 Good afternoon, and welcome to all of you. My name is Andreas Martinez. I'm the editorial director and vice president at the New America Foundation. I also coordinate our fellows program in New America, which is how we first connected with Peter Beiner. My role here today is to welcome you and get out of the way as quickly as possible because I think we're all leaving for this conversation. Peter Beiner, as all of you know, and the reason you are here is published on The Crisis of Zionism. Peter is a senior fellow at New America. He's the chief political writer for the Daily Beast as well. He's the editor-in-chief of Zion Square, which is a collaboration between the Daily Beast and New America. He also teaches journalism at the City University of New York. And I should say that New America supports a fellows program whose purpose is to write timely books about public policy issues. Many of them are provocative, sometimes some of them are controversial. But occasionally we take a breather and we also support works like Peter's that don't make any waves and don't upset anybody. So it's kind of an encouraging change of pace. I'm also wanting to thank E.J. Dion, whom all of you I think are aware is a long-time story columnist for the syndicated columnists who watch and post. And thank you. So I will just hand this off to you. Really appreciate all of you being here. We are so proud of New America and Peter's work and in all seriousness, both as a me first joining us when he was working on his previous book. He was a great mentor to other fellows at New America, a great friend and collaborator. And we're very thrilled to have seen, to play a small part in this project and going forward in being a partner in Zion Square. So thank you Peter, congratulations. And Peter even brought his two adorable children here, so you've got to be on his side after you meet those kids. I feel in this theatrical setting we should just sit here and recite waiting for Godot. It seems perfect for that. I am very happy to be here because I'm a long-time fan of Peter Bynard. I admire his writing. I admire his thinking and I admire his courage. And I feel that way about him when I agree with him, which is most of the time, but I even feel that way about him when I disagree with him, which is some of the time. I think with this book, as in so many things he's written, he doesn't just take a stand, he's actually willing to take inconvenient stands. And I think this book reflects the view of a lot of people who genuinely love the state of Israel and are worried about the future of democracy in Israel, whatever people will agree or disagree with Peter's book. And yet I don't think anyone can doubt that the debate he wants to open up here is actually essential to the future of a democratic Israel. And I think, as those of you who have not read the book yet, that love and affection just runs right through the whole book. I've been at sessions like this where they set it up with a moderator who's supposed to ask a lot of questions to make it look more like a TV show and less planned than a very formal lecture. And yet one of the things that gets lost in those is that a writer never really has to have a chance to explain why he wrote the book and what he is really trying to say. And so before we go into any specific questions, I'd like to invite Peter to tell us why did you have to write these designs? They're achieved to two-state solution which preserves Israel as a Jewish democratic state because it allows Israel to give back the territory on which millions of Palestinian non-citizens live. Or we will fail, credit to a state which was so much a part of my experience of what it meant to be Jewish my entire life will be gone. And then it seems to me, a lot of people in the American Jewish community I find spend a lot of time worrying about the conversations they're going to have with older relatives of theirs. People who might not be open to hearing any criticism of Israeli policy. But I began to kind of be haunted a little bit by the conversations that I might have with my own children had done during this moment when it seemed to me the evidence was very strong that a continued process of settlement growth was going to eventually foreclose the possibility of a Palestinian state. Which is not to say that the Palestinians themselves don't bear some of the responsibility as well. They do bear some of the responsibility. I think quite a significant amount of it. But there's an interactive dynamic that takes place whereby the more and more Israel eats away at the West Bank the harder and harder it is to expect Palestinians to make the kind of compromises that they will ultimately have to make for a two-state solution to be possible and for a Jewish democratic Israel to survive. And so I felt that of all the debates and issues in American politics and foreign policy that were going on, none was as precious to me as this. None was as emotional as this. And there was none that I felt I would be haunted by as much if I didn't try to write something about it. Even though I was extremely nervous and inhibited about years and didn't write a book about it for many, many years and avoided it. Even though in some ways in my intellectual life it was kind of the elephant in the room. So I just decided gradually over time that I would so that whatever happens I can at least say that I took my best shot at what I think is the problem and at trying to shift the American Jewish conversation a little bit in the hopes that I won't have to have that conversation with my kids one day. Thank you. Let me ask you about the whole idea of a two-state solution because there are many people on both sides of the conflict and who are not part of the conflict who are very worried or in any case is worried that the whole prospect of a two-state solution is slipping away and that in fact we may not have as much time for those who support a two-state solution and may not have as much time as we think. I'd like you to analyze if you would what's happened on the Israeli side and also what's happened on the Palestinian side because I think there are so many, I mean the word paradox was invented for this situation and that on the one hand there may well be majority support on both sides for a two-state solution that it's a majority that cannot ever seem to express its will on either side of the divide. First of all is that an accurate portrayal which it might not be and second could you talk about that because I think the problems exist on both sides of this divide. Yeah, I think you know you can, there's a lot of polling on this kind of stuff and I've looked at Fahrenheit. I think it's probably true that there is majority support for a two-state solution on both sides the problem is that what Israeli Jews and Palestinians mean by a two-state solution is really quite different and that is often not interrogated necessarily. I think Palestinians believe that accepting a Palestinian state in all of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which means the Green Line, which means all of East Jerusalem is an enormous concession. Their perspective in mind generally tends to be look, this is 22% of British mandatory Palestine. This is an enormous concession we are making to you to take a Palestinian state in all of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and that should be the fundamental deal and then beyond that they tend to say the right of return is absolutely central to our national identity. They don't necessarily say that they believe that all the refugees are going to return or even that most of the refugees are going to return but in my experience talking to Palestinians the right, the historic acknowledgement and the right of those people to decide is very, very core to their sense of what it means to be a Palestinian. So that's one vision of the two-state solution. The Israeli vision of the two-state solution tends to be sure we have a Palestinian state but we're not really sure that we want it to have East Jerusalem or which is sacred to Jews or at least certainly not to have that much of East Jerusalem. Barack, for instance, in his famous offer at Camp David was willing to give the Palestinians a cap on East Jerusalem which was enormously significant, I would even say, very courageous in his really perspective but only some of the Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, not all of them so even there there was a difference. And then the Israeli vision would be, you know the Palestinian state but there are certain large consensus settlement blocks that are going to stay because their suburbs of major Israeli cities at this point. Malay Ademim, Ariel, the Gush block and then the Jordan Valley, we're going to have to keep some troops in the Jordan Valley because otherwise it's just too dangerous because you've got a border with Jordan and goodness knows what can come across that border. These are really quite large divisions and one that I think that I find frustrating about the American Jewish conversation is its lack of understanding of where the Palestinians are coming from which is not to say the Palestinians are right but you constantly, just to use a small example, you constantly find that in the American Jewish community people say, Israel need to give the settlement blocks. The Palestinians not even accept the concept of a settlement block, partly because what is a settlement block? It's basically about a whole bunch of small settlements. You draw a circle around it and you say, we're going to keep this. Well, the Palestinians say, wait a second, they're Palestinian villages in this little area. What are you going to do with those people? Are they going to become Israeli citizens? Are you going to make them leave their homes? For me, one of the most frightening examples of all this is the settlement of Ariel. I had this conversation so many times with Jewish friends and family. I say, well, what are we going to do with Ariel? What do you mean we're going to do with Ariel? Ariel is that they have 20,000 people living in Ariel. That's Israel. What are you talking about? It's one of the consensus blocks right near the Green Line. But it's not near the Green Line. It stretches 13 miles into the West Bank. It essentially cuts right through the half, the northern half of the West Bank, essentially kind of severing the northern cities of the West Bank to its south. Now, maybe you could get creative and build a bridge or a tunnel or something. But you can understand why the Palestinians are not so thrilled at having to accept Ariel. And so I then turn around to my friends and say, why do the Palestinians have to accept Ariel? I mean, what do they do to deserve this? What is so necessary to Israeli security that it has to have Ariel? I mean, it's actually a finger, right? Just from a security perspective, a finger straight into the West Bank makes no sense anyway. And ultimately what they're saying is, the Palestinians have to accept Ariel because we can't dismantle Ariel. Of course we can't dismantle Ariel. There are 20,000 people there. And then that's what terrifies me. So really, you're not saying that there's any reason that the Palestinians should have to accept it. You're just saying that you really can't do it. And yet you're still basically fine with the Israeli government subsidizing more and more people to move there. And that's where it gets scary for me. I think there is a profound gulf. The question is, how do you do the things that can get you close enough to being able to bridge it rather than essentially going in the other direction? Could you talk about why Camp David failed because that is the closest we have ever gotten. And there seem to be at the time a fair number of creative efforts to get around some, if not all of these problems. You mentioned the effort on the Jerusalem problem. There were land swaps designed to make up for annexing some of the settlements that are genuinely contiguous. Why did that blow up? Well, you know, it's a little bit like asking what the causes of World War I are. It's essentially to say, it seems to have been this, first of all, just historiographically, a lot was not written down. Even Barak's famous offer that he made at the end was oral, and what the Israelis did very often was they went to the Americans. They essentially had the Americans convey the offers for them. So even amongst, if you look at the Israeli delegations writing about this, even on the question, this very important question, did Arfa ever counter offer? Which has been one, a lot of people say, even if Barak's offer was not perfect, Arfa never counter offered. Israeli negotiators say he did counter offer. Yilat Sharif, who's Barak's top aide, said he did counter offer. The Israeli negotiators are divided into what happened. The American negotiators are divided, very famously between Rob Malian, Martin Indyk, and Aaron Miller, kind of somewhere in between. And actually there's very little Palestinian running on something all. So it's really just darn hard to tell. I think that what you can say is this. Barak believed that he needed to keep 80% of the settlers to incorporate 80% of the settlers in Israel. That was kind of a defining political understanding he had of what was possible in Israel. Remember, he was in office not so long after he was assassinated. He was concerned about what was politically possible. So I think he believed in his offer that he wanted to annex, he wanted to annex 9% of the West Bank and then give a land swap of 1%. And I think he believed that would have allowed enough settlers to stay in Israel that it would have been possible. The Palestinians, some people believe the Palestinians never made a real counteroffer. If they did, the Palestinians were always essentially in the neighborhood of more like 2% or 3%. And that hasn't really changed. If you look at the Omar Abbas negotiations, Omar offered 6.3% with a 5.8% land swap and Abbas offered 1.9%. So this is one way of thinking. It's not the only issue by any means. I'm going to talk about the others, which are equally important. But it just isn't a territory. You have an issue in this basically. Israel wants to keep roughly 8%, maybe as low as 6%, because they feel like that's the only way you can do it politically. You can keep some of these larger settlers. The Palestinians feel once you get to that higher number, you create a real contiguity problem for them with places like Ariel and not only Ariel. The Israelis also feel they need a troop presence in the Jordan Valley. And the Palestinians will extend an international troop, but they will not accept Israeli troops in the Jordan Valley. Those are the territorial issues. Then on the what are called the kind of 1967 issue, then the equally or even more profoundly difficult issues are the existential issues, you would call the 1948 issues, which are essentially Jerusalem and refugees. We know that at Camp David and afterwards that the second question of the Temple Mount was hugely, hugely difficult and the Arafat was extremely determined not to give it on the Temple Mount. On refugees, the Israelis again are divided, the Israeli negotiators. There's some who believe as most American Jewish commentators tend to and they may well be right that the Palestinians were never, ever going to compromise on refugees, period. Others believe like Yossi Balin, who was a kind of dovish aide and shared himself believe that if Arafat had gotten the Temple Mount, remember Arafat himself was not a refugee, like a boss, then Arafat basically was willing to trade refugees. When I say trade, they would say we have the right of return but you control your immigration policy. So it's a little like a legal fiction. The Palestinians get to say we have the right but you can regulate your immigration policy. And maybe you have 10 or 20 or 30 or 40,000 people coming over a few years, mostly elderly people. Iraq like to say we can let in salmon when they're old they come to die. Some Israeli negotiators think that the Palestinians have gotten what they wanted off the Temple Mount. They were a traded refugee. We don't know. The parties got closer at Taba but by Taba, the second jifada was underway, the Israeli government had lost its support. Arafat still did not react bravely or well to the Clinton parameters which he kind of said he accepted but basically then gave a thousand excuses which meant he didn't really accept it. But we just really don't know. I think you could make an argument that they were perhaps actually closer in 2008 with Omar and Abbas than they actually were at Camp David. So what is people... There are so many aspects of this book I'd like to discuss and I also want to bring in the audience but I think that if you take a lot of people who broadly agree with you on the urgency of the two-state solution because despite lots of talk neither a one-state solution which raises all kinds of questions about the existence of Israel as a Jewish state or a permanent occupation, the only thing between those two is a two-state solution. And yet when people look back on those talks we all know the gold in my ear line that Palestinians have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity and the question is did that happen again? Because I have found in discussing this question with friends both like-minded and people I've disagreed with you always end up back on this ground yes but they will in the end not say the magic words about Israel and they just won't get there. In order to advocate a two-state solution you really have to have hope that we can get there. Where does that hope come from? First of all, do you think this analysis of the Palestinian position is unfair or does it have some justice to it and then how do you get there? I think it absolutely has justice to it and actually one of the most frustrating and painful things for me about a few of the reactions I've gotten initially to the book is that I feel like people have not noticed that I feel like I'm actually quite consistently critical of the Palestinians for a whole series of things and especially Arafat. I think Arafat was such a dictatorial and corrupt leader that he didn't have the moral authority to ask Palestinians to make some of the compromises that they ultimately needed to make and he was not an honest leader and he didn't prepare them for some of these compromises. He was, unlike Abbas, a strong leader with revolutionary credentials but that's part of the tragedy but I think he had someone's greater capacity who wasn't really willing to use it. On the other hand, so the Palestinians have absolutely missed opportunities. Arafat, especially Arafat, I would say the single biggest failure was Arafat's response to the Clinton parameter even more than in December 2000, even more than in response to the Barats offer at Camp David. Barats offered Camp David the 9% and then Israel and Jordan Valley for 12 years and the Palestinians only with control of some of the neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, so Ben Ami, who became Barats's foreign minister, said he would have rejected that even if he had been a Palestinian but the Clinton parameters were much better, a much better deal and there I think that was really Arafat's greatest failure but I think it's also important to acknowledge when one talks about missing an opportunity, missing an opportunity that the fact that Salama Grove went from roughly 200,000 or so in 1992 to 500,000 300,000 in the West Bank about 200,000 in East Jerusalem has also been a way of missing an opportunity because it strengthens the most radical forces among the Palestinians that Hamas and other radicals say to Fayyad and Abbas what are you talking about this two-state solution? You want to go negotiate with Israelis about the size of the pizza? They're eating the pizza and one of the things that drive the Palestinians crazy is for instance this Jewish neighborhood of Harhol Ma, right? And they say, okay in all the Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem we keep the Arab neighborhood you keep but Harhol Ma only became a Jewish neighborhood in the 1990s when it was built there by Bibi in his first term and now he's building another one called Givan Hamatose and the Palestinians say, wait a second now we have to accept this because we're eating the pizza while we were trying to talk about it which I think is also the great political fear that Abbas has of being in endless negotiations with very profound missed opportunities on both sides I also think there have been real accomplishments on both sides the accomplishment on Iraq and Omer was to recognize we were going to have to give back most of the West Bank that was hugely important and Omer especially I give a lot of credit the accomplishment on the Palestinian side was the very decision back in 1993 to recognize Israel's existence and then their basic support for the Arab Peace Initiative was a missed opportunity on Israel when all the Arab countries in fact even Iran actually supported the Arab Peace Initiative initially saying basically we're willing to trade acceptance of Israel for 67 borders and then even on refugees they were arguably vague enough in their language on refugees that really gave Israel a chance to respond positively the Israeli government didn't and so I think there have been missed opportunities on both sides let me, one other often hears that I'd like to run by you which is that it would be easy enough to make peace between Tel Aviv and Ramallah but not between Jerusalem and Saigaza could you unpack that for those who don't like these sayings about Middle East as much as I do and is there any truth to it because the reason I ask is what pains me about the current situation is that the economic development on the West Bank is really quite extraordinary and it has created the basis for a viable state that far more than ever existed on the West Bank before, again I'm curious if you see it that way yeah I think there's some debate about that I've heard some Palestinians say this is a bit of a bubble created by foreign aid and we still there's been a lot of foreign aid built hotels and stuff in Ramallah but essentially there's still not a functioning economy that's sustainable partly because of the problems with simply travel and movement both from the West Bank and also to get in you know the Palestinian diaspora actually we're not we have this law that you can promote it by the way it's called OpenZion.com it's a really unusual project in the sense that we have hawkish really lighted up writers like Benny Morris a member of Knesset and I will we also have Palestinian writers like Yusuf Munair it's very unusual for a Jewish theme publication Abishai is a very good piece about this act he has this great piece about going to the West Bank with Chinese entrepreneurs and the way it looks to them and some of their, the way they see the occupation which is they see it as bad for business basically are the Jerusalem and what I think one of the frightening things is that I think this is a great almost as a great line that this is a real estate dispute and it must be seen only as a real estate dispute not in cosmic terms and I think there is an increased tendency to see it in cosmic terms on both sides the corruption and oppression and failure to deliver on the side of the secular nationalists, the PLO just as an all over the Arab world has made it easy for Hamas to move into the breach and Hamas even though there is a debate about whether Hamas has sent more compromising signals there is no doubt that Hamas is first has not crossed certainly not crossed the kind of Google con that I think Abbas and Fayyad arguably have crossed in terms of genuinely being for a real estate dispute on the Israeli side you have very powerful demographic changes a huge increase in the in the Kharadi or ultra orthodox population and what's frightening about that is that the Kharadi were historically indifferent to the settlement project and they weren't part of it they didn't care, they didn't even like the state of Israel very much at all let alone making it bigger what they wanted was money all they wanted, they wanted money they had these ever growing populations they weren't working the men they needed to suck the money out of the government for their Yeshivas and their Kohlels and their schools and everything else they were agnostic that's why some of them were even said they gave justifications under if it saved Jewish life and it could preserve good relations with the Gentile world the problem is that Israel because the Kharadi have such huge housing crises Jerusalem and and they brought up other places the Israeli government built them settlements the two largest settlements now are Baitar al-Nidim or the Inali which are ultra orthodox settlements in the West Bank now they are very close to the Green Line but essentially there are many more ultra orthodox Jews on the other side of the Green Line now which is coincided with a move by the ultra orthodox which is much more hawkish on this question one of the things that people worry is that even if someone like Lidny tried to form a government she would have a lot of trouble she couldn't pay these guys off and get them to support her two state agenda in the way that Yitzhak Horeen was able to do because they become much more hawkish and so of course the national religious where we call here in the United States modern orthodox have always been very very hawkish they are the kind of core of the settler movement itself and then you have this big Russian influx which has been great for Israel's economy very productive but very very right leaning when it comes to politics and with a higher level of hostility towards Arabs and Muslims than native born secular Israeli Jews and all of that has created the political coalition that makes up the Netanyahu government and that I think constrains him in his ability to move boldly towards the two state solution even if he really wanted to would this book will this book be as controversial in Israel as it might prove to be here you know the Israeli debate it's different than the American Jews debate it's funny on the one hand Israelis are less inhibited because they're Israelis they don't have to prove their bona fides they tend to ask and answer more than anyone else any other one which is if you care so much why don't you just go live there because they do live there and so in a way that creates a greater sense of not being inhibited on the other hand the Israeli this is one of the things that frankly makes it much harder for American Jewish liberals the Israeli left has become very marginal very marginal I mean to talk to today he's a little bit sometimes like talking to American liberals right after George W. Bush got reelected which is to say they're not only alienated from their government they are some degree alienated from their whole society because they recognize that the society is more in tune with that government than with them and that's one of the now the reasons for that are actually Kerry did better in the election you know if you're talking about 2004 then the Israeli left did in the last election the early elections are very poorly and I think it's a combination of reasons partly it's demographic change the most dovish group in the Israeli population the population that tends to show the most favorable attitudes towards Arabs are also the oldest trope of the population and who tend to be more secular Ashkenazi Jews also there is a very powerful political narrative in Israel that exists also in the American Jewish community that essentially says we offered them everything they responded with a second into father which was incredibly traumatic in Israel I mean it was traumatic for the Palestinians too but the randomness of the violence against civilians was incredibly traumatic for Israelis and then we gave, we offered them Gaza and they respond to Iraq fire it's very important I think it's a matter of description political description that that is a dominant very strong narrative in Israel I think that the reality is considerably more complicated and just as in the United States one can recognize that there was let's say a political reality that emerged at certain points like after 9-11 or during the Vietnam War that devastated the left that may not actually be the same as an actual recounting of the historical facts I think it's important that we keep these two things separate just because most Israeli Jews believe it doesn't necessarily mean it's the whole truth just as the Palestinian narrative about what happened which is radically different doesn't mean they are the whole truth but politically the narrative is very important and partly because Barak himself used it when after the second into father started and Barak had to run for reelection Barak went out and said I gave Arafat the store and he responded with the second into father so when Barak said it people said well of course one of the fascinating things that's happened recently and I mentioned a little bit because several of Barak's key aides have come out and said we said that during the election but in fact that wasn't really the full story that it was actually and that we really regret having said this because it helped to bury the left but in fact Barak was very much part of driving that narrative in his hopes of beating Sharon would you fail let me just to ask you and I want to go to a couple other questions and open it up to the audience as somebody who's always thought of himself and still does as pro-Israel but is also favored to state solution and has worried about the impact of the spread of settlements I must say I have been chased by I was chased by the second into father and when you listen to that narrative that you just offered why is that wrong in other words what is wrong with the argument that says put aside whether they offered them the whole store let's say it was half a store but let's say that there were talks going on there was something that sure looked like a serious offer on the table it strikes me that if there were there were mistakes on the Israeli side the decision to go for the second into father really blew up so many opportunities and I think decisively set back the cause of Doves and the left I agree with you and I call the second into father but I think it's also important that George Mitchell was actually sent to the time to do a report looking into the causes of the into father and he found that the into father had several causes and I go into them not to excuse our father to explain that there were a number of factors in play that happened here the Israelis and the Palestinians were negotiated on the Palestinian street there was in growing frustration and anger because of settlement growth and because of the economic closures that were preventing Palestinians from going to their jobs in the West Bank and in fact if you look at polling among the Palestinians you find that the percentage of Palestinians who think that they're going to get a state out of the Oslo process really starts to plummet especially after Netanyahu takes power in 1996 so by 2000 Palestinians are much more pessimistic about where this process is going than they are in say 1995 so this is part of I think the dry tender that exists not to justify any of the violence but just to understand politically what was happening on the Palestinian side which was that the Israelis felt that they were moving in the right direction the Palestinians were getting towards the state the Palestinians thought what are we getting towards the state we're seeing new settlements crop up on every hilltop in the state and our economy is worse because now we're having trouble getting to the West Bank these Israelis of course we're not letting them to the West Bank because you're blowing yourselves up because they're a suicide bomb you're saying this is the dual matter that existed then in a very sensitive time Sharon went to the Temple Mount and Sharon is a hated figure among the Palestinians where he's rolling and suffering and shatimo so it's probably not a wise he had the right to go to the Temple Mount which is again the epicenter of this conflict but it may not have been the wisest thing Palestinian started throwing stones Mitchell focused among other things on the Israeli police overreaction there were a million bullets fired by the Israelis in the first few weeks of what started with stone throwing and quickly escalated to Molotov cocktails and then to suicide bombings so there was a cycle of overreaction that took place which went and I think one of these really mistakes that Mitchell points out was a very very strong overreaction to the initial bout of stone throwing that took place and then I think then what happened was that Palestinian forces moved in, younger forces moved in to lead the Second Intifada partly because they were enrolled in by Hezbollah partly frankly because they saw it as a way of kicking out Arafat they hated Arafat because he was a dictator and also because he hadn't delivered and people like Marwan Barboudi saw this opportunity to basically have a violent struggle that would eclipse Arafat and I think Arafat's most profound failure was his failure to stand I don't think Arafat led and directed the Second Intifada I think it was led and directed by younger Tanzien Infatah but he didn't stand against them he didn't say absolutely not he led and he wrote the Tiger partly because I think he maybe thought he wasn't strong enough maybe because idiotically he thought he would get a better deal from Israel if there was also an armed struggle whatever but I think that there was an interplay of forces here that took place and which had these very very very profound consequences in terms of shifting Israeli public opinion and also losing us many many years in which we could have had serious negotiations I want to ask you one personal question about that you talk about in the book and talk about a very moving new person about your interactions with Palestinians on the West Bank and how this also altered your own view and then I want to ask you afterward about the one view in this book that probably if one assumes this is a liberal audience about 90% of them will disagree with you but I think you know what I'm talking about but please talk about your experiences one of the things that's hard Israel in the West Bank policies are not citizen they have very little control over the state that really governs their lives they go before military courts which are often conducted in Hebrew which have prosecution rates of kind of 99% according to some studies they're at their travel if they want to get to Jerusalem or to the Jordan Valley or inside on the other side of Israel this really has brutal consequences for people's lives and it's hard for those of us who love Israel to face that because we believe Israel means well and we feel like we in some sense know those kids who are sent to serve in the West Bank and we know that they're good kids and yet the more you interact with Palestinians the more you're forced to confront that even these good people who we feel connected to, we love we admire so much that there's a system in place that becomes brutal in practice and it's very hard to come to terms when you know people personally who've been brutalized by it I mean there was a guy who came to see me a few months ago named Fadi Quran I mean literally like you could not dream up the more ideal Palestinian that is an American Jew Fadi Quran he's inspired he's a Gandian he's obsessed by the civil rights movement and by the American Jewish role in the civil rights movement he came to talk to me because he said we want to do freedom rides in the West Bank in which we get on buses and try to go to East Jerusalem because we can't go to East Jerusalem most of us and if we did this in the spirit of freedom rides knowing that American Jews were so involved they would support us and I have to say just hearing him ask that question was so poignant to me because the truth answer is that American Jews will never know that's the real answer they did do these freedom rides they've got to help me that then we had a confrontation with some police disguised as a federal I know this guy is a good person I just happen to know he was accused of assaulting some Israeli soldier he was arguing with the Israeli soldier he was angry but he was beaten very badly and then put into taking detention for several days now there's a secret file against him can't leave the West Bank doesn't know what's in this secret file because he can't see the evidence against him and I talked to him recently about this question and for me the struggle is how do I how do I deal with this you know how do I deal with it emotionally one of the greatest challenges for Israelis on the Israeli left who go to the West Bank most Israelis don't except maybe in their military service the people who go a lot find it hard not to feel alienated to no one's society and I think that happens to American Jews too who spend a lot of time most American Jews who go to Israel never go and experience Palestinian life they never do the big guys who go to the King David Hotel six times a year to meet with their Israeli mother they never do it and it's very very powerful and very challenging and difficult it doesn't mean the politics are not complicated it doesn't mean the solution is simple I'm not trying to say that but politics can be complicated and there can also be a moral reality underneath and just while we shouldn't use the moral reality to obfuscate the political complication we shouldn't use the fact that it's complicated politically to forget the fact that there's a moral reality and the moral reality is one that I think American Jews have a lot of difficulty dealing with I have difficulty dealing with it on your proposal that may draw widespread dissent you call for government aid to American religious schools it occurred to me that there will be some readers of your book who will tear out all the other pages but Xerox those particular pages in your book tell us about why you have come to that position besides our own tuition bills so it's a it's not weird to tell it's funny this is the part of the book that's gotten no attention but I hope we'll get some attention because I wanted to try to spark another conversation he wants to make sure that no one agrees to keep a hold of us American Jews the American Jewish community tends to be very very very worried about assimilation and about the fact that young American Jews don't feel very connected to Israel and often don't feel very connected to being Jewish and the intermarriage rate is 50% I think that the fundamental failure of the American Jews community is not to understand that it doesn't make sense to ask American Jews to care very deeply about something they know very little about I don't care very deeply about Australian which probably has a lot to do with the fact that I don't know anything about Australian football American Jews ask their kids to care deeply about something they have made no effort they've made very little effort to educate them about it what do they expect it's not easy to learn about Judaism but there's a very strong correlation between Jewish commitment and Jewish education and the Jewish communities around the world that are having much more success in the United States Canada, Australia, England, France are ones that have a very strong Jewish school system by strong I mean academically excellent and economically affordable which is really not the case in the United States where basically you basically pay till you pay astronomical amounts of money to schools that can't really compete academically often with the best public schools or the best private schools Jewish schools will never be I'm not saying that all American Jews should take advantage of Jewish schools it's very honorable to be involved to go to public schools but the question of Jewish continuity and Jewish commitment seriously which I do you have to take seriously the question of Jewish education and I think the most effective way the only really effective way of doing that is in full time Jewish schools and they are not economically feasible unless you have some government support which is the reason that they're successful in places like Australia Canada Orthodox Jews by the way are thrilled about this idea frankly just there's such desperate economic space trying to pay for these schools Orthodox Jews do send their gifts to Jewish schools other American Jews are afraid because they feel like it violates the separation of churches there perhaps it's my own family's experience in South Africa where the government always supported Jewish schools as they do in Australia and parts of Canada the Jews are not suffering a denial of religious liberty in these places I think it's an exaggerated fear I think if you have to look at the balance of risk American Jews need to worry a little bit less about whether the government will give them the right to practice Judaism and a little more about the fact that in fact they're not taking advantage of it and so it's a controversial proposal but I put it out there because I think that's another urgent kind of crisis that the American Jewish community has not really responded if this is a crisis why is this particular crisis one that the American government should worry about because I think it's I think we have the right to agitate for our own self-interest and it may be that this argument is from a variety of groups arguing from their own particular self-interest that maybe some Catholics want it because they want Catholic schools, evangelicals or African Americans have their own interests but this is an argument from Jewish self-interest so I think and I think the Jewish community has the right to say we believe that this is just as we say about Israel in some way this is something that we profoundly believe is in our self-interest and we have the right of citizens to to support something which is in our self-interest Let's we could just go on and I argue with you but I won't do that right now there are lots of points we've left I can barely see with the light but there we go we have a couple of mics floating around when we go because the first hand I saw was this is going to be a lively audience can we go to this gentleman over here we go to the nearest hand with the mic and then we'll organize let's see go ahead and then we'll pass it over thank you sir if you could if you could identify yourself whoever asks questions Austin I want to ask you about two statements you made and then I want to ask you a follow-up questions related to that in your introductory post to Zion Square you say my own deeply held belief is that struggle should be guided by the principles of Israel's Declaration of Independence which envisions a Jewish state that ensures complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants religion, race, or sex I believe that such a state can only be achieved through a new commitment to full citizenship for those Palestinians who lived in the green light and in a May 2010 interview with Jeffrey Goldberg you said I'm not asking Israel to be utopian I'm not asking it to allow Palestinians who are forced out or fled in 1948 to return to their homes I'm not even asking it to allow Israelis since that would require Israel no longer being a Jewish state I'm actually pretty willing to compromise my liberalism for Israel's security and for its status as a Jewish state so my first question is are we to assume that the first statement I read supersedes the one I just read because they seem fairly contradictory on their face and secondly I want to ask you about the Neva which is curiously absent from the discourse of quote-unquote liberal Zionists and the echoes of the Neva within Palestinian identity but also for Palestinians that are citizens of Israel there are villages like Kefir Baram like Ithret I can go on and on and on where the residents are currently or expelled from their original villages in the last villages that I named they were expelled in November in 1948 and they live next door to them but they are prevented from the state from returning to their original homes so the right of return is also a right that is that citizens of the state are deprived of so does that not expose the supposed liberalism of some Zionists as a fraud well that's it, there's a lot of question I should say the interview with Jeffrey Goldberg was a kind of an off-the-cuff response and I think what's I think my answer at the very beginning of the very first chapter of the book is essentially an effort to answer exactly that question which is to say I believe that there is a tension between liberalism and Zionism there's a tension between the idea that this is a state that has a particular commitment to the Jewish people to represent the Jewish people and the statement and the declaration of the dependence that it will offer complete equality you see that tension in the fact that Israel has a preferential immigration policy for Jews, Jews can get citizenship on day one other people cannot you see it in the fact that Israel has symbols in its flag in its flag and national anthem that are Jewish symbols that you naturally would not identify with in the same way if you were not Jewish I think it's important that Zionists accept that there is a tension in the book a couple of things first of all that Israel is not the only country with that tension that there are a lot of European countries actually that have religious symbols in their flag and that have preferential immigration policies that we still consider to be liberal democracy secondly that there you can there can be a tension between two principles and you can still believe that both principles are legitimate you can say there's a tension between economic development and environment protection or security and civil liberties that recognizes the tension but believe that there is some validity in both principles and thirdly and this is where I think you know in some ways the influence of my last two books really informed me a lot as some of the EJs thought and written a lot about too I'm a non-utopian or even anti-utopian liberal which is to say I measure my my goal for progress what I think is a real world alternative not the alternative would exist in the abstract and the reason I say this is because when I think about the real limitations on full citizenship that exist for it's called the Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel because there's some disagreement amongst Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel about most most used to call themselves Arab citizens of Israel now more and more call themselves Palestinian citizens of Israel I think you have to compare their status today to what their status would be like in a second of binational state which is the alternative which I think would be a bloody mess I don't think it's a viable alternative I think that the I think binationalism is very difficult even in more plastic countries like it didn't work in the Czechoslovakia, in Belgium in Quebec and Canada has a lot of trouble in this part of the world where these two parted communities have been at war for 100 years I don't I think you would recreate the civil war of the 1930s I mean what would it mean to have an Israeli a military, some binational state half Jewish and half Palestinian I think it would be rival malicious fighting one another so I think that there are things you can do within the construct of Israel as a democratic Jewish state to dramatically move towards fuller citizenship for Palestinian Arab citizens some of them when I talk about it in my first he equalized allowances for child allowance, the state pays people when they have children he made a significant effort to build health clinics in Israeli Arab neighborhoods he had affirmative action for the Israeli civil service he found a way although he didn't go far enough of allowing Israeli Palestinian Arab parties to participate in Israeli government coalitions I think Israel needs a dramatically renewed commitment to that and ultimately you might even need to do you could even get to a point where for instance added a stanza to HaTikba which is a national anthem that talks about the Jewish soul so it had a stanza that spoke in a way that Israel's non-Jewish citizens could identify with more and therefore you wouldn't have a situation like you have today where on the one hand it's great that Israel has a Palestinian Arab citizen on its Supreme Court but he doesn't salute the flag in the national anthem because he's not Jewish and he considers it until Jewish simple so I think you could move significantly in that direction I say this because I would not say this if I did not believe I would not be willing to tolerate those limitations if I did not believe that the Jewish history gives Jews the right to a state that is dedicated to Jewish protection and if I did not believe that the alternative in practical terms would be both worse for Palestinians and for Jews Thank you this gentleman over here ok who ever has the mic ok there are many questions that come up but are you familiar with the book by Clayton Sprecher yes I said it ok because he presents a very different picture of what he calls the truth about Ken David than most of the other writers that's true I would say my book is probably somewhere in between him on the one hand and the more conventional let's say Dennis Ross perspective on the other but you're right there is a lot of literature on this question that is quite different than the conventional American narrative it's just that most people haven't read it ok so I won't just cast that anymore on the question of when the Labour Party was empowered during the Oslo agreement the number of Jewish settlement expansions was tremendous the number of areas involved talking peace they get that standing silence right finally on the question of Jewish schools in this country a lot of very rich Jews give a lot of money to Israel why can't they be tasked to give money to Jewish students they should and I call for that but the economics are such that it's simply prohibitively expensive and the only communities that have made it work are ones that have a provision for funding the secular aspects of religious schools they will pay for the secular aspects of Catholic schools, Jewish schools, etc it's it's it sounds like a political state yeah it's actually during that actually Ezra asked me a little while ago because he often tends to focus on who wins what happened if there was a battle between the R Israeli president and our American president I can answer that question actually as it turns out no I think you're right the Barat I think basically decided that he was going to defer all his confrontations with the Israeli right to the very end he was going to buy them off and buy them off and buy them off he was going to hold all his chips for the very end when he was going to try it and I think you can argue the merits of that strategy but it's important to understand that from the Palestinian perspective this is what I tried to say and this is what is not very often present in the American Jewish perspective of we gave them everything which is to say from the Palestinian perspective if you understand why a boss doesn't want to negotiate with Netanyahu without a settlement treaty you have to understand that the Palestinian narrative of Oslo was that we sat around negotiated, negotiated, negotiated and they kept eating the pizza and we don't want to go through that especially with a guy who were pretty sure he's not interested in negotiating seriously anyway so you want to go through that for another 10 years so you have a million settlers in East Jerusalem and West Bank and that is a legitimate point of view and I think American Jews and supporters of Israel have to recognize the way in which settlement growth poisons the possibility of meaningful effective negotiations with the Palestinians by empowering those Palestinians who are most pessimistic and most hostile to the two states who has the mic for now, please I appreciate you having the courage to endure the controversy and sure this is going on in gender especially bringing up the talk about the settlements that you just did but I want to ask more about people have you considered the and I'm looking from the point of view of the United States too as after 10 years of a supposed war we're getting more and more over the hard right and I think we really need to begin talking about the hard right not just hot where the the militarist corporatist are getting more and more political power just like in Israel with the hard right in Israel where we really are undercutting our own constitutional democracy now we have military detention mandated in the United States and the most recent so I guess would you want to comment I guess my question is aren't we losing our democracy by what we're doing to ourselves in order to maintain the oppression you mentioned being from South Africa you know that oppression so often has an even more harmful effect upon the oppressor that they become if you've already touched on harsher and harsher and more brutal and so we are undercutting our own constitutional democracy in supposed defense against these people who are becoming more and more hostile to their own oppression I don't think that the South African Israel analogies work because in the Green Line policy we do have the right to vote and citizenship I think that there are a couple of important points you made one of which is actually and I do say this in the book but I don't think my critics are going to notice it maybe as much as I would like for all that I criticize Israeli settlement policy it is important I do not necessarily believe that we in the United States had we been in a state of kind of relatively permanent war would have done any better in fact if you think about the way in which the United States has dealt with minority groups who had any connection to our enemies you know German American during World War I Japanese American during World War II Muslim Americans in 2011 it does inculcate a certain humility about recognizing the way we react during wartime in looking at the way that Israel has reacted and that's not to say that I don't think we have the right to criticize it but I do think it's important to remember that I don't necessarily I think that I'm not necessarily sure that any other democracy under those circumstances would have done it any better we have been much less threatened by Israel and we've done horrible horrible things during wartime I think one of the fascinating dynamics that you just to pick up on one other strain you mentioned is actually the relationship to the US military and Israel I think that the most significant thing that's happening in the American political dynamic about Israel is not actually what anything is happening in the American Jewish community is what's happening in the US military I think that if I were an Israeli right wing leader I would be less worried about Jake Streeth and I would be about the US officer rule I think the significant thing that's happening happened in recent years and we have a new generation of American officers a lot of them have spent time in the Arab world they know Arabic, they're sensitive to public opinion in the Middle East, a lot of them do believe that Israeli policy are not good for American security a lot of them are deeply deeply hostile to the idea of getting dragged into a war in Iran and that worries me, I mean because I believe in the US Israeli military relationship I believe in the US Israeli security relationship and I actually think that Israeli leaders are not sufficiently cognizant of the degree to which they are breeding animosity within the US military which is ultimately I think a more politically, potentially politically important force in all of this than liberal Jews like myself Why is it that you say it's the Israelis who are breeding this animosity, does it come from Israeli policy or does it come from time in the Arab world spent by the officers what's the arrow I think it's because a lot of people in the US military and a lot of national security experts genuinely do believe that the Arab Israeli conflict is a good recruiter for Jihadist groups not just that it is an effective propaganda tool for them to use in fact the Baker Hamilton Commission reporter although it didn't get very much attention made the point that during Israel's 2006 war in Lebanon there was a spike in attacks against US troops in Iraq didn't get that much attention, it was a very sensitive point, it was made and one of the fascinating things that if you look at the dynamics of the Obama Administration was that Gates turned out to be the most left wing or the guy who supported the most pressure I hope anyone in that government and that is also in it and that's because I think they're getting this pressure from what's coming up through the uniformed military I think it's a really significant interesting problem I think that and that I think particularly we've brought to bear when Obama went out there with his speech about 67 lines plus swaps and basically got kind of publicly slammed down by Netanyahu after which Gates said this is something about ingratitude or something like this, Petraeus also made a very controversial statement about this so I think that there's more going on under the surface and I think it is because it's maybe partly because the Palestinians haven't been shooting themselves in the foot as much recently I mean there has been less Palestinians have always deeply undermined their cause by their resort violence and since 2009 there has been less violence less terrorism which is partly the reason that they are doing a little better in this public relations struggle which is taking place amongst everybody but also within the US military itself I'm sorry to do this but I'm going to have to cut this off. The subject is so rich and talking to Peter is always so interesting I'm feeling like we're just getting started and I want this to go on and on but we also want you all to buy the book and have a chance for Peter to sign it and have refreshments and to continue the conversation amongst ourselves so really thank you Peter congratulations, thank you