 First of all, I'd like to introduce my guests. To my right, I have Shira Robinson. Shira is an associate professor of history and international affairs at George Washington University. And she's author of the book that we're here to discuss. It is in The Strangers, which came out recently. And this is Yusuf Manair, to my far right. He's the executive director of the Jerusalem Fund. And he was also a Palestinian who was born in Liddalud and came over to the States when he was a child. So I don't know how many of you have heard about this book. It's been received by academics across the political spectrum, with either a fusive or begrudging praise, depending on their political point of view. But nobody has questioned its scholarship. It's extremely well-edited and footnoted and researched. And it's also, as one colleague said to me, who teaches at a university in England, he said it's a bit of an eye-opener. And for me, I did find it a bit of an eye-opener. I thought, in my hubris, there's nothing more you can teach me about Israel-Palestine. But in the opening of the book, you described the military regime that the new state of Israel imposed on the Palestinian minority. Was how many Palestinians were left? About 150,000. And how many Jews were living in the state then? This was in 1949. Yeah, in 19- Oh, a little louder, please. Oh, a little louder. It's not very clear, but the mic is- Can you hear me better now? Yeah? OK. They can hear us in the other room, so they're probably fixing it as we speak. Is it better now? Should we take off the mics? No. OK. We'll try to speak clearly. Can you hear us in the back? Yeah. OK. So as we were talking about the 1948, there were again- So there were about 150,000 Palestinians who managed to remain inside the state, inside the territory that became Israel, which ended up being about 78% of historic mandate Palestine. I don't actually know the exact number of the Jews. There were no Israelis until 1952, actually, when the citizenship law passed. But let's just put it this way. The area of the territory that the UN had allocated as a part of the partition plan for the Jewish state in November of 1947 was to have about 49.5% Palestinian Arabs and 50.5% of what were then known as Palestinian Jews. And after the war and after the fighting and the last shots were fired, there was about 1 eighth of the Arab population in the territory that became Israel remained Palestinian Arab and the rest of the population. So the overwhelming majority, 85%, 85%, 88% was Jewish. So I'm going to come back to the details of what the military regime meant in terms of its application and how it affected people. But one of the tensions that you come back to over and over again in your book is the tension between a liberal state being Israel founded itself as a liberal state. And yet it had a minority of citizens that it didn't really it was supposed to be a liberal state for Jews. And yet they had a minority of native-born citizens, Palestinians who were not Jewish, had to be given the right, had to be given the right to vote. But at the same time, they also, you know, the idea of including them completely in the society was problematic for a state that was meant to be for the Jews. Now, just last week to mark Israel's 66th Independence Day, Haaretz newspaper, the English edition on the website, published the profiles and photographs of 66 Israeli women. And they included several women who were not Jewish. They were Palestinian citizens of Israel or sometimes they're called Arab Israelis. And one of them was Abir Qopiti. She's an activist and she's presently living in Berlin and doing her PhD there. But she's very active politically for Palestinian causes in Israel. And when someone, she didn't know about it and someone told her about this article and she wrote on her Facebook status that she objected that she didn't, first of all, that she didn't want to be described as an Israeli woman. And she didn't regard this as an honor. And she demanded that it be taken down because she thought that it wasn't appropriate for Israel's Independence Day to celebrate Palestinians. So Haaretz actually refused to take that down. There was another Palestinian woman who also said she didn't want to be included. But Haaretz decided to leave it as is and they published a follow-up article saying that one woman had objected and they republished her objection. So it was really interesting for me because what you see here is the tension of Haaretz being a very, very liberal newspaper and wanting to show that they're including the Palestinian citizens of Israel. You do have Palestinian citizens, you have a Palestinian citizen who's a Supreme Court judge. You have lower court judges who are Palestinians. You have famous actors who are Palestinian citizens of Israel. And yet, just 66 years ago, these were people who, what was happening to them under this military regime? I mean, you described in your book they couldn't move from one village to the next. Or from one town to the next, for several years. Applying for permits, and how long did this go on? This went on formally for about 18 years. There were different parts of the country, particularly anytime there were, like in the cities, places like Liddah or Ramleh or Haifa, Akka. These were places, Akko in Hebrew. These were places that immediately, these were some of them like Haifa already had a substantial Jewish population, but several of them like Akka did not have any Jewish settlers or any other native-born Jews in the city. And so with each city after the war, after a certain number of Jewish settlers came to settle down in those places, the military regime would lift the formal movement restrictions on the entire population, including the Palestinian population. However, that population remained under strict political and other surveillance. But in most of the villages, which is where most Palestinian Arabs who remained in the country lived, the system not only of movement restrictions and passes, but also curfews in places like the area, the strip, just to the west of what is today the West Bank, they were under curfew almost the entire time every single night. This is called the Triangle Region. The Triangle Region. When you say curfew, that means, for example, we had the case of 1956 where people didn't know that a curfew had been imposed in a village called Kafir Qasem. Right. So there was a village just in the southernmost tip of this strip, this narrow strip of land that abuts what is today the West Bank and what was then Jordan. And there was a nightly curfew that existed that was in place every night. However, the curfew was moved up. This was the night of October 29th, 1956, when Israel was about to attack Egypt, along with Britain and France, and the curfew was moved up because the army wanted to get its operations in place, but there wasn't enough time to tell the people living in the village about the curfew being moved up. So people started returning from work and in successive waves, they were lined up and shot by the border police. This was, they were 30 minutes past a curfew they didn't know about. Correct. Right. This was in 1956, but the military regime continued until 1966. Yeah. So it formally ended in December of 1966. The prime minister at the time was the first prime minister after David Ben-Gurion, who was the first prime minister, resigned in 1963. And basically Levy-Eschkole was the prime minister. And he gave assurances to a lot of people who were still in the government who were still somewhat concerned that it would be a problem to lift these movement restrictions and other restrictions on Palestinians in which he basically said, friends in the Knesset, my Jewish friends, don't worry about it. The container, the appearance of the container will change, but the contents will remain the same. And what that meant, and he said this openly in the Knesset. And what that meant to him and to the people who heard him speak was that effectively the, not just effectively, in literally the powers of the military regime that had been in place since 1948, 1949, were simply transferred to a less visible, less visible manifestation or less visible infrastructure. So military powers were transferred to the civilian police. And what you have in the spring of 1967, and supposedly in the aftermath of this feted end of military rule was actually a clampdown on Palestinian movement. And so Palestinian newspapers and activists were talking about how it was becoming harder and harder. The police were cracking down on movement, even making it harder for people to go about their daily lives, going to the doctor, going to visit their mother, going to school. Then it had been just a few months earlier. So speaking of Independence Day, which we just had in Israel this past week, you write in your book extensively about this tension between, first of all, there was a sort of requirement even during the years of military rule when Palestinians had to celebrate Israel's Independence Day. And they actually had inspectors who would come to the village to make sure they were celebrating wholeheartedly. Yes, with the right clothes, the right songs, the right appropriate amounts of sweet treats for the kids who were otherwise very, very impoverished and didn't have access to such sweets in the kindergarten, for example. And this year we were talking earlier that Independence Day, more and more Palestinians are now refusing to just stay quiet and stay out of sight on that day. And they're actually going out, and Yusuf, we were talking earlier about a sort of a memorial that happened at a village called Lubia. And this is not the first instance when Palestinians have gone back to villages that were depopulated in 47, 48. But this was an especially significant event because... Yeah, I think so. What happened in Lubia, which is an ethnically cleansed Palestinian village in the north of the country, was a mass gathering of Palestinians, most of them Palestinian citizens of Israel, on the occasion that is Israel's Independence Day, which the Palestinian citizens of Israel, of course, view very differently than the state views it. For the state, this is their independence, although I'm not really sure about independence from what. But for the Palestinians, this day marks essentially, and people often misunderstand this as the mourning of the creation of the state of Israel or something along those lines. But for Palestinians, what this marks is the establishment of a state that enforced their perpetual exile because it was the creation of that state that allowed one particular ethnic group, the authority and the power to keep Palestinians out of the homes in which they were from. And this is a process that, of course, began from 1947 to 1949, but really was enforced after that and continues to be enforced today. And one of the things that I appreciated so much about Shira's book was the focus on this period, which is really absent in a lot of the discussion about the entire situation. And also, from the general historiography on this issue, on the Israeli-Palestinian issue in general, we have tons of historical narratives about 1948. We have plenty about 1967, the different major Arab-Israeli wars, and then the period after that and the occupation and so on. But this formative period, really in the immediate aftermath of the creation of the state, was the foundation, the legal foundation of many of the policies that we are still seeing in effect today in the West Bank and throughout the rest of the country. And I think that it's a period that has been greatly under discussed and that Shira did a service by looking at it in a very authoritative way to remind us about the genesis of what we're seeing today. And I think that for all the conversation we have about 1967 and two states and the occupation and all of the ills of the occupation, of course, you cannot understand that and how to get out of this problem if you don't understand that the genesis really was at the period which is discussed in Shira's book and, of course, the events of 1948 as well. So you make, I mean, that's a really important point tonight. As I was saying when we were talking earlier in the Green Room, Shira's descriptions of what was going on under the military regime in Israel really sounded to me just like what's going on in the West Bank now. The repressive measures and the lack of movement, are you okay? Okay. And I thought, you know, they knew it was easy to put that system in place in the West Bank because they had plenty of experience already. But now today you have, you know, the Israeli government holds up its minority citizens as, you know, fabulous examples of successful coexistence. And again, they point to Supreme Court judges and there are even Palestinian officers in the police corps, in the civilian police. You have famous actors like Kara Khoury, Makram Khoury, Ali Suleiman, who work in Hollywood. So have things not become better? Well, to use the American context because we are here in the United States and we can easily relate to it. We had African-American congressmen in this country in the 1850s and 60s. We had African-American judges in this country. That means Jim Crow did not exist. Obviously not. We can always point to examples here or there to try to make the case that there is equality. But any objective assessment of the system and what we're really talking about here is a system. Not, you know, outlying cases here and there. Any objective assessment of the system, I think would have to come away with the conclusion that it is, as it is described in the book, when we talk about the issue of citizenship. And I think this is one of the best chapters in the book, is citizenship is used as a category of exclusion as Shira talks about it. And I think it's difficult for us here from the American context and a general Western, let's say, context and understanding of citizenship to really understand what citizenship means and doesn't mean for Palestinians in Israel today and has meant all this time. In the United States, citizenship is basically the highest civic level that you can attain within the state. And at that point you are on par with other citizens. As an immigrant to this country, you'd go through a process and then eventually a waiting period, you move from a non-resident alien to a resident alien to a citizen. And that's the gold standard. Once you get there, once you get that Navy blue passport, you are as equal before the state, at least as far as the law is concerned, as the president of the United States. But that concept of citizenship, which is common to our understanding of the United States and in other Western contexts is not the case in Israel. There is a class that is citizenship, but also a class that is, for lack of a better term, a national. And these two distinctions are used to treat populations differently. And I think this is also discussed in length in the book that citizens are afforded a certain set of rights. And among citizens, Jewish and Arab citizens, as citizens, those rights are at least, as far as the law is concerned, equal. But the treatment and the relationship between the state and those individuals is not only governed by their status as citizens, but is also governed by their status as members of national groups. And a group of citizens within the state, which are Jewish citizens, are privileged as a nationality. This is a dynamic that does not exist here in the United States, certainly not in the kind of institutionalized and legal way that it exists in Israel. And using this bifurcated system of relating to the people within the state, Israel is able to claim, look, we've got citizens in the Knesset. But at the same time, privilege one group of people over another. So that is the ruse here. And I think that understanding how that came to be is really instrumental to understanding the system in general and instrumental to understanding what needs to change for there to be any sort of peaceful coexistence between the people that live in this land. And the discussion of that in Shira's book is really unique as far as the historiography is concerned because you don't see it nearly as often enough. And I'd urge you all to check that part out in particular. Can I just add one thing to that? I mean, I think just apropos your comment about Abir Kopti and other people who resented being included on this, other Palestinian citizens who resented being included on this list of what was at the top, Israeli, or? 66 Israeli women to celebrate. Israeli women to celebrate. I mean, there are potentially, I don't know these people personally, but I can imagine there are at least two reasons why they would feel strongly opposed to this designation. One is that they might feel like they identify themselves as Palestinian and that can't reconcile with also being identified as Israeli. But the other reason, or another reason, might be along the lines of what Yusuf was describing, which is that there is actually no such thing as an Israeli. There are Israeli Jews and there are Israeli other folks. There are Muslims, there are Arabs, there are Christians. As their ID cards say. As their ID cards say. Yeah, which is something else we should talk about. Yes. We talked earlier about analogies between Israel and South Africa under apartheid, which is kind of hot button analogy to make. But I think in Israel too, yeah, but maybe less. But you actually quote quite early on in 1956, the editor-in-chief and owner. Even earlier, I think 53. Was it 53 when I? I think so. We're talking about an op-ed that was published in Ma'arive newspaper by the owner and editor-in-chief, owner and publisher. Whose name was Azrael Karlebach. At the time, Alan Payton cried the beloved country, had been translated into Hebrew, and it was a best seller. It was also made into a play and it was selling out at Habima, Israel's national theater in Tel Aviv. And this was during the period of the military regime. So this is when Azrael Karlebach published his very angry op-ed, which you excerpted, and it's just one short paragraph. Can you read that? Sure, and he titled his op-ed, the Hebrew translation of cry beloved country. So he in this excerpt, what he's doing is he's writing a kind of model letter to his daughter. I don't know, we don't know if he actually had a daughter, but he was sort of writing a letter to his daughter reflecting on, well okay, reflecting on what was going on at the time in Israel, which was that this land law had been passed, the new land law, which was gonna make possible the massive confiscation of land owned by Palestinian citizens who managed to remain inside the country. So here he is in his voice as a father. How can we take land that belongs to someone else who is here, who lives and work on it? Ah, my daughter, there is no technical difficulty in this. If you hold the reins of power, you declare for example that these lands are a quote unquote closed zone and you forbid anyone to access them without a permit. You give permits only to your cronies, the people of the neighboring Kibbutzim who had set their sights on this land and you don't give permits to the Arabs to whom the land belongs. The matter is simple. That's at a time when, mainstream, this was very much Ben-Gurion's Israel. There were not that many deviations from mainstream thought. This is a mainstream newspaper and sure that. He was a Ben-Gurionist. He was a Zionist, a very strong Zionist. I mean, very ideologically so. So basically what you're saying, and you bring other examples in of South Africa's apartheid foreign minister coming over to Israel in 1951. Yeah. And basically complimenting Ben-Gurion for his system of separation that was working out so well. Yeah, actually, sorry, it was the prime minister, Malen, and he came in June of 1953 and he became the first, the person who was considered to be the first European head of state, even though he's coming from South Africa, to visit Israel. And he reportedly, or sorry, Ben-Gurion reportedly praised his, quote, contribution to mutual understanding between the races, unquote. So there's a lot of people get very anxious when you talk about, for example, racial discrimination or racism. In Israel, saying, well, there are no races. This is not South Africa. There's no kind of biological determinism here in the, for what you might call ethnic discrimination or marginal ethnic inequality that exists. A part of what I'm doing in my book is to show that actually a racial consciousness was very much at play from, not just even from 1948, but from much earlier. But I would argue, and I do argue in the book, that racial identities actually hardened, and categories hardened quite a bit on the Israeli side, on the Israeli Jewish side, excuse me, as a result of the war, and after 1948. Right, but you also talk about how there is a tension even then in developing policy between this sort of desire to, between helping them to assimilate and become just like us, and maybe keeping them as some sort of foreign, almost oriental, the people who would make the homeless, and the ones who serve, whose villages you can come visit and feel a sense of connection with, but not live together with, maybe separately one alongside the other. And actually, one of the things that you mentioned that really fascinated me was the idea of food. How in the early days of the military regime that Palestinians used to actually serve meals to policemen and to military officers in order to bribe them, to give them permits. And then later on, you write that in the 1990s, the government sort of encouraged Israelis to, Israeli Jews to visit Arab cities and towns and eat their food, and they held this after this sort of example of coexistence. Yeah, I mean the model of, or the sort of language around food as indicative of coexistence between Jews and Arabs has been around for a very long time, and from the very beginning, and it's very ironic, because food served as a kind of mediation of stark inequality between Jews and Palestinians under military rule. And actually it was after the first Palestinian uprising, or Intifada, that began in 1987, that a lot of Israeli Jews who were very accustomed to enjoying their Saturdays going to Palestinian marketplaces in the West Bank for cheaper produce and good food, they, after the Intifada broke out in December of 87, they began to worry, would their car be stoned? Would they not be as welcome or not be as comfortable? And so the government, as also as part of, especially after the Oslo process began in the early 1990s, people like Shimo and Perez talked about the New Middle East and the tourism ministry and kind of industry in Israel really emphasized the loveliness of coexistence that could be achieved by going to Palestinian restaurants on the outskirts, mind you, of Palestinian villages inside Israel, not on the internal parts of those villages where Israelis might actually see the poverty and the lack of roads and other kind of infrastructural neglect, but at least they could go to the outskirts and sort of frankly feel good about themselves for partaking in this diversity of the country. But that all ended, that kind of promotion of coexistence through consumption, food consumption, it ended almost immediately after the Second Intifada broke out and Palestinians participated in their own demonstrations, protesting their own ongoing systematic exclusion, and then the call was boycott these restaurants. Boycott them, boycott them, boycott them. Yeah, I remember that very well in October 2000 and of course that was also sort of a searing example of inequality for the Palestinian citizens of Israel because there was 17 people were shot, many of them in the back by the police, yes? These were all citizens of Israel, 13, yeah. And there were all citizens of Israel? Yes, I believe there was one person from Gaza, I don't know exactly what his story was, but yeah. There nobody was ever convicted of wrongdoing. No, there was a big governmental commission and maybe Yusuf could also speak to this, I'm sure you followed it. There was a big governmental commission sort of at the Supreme Court a year or two later after these people had been summarily shot often from the back and many young people, I mean almost all of them were quite young. And there was really no punitive measures were taken, there were kind of... There was the OR commission? Yeah, it was the OR calls called the OR commission after the person who chaired it and there were a lot of kind of recommendations that came out of the report like we need to address the problem of stark infrastructural inequality, budgetary allocations, for example, municipal allocations, education between Jews and Palestinians, but no one was ever actually held accountable legally for the summary shooting and execution of these Palestinians. And that was when Israeli Jews started to become afraid of going into villages of Palestinian citizens of Israel and the Galilee, I think. Yeah, and it was also a time when Palestine, this was when I was doing the bulk of my research for the book, and this was also a time when Palestinians became extremely afraid of going out in public, whether it was to the beach or to the mall in the Galilee or to restaurants and cities, people, I heard many people tell stories about how they didn't want their kids going into the mall and speaking Arabic because there was a huge rise of hate crimes. It was very, very difficult to be Palestinian living in any kind of proximity to Jewish public spaces at this time because there was a lot of fear, essentially, of being attacked, just randomly attacked by people. You were following that quite a lot, weren't you, the hate crimes against Palestinian citizens of Israel? Yeah, there's, you definitely saw an increase of that in recent years, but I would sort of push back on the notion that it is a recent phenomenon. The interaction between both people, even within the state, was at the margins, and there was a deep-rooted sense that, among many Israeli Jews, that the Arab was unequal, lesser, and one of the oft-used sayings is to describe basically manual labor, Arab labor. And so, right, and this is something that goes back for many years and is part of the structural discrimination of the state. And so the kind of events, whether they were the events of 2000, might exacerbate that at times, but it is really a reflection of an underlying sentiment that is part of a system that really, from the top down, says that one group is privileged over the other. Well, there's sort of vacillate between wanting Palestinians to be loyal and joyful citizens and wanting to keep them, and regarding them as a fifth column, I think, and you can see that constantly. And I would go back here to where we started earlier with what happened in the village of Lubia the other day. You had this mass gathering of Palestinians, some 10 to 20,000, which is a really significant number, in a ethnically cleansed village, and there's a fantastic video of this gathering. And here you have these Palestinian citizens of what is a so-called Jewish state, and we're hearing more and more of this today about the need to recognize Israel as a Jewish state from Israeli officials. And even this past week, we hear talk about the Israeli Prime Minister, Netanyahu, pushing for a basic law to be legislated to name Israel as a state of the Jewish people only, which is probably the most exclusivist language that we have heard from him so far as this issue goes. And here in this village, you have this mass gathering of Palestinian citizens of Israel who are citizens of this so-called Jewish state who are not Jewish, singing the Palestinian national anthem. And if any of you are familiar with the Palestinian national anthem, which is Maltini Maltini, and also familiar with the Israeli national anthem, you have to ask yourself how it is possible that a state that defines itself as Jewish that has a national anthem that includes the yearning of a Jewish soul can possibly reconcile itself with this native population that has a undeniable connection to the land and is not Jewish, and are here today asserting that identity in very strong ways, just as the state is moving further and further in this exclusionary direction. So, it's not a circle that can be squared. Well, I mean, it could be a five-hour conversation, but I'm really interested in going back to this idea of the original problem being in 1948 and not 1967, meaning even if there were a negotiated two-state solution, which seems pretty remote at the moment. You still, how do you define the state when you have such a significant minority that wants, they demand their rights as full citizens and their right to define their own identity and it doesn't fit with the idea of a Jewish identity, obviously. I think the question that proponents of a Jewish state are defining Israel as a Jewish state as such really need to answer today, not tomorrow, but today, is what are the rights of the Palestinian population? How do they fit in this state today? And how would they fit in a state if they are not 20% of the population or 25% of the population, but 30%, 40%, 50%, which is a very possible scenario down the road, what steps does the state take at that point to maintain the Jewish identity towards this population? Does it ethnically cleanse? Does it put that population under some new form of occupation? Does it, what does it do? What is the answer to that? And that is an answer that needs to be given today if there is an answer, because if you are saying that Israel must maintain this perpetual Jewish majority at any cost, well then what you're essentially giving license to is the state to take all sorts of measures against this population to maintain that in the future. And if you look at sort of the demographic history of Israel, it is very unique in the way that you've seen population changes over time. You had a couple major sort of spikes and influxes that were immediately after the foundation of the state in 1948 where you almost had a doubling of the Jewish population. And then in the early 1990s with the arrival of Jews from the Soviet Union. And Ethiopians. And Ethiopians, but the largest single number was from the former Soviet Union. You had almost an extra one million people in a state of only five or six million at that time. One million people to have an influx of that size is tremendous. So barring those two unique moments. What proportion would the Palestinian population be today? It would be far more significant. So unless you are talking about maintaining perpetual demographic engineering over time, how do you plan to sustain a Jewish majority in a state that originally had a native majority of Palestinian Arabs? How do you plan to sustain that? In a way that works in a 21st century with liberal values. And I simply don't see how you can do that. I don't think you offer any solutions in your book either. You end on a pretty gloomy note. Yeah, and I don't think, I think Israel already does define itself as a Jewish state. And I think that Netanyahu's reiterated, repeated demand that Palestinians recognize the right to continually marginalized, systematically exclude no matter what the demographic ratio is. Frankly has been a kind of distraction because he's known that that won't be, that that's something that no Palestinian leader can accept. Of course, an interview came out this weekend with an anonymous American official who some people think was Martin Indyk. And he claimed that, or sorry, there were two things that came out this weekend, but one of them was an interview with Shimon Peres who said actually Abou Mazen, Mahmoud Abbas, did agree to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, but other things got in the way, basically Netanyahu was being obstructionist and so the negotiations didn't go through. But I mean, part of what I'm trying to show in my book is that Israel made it very, very clear this state officials and government officials did everything they possibly could at the foundation of the state in those formative years. And I would get even more specific and say the first five, first six years to ensure that there could never be anything, any kind of citizenship along the lines of the gold standard or the theoretical gold standard that Yusuf was invoking in the context of the United States. So the difference between citizenship and nationality, the very quick expropriation of land through Jewish national land agencies and organizations to distribute that land to Jews and Jews only. And all kinds of mechanisms were put in place and kind of developed during these early years, legal, unofficial, a whole host of mechanisms and institutions to ensure that there could never be such a thing as actually equal citizenship. The first and most important one being the law of return which ensured that any Jew can come to Israel at any time in his or her life and get citizenship. And the law of return is actually one of the first, the inclusion of the law, the law of return is included as one of the first clauses of the law of citizenship that was finally passed in 1952 only because the law of return managed to create a hierarchy between Jewish and Palestinians such that Jews had kind of a priori rights to the state leaving Palestinians a kind of handful of discreet rights like voting like holding an ID card within that state. So after the law of citizenship was passed in 1952 it basically it says this law applies to anyone to whom the law of return does not apply. So Palestinians gained citizenship but it was not about universal citizenship. It was just sort of an afterthought and that's why I talk about citizenship as a category of exclusion. And that hasn't changed, right? That's firmly in place and the Supreme Court has repeatedly and continually reaffirmed this idea that there is no such thing as an Israeli. There are only Jews and others. So we're gonna go to questions in about two minutes. I just wanna close with a question for you Yusuf. If you were born in Israel as you have Israeli citizenship you're married to someone who's a citizen of the Palestinian Authority. Your child was born in the States. Now, if two Israeli Jews had a child in the States then their child would automatically have Israeli citizenship. Does your child have Israeli citizenship? No, now he does not. But is he able to, to be honest with you I'm really not sure. I doubt it. What I do know is that to prevent what the Israeli Prime Minister refers to as demographic spillover. This notion that Palestinian Arabs that are concentrated in the West Bank could somehow spill over into Israel and create all kinds of demographic threats to the Israeli state which is really sort of dangerous in racist language when you think about it. But this is the language that's used. To prevent that they put in place this law that prevents Palestinian citizens of Israel from residing with their spouses inside the state, right? If those spouses are Palestinians from the West Bank or elsewhere, for example. That's new though, that's relatively new. This is 2002, 2003, sometime around. But it was, I think it was recently challenged in the courts and the courts upheld it basically. And it goes back to this ethos about demographic superiority. Which is really part of the story from the very beginning. I mean this is a manifestation of that in 2003 that was extended today but it's all part of the same objective. Maximum Palestinian geography, minimum Palestinian demography. That's what it comes down to. So for my wife and I, because you bring it up, we can reside together in the United States as we do, we cannot reside together in the country of my birth. You can't go home to Liddah with your wife. No, but two people who happen to be Jewish who were born in the United States or Japan or anywhere else and get married can migrate to Israel tomorrow and live in the town that I was born in. Not just two Jews, one Jewish. Right, right. I mean a Israeli Jew resident of Israel can marry a foreigner and have them come, live with them like normal people do. Even if they're not Jewish. Even if they're not Jewish. Though they might have some difficulty passing that with the religious authorities, they would nonetheless be able to do so as far as the state is concerned. Because there's no law against that. But there is a law specifically preventing Palestinians from doing that. So I mean this is just a recent manifestation the past 10 years of the same issue that goes back to the foundation of the state. Okay, on that very positive note. We're gonna start taking questions. Do we have anyone here with a mic? I think there's, yeah. Thanks. So if you could, yeah, I let us talk too long as I usually do. So please keep the questions to just one question. Thanks. Sorry, who had that, yeah please. You alluded to but didn't describe the differences and privileges of the national groups within Israel. And certainly it's clear one is better than the other. But can you talk about what the differences are and they're all citizens but the national groups are treated differently. Sure, I mean basically pick a category of government work, the public sphere and you'll find discrimination and unequal services. So whether it's education, whether it's municipal budgets, things for like the mayoral office taking care of local trash collection, water hooking up people's homes to the water network, the electric grid, marriage law now, although that's been a problem since 1948. Medical school. Medical school, you're not allowed to go to medical school until after army age. Oh, okay, I didn't even know that. Getting into medical school, there are the internal security services in Israel for example, continue to run the Arab education sector. There's separate education systems for Jews and for what used to be called minorities then become the Druze and the Arabs. Now potentially there's gonna be an effort by the government to establish a Christian stream of education I don't really know but all of these different school systems have unequal municipal or sorry unequal budgetary allotments compared to what is a lot to Jewish schools, access to healthcare, access to land, the ability to rent a house or buy a house in a particular community. Army veterans get all kinds of privileges by virtue of being in the army that most other people who are not in the army namely most Palestinians don't get even Druze, the community that has been forcibly, the community of Palestinians that have been forcibly conscripted since the mid-1950s. They saw their villages have their village lands be expropriated as they were serving in the military and now there's actually a growing movement among young Druze of conscientious objectors saying actually you can say that we're being recruited into the army and getting certain privileges by dint of our army service but we're at the end of the day still just being treated like other Palestinians. So any activity within the public sphere and anywhere you look and there is systematic discrimination. And that's all institutionalized. I mean that's formal, legal, institutional. Yeah I mean there's some things that are formal and something just like Jim Crow just to invoke Jim Crow. I mean there were certain laws that were put in place and then there were certain patterns of and mechanisms of discrimination and exclusion that weren't written into the law because they didn't need to be. Because there were certain institutions and forces that worked together to ensure that in this case there are certain institutions that worked together to ensure that Palestinians are always held back. The high tech sector is I think also a very good example because, sorry. I don't know if I'm saying these two. So for example in the high tech sector which is one of the employers, it's one of the best paid employers in Israel. Most of them do work with the security sector in Israel. So they use that as a reason not to hire Palestinian citizens of Israel. And also Palestinian citizens of Israel who go to university tend to be disproportionately in the sciences and engineering and computer programming. So they're locked out of the significant sector of the economy just in practice not by legislation. There are also all kinds of labor laws such that during an economic recession for example, the first people to be fired from a factory or from any kind of industrial sector or any kind of industrial factory or anything are people who live outside of the district. Well guess what? There's very little industrialization allowed within Palestinian communities. So Palestinians who are unable to get access to higher education, they go work in service sector, the service sector, the industrial sector, whatever. They're the first ones to get fired because technically there's this universal law that says well the first people to be fired if there's a recession are the people that live outside the community. Guess who lives outside of the community? Palestinians. There are all kinds of interesting legal ways in which this kind of deceptive language is used to have an effect that marginalizes and discriminates against Palestinians without explicitly saying so. If we think for example in the American context about the grandfather clause which prevented certain people from voting without explicitly saying that they weren't allowed to vote, it's sort of the same dynamic. You have it with the infiltrators law or what was effectively an infiltrators law from the 1950s where the law did not specifically say Palestinians in regard to who was allowed to enter the country or who would be treated as an infiltrator. But said people that were living in this country before this particular date but then left and now reside in these countries or found themselves to be absent. Or found themselves to be absent. Those people are not allowed. Well who are we talking about here? It's obvious that the effect and the targeted population is Palestinians. It's not written explicitly but it's very clear what it's about. And so you see that in a number of different places as well. Sorry, you had your hand up earlier, yeah? I'm wondering if you think that the feasibility of sort of this system of whatever you want to call it discrimination within Israel would change if the demographic situation changed considerably. And I sort of wonder in terms of the fact that there's now a large segment on the Israeli right that is rejecting the two state paradigm and seems to to an extent maybe be embracing a one state paradigm that would involve annexation of the West Bank. And they don't seem very perturbed when people say to them, well, that's going to lead to a Palestinian majority. How is that situation gonna work? And it almost seems as if they'd imagined that they could use the same institutional practices that they've used within 67 Israel to suppress the Arab minority on the Arabs in the West Bank. And I'm wondering if you think that that's something that sounds feasible or that if the percentage, the number of Arabs was to increase greatly, if the percentage of the Arabs as the total population of citizens was to increase greatly that their political power might change in such a way that Israel would find it much harder to use these same sort of systems of legal segregation among citizens. Wow, tough question. Well, look, one of the biggest myths about this entire issue in the discourse that we hear over and over again is that the occupation is not sustainable, right? The reality is nothing has sustained quite as long as the occupation. It's been there for 47 years now. And even though we keep hearing that, the Israeli state seems to be doing pretty well. It's got a thriving economy. It continues to get support to maintain this occupation. And so the idea that things are not, certain systems are not necessarily sustainable may seem more of a reality to us than they would be to the decision makers on the ground in Israel that are thinking about creative new ways to work around the demographics and discriminate against people. And that's why this kind of conversation exists today among some decision makers in Israel who say, look, we can absorb another 100,000, 200,000, maybe even a couple million Arabs, just keep Gaza out of the picture. And then we'll just continue on with this system and find these legal ways to discriminate against them. But everybody agrees that whatever the demographics, the objective is still to keep a one particular group, a Jewish ethnic group in power. So how you do it, what language you use, what type of laws you use, whether you call it occupation or annexation or different classes of citizenship or what else, it's the same thing, just by a different name. I can just add one story to that. I was very interested when I was doing the research for the book in the end of this military rule period, which happened to fall just six months before the 1967 war and the occupation. And as some of you may know, that Moshe Dayan, big military guy in Israel, became kind of like the head muckety muck of the occupation, the principal person in charge of what originally was called the military administration and its name euphemistically was changed, the civilian administration. And basically what he said was, guys, the military regime that existed inside Israel before 1967 was a nightmare, there was so much bribery, there was all this business of the food. Palestinians were complaining because they were seeing Israeli soldiers on the street and then the checkpoints and this and that. It's a new dawn and frankly, we live in a new world of international media and everyone has their eyes on us. So we're gonna have what we're gonna call an enlightened occupation and what that is gonna entail, among other things is Palestinians will be able to be born, raised as children, go to school, get married, get a job and die without ever having to see an Israeli official because the whole staff will be run, the occupation administration will be called civilian and they'll be run by Palestinians themselves. That didn't really work out and so Israelis, what's so interesting if you think back historically is looking at how Israelis have been trying to figure out this puzzle of how to control people without the world paying attention or giving them too much strife. But there's never, as Yusuf said exactly, there's never been a question of maybe the goal, maybe our relationship to this native population shouldn't be one of control and exclusion. That has never been up for question. It's more of a question of how do we manage this control? I mean, there is, I would add a sort of a tendency. I can say this as somebody who spent a serious chunk of her life living in Israel as an Israeli citizen. There is a tendency in Israel not to think things through in terms of policy. And I remember someone once saying that an official said we've decided not to decide. Yes, you had a question and I think we'll take Howard and then we have to finish. Yes, my question is whether this problem is going to continue to be intractable unless Israel gives up its idea, its vision of sustaining itself as a Jewish state. And while you consider your answer, I'd like to just have you take into account two points. First, Jews have lived as minorities since time immemorial in many places and really what they asked for was to be treated as equal citizens in those places. So I would agree that Jews in a Jewish state should be the last place where people are not treated equally as citizens. But the reality is that not all states are agnostic when it comes to culture or religion, they're Muslim states, there are Christian countries and so forth. And the second point is the US citizenship is held up as a gold standard and I just checked on my Blackberry, the oath of allegiance which talks about upholding the Constitution of the United States, rejecting working on behalf or allegiance to any foreign powers. So that implies loyalty to the existence of the United States. So my question again, are we saying that as long as Israel defines itself as a Jewish state, we have an intractable problem? I mean I think we have to remember that this, that the state itself is a product of a colonial movement, right? This is not a state that came to be in a space where as Benedict Anderson wrote about, a number of people came to this conclusion about imagined community and then decided to establish a state. It was a state that existed in theory in a collective mindset and then was put into practice in a place where the demographics did not match the ideal outcome of the state or what the state had in mind. So you had one group that wanted to establish a state in a space, in a geographic space where the vast majority of people were gonna be excluded from political power in that state. I mean it is a recipe for conflict from the beginning. So and I think it would be that case in Palestine, it would be that case in South Africa, it would be that case in China, it would be, it's not about Israelis and Palestinians. It's about any particular group wanting to come and impose itself in a position of political power in a space where the vast majority of people are not from that group. That's what it boils down to. So the question is, is it intractable unless you resolve that? I mean I don't see any other way. You're either going to be constantly controlling this demographic group through all kinds of means that we put nicer whitewash names around, denying the rights of people to live in that land because of who they are and where they come from while at the same time, privileging others from outside of the country to come in. I mean how else would you sustain this system, I guess? Just speaking to the mic because we're recording this, okay, thank you. All countries, including the United States have had immigration policies that vary group by group. So if by some chance under my construct, Arab Israelis were to become the majority, I would say the democracy transcends and needs to be upheld. But if Israel defines itself as a Jewish state and provides a right of return, and we haven't mentioned the Holocaust, we haven't mentioned not just the Holocaust but for centuries Jews have not had a place where others, Islam and Christianity and so forth, have had. So the point is this little tiny patch is the only place where Jews can say this is a place we're safe, okay? I don't deny the history but we have a real politic existing situation. The question is we can't change history, what can we do in the future? If Israeli immigration policy is to give preference to Jews, that's no different than immigration policies of other countries that have given preferences. At the same time, they should take the high road and afford all of the privileges and in fact enable Palestinian citizens or excuse me, Arab citizens of Israel to read an oath of allegiance kind of thing and say my allegiance is to this country as it is. As minority Jews try to do in the countries in which they lived for many, many years, okay? And unfortunately it didn't always work out. That's the solution it seems to me. And your aspirations are well founded but if the solution lies in Israel rejecting itself as a Jewish state, you know that's not gonna happen and then what we're saying is it's a race to the bottom. I mean, it's a super important point you make and I would love to discuss it at length but you know we're short on time so maybe afterwards I know that, yeah. Howard, you had a question and then we'll have to finish. Thanks. Congratulations, Shira. I learned a lot from the book. I didn't think I knew everything but I knew even less than I thought. You end not explicitly but pretty much rejecting a two state solution as a way to try to solve these problems and after reading the book I reached exactly the opposite conclusion that if we could get to a two state solution forget about the politics right now that two and a half million or four million if Gaza's included in that. Palestinians are now in their own state and Israel is dealing with a much more manageable problem of trying to reconcile a kind of anachronistic religious based state with a modern liberal nation state which is doable with a 20% minority of non-Jews and not doable in most any other circumstance as a demography changes. I think a one state solution of the Caroline Glick model which is what was referred to earlier in a question of the Israeli right coming up with its models is totally abhorrent and a one state solution that comes from the Palestinian left which envisions a 50-50 split and no religious designation state at all I think is just a formula for unending conflict because you know that the Israeli Jews are not gonna give up what they have fought so hard to create and so a two state solution it seems to me solves a lot of those problems or at least holds the potential to solve them or at least is the only way we could even imagine a way forward that's not another 150 years of conflict and so I would just like to hear why you came to that conclusion. I know you Sif, you also are a one stator and so I'd like to hear what you think, thanks. I mean there are a lot of ways to answer that question. The first thing I would say with all due respect is that I wouldn't want to be considered as a demographic problem in the United States so I reject the idea that the goal should be to find a way to manage the problem of the Palestinian ratio or demographic proportion in the population. So that's kind of my moral or ethical response. My second response would be that those numbers are not necessarily static and they're not controllable. You can't, I mean more Israeli Jews are leaving the country in greater numbers than ever before as far as Ian Ion Lestic from the University of Pennsylvania has documented and Palestinian citizens of Israel aren't going anywhere so it seems like the only way you can maintain that manageability over time, I think this is what you Sif also was getting at is through ultimately finding new and potentially much more repressive ways of controlling the population. The third response that I would give is that there's been no, absolutely no reason in the last 20 years since the Oslo process, I'm sure my math is wrong now, since the Oslo process has begun to suggest that Israeli society, forget the Israeli government, but Israeli society at large at the grassroots level is becoming more inclusive of Palestinians. If anything, anthropologists, cultural observers, observers of the cultural scene in Israel have observed that they kind of clamp down on the need for Israel to be more and more and more Jewish because we might actually lose this land, which of course doesn't look like it's gonna happen, West Bank and Gaza in any kind of meaningful sense, that clamp down and that sense of urgency on the part of the Jewish Israeli population has only increased, not decreased. So I'm just not, I don't see any evidence that anyone, whether at the governmental level or the social level is actually really pushing to withdraw from territory or to be more inclusive should that withdrawal take place within the 1949 lines and then on more principled grounds, I would say, I wouldn't wanna be considered a problem, so I wouldn't treat someone else as a problem. The issue of the two-state solution, and it's one that you more or less identified in your question, and the issue that I have with it as it is discussed today is when we talk about solutions, solution to what, what is the problem? And as you pointed out, the two-state solution is a solution for a problem that Israel has primarily. It is this identity crisis, this problem of there's lots of Palestinians here and we want a Jewish state. How do we solve this problem? Two-state solution. But that's not a real solution for Palestinians. 67% of whom are refugees. If we're talking about a conventional two-state solution in which the rights and concerns of the vast majority of Palestinian stakeholders are ignored, then perhaps that's a solution for Israel's identity problem or image problem in the 21st century. But it's not a solution for Palestinians. So I would not rule out a two-state solution in theory if we're talking about one in which we have two states that are equal in sovereignty, that are equal in the rights that they afford their citizens and also provide a solution of human rights for all the stakeholders involved. But if we're just looking for different ways to draw lines to maintain this project, that's not a solution to the problem overall. It's a solution to Israel's problem. Which is unsolved. And we're five minutes over time. I'm sorry, but you're welcome to come up afterwards. Thank you very much. You've been a terrific audience. Thank you.