Monday Morning International Politics: Israel and Gaza

[Introduction music]

Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. David Remnick, Editor of The New Yorker and host of The New Yorker Radio Hour is with us.

After the October 7th, attack, he personally went to Israel and has just published a masterful piece of reporting that is rich in history, respects the experiences of both Israelis and Palestinians, if I may say, and includes political analysis that goes beyond trying to lay blame and express rage.

It's worthy of what we know David Remnick to be in his position as Editor of The New Yorker, and it's good if you have time on your hands too, because it displays at 47 pages.

David, we always appreciate when you come on the show. Sometimes it's to have some fun. I always enjoy those, but in this case, I just want to start by thanking you for your deep take that even includes some rays of hope. Welcome back to WNYC.

David Remnick: It's always good to talk with you, Brian. Thank you so much.

Brian Lehrer: We'll save that ray of hope for the end with one soundbite from the Radio Hour version. David, why did you decide to personally run toward the fire, as it were, after the Hamas invasion of October 7th? As Editor-in-Chief, it doesn't have to be you.

David Remnick: Well, I've been covering this part of the world for a very, very long time, and we also had other people writing about this, I should say. Ruth Margalit in Israel. We've had a young boy inside Gaza has written a couple of dispatches for us, Mosab Abu Toha. Isaac Chotiner has done any number of interviews.

It's just, I do know my way around there a little bit, and have written many pieces from there over the years from Gaza from the West Bank, as well as from Israel, and I felt compelled to do it, but I'm back and others will write more.

Brian Lehrer: You titled your article In The Cities of Killing, cities plural, a reference to a landmark Hebrew poem from around 1904 after a devastating Russian pogrom. Could you tell that story a little bit? Even many Jews don't know it. The Kishinev pogrom and the poem that came as a response.

David Remnick: Yes. In 1903, in the Pale of Settlement, where Jews were made to live in the Russian Empire, it was one of many pogroms famously in Kishinev, 1903. The alleged compulsion for this horrible act was that there was an accusation that Jews had killed a young Christian child to use the blood for the making of Passover Matzoh.

Led by priests, people beset on the Jewish population. This pogrom is a pivotal moment in history. It's interesting to recall that 49 Jews were killed. 49. What happened in Israel on the 7th was 1,400. You can be sure this event, and we'll talk about the wider event as well, but this event will have enormous meaning, for I think, decades and decades to come, for all kinds of reasons.

A poet named Bialik wrote a poem called, In the City of Killing about Kishinev. He'd been sent there to write an oral history. That poem about the massacre is read by almost all school kids in Israel, and it remains one of the pivotal modern poems in the history of the modern Hebrew language.

Brian Lehrer: Your title, "In the Cities," plural, "Cities of killing," were you're trying to make an analogy that you can explain?

David Remnick: Well, I think it's a resonant title. I think the killing has been in any number of communities in Israel proper, in various kibbutzim, at a music festival known as Nova, and now we're seeing the devastating bombing and now land incursion into Gaza where so many innocent people are being killed, for reasons that we know.

These Israelis are in a state of grieving, mourning, shock, and the need to do what countries do, which is to lash out. I think there needs to be a very serious discussion right away, at every level, of the wisdom of this, the humanity of this, the intention of this, and the repercussions of this.

I totally understand, and more importantly, many, many, many Israelis totally understand the contradiction here between security and what will be achieved by this incursion into Gaza. It is a terrible, terrible problem. We could go on about it for hours and hours.

What the piece tries to achieve, and I begin by saying, I know that I'll fail, is to is to illuminate those contradictions and that history, and the various narratives that are constantly at odds with each other, all of it moving at the speed of social media. Everybody-- [crosstalk] Yes, go ahead. I'm sorry.

Brian Lehrer: Well, I was going to say I want to come back near the end of our conversation to your lead sentence and saying, you know you will fail in your attempt to report truthfully. David, I did read off 47 pages of your article yesterday.

David Remnick: It's not 47 pages. In a print magazine, it's more like 12. It's 10,000 words long.

Brian Lehrer: Well, that's how it displayed on my computer, if one were to print it. A tragic irony that you seem to shed light on is how Netanyahu and Hamas each seem to empower each other's rejection of a two-state solution contributing to today's awful results for both peoples.

On the Hamas' side, for example, you cite the period right after Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. When the Gaza leadership could have used the international support, they were promised to develop their economy, one of your sources says, and Israel might have been further pulled back.

Instead, Hamas launched thousands of missiles back into Israel in the next two years and the pattern was set. Do you get any sense from your reporting that many Gazans or most Gazans think Hamas made the wrong choice for the popular good?

David Remnick: I should say, first of all, that I have not been in Gaza for some years, and certainly not on this trip. That would have been impossibly dangerous and impossible to do. This is extraordinary reporting coming from any number of Gazans, Palestinian stringers who play for various newspapers, and so on, and I can't commend them enough.

The telling of history depends on when you start to tell it. That's where the arguments begin, but never end. Yes, Israel under Ariel Sharon withdrew from Gaza, uprooted settlements there. The hope was that Gaza, with help from abroad, would develop.

It didn't. In fact, in 2006, Hamas, which is opposed and has always been opposed to a state, maybe they might want it for what's called a hudna or a kind of truce, but in the end, it wants to get rid of what they call the Zionist entity. It won an election in Gaza.

When the Palestinian, the nationalist faction, the PLO, what we now call the Palestinian Authority, it's very complicated. There was a clash between Hamas and the PLO, and Hamas, using extremely violent tactics, including throwing people off of buildings prevailed and has been in power ever since, and there have been no elections ever since.

Israel, pointing to the missiles that have been fired to it has imposed, with differing strength at differing times, a siege or a blockade. This has been a complicated history of back and forth for many years. Anybody who's 25 years old has lived through any number of periods of rocket fire and then airstrikes into Gaza. It's just that the magnitude of it now is just so much larger by an order of magnitude.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. On the Israeli side, you describe in your article a strategy of Netanyahu's known as the Conception.

David Remnick: [crosstalk] Correct.

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead.

David Remnick: To be sure, the Conception was to empower Hamas so that it would make the Palestinian authority weaker. The Palestinian authority would've been the way toward establishing a Palestinian state. It's a very complicated story.

I'm not giving you a nuanced explanation at all. I know the arguments will come at me in callers if we plan that, but that's the shape of it. It was a terrible miscalculation obviously.

Brian Lehrer: Netanyahu, if this is a decent, very short form description, managed to marginalize talk of a two-state solution rather than his plan to annex the West Bank without full citizenship for the Palestinians who live there by weakening the Palestinian Authority, which was the institution that Israel could have more easily worked with for a two-state peace.

I guess my question is similar to what I asked you about your impression of Gazans over the years. Did many Israelis actually think that would satisfy Palestinians' longer-term goals rather than lead to more generations of uprisings against occupation?

David Remnick: Well, I think they were, day-to-day, glad not to have to think about it very much. I don't say that in a critical sense. I would say just in a descriptive sense. As a result, all the concentration was on domestic politics like the Judicial Reform debate.

The Israeli leadership has been much more right-wing in the last couple of decades for the most part. Foreign affairs were concentrating on making peace with and normalizing relations with the Sunni Arab states, the UAE, and most importantly Saudi Arabia, the Abraham Accords.

This was on the brink of happening before October 7th. That's now completely in tatters, at least for the time being.

Brian Lehrer: My guest is David Remnick for another few minutes, Editor-in-Chief of the New Yorker and Host of The New Yorker Radio Hour. Most of the Radio Hour this past weekend was about his trip to Israel after October 7th. He's got a long article in The New Yorker. We can argue over whether it's 12 pages or 47 pages. People will argue over anything, so we could argue over that.

David Remnick: Exactly.

Brian Lehrer: David, I want to start our last few minutes together by quoting the very first line of your article, which you referred to a few minutes ago. Before you get into all the content, you say, the only way to tell this story is to try to tell it truthfully, and know that you will fail.

I think that we are trying to do a similar thing. I wrote in our newsletter last week, if I may quote my own article, I wrote, "We try to strike a good faith balance on the show of hearing the grievances and aspirations of both sides without falling into bothsidesing, a shallow false equivalency that's too common in news coverage. Striking that balance is hard, and I'm sure we fall short."

Those are my words. I was struck when I read your opening sentence about trying to tell it truthfully and knowing that you will fail. How do you at least strive for that truthful ideal?

David Remnick: First of all, you have to write the second line. In other words, you can't throw up your hands and give up. If a journalist is doing anything, they're trying their damnedest to bear some witness to try to understand their own biases and limitations, what they're seeing, what they're not seeing.

Then at the same time, do your damnedest, a journalism of futility where you don't get to the second sentence, I think does nobody any good. I did my best, but I know that it comes up short.

I also know this; the two foreign stories that I've covered in my life, which in some sense went from optimism to something completely at the other end of the spectrum, which is to say Russia and the Israel-Palestinian question, Israel-Palestine. I could write about Russia. Very few people follow this very carefully.

People usually are grateful for what you write. They learn something and they say so. They're obviously are critics. On this question, people have intense feelings, intense political attachments. They know some things, they don't know some things but one thing for sure is they have powerful opinions about it.

If you've ever done any public speaking and somebody gets up to ask the first question and says, "I have three questions in four parts in a public statement," that's the way it goes.

Brian Lehrer: You should see my inbox.

David Remnick: I can imagine.

Brian Lehrer: To that point, David, I also wrote in the newsletter, and I haven't said it yet on the show in these words, that some on one side will say nothing is the equivalent of a sudden murderous terrorist attack on thousands of civilians.

Some on the other side will say nothing is the equivalent of a long, brutal occupation that has killed so many over time. Maybe they are both right in their own ways, but maybe we can have conversations that go beyond which side is worse.

I think that's what you're trying to do in your article, but do you ever feel that's where the political conversation about all this maybe especially gets stuck on the question which side is worse?

David Remnick: I think it's probably, in the end, impossible in any given moment to reach everybody. Impossible. When I hear people five seconds after a massacre of 1400 people, a gleeful one with butchery, and just unspeakable acts, not even gesture toward-

Brian Lehrer: Sorrow.

David Remnick: -empathy. Sorrow, empathy, call it what you will, and rush immediately towards some abstract framework of whatever it might be. I'm not going to reach that reader. I'm not going to reach readers who have no empathy at all for innocents being killed on the other side of the wall either.

I have to think. Otherwise, we would despair. I have to think the vast majority of people are tortured one way or another, are trying to sort this out, are trying to come to some resolution. On those extremes of hardheartedness, I don't think I can reach to anybody. I don't think we can at all.

Brian Lehrer: Here is that ray of hope for peace and a long-term resolution of the conflict that I mentioned at the top that we would end with from your article, really from your New Yorker Radio Hour, from both. The New Yorker Radio Hour piece holds it out in audio. The print version in the magazine obviously holds it out in print.

This clip is from your interview with a scholar, a significant figure in Palestinian public life, and former advisor to Yasser Arafat, Sari Nusseibeh. This is one minute long from this weekend's New Yorker Radio Hour.

Sari Nusseibeh: Look, people get very angry. I can understand the Israelis and the Palestinians now today wanting vengeance and wanting to regain the image they have of themselves and wanting the rights and all of that.

I think both peoples know deep down that it doesn't lead anywhere to continue shooting at each other, and that there must come a point when they have to come to terms with one another, and to find some form of coexistence between them.

Although the Israeli population has been pushed to the right, and on the Palestinian side have been pushed towards Hamas, nonetheless, I think this is a temporary thing. I think that there will come soon when it'll be possible again to build for peace. It can be done with sufficient also help and intervention by the international community.

Brian Lehrer: Sari Nusseibeh from the New Yorker Radio Hour this weekend. David, he made me think some long civil wars, really long civil wars and international wars too have reached that point where the people on both sides are just so exhausted that they throw up their hands.

One could argue that Europe, after centuries of wars, most of Europe, reached that point fairly recently, that exhaustion and disgust with war itself. Maybe that's a ray of hope. The question being, how long will that take? Do you have a final thought as we run out of time, maybe about your time at Sari Nusseibeh, or anything else?

David Remnick: I thought Sari Nusseibeh, someone I've known for a long time, was very wise in that he said we cannot afford pessimism, just a throwing up of the hands, a politics of despair. If you give yourself over to that, people have no hope. That's where the hell comes in.

If you do that, then all is lost, and none of us can afford that, not Americans, not Palestinians, not Israelis, not anyone. It's very hard.

Brian Lehrer: "It's very hard," are probably good words to leave this on, as we run out of time. David Remnick, new article in The New Yorker based on his reporting in Israel since the 7th of October is called In the Cities of Killing. David, thanks for sharing some of this with us.

David Remnick: Always, Brian. Take care of yourself.

 

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