Shumita Basu, Narrating: Hey there. A quick message before we get into the show. This episode contains graphic descriptions of violence that might be upsetting to some listeners.
As with any conversation or article about the Israel-Hamas war this episode on its own will not capture all of the complexities of the ongoing conflict. If you're curious to hear other coverage we've done on this topic, check out our daily news show "Apple News Today" or past episodes of "In Conversation."
Okay, here's the show.
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Basu, Narrating: This is "In Conversation" from Apple News. I'm Shumita Basu. Today, impressions from a trip to Israel with "The New Yorker" editor David Remnick.
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[SOLEMN MUSIC]
Basu, Narrating: There is a lot of pain and suffering right now as the violence escalates between Israel and Hamas.
David Remnick: This situation is intolerable.
Basu, Narrating: This is David Remnick, editor of "The New Yorker."
Remnick: It's intolerable for Israelis to live in fear, and it's intolerable for Palestinians to live lives of occupation, or blockade, and misrule and immiseration. It's intolerable.
Basu, Narrating: David recently returned from a reporting trip to Israel where he visited the communities that Hamas attacked on October 7th and spoke to survivors of the massacre. Fourteen hundred people were killed, and even now, a month in, more than 200 people are still being held hostage.
Remnick: It is mind boggling. And to see or hear that being looked past, dismissed, not taken on with any empathy, no matter what your politics, is deeply disturbing. And to say that does not discount one's pain and empathy of seeing what's happening in Gaza.
Basu, Narrating: In Gaza, the situation is increasingly dire. Most people can't get out, and basic necessities like water, food and medical supplies are dwindling. More than 10,000 people there have been killed, nearly half of them children.
I wanted to talk to David Remnick because this piece he wrote when he returned from Israel felt different. "More self-conscious than usual," is how he puts it. Here's a journalist who has been to this region many times, covering this conflict over the years. And yet, he seems very aware that no matter what he writes about it, some readers will think he fell short.
David says too many people are getting stuck on a zero-sum way of thinking, that bringing up the horror of the October 7th attack is somehow dismissing or trying to share equal footing with Palestinian suffering in Gaza right now. But he argues stopping to acknowledge what happened on October 7th and the effect it's had on the greater Israeli political psyche is an important step in understanding where this conflict might go next.
I asked David to start by describing what it was like when he arrived in Tel Aviv.
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Remnick: I've never seen any place like this before. So, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the most solemn day of the year in the Jewish calendar, in Israel is commemorated by absolute quiet even by the most secular people. The roads are empty. The country shuts down. The country shuts down. And that was what it was like in Israel when I was there. You could go along at 70 miles an hour on the highway, and the only thing that would interrupt your driving was if there was a siren or an alert on the radio telling you to pull over to the side of the rod and lay flat on the ground, preferably under an overpass because rockets were in the air. And certainly, by the time I was there, there were all kinds of booms in the air, uh, rockets, Iron Dome interceptors, and of course the bombing of Gaza was well underway.
Basu: Right. Right. You were invited by Israeli officials along with some other reporters to watch video footage of the October 7th attack put together by the IDF. What was that experience like? What did you take away from it?
Remnick: Well, first let me say, I'm not a fool. I know that governments and armies can lie. God knows they have over time. Our government has. Israeli government has, and Palestinian officials have, and it's a common affliction. But I saw no reason not to accept that invitation and go see these films, and they were horrible. They were horrible. What they are is a compilation of social media clips, and many of them, by the way, were familiar. I saw them on social media long before going to the spokesman's headquarters at the IDF in northern Tel Aviv. And then some of them were from GoPros taken by Hamas fighters, militants, terrorists, whatever we're gonna call them, as well as phones and all the other ways you can do this. And the overall impression, and again, it's not isolated to this film put together by the IDF, it's all over the place, is one of absolute [SIGHS] horrifying acts of deliberate, constant cruelty and killing with an overlay, I have to say, of ecstasy in so many cases, of ecstasy and deliberate cruelty. It's just disgusting to even… horrifying to recall it of a Hamas guy who's… He's got a dead… By the way, a foreign worker, and with a hoe, tries to decapitate him after he's dead.
Basu: Oh.
Remnick: But he keeps missing, and he keeps hitting him in the, you know, sternum and then kind of gives up and throws the hoe away. Another film had a… It was just a security camera in one of these bungalows in a kibbutz. I believe it was Kibbutz Be'eri. And, um, it's just two kids, two boys, maybe nine, ten in their underwear, terrified. Where's mom? They're disbelieving, and they're just kind of running around, and meanwhile, in the other part of the room is a Hamas fighter very calmly going through the refrigerator because he's thirsty. The banality of it and the knowledge that one of the parents is outside dead and the other one… It is mind boggling. It is mind boggling. Believe me, I understand why people want to reject complexity at a time like this. You see dead children, and how complex can it possibly be to find that horrific and wrong? There's no but to that, but in addition to that, there's also the problem, to say the least, of Israel's choices, and you can say whatever you want about Netanyahu, and God knows I have written negatively about him for not just this time around, but for years and years since the 90s. But it is also a legitimate question to ask, "How is it possible for Israel to live next door, and I mean next door, to 25, 30,000 Hamas fighters devoted to coming into Israel again and again and again, as stated by its spokesman three days ago. How is that to be tolerated?
Basu: Yeah.
Remnick: How is the occupation of the West Bank to be tolerated where the violence of settlers against Palestinians has only gotten worse? It's intolerable. This situation is intolerable. It's intolerable for Israelis to live in fear, and it's intolerable for Palestinians to live lives of occupation, or blockade, and misrule and immiseration. It's intolerable. And right now, and what makes it all the more complicated, I'm sorry to go on, that the two-state solution in many people's eyes still seems like ah, it's nostalgic fantasy that's just… You know. And a one-state solution, which many people argue for, seems like an instant recipe for civil war.
Basu: Yeah.
Remnick: The choices are really hard, and I don't see them… I think only a fantasist would say they're gonna come to some happy resolution very soon.
Basu: Mm. Well, let me ask you because it's… I mean, you're of course not the first to point this out, but the people who were living in these kibbutzes that were under attack on October 7th were not settlers for the most part, not fanatics. You describe them as for the most part liberals, liberals in Israel. And I understand that you've traveled to at least one of those kibbutzes and spoken to people from there.
Remnick: I went to Kibbutz Kfar Aza, Kibbutz Be'eri and other Kibbutzim in the area. These places look like… They were like little villages. They had small factories. They did farming. These were not hilltop settlers. These were not messianic, right-wing fanatics. These were people living their lives. Their biggest sin is they lived in the proximity of Gaza. And that was a level of insecurity. There'd be rocket fire every once in a while, and they're protected by Iron Dome, and once in a while a rocket would come through and kill a few people, which is, if you were in New Jersey or California, you would find that absolutely intolerable by the standards of where we're talking about. It was… Strangely, that's what it was. And these people were slaughtered. These were the same people who were going to demonstrations on Kaplan Street outside the Defense Ministry protesting against the Netanyahu government and their judicial overhaul. These were idealists who, again, I'm not… I don't want to overgeneralize and say it was 100%, but these were idealists who were pro-two-state solution. Some of them worked in human rights work. One of the people I interviewed from Kfar Aza who lost, I don't know how many friends and family in her little kibbutz of 750 people, her sister is the head of Yesh Din. It's one of the most prominent human rights organizations in Jerusalem. And to hear those people say, "I can't move back there. I may even leave Israel. I cannot do this to my children," is unspeakable. And of course, if you are Gazan and living an already extremely, extremely difficult, to say the least, life in Gaza, and every night you're facing from the night sky the possibility that you may be gone in an instant, and more to the point, your children may be, this is intolerable. Intolerable.
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Basu, Narrating: David was not able to travel into Gaza on this trip. But he was in touch with many people inside, including a 30-year-old poet named Mosab Abu Toha. Mosab's essay, "The View from my Window in Gaza," was recently published in "The New Yorker." It's about trying to find bread in a city where electricity and water has been cut off and hundreds of people are lined up at the bakeries still standing. Mosab read an excerpt for "The New Yorker Radio Hour."
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Mosab Abu Toha: On the main street leading to my house, I find the first of many shocking scenes. A shop where I used to take my children to buy juice and biscuits is in shambles. The freezer which used to hold ice cream is now filled with rubble. I smell explosives and maybe flesh. I ride faster. I turn right…
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Basu, Narrating: Mosab's home was destroyed, and his family relocated to Jabalia refugee camp. They were there when Israeli forces struck it last week. Israel says it was targeting Hamas militants. A bomb fell 70 meters away from where Mosab's family was staying. Mosab writes, "The only two things I can do are panic and breathe." David says he's managed to stay in touch.
Remnick: I'm very relieved when I get a WhatsApp message back from him.
Basu: Yeah, I'm sure.
Remnick: And I, by no stretch of the imagination, do I have the illusion that just because Mosab and his immediate family have survived, that, um, [SIGHS] that's true for everybody.
Basu, Narrating: There have been countless stories of whole families, generations, sometimes 20 or 30 relatives, killed in a single Israeli airstrike. Save the Children says children account for two out of every five civilian deaths in Gaza. Hundreds of people are believed to be trapped under rubble.
"CNN" spoke to some of the tens of thousands of Palestinians fleeing northern Gaza and heading south.
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Civilian 1: [SPEAKING THROUGH TRANSLATOR]
Translator 1: It felt like the catastrophe of 2023. We walked by people who were ripped to parts, dead bodies. We walked beside tanks. The Israelis called us, and they were asking people to take off their clothes and throw their belongings.
[BABY CRIES]
Civilian 2: [SPEAKING THROUGH TRANSLATOR]
Translator 2: This war left nothing safe. Now we are in this safe area after Wadi Gaza, and we are still hearing bombardments. There is no safe place in Gaza.
Civilian 3: [SPEAKING THROUGH TRANSLATOR]
Translator 3: We are being destroyed. No one cares about us. Maybe we are safe now, but I'm not sure about those who are still behind.
[END CNN ARCHIVAL CLIP]
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Basu, Narrating: On Thursday, the White House announced that Israel agreed to daily 4-hour humanitarian pauses in northern Gaza, meant to allow people to access food and medicine in the south. Netanyahu has so far resisted calls for a ceasefire until all hostages are released. And while a majority of Israelis support the war, Netanyahu's approval ratings have tanked. I asked David for Israelis just on the other side of the border, the ones living in these more left-leaning communities and protesting Netanyahu's government, what exactly are their criticisms of the prime minister?
Remnick: Where do I begin? If you're on the left, your criticisms of Netanyahu are 20 years, 30 years standing. His resistance to dealing with the Palestinian problem is one issue. His most recent coalition government that includes… It underestimates it to call people right-wing, I mean, messianic people who have criminal records. The national security person in the Cabinet, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has a long record as profiled by Ruth Margalit in "The New Yorker," of all kinds of provocations against Palestinians and as well as Israeli law enforcement. And he's not alone. Just the other day, in the top echelon of government, somebody said, "Well, maybe we should use the nuclear option on Gaza." And even Netanyahu had to sideline him. Netanyahu's also under criminal indictment. I do think the common wisdom in Israel now is that he's, you know, politically finally dead man walking, and, you know, his popularity is down to, I don't know, 25%, 30%, at the very most. I think in his, you know, his longstanding desire to be Israel's Churchill, its protector… I'm sure he in his mind sees, well, if I somehow carry this off well, meaning the war, they'll finally see the light that I am. And by the way, a lot of the vulnerability on October 7th was due to policy in which Netanyahu decided okay, I will empower Hamas. I know who they are, but I'm empowering them. I'll let them have money from Qatar. I'll let many thousands more workers come into Israel to do their job. If they fire some missiles at us, I'll fire back, but it will be limited.
Basu: Right. This strategy known as the conception.
Remnick: The conception, and what it was aimed to do, was to undermine the Palestinian Authority, which was still for a two-state solution, which… That's what Netanyahu saw as the ultimate evil. And that came to, um… I don't know. What's the polite expression for it? Disaster.
Basu: Well, Hamas also played a role in helping to bolster Israeli's political right, right? I mean, what role has Hamas played in scuttling hopes?
Remnick: Let's be clear about Hamas. It began with Sheik Yassin and so on trying to empower a religious organization. But it very quickly became the source of militarized Islamic fundamentalism. And after the signing of the Oslo Peace Accords, Hamas did everything it could to undermine that possibility, to undermine Yasser Arafat, who's far from perfect. God knows. And its charter has always made it very clear that it was for the elimination, the elimination of the State of Israel. And that if it ever agreed to a two-state solution or anything of the like, it was only in the spirit of a hudna, meaning a truce, a tactical truce. But ultimately, that is the goal. Now, a lot of people thought well, okay, if you normalize it and, you know, just keep it in check, the absolutism of Hamas would fade. Well, I think we saw on October 7th that was not the case. Not the case. And I don't think Israel is prepared to gamble on Hamas again.
Basu: Do people in Israel believe that the response to October 7th, these ongoing attacks on Gaza, make Israel safer?
Remnick: That's a tough… That's extremely tough. Here's what most Israelis believe. It is intolerable, and I'm just reporting here. It is intolerable any longer to live in proximity, and you know the proximity from Tel Aviv to Gaza is an hour and 15 minutes in the car.
Basu: Yeah, it's very close.
Remnick: From Be'er Sheva, it's half an hour. It is intolerable to live with a organization devoted to your elimination on your border. That organization, which has been in power since 2006-2007, is heavily armed, has a network of tunnels that are incredibly intricate that make the Viet Cong's tunnel system from the Vietnam War look like child's play, and has been well armed by, over time, by a number of sources, but principally Iran. And what do you do about that? And there's all kinds of evidence, not just IDF, but reporting, independent journalism, that the defense structure of Hamas knows very well that if enough civilians, who are essentially shielding them above ground, die that world opinion will turn against Israel very quickly. That's the dilemma. That's the dilemma. And you saw that happening right away. It's… Again, [SIGHS] please don't for one second think this is, uh, somehow a polemic one way or another. I'm just trying to describe the situation as best I can. There's plenty of, um, polemics out there. That's what I'm trying to do here. In fact, when complexity is being rejected, I think it's necessary. I think it's necessary to see things whole.
Basu: The strategy of conception sounds like a way to make a diplomatic solution impossible and to instead justify what exactly?
Remnick: I think the Netanyahu view, which by the way is shared by a lot of Israelis on the right in particular, is we don't have a partner for peace. We don't have it. They don't trust it, and their justification for this, and you know it very well, is there has been a number of moments in history, most glaringly at Camp David with Clinton, Arafat and Ehud Barak in which a settlement, however flawed, was on the brink, and Arafat, most glaringly, walked away from it. So, any time the notion of a two-state solution is brought up… And by the way, it is not and has not been subject number one for nine tenths of Israelis for many years.
Basu: Sure.
Remnick: They would say, "We don't have a partner for peace." And [SIGHS] they just kick the can down the road as if it could be contained indefinitely. There'd be flare ups here. There'd be, you know, as they say, an exchange, to be cold and brutal about it, an exchange in Gaza. There'd be settler violence that would get some attention, you know, in a left-wing paper like "Haaretz," a very brave and terrific paper, I should say. But the world had moved on. And you were in a world now where the UAE and the Saudis and other countries were very eager to not only normalize their relations with Israel, but to benefit from them. They had their own agendas. And I think Hamas and Iran didn't want that to happen. I think that was part of the calculation in addition to prisoners, in addition to the West Bank, in addition to the Haram al-Sharif and so on.
Basu: But it sounds like that sentiment goes both ways, the idea of not having an honest negotiating partner to meet at the table.
Remnick: Look. Israel has independent treaties with Jordan and Egypt, who both have different interests. Jordan has a huge Palestinian population. There aren't that many Hashemites in the Hashemite kingdom. So, if you're King Hussein and Queen Rania, your power is jeopardized if the Palestinian population sees you as an enemy of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza or not sufficiently interested in them or compassionate about them. In Egypt, Sisi does not want to see Gazans enter out the Rafah gate and into Sinai, making their lives more complicated. So, these are not [CHUCKLES SOFTLY] idealistic innocents either.
Basu: Yeah. Well, let's shift to U.S. policy for a moment. I mean, here, we've seen President Biden seeming to try to walk this line of continuing America's historic support for Israel while saying Palestinian civilians have a right to safety, calling for humanitarian pauses but falling short of calling for a ceasefire. I think it's safe to say he's made people angry on all sides of this issue. How long do you think President Biden can walk this line he's trying to walk right now, and what do you think he needs to be doing or saying differently?
Remnick: Take a minute and think about what's on Joe Biden's plate. [CHUCKLES SOFTLY] It's almost unbelievable. Russia has invaded Ukraine, and that war is now in a kind of horrible, meat grinding stalemate with immense American and NATO involvement that requires all kinds of time and resources, and you have a Congress that's starting to rebel, a Republican Party that's starting to rebel. You have a reelection campaign where the polls are telling you that your… The one thing that you can't change is the thing that they dislike the most, your age.
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Basu: Right.
Remnick: With polls in "The New York Times" telling you that in the half a dozen battleground states, you're behind in five of them. And now, you have this issue. Where there's a reputational cost. There's a financial cost. There's all kinds of diplomatic and military complications. To say nothing about domestic political concerns in the Democratic Party… There's real generational tension on this issue and not only just in the Jewish community. You know, you want to win the state of Michigan, and you're worried about the Muslim American population in places like Dearborn. So, I have to think that Anthony Blinken, the secretary of state's, statements in recent weeks or days about humanitarian pauses, making sure that he shows empathy for Gazan children as well as Israeli children… I'm not saying these aren't sincere, but they're very pointed and have political import as well. When this will change, I don't know. But it could change in a moment. You know, an errant bomb could go blow something up even more horrifically if that's possible to imagine.
Basu: You know, I've been thinking about something that I heard the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates say recently. He was on "Democracy Now!" He was talking about having traveled to the West Bank over the summer.
Remnick: Mm-hmm. I watched it.
Basu: Yeah, you saw that clip?
Remnick: Mm-hmm.
Basu: And I thought what he had to say about the parallels between the plight of Palestinians and African Americans but also the connection and relationship that he sees with the Israeli people in regards to this idea of rage, rage that comes when you have a history of oppression.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates: I understood the anger. I understood the sense of humiliation that comes when people subject you to just manifold oppression, to genocide, and people look away from that. I come from the descendants of 250 years of enslavement. I come from a people who sexual violence and rape is marked in our very bones and in our DNA. And I understand how when you feel that the world has turned its back on you, how you can then turn your back on the ethics of the world. But I also understood how corrupting that can be.
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Basu: It reminded me a bit actually of what that former Israeli army general told you and what you wrote about in that piece about corruption, about becoming morally corrupt. And I just, I was curious to know your thoughts on that.
Remnick: The one thing I would say is not every historical circumstance equals another. Israel and Palestine is an incredibly complicated history, and it is not exactly the same as France and Algeria. It is not exactly the same as Jim Crow in America. I'm not saying there aren't injustices in all of these, but they have their own particularities. Yes, there is a history called colonialism. But there are differences in different aspects of it, and in order to solve these questions, in order to come to any understanding of each other, it's worth knowing the particularities of this situation. That's independent of what Ta-Nehisi said. I respect Ta-Nehisi's experience, and he knows a lot of things that I don't. You know, I came up in a very different way than Ta-Nehisi. I grew up a Jewish kid in New Jersey, and when I was ten years old, there was this thing called the Six-Day War, and it was a miracle, and we thought this was, you know, like one of the miracles of Jewish history of ancient time. And in fact, what it turned out to be was both a necessary miracle, but at the same time, the beginning of terrible troubles, which was the inability or unwillingness to relinquish lands, particularly Gaza and the West Bank, and this has now been going on for 56 years. That's its own thing. Jewish history and Palestinian history are its own thing. It's different from the French Algerian model of colonialism, or the Brits in India, or, or, or…
Basu: I wonder if after, you know, having published this piece but also just thinking about it for all these weeks now, uh, now that we're over a month past October 7th, if you've arrived at a different way of thinking about how we engage with each other on this topic. How do we… [DEEPLY EXHALES] How do we resist thinking the worst of others when we go into these conversations?
Remnick: I've thought about that a lot because I see friends of mine, people I know, people I work with. What's in front of their face when they pick up the phone is so inflammatory and so all this or all that. And I don't know that that's a friend of clear thinking, much less empathy. The same goes with strict models of how to fit, you know, everything that's ever happened in the world into one model. And I think for the people who are most directly involved, it's very hard to in the midst of such horror, whether you're an Israeli or a Gazan. I'm not talking about Hamas, just a person who lives his or her life and wants to send their kids to school and sleep through the night without hearing explosions or live on a kibbutz without having to hide in a reinforced room until the shooting and the grenades go away. People want to live a reasonably stable life. In the midst of such horror, clear thinking is impossible to ask of anyone.
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Basu: Thank you so much for your time.
Remnick: My pleasure.
Basu, Narrating: David Remnick is the editor of "The New Yorker." We'll link to his recent article about his reporting trip to Israel called "In the Cities of Killing" in our show notes page.
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