I’ve been trying to think about how to begin this episode, which is a very, very tricky one. And I found myself thinking about a debate I heard a lot in 2023 and 2024. "Free free Palestine." You would hear these chants and see these signs "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free". And it flared into this huge controversy. "Free Palestine from the river to the sea means get rid of all the Jews. No, from the river to the sea means the land in between is free. Everyone in between is free." "No, this is a genocidal chant." It was always so strange to me, so backwards about this focus on college campus protesters.

There was this reality. People weren’t really admitting that there is one power from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. That power, that sovereign, which if you travel in that area and I have is just visually undeniable, is Israel. American politics has not grappled really at all with the level of day to day domination that Israel exerts over Palestinian lives and the complete absence of any horizon at all for that to end. And this was true before October 7th.

In early 2023, the political scientist Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami published an edited volume called "The One State Reality." Their argument was that "Palestine is not a state in waiting and Israel is not a Democratic state, incidentally occupying Palestinian territory. All the territory west of the Jordan River has long constituted a single state under Israeli rule, where the land and the people are subject to radically different legal regimes and Palestinians are permanently treated as a lower caste." What they were saying then is that the hope of a two state solution in the future had become a way many in America particularly avoided reckoning with the one state reality of the present. That reality was not accidental. It was being etched into the land in stone and cement, in settlements and checkpoints, in the construction of walls, and the demolition of homes.

What has happened since October 7 has made it an undeniable reality. Israel now occupies more than half of Gaza, also the more than two million Gazans have been herded into less than half of the land they formerly occupied. And Gaza, it should be said, was already one of the most overcrowded places on Earth. The conditions Gazans now live in, they’re hellish. And there is no near term envisioned relief. This is, and it remains, collective punishment. Hamas, not the children of Gaza, attacked Israel on October 7th. The conditions of the children of Gaza now live in are not moral.

In the West Bank, Israel has choked off money to the Palestinian Authority. It has built settlements at a record pace. More settlements were approved in the last year alone than in the two decades before combined. Israel has allowed and protected a terrifying rise in settler violence and military violence towards the Palestinians. There is no doubt if you go there, who rules the West Bank and is not the P.A. When Netanyahu signed a recent settlement project, a project the United States had opposed for a long time because it would effectively bisect the West Bank, making a Palestinian state physically unimaginable, Netanyahu made clear that was exactly why he was signing it. He said, "we are going to fulfill our promise that there will be no Palestinian state. This place belongs to us."

I agree that loss of faith is a profound part of this. The collapse of faith among Israeli Jews, and simply the idea of political deals. Political deals, settlements, negotiations failed them. The only thing that is reliable is might and force and dominance and deterrence. The only way to be safe is to dominate, to be there, to have your troops there, to have control of the Syrian airspace, to have a security zone in Lebanon, to have a security zone in Gaza. There’s no more belief in deals. Diplomacy none of it. You dominate. And that is how you are safe.

I don’t agree actually that Israel had worked with deterrence. I think the Israeli strategy from day one has been to have what they call escalation dominance. Escalation dominance is not mutual deterrence. It is one sided deterrence. It is that whenever there’s a fight with any party in the region, Israel can escalate it to the next level until it has the upper hand, and it will always have the upper hand. In my opinion, that is why Israel doesn’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons, not because they fear Iran is irrational. I think the reality of it though is that it neutralizes their upper hand, and that increases the chance of attrition for them. In order to have that upper hand, there is no way you can sustain that without depending on the United States.

In February, Gallup found for the first time, more Americans sympathized with the Palestinians than the Israelis. Among Democrats, among young Americans, it is not even close. Israel maintains support among older Americans, and it has benefited from the advanced age of the last two presidents. Their views of Israel were forged in another time around another Israel. American politics has not yet fully grappled with what Israel has chosen to become.

Israel cannot live as a state on its own if it’s at peace with its neighbors. As long as you covet the West Bank and Gaza and prevent a Palestinian state, you’re not going to be in peace with your neighbors. And if you’re not in peace with your neighbors, you’re going to maintain your strategy of dominance, escalation dominance, over half a billion people in the Middle East. Most of the sophisticated weapons that are being employed are American weapons. The planes that are incredibly effective in bombing Iran, the THAAD missiles. In Gaza, Israel needed immediate replenishment of munitions. We were taking them even out of our own stockpiles. Then there is the international law part because it’s the shielding at the UN, it’s the shielding at the International Criminal Court. If you remove that, I just don’t see it. Netanyahu can use that as we’re going to be the ally of China or India, but no one has that kind of power the one that we bring to bear.