Transcript

Alex Kane 00:00

Hello and welcome to on the Nose. My name is Alex Kane, and I’m the senior reporter at Jewish Currents. Before we get started with this week’s episode, I wanted to tell you that our fall print issue is almost here, so it’s a good time to subscribe, especially because after this issue, our prices are going to change a bit. Digital subscriptions, including access to special subscriber-only podcast episodes, will cost $4 a month or $40 a year, and print subscriptions, which include all the perks of a digital subscription plus the print magazine, will cost $60 a year. So if you’d like to lock in the current pricing, which is $24 for a digital subscription or $48 for a print subscription, it’s not too late. Visit JewishCurrents.org/subscribe to sign up, and as a podcast listener, you’ll get an additional 25% off when you enter code OnTheNose25 at checkout. That’s JewishCurrents.org/subscribe, and the code is OnTheNose 25. Thanks so much for listening, and now, here’s the episode.

AK 01:16

At the end of September, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the White House to meet with President Donald Trump. Trump then unveiled a 20-point plan to end the fighting in Gaza. The plan included not only a prisoner exchange between Israel and Hamas but an end to Israel’s bombardment, followed by the deployment of an international force to oversee security in Gaza as well as Hamas’s disarmament, and then the appointment of a board that would include Trump and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair to oversee the governance of the coastal enclave. Then last week, President Donald Trump announced that Israel and Hamas had in fact reached the ceasefire, and what followed was a series of momentous events. There was the release of 20 Israeli captives who had been held by Hamas for two years, coupled with the release of around 2,000 Palestinians jailed by Israel, and the end of Israel’s ceaseless destruction of Gaza, which is widely considered by international legal experts to amount to genocide. Trump has since said that the war is over, but Israeli troops continue to remain deep in Gaza, controlling over half of the enclave, and many questions remain about the future of Gaza, including whether the ceasefire will in fact hold, whether Hamas will give up weapons, and whether Gaza will be in fact subjected to a colonial governance board headed by Trump and Blair.

AK 02:42

I’m going to dig into these questions and more with two experts. Khaled Elgindy is a visiting scholar and adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, and he’s the author of the book Blind Spot: America and the Palestinians from Balfour to Trump. We also have Daniel Levy, president of the US Middle East Project, the former director of the Middle East and North Africa at the European Council on Foreign Relations, and a former member of Israel’s negotiations team under Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin. Daniel and Khaled, welcome to the show. I really just wanted to open up with a relatively general question, which is basically what your immediate reaction was to the series of events that just took place over the weekend. The hostage and the prisoner release, Trump’s speech in front of the Knesset, the gathering of leaders in Sharm el Sheikh, and the beginning of the ceasefire.

Daniel Levy 03:36

So I think one starts in a very human place, or at least certainly I did, which is huge relief. The prospect of not having the daily toll of killing, destruction, displacement, starvation in Gaza—people being able to look up at the sky and perhaps see something that resembles hope rather than drones, and artillery shells, and fighter jets. Seeing those images in Israel of the 20 remaining living Israelis or military age males who were released, returning to their families—I think many of us have followed some of those personal stories, friends of mine who’ve worked with some of those families over the course of the last two years in a very intense way. Seeing Palestinians coming out of Israeli prisons—those people have been jailed by military tribunals run by an illegal military occupation—seeing them released, some unfortunately sent into exile. Israel trying to impose restrictions on the celebrations that could be conducted by Palestinians in the West Bank in receiving those people back home, and the prospect of the massive ramping up of aid—albeit, we knew from the get-go that Israel would try to hold on to this, as they are and as I expect that they will continue to do.

Daniel Levy 04:58

Alongside that, an acknowledgment that the bombastic claims of the circus master who came to town for the show—the American president—that those claims were largely fictitious. This is a really important ceasefire, but when you have a ceasefire at the end of such a scale of atrocity and horror, the next thing you normally have is accountability. And the absolute absence of that, no attempt to hold those accountable—in fact, in the speeches of the American envoys and in the speech of the president praising Israel’s military for what they had done, obviously, no sense that compensation would be forthcoming. Apparently, the check for reconstruction is going to be picked up by other folks. And, of course, the extent of unseriousness in the so-called plan itself, the 20 points, no reference to the West Bank, some really bad things in there, like this colonial governance structure, this Board of Peace. The attempts by the eight Arab and Muslim majority states to put at least some improvement into that text were all rejected. So what one saw was the greatest strength of this was also its greatest weakness: namely, the ownership of Donald Trump. The ownership of Donald Trump means that it’s conceivable, perhaps even more likely, that there won’t be a return to the intensity of killing. But that same ownership means that the paper itself was not serious, that the narrative was an almost exclusively Israeli narrative, and that the prospect for Israel actually withdrawing from the other half of the Gaza Strip that it still is in militarily, let alone an improvement in the West Bank or elsewhere, is, I’m afraid, minimal.

Khaled Elgindy 06:36

There’s not a lot I can add to what Daniel said. I had the same sentiment that Daniel expressed so eloquently: a sense of relief, a sense of daring to hope. I think also a sense of real trepidation as to what would come next. Gaza has been completely destroyed, and there are security vacuums. There is still starvation. There is still a lot of collective mass trauma on a scale that I really can’t even wrap my brain around. All of which also contributed to this overriding sense of relief. I also had some trepidation about, as Daniel said, Trump’s role. It’s just another repeat of what we saw in the early part of this year, where we all thought there was a real ceasefire, and it was playing out in that way on the ground—we saw these staged or phased hostage releases, we saw release of Palestinian detainees and hostages, as well—and then it all came to an end. Once Donald Trump had his headline, he seemed to get tired. He grew bored with it. And he had Benjamin Netanyahu kind of in his ear, saying: I need to go back and finish this. And he said: Sure, go ahead. So how do we know that that isn’t going to happen again? I don’t think we have any real sense of that. The President is not a details guy. He has a fairly short attention span on these things. I’d like to think this time is different, but I’m not 100% sure.

AK 08:16

Before I ask you both about the future, I did just want to pause on the Trump factor and compare it to President Joe Biden. Obviously, the October 7th Hamas attacks and Israel’s ensuing genocide began under Biden’s watch, and President Biden, as the cliche goes, gave Israel and Netanyahu a bear hug, which really means shipping untold amounts of bombs, artillery, ammunition to drop on the people of Gaza. And then, obviously, his vice president lost, and Trump won. The conventional wisdom now, if you read a lot of the mainstream newspapers, is that: Well, the reason why Trump could do it is because the Republican Party and Trump himself are so pro-Israel that Netanyahu was boxed in and that he couldn’t say no to Trump, given all of what Trump has given him. What do you make of that narrative? Do you think Biden could have done something similar and, for various reasons that you could explain, he didn’t? Is there some truth to that? I just want to get your thoughts on that kind of basically conventional wisdom that Trump was the unique factor because of how close he was to Netanyahu.

KE 09:28

Yeah, I mean, I think these are two very different men with different temperaments and very different relationships with Israel. I think there’s a paradox here because Biden loved Israel so much, deep in his heart, and was so sentimental about Israel, he could have done the same thing that Trump did, but he couldn’t get himself to do it. He could not put that kind of daylight between him and the Israelis. He did not want to be remembered as the president who let Israel down in its time of need. Despite all of his fist pounding, and angry words, and occasional expletives about Benjamin Netanyahu and the horrors that we were all seeing that they were ostensibly outraged over, Biden could have just simply said: That’s it, it’s enough. You had your go, now it’s over, it’s finished. The time to do that would have been more than a year ago, and I think there was an opportunity. I think Trump, what he brought to the table was that actual lack of sentimentality. His relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu is totally utilitarian and transactional. They need each other. They both play a role, a useful role for their own domestic political calculations, but at the end of the day, everybody understood that Netanyahu needs Trump more than Trump needs him. And he was able to just tell him: Look, you overreached, especially after the Doha strike, and now it’s time to pull it back. Not only that, but he made him apologize. I can’t imagine Biden ever doing anything like that. It must have been humiliating for someone like Benjamin Netanyahu to have to apologize in front of the whole world. I think it was precisely because of Trump’s lack of sentimentality that he was able to just say: That’s it, cut it out. This is not useful anymore for me, and I want it to stop. I think it helped that he’s probably the most popular US President that Israelis have ever borne witness to, but I think it was his ability to separate his own emotions from the political reality.

DL 11:39

Yeah. I must admit I have no feelings of whimsical longing or missing the hand-wringing of the Biden administration. I think Khaled is right when he says it’s an easier reach for Trump, but I don’t therefore want to let Biden or the others in the gallery of people who should, at some stage, face accountability for their role—Blinken, Sullivan, McGurrick—we need to remember those names, lest we allow them ever to be officials in a Democrat administration again. It was there for America to stop under either Biden or Trump. Perhaps Biden would have had to have sustained a standoff a little longer, but Israel could not have continued this. So, in a way, this was also America’s war. And therefore, it was always going to be America’s ceasefire. It was always going to be the deal that America secured. And this indeed was the deal that America secured, and I would go a step further and say the Trump administration did something, which I’ll give them credit for, but it should have been palpably obvious: They talked directly to Hamas. You have to do that. We’re often treated to eyerolling at the unseriousness of the Trump administration, and I engage in that as well, but the great diplomats of the Biden administration didn’t do diplomacy 101. You talk to the guys who you need to get the ceasefire with. Be serious human beings, and they didn’t do that.

DL 13:07

Having said all of that, I want to point out two things because I think they matter, and Khaled has already spoken about. I think what moved Trump to do this is the Israeli strike in Doha when the Hamas leadership were meeting to discuss the American ceasefire plan, in the sovereign territory of an allied state, where America has its largest base in the region, where Trump had just visited, where he has close relations. And in doing that, as Israel, you set in motion a very significant question in the Gulf: What is this relationship on a security level with America worth when they can let Israel do that? You saw Saudi Arabia making new defensive arrangements with Pakistan as a consequence. So I think that’s what pushed Trump into doing what he was doing.

DL 14:01

But I don’t want to ignore what else happened, which is that a sense of pressure was becoming more palpable inside Israel. The Israelis were feeling this shift, the remarkable public mobilization among its allies in the west that translated a little bit more into politics in Europe than it did in the US. And I’m not just talking about recognition, but the understanding that it wasn’t going to stop at recognition—what I call the three Ts of Israel’s very important relationship with Europe: trade, tourism, and tournaments. Football, Eurovision—that’s where Israel participates in Europe. Those things were beginning to be on the radar screen. The European Union actually had a resolution on the table to revisit some of its trade deal. Netanyahu talked about isolation, talked about economic autarky, self-reliance, which didn’t go down well. So I want to acknowledge that, because that for me also is a signal about what we have to be thinking of next. The other thing I want to acknowledge is—and I think this would have been exactly the same had it ended under Biden—even in this moment of the ceasefire, there was still the real absence, the complete absence of being able to humanize, to mourn with Palestinians. Trump embraced those [Israeli] hostage families. He often called them our hostages, and that was a human, decent thing to do. Never was there a recognition of Palestinian loss, Palestinian suffering. Never did he meet with survivors from Gaza, those who had lost family members. Two visits now to the region; he still hasn’t done that. No acknowledgment of that in any of the speeches. Some of the Truth Social postings, he would say: Everyone’s so happy. Wouldn’t even mention the Palestinians. So this absence, even in this moment, of bringing this to closure—we will continue in the coming days, I imagine, to talk about the bodies of Israelis being returned. But what about the bodies of Palestinians still being held by Israel? What about the bodies being discovered under the rubble every day? So that also leaves a very unsavory taste in one’s mouth.

AK 16:13

Daniel, when you talked about the dehumanization of Palestinians by Trump and also within Israeli society, and of course, by the Israeli government, we’ve also seen these immense celebrations, euphoric celebrations. Obviously, we’re all happy that hostages have come home, and Israeli society deserves to celebrate that, and it’s obviously a human thing to celebrate that, but the images seem as if they’re celebrating the end of something when Israel remains enmeshed in Gaza, when Gaza remains destroyed. I want to get your thoughts on where you think Israeli society is at the end of this, because it seems to me that there’s also this crazy split screen of celebration of the hostages, while seeming to ignore the destruction in Gaza.

DL 17:00

Yeah, I’ve had Israelis say to me that, in a way, the day of the hostage release was the sun finally setting on October 7th, but then is where perhaps the division will kick in. Because for some people, this is: Can we go back to normalcy now? It’s the end of the war. Although Israel occupies half of Gaza, although Palestinians are still being killed each day. Many of the areas that were previously the most heavily populated in Gaza before, they were obliterated and destroyed. Israel is now in half a neighborhood, half a city. That’s a recipe for daily friction, tension, and Israeli soldiers with a light finger on the trigger, I think, is what we can expect. Of course, there’s the relentless Israeli occupation, destruction, military raids, support for settler violence by the Israeli military in the West Bank. And yet, for some people, hopefully, there’s some kind of closure. For others, that’s not what they want. They want to see this carry on, and one of the mechanisms for manufacturing consent here has been, by the way, maintaining this force of reservists. It’s a kind of form of military Keynesianism, where to get people to sign up for more and more and more reserve duty, they have been so handsomely compensated that people have been earning more than they would in their regular civilian jobs. And so, actually, many people are like: I want to keep going with this.

DL 18:22

So I think the question becomes: What do you do in a society—and I think this is what you were getting at, Alex.—what do you do when you have managed to manufacture a significant degree of societal mobilization and support for a genocide, what is well documented by the UN Commission of Inquiry and others, and where do you go from there as a society? Is there the possibility that now that the sun has set on October 7th, in that cool light of day, people will be willing to pierce through the things that they weren’t willing to look at before? I fear the answer is going to be negative. I fear Israel’s media will continue to do a terrible job because the main division in Israel, anti- or pro-Bibi, both camps have basically said—even those who’ve said: We should have brought the war to a close earlier; 42 Israeli living hostages died during the course of Netanyahu’s refusal to agree to a deal—even those who’ve said all of that have still said: But everything that’s happened to the Palestinians is their own fault; this is Hamas; it’s embedded in the civilian population, etc. And do the scales begin to drop from the eyes of the current dissident cohort, a significant group of Israelis who are willing to confront? And that’s what I think we have to hope for and try to build. But these are bleak, bleak times. Let’s not make light of that.

AK 19:45

We’ve talked about the regional factors that help this, meaning the Doha strike, getting the Gulf Arabs to really worry about what the US relationship gives them, and perhaps leading Trump to put more pressure on Netanyahu, and Netanyahu not saying no. But I do want to ask a question about Hamas. So Hamas’s central line has always been: We will give the hostages back. You just need to end the war, fully withdraw, and of course, release Palestinian prisoners. But in this deal, which Hamas agreed to, Israel remains entrenched in Gaza. Right now, they control over half of the enclave. So I want to get your sense of what that means. Netanyahu promised to wipe Hamas out. Obviously, that hasn’t happened. We’ve seen Hamas-affiliated gunmen go on the streets to restore security. But was Hamas weakened that they had to accept a deal that was less than what they had wanted? Basically, why did Hamas agree to this deal even though it was far from their line that they had been putting out since October 7th? And Khaled, we could start with you.

KE 20:54

Yeah, I mean, I guess the short answer is Hamas had very few choices. This was the offer that was on the table, and it was a bad proposal that then, when Trump handed it to Netanyahu, became even worse when he had his way with it. I think there was pressure from above and from below. There were the Arab states and Turkey, who were pushing Hamas: This is the best you’re going to get; you need to accept this. But I think at the end of the day, it was Palestinians on the ground. I mean, we can’t know this, but the minute Trump announced his plan, everything that I heard from every Palestinian I knew in Gaza was the same: Hamas must accept this without any reservation. We need to end this horror. We’ve had enough. It’s too much. We can’t go another day. So there was enormous public pressure. And obviously, this isn’t a plan that is good for Palestinians in Gaza. This colonial regime that it envisions robs Palestinians of agency, much less self-determination. So despite everything, they desperately needed it to stop. So I think Hamas could not ignore either what Arab states were telling them and what people in Gaza were telling them. And so they had to come down off of that ledge of full Israeli withdrawal and so forth. So I think that’s what it came down to.

DL 22:20

I think that’s absolutely right. And as you say, Netanyahu has a victory narrative. He doesn’t have what he claimed he would have in terms of: There’s no more Hamas. That’s not the case. Obviously, not the more far-reaching intentionalities that they try to pursue regarding the Riviera, the displacement, the ethnic cleansing, the removal of Palestinians. So I think on balance, what you have is the following. I think the real hard swallow for Hamas is that initial line of withdrawal. In previous negotiations, I think Israel would have had to withdraw further at the moment of hostage release. And that’s significant. I think on the other side, what you do have this time around—because this has been the sticking point: What stops Israel from returning to the killing? And there’s no such thing as an ironclad guarantee. The only ironclad guarantee would be if the Americans signed off on: We will not provide any weapons if they do that. That wasn’t going to happen. I think you have created what has been needed all along, which is the maximum plausibility that that would be the case. And that’s why, alongside the somewhat ridiculous nature of this ceremonial circus that everyone was brought to town for, and the claims of: We’ve made peace after 3,000 years. Park all of that. The extent of the grandiose nature of this was part of creating that maximum plausibility, because it makes it that much more difficult for Israel to then violate this in a way where they’re going back in. And so, you don’t have Hamas agreeing to those governance structures. They’re in the plan. You don’t have Hamas agreeing to disarm. It says that Hamas will not play a role in future governance. That has been a Hamas position for years: that as long as there was a legitimate Palestinian government, they wouldn’t be a part of it. And Israel being stuck in 50% of Gaza is eventually going to wear down Israel militarily if it stays there. So you can look at this as a concession, as something that they would have preferred not to agree to, and I think that’s correct. But I don’t think that this has been, somehow, a defeat for them in the terms of the agreement as such.

AK 00:00

I guess the question of victory, or the question of Hamas, is also obviously tied to their arms. And that’s part of the Trump 20-point plan: Hamas will disarm. The New York Times has reported that some Arab mediators indicated that Hamas might be willing to give up some of its arms. The details were pretty light, and I don’t know what that means. But what do you make of that? I mean, is that at all plausible? Hamas, their leaders in Doha, have said: Armed resistance is a right, under international law, to illegal occupation. So what do you make of this question of Hamas disarmament, the focus on it? Is that just a talking point that Netanyahu is using, and Trump? or is it actually something that they’re going to pursue?

KE 25:15

My sense is it’s something they’re going to pursue, and not only pursue, but Netanyahu talks about disarmament and demilitarization, and they’re not the same thing. And so, he obviously has a very expansive view that no Hamas-affiliated person will have any weapon of any sort. So, there is a spectrum, maybe multiple spectrums, of what disarmament or decommissioning weapons, or whatever we want to call it, would look like. I can envision a scenario in which Hamas would agree to—not necessarily relinquish, but let’s say put some of their weapons capabilities under the supervision of others, preferably Palestinian, but possibly also Arabic actors, in a way that would neutralize these weapons because they’re not usable, but without giving up the weapons. That looks too much like surrender, and Hamas is not going to agree to commit suicide. At the end of the day, Hamas is a political movement and military movement. If it’s stepping down from governance and also says: Not only are we not going to be involved in politics, but we’re also not involved in anything military, they’re negating themselves. Why do you exist if you’re a political-military group that doesn’t do political or military things? Resistance is obviously in their name.

KE 26:39

So they’re going to have to find some formula, somewhere between “Hamas gives up everything” and “Hamas at least is perceived to be giving up, disarming in some way,” with the caveat that people need to understand: As long as there’s an Israeli army presence inside Gaza, you’re going to have people who are taking up weapons, whether they are Hamas or something else. It’s just inevitably going to happen. So even if you completely disarm Hamas, which I don’t think is possible, but even if you could, eventually, someone is going to have weapons to use against this occupying army. But also, because we’ve seen what Israel is capable of doing, you have a highly, highly predatory military occupation and presence. It would be insanity, I think—it poses an existential threat to Palestinians to completely disarm Gaza in the face of the kind of massive violence that Israel has exercised and is capable of. It doesn’t make any sense. And so, I think if people can be made to understand that Hamas is not going to commit suicide and that Palestinians in general also aren’t going to commit mass suicide, maybe there’s some way to neutralize, to find some formula, some arrangement in which some of Hamas’s weapons are neutralized but not total disarmament. I don’t know if that’s even attainable, but I would think that that’s probably what Hamas folks have in mind.

DL 28:13

I think the worst-case scenario is: This is the hook, this is the excuse for Israel to go back in, in a particularly aggressive way militarily, and it’s given the green light to do so. I think this is a poison pill that’s there. It’s actually not that difficult, by the way, an issue to address, including within the confines of things that Hamas have said, if you had a realistic pragmatic interlocutor on the Israeli side. First of all, these processes never happen unless they are in the context of a political move, where one looks at decommissioning and things like that that have happened elsewhere. They happen in the context of political progress. This is not the context of political progress. This is the context of an Israel that says: You will get nothing. There’s no Palestinian state. This isn’t just about Hamas. Netanyahu, in his speech to the Knesset, alongside Donald Trump, did not utter the word Palestinian once. Perhaps it was better that he didn’t do so. In the vacuum, Hamas will continue to function, whether that’s the plainclothes police, which were part of the governance structure, or whether that’s occasionally seeing AQB—Al Qassam brigades. And they will operate against the clans, and militias, and just plain criminals. They will sometimes do so brutally. Those clans and militias will also act brutally. They are, some of them, in the pay and being armed by Israel, and one imagines that they will have free access and egress to some of those Israeli-controlled areas. But what we understand is: Hamas’s position has been that some of the heavy weaponry could be handed to a legitimate Palestinian trusted Arab presence, were it there. This is not a Hamas decision exclusively to make—the future nature of the resistance and Palestinian strategy—this is a joint Palestinian position. Hamas is just one faction. And so, this all becomes a lot more doable if you have a reunified, renewed Palestinian political movement. Not the reform that the West talks of—to make the Palestinian leadership even more part of a plan, to have an acceptance of bantustanization apartheid, but rather a Palestinian-owned Palestinian change. And you have things: You have non-display of weapons; you have no rearming. So you can do lots of things. What you can’t do is try to impose in a deal what you failed to achieve on the battlefield in a condition where there is no credible political process. And so, that’s not going to happen.

AK 30:35

The last question is the efforts to hold Israel accountable for the genocide. The International Criminal Court last year authorized the issuing of warrants for Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, the former defense minister, as well as Hamas leaders, for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Obviously, right now the ICC is under intense pressure, and it was also difficult to imagine how those arrest warrants would ever actually be actualized, given that the United States was always going to oppose this. It’s difficult to see how Israeli leaders were going to be arrested and held in the Hague, but still, these arrest warrants exist. Other efforts to hold Israel accountable in various countries are going to continue, and at the end of all of this, we still have no accountability for what most international legal experts have deemed a genocide. And so, where do those efforts go now? Do you think that there’s a risk that the momentum behind isolating Israel, to impose accountability for the genocide, to actually trying to arrest Israel leaders—are those going to dissipate in the face of the ceasefire? Is it a moot question because it was never going to happen? Any thoughts on the question of accountability right now after the ceasefire is signed?

KE 31:51

Yeah, accountability comes in many different forms. There are the official mechanisms: the ICJ and the ICC. I think the ICJ genocide trial will move forward. Israel will go on trial for the crime of crimes, and I think it’s entirely likely that the court will rule that Israel did, in fact, commit genocide. That seems to be the critical mass of where the experts are on the issue. So that, even in the abstract, I think, has a certain moral weight to it that will be difficult for countries to deny or ignore. The ICC is going to be more difficult. We could see sanctions on the entire court that are placed by the Trump administration, which actually could threaten the very existence of the court itself. And then, you have the Europeans who fought for the Rome Statute, and the creation of the court in the first place, will have a fight on their hands. But for the moment, for the time being, I don’t see the ICC moving forward. I don’t see countries arresting Netanyahu. I don’t see Netanyahu traveling to countries that there is even a remote risk of him being arrested.

KE 33:00

So that’s not going to, I think, move in the short or medium term, but I think a threshold has been reached that there is really no going back to the way things were: of complete and absolute total impunity for Israel. What form that will take, we don’t know. I think there are a lot of movements that are going to grow out of the mass movements that have been created already. I think they’re going to have to reevaluate their tactics and strategies going forward. But now, all of these things are on the agenda, as Daniel said. Things like the EU-Israel trade agreement. That at least was on the table. A lot of taboos have been shattered. FIFA, and Eurovision, and all of these things where Israel’s membership is in danger, those things are no longer off limits, so we’ll have conversations about those. I think it will be harder to get things like sanctions, but I don’t think it will be impossible. I think there will be some kind of accountability, even in small ways. When an Israeli reservist who served in Gaza goes on vacation in Portugal or in Greece or something, if there’s legal action taken against them on an individual basis, that could create a different kind of dynamic. So the kind of accountability we’re going to see is going to depend on how these different movements are going to adapt to this new environment, if in fact it is new. If in fact the ceasefire actually holds.

KE 34:36

The other point I would make is—and this is an argument I make with folks in Washington, in the policy world—accountability isn’t just a moral question. It is also about stability. If you want to stabilize Gaza, given the mass destruction, mass despair, mass suffering, mass trauma, you’re going to have to find some measure of justice for the victims of the many atrocities that we all witnessed with our own eyes over the last two years. In the absence of some kind of accountability, that’s where you have an environment in which people are going to be motivated to take matters into their own hands, and to exact their own form of justice, and that’s how you get insurgencies. That’s how you get armed insurgencies, and terrorism, and other forms of asymmetrical warfare, is when you have an aggrieved population mixed with security vacuums and ungoverned spaces mixed with mass trauma. Those are precisely the conditions that are going to lead to future attacks on Israelis. And it was shocking to me—there were very few voices, at least in the security establishment, saying: We can’t continue like this because we are threatening our own future safety. I mean, how does anyone imagine that creating this level of destruction, and death, and trauma is not somehow going to come back and haunt them later on? There’s going to be blowback; there’s going to be backlash, and it seems incredibly short-sighted and frankly stupid that that was not a consideration in mitigating some of the horrors that we all witnessed. So some measure of accountability is necessary on moral grounds. But some of it also just makes sense from a practical standpoint if you want stability. Otherwise, a hopeless population will find their own ways to exact a different kind of justice.

AK 36:40

With that, Khaled and Daniel, thank you so much for joining. This was another episode of On the Nose. We, of course, are going to be continuing to cover this issue on our website and in our magazine. If you like this podcast, please rate and subscribe, and of course, subscribe to the magazine. That does it for this episode, and we will see you next time.