Arabs vs Jews? Maybe Not | Ambassador Ron Dermer | EP 288
It's as if there's an insistence, and maybe it's psychologically rooted to some degree, to reduce the entire intractable complexity of the Middle East to a single point of conflict. You can imagine the psychological advantage of that; it's because you reduce an irreducible set of problems to something hypothetically comprehensible.
Let's take a step back. The idea that there's a Middle East conflict singular is ridiculous. I mean, you could solve the Israeli-Palestinian issue tomorrow, and it's not going to impact what's happening in Yemen, or in Libya, or in Iraq, in ten other places, uh, countries around the region. But everybody focused on this being a Middle East Peace Prize. It's not a Middle East peace process; it may be an Israeli-Palestinian peace process. If you solve that conflict, maybe it'll have some positive impact beyond that conflict.
But in the Middle East, you have a battle that is going on between the forces of modernity and medievalism. Israel is clear early on the force for modernity.
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Hello everyone! I am very, uh, privileged, I would say, and happy today to be speaking with Ambassador Ronald Dermer. I've been investigating the background and the significance of the Abraham Accords, which are a peace initiative signed a few years ago aimed at stabilizing and bringing prosperity, security, and opportunity to the Middle East. I became aware of these Accords somewhat late, in some sense, given what appears to be their significance.
They look to me like the most noteworthy move towards something approximating peace in the Middle East that might have occurred in the last, certainly since the Second World War, perhaps since the First World War. That's really saying something in such a fractious world, where so much of the conflict has been centered in that area as it has been for so many thousands of years.
So, I'm doing some background investigation into the Accords, trying to find out their strengths and weaknesses, trying to separate the wheat from the chaff and give credit where credit is due. I talked to the American ambassador to Israel a while back, who was signally important in bringing these about, and now I'm reversing that by speaking to Ronald Dermer, and I'm going to share that with you, so you can make up your own mind, in so far as that's possible.
I'll start with a brief bio of Ambassador Dermer, and then we'll move to a discussion of the Abraham Accords in their details and in their context, and some of the associated moves on the political and strategic front that have been, that were undertaken in Ambassador Dermer's term.
So, that's the plan for this conversation, and so welcome aboard Ronald Dermer. An American-born Israeli political consultant slash diplomat, he served as the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. from 2013 to 2021.
In 2004, Dermer and Natan Sharansky co-authored the best-selling "The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror," which has been translated into ten languages. He served as Israel's economic envoy to the U.S. from 2005 to 2008 and then for four years as senior advisor to former Israeli PM's Benjamin Netanyahu. For four years from 2013 to 2021, Mr. Dermer was Israeli ambassador to the U.S. As Netanyahu's top advisor, he worked closely with his U.S. counterparts on securing long-term military assistance and missile defense funding for Israel, moved the American Embassy to Jerusalem, attaining U.S. recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, implementing the maximum pressure campaign against Iran, and achieving, as I mentioned, the breakthrough Abraham Accords, which normalized Israel's relations with several Arab Nations.
Mr. Dermer is currently a non-resident distinguished fellow at JINSA, the Jewish Institute for National Security of America. He's co-host of the podcast "Diplomatically Incorrect" and has assured me that he is in fact diplomatically incorrect, a partner at Exigent Capital, a boutique investment firm in Jerusalem, and serves on the board of NetSpark, a leading Israeli internet filtering technology company.
So welcome to my YouTube channel and podcast, Ambassador Dermer, and I'm pleased that you're here and willing to talk to me. I'd like you to take over the conversation here and introduce the audience who is watching and listening to the Abraham Accords and your understanding of their nature, significance, and the process by which they came to be.
So, it's a pleasure to be with you, Jordan. I'm also thrilled to be here because there is a slight chance that my children will actually watch this; they can be my audience as well because they won't listen to me around the dinner table, but they are big fans of yours. So, I'm looking forward to them actually listening to their father for a change.
So, the Abraham Accords, if we're trying to understand the Abraham Accords, which happened in the summer of 2020, it's very interesting because Israel had its first peace agreement with Egypt in 1979. So, we waited for 30 years. Israel was established in 1948; it was three decades before we had our first peace agreement with Egypt, which was definitely a breakthrough.
I think it changed Israel's not only the military equation regarding Israel and its neighbors but had a huge impact on Israel's strategic position in the region. Then, we had to wait another 15 years, in 1994, when we had peace between Israel and Jordan. In between the second and the third, we had to wait over a quarter-century, 26 years.
Until 2020, on August 13, 2020, there was a phone call between Prime Minister Netanyahu, President Trump, and Mohammed bin Zayed, who then was the Crown Prince of the Emirates, the United Arab Emirates, and today is the ruler of the United Arab Emirates. That was a breakthrough.
Well, we only had to wait about 25 days for the next breakthrough to happen, which happened in early September with a call with the King of Bahrain, the Prime Minister, and the President. Then, you had the Abraham Accords, which were formally signed on September 15, 2020.
So, we had two immediately after those Accords were signed: two more countries, Sudan and Morocco, increased the number to four, four Arab countries that had done peace or normalization agreements with Israel. What is striking is how little attention is paid to the fact that in the first 72 years of Israel's history, we have two peace agreements with Arab countries and, in a four or five-month period in 2020, you had four agreements.
Now, how did that happen? Now, there's a lot of reasons why this has been dismissed by a lot of people around the world because it actually, I think, breaks a paradigm that existed for many, many decades. This paradigm may also give political credit to people that they don't want to give political credit to.
But in understanding what changed in the region and what enabled ultimately the Abraham Accords—and by here the Abraham Accords is specifically the surfacing of Israel's relations with our Arab partners, particularly in the Gulf—if you want to understand, in my view, the Abraham Accords, you really have to go back about 20 years.
I'll take you back to 2002. You may remember, I don't know if you were following the Middle East in those days, but in May 2002, the Saudis put forward what was called the Arab Peace Initiative. Now, a lot of people thought that was a breakthrough for the region; I didn't. I actually thought that that was a con job.
In the sense that a few months earlier, about eight or nine months earlier, on September 11, 2001, 19 hijackers had flown planes into a building, the World Trade Center, had downed the plane in Pennsylvania, and 15 of those 19 hijackers were Saudis, and they were responsible for the murder of nearly 3,000 Americans.
So, they faced enormous pressure on them to do something. If you know a little bit about the history of Saudi Arabia, there was a bond that the ruling family in Saudi Arabia, the Sauds family, made with the Wahab family, which is the Wahhabis.
Part of that, um, deal that they made enabled the Wahhabis not only to control the education system within Saudi Arabia but also to promote a particularly virulent brand of Islam all over the world through the mosques that they had funded. That was the deal that the Saudis made, and 9/11 was a product of that—not because the Saudis directly were involved in it or directly ordered it, because the Saudi regime had actually enabled this infrastructure of radical Islam to develop, and ultimately, it blew up on September 11, 2001.
Now think about the situation if you're Saudi Arabia: how much pressure you have on you to do something. So about eight months after those September 11th attacks, they called in the reporter from The New York Times, a columnist, Tom Friedman, I believe, who went to Riyadh, and he met with one of the senior Saudi leaders, and he opened a desk drawer and pulled out a peace plan. All of a sudden, the Saudis, in the public imagination, went from being terror masters to peacemakers.
But the real question, Jordan, is this: if you would have asked the leaders of Saudi Arabia in 2002, if you would have asked them, if you could wave a magic wand and end the Arab-Israeli conflict or end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which are not the same conflict, which we'll get into, but if you could wave a magic wand and end those conflicts, would you? The answer in 2002, in my view, was no.
I think they had no desire to do it. I think the conflict served their purposes; it helped divert from a lot of bad things that were happening in the Kingdom. I think a lot of the British, the French, and the American diplomats fell for the nonsense that the center of all the problems and maladies of the Middle East is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So, they had no strategic interest in solving the conflict, period, full stop.
Now, let's fast forward ten years—not to 2020, let's talk about 2012. Maybe even a little bit beforehand. But around 2012, if you would have asked the leaders of Saudi Arabia if they could wave their magic wand, would they end the Israeli-Arab conflict, would they end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the answer then was yes.
Now, what changed in that decade? I'll tell you what didn't change: they didn't translate Herzl, who was the visionary of modern Zionism; they didn't translate his "Jewish State," his famous book, into Arabic, and you didn't see a wave of Zionism spread across the sands of Arabia.
What changed was a fundamental shift in their understanding, not only in Saudi Arabia but throughout the Gulf, of what their interests are. This was a result of several factors that came together to, I think, change their approach to Israel, to many other issues, even internal issues we can get to, but certainly to Israel.
One of the changes that happened was the Arab Spring. You remember that in 2010, you had Tunisia undergo this revolution; you saw it in Egypt; you saw Libya; you saw Syria; some of them were violent; some of them were not violent—Yemen, Iraq—all across the region, things were starting to get unstable, and so regimes that were certain of their hold on power for decades to come were less certain.
That's the first thing. Second thing is you had the rise of Iran as a very dangerous power in the region, and that was happening before 2012, but it sort of shifted into overdrive in those years as Obama, the Obama Administration pursued a policy of appeasement with Iran rather than confrontation with Iran.
Iran is a Shia radical power; they not only threatened the state of Israel, which everyone knows, with destruction, but they also threatened their Sunni Arab neighbors. As I would sometimes tell my Arab friends, they want Riyadh for breakfast; they want Jerusalem for lunch, and frankly, they want New York for dinner. I don't know if Toronto may be a midnight snack, but the Shia radical power of Iran threatens them, and you see Iran getting stronger and stronger as they feel less certain.
Now you had another factor, which is the rise of Sunni radicalism, and that would be in the form of ISIS. Now, Iran, as I said, is a Shia radical power; there are also Sunni radical forces—Al-Qaeda, who perpetrated 9/11—that Sunni radicalism is 1.0; ISIS is 2.0, and there'll be a 3.0. These regimes in the Gulf are also frightened of them.
So, you've got this Iranian tiger whose claws are getting longer and teeth are getting sharper. You've got this ISIS leopard that is roaming throughout that region, chopping off heads, decimating populations, and instilling fear in a very wide swath of territory.
Here is another factor that is critical to understand: The change in the Middle East, when that Iranian tiger and ISIS leopard are rising and becoming stronger, the 800-pound American gorilla is leaving the building. So, the withdrawal from the Middle East of the United States, at least the reduction of the military footprint of the United States in the Middle East, I think that helps seize the minds of plenty of people in the Gulf.
Because if there is one thing, Jordan, that connects Obama, Trump, and Biden—and they don't want to be in the same sentence with one another on nearly anything—none of them are looking to send more American troops to the Middle East.
So when you see these threats, the tiger and the leopard getting stronger and the 800-pound gorilla has left, they say there's a 200-pound gorilla with a keeper on called Israel. Let's work in closer cooperation with that.
So the fundamental thing to appreciate is they had a different understanding of their most vital security interests, and working closely with Israel helps them advance their interests.
The second issue is now the rise of Israel as a global technological power. Israel is the second great source of innovation outside of Silicon Valley; Silicon Valley's one, and Israel—the ecosystem that we have for innovation is remarkable.
We're not just a great innovator when it comes to technologies in traditional fields like agriculture or water; we also take an area like cyber, which has both civilian or military applications. So Israel is one-tenth of one percent of the world's population, with all of nine million people, but we account for about 20% of private investment in cyber.
So Israel is punching 200 times above its weight in cyber. We're not a country the size of New Jersey with all of nine million people; as I say, in cyber, Israel is bigger than China. But there are other areas: autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence—all of these technologies of the future.
Maybe we'll get a chance to talk about why Israel has that ecosystem, how we developed it, but we have it. Now, if you think about the Arab world's traditional boycott of Israel, it's about as intelligent as Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and half of California boycotting Silicon Valley. It makes no sense.
To the extent that you have leaders in the region who care about the future of their regimes, which they all do, but who are smart enough to understand that the world still needs oil today, but who knows what's going to happen in 20, 30, 40, 50 years, they have to prepare their countries for a different future.
Mohammed bin Zayed, the Crown Prince of the Emirates is certainly one of those leaders. I think Mohammed bin Salman, and we could talk about Khashoggi and all of that, but I think he's also one of those leaders. They're looking around the region, and the bottom line is this: they see that their security interests and their economic interests are tied to a partnership with Israel.
They want to actually move into an alliance with Israel, but they do have a big problem. These regimes have been poisoning their populations against Israel for six, seven decades, so it's very hard for them to turn on a dime and say all of a sudden, "Hey, you know, we need to do this for the good of our countries."
It is very difficult. They don't have democracies; they're authoritarian systems. Some people say it's more benevolent or less benevolent, but they're all authoritarian systems. But public opinion in these systems matters, and they have to navigate, particularly when you've seen in other countries a whole regime go down because they didn't respond to public opinion.
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So, let me summarize just so that I make sure I've got this. You made a couple of points at the beginning, one of which was that these peace agreements, multiple peace agreements, four of them, emerged in a very short period of time after a very slow process of similar peace agreements extending over about a 70-year period.
You said that there was some movement towards this in 2002 by the Saudis, but that was mostly a reaction to the negative publicity associated with 9/11. You said that the Saudis, however, by 2014, because of all sorts of changes on the international scene—including the American withdrawal and the rise of the Arab Spring, and the dawning realization of Israel's value as a tech and innovative hub—had convinced many Arab leaders in the region, including the Saudis, that it was more intelligent to pay attention to the threat that was posed to their regimes and to the stability of the area by internal dissidents, both on the Shiite and the Sunni side, than to be concerned with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
They began to ignore the potential benefit that partnership with Israel might bring about, and that shifted harden up by 2014, so that even the Saudis, who might have been regarded as particularly intractable because of their partnership with the Wahhabis, were willing to contemplate the idea that the proper pathway forward for them was, in fact, a normalization of relations with Israel and the development of the kind of economic stability and military security that might ensure the longevity of their regimes.
So just a couple of fine points on what you said. First of all, it's before 2014, by 2012, it was already there. I would say we went into the Prime Minister's office—I joined Prime Minister Netanyahu there as a senior advisor in 2009. Very quickly, we could see a situation where we were assessing the region in the same way as the Saudis because you'd have officials, presidents, prime ministers, senators who would come through the region, and a lot of them would be coming from Riyadh or coming from Abu Dhabi, and they would say to Prime Minister Netanyahu, "Your analysis of the problems of the region are the exact same as the analysis that we're hearing in the Gulf."
So, there was clearly a marriage of interest at that point. The other thing I would say just to clarify, it's not about the dissidents that happened, because in my view, I wrote a book with Nathan Sharansky about the case for democracy; when I think of dissidents, I think about people who were fighting for freedom, for political rights, civil rights, and human rights.
Obviously, these are about terrorists—I was thinking more about the Iranians than ISIS, actually. Right. So, Iranian and ISIS, I agree with you. I would say it's terrorists who want to not only destroy their regimes, but they want to actually take the whole world back to the 8th century.
You know, there are Sunni terrorists that want to take us to the 8th century, and there are Shiite terrorists that want to take us to the 10th century. Maybe they'll get together and they'll make a compromise and try to take us all back to the 9th century, but they're all bad, and they're a huge problem for any regime that is actually focused on the future and doesn't want to go back to the Dark Ages.
Okay, now, how are they? Now, you laid a fair bit of stress on the positive Saudi contribution to this peace process, but the Saudis aren't signatories yet, and maybe they will be, but I have heard from many informed sources that they were powerful players behind the scenes and were fundamentally not only on board with this but, in some sense, enabling it.
I'm wondering, given the bet with the devil, metaphorically speaking to some degree, how are the Saudis managing to move towards normalization of relations with Israel, given their partnership with a particularly fundamentalist brand of Islam?
Well, to me, the Saudis are the invisible hand behind the whole Abraham Accords. It's hard for me to imagine that it would have gotten off the ground without at least their tacit support. So, Bahrain—if you've been there, you know it's a bridge, literally a bridge from Saudi Arabia—you could, in American terms, see it as sort of the 51st state of Saudi Arabia. So the idea that the Bahrainis would have made peace with Israel with the Saudis giving a red light, I just don't believe that would be the case.
I think even the Emirates, despite the real leadership of Mohammed bin Zayed, MBZ, I think if the Saudis had a complete red light against doing this and were fighting it actively, it would be very hard to imagine that he would have agreed to move forward.
Also, remember that in order to get from Israel to the Emirates, you've got to fly over Saudi Arabia, unless you want to go around and fly over Iraq and Iran, which I don't think anybody wants to do. So the Saudis made their airspace available for planes flying over.
So there's no question that they were behind it, and I think they probably saw Bahrain and the Emirates as a trial balloon to see how that goes, to see how the public—because, you know, you never know exactly about public opinion in these societies that are more closed societies.
In a democracy, you can tell where people are because they say it openly and freely on all the television stations, and everybody is criticizing everybody. In these countries, when you do a big event like that, a big move for peace, you know, maybe you think your assessment is right about where the public is, but you don't know for sure.
I think that was part of that process; unfortunately, and maybe we'll have a chance to get into this, unfortunately, the Trump Administration began the Abraham Accords in the final months of the presidency rather than in the first months of the presidency, and I think that was a missed opportunity.
Certainly, better late than never when it comes to a breakthrough piece, but this was something that was possible to do years before because, as I said already in 2012-2013, they were ready. If the answer to that question is, when you're thinking about peace, the first question is: do these people actually want peace?
Forget about them doing the dance internationally to try to get on the right side of what popular elite opinion is—to be seen as peacemakers that they always wanted—but would they actually want to make peace?
I think that they were already there about a decade ago, and we tried. I must confess we tried with the Obama Administration. Israel did in its second term try to convince them to move along this track and to try to focus their efforts on achieving Israeli-Arab peace.
And then Kerry was Secretary of State, and I spoke to him countless times about pursuing it and explaining that the Arabs were ready. He was insistent, and this had been conventional wisdom for two decades: he said the only way that you’re going to get these Arabs to make peace with you is if you make peace with the Palestinians.
I would have people—not just Democrats, but also Republicans for two decades—saying, you know, if you make peace with the Palestinians, you'll have peace with some two dozen Arab states, and I would say, well, that may be tautological; you may be right—they'll have no other big excuse that they can put forward. But what if the Palestinians don't want to make peace? Does that mean that we have to just wait when these countries' interests are to move forward?
So we tried with Secretary Kerry so many times to convince him to take this approach. Instead, before he did the Iran deal, which is also connected to this, he tried to again use the same formula and a failed approach to peacemaking and went down this Israeli-Palestinian rabbit hole, which was a road to nowhere.
Why was there so much insistence? I've heard this from other people that I've talked to here, and you see this playing out on the media landscape. There's an insistence, and maybe it's psychologically rooted to some degree, to reduce the entire intractable complexity of the Middle East to a single point of conflict. You can imagine the psychological advantage of that; it's because you reduce an irreducible set of problems to something hypothetically comprehensible.
So you focus it on Israel versus Palestine, and then that becomes an intractable moral issue to some degree because then it depends on which side of the argument that you take, and that seems to have completely stymied any attempts to well do the sorts of things to go around in some sense or to find alternative routes in the manner that you describe.
But why do you think that the Israel versus Palestine conflict has become such an unbelievable sticking point for this kind of movement? What are the sociological and economic reasons, I suppose in geopolitical reasons, why that might be the case?
Carrie's attitude seems in some sense incomprehensible, given that you were providing evidence that there was at least some possibility that there was an alternative route.
Yeah, listen, I think that you—that's a deeper question that you're asking now is why people have the view of Israel that they do. I mean, let's take a step back, the idea that there's a Middle East conflict singular is ridiculous. I mean, you could solve the Israeli-Palestinian issue tomorrow, and it's not going to impact what's happening in Yemen or in Libya or in Iraq, in ten other countries around the region.
But everybody focused on this being a Middle East Peace Prize; it's not a Middle East peace process. It may be an Israeli-Palestinian peace process. If you solve that conflict, maybe it'll have some positive impact beyond that conflict.
But in the Middle East, you have a battle that is going on between the forces of modernity and medievalism; that's what the conflict is. There are Sunni forces on the modern side and Shia forces on the modern side, and there are Sunni forces on the medieval side and Shia forces on the medieval side.
Israel is clearly on the force for modernity as a country, as a society, as the one real democracy. If you came to Israel, you would see it has all the rights: free speech, freedom of the press, independent courts—the things that we take for granted in democratic societies. You don't have that anywhere else, and these societies are trying to overcome centuries of tyranny to see if they can chart a path for a different future.
But the focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—why does everybody believe that this conflict is the root of everything? I think a lot of it has to do with the demonization of Israel for many, many decades. Because if you can cast Israel as the villain in that theater, and we're the powerful force against the Palestinians, who are the weak party, then therefore if it can all be cast to Israel and Israel can be blamed, I think that’s sitting on thousands of years of history.
I'll tell you a story about how absurd the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is as the source of all the region's problems, let alone the world's problems.
By way of background, I remember there was Obama's former National Security Adviser, I think it was General Jones, who once gave an interview and he said something very bizarre: he said, you know, if I were God and I came to Obama and I told him to resolve one issue in the world, I would tell him to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. You know, it was a bizarre statement, but it shows the centrality that this conflict has held.
Even, we'll get to it with Trump, where Trump was also at the beginning, like the Holy Grail of peacemaking is you're going to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Yeah, it makes me wonder to some degree too, to how it's tied to a very deep underlying dynamic which is something like that's being played out over thousands of years in many different places, and that makes the Jews, in some sense, the eternal scapegoat. You know, when it's so convenient that you can point—if, imagine you're a leader that's beset by all sorts of ethical troubles in the Middle East, and you can point to the outsiders who are the Jews, let's say, who also happen to be successful, which is extremely annoying, and you can say, like the Germans did in Nazi Germany, well look at those successful outsiders; they must be oppressive thieves, and then all the attention that might be paid to the distributed evil is localized to that particularized and externalized evil, and that's just hyper-convenient for everyone involved.
And so it seems to me that there's something like that going on in addition to many other things.
I agree with you; it's a potent cocktail. I think part of that cocktail for decades was essentially oil because you have oil-producing states, and Israel is seen as being on the other side. You've got 22 Arab states; you've got 57 Muslim states. So what are you going to do? You're going to stand with the one Jewish state in the region.
And you see how oil affects the politics of Russia and Ukraine and everything around there, so oil played a big role. But I think it's also sitting on this powder keg that goes back a couple thousand years with this attempt, not just to make the Jews, let's say, a scapegoat but also to cast them as some sort of source of evil in the world.
Well, you do have this weird situation that you described, so you said if I got my figures right that Israel is one-tenth of one percent of the world's population but responsible for something like 20 percent of a major element of technological development.
And so you have this—not only do you have this status on the Jewish side as an extreme minority, very tiny population considered by global standards and generally within any country, but you also have the additional problem of a tiny minority who are disproportionately successful and at an exponential scale.
And so you can also imagine that people looking at that have a moral problem to solve, which is something like, well, there's hardly any of these people, and they're really, really successful, and so either they're doing something right in some fundamental way, which implies that we're doing something wrong, or they're thieves and villains.
There's a fair bit of moral hazard in a calculation like that because obviously the easier pathway to take, rather than the radical self-examination that might be required to determine what you're doing wrong, is to point the finger and say, well, they're obviously just thieves and parasites and should be scourged, and I mean, it's not like that's only happened once; it's happened continually, and it's pretty much happened forever.
No, it gets... First of all, I think it's a deeper discussion. I know we're going to do a deep dive; we'll have to do an even deeper dive on sort of the mission of the Jews and the nature of anti-Semitism, how it developed, why it developed, why you see its reemergence today. I think that’s true.
But the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you know, to cast Israel as the world's Jew—that's the kind of new form of anti-Semitism—to single out Israel for special treatment, to treat it by a standard that you treat no other country in the world, and that when Israel does something wrong—because, you know, we're not a perfect country; no country is perfect—and somebody could make a mistake, uh, somebody could do something in society that's wrong.
We're the only country that when something is done that is wrong, we supposedly have no right to exist.
Which I think is a much deeper question of the role the Jews have played in the world. You know, Abu Ghraib. I remember happening about 20 years ago in Iraq, and people were rightly appalled by that, and people called for heads to roll and all sorts of things to happen. Nobody says America doesn't have a right to exist because of Abu Ghraib, but every day, multiple times a day, the second anything that Israel does is perceived to be wrong, we no longer have a right to exist.
But I wanted to tell you a story just when you're looking about the scalar or the scope of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when you're thinking about global affairs—a story that happened to me when I was ambassador.
So, new ambassadors to Washington usually get—you pay courtesy calls to other ambassadors, and by way of tradition, you meet about ten other ambassadors. So when I came to Washington, the first ambassador I went to see was the ambassador of Egypt to the United States. Then, the ambassador of Jordan to the United States, who are peace partners. I think I met the ambassador of England and Germany, a whole bunch of others— a whole bunch of others.
I found myself in my seven-and-a-half years, I met a lot of ambassadors who they would come to town. It was their—and we would find ourselves in their top ten list of ambassadors that they wanted to meet with.
And I would never turn down a meeting with another ambassador for two reasons: number one is Israel is not in a position to turn down anybody, any friends, potential friends. The second thing is, if you meet a smart ambassador, it usually saves you about five years of reading The Economist, which I don't really like to read.
So one particular day, I come back, and it's after a long day; I had seven or eight meetings, White House, Congress, and I come back, and in my waiting room, there is the ambassador of Burundi to the United States.
So I said, give me a moment. I went into my office, and I have to admit on your podcast, I had to look up and Google Burundi. Like, I knew it was in Africa, but that's about it. I didn't know what it bordered; I didn't know anything about its history.
I did the Wikipedia thing in two minutes to try to get as much information as I can, and then I invited him into my office, and we started speaking. This happened to me that day—it's very rare for me; it might be rare for you—that day it happens about twice a year, I was actually tired of listening to myself speak. I was so exhausted having talked for about eight hours; I just didn't want to talk about Iran, about the peace process, about anything to deal with Israel.
I know nothing about Burundi, and I get this very smart guy; I think he was Harvard-educated, in my office, and I started peppering him with questions about Burundi. What do you make in Burundi? What do you export from Burundi? What are you trying to achieve in the United States?
And then I asked him, do you have a security problem? And he says, not since 2004. I said, what happened in 2004? He said, well, in 1994, you had the genocide of Rwanda that spilled over to Burundi, and we had a terrible violence over the next decade, and there was some sort of ceasefire peace agreement in 2004, and since then, we haven't had a security problem.
I asked him, how many people died in that decade between '94 and '04? And he says, 300,000. I said, really? 300,000? I said, how many people do you think have died in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
Now, this meeting is about 2015, so we're talking about a century—almost a century—in 1920, when you had an attack outside of the immigration office in Jaffa… until 2015, where I'm sitting with this ambassador, and he's a very intelligent person, and he thinks about it for a while, probably 30 seconds or so, and then he said, 2 million.
And I said, well, you're pretty close; you're only off by two zeros, because it's about 20,000. Twenty-two thousand Israelis and Palestinians have died in the century of conflict, uh, since 1920.
Now, if you take the Israeli-Arab conflict, where you take all the soldiers of Israel who have died, all the victims of terror, the wars that we have fought, and you add Egyptian casualties and Lebanese casualties and Syrian casualties and Jordanian casualties, you take the entire conflict, you get to 125,000. Of that 125,000, about a fifth are the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Without getting into who's right, who's wrong, just in terms of the number of people who have died in this conflict, this ambassador's jaw drops; he cannot believe it. He said, why is the whole world obsessed with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
Yeah, well, there's a Biblical phrase, right? The biblical phrase is, to those to whom much has been given, much will be demanded. And that seems to be the eternal position of the Jews in some real sense, right?
So, I don't know what to make of that exactly, but that's one way of looking at it. But what I told him in that meeting just to finish the point is, I said, you know, it's a problem for us that the world is obsessed with Israel and demonizing Israel and that more resolutions are passed at the U.N. against Israel than all the rest of the world combined—or in the so-called Human Rights Council.
I mean, seriously, if you show the statistics to your viewers, they won't even believe it; it's a farce. But I said, it's not just a problem for Israel; this demonization and this piling on Israel—it’s a problem for you.
Nobody knows that 300,000 Burundians were killed in a decade. That is an enormous tragedy, and barely anybody even knows about it because the world is obsessed with Israel, and he understood it.
So then what I did is I said to myself, listen, I don't know anything about Burundi, so I shouldn't begrudge him for not knowing anything about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So I started asking other people, and I would do this question, and you know, you got to set it up so you're not trying to gain one answer.
I'd say it sort of straight—I'd say, how many people have been killed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? The lowest number that I got was 500,000—a factor of 20 times as big. And when this person, who was head of his foreign ministry in Europe, he was the head of the Middle East Division and the foreign minister of one of the European countries, said, that's not true; what you're saying is not true; there hasn't been 22,000.
I said, well, you know, it used to be in antiquity, if you wanted to be a scholar, you’d have to sit in the Library of Alexandria and peruse scrolls for a few decades. Now all you need to do is Google it, so go into the palm of your hand, that ever-expanding library, and go look it up.
And he was sort of stunned. And so it is ridiculous, the obsession with Israel. Forget about the fact that we have focused only on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and we have not opened the door—finally we did—to peace with the Arab states.
But the obsession of the international community with this conflict and every single person who dies is, of course, a tragedy for that family if you're looking at it from the point of view of the international community, with that which threatens peace and security, it's a non-event, and yet they've made so much focus on this for the last century, and they wasted a lot of time.
So with Kerry, getting back to the point that I wanted to make about Kerry, is I tried and Netanyahu tried incessantly to tell him, John, you know, they've known each other for three decades. There's a real opportunity here; you need to focus on it. Netanyahu spoke about it at the U.N., this is before Trump—this is a couple of years before Trump—where he says never in my lifetime have I seen the possibilities that I see today. The Arab world is in a different place for all the reasons that we discussed.
But he would not listen; he was focused on the Holy Grail of peacemaking and this rabbit hole to nowhere, because unfortunately, the Palestinians have not abandoned their desire to destroy the one and only Jewish state.
Which is a separate question from the Abraham Accords; they have not abandoned it, and we tried to convince Kerry, go and focus on the Arabs, and he refused to do it.
In fact, there's a famous video—I don't know if you have links that you put on your podcast, where you can see Kerry who says there are those in Israel or political leaders in Israel, I think he said, who say that you can have a separate peace between the Arab states and Israel without first having peace with the Palestinians. And he goes, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
I said, after it’s too bad he didn't say no six times because then we would have had six peace agreements and not four, because he said no four times. But we tried very much with Secretary Kerry, and we failed. They weren't focused on it. And one of the reasons why they didn't do it is you not only had this paradigm that goes back from Oslo that all roads to peace must go through Ramallah, so everybody's waiting for the Palestinians to deign to meet with Israel, let alone make peace with Israel.
But everybody's waiting on the Palestinians, and solving this conflict, and because the Palestinians are holding the line, inevitably more and more pressure gets brought to bear on Israel because we're seen as the powerful party. And you know what happens in a world where power and justice are seen as buckets in the well, which is the kind of world that we're living in now?
So all the pressure comes onto Israel, and there were many other reasons why Kerry decided to pursue it. There was also skepticism that when Netanyahu was saying to have peace with the Arabs, he was really just trying to avoid making hard concessions to the Palestinians because making peace with the Arabs could be peace for peace and not land for peace.
So instead of having the quote-unquote courageous decisions of sacrificing vital interests of your country to make peace with the Palestinians, he wants to move to the Arabs, where it'll be an easier path for him to do it without the political risk.
That's how they thought about it, not realizing, hey, the Middle East has changed; there's a real opportunity here.
And here's something that people do not know: we also failed with the Trump administration at the beginning. They were not prepared to see that as well. About a week after, I don't think I've said it publicly, but a week after I went to visit Trump at Trump Tower...
This is the week after he gets elected—sorry, in November 2016. It’s Trump Tower, and I walk into his office, and the first thing he says to me is, "So, you think we can make peace?" I said, "With whom?" He said, "The Palestinians."
I was almost surprised by my question, and I said no, but we can make peace with several Arab states, right? That's what we were telling the previous administration!
We started telling him that. Now fast forward three months; Netanyahu visits Washington—his first trip to Washington as Prime Minister, with Trump in office. It's February 2017. What Netanyahu says to Trump—and I can say it because he mentioned it recently publicly as well, for the first time—what Netanyahu said to Trump in that meeting, he said, "75 years ago, there’s a picture of FDR sitting with the leader of Saudi Arabia, and that helped establish a 75-year alliance between the United States and Saudi Arabia."
He says to Trump, "Get a boat, you, me, and MBS—MBZ—we change history." That's what he said.
Now, it took us about two years to convince them of the opportunity that it was real. This was really due more to President Trump, who deserves a lot of credit for a lot of the decisions that he made.
But at the beginning, he was really fixated, even at the end, to a certain extent. He was still fixated on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process; that was the Holy Grail; that was the ultimate test of whether you've actually done something rather than trying to do all of these agreements that have a huge impact in the region.
Because a peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia is effectively the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It's not the end of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; it's not the end of the Israeli-Iran conflict, but it's essentially the end of a century-old Israeli-Arab conflict.
I think that's a goal that is worth pursuing, but it took two years for them to see the opportunity that was there, and then we wasted another year because of our insane politics in Israel, where we're going from one election after the other.
So by the time that President Trump kind of put out his peace plan, which was sort of an effort to open the door for the Palestinians if they'd like to go through that door, but essentially it would park a real plan on the table while Israel moves ahead and normalizes its relations with the Arab world, that process only started in the last year of his administration rather than in the first year.
I do believe that had we done this from the beginning of the administration, we would have a peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia today. But because we waited too long, we only started it very late in the game.
Now the Trump Administration, they didn't waste time. They may not have recognized the potential for that breakthrough in those two or three years, but they didn't waste time because they took steps that actually facilitated the emergence of the Abraham Accords.
What I described to you before is the fundamentals underneath the surface.
So let me, let me summarize some of this too and ask—then I'll ask you some broader questions. So you're—you pointed out, and please correct me where I get it wrong, you pointed out that it's a straightforward psychologically to make the assumption that all the conflict in the world, but certainly on the conflict in the Middle East, is best conceptualized in relationship to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Now, it's morally hazardous and inappropriate, and also blinds people, uh, whatever the flaws of the Jewish State might be; it also blinds people to the fact that Israel is a hyper-successful state and that has much to offer its Arab partners and the world in terms of technological development and innovation and governance.
And now, I think that's just clearly true, as far as I can see. And then you pointed out that there are many conflicts that are riveting the Arab and Middle Eastern world, but the most fundamental of those likely is something conceptualized as modernity versus medievalism, and that's raging that war both on the Sunni side and the Shia side.
And you, and so you complexified, in some sense, the Arab situation. Then you pointed out as well that there were pathways around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that were very productive, that you had been developing and that were emerging of their own accord.
That the players who were fixated on Israel versus Palestine weren't willing to consider, including the Trump Administration until relatively late in the game.
And then, okay, now, so I have some questions that come out of that that would help me, and hopefully my listeners, understand the broader context within which this is occurring.
And so it's not appropriate to produce the complexities of the problem in the Middle East to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for a variety of reasons, and you started to detail out the complexities of the situation with regards to this modernity versus medievalism situation.
And so if I asked you, maybe I could get you to flesh in for me the status of other major players in the region in relationship to a potential pathway to peace forward. So I would like to start by picking your brain to some degree about both Iraq and Iran.
And so I would like to know how you see them in relationship to, well, the world geopolitical situation but to the Abraham Accords, and I would also like to know—I’ve always thought that the Palestine-Israel conflict was just a bit too convenient for many major players in the region, partly because it could be used as a scapegoat, and partly because support for the Palestinians caused a certain amount of intractable and continual trouble that did—this is the moral hazard argument—that did it detract people from other sources of unrest and instability and corruption.
Obviously, the Palestinians are backed by external players who are, I think it's obvious, who are capitalizing on that conflict for their own purposes. And so, in whose interest do you think it is primarily in the Middle East to foster and facilitate a continuing non-peaceful standoff between the Palestinians and the Israelis?
So, the first is the Palestinians themselves, because they’ve been dining out on this conflict now for, since Oslo really, for 30 years, and becoming the wards of the international community.
I'd say the Middle East is incredibly complicated; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, much less so in my view. The reason why you have a conflict today is the same reason why you had a conflict for the last century, which is the refusal of the Palestinians to recognize the legitimacy of a nation-state of the Jewish people in any boundary in our ancestral homeland.
They refuse to do it. It's very simple and almost raw in their minds. We stole their house, and that's how they see it. They don't understand that this is the territory, you know, where the patriarchs or the Jewish people prayed or where our prophets preached and our kings ruled.
It's a complete denial of any historical connection between the Jews and the land of Israel. Their refusal to accept some sort of compromise, the fact that they haven't paid such a huge price for that refusal because they've been supported by various actors in the region for a long time, and actually the Abraham Accords is like the beginning of a shift away—it’s the removal of the Palestinians' veto over this process.
And the Arab leaders, for their own interests, which we've discussed before—security and economic interests—understand we're not going to give the keys to the Middle East to the person who's effectively the mayor of Ramallah, the leader of the Palestinian Authority, because Palestinian politics are divided.
You have Hamas, which is a terrorist organization that openly calls to destroy Israel leading Gaza, which is half of the Palestinian polity. Then on the other half, you have this Palestinian Authority which refuses to confront the terrorists, and all also makes sure that the next generation is fired by the same hatred and denial of any Israeli presence in the land.
They do it to their schools and their media and everything else, and they also pay people, actually, they put them on the payroll, those who are terrorists. So the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a pretty simple one.
Okay, so let me ask you a question about that. This is something that's bothered me for a very long time, and I think it's key to this in some sense.
So, let me set up an analogy, and it's a dangerous analogy and it may be inappropriate, but I'm going to use it anyways. And so, um, Constantinople is now Istanbul, but historically it wasn't.
And so you could say, in some sense, that the Christians have a claim on Constantinople, and it's not like people haven't made that claim.
And so I'm not saying they have a claim or that they don't. What I am saying is that when you look at a given region, you can look at it through the lens of different temporal durations, and the ethical conclusion that you derive is, in some sense, dependent on the expanse of the temporal horizon that you're willing to consider.
Now, the argument you made for the legitimacy of the state of Israel is an ancient claim, and then that begs the question—and I think this really is an extraordinarily difficult question—how do you know which temporal horizon should be most appropriately applied to a given landscape, especially given that there are different claims and different temporal frames of reference that are applied to the same territory of land by other people?
And I mean, the same thing is true, say, in North America, because the Europeans came in, and obviously there were people living here before the Europeans came in. And so, it's an endless conflict, in Canada, let's say, in the U.S., about to what degree the people who inhabited the territory originally have a valid moral claim on the territory.
And it's not like that's being resolved; I don't think we know how to resolve it. And then with the Jews, you seem to have this additional insistence by the world that they solve it better than anyone else.
And again, that has something to do with, to those to whom more has been given, more will be demanded. The Jews seem to be held consistently to a higher moral standard, but it is a real problem: why do you think the Palestinians should both ethically and practically accept the claim of the Israeli state and the right of the Jews to inhabit it?
Like, because that really is the central issue.
The thing with your analogy in the issue of sort of the new world: we're the Indians who came back—in the case of Constantinople, you'd have the Christians who would come back, and they would have had to have lived there continuously and established the state.
And then the Muslim power says, no, you have no right to be here. Like, no one would question if the Native Americans somehow—and this is not the case with Native—most peoples were lost to history when they lost their land. Now, the Jews lived continuously, a small Jewish community lived continuously for over 3,000 years in the land of Israel.
But Jews were dispersed all over the world, and they came back. No one has ever dealt with that, where people coming back. But when you're talking about legitimacy, there's a historical legitimacy here where we are in our ancestral homeland that doesn't exist anywhere else.
It's not displacing the natives; the Jews were the ones who were displaced, not just by the Romans but also by the Arab conquest, where a lot of Jews were. People just don't know history. I mean, most people's sense of history, as you know, goes back to breakfast.
So why should anybody care about what happened? But if those historical claims don't work for you, well, you could take the legal claim. The legal claim was that there was an Ottoman empire here; the Ottoman empire collapsed.
The British were given a mandate to control this territory specifically by the League of Nations in order to enable the settlement of the Jews, who in the 19th century—the late 19th century, in the spring of nations—were considered a people.
You know, there are people who don't consider the Jews a people, but we have a 4,000-year history. Peoples have rights of self-determination, and so the British were given a mandate by the League of Nations, which folded into the United Nations, to actually affect the settlement of that territory to enable the Jews to establish this homeland there.
That's the legal case; it's rock solid. The historical case is rock solid, and to me, the moral case is rock solid because we're a people that the entire world turned their backs on the Jews anytime we were oppressed.
I mean, Jews would have a right to a state; anyone. But to say that the Jews don't have a right to a state in their ancestral homeland, that seems to me lunacy.
Now, there are people who say no, people have a right to a state, and so those people who deny Israel's right to exist—that they should deny no nation-states.
Well, I wouldn't call them anti-Semitic. One of the measures of anti-Semitism is: are you treating Jews to a different standard than you're treating other people?
So, if you believe any people have a right to a state, that there is such a thing as a people. And what makes a people a people? It can be language; it can be a common culture; it can be a common history.
Right? The one thing that the Jews were missing historically is they didn't have the same land, but all the elements of a people they had. So if you're going to look around the world and you're going to say peoples deserve states, but for some reason, the Jews, who their statelessness has caused more oppression and persecution than against any other people in history—at least any other people that currently exists.
And, you know, you have pogroms, and you culminated because everyone is focused on the Holocaust, which I think the Holocaust has a certain sense distorted our view of anti-Semitism and Jewish history, because is it is it, is it is such a blinding event that happened: 18 million Jews, six million are wiped out; it’s a third of the Jewish people.
The equivalent of a hundred million Americans or over ten million Canadians—huge numbers of people.
And I used to when I was ambassador to the United States to explain what the Holocaust did to the Jews, I would tell Americans, if you can't wrap your mind around a hundred million people, imagine a 9/11 every day for a century. That's what the Holocaust did to the Jewish people.
So it is such a seismic event that people don't recognize all the anti-Semitism that came before it, all the centuries of anti-Semitism that came before. People were killed—200,000 Jews, 400,000 Jews. The Jews are expelled from England, and then they're expelled from France, and they're expelled from Spain, and they're expelled from Portugal—all the persecutions, all the pogroms, all the massacres during the Crusades, before the Crusades, in antiquity.
In present day, you're sitting, I understand, in England. Well, they just discovered up in Norwich… oh, well, I don't know if you had a chance to read that story, where they have a bunch of skeletons that they found at the bottom of a well, and they dated those skeletons to the 12th century to the end of the 12th century when there was a pogrom against the local Jewish community.
So anti-Semitism has existed century after century to century, and it's a big subject that we could maybe tackle in the future. But for me, the bottom line is to make a case where the Jewish people do not are not by right entitled to a state is absurd.
And the fact that somebody would deny it in our own homeland is the height of absurdity.
Let me ask you one more question on the Palestinian front then. So you’ve made a case, I would say globally and abstractly—and this is not a criticism of the case precisely—that nationhood, it's reasonable to associate nationhood with the necessity of a state.
And then you made a case that the Jews have a legal right to the land they occupy as a consequence of what occurred after World War I—a strong legal case.
So then I would say, let’s particularize that for a minute, and perhaps if I was arguing the Palestinian case, I would say yes, but it wasn't reasonable for the world to purchase what was just and appropriate to deliver to the Jews at disproportionate cost to the Palestinians.
The Abba, Jordan, the world didn't do that; the Jews did that. The Jews came and immigrated in larger numbers—there was a trickle of immigration; the Jews, over the centuries to be in the land of Israel and the Holy Land—but in the late 19th century, with the birth of modern Zionism, and actually Christian Zionism came about three or four decades even before that.
In the late 18th century, in the 19th century, the Jews came back, settled the lands, drained the swamps, purchased it a lot of times from Arab landowners who weren't even present, who would sell it.
And the Ottoman Empire collapses. So now the question is, who does this land that you have legal deed to? Who does it belong to?
And instead of actually having a Palestinian national movement—and this is really their great tragedy—they didn't have a Palestinian national movement a hundred years ago, and they don't have it today.
Who says, look guys, you have a right to be here, but we have a right to be here. You know, if that's the case, you're in a negotiation.
When somebody says, you stole our house, even if you give 99.9% back, there's no justice to your claim when another side says, it's 1% yours by right—not just by might, but by right—and it's 99% ours, you're actually in a negotiation.
And the reason why you have to ask yourself why did the Palestinians deny history? So Arafat went to Clinton at Camp David; Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestinians at the time, 20 years ago, goes to Camp David and tells Clinton, there was never a temple on the Temple Mount. Like, why does he say that?
And why did they deny any Jewish connection to Jerusalem? It's like you hear the current Palestinian leader, Abu Mazin, says the Jews are trying to "judeify" Jerusalem.
You know, that's like saying the Chinese are trying to signify Beijing or the Russians are a russifying mosque. I mean, it's ridiculous!
But why do they do that? Because the entire scaffolding of their rejectionism collapses if we have a legitimate claim to that territory.
They don't have to deny their claim, but they can't make themselves take that one step, which is by far a very small step for a leader but a giant leap towards peace.
The second they say that we, the Jews, have a right to be in the land of the Patriarchs and the prophets, then we're in a negotiation.
Then we have to work out a settlement, but they refuse to cross the Rubicon.
In the aftermath of the Abraham Accords, there are a couple of things we want to get to, which partly would be the pathway forward for expanding the Abraham Accords.
We don't want to forget about that, but we'll take a bit of a side venture into the Palestinian issue. Do you see any reasonable pathway forward or movement towards peace on the Palestinian side as a consequence or an extension of what's being achieved with the Abraham Accords?
So yes, I would say yes, but my yes answer is: the right way to approach this is you have in the Arab leaders, particularly in the Gulf, the recognition, as we discussed, that their interests mean an alliance with Israel.
What we should do is focus on expanding that, broadening it, and deepening it because, you know, we've had peace with Egypt since 1979, Jordan with 1994, but it is a cold peace, which is certainly better than a hot war, but you didn't have any people-to-people or business-to-business development that could actually create the foundations for something that would convince the people in these societies that their interests are served by having their peace.
That peace the leaders get, but the peoples don't yet.
There is goodwill that's coming from the bottom in the Emirates, I think, in Saudi Arabia, in Bahrain, and other places in the region, but we should be trying to expand it.
Now, what would happen if we expanded it? If we had not now six countries—the Jordan in Egypt, and the other four—but if we can get it to ten, twelve, what you’d be left with is Iran. You mentioned Iraq before; Iran and its axis that is opposed to Israel because you have this Shia radical power in Iran.
It is a historical aberration. You know, we talked about anti-Semitism; you know, Jews have been kicked around in so many different societies; we have a pretty good sense of what a tolerant society is.
So, Western democracies like the United States and Canada are different in terms of history, in terms of acceptance and openness of Jews and allowing them to become full members of the society.
But if I have to say, like which ancient civilization was relatively welcoming to the Jews with all of its imperfections and problems and programs occasionally and things like that, it’s the Persian civilization.
Cyrus the Great, the Persian king, allowed the Jews to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, and throughout history, we had decent relations.
Even when the Shah was there before the revolution in 1979, Israel had good relations with them, and also the United States did.
If this regime in Iran would disappear tomorrow, and you would have a semblance of—if you don't want to call it a democracy, but a more open society in Iran with some representative government, there you would see good relations between Israel and that country, good relations between Europe and that country.
I mean, right now Europe is doing appeasement anyway, but there would be no fire in them to have a kind of global revolution to export their particular brand of Islam, as Netanyahu said.
You know, there's a fight in Islam between the Sunni radicals and the Shia radicals of who's going to be the king of the militant Islamic hill, but there's no place in their world for Christians, for Jews, certainly not for atheists, for anybody who disagrees with them.
But if we're able to actually get to a point where we've gotten the Israeli-Arab conflict as far as we can, and all we're left with is Iran and its proxies, I think then we're going to be left with the Muslim Brotherhood and its effort to push against it because that's another force in the region that is against—that would be on the force of medievalism, not on the force of modernity.
Then the hope would be that there would be Palestinian leaders who would say, guys, you know, the Arab armies and the Muslim armies are not waiting for us to conquer Jerusalem; they're already on the other side; they're in an alliance with the Jews.
And then hopefully there'd be courageous leaders within that society—they could emerge and at least start with something called some sort of accommodation.
But I really think people don't take ideology seriously, and it's a major flaw in international diplomacy because we—that's you, the psychologist; I don't want to touch on your field—but I think people project, and if they—they don't understand how important their ideology, which has gotten wrapped up in a religious faith that they have to sort of destroy the Jews who are there.
If it were Christians, they would destroy that as well. The radical Muslims, they would try to destroy like a crusader state; they would be there, but the fact that it's Jews makes it worse.
Because historically, the Jews were not seen as a powerful actor when Muslims were defeated by Christians. Okay, they didn't like it; they could understand it.
But for the bully in the class who sees himself as this warlike figure to be defeated by the nerd in the class, which is supposed to be the, you know, the George Costanza of Seinfeld fame, you know, the George Costanza Jews, they can't make sense of it.
In fact, the greatest scholar of Islam of the last century is Bernard Lewis, and he said the birth of European-style anti-Semitism in the Arab world, one of the factors that gave rise to it, was their defeat at the hands of Israel in 1948 because they couldn't believe that a Jewish army could defeat them.
There had to be other forces at work. So, the traditional Protocols of the Elders of Zion were Jews manipulating all these forces; you don't really have a history of that in the Muslim world.
You had us having dhimmi status, like Christians in the Muslim world, but the European style globalist Jew anti-Semitism that actually came in the wake of Israel's defeat, of making sense of why this happened.
At the end of the day, getting back to the point, if we're able to finalize as many peace agreements as we can with the Arab world, we will diminish those forces on the medieval side of their power.
And then hopefully there would be forces within Palestinian Society. I personally believe many of them are in the business sector that would seek a long-term accommodation because peace with Israel would be great for the Palestinians; it would be terrific for them.
But it wouldn't be good for leaders; it wouldn't be good for their leaders because they're more interested—the Palestinian leadership has been more interested in the cause of the Palestinians and the Palestinians themselves, and the cause would die when there's peace with Israel.
But the Palestinian people, actually, their futures would be improved, but they have to cross this Rubicon; they haven't crossed it yet.
One thing I can tell you, just to put a period on that point—the only way it's going to happen is if Israel stays extremely strong. The stronger we are as a country—militarily, economically, technologically, diplomatically— which is the Abrahamic gorgeous part of it, the more there's a sense within Palestinian society that time is not on their side, that the train is leaving or has left the station, the more likely you are to see people get on board.
Okay, so I want to turn to the issue of Iraq at some point, but before that, I want to go back to the notion of modernity versus medievalism, and I want to speak briefly on behalf of the medievalists.
And I'm going to try to do that from a Jewish perspective, let's say, because one of the things that's very interesting about the Jewish state is that despite its status as a modern democracy, it's also unbelievably deeply rooted in an ancient tradition and also draws the ethical wellspring of its right to exist from that tradition.
And so the Jews are wrestling in some real sense with the problem of not precisely medievalism versus modernity, but definitely tradition versus modernity.
And I do have some sympathy for the more fundamentalist end of the religious spectrum, but let's say more specifically the Islamic well, and also the Jewish Orthodox end of the spectrum. And the reason I say that is because one of the problems with modernity is that it frees you up technologically, and it produces a land of abundance in some sense.
But the price that's paid is ethical confusion and a kind of corrosive and nihilistic cynicism that emerges as a consequence of the realization, let's say, that the world is only objective in nature and that God is dead, and Western societies are paying a very big price for this, reflected for example in places like South Korea and Japan, reflected not least in their catastrophically low birth rates and their lack of belief that it's ethically appropriate to move forward, forthrightly, into the future.
And so you can imagine that on the medievalist side, and the Christian fundamentalist side and the Jewish Orthodox side, there's this insistence that goes something like, look, there are a lot of things in these more traditional views that have to be, um, they’re appropriate bulwarks against the dissolute tendencies of an overweeningly intellectual modernism.
And I do believe that's the case. Now, I've had some preliminary discussions with people who are more on the fundamentalist side of the Muslim argument, and they took me to task for a variety of things, and but did admit that from their perspective, even that there is, in some fundamental sense, in the ideal, to be no compulsion in matters of religious belief, which is a doctrine that has some origin in the Quran itself.
Now, of course, it's always subject to interpretation, but at least you can make that case. And so I would say, do you see a pathway?
You said that with regard to the Palestinians that the proper approach in some sense is to expand Israel’s relationship with other Arab states, particularly on the diplomatic and economic fronts, and that also opens up the rest of the Arab world in some sense to be the beneficiaries of the immense innovative capacity of the Israelis on the technological and the governance side.
What would you do to extend a hand to the medievalists, given that the Jews are also rooted in an ancient tradition and obviously value it immensely, and regard it as the very ethical foundation of their claim to a state?
Like, what's the pathway forward?
So one of the things that really struck me after I had this conversation with a more traditional Muslim leader—and I've talked to lots of different Muslim thinkers, some of which are like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who are quite profoundly anti-Islam, in some real sense—the what was very heartening to me was that despite the rather fractious nature of the conversation, it was watched by many millions of people; it got about two and a half million views in the first two weeks it was posted, and most of them were Muslim, and most of them were traditionalist Muslims.
And all of them said, almost without exception, that they're absolutely thrilled that a conversation like that could take place where real issues were discussed relatively peacefully but intensely and that there was a sense that I got, that they were extremely pleased to be regarded as valid participants at the table of discussion.
So, a lot to unpack there. I will say about the Jews first what's different is we're not a missionizing, a missionary faith. So there's, you know, for radical Islam, they have to spread their particular brand of Islam all over the world.
That is an article of faith that they have, certainly in all those regions that Islam once held. They have to go back and sort of reconquer it.
And I think if there is a radical Christian group that would believe they have to missionize to everybody around, it would also make it harder for them to develop tolerance for those who disagree with them.
But Jews are, I think, in a different category because we’ve been—you'd have to go back to the Bible and how we governed in the Bible, and it certainly wasn't perfection there.
I mean, I think one of the most remarkable things about Jewish scripture is that all the blemishes are put there for everybody. You know, if you see the Jews wandering through the desert, you know it's 40 years but the five stories of them sinning or so, whatever that number is, that all it's all there.
And all the words and everything, and even King David, you know, when he sins and the prophet is telling him, you know, you're the sinner, that's the foundation of the rule of law, frankly.
And that the Jewish leaders would put a king being rebuked by anybody is, I think, remarkable in itself. So there was always—there was always— there was always a check on power, but a people could argue the jury is still out, because you haven't had sovereignty for 2,000 years.
Now you're working your way through the modern world. I think Israel is actually an excellent example of reconciling faith and freedom.
And I'm somebody who was born and raised in the United States, which you may have mentioned at the top. And I always thought the greatness of America, one of the things, is their ability to reconcile faith and freedom in a way that Europe didn’t, because it sort of abandoned faith.
And in the Middle East, they couldn't accept freedom, and that America could do it, and now a lot of those things are breaking down in the United States.
But let's take a step back about five centuries. And here I want to go back to something I read that fascinated me by Isaiah Berlin, the great British philosopher. He said that sincerity is a complete, completely modern virtue; it doesn't exist before, I think, he said the 17th century, maybe the 16th century.
Like this idea that we have today that we accept other people who disagree with us fundamentally on theological matters because we know that they are true to their faith and they live by those principles— that did not exist before the 16th century.
So, when Protestants were killing Catholics, and Catholics were, you know, killing Protestants in Europe, they weren't saying, you know, about Thomas More, others, well that guy really believes what he believes, and we have to have appreciation for that.
No, sincerity is a completely, you know, modern virtue.
And I think it's very interesting—James Q. Wilson, the great sociologist, I don't know if you had ever had a chance to meet him, but he wrote an essay, I think it was in City Journal about 20 years ago, called "The Reform Islam Needs."
And in that essay, he's explaining how democracy rose in the West, and it didn't rise because philosophers