
--:-- Alison Kaplan-Summer: If Benjamin Netanyahu is able to stay in power, he could try to manipulate the basically the legal system to try to protect himself from some of these serious charges against him. And so there was a consensus by many who were his political allies, many who have a similar political outlook that he does, that his presence in the prime minister's office was dangerous for the future of the country.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, so this coalition was successful in getting rid of Netanyahu. Now they're led by Bennett and there's a bunch of parties in there that don't see eye to eye on this Palestinian issue. What do most Israelis want when it comes to Palestine?
--:-- Alison Kaplan-Summer: When you look at most polls both Israelis and Palestinians by large majorities prefer a two solution to any other of the alternatives. In both cases 43 to 44 percent say that their preferred solution is a two solution.
--:-- Alison Kaplan-Summer: You know, many of them say they don't know or they don't care, etc. But when you compare it to those that actively support an alternative like one state for both people, etc., overwhelmingly they support the idea of a two-state solution.
--:-- Alison Kaplan-Summer: The question is whether they support taking real concrete steps towards it in the current reality. I think you would probably find a majority of Israelis opposed to doing that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the alternative, we're talking about this one-state solution. What is that one-state solution? Is that just the state of Israel?
--:-- Alison Kaplan-Summer: It depends on what kind of one-state solution you're interested in. The far right and the far left in Israel each have their own vision of a one-state solution. If you're on the far right, you want the annexation of West Bank territory without giving full rights and an equal status to the Palestinian residents of the West Bank.
--:-- Alison Kaplan-Summer: Which relates to how people are saying that Israel is heading towards apartheid if not engaged in apartheid already. Those on the left, of course, have a more American-style vision of one state with equal rights for all, with everyone having voting rights.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: However, you know, most people will point out that this would result in a state that would clash with the vision of having a state that is clearly a majority Jewish state.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And in the meantime, it doesn't sound like this new coalition in Israel with, at least for the moment, Prime Minister Bennett is going to bring any significant change on this issue.
--:-- Alison Kaplan-Summer: No, absolutely. They are going to stay as far away from it as possible. But events will overtake them. And there are some landmines, even in the coming week, that could lead the Israeli-Palestinian issue to explode in the face of the new Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There is a march, a nationalist flag march scheduled to take place in Jerusalem, which is going to put really a spotlight on where this new Israeli leader stands when it comes to the future of the West Bank.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I, Naftali Bennett, son of Jim Yaakov of blessed memory, admir Nalea, may she have a long life. commit as the prime minister and as the future alternate prime minister to maintain allegiance to the state of Israel and to its laws.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, so maybe the new prime minister doesn't mean big changes are on the horizon, but what would those changes look like? That is in a minute on Today Explained.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, so Israel's got a new prime minister and a new coalition in power, but it doesn't appear to suggest we're going to see much progress on the Israel-Palestine conflict in the near term.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But we were wondering what progress would look like, so we asked Rashid Khalidi. I am the author of The Hundred Years' War on Palestine and the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: Rashid with the election of this new coalition this entrance of this Bennett character who seems to have no love for solutions do you think the two-state solution, as it's called, is dead at this point?
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: I don't think Bennett changes anything about the two-state solution. This is a government that is paralyzed on this issue.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: But the two-state solution itself faces obstacles that nobody who mouths those words ever wants to discuss. Israel has been pouring concrete for 54 years and has engaged in the largest infrastructure projects in its modern history in order to prevent a two-state solution.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: It has illegally exported 10% of its population into the occupied West Bank. Anybody who even uses the words two-state solution would have to say, how would we change a situation in which 10% of Israel's Jewish citizens have been implanted in most of the West Bank?
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: How do you change that? Let's just talk about why the entire international community is so committed to this two-state thing that doesn't seem to be working out in any way, shape, or form right now.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: Why is that? Well, I think it solves their consciences, frankly. There is and should be a guilty conscience about what happened during World War II, during the Holocaust.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: And you can't pivot from a solution that's enshrined in UN resolutions going back to 1947. At Flushing, Long Island, the General Assembly of the United Nations has made its decision on Palestine. I mean, 1947, the partition plan of 1947 was a two-state solution.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: An Arab state was never created because the UN didn't really care. The powers behind that resolution didn't really care, the United States and the Soviet Union. There was heated debate in the assembly.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: And now I think that over time, there's a sense that something should be done for the Palestinians, but there has never really been any willingness on the part of any major international actor to get the Israelis to climb down from a position where whatever they say, whether they accept the two-state solution in principle or not, they are working tirelessly day and night to make sure that it's absolutely impossible.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: Pouring concrete, installing new settlers, building bypass roads, hemming in the Palestinians, confiscating their lands, and so on and so forth.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: Well, does it make more sense then to talk about the one-state solution? Well, the one-state solution has obstacles too. One of them is that there is this wall-to-wall international consensus that the two-state solution is a good thing.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: But that is a real obstacle because it's enshrined in all kinds of UN resolutions and in the policies of literally dozens and dozens of countries.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: Another problem that the one-state solution faces is how do you do it? how do you move from a situation where you have essentially one state, an Israeli Zionist state, created in order to privilege one people at the expense of another?
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: And that's now part of the Israeli constitution. A law was passed in 2018, which said only one people uniquely has the right of self-determination in Israel, and that is the Jewish people.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: So you really have to do a whole lot to transform that into an equal, or I should say a one-state solution in which everyone is equal, has equal national rights and civil rights and political rights and so forth.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: What would this one-state solution that nobody wants to humor look like? I think it depends on what kind of one-state solution you're talking about.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: Back in the 60s, the PLO put forward the idea of a singular democratic, secular Palestinian state where everybody, Jews, Muslims, and Christians would be equal, but where there's no recognition of the fact that an Israeli nationality or an Israeli national entity has developed or has been created.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: South Africa is more the first model. That's one option. Another would be some kind of binational state where you would have a formal recognition that there are two peoples here and figure out how you would arrange the adjudication of all the issues between them.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: There are not many cases of the second model. You might argue maybe Belgium, maybe the Netherlands, maybe in the future, maybe Northern Ireland.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: People will say, well, the Middle East isn't Ireland and the Middle East isn't Belgium or whatever. Well, you know, Belgium and the Netherlands and Ireland were not quiet places a little while ago.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: Finally, there are other models within the context of a one-state solution. Cantons, a federal system, whereby you would have one state, but you'd have enormous autonomy within that for different regions or groups.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: I'm not particularly wedded to any of this. I'm just throwing things out. But I think any one of those options would have to be fleshed out in great detail, and people would have to see how they would work and look at historical examples where they have worked.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: And so we're going to need an original solution, but I think it should draw on these cases I mentioned, and there are others, where you have people of different ethnicities, languages, and religions who have managed some kind of arrangement.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: And each of them is different Each of them has a different set of problems and a different resolution but have similarities that I think can be drawn on
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: I guess thinking about this 50 occupation of Gaza and all these questions about solutions and comparisons to Ireland and South Africa, it all feels so theoretical.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: I'll admit to a bias. I'm a historian. I think people have got a lot of the history wrong or they don't understand it as fully as they might.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: But certainly getting the history right is part of it. making comparisons that are useful is part of it. And you can't make a comparison to South Africa without knowing something about South Africa.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: I would promise you that a very large portion of the people who mouth the word apartheid have absolutely no idea about what actually happened in and what the nature of the struggle in South Africa was.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: And that's not a criticism. That's understandable. But if we're going to use those kinds of parallels, we have to know what we're talking about.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: Saying it either way is in effect problematic for one or the other side. And I think a huge amount of persuasion and a great deal of change is going to be necessary before any solution, whether one state, two states, three states, binational state, cantonal, federal, is possible.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: Moving away from square one where we are now, which is in effect a one state, Israeli state solution. That is where we are today. People don't want to admit it, but that's where we are.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is this all as intractable as it always seems? It's intractable until suddenly it breaks and you suddenly realize, no, it's not quite as intractable as it seemed.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: I don't think anybody would have predicted the end of apartheid. A new South Africa has to eliminate the racial hatred and suspicion caused by apartheid.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: I don't think anybody would have predicted the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland. The principle of consent is absolute and is throughout the agreement.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: And the breakthrough is that that is now accepted by all North and South. I don't think anybody would have predicted that Brexit might come close to breaking the Good Friday Agreement.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: My point is that when these things work, they work rather suddenly. Things change very fast.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: You know, two months ago, I don't think you could have found a commentator worth her or his salt who said, oh, the Palestinians are united and it's clear that they're capable of coming out and defending their rights.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: And then suddenly what happened starting in the 10th of May happened. Israeli settler groups have been trying to get Palestinian families evicted from their homes in this area for years.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: The Israeli military has confirmed that it's destroyed the building, which houses the offices of some foreign news operations. 5,000 reservists as the military responds to rocket fire from Gaza with airstrikes.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: Air raid sirens have been going off for hours in the Israeli city of Ashkelon. Those things had happened an infinite number of times before.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: In the case of Gaza, this is the fourth time. In the case of evictions, they've been going on since 1948.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: In the case of the Hanam-e-Sherif, I don't know how many times the Israeli security forces have charged in there and beaten people up, fired tear gas.
--:-- Rashid Khalidi: Yet somehow all of this came together in May. So I don't know. These things could change literally overnight.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But it's going to take some, it probably will take some time. And it is certainly not easy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think you have to know what the problem is before you can think about a solution. If you deny that there's a problem of, say, settler colonialism or inequality or whatever it may be, then of course you're not going to have a solution.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Anybody who says everybody is happy in Israel, and Israel is a democracy, a perfect democracy, is taking us away from a solution rather than towards a solution.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Rashid Khalidi, he's the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Ramos from This Is Today Explained. The team includes Emily Sen, Victoria Chamberlain, Miles Bryan, Will Reed, Halima Shah, and Afim Shapiro, who's our engineer.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We had some engineering help this week from Paul Mounsey. Some facts checked by Laura Bullard. Some music from Breakmaster Cylinder and also Noam Hassenfeld.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our editor is Matt Collette, supervising producers Amna Alsadi. Veep of audio at Vox is Liz Kelly Nelson. and Jillian Weinberger is the deputy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Get in touch via electronic mail if you like. We're todayexplained at vox.com. Thank you.
