News clip: Biden administration is facing backlash for a new executive action on immigration that's being compared to asylum restrictions that were enacted by Donald Trump.

Brooke Gladstone: Immigration is foremost on people's minds and never far from the headlines. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. America's view of our immigration problem is so focused on the Oval Office and the border. That's where we think we'll find a quick fix.

Jonathan Blitzer: There's this fantasy of a silver bullet in the American political discourse that if only the administration could just turn off immigration at the southern border, the problem would be solved, and obviously, it doesn't work like that.

Brooke Gladstone: Also on the show, the importance of nuance when employing terms like colonialism, decolonization, and liberation to talk about the crisis in Palestine.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: There's a lot of these words flying around, and there are many people who are not using them in a way that furthered the debates or even informed people.

Brooke Gladstone: It's all coming up after this.

Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. Micah Loewinger is out this week. I'm Brooke Gladstone. As I write this, President Biden just gave a press conference that showcased his mastery of foreign policy and deep experience with the Senate, but it didn't seem to assuage a growing number of Democratic Party members who no longer see him as their best choice for the top of the ticket, especially in a crucial election just four months from now.

Brooke Gladstone: Yet, even his critics, especially his critics, log him as a great president who gets things done. Even so, immigration policy remains a sticky wicket. Case in point, in mid-June on the 12th anniversary of DACA, that's the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, Biden announced a sweeping new program for undocumented immigrants living in limbo in the US.

News clip: Under Biden's new policy, some half million undocumented spouses of US citizens will be able to apply for permanent residency if they've lived in the US for more than a decade. As of Monday, migrants will receive temporary work permits and be protected from deportation.

Brooke Gladstone: This came just two weeks after Biden unleashed another quite different executive order.

News clip: President Biden announced an executive order to shut down entries to the US-Mexico border when 2,500 daily encounters happen between entry points. It also bars migrants who cross illegally from seeking asylum.

President Biden: The Statue of Liberty is not some relic of American history.

Brooke Gladstone: That's Biden earlier this month.

President Biden: It stands, still stands, for who we are. But I also refuse to believe that for us to continue to be America that embraces immigration, we have to give up securing our border. They're false choices. We can both secure the border and provide legal pathways to citizenship.

Brooke Gladstone: All this comes in the midst of escalating tensions on all sides of the immigration debate as the election ticks nearer and nearer.

News clip: Biden administration is facing backlash for a new executive action on immigration that's being compared to asylum restrictions that were enacted by Donald Trump.

News clip: I am profoundly, profoundly, disappointed in this executive order. We have to remember that the victims of this policy will be the innocent.

News clip: This week, Biden gave amnesty to half a million illegals and said it's going to make us all rich. Biden wants to give his 10 million migrants your job so we can say he saved the economy.

Brooke Gladstone: Jonathan Blitzer covers immigration for The New Yorker and is author of Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here. He's written about the framing of three humanitarian emergencies at the southern border in 2014, 2019, and 2021. When I spoke to him earlier this year, he observed that, tellingly, each of these crises is experienced by the American public as separate unrelated events.

Jonathan Blitzer: That's right. There's this feeling of, "Okay, well, that was Obama's crisis," "That was Trump's crisis," "This is Biden's crisis," as opposed to understanding just one story that's unspooling in the region and in the wider world.

Brooke Gladstone: I assume that the media have a big role in that misapprehension.

Jonathan Blitzer: It's understandable in a certain sense that the decisions made in Washington would be responsible for what we see at the US southern border, but the politics of this issue, which are so irresistible to cover, are so bruising. That tends to dominate the conversation. What the consequences will be for a particular administration. Does this sabotage other elements of their agenda? We gloss over what's led to the situation at the border in the first place.

Brooke Gladstone: What drops out of the narrative?

Jonathan Blitzer: The actual circumstances driving people to leave their homes in the first place and come to the US border. Those dynamics have changed over the years. Right now, we're actually in a very interesting moment. We've seen crises in 2014 and 2019, in 2021. For the most part, each of those crises have had to do with Central American children and families coming to the border seeking asylum. Now what we're seeing is an even expanded version of the problem. Venezuelans principally, Cubans, Nicaraguans, people from all over South America and the world.

Jonathan Blitzer: The over-fixation on the Washington dimensions of this story mean that we tend to think, well, it's just a function of whether or not the current administration is sending a message of permissiveness or harshness and that that's dictating people's decisions to move, when, in fact, people have been on the move for years before we start to see the situation play out at the border.

Brooke Gladstone: You say that the system hasn't been reformed or modified since 1990, and you say the border is a pressure point that the asylum system was never meant to sustain.

Jonathan Blitzer: This is a problem that successive administrations and congresses are responsible for creating.

Brooke Gladstone: I think that's why you set out in your book to tell the story of the immigration crisis going back some time, but you find the story really begins in 1980.

Jonathan Blitzer: 1980 was a key moment for one reason above all, and that was the government passed the 1980 Refugee Act. In the past, the US government tried to provide protection to people fleeing persecution and upheaval and wars and all sorts of things across the world, but there had never been a systematic policy. For the first time, you had a concerted effort to give some sort of order to this broader ethos.

Jonathan Blitzer: You have a split screen in the United States that's happening at that moment. You have on the one hand this very noble ethos that brings the United States into accord with international law and human rights and on immigration policy, but you also have, in the early 1980s, the Cold War raging at its peak. The United States government was simultaneously engaged in propping up right-wing regimes in Central America and the logic that these right-wing governments, even though they were perpetrating all sorts of atrocities in our countries, were nevertheless allies with the United States to help contain the spread of communism.

Brooke Gladstone: We're talking about the Salvadoran civil war that was from '80 to '92. The Guatemalan Civil War lasted from the late '60s to the early '90s.

Jonathan Blitzer: Exactly. It should be said that these military governments were receiving, not just diplomatic cover from the United States, but military aid, resources, advisors, and so US foreign policy essentially created a new demographic of immigrants coming to the United States seeking asylum and refuge.

Brooke Gladstone: You say the wars lasted longer because of US involvement.

Jonathan Blitzer: Exactly. In the case of El Salvador, civil war extended from 1980 to 1992. The US was propping up the Salvadoran military, which at the time was battling a group of leftist guerrillas. For all of the resources that the US poured into that war effort, the Salvadoran government essentially fought these guerrillas to a stalemate, and in the process, 75,000 people died.

Brooke Gladstone: Given, as you say, the split screen, the pressures of the Cold War on one side, and the drive to get into accord with international norms on the other, how did the US asylum system work?

Jonathan Blitzer: The way it was supposed to work, according to the law, was that people's claims were supposed to be analyzed based only on the question of whether or not they were being persecuted based on their identities. Technically, now, a law existed that required the US to extend protection to people seeking relief at the border, but a large number of people who were showing up at the border seeking relief were fleeing repressive governments that were allies of the United States. You started to see very, very high rejection rates of asylum claims from people coming from El Salvador and Guatemala.

Jonathan Blitzer: At a time when, on the whole, about 20% or so of asylum seekers had their applications granted, you had for Salvadorans and Guatemalans who were applying for asylum, grant rates that were less than 2% and less than 1%.

Brooke Gladstone: This ultimately led to a court settlement where the US government had to admit that it had systematically discriminated for geopolitical reasons.

Jonathan Blitzer: Just one incident in a long historical pattern coloring the way in which immigration law and practice actually played out, but the broader history, as you zoom out over time, is the fact that just as during the Cold War, you had the US government making all sorts of allowances for Cold War allies that perpetrated all sorts of atrocities.

Jonathan Blitzer: Fast forward a couple of decades, you have a similar phenomenon playing out where the US now is willing to make allowances for governments in the region that also perpetrate all kinds of atrocities, that are guilty of all sorts of corruption because they have vowed to help the US limit the spread of migration to the US southern border. There's a second iteration of that realpolitik.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's take Honduras today. It's oppressive. The government is openly corrupt.

Jonathan Blitzer: One way of summarizing what's gone on in Honduras in recent years is this, later this month, the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was a US ally over the course of two successive American administrations, is facing drug charges in a federal court in New York.

Brooke Gladstone: Ah, so we are not averting our eyes as much as we used to.

Jonathan Blitzer: Yes and no. It took more than a decade for this to come to pass. When he was president of Honduras, the corruption was transparent. The ways in which he repressed the broader population, it seems highly likely that he committed fraud in the 2017 election. All of these things were accommodated by the US government because he said all of the right things on the subject of fighting crime, drug interdiction, and immigration. It became very easy for regional leaders like this to play the United States because the US interests were so obvious.

Brooke Gladstone: When you say they said the right things, what kind of things do you mean?

Jonathan Blitzer: This is, I think, something that's very often overlooked. For the US to be able to deport people back to their homes, depends on an agreement with the government of those countries to receive the deportees. When those governments have been at odds with the United States, they can cause real chaos for the Americans. An example, until fairly recently, the Venezuelan government would not accept American deportation flights, and so US authorities were in a real bind because they had large numbers of Venezuelans showing up at the southern border. The enforcement-minded agenda was to apprehend them and deport them, but they couldn't deport them.

Jonathan Blitzer: There's all kinds of international cooperation that's out of public view that dictates how the US prosecutes its immigration agenda at the border. This goes back to why I think it's so important for media conversations to take into account these broader issues.

Brooke Gladstone: Right. President Clinton, you noted, was working on an immigration bill that drew a distinct line between legal immigrants seen as upstanding and illegal immigrants treated as unworthy. You think that debate in the '90s set up the framework for how we talk about immigration today?

Jonathan Blitzer: That was a real watershed moment in the 1990s. You had all kinds of converging political imperatives for a White House that saw its job as essentially needing to outflank Republicans in an election year.

Brooke Gladstone: That was the essence of a lot of the Clinton administration.

Jonathan Blitzer: There was an extremely harsh law passed in 1996 that basically made it much easier for the government to deport people and to strip them of their legal status. One of the characters in my book actually had a green card that he lost because he was convicted of a drug crime. This particular law was passed by a bunch of conservatives in Congress who themselves ended up getting so shocked by how many people were rounded up that they wound up appealing to immigration authorities and asking them to moderate the very law that they had passed.

Brooke Gladstone: Wow.

Jonathan Blitzer: There were these legal bars that the law created that said that if you had crossed the border unlawfully and/or if you had overstayed a visa, or if at any point your legal status had lapsed, you would be barred from the United States for either 5 or 10 years. Now, we accept, as part of the landscape, the fact that there are 11-plus million undocumented people living in the United States. The size of that population was, in large part, created by this law in 1996 that trapped people in this country and denied them avenues to regularize their legal status. The size of the undocumented population decades later reflects the consequences of that law in the mid-1990s.

Brooke Gladstone: Then in 2015, then Alabama senator, Jeff Sessions released the immigration handbook for the new Republican majority, and you say that was a sea change in the GOP's immigration policy.

Jonathan Blitzer: Now, it seems so fateful. At the time, it seemed like a very strange blip. You basically had in 2012 Obama's reelection. He beats Mitt Romney for president. The common wisdom was that Romney's greatest liability, the real reason he lost, was that he'd used issues like immigration way too conservatively and alienated broad segments of the electorate. While that was the broad consensus following the 2012 election, you had hardliners, like Jeff Sessions in Congress, who actually took the exact opposite lesson. Sessions read on the situation was we lost in 2012 because we were not harsh enough. That there was a real constituency out there who would love to see us crack down even more on immigration.

Jonathan Blitzer: For the most part, Sessions was in the political wilderness until the arrival of Donald Trump who recognized the potential to weaponize the immigration issue, to whip up fear, and to ride that to the White House.

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Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, US immigration changes in the 21st century. How and why? This is On the Media.

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Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Picking up on my conversation with Jonathan Blitzer, in his book, Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here, he traces the root causes of record breaking migration at the southern border. Now, our focus shifts to the 21st century, and specifically, the weekend of Mother's Day 2014 when decades of Central American history came crashing down at that border.

Jonathan Blitzer: Because that's really when you had seemingly suddenly the arrival of large numbers of Central Americans seeking asylum at the border.

Brooke Gladstone: Families.

Jonathan Blitzer: And children. Populations that were extremely vulnerable that administratively required a lot of attention. This was the culmination of decades of US foreign policy and US immigration policy. A lot of what these Central Americans were fleeing in 2014 was gang violence. That gang violence in Central America was the result of US deportation policy in the 1990s. Americans were deporting gang members who had been hardened on the streets of American cities.

Brooke Gladstone: That sounds a little simplistic. Are we really responsible for the gang violence?

Jonathan Blitzer: In this instance, I have to say, while American complicity in the horrors of the region is often indirect, this is one instance where there is a direct through line between US immigration policy and crime in the region. All throughout the 1980s, you had hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans and Central American asylum seekers, refugees, immigrants arriving in the United States, and a lot of them arrived in inner cities across the country.

Jonathan Blitzer: In Los Angeles at the time, the Salvadoran population that arrived was immediately brutalized by a vicious racial hierarchy, Black gangs, Mexican gangs, and a lot of young Salvadorans started to form their own groups and gangs as just a form of self-defense. Over time, elements of these groups grew increasingly violent in their own right. For example, gangs like MS-13, which now is such a widely known name because President Trump talked about it incessantly, that gang began on the streets of Los Angeles in the 1980s.

Jonathan Blitzer: The United States in the '90s as it was cracking down on crime and as it was also trying to show itself to be tough on immigration matters, started to deport a lot of these gang members who had really come into their own on the streets of American cities. The issue was that the United States didn't warn Central American governments about the types of people it was deporting. There was just a kind of callousness and neglect.

Jonathan Blitzer: Take a country like El Salvador. This country was just reeling from 12 years of civil war. One of the agreements that emerged in the Peace Talks was that the state would have to dismantle the police force because it engaged in all kinds of abuses during the war. They were slowly building back the police. The state itself was weak. The country's economy had cratered, and at that moment you started to have the mass arrival of very violent criminals from the United States.

Jonathan Blitzer: You had instances in which Salvadoran Presidents complained to Clinton at international summits that the US wasn't giving them a chance to adequately prepare for the types of people now who are arriving and who are causing chaos and mayhem in Salvadoran cities.

Brooke Gladstone: Hence the repeated wave of refugees. Now, that is fascinating. I mentioned earlier that there was an attitude that arose during the Clinton administration that legal immigrants are fine, illegal ones, they shouldn't be allowed in. Nowadays, conservatives say that, oh, immigration is fine and all, my grandpa, yada, yada, yada, but the law is the law.

Jonathan Blitzer: There was always an element of bad faith in that argument that I think in recent years we've now finally seen for what it is. The standard bearer of the Republican Party, the former president, Donald Trump, made his administration into a war on immigration of all forms. The Trump administration worked assiduously to cut legal immigration to the United States, and so they can no longer credibly claim that what they're trying to do is just be harsher and follow the rule of law for people who are attempting to cross unlawfully. In fact, what they're trying to do is make it harder for anyone to come to the United States.

Brooke Gladstone: They did two big things. The Remain in Mexico policy was one of them.

Jonathan Blitzer: The premise of it was that rather than extending people protection when they sought asylum at the US border and letting them enter the country, as was their legal right to do, the US government instead would shunt them to Northern Mexico and basically say, okay, you have to wait here for however many months it takes for your case to make it through the backlogged American immigration courts. There were no measures taken to see to the general welfare or protection of asylum seekers while they were in northern Mexico, a notoriously dangerous region. We're talking about 70,000 people over time stuck in tent cities along the border in immiserated conditions, often preyed on by criminal gangs and cartel elements.

Jonathan Blitzer: Trump really worked to put the lives of these migrants at the border out of sight and out of mind. Any government that succeeded Trump that attempted to reengage with this issue guided by a sense of the law and basic human decency was going to face this problem of bringing a situation that had been kept out of view back into the fore of American public life. That's one of the things that contributed to this sense that Biden was bringing chaos when he took over. This stuff was all building south of the border. It was just out of plain view.

Brooke Gladstone: Remain in Mexico was one of Trump's big policies. The second one was to use the pandemic to make it almost impossible to apply for refugee status at all.

Jonathan Blitzer: We really live with the legacy of that now. What the Trump administration did was it invoked this obscure public health authority to say, look, we're in the start of a pandemic. We have to see to the protection of federal workers and Americans, and we can't process people coming to seek asylum. We've since learned, of course, that public health officials did not support the use of this authority and that they got strong-armed by the White House at the time.

Jonathan Blitzer: What's so significant about it was it did a few things that Biden has now had to reckon with and hasn't fully overcome. The first was that because this policy just expelled people en mass without processing them, it led actually to more repeat crossings because they had nothing to lose. If they got turned away the first time, they were so desperate they may as well try a second time. They weren't going to be detained. They weren't going to lose a case that then became a mark on their record.

Jonathan Blitzer: It's also become an issue for the Biden administration which was opposed to the policy in theory when it took office but was slow to end it because it was very seductive for members of the current administration to hold onto this authority that promised to allow the government to expel anyone and everyone they had to whenever they wanted. The result was that this idea somehow got normalized such that, just the other day, you heard President Biden say that he's willing to shut down the border if that meant gaining control.

Brooke Gladstone: In your view, what did Biden do well and what has he not done well?

Jonathan Blitzer: What Biden has done well, he has stood the legal immigration system back up after years of its deterioration under Trump. It has stood back up the refugee system, which was a program that the Trump administration had deliberately run into the ground, and so now the United States is resettling large numbers of refugees at levels that we saw prior to the Trump years. There have been all sorts of administrative regulations that the administration has put into place to reverse some of these more technical Trump policies and also interior enforcement. ICE continues to make arrests and to deport people but in a more targeted way.

Jonathan Blitzer: Of course, it's a double-edged sword for the Biden administration because here is something that they could really credibly say, particularly to democratic voters and members of the progressive left, that look, we have actually been increasingly humane in how we carry out interior enforcement in the country, but they don't want to sound like they're being too soft on immigration because the border looms large. These successes that I'm describing, the Biden administration has been slow to tout.

Jonathan Blitzer: The area where the Biden administration has really struggled is at the border, is figuring out how to deal with this historic number of people showing up seeking asylum, figuring out ways of dealing regionally to try to manage the flow. That is an immense problem, particularly now as Congress is resisting requests from the administration for more funding. Their goal here is to make the situation worse because it plays better politically for them.

Brooke Gladstone: Would you say there's some denialism on the part of some progressives about how serious the problem is at the border, which is partly why it's been such a winning issue for Republicans because at least they're acknowledging there's a problem?

Jonathan Blitzer: I think that that's right. Republicans are capitalizing on the fact that people think, oh, the fact that Republicans are able to say that there's a problem means that they're clear right about a solution. That is not true. The proposals that Republicans have put forward in Congress are not credible solutions.

Brooke Gladstone: Who says they're not credible?

Jonathan Blitzer: I'm glad you asked because, often, the way this issue plays out in the media is we say, oh, Republicans say X, and Democrats counter with Y. In fact, if you talk to career officials at Border Patrol, Customs and Border Protection, ICE, what you hear a lot of them say is that the things Republicans are proposing are not workable. They're impractical.

Brooke Gladstone: Like what?

Jonathan Blitzer: An example, you hear Republicans say that one of the problems we have is that so many families are showing up at the border seeking asylum. The solution to that is to detain all the families. This is an impossibility. There aren't the resources to detain families at that scale. It's not clear that that would really stem the flow of families who are desperate to reach the border. What it would do is it would overwhelm resources. It would consume a great deal of money.

Jonathan Blitzer: It would take a long time to set up the facilities that would be necessary to act on that premise. It would also mean that you would have to release certain single adults, for instance, in order to make room for families. It is nonsense. If you talk to people who actually engage in operations on a granular daily level at the border and beyond, they say as much.

Jonathan Blitzer: That doesn't mean that Democrats aren't to blame for failing to come up with more credible alternatives. They've almost sat out the policy debate over the years, and it's a policy debate that is ugly. Every operational idea for how to deal with what's going on at the border has countless trade-offs. It really is a complex tangle. The way through it is to engage rather than to disengage. I feel like that's been historically the problem of Democrats. They've pulled back rather than doubled down

Brooke Gladstone: Right. At the end of 2019, a million migrants were arrested at the southern border, and you quote the head of Customs and Border Protection saying these are numbers no immigration system in the world is designed to handle.

Jonathan Blitzer: I'm glad you cite that moment in 2019 because you'll remember Trump is still in office, and that is the year following the harshest border enforcement policy we have ever seen, which was the separation of families. The premise of that policy was, if we treat families harshly enough at the border, enough of them in the region will take stock and they will stop coming. What did we see? The numbers reach historic heights. Until we get away from the idea that pure enforcement at the border has a demonstrable impact on mass migration patterns in the region and the world, we are going to be in this endless cycle.

Brooke Gladstone: What does that mean?

Jonathan Blitzer: Regional cooperation that we've never really seen before at a meaningful scale, it would mean trying to reimagine what asylum looks like, acknowledging the fact that you can't process everyone at the border, and there need to be more concerted efforts made to deal with people in their home countries. That's stuff that quite honestly is going to take years to set up. The politics are so reductive and so bruising in the meantime that we're stuck in this terrible loop where the things that we need to try to consider are just too long-term to withstand the immediacy of our present-day politics.

Brooke Gladstone: There are a lot of characters in your book, but you conclude with one, Juan Romagoza. I wonder if you can tell me about him, why you chose him.

Jonathan Blitzer: Juan was a surgeon by training who in 1980 in El Salvador where he's from was tortured by the Salvador National Guard, brutalized to incapacitate him so he couldn't practice medicine again.

Brooke Gladstone: Why?

Jonathan Blitzer: He had helped rural peasants whom the government at the time thought were sympathetic to the leftist guerrillas. He ended up escaping, spending a few years recuperating in Mexico where he helped Guatemalans fleeing the Guatemalan Civil War travel through Mexico and reach the United States and get linked up with American sanctuary activists. Juan eventually reaches the United States himself, ends up applying for and getting asylum, a real rarity at the time for Salvadorans, and becoming a community leader and a public health advocate first in LA and San Francisco and then eventually in Washington DC.

Jonathan Blitzer: In the early 2000s, there was this incredibly important human rights case that was tried in a federal court in Florida where two Salvadoran generals, who by then were in their late 60s or early 70s, were finally taken to task for their involvement in war crimes. Juan was the main plaintiff and witness in that case, and that case led to the eventual deportation of these two Salvadoran war criminals in 2015 after years of their having lived in the United States, thanks to the intervention of the US State Department in the 1980s.

Jonathan Blitzer: Juan's the kind of beating heart of this story, a moral presence, also an embodiment of history, and illustrates something that's very central to the reporting here, which is the US and Central America are deeply entwined. You can't disentangle the United States and the wider region. The more American lawmakers have tried, whether through politics or foreign policy or immigration policy, the more tightly bound the US and this region become, and Juan really exemplifies that.

Brooke Gladstone: Jonathan, thank you very much.

Jonathan Blitzer: Thank you so much for having me.

Brooke Gladstone: Jonathan Blitzer is a staff writer of The New Yorker and author of the new book, Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here. Coming up, before we argue about Palestinian, anti-colonialism, and decolonization, we need to define those terms and to know the difference. This is On the Media.

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This is On the Media, I'm Brooke Gladstone. Almost 300 days have passed since the Hamas attacks on October 7th and the ensuing war in Gaza began. Ceasefire talks have ebbed and flowed ever since. Let's just take the summer. This On June 11th.

News clip: Hamas has responded to the latest proposal for a hostage and ceasefire deal, and Hamas has rejected it.

Brooke Gladstone: This on June 24th.

News clip: As US-backed ceasefire proposal that would end the war in the Middle East was shot down by Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Brooke Gladstone: And this on Friday, as we headed into the weekend.

News clip: News on the Israel-Hamas war, President Biden posted on X that Hamas and Israel have agreed to a ceasefire framework. He said, "Six weeks ago, I laid out a comprehensive framework for how to achieve a ceasefire and bring the hostages home. There is still work to do, and these are complex issues, but that framework is now agreed to by both Israel and Hamas."

News clip: President Biden probably would like for this to be a done deal, especially given his political situation at home, but from our conversations with sources in the region, this is still not a done deal.

Brooke Gladstone: As Israel's attacks on the strip continue, and as violence in the West Bank goes unchecked and unabated, scholars and journalists, among others, are looking for ways to explain or even describe an intractable crisis that has spanned generations. To that end, three words are deployed over and over again. Colonialism, decolonization, and liberation.

News clip: We were pushing for a free, independent Palestine. We're pushing for decolonization, land back, et cetera.

News clip: Decolonization, free Palestine, that equals the slaughter of Jews.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: I felt that there's a lot of these worst kind of flying around, and there are many people who are not using them in a way that furthered the debate or even informed people.

Brooke Gladstone: Iyad el-Baghdadi's forebears left Yafo, Tel Aviv, in 1948. Today, he's a Palestinian human rights activist, a writer and author of The Middle East Crisis Factory. I spoke to him earlier this year about a thread he'd written on X in November. In the thread, he clarified with terms like colonialism and decolonization really mean and why muddling them can be risky.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: To colonize means we just establish a colony. If we go to Mars, for example, and we establish a base over there, we can say it's a Mars colony. Colonialism, on the other hand, to colonialize, is really an exercise in hegemony. It's a mode of domination. This is where a society might have existed for its own sake, but through the deployment of immense power, immense hegemony, you can turn it into something that doesn't exist for its own sake.

Brooke Gladstone: Colonialism, he says, comes in two flavors. First, the extractive kind.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: In extracted colonialism, the objective is to extract wealth away. You need the labor class. You need people to work the fields. You need people to work the plantations. You need them subjugated, but you don't need them dead.

Brooke Gladstone: Then the second, settler colonialism, where the colonizer wants the land without the people, and that, el-Baghdadi says, describes what happened in Palestine.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: In settler colonialism, the colonizer here wants the land without the people on top of it. They want the land for settlement, for expansion, for building a new settlement, displacing the natives. The tools of hegemony over here are much more brutal because we don't need those people to be there.

Brooke Gladstone: The word that's most muddled, and he says dangerously so, is decolonization. It's too often confused with another term, he says, anti-colonial.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: Not every anti-colonial movement is decolonial. Anti-Colonial simply mean opposed to the presence of colonialism. Anti-colonial movements themselves can fall into the same patterns of the colonizers. They can start to have a worldview which is built upon these colonial concepts. Decolonization, on the other hand, the way that I approach it is that it's not really about removing people, it's about removing supremacy. There's no longer colonizer and colonized, there's simply equal citizens in one state. This, of course, does not erase the inequities of the past, but this is the only light that can lead us towards the future.

Brooke Gladstone: You argue that there are two main models of settler colonialism, and you say that understanding the nuances of these models is key to reckoning with Palestine. There's the Algeria model and the South African model. They've both been applied to Palestine.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: We talk about Algeria and South Africa as two different models with very different struggles. Algeria, as you know, was colonized by the French for a period of around 132 years. The model followed by the Algeria independence movement was mainly a military approach, make the colony unlivable until they leave. Algeria managed to accomplish that eventually in, I believe, 1962. In the South Africa model, the colonial situation was resolved by creating a democracy that included both the previously colonized and the previous colonizer in a democracy. It's one person, one vote. Everybody has the same political agency, but also everybody has the same citizenship, the same rights.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: Whether you pick the Algeria model or the South Africa model, the kind of movement that you build is going to be very different. It's very important to mention that it's not only me as a Palestinian who refers to these models. 21 years ago in a 2003 interview, Ehud Olmert, who at the time was Sharon's deputy Prime Minister, actually referenced the Algeria model and the South Africa model in reference to Israeli plans to withdraw unilaterally from Gaza.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: This is literally what he said, "More and more Palestinians are uninterested in a negotiated, two-state solution because they want to change the essence of the conflict from an Algerian paradigm to a South African one. From a struggle against occupation in their parlance to a struggle for one-man-one-vote. That is, of course, a much cleaner struggle, a much more popular struggle, and ultimately, a much more powerful one. For us, it would mean the end of the Jewish state."

Brooke Gladstone: He's saying basically that there cannot be a two-state solution.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: Because it was perceived that Palestinian statehood would be a lethal threat to the Jewishness of the state. This was where the current impasse, where we have a status quo, where it's neither Algeria nor South Africa, but kind of both. The pre-October 7th kind of reality was not something that Israel stumbled into but an accomplishment of two generations of Israeli politicians. It was a conscious choice.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: October, 2004, senior advisor to Ariel Sharon, it says, "The significance of the disengagement plan," which is pulling out from Gaza, "is to freeze the peace process, and when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of the Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders, and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state with all that it entails has been removed indefinitely from our agenda."

Brooke Gladstone: What would be the result of pursuing the Algeria model in Palestine? Because a big part of the Palestinian movement doesn't acknowledge Israel's right to exist.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: They don't. Algerians were fighting around the same time that Palestinians were fighting, but Algerians won. Many Palestinians got this impression that, yes, we have to do the same thing that they did. My position, of course, the position of many others, is that French-Algeria is not Israel. There are many, many reasons.

Brooke Gladstone: For one thing, the French had a place to go. They could go back to France.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: Yes. Meanwhile, Israelis have nowhere to go. Also, at the height of French colonialism in Algeria, I don't think the French non-natives exceeded 20% of the population. They were always a minority. In the case of Israel/Palestine, it's very even there, half and half.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: Another here is that we have to acknowledge that Israel was founded by Holocaust survivors. They were escaping a millennium of European antisemitism. A lot of the soldiers, two-thirds of those who expelled my own family from Yafo, now Tel Aviv, were either Holocaust survivors or Holocaust refugees. This changes the psychological dynamic here because these are two different peoples who have been locked into a cycle of trauma, traumatizing each other, but also traumatized. We can't lose our humanity when we actually approach this conflict.

Brooke Gladstone: As far as the pro-Palestinian movement that still thinks about Algeria, just make Israel unlivable and they'll all leave? You say it's a dead end.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: I'm saying that it's not desirable. The objective is not simply to defeat Israel. It's not simply to liberate Palestine. It is also to give us a country that we can live in, to give my children and their children a country that they can live in. A country that is liberated into a pile of rubble, a country that is liberated into a whirlpool of pain, liberated into pools of blood, that is not a livable country. The mistaken idea that in the conception of many Palestinians, but also pro-Palestinians, this is still the Israel of 1948. This is still in Israel which is basically mostly European white settlers, Jewish people coming basically from Europe.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: This is not the case now. This is not today's Israel. More than 60% of Israelis today have at least full or partial Middle Eastern heritage. Basically, descended from Middle Eastern Jews. The whole idea that this is still a white settler colony, it's not true anymore.

Brooke Gladstone: You wrote that decolonization doesn't mean removing people; it means removing domination, and that's why South Africa is a helpful model

Iyad el-Baghdadi: Because it is rooted in values such as equality, coexistence, humanity, integration. On the other hand, there is a demographic reality here. It's true that even in South Africa, the white population were always a minority. The fact that we are talking about a demographic reality where we have roughly 50% Palestinians, 50% Jewish people, the premise of equality here is far more applicable. We have to think in intergenerational terms because really I see a lot of Palestinians but also Israelis now asking the question, how can we live with these people after what they have done?

Iyad el-Baghdadi: This is something, of course, tragically, we hear year after year very much amplified by what's happening right now in Gaza. There's two ways that I respond to this. The first is tough luck, you're going to live with these people, and the question is, how? There are babies who are going to be born tomorrow between the river and the sea, some Jewish, some Palestinian. We have to ask ourselves, what do we want for them 20 years of 30 years from now? Do we still want them to be doing what we're doing right now? We would have failed them. We would have failed our own children?

Brooke Gladstone: Many people discuss Palestinian liberation as a clean reversal of 1948, the Nakba. Edward Said, the late prominent Palestinian-American scholar, warned that obsession with the past will doom a movement. What are the dangers of a backward-looking movement?

Iyad el-Baghdadi: I think this impossibility or this difficulty of imagining the future is itself an impact of trauma. The Nakba being an ongoing trauma. It started but it never ended. When you don't mourn the past, it remains in your present and it blocks your vision of the future. I'm reminded here, with a quote from Edward Said, "The future, like the past, is built by human beings. They and not some distant mediator or savior provide the agency for change."

Iyad el-Baghdadi: The idea here is that time only goes forward. We cannot undo the past. We have to be informed by the past, inspired by the past, and maybe sometimes the past is a cautionary tale, but in the end, time only moves forward and liberation itself has to only move forward.

Brooke Gladstone: You have observed that people who have been systematically excluded, like the Palestinians in Israel, end up as nihilists or architects. You were a stateless refugee until last summer.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: Yes. Me being a stateless refugee my entire life has given me this innate, almost automatic radicalism for most of my life. I'm 46 years old. I was a stateless refugee until last summer. I'm a fourth-generation stateless refugee. My family left Yafo in 1948. It was my great-grandfather, my grandfather, and my father, who was a toddler at the time.

Brooke Gladstone: Yafo, which is now Tel Aviv.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: Exactly. This was four generations of statelessness, and what that does to you is that you know that there is nothing worth preserving for you in the current world order. Then there's a very important distinction here in how we speak about this. We can either say, it cannot be reformed, it must be destroyed, or we can say it cannot be reformed. We have to build a replacement. The first I would say is nihilistic. I just want to destroy it. Changing the world, this decolonial vision, is a task for entrepreneurs, for architects, not for nihilists. We have to have the imagination to build that mass movement premised upon equality, premised upon solidarity, and premised upon humanity.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: People are starting to think that there is no future in which a Jewish person and a Palestinian person can live together in peace in one country. This is exactly why we have to double down on it. I don't think I'm the one who's dysfunctional for thinking that democracy and humanity is the only thing that can win. I really think that anybody who thinks that anything else can fix this is the one who's dysfunctional.

Brooke Gladstone: What do you think a viable movement for Palestinian liberation would look like?

Iyad el-Baghdadi: Look this is not only going to be about liberating Palestinians. Ultimately, this is also about liberating Jewish Israelis. It's really about humanizing both the colonizer and the colonized. Maybe I'm not the right person to speak about this, but when I speak to my Jewish Israeli friends, they say that they are not free because they're living in this entity which is always scared. If you have to kill that many people in order to feel safe, that means you're never going to feel safe. Colonialism is not only brutal to the colonized but also to the soul of the colonizer.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: This decolonial movement should be led by the colonized, but this movement has to center both peoples. Building a future for both peoples. This is not going to be something that we're going to fix in 10 years or 15 years. I'm thinking 20 years and above. You asked me a question is the Algeria model possible or not? Even if we acknowledge that it's possible it's going to require rivers of blood, a lot of destruction. As a Palestinian, I want a country that my children and grandchildren can live in with full dignity, with freedom. Not a country without Jews.

Brooke Gladstone: If you listen to the rhetoric of some of the members of the current Israeli government and the leadership of Hamas, there are a lot of similarities. Neither of them would really cotton to the South Africa model.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: Yes, this is true. There is a paradigm of partition and segregation and domination that's premised upon this idea of ethnic nationalism. There's another paradigm here. I don't want to talk about the one-state solution, but the paradigm here. The paradigm is an integration paradigm. It's about equality, it's about integration, it's about coexistence. My premise is that this paradigm is the only thing that can move forward.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: The path in front of us from here, from post-October 7th, is the state of sustained crisis, an actual zero sum where anything the Israelis get, they're going to get by taking it away from Palestinians or taking away Palestinians and anything that Palestinians can get, they're going to have to get it by taking it away from Israelis. The strategic nihilist is only a reflection of something much deeper, which is the cycle of trauma that we're locked into. Current politicians, current movements, et cetera, who are locked into this old way of thinking simply are not going to bring anything new to the table. All they're going to give us is more of the same, more bloodshed, more conflict, more violence, more war.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: I'm cognizant here that I don't want to seem to be criticizing Palestinians. Their backs are to the wall. They're being starved. They're being bombed. They feel like the only thing they can do is fight back. We live in a two-state solution world. We live in a world in which we have, for 75 years, we decided that the solution over here is partition and segregation and domination. We have two paths, one path is completely blocked. The other path is intergenerational and it's very steep and it's going to take a lot of work, but at least it can get us there.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: The history of the Jewish people is very long, very well documented history, and a very proud history. The state of Israel, this phase of history which is marked by ethnonationalism is only one chapter. I want Jewish people to thrive in the Middle East, in their native region for a very long time. Maybe the prerequisite for that is to give up on this idea of ethnonationalism and to embrace each other as brothers and sisters without questions of who belongs and who doesn't belong.

Brooke Gladstone: Up until this summer, you were stateless.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: What happened?

Iyad el-Baghdadi: I was granted Norwegian citizenship last summer. I remember that moment of time when I had to actually go to a government office to give up my refugee travel document. I don't think a little tiny booklet has ever felt this heavy in my hand. It felt to me that I'm not gaining a new identity or a new citizenship but giving up an identity. It almost felt like a betrayal of my ancestors who never made it and many Palestinians who never made it.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: I remember waking up the next morning-- Summer in Norway is beautiful, and I live very central Oslo, and walked up to the terrace in my apartment looked out to Oslo in all directions, and I got this sense of immense love, a physical feeling of love all over my body. I was able to say to myself for the first time, "This is my country and these are my people. Together from this place of safety and prosperity and privilege, we're going to do everything that we can to heal our world."

Brooke Gladstone: Yes. Thank you very much.

Iyad el-Baghdadi: Thank you, Brooke.

Brooke Gladstone: Iyad el-Baghdadi is a human rights activist, writer, and author of the book, The Middle East Crisis Factory: Tyranny, Resilience, and Resistance. [unintelligible 00:50:06] the show. On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondiau, Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wang with help from Pamela Appea. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineers this week is Brendan Dalton. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. Micah Loewinger will be back next week. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

 

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