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BACK STORY WITH DANA LEWIS
Dana Lewis is a veteran World Affairs Correspondent. He's been everywhere. From global war zones to the streets of London where he is based.
He has been based in Jerusalem, and Moscow.
And he loves talking to people about whats behind the headlines. Award winning. "A real in the trenches reporter". Great interviewing skills and easy to listen to.
BACK STORY WITH DANA LEWIS
The Long Road to Coexistence in Israel and Palestine
Imagine the heartache of a family whose beloved Romy is held captive by terrorists, a stark reminder of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict's cruel reach into personal lives. Our latest episode navigates the complexities and emotional turmoil of this ongoing war, including the formidable political strategies of Israel to secure the release of its citizens.
We are joined by Fania Oz Salzberger, a revered Israeli political activist and history professor, who articulates a vision of "humanist Zionism." She advocates for a state founded on the ideals of sanctuary for Jews, yet insists on the imperative of coexistence with Arab neighbours.
Fania tells us Israel was always meant to be a State for Jews, but not a jewish State.
103 days is 103 days too many and we are running out of time. The hostages are running out of time, but it's day 103, and we must be beyond the state of awareness. This is an emergency that requires action and, as Americans, we expect the United States the greatest superpower in the history of the world to use its full power to secure the hostages release. This includes making sure that all partners in the region make this a top priority, and that includes those who maintain close ties with Hamas Hostages home now.
Speaker 3:My little sister, romy, only 23 years old, went to the Nova Music Festival. Instead of having the time of her life celebrating love, peace, freedom and friendship, she was the victim of unimaginable hate, torture and pure evil. Ben came to rescue us. She called me to say and we got 10 minutes of hope. Ben picked her, gaia and another man name of fear from the area trying to rescue them from the hands of the terrorists. 10 minutes of grace that all they have had. And then Romy called my mother. Mom, we were ambushed. They're shooting at us. Ben is most likely dead. Gaia was shot and she's not responding. A fear is wounded badly. I was shot on my arm. If no one will come quickly, I'll be dead.
Speaker 3:My sister has asthma and chronic sinusitis. She needs her inhaler in order to breathe properly. We can only imagine how she's struggling, gasping for air, wherever she's held underground. Can you grasp the feeling of fighting to breathe? Such a basic need, 103 days, no privacy? Can you imagine sleeping, going to the bathroom, changing your clothes when someone is watching you every move? It's not only that you're in control of someone else in your daily basic needs. It's also the fear from every move, every breath, every word could be the one that will lead to another sexual abuse, to another threat on your life, another rape. 103 days of horrible pain in her body, of her bleeding gunshot wound, of her paralyzed hand barely moving her fingers, suffering from every movement. Do you think anyone over there cares for her pain? I miss my little sister.
Speaker 4:You just heard their relatives gut-branching pleas for their release. Israel has carried on weeks of war in Gaza to crush Hamas and free the captives. Palestinians killed, but there could be as many as 25,000, says the Gaza Health Ministry. How many of those were Hamas fighters is unknown, but there are thousands of them. The war risks spreading, but long term, what will become of Gaza and Israel? There aren't many voices of reason in this angry moment, but Fania Oz Salzburger, the daughter of the famous Israeli author Amos Oz, spoke to me about Israel's beginnings, the struggle for a life raft where Jews could be safe and where the state of Israel was not so much a Jewish state but a state for Jews. And maybe later, that's where right wing leaders like Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu got it all wrong. Fania Oz Salzburger is an Israeli political activist and history professor. Her books include Israelis and Berlin, and with Amos Oz she wrote another book called Jews and Words. And she joins me from close to Carmel in Israel. Hi, Fania, Nice to meet you Hi, Carmel.
Speaker 2:Hello, Dane, Nice to meet you too.
Speaker 4:Nice to meet you, so you wrote a piece that really I really took me and I thought it was so timely and important where you talked about Zionism, a quick guide to Zionism in hard times, or why, in spite of everything, I am a human Zionist, and I thought it was a very eloquent and well-written piece and it reminded me so much of why people went to Israel and what Israel should be about and what it, at its heart, is probably about. So, as the war is raging in Gaza and there is so much hatred on both sides right now, why did you want to write a piece about Zionism?
Speaker 2:Well, first of all, thank you, and thank you for hosting me on your wonderful podcast. I'm a Zionist and I call myself a humanist Zionist. So did my father. Actually, the term, the combination of humanist Zionism, emerged in our conversations a few years before he died and we realized that actually the mainstream Zionist movement, from Theodor Herzl onwards, or from the founding father of political Zionism in the 19th century, and all the way until the recent two decades, the mainstream Zionism has been moderate. It has been pragmatic. It agreed in principle and often also in practice to a two-state solution as decided and as ruled by the United Nations General Assembly in 1947.
Speaker 2:And this Zionism was not about conquering and overcoming the Arabs, let alone ethnic cleansing. It was about living alongside Arabs into ways both within the state of Israel and Zionism did not decide what these borders, what the borders of the state of Israel are supposed to be. That was up to international decisions. Within the borders of Israel, a full civil equality of Arab, palestinian citizens and Jewish citizens and, this door, a possible viable Palestinian state. This was the Israeli status quo, give or take some ages of war, extremism and so on, but this was the Zionist status quo until about two or three decades ago.
Speaker 4:So Amos Oz.
Speaker 4:I read his book 25 years ago when I was based in Jerusalem as a correspondent with Canadian television, and it was this.
Speaker 4:You know it was this great and I know he wrote more than a dozen of them, but it was this great book where he looked at those horned days of the formation of Israel through a child's eyes. He made the point in that book how Jews were being I mean, they were being killed in Europe. And then there were posters in places like Lithuania and elsewhere like go back to Palestine or go to Palestine, and then when they would get to Palestine, they would go back to Europe. And he painted, you know, in a very innocent way perhaps, that you know, perhaps best explained by a child sometimes, how there was no, there was no home at that moment and there was no place for Jews to be. And that is why the world today, in most places, supports the state of Israel. And there are probably a few generations, if you would agree with me, that don't understand how we got here and don't understand why the state of Israel came into being.
Speaker 2:Yes, this is why I think that the United Nations Resolution 181 of November 1947 is so very important, never mind the fact that afterwards, both Palestinians, arab nations and Israelis disobey some following United Nations resolutions. This was a decisive plan of dividing the land between its two ancestral people. My book by my father that you mentioned is A Tale of Love and Darkness and Autobiography, and although he describes his childhood in Jerusalem and the Arab Jewish relations and the United Nations resolutions and the war of 1948 from the eyes of a child, this is not an innocent description in the sense that the adult, weary, elderly writer is standing there behind the child's shoulder and he said something very interesting about his family, who did come from Europe. Yes, they did come from Europe, and I came from Europe following antisemitic attacks and cries, jews back to Palestine. But I have to say right now that more than half of the Jewish population here did not come from Europe. It was ousted, driven out ethnically, please, if you like, from Arab and Muslim countries following 1948. So my European descent is actually a minority descent among Israeli Jews. But okay, we are a European family, lithuania Jews, educated, studying, working, and my great-grandpa Alexander is a kind of a Zionist of sorts. He likes the idea of a state for the Jews in the land of Israel, but this is not his first priority in life at all. And when antisemitic attacks become dangerous and my grandpa Arya is beaten by his school fellows and this happens again these days to Jewish children even in the United Kingdom Beaten and abused by school fellows and the graffiti on the walls say Jews, go to Palestine. It was very prevalent in Eastern European countries.
Speaker 2:Alexander decides to move his family not to Palestine, the land of Israel, he decides to move his family to some other European country. He starts applying and everyone tells him no way. In the Scandinavian countries there is a quota and he has to wait 27 years. In the early 1930s you don't have 27 years to wait. Germany says no. Switzerland says and now I'm quoting my father from memory Switzerland says even one Jew allowed in is one too much. Canada says your own country, original country, even zero Jews are too much. In South Africa, field Marshall smaps a philocybite in those days Actually says something to the effect that if we bring in no Jews there will be no antisemitism, and we do hate antisemitism. So no Jews to South Africa during the war either. As the war gets closed, all gates are shut in their faces and the only thing his grandfather manages somehow to scrape our mandatory British Palestine visas for the whole family. This is why I'm sitting here and talking.
Speaker 4:Isn't it shocking? Isn't it shocking? And thank you for taking us back to that moment where you wrote in your article as well, that you know, arriving from Europe and elsewhere, Jews weren't armed and they didn't have an army behind them. I mean, Israel was just a life raft.
Speaker 2:Israel was a life raft with a lot of historical meaning for a life raft, with a lot of historical energies for a life raft, but it was in terms of its international justification, and I'm also following here partially on my father's lead. It's not about the biblical tradition. It's not about our two millennia of belonging and praying and wishing and occasional migrating back to the land of Israel. It is about saving a nation from genocide, and the land of Israel, palestine, was a life raft. Now, a life raft doesn't mean that we should push the other people out. On the contrary, a life raft may mean that they would be generous enough to cohabit their land with us. Of course, the land didn't belong. There was no Palestine. There was a British mandate on a historical Ottoman region. That's what. That's what we had then.
Speaker 4:All right, and that's our interview, because you wrote about that very eloquently and you quoted David Ben-Gurion as saying in 1918 that the idea of evicting Arabs of the land was a harmful, reactionary mirage. Israel's Declaration of Independence puts this more positively, announcing full civil equality to its Arab citizens, offering peace and neighborlessness to the Arab countries, a national homeland for Jews and a democracy for all its citizens. But then you said that that didn't work out and it's a tragedy for both people.
Speaker 2:It didn't, but it's still the formula, you know, dana, it's still the solution, it's still the salvation in Israel, which is the state of the Jews, not a Jewish state in the sense of some kind of a mystical group of fanatics ordered around by God, but in terms of the people, the Jewish people. So a state for the Jews and for all its citizens, non-jews too, and, I'm adding, next door to a stable, sovereign Palestine. That was the solution. Now, the fact that Ben-Gurion had to say it back in 1918, and we have to be honest about it I'm not honest about my right wing fringes, my lunatics, my nationalists, who are unfortunately today still a small minority but represented in the government, and Ben-Gurion had to answer back to someone when he said that. So there were lunatic, nationalistic Jewish fringes in the Zionist movement, the difference being that they were never in control, until these days, when they are represented in minor jobs in Netanyahu's cabinet and utter the worst racist obscenities that you can imagine.
Speaker 4:You wrote a state for Jews, not a Jewish state, exactly. What's the difference?
Speaker 2:I think Herzl himself was very aware of the difference when he titled his futuristic novel of 1904, the Ayuddin state and not the Yiddish state, so the state of the Jews and not the Jewish state. He was very weary. He was a secularized liberal Democrat very much in touch with his times and he was very worried about some kind of a metaphysical, metahistorical idea that God is returning the Jews to Israel to accomplish some historical task of theirs. There were people speaking like that. Herzl and many of his co-founders of Zionism did not like that, because their Zionism was a humanist Zionism. If they didn't call it so, this is my coin and it applies to them.
Speaker 2:Humanists don't only mean to be nice to other human beings. This is the main thing, but it's not only that. It's also the belief that human beings, rather than divine or mysterious, mystical elements, run history and can change history. So the idea was that individual human beings, jews, would come to the land of Israel, change the tragic trajectory of Israeli history for the last two millennia, have a place to call their own in part of the land of Israel, their own very own sovereign state, shared with Arabs both within and outside its future borders.
Speaker 4:So people would say now, especially after what happened in October the 7th, that you're a dreamer and that more and more Israelis now realize that any kind of two-state solution is just an excuse by the Palestinians to eventually push them into the sea. And what's happened in Gaza in terms of it being a terror base, well, sooner or later happened in the West Bank too. They talk about reoccupation, reintroducing settlements into Gaza. You're a dreamer?
Speaker 2:I'm a dreamer at this moment. Yes, by the way, I reject these people's hopes, certainly of reoccupying Gaza. I do not reject their fear. People here in Israel around me, my own people, the center left not the right lunatic the center left are dazzled with shock and horror. Ongoing shock and horror, don't forget. We still have the hostages being killed by the day, murdered, horribly murdered by the day. We still have children and women in Gaza. We still discover and identify the dead of 7th of October. They are naturally enough. They reject the notion of a Palestinian state next door anytime soon. I also reject the notion of a Palestinian state next door tomorrow morning because it could easily be a Hamas state.
Speaker 2:I can give you numbers that I read this morning. Latest polls 70%, 70%, 70% of Israelis reject the idea of a Palestinian state. 20% are for this I found encouraging. Even in this horrific time, 20% are still for it. Unfortunately, Dana, the numbers in the West Bank I don't know about Gaza, I assume quite similar. The numbers in the West Bank are over 90% in support of what Hamas did in the 7th of October.
Speaker 2:This is not even against the Jewish state. It is for massacring the Jews one by one. These are the wins of war and we can expect a huge, sudden, immediate radicalization of both sides as long as the memory is fresh and the war is going on. This does not mean that in the foreseeable future, with hands-on international intervention and the ousting of the Netanyahu government in favor of a more traditional Zionist, humanist government, would not be able to work out a path, a horizon, a roadmap for setting up, first of all, a demilitarized Palestine, monitored by international powers, and, in the future, perhaps in the further future, as two-state solution. That's the only hope we have, isn't it? What else do we have?
Speaker 4:Do you believe that you have to convince the Israeli public and pull more and more to that 20% that would support a two-state solution? Or is it the vision, much like the peace accords between Egypt and Israel that were done so many years ago, that the leaders have to lead? They have to believe in the process, just like Yitzhak Rabin did when he was prime minister before he was shot by a Jewish extremist? They need to. You need new leadership. They need to sign on to the idea of a two-state solution and then Israeli public opinion probably not now, so soon and while Israelis are still being held hostage in Gaza, but months from now, it's really the only alternative that people will have to come around to believe in.
Speaker 2:Yes, but after the 7th of October. I'm adding another factor. This is exactly what I believe before and I still, in principle, believe it. I don't think it will take months. I think it will take years and no love will be lost between Gaza, the Gaza part of Palestine, and Israelis within the coming two or three generations. But this is not about love, not even about peace. It's about a permanent territorial agreement. This is my horizon. I'm not saying peace and love. I will leave it to our great-great grandchildren. Maybe they will be able to be hippies again. We can't anymore.
Speaker 2:So, yes, the extra factor which has become so clear after the 7th of October is a powerful international presence and intervention in Gaza and, if needed, in the West Bank and, if needed, pressing Israel diplomatically, but hard. This is a factor we can no longer do without. Israel and Palestinian Authority are not sovereign and not able. Some of their leaders are certainly not willing to strike a deal in the coming future. It will have to be international pressure and, mind you, not the United Nations. We have zero trust in the United Nations and all its organizations, not least United Nations women organization, are we not?
Speaker 4:saying sorry, go ahead.
Speaker 2:So I'm just saying an international force, hopefully the input of moderate Arab regimes. Israel should not rule Gaza by any means. We need the United States, europe and the Gulf States, perhaps Egypt to put it more precisely.
Speaker 4:You're talking about a divorce. You're not talking about love.
Speaker 2:No, that was my father's famous metaphor help us to divorce. This is not love. It will not be love. Of course we will have personal, hopefully, love affairs and friendships we already do between Palestinians and Israelis, certainly within Israel, also with the West Bank, with Gaza, I don't know To put it very politely. It will take a while. We are not in the business of befriending Gazans these days.
Speaker 4:I feel like I'm in a revolving door of time talking to you. You must feel it too, in the sense that in the 90s, the Oslo Accords proposed much of what we're talking about Two-state solutions, separation. Israeli soldiers left Hebron, bethlehem, ramallah I covered it all In Gaza.
Speaker 2:Oh, yes, that was included In another stage.
Speaker 4:Yes, and then a five-year interim period, perhaps leading to a Palestinian state, although that wasn't written in the Accord as far as I remember. And then the extremists won the day Bus bombs in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem cafes, israeli extremists.
Speaker 2:Don't forget the Israeli, the Jewish extremists who murdered Rabin, of course, and then, of course, israeli extremists who twice went on shootouts in the Palestinian area, and that was immediately followed by the second in Tifada. All hell broke loose. The Oslo Accords were not even given a chance, not given a period of grace. So we haven't tried. You are not in a revolving door in this sense that we haven't really tried to apply the Oslo Accords, not yet. We will not return to them. They're not relevant anymore. We will need to create a new Accord and again have a powerful international presence as it is being applied to realities.
Speaker 4:Why are the Oslo Accords not relevant anymore? Because the joint patrols between Palestinians and Israelis and all of that just don't. They're not going to work anymore. So that's why you say you need a lot of the elements of the Oslo Accords, such as access to Jerusalem, discussions of the right of return of refugees or not, or compensation.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, All this will be relevant for a new Accord, of course. What Oslo lacked is, as I've been saying and repeating myself, soldiers on the ground. I'll be even clearer Soldiers on the ground from other nations' army keeping the peace. Another factor which I haven't mentioned yet and not appearing the Oslo Accords and its absence was detrimental was the education system in the Palestinian Authority in Gaza. I'm sorry to say that now small parts, but parts of the education system in Israel is also becoming extremist, but the whole of the education system in the future Palestine would have to be changed. The public sphere would have to.
Speaker 4:I think what you're talking about there may be a lot of people don't understand. It's even during the Oslo Accords and the peace process, palestinian television glorified suicide bombings and attacks in cafes and suicide bombers. In Oslo, too, was actually discussed a lot of that and said okay, take, if you really want to be living beside Israel in peace, then take away the glorification of killing Israelis. And that's one of the things that was in the Accords but never implemented.
Speaker 2:Never implemented. In Gaza there is, there was a TV, kids Television channel which showed I don't know if you ever saw him that famous Palestinian mouse, a kind of a Mickey Mouse. Poor things, poor kids, that's what they could were able to watch. And this mouse keeps calling for the destruction of Israel until bad Israeli guys come into the studio and kill that little, poor little mouse, to the trauma, of course, of the little Palestinian viewers. This is awful. This has to disappear. This must disappear. Also, our extremism. But our extremism is small in the hyper nationalist and hyper religious schools compared to the overall attitude of the Palestinian cultural system. This is goes deep. This will have to change as we go along, in parallel to demilitarization, which is not going to be easy, in parallel to international forces keeping a strong presence. These are the conditions, dana. You know we can't do without them, but if implemented, we have hope.
Speaker 4:Do you find it disturbing difficult to rationalize the fact that the Jews that fled oppression in Europe and in the Middle East, as you rightfully pointed out, sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews now are having I don't want to say having to, but they are oppressing Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank in very uncomfortable ways that the founders of the state of Israel could never have imagined.
Speaker 2:Of course I find it tragic and Ben Gurion lived long enough to see 1967, the occupation so called occupation, because I mean the real occupation began after the Six Day War in 1967. And ever since I was a young adult or a late teenager, I joined the peace movements. My father helped to found them. There are several peace movements still existing, such as peace now and others that have demonstrated and told a succession of prime ministers in Israel that putting the settlements where they did was a fatal mistake. We were right.
Speaker 2:By the time Rabin came to power it was his second term in office in 1993, there was a majority of Israelis, of Jewish Israelis, supporting the Oslo Accord. This is very, very important. So, yes, we knew and we said and we cried out loud that the occupation was wrong and immoral and unjustified and that within the occupation there are practices happening, legal practices, military practices, human behavior which is corrupting us, corrupting Israeli society. We screened that and many people listened. So Rabin was elected and given the mandate to go ahead with a two state solution. We know, we know. Problem is that after the Second Intifada and the rise of right wing populism and Netanyahu's own charismatic and destructive personality, we have become a minority. We are a significant minority. We might become a majority again.
Speaker 4:You might become a majority again, but it seems like a very distant dream, and forgive me for using that word again. But is there a and maybe this is the wrong term I wanted to ask you is there a peace camp still alive in Israel? Maybe it's not a peace camp, though Maybe we should characterize it as something else, something more practical.
Speaker 2:Okay, so practical is exactly the point. You know, when you keep talking about me dreaming, you're thinking peace and love. I'm not thinking peace and love anymore. I'm awake. By the way, I'm awake from before the 7th of October. I'm awake from the time when I saw Arafat's successor, mahmoud Abbas Abu Mazen, fail in every test and drop every chance to kick the Ossu agreement into life again, and then Netanyahu came and the whole thing, of course, came to an end. I'm not a dreamer in the sense of a practical territorial solution and, on this, this is not the peace camp. Okay, peace camp is now 20, perhaps 25%. We are going to march, by the way, tomorrow in Tel Aviv, if Mr Ben Gver's police will not beat us up at the very beginning. We are going to march in Tel Aviv for Jewish Arab peace and there will be thousands Israeli Palestinians, israeli Jews. So maybe 20%, maybe less now, because some people are still so shocked they're not saying peace anymore.
Speaker 4:But you have to be heroic at this moment, don't you? To go to the street amid so much anger and bloodshed and talk about peace, but at the same time, it's in so many ways sensible.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, if a policeman beats us up tomorrow it's happened to me once before I just hope that my husband will get him on his smartphone camera. That's the main outcome, which is a good outcome because this is still a democracy and this policeman at some point will be punished Not right now. Remember, these are emergency times for Israel as well as from Gaza. We are bombarded from, still from Gaza. There was a barrage of rockets yesterday. We are bombarded constantly by Hezbollah in the north. 150,000 Israelis, by my last count, are evacuees, refugees in their own countries. The whole regions around the Gaza and Lebanese border are completely empty of civilians. This is an emergency.
Speaker 2:So, yes, I can be a dreamer and talk about peace or territorial hold, but the fact that 20% of Israelis today are still saying this In agreement a two-state solution, put love on one side, but a two-state solution this I find hopeful, rather than its opposite. I think that by the time things calm down and they'll have to come down at some point if the Netanyahu government is replaced by a responsible center, center, center, right, center, left, center, center government and this is what the polls are telling us now, with significant likelihood, I think, then this government will start telling its people what needs to be done, while accommodating their emotions and their fears. I can only wish Dana that there would be an equivalent Palestinian leadership out there. We need patience.
Speaker 4:That was my last question to you. Do you think, with all of your vision and that 20% of Israelis who I think, with a more central government leading them and informing them, might become 30%, 40%, 50%, 60%, and maybe that's hopeful, but do you think, on the Palestinian side, that you have those corresponding moderates with vision?
Speaker 2:Well, exactly, not exactly in a different way from us. The political system somehow shoots up the fanatics and keeps the moderates down. This was true also, unfortunately, for Israel in the last decade, but it's doubly true for the Palestinians. There have been many moderate voices. Most of them are not there anymore because they packed up and went away when Arafat and his tugs, if you forgive me came into the West Bank in the 1990s. That was another outcome of the Oso agreement. Among the Arafat and now Abu Mazen Mahmoud Abbas circles, there are a few moderates. I don't think their voices are heard.
Speaker 2:We will have to see what history brings up in this lottery of the next leader after Mahmoud Abbas. Who knows, maybe there would be a group of brave Palestinians who would say and listen to this. We hate the guts of Israel, but we realize we have to exist next door to Israel. So we are moving on to a territorial agreement. And my father said if I can finish with this quote, my father said a real leader is not the one who tells his or her people what they want to hear. A real leader tells her people what, deep in their hearts, they know must be done.
Speaker 4:Fania Oz Salzberger, and again I just wanted to say that it's such an honor to talk to you and your article A Quick Guide to Zionism in Hard Times or why, in Spite of Everything, I'm a Human Zionist. Don't take my paraphrasing of that article or the way I led Fania through the interview. Go and read the article, because it tells you more about the spirit and heart of Israel than maybe we were able to squeeze out in a podcast interview, but it's so well written and so thoughtful. Fania, thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Dana, for the opportunity, and the article is accessible free online. Just google my name and the word Humanist, Zionist. Toda Toda rabbalacha. Thank you.
Speaker 4:And that's our backstory. This week, I wanted to bring you Fania Oz-Saltzberger's interview because I think it's all about the future. How do Israeli and Palestinians dig themselves out of this latest cycle of violence that threatens to drag us all into the quicksand of hatred and war in the Middle East? I'm Daniel Lewis. Thanks for listening, share the podcast and I'll talk to you again soon. You.
