This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.
I’ve been trying to think about how to begin this episode, which is a very tricky one, and I found myself thinking about a debate I heard often in 2023 and 2024.
Back then, when you had more protests around cease-fires and “Free Palestine,” you would hear these chants and see these signs: “From the river to the sea.” It flared into this huge controversy.
What was always so strange, so backward, to me about this focus on college-campus protesters was that there was this reality people weren’t really admitting — that there is one power from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
That power, that sovereign — which, if you travel in that area, as I have, is visually undeniable — is Israel.
American politics has not grappled at all with the level of day-to-day domination that Israel exerts over Palestinian lives — and the complete absence of any horizon at all for that to end.
And this was true before Oct. 7, as well: In early 2023, the political scientists Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami published an edited volume called “The One State Reality.” Their argument, which they also made in a very controversial Foreign Affairs piece, was:
Palestine is not a state in waiting, and Israel is not a democratic state incidentally occupying Palestinian territory. All the territory west of the Jordan River has long constituted a single state under Israeli rule, where the land and the people are subject to radically different legal regimes, and Palestinians are permanently treated as a lower caste.
What they were saying then is that the hope of a two-state solution in the future had become a way by which many in America, particularly, avoided reckoning with “the one-state reality” of the present. That reality was not accidental. It was, and is, not intended to be transient. It was being etched into the land — in stone and cement, in settlements and checkpoints, in the construction of walls and the demolition of homes.
That might have been a controversial claim when it was made. But what has happened since Oct. 7 has made it an undeniable reality.
Israel now occupies more than half of Gaza. More than two million Gazans have been herded into less than half of the land they formerly occupied. And Gaza, it should be said, was already one of the most overcrowded places on Earth.
The conditions Gazans live in are hellish. And there is no near-term, imagined, envisioned relief. This is — and it remains — collective punishment. Hamas, not the children of Gaza, attacked Israel on Oct. 7. The conditions that the children of Gaza now live in are immoral.
In the West Bank, Israel has choked off money to the Palestinian Authority. It has chosen to build settlements at a record pace. More settlements were approved in the last year alone than in the previous two decades combined.
Israel has allowed — has protected — a terrifying rise in settler and military violence toward the Palestinians who live there. There is no doubt, if you go there, who rules the West Bank — and it is not the P.A.
When Netanyahu signed a recent settlement project — one the United States had opposed for a long time because it would effectively bisect the West Bank, making a Palestinian state physically unimaginable — he made clear that was exactly why he was signing it. He said: “We are going to fulfill our promise that there will be no Palestinian state. This place belongs to us.”
In the north, Israel has used the war in Iran as cover to invade Lebanon, displacing more than a million people and suggesting that up to 600,000 will not be allowed to return to their homes until Israel has established its security zone, whatever that proves to be, and when it has decided that Israelis in the north are safe. To put it bluntly, it is an open question whether any of those 600,000 Lebanese will ever be able to return to their homes, or if they will even have homes to return to.
I do not want to underplay what Israel is actually dealing with here. I have immense sympathy for Israel’s war against Hezbollah. They’re defending themselves in a way any state would. But this is collective punishment. Those million Lebanese are not all Hezbollah.
Israel’s security challenges are very real. Its horror, its fear, its trauma after Oct. 7 is very real. Its determination to make sure that never happens again is what any state and any people would do. Its right to reprisal against Hamas and Hezbollah is undeniable.
I am not someone who wants to see the state of Israel cease to exist. But what Israel is choosing here — a one-state reality, which already is and will continue to be understood the world over as apartheid — endangers that state, too. The cost of Israel cannot morally be the permanent subjugation of millions of Palestinians.
In February, Gallup found, for the first time, that more Americans polled sympathized with the Palestinians than the Israelis. Among Democrats, among young Americans, it is not even close.
Israel maintains support among older Americans, and it has benefited from the advanced age of the last two presidents, whose views of Israel were forged in another time, around another Israel. American politics has not yet fully grappled with what Israel has chosen to become. But it will — and soon.
So what does it mean to grapple with Israel’s one-state reality? To see what Israel, the West Bank, Gaza and Lebanon are now, without illusion?
Shibley Telhami is the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland. Marc Lynch is the director of the Project on Middle East Political Science at George Washington University. Lynch is the author, most recently, of “America’s Middle East: The Ruination of a Region.” And together they were two of the editors on “The One State Reality.”
Ezra Klein: Marc Lynch, Shibley Telhami, welcome to the show.
Shibley Telhami: Pleasure.
Marc Lynch: Thanks.
I want to start, Marc, before Oct. 7. You and Shibley and a few coauthors published a book of essays and a big Foreign Affairs article called “Israel’s One-State Reality.” And the argument you make is that the two-state solution is a fantasy. It’s dead.
There is a reality that we are failing to apprehend in Israel, which is that there is one sovereign from the river to the sea. I want to ask you: What were you seeing that convinced you to make your argument? How did this work in your view, say, in the West Bank?
Marc Lynch: Sure. I think it is important to put this into a bit of a trajectory, historically.
Back in the mid-90s, during the Oslo years, you actually had a situation where, if you’re living in Jerusalem, if you’re living in Ramallah, if you’re living in Nablus or Jenin, you can actually feel a state emerging around you. You can see the Palestinian legislature is active.
They have ministries, the checkpoints are coming down. You’re able to travel. If you have an olive oil business, you can actually load it into the back of a truck and sell it in Bethlehem. And so it actually was this idea that it’s not just that we were negotiating toward a two-state solution, but people could feel two states coming into existence.
Fast-forward 10 years, after the second intifada: That’s just not true anymore. Right now, you’ve got a whole range: You’ve got the big security wall, which is a de facto new border. You’ve got a whole range of checkpoints that have come into place, making it impossible to move freely across the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority has basically been destroyed, and it’s being rebuilt from scratch.
If you’re just an average Palestinian living in the West Bank, you no longer feel like you’re on the path toward a state. You might follow the negotiations, but now you feel that you’re living under occupation.
Then fast-forward another 10 years, and you’re in a situation where nothing has happened, in all of that time, that would make you believe that a two-state solution has become more likely. There are more settlements, more settlers, more settler-only roads, more repression, no presidential elections — nothing that would make you feel like you’re moving toward something else.
So there is this real sense of stagnation, and we’re looking at this, and we’re trying to understand, as political scientists: What is this entity? It’s clearly not something on a path to two independent sovereign states.
It’s clearly not anything that is familiar to us as just an occupation or just a transitional phase. But it also isn’t really formally, yet, a single Israeli state.
It hasn’t been annexed; it hasn’t come fully under Israeli law. It’s just this limbo, which goes on forever. And so that’s what we were trying to capture with “The One-State Reality” — that, in reality, everybody living in the territory that was once British Mandatory Palestine, everything from the river to the sea, is under the effective power of a single sovereign, which is the Israeli government. But the Palestinians experience it very, very differently: They have different rights; they have different responsibilities; they have different security concerns.
If you’re born in one place, you are trapped within Gaza. If you’re born in Ramallah, you have one set of rights, but your family who lives just a couple of kilometers away in Jerusalem, they might have a few more rights. And so it was a highly differentiated legal regime, but one in which Israel ultimately holds all the cards.
Shibley, one thing that Israeli Jews say to me when I say something like this to them is: No, the Palestinian Authority is the government in the West Bank.
What do you think about that?
Telhami: That’s a really good starting point. Think about what Palestinians are facing now in terms of settler attacks. Meaning, the settlers are obviously civilians who are very often in the West Bank illegally and going into homes of Palestinians or burning them or going into properties and stealing them or going into cars and burning them and, in some cases, shooting people.
And that’s in Palestinian territory, on Palestinian land. There is not a single policeman stopping them, not a single one, because they don’t dare: They’re not supposed to, and the Israeli military would shoot them to death.
At the same time, look at what they’re doing: They are working hard, around the clock, to make sure that there are no attacks on Israelis — one reason we haven’t seen a lot of attacks, or even demonstrations during what happened in Gaza, in the West Bank.
So the Palestinian Authority is a joke if you’re thinking about it as a real government. It certainly has no real control. It’s more of a municipality. It plays some functional role that’s important — but it is not a government.
To think about the asymmetry of power that has defined the past few decades — think again that Israel could put Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, under arrest in his compound. They did it with Yasir Arafat, the founder of the Palestinian movement. He was confined to his compound, not able to move, until his death.
We could describe the awfulness of life in the West Bank. A lot of people don’t understand, for example, how important the prisoner issue is to Palestinians. You’ve got probably more than a million Palestinians who have been arrested by Israeli forces throughout the occupation since 1967. It’s a very small population, as you know, and there’s not a family that has not been touched by it.
Many of them, thousands of them, are held without charges. And if they’re taken to court, they go into military court. In that military court, the conviction rate is close to 100 percent.
A settler who kills a Palestinian in the West Bank — they probably will not even be charged. And if they ever get charged, they go to civil court, and rarely do they get convicted.
So you have to be evenhanded here — you know, say: Yes, Palestinians should reform, too. Right — they probably should, for sure. Even if it’s a municipality, there’s corruption that could be repaired. But to think that’s going to matter at the strategic level, it’s really a joke.
The other thing I want to say about this is that there is a religious narrative, even in secular Israel, about the entitlement to the land, particularly after 1967, and holding on to the West Bank as part of Israel. And I think the entitlement, to at least the occupied territories, is tied to a legitimacy of Israel as derived from the biblical narrative and not from the fact that it’s recognized by the United Nations as a legitimate state.
And I think that narrative has really grown in a way that subconsciously, even for people who are not religious, really dominates the thinking and, in a visible way, in the West Bank. That’s why a lot of people look away when they don’t agree with the crazies who are killing or doing something, and they want to pretend it doesn’t exist, but they’re not entirely uncomfortable with the outcome.
Something that I wanted to zoom in on a bit is the American narrative that you’re getting at, which thinks a lot about the failure of the peace process — the failure of Camp David in 2000 and, to some degree, you’ll hear about the failure of negotiations between Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas in 2008.
In 2009, Benjamin Netanyahu came back into power. He has now been prime minister, with short interruptions, since then — which is a long time.
I was going to bring this quote in later, but I think it’s worth talking about now. This is something that Netanyahu said recently, which I think helps shift the understanding of whether or not what we are looking at is the failure of a process or the success of a project. Netanyahu said:
There will be no Palestinian state to the west of the Jordan River. For years I have prevented the creation of that terror state, against tremendous pressure, both domestic and from abroad. We have done this with determination, and with astute statesmanship. Moreover, we have doubled the Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria, and we will continue on this path.
Marc, when you listen to that, what do you hear?
Lynch: I think it’s a very honest and direct statement of the reality.
Again, I do think that there was a serious effort to negotiate a two-state solution under Oslo. For all of its flaws, it was real.
But Netanyahu opposed that at the time and was very happy to bring it grinding to a halt when he first became prime minister, in 1996. And I think he’s been extremely consistent his entire career. I think that has really been part of his political success, in a way, of being able to position himself as the one who is able to advance this particular project.
And I don’t think that Americans are blind to this. They tend to look at it as: Netanyahu is the problem. He’s always pushing back. He’s always slowing things down. He’s always giving us problems. And if we could just get rid of Netanyahu — if we could just find a way to get a more reasonable alternative as Israel’s prime minister — then we could get back to the business of two-state negotiations and the like.
And that’s always been a very willful misreading of the situation. I think that Netanyahu isn’t a magician who is somehow convincing the Israeli public to accept this. He’s reflecting what is a real and a steadily growing center position in Israel, which is that they really don’t see the need for there to be two states.
The left wing in Israel, back in the 1990s, were consumed with the idea that Israel had to make a choice between being Jewish or being democratic.
If you annex the West Bank, if you control the West Bank and Gaza, then you get to a demographic situation where Jews are no longer a majority in this territory. And I think that dilemma was resolved a long time ago. They chose to be Jewish — not democratic. The vehicle for doing that was the perpetuation of this idea that eventually, someday, there will be a two-state solution. Maybe we don’t need to think about giving any kind of rights to Palestinians.
And again, I don’t think that Americans were blind to this. I think that they were just willing to go along with it because it was convenient to do so.
We often talk about the West Bank, we talk about Gaza, but there are many Palestinians living in Israel proper, Israel’s traditional borders, however you want to call it. One of the arguments you make is that the one-state reality is:
based on relations of superiority and inferiority between Jews and non-Jews across all the territories under Israel’s differentiated but unchallenged control.
Israeli Jews I know have to make the point of telling me that Palestinians in Israel have equal rights — that they are equal citizens in Israel proper, such that Israel is a democracy. In fact, it is a multiethnic democracy.
Why don’t you agree?
Telhami: We didn’t say we didn’t agree. Actually, we put it on a scale. From, on the one end, you have citizens who do have civil rights and can vote and get elected. They’re discriminated against in a very real way, structurally and in practice, for sure. But then, on the other hand, you have Gaza and the West Bank on the other end of the spectrum.
So we look at it as a spectrum. The reality is, if the national security minister is supremacist Itamar Ben-Gvir, who thinks a Jewish life is more valuable than an Arab life, it’s not about citizenship, it’s about ethnicity, it’s about religion.
And there are fears already. You could see the tension. It’s hard to also decouple, particularly in times of war and crisis. But what happens is that, let’s say you are in a factory together. You have an Israeli citizen who’s Jewish and an Israeli citizen who is an Arab, and they’re working together. And they post on social media, and the Palestinian says: This is genocide, what’s happening, what the Israelis are doing. And the Israeli says: Go, go to the army. And they’re sitting next to each other. What do you think is going to happen to them?
So then, where on the spectrum, prior to Oct. 7, is Gaza for you? Because when I speak to Israeli Jews about this, their view is that they did not have control of Gaza.
They had withdrawn from Gaza, and after they withdrew, Gazans chose Hamas, a group dedicated to Israel’s destruction. And eventually the result was Oct. 7.
And so to many Jewish Israelis, the lesson of the Gaza withdrawal is not that they had too much control but that they had too little — that they had offered too much autonomy and more than a thousand of their citizens paid a terrible price for that.
So when you include Gaza in this period, in the single-state reality, how do you explain that?
Telhami: Well, first of all, with regard to Oct. 7 — obviously, it’s a horrific attack, and there’s nothing justified. We can analyze it, politically. Explanation, justification — not one and the same thing. A lot of people conflate the two sometimes when you talk about it.
But control doesn’t mean you have to be there physically. Certainly, Gaza didn’t have sovereignty. Gazans couldn’t go in and out without Israeli permission. So when you’re controlling the water, when you’re controlling the electricity, when you’re controlling the trade, when you’re controlling the movement of people, when you’re controlling the money, even that goes in and out — I know many Israelis buy that.
It’s an easy way out, but, in reality, this was not the case.
Lynch: Can I add something here? Because what’s very interesting about this is that if you look at the role that Gaza played in all of this, and in Israeli politics, that, in effect, this became, actually, what seemed to be a very sustainable and workable situation for a very long time for Israel — by withdrawing from Gaza and establishing this kind of control from the outside and controlling all the points of access. That gave them the ability to regulate things, turn it on or off.
And if Hamas was running it, that’s OK. Hamas functionally became something like the Palestinian Authority, in the sense of providing enough security, on behalf of Israel, to make sure that things didn’t blow up too much.
There was this huge scandal in Israel, as you know, about Netanyahu’s supposedly working with Qatar and signing off on the transfer of significant funds from Qatar to Hamas.
But there’s nothing especially scandalous about this, if you are in a situation of basically maintaining enough stability so that the problem doesn’t have to be dealt with anymore. And I think that’s what was happening in Gaza. From the perspective of people in Gaza, this was a horrific life.
You’re living in a situation where you don’t have sufficient access to food, to water, to medicine, to leave and go see the outside world — all of these other things. You’re at the mercy of Israel. They can cut it off at any time.
At the same time, you did have the tunnel system going out into Sinai. This allowed Hamas to engage in enough smuggling to make sure that the needs would be met — but also to ensure their own power.
In other words, it is a very symbiotic relationship, where Hamas could stay in power and thrive under the situation of blockade, even if many Gazans suffered. Israel didn’t have to worry about trying to deal with a very hostile and difficult environment. And up until Oct. 7, this seemed like a workable situation.
I think that is part of why it was such a profound shock on Oct. 7, because up until that moment, it really seemed, from an Israeli perspective — from Netanyahu’s perspective — that this was working. Maybe it wasn’t a long-term solution, but solutions are overrated.
And, as I understand it, this is one of the reasons that the intelligence signaling something like Oct. 7 is discarded. It’s not that Israel had no warning, but that there was such a strong belief that Hamas wanted to maintain its current situation, that they would not dare to upend the equilibrium so violently, causing this kind of Israeli response.
Telhami: Yes, and Gaza doesn’t have, for all Israelis, the same status as the West Bank. Now, it’s true that Ben-Gvir — and some people like Ben-Gvir, who now oversees the police and comes out of a very far-right party — wanted to, at some point, have, essentially, ethnic cleansing in Gaza, that Palestinians should be removed to somewhere else.
But, in general, I think, if you look, even among the right, the Likudniks — the Likud party of Benjamin Netanyahu — throughout there were voices that maybe wanted Gaza not to be part of the overall Israel. So there was a mixture. I don’t think the Israelis were all unified about what would happen with Gaza.
At some point, they even preferred Gaza’s going back to Egypt. The Egyptians didn’t want it. So I don’t think they all had universal views of what Gaza should be. But now I think they do.
So Oct. 7 does shatter this equilibrium. It shatters Israel’s sense of security, sense that any of this was working or could work.
It traumatizes Israeli society. There are hostages — the last of them only came home fairly recently. I still think it is impossible to overstate how much that has remained a live trauma.
But the part of this that we have followed in America, to the extent we followed it, is the war in Gaza. Very quickly after Oct. 7, life begins to change in the West Bank, too.
So Marc, tell me a bit about that. What begins to change?
Lynch: I think that you really capture well this idea of this being a genuine national trauma, and it just really shattering a lot of the boundaries and the taboos that had previously shaped Israeli strategy and Israeli political life. Things that previously had been unthinkable became thinkable.
And, as you said, in Gaza we saw how that played out. But in the West Bank, what I think you saw was the real unleashing of the extreme right-wing settler movement, which now began working, almost in partnership, with the Israeli state, with the Israeli government.
In the past, there had been some degree of restraint. You might have had extremist settler groups who were trying to expand, establishing hilltop settlements, trying to take more land and then daring people to stop them from doing so.
After Oct. 7, that really began to change. Now it was a much more direct and coordinated movement to take more territory to expel more Palestinians, to seize houses, to destroy olive trees, to destroy agricultural land. Again, it went beyond just toleration and often into active coordination, where you would have Israel Defense Forces troops standing by and watching, making sure that things would get done.
The idea that this was something that would have to be done secretly, that it would have to be done in the dead of night — and then dare people to pull them back — that has changed. Now it’s in broad daylight, it’s on social media.
And it’s actually presented in this veil of legitimacy, like: We’re not just taking land, we’re asserting a claim that this is legitimately our land — in ways that I think would have repelled many people in Israeli society before Oct. 7. Now they’re more receptive, at least, to the idea.
You probably both saw this event. It became an international incident, functionally, where there was a team of CNN reporters in the West Bank. They were reporting on settler violence in the West Bank, and they’re stopped, and I would say threatened and detained, by Israeli soldiers.
They’re showing their passports, they’re showing themselves to be journalists. But there’s this remarkable conversation they have with some of the soldiers.
And Jeremy Diamond, the CNN reporter speaking, says: Look we’re here, this settlement, it’s not even legal under Israeli law. And the soldier says: It will be. It will be.
The soldier explicitly describes that what they were doing as revenge, because a settler was killed in a car accident, as I understood it. You saw the level of interplay between the settler violence and the Israeli army.
One of the things that we were looking at when we were preparing for this episode was the way the composition of the Israeli military, Israeli cabinet officials, but also Israeli military leadership, has changed. The Israeli military leadership used to be highly professionalized, often very centrist.
There’s been a rolling purge, replacement, under Netanyahu, as he’s tried to put people who are more loyal to him into senior positions. In order to sustain itself, his coalition has had elements — like Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich — who in Israel had been seen as much more extreme.
But you look at what senior people now say, and it’s fairly shocking. So the Shin Bet, which is one of Israel’s internal security forces — one that, at times, would prosecute radical settlers for violence — its leader, David Zini, has now said that the Palestinians are “a divine existential threat,” that “messianism” is not a dirty word:
We will return to Zion, and we will have an army, warriors and wars, and the kingdom will return to Israel. Such is the way of redemption, in days of yore and in our time.
When that is what the people leading the security force are saying, you can imagine how the security force itself is operating.
How do you understand that sort of military, paramilitary, dimension that has emerged in the West Bank?
Telhami: I think that has always been there, but it has gotten much worse, particularly because of the fact that you have people like Ben-Gvir, who has a say even on the makeup of certain units.
And so yes, CNN captures that, in this particular case. But it happens every day. I mean, we’ve had, I think, over a hundred such incidents just over the past month, in March.
When people say: Oh, it’s just the settlers — yes, of course, there are just the settlers who are actually carrying out the violence. But they’re being empowered by the military.
Even if the military don’t necessarily sympathize with them, even under the best of circumstances, they’re going there to protect them. But it’s not under the best of circumstances, because you have units that actually are very sympathetic to them, and therefore see the project that the settlers are pursuing to be perfectly legitimate.
And what role do the settlers play? I mean, there’s this concept out there between “functional” and “dysfunctional” settler violence. Dysfunctional is when it creates international anger, when they go after a CNN camera crew. Functional is when — and it’s a very cold term — they’re being used a little bit as a tool of ambitions that the state actually has.
I’ve talked to many people in Israeli human rights organizations who say the way to understand what is happening in the West Bank is ethnic cleansing. And it may not look like that to Americans, because people are staying in the West Bank — largely, although some leave and are pushed out.
But the brutality of living under settler violence and settler threat, and then military violence and military threat, and police violence and police threat — to say nothing then of this bureaucratic machinery that says you don’t actually have a claim to your land, because you don’t have papers that never existed, in the way that the land was passed down through generations. What it’s doing is functionally pushing Palestinians onto a smaller and smaller part of the West Bank, which creates more room for Israeli Jews to settle there.
So how should one understand the settlers? I think they used to be presented in the American conversation as like a splintered religious sect, but that’s not what they’re doing now.
Lynch: No, this is a long-term project, which they have been trying to execute and carry out for many decades. And now they have a permissive environment in which they can move much more aggressively, and with functional state support.
I mean, we used to make these distinctions, back in the old days, about the bedroom settlements: You want to get a cheap apartment — you’re basically in Jerusalem anyway — and you just go there. You’re not ideological.
And when they talked about land swaps after the old Oslo negotiations, that’s what they were talking about. Israel would annex those big settlement blocks that were very close to the border. Meanwhile, you had the radical settlers, the ideological settlers, who were out there establishing hilltop settlements and going close to Palestinian population centers.
They were seen as primarily the source of the problem. But, as you said, they were seen as a relatively minor, fringe element within this broader settler movement.
I think a lot of that has been reversed now, where this messianic notion of reclaiming the land of Judea and Samaria is now actually at the heart of a large state-supported movement in which the settlers are not just a fringe who are challenging the state — they really are, in many ways, a leading edge of the state project, which is to capture and colonize as much of the West Bank as possible.
People talk about the growing lawlessness on the West Bank. And, from a Palestinian perspective, it is very much about lawlessness. You have no recourse, you cannot protect yourself, and when settlers come and drive you off your property — and uproot your trees and kill your livestock — you have no recourse.
It’s not lawlessness in the sense that there are no policemen or there’s no military — it’s actually the opposite. This really is something that is being supported and enabled by the law, the actual, functional law, in that area. And so it would be wrong to think about this as simply this random, chaotic, splinter element.
I think that’s much more now at the center of what is, more or less, official state ideology. The Kahanists have taken over, and they are implementing precisely the kind of strategy that they would have done in the past, if they had been in the same position in Israeli political society and in the state.
It seems to me there’s a braided rationale that emerges and that I think is quite important, that there’s a messianic dimension of this: Israeli Jews, who believe Judea and Samaria, as they call it, is guaranteed to the Jews in the Torah. But for more secular Israelis, there is a shifting understanding — it seems to me, in my reporting, in my going there — of what the settlements are, of what these outposts are. They go from a radical religious project to something like a sentry system.
If the problem in Gaza was that Israel didn’t have people there, didn’t have boots on the ground, didn’t have effective intelligence, all of a sudden, the settlements and the outposts and the settlers become a way of being sure that no violence, no horror — nothing like Oct. 7 — is going to rise out of the West Bank.
So it seems to me that what has happened, maybe for the first time, at least at this level, is the merging of the security establishment — and security thinking in mainstream Israel — and the religious settler movement that wants the land as a kind of fulfillment of biblical prophecy. And together these become a very potent force.
Telhami: I think that really preceded Oct. 7. If you look at the 2015 poll in Israel by Pew, it found that half of Israelis polled supported removing Arabs, who are citizens, from Israel itself. It showed that 79 percent of all Israeli Jews polled believe that Jews should have privileges over non-Jews in the state of Israel.
So I think it crept in. I think that now Oct. 7 is a very good rationalization — justification — of a trend that has already taken place.
I don’t want to interrupt you, and I agree with what you’re saying, but I do want to argue that something changes here. There’s this chart from Peace Now, tracking Israeli government approval of new settlements that I find really striking.
In 2020, no new settlements were approved. None in 2021; none in 2022. During 2023, the year of Oct. 7, nine new settlements were approved. In 2024, it’s five.
In 2025, it is 54. Fifty-four new settlements approved by the Israeli government.
So I think, ideologically, what you’re saying is true, but clearly the shackles came off.
Telhami: No, I agree. I think that’s true. I think there was something, in terms of the permissiveness of what is happening, on a scale that we had not seen before. I agree with that. There’s no question that Oct. 7 intensified it.
What I’ve been pointing out is that there is an implicit assumption of biblical legitimacy, even among secular Israelis. And it’s very hard to think about this biblical legitimacy without entitlement to the West Bank.
I mean, Hebron is more biblical than Haifa.
I agree with what you’re saying ——
Lynch: Can I come back to your braided notion, because it’s really interesting. I hadn’t thought about it in quite that way before.
I think there’s a third component to it, which is really important, that we don’t want to miss: I think many Israelis looked at what they see as almost the betrayal of Hamas kind of playing their role in Gaza, and made an equation from that to the Palestinian Authority.
Basically, each of them was supposed to be providing stability and security: If Hamas did this horrible thing to us, the Palestinian Authority might do the same thing.
And I think that has led to a number of things. You mentioned the approval of new settlements, but there’s also withholding of tax revenues that’s supposed to go to the Palestinian Authority. There used to be agreements, the old Oslo agreements, on where Israeli forces could operate in Zone A and Zone B — not supposed to go into Zone A. I think all of that basically went away. Now the entire West Bank became a permissive zone for the I.D.F. and for Israel to operate.
And that leaves the P.A. in a very difficult place. So what is it if it’s no longer even a security subcontractor for Israel? What is its purpose now?
I agree that loss of faith is a profound part of this. I was doing a bunch of reporting before we had this conversation, and one of the things I found myself talking about with a number of Israelis was the collapse of faith among Israeli Jews in simply the idea of political deals.
This was true with their views after the peace process: We tried a peace process, and we got the second intifada.
This was also true, to some degree, in what you’re saying about Hamas and Gaza. There was a sense that they were letting in more money and trying to stabilize.
You can argue about their perception of this or their role in this, but in terms of how they see it: Political deals, settlements, negotiations failed them, and the only thing that is reliable is might and force and dominance and deterrence.
If I were to describe the entirety of the shift — and I mean, one reason I wanted to have you both on is that, as you say, this was the acceleration of trends that existed before Oct. 7. You cannot pin everything here on Oct. 7.
But I think the most profound shift in terms of the mainstream of the country’s orientation is that the only way to be safe is to dominate: to be there, to have your troops there, to have control of the Syrian airspace, to have a security zone in Lebanon, to have a security zone in Gaza.
There’s no more belief in deals, diplomacy — none of it. You dominate, and that is how you are safe.
Lynch: And not even deterrence, because deterrence still requires the other actor to behave in a rational way. And so even that is no longer seen as acceptable.
Between Israel and Iran, there was basically a deterrent relationship for years; between Hezbollah and Israel there was a deterrent relationship that evolved. And I think Israel is no longer willing to accept that anymore, because it’s not about their ability to dominate militarily, as you say.
Telhami: I don’t agree, actually, that Israel had worked with deterrence. I think the Israeli strategy from Day 1 has been to have what they call escalation dominance.
Escalation dominance is not mutual deterrence. It is a one-sided deterrence; it is that whenever there’s a fight with any party in the region, Israel can escalate it to the next level until it has the upper hand, and it will always have the upper hand.
In my opinion, that is why Israel doesn’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons — not because they fear Iran is irrational. I think that if North Korea doesn’t use them, and Maoist China doesn’t use them, and Stalinist Russia doesn’t use them, the Ayatollah’s Iran is not going to use them.
I think the reality of it, though, is that it neutralizes their upper hand, and that increases the chance of attrition for them. And I think the problem, when you have that, is: In effect, you’re saying you have to have strategic dominance over every conceivable party in the Arab world and the Middle East. That’s half a billion people. And you are a country of 10 million.
In order to have that upper hand, there is no way you can sustain that without depending on the United States.
I want to talk about that broader regional question, and particularly the Lebanon and Hezbollah side of it. But I want to talk about Gaza first.
People listening to the show understand the scale of devastation and death that the war brought to Gaza. But what has happened since the cease-fire? What is the structure of Gaza now?
Telhami: First of all, if Israel didn’t physically control much of Gaza before directly, now it controls a little over half. So these are areas that were supposed to be a buffer, according to the cease-fire agreement that was negotiated by Trump, to end the conflict, to end the war.
Of course, the war has not ended, because recently 10 people were killed. So fewer people are dying right now, but there are still a lot of people dying.
But Israel has taken control of the so-called buffer zone and clearly intends to keep it. Netanyahu has been saying so. He’s actually taking credit — saying that now they have more than half of Gaza — leveling it, keeping it, shooting anyone who comes near it.
Inside Gaza, it’s a disaster. You can see that what we’ve witnessed during the war is still ongoing in terms of not enough aid going in. Medical facilities are still in huge trouble. They haven’t been repaired, and many of them are still not operational. People are still, obviously, living in tents or are homeless, and the structures are destroyed or damaged.
The U.S. has come up with this peace board that was supposed to be not only ambitious toward resolving the Gaza situation but even replacing the U.N. Security Council at some point. But it certainly hasn’t done anything. And the worst part of it is that we know nobody is looking at it.
So the structure of the Trump cease-fire plan was that what would eventually happen is Hamas would disarm, and Israel would withdraw. There was never really an obvious way to that. When I had Israeli Jews on the show right after, they said: That’s not going to happen.
And sure enough, it is not happening. Hamas is in control, in the less than 50 percent that Palestinians are now allowed to live on.
And I was very struck by something that Eyal Zamir, the chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, said in December:
We will not allow Hamas to re-establish itself. We have operational control over extensive parts of the Gaza Strip, and we will remain on those defense lines. The yellow line is a new border line, serving as a forward defensive line for our communities and a line of operational activity.
That “new border line” language really caught my eye, because what I hear him saying, and what others in Israel have said, is: This is ours now. We’re going to keep this buffer zone. We’re going to keep the security zone. We’ve simply redrawn the map.
Lynch: “Border line” is interesting language because Israel doesn’t have borders. That’s been one of the issues all along.
Whether he called it a border line or not, this is more of a zone of control, where they basically want to create this expanded territorial control as a buffer. I think we’re seeing the consolidation of that.
I see almost no prospect by which that 50-plus percent of Gaza will ever become part of a Palestinian entity at this point. They’re fortifying it, and they’re there to stay.
What is life like for Gazans now? Gaza was already one of the most crowded places in the world. You now have two-plus million people in less than half the space they were in before.
Lynch: It’s absolutely horrible, because all of the conditions that sustain human life have been destroyed, especially when you’ve just recently had the storms coming through and the horrible weather.
The quality of life is almost staggering. I think probably the Israeli hope will be that, as the border crossings are allowed to open in one direction, more and more people will just leave and will not be allowed to come back — steadily emptying it out. There’s a long history of control of the border crossings in that one direction. Encouraging people ——
Toward Egypt, you mean.
Lynch: Also toward Jordan. Encouraging people to leave the West Bank over the Allenby Bridge into Jordan, just as a way of thinning out the numbers.
So over the long term, I imagine they’ll figure it out. Right now, though, it really does feel like it’s in this highly destructive, miserable limbo, where Israel’s attention is elsewhere and the main focus in Gaza is just keeping it as it is — consolidating control over everything on their side — and just neglect.
And what’s the condition of Hamas there?
Telhami: Well, they’re obviously still consolidating control. The remarkable thing about this — and particularly when we were thinking about the war with Iran, a country of 93 million and huge geographically — is: For decades, Israel had been dominating such a tiny place, with only a few thousand fighters underground, and couldn’t really — despite the fact of leveling the place — that it is still even in existence should send a message.
And they’re obviously dramatically weakened and weakened economically. They can control internally, and they’re asserting themselves internally, because there’s no alternative right now to them internally. But their capacity to wage war across borders is obviously very limited.
I do think that the mind-set, though, of: Now we have them, and we now can prevent them — is just so flawed. Of course, we know what Hamas is, and yes, the Israelis want it controlled, but if you look at the history of this conflict, or any conflict: If it’s not Hamas, it’s going to be something else.
You’ve created tens of thousands of orphans. You’ve created so much devastation and ruin. So what’s happening to the next generation? Where are they going to go if you’re not going to solve it politically and give them freedom?
So if it’s not Hamas, it’s going to be something else. And we forget how Hamas was born originally. Israel thought that the Palestine Liberation Organization was the problem. It was secular, but it was the biggest Palestinian movement. They started helping the Muslim Brotherhood in the West Bank, and allowing it to compete with the P.L.O., and the Muslim Brotherhood gave birth to Hamas during the first intifada in 1987.
We see this book everywhere. We get the jihadists to help in Afghanistan, and then they become the biggest anti-American force in the Middle East. I think that’s frightening to me.
So Israel consolidates control over Gaza. And certainly, it has consolidated a lot of control over the West Bank. And from there, there’s been a series of expansionary moves.
During the Gaza war, there was the decapitation of Hezbollah, which initially, we were told, functionally destroyed them as an organization. That seems not to have been true.
Israel does succeed in convincing President Trump to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. We’re told that the nuclear facilities are obliterated and the threat is over. That appears not to have been true.
Whether Israel dragged the U.S. into war, convinced it, or it’s simply a union of interests, I think is a little bit unclear. But I think they have a much clearer vision of what they’re trying to achieve in the war with Iran than the U.S. does, than Donald Trump does. I think they had planned for it and thought about it in a way that we hadn’t.
So what is Israel’s theory of security here?
Lynch: I think you’re absolutely right about the mismatch between Israeli and American goals here. And Trump, I think, really doesn’t know what he wants to achieve.
But Israel does. And I think that what they really want is to make Iran no longer the kind of state that can threaten them, either in Israel or across the region. And what that means is, if it were possible to simply decapitate the regime and replace it with a friendly leader, they might be willing to accept that. But I don’t think that’s their preference.
Even if it’s someone who seems like a pro-American, pro-Israeli figure, there’s no guarantee that person would stay in power. And so once again, that would be a deal that they would be trusting someone else to provide their security. They don’t want to do that anymore.
So from the point of view of at least some of the strategists in Israel — I don’t want to speak about all Israelis — but I think the current strategy is one of saying: Look, we want to destroy Iran’s ability to project power and to function as a state. And that is preferable to any of the other possible outcomes.
If you look at the way they’ve — particularly in this war, more than the 12-day war — been targeting state capacity, they’ve been targeting state institutions, repressive capacity, but also infrastructure. All the things that basically allow a state to function as a state.
And if it turns into a series of localized civil wars, ethnic breakaway, secessionist regimes and a long-term state failure — that, from an Israeli point of view, is just fine. They’re insulated from the consequences of that.
Everyone else in the region is horrified by that outcome — that’s their worst-case scenario. If you’re in the Gulf, if you’re in Syria, if you’re in Turkey, the idea of having an Iran that’s shattered, and you have state failure, refugees, the emergence of different extremists, armed groups — all the things we saw in Syria, we see in Libya, terrorism — that’s the worst-case scenario. They want to avoid it at all costs, because they will pay the immediate price of that.
I think you saw that in the hesitation that most of the Gulf states had at the outset of the war, where they had not chosen this war. They did not want this war. They could see where it would very likely go.
And then the United States, of course, is always in the position of trying to bridge its allies, where you have Israel pushing in one direction, the Gulf states pushing in the other direction. And as leader of this awkward coalition, the U.S. has to pay attention to both of those things.
And I think the difference, which they split, was going for this knockout blow: decapitation of the regime and calling on Iranians to rise up in the hope that, essentially, you just win this war quickly.
And then, when that didn’t happen — when the regime didn’t fall, when you didn’t see a mass uprising and you saw Iran immediately targeting the Gulf states — then you shifted into Plan B.
The Trump administration didn’t have a Plan B, but Israel did. And I think if you look at their targeting, if you look at what they’ve been doing, that Plan B has very much been: We’re going after state capacity. We are trying to break the ability of this regime, but also of the state, not just to threaten us but to control Iran as a state.
Do you think they can achieve that?
Telhami: I think, certainly, the Iranian state will be set back by many years. It is now.
But if by that we mean then there will be capitulation by Iran or necessarily that the state will disintegrate — I mean, it could. Obviously, none of us would know. As Marc said, I think disintegration would be the worst thing for the international community — except, perhaps, for Israel.
But it would certainly be the worst thing for America’s Arab allies. It would be the worst thing for the U.S.
What is really obvious is that the Iranians have been planning for this war. Unlike us, they’ve been planning for it perhaps for decades.
And I would be shocked if the Iranians didn’t think that at least the Israelis — they might not know where Trump will go — would want to go after their infrastructure; that they had not planned for these contingencies, that they don’t have additional surprises in their sleeve.
I actually expect that they will go further than they have gone.
But that’s what makes it unpredictable. And I think, right now, it’s fluid. We don’t know where Trump is getting his assessment. We don’t know what he’s expecting.
So I’m terrified, not so much by what might happen to the regime — who cares? — but what might happen to the people of Iran.
I’m not just worried about what happens to Iran, I’m worried about what happens to us. When you’re threatening something on the scale of genocide, I am terrified that we, as citizens in what’s supposed to be the greatest democracy, are having things done in our name — over which we have absolutely no control — on a scale that offends us when anybody else in the world does it.
And so that’s why I think it’s a terrifying moment.
I saw Marjorie Taylor Greene calling for the 25th Amendment to be used to remove Donald Trump. And when Marjorie Taylor Greene has become your country’s voice of moral clarity, you’re in a position.
Amid the Iran war — which is, I think, the part of this that most people in America are paying attention to — there’s been this huge expansion of Israel’s war in Lebanon.
I don’t know if people really appreciate the scale of this: A million Lebanese are now displaced — which is around one-fifth of the population. And around 600,000 of them are coming from places that Israel said maybe they will not be allowed back into.
What is Israel attempting to do in Lebanon? What are they envisioning here?
Lynch: I think what they want is to achieve a final, decisive victory over Hezbollah, which they were unable to achieve through this decapitation strike, which seemed to be so successful back in November. I don’t think there was any immediate threat to which they were responding. I think this was very much an opportunity for them — that this is happening at a moment when the world’s attention is elsewhere, that they can actually do something they’ve been wanting to do for a very long time.
They want to find some way to remove Hezbollah completely from the equation. So they were putting pressure on the Lebanese Army to do so.
But I mean, that’s a joke. The Lebanese Army doesn’t fail to disarm Hezbollah because they don’t want to — it’s because they can’t — they don’t have the capacity to do so. Hezbollah is more powerful than they are.
But even the attempt to do so risks retriggering civil war. And I think that, from the perspective of many Lebanese, that’s one of the most horrifying possible outcomes — a return to the interethnic and interreligious violence that tore the country apart in the 1980s.
It’s one of these things where Americans tend to have a very short memory. They don’t remember exactly how horrible the Lebanese civil war was in the 1980s.
The Lebanese remember. And for many of them, it never really ended. It just kind of paused. And then there’s this constant expectation that maybe it will start again. This push to disarm Hezbollah by the Lebanese Army, many people think, could trigger a return to that kind of street violence and complete breakdown of the state.
So if that’s not going to happen, and you haven’t been able to remove Hezbollah simply by a decapitation strike and the usual mowing-the-grass strategy, then I think the Israeli strategist said: Look, we want to solve all of our problems permanently, all at once. Everything, everywhere, all at once. Gaza and Hamas, Hezbollah and Lebanon, Iran — this is our moment. We don’t know how long Trump is going to be in office. This is a moment when we’re just going to use everything. We’ve got to solve our problems.
And they’ve learned that they will face no serious international pressure or sanctions for doing so. They learned that in Gaza, they’ve learned that repeatedly.
The idea that they’re just displacing a million people from the south of Lebanon — as bad as that is, they’re doing much more than that. They’re actually bombing all over the country. They’ve been basically calling for the evacuation of much of the southern suburbs of Beirut. This is like asking people to evacuate Brooklyn — and not giving them any place to go.
And I think that they, once again, have been surprised by the inability to win decisively. They were surprised at how many missiles Hezbollah actually still had and at the continuity of Hezbollah’s command and control.
They basically thought that Hezbollah was just limping along as this decimated legacy organization that would just require one more push. I think they’re finding that’s not true. And now they’re in this situation where they’re probably moving into long-term occupation of that southern zone, without having actually resolved the problem that they set out to resolve.
This is one of those places where the center of Israeli society seems to have embraced something that, from the outside, looks quite radical.
I want to read you a quote in early March from Yair Lapid, who is not part of the Netanyahu coalition but who is a sort of opposition and, within Israeli politics, understood as a moderate-centrist figure.
He says:
In the end we will have no choice but to try to create some kind of sterile zone in southern Lebanon — not huge, but something somewhat similar to the yellow line in Gaza ——
Which is more than half of Gaza that Israel now controls ——
That is to say, an area with no Lebanese villages in it, but rather a completely clean strip of land between the last Lebanese village and the first Israeli settlement.
He adds:
It might be unaesthetic, perhaps, or unpleasant to scrape away two or three Lebanese villages, but they brought it upon themselves. It’s their problem. No one told them they had to become the host state of a terrorist organization.
What do you make of that?
Telhami: Yes, and I think this is the consequence of lack of accountability. Because this is what Lapid said, and it’s good that you started with he’s supposed to be much more moderate.
But if you listen to the defense minister, who’s actually making the decisions, he says, basically: We’re going to do what we did in Gaza. We’re going to do what we did in Rafah. So in essence: If we have to defend ourselves, everything is legitimate.
There are no rules of law. There are no human rights. There’s no difference between civilian and combatant.
I say that literally, because, obviously, they’re uprooting entire villages and actually destroying homes to make sure they don’t return and destroying the infrastructure in Gaza, including health institutions and hospitals so that the people don’t have an infrastructure to service them.
And even going more than that, because now they’re calling on non-Shia Lebanese, whether they’re Christian or Sunni or Druse, not to host Shia because Shia — essentially, it’s all the same: Shia, therefore, is just like a Palestinian, therefore like Hamas; Gaza — therefore Hamas; Shia — therefore Hezbollah.
So yes, it’s troubling. And, as Marc said, yes, the international community speaks up, but the U.S. shields its own actions and Israeli actions in a way that renders all these international efforts — whether they’re the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court or the European Union — they can’t do anything, because we take actions to prevent the consequences. And that has been a big part of the problem that we face.
One reason you see a comment like that from Lapid, though, is that, to Israelis, the Hezbollah problem has been maddening. There was an international settlement in a U.N. resolution, which ended up not really being enforced, which created a deep sense of betrayal.
I’ve talked to Israeli Jews who live in the north, and they say: Look, I can see Hezbollah members from my home. How am I supposed to allow my family to live there?
During the Gaza war, there was rocket fire. You had the evacuation of the Israeli north. The people I spoke to felt completely failed by this.
Unlike with the Palestinians, Hezbollah just seems like an aggressor organization — they understand it as an Iranian proxy. And what are you going to do? You’re a state. You have to protect your people.
So what Lapid is saying, in his own way here, is: Look, this is ugly. It’s unpleasant. It’s unaesthetic. But what are we supposed to do?
Is he right?
Lynch: I think that makes a lot of sense if you’re kind of living in this, like, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” thing, where history started yesterday.
The Hezbollah perspective is that Israel invaded Lebanon. They did this repeatedly in the 1970s, and then in 1982, and they kept the security zone until 2000. And Hezbollah emerged as a resistance organization to that Israeli occupation. And then it kept its weapons and kept its guns, because of the ongoing threat, which Lebanon and Hezbollah believed that they faced from Israel.
I remember the 2006 war. There’s been a lot of episodes of this over the years. And this is not to take Hezbollah’s side but rather to say that this is a strategic interaction between Israel and Hezbollah that has been going on for a long time.
The fact that Israel now finds itself in a situation where neither diplomacy nor military force seem to work is in many ways a function of that long history of aggression on both sides.
I don’t think that they’re right that Hezbollah is just an Iranian proxy. I think they became more of an Iranian proxy after the killing of Hassan Nasrallah and much of the other senior leadership. Because Hezbollah needed to rebuild. They needed to rebuild the organization.
And from all the reporting I’ve seen, that has increased Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps influence and control over Hezbollah. Things that were not true five years ago are more true today.
And I think the Israeli theory of change is that it’s not just creating the buffer zone, it’s also — by doing this bombing, by creating all this misery and displacement and everything — going to force the Lebanese to take care of this for them. It will make Hezbollah so unpopular that maybe the Lebanese armed forces, or somebody, will finally deal with it for them.
But that’s going to fail, too. I think that what this is actually doing is creating exactly the kind of environment in which Hezbollah can thrive. When they’re in a normal, relatively stable situation, then their ugly side becomes very clear. When there’s actual Israeli aggression, then their claims to resistance become stronger.
And so I understand Lapid’s frustration. I understand Israel’s frustration with regard to Hezbollah. But, at the same time, they’ve kind of locked themselves into this, and I don’t really see an exit for them, either.
I began reading you, Marc, in the post-Sept. 11 period ——
Lynch: We’re getting old, Ezra. [Laughs.]
Tell me about it.
In this period, when Americans had to confront this reality that things you did decades ago created the conditions for radicalization and enmity among people who have a longer memory than you do, because it mattered more to them than it did to you. And it can come back in horrifying ways quite a long time later.
People trying to take revenge, not just right now, but over long periods. People who lost their parents, who lost their children, who lost their pride, who lost their business, who have been displaced.
The entire sense that there is a memory has just been so strangely absent to me in the discourse. The focus on short-term victories, this sort of absolute insistence on not having any sense of history in the conflict and treating Oct. 7 as the beginning of history as opposed to a part of history — a horrifying part of history, but a part of history — it has just been a very striking dimension of this.
Because we all know better. That doesn’t mean we know what to do, but we all know better than this.
Telhami: Yes. It’s good what you said about the history, and particularly Oct. 7, because as horrible as that was, and obviously, you expect consequences, it is part of a much deeper, longer history. And the same thing, as Marc said, about Lebanon.
Also it’s true of Iran. Remember that the Iranians, to this day, tell the story of the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, and the saving of the Shah of Iran. That was part of the force behind the revolution, and part of the force of targeting America after the revolution.
And what’s happening now is so much more intense than what happened then. And to expect no blowback, or to expect no blowback from Palestinians — whether Hamas as an organization exists or not — or to expect no blowback from the Lebanese.
I think the public, by and large, particularly in relation to international affairs, is really usually only invested when there is a crisis. So those are the moments when they formulate their opinions.
What I get frustrated with is not so much policymakers but really the level of analysis and discourse of people who write about it, who should know more and should frame the questions a little better.
Lynch: I would go a little bit further. I think the fundamental problem is that we just have an extremely difficult time seeing these people as real human beings, and I think we just do not see them as people with families and lives and complicated motivations.
There’s a real abstraction and, frankly, a lot of racism that goes into basically saying: Well, that’s just the way Gaza is. That’s just the way Syria is. That’s just the way the Iranians are. And we would just make assumptions about their behavior, which we would never accept if people wanted to apply that analysis to us.
I think if we were just more able to have a certain kind of empathy — not even liberal empathy, not the kind of wishy-washy stuff but a strategic empathy to be able to see what the world looks like from their eyes — then I think we’d do much better at some of these things to understand that these are actually human beings. Of course, they’re going to be upset that you bombed their school and killed their children — who wouldn’t be upset by that?
Yet we seem to abstract away from it in ways that make it just seem so easy and so natural, like you’re going to push a button and something will happen. And that’s just not the way things work here or there.
I think that brings us back to the big picture of this episode, which is the entrenchment, the expansion of Israel’s one-state reality.
We’ve talked about here a tightening of control and vast expansion of settlements in the West Bank; a much more messianic attitude toward the West Bank as part of Israel’s divine right; the taking of more than half of Gaza and the cordoning off the place where Palestinians live in Gaza, beyond the so-called yellow line. There’s now going to be a large security zone in Lebanon, a sterilized zone, in the very sterile language being used. There’s been territory taken and airspace dominance in Syria.
Telhami: And annexation of the Golan Heights, don’t forget that.
Yes. So where does that leave the reality of the Middle East?
In your original piece, you write:
Palestine is not a state in waiting, and Israel is not a democratic state incidentally occupying Palestinian territory. All the territory west of the Jordan River has long constituted a single state under Israeli rule, where the land and people are subject to radically different legal regimes and Palestinians are permanently treated as a lower caste. Policymakers and analysts who ignore this one-state reality will be condemned to failure and irrelevance.
What does it mean to not ignore it — in a situation where Israel is so much the hegemon of the region?
Lynch: That’s a tough question, because right now, I think, we are very far down that road. Bob Dylan had the song that goes: “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.” And I think right now, it’s getting really, really dark.
There’s a reason that everyone converged on the two-state solution for so many decades, because it really is the only way to provide genuine justice for both Palestinians and Israelis. And I think that, even now, even people like us who see this as impossible, still understand that actually having two sovereign states is the only way to realize these national ambitions.
But where we are right now is exactly as you say. What is left is to fight for equality, civil rights, human rights, justice, all of that, within the context of Israeli domination.
And yet, I see almost no opportunity to do so given the realities within Israeli society. Everything is pushing in the other direction. So then you really are forced to confront what it means to have a state that’s a major American ally, and supposedly part of the West, that is going to be, not just functionally but fairly explicitly, a long-term apartheid-type system.
And I think that’s very uncomfortable, normatively, to think about.
I don’t think that we have a good answer to what else can be done at this point. But I think that if you’re going to push, I think that’s a more productive way to push — to try to really call out the inequalities, the structural domination, and say you can’t keep ignoring the fact that these people are living in these horrifying conditions because we are pretending that someday they might get a state.
The time to start advocating for human rights, equality and everything else is now. But in the world we’re living in right now, I don’t really see liberal values in Washington. I don’t see liberal values in Israel, and I don’t know where that push would come from.
So if we really have this idea right now — at least for me, I can’t speak for Shibley or anyone else — that, in a sense, it’s almost too late.
But right now is limited. And when I think about this, even from Israel’s perspective, as it settles into an apartheid condition — I don’t really see a way to avoid thinking about it that way — you create an Israel that is highly compatible with evangelical right-wing populism and fundamentally incompatible with modern liberalism.
You have a situation where, inside the Democratic Party, not only Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez but Rahm Emanuel think we should no longer give Israel military aid, where Gavin Newsom is dancing back and forth around the language of apartheid.
For Israel to be a symbol of modern apartheid, in a situation where it has a lot of enemies all around it and it is trying to maintain control of the West Bank and of Gaza — and who knows what will be the situation in Iran — I mean, that doesn’t seem stable, either.
It’s one thing when you have Donald Trump in power, but that’s not where the politics of the U.S. are going. I mean, you look behind Donald Trump and the Republican Party, and support for Israel is increasingly an older-generation dynamic. It’s Ted Cruz — it’s not JD Vance.
Israel is not trying to maintain deniability. They’re not trying to create a space where Democratic politicians can stay near them. They have heightened the contradictions to an unbearable level.
Telhami: Yes. Given the Israeli agenda, which is expansionist right now, at least for the West Bank, Gaza, southern Lebanon and maybe beyond — and given its strategic outlook, which is escalation dominance, which really means military dominance over a half a billion people: No. 1, there is no way this can be maintained without almost unlimited American support. You just cannot maintain that posture.
No. 2, I would want my government to intervene, to prevent the inequality and injustice and violation of international law. And in fact, when I write about it — and when we even wrote the book “The One State Reality” — when we edited it and had the project, our aim was actually to address our public discourse, just as much. Meaning, as Americans, we know that we play a role in what’s happening there.
When I’m writing, I’m not trying to tell the Israelis and the Palestinians: You should have two states in one state. But what I do insist on, at least from my moral point of view, or as an American — as somebody who cares about international law — is that we, as the United States, should not basically be trying to tell them what to do but to reject anything that violates our set of basic norms — what we used to call our values — and international law.
But from the Israeli point of view, if you’re looking at it down the road, and you’re seeing how the trends are going, as you have described, not just the Democrats but also Republicans — even the interpretation among evangelicals is changing. Look at the religious discourse. It’s changing in some circles, particularly among Catholics. The attack on the very theology that is espoused by some evangelicals that embraces Israel. There’s a huge explosion of debates right now on this issue.
So that’s why I think this moment is ultradangerous. Because if you are sitting in Netanyahu’s chair, and you are looking at this as an existential war, based on his own objectives in the region — whether what’s happening in Iran, what’s happening in Lebanon, but also the fight in America for America’s soul, for what we stand for — then everything goes, this is his moment.
He sees Trump as the last chance. He sees evangelical support as the last block of support. And he’s going to go all out. So that’s what makes this moment extremely dangerous, not just now but really throughout this administration.
Something you’ve mentioned a few times is Israel’s dependence on the United States. And I want to ask if that is still true.
Netanyahu has talked about the need, or the likelihood, that Israel has to become autarkic, relying on its own ability to manufacture weaponry. And Israel is a very wealthy state now. Its tech sector is booming.
There were clearly moments between Netanyahu and Joe Biden, and the two administrations, where Netanyahu said: Look, if you can’t support us on this, we’ll go our own way. We thank you for your help up until this point.
The Biden administration decided to not allow the rupture to happen. But traditionally, I think the view has been that Israel relies on the U.S. for weaponry, protection and support in a way that it would not be viable without that.
Is that true for modern Israel? Or does Netanyahu’s behavior reflect a view that actually Israel can be self-sufficient?
Telhami: It’s even more true than in the past.
Let me tell you why: Not in the sense that Israel can’t live as a state on its own if it’s at peace with its neighbors. But as long as you covet the West Bank and Gaza, and prevent a Palestinian state, you’re not going to be in peace with your neighbors. And if you’re not in peace with your neighbors, you’re going to maintain your strategy of escalation dominance over a half a billion people in the Middle East.
And if you are only a country of 10 million, even if you’re rich per capita, that’s not going to make a dent in what you need to maintain that.
To get a scale of it, it’s not just the money. The money isn’t the problem. It’s the military dimension of it. You say they do their military technology. Of course, they do. They’re very good and innovative people, but most of the sophisticated weapons that are being employed are American weapons.
The airplanes that are incredibly effective in bombing Iran, refueling — all of that is American technology. The THAAD missiles that are intercepting the incoming Iranian missiles: Each one costs maybe $12.5 million. You shoot two to just intercept one.
In Gaza, when Israel entered after Oct. 7, Israel needed immediate replenishment of munitions. We were taking them out of our own stockpiles. We were running out even for the Gaza war, let alone intercepting missiles that were coming from Iran, or the Houthis later on. Without the U.S. intercepting them, the 12-day war would have looked differently in the end.
Even now, think about what we are deploying in the Middle East. We are depleting our missiles right now, our own stockpiles, to the point that we’re now not able to employ them in Ukraine. Or we’re telling Japan that we can’t deliver the Tomahawk missiles because we have to use them now.
This is a superpower. Remember, we are the mightiest state on Earth. We are the richest state on Earth, and we still, to fight this war with Israel, we are running out ourselves.
The most critical part for Israel is, of course, the military technology and the dominance in that area. Because you take that away, it’s impossible to maintain that posture.
But then there is the international law part, because it’s the shielding at the U.N., it’s the shielding at the International Criminal Court. And without that, there would have been many more measures that the U.S. had either vetoed or prevented a U.N. Security Council to come that would have stopped settlements, for example.
And by the way, even aside from the military dimension and the intervention in international organizations, anyone who worked with the U.S. government, or advised the U.S. government, as I have: You get a sense of the amount of time we spend twisting the arms of other people, using our muscle with this country or that country in order to protect Israeli policy.
If you remove that, I just don’t see it. And if anything, if I’m in the Israeli position, I want to maintain this posture. I even see that I have to maintain more of an upper hand in the region. I have an idea of controlling more territory, and I see how dependent I have been the last two and a half years on the U.S. I would be terrified of losing it.
And there is no country in the world that can replace that. And Netanyahu can use that as: We’re going to go on, we’re going to be the ally of China instead of India.
India is more like it, actually, because they have a close relationship with India. But no one has that kind of power, the one that we bring to bear.
And then, always the final question: What are the three books you’d recommend to the audience?
Lynch: To understand the limitations of Palestinian strategy, I really liked Noura Erakat’s book “Justice for Some,” where she takes international law seriously and asks: What can you actually accomplish with this? And I think it’s pretty essential reading for a lot of the stuff we were just talking about.
Afshon Ostovar has a recent book called “Wars of Ambition,” which is a really sweeping history of American-Iranian competition across the entire Middle East. And it’s pretty much as timely as it can get, in terms of really trying to understand where this all came from.
And for the last book, I’m going to go with Howard W. French’s recent book, “The Second Emancipation.” It’s a biography of Kwame Nkrumah and Ghanaian independence. It has nothing to do with Israel, Palestine or the Middle East, but it’s just a fascinating story about decolonization and the frustrations of independence that followed. And it’s a great read.
Telhami: I’ll start with Diana B. Greenwald’s “Mayors in the Middle,” which is really about the indirect Israeli control of Palestinian territories. She does that in a brilliant way — in a way that brings home why it is a one-state reality.
The second book is by Omer Bartov, called “Israel: What Went Wrong?” It’s coming out this month. I happened to read the galleys, before it came out. It’s a very powerful interpretation of what happened in Israel, a country that was, essentially, in part, built to protect Jews globally, and, in fact, gets the opposite, where the Jews are more threatened. And he has a brilliant take on it that I think is worth reading.
The third book is “Tomorrow Is Yesterday,” by Hussein Agha and Robert Malley. These are two seasoned analysts. Robert Malley, of course, served in the U.S. government for many years, on Israel, Palestine, as well as on Iran. Agha had advised the Palestinian delegation. They had written together in the past, but this book is a powerful book, really, about looking forward and backward at American policy toward Israel and Palestine.
Shibley Telhami, Marc Lynch. Thank you very much.
Lynch: Thank you.
Telhami: Pleasure.
You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our recording engineer is Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Mark Mazzetti. Transcript editing by Filipa Pajevic and Marlaine Glicksman.
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