Two-State Friendship

“My next question is, why are you friends with me?”

The speakers, September 2023

Ramsey Alsheikh is a 21-year-old writer from Florida studying Middle Eastern Studies and Computer Science at Dartmouth College.

Elan Kluger is a 21-year-old writer from Michigan studying intellectual history at Dartmouth College.

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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

ELAN KLUGER Let’s begin with how we got to know each other.

RAMSEY ALSHEIKH The first time I met you was in Arabic class.

KLUGER Before. I was thinking about this. At orientation when we went around to different departments. The Jewish Studies program was advertising their new class on Israel-Palestine and I was flipping through the syllabus and you walked over. I was looking at Benny Morris’s book on the syllabus. I said I like him and you said I hate him and that was the only interaction we had.

ALSHEIKH I have no recollection of this, but that is so funny to me. That’s crazy. It’s fate, it was destiny — then in spring in Arabic you were much more reserved. One time I followed you after class to Rauner Library and we chatted a little bit.

KLUGER Then we both did the study abroad to Morocco for Arabic, in the summer after freshman year. We started a little essay reading group — reading William James and Ghassan Kanafani and Camus.

ALSHEIKH Yeah, we just hung out a lot talking about ideas. Great conversations just walking through Rabat. And then the next big event was our walk to Casablanca, sixty miles along the Atlantic coast. And we went and ate at all the kosher restaurants in Casablanca.

KLUGER Apparently there’s another kosher restaurant in Casablanca.

ALSHEIKH Next time, next time. We’ll have to go back. Then sophomore year we were normal friends until the next fall.

KLUGER Yeah and then in the fall I was doing research in Jerusalem and you were in Budapest and I stayed on your floor when I visited.

ALSHEIKH Magical city. It was really lovely to have you, that was a great time. Let’s talk about why we are doing the questions. What do we hope to get out of this?

KLUGER Yeah my thinking was simply that I wouldn’t call myself a right-wing Zionist but I would not not call myself that, and I know a lot of people where all they do is talk to themselves and can’t even imagine that anyone in good faith would ever disagree. And I am sure there is some of that on your side.

ALSHEIKH I would add that at this moment with Israel-Palestine, there are diverging ideologies in how young people are thinking about it. On a basic level, young people’s views are changing, and in America, for example, a lot of traditionally Zionist Jewish spaces are becoming ambivalent or more Zionist — I don’t know how you are now — but earlier on in our relationship you spoke with a new right perspective. I think your perspective on Zionism reflects that. For me, at the same time I think there’s also ways my ideology is changing and developing under the ways that people have thought about Israel-Palestine in the past. I think it is interesting how we as people epitomize the discussion on how Israel-Palestine views are evolving and changing in new directions.

KLUGER I like that. I would clarify in the sense that I don’t see the goal as representing views. I don’t represent anyone. I barely even represent myself in some ways.

ALSHEIKH That’s a good caveat, but I think there are definitely interesting points to make.

KLUGER Absolutely.

ALSHEIKH Let me say a brief word about my questions. This could easily just become a polemical debate and I don’t want that because it would be very boring. So I’ve tried to stay away from anything too polemical. There’ll be questions where I imagine there’ll be disagreements where we can explore differences and interrogate beliefs. So that’s my thinking in choosing the questions.

KLUGER I was thinking along the same lines. What are the origins of your Palestinian activism? Your family? High school? College?

ALSHEIKH Growing up, I knew I was Palestinian in the barest sense. My dad would occasionally mention that our family was from a place called Palestine, but all of our relatives lived in Jordan. I visited them every summer and have lots of memories there, but it was always in Amman.

My father would play Palestinian rap in the car and say, “This song is about Palestine — this is where we’re really from.” But it never went deeper than that. I vividly remember one time at a resort by the Dead Sea in Jordan, he pointed across the water and said, “That’s Palestine. That’s where our family is from. If you could swim across, you’d be there.” But I didn’t know anything about the history. My family never raised me to be political. My mom’s from Belarus — she has her own family history. So I grew up with only the vaguest sense of being Palestinian. I knew my dad had grown up in a refugee camp.

KLUGER Which one?

ALSHEIKH Wahdat, in Amman. He was born in Jericho but raised in Wahdat — it’s a well-known Palestinian refugee camp.

The real connection started for me in early high school, though the starting point is funny. I got into anime, so I decided to start learning Japanese just for fun. Once I started learning the language, I got curious about the culture, and then about the history. So I picked up a college-level history textbook on Japan and read it cover to cover. I thought that was how you had to read books — page by page, or it didn’t count.

It wasn’t easy reading, but I was amazed. Japanese history is fascinating — a case study in modernization, nationalism, and identity. Watching a nation evolve over time into a collective self-understanding — that struck me. I wasn’t becoming a Japanese nationalist or anything, but I was fascinated by the development of national identity.

So I thought, why don’t I look into my own history? I asked my dad, “We’re from Palestine, right?” He said, “Yes.” So I went to the library and found a book — a history of Palestine from the Ottoman Empire through the founding of Israel. I read that one page by page too. And by the end, I was absolutely furious. I was enraged. To see the story of a people — my people — losing everything. Not just a war, but their homes, their dignity. Expelled, subjugated, humiliated.

It was a shock after reading about Japan — a nation that lost a world war but rebuilt, modernized, flourished. My family’s story felt like the opposite. That anger stuck with me. It became the beginning of my political awakening. I started reading more, talking to more people about politics. That was my senior year of high school. That’s when I became a political person.

KLUGER Did you ever look into the history of Belarusian Nationalism?

ALSHEIKH I didn’t, I really didn’t. Although I knew my mother and my mother’s family story, I guess in my family my dad has the dominant personality. My mother is actually not in contact with her family in Belarus. There was family drama on her side after a death in the family. . I always identified more as an Arab and, growing up as a Muslim, the Palestinian side was more dominant.

KLUGER Is your mom Muslim?

ALSHEIKH Yes, she converted.

But at the same time it’s something I think about a lot, that other half of my family history. When I was in Budapest, I really wanted to go to Belarus because that is where my mom’s family is from, but my mom forbade me because it’s dangerous. So I didn’t go, but sometimes I think about learning Belarusian and connecting with that part of my family’s history.

When I take a step back, Belarus obviously is not in a great situation politically. There’s a dictator. It’s horrible, but it’s also not as existential of an issue as it is for Palestinians. So in a sense — because Palestinians are really in a moment where the existence of that group is under question for the future — I feel more of a duty to represent it and connect to it than I do necessarily on my Belarusian side. That, in addition to being raised in a way which makes me have much more connection with Palestinian history.

There are some Jews in my family, too. My mother’s grandma had a liaison with a Jewish man out of wedlock. So my mom grew up in high school getting bullied for being Jewish actually. She was called “the little Jew” and belittled and ostracized for that part of her history. Also, another one of my great-grandmas on my mother’s side was in a Nazi concentration camp, for being Ukrainian. I say these things because they’re tangentially relevant but also connected.

What is your best — and worst — memory in Israel, and what is your earliest memory there?

KLUGER My earliest of any memories is in Israel. To preface, both my parents moved to Israel after college.

ALSHEIKH Did they know Hebrew when they went?

KLUGER No. They learned it there. But they moved back before I was born because Israel was unaffordable — not an ideological reason.

So I went when I was two, and my first memory was I had chocolate milk — which is served in a bag there. I got one of those and I was on the carpet and I was about to drink it and I spilled it on the carpet. And my mom came and yelled at me and she said, “You have to put it in a cup now.” That’s my first memory.

My worst memory is being either minutes, days, or weeks away from various terrorist attacks. So there was a McDonald’s in the Be’er Sheva Bus Station that I was at where there was a shooting three days later. And then there was the Iranian missile attack in September.

I remember, I was in Mea She’arim, the ultra-religious neighborhood. And it is always bustling. Then it started to clear out, and I was like what is going on? And then I got ten text messages all from people from the United States asking if I was okay, and I thought that meant something. I guess those would be my worst memories although I never really felt unsafe.

My best memory was in high school, the second time I visited with my family. We went to my mother’s friend’s house for Shabbat dinner. There was the matriarch of the family and her four children, then their boyfriends and girlfriends, their kids, all gathered together. The entire family comes from all around the country. I felt this real sense of organic community, a kind of Thanksgiving every Friday, this fullness to life that seemed impossible in the US. The idea that you could build a family and live a communal life, that appealed to me. It’s looked down upon in the US. I can give you an example: people that go away for college. I’m very far away from where I grew up, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It’s a long way from Dartmouth. But that’s a sign of success in a way.

ALSHEIKH That’s similar to Arab countries. My dad was going to send me, for example, to FAU [Florida Atlantic University] which is twenty minutes away, for most of my life because, “Why would you leave home? You can just stay here and stay home.” That changed only when I was going to middle school, but it’s the same mentality, I think.

KLUGER And this is where I think of the US as a Jewish country in the diasporic sense because it causes this rootlessness among the elite classes. We all get stripped of our roots and become roughly the same. And so Israel, the anti-diaspora project, is in contrast with Dartmouth.

Okay, back to you. We sort of cut off at the end of high school. What happened in college and what changed from high school?

ALSHEIKH I was determined to set up political activism because I’d become more politically active in high school. But back then mostly it was about talking to people. I joined various debate clubs and discussions.

The first thing I did when I got here [to Dartmouth] in orientation week, before anything, was I met with someone I reached out to on Instagram who did the [Palestine Solidarity Coalition] and I immediately started doing Palestine activism stuff. Before October 7, it was completely different. It was mostly lectures, discussion, events. I wrote an anti-birthright article in the newspaper [The Dartmouth]. The first big protest I organized was in the spring around Nakba Day. But it was mostly just walking around with some flags. I was really nervous before that one. Ironically, I’m not a very confrontational person. I get nervous and uncomfortable very easily, so before that one I was really on edge. Since October 7, I have not been the president [of the PSC] but one of the leaders as the club has grown.

How do you feel about the diaspora and diaspora Jewry, considering that you grew up in the diaspora but also because most of Jewish history has been in the diaspora since the destruction of the second temple and it’s really something that the modern state of Israel is pushing against?

KLUGER It’s a tough question but I can give a rough sketch. I don’t think of diaspora Judaism at this point. I think there’s American Judaism and there’s Israeli Judaism and that’s it. There are other bits of populations of Jews in Argentina, in France, but those are falling away. The question is then: how do you view American Judaism?

Calling it diaspora already indicates a sort of view. But then I’d follow up and say yes, I also think of American Judaism as the diaspora. So that’s a kind of exile. I’ve read all the new books by Shaul Magid, Joshua Leifer. I’m not religious, so when I look at the achievement of American Judaism, I think of literature. When I look back to the history of American Judaism, in the mid-century there were great writers, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Isaac Rosenfeld. They’re not even the greatest Jewish American writers — they’re the greatest American writers of their time, and it’s the Jewish experience that lets them say something about the American experience, about the struggle to assimilate and the struggle for recognition. Since then, the Jews have become the WASPs. I agree with Joshua Leifer when he describes embourgeoisement as the real problem — fading traditions, Americanism taking the place of Judaism.

The response would be: how about you take your religion seriously? To which I would say: I’m trying. But maybe that won’t stop embourgeoisement.

So it is not about Israel, it is about America. This is similar to what you’re saying — your story about discovering your lineage in the history book, the rage. It also provided a sense of “Okay, now I’m not just like any bland, white American.” So that’s where I think a lot of the writing about Israel and American Jews does not give enough thought to the weirdness of America today. Now I’m not gonna say I’m an anti-American. America has provided more safety, economic security, and the democratic right to self-creation to more people. That’s magnificent. But you don’t live by bread alone. What even is American culture? A thin intellectual veneer on a bulwark of capital.

ALSHEIKH Right. And Israel provides an alternative answer.

KLUGER Exactly. I mean there’s a thrumming intensity and sense of meaning that washes over everything there. This is less praise of Israel though, than critique of America.

ALSHEIKH If I had to summarize your thoughts on the diaspora, it isn’t so much the old Jew, with their weakness and degradation, versus the new Jew, with their strength and liberty. It is this modern question of class and meaning and embourgeoisement and the reduction of culture and life to money and capital. Whereas in Israel, there is an alternative vision for something more.

KLUGER About the old Zionist thing with the old and the new Jew, I don’t think those categories are very useful at all. New York Jews do not look like the image of the old Jew. They don’t need the kibbutz to become strong. There are new Jews in America, and there’s a class dimension in Israel. It’s different than the US, but it’s a problem of its own kind. I think that when people still talk about the old Jew versus the new Jew, it’s just self-hatred. Instead of Zionism, go to the gym.

My next question is why are you friends with me? I was friends with a student who you know, we had shared interests in Western Marxism and European intellectual history, but he was pro-Palestinian. Then he understood my full perspective on the world, and now he doesn’t even acknowledge that I exist.

ALSHEIKH If I look at the two options, one is to continue on with the friendship as if Israel-Palestine wasn’t necessarily an existential thing even though it is. Then there’s the other path of just cutting you off and being anti-normalization. My perspective is yes, I could cut you off and not talk to you because of our political differences or because of our ideological differences, but then what would happen is you would be like, “Okay, this pro-Palestinian guy was a jerk.”

You would develop more negative feelings towards Palestinians or pro-Palestinians and you would hate them slightly more and we would all just be in a slightly worse position in the world. I wouldn’t be helping anyone if I just didn’t talk to you. I think on the one level, when it comes to personal relationships from a very basic standpoint, it makes no sense not to talk to people who are extremely different from you. Especially in this political sense, because you actually gain something from it in terms of understanding the thought processes of this very alternative position from you — understand more what Zionism is about — understand more why someone would not be opposed to the occupation or something. But if we went on public TV, I would have to think about what kinds of conversations we would have. And this is something you’ve also said in the past too.

KLUGER Right.

ALSHEIKH I gave you this depressing answer. But if I take it a step further now, our personal relationship is incredibly beneficial to me. It’s incredibly intellectually stimulating. For example, when you came to Budapest and we went to the antique book store and you were telling me all about the different writers you’ve read and all the different thoughts you’ve had, it makes me want to think and read and do more for myself. It inspires me intellectually, academically. So from a personal point of view, in my own selfish interest, you’ve been a great positive experience for me. I think putting aside politics, right — and don’t take that the wrong way — but I think you’re a good person, you know deep down you want to do good things. I really admire you, I look up to you and all that. So for me to cut you off because of whatever — it would be a very shallow reason to cut off something which I think is beautiful as it stands now.

KLUGER I feel the same way.

ALSHEIKH Even if you weren’t so interesting, I would not cut someone [with the views you hold] off. I was thinking about this. I was in Jerusalem with a Dartmouth alumni. He was showing me around. I thought to myself that if I were Jewish, I one-hundred percent see how I would become a big Zionist just going around Jerusalem. [It was] not even the old city but the center of West Jerusalem. We had just had shakshuka somewhere. And really, there was something very beautiful about it.

And what is disturbing to me now is that from my own study and my own background I know there’s a lot of injustice and blood behind all this beauty, but it didn’t change the fact that there was a lot of beauty in Jewish life in Israel. I felt there was something really compelling about it. If I was Jewish, especially [given] my own personality where I jump quickly to these nationalist ideals just because I think they’re enchanting, I very much see how I could become a Zionist and join the IDF and internalize all these notions. So when I was there, I understood on a deeper emotional level, the emotional power of Zionism. I really understood how it’s something which inspires a lot of people, but not in the way that I agree with it because I’m still very much anti-Zionist. But it shows there’s something much deeper in what’s human in Zionism. But it’s also deeply disconcerting because now I can see how I can go along with it. That makes it more disturbing for me because of how I see Zionism. I see it as something really bloody and settler-colonial. For it to be beautiful at the same time is much more disturbing than if it was just something cartoonishly evil. There’s a can of worms I’ve opened there.

KLUGER That’s a can of worms which I had written down as the universal versus the particular. Can we imagine these perfect people that can get together on universal truths? Or are we thrown into our being and we’re situated by all these streams of history and we’re faced with taking up what we believe in fighting for but it’s really restricted by the way we’re born and situated not by our abstract reasoning?

ALSHEIKH Yeah, because we’re not all Kant speaking through the categorical imperative.

KLUGER Exactly. All our categories are confused because of Kant.

ALSHEIKH That’s a very good question. It directly connected to what I was saying. It’s one thing to speak about universal justice, human life, and human truth, but what if it all just is a struggle for power and not necessarily something which should be treated as a moral category? I don’t know if I can give you a particularly great answer, but where I’m at now in my life is I want to try and resist that and build something universal. It might be that we’re all stuck in our little nationalisms, that we’re gonna have all these bloody wars to the end of time because we’re just apes belonging to a tribe who want to fly our flag the highest. Maybe that’s the case. But I would prefer not to live like that, and I want to do my best. I don’t want to be nihilistic. I want to just live something more godly and I think part of that is striving to do justice in a universal sense.

KLUGER I mean, there’s a way in which, once you’ve decided that we’re all these situated people and we’re never going to come together on anything, you're over—your education’s over, at a minimum.

What is disturbing to me is it seems that a lot of people have come to that position in college. To give the cynics some credit, what’s going on to some extent is that they see anti-Zionists that are using the language of universality in fighting for justice, but they’re really fighting for the particular. So it’s this way of looking good morally, but then being in the same power struggle like everyone else. You have to deal with well intentioned people. I’m speaking to you, so that’s my solution.

ALSHEIKH Yeah, except it’s very easy for you and I to be friends, but it’s hard to translate that into a political platform.

What are your thoughts on human rights organizations? They criticize Israel. And they are the preeminent organizations that in almost every other context are respected and acknowledged. Do you think they have a point? Do you think there is some sort of secret bias? Do you think Israel’s only attracting so much attention because it’s a Jewish state and that it’s all blown out of proportion?

KLUGER My main thinking on this question has to do with this essay I read many years ago in The New Republic by Mark Lilla. He wrote this essay arguing that Israel is seen as this European nation in terms of the origin of its ideology.

ALSHEIKH It’s in Eurovision…

KLUGER Yeah, yeah, a European nation in idea, but not population-wise. Itamar Ben-Gvir, for example, is a figure out of anti-colonial nationalism. I see him as a Franz Fanon-like figure. He is famous for his ties to the Rabin assassination and his love of Baruch Goldstein, the mass murderer. There’s another part of his career which has to do with the racial balance in Israel among Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews. He once brought all these Mizrahi children and he took them to a pool, an all Ashkenazi pool. This is right out of American segregation history. He confounds our categories.

That micro-detail in my mind explains a lot because if you say like, “Oh here’s this Israeli who also works for Amnesty International,” they’re going to be an Ashkenazi Jew who lives in Tel Aviv who’s very wealthy. But that is far too sociologically deterministic. There is no truth, there is only power competition. And I don’t buy that. These people, sure, they have the wealth to become the universalist subject, but also what they believe is true. So what do I think? I do think there is a unique focus on Israel. But I will admit, I am torn. There are serious human rights violations in Israel —

ALSHEIKH Would you say systemic?

KLUGER I am not sure. There are political implications to that statement that I am not discussing so I will hold off on that. And I could imagine myself being drawn to the impulse you described in West Jerusalem, that feeling of tribal identity that has nothing to do with Kant, that has nothing to do with “I’m going to sign up for human rights and universal values, et cetera.” People want the both-and. They want the feeling of national belonging, and they want to feel that they’re also good universal subjects.

ALSHEIKH The romance and being on your high horse. The moral superiority.

KLUGER They want both. And I want both. I mean everyone wants both. Imagine being American and then also feeling like Thanksgiving was every day. I want to combine enlightenment ideals but also be warmed by my hearth and home. Those are fundamentally in tension in Israel. I think they are to a greater extent than they ought to be. There are various writers who try to say, “Well, nationalism is the basis of a real liberal universalism.” Those writers are wrong and deluded. There’s a real tension. And I’ll admit, I would choose tribalism. But one can also call into question some of the human rights reports. I don’t look into this all that much because there are many full time polemicists at work on this, but you can call into question the motivation of a lot of them. But let’s say you do. You will still find really fucked-up things happening in the West Bank and in Gaza and it would be undeniable. And people focus on the ones that have question marks around them because they want to be disproving something. But ultimately when it comes down to it, you know, there are settlers who are breaking international law. There are settlers breaking Israeli laws that are not enforced. There are questions of the conduct of the war in Israel about whether it’s even about Netanyahu’s political gain.

ALSHEIKH If I had to summarize, you think there’s some credence to the human rights organizations’ claims, but you’re a bit skeptical of some of the underlying motivations of these international human rights orders.

KLUGER Yeah. But nonetheless, the fact that there’s any amount of credence makes me feel ill.

ALSHEIKH The reason I asked regarding “systemic” is because I think this is something that I have noticed a lot. There’s a big jump between saying “yeah, all of these human rights violations do happen in Israel on a case-by-case basis,” and a step forward which is saying this is all part of a broader policy. This is systemic.

Okay. My next question is about Yeshayahu Leibowitz. So I checked this book out just before I came to our conversation: Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State. Leibowitz thought Israel was doing terrorism in the West Bank and that Palestinian terrorism itself was “terrorism against terrorism”. His fundamental view is that the occupation is a real moral, degrading force on Israel and that it would really make Israelis into what he called Judeo-Nazis — something really fascistic and something really hard-liner. He has a quote, which in full transparency I got from Wikipedia, where he predicts the future that will happen if the occupation continues. I’m going to read it to you because for me it seems like this came true. And I want your thoughts on his idea that the occupation will make Israel into a bunch of Judeo-Nazis and that it’ll degrade Israel. So I’m gonna read this quote:

“The Arabs would be the working people and the Jews the administrators, inspectors, officials, and police — mainly secret police. A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret-police state, with all that this implies for education, free speech, and democratic institutions. The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the state of Israel. The administration would have to suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire Arab Quislings on the other. There is also good reason to fear that the Israel Defense Force, which has been until now a people’s army, would, as a result of being transformed into an army of occupation, degenerate, and its commanders, who will have become military governors, resemble their colleagues in other nations.”

This theme of moral degradation and becoming Judeo-Nazis as a result of these practices in the West Bank — what do you think of that? Is Israel being dragged down morally and socially by the occupation? Is Israel on a path to become a Judeo-Nazi state in light of people like Ben-Gvir and Smotrich and now even Netanyahu running the government?

KLUGER First of all, I reject the whole category of Judeo-Nazi because this is insane and purposefully inflammatory. The whole idea is a kind of inversion. It’s too cute by half and at that point becomes disgusting. But I’ll address the real point. The real point is he is onto something. Any nation at war I think. There’s a cost. In Egypt or Lebanon, they act differently when at war.

ALSHEIKH In Egypt it’s to suppress political dissent. In Israel it’s directed against a group of people. You see the difference there?

KLUGER No, I don’t. I would say there’s very little difference. Both are questions of security. It is making Israel unique in regards to Western countries, not unique in regards to its environment.

ALSHEIKH Okay, okay, I see what you’re saying. Then let me ask this. It follows naturally. What do you think Israel’s goals are for the West Bank and Gaza? Not what they should be, but what they are currently.

KLUGER I reject the question because I don’t think it’s the right framing, which comes from international relations theory where nations have these discrete goals. Israel — and all nations — have a multiplicity of interest groups.

ALSHEIKH I would push back on that. The Gaza war is not a spur of the moment decision. It is like asking what are America’s goals in Afghanistan? Because this is a consistently sustained foreign policy decision. There must be goals.

KLUGER I am going to bracket out Gaza for the sake of answering this question simply. Your teleology only looks like that when history is from one side only. But everything is more complicated. You want me to say something like the long-run intention of Israeli foreign policy is to annex the West Bank.

ALSHEIKH Yeah, I would love if you said that —

KLUGER Okay. Well the thing is that’s just not true. There have been serious attempts by Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak to create states in the West Bank. You get a new Left-wing government and they’re like, “Here’s our policy to create peace” and then there’s a suicide bombing, and then there’s another suicide bombing, and then there’s another. How can you win votes on even more dovishness?

ALSHEIKH You bring up a good point, which is that Israeli leadership has been very diverse, there have been different approaches. But I think if we take a step back, we should look at the successive actions of Israeli governments.

Although there are some deviations and different leaders have pursued different policies, it seems that there’s been a consistent march towards settlement and expansion. A consistent march towards creating a class of Arab collaborators. A consistent march towards expanding the reach and control over Israel’s presence in the West Bank to the point where it’s kind of non-negatable, until the point where the settlement block is so big that a two-state solution comes to be unworkable. I think these things have been maintained over successive governments, maybe for different reasons, but when you see this sustained pattern or behavior, you have to wonder, maybe — and I’m not trying to make Israeli politicians seem like cartoon villains — but there’s some solid subtext always which I really think we have to acknowledge is a subtext of domination and a subtext of colonial domination. These are the consistent motivations or goals which seem to motivate the policies.

Now you bring up Ehud Barak and Rabin as wanting to create a Palestinian state. You bring up these efforts for which there’s a grain of truth in that they did want to create some form of Palestinian Arab state. I think, if I remember correctly, the highest offer was under Ehud Olmert — there were going to be a bunch of different cantons disconnected by settlements, no border security, no military. So a horrible offer but, sure, he was offering that to Arafat.

Even if you look, if you study these offers and you look at what the Palestinians actually get in terms of a functioning military and functioning capacities for self-defense, you justify this by realpolitik. But it’s always something that can be very easily controlled by Israel and easily mutilated, while maximizing the amount of land Jewish settlers can get and minimizing the amount of land that Palestinian Arabs have to live on. And, of course, it goes without saying that they’re negating the right of return, negating Palestinian presence or attachment to the land, or if it ever exists, qualifying it as an Israeli-Arab. So I really think — and maybe this is my thesis here — that what is going on is settler-colonial and part of the essence of settler-colonialism is the destruction of the indigenous population, a form of genocide, and this is where the issue becomes so existential for me. Because I really do think the way things are going, Palestinians are going to become at best like the American indigenous population.

Probably someone like Ben-Gvir or Smotrich will try to push for a second Nakba and drive more Palestinians into Jordan and destabilize the kingdom there and expand more. But really conquest is what I think is motivating Israel, and this is my position, and this is why I’m so involved with activism. When you adopt these beliefs, when it comes to something existential — genocidal — regular, everyday life becomes kind of disgusting. Because you see not only that it’s going on and people don’t care, but also that many people are complicit in it, and they still don’t care. Business as usual. Let’s do trade with settlements or let’s sell AI drones and bombs to the Israeli military as Palestinians continue to be dispossessed and stripped down and marginalized and done away with. So this is really where my anger and frustration and political action come from. This has to be taken seriously because I think looking at the history, — whether or not that allegation is correct, although I do believe it is — I’m well supported by evidence.

KLUGER You smooth over history and say what happened had to have happened. That failed plans failed for a reason, because of some necessity. I reject that.

ALSHEIKH I don’t think that Israeli politicians didn’t really want to see a Palestinian state. Olmert probably did want to see his demilitarized, no-border continuity state come into fruition because it would have perpetuated promoting Israel’s dominance and promoting Israel’s control over Eretz Yisrael. That’s the motivation. I mean, you’re right, I’m sort of making a simplistic reading of Israel’s history, but I think the history in a sense is almost simple. From Israel’s whole history there’s only a twenty-year gap when it isn’t settling or colonizing.

KLUGER There was still a war going on then.

ALSHEIKH Well I’m talking about between ‘48 and ‘67. So there’s Suez.

KLUGER No, I mean the fedayeen and invasions and potential invasions from Egypt, Jordan, and the North, saying, “You, Israel, have already taken too much land.”

ALSHEIKH I’m not going to pretend that Nasser was going to win and become a Saladin to the Jews. Maybe he would have done another genocide. I want to put this in a way which isn’t insensitive because the experience of the Jewish exodus from Arab countries is something which is a crime, which is tragic.

KLUGER I think forced expulsion is the term used.

ALSHEIK Right. I’m not gonna justify the injustice that was done to Palestinians to justify the injustice done to the Arab Jews. But at the same time, even though a lot of the motivations of these Arab leaders were condemnable, I think Israel’s were pretty similar or even worse. Perhaps everyone wanted to destroy each other. So at best we need new Arab leadership, which I would agree with.

KLUGER The main stakes of the argument are about recent history in some ways. Recent, as in the past twenty years. What is shocking about Olmert is how hard he tried for peace.

ALSHEIKH I see how you can read it like that. It’s not so much that I don’t think he didn’t want peace. I think he wanted a certain kind of peace, and peace and justice are not the same thing. He wanted peace to perpetuate Jewish supremacy in this shared land. And we both know that regardless of the partitions and the borders it is really all one piece of land for both Jews — Israelis — and Palestinians. But what Netanyahu figured out is [the attitude of], “We don’t even need to give them Ramallah. We can take Ramallah, too, just, give us twenty, thirty years of this settlement and brute force.”

I think in a sense, Israel kind of bred the conditions which manufactured that violence. I mean, I don’t want to strike the tone of, “Oh, look, listen, this guy blew up a bus but it’s actually Israel’s fault.” We need to hold individuals fully accountable. We’re talking about the suffering of human beings. I think international law is useful in this respect because it gives us a universal standard to work from. But when you look at the fear and the terror and daily humiliation in the West Bank, it’s inevitable that you will generate these types of criminals.

KLUGER There’s this game where you only humanize the Palestinians. But really, extraordinary offers of peace from war-torn nations should be a time for asking: “Wow, you’ve exceeded expectations, this is something out of place.”

ALSHEIKH I mean, at the end of the day, if you keep asking, “Why would they do this?” You could almost justify any crime. The Nakba came directly after the Holocaust — how much sympathy is really left when your people have just come through concentration camps? A professor brought this up to me during office hours, and he had a point: if I’ve just come from a German concentration camp and I arrive in Israel, and someone tells me, “Yes, a Palestinian family used to live in this house,” there’s only so much empathy I have left after an experience like that.

But I think the solution to this dilemma — of how much we humanize before it becomes justification — is not to humanize less. It’s to humanize much more. And not just humanize, but demand more from those we humanize. If I want to humanize, say, a suicide bomber, it shouldn’t be to say, “Well, these attacks are inevitable.” It should be to say, “I understand the immense pain and suffering in these communities that produce such actions — but we still have to ask more. You must do better. You must stop blowing up buses.” Conversely, I can understand the decades, even centuries, of trauma experienced in the diaspora that might lead a settler to feel entitled to live in a place like Hebron. But that trauma must be channeled into something more productive than violence — than, say, shooting up Ibrahimi mosque.

So rather than humanize less, we must humanize more — but always with care to avoid justifying violence. I don’t know how politically useful this is, but maybe it’s a good starting point for building a political program. That’s why, if I had to place myself in any political camp, it would be with international law and human rights — because I think they offer us a useful, universal standard.

KLUGER In regards to the history of the peace movement, in regards to all these attempts to realize what Jabotinsky called “the iron wall,” the sense of the problem is that the Palestinians think they have hope for conquering all of Eretz Yisrael. That hope needs to die. Otherwise, peace will be rejected for ever more land.

ALSHEIKH This logic did convince a large part of the Palestinian elite to go along with the calculus you were describing. This is what the Palestinian Authority [PA] was conscripted to do, and they are already fully on board. But the problem is that there is a large and very influential part of Palestinian society which would rather die and nix the whole thing then lose the dream of return. And so they cannot be quelled.

So I mean now, of course, if Israel wants to put up an iron wall and offer Palestinians some kind of demilitarized state in the West Bank and Gaza, maybe that’ll move enough people. But as long as it pursues a strategy of iron wall in a colonial context where the only thing which will be achieved is some sort of deference to the state of Israel, they’ll get people like Hamas, who are going to torpedo it and kill themselves regardless of whether that’s right or wrong, and there will be a lot more violence. You need to give enough to the Palestinians so that they don’t die on their own Masada. Because that is where Israel’s going. They’re giving them nothing, and they’re asking them for everything.

KLUGER You are making a distinction between the groundswell of the people and the PA. There’s this sort of categorization you’re making between the hearts and the minds. Cosmopolitans versus masses. But that’s not an accurate picture of any society, number one. I really think these elites that you’re describing have real effects on the imaginations of these people. For example, this dream that you discovered reading a history book has been created not through everyday people and manifestos and the jottings of the masses but [through] an explicit elite project with the construction of UNRWA and things like that. It’s a project of elites just like most successful projects are.

ALSHEIKH Yeah. I mean that’s a very good point. But I don’t think it reduces the reality on the ground, which is that because of various historical circumstances Palestinians have not been content to live as displaced, fractured people, and that there is some sort of dream or motivation, not just of return but of a life built on dignity and rectifying the injustice of the past. If enough Palestinians decided today that this whole thing could be settled, they could go out and move to Jordan or something. But Palestinians, enough of them, don’t want to do that. And this is where the iron wall strategy fails, in that these are not necessarily rational actors. These are high, blind, human emotions which will not necessarily be negotiated away. There’s a level of dignity involved.

KLUGER You’re underselling the possibilities of an iron wall strategy because you underrate the efficacy of elites and the way in which Palestinian elites and English elites are the sort of main drivers of the history.

ALSHEIKH Maybe because I’m young and idealistic, but I believe in something as far-fetched as the right of return, as far-fetched as going back and being able to live in the village my family was expelled from. And if that dream is crazy, and I’m crazy, then this is a sort of crazy which I think is worth living my life entertaining. If I only have one life to live, why would I live it without a dream . Maybe it is impossible, but if a dream is beautiful enough then I think it’s worthwhile to go chase after it, even if it’s stupid and insane to other people. Not that I believe it’s impossible for these things to be realized, to realize the respect for the human dignity and human rights of everyone who lives in that area of land. What I think, if anything, what Zionism has shown us, is that fantastical historical conditions can come about in miraculous circumstances and that it’s not unreasonable to hold on to the hope and dream of returning to your land, even if it takes you two thousand years. So if I’m going to take a lesson from my Israeli brothers — why not be irrational and why not be an idealist? Why not? What do I have to lose?

KLUGER I’m thinking now about the unique popular support for Palestine. It’s sort of like the last utopian project. People don’t have dreams of turning America into a communist state. They don’t have dreams of mass scale reform in any substantial way, but there’s a way in which the specificities of the conflict of Israel and Palestine are special, because the moderate solution doesn’t seem like a real solution.

ALSHEIKH This vision is because Palestine is increasingly viewed as the last holdout of a colonial order.

KLUGER How is it the last colonial order? With Algeria right, the textbook case of post-colonial struggle, where did the French go? Where do the pied noir go? Back to France.

ALSHEIKH This is why it’s a much more bitter and much more bloody conflict. Because the Jews do not have one homeland to go back to. This fact is built on centuries of injustice which makes everything a million times more heartfelt and complicated to solve. And this is why I think we need to reimagine or re-envision what liberation means in a post-colonial context. When it comes to Palestine, we can’t just apply the old method of, “Get the French out and make them go back to France” because what will end up happening, you know, the Jews being kicked into the sea and potentially another Holocaust.

I mean obviously now the population suffering the second Holocaust is flipped. But what if Palestinian liberation did just end up in another Holocaust? We need to re-imagine what liberation looks like. You cannot replace one crime for another. We need to reimagine people’s freedom and what can be grown in tandem with that of your former oppressor. This is why I believe in the one-state solution, maybe not as something which will be achieved tomorrow, but as a dream which can be aspired to. I think we need to figure out a way to live together and let the past be the past.

KLUGER You opened our discussion about this whole topic by talking about reading a book about Japanese nationalism.

ALSHEIKH Ethnic nationalism.

KLUGER Ethnic nationalism. So I mean that’s a question in itself.

ALSHEIKH You’re absolutely right. Palestinian nationalism will have to be reimagined from Arab nationalism to something which is a nationalism based on land and on history and life, not just on ethnicity. I don’t want Palestine just to be another Arab country. Palestine is a land with its own unique history. Jewish history is a vibrant and inspiring part of that history. When I say I’m Palestinian, I don’t want to cut off all those parts of my history.

Let me tell a very personal story. My family is from a village called Al-Abassiyya, near Jaffa. But that wasn’t always its name. The villagers adopted the name Al-Abassiyya in 1936, during the height of tensions with Zionist groups. For centuries before that, the village was known as El Yehudiya — literally, “the Jewish.” It was named that way because the tomb of Yehuda (Judah) is located there. So yes, my Arab family, my Arab ancestors, lived and thrived in a village called El Yehudiya. And it wasn’t a contradiction — for it to be an Arab village with a Jewish name, with the tomb of Judah in its heart.

That’s the kind of nationalism we Palestinians need to imagine: one that is not exclusionary, not fueled by anger and hate, even though that anger is born of trauma. We need to transform that energy into something rooted in love — love and respect for the land, and for everyone who lives on it and wishes to share in its future.

I think there are lessons we can draw from the construction of American identity — as flawed as America is — in how to build a pluralistic society. A society built on rights, not on banner-waving or ethnic and tribal identification. I want a Palestine that is as Jewish as it is Arab — as open to everyone who lives there, and not defined by some narrow, momentary conception of what it means to be Arab or Jewish. Now obviously, we’re far from that vision. Palestinian leadership has moved very far away from it. There was a time when it brushed up against these ideas, but now it has drifted far, far away. In many ways, the leadership has played a huge role in reducing this to another ethnic conflict, when in reality the Palestinian struggle should be about something much larger than ethnicity. And they bear a good share of the blame for that.

At the same time, my own political framework demands that I place this firmly in what I believe is a settler-colonial context, where Israel is setting the terms of the violence. I know this all sounds idealistic — and it is. It’s far removed from the current reality. But when things get this bad, sometimes we have to step back and imagine the world we actually want to live in. And then, take whatever steps we can, from where we are, to move toward that vision. This raises a real question. What do you imagine as the ideal endpoint for all of this? One state? Two states? Something else entirely? What kind of society would you want to live in — if, say, security could hypothetically be arranged? Would you want to live in a one-state solution?

KLUGER I recently went on Birthright. We had a day in Jerusalem. We’re walking towards the old city, and we’re in the Jewish quarter. They let us out to go buy lunch, and I’m like, “We’re in the Jewish quarter and it’s like daylight robbery, the cost of things here.” I say, “Let’s go to Abu-Shukri’s in the Muslim quarter.” Afterwards, I’m told that I should not have gone into this dangerous area. I thought nothing of it. Because it’s not dangerous, but also because of all that time I spent in Morocco. The Muslim quarter of the old city [in Jerusalem] and the old city of, say, Rabat, are not so different. Is my ideal a time where going to the Muslim quarter is said to be “risky”? No. Not at all…