We are now almost a year from October 7. And where are we. More than 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza are dead. The hostages are not home. Does not look like there will be a ceasefire deal that brings them home any time soon. Israeli politics is deeply divided. Netanyahu has made a significant comeback. Israel’s international reputation is in tatters. The Palestinian Authority is weak. There may well be soon a war in Lebanon. There is no vision for the day after. There is no theory of what comes next. It has just gotten worse. And so I asked David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker on the show. The reason I wanted to have him on is he has been doing deep, long form reporting from Israel for decades. And over that time, he has profiled almost all or spoke with almost all of the major players right now. He first profiled Netanyahu back in 1998. He profiled in 2013 Naftali Bennett, the candidate leading Netanyahu in polls of who Israelis think is suited to be prime minister. And he just did a big profile of Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas, who is somebody who has not been profiled enough or focused on enough in the American press. So Remennick has a deep familiarity and history with both the region and the politics and the people who are driving it. As always, my email. Nytimes.com David Remnick, welcome to the show. Pleasure to be here. So who is Yahya Sinwar? Yahya Sinwar is, for all intents and purposes, the leader of Hamas in Gaza and has been for some time at this point, the most powerful person in Gaza and the decider for Hamas and has been for quite a while. He’s now, so far as we underground and has been since October 7 and communicates with the outside world and his Hamas colleagues by runner and by written message because he doesn’t trust electronic communications. But who is he? Where does he come from? What is his early life like? How do become how do you become Yahya Sinwar? Sinwar, whose parents were from what is now called Ashkelon, which was a Palestinian village up the Coast from Gaza. And in 1948 they fled to what is the Gaza Strip and they settled there and Zamula was. A religious kid. He grew up in a particularly religious family. And when he was a university student at the Islamic University, he attached himself to Sheikh Yassin. Who was Sheikh Yassin? Sheikh Yassin was the founder of Hamas. And he Sinwar found himself appointed to be one of the leaders of something called the Majd. The Majd would be Hamas’s morality police and also, most importantly, the organization that would root out, prosecute, torture, and kill people who dared to collaborate with the Israelis in Gaza. And Sinwar was known to be a particularly ruthless head of the Majd in Southern Gaza. He’s from Khan Younis. Sinwar was arrested by the Israelis and put in jail in the late 80s, and there he remained for the better part of a couple of decades. And in Israeli jails. He decided with a great sense of. Determination because he wanted to be a leader of Hamas and was committed to armed struggle. He learned Hebrew. And he learned it perfectly. He read Israeli papers. He watched Israeli television. He became incredibly familiar with and fluent in Israeli society, language politicians. He read memoirs of security Chiefs, prime ministers and all the rest. One thing I heard from a lot of Israelis at different levels of Israeli society was that they feel he understands them and they don’t understand him. He used prison. He’s talked about this as a sort of study Hall in the Israeli psyche. What did he learn in Academy, I think is the word he used. He wrote a novel, too, by the way. He wrote a novel about his experiences called the thorn in the carnation. Obviously, it’s a very self-justifying novel. It’s not a particularly brilliant novel, but it’s an extremely interesting novel to read. Prison has it smuggled out while he’s in. Bit by bit. Yeah, we know that this novel exists because it was on Amazon for a while. And after October 7 there were loud protests against Amazon by an employee of Amazon was one of the hostages. And they took it down. But it’s still floating around the internet. And if you want to know something about yellow Sinwar, it’s very much worth reading. And it’s a portrayal of. The making of himself, how he became this political leader, military leader, terrorist strategist, what the roots of his politics and fury are. And they’re rooted in his family’s exile. They’re rooted in his witnessing close at hand. The 1967 war, which everybody around him thought was going to be a great victory. And a week later, it was a humiliation. Same thing in 1973. They’re long passages about sinhua and his schoolmates being taken. By bus to visit Israel inside the green line. Including a visit to Jerusalem. And this overwhelming experience, however romanticized in the rear view mirror of visiting the al-aqsa mosque and also where Saladin, the great Muslim military leader and political leader who defeated who had victories against the Crusaders. And he asks at one point rhetorically in this novel, who will be our great saladin? Clearly, at some level, at least how I’m reading it, posing himself as a possible answer to that question. You might imagine the leader of Hamas is somebody whose experience is. Waging war against Israelis, killing Israelis. But his experiences, at least before prison. Appears to be in killing Palestinians. I don’t think he had any compunction about. Killing Israelis to. Yeah, my point is not that he’s full of mercy, but it is to say he says it to this dentist at some point that he’s ready to sacrifice 20,000, 30,000, 100,000 Palestinians in order to. That’s right. You’re referring to a dentist named Benton. Bitton, who lives on a kibbutz and was a dentist in the Israeli prison system. And Benton struck up a relationship or vice versa with Sinwar. And he had lots and lots of conversations with Sinwar, by the way, and so have many other Israeli visitors to those jails. And there have been many. There have been numerous interviews, even semi recent interviews with Sinwar. He is not a figure who’s one of. Extraordinary mystery. I think in jail. The most important thing that happened to him. That helped shape events. Was the increasing awareness on a tactical level that the taking of hostages. Was effective. In fact, I discovered a document. Thanks to the health of my colleague Ruth Margolis. In his police file that showed that he and one of his cellmates tried to engineer the taking of an Israeli military hostages from their jail cells through the use of his brother, the other guy’s brother. And the plot was foiled and found out. So that was step one. Then came the really pivotal Gilad Shalit kidnapping. 20 years ago, you had a situation where members of Hamas came across. The border, the fence and kidnapped in a raid a young Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, one. One brought him into Gaza. And for the next five years while Shalit was in the hands of Hamas. Israeli society was obsessed with this case. There were demonstrations on the street, not entirely dissimilar, not in the same scale as you’re seeing now. And finally, he was released for 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. One of them was Yahya Sinwar. And Sinwar is part of the negotiations over this. He was and he was the most hardline of the negotiators. In fact, he was holding out for much more than 1,000. They put him in solitary confinement to isolate him from the negotiations to do the deal. By the way, Netanyahu is the politician. That’s what I’m saying, who released 1,000 prisoners under tremendous political pressure. And I feel like there’s a deep historical irony in this, the sort of devaluing of Palestinian life, becoming a devaluing of Israeli life. He’s released because he’s not killed Israelis. He’s killed Palestinians, correct Correct. But many, many of the people who were released, many of the Palestinian prisoners who were released were in prison for planning or the blowing up of buses or cafes, all kinds of horrific crimes. This is one of the bits of this that I am surprised Netanyahu has survived. This whole moment goes back to a deal that confirms the value of hostage taking in an incredibly lopsided negotiation and releases the mastermind of the October 7 massacre and the hostage taking. How is Israeli politics, society absorb that. How has it shifted the system’s understanding of how to think about the hostage. There are so many ironies in this that we can’t even begin to count. I mean, I’m always going on about this, but I think one of the things that needs to be kept in mind is how many contradictory truths and narratives and tragedies are going on all at once. And this is one of the awful parts of this thing is there is an. Inability or refusal of all sides to take on. All the painful truths that are presented to them. So if you’re. In Israeli. You are not seeing what’s going on in Gaza. Every night, not on Channel 12, not on 13, and certainly not on 14, which is the kind of Fox News station you are seeing military operations. You’re seeing the military spokesman taking an embed of some correspondents into the Philadelphia Corridor near Rafah. You’re much more you’re seeing lots and lots, understandably, about the hostages, about internecine political battles, street demonstrations. The one outlet that’s publishing a lot about Gaza in Hebrew every day is Haaretz. But that’s a newspaper that now reaches a lot of people here, probably a lot of liberal readers in the United States and English speaking countries. But it’s a modest readership. And in Israel do not know or do not want to know. I think it’s more the latter. So Sinwar now lives underground, communicating by messenger. That’s right. He had an extraordinarily successful lethal attack, but Gaza is destroyed. Tens of thousands of people dead. What is he believe in your reporting. What is his theory of this now. What is Hamas’s theory of this. Now, he might be fine. Let’s be clear. But I have. But Hamas is not going to rule this. Let’s be clear. Yahya Sinwar is unavailable for comment. And I certainly have not talked to him for this piece or anything else. But if we accumulate all his collected speeches and interviews and look at them and review them, it’s very clear that he sees himself as a great actor in a great historical struggle in which and he has said this not just to interrogators, but Palestinian comrades and academics who know him. I talked to all kinds of Palestinians, including people in Hamas, that he saw himself engaged in this great historical drama. And as you said earlier, if 20 or 30 or 100,000 Palestinians have to die for the liberation of Palestine and the liberation of Palestine, also, in his view, repeatedly means the elimination of what we now know as Israel. So be it. But when you talk to some of these people, did they feel that there was a way, this leads to the liberation of Palestine. If that’s the goal, what is the intermediate. Step here. Well, I think part of what distinguishes this part of the world is that there are. Political actors on both sides who are fantasists fantasists with guns. And in Gaza, not that long before October 7, a couple of years before I forget the date, there was a conference sponsored by Hamas sponsored by Sinwar about. What taking over would look like. And there were all kinds of speeches and very specific plans about what would happen on the day after Israel was eliminated and Palestine was liberated in their terms. What should we do about the Jews. Should we kick everybody out or kill them. Or should we keep the ones that are really valuable. Who are doctors or advanced computer programmers. That conference of the hereafter took place that was on the level of fantasy. I think it’s fair to say that when he unleashed his soldiers on October 7 that he might have hoped for any number of things, even deeper penetration into Israel. But it was basically a suicide mission to spark something even larger if possible. What he was operating from was a sense that nothing is happening. We are still here in Gaza living the life of the oppressed. Palestine is not free. The West Bank is in the circumstances it’s in. Meanwhile, the Israelis are negotiating through the good offices of the United States with Saudi Arabia. The Abraham Accords. And it’s ignoring us. We need to blow this up and in their terms. Hope for the best that Hezbollah militias from the Houthis, Syria, Iraq and maybe even Iran will join the battle. And the final answer will come. But short of that, we will have exploded. Israel’s sense of the status quo. I think that was what it was about. Let me talk about the North. Sure what is happening on the northern border of Israel for people not familiar with it. Remember, October 7 was October 7. That was an attack from Hamas. Something happened the next day. On October 8. Which is that Hezbollah began to attack northern Israel. Hezbollah is a Shiite group, heavily militarized, infinitely more sophisticated than Hamas, infinitely better armed, and obviously doesn’t have the sense of isolation. And in fact, in a relatively failed state of Lebanon, its power there is immense. Its ability to operate is immense. So this has been going on for years. Americans old enough to remember, even during the Reagan administration, that Hezbollah killed hundreds of Marines. It is a real threat. But what you have right now is a depopulated northern Israel and a constant back and forth, which is, again, an absurdly bloodless word to describe what’s going on, but a back and forth that’s limited, somewhat controlled between Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon and Northern Israel. And if you and I know you’ve been there, as have I. Those towns in Northern Israel are. Ghost towns. Small small kibbutzim. Kiryat Shmona. Other places like it. Or they’re empty. They’re empty. Just as a lot of places in Southern Israel have now been transformed. Israel has shrunk. In a strategic geographic sense. Israel, already a tiny state, has shrunk. This, to me was the piece of it that is most potent in the politics there that you hear the least about here. I was up in Kiryat Shmona. It was on fire when I was there. As you say, everything is a ghost town. You’re dealing with tens of thousands. I think the number I heard then was 60 to 80,000 Israeli refugees. I think not all of them from that. Not all of them from that area, but many. And they I mean, some of the interviews I did with people who had lived up there or whose family had now been living in a one bedroom hotel room somewhere else now for seven months, like their fury was palpable. And their question, which they kept posing to me and I don’t have an answer for, but it seems to me to be coming more central in Israeli politics is what is supposed to make them feel safe enough to go back. I mean, some of these people on the border, they say, look, I can see Hezbollah. And to me, October 7. Now feels like a coming attractions preview. They can see them. I mean, I was in a little village called Metula. And without binoculars, you saw the yellow and green flag of Hezbollah. And on a daily basis, there was. Mortar fire. There were Israeli Air raids, bombing raids. This is untenable. And it’s worth remembering, Ezra, that in the very early days, post October 7, there was a big push in the Israeli leadership to go all out on two fronts, not just against Hamas in Gaza, but in the North as well. This was a big push. And I think an underplayed story to some degree. Remember, the United States placed enormous military hardware in the region to head off, nothing having to do with Gaza so much as an expansion of the war into Lebanon and Iran or wherever. And I get the criticism of Biden. Harris in many ways, I really do. But it’s worth remembering that in the early days. The first weeks. Joe Biden said the following. You can’t look at what has happened here to your mothers, your fathers, your grandparents, sons and daughters, children, even babies and not scream out for justice. Justice must be done. But I caution this while you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it. After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. While we sought justice and got justice. We also made mistakes, a very clear reference to the misbegotten Iraq war and to some extent, Afghanistan. Don’t do that. Don’t act out of a sense of rage that was very carefully said in the first week. And at the same time, behind closed doors, there was a lot of pressure on the Israelis not to go full force into Lebanon. And a lot of Israeli political figures and military figures believe that was a mistake, to have to have listened to that council. And this seems to be a mistake that Israelis now want to correct. A number of things have happened here. But one thing is that it has just been announced recently that the return of evacuated residents to the North, which means the safety of the North, is now an official war goal. Members of the Israeli military and political class are speaking much more of going into Lebanon now. 67 percent of Israelis in early September poll say the government should intensify its response to Hezbollah. There’s talk of Netanyahu firing his defense minister, Gallant with. It’s not clear if the reason or the pretext being that Gallant has been in opposition to a full on invasion of Lebanon. I think Gallant also recognizes that the vaunted. IDF proved that it was deeply flawed. On October 7 and that it is now exhausted. It suffered losses. It’s forget the criticism from abroad that the idea that they’re now going to wage war in Lebanon is something that Gallant objects to by the way. Gallant is no, no superhero in my mind. But he plays an important role here. I just don’t know what’s going to happen on that front. This is something that changes hour to hour. This gets also to I think, a deeper ideological dimension. Every single Israeli I spoke to believes the real enemy for them is Iran. And functionally, every threat they face from Hamas, even more so, Hezbollah, Houthis and a smaller but unexpected and significant way. And they don’t think it because they have a rich imagination. They think it because for years and years, the leadership of Iran has made it absolutely plain in its rhetoric. And in its actions that its intentions is the reason for the state to some degree. Is the future elimination of the state of Israel. Which part of the National project. Now, you may be dismissive of that and say that’s just rhetoric, that’s just for the street or something like that. But I think. I don’t know about you, Ezra, but the longer I live, the more it seems very sensible to listen to what people say, whether they’re Israeli or from Iran or from wherever. It often turns out to be quite true. The thing that has been surprising to me on the other side of this, and I think militates against the view of Iran as an implacable, hyper ideological adversary, has been the sort of caution on both sides about escalation. That includes with Hezbollah, which has rockets that could go much deeper into Israel and does not been trying to do primarily civilian targeting. There was a sort of exchange between Iran and Israel. Israel committed an assassination on Iranian diplomatic soil. Iran launched drones that were knocked out of the sky and both sides stopped more or less. So on the one hand, there is a sort of tit for tat that is not exploded. On the other hand, this to me was what Israelis felt we most did not understand about them because it looked to us in America like they are Goliath against the Palestinian David, and they see themselves as locked in ongoing multigenerational war against a patient adversary who strikes at them from all directions, using all kinds of different clients. And may one day, in fact, one day soon have nuclear weapons. I was speaking to somebody named Hussein, who was a negotiator for the PLO back when. And the better days. Very sophisticated. Guy and he said, look, to some extent, Sinwar. And it’s a horrible thing to say. But on a pure level of consequence. That Sinwar won this great victory that he had hoped for. Immediately what do I mean by that. And I say this with whatever the opposite of relish is disgust. Despair that by. Shattering Israeli sense of security by exposing the weaknesses of the Israeli military or its the degree to which it’s overextended, that it’s not some mythological institution that could fight on infinite fronts. By arousing the fury that you see in the West Bank rather than a kind of terrible resignation by arousing Hezbollah, by tripping off a set of events in which Iran, for the first time directly sets missiles off toward Israel. Well, in Singer’s mind, that’s an enormous victory. It makes him in his mind whether he survives this or not. He makes good on this deal with himself that I mentioned in his novel about being, again, however fantastical and grotesque, the Saladin of his cause. Here’s the piece of this that I found perplexing. I understand a lot of the argument and believe it that Israelis make about Iran. At the same time, if I thought I was facing an existential threat from a soon to be nuclear regional power with an imperialistic past and grand strategic ambitions and deep ties to Russia and China, my international alliances would be extremely important to me. My alliance with America would be extremely important to me. Europe would be significant to me, other places. And at the same time that there is this emphasis on the long term multi-pronged multilateral threat of Iran, there is this recklessness I see in Israel in terms of how it is seen internationally, in terms of how it treats partners like America. I mean, I think the way Netanyahu has treated his American partners, not just the Biden administration, but for many, many years has been astonishing and cynical. He has lied to. And betrayed at certain instances for years American presidents. And it’s unbelievable. Bill Clinton, remember him leaving a meeting with Netanyahu and he and he said out loud, wait a minute, who’s the superpower here. He wasn’t kidding around Obama who whom the Netanyahu loathed. Extended himself. And to such a degree that Netanyahu made his cynical speech at bar-ilan University hinting that he might be for a Palestinian state. It was all a sham. It was all a sham. And I really recommend there’s a new film about Netanyahu that Alex Gibney’s jigsaw productions just did. And at the heart of it is a subject we haven’t discussed, which is Netanyahu’s motivations, his political personal motivations for the way he’s behaving to keep himself in power. And behind it to some extent are the corruption charges that are leveled against him. And he knows that the longer he stays in power, the more attenuated those charges get and the more he can escape them. And you see in this film so vividly the dismissiveness and the arrogance, the worn out. Of Netanyahu and the outlandish sense of entitlement and embattlement of Sara Netanyahu and the MAGA like rhetoric of Yair Netanyahu, the son who sounds like somebody who’s just never off of Truth Social going on and on about how the Israeli people and particularly the media are ungrateful. And it’s like it’s like North Korean media. It is proof positive that to stay in power for too long corrupts and corrupts and corrupts until you are your worst version of yourself. What struck me. So I went back and I read you did a great and very deep profile of Netanyahu in 1998. I’m an old guy. You’ve been doing this a long time and you spent time with his father, which is quite rare for a journalist. And sometimes you go back and you read a piece like that and you think, my God, how this person has changed up to a point. And what I thought when I read that piece was, my God, how this person has not changed. Yeah, put aside the corruption. I’m not saying that’s not a part of his motivations. Put aside his own politics. We’ll talk about that in a second. What do you think Netanyahu believes of the situation itself. Bibi Netanyahu’s father, Benzion Netanyahu, was a scholar. And in some ways felt himself to be a scorned scholar of the Spanish Inquisition. He was a follower, not of mainstream labor, Zionism, but rather a follower of what’s called Revisionist Zionists and much more conservative, an ideology developed by Jabotinsky as opposed to ben-gurion and so on. Long story. So when you say revisionist Zionism, what was it. Revising? revising. It was revising in a sense what was considered mainstream Zionism. The revisionist Zionist led by Jabotinsky, felt that they were too compromising. They felt that the state of Israel should be not only in the West Bank of the Jordan River, but the East bank. They were essentially looking for as much territory as possible, not because they were unaware of the presence of Arabs in eretz-israel and the land of Israel, but because they felt that was a menace and they needed as much land as possible. And therein lay the most essential difference at every turn. The ideology of. The old man, Benzion Netanyahu was that the worst thing you can be is a friar. A friar in Hebrew means a sucker. Oslo was the ultimate in being a sucker. Any he didn’t believe in even the partition plan of 1947 that ben-gurion accepted, however reluctantly as O.K., at least we have a stake. Any compromise was thought to be a betrayal of the Jews and Jewish history and all of it informed by an intense knowledge of and feeling about everything from the Inquisition to the Holocaust. Bibi Netanyahu’s brother, Yoni, was the one Israeli killed at the heroic 1976 military operation that went to Uganda and brought back Israeli hostages from their PLO captors. This family history weighs on Netanyahu and shapes him, I think, entirely without becoming an absurd psychohistorian. It’s not just obvious. And Netanyahu sees himself in Churchillian terms. Only I have the political sagacity and shrewdness only I have the realistic view of Israel’s circumstances and history. Only I can lead this country. And it was corrupting, it was intellectually corrupting, morally corrupting. And even on the level of champagne, cigars and ice cream, it became. Corrupting so I think ideologically he’s the same guy. But I think he became himself, as they say, about aging. You become yourself only more so. And the anti-democratic aspect of him and the lust for power allowed himself to make common political cause. With followers of the worst and most extreme current of religious nationalism, the followers of Meir Kahane. And I’m talking now about ben-gvir and Smotrich. Ben-gvir and Smotrich are vile creatures. They’re thugs. They’re not just annexationists and extremists. They’re background. They were in trouble with the law. They ben-gvir couldn’t serve in the military. It was in so much trouble with the law. That’s who Netanyahu was. The police forces, just to be clear. Yeah he runs the police forces that have a lot to do with how the West Bank is run day to day. Smotrich controls a lot of the finances in the West Bank. It’s horrific. And this is Netanyahu’s latest bargain with the devil. And it’s corrosive to Israeli society. Corrosive is not nearly as strong enough word. The last time you were in the West Bank, when you go to it, when you drive around it. Just visually, what do you see if you were taken by someone on a 20 minute trip from Jerusalem to one of the more established, bigger settlements outside the green line in the West Bank, and you were inclined to believe it, you might think, well, what’s so bad here. But if you take a much more varied ride. And you go to Janine and to Nablus and you go to the outskirts, villages of Ramallah, and you see how. There is an architecture of isolation and oppression that has been building and building and building over the decades in the West Bank. What you see is something. So comprehensive and systematic that with each passing year, it becomes harder to believe. Especially if you’re Palestinian. But I think for everybody that this is reversible. You remember 20 years ago, Sharon decided to withdraw from Gaza unilaterally. And there was a great drama of uprooting the thousands of settlers, but it was much infinitely smaller number of settlers in Gaza than in the West Bank. It was a big drama. The Israeli view of this, a predominant Israeli view of this now in the rear view mirror is that Gaza and Gazans just went ahead and created an empowered Hamas and things were terrible. And if we do that in the West Bank, we will get Gaza in the West Bank. That’s the common psychology. To imagine. A dismantling of the settlement project in the West Bank would require a political transformation in Israel, a psychological sense of the future and assurance and security that just doesn’t exist. So I. Agree with people who say that the only answer, unfortunately, is separation. Is partition. But to imagine that is. The prospect any time soon is tragically, woefully, not a possibility. When I was there in June, I spent about half of my time in the West Bank, and my strongest thought in my first day in the West Bank, which never changed, and I spent time in the big cities and I spent time in settlements. And I spent time in all kinds of places, was this is what the American South would have felt like. In the 1940s or 50s. And the thing that I think I had Not been prepared for was its visual immediacy. So I asked you what it looked like. So an example in the simple way you talk about it, West Bank is run by the Palestinian Authority. There’s actually areas a, B, and C area is run by the Palestinian Authority to a large extent. B is in a complicated way shared C, which is 60 percent of the land mass roughly, of the West Bank is just governed by Israel. The Palestinian Authority cannot govern there. And one of the things I noticed often in C was trash. In the areas of ABC where Israelis live, trash is picked up. It looks great in the areas where Palestinians live or move. Trash is everywhere. The other thing that was so visible was water. The easiest way I found to politics of water and the architecture of differing water access is intense. The easiest way to tell if you are looking at a Jewish or Palestinian settlement city village was whether or not there were water tanks on the roofs because the Palestinians get less water. The water is off on some days in many parts. When I was there, the water allotment had been recently cut. And so the Palestinians have these water tanks everywhere. And need to store water for the days when they’re not getting it. I have sympathy for the narratives of how we got here, but. But I felt very little sympathy for where here was. I mean, you can say what you want about Gaza and Hamas. This is West Bank. It is a Palestinian Authority. At the time I was there, Smotrich had cut the amount of revenues that Israel was passing on of the Palestinian Authority’s own taxation. So they weren’t being able to pay the people they employed there. The largest employer, the place was being squeezed, right. And I went around the West Bank and I thought if what I cared about was security, this is not what I would do. I would not want people unpaid. I would not want people angry about what are Israel’s a desalination superpower. They have the capacity to move water around and they do for their own settlers. You hear a lot from here about security. There it felt like that was certainly not the only agenda that was being pursued. I think also. Part of that architecture is a stultifying of life, day to day life. In a sense of possibility, an architecture that tells you. To stay in line. And an architecture that tells you that if you step out of line. This is what will happen. I look at this history, Ezra, as one mistake after another one. Injustice after another one. Refusal and miscue after another. It doesn’t begin. And October 7, it doesn’t begin in 1948. It just it extends back in history. And the only solution again, I don’t see it in the offing. The only solution is a real partition. That is secure, just and lends dignity and possibility to both peoples. And right now, that sounds like the greatest fairy tale mistakes of all time. And you don’t hear it very, very often or at all in the political conversation in Israel. When I talk to Palestinians there, what they felt was happening was not mistakes, but a policy project and what they believed the policy. It is a policy project. And the politics and the politics of Israel are being led by the just as the kind of pioneers post 1948, what was then called labor. Zionism was the dominant spirit. And political ethos of the country for all its mistakes and worse. Now, in many quarters the dominant ethos, even though they are far from they are distinct minority in the country is the ethos spirit of the settlers. Naftali Bennett, who is quite likely to be the main challenger to Bibi Netanyahu, is. To say the least. Pro-settler and pro-settlement project. He doesn’t live there. He lives in Ra’anana on the Mediterranean Coast North of Tel Aviv. He’s a town filled with of tech people. But his political ethos, his political ideas, his spirit doesn’t reside with Tel Aviv liberals. It resides elsewhere. We’re maybe going to get to Bennett later, but you profiled him in 2013 and you talked about the way he saw the endgame of the conflict. And I think this is something is not well absorbed in politics here that I think here people say what you just said. Well, the only possible solution is a partition, a two state solution. Some people on the left will say and I’ve and I’ve explored the other alternatives, binational, the one state solution and all the rest. But I think there are recipes for disaster. Well, the Israeli right. Their theory this is how you described it with Bennett in 2013. Bennett’s solution has become a commonplace on the right. Virtual annexation, followed by a potential exodus of dispirited Palestinians eastward into Jordan, where Palestinians are already a majority. And a number of people on the right said something like this to me. There’s a famous document from Smotrich, the finance minister, who says something like this in 2017, I believe. But there’s an argument that the mistake Israelis have made is to give Palestinians a hope of a state. What they need to do is break that hope. What they need to do is make sure Palestinians know they will never get a state. And if they live there with better behavior, they get a better quality of life or they get harassed out into Jordan. When I talk to Palestinians in the West Bank, what they felt was happening to them was a campaign of trying to turn up the pressure on them so they would leave. I may not believe that to be a steady state, but that is the Israeli rights to the best I can tell, the Israeli rights theory of what happens here. Let me just to elaborate on that, just what the narrative of trust was and the narrative of hope. Most Israelis, if you ask them about on the level of trust, will say, well, and it’s a very long and intricate story. We don’t have to get into every detail and twist and turn. But the Second Intifada proved that to so many Israelis, rightly or wrongly, that Palestinians could not be trusted with their own state. They’re going to live side by side with us in this tiny geography, and they’re never going to stop. There’ll be no what’s called end to claims. And this is mainstream and right of center and right wing Israeli speaking that once they have the West Bank and Gaza as a state, they will also want Afula and Haifa and Ashkelon to say nothing of Tel Aviv. It will never end that conviction post Oslo emerged from the Second Intifada and only got worse and worse and worse and worse. And parallel to that, the settlement project became more and more and more intense. And on the Palestinian side, the sense of hope diminished and diminished and diminished. And so when you go to the West Bank and you talk to people. Who obviously want a Palestinian state and have fought for years to do so and have never really liked Hamas, have now reached the point where they grudgingly and I it’s a bitter thing to say admire Sinwar because of the failures, the weakness of the Palestinian Authority and because of the long years that have passed in which the settlement movement has grown and grown and grown and the thought of a two state solution. Spoken about so ardently in certain corners still in Washington and elsewhere, it just doesn’t feel even remotely real. One of the things that struck me when I was talking to politicians in the Palestinian Authority, people who were city councils and that kind of thing in different parts of the West Bank. And I heard this also when I spoke to Salam Fayyad, the former prime minister, was there was a lot Israel could have done, could still do, but certainly could have done to make the Palestinian Authority a more successful governing player, partner force, try to make them look better in relationship to Hamas, try to make it seem true that if you supported the more moderate technocratic elements of the Pa, that you got something for that would lead to a better life, it would lead to better governance to money, to freedom, to self-determination. And universally, they just that is not their experience of working with know we. Salam Fayyad was as good a partner as Israel could have hoped for. If your intention was to make actual progress rather than to stifle it. So why did Israel, over this period, which was, let’s call it, the period of Netanyahu’s long reign, not want a stronger Palestinian Authority. Why did they not want the more moderate of the factions vying for leadership of the Palestinians to become stronger because they didn’t want a state ultimately. It didn’t really want. There’s no evidence that. Netanyahu really wanted. Negotiations for anything other than to tread water and to show the Americans that he was doing so. It was no political impulse in him. And in his. And we shouldn’t blame everything on one guy. That’s ridiculous. But he had no interest in creating a politics or a constituency for the creation of a Palestinian state. If we haven’t recognized that by now, we’ve recognized nothing. One thing that has just been true prior to October 7, you were seeing an acceleration of settlement construction after October 7. You have both seen that, but you have also seen a real rise in settler violence around or almost 700 Palestinians have been killed. And there is talk, you hear talk now of a third Intifada. There is this question that I was thinking about a lot when I was there, which is how much can you squeeze before you get an uprising and certain things that were being done like the withholding of tax revenues felt to me like they were lighting matches around dry Tinder for those who do see annexation as an end. And they are there and they have political power. Is violence something to be warded off or invited in, which is to say that if you wanted to annex and hold more of the West Bank, a third Intifada may not be. I mean, use that presumption as a means to an end. What a horrible thought. But unfortunately, horrible thoughts have a way of being predictive. When I talk to Israelis in the days, weeks and months after October 7, there was uncertainty on every point except one point, which is Netanyahu was done. He would phase out of Israeli politics and infamy. He would try to hang on, but there’d be marches in the streets and he’d be gone. People don’t seem to believe that now. Nahum Barnea, who has been writing a column for yediot aharonot for God knows how many years, when I interviewed him on my first trip after October 7, he said, look, I go to the funerals of politicians to make sure they’re in the ground. And Bibi Netanyahu is and he has no affection for Netanyahu remains the shrewdest raw political actor on the stage, the person that was thought to be the great pretender that would somehow displace Netanyahu was as a military general who had no political skill whatsoever. Benny Gantz. Benny Gantz. Benny Gantz is just not a skilled politician. He was just the not Netanyahu. And he was in the Ward council and he looked great in a uniform, and he had, I suppose, a storied military career. But that wasn’t going to happen. And slowly, after leading in the polls, I think he had was leading by 30 points. He’s now behind Netanyahu and the politician that’s now ahead of Netanyahu. But don’t blink twice is somebody that’s been on the scene in the religious nationalist arena and was prime minister for a year a few years ago. Is Naftali Bennett. Tell me two things. So one, who is Naftali Bennett. And then this is another big one. But what is religious nationalism as you use the term here. What is it they say in the Talmud can tell me the secrets of the world while I stand on one foot. Well, first, Naftali Bennett. Is comes from American parents. In fact, his father was kind of a civil rights minded guy in the early 60s. They became modern Orthodox. They moved to Israel. The parents after a while didn’t really like it. Naftali Bennett did. And he had one of these kind of lives where he got involved in technology, not in a huge way, but he lived in New York for a while and he made some money. Not a gigantic fortune, as sometimes has been proposed in the press. But, he made some money and lives in a nice house in Ra’anana. And in the wake of the Second Intifada, started wearing a kippah, a yarmulke head covering and was in the Lebanon war in 2006, became a politician. How did he become a politician. He became eventually chief of staff to Netanyahu, a more thankless job one could not imagine. And they fell out over Sara Netanyahu, who apparently was not a wonderful to work with or around. But they come from different streams. As I said, religious nationalism is a different current. Much more associated with the settlers, in fact, than revisionist Zionism. Revisionist Zionism is the current where Netanyahu comes from and the Likud party and Netanyahu is more secular. He’s entirely he’s not a man who when he goes to a shul, when he goes to a synagogue, it’s for political purposes. Maybe he goes to a bar mitzvah or a wedding or something like that. But no, he’s not a religious guy. Bennett when I first met him, when I went to visit him in his house, we were supposed to meet at 9:00. And I think he told me come at 10:00. So I came at 10 and he was still having his private tutorial on the parsha the reading from the Torah. That week he came to it a little later in life. But he is religious. Religious Zionism was discouraged in the early days of the state. The religious were not big Zionists to begin with. They wanted to live their own lives, study Torah and exist. Birth rates were such political developments were such they became much more powerful. And around the time of 1967, religious Zionism became this kind of almost messianic current in life, in Israeli life, Thanks to the aftermath of the war. Rabbi kook and the development of gush emunim the block of the faithful, the rise of settlements, politics changed, and this current grew and grew and grew. It’s not uniform, but it is immensely powerful and it has a very different. Perspective on the land. What is in the green line is not religiously what is in Israel. Yeah Tel Aviv is nice, but Chevron is the soul of why we’re here. You would hear that from a lot of religious nationalists. Tel Aviv is it’s not Sodom and Gomorrah, but it’s this kind of secular modern aspect of Israel. But the heart and soul of Israeliness is Jewish, not this other thing. And that resides in places like Chevron. And we’re talking here you do this profile of Bennett in 2013, I believe it is, he says, I think it’s to you. I will do everything in my power forever to fight against a Palestinian state being founded in the land of Israel. He considers the speech that most people now believe to be a sham of Netanyahu trying to placate a Shannda to Obama, but suggesting an openness to a two state solution that he never actually showed to be, as you say, a Shannda betrayal. And he is the person when right now you poll Israelis or there’s a channel 12 poll. He is the one who leads Netanyahu by the most, who is considered to be more suited to be prime minister than Netanyahu. Somebody said to me that to understand Israeli politics, where was going, you have to understand that both are going to be a rejection of Netanyahu, but it was going to the right. And Bennett reflects that. Absolutely and he was prime minister for a year. And there were people that would say that he moderated himself to some extent. On the one hand, when asked about gay marriage, he made some crack that was better, not repeated. It was quite disgusting. But on the other hand, he was for LGBTQ rights. So there was in some ways some softening of rhetoric. But he is extremely conservative. And if anything, he was a critic of Netanyahu on the prosecution of the war in Gaza. He thought it was too slow. Too hesitant that the Israeli leadership was guilty of listening to the Americans too much. Slowing down. What I can tell from what I see from Gantz, what I see from Bennett, if you want to challenge Netanyahu, what they all seem to believe is that Netanyahu’s advantage is if he can get to that, if they believe if the Israeli public believes that they might support a Palestinian state, they might go slower. They might. That’s why ben-gvir and Smotrich are there. It’s not like Bibi made any effort to or necessarily could have built a coalition to his left. It’s very important to tell ourselves the sad truth. The center center left is vastly diminished. It’s not just that the labor Zionism of khaki shirts and good liberals and Amos Oz novel reading public as diminished a lot. This is a very different political culture and has been for quite some time. And it’s influenced by any number of currents, whether it’s Russian immigration, religious birthrates, it’s just not a political circumstance where the left or even the center left. I mean, even Yair Lapid, who was, I believe, interviewed by the times not long ago. He can’t talk about Palestinian state. Benny Gantz never talked about Palestinian state. Even the general who’s now running on the left doesn’t utter that. So it’s a political culture that it’s in a moment of. Trauma, protectiveness and deep existential concern. And that’s a recipe for being on the right. But it was there before, too. I mean, I think this is one of the things like this, not like this. I agree with that. But this profile of the rising power of Bennett is 2013. Netanyahu is in power almost this entire time. This is something to me that in the American political conversation, I listened to Joe Biden, I listened to Kamala Harris, I listened to any member of the Democratic Party. And they feel out of touch with the reality. They’re to me, they talk about two state solutions now more than ever, and there’s no support for this, but a lot of that is talking to the American electorate. Do you believe that. Because I actually don’t. Tell me. I think the question of what is America’s position. If you believe and you accept that at this moment, Israel has no interest in it gets called a political horizon with the Palestinians. There is no support for that. It is not going to happen. What should American policy be. It would be an interesting question for somebody to answer. But in continuously saying that we believe in a two state solution. And we work with Israel on that basis and not accepting not where these leaders have moved, but where the Israeli public has moved and had moved some time ago. agree. But Israelis have to reckon with that. American support for Israel is shifting generationally, particularly among American Jews. The generation that grew up with the 67 war and a kind of liberal Zionism that they could relate to and traveling back and forth and feeling a sense of profound kinship that is changed not for the religious community. And I straddle both in my own life. I’m a secular Jew with a deep interest in this. And I want you to listen to the younger people around me how they view this. And I also I have religious conservative relatives as well. And I hear how they talk about it is radically different. They see it radically different. And I’ve watched how and listened to how Israelis have processed the demonstrations in this country. And sometimes hearing that they’re all pro Hamas across the board is a kind of both a fear and a profound misunderstanding, a willful misunderstanding that no, in fact, that there’s deep revulsion for what’s happened in Gaza. And it’s possible to have that. And at the same time, not in any way sympathize with Hamas’s attack on Israel. It’s possible to have both things in your mind. I mean, this to me is a strategic success of Hamas’s attack, that it has pushed Israel further, goaded Israel into becoming a thing that in the long run, I mean, now you see it. But it’s going to I think, get worse over time. That is just incompatible with say, being a liberal anywhere else in the parts of the world where Israel has deep alliances. Speaking here specifically, though, of America, that it’s a point that others have made. But this question where you will have to check your liberalism or your support for Israel because Israel is becoming illiberal, arguably already has no pathway or intention of becoming other than that. And the only thing that would save it is being a Democratic State and changing its politics. Look, we had the most illiberal president imaginable from 2016 to 2020 and while we were living it. It felt endless. But it was not necessarily yet inscribed in our politics that it was ineradicable. I mean, this to me is one of when you think about divisions in Israeli society, I think some people here still think of there once were these big divisions about should there be a peace plan or not. Now they’re about whether or not Israel will be a democracy. For Israelis, particularly Israeli Jews, to say nothing of the often second class treatment of Arab Israelis, there are fights over the Supreme Court. There are fights over whether or not fair enough, as Orthodox, the Haredi will serve in the military. The locus of internal conflict in Israel seems to me to have changed quite dramatically. Let me be the ventriloquist for what some Israelis would then say to you, although I see the sense in what you’re saying. They would say, hey, wait a minute. We still have a free press. We have all kinds of freedoms here that don’t exist elsewhere in the Middle East. The United States is commitment to Democratic norms is rather peculiar when you can win a majority of the vote for presidency and then lose the presidency. What’s that about. Our politics in some ways are minoritarian, arguably. So that gets played back against us in some quarters. Doctor, heal thyself. But they would also say, lucky you, you’re a big, gigantic, powerful country and your border states are Canada. I think this is Mexico, not Syria, not Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon, not Iran. Et cetera. I think that is a real argument. And the point that it’s all easy to say from a Podcast Studio in New York is true. You have to accept that is true. This is simply an observation about the reality of it around the West Bank is one thing that struck me when I was there was every settler I spoke to every person who lived in a settlement describe themselves now as a century. That their presence was necessary here. Because if they were not there, if the West Bank was a Palestinian state under the Pa, it would raise up an army. It would make common cause with neighbors and it would eventually come and commit a slaughter on a scale that October 7 couldn’t match. And look, you can see Ben Gurion airport from this hilltop. Et cetera. All of it true. And what we’re describing, Ezra, is not an easy solution, but a set of interlocking Tragic circumstances in a history of folly and cruelty and missed opportunities. And it’s important to understand that history thoroughly, but not throw up your hands. And so there I sympathize with the talk of two state solution, no matter how naive it may sound coming out of my mouth or an American politicians mouth. I think to some people, the more satisfying notion of well, it’ll be from the Mediterranean to the Jordan 1 state, I don’t see that as anything other than the elimination of Israel for something else that is potentially even more violent and leading to a history of constant war. I just right now myself, just try not to think about the endpoints that make Yugoslavia look Yes And you hear that a lot, I do think, in terms of just describing. But you think it’s wrong. Ezra, do you think a one state solution is AI don’t think any solutions are plausible right now. I don’t think that a two state solution is in any way plausible or realistic that any of the preconditions exist there. We agree. I don’t think a one state, a one state reality is sort of there in a way, but a one state solution. When people are talking about equal rights and political participation or Confederation. And yet it’s a very bitter thing to hear, particularly if you’re sitting in the West Bank Yes And living the life of a Palestinian today. And when I think of what the ways that political reality is reshaping itself, I thought this was a very interesting poll. I mentioned this channel 12 survey that found that Bennett was ahead of Netanyahu. It polled Israeli views on the American election, which just came out a couple of days ago. And it found that 58 percent of Israelis would vote for Donald Trump, found that 25 percent of Israelis would vote for Kamala Harris. The remainder didn’t know. I think Trump even beat Biden, despite the fact that a lot of Israelis were incredibly grateful, at least in the first months of the war, for his support. But this is something that has been a through line of Netanyahu’s entire career, of his entire political strategy. You can say that it has come to fruition in a damaging way for them. I think Biden was trying to reverse it. And I think ultimately has failed. But I think that for many Israelis, they now maybe rationally understand their long term securities. And alliance with the American right, that in the end there politically is the Democratic party’s generational changes happen, that there’s going to be too much pressure from Democratic politicians to be an Israel. They don’t want to be or don’t believe it is safe for them to be or don’t believe they should be. And that there is potentially space on the right for a more partisan, which is dangerous because sometimes your people are not in power, but also less demanding relationships. I think emphasis on the less demanding. If they only knew how little Donald Trump cared one way or the other. I mean, Biden I will say this has a feel for Israel. And I think something I see in that poll. Well, he also has a generational feel and a vocabulary that is Israelis, particularly Israelis of a certain age, can understand this connection. Israel’s emotional like. I believe that about him very deeply. All of my reporting on the administration suggests that to be true. And I think something you see in that poll that is probably correctly intuited is, I don’t believe, as Donald Trump says, that Kamala Harris both hates Jews and hates Arabs. But Harris reflects something that I think is going to be a generational change, frankly. I think you see it among young conservatives, too, where the question of what our support for Israel should be has been very different. You’re not going to have this cohort of 78 and 81-year-old politicians. Forever I mean, I do wonder if we are at an inflection point in the us-israel relationship. I to some extent, I hope so. I hope that American presidents. Will feel that they can express criticism without being criticized as. Anti-semites I mean, you hear this. I used to hear this about Obama all the time. He’s an anti-Semite. But it’s important for friends to speak firmly and directly to one another in moments of crisis. And I think you’re going to see that more and more, whether it’s Kamala Harris or any number of other politicians in the future. It’s a necessity. And because our investment in. A politically, militarily in terms of intelligence is immense and it’s going to come under fire. And it has to be those politicians are going to have to rationalize that. I think that is a place to end. Always Our final question what are three books you would recommend to the audience. Only three. Only 3. O.K. we’re right up against an election that is so tense and so consequential about. The future of the United States. The future of democracy. The future of everything imaginable. Rule of law. So I pick three books that are not connected to what we’ve been discussing, but just connect it to the sense of what resides in me, of hope and optimism. The first is a book called Hope against hope, which is a memoir by Mandelstam, who was the wife of. Then the widow of the great poet Osip Mandelstam. And it’s a memoir in which the ferocity of spirit and facing up to the worst that the world has to offer, particularly during the Stalin period is exemplified in the most heroic way. I love that book, hope against hope. That’s one just as a pure American history, I think Jill Lepore is survey is. These truths is just so moving, brilliantly written. And I’m not picking it because she’s my colleague at the New Yorker. Much the third is Kwame Anthony Appiah book, cosmopolitanism. So in a world in which we’re constantly discussing singular identities and with reason, I understand why we do that. But Appiah’s, who’s a philosopher and now at NYU. Appiah’s discussion of multiple identities and what it means to be a citizen of the world for all of us, I find extremely convincing, penetrating and really essential. David Remnick, Thank you very much. Thank you, Ezra. It’s a pleasure.