On "The Ezra Klein Show" podcast, two guests grapple with the narratives around the Israel-Hamas conflict.
I've been thinking lately about a line from Yossi Klein Halevi's book "Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor." He writes, "We must recognize not only each other's right to self-determination but also each side's right to self-definition." |
That's harder than it sounds, I think. The Israel-Palestine conflict is a fight over land and security and freedom. But it's also a fight over narratives. Anyone who has engaged with it even glancingly has witnessed the ferocious contestation of even the most minute historical facts. |
One thing I appreciate about Halevi's book is its insistence that reconciliation does not come because one side or the other finally accepts that its story is wrong. Halevi, an ardent Zionist, believes that reconciliation comes — if it comes — because both sides accept that the other's story is right, at least to them. There is wisdom in that, I think. You're not going to be able to go door to door in the region and argue everyone out of their positions. Somehow, these narratives will have to live alongside each other. |
That's what we tried to do this week on my podcast, "The Ezra Klein Show." I asked Amjad Iraqi, a Palestinian writer and policy analyst, to guide me through Gaza and this war from his perspective. And I asked Halevi, the Israeli author, to do the same. We also talk about the brutal realities of the war right now — what Israel is trying to achieve, whether those goals can be achieved, and what that means for the people caught between. |
I didn't find everything said in these conversations easy to hear. I didn't agree with everything I heard in these conversations. Much that they said was irreconcilable. But we have to be able to hold irreconcilable perspectives at the same time. That is the only way reconciliation is possible, if it is. |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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