Someone on Reddit made the mistake of saying, "Teach me how this conflict came about" where I could see it.
Let me teach you too.
The common perception is that Jews came out of nowhere, stole Palestinian homes and kicked Palestinians out of them, and then bombed them for 75 years, until they finally rebelled in the form of Hamas invading Israel and massacring 22 towns in one day.
The historical reality is that Jews have lived there continuously for at least 3500 years.
There are areas, like Meggido iirc, with archeological evidence of continuous habitation for 7,000 years, but Jewish culture as we recognize it today didn't develop until probably halfway through that.
Ethnic Jews are the indigenous people of this area.
Indigeneity means a group was originally there, before any colonization happened, and that it has retained a cultural connection to the land. History plus culture.
That's what Jews have: even when the diaspora became larger than the number of Jews in Israel, the yearning to return to that homeland was a daily part of Jewish prayer and ritual.
The Jewish community in Israel was crushed pretty violently by the Roman Empire in 135 CE, but it was still substantial, sometimes even the majority population there, for almost a thousand years.
The 600s CE brought the advent of Islam and the Arab Empire, expanding out from Saudi Arabia into Israel and beyond. It was largely a region where Jews were second-class citizens. But it was still WAY better than the way Christian Europe treated Jews.
From the 700s-900s, the area saw repeated civil wars, plagues, and earthquakes.
Then the Crusades came, with waves of Christians making "pilgrimages to the Holy Land" and trying to conquer it from Muslims and Jews, who they slaughtered and enslaved.
Israel became pretty well depopulated after all that. It was a very rough time to live there. (And for the curious, I'm calling it Israel because that's what it had been for centuries, until the Romans erased the name and the country.)
By the 1800s, the TOTAL population of what's now Israel and Palestine had varied from 150,000 - 275,000 for centuries. It was very rural, very sparsely populated, on top of being mostly desert.
In the 1880s, Jews started buying land and moving back to their indigenous homeland. As tends to happen, immigration brought new projects and opportunities, which led to more immigration - not only from Jews, but from the Arab world as well.
Unfortunately, there was an antisemitic minority spearheaded by Amin al-Husseini. Who was very well-connected, rich, and from a politically powerful family.
Al-Husseini had enthusiastically participated in the Armenian Genocide under the Ottoman Empire. Then the Empire fell in World War One, and the League of Nations had to figure out what to do with its land.
Mostly, if an area was essentially operating as a country (e.g. Turkey), the League of Nations let it be one. In areas that weren't ready for self-rule, it appointed France or Britain to help them get there.
In recognition of the increased Jewish population in their traditional, indigenous homeland, it declared that that homeland would again become Israel.
As in, the region was casually called Palestine because that was the lay term for "the Holy Land." It had not been a country since Israel was stamped out; only a region of a series of different empires. And the Mandate For Palestine said it was establishing "a national home of the Jewish people" there, in recognition of "the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country."
Britain was appointed to help the Arab and Jewish communities there develop systems of self-government, and then to work together to govern the region overall.
At least, that was the plan.
Al-Husseini, who was deeply antisemitic, did not like this plan.
And, extra-unfortunately, the British response to al-Husseini inciting violent anti-Jewish riots was to put him in a leadership role over Arab Palestine.
They thought it would calm him down and perhaps satisfy him.
They were very wrong.
The second week of November 1942 has much to tell us about the region’s geopolitical centrality, its enduring political currents, and its ro
He went on to become a huge Hitler fanboy, and then a Nazi war criminal. He co-created the Muslim Brotherhood - which Hamas is part of - with fellow fascist fanboy Hassan al-Banna.
After years of causing disruption on the streets of Egypt, on 30 June 2012, the Muslim Brotherhood’s leader Mohammed Morsi was sworn i
He got Nazi Party funding for armed Muslim Brotherhood militias to attack Jews and the Brits in the late 30s, convincing Britain to agree to limit Jewish immigration at the time when it was most desperately needed.
He started using the militias again in 1947, when the United Nations voted to divide the mandated land into a Jewish homeland and a Palestinian one.
Al-Husseini wouldn't stand for a two-state solution. He was determined to tolerate no more than the subdued, small Jewish minority of second-class citizens that he remembered from his childhood.
As armed militias increasingly ran riot, the Arab middle and upper classes increasingly left. About 100,000 left the country before May 1948, when Britain was to pull out, leaving Israel and Palestine to declare their independence.
The surrounding nations didn't want war. They largely accepted the two-state solution.
But al-Husseini lobbied HARD. And by mobilizing the Muslim Brotherhood to provide "destabilizing mass demonstrations and a murderous campaign of intimidation," he got the Arab League nations to agree to invade, en masse, as soon as Britain left.
This article deals with the after-effects of Nazi anti-Zionist propaganda in the Arab world and the antisemitic campaign of the Mufti of Jer
ACTS OF AGGRESSION PROVOKED, COMMITTED AND PREPARED BY ARAB STATES
IN CONCERT WITH THE PALESTINE ARAB HIGHER COMMITTEE
AGAINST T
About 600,000 Arabs fled to those countries during the ensuing war.
Jews couldn't seek refuge there; in fact, most of those countries either exiled their Jews directly, confiscating their property first, or else made Jewish life unlivable and exploited them for underpaid or slave labor for years first.
The expulsion of Jews from Arab countries, one of the biggest humanitarian crises of the 20th century, is all the more tragic for how little
By the time the smoke cleared and a peace treaty was signed, most of the Arab Palestinian community had fled; there was no Arab Palestinian leadership; many of the refugees' homes and businesses had left had been destroyed in the war; and Israel had been flooded with nearly a million refugees from the Arab League countries and the Holocaust - even more people than had fled the war.
That was the Nakba. The one that gets portrayed as "750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled!" in the hope that you'll assume they were expelled en masse, their beautiful intact homes all stolen.
Egypt had taken what's now the Gaza Strip in that war, and Jordan took what's now the West Bank - expelling or killing all the Jews in it first.
(Ironically, Jordan was originally supposed to be part of Israel. Britain, inexplicably, cut off what would have been 75% of its land to create Jordan.
Even more inexplicably, nobody ever talks about it. I've never seen anyone complain that Jordan was stolen from Palestinians. Possibly because Jordan is also the only country that gave Palestinian refugees full citizenship, and it's about half Palestinian now.
Israel is nearly 25% Arab Palestinians with full citizenship and equal rights, so it's not all that different -- but the fundamental difference of living in a country where the majority is Jewish, not Muslim, probably runs pretty deep.)
Anyway: that's why Palestine is Gaza and the West Bank, rather than being some contiguous chunk of land. Or being the land set aside by the U.N. in 1947.
Because Arab countries took that land in 1948, and treated them as essentially separate for 20 years.
Israel got them back, along with the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula, in the next war: 1967, when Egypt committed an act of war by taking control of the waterways and barring Israel from them. It gave the Sinai back to Egypt as part of the 1979 peace accords between Egypt and Israel.
Israel tried to give back the Gaza Strip at the same time. Egypt refused.
Palestine finally declared independence in 1988.
But Hamas formed at about the same time. Probably in response, in fact. Hamas is fundamentally opposed to peace negotiations with Israel.
Again: Hamas is part of a group founded by Nazis.
Hamas has its own charter. It explains that Jews are "the enemy," because they control the drug trade, have been behind every major war, control the media, control the United Nations, etc. Basic Nazi rhetoric.
It has gotten adept at masking that rhetoric for the West. But to friendlier audiences, its leaders have consistently said things like, "People of Jerusalem, we want you to cut off the heads of the Jews with knives. With your hand, cut their artery from here. A knife costs five shekels. Buy a knife, sharpen it, put it there, and just cut off [their heads]. It costs just five shekels."
Hamas Political Bureau Member and former Minister of the Interior Fathi Hammad urged the people of Jerusalem to "cut off...
(Palestinians were outraged by this speech. Palestinians, by and large, absolutely loathe Hamas.
I thought I'd left Gaza behind, yet all this time, Hamas was planning to expand its extremism and intimidation.
It's just that it's not the same to say that to locals, as it is to say it where major global powers who oppose this crap can hear you.)
Hamas has stated from the beginning that its mission is to violently destroy Israel and take over the land.
It has received $100M in military funding annually, from Iran, for several years. Because Iran has been building a network of fascist, antisemitic groups across the Middle East, in a blatant attempt to control more and more of it: Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Houthis in Yemen.
Iran has been run by a very far-right, deeply antisemitic dictatorship for decades now, which pretty openly wants to take down both Israel and the U.S.
Last year, Iran increased Hamas's funding to $350M.
The "proof of concept" invasion of Israel that Hamas pulled off on October 7th more than justifies a much bigger investment.
Hamas has publicly stated its intention to attack "again and again and again," until Israel has been violently destroyed.
That is how this conflict came about.
A Nazi group seized power in Gaza in 2007 by violently kicking the Palestinian government out, and began running it as a dictatorship, using it to build money and power in preparations for exactly this.
And people find it shockingly easy to believe its own hype about being "the Palestinian resistance."
As well as its propaganda that Israel is not actually targeting Hamas: it's just using a literal Nazi invasion and massacre as an excuse to randomly commit genocide of the fraction of Palestine it physically left 20 years ago.
Despite the fact that Palestinians in Gaza have been protesting HAMAS throughout the war.
This is such a good summary! I didn't know why it was called British Mandate Palestine (I just thought the British had mandated it, not that it was supposed to be returned).
It blatantly denies Palestinian indignity to the land, denies and distorts the Nakba, and denies and distorts the colonialism of Zionism."
(but blocked me, so I'm doing this by hand for anyone else who wants to know)
Blatantly denies Palestinian indigeneity to the land:
Palestinians are not indigenous to the land.
Palestinians are Arabs, and are indigenous to the Saudi Arabian peninsula southeast of Israel.
You don't need to be indigenous to have human rights.
I encourage people to think about why they think Palestinians are indigenous to the land. I.e., does this come from your knowledge of Palestinian history? Is this the Palestinians-are-the-original-Canaanites myth that arose in the 1960s? Is it because they're called Palestinians?
If anyone finds themselves recoiling from this statement because they've been going on the premise that Oct 7 was indigenous resistance against colonialism -- that being indigenous justifies the horrors perpetrated on civilians that day -- and they think I'm therefore saying Israel can do whatever violence it wants, then... I encourage you to not.
As indigenous people who reclaimed our ancestral homeland, we must be sensitive to others undergoing that same process.
If we're going with the "indigeneity has a time limit, if you've been there for a thousand years you're indigenous now" argument that's used only for Israel/Palestine, then it also has to apply to the Jews who were still there through those thousand years.
(Also, I don't think Westerners should be making that argument in the first place. Because it lays the groundwork for white people to just drag out the battle over indigenous land rights for a few hundred years until it becomes commonly accepted that oops, now white people are indigenous to the Americas too?)
If we're going with the additional "people who immigrated back from your diaspora can't be indigenous" argument, then we need to look at the fact that the population increase consisted of massive amount of Arab immigration alongside Jewish immigration.
During the mandate period, Arabs from many lands flowed freely into Palestine while Jewish immigration was severely limited. The truth remai
In deep antiquity, particularly in Egypt, the early civilization where the arts were most strongly developed, the visualization was aspectiv
Denies and distorts the colonialism of Zionism:
I've seen dozens of people claim that Zionism-is-a-settler-colonialist-movement, especially over the past ten months.
The basic argument is that (1) early Zionist writers used the word colonialism, and (2) Britain was a colonial power and was in charge of the Mandate.
The first part is a common but very bad-faith argument. We're talking about writings from 100-150 years ago, decades before it became common to think of the words "colony" and "colonialism" -- and "settlement" and "settlers" -- as meaning, "tools for subjugating indigenous people and stealing their land and resources."
This 1828 dictionary, for example, is just like, "A colony is when a bunch of people live in one country, but are citizens of a different one." That usage still lives on on the concept of art/artist colonies. Because they became A Thing in 1860-1900, when the word "colony" was still being used to mean "a bunch of ex-pats."
More importantly: You cannot DIY settler-colonialism.
In settler-colonialism, a country sends settlers "to completely destroy and replace indigenous people and their cultures in order to establish themselves as the rightful inhabitants. Therefore, settlers do not only exploit indigenous people’s lands and resources, but they displace them, modify the names of the cities and places they colonize in order to completely erase the indigenous’ tracks."
A lot of you have probably seen memes like this one, that aim to show exactly that. The original Palestinian names of Palestinian cities, before Israel colonized them.
Let's just fact-check these real quick, because it's a really good illustration of what's going on here.
The first two, Jerusalem/Al-Quds and Israel/Palestine, really say it all. The rest, you can skip unless you really want to know.
Jerusalem Al-Quds Jerusalem: 4,000 years it's been Jerusalem. "The modern Arabic name of Jerusalem is اَلْـقُـدْس al-Quds, and its first recorded use can be traced to the 9th century CE, two hundred years after the Muslim conquest of the city."
Israel Palestine Israel: The first written reference to "Israel" appears on the 3,300-year-old Memphis Stele. Israel and Judea were either adjoining Jewish kingdoms, or two parts of the United Kingdom of Israel, depending on which historian you ask. Judea is where the term "Jew" originated, but Israel is the umbrella term for the Jewish people. (Which is why you might hear people saying "am Yisrael chai," "the people of Israel live." It means all Jews, not the country.)
The region was renamed Palestine by the Romans about 1,900 years ago, after the SECOND Jewish Revolt against colonialist Roman occupation. This time, they revolted because Emperor Hadrian banned circumcision and "decided to build a Roman colony, Aelia Capitolina, on the site of Jerusalem."
(Fun fact: During the revolt they minted their own coins, many of which said, "For the freedom of Jerusalem" in paleo-Hebrew. This paralleled coins from the first revolt, which said, "For the freedom/redemption of Zion.")
The Romans brutally crushed the revolt, destroying almost 1,000 Jewish villages and killing more than half a million Jews over the course of a few years.
THEN they exiled all remaining Jews around Jerusalem, and banned any Jews from visiting it.
And THEN they downgraded Judea from basically a state to just a district, and renamed it "Syria Palaestina," after the now-gone Philistines, to really rub it in that Jews had no self-determination.
That's why it's named Palestine today. That's where the name came from. The region has been named Palestine for almost two thousand years because of Roman colonialism.
The Arab-Islamic Empire that conquered so many of the Holy Roman Empire's lands, and the Crusaders who conquered the area for a while in the middle of that, just had no reason to change the name again.
This post is way too long. Continuing in a reblog!
Acre Akko Akka: Acre is jut the English name for it. The Crusaders named it St. Jean d'Acre a thousand years ago, when they were invading and ethnically cleansing the Holy Land by murdering and enslaving the Jews and Muslims. This city has been called Akka for 5,000 years, all the way back to when it was Phoenician. Akko is just Arabic for Akka.
Kiryat Shmona Al-Khalisa Al-Khalisa: This one is tough because it doesn't look like there's been any archaeology done there yet. There were lots of Jewish towns in that region 3,000 years ago, but I don't know if one became itty-bitty Al-Khalisa 1,500 years later, or what. The oldest historical record I have is that it was a Bedouin village starting in the 1500s. Bedouins are indigenous to the Negev Desert (#NotAllBedouins, but I'm assuming these Bedouins) and still live there today, so, like, ok, I guess?
Netanya/Umm Khalid: These aren't the same town. Netanya was founded in 1928. Umm Khalid was one of four villages founded in the 18th century, during the Ottoman Empire.
Ahilud Al-Birwa Beri and then Ahilud: The Arabic name Al-Birwa was first recorded in 1047, in the book Sifr Nameh by the famous Persian author Naser Khasro. It may be the later Arabic version of Beri, which was burnt to the ground during the Roman occupation.
Tel Aviv Yaffa Tel Aviv-Yafo: That's the city's official name. Yafo is the original Hebrew name going way the hell back. Yafa is just the Arabic for Yafo. (It's Jaffa or Joppa in English.) Tel Aviv was founded in 1909 by 60 Jewish families who raised the money for the land so they could get out of crowded Jaffa. It got big and the cities merged together.
Beer-Sheba/Beer-Sabe: This is just the Arabic name for a 4,000-year-old city that at one point marked the southern boundary of Israel.
Lod/Al-Lydd: Lod was the center of Jewish scholarship and trade 2,500 years ago, although it's much older than that. Al-Lydd is just Lod in Arabic.
Ashkelon/Ashkalan, Zekharia/Zakaria, Ashdod/Isdud: these are so fucking obviously the same name in two different languages I'm not even doing them
Hebron al-Khalīl Hebron: Archaeologists have found a 2,700-year-old Jewish home in Hebron, and seals that say "LeMelech Hebron" ("the king of Hebron") in paleo-Hebrew. The name was changed under Arab colonization: "The Arabic name for Hebron, al-Khalīl, emerged as the city's actual name in the 13th century. Earlier Muslim sources refer to the city as Ḥabra or Ḥabrūn."
It wasn’t long after Hamas carried out its attack on Israel in Oct 7, 2023, that Taryn Thomas found herself swept up in the chorus of pro-Palestine activists mobilising against the Jewish state.
Even before Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza following the Oct 7 massacre,“I was scrolling through social media, and I only saw support for Palestine,” she recalls. “People I know, whether it was activists or people I look up to, were already posting their thoughts.”
Then aged 19 and studying biomedical science at the elite Stanford University in northern California, Thomas, an African American, was first introduced to the anti-Israel movement at Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, where Palestinian flags were flown by some activists. “I never really understood why, but we were told that in order for us to be free, Palestine has to be free,” she says.
She subsequently helped lead large protests against Israel and, within two weeks of Oct 7 2023, had joined an encampment of activists on campus protesting against Israel’s invasion of Gaza. Like many others, she donned a keffiyeh, the headscarf worn to demonstrate solidarity with Palestinians. “I really loved it because of the sense of belonging and the sense of purpose,” she says of the encampment. “It was like an instant community.”
Besides fellow students, Thomas was encouraged by “faculty members like history professors” who “validated the movement”. “It seemed like everyone was a lot more educated than me and very certain and sure of themselves that this is a genocide,” says Thomas, who is now 21. “The only safe position was the more radical one in the encampment.”
‘I was confused by what our mission was’
Thomas grew up in Riverside County, one of the few Republican counties in the otherwise “very liberal California”. That, together with racist abuse at school, influenced her political outlook. “I thought going further to the Left would be the solution to the extremism I was seeing from the Right,” she says.
Huge demonstrations took place at universities across the US in the months that followed Oct 7, with protesters confronting the educational institutions with their demands – including to divest from Israel and cut ties with counterpart Israeli institutions.
While the movement was largely peaceful, some demonstrations turned violent and led to clashes with police. “One of our protests got out of hand, and that kind of made me take a step back,” says Thomas.
This was in June 2024, when several militant students broke into the office of Stanford’s president, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage. “They spray-painted disgusting things, such as ‘Pigs taste best when dead’, ‘Death to America’, ‘Death to Israel’, and ‘Kill cops’,” Thomas recalls.
“I was confused by what our mission was. At what point did the pro-Palestine movement turn into this anti-Israel, anti-America movement? We completely lost sight of the victims we were claiming to be supporting and fighting for.”
Yet those behind the vandalism “doubled down”, she says, and justified their actions, “even though Jewish students said they felt unsafe”. She explains: “They felt like they couldn’t go to their classes, they were getting harassed and doxxed [having personal information published online] and things like that. Essentially, we completely lost our minds.”
A drastic change of heart
Then, in October 2024, Thomas was one of many students who received an open invitation to the Nova Music Festival Exhibition in Los Angeles. Recently opened in London, the exhibition aims to recreate the festival site where 413 people were murdered by Hamas, and many more were injured or taken hostage.
Nova exhibition
The recently opened Nova exhibition in London commemorates the 413 young people murdered by Hamas at the festival Credit: Jeff Gilbert
“Initially, I laughed, thinking, ‘What’s this propaganda?’” Something piqued her interest, however, so she decided to go. “I’d heard about the festival and was curious, but I’d only really heard the reasoning, ‘Well, why would you have a festival next to a contested border? Essentially, they were asking for it.’
“I was hoping it was going to reaffirm my position, that I would find Zionist lies and whatever. I went with a very closed mind.” Three hours later, Thomas emerged feeling “so lost”.
“I experienced a lot of cognitive dissonance – what I was seeing versus what I’d been told. It was like I arrived a year too late to a funeral. I had so many questions, but I really had no one I could talk to about this. All of my friends were from the encampment. I’d never met an Israeli or talked to them about their experiences – I was fluent in the state’s sins, but I was illiterate in its people.”
Seeing pictures and footage of the young festival-goers hit home for Thomas. “They were kids my age, just dancing, and then fleeing for their lives the next moment. I could see myself in them. I could have been sending a last ‘I love you’ message to my mum. I felt so much empathy and sadness.”
One element in particular changed everything – an audio clip of a jubilant Hamas fighter phoning his father to let him know he’d killed 10 Jews. “My heart sank because these [were meant to be] our martyrs. [This was] the resistance we were claiming we wanted. When we called for any means necessary, I didn’t realise that’s what it meant.”
Months later, Thomas was invited on a trip to Israel organised by a group combatting anti-Semitism on campus. “I knew if I was going to continue to speak on this, I needed to see it for myself,” she says.
During the 10-day trip last March, she met with Israelis, Ethiopian Jews, Palestinians, Druze and Bedouin. “I was shocked at how much diversity I saw – I didn’t even know Israel had black people,” she said.
On the fourth day, the group had to take cover during a missile attack. “Our guide told us to get on the ground, and I put my hands over my neck and prayed. “I thought about the irony of how I’d called for the divestment of the very system I was praying for,” she says. “It [the missile] didn’t care about my politics or what I posted or any of that. I was a target, a body on the ground, and I felt utterly useless.”
Fortunately the missile was intercepted and the trip continued, but the experience left Thomas shaken. She says it made her realise “how cushy and comfortable a life” she had in America, and that she’d not realised the “real consequences” of what she’d been calling for.
‘It felt like being stoned publicly’
Back home, she posted a picture of her trip online – a decision that cost her dearly. “My best friend of three years asked, ‘Is this in Israel?’ I said, ‘Yeah, do you want to talk about it?’ She immediately blocked me. I hadn’t even expressed anything. I literally said I went. Period.”
Her post opened the floodgates. “I lost every single friend”, while her classmates “posted really disgusting things”, including labelling her a “genocidal apologist”. Thomas says she was doxxed, and received death threats and racist abuse – and that her family was also targeted. “It was like a crusade and felt like being stoned publicly.”
She now takes a dim view of the encampment atmosphere. “It completely insulates you in this echo chamber and indoctrinates you. If you had any questions, you’d lose your social belonging – the last thing you wanted to be called was a Zionist.”
She adds that the protesters’ “attention turned into this hatred” and there were constant calls for the “normalisation of violence”. Some activists, for example, celebrated the assassinations of Charlie Kirk, the Right-wing political activist, and Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare chief executive, she says.
The mental toll had become so heavy on Thomas that she stepped away from her studies late last year. What helped get her through this tough period is the new friendships she has formed, including some with Jewish students.
“They knew I came from the encampments and they engaged with me, intellectually argued with me, disagreed with me, but we still broke bread on Shabbat,” she says. “I learned from my [now] best friend that she was doxxed because of people within our movement. I know I have to repair some of those damages.”
‘Open your heart and put down those megaphones’
Thomas says her family are not politically engaged in the issue of Israel and Gaza and she has faced questions from her mother about her involvement. “She was just like, ‘Why are you doing this? It isn’t your burden to shoulder.’ She just wants her family to be safe and protected.”
But Thomas hopes that by sharing her story it will encourage others to experience the Nova exhibition. “I hope the people who are protesting will come – I just want them to go inside,” she says. “None of this is political. Just look and learn the stories – you don’t have to agree. Come in with an open heart and an open mind and put down those megaphones.”
As for Thomas, she hopes to return to university in September, but in the meantime, she is determined to do what she can to increase cross-community understanding. “A lot of us on the pro-Palestine side were recruited through empathy, so I think we can be reached through it too. Because of this unique perspective I have of what changed my heart, I think I can hopefully change other people’s.
“I’m not Jewish. I’m an African American woman. But a lot of our struggles are parallel,” she says. “We’re seeing an increase in anti-Semitism, we’re seeing an increase in extremism and political violence. There’s just no way that I can now sit back, kick my feet up and call it a day.”
This isn't even supposed to be a blog about zionism, but I can't stay silent. The amount of casual, ecstatically accepted antisemitism present in queer and leftist movements is just beyond the pale. People just make up wild lies about what zionism is, and because no one ever talks to anyone who is actually a zionist in these groups, they get away with it.
You know when it comes to Graham Platner I’m glad that a lot of women on the left are finally waking up to how blatantly misogynistic a lot of leftist men truly are. They’re seeing the way these men are talking about Platner’s accuser: calling her a liar, calling her a “Zionist plant”, saying that she was asking for it, and a lot of women are rightfully horrified and fed up.
But I also think a lot of these women need to ask themselves a simple question: why were you ok with them doing this to Israeli women? When Hasan Piker said that he “didn’t care” if women were raped on Oct 7th, when they called Israeli women who came forward about their assaults liars, when they mocked the suffering of the hostages and said that Hamas “treated them well”, when they said they deserved it, when they joked that they were “too ugly to be raped”, where was your outrage over that behavior then? Why were you silent when it was Israeli women, and why did you think it would stop there?
will never get over how the people who claimed to stand up to all bigotry fell for the oldest bigotry in the world, and didn’t even need new lines to fall for it — they ate up every single age old antisemitic trope ever devised with just slightly different wording to adapt to today’s atmosphere
Why the fuck are you going after random Jews though? Do you seriously believe that Aussie Tumblr user Maimonideznuts has a lot of influence on Israeli politics?
Maimonideznuts supports a two state solution and peace between Israel and Palestine. If you actually care about the civilians affected by this conflict, that is objectively the best outcome to reduce the amount of suffering and harm in the region and it has the best chance to create a more lasting peace for both Israelis and Palestinians. Also, go do some reading and learn about why Jews live in Israel.
I also gotta point out that their pinned includes a call for peace and a fundraising link for Palestinian and Lebanese civilians affected by the war. Your bio says that you support terrorists and want Americans to commit suicide. You also have only ever interacted with me once and it was to complain about a random Jew who is objectively doing more to heal the world than you are doing, given that they post about disability awareness and cool dinosaurs while you post about…lesbians supposedly harming trans men, being mad at the entire concept of transfeminism, and hating religious people.
I’ve been reluctant to talk too much on the show about imagined solutions for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I don’t think any of the underlying conditions for a political solution are present. We’re in a presolutionary space.
I worry about it as a form of escapism. It’s more comfortable to debate two-state models or one-state imaginings rather than confront the realities of what is happening right now.
But the other reason I have backed off from these conversations is that the old solutions don’t fit the present reality.
I don’t see how a two-state solution is still possible given the number and size of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. They’re not going away. Or the insistence on a right of return for Palestinians.
I don’t think a one-state solution is plausible or likely. The Jewish people in and around Israel want self-determination and sovereignty. So, too, do the Palestinians. Neither side, given their history, is going to willingly give the other that kind of power.
But a number of people I trust have written to me saying I should look at the A Land for All plan. A Land for All was founded in 2012 by a group of Israelis and Palestinians. It’s attempting something different, something I find in some ways beautiful: Not a two-state model of separation, not a one-state model of unification, but a confederation model that centers both peoples’ connections to the land and tries to combine the free movement of people with separate political entities. In this model, you would have an Israel and a Palestine. There would be free movement, but political separation. The borders would be open, but, they say, hopefully secure.
There’s a lot to unpack about all this. I have a lot of questions. I would describe my own thinking here as intrigued — not convinced. But I do think it is worth considering a new political vision, even though I think we’re far from the conditions that might make one possible. Because if you don’t have any idea of where you’re going, how do you get there?
Rula Hardal is a Palestinian citizen of Israel who received her doctorate in political science from the University of Hannover in Germany. May Pundak is an Israeli lawyer, activist and social entrepreneur. Her father, Ron Pundak, was an Israeli historian who played an important role in the Oslo peace process in the 1990s.
Hardal and May Pundak are the co-executive directors of A Land for All, and so I wanted to ask them both about the proposal, as well as the politics, questions and social forces that have undermined every other plan.
Ezra Klein: Rula Hardal, May Pundak, welcome to the show.
May Pundak: Thank you so much.
Rula Hardal: Thank you.
I think that people listening are familiar with the two-state solution concept: an Israel and a Palestine separated and side by side.
People have heard ideas for a single state, where you would have people throughout the territory, throughout the land, all voting within the same political system. I don’t think that they are as familiar with what you’re offering — a confederation model.
So May, let me begin with you. How does this differ from the two-state solution that has been pursued for so long?
Pundak: So first of all, let me say that we are offering what we call a new vision. But in that new vision, it is still based on two sovereign independent states — Israel and Palestine.
The two-state solution, the classic version of it, was based on a paradigm of segregation and separation, and we are moving away from that and offering a model that is based not on a zero-sum game but rather on acknowledging two very important components of the conflict.
No. 1: Both Israelis and Palestinians have an immense psychological and social connection and sense of belonging to the entire homeland — from the river to the sea. That’s a fact.
No. 2: The intertwined reality on the ground — meaning that today Israel-Palestine, in a way, is already shared — the intertwined reality is everywhere we look. And so the model says yes to sovereignty, yes to nation states, yes to identity, yes to borders.
And there’s another layer to that, of a shared mechanism of shared institutions that take care of things that have to be taken care of jointly. So there is a human rights court, and there is cooperation around the economy, and climate challenges are dealt with together. Because you can’t deal with these things separately — but also because it’s a mechanism to ensure a sustainable peace.
So that word “shared” is important in your vision. Your father was one of the negotiators at Oslo. He spent his life working on the two-state solution paradigm, and that paradigm is built on the idea of security through separation, at least on the Jewish side — that if we can just separate, everybody can live in peace. Everybody can leave each other alone.
What led you to move away from that vision and toward this idea that peace doesn’t come through separation, that it comes through a shared set of institutions and interests?
Pundak: Well, I would say two main things. The first one was that I found myself advocating for the two-state solution for many, many years. I was doing much more anti-occupation work. I wasn’t really interested in solutions. We kept that separate from each other.
But at a certain point, and this was after my father passed away — and I think that was part of my reckoning process, of grief, of just coming to terms with the fact that I’ve been fighting for the two-state solution.
But at a certain point, I started feeling that this model is crumbling between my fingers, and I don’t believe in it anymore. The reality is telling me something else. Meeting Palestinian friends who are telling me something else. Meeting the international community, I’m learning something else. Living in Israel, I’m learning something else.
So I’m there, advocating for the two-state solution as an activist, but everywhere I’m hearing the two-state solution is dead. It’s impossible.
And at the same time, in Israel, this idea of peace, of negotiations, of two-state solution, is becoming irrelevant in the public discourse. There’s no conversation about this.
In 2018, I had my first son, and we were living in the States for a couple of years. Coming back to Israel, no one was talking about a future for my child — about security, about safety, about vision, about horizon, about hope. No one was telling me what we’re fighting for, and that two-state solution has become an empty shell for people to talk about something but not take any action.
And by not taking any action, we’ve been led to Oct. 7. By not presenting a viable vision and not organizing ourselves around that, we’ve succumbed to managing the conflict.
So we’ll talk about the two-state solution, but everyone knows it’s not going to work. And we find ourselves in international, very important forums with serious decision makers who say: Two-state solution — we know it’s never going to happen.
So in a way, for me, I was taking the life of my children into my own hands. I was like, OK, that’s just not good enough. We have to reimagine a two-state solution that can work or a new vision that will actually be able to be pragmatic and practical to work, but also organize and excite Palestinians and Israelis.
And I’ll just say one more thing about that kind of transformation: For me, coming from a human rights background, I wanted to be a human rights lawyer to end the occupation. And I understand that sounds a little naïve today. I still think that Israelis who are doing that work are saints, and this is the most important work to be done.
But at the same time, we haven’t seen Palestinians as equal politically. We can maybe save them, we can control them — there’s a dynamic, that power dynamic, always underneath. And for me, the positionality of realizing, in my skin, that until Rula and the Palestinian people are safe and free, we will never be free and liberated and safe, either. Our security is dependent on each other.
Rula, I know that you previously were a supporter of a one-state solution. Tell me about how you came to this idea and how your thinking evolved.
Hardal: I came to this idea because I started realizing two things: First of all, we already have a one-state reality, or one-state construction on the ground, between Jordan and the sea, but under one regime and one power, which is the Israeli one. And the Palestinians live under daily domination and occupation and military control and apartheid, and, needless to say, in the last two and a half years, ethnic cleansing and genocide and annexation of their tiny, small part of the land. I mean the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
I’m not sure that even you, the audience, is understanding what’s happening in the West Bank. People hear about having checkpoints, and there is military control, terrorism and violence of the settlers, but the reality on the ground is way worse.
The daily domination and control of people’s lives in the West Bank is just immense. I don’t know if there is something similar, or has been, in other places under other conflicts. And because we are not speaking about a very direct war, it’s ongoing, long-term, daily atrocities and restrictions and humiliation of people.
So to start from this fact and reality on the ground, it will be hard for us to move — especially now after what has happened in the last two and a half years — immediately toward an equal one-state reality, where actually all Palestinians and all Israelis are equal in the same one state.
The second point: I claim, from my research and observations, that the majority of the Palestinians and the Israeli Jews on the ground in Israel-Palestine are not in a post-national mind-set the way I thought, and the way that a lot of people here think. The sense of ethnonational belonging and interests, and national symbols, and the desire for each group to have its own political, national entity is still very strong, and we need to acknowledge that and to respect that.
The last few years have been staggering in their violence. You’ve used the word “genocide” and “domination,” and here you are also advocating for a plan that, at its core, would require people to treat each other with trust, as equals in a shared enterprise.
It feels hard not only to imagine the plan but to imagine the people who would engage in this plan.
Hardal: Yes.
So this may seem like a simple question, but I think it’s an important one to try to feel: Why are you not held back by the belief that this is impossible to solve?
Hardal: Well, I think it’s very hard. It’s very complicated. We are now facing a very —maybe the ugliest — phase of the history of both people since Oct. 7. We are not ignoring all of that. I’m not ignoring that.
We were speaking, a couple of days ago, with some friends and policy experts in Washington. And one of them, who is an Egyptian American, we’d been speaking about Gaza, and he brought an Arabic word to describe what all of us feel and felt while watching the second Nakba, the genocide, 24/7 on our screens. The word, which doesn’t exist in the English language, is “qahr.”
Qahr is a combination of being angry and the humiliation of your humanity, existence and who you are, and being helpless that you cannot — you don’t have anything to do.
That’s why I’m doing what I’m doing. Because if there is something to save in our souls as Palestinians, and if there is something to save in terms of dreaming about Palestine — even in part of historic Palestine — this is something that I’m committed to do after what happened in Gaza.
Gaza is gone. And we are involved with a lot of people who are involved with what’s going on in Gaza: the Board of Peace, the executive committee and so on, and the many actors in the international community. The amount of helplessness, the lack of orientation and ability to make decisions and to do things on the ground is just insane. I don’t want to see that in the coming years when it comes to the whole Palestinian situation.
Because what is threatened now, since Oct. 7 — in a very direct, intensive way — is the collective, political and national being of the Palestinians in Palestine. And I’m doing this work in order to just maybe save what is to be saved there.
If we don’t offer new arrangements, a new political vision, if we don’t see this very bad situation as an opportunity to start — I don’t have any illusions, I cannot promise anybody that this solution, or any other solution, similar or different, is going to be implemented tomorrow or next year. Or I don’t know when. But history is not static, and we cannot know now when this opening is going to come.
We Palestinians are not going to give up. We are there, and we insist to be there. This is our place, and we are going to continue to struggle.
Pundak: Can I say something about trust? As an Israeli, I think that’s an important question for us to deal with.
What is the alternative? The alternative right now is either continuing in the footsteps of this government, which is to destroy the Palestinian peoplehood, or a fake status quo — I don’t know if that would be the right term — this belief that we can just not solve this conflict.
And so the first thing that we need to commit ourselves to is realizing that if we’re not going to solve this conflict, it will solve us. That is what led us ——
What does that mean? Because, as you know better than I do, most Israelis — the center of Israeli political opinion, actually — do not think there is no alternative.
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The alternative is the path they’re on. The opposition party, even in this election, is not hugely different from Benjamin Netanyahu on this.
The idea, as best I understand it, is basically: The alternative is that there is Jewish Israeli security supremacy over the land. And the conflict, so to speak, can be controlled and managed.
They’re not going to let their guard down the way they did before Oct. 7. There’s going to be more settlement building. There’s going to be more control — Israel controls roughly 65 percent of Gaza now.
Pundak: Absolutely. This is absolutely true.
To some people, this is not just an alternative. This is a pathway to realizing quite ancient hopes.
So when you’re in conversation with that ——
Pundak: Yeah, so that is all true, and what we are seeing play out right now in Israel-Palestine, this is the reality. And my question to us Israelis is: Has this ensured your safety and security?
The answer is no.
If you are messianic, and you have dreams that are beyond life, that are about eternity, that’s a different timeline. But for people who are actually concerned with safety and security for their children, and a better future and life, the current paradigm has not ensured our safety and security until this day.
It’s not only Oct. 7. What about what’s happening now with Israel re-entering Lebanon? What’s happening with Iran? What’s happening in the south?
There’s no place where we actually feel safe right now, and I think that’s an important realization that we have to say out loud and confront: We’re not safe now. This has not given us safety.
I’ll give you a more concrete example: In the place where we have seen the utmost commitment to segregation and separation, and the billion-dollar wall, and these mechanisms, and all of the I.D.F. security measures and technology, that is where all hell broke loose. That’s Gaza.
So when people say that big walls will ensure my safety, I say: No, they won’t. I live in Jaffa. There’s a lot to say about the inequality of Palestinian citizens of Israel, but the truth of the matter is that Palestinians who are living within Israel and have more rights — not equal rights at all — that is where we’re not slaughtering each other. Those are the kindergarten teachers of my baby.
So no one will convince me that security will be given to me or ensured to me by bigger and more walls and more separation. That’s No. 1.
The other thing that I want to say about this is history. History shows us, also, in Israel — I think that Egypt is probably the best example. After 1973, Anwar Sadat was considered Adolf Hitler, and Egypt was considered the next biggest threat to Israel. And then we got to ’79. There’s a peace agreement, and that today ensures my safety. Israelis take vacations in Sinai, and that’s the safest border that I have as an Israeli. So we have to flip the narrative based on history.
The last thing that I’ll say about this is that when you look at other conflicts around the world, but also in Israel-Palestine, before negotiations, there’s no belief that this can be solved. Once negotiations start, suddenly the belief in public opinion rises.
A month before the Berlin Wall fell, people said that it would never fall. A month before the Good Friday Agreement was signed, people said that it would never be solved. Well, guess what? It was.
We need to get to that tipping point. We’re doing the work on the ground. But once we get there — and that moment will come — are we ready with a good, pragmatic, relevant solution?
That is what we’re here to do.
One of the things I’ve been curious about is how both of you see, in your respective parts of these societies, the role of the religious factions.
Something that many people involved in previous negotiations have said to me is that they never knew how to approach people who were not working off the interests of today but instead on a more eternal timeline — to use a term you used.
These are significant factions in both societies. I mean, right now the Netanyahu coalition is in a state of instability and fracture, because it might lose ultra-Orthodox support.
How, in this vision, do you balance people whose belief is that there is a divine right and writ to a certain outcome?
Hardal: I think both national movements, if we consider now, for two minutes, Zionism to be a national movement — and it is — but not only ——
Pundak: You see how difficult a partnership is, right? I mean, this is a good example of just emphasizing how difficult this work is. Just by Rula saying: Zionism is a national movement. I mean, yes, it is also.
Hardal: Yes, but Zionism has developed also to have another component, which actually constitutes the major problem in Israel-Palestine, and for the Palestinian people, which is the settler-colonial aspects of Zionism.
So to go back to the national aspects of Zionism, I think all of us — Palestinians, Israeli Jews — changed, and both societies developed to be much more conservative and religious. I think there is a tendency among Israelis, even secular, liberal, to use religion and to emphasize the role of religion and conservatism when it comes to imagining the future and speaking about Israel-Palestine.
While in the Palestinian context, less. It’s more about the importance of ——
Can you defend that statement for me? I mean, Hamas is a very religious organization.
Hardal: Yes, absolutely, and it’s part of an Islamic — political Islamic movement ——
I understand that, but maybe I can better understand what you’re saying here. You’re saying that there’s a tendency for secular Israelis to overstate the role of religion as a barrier on either side?
But it feels like it’s quite real on both sides. And Hamas is religiously informed. Much of Israeli society is quite religiously informed.
And to take these views sincerely, they are not just based on a horse trading of interests around security and prosperity in the moment — they’re connected to questions that are less vulnerable to transactional solutions.
Hardal: Absolutely. I agree with you, but I was trying to describe the development that actually brought both of us, Palestinians and Israelis, to this situation.
We do not skip, in our political vision, all of these aspects and developments. We start from acknowledging, not only international law and rights — and all of these liberal approaches and universal approaches — but we start from the connection of both people to Israel-Palestine as part of their religious, historical, cultural and also political identity.
So we know that it’s important. And in the way that we cannot avoid other lessons learned from our history, and the history of negotiations and peace efforts, we also cannot ignore this very important component that describes our societies.
Pundak: Yes, I absolutely agree. I think that one of the lessons learned from Oslo, as you said, is that this cannot be a liberal, elite, intellectual, secular solution.
Israel and Palestine, today, are becoming more and more religious, if anything. More and more traditional. Less and less liberal. Both societies. So this is a very important question.
For me, one of the reasons I joined A Land for All was because I had to come to terms with my blind spot around this exact reality. And looking within that — and I think that Rula said it so beautifully — the beginning of the solution is emotions. The very strong emotions that also have a religious connection to the entire homeland. We all love this place, literally to death, right? We love it so much, it’s making us crazy.
So I would say that’s a really strong part of our work, and I would even say that one of the most beautiful moments in our events in Israel is that when we have events, religious people come to them, and they say: This is the first time that we feel part of the peace camp. We don’t feel that you’ve excluded us. We feel that we can be part of this, and we can support this. And that’s very reassuring right now.
So let’s talk about what this vision actually calls for. I want to talk through the dimensions of the plan, and then also, of course, through some of the challenges or questions it opens.
The first tenet in your paper is open borders. What do open borders mean in this context, Rula?
Hardal: First of all, I do want to see the day that Israel is going to define its borders. Because we are not there now. Even to speak about borders between Israel and Palestine, it sounds imaginary now, because Israel is still in the ideology of expansion in the whole Middle East. And this is one of the problems, by the way, with the Zionist ideology ——
But your plan does call for a border.
Hardal: We are speaking about gradually opening the borders between Israel and Palestine as two states.
We will have borders, but we want to have these borders open in order to, first of all, implement and give people the ability to practice what we started our conversation speaking about — the connection to the entire homeland.
For me, the whole space is going to be Palestine. It’s been Palestine, and it’s going to continue to be Palestine. Despite the definitions of two territories and the acknowledgment of the state of Israel and the state of Palestine, it will be — in my blood, in my soul — Palestine. And for the Jews, they can also consider the whole entire homeland, if they would like to, as Israel or Eretz Israel.
So opening the borders will give both people the opportunity to practice this sense of belonging and connection — but also to reside from one place to another. For example, if you are an Israeli Jewish citizen, and you have practiced as a software engineer, and you want to work for a company in Rawabi, in the West Bank — there is a tech park in Rawabi, in Bir Zeit, near Ramallah — you will be able to work there. You will apply for a work permit, and if you would like to, you can also take your family with you and have an apartment there.
It’s like in any other place in the world, even here. You live in New York, but you work in, I don’t know, L.A. This ability for people to move between the two spaces — and we are speaking about a very tiny, small place, Israel-Palestine. It’s like New Jersey, I think.
So it’s very natural for people to also move between the two spaces, because of their circumstances, life conditions and because of their connection.
In that scenario that you laid out, the software engineer who wants to work outside Ramallah, that person, even if they moved there — and this seems to me to be one way this vision differs from one-state visions — they would still vote for the prime minister of Israel.
Hardal: Exactly.
And similarly, somebody from Ramallah, who maybe moves to work near a hospital in Tel Aviv — they can live in Tel Aviv, but they would still vote for the prime minister or leader of Palestine.
Hardal: They will continue having their citizenship rights in their national state.
Palestinians vote for the Palestinian government, but they can have residency in Israel and, accordingly, all the civil rights and local rights that come with the residency status — and vice versa.
The whole concept is to start with freedom of movement and freedom of residency. This concept actually gives us a space to think about arrangements when it comes, for example, to solving the very important issue — one of the core Palestinian issues — which is the right of return and the Palestinian refugees.
These refugees will get citizenship in the state of Palestine, but they will be able to also apply for residency in Israel, in the place that they were expelled from originally in ’48.
I’m going to come back to the right of return in a moment, because I do want us to talk about it.
But, May, I want to ask the question that I think many Israeli Jews would have, hearing this, which is: How can you possibly have open borders and be safe? How can you have open borders and not have someone in the West Bank coming through with explosives strapped to them and then blowing up a bus in Tel Aviv, as happened many, many times — as you know much better than me.
Even here, in America, with much more peaceful relations with Mexico and Canada, the idea of open borders is politically lethal. The concerns are primarily security and overwhelm. So how do you answer those concerns?
Pundak: There’s a practical answer to that, which is we’re not talking about no borders.
The question is not if there’s going to be a border. It’s: What kind of a border will there be — and in order to achieve what?
We are committed, first and foremost, to the security of both people. That is why we do what we do, for the security of Israel and for the security of Palestine.
What we’re offering here is moving gradually — gradually, with all the mechanisms needed. And we can look at places like the European Union.
So it’s important to keep in mind that the European Union is one good example, but there’s no exact example for Israel-Palestine. And I want to say that because a lot of the time people get stuck and say: Oh, it’s not exactly the same. It’s impossible. Here’s Jews and Arabs. This is the Middle East. It’s a different time. And because there’s no other exact example: It’s never going to work.
And that “never going to work” mentality is part of what got us to this awful situation we’re in. There is no unique, perfect example.
It’s good to talk about Northern Ireland as another example of power-sharing and transitioning from a zero-sum game into freedom of movement, freedom of residency. I mean, decoupling that nationality from a geographic space and into sustainable peace. So there are other examples out there.
What I have been admiring about the European Union, and what has helped me, is, No. 1: the political imagination of it. If you were in Europe 80 years ago, and someone told you that in 75 years you would be able to move freely between France and Germany, and your grandchildren will be able to reside in Berlin as French hipsters, you would say: There’s no way. Lock her up.
But that’s the reality today, and the reality of that came from a place of interest, and that’s very important to say, as well. This was not, you know, that the French and Germans were starting to love each other, and they said: How can we live together happily?
It was after hundreds of years of bloodshed and the realization that their shared interests can actually ensure their safety. It took 70 years, 60 years, 50 years to get to an arrangement of freedom of movement.
That’s OK. I have 50 years to wait for peace. I don’t have 50 years waiting for what’s going on right now to continue.
But how do you ensure security at this border? When people hear “open border,” they hear easeful freedom of movement through a line that barely exists.
What are you actually envisioning there?
Pundak: So we are talking about borders, for sure. What we’re suggesting is not to not have security arrangements.
It’s, of course, to have very sophisticated security arrangements. Again, I think that the European Union is a great way — or Northern Ireland, and Ireland and the U.K., are great places to see how that works without compromising on security — on the contrary — but basing it on an individual question rather than a collective question. It will have to be a process.
So we start with borders, and then we start within these borders, creating the ability to move freely between the two states, based on your individual security file rather than a collective, ethnic, religious question.
Right now, if you’re a Palestinian, you can’t cross the border, although there’s a lot to say about that, with the amount of Palestinian workers entering Israel every day. And no one is even talking about that when it comes to security, because we depend on it.
What I think is exceptionally meaningful with the A Land for All proposition is that it tackles the motivations of the conflict. Now this does not mean that we’re going to sign an agreement, and everything will be perfect. But if you have that endgame clear, and if you have answered the collective needs of both people, you take away the justification, the normalization, of conflict and violence. I think that is the biggest new thing that we offer.
Hardal: I have a shorter answer for this question, actually, Ezra. Let’s remember how things started. Everything started in ’48.
Pundak: Even earlier.
Hardal: Of course, earlier, but the important point, at which everything started, is actually ’48, the Palestinian Nakba — first Nakba. We now have a second Nakba.
So in this case, if we are going to have a political settlement and peace and reconciliation and recognition — and I’m speaking about big concepts, but we believe that it’s doable — there will be no need to speak about this question: How can we ensure the security of the Israeli Jews?
I do want to ensure their security. But you know what? I think that who is more threatened and has been threatened equally, at least equally, like the Jewish Israelis — if not more in the last two and a half years — are also the Palestinians.
So we need to mutually revise what has happened over the past, I don’t know, eight decades and start from that.
I don’t disagree with that, but I think that it creates this chicken-and-egg question with the plan you’re offering. To say that if there is no need for violence, there will be no violence — I mean, that’s true. But it’s somewhat tautologically true.
Some people might say: Look, this is a huge step forward. I’m willing to approach this peacefully. But every day in the West Bank, radical settlers are committing tremendous acts of violence. During the second intifada, there was constant suicide bombing.
One of the histories of this region, as you both know better than I do, is violent spoilers making peace projects or settlement projects impossible.
So it is true that if you could get to a point where there was no more violence, then a lot of the ideas on this become much easier. I’m not worried about the absence of aggressive security on the California-Arizona border, but that’s not where things are.
Pundak: But that’s exactly the opposite.
Tell me.
Pundak: So we’re not going to sign an agreement and open the borders. That is not the plan. We will absolutely have to go through a long process. And again, that has been done in other places with bloodier conflicts. So we have to let go of the fact that it’s impossible.
But the truth is that we have left room for spoilers, and we have experienced the fallout of previous negotiations because there has never been a commitment to a clear endgame.
So during the Oslo Accords, there were steps. There was a process. But at no point did Israel say: There will be, at the end of this process, a Palestinian sovereign, independent state. Never.
And if you don’t have that commitment to the endgame, then you leave room for spoilers. Palestinians are never going to buy that anymore, ever. We’ve failed too many times to say: Oh, yeah, eventually there’s going to be kind of a two-state solution — without doing that.
So what we are saying is that we need to flip that on its head. I think the recent moves of several states to recognize Palestine first was a step in that direction. Not to say that the two-state solution is the end of the process, but a Palestinian state has to be the beginning of the process in order to get to a reality where we could actually make peace.
But I guess the reason I’m pushing on this is that the politics of Israel could not be farther from that in any possible way.
Pundak: Absolutely.
And so to say that the only way to think about this plan, or the only way to think about this approach, is that there needs to be, first and foremost, an ironclad commitment from, let’s say, a supermajority of Israeli Jews to go not just to a two-state solution but to a confederacy with shared sovereignty over Jerusalem — which is one of the tenets of the plan — with a form of right of return throughout the entire land.
And to say that the promise is that security will follow that, when I talk to people there, and they all say: Well, look, we tried a peace process. We tried Oslo, and what we got was a second intifada. We are not going to make that mistake again.
So when you are trying to pitch it to the audience that you need to get to agree to it — which are the people who live near you — what do you say to them?
Pundak: Things are changing in the Middle East, and in Israel-Palestine, in a way that they haven’t in a very, very long time. For the past 20 years, we have been under this false assumption that we can, again, not solve this conflict.
Oct. 7 is not, was not, a security problem. It’s a political problem. It’s an outcome of not solving the conflict.
Do we have all the answers? Absolutely not. We have invested 30 years in thinking about the paradigm of separation for peace, which I think today is impossible to achieve, and also not desirable if we learn from other conflicts.
We haven’t invested nearly anything in trying to elaborate a vision like this, that learns from mistakes of the past and learns from other conflicts that have been solved sustainably. That is what we need to do today.
This is not to say that security is not our No. 1 concern. As Rula said: security for both people. Because a lot of the time when we say “security,” we mean security for Israeli Jews. I would say that has been part of the problem with the international discourse around this.
But I, as an Israeli, trust and know that we have the technical capacity in Israel to deal with this challenge. There’s no doubt that we have the technical capacity.
But the question is: Where are you going? What is the vision? What is the endgame? Because if the endgame is what we had 30 years ago, that hasn’t been relevantly updated, that doesn’t tackle the core deadlocks of the two-state solution that we all know — refugees, water, Jerusalem, borders, settlements. If we don’t have good answers to these questions — and that’s what we’re doing — we will never get to a place where we can actually move forward.
Tell me a bit more about the way that the vision approaches the settlements. I always think about some conversations I had, when I was also there, where Israeli Jews said to me: These lines you all draw are ridiculous — the idea that, if there is any Jewish connection to the land, it is deeper to Hebron than to Tel Aviv. That if there’s any religious grounding for why we are here, it does not follow the boundaries of the ’67 borders.
And I also remember realizing, when I was driving around the West Bank, that these settlements are not going away.
The Israeli Jews from the old peace camp, who tell me: Oh, maybe we can still — it’s too many people. It’s too big. It’s too entrenched. They’re building more every day.
One thing that I find very interesting in this project is that — you can frame it in different ways, but in a way that is different from, I think, the two-state solutions with all of its land swaps and everything — you’re able, much more directly, to simultaneously accept the presence of Jewish people in the West Bank, in East Jerusalem, and accept the Palestinian right of return at the same time.
When I read it, and I doubt this is how you all would frame it — though maybe you do — it almost feels like a trade.
Pundak: Well, first of all, we are very careful not to make that symmetry between refugees and settlers. It’s very important for us not to make that symmetry, for all the reasons. But what I would say ——
Why?
Pundak: Because refugees have a right to be part of their homeland. They have been subjected to terror and to expulsion from their homes.
The settlement enterprise is an illegal and immoral enterprise. It is against international law, a lot of it is against Israeli law, and it is based on a system of supremacy. There’s no question about that, and we are all in agreement with that.
But what we also see is that Jews have a strong sense of attachment, and that’s not going to change. That has been going on forever. Jews have forever lived in that piece of land, and they probably forever will. Because that attachment is greater than anything else, than the sovereign. It’s greater than that.
And what we are offering around that is not to approve the settlements and normalize them and say: They’re there, so whatever. They can stay. Not at all. But it is to say that we understand that there needs to be a mechanism to deal with Jews who have a very strong sense of attachment to their homeland, and for them to be able to live there safely, but with no privileges, control, terror to Palestinians.
So it’s important for me not to make that symmetry, but it is important for me to say that A Land for All has this elegance to it. It is a holistic approach.
When I talk about it, as a trade, the way I read the plan — and again, this might be wrong — I’m reading it as a person who lives in the United States — I was thinking about it in terms of interests.
One of the things that feels different to me about A Land for All is that there are certain interests that both societies hold very dear that have typically been excluded or pushed to the side as too difficult or too extreme for the main negotiations.
The main ones I think of there are the right of return, which the Israeli governments have functionally not been willing to discuss at any serious level.
Settlements, which people have not known what to do with, and that the more they have been built, the more unlikely their unwinding has become. And the fact that people still talk about it, to me, is evidence of a dead paradigm they’ve not figured out an answer to.
And Jerusalem, which is another complex conversation. But those two specifically. I guess you would describe it as an elegance, but, to me, what it looks like is a bringing into the conversation of two quite profound interests that have been pushed to its margins with arguably somewhat disastrous results.
Hardal: Yes. The right of return of the Palestinian refugees is one of the core issues — political, moral, emotional issues — of the Palestinian question. Any solution that tries to avoid referring to this issue is going to fail. And we are speaking of about half of the Palestinian people.
We didn’t speak much about the aspects of recognition and historic reconciliation between the two people that are two important principles that our paradigm and political platform is based on.
This political vision — before saying more about the right of return of the Palestinian people — needs actually transformative national narratives of both people.
Can you say more about what that means and what those narratives would be?
Hardal: Yes. I will start with us Palestinians. I think it’s time for all of us to acknowledge the collective history and memory of the Jewish people that is shaping their fears, insecurities and so on.
It doesn’t in any way mean to give them any legitimacy for what has been done to the Palestinian people in the last 80 years. But we need to understand these people, and these are very deep, psychological aspects of any conflict that we need to acknowledge.
The same for the Israeli Jews. They also need to have this national narrative transformation of moving from denying the Nakba and what happened there and the injustices, and to acknowledge this is something that they did.
And in order to move forward, acknowledgment is very important, and the reconciliation with our self-histories and memories and with the others are very important.
I think this question of how people’s stories both change and coexist is really important and worth spending time on. Because it’s a hard one to address through policy. Plans don’t know what to do with stories and identities. But it’s also a place where, for instance, the European Union example begins to break down.
One very important dimension of the European story was an agreed-upon post-World War II narrative: Germany was wrong. Germany had lost. Germany was defeated. Germany was correctly occupied. Germany was not allowed to have a military ——
Pundak: And that’s not going so well right now.
But you got a fair amount of peace out of it, so we’ll see. We’ll see what happens with the Alternative for Germany, or AfD.
But the point I’m making about that is that one way that Europe, as we now think of it, was built was on a very bloodily agreed-to description of what had happened. And that’s not going to be true here.
Pundak: No. And I think that’s actually, as you said, also part of the weakness of these arrangements. I think that Rwanda is also a good example of that — of the weakness of this history of winners. I think that what we are suggesting is something that is, again, like breaking away from the binary.
And this is also the origin of A Land for All. It was a group of people who came to terms with the fact that the two-state solution, as we know it, is no longer viable. It can’t physically happen.
Learning from the mistakes and saying: Why? Why has this failed? Or in the control that we have — I’m not talking about the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin — but what is in our control to learn from the reasons why? And the co-creation, which I think is really the secret ingredient, right?
I mean, Israelis have been trying to negotiate with Americans over Palestine for a long time. That hasn’t been successful. It has to be co-created in order for it to be acceptable.
So another thing we learned from Oslo is that the conflict didn’t start in 1967. The occupation is a problem, but it’s not the problem.
It needs to go backward. It needs to address the motivations, the narratives. And so if you do not come with a narrative that addresses religion, that addresses belonging, that addresses belonging to the entire homeland, to the refugees, the Nakba, the Holocaust ——
Hardal: And now, in addition, we have Oct. 7.
Pundak: Of course.
Hardal: And the genocidal war in Gaza without, again, doing symmetry between both events. Part of this package needs to be also to practice accountability for those who were involved in all of these atrocities and massacres and killing and so on.
I want to hold on this for a minute, because I think two things you both have said here in the last couple of minutes open up questions that — certainly in my reading of the plan and the documents — are not answered.
One is this question of accountability that you brought up. If your belief is that there cannot be peaceful sharing and partnership, absent some kind of accountability process, what do you imagine that looking like? And why do you imagine that players on either side would submit to it?
And two, both of you brought up quite a lot of the long historical stories both sides tell. But I actually don’t understand how this is able to address that. How does this address the completely incompatible narratives of what happened on Oct. 7 and after it?
I can sort of understand how it addresses the Nakba. I can read that in the plan and its focus on creating a space of right of return. I can see that.
But there’s a lot that has happened since that is not answered there — from the peace processes to the second intifada. So there’s a sort of a difference between saying there’s a plan for now versus a plan to reconcile this shared history.
Which of those are we looking at? And if you believe we’re looking at the second — a way to change the way Israelis see themselves, a way to change how Palestinians see themselves — I mean, that in some way seems like an even harder challenge than trying to imagine new border policies.
Pundak: Yeah.
What is the mechanism, the levers, that you see doing that?
Pundak: One of the research groups that we are organizing is about transitional justice. We are committed to learning from other places to ensure that we incorporate those lessons in this program, in this solution.
And so I’m humbled to say that we have amazing experts — international and Israeli and Palestinians — who are doing that work. With that, I think that this solution — the fact that it does talk about the past in a way that reconciles the main collective needs of both people, for freedom, for acknowledgment of their history, for self-determination, for the connection, as we said, to exercise that relationship with the entire homeland, to address the issue of the Nakba properly, to envision a future that is better — that is better than what they have.
And Rula always says this, that when we talk to Palestinians, what we often hear is: Well, this is definitely much better than Oslo. Like, this is better, much better for Palestinians than what we’ve been given before.
Hardal: I do want to say a couple of words about that.
I don’t want the Israeli Jews to love the Palestinians and vice versa. And we are not going to love each other — not at this moment and not in the coming years. Maybe. And we don’t need to forget and not to forgive. But we need to ensure that we have another situation in which we can at least continue living. The other problems maybe won’t be solved in our generation, but in the other generations.
We have to start implementing the political vision itself gradually, and changing the reality in order to open the space for deeper transformative conversations between the two people that will come one day.
I want to pick up on something you just said, which is around gradualism. There’s one dimension of looking at this, which is like a big plan. It’s a kind of final equilibrium that would be a radical transformation of these two societies and their relationships with each other.
But to go back to something we were talking about earlier — if you take the E.U. example, it begins with the steel and coal community. And so if you imagine a world that is six or seven years down the road — not a world of Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas or Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid and Abbas — but there’s been a sort of revolution or two in leadership. And it’s not that who has come into power is transformationally different, but they’re open to something new, and there’s a feeling that this has gone — the fighting, that it has all become destructive, that it is going nowhere.
There’s space. For whatever reason, there is space. But there’s no space for an end to all these issues — there’s just space to try something new. What does gradualism look like? What is the steel and coal community? What are the things that could begin to build the sense of trust or belief — because you saw it work on a small scale — that then ladders up to larger possibilities?
Pundak: You know, when we met with a very, I would say, important regional player in the past few months, the first thing that they said is like: Do not talk to us about a “road map.” We never want to hear that word again, ever. Like, just don’t even mention it.
Our commitment is to present an endgame that can work. Because we know that without that clear endgame, you just repeat mistakes of the past.
OK, but you have to start somewhere.
Pundak: Yes, absolutely. But it’s important for me to just reiterate how important that is, and how we have examples on the ground that show that. What I would say is, except for that commitment to an endgame —like that clarity of where this is leading us, and no questions about that — is issues like public health. I think that public health and economy and climate are things that impact our day-to-day life, and are great examples of places where we know we can’t work separately. If you have Covid in Tel Aviv, you will have Covid in Ramallah.
That’s in my imagination of this, without developing the blueprint exactly yet of how to get there. And again, we’re working on it. I would say that those are the places where I would imagine this starting from. Health care, economy, climate, water, Jerusalem. The places where it actually ——
Do you want to say a word on what that would mean for Jerusalem?
Pundak: I would add to that also security. Security cooperation — not under a system of control and violence.
I want to dig in on this a little bit, because that was a list of, I would say, issues escalating in their scale. You can imagine modest levels of cooperation in public health, all the way up to Jerusalem and security, which are core. So I think the reason I’m asking this, and the reason I’m pushing a little bit on this question, is that I don’t think people will believe in your endgame until they see it work in miniature.
Pundak: Yeah.
Your view, as I hear it, is that people have to be committed to the endgame for this to even begin.
Pundak: Mm-hmm.
But, you know, I can read the polling. You do not have the support for that right now.
Pundak: Right.
So if you’re ——
Pundak: But again, you didn’t have the support for Oslo before Oslo, or ——
But Oslo didn’t work.
Pundak: Sure. Absolutely. But, and again, that’s because no work was also done on the ground to complement it.
So the question I’m asking is: If there is a moment of opportunity, and you could implement something — security or Jerusalem are both good examples — I find it to be one of the more depressing realities of the situation, that the degree of cooperation and the effectiveness of the cooperation on security between the Palestinian Authority, or P.A., and the Israeli government has been sort of pocketed by the Israeli government as opposed to being the basis of something bigger.
Pundak: Yeah.
But you put that on the table as something that you could imagine as being a place where there could be a more transformational thing. Because it has also created a negative outcome, where the P.A. has lost and eroded support and legitimacy.
Now I would say that was sort of the way the Israeli government wanted it. But talk me through one place — be it Jerusalem, security, something else — where people would look at this, and in your view, they would see it, and then they’d say: Oh, maybe these A Land for All people are right. Maybe if we share as opposed to separate, maybe if we cooperate as opposed to dominate, you get an outcome that is, for — in this case — Jewish Israelis, safer and more stable and more just, without having to be committed to the entire vision.
Hardal: There are a lot of examples in the health field. But I’m not sure that I do want to cooperate with you in this conversation, on this topic, because I think it needs to be in a different way. The Palestinians are not going now to accept or agree to actual partial steps on the ground until — I think there is a need for something dramatic.
And people from both sides need to see a plan with a timeline, not, again, some steps here — like what has been happening since last fall with Gaza. People are — and believe me, you are in these conversations, in a lot of international context — speaking about the reconstruction of Gaza and the humanitarian situation, of course, without doing anything.
That is, for sure, since September or October. But nobody is speaking about the rest of the Israelis and the Palestinians, and about where we are heading this time. So no, I’m not going to accept all of these failures.
We start, first of all, from acknowledging —in transformative acknowledgment and recognition — the state of Palestine. Countries and states need to start filling in this recognition with actions: diplomatic, political, legal, economic and so on, OK? To start with.
And presenting a platform for the political vision. I hope it’s going to be our political vision, and we are happy to bring much more insights and blueprints and content to whole phases. But we know, all of us, we know in, I don’t know, 2050, we will be there. And people will start also seeing the improvement in the conditions of their lives ——
Pundak: Right, I think that’s No. 1.
Hardal: Immediately. But we cannot do it the way it was done 30 years ago.
For me, it creates an interesting instability in how to think about what you all have released here. And the way I’d put it is this: I take the point that you need a vision you’re working toward. And I also take the point that I think you’re making here, which is that it would be folly right now to think that every sentence put down on a plan in 2026, even in a world where that plan became viable, would be the final structure of the plan or would be how it would be implemented. That requires a level of policy literalism that even I am not willing to do.
But I guess what you’re both getting at on some level — and I agree with, but is in some ways a harder question — is not what kinds of answers you might imagine a constructive process with people committed to a just outcome might entertain. It’s how you get to the point where there’s a room with a table, with people who can begin debating the finer points of the plan.
Israel is, at this moment, undoubtedly the stronger actor in this conflict, and there is very, very little room for much that is in this vision, in Israeli politics. The coming election is going to pit Benjamin Netanyahu, whose, I think, politics are well understood, against Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid. And Bennett is, I think, one of the leaders of that coalition. I mean, he has traditionally, on many of these issues, been to Netanyahu’s right.
Pundak: Correct.
And so I can read the polling there. For the commitment to this kind of vision that you’ve described needing, you would need a wholesale change in the structure of Israeli public opinion and leadership.
What is your theory of what creates that change that makes this possible?
Pundak: Well, yeah, that’s kind of what we’re doing. That’s the work. We’ve never said that it’s easy work. And even more so, there are no shortcuts. There are no shortcuts.
When you think about Northern Ireland, for example, as I said earlier, a month before the Good Friday Agreement, no one believed it would ever end. But there were at least three, if not more, very intense years of working bottom-up to make people start imagining that the Good Friday Agreement can and will happen, with civil society, with journalists, with artists.
There needs to be a whole mechanism of moving the society from where we are today, which is annihilation of the Palestinian people.
But what moves it? The young in Israel today are to the right of older generations.
Pundak: Yeah, absolutely. That’s one of the biggest problems.
Society has moved, and it is moving. And it is changing. But not in the direction of this. So ——
Pundak: No, no, and I would say ——
I know there are no shortcuts, but, even on a 10-year time frame, what do you believe will change attitudes sufficiently so that something like this becomes possible?
Pundak: We’re not in a postwar election. There isn’t even a cease-fire in Gaza right now. There’s no cease-fire, and the war continues, and people are very much still entrenched in the reality of Oct. 7. And so I am not counting on these elections to get us to that vision — not at all.
But right now, within these elections, within the political framework in Israel, the conversation is so, so limited. It’s between, really, the political imagination, which is becoming our reality, of the reality in Gaza and the West Bank, and eliminating the Palestinian people and then delegitimizing Palestinian citizens of Israel.
That’s the other part of that spectrum, and it’s basically all we have within the Jewish parties. There is no vision. I come back to this point because I think — and I know, as an Israeli — that young people are looking for hope and for alternatives.
Sorry, I want to push us from a space of realism here. Young people have moved to the right in Israel. There are left-wing politicians in Israel, like Yair Golan. They are not popular.
Pundak: No, but Yair Golan is also not offering hope — real hope — to solve this conflict and for security.
But are people lacking for vision, or do they not want a vision like this?
Pundak: No. I think that we have been trained and normalized this thinking that we do not need to solve this conflict. And I think that Oct. 7 is the worst wake-up call that we could have imagined.
We said that this will blow up in our face. We never imagined it to be so bad, but this is and should be — and I believe, again, that this is not the postwar election that we’re waiting for — the time to integrate into the Israeli public discourse the fact that this conflict needs to end, that there is a solution.
I will say — and this is not to counter the reality where Israelis are not at all interested in anything right now of such — but we have met, in 2025, 15,000 Israelis — that is equivalent to half a million Americans — who have been looking for vision and hope and alternatives and ways out and political imagination. We’ve been doing it, I would say the majority of these, with young people, with political imagination workshops, with soft entrance points. Not immediately to say: This is the vision. Vote for this vision.
No. But to say: Guys, wake up. Your future is in your hands. The leaders are not giving us that. It has to come from us — from civil society, from artists, from journalists, from small politicians.
That is something that we are very committed to doing. And we see that our movement has been growing exponentially since Oct. 7.
People are looking. Are we there yet? No. But, for example, our dear friends at Standing Together, who are one of the largest, bottom-up, Jewish-Arabic movements on the ground today in Israel — they, a few months ago, announced that, for their 10th anniversary and around everything that’s going on, they’re committed to presenting a political vision. That political vision is ours.
And so you see that there’s an emergence coming out of Oct. 7, of people looking for a new big idea. Because everything has been shattered, and paradigms that we’ve been working around are crumbling.
So when you ask me about where I find hope when I read the polls, when I see the young people voting for Itamar Ben-Gvir more and more, when I see how saturated Israeli society today is with violence — because the violence is everywhere — it is with these young people who are asking me: How can I join A Land for All? And we’ve been getting these by the thousands.
So I’m not looking for shortcuts. We are here to do that work. But if we don’t start now and present that alternative now, we’re absolutely never going to get there.
Hardal: I agree with May about all of that. I think we need a lot of pressure from outside in order to promote this change inside Israel.
I think it’s not only the void of people, and it’s not only that people got used to not speaking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We’ve been seeing how they speak and treat Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank. So there is something ——
Pundak: And inside of Israel, as well, by the way.
Hardal: Yes. And against us Palestinian citizens in Israel.
The degree of the dehumanization of the Palestinian people in the Israeli public conversation and political conversation is just insane. And not surprising, because this is actually the nature of settler-colonial, violent, arrogant societies. But also of ——
Pundak: But also of separation.
Hardal: And also of separation. And also of propaganda — of propaganda in the media and in the whole political conversation and discourse in Israel over years. And that’s why I think there is a place for top-down change in Israel and for pressure from outside.
Pundak: I just want to say, we are taking the agency of Israelis and Palestinians leading a vision, but we can’t do it alone. We can’t.
At this point, thinking that Israelis can ensure the safety or security of Israel — or of Palestinians, for sure — is wrong. There is no way we can do this without serious pressure and without serious commitments of international actors.
So this is absolutely to say that this should be a wake-up call for the international community — not to talk about the two-state solution but to end the atrocities on the ground first and foremost, and then by securing and committing to a real solution.
That is a good place to end. Always our final question: What are three books you would recommend to the audience?
Rula, why don’t we begin with you?
Hardal: I decided to choose three books that are related to the conversation that we are having today.
The first one is “The Holocaust and the Nakba,” edited by good colleagues and friends, Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg. It’s very important to understand what’s happening now. It was written before Oct. 7 and the genocide in Gaza, but it’s still a very important, essential book.
The second is “States of Denial” by Stanley Cohen. It’s not about Israel and Palestine, but I claim all the time that the Israelis are suffering from severe collective denial and blindness. I’m trying to understand that, and I think a lot of people need, want, maybe, to understand. And this book is very important and helpful.
The last book is by our colleague and friend Omer Bartov — his very recent, latest book, “Israel: What Went Wrong?”
May?
Pundak: I’m also thinking about where I’m at today, and so I was thinking of three books.
One is looking to the past and learning from it: Hussein Agha and Robert Malley’s book “Tomorrow Is Yesterday.” We’re doing this as people on the ground, who are committing to doing this bottom-up work of building the movement and vision. But they’ve been there in the negotiations, learning from the mistakes, and I think that this is a practice we overlook, and we need to really do more often — learning from our mistakes. So that’s the past.
The second is “A Psalm for the Wild-Built” by Becky Chambers. It’s a genre that I — do you know this book?
Yes. I didn’t expect it to pop up here.
Pundak: Yes. It’s from a different world, which is very off-genre for me, but I’m so grateful that I have read it.
We’ve been in the business of dystopias for a long time. As a Jew, I am committed to practicing my political imagination. It’s part of my heritage, and we’ve neglected that. So this book by Becky Chambers has really allowed me to sit with alternative futures and help me imagine beyond what I think is possible. I think that’s so important.
And the third is a kind of book for the present, which is a children’s book. There are never enough good recommendations for a children’s book. It’s a book by Tove Jansson. It’s the “Moomin” series, which allows me to, first of all, read a book to both my 4- and 8-year-old, which is not so easy to find, something that we all enjoy. But also it is a profound, I want to say humanist — but, of course, it’s not only about humans — but a very sensitive series that allows room for emotions and for tackling very serious philosophic questions and fears, in a way that helps me be present with my children and kind of remember why I’m doing what I’m doing.
Just to be a nerd about this: I'm going to break the ones on the right down, and show how they're connected to the ones on the left.
This is long.
But if you're questioning some part of the meme above, you can scroll down and learn how these things are similar.
SKINHEADS VS KEFFIYEHS
Skinheads and people wearing keffiyehs are not inherently or necessarily biased against Jews. But as a group, we've seen a disproportionate amount of negativity and even violence against Jews from each one.
SWASTIKAS VS RED TRIANGLES
Swastikas are a symbol of a group that explicitly considers Jews the enemy; accuses them of controlling the international mass media and imperialistic nations with their wealth; starting and profiting from every war; corrupting societies; wanting to occupy the entire world; and having outlined this plan in the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion....
And so are inverted red triangles. I literally copied all of that from Hamas's founding documents.
Additionally, inverted red triangles are the symbol Hamas uses to mark targets it's boasting about hitting or hunting down.
Berlin has banned the inverted red triangle symbol due to its use by Hamas and their supporters to mark enemy targets in videos and graffiti
NOT WHITE VS TOO WHITE
Nazis and other white supremacists, to this day, vehemently argue that Jews are not white. Jews are one of their favorite targets.
That's a big part of the reason that in the U.S., almost every single year, the second-most hate crimes are against Jews.
(The most: Black people. The third-most: Gay men. If you include the hate crimes against all groups in the LGBTQIA+ community, the total is larger, but still third.)
Worse: there are 7.55 times as many Black people in the U.S. as Jews. But there are about twice as many hate crimes against Black people as Jews. Which means that in terms of hate crimes per person, Jews win first prize?
If you're not Jewish, you're probably going, "But you can't trust the ADL!" And I have to tell you: these statistics are from the FBI, actually.
But this is a good moment to think about where your distrust of the ADL comes from. Was the source solid? Did you fact-check what it was saying?
If a different marginalized group said, "We've tracked the actions that harm us," and people outside that group said, "No they don't, you're just bad people who are trying to chill free speech," what would you think? Would you have the same reaction to that group as to the ADL?
Anyway, here's a fun tweet from Elon Musk:
Please note: that is an actual link preview from the actual link to his tweet. That is not a photoshopped fake tweet. The man literally said this, and I didn't see the Musk-hating progressive community even blink.
He had previously said that white people are gonna get eliminated and replaced, which is standard neo-Nazi garbage. And which DID elicit a lot of outrage.
This is not Elon Musk agreeing that Jews are just regular white people like him.
This is Elon Musk saying that Jews are hyper-privileged. That Jews have enormous power.
This is, simultaneously, Elon Musk weaponizing the Holocaust to be like, "See? That's proof of white genocide!"
Nazi Twitter took great offense.
This Nazi's response neatly bridges the gap for everyone. This is where the two beliefs join hands and become one.
(Tumblr struggles with tweet previews sometimes, so that one IS a screenshot.)
I've seen lots of "Jews are white" people also say that a secret cabal of Jews controls the media, the government, and/or the world. Sometimes they think the Israeli government is that secret cabal of Jews. Sometimes they think AIPAC is. Sometimes they just call it "Zionists."
Other comments included:
"You got community noted by the jews that run your community notes"
"Stop playing stupid." followed by this:
And, of course, "The jews are NOT White. They wear 'Whiteness' like a skin suit when it's "convenient. Don't believe me, listen to her..."
Followed by a video in which a Jewish creator explains, "Some Jews are white, like me, but our whiteness is conditional, and that's why it's different…. we are [considered] white when it's convenient [for actual white people]. We are [considered] white when our whiteness boosts the numbers of white people in order to oppress people of color. We are white. until. we're fucking. NOT.
"And when we're not, we're almost hated in a different way because we can 'fool you' with our whiteness. We can assimilate. Which is why the man whose name starts with H put stars on our jackets. so we wouldn't trick anybody."
(He got the idea, presumably, from the centuries of European countries making Jews wear badges or silly hats for the same purpose. And they got the idea from the centuries of caliphates doing the exact same thing across North Africa and the Middle East.
Which begs the question: if Jews are so obviously white, why did Jews from Morocco through Afghanistan need to wear special badges, belts, or even strings of bells, to make sure they weren't accidentally treated as equals there either?)
Back to the bullet points.
The argument I have seen made over and over, across social media platforms, is that Israel was founded by and is mostly made up of Ashkenazi Jews. I.e. Jews who immigrated from Europe. Who are, therefore, white people.
Literally: they came from Europe, therefore they're white.
Because nothing says, "I am a well-informed person engaging in perfectly reasonable discourse" like the descendants of people who forced Jews into Europe, repeatedly exiled them from region after region, and/or repeatedly tried to kill them off, insisting that being in Europe makes you white.
This short gives a good overview of what's wrong with that theory. But basically, moving to an area with less sunlight will in fact make your descendants lighter-skinned. So will intermarriage and - though this video doesn't address it - rape.
When people are challenged on this idea, the fallback is Khazar theory and racist blood quantum.
Blood quantum emerged as a way to measure 'Indian-ness' through a construct of race. So that over time, Indians would literally breed themselves out and rid the federal government of their legal duties to uphold treaty obligations.
This is the inverse of the equally racist "one drop rule."
The one drop rule measured the amount of 'black blood' that black people had in society. And that ensured that every person who had at least one drop would be considered black and would be covered under these discriminatory laws and, even in the earlier days, enslaved.
Basically, if you have a way to exploit a group, you define them using "one drop." If you don't, then you just want to eliminate them. So you use "blood quantum"/DNA to argue them out of existence.
People will claim that research shows Ashkenazi Jews only have European DNA (false) and that's why DNA tests are illegal in Israel (false): because (((they))) don't want you to know they don't belong there!
There are 4,000+ years of continuous archeological and historical records showing that the Jewish people originated in Israel and are the only group that has continuously been there.
But we don't learn about the history of West Asia (the Middle East) in Western schools. So we default to our racist assumptions about the people there, and ignore and speak over all of them.
HOLOCAUST DENIAL VS HOLOCAUST INVERSION
Holocaust Inversion is a much easier one to explain.
Inversion is when you take a traumatizing experience of oppression that a group has experienced, and claim that actually, that group is the one committing that oppression on another.
White replacement/white genocide theories are a good example of that.
Like when white conservative groups, who are only here because their forebears violently replaced the existing populations (in some cases via actual genocide), claim that they're being deliberately "replaced" by indigenous people immigrating from farther south. And that the intention is somehow to commit genocide against them.
Inversion conveniently waters down what actually happened.
It relieves people of the perceived guilt from what their ancestors did, while awarding themselves the moral weight of it.
It's so, so juicy, you guys. It's such a good move. Who wouldn't want to turn, for example, the deliberate attempt to demonize all Jews, in order to gain the power to take over the world, while wiping them off the earth, and the mass enslavement of Jews along the way, into a war that has killed about as many Gazans as have been born during that time?
It simultaneously removes "you literally tried to kill all of us less than a century ago, don't talk to us about genocide" as an argument, and (ironically) gives you that healthy moral glow you feel from passionately arguing against the Holocaust.
Plus, it makes arguments against it sound like they're the ones minimizing it. It's very difficult to argue against exaggerations of the death toll, for instance, without sounding callous and uncaring of those who have been killed.
Ultimately, Holocaust inversion does the same thing as Holocaust denial.
Many Holocaust deniers don't argue that the Holocaust never happened. Instead, they seek to minimize it by saying that far fewer than 6 million Jews died. 271,000 is a popular denial number that I've seen thrown around in a lot of Instagram comments.
Or to increase the number of non-Jews who were killed. To argue that it was not specifically an attempt to kill every Jew on earth. To argue that Jews weren't targeted at all.
By contrast, people commonly say, "what Israel is doing in Gaza is exactly like the Holocaust."
This is the equivalent of saying that the Nazi Party spent almost two years bombing a 140 square mile area where 15% of the Jews on earth lived. And attacking it through ground invasions. And that they let humanitarian aid in.
And that the UN could not distribute that aid effectively, partly because 88% of its trucks regularly got looted, partly because there was a war going on around it.
It's actually a brilliant way to erase both the Holocaust and October 7.
Because the assumption, and implication, is that Israel attacked Gaza in order to wipe Palestinians off the face of the earth. Or at least to drive them out of Gaza and grab the land.
Land where Israel had already destroyed all its settlements in 2005, when it pulled out of Gaza and turned it fully over to Palestinian rule. Land where all synagogues have been destroyed. I don't know why Israel would wait 20 years and then try to take the entire thing back. So far, nobody I've asked has been able to give me a reason for thinking that.
It erases the fact that Hamas invaded Israel and mutilated, tortured, and burned its way across an area larger than the Gaza Strip itself, in just one day.
It erases how incredibly, graphically violent that attack was.
It erases the fact that Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007, kicking the Palestinian government out entirely, and has run it as a brutal dictatorship ever since.
It erases the fact that Hamas's stated mission is to violently destroy Israel (because Jews are terrible and have no right to be there, see above).
And that it asked for, and got, $500,000,000 from Iran to plan October 7.
And that it has publicly stated, at least twice, that it will keep attacking until Israel has been "annihilated." (Hamas even has explicit plans for what it will do when it conquers that land.)
Ok I don't know why I thought "easy to explain" would mean I could explain it BRIEFLY
NAZI GERMANY VS THE USSR
Honestly, these are just two wildly Jew-hating places. That's it, that's the tweet.
Okay, fine:
The Russian Empire, while trying to control more and more land, instigated pogroms that scapegoated and killed hundreds of thousands of Jews, while driving out about as many. It continued to be a nightmarishly Jew-hating and Jew-scapegoating place, yea, verily even unto today.
Doesn't matter what it's called, it's been doing the same shit the whole time. Including empire-building invasions.
And part of the way it scapegoated and mass-murdered Jews was by creating some of the worst, most powerful antisemitic propaganda the world has ever seen, and actively spreading it around the world.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is the most widely distributed antisemitic publication of modern times. Although repeatedly discredited,
The Nazi Party had the same playbook. Land, propaganda, murder, profit.
And it drew HEAVILY from the Russian playbook. It even integrated the Protocols of the Elders of Zion into its massive propaganda machine.
It was especially heartened by the fact that nobody lifted a finger against Russia for killing and cleansing a total of probably 500,000 Jews.
The main difference is: because the Nazi Party was willing to do the killing itself, and to industrialize it, it was able to kill 2 out of every 3 Jews in all of Europe. 90%+ of the Jews in the countries it occupied. Along with all the Jews who were just killed by civilians who believed in the cause.
It's especially awful that people claim Israel was founded by "white European colonizer Jews," when "white European colonizers" spent so much time and effort trying to wipe the Jews out during that time.
It's also just plain annoying that people misinterpret early Zionist writings as meaning, "we're powerful colonizers!" when, for the first 40 years of the Zionist movement, that was literally the Ottoman Empire.
I asked someone recently how she could claim those Jews were colonizing a literal empire. The response was that they were obviously colonizers, because they came from Europe.
Please send help.
RIGHT WING VS LEFT WING
This is purely a matter of what other issues you support, and - sometimes - how you frame your arguments.
I literally can't tell the difference on Twitter anymore.
Like, ok:
She's responding to French president Emmanuel Macron saying France stands with Lebanon. "Exterminating the population" is Holocaust inversion. I'm going to guess that this is a leftist, based on the "all of humanity" wording, but I literally don't know. Let's find out!
Her header says, "The whole world is my temple, love is my sanctuary, the universe is my homeland." She's white and blonde as heck, which maybe explains why she feels like the entire universe is her homeland.
Her retweets are for USAID, against everyone in the Epstein files, against attacking Iran. She has one saying, "they lied to you about what a terrorist looks like," with a photo of some white dude I'm guessing is Pete Hesgeth or somebody. And another claiming that they lied to you about who bombed all the countries in West Asia - that it was not Iran, it was all "false flag operations" by the US and Israel.
(hilariously, one of the tweets claims that this was "revealed" by someone named "Krystal Ball." propagandists have realized they don't have to try anymore)
And then: a retweet from white supremacist Jackson Hinkle, whose "MAGA Communism" has been called out by antifascist groups for "cryptofascist" socialism. In other words, he infiltrates the left wing and creates a pipeline to the right wing.
(Followed by a tweet claiming that "If we don't stop Israel in time, it will do to the entire world what it has already done to the Palestinians." Again, buying right into the standard-issue propaganda that comes from both Russia and the Nazis.)
Let's do just one more! I thought right-wing at first, based on "vibes" I guess. But then I noticed the use of "anti zionists," which implies leftist. And "zios" was popularized by KKK Grand Wizard David Duke, which should mean right-wing - but it's been embraced by the left now.
Plus, it's in response to a politically conservative rabbi rejoicing that literal Nazis Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Joe Kent are no longer working in government.
Aaaaand.... I'm wrong.
His Twitter page implies that he's a Christian Nationalist. His most recent retweet is from a contest to win three guns. And he follows that by retweeting something claiming that your enemy if you're a Republican or Democrat is not the other party, it's Satanists. This one really clinches it:
oof.
Okay, last item!
OPEN BIGOTRY/RACE POLLUTERS VS ELIMINATIONISM/ZIONIST INQUISITION
This is very "potayto, potahto."
But only if both potatoes are green and poisonous.
I assume we all understand that openly being a bigot is bad. And that believing a group is "polluting" your race is also bad. So let's look at "eliminationism."
The most obvious example is the frequent claim that Israel is "Occupied Palestine"/"a failed state" that should be eliminated.
Some people who say this seem to think it's possible to just order a country's government to disband and hand the reins over to the neighboring government.
This would be especially complicated in the current situation, when Israelis are explicitly not allowed in almost any West Bank cities and it's a capital offense to sell land in Palestine to Israelis.
But also, that's just... literally not a thing. The way you get that would be by Palestine invading and conquering Israel. That's what you're talking about. And honestly, the government of Palestine doesn't seem to want that land or its people. That's a lot to dump on it all of a sudden.
Others who say this are clear that they mean someone should indeed invade and kill all the Zionists, by which they mean everyone in Israel. (Including about half the Jews on earth.)
Personally, I think that there should be a once-a-millennium limit on killing half the Jews on earth. (/s)
oh crap they're just gonna say they're taking this one early fuck shit fuck (/gen)
Literally, though, you cannot just sit there and call for the destruction of a country. You know that's calling for genocide.
But what else does "eliminationism" mean?
Pervasive right-wing extremist themes on radio, television, and some online news sources (often as a modern-day replacement for hard-copy newspapers and newsletters).... support an increasingly passionate and virulent message in public discourse.
This message encourages persons who feel uneasy or displaced in society to expiate their grievances not through the political process, but through murder.
That paper points out that Americans tend to think our country is immune to such things - and that our history of lynching, among other things, disproves that.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were thousands of lynchings. This was a direct reaction to the end of slavery. That's why (and when) the KKK and other white supremacist groups started.
Being a Jew in a predominantly Christian town could be fatal.
However, courts recognized that if the defendant was a black man the likelihood of race-based hostility grew significantly.
....When a more or less silent majority discounts eliminationist rhetoric as "merely" symbolic, the message can manifest as action. Cultural symbols gain power by articulating aspects of a group narrative.
People generally talk about this as a right-wing, even fascist phenomenon.
But like.
This is a false binary. But it's a very fucking popular false binary.
Because let's be real: we're all very fucking angry about how shitty capitalism is. And especially American capitalism. And especially its impact on the American healthcare system. And it's fun to fantasize angrily that this one dude killing one healthcare CEO is going to get us universal coverage. Instead of having zero impact on the system.
Fantasizing that you can achieve major social change by just going out and killing people, and that doing that wouldn't fuck you up, makes people feel powerful. Which makes us happy.
It's fun to imagine taking your rage out on the people in power.
But it's kind of scary to see people cheering on the murder of someone they abstractly hate, when you've seen time and again that they also abstractly hate you.
(In fact, people were spreading disinformation claiming that the New York Times ran a headline saying "The Glorification of Luigi Mangione Is Inherently Anti-Israel."
People are at the point where they make literally everything about "Israel" somehow. Everything is a "zionist psyop."
It feels like watching the Protocols of the Elders of Zion get popular. It feels like the 1930s.)
Symbols are manipulated to create an atmosphere that accepts political violence.
The next ones are replies to someone selling cryptocurrency called Snowball:
An NYC group tried to incite a second Crown Heights riot in 2025, spreading the same old lies that started the first one. but this time, targeting the "jewish supremacist zios" who "martyred" the kid who died to a car accident.
This was the lie that started the Crown Heights Riots in 1991, in which 29-year-old Yankel Rosenbaum was murdered and 38 civilians were injured.
This begins by dehumanizing the targeted social group. The repeated use of culturally specific imagery supports brutalizing such targets individually.
Research from the Union of Jewish Students suggests antisemitic attitudes have become increasingly common on university campuses
"The research found that student groups have explicitly called for violence against Jews, with some justifying the terrorist attack at Bondi Beach in December, which killed 15 people and injured 40. Nearly half, 49 per cent, of students had heard slogans or chants glorifying Hamas, Hezbollah or other proscribed groups on campus, while 47 per cent have witnessed justification of the October 7 attacks."
As moderate voices remain silent or ineffective in the face of such events, extremist messages move from the fringe toward the center of public discourse.
By imbuing the message with religiosity, extremist positions and actions convert into "[h]oly wars and just causes [that] invite warriors to view battle as sacred drama."
A 19-year-old accused of setting a Mississippi synagogue on fire allegedly dubbed Beth Israel a “synagogue of Satan.” The phrase echoed anti
Extremist violence against the dehumanized becomes accepted.
Israeli ambassador Yechiel Leiter says Washington attack on diplomats was deliberate and preplanned, linking suspect Elias Rodriguez’s 'Gaza
Episodic events of assault turn into acts of arson and rampages, then, if unchecked, into pogroms and genocide.
A man accused of yelling “Free Palestine” and throwing Molotov cocktails at demonstrators calling for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaz
After the Bondi Beach shooting, what is at stake is not a ‘conflation’ between Jews and Zionists, but the power of anti-Israel hatred itself
No arrests yet, as new Iran-linked terror group claims responsibility for burning of four community ambulances next to Golders Green synagog
We have grown used to the reality of anti-Semitic attacks like the torching of the Hatzola ambulance service
(de-paywalled links: the bondi beach one, the jews are no longer surprised one)
A coalition of Muslim groups launched an anti-BDS initiative. The new group, called the Unbreakable Bond Coalition, announced that it’s starting an alternative to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel that will invest in Israel, its Arab citizens and Palestinians employed by Israeli companies, reported AmNY. The initiative will launch on July 9 and aims to mobilize at least 500,000 pro-Israel supporters to invest in Israeli treasury bonds.
NYC Jews are the most targeted minority in hate crimes this year, police records say. The NYPD documented 178 anti-Jewish hate crimes from January to June, even as hate crimes against other minorities fell and overall crime declined to historic lows, according to the department’s biannual crime report.
Psychologists launched a program to combat antisemitism in mental health care. Miri Bar-Halpern, a lecturer in psychology at Harvard Medical School, and Dean McKay, a professor of psychology at Fordham University, are rolling out a program to train future clinicians in providing care for Jewish patients, reported Jewish Insider. The program will be piloted in doctoral psychology programs at universities in New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts.
A new Riverdale synagogue was approved by a community board. The construction of the synagogue was approved this month by Bronx Community Board 8’s Land Use Committee, reported The Riverdale Press. The project, set to end with a 4,100-square foot synagogue that holds 120 people, is still awaiting approval from the New York City Planning Commission and the New York City Department of Buildings.
Platner's neo nazi tattoo wasn't enough to kill his chances with the democrats. They were warned nothing good could come of someone who gets a totenkompf tattoo - it is as clear of a sign as anyone needs to write someone off entirely.
Now that someone has come forward and accused him of rape, suddenly (most) people get it. This guy is a neo nazi sex predator; he is completely bereft of value to society. It doesn't get any more blatant than this.
Yet some democrats, high and low profile alike, are still defending him - like Stephen King who wished he would continue running after the news came out.
Good people don't get neo nazi tattoos.
Were the democrats always this unable to distinguish good and evil from each other, and always this supportive of nazis, or have they gotten worse since the pro palestine movement desensitized the party to antisemitism on a wide scale?
"Who authorized you to speak on behalf of the children of Gaza? Nobody did."
If I could choose a video that every antizionist would be obligated to watch before they opened their mouth, it would be this one.
"Who authorized you to speak on behalf of [the children of] Gaza? Nobody did. [You're] self proclaimed, just like Mahmoud Abbas, just like Yasser Arafat, just like all the Palestinians who have been feeding on the pain of the Palestinian children. You are a parasite, a bottom-feeder - this is what you are. So before you speak against the prime minister of a democracy and accuse him of being a terrorist, you need to look at yourself in the mirror. You have been supporting Hamas, and it's recorded against you for eternity. So don't play the game now that your fight is for the children in Gaza. This is not your fight. You know who's fighting for the children of Gaza? The IDF, that is kilking Hamas, that is uprooting Hamas so the children of Gaza can have their freedom after 36 years of slavery. Those are the ones who qualify to speak on the topic: not you, sitting [in] your comfort, and you want to have an opinion about it? This is the problem that we are dealing with - scumbags like this."
