- [Interviewer] Do the
Palestinians have a right to a static state? - [Netanyahu] No, I
don't think they do. But. - [Johnny] In 2007, the head
of military intelligence for the Israeli army had a meeting with the US Ambassador in Tel Aviv. We're looking at the classified cable that summarizes what was
talked about in this meeting. The topic of discussion was Iran, Syria, the Gaza Strip and Hamas. Hamas had just won the
Palestinian elections, which kicked off a fight with
the other Palestinian group, which ended in Hamas taking
over Gaza completely. They controlled it. And if you're an Israeli
citizen or the US government, this is a terrible set of events. Hamas is a violent extremist group known to commit heinous violence against civilians in Israel, and they were now in power. They controlled the Gaza Strip
an hour away from Tel Aviv. But look at this leaked document. In this leaked cable, you see that the Israeli official says that Israel would be happy
if Hamas took over Gaza because it would mean that
Israel could now treat Gaza like a hostile country. - [Reporter] Three days post cease fire, and there's unrelenting bombing in Gaza. - [Johnny] This document
is a view into a strategy that right-wing factions
within the Israeli government have used for decades in an effort to win one of the most divisive
conflicts in the world today, in which two groups are fighting
over one piece of holy land and one side is winning by
using a very specific tactic, one that the world says
is illegal and immoral, and one that worked for a short time, but that recently has
been shown to be a recipe for even worse violence
and conflict and suffering. In this video, I wanna lay out
what this strategy looks like and show you how it failed. I know this is a topic that
is full of deep emotions that has real stakes in people's lives. Please know that I am
earnest in my efforts to tell this story with
clarity and with accuracy. And also please note that
this is not a full account of the conflict between
Israel and its neighbors, but I do hope that it sheds
light on a view of the conflict that sometimes gets lost
in all of the yelling. (intense music) (speaking in foreign language) (crowd cheering) For 2000 years, Jewish
people around the world have been persecuted and segregated and ostracized from society. That is a fact. By the time the 1800s came around, it became clear that
wherever the Jews went, persecution would follow. This is when a movement
emerged calling for Jews to come together and to create
a country for themselves where they could govern themselves and be free from all
of this racist hatred. The creation of a Jewish
country would have at the top of its priority list the security of the Jewish people. But the big question was where? Several places floated
around in proposals, Argentina, even modern day Kenya, which back then was Uganda. But most people in this
movement wanted the Jews to return to their historic homeland, a place called Palestine. Where Jews built their temple and their culture 3000 years ago, but then were exiled, and now there was this call to return so that Jews could feel safe after 18 centuries of Jewish suffering. So as the 1900s came around, tens of thousands of
Jews, mostly from Europe, flocked to Palestine, which eventually came under
control of the British. The British were getting
ready to leave this region and were struggling to
contain the growing conflict between Native Arabs and
all these Jewish immigrants. Then in the 1940s came a horrific genocide against the Jewish people in Europe, led out by Hitler and his Nazi regime. This created a wave of
international support for this idea of giving the Jewish people a homeland where they could be safe. Before they left, the British asked the UN to determine what would
replace them in Palestine, and the UN decided that Palestine would become two new countries, one for the Jews and one
for the Palestinian Arabs that had already been
living in this region. - [Reporter] The Jewish
state colored light, the Arab state dark. Jaffa to go to the Arabs,
Jerusalem internationalized. - But as happens when outsiders
draw lines on old land, there was a problem here. Within these borders that were meant for the new Jewish country, hundreds of thousands of
Palestinian Arabs were living who would soon have to leave their homes to move to their side of the line. Okay, wait. I'm gonna pause there. Because as I said this
is not a full history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. We actually just made a video on our new channel Search Party, which focuses on what happens next, the conflict between Israel
and its Arab neighbors. You can go watch that.
Link's in the description. It'll give you some useful context. For now just know that this
led to a horrific conflict. Jewish militias forced over 700,000 Arabs out of their homes turning
them into refugees. The proposed borders shifted around, turned into ceasefire lines, and after all was said and done, the Jewish people did indeed
get their own country, the state of Israel. And the two important points
here are that number one, the very foundation of the Israeli country is for security of the Jewish people after nearly 2000 years of persecution. And number two, the location
they chose to set it up was becoming, as a
result of this conflict, not much safer than Europe. (intense violin music) That's a tension that
follows this whole story. Okay, so now let's fast forward to 1967. Israel has its country and they fight a short war
with their Arab neighbors, and they win that war and they
take over all of this land. It's a huge victory for them. I'm gonna take away the
Sinai Peninsula from here because they did give that back to Egypt as part of a peace deal a few years later. Israel now controls
important pieces of land that enlarge their Jewish country. Many saw this victory as a sign from God that they were actually
entitled to be here. But once again, Palestinians, nearly a million of whom had
been kicked out of their homes, were living here in the West
Bank and the Gaza Strip, which Israel now controlled, but they weren't really
sure what to do with it. And it's this territory
that would become the stage for the strategy that is
the topic of this video, where over time this
land would be sliced up with roads and checkpoints, walls and other military infrastructure that would control the movement and lives of the Palestinians. Soon, even Israeli citizens
would start to move out here in large numbers building full on towns and further dividing up this territory. Moving citizens into
occupied territory like this is something that the world
has deemed illegal and immoral. So this occupation starts in 1967 and it goes on for decades, until eventually the
Palestinians living here can't handle it anymore and
they start fighting back. This is known as the first
uprising for Intifada. It started with boycotts, but escalated into mass protests where Palestinians of all
ages would throw stones and sometimes Molotov cocktails at much better equipped Israeli soldiers. It was Palestinian rage exploding against Israeli occupation,
and it went on for years. The Israeli government would
respond by cracking down, killing many Palestinians. Another important thing that
happens around the same time down in the occupied Gaza Strip
is that a new movement forms promising to fight back
against this occupation calling for the destruction of Israel. The group is called Hamas. The first Intifada showed
that this wasn't gonna work. Chopping up Palestinian
land, oppressing them, keeping them in this occupation, was only going to produce more violence. It wasn't gonna fulfill Israel's promise to provide security and
safety for the Jewish people. They had to switch course. - The security of the Israeli
people will be reconciled with the hopes of the Palestinian people and there will be more
security and more hope for all. - [Johnny] So in the 1990s, they start getting
serious about peace talks with the Palestinians, and they come to this agreement
called the Oslo Accords, which for the first time establishes a Palestinian government authority and giving it power to
govern pockets of land in the West Bank. It also gave the
Palestinians some authority over almost all of the Gaza Strip, though there were still
settlements in all of these places. This was a big deal for this conflict. Like, both sides were
talking to each other and coming to agreements that was giving like,
authority to the Palestinians. But another theme of the story is that hardliners can use
violence to derail peace. And that's exactly what happened here. Right wing Israelis start holding rallies, calling their Prime Minister
a traitor and a Nazi for giving land to the Palestinians. Some of these rallies are led by a now familiar character,
Benjamin Netanyahu. - The people of Israel want a real peace and real peace means peace with security. Peace they can trust with
a partner they can trust, and they don't feel they have it here. We want a real peace, not a fake one. - [Johnny] But the peace talks continue. - With all our neighbors,
a comprehensive peace. - [Johnny] And shortly after signing the second part of this deal
to give Palestinians some land, the Prime Minister Yitzhak
Rabin is assassinated by a far right Israeli. Hamas conducts bus bombings. And the next year, Benjamin Netanyahu is elected as the prime
minister of Israel. And Netanyahu is a key
figure in this story because his worldview
embodies a way of thinking that has taken root in
Israel in recent years. The idea that the only
way to give true security to the Jewish people is by
doing whatever is necessary to stop the Palestinians
from having a state anywhere in these borders. - Look, I'm 28 years old. I've had to defend my country in two wars and in many battles. Nobody wants peace more than Israel. But the stumbling block
to the road for peace is this demand for a PLO state,
which will mean more war, which will mean more
violence in the Middle East. And I think, I sincerely believe, if this demand is abandoned, we can have real and genuine peace. - [Johnny] So that was
Netanyahu. He was a 28-year-old. But when he becomes the prime minister a couple decades later, he spends his term
sabotaging the peace accords that his predecessor had
worked so hard to create, claiming that the
occupation of all this land and its people wasn't actually conquest, but rather the key for
security of the Jewish people. They had to do this. Security was the one and only
justification for all of this. So under his watch settlers continue to move into the West Bank. We found this leaked video
of Benjamin Netanyahu talking to some settlers in the West Bank. (several voices speaking) The cameraman does turn off
the camera for a moment, but then turns it back on moments later. (Netanyahu speaking foreign language) He is admitting to
sabotaging the peace accords that the Israeli government had signed with the Palestinians, that because he disagreed with them, he wanted to sabotage them because he was so against
a Palestinian state or any form of Palestinian
autonomy in this land. And then he goes on to explain what his real thinking
is on the situation. (Netanyahu speaking foreign language) Netanyahu is a fantastic
politician and statesman, and he's able to sort of cover
up a lot of these policies in the name of security. But here we see what he really thinks as he's talking to these settlers thinking he's not being recorded. So unsurprisingly the
appetite for peace breaks down on both sides. Palestinians come to the conclusion that the Israelis aren't really serious about giving them any kind of autonomy in the West Bank or Gaza, that their situation will never change. And once again, they rise
up in a second Intifada. This one, much more violent,
much more coordinated. (intense music) Hamas becomes a major
player in the violence with suicide bombings and attacks. Israel responds with great
force and during the fighting, 1000 Israelis and 3000
Palestinians are killed. At this point the Netanyahu
way of seeing the world is starting to look a lot better. Peace talks didn't work. All they did was produce more violence. And so maybe the only
way to ensure security is to go back to full blown occupation of controlling every
move of the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. So at this point the occupation gets more and more suffocating, more walls, more barriers, more checkpoints, more settlements. (intense music) Then in 2005 Israel withdraws
from the Gaza Strip, letting the Palestinian Authority
have total control there. They turn their attention entirely to their historic homeland
of Judea and Samaria, which is the West Bank. The next year an election is held in the Palestinian Authorities and the winner surprised the world and would create a new
chapter for this conflict. The winner of these elections was Hamas. - [Reporter] This is a
very, very bad result for the Palestinians and for Israel. - [Johnny] The incumbent Palestinian party that had lost the election tried to forcibly hold on to power, and soon the two Palestinian parties were fighting with each other. And it results in this split between the two Palestinian governments. It turns into violence. And when the dust settles, there's suddenly a bitter divide between these two Palestinian groups, Hamas completely taking
over the Gaza Strip. And this gets us back
to our leaked document that we started this video with where an Israeli official is saying that they would actually be happy if Hamas took over the Gaza Strip because now they can treat
Gaza like a hostile country. Now that they're not occupying it, they're not responsible
for the 2 million civilians who are living there. They can impose a blockade
to control anything coming in and out of the Gaza Strip, people, food, medicine,
money, building supplies. But there was another
reason why Israel was happy that Hamas now controlled the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian government
was now deeply divided, Hamas ruling Gaza and
the West Bank being run by a more moderate, secular
Palestinian faction. And crucially neither considered
the other to be legitimate, which weakened their ability to negotiate for any kind of state,
for any kind of country, especially when Hamas still refused to recognize Israel's right to even exist. This division played right into the hands of the Israeli right. And this gets us back
to Benjamin Netanyahu, that enemy of the earlier peace talks. He gets elected once again in 2009, declaring himself Mr. Security and promising to provide
safety to Israeli citizens who are still shaken
from the second Intifada and are now worried
that Hamas now controls the entirety of the Gaza Strip. Netanyahu's playbook
was already made clear. He had said it point blank. It's what he had been doing for years. Sabotaging peace talks that
would give Palestinians any kind of authority over this land, and continuing to build settlements, while continuing in his
words in that leaked tape to hit the Palestinians hard
to make it unbearable for them. A complete assault on the
Palestinian government. Dividing and slowly conquering
the Palestinian people, making life hard and desperate for them, controlling their lives,
watching their every move. And this is where we get to
this paradoxical alignment, almost alliance between
Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas, the enemy of Israel. As long as Hamas held
control over the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian cause would
remain weak and divided. Netanyahu would feel justified in imposing this crippling blockade of the Gaza Strip, which in turn gave Hamas legitimacy among the people of the Gaza Strip, showing that their armed struggle against Israeli oppression was justified, provoking them to launch
rockets into Israel to show that they were
actually doing something unlike the Palestinian
Authority in the West Bank, which in turn bolstered
Netanyahu's narrative that the Palestinians
actually don't want peace, they want violence and
the destruction of Israel. And the only way for security is more occupation, more oppression. So instead of try to take Hamas out, Netanyahu overtly supported them by approving huge transfers
of untraceable cash literally delivered in
suitcases into the Gaza Strip, cash that would inevitably
end up in the hands of Hamas to be used against Israel. He legitimized Hamas by
negotiating with them, releasing a thousand Palestinian prisoners in exchange for one Israeli. - The Israeli soldier held
captive by Palestinian militants for five years is expected
to be freed within days. - The more Netanyahu could
keep Hamas in power in Gaza, but keep them contained, the more he could ensure that
Palestinians remain divided. He could keep peace talks
from ever happening, which in turn gave him time to continue to pursue his expansionist
project in the West Bank. And indeed, since 2009, when Netanyahu became the Prime Minister, the number of settlements in
the West Bank has only gone up. And if you look at this map, you can see how these settlements just weave through and carve up this land, making it impossible to even fathom what a Palestinian state could look like, which is precisely the
point of the strategy. I actually reported out here, visiting the settlements
back when I was at Vox. I did a series talking to the settlers, trying to understand
why they live out there, what it's like to live
in these settlements that are strangely peaceful and banal and just mundane, people
living their lives, because they're protected by the army. If you want a deeper dive on settlements, you can go watch that series. But if you're Netanyahu
over the last 16 years, you think your plan is working. Like, you see all these
settlements going up, the international community
can't do anything about it. They keep supporting you. Every once in a while there's
some flare up in the West Bank where Palestinians get into a
fight with Israeli soldiers, but it gets contained. Every few years Hamas fires some rockets, which then gives Israel the
excuse to go, as they put it, "cut the grass" by
conducting a short, swift, violent military campaign
to keep Hamas at bay. And every day that goes by, the notion of a Palestinian state becomes less and less feasible. This is one reason why a
far right Israeli lawmaker called Hamas "an asset." (man speaking in foreign language) So divide and conquer has
been the name of the game in Israel for a long time, but especially in the last
16 years under Netanyahu. And again, to the people in
charge, they think it's working. Maybe this violent status
quo, this equilibrium can hold and the far right can get
exactly what they want. Security for the Jewish people and expansion into all of this land. And maybe the occupation will
break the Palestinian spirit and they would give up on
their dream of having a state. But that's not what happened. On October 7th, 2023, we saw how wrongheaded this
theory of security was. - In an unprecedented surprise attack, the militant Hamas rulers of Gaza sent dozens of fighters into
Israel by land, sea, and air. - This deadly attack launched by Hamas showed us that while Netanyahu's strategy of divide and conquer might be good for taking over more land, what it's not good for is making good on the original promise of Israel, which is ensuring the
security of the Jewish people. In fact, his strategy has
produced exactly the opposite. (crowd chanting in foreign language) Now, the responsibility for
what happened on October 7th lies with the people who
committed those acts of terror, Hamas fighters and their leaders. There is no excuse or
justification for their actions. But the point I'm trying
to make with this video is that there's also others that need to stand accountable here. Those who used Hamas as a pawn to continue this divide
and conquer policy, who are now engaged in a campaign of mass bloodshed on civilians, they deserve to stand accountable as well, to the Israeli people and to the countries that support Israel. I believe in the need
for a Jewish state. I do. I think that's a very reasonable proposal that Jewish people should feel
safe somewhere in this world. And yet what we're looking at isn't it. The Israeli project, the way that it's been
wielded in its current form, produces the exact opposite of security for the Jewish people. Thanks for watching, and I know that you
probably have thoughts, and I'm sure a lot of you
disagree with what I've said here, and that's okay. I want to hear from you. I want to listen to that and I will see you down in the comments. Today's video, we didn't
have a normal sponsor because a lot of people right now don't want to be attached
to this discussion. But luckily I can tell you about something that is a big support to our journalism, which is Nebula. Nebula's a platform where we publish all of our videos ad-free. It is a platform that is run and owned by creators, which makes a big difference
for a lot of reasons. But it is a place where creators like me who like to learn about the
world publish their stuff. On Nebula you'll also find stuff that you can't find anywhere else, stuff that's exclusive
to the Nebula platform. These are called Nebula Originals. Stuff like Modern
Conflicts by RealLifeLore is extremely rigorous and well-told and explains how wars are fought today. And again, you can't
watch it anywhere else. The other thing I love about Nebula is that I find new creators
and new shows here, like this is a new
series called Red Atoms. It's about the Soviet Nuclear Program, and it's just really high-quality stuff. It's very similar to what you see here, but you can't get it anywhere else. It's not on YouTube. There are loads of these
kinds of series on Nebula, and when you sign up, you support the creators
who make this stuff. Including us here. We're trying to do independent journalism and deep dive investigations
and visual explainers, and it's a big effort. We have a big team of people
that make this all happen. When you sign up for Nebula using the link in our description, some of your monthly subscription
goes directly to our team so that we can continue to
do this, so that we can grow, so that we can do more ambitious things. The link is Nebula.tv/JohnnyHarris. Again, click the link, and if you're gonna sign
up for this, use that link. It is $2.50 a month if you
sign up for the annual thing. It's $5 a month if you
do the monthly thing. You can cancel any time. So, sign up for Nebula, support us. Watch a bunch of exclusive stuff. It's Nebula.tv/JohnnyHarris.
Again, use the link. Thank you all for being here, and I'll see you in the next one. (closing synth music)
