Factually! with Adam Conover - What’s Happening in Israel and Why with Nathan Thrall

Episode Date: November 1, 2023

The October 7th attack by Hamas and Israel's subsequent response have left the world in shock. To better understand the context behind this moment, Adam is joined by Nathan Thrall, a Jerusalem-based journalist, former Director of the Arab-Israeli Project at the International Crisis Group, and one of the leading experts on the conflict in Gaza. Nathan and Adam discuss the history of this conflict, and the dehumanizing impact of war on the everyday people caught up in it. Find Nathan's book at factuallypod.com/booksSUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAboutHeadgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgumSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Hello, I'm Adam Conover. Welcome to Factually. Thank you so much for being with us. We have a bit of a different episode for you this week. As I'm sure you know, on October 7th of this year, militants from Hamas attacked Israel. They killed 1,400 civilians in response. Israel has launched an all-out air war against the city of Gaza, a city of two million people, killing so far around 7,000 civilians, many of them children. And, you know, I'm a guy who's known for explaining things, for having takes on things, for taking stance on important matters. And some people reached out to me and said, hey, are you going to do a video?

Are you going to make a TikTok about what's happening right now? And I'm not going to do that because I don't think it's my role to do that. See, I think it's my role as a communicator to talk about things that I understand, that I have some expertise in, that I have a genuine take on. Not a quick take, but something that I really know and feel that I can communicate to you. And the truth is that I don't have that for this. I don't have something to say about it because the, and that I, frankly, don't understand in a clear way. And I don't feel right standing up and saying, here's what I think about it.

You should think the way I do. I think I have a different responsibility in this moment. That's to be of support to my friends who are hurting now, who I reach out to one by one to talk with. I think it's my responsibility to be a witness to history, to watch what's happening and to not look away from it and to try to reconcile my understanding of the world with it. And the last thing I think it's my responsibility to do is to learn, is to learn about what's happening. The history of this conflict, of what happened in Palestine, then Israel, Gaza, these cities, is one of the longest, most tortured histories that we have.

the longest, most tortured histories that we have. And my first instinct at a moment like this is to learn as much as I can about what happened and how we got here. So as I thought about what my responsibility is in this moment and how I want to handle it, that is the main conclusion I came to is that I want to learn about what's happening and I want to do that, that is the main conclusion I came to, is that I want to learn about what's happening, and I want to do that with you. And that is what we are going to do on this week's show. We have an incredible expert who is here to share with us the history of this conflict, what has happened in this region, and what so many of the people there are going through. His name is Nathan Thrall. He's a journalist who's based in Jerusalem. He's the author of two books on the conflict.

For 10 years, he was the director of the Arab-Israeli Project at the International Crisis Group. And he's generally considered to be one of the best experts we have on this conflict, its history, and the people who are caught up in it. I found this to be a really beautiful conversation that really helped me to understand what is going on there. And I hope it does the same for you. So without further ado, let's get to this conversation with Nathan Thrall. Nathan, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. So as we're speaking right now, it's October 26th, which I want to be clear about in case

more things happen between us recording this and it coming out. I'm sure that they will. But, you know, at this point, the situation in Israel and Gaza is really rough. Thousands of people have been killed. There have been 7000 airstrikes on the city of Gaza. airstrikes on the city of Gaza. As somebody who has been, you know, covering, being a scholar about this conflict for a really long time and who just now has a book out, what was your reaction to the events of October 7th and what have happened since? Total shock. It was the most unexpected thing to see just those first videos before we even knew the scope of it.

When you saw the first videos that started circulating on social media of a white pickup truck with Hamas militants in the middle of an Israeli town, and they're unobstructed, there are no police, there's no army stopping them. They're controlling the streets of an Israeli town. Nobody ever expected to see that. And it was just utterly shocking are refugees. And they are refugees largely from the communities that are now inside Israel, just outside of Gaza. So the very places that the Hamas militants went in and attacked. And it is something deep inside the Israeli psyche is a fear of the return of refugees, the fear that Palestinians who used to live in those very homes or villages will come back and demand them. And when Hamas was started to build tunnels a long time ago, the very idea of the tunnels and, you know, Palestinian refugees from Gaza coming through the tunnels and re-entering their home villages, there was a real deep

Israeli fear of that on a subconscious level. But I don't think anybody imagined that you could actually have them succeed in breaking through in the thousands and taking over military bases and towns. And, you know, this attack was the greatest, you know, single day attack that Israelis suffered since the founding of the state. this is also playing on so many deep historical themes for israelis i mean they believe that the state of israel was created as a refuge and it looks like anything but that and many critics had always said you know what kind of a refuge is this a heavily armed state that needs to had to be created against the will of the native majority population yeah and that's been in constant conflict for all of the decades since yes so so um not exactly a safe haven uh and i think that's part of the um the deep pain of october 7th is the confrontation with the reality that this isn't a safe haven. The psyche that you mentioned is really interesting to me that it would be surprising because

if you're, you know, an Israeli living under, you know, that fear, as you say, of like knowing that there are people very close by who would like to return to the place in which you live, what about it made it seem impervious to them? What made it a surprise when it actually happened? Because it would seem strange to me to have a feeling of security when you're living under those conditions every day. Yeah. The success of this uh system of control you know we have uh under israeli rule we have seven million jews seven million palestinians and the vast majority of those palestinians are living without basic civil rights and this palestinians are in different categories with different degrees of freedom of movement and rights, depending on which category they are in. If you're a Gazan, you're the most restricted. You're under siege.

If you're a West Banker, it's slightly better. You have more. You're not under siege, you have more freedom of movement, but your town can be shut down in an instant by two Israeli soldiers shutting down, putting a gate in front of the two roads that lead out of it. If you're a Palestinian in East Jerusalem, you have slightly more rights. And if you're a Palestinian citizen of Israel, you have even more rights. But the basic system is one in which half the population are Palestinians, and the majority of them don't have basic civil rights. But the basic system is one in which you have 7 million Israeli Jews, 7 million Palestinians, and the vast majority of those Palestinians don't

have basic civil rights. But the success of that that system which one would think is highly unstable uh is that for the ruling class for the israeli jews you basically do not feel the occupation you do not feel that you are living in a system that is oppressing millions of people day in and day out. You are unaware of the, you know, nightly raids to arrest teenagers who are throwing, you know, stones at occupying army tanks. You are unaware of, you know, a thousand people in so-called administrative detention, which is being held without trial or charge, and that can be extended indefinitely. These aspects of the daily system of control, which of course is violent, it has to be violent to put in a system of oppression and have it last

as long as this, you can live a life entirely oblivious to this, except for the two or three years that you might do army service as an 18-year-old, and then likely you're a part of it. I mean, many people in the army also are called jobniks. I mean, they just do, you know, administrative clerical work. But many people do, they are exposed to it for two or three years, but then they forget about it. And you can be a very good, well-meaning liberal who is against, you know, perpetual occupation and live in Tel Aviv, but not feel it in any way.

And it's too, you know, a few miles away from you. That's very similar to, I think of myself as an American. There are a lot of systems of oppression within America that are hurting people that daily that I do not witness, um, that I can, I can read about in the New Yorker, right. And care about and vote about and donate about, but I'm, I'm separated from it by design. We're separated from our prisons. We're separated from, you know, that that's what a ghetto is. Right. Yeah. Um, tell me about the Palestinian psyche. I mean, you described the attack by Hamas in the New Yorker as a as a suicide attack in that. I mean, first of all, it was fourteen hundred people were killed. Many were kidnapped. These are civilians. It was a shocking attack by any measure. What what would I guess maybe I think I want to separate the psyche of Hamas from the psyche of the Palestinian civilian.

So if you could tell me a little bit about just, you know, how those different groups and those different people are thinking. Yeah. So for Hamas, I think there was also shock at the extent of their, uh, military success. of their uh military success i i think they uh surpassed any kind of expectation for their planning the fact that they had i mean drones that succeeded in taking out these um towers with remote controlled machine guns that are supposed to gun down anyone who approaches the Gaza border fence. They put up drones that took those machine guns out. Wow. They knew exactly where the comm systems were in the bases. So they took over entire military bases.

I'm sure they had to expect that there would be a drone or some kind of air force attack on the base on them within seconds of they're doing this, they were controlling bases for days. They went in and took out the entire comm system for the Southern command, the Southern command of the Israeli army couldn't communicate with one another. And then they're taking over whole towns. And even the,

the length of this thing that it was, you know, 48 hours later, you still had streets controlled by Hamas in Israel proper. It's just shocking. You know, at the end of the day, however sophisticated this attack turned out to be, Hamas is still a militia and it's not even one of the strongest ones around you know it's like nothing compared to Hezbollah in in the north in in Lebanon uh and so so this militia was able to to control towns inside Israel proper against you know what is often described as the strongest military in the Middle East.

So they're a bit of the dog that caught the car, maybe, and like, is what now? You know, they did not expect for this to happen either. They didn't expect to succeed at this level, with this scope. That said, the nature of the attack was itself unprecedented. So they had to expect that there would be an unprecedented response and that it probably would not merely be, you know, another quote unquote round in Gaza, meaning another bombing campaign of Gaza without Israel really going in in a major uh major way with it with its ground forces and throughout the past wars it was always there was always this discussion you know okay the rockets basically they land in empty fields or they're intercepted they do very little

damage they're you know very few israeli uh casualties from these rockets. But it, you know, one can hit a school. And the second that happens, the second a rocket hits a school, this was commentary in every single war up till now, it's game over. Israel has to go in with ground forces and do something it's never done before and quote unquote eradicate Hamas or something of that nature. And so the very fact that they were doing something, they were aiming for something a thousand times more impactful than just a rocket hitting a school means that they had to be prepared for something huge from Israel, which we still haven't seen yet. The huge thing we've seen from Israel is bombing of unprecedented scale and deaths of unprecedented scale. But that, I think, is not going to be the extent of it. I think that there

will be much more. And you see it from the israeli stated goal is to uh eradicate hamas now eradicating hamas is not actually an achievable goal for israel so because hamas is not just you know 40 000 um militants who are um hiding out in tunnels underneath Gaza right now. It's the government of Gaza. It is a social and political movement. It's an ideology. And you're not going to eradicate it, even if Israel is willing to pay the very high price of going and setting explosive charges in the tunnels and destroying the tunnel network and going bit by bit deeper and deeper into Gaza to try and kill as many of those 40,000 militants in the political leadership as they can. They can do that, but Hamas itself will not be eradicated.

What can be eradicated is Hamas' territorial control over Gaza. That's an achievable aim for Israel, but it's also one that they don't really know how to do because in order to do that, they need to figure out how they leave after they've eliminated Hamas territorial control of Gaza. So who's going to come in and take over? Israel doesn't want to occupy Gaza forever the only circumstance in which Israel wants to annex parts of Gaza or occupy parts of Gaza for a very long time is if many of these Palestinians who live there 2.3 million of them are expelled to to Sinai in that case then you can have fairly empty land in Gaza that Israel would, in fact, like to establish new settlements in or annex partly. But actually to control all of Gaza

with 2.3 million people there, Israel didn't want to do that. And that's why it withdrew from Gaza in 2005. It was simply too costly. And you have, you know, basically in Israel's approach to the Palestinian issue, you know, of having an equal number of Palestinians and Jews living under their control with the Palestinians not having basic civil rights. They take a variegated approach that depends largely on how densely populated the area, the Palestinian area in question is. So when the first, you know, the first idea for creating Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza. That idea came out of an uprising, the first intifada, which lasted from 1987 to 1993. It was at that moment that the Israeli defense minister, who later, who was a previous prime minister and a future prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin,

he said that he was convinced by the uprising, by the Intifada, that Israel could no longer directly rule over these city centers, didn't want his soldiers in the casbahs of Nablus and Hebron. other solution, which would be indirect rule, which would be to have Palestinians have limited autonomy and Israeli troops would be safer and they would be in less densely populated areas. So out of that realization on the part of Rabin and others in the security establishment came the Oslo Accords of 1993. And those allowed for the first time Palestinians to have limited autonomy. Those areas of limited autonomy, just to give you a sense of the scope, if you look at historic Palestine, so in 1948, in the war that established the state of Israel, war that established the state of Israel, Israel conquered 78% of historic Palestine. What was left is 22%. That's the West Bank and Gaza. And if you look today, how big are the areas of Palestinian limited autonomy, which are little islands. They're surrounded by a sea of Israeli control. There are about 165 little islands of Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank.

Gaza is its own big island of autonomy. Those areas combined make up about 10% of historic Palestine. So 90% of the territory is not just controlled in a security sense by Israel, but administered by Israel. So the autonomy is very limited and it's directed really at densely populated areas that Israel both doesn't want to bleed out in by controlling a dense urban area and also doesn't have a hope of settling with new Jewish settlements. Now, there are a couple of small exceptions to this because of their religious significance for Jews. So Hebron and East Jerusalem do have small groups of settlers who are planting themselves in the center of densely populated

palestinian areas but they don't really have a hope of taking over those areas the way that they have that they do succeed in taking over large areas in the west bank um so the the attitude toward gaza was we do not this is 2.3 million people in a very small place. Settling it is not going to work. We can't actually take over Gaza. And so what we're going to do is cage it off first with a fence and then with a wall, a permit system, make it very difficult for people to exit. Later, there was a siege on Gaza that's still in place today. So that's the attitude toward densely populated areas.

And, you know, my book takes place in an area like that, in the West Bank, in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, a community called Anatta that is partially annexed by Israel. So it's partly within municipal Jerusalem and from the perspective of Israel is considered within the sovereign boundaries of the state. And part of it is unannexed. So it's considered to be in the West Bank. And all of it together with the Shuaifat refugee camp, a refugee camp for Palestinian refugees from 1948 who are not permitted to go to their homes and live inside municipal Jerusalem. This area is a walled off urban ghetto.

This area has a refugee camp dating from 1948. Did I understand that right? Yeah, the refugees are from 1948 did i understand that right yeah the refugees are from 1948 um this particular camp was relocated it used to exist in the old city of jerusalem and then just before 1967 it was relocated to its current location wow very close by uh you know two miles away from, from it. Um, so yeah, you have about 130,000 people living in this walled ghetto inside Jerusalem. Uh, there is, um, virtually no municipal services provided to them. The, um, the residents are forced to burn trash in the middle of the street at night. There are no lanes on the roads, no sidewalks, no playgrounds. The main artery that runs through this dense area for 130,000 people is so narrow that when I go in to visit some of the characters in the book, visit some of the characters in the book, I would, you know, inch my car within millimeters of a parked car next to me, roll down my window and pull in my side mirror so that a bus could

pass me in the other direction. And the bus would inch by me and it's clogged, you know, traffic. So, I mean, that's how all of these people are living day in and day out. And even emergency services would not go in without the permission or an escort of the Israeli security forces. So this is an area of gross neglect, and it's in the city I live in. I live two miles away from the 26-foot tall gray concrete wall that surrounds this enclave on three sides. A fourth side has a different kind of wall, which runs through the middle of a segregated highway called, famously called the Apartheid Road. It's a 4370 is the route.

And there's Palestinian traffic on one side, Israeli traffic on the other, and a giant wall separating them. So this enclave of Anatta, where the characters in my book live, is completely surrounded and enclosed. And it has one exit at the top for people who have blue Jerusalem IDs that will allow them to enter the rest of Jerusalem. And one exit at the bottom for people with both blue IDs and the green West Bank IDs with which you cannot enter Jerusalem. And so for example, when these attacks occurred

on October 7th, many towns like Anatta included were shut down immediately. And it's so easy. It takes two soldiers. They just put down a gate or put up a couple of cement roadblocks, and that's it. 130,000 people can't move. Wow. So that actually happened to the main character of my book, Abed Salama.

His family was trapped there. They couldn't go to work. You know, almost every Palestinian family in the West Bank relies on higher paying jobs in Israel and the settlements. After October 7th, most of those employers are not allowing Palestinian workers to come. The economy of, of the entire West Bank is in a terrible state as a result. It really feels like the second intifada in the West Bank in the way that all of these towns are being closed down and movement is being restricted. And even when it opens up as it did later in Inanata, did later in Inanata, people still couldn't go to jobs because, you know, Abed's son, Adam,

he works in Ramallah and his employer told him don't come to work because the settler violence on the roads is too severe and I don't want to risk any of my employees coming to work right now. So all of that together, and as well as the big surge in killings in the West bank right now and, and settler violence, um, made Abed cut our book tour short. We had been traveling around the UK and the US and he just couldn't, uh, he couldn't be away from his family anymore. But the point is that this Gaza model is applied wherever you have a densely populated palestinian area that you don't want uh really to directly control i i want to i want to dive into the book in a second but first i just want to make sure i understand you know how we got to the point that we're in so if i can give my dumb dumb version you correct me if i'm wrong yeah the

state of is Israel is created. There's millions of Palestinians already living there. There's a lot of war and conflict. The Palestinians are pushed into smaller and smaller areas. After much conflict, Israel realizes, hold on a second. Well, we can't just get rid of these people, we need to have some sort of working arrangement. Um, and so the densest areas will basically wall those off and allow the Palestinians some amount of self-government, but that creates just a massive ghettos across the country in various places in Gaza and the

West bank, et cetera. And it seems like it creates a bit of a pressure cooker environment. Do I have it generally right? You've got it generally right. Okay. Yeah. You know, when Israel was established in 1948, there was a massive flight and expulsion of the Palestinian population. So in the territory that became Israel, that 78% that was conquered, Jews at that time were a third of the population in Israel-Palestine. And they were offered by a UN partition plan the majority of the land, even though they were a third of the population. They were a third of the population. And in the war, they got not just that majority, but even further gains. And during that process, they set the conditions for the flight and expulsion of what was 80% of the Palestinians living in that 78% that became the state of Israel. So you had an overnight of total reversal of who was the majority and who was the minority

in this 78% of historic Palestine. Wow. And that allowed Israel to be a Jewish state. Otherwise it couldn't have been one. And even then, even with just 20 percent or then it was maybe closer to 15 percent of the palestinians who remained inside israel proper who were not expelled uh in 1948 even then those palestinians were living under military governance, a separate military governance with a permit system and all kinds of curfews, restrictions on their movements, areas that they could not go to.

And that's how they lived from 1948 until 1966, a year before, six months before the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza began. And so even when you had Palestinians who posed really no military threat, there were, there was really zero resistance. They were totally quiescent, the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Still Israel put in this separate system with less rights for the palestinians uh and separate governance through the military and that model six at right as it came to an end in december 1966 six months later there's the 67 war israel conquers the west bank and gaza and uh also sinai and the golan and it just transports this existing model that it had been putting in

on in place over its own citizens of military government with lesser rights. It put that same model in place in the West Bank and Gaza. So yes, totally, you've got the basic picture. This question is maybe unanswerable in the two minutes i want to take before we go to break but you know israel is a is a democratic country as a liberal democratic values in the way at least it governs israelis um why why why create you know a two-tiered system of of citizenship or of military governance, why not from the beginning say, hey, this is clearly a multi-ethnic state, you know? Because you needed this separate system in order to take over the land of the Palestinians.

So the Palestinians who remained were also internally displaced and not allowed, many of them were internally displaced and not allowed to return to their villages, even though they're full citizens of the state. And there was enormous land confiscation from both the Palestinian citizens who remained within Israel, that roughly 15% at that time, now 22% of the population of Israel proper, and also the theft of all of the properties of the refugees who were expelled and prevented from returning. And so you needed a system in place that would essentially declare the land Jewish or collectively Jewish through peristatal organizations and to constrict the Palestinian population, much like you see in the West Bank, into pretty small areas such that, you know, today, Palestinian citizens in, you know, Israel proper, the place that's

described in the press as democratic, that they're 20% of the population and they're on 3% of the land. So that need to take over the land was really the driving force of having a separate system in place. And you have quotes from the prime minister, Ben-Gurion talking about how, you know, after 48, you know, this was our real opportunity to colonize

on a scale we never could before. In 1948, prior to the founding of the state, Jews controlled, they owned 6% of the land. And now they own more than 90% of the land. So, um, so that was the process that was put in place. Unbelievable. Well, uh, we have to take a really quick break. When we get back, I want to ask you more about your book and the view that you give of the occupation on a really personal level. We'll be right back with more Nathan Thrall.

occupation on a really personal level. We'll be right back with more Nathan Thrall. We're back with Nathan Thrall. Your book, I know, gives a really personal account of what the occupation, what the situation just before the events of October 7th was like for an average Palestinian citizen and, you know, the effects that had on them. Can you just tell us about it a little bit? Yeah. So, um, I tell the story of a tragic event, um, which happened very close to my home. I live very close to the walls of the old city of Jerusalem. And, you know, nearly every day I would pass this walled ghetto in my car and hardly pay it any mind. A walled ghetto within my own city. sits just underneath the manicured grounds of Israel's most prestigious university, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. And you are on the grounds of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. You look down and you see a checkpoint. You see parents and children waiting in line to exit their part of Jerusalem and cross into the heart of Jerusalem to get to their schools and their jobs. And you

see, you know, trash being burned in the middle of the street in an area of utter neglect. And I hardly paid any mind to this walled ghetto, even though I passed it almost every day. And one day there was a horrific bus crash involving a kindergarten class trip. And after that crash, I couldn't stop thinking about these people, these parents and children who share the same city with me and who live a radically different life than I do. And so I decided to start looking into this crash to tell the story of this place, of this utter neglect, and what it is to live for both Palestinians and Jews under Israeli rule. And so I tell the story of one man named Abed Salama. It's called A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, but it's really about much more than a day. We learn Abed's old love stories and life stories and his participation in the first intifada and his

imprisonment and his torture and his living through the history of Israel-Palestine. I mean, it really, the book aims to tell the story of this crash while telling the entire story of Israel-Palestine. And Abed took his five-year-old son Milad to go buy treats for a class trip that was going to happen the next morning milad was extremely uh excited for the class trip he uh scurries out the door the next morning uh and he boards a bus with about 50 uh kindergartners on it and they go to an indoor uh play area uh like a they call it a jimbery and like the thing on the side of a mcdonald's yeah exactly one of those a big version of that yeah and and the reason they do that is they don't have one in their walled ghetto they don't even have a playground in their walled ghetto. And on the other side of the wall are many play areas and playgrounds.

But the other side of the wall is a Jewish settlement of East Jerusalem called Pisgah Tze'ev. And they're not allowed to go there because some of the kids have green IDs and some of them have blue IDs. And only if you have a blue ID can you enter Jerusalem. These are all people in the same extended families. Even within nuclear families, you have some who have green IDs, some have blue IDs. It has enormous consequences for their lives, and it really had enormous consequences on the day of this crash, the worst day of their lives. And so the bus drives along the winding path of the wall, and it passes through a checkpoint. And just after passing through the checkpoint, a giant semi-trailer that was going back and forth from a settlement quarry to a factory in East Jerusalem. They're taking rocks from this quarry, illegally, of course,

extracting natural resources from the occupied territory and using them to pave roads inside of Israel. This semi-trailer slides into opposing traffic. It's raining, slams into the bus. slams into the bus. The bus flips over, catches fire, and six children die, and one teacher dies in this fire. Now, the area where this happens is an area of not Palestinian autonomy. It's an area of total Israeli control, what's called Area C of the West Bank. And Israeli police, not the army, but Israeli national police patrol this road. They give out traffic tickets on this road. It's their responsibility, and the Palestinian autonomy government isn't even allowed there. Allowed there. Yeah. And so who is left to deal with this burning bus filled with kindergartners are just all of the Palestinian bystanders who are taking these soot-covered kids out of the

broken windows of the bus because it's flipped on its side and uh pulling them out and then putting them in the back seat of any random person's car and that person would drive off toward the superior hospital in Jerusalem if he had a blue ID. And he would drive off to a Ramallah hospital if he had a green ID. And so the kids are going in all different kinds of directions depending on the color of the ID of the people who are driving them. And by the time the first Israeli fire truck arrives, more than a half an hour later, all of the kids have been evacuated or killed. And so I tell how Abed and other parents raced to the scene of the accident. The army had closed off the road, wasn't letting cars pass through. He got out of the car and starts running toward the accident site. He flags down an Israeli Jeep,

says, my kids on this bus, can I have a lift? He asks them in Hebrew. They refuse. He keeps running. He gets there. There's a giant crowd. And he asks, where are the kids? He doesn't see a single child. And they tell him the kids are at the military base that's a minute up the road. They're at this West Jerusalem hospital. They're in Ramallah hospital. They're in Annapolis hospital. And he himself cannot go and check at many of these places. He's got a green ID. He can't look for his kid at either of the, um, uh, West Jerusalem hospitals that he has been told the kids are at. He can't enter the military base with a green West bank ID.

He can't enter the military base with a green West Bank ID. So he goes to the Ramallah hospital and starts to search for his kid through all of the rooms of this hospital. It's more than 24 hours before he finds the fate of his son. the fate of his son. And what I do in the book is I show how Abed tries to navigate through the jaws of this bureaucracy to find his son on this day, how he sends a relative who does have a blue ID to go check for him at Jerusalem hospitals. And in the kind of deeper story of his life, I talk about the degree to which this system reaches into the most intimate details of people's lives. So that at one point, Abed, he chooses a marriage partner in order to try to get a blue ID that would allow him to keep his job in Jerusalem. Wow. The restrictions were getting tighter and tighter,

and they were making it very difficult for anyone with a green ID to keep a job in Jerusalem. And he had been working for the Israeli phone company for quite a while, and he was at risk of losing his job. And he went and actually married someone just in order to keep his job because she was a she had citizenship and through her he could hope to get a blue id wow and this you know the story is really telling it's not just abed's story it's also the story of pair other parents and teachers and uh the the Jewish founder of the settlement right next to where the accident happened, the Israeli army colonel who designed the wall, who created the wall,

who designated all of these different areas, what should be area C of the West Bank and what should be, what route should the wall take? Why is the wall enclosing Abed's community in this particular way? Well, that was his decision. And he describes the choices that he made and how the overriding goal when creating the wall was to lop off as many Palestinians from the heart of the city while relinquishing the least amount of land. Wow. And that has, you know, driving Israeli policy throughout the West Bank. So I tell also, you know,

the story of a doctor, a mother, who worked for UNRWA, the UN Refugee Agency, happened to be with her team on her way to work. It was a mobile clinic she ran. They were going to go and treat some Bedouin who happened to actually live on land owned by Abed's grandfather. And this is a Bedouin community that's constantly targeted for expulsion by Israel. The nearby settlers consider it an eyesore. Israel wants this area cleared of Palestinians. And this community, it's called Khan al-Ahmar, and it's gotten so much attention that even the Israeli foreign minister at one point said, we can't expel this community because the icc is uh looking at us and this is a really

high profile uh case wow so this this uh uh doctor just happened to stumble on the accident as she's on her way to hanalah and she instructs the driver of the van to pull over, they get out and start to help to rescue these children. And, you know, as she's rescuing the kids, all she can think about is the worst day of her life when she was a young doctor working for the Palestine Red Crescent in Tunisia, which is where the PLO was headquartered in 1985. And the PLO headquarters was bombed by Israeli airplanes in Tunis. Wow. Many, you know, dozens of Tunisians and Palestinians died.

And she was a young doctor who was tasked with picking up bodies and body parts out of the rubble. And, you know, for her too, she comes from a family that was forced to flee Haifa in a town now inside Israel proper, forced to flee Haifa in 1948. So she grew up in refugee camps in Syria. And she is able, through her husband, to return to Palestine after Oslo, which was her dream. She can't return to Haifa. That's not allowed to where her family actually comes from. So she returns to the West Bank with her husband because a few thousand Palestinians who worked with the PLO were allowed to return at the beginning of Oslo. And she comes back and she describes what her life was like raising children under occupation,

what it was like to watch her son slowly, you know, get harassed every day by soldiers outside his school, get shot at by soldiers outside his school, get stopped and frisked by soldiers outside his school, get beat by soldiers outside his school, and how he slowly started to join the boys who were throwing stones at the soldiers. And she would watch from a distance and see her son doing this and her heart would break because she knew what was going to happen to him if this continued. And she didn't even dare to show her face and her connection to her son because she didn't want to make it easier for the soldiers to

locate him later because he'd be wearing a mask when he's throwing the stones. So she didn't want to make it easier for the soldiers to locate him later. Cause he'd be wearing a mask when he's throwing the stones. So she didn't want to come up to him and reveal. Don't do this. Yes. And so then 1 30 AM soldiers show up at her door and say, we're taking, we're taking your, uh, uh, adolescent boy, Hadi, we're taking him. And him and uh she's got tears streaming down her face and says you know what did he do and they won't answer wow and they grab this boy and she wants to give him a hug before he goes off for who knows how long and to who knows where she's afraid even to give him a hug like any movement she can imagine that he'll get shot and it'll be described as self-defense. And so she watches these soldiers take off, take her son and she spends, you know, 10 days just trying to find which prison, which detention facility he's located in. She's uniquely able to perform that search because she works for UNRWA, which allows her to enter certain areas that most Palestinians couldn't.

And she describes the feeling of utter helplessness that every Palestinian family feels because they know that that can happen to them any night. Soldiers come and take your children and you don't know when you're going to see them again so the real aim of the book was to tell these the ordinary life of this system uh for both jews and palestin, because we often, you know, our eyes are rightfully on Gaza now, and they're rightfully on Gaza in the previous wars too. That's the thing of greatest urgency right now. But often our eyes are on that. And what we say is, let's restore calm. Let's get a ceasefire. Let's restore calm. And I wanted to write a book about the calm, this quote unquote calm, which is a deeply violent system. And to explain that unless we address

the injustice of the calm, we are never gonna see an end to this bloodshed. And books like yours are my favorite kind of journalism, my favorite kind of storytelling, where you use that personal story to explicate the system and the overall system, because when you can knit those two things together, for someone like me, that's, I can understand because I can, gives me the experiential nature of knowledge, right? That I'm, I can place myself there, but also the, the view of the overall system. But as someone engaged in that project, uh, on October 6th, you were engaged in that project and maybe had some hope for it. Maybe hoped that, Hey, we can tell this story. Maybe we can build some bridges. We can thaw some hearts. We can create whatever your goal might be.

How did you then feel seeing the events of October 7th? I mean, does that, you know what it what an unmitigated disaster what it what a what a horror yeah we're seeing and and we are just at the beginning of it i mean i think that it cannot be overstated the significance of what happened on october 7th and what has happened since uh this is on a different scale than everything we've seen before and it will have decades-long repercussions for israel palestine and um of course you know it uh reinforced many right-wing talking points. And I had been told prior to my book coming out, many friends said to me,

your book's gonna be a weather vane because we've seen all this progress in the mainstream in their openness to hearing palestinian stories even you know it used to be that saying the word occupation in many circles in the united states was uh taboo uh and you know the u.s has moved a lot since then yeah and so we're sharing statements that obama made a few years ago and you know oh look at look at how even a nuanced you know the this this understanding is at least yeah yeah so so so i think that you know there really has been progress in the united states and understanding israel palestine uh and my initial reaction with october 7th is wow we is going to be a huge setback to all of that

progress. And then I witnessed it. I felt it. I had, you know, progressive Jewish organizations that were excited about my book, were promoting my book, wanted to, you know, give copies to their board and to their constituents and to do events with me. And they immediately, you know, lined up with the right-wing pro-Israel groups that they loathed and that they would have nothing to do with in the past. And they started to do events with them, cancel events with me. And, you know, it's for a book that, you know, I, in, in other interviews, I'd been questioned about whether I had, um, painted the, the settler characters and therefore the settler movement in the book too sympathetically. And it, you know, pleased me that I was asked that question because my goal as a writer is to paint real human beings and for people to feel

like they're really in the shoes of every character in the book. So I was glad to be asked that question, but for a book that is being asked that kind of a question to be the target of cancellation, the UK police shut down an event for me in London, I've had in five cities events canceled. I've had other media stuff canceled. And I'm talking to people in the media and the producers who have shows that are being held that we recorded prior to October 7th. And there is a lot of pressure on them not to do anything that will offend, upset, result in complaints from pro-Israel groups. wanted to silence any kind of debate or nuanced conversation prior to October 7th, but they weren't, they were losing ground every, every day in the mainstream. That's how it appeared to me.

And now they're gaining ground. Now they're, now they're getting people who would never be their allies to stand with them. And how long lasting that is, I really don't know. That is, I really don't know. I even had ads pulled from, you know, the most innocuous ads, sorry, the most innocuous ads were pulled from NPR and the BBC in the US due to listener complaints. And, you know, those ads aren't even allowed. They have to be neutral. And they were running prior to October 7th. But as soon as October 7th happened, they pulled them. if you're a television producer, I understand why you, you, you know, people behave in a way that's,

that's conservative in order to sort of protect what they're doing. But I guess one thing that really strikes me here is, you know, I have many Jewish friends who care about this very deeply, who care about Israel deeply, who have a family there. The amount of pain that people are experiencing right now is so great. Um, and it's coming from so many, from different, so many different causes, you know? Uh, and, uh, you know, it strikes me that, that the attack by Hamas was so, it was it was so unconscionable it was so it was so beyond the pale right that it just is sort of scrambling people's you know the the the sort of stasis that everyone existed in is being is being completely scrambled and people maybe end up feeling a different way than they had ever felt before or they are they suddenly feel that the a position that they held isn't can no longer be

spoken or uh because of the pain that their their countrymen or their their you know people who they care about are in yes um it's it's really difficult um I, I don't know. I have to find a question in that. No, no, but I, I agree with you. I think that,

you know, it really can't be stressed enough how deeply scarred Israeli society, Israeli Jewish society is by October 7th. Yeah. American Jewish society. And American Jewish society is by October 7th. Yeah. American Jewish society. And American Jewish society. And, you know,

that, that feeling of a grief and horror is, is very real. And as a result, you know, you are hearing also, you know, the, the worst kinds of, you know, you are hearing also, you know, the worst kinds of, you know, genocidal rhetoric from mainstream voices. I mean, the center-left president of Israel, the former head

of the center-left labor party, in, you know, know prepared remarks it's not even off the cuff he said he says there are no innocents in gaza there is no such thing as an innocent civilian in gaza i mean it's shocking yeah you know the people of gaza are as surprised by that attack as the israelis were yeah so 2.3 million people for a center left politician just to prepare the ground for mass slaughter of innocents. It's, I mean, the level of rage, the level of shock, you cannot overstate it. On a per capita basis,

this is much bigger than 9-11 for Israelis. The US invaded two countries, changed its domestic laws. It had a profound effect on American society. And that was when it was by, you know, a bunch of attackers from Saudi Arabia, more than an ocean and a continent away. And this is right there, right next door. New York attacking New Jersey, this is right next door. Yeah. And the most frightening thing is that for the first time in my life, I can imagine this descending into a kind of Balkan civil on civil conflict because people are not just blaming innocent Gazans. They're blaming

the Palestinian people as a whole. And there are Palestinians who are citizens of Israel. There are Palestinians who are residents of East Jerusalem. There are Palestinians in the West Bank. Palestinians were residents of East Jerusalem. There are Palestinians in the West bank. And we already got a little taste of what that civil on civil conflict can look like in May, 2021 when there was an escalation in, in Gaza. But,

but I think we're at the beginning of something much worse. The, the people who run Hamas must've known, as you said earlier, that they would provoke this kind of response. What, what would their justification be or what, what would cause them to take,

you know, after decades of, Hey, we fire a few rockets. There's, you know, we go back and forth. We're in this sort of stasis,

yada, yada. Is there like, what would the reason be forth we're in this sort of stasis yada yada um is there like what would the reason be to suddenly go in this huge again unconscionable attack yeah precisely that it's precisely that this pattern of we throw rockets at at israel israel bombs us, and then Egypt and Israel come with the United States and propose a ceasefire where Israel promises to slightly ease the choking of Gaza. I mean, Gaza is kept at all times with its nose a millimeter above water. I mean, these people are under siege. Yeah.

I mean, these people are under siege. Yeah. And so this pattern of rockets and bombs and a leveling of Gaza with a ceasefire with promises that are broken within weeks or months to ease the restrictions on Gaza, that wasn't working. Another round wasn't going to change that situation. wasn't going to change that situation. And so this is clearly an attempt to turn the whole table over with enormous risk to themselves, to the civilian population of Gaza. Not just risk, almost guaranteed devastation.

Guaranteed, yeah. Risk is understating it. Yeah. Guaranteed. And the, but the thing about it is is that as as horrible as it as as that attack was and as horrible as it is now in its consequences for the civilians in gaza if you look at it strategically from Hamas's perspective, right now they are in a position of, even after launching the greatest attack against Israel, and Israel's making comparisons to the 1940s, and they have to do everything to eliminate Hamas, and all the society

is behind the collective punishment of 2.3 million people and depriving them of food, water, and electricity. Uh, even with all of that, Hamas has Israel in a corner. Israel does not have any decent option for what to do now. Israel doesn't know how to get those hostages out. It doesn't know how to answer the demand of its public. How is this never going to happen again? Well, it can't, it's not never going to happen again if it's just another bombing, no matter how severe, of Gaza.

There will still be tunnels there. There will still be Hamas there. Even if you kill a bunch of guys, there will be new ones. And with every quote-unquote round in Gaza, Hamas got stronger and stronger. So that cannot be an answer to the Israeli public, which wants to know, how is this never going to happen again? So then Israel is forced to actually try and execute on its stated aim, which is to quote unquote, eliminate Hamas, which again, that's impossible, but they can do something short of it. But that is extremely costly. They've got 360,000 reservists called up right now. It's costing their economy a billion and a half shekels a day. They cannot continue for this for months, and it would take months to do what they claim that they want to do in Gaza. And even after doing that, who are they going to get

to come in and administer Gaza, help rebuild it? They can't find an international force that would want to take on this task. And would that international force really have a mandate to shoot at Palestinians who are creating new rockets, for example, or doing new attacks against Israel or preparing for them? Hard to believe. Israel are preparing for them. Hard to believe. So Israel really has no, no decent options. And,

and so Hamas is in a position of great strength right now, even after doing this attack, they've got 200 plus hostages. Yeah. As time passes, you know, right now the attitude of the Israeli government is we lost 1400,400, we can lose another 200 to achieve this higher goal, which shows you how shocked they are. Because that's a total reversal of the entire Israeli ethos.

Before this, it was we're trading 1,027 Palestinian prisoners for one Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, in 2011. Now it's, we can lose 200 by bombing Gaza and then going in with ground forces. But again, the strategic goal that Israel has, which is to have some other force in place in Gaza doesn't look very achievable. So at the end of the day, they're looking at having Hamas in place, battered, beaten, whatever, but still having Hamas in place in Gaza. So that's a total failure if you compare it to their rhetoric. And potentially doing a massive prisoner exchange like you know potentially releasing every palestinian prisoner and if hamas does that it'll be the greatest achievement of any

palestinian organization in in in history but at the expense of thousands of palestinians being killed untold misery thousands obviously of israelis being killed uh it seems what you've painted a picture where uh i mean that's i guess a moral victory in some narrow strategic sense it's a it's a horrible loss for almost everybody in the region in every way. And especially for Hamas's own constituency that they're supposed to be taking care of the people of Gaza. They are paying the highest price. And it's clear that Hamas is willing to, to have them, uh, uh, pay that price. Um, well, look, I, I don't want to end by asking you what you think is going to happen or anything along those lines or what a solution could be.

Um, because it's just, I mean, it's, it's, you know, we're just witnessing the horror of humanity here and, and what's going to happen is what's going to happen. But I guess I want to ask how you, as someone who cares about the region, is connected to the region, clearly feels what's happening very deeply. Like for those who feel similarly, how do you even try to begin to emotionally orient yourself towards what is happening? You know, how do you, how do you try to think about it? What, what do you try to, you know, look, look forward to? I don't know. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I, I feel a despair that I've never felt before because of the level of brutality that we've seen. The level of brutality on October 7th by the militants who came across the Gaza border and attacked civilians, and the level of brutality of Israel in its response now of cutting off food, water, and electricity and bombing many, many, many innocents, thousands of innocents. And I honestly, for the first time, I am really reconsidering whether I can raise my three daughters in that place because of the amount of poison, the amount of hatred and racism that I will not be able to protect them from. Even putting aside issues of safety, it's just so bleak that that dehumanization and that

dehumanization preceded you know october 7th there the fact of all of israel sitting pretty in cafes and drinking lattes and not thinking about choking for more than a decade and a half the people of gaza under siege uh who don't have you know clean clean drinking water uh and you know nightly arrests of children for throwing a stone at a tank uh you know, that system had embedded in it the deepest de this bus crash with these kindergartners and they were all gone. And he sees the backpacks on the road and he sees this burned out shell of a bus. And all he can think about are the suicide bombings that he had to attend to. Those scars are very, very deep for both peoples. After the crash, there were Israelis, for both peoples.

After the crash, there were Israelis, young Israelis posting online jubilant posts on Facebook, on the comment sections of news articles, celebrating the deaths of kindergartners in a car crash. And this so shocked an Israeli TV news anchor, a center-left TV news anchor. He created a whole TV special about the israeli reaction to the crash and these facebook posts and he called it the title of the post of the

feature was an arab kid died ha ha ha ha which is a direct quote of one of these posts and he wanted to hold up a mirror to his society and ask how the hell did we get to the point where people without even using pseudonyms, they weren't anonymously posting with their real names, celebrating the deaths of kindergartners. What kind of, of a dehumanization had to take place for us to be there. And so, so more than anything,

what I, to be there. And so, so more than anything, what I, what I worry about is the kind of soul and the, uh, psyche of these two peoples and what it means will mean for their future, uh, together. I mean, the amount of poison we've had even in this country with people, you know, uh, even in this country with people, you know, glorifying and celebrating and arguing and, you know, has been so intense. And it's been why I've been really grateful to have you on and just, you know, give us a full picture of it. And I thank you so much for coming on the show.

It's been quite a bit, but it's been really powerful and important. So thank you for coming on. Thank you for having me. Yeah. Well, I can't thank Nathan Thrall enough for coming on the show. If you want to pick up a copy of his book,

you can get it as always at factuallypod.com slash books. I can tell you, I am going to be reading this book and I encourage you to as well, if you are interested in it. If you want to support this show and the conversations that we have on it, you can do so at patreon.com slash adamconover. Five bucks a month,

every episode of the show ad-free, you know the deal. Really want to thank everyone who supports the show because you make conversations like this possible. And most recently, I want to thank Richard McVeigh, Emily Wilson, Lee Dotson, Blamo and Michael Frasco for supporting us

at the $15 a month level. As always, you can find all my tour dates at adamconover.net. I'm going to be on the road again in January. Hope to see you there. I want to thank my producer,

Sam Roudman and Tony Wilson, everybody here at HeadGum for helping make this show possible. We'll see you next week for another episode of Factually. And thank you so much for being here with us. I don't know anything. That was a HeadGum podcast.