David Remnick: Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I was reporting in the Middle East recently, and while I was there, I spent a day driving around the West Bank with a couple of people who know it very well. An Israeli peace activist named Yehuda Shaul and the American journalist Nathan Thrall.

For Ramallah to Bethlehem, with no traffic for an Israeli Jew can be 35 minutes, no traffic.

Nathan Thrall: No traffic, of course, yes, nothing.

David Remnick: For a Palestinian, you can't go through Jerusalem so you're taking this, what's called Wadi Nar, which is a terrible set of thin bypass roads with hairpin turns, and you would go all the way around like this to get to Bethlehem.

Nathan Thrall: Two hours.

David Remnick: It'll be two hours, whereas the Israelis are just going to go straight through. We weren't making small talk about the traffic. In the West Bank, which road you're allowed to use, where you're allowed to go, and what identification card you have, these are just some of the aspects of the Israeli occupation, the architecture of the occupation.

With the airstrikes from Hezbollah this week, and the assassination of a Hamas leader in Iran, the war in Gaza threatens still to become an even wider regional conflict.

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

Nathan Thrall, who drove me around the West Bank that day, wrote the best account I've read of how the occupation has made life for Palestinians oppressive, hopeless, and nearly unlivable. The book is called A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, and it won the Pulitzer Prize this year. Thrall told me that the way that Israel has carved up the West Bank over time, leaving pockets under Palestinian control, certain cities and towns, well, that might be the government's long-term plan for Gaza as well.

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

David Remnick: Essentially along the border with Egypt.

Nathan Thrall: The border with Egypt. If Israel were to create, let's say, two more of those, you will have divided Gaza into five pieces. You then have what Israel is describing as humanitarian bubbles. These are concentrations of Palestinian refugees where aid will be administered, and again, Israel can go in and perform raids repeatedly, and we have seen that that is the approach that Israel is taking now in Gaza.

David Remnick: Nathan, tell me about the origins of your book, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama. The idea for that book was triggered by a horrific incident.

Nathan Thrall: In 2012, there was a school bus trip with a group of Palestinian kindergartners in the greater Jerusalem area. These are children who live just on the other side of the 26-foot-tall separation barrier that runs in and out of Jerusalem. About half of the people in the enclave in which this school existed are residents of Jerusalem, paying municipal taxes, receiving virtually no services, surrounded on three sides by the separation barrier, and on a fourth side by a different wall that runs through a segregated road, Route 4370, known as the Apartheid Road, with Israeli traffic on one side, Palestinian traffic on the other.

You have about 130,000 people living in this walled enclave today, and they are just a couple kilometers away from my home. These people live a radically different existence from mine. They have no sidewalks, no playgrounds, a single main thoroughfare for these 130,000 people to get from one end of the enclave to the other, a shortage of classrooms that exists throughout East Jerusalem, but is especially acute on the other side of the wall.

Because the students in this enclave could not access the play areas just on the other side of the wall in the Jewish settlement of Pisgat Ze'ev, they had to follow a long and circuitous path along the wall, passing through a checkpoint in order to reach a play area on the outskirts of Ramallah. After passing through a checkpoint, they were struck by a giant semi-trailer that was on its way to a West Bank quarry. The bus flipped over, caught fire. Six children and one teacher died.

Because this occurred on a road that is under full Israeli control, where the Israeli police give out traffic tickets, where the Palestinian Authority is not able to go, and because it's on the other side of the wall, in an area of utter neglect, deliberate neglect by the State of Israel, it was more than 30 minutes before the first fire truck, the first Israeli fire truck arrived on the scene. Who was left to deal with this crisis were just ordinary bystanders, who were Palestinian, on this road.

They began to take these children, covered in soot, from the bus into the back seats of their private vehicles, and because some of them had the kind of ID, the blue-colored ID, that would allow them to pass through the checkpoints to access the superior hospitals that were nearby in Jerusalem, and some of them had the green West Bank ID that prohibited going through those checkpoints, the cars went off in different directions to different checkpoints.

By the time that the title character of the book, Abed Salama, arrived at the scene of the accident, there was a burned-out shell of a bus and a huge crowd and no children. He asked, "Where are the children?" It takes him more than 24 hours to find out where his son is, what has happened to his son. Really, the idea of the book is to tell the story of Israel-Palestine through Abed's day.

The system itself is very complicated. There are so many layers of highly bureaucratic control. It's boring as hell to hear people talk about it, and the one way that I felt that you could really convey what this thing actually is, is to put the reader in the shoes of a man like Abed Salama, navigating through the system on the worst day of his life.

David Remnick: Now, to me, there's two dimensions to the book, at the very minimum. The first is the emotional power of this family story, the humanity of it, and it runs parallel to the details of occupation, what it looks like, what's the nature of the identification card system for Palestinians, the roads, the movement restrictions, the walled-off cities.One of the most striking things for anybody who visits the area is that there's just too little geography, too much religion, too much history on this patch of land. How aware are Israelis living their lives in Haifa, Tel Aviv, wherever, about the details of what's going on?

Nathan Thrall: It's shocking the degree to which they are unaware. There is a long-standing practice of willful denial or ignorance of what Israel is doing vis-à-vis the Palestinians. This goes back to the founding of the state, but it surprises me all the time how little Israelis know about what is happening. At the same time, they don't really not know. They serve in the army, their kids serve in the army, they themselves have executed these policies.

The success of this system and the longevity of this system depends on huge numbers of Israelis being able to live lives that are untouched by it, and that Israelis who really do not feel in their day-to-day lives the occupation that's just a dozen kilometers away. If you had the occupation affecting the lives of ordinary Israelis, there would be much more effort to end the occupation.

David Remnick: Nathan, when we had our discussion, one of the first points that you made and that your friend from Breaking the Silence made was that the dominant part of the occupation in the West Bank is in the Greater Jerusalem area, which I think is sometimes overlooked.

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

It is also the most successful aspect of the settlement project. It is where you have huge concentrations of Israeli Jews living in very large numbers with a lot of continuity, and it is very difficult to imagine them ever being uprooted.

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David Remnick: The American journalist Nathan Thrall. We'll hear more from him in this hour. I'll turn now to Raja Shehadeh, a Palestinian lawyer and author. For decades, Raja has been a voice advocating non-violence in the Middle East. He and his family have worked for peace for over 50 years. His father was also a prominent lawyer, an activist, and an early supporter of a two-state solution.

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

This is a process that has begun since 1967 in the West Bank, increasing settlements, the encirclement by settlements of Palestinian cities and towns, a road system, and a water system, and electricity system that is separate and hardly equal. In your view, what is behind all this? What is this leading to as a matter of politics in the future of the West Bank for the Palestinians?

Raja Shehadeh: I think it's clear, and it's been clear since the very beginning. They want us out of the West Bank and they want to take it over and then exit to Israel. I remember in 1979 when I first heard of the Gush Emunim who were the forefront of the settlement movement.

David Remnick: The Gush Emunim being the Bloc of the Faithful.

Raja Shehadeh: Yes, Bloc of the Faithful. I thought, "They're crazy people," because how could they get rid of the Palestinians from the West Bank? We are here to stay. We didn't leave in '67. Their chances of taking over the land without the people is minimal. Nil.

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

Raja Shehadeh: Unfortunately, they're thinking of annexation of the land but not the people. They want to put us in Bantustans.

David Remnick: Bantustans being the small communities in South Africa under apartheid?

Raja Shehadeh: Yes. As I described in the book, What Does Israel Fear From Palestine?, when Sharon went to South Africa, he said, "I just want to learn about the Bantustans and how they're governed." He came back and he applied that policy in the West Bank. Now, we are, in a sense, living under a different law than the law of the settlements. The settlers are going to be part of Israel and the laws of Israel apply to them and that's annexation, but not on us. There will be two communities living side by side, each subject to different laws, and that's entirely apartheid.

David Remnick: Your new book is titled What Does Israel Fear From Palestine? If you were to go to Israel today, and I was just there a couple of weeks ago, the answer would be in most quarters, not just the far right wing, of course, we fear Palestine. The offer from Ehud Barak to Yasser Arafat in Camp David was rejected and then came the Second Intifada. This is the rhetoric. Ehud Olmert made a similar offer some years later, also rejected. Israel left Gaza in 2005 and Hamas came to power, and then came rockets.

Now, October 7th, the Al-Aqsa Flood and the attack on Israel, and all that came with it. This leaves out a great deal of history. What I'm saying is that this is the predominant Israeli answer that Israel does have something to fear from a Palestinian state. Do you agree with me that that's the answer in Israel to your question?

Raja Shehadeh: I think Israel is very concerned, but the real concern of Israel is that the mere recognition of Palestine and the Palestinian nation is a threat to Israel.

David Remnick: What do you mean, Raja?

Raja Shehadeh: Israel, in 1948, tried to eradicate the Palestinians and force them out, and tried to suppress every trace of their existence in former Palestine. If Israel were to accept the existence of Palestinians, then it would have to revise its foundational myth, and that would be more than it's willing to do.

In all these offers that you have mentioned, there has never been a recognition of the Palestinian nation. There have been offers to management of certain areas of Palestine, but never an acceptance of the Palestinian nation, including in Oslo Agreement. There wasn't a recognition of the Palestinian nation. The existence of the Palestinian nation is what Israel fears because it will threaten, in their view, the very existence of the myth upon which Israel is founded.

I think that it's completely wrong because only if the Palestinians recognize Israel and Israel recognize the Palestinians, will there be peace. The peace is the best security for Israel, not this existence of continuous war as is happening now.

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

Raja Shehadeh: I grew up in the shadow of the Nakba.

David Remnick: The Nakba, being what's called the catastrophe.

Raja Shehadeh: The catastrophe. Yes, what Palestinians described the forcing out of the Palestinians from Palestine. My father suffered a lot from the Nakba because he lost everything in Jaffa. He tried for years in 1948, and '49, and '51 to force Israel to implement the right of return according to the resolution in the UN 194 and failed.

He never believed that it is impossible to make peace with the Israelis. I grew up in a household which always believed that it's possible to make peace with Israelis based on mutual recognition, because it's a small area of land and the two nations live together side by side, and there's no way that they can continue living together unless they make peace with each other.

David Remnick: In two-states, [chuckles] what used to be the common parlance of two-states solution.

Raja Shehadeh: Yes. Two independent sovereign states, that is the main thing. I grew up with a sense of Jaffa as the real home and Ramallah as a temporary home. I would look out to Jaffa with my grandmother who saw the lights of Tel Aviv thinking they were the lights of Jaffa. She would point out, "Look at the lights of Jaffa." I grew up thinking that Jaffa is the real place.

After '67, I realized that we are in the West Bank and I started looking at the hills of the West Bank and then realized that the Israeli policy is to deprive us of these hills by building more settlements and using the same tactics they used in '48 against us, and eventually, a second Nakba would occur. This is exactly what's happening now, a second Nakba, a slow attempt at depriving us of our land.

The important thing is that all of this has not succeeded because Palestinians have refused to leave and have retained their status on the land, and their sumud, which is perseverance. Sumud is a passive resistance that is very important in our life. The attempt at Israel to throw us out by making life very difficult has not succeeded, and that is very important. Also, we have fought back through the law and through revealing to the world Israel's attempts at manipulating the law and using it to excuse the settlements and the takeover of the land.

David Remnick: Just a couple of weeks ago, as I said, I was in the West Bank and I met with members of Fatah, the people who had opposed Hamas and who had favored for a long, long time two-state solution. These people had just gotten out of what's politely called administrative detention. That's they were imprisoned without charge for months.

These are not Hamas people. Not at all. When I asked them about Hamas now, when I asked them about their leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, who led the October 7th attack on Southern Israel and is now most likely in tunnels beneath the Gaza Strip, they told me that they now saw Sinwar as a hero, a great freedom fighter. This is their language, the person who put the Palestinian question back on the table. Despite all the bloodshed, this was, in their eyes, a great victory October 7th, and the polls reflect that this is a general sentiment now in the West Bank. Am I right?

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

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

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

The thing is that he could have done something afterwards that would've stopped the war, and maybe Israel could have stopped also by making an ultimatum to Hamas after the first attack through the Gaza Strip, "Return the hostages or else--" They didn't and they just continued bombing, bombing, bombing, bombing. That is the tragedy.

David Remnick: I want to be clear. When you initially heard the news of October 7th, many hundreds of fighters and ordinary civilians had broken through the fence, you welcomed it. But what came next, you oppose?

Raja Shehadeh: I welcomed it because I thought that it'll finally make it clear for Israel that barriers and fences and wars and even the most sophisticated of wars will not protect Israel. I thought that this is a message that Israel will finally hear and take heed of and they will not try anymore to secure their security by walls, but they didn't.

Then the killing and the taking of hostages I think is what went beyond what was legitimate and was criminal. That is something that should not have happened, it did happen and it is a criminal action I think that shouldn't have happened.

David Remnick: So far as we know was also part of the plan and I would've thought that Sinwar could easily have expected a massive retaliation from Israel.

Raja Shehadeh: Well, I'm sure he must have expected it, but he probably didn't expect it to this extent. I don't know about these things but I think that he should have expected it, yes, but he went through with the breaking of the barrier and that was his first plan.

Also, the taking of hostages in order to exchange them for Palestinian prisoners because he had spent 22 years in an Israeli prison and so it was important, I think, for him to attempt to kidnap soldiers in order to exchange them for Palestinian prisoners.

Now he went beyond that and he also kidnapped civilians and that I think is unfortunate and wrong. He could have offered to return the civilians and kept the soldiers and the soldiers would be exchanged for the Palestinian prisoners, but he didn't and that is, I think, a fault of his.

David Remnick: The idea that acknowledging Palestinians and their presence on the land prior to 1948 goes against Israeli political objectives and that's something you lay out in several ways in your book.

One quotation that you highlight in your text is from Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and he said in an article published in 1970 that if Israeli Jews acknowledged Palestinian concerns, then they would betray the concerns of their own people. He said, "If this be the land of Israel, we have returned to it. If it is Palestine, we have invaded it." How do you see this kind of perspective in what's happening in the West Bank today?

Raja Shehadeh: I think that's become the prevailing idea of the Israeli religious Zionists and they see it as all or nothing. That is very detrimental to future peace and future relations because the land is a small land inhabited by two nations, the Palestinian nation and the Israeli nation.

There's no way that we can make the land prosper and flourish unless we both the Palestinian nation and the Israeli nation come together and make peace and recognize that the land belongs to the two nations and not to one nation exclusively.

Begin, unfortunately, had this idea that they have to recognize it as only exclusively Jewish and that has brought us into all the troubles that were into.

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David Remnick: The Palestinian scholar and political activist Raja Shehadeh. His memoir We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I was a finalist for the National Book Award. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour and we're going to continue the conversation in just a moment. Stick around.

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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Right now, much of the world's attention is focused on the Middle East, on the horror of Hamas' October 7th attack on Israel and then the massive devastation of Israel's war on Gaza that has continued for 10 months. There's also the potential for a wider war between Israel and Iran's proxies, particularly Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.

Today we are concentrating on one place, on the West Bank. This was part of Jordan until the 1967 War with Israel and ever since, Israel has occupied the territory, particularly since 2000 in what is known as the Second Intifada.

Opportunities for compromise have either been lost or disdained and the Israeli settlement project has expanded year after year. Indeed, the settlers and their supporters have come to dominate much of the spirit of Israeli politics. Even Benjamin Netanyahu's opponents, men like Benny Gantz, dare not advocate directly for two states. Particularly after October 7th, there's no real constituency for such a deal.

Indeed, the Knesset recently held a vote on such a plan and as a show of ideological unity, two states was voted down by a landslide.

On our program today I'm speaking with two particularly insightful thinkers on this situation. Raja Shehadeh, who is the author of many books including What Does Israel Fear From Palestine?, and the writer. Nathan Thrall. who worked for years with the International Crisis Group and lives and writes in Jerusalem.

Nathan, there's a presidential election going on here in the United States. What do you expect will happen under a potential Trump presidency vis-a-vis this situation, and what could a Democrat do to make matters better?

Nathan Thrall: I think that a Trump presidency could make things much, much worse. There are things that Israel has refrained from doing that it might be given a green light to do in Gaza.

We could see much more serious efforts to push Palestinians out of Gaza to third countries or maybe even against the screams and cries of the Egyptians into Sinai. I see a real potential for a deterioration in the entire situation in the region if Trump is elected

David Remnick: And with a Democrat in office?

Raja Shehadeh: I see little chance of significant changes in policy toward Israel-Palestine. What I do see the possibility of is small incremental changes such as the sanctions that have been imposed on violent settlers and on settlement organizations. That could be ramped up a great deal.

It is slowly being ramped up, I think it's clear that the reason that the Biden administration is doing that is because of criticism from the left within the United States. There is little doubt that that is a driving force behind these sanctions that are unprecedented.

The US had never done that before and they are increasing in scope. Every couple of weeks we hear about new ones and that's the process that could really change things here if it were ramped up in a major way.

David Remnick: The question of Netanyahu if he were to resign, if he were to be thrown out of office, if he were to leave the scene, what could possibly replace him that would improve matters at all? What is the realm of the possible here?

Nathan Thrall: The realm of the possible is more of the same or worse. There is a notion in the Israeli press and much of the Western press that the policy toward the Palestinians is a partisan issue in Israel it's driven by Netanyahu and the right. There is hope, false hope derived from the fact that there is a great deal of opposition to Netanyahu, the person, but in fact, there is a bipartisan consensus in Israel. Its left center, right governments, all of them since 1967 have advanced the settlement project, have constricted Palestinians, have dispossessed Palestinians. I don't see really any possibility of an improvement no matter who is elected. It's not just Gantz who neglects the Palestinian issue. It was the successive heads of the Labor Party over the last decade who during those elections have ignored the Palestinian issue.

David Remnick: Nathan, I get a sense, and I have for some time, that part of your mission, part of your intent as a writer, as a commentator, is to make sure that no one has any sense of false optimism, that your voice is distinguished in many ways, but one of them is to puncture what you see as the pieties of the center-left about what is possible in the short term.

Nathan Thrall: I think that's fair. I think that is a driving motive for me. I feel enormous frustration reading that false optimism from the center-left. I think that it is actually destructive. I don't think it's just a matter of, oh, it's hope is a good thing. I think that there is an enormous apparatus in place. That is the system of domination. It rests on the illusion of a temporary occupation. It rests on the illusion that some solution is just around the corner.

David Remnick: I get that. My only beef with that is the potential spirit of it, which can lead to despair. Despair is the one, as the Bible writes, the one unforgivable sin.

Nathan Thrall: Well, I'm not calling for despair.

David Remnick: Do you despair of the situation?

Nathan Thrall: I despair of the situation because of all of the false optimism that's propping up this system of indefinite control. If we graph over time, this process of expanding Jewish presence and shrinking Palestinian space, let's extrapolate. What is the future? It's been linear. The future is one that is not unlike that of the Native Americans for the Palestinians. My aim in puncturing false optimism is to wake us up to that reality before it's too late so that we can avoid that outcome.

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David Remnick: Nathan Thrall, his recent book is A Day in the Life of Abed Salama. The question of hope is certainly a vexed one. For longtime observers, it can be hard to imagine anything getting any better. If we can't imagine it, we can sign ourselves to the notion of a permanent state of war in the Middle East. I put that question to Raja Shehadeh, the Palestinian lawyer and writer with whom I spoke earlier. He is based in Ramallah. How old are you now?

Raja Shehadeh: 73.

David Remnick: You're 73. Even when I spoke to you years ago, I asked you if you ever expected to see a deal in your lifetime. You said no. What do you see in the years ahead?

Raja Shehadeh: I think it has become much more complicated after the Gaza War and the terrible devastation that Gaza has suffered. Yet, usually after great upheavals comes something that is a great development towards a new future. Perhaps after this great upheaval, something like that would come. Yet it cannot come unless there is recognition of what has happened to the people in Gaza, of the greater station and an attempt by Israel to recognize the Palestinians and move forward in the peace, which doesn't seem at all now to be possible.

Unless the nations of the world come together and put pressure on Israel, it's not going to happen. There's also the ICC and ICJ, the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice, who give me a lot of hope, because after years of struggling in the law and in attempts to show that Israel is breaking international law, we never succeeded into making it popular and known all over.

Now, with the ICJ, International Court of Justice, they're going to rule on the legality of the occupation, and that is very positive development. The ICC, International Criminal Court is going to hear the case of the prosecutor of the court for arrest warrant on Netanyahu and Gallant. That's something that I would never have expected to happen, and now it has happened. That could bring about the end of the era of impunity of Israel. That can make a big difference.

David Remnick: You're a close observer of Israeli politics. There's not much of a left, left in Israel, and Netanyahu is many things, but he's also extremely shrewd in his own survival. How do you see Israeli politics developing as a reaction to what's just taken place in Gaza?

Raja Shehadeh: I think Israeli politics is doomed to failure because the problem is that the right-wing, religious right-wing are increasing in power and they have such extreme politics towards the Palestinians that they will lead Israel into outright fascism and racism. That means that Israel will have to fight one war after the other.

That is a terrible fate for Israel because Israel depends on its wars on the United States, and that dependence is not going to be forever. The United States is not going to be supporting Israel forever. If they don't do that, then Israel will be in a dire situation. The only way for Israel is to stop wars and to come to peace with the Palestinians. Otherwise, it'll go from one war to another, perpetually.

David Remnick: Come to an agreement with the Palestinians, that would mean, in your view, a two-state solution.

Raja Shehadeh: I think that the first step is to end the occupation, and to establish independent Palestinian state. That's only a first step. After that, there should be something that will include all the Israel Palestine and make it one unit and somehow a new relationship, which will enable the free movement and free life for both on the same land. That cannot come until we've go through the first stage of ending the occupation and establishing an independent Palestinian state. That's how I see it.

David Remnick: Do you see Israel ever giving up its position as a Jewish majority state? Why would it do that?

Raja Shehadeh: Well, it'll give up if it doesn't make peace with the Palestinians because the number of the Palestinians in greater Israel is now equal to the Israeli Jews. In a while, there will be the majority. If Israel doesn't make peace with the Palestinians and keeps them within the borders of the state as they are now, then they would become the majority, and Israel would not really be a Jewish state.

David Remnick: You invoke throughout your book a comparison between South Africa and Israel. The South African experience as brutal as that apartheid was and as long lasting, ultimately brought about a representative democracy, a very troubled one, but a democracy. Do you see a path forward for Israel and the Palestinian territories in which both Palestinians and Israeli Jews live in one country together, this is thought of as a one-state solution? To my mind, to my observation, this seems to be a recipe for conflict and what happened in Yugoslavia. I don't quite understand the logic in real life how that would work.

Raja Shehadeh: I think it cannot work immediately. It has to work after many years of preparation. I think that you're right, if it happens now, it'll be a recipe for disaster. That's why we have to work first on a two-state solution and two states side by side and then make relations and bring the two sides together and change the laws and so on in order to establish the vision of a one state or even more than one state.

The whole of the Middle East can become united in some form or another, because it's all small states that will not ultimately work, whether it's Jordan, whether it is Syria, whether it's Lebanon, whether it's Palestine, whether it's Israel, all of them have to come together and build a unified nation that will ultimately bring the Middle East into flourishing times.

David Remnick: We began our conversation by your saying that Israel must acknowledge the legitimacy of a Palestinian people and nation. Do Palestinians ultimately acknowledge the legitimacy of an Israeli people and nation?

Raja Shehadeh: I think they didn't start off acknowledging that, but now I think they do. Now, I think they recognize that there has to be such a recognition if there is going to be peace.

David Remnick: Yet, when I read the speeches of Sinwar, of Hamas, and of many, many others, they see a two-state solution only as a hudna, as a kind of interim step, but that ultimately that this is Muslim land, that this is bequeath from God, and that the Israeli presence must be, and I'll use Sinwar's word, eradicated.

Raja Shehadeh: That's a reaction to the Israeli side, which also says that the land is God-given land to the Jews and the Palestinian-era presence must be eradicated. This is a reaction one to the other.

David Remnick: An Israeli would answer that by saying, there are 2 million Israeli-Palestinian citizens, and there have been offers of two-state solutions repeatedly. We go round this merry-go-round historically. How does it end, Raja?

Raja Shehadeh: David, there has never been a real offer of a Palestinian state. There has been an attempt at managing the Palestinians in their little enclaves, but never an offer of an independent Palestinian state. Never. Never a recognition of the Palestinian designation. That is not true, that they have offered a Palestinian state. Never.

David Remnick: If that recognition were on the table and accepted, that would put an end to the conflict?

Raja Shehadeh: Yes, it would bring it closer to an end because then it would be a step forward, and on it, we can build and bring the conflict to a close. It'll be a very, very important step forward, yes.

David Remnick: Raja, thank you very much, and all the very best to you.

Raja Shehadeh: Thank you, David. Pleasure.

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David Remnick: Raja Shehadeh is a lawyer and a writer based in Ramallah. Raja mentioned the case before the International Court of Justice, the top court of the UN, and after we spoke the ICJ ruled that Israel should evacuate all occupied Palestinian territory, including the West Bank, and pay reparations. That's considered an advisory ruling, and it's not binding on Israel, but it's an unprecedented degree of global pressure. Raja Shehadeh has written for us, and you can find his work at newyorker.com.

 

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