Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. One thing about the Israel-Hamas war is that there are divisions on the political Left that are painful right now in various ways to people in various communities who often agree on other things. After last Sunday's pro-Palestinian rally in Times Square, endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America just a day after the initial attack by Hamas terrorists, for example, and which Politico reported included chants of, "Resistance is justified when people are occupied," and cited reports of a Nazi emblem being shown and Israeli flags burned and trodden on, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, obviously a prominent member of the DSA, issued a statement saying, "The bigotry and callousness expressed in Times Square on Sunday were unacceptable and harmful in this devastating moment. It also did not speak for the thousands of New Yorkers who are capable of rejecting Hamas' horrifying attacks against innocent civilians, as well as the grave injustices and violence Palestinians face under occupation." From AOC.

We're seeing divisions on college campuses as this will be a day of protest around the country and around the world. The student body president of NYU's Law School had a job offer rescinded after posting in a newsletter, "Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life. I will not condemn Palestinian resistance," among other things. Harvard is in a debate about a similar statement by a coalition of student groups also holding Israel entirely responsible for last weekend's attacks by Hamas.

We'll get the views now of Julia Ioffe, founding partner and Washington correspondent for the national politics site, Puck News, and co-host of their newsletter, Powers That Be-- oh, co-host of their podcast, I should say, Powers That Be. She's been on before with reporting and views primarily about the war in Ukraine. In a Puck newsletter, she writes, and what she calls a personal note, it begins with a lament that both sides had already hardened to the point where a two-state solution had come to be seen as impossible for now, and the events of the last week will ensure that even the embers of those hopes are doused cold, as she put it.

She then draws on her Russian-Jewish background to write about what she calls historical illiteracy informing some of the political response with respect to the Jewish experience. We'll let Julia explain in more detail in her own words. We'll also touch a bit, in the context of her Washington reporter role, on the shocking development last night in the race for Speaker of the House that Steve Scalise, basically the only candidate, pulled out.

Julia, it's so awful that it's under these circumstances, but welcome back to WNYC.

Julia Ioffe: Hi, Brian. Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: You wrote that what's happening in the Mideast right now is deeply, deeply personal for you in a way that goes back generations, and it's not just about the Holocaust. Where would you like to start to explain that?

Julia Ioffe: Well, I think this is one of the issues at the core of this conflict is, where do you start the historical clock? Because in the end, I believe that both Palestinians and Jews have a real and legitimate historical claim to this land, and both communities have suffered greatly, great violence, great dispossession, and that trauma has so informed both of the communities' responses.

I think what I see being left out of the political discourse on the Left and the responses on the Left is any acknowledgment whatsoever that Jews also have a real claim to this land. There is the imposition, the projection of anti-colonialist discourse onto this, and parts of it do have a place, but this isn't exactly the British in the subcontinent, or the Belgians in the Congo. The Jews are people who are from there. They're from this same piece of land that the Palestinians are from. It's a tiny piece of land and, unfortunately, they're both from there.

The Jews lived there 2,000 years ago. I get it, it's a very long time, but again, it's a question of when you start the clock. There has been a continuous presence in this part of the world by Jews, despite the fact of their violent, violent expulsion by the Romans and the renaming of what was then known as Judea to Palaestina. The Jews were then scattered all over the world, including across the Middle East, where a lot of Jews who are not white are from. They, of course, were violently dispossessed themselves after 1948.

This is another part that is very much left out of the discourse, this historical fact, that Israel is not a rogue state. This isn't exactly apartheid South Africa in terms of a white-settler state that just took over and declared itself a state. The state of Israel was created by the UN. It was created by the United Nations. There would be no Israel without it. It is a state that was created and, in some ways, blessed by the international community. There was also a Palestinian state that was supposed to be alongside it. It was not contiguous, not very much a defendable state, but that was the case for what Israel was as well under the UN plan.

The Jews, who had just been decimated in the Holocaust, took whatever they could get. The Palestinians wanted more also, understandably. I understand why both sides did what they did. In the war that followed, when Palestinians fought back and Arab countries invaded, Jews from all over the Middle East, from Yemen, from Iraq, from Iran, from Syria, from North Africa, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, were violently expelled and dispossessed. There were nearly a million of them, and a lot of them came to Israel.

Again, it's a question of, what do we highlight? What facts do we omit? Where do we start the clock? Whose claim to the land is more valid than somebody else's? What I find on the extremes of both sides of this discourse is that there is a selective erasure of the other side. You see this in the right wing of the Zionist movement of Israeli politics, right wing here in the US as well, saying that the Palestinians are just Arabs. There wasn't a real Palestinian people. They're not real. This is just something created to basically get in Israel's way, which is also not true.

This kind of erasure of the very complex and messy fact that both of these traumatized people have a real historical claim to the land, I think makes a solution more difficult to reach. Because how do you figure out a political solution to this without a full grasp of the facts? I wager that you can't.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take your calls for Julia Ioffe from Puck News on the complexity that she was laying out, and the question of whether we can have a full grasp of history that respects both sides and moves this somewhere beyond the awful position that it's in now and, frankly, the awful stalemate that it's been in for so long.

Julia Ioffe: Absolutely.

Brian Lehrer: Are you a Jewish listener with similar historical backgrounds and feeling similar things about historical illiteracy on that side, as Julia was just describing? Are you a Palestinian or anyone else focused on historical illiteracy regarding them? Tell us a personal story of your own if you like, ask Julia a question, or comment on the news from the region today or what good might possibly come of any of this. These conversations are hard. I know for everyone, so much pain and death everywhere right now and for so long in both communities. We can only try to have conversations in good faith that don't erase either side but respect both sides' pain. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. We'll also touch on Steve Scalise pulling out of the House Speaker's race, increasing the chaos there, and you can call about that too. 212-433-WNYC. Call or text.

Let me play a clip, Julia, of the former Palestinian peace negotiator and Minister of Higher Education, Hanan Ashrawi, on NPR's Morning Edition today, in which she argues that much of the Western world has kind of an opposite historical illiteracy than the one you were describing with respect to historical illiteracy toward the Jews. Asked about the horrific images of violence against civilians perpetrated by Hamas last weekend, she said this.

Hanan Ashrawi: These are the kinds of images that we have seen where the Palestinians have been on the receiving end; the killing of civilians, the terror and so on. I think that it's very tragic what is happening, but it didn't come out of the blue because the Israelis have been brutally oppressing the Palestinians systematically and Hamas has been telling them stop it. Everybody has been telling them stop it. Ultimately, when you are arrogant and when you feel that you can do anything and get away with it, because Israel has been acting with full impunity, then this type of arrogance breeds complacency, where you feel you don't have to in any way listen to your victim or even to international law and the international community.

Brian Lehrer: Hanan Ashrawi on Morning Edition today. Julia Ioffe from Puck News with us. What's your reaction to that clip and to her take on historical illiteracy? You do write about ethnonationalism in Israel fueling ethnonationalism among the Palestinians, so in that context or whatever your reaction is.

Julia Ioffe: I think it's true that this attack didn't come out of the blue. At the root of what is happening all of this last week is what we talked about, is what happened in 1947 and 1948 and long before that. I would say, though, that-- here's what I would say. It is true that the Palestinian people have been oppressed. The occupation under which they live in the West Bank and Gaza has been absolutely brutal and it's getting worse, especially under the current government-- well, the government we had before this emergency unity government in Israel.

I would argue, though, that aside from things like Sabra and Shatila, you have not seen things like this in the Palestinian territories. You have not seen rogue factions from the Israeli side go in and slaughter 1,300 civilians in a matter of hours, including killing babies in their beds and kidnapping 150 people. I think the scale of this and the tactics used is just different. That doesn't in any way denigrate or diminish the violence that Palestinians have been living under and the dehumanizing occupation that they've been living under, but we don't have to say everything is equal. I was just having this conversation last night with a historian, that the history that simmers, as it were, is in these nuances.

The other thing I would say is that again, where do you start the clock? I think that the Israeli population has definitely hardened to this problem. One of the first things I thought when I saw the news about the rave and 260 kids getting gunned down is that they were ostensibly dancing for peace, they were doing so in this carefree, happy way, just a couple miles from where people lived in brutal, awful conditions in the Gaza Strip. There's a certain way in which Israeli society has become detached from the problem. They felt that if we can contain it to the territories, there's a certain level of acceptable violence that we can live with as long as it doesn't threaten us existentially. I think that's where these attacks crossed over in the minds of a lot of Jews and Israelis.

The other thing I would say is that again, I think where Israelis really hardened was after 2000 when the Palestinians, in the Israeli eyes, walked away from a very good deal. What Israelis got from offering more than they were comfortable offering was the Second Intifada, where buses were being blown up by Hamas and other terrorist groups and cafes were being blown up. There was a sense, I think, that really took root and deepened in Israel that the Palestinians don't want to make a deal. This isn't about these territories.

Again, when we talk about the occupation, I think different groups mean different things by it. Some people mean the territories that Israel occupied after the 1967 war, and some people mean the entire thing. Again, I think in all the yelling and all of the finger-pointing and all the memes and virtue signaling on social media, a lot of this gets lost of, what are we actually talking about, what actually happened, and where do we go from here? Again, where do you start the clock and what facts do you include?

Because when you include all the facts, then it's a much more complicated picture, and that's what human history is, that's what human politics is, that's what international relations is. Unfortunately, we've come to a place in our public debate where complexity is seen as moral equivocation or acknowledging that complexity is seen as moral equivocation, when in fact it's a way to diagnose the problem. If you can't accurately diagnose the problem, I don't see how you can actually go forward in solving it, and I fear that it's becoming more unsolvable by the day.

Brian Lehrer: Here's a text from a listener on the question of where we start history that you're raising. Listener writes, "A 2,000-year-old claim can't be equated to people who are living there now, for heaven's sake. The Norman invasion of England was less than 1,000 years ago. Should we kick all Norman descendants out of their homes, seize their farms, ghettoize them like the Palestinians have been, and replace with people who were there 2,000 years ago?"

Julia Ioffe: No, but I think what happened in '48 and before that was some of that, some of what you're describing, and also some settlement where people bought land, this became their property. I would challenge the listener to ask herself the same question about the Israelis. What do you do with the fact that Jews have been living there now for almost 80 years? Do you dispossess them? Do you kick them out? I mean, what happened in 1948 was a tragedy for the Palestinians, but now we have a different reality on the ground. What do you do with that?

Another thing I've been thinking about is Monday was Indigenous Peoples' Day, and there's a lot of, again, virtue signaling that let's acknowledge that we're-- right now I'm sitting in the WNYC Studios on stolen Indigenous land. A lot of the American Left that is talking about decolonizing Israel, let's decolonize America as well, but I think people don't want to give up their homes that they built, that they bought. There are people who arrived there much later that didn't dispossess Palestinians. What do you do with the fact that both of these people have a real claim to this land, have real connections there, have homes there? Do you dispossess and kick out another population and create more tragedy?

I'm not saying that one was okay and one isn't. I'm just saying that this is a profoundly complex and messy ball of problems. Again, what is the solution that your listener is offering?

Brian Lehrer: Neil in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with Julia Ioffe from Puck News. Hi, Neil.

Neil: Hi, Brian. Well, kudos to your guest. I was not familiar with her previously. I studied the Israel-Palestine conflict at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown and worked in a think tank in DC, talking about the two-state proposal in the late '70s and '80s long before Oslo. I would just like to add on to her excellent historical narrative that up to the '48/'49 war, Jordan had control of the West Bank. Under the UN partition plan, that West Bank was supposed to be the core of the Palestinian state, but instead of Jordan helping to make a Palestinian state out of that land, it annexed it. That's how Transjordan became the Kingdom of Jordan. Analogously, Egypt had control of the Gaza Strip, also supposed to be part of the Palestinian state, and Egypt did nothing with it except begin the process of turning the Gaza Strip into a horrific slum.

To a certain extent, not so much the Palestinians themselves, but the Arab countries around it prevented the creation of a Palestinian state when they could have created it in 1948, 1949, 1950. I still think the two-state proposal was the only way to go forward and establish an enduring peace, except also the reality is, as your guest points out, any negotiations or hope for that right now are, I don't want to say dead, but moribund, and it's tragic. I don't see the way forward. I wish I did. I do not.

Brian Lehrer: Neil, thank you for your call. Julia, what about his take on history, which blames the Arab nations, primarily?

Julia Ioffe: Oh, I didn't get the sense that your listener, Neil, was blaming the Arab states, primarily. I think what he was saying is that again, here's another layer of why this is complicated, and that it isn't a story of good versus evil and black versus white. I think he's absolutely right. There have been many times-- I mean, let's talk about the fact that millions of Palestinians live in refugee camps in Arab countries and that these countries have not assimilated them. That they keep them in these camps, they keep them segregated.

Let's talk about the fact that, yes, the Israeli government bombed the Rafah Border Crossing in the last few days, but Egypt, which has also been actively blockading Gaza, which we don't often hear about. Gaza has basically four sides and one of the sides is blockaded by Egypt. Egypt, just the other day, said it refused to take Palestinians trying to flee the fighting in Gaza, let's be frank, the Israeli bombardments of Gaza, because the government of Egypt doesn't like Hamas. Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, which the current government of Egypt has been violently suppressing. To act like this is this very simple morality tale happening in a vacuum and not in a very complex region, ignores, again, a lot of facts.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take another call. Here's Sohab in Paramus. You're on WNYC. Hello, Sohab.

Sohab: Hello. How are you? Just, I guess, a couple of points. First, to give perspective. I am a first-generation Palestinian-American. I actually lived in the West Bank from about '93 to 2002. Firsthand experienced how, unfortunately, Palestinians are treated there. Went through having to go through blockades. My school was shot at multiple times. I, just for walking in the street, for doing absolutely nothing, was shot at. In any case, I guess we'll ignore all that.

I love how the person you have there used the UN and how the UN had set up a state of Israel. Well, let's go to that. What does the UN consider the West Bank and Gaza? They consider them occupied territories. It's known to everybody, right? Occupation is illegal. You're not allowed to have settlements in those areas. Yet, what has continued year after year after year is more building of settlements, more incursions into occupied territories consistently by the Israeli forces, taking in prisoners, taking in children prisoners and continually killing people.

What's happening in Gaza now is not new to Gaza. It's not because, well, Hamas went out and did what they did. It's a constant thing that continually happens. Just from the beginning of this year up to before this, there were over 350 people killed, including children. It's not really mentioned anywhere. This is a constant thing that happens consistently. Yet, when Palestinians do something, the entire world turns around and says, terrorists.

It was called by their own Defense Minister when they said that, okay, we're going to shut down water, cut down food and everything, which Israel controls, which is a war crime. I don't know why when you cover it, you say it's possibly a war crime. It's not possibly a war crime. You're cutting down necessities, essentials to 2.2 million people in an area that you control. It is occupied, it's controlled by you. You're the one that blockaded it everywhere. It is absolutely a war crime, yet that's not really mentioned anywhere.

With all due respect, yes, you can look back 2,000 years, you can look back however far you want to go back, and there are Jews that have lived there forever, lived side by side with Palestinians-- let alone, Palestinians, actually, when the Jews came in before '48, they welcomed them. They welcomed them to their areas. They lived side by side. They were neighbors. What happened in '48? You're like, nothing exists? You cannot equate what the Palestinians are going through at all, ever, for the past 70 years to anything that the Jews have gone through in Palestine. [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: Sohab, let me get a reaction from Julia. Thank you for putting so much on the table. Julia, there was a lot there. Where would you like to enter?

Julia Ioffe: Well, first of all, Sohab, you said, "Let's ignore all that." I don't in any way want to ignore what you went through and what your friends and family go through on a daily basis in the West Bank and Gaza, which are illegally occupied territories. It is horrible, it is brutal, and it is illegal. What the Israeli government has been doing in terms of settlements and seizure of Palestinian homes and Palestinian lands, and the way it has treated Palestinians in these areas, is indefensible and I have never defended it. I think it is horrifying and unjust. I hear the pain in your voice, and I get it. It's horrible, and I can understand why you are hurt and angry and despondent and why so many Palestinians are as well. I don't want to diminish that in any way.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue in a minute with Julia Ioffe, co-founder of and Washington correspondent for Puck News. When we come back, Julia, I want to pick up on the other part of Sohab's call, which is about what's going on right now. Of course, there's this dramatic development in recent hours that Israel is ordering over a million people in north Gaza to evacuate to the south. We'll also talk about the domestic politics of this with your Washington correspondent hat on. Listeners, stay with us. Brian Lehrer on WNYC.

Brian Lehrer on WNYC, as we continue with Julia Ioffe, founding partner of and Washington correspondent for the national politics site, Puck News, and co-host of their podcast, Powers That Be. I'll say as I did in the introduction, because that's almost a half-hour ago now, that she's been on before with reporting and views primarily about the war in Ukraine, which we'll touch on very briefly, and that in a Puck newsletter, she writes- she put what she calls a personal note that begins with a lament that both sides had already hardened to the point where a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians had come to seem impossible for now, and the events of the last week will ensure that even the embers of those hopes are doused cold, as she put it.

She then draws on her Russian-Jewish background to write about what she calls historical illiteracy informing some of the political responses with respect to the Jewish experience, particularly on the Left. We'll continue to talk about the politics of that as we go and take some more calls and texts.

Julia, can I get your take on today's development of Israel telling a million people in northern Gaza to evacuate to the south in 24 hours? The New York Times headline is Panic Grips Gaza as Israel tells 1.1 million to Leave the North. Having the mix of feelings that you have about the whole thing, what's your reaction to the morality or necessity of that?

Julia Ioffe: I personally was at a loss for words when I saw that. It's an incredible number of people to move in 24 hours and to do so safely, as the UN has pointed out, but more than that, where do they go? Where do you put a million people who are already in one of the most densely populated places in the world, who are now living under constant bombardment, who are without food and water and electricity and medicine? They can squish into southern Gaza and make things even more horrific down there. They can't go into Israel, they can't go into Egypt. Neither country will let them in. The only thing left is the sea. I truly was at a loss for words. It is an impossible, almost alchemical demand. I just don't understand how the physics of that would even work. It is a grotesque demand in my view.

I did want to come back to what your listener Sohab said. I think, again, there's this idea that before 1948, there was this kumbaya situation in what is now is Israel-Palestine. That was not the case. There was, obviously, Palestinians living there, hundreds of thousands of them. There were tens of thousands of Jews, with more arriving. The arrival of these Jews actually resulted in a lot of violence and tension between the Jewish and Arab communities there, with Jews attacking Palestinians and Palestinians attacking Jews. This is where the origins of the Israeli Army are in, are these settler defense communities because there was constant fighting back and forth between the two groups before 1948, and the partition of Palestine was intended in some way to alleviate that and to give each side something.

I worry, again, going forward that we now have both the Israeli side and the Palestinian side that have completely maximalist demands, which is why I say the two-state solution is dead. I have not heard anybody really on either side mention it. Everybody wants their own one state in the whole thing without the other party. Whether you want a Palestine from the river to the sea or an Israel from the river to the sea, both erase the other group of people and not just theoretically, because having that one state would necessitate the physical erasure of these people. That is what is incredibly terrifying to me.

Brian Lehrer: I've seen some people on various television channels say that while they do not support the tactics of Hamas at all and the gruesome attacks of last week and ongoing holding of the hostages and all of it, it is possible that while the world looked the other way for so long, this will actually put the conversation about a two-state solution on the map again because Israel can't just ignore it. Do you think there's any possibility of that?

Julia Ioffe: I have no idea. Right now, when Israelis are still identifying the bodies of the dead and giving DNA samples and looking for their loved ones, aren't sure if they've been killed in these kibbutzim or are still hostage in Gaza; while Palestinians are under constant, round-the-clock bombardment, running out of fuel, water, medicine, the hospitals at capacity and now perhaps at risk of-- I mean, the area that Israel wants evacuated in 24 hours impossibly includes the biggest hospital in Gaza.

I don't see how these two populations who are in acute fight-or-flight mode can sit down and talk. Maybe this is something that spearheads it later, maybe, but again, after what Hamas has done to Israelis, what Israelis are doing to Palestinians, again, I can't fathom it.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, nobody can imagine, it seems right now, how this ends or certainly how it ends well. If both sides seem committed to a fight to the death that includes physical erasure, we don't know how this ends.

Julia Ioffe: No, we don't, and history has shown us time and again that predicting is a fool's errand.

Brian Lehrer: Now the US won't denounce the order for a million-plus Palestinians to leave the north of Gaza in the next 24 hours. Here's Pentagon spokesman John Kirby on MSNBC this morning.

John Kirby: That's going to be a tall order, given how densely populated it is, given that it's a scene of combat. There are bombs falling and strikes happening. That is a lot of people to move in a very short period of time. We recognize the challenge there. I think the IDF recognizes the challenge there. We don't want to be too much into the armchair quarterbacking about everything that they're doing at a tactical level, but again, we understand what they're trying to do and why they're trying to do this; to try to isolate the civilian population from Hamas, which is their real target.

Brian Lehrer: Pentagon spokesman John Kirby. Surprised by that at all?

Julia Ioffe: No, not at all. I think what you've seen coming from the Biden administration since Saturday is a firm commitment to Israel and not publicly second-guessing or questioning their decisions. I'm sure there are conversations happening in the background, but their clear policy has been-- and you saw it in an interview earlier this morning with John Feiner, the Deputy National Security Advisor, with Politico's Playbook, where he said, the last thing we're going to do is publicly address suggestions to them.

I think there's also a political calculation being made here domestically. That Biden, as he heads into a tough reelection campaign, one of the things that, to use a charged word, the Republican Party has colonized in this country is support for Israel. It's done with some grotesque motivations, including theological and eschatological ones, being that if Jews all go back to Israel, it will usher in the second coming of Christ. The believers will be raptured. Us Jews, we'll all die a horrible death, and the Muslims will too.

This used to be a bipartisan position, support of Israel, and it has been fracturing the Democratic Party. I think the calculation that the Biden administration is making here is that actually, support for Israel is more popular than meets the eye, especially in that middle, and that that's what they're going to go for going into this election. Part of that is publicly reiterating over and over again that they're backing Israel to the hilt, they've got their back no matter what, and they're not going to publicly second-guess what they're doing. I imagine soon we will start learning about some of the conversations that are happening in private.

Brian Lehrer: Right. In the intro, I referred to some of the divisions on the Left, including AOC denouncing at least some of what she saw and heard at last Sunday's rally in pretty strong language. How do you understand that as representative of something, if you do?

Julia Ioffe: Well, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is from a state that has the largest Jewish population outside of Israel, and there has been a lot of pain in the Jewish community over this. I also think it is, frankly, a moral and just position. If you are against these kinds of things being done to human beings, be they Palestinians at the hands of Israeli soldiers and settlers, then it's not hard, it shouldn't be hard to be against this happening to Israelis at the hands of Hamas. If you value human life and human dignity and human equality, which is what progressives and liberals theoretically desire and advocate for, then this should not be a hard call. I think she is absolutely right in that. In that sense, it's quite easy.

Brian Lehrer: The evacuation order, by the way, I think assumes that the activated members of Hamas, the military active members of Hamas and the hostages that they took will remain in the north and they won't be able to use the population as human shields anymore. Do you have any reason to even have analysis about whether that's the case?

Julia Ioffe: I don't know. It also assumes that parts of Hamas wouldn't evacuate with some of these people. It assumes that they would stay and fight. Again, I don't know. I don't have insight into this.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Listener writes in a text message about your emphasizing the historical illiteracy on the Left. Listener writes, "I'm a little disappointed with your largely reasonable guest. It is the Right that dominates and drives Israel's power. It is the Right who doesn't understand the Palestinian side. She wants to dismiss the living memory of 1948 and its effects, but not 2,000 years of history. Solution? Real concessions by Israel for peace. They knew who is Hamas, but wouldn't figure out a way around them. Protesters should fly both flags. Let those with the upper hand, Israel, start with such a gesture."

Julia Ioffe: Well, to that listener, I say that in 2005, Israel, under the far-right leader Ariel Sharon, who was guilty of some incredibly heinous crimes, fully disengaged from Gaza, broke down Jewish settlements there, forced-- I don't know if you remember seeing this. There were Israeli soldiers dragging Jews out of Gaza kicking and screaming. A year or two later, Hamas was elected.

I in no way, as I said, in no way denigrate or erase what is happening to the Palestinians. As I've said during this show, the government of Israel, especially under Bibi Netanyahu, has pursued a dehumanizing and criminal occupation of the West Bank and the increasing settlement activity there. In fact, one of the horrible ironies of what happened on Saturday, October 7th is that these kibbutzim in the south, where it seems like a lot of secular left-leaning Israelis lived, were unprotected because so much of the army has been focused on the West Bank and protecting these settlers who are living there illegally. The right wing of Israel, which you're absolutely right, has driven the policy for the last 10, 15 years in Israel to horrific effect, has not been the part that's affected the most by this. A lot of them do not serve in the army. They did not bear the brunt of Saturday's attack.

What I worry about is that people are talking about Bibi Netanyahu's- whether he can survive this politically. I think back to George W. Bush on 9/11, and what a massive Intelligence failure that was, and the massive overreaction of the American government in terms of invading Iraq, wiretapping, torture of suspected terrorists at CIA black sites; he was massively popular through all of that. Unfortunately, when a population is attacked, they double down like this.

Yes, I agree. Including in my conversation here with you, Brian, I think you've heard. I've been talking about the horrific policies that this government has pursued-

Brian Lehrer: Absolutely.

Julia Ioffe: -and it is a right-wing government. The right wing on the US side is a whole other story, as I said, driven by some really messed up theological motivations for their "Christian Zionism" that I find deeply disturbing and, frankly, anti-Semitic.

Brian Lehrer: Just one follow-up on what you were saying about Israel pulling out of Gaza more than 15 years ago and Hamas being elected after that. Palestinians say, yes, but Israel never really left controlling everything there from the outside in ways that kept Gazans in desperate poverty and isolation, so of course the resistance continued.

Julia Ioffe: Of course. I mean, yes. Again, my point here wasn't to say that the Jewish history matters more and the Palestinian history matters less. My point is that what I'm seeing on the Left is an incomplete picture, one that omits very important historical facts. In adding these facts, I'm in no way trying to say that the other facts that have been presented don't matter. What I'm saying is that it is a messy and complicated problem, and the solutions that have been offered so far are messy and incomplete and clearly have not been satisfactory because here we are. In trying to simplify the conflict and say that it's black and white and it's easy, we're just leading ourselves into a bloody dead end as we have so far.

Brian Lehrer: Julia, thank you for so much time today. I just want to ask you one or two quick questions about the other story that's big in national politics this morning. If you could put on your Washington reporter hat. The domestic politics that seemed so intense before this in the Mideast, but now seem maybe even a little more like a clown show than they did before by comparison, we have Steve Scalise, who was the only candidate for Speaker, pulling out last night. What happened?

Julia Ioffe: Well, he was not the only candidate, but he had been nominated by the House GOP. He was not the only candidate. There was [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: Right. Well, Jim Jordan, who was the other [crosstalk]--

Julia Ioffe: Jim Jordan, yes.

Brian Lehrer: He pulled out and endorsed Scalise.

Julia Ioffe: Yes, and then there was Emma. It is a clown show. Here's the thing. I was reading something this morning about how John Boehner referred to this faction of the Republican Party as terrorists, and looking at how they've behaved since they've had the House majority, it's hard to argue with that. At the very least, I would say there is an anarchistic strain there, and you hear from their voters and their constituents that they're happy with this. That they believe that the less that the US Congress does, the better. That a paralyzed Congress is actually good.

You have people that don't believe in government, that don't want a functioning government now inside the government, and we expect them to run it. I would argue it doesn't really make sense. Where we go from here is also unclear. There are now other candidates in the ring. You have Jim Jordan apparently telling Scalise in a closed-door meeting yesterday that America wants him, which is interesting.

Brian Lehrer: Him, Jim Jordan?

Julia Ioffe: Yes. He disputes that this is what happened, but these are the reports emerging that he told Scalise, America wants me, and he walked out and slammed the door. It's interesting that the party that says they were 100% behind Israel, that the Biden administration is not doing enough, they can't even literally get the House in order to pass more aid for Israel because, again, they don't believe in the government functioning.

In the lead up to this, my incredible colleague, Tina Nguyen, reported that these members of the House that voted against Kevin McCarthy, that came out against Steve Scalise, that they were hearing from their constituents on August recess, "Shut it down. Shut the government down." That is what their constituents want. Unfortunately, I guess this is how democracy works. They are kind of doing what their constituents want them to do.

Brian Lehrer: To be continued. Julia Ioffe, I-O-F-F-E, in case you're looking her up, founding partner and Washington correspondent for the national politics site, Puck News, and co-host of their podcast, Powers That Be. Thank you so much.

Julia Ioffe: Thank you, Brian.

 

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