(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to "Prairie Pulse."

Coming up a little bit later in this show, we'll hear some holiday music from one of our prairie musicians.

But first, joining me now is Dr. Thomas Ambrosio, political science professor at NDSU.

Dr. Ambrosio, thank you for joining us today.

- Thank you for having me.

- Well, as we get started, tell the folks a little bit about yourself and maybe your background, maybe where you're originally from.

- Sure, I'm originally from New Jersey, but I've been here since 2000.

I consider myself a mid-Westerner at this point.

I got my PhD at the University of Virginia and my topic originally was ethnic conflicts and the wars between different ethnic groups and nations.

And then I kind of transitioned a bit from that into Russian foreign policy and Russian authoritarianism, which of course is also back in the news.

So yeah, it's been a busy time in international politics and always is busy.

- Well, it is and today you're here to talk about the Israel-Hamas crisis.

And with that said, I understand you follow it pretty closely.

- [Dr. Ambrosio] I do, yes.

- And so let's back up a little bit and set the stage.

Go back to October 7th or so and talk about what's going on and the failure of Israeli intelligence in not knowing that attacks were coming.

- Sure.

On October 7th, you had the group that runs the Gaza Strip, which is called Hamas, launch a massive attack, a surprise attack against Israel.

This was the largest intelligence failure that Israel's had since the 1970s Yom Kippur War in which Israel's completely taken by surprise.

There are reports coming out now that Israel may have had some warning about this, not specifically that they had some plans that they had intercepted, but Israel never believed that Hamas could actually carry out such an operation.

This was a massive success by Hamas, a brutal success by Hamas, and an incredible failure for Israel.

And Israel, once this is over, is gonna go through and clean house.

Clean house of their intelligence community, clean house of their political system, and there will be ramifications for this moving forward.

And Israeli society will not be the same after this is all resolved.

- With that said, and when you talk in the US about the situation in the Middle East, it's kind of always been a complicated one and can you maybe try to explain to our viewers what and where Gaza is and why is this region so in dispute?

- Sure, I'll actually start with the second part first.

The core problem of this region, in particular the Palestine-Israel issue, is that we have two people who want to be in the same space and they consider that their homeland.

And as we know from physics, two things cannot occupy the same space at the same time.

And that is the core problem.

We have a problem that there's no real way for these two groups right now to live together.

The Palestinians were there before the current wave of Jews came to the region.

They are descendants from Arabs who came in from the Arabian Peninsula in five, 600 AD.

But of course, the Israelis had already been expelled from there.

They always saw this as their historic homeland.

And in the 1800s, you started having this migration of Jews to Palestine, to this area that was occupied by the Ottomans, part of the Ottoman Empire at the time.

And they began buying up land, kind of displacing the native Arab population there.

And then of course, that intensified during World War I and then of course, after World War II with the Holocaust, you had a large number of Jews migrate to this region, and then you have the establishment of Israel in the late 1940s.

- So does Israel control Gaza and is it Palestinian Jews that live there or is it a combination?

- No, so what we have is we have kind of three territories.

We have Israel proper in the middle and then on the east side we have the West Bank, part of which is Palestinian-run, part of which has Israeli settlements on it, part of which is controlled by Israel.

That is run by the Palestinian authority, which is different than the group that runs Gaza.

Gaza is a small strip of land about kind of the size of not much larger than kind of the greater Fargo-Moorhead region, kind of almost a couple of times that size, but really relatively small kind of strip of land on the Mediterranean where you have over 2 million Palestinians living there.

There were Jewish settlements there as a result of the 1967 war when Israel occupied that.

But Israel withdrew from that territory and took the Jewish settlers out of it.

So since now for about a generation, there have been no Jews living there, it's just Palestinians run by this group called Hamas, which is seen as a terrorist organization and is different then kind of the Palestinians running the West Bank so it's really complicated.

So you think of it, you have three groups.

You have the West Bank Palestinians who are run by the Palestinian Authority, who work with Israel, and also against Israel at the same time, you have Israel proper and then you have Gaza, which is run by Hamas, which is itself much more radical in its makeup, it has the thinking kind of a terrorist organization.

They want to inspire a global Islamic movement.

In their charter, they explicitly state they want to eliminate Israel and we saw what happened on October 7th.

- So what is the end game for Israel in this invasion of Gaza?

- Well, yeah, given the brutality that we saw from Hamas, reports are still coming out about just how absolutely brutal, the list of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

These are a kind of list what they hadn't committed when they invaded into Israel proper.

Israel cannot live with Hamas.

They thought they could.

They thought they could live with this terrorist organization on their border that would occasionally launch missiles across into Israel.

They could handle that, there's something they could manage.

Just as the United States thought we could manage Al-Qaeda before 9/11, Israel thought they could manage Hamas.

After this, Israel realizes there's no living with Hamas.

And as a result, their goal, their stated goal is to eliminate Hamas from the Gaza Strip.

What comes afterward?

No one knows.

The Palestinian Authority that runs the West Bank is largely seen as illegitimate by the Palestinian people because it is seen as a collaborator with Israel.

It's kind of worked with Israel since the 1990s and moving them in is gonna be almost impossible.

So Israel kind of knows what it has to do, the United States supports eliminating Hamas, but no one knows what happens the day after or even if that's even possible.

- So what responsibility does Iran bear in all this, in your view, I guess?

- Yeah, so Iran is one of the main backers of Hamas.

And there has been some reports that Iran helped to train some of its operatives and to potentially work on some of the plans.

Now there are also reports coming out that Iran, now there's no question that Iran supports Hamas and has always supported Hamas, financially and militarily.

But the question is whether or not Iran actually knew about this operation.

And there are some reports that have come out, and again, we don't know what's going on behind the scenes, that Iran was not happy with Hamas given the nature of the operation, given the brutality, because that is gonna force other actors, in particular United States, into the mix and ultimately is going to have Israel eliminate one of Iran's allies, which is Hamas.

So when all is said and done, Iran will most likely lose ground geopolitically in the region.

- Do you think some of the anti-Israel rage is based on anti-Semitism, or is it based on the actions of Israel sort of militarily over the years, or some of both, obviously?

- It's gonna be a mixture of the two.

Antisemitism is really rife, especially in the Middle East as well as we're seeing now in other places like Western Europe and even on college campuses.

I come at this very much from as an outsider, but also as someone who studied ethnic conflicts throughout the world and throughout history, and it's hard to say kind of who threw the first stone in a situation like this.

In some ways we have to deal with the present rather than the past.

And yes, many would say that Israel has occupied these territories, Israel has kept Gaza in a blockade and has essentially besieged Gaza even long before this operation began because Hamas had controlled Gaza.

And therefore this is kind of just retribution, some would say that.

But I think at this point, it's kind of hard to separate these two out.

At this point, the rage against Israel is so extreme and we would never have seen the actions by those who committed these atrocities in Israel unless that rage had reached such a level.

At this point, the level of brutality is something that we hadn't seen except quite frankly, unfortunately with groups like ISIS and those types of terrorist organizations.

- Yeah.

So is a two-state solution essentially a pipe dream or could it become a reality?

- That would be the goal.

And when Israel was founded, it was supposed to be a two-state solution.

There was supposed to be a state for Israel and a state for the Palestinians.

But in the 1940s, the Arab states invaded, tried to eliminate Israel's existence and that dream went on the back burner.

In the 1960s, Israel occupied the Palestinian Territories, and did not have really any idea of the two-state solution.

In the 1990s, it was revived.

So this has always been the goal now, which is we need a two-state solution.

But the problem with two-state solution is you have to have another partner on the other side.

Israel is there, it's not going anywhere.

But who is the other partner?

It can't be Hamas because Hamas wants to wipe Israel off the map.

It is explicit in their charter and certainly their activities on October 7th make it so that Israel can never work with them again, would never work with them.

The Palestinian authority has almost no legitimacy amongst the Palestinian people.

So who do you make peace with?

So the two-state solution is an idea and you will have diplomats talking about it, but the reality is it's impossible at this stage unless there's a fundamental change in the Palestinians, but also a fundamental change in Israel.

A support for a two-state solution has declined every year in Israel since the wave of terrorist attacks that occurred in Israel in the mid 2000s.

So the Israelis really aren't on board for a two-state solution, the Palestinians aren't on board for a two-state solution.

We can talk about it and diplomats will, but it's not gonna go anywhere.

- So with all this taking place, how do you think the US and the Biden administration has been handling the situation so far?

- I think they've done as good of a job as they could.

From a geopolitical standpoint, the United States made it very clear we're backing Israel 100%.

We sent aircraft carriers into the region in order to ensure that no other groups, in particular Iran and their allies or other allies of Iran interfered.

So geopolitically, we've done as much as we can with Israel.

So I think in that sense, they are an ally of the United States and therefore we have backed our ally.

Within the Democratic party, we're seeing a division between those who support Israel, mostly the older generation, and then the younger generation who support the Palestinians.

So President Biden also has to deal not just with the geopolitics of this, but also deal with the domestic politics of this and in the internal politics of the Democratic Party.

And we're starting to see some fractures within the Democratic party over this issue.

And it could even, depending on how things go in some of the swing states like Michigan for example, which has a very, very large Arab population, could actually cause Biden to lose the election.

- Well, you answered my next question right there.

But can you explain to viewers how Israel views all this and coming at it from their perspective that there are states surrounded by neighbors who potentially wanna harm them?

- So I've been to Israel and I went on a tour to study how they do counter-terrorism.

And one of the things that they made very clear was that they don't consider the war for their independence and their survival starting and finishing.

They see it as a tempo going up and down, that it is something that gets better or gets worse.

However, October 7th fundamentally changed that.

It is very much a sea change in Israeli society that we had in the United States after 9/11 and we had in the west after ISIS's attacks in Paris, in which we thought we could live with these terrorist groups and then we realized we couldn't.

And Israel's in that same spot.

Israel society has fundamentally changed.

And we have to see how this all shakes out but there is gonna be less of a willingness to live with the Palestinians and to work towards peace now than there was on October 6th.

So Israeli society has hardened as a result of this, and it had been hardening for several decades leading up to this.

So they see themselves as surrounded by enemies, surrounded by groups that wish to eliminate them as a people.

And in the case of Hamas, it's very clear that that is the case.

They look to the north and they see groups, a group in Lebanon and they see something very similar.

They see Iran within the region and Iran's influence.

And for the Israelis, this is a war of survival, it's not a war of territory, it's not a war of geopolitics or anything like that.

For them, it is all about survival.

- Well, are you at least somewhat hopeful by the recent hostage releases that we've seen?

- I think Hamas released some hostages for a pause in conflict.

And this was really pushed by one of the other backers of Hamas, which is Qatar.

Qatar, a country in the Persian Gulf, is a close ally of the United States.

The United States kind of worked its pressure on Qatar.

But I'm really not hopeful.

Again, there is no living together anymore between Hamas and Israel.

And therefore, having these hostages released gave Hamas a pause in the Israeli operation, but at this point I think probably everyone who's been released is going to be, or everyone who's been released is the ones who are gonna be released and therefore Israel is gonna move to the next stage and we're already starting to see that next stage of military operations.

- So with that said, and we don't have a lot of time, how do you see all this end, do you think?

- We're going to see a grinding military campaign for the next couple of weeks, possibly months.

At a certain point, the United States is going to say it has to stop because the United States is ultimately playing a larger game.

The larger game's a geopolitical game in the region and in the world.

And the longer this goes on, the more opposition is gonna be and the more problems gonna be for the United States.

So Israel's gonna go as far as it can until the United States says stop.

- Well, we are out of time, but if people want more information, where can they go?

- One thing I would be careful about is looking at podcasts.

Be very careful because there's a lot of heightened emotions, a lot of tension about this.

One thing I would do, the BBC actually has pretty good coverage about this.

I would stay away from sources in the region pretty much because they obviously have a great stake in it.

- Okay.

Well thanks for joining us today.

- Thanks for having me.

- Stay tuned for more.

(upbeat music) Keri Noble is a piano-driven singer-songwriter from Minneapolis who performed some of her original holiday music on our series, "Prairie Musicians."

Enjoy these inviting seasonal sounds.

♪ Looking at a girl like me ♪ ♪ You think you know what to do ♪ ♪ Buy me a diamond ring ♪ ♪ Or fly me to the moon ♪ ♪ No, oh ♪ ♪ Well, let me think of how to say ♪ ♪ What I wanna say to you ♪ ♪ I don't wanna hurt you, babe ♪ ♪ But you don't have a clue ♪ ♪ Let me tell you that every girl's idea ♪ ♪ Of a perfect holiday ♪ ♪ It doesn't revolve around the size of what you pay ♪ ♪ Oh, I'll give you a little peek at my Christmas list ♪ ♪ And then you'll see ♪ ♪ It's really easy ♪ ♪ Gimme your time, gimme your love ♪ ♪ Cut me some slack when I've been wrong ♪ ♪ Write me a letter or sing me a song ♪ ♪ Gimme your love ♪ ♪ And just make me laugh when I've been crying ♪ ♪ Can't mess up long as you are trying ♪ ♪ To sum it up ♪ ♪ Gimme your love ♪ ♪ Well, looking at a boy like you ♪ ♪ It can't be easy ♪ ♪ I bet they don't get in line ♪ ♪ Trying to catch your eye ♪ ♪ Whoa, oh ♪ ♪ Well, it's why I cannot believe ♪ ♪ You're standing outside my door ♪ ♪ You're bringing me everything ♪ ♪ You bought me at the store ♪ ♪ Let me tell you that every girl's idea ♪ ♪ Of a perfect holiday ♪ ♪ It doesn't revolve around the size of what you pay ♪ ♪ Oh, I'll give you a little peek at my Christmas list ♪ ♪ And then you'll see ♪ ♪ It's really easy ♪ ♪ Gimme your time, gimme your luck ♪ ♪ Cut me some slack when I've been wrong ♪ ♪ Write me a letter or sing me a song ♪ ♪ And gimme your love ♪ ♪ And just make me laugh when I've been crying ♪ ♪ You can't miss up long as you're trying ♪ ♪ To sum it up ♪ ♪ Gimme your love ♪ ♪ Well, life is full of endless possibilities ♪ ♪ All I want for Christmas is for you to understand me ♪ ♪ And gimme your time, gimme your love ♪ ♪ Cut me some slack when I've been wrong ♪ ♪ And write me a letter and sing me a song ♪ ♪ And gimme your love ♪ ♪ And just make me laugh when I've been crying ♪ ♪ You can't miss up long as you are trying ♪ ♪ To sum it up ♪ ♪ Gimme your love ♪ ♪ To sum it up ♪ ♪ Gimme your love ♪ ♪ Whoa, oh ♪ ♪ Money will come and go ♪ ♪ Already somethin' we both know ♪ ♪ Bracin' ourselves against the cold ♪ ♪ Is nothing new ♪ ♪ Every now and again ♪ ♪ Inevitably something always ends ♪ ♪ But I can make through with supplement ♪ ♪ As long as I've got you ♪ ♪ I can't buy a bunch of presents ♪ ♪ We don't have a fancy tree ♪ ♪ But I've got everything that matters ♪ ♪ Standing right in front of me ♪ ♪ You can't buy me gold and silver ♪ ♪ If you ask me, we've got enough ♪ ♪ Baby, on this Christmas morning, I'm ♪ ♪ Givin' you my love ♪ ♪ Doesn't it always seem to be ♪ ♪ Everyone's chasin' make-believe ♪ ♪ Being with you, it's hard to see ♪ ♪ Wanting anything more ♪ ♪ I can't buy a bunch of presents ♪ ♪ We don't have a fancy tree ♪ ♪ But I've got everything that matters ♪ ♪ Standing right in front of me ♪ ♪ You can't buy me gold and silver ♪ ♪ If you ask me, we've got enough ♪ ♪ Baby on this Christmas morning, I ♪ ♪ Want the smile on your face as your waking up ♪ ♪ The sight of filling my coffee cup ♪ ♪ A touching hand to remind me of our love ♪ ♪ Considering every high and low ♪ ♪ I'm loving you more than ever before ♪ ♪ Settling down and growing old ♪ ♪ Is all I need ♪ ♪ I can't buy a bunch of presents ♪ ♪ We don't have a fancy tree ♪ ♪ But I've got everything that matters ♪ ♪ Standing right in front of me ♪ ♪ You can't buy me gold and silver ♪ ♪ If you ask me, we've got so much ♪ ♪ Baby, on this Christmas morning, I'm ♪ ♪ Givin' you my love ♪ ♪ Whoa ♪ ♪ Givin' you my love ♪ ♪ Oh ♪ - Well that's all we have on "Prairie Pulse" for this week.

And as always, thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008.

And by the members of Prairie Public.