Terrorism, Israel, and Dreams of Peace (with Haviv Rettig Gur)

Nov 18 2024

Over the last 30 years, the Israeli public has moved to the right on the question of how to deal with the Palestinians. Why did this happen? How has this changed Israeli politics and the strategy of the Palestinians? Listen, as journalist Haviv Rettig Gur explores the political and military history of the last three decades in Israel with EconTalk's Russ Roberts. The conversation ends with lessons for the future and a discussion of the differences between American and Israeli Jews.

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Time	Podcast Episode Highlights
0:37	Intro. [Recording date: November 7, 2024.] Russ Roberts: Today is November 7th, 2024 and my guest is journalist Haviv Rettig Gur, Senior Analyst for the Times of Israel. Haviv was here in December of 2023 to discuss the birth of Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict, an episode that was your Favorite Episode of last year [2023]. Haviv, welcome back to EconTalk. Haviv Rettig Gur: Thank you. Thanks, Russ. It's wonderful to be here.
1:00	Russ Roberts: We are recording this episode in a very dramatic time. All times these days feel dramatic in Israel, but we are two days after the U.S. election of 2024 won by Donald Trump. Two days after Bibi Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, fired his Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant. And, last month we observed the one-year anniversary of the attacks of October 7th and the world that followed. So, there's a lot going on. At the end of this conversation, I hope we'll have some time to talk about what might come next, but our topic for today is to talk about Israeli sentiment toward the Palestinians in this moment and how we got here. So, start us off. Haviv Rettig Gur: Yeah. I mean, it really isn't--it feels like an inflection point this moment. There's also a very significant offensive by the Israeli army in Northern Gaza. There is serious talking in Lebanon and in Washington about the possibility of ending actually that conflict up in Lebanon. So, we really are--it feels--we are at a nexus of, you know, five different things. The Iranian regime over the last month has been revealed to be much weaker than we all thought it was. That is a turning point that the Middle East will feel for decades, and we don't yet know exactly what it means. So, we are at a pivot. It's really a joke that every week in the Middle East is dramatic. I keep getting called by, you know, various news networks; and they say things like, 'It's been a dramatic week.' And, I'm just, like, 'I'm 15 years in this business. It's all a dramatic week.' The Chinese curse me: You live in interesting times. I don't know if there is a Chinese curse or if it's one of those sort of British imperial conventions; but there should be, there should be. It's a terrible curse. Russ Roberts: My line is: Everywhere else the focus is on everyday matters, and here every day matters. It's intense here; and there are new events every day to make you wonder what comes next.
3:11	Russ Roberts: But, we're going to start with an historical look back at how Israel and its attitudes toward its neighbors have changed over time. Haviv Rettig Gur: Yeah. Well, I argue: A lot of times in the coverage, a lot of times when people look at Israel from abroad, they see political rhetoric and they see momentary flash in the pan political rhetoric. Or, they do something even worse: Not worse because it's immoral--although it is immoral--but worse because it's also uninformative, which is they quote-mine. They go looking for: what do we think the Israelis think about the Palestinians? Or, what do we think the Palestinians think about the Israelis? And, you just type into your web browser the right words: 'Palestinian leadership Nazism,' and you find just a long, rich, deep association of Palestinian leaders with outright blatent Nazism. And then, you conclude what you wanted to conclude in the first place, which is that Palestinian identity, nationalism, the Palestinian cause, is somehow fundamentally Nazi. Which is not true. It is not true. Palestinian ideological elites have often taken Nazi ideas, but fundamentally, the turn to the Germans was a turn away from British imperialism and part of that uprising. And, there's a tremendous amount of anti-Semitism. Hamas's charter doesn't just literally borrow language from Nazi ideology. It cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in that charter. And so, you have so much to hook onto. But if you do hook onto that and assume that you've now understood the Palestinians, you'll miss the deep story, the rich story. The reason that we have polls that tell us that Palestinians still now love and admire Hamas. And, the same Palestinians who tell us they love and admire Hamas also tell us they hate Hamas. They hate Hamas for destroying Gaza. They hate Hamas for being a theocratic tyranny that has ruined their existence and lives--by the way before the war and certainly after. They hate Hamas for stealing aid. They hate Hamas for this and for that. And they absolutely admire Hamas for giving them a profound story of religious dignity that explains all of their suffering. And, there aren't many other stories in their political life that do that. And so, if you tackle the Palestinian national movement from this window of quote-mining and this very easy sort of association, you build out--intellectuals love to do this. And, it's why intellectuals are no fun at a party. They love to build out abstract constructs that kind of make sense to some piece of reality they know and then take that abstract construct and apply it to every other thing on Earth. [More to come, 6:01] And, when all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail. And they do it here constantly. Now, when that happens in reverse--when they do it to the Israelis--it's basically the same phenomenon. They'll find some racist quote in some Zionist text and say, 'This is Zionism.' And then, you say to them, 'But, that was Zionism back when less than 2% of Jews actively participated in the Zionist movement. Why did the other 98% come around suddenly in the 1920s and 1930s?' And they'll say, 'Don't bother me. What are you, protecting racism? This is Zionism.' And, there's such a rich, like, Zionist debate. Herzl [Theodor Herzl] is a man who is--sometimes they borrow these little quotes from him, which are just 19th century Viennese intellectuals talking about the global south, so to speak. And, sometimes Herzl says things that would come out of absolutely every German language writer of the time. But, Herzl's very last testament to the Jews, the Altneuland, his utopian novel--it's the last thing he gives us before he dies. The dramatic tension there is about Jews being racist in their new state, in their new mass society. They escaped the mass societies of Europe, these new nationalisms, and they escaped them because these new identities--these imagined identities--can't contain minorities because minorities call into question the organic validity of the identities. And so, the Jews have to escape this. Zionism is an entire sociological analysis of modernity. It's something much bigger than just Jewish nationalism. And, then they arrive in the land of Israel and they establish their own mass society, their own nation-state. And, Herzl says, 'Be wary of that same impulse because you will have it, too.' And, in this novel, there is a rabbi who arises who wants to oppress the Arabs, and the Jews all vote not to. And, that's what makes it utopian. In other words, the racism of the Jews is something Herzl worries about. And yet they shrink him down to this tiny little pathetic thing by quote-mining. So, so much of the discourse about this place is this cartoonicization of Israelis, cartoonicization of Palestinians. The people who think Palestinians are these perfect victims and their symbols are these inspiring symbols are racist against Palestinians. That, just because the Palestinians are ridiculously innocent and perfect and pure and lovable doesn't mean that it's not racism. And, ultimately just Westerners living out Western moral fantasies projected onto them. So, in that kind of discourse--in that kind of world in which the debate over Israelis and Palestinians is so much a fight between these very dishonest ways of addressing these two groups, it's hard to tell the real story. And, the real story is very human and very reasonable. You have two peoples that have lived through a history that utterly validates their sense of what's happening around them, but still results in radically different senses of what's happening around them. And, they don't--you know, this isn't--I'm not just talking about campus activists. I'm sorry, this sounds a little sort of cluttered or confused. It's all going to make sense in just a minute. I hope. But, this kind of shrinking us down to these very simplistic narratives that elites do in the West--primarily elites. You see in mainstream elites: John Kerry as Secretary of State, his very last speech as Secretary of State--people should look it up. It was essentially finger-wagging at the Israelis and the Palestinians, mostly at the Israelis. And, he says, 'We all know how this ends. We all know what the peace looks like. Just do it. And, if you don't do it, everything will fail. Everything will collapse.' There's this sense that the Israelis are either just foolish, stupid, or possibly malicious and evil, and that's the explanation. It's a moral judgment masquerading as an explanation. And, there is a political, intellectual class in America that has lost the ability to distinguish between--too often--not everybody, obviously, but too often lost the ability to distinguish between moral judgment and actual diagnostic explanation. Israelis are not stupid. The reason Israelis can't reach a peace with the Palestinians is because they know more than the Western critic, not less. And, the reason Palestinians can't reach a peace with the Israelis is because they know more than the Westerners looking at them, not less than the Westerners looking at them. And, when you really dig deep into these stories, you discover this vast--and frankly, even though we're talking about very, very sad and tragic and painful things--beautiful stories and histories and narratives that ordinary people, good people learn and go through and adopt and think about themselves in their search for dignity, in their search for meaning, in their search for solidarity. They produce very bad outcomes and some very bad policies. I try to talk about Israelis and Palestinians in their own terms and to try to convey why they're not stupid, and why if you want to come and look at them and learn about them, and think about them, you actually have to learn them on their own terms. We have to crack that open. We have to tell that story. We have to dive into those weeds, because when you come out of the weeds on the other side, you suddenly see everything very different. And, you suddenly understand why a reasonable good person would reach the conclusion of the Israeli who says, 'This is the only war available to us in Gaza.' Or the Palestinian who says, 'Gaza's destruction was worth it.' Those are not crazy, and those are not evil, and they make sense. And, by the way, they could still be utterly wrong and you could still have to oppose it, and you could still have to fight a war against it. But, they're human and real, and meaningful, and serious, and not moral cartoons. Did that make sense? That was like a methodologic-- Russ Roberts: Yeah. No, it's great. And of course, it's very consistent with what is the ethos of this program, which is respect for people who don't agree with you and treating them as human beings rather than caricatures, which is half of what you're saying. And, the other half is that once you go behind the caricature, once you erase the cartoon and you see a human being, you understand something about what motivates them. And conceivably--and I don't want to be too utopian ourselves--but conceivably you could make some progress. I mean, that's what I take as one of your fundamental lessons, which: the misunderstandings are good for getting people angry. They destroy the ability to allow us to live with our neighbors peacefully and to flourish. And we could imagine a world where if we respected each other in a different way than we do now and understood each other in a different way than we do now, maybe we could live together side by side in some fashion.
13:22	Russ Roberts: Now, you know much more than I do about Israeli attitudes. I do argue with my Western friends quite a bit because I do know one thing about Israeli attitudes, which is I know how my students feel when they go into Gaza, into Lebanon. They may not be representative of all soldiers. I'm not naive. I'm not foolish. These are often officers. They're on their way to becoming well-educated. They're thoughtful. That's why we accepted them here at Shalem College and why we have great hopes for them. But, I understand that the way that many people in the West look at the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] is a grotesque caricature. But, we're not going to look at that. We've talked about that on the program a little bit in the past. I want to talk about the average--whatever that means--Israeli attitude--as a way to get us started--toward our neighbors, because I have a limited circle of friends. You've got a much wider circle of Israelis that you've grown up with and know. And, you think about it a lot harder and read about it a lot more than I do. And, I think I would benefit, and our listeners would benefit from understanding how Israeli public opinion, broadly defined as best as we can define it, has changed over time and what that implies for an optimistic or realistic future. Haviv Rettig Gur: Okay. So, let me try to do the very thing--try to actually walk through this exercise of understanding. There's one statistic that I urge people to hold onto that when you unpack it, helps really reveal something profound about the Israeli sense of the Palestinian question and what the future holds and what options are available to Israelis when it comes to the Palestinians. And, that statistic is voter turnout in an election that we had 23 years ago, 2001. And, before I tell you that turnout--and I hope nobody is looking it up too quickly--the reason that that collapse in turnout had a couple of different factors. But, the fundamental factor was a collapse in faith in politics: an absolutely unique moment in Israeli history in which faith in politics was shattered, still has not really recovered, and really reveals the--first of all--the influence that Palestinian actions have on Israelis and on Israeli politics. The immense influence. And secondly, the Israeli belief--by the way, the belief of the Israeli left-winger, the liberal, the Progressive, even, who yearns for separation and a Palestinian state and an end to the occupation--the belief in how few options they actually have. And the belief that Palestinian politics reduce their options, not the Israeli political right. I am not arguing that this is historical truth. I'm arguing that this is the lived experience of the mainstream of Israeli Jews. Probably--I'm going to throw out there--I mean, I know a lot of polls over the years: I would say 80% of Israeli Jews would agree with the narrative I'm about to tell. There's obviously, to the left of the mainstream, people who would disagree. And to the right who would disagree in other ways. Just like among the Palestinians, there are 11 narratives about what happens to them and what has happened to them. And, they've fought literal civil wars over those different narratives. Start at 2001. Actually, let's not start 2001: 2001 is that pivot. I want to start in the First Intifada. The First Intifada begins in 1987. There's a car accident in the Gaza Strip: an Israeli military truck, I believe, crashes into a Palestinian private car and people in the private car are killed. And that incident sparks, catalyzes a whole series of riots and protests in Gaza that very quickly spread to the West Bank. I am going to simplify, cartoonishly--there are libraries written about the First Intifada, the Second Intifada, the peace process--but, just to give people a sense of the Israeli-lived experience of this. These riots and protests spread throughout the cities and towns of Gaza and the West Bank very, very quickly. And, the Israeli civil society--civilian society, excuse me--experiences that very, very quickly, because, unlike the Americans or the British or the Australians, when our military deploys, it doesn't deploy to the end of the world, right? It deploys an hour bus ride from home. And, our soldiers go home for the weekend to Mom's dinner table. Right? And, the First Intifada consisted of a whole range of different phenomenon and really complex and all layered in itself: terror attacks on sort of the clean FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] definition of what a terror attack is; and attacks, and reprisals, and Israeli crackdowns. And there was a whole big, vast, complex event that lasted five years. But there's a piece of it that is burned into the Israeli psyche. And, that is a big part of how Palestinians tell the story of that First Intifada. And that's the piece that we call the Children of the Stones. The Children of the Stones are these literal kids. Right? What sparked those protests? They weren't actually cause--the reason wasn't--the spark was the car accident, but the reason wasn't the accident. The reason was 20 years of occupation. If you're a Palestinian school child in 1987 and you live in Jenin, let's say--in the Northern West Bank--and you come out of school and you're walking home, the guy running traffic at the traffic circle is the Israeli infantryman. I mean, the occupation, the military rule is deep within Palestinian society. It's very close. And, if you're that school child, it's been 20 years. You've never known anything else. And, it shows no sign of going anywhere. And so, this truly grassroots uprising, one of the really powerful images that come out of it are these Children of the Stones where these school kids pick up stones off the ground and throw them at the Israeli infantry. Inside these cities, inside these towns. Now, those Israeli soldiers, that very first weekend of the First Intifada, went home to Shabbat dinner, at Mom's dinner table. And their moms turned to them--I am only slightly dramatizing; I mean this quite literally--in tens of thousands of households all over Israel, their mothers turn to their soldiers, to their children, and they say to them, 'What the hell is going on? I'm watching the news. This is headline news already.' And, obviously, and for the next five years, it's going to be every day's headline news. 'What the hell is going on? Are you safe? Are you okay?' And those soldiers turn to their mothers and they say to them, 'What am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to do, facing an 11-year-old boy throwing a rock at me? I'm the Israeli infantry. I'm trained to take the Syrian commando fortifications on the road to Damascus.' In 1987, the Israeli army is still training its infantry, basically, to fight the 1973 War better. Which, in 1987 makes sense. 'What am I supposed to do with an M-16 or a Galil rifle?'--which is kind of an Israeli copy of an AK-47 that we pretend we invented. I apologize. That was humorous. But, the point is, 'What am I supposed to do facing these kids?' And, that experience--again, at a very simple level, because it was many things and it was very complex and it lasted a while--but that experience very, very quickly, forges a whole new Israeli left, a whole new Israeli left-wing consciousness. It's also a left that hungers for a new civic religion, for a new purpose, for a new ideology. Basically, because 1985 saw this radical economic revolution after eight years of triple-digit inflation. All of the old Socialist/Marxist institutions, the state-controlled industries, were basically dismantled. Monetary policy was actually made independent with the Bank of Israel law of 1985. There was this huge reform because of a massive financial crisis, monetary crisis, that shattered the Israeli economy. And, there weren't a whole lot of Socialists left after 1985. So, the Israeli left that had been this Socialist--right?--it was its civic religion. It was its belief. It had secularized for its Socialism, very quickly responded to the First Intifada by adopting the question of the occupation and ending the occupation and creating peace as a new civic religion. It took it in, this moral argument that it heard from Palestinian youngsters. It imbibed it very, very deeply. Within five years, 1992, Yitzhak Rabin is winning an election in which many, many people in the left are talking about: peace. Rabin goes to Oslo with Yasser Arafat. In 1993 they sign a document that doesn't have a lot of actual, actionable--it's essentially a Declaration of Principles. I think that's what it was called, the Declaration of Principles. It's Oslo I, the Oslo Agreement. It's really a declaration that they're going to start working on a proper peace treaty. 1995, two years later, there's already something called Oslo II, which is essentially a kind of treaty. It creates the Palestinian Authority. It establishes rules that give the Palestinian Authority great leeway in Palestinian population centers. It commits the Israelis and Palestinians to a five-year window for solving all the rest--you know, Jerusalem, refugees, holy sites, independence, borders, all the sticky hard stuff. And, the Knesset has to ratify it. There's a vote. The Knesset ratifies it. Very close, but it does ratify it. And then, in November of 1995, of course, Yitzhak Rabin is assassinated by an Israeli Jew--who kills him because of the peace process. And now the left, which can win elections talking about peace, that left now has its martyr. And, the country is now heading into an election in 1996--when the Prime Minister is assassinated, the country goes to election. And, on the eve of the election--literally in the handful of days leading up to the election--Hamas detonates suicide bombings in Jerusalem. It's a very close race between Shimon Peres who replaced Rabin at the head of the Labour Party, who wants to continue the Oslo process. And this new guy, this young guy from Likud, Benjamin Netanyahu, a whole new generation of Likud leaders who has argued that if you give guns to an arch-terrorist like Yasser Arafat, it will end badly. On the eve of the election--in the days leading up to the election--there are suicide bombings in Jerusalem that tilt the election by a couple of points. Just tiny little margin from Peres to Netanyahu. Netanyahu wins that election by the narrowest margin in the history of Israeli elections. I think it was 30,000 votes. And, that's the first moment when the Israeli left experiences Hamas not going to war against the occupation: going to war against the peace process. Netanyahu wins that election. He has a government for the next three years. He does not advance the peace process. He actually signs the Wye River memorandum in 1998. That's the last document signed by Israelis and Palestinians. But, he does implement quite a bit of Rabin's commitments. He pulls the army out of Jericho, and Gaza, and Hebron, and many different places; and he really begins the establishment of--as per the treaty Israel committed to--begins the establishment of the Palestinian Authority during his term. In 1999, Netanyahu's government falls. He's deeply unpopular. A lot of pundits say, 'We'll never hear of Benjamin Netanyahu ever again,' which is why you shouldn't trust political pundits, obviously--other than myself who has never been wrong. But, I was in high school then, so I can mock them for their mistakes. But, that government falls and the left now elect a new guy named Ehud Barak. Like Rabin, a former chief of staff of the army. In fact, far beyond Rabin, Barak is already talking about a much more significant independent Palestinian entity, that it's clear to everybody, and I believe he even says it outright in a way that Rabin never did. And we, to this day, there are debates. We don't quite know what Rabin was thinking, and it's possible that Rabin was testing the waters and he wasn't sure how far he could go. Barak is already talking about a Palestinian state. Barak wins that election talking about a Palestinian state. He goes to Camp David with Yasser Arafat and Bill Clinton, and they are negotiating shared sovereignty over the Temple Mount. They are negotiating borders. They're negotiating land swaps. They are negotiating all kinds--everything. Everything difficult, they are negotiating at Camp David. Then in the fall of 2000, the Second Intifada begins. Now the Palestinians get to name these things. So, the first one was an Intifada. The second one was an Intifada. In the Israeli Jewish experience, these were opposite events. These were opposite events. Certainly on the left. And, what do I mean by that? The Second Intifada consisted of 140 suicide bombings that blew up in Israeli cities over the course of three years. I want listeners to try to imagine 140 suicide bombings on any issue that is a divisive culture war issue in their society. Imagine if a Mexican immigrant in America walks into a non-alcoholic bar--that's a bar for teenagers; we have those--and detonates a shrapnel bomb that kills 24 kids. And leaves a video. And, in the video, that's how we know they're not mentally ill or just randomly homicidal. They're terrorists. They left a video. And, in the video, this person says--my immigration policy is not that great. Please don't catch me on--I'm trying to cosplay a terrorist version of this, okay? But, let's say it says: Donald Trump lost children in children's prisons, and President Obama deported more people than the Republican Administration before or after. And President Biden didn't solve anything while millions of people suffer in a terrible immigration policy. That's the video. I, America am going to make you see. Boom. Okay? Let's imagine an event like that in American politics. The immediate aftershock of that event. First of all, the conservative Republican response is very simple because it fits with their basic worldview, right? It's not a challenge to write that tweet for Donald Trump. But, what's the Progressive response to an event like that? What would that look like? I submit to you that Progressives would be tormented. There would be 15 different responses. Some of them would be, 'This guy is an evil murderer who made it harder to fix the immigration problem because of his own narcissism and psychopathy.' Some of them would say, 'Look, this is how bad it is that it would generate this kind of violence.' There would be all kinds of different responses. And, when we've had in actual democracies, real examples of terrorism, right, along those fracture lines of culture wars, those are the kinds of responses you see. But, fundamentally, Progressives would have a real problem with violence like that. And, the problem is that they agree with the video. But the guy just murdered children. What do you do when you agree with the video, but the guy murdered children? Whatever that Progressive response is, now try to imagine the Progressive response when there's another bombing a week later. And now try to imagine the Progressive response when there are three more a week after that. And, now try to imagine the Progressive discourse on immigration over the next month when there are 13 bombings. And, now try to imagine over three years, 140. But, there is a point--I don't know what that point is: I don't know if it's bombing three or bombing 30 or bombing 113--but there is a point where the Progressives of America say, 'You know what? Let's put a pin in this one and circle back 10 years from now, because you can't even breathe. You cannot talk about it. All the air has been sucked out of the room.' The Second Intifada's 140 bombings shattered the Israeli political left. It hasn't won an election since. And, it hasn't won an election not because of the death toll--which was horrible--and not because they targeted children. My example of a non-alcoholic bar was the Dolphinarium bombing on the beach in Tel Aviv in 2001. It was because of the timing, and it was because of the story. In the First Intifada in 1987, we understood--we, Israelis--what those kids were protesting. We knew exactly what they were protesting. What were they protesting in 2000? Thirteen years later, who is running traffic in Jenin as school kids walk home? The school kid who walked home past the Israeli infantryman in 1987 was now the officer running that traffic as part of the Palestinian police. Bill Clinton was sitting there in Washington desperate--desperate--to fund this project. He had no other legacy. He had one other legacy and that made him more desperate to fund this project. The Palestinians were getting everything handed to them--everything, on a silver platter--and it had cost the Israelis a murdered Prime Minister and an internal culture war; and it was happening. And that's when the Palestinian decision to launch the Second Intifada happened. There were no Israeli soldiers in any Palestinian city, town, or village when the bombings began in 2000. And so, the great question Israelis ask--and they scream it silently into an echoing chasm of their own psyche; but it's everywhere. It is the bedrock. You catch a cab in Jerusalem and you start talking to that cab driver about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict--and you can tackle it from the right and you can talk about terrorism; and you can tackle it from the left, you can talk about settlements--doesn't matter how you talk about it. Three minutes in, you hit bedrock. And that bedrock is: What the hell was the Second Intifada about? What was it for? What was its purpose? Israelis know about the Second Intifada something that outsiders might have trouble seeing. It's extremely difficult to recruit a thousand suicide bombers. 140 actually make it past the Israeli security services and blow up in Israeli cities. I'm giving a random sort of guesstimate that a thousand set out. It's extremely difficult to build those bombs. There was no YouTube and you couldn't build those bombs at home from YouTube. These are shaped shrapnel explosions. It's difficult to recruit. Recruiting a suicide bomber, it's--there's an entire science. There's tremendous amount of academic research on this, especially in the United States, and I don't claim to know it very well. But I know enough of it, and I have learned from enough scholars who have studied it to know that first of all, suicide terrorism is a phenomenon that goes beyond Islam. There's this image in the West that suicide terrorism is just a Muslim thing. It's not. There have been Marxist suicide terrorists in the 20th century-- Russ Roberts: And it's-- Haviv Rettig Gur: It's big, it's complex--anarchists. But there are certain characteristics that are almost universal in suicide terrorism. For one thing, it's not a function of desperation. The poorest people on earth--the most desperate people on earth--people on earth facing genocide don't produce suicide terrorism. It is a function of redemption. It is a function of a redemptive ideology that seeks to shake the foundations of the existing order in order for that redemption to be able to peek through the cracks of the order that you produce. It is people who believe they are saving the world by murdering other people's children. And, how do you get people to believe they're saving the world by murdering other people's children? The answer basically is social capital. You need the investment of social groups, of your own social network. You need the investment of people of authority in your society. In the Palestinian case--and again, this is a phenomenon far larger than Palestinians and Palestinians are not unique in this feature of the suicide terrorism--Hamas ran literal martyrdom classes in mosques in Gaza to try and recruit these kids, these teenagers and sometimes much older.
35:32	Russ Roberts: And, we should just clarify that in this time period of 2000, Israel is occupying Gaza, not like pre-October 7th. The Israeli Army is present in a way that they are not in parts of the West Bank, so it's probably easier for them, I assume, to recruit for those classes. Haviv Rettig Gur: Israel absolutely still controls Gaza. It has pulled out of Palestinian towns and cities-- Russ Roberts: At this point. Haviv Rettig Gur: At this point. In those previous years, in literally the three years previous. And Palestinian Police now run the towns and cities. But between the towns and cities and around the Israeli settlements, there is an Israeli military presence, absolutely. The point is: you needed labs that could build these bombs. You needed recruitment networks. You needed people with social standing and authority and religious standing to validate the narrative that would allow this recruitment. You needed money. You needed bank accounts. You needed command and control. You needed people who can sneak a terrorist past Israeli security and Israeli intelligence. You needed, essentially, a guerrilla fighting force. And so, the First Intifada was experienced by huge parts of Israeli society, enough to win an election as a bottom-up, grassroots, moral cry against something Israel was doing wrong. The Second Intifada was experienced by that very same Israeli majority--and a much larger majority--as the exact opposite. Now that we were pulling out, now that we were negotiating the final status, now that the political system had managed--painfully, agonizingly--to make this argument and try and carry forward this agenda, now Palestinian ideological elites had turned on us in a vast massacre of our children, purposeful guerrilla warfare. And why? Make it make sense. To this day, the Israeli left can't explain to ordinary Israelis why the Second Intifada happened. And so nobody can make a credible case within Israeli Hebrew language politics that it won't just happen again. That, everywhere we pull out of won't simply result in the same bloodshed--disastrous, catastrophic bloodshed, if not worse. The point about voter turnout in 2001 illustrates this. Israeli voter turnout before 2001 was incredibly high. I think it averaged 80% for 40 years. It never dropped below 78% or 77%. It went as high as 83, 84. Incredibly stable, incredibly high just for generations. And what's amazing about that is: voter turnout is a signal, among other things, of faith in the political system and that the political system can hear me, that it can respond to my needs. Israelis voted in incredibly high numbers even when their government failed them disastrously--even in 1973, in the immediate aftermath of the 1973 war. Even in December 1973, there was an election, very high turnout, with people very angry at the government. Even when there was a massive dramatic shift in 1977 for the first time, the big Labor Party that had founded the state lost an election--29 years after founding the state--and went home quietly and peacefully; and Likud took over for the first time. And, the next election, massive voter turnout, just like the election before. The 1976 war in Lebanon, the 1982 war in Lebanon--you could go back to 1967, 1973: there was a war in between 1967 and 1973 called the War of Attrition. Soldiers were dying every week on the Egyptian front. Israeli history is, as we said at the beginning, interesting in the worst possible way. There's a trauma every three, four years; and voter turnout never drops. Even in the late 1970s when you start to get triple digit inflation, year-on-year-on-year-on-year. You throw out the currency in 1980 and issue the shekel. You throw out the shekel in 1985 and issue the new shekel, just to try and get a handle on triple-digit inflation for half a generation. And, throughout all of that collapse--imagine, Russ, American politics. If inflation wasn't 9% for part of 2023, which hurt everybody, but was 140%--imagine if everybody's life savings were essentially wiped out in the course of a year and a half, what would happen to American voting patterns? Who would be elected? Well, that's Israel for eight long years and voter turnout never drops. And then, that's the astonishing thing. You then get to 2001 and suddenly, I think the election before in 1999--people can look this up--but in 1999, I believe the election, the turnout was--Barak's election--was 78 and a half, if I'm not mistaken. And then, it gets to 2001, overnight, literally in the 18 months of the Barak government, voter turnout drops 17 points to 62%. Overnight. And, it has not yet recovered to the lowest it had ever been before. Russ Roberts: Meaning it's below that even now. Haviv Rettig Gur: Even now, it's below 77. Yeah, it went back up to 71 and down into the 60s. It hovers in that place, but it's an entire sort of swath of the population lower. Now, just to clarify, because these are complicated things. In 1992, the Knesset passed a separation of the vote for Prime Minister and the vote for Knesset Party. And, it was an experiment: direct election of Prime Minister. It was deemed a bad experiment that weakened prime ministers. It was supposed to strengthen prime ministers, but it in fact expanded--people then ended up voting one Prime Minister and then a different party; and it actually weakened prime ministers tremendously. And so, it was then reversed, I believe, in 2003 it was canceled, if I'm not mistaken. And, 2001 was the very first time you had a Prime Ministerial election without a Parliamentary election. There was only that half of the election. And that might have caused some of it. But we also know that the shattering of--by the way, because the Barak government falls so dramatically as the bombings are blowing up in Israeli cities literally, and it keeps negotiating right up to the end because Barak is desperate to get some deal from the Palestinians and the worse things get--the more buses blow up in Jerusalem--the more he needs a deal. Otherwise, he's just the man who brought the Second Intifada upon us. And so, he's negotiating, and negotiating, and negotiating right up to the end, and then he finally agrees to resign. But, there's this great national emergency and the decision is made for various reasons not to have a full parliamentary vote, but to just have a Prime Ministerial vote and replace the Barak government. And that Prime Ministerial vote ushers in the first Sharon government in 2001. And some people said, 'Well, the collapse of 17 points in voter turnout, which never happened before for any reason, was a function of the separation of the vote for political party and the vote for Prime Minister.' But, the next election two years later is a vote for both, and voter turnout is still 63. And, the next election it went up to 65, then down to 63 again. The next election, again--it never again will be a separate vote--and voter turnout doesn't recover. And so, two things shattered here. There's a correlation, but the causation is the shattering of the Israeli belief that politics has answers. Why? Because Israelis still don't know why the Second Intifada happened. Because everything they were told--the left had a fundamental basic story and the basic story--and this was the new religion of the left--and when Rabin was killed, the idea of Oslo actually went up in the polls because the left now had its martyr and its mobilizing sense of sacrifice. Russ Roberts: And he shouldn't die for nothing. I mean, it's a terrible--it's bad enough he's dead; how could he not vindicate-- Haviv Rettig Gur: He shouldn't die for nothing. Russ Roberts: Yeah, you got to vindicate his vision. Haviv Rettig Gur: Exactly. And, look what the other side was willing to do to stop it. And, there's a taboo generally in Israeli culture, born in the refugee experience of Israeli immigration, that Jews don't kill Jews. That, the Altalena is still remembered as a traumatic moment, this moment in 1948 where in order to consolidate the various Jewish militias into a single army of the state, Ben-Gurion actually ordered the opening fire on a right-wing militia's gun-smuggling ship. And, that to this day is a memorial attended by a Prime Minister. Why? Because it's a moment where Jews killed Jews right at the establishment of the state. That's a taboo in Israeli society and Israeli political culture. And, it happened in 1995 and it strengthened the left. And it all fed into this one story the left told for decades--certainly since 1987. A part of the left had been saying it for a long time and it really took over the entire left and became the left's fundamental idea beginning in 1987. And, the idea was very simple and people will recognize it. It's generally the liberal notion of the Western average liberal who looks at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The idea is the Palestinians are under military occupation. Right? They don't elect the Israeli Military Governor of the West Bank who is the sovereign in the West Bank legally, right? So, that's a moral debt that the Israelis owe the Palestinians. That's not sustainable, that's not permanent. You can't just not give people suffrage. And, then the left said: If we do give them this thing, that we owe them; this thing that we have to give them, it's a debt. If we give them their independence from us, they will give us--the left argued, and I was a high schooler and passionately believed in this--if we give them this thing that we owe them, they will give us the only thing we need from them. Rabin called it security; Bill Clinton called it peace. Most Israelis just thought of it as quiet. I give them their independence, they give me quiet. That's the deal. As I pull out, Hamas in 1996 detonating those suicide bombings and handing the election to Netanyahu, Hamas in 2000--and not just Hamas: Arafat was a huge factor in this. But let's just--it's certainly the Hamas idea and Hamas was deeply, deeply involved in the Second Intifada and probably committed a lot of the worst of the attacks. But, that branch, that vision, that Islamist sort of restorationist Islamic ideology that produced those suicide bombings of the Second Intifada, they proved the left wrong. Everywhere I pull out of, they come for me to murder my children from that place.
46:45	Russ Roberts: So, I have two questions. And question number one is: Four, or three--some few years later, Israel pulls out of Gaza despite the Second Intifada. And, I also want to understand how you're telling me that Israelis can't understand the Second Intifada; but we started this conversation by: we have to put ourselves in our neighbor's shoes. So, are you giving up on that? Haviv Rettig Gur: No. I was a soldier in the Second Intifada. I was a soldier. I stood at a particular checkpoint, I remember, in the Northern West Bank, in the middle of the Second Intifada. This was a profoundly frustrating time because we were the soldiers who were supposed to stop all those suicide bombers. And, day after day, they blew up and reminded us that we were failing. [WARNING: Gruesome description in next few paragraphs--Econlib Ed.] And, one day, a car arrives--a Palestinian vehicle arrives at the checkpoint and rushes the checkpoint. There's a line of Palestinian cars getting checked and one car rushes up to the soldiers and detonates explosives. There was something like 50 kilos of TNT [trinitrotoluene] in the trunk. The driver is a bomber. He has a belt on. His body, from the shockwave, flies out the front window. The bomb--his belt bomb--detonates, splitting his upper torso from his lower torso right in the air, right in front of the soldiers. They land in different parts of the road. [END WARNING] And, everybody did everything right. And so, one soldier had shrapnel in his leg and everyone else came out of it okay. But, we stopped five bus bombings that day with that one car that didn't feel like[?] he could get through us and so decided to try and blow up on us. And, I stood there at that checkpoint, and I asked myself a great question that has really kind of guided my professional life ever since. And, that question was: What the hell is the Second Intifada about? What does this person think he just did? Is he stupid? Because I knew, or believed I knew, what was on offer. They could have everything. They had us eating out of the palms of their hands. If they made themselves the partner that half of Israeli politics was desperately invested in them being, the entire Western world would fund them forevermore; and they would have a polity that is more than anything they could possibly get in any other way. And, so many arguments: I mean, there is no prosperous future for Palestinians except integration into the Israeli economy. There's simply no other economy around they could integrate into that would be worth integrating into. If they're cut off from the Israeli economy, they're going to be a Somalia--best-case scenario--by the way, in their own separate state but deeply integrated. There's so much here that they're giving up and sacrificing by this need to murder us. And, that's when I got into these questions and began to actually ask and began to read and discover the Algeria Paradigm in which a lot of them live. Russ Roberts: Which we talked about before in your previous episode. And, I encourage-- Haviv Rettig Gur: Right, a year ago-- Russ Roberts: listeners to--yeah, but many people have forgotten it, so you can certainly explain-- even if they heard it, many have forgotten it, so you can certainly summarize it here. Haviv Rettig Gur: I went looking for what drives--I literally just asked it very bluntly because it matters, so I don't have time to be politically correct or polite: Are they stupid? What don't they understand? Why do they think this is a good idea? And, as I dug in deep to their narrative, I discovered, a). They're not stupid. It's old. These are old ideas. This is a 140-year discourse in Arabs--among Palestinian Arabs specifically; in the Arab world generally. And it's still wrong. Even though it's deep and old. And, I built that out as--and by the way, I gave talks at Shalem College about sort of what I learned from that--but I went on that journey from that experience of the Second Intifada. Russ Roberts: And we'll link to that video.
51:18	Russ Roberts: So, when you say Israelis couldn't understand-- Haviv Rettig Gur: I can summarize it very briefly. Russ Roberts: Go ahead. Haviv Rettig Gur: Basically, the story is Algeria. In 1954--really, truly, cartoonishly simple--Alistair Horne wrote--this British historian wrote--a magisterial history of the Algeria War, A Savage War for Peace, I believe it was called. I recommend it. There have been a thousand others. The Algeria War produced the Frantz Fanon literature and the anti-colonialist literature that is so very popular on college campuses--elite college campuses in the West today. You want to understand why kids are screaming at Columbia, 'Decolonize Palestine,' you need to go back to that Algeria War and you'll understand it. But, my point is the influence it had, not on Western elites, but on Palestinians. In 1954, the French had been colonizing Algeria since, I believe, 1830. They'd been there 124 years already. There were something like a million and a half French--European, white--citizens of France living in Algeria. They were legally constituted as a Département of the French Republic. They voted for Members of Parliament in Paris. And they, of course, didn't give citizenship to the millions--I think it's five or six million; it might be more than that--of Algerian Muslims in the country. And in 1954, the Algerian Muslim organizations and groups and parties came together in a room and established the National Liberation Front. It's a group of activists, and it slowly grew. It's, again, a long story; I'm making it cartoonishly simple. I'm just giving people hooks on which to begin their journey of discovery. But, they found, in 1954, the National Liberation Front, the FLN [National Liberation Front]--which, the letters are flipped because it's in French--and they embark on what is probably a paradigmatic--the paradigmatic--anticolonial war. And an anti-colonial war, its fundamental strategy is pretty simple. Its fundamental strategy is the idea that a colonialist shows up in your country for some benefit. Let's give that benefit the value X. The benefit, by the way, could be silver mines. It could be slaves. It could be the territory itself--just expansionism. It could be abstractions like the glory of empire. There are places the Portuguese conquered just in their competition with the Spanish, not because they cared. The British needed Egypt for the canal. It could be any reason that a powerful nation takes over some other territory. Give that benefit that the colonialist perceives the value of x. How do you get rid of them? And, the answer of the FLN and other anticolonial movements modeled on the FLN or that came before the FLN was very simple. You exact a cost that's x+1. And, if the cost is x+1, they leave. But of course, you are not responsible to the colonialist to be polite. You're responsible to your children to be free as soon as possible. So, you don't exact a cost of x+1. It's never x+1. The cost you try to exact is x+300. Because if the cost is x+300, the colonialist leaves sooner. And so, anticolonial wars always tend to horrific brutality because of the x+300 logic. Not because colonized peoples are crueler than civilized Europeans or any of these kinds of ideas that percolated through the French discourse and other colonial discourses. And, the FLN was brutal, horrific. The terror attacks, gunning down families on the beach, cutting off body parts of random victims, just bombings of cafes--it was a horrific, horrific terror war. The French response, bless their hearts, managed to be even more horrific. The estimates of the civilian dead of the French bombings of the villages south of the coastal cities where the FLN would hide, probably one reasonable estimate is probably 500,000 dead Algerian civilians. Some ideological movements in Algeria argue that it was one and a half million, historians think [?]. Russ Roberts: The "bless your hearts" was a sarcastic remark. I just want to get that on the table. Haviv Rettig Gur: It was a sarcastic remark, yes. The French response to the FLN was actually horrific. And, the FLN also, really importantly, to understand how this functions and how really smart the anticolonial struggle was, the strategy was: the FLN lost every single engagement in eight years and won the war, because the pressure that this war created--two things created pressure back in Paris. The first was the terrorism inflicted by the FLN and the second was the French cruelty that that terrorism drew in response. Fundamental to the FLN strategy was goading the French to be cruel to the Algerians. And, that toppled the Republic and brought in de Gaulle. That created really deeply revolutionary political change in the France. The profound influence that the FLN had on France itself--on the Metropole--was astonishing. And, that war ends in 1962 with what is essentially a miracle in the experience of the Algerian Muslim community, which is to say: almost overnight a million people just get on a boat and leave, just like that. They got sick of it. They couldn't do it. They couldn't be killed and they certainly couldn't kill anymore. And, their whole politics had restructured themselves; and the French Republic got out. The PLO--the Palestine Liberation Organization--is established two years, I think less, I think about 18 months later in Cairo. There's a lot of Arab League politics, there's a lot of factions, there's a lot of debates, there's a lot of ideology. There's a lot of Soviet Union. There's a lot of complexity there that people--again, libraries have been written about. But, the fundamental story in that room was Algeria. Algeria becomes, in 1962, this touchstone of anticolonial--the third-world almost invents its identity based on that Algerian moment. And, when Arafat would go on to declare a Palestinian State in 1988, he did so in Algiers. When Arafat, in 1974, gave a speech in the General Assembly talking about Zionism as colonialism, he was invited to speak by the President of the Assembly--who was the President of Algeria, who had been a major figure in the FLN. The connection is conscious. And when the PLO is established in 1964, the PLO is established three years before there's an Israeli occupation in the West Bank in Gaza. It's not established to push back the Israeli occupation. There is a military occupation in Gaza in the West Bank, but they're Jordanian and Egyptian; and that's not something the Palestinians ever resisted or fought against; and in fact, the Palestinian elites accepted openly and officially. But, the 1964 establishment of the PLO was based on the idea that just as the Algerians had been able to kick out the French, so, too, Palestinians--using anticolonial methods--could kick out the Israelis. And, that's really important to understand. The French were strong. The French had been there a long time. The French were many. And those were reasons not to try. And, the Algerians proved that even though the Jews were strong, the Jews were many, and the Jews had been there a long time, it could still be done. And so, this terror war--and after 1964, there's the hijacking of airplanes, there's massacres like the Ma'alot Massacre. Commandos of the PFLP [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine] come down from Lebanon, take over a school, and murder 22 kids. That kind of warfare is modeled on Algeria. And, here's where it gets interesting. Let me just pause there for a second. I'm talking way too much. I apologize.
59:40	Russ Roberts: I'm enjoying every minute of it, and I suspect our listeners are as well. Carry on. I'm going to raise a couple of questions in a minute, but you're doing great. Haviv Rettig Gur: Okay. Russ Roberts: You're killing it. Haviv Rettig Gur: One of the really interesting arguments that come out of FLN strategy is an argument about the nature of power in a colonialist situation. The colonialist state, by definition, is powerful--right?--just because it's a state that can project itself from its own land to another land. When I declare war on it, it gets more powerful, because it sees the crisis and it sends troops from the homeland to the colony. So, it'll only ever get more powerful. And, under the conditions of colonialist rule, I can never meet it in conventional war. I can never develop the industrial base to face its industrial base--because I'm colonized by it. In other words, even best-case scenario that I could industrialize quickly if I chose to, I can't under their control. So, the colonialists will only ever look powerful, and it will remain powerful, and it will remain powerful, and it will remain powerful, and it will remain powerful. And then it will collapse. And I can't, from the outside, see the collapse; but sometimes I get signals of weakness, signals of collapse that come from within the colonialist structure. And, for example, sometimes the French asked for some kind of accommodation or a ceasefire. The FLN interpreted those attempts at some temporary halt of fighting, or something like that, as signals from within the colonialist structure of power as an internal weakness. What's the theory of how the colonialist collapses? You cause them the x+1--you cause them more cost than the colony is worth. Because, a colonialist project fundamentally is an economic project or a power projection project; if you cost more than the value to the colonialist, they'll ultimately roll it up and quit. But also, you force them to do things they can't explain. Their cruelty is critical to your strategy. And then eventually they don't want to anymore. They don't want to pay the cost--the moral cost, the political cost, the financial cost, the diplomatic cost--of maintaining that superstructure of power. And so, they collapse in six different ways and it happens all at once, and it happens from within, not from you. That's the FLN theory of how you destroy a powerful colonialist. Russ Roberts: So, let's-- Haviv Rettig Gur: That's what the Second Intifada was. That's the point. The Second Intifada was Palestinian terror organizations that modeled themselves on the FLN--the generation of Hamas leaders, of Fatah leaders, Arafat himself, who are leading the Palestinian cause in 2000. How did they interpret Oslo? How did they interpret the fact that Yitzhak Rabin in 1992--the Chief of Staff of the Israeli army in 1967, the conqueror of the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan and Sinai--he's the one coming to the Palestinians and saying, 'Let's pull back. Let's make some accommodation. Let's end the occupation. Let's create independence for you.' And Barak, in 1999, running on an even larger, more magnanimous, more actual statehood platform--Barak, the most decorated soldier in the history of the Israeli military, Barak, the Chief of Staff of the Israeli--it matters that he came from within the military establishment to this Palestinian interpretation. What is Oslo, if not signals from within the power structure that the power structure is caving? And, what does the FLN do when the power structure caves? It doubles down on its attacks because the fact that the French ask for a ceasefire means that they sense their vulnerability. That's your only signal of vulnerability: you triple down on the attacks. And so, what was the Second Intifada in the minds of the orchestrators of the Second Intifada? The First Intifada was bottom-up: Palestinian leaders were as surprised as the Israelis and they had to pivot to pretend to be in charge of it. The Second Intifada was a planned, organized, guerrilla-warfare project--really a campaign--with leaders, with bank accounts, with planners, with intelligence, with engineers. The Second Intifada was the Palestinian political elite, raised on the ideas of Algeria, saying, 'We've just gotten the signal; now we double-down.' And, so, the height of peace was the moment to destroy the peace in 140 suicide bombings.
1:04:26	Russ Roberts: If I'm listening to this and I'm a relative newcomer to Israeli politics or the Israeli conflict, and you, listeners, may know--we've talked about it before--that the October 7th attacks on what's called the Gaza envelope, the part of Israel close to the Gazan border, which take place 18 years after Israel withdraws its army--another withdrawal--and give some level of sovereignty to Hamas after elections in 2006. And then, in 2007, Hamas has basically control over it. There's a big debate among left and right here and out in the Western world as to how much Israeli blockading of Gaza helped create Hamas' October 7th moment. I naively believed that Gaza really was a massive slum. We have learned since October 7th, actually, there were parts of it that were quite nice. And, we've also learned that the billions of dollars that Western aid gave to Gaza were used not to create bomb shelters, or schools, or other things, but were mainly used to create a very large tunnel system to protect Hamas to launch a horrific attack. So if I'm listening to this, though, I'm thinking, well--and, sorry, and the tragedy--there are many of October 7th--but one of the tragedies is that the people who were killed, many of them were on the left. As many of the Israelis who were murdered, they were on the left, eager to create connections between Jews and Palestinians and Gaza. Worked with them, hired them, drove them to hospitals in Israel when they had conditions that Palestinian hospitals couldn't take care of. And so, if I may use a little French, 'Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose'--the more things change, the more they stay the same. On the surface--you can footnote this, caveat it, or expand on it--there's no difference between October 7th and the Intifada of the early 2000s we're talking about. It's just another set of events that makes it harder for Israelis to favor a two-state solution because it's evidently not what they want. Is that a fair assessment of where we stand right now? Haviv Rettig Gur: That is an extremely fair depiction of what most Israeli Jews think. Absolutely. Within Palestine society-- Russ Roberts: Sorry, you're saying Israeli Jews, because there's two million Arab Israelis who we're not talking about right now, but we're talking about the seven million Jewish Israelis who are neither Christian, Druze, nor Muslim. Go ahead. Haviv Rettig Gur: Yes. That's really important. I want to make it very clear. The entirety of the narrative that I have tried to lay out and anything I say ahead of time, unless we say otherwise explicitly, is my attempt to portray as authentically and truly and empathetically as I know how the mainstream Israeli Jewish narrative. There are, as we said, narratives among the Jewish left to the left of the mainstream and with the right to the right of the mainstream. They're fascinating, they're different. They have a lot of data points that they use to show that they are right and everybody else is wrong. Among Israeli Arabs, there are many layers of identity. They consider themselves Palestinian and Arab and Israeli and Muslim, and many of them are Christian. And, they have five narratives amongst themselves, complex, layered. There's a lot of Israeliness, deep Israeliness and identification with Israel, and Palestinianness and deep identification with the Palestinian situation and suffering and cause and identity. And then, among Palestinians in the West Bank in Gaza there are another 11 narratives. It's big, it's complex. It's a real living, breathing human society. All of us are real living, breathing human societies. So, I want to just clarify--and it's really important to--that what I'm trying to convey is what the mainstream--I estimated it at 80%; it really is a huge mainstream cohesive. Because the left collapsed in this story, it kind of joined the center that the right also kind of collapsed into and is 80% of the Israeli mainstream we have now. Excuse me.
1:09:00	Russ Roberts: And I would just add that, when we talk about the left and we talk about Jews, among Jewish Israelis, many of them are religious and many of them are not religious, which complicates outsiders' understanding. When we talk about the left in Israel, it is not the same as the left in normal Western democracies. Overwhelmingly the issue we're talking about when we make the left-right distinction is how to treat our neighbors, the Palestinians, as well as our internal Arab cousins. All the other issues are either much less significant in the left-right divide--or the reverse. Just to take one of my favorites, in Israeli politics, the left are capitalists. They're in Tel Aviv, starting up companies, investing money, making profit. The right are often ultra-Orthodox who want to live off the state and live on welfare, which is completely the opposite of what would be left-right distinctions in the United States. So, carry on. Haviv Rettig Gur: Right. The left is more likely to balance the budget than the right, yes, in Israel, by far. And, the best correlation I ever heard in the data was a study conducted I believe by the Israel Democracy Institute, of all the parties currently in the coalition and all the parties currently in the opposition. This was I believe a year ago or a year and a half ago. And, the closest correlation was religious observance. Russ Roberts: Meaning? Haviv Rettig Gur: Meaning the more religious you are, the more likely you are to be on the right. And, the less religious you are, the less likely you are to be on the right. And, that was a very, very high correlation. And, there was also a correlation to Ashkenazi and Mizrahi--Jews from the European who tended to the left; there's Jews from the Arab world and the Muslim world who tended to the right. There are a lot of different correlations. The single best correlation for which way you voted was religious observance. And, make of that what you will. The culture that produces the Israeli right is a more religious culture. The culture that produces the Israeli left are more a secular one. That's a lot of the energy also, those fears of treading on each other's fundamental way of life is a lot of the energy behind the judicial reform fight of last year, which, if people remember about three Israels ago, that was the thing tearing us apart--right?--13 months ago. So, yeah, the left-right distinction is very important. I'll also say there's more diversity on the ground than you could possibly see from far away. For example, when Ariel Sharon in 2005 carried out the Gaza disengagement--pulled out of Gaza, to the last settler, to the last soldier, to the last inch--he offered money to people who would leave ahead of time. And, the Gaza settlers were considered very, very ideologically fervent. This was a group of 8,000 people who lived among a million and a half Palestinians at the time, and you had to have a lot of faith to think that that was somehow going to ever become Israel. Even that group of deeply, deeply religiously believing--thinking that they're part of a redemption of the land, that is the redemption of the people, and all of that--even with that ideology, half of the Gaza settlers took the money and left before the army went in and pulled the rest out. And so, there is a willingness to compromise in places where you don't expect. There is a disappointment with the Second Intifada, even on the right, that always opposed the Oslo Peace Process. And I'll give you an example. And, this is really important to understand, because for Israelis, the last test of Arab intentions--Palestinian intentions, and beyond Palestinian intentions, in Lebanon and elsewhere--wasn't in 2000 or 2000-to-2003, the Second Intifada. The test continued. Because, who won that election in 2001 at the collapse of the left when 17 points of the electorate disappeared on us? A man named Ariel Sharon. He was the head of the opposition, head of the Likud Party at the time. And, Sharon is a former major-general-- Russ Roberts: On the right-- Haviv Rettig Gur: controversial--on the right. A controversial fellow. A brilliant military commander in his past. And, Sharon becomes Prime Minister while buses are blowing up. I can't convey the trauma of those years. A 7:30AM bus blowing up in Jerusalem is essentially a school bus blowing up. I mean, this was a horrific period. And, Sharon-- Russ Roberts: You say that because many children were taking public transportation to get to school. Would you say literally a school bus? That's what you mean. Haviv Rettig Gur: Yeah. It's not literally a school bus. Many children-- Russ Roberts: But, it's full-- Haviv Rettig Gur: I, as a child in Jerusalem, took the city bus to school. City buses are more reliable. I was often late out of the door. And, the school buses--the buses--the city buses that are blowing up in the morning in the city of Jerusalem in 2001 are full of kids. And, so the idea that these attacks, it's something--it's a statistic. It's a Wikipedia article. No. This is actually the lived experience of people convinced that the other side wants to mass murder our children, and they're convinced of it because the other side tried to mass murder our children. And, that's-- Russ Roberts: Where does that--go ahead. No, finish. Haviv Rettig Gur: So, Ariel Sharon becomes Prime Minister under those conditions. And, there's a debate in the Israeli strategic elite about what to do. And there's actually a voice--coming out of army intelligence and some other places--that says that it's not clear that we can stop it with military solutions. That you need a political solution. Because, in all the history of warfare, there has never been a guerrilla army based in a supportive civilian population that was defeated by any standing army. Now, standing armies don't defeat guerrillas in support of civilian populations. That's never happened, not since Alexander the Great. It was a whole discussion. And Sharon's answer to that was essentially, 'I didn't say it was possible. I just said we're going to do it.' Map of British Mandate for Palestine, 1920-1922. Also showing the narrow, 9-15 mile, highly populated area remaining for Israel, from Hadera to Tel Aviv to Ashdod, if the West Bank is ceded as Palestinian. Source: Cristian Ionita, edmaps.com. And, this was my army; I was in the infantry in these years. The infantry carried out tremendous amount of urban warfare training. We tried to lock down as much as possible the pathways to Israel. I sat in many, many ambushes on the mountainsides of the West Bank at night, trying to catch the suicide bombers sneaking in the night through the valleys to get to Jerusalem, to get to Tel Aviv. The West Bank, people should remember, are the highlands overlooking all of our major cities. And, Israel is nine miles wide--without the West Bank--right in the middle of the country. So, it's very close, it's very intimate. I was an hour walk from the Green Line when I was laying those ambushes. And, Sharon's response actually is implemented in April of 2002 when there's a particularly heinous bombing. I don't know how to measure the heinousness of bombings; but this one, we call it to this day the Passover Massacre. This was a bomber who walked into the Park Hotel on the beach in Netanya on Passover Eve, when a couple hundred people were in a ballroom of the hotel celebrating the Passover Seder, many of them elderly. And, detonated his bomb, his shrapnel bomb. I believe the death toll was something like 30 people and many, many dozens wounded. And, Sharon declared Operation Defensive Shield. Defensive Shield was basically my war. In other words, every generation in Israel has its war. It's one of these tragedies of the Israeli experience. My father was in the artillery on the southern Golan when the Syrians overran their positions, and he spent the first many hours of the war behind Syrian lines. Many of the men in his battalion--most of the men in his battalion--were killed in that first day. I did not have-- Russ Roberts: In 1973? Haviv Rettig Gur: Right, right, right. In 1973. Thank you. I apologize. I'm used to talking to Israelis about this where a lot of the sort of background is obvious. In 2002, our orders were very simple in Defensive Shield. Battalions were basically given lists of people to arrest. When the army pulled out in the late 1990s of the Palestinian population centers and handed over control--security control, police control--to Arafat's various security services, that included the intelligence networks that they had built in the Palestinian population centers. All the things that travel with an army when an army goes somewhere, including the intelligence gathering. And so, we were blind. We couldn't see these networks producing these suicide bombers. And, the first priority was to rebuild that--that ability to see what's going on in Palestinian society. And so, we had long lists of people to arrest. There were checkpoints: there were literally Israeli infantry walking into cities--just literally, some places encountering gun battles. And, it was very painful. It was very dramatic. My dad once told me that he thinks I had the worst war, which is shocking because he was in desperate danger and I was not. The gap in power between Fatah[?fat'hun?] and the IDF in 2002 had nothing to do with--it was totally orders of magnitude--I was orders of magnitude safer. But my dad got to be in a clean area without civilians facing an enemy conventional army. And, you could just shoot. And you could feel good about having stopped them, when you stopped them, or survived them, if you couldn't stop them. And, we were, of course, fighting in the middle of civilian populations. It was a much messier kind of fighting. And, long story short: Defensive Shield lasts--it doesn't quite end at any particular place, but it is unquestionably successful. We start rolling up--'we,' the Israeli Army--starts rolling up these intelligence--these, excuse me, terror networks--start gathering proper intelligence, start defeating a lot of these cells and networks. And, by I think December of 2003, the Second Intifada is basically over. I mean, people can look up the dates of each bombing, but if I'm not mistaken, it's not even a bombing every two months by then. And, Ariel Sharon gets up at the end of the year--late December 2003--on national television, and he gives this astonishing speech in which he announces what would come to be called the Disengagement from Gaza. And his basic rationale--in interviews, and some of it's in the speech and some of it other people have said in his name--his basic rationale is: We can't roll over them forever. We learned in the Second Intifada that we can't pull out and have them reciprocate that with the one thing we want from them, which is peace. Why can't they? Political ideologies, political dysfunction of their elites, whatever. Who cares why? I'm not going to socially engineer them. I don't know how to fix them. They can't. So, what do we do? And, Sharon's answer was: We get the hell out--for our interest--and if anybody crosses the border, we shoot them. That's it. We separate. They're free--free to collapse, free to thrive, free to do whatever the hell they want. And, we're free of them. And, everybody is thus free of this terrible situation where we control another people. And, in August of 2005, the disengagement is carried out. What's really important for people to understand was the that in real time it was incredibly popular. What the Israeli public thought--and the Israeli public is a big place with many different opinions--but what I would say the majority of the Israeli public believed about the disengagement from Gaza when it was happening in August of 2005 was that the Israeli left had tried to end the occupation, but--with a ridiculous and inappropriate amount of optimism--assumed that what it was trying to do was what Palestinian leaders were trying to. And, that had failed miserably and disastrously in rivers of blood. The right was now going to do much more responsibly the same exact thing the left can't do because the left are a bunch of Pollyannas. That was the basic perception, and it was immensely popular. And the day after the disengagement from Gaza, when the literal gates to the fence were closed by a soldier and Israel no longer controls any part of Gaza--there isn't even a blockade at that point; the blockade comes in two years later when Hamas takes over Gaza--that end of Israeli presence in Gaza made Sharon more popular the day after than he was the day before. He's by now everybody's grandpa. He's one of the most popular prime ministers in Israel's history at this moment. He is so popular--and Likud is so unpopular and mired in a whole bunch of corruption scandals, and it's a lot of detail there that doesn't matter--that he decides to leave Likud. Netanyahu is back in Likud leading a rebellion against him. He decides to leave Likud. And, I believe it's November of 2005, in August he pulled out of Gaza. In November, he leaves Likud and establishes a party called Kadima. He then has a massive stroke. He is enormously obese. He is very unhealthy. He's in his 70s. He has a massive stroke. He's basically brain-dead. And, the country goes to an election in early 2006. The Number Two guy in Kadima, who came with Sharon from Likud, his name is Ehud Olmert--apologies again for being so deep in the weeds. When we come out of it, things will be visible that were not when you don't go through the weeds. Ehud Olmert, unpopular, but Number Two in Kadima with Sharon, former Likudnik, is now running for Prime Minister. And, before the election, he actually gives a speech in which he says on public television--I think it's two weeks before the election--he says, he talks about this idea of withdrawing from the West Bank. Sharon, when he pulled out of Gaza, also took down four small settlements in the northern West Bank in northern Samaria. And, Olmert says that that was the goal. The goal was then to do the same disengagement, unilateral, in the ways that serve our interests. 'Screw them, they can't reciprocate. We are not waiting for them. We're going to pull out of the West Bank.' And, he would come to call this the Convergence Plan, [foreign language 01:24:12], which is like the in-gathering plan. In English he translated it, Convergence Plan. Terrible names. Israeli Prime Ministers, whether it's 'disengagement' or 'convergence,' they'll use any word they can to not use the word 'withdrawal.' It's really kind of adorable. But, the Convergence Plan is known to the public that he wants this--that he thinks this way--on election day. And, I often, when going through some of this history, ask people, ask groups that I'm talking to: You have Netanyahu back in control of Likud after the bloody collapse of Oslo, a man who argued Oslo would collapse in bloodshed. And, you have Olmert, this deeply unpopular Prime Minister. By the way, he once ran for Likud leader in the primary. He got 2% of the Likud primary vote. Olmert is now head of Kadima, and Olmert is talking about withdrawals from the West Bank. Who wins that election in 2006? And, I always get 90% raising their hand for Netanyahu and 2% hesitantly for Olmert because they figure there's probably a trick here. And of course, the answer is that Olmert wins the 2006 election. In 2006, if a right-winger is saying it and Sharon wanted it, it is still plausible to talk about withdrawals from territory. Olmert forms his government, I think in March of 2006. He forms it with the Labor Party. He gives the Labor Party the Defense Ministry, which is really significant. The left that can no longer win an election is now in charge of the military that will pull out of the West Bank. In other words, the people who believe in a West Bank withdrawal will be the ones carrying out the West Bank withdrawal. And, the government exists--I'm trying to do math on the fly, I apologize, but this is all so easy to look up--I believe the government is in existence 10 weeks when Hamas in Gaza carried out, in June of 2006--we are out 10 months?--the first tunnel operation that Hamas has ever carried out. They dig a tunnel under the border. They pop up on the Israeli side. They kill two Israeli soldiers. They kidnap a third. His name is Gilad Shalit. And, they drag him into the dungeons of Gaza. There is now a shooting war on the Gaza border. The Israeli army is racing in to try and rescue him. And, on July 12th, 2006, in the midst of that shooting war in Gaza, Hezbollah in the north carry out its first cross-border attack. They kill four soldiers, they kidnap two others, Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser. We start to see this systemic sort of idea of kidnapping coming to the strategic and tactical arsenal of the enemy. Hezbollah is the exact same story. In May 2000, Ehud Barak gave the order, after 18 years in Lebanon, to pull out of Lebanon. It was our Afghanistan. Right? We went in chasing after terrorists. We got bogged down there for 18 years. And, when we pulled out the very terrorists--well, in Lebanon's case, different terrorists; in Afghanistan's case the exact same terrorists--but still, terrorist group, then takes over the vacuum that we left behind. Six years after Israel unilaterally withdraws from Lebanon, Hezbollah now carries out the first cross-border attack, killing and kidnapping soldiers. And, Ehud Olmert has a problem. And, maybe I'll end the story with this problem, because this is where the lesson that Israelis learned in the Second Intifada becomes almost unassailable truth in the Israeli psyche. The problem Ehud Olmert has is that he has just argued--and he argued it before an election, publicly; he even at one point said, 'Don't tell me I didn't tell you.' The right had accused Sharon of carrying out the Gaza disengagement, but when he was elected back in 2003 he didn't say that he wanted to pull out. He ran as a right-winger. So Olmert says, 'I don't want anybody telling me you didn't know.' Olmert's problem is: The two places we had just pulled out of unilaterally, Gaza and South Lebanon, we were now in a shooting war with those places. When Barak pulls out of Lebanon in 2000, Israelis come to him. And, there's this discussion in the public in Israel in which Israelis say to him, 'Who do you think is going to take over when we leave? Who do you think fills a vacuum of power in the Middle East today?' Right? When President Obama ordered the American troops out of Iraq, who filled that vacuum of power? There's a direct line. Russ Roberts: John Adams. Yeah. Haviv Rettig Gur: Yeah. There's a direct line to ISIS [Islamic State of Iraq and Syria]. Right? That's not even an accusation; it's not a criticism of Obama. I am not sure that was a bad policy decision at all. If after that much money and that much blood spent in a place for so long--when you pull out, ISIS fills the gap into the vacuum--it wasn't working. I'm not accusing Obama of anything. I'm just saying, when there's a vacuum of power in the Middle East today, going through the crisis it's going through, who fills it? Not Jeffersonian Democrats, right? Like you say. If we leave Lebanon, Hezbollah will take over. And, when Sharon pulls out of Gaza, that same argument is made to Sharon. And, people say, 'Who is going to take over Gaza when we leave? The one liberal in the entire Palestinian Parliament, the Salam Fayyads? Who is going to take over?' The people who are going to take over are Hamas. And Sharon and Barak's answers, basically--I'm paraphrasing, but their answers were basically--'Look, we pull out to the international border. We don't pull out gently or politely or because we're making peace. We don't believe in peace because they don't believe in peace. We don't believe they can reciprocate peace. We pull out to a defensible border. They come at us, we shoot them. Believe me: I'm Ehud Barak, former Chief of Staff of the IDF, most decorated soldier in the history of Israel.' Sharon--Sharon is this brilliant military commander, ruthless commander. People should look up his exploits in 1973 in the southern front--and Sharon says, 'If they think this is weakness, they're going to test us. And then, we're going to have to "explain" to them it's not weakness'--'explain' in air quotes--'and then they will understand. Don't worry, Israelis: We will have international backing because we've pulled out to an international border. Don't worry, this is defensible. I promise you it'll be okay.' Russ Roberts: 'We'll have the moral capital to defend that border, just like any country when it's invaded.' Haviv Rettig Gur: Exactly. And, that's when Olmert's problem is clear-- Russ Roberts: Because of the tunnels. Haviv Rettig Gur: Barak and Sharon offered this promise: 'We will restore deterrence if the enemy interprets our withdrawal as weakness.' And, Olmert has to restore deterrence. But, Olmert has to restore deterrence urgently and more powerfully for one huge reason: He wants to pull out of the West Bank. That's his legacy. That's his fundamental idea. And, the West Bank is an order of magnitude more dangerous than Gaza and Lebanon because the West Bank is the mountain range overlooking the coastal plane where most Israelis live. The West Bank shrinks us down to nine miles wide, like I said. If we pull out of the West Bank, somebody can stand in the West Bank with a weapon they can carry on their literal shoulder--for example, an 88 millimeter mortar--and shut down, using that little tube, our major international airport. And then, walk away--just literally get in a car and drive away, calm as can be. If we pull out of the West Bank and it goes the way Gaza went when Hamas took over in 2007, we have to retake it. I'm not even saying--this is not a moral discussion--this is a strategic, tactical one. If we pull out of the West Bank and it turns into a kind of non-sovereign, non-state entity that takes over the functions of state entities and can declare war, but can't be made responsible because it's not actually the government--meaning Hamas in Gaza/Hezbollah in Lebanon--if that happens to the West Bank, we have to go back in just to reopen our major highways and cities. And so, the West Bank can't go the way Gaza went. It has to be safe or it can't be done. Literally can't be done. It'll be reversed with terrible bloodshed. And, nobody knows how to prevent that, how to stop that from happening. And so, Olmert has to show that he can restore deterrence in Gaza and Lebanon in order to be able to pull out of the West Bank. And, he tries. It's called the Second Lebanon War. Every single bridge in Lebanon was destroyed. Half of Beirut lost electricity. I remember one scene on TV where Fouad Siniora, the Prime Minister of Lebanon--as close as the Arab world comes to an actual liberal--is sitting at the Security Council--I believe is in New York, addressing the Security Council--and he wept actual tears. This is not some, like, Bill-Clinton-on-the-campaign-trail weeping. An Arab politician weeping on television is a different cultural moment. Lebanon suffered terribly. Olmert smashed everything he could find that could possibly be connected to Hezbollah.
1:33:22	Russ Roberts: And you're saying he did that because he had to validate his vision of what he wanted to do in the West Bank. He had to show that we could respond and restore deterrence through aggression, through military action. Haviv Rettig Gur: Through shattering the enemy, Hezbollah. Russ Roberts: Yeah. Haviv Rettig Gur: Yeah. And, here's the thing--and this is really the end; thank you, and apologies: It didn't work. The Israeli civilian experience did not experience this smashing of Lebanon. Did not experience Olmert's powerful response to Hamas. What Israeli civilians experienced in 2006 was that hundreds of thousands of them became displaced people. Was that cities were bombarded by thousands upon thousands upon thousands of rockets, and nothing on earth could stop it. There was no Iron Dome. The north and south of Israel didn't have enough bomb shelters. There has since been a multi-billion shekel project to literally build towers of bomb shelters attached to old apartment buildings, with a door cut open so that every old apartment now has a new bomb shelter. If you drive through the city of Sderot, just a few miles off the Gaza border-- Russ Roberts: I've seen it-- Haviv Rettig Gur: you will literally see new rooms, towers of new bedrooms, attached to old apartment buildings. Israel has built a bomb shelter in every apartment because if you have 14 seconds' warning of a siren and you have two little kids and you're on the third floor, you're not getting to that bomb shelter in the street. And so, Israelis fled and entire cities were emptied, and nothing Israel did--Hezbollah was proud of this. Hezbollah said publicly, in Hebrew, on YouTube--YouTube, was around then, right? I remember the videos. I think it was YouTube. Said, publicly, 'Nothing you do will stop the missile fire.' And, the terrible tragedy--not so much for us as for our enemies--was that the Israeli public came to believe them. They're undeterrable, Israelis believe. You cannot deter Hamas. You cannot deter Hezbollah. They're not sensitive to their own people's suffering. And therefore you cannot pull out of the West Bank. And so, any potential support for a West Bank withdrawal collapsed. And, really, it's important: The fundamental point here is that it didn't collapse on the right, which already had reasons--security, sometimes religious, sometimes other kinds of ideological--not to pull out of the West Bank. It collapsed on the left that was desperate to pull out of the West Bank for a hundred different reasons. All of them good. And they no longer thought, after 2006--confirmed again and again and again in different ways that even the right-- I'll stop with this sentence: What do Israelis actually believe? People ask me that a lot, and I don't go on CNN [Cable News Network] to convey the five-minute Israeli--if you get 90 seconds, you're lucky. But, you have to walk through it because what Israelis actually think is utter total confusion and frustration. They think--and again, this is their experience, this is not the totality of objective history; I don't know the totality of objective history--but what the Israeli Jewish mainstream believes happened to it, what it experienced, was that it tried. And it tried, and tried again. It reorganized its entire politics around this attempt. It fought an internal political civil war for this attempt. And every single move in that direction ended in rivers of blood because Palestinian ideological elites or Hezbollah ideological elite, Lebanese--certain parts of Lebanese ideological elites--were fighting in a whole different universe, an entirely different kind of war, and could not reciprocate an Israeli withdrawal with peace. The West Bank is dangerous in a way that Gaza and South Lebanon--dangerous though they may be, if they're controlled by Hamas or Hezbollah--could never be. That is what the Israeli left--which still exists. These people didn't evaporate: they just don't vote that way anymore. And, not only that, we have these fascinating polls that tell us that when you ask them conditionals--in other words, you say, 'Should there be a Palestinian state?'--huge numbers of Israeli Jews say no: I mean, 80% say no. And then you say, 'Well, what if it were safe?' And then, suddenly 60% say, 'Sure.' And then, you say to them, 'Will it ever be safe?' 80% say, 'No.' That's where they're at and that's the fundamental Israeli story. That's also why they're totally immune to international pressure on this point, because they actually believe that every place they pull out of, the Palestinian ideological factions will use to murder their children. How are you going to pressure the Israelis, if you can sanction the Israelis, or boycott the Israelis, or ostracize the Israelis, or turn anti-Semitic and hate Jews anywhere you find them? Whatever you think you're doing to pressure the Israelis, Hamas lies on the other side, pressuring them in the other direction. Because, it absolutely convinced them for a generation that there is nothing they can do to pull out that Hamas won't turn into terrible bloodshed and the murder of their children.
1:38:35	Russ Roberts: So, now what? Since 2006 we had this thing called October 7th. We did something in Gaza in response to it that dwarfs everything that was done before. The old metaphor--it's grotesque--but it was called 'mowing the lawn': every once in a while things get bad in Gaza, we have to go in. So we've had a bunch of skirmishes, whatever you want to call them. You mentioned tunnels, by the way: these were tunnels that went under the Israeli border, not tunnels that sheltered Hamas that we've been dealing with lately. So what do we do? Where does this leave us? Should we be dropping copies of Gandhi--which is another anti-colonial movement that chose a different approach? It was successful. The British left India. Again, the more things change, the more they stay the same. You can't, as they say, kill an idea. You can kill a lot of the leaders of that idea, and Israel has very effectively over the last few months, destroyed the leadership on October 6th of Hamas, or October 7th. It's been replaced. Many of their fighters are dead. But still, Hamas in Gaza, still holding hostages. Hezbollah, we've supposedly destroyed 80% of their missiles, but they still have 20%. Yesterday was a beautiful day of sirens and warnings and shrapnel and missiles falling all over Israel launched from southern Lebanon. There is that thing called Iran, which has funded much of that infrastructure that is either about to attack us or we're about to attack them. Got any optimism for me, Haviv? It's a great, credible history lesson, but what do I learn from it--for tomorrow as opposed to yesterday? Haviv Rettig Gur: Yeah. October 7 was Hamas arguing, essentially--if you understand that history, the strategic history--arguing essentially that the problem so far is that we haven't sufficiently sacrificed on the altar of Algeria. Russ Roberts: Yeah, x+1 is not enough, or x was higher than I thought; so we need to do 2x, not x+300. Haviv Rettig Gur: Right. And Hamas engineered, painstakingly, the destruction of Gaza. The tunnel networks have--they've said this. This isn't an Israeli conspiracy theory. They have argued this. The Israeli--not a single civilian. There are 500 kilometers of tunnels in Gaza; it's the single biggest thing Palestinians have ever built. Hamas bent the entire Gazan economy to this tunnel project; and they built nothing else for 17 years. And the fundamental purpose of this tunnel project is that when Hamas begins the war it planned to begin, the only way the enemy can get to Hamas is to cut through the cities. There's simply no other way to get to those tunnels. And in 13 months of war, not a single civilian has been allowed to step foot in a single tunnel for their protection. The point of this war is a). to double down on Second Intifada traumatic terrorizing of the Israelis; and b).-- Russ Roberts: And, boy are they succeeding-- Haviv Rettig Gur: Right. In causing the pain they certainly succeeded. And, b). in doubling down on the Israeli response--military response--pain for Palestinian civilians that empties the Israelis of their purpose, like it did to the French colonialists. Like the Mau Mau Rebellion did to the British and Kenya. Like Gandhi, in his exact opposite strategy; but it was based around robbing the British of their excuse for their use of force, for their violence, for their imposition of oppression. By forcing the Israelis to decide that any cost--there is no cost they won't pay to get Hamas; and then making that cost catastrophic for Palestinians, you impose all of those Algerian costs that the Algerians thought about on the French from all the different layers: the forcing French cruelty against Algeria, forcing Israeli cruelty against Gaza. That's the strategy. It is a doubling and tripling and quadrupling and whatever goes beyond quadrupling--quintupling--of that strategy by Sinwar for this conflict. And, I have argued--and I have argued this since 2012: I wrote a piece in 2014 about the Hamas/Gaza strategy being the Algeria strategy. And, that piece went insanely viral. Hundreds of thousands of people read an essay that was 3,000 words--that, after something goes viral, you look back at it and you're very upset that you got something wrong in it. Things like that, right? That's not a piece that should have gone viral. That was long and plodding and complicated. But, it explained why Hamas isn't stupid and that people really are hungering for: what's the deep, rich, serious thinking? Sinwar is a psychopath, and probably actually a sociopath, literally; but all Hamas isn't psychopaths. And all Hamas did this. And so many Gazans still find dignity in that version of the story. What's going on? And the answer is: It was a doubling down on Algeria. And, I have argued that it won't work. It won't work. And the reason it won't work is the ways in which the Israelis are unlike the French. And the biggest way that the Israelis are unlike the French, is that they have no France-- Russ Roberts: Yeah. Well-- Haviv Rettig Gur: There's no France to go back to. But there are many other ways that the Israelis are unlike the French. They come from the Arab world. If the PLO, in 1964, looking at Algeria drawing inspiration--modeling its strategy on the FLN strategy--had noticed that, in the immediate aftermath of the FLN kicking out the French, they kicked out another group: They kicked out the Jews, a Jewish community that had been in Algeria since before Algerians spoke Arabic. And, the Jews could not live in Algeria under the FLN. And that's why Israel--where those Algerian Jews largely live--is immune to the anti-French strategy: because we don't have a France, and we don't even have an Algeria. Russ Roberts: To go back to-- Haviv Rettig Gur: Right. Russ Roberts: So, so-- Haviv Rettig Gur: So, what happens when you launch an anti-colonial strategy of brutalizing warfare, meant to draw cruelty to your own side as well, against an enemy that in the specific characteristics needed for the strategy to work, it doesn't share those characteristics with colonial? You want to still call me colonialist as an epithet? You want to still call me colonialist because you don't like me? You want to call me colonialist because in some philosophical sense, there's some version of this in which I'm a colonialist? I don't care about this moralizing language. By the way: none of us care: not Palestinians, not Israelis. There are polls that tell us that 90% of Palestinians think the Israelis want to exterminate them, and 90% of Israelis tell us Palestinians want to exterminate them. No Israeli and no Palestinian cares about the moral emotions of foreigners. It's just not registering in their psyche. And it shouldn't register in their psyche because it looks to them detached and ridiculous. The idea that you foreigners are living out your moral fantasies on us, while we have everything literally at stake--which is how people are experiencing this--means that none of this foreign emotion matters. Nothing will stop the Israelis and nothing will stop the Palestinians because everything is at stake. But, they will still fail, and they will fail because of all the ways in which we are not French colonialism. Russ Roberts: Okay. So-- Haviv Rettig Gur: And, that's the great tragedy: that they are destroying Palestine, not Israel, in this refusal to understand us on our own terms. I think that if they knew our history--if they listened to your and my podcast a year ago--then Hamas's catastrophic, cataclysmic mistake would become obvious. And I try to teach Palestinians our story, inasmuch as any Palestinian will listen to me--which is not very much.
1:47:18	Russ Roberts: So, let's close. I mean, there's a lot more to say. Haviv Rettig Gur: Yeah, we've only just begun. Russ Roberts: I know. But-- Haviv Rettig Gur: Welcome to the Middle East. Russ Roberts: What's the--all this does is break my heart. Right? So, when I moved here three years ago--and I may have told this story before; I apologize to listeners--but in my book Wild Problems, I write about the decision I made to come here: to move here to take this job as President of Shalem College, for my wife and I to become Israeli citizens. It's a wild leap of uncertainty. It doesn't matter how many times you've visited Israel before--which we had both had: Living here is different. There's a great joke about that--I won't tell it now--but the punchline is, 'Oh, well then you were a tourist.' Haviv Rettig Gur: Oh, it's a joke about Hell? Russ Roberts: Yeah, exactly. So, we'll save it for another time. But, my point is, is that when I wrote this up in my book, a friend of mine, a Jewish friend who read the manuscript said, 'Well, of course when you talk about your decision to move to Israel, you're going to concede that you had a moral dilemma to become complicit in the occupation of Palestine.' And I thought, 'No, I'm not actually. I don't feel that way and I'm not going to pander to that.' You can read the book: I didn't put anything in about that. But, what he was saying was: to live here, to move here--which is even stronger than to stay here--to move here, is to say that I accept what happened in 1948 as part of my narrative, and I will fight, and my children will fight--not in the literal sense in my case, my children are older. But, to move here as a young person, which thousands of people have done, is to say, I'm going to walk into this knowing that my neighbors don't believe I have a right to be here and will, and have a strategy--which, I like your narrative, Haviv: I'm very sympathetic to it--that they have adopted a strategy that is equivalent to the wind trying to get me to remove my coat and all I do is clutch it closer. And the sun is what gets me to take my coat off by being strong. And so, boy, you kill 1200 of our people and kidnap 250, and rape our women and kidnap our children and do other cruelties? We'll show you. And, we have; and it's horrible. It's absolutely horrible. And, the death and destruction we've wreaked on Gaza, I hope and pray will lead to a better tomorrow for them as well as us. But, shouldn't we just move? I mean, come on. You said every few years there's a terrible war. How do we reconcile that reality? And I have no regrets about moving here, by the way. I'm being somewhat rhetorical and dramatic here. I believe it's our homeland. I believe we're entitled to live here. I do not believe it is immoral to live here. But it's tough, parts of it. And I don't have children here, in the Army. My heart goes out to all my colleagues who do and my students who go back and forth between Gaza and Lebanon over the last year. It's horrific. But, the idea that it wouldn't accomplish anything is more horrific still. So, you got any cheer for me at the end of this narrative? Haviv Rettig Gur: I mean, that's such a fundamental question and I'm glad you asked it. There is a profound gap between the way that the West looks at us and the way we look at ourselves. And it is a gap that I think is rooted to some significant extent--maybe even a very significant extent--in the gap between the Jews of the West and the Jews of Israel. We have, today, two Jewish civilizations, and they're basically the two Jews who survived the 20th century--the English-speaking Jew and the Hebrew-speaking Jew. In the 20th century, you either learned Hebrew, learned English, or died. That's the story of the Jews. Every time I say something like that, French Jews raise their hand and get angry at me, but they're the third largest Jewish community after Israel and America. But, French Jews are the exception that proves the rule because French Jewry is 90% Sephardi: they're 90% from North Africa. After the Holocaust, France was refilled with Jews because North Africa empties of its Jews. See, for example, Algeria. So, they're the exception to this rule that absolutely proves the rule, and they've had radically different histories. The story of American Jews--who are the lens through which America and larger parts of the West and the left see Israel--is a story of the promise of liberalism coming true in astonishing ways. When the Jews land in America, these 2.5 million refugees who flee, 1,300 pogroms and a quarter million dead, and horrific oppression and laws against them. The Russian Empire, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the new Romania, and all of these different things that are happening in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to Jews, and Europe is slowly but very, very clearly becoming literally uninhabitable to Jews. Millions are fleeing, and the vast majority flee to the United States. These 2.5 million Jews land in America, and they discover for the very first time in Jewish history--it had never happened before, no Jew had ever seen this before--a country that actually, genuinely, truly believed that they belonged to it. It wasn't that Jews fantasized, as in Germany for certain periods, that they could become Germans, but the Germans never had that fantasy about the Jews. It wasn't that the Jews thought maybe there was integration in our future in the Russian Empire. And the Russians never, ever, not even under Communist rule when that was the official ideology, but still it said 'Jew' in your passport--Jews could never be Russian according to the Russians. And Jews could never be Germans according to the Germans; and Bulgarians, and by the way, Iraqis. But, the Jews could suddenly be Americans and all America thought so. And that's weird. That is an absolute unique exception. It happened a little bit also in the rest of the English-speaking world. It happened in Canada as well. Russ Roberts: It's an aberration. Haviv Rettig Gur: It's an aberration. And it felt to the Jews of America, like an end to Jewish history, to the Jewish history of pain. That's one reason that American Jews stopped teaching history about five generations ago. And, you, today, have young people in your college campuses who think that the entire experience of millions of refugees, and vast pain, and hundreds and hundreds of pogroms and death tolls into the six figures--the 20th century is the bloodiest century in Jewish history without the Holocaust. And all of that history has been reduced essentially to Fiddler [Fiddler on the Roof] in the American Jewish imagination, because they consciously decided to stop teaching history--because history had ended because America was the answer. American Jews are home, in a homeland, that's not quite America: it's American liberalism. And that existence in that homeland is a radically new Jewish world, Jewish community, Jewish psyche. The promise of liberalism came true so utterly and profoundly that it created a whole new kind of Jew. Who are the Israelis? The Israelis are the exact mirror image opposite of that. They're the Jews that went through the 20th century--because when America put up its Quota Laws in 1921 and 1924, they're the Jews who couldn't get in. They couldn't get into Canada, and Britain, and Brazil, and Australia. All the nations of the world in the 1920s and 1930s for various reasons put up Quota Laws and Immigration Laws. South Africa passed four distinct immigration laws to keep the Jews out, including one in 1937 targeting German Jews. The whole point was: Europe deals with the Jewish problem. We don't deal with the Jewish problem. Jews became undeportable. That was the Nazi problem. They'd wanted to get rid of the Jews by deportation. They couldn't--nobody would take them at a certain point--and so they had to kill them. That was how the Nazis thought of it. And, these immigration laws corralled the Jews into the gas chambers. But even after the Holocaust, these people who would become Israelis still watched as the world wouldn't take them in. I was in a high school AP [Advanced Placement] American History class in Wisconsin in 1998 or so, and my teacher talked about how the British liberated Bergen Belsen and the American soldiers liberated Buchenwald and Dachau; and then the books closed and the next day we talked about the Vietnam War. Russ Roberts: Yeah, sure. Haviv Rettig Gur: I raised my hand and I said, 'Wait a second, you think that the American troops liberated Bergen Belsen and Dachau and Buchenwald, the American and British troops? The Jews are still living there three years later. What does liberated mean?' Truman begged Congress to let them in, and Congress refused. The quotas were never lifted after the world knew everything there is to know about Auschwitz. Nobody on earth--the International Refugee Organization [IRO] brought dozens of governments to the camps to set up booths, interview the million DPs [Displaced Persons] who couldn't go home, and every single non-Jew--750,000--was given citizenship in new countries and taken away. After the IRO closes up shop and shuts down its booths and leaves, the last quarter million DPs--by the end of 1946 I believe it was--every last one of them is a Jew. The Jews watched as the world carefully sifted--after the Holocaust--the entirety of the West carefully sifted through the last survivors. When Congress shuts the doors in the 1920s, there's potentially 8 million Jews who could flee Europe to America. Nobody wants 8 million Jews: that's way too many. But, the last quarter million of a shattered remnants--the Nazis lost to the Allies, but they didn't lose the war on the Jews. They destroyed European Jewry. And that last quarter million had no place to go. When did the DP camps start emptying out in large numbers? In May, 1948; and those DPs are a quarter of the IDF. So, what is the Israeli Jewish experience of history? And this exactly speaks to your question of living on our sword, of fighting forever and ever. The world is capable of watching you die, shrugging, and turning away. And, that the best of the world, the most moral, and the American empire that created the greatest happiness and prosperity in the history--the Pax Americana is a period everybody's going to miss, especially the people who complained about it the most. And that part of the world, that great America, that the Jews who did make it in, they actually allowed to become Americans in a way that--there is no compliment paid in the history of the world to any nation on this earth than the Jewish experience of America. But, any Jew who didn't get in, watched America sit and look at them as they died. The last living Jews in the Eastern Hemisphere--I give a lot of college talks, university talks over the last year on American college campuses, and in Britain a little bit, and Canada and Australia. I think it was at GW [George Washington University] in DC, and a kid raises his hand and he says to me, 'Everyone on campus is anti-Zionist. The professors are anti-Zionist, and the students--my friends aren't my friends anymore, and I can't get a date.' This, by the way, is a very smart kid because he's waving the flag of Zionist victim of anti-Zionism in a room full of kids who self-selected to come to hear me speak. This was the right crowd to look for a date. But, I tried to convey to this kid exactly this gap. And so, I said to him, 'Look, I'm the idiot Israeli in the room. What's an anti-Zionist?' And, he says, 'Well, the anti-Zionist is the person who thinks that Israel should never have been founded.' And, I said, 'Well, but every other Jew in the Eastern Hemisphere is dead.' There's a few, but statistically that's the basic truth. What's the argument? Is the argument that we should also be dead? You wish 8 million Israeli Jews who live today should have died then? Say so out loud. Or is the argument that the world should have given us other options, somewhere else to go, to flee to? Well, I agree with that. If that's anti-Zionist, I'm an anti-Zionist. But, are there any other options? What are the other options? You're either genocidal, ignorant of the history--so you think the Jews had a choice--Zionist, or what? What's the fourth option? And, that's the gap between the American Jewish perception and the Israeli Jewish perception, which is to say: in the United States, Zionist is a word that is believed to convey a kind of ideological option. In other words, you can be six kinds of Jews, you can be Orthodox, and conservative, and reform, and Buddhist, and Communist, and Democrat voting, and Republican voting, and mountain biking. You can be a mountain biking Jew. You can be all different kinds of Jews. One of them is Zionist. Among the 16 ideological options you have for your Jewishness, you can be Zionist Jew. Ew, yuck, Zionist Jew is icky, don't be that one. That's what people think they're saying in America when they say anti-Zionist. But, what is the Israeli understanding of anti-Zionist, because they lived that history that American Jews don't even learn? They actually lived through the 20th century in a way America saved its Jews from ever having to live through. Zionist just literally means survived. And I say that because, to those DPs who were a quarter of the IDF in 1948, if they don't have this place, they don't have any place on earth, and the entirety of the world proved it to them. When Truman sends Earl Harrison, the Dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School--I think we mentioned him in the last talk-- Russ Roberts: Yeah, we talked about him. Yeah-- Haviv Rettig Gur: He gives this poll, and I want to re-mention it if people haven't heard. It's a year ago-- Russ Roberts: Yeah, it's [inaudible 02:01:55]-- Haviv Rettig Gur: He gives this poll at one camp in which-- Russ Roberts: DPs meaning displaced persons--people who, after the war, quote, "have no place to go." Haviv Rettig Gur: Right. So, he comes to one camp and he gives a poll in which he says to people, 'Where do you want to go? I don't know if I can get you there. President wants to take you into America, Congress won't let him. I don't know what we're going to do, but where do you want to go?' And, 90% write on the first line, 'Palestine.' And, 90% write on the second line, 'Palestine.' Harrison is annoyed because apparently Jews don't know how surveys work. So, he gives them a new survey in which he says, 'Other than Palestine, where do you want to go?' And, 25% write, 'Crematorium.' They got the message. They got the message. The world gave them a message, they finally understood it. So, for an Israeli--and this is something American Jews really struggle to understand and imagine, but it is so fundamental--living on our sword is redemption. We stopped dying when we started having the great and profound right that our ancestors never had and so they just died quietly while others tried to tell a story about their deaths that ennobled the others. Our ancestors did not get to live on their sword. We do. That's the privilege. That's the change in history. That's what Israel means. Our enemies can't scare us out of here. War came on October 7, and left-wingers went to Gaza, just like right-wingers, because Gaza had convinced them--Hamas had convinced them--that there aren't any other paths. Again, I don't argue this is truth, all of it, all told, objective, and perfect. This is what those Israelis think is happening to them, and they're not stupid. If you're going to tell them they're wrong, you have to start with what they know. You can't start not knowing what they know and think you have something to say--because you don't have anything to say. For Israelis, this moment, this period, this pain, this frustration, this agony, this is the best version of history available to us, and thank God we get to live in it because wow, do our enemies suffer. It used to be that the Jews suffered and the enemies did not. Israel didn't make Jews invincible. It just made their blood very, very costly. And that's enough. And that's what happens when you go through the 20th century. There is no reason that Iran would want to destroy Israel. It has no interest in Israel. It has no border with Israel. And it doesn't give a shit about Palestinian rights. It doesn't even give a shit about Iranian rights. The Iranian regime wants to destroy Israel because of some wack-a-doodle, insane, vast--I mean, I explain it very empathetically: I have a whole class on it, but that's not the point. The point is because of this vast restorationist redemptive religious vision. And for the first time in the history of Jews, the Jews can hurt them more than they can hurt us. And that's it. That's--the thing you just asked me about as if it was the bad scenario, feels to Israelis like the good news. Russ Roberts: My guest today has been Haviv Rettig Gur. Haviv, thanks for being part of EconTalk. Haviv Rettig Gur: Thanks, Russ.

Time

Podcast Episode Highlights

0:37

Intro. [Recording date: November 7, 2024.]

Russ Roberts: Today is November 7th, 2024 and my guest is journalist Haviv Rettig Gur, Senior Analyst for the Times of Israel. Haviv was here in December of 2023 to discuss the birth of Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict, an episode that was your Favorite Episode of last year [2023]. Haviv, welcome back to EconTalk.

Haviv Rettig Gur: Thank you. Thanks, Russ. It's wonderful to be here.

1:00

Russ Roberts: We are recording this episode in a very dramatic time. All times these days feel dramatic in Israel, but we are two days after the U.S. election of 2024 won by Donald Trump. Two days after Bibi Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, fired his Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant. And, last month we observed the one-year anniversary of the attacks of October 7th and the world that followed.

So, there's a lot going on. At the end of this conversation, I hope we'll have some time to talk about what might come next, but our topic for today is to talk about Israeli sentiment toward the Palestinians in this moment and how we got here. So, start us off.

Haviv Rettig Gur: Yeah. I mean, it really isn't--it feels like an inflection point this moment. There's also a very significant offensive by the Israeli army in Northern Gaza. There is serious talking in Lebanon and in Washington about the possibility of ending actually that conflict up in Lebanon. So, we really are--it feels--we are at a nexus of, you know, five different things.

The Iranian regime over the last month has been revealed to be much weaker than we all thought it was. That is a turning point that the Middle East will feel for decades, and we don't yet know exactly what it means.

So, we are at a pivot.

It's really a joke that every week in the Middle East is dramatic. I keep getting called by, you know, various news networks; and they say things like, 'It's been a dramatic week.' And, I'm just, like, 'I'm 15 years in this business. It's all a dramatic week.' The Chinese curse me: You live in interesting times. I don't know if there is a Chinese curse or if it's one of those sort of British imperial conventions; but there should be, there should be. It's a terrible curse.

Russ Roberts: My line is: Everywhere else the focus is on everyday matters, and here every day matters.

It's intense here; and there are new events every day to make you wonder what comes next.

3:11

Russ Roberts: But, we're going to start with an historical look back at how Israel and its attitudes toward its neighbors have changed over time.

Haviv Rettig Gur: Yeah. Well, I argue: A lot of times in the coverage, a lot of times when people look at Israel from abroad, they see political rhetoric and they see momentary flash in the pan political rhetoric. Or, they do something even worse: Not worse because it's immoral--although it is immoral--but worse because it's also uninformative, which is they quote-mine. They go looking for: what do we think the Israelis think about the Palestinians? Or, what do we think the Palestinians think about the Israelis?

And, you just type into your web browser the right words: 'Palestinian leadership Nazism,' and you find just a long, rich, deep association of Palestinian leaders with outright blatent Nazism. And then, you conclude what you wanted to conclude in the first place, which is that Palestinian identity, nationalism, the Palestinian cause, is somehow fundamentally Nazi. Which is not true. It is not true. Palestinian ideological elites have often taken Nazi ideas, but fundamentally, the turn to the Germans was a turn away from British imperialism and part of that uprising.

And, there's a tremendous amount of anti-Semitism. Hamas's charter doesn't just literally borrow language from Nazi ideology. It cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in that charter. And so, you have so much to hook onto.

But if you do hook onto that and assume that you've now understood the Palestinians, you'll miss the deep story, the rich story. The reason that we have polls that tell us that Palestinians still now love and admire Hamas. And, the same Palestinians who tell us they love and admire Hamas also tell us they hate Hamas. They hate Hamas for destroying Gaza. They hate Hamas for being a theocratic tyranny that has ruined their existence and lives--by the way before the war and certainly after. They hate Hamas for stealing aid. They hate Hamas for this and for that.

And they absolutely admire Hamas for giving them a profound story of religious dignity that explains all of their suffering. And, there aren't many other stories in their political life that do that.

And so, if you tackle the Palestinian national movement from this window of quote-mining and this very easy sort of association, you build out--intellectuals love to do this.

And, it's why intellectuals are no fun at a party. They love to build out abstract constructs that kind of make sense to some piece of reality they know and then take that abstract construct and apply it to every other thing on Earth. [More to come, 6:01]

And, when all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail. And they do it here constantly.

Now, when that happens in reverse--when they do it to the Israelis--it's basically the same phenomenon. They'll find some racist quote in some Zionist text and say, 'This is Zionism.' And then, you say to them, 'But, that was Zionism back when less than 2% of Jews actively participated in the Zionist movement. Why did the other 98% come around suddenly in the 1920s and 1930s?'

And they'll say, 'Don't bother me. What are you, protecting racism? This is Zionism.'

And, there's such a rich, like, Zionist debate. Herzl [Theodor Herzl] is a man who is--sometimes they borrow these little quotes from him, which are just 19th century Viennese intellectuals talking about the global south, so to speak. And, sometimes Herzl says things that would come out of absolutely every German language writer of the time.

But, Herzl's very last testament to the Jews, the Altneuland, his utopian novel--it's the last thing he gives us before he dies. The dramatic tension there is about Jews being racist in their new state, in their new mass society. They escaped the mass societies of Europe, these new nationalisms, and they escaped them because these new identities--these imagined identities--can't contain minorities because minorities call into question the organic validity of the identities. And so, the Jews have to escape this. Zionism is an entire sociological analysis of modernity. It's something much bigger than just Jewish nationalism.

And, then they arrive in the land of Israel and they establish their own mass society, their own nation-state. And, Herzl says, 'Be wary of that same impulse because you will have it, too.' And, in this novel, there is a rabbi who arises who wants to oppress the Arabs, and the Jews all vote not to. And, that's what makes it utopian.

In other words, the racism of the Jews is something Herzl worries about. And yet they shrink him down to this tiny little pathetic thing by quote-mining.

So, so much of the discourse about this place is this cartoonicization of Israelis, cartoonicization of Palestinians. The people who think Palestinians are these perfect victims and their symbols are these inspiring symbols are racist against Palestinians. That, just because the Palestinians are ridiculously innocent and perfect and pure and lovable doesn't mean that it's not racism. And, ultimately just Westerners living out Western moral fantasies projected onto them.

So, in that kind of discourse--in that kind of world in which the debate over Israelis and Palestinians is so much a fight between these very dishonest ways of addressing these two groups, it's hard to tell the real story.

And, the real story is very human and very reasonable. You have two peoples that have lived through a history that utterly validates their sense of what's happening around them, but still results in radically different senses of what's happening around them.

And, they don't--you know, this isn't--I'm not just talking about campus activists. I'm sorry, this sounds a little sort of cluttered or confused. It's all going to make sense in just a minute. I hope.

But, this kind of shrinking us down to these very simplistic narratives that elites do in the West--primarily elites. You see in mainstream elites: John Kerry as Secretary of State, his very last speech as Secretary of State--people should look it up. It was essentially finger-wagging at the Israelis and the Palestinians, mostly at the Israelis. And, he says, 'We all know how this ends. We all know what the peace looks like. Just do it. And, if you don't do it, everything will fail. Everything will collapse.'

There's this sense that the Israelis are either just foolish, stupid, or possibly malicious and evil, and that's the explanation. It's a moral judgment masquerading as an explanation.

And, there is a political, intellectual class in America that has lost the ability to distinguish between--too often--not everybody, obviously, but too often lost the ability to distinguish between moral judgment and actual diagnostic explanation. Israelis are not stupid. The reason Israelis can't reach a peace with the Palestinians is because they know more than the Western critic, not less. And, the reason Palestinians can't reach a peace with the Israelis is because they know more than the Westerners looking at them, not less than the Westerners looking at them.

And, when you really dig deep into these stories, you discover this vast--and frankly, even though we're talking about very, very sad and tragic and painful things--beautiful stories and histories and narratives that ordinary people, good people learn and go through and adopt and think about themselves in their search for dignity, in their search for meaning, in their search for solidarity. They produce very bad outcomes and some very bad policies.

I try to talk about Israelis and Palestinians in their own terms and to try to convey why they're not stupid, and why if you want to come and look at them and learn about them, and think about them, you actually have to learn them on their own terms. We have to crack that open. We have to tell that story. We have to dive into those weeds, because when you come out of the weeds on the other side, you suddenly see everything very different. And, you suddenly understand why a reasonable good person would reach the conclusion of the Israeli who says, 'This is the only war available to us in Gaza.' Or the Palestinian who says, 'Gaza's destruction was worth it.'

Those are not crazy, and those are not evil, and they make sense. And, by the way, they could still be utterly wrong and you could still have to oppose it, and you could still have to fight a war against it. But, they're human and real, and meaningful, and serious, and not moral cartoons. Did that make sense? That was like a methodologic--

Russ Roberts: Yeah. No, it's great.

And of course, it's very consistent with what is the ethos of this program, which is respect for people who don't agree with you and treating them as human beings rather than caricatures, which is half of what you're saying. And, the other half is that once you go behind the caricature, once you erase the cartoon and you see a human being, you understand something about what motivates them. And conceivably--and I don't want to be too utopian ourselves--but conceivably you could make some progress.

I mean, that's what I take as one of your fundamental lessons, which: the misunderstandings are good for getting people angry. They destroy the ability to allow us to live with our neighbors peacefully and to flourish. And we could imagine a world where if we respected each other in a different way than we do now and understood each other in a different way than we do now, maybe we could live together side by side in some fashion.

13:22

Russ Roberts: Now, you know much more than I do about Israeli attitudes. I do argue with my Western friends quite a bit because I do know one thing about Israeli attitudes, which is I know how my students feel when they go into Gaza, into Lebanon. They may not be representative of all soldiers. I'm not naive. I'm not foolish. These are often officers. They're on their way to becoming well-educated. They're thoughtful. That's why we accepted them here at Shalem College and why we have great hopes for them. But, I understand that the way that many people in the West look at the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] is a grotesque caricature.

But, we're not going to look at that. We've talked about that on the program a little bit in the past. I want to talk about the average--whatever that means--Israeli attitude--as a way to get us started--toward our neighbors, because I have a limited circle of friends. You've got a much wider circle of Israelis that you've grown up with and know. And, you think about it a lot harder and read about it a lot more than I do. And, I think I would benefit, and our listeners would benefit from understanding how Israeli public opinion, broadly defined as best as we can define it, has changed over time and what that implies for an optimistic or realistic future.

Haviv Rettig Gur: Okay. So, let me try to do the very thing--try to actually walk through this exercise of understanding.

There's one statistic that I urge people to hold onto that when you unpack it, helps really reveal something profound about the Israeli sense of the Palestinian question and what the future holds and what options are available to Israelis when it comes to the Palestinians. And, that statistic is voter turnout in an election that we had 23 years ago, 2001.

And, before I tell you that turnout--and I hope nobody is looking it up too quickly--the reason that that collapse in turnout had a couple of different factors. But, the fundamental factor was a collapse in faith in politics: an absolutely unique moment in Israeli history in which faith in politics was shattered, still has not really recovered, and really reveals the--first of all--the influence that Palestinian actions have on Israelis and on Israeli politics. The immense influence.

And secondly, the Israeli belief--by the way, the belief of the Israeli left-winger, the liberal, the Progressive, even, who yearns for separation and a Palestinian state and an end to the occupation--the belief in how few options they actually have. And the belief that Palestinian politics reduce their options, not the Israeli political right.

I am not arguing that this is historical truth. I'm arguing that this is the lived experience of the mainstream of Israeli Jews.

Probably--I'm going to throw out there--I mean, I know a lot of polls over the years: I would say 80% of Israeli Jews would agree with the narrative I'm about to tell. There's obviously, to the left of the mainstream, people who would disagree. And to the right who would disagree in other ways. Just like among the Palestinians, there are 11 narratives about what happens to them and what has happened to them. And, they've fought literal civil wars over those different narratives.

Start at 2001. Actually, let's not start 2001: 2001 is that pivot. I want to start in the First Intifada. The First Intifada begins in 1987. There's a car accident in the Gaza Strip: an Israeli military truck, I believe, crashes into a Palestinian private car and people in the private car are killed. And that incident sparks, catalyzes a whole series of riots and protests in Gaza that very quickly spread to the West Bank.

I am going to simplify, cartoonishly--there are libraries written about the First Intifada, the Second Intifada, the peace process--but, just to give people a sense of the Israeli-lived experience of this. These riots and protests spread throughout the cities and towns of Gaza and the West Bank very, very quickly. And, the Israeli civil society--civilian society, excuse me--experiences that very, very quickly, because, unlike the Americans or the British or the Australians, when our military deploys, it doesn't deploy to the end of the world, right? It deploys an hour bus ride from home. And, our soldiers go home for the weekend to Mom's dinner table. Right?

And, the First Intifada consisted of a whole range of different phenomenon and really complex and all layered in itself: terror attacks on sort of the clean FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] definition of what a terror attack is; and attacks, and reprisals, and Israeli crackdowns. And there was a whole big, vast, complex event that lasted five years.

But there's a piece of it that is burned into the Israeli psyche. And, that is a big part of how Palestinians tell the story of that First Intifada. And that's the piece that we call the Children of the Stones. The Children of the Stones are these literal kids. Right?

What sparked those protests? They weren't actually cause--the reason wasn't--the spark was the car accident, but the reason wasn't the accident. The reason was 20 years of occupation. If you're a Palestinian school child in 1987 and you live in Jenin, let's say--in the Northern West Bank--and you come out of school and you're walking home, the guy running traffic at the traffic circle is the Israeli infantryman.

I mean, the occupation, the military rule is deep within Palestinian society. It's very close. And, if you're that school child, it's been 20 years. You've never known anything else. And, it shows no sign of going anywhere.

And so, this truly grassroots uprising, one of the really powerful images that come out of it are these Children of the Stones where these school kids pick up stones off the ground and throw them at the Israeli infantry. Inside these cities, inside these towns.

Now, those Israeli soldiers, that very first weekend of the First Intifada, went home to Shabbat dinner, at Mom's dinner table. And their moms turned to them--I am only slightly dramatizing; I mean this quite literally--in tens of thousands of households all over Israel, their mothers turn to their soldiers, to their children, and they say to them, 'What the hell is going on? I'm watching the news. This is headline news already.' And, obviously, and for the next five years, it's going to be every day's headline news. 'What the hell is going on? Are you safe? Are you okay?'

And those soldiers turn to their mothers and they say to them, 'What am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to do, facing an 11-year-old boy throwing a rock at me? I'm the Israeli infantry. I'm trained to take the Syrian commando fortifications on the road to Damascus.' In 1987, the Israeli army is still training its infantry, basically, to fight the 1973 War better. Which, in 1987 makes sense. 'What am I supposed to do with an M-16 or a Galil rifle?'--which is kind of an Israeli copy of an AK-47 that we pretend we invented. I apologize. That was humorous.

But, the point is, 'What am I supposed to do facing these kids?'

And, that experience--again, at a very simple level, because it was many things and it was very complex and it lasted a while--but that experience very, very quickly, forges a whole new Israeli left, a whole new Israeli left-wing consciousness.

It's also a left that hungers for a new civic religion, for a new purpose, for a new ideology. Basically, because 1985 saw this radical economic revolution after eight years of triple-digit inflation. All of the old Socialist/Marxist institutions, the state-controlled industries, were basically dismantled. Monetary policy was actually made independent with the Bank of Israel law of 1985. There was this huge reform because of a massive financial crisis, monetary crisis, that shattered the Israeli economy. And, there weren't a whole lot of Socialists left after 1985.

So, the Israeli left that had been this Socialist--right?--it was its civic religion. It was its belief. It had secularized for its Socialism, very quickly responded to the First Intifada by adopting the question of the occupation and ending the occupation and creating peace as a new civic religion. It took it in, this moral argument that it heard from Palestinian youngsters. It imbibed it very, very deeply. Within five years, 1992, Yitzhak Rabin is winning an election in which many, many people in the left are talking about: peace.

Rabin goes to Oslo with Yasser Arafat. In 1993 they sign a document that doesn't have a lot of actual, actionable--it's essentially a Declaration of Principles. I think that's what it was called, the Declaration of Principles. It's Oslo I, the Oslo Agreement. It's really a declaration that they're going to start working on a proper peace treaty.

1995, two years later, there's already something called Oslo II, which is essentially a kind of treaty. It creates the Palestinian Authority. It establishes rules that give the Palestinian Authority great leeway in Palestinian population centers. It commits the Israelis and Palestinians to a five-year window for solving all the rest--you know, Jerusalem, refugees, holy sites, independence, borders, all the sticky hard stuff. And, the Knesset has to ratify it. There's a vote. The Knesset ratifies it. Very close, but it does ratify it.

And then, in November of 1995, of course, Yitzhak Rabin is assassinated by an Israeli Jew--who kills him because of the peace process.

And now the left, which can win elections talking about peace, that left now has its martyr. And, the country is now heading into an election in 1996--when the Prime Minister is assassinated, the country goes to election. And, on the eve of the election--literally in the handful of days leading up to the election--Hamas detonates suicide bombings in Jerusalem.

It's a very close race between Shimon Peres who replaced Rabin at the head of the Labour Party, who wants to continue the Oslo process.

And this new guy, this young guy from Likud, Benjamin Netanyahu, a whole new generation of Likud leaders who has argued that if you give guns to an arch-terrorist like Yasser Arafat, it will end badly.

On the eve of the election--in the days leading up to the election--there are suicide bombings in Jerusalem that tilt the election by a couple of points. Just tiny little margin from Peres to Netanyahu.

Netanyahu wins that election by the narrowest margin in the history of Israeli elections. I think it was 30,000 votes.

And, that's the first moment when the Israeli left experiences Hamas not going to war against the occupation: going to war against the peace process.

Netanyahu wins that election. He has a government for the next three years. He does not advance the peace process. He actually signs the Wye River memorandum in 1998. That's the last document signed by Israelis and Palestinians.

But, he does implement quite a bit of Rabin's commitments. He pulls the army out of Jericho, and Gaza, and Hebron, and many different places; and he really begins the establishment of--as per the treaty Israel committed to--begins the establishment of the Palestinian Authority during his term.

In 1999, Netanyahu's government falls. He's deeply unpopular. A lot of pundits say, 'We'll never hear of Benjamin Netanyahu ever again,' which is why you shouldn't trust political pundits, obviously--other than myself who has never been wrong. But, I was in high school then, so I can mock them for their mistakes.

But, that government falls and the left now elect a new guy named Ehud Barak. Like Rabin, a former chief of staff of the army. In fact, far beyond Rabin, Barak is already talking about a much more significant independent Palestinian entity, that it's clear to everybody, and I believe he even says it outright in a way that Rabin never did.

And we, to this day, there are debates. We don't quite know what Rabin was thinking, and it's possible that Rabin was testing the waters and he wasn't sure how far he could go.

Barak is already talking about a Palestinian state. Barak wins that election talking about a Palestinian state. He goes to Camp David with Yasser Arafat and Bill Clinton, and they are negotiating shared sovereignty over the Temple Mount. They are negotiating borders. They're negotiating land swaps. They are negotiating all kinds--everything. Everything difficult, they are negotiating at Camp David.

Then in the fall of 2000, the Second Intifada begins. Now the Palestinians get to name these things. So, the first one was an Intifada. The second one was an Intifada.

In the Israeli Jewish experience, these were opposite events. These were opposite events. Certainly on the left.

And, what do I mean by that? The Second Intifada consisted of 140 suicide bombings that blew up in Israeli cities over the course of three years.

I want listeners to try to imagine 140 suicide bombings on any issue that is a divisive culture war issue in their society. Imagine if a Mexican immigrant in America walks into a non-alcoholic bar--that's a bar for teenagers; we have those--and detonates a shrapnel bomb that kills 24 kids. And leaves a video. And, in the video, that's how we know they're not mentally ill or just randomly homicidal. They're terrorists. They left a video.

And, in the video, this person says--my immigration policy is not that great. Please don't catch me on--I'm trying to cosplay a terrorist version of this, okay? But, let's say it says: Donald Trump lost children in children's prisons, and President Obama deported more people than the Republican Administration before or after. And President Biden didn't solve anything while millions of people suffer in a terrible immigration policy. That's the video. I, America am going to make you see. Boom. Okay?

Let's imagine an event like that in American politics. The immediate aftershock of that event.

First of all, the conservative Republican response is very simple because it fits with their basic worldview, right? It's not a challenge to write that tweet for Donald Trump. But, what's the Progressive response to an event like that? What would that look like?

I submit to you that Progressives would be tormented. There would be 15 different responses. Some of them would be, 'This guy is an evil murderer who made it harder to fix the immigration problem because of his own narcissism and psychopathy.'

Some of them would say, 'Look, this is how bad it is that it would generate this kind of violence.'

There would be all kinds of different responses. And, when we've had in actual democracies, real examples of terrorism, right, along those fracture lines of culture wars, those are the kinds of responses you see.

But, fundamentally, Progressives would have a real problem with violence like that. And, the problem is that they agree with the video. But the guy just murdered children. What do you do when you agree with the video, but the guy murdered children?

Whatever that Progressive response is, now try to imagine the Progressive response when there's another bombing a week later. And now try to imagine the Progressive response when there are three more a week after that. And, now try to imagine the Progressive discourse on immigration over the next month when there are 13 bombings. And, now try to imagine over three years, 140.

But, there is a point--I don't know what that point is: I don't know if it's bombing three or bombing 30 or bombing 113--but there is a point where the Progressives of America say, 'You know what? Let's put a pin in this one and circle back 10 years from now, because you can't even breathe. You cannot talk about it. All the air has been sucked out of the room.'

The Second Intifada's 140 bombings shattered the Israeli political left. It hasn't won an election since. And, it hasn't won an election not because of the death toll--which was horrible--and not because they targeted children. My example of a non-alcoholic bar was the Dolphinarium bombing on the beach in Tel Aviv in 2001. It was because of the timing, and it was because of the story.

In the First Intifada in 1987, we understood--we, Israelis--what those kids were protesting. We knew exactly what they were protesting. What were they protesting in 2000? Thirteen years later, who is running traffic in Jenin as school kids walk home? The school kid who walked home past the Israeli infantryman in 1987 was now the officer running that traffic as part of the Palestinian police.

Bill Clinton was sitting there in Washington desperate--desperate--to fund this project. He had no other legacy. He had one other legacy and that made him more desperate to fund this project.

The Palestinians were getting everything handed to them--everything, on a silver platter--and it had cost the Israelis a murdered Prime Minister and an internal culture war; and it was happening.

And that's when the Palestinian decision to launch the Second Intifada happened. There were no Israeli soldiers in any Palestinian city, town, or village when the bombings began in 2000.

And so, the great question Israelis ask--and they scream it silently into an echoing chasm of their own psyche; but it's everywhere. It is the bedrock. You catch a cab in Jerusalem and you start talking to that cab driver about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict--and you can tackle it from the right and you can talk about terrorism; and you can tackle it from the left, you can talk about settlements--doesn't matter how you talk about it. Three minutes in, you hit bedrock. And that bedrock is: What the hell was the Second Intifada about? What was it for? What was its purpose? Israelis know about the Second Intifada something that outsiders might have trouble seeing. It's extremely difficult to recruit a thousand suicide bombers. 140 actually make it past the Israeli security services and blow up in Israeli cities. I'm giving a random sort of guesstimate that a thousand set out.

It's extremely difficult to build those bombs. There was no YouTube and you couldn't build those bombs at home from YouTube. These are shaped shrapnel explosions.

It's difficult to recruit. Recruiting a suicide bomber, it's--there's an entire science. There's tremendous amount of academic research on this, especially in the United States, and I don't claim to know it very well. But I know enough of it, and I have learned from enough scholars who have studied it to know that first of all, suicide terrorism is a phenomenon that goes beyond Islam. There's this image in the West that suicide terrorism is just a Muslim thing. It's not. There have been Marxist suicide terrorists in the 20th century--

Russ Roberts: And it's--

Haviv Rettig Gur: It's big, it's complex--anarchists. But there are certain characteristics that are almost universal in suicide terrorism.

For one thing, it's not a function of desperation. The poorest people on earth--the most desperate people on earth--people on earth facing genocide don't produce suicide terrorism. It is a function of redemption. It is a function of a redemptive ideology that seeks to shake the foundations of the existing order in order for that redemption to be able to peek through the cracks of the order that you produce. It is people who believe they are saving the world by murdering other people's children.

And, how do you get people to believe they're saving the world by murdering other people's children? The answer basically is social capital. You need the investment of social groups, of your own social network. You need the investment of people of authority in your society.

In the Palestinian case--and again, this is a phenomenon far larger than Palestinians and Palestinians are not unique in this feature of the suicide terrorism--Hamas ran literal martyrdom classes in mosques in Gaza to try and recruit these kids, these teenagers and sometimes much older.

35:32

Russ Roberts: And, we should just clarify that in this time period of 2000, Israel is occupying Gaza, not like pre-October 7th. The Israeli Army is present in a way that they are not in parts of the West Bank, so it's probably easier for them, I assume, to recruit for those classes.

Haviv Rettig Gur: Israel absolutely still controls Gaza. It has pulled out of Palestinian towns and cities--

Russ Roberts: At this point.

Haviv Rettig Gur: At this point. In those previous years, in literally the three years previous. And Palestinian Police now run the towns and cities.

But between the towns and cities and around the Israeli settlements, there is an Israeli military presence, absolutely.

The point is: you needed labs that could build these bombs. You needed recruitment networks. You needed people with social standing and authority and religious standing to validate the narrative that would allow this recruitment. You needed money. You needed bank accounts. You needed command and control. You needed people who can sneak a terrorist past Israeli security and Israeli intelligence. You needed, essentially, a guerrilla fighting force.

And so, the First Intifada was experienced by huge parts of Israeli society, enough to win an election as a bottom-up, grassroots, moral cry against something Israel was doing wrong.

The Second Intifada was experienced by that very same Israeli majority--and a much larger majority--as the exact opposite. Now that we were pulling out, now that we were negotiating the final status, now that the political system had managed--painfully, agonizingly--to make this argument and try and carry forward this agenda, now Palestinian ideological elites had turned on us in a vast massacre of our children, purposeful guerrilla warfare. And why? Make it make sense.

To this day, the Israeli left can't explain to ordinary Israelis why the Second Intifada happened. And so nobody can make a credible case within Israeli Hebrew language politics that it won't just happen again. That, everywhere we pull out of won't simply result in the same bloodshed--disastrous, catastrophic bloodshed, if not worse.

The point about voter turnout in 2001 illustrates this. Israeli voter turnout before 2001 was incredibly high. I think it averaged 80% for 40 years. It never dropped below 78% or 77%. It went as high as 83, 84. Incredibly stable, incredibly high just for generations. And what's amazing about that is: voter turnout is a signal, among other things, of faith in the political system and that the political system can hear me, that it can respond to my needs. Israelis voted in incredibly high numbers even when their government failed them disastrously--even in 1973, in the immediate aftermath of the 1973 war. Even in December 1973, there was an election, very high turnout, with people very angry at the government. Even when there was a massive dramatic shift in 1977 for the first time, the big Labor Party that had founded the state lost an election--29 years after founding the state--and went home quietly and peacefully; and Likud took over for the first time. And, the next election, massive voter turnout, just like the election before.

The 1976 war in Lebanon, the 1982 war in Lebanon--you could go back to 1967, 1973: there was a war in between 1967 and 1973 called the War of Attrition. Soldiers were dying every week on the Egyptian front.

Israeli history is, as we said at the beginning, interesting in the worst possible way. There's a trauma every three, four years; and voter turnout never drops. Even in the late 1970s when you start to get triple digit inflation, year-on-year-on-year-on-year. You throw out the currency in 1980 and issue the shekel. You throw out the shekel in 1985 and issue the new shekel, just to try and get a handle on triple-digit inflation for half a generation. And, throughout all of that collapse--imagine, Russ, American politics. If inflation wasn't 9% for part of 2023, which hurt everybody, but was 140%--imagine if everybody's life savings were essentially wiped out in the course of a year and a half, what would happen to American voting patterns? Who would be elected? Well, that's Israel for eight long years and voter turnout never drops.

And then, that's the astonishing thing. You then get to 2001 and suddenly, I think the election before in 1999--people can look this up--but in 1999, I believe the election, the turnout was--Barak's election--was 78 and a half, if I'm not mistaken. And then, it gets to 2001, overnight, literally in the 18 months of the Barak government, voter turnout drops 17 points to 62%. Overnight. And, it has not yet recovered to the lowest it had ever been before.

Russ Roberts: Meaning it's below that even now.

Haviv Rettig Gur: Even now, it's below 77. Yeah, it went back up to 71 and down into the 60s. It hovers in that place, but it's an entire sort of swath of the population lower.

Now, just to clarify, because these are complicated things. In 1992, the Knesset passed a separation of the vote for Prime Minister and the vote for Knesset Party. And, it was an experiment: direct election of Prime Minister. It was deemed a bad experiment that weakened prime ministers. It was supposed to strengthen prime ministers, but it in fact expanded--people then ended up voting one Prime Minister and then a different party; and it actually weakened prime ministers tremendously. And so, it was then reversed, I believe, in 2003 it was canceled, if I'm not mistaken.

And, 2001 was the very first time you had a Prime Ministerial election without a Parliamentary election. There was only that half of the election. And that might have caused some of it. But we also know that the shattering of--by the way, because the Barak government falls so dramatically as the bombings are blowing up in Israeli cities literally, and it keeps negotiating right up to the end because Barak is desperate to get some deal from the Palestinians and the worse things get--the more buses blow up in Jerusalem--the more he needs a deal. Otherwise, he's just the man who brought the Second Intifada upon us. And so, he's negotiating, and negotiating, and negotiating right up to the end, and then he finally agrees to resign.

But, there's this great national emergency and the decision is made for various reasons not to have a full parliamentary vote, but to just have a Prime Ministerial vote and replace the Barak government. And that Prime Ministerial vote ushers in the first Sharon government in 2001.

And some people said, 'Well, the collapse of 17 points in voter turnout, which never happened before for any reason, was a function of the separation of the vote for political party and the vote for Prime Minister.' But, the next election two years later is a vote for both, and voter turnout is still 63. And, the next election it went up to 65, then down to 63 again. The next election, again--it never again will be a separate vote--and voter turnout doesn't recover.

And so, two things shattered here. There's a correlation, but the causation is the shattering of the Israeli belief that politics has answers. Why? Because Israelis still don't know why the Second Intifada happened. Because everything they were told--the left had a fundamental basic story and the basic story--and this was the new religion of the left--and when Rabin was killed, the idea of Oslo actually went up in the polls because the left now had its martyr and its mobilizing sense of sacrifice.

Russ Roberts: And he shouldn't die for nothing. I mean, it's a terrible--it's bad enough he's dead; how could he not vindicate--

Haviv Rettig Gur: He shouldn't die for nothing.

Russ Roberts: Yeah, you got to vindicate his vision.

Haviv Rettig Gur: Exactly. And, look what the other side was willing to do to stop it. And, there's a taboo generally in Israeli culture, born in the refugee experience of Israeli immigration, that Jews don't kill Jews. That, the Altalena is still remembered as a traumatic moment, this moment in 1948 where in order to consolidate the various Jewish militias into a single army of the state, Ben-Gurion actually ordered the opening fire on a right-wing militia's gun-smuggling ship. And, that to this day is a memorial attended by a Prime Minister. Why? Because it's a moment where Jews killed Jews right at the establishment of the state. That's a taboo in Israeli society and Israeli political culture. And, it happened in 1995 and it strengthened the left.

And it all fed into this one story the left told for decades--certainly since 1987. A part of the left had been saying it for a long time and it really took over the entire left and became the left's fundamental idea beginning in 1987. And, the idea was very simple and people will recognize it. It's generally the liberal notion of the Western average liberal who looks at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The idea is the Palestinians are under military occupation. Right? They don't elect the Israeli Military Governor of the West Bank who is the sovereign in the West Bank legally, right? So, that's a moral debt that the Israelis owe the Palestinians. That's not sustainable, that's not permanent. You can't just not give people suffrage.

And, then the left said: If we do give them this thing, that we owe them; this thing that we have to give them, it's a debt. If we give them their independence from us, they will give us--the left argued, and I was a high schooler and passionately believed in this--if we give them this thing that we owe them, they will give us the only thing we need from them. Rabin called it security; Bill Clinton called it peace. Most Israelis just thought of it as quiet. I give them their independence, they give me quiet. That's the deal.

As I pull out, Hamas in 1996 detonating those suicide bombings and handing the election to Netanyahu, Hamas in 2000--and not just Hamas: Arafat was a huge factor in this. But let's just--it's certainly the Hamas idea and Hamas was deeply, deeply involved in the Second Intifada and probably committed a lot of the worst of the attacks. But, that branch, that vision, that Islamist sort of restorationist Islamic ideology that produced those suicide bombings of the Second Intifada, they proved the left wrong. Everywhere I pull out of, they come for me to murder my children from that place.

46:45

Russ Roberts: So, I have two questions. And question number one is: Four, or three--some few years later, Israel pulls out of Gaza despite the Second Intifada. And, I also want to understand how you're telling me that Israelis can't understand the Second Intifada; but we started this conversation by: we have to put ourselves in our neighbor's shoes. So, are you giving up on that?

Haviv Rettig Gur: No. I was a soldier in the Second Intifada. I was a soldier. I stood at a particular checkpoint, I remember, in the Northern West Bank, in the middle of the Second Intifada. This was a profoundly frustrating time because we were the soldiers who were supposed to stop all those suicide bombers. And, day after day, they blew up and reminded us that we were failing.

[WARNING: Gruesome description in next few paragraphs--Econlib Ed.] And, one day, a car arrives--a Palestinian vehicle arrives at the checkpoint and rushes the checkpoint. There's a line of Palestinian cars getting checked and one car rushes up to the soldiers and detonates explosives. There was something like 50 kilos of TNT [trinitrotoluene] in the trunk.

The driver is a bomber. He has a belt on. His body, from the shockwave, flies out the front window. The bomb--his belt bomb--detonates, splitting his upper torso from his lower torso right in the air, right in front of the soldiers. They land in different parts of the road. [END WARNING]

And, everybody did everything right. And so, one soldier had shrapnel in his leg and everyone else came out of it okay. But, we stopped five bus bombings that day with that one car that didn't feel like[?] he could get through us and so decided to try and blow up on us.

And, I stood there at that checkpoint, and I asked myself a great question that has really kind of guided my professional life ever since. And, that question was: What the hell is the Second Intifada about? What does this person think he just did? Is he stupid? Because I knew, or believed I knew, what was on offer. They could have everything. They had us eating out of the palms of their hands. If they made themselves the partner that half of Israeli politics was desperately invested in them being, the entire Western world would fund them forevermore; and they would have a polity that is more than anything they could possibly get in any other way.

And, so many arguments: I mean, there is no prosperous future for Palestinians except integration into the Israeli economy. There's simply no other economy around they could integrate into that would be worth integrating into. If they're cut off from the Israeli economy, they're going to be a Somalia--best-case scenario--by the way, in their own separate state but deeply integrated. There's so much here that they're giving up and sacrificing by this need to murder us.

And, that's when I got into these questions and began to actually ask and began to read and discover the Algeria Paradigm in which a lot of them live.

Russ Roberts: Which we talked about before in your previous episode. And, I encourage--

Haviv Rettig Gur: Right, a year ago--

Russ Roberts: listeners to--yeah, but many people have forgotten it, so you can certainly explain-- even if they heard it, many have forgotten it, so you can certainly summarize it here.

Haviv Rettig Gur: I went looking for what drives--I literally just asked it very bluntly because it matters, so I don't have time to be politically correct or polite: Are they stupid? What don't they understand? Why do they think this is a good idea?

And, as I dug in deep to their narrative, I discovered, a). They're not stupid. It's old. These are old ideas. This is a 140-year discourse in Arabs--among Palestinian Arabs specifically; in the Arab world generally. And it's still wrong. Even though it's deep and old.

And, I built that out as--and by the way, I gave talks at Shalem College about sort of what I learned from that--but I went on that journey from that experience of the Second Intifada.

Russ Roberts: And we'll link to that video.

51:18

Russ Roberts: So, when you say Israelis couldn't understand--

Haviv Rettig Gur: I can summarize it very briefly.

Russ Roberts: Go ahead.

Haviv Rettig Gur: Basically, the story is Algeria. In 1954--really, truly, cartoonishly simple--Alistair Horne wrote--this British historian wrote--a magisterial history of the Algeria War, A Savage War for Peace, I believe it was called. I recommend it. There have been a thousand others. The Algeria War produced the Frantz Fanon literature and the anti-colonialist literature that is so very popular on college campuses--elite college campuses in the West today. You want to understand why kids are screaming at Columbia, 'Decolonize Palestine,' you need to go back to that Algeria War and you'll understand it.

But, my point is the influence it had, not on Western elites, but on Palestinians. In 1954, the French had been colonizing Algeria since, I believe, 1830. They'd been there 124 years already. There were something like a million and a half French--European, white--citizens of France living in Algeria. They were legally constituted as a Département of the French Republic. They voted for Members of Parliament in Paris. And they, of course, didn't give citizenship to the millions--I think it's five or six million; it might be more than that--of Algerian Muslims in the country.

And in 1954, the Algerian Muslim organizations and groups and parties came together in a room and established the National Liberation Front. It's a group of activists, and it slowly grew. It's, again, a long story; I'm making it cartoonishly simple. I'm just giving people hooks on which to begin their journey of discovery. But, they found, in 1954, the National Liberation Front, the FLN [National Liberation Front]--which, the letters are flipped because it's in French--and they embark on what is probably a paradigmatic--the paradigmatic--anticolonial war.

And an anti-colonial war, its fundamental strategy is pretty simple. Its fundamental strategy is the idea that a colonialist shows up in your country for some benefit. Let's give that benefit the value X. The benefit, by the way, could be silver mines. It could be slaves. It could be the territory itself--just expansionism. It could be abstractions like the glory of empire. There are places the Portuguese conquered just in their competition with the Spanish, not because they cared. The British needed Egypt for the canal. It could be any reason that a powerful nation takes over some other territory. Give that benefit that the colonialist perceives the value of x.

How do you get rid of them?

And, the answer of the FLN and other anticolonial movements modeled on the FLN or that came before the FLN was very simple. You exact a cost that's x+1. And, if the cost is x+1, they leave.

But of course, you are not responsible to the colonialist to be polite. You're responsible to your children to be free as soon as possible.

So, you don't exact a cost of x+1. It's never x+1. The cost you try to exact is x+300. Because if the cost is x+300, the colonialist leaves sooner.

And so, anticolonial wars always tend to horrific brutality because of the x+300 logic. Not because colonized peoples are crueler than civilized Europeans or any of these kinds of ideas that percolated through the French discourse and other colonial discourses.

And, the FLN was brutal, horrific. The terror attacks, gunning down families on the beach, cutting off body parts of random victims, just bombings of cafes--it was a horrific, horrific terror war.

The French response, bless their hearts, managed to be even more horrific. The estimates of the civilian dead of the French bombings of the villages south of the coastal cities where the FLN would hide, probably one reasonable estimate is probably 500,000 dead Algerian civilians. Some ideological movements in Algeria argue that it was one and a half million, historians think [?].

Russ Roberts: The "bless your hearts" was a sarcastic remark. I just want to get that on the table.

Haviv Rettig Gur: It was a sarcastic remark, yes. The French response to the FLN was actually horrific. And, the FLN also, really importantly, to understand how this functions and how really smart the anticolonial struggle was, the strategy was: the FLN lost every single engagement in eight years and won the war, because the pressure that this war created--two things created pressure back in Paris. The first was the terrorism inflicted by the FLN and the second was the French cruelty that that terrorism drew in response. Fundamental to the FLN strategy was goading the French to be cruel to the Algerians. And, that toppled the Republic and brought in de Gaulle. That created really deeply revolutionary political change in the France. The profound influence that the FLN had on France itself--on the Metropole--was astonishing.

And, that war ends in 1962 with what is essentially a miracle in the experience of the Algerian Muslim community, which is to say: almost overnight a million people just get on a boat and leave, just like that. They got sick of it. They couldn't do it. They couldn't be killed and they certainly couldn't kill anymore. And, their whole politics had restructured themselves; and the French Republic got out.

The PLO--the Palestine Liberation Organization--is established two years, I think less, I think about 18 months later in Cairo. There's a lot of Arab League politics, there's a lot of factions, there's a lot of debates, there's a lot of ideology. There's a lot of Soviet Union. There's a lot of complexity there that people--again, libraries have been written about. But, the fundamental story in that room was Algeria. Algeria becomes, in 1962, this touchstone of anticolonial--the third-world almost invents its identity based on that Algerian moment. And, when Arafat would go on to declare a Palestinian State in 1988, he did so in Algiers.

When Arafat, in 1974, gave a speech in the General Assembly talking about Zionism as colonialism, he was invited to speak by the President of the Assembly--who was the President of Algeria, who had been a major figure in the FLN. The connection is conscious.

And when the PLO is established in 1964, the PLO is established three years before there's an Israeli occupation in the West Bank in Gaza. It's not established to push back the Israeli occupation. There is a military occupation in Gaza in the West Bank, but they're Jordanian and Egyptian; and that's not something the Palestinians ever resisted or fought against; and in fact, the Palestinian elites accepted openly and officially. But, the 1964 establishment of the PLO was based on the idea that just as the Algerians had been able to kick out the French, so, too, Palestinians--using anticolonial methods--could kick out the Israelis. And, that's really important to understand.

The French were strong. The French had been there a long time. The French were many. And those were reasons not to try. And, the Algerians proved that even though the Jews were strong, the Jews were many, and the Jews had been there a long time, it could still be done.

And so, this terror war--and after 1964, there's the hijacking of airplanes, there's massacres like the Ma'alot Massacre. Commandos of the PFLP [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine] come down from Lebanon, take over a school, and murder 22 kids. That kind of warfare is modeled on Algeria.

And, here's where it gets interesting.

Let me just pause there for a second. I'm talking way too much. I apologize.

59:40

Russ Roberts: I'm enjoying every minute of it, and I suspect our listeners are as well. Carry on. I'm going to raise a couple of questions in a minute, but you're doing great.

Haviv Rettig Gur: Okay.

Russ Roberts: You're killing it.

Haviv Rettig Gur: One of the really interesting arguments that come out of FLN strategy is an argument about the nature of power in a colonialist situation. The colonialist state, by definition, is powerful--right?--just because it's a state that can project itself from its own land to another land. When I declare war on it, it gets more powerful, because it sees the crisis and it sends troops from the homeland to the colony. So, it'll only ever get more powerful.

And, under the conditions of colonialist rule, I can never meet it in conventional war. I can never develop the industrial base to face its industrial base--because I'm colonized by it.

In other words, even best-case scenario that I could industrialize quickly if I chose to, I can't under their control. So, the colonialists will only ever look powerful, and it will remain powerful, and it will remain powerful, and it will remain powerful, and it will remain powerful. And then it will collapse.

And I can't, from the outside, see the collapse; but sometimes I get signals of weakness, signals of collapse that come from within the colonialist structure.

And, for example, sometimes the French asked for some kind of accommodation or a ceasefire. The FLN interpreted those attempts at some temporary halt of fighting, or something like that, as signals from within the colonialist structure of power as an internal weakness. What's the theory of how the colonialist collapses? You cause them the x+1--you cause them more cost than the colony is worth. Because, a colonialist project fundamentally is an economic project or a power projection project; if you cost more than the value to the colonialist, they'll ultimately roll it up and quit.

But also, you force them to do things they can't explain. Their cruelty is critical to your strategy. And then eventually they don't want to anymore. They don't want to pay the cost--the moral cost, the political cost, the financial cost, the diplomatic cost--of maintaining that superstructure of power. And so, they collapse in six different ways and it happens all at once, and it happens from within, not from you.

That's the FLN theory of how you destroy a powerful colonialist.

Russ Roberts: So, let's--

Haviv Rettig Gur: That's what the Second Intifada was. That's the point.

The Second Intifada was Palestinian terror organizations that modeled themselves on the FLN--the generation of Hamas leaders, of Fatah leaders, Arafat himself, who are leading the Palestinian cause in 2000. How did they interpret Oslo? How did they interpret the fact that Yitzhak Rabin in 1992--the Chief of Staff of the Israeli army in 1967, the conqueror of the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan and Sinai--he's the one coming to the Palestinians and saying, 'Let's pull back. Let's make some accommodation. Let's end the occupation. Let's create independence for you.' And Barak, in 1999, running on an even larger, more magnanimous, more actual statehood platform--Barak, the most decorated soldier in the history of the Israeli military, Barak, the Chief of Staff of the Israeli--it matters that he came from within the military establishment to this Palestinian interpretation.

What is Oslo, if not signals from within the power structure that the power structure is caving? And, what does the FLN do when the power structure caves? It doubles down on its attacks because the fact that the French ask for a ceasefire means that they sense their vulnerability. That's your only signal of vulnerability: you triple down on the attacks.

And so, what was the Second Intifada in the minds of the orchestrators of the Second Intifada? The First Intifada was bottom-up: Palestinian leaders were as surprised as the Israelis and they had to pivot to pretend to be in charge of it. The Second Intifada was a planned, organized, guerrilla-warfare project--really a campaign--with leaders, with bank accounts, with planners, with intelligence, with engineers.

The Second Intifada was the Palestinian political elite, raised on the ideas of Algeria, saying, 'We've just gotten the signal; now we double-down.' And, so, the height of peace was the moment to destroy the peace in 140 suicide bombings.

1:04:26

Russ Roberts: If I'm listening to this and I'm a relative newcomer to Israeli politics or the Israeli conflict, and you, listeners, may know--we've talked about it before--that the October 7th attacks on what's called the Gaza envelope, the part of Israel close to the Gazan border, which take place 18 years after Israel withdraws its army--another withdrawal--and give some level of sovereignty to Hamas after elections in 2006. And then, in 2007, Hamas has basically control over it. There's a big debate among left and right here and out in the Western world as to how much Israeli blockading of Gaza helped create Hamas' October 7th moment.

I naively believed that Gaza really was a massive slum. We have learned since October 7th, actually, there were parts of it that were quite nice. And, we've also learned that the billions of dollars that Western aid gave to Gaza were used not to create bomb shelters, or schools, or other things, but were mainly used to create a very large tunnel system to protect Hamas to launch a horrific attack.

So if I'm listening to this, though, I'm thinking, well--and, sorry, and the tragedy--there are many of October 7th--but one of the tragedies is that the people who were killed, many of them were on the left. As many of the Israelis who were murdered, they were on the left, eager to create connections between Jews and Palestinians and Gaza. Worked with them, hired them, drove them to hospitals in Israel when they had conditions that Palestinian hospitals couldn't take care of.

And so, if I may use a little French, 'Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose'--the more things change, the more they stay the same. On the surface--you can footnote this, caveat it, or expand on it--there's no difference between October 7th and the Intifada of the early 2000s we're talking about. It's just another set of events that makes it harder for Israelis to favor a two-state solution because it's evidently not what they want. Is that a fair assessment of where we stand right now?

Haviv Rettig Gur: That is an extremely fair depiction of what most Israeli Jews think. Absolutely. Within Palestine society--

Russ Roberts: Sorry, you're saying Israeli Jews, because there's two million Arab Israelis who we're not talking about right now, but we're talking about the seven million Jewish Israelis who are neither Christian, Druze, nor Muslim. Go ahead.

Haviv Rettig Gur: Yes. That's really important. I want to make it very clear. The entirety of the narrative that I have tried to lay out and anything I say ahead of time, unless we say otherwise explicitly, is my attempt to portray as authentically and truly and empathetically as I know how the mainstream Israeli Jewish narrative.

There are, as we said, narratives among the Jewish left to the left of the mainstream and with the right to the right of the mainstream. They're fascinating, they're different. They have a lot of data points that they use to show that they are right and everybody else is wrong.

Among Israeli Arabs, there are many layers of identity. They consider themselves Palestinian and Arab and Israeli and Muslim, and many of them are Christian. And, they have five narratives amongst themselves, complex, layered. There's a lot of Israeliness, deep Israeliness and identification with Israel, and Palestinianness and deep identification with the Palestinian situation and suffering and cause and identity.

And then, among Palestinians in the West Bank in Gaza there are another 11 narratives. It's big, it's complex. It's a real living, breathing human society. All of us are real living, breathing human societies.

So, I want to just clarify--and it's really important to--that what I'm trying to convey is what the mainstream--I estimated it at 80%; it really is a huge mainstream cohesive. Because the left collapsed in this story, it kind of joined the center that the right also kind of collapsed into and is 80% of the Israeli mainstream we have now. Excuse me.

1:09:00

Russ Roberts: And I would just add that, when we talk about the left and we talk about Jews, among Jewish Israelis, many of them are religious and many of them are not religious, which complicates outsiders' understanding. When we talk about the left in Israel, it is not the same as the left in normal Western democracies. Overwhelmingly the issue we're talking about when we make the left-right distinction is how to treat our neighbors, the Palestinians, as well as our internal Arab cousins. All the other issues are either much less significant in the left-right divide--or the reverse.

Just to take one of my favorites, in Israeli politics, the left are capitalists. They're in Tel Aviv, starting up companies, investing money, making profit. The right are often ultra-Orthodox who want to live off the state and live on welfare, which is completely the opposite of what would be left-right distinctions in the United States.

So, carry on.

Haviv Rettig Gur: Right. The left is more likely to balance the budget than the right, yes, in Israel, by far.

And, the best correlation I ever heard in the data was a study conducted I believe by the Israel Democracy Institute, of all the parties currently in the coalition and all the parties currently in the opposition. This was I believe a year ago or a year and a half ago. And, the closest correlation was religious observance.

Russ Roberts: Meaning?

Haviv Rettig Gur: Meaning the more religious you are, the more likely you are to be on the right. And, the less religious you are, the less likely you are to be on the right. And, that was a very, very high correlation.

And, there was also a correlation to Ashkenazi and Mizrahi--Jews from the European who tended to the left; there's Jews from the Arab world and the Muslim world who tended to the right. There are a lot of different correlations.

The single best correlation for which way you voted was religious observance. And, make of that what you will. The culture that produces the Israeli right is a more religious culture. The culture that produces the Israeli left are more a secular one. That's a lot of the energy also, those fears of treading on each other's fundamental way of life is a lot of the energy behind the judicial reform fight of last year, which, if people remember about three Israels ago, that was the thing tearing us apart--right?--13 months ago.

So, yeah, the left-right distinction is very important.

I'll also say there's more diversity on the ground than you could possibly see from far away. For example, when Ariel Sharon in 2005 carried out the Gaza disengagement--pulled out of Gaza, to the last settler, to the last soldier, to the last inch--he offered money to people who would leave ahead of time. And, the Gaza settlers were considered very, very ideologically fervent. This was a group of 8,000 people who lived among a million and a half Palestinians at the time, and you had to have a lot of faith to think that that was somehow going to ever become Israel.

Even that group of deeply, deeply religiously believing--thinking that they're part of a redemption of the land, that is the redemption of the people, and all of that--even with that ideology, half of the Gaza settlers took the money and left before the army went in and pulled the rest out.

And so, there is a willingness to compromise in places where you don't expect. There is a disappointment with the Second Intifada, even on the right, that always opposed the Oslo Peace Process.

And I'll give you an example. And, this is really important to understand, because for Israelis, the last test of Arab intentions--Palestinian intentions, and beyond Palestinian intentions, in Lebanon and elsewhere--wasn't in 2000 or 2000-to-2003, the Second Intifada. The test continued. Because, who won that election in 2001 at the collapse of the left when 17 points of the electorate disappeared on us? A man named Ariel Sharon. He was the head of the opposition, head of the Likud Party at the time. And, Sharon is a former major-general--

Russ Roberts: On the right--

Haviv Rettig Gur: controversial--on the right. A controversial fellow. A brilliant military commander in his past. And, Sharon becomes Prime Minister while buses are blowing up. I can't convey the trauma of those years. A 7:30AM bus blowing up in Jerusalem is essentially a school bus blowing up. I mean, this was a horrific period. And, Sharon--

Russ Roberts: You say that because many children were taking public transportation to get to school. Would you say literally a school bus? That's what you mean.

Haviv Rettig Gur: Yeah. It's not literally a school bus. Many children--

Russ Roberts: But, it's full--

Haviv Rettig Gur: I, as a child in Jerusalem, took the city bus to school. City buses are more reliable. I was often late out of the door. And, the school buses--the buses--the city buses that are blowing up in the morning in the city of Jerusalem in 2001 are full of kids.

And, so the idea that these attacks, it's something--it's a statistic. It's a Wikipedia article. No. This is actually the lived experience of people convinced that the other side wants to mass murder our children, and they're convinced of it because the other side tried to mass murder our children. And, that's--

Russ Roberts: Where does that--go ahead. No, finish.

Haviv Rettig Gur: So, Ariel Sharon becomes Prime Minister under those conditions. And, there's a debate in the Israeli strategic elite about what to do. And there's actually a voice--coming out of army intelligence and some other places--that says that it's not clear that we can stop it with military solutions. That you need a political solution. Because, in all the history of warfare, there has never been a guerrilla army based in a supportive civilian population that was defeated by any standing army. Now, standing armies don't defeat guerrillas in support of civilian populations. That's never happened, not since Alexander the Great. It was a whole discussion.

And Sharon's answer to that was essentially, 'I didn't say it was possible. I just said we're going to do it.'

Map of British Mandate for Palestine, 1920-1922. Also showing the narrow, 9-15 mile, highly populated area remaining for Israel, from Hadera to Tel Aviv to Ashdod, if the West Bank is ceded as Palestinian. Source: Cristian Ionita, edmaps.com.

And, this was my army; I was in the infantry in these years. The infantry carried out tremendous amount of urban warfare training. We tried to lock down as much as possible the pathways to Israel. I sat in many, many ambushes on the mountainsides of the West Bank at night, trying to catch the suicide bombers sneaking in the night through the valleys to get to Jerusalem, to get to Tel Aviv. The West Bank, people should remember, are the highlands overlooking all of our major cities. And, Israel is nine miles wide--without the West Bank--right in the middle of the country. So, it's very close, it's very intimate. I was an hour walk from the Green Line when I was laying those ambushes.

And, Sharon's response actually is implemented in April of 2002 when there's a particularly heinous bombing. I don't know how to measure the heinousness of bombings; but this one, we call it to this day the Passover Massacre. This was a bomber who walked into the Park Hotel on the beach in Netanya on Passover Eve, when a couple hundred people were in a ballroom of the hotel celebrating the Passover Seder, many of them elderly. And, detonated his bomb, his shrapnel bomb. I believe the death toll was something like 30 people and many, many dozens wounded.

And, Sharon declared Operation Defensive Shield.

Defensive Shield was basically my war. In other words, every generation in Israel has its war. It's one of these tragedies of the Israeli experience. My father was in the artillery on the southern Golan when the Syrians overran their positions, and he spent the first many hours of the war behind Syrian lines. Many of the men in his battalion--most of the men in his battalion--were killed in that first day. I did not have--

Russ Roberts: In 1973?

Haviv Rettig Gur: Right, right, right. In 1973. Thank you. I apologize. I'm used to talking to Israelis about this where a lot of the sort of background is obvious.

In 2002, our orders were very simple in Defensive Shield. Battalions were basically given lists of people to arrest. When the army pulled out in the late 1990s of the Palestinian population centers and handed over control--security control, police control--to Arafat's various security services, that included the intelligence networks that they had built in the Palestinian population centers. All the things that travel with an army when an army goes somewhere, including the intelligence gathering.

And so, we were blind. We couldn't see these networks producing these suicide bombers. And, the first priority was to rebuild that--that ability to see what's going on in Palestinian society. And so, we had long lists of people to arrest.

There were checkpoints: there were literally Israeli infantry walking into cities--just literally, some places encountering gun battles. And, it was very painful. It was very dramatic. My dad once told me that he thinks I had the worst war, which is shocking because he was in desperate danger and I was not. The gap in power between Fatah[?fat'hun?] and the IDF in 2002 had nothing to do with--it was totally orders of magnitude--I was orders of magnitude safer.

But my dad got to be in a clean area without civilians facing an enemy conventional army. And, you could just shoot. And you could feel good about having stopped them, when you stopped them, or survived them, if you couldn't stop them.

And, we were, of course, fighting in the middle of civilian populations. It was a much messier kind of fighting.

And, long story short: Defensive Shield lasts--it doesn't quite end at any particular place, but it is unquestionably successful. We start rolling up--'we,' the Israeli Army--starts rolling up these intelligence--these, excuse me, terror networks--start gathering proper intelligence, start defeating a lot of these cells and networks. And, by I think December of 2003, the Second Intifada is basically over. I mean, people can look up the dates of each bombing, but if I'm not mistaken, it's not even a bombing every two months by then.

And, Ariel Sharon gets up at the end of the year--late December 2003--on national television, and he gives this astonishing speech in which he announces what would come to be called the Disengagement from Gaza. And his basic rationale--in interviews, and some of it's in the speech and some of it other people have said in his name--his basic rationale is: We can't roll over them forever. We learned in the Second Intifada that we can't pull out and have them reciprocate that with the one thing we want from them, which is peace.

Why can't they? Political ideologies, political dysfunction of their elites, whatever. Who cares why? I'm not going to socially engineer them. I don't know how to fix them. They can't.

So, what do we do? And, Sharon's answer was: We get the hell out--for our interest--and if anybody crosses the border, we shoot them. That's it. We separate. They're free--free to collapse, free to thrive, free to do whatever the hell they want. And, we're free of them. And, everybody is thus free of this terrible situation where we control another people.

And, in August of 2005, the disengagement is carried out.

What's really important for people to understand was the that in real time it was incredibly popular. What the Israeli public thought--and the Israeli public is a big place with many different opinions--but what I would say the majority of the Israeli public believed about the disengagement from Gaza when it was happening in August of 2005 was that the Israeli left had tried to end the occupation, but--with a ridiculous and inappropriate amount of optimism--assumed that what it was trying to do was what Palestinian leaders were trying to.

And, that had failed miserably and disastrously in rivers of blood. The right was now going to do much more responsibly the same exact thing the left can't do because the left are a bunch of Pollyannas. That was the basic perception, and it was immensely popular.

And the day after the disengagement from Gaza, when the literal gates to the fence were closed by a soldier and Israel no longer controls any part of Gaza--there isn't even a blockade at that point; the blockade comes in two years later when Hamas takes over Gaza--that end of Israeli presence in Gaza made Sharon more popular the day after than he was the day before. He's by now everybody's grandpa. He's one of the most popular prime ministers in Israel's history at this moment.

He is so popular--and Likud is so unpopular and mired in a whole bunch of corruption scandals, and it's a lot of detail there that doesn't matter--that he decides to leave Likud. Netanyahu is back in Likud leading a rebellion against him. He decides to leave Likud. And, I believe it's November of 2005, in August he pulled out of Gaza. In November, he leaves Likud and establishes a party called Kadima.

He then has a massive stroke. He is enormously obese. He is very unhealthy. He's in his 70s. He has a massive stroke. He's basically brain-dead. And, the country goes to an election in early 2006.

The Number Two guy in Kadima, who came with Sharon from Likud, his name is Ehud Olmert--apologies again for being so deep in the weeds. When we come out of it, things will be visible that were not when you don't go through the weeds. Ehud Olmert, unpopular, but Number Two in Kadima with Sharon, former Likudnik, is now running for Prime Minister.

And, before the election, he actually gives a speech in which he says on public television--I think it's two weeks before the election--he says, he talks about this idea of withdrawing from the West Bank. Sharon, when he pulled out of Gaza, also took down four small settlements in the northern West Bank in northern Samaria. And, Olmert says that that was the goal. The goal was then to do the same disengagement, unilateral, in the ways that serve our interests. 'Screw them, they can't reciprocate. We are not waiting for them. We're going to pull out of the West Bank.'

And, he would come to call this the Convergence Plan, [foreign language 01:24:12], which is like the in-gathering plan. In English he translated it, Convergence Plan. Terrible names. Israeli Prime Ministers, whether it's 'disengagement' or 'convergence,' they'll use any word they can to not use the word 'withdrawal.' It's really kind of adorable.

But, the Convergence Plan is known to the public that he wants this--that he thinks this way--on election day. And, I often, when going through some of this history, ask people, ask groups that I'm talking to: You have Netanyahu back in control of Likud after the bloody collapse of Oslo, a man who argued Oslo would collapse in bloodshed. And, you have Olmert, this deeply unpopular Prime Minister. By the way, he once ran for Likud leader in the primary. He got 2% of the Likud primary vote. Olmert is now head of Kadima, and Olmert is talking about withdrawals from the West Bank.

Who wins that election in 2006? And, I always get 90% raising their hand for Netanyahu and 2% hesitantly for Olmert because they figure there's probably a trick here. And of course, the answer is that Olmert wins the 2006 election. In 2006, if a right-winger is saying it and Sharon wanted it, it is still plausible to talk about withdrawals from territory.

Olmert forms his government, I think in March of 2006. He forms it with the Labor Party. He gives the Labor Party the Defense Ministry, which is really significant. The left that can no longer win an election is now in charge of the military that will pull out of the West Bank. In other words, the people who believe in a West Bank withdrawal will be the ones carrying out the West Bank withdrawal.

And, the government exists--I'm trying to do math on the fly, I apologize, but this is all so easy to look up--I believe the government is in existence 10 weeks when Hamas in Gaza carried out, in June of 2006--we are out 10 months?--the first tunnel operation that Hamas has ever carried out. They dig a tunnel under the border. They pop up on the Israeli side. They kill two Israeli soldiers. They kidnap a third. His name is Gilad Shalit. And, they drag him into the dungeons of Gaza.

There is now a shooting war on the Gaza border. The Israeli army is racing in to try and rescue him. And, on July 12th, 2006, in the midst of that shooting war in Gaza, Hezbollah in the north carry out its first cross-border attack. They kill four soldiers, they kidnap two others, Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser. We start to see this systemic sort of idea of kidnapping coming to the strategic and tactical arsenal of the enemy.

Hezbollah is the exact same story. In May 2000, Ehud Barak gave the order, after 18 years in Lebanon, to pull out of Lebanon. It was our Afghanistan. Right? We went in chasing after terrorists. We got bogged down there for 18 years. And, when we pulled out the very terrorists--well, in Lebanon's case, different terrorists; in Afghanistan's case the exact same terrorists--but still, terrorist group, then takes over the vacuum that we left behind. Six years after Israel unilaterally withdraws from Lebanon, Hezbollah now carries out the first cross-border attack, killing and kidnapping soldiers.

And, Ehud Olmert has a problem. And, maybe I'll end the story with this problem, because this is where the lesson that Israelis learned in the Second Intifada becomes almost unassailable truth in the Israeli psyche. The problem Ehud Olmert has is that he has just argued--and he argued it before an election, publicly; he even at one point said, 'Don't tell me I didn't tell you.' The right had accused Sharon of carrying out the Gaza disengagement, but when he was elected back in 2003 he didn't say that he wanted to pull out. He ran as a right-winger.

So Olmert says, 'I don't want anybody telling me you didn't know.'

Olmert's problem is: The two places we had just pulled out of unilaterally, Gaza and South Lebanon, we were now in a shooting war with those places. When Barak pulls out of Lebanon in 2000, Israelis come to him. And, there's this discussion in the public in Israel in which Israelis say to him, 'Who do you think is going to take over when we leave? Who do you think fills a vacuum of power in the Middle East today?' Right? When President Obama ordered the American troops out of Iraq, who filled that vacuum of power? There's a direct line.

Russ Roberts: John Adams. Yeah.

Haviv Rettig Gur: Yeah. There's a direct line to ISIS [Islamic State of Iraq and Syria]. Right? That's not even an accusation; it's not a criticism of Obama. I am not sure that was a bad policy decision at all. If after that much money and that much blood spent in a place for so long--when you pull out, ISIS fills the gap into the vacuum--it wasn't working. I'm not accusing Obama of anything. I'm just saying, when there's a vacuum of power in the Middle East today, going through the crisis it's going through, who fills it? Not Jeffersonian Democrats, right? Like you say.

If we leave Lebanon, Hezbollah will take over. And, when Sharon pulls out of Gaza, that same argument is made to Sharon. And, people say, 'Who is going to take over Gaza when we leave? The one liberal in the entire Palestinian Parliament, the Salam Fayyads? Who is going to take over?' The people who are going to take over are Hamas.

And Sharon and Barak's answers, basically--I'm paraphrasing, but their answers were basically--'Look, we pull out to the international border. We don't pull out gently or politely or because we're making peace. We don't believe in peace because they don't believe in peace. We don't believe they can reciprocate peace. We pull out to a defensible border. They come at us, we shoot them. Believe me: I'm Ehud Barak, former Chief of Staff of the IDF, most decorated soldier in the history of Israel.'

Sharon--Sharon is this brilliant military commander, ruthless commander. People should look up his exploits in 1973 in the southern front--and Sharon says, 'If they think this is weakness, they're going to test us. And then, we're going to have to "explain" to them it's not weakness'--'explain' in air quotes--'and then they will understand. Don't worry, Israelis: We will have international backing because we've pulled out to an international border. Don't worry, this is defensible. I promise you it'll be okay.'

Russ Roberts: 'We'll have the moral capital to defend that border, just like any country when it's invaded.'

Haviv Rettig Gur: Exactly. And, that's when Olmert's problem is clear--

Russ Roberts: Because of the tunnels.

Haviv Rettig Gur: Barak and Sharon offered this promise: 'We will restore deterrence if the enemy interprets our withdrawal as weakness.'

And, Olmert has to restore deterrence.

But, Olmert has to restore deterrence urgently and more powerfully for one huge reason: He wants to pull out of the West Bank. That's his legacy. That's his fundamental idea. And, the West Bank is an order of magnitude more dangerous than Gaza and Lebanon because the West Bank is the mountain range overlooking the coastal plane where most Israelis live. The West Bank shrinks us down to nine miles wide, like I said.

If we pull out of the West Bank, somebody can stand in the West Bank with a weapon they can carry on their literal shoulder--for example, an 88 millimeter mortar--and shut down, using that little tube, our major international airport. And then, walk away--just literally get in a car and drive away, calm as can be.

If we pull out of the West Bank and it goes the way Gaza went when Hamas took over in 2007, we have to retake it. I'm not even saying--this is not a moral discussion--this is a strategic, tactical one. If we pull out of the West Bank and it turns into a kind of non-sovereign, non-state entity that takes over the functions of state entities and can declare war, but can't be made responsible because it's not actually the government--meaning Hamas in Gaza/Hezbollah in Lebanon--if that happens to the West Bank, we have to go back in just to reopen our major highways and cities.

And so, the West Bank can't go the way Gaza went. It has to be safe or it can't be done. Literally can't be done. It'll be reversed with terrible bloodshed. And, nobody knows how to prevent that, how to stop that from happening.

And so, Olmert has to show that he can restore deterrence in Gaza and Lebanon in order to be able to pull out of the West Bank.

And, he tries. It's called the Second Lebanon War. Every single bridge in Lebanon was destroyed. Half of Beirut lost electricity. I remember one scene on TV where Fouad Siniora, the Prime Minister of Lebanon--as close as the Arab world comes to an actual liberal--is sitting at the Security Council--I believe is in New York, addressing the Security Council--and he wept actual tears. This is not some, like, Bill-Clinton-on-the-campaign-trail weeping. An Arab politician weeping on television is a different cultural moment. Lebanon suffered terribly. Olmert smashed everything he could find that could possibly be connected to Hezbollah.

1:33:22

Russ Roberts: And you're saying he did that because he had to validate his vision of what he wanted to do in the West Bank. He had to show that we could respond and restore deterrence through aggression, through military action.

Haviv Rettig Gur: Through shattering the enemy, Hezbollah.

Russ Roberts: Yeah.

Haviv Rettig Gur: Yeah. And, here's the thing--and this is really the end; thank you, and apologies: It didn't work.

The Israeli civilian experience did not experience this smashing of Lebanon. Did not experience Olmert's powerful response to Hamas.

What Israeli civilians experienced in 2006 was that hundreds of thousands of them became displaced people. Was that cities were bombarded by thousands upon thousands upon thousands of rockets, and nothing on earth could stop it.

There was no Iron Dome. The north and south of Israel didn't have enough bomb shelters.

There has since been a multi-billion shekel project to literally build towers of bomb shelters attached to old apartment buildings, with a door cut open so that every old apartment now has a new bomb shelter. If you drive through the city of Sderot, just a few miles off the Gaza border--

Russ Roberts: I've seen it--

Haviv Rettig Gur: you will literally see new rooms, towers of new bedrooms, attached to old apartment buildings. Israel has built a bomb shelter in every apartment because if you have 14 seconds' warning of a siren and you have two little kids and you're on the third floor, you're not getting to that bomb shelter in the street.

And so, Israelis fled and entire cities were emptied, and nothing Israel did--Hezbollah was proud of this. Hezbollah said publicly, in Hebrew, on YouTube--YouTube, was around then, right? I remember the videos. I think it was YouTube. Said, publicly, 'Nothing you do will stop the missile fire.'

And, the terrible tragedy--not so much for us as for our enemies--was that the Israeli public came to believe them. They're undeterrable, Israelis believe. You cannot deter Hamas. You cannot deter Hezbollah. They're not sensitive to their own people's suffering. And therefore you cannot pull out of the West Bank.

And so, any potential support for a West Bank withdrawal collapsed. And, really, it's important: The fundamental point here is that it didn't collapse on the right, which already had reasons--security, sometimes religious, sometimes other kinds of ideological--not to pull out of the West Bank. It collapsed on the left that was desperate to pull out of the West Bank for a hundred different reasons. All of them good. And they no longer thought, after 2006--confirmed again and again and again in different ways that even the right--

I'll stop with this sentence: What do Israelis actually believe? People ask me that a lot, and I don't go on CNN [Cable News Network] to convey the five-minute Israeli--if you get 90 seconds, you're lucky. But, you have to walk through it because what Israelis actually think is utter total confusion and frustration.

They think--and again, this is their experience, this is not the totality of objective history; I don't know the totality of objective history--but what the Israeli Jewish mainstream believes happened to it, what it experienced, was that it tried. And it tried, and tried again. It reorganized its entire politics around this attempt. It fought an internal political civil war for this attempt. And every single move in that direction ended in rivers of blood because Palestinian ideological elites or Hezbollah ideological elite, Lebanese--certain parts of Lebanese ideological elites--were fighting in a whole different universe, an entirely different kind of war, and could not reciprocate an Israeli withdrawal with peace.

The West Bank is dangerous in a way that Gaza and South Lebanon--dangerous though they may be, if they're controlled by Hamas or Hezbollah--could never be. That is what the Israeli left--which still exists. These people didn't evaporate: they just don't vote that way anymore. And, not only that, we have these fascinating polls that tell us that when you ask them conditionals--in other words, you say, 'Should there be a Palestinian state?'--huge numbers of Israeli Jews say no: I mean, 80% say no. And then you say, 'Well, what if it were safe?' And then, suddenly 60% say, 'Sure.' And then, you say to them, 'Will it ever be safe?' 80% say, 'No.' That's where they're at and that's the fundamental Israeli story.

That's also why they're totally immune to international pressure on this point, because they actually believe that every place they pull out of, the Palestinian ideological factions will use to murder their children. How are you going to pressure the Israelis, if you can sanction the Israelis, or boycott the Israelis, or ostracize the Israelis, or turn anti-Semitic and hate Jews anywhere you find them? Whatever you think you're doing to pressure the Israelis, Hamas lies on the other side, pressuring them in the other direction. Because, it absolutely convinced them for a generation that there is nothing they can do to pull out that Hamas won't turn into terrible bloodshed and the murder of their children.

1:38:35

Russ Roberts: So, now what? Since 2006 we had this thing called October 7th. We did something in Gaza in response to it that dwarfs everything that was done before. The old metaphor--it's grotesque--but it was called 'mowing the lawn': every once in a while things get bad in Gaza, we have to go in. So we've had a bunch of skirmishes, whatever you want to call them.

You mentioned tunnels, by the way: these were tunnels that went under the Israeli border, not tunnels that sheltered Hamas that we've been dealing with lately.

So what do we do? Where does this leave us? Should we be dropping copies of Gandhi--which is another anti-colonial movement that chose a different approach? It was successful. The British left India. Again, the more things change, the more they stay the same. You can't, as they say, kill an idea. You can kill a lot of the leaders of that idea, and Israel has very effectively over the last few months, destroyed the leadership on October 6th of Hamas, or October 7th. It's been replaced. Many of their fighters are dead. But still, Hamas in Gaza, still holding hostages.

Hezbollah, we've supposedly destroyed 80% of their missiles, but they still have 20%. Yesterday was a beautiful day of sirens and warnings and shrapnel and missiles falling all over Israel launched from southern Lebanon.

There is that thing called Iran, which has funded much of that infrastructure that is either about to attack us or we're about to attack them. Got any optimism for me, Haviv? It's a great, credible history lesson, but what do I learn from it--for tomorrow as opposed to yesterday?

Haviv Rettig Gur: Yeah. October 7 was Hamas arguing, essentially--if you understand that history, the strategic history--arguing essentially that the problem so far is that we haven't sufficiently sacrificed on the altar of Algeria.

Russ Roberts: Yeah, x+1 is not enough, or x was higher than I thought; so we need to do 2x, not x+300.

Haviv Rettig Gur: Right. And Hamas engineered, painstakingly, the destruction of Gaza. The tunnel networks have--they've said this. This isn't an Israeli conspiracy theory. They have argued this. The Israeli--not a single civilian. There are 500 kilometers of tunnels in Gaza; it's the single biggest thing Palestinians have ever built. Hamas bent the entire Gazan economy to this tunnel project; and they built nothing else for 17 years. And the fundamental purpose of this tunnel project is that when Hamas begins the war it planned to begin, the only way the enemy can get to Hamas is to cut through the cities. There's simply no other way to get to those tunnels.

And in 13 months of war, not a single civilian has been allowed to step foot in a single tunnel for their protection.

The point of this war is a). to double down on Second Intifada traumatic terrorizing of the Israelis; and b).--

Russ Roberts: And, boy are they succeeding--

Haviv Rettig Gur: Right. In causing the pain they certainly succeeded. And, b). in doubling down on the Israeli response--military response--pain for Palestinian civilians that empties the Israelis of their purpose, like it did to the French colonialists. Like the Mau Mau Rebellion did to the British and Kenya. Like Gandhi, in his exact opposite strategy; but it was based around robbing the British of their excuse for their use of force, for their violence, for their imposition of oppression.

By forcing the Israelis to decide that any cost--there is no cost they won't pay to get Hamas; and then making that cost catastrophic for Palestinians, you impose all of those Algerian costs that the Algerians thought about on the French from all the different layers: the forcing French cruelty against Algeria, forcing Israeli cruelty against Gaza. That's the strategy. It is a doubling and tripling and quadrupling and whatever goes beyond quadrupling--quintupling--of that strategy by Sinwar for this conflict.

And, I have argued--and I have argued this since 2012: I wrote a piece in 2014 about the Hamas/Gaza strategy being the Algeria strategy. And, that piece went insanely viral. Hundreds of thousands of people read an essay that was 3,000 words--that, after something goes viral, you look back at it and you're very upset that you got something wrong in it. Things like that, right? That's not a piece that should have gone viral. That was long and plodding and complicated. But, it explained why Hamas isn't stupid and that people really are hungering for: what's the deep, rich, serious thinking? Sinwar is a psychopath, and probably actually a sociopath, literally; but all Hamas isn't psychopaths. And all Hamas did this. And so many Gazans still find dignity in that version of the story. What's going on?

And the answer is: It was a doubling down on Algeria. And, I have argued that it won't work. It won't work. And the reason it won't work is the ways in which the Israelis are unlike the French. And the biggest way that the Israelis are unlike the French, is that they have no France--

Russ Roberts: Yeah. Well--

Haviv Rettig Gur: There's no France to go back to.

But there are many other ways that the Israelis are unlike the French. They come from the Arab world. If the PLO, in 1964, looking at Algeria drawing inspiration--modeling its strategy on the FLN strategy--had noticed that, in the immediate aftermath of the FLN kicking out the French, they kicked out another group: They kicked out the Jews, a Jewish community that had been in Algeria since before Algerians spoke Arabic. And, the Jews could not live in Algeria under the FLN. And that's why Israel--where those Algerian Jews largely live--is immune to the anti-French strategy: because we don't have a France, and we don't even have an Algeria.

Russ Roberts: To go back to--

Haviv Rettig Gur: Right.

Russ Roberts: So, so--

Haviv Rettig Gur: So, what happens when you launch an anti-colonial strategy of brutalizing warfare, meant to draw cruelty to your own side as well, against an enemy that in the specific characteristics needed for the strategy to work, it doesn't share those characteristics with colonial? You want to still call me colonialist as an epithet? You want to still call me colonialist because you don't like me? You want to call me colonialist because in some philosophical sense, there's some version of this in which I'm a colonialist? I don't care about this moralizing language.

By the way: none of us care: not Palestinians, not Israelis. There are polls that tell us that 90% of Palestinians think the Israelis want to exterminate them, and 90% of Israelis tell us Palestinians want to exterminate them. No Israeli and no Palestinian cares about the moral emotions of foreigners. It's just not registering in their psyche. And it shouldn't register in their psyche because it looks to them detached and ridiculous. The idea that you foreigners are living out your moral fantasies on us, while we have everything literally at stake--which is how people are experiencing this--means that none of this foreign emotion matters. Nothing will stop the Israelis and nothing will stop the Palestinians because everything is at stake.

But, they will still fail, and they will fail because of all the ways in which we are not French colonialism.

Russ Roberts: Okay. So--

Haviv Rettig Gur: And, that's the great tragedy: that they are destroying Palestine, not Israel, in this refusal to understand us on our own terms. I think that if they knew our history--if they listened to your and my podcast a year ago--then Hamas's catastrophic, cataclysmic mistake would become obvious. And I try to teach Palestinians our story, inasmuch as any Palestinian will listen to me--which is not very much.

1:47:18

Russ Roberts: So, let's close. I mean, there's a lot more to say.

Haviv Rettig Gur: Yeah, we've only just begun.

Russ Roberts: I know. But--

Haviv Rettig Gur: Welcome to the Middle East.

Russ Roberts: What's the--all this does is break my heart. Right?

So, when I moved here three years ago--and I may have told this story before; I apologize to listeners--but in my book Wild Problems, I write about the decision I made to come here: to move here to take this job as President of Shalem College, for my wife and I to become Israeli citizens. It's a wild leap of uncertainty. It doesn't matter how many times you've visited Israel before--which we had both had: Living here is different. There's a great joke about that--I won't tell it now--but the punchline is, 'Oh, well then you were a tourist.'

Haviv Rettig Gur: Oh, it's a joke about Hell?

Russ Roberts: Yeah, exactly. So, we'll save it for another time.

But, my point is, is that when I wrote this up in my book, a friend of mine, a Jewish friend who read the manuscript said, 'Well, of course when you talk about your decision to move to Israel, you're going to concede that you had a moral dilemma to become complicit in the occupation of Palestine.' And I thought, 'No, I'm not actually. I don't feel that way and I'm not going to pander to that.' You can read the book: I didn't put anything in about that.

But, what he was saying was: to live here, to move here--which is even stronger than to stay here--to move here, is to say that I accept what happened in 1948 as part of my narrative, and I will fight, and my children will fight--not in the literal sense in my case, my children are older. But, to move here as a young person, which thousands of people have done, is to say, I'm going to walk into this knowing that my neighbors don't believe I have a right to be here and will, and have a strategy--which, I like your narrative, Haviv: I'm very sympathetic to it--that they have adopted a strategy that is equivalent to the wind trying to get me to remove my coat and all I do is clutch it closer. And the sun is what gets me to take my coat off by being strong.

And so, boy, you kill 1200 of our people and kidnap 250, and rape our women and kidnap our children and do other cruelties? We'll show you. And, we have; and it's horrible. It's absolutely horrible. And, the death and destruction we've wreaked on Gaza, I hope and pray will lead to a better tomorrow for them as well as us.

But, shouldn't we just move? I mean, come on. You said every few years there's a terrible war. How do we reconcile that reality?

And I have no regrets about moving here, by the way. I'm being somewhat rhetorical and dramatic here. I believe it's our homeland. I believe we're entitled to live here. I do not believe it is immoral to live here.

But it's tough, parts of it. And I don't have children here, in the Army. My heart goes out to all my colleagues who do and my students who go back and forth between Gaza and Lebanon over the last year. It's horrific. But, the idea that it wouldn't accomplish anything is more horrific still.

So, you got any cheer for me at the end of this narrative?

Haviv Rettig Gur: I mean, that's such a fundamental question and I'm glad you asked it.

There is a profound gap between the way that the West looks at us and the way we look at ourselves. And it is a gap that I think is rooted to some significant extent--maybe even a very significant extent--in the gap between the Jews of the West and the Jews of Israel. We have, today, two Jewish civilizations, and they're basically the two Jews who survived the 20th century--the English-speaking Jew and the Hebrew-speaking Jew. In the 20th century, you either learned Hebrew, learned English, or died. That's the story of the Jews.

Every time I say something like that, French Jews raise their hand and get angry at me, but they're the third largest Jewish community after Israel and America. But, French Jews are the exception that proves the rule because French Jewry is 90% Sephardi: they're 90% from North Africa. After the Holocaust, France was refilled with Jews because North Africa empties of its Jews. See, for example, Algeria. So, they're the exception to this rule that absolutely proves the rule, and they've had radically different histories.

The story of American Jews--who are the lens through which America and larger parts of the West and the left see Israel--is a story of the promise of liberalism coming true in astonishing ways. When the Jews land in America, these 2.5 million refugees who flee, 1,300 pogroms and a quarter million dead, and horrific oppression and laws against them. The Russian Empire, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the new Romania, and all of these different things that are happening in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to Jews, and Europe is slowly but very, very clearly becoming literally uninhabitable to Jews. Millions are fleeing, and the vast majority flee to the United States.

These 2.5 million Jews land in America, and they discover for the very first time in Jewish history--it had never happened before, no Jew had ever seen this before--a country that actually, genuinely, truly believed that they belonged to it. It wasn't that Jews fantasized, as in Germany for certain periods, that they could become Germans, but the Germans never had that fantasy about the Jews. It wasn't that the Jews thought maybe there was integration in our future in the Russian Empire. And the Russians never, ever, not even under Communist rule when that was the official ideology, but still it said 'Jew' in your passport--Jews could never be Russian according to the Russians. And Jews could never be Germans according to the Germans; and Bulgarians, and by the way, Iraqis. But, the Jews could suddenly be Americans and all America thought so. And that's weird. That is an absolute unique exception. It happened a little bit also in the rest of the English-speaking world. It happened in Canada as well.

Russ Roberts: It's an aberration.

Haviv Rettig Gur: It's an aberration. And it felt to the Jews of America, like an end to Jewish history, to the Jewish history of pain. That's one reason that American Jews stopped teaching history about five generations ago. And, you, today, have young people in your college campuses who think that the entire experience of millions of refugees, and vast pain, and hundreds and hundreds of pogroms and death tolls into the six figures--the 20th century is the bloodiest century in Jewish history without the Holocaust. And all of that history has been reduced essentially to Fiddler [Fiddler on the Roof] in the American Jewish imagination, because they consciously decided to stop teaching history--because history had ended because America was the answer. American Jews are home, in a homeland, that's not quite America: it's American liberalism. And that existence in that homeland is a radically new Jewish world, Jewish community, Jewish psyche. The promise of liberalism came true so utterly and profoundly that it created a whole new kind of Jew.

Who are the Israelis? The Israelis are the exact mirror image opposite of that. They're the Jews that went through the 20th century--because when America put up its Quota Laws in 1921 and 1924, they're the Jews who couldn't get in. They couldn't get into Canada, and Britain, and Brazil, and Australia. All the nations of the world in the 1920s and 1930s for various reasons put up Quota Laws and Immigration Laws. South Africa passed four distinct immigration laws to keep the Jews out, including one in 1937 targeting German Jews.

The whole point was: Europe deals with the Jewish problem. We don't deal with the Jewish problem. Jews became undeportable. That was the Nazi problem. They'd wanted to get rid of the Jews by deportation. They couldn't--nobody would take them at a certain point--and so they had to kill them. That was how the Nazis thought of it. And, these immigration laws corralled the Jews into the gas chambers.

But even after the Holocaust, these people who would become Israelis still watched as the world wouldn't take them in. I was in a high school AP [Advanced Placement] American History class in Wisconsin in 1998 or so, and my teacher talked about how the British liberated Bergen Belsen and the American soldiers liberated Buchenwald and Dachau; and then the books closed and the next day we talked about the Vietnam War.

Russ Roberts: Yeah, sure.

Haviv Rettig Gur: I raised my hand and I said, 'Wait a second, you think that the American troops liberated Bergen Belsen and Dachau and Buchenwald, the American and British troops? The Jews are still living there three years later. What does liberated mean?' Truman begged Congress to let them in, and Congress refused. The quotas were never lifted after the world knew everything there is to know about Auschwitz.

Nobody on earth--the International Refugee Organization [IRO] brought dozens of governments to the camps to set up booths, interview the million DPs [Displaced Persons] who couldn't go home, and every single non-Jew--750,000--was given citizenship in new countries and taken away. After the IRO closes up shop and shuts down its booths and leaves, the last quarter million DPs--by the end of 1946 I believe it was--every last one of them is a Jew. The Jews watched as the world carefully sifted--after the Holocaust--the entirety of the West carefully sifted through the last survivors. When Congress shuts the doors in the 1920s, there's potentially 8 million Jews who could flee Europe to America. Nobody wants 8 million Jews: that's way too many.

But, the last quarter million of a shattered remnants--the Nazis lost to the Allies, but they didn't lose the war on the Jews. They destroyed European Jewry. And that last quarter million had no place to go.

When did the DP camps start emptying out in large numbers? In May, 1948; and those DPs are a quarter of the IDF. So, what is the Israeli Jewish experience of history? And this exactly speaks to your question of living on our sword, of fighting forever and ever. The world is capable of watching you die, shrugging, and turning away. And, that the best of the world, the most moral, and the American empire that created the greatest happiness and prosperity in the history--the Pax Americana is a period everybody's going to miss, especially the people who complained about it the most. And that part of the world, that great America, that the Jews who did make it in, they actually allowed to become Americans in a way that--there is no compliment paid in the history of the world to any nation on this earth than the Jewish experience of America.

But, any Jew who didn't get in, watched America sit and look at them as they died. The last living Jews in the Eastern Hemisphere--I give a lot of college talks, university talks over the last year on American college campuses, and in Britain a little bit, and Canada and Australia. I think it was at GW [George Washington University] in DC, and a kid raises his hand and he says to me, 'Everyone on campus is anti-Zionist. The professors are anti-Zionist, and the students--my friends aren't my friends anymore, and I can't get a date.' This, by the way, is a very smart kid because he's waving the flag of Zionist victim of anti-Zionism in a room full of kids who self-selected to come to hear me speak. This was the right crowd to look for a date. But, I tried to convey to this kid exactly this gap. And so, I said to him, 'Look, I'm the idiot Israeli in the room. What's an anti-Zionist?' And, he says, 'Well, the anti-Zionist is the person who thinks that Israel should never have been founded.' And, I said, 'Well, but every other Jew in the Eastern Hemisphere is dead.'

There's a few, but statistically that's the basic truth. What's the argument? Is the argument that we should also be dead? You wish 8 million Israeli Jews who live today should have died then? Say so out loud. Or is the argument that the world should have given us other options, somewhere else to go, to flee to? Well, I agree with that. If that's anti-Zionist, I'm an anti-Zionist. But, are there any other options? What are the other options? You're either genocidal, ignorant of the history--so you think the Jews had a choice--Zionist, or what? What's the fourth option?

And, that's the gap between the American Jewish perception and the Israeli Jewish perception, which is to say: in the United States, Zionist is a word that is believed to convey a kind of ideological option. In other words, you can be six kinds of Jews, you can be Orthodox, and conservative, and reform, and Buddhist, and Communist, and Democrat voting, and Republican voting, and mountain biking. You can be a mountain biking Jew. You can be all different kinds of Jews. One of them is Zionist. Among the 16 ideological options you have for your Jewishness, you can be Zionist Jew. Ew, yuck, Zionist Jew is icky, don't be that one. That's what people think they're saying in America when they say anti-Zionist.

But, what is the Israeli understanding of anti-Zionist, because they lived that history that American Jews don't even learn? They actually lived through the 20th century in a way America saved its Jews from ever having to live through. Zionist just literally means survived.

And I say that because, to those DPs who were a quarter of the IDF in 1948, if they don't have this place, they don't have any place on earth, and the entirety of the world proved it to them. When Truman sends Earl Harrison, the Dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School--I think we mentioned him in the last talk--

Russ Roberts: Yeah, we talked about him. Yeah--

Haviv Rettig Gur: He gives this poll, and I want to re-mention it if people haven't heard. It's a year ago--

Russ Roberts: Yeah, it's [inaudible 02:01:55]--

Haviv Rettig Gur: He gives this poll at one camp in which--

Russ Roberts: DPs meaning displaced persons--people who, after the war, quote, "have no place to go."

Haviv Rettig Gur: Right. So, he comes to one camp and he gives a poll in which he says to people, 'Where do you want to go? I don't know if I can get you there. President wants to take you into America, Congress won't let him. I don't know what we're going to do, but where do you want to go?' And, 90% write on the first line, 'Palestine.' And, 90% write on the second line, 'Palestine.' Harrison is annoyed because apparently Jews don't know how surveys work. So, he gives them a new survey in which he says, 'Other than Palestine, where do you want to go?' And, 25% write, 'Crematorium.'

They got the message. They got the message. The world gave them a message, they finally understood it.

So, for an Israeli--and this is something American Jews really struggle to understand and imagine, but it is so fundamental--living on our sword is redemption. We stopped dying when we started having the great and profound right that our ancestors never had and so they just died quietly while others tried to tell a story about their deaths that ennobled the others.

Our ancestors did not get to live on their sword. We do. That's the privilege. That's the change in history. That's what Israel means. Our enemies can't scare us out of here. War came on October 7, and left-wingers went to Gaza, just like right-wingers, because Gaza had convinced them--Hamas had convinced them--that there aren't any other paths.

Again, I don't argue this is truth, all of it, all told, objective, and perfect. This is what those Israelis think is happening to them, and they're not stupid. If you're going to tell them they're wrong, you have to start with what they know. You can't start not knowing what they know and think you have something to say--because you don't have anything to say. For Israelis, this moment, this period, this pain, this frustration, this agony, this is the best version of history available to us, and thank God we get to live in it because wow, do our enemies suffer.

It used to be that the Jews suffered and the enemies did not. Israel didn't make Jews invincible. It just made their blood very, very costly. And that's enough. And that's what happens when you go through the 20th century.

There is no reason that Iran would want to destroy Israel. It has no interest in Israel. It has no border with Israel. And it doesn't give a shit about Palestinian rights. It doesn't even give a shit about Iranian rights. The Iranian regime wants to destroy Israel because of some wack-a-doodle, insane, vast--I mean, I explain it very empathetically: I have a whole class on it, but that's not the point. The point is because of this vast restorationist redemptive religious vision. And for the first time in the history of Jews, the Jews can hurt them more than they can hurt us.

And that's it. That's--the thing you just asked me about as if it was the bad scenario, feels to Israelis like the good news.

Russ Roberts: My guest today has been Haviv Rettig Gur. Haviv, thanks for being part of EconTalk.

Haviv Rettig Gur: Thanks, Russ.

Terrorism, Israel, and Dreams of Peace (with Haviv Rettig Gur)

Yossi Klein Halevi on the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict

Is Israel Occupying the West Bank? (with Eugene Kontorovich)

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