Israel & Palestine: Six Days that Changed Everything (Part 4)

Paratroopers Reach The Western Wall

0:05 It is the morning of June 7, 1967. A company of Israeli paratroopers is pushing through the narrow alleyways of Jerusalem's old city, past the Lions Gate, past the Temple Mount, past stone walls that still carry the scars of the 1948 fighting, down a flight of worn steps towards a plaza that has been cleared of rubble than widened by the Jordanians into a modest open space. And then they see it. The Western Wall.

0:41 The wall rises 40 feet above them. Massive limestone blocks fitted without mortar by Herodian engineers 20 centuries ago. The last remnants of the retaining wall that held the platform of the Second Temple. Tufts of caper bush grow from the cracks between the stones. The surface is golden in the morning light. For 19 years, since the Jewish quarter fell in 1948, no Jew has been permitted to stand here. The Jordanians barred them from this wall, from this plaza, from this city. And the absence has been an open wound in Israeli national life.

1:24 It is the holiest site in Judaism, visible from the hills to the west but unreachable, separated by a border and a war that never formally ended. The paratroopers are young men, mostly in their twenties, secular kibbutzine soldiers who've been fighting house to house through the old city since dawn. They are not, most of them, particularly religious, but when they reach the wall, something happens that none of them expected and that every one of them will remember for the rest of their lives. They weep.

2:03 Rabbi Shlomo Goren, the chief military chaplain, who has followed the paratroopers through the fighting with a Torah scroll under one arm and a Shafar in the other, presses himself against the wall and blows the ram's horn. The sound is raw and ancient. The same sound that Jewish tradition says will announce the coming of the Messiah. And it echoes off of the stones of the Temple Mound and fills the old city. Lieutenant General Mota Gur, the brigade commander, grabs the field radio and broadcasts three words that will become among the most famous in Israeli history.

2:44 Harha Bayit Yadanu. The Temple Mount is in our hands. Paratroopers who have killed men this morning press their faces against the stone and suck. Some of them stuff handwritten prayers into the cracks between the blocks. The same act that Jews have performed at this wall since Hadrian grudgingly permitted them to weep here one day a year, nineteen centuries ago. A nation that was born in exile, that maintained its identity through memory and text, and an unbroken promise to return, is touching the last physical remnants of the world it lost in the year 70 CE.

3:26 The echo reaches all the way back to the first episode of this series. To the screams that Josephus described rising from Jerusalem when the temple burned, to the priests performing their final sacrifices as the ceiling collapsed above them, to Jochan and Ben Sekai being smuggled out in a coffin to reinvent Judaism from the ruins. Two thousand years of next year in Jerusalem, and now Israeli soldiers are standing at the wall with rifles in their hands and tears in their faces.

4:03 In six days, Israel has conquered the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, is Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights, tripling the territory under its control and achieving a military victory so total that it reshapes the strategic map of the entire Middle East. For Israelis, this is the moment of redemption. The exile is truly over. Jerusalem is whole. The existential threat has been annihilated. The nation that faced destruction has now emerged triumphant. For Palestinians, this is the moment when the last fragments of their homeland fall under Israeli military control.

4:48 When the refugees of the West Bank and Gaza, many of them already displaced once in 1948, find themselves governed by the army of the state that displaced them. The occupation begins. And the victory that fell like salvation will become a trap from which neither side has yet escaped.

5:19 This is part four of our series on Israel and Palestine. Six dates that change everything. 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 walk 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.

Six Days That Redraw The Map

6:01 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.

6:50 But since we've reformatted the show, this is officially episode 60. And I'm really excited that we've gotten here. The show has continued to grow, it continues to perform well, and that's because of you the people who are listening. We're sharing episodes, who are telling friends and family about the show, and I do not take that for granted. They say most podcasts don't make it past two or three episodes. So the fact that we're sitting at 60 that tells me something about what we're building here and what we can do.

7:22 I've got a lot of new episodes coming for you after this series, and I can't wait to share them with you. So I just wanted to sneak in real quick and say thank you once again for listening, for helping us reach this milestone. I am eternally grateful. Alright. Let's get on with the show. We ended episode three with the aftermath of 1948. A new state absorbent immigrants at a staggering pace. Refugee camps that were supposed to be temporary, filling with families who still carry their house keys, and a green line drawn on a map in ink that everyone called temporary, and nobody moved to change.

Series Setup And Milestone Thanks

8:06 For nineteen years that line held. Israel existed within its 1949 borders, the Arab states refused to recognize it, and the Palestinians waited in the camps where I returned that would never come.

Nasser’s Bluff Becomes A Trap

8:36 The crisis begins with a bluff that becomes a trap. Gamal Abder Nasser, the president of Egypt, hero of the Arab world, the man who nationalized the Suez Canal and survived a joint British-French-Israeli invasion to punish him for it, has spent the spring of 1967 trading threats with Israel over Syrian border skirmishes.

After 1948 The Frozen Green Line

9:00 In May, acting on false Soviet intelligence that Israel is massing troops on the Syrian border, Nasser makes a series of escalating moves that are probably intended as brinksmanship that back him into a corner from which the war is the only exit. He orders UN peacekeeping forces out of the Sinai Peninsula, and the UN, to the astonishment of nearly everyone, complies. He masses Egyptian troops along the Israeli border, moving 100,000 soldiers and nearly a thousand tanks into the desert, and on May 22nd, he closes the Straits of Tehran to Israel's shipping, cutting off Israel's access to the Red Sea and by extension, its oil supply from Iran.

9:47 Israel has declared publicly, repeatedly, that closing the straits is a cause of Beli, an act of war. Nasser knows this. He closes them anyway. Whether he genuinely wants war or has simply maneuvered himself into a position where he can't back down without losing faith across the Arab world is a question historians still argue over. What is beyond argument is the effect on the Israeli public.

Tel Aviv Braces For Destruction

10:16 Let me take you to Tel Aviv in late May of 1967 because the country that's about to win the most decisive military victory of the 20th century doesn't know it is going to win. What it does know is that it is about to die.

10:38 We are in late May of 1967, in Tel Aviv, Israel. Parks are being dug up to serve as mass graves. Rabbis are consecrating public spaces as cemeteries. Schools are being converted into hospitals. Families are stockpiling food and water. The Israeli public, 19 years removed from the War of Independence and 22 years removed from the Holocaust, is staring at maps that show Egyptian armor massed on the southern border, Syrian artillery positioned on the Golan Heights overlooking Israeli farms, and Jordanian troops deployed along the border that runs through the heart of Jerusalem.

11:21 They are terrified.

11:31 Later describes the national mood as a fear so deep it was physical. Israelis are listening to Nasser's speeches on Cairo Radio. Speeches in which he declares our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel. The Arab people want to fight. Whether Nasser really means this, literally, or is plain to a domestic audience, doesn't really matter in Tel Aviv. The people hearing those words have parents who survive outswit. They live in a country nine miles wide at its narrowest point. The margin for error is zero.

12:15 The three-week waiting period between Nasser's closure of the Straits and the start of the war, the Tecufa Hahamtana, as Israelis call it, is one of the most harrowing periods in the country's history. The army has been mobilized, which means the economy has essentially stopped. Israel is too small to maintain both a civilian economy and a fully mobilized military. Every day the crisis continues, cost the country more than it can afford. The government debates endlessly. The generals push for a preemptive strike.

12:50 The politicians hesitate, seeking international support that doesn't come. President Johnson, the American president, tells Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban that Israel will not be alone unless it decides to go alone. A statement so carefully ambiguous that it means nothing and everything all at once.

The Preemptive Air Strike Plan

13:15 June 1st, Bosha Dayan is appointed Minister of Defense, and the nation excels. Barely, partially, because Dayan is the one-eyed general with the black eye patch who commanded the Sinai campaign in 1956 and who projects the particular calm of a man who has already decided what to do. On June 4th, the Israeli cabinet votes to go to war. At 7.45 in the morning, nearly the entire Israeli Air Force takes off from bases across the country and flies west over the Mediterranean, dropping to wavetop altitude to avoid Egyptian radar.

13:57 The planes turn south, cross the Egyptian coastline, and at 7.45 Cairo time strike 11 Egyptian air bases simultaneously.

14:15 The timing is calculated with a precision that borders on arrogance. Israeli intelligence knows that Egyptian pilots take breakfast between 7.30 and 8 a.m., and their commanding officers arrive at nine. And that gap between the Dawn Patrol's return and the next scheduled flights is exactly the window in which Egyptian aircraft will be sitting on their runways, fueled, armed, and unprotected.

14:46 In less than three hours, the Israeli Air Force destroys 338 Egyptian aircraft, nearly the entire Egyptian Air Force, most of them on the ground. Runways are cratered with specially designed bombs that prevent the surviving planes from taking off. By noon on the first day, Egypt has effectively lost the war because in desert warfare, whoever controls the sky controls the ground. Every Egyptian tank, every troop convoy, every supply line is now exposed to air attack with no possibility of fighter cover.

15:21 Nassir doesn't know this yet. Neither does King Hussein of Jordan.

15:30 On the same morning in Amman, Jordan, at 8 30 a.m., Nasser telephones King Hussein and tells him that Egypt is winning.

Jordan Opens Fire On Jerusalem

15:39 That the radar screens are showing an Egyptian aircraft over Tel Aviv. That Israeli bases are being destroyed. It is a lie. Nasser knows it is a lie. His air force is burning on the ground. But he needs Jordan to open a second front, to divide Israeli forces, to create enough chaos that the disaster in the Sinite might somehow be contained. Hussein, who has signed a mutual defense pact with Egypt just days earlier under enormous domestic pressure, believes Nasser. He orders the Jordanian Arab Legion to open fire on West Jerusalem.

16:21 Jordanian artillery begins shelling Israeli neighborhoods. Jordanian troops advance on Government House, the former British Mandate headquarters that sits on a hill between the two halves of the city. It is the worst decision of Hussein's reign, and he will know it within hours. By opening fire on Jerusalem, he gives Israel the justification to do the one thing that the Israeli government has not yet decided to do. Take East Jerusalem, the Old City, and the West Bank.

16:57 The war unfolds with a speed that stuns everyone, including the Israelis. In the south, Israeli armor punches through Egyptian lines in the Sinai and races towards the Suez Canal. In the north, Israeli forces storm the Golan Heights, fortified Syrian positions on a botop plateau that overlook the entirety of Galilee. In some of the most ferocious fighting of the war, climbing into entrenched positions under direct fire. And in the center, Israeli paratroopers fight through the old city of Jerusalem, house by house, street by street, towards the western wall.

17:38 In six days, the map of the Middle East is completely redrawn. Israel has conquered territory three times its own size. The Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank, its Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. The Arab armies are shattered. Nasser offers his resignation on Egyptian television, weeping. The Egyptian public refuses to accept it, but its aura of invincibility is gone forever. The Arab world sinks into a shock so deep that it reshapes the region's politics for a generation. And Israel stands in the ruins of his victory, intoxicated and uncertain, holding territories full of people who did not ask to be conquered.

Occupation Begins In Daily Life

18:27 Let me take you to a Palestinian village in the West Bank in the weeks after the war. Because the occupation doesn't begin with a policy paper or a cabinet debate. It begins with a soldier at a crossroads.

18:44 At a village near Anabolis on July of 1967, a farmer named Hassan, and this, drawn from the kind of testimony collected by researchers and journalists across the West Bank in the years following the occupation, is working his olive grove when he hears that soldiers are in the village. Israeli soldiers. He has never spoken to an Israeli soldier. He has never been to Israel. He has lived his entire life within a few miles of this village, under Jordanian rule since 1948, under Ottoman rule before that.

19:19 The border between his world and Israel, there's been a line on a map that he has never crossed. Now, the line has moved. It moved in six days, and it moved over him, and there is an Israeli military jeep parked in the center of his village, and a twenty-year-old soldier with a rifle telling him, in Hebrew, which he doesn't understand, that there is a curfew. Over the following weeks, the architecture of occupation takes shape around Hassan's life. A military governor is appointed for the region.

19:56 Jordanian law remains technically in force, but it can be superseded at any time by military orders. Israeli soldiers can enter any home at any hour without a warrant. Movement between villages now requires a permit. The roads that connect Palestinian communities to each other are now controlled by checkpoints, where soldiers decide who passes and who waits. This is what occupation looks like at ground level. Not a single dramatic event, but a slow accumulation of control over the ordinary details of daily life.

20:32 When you can travel, where you can work, whether your children's school is open today or closed by military order, because there was a protest last week, whether the water that feeds your olive tree will be allocated to your village or diverted to the new settlement being built on the hill above you.

Settlements Turn Temporary Into Permanent

20:51 Because the other thing that's coming is settlements.

21:00 Within weeks of the war's end, the first Jewish settlements begin to appear in the occupied territories. Some are established by the government for strategic reasons. Military outposts along the Jordan Valley, kibbutzim, on the Goline Heights. But the movement that will transform the occupation into something permanent comes from a different source. Religious ideology. A group of religious Zionists, led by Rabbi Zib Yehuda Kuk, the son of the first Askenazi chief rabbi of the Mandate Palestine, sees the conquest of the West Bank as a divine miracle, the next stage in the messianic redemption of the Jewish people.

21:43 For Cook and his followers, the territories captured in 1967 are Judea and Samaria, the biblical heartland of ancient Israel, the land where Abraham walked, where David ruled, where the prophets spoke. Drawing from these territories would be a stint against God's plan for Jewish history. 1968, a group of Cook's followers led by Rabbi Moshe Levinger checks into a hotel in Hebron for Passover. The same city where 67 Jews were massacred in 1929. The same city that had a Jewish community for centuries before 1948 and refused to leave.

22:42 With this, the pattern is set. Settlers establish a precedent, sometimes with government approval, sometimes without it, and the state follows with infrastructure, roads, water, electricity, and crucially, military protection. Each settlement creates facts on the ground that make withdrawal harder. Each new road connecting a settlement to Israel carves up Palestinian territory into smaller and more fragmented pieces. With each passing year, the line between occupation and annexation blurs even further.

23:20 By the mid-1970s, the settlement movement has organized itself into Gush Emunim, the block of the faithful, and has become a political force powerful enough to shape Israeli government policy, regardless of which party holds power. Settlements that begin as clusters of trailers on hilltops become towns with schools and shopping centers and bus lines running directly to Tel Aviv and to Jerusalem. The settlers see themselves as the heirs of the kibbutz pioneers, idealists building a new society on redeemed land.

23:57 The Palestinians see them as thieves, living on stolen ground under the protection of an army that enforces one set of laws for Israelis and another for Arabs. Both perceptions contain some truth, and the settlement project, more than any other single factor, will make the conflict progressively harder to resolve.

Palestinians Shift To Self-Liberation

24:21 The defeat of 1967 transforms the Palestinian national movement in a way that the Arab states never intended and cannot control. For nineteen years, the Palestinians waited for the Arab armies to liberate them. They waited in the camps, they waited behind the rhetoric, they waited for Nasser and Hussein and the Arab League to honor the promises made in 1948. And in June of 1967, the Arab armies were destroyed in six days. The lesson is annihilating in its clarity. No one is coming to save the Palestinians.

24:58 If liberation is going to happen, the Palestinians will have to do it themselves.

25:07 Yasser Arafat, a compact, restless man with a talent for survival and a carefully cultivated persona that includes the Kafia headdress, its double, and the pistol on his hip, taking control of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1969. The PLO, as he will come to be known under Arafat, turns to armed struggle. Guerrilla attacks across the Israeli border from Jordan and Lebanon, airplane hijackings that put Palestinian cause on the front pages of the world's newspapers, and in September of 1972, the operation at the Munich Olympics, where members of the Black September faction take 11 Israeli athletes hostage and kill them all.

25:54 Munich is a catastrophe for the Palestinian cause in every way that matters. The images of masked gunmen on the balcony of the Olympic village horrify the world and cement an association between Palestinian nationalism and terrorism, and that will take decades to undo. Israel responds with Operation Wrath of God, a years-long assassination campaign targeting the planners and operatives behind Munich across Europe and the Middle East. The cycle of violence escalates. Palestinian cause gains notoriety but loses legitimacy.

26:34 But the armed struggle is only one dimension of Palestinian resistance. In the occupied territories themselves, a quieter, more sustainable form of resistance is taking shape. In universities, in the labor unions, and in the women's organizations, and in the daily refusal to accept the occupation as normal. Palestinian civil society under occupation is producing a generation of leaders who understand that international terrorism is a dead end and that the real struggle will be fought in the streets of Gaza and in the villages of the West Bank.

Munich And The Global Backlash

27:17 On Yom Kippur, the holiest date in the Jewish calendar, when the entire country stops, Egypt and Syria launch a coordinated surprise attack on Israeli positions in the Sinai and the Golan Heights. Egyptian forces cross the Suez Canal in a meticulously planned assault that catches the Israeli military completely off guard. Syrian tanks pour across the Golan in numbers that overwhelm the Israeli defenders. It is October 6, 1973.

27:56 For the first 48 hours, the war goes badly for Israel. On the Golan, a handful of Israeli tank crews fight a desperate holding action against hundreds of Syrian tanks. Battles where individual commanders lose their entire companies and keep fighting because there is nothing between them and Galilee. In the Sinai, Egyptian forces establish a bridgehead across the canal that the Israeli Air Force cannot dislodge because Egypt has deployed Soviet-supplied surface to air missiles that destroy Israeli jets at a rate that the Air Force has never experienced.

28:33 However, Israel recovers. A massive counterattack led by Ariel Sharon crosses the Suez Canal and encircles the Egyptian Third Army. On the Golan, Israeli reserves push the Syrians back across the ceasefire line and advance to within artillery range of Damascus. The war ends in a military stalemate that feels like an Israeli victory on the map, but an Israeli defeat on the national consciousness.

29:08 The cost? Roughly 2,700 Israeli dead in three weeks. Devastates a small country where everyone knows someone who was killed. The intelligence failure that allowed the surprise attack produces a political earthquake. A commission of inquiry forces the resignation of senior military leaders, and Prime Minister Goldamir's government falls. The war that Israelis called the Yom Kippur War leaves a wound that changes the national character forever. A loss of the confidence that defined the post-1967 years replaced by something more guarded and more afraid.

29:53 For the Arab world, the war restores a measure of honor. Anvar Sadat, Nasser's successor as president of Egypt, uses the war's achievements as leverage for a different kind of victory.

Camp David Peace Leaves Palestinians Out

30:06 He travels to Jerusalem in 1977, addresses the Israeli Knesset, and negotiates the Camp David Accord with the Israeli Prime Minister Menechan Begin. Egypt recovers of Sinai in exchange for full peace with Israel. It is the first Arab state to recognize Israel's right to exist.

30:29 Meanwhile, the Palestinians watch from the silence. Camp David contains vague language about Palestinian autonomy that leads us to nowhere. The peace between Egypt and Israel is a peace that trades land for recognition. Egyptian land. Egyptian recognition. Palestinian land is not on the table. Palestinian recognition has not been asked for. The lesson is the same one that Palestinians have been learning since 1948.

The First Intifada Erupts In Gaza

31:11 Let me take you to the moment the Palestinians stop waiting.

31:21 We are at the Jabalia Refugee Camp in the Gaza Strip on December 9th, 1987. An Israeli military vehicle strikes a line of cars at a checkpoint near the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza, killing four Palestinian workers. Whether the collision is an accident or deliberate is disputed. What is not disputed is what happens next. The funeral for the dead men becomes a protest. Protests becomes a riot. And the riot becomes something that nobody, not even the Israelis, not the PLO and its Tunisian exile, nor the Arab governments, anticipated.

32:05 The intifada. The word means shaking off in Arabic, and it spreads across the occupied territories with a speed that stuns everyone. Within days, every refugee camp, every village, every city in the West Bank and in Gaza is an open revolt. And the weapon of choice, the image that defines the uprising and transforms international perception of the conflict is the stone.

32:36 Palestinian teenagers, boys of 14, 15, or 16, face Israeli soldiers with rocks and slingshots. The soldiers, of course, carry rifles, they wear body armor, drive armored vehicles. The teenagers wrap their faces in kafiyas and throw stones at tanks. The asymmetry of the image is overwhelming. It takes a conflict that the world has understood as Arab armies against the Jewish state and replaces it with children against soldiers, David against the Goliath. Except in this version, Israel is Goliath.

33:16 The Israeli military's response follows the directive of defense minister Ishaq Rabin. The Saint Rabin who signed the Lita expulsion order in 1948. The Saint Rabin who will later shake Arafat's hand on the White House lawn. Rabin tells his commanders to use force, might, and beatings to suppress the uprising. Soldiers are ordered to break the bones of stone throwers. The images of Israeli soldiers beating Palestinian teenagers with clubs, broadcast on international television, produced a shift in global opinion that decades of PLO communication and UN resolutions never achieved.

34:04 It is organized from within, by local committees, by neighborhood leaders, by women's groups, by a generation of Palestinians who have grown up under occupation and who understand in a way that the exile leadership does not, that the struggle has to be fought here, in the streets, in front of cameras, with a moral clarity that armed struggle can never achieve. The unified national leadership of the uprising issues communications by leaflet, with photocopied pages distributed hand to hand through the camps and villages, calling for commercial strikes, tax boycotts, and days of protest.

34:45 Palestinian society mobilizes at every level. Shopkeepers close their stores on schedule, farmers refuse to pay taxes to the military administration, teachers hold classes in private homes after the Israelis shut down the universities. It is an act of collective civil disobedience on a scale that the occupation has never faced.

Two-State Thinking And Hamas Rise

35:10 A Palestinian from Jabalia named Sari Nusube, a philosopher educated at Oxford and Harvard, the son of a prominent Jerusalem family, becomes one of the Intifada's intellectual voices, arguing publicly that the goal of the uprising should be a two-state solution, an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, alongside Israel, not the destruction of Israel itself. His position represents a transformative shift in mainstream Palestinian thinking, an implicit acceptance that Israel exists now, and that it will continue to exist, and that Palestinian statehood depends on negotiation rather than military victory.

36:00 At the same time, a very different movement is taking shape in the refugee camps of Gaza. Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, founded in 1987 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. It rejects negotiations entirely. For Hamas, all of Palestine is an Islamic endowment that cannot be surrendered or divided. The movement builds its base through social services, schools, clinics, food distribution, and through arm attacks that will grow in scope and lethality throughout the 1990s.

36:41 The split between those Palestinians who accept a two-state compromise and those who reject any compromise at all will define Palestinian politics from this point forward.

Israel’s Reckoning And The Oslo Path

36:53 For Israel, the Intifada forces a reckoning that the country is not prepared for. The occupation was supposed to be temporary, a security buffer until the Arab states accepted Israel's existence and peace could be negotiated. Twenty years in, it has become permanent, and the cost of maintaining it and soldiers' lives and international standing, in the moral burden of governing two million people who have no vote and no rights, is becoming impossible to sustain.

37:38 Israel must negotiate with the PLO. The organization that Israel has spent twenty years trying to destroy, that it has assassinated, bombed, invaded Lebanon to uproot, is the only body that can deliver a deal on behalf of the Palestinian people. And so, secret negotiations begin in Oslo, Norway.

The 1967 Paradox And Closing Tease

38:09 The paradox of 1967 is that the victory Israel needed for its survival created the conditions for its most intractable crisis. The Six-Day War resolved a problem that had haunted the state since its founding, the existential military threat from neighboring armies, and replaced it with a problem that no army can solve. What do you do with two million people who live on your land you've conquered but who will never accept your rule? Every option from that point forward is a trap. Annex the territories and grant the Palestinians citizenship, and the Jewish majority that defines the state disappears within a generation.

38:52 Annex the territories and deny the Palestinian citizenship, and Israel becomes an apartheid state in all but name. Withdraw from the territories and allow a Palestinian state, and you place a potentially hostile entity within rocket range of Tel Aviv. Maintain the occupation indefinitely, and you condemn both peoples to a permanent state of conflict in which Israeli soldiers govern Palestinian lives and Palestinian resistance targets Israeli civilians. Israel has been cycling through these options for six decades now.

39:28 None of them have worked. None of them can work, because the contradiction is at the center. A democratic Jewish state governing a population that is neither Jewish nor democratic participants in that state. It cannot be resolved without one side giving up something it considers essential to its identity. The settlers believe God gave them this land. Palestinians know their grandparents are buried in it. The Israeli security establishment sees indefensible borders if it withdraws. The Palestinian National Movement sees an unleavable future if it doesn't achieve statehood.

40:08 And in the background, the refugee camps from 1948 are still there, still waiting, still holding the keys.

40:23 In 1993, two old enemies will look at this impossible landscape and decide to try the impossible. A negotiated peace between Israel and the PLO, conducted in secret in a Scandinavian capital by people who have spent their entire lives trying to destroy each other. What they achieve and how it falls apart is the story of our final episode.

40:55 Next time, on Double Helix, a handshake on the White House lawn, Ishak Rabin and Yasser Arafat clasp hands while Bill Clinton spreads his arms behind them. And for one September afternoon in 1993, it looks like the impossible might actually happen. Oslo, Camp David, and the second intifada, the wall in Gaza. The collapse of the peace process and the questions that hang over everything. Is a just resolution still possible, or has the window closed for good? Join us for the final episode of our series on Israel and Palestine.

41:40 Until then, thank you for listening. We will see you soon.