(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to "Journal."

I'm Steve Kendall.

The conflict between Hamas and the state of Israel is about two months old now, entering its 11th week with obviously no end that, where we see the end of the fighting for this and the contesting that's going on there.

Join us to talk about this particular issue and the history of how we got to this point.

And maybe where we'll go once things settle back down as much as they can in the Middle East.

Is that Dr. Marc Simon from the Department of Political Science here at Bowling Green State University.

Marc, appreciate you being here.

This is the kind of topic that everybody has multiple opinions on and multiple facts on, and see things through different lenses.

So, we know that as we talk about this, not everybody's probably gonna be happy with some of the things we say, but the reality is, it's a contentious issue and it's an issue.

Obviously, if it was easy to solve, it would've been solved years ago.

So, thank you for being here again.

Let's talk a little about, about the history.

I know you could go back thousands of years, but the reality is much of that is isn't impactful right now.

So, talk about where this sort of started and then we can talk in the next segment about where we are right now.

- Well, thanks, I'd like to maybe shorten the history a bit, although it is all very important.

You know, the state of Israel was created in 1948.

The British left their mandate that they'd had since World War I to rule the very Palestine.

The UN thought about a partition plan.

In the end, the Israelis accepted the partition, the Arab countries around did not, and there was a war.

And the Israelis call that the War of Independence in 1948.

And that's what established the state of Israel initially.

And while, and then also created three quarters, a million Palestinian refugees and some of the problems we have now.

But I wanna fast forward a little bit to 1967.

- [Steve] Right, - Which is the war, which established the occupied territories, and the situation we've really been dealing with since that time.

So.

- [Steve] Okay.

- And I know we have a map here.

I don't know if your viewers can see that.

So in 1967, there was another war where Israel fought its Arab neighbors.

Israel actually initiated the war.

It's called the Six Day War.

It was very short.

Israel kind of preemptively attacked because they expected Egypt to be attacking.

And they ended up having a really unexpected great deal of military success.

They took over the Gaza Strip, which had been part of Egypt, and the West Bank of the Jordan River area, which had been part of Jordan, and then also from Syria, the Golan Heights, which is up north.

Finally, they also took over the whole Sinai Peninsula, which isn't really on the map as much, but it's south of the Gaza Strip.

It's a big desert area, historically, part of Egypt.

So, Israel takes over these territories, but they don't annex them.

They occupy them, and that's a term, a legal term, but it's also kind of a defacto situation.

So, the occupied territories, especially the West Bank and Gaza, where the vast majority of, well, I can't even say majority now, but most Palestinians live in the region.

There's actually about around 6 million Palestinian refugees from all the war since 1948 that are recognized by the UN.

Actually, I think the big country with the largest number is Jordan.

All right.

So, the conflict is really about land.

It's about who's gonna control the land.

The Palestinians feel that the creation of Israel and then especially the Six Day War, deprive them of a potential homeland, of an independent state.

And the Israelis, of course, have a state, but want security.

They want to be safe and live in this area where they can get along with all the people and their Arab neighbors.

- [Steve] Correct.

- And that's never been the case.

And so, those viewers that have a long memory will know there's always been conflicts going on in this region, right?

And unfortunately, the current conflict looks a lot like some past ones, but some of the names are changed, right?

- [Steve] Yeah.

Now, when you talk about the Palestinians did at one time, they actually have an area where they lived.

Have they been moved off of that?

Is that part of this whole thing?

I mean, have they been forced to leave land that they believe is theirs?

Because again, this is such a complex situation.

Was there ever a state of Palestine that was run by Palestinians?

- Well, we'd have to go back for hundreds of years.

- [Steve] A lot farther, Yeah.

- But the point is both Israeli people, and I mean, the Jewish people have a couple thousand year history in this region.

The Palestinians do as well.

- [Steve] Okay.

- There's not really a point of getting into who was there first.

- [Steve] Right.

- Because because if who was there first defines who owns the land.

Well.

- [Steve] Not necessarily.

- That's not how we would work anywhere else in the world.

So, The state of Palestine was not a state, it was a colony run by the British.

- [Steve] The British, okay.

- Between World War I and World War, or 1948.

- [Steve] Part of the May, yeah.

Okay.

- And before that, it was part of the Ottoman Empire.

And you know, the Ottomans didn't really have states as the way we think of them.

They had regions.

And, I mean, the state system didn't come to this part of the world until the 20th century where we started drawing hard boundaries and things.

- [Steve] Yes, it was just sort of a large area that had multiple different kinds of different populations.

- So when Israel was created, of course, like I said, three quarters of million Palestinians who were living there left.

But it's complicated.

So one of the things I want to establish is that, you know, each group, they're not homogenous.

They're not, it's not good guys and bad guys, right?

There's different groups.

So, for instance, on the Palestinian side, our viewers may not know, but there are actually over a million Palestinian Arabs who live in Israel and are citizens and can vote.

Okay.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- So, it's not like they're all living in the West Bank and Gaza and in the country surrounding it in refugee camps.

Israel also, I'm sorry.

The Palestinians also have two major factions.

- [Steve] Okay.

- And if I can go over this quickly.

- [Steve] Sure.

- So, Hamas is one of the factions, and the other one is called Fatah.

- [Steve] Okay.

- And our viewers with a sense of history might remember Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

That was a group that initially tried to push for Palestinian statehood and actually just recognition the Palestinians as an independent group of people with a national identity that wanted to have statehood there.

- [Steve] Right.

- They used terrorist tactics a lot through the 1960s and '70s to get their issues on the agenda and to do some of the things that are happening here.

But for various reasons, in 1988, the Palestinian faction, Fatah, which is was the PLO's group, renounced terrorism and entered into some negotiations with Israel that resulted in a peace agreement in 1993, the Oslo Accords.

- [Steve] Right.

- Okay.

So, the Oslo Accords was the attempt to try to take this land conflict from 1967 and move it toward a two-state solution.

In other words, take the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in some form and create a Palestinian state on those lands that could live in peace with Israel.

Right?

- [Steve] Right.

- And Arafat and the Fatah faction agreed to that.

And that's when we created this thing called, the Palestinian Authority.

- [Steve] Okay, which we've heard about in this situation as well.

Right.

- And they run the West Bank.

That's a governmental, they call it the authority because they didn't want to call it a state, right?

- [Steve] Right.

- But the idea of Oslo was let's create a roadmap, or we give some sovereignty to Palestinians.

So they turned over six or seven towns in the West Bank to complete Palestinian administration, right.

So they run the local governments, police, they pick up the trash, they do all that.

Right?

- [Steve] Right.

- And then there were other areas where there was still Israeli presence, and then there was these third areas where they were gonna negotiate later right?

- [Steve] Okay.

- So the idea was step by step, the Palestinian authority would evolve into a responsible government, and we would have a two-state solution by now.

This was 1993, right?

- [Steve] Yeah, we unfortunately to take a break here.

We come back, we'll pick it up in 1993.

I hate to interrupt you, but yeah.

Because we're gonna look, the continuity is there.

- [Marc] Sure.

- Back in just a moment.

We're talking about the situation in Gaza, the state of Israel, the war between Hamas and Israel.

Back in just a moment here on the "Journal."

Thank you for staying with us on the "Journal."

Our guest is Dr. Marc Simon from the Bowling Green State University, Department of Political Science.

And we're talking about the Middle East.

We're talking about Gaza and Israel, the current situation.

We're working our way through history to find out how we got here and why we got here.

You were in 1993, we're at the point where the Oslo Accords have started to go into place.

And there's obviously, apparently a movement by both sides, the sides that we're involved in, to go to a two-state solution.

So, pick it up and context that for me as I've sort of shamble through it, but explain where we are at that point.

- So, I established in 1993, there's this faction, the Fatah faction of the Palestinians that evolved from the PLO that's running the West Bank.

Right?

So, but then we have a split.

So, in 1987, there was an Intifada and an uprising that actually helped create the basis for the Oslo Accords.

But in that split, the Palestinians had a split and a group emerged out of that resistance movement called, Hamas.

- [Steve] Okay.

- Hamas has a very different ideology than Fatah.

Hamas does not believe that Israel has a right to exist, at least at that point.

They didn't, they used violence to try to drive Israel out of the region.

They're also Islamist and they want to establish a religious state in Palestine.

Okay, and so that movement grew out of the Intifada and the Fatah faction that negotiated peace was very, you know, hopeful and popular.

But you had this militant faction that said, "No, we don't want to do this.

This is selling out."

Right?

And so what ended up happening is Hamas started to use a lot of terror attacks to undermine the Oslo process.

So they were attacking in Israel proper, this was creating reactions in Israel, which is normal.

They felt that they weren't getting peace here.

They signed a peace agreement.

Now we're getting terrorist attacks.

- [Steve] And things have gotten worse actually.

Yeah.

- It helped to destroy the Oslo process, right.

The other thing that happened was the Palestinians had elections, in 2006, I believe.

And at that point, there was enough division and that Hamas actually won those elections by a small margin.

- [Steve] So they're now the governmental authority.

- Well, they won the Palestinian authority elections, but there was a split and a sort of a mini civil war emerge where basically Hamas ends up going to Gaza and they run the Gaza Strip.

- [Steve] Gaza Strip.

- And the Palestinian Authority under Fatah runs the West Bank.

- [Steve] West Bank, okay.

- Okay.

So now that we have that, there's two factions.

One that's much more violent, one that's less.

The same thing goes in Israel as well.

You've had governments that negotiated the Oslo Accords and have been promoting peace and different kinds of solutions.

And then you've had governments that have resisted those and it's then tends to break down on the left and right.

And the thing about Israel is it's just as politically divided as the US.

It's about a 50/50 split, right.

- [Steve] Okay.

- Between those on the left, in the center, who would probably favor some kind of process to lead toward a two-state solution.

And those on the right, really led by mostly Benjamin Netanyahu since the 1996 when he was elected for the first time, who don't want a two state solution, who think that, "This is fine, we can keep going, and keep adding Israeli settlers to the West Bank and that, you know, we can manage this," right?

So what ended up happening was what's happened since 2006, I mean, this is like 17 years.

Nothing's happened as far as the two, a solution to the land conflict.

Right?

And what started to happen in the recent weeks before the October 7th attack was, first, the Abraham Accords were a couple of countries.

The UAE, Morocco signed a peace agreement with Israel, and then it was known that the Saudis were negotiating a normalization of relations with Israel.

- [Steve] And they sort of carry a lot of weight within the era.

Yeah.

- Right.

And so the Hamas group decided that they couldn't let their issue go off the agenda because if the Saudis and other neighbors make peace with Israel.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- Then nobody's gonna be caring about the Palestinian cause.

- [Steve] Yeah, and in the minds of Hamas, that's their interpretation of it.

- [Marc] Right.

- [Steve] Right.

- So I think that's part of the reason they use these terrorist tactics and they committed a mass atrocity.

You can call it lots of things.

It was just horrific.

- [Steve] Yeah, yeah.

- But the strategy behind it was terrorism.

Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th, knowing that Israel would respond with overwhelming force and kill up to, I guess, 19,000 Palestinians.

- [Steve] So far.

- So far in Gaza, right.

- [Steve] Yeah.

And then the process blow up the movement that the Saudis now would be in an incredibly difficult position to make peace with Israel or to sign with Israel.

- [Marc] Exactly.

So now what they've done is, the strategy of this terrorist tactics is, they've gotten their issue back on the agenda.

They've stopped the Saudis and other Arab states from signing peace agreements or working on that.

And there's a lot of pressure to solve this land conflict, which has been going on since at least 1967.

- [Steve] Right, right.

Now, if we, as obviously, you know, we're seeing the conflicts in a much more upfront way than we have in terms of being able to watch what goes on.

You talked about the political split in Israel and, you know, for a lot of people, Israel is a monolith, it's the state of Israel and that sort of thing.

But within that, you talked about the political divisions and Netanyahu tends to be far to the right, now, don't really want it to, they're comfortable with the status quo.

Is that sort of their position?

We'll just keep doing what we've been doing for the last 20 years.

And what is their end game though?

Is their end game to?

- Well, I think that it's what's been revealed is that they don't really have the end game, I think, is essentially annexing the territories eventually and making a one state solution, which there are variants of that, which are not, which are reasonable, but.

- [Steve] Okay.

- They've been going along thinking and see, the other thing is Hamas has been in power in Gaza for quite a while, they're supported by the Iranians.

They have the ability to make very inaccurate but lethal rockets.

And every so often, about four times in the last, since, well, 2012, they've launched rocket attacks at Israel.

The Israeli government responds with air attacks on Gaza.

- [Steve] Right.

- Those things have usually lasted a few weeks.

And that's been it.

And the Israeli governments on the right felt like that was an acceptable price to keep things the way they are.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- But now with this attack, all bets are off because everyone realizes we can't just let this fester for decades.

- [Steve] Yeah.

And for the last 20 some years, it's just been this sort of back and forth situation.

We come back 'cause we're at the end of this segment.

Is there a political advantage to the current Israeli government pushing hard on this?

That's the question I'm gonna ask you when we come back, because is it more than simply the conflict we've dealt with for 20 years, but is there really a political agenda for them to stay in power?

And it's a question that people ask.

Back in just a moment with Dr. Marc Simon from the Bowling Green State University, Department of Political Science.

Back in a moment.

We're talking about the current situation in the Middle East with Hamas and the state of Israel, but it's obviously a much bigger group of participants.

You talked a little about the split in Israel in terms of the politics there.

Is there a political reason why Israel has moved the way they have this time, maybe compared to the more limited responses?

Is this a reaction to the incredible severity, there's no words that can really capture what happened on October 7th, but is there a political thing behind this as well as a, let's find just an overall solution from the current government of Israel.

So they don't really have an end game, but is it a political thing to keep them in power as well?

- Well, any Israeli government would've responded in overwhelming fashion to a mass murder on this scale.

Largest one day death toll since the Holocaust for the Jewish people, right?

- [Steve] Yeah.

- So that's part of it.

Netanyahu is faced with a lot of backlash internally because people are blaming him for creating a lot of internal division in Israel over his issues with the Supreme Court reforms and just creating, you know, being neglectful and not allowing this to happen, right.

So a lot of people are blaming him, which is understandable.

The strategy here is really important though, and the United States is trying to get Israel to see that, you know, we've been here before.

- [Steve] Right.

- The US has experienced these kind of situations.

When you try to militarily destroy, essentially a guerilla operation, you can destroy the fighters, you can destroy the tunnels, you can destroy the weapons, but it will regenerate.

- [Steve] Yeah, you can't destroy the idea.

- [Marc] Right.

- [Steve] That's the situation.

- So, I mean, and the easiest example is United States invaded Afghanistan after 9/11 to depose the Taliban government.

Who's in power now?

The Taliban.

- [Steve] Taliban, yeah.

- Right.

The Israelis have lots of experience with this too.

In 1982, they invaded Lebanon to drive the PLO out of Northern Lebanon because they were launching rockets into Northern Israel.

- [Steve] To Northern Israel.

- And the Israelis that had enough.

And they're finally like, "We're gonna get rid of this threat forever."

So they went and invade Lebanon, concrete all kinds of casualties, drive the PLO successfully out, they went to Tunisia.

But guess what?

A local militia in southern Lebanon was formed to resist the Israeli occupation called Hezbollah.

That's another group you hear in the news, right.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- So, where did Hezbollah come from?

The attempt to get rid of the PLO, right?

So if the Israelis just keep going in Gaza, they may get rid of Hamas.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- But there is Islamic Jihad and there's also a lot of support for Hamas, not just in the West Bank, but around the Arab world.

So it's not going to go away.

And they need a strategy for afterward.

And that would really, it would make a lot of sense if they went back to ceasefires and hostage exchanges and started thinking about the day after.

- Step back from the precipice back from the brink.

Kind of, although there seems to be a lot of brinkmanship.

Brinkmanship going on there.

That's it's like.

So we're now at the point, here's where we are.

What is the future there?

What should be, or what could be the way to reach some sort of settlement that allows most of the people there to be comfortable with what's going on?

Is that even possible?

I mean-- - [Marc] All right, well, let's think about-- - [Steve] It's so complex.

- Well, the last time we had some, all right, so in 1973, there was a war.

And by 1979, there was a peace agreement between Egypt and Israel over that returned the Sinai Peninsula.

This is the Camp David Accords.

- [Steve] Jimmy Carter's.

- Jimmy Carter mediated.

So that was about six years.

So, I mean, if you're thinking that there could be progress on this issue, it's gonna take a few years after this war goes away.

But it has to, I mean, smart leaders could do smart things to stop it.

First of all, they really need to stop the violence on both sides right now.

The Israeli soldiers, as you can see from the recent news about Israeli hostages that were accidentally killed during an untenable situation.

- [Steve] Sure.

- In urban warfare.

You know, if they're killing their own hostages in error, who knows how many civilians they're gonna kill and why?

Because they're fighting in an urban environment.

It's just very dangerous, right?

Hamas needs to get stop shooting too, because they've actually achieved what they needed to achieve with this thing.

- [Steve] In their mind, they've put it back on the front and center on the agenda again.

- Right, and they don't gain anymore by having more civilian deaths.

And that's just a part of their own brutality that they won't stop.

But this, there needs to be a ceasefire and then there has to be who's gonna run Gaza, if not Hamas.

The Palestinians in the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority.

They don't really wanna take that on because that's not necessarily a popular task for them.

Right?

- [Steve] Right.

That's like, almost like a no win situation for them.

- [Marc] Yeah.

Would the Israelis come in and do it?

Well, then the Israelis have to be there on the ground and they're gonna be targets and it's gonna be.

- [Steve] And it's just gonna trigger another event like this.

- [Marc] Yeah.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- So we've been through this a lot before in the region and there are models out there.

I don't know if we have time, we can get into some of the ideas.

- [Steve] Got a few minutes, couple of minutes.

Yeah, yeah, I know.

- [Marc] Okay.

- [Steve] Gonna try to ask you to capitalize that in a couple of minutes.

- [Marc] Yeah.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- [Marc] I mean, there been situations where you and peacekeepers have been involved, certainly in Lebanon and other places.

You know, outside forces could try to organize some kind of governance structure.

It'd be hard to get Arab states to participate in that, but it might happen.

And there needs to be a way that Gaza can be actually operated and rebuilt.

- [Steve] Sure.

- With some governance structure there, that's not going to create the opportunity and the incentives for more violence.

- [Steve] It is interesting you mentioned the other countries who, because obviously if they become involved then they become targets.

For some of the groups you've mentioned that don't want things to settle down, that don't want, in essence, don't want the kind of solution that appears to be that would would make it calmer over there.

They want an ultimate solution which leaves them in complete power.

And that's a difficult, so there's no negotiation.

That's a difficult thing to solve.

- So this is the problem.

Every time we get to some peace in the in the Middle East in the situation, those on the far right, the violent factions can use terror tactics to undermine support for peace.

And that's included assassinations, which we've seen.

- [Steve] Sure.

- Rabin and Sadat who've made peace.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- In the region that includes terror attacks like Hamas launched after the Oslo Accords.

That includes attacks by far right Israelis on Palestinians.

And so the violent factions can undermine the peace.

And it's a dilemma that we faced for at least 50 years and we're gonna continue to face.

But I think this is a moment where, because of the horrific suffering here, there's incentive now for the US, Europeans, Israelis, the Arab countries to get together.

There are a lot of models for a two-state solution to actually work on this again and try to create some hope.

Because what we've learned now is that if you let this thing go for a couple of decades without giving the Palestinians some hope that things are gonna improve, violent factions will emerge.

- [Steve] Will become the-- - We'll go back to violence.

- [Steve] Yeah.

Because people get frustrated or whatever and you have a situation where they just don't, as you said, they don't see any hope for any progress.

Therefore, what does that leave them?

Well, you know, human nature being what it is, just on any other level, people get mad and get upset and then act.

- I want to emphasize too that there are lots of Israelis that are working for peace in all through their country and in the West Bank and other places.

There are lots of Palestinians that work with the Israelis.

This is not a good guy, bad guy thing.

- [Steve] Right.

- There are people of goodwill on both sides, but there are also violent factions and we just, you know, that has to be dealt with.

- [Steve] Yeah.

So, well, I guess, and obviously, we'll leave it there for right now and hopefully when we have you back again sometime in the very near future, hopefully, you'll be able to, we can talk about movement towards some sort of an agreement like you've described or versions of that you've described so that we can talk about some sort of solution there.

Because obviously, you know, solutions in the Middle East and in other places, not just the Middle East, there are conflicts like this going on all over the world.

In some cases, they just don't get this level of notoriety and for no other reason other than they just don't.

But this is a situation that obviously, I can remember growing up as a teenager, I was hearing about, you know, the 1967 war.

So as you said, it's not something that started just on October 7th and the solutions aren't gonna be done in the next two months, but maybe there'll be some progress at some point.

So appreciate your taking the time to do this and your insight into it too, because it's a difficult subject to talk about.

- [Marc] Thanks, Steve.

- Appreciate it again.

Thank you, Marc.

You can check us out at wbg.org.

You can watch us every Thursday night, eight o'clock on WBGU-PBS.

Enjoy the holidays.

We will see you again next year.

Goodnight and good luck.

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