Understanding Israel's "System of Domination"

This episode focuses on Israel's complex control over Palestinian territories, described as a "system of domination" by author Nathan Thrall.

1. Israel's control system involves intricate permits and legal restrictions that deeply affect Palestinians' daily lives.
2. The Israeli settlements are seamlessly integrated into Israel, complicating the political landscape.
3. International perspectives often overlook the depth of control and its implications on the feasibility of a two-state solution.
4. The episode highlights the emotional impact of the Israeli system on Palestinians, emphasizing personal stories over abstract political analysis.
5. Nathan Thrall suggests that the current system closely resembles apartheid, with significant implications for both Israelis and Palestinians.

1. Introduction

Mertazza Hossein introduces the topic and sets the stage for a deep dive into Israel's control mechanisms over Palestinian territories. Mertazza Hossein: "As the Israeli military campaign in Gaza grinds forward, it's difficult to see what the region will look like post-conflict."

2. Nathan Thrall's Insights

Nathan Thrall discusses his book and the timing of its release, which coincided with heightened conflict, affecting its reception. Nathan Thrall: "The biggest event of my tour was shut down by the UK police."

3. System of Domination

Thrall explains the bureaucratic and physical barriers that form the core of Israel's domination over Palestinians. Nathan Thrall: "You need to use a great deal of force to maintain this system."

4. Legal and Political Implications

Discussion on the political implications of the Israeli control system and its integration into the broader Israeli governance structure. Nathan Thrall: "Every single ministry in the Israeli government is allocating resources to the West Bank."

5. Conclusion

Reflections on the broader implications of the discussed systems and a call to action for deeper understanding and engagement with the issue. Mertazza Hossein: "Thank you so much for joining us. Until next time."

1. Educate yourself about the nuances of the Israel-Palestine conflict through reputable sources and firsthand narratives.
2. Support organizations that work towards peaceful resolutions and aid those affected by the conflict.
3. Engage in informed discussions to spread awareness about the complexities of the situation.
4. Advocate for fair media representation of the conflict to ensure a balanced understanding.
5. Consider the impact of political decisions and support policies that promote human rights and justice.

The process of Jewish expansion over Palestinian land has involved maintaining a "system of domination," says author Nathan Thrall on this week's Intercepted. In order to constrict "Palestinians into tighter and tighter space" over the decades, Israel has deployed a strict permit system, movement restrictions, walls, fences, segregated roads, and punitive actions such as arrests and detentions, even of children.

In “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy," Thrall’s book, published just before the start of the current war, tells the story of one Palestinian man’s struggle to navigate Israel’s painful system of legal and security controls after his son’s school bus is involved in a fatal accident. Thrall joins host Murtaza Hussain in a discussion about the system of control that Israel maintains over Palestinians, violence in the West Bank, the future outlook for a negotiated solution to the conflict in Gaza, and possible escalation amid fighting at Israel’s northern border.

"A Day in the Life of Abed Salama" is a 2024 nonfiction Pulitzer Prize winner. Thrall is also the author of "The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine."

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Nathan Thrall, Mertazza Hossein

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"A Day in the Life of Abd: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy"

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Nathan Thrall

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Nathan Thrall
This is intercepted.

Mertazza Hossein
Welcome to Intercepted. I'm Mertazza Hossein. As the israeli military campaign in Gaza grinds forward with the possible war in Lebanon on the horizon, it has been difficult to think of what the region will look like the day after these conflicts subside. Prior to the war, Israel maintained a blockade over Gaza as well as a suffocating system of control over the West bank, where millions of Palestinians live under direct military occupation. Today, the West bank is a cauldron with regular violence from the israeli military and armed settlers aimed at suppressing any hint of an uprising from Palestinians and confiscating land legally entitled to them for a future state.

Israels control over the territory for now remains intact, but it is unclear what form it will take in the future. Today, author Nathan Thrall joins me to discuss the situation in the West bank and beyond. His latest book, a Day in the life of Abd Anatomy of a Jerusalem tragedy, tells the story of one palestinian family living under israeli occupation and the broader systems of domination that they encounter in their everyday life. Nathan, welcome to intercepted. Thanks for having me, Nathan.

Interviewer
A day in the life of Abd Salama was published on October 3 last year, just before the Hamas attacks on Israel and the onset of the current war in Gaza. You know, obviously you're a very highly regarded analyst and expert on the Israel Palestine conflict. Can you talk about how the timing of the book released influenced its reception and pressure on your ability to talk about the book? Yeah, so, I mean, I think that there's been a mixed picture. On the one hand, a lot of the gatekeepers who originally were going to host me at various venues as soon as October 7 happened, canceled those events.

Nathan Thrall
So that was quite a negative development. And in the UK there was a really insane atmosphere where they were shutting down anything that had Palestinian in the title. There was a classical music, or not classical, but traditional music concert at a church in London of traditional palestinian music. That was shut down. The biggest event of my tour that I was gonna do with the title character, Abd Salama, that was shut down by the UK police.

And we had radio ads pulled for the book in the US, radio ads pulled from national radio. So it was definitely a hostile reaction as soon as October 7 happened. At the same time, of course, there's more interest in Israel Palestine as a result of October 7. And I would hope that there's a lot of that. There are a lot of young people who are coming to the book and maybe compensating some for this older generation that just doesn't want to hear anything about palestinian life under occupation.

Interviewer
Nathan, I'm reading the book right now, and I encourage our listeners to pick it up as well. It's really a fantastic book. And in the book you use a very, very ingenious kind of framing. You use the story of a tragedy of one particular palestinian family to talk about a broader system of domination, as you call it, that Israel operates in the West bank. Can you talk about what that means, the system of domination, and how it actually plays out in controlling or influencing the lives of Palestinians living under israeli military control?

Nathan Thrall
Well, thank you for those kind words. I mean, the real aim of the book was to put the reader in the shoes of Palestinians living under occupation and to understand this system of domination in a visceral way, in an emotional way, not to just take it in in an abstract way, in an analytical way. So the only way that I felt that you could really do that was to have real three dimensional characters who you identify with and who you watch, navigating this very complex bureaucratic system. And it has so many different layers to it. But the basic element is that you have a process of jewish expansion, taking over palestinian territory and constricting Palestinians into tighter and tighter space.

In order to maintain that system of domination, you need to use a great deal of force in order to deter Palestinians from resisting. So there's an elaborate permit system. There are elaborate restrictions on movement. There are walls and fences that enclose palestinian communities. There is a segregated road system, and there is a system of punishment and arrest of Palestinians who raise their heads up in any way, including kids who are just taken in, in the middle of the night.

Their parents are helpless, powerless to protect them. And these kids will be held in jail. Their parents will sometimes spend a week just trying to find which detention facility the kid is being held in. What I wanted to do was rather than just describe that, as I'm doing now, in a general way to give very specific stories so that people understood what it really meant for a human being to live through that. And by understanding what it is for a human being to live through it, you wind up learning how the system actually works in a deeper way than you would reading an NGO report on apartheid or an NGO report on the permit system or the checkpoints or a land confiscation.

And so, I mean, just to give you one anecdote, at one point in Abd Salama's life, something that I describe in the book is how he chooses a marriage partner based on the color of her id because he's at risk of losing his job in Jerusalem and the only way he can keep it, as if he buries someone with the right color id. And many of his colleagues at the same firm that he was working in were trying to do the same thing. And this is how deeply the system of domination reaches into palestinian lives. I mean, down to choosing who you might marry. You know, it's interesting because when you're in the West bank, you feel this very visceral, sort of omnipresent israeli military control, the constriction of people's lives.

Interviewer
And Israel itself has multiple legal regimes. It seems if you look at the whole territory from the river to the sea, so to speak, there's obviously Israel, 1947, Israel. There's Gaza now, which is currently in conflict, and then there's the West bank. And a lot of the ways of thinking about the subject seem to view the situation in the West bank, or maybe even in Gaza as temporary or contingent on certain political factors. But when you look at it holistically, it gives a very interesting picture of the character of the israeli government, or viewed in total, do you see the West bank as sort of separate from Israel today, given the length of time it's been controlled and the ongoing settlement project?

Or is it exceptional in a way? And the reason I ask is because it kind of gets to the question of Israel being democratic or not in the moment. How compelling do you think the argument is today that the West bank system of domination, as you put it, is something which is not intrinsically part of the character of the israeli government? It's something that I've written about, actually. I wrote a piece for the London Review of books a couple of years ago called the separate regime's delusion.

Nathan Thrall
And that piece was about what I call a delusion, which is this notion that Israel's control of the West bank and the settlements constitutes a separate regime from Israel itself. And the fact of the matter is you have one in ten israeli Jews living in the occupied territories. The settlements themselves are suburban. They are connected by highways to workplaces inside Israel and Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Going to and from the settlements is seamless.

It is just like going to any suburb in Israel. And when you enter these settlements, you feel that you are inside Israel. You see israeli street signs, you see the israeli health clinics, israeli schools, israeli police stations, israeli fire stations, israeli malls, all of that you see inside the settlements, and you do not have the sense that you are abroad. When israeli citizens who live in the settlements vote, they vote inside the settlements. They're not filing absentee ballots.

Every single ministry in the israeli government is allocating resources to the West bank. There's not a separate budget for the West bank. It's not as though the army is doing everything in the West bank. No. The Ministry of Transportation is paving this settler infrastructure, the roads in the West bank.

The Israeli High Court of Justice is ruling on israeli practices inside the West bank. The israeli ministerial committee for settlement is deciding on policy in the West bank. So it's legislative, judicial, executive. All the branches of the israeli government are deeply entrenched in the West bank. And you cannot separate that and say that there's some separate administration.

Administration. In addition, you can look at it in the reverse direction as well and look at the practices of Israel toward, for example, the palestinian citizens of the Nakab of the Negev desert. These are palestinian citizens of Israel. They have full citizenship, but they are subjected to the exact same practices as palestinian Bedouin pastoralists inside Area c of the West bank. They are forced off of their land, they're subjected to repeated home demolitions, and their lands are taken over for the expansion of jewish communities.

So what I see when I look at Israel Palestine is a single sovereign Israel ruling over 7 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians. Now, within that system, the Palestinians have variegated rights and are subjected to different rules depending on where they live. And so the Palestinians, first of all, it should be said that the majority of those 7 million Palestinians are living without basic civil rights. The worst off are palestinian refugees who aren't even counted in those 7 million. Those are palestinian refugees who are not allowed back into Israel or the occupied territories.

And the next level are Palestinians in Gaza who are under a siege, who were under a siege before this war, who could barely leave Gaza, who had to ask for special permission just to go and travel to the West bank, to study in a western bank university, to go and receive medical care in the West bank or in east Jerusalem. And the next level are Palestinians in Area C of the West bank. And they are the ones who need to go to the israeli authorities in order to get permission to just build a new shed outside their house, a new floor on top of their home, any kind of structure. And almost all of those requests are denied. And then Israel comes and demolishes anything that these people do wind up building.

The next level are Palestinians who live in Area B and Area A of the West bank. These are the places that are under some limited Palestinian Authority autonomy. It's very limited in the sense that Israel is the ultimate sovereign. Israel comes in and makes arrests and enters with its forces in Area B and Area A every day just to give some perspective on how much territory we're talking about here, Area A and B and Gaza, the three places where you have some palestinian autonomy. Altogether, they make up about 10% of the territory under Israel's control.

That's all it is. And it's disconnected. Area A and B are 165 little islands surrounded by a sea of israeli control. And then the next level are Palestinians who live in east Jerusalem, including the parts of the West bank that Israel annexed in 1967 and unilaterally declared to be part of east Jerusalem, going from the edge of Rabullah in the north to the tip of Bethlehem in the south. And they do not have the right to vote in national elections, but they do have the right to vote in local elections.

And they have much more freedom of movement than Palestine in the West bank. And then the next level are palestinian citizens of Israel, who, as I say, they themselves live in very different circumstances, depending on where they are. If they are palestinian Bedouin living in an unrecognized village in the Negev, then they're living very much like a Palestinian in area c of the West bank. And their citizenship doesn't really get them very much protection. But if you're a palestinian citizen living in Haifa, it's a very different story.

You still don't have all the rights that a jew does. You don't have the same rights to immigration and land, but it is the most rights that you can have as a Palestinian within the system. Now, the fact that there are different regulations applied to different groups of Palestinians doesn't negate the notion that this is a single regime. This is Israel controlling palestinian lives in different ways. It doesn't mean that there's a separate regime in each of these different locations.

And similarly, in apartheid South Africa, you had a whole host of different rules applying to black South Africans, colored South Africans, depending on where they lived, if they were in bantustans, if they were in townships. You even had this tricameral parliament in the 1980s under apartheid South Africa. So the notion that somehow there's a democratic Israel within its pre 1967 borders and then there's this temporary occupation that's outside of Israel and separate from Israel is simply false. And it's an illusion that the world needs to put forward in order to think of Israel as a democracy. Because the only way that you could actually call this place a democracy is if you put up this mental barrier and say, okay, there's Israel within the green line, and everything beyond it is no longer Israel.

And it's not actually controlled by the same government, but it is controlled by the same government.

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Interviewer
You know, Nathan, for many years now, the Oslo accords have been sort of the basis for thinking of how this situation could be ameliorated politically. And not just the Israelis or the Palestinian Authority or the US, but even the Arab League continues to make reference to a two state solution and the terms of that accord as a basis for their political vision of how this conflict could be transcended or moved forward from. But from what you're describing, the israeli control has become so pervasive in these territories, and it's become such a seamless part of Israel today, it sounds to me that it's very difficult for such a state to come into existence. What's your perception about the continued reference to a two state solution on the 1967 borders and the Oslo Accords, which to me seems like a very elegant potential solution, but now seems almost farcical in the sense that actually implementing it on the ground? I'm curious, your own take about that.

Nathan Thrall
So, I mean, I think that there are a few different things to unpack when we're talking about a two state solution. One question is a moral question, which is, is that actually a fair settlement? So if you have 7 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians living under israeli control, and let's just leave aside the millions of palestinian refugees who are not even able to enter Israel in the occupied territories, is it a fair distribution to say that half the population and the Palestinians are a little bit more than half now are going to get 22% of the land and it's going to be discontiguous and they're not even going to have full sovereignty in this area? Because what we're really talking about when we talk about a two state solution is what Netanyahu has called a state minus what Yitzhak Rabin called less than a state. And so is that fair?

That's one question, a moral question, to give half the population 22% of the land that's not actually contiguous while the other half gets a contiguous 78%. Another question is, is it realistic? That question, I think the answer is clearly no, it's not realistic. Not because it's physically impossible to evacuate settlers from the West bank. It's unrealistic because there is no incentive for Israel to do it.

Israel has many strong disincentives to do it. And so if you look at what two states would entail for Israel, and I'm not talking about the israeli right, I'm not talking about people who have an ideological commitment not to give up an inch of the land of Israel, who are significant political force. I'm talking about mainstream Israelis, even secular, mainstream, centrist Israelis. You're talking about something that is extremely costly, that will potentially involve major political conflict inside Israel, perhaps bloodshed. You're talking about something that is perceived as a security risk by Israel to give up this territory.

The way that they look at it is they're not going to get really anything of significance in return. This occupation has lasted for over half a century. There's no sign that it's going to end anytime soon. There's very little pressure on Israel to end it. And so why would they just give this away when there are all these costs associated with doing so?

And then the other possibility that people talk about is Israel giving full citizenship and equality to all the residents under its control, regardless of their ethnicity or religion. And that is something that Israel will never do in a million years. And so for me, the real issue is not so much. Is it too late for two states? Has the settlement project expanded to such a degree that it's too costly to withdraw the settlements?

It's more a question of, is there any actual incentive to force Israel to move from what is the most comfortable option for it now, which is to continue the status quo, to expand the settlements, to constrict Palestinians into tighter and tighter spaces? And the answer to that is no. I mean, we may be now seeing the very first steps of inching towards some kind of accountability for Israel, but we are decades away from the kind of pressure that would be required to make it in Israel's self interest to take what it perceives to be a very costly step of giving up this 22%. Nathan even before the October 7 attacks, it seemed like the window for political negotiation that narrowed quite considerably. And even the prospect of negotiated solutions seemed almost moribund between the Israelis and Palestinians.

Interviewer
Since October 7, obviously, there's been the terrible attacks on that day itself, but the very devastating war in Gaza, which has seemingly inflamed people's sentiments quite considerably and politically, I would say, from observing, seems to have radicalized israeli politics to some degree as well, too. You based in Jerusalem, can you talk a bit about the effect of the attacks in subsequent war on israeli society and how you see it perhaps influencing the possibility of any sort of negotiation or compromise in the future? I think it's had a profound effect. I think Israelis, for the most part, have been pushed to the right. I think that in many ways, what you had previously in Israel prior to October 7 was this kind of division between the left and the right, the zionist left and the zionist right, about what is the conflict really about.

Nathan Thrall
And the Zionist left basically had the perception that the conflict is really about our occupation of the West bank and Gaza. This is what the world's really upset about. This is what needs to end. That's what's being demanded of us in international institutions and by our allies. And so once we end that occupation, we will have resolved the conflict.

And the israeli right had said no. The PLO was founded before 1967. They are not interested in simply ending the occupation that began in 1967, they are standing in opposition to the takeover of their entire homeland against the will of the native majority. The left is delusional. The zionist left is delusional and thinking that you can resolve this conflict just by resolving the issues of 1967 and the occupation that began that year.

My view is that the israeli right is much closer to the truth on this. It's true that the PLO, the national liberation movement of the Palestinians, has accepted the international resolutions that have demanded that Israel and the occupation and give Palestinians a state on 22% of the land. And they have made this giant concession to say that actually we will be satisfied with just 22%. We're giving up 70% to 8% of our land. But that is a very controversial position among Palestinians.

And the PLO has had to kind of play a game of saying that we're not actually giving up the right of return when we say that we're accepting a palestinian state on 22% of the land, when everybody knows, in fact, they are, in effect, giving up the right of return. They have published leaks from the various negotiations that they've had with Israel where they've said very clearly, we won't change israeli demography. And Abbas has even made public statements about not returning himself to suffod where he and his family come from. My own view is that the israeli right was much closer to actually an accurate analysis of what this conflict is really about. And I think that October 7 was a rude awakening for many, many Israelis on the center and the left, in the sense of realizing that maybe the right was right.

It's not just about the occupation, that the communities that surround Gaza are perceived to be settlements. Now, they might not have the same status as newly built settlements in the West bank in the minds of many Palestinians, but they are built on palestinian land. These are communities built on the lands of Bait Lahia in northern Gaza. Some of them and some of the Palestinians who were rushing across the border on October 7 were filming themselves and saying ecstatically that, I am returning home. I've made it across the border and I'm returning home.

So I think that realization for many Israelis has pushed them to the right and toward a view that there is no choice but to control the Palestinians indefinitely and never to give them a state, because they'll just use that state as a launchpad to future attacks. And I think it's a really deep, a really deep change that's happened for a lot of Israelis. You wrote a book before, your current book called the only language they understand, which was based on your work. As for the International Crisis group on diplomacy in Israel Palestine, and it a very compelling thesis, I thought, which was that the parties to the conflict have only really responded and made concessions in the face of pressure or when they felt that they had to do so and their options were constricted, including the israeli side. Given the situation you've sketched out where positions have hardened so much, is there still a window where outside pressure, whether from the US or international institutions, could be effective in pushing the israeli side, which has more power, or maybe the palestinian side and the Palestinian Authority to a zone of mutually acceptable agreement, if there is one that still exists after October 7?

So I do believe that the historical record clearly shows, as I argue in that book, that all of the concessions that have been made, every single israeli territorial withdrawal that has come about has come about through pressure, either violence or diplomatic pressure or serious threats, credible threats. I think that that is the only thing that is going to get Israel to reassess its current view, which is that the least costly thing is to continue the status quo indefinitely, to control palestinian lives indefinitely, to prevent palestinian statehood and self determination and certainly equality and full rights as citizens. I think that we are now seeing the world, as I mentioned earlier, beginning to take some measures that have some teeth. The ICC announcing that they're likely to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and gallant is a very significant step. And it's going to be, I think, a years long process.

But it's something that Israel greatly, greatly feared. And I think that if we can get a to more actions like we're seeing the first steps from the Biden administration of sanctioning violent settlers, Canada just put sanctions on the main organization that is constructing the settlements called Amana in the West bank. Steps like those are the kinds of things that would make Israel reconsider its current path and make it rational for Israel to say, actually the least costly thing for us to do is to give Palestinians a state on 22% of the land. And I think that's possible. But I think that the rate at which we're going there is very, very slow.

And in the meantime, we could see many, many worse developments, including expulsion. You know, in addition to the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians themselves, or the regime of control that Israel administers over the Palestinians in the West bank, theres a broader regional context as well, too, which im sure people in Israel are thinking about, which is that its very possible there could be a war with Lebanon and Hezbollah in the near term future. The north of Israel has been evacuated and so is the south of Lebanon as a result of the preparations for such a conflict putatively. And at the same time, Israel has a conflict with Iran and Israel has very tense, increasingly tense relations with the Arab League and so forth. As you mentioned, it's a pretty small country and there's only 7 million jewish Israelis in a relatively small strip of territory.

Interviewer
How does this broader context, do you think, shape the possible actions that Israel may take in the future? Because it's a very heavily armed state, does not have integration with its neighbors. And whatever brief moment that this integration seemed to be happening in the last few years, it seems to come to an end now. Does this kind of siege mentality influence how you think what may happen? And I kind of bring it up because Israel has very robust doctrines for deploying military force if it feels it's under great threat.

And I think it's a concern about many of us in the region. And beyond that, this could lead to a much broader war if people do not communicate in a way which gives an off ramp. I don't believe that the process of integration, as you put it, has come to a halt, actually. I mean, the fact that we are nearly nine months into this mass slaughter in Gaza and the UAE and the other states that normalized with Israel over the past several years have not even hinted that that normalization, that their relations with Israel will be called into question or downgraded. The fact that all of the reporting about the discussions between the US and Saudi Arabia about normalization with Israel indicate that the Saudis still are interested in normalizing with Israel under the right circumstances.

Nathan Thrall
I think that the betrayal by the arab states of the Palestinians is one of the most shocking developments for Palestinians. I know over the last several years and especially the last several months that this normalization has continued. And so I am not ready to say that the process of Israel integrating and normalizing with other states in the region is now finished because of this Gaza war. But you're right that there is a very large risk of a regional war, and the talk in Israel now is almost as though it's guaranteed to happen. Israel has been saying for many months that they are going to move Hezbollah from southern Lebanon up to the Letani river one way or another.

Either Hezbollah is going to do it through agreement, through a diplomatic agreement, or Israel is going to move them forcefully and they have not backed down from that claim. And if that happens, then we're likely to see a war that is on a much greater scale than what we've seen so far. Yeah, it's deeply concerning because obviously Hezbollah's capacities are much greater than Hamas. And there was a devastating war in Lebanon in 2006 and a very sordid history between the two countries. It's something that a lot of people are afraid of, including the potential involvement of the US and Iran as well, too.

Interviewer
I wanted to pivot, though a bit, Nathan, to your own background. I think you have a very fascinating story, actually. You worked at ICG for many years and you wrote a previous book I mentioned earlier about your work there. And then you have the most recent book, Day in the Life of Abd Salama, which has been very well received, including with the Pulitzer Prize recognition recently as well, too. How did you get into Israel Palestine?

What was your backstory that actually brought you to the region and led you to develop this background and expertise in the subject? When I really first came and started reporting here was in 2006. I had just finished graduate school, finished a master's degree, and Gilad Shalit was kidnapped, brought into Gaza, and the 2006 war with Lebanon broke out. And I hopped on a plane, came to Israel Palestine, started to study both Hebrew and Arabic, and kind of went to an english language newspaper and asked, can I start reporting? I had very naive ideas about, you know, I had the notion that ID be sent to the front and start filing dispatches at the lebanese border.

Nathan Thrall
In fact, they were not interested in allowing me to do that. It gave me a story, a much less interesting story to cover to see if I could write. And I lived here for a year from 2006 to 2007, and was trying to make my way as a journalist. Then I decided that I was better off moving back to New York after a year here and worked in New York partly as an editor. I was an editor at the New York Review of Books.

And while I was working as an editorial assistant at the New York Review of Books, I convinced the editor, Bob Silvers, to allow me to do a reported piece in the West bank. And I came and I did a reported piece on what was then called Fayyadism, which was a phrase I think Tom Friedman coined. He was a big champion of the palestinian prime minister, Salaam Fayyad, and he and many others were hailing Fayyad as like a new Ben gurion. He was going to build a palestinian state from the ground up. All of these negotiations were a waste of time.

The way to do it was to cooperate very closely with Israel, to have palestinian security forces that could do Israel's work for it extremely well. Israel would then have the requisite level of trust to withdraw from the West bank and a palestinian state would be created. And I came and reported on all of that at a time when there was bipartisan enthusiasm for this project, there were very few people who were critical of it. And I wrote a pretty critical piece about it, saying that this is just making Israel's occupation easier, and it is thereby prolonging Israel's occupation. It will only help this occupation survive much longer.

And as a result of that piece, two people who write frequently for the New York Review of Books on Israel Palestine, Hussein Aga and Rob Malley, really liked the piece. And Rob Malley was the Middle east director for the International Crisis group. And he invited me to try my hand at basically doing the same kind of thing. He said, just do the same kind of writing. It's with more footnotes.

Where would you like to go? And I told him I wanted to go to Gaza. So within a few weeks of that piece being published, I was in Gaza, rented apartment in Gaza City, right by the pier, and started to write my first report for Crisis group. They liked what I wrote, and I moved with my family to Jerusalem a few months later. You know, Nathan, my last question.

Interviewer
I think myself and many of us are trying to get a prognosis of where this is all heading. Obviously, this is a conflict which has gone on for many decades now, an occupation which is very deeply entrenched, an escalating regional, even global crisis which has its crux right in Israel Palestine. Given your breadth of experience and years in the region, if you could say where you think this could be headed with the appropriate caveats. I'm just curious because it seems that we're at the moment where the previous paradigm of a negotiated solution no longer has a clear path forward. But there's also not a clear idea of what comes in alternative to that.

If you could give your perception of what you think could happen, what would be so? I think, broadly speaking, there are a few possibilities. One is for Israel to agree to give Palestinians full rights and citizenship. A second is for Israel to agree to give the Palestinians a state with sovereignty on 22% of the land in the West bank and Gaza. A third is to continue this system of domination that has been described as apartheid by the leading human rights organizations in the world, HRW, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, by the UN special rapporteur, by leading palestinian human rights organizations like al Haqq, by leading israeli civil society and human rights organizations, and even by former israeli ministers and the leading legal authority in Israel, the former attorney general of Israel.

Nathan Thrall
All of them have described this as a system of apartheid. And continuing that system of apartheid would be the third option. And the fourth option is to see some kind of mass expulsion. And of those, the only two that I see as realistic in the foreseeable future are mass expulsion or continuation of apartheid. It's possible to make the first or the second option something more realistic, but that would require a real change in circumstances.

It would require a revolution in the way that the international community deals with Israel, and I don't see that happening. So for me, it's really these two bleak scenarios. And of those two, the one that is the most likely is just to continue the system of apartheid. Well, there will be growing pressure on Israel. But when there's not a war, Israel's not going to be on the front pages of the newspapers.

There aren't going to be mass demonstrations about Israel Palestine in cities across the world or on college campuses across the world. And Israel has been dealing with this threat of becoming a pariah for decades. I mean, if you go back and read the way that people were reacting to Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, you will see that Israel is quite used to this and ready to live with the world wagging its finger at it, but without really any serious consequences. Nathan Thrall, thanks for joining us today. Thanks for having me.

Mertazza Hossein
That was Nathan Thrall, author of a Day in the life of Abd Salama, Anatomy of a Jerusalem tragedy, available in paperback this August. He is also the author of the only language they understand forcing compromise in Israel and Palestine.

And that does it for this episode of Intercepted. Intercepted is production of the Intercept. Laura Flynn produced this episode. Rick Kwan Mixtar show legal review by David Brelo, Sean Musgrave, and Elizabeth Sanchez. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Firemandhe and our theme music, as always, was.

Interviewer
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Mertazza Hossein
If you want to give us additional feedback, you can email us@podcastshintercept.com. thank you so much for joining us. Until next time, I'm Mertazz Hossein.

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