- [Interviewer] Do the Palestinians have a right
to a static state?
- [Netanyahu] No, I don't think they do. But.
- [Johnny] In 2007, the head of military intelligence
for the Israeli army had a meeting
with the US Ambassador in Tel Aviv.
We're looking at the classified cable
that summarizes what was talked about in this meeting.
The topic of discussion was Iran, Syria,
the Gaza Strip and Hamas.
Hamas had just won the Palestinian elections,
which kicked off a fight with the other Palestinian group,
which ended in Hamas taking over Gaza completely.
They controlled it.
And if you're an Israeli citizen or the US government,
this is a terrible set of events.
Hamas is a violent extremist group
known to commit heinous violence
against civilians in Israel,
and they were now in power.
They controlled the Gaza Strip an hour away from Tel Aviv.
But look at this leaked document.
In this leaked cable,
you see that the Israeli official says
that Israel would be happy if Hamas took over Gaza
because it would mean that Israel could now treat Gaza
like a hostile country.
- [Reporter] Three days post cease fire,
and there's unrelenting bombing in Gaza.
- [Johnny] This document is a view into a strategy
that right-wing factions within the Israeli government
have used for decades in an effort to win
one of the most divisive conflicts in the world today,
in which two groups are fighting over one piece of holy land
and one side is winning by using a very specific tactic,
one that the world says is illegal and immoral,
and one that worked for a short time,
but that recently has been shown to be a recipe
for even worse violence and conflict and suffering.
In this video, I wanna lay out what this strategy looks like
and show you how it failed.
I know this is a topic that is full of deep emotions
that has real stakes in people's lives.
Please know that I am earnest in my efforts
to tell this story with clarity and with accuracy.
And also please note that this is not a full account
of the conflict between Israel and its neighbors,
but I do hope that it sheds light on a view of the conflict
that sometimes gets lost in all of the yelling.
(intense music)
(speaking in foreign language)
(crowd cheering)
For 2000 years, Jewish people around the world
have been persecuted and segregated
and ostracized from society.
That is a fact.
By the time the 1800s came around,
it became clear that wherever the Jews went,
persecution would follow.
This is when a movement emerged calling for Jews
to come together and to create a country for themselves
where they could govern themselves
and be free from all of this racist hatred.
The creation of a Jewish country would have
at the top of its priority list
the security of the Jewish people.
But the big question was where?
Several places floated around in proposals,
Argentina, even modern day Kenya,
which back then was Uganda.
But most people in this movement wanted the Jews
to return to their historic homeland,
a place called Palestine.
Where Jews built their temple
and their culture 3000 years ago,
but then were exiled,
and now there was this call to return
so that Jews could feel safe
after 18 centuries of Jewish suffering.
So as the 1900s came around,
tens of thousands of Jews, mostly from Europe,
flocked to Palestine,
which eventually came under control of the British.
The British were getting ready to leave this region
and were struggling to contain the growing conflict
between Native Arabs and all these Jewish immigrants.
Then in the 1940s came a horrific genocide
against the Jewish people in Europe,
led out by Hitler and his Nazi regime.
This created a wave of international support
for this idea of giving the Jewish people
a homeland where they could be safe.
Before they left, the British asked the UN
to determine what would replace them in Palestine,
and the UN decided that Palestine
would become two new countries,
one for the Jews and one for the Palestinian Arabs
that had already been living in this region.
- [Reporter] The Jewish state colored light,
the Arab state dark.
Jaffa to go to the Arabs, Jerusalem internationalized.
- But as happens when outsiders draw lines on old land,
there was a problem here.
Within these borders that were meant
for the new Jewish country,
hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs were living
who would soon have to leave their homes
to move to their side of the line.
Okay, wait. I'm gonna pause there.
Because as I said this is not a full history
of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
We actually just made a video
on our new channel Search Party,
which focuses on what happens next,
the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors.
You can go watch that. Link's in the description.
It'll give you some useful context.
For now just know that this led to a horrific conflict.
Jewish militias forced over 700,000 Arabs
out of their homes turning them into refugees.
The proposed borders shifted around,
turned into ceasefire lines,
and after all was said and done,
the Jewish people did indeed get their own country,
the state of Israel.
And the two important points here are that number one,
the very foundation of the Israeli country
is for security of the Jewish people
after nearly 2000 years of persecution.
And number two, the location they chose to set it up
was becoming, as a result of this conflict,
not much safer than Europe.
(intense violin music)
That's a tension that follows this whole story.
Okay, so now let's fast forward to 1967.
Israel has its country
and they fight a short war with their Arab neighbors,
and they win that war and they take over all of this land.
It's a huge victory for them.
I'm gonna take away the Sinai Peninsula from here
because they did give that back to Egypt
as part of a peace deal a few years later.
Israel now controls important pieces of land
that enlarge their Jewish country.
Many saw this victory as a sign from God
that they were actually entitled to be here.
But once again, Palestinians,
nearly a million of whom had been kicked out of their homes,
were living here in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip,
which Israel now controlled,
but they weren't really sure what to do with it.
And it's this territory that would become the stage
for the strategy that is the topic of this video,
where over time this land would be sliced up
with roads and checkpoints,
walls and other military infrastructure
that would control the movement
and lives of the Palestinians.
Soon, even Israeli citizens would start to move out here
in large numbers building full on towns
and further dividing up this territory.
Moving citizens into occupied territory like this
is something that the world has deemed illegal and immoral.
So this occupation starts in 1967
and it goes on for decades,
until eventually the Palestinians living here
can't handle it anymore and they start fighting back.
This is known as the first uprising for Intifada.
It started with boycotts,
but escalated into mass protests
where Palestinians of all ages would throw stones
and sometimes Molotov cocktails
at much better equipped Israeli soldiers.
It was Palestinian rage exploding
against Israeli occupation, and it went on for years.
The Israeli government would respond by cracking down,
killing many Palestinians.
Another important thing that happens around the same time
down in the occupied Gaza Strip is that a new movement forms
promising to fight back against this occupation
calling for the destruction of Israel.
The group is called Hamas.
The first Intifada showed that this wasn't gonna work.
Chopping up Palestinian land, oppressing them,
keeping them in this occupation,
was only going to produce more violence.
It wasn't gonna fulfill Israel's promise
to provide security and safety for the Jewish people.
They had to switch course.
- The security of the Israeli people will be reconciled
with the hopes of the Palestinian people
and there will be more security and more hope for all.
- [Johnny] So in the 1990s,
they start getting serious about peace talks
with the Palestinians,
and they come to this agreement called the Oslo Accords,
which for the first time establishes
a Palestinian government authority
and giving it power to govern pockets of land
in the West Bank.
It also gave the Palestinians some authority
over almost all of the Gaza Strip,
though there were still settlements in all of these places.
This was a big deal for this conflict.
Like, both sides were talking to each other
and coming to agreements
that was giving like, authority to the Palestinians.
But another theme of the story
is that hardliners can use violence to derail peace.
And that's exactly what happened here.
Right wing Israelis start holding rallies,
calling their Prime Minister a traitor and a Nazi
for giving land to the Palestinians.
Some of these rallies are led
by a now familiar character, Benjamin Netanyahu.
- The people of Israel want a real peace
and real peace means peace with security.
Peace they can trust with a partner they can trust,
and they don't feel they have it here.
We want a real peace, not a fake one.
- [Johnny] But the peace talks continue.
- With all our neighbors, a comprehensive peace.
- [Johnny] And shortly after signing
the second part of this deal to give Palestinians some land,
the Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is assassinated
by a far right Israeli.
Hamas conducts bus bombings.
And the next year, Benjamin Netanyahu
is elected as the prime minister of Israel.
And Netanyahu is a key figure in this story
because his worldview embodies a way of thinking
that has taken root in Israel in recent years.
The idea that the only way to give true security
to the Jewish people is by doing whatever is necessary
to stop the Palestinians from having a state
anywhere in these borders.
- Look, I'm 28 years old.
I've had to defend my country
in two wars and in many battles.
Nobody wants peace more than Israel.
But the stumbling block to the road for peace
is this demand for a PLO state, which will mean more war,
which will mean more violence in the Middle East.
And I think, I sincerely believe,
if this demand is abandoned,
we can have real and genuine peace.
- [Johnny] So that was Netanyahu. He was a 28-year-old.
But when he becomes the prime minister
a couple decades later,
he spends his term sabotaging the peace accords
that his predecessor had worked so hard to create,
claiming that the occupation of all this land
and its people wasn't actually conquest,
but rather the key for security of the Jewish people.
They had to do this.
Security was the one and only justification for all of this.
So under his watch settlers continue
to move into the West Bank.
We found this leaked video of Benjamin Netanyahu
talking to some settlers in the West Bank.
(several voices speaking)
The cameraman does turn off the camera for a moment,
but then turns it back on moments later.
(Netanyahu speaking foreign language)
He is admitting to sabotaging the peace accords
that the Israeli government had signed
with the Palestinians,
that because he disagreed with them,
he wanted to sabotage them
because he was so against a Palestinian state
or any form of Palestinian autonomy in this land.
And then he goes on to explain
what his real thinking is on the situation.
(Netanyahu speaking foreign language)
Netanyahu is a fantastic politician and statesman,
and he's able to sort of cover up a lot of these policies
in the name of security.
But here we see what he really thinks
as he's talking to these settlers
thinking he's not being recorded.
So unsurprisingly the appetite for peace breaks down
on both sides.
Palestinians come to the conclusion
that the Israelis aren't really serious
about giving them any kind of autonomy
in the West Bank or Gaza,
that their situation will never change.
And once again, they rise up in a second Intifada.
This one, much more violent, much more coordinated.
(intense music)
Hamas becomes a major player in the violence
with suicide bombings and attacks.
Israel responds with great force and during the fighting,
1000 Israelis and 3000 Palestinians are killed.
At this point the Netanyahu way of seeing the world
is starting to look a lot better.
Peace talks didn't work.
All they did was produce more violence.
And so maybe the only way to ensure security
is to go back to full blown occupation
of controlling every move of the Palestinians
in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
So at this point the occupation
gets more and more suffocating,
more walls, more barriers,
more checkpoints, more settlements.
(intense music)
Then in 2005 Israel withdraws from the Gaza Strip,
letting the Palestinian Authority have total control there.
They turn their attention entirely
to their historic homeland of Judea and Samaria,
which is the West Bank.
The next year an election is held
in the Palestinian Authorities
and the winner surprised the world
and would create a new chapter for this conflict.
The winner of these elections was Hamas.
- [Reporter] This is a very, very bad result
for the Palestinians and for Israel.
- [Johnny] The incumbent Palestinian party
that had lost the election
tried to forcibly hold on to power,
and soon the two Palestinian parties
were fighting with each other.
And it results in this split
between the two Palestinian governments.
It turns into violence.
And when the dust settles,
there's suddenly a bitter divide
between these two Palestinian groups,
Hamas completely taking over the Gaza Strip.
And this gets us back to our leaked document
that we started this video with
where an Israeli official is saying
that they would actually be happy if Hamas
took over the Gaza Strip
because now they can treat Gaza like a hostile country.
Now that they're not occupying it,
they're not responsible for the 2 million civilians
who are living there.
They can impose a blockade to control anything
coming in and out of the Gaza Strip,
people, food, medicine, money, building supplies.
But there was another reason why Israel was happy
that Hamas now controlled the Gaza Strip.
The Palestinian government was now deeply divided,
Hamas ruling Gaza and the West Bank being run
by a more moderate, secular Palestinian faction.
And crucially neither considered the other to be legitimate,
which weakened their ability to negotiate
for any kind of state, for any kind of country,
especially when Hamas still refused
to recognize Israel's right to even exist.
This division played right into the hands
of the Israeli right.
And this gets us back to Benjamin Netanyahu,
that enemy of the earlier peace talks.
He gets elected once again in 2009,
declaring himself Mr. Security
and promising to provide safety to Israeli citizens
who are still shaken from the second Intifada
and are now worried that Hamas now controls
the entirety of the Gaza Strip.
Netanyahu's playbook was already made clear.
He had said it point blank.
It's what he had been doing for years.
Sabotaging peace talks that would give Palestinians
any kind of authority over this land,
and continuing to build settlements,
while continuing in his words in that leaked tape
to hit the Palestinians hard to make it unbearable for them.
A complete assault on the Palestinian government.
Dividing and slowly conquering the Palestinian people,
making life hard and desperate for them,
controlling their lives, watching their every move.
And this is where we get to this paradoxical alignment,
almost alliance between Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas,
the enemy of Israel.
As long as Hamas held control over the Gaza Strip,
the Palestinian cause would remain weak and divided.
Netanyahu would feel justified in imposing
this crippling blockade of the Gaza Strip,
which in turn gave Hamas legitimacy
among the people of the Gaza Strip,
showing that their armed struggle
against Israeli oppression was justified,
provoking them to launch rockets into Israel
to show that they were actually doing something
unlike the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank,
which in turn bolstered Netanyahu's narrative
that the Palestinians actually don't want peace,
they want violence and the destruction of Israel.
And the only way for security
is more occupation, more oppression.
So instead of try to take Hamas out,
Netanyahu overtly supported them
by approving huge transfers of untraceable cash
literally delivered in suitcases into the Gaza Strip,
cash that would inevitably end up in the hands of Hamas
to be used against Israel.
He legitimized Hamas by negotiating with them,
releasing a thousand Palestinian prisoners
in exchange for one Israeli.
- The Israeli soldier held captive by Palestinian militants
for five years is expected to be freed within days.
- The more Netanyahu could keep Hamas in power in Gaza,
but keep them contained,
the more he could ensure that Palestinians remain divided.
He could keep peace talks from ever happening,
which in turn gave him time to continue
to pursue his expansionist project in the West Bank.
And indeed, since 2009,
when Netanyahu became the Prime Minister,
the number of settlements in the West Bank has only gone up.
And if you look at this map,
you can see how these settlements
just weave through and carve up this land,
making it impossible to even fathom
what a Palestinian state could look like,
which is precisely the point of the strategy.
I actually reported out here,
visiting the settlements back when I was at Vox.
I did a series talking to the settlers,
trying to understand why they live out there,
what it's like to live in these settlements
that are strangely peaceful and banal
and just mundane, people living their lives,
because they're protected by the army.
If you want a deeper dive on settlements,
you can go watch that series.
But if you're Netanyahu over the last 16 years,
you think your plan is working.
Like, you see all these settlements going up,
the international community can't do anything about it.
They keep supporting you.
Every once in a while there's some flare up in the West Bank
where Palestinians get into a fight with Israeli soldiers,
but it gets contained.
Every few years Hamas fires some rockets,
which then gives Israel the excuse to go, as they put it,
"cut the grass" by conducting a short, swift,
violent military campaign to keep Hamas at bay.
And every day that goes by,
the notion of a Palestinian state
becomes less and less feasible.
This is one reason why a far right Israeli lawmaker
called Hamas "an asset."
(man speaking in foreign language)
So divide and conquer has been the name of the game
in Israel for a long time,
but especially in the last 16 years under Netanyahu.
And again, to the people in charge, they think it's working.
Maybe this violent status quo, this equilibrium can hold
and the far right can get exactly what they want.
Security for the Jewish people
and expansion into all of this land.
And maybe the occupation will break the Palestinian spirit
and they would give up on their dream of having a state.
But that's not what happened.
On October 7th, 2023,
we saw how wrongheaded this theory of security was.
- In an unprecedented surprise attack,
the militant Hamas rulers of Gaza
sent dozens of fighters into Israel by land, sea, and air.
- This deadly attack launched by Hamas
showed us that while Netanyahu's strategy
of divide and conquer might be good
for taking over more land,
what it's not good for is making good
on the original promise of Israel,
which is ensuring the security of the Jewish people.
In fact, his strategy has produced exactly the opposite.
(crowd chanting in foreign language)
Now, the responsibility for what happened on October 7th
lies with the people who committed those acts of terror,
Hamas fighters and their leaders.
There is no excuse or justification for their actions.
But the point I'm trying to make with this video
is that there's also others
that need to stand accountable here.
Those who used Hamas as a pawn
to continue this divide and conquer policy,
who are now engaged in a campaign
of mass bloodshed on civilians,
they deserve to stand accountable as well,
to the Israeli people
and to the countries that support Israel.
I believe in the need for a Jewish state. I do.
I think that's a very reasonable proposal
that Jewish people should feel safe somewhere in this world.
And yet what we're looking at isn't it.
The Israeli project,
the way that it's been wielded in its current form,
produces the exact opposite
of security for the Jewish people.
Thanks for watching,
and I know that you probably have thoughts,
and I'm sure a lot of you disagree with what I've said here,
and that's okay.
I want to hear from you.
I want to listen to that
and I will see you down in the comments.
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(closing synth music)