Assessing Where Israel Went Wrong in Gaza

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Coming up later this hour, we're going to invite calls from 8th graders in the New York City public school system, or your parents. I realize the 8th graders yourself are probably in school, or at least you should be. 8th graders and their parents, and maybe other loved ones on how the high school admission process worked out for you. I know the admission notices went out yesterday, so a lot of families are buzzing with excitement or disappointment or some mixture.

We're going to ask, where did you get in and what do you think about the process because we all know it's a byzantine process to apply for public high school in New York City, and not just the specialized high schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, even regular high schools. There's this whole complicated thing. We're going to invite your comments on the process and your stories of where you applied, where you got in, where your kid applied and got in, coming up later in the hour.

Right now, here's one way to look at the situation in Israel and Gaza right now, that in addition to the violence itself that Hamas brought on October 7th, they laid a trap for Israel, and Israel has fallen for it, hook, line, and sinker.

As described in an article on Vox, "The goal was to create a visceral response from Israel that would be seen as so disproportionate that the violence Hamas carried out on October 7th would be pushed to the side, and that Israel would be seen as the irrational actor. In that sense, the article proposes Hamas actually succeeded." That's a quote actually from Devorah Margolin in the article, an expert on preventing violent extremism at the center-right think tank, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, in the article on Vox called How Israel's War Went Wrong. We'll talk to the writer in just a minute. Some evidence for Devorah Margolin's point came last night in the State of the Union address when staunch ally of Israel, Joe Biden, felt compelled to say this.

President Joe Biden: More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of whom are not Hamas. Thousands and thousands of innocents, women and children, girls and boys, also orphaned. Nearly 2 million more Palestinians under bombardment or displacement. Homes destroyed, neighbors in rubble, cities in ruin. Families without food, water, medicine. It's heartbreaking.

Brian Lehrer: President Biden from the State of the Union address last night. With us now, Zach Beauchamp, senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers challenges to democracy in the United States and abroad, right-winging populism, and the world of ideas. Zach, thanks for coming on with us again. Welcome back to WNYC.

Zach Beauchamp: Oh, hey, Brian. I'm happy to be here.

Brian Lehrer: First, interesting that Biden accepted the 30,000 number and the statistic that the majority of those killed have been civilians.

Zach Beauchamp: Yes. Very early in the war, Biden called into question the death count compiled by the Palestinian Health Ministry, which is part of the Hamas foreign government in the Gaza Strip. This was widely seen as a low moment in his handling of the war. Not because it's inherently wrong to distrust what Hamas is saying, but because there's a long history of the Palestinian Health Ministries "being accurate" and roughly verified by the US government, and they're widely treated as correct. Externally, you don't trust Hamas but this particular agency that is controlled by Hamas has a good track record for reasons that I'm not fully sure about.

Second, for Americans especially Americans who are Arab, Muslim, or especially Palestinian, it felt challenging the very idea that they were suffering, calling into question the horror that they were experiencing. The Biden team has really learned from that experience.

I've argued also in a new article that came out this morning that there's a lot of evidence that they're really trying to rethink the close-hugging Israel approach that they've had throughout the war, and trying to figure out new ways to put pressure on a government and ally that they think is going rogue.

Brian Lehrer: On those death statistics I read a few days ago that Israel's own publicly-stated estimates are that they've killed 10,000 to 12,000 Hamas fighters. I guess even by the Israeli government's own numbers, most of the dead would be civilians. Can you talk a little more about that scenario from terrorism prevention expert Devorah Margolin from the Near East Institute who you quoted in the article? I read from that in the intro that the way Israel is fighting in Gaza is what Hamas wanted from the October 7th attack.

Zach Beauchamp: When I talked to Devorah, she pointed to captured orders and planning documents, instruction manuals for the attack, figured on- that were discovered on Hamas fighters. If you look at them, they contain explicit instructions to be extraordinarily violent. This is why some of the spin that you're hearing from some people, like say you can't believe Israeli claims about mass rape during the attack, first of all, those specific claims are very well documented, independent of controversies around specific articles.

Second, it's not surprising. It's horrifying, but it's not surprising because this is what Hamas wanted. It's in the documents. It's what we've learned from zero interrogations of captured Hamas fighters. They were attempting to provoke an extraordinarily violent response from Israel. This has long been part of their strategy. Hamas wins. They haven't accomplished their long-term objective, but they improved their political standing by polarizing the Israel-Palestine conflict. They're at their weakest when it looks there might be some kind of peace agreement between the two sides that Palestinians and Israelis can live in comparative harmony next to each other. There might be some way for Palestinians to get what they want; the end of an Israeli occupation, the end of the siege on Gaza, and their national aspirations fulfilled without having to resort to violence.

What Hamas succeeds and gets support from Palestinians that allows it to strengthen in the long run, when they can say, "Look, the only language they understand is force. The only way we can beat them is by fighting them until the very better end." When Israel commits extraordinary amounts of violence against Palestinians as it's been doing since October 8th, basically, then Hamas' narrative becomes more and more and more compelling.

From the point of view of this group, it's more important to them to win this narrative war and win the hearts of the Palestinian people than it is to maintain their short-term military operating capabilities. While Israel has done tremendous damage to Hamas' ability to launch an attack like October 7th in the near term, the fear that people like Devorah told me, and I think it's unfortunately borne out by the evidence, is that it's increasing their ability to remain a threat to innocent lives Israeli and Palestinian and the like in the long run.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, our question for this segment for you is going to be, if you supported Israel's right to defend itself on October 8th, how do the ethics or the wisdom of the war look to you today on March 8th? Is this changing for you? 212-433-WNYC. If you supported Israel's right to defend itself on October 8th, and you still support, in theory, Israel's right to defend itself, how do the ethics or the wisdom of the way the war is being fought look to you today on March 8th? Is this changing for you? 212-433-WNYC, call or text for Zach Beauchamp from Vox.

On how Israel is fighting, you cite Israeli journalist, Yuval Abraham, who reported that Israel changed its doctrine to permit far greater civilian casualties than it would've tolerated in previous wars. Can you describe the before and after of that at all, what Israel was willing to do in its previous wars regarding civilian casualties, and how specifically that changed for this one?

Zach Beauchamp: Sure. The way that militaries in advanced democracies make decisions is that they think about a threshold of acceptable civilian casualties to advance a particular military objective. This sounds really grim, but it's one of those things that's- it's a scenario that's forced by war. The US government does the same thing. They have different procedures for how they go about doing it, but there are lawyers that are often involved in the conversations about whether or not a particular strike can be justified.

Now it's been true that Israel has a much more expansive view than many of its other peer democracies, and has for a long time of all international humanitarian law can permit, and what kinds of force they can use and where, and what the acceptable casualty thresholds might be. Israel's does tend to be higher. In the US, sometimes it's zero. If you have a reasonable chance to think that there's a civilian casualty, this strike cannot proceed.

What happened here is that that threshold got cranked up by extraordinary amount. When Israel, which had accepted restraint in previous, or at least a higher degree of restraint than it's currently doing in previous conflicts, it's not doing that right now. Abraham cites, based on his reporting, a situation where Israeli war planners knew in advance that there was a high likelihood of there being, I believe the quote was hundreds- it could just be open.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, that was going to be my next question to you anyway about Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham's reporting. The quote is basically that the Israeli military command knowingly approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an attempt to assassinate a single top Hamas military commander.

Zach Beauchamp: That's right and that's the kind of thing that changes. That is dramatically different than previous wars. The willingness to strike in these incredibly heavily populated areas with frequency as opposed to one-off for one extraordinarily valuable target, and even then some of these strikes might very well not have passed muster in previous Israeli wars.

The country has embraced such an expansive view of what's militarily necessary in this particular conflict that they're willing to go to relative extremes. This is just airstrikes we're talking about. We haven't even gotten into other components of the Israeli offensive, like its restrictions on humanitarian aid, or the way that it operated on the ground. When we're talking about airstrikes and which made up a huge percentage of the civilian casualties early in the war, a lot of it had to do with this understood casualty threshold.

Brian Lehrer: This also gets us to your analysis of Israel's stated goal for the war destroying Hamas. You, like many people, say that may be impossible, and that support for Hamas seems actually to be rising despite the brutality that everyone saw in the October 7th attack. What's an alternative goal that Israel might have set that would've both protected more civilians in Gaza, and protected Israelis for more October 7s, which to be fair to Israel, Hamas has vowed to stage if they can?

Zach Beauchamp: I've long argued since the very beginning of the conflict that Israel had every right to take actions to make sure that this didn't happen again, and that some of those actions would need to be military in character. I also argued that destroying Hamas did not seem like a feasible objective, or one that could be accomplished without a catastrophic set of consequences. The argument that I made, and this was in a piece that I published in late October, was that Hamas could be degraded and politically defeated, but not just crushed militarily so that force could be employed in a more calculated counter-terrorism strategy aimed at blunting Hamas' capacity to launch offensive war. While at the same time, Israel pursued a policy that reoriented its overall political approach to the Palestinians by strengthening the Palestinian authority, which has long cooperated with Israel and is much more peaceful, reigning in its settlement activity in the West Bank, and in general, reorienting policy to illustrate that the path of peace would provide what Palestinians want far better than the path of violence.

Israel chose not to do that. In fact, during the war, West Bank settlers have gotten more violence and extremist activity has been encouraged to a degree by elements of the current government who are themselves extremists. Israel had an option to move away from the decades of right-wing drift that had been happening in Israeli politics towards a more aggressive policy towards the Palestinians, and understand that the only solution to the conflict is political rather than military.

For a variety of reasons that we can get into, Prime Minister Netanyahu was not capable of executing on such a pivot. He didn't want to, and his governing coalition wouldn't allow it. We're in a real nightmare scenario right now.

Brian Lehrer: We'll get more into the Netanyahu government as we go, but let's get a couple of callers on here, contrasting views, I think. Angelique in Oakland, California, you're on WNYC with Zach Beauchamp from Vox. Hi, Angelique.

Angelique: Hi Brian. I'm a long-time listener. I call in occasionally, and I appreciate everything that you do. Thank you for having these conversations.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you so much.

Angelique: As an American Jew, I was very supportive of Israel, especially after October 7th. I have friends in Israel, and every time I comment about it, I feel like I get slammed on both sides. I don't want to see Palestinians dying, but at the same time, my Israeli friends are like, "You don't understand what it's like to have friends being bombed on buses every few weeks."

When we went to cemeteries with them, every single one of my friends knew at least two people who had been killed in terrorist attacks in their country. They were like, "You just don't understand what that's like. You can't tell me how to defend myself." I just feel so trapped. I look every day on the news for whether or not Netanyahu is going to be removed, because I really feel like the only way for peace is not with him.

It's scary to see antisemitism rising worldwide in a way that I've never seen it in my lifetime. I'm 34. I've never seen this in my lifetime at this level, and the killing has to stop. What's going on in Gaza has to stop. Also, this is not the way. What your guest said about that there has to be a diplomatic way, and that's the only way out of this. I feel like that's been so obvious to so many of us from day one, and it's just like Netanyahu is so warmongering, it's terrifying.

Brian Lehrer: Angelique, thank you very much. We appreciate your call a lot. I think we're going to get a different point of view from George in Brooklyn. George, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

George: Thank you for having me, Brian. I want to tell you that I've been a great, great fan of yours until very recently. I'm changing my views, unfortunately. I think I have three points in here. One to answer Angelique. Angelique said that diplomatic solution. There have been about 15 to 20 diplomatic solutions that the Palestinians rejected. Number two, SAC philosophy about Hamas is super crystal clear that Hamas wanted a severe violent reaction from Israel. It's very, very clear that Hamas is using its own people as human shields.

Isn't that a clear crystal solution to remove them, that the whole world should be joining us, that we doing actually a favor to the Gazan people and not the exact opposite? My point number three is, every time I listen on your radio, I'm very, very glad that you have something. Every time you give about, let's say in ratios 1 to 10, you give one to the Israeli side, provided that particular side is leaning more towards anti-Israel. Given the fact that he's Jewish or pro-Israeli, giving him the authenticity that he's saying what he's saying is correct. You put nine to the Palestinian side.

Number four that I forgot to mention is, every proof that Israel brought into the world was not collaborated or corroborated, whatever the verb is. Every time Hamas say something, yes it's 100% [unintelligible 00:18:02] kosher. It's right there to the [unintelligible 00:18:05]--

Brian Lehrer: George, let me--

George: There are 10 minutes of bombing that was their own bombing. They managed to count 500 Palestinians in less than 10 minutes. I served in the military for three years, and I can tell you to react to that, you have to be a super superman.

Brian Lehrer: George, let me leave it there because you've made a lot of points, and I want to get some reaction from our guest. Two contrasting calls there.

Zach, you probably get the same thing. I constantly get it from both sides. Oh, you put more people on on the other side. You put more people on this side. I think George's call suggests a moral debate around the terms of any ceasefire. Biden's version would necessarily include Hamas returning the remaining hostages, which on one level is very fair to demand, while the UN resolution that the US vetoed and the sense of the protest movement is more focused on Israel stopping this large-scale killing of civilians, period.

George and many other people in Israel, as the earlier caller was citing, who doesn't support the way Israel is fighting the war, many, many people in Israel are fed up and say they've given the Palestinians many offers for peace, and Hamas keeps doing things like this so they have no choice.

The moral question, I wonder if you interviewed anyone or have your own views on like, maybe on paper the demands on Israel are unfairly unilateral when Hamas is an immoral act or two, but the reality is 10s of 1000s of civilians have been killed, and the plight of the 100 hostages doesn't add up to enough reason to allow that much killing of civilians to go on, when there might have been other ways to protect against another October 7th.

There's a real moral sacrifice there to sideline the hostages, even if it makes larger moral sense, but these are the kinds of very difficult ethical questions that I think ethicists of war are talking about. Right?

Zach Beauchamp: Yes. Look, I think there are two very simple narratives on this conflict, and both of them on this particular conflict on Israel-Palestine in general, but the Gaza war, specifically, both of which are wrong. The simple pro-Palestinian narrative is, Israel is an occupying power that's been oppressing Palestinians for a long time. They have no right to use force against Palestinians. The more extreme versions of this narrative go, they, in fact, deserve what they got on October 7th. I think that's morally reprehensible.

On the Israeli side, the pro-Israel side, there's this argument that says, well, because Hamas is an evil organization dedicated to the murder of Jews, all true, that they are responsible for everything that we do. That's also reprehensible. You can't shoot a gun into a crowded theater or trying or a crowd of people trying to get somebody that you think is responsible for hurting you at one point, and then when you kill innocent people say, "Well, really, it was that guy's fault."

The moral logics on both of the hardcore partisan sides, and you see them expressed as boldly as I just said, in certain quarters, I think they're indefensible. All of the rest of us, the morally reasonable people, are living in this uncomfortable zone, where we're always having to make judgments along the lines of, "Okay, does this legitimate Israeli objective, justify this level of violence?

The reason I talked about it mostly from the point of view of Israel is that I don't think of Hamas as a reasonable actor. Giving moral advice to Hamas is a little bit like telling a rock to hatch and have a baby. It doesn't even make sense to speak about them, given what the organization is, as being able to change their ability. If you're like, "Hamas should stop using human shields," well, yes, obviously they should, but they're not going to, so then what?

Israel, while the current government, I think is not capable of making more moral choices, there are actors in the Israeli political system that will, so evaluating and talking about Israel through the lens of its moral policies, that makes a certain amount of sense to me in a way that talking about the Hamas warfighting doesn't. Then now we're talking about all of these different difficult complex judgments.

To take one example that you brought up, the nature of the hostage fighting, well, there's a very strong case to be made. A lot of critics of the government make this in Israel, that the war is making it less likely to get hostages back. Now more likely that hostages have been killed in strikes, even shot by Israeli troops. So long as the fighting is going on, Hamas has an incentive to keep hostages in high-value areas that they don't want Israel striking. There are some reports that Hamas's leaders live right now surrounded by hostages because they know that Israel won't strike them if the consequence of doing that is killing 20 Israeli hostages or something like that.

Brian Lehrer: A listener texts, reframing the question in one sentence, "Who is worse, the person who uses human shields, or the person who doesn't care about the human shields and kills them anyway?"

Zach Beauchamp: It's horrible. What Hamas does means that Israel is in a no-win situation in terms of military fighting, in terms of the actual ground, the combat operations. The only way to beat Hamas is to restructure the terms of engagement, such that the logic of violence doesn't prevail, and the logic of peace and positive, some cooperation becomes dominant.

I really believe, based on my own reporting in the field in Israel-Palestine and talking weekly, daily, with people who live there, that that's possible. They can do it. It takes political will. It takes real political will and strength. Right now, there are serious questions about whether the political actors are capable of doing it, but that doesn't mean that the peoples aren't capable of doing that. That's a really important distinction to keep in mind.

Brian Lehrer: You write in your article, "It didn't have to be this way. After the horrific events of October 7th, Israel had an obviously just claim to wage a defensive war against Hamas and the tactical and strategic capabilities to execute a smarter, more limited, and humane war plan." Why didn't they?

Zach Beauchamp: There's a lot of reasons. It's a little bit like asking, why didn't the United States adopt a smarter strategy after 9/11? The country was so traumatized and so in shock, that there was a need to respond massively to, the language that's often used is restore determines, to show that Israel can't be hurt like this again. That led to an immediate outpouring of largely unstrategic military attacks of being like we're going not, in the sense of-- It wasn't obvious how it linked up to long-term goals other than showing Hamas that there's a price to be paid.

They didn't, over time, move away from this immediate reaction of pain and fear and anger towards something smarter, a more calculated use of force designed to secure their short-term interests of ensuring that Hamas can't launch attacks like this again, and instead, then, at the same time executing this political pivot I've been talking about to try to reframe the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in ways that sap the root causes of Hamas's ability to saint itself. That can be laid at the feet of the elected leadership of specifically Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the coalition that he chose to build.

Netanyahu is, as one observer put it recently, a uniquely malign actor in Israeli politics, who has been in power every year, but one, since 2009, and has used that power to distort Israeli politics in incredibly dangerous, incredibly dangerous, and in fundamental ways. The horrible conduct of this war reflects both complicity on the parts of reasonable people and Israel's governments, who should know better, and should be thinking more clearly about the strategy, but also, and I think, first and foremost, Netanyahu's leadership of the government and his refusal to set clear strategic guidelines.

Brian Lehrer: It goes beyond that, doesn't it? In your article, you acknowledge that the Israeli public and our caller who's become disenchanted with the war, as an American Jew, though she started by supporting it in October, she brought this up too that the Israeli public is so traumatized still by the original attack, that they are still in an October 8th mindset as if nothing has happened yet in Gaza, but here we are on March 8th.

If anything, it seems to be the families of the hostages, and ironically, the people in the military, who you cite as becoming most skeptical now. Is that how you see it, but that Israeli public opinion kind of behind Netanyahu, even though they don't really like Netanyahu, is a factor, right?

Zach Beauchamp: Not anymore. Netanyahu's public opinion ratings are abysmal. Polling shows that his party would lose, his coalition would lose in any election that was held and his party would lose a significant number of seats to the [unintelligible 00:28:05] party.

Brian Lehrer: You even seem to suggest in your article that if the Netanyahu government falls, the next government in could be even more right-wing. Did I read that right?

Zach Beauchamp: That's not right. No, I think that's extremely unlikely, but there are questions about what the differences would be on certain policy issues. It seems extremely likely to me that the next government of Israel would be some kind of centrist coalition.

The polling suggests that Benny Gantz, who is a former head of the IDF, and currently the leader of one of the top opposition parties and is also in the war cabinet helping shape military policy right now, that Gantz would be the next prime minister, and he would likely be in a coalition with Yair Lapid who's the centrist center-left figure in Israeli politics, and likely some other parties that range from right to left.

That coalition would, I think, have a very different policy towards the West Bank Palestinians, which is an essential component of dealing with the consequences of this war. Whether or not they would end the war, now, there are some signs from Gadi Eisenkot, who was one of Netanyahu's chief deputies, that things would change in terms of the conduct of the war.

I think that it's clear where Israel hold elections, that the policy would move back towards the center. Exactly what that means, as to how it would affect the pace of bombings, the willingness to come to the ceasefire, that's not quite as clear, but it would definitely create a political opening for something like the resolution that the United States is pushing right now.

Brian Lehrer: James in Brooklyn has a question. James, you're on WNYC with Zach Beauchamp from Vox. Hi.

James: Good morning. I had heard it theorized like you posited in the article, that Hamas, in fact, did do this for the PR, but then it was motivated specifically because Israel was about to sign a peace accord with, I think it's Saudi Arabia, and that this is all somehow tied to the Shiite-Sunni conflict. Have you seen any evidence to that point?

Brian Lehrer: Right. I think the argument is that Hamas, and you do touch on this in the article, that another way that you say Hamas succeeded, no matter how you judge Hamas, is that they wanted to draw attention to the Palestinian plight, which they thought wasn't getting world attention. It was going on and on in the way that it was, and that they've succeeded in doing that. One of the trigger points for that, the caller is suggesting, is that Israel and Saudi Arabia were on the verge of normalizing relations without a solution for the Palestinians. Fair?

Zach Beauchamp: That's right. There was some discussion of there being, I don't know if on the verge is accurate. There was reporting to that effect. I think some people in the Biden administration thought so whether or not that was actually going to be the case. We'll never know at this point. I think that that was, as you suggested, and the caller suggests, it was part of the general sense among Hamas that they were losing the ability to make the Palestinian cause potent, especially within the Arab public, but also globally. I don't know if they said, "Okay, we have to launch now because normalization is happening." They had been planning this for a really long time.

I think there was, clearly a long-running sense that things among them that they were losing the public, the Arab Street, so to speak, and that there would need to be a dramatic demonstration that Israel and the Palestinians were still in conflict, in order to refocus attention on the causes that benefit Hamas, in terms, not just a public opinion, but its ability to serve as a champion for the Palestinians in a way that enhances its domestic profile at home, which is all-important for it, as well as to reshape the contours of that conflict away from any kind of peaceful solution, which was hard to begin with and towards the violence. It's all bound up with itself.

Brian Lehrer: Finally, you ask in your article, "Can things get better?" Is there a more constructive path forward for long-term Israeli security and to save Gazan lives from continuing the war in the current way? Are there scenarios?

Zach Beauchamp: Yes. I think that there are two factors that need to happen. First, the United States needs to ramp up its pressure on Israel. There are signs that the Biden administration is willing to do that and that they may already be doing it behind the scenes, but they need to do more.

One suggestion I heard from a lot of experts is, they need to go speak directly to the Israeli public and tell them things have gone wrong. Your government is not telling you the truth about what's happening in the war and what it's doing. I don't know if I put it in exactly those terms. I'm not a speechwriter, but that kind of argument saying that Netanyahu is leading you towards disasters, one that Biden has extraordinary credibility to make. He's much more popular among Israelis than Netanyahu is. His moral authority is immense. Pressure from the US to get Israel to change course, both on the war right now, and its general policy towards the Palestinians.

Second, I think there needs to be a new government in Israel. I think that the only way to get real change on this broader political question is for Benjamin Netanyahu to be gone. That's not something the US can force necessarily, but it's something that could very well happen. Given the nature of the political landscape in Israel, there's setting up to be a very complex fight that I don't have time to explain right now on over conscription, and specifically conscripting ultra-orthodox into the military, ultra-orthodox men, and this could split Netanyahu government apart right now.

If that does come to pass, which is a plausible scenario, according to Israeli politics experts, the government could very well fall, leading to new elections, which they will lose without a shadow of a doubt, I think. I'm usually not this confident about Israeli politics, but this time, the polling all points in one way.

Those are real conditions, in which not just the war policy could change. That is badly needed in the immediate term, given the humanitarian situation in Gaza, which is one of the worst I've seen in my career as a journalist covering these kinds of things. We haven't talked about it that much, but it's probably, I think, the thing most important to consider right now.

Also, in the long run, to transform the parameters of the conflict so that something like this can never happen again. That's what we need in the long run, and that requires a new Israeli government. There's no way around it.

Brian Lehrer: Zach Beauchamp, senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers challenges to democracy in the United States and abroad, right-wing populism, and the world of ideas. He's written multiple times about the Israel-Gaza situation since October 7th, and obviously interviews a lot of people and thinks deeply about the situation. Zach, thank you for coming on with us again.

Zach Beauchamp: Hey, Brian, I appreciate that and you tolerating me after being up until 1:30 AM covering the State of the Union. Sorry.

[chuckles]

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Listeners, as we say at the end of many of these conversations, we won't solve the Middle East today, but we're trying to have conversations that respect the complexity of the situation and the humanity of both the Palestinian and the Israeli people. We try in good faith. Obviously, we get a lot of polarized texts and callers, and some people expressing more complex views as well. All I can say is, we try in good faith. We hope conversations like this are helpful in some small way.

 

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