We’re a few weeks into the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas. It’s a deal that has already been troubled by violence, but so far it is holding. If you’re listening to that deal being talked about in the US, you’re hearing it spoken about one way. So this long and difficult war has now ended. Some people say 3,000 years, some people say 500 years. Whatever it is, it’s the granddaddy of them all. But when I read the Israeli press, I’m hearing and seeing something very different. In America, the dominant position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is still a belief, a hope in the two-state solution. In Israel, it’s just not. Israeli politics is well to the right of where America admits it is, where America, even I think, often realizes it is. One of my intentions in the way we have covered this conflict since October 7, is to not present either an Israel or a Palestinian politics that is different from the one that actually exists. And so I wanted to talk to someone about this deal who represented more the way the Israeli government and the forms of politics that are in power in Israel see it. Amit Segal is the chief political analyst for Channel 12 in Israel. He is a political columnist there. He’s the author of the newsletter It’s Noon in Israel and a book recently published in English, A Call at 4:00 AM, 13 prime ministers and the crucial decisions that shaped Israeli politics. And Segal is well to my right. There are things I think you’ll hear him say that many people listening to this will not like. But in order to understand this conflict, you have to take seriously where the Israeli public actually is on it, and how the government that is in power in Israel and the coalition that might take power in Israel see it. As always, my email is ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. Amit Segal, welcome to the show. Hi, sir. How are you? I’m good. I wanted to start with the state of the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas. How do you understand what was agreed to? Well, it was something quite minor. I’m quite I’m quite skeptical about the chance of having peace. The biggest peace in 3,000 years or something like this. I think it was a ceasefire based on a prisoner swap deal. And this is it. Now, It’s not something small in terms of the hostages. And it was a huge question. And the welfare. But it does not end the war between Israel and Hamas. It just it’s like pressing the pause button when Israel still controls 53 percent of Gaza Strip and Hamas is in 47 percent and there is a plan, pledge, you name it, by President Trump to actually unroot Hamas one way or the other. Now, Israelis are quite skeptical about, I don’t, Hamas just decided to demilitarize themselves. But let’s give peace a chance. How did Netanyahu sell it to his own coalition? Well, I guess he doesn’t mention the term total victory anymore. But he says we got the hostages back, which 80 percent, 90 percent of the public wanted, and we actually stay in Gaza Strip. And we don’t withdraw from Gaza as long as Hamas is not demilitarized and dismantled. So it’s like saying there were three goals for the war, releasing all the hostages, check, dismantling Hamas as an army, check, the demilitarizing Gaza Strip and removing Hamas from Gaza. So it has not happened yet. But unlike all the a offers made by the Biden administration and by many Arab countries, the war does not end when Israel is out of Gaza and Hamas is still there. It’s where Israel is still in Gaza, and there is an agreement that Israel will be there as long as Hamas is not demilitarized. And I think this is the most important thing. Hamas was not alone in this war. Qatar supported it and Turkey supported it. And the fact that Qatar and Turkey, Egypt and Jordan and even the Palestinian Authority are agreeing to a plan according to which Hamas is to be demilitarized, means something which didn’t exist before. So there has been a lot of focus in American coverage of the deal on what gets called phase Ii, which is this demilitarized Hamas and the possibilities of international operations and a new Gaza. You wrote that there is a view that Israel’s unstated goal is to avoid moving forward with the next complicated and mostly fantastical phase, Arab soldiers policing James with a heavy price of IDF withdrawals from the Gaza Strip, as well as a future, however unlikely, return of the Palestinian Authority to the area. So if Israel’s unstated goal is to not move forward to the form of settlement or peace envisioned in that deal, what is the goal. Everyone would wish that Hamas would be demilitarized with by outsourcing, no one wants Israeli soldiers to die at a pace of two a week or five a week in order to have a mission that can be done. Otherwise, it’s just the pessimism about the option that Hamas would see. I don’t know. Two battalions, two Emirati battalions, and all of a sudden would release a would give each and every Kalashnikov rifle, for instance. So it’s about what I call in the Middle East, cautious pessimism. So from the highest possible American sources I spoke, I spoke to this week, they don’t think it’s feasible. What they do see is a future in which in five years from now, in the area controlled by Israel, behind what we call now the yellow line, there would be a new Rafah, the yellow line in Gaza, in Gaza being this 53 percent exactly the Israeli line. It’s the Israeli controlled area. In this area, there would be a recovery. Rafah would be rebuilt as a city funded by the Emiratis, with a deradicalized education system and under Israel’s security supervision. So what you said is that you now envision a two state solution, but it is a two state solution inside the Gaza Strip, right. What do you mean by that. I mean that since I don’t believe in the idea that Hamas is something that took over Gaza, taking out of the will of 2 million Palestinians, innocent Palestinians. So I don’t see any way in which Hamas can be fully be unrooted from Gaza. O.K I think it will still be there as long as that as there are in Gaza, young males between the age of 17 to 35. And as many Kalashnikov as one can see is more than meets the eye. There will be Hamas in Gaza, and therefore the only way to actually create something else is in the 53 percent that Israel controls militarily. And then if you build there, the new Rafah and Emirati funded, Saudi funded, I hope not Qatari funded city in which people have no weapons and there is an efficient police force. No tunnels, no Kalashnikovs, no hatred. Then you can see a future. This would be the moderate Gaza and the other Gaza would be the Gaza that lies in ruins in Gaza City and the refugee camps in Central Gaza. What I’ve heard this vision, it seems extraordinarily putting aside a lot of questions about it, very hard to administer. Are you is there movement between the people in the two Gaza’s that you’re describing here. Just think about I it’s not exactly the same East Berlin and West Berlin before the war, before the wall in 1961, you could actually move through. But if you want to go to the so-called Israeli side or the American side, I would call it O.K, American Emirati side, you have to go without your weapon and without being part of Hamas. But once you are there, and you get to run security vetting on people somehow. Yes, exactly. And then I guess that then the market would the market forces would actually determine the future of Gaza, because where do you want to live. In the ruins of Gaza, where no one pays for recovery and rebuilding, et cetera, or in The New Gaza, heavily funded, more not Democratic, but more Western than the other. There is a future for Gaza. You also say in that quote I read that Israeli society does not want to go to the point where the Palestinian Authority is ruling in Gaza after 32 years of having failed attempts to foster the Palestinian Authority as a partner for peace. I would say that 9,092 percent of the Israeli public. Does not believe in the idea of the Palestinian Authority, because as long as its education system poisons the minds of a generation after generation of young Palestinians for anti-Semitism, a hatred towards Jews, a anti-western sentiment, people don’t see any option. Of prosperity and peace and Middle East with this Palestinian Authority. By the way, Israel is not the only one to have a strong disbelief in this option. The Emiratis and the Saudis too, do not really believe in this. That’s why they want a reformed Palestinian Authority. But to be honest, I think that a Palestinian Authority that does not educate its youngsters, its pupils for hatred and does not pay for Slay, is not a Palestinian Authority. I don’t see it. I don’t see it happening in this generation or two to come. I think it’s fair to say that most of the players in the region. And at this point, the United States, have not been they’re not confident in the Palestinian Authority. Yes I was actually surprised to see in Trump’s plan an end state in which the Palestinian Authority was believed to be the final governing regime. But if you don’t believe in that, if Israelis don’t believe in that, then is there any assumed future in which there’s Palestinian self-determination, or is this really forever under Israeli control. O.K, so so I think you can identify two streams within the Israeli right wing. One is Smotrich. Smotrich and ben-gvir believes that there is no future. They do not believe in a Palestinian state. Even the Palestinians were to be Americans or Swedish. This is the part of the right wing that said we want annexation, we want settlements in Gaza Strip, and we want mass emigration. I don’t think that the vast majority of Israelis is there the most, the vast majority or the lion’s share of even the right wing believes in Netanyahu and their perception that says we actually had given we actually have given three symbolic concessions to President Trump a reformed, a future for a reformed Palestinian Authority, a future participation of this reformed Palestinian Authority inside Gaza. And more important than this, in the image in the future of a reformed United West Bank and Gaza. All together now, Israel opposed it for many, many years under Netanyahu. What’s the difference. The difference now is that according to Netanyahu and Dermer, if it’s going to be reunited, Dermer, his very close aide. Yeah, exactly. The joke says in Israel that Netanyahu is the closest person to Ron Dermer. So anyway, that now it’s not that the West Bank is going to take over Gaza, but that a reformed, demilitarized de-radicalised Gaza is going to take over Judea and Samaria, because according to the Emirati plan, for instance, it’s not only that they are about to change the education system in Gaza, but in Ramallah as well. I live 20 minutes from schools in which children are taught that you should kill as many Zionist pigs as possible, for instance, you can’t have peace with generation after generation taught on these principles. So you describe the ceasefire deal as giving a number of symbolic concessions to the Trump administration. And they’re based on these benchmarks. So they could be more or less symbolic, depending on how things play out. Do you think the understanding of this deal is the same for the Trump administration and for the Netanyahu government. Do you think they’re aligned on what it will mean for benchmarks to be met or not met. Or do you think that there is a possibility of divergence in one way or the other on the two sides. I think it’s a rare case in which usually in diplomacy you have a debates behind closed doors and in the news conference, you try to actually marginalize it. Here, it’s exactly the other way around. In order to sell the plan for the Arab world, Trump speaks mainly about ending the war rather than eliminating Hamas. However, the main advantage of this plan is that President Trump articulated for at least five or six times since the ceasefire has begun, that between the two goals of the plan, ending the war and eliminating Hamas, he prefers eliminating Hamas. That’s why he keeps saying that if Hamas does not demilitarize, Israel would crush him. If I only give the word, as Trump said. And that’s why I’m quite confident that the number one strategic asset of this ceasefire plan that Hamas can no longer rule Gaza is there to stay. And as long as Trump is the president, I don’t see, to be honest, any option in which this Hamas presence gets legitimacy, you’re putting a lot of weight in this conversation. And your vision here. I remember this was actually true the last time we spoke to you on the power a reconstructed education system could have for the future of how Palestinians see Israelis. I think that creates two questions. One is why you believe it is the education system as opposed to lived experience, checkpoints, that kind of thing. Obviously, in Gaza, huge numbers of people have now lost relatives, lost, lost friends seen their homes destroyed. Perhaps it was a bad idea to massacre Jews. It was a bad idea to massacre Jews. Yes right. We’re not. We’re not disagreeing on that. And it was an immoral idea. Not just a strategically bad idea. But it’s a lot of work for an education system to do. So that’s one thing. But also, how is this work done. I know you’re thinking of it being based on what’s been done in the UAE. Maybe it’s overseen by the UAE, but what is being imagined here. O.K, so it’s not only education. It’s not only the pupils, but it’s both the media. I’ll give you an example, Jazeera, if you watch Jazeera, all of a sudden you see that there is the winds change. I suspect that this is the Qatari gift for this wedding between Israel and President Trump, that a Hamas would no longer have this, media branch named Jazeera to fuel hatred among all over the Middle East. So it’s media, it’s education. I would say I would compare it not to the UAE and Saudi Arabia, but to Japan following World War II or Germany. However, it is not the case. Why Because there was only one Japanese state. The Middle East is still full with Arabic speakers, Muslim countries that hate Israel. So even if you live in reformed Gaza and educated on Western values, you still you can still follow influencers on TikTok that hate Israel. That’s why I’m more cautious. But when I see in the UAE and Saudi Arabia how it succeeded, I’m more optimistic now. Yes, the ruins in Gaza are might be a bad service for living side by side with harmony, in harmony with the Israelis, but it can have exactly the other effect. I’ll give you an example. I visited Ramallah a few weeks ago in the biggest mall. If I send you the pictures, you won’t believe it’s in Ramallah. I would say to me, you would tell me it’s in Abu Dhabi or in I don’t Cincinnati. It’s better than every mall I saw in Israel. I walked there with yarmulke. No one told me anything. And Ramallah was a city that I don’t know. 20 years ago, soldiers were lynched there. So things change and you can change them more rapidly as long as you recognize the problem. Is there a view eventually, even just a pragmatic view on the second non-messianic stream of Israeli society that in the long run, Gaza and the West Bank should have self-determination of some from Palestinian government. The government should be Palestinian, even if it is not today’s Pa, today’s Hamas, or is the view that either it will be in Israeli control. We’ve moved back to occupation or that it will be under some kind of Arab consortium, or I’ve seen people talk about the Jordanians or obviously you’re talking about the UAE and they’re a big player in this, that there is some other alternative. 50 years from now, five years from now, let’s say 10 years from now. So here’s the main debate between the Israeli median voter and the center left in the US, the center left in the US says we should try and give Palestinians a state because that’s how people are used to live. And the Israelis say we gave them a state. Gaza was a state. This was the outcome because when Israel evacuated the settlements in 2005 unilaterally, it actually abandoned Gaza. And Israelis were under the impression that if you build a big wall, you can forget about Gaza. And the outcome was horrifying for Israelis. The Palestinian Authority was something like 60 percent state. It failed in the Second Intifada with 1,200 casualties over five years. And when we gave them a state in Gaza, we got 1,200 casualties in five hours. So that’s why Israelis don’t even want to talk about it. Now, if you speak about 10 years from now, I guess we’ll see something closer to what I feel easier to speak about 10 years from now, because this is the time frame for raising a new generation. I would say that you’ll have 60 percent 70 percent statehood with reformed entity. I don’t want to call it the Palestinian Authority, but something like this, living really side by side in peace with Israel and a Palestinian would say none of these things were anywhere close to a state. They did not have control of their own borders. They could not leave and come at will. It will never be 100 percent There was a siege, functionally a siege and control of the borders. And barring different goods coming in and out, which is partially why you got the tunnels in Gaza. But in the West Bank, too, you have checkpoints. You have a tremendous amount of Israeli control over daily life. I’ve been through it. It’s striking and visually apparent the moment you step foot in it. And they would say that the reason you have this ongoing conflict is that the conflict for the Palestinians is ongoing, that in none of these 60 percent percent states that you’re describing, was there anything like genuine self-determination, freedom, in that condition there will never be any kind of stability. I refuse to call it a cycle of violence because it bases. The idea is that we do something they revenge and vice versa. It’s not the case. There was a wide agreement in Israel towards a two state solution, but what we have to undo to the conclusion from October 7. The only reason it didn’t happen in the West Bank is because the IDF is still there. The support, I think we spoke about it in Jerusalem a year and a half ago. The support, the level of support for the October 7 massacre in the West Bank was even higher than in Gaza Strip, because they were not to pay the price of bombing, et cetera. So we should be very cautious before we give anything. I mean, the last attempt to have a real peace not a cold peace, but a peace between Germany and France. That was the perception in the 90s, this multiculti era, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, new Middle East. Perez and Rabin are in office. The center left controls, Michael Jackson has a show in a concert in Tel Aviv. That was the sentiment. I lived in a settlement and even in this settlement, far from the I. O.K, far in the right, we could smell or we could feel the winds of change. And it collapsed here. Not because of Israelis, but because they didn’t want peace. And as long as we don’t take care of the idea that the Palestinian image is not of a Palestinian state living side by side with Israel, but of from the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free. And I believe when they say it, I don’t think it’s just a slogan, just a campaign ad. As long as we don’t change it, we’re not going to see peace in as we describe it. So the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that Arab governments strongly oppose the idea of dividing Gaza, arguing it could lead to a zone of permanent Israeli control inside the enclave. I mean, that seems more or less what we’re talking about permanent Israeli control inside the enclave. But in that world, the journal reported, they’re unlikely to commit troops to police the enclave on those terms. Do you think Israel is going to face a choice between the involvement that you and others are hoping for, from the UAE and from others Saudis, and having the level of control, involvement, security, presence that you’re describing. To be honest, I don’t think any of the actors know what is going to happen. No one knew about Berlin. That is going to be divided into two cities. No one, by the way, two days before the wall was built. It’s a reality created. But Sherlock in Sherlock Holmes stories, once you rule out every possible. That doesn’t make sense. The last one is here to stand. And I don’t see Hamas demilitarizes itself. I don’t think the IDF would soon invade Gaza again with full engines and 5 divisions. And hence I think the only option is what I described. I don’t think it’s perfect. I just try to envision what’s going to happen in five years from now. No, I appreciate the realism you’re offering on that from the Israeli perspective. One reason, I think that the two state solution, which caught my eye, is that this feels more, in a way, the West Bank solution for Gaza. Exactly and in this case, the role of the Pa is being played by the UAE and some Arab consortium. But that sets up this other set of dynamics, which we’re seeing play out with incredible force and violence in the West Bank right now, which is that there is a lot of pressure, particularly over time in Israeli society for expansion, for annexation, for settlements to be returned to Gaza, that this is not a situation where what Israeli society wants is Palestinians living in a thriving Israel, UAE controlled Gaza. Please, I’m not sure. Listen, I come from the most ideological settlement in Judea and Samaria, and yet I allow myself to say that the vast majority of Israelis, when they speak about right wing ideas. They don’t think about annexation or about a settlements in Gaza Strip. They think about being a right winger in Israel, or being hawkish means that you think the only solution to protect Israelis is not by is neither speeches by US President nor, I don’t a treaty and international treaties by, but by Israeli soldiers with boots on the ground where it’s needed. So this is why the Oslo Accords, the collision between the leftist idea of the Oslo Accords and the right wing idea of annexation actually led to the outcome you have just described in Judea and Samaria and the West Bank, which is an Israeli permanent security presence in areas in Palestinian areas, but no annexation. It’s not a coincidence. So this is going to be the same outcome in Gaza, in my opinion. A heavy security presence with no other presence. Another way to describe it that you’ve used in other columns and interviews is that the Israeli goal is lebanonization. Exactly what is lebanonization? In the past, lebanonization meant something really bad. Israeli military presence. When you suffer from booby traps or a terrorist attacks and you bleed two or three soldiers a week or a month following the war. Lebanonization means something way more positive that you have a ceasefire, but this ceasefire is really kept and you enforce it with a heavy fire when needed, when Hezbollah tries to rearm itself. Israel attacks since the ceasefire almost a year ago. 11 months, I think. Israel attacked more than 1,000 times and Hezbollah didn’t even dare to attack back even once because they are deterred. So I think this is what Israelis want from Gaza. Now, when you have a very, very big perimeter that this imminent threat no longer exists, and then you can attack from the air. Once you see, I don’t a tunnel being built, for instance. And when I was in Israel a year ago, June, I was talking to people who lived on the border with Lebanon. And at that time they were furious. They felt completely unsafe. They would say, look, I can see Hezbollah from my house. Since then, obviously, Israel has functionally destroyed Hezbollah. I mean, it’s not gone as an entity, but the threat it poses is significantly Israel’s most significant victory since the 1967 war. But the reason I ask about it is because as of not very long ago, many Israelis seem to me to feel that the lebanonization strategy had been a failure and there had been a lot of lebanonization. So you mean the lebanonization of like the last year. Yes the early period of lebanonization meant that your enemy is 1 inch from your border with commando divisions, and you are trust the international the legitimacy or the International border being sacred. The new lebanonization says that you have outposts, military outposts behind or I mean in Far From your international border, and you attack when needed. That’s what I meant. So this is when you talk about Lebanon as it actually exists, when you talk about Gaza as it is coming to exist, when you talk about the West Bank as it currently exists, the theory of the Israeli mainstream, you call it the right, but it seems to me to be the center right is that there is no security without actual constant boots on the ground presence. Surveillance like there is no trusting an agreement. There is no pulling back that either you are there and you can see it, and you have operational control of it, or you are not safe. And that the lesson Israeli society has taken from October 7, and also, I suspect, from attacks on Iran, on Hezbollah and Syria, is that the one thing you can trust in is its own military strength. Exactly, exactly. And it came I mean, it came exactly when President Trump talked about Greenland. Now, I know President Trump is not going to invade Greenland, right. But his talking points about invading or annexing Greenland or taking over the Panama Canal, I think articulated something that Israelis can understand. It’s not imperialism. It’s that the legitimacy or that international borders used to be sacred, but it’s no longer the case. And when you see Russia invades Ukraine and you multiply it by 1,000, because Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran are not even Russia, they are way more monstrous. You can’t trust only international guarantees or borders, and you have to be wherever there is a danger. This is the main lesson from October 7. Trump’s view of power, of strength, of geopolitics, of treaties of all of it is very different than Republicans and Democrats who preceded him. But you just got something I’d be interested to hear you reflect more on, which is how does Trumpism, the rise of right wing populist parties in many other countries, particularly in Europe. How has that affected Israeli politics. Its sense of what is possible, what is desirable. So in 20, when I go back to 2016, following a Super Tuesday in March 2016, in 2016, when Trump actually took over the Republican Party, Netanyahu told his staff, be like Trump. He repeated those three words be like Trump. And then Netanyahu shifted from the TV Netanyahu to the Facebook Netanyahu. O.K, from Netanyahu. The elder statesman. Think about I don’t not Ronald Reagan, but even more boring than this. George Bush, something like this. He turned into Donald Trump. Now he is no Donald Trump. He is. And he’s way more educated. He got better English. But he changed. And in my opinion, this is why, in an absurd way, the right wing in Israel or the power of the populist right, the radical right wing in Israel is way smaller than in the US, the UK, France, and Germany. Why because you still have the founding father of the right. Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu is to the price of one. He is both the elder statesman that gets the agreement of the US to attack Iran and for annexation of the Golan Heights and the recognition of Jerusalem. And at the very same time, he is the Netanyahu that speaks I don’t viciously about the left. So once Netanyahu resigns, you will see a spike, in my opinion, in the representation of the far right in Israel. I don’t know how many people are aware of the fact that both Smotrich and ben-gvir combined got only 10 percent of the popular vote in Israel. 10 percent just compare it to the Reform Party in the UK these days. So Trump’s I think most significant foreign policy success of his first term was the Abraham Accords. And that’s based on Netanyahu and him and Kushner and others realizing, and this comes from some of the Gulf states, too, that there is a transactional relationship that is possible with surrounding Arab states. Absent any change in Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians. Exactly And I think, somewhat to the surprise of many, the Abraham Accords hold through this whole period. So you recently wrote that Ron Dermer, Israel’s Minister of Strategic Affairs, a person who counts Netanyahu among his closest aides, believes the chances of Israel signing peace agreements with Saudi Arabia, Indonesia And even Syria have now increased. There’s a belief there that they are now, with the ceasefire on the cusp of an expansion of the Abraham Accords. Why So there is a gigantic two years, which is rarely spoken. The main idea behind October 7, behind, I mean behind, killing as many Jews as possible was to stop the normalization process, the Abraham Accords, from happening. It was 12 days before Saudi Arabia. Arabia was to sign a peace treaty with Israel. The due date was October 19, 2023. Now, the whole idea of the Abraham Accords were based on denying the liberal idea that the way to have Israel involved in the Middle East with normalization this way goes through Ramallah, the Palestinian capital city. Many, many Arab countries refused to base there a commercial relationship there, even relationship with the United States on the idea that a very old, a unelected dictator named Abbas is going to actually set the terms of the entire regime. And that was the idea behind the peace agreement between Israel and the Emirates, which is, in my opinion, the most important development in Israel’s history, save only the six-day war in 1967. And that’s why as a right winger, I wrote against annexation of the settlements a few weeks ago, because what I heard from my friends in the UAE is that this is it would be too much on their plate to digest. This is one thing. Now the apart from the military operation, the best Israeli answer to October 7 would be to expand the Abraham Accords, thus proving that strategically, strategically speaking, not even morally speaking, but strategically, strategically speaking, October 7 was a failure. And that’s why in my opinion, Israel’s effort should be based on expanding the peace agreements with Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, and Syria. And from what I hear, there is an option that the agreement with Syria would be more than merely a security agreement. What are these agreements now based on. I mean, I think this is partially what I’m trying to draw out, that for a very long time, the relationship between Israel and its neighbors was understood to be ideological isn’t quite the right word, but based on an assessment of the moral and ethical condition of the Israel’s relationship to the Palestinians. And there’s been a move towards these bilateral agreements that are much more transactional because, in my opinion, the Emiratis signed a peace treaty with Israel because they no longer saw the Middle East as a battlefield of Jews versus Muslims, but of radicals versus moderates. Or if you want a Shia versus Sunni and Jewish states, that was the main idea behind it. But even in these countries, there has been a huge amount of anger over the devastation and the death toll in Gaza. So what are the chits being traded back and forth. So here’s the thing. Because there was a change following October 7. Prior to October 7, all the Saudis wanted was, I’ll put it in an undiplomatic way, a lip service regarding the Palestinian question. Now, prior to October 7, the Saudis wanted something quite vague that even Smotrich and ben-gvir would greenlight. Following October 7, they nonetheless wanted a bit more. Now, I don’t know what this more is. I suspect that the idea of the Palestinian Authority somehow, symbolically, hypothetically being involved in Gaza Strip would be part of the agreement was that Saudi Arabia would base the normalization on this idea. So this would be the Palestinian ingredient of the normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel. My mistake as a commentator was that prior to October 7, I thought that Netanyahu’s main achievement was that he choked the idea of Palestinian statehood. I still think that there is not going to be a Palestinian state in our lifetime, but following October 7, there is a presence to this idea. One of the things going the other direction, though, is Israel has become such a capable developer of technology and weaponry and then highly technological weaponry in particular, that it seems to have become a kind of I don’t want to call it soft power. I want to call it medium power. That is at the base of many of these agreements, both that Israel is part of your security umbrella, and it’s a way station also to a close relationship with America, particularly under Donald Trump. But even in Europe, where a tremendous amount of public opinion and state level opinion has turned against Israel, right. Israel as a seller of weaponry to Europe. Germany puts an arms embargo on Israel, but decided to buy a missiles into a 2 euros billion. So something is happening there that has become a kind of bargaining chip, or more than that, almost like a foundation, it seems to me, of how Israel understands it is going to maintain relationships without substantial change amidst the Palestinians. And this is a very Trumpist transactional, although I’m not a big fan of the idea of Israel being first the mistress of the Middle East and now the mistress of Europe. Can you say what that means. The idea in Hebrew, we say a mistress in the Middle East, that is to say that we don’t have I mean, we are not married to I don’t Saudi Arabia or the Emirates, but we meet at night when no one sees. The relationships are all clandestine. Exactly now, here is the a dangerous idea behind it in Europe. Because I think Netanyahu failed to understand the depth of the International Crisis Israel has gone through because he knew more than you and me know about the real relationships, O.K. Because he knew the how many European countries are beg for Israeli technology and weapons. But when it comes to soft power, soft power is based on the idea that your brand is very strong. And in with Israel. The exactly the other way around. It was exactly the other way around that while Israel turned always to almost to be a pariah state, the consumption of Israeli technology and weapons went up. And that’s why I think Israel should invest more in its branding if you want to. I think it’s more than branding but but I know that does open up that does open up that question, which is that my read of Israel’s geopolitics right now is that it is thriving, where the relationships are transactional and it is suffering with the relationships are more values based. And that’s beginning to include America. So we just had a New York Times’ Siena poll, which for the first time since our polling has asked this question going back to 1998, you had more Americans sympathizing with the Palestinians than the Israelis. Now, the poll is very narrow. I think it was something like 3534. No, but you look at the age split in that poll, and Americans over 65, 47 percent are more sympathetic to the Israelis and 26 percent of the Palestinians between 18 and 29, 61 percent are more sympathetic to the Palestinians and 19 percent to the Israelis. And I think there’s a tendency to say it’s just a leftist thing. But Megyn Kelly, the right wing commentator, she just told Tucker Carlson that everybody under 30 is against Israel, right. Tell me how you’re understanding this. I mean, what’s going on in America. Also, it’s like Europe, other places. The numbers look much worse even than that. For Israel. How do you see this. To be honest, it’s too early to call. So I don’t know if it’s something generational, something that’s going to change with time. Years past you leave University. They heavily, heavily funded by Qatar University. And you understand the situation more one thing. Second the war. Today the world is focused on suffering. The more you suffer, the more sympathy you get. Now, remember October 8 when the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, Brandenburg Gate were lit with a blue and white flag. And to be honest, the image that frightened me the most as an Israeli wasn’t the horror pictures from Sderot and the kibbutzim. But to see Eiffel Tower lit with blue and white because I said, Wow, we look so miserable that even in France we get legitimacy. O.K, now we want the war. We decisively want the war. I can explain to you for hours why abducting the Bibas family and murdering them with bare hands is not something that you can compare to the death of Palestinian children, from Israeli bombardment. However, I’m fully aware of the fact that the images are so strong that I can’t convince millions and millions of TikTok followers. And that’s why I think the most dramatic thing for Israel is first and foremost, to end the war and to move to a new phase of normalization peace. Having Israel either mentioned positively on the press or even better, not mentioned at all. You see that Netanyahu went for a few podcasts, and all of a sudden, you could see that Netanyahu I mean, he didn’t really control the medium, right. For the first time, he went on the Nelk boys, which is AI don’t know how to describe it, a manosphere podcast that Trump has been on many times. They got so much backlash from their own listeners that they needed to apologize. And one of them said he was told that having Netanyahu on is like having a modern day Hitler on. And he went on to say, he thought that was a good point. So I mean, that’s a right wing coded in this country. That’s something different happening, I agree. So I think there was a damage, a permanent damage. I still think it’s smaller than people think now. It’s elastic to the public. Opinion is elastic, especially when it comes to something to Israel and the Palestinians. It’s not abortions or weapons or I don’t Trump. It’s not something that is I mean, it’s something that you can change your mind on. People tend to forget that. A following Yom Kippur War, Israel’s a rating fell both in the States and in Europe following the oil embargo, et cetera, and that Israel’s positioning in the States was very low following the first Lebanon war in 1982. The very same picture of a very long war in highly populated Palestinian areas. So I think it can change, but we can’t base and this is something more dramatic. We can no longer base our relationship with the United States on the values of the 20th century, because even evangelicals, the new generation, doesn’t see Israel through the lenses of a biblical happening, but through the lenses of social justice, exactly like the African-American community used to see the Jews. As Moses coming from slavery in Egypt. And over the last few decades, they see Israel as a white colonialist power. So, I mean, there is a lot to work on. And so something bigger than that seems like it has changed to me. And I feel like I have a good sense of US politics. Yes And it’s not just the polling. It’s what is considered conceivable in politics or in Israel. And right now, we’re in New York City. Zoran Mamdani is likely to become very, very likely to become the next mayor. His views on Israel, that would have made you absolutely unelectable, I think in almost anywhere in the country, but particularly in New York City, a very Jewish city just a couple of years ago. And it’s not just that he is going to win the election. Most likely it is that what he is showing a lot of other Democrats is that they can express something closer to where their politics and Israel have actually gone. Andrew Cuomo tried very hard to weaponize Israel against him. Completely failed. Eric Adams was running on the combat anti-Semitism or end anti-Semitism ballot line completely failed. The most Jewish city on Earth and the most Jewish city on Earth. And so, or at least the city with the most Jews on Earth. That shifts things. And one reason I think it shifts things. One thing that it is getting at is we’re talking about how is this happening on the right. But Netanyahu, really, over the past 15 ish years, 20 years, threw in with the right and began to choose to polarize Israel in America. Going around Barack Obama to the Republican Congress, members of Congress, I have the high privilege and distinct honor of presenting to you the prime minister of Israel, His Excellency Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel had a bit of an interregnum with Joe Biden, who was a much older generation of Democrat and had an older Democratic generation’s views on Israel personally. It’s one of the issues where Biden was I think, to the right of his own administration on how a lot of his staff would have liked to approach this issue. Israel seems to be betting a lot on continued Republican dominance presence in America that if you imagine the next generation of Democrats being in power here and Israel needing American support in a time of conflict and crisis, it seems to me. It’s going to look very, very, very different, both because of the views, but also because I don’t think American Democrats anymore believe that they have to be more pro-Israel than they actually are. Two years ago, before the war, I met with the IDF chief of staff back then, and he told me when they are to buy air Jets, jet fighters, are you buy a jet Fighter. It’s life expectancy is 40 years, four zero. And he said that when we decide which fighter jet to buy take into account that in the next 40 years, 10 terms, there is going to be a US President that would put an arms embargo on Israel. That’s what he said in 2023. Now, I think you and me would agree. You and I would agree that had Kamala Harris got elected and Israel invaded Gaza City, we would already we would have already seen it. So Yes, it’s there. I think that the question of whether I think we were on the cusp of that already happening, that’s a good point. Exactly and then again, it’s a chicken and egg question. I don’t think Netanyahu is to be blamed to for the fact that Israel became a partisan issue because each and every topic in the US, including the weather, became partisan. So maybe he made choices. I watched this happen in 2015 practically in the Obama administration. But tell me something. When Obama got elected for the first time, I remember people say that he doesn’t have the sympathy for Israel and his kishkas in his guts. It’s not that it was, by the way, Obama got elected before Netanyahu came back to office. And when Obama and Netanyahu met for the first time, Obama told him not even one brick in the West Bank, and he appeased the Iranian regime. So I fully agree. It takes two to tango, but I think it was a series of strategic decisions because he did not want to take pressure, or at least he wanted to see if he could if Obama was really capable of bringing pressure on him. Look, I’m an American Jew. I have more Israel in my kishkes, so to speak. But I think Israel would have been better off if they had listened to Obama on settlements. Now, I recognize that you and I have a different view on this slightly, but even in the last two years, there’s been a rapidity of settlement construction in the West Bank that outpaces the last, I think, 20 years, according to Nielsen. More than ever, more than ever. So there is a world in which Israel made a strategic political decision to say, well, we want to make sure that the Democratic side of the aisle in the US feels kinship here, feels we’re taking into account some of their concerns, and we’re going to hold ourselves back on certain things for that reason. Israel decided not to do that. And in many ways, kind of spat in their face, Biden ended up humiliated. I think there were real decisions here on the Israeli side, particularly on Netanyahu side. And you could have imagined it, playing out differently with different prime ministers. But West Bank is West Bank is easy. How about Iran. Do you see any scenario in which Obama, the West Bank, is easy. Why didn’t Israel do it. No, I mean, no, it’s easy to it’s easy to speak about it. But the differences between Israel and between Democratic administrations and Israel is not between Democratic administrations and Netanyahu, because each and every Israeli saw Iran as the biggest threat to the Jewish existence since the Holocaust. Now we know that Obama and Biden didn’t consider for a second to attack Frodo, for instance, or even to allow Israel to attack. And I guess Kamala Harris wouldn’t either. So it’s not only the easy Palestinian questions, it’s about. It’s something really bigger than this. President Obama came to office and he appeased enemies and pissed off friends. I think it is almost axiomatic that the Democrats have a different view of what creates security than the Republicans do. Yeah prime Minister Netanyahu, I understand it’s addictive stuff to have to Inhale the Trump administration, because you have the most pro-Israeli approach, because his enemies is yours. I know it’s addictive, but maybe this problem is to be fixed with a different prime minister and a different president. I think when I look forward into the future of this, and when I try to put together the two parts of this conversation we’ve been having have Israel pursuing a lot of settlement, building and control of the West Bank. There’s been a lot more violence. You have the indefinite reoccupation of much of Gaza. You combine that then with these poll numbers, these changes in support here. And it’s not just like Israel can wait for the war to end. It is setting itself up in a structural position where the effort is going to be, and possibly quite successfully, to make it into apartheid South Africa. And that is the strategy and also the risk it has opened up for itself by maintaining so much control in both places. How do you think about that. The main difference between Israel and South Africa is that the Black community in South Africa didn’t try to massacre each and every white. It wasn’t the case. There And here we speak about South Africa, but let’s imagine that the clerics signed an agreement with Nelson Mandela, only to find out that Nelson Mandela, just our Yasser Arafat, actually initiated a Second Intifada, a war against the whites, killing 1,200 of them and sending suicide bombers to Cape Town and Johannesburg. I understand the argument that it’s a different situation. What I’m saying is that the international view that you have roughly 7 million Palestinians without any self-determination. No They have a civil one, but they got more than they have now. And they decided that it’s more important for them. They decided twice, both in the West Bank and in Gaza, that it’s more important for them to kill as many Jews as possible than to get more independence. That’s the thing that we Westerners fail to understand that. Why I keep asking myself, why did the security establishment failed on October 6 to understand that this attack is imminent. And my response, I mean, I can speak to you for hours about those Sim cards and alerts, et cetera. But at the end of the day, they fail to understand that there are people who have a lose-lose policy. We win policy. This is good for all we win-lose policy in Russia versus Ukraine, that Russia tries to take something, it’s evil, but it’s digestible. We fail to understand a lose-lose situation in which I know I’m going to suffer. I know my people are going to die. I know Gaza is going to lie in ruins at the end of this war. Yet I want to kill as many Jews and Israelis. I think they I think many I don’t want to speak for, God knows, Hamas. But I think that another way of saying it and why this does not seem stable to me. The situation you have described is that I mean, they felt accurately like they were losing and that we talked about said, look, this is not a cycle of violence. It’s one side created to I’ve had many Palestinians on the show. I’ve talked to many of them in my our reporting. To them the violence is every day. It is ongoing. It is ceaseless in Gaza and in the West Bank. They understand the condition they are living in as a condition of structural violence. And I don’t disagree with them on that. And the thing that is going to create the ongoing pressure, if you combine an international community that is less sympathetic to Israel, but Israel having much more control over these two places, I agree that it has many differences from the South African situation. But the image you spoke about the image. I mean, I’m speaking about both the image and the reality that people are going. The idea that forever you will just have a situation where you have 7 million ish people. O.K Well, I’m including actually Israeli Arabs and Israel who have a different situation than they get full citizenship. The people debate this in different ways. I don’t mean to go into it too much that seems like it is a situation in which Israel is going to have a lot of trouble in the long term with not just international standing, but eventually questions like sanctions and other things. Yes, I came to the conclusion following October 7 that Israel’s number one problem is the Palestinian one. I thought before that it’s the Iranian one. It’s not. However, I cannot, in order to get legitimacy, giving a license for people who see me, treat me as an evil enemy that should be eliminated in each and every way. That’s the main thing. So I think we should wait patiently for a new generation to come. I think that the most urgent mission of our generation, our generation, both in the US and in Israel and in the UAE, is to base the education system in the Palestinian Authority not on hatred, but on Western values, on moderate Islam. I know it can succeed. How because this is exactly what happened in the UAE and in Saudi Arabia. And they changed the minds of Muslims. In both countries you see a decline in the levels of anti-Semitism. And since I’m no racist, I don’t think that Islam is about killing as many Jews as possible and hating as many Americans as possible and cheering and give candies in the streets. When 9/11 disaster happened, as has happened in Gaza. And I think it takes time. It takes time. It takes, I would say, 20 years in 20 years from now, if we start today, you will see a major change in both what you call the West Bank, Judea and Samaria and in Gaza Strip. I think the question that many people want to see change in Israel have here is whether or not if Israel sees its politics collapsing in other countries. You have after President Trump, a Democrat, win office, and there’s a recognition that Europe is now accepted Palestinian statehood in some abstracted way and a sense that Israel cannot maintain support here with the politics. It has had. I could see that going one of two ways. I could that going under certain leaders and under certain conditions, towards trying to create some space for the international opinion to express itself. And a change in Israeli policy. I could see it in Israel becoming more inward looking, more focused on weapons development, trying to be less reliant on others. I mean, there was an interesting quote, I thought, from Netanyahu where he said that Israel is going to have to adapt to international isolation, become an Athens and a super Sparta in terms of weaponry acquiring. Yes so tell me about I’m sure people in Israel are thinking about this somewhat, given how aggressive the and total the international anger has been. What are those two paths. I don’t see any chance that Israelis are going to change their mind regarding Palestinian statehood, because it’s not about diplomacy. It’s not about public opinion. It’s about fear. People saw what happened on October 7, that they will not be willing to give an opportunity for peace five minutes from their home in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, 10 minutes the most. This is one thing when it comes to cooperation. I think there is room for a party that would say, O.K, we are quite tired, we want to rest a few years. We will be prepared. Our soldiers would guard everything. But we want to breathe some air, international air, economic air, et cetera. And that’s the next I think the next government would see a significant ingredient as I just described. There will be either in October of 2026 or sometime before then if this government falls elections. Israeli politics isn’t structured the way US politics are. Here we’re used to thinking in terms of two parties that battle it out there. It’s two coalitions of different parties. Walk me through the anti-netanyahu coalition that’s developed. It looks like it would be led by Naftali Bennett, who traditionally in Israeli politics was understood on Netanyahu’s right in terms of security, in terms of security, certainly at an earlier point, was harshly critical of how open Netanyahu at least claimed to be to a two state solution, for instance. Exactly You have Benny Gantz, who in November of 2023, I think, was widely considered to be a plausible next prime minister for Israel. Now, his blue and white coalition under the threshold is under the threshold for representation. Avigdor Lieberman, who’s a quite far right wing defense minister in 2018, a year Lapid, who was one the more centrist centrist. Yes, Yair Golan, who represents the left in Israel and is inside this coalition two 8 percent of the popular vote. How would that group govern. Where would they differ or it won’t. My 10-year-old child asked me, why don’t you vote for the center left. I told him, because they are leftists. So he said, what is a leftist. So I had a hard time to explain to him because 20 years ago it was his for evacuating the settlement where your grandfather lives. O.K nowadays, no one really offers seriously to evacuate settlements. So what is the watershed line in Israel these days. Is it a center left. O.K Naftali Bennett is the center left. Exactly now, here’s the thing. Who is this awful, monstrous left that is going to try to defeat Netanyahu. According to the right wing, it’s Naftali Bennett, the former CEO of the yesha council, the settlement movement. Avigdor Lieberman, a settler himself who once said that Israel should hang each and every of the Arab Knesset members in Nuremberg. And Benny Gantz, who is not I mean, calling him a leftist is not I mean, I don’t think leftists would claim him and vice versa. So it’s about identity first and foremost. What I believe is that the more religious you are, the more you tend to vote for the right wing. That’s the debate over the judicial reform was not about the judicial reform, but about whether Israel is more Jewish than Democratic or more Democratic than Jewish. And the right wing here is the Netanyahu coalition. Exactly now, it’s quite a miracle that the leader of the so-called religious Jewish Sephardic, a relatively lower class camp in Israel, is this secular, atheist millionaire, the son of a professor from Jerusalem. We’re acquainted with these peculiarities in American politics at this point, by the way. It’s not peculiarity, because the politics of identities is not something that I believe in. I think it’s a woke way of describing things, and that people don’t vote for someone like them. If you have a bird, you’ll vote for someone with a bird. It’s ridiculous. You vote for someone that you believe would represent your values the most. So this is the watershed line. And that’s why. That’s why, in my opinion, the ultra-orthodox parties who are not part of the right wing at all, they are anti-settlement anti-annexation are a basic part of Netanyahu’s coalition because it’s about Judaism. But I would like to offer something else. We moved in 2020 from one generation, the security generation, towards the identity generation. And that’s exactly the point where Israel went through five consecutive election campaigns. Why it’s like the Summer League in the NBA. O.K where you still try to get accustomed to your new basketball team. But it takes time because you used to be from for the Chicago Bulls and now you are for the New York Knicks. What was the dividing identity line that created it. It’s just religious identity is the way you see it. The religious one. And I’ll give you an example. O.K Avigdor Lieberman, in terms of security, he’s the most hawkish figure in Israel. His voters are former USSR immigrants who are more hawkish than ben-gvir. But when you talk about domestic issues, about civil society issues that are more secular than Yair Golan and Yair Lapid, that’s why Avigdor Lieberman moved from the so-called right wing to the so-called left, although he is not leftist, because it’s not the left, we used to know. The same applies for Naftali Bennett in terms of security. Yes, he’s for annexation is allegedly more hawkish than Netanyahu. But when it comes to civil society thinks, et cetera and domestic issues. He is the leader of the moderate small yarmulke voters. Small yarmulke voters who believe in, for instance, public transportation during Saturdays during Shabbat. This is the main change. Let’s imagine, let’s speak about the last coalition to defeat Netanyahu in 2021. It was called the Coalition of change. But when you try to really analyze where the change is couldn’t find the change in the policy towards Gaza, which was the same in the policy towards Iran, which was the same in the policy towards settlements, which was exactly the same even in terms of economy. It wasn’t a social Justice Coalition, but even more hawkish, more capitalist than Netanyahu’s right wing coalition. So the main change was changing the living address of Sara Netanyahu, the prime minister, the Netanyahu’s Netanyahu’s wife. So there was no change. And that’s why you see the Israel’s political system reshapes itself. If you are American, hoping for a change in terms of policy, you will get quite disappointed towards the Palestinians, towards the Palestinians, towards Gaza. I would say even more than this, that a coalition controlled by Bennett, Lieberman and Lapid, et cetera would never be able to sign this Trump a ceasefire plan because the right wingers would kill them. Netanyahu would say this is a surrender to Hamas. And do you think there’s a good shot that Netanyahu just survives the next election. Yes but I have to explain something about Israeli politics in the US. When you have Trump versus Harris, one of them must win, right. Because someone has to get 270 votes on the electoral college in Israel. You can either win, or lose. Or having the vote. The election. Undecided why. Because in Israel you have Arab parties that traditionally do not take part in coalitions. There was one exception four years ago, but it was under the COVID crisis, which was a domestic issue as long as Israel has. It’s a complicated strategic relationship with the Muslim world. I don’t see any coalition formed on the basis of an Arab non-zionist or sometimes anti-zionist party. Hence, if they get at least 10 seats out of the 120. So if you get 61 seats, you want the election, right. If your baby, you won the election 61 out of 120 outright majority. But if you get 50, you didn’t win the election, but you didn’t lose it either because you blocked the center left change block from forming a coalition according to each and every poll. Following the deal reached in Gaza, Netanyahu got 51 at least. Netanyahu lost the outright majority, but as a result of October 12th ceasefire and the Iran being defeated with Hezbollah being defeated, Netanyahu secured himself from not losing the election for the time being. Of course, time and again he outnumbers his opponents. And it’s too early to call. But I would say that something dramatic would have to happen in order for Netanyahu to directly lose the next election. Do you think his government will stand until October 2026? No, but I mean, the last coalition to survive a full term in Israel was in 1988. I know it sounds weird for Americans, but in Israel there are no fixed terms. So Netanyahu succeeded in the mission that most of the governments failed to reach the fourth year, the final year of his term, and it’s amazing no one believed it, including Netanyahu himself. The day after October 7. Then always our final question what are three books you’d recommend to the audience. Yeah, so I’ll recommend two English books and two books in English and one in Hebrew. The first is “The Accidental President“, about President Truman’s first four months by A.J. Baime, I think. Great book. The second is not exactly a book about presidents, but a book about the history of how to write a history of presidents. It’s “An Unfinished Love Story” by Doris Goodwin, Doris Kearns Goodwin. Yeah, exactly. But yeah. Goodwin because, Yes, she was married to a President Johnson, and President Kennedy’s a special advisor. And it’s a brilliant book about how to write about history. And the third is a book in Hebrew, and it’s a book written by my father. It’s called the “Messiah at Sde Boker” It’s about David Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion was the founding father of Israel. A mixture of George Washington and, I don’t know, Thomas Jefferson. And he was a very he was considered a very secular leftist leader at the time. But my father reveals how deep inside he was very Jewish, and how the right wing should fall in love with him. In retrospect. And if you want to understand Israel, so it’s better for you to study Hebrew, to learn Hebrew as fast as possible and read it. I mean sagal. Thank you very much. Thank you so much.