Nathan Thrall, the former director of the Arab-Israeli project at the International Crisis Group, is the author of “The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine” (2017). Originally from California, Thrall now lives and works in Jerusalem. His latest book, “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama. Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy” (2023) won the Pulitzer Prize.

Robert Mackey: We want to talk about Israel-Palestine, and about challenges to, and possibilities for, peaceful coexistence even in places where it seems kind of impossible. I'm interested in, from where we are now, what you think the possibilities are and what it's going to take to get somewhere eventually.

Nathan Thrall: It's going to be a pretty pessimistic conversation, because I don't see a real possibility of peace on the horizon. I mean, it very much depends on what term we're using.
I think a big part of the problem has been that the international community has been willing to treat the absence of major violence – in the form of, let's say, war in Gaza – as a kind of, if not peace, then at least stability, and so basically to ignore Israel-Palestine and to continue to support the system as it exists day in and day out, during a war, or not during a war.
I definitely think that it's possible that this war will end and that we will return to a kind of slow, daily violence that you see from Israel against the Palestinians, which is necessary to keep millions of people deprived of their basic civil rights. I mean, there's no way to do that other than through extreme coercion, and that takes the form of mass arrests, and raids and violence against anyone who dares to resist the system of control.
So I guess before we get into the rest, we should try and think about what we're talking about. Are we talking about the end of the Gaza war and the return to the system as it existed prior to it? Or are we talking about an actual end of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

Mackey: I think the idea is to think more long term, even if it seems very long-term at the moment, or have we progressed to a point where that doesn't even seem possible anymore?
Thrall: Again, I don't believe that an Israeli-Palestinian peace is anywhere on the horizon. The basic reason for that is that we have a huge discrepancy in power between the two parties. One of them has all the military power in the world, controls the lives of the other party, controls the borders, the movement, the freedom of the other party. And the weaker party, the Palestinians, has very, very little leverage to try and achieve its own freedom and then peace that would come from that.
If you look at the past decades of negotiations through the eyes of the more powerful party, you see that they basically had three broad options in front of them. One was to give Palestinians a state; that is, to give them sovereignty within the 22% of their homeland that the Palestinian national movement, the PLO, had demanded. The second option was to give Palestinians citizenship and equal rights. And the third option was to continue with what is called 'the status quo,' which is to choose neither of those options; to call this more than half century long system of control over Palestinian lives temporary; to expand Israeli settlements inside the occupied territories, and to constrict Palestinians into smaller and smaller spaces.
If you look kind of coolly and rationally at those three options, from Israel's perspective, you see that the first two are perceived to be much more costly than the third. 99.9% of Israelis do not want to give Palestinians equal rights and citizenship, because that would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish majority state, which contradicts the entire driving force of the Zionist movement, and the whole rationale for Israel's existence.
The first option of giving Palestinians sovereignty within 22% of their homeland is also perceived to be a very, very costly step for Israel. It would require the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of settlers. It would likely entail huge political conflict among Jews within Israel, potentially including violent conflict among them. And it is perceived to be a weakening of Israel's security; that by definition they have full control over the territory now, they would have less if there was a Palestinian state. And they're being asked to give up this tangible asset, the control over these people and the land that they're on, for something intangible, which is a promise of peace.
So in that very, very unequal exchange between parties with radically different levels of power and leverage, each time it is proven to be the case that Israel sees the perpetuation of the status quo as far less costly. Until that equation changes, we are not going to see an Israeli-Palestinian peace.
What would have to happen is for the status quo to become much more costly for Israel, such that Israel would for the first time see one of these other two options as actually an escape from something worse – because, 'We are an international pariah, and we have sanctions imposed on us, and we're not participating in the Olympics, and the EU Association Agreement has been canceled, and the US has cut off the arms supply.'
In that kind of a scenario, which of course sounds entirely fanciful today, you could imagine Israel quite rationally going for some kind of a long-term peace, either by giving Palestinians sovereignty or citizenship.

Mackey: In essence, you don't think the change can come from within Israeli society – it has to be forced on Israel by international pressure?

Thrall: Well, I do think that in the end, that mechanism that I'm describing would be from within Israeli society. It would be that ordinary Israelis would see the writing on the wall and say, 'Well, I really don't like that it's very hard for me to make normal investments. I don't like that I have to apply for visas to travel to Europe. I don't like that this country is increasingly isolated and seems to be a place bereft of opportunity. I don't like that all these international companies that have been providing jobs here no longer want to do business here.'
And of course, it would be accompanied by a flight of many of Israeli elites to other countries, which would accelerate a process that we already see in place, of Israel becoming much more a country of the religious and the rightwing. And again, these processes feed off each other, which in turn also changes Israel's image in the world, where everybody who is looking at Israel says, 'This is basically a Jewish Iran, and why are we doing business with it?'
So I do think that as that kind of a future unfolds, there will be a perfectly natural response among many Israelis to try to change that reality, to have a better future for themselves and their children. And the price for it is very simple: it's to accept what the international community and the Palestinians have been asking for decades, which is not only reasonable, but a “steal” for Israel – to have the people whose ancestors lived in this place, who were more than 90% of the population at the start of Zionist settlement in Palestine, accept that 78% of their homeland is going to be the state of Israel, and that they're going to have a mere 22% – a discontiguous 22% –, and accept full normal relations with the country that has taken over 78% of their homeland.

Mackey: From your perspective in Jerusalem, is it kind of shocking that it's so difficult for people in Europe to comprehend these realities? I ask because it seems that people in Europe and the US are very ignorant of the actual situation on the ground and your role in helping to educate people seems really important. But if people won't listen…

Thrall: I absolutely think that there has to be a real shift in Western public opinion before we can move to the kinds of steps that I was just describing. And I believe that we are seeing that change in global public opinion happen right now. It's happening in large part because of the tremendous bloodshed in Gaza. But that's a very, very slow process. You see it's happening mostly among youth. For us to see the effects of that politically, it might take a couple of decades until those youth whose views are being shaped by what's happening now are in power.
So yes, I absolutely think that so much of the support for this system of oppression comes from ignorance, and from the successful Israeli marketing of all kinds of falsehoods – such as 'The occupation is temporary.' It's lasted for half a century. Or: 'The occupied territories are a separate regime from Israel, so we can continue to treat Israel as a good democratic state and separate control over the occupied territories, which is something entirely different.' When the reality is that one in ten Israeli Jews now live in the occupied territories. The settlers do not cast absentee ballots when they vote. The travel from the settlements to cities inside Israel proper is seamless. These are entirely suburbanized communities that feel no different from suburbs within Green Line Israel.
So a kind of de facto annexation has already occurred. But for the whole world to treat Israel as a democracy, there needs to be this construct created and maintained, that there's a separation, there's a Great Wall of China between Israel and its pre-1967 borders and the settlements in the occupied territories.

Mackey: My family is from Northern Ireland. And I know at some stage, there was all this talk of people from South Africa and Northern Ireland and Israel-Palestine comparing notes, during the Oslo period. But I guess structurally a huge difference between Northern Ireland achieving some kind of peace and Israel-Palestine not, is the role of the United States; that the US was not willing to just tolerate the situation in Northern Ireland staying the way it was. And we don't really have any sort of sustained US pressure for changing things in Israel-Palestine, right? You've written about the Obama administration threatening to do something and then backing away. Do you feel like the US role here is really central, that it has to change, or does the EU also have an important role?

Thrall: I think that the EU absolutely has a central role to play in addition to the US. But on Israel-Palestine, the EU has deferred to the United States. That has been the overall policy for decades. And so it is essential that we see change in the United States.
And the United States isn't merely failing to change things positively. It is actively supporting this system of oppression. It is vetoing any kind of resolution in the Security Council that is condemning Israeli settlements or calling for any kind of accountability toward Israel's violations of international law. And it's painful for the US ambassadors to the UN who are casting these votes because they're in violation of the US's own stated policies and principles. The US claims that it's opposed to settlements, and yet it's protecting them, and yet it's financing the Israeli government and military, which is expending so much of its effort on expanding the settlements.

Mackey: I was reading one of the last interviews that Tony Judt gave in 2010.¹ and he was talking about how Germany refused to criticize Israel or take any action against it, even then, because of the role that the Holocaust plays in the thinking there, the historical memory and sense of responsibility. Given that, can you see any way in which Germany or the EU could move toward actively intervening to pressure Israel? Or does that just seem completely impossible now?

Thrall: Certainly in the near term, it's unthinkable, especially with respect to Germany. But we do see the direction of movement is toward accountability. It's toward revising the blanket support for Israel that we see from Europe. And it's toward doing things like calling into question the EU-Israel Association Agreement, which would be a tremendously threatening step to Israel. The EU is Israel's number one trading partner. I think you see in countries like Spain and Ireland there are changes afoot within Europe. But we are still very, very far away from imagining even a serious discussion of threatening Israel with the suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement.

Mackey: It is interesting that ultranationalism is ascendant in Israel just as Europe, where the idea of nationalism was born, is gradually becoming a more ethnically mixed, integrated society – obviously with difficulty and problems. But it always struck me as strange that the US, which is such a multicultural society, can support something so obviously enacting segregation. It's kind of baffling.

Thrall: Yes, it is hard to understand, and that's part of why I have had perhaps naive hope that by educating people, there is some chance of actually changing US policy. Because I have seen that when most US Congresspersons and staff members come on delegations and visit Israel-Palestine, within just a few hours of seeing the West Bank, they are spontaneously making comparisons to apartheid and Jim Crow. It's obvious to them. Nobody needs to feed it to them. They see it with their own eyes. They're horrified by what they see. And so that tells me that indeed, a huge part of the problem is a lack of understanding or awareness.

Mackey: Is it right to say that there has been less and less interaction between ordinary Israelis and Palestinians [the ones not living on Israeli territory] over the last two decades, since Israel built the separation barrier in the West Bank and withdrew settlers from Gaza?

Thrall: I would date it to earlier than the creation of the separation barrier. It's really the Oslo process, with the establishment of the Palestinian Authority that resulted in a huge decrease in not just Palestinian freedom of movement but also in the number of Palestinians working for Israeli employers. That went down drastically with Oslo. And what Israel did was it imported a huge number of foreign workers to take the jobs that Palestinians had previously held. And part of this was the deliberate policy of Israel as a response to the First Intifada.
From 1967 to 1987, Israel had a pretty quiescent occupation that it was running. Palestinians had curfews at times, but during the day, they could move around within the territory under Israel's control. And they were the ones who were staffing so many of the unskilled or low-skilled jobs inside of Israel.
When the First Intifada happened, one of the main tools that the Palestinians used was to go on strike. And they did incredible damage to the Israeli economy with their boycotts and labor strikes. And Israel decided it was not going to allow itself to be vulnerable in that way anymore.
So part of the solution to the problem of the First Intifada was to create a Palestinian autonomy, so that Israeli soldiers didn't need to go and directly occupy the city centers of Gaza and the West Bank, but could have a proxy force doing it for them. And secondly, to start to put up all kinds of restrictions on movement for Palestinians, with the creation of fences and walls. And thirdly, to reduce Israel's vulnerability to future Palestinian civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance by replacing the Palestinian workforce with foreign workers.

Mackey: I think a lot of people were surprised that so many of the hostages taken from Israel into Gaza on October 7 were foreign workers.

Thrall: Were Thai. Yeah, absolutely.

Mackey: You recently said that the fate of the Palestinians could be akin to what happened to the Native Americans.² Do you feel now that that's more likely than some kind of peaceful reconciliation?

Thrall: Absolutely. I think that that is the trajectory we're on. I mean, we can create a graph with one axis being Israeli expansion and the other axis being time. And of course, as the Israeli expansion is occurring, the Palestinian shrinkage is occurring alongside it. And it's just a linear process of Israel taking over more and more land, Palestinians being shrunk into tinier and tinier reserves. And when there is a large war, you have mass Palestinian displacement, forced displacement. So more than 700,000 in 1948; more than 200,000 in 1967; at present, more than a million are displaced within Gaza. But this war isn't over. And if Israel saw an opportunity, it could easily attempt, at least, to push Gazans outside of Gaza.
This is a process that has been steadily marching forward. And if it continues, then yes, the fate of the Palestinians will be like that of the Native Americans. I don't see anything on the horizon that stands a real chance of stopping it – other than these glimmers of hope we see among youth activists, of the baby steps toward accountability that we're seeing. The US has started to impose sanctions on violent settlers. The ICC has said that it's going to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant. The ICJ issued an advisory opinion calling on all member states of the UN to begin to hold Israel accountable. Those are all steps in the direction of potentially stopping this process. But those two processes are operating on very different timelines. The measures toward accountability are inching forward at a snail's pace, and Israeli expansion is moving very rapidly.

¹ https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n06/tony-judt/the-way-things-are-and-how-they-might-be

² https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/aug/04/nathan-thrall-a-day-in-the-life-of-abed-salama-gaza-palestine

 

 

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