Israel & Palestine: Broken Promises (Part 5)

The Handshake The World Watched

0:08 SPEAKER_00: It is the afternoon of September 13th, 1993. Three men stand on the south lawn of the White House. One in the middle, tall, silver haired, arms spread wide like a man trying to hold a door open through sheer will, is President Bill Clinton. To his left, Yasser Arafat, the Kafiye, the Stubble, the Olive Uniform, the men who has personified the Palestinian cause for a quarter century, who has been bombed in Beirut and besieged in Tripoli, and exiled to Tunis and declared a terrorist by the very Western government that is now hosting him on this lawn.

0:53 SPEAKER_00: The Clintons right, Ishaq Rabin, 71 years old, stiff in his suit, visibly uncomfortable, the soldier who signed the LEDA expulsion order in 1948, and who is now about to shake the hand of the man he spent his career trying to kill. The signing ceremony for the Oslo Accords has just concluded. The documents are signed. Arafat has spoken of the peace of the break. Ravin has quoted Ecclesiastes. To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven. A time to be born and a time to die.

1:39 SPEAKER_00: A time of war and a time of peace.

1:44 SPEAKER_00: And now comes a handshake. Clinton nudges Arafat gently towards Rabin. Arafat extends his hand. Rabin hesitates. And in that hesitation, cameras capture the reluctance, the weight of it. What his gesture is costing him perfectly. And then he takes Airfett's hand and a card. The long failed and for one September afternoon in Washington, impossible, seems real.

2:24 SPEAKER_00: Rabin will be dead within two years. Shot by Jewish extremists who consider this handshake a betrayal of God. The peace process that Oslo sets in motion will stagger forward through the next decade, absorbing assassinations and terror and bad faith of both sides, before collapsing entirely in the fires of the second antifada. The promise made on this lawn will break.

2:58 SPEAKER_00: That's later. Right now, two old enemies are touching hands. And the world is watching.

A History Told Like DNA

3:17 SPEAKER_00: Broken Promises.

3:21 SPEAKER_00: You know how they say you can't understand someone until you walk a mile in their shoes? Well, I'd argue you can't understand a nation until you've walked through its history. Not just to highlight Rio or the sanitized version you find in textbooks. I mean really getting into its DNA. Those defining moments that shaped everything that came after. Those moments where paths were chosen, where decisions were made in palaces and backrooms and city streets that changed the course of millions of lives.

3:53 SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Paul, and this is Double Helix, Blueprint of Nations, where we unravel the genetic code of countries through their most transformative moments. Think of it like ancestry testing, but for entire nations. We dig deep into the historical DNA, finding those crucial moments that made countries who they are today.

4:25 SPEAKER_00: We ended episode 4 with the first intifada. Palestinian teenagers throwing stones at Israeli tanks, a defense minister ordering his soldiers to break bones, and a prime minister looking at the wreckage and concluding that the organization who spent his career fighting was the only partner who could deliver peace. Secret negotiations began in Oslo, Norway. Today we're going to conclude this series, and we're going to follow those negotiations to the White House law. Watch the promise that they produce the rise and the fall of that promise, and try to understand why the closest these two peoples ever came to peace ended in the worst violence either of them had seen since 1948.

5:14 SPEAKER_00: This is the final episode of the series. And it doesn't end with resolution. Because the conflict, as you may know, hasn't ended. It does end with a question.

5:26 SPEAKER_01: And whether that question still has an answer is something I genuinely don't know.

Oslo Begins In Secret

5:37 SPEAKER_00: The Oslo negotiations begin in a country house outside of the city, in conditions so informal that the participants will later struggle to describe them without laughing. The setup is almost absurd. The Norwegian government has quietly arranged for a group of Israeli academics, who are, in fact, operating with the blessing of Deputy Foreign Minister Yoshi Balin to sit down with PLO officials led by a man named Ahmed Kure, also known as Abu Allah. He runs the PLO's economic department. Nobody's supposed to know this is happening.

6:16 SPEAKER_00: The Israeli government can deny it if the talks collapse. The PLO can do the same. It is deniable by design, which is the only reason anyone agrees to try it. Let me take you inside one of these early sessions. Because the setting tells you something essential about what makes Oslo different from every previous attempt at negotiation.

6:48 SPEAKER_00: No flags on the table.

7:00 SPEAKER_00: Arguing about borders and refugees in Jerusalem. A mix of English, Hebrew, and Arabic. And discovering to the physical astonishment that the person across the table tells jokes, has children worries about, is tired in the afternoon, is the most unsettling way in magic. A human being.

7:34 SPEAKER_00: Later wrote that the breakthrough came down to one or we negotiators had to eat together, socialize together, spend their evenings in the same house. We humanize the enemy, Savir said. That was the revolution. The problem is that revolutions can happen in Scandinavian living rooms, don't always survive contact with the world outside.

8:07 SPEAKER_00: This is crucial, and it gets lost every single time someone invokes Oslo as if it were a blueprint that the Palestinians walked away from. Oslo is a framework, a declaration of principles. It does two things. One, Israel recognizes the PLO as a legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and the PLO recognizes Israel's right to exist in peace and security. After everything we've covered in the series, the temple, the Valf War Declaration, the knockback, the occupation. Two enemies looked at each other across the table and said, You are real.

8:51 SPEAKER_00: That recognition in itself is historic. And it shouldn't be minimized. But what Israel doesn't do is equally important. It creates a timeline for entering Palestinian self-government in parts of the West Bank and Gaza.

9:12 SPEAKER_00: A patchwork that looks on a map like a rosehard test and functions on the ground about as well. And the genuinely hard questions the ones that actually matter, the ones that have driven this conflict for a century will those get deferred. Jerusalem, refugees, final borders, and settlements.

9:47 SPEAKER_00: Not on a specific day, not with a single bullet, but slowly.

Recognition Without Final Answers

10:06 SPEAKER_00: Rabin is a Palestinian partner who officially accepts Israel's existence.

10:15 SPEAKER_00: Because Jerusalem can't be divided like a dinner check, and 700,000 refugees and their descendants can be told to just move on.

10:33 SPEAKER_00: During the interim years, the years that are supposed to be about building trust, demonstrating good faith, showing both populations that peace is worth the risk, the settlements, well they kept growing. New construction, new roads, new bypass highways connecting settlement blocks to Israeli cities, all beyond the Green Line, all on land that is supposed to be subject to final status negotiations. Every new building says the same thing. We are never leaving. Whatever we signed in Norway, whatever we shook hands on in Washington, this land is ours and we're making it permanent.

11:14 SPEAKER_00: I understand the Israeli argument that the settlements are bargain and chips for the final talks, but you don't build permanent homes and schools and shopping centers and bus lines as bargain and chips. You built those things because you intend to keep them. And the Palestinians, watching from villages below hiltips where cranes are working, draw the obvious conclusion. Israel is negotiating the terms of a withdrawal it has no intention of carrying out. Whatever trust Oslo was supposed to create starts bleeding out through the gap between what Israel says at the table and what it builds on the ground.

11:54 SPEAKER_00: But none of that happened yet in the White House one. What happened is the recognition, the mutual acknowledgement that both sides do exist. And Rabin captures the cost of that acknowledgement in his speech at the signing ceremony, addressing the Palestinians directly.

Settlements Drain Trust

12:12 SPEAKER_00: We who have fought against you, the Palestinians, we say to you today in a loud and clear voice, enough of blood and tears. Enough.

12:28 SPEAKER_00: Two years after the handshake, Rabin stands on a stage in the center of Tel Aviv at the largest peas rally in Israeli history.

12:48 SPEAKER_00: An opposition that has grown venomous in a way that shouldn't have alarmed everyone and didn't alarm enough people.

Rabin Assassinated For The Deal

12:56 SPEAKER_00: Protesters have paraded through the streets carrying coffins with Rabin's name on them. Posters show him in an SS uniform. Settler rabbis in the fringe have invoked Dean Rodeth, an ancient religious ruling that permits, even requires, the killing of a Jew who endangers other Jewish lives. They've applied it to the sitting prime minister.

13:23 SPEAKER_00: Rabin is not built for rallies. He belongs in the briefing room, not on a stage with a microphone. He is, as he was before, stiff, awkward, a general who never learned to be a performer. Tonight he sings Shia La Shalom, the song of peace. A lyric that Israeli soldiers have been singing since the 70s. He sings it badly, self-consciously. The way a man sings, he doesn't normally sing but has decided that tonight his voice is going to mean something, even if the voice itself is not to the task. The lyrics to Shirla Shalom are folded in his jacket pocket when he comes down the stairs from the stage.

14:08 SPEAKER_00: Then, a 25-year-old law student named Jigal Amir steps out of the crowd, raises a Beretta pistol, and fires three rounds into Rabin's back from point-blank range.

14:29 SPEAKER_00: Rabin dies on the operating table at Ishulov Hospital within the hour. He's 73 years old.

14:37 SPEAKER_01: The lyrics are found in his jacket pocket.

15:04 SPEAKER_00: The man who was murdered for believing that the people he spent his life fighting deserved a state of their own.

15:14 SPEAKER_00: You can't make him into a hero or a villain. Because he is both and he is neither. And the fact that one Israeli leader with the credibility to trade security for peace was killed by a fellow Israeli for training.

15:34 SPEAKER_00: The enemy of peace is not always on the other side of the border.

15:38 SPEAKER_01: Sometimes the enemy of peace is in your own ground, holding your flag and reading your scripture.

15:47 SPEAKER_00: What that is with Raven is the possibility of a specific kind of peace. The kind that requires a leader trust in a normal security and trust and territorial compromise. Rebin was a general who became a peacemaker.

16:11 SPEAKER_00: Not a hoot barack, who tries. Certainly, not the man who replaces Perez after the 1996 election.

Bombings And The Oslo Backlash

16:22 SPEAKER_00: In the months following the assassination, Hamas launches a series of suicide bombings in Israeli cities. Buses ripped open in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv during morning commutes. A cafe in a market district gutted during the lunch rush. The timing is deliberate. Each bomb is aimed as much at the peace process as at the passengers aboard the bus. And it works. Israelis who were willing to take risks for peace in September of 1993 are burying their children in March of 1996. Benjamin Netanyah, a Likut leader who has opposed Oslo from the beginning, who spoke at rallies where Rabin was depicted in Nazi uniforms, who has spent years telling the Israeli public that the peace process is a mortal threat, defeats Shimon Perez in the 1996 elections by less than one percentage point.

17:22 SPEAKER_00: Netanyahu's approach to Oslo is corrosive in a way that's difficult to combat because it maintains the appearance of compliance. He signs agreements, the Hebron Protocol, the Y River Memorandum, transferring limited authority to the Palestinian Authority in designated areas, meeting the letter of what's required. And simultaneously, he accelerates settlement construction across the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The signal is incoherent for the Palestinians and raging. Israel is negotiating their future statehood while building permanent Israeli cities on the land that the state is supposed to occupy.

18:05 SPEAKER_00: Every new settlement unit is a statement of intent that contradicts every word spoken at the negotiating table. An Arafat, who should be using this period to build a Palestinian society worthy of the statehood he's negotiating for?

Corruption Inside The Palestinian Authority

18:23 SPEAKER_00: Well, he does something nearly as destructive on his side. He builds a Palestinian authority that is corrupt at every level, authoritarian in its governance, and increasingly detached from the people it claims to represent. The democratic institutions that the Oslo Accords envision never materialize. Instead, Arafat constructs patronage networks, multiple overlapping security services, whose primary function is maintaining his personal power rather than building a state.

19:08 SPEAKER_00: Instead, he chose kleptocracy. It is one of the great wasted opportunities of the 20th century, and the Palestinian people are paying for that up to this day. Security cooperation between the Palestinian Authority and Israel, a cornerstone of the Oslo framework, is inconsistent and deeply resented by the Palestinian public who see their own police acting as subcontractors for the occupation. Palestinian Authority arrests militants that Israel identifies as threat. And ordinary Palestinians watch their own security forces enforcing the will of the occupier under a different flag.

19:50 SPEAKER_00: By the time Bill Clinton convenes the Camp David Summit in July of 2000, its last serious attempt to forge a final agreement before the precedency ends has been almost completely consumed by settlement construction on one side and institutional rock on the other.

20:14 SPEAKER_00: Let me take it to Camp Date.

Camp David And The No Counteroffer

20:18 SPEAKER_00: That is what happens here. And what doesn't happen? It will be argued about for as long as the stop is determined. Every telling of the story reveals as much about the teller as about the event itself.

20:44 SPEAKER_00: Barak, who has campaigned as the heir to Rabin's legacy, makes an offer that goes further than any previous Israeli proposal. Palestinian statehood in roughly 90% of the West Bank and all of Gaza, a capital and neighborhoods in the outskirts of East Jerusalem, no form of church sovereignty over the holy sites of the old city. Clinton presents this historic bravely. Barack presents it as the outer limit of what Israel can possibly occupy. But Arafat says no. And he doesn't counter.

21:25 SPEAKER_00: Now, why he says no depends on which room you're standing in when you ask the question. The version that dominates Western media at the time, the version Clinton promotes publicly and aggressively, is that Barack made a generous offer and Arafat rejected it because he was never serious about peace. Because he couldn't bring himself to accept a Jewish state, because he was holding out for a maximalist position that no Israeli government could ever accept. And there's something to this. Arafat's refusal to make a counter offer is.

22:00 SPEAKER_00: At a minimum, a strategic failure of enormous proportions. You don't just say no. You say no, and here's what we need. But he didn't do that. And the failure to counter is indefensible regardless of your sympathies. But the offer itself. When you look at the maps rather than the talking points, and I want to be specific about this because the details matter in the story.

22:29 SPEAKER_00: The proposed Palestinian territory is not a contagious state, but a patchwork of carved up settlement blocks and Israeli-controlled bypass roads that would remain under Israeli sovereignty. East Jerusalem is offered in name, but the actual boundaries of what's being called East Jerusalem are drawn to exclude the areas that matter most to Palestinians, including much of the old city's immediate surroundings. And the refugees, the 700,000 people from the 1948 NACA and their millions of descendants, the people carrying the keys we talked about in episode three are offer acknowledgement of their suffering with no right of return.

23:12 SPEAKER_00: For a Palestinian leader to sign that deal, go home and tell his people that he gave away their right of return, the foundational demand of the Palestinian national movement, the thing the keys symbolizes the promise that has held the refugee community together for half a century. Well, that's political suicide. Possibly literal suicide. I think Arafat made the wrong call. And I think he should have countered, he should have pushed for something closer to what the Palestinians could accept. Should have used the momentum of American engagement to negotiate a better deal rather than walking away empty-handed.

23:53 SPEAKER_00: But I also think that the framing that this was a brilliant offer rejected by an irrational man is self-serving in ways that obscure what the deal actually looked like for the Palestinian side. Both things can be true, and both things are true. And the result is that Camp David fails Clinton, who blames Arafat publicly, and the ground is clear for the war's violence since 1948.

24:46 SPEAKER_00: A suicide bomber walks into a Sbarrow pizza restaurant in the center of Jerusalem during lunch rush hour.

The Second Intifada Ignites

24:55 SPEAKER_00: At this time, the restaurant is full of families, parents with children, teenagers on summer break, tourists. The bomber detonates a vest packed with explosives, nails, and screws. 15 people are killed, including seven children and a pregnant woman. 130 others are wounded. The Sparrow Bombing is one of scores of suicide attacks that define the second intifada. The wave of violence that erupts in September of 2000 and will kill roughly 8,000 Israelis, most of them civilians, over the next five years.

25:34 SPEAKER_00: The Second Intifada is not the stone-throwing uprising of 1987. It is more like a war, fought with suicide belts and helicopter gunships, and the experience of living through it reshapes Israeli society in ways that are still visible today. The trigger is disputed, and the dispute does matter.

26:16 SPEAKER_00: Palestinians respond with protests that escalate into violence, and within weeks the entire West Bank and Gaza are burning.

26:28 SPEAKER_00: The Israeli narrative holds that the violence was pre-planned by Arafat, that Sharon's visit was merely a pretext. The Palestinian narrative holds that the visit was the match thrown onto fuel that decades of occupation and failed peace talks had been accumulating.

26:48 SPEAKER_00: The truth contains elements of both. But the deeper truth is that by September of 2000, the gap between what Oslo promised and what it delivered had become so wide that something was going to ignite it. If not Sharon's visit, while something else.

27:40 SPEAKER_00: You attend funerals for people you knew or people who knew people you knew. And the circle of grief expands until it encompasses everyone. A society learns to be afraid of the ordinary spaces of daily life. The commute, the cafe, the shopping mall. The canope changes a country from the inside out.

28:07 SPEAKER_00: What does it feel like to be a Palestinian during the Second Intifada? What it feels like is this.

28:39 SPEAKER_00: Targeted assassinations take out Hamas and Islamic jihad commanders, and regularly also kill the civilians who happen to be nearby. Family members, neighbors, bystanders. In April of 2002, Israel launches Operation Defensive Shield, the largest military operation in the West Bank since 1967, reoccupying Palestinian cities wholesale, conducting house-to-house searches for militants and weapon storage. In the Janine Refugee Camp, a battle that lasts two weeks kills dozens of Palestinians, levels much of the camp's infrastructure, and produces images that horrify the international community.

29:31 SPEAKER_00: I am gonna step away from my usual neutral tone in the podcast to say something here. I think it would be easy to present the second intifada as a symmetrical exchange of suffering and just move on. The suffering is real on both sides. But the symmetry is false. Israel is a state with an army, an air force, intelligence services, and the backing of the most powerful country in the world, the United States. The Palestinians, by contrast, are a stateless population under military occupation with no army, no air force, and no meaningful international protection.

30:11 SPEAKER_00: The suicide bombings are atrocities. Deliberately targeting civilians is a war crime, and no political cause on earth justifies walking into a pizza restaurant and murdering children. That needs to be said clearly and without equivocation. And the Israeli military response, however legitimate its stated objectives, imposes costs on a civilian population that has no capacity to defend itself or hold anyone accountable. The power imbalance doesn't excuse the bombings, but ignoring it, pretending that there are two armies fighting on a level field, well, that is its own form of dishonesty, and I'm not going to do it.

The Barrier That Both Sides Fear

30:58 SPEAKER_00: Israel begins building the separation barriers in 2002. And those barriers tell you everything you need to know about the impossibility of this conflict, Yacht. In some places is a chain-linked fence with sensors and patrol roads. In others, near population centers, near the green light, a 26-foot concrete wall topped with watchtowers and surveillance cameras. The Israeli government calls it a security fence. Palestinians call it the apartheid wall. And here's what's maddening about the barrier.

31:33 SPEAKER_00: The thing that makes it so resistant to a clean moral judgment. Both sides are right about it. Because the barrier does work. After it goes up, suicide bombings inside Israel drop from dozens per year to nearly zero. It saves Israeli lives, and that fact cannot be dismissed or minimized. Israeli families who lost children to bus bombings have a right to demand that the government prevent the next bombing. And the barrier thus prevent it. The barrier also cuts deep into the West Bank in several places, not following the Green Line, but detouring around settlement blocks to keep them on the Israeli side.

32:17 SPEAKER_00: Which means it slices through Palestinian territory, separating farmers from their fields, workers from their jobs, families from each other, villages from the roads that connect them to the rest of the West Bank. A farmer whose olive grove ends up on the wrong side of the wall needs a military permit to tend trees his family has owned for generations. The permit may or may not be granted. The checkpoint may or may not be open when he arrives. His harvest, the economic foundation of his family's life, depends on the decisions of a 19-year-old soldier who has never met him, who has no idea how old those trees are, who is following orders that were written in an office a hundred miles away.

33:09 SPEAKER_00: If you can only see one of those things, then you're not looking hard enough.

Gaza Withdrawal Then Blockade

33:15 SPEAKER_00: The second antifada grinds to a halt not through a peace agreement, but through mutual exhaustion. By 2005, both sides have inflicted and absorbed enough devastation to reach a stalemate that nobody dignifies with the word peace. Oslo is dead as a framework, a two-state solution, which a decade earlier seemed like a question of when rather than if, sounds increasingly like something people say at international conferences when they don't have anything better to offer.

33:54 SPEAKER_00: In 2005, Ariel Sharon, the last person on earth you'd expect to do this, orders every Israeli settlement and soldier out of the Gaza Strip. The architect of the settlement movement dismantles his own creation in Gaza. Israeli soldiers physically drag screaming settlers from homes they've built over decades, carry them to buses, and drive them out. The settlers supporters call the soldiers Nazis. The images split Israeli society down the middle, and the political cost is so catastrophic that no Israeli government has removed the settlement anywhere else ever since.

34:37 SPEAKER_00: The withdrawal is supposed to be a test case. If Israel leaves and Gaza prospers, the argument for further withdrawal from the West Bank strengthens. If Israel leaves and Gaza becomes a launching pad for attack, the arguments for holding the West Bank permanently wins. What actually happens is worse than either scenario.

35:02 SPEAKER_00: In January of 2006, Hamas wins the Palestinian legislative election. Elections that the United States and the European Union demanded, pushed for, insisted upon, and then immediately rejected when democracy produced the wrong results. Palestinians voted for Hamas less out of enthusiasm for armor systems and the destruction of Israel than out of sheer disgust with FATA, which turned the Palestinian Authority into a patronage machine that enriched its leadership while ordinary people get poorer and more hopeful.

35:38 SPEAKER_00: Amass random competence, an incorruptibility, and actually delivering services to communities that FATA had neglected. It also ran on refusing to recognize Israel's right to exist. And can't forget that the package comes money. Hamas and Fatah fight a brief brutal civil war in 2007. Hamas ceases control of the local.

36:27 SPEAKER_00: The West Bank remains under Fatah and the Palestinian Authority, which increasingly governs at Israel's suffering rather than on its own authority.

36:41 SPEAKER_00: Israel and Egypt impose a blockade on the Gaza Strip. What enters, what leaves, who crosses, it is all controlled. The stated justification is security, and the justification has some substance. Without the blockade, Hamas imports weapons, rockets, tunneling equipment, everything it needs to attack Israeli communities across the fence. The blockade is a security measure that creates a humanitarian catastrophe, however. Both of those things again are happening at the same time in the same policy, and neither one cancels the other out.

37:26 SPEAKER_00: Because the numbers two million people, 140 square miles, one of the highest population densities on earth, gonna convey what it means to actually live there.

37:53 SPEAKER_00: She has never left Gaza. Border crossings are functionally closed to most civilians. She has applied for exit permits and has been denied. Youth unemployment is above 60%. The electricity comes on four hours a day. Maybe six of the fuel shipments have come through. Maybe two if they haven't.

38:24 SPEAKER_00: Welcome press into whatever window the grid provides.

38:31 SPEAKER_00: The atmosphere beneath Casa has been contaminated by some water intrusion and untreated sewage. And the materials to repair the treatment infrastructure are restricted under the blockade because Israel classifies them as potential dual-use items. She can see the Mediterranean from her rooftop. The beach is right there. She can't swim in it because the sewage outflows have contaminated the shoreline, and the fishing zone is restricted by the Israeli Navy.

39:06 SPEAKER_00: This is what our blockade does to two million people over 16 years. It doesn't kill most of them outright. It makes life slowly, systematically unlivable.

A War Cycle That Resets

39:18 SPEAKER_00: The economy strangled, the infrastructure crumbling, an entire generation growing up in conditions that would radicalize almost anyone. And I say that not to excuse Hamas or its methods, but because if you look at Gaza under blockade and express surprise that it produces extremism, you're not paying attention. Desperation is a factory, and this blockade has been running the machinery for almost two decades now. Between 2008 and 2023, Gaza goes through multiple rounds of the same war. A war that has become so cyclical that it has its own grim rhythm.

40:01 SPEAKER_00: Hamas and other militant groups fire rockets at Israeli communities over or near the border. The rockets are real, they target civilians, they terrorize families who have seconds to reach a shelter when the sirens sound, and they kill people. Israel responds with airstrikes and in some cases ground operations. Military campaigns wage in one of the most densely populated places on earth, where the distance between a militant position and a school is measured in meters rather than miles. Thousands of Palestinian civilians are killed across the operation, including large numbers of children, because in a place this small and this crowded, there's no way to wage war without killing civilians.

40:46 SPEAKER_00: Everyone involved, Israeli commanders, Hamas leaders, international observers know this before the first bomb falls. But the wars happen anyway. Each cycle follows the same script. Rockets, bombardment, dead civilians on both sides, international outrage, a ceasefire broker by Egypt or Qatar, a pause that changes nothing about the underlying conditions, and then a reset. The people trapped inside the cycle. Israeli families in Storat and the Gaza envelope. Israeli families in Storat and the Gaza Envelope who live with fifteen-second warnings and reinforced rooms.

41:30 SPEAKER_00: Palestinian families in Gaza City and Khanis who have nowhere to shelter, nowhere to flee, pay the price for a political failure that none of them created, but that none of them can escape.

41:44 SPEAKER_01: And then comes October, 2023.

October 7 And A Shattered Promise

41:56 SPEAKER_00: On October 7, 2023, a Saturday, Shabbat, the holiday of Simchat Tura. Hamas breaches the Gaza border fence. Thousands of rockets are fired at Israeli cities as cover while roughly 3,000 fighters pour through at multiple points, overrun military bases, and attack kibbutzim and communities across the Gaza envelope. A music festival near the town of Fraim, young people dancing in a field at dawn, becomes a killing ground. The parallel to the Yom Kippur war is unavoidable. 50 years almost to the week, the same catastrophic intelligence failures, not a failure of information because Israeli intelligence had the information, but a failure of imagination, the inability to believe that the enemy would do the one thing it was clearly preparing to do.

42:53 SPEAKER_00: In 1973, the assumption was that Egypt wouldn't dare cross the Suez Canal. In 2023, the assumption was that Hamas was contained, deterred, or interested in governing Gaza and collecting Qatari aid money, and then launching a suicidal assault across one of the most heavily surveilled borders on Earth.

43:19 SPEAKER_00: We mistook the enemy's rationality for the enemy's intentions. And beneath the military shock, the deeper wound. The one that reaches all the way back to episode one of this series. The state that was built to guarantee Jewish safety. The state whose founding promise was never again, failed to protect his own people on a Saturday morning. Kibbutzin that were founded by Holocaust survivors' children were overrun. The communities closest to the border, the ones that bore the most risk and received the most assurances, were the ones that burned.

44:01 SPEAKER_00: Approximately twelve hundred people are killed on October 7th. The deadliest day for Jewish people since the Holocaust. Entire families are murdered in their homes. Roughly 250 people are taken hostage and dragged back into Gaza. The footage that emerges from the attackers' own body cameras, from security feeds, from survivors' phones, document atrocities against civilians that produce a grief and a fury in Israeli society that goes beyond politics, beyond strategy, into something more primal. The social contract between the state and its citizens who will keep you safe, shatter that morning, and the rage that follows is the rage of people who trusted a promise and watched it break.

44:51 SPEAKER_00: Israel's military response is the most sustained and destructive campaign in Gaza's history. The Israeli government declares his objective as the destruction of Hamas as a military and governing force. And what follows is a ground invasion and aerial bombardment campaign that reduces vast sections of Gaza to rubble. Entire neighborhoods are leveled, hospitals are damaged or destroyed. The water system, the sewage system, the electrical grid, the roads, the infrastructure of daily life is dismantled systematically.

45:26 SPEAKER_00: Tens of thousands of Palestinians are killed, a large number of them civilians, women, children, families who have nowhere to flee in a territory where there is no safe zone and no exit. The population already under blockade for sixteen years is displaced again and again within Gaza's own border, told to move south as operations advanced and bombed in the areas that they've been told to move to. Israel invokes his right to self-defense and the unprecedented nature of the October 7th attacks. International legal bodies, humanitarian organizations, and growing segments of global public opinion argue that the scale of the military response constitutes collective punishment of a civilian population for the actions of a militant group.

46:17 SPEAKER_00: Proceedings are open at the International Court of Justice. Eight organizations describe conditions in Gaza as catastrophic. And the debate about proportionality, about the loss of war, about where self-defense ends and destruction of a society begins plays out across every screen and every dinner table while the people of Gaza dig through the rubble for their families and the families of Israeli hostages expect their own government to prioritize bringing their loved ones home alive.

46:52 SPEAKER_00: I am once again going to break away from my narrative to say that I've been thinking about this for the entire time I've been working on this series. The Israeli families who lost people on October 7th deserve justice. The hostage families deserve their loved ones back. Israel has a right to defend itself against an organization that brutally murdered twelve hundred of its people and has promised to do it again. All of that is true.

47:47 SPEAKER_00: I don't know what the right military response to October 7 looks like. But I know it doesn't look like this. Americans should know a little bit about this. After September 11 of 2001, the United States invaded Afghanistan and later used the same pretext to invade Iraq, millions of Afghan and Iraqi lives have paid the price. Both populations have been failed by leaders who made promises they couldn't keep, and decisions whose cost are paid by the others, by decades of choices made in offices and war rooms, by people who will never carry a house key in their pocket, or hear a rocket siren in their kitchen.

Holding Two Claims At Once

48:44 SPEAKER_00: The Second Temple burning, a people beginning an exile that would last 20 centuries. We followed the longing that survived it. Next year in Jerusalem, set by people who'd never seen the city in countries that would eventually try to murder them. We watched a Viennese journalist walk out of a Parisian courtyard where the mob was screaming, death to the Jews, and into the idea that would become the state of Israel. We watched that state built on land where another people had lived for the same 20 centuries, built in the same years those people were being driven from their homes, carrying their keys, teaching their children the names of villages that were already being erased from maps.

49:31 SPEAKER_00: We sat inside an occupation that was supposed to last months and is now older than most people living under it. And we stood on the lawn where two old enemies shook hands and mented, we watched what happened after. Now we are here. Settlements expanding, camps still standing, Gaza in ruins. The two-state solution spoken of in the past ends more often than the present. Two peoples further from peace than they've ever been. Further than the day when Rabin and Arafat shook hands. I don't have any conclusions.

50:13 SPEAKER_00: I've spent months inside this story and I persist every attempt I've made to wrap it up cleanly. But I've come away with this.

50:26 SPEAKER_00: The framing is comfortable and it is wrong. It is a collision between wounds. Two people who've each decided that the other's existence threatens their own. Each capable of extraordinary courage and extraordinary cruelty. Sometimes in the same week, sometimes by the same person, but they're both trapped. The Jewish claim to this land was forged in the fire of 70 CE and carried across 20 centuries of exile that ended in gas chambers. Palestinian claim was billed through centuries of farming the land, building on it, burying the dead in it, and refusing to leave.

51:08 SPEAKER_00: I spent five episodes trying to hold both of those claims at the same time without dropping either one, and I'll tell you, it is exhausting. The temptation to simplify is enormous. The temptation to pick a side, decide who's right, let the other side's suffering become background noise in your moral certainty. I understand those temptations because I've felt them, I've resisted it, and I think resisting it is the only honest thing to do when material that is painful.

51:42 SPEAKER_00: There's a Jewish prayer for the dead called the Kaddish. And the strange things about it is that it never mentions death. It praises God in the first life. There's an Arabic word to mut that means something like steadfastness. The refusal to be moved, to be erased, to give up and go somewhere else. I keep thinking about those two ideas. Because they're both about surviving destruction. They are both, in their way, beautiful. The affirmation of life after everything has been taken. The refusal to disappear no matter what is done to you.

52:22 SPEAKER_00: Two of the most admirable impulses that human beings have. And in this land, they run directly into each other. Because the affirmation of Jewish life here and the Palestinian refusal to leave here are the same story told by two peoples who cannot hear each other telling it.

52:46 SPEAKER_00: I don't know how this ends. But I believe that understanding how it started, how we got from the burning temple to this moment, through all the horror and all the hope without turning either side into a cartoon, that has to count for something.

53:04 SPEAKER_01: That has to be better than the screaming. And that's what I've tried to do. I hope it was worth your time.

53:21 SPEAKER_00: Next time, I'm double helix.

Closing Thoughts And Next Story

53:24 SPEAKER_00: After five episodes of the most intense history this show has ever covered, we're going to do something a little different. In 1932, the Australian government declares war on 20,000 Emus. They are destroying wheat farms in Western Australia. And they send in World War I batters armed with Lewis guns. Wouldn't you believe it? The Emus win. It is the funniest, strangest, most Australian military defeat in history, and it tells you everything you need to know about humanity's relationship with a continent that has never once cooperated with our plants.

54:04 SPEAKER_00: Until then, thank you for listening. We will see you soon.