Nathan Thrall on a Lasting Peace
Nov. 28, 2023
I haven’t sent out news updates since Hamas’s horrific October 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s vengeful retaliatory assault on the Gaza Strip because there has been more than enough news to consume for anyone who desires to do so. Another reason that I haven’t done so is that my niece and her husband, residents of Kibbutz Nir Oz, were taken hostage by Hamas. So my ability to concentrate has been limited.
Nonetheless, I wanted to recommend most highly Isaac Chotiner’s interview with Nathan Thrall in The New Yorker Daily, Nov. 28, 2023: “What Would a Lasting Peace Between Israel and Palestine Really Look Like? The need for a new paradigm after October 7th.”
Thrall has been quite critical of discussions about the desirability of one state, two states, or a confederation as a distraction from Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing and de facto annexation of large parts of the West Bank. October 7 proved that all the prevailing Israeli assumptions about the conflict and US willingness to countenance them were catastrophically wrong. Thrall concludes:
If a realistic political alternative to the status quo is to emerge, it will have to offer more clarity about the rights of the other side. That clarity is lacking not just in the messages sent to the outside world but within the Israeli and Palestinian coalitions themselves: Palestinians have not agreed internally about what status the Jews would have in a Palestinian state. And Jews likewise have not been clear about what status Palestinians should have in this more than half-century-old single state that Israelis still manage to deceive themselves into calling temporary. In the meantime, while everyone argues about these entirely hypothetical scenarios, Palestinians are constricted into smaller and smaller spaces while Jewish settlements expand, the U.S. increases its support for Israel, and anyone who says that this system of ethnic subjugation is racist is at risk of being called an antisemite.
Link to full text of the interview.