 Good afternoon. My name is Professor Michael Kerr from the Department of War Studies at Kings College London, and it is a great privilege and a pleasure to offer you a very warm welcome to the launch of Dr Stacy Gatkowski's excellent new book, Religion, War and Israel's Secular Millennials. Being reasonable, question mark. This has just been launched by Manchester University Press, and it questions how Jewish-Israeli millennials who came of age in the shadow of the Oslo peace process, the questions how they feel about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today by focusing on their lived experiences and the collective memory of this generation. Dr Gatkowski is a co-director of the Center for the Study of Divided Societies and Senior Lecturer in Conflict Studies in the Department of War Studies at Kings College London, where we have been fortunate enough to have her as a colleague since 2011. Stacy is also the co-director of the Non-Religion and Secularity Research Network, and she is co-editor of the book series Religion and its Others, Studies in Religion, Non-Religion and Secularity, and she also sits on the Academic Advisory Board of the Cambridge Center for Palestinian Studies. Prior to joining Kings, Stacy was an ESRC postdoctoral researcher in the Department of International Relations at the University of Sussex and a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict in Arizona State University and a research associate with the Religion and Ethics in the Making of War and Peace program at the University of Edinburgh. Stacy's research interrogates broadly the various relationships between war, peace, religion and the secular, setting up the crossroads in Middle Eastern Studies, political sociology, religious studies and critical security studies. Her current research focuses on theorizing intersections between emotion, violence and the secular, host war spirituality and self-making in the Middle East, analyzing moderation as a political category, interreligious pluralism among Syrian refugees and their hosts in Jordan and Lebanon and interreligious pluralism and youth-based peace building in the Middle East and Northern Ireland. She holds a PhD in international studies from the University of Cambridge and then fill in international peace studies from Trinity College Dublin and a BA in philosophy from Wellesley College. Stacy is the author of several books and numerous articles and book chapters on politics, security, religion and secularism in Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, Afghanistan, the United States and the United Kingdom. A native of Arizona, she recently added to her long list of achievements this year by becoming a pretty citizen and it is my pleasure also to welcome our special guest who's going to be discussing Stacy's new book and he is Ian Black and currently he is visiting senior fellow at the Middle East Centre at LSE. We'll read very little introduction for those of you who are Middle East watchers as he appears regularly on international television and radio channels commenting on current affairs. Ian was formerly Middle East editor, European editor, diplomatic editor and Jerusalem correspondent for the Guardian newspaper and he has also written The Washington Post, New York Times and The Economist. He is author of several books the latest of which is Enemies and Neighbours, Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel in 1917 to 2017. This book launch is being recorded and we will stream it immediately afterwards onto YouTube and Stacy has also compiled a war studies podcast on the book and we'll put a link to that in the chat so you can access that in your own time. After Ian and Stacy have discussed the book in the last 20 minutes of the event we will have a Q&A where you can pick your questions to Dr Bob Kowsky and I'd ask you to please put those into the chat box and Ian will pick these up and put them to Stacy then. Okay, like further ado I'll hand over to Ian. Thank you Ian. Okay, unmuting, can you hear me? Yes? Good. Okay, I think that Michael was wrong to say that the questions should be posed in the Q&A box, in the chat box, could you put them in the Q&A box I think? Yes. Okay, so very pleased to be asked to interview or have a dialogue if you like with Stacy's, with Stacy about her impressively researched new book. For me the overwhelming, the overriding impression if you like was a generational difference. So I was the correspondent in Jerusalem between, it seems like, you know, a long time ago between 1984 and 1993 and I left with impeccable timing just before the Oslo agreement of September 1993. So my experience is of a very different generation and that's what I'd like to focus on because of course the title of your book is Religion, War and Israel's Secular Millennials and the Millennials, the generation of Millennials begins in 1980, 1981. So my experience is completely different. So I want to ask you about that and the changes that have taken place. I very much like the concept of generational memory. I think it's from Karl Mannheim. So what was your impression based on, you know, an impressively empirical evidence of the generational memory of the Millennials or secular Millennials over to you. Thanks very much Ian. I'm really excited to have the opportunity to speak to you as well. So this is really great. I might just talk a little bit about the kind of the background to the book, background to the social group, give a little bit of context about their generational memory as you say and then I think talk about what I think is the key finding about their generational memory. So for about 15 years I've been interested in how people who describe themselves as secular or not especially religious understand war and violence. And for 12 years I co-ran a research network which investigated what this meant in different contexts for people who in their given context say I'm not really all of that into religion. In the academic world there's a lot of really great research about religion and how religious and ethnic symbols help fuel and can also be used to end national conflicts. But there's hardly anything at all about this other realm of human experience where people have quite mixed feelings about the majority religious tradition in their society. Now Israel is an interesting case study for studying these things, not least because it's experienced repeated wars, but also because Judaism is so central to social life, politics, and state law. There are about 40% of the society who claim to be largely non-absorbent, Himani. This term Himani translates imperfectly into English as secular Jew. But importantly I don't think of this exclusively as a religious group, but a religio class. They're largely middle class, two-thirds Ashkenazi of European descent, one-third Miss Rahi descended from Middle Eastern Jews, but they're important for the reasons that you talked about about the time that you were there previously. These are the former and to some extent still the current elites within the state. They are culturally, sometimes literally descended from the generations of European settlers who founded the state and who ran it for 30 years, who ran the army, and who also importantly started the peace movement in the 1980s and 1990s. One thing that Charles Liebman and others have pointed out is that Judaism is fundamentally intertwined in people's everyday lives in society, in Israel, even among Jews who say, oh, I only celebrate the holidays. Israel is a state where Judaism is privileged as part of law, reinforced by the 2018 changes to its basic law, to its constitutional structure. But I argue in the book that we can still study what Talal Assad calls the power of the secular in Israel, but we need to recognize that it has this, as Rezaam calls it, this Jewish valence to it. As you say, since the 1980s, Israel has changed a lot and not just because there's been this shift in this political elite, a diversification from the secular Ashkenazi group who ran the state for its first 30 years. Israel has become a capitalist liberal economy with high levels of consumerism and individualism. It's been impacted by globalization, by inward immigration, which has brought new ideas, including new spiritual, non-Jewish spiritual ideas, which I talk about in the book. But at the same time, Jewish beliefs and practices have become more prominent in public life and politics, what some people call religionization or hadrapah in Hebrew. Of course, Israel has also experienced a failed peace process, repeated wars with the Palestinians, as well as the strengthening of the security, political and economic apparatus of occupation. As a result, the population has shifted to the right politically, and the peace movement has grown very small since the period when you were there. All these trajectories have intensified for this generation in the 2000s and 2010s. They predate them, but they intensified, have intensified during this period when millennials became adults, when they sort of came to their political awakening after Oslo in the 2000s and 2010s. Now, Almag and Almag published a large study of this generational group with about 1,000 people, both the social group and their teachers, their employers, their parents. It attracted a lot of attention in Israel. I did my field work in the two years after the 2014 Gaza War. I built on their work, but I looked more closely at the dynamics of religious nationalism, which I think are important, but somewhat still understudied. There's a perception in this period I'm talking about, post Oslo, that Israel's Jewish Israeli society is growing more religious and more right wing, but what does that really mean? How do we unpack that? I asked two questions in the book, one to do with the case study, and then one comparative. I asked, as a young secular Jew, what has it felt like to come of age during the phase of national conflict when some Palestinian and Israeli government leaders, not just fringe figures, have used ethno-religious symbols to motivate and divide? And I asked the comparative question, what do violent political conflicts look and feel like to people who claim to somewhat distance themselves from the majority religious tradition in their given context, but are fundamentally embedded within it? Now there are a lot of interesting books you could write about this social group. I focused on four case studies, which I think allow me to interrogate that long-term interest in the relationship between violence, religion, and the secular. So I, in the book, look in detail in attitudes towards Jihad and Islam, towards what the IDF calls Jewish consciousness education, towards attitude, I looked at attitudes towards the Haram El-Sharif Temple Mount, and also what it feels like to live through a violent attack. And I tried to tell stories that would be of interest both to people who are interested in comparative study of religion and violence, but also Jewish Israelis who know a great deal about their society. But there's a lot still, of course, to write about this group and to write about how Jewishness and Zionism are involving among millennials. So that's the context, but what was the main finding? What I found, and this touches on what you said about generational memory, is a new way of understanding why Halani millennials across the political spectrum from right to left and including all their subgroups think continuing on occupation indefinitely is regrettable, but reasonable. Now when you study aspects of the Israeli Palestinian conflict as I did, you can't help but bump up against something which is widely recognized in Israel that the country is moving politically to the right on the question of maintaining occupation, as well as becoming quote-unquote more religious. But regular people and researchers usually understand stronger attachment to Jewish identity and practice in Israel as associated with right-wing politics. So they assume that if religiosity increases, naturally right-wing conservatism will increase and support for occupation and the settlements. I'm not disputing that this happens, but I'm arguing that the explanation is too simplistic and it misses a key point. Not everyone is becoming more religious. Not everyone is swept along with a rising tide of hatha-pah for legionization, but left-wing progressive politics on occupation has grown increasingly niche. So we need a better explanation for this and I tried to do that in the book. So my research, as I said, with Halani millennials across the spectrum from right to left, this was the group who wore the backbone of the peace process in the 80s and the 90s but today are fairly evenly split, a third, a third, a third across the political spectrum. And what I found was that these discourses and these sort of feelings and sentiments were shared even among the left-wing, that the people who described themselves as left-wing, that continuing the occupation for now is reasonable and regrettable. Now that they would feel this way isn't surprising and the popular explanation emphasizes a combination of conflict fatigue, people feeling unhappy about the direction of the economy and domestic politics and political corruption and also the impact of immigration from the former Soviet Union which swelled the ranks of the Hinonim within Israel. Now this is the generation who fought for, if we count 2019, five wars against Hamas and Islamic jihad and one against Hezbollah and they also grew up on the other side of Israel's various separation barriers, separation walls separated psychologically and also physically from Palestinians. At the same time that mainstream politicians have been emphasizing the exclusively Jewish character of the state. They've absorbed politicians' messages that while there's no Palestinian partner for peace, it's best to concentrate on the economy and their own lives and their own futures. Popular explanations also emphasize that Hinonim from the former Soviet Union have swelled the right wing among Hinonim, making this group a larger one than those from this veteran background and that those veteran descendants have stuck to the left, but that's an overgeneralization. I found something to add to this explanation that we have because the explanation leaves out agency. People aren't just puppets who are part of larger social trends and they do what they see reflected in the media and they do what the politicians tell them. So we need to look more carefully and look beyond public opinion polls and so in my research I'm taking a feminist approach looking deeply at how people talk about themselves and their lived experience because as feminists have told us the personal is political. These things matter. So to understand what's going on in the book I argue that we need to think more deeply about two things. First how secular Judaism is evolving in Israel and also the extent to which secular Jewish Israeli millennials are influenced by a globalized youth culture. In particular I think we need to start thinking more creatively and more expansively about what secular Jewishness in Israel is, that it's not just for example keeping Kashrut or an ethnic identity with religious symbols mobilized by the early secular Zionist settlers. So what I observed is what I call a neo-romantic sensibility among Hellenium I interviewed. I'm developing something that Talal Assad, a point he makes in his book Formations of the Secular. I say this is similar. There aren't clear you know there aren't direct historical connections between the 19th century romantics and my group but there are a couple of things they share in common. Most importantly this emphasis on personal intuition and emotional experience, greater self-expression but also greater attachment to one's nation. Jewish thinkers were influenced by romanticism as well. In Europe they were excited about how creative individuals could interpret Jewish tradition and develop new ways of being meaningfully Jewish for themselves beyond rabbinical authority. Like the romantics and also millennials around the world my interviewees had a commitment to self-expression. They emphasized sincerity and critically personal experience. We talked about philosophical exploration within and beyond Judaism. Hellani culture has also evolved beyond the secular Ashkenazi model that influenced earlier generations. But the important thing is like the romantics, like other millennials around the world, this group emphasized relying heavily on their personal experiences as providing a personal moral compass to help them make decisions. Personal experience included what happened to them, also what they went out and researched themselves. And they are looking at facts, at evidence, but they read the evidence in a particular way. I call them in the book fulcrum citizens. I saw deep commitment to the state and drawing on their personal compass they see themselves as the most moderate among moderates trying to balance out the extremes within their own society and among Palestinians. And this is something I saw across the political spectrum. But it's important to remember that they came of age under deepening conditions of separation from Palestinians and Oslo. So their personal experience is largely focused within Jewish Israeli society. And this shapes their views. So for example, for leftists who want to do something to improve society during the 1990s, this might have been advocating against occupation. But now socioeconomic activism is largely focused within Green Line Israel. And I call this a kind of Green Line liberalism. Can I ask a question? Yeah, yeah. Okay, sorry. So in your conclusion, you talk about connecting the personal and the political. So I have various questions that flow from that overarching concept. So for example, I was interested, I'd be interested to hear your view about, obviously, based on your interviews, about attitudes to settlers. Settlers now form 600-something thousand. They're the primary reason for the increasing unviability, if you like, of a two-state solution. There are other factors as well. But of course, for the last 20 odd years, the number of settlers has expanded. What did you perceive as the attitudes of the generation of millennials that form the heart of your work to the settlement enterprise? Do they make distinction, for example, between extremists and the hilltop youth, for example? Is there a relevance of the contribution of the settler community to the death of the two-state solution, which their parents' generation often believed in as the only solution to whatever you will agree is one of the world's most divisive and toxic conflicts? So there are a couple of questions. Thank you. Thanks, Ian. Let me start with a couple of those things. The generationally pivotal experience, I thought, was being involved in the disengagement from settlements in Gaza and also some in the West Bank. I used Karl Mannheim's generational memory. Mannheim observed, and other people have, I guess, provided the empirical data to back this up, is that multiple generations can live through a pivotal experience, something like, for example, 9-11. But those pivotal experiences that happen when people are in their early 20s really shaped how they see the world. And this experience really shaped how they saw the settlement project, either because they themselves were taking people out of their homes or involved in that, or they had a family or close friends who were involved in that. And I found a real, it had an impact in their concern for the cohesiveness of Jewish Israeli society. It had been a generational trauma, the ideas that had been circulating at the time that potentially this could lead to civil unrest among Jewish Israelis. For those who had been involved in the disengagement, as they saw it carrying out their jobs, as sent by the IDF, the experience of being called names to their face, being told they were like the Nazis to their face, and close proximity had had a seismic impact. So, I mean, we know what's been happening in Israel afterwards that there's been a reinvigoration among the religious Zionist circles within society. And so my group have lived through that. They see that group as a rising group within society. They don't see them as the other. The other are, as you say, the hilltop youth who are also millennials. They see them as the extremists. They see their own role as balancing that out. They widely condemned violence against Palestinians and Palestinian property in the West Bank. And for, you know, they used the language, those who believed in a two-state solution still used the language of the two-state solution, but said, we're stuck. There's nothing that we can do about this now. And they felt quite powerless to change things. These are my observations. This is, of course, a group that can speak very well for themselves within, within the public space. I'm just, you know, providing that as far as the academic perspective. But did you see, did you encounter anybody who believed in the, the idea of one state with equal rights for Jews and Arabs between, to use the increasingly fashionable phrase between the river and the sea? Did you encounter any, anybody who spoke of that goal with any kind of hope? Yes, certainly. I mean, it's a complicated society, right? So if you're going to, you know, do this properly, rigorously, academically, or you try to get everybody. So, yes, I certainly spoke to, spoke to a few people, you know, who held these views, who spoke about a one-state solution, potentially, who spoke about the potential for a confederation, who could imagine something like a consociational democracy in these lands, who spoke about what a, what a democratic state would look like that wasn't just a Jewish democratic state. So it's, it's not all, it's not all doom and gloom, but we know from public opinion polls and from this research that there's also plenty to be pessimistic about as well. But did you encounter, for example, people, millennials, who were interested in promoting Jewish-Arab current operation within the Green Line, at least. The Green Line is the 396-7 borders for those who don't know. Yeah, thank you. So I had, I spoke to people who were involved in that. I also spoke to others who were involved in promoting projects, also with Palestinian activists in Ramallah in the West Bank. Again, a generational issue and, you know, there's definitely more research to be done on Palestinian millennials and the interaction between the two. But they talked about, you know, the difficulties of the BDS movement, the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement, which had, in their view, narrowed opportunities for cooperation that Palestinians didn't want to cooperate with them. I found, you know, of course, you can find a few people who support the BDS, even within Israel. So that's what I found among activists. I've observed in recent times, of course, Israel may be facing the fourth election in less than two years. In recent elections, I've noticed that quite a lot of Israeli Jews vote for the joint list, which is the combined list of basically Arab parties. Did you encounter that at all? On the argument that the left has failed, the Labour Party has now less seats than ever before, merits has shrunk. So the Jewish Israelis have crossed the line in breaching the taboo, if you'd like, previously held taboo of voting for Arab parties. Have you come across that at all? I mean, my research was primarily either side of the 2015 election. I saw there was a lot of discussion about the demise of Labour, the demise of merits. Interesting to see merits constructed as an extremist group by at least one of my interviewees. You know, they said this is the hard left. This is beyond the bounds of, you know, the reasonable middle, the reasonable middle. In terms of voting for the joint list, I mean, among those I happen to speak to within this research, that was largely a bridge too far for them. But, you know, I mean, we have seen within the past three elections, which took place after this research, that the left has seen that as something credible to vote for the joint list. And maybe that is, you know, the new direction, you know, as we're staring down the barrel of this fourth election, as you said, you know, looking to, you know, who can build a coalition. That I mean, one thing I would say generally, speaking, and again, you know, I didn't speak to everybody in the entire country, but there was more understanding about the Palestinian Authority and that dimension of Palestinian politics, than there was about Palestinian politics within the state of Israel. But again, you know, this, I didn't speak to everyone, but this was, you know, when people talk about the state, they're talking about the majority. So you completed your research in around 2016, right? I guess. So we've had four years since then of the most openly biased American president since 1948, whose name escapes me. I don't want to mention him by name, of course. But things presumably will have accelerated since then. The direction of travel that you observed in your research up to 2016, presumably has only got worse, no? Yeah, I mean, I think, of course, I've been watching the past four years very, very carefully. And I don't think the direction of travel has changed in any seismic way. I mean, in terms of Israeli politics, you know, seeing the swelling of the center, blue and white and Gantz as an alternative to the Netanyahu government, that seemed to me an outgrowth of the things I found about what was happening in the political center among this group. And then in terms of the new American plan and the subsequent, you know, the Abraham Accords that we have seen signed between Israel and Arab states in the region, I mean, I saw this again as an outgrowth that the Palestinian side of things is, you know, the two state solution is dead or at least paused. But if we can make peace with the Arab world, then this would be acceptable. And this is something that I, you know, they did, many interviewees did raise was the possibility of making agreements with other Arab states alliances bearing in mind the Iranian threat to all actors involved. And they thought that this was perhaps the way forward because this is peace. But of course, you know, I'm not the first person to make this observation, but it's clearly attractive for Israeli Jews to be able to fly to Dubai and Abu Dhabi and even Khartoum and Sudan. But if you can't go to Ramallah or Nablus or Bethlehem safely, it's surely not a solution to the world's most divisive conflict, is it? No, I mean, I think we agree on that point. I have to say, you know, having been observing these things on media and social media, as you say, I mean, I can see a phenomenon, you know, I talk about it in one of the chapters about, you know, so, you know, sort of jutting off to Dubai is also, you know, it's a form of self, you know, self exploration and and tourism. And, you know, it very much fits with this kind of hellony neo romanticism that I that I talk about here. But certainly, that's not a solution to the long term problem. So we're coming to the end of our dialogue in order to allow people to ask questions. So what do you what do you see the main implications of your research for the future? I think in terms of the political future, I think I've found a deep reason why there will be paralysis politically on on the occupation and on Palestinian Israeli conflict and long term peace. Because if you see these things not just as a matter of who you vote for, but who you who you are deeply as a reasonable person, then those things we know from political psychology and personal psychology are very, very difficult to to change. So I mean, I think I've just found for the future another dimension of what we know about about paralysis. And, you know, something that one of my interviews talked about what I've quoted in the conclusion is, you know, about the need for a real seismic change. But that is the only thing that is going to bring about something a shift in Palestinian Israeli relations. So I think those are the future implications. I, you know, I talk in the future, I talk in the book about what else, you know, we could study about this group or, you know, what the implications are for the study future study of religion and violence. But, you know, I think the big most important story is about the continuing political paralysis around the possibility of a two state solution and a Palestinian state. But do you see any possibility of change in that current paralysis with in terms of its effect on the millennial generation that are the focus of your research? Well, one of the things that I focus on a great deal, and it comes out in various places in the book, and it comes out in chapter five, I think, is about empathy and about feelings of feelings of empathy for Palestinians, even among those who were on the right. So even if they were simply just imagining what these other people would be like rather than necessarily meeting them, they still, when when asked, maybe pressed, expressed, you know, expressed empathy for a shared common humanity. So maybe then we should be slightly optimistic if the political star is alone. But I mean, I'm sorry, I'm maybe being annoying here, but surely you understand, don't you? I would have thought you do understand that the level of human contact between millennial Israelis and millennial Palestinians, particularly those who live in the occupied territories, is very limited. No. I mean, I make a distinction, of course, between Palestinians who are also Israeli citizens, but that's a different story. Surely, surely it's a factor of the other dehumanization lack of empathy. Yeah, no, I agree with you. I'm trying to, you know, pull out the, you know, the little bits of positivity to this. But as long as separation continues, it's hard to see. You know, I think one of the most poignant things was when asking people to imagine who the other, you know, imagine the other to put themselves in their shoes and having little basis to imagine besides what's in what's in the news or indeed, you know, outright failures of the contact hypothesis where Israelis and Palestinians had met abroad and it hadn't been all, you know, a wonderful experience where suddenly they understood each other. So, you know, I think as I see it, separation is the real key. So I'm going to ask a few questions that have appeared in the chat box. So how much of the current population Jewish Israelis presumably are Sephardic, Sephardim? Ah, right. So this is about 30%. Oh, so I presume they mean Sephardim is Rahi, non Ashkenazi, but 50%. Okay. Okay. So another question is, could you expand a little on the commodification of Arab culture in the Israeli millennial interest in consuming Arab culture? I would add food actually also without engaging with the Palestinians themselves. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I didn't research this, you know, in great detail. So I can't tell you more than probably you already know about, but this is a there's been, I think, under this generation, even greater commodification of Palestinian culture, of food, of appropriation of these things. And probably separation is also also a part of it that this generation cannot just, you know, doesn't go to East Jerusalem or visit the West Bank largely for, I think, maybe tourism and leisure rather than much, you know, deep interaction. And that this is the results. You know, there's lots of really fascinating things that are written, for example, on Yafo and on sort of the appropriation of Arab life in Yafo and the, I think, the implications for secular millennials. I mean, they're deeply implied in this of, you know, not only buying up buying up properties, but sort of appropriating the culture as well. So another question is, do you think that the way the media portrays the ongoing conflict adds to the fire and increases the passions of both parties leading to the exacerbation of those confrontations? So the role, the role of the media. I mean, I think we have, we can talk about different, different forms of media here, right? So the media was something that my interviewees liked to talk about a lot, because this is after the 2014 war. So they were spending a lot of time looking at not only how the Israeli media was portraying Israel's actions in the 2014 war, but also the global media. And there was substantial anger at the portrayal in the European media, certainly, that they had not taken an even-handed approach to the portrayal of the 2014 war. So we have to ask ourselves, you know, what, what kind of media are there possibly neutral media sources? One thing my interviewees, a couple of them talked about with, you know, growing kind of media hopping and trying to find all these different perspectives on, on Israel to try to, to try to understand their own society beyond, beyond the media. But, you know, certainly the media in, in Israel portrays its own side as, as the Palestinian media portrays, portrays its own side as well. The real and slammatory thing rather than the traditional media really was, was social media, Facebook, the role of Facebook in Hebrew. That was something when I wanted to talk about after the disengagement. So now a lot of these intra-Jewish Israeli arguments among millennials are happening, you know, on Facebook and they happened on Reddit. And so there's this, for millennials, this whole other world, which is just as real, which is the virtual world on social media, and that's where the really inflammatory stuff happens. Not just between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians, but within young Jewish Israeli society. This, I don't think we can, you know, we can blame the media for framing a discourse. We can blame politicians for flaming a dis, for framing a discourse, but actually what's making it inflammatory is the way people are interacting in this virtual space. I would like to ask a question of my own again. Do you, obviously I read your book and was very impressed by the efforts that you went to capture genuine voices. Maybe I've forgotten, but did anybody address the concept increasingly popular of explaining the Zionist enterprise and Palestine and Israel as an example of settler colonialism? Do you find that helpful as a concept? I mean, I find the frame helpful in understanding Israel as a, as a settler society that we can think of in conjunction with other settler societies like my own in the United States. But this is not something that was discussed among my group at all. I think I had some conversations fairly on about, about post-Syanism. I needed to explain what post-Syanism was, which, you know, kind of goes to show how what a, you know, elite intellectual projects, maybe it's become not something that, you know, resonated with young people. I mean, there were definitely frustrated leftists who said, you know, we need, we need a new way forward. Now, you know, many of them are also working within a, in a hegemonic Zionist frame. But in terms of talking about the country as a, as a settler society, I mean, that was, I don't think I saw that, you know, a very minority view again, like amongst, you know, activists who are talking about the possibility of a, of a secular state and of a truly democratic politically plural state where Palestinians are equally represented. So the next question is from the participant and indeed it's highly relevant to what we just been talking about. Could a one state solution that is inclusive of all, to all parties, is it possible considering the deep fragmentation of the two sides? Oh, I mean, this is, this is the million dollar question, isn't it? You know, and we can, I mean, there are people who are far better placed to talk about the one state solution than me. What I can say is that among this group, there was still, the discussion was still framed in terms of the two state solution, if they were on the left, or if they were in, in the center. So I suppose that's why it feels, why it came across that they were stuck in terms of, in terms of a one state solution. Again, this was articulated by people on the, you know, very, very far left and not in any great detail. I would say that overall there was a stronger, stronger feeling that the Palestinians should, should have their state, that they should have a state constructed in, in their own image rather than a, a one state democracy. Whether it's, you know, whether it's possible, you know, depends on how quickly you think history moves. And I tend to think history moves very slowly. And, you know, and why, and is that the optimum answer? I don't think that's, that's clear that Palestinians or Israelis think that's the optimum answer, even if you see greater discussion about a one state solution among Palestinians now. You see the IDF, Israel Defense Forces, as being a secularizing or religionizing force in Israeli society. You talked a lot about Hadatah, religious, religionization. What's the role of the, of the IDF in that? Yeah, so I wrote a chapter on this in the, in the book, talking about these two competing, I think, cultures within the IDF. That really, this is a generationally significant matter, because the two cultures take on greater parity at the time when this generation is serving. They're, they're conscripted service and then also their, their reserve duty. So you have this kind of the, the secular, which was overall the, the main culture in the army, even, you know, through the, through the 2000s, and people, I think, would still say that it's a largely secular culture that's trying to accommodate religious diversity, including, including the Orthodox. What I, I found, and I talk about competition in Jewish consciousness education, that part of the IDF's activity is also what I say is a traditional, a Jewish traditional culture within the IDF. So this is not just officers who are religious Zionists, of course, with their growing numbers, or indeed, you know, the largely religious Zionist character of the, the military rodent, but, you know, an overall kind of shift within, within the culture, from the top down, which is more, I suppose, inclined to an open to Jewish religious interpretations of, of the state of the land. And what I think we see are two, two competing cultures. I don't think the IDF is religionizing the state. I think the state is having an impact on the character of the IDF. And then I think there are controversial instances where it appears that some officers may attempt to religionize the conflict with the Palestinians. But what I saw was resistance within that millennial class of commanders to largely two attempts to bring religion into the conflict. Okay, I think we have time for one more question, maybe. I can't find it. Oh, yes. How and whereabouts in Israel were your interviews conducted? I guess inside Israel there's a huge difference among cities when it comes to religious inclinations, presumably the, the difference between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, I guess. Yeah. No, absolutely, absolutely. If the person who asked wants to know more detail about the method, drop me an email. I'm really happy to talk about that more. So the interviews are all carried out with people who are within the Green Lai. Kelly Madoff has written some, a really wonderful PhD about Hulani who live across the Green Lai in the settlements. Mine were conducted within, within the Green Lai. And I tried to get a balance of people who lived in Tel Aviv, Haifa, Jerusalem, lived on Kibbutzim, Masha'vim, people who lived, who lived in the south, trying to get a balance of, you know, people who grew up in rural areas versus growing up within, within the city. You know, and you just, in this kind of project try to get, I suppose, some sort of balance. But, you know, in terms of the, you know, all of the assumptions that we have about things were there and they weren't there, you know, secular Jews and Jerusalem were annoyed by however that just the city is becoming. Haifa people had more contact with, with Arabs. Tel Aviv was more, you know, sort of, I call it the, you know, the beating heart of the, of the Hulani culture. But it, you know, the thing I want to say about the geography as well as, you know, any different sub-sectors within this population is the thing that, you know, there were very strong commonalities. There's, you know, there was nothing that, that stood out especially, you know, what I wanted to emphasize was the, the commonalities across geography, across gender, across group. Something I'll make an albumic point out, and I found it as well as there's a bit of a difference between the older part of this group who might have served in the Second Intifada at the very end and the very young members of this group. But very strong commonality. Okay. Thank you very much. I've managed to answer quite a few of the questions. So thank you very much Stacey and good luck with the book. Thank you so much. Thank you Ian for joining me. It's been a really great privilege. Thank you everybody who joined. It was really wonderful to have you and hopefully in 2021 we can do more things in person. Thank you so much for coming. Bye bye now. Take care.