Gaza, Israel and the United States - with Zachary Foster

Dr. Zachary Foster is a historian of Palestine, having gotten his PhD in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. He’s a distinguished fellow at the Rutgers Center for Security, Race and Rights. He also runs the PalestineNexus.com, which offers an invaluable newsletter, accessible research and even courses you can enroll to learn more. He returns to Zipcode Zero to talk about where things stand in Gaza and the historical context needed to understand the present conflict.

Website
PalestineNexus.com

Twitter
@_ZachFoster

Chapters

00:00
Introduction to the Conflict

03:09
Current Situation in Gaza

05:53
Israel's Goals and Strategies

09:11
US Involvement and Influence

12:07
The Humanitarian Crisis in Gaza

15:04
The Nature of Cruelty in Warfare

17:59
The Role of the US in Supporting Israel

21:10
The Israel Lobby and Political Dynamics

24:05
Historical Context of Peace Efforts

26:59
Conclusion and Future Implications

46:40
The Oslo Accords: A Complicated Legacy

49:47
Colonialism and the PLO's Role

52:11
Negotiation Failures and the Road to Violence

55:11
Taba Talks: Progress Amidst Stalemate

57:23
The One-State vs. Two-State Debate

01:01:41
The Settler Movement and Ethnic Cleansing

01:03:45
The Future of Israel-Palestine Relations

01:11:26
The Generational Shift in Public Opinion

01:24:15
Conclusion: Hope and Challenges Ahead

Show Info
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Twitter
@KevinAMaley
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Email
ZipcodeZeroPodcast@gmail.com
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Music
Urban Deer Hunt:  https://linktr.ee/urbandeerhunt

Transcript

Zachary Foster (00:00)
So my name is Zachary Foster. I am a historian of Palestine. I did my PhD on the origins of a Palestinian identity in the Ottoman period. I write a newsletter called Palestine in your inbox where we try to provide historical context for the present moment. And I also teach courses online. So if you're interested in the history of Israel-Palestine, if you're interested in the history of Zionism, you can also register for those courses at PalestineNexus.com.

Kevin Maley (00:24)
Awesome. Well, welcome back. Excited to dive in. So I wanted to get started just kind of looking at where things stand today with the conflict in Gaza. There's also things going on in the West Bank. Israel is expanding to Lebanon, just attacked Iran. There are the Houthis in Yemen. So there's a lot going on, but it kind of feels like it's not getting the sort of front page coverage to the extent that it ever was just given the U.S. presidential election.

So where things stand right now, mean, as far as one can tell, currently in Gaza, there's between 40 and a couple hundred thousand people dead. I think it's hard to measure. I've seen estimates all over the map. We did see that Israel killed one of the leaders of Hamas, Yahya Sinemar, if I'm pronouncing that correctly. And it also killed Ismael Khinia in July.

And, you know, I reading something in the Financial Times a couple of days ago urging President Biden to pressure Netanyahu to wrap things up given that Gaza has effectively been destroyed. The leadership of Hamas appears to have been decimated. Just kind of looking at that, where do you see things now and why doesn't, why wouldn't Israel just call it off now and kind of wrap things up, declare victory and go home?

Zachary Foster (01:48)
Well, the goal of the war on Gaza was never about killing Sinwar. It wasn't even one of the stated goals of the operation to begin with. The stated goals, we can talk about the real goals afterwards, but the stated goals were the destruction of Hamas, as well as a return to the hostages. Well, you can kill however many leaders of Hamas that you like, but that's not gonna destroy the organization. The organization is divided into many, many battalions.

who are local fighting forces, there's a battalion based in Rafah, there's a battalion based in Khan Yunis, there's a battalion based in Jabalia, there's a battalion based in Beit Lahya, et cetera, et Just because you kill Sinwar in Rafah doesn't have any impact really on the operational capacity of the other brigades. And by the way, that's just leaving aside the other armed factions in Gaza altogether, which don't report into Sinwar at all. I mean.

There's no world in which you destroy Hamas as an organization by killing the leader if that was the case then Israel would have destroyed Hamas decades ago, right? Israel has killed every single leader of Hamas going back to the founder of Hamas Sheikh Ahmadi Asin who was assassinated in was it 2004? And then they killed his replacement Ablaziz Rantisi also in 2004 And and they killed the the polyp Rio chief as you said as Marania that

apparently had no impact on the organization. They killed Sinwar. Since Sinwar's death, the fighting has accelerated. Hamas has carried out dozens of operations since Sinwar has been killed. I mean, unless you've just been living in a coma for the past year, you would never make the argument that Israel destroys Hamas by killing Sinwar. So that's point one. But of course, the goal is never about...

really destroying Hamas or even bringing back the captives and the hostages and the prisoners of war. We've known that since October. There was a plan on the table already in October 2023, all for all. And this was well established. The reporting was very clear, all for all. It was rejected that in October. Israel has rejected it many, many times since then. You even have the Jerusalem Post, which I would describe as a pro-genocide publication based in Jerusalem, publishing reports in May, June, July with the title

Netanyahu is actively seeking to sabotage the peace negotiations, the ceasefire deal. mean, that's Israel's right wing saying Netanyahu has no interest in the ceasefire. And this has been known all along. Anyone who pays any attention to Israeli politics has known for more than a year that Netanyahu has no interest in a ceasefire. His goal is the complete annihilation of Gaza. Ultimately, we learned already in October 2023, the goal was to push out.

as many Palestinians as possible from Gaza to North Sinai. When it became clear that the Egyptians were not gonna allow that to happen, then the plan has shifted over the past 12 months. Now, the new plan appears to be the ethnic cleansing of the North. This has become known as the Generals Plan, which is a plan to effectively destroy all ability, all capacity.

in the north to sustain human life. So that means completely destroying the Kamel Adwan Hospital, which was the last remaining hospital in the north, at least in Bet Lahya. It means completely destroying all the remaining civilian infrastructure. And the plan appears to be to try and push out as many Palestinians from the north down to the south. And so that is what Israel is doing. People are calling it a genocide within a genocide because guess what happens if you don't leave?

you will be assumed to be an enemy combatant and targeted, which is effectively genocide. that's the plan. The plan was never about, it was never about bringing back the hostages or even destroying Hamas. It is to make life in Gaza unlivable.

Kevin Maley (05:26)
So, mean, just stemming from that, so do you think Israel's intention is to fully take control of the northern half of Gaza, expel the Gazans from the northern half of Gaza? And then what, institute military bases there? Would they bring the settlers back to North Gaza? And then what happens to the southern half of Gaza? And just for context, for those who need a reminder, Gaza is what effectively the size of Manhattan. It's through, I don't know, like five kilometers wide and

15 to 20 long, is that about right?

Zachary Foster (05:57)
Yeah, that's about right. That's five, six kilometers wide and its widest point and yeah, about 20 some miles from north to south. yeah, that feels like about the size of Manhattan. So that's right. We're talking about a population that was considered to be the second most densely populated area on planet earth before October 7th. And now they've already decreased the size of Gaza by about 15 % through the

through the occupation of the expansion of the security zone, the buffer between Gaza and Israel. So they've taken over another 10 to 15 % of Gaza just through those security zones. They've also expanded the Philadelphia quarters. They've taken land there. They've also implemented a new Netzerim quarter, which is again, another security buffer. And now what they're doing in Netzerim quarter being that strip of land basically dividing Gaza North and South. So they've already taken over something like 10, 15 % of Gaza already.

Now the plan appears to be, even though Israeli officials have denied this, but the reports from the ground are really confirming what we already knew was Israel's plan all along to depopulate the north. But now the plan appears to be to try and depopulate, to try and ethnically cleanse the four, five, 600,000 people left in the north of Gaza, north of the Netzerim corridor. And they're doing it neighborhood by neighborhood. They started with Jabalia and Beit Lahya, and I imagine they'll probably proceed to Gaza City.

and the other towns and refugee camps north of the necessary corridor. That's the plan right now.

Kevin Maley (07:30)
The United States and the Biden administration has set a series of red lines, the most famous being Biden said a clear red line for him is that Netanyahu Israel should not go into Rafa,

obviously Biden's not gonna be president that much longer, but with the United States, is that a bridge too far for them on basically Israel taking full control of the northern half of Gaza and ethnically cleansing it? I mean, I do wanna get into later the question of whether the US has any influence over Israel or what that relationship is like, but you hear just with Israel's recent attack on Iran that the US was.

pressuring them not to go after the nuclear sites, pressuring them to go a little easy. And I don't know how much of that is true, but Would the US accept the full ethnic cleansing of Northern Gaza? And would Israel even listen to them if they said that they were not for that?

Zachary Foster (08:27)
There are no red lines. That is very clear. So long as Biden is President of the United States, so long as Blinken is Secretary of State of the United States, Lloyd Austin, Secretary of Defense, they're all completely complicit. We now have US troops on the ground in Israel. In fact, there was some reporting a few months ago that you have USAID the International Aid Development Agency of the State Department, that they have offices in the Sde Teiman prison torture camp, that they're literally...

in the same building, in the same facility where a few months ago in August 2024, video evidence surfaced of Israeli prison guards brutally raping Palestinian prisoners on video. After which point you saw riots in Israel to support the right to rape Palestinian prisoners. And then you had debates on Channel 12 and Channel 14.

where the left and the right debated whether or not it was okay to rape Palestinian prisoners. I got off on a tangent there, basically...

Kevin Maley (09:27)
They had debates in the Knesset too, right? On the, on whether it was okay to gang rape Palestinian prisoners.

Zachary Foster (09:33)
That's right. All the while you have administration officials continually repeating the lies that Hamas carried out a plan of mass rape, it was a perpetrated, premeditated campaign of mass rape, even though we have yet no evidence that there was even a single rape, let alone mass rape, let alone perpetrated mass rape, or premeditated mass rape. And yet we still hear the lies that it was, you know. So there are no red lines in this war.

Israel can do whatever it wants. In fact, what you see, what you appear, what seems to be happening over the past few months, ever since the escalation with Lebanon and Iran, is that by expanding the conflict, by moving, by first attacking Iran, the Iranian embassy in Damascus, it was April 1st, I believe, and then by attacking on Iranian soil itself, killing the polyp, your chief of Hamas, Ismail Hani, and then by...

attacking Lebanon, killing 550 people in a single day in order to assassinate Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and then expanding the ground war in Lebanon and moving troops into border areas in Lebanon. what has been very obvious is that Israel has sought to escalate with Lebanon, with Hezbollah, with Iran, and that escalation has pulled the United States closer to Israel, has brought the United States, who seem to be increasingly

trying to distance itself from Israel's war in Gaza and trying to push the Israelis, at least publicly, to allow more humanitarian aid, that that is now completely off the table. And instead, you have a U.S. doubling down on Israel's war effort out of this fantasy of remaking a new Middle East, where we're going to bring about regime change in Iran and bring about an end to Hezbollah, decapitate the leadership. What we're seeing, actually, is Netanyahu

Netanyahu's strategy is winning, right? His strategy all along for many, many months was how can I bring the United States into direct military confrontation with the axis of resistance, starting with Iran? And he succeeded at that. so, whereas before, it appeared to be the case that so long as the war was just limited to Gaza, obviously, air operations in Lebanon,

as well as the West Bank, but basically it was still somewhat contained. In a world where there was some amount of containment, the US was applying more and more pressure on Israel, but in a world where Israel is expanding the war effort, trying to remake the Middle East, it has succeeded in bringing the US further into the battle, into the trenches. We now have US troops on the ground in Israel. In order for them to expand their defense capabilities,

You need US military personnel operating that equipment. And that's simply for one reason and one reason only. It's because Netanyahu has successfully expanded the war with US support.

Kevin Maley (12:22)
There was a podcast I was listening to with Norman Finkelstein recently, and he was saying that Netanyahu has basically succeeded at destroying Gaza. And he gave some statistics on just the level of rubble and cement in Gaza and how long it would take to even clear that out. Obviously many, many bodies buried under the rubble. But the idea that Gaza has been made unlivable, the health infrastructure, as you mentioned, the hospitals have been attacked. The Israelis have intentionally attacked water infrastructure.

Just basically the whole place is leveled in a way that I think is unimaginable to most Americans. In that sense, do you think, as Finkelstein and others have suggested, that Netanyahu has succeeded in destroying Gaza and that if not now, it will become very quickly unlivable.

Zachary Foster (13:10)
you recall it was the United Nations that put out a report in 2010 declaring that Gaza would be unlivable by 2020, three years before October 7th. The Gaza Strip has been, I mean, if you go back to the 1950s, have descriptions from reporters on the ground in Gaza talking about Gaza basically being an open air concentration camp where you have these refugee populations totally impoverished stripped of their means of livelihood.

expelled from their villages who have no property, no jobs, no ability to earn a living in these overcrowded refugee camps without adequate food, without adequate water. And this has been the case for literally 75 years. this idea that Gaza is unlivable, this is sort of, I think, The point I'm trying to make, which is that somehow, some way, could, Palestinians will figure out a way of making it work.

And that has been the case for many decades now, right? And now you see these incredible images of bombed out buildings, literally Palestinians remaking their lives inside the rubble. We're talking about some of most resilient people on planet Earth, making do with almost nothing and yet somehow still surviving. Now, Palestinians will figure out a way of living in Gaza. So When we say making Gaza unlivable, what we mean is making life miserable. They're not going anywhere. They have nowhere to go.

But, and so when we say Gaza's unlivable, what we mean is life is miserable. What we mean is infant mortality rates will be through the roof. What we mean is that miscarriages will be through the roof. What we mean is that children will not live to the age of five because they're not provided adequate medical care, prenatal care. So what we're talking about is a population that will suffer from disease, from communicable diseases, from polio. We're talking about a population that will not have access to clean drinking water.

which will affect kidney disease. We're talking about a population that forget about cancer treatment, forget about dialysis machines, where anyone with any type of condition will die. Preventable deaths will be widespread. That is what we're talking about when we say Gaza's unlivable. It's not that it's unlivable, it's that life will be miserable and the people who manage to survive will be people who have suffered through thick and thin and just survive just unimaginable conditions.

Kevin Maley (15:23)
Yeah. And one thing I kind of struggle with, it seems very clear that that's a level of cruelty that's intentional, that it's not an unintended consequence of war. even going beyond that, these reports that come out of Gaza where you hear American physicians, think something like 15 or 30 American physicians that had spoken to the New York Times talking about the number of children that had sniper lethal, obviously, sniper wounds to their head.

that they'd never seen anything like that before. When the IDF goes into hospitals in Gaza and forces the evacuation movement around of soldiers and leaves children in the neonatal unit. So then you come back and those babies are decomposing. You hear over and over again about IDF soldiers going into homes of people who have fled and going through and trying on women's lingerie. And we know this is true because they make TikTok videos of it.

There's in fact quite a lot of TikTok videos of IDF soldiers playing around with Palestinian women's underwear. Is there something different about this conflict? What is it about it? Is this just the colonial mindset? you know, horrible things happen in war. And maybe every war this happens. But it feels like with certain wars, usually colonial wars,

maybe sometimes the Second World War between the Russians and Germans, the dehumanization of the enemy allows just this level of cruelty. And the idea that you just have these young soldiers going in and intentionally blowing up clean water infrastructure and shooting babies in the head and laughing about it blowing up buildings and laughing about it and bulldozing cemeteries and digging up bodies and laughing about it.

And again, we know all this because they make TikTok videos over and over over again. Like this is not, these are not just anonymous quotes going into UN reports. They are documenting it themselves. What am I missing here that enables this level of cruelty?

Zachary Foster (17:26)
think the conversation ought to start with decades-long impunity that Israel and Israeli soldiers and Israeli military and political leaders have felt for, like I said, many, many decades. This is not the first time Israel has been charged with war crimes. It's not the first time at all. You had an ICJ case almost 20 years ago in 2005, where the International Court of Justice declared the wall that Israel was building, 89 % of which is built on occupied territory in the West Bank.

That was declared illegal. This is 18 years ago. And what happened? Nothing. Nothing happened. There were no consequences. Israel has been expanding its settlements, colonizing the West Bank since 1967. Every 10 years, the settler population doubles. It started off at zero in 1967, and now it's almost a million. Okay? No consequences, none whatsoever. 3.8 billion every year. Every year, Israel expands its settlement population.

colonizes more land, confiscates more Palestinian property, destroys more Palestinian homes, and gets another 3.8 billion. So when there's no consequences for continually violating international law, then it continues. We saw even in the most extreme cases, you had a Palestinian elderly man who also had American citizenship. This is in 2022. He was a Palestinian man in his 70s, an elderly man.

and he was ruthlessly murdered by the Israeli military, an American man, his name is escaping me at the moment. And he was, and then the United States said, we are going to consider imposing sanctions on this unit of the Israeli military that murdered this American citizen. And guess what happened? Just a couple of months ago, Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, declared that that investigation was over and no consequences would be faced by the unit who carried out that atrocity.

Shireen Abu Atlet shot in the head by an Israeli sniper. Okay? What happened? An American citizen, Palestinian journalist, one of the most famous American Palestinians, period, shot in the head, murdered in cold blood. What happened to her, perpetrators of that murder? Nothing, no consequences, zero. And so when you have a country that carries out acts of violence, murdering innocent people for decades,

And there are no consequences. Well, guess what? Then it's going to continue doing it. And so I think you have to start with the impunity to understand how it is that you see these TikTok videos. But I think it's much, much deeper than that, which is that the Israeli military's attitude for really going back to the 1950s, I mean, you might even really trace it to the 40 war itself, but going back to the 50s, the attitude of the Israeli military was make them pay. And there's a direct quote from Ben Gurion to

who was then Prime Minister of Israel, I it was 1953, or think it was 55, when he tells Ariel Sharon, who is a commander on the front lines, he tells him, you know, anyone who murders a Jew, make them pay. I mean, this was the attitude. was disproportionality as a military principle. And that was the attitude of the Israeli military in the 50s, during the quote unquote border wars, when a Palestinian might raid Israel, vandalize some property, maybe even kill an Israeli. What happened? The Israeli military goes in,

and just commits indiscriminate slaughter. That's what they did in 1956, right? Out of revenge for all those raids where a handful of Israelis were harmed. Israel goes into Rafah, goes into Chanunis, on November 3rd, 1956, lines up all the men above age 15 in the village of Chanunis and massacres them, and then goes to Rafah and does the same thing. I mean, what did they do? The policy was disproportionate violence. The policy was a war crime.

That was 56, the same thing of course happened in 67 when Israel was not facing any kind of war of annihilation. It was a war of choice. Israel chose to invade Egypt. Israel chose to start a war and know, committing, know, taking all this land. This thing was true in the 80s, 1982, right? This is a war of choice. Israel goes in, occupies Beirut, besieges the city, slaughters thousands and thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians.

The same was true in every single, basically every single military engagement between Israel and the Palestinian people from the 80s to the present. The exact same philosophy during the first Intifada from 1987 to 1993, Palestinians kill about 160 Israelis. Israel kills 1,100 Palestinians. Same thing in the 90s, the period when Israel is now faced actually with real terrorism where you have Palestinians going into Israeli cafes and Israeli buses and blowing up innocent Israelis. A real period of violence for the Israeli public.

Even then, even then, the ratio of dead Palestinians to dead Israelis is like, I think it's three to one. Roughly 600 Palestinians slaughtered from 93 to 2,000, where you have less than 200 Israelis killed from 93 to 2,000. And then the ratios just become bonkers. As soon as Israel starts, closes in on Gaza, know, locks up, withdraws settlers in 2005, and imposes a siege from without.

Every single war in Gaza, the guiding principle in 2008-9, Casly, 2012, the pillars of defense, 2014, 2021, 2018-19, same philosophy in every single war. Make them pay. And so no surprise that in 2024, when you have hundreds of Israeli civilians killed, unclear how many were killed by Israel versus Hamas, but you have hundreds of Israeli civilians killed, what's the philosophy? It's genocide.

That's all right.

Kevin Maley (23:05)
But there has been, there have been American attempts previously to restrain Israel, right? I mean, so you mentioned the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. There, there was a massacre. I can't remember what it was, but you had Reagan calling up Menachem Begin telling him that, you know, he's instituting a Holocaust and he's got to pull back. And I think Israel complied with that. You had in 1992 or 1991, whenever it was, James Baker, then secretary of state under George H.W. Bush.

trying to put a freeze on loan guarantees to Israel because they wouldn't stop the expansion of settlements in the West Bank. And then you had some tepid responses from people like George W. Bush to some Israeli actions in the early 2000s. But you really haven't seen that much. mean, Obama abstained from a UN resolution condemning Israel and everyone freaked out. Trump obviously did nothing and Biden has

done nothing. there an evolution toward fewer and fewer attempts to restrain Israel? If not, why isn't the US doing more? mean, it can't just be Biden, obviously, because you went through the whole history going back to Eisenhower, where the US has not really been doing much, but there have been a few instances. So I'm just wondering why we're not seeing that now. Is it just about Biden?

Zachary Foster (24:25)
There's no question that the United States president plays an outsized role in US foreign policy making decisions. I mean, there's no question about that. so really, mean, the public on average doesn't really care about foreign policy, right? If you poll your average American, what do you think about this side of the other foreign policy issue and how high does it rank on your list of voting priorities? It's rarely going to make the top three. And for the most part, people just don't have very strongly formulated opinions about foreign policy issues.

Expectedly most people care about domestic issues foreign policy issues to most people just don't have an impact on their day-to-day life So that's that's the first point to make but you're absolutely correct to point out that Biden of all US government officials For various reasons which we can get into he has shown this Almost irrational Loyalty to the decision-making process of the current Israeli Prime Minister. I mean, there's the quote already going back to the 80s

where he tells Menachem Begin, shortly after Israel's invasion of Beirut. It's a very famous quote. He says something to the effect of, didn't go far enough. I would have killed more women and children, or you should have killed women and children. We could...

Kevin Maley (25:30)
Yeah, here's to the writer Ronald Reagan on that. Reagan was the dove there.

Zachary Foster (25:33)
He, exactly my point. So he has been an extreme outlier when it comes to support for Israel. Why that is the case? I mean, we can all speculate on his, you know, the psychological trauma he had as a kid, or I don't know what it was that led him to believe that genocide is an okay response to October 7th. But here we are with a US president that has no, has shown no ability to show any, to place any constraints on Israel at all.

I would add that he's also senile and is incapable of really running the country or making coherent statements or developing some kind of strategy when it comes to Israel-Palestine. So he's just in the passenger seat. He's deferring to Netanyahu, a prime minister who has openly declared his support for Biden, Harris's contender. mean, this is the crazy thing. And now you look at some of these polls,

you shared with me the poll, I didn't even see that apparently Arab Americans are split 50-50 on Biden-Harris, which is mind-blowing. I mean, which really just goes to show just what a catastrophic policy this is. And this is not just for the Palestinians and the Lebanese, but also for your chances of winning. I just don't understand how it is you believe that, that by continuing the current policy, by declaring that we're not going to, you know,

Kevin Maley (26:35)
Yeah.

Zachary Foster (26:57)
imposed an arms embargo on Israel. that was what Kamala Harris's advisor stated shortly after the DNC. Her advisor came out with a tweet and said, there's no consideration of an arms embargo on Israel. In other words, the genocide will proceed. And so you have basically many, many polls showing that there's widespread support in the Democratic Party for an imposed ceasefire. In other words, an arms embargo. We have

We have a Zateo poll going back to, I believe, August, in which a majority of Democrats, I think it's about 55, 56 % of Democratic voters, support a ceasefire and support in arms, sorry, are calling what is happening in Gaza genocide. know, 18 to 29 year olds, the vast majority support a ceasefire on both sides of the aisle. You want to bring young people out to vote? You want to bring out the base to vote? You gotta impose it. You gotta at least declare your support.

Ford arms embargo. So, and yet we're not seeing any such policy. So it's really mind boggling how Biden and obviously Kamala right behind him are just continuing along with the current policy. It seems to be obviously bad for the Palestinians and for the Israelis, but also catastrophic for your own chances of winning the election.

Kevin Maley (28:16)
Yeah. Well, Harris is going around campaigning with Liz Cheney and thanking Dick Cheney for his service to this country. So I'm sure it's not really great for peace-minded voters. Another thing I wanted to get your thought on is the notion of the Israel lobby. So I'm sure you're familiar with the Merzheimer-Mault argument in the book. And Merzheimer is doing lots of events talking about this now. That perspective is that there's

a very, very powerful lobby, not just APAC, APAC being a component, but also Christian evangelicals and the arms industry and that sort of thing, who come together to really pressure the United States to go lockstep in Israel, often going against the United States' own interests. And there's a kind of dissent from that argument from the Chomskys and the Finkelsteins of the world that argue.

The US is doing this because Israel is an appendage of US power and it's a proxy of US power. And so even though it looks like, you know, the tail is wagging the dog here, this is really being done because the kind of liberal political establishment, liberal and Republican political establishment view it as an American interest and they don't need to have AIPAC in their offices telling them to do it. They would do it either way. Where do you come down on that?

Or is there a third side of that debate? But where do you fall down on that?

Zachary Foster (29:41)
It's a very academic debate, right? Because it's not really the way the world works, right? That it's either one or the other. It's a complex set of factors that lead U.S. officials to support Israel. And some of them have to do with the pressure of the lobby. Some of them may have to do with the perceived interest of the United States in the Middle East. And I don't see any reason why these two perspectives are at all conf-

Contradictory in fact, I think they're very complimentary right? So on the one hand you have obviously have a back which Has played an outsize role in electing pro-genocide candidates to the US Congress since 2023 but long before 2023 played an outsize role in electing pro-israel pro-apartheid candidates to the US Congress You have the number one donor in for the on the Democratic side a guy by the name of Haim Saban

Who has said many times I'm a single issue issue voter. My issue is Israel He is he donates more money to the Democratic Party than anyone else and on the Republican side you have again single issue a voter Sheldon Adelson now the late Sheldon Adelson his wife Miriam has taken over the multi-billion dollar fortune Many many tens of millions of which go to the Republican Party every campaign season You have Bernard Marcus you have Paul Singer you have Ron Lauder all people major donors to Republican Party all

who care primarily about Israel, so that you have these big forces, right? I mean, this goes back to the, I mean, this goes back many, many decades, right? Because you had, was Bill Clinton, Bill and Hillary Clinton, right? Each of whom received millions of dollars from AIPAC and from other pro-Israel groups and speaking fees. Hakeem Jeffries, who has risen to the highest ranks of the Democratic party. He was basically an AIPAC stooge when he was recruited by AIPAC to run for Congress.

and now he's reached the very highest echelons of the Democratic Party, right? You have the most recent cases of Jamal Bowman being unseated. I believe the AIPAC spent something like 15 million to unseat Jamal Bowman, which in a congressional, this was in a congressional primary race, 15 million in a primary race, okay? This is outside a lobby spending money through these

super PAC fronts that on advertisements that have nothing to do with Israel. Right? It's just trying to attack the candidate wherever they think they're weakest. But it's effectively pro-Israel money trying to take down people like Jabal Bowman because they were the strong supporters of a ceasefire. Okay. Then you had E-PAC spend another $8 million to unseat Cori Bush. Again, same story attacking her on non-Israel issues. Again, for one reason only, she is against genocide. And then you had

Kevin Maley (31:55)
Yeah, it was about the infrastructure bill, I think.

Zachary Foster (32:17)
who am I missing? Cordie Bush, Jamal Bowman, and they took down a third one. or they tried to take down Summer Lee. They tried to take down Summer Lee in Pennsylvania. what was the result of that election? I'm, think they lost.

Kevin Maley (32:23)
Summer Lee in Pennsylvania, yeah.

She came out well because I think it was a different kind of congressional district. Bowman's in Westchester, I mean half Westchester, half the Bronx. So he had a tricky district and then Cori Bush may have been drawn a certain way, but I think some of her leaves was less able to be influenced by outside money.

Zachary Foster (32:37)
Right.

That's right, some really survived. They obviously also tried to take down Rashidat Leib. They failed because they offered $20 million to both Hill Harper and Nasser Baydoun, two Michigan-based Democrats, to run against Rashidat Leib in the primary. Both of them leaked the dollar amount they were offered in order to try to prevent other Michigan-based Democrats from accepting the blood money. So they are...

Who spends $20 million just trying to unseat people at the primary level? I mean, this is the desperation you're seeing. No one spends $20 million if you think you have a chance of winning. You spend these kinds of dollar amounts because you're behind. So this is the ad.

Kevin Maley (33:28)
But it's scare everyone else from falling out of line, right? I mean, it's to show that we've got the power to do this so that they don't have to spend that in any other race. I mean, some of these races like Jamal Bowman may have lost anyway. there's articles I was reading saying the APAC money may have not even been necessary for a variety of different reasons, but APAC being

Blamed, but also taking the credit for his defeat and showing that demonstration of 10 or 15 million sends a signal to every other, especially Democrats, don't get out of line because we've got a lot of money and we can take you down even in liberal district.

Zachary Foster (34:08)
No, you're absolutely right about that. Some of these districts may have been somewhat competitive in any case, and maybe the APEC money didn't matter that much. But what it does is it creates a culture of fear. Because why if I don't really have a horse in the race, if my district doesn't really care that much on this one issue, even though I want to take a principled stand, am I going to sacrifice my senacy, my congressional seat? Am I going to sacrifice all the issues that I care about just for this one issue?

No, I'm just gonna fall in line. And it's that culture of fear that has an impact. And so there's no question AIPAC has a huge impact on who runs in what races, who has enough money to run in which races, and who gets elected. I mean, that's very obvious. But I don't discount the point that is raised on the other side. The Chomskys as well as...

You have people like Joseph Massad making this argument as well. So you could be very, very, you know, about as pro-Palestine as it gets and make the point that actually it's not really the Israel lobby that matters. And the point Joseph Massad makes is that the United States has long been a supporter of settler colonial regimes around Africa and Asia for decades. There's something new, there's something unique about the United States' support for settler colonial and apartheid states. You just need to look no further than the United States'

support for apartheid South Africa, which despite the recommendation by the United Nations to impose an arms embargo on South Africa in the 80s, the US did continue to send arms to this apartheid regime. And of course, it's beyond just apartheid South Africa, right? The United States supported the French in Algeria during that brutal colonial war, during which many, many tens of thousands of Algerian revolutionaries were slaughtered by the French military.

Who was the United States supporting? Were they supporting the indigenous population of Algeria? Resisting colonial rule? No, of course not. They were supporting the French. Same is true in the Portuguese settler colonies. The United States supported Angola and Mozambique, those Portuguese settler colonial states. And then the United States also supported in the case of, basically, also had apartheid South Africa, also had its own colonies.

And the United States supported those colonial establishments as well. So there's nothing particularly unique about the United States' support for Israel when you really zoom out and say, in general, when you just look at US foreign policy writ large, which kinds of states does the United States generally support? Well, we support these white settler colonial outposts in Africa and the Middle East.

Kevin Maley (36:42)
Do you ever get bothered or, let me find a way to rephrase this. I find myself often getting bothered just thinking about all the things that you just said about the US supporting settler colonial regimes throughout its history, but even in recent times, in the Democratic Party, it feels like over the last four to five years, there's been this prioritization of racial equity and gender equity and.

caring about everyone and human rights and that sort of thing. And it's just completely divorced from US foreign policy. And of course, US rhetoric has always been different from what we actually do on US foreign policy. just it's something that just angers me in a different way because there's such a self-righteousness in the Democratic Party right now about using these terms like racial equity while they're supporting an apartheid regime that's

an ethno state that is slaughtering people because they're the wrong religion. I mean, am I the only one that that baffles my mind that no one sees the contradiction there?

Zachary Foster (37:48)
Well, I think the biggest contradiction in United States policy making, decision making circles has been what we do at home versus what we do abroad. I mean, look at what we did in Iraq. Look at what we did in Afghanistan. Look at what we did in Yemen. I mean, in Iraq, we launched a war against, you know,

a war that was obviously illegal international law, you can't invade a country that's illegal without the Security Council resolution supporting it. And so, you know, and what did we do? We invaded Iraq, destabilized the Middle East, led to the rise of ISIS, and 20 years later, a million Iraqis are dead as a result of our invasion. Right? What did we do in Afghanistan? Invaded, occupied, 20 years later, the same people are in power.

We just wrecked havoc down the country for 20 years. What progress was made? What did we do in Yemen for five years? We sent arms and weapons to Saudi Arabia and the UAE so they could carry out a war of annihilation, slaughtering a million Lebanese, excuse me, slaughtering a million Yemenese. know, tens of thousands of children slaughtered with our weapons and our bombs that they proudly show when you drop a bomb, guess what happens? They're gonna pick it up and show in front of the camera.

US-made weapon. This is something the United States have been doing for decades. The idea that the United States is somehow a force for good in the world? mean, this is, think, the faultiest assumption whenever people ask the question of, why is the US so pro-Israel, right? I do a lot of talks, a lot of people ask. The number one question I get asked, why, especially from young people, right? Why is the US supporting Israel? How are we complicit in this genocide? Why?

That question is in of itself, presupposes the United States is some force for good in the world. I mean, the amount of destruction and devastation that we have wrought all around the world is probably by far and away larger than any other country in recent memory. I what other country has started or contributed to or supported four, five, six wars of annihilation where innocent civilians are just being slaughtered for no reason? That's the United States is doing.

Kevin Maley (40:06)
Yeah, it's tough to think about. So go into the historical context. One of the things that I wanted to get your perspective and your knowledge on is I, you know, just hearing how people talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you hear a lot in American media that the Palestinians had a chance for peace, but they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. This is especially talked about with Oslo that

You had this great opportunity with the Oslo Peace Accords in think 1993, you know, very unfortunate that Rabin was assassinated, but you had this great promise of eventually moving toward a two-state solution, but it all kind of fell apart because Arafat couldn't take a good deal at Camp David. And then you had the second Intivada start kind of shortly thereafter. And the Israelis realized they just would never have a partner in peace.

And they couldn't extend the hand anymore and they had to get, you know, harsh guys in like Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu again. And so what do you say when you hear that and what's the, does the historical record support that?

Zachary Foster (41:20)
Israel's goal long before the asl process has been we want compliant Palestinians right that has always been the goal And by the way this long predates asl and I do think it's worth mentioning that in the 70s Israel allowed Palestinians to hold municipal elections those in 1976 PLO supporters of the PLO won they swept across the board it was like an overwhelming victory for supporters of the PLO who won all these

You know mayor races and and now you have basically, you know Pro pro Pielo mayors in Ramallah and all across the West Bank beginning in 1976 and what is all doing response? It spun up these These organizations that were known as the village committees They basically appointed shares in village in from rural parts of the West Bank in Gaza And gave them real power. They gave them weapons. They gave them funding. They gave them, you know

certain privileges and the ability to issue building permits and so on. Why did they do that? Because the elected representatives of the Palestinians, municipal, the winners of these municipal elections, they were all non-compliant, right? They supported the PLO, which was at the time Israel's main adversary. So there's been a long-standing attempt by Israel to create a compliant, a Palestinian to work with.

And basically you could say Oslo was finally kind of that dream come true. It was a, PLO had himself, Yasser Arafat, coming around in 1988, basically comes out with a declaration saying, support Israel's right as a Jewish state in 1988 and renouncing violence in 1988. And so in 1993, by the time you have the Oslo Accords, this document signed between the PLO and Israel,

Israel is effectively signing an agreement with people that have already renounced violence and have already given up on armed struggle. At the time, there actually was an armed struggle. It was being carried out by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Hamas, who between 88 and 93 had carried out dozens and dozens of attacks on primarily Israeli military targets. But Israel had no desire to negotiate with the armed factions. No, they were happy to negotiate with the PLO. Because what happens when you negotiate?

With compliant Palestinians you make all the decisions you set the rules of the engagement Which is basically what Oslo was it was Israel dictating the rules, you know, the process was basically I mean just to summarize, know a tremendous amount of history and just a very short summary Oslo says that in Palestine and say look we you get to continue expanding the settlements you can continue to intensify the occupation you can impose closures and lockdowns on us there's

There's no limits. This has nothing to with the occupation. Instead, what the Palestinians, what they were given was limited autonomy in urban areas of the West Bank and Gaza. They were given the right to issue building permits, the right to clean the streets, the right to police the streets, the right to run the hospital system, the right to run the education system. All things Israel wanted to offload. Israel didn't want to be policing the streets of Ramallah and Hanunis.

No, they were facing heavy casualties. That was the first Intifada, right? It was 160 Israelis, almost all of them soldiers killed from 87 to 93, right? Israel didn't want to be bogged down in the territories. There was casualties, this was costly. And so Israel wanted to offload those responsibilities to a compliant subcontractor. And that is what it achieved with Oslo. And so, yeah.

Kevin Maley (44:55)
And that's big colonial theme, right? I think Shlomo Ben-Ami had called that a neo-colonial's exercise later in his life and compared it to the British in India or the French in different parts of Africa where colonial powers, imperial powers had traditionally outsourced some local control because if you're the British Empire, you're not in fact a big nation yourself in the

the Metropole, so the British ran India largely with Indians. They found compliant partners to, as you said, run the municipalities, run the police force, that kind of thing, but they were subservient to the imperial interests.

Zachary Foster (45:38)
That's exactly correct. is tried and true colonialism 101 is offload the dirty work, which is exactly what Israel did with Oslo, right? And in fact, it was almost a dream come true because then they got to pretend to the world that they were making these painful concessions. We're giving up land, you know, but of course actually no land was actually really given up. In fact, Israel continued to expand the settlement enterprise from 93 to 2000 during the Oslo process.

Israel doubled its settler population, continued to confiscate Palestinian land, continued to destroy Palestinian olive groves. And then what happened in 2000, when as a precondition for going into the negotiations, Yasser Arafat made Bill Clinton promise to him that he would not blame Arafat if the negotiations failed. And then of course what did Clinton do? He blamed Arafat. But that was for one simple and obvious reason. Arafat didn't want to go to negotiations yet.

The time was not ripe. He knew that. There was an election coming up in Israel. Ehud Barak basically had only a few months left before there would be an election. Clearly, the time was not ripe. And then on top of that, there was just so much distance between the parties. Which, by the way, they closed some of that distance, which we can get to in the 2001 Tawa discussions, and then later in Annapolis. But during 2000...

They basically did not agree on anything. There was just so much distance between the two parties. And just to give you a few examples, Israel insisted on maintaining three military outposts in the West Bank. Israel insisted on maintaining complete control of the Jordan Valley and the border with Jordan, such that it completely encircled the West Bank. Israel insisted on maintaining control of the telecommunications network. Israel insisted on maintaining control of the airspace, the groundwater, the surface water.

It also maintained insisted on maintaining the vast majority of its settlement blocks Right which chop up the West Bank and enable Israel to you know Almost in a kind of a Swiss cheese divide up the West Bank into bantu stands cutting them off one from the other which is what we have witnessed Israel do over the past two decades since the Oso The failure of Camp David. So that was the proposal. We haven't even started talking about the refugees. We haven't talked about Jerusalem

on the refugee issue, Israel was not willing to make any concessions at all, even acknowledging they played a role in creating the refugee problem in the first place. When zero historians would tell you that Israel played no role in creating the refugee process. They're just denying history. They're denying a people's right. If you're an Israeli leader and you tell Palestinians, we will not acknowledge having played any role in the...

of 750,000 refugees in 1948. If that's your position, and you expect to be able to make peace with the Palestinians, you are fucking delusional. That would be like telling to the Jews and be like, we deny the Holocaust happened. How are you trying to negotiate peace with someone denying the reality, denying their historical suffering that you are responsible for? It's just mind blowing. And then on Jerusalem, they proposed a capital in Abudis.

Which is by the way, not Jerusalem. To the Palestinians, like, hey, I know you guys want Jerusalem, how about Abu Dis? So there was just so much distance on every issue that it was just obviously there was no, and then, you and you had a very limited time to close these negotiations because like I said, Ehud Barak was coming up for an election. So the negotiations collapsed and then Clinton blamed it on Arafat.

Kevin Maley (48:45)
For the Palestinians.

And wasn't that, didn't Ariel Sarone go to the Al-Aqsa Mosque or something like that around this time and this helps spark the second Intivada?

Zachary Foster (49:15)
That's exactly right. So the negotiations are July 2000, September 2000. You have Ariel Sharon, who's by the way, then an opposition member. He's not part of the government at that time. He's still in the opposition. He takes this provocative tour on the Al-Aqsa Mas compound, asserting Israeli sovereignty over the holiest site to Palestinians, the third holiest site to all of Muslims. The number one cause of violence in Israel-Palestine over the past 140 years is this fear of this Jewish takeover.

of this holy Palestinian Muslim site. And that's exactly what he was trying to do, stoke the fear, right? Enrage Palestinians. That was the point to assert Israeli control, okay? And what happened? You get protests immediately. And what does the Israeli army do in the first three weeks after the protests? They want to fan the flames. They want to rile up Palestinians. They shoot 14 Palestinian kids in the head in the first three weeks. Okay, some of the most violent scenes that you have witnessed to date.

in the Israel-Palestine question. And then you get a second intifada. So, I mean, Israel brought that on itself. It brought it on itself. And I'm not justifying violence against civilians, but this was entirely predictable.

Kevin Maley (50:22)
So then.

So Camp David didn't go well. You have the second intifada starting. But can you speak just a little bit about Taba and how these talks, maybe not between the principals, but between people I think who are on their staffs, the talks continued for a little bit in Egypt to see if they could get to some sort of solution.

Zachary Foster (50:46)
That's exactly right. you do have basically kind of a round two in Taba. And what I would say in Taba, and there's been a lot of reporting on this, so I'm not saying anything really new here, but I would say that they made some amount of progress on borders and security. And basically with this idea of land swaps, where you would swap out basically some part of Israel, which is whatever, not very...

you know, doesn't have very many population centers in it. And Palestinians would get that in exchange for the settlements. But again, the problem really was not so much how much land the Palestinians would get. It was would they actually get control over that land? In other words, Israel actually, would the Israeli military actually withdraw? Would they allow Palestinians control over the telecommunications and the airspace? answer was no. So they would get more land, but they still wouldn't get control over that land that they were given. So are they really given any land at all?

And then I think they do make some progress. I can't remember if it's Taba or Annapolis, but there is, on the issue of Jerusalem, think, ultimately, I think that could have actually been settled. Because actually, Jerusalem was quite a divided city in the year 2000 or 2001. The Israeli settler population, you do have these big Israeli settlements like Piskatzayev, right, or Ramot. But basically, those are basically Jewish-only settlements that are taking over Palestinian land, but you can draw essentially a border, right? It's possible.

So in terms of Jerusalem, it appears as if there was enough creative thinking that there was a way forward on Jerusalem. But again, on the refugee issue, there was no progress. Same stance all the way to the very end of the negotiations in Annapolis in 2007-8, and then all the way up through the John Kerry efforts in 2013-14. Again, no effort was made on the crux of the issue, which is the establishment of the State of Israel was based on the dispossession of the Palestinian people. And if you can't acknowledge that.

There's no hope for peace.

Kevin Maley (52:37)
So you probably get this question a lot, but where do you stand on one state solution, two state solution? Is there any possibility for peace in this conflict?

Zachary Foster (52:48)
There are a lot of creative solutions here. I think the Jeffrey Sachs of the world talk about two states. Great. Let's uproot a million Israelis. Good luck trying to do that.

Kevin Maley (53:01)
Do you think that's impossible though? I mean, you mentioned Algeria before. I think it was a million French left. I mean, it destabilized the French government. I think it collapsed, but you had a million French people leave Algeria after that conflict.

Zachary Foster (53:15)
I mean, look, guess, look, 80 % of these Israeli settlers living in places like Maale Adumim, they don't, they're not ideological. They moved there for cheap housing. They were offered subsidized mortgages by the state of Israel, right?

Kevin Maley (53:32)
I thought the settlers were always more extreme. know my Al-Adabim is closer to Jerusalem, my read had always been that it was more ideological people. Who is it? Itman Ben-Ghavir? He's a settler, right? Is he the one who, and he's like a terrorist nut job, right? I viewed him as being emblematic of the settler movement, people who had, who.

Zachary Foster (53:47)
Yeah, absolutely. No, there's no question.

Kevin Maley (53:57)
go there because they are extremely religious and think they have a God given right and want to dig up Palestinian olive trees and things like that. But is that not the case? mean, it just as you're saying, like, is it a mix of people? Is it people who just need cheap housing?

Zachary Foster (54:13)
Well, I mean, you obviously have two types of settlers, right? You have the settlers and like I said, these are the majority of them who move there for cheap housing and they want a backyard. They can get more land at lower prices. That's 80 % are not. I mean, OK, when I say not ideological, what I mean is I don't mean that they're

like pro-Palestine by any stretch of the imagination. They're living in occupied land, they have no problem with that. They don't care about Palestinians at all. I'm not saying that these people are somehow peace loving, know, peaceniks, no, not at all. In fact, they're probably right wing, most of them, if they're willing to live in the settlement. What I'm saying is that they're not ideologically driven to live there. That the reason for moving to Efrat or to Maale Adumim or to one of the other settlements, because remember, these are big cities.

You know for example like Piskatz Ev is a neighborhood of Jerusalem. It's a settlement, right? It's built on occupied land. It's got 20,000 Israelis They don't even realize that half of them probably don't even know they're living in occupied East Jerusalem remote You know 15 20 thousand Israelis live in remote is a massive, you know neighborhoods They don't they don't even realize it. They're not living there for ideological reasons is the point I'm making they're living there because it's nice place to live from their point of view But anyways like can you uproot a million of these people? I mean

Did you see what happened in 2005 when they tried uprooting 6,000 in Gush Katif? I mean, it almost blew up Israeli.

Kevin Maley (55:36)
Yeah.

They were all they're all saying never again. And I think I was reading something from Chomsky saying the same thing was happening when they had to leave the Sinai that there they was played up as like a Holocaust kind of thing. And they were crying and saying never again. This can never happen again. So imagine it would be worse in the West Bank when there's upwards of a million.

Zachary Foster (55:52)
Forget about even... I mean forget about... Forget about trying to regroup these people. You first of all you have to stop them from expanding. I mean every single day you have now hundreds of these, you know, extremely violent, extremely malicious settlers. You know, people like Moshe. I met him face to face in the northern West Bank near the town of Khumsa. He wakes up every morning and asks himself, how many Palestinians am I going to harass today?

How many palcines am I gonna try and ethnically cleanse tomorrow?

Kevin Maley (56:23)
Yeah, that's what I was picturing for settlers.

Zachary Foster (56:25)
So that is obviously one element of the settler population. But that is an expanding element, right? And it's one that's supported by the Ben Geviers and the Smotriches. so that is... So talking about uprooting settlers, mean, what we're witnessing is the expansion, the intensification of the land confiscations and the ethnic cleansing throughout Area C. In the past 10 years or so, you are 100 times more likely...

to be issued a demolition order on your home. If you live in area C of the West Bank, then you are to be issued a building permit to build a home in area C of the West Bank. The goal is to ethnically cleanse area C. That's what's happening. That's what we're witnessing all around area C. Area C being the 60 % of the West Bank that Israel realized already in 93 it wanted to keep for himself. That's why it's area C. That's why it's full Israeli control, full Israeli civil and security control.

And over the past 30 years, it has engaged in a process of trying to uproot and push out and restrict those Palestinians in areas, say about a hundred thousand of them, get them out of there. And it's using these settlers like Moshe in near Khumsa, whose property I believe has a listing as a verbal or Airbnb where you can go, you know, live life as a settler colonist and experiencing the joy of ethnic cleansing Palestinians yourself. You can go there and visit.

as an Israeli and...

Kevin Maley (57:49)
So is the end game that Israel is just going to be successful in all this? mean, the clear end game is that Israel obviously wants full control over the West Bank and Gaza. They already have full control. They want ethnic cleansing in that area and to incorporate it into Israel proper as a Jewish state. It seems they're on track to succeed. I mean, they're playing the long game, but they took control of the West Bank and Gaza in 67. As you pointed out, there's now million settlers there.

clearing out the northern half of Gaza, it feels like they just have to play the waiting game. I know they've got internal issues as any country does, but it just seems to me there's nothing stopping them from slowly encroaching and taking over the rest of the land and slowly expelling the Palestinians. Because as you pointed out earlier, there aren't any real repercussions, especially through taking it kind of incrementally.

Zachary Foster (58:44)
I don't know what will happen next. I don't think a two-state solution is viable anymore. By the way, neither does anyone else. There's nobody, there's no serious people who actually understand what's happening in Israel-Palestine, maybe with a few minor exceptions of these people like Jeffrey Sachs, like who I mentioned, who is a very respectable intellectual and has lot of interesting things to say, and I genuinely support what he says, but a two-state solution? I mean, how delusional do you have to be to believe that's possible? And then what do you have left?

Kevin Maley (59:12)
Or could it be a one state solution? I mean, did you read like Peter Beinart's take on the idea of a one state solution? This was years ago.

Zachary Foster (59:18)
You have this one democratic state solution, you have one state with two confederacies, there are all these ideas, and again, ultimately, I don't really care how many states there are between the river and sea, states don't matter. The number of states between the river and sea is not relevant to do people have equal rights. Is there rule of law? Do you have a separation of powers? Do you have an independent judiciary? Do you have a thriving civil society? It was under the Israeli leftist government.

leftist, I'm putting that word in quotes obviously, of yeti Lapid, during which time six NGOs based in Ramallah, know, El-Bissan, know, there were six of them. There was a union, the Palestinian Union's organization. They were declared terrorist organizations without any evidence. And the EU decided not to cut off funding to them because Israel presented no evidence they were terrorist organizations.

Why would they declare terrorist organizations? Because they were documenting Israeli human rights violations. And Israel doesn't like that, as we all know. That's why they're putting targets on the heads of journalists in Gaza, trying to kill the six last remaining journalists in North Gaza reporting in English. Israel does not like when people talk about its human rights violations. That is why they put targets on the journalists back. That is why they are trying to declare human rights organizations, terrorist organizations. That is why...

They've just literally made UNRWA illegal in the West Bank and Gaza. The primary organization providing aid to Palestinians is now illegal? I mean, can you imagine during the Holocaust, if Nazi Germany basically said, you know, the organization providing aid, you know, relief aid and humanitarian assistance to Jewish refugees, those organizations are terrorist organizations that are illegal? And then having the United States support them in that?

I it's just wild. I got off on a tangent, but the idea was...

Kevin Maley (1:01:13)
So there's no hope, you're saying. I mean, not that it's incumbent upon us to come up with hope for a dire situation or to come up with a solution because there is no obvious solution. I just didn't know if you had any particular theories on ways to get out, just given especially the thoughts that people have put into the one state solution idea.

Zachary Foster (1:01:31)
Look, if it's up to me, it's everyone, it's one person, one vote, okay? That's how it ought to work.

Kevin Maley (1:01:37)
And so there wouldn't be a Jewish state in that scenario, right?

Zachary Foster (1:01:40)
What does the Jewish state even mean? I think that's the key question.

Kevin Maley (1:01:43)
Well, it's the supremacy of the Jewish people. Right. I mean, isn't that the one of the basic laws that they pass? But, know, just the idea, mean, I guess we could go on this for a while, but just the idea to play the other side here that you needed to have a Jewish state of Jewish majority in order for there to be a refuge for Jews worldwide. And if you have a state where, you know, say

Israel becomes a one state solution and then the Arab population overtakes the Israeli, the Jewish population. Then you no longer have a Jewish majority state and it's just like any other country in the world. then couldn't the same cycle of violence that has beset Jews for millennia come back to haunt them again.

Zachary Foster (1:02:26)
All those people who support a Jewish state in Israel, do they support a white state in the United States? Should we create a-

Kevin Maley (1:02:32)
They would argue that the United States is a majority white country already. that whites as a people have not been persecuted and come near genocide.

Zachary Foster (1:02:36)
Why don't we define it as a-

well, we're facing all this, you know, these attempts at DEI and, you know, they're trying to take us over and replace us. I mean, that's the argument, right? I mean, should we create an Arab state in Egypt? Where you have millions of Nubians and non-Arab Egyptians? Does that sound like a good idea for those people? Should we create a Shia state in Bahrain? Okay. I'm sorry, should we?

Kevin Maley (1:03:05)
No, it be because you have a Shia state next door. mean, there's a majority Shia state in Iran. So I think the argument is there's no majority Jewish state in the world.

Zachary Foster (1:03:10)
Should we create a-

Should we create a Sunni supremacist state in Iraq? Should we create a Turkish state in Turkey, where you have tens of millions of Kurds? I mean, the point I'm making is that...

Kevin Maley (1:03:25)
No, but the argument there would be that you should have a Kurdish state and then people do make that argument that there should be a Kurdistan because they're a persecuted minority.

Zachary Foster (1:03:34)
Fair enough. The point?

Kevin Maley (1:03:35)
I mean, I'm your side. So I'm just playing that I'm trying to provoke your thoughts on this because I don't think that there should be ethnic states anywhere. But this is just the argument that you hear.

Zachary Foster (1:03:39)
Well, rip.

Yeah, I I think that my reading of history is that when you try to create ethno-national states, when you tell the Serbs, know, Serbia is for the Serbs, well guess what happens to the Albanian Kosovars? They get slaughtered. Guess what happens to the Bosnians in Croatia? They get massacred. 7,000 Muslims get slaughtered in Srebrenica. That's what happens when you tell them we should create an ethno-national state. And the same thing happens in every ethno-national, every ethno-nationalism I can think of.

to think of has awful consequences for the non-ethno-nationals in those states. Always. There's zero exceptions. You know, we had this idea of white, you know, the white man's burden in the United States, but what happened to the natives in the United States when it was all about creating a white state? Genocide is what happened to them. And what happens in Egypt when you have this Egyptian Arab nationalism in Egypt? But guess what happens to all the black Egyptians? The most racist people in the world, not Arab Egyptians.

who think black people are slaves. Whenever you create an ideology around a particular ethnic identity or a particular religious identity or a particular racial identity and then say we're gonna privilege that racial, that ethnic, religious identity ahead of the others, you will always see discrimination and racism and at worst, ethnic cleansing, if not genocide. And that's what we're witnessing. Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome.

expression that should be much more popular whenever talking about Israel and Palestine because the The incentive for Zionism was always the same it was gosh wouldn't it be wonderful if this was a Land without a people I mean that was actually the slogan a land without a people for a people without a land wouldn't it be a Zionist dream come true if that was actually the case So what you've done is you've your ideology incentivizes ethnic cleansing and genocide. It's baked in now if you've ever been

In any organization, the incentives determine the outcome. It's a structure. The problem is the structure. It's not even necessarily that these Israelis are more racist than Egyptians or more racist than anyone else. No, the problem is the structure. And so long as you say, this should be a Jewish state, so long as you say we should give Jews privileges in the state, there will always be discrimination against non-Jews. That is the nature of ethno-nationalisms.

Kevin Maley (1:06:11)
Yeah. And I guess there's just no way around it, which again, takes me back to like, how can an American, especially on the left, support the idea of an ethno state and ethnocracy, or I don't know what the right terms are, but the idea that you can be a liberal, small L liberal and support the idea of one ethnic group having supremacy over the other. So just to take us in the final stretch, we've got the election here in the United States next week.

Do you think that outcome will make any difference at all considering, you know, one of the things that I hear a lot, I'll lay my cards on the table. I'm not voting for either one of them. I live in Washington, DC and I actually wrote in Noam Chomsky. But I've had people angrily tell me that it's a vote for Trump, even though I'm in DC, but also that Trump would be so much worse in Gaza because that's one of the primary reasons I'm not voting for.

Harris is Gaza's probably number one for me. Would Trump be worse? mean, this is pure speculation. Who knows? Because I hear, you know, maybe he could rein in Netanyahu, but then he's getting a hundred million dollars from Marian Adelson and she wants him to allow the annexation of the West Bank. But it's just hard to envision with Biden and Harris being a successor of Biden, there hasn't been any restraint.

on Israel. So what difference would it really make between the two of them? And does it, I hate to say this, but really matter in the grand scheme of things if Trump allows the war to go on for another day and kill another hundred Palestinians, if the whole US policy is just to allow Israel to destroy the strip, which again, has largely succeeded. So that's a long way of saying does the election make a difference on this issue.

Zachary Foster (1:07:58)
The short answer is no. On the issue of Israel and Palestine and Gaza and Lebanon and Iran, they're competing over who's more belligerent, who's more pro-war, who's more pro-genocide. That appears to be the debate, at least on the regional escalation. Kamala has made statements to the effect of, would be more belligerent with regard to Iran than Trump, which is just mind-blowing.

I think there's an argument to be made either way. mean, none of us have a crystal ball. I think anyone telling you, one of these candidates will lead to more Palestinians death than the other is just lying to you because we don't really know. I think there's a case to be made that Kamala is actually worse. I mean, I think this is the counterintuitive argument, right? I think the average voter who cares about trying to bring an end to the war in Gaza and the genocide in Gaza is probably voting for Kamala out of this belief that she is maybe slightly better.

But again, I think that's just speculation. We don't know that to be true. She may be even more pro-Israel than Trump. We don't know. We're just speculating. I think the argument you would make if you wanted to vote for Trump, if your number one issue is Gaza, what you would say is that he doesn't pretend, he's not gonna lie to you. Kamala is just gonna lie to you.

And lies are very dangerous because what will happen when Kamala wins is that she's, we're working hard for a ceasefire just tirelessly. I have lost sleep. can't even get a full, which we know is obviously bullshit. Which we know is bullshit, okay? And that will appease some segment of the population to forget about the issue. they're working on it. They're working hard. Whereas if Trump gets elected, there's no pretense.

Kevin Maley (1:09:28)
Up all night, working around the clock. Since January.

Zachary Foster (1:09:45)
He's not gonna lie and tell you, maybe he will, he has no problem lying. But it'll just be more raw. He'll actually just say what we're doing, more likely. And so I do think that that will have, the second order impact of that approach to foreign policy has benefits for the Palestinians. Namely that the immunity system will kick in, protests will get bigger, there will be more outrage, human rights organizations will publish more reports, the ICJ will probably have more evidence at its disposal.

So things can happen. Again, I'm not making a case one way or the other. I'm just presenting an argument that could be made. And then I think ultimately, you know, again, if you believe that Trump is less, is sort of more America first than Kamala, right? Is sort of more, I'm opposed to military intervention abroad. Russia would have never invaded Ukraine if I were president, right? This mentality. If you believe that to be true, there's some possible...

an argument to be made here that actually maybe he will strong arm Bibi. He does not appreciate that 70 % of the cost of the war in Gaza, which I believe is in the many, many tens of billions of dollars, that that is buried on the US taxpayer. Trump is obviously opposed to that. He doesn't like giving away free money when it doesn't benefit us. So there's an argument to be made there perhaps that maybe that side of Trump will come to the floor?

Again, I'm not advocating voting for either one of these candidates. They're both genocidal fucksmercs and I would highly advise you to consider their genocidal rhetoric and their support for genocide when voting for them. I can't bring myself to vote for someone who is actively supporting a genocide. I just can't do that. That's not logical statement. That's an emotional statement. As you can see, I'm emotional, okay? I'm not gonna pretend here that I'm voting based on, you know, sort of like...

You know, logically this is the correct decision. Because again, we're all speculating, we don't know. And anyone who tells you one will necessarily be worse than the others, lying to you because they don't know either.

Kevin Maley (1:11:47)
And then just as a final question, which I'll probably make sound complex because my thoughts are not fully clear on it, but what do you make of the kind of anti-war movement or just reaction within the United States to what is going on in Israel? And I'll preface that by saying I see positive developments like you see

you know, Ta-Nehisi Coates going on his book tour and really getting some of these ideas into the mainstream you have. I mean, even from columnists like Thomas Friedman, just being a little more critical of Israel than I've seen in decades past. I mean, that's a very low bar, I realize with Thomas Friedman, but there seems to be a little more space in the sort of Overton window of conversation for

criticism of Israel. Maybe that has to do with social media. I'm not sure, but it seems like that from when I was in college 20 years ago, it feels like there's more room to breathe on that. On the other hand, it also feels somewhat more repressive. Maybe that's technology, but the encampments on college campuses getting shut down, the attempt to redefine anti-Semitism.

and classify everything as, you know, hate speech or violence against Jews. If you say you don't support what's going on in Gaza, feels like that is clamping down, harsher. Maybe that's a reaction to the first development. don't know, but, and also part of me is I see groups like Jewish voices for peace, or if not now taking over grand central terminal and it's really moving and incredible to see. And then I just kind of wonder like, where's everyone else? Why I know this isn't.

We tend to not have large protests if US troops aren't on the ground, but you wonder about in the 1980s, a huge movement against apartheid in South Africa and that there is no US troops dying because of that. We weren't there on the ground at all, or at least in any meaningful way. So I just, I said at the beginning, it wasn't fully developed in my head, but I have these scattered thoughts on, things, things have gotten worse for the Palestinians, but in the conversation in the US, have we made progress in being able to have more

adult conversation or are we moving toward more censorship and control over that conversation and it's really just an ephemeral sense of progress.

Zachary Foster (1:14:13)
As far as I can tell, there is a secular generational shift. That is the headline. It's that people ages 18 to 29 are overwhelmingly in support of an arms embargo on Israel.

Kevin Maley (1:14:29)
And that includes among Jews, right? Especially the generational divide.

Zachary Foster (1:14:33)
Yeah, I actually don't know the polling among Jews specifically around that question of the arms embargo but something like a third of young Jews, I can't remember if it's young Jews or if it's just Jews overall, but a third of young Jews describe it as a genocide. I mean, that's not nothing. I think the polling as of 2022, so we're talking a couple of years ago now, was about 28 % of Jewish millennials or younger described as well as an apartheid state. So...

It's very obvious that there's a generational shift happening. It's very obvious that baby boomers have a very difficult time evolving their worldviews. They grew up in a very different world where there was no social media, where a small number of media companies controlled the narrative, where there were no Palestinians on TV, there were no Arabs hosting the nightly news programs, but there were many, many Zionists telling you the news, controlling the narrative.

And so obviously, I think if you zoom out and just look over the past couple of decades, we've seen a remarkable shift in public opinion. I mean, there's no question about that. But again, but it is generational. I think if you grew up in the past two decades and all you know is, see John Gaza, two million Palestinians living in an open air prison, apartheid in the West Bank, Palestinians being killed every year, the famous Onion headline.

10 Palestinians killed in an Israeli raid in the West Bank, which is literally true like every single day in the past year. And so when you see, when that's the reality you're exposed to, and the information's all available, right? You don't need CNN, you don't need Fox News, you don't need MSNBC, you don't need the New York Times or the Washington Post. You can just follow the reporters themselves. They're posting the stories on their TikToks and Instagrams and Twitters. You don't need the mainstream media. They're just not relevant anymore.

And so young people go directly to the news, they go directly to the source, they can find the perspective they're interested in. And so you're seeing a sea change in public opinion at the generational level. But of course, at the political level, at the media level, at the level of public discourse, we haven't seen the shift in the same way, because those people are the boomer generation who control the media and who are occupying the seats of the US House of Representatives and the Senate and the presidency and the Supreme Court.

So what you have is you have a population that is increasingly sympathetic to the Palestinians, but you have a leadership class, the beltway class, the political class, the media class that is increasingly disconnected, which is why we've all seen the studies, the intercept study, the growth task, know, this disparity that we're seeing between the mainstream media.

and the population at large is growing. And that's, I think, undeniable. And I think that's where we're at. We're in a very, very divided society where we all believe one thing, we all can see with our own two eyes what is happening on the ground, and then we turn on the TV and it's some Israeli military spokesperson talking about how the problems are all with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. And there's just such a gap between what your average, especially young person, thinks and believes.

and what they're being told by the political class and the media class. And that's where we're at right now.

Kevin Maley (1:17:50)
Yeah, I just kind of wonder whether the change will come in time before it's too late. It's kind of like with climate change, you you see the positive movement coming, but there's a ticking clock and it's ticking very fast. And you have to wonder what's going to come first, the complete disaster that you're trying to prevent or the shift in public opinion that can prevent it. And I don't know what comes first.

Zachary Foster (1:18:14)
I'll see.

Kevin Maley (1:18:15)
Well, Zach, thank you so much for coming back again. I mean, you're such a wealth of knowledge. It's incredibly impressive. So just really appreciate the conversation. It's really helpful to understand. I know people define it as a complicated, a complicated conflict. I don't think it is that complicated, but I appreciate all the work that you do and the insight that you bring to conversations like this and then all the work that you do online and then in your work.

I think it's enormously helpful in shifting that public opinion and bringing that over to the window and inspiring people to try and make change. So thank you for all that you do on this.

Zachary Foster (1:18:55)
Thank you, Kevin, for hosting me and thank you so much for all your good work as well.

Kevin Maley (1:19:00)
All right, take care.