Israel’s Other Intractable Conflict (Part 1)
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I was reporting in the Middle East recently, and while I was there, I spent a day driving around the West Bank with a couple of people who know it very well. An Israeli peace activist named Yehuda Shaul and the American journalist Nathan Thrall. For Ramallah to Bethlehem, with no traffic for an Israeli Jew, can be...

35 minutes? No traffic? Ah, no traffic, of course. Yeah, nothing. Okay. For a Palestinian, you can't go through Jerusalem. So you're taking this, what's called Wadi Nar, which is a terrible set of thin bypass roads with hairpin turns. And you would go all the way around like this to get to Bethlehem. Two hours. And it'll be two hours. Whereas the Israelis are just going to go straight through.

We weren't making small talk about the traffic. In the West Bank, which road you're allowed to use, where you're allowed to go, and what identification card you have, these are just some of the aspects of the Israeli occupation, the architecture of the occupation. With the airstrikes from Hezbollah this week and the assassination of a Hamas leader in Iran, the war in Gaza threatens still to become an even wider regional conflict.

We're going to talk about one of the most intractable sources of this conflict, Israel's occupation of the West Bank. The occupation began after the Six-Day War in 1967, when Israel seized control of the West Bank and Gaza. And with each passing year, more and more Israelis have been settling on Palestinian land in the West Bank. Violence committed by armed settlers has been on the rise for years.

Nathan Thrall, who drove me around the West Bank that day, wrote the best account I've read of how the occupation has made life for Palestinians oppressive, hopeless, and nearly unlivable. The book is called A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, and it won the Pulitzer Prize this year.

Thrall told me that the way that Israel has carved up the West Bank over time, leaving pockets under Palestinian control, certain cities and towns, well, that might be the government's long-term plan for Gaza as well.

I do think that it's possible for something similar to be created in Gaza. There are now two east-west corridors running through Gaza. The Netzarim corridor separating northern from southern Gaza that is entirely under Israeli control. And then what's called the Philadelphia route, the border between Sinai and Gaza in the south. Essentially along the border with Egypt.

The border with Egypt. And so if Israel were to create, let's say, two more of those, you will have divided Gaza into five pieces.

You then have what Israel is describing as humanitarian bubbles. These are concentrations of Palestinian refugees where aid will be administered. And again, Israel can go in and perform raids repeatedly. And we have seen that that is the approach that Israel is taking now in Gaza. Nathan, tell me about the origins of your book, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama.

The idea for that book was triggered by a horrific incident. In 2012, there was a school bus trip with a group of Palestinian kindergartners in the greater Jerusalem area. These are children who live just on the other side of the 26-foot-tall separation barrier that runs in and out of Jerusalem.

About half of the people in the enclave in which this school existed are residents of Jerusalem, paying municipal taxes, receiving virtually no services.

surrounded on three sides by the separation barrier and on a fourth side by a different kind of wall that runs through a segregated road, Route 4370, known as the Apartheid Road, with Israeli traffic on one side, Palestinian traffic on the other. You have about 130,000 people living in this walled enclave today. And they're just a couple kilometers away from my home.

These people live a radically different existence from mine. They have no sidewalks, no playgrounds, a single main thoroughfare for these 130,000 people to get from one end of the enclave to the other, a shortage of classrooms that exist throughout East Jerusalem but is especially acute on the other side of the wall, and a shortage of classrooms that exist throughout East Jerusalem but is especially acute on the other side of the wall.

And because the students in this enclave could not access the play areas just on the other side of the wall in the Jewish settlement of Pisgah Tze'ev, they had to follow a long and circuitous path along the wall, passing through a checkpoint in order to reach a play area on the outskirts of Ramallah. And after passing through a checkpoint, they were struck dead.

by a giant semi-trailer that was on its way to a West Bank quarry. The bus flipped over, caught fire, six children and one teacher died.

And because this occurred on a road that is under full Israeli control, where the Israeli police give out traffic tickets where the Palestinian Authority is not able to go, and because it's on the other side of the wall, in an area of utter neglect, deliberate neglect by the state of Israel, it was more than 30 minutes before the first fire truck, the first Israeli fire truck arrived on the scene.

And who was left to deal with this crisis were just ordinary bystanders who were Palestinian on this road. They began to take these children, covered in soot, from the bus into the back seats of their private vehicles.

And because some of them had the kind of ID, the blue colored ID that would allow them to pass through the checkpoints to access the superior hospitals that were nearby in Jerusalem. And some of them had the green West Bank ID that prohibited going through those checkpoints. The cars went off in different directions to different checkpoints everywhere.

And by the time that the title character of the book, Abd Salama, arrived at the scene of the accident, there was a burned-out shell of a bus and a huge crowd and no children. And he asked, where are the children? And it takes him more than 24 hours to find out where his son is, what has happened to his son,

And really, the idea of the book is to tell the story of Israel-Palestine through Abed's day. The system itself is very complicated. There are so many layers of highly bureaucratic control. It's boring as hell to hear people talk about it. And the one way that I felt that you could really convey Abed's

what this thing actually is, is to put the reader in the shoes of a man like Abed Salama navigating through the system on the worst day of his life. Now,

To me, there's two dimensions to the book at the very minimum. The first is the emotional power of this family story, the humanity of it. And it runs parallel to the details of occupation, what it looks like, what's the nature of the identification card system for Palestinians, the roads, the movement restrictions, the walled-off cities. And one of the most striking things for anybody who visits Palestine

The area is that there's just too little geography, too much religion, too much history on this patch of land. How aware are Israelis living their lives in Haifa, Tel Aviv, wherever, about the details of what's going on? It's shocking the degree to which they are unaware. There is a longstanding practice of willful action

denial or ignorance of what Israel is doing vis-a-vis the Palestinians. This goes back to the founding of the state.

But it surprises me all the time how little Israelis know about what is happening. And at the same time, they don't really not know. They serve in the army. Their kids serve in the army. They themselves have executed these policies. But the success of this system is...

And the longevity of this system depends on huge numbers of Israelis being able to live lives that are untouched by it. And that Israelis who really do not feel in their day-to-day lives the occupation that's just a dozen kilometers away.

If you had the occupation affecting the lives of ordinary Israelis, there would be much more effort to end the occupation. Nathan, when we had our discussion, one of the first points that you made and that your friend from Breaking the Silence made was that

The dominant part of the occupation in the West Bank is in the greater Jerusalem area, which I think is sometimes overlooked.

It is the heart of the settlement project. If you count the number of settlers, we're talking about half the settler population in East Jerusalem and the surrounding area. This is the number one priority of the settlement project from the very beginning. And the idea is to ensure that there will never be a Palestinian capital in Jerusalem, that East Jerusalem will be severed from the rest of the West Bank, and that the

And it is also the most successful aspect of the settlement project. It is where you have huge concentrations of Israeli Jews living in very large numbers with a lot of contiguity. And it is very difficult to imagine them ever being uprooted. The American journalist Nathan Thrall. We'll hear more from him in the second part of this program. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come.

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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I'll turn now to Raja Shahadi, a Palestinian lawyer and author. For decades, Raja has been a voice advocating nonviolence in the Middle East. He and his family have worked for peace for over 50 years. His father was also a prominent lawyer, an activist, and an early supporter of a two-state solution.

Shahadi's family was originally from Jaffa, a town just south of Tel Aviv, and they were displaced by Israel in 1948. So Roger grew up and still lives in the West Bank, in the city of Ramallah. And he knows firsthand the impact of the occupation on Palestinian life. His new book is called What Does Israel Fear from Palestine?,

This is a process that has begun since 1967 in the West Bank, increasing settlements, the encirclement by settlements of Palestinian cities and towns, a road system, a water system, an electricity system that is separate and hardly equal.

In your view, what is behind all this? What is this leading to as a matter of politics and the future of the West Bank for the Palestinians? I think it's clear and it's been clear since the very beginning. They want us out of the West Bank and they want to take it over and annex it to Israel.

I remember in 1979 when I first heard of the Gush Emunim, who were the forefront of the settlement movement. The Gush Emunim being the block of the faithful. Yeah, block of the faithful. And I thought they are crazy people because how could they get rid of the Palestinians from the West Bank? Because we are here to stay and we didn't leave in 67. So their chances of taking over the land without the people is minimal, nil.

What would annexation mean if that's the ultimate policy of Israel? And this is something being discussed, I'm afraid, in the highest levels of government with ministers like Ben-Gavir and Smotrich and many more. What would a policy of annexation mean?

Well, unfortunately, they're thinking of annexation of the land, but not the people. And so they want to put us in Bantustans. Bantustans being like the small communities in South Africa under apartheid. Yeah, yeah. You know, as I describe in the book, What Does Israel Fear from Palestine? When Sharon went to South Africa, he said, I just want to learn about the Bantustans and how they are governed.

And he came back and he applied that policy in the West Bank. And now we are, in a sense, living under a different law than the law of the settlements. And so the settlers are going to be part of Israel and the laws of Israel apply to them. And that's annexation, but not on us. And so there will be two communities living side by side, each subject to different laws. And that's entirely apartheid.

Your new book is titled, What Does Israel Fear from Palestine? If you were to go to Israel today, and I was just there a couple of weeks ago, the answer would be in most quarters, not just the far right wing. Of course, we fear Palestine. The offer from Ehud Barak to Yasser Arafat and Cam David was rejected. And then came the second intifada. This is the rhetoric.

Ehud Olmert made a similar offer some years later, also rejected. Israel left Gaza in 2005 and Hamas came to power and then came rockets. And now October 7th, the Al-Aqsa flood and the attack on Israel and all that came with it. This leaves out a great deal of history. But what I'm saying is that this is the predominant Israeli answer. That Israel does have something to fear from Palestine, from a Palestinian state.

Do you agree with me that that's the answer in Israel, to your question? I think Israel is very concerned, but the real concern of Israel is that the mere existence, the mere recognition of Palestine and the Palestinian nation is a threat to Israel. What do you mean, Raja?

Israel, in 1948, tried to eradicate the Palestinians and force them out and tried to suppress every trace of their existence in former Palestine. And if Israel were to accept the existence of Palestinians, then it would have to revise its foundational myth.

And that would be more than it is willing to do. In all these offers that you have mentioned, there has never been a recognition of the Palestinian nation. There have been offers to management of certain areas of Palestine, but never an acceptance of the Palestinian nation, including in the Oslo Agreement. There wasn't a recognition of the Palestinian nation. And so the existence of the Palestinian nation is what Israel fears most.

And because it will threaten, in their view, the very existence of the myth upon which Israel is founded. But I think that it's completely wrong because only if the Palestinians recognize Israel and Israel recognizes the Palestinians will there be peace. And the peace is the best security for Israel, not this existence of continuous war as is happening now.

Your family is not from Ramallah, which is in the West Bank. Your family is from Jaffa. It's a coastal city just south of Tel Aviv, and your family was displaced in 1948. How did the displacement of your family affect your sense of place and home while you were growing up? Was Ramallah a place that felt like home to you as a child?

Well, I grew up in the shadow of the Nakbe. The Nakbe being what's called the catastrophe. The catastrophe. Yes. Yeah. What the Palestinians describe the forcing out of the Palestinians from Palestine. And my father suffered a lot from the Nakbe because he lost everything in Jaffa. And he tried for years in 1948 and 49 and 51 to force Israel to implement the right of return according to the resolution in the UN 194 and failed miserably.

But he never believed that it is impossible to make peace with the Israelis. And I grew up in a household which always believed that it is possible to make peace with the Israelis based on mutual recognition. Because it's a small area of land and the two nations live together side by side. And there's no way that they can continue living together unless they make peace with each other. In two states, what used to be the common parlance, a two-state solution.

Yeah, two independent sovereign states. That is the main thing. And I grew up with a sense of Jaffa as the real home and Ramallah as the temporary home. And I would look out to Jaffa with my grandmother who saw the lights of Tel Aviv thinking they were the lights of Jaffa. And she would point out, look at the lights of Jaffa. And I grew up thinking that Jaffa is the real place.

But after 1967, I realized that we are in the West Bank, and I started looking at the hills of the West Bank, and then realized that the Israeli policy is to deprive us of these hills by building more settlements and using the same tactics they used in 1948 against us. And eventually, a second Nakbe would occur. And this is exactly what is happening now. A second Nakbe, a slow attempt at depriving us of our land. But...

But the important thing is that all of this has not succeeded because Palestinians have refused to leave and have retained their status on the land. And their sumud, which is perseverance, and sumud is a passive resistance that is very important in our life. And so the attempt at Israel to throw us out by making life very difficult has not succeeded.

And that is very important. And also, we have fought back through the law and through revealing to the world Israel's attempts at manipulating the law and using it to excuse the settlements and the takeover of the land. Just a couple of weeks ago, as I said, I was in the West Bank and I met with members of Fatah, the people who had opposed Hamas.

And who had favored for a long, long time a two-state solution. These people had just gotten out of what's politely called administrative detention. They were imprisoned without charge for months. These are not Hamas people. Not at all. But when I asked them about Hamas now, when I asked them about their leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, who led the October 7th attack on southern Israel and is now most likely in tunnels beneath the Gaza Strip,

They told me that they now saw Sinoir as a hero, a great freedom fighter, the person who, and this is their language, the person who put the Palestinian question back on the table. And despite all the bloodshed, this was, in their eyes, a great victory, October 7th. And the polls reflect that this is a general sentiment now in the West Bank. Am I right?

I think that's right because the policy of the Palestinian Authority in not fighting Israel in any way, either passive or armed resistance, has failed. And I think that after Gaza was under siege for 17 years, then this is a state of blockade.

And the blockade is a state of war waged by Israel against Gaza. And a state of war like that can be resisted. And so the resistance of Hamas by breaking through the barrier, I think, was a legitimate resistance. But what followed afterwards of killing of Israeli civilians was not legitimate.

And so the thing is that Senwar succeeded or Hamas succeeded in making a very bold and well-planned attack on Israel like no other Palestinian leader has succeeded. And that makes him a hero in the eyes of many Palestinians, of course.

But the thing is that he could have done something afterwards that would have stopped the war. And maybe Israel could have stopped also by making an ultimatum to Hamas after they first attacked the Gaza Strip, return the hostages.

Or else, and they didn't, and they just continued bombing, bombing, bombing, bombing. And that is the tragedy. But I want to be clear. So you, when you initially heard the news of October 7th, many hundreds of fighters and ordinary civilians had broken through the fence. You welcomed it. But what came next, you oppose, right?

I welcomed it because I thought that it will finally make it clear for Israel that barriers and fences and walls and even the most sophisticated of walls will not protect Israel. I thought that this is a message that Israel will finally hear and take heed of and they will not try anymore to secure their security by walls.

But they didn't. And then the killing and the taking of hostages, I think, went beyond what was legitimate and was criminal. And so that is something that should not have happened. It did happen, and it is a criminal action, I think, that shouldn't have happened. But so far as we know, it was also part of the plan. And I would have thought that SINWAR could easily have expected a massive retaliation from Israel.

Well, I'm sure he must have expected it, but he probably didn't expect it to this extent. I don't know about these things, but I think that he should have expected it, yes. But he went through with the breaking of the barrier, and that was his first plan. And also the taking of hostages in order to exchange them for Palestinian prisoners, because he had spent 22 years in an Israeli prison. And so it was important, I think, for him to attempt to kidnap Palestinians.

soldiers in order to exchange him for Palestinian prisoners. Now, he went beyond that, and he also kidnapped civilians, and that I think is unfortunate and wrong. And he could have offered to return the civilians and kept the soldiers, and the soldiers would be exchanged for the Palestinian prisoners, but he didn't. And that is, I think, a fault of his. The idea that acknowledging Palestinians and their presence on the land prior to 1948

goes against Israeli political objectives. And that's something you lay out in several ways in your book. One quotation that you highlight in your text is from Prime Minister Menachem Begin. And he said in an article published in 1970 that if Israeli Jews acknowledged Palestinian concerns, then they would betray the concerns of their own people. He said, quote, if this be the land of Israel, we have returned to it. If it is Palestine, we have invaded it.

How do you see this kind of perspective in what's happening in the West Bank today? I think that's become the prevailing idea of the Israeli religious Zionists.

And they see it as all or nothing. And that is very detrimental to future peace and future relations because the land is a small land inhabited by two nations, the Palestinian nation and the Israeli nation. And there's no way that we can make the land prosper and flourish unless we both, the Palestinian nation and the Israeli nation, come together and make peace together.

and recognize that the land belongs to the two nations and not to one nation exclusively. And Begin, unfortunately, had this idea that they have to recognize it as only exclusively Jewish, and that has brought us into all the troubles that we are into. The Palestinian scholar and political activist Roger Shahadeh. His memoir, We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I, was a finalist for the National Book Award.

I'm going to return to Raja Shahada and Nathan Thrall in our next episode. We'll talk about whether there's any prospect for a resolution in the West Bank and also some signs that the international community is beginning to turn against the Israeli occupation. That's our next episode of the New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks for listening.

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