Bad Leaders, Wrong Turns

Antisemitism is a scapegoat for societies in crisis.

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Jonah is joined by Dr. Einat Wilf—a former member of Israel’s Labor Party and author of The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace. They discuss  Israel’s failure to reckon with antisemitism in the pro-Palestinian movement, how the two-state solutions got derailed, and what bad leadership means for the future of the conflict.

Show Notes:
—Dr. Wilf’s website

—Dr. Wilf on the history of Zionism and UNRWA
—Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

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Comments (47)
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  1. Bruce Link

    An obvious question for the guest would have been why, in a two state solution should Jews not be allowed to live in the Arab state with full civil rights as a precedent for establishment of the state. Then no removal of settlements would be needed. The ones that wound up in the new state could keep their residents. Any who did not like it could move back to Israel. This might make boundaries easier to establish, and would clarify the seriousness of the project (or lack thereof).

    Somehow the people who want a right of return to Israel also want a right of expulsion for Jews from a future state. Neither is reasonable.

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    Ben Connelly

    A good interview. Perhaps it’s the podcasts I’m listening to (or maybe just the combination of Russ Roberts’ guests and Haviv Rettig Gur on Dan Senor’s) but I seem to almost exclusively hear from Israeli leftists who are also very hawkish on fighting Hamas. “I’m on the left and hate Netanyahu, but…” is the common refrain. I don’t like Netanyahu, but it would be interesting to hear from the Israeli right. What would be a defense of Netanyahu? So far, the best/only one I’ve heard is, “Netanyahu may be bad but the Americans criticize every Israeli leader as a stand-in for Israel and each time they say, ‘our disagreement isn’t with Israel but with it’s leader’ and then they say that again with the next leader and we know it isn’t just our leaders at a certain point.”

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    Dustin Anglin

    Both this and the Medhi Hasan interview have been interesting looks into the absolute mess that is the “total ideology” that is attributed by one side to the *other* side, seemingly justifying both the victimhood of one’s own position, and the total defeat of the other. At least in Hasan’s naive view, in which he refuses to acknowledge the *actual* total ideology of groups like Hamas, he can envision a world where people are living together in peace with equal rights, but Dr. Wilf seems to leave no room for a solution other than the total subjugation and reeducation of an entire peoples group, or the elimination or expulsion of that group, which is a pretty dark perspective. Neither voice gives me much hope that there are people willing to sit down and acknowledge the extreme elements and wrongs of their own side enough to have a productive discussion about reconciliation and peace. I say this as someone who typically hates both-sides-erism but am becoming crankier at everyone in my advancing age 😆

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    Aylene Wright

    Since I have been rather negative in replying here, let me be more constructive and recommend another guest who I think could deepen our understanding of the Israel-Hamas war: Will Selber, Military Affairs Fellow at the Bulwark.

    Unfortunately, I get the impression there's some kind of cold war going on between TD and TB these days, but if that ever thaws, I think he'd make a good guest.

    Somewhat chillingly, he basically predicted something like the WCK disaster would happen, in the TB Morning Shots March 27 Edition.

    https://www.thebulwark.com/p/trump-makes-billions-thumps-bible/

    (It's at the very end. Feel free to scroll through the Trump stuff. Or don't, as Andrew Egger wrote it, and it was actually really funny. I was myself planning to scroll through it, but wound up reading it.)

    "I spent over half of my 1,500 days in Iraq and Afghanistan at the tactical level. As an enabler for predominantly Army maneuver units, I regularly delivered, scheduled, and planned humanitarian assistance (HA) operations. I’ve delivered school supplies and food, coordinated vaccination campaigns for young Afghans, and even brought in an American veterinarian to help Afghan farmers care for their flocks.

    Everyone loves these operations at higher echelons because they are good news stories. But those conducting them on the ground find them maddening..."

    After describing the many logistical issues involved, he ended the piece with:

    "The Israeli government needs to do more on this front, not only to help Gazans stuck in the middle of this conflict but also to blunt Hamas’ political strategy of isolating Israel. Nevertheless, these operations are not easy. They are dangerous. And people will be killed either during the operations or because they provide aid to the enemy."

    Unfortunately, this scenario is indeed what happened. And simply whining "it's so unfair that Hamas, an eeeevil terrorist group, is succeeding in its strategy to isolate Israel", may make Israel supporters feel morally righteous, but IMO it doesn't actually help Israel.

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  5. Phillyex1

    She castigates Israel’s leaders and then says all the wrong turns are the Palestinians’ fault. When Jonah presses her on what any Israeli leader could have done in the face of the Palestinians’ refusal to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist, she throws out some crap about Bibi dismantling Israel’s education system. She’s just a disgruntled lefty critic whose own solution is basically to arm Israel to the teeth and vaporize anybody who looks at you sideways.

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    Jordan Caruso

    One organization that has been fighting the ideology for a long time, like Dr. Wilf suggested, is Jerusalem Institute of Justice (jij.org). I highly recommend. Here is one example of their work:
    https://youtu.be/j7Mupoo1At8?si=AuuUhe1eDXDCqMSG

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  7. BenP

    I wish Jonah had asked Dr. Wilf if she thought Israel was blameless in the failures of the 2000 and 2008 negotiations. The way she tells it, Israel made very generous offers to the Palestinians in pursuit of a two-state solution, and the only explanation for the failures of these negotiations is that Palestinians were never willing to accept a Jewish state under any reasonable conditions in the first place.

    I won't lay out all the arguments opposing this narrative; they're easy enough to look up on Wikipedia (examples include the Israeli positions on the status of Jerusalem, West Bank settlements, geographic continuity of a Palestinian state, and the right of the Israeli military to operate within a Palestinian state). I would have liked to hear her positions on these: did she agree with the Israeli negotiating stances? Is she saying that these were side shows and that even if Israel had taken softer positions the talks would still have failed? Is she saying that Hamas's victory over Fatah in Gaza wasn't consequential, and Palestinian acceptance of a Jewish state would have been just as impossible in the hypothetical world where Fatah controlled Gaza?

    I love all the Dispatch podcasts, but on Israel I've been disappointed by the lack of engagement with good faith criticisms of Israel. Jamie gave it a try, but with a pretty belligerent and combative pro-Palestinian guest. Other than in that episode, I've not heard much engagement on any Dispatch podcasts with non-stupid criticisms of Israel.

    Given Jonah's warm disposition toward both-sidesism, it would be nice to hear him discuss all this with someone whose sympathies are more mixed.

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      Patrick

      I think her response would be:

      Yes, those were excuses made by the Palestinians. There is no offer they would have accepted short of the elimination of a Jewish state. If this is wrong, please point me to any prominent Palestinian leaders willing to say so.

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      1. BenP

        You're probably right. And I guess my response would be "Does Yasser Arafat count?"

        If the answer is "no, because he walked away from the deal" (and that's, I think, the standard story), then the argument is circular: the reason we know that he was never sincere about accepting a Jewish state under any conditions is that he walked away from this particular set of conditions. This is what frustrates me in her account the history of "two state" negotiations.

        Even Abbas has stated his willingness to accept Israel's right to exist; he refuses to add the "as a Jewish state" part because he claims this is tantamount to giving up any rights of return. Arafat, as I understand it, would not give this up completely, but recognized that the number of "refugees" allowed to return would have to be limited in order for Israel to maintain its majority-Jewish character. BUT - and here's where the trick comes in - this doesn't count as a public acknowledgment by a prominent Palestinian leader, because we all know he didn't *really* mean it.

        At any rate, there have been many attempts at negotiating a two-state solution, and for all the Palestinian intransigence there has also been Jewish intransigence. Both sides going to the mat over how to carve up East Jerusalem, or over land swaps between chunks of the West Bank and Gaza suggests, to me, that there's more to this than whether Palestinians would ever be willing to recognize a Jewish state. Israel's demands have some more specific and contentious elements beyond a right to exist.

        But maybe Bibi or whoever else can try calling their bluff by dropping the demands for control over hotly contested holy sites and the incorporation of West Bank (or "Judean and Sumerian") settlements into their Jewish state, and see what Palestinain leaders say in response? All he wants, after all, is peace and security. Right?

        I'm not making excuses for the many horrific and stupid decisions Palestinians have made since Israel was founded. But when I look at the demands made by past Israeli negotiators, I see more than "we just want a state for our people".

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  8. Dhetzel1

    A question Jonah somewhat alluded to but I wish had been asked more directly at the end if there had been time is what Dr. Wilf thinks is the end game for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict writ large given that she has come to the conclusion that a two state solution won't quench Palestinian desires in a way that can lead to lasting peace? My inference was that given her comments regarding Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, an utter defeat of all militant Palestinians would likely be required as a foundational step, but how does that come to fruition in a world where most western nations can't seem to tolerate Israeli military deployment for more than a few weeks at a time, and actively work to prevent a total Palestinian defeat?

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    1. Israel.D.Gale

      I would not assume that Ms. Wilf, or anybody else, has a good answer. The Biden administration has coerced Israel into stopping the only plan that had a chance. For now, only bad results are foreseeable.

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      1. Dhetzel1

        Unfortunately, I think that you are almost certainly correct. Hard to see anything but unfortunate outcomes.

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  9. Viki

    Really appreciated Dr Wilfs voice and thank you for bringing her voice on the podcast. I had never in my lifetime thought I would see antisemitism rise again to the degree we are seeing.

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    George.Skinner

    I think Dr. Wilf identified the root problem: Palestinians don't accept Israel's right to exist. Until that changes, this conflict will not end unless one side is destroyed. The Palestinians apparently at least recognize that they lack the strength to destroy Israel, so their strategy is to get the rest of the world to do it for them. Western supporters of Palestinians usually don't seem to understand this fundamental element of the conflict. They also don't really think through the question of which society they'd want to survive: the cosmopolitan, liberal, and prosperous Israelis (20% Arab), or the Palestinians mired in poverty and dedicated to a death cult like Hamas?

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      Aylene Wright

      This is the kind of comment that comes across as implicit support for an actual genocide of all Palestinians not as a willed end, but a totally acceptable means, to prevent the destruction of Israel as a state, or perhaps the genocide of all Israelis.

      I really don't want to believe that these are the only two options. We defeated Nazi Germany, that certainly did have genocidal aspirations, without committing a genocide of Germans.

      Or, do most people who see the Holocaust as a war crime, do so because they see the victims as innocent, rather than because they actually oppose genocide out of principle? Do they think "some tribes, such as the Israelis, are good and don't deserve to be wiped out, but some, such as the Palestinians, are evil, and so do all deserve to die, including children below the age of reason"?

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        David Chen

        The degree of indoctrination is the question. If the typical Palestinian is as brain washed as the typical North Korean, I'm not optimistic. How widespread the Nazi desires are in WW2 is also not something I'm deeply familiar with. But the death camps were mostly hidden away, and we did have to destroy them to such a state that shattered their dreams of domination as well as occupy the country. They weren't exactly peacefully pacified.

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        George.Skinner

        I’ve no intention of condoning genocide: this is more an observation that unless Palestinians accommodate themselves to the existence of Israel, this conflict is going to continue until one side is no longer capable of fighting. Seeing the Palestinians continue down this path is a bit like watching an acquaintance succumb to drug addiction. The only alternative I can imagine is if a 3rd party stepped in to address the question of security: keep the Palestinians from attacking Israel, and protect the Palestinians from attack by Israel as well. The problem is that talk is cheap, and nobody has shown an interest in committing to a real investment in peace in the region.

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