You can't maintain this kind of cruel dehumanization in your
day-to-day interaction and treatment of another people.
You can't sustain that without it fundamentally emptying your
own Society of any values. You can't sustain that.
And the remarkable thing is in the months leading up to October
7th 2023, what did you have? You had the largest ever mass
St. protests and mobilisations week after week in Israel
against the judicial overhaul to save Israeli democracy.
And those protests almost never You had a small block, the anti
occupation block. You had a petition, the elephant
in the room, which talked about Palestinians, apartheid,
occupation, how that corrupts. But the the overwhelming message
of those things were save Israeli democracy without
acknowledging that the biggest blemish on that democracy, the
biggest affront to the law, the most corrosive thing for
Israel's inner values and well beings, was its treatment and
remains its treatment of the Palestinians.
That is the backdrop to manufacturing consent for
genocide in the last two years. Hello and welcome back to the
Palestine Deep Dive. My name is Ahmed Al Nahuq, and
I'm a journalist from Palestine, Gaza.
And today I'm joined with Daniel Levy, who is a former Israeli
negotiator. Today we're going to talk about
the future for Gaza, the American, and there's really a
plan for Gaza and much more. Daniel, thank you very much for
joining us today. Pleasure to be with you.
Ahmed, we met many times before, but this is your first interview
with me. Yeah, you were.
You were interviewed by Mark Sutton four years ago.
Yeah. So welcome back to Palestine
Deep Dive. Thank you, good to be back.
Things have moved on since I was last here.
A lot for Palestine deep dive, sadly also for.
Palestine for everyone. I think the world is changing
after October the 7th and, but today, Daniel, if I may, I want
to really delve into the Israeli government mindset and they're
actually plans for Gaza beyond the headlines and beyond the
news because I, me and many others do not trust them
anymore. But before we go to that, allow
me to ask you about your experience working for the
Israeli government back in the 90s.
And I know you worked under a hood, Barack and, and and the
other Prime Minister. Is hakrabeen.
Is Hakrabeen? Yeah.
And I have to be honest, I'm not a fan of either.
I don't like any of them. I have always view the Israeli
government as racist. They hated the Palestinians.
None of them was very good to the Palestinians.
But recently realized that the Israeli government is moving to
the extreme right wing and they have become more genocidal than
ever before. How do you see that change?
What led to that change in the Israeli government?
And there's really society as well.
Yeah. So I, I think you said something
that's really important and and I want to acknowledge that,
which is you don't need to maintain a false notion because
it would be a false notion that there was ever a golden era.
So I don't want to suggest that the the the prime ministers I
served, the government I served, sought a Palestinian fan club or
were sitting in that office thinking how do we guarantee
Palestinian rights and Palestinian freedoms that there
was, there was no golden era, not in the establishment of the
state and the Nakba, not in keeping the the 48 a community
under a military governorate from 1948 to 1966, et cetera.
One can acknowledge that and at the same time acknowledge that
something has happened, that there is a difference when the
societal political structures have gone through a process
where today consent has been manufactured for genocide in
society. That is something qualitatively
different. And if I were to give a one word
encapsulation of how did we get there, the word would be
impunity. Impunity.
The lived experience of Israelis was that we can get away with
anything, anything. And I, I remember having
arguments back back in those days with people who were
saying, yeah, look, he shouldn't be talking to the PLO.
We shouldn't be going down this path, whatever that path was.
And maybe we won't unpack that today, but there's no choice.
The world won't accept it if we don't.
After the first Intifada, it felt like Israel was under a
microscope. It felt like Israel could only
progress economically and in other ways in the region if it
moved in a different direction. 2 wards accepting the
Palestinian acceptance of a let's face it a mini state on
just 22% of the land and the sense was Israel to realise its
potential let's say would have to go down that path and that
that the demography would overwhelm it it it couldn't be a
flourishing country in the community of nations.
Fast forward. Israel undermines every effort
at achieving peace. Israel double s and then
quadruples the number of illegal settlers in the occupied
territories. Israel puts into place an even
more aggressive matrix of control of every aspect of
Palestinian life. And what does it get in return?
Better economic relations? Improved diplomatic standing,
normalization with countries in the region.
You cannot understand what happened in the Israeli response
after October 7th without understanding that the learned
Israeli experience was we can do anything to Palestinians.
And they cost are always getting away with it.
They're getting away with the, with the siege, with afflictive
punishment, with the settlements, which are illegal
according even to the UK. And we're still in the UK where
you said receive products from the Israeli, from the Israeli
settlements and so on. So who is complicit in this
impunity? So everyone.
The well, this combination of on the one hand, the the
intensification of yes, violations of international law,
but also just cruelty in the treatment of Palestinians, the
intensification of that going in tandem with Israel achieving
unprecedented economic growth. Everyone talking about the start
up nation, the high tech superpower.
You then therefore had to make a very different argument with
Israelis. Could you couldn't say to
Israelis listen, like the Palestinians don't like the
Palestinians, but the world is not going to accept this.
We're not going to. And they'd say they'd look at
you and they what, what planet are you from?
Have you seen it? Of course, we hosted a a, a, a
an under something. I can't remember exactly what it
was. Israel hosts a football
tournament. Israel's, you know, Israel is
brought into more and more. You have not only the Abraham
Accords, but you have the I think it was called the the
Negev Forum with all the Arab countries with whom Israel and
may peace. You have I2U2, USAUAE, Israel
and India. And in late September of 2023,
you have the announcement of something called IMEC, the India
Middle East Europe Corridor in the margins of the Indian hosted
G20. And off the back of that, Prime
Minister Netanyahu with his famous graphic nonsense, appears
at the UN at the annual General Assembly in late September 2023
and shows this map of all, of all the countries that Israel is
is rapidly normalizing with, even those it didn't have
relations with. And so you therefore had to make
the case that there was either something fundamentally morally
corroding and corrupting to Israel itself by continuing to
treat these people, treat Palestinians as they did, that
it would be corrosive to Israeli democracy.
You either had to make that case, or you had to make the
case that it was too much of A security albatross.
In a way, you were sending the message if you can't succeed
diplomatically, then there's only one way left.
Undermine our security. But the amazing thing about the
first part, the the Israel as a society, as a polity is going to
pay a price because you can't maintain this kind of cruel
dehumanization in your day-to-day interaction and
treatment of another people. You can't sustain that without
it fundamentally emptying your own Society of any values.
You can't sustain that. And the remarkable thing is, in
the months leading up to October 7th 2023, what did you have?
You had the largest ever mass St. protests and mobilisations
week after week in Israel against the judicial overhaul to
save Israeli democracy and those protests?
Almost never you had a small block, the anti occupation
block. You had a petition, the elephant
in the room, which talked about Palestinians, apartheid,
occupation, how that corrupts. But the the overwhelming message
of those things were save Israeli democracy without
acknowledging that the biggest blemish on that democracy, the
biggest affront to the law, the most corrosive thing for
Israel's inner values and well beings was its treatment and
remains its treatment of the Palestinians.
That is the backdrop to manufacturing consent for
genocide in the last two years. So you said that there's really
society, there's really community will pay the price for
this immorality of the Israeli actions.
But how are they going to be the price?
Because as you have mentioned earlier, economically Israel is
a thriving and everything seems good to the Israelis.
So how are they going to pay the price?
In what way? Well, I'm sorry, this is the
thing. If, if, if a society shifts into
a mentality that what we see in the last two years is OK.
And if those who, who fundamentally disagree with
that. And of course, there are
Israelis who Israeli Jews who fall into that category become
marginalized as dissenters. Then then everything becomes
normalized. Now, I, I would argue that you
then see the kind of society that the, the kind of way in
which Israelis self criminalize every day on social media,
right? So people taking pride in
genocidal acts, in incitement to genocide, in the commissioning
of of acts of such inhumane cruelty, proud to say and do
those things that that is a society in a horrible place.
Now, that's not the kind of cost, right?
So we're not saying, but OK. And yet it's thriving
economically. That fleeting moment when it
was, will Israel still be able to play in international sport?
Will Israel be able to participate in Eurovision?
That fleeting moment where we were saying is public pressure
going to lead to actual cuts in arms sales in trade with Israel?
Will Israelis as I think anyone in in in in any country that
that people can visit freely would perhaps want that
reassurance that anyone visiting right now who has, for instance,
served in the military in the last two years should at the
very least have to sign a a a a a a declaration that they were
not directly involved in the commissioning of genocidal acts
war crimes during that period. All of those things.
I'm not saying they were imminent, don't get me wrong,
but they were on the agenda. They were being discussed.
They're being discussed less now.
I don't personally, I don't think they're going to go away,
but the flip side or the continuation, more of everything
I've said is you only begin to change this if indeed costs and
consequences, a different incentive structure.
If the impunity is replaced by accountability, we're not there.
I think that is the that has been the challenge.
There were significant strides made.
That remains the challenge. Not because Israelis will go the
game's up. OK, what?
What do you want? Some land, but no.
But because it will force first of all on the fringes but then
increasingly mainstream, it will force a different conversation
inside Israeli society because right now not much is being done
by way of holding up a mirror. And what was engineered to
create this consent for genocide needs to be reverse engineered.
And I don't think you can expect Israeli society to summon that
from within. Do you think there will be a
time where when there's really society, there's really normal
average people will look in the mirror and a question what they
have done to Gaza and realize that what they have done to Gaza
is a criminal, it is bad, it is genocide.
Will they either wake up or you think, as long as this impunity
resists they? Will never wake up.
So my answer is going to be the signs are not good, but it's too
early to tell. So does that remarkable book
title. One day everyone will have been
against this. Is that also going to apply to
Israelis now that there are not living Israelis being held in
Gaza? Some Israelis I've spoken to
have described that as a moment where the sun finally set on
October 7th. OK, what it hasn't yet
translated into and the word yet may be optimistic of me to even
put it in the sentence. OK, what it hasn't translated
into is people saying what have we done?
Was that us? I need to know, did these things
that we've tried to keep out, that our media has worked very
hard to keep out, that we've been told rule lies, did those
things happen? You don't have an interrogation
of that question. You don't have in the Zionist
political camp that kind of a critique.
So it's almost a pathetic debate inside Israeli Zionist political
circles. Oh, as as Netanyahu appeased
Hamas too much, are we going to pay a price now on Saudi F35
fighter jet sales? We missed out on getting
normalization on the cheap. That there's there's the willful
denial and the continuation of that trend.
Is there a moment where something that's something that
we can't predict right now causes that to switch?
I, I, I won't say it's not inevitable at the moment.
If anything, the effort is still bludgeoned forward.
Killings every day, still in Gaza, preventing the aid from
getting in. Expansion of military operations
in the West Bank, still bombing Lebanon, still bombing Syria,
still talking about the Seven Front war, still a mobilized
militarized society. What can puncture that?
Is IS is probably the last in question.
Important question one has to address.
Again, at the risk of a sounding naively optimistic, I believe it
can be punctured. I believe societies that have
gone on a genocidal tilt, settler colonial societies have
landed in a different place, but not when there is an effort that
achieves enough of a degree and perhaps a significant degree of
success in normalising what it is doing.
The fact that Israel is not alone in saying well, there's a
ceasefire now, of course there isn't, move on, Nothing to see
here. Anyone who still wants to obsess
over this support posted idea of suffering of these people who
had it coming, Who's that effort is absolutely the shared effort
of Israel's Western allies and perhaps not just its Western
allies. So here in the UK and elsewhere,
it's what? Why would anyone still want to
talk about this? We'll have a conference on aid.
Maybe we'll commit to put some money.
Maybe we'll have three children come here for some medical
treatment, but nothing to see here move on.
So as long as there is enough success in this shared effort to
normalize this situation, it will be harder to puncture that.
But, and I, and I will say this, I think there has been a shift
in the cultural zeitgeist. I think even if one sees.
An abeyance. Even if one sees a lessening of
the mobilization, it's still there.
What people have seen can't be unseen.
People have been politicized around this issue in ways that
it's not going to go away. And one of the main sources of
evidence for me of this change is how actually insane and
totally living in their own dogmatic bubble are the
apologists for this stuff. So when someone who I'd never
heard of, most of us have probably never heard of Sarah
Hurwitz, I don't even know how to say the, the, the, the
surname suddenly goes viral with absolutely.
And and she clearly thinks she's, she's making a really
great point and people look at it and say, did, did, did
something happen to this person? So the the insanity of the
supportive bubble suggests to me that it's not working so well in
her particular instance. Maybe she thinks there's a great
career to be had in this. She sees what's happened to
Barry Weiss, but I don't know. So it's been 26 months since
October the 7th started. There's really military
destroyed. Gaza destroyed the vast majority
of Gaza, building, streets, infrastructure killed.
I don't know how many people in Gaza, their least estimates
70,000, some people say more of 100,000.
They damaged Hamas hugely, to be honest.
They destroyed Hezbollah to some extent.
They bombed Iran, they bombed even Doha.
They bombed the Yemenis and the Houthis.
But my question to you, has Israel really achieved its
military objectives in this war? So first of all, the, the, the
level of destruction is the loss of human life and the human
suffering is incalculable really.
And while there are legitimate and less legitimate
conversations to be had around what reconstruction looks like,
one of the modalities who's in charge?
The truth that we are all facing is I, I, we're struggling to
come to terms with what the obliteration of the fabric of
life in Gaza will mean because that's what we've seen.
And you know, I think it's as of us having this conversation, 582
bodies have been pulled from the rubble and that number is just
going to keep going up. The consequences will be felt
for a generation if not more. And we also see subsequent to
the so-called ceasefire that even in death, Jewish Israelis
and Palestinian Arabs are separate and unequal.
So you can build bring a rubble clearing equipment to search for
bodies into. Gaza for the Israelis.
In order to look for dead Jews, dead Israeli Jews, you can't
bring that equipment in to look for dead Palestinians.
So thousands of thousands. So even in death this this
system of separate and unequal carries over.
Now you could say that obliteration rendering this
space uninhabitable is is a success on the Israeli side in
and of itself. Because it was an objective of
the war. Because I think it became an
objective. I mean, I think if we'd have
been having a conversation in September 2023, I think one
would have said, look, Israel withdrew from Gaza and the
signal it wanted to send and the signal that was absorbed inside
Israelis, we must never do that again.
But going back into Gaza, why do you need it?
Gaza's sealed off. You got 2 million Palestinians.
You don't want to bring them. Yeah, you don't want to bring
them back into the demographic equation.
One of the things that Israel felt it had achieved was it had
removed the two plus million, 2.3 million perhaps Palestinians
in Gaza from this question of the demographic equation in
Greater Israel. Easier to digest the West Bank.
I think what happens after October is well if those two
millionaire back in the equation, how can we get them
out the equation again. And so permanent displacement
and ethnic cleansing is still very much on the agenda and what
you start in Gaza you will replicate in the West Bank.
But then of course, you get what what I think by any reckoning
would be considered military successes in terms of more
broadly the axis of resistance. So when it comes to Hezbollah
clearly diminished capacity, I think Iran is much more
complicated. The fall of Assad in Syria was
clearly not by Israeli design, but Israel is seeking to see how
it can utilize that Gaza much more complicated.
How small? Well.
You can see in the attempts to now say, well, now you have to
disarm. Well, what you couldn't achieve
militarily now, yes, you're not going to achieve an agreement
now. Now, yes, Hamas has been
depleted. Hamas access to arms is, is much
different to what it was. Hamas actually is putting
forward a a very realist position when it comes to how a
long term ceasefire could be sustained.
The kinds of things that one would see elsewhere where the
conflict has not been resolved, where the, the, the, the
aggressive military occupation is there, but there can be an
extended period of ceasefire there.
Non display of weapons, the kinds of weapons that could
perhaps be handed to a trusted third party, et cetera.
Israel is not interested in any of these practical ways forward.
And therein I would say, lies the weakness, the deep weakness
of the Israeli approach because it has no political plan.
It's political plan is domination in the region by
virtue of permanent military superiority.
Israel doesn't have a political plan to go along with that other
than come under our wing other than subjugation.
Which is why, although this may look like a hegemonic plan, it's
probably the wrong word to use because a hegemon has to have a
project that isn't reliant exclusively on permanent
military domination. The Israeli bet is no one can
match us and that the Arab and regional states are sufficiently
compartmentalized in these post colonial nation state structures
that they were put into. And those nation states have to
look out for themselves. So the the leadership of any of
any of those given states in the region will say, well, I need to
look after my own interests. Can we make common cause with
them? Yeah, but we don't really trust
them. Yes, our public watches on their
devices what's being done to Palestinians.
They want us to do more, but that's uncomfortable.
But it's not something we're going to sacrifice our elite
interest in favour of. So the Israeli bet is that even
if Israel is the number one radicalizing, destabilizing
actor in the region, even if Israel is now perceived as a
direct threat to the security of other regional actors, the
bombing in Doha being the most blatant example, even if that is
the case, the states will not be able to come together.
They won't challenge Israel. They will look to double down on
what have been proven to be quite useless security
guarantees from America. I would argue that while that
bet does not sound crazy to any of us who know the region, it is
quite a risky bet because Israel keeps going down the path of
overreach, of more hubris, of taking on more.
And it isn't. It is ignoring the limitations
to its own resilience, which I would argue exist.
Tell me more about these limitations.
Yeah, I will and I and that's ignoring the geopolitical
shifts. So these are emerging in
different ways and and I think there are things that people
understandably pay less attention to in terms of what's
going on in Israel. So one of the things of course
is the extreme ideology. It would be nice if I could tell
you that this is limited to bank variance.
Mantrich and Netanyahu it isn't. They may be qualitatively
different, but I'm not hearing from the so-called Zionist
opposition a fundamentally different vision.
So they'll stay in 30% or 50% of Gaza, not resettle 100% of Gaza.
Yes, there's a difference there. It will be the job more of the
military to remove Palestinians in the West Bank, not the job of
settler militias. OK, there's a, there is a
difference there. But the, the, the ideological
overreach is, is goes quite deep now.
So that's one thing you have, other things you have.
What does Prime Minister Netanyahu do every week?
The beginning of every week, he sends his lawyers to the High
Court. Netanyahu is still in the
process of being cross examined on a weekly basis in the Israeli
High Court. So people may not know this.
Every week his lawyers have to go to the High Court and say the
Prime Minister would really like to not be available on Tuesday,
Wednesday afternoon and Thursday because he has urgent security
matters to deal with. To sustain the credibility of
that appeal to the court, to let Netanyahu off from showing up in
court and being cross examined, you have to be on a permanent
security putting. So there are things like that,
but then there are things that are much more significant.
There are things to do with the Israeli economy and how military
Keynesianism has been deployed in an unusual way in the last
two years, notably around how you've kept reservists showing
up for reserve duty. There's things to do with that.
There's things to do with fragmentation in Israeli
society. The ultra Orthodox, the Haridim
who don't serve in the military, who make up a significant part
of the population, the alien nation of the 48, a Palestinian
Israeli community. So it's it's quite a fragmented
society The the the fact that in the military, it's not a this
isn't a military that has endless reserves of manpower to
keep people coming in serving for for endless amounts of time.
Israel's pain threshold. We saw it wasn't so simple.
Everyone says, oh, the 12 day war with Iran was a cakewalk.
It wasn't so simple. They were running out of
interceptor missiles. So if you look at these
vulnerabilities inside Israeli society, you look at the
mobilization that has gone on on the outside, what's missing is
something that threads these things together and that poses a
different kind of strategic challenge.
But the building blocks for bringing home the limitations,
the areas where the resilience is not there, the divisions in
society, there are real options there.
And then finally we had this American, Israeli, Arab peace
plan, they call it peace plan and ceasefire.
And it's, it wasn't clear there was no actually ceasefire in
Gaza. Every day at least 8
Palestinians are killed. There is a cell very limited
number of trucks that enter Gaza.
Even the goods that they provide to the Gazans is not essentials
at all to have like iPhone 17 and sugary and Nutella and the
sweets no essentials and Israel sell bombing Gaza every day.
This morning Israel bomb Gaza again.
So I what I want to ask you Daniel is what is actually what
was actually discipline beyond the headlines and the the talks
that we hear from the Americans and the Israelis.
Is it going to be accomplished as it was said or is there
anything else that we don't know about?
Well, first of all, you read the plan, you immediately understand
serious people did not draft this plan, let alone people who
understand the region or what is needed or what could be a
genuine path forward. So what you see is in this 20
point plan, which then becomes UN Security Council Resolution
2803, very little is agreed, right?
The only things that are agreed are the release of the Israelis,
the release of Palestinian prisoners, the key for how many
dead Palestinians, dead Palestinians will be returned in
exchange for the dead Israelis. So by the way, Israel says how
inhumane to keep bodies, which I agree with.
By the way, what's Israel doing? It will release 15 now, we don't
know how many bodies Israel will still be keeping once once that
stops, let alone how many people are still being disappeared, are
still being abused. OK, and that's it, right?
The only other thing you have in that agreement is the aid, which
is important and totally violated. 600 trucks a day was
supposed to be the minimum. If you calculate according to
the UN data how many trucks have gone in, it works out since
October 10th. Since the ceasefire, it works
out at about 108 a day, some days zero.
And as you say, look at what is being allowed in.
So you had that and then you have this.
This is the the one of the most problematic things is everyone
signed up for it. What is in that plan?
Hamas agrees and it says in the plan they've agreed to not be
part of the governance structure, which is true.
It was true before October of 2023, by the way, as you know,
as I know, we could have had Palestinian elections.
Sure, Israel, the Americans made those elections more difficult,
but who called off the elections?
Mahmoud Abbas calls off the elections.
So. But what Hamas does not agree to
and won't agree to, and no party that is a resistance while an
illegal belligerent occupation is still going on, will agree to
and has agreed to in history is disarmed.
It's not disarmed. So you have now a gift to
Israel, which is it can continue.
And protects for the continuation of the war.
Exactly. It can continue not to do
anything because it says well the disarmament, but the
disarmament isn't agreed. Even the language of the 20
point plan doesn't say it's agreed, it puts it in the plan.
So what has gone on? Understandably, the hope was
just get the cease-fire, let's stop seeing triple digits killed
every day, Let's get the aid in that.
We've seen some of that. We're almost at 400 though
killed since the so-called ceasefire.
But the hope was that that could lead on to other things.
That hope was not born out of a solid reading of the reality or
the intentionalities. And Netanyahu was quite clear in
terms of what he intended to keep doing.
I think there was this premise, maybe you could build cracks
between Trump and Netanyahu, but look at the team around Trump.
Look at not just Jared Kushner and and Witkoff and others, but
look at who is sitting there day in, day out.
Rea Lightstone, who was the, I don't know, the assistant to
Kushner in the first term, who has worked on the the Abraham
Accords in his own institute ever since.
So these are people thoroughly marinated in Israeli maximalist
positions. Yes, you do have a crack inside
the MAGA movement, but that crack is not being felt on
Palestine in a palpable way. And the hope perhaps was as if
you remembered before the plan, so-called plan is agreed,
President Trump meets with the in New York, with the leaders of
eight Arab and Muslim majority states.
So in addition to those from the region, you have Indonesia,
Pakistan, Turkia. And the hope was these are
people who he clearly has affinity with who can pick up
the phone to Trump that could act as some kind of count
counterbalance to all the Netanyahu whisperers in Trump's
ear. But, and it's a big caveat, the
Netanyahu cohort have their talking points, they have
message discipline and they all repeat the same thing.
The 8 states all have their their states.
It will, it goes back to what I said about these nation state
actors. They have their own equities
with the US, with Trump in the tariff wars, in other things
that they have going on with their own defense arrangements,
with the things they want to buy, the things they want to
avoid. I'm not saying Palestine doesn't
appear on the agenda. Is it item number one?
Probably not. Are they coordinated?
Do they trust each other? Are they going to delegate to
one of those parties to write robust talking points to go to
Trump with? And crucially, is there a
Palestinian National Liberation movement which defines what the
strategy is? No.
And this is what's even worse. And this is what is in the
Security Council resolution. So where are we going now?
So what? So what is in that resolution is
that President Abbas undermines everything that Palestine has
achieved in the international legal arena with the ICJ
advisory opinion of July 2024 and says these are the things we
have to do as Palestinians in order to get our rights.
And that is now enshrined in the UN resolution, which is a
precedent. It's a terrible precedent.
The option still exists that without these partner countries
who are partners to the agreement, one will not get an
international stabilization force which Trump apparently
wants. One will not get the investments
which Trump apparently wants. But those things are still not
being deployed. Nothing prevents A Palestinian
National Salvation Front politically from filling that
vacuum. In reality, of course, many
things do prevent it. The current structures don't
exist. Coincidentally, the current
structures serve Israel, serve the US in many respects, serve
those leadership, those states in the region who want this to
be quiet and down. All of those things will need to
be challenged if we are going to get out of what increasingly
looks like a trap where the American president can say peace
after 3000 years. It's an awfully long wait for
not very much peace. He can make that claim.
Israel remains in occupation of more than 50% of Gaza.
It is trying to make permanent this dividing line within Gaza.
We hear talk of building new communities, the so-called
alternative safe communities. I'm pretty sure that money will
flow to some contractors, to some consultants in in this
whole process. I don't think you're going to
see Palestinians in Gaza saying, where do I sign up to come and
live under the occupation of the people who just genocided me?
And what we can also be quite sure of is these things aren't
going to happen because Israel's cruelty and dehumanization of
Palestinians mean that these won't be zones.
So what you have instead, whether it's in the West Bank or
in Gaza or in the broader region, is the continuation of
this permanent, perpetual overreach, hubristic, maximalist
war footing by a country that has significant vulnerabilities.
But those are not being challenged or tested by a
strategy of a liberation movement of the people who've
just been genocide. You put all that together and
there's plenty to possibly work with.
Daniel, what a very depressing point to end with, but I'm aware
of the time you have another appointment to attend.
So thank you very, very much for joining us today, and I really
hope we will do another podcast very soon.
Before 4 years. Before 4 years, of course.
I, I, I want to say this, I don't want to be depressing.
I, I think we have seen remarkable resilience in the
most impossible of circumstances from Palestinians.
I think we have seen a remarkable mobilization, people
not just aligning themselves with this cause of justice, but
people also seeing the injustices in their own
societies and in the world in which they live through the eyes
of the lies that they're being told by their leaders on
Palestine and what can be done. So we've seen a remarkable
mobilization. If I can say I think there is an
unprecedented debate inside my own Jewish community.
People look people saying not enough, we have lots of work to
do, but people saying this isn't not who we are, not the lessons
we learned from our history. And in Israel, I see that that
there are ways of challenging this by ending by changing that
incentive structure. So I see all those things.
It's not that there aren't threads to pull on and, and, and
I don't want to suggest to people that give up none of
this. Most of the things that gave
openings, that gave moments of hope and actual things that
moved forward were because people tried to hold their
political leaders to account. They went on the streets, they
voted, they raised their voices, they challenged their media,
they challenged their politicians.
And I think if we continue to do those things, then the journey
to change is there, we can see it, it's achievable.
It's not the time to give. Up.
I think that journey has started already has started for since 2
years and I think it will continue to grow and become
bigger and bigger. And I'm very happy that we're
ending with a hopeful note, which is a blessing.
Thank you very much. Thank you so much.
It's really good to see you.