#1288 Omer Bartov - Israel: What Went Wrong?

00:00 Ricardo Lopes: Hello everyone. Welcome to a new episode of The Dissenter. I'm your host, as always, Ricardo Lops, and today I'm joined by a return guest, Dr. Omar Bartov, Dean's Professor of Holocaust and Genocide studies at Brown University, and today we're going to talk about his latest book, Israel What Went Wrong. So Dr. Bartov, welcome back to the show. It's always a big pleasure to everyone.

00:25 Omer Bartov: Thanks for having me here again.

00:27 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, OK, so one of the things I would like to focus on today and you also explore in your book is, uh, Zionism. So what is, uh, Zionism or what was it originally? BECAUSE then we can get into how it might have changed over time and some misconceptions that people have about it.

00:51 Omer Bartov: So Zionism is a movement that began in the late 19th century and it was influenced by many other national movements of that period. It's a movement that assumed that the, the Jewish people, which had existed in one form or another in Europe and in the Middle East and other parts of the world for A couple of millennia was a nation or that could be made into a nation. Most of the Jews of the world at that time, about 80% of the Jews in the entire world, were living in East Central Europe, and they were coming under increasing pressure because of the growth of ethno-nationalism around them, one of whose attributes was also the growth of anti-Semitism. And so what Zionism proposed was that the Jews, like all other groups, form themselves into a nation, claim self-determination as a nation, and then find a place in which they could then implement that idea and create a state or some kind of political entity for themselves. And the territory that Zionism proposed would be where the Jews would create their own state was the ancestral homeland, mythical, historical, of the Jews in what was then Palestine, which at the time in the late 19th century was part of the Ottoman Empire. And as of the early 1880s, small numbers of Jews who increasingly refer to themselves as Zionists start coming to the Ottoman Empire to settle, not as religious Jews, but as the carriers of a new national movement called Zionism. So that's the beginning of Zionism at the time. It was certainly not the most popular movement among Jews. Most Jews who were coming under increasing pressure and violence in Russia, in Ukraine, in Eastern Europe, uh, and also were deeply impoverished, uh, made other decisions. That is, about 2.5 million Jews left East Central Europe and went to North America between the early 1880s and World War I. But increasingly as it becomes more difficult for Jews to migrate, the United States closes off its borders after World War I, and in Europe there is growing resentment against immigrants, especially with the economic crisis. As a result of that, Zionism becomes more popular, as well as the growth of political anti-Semitism that appears to be increasingly threatening for Jews in Europe. And so Zionism from the end of World War I to the outbreak of World War II becomes a much more popular movement and brings several hundreds of thousands of Jews from Europe, mostly from East Central Europe, to Palestine.

04:20 Ricardo Lopes: When was it that Israel's independence or the formation of the state of Israel became intertwined with Palestinian displacement or the displacement of Palestinian people?

04:37 Omer Bartov: So one part of this process that I described is that when Jews start coming to Palestine, uh, which becomes, uh, comes to be called Palestine under the British Mandate after World War One and becomes under the British, the so-called mandate, which is uh permission that the uh that Britain gets from. THE international community to rule over Palestine and cause it that once Jews start coming there, even before World War I, this begins to create a conflict between the indigenous population, Arabs living there who are increasingly referred to as Palestinians or speak of themselves as Palestinians, and these new immigrants from the point of view. Of the Palestinians, as the numbers of Jews grow, the way they experience it is that they are experiencing settler colonialism, that people are coming from Europe and settling the land and encroaching on their own lands and claiming that that's their territory. So the friction between Jews coming to Palestine who believe that they're coming home to their ancestral homeland. And Palestinians who live there who say, well, that's where we live, and you're taking over our land begins from the very beginning. And it's interesting because there were Jews living there before, but the Jews living in Palestine before that were living there as, as, as local communities and were not making national claims. They were, they were Ottoman citizens, and they were part of the society there. The conflict grows as the numbers of Jews grow, and Jewish settlement in Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s is supported by the British. The British in 1917 issued the Balfour Declaration. Which promises that Britain, then the largest empire in the world, would facilitate the creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine. They don't exactly explain what a Jewish national home is. It's kind of open to interpretation, but eventually it becomes the idea of creating a Jewish state, and they helped the Jews create the infrastructure for a future state in Palestine in the 1920s and the early 1930s. So that creates more and more friction between Jews and Palestinians. Uh, THAT comes to a head, of course, eventually in 1948, because in 1947, The British after World War II declared that they no longer want to be the mandatory power in Palestine. They don't have the energy. They don't have the manpower, resources. They're exhausted after World War II. They're fed up with all the friction in Palestine. They want to leave and they hand over Palestine to the UN, the newly established UN, and the United Nations offers a partition resolution. Uh, uh, United Nations on, on November 29th, 1947, uh, decides that Palestine will be divided into two states, a Jewish state and an Arab state. The leadership of the Jewish community, which numbers then about 600,000 people, accepts that petition. It it accepts it reluctantly because it thinks that it's being offered too little. It's being offered just over half of the territory of Palestine. And the leadership of the Palestinians and the Arab states surrounding Palestine reject it because they say it's unfair because 2/3 of the population of Palestine are Palestinians and they're being offered less than half of Palestine. And that leads to the creation of a Jewish state, not a Palestinian state, and to a war that breaks out in 1948. In the course of that war, The Israeli military, which is being established and then becomes the so-called Israel Defense Forces, the IDF, ethnically cleanses most of the Palestinians in that territory. And so by the end of that war with the ceasefire agreements of 1949, A state of Israel is created in which the majority of the population are Jews and the majority of the Palestinians who had lived there become refugees.

09:22 Ricardo Lopes: Do you think it's fair to say that over time Zionism has evolved into what is now an ethno-nationalist and settler colonialist ideology? Do you think that's a fair characterization?

09:40 Omer Bartov: So first of all, Zionism was always an ethno-national movement. It's it didn't evolve into an ethno-national movement. It was an ethno-national movement, that is, it was a movement that claimed that a particular ethnos, Jews, are a nation, and according to the logic of that, such nations deserve a place of their own. This was not a Jewish invention. This was all around. That's what the polls said, Ukrainians, Latvia, Estonians, whoever. Germans, this was a European invention and and the Jews latched on to that partly because they were victims of this process as a minority in all the countries in which they lived. When you create an ethno-national state, one instinct is that you identify. The people who do not belong to your ethnos but who live in that state as outsiders to your state as a minority. That's how minorities were invented. They were invented by the creation of ethno-national states. Before that they were not minorities. They were just different groups living in a particular territory. So it's always been that. But until 1948, and as I write in the book, Zionism has two faces. One face is of an ethno-national movement that claims a particular territory and exercises precisely that sort of dynamic of saying this is our land, we want to be a majority here. The other people who live here should be a minority, although in fact they are a majority. And there needs to be some mechanism as to how do we make ourselves into a majority. The The plan the Zionists have is that more and more Jews would come from Europe until Palestine becomes a Jewish majority state. But in the Holocaust, most of the Jews of Europe are murdered, and so those people who were expected to create a Jewish majority state are no longer there to make that possible, and that is the sort of underlying logic of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. That's the other mechanism. Again, it, it wasn't invented only by Zionism. Ethnic cleansing has been carried out by many other national ethno-national movements, but in this case, it's the Zionists who carried it out in 1948. After the establishment of the state, this one phase of Zionism, which is to say we are here to provide a safe haven for the Jews of Europe. And in many ways that's true. In the 1920s and 1930s when hundreds of thousands of Jews come to Europe, that's how they're saved. Those Jews who stayed in Europe were largely murdered. That includes my own family, both, both my, my grandparents who came in the 1920s and 1930s to Palestine. The rest of their families, my families whom I never knew, were all murdered because they stayed in Poland. So that argument of Zionism seems logical, but Zionism has another face, and that face is from the point of view of Palestinians of settler colonialism, that is, those people who come, including my grandparents, functionally act as settler colonial encroachers on Palestinian land. In 1948, when the state is established, and that's my argument in the book, the state has a choice to make. It promises. Uh, IN its declaration, in its proclamation of a state, it promises to be a, a, an equal state for all its citizens. That all those Jews and Arabs, men and women, all those who become citizens of the state will have equal rights. Now he does that because the UN demands that in order to recognize it as a state. It also promises to issue a constitution. That would reflect the spirit of that proclamation of the state, and it's supposed to do that within a few months. The proclamation of the state is in May 1948, and it says by October 1st, 1948, we'll issue a constitution, and we are still waiting for that constitution. A constitution was never issued by the state, was never adopted by the state, and so the state never actually enshrines in law a commitment to equal rights to all its citizens and never determines in any document what its final borders are. It only has ceasefire lines. It doesn't have any borders that it recognizes as the final borders. And that decision not to have a constitution means that Zionism becomes at that point a state ideology, because now there's a state, and the only thing that drives it is Zionist ideology. Right,

14:44 Ricardo Lopes: when nowadays people identify themselves as anti-Zionist and they say that they are anti-Zionist because they oppose the settler colonialist actions performed by the state of Israel, and they oppose ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. Recent genocide, the expansionist activities of Israel, and they oppose, for example, what they call a two-tier legal system in Israel where people that are descendants of Palestinians or Palestinian prisoners are treated differently than Jewish citizens, for example, and so So I mean what they are opposing is all of those kinds of actions, and they label themselves as anti-Zionist. Do you think that that is a proper label for them to have that what they are opposing is really Zionism? And if so, do you think that Zionism can be the same as anti-Semitism in any way, or no?

16:06 Omer Bartov: Uh, OK, that's, that's a big question. So as you can understand from my previous answer, um, I think that Zionism historically is a movement that you can support or not support, you can like or not like. Um, I personally am, I am not a great supporter of any nationalism of any kind because nationalism has brought about a huge amount of destruction to human lives, to cultures. Around the world, uh, but it is what it is. It's something that happens, so to say I'm opposed to that is, is well and fine, but I don't know exactly what it means. We live today in a world of nations. Try living outside of a nation in this world. Think of migrants. If you don't have a passport, if you don't have citizenship, then you are a ship adrift the ocean. You have nothing, uh, and so it's, it's easy to say, well, I'm against it, but what is your alternative? Uh, SO in that term to say I'm an anti-Zionist, you can say I'm anti-Portugal, I'm anti-Spain, I'm anti-France, it's, it's, it's a meaningless term, uh, and I find that to be a kind of cheap label that people now stick on their sleeve because it's sort of become. Um, POPULAR to say that. On the other hand, Zionism as it has evolved and as it exists today as the state ideology of Israel is completely insupportable for all the reasons that you mention. It has become a violent racist, Jewish supremacist, ethnic cleansing, genocidal movement. It's an ideology and it's an that ideology of Zionism in many ways like other ideologies, you know, uh, Portugal had a dictatorship, uh, Italy had fascism, Nazi Germany had Nazism. With the fall of the dictatorship in Portugal, no one said, let's break up Portugal. It doesn't have a right to exist, but the dictatorship didn't have a right to exist and was thankfully done away with after many decades. In Italy, no one said Italy should just go away to the dung heap of history. They said fascism should. And so in that sense, Zionism today has no viability. Anyone who today proclaims their loyalty to Zionism must admit that they are supporting an ideology that has supported genocide. And if you support an ideology that supports genocide, well, you have to look at yourself in the mirror and say, is this something that I can support? Does that mean that Israel can continue to exist as a state? I think Israel will continue to exist as a state. It's not going anywhere. Just like the Palestinians are not going anywhere despite all the claims by Israeli politicians and ideologues that they have to go, that they don't belong, all that kind of nonsense, but it has to redefine itself, as many countries in the 20th century did when they rid themselves of these ideologies. And in the case of Israel, in order to redefine itself, it has to go back to the beginning. It has to go back to precisely that moment of 1948. It has to give itself a constitution. It has to define its borders. It has to accept the wrongs that it committed in 1948 all the way to Gaza, and in many ways Gaza is an extension of what happened in 1948. It's a second attempt to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians. People in Israel spoke about it as being the second Nakba, the second catastrophe for Palestinians. They spoke about it in positive terms. That's what we want to do to them. It has to go back to that and rethink how that territory, which is now one state. There are no two states there. It's one state between the Jordan and the sea. How does that state redefine itself as a place where the equal numbers of 7 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians can share that space, and dreams of getting rid of one group or the other are genocidal, whether they come from the left or the right, whether they come from Palestinians or Jews. They're not the only humane. ACCEPTABLE resolution of this to my mind is to find a way for those people who live there to share the space rather than to dream about kicking them out.

21:06 Ricardo Lopes: What is it like to grow up in Israel, serving the IDF, for example, and be exposed to these state and settler colonialist ideology? I mean, what, what kinds of ideas in terms of what might be Islamophobic ideas, anti-Palestinian ideas? Ideas and ideas that perhaps drive people, Jewish people from Israel to support ethnic cleansing, genocide, wars of aggression. I mean, what is it like to be exposed to all of those kinds of ideas and what effects does it have on people according to your own experience?

22:00 Omer Bartov: Look, I'm, I'm, I'm 72, so my experience is very different from the experience of younger cos of Israelis. When I was born and raised, uh, Israel was a very small state, uh, that was before 1967, um, and, um, the discourse of, uh, about the nature of the state. And the reality of living in Israel were very, very different from that of later generations. My, my eldest son is now almost 40 years old. He has no idea. What pre-1967 Israel was like. So for later generations, even the notion of the so-called green line, that is, which was the ceasefire line of 1949, which defined the borders of Israel between 1949 and 1967. They have no clue what that is. The, the idea that Israel was once a country between 1948 and 1967, where the majority of people were actually Jews, only 20% of the population were Palestinians, they don't know about that. They, they, they've never lived in a country that is not an occupying country. So, uh, if you ask about my experience, my own experience was very different, and in some ways, that's why. It is difficult for me and I think for many people of my generation in Israel, especially those who grew up in left-leaning homes, who grew up in secular homes, who grew up in homes where there were ideals of social justice and national justice, to look at Israel today and to recognize it. It feels like a completely foreign country. Uh, NOW that does not mean that I did not imbibe, uh, in my childhood and in school, a particular Zionist ideology. I should say that, you know, thinking about it, uh, when I was growing up, we never thought about ourselves as Zionists. We didn't even think of ourselves as Jews. We were Israelis. Zionism was a kind of term that was used by the old people who made all these big speeches that we found really boring. We were just born there and we thought it was our place, and it took a long time for us, because of our education, for people of my generation to start recognizing. That, you know, I was born in the mid-1950s, less than 10 years after the expulsions of the expulsion of the Palestinians, to realize that we grew up in a country in which there were very few Arabs because they had been kicked out. No one spoke about it at the time. There were empty villages and nobody said how were they emptied? What happened there? So yes, for members of my generation, it took a long time and many never went through that process of recognizing that the state was established on a major act of injustice, that it was born in sin. It's not, again, it's not the only country that was born in sin, but that's a particular sin of that particular country. For younger generations, this is a very different situation that we're seeing today. Israel has become Uh, much more religious than he was when I was growing up there, including the army, is much more religious, and the religion that people have now has almost nothing to do with the kind of religion that my grandparents believed in, the kind of traditional Judaism that they had, and they were both Orthodox Jews, both, both sides of my family. Now it's a messianic Jewish supremacist, anti-democratic, violent type of Jewish religion that no Jew around the world living outside of Israel could ever endorse. Uh, AND so, um, the, the, the way that Israelis think of themselves today is very, very different, and I'll say one last important thing, you know, when I was, I left Israel in 1989, uh, and I had served in the military, both as a regular soldier and then as a reservist, and I did serve in occupied territories, but these were the very early years of the occupation. The formative experience of generations of Israelis has been to act as occupiers, as colonizers, and that has really changed the mentality of society vis a vis Palestinians. It has created the process of dehumanization of Palestinians, of thinking of them as people who should be bossed around, who don't have rights, who shouldn't have rights, who don't even have the right to have rights. Uh, AND so that sort of long-term process, uh, is in many ways the result of the long-term occupation that Israel has exercised for most of its existence.

27:18 Ricardo Lopes: How do you look at groups like Hamas and Hezbollah? I mean, in the, in the way that they behave toward the state of Israel, do you agree with, uh, I mean, the label of them being terrorist groups, or do you look at them as more of resistance movements?

27:43 Omer Bartov: Well, look, first of all, uh, Hamas and, and Hezbollah are very different. Um, um, SO if, if you focus on, on, on Hamas for a moment, uh, Hamas is a, an Islamic fundamentalist movement and ideology. In many ways, ironically, it has much in common in its ideology and in its sort of long range goals with Jewish extremists who happen to be now in the Israeli government, people like Smotric, that is it, it wants ultimately, and it doesn't, you know, deny that to create an Islamic state in all of Palestine. A religious Islamic state in which there might be some tolerance for other minority religions, and people like Spotori want to create a Jewish religious state in the same territory in which there would be as few Christians and Muslims as possible, so that kind of ideology is very far from what I think I could support. Whether it comes from the from the Jewish right or from Hamas, but of course Hamas is a creature of circumstances. We have to remember that Hamas really emerged in the 1980s because of Israeli rule over Gaza. In Gaza, there was resistance at the time, mostly by Fatah, which was the armed wing of the PLO of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which was secular at the time, was Marxist, adored Che Guevara, and so forth. This was the kind of symbolism of the time, and the Israeli occupiers, particularly one general, Sharon, who later became chief. Minister of Defense and then became prime minister claimed that the best way to have a counterweight to Fatah was to work with Hamas, with what became Hamas, with members of the, of the Muslim Brotherhood, because they just took care of the education, of welfare for the Palestinians there. They were not particularly militant. Well, of course they did become militant. And they became militant because of Israeli policies, so they are a creature of Israeli occupation and in many ways, of course, Hezbollah is the same thing. There was no Hezbollah before 1982. In 1982, Israel invaded southern Lebanon, took over the southern part of Lebanon which is populated by Shiites. And that the resistance to Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, of the Shiite part of Lebanon, produced Hezbollah, which is a Shiite resistance resistance group supported of course by Iran. I don't think that either group is particularly good. Uh, FOR its own people, I don't think that if I were Lebanese, I, I, I wouldn't be in a mood of Hezbollah, and I know many Palestinians who don't really love Hamas. If you're a woman living in Gaza, you, and, and you're not an Islamic fundamentalist, I don't think that's the kind of movement you would choose, um, because of its own ideology. But I don't think that simply speaking about them as terrorist organizations explains anything to you. They use terrorist means. Certainly Hamas has in the past. If you call suicide bombers, people blowing themselves up in cafes, and discotheques, in restaurants. You can call it terrorism or not, but it's certainly a very violent way of resisting occupation. But what they are about is resisting occupation. You cannot undo. The ideology of Hamas through bombs. You can kill a lot of people, but you cannot undo that. You cannot change people's minds through that. So from my point of view, while I don't think that Hamas is the is is the best solution for Palestinians, I think that for Israel, if it wants a peaceful resolution of that, it has to provide hope for Palestinians. It has to provide a different political horizon for them. And then I think fewer people will opt for more radical solutions such as those that are being proposed by Hamas, and fewer people in Israel would support the kind of ethno-nationalist Jewish supremacists that are now in the Israeli government.

32:47 Ricardo Lopes: Looking at the, I think we could argue, is still the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the continuous takeover of the West Bank, and also the situation, the current situation in southern Lebanon. What do you think could be the aftermath of all of that? I mean, what could we expect from all of these actions by the state of Israel?

33:16 Omer Bartov: Well, look, you may know that a couple of days ago, um, I published an op ed in the, in the New York Times that actually tries to think about that. About what I call the future of genocide. And right now the future of genocide looks very bright, that is that Israel, along with its allies, has possibly created a new idea about genocide, that genocide could be accepted by certain states as the extension of policy by other means, because not only Is Israel not being brought to account for what it did and not only its allies in Europe and certainly the United States not recognizing their complicity in what happened, everybody seems to be Thinking about gainful prospects from this process, that is that if we think about what is the future of Gaza, if the future of Gaza is to create the beautiful Riviera which would be built by Palestinians and served by Palestinians who would be kept in camps in Gaza, then, and all this built with potentially with money from the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia. Then everybody would profit. Israel, Arab states, European states, real estate moguls, and the victims of this process who began as the victims of genocide will continue being victimized. That's a very scary prospect. It's not only for Palestinians, it's a scary prospect for the entire international order because it means that Many other states could say, well, you know, we can carry out genocide, we can rope in a lot of people and reap a lot of profits. It's actually not a bad way to pursue politics. Uh, NOW that's of course a very dire prediction, and I'm not sure that it will happen. I hope it won't. I just wanted to warn that this may be the future. There is, uh, uh, another way of looking at this. And the other way of looking at this is for European states and for the United States to realize that this will dismantle the international order and that in order to rectify that one has to put immense pressure on Israel. Which means, and I think that's not impossible, that a future American administration and European governments, which are very timid but may adjust to new American politics, will decide on a regime of sanctions against the state of Israel. BY and will redress the question of where does, where are the limits of power of Israel determined. If the limits of power of Israel are determined in Washington, then it's limitless. If it's returned to Jerusalem, then Israel will be forced to go back to politics. But that would mean a regime of military, economic, and political sanctions on Israel, which would eventually bring about a redefinition of the state itself. You mentioned all kinds of things earlier about the kind of two-tier system in Israel. That two-tier system is called apartheid. What exists in Israel today in the West Bank is apartheid. That apartheid is creeping into the state of Israel, and you may know that just a couple of days ago, one of the Supreme Court justices in Israel claimed that anyone who uses the term apartheid in Israel has no room to live in Israel, has no room to act in Israel. So the Supreme Court. Of the state of Israel, which was being supported by all these protesters on the eve of October 7th because of the attempt by the state to change the rules of the game, that very Supreme Court, which had established the apartheid regime now forbids even using the term in Israel. That will not change from within. If the Supreme Court is moved over to the dark side, things are not going to change from within. They will change from without, and that calls for international will. That international will will not come just because of goodwill, but it will come because of a definition of national interests, and I think that that may happen with the new administration in the US. So that's the other option. That's the other future of preventing a state like Israel from benefiting from genocide. Right now, the odds are 50/50, I would say.

38:38 Ricardo Lopes: So I have one last question then. ER earlier in my previous question I also mentioned er the situation in southern Lebanon. I mean, why is it that apparently Israel is in a state of forever war with its neighbor with its neighbors and we also have of course the war, the ongoing war in Iran. And do you think that this sort of relationship, warring relationship with its with its neighbors can never lead to any form of stability for Israel and even the broader Middle East region?

39:23 Omer Bartov: So look, I mean, I think there are two answers to this. There's a sort of short term and a much deeper response. The short term is that for the current government, for the current prime minister in Israel, for Benjamin Netanyahu, war is the only way to survive. So he needs a war to keep going on, and he's inciting it just like you mentioned the war in Iran. It was clearly we know now Netanyahu, who had tried to persuade many other American presidents to join Israel in a war against Iran, finally found the useful idiot in the, in the White House to, to, to do that for him, and we see the consequences of that, as many people have said before, it cannot succeed. And it was a very bad policy choice for the United States, but for Netanyahu, it's fantastic. He needs war to continue because he's like this cartoon character floating over the abyss. As long as he doesn't look down, he doesn't fall. And he needs the war because if the war ends, then, well, there will be a commission of inquiry about what happened on October 7th, of which of course he was the main culprit and everything that happened after that. He is under trials of corruption and so forth as long as there's a state of emergency, which he may invoke again on the eve of the elections in Israel in October just to prevent or to modify the elections in ways that would serve him. So that's the sort of one sort of immediate cause, but the larger cause, of course, is much deeper than that. The larger cause is that although Israel for lengthier or shorter periods did have some periods of peace in between, has always been engaged in conflict and in war. Why is that? It's because Israel has refused to face up to the main question of its existence, and the main question of its existence is, can it be a Jewish and democratic state? It cannot be a Jewish and democratic state as long as it is not purely Jewish. And it cannot be purely Jewish as long as he wants to rule over large territories in which there are large numbers of Palestinians. So it has to resolve the fundamental question of its existence, relations between Jews and Palestinians. It has refused to do that since 1948. It still refuses to do that. And as we know, In 2002, Saudi Arabia already offered a peace plan for Israel and the rest of the Arab world, and Israel has ignored it since 2002. Why? Because their plan called for a resolution of the so-called conflict, meaning really the occupation of Palestinians by Israel. That's the core reason for the ongoing violence between Israel and its neighbors.

42:26 Ricardo Lopes: Right, but, but I mean, just to reemphasize the second part of my question, do you think that this kind of attitude of Israel toward its neighbors in the Middle Eastern region can ever lead, I, I mean, of course, if it stays on this trajectory of continuous war, can it ever lead to stability in the region?

42:53 Omer Bartov: No, look, I mean, but obviously war is instability, so as long as you have war, you have instability. STABILITY comes when you stop war. I, the fact of the matter is, and, and people get confused about that. Israel has peace with Jordan. Israel has peace with Egypt. Israel had very good relations that were formed over the last 10 years or so with the Gulf states. Saudi Arabia wants peace with Israel. That is, Lebanon wants peace with Israel. Syria has a regime now that wants some kind of peace with Israel. So the neighborhood actually wants has come to the point. It wasn't always the case, one has to admit, but it has come to the point that the neighborhood would like to integrate Israel into its own neighborhood. And that would serve their interests, not for love of Zionism or Jews, but because Israel has shown itself to be a resilient country and is supported by very powerful allies, so it's good for everyone. Israel has refused to do that. And it's refused to do it again because of course it would like to have peace with Saudi Arabia. It would like to have peace with the Gulf states, yes, but it refuses to face up to the fact that in the borders in which it controls, half of the people don't have equal rights, and they are struggling to gain those rights, and they're appealing. To our populations around the world, in countries which are mostly authoritarian and which worry about the popular sentiment in the countries that they rule, the Palestinians are appealing to those people to come to their rescue. That creates this ongoing instability. So if you want to get to the core of the issue, you have to go back to that beginning. If you go back there, if you, uh, I would say compel Israel for its own good. To find a way to share that space with Palestinians that will resolve the issue of conflict between Israel, not so much with its neighbors because it's not fighting other Arab countries. The last war Israel fought with Arab armies was in 1973. That's the war that I was in. But the militants who are fighting against the Israeli occupation of their own lands.

45:39 Ricardo Lopes: OK, great. So let's wrap up the interview here then, Dr. Bartov, and the book is again Israel What Went Wrong, and I will be leaving a link to it in the description of the interview. And Dr. Bartov, thank you again for taking the time to come on the show. It's always a big pleasure to talk with you.

46:00 Omer Bartov: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

46:03 Ricardo Lopes: Hi guys, thank you for watching this interview until the end. If you liked it, please share it, leave a like and hit the subscription button. The show is brought to you by Enlights, Learning and Development done differently. Check their website at lights.com and also please consider supporting the show on Patreon or PayPal. I would also like to give a huge thank you to my main patrons and PayPal supporters, Perergo Larsson, Jerry Mulleran, Frederick Sundo, Bernard Seaz Olaf, Alex, Adam Cassel, Matthew Whittingberrd, Arnaud Wolf, Tim Hollis, Eric Elena, John Connors, Philip Forrest Connolly. Then Dmitri Robert Windegerru Inai Zu Mark Nevs, Colin Holbrookfield, Governor, Michel Stormir, Samuel Andre, Francis Forti Agnun, Svergoo, and Hal Herzognon, Michel Jonathan Labrarith, John Yardston, and Samuel Cerri, Hines, Mark Smith, John Ware, Tom Hammel, Sardusran, David Sloan Wilson, Yasilla Dezara Romain Roach, Diego Londono Correa. Yannik Punteran Ruzmani, Charlotte Blis, Nicole Barbaro, Adam Hunt, Pavlostazevski, Alec Baka Madison, Gary G. Alman, Semov, Zal Adrian Yei Poltontin, John Barboza, Julian Price, Edward Hall, Edin Bronner, Douglas Fry, Franco Bartolotti, Gabriel P Scortez or Suliliski, Scott Zachary Fish, Tim Duffyani Smith, and Wisman. Daniel Friedman, William Buckner, Paul Georg Jarno, Luke Lovai, Georgios Theophannus, Chris Williamson, Peter Wolozin, David Williams, Dio Costa, Anton Ericsson, Charles Murray, Alex Shaw, Marie Martinez, Coralli Chevalier, Bangalore atheists, Larry D. Lee Junior. Old Eringbon. Esterri, Michael Bailey, then Spurber, Robert Grassy, Zigoren, Jeff McMahon, Jake Zul, Barnabas Raddix, Mark Kempel, Thomas Dovner, Luke Neeson, Chris Story, Kimberly Johnson, Benjamin Galbert, Jessica Nowicki, Linda Brendan, Nicholas Carlson, Ismael Bensleyman. George Ekoriati, Valentine Steinmann, Per Crawley, Kate Van Goler, Alexander Obert, Liam Dunaway, BR, Massoud Ali Mohammadi, Perpendicular, Jannes Hetner, Ursula Guinov, Gregory Hastings, David Pinsov, Sean Nelson, Mike Levin, and Jos Necht. A special thanks to my producers Iar Webb, Jim Frank Lucas Stink, Tom Vanneden, Bernardine Curtis Dixon, Benedict Mueller, Thomas Trumbull, Catherine and Patrick Tobin, John Carlomon Negro, Al Nick Cortiz, and Nick Golden, and to my executive producers, Matthew Lavender, Sergio Quadrian, Bogdan Kanis, and Rosie. Thank you for all.