Khaled Elgindy
Khaled Elgindy is a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, where he also directs the Program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli Affairs.
Elgindy previously served as a resident scholar in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution and as an adviser to the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah on permanent status negotiations with Israel from 2004 to 2009. He is the author of Blind Spot: America and the Palestinians, from Balfour to Trump, published in 2019.
The following interview was conducted by FRONTLINE journalist James Jacoby on Nov. 9, 2023, with additional questions from Lauren Ezell Kinlaw. It has been edited for clarity and length.
Read more interviews from Netanyahu, America & the Road to War in Gaza.
When it comes to [the Oslo Accords], it’s widely recognized or seen as kind of a missed opportunity in some ways to broker peace or to put into place a workable peace process. I’m kind of curious. You see it in some ways differently than that. In some ways I think you see it as that there wasn’t a workable process based on what was created there. So I’m kind of curious: What’s the best way for us to understand from your perspective what Oslo put into motion?
Yeah. The Oslo process reflected and replicated the power asymmetry that existed between the two sides, between Israel as one of the most powerful militaries in the region and that was also the occupying power, and the Palestinians, who are the occupied population. And that asymmetry was built into Oslo. For example, the mutual recognition: The PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] recognized Israel’s right to exist in at least 78% of what Palestinians view as their historic homeland, and in return, Israel only recognized the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.
There wasn’t a recognition of two states or even the right of both peoples to self-determination. So that right there, it was sort of emblematic of the kind of asymmetry that Oslo incorporated, in addition to institutionalizing things like Israeli settlements, right? Israeli settlements, Jerusalem—the core issues of the conflict were put off until the end of the interim period.
In the meantime, they would focus on day-to-day issues like security cooperation, improving the Palestinian economy and that sort of thing, rather than the core issues. Palestinians were already at a disadvantage going into the Oslo process, and that power imbalance was reproduced in the context of the peace process.
That didn’t necessarily mean it was doomed to fail, but it certainly was pointing in that direction. In order for it to not fail, the United States, as the chief broker in this process, would have to go out of its way to overcome that power imbalance to some extent. It’s impossible to totally level the playing field, but it was essential that the United States at least not exacerbate it, and that’s what happened.
The reality was that the United States did, in fact, deepen the power imbalance between the two sides. It consistently had its thumb on the scale in Israel’s favor in good times and in bad. When things went wrong, it was usually the Palestinians who got blamed. Even in terms of discussing the substance of the negotiations, core issues, the United States consistently favored the Israeli position on issues like Jerusalem, refugees and so forth. …
… One of the examples you point to is that the Israelis were willing to accept the existence of the PLO, but they weren’t necessarily willing to accept the existence of a Palestinian state, right? But the diplomats that we’ve spoken to have kind of framed Oslo as saying it really was meaningful in how it transformed the conversation from an existential crisis on both sides to a political problem that could be solved.
Right. I don’t know about existential crisis. I’m not sure I’m in agreement on that. But what I think Oslo did was take issues that were taboo and overcome them. In Israel, the PLO was the bogeyman; [then chairman of the PLO] Yasser Arafat was the embodiment of evil. And for Palestinians, Yitzhak Rabin, then prime minister, was also seen as a war criminal and as someone who represented the worst aspects of Israeli society. So overcoming those psychological obstacles of humanizing, to some extent, the other side, the enemy — that was important. Breaking the taboo of Israelis and Palestinians not having any official contacts. There were always kind of second-track or proximity talks or indirect talks between Israelis and Palestinians, but this was the first time that the PLO, as the representative of Palestinian people and the Israeli government, were sitting down together face-to-face. That was a major hurdle, and it was not insignificant. Also, the fact that someone like Yitzhak Rabin, who is known mostly for his wartime credentials as a leader in the security realm, the fact that he could come to terms with the idea of a Palestinian nation, that Palestinians have political aspirations, that was another major hurdle. And I think there was, despite the flaws in the process, a considerable amount of hope and expectation wrapped up in the Oslo process.
So I take it when you talk about the structural imbalances, right, and the power imbalances, this is what you’ve referred to as “blind spots,” right? So tell me just more specifically what would you say was the major blind spot in a way—this is going to a lay audience and not [an] academic one—but how would you describe the blind spots that were set in stone almost at the beginning of this process?
Yeah, the blind spot refers to a particular lens that American policymakers tend to look at the issue through, and that is, they usually look at the Palestinians and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through an Israeli lens. I think that’s not a secret, given the special relationship, given the prominence of Israel in American domestic politics. There is a genuine appreciation for Israeli historical narratives, Israeli claims, Israeli interests, Israeli internal politics that doesn’t exist really when it comes to the Palestinians, because when you look at Palestinians through a distinctly Israeli lens, certain things get filtered out, including things like Palestinian politics and Palestinian needs and interests, historical narratives that are seen as alien or as inherently extreme somehow.
And so really, the blind spot refers to the inability of American policymakers to step outside of themselves to see the reality as it was or to see Palestinians and their political aspirations on their own terms and for their own sake. There were times when that was possible. I don’t want to imply that it was somehow permanent.
It also depends on the president, the secretary of state, on their own personal involvement in the issue. But it’s always there. Sometimes the blind spot is bigger, sometimes it’s smaller, but it’s almost never not present.
I guess the American perspective on that, I assume, is that Israel—as you said, there’s the special relationship, the alliance between Israel and the United States. But I guess my question is whether or not you’re basically saying that from the start, there wasn’t a good-faith effort in some way by the Americans to embrace the Palestinian point of view.
I’m not saying that.
So I want to understand that.
Yeah. The question that I’m hearing you ask is, does that mean the process was doomed to fail and that the United States could never have played that effective role? I don’t believe in any kind of deterministic reading of history. I think the United States could have played a much more effective role as broker, and in fact, that was the expectation.
The fact that the United States had such a close relationship with Israel was part of what was the incentive for Palestinians to enlist the United States as the chief broker, right, because their view was that only the United States could deliver Israel. And that is largely true. There is no other international actor who has the credibility and the trust of the Israeli leadership and public to broker this kind of an agreement. So ironically, it was both an advantage and a disadvantage, even from the standpoint of Palestinians or other Arab interlocutors. That’s why Egypt and others, the Syrians as well as the Palestinians, went to the United States to seek out agreements with Israel, right? For the Palestinians, they made that same calculation, that only Washington can deliver Israel.
The expectation was that even if the United States couldn’t be an evenhanded broker, it would still be an effective broker on the issues that mattered most—Jerusalem, statehood, refugees; that there would be enough distance, daylight, if you will, with the Israeli side that they could compel Israeli leaders to make the necessary difficult decisions needed to reach a conflict-ending peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians. …
… In response to Oslo, right, so we’re talking ’93 onward, Hamas starts to emerge as a major opponent of the peace negotiations. Can you just describe how that emergence was seen, how the Palestinian public viewed it as a challenge to the PLO? … I think that it would be helpful to understand who they were, how they had begun to switch tactics.
Yes, but there’s a distinction between violent opposition and then targeting of civilians. Hamas was not opposed to violently opposing Oslo. They were fine with that, but they were mostly attacking soldiers. It was the massacre in Hebron by a Jewish extremist of 29 Palestinians worshipping in the Abrahamic mosque [Ibrahimi Mosque] that shifted Hamas’ tactics to start targeting civilians. It was after Hebron that Hamas said, “OK, you kill our civilians; we’ll target yours as well.”
But I just want to back up to the context of, there was always a constituency for armed resistance. I think in any society, you’re going to have people with diverging views. Some people believe diplomacy and negotiations is the path forward; others who still believe Israel is a military power, it is enforcing its occupation through military means, and so only armed struggle will liberate Palestine.
So when the Oslo Agreement is signed, those constituencies start to come to light, where I think for most Palestinians in the occupied territories, they were cautiously optimistic. They said, “OK, this is new. This is different. Israel has never talked to the PLO. They’ve never recognized the PLO. They’ve never recognized our political aspirations, so let’s give this a chance.” But there was that core constituency among Palestinians who said, “The peace process is a sham. It can never succeed. Only armed struggle can liberate Palestine,” and Hamas became the embodiment of that sentiment.
People who either for ideological reasons, because they liked Hamas’ Muslim Brotherhood ideology or because of their use of armed resistance, would gravitate toward Hamas. Just as there was a kind of peace camp among Palestinians, there was also the armed struggle camp. And Hamas was committed to torpedoing the Oslo process through whatever means it could, particularly violence. They knew that they’d stand to gain as long as the process failed. If they failed to meet redeployment deadlines, if they failed to hand over territory, if Israel failed to meet its obligations, they could point to that as their success and capitalize on that. So that was a lesson that Hamas learned very early on, that Oslo’s failure was its success, and they were going to do everything that they could to accelerate that failure through violence and other means.
And how was this viewed by the PLO at the time? Was there a tremendous power struggle between the two to say, the “Give peace a chance” group and “Let’s try to negotiate” versus Hamas? What was the dynamic there?
Yeah. Oslo enters in a kind of peculiar moment in Palestinian politics, where the PLO had been in a state of decline for several years, and Hamas was a relatively new political force. Historically, the PLO is an umbrella organization that represents all Palestinian political factions. It is dominated by one in particular, Fatah, the party of Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, but it includes the full range of political forces from the left, center and right, in addition to women’s groups and youth movements and so on. So it really was the embodiment of the Palestinian national movement writ large.
By the time Oslo comes around, the PLO is in a state of paralysis and stagnation. Ordinarily, if there’s a new political faction that emerges, it would join the PLO, and that’s what makes the PLO representative. It represents all of Palestinians inside and outside the occupied territories, regardless of which political faction. Hamas did not join the PLO. So we have this kind of weird moment where the PLO was negotiating and reaching a deal with Israel when the most important political opposition was not part of the PLO. So they weren’t the loyal opposition. They were hoping to actually replace the PLO eventually as the voice and leader of the Palestinian people. That’s not something they were going to declare openly because the PLO still enjoyed legitimacy among most Palestinians, but that was the battle that they were going to fight on the ground through their competing agendas.
And was Hamas mostly made up of Palestinians, or was it also Egyptians, others? … I’m just kind of curious whether this was an actual homegrown Palestinian group.
Absolutely, yeah. Hamas is a thoroughly homegrown, organic Palestinian organization. It is a political movement. Like Fatah, like the PFLP [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine] or other Palestinian factions, it is first and foremost Palestinian. And even though they have an Islamist ideology, they’re very much focused on the question of Palestine and Palestinians. So it’s an odd mix between Islamism and Palestinian nationalism, as distinct from the more secular nationalists. But their constituency, their goals, their aspirations are all thoroughly Palestinian. …
We understand what happened when the Israelis pull out of Gaza in 2005, right? What was the Palestinian view of that at the time? And looking back, what would you say is the significance of that moment?
The Gaza disengagement, the plan to evacuate Israeli soldiers and settlers from Gaza, was a very significant moment both for Israelis and for Palestinians. The Palestinians feared that it would be the beginning and the end, that after Israel pulled out that Gaza would be closed. It would be Gaza first, Gaza last, and Gaza would essentially be cut off from the West Bank and the rest of the world. So they were very keen, the Palestinian side was very keen to negotiate the process with the Israeli side.
The Israeli side had a very different view. They insisted that the disengagement was a unilateral Israeli initiative. They were not interested in negotiating with the Palestinian side, and particularly they didn’t want to link it to any sort of political horizon. They didn’t want the evacuation from Gaza to lead to more evacuations in the West Bank or to some sort of political process that would lead to a Palestinian state. They wanted to leave Gaza and be done with that for their own reasons. The role that the United States played was to convince the Israelis, if not to negotiate the withdrawal with the Palestinians, then at least to coordinate, because they would have to hand the keys over to someone.
That was something that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice took on, and she brokered an agreement called the Agreement on Movement and Access. It was a way to assure Palestinians that Gaza’s borders would not be closed, that there would be a flow—not necessarily a free flow, but a flow, regular flow of people and goods in and out of the Gaza Strip to allow for economic development and also, obviously, exchanges between the West Bank and Gaza to have some sort of territorial link between the two territories. …
The problem was that the agreement was never implemented, and so after November 2005, Gaza’s borders were essentially closed, and that paved the way for violence and attacks from Gaza on Israel and Israeli counterattacks. But … the failure of the Gaza disengagement also paved the way for the election of Hamas just a few months later in January 2006. Hamas could claim that it was through their armed actions over the previous years that forced the Israelis out of Gaza, and it was a fairly compelling argument, the timing of the evacuation coming at the very end of the Second Intifada. So Hamas could claim victory that they forced the Israelis out of Gaza and at the same time … why they could point to the Agreement on Movement and Access as a total failure of diplomacy and negotiations. They were able to capitalize on both of those.
In your view, a very significant event in terms of how to understand the subsequent history here.
Since, yes.
Yeah, so 2005 being, in order to understand where we are today, you think this is an essential ingredient, an element here?
Yes, absolutely. The failure of the Gaza disengagement paved the road for restrictions on the border of Gaza, the closure of the Gaza Strip, and eventually to the blockade a couple years later.
And as you said, also the election of Hamas and then of course what happens in ’07. So was it initially celebrated, though? Was there initially excitement?
Oh, yeah.
Tell me a little bit about that.
Yeah, there was quite a lot of excitement. Initially Palestinians were skeptical. They thought, “Oh, this is a ruse. Why would Israel unilaterally withdraw and remove settlements? And especially [former Israeli Prime Minister] Ariel Sharon. He’s the godfather of the settlement movement in Israel. Why would he do that?” So there was a lot of skepticism initially. But once Palestinians realized that this was going to happen, then there was a fair amount of excitement on the part of the Palestinian leadership and the Palestinian public. People thought, “OK, we’ve had years of violence. The political process has been totally paralyzed. Maybe this will generate movement. Maybe it won’t be Gaza first, Gaza last.” I remember I have a T-shirt that came out. There were hats and T-shirts that Palestinians made celebrating the Gaza disengagement that said, “Gaza today, the rest of Palestine tomorrow,” things along those lines. So there was a fair amount of optimism, but that ended fairly quickly once the borders were closed.
… So the Israelis saw this very differently, clearly, than the Palestinians. If the Palestinians saw this as a step on the way to statehood, it’s not how the Israelis saw it.
Yeah, if the Palestinians saw this as a step toward a political horizon or a process that would lead to a Palestinian state, the Israeli side insisted on it not being a political horizon or a step toward a Palestinian state. They were quite explicit that that was not on the table. They did not want the Gaza disengagement to lead to anything more than that. And in fact, the Israeli leadership wanted to use the Gaza disengagement as a way to forestall the possibility of a state or of any kind of similar move in the West Bank.
So the U.S. encourages elections. … How would you characterize the reaction to Hamas’ election?
Right. The United States had been pushing for the Palestinians to hold elections. They were particularly keen on seeing a new leadership come in after years of rule by Yasser Arafat, who they saw as an impediment to peace and as someone who facilitated terrorism.
So they welcomed first presidential elections in 2005. Of course that was after Yasser Arafat died, so there had to be a presidential election. The United States was very keen on pushing for parliamentary elections, and those were held in January 2006. The expectation was that a new Palestinian leadership would be not only democratically elected, but more peace-minded, more opposed to violence and so forth.
And so in Gaza, Hamas is elected. Was that expected? Was it, or was it a surprise?
Hamas’ election victory in 2006 was a surprise to everyone, including Hamas. Hamas did not expect, I think, to win an outright majority, which then gave them the ability to form a government all on their own. Initially Hamas was a little bit reticent and tried to convince Fatah to enter into a unity government. They weren’t quite sure how the international community was going to respond. …
Hamas was designated by Israel, by the United States and by many European countries as a terrorist organization, so this was not a government that they could deal with. There was a real quandary on the part of the United States: How do we maintain support for this Palestinian Authority that we’ve invested a great deal of resources in over many years, and is supposed to be the embryo for a future Palestinian state, and at the same time reconcile that with the fact that the Palestinian Authority is now headed by a designated terrorist organization?
… I really do want to skip ahead, but I guess one thing is that, especially in light of today and what’s happened on Oct. 7, … there was this assumption after the pullout in 2005 and through successive administrations that Hamas was a kind of a problem that could be contained, at least from the American or Israeli perspective, right? There was this “mowing the lawn” idea, or “mowing the grass.” And I’m just kind of curious, from your perspective, what the kind of containment policy has wrought as opposed to some other alternative.
I’ve been very critical of [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s approach toward Gaza, which also became de facto the American approach of divide and rule, whereby Israel would prop up a weak authority in the West Bank and another weak authority in Gaza, both of which were problematic from an Israeli standpoint. But as long as there was no unified Palestinian polity, that was the best bet toward preventing a Palestinian state.
It was clear to me and I think a large number of analysts and observers who were looking at the issue that that was the case, and that this was also quite destabilizing. This notion that every so often there would need to be predictable rounds of violence, “mowing the grass,” as Israelis call it, only to result in reinstating the status quo that existed before the violence was an untenable situation. It was cruel to maintain a permanent blockade on two million people, and then every now and again when they got too rowdy you would have to go in and bomb them. That was essentially the logic of this arrangement, and that could be sustained indefinitely. I and others had argued that eventually something’s going to give. There’s going to be an escalation that spirals out of control, or the situation becomes so dire in humanitarian terms in Gaza that there’s a bigger explosion than anyone had anticipated. And that’s precisely what happened.
Speak a little bit more to that, [that] what you saw is in a way the inhumanity of this policy or the unsustainability of it. You’re saying that you had been, you and others were basically warning that this policy is not something that is sustainable and could certainly result in violence.
The notion that you could keep two million people locked up indefinitely with no real economy who are surviving on international donations from the international community for their basic subsistence, who are entirely dependent on Israel opening and closing the border to allow movement of goods and people in, where the middle class has been decimated, where a majority of the people are now impoverished, where you have 60% unemployment — the notion that that could be sustained indefinitely, I think, was not only absurd but also quite cruel, because it depended on periodic, predictable eruptions of violence that, from Israel’s standpoint, were acceptable. The level of violence was certainly not anything that Israel would consider existential.
And Israeli casualties were always quite low. And they could reestablish their “deterrence” fairly quickly in a matter of a week or two or three weeks of bombing, and that would be enough to restore Israel’s deterrent capabilities until the next round of violence. And the cruelty of it was in knowing that it was going to happen again and again and again.
So from an Israeli standpoint, it makes sense. Divide and rule. Keep the West Bank and Gaza separate. That’s the best way to prevent a Palestinian state. Keep the Hamas authority operating at just an existence level, not letting it collapse but also not letting it thrive, and more or less the same policy adopted toward the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Keep them both weak, but not weak enough where they collapse.
That’s quite a cynical arrangement, but I understand why Israel as a colonial power would pursue that. It makes sense.
What I don’t understand, and I think what is going to require now in light of Oct. 7 a lot of soul-searching, is why the United States and the international community acquiesced in that arrangement for as long as they did. We’re talking about a blockade that wasn’t two or three years or four years. Sixteen years, and three years after the United Nations had declared officially that Gaza was unlivable for two million people. Everyone knew what the risks were. Everyone knew what the problems were. Everyone knew what was causing this violence and instability, and yet were willing to accept it because it was tolerable for Israel. So it was inevitable that some Palestinian actor would decide that it won’t be only Palestinians who pay a price for the status quo. And that’s what happened.
… I think we should skip to the Trump years for a little while. … [Former U.S. President Donald] Trump comes into office and says he wants to make a deal. He says he wants to, if there’s any American president who could ever make a deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians, he’s the guy to do it. He’s the ultimate dealmaker. How did that land with you? How did that land with Palestinians at the time that this was going to be the guy that could make the deal?
I think there was a lot of skepticism about whether Trump could actually make a deal, whether he knew enough about the issue, whether he could understand the nuances, understood the history. I was certainly skeptical of his ability to do that. But initially we only saw positive signs coming from Trump himself, not necessarily from others in his administration. But he very famously stood next to Benjamin Netanyahu in a press conference and said, “I could live with one state or two states, whatever the parties agree on.” And so I think Palestinians saw that, “Well, that’s odd.” Obviously U.S. policies just support a two-state solution. But it showed a certain naivete on his part, but also maybe a willingness to learn and accept different frameworks than what people had been accustomed to.
There was some maybe limited hope that maybe Trump would have a different approach. And of course he did, but in a different direction. The approach that he took was one that was to delegitimize Palestinian narratives, aspirations and so forth, and to adopt the most maximalist demands of the Israeli side.
Speaking of maximalist demands, the embassy move, how is that perceived? How is that read in terms of Trump [doing] this massive move of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem?
Yeah, the Jerusalem embassy move was a sign that the old playbook, that the old rules of diplomacy in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process were out the door. They no longer applied…. The idea that Israel would have to withdraw from occupied territory in return for peace with Arabs, including Palestinians, that was now out the window. And the idea that international law or an international consensus was somehow relevant was also out the window. Bearing in mind that one of the assurances that the United States had given to the Palestinians back in the 1990s for entering the peace process was that things like the status quo in Jerusalem remaining, that the United States would not change its policy toward Jerusalem, and that Jerusalem would remain an issue to be decided through negotiations. That was a key assurance that the United States gave to the Palestinians and that Palestinians accepted, and that was now breached by the Trump administration.
So I guess to put a finer point on it, the significance of the move, historically speaking, for the Palestinians was what?
What the embassy move symbolized to Palestinians was that they were not going to have a state with its capital in Jerusalem, because now the president of the United States had said that only Israel had a legitimate claim to Jerusalem and that it would remain eternally Israel’s capital. And for Palestinians, that’s a nonstarter. There is no configuration of a Palestinian state that any Palestinian could imagine that doesn’t include a Palestinian capital in Jerusalem.
So this is not only just a break with the past, but I’d imagine this is just a tremendous provocation of conflict, right? This is the U.S. and Israel kind of in lockstep here in a way that hadn’t happened before, right?
Right. And it was also a breach of more than 70 years of American policy that predated even the two-state solution or the peace process or any of it. There were reasons for not putting the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem that had nothing to do with Palestinians or a Palestinian state, but had to do with the fact that Jerusalem, being such a special city that was holy to three major religions and that had competing national claims, was not something that could simply be handed over unilaterally to one side, and that there were many stakeholders in Jerusalem beyond the Palestinians that include the Arab world and the wider Muslim world, not to mention the Christian world that also had equities in Jerusalem. It was a major reversal in U.S. policy going back to 1947.
And what about a provocation? Did you remember thinking of it at the time in terms of the warning signs of what leads to conflict eventually? Was this a provocation?
I think Palestinians did see it as a provocation, and there was an eruption of violence in Gaza and in the West Bank, mainly in the Gaza Strip, where dozens of Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in the context of this announcement.
… Let’s just get to the Abraham Accords. The Trump administration decides to kind of do … a kind of move. How would you describe what the Trump approach was to the Palestinian issue vis-à-vis the Abraham Accords?
The Abraham Accords, the normalization agreements between Arab states and Israel in 2020, were part of the administration’s effort to bypass the Palestinian issue entirely and to show that, whereas in the old days everyone believed that Arab normalization with Israel would only happen after a Palestinian state and an end to Israeli occupation, the Abraham Accords were designed to flip that framework on its head, and essentially either to force Palestinians to go along with whatever Israel and the United States had in mind, or to simply be left out and suffer the consequences.
It’s been described to us by various diplomats and others saying the Palestinians may have missed an opportunity there to kind of go to the Arab states and say, “Hey, maybe you could do more on our behalf when you negotiate with the United States.” What do you make of that?
In a lot of ways, the Abraham Accords, I think, do signify a failure on the part of Palestinian diplomacy in their own backyard. The Arab world had always been the base of support for Palestinians, politically and diplomatically, in the international arena. It was always the Arab states who were making the case for Palestinians, particularly the main Arab powers, like Saudi Arabia and Egypt and others.
So it was clearly a diplomatic failure on their part. The fact that they didn’t anticipate this, that it wasn’t coordinated with them by these different Arab governments that signed deals with Israel, that’s very much a failure of Palestinian diplomacy and part of the weakness of this particular leadership. But it’s also a sign that Arab states and the region and the United States and Israel have moved on from a two-state solution and from the Palestinian issue. The fact that the UAE [United Arab Emirates] and Bahrain would even consider signing a normalization deal with Israel without consulting Palestinians was pretty remarkable. It’s really a sign of just how much the region has changed in the past decade and how much lower the Palestinian issue was now on even the priorities of Arab states.
Was it seen as a betrayal?
It was definitely seen as a betrayal. The Abraham Accords were definitely seen as a betrayal by Palestinians. The reaction of [Palestinian President] Abbas’ leadership was quite hostile and really strained relations with both the UAE and Bahrain in that moment. They’ve since been restored, but there was real hostility. It wasn’t just the leadership. It was Palestinian civil society, the unanimous sentiment of all Palestinian political factions from the left to the right. And Palestinians in general felt that the Arab states had abandoned them.
… Was this just basically keeping the status quo? Was this another element that kept this unsustainable status quo going?
The Abraham Accords were definitely an end run around the Palestinian issue that consolidated the status quo and that removed any remaining incentives that Israel might have had to move toward a Palestinian state or to end its occupation or even really to change its behavior in the occupied territories vis-à-vis things like demolition of homes, confiscation of land, shooting unarmed protesters, that sort of thing, or settlement expansion. Now Israel was essentially off the hook. Now that Israel knew that the gates of normalization with the wider Arab world were open without having to deal with the Palestinian issue, then the Palestinian issue could be shunted aside.
But Bibi Netanyahu announces at the White House, in this White House ceremony, that there was also an annexation part of this plan, that he was going to move forward with annexing parts of the West Bank. … This was the Peace to Prosperity plan. It’s before they took annexation off the table, so to speak. But just curious about what the reaction was when Bibi kind of comes out on the White House lawn and says, “We’re going to be moving forward with an annexation plan.”
The Trump plan included a provision for the annexation of 30% of West Bank territory. That was part of what it called for, which would include all existing Israeli settlements plus all or most of the Jordan Valley and Jerusalem.
… What that meant was a “Palestinian state,” in quotations, that was entirely encircled by Israel, that was under Israeli control, that didn’t control its airspace or borders or natural resources. And so it really was just a repackaging of the status quo.
So in comes a new administration. Was there hope that the Biden administration, the election of [U.S. President] Joe Biden and the incoming Biden administration would take a radically different approach than his predecessor?
I think on the part of the Palestinian leadership, there was quite a lot of hope after four years of Trump and the total severing of relations, the cutting off of aid, closing down the Palestinian diplomatic mission, the closure of the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem. … The consulate had been the unofficial mission of the United States to the Palestinians, so when it was closed and then folded into the new U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, that basically cemented the severing of U.S.-Palestinian ties. When Joe Biden won the election, there was quite a lot of excitement and optimism in Ramallah on behalf of the Palestinian leadership, even if the Palestinian public maybe was a little bit more skittish about Biden given his very prominent record of support for Israel.
And so early in Biden’s presidency, in 2021, we have a war that breaks out, basically, with Gaza. If you think about it in terms of today, what was the significance of that moment in terms of how Biden handled it, how the Israelis handled it, and certainly how it was seen from the Palestinian perspective?
Yeah, do I need to get into the triggers of that work? Because it started in Jerusalem and then spread. The immediate reaction of the Biden administration to that outbreak of violence was to unreservedly condemn the Palestinians, to assert Israel’s right to defend itself without qualification, without any conditions at all. And that has been a consistent refrain, even in the West Bank where the violence has been more limited, but still quite deadly. The response from the Biden administration, anytime there’s violence, has been more or less to assert Israel’s unqualified right to defend itself, even when the violence is directed at Palestinian civilians.
And you had an eventual cease-fire there, right, but you also had Hamas in some ways claiming that this was a victory. And I’m wondering if you can kind of speak to the significance of that.
That’s the thing. Hamas is always going to claim victory, regardless of what happens on the ground. That’s the nature of asymmetrical warfare, is the weak side, if they survive, they will claim victory. And it doesn’t matter the actual results on the ground in terms of human or material losses. As long as Hamas would survive, then it would be in a position to declare victory, because it’s going up against Goliath, the mighty Israel.
No one has any expectation that somehow Hamas is going to defeat Israel. But if the conflict can be used to gain some concessions, some loosening of the restrictions around Gaza, more work permits, more trucks entering, more exports allowed, that sort of thing, then all the more ability for Hamas to be able to claim a political victory.
And this was just again, I mean, was it handled as if it was the status quo, just yet another spasm of violence in that region?
By whom?
By the Americans, and the Israelis, basically, in terms of, again, this repeating pattern of the status quo being back to normal after that.
Yeah, I think the eruption of fighting in Gaza in 2021, once you had a cease-fire, then the United States and everyone else just sort of went back to the status quo ante, knowing that it was only a matter of time before the next eruption happened. It could be in a year. It could be in two years. But we knew for certain that it would happen.
[SECOND INTERVIEWER] We’ve just seen this described by experts and journalists as sort of a moment of change over there of Hamas and Gaza. And then by Israeli intelligence, do they notice a moment of change in [Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar]? … When we talked on the phone, you just talked about it in the context of by this moment that something had shifted; a change had happened on the ground in Gaza that feeds into Hamas’ popularity.
Well, the shift I think I was referring to is in May of 2021 is when we see, OK, there’s the protests in Jerusalem on the evictions, and then the provocations at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and that’s when Hamas enters and starts throwing rockets. And then you have this war, but at the same time, there’s a kind of mini-uprising among Palestinians inside Israel who are citizens of Israel in so-called mixed cities.
That’s the new element that gets introduced. Maybe that’s what I was referring to. So it’s like a pan-Palestinian uprising. It’s no longer just Palestinians in the occupied territories, but now even those in Israel are rising up. And that was jarring for Israelis who are like, “Holy crap, we do have this enemy in our midst.” And for Palestinians, they call it the Unity Intifada. …
The other point I may have been referring to in terms of change is the perception outside, particularly in the United States, how it affected public opinion here.
[SECOND INTERVIEWER] … This was a moment where Hamas was seen as having done something; that Fatah, who has been negotiating forever, getting nowhere, right? But there’s some perception shift that Hamas is getting something accomplished.
Right, because what makes this moment different than previous Gaza wars is that for the first time, Hamas is responding not to events in Gaza or in relation to demands with regard to the blockade or anything having to do with Gaza, but in connection with events in Jerusalem. That’s what’s different. Hamas now is not just protecting its fiefdom in the Gaza Strip, but now vying for a leadership of the Palestinian struggle as a whole by being the only party that is responding to events in Jerusalem, in contrast to the impotence and ineffectiveness of the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah.
And how is this seen both outside of the region, and how is it also seen by Palestinian people that all of a sudden Hamas is sort of stepping into the void of leadership here?
I think for Palestinians writ large, both inside and outside of the occupied territories, they see this as a moment of national unity, because it’s now you have Palestinians rebelling in Jerusalem but also in Gaza, in parts of the West Bank, but also now inside Israel itself, where Palestinian citizens of Israel have entered the fray and are part of what is now being referred to as the Unity Intifada.
It transcends the Green Line or the 1967 border and even is sort of post-Oslo and post-two-state solution. If we’re talking about a unified Palestinian people across borders, that’s a very different scenario, and that goes beyond Hamas.
… Clearly the nature of the [Oct. 7] attack has put this back on the international agenda to some extent. So how do we sensitively talk about that in terms of what has happened, I mean, and what Hamas has seemingly, I don’t know, accomplished this time around? I know it’s difficult.
Yeah.
Yeah, I know.
Nowadays if you talk about context, you’re accused of being pro-terror. So everything exists in a vacuum, apparently. So the question: What did Oct. 7 change?
Yeah. What did Oct. 7 change?
I think what Oct. 7 did, in addition to obviously delivering a shock to the Israeli system and killing hundreds of Israelis, it clearly put the Palestinian issue back on the international agenda in a way that we hadn’t seen in many years. It also, I think, defeated the notion that Israel was invincible. That’s something that resonates very deeply with Palestinians who had come to see, who had lost hope in the ability to alter the status quo.
The Arab states weren’t helping them. The United States wasn’t helping. Europe, everyone had moved on from the Palestinian issue. And there was this sense that the settlements and all of these things, violence against Palestinians—because occupation is violence—occupation needs ever-increasing amounts of violence to be sustained, and that there was no end in sight to occupation, to the blockade. …
And Hamas delivered this major shock to the Israeli system. Hamas overcame mighty Israeli intelligence and security and did far more damage in a single day than all previous armed Palestinian groups in decades. And the fact that they were able to have their way inside Israeli communities where security, Israeli security, Israel’s vaunted security, had completely fallen apart I think was something that would resonate with Palestinians because it gave them some hope that the status quo could be changed.
… When you see Palestinians demonstrating in the streets in support of Hamas, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that they support what were really atrocious attacks on ordinary civilians, when the reality is much more complicated than that. It’s an expression of hope. …
I think it was inevitable that the Oct. 7 attack on Israelis, as atrocious as it was, as brutal as it was, would still resonate with Palestinians who had been immersed in this sense of deep despair for many years, a sense of abandonment, a sense of ongoing pain and suffering that was grinding them, and at the same time feeling that they’ve been abandoned by even their best friends in the Arab world. So any party that could dramatically alter that status quo and at the same time inflict a cost on the enemy, on the very people who were their tormentors, would be something that Palestinians would inevitably support.
It’s not surprising today that Hamas is more popular now than it’s been maybe ever, not because of the people that they killed, but because they were able to deliver a shock to the Israeli system. They were able to deliver a cost where there had been none. They were able to overcome this notion of Israeli invincibility. And so that speaks to the sense of despair and powerlessness that Palestinians had been gripped by for all these years.
Maybe now there are alternatives, and there’s no question that the Palestinian issue has been put back on the international agenda in ways that we haven’t seen in many, many years. In some ways we can say that the Hamas attack was successful at least in achieving those objectives, but of course it comes at an exceptionally high cost for Israelis, but also now for Palestinians, now that we’re, you know, thousands and thousands of Palestinians who have been killed, and no end in sight.
And to those who say, where is the sense of responsibility in terms of—of course, this isn’t to deny or in any way diminish the pain and the suffering and the humiliation of the occupation, but where has been the Palestinian leadership that could have either made something of Gaza that Hamas wasn’t able to create for its people, for the PA to create in the West Bank? To those who say, “OK, hey, Palestinians need to take a bit of responsibility here for the societies that, granted, in a handicapped way, were enabled to develop.” But where’s the responsibility?
I’m trying to address your question, which is premised on some faulty assumptions.
My question is premised in part on the Israeli perspective on, right?
Yeah, but the Israeli perspective is, we left Gaza in 2005. You didn’t turn it into Singapore.
Right.
You said you turned it into a nest of terror.
What is the faulty assumption here?
The faulty assumption is that they had the capacity to turn Gaza into anything other than an impoverished, isolated enclave when it is under a complete blockade, when Israel controls the borders, the maritime waters, controls the population registry, Israel knows everything that goes in and out of Gaza. There was a period of time when Israeli military commanders were counting the number of calories per capita that Palestinians in Gaza needed to live, and that they would allow only that number, that amount of food. This is mechanized structural violence at a massive scale. So Gaza was impoverished deliberately.
Hamas is many things. Hamas is repressive. It has carried out terrorist attacks. It’s targeted civilians. It has repressed its own people. But Hamas doesn’t control the economy, right? Hamas isn’t the reason there is 60% unemployment in Gaza and 70% people who live on international food assistance. I mean, that’s not Hamas’ fault. That’s a result of the blockade.
But if you want to look at Palestinian responsibility, you want to compare. We have two models of Palestinian governance, one in Gaza run by Hamas and one in the West Bank run by the Palestinian Authority and Abbas and his Fatah Party.
The West Bank leadership of Abbas has been playing by the rules. They are intent on maintaining security cooperation with Israel. They crack down on terrorism. They prevent attacks on Israelis. They do quite a good job of that, even despite the financial and other constraints that they have and despite the fact that they’ve lost the support of most of their people. They’re committed to a diplomatic process and peaceful negotiations. And where has that gotten them, right?
Where is the Palestinian state? They’ve jumped through all the hoops that the United States and Israel put in front of them, and it didn’t produce the promised state. That’s something that Hamas can point to and others who will say that approach gets you nowhere. The only approach that will make sense, the only language Israel understands, is power, is force. You match power with power. You match violence with violence. And that’s the logic of Hamas, and that is the logic of Oct. 7.
So as you watch what’s happening today, right, we have this, obviously this horrific humanitarian crisis and this tremendous response by Israel. Where does this go in terms of whether that approach, power for power, is really going to work here, and whether—I know you said the Palestinians, that Hamas has kind of never been as powerful. But here, they poked the tiger, and the tiger is definitely responding. … I know you can’t predict the future, but you’re saying the other approach wasn’t validated, but is this a validation of Hamas’ approach?
No. In fact, I think a lot of Palestinians and non-Palestinians like myself have been quite critical of both approaches. I think Hamas’ approach has been a total failure, whether it’s governance or armed resistance, in the same way that Abbas’ approach in the West Bank has been a total failure. Playing by all the rules and doing security cooperation and committing yourself to nonviolence and diplomacy also doesn’t pay off. And that’s the quandary that Palestinians are in.
They’ve tried armed struggle. They’ve tried negotiations. They’ve tried nonviolent resistance. Over the years, we’ve seen it in Jerusalem. We saw the Great March of Return in 2018. All forms of nonviolent resistance are consistently met with violence. More than 200 Palestinians were killed in the 2018 March of Return protests in Gaza. They were entirely unarmed. So there’s no diplomatic solution. There’s no civil society solution. There’s no military solution. And therein lies the source of Palestinian despair.
When you combine that with they’ve tried every avenue on their own, in addition to the fact that they now feel abandoned by the region and the world, that’s how you get this level of despair and how you get this level of violence. So if previous kinds of violence didn’t do anything because they were manageable, they were the kind of violence that Israel could absorb, “mowing the grass,” it was expected, then maybe what had to change was the level of violence. And so maybe that’s what explains the scope and scale of the Oct. 7 attack, is that it couldn’t just be a small attack in which we’d have another round of limited violence and then we’d go back to the status quo. It needed to be something that was so off the charts that there could never be a return to the status quo. And that’s exactly what happened.
So Hamas’ calculation was correct. There is no going back. Everyone agrees. Israelis, Americans, Palestinians, Gaza, West Bank, anywhere you ask, everyone agrees there’s no going back to the Oct. 6 status quo. The question is, where do we go from here? Is it a new and better status quo? Is it at least less awful? Is it at least a pathway to something less awful? Or is it more destruction and death and something considerably worse than what we’ve had before? Those are still open questions.
So the reality here is that there is no military solution to what’s happening. Hamas is not going to be destroyed. The stated objectives that Israel has of completely wiping out Hamas is simply not going to happen. Hamas is a political movement. It’s an idea. It’s an ideology. The point I wanted to make, the point I made earlier, now I lost it, of the—
Well, you can wipe out the leadership, right?
Yes, right, Israel can wipe out Hamas’ weapons, it can take out the entire leadership, but there will always be new weapons and new leaders that emerge. As long as the underlying causes of violence are there, and the reasons for Hamas’ existence—the occupation, a blockade—as long as those are still in place, there will always be a Hamas or something like Hamas that will emerge to respond. Unless we’re addressing those root causes, we’re just kicking the can down the road.
But actually, it’s much worse than that, because the scale of death and destruction that is happening now in the Gaza Strip is on a level that is unprecedented and that is in all likelihood going to produce more instability, more violence, more misery, as well as a power vacuum and a security vacuum after the removal of Hamas from power.
And all of those are the ingredients for violence and terrorism. … It’s unimaginable to me how anyone could think that the destruction of 30% or 40% of Gaza’s infrastructure, the displacement of 1.5 million people, the depopulation of all of northern Gaza, the destruction of more than 200,000 homes, is somehow going to make Israel more secure in the future as opposed to precisely the opposite. All of this destruction and misery and trauma is going to be channeled not only into violent resistance but to far greater forms of violence down the road.
Every social scientist who understands conflict understands this. But the fact that the United States is allowing this to continue to me is actually mind-boggling. When there is such clear potential for blowback and harm, already I think the United States has done enormous damage to its international standing.
In the Arab world, certainly among Palestinians, I can’t imagine how Palestinians will ever trust the United States again. But even in the Global South, where people see the hypocrisy and the stark contrast between what Russia is doing in Ukraine, and that elicits Western and American opposition and support for Ukrainian freedom fighters against Russian occupation, but when Israel does the very same thing—bomb civilians, use starvation and the denial of basic life needs like fuel, medicine and water as a weapon—when Russia does those things, there is rightful international outrage and condemnation. When Israel does those things, there is silence. Or worse: There is tacit support under the rubric of Israeli self-defense. The notion of self-defense has to have limits.
Biden goes over to Israel in the wake of the attack. What was the significance to you of that visit, right? Because you talked about the need of a third party to have a steady hand on things. And some have read that to say, listen, you can’t control Israel unless Israel trusts you. You can’t help but hug them. But the bear hug has this greater significance. So it’s also like I love you, but you’re going to have to restrain yourself here. So I’m just kind of curious how you see that moment of Biden going over there.
The Biden visit to Israel was clearly intended to show Israel, and it did show, that the United States has Israel’s back, that they are in a show of solidarity with the people and the government of Israel and to affirm Israel’s right to defend itself and to protect its citizens. That was clearly going to happen. That was a necessary message that any administration would have to deliver to Israel as Israel’s closest ally. But it needed to do that in a way that was responsible. The bear-hug approach, hug Israel publicly, show no daylight with Israel, while privately delivering messages to show restraint and to be more cautious and so forth, that approach doesn’t work. It’s never worked. It doesn’t work for Israeli settlements.
The outpouring of American solidarity and sympathy for Israel is understandable at all levels of government and civil society and the public. But after delivering that message, there needed to be a more stern message about the need to operate within the constraints of international law, and also the ability to call Israel out when it wasn’t living up to those standards. And I think it’s pretty clear by now that it is not living up to those standards. We are seeing unprecedented levels of civilian casualties, and we’re seeing unprecedented levels of violence. The vast majority of people who are killed in Gaza right now are women and children. The largest single number of any group are children. In the first five weeks of this relentless bombardment of Gaza, we’ve seen at least 11,000 people killed, 4,500 of those are children, enormous damage to civilian infrastructure. And for what? How much of Hamas’ military capabilities have been degraded? We don’t know. Hamas still has the ability to launch rockets at Israel. They are fighting on the ground. Israel is taking casualties. We don’t know exactly how much, but we’ve not seen a significant degrading of Hamas’ command and control in military terms.
What is the upper ceiling? Is it 20,000 killed? Is it 100,000? At what point, since we know that the goal of destroying Hamas is not something that’s achievable, what is the upper limit? How do we know when Israel’s objectives have been achieved if they’re not achievable? …
… What’s the end game? No one knows what that means, and Netanyahu’s out there talking about indefinite security, you know. So what would you like to see the American role played here?
So the problem with the way this war is being prosecuted is that no one knows what will need to happen for Israelis to feel satisfied that they’ve achieved their stated objective of having destroyed Hamas, since there is no destroying of Hamas. So all that’s left is to just keep killing and bombing and killing and bombing until when?
When the Israelis talk about targets, they’re not only talking about Hamas’ military or even just the military and political wing. They’re talking about Hamas’ bureaucracy. They’re talking about Hamas’ supporters. They’re talking about potentially—the language that they use should be alarming. They talk about not civilians but “uninvolved individuals.” What does that mean?
Who are the involved individuals? It’s not just people carrying weapons. It could potentially extend to Hamas’ political supporters, sympathizers, people who voted for Hamas, people who have a Hamas poster on their wall. It’s impossible to say exactly where the lines are between who the combatants are and who the civilians are.
So for operating under these very blurry definitions of who is and isn’t a civilian, then we’re really talking about an enormous capacity for civilian casualties. And the American approach of bear-hugging in public and showing no daylight in public while delivering ostensibly stern warnings in private to limit civilian casualties, to allow more humanitarian assistance, then those messages we’re told are being delivered privately, but they haven’t produced anything.
When American senior officials have gone out to deliver these messages, we’ve seen an escalation in response. Instead of a reduction in civilian casualties, we actually saw civilian casualties go up. So that approach, I think, isn’t working, and it hasn’t worked. It hasn’t worked in this context of the current Gaza War.
It hasn’t worked in relation to other issues like Israeli settlements or anything else. In order for Israel to be constrained, they need to be told by their best friend, the only party that they truly trust in the world, the United States. And I think President Biden in particular is very highly regarded among Israelis. No one can accuse him of being hostile towards Israel or being an enemy of Israel, and the only way to change Israel’s behavior is to say it publicly, is to lay down markers and red lines in a public way, and to call out Israel whenever they go too far, which, frankly, is quite often.
