“Conflict In The Middle East” with Graham Pitts

Shownotes:

Conflict in the Middle East. It’s a phrase that has been a part of global conversations for years. The assumption is that any ongoing issues are the result of thousands of years of disagreement and strife, but the reality is that the current violence is a much more recent problem.

Today’s guest on The Weight gives us a framework and some history to think more critically about how we engage the news around Israel and Hamas. Dr. Graham Pitts is the Assistant Professor of History and Middle Eastern Studies at the Croft Institute for International Studies at the University of Mississippi. His focuses are food, famine, and environmental history in Lebanon and the Middle East. He first encountered Lebanon while he was a student at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, and his time studying abroad only increased his passion for the people of that region. Graham earned his Ph.D. at Georgetown University, and has worked at North Carolina State, Georgetown, and George Washington University.

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Learn more about Graham’s research and writing

In this episode, Chris talks about the book Apeirogon by Colum McCann. You can buy that book here.

Transcript:

Graham Pitts 00:00 I'm Eddie Rester.

Chris McAlilly 00:01
I'm Chris McAlilly. Welcome to The Weight.

Eddie Rester 00:04

Today we have Dr. Graham Pitts. He is a historian at the University of Mississippi. He's a historian of food, famine and environmental history, and his work centers on Lebanon, in the Middle East. And we chose him today for that reason to help give us some context and some understanding to the violence that has erupted around the Gaza strip with Hamas and Israel, to help us just kind of wrap our minds around what's the reality of history, what's actually feeding some of this.

Chris McAlilly 00:38

Graham went to college at a Quaker college in the Midwest and met some Palestinians who were there for college on an exchange program. That led him to live in the Arab world in various countries in his early 20s. And he got to see kind of the human texture of the region. And we talk about that, in particular through the lens of food. He wrote a book on the cuisine of the eastern Mediterranean world. And then we also talk about the way in which human beings on the ground are, and the reality, particularly in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and throughout the region, are impacted by a range of geopolitical forces, over the course of the last 150-200 years, that created up pretty complex political landscape in which some of these conflicts are arising. But also, at the basis of it just human beings that are trying to figure out their way through a really, really hard conflict. And there's just a ton of pain connected to it, even in the midst of the power dynamics.

Eddie Rester 01:52

Yeah. I think for me, it's always helpful to hear a historian talk to realize that there are real human threads that run through all of this. When you talk about over 2 million people being pushed into an area that's half the size of Memphis, Tennessee, it really helps you begin to grapple with not just what has happened in this moment, but kind of how do you take two or three steps back from it. And I think that's what we, when we just grab pieces of the news sometimes, when we listen to 30 seconds, or we read the first two paragraphs of an article about what's going on right now in Israel with Gaza. We at times miss out on what is the bigger picture of what has been happening, and not just what is happening.

Chris McAlilly 02:43

And what is happening is that there is a conflict that is you know... I mean, we're recording this on October the 16th. And between now and the time we release this episode, it's unclear what will happen. It appears that Israel is poised to enter and invade Gaza. And, you know, one of the things that he said was, there is the possibility that this conflict could continue to grow and that, you know, de-escalation is a really important, if not imperative, kind of global responsibility for the region. It's just a very difficult thing, to... You know, there are heavy topics, there are weighty topics, one of the most heavy and the most intense, really, is the reality of human conflict, violence ,and war, and particularly the death of an innocent people. And, you know, that's on the table here. I mean, there are people that have died. And there are a lot of innocent people in the region that stand to suffer. And, you know, that's one of the realities of the conversation that comes through.

Eddie Rester 03:58

So maybe our best response is simply to pray for the peace of the Kingdom to break in and break through to help people see a better way. And so, hope you enjoy the episode. We call you to pray for an end to that violence, that human life might flourish and find its way to flourishing. Share the episode, let us know what you think.

Chris McAlilly 04:24
[INTRO] Life can be heavy. So heavy, in fact that the weight we carry can sometimes cause us to lose hope.

Eddie Rester 04:33
But we've all come across those people in life who seem to be experiencing the same world we live in, except they maintain a great depth of joy and hope.

Chris McAlilly 04:41

A former generation called this gravitas. It was their description of a soul that had gained enough weightiness to be attractive, like all things with a gravitational pull.

Eddie Rester 04:53
Those are the people we want to talk to. On this podcast, we talk to pastors, entrepreneurs, artists, mental health experts, and many others.

Chris McAlilly 05:02
We'll create space for heavy topics. But we'll be listening for a quality of soul that could be called gravitas.

Eddie Rester 05:09

Welcome to The Weight. [END INTRO] Today, we're here with Dr. Graham Pitts. He is a history professor at the University of Mississippi. He is in Middle Eastern Studies along with some other things in his background. And we wanted to invite him in today for a very specific conversation with what's happening in Israel right now. Graham, thanks for being with us today.

Graham Pitts 05:33
Thank you so much for having me.

Eddie Rester 05:35
Yeah. So give us a little bit of just your life background, how you ended up studying history, why Middle Eastern history has appealed to you through the years.

Graham Pitts 05:48

So I grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina, and I went to a Quaker college, Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. Quakers are a peace church. They have lots of social justice concerns. And they have a school in Ramallah, Palestine. So each year at Earlham there are 20 odd students from Palestine. So I was exposed in college to people who were from the West Bank and Gaza. The Iraq war happened in 2003. And I felt concerned that this was going to be a disaster not only for our country, but for the region. That's turned out to be the case. And we drove from Indiana to New York to protest against the war. That was the biggest day of mass protests, probably in human history. Nobody listened to us, unfortunately. But I felt like the one thing that I could do with that feeling of helplessness was study Arabic, and live in the Middle East. And so I got to spend a semester of my senior year at Birzeit University, which is Palestine's top University, where I lived in the West Bank, and was very well received by Palestinians, and kept on studying Arabic after that. Ended up living all over the Arab world, in Cairo, in Damascus, in Syria in 2008. And my work is focused on Lebanon. So I'm writing a book right now about the first world war in Lebanon. But I would note for your listeners, that the countries that are now Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, constitute one historical, cultural unit that we could call the Levant, or sometimes greater Syria, but that has a little bit of a shade of political connotation.

Eddie Rester 07:29 Right.

Graham Pitts 07:30

So the Levant is more neutral term in English. And those people all speak... It's a continuum of Levantine Arabic, but it's the same language. It's variations on the same dialect of Arabic. And they eat the same food. And they've lived in that place for a very long time.

Chris McAlilly 07:50

One of the lenses that you've used to study the region has been through food. And I wonder if you could maybe just say a little bit about that. Just, I mean, I think going and studying in a particular region, and being received by a group of people. Food is one of those... I studied abroad in Spain. The food really gives you a way into the region, kind of in a unique way. Maybe speak to kind of how you use food as a lens for thinking about the culture.

Graham Pitts 08:19

So like you, when we travel, and we think about our own culture and other cultures, our own class, gender, any issue about human society, we can look at it through food, which is, it's a way to sort of make the conversation more human, more universal, and more particular and precise. So it's just you can do anything you want to with food. And so many times when we think about the region, when we talk about the region, as we will today, the focus is going to be on problems, injustice, violence. And so we forget to put this... We can--it's easy, if you're consuming media about the Middle East and the United States, to forget that this is a place where normal human beings live, doing very normal human things. But further than that, almost anywhere in the world, people who aren't from the region, they encounter, the Levant through its food, which is like a world class cuisine, right? You can go anywhere in the world, especially in the South. I know we all grew up with Greek and Lebanese restaurants, sometimes Mediterranean restaurants. And I think something that we can come back to in this conversation is that, as often as not, those are Palestinian restauranteurs, hiding the fact that they're Palestinians, because they're scared of being discriminated against. So I would add a word of caution there. Sometimes there's a cliche about, you know, food brings everybody together, like only if Israelis and Palestinians can eat together, that they'll solve all of their problems. I don't endorse that point of view as much as just like an indispensable realm of human existence, that we should think critically about. And I'll just tack on one final comment, which is we're going to talk about how old is Israel, how old is Palestine. What's the history of these nations? Like I already said, there's one cuisine that ties these places together. But nobody was calling it Lebanese, Israeli, or Palestinian a hundred years ago, right? These categories didn't make sense to anybody. So these are very sort of new designations. And food helps us see that.

Chris McAlilly 10:26

I want to ask one more question before kind of moving into, you know, just more substantive matters, just about the human texture of the region. You mentioned that this isn't just a region that you've studied, but you've also lived in, in different areas. I wonder, you know, maybe beyond food, if you could lift up a couple of dimensions that kind of humanize your study of the region, just, you know, from your personal experience.

Graham Pitts 10:55

So Palestine, or what's left of Palestine, in my experiences in the West Bank, in particular, is, I put it in southern terms, it's a very kind of country place. These are villages. They have, like, a traditional culture and a traditional culture of hospitality. So the way that I was received there, it was just really incredible. Like, you have to fight off invitations to eat at people's house, to become friends, etc. And not a knock on hospitality anywhere else in the Arab world, or elsewhere. But that's just not something that I found in other countries in the Middle East, or elsewhere. And I would say, the experience that struck me the most, when I first got there as a 21-year-old, was that despite the fact that I had been studying the Middle East, had a series of kind of social justice concerns about how the United States relates to the Middle East, etc., I found that I was really scared, that I had internalized lots of racism against Arab and Muslim people. So just the, you know, this transatlantic flights, and you're really tired and thirsty, and you've been up all night, and I get to this hotel. I flew into Jordan. I was gonna go to the bridge, they call it, cross into the West Bank the next day. And just kind of... I felt, like, delirious, but also just certain that I couldn't go down into the street because it wasn't safe for somebody who looks like me, a tall, blond headed American kid, to walk around the streets of Amman, Jordan. Nothing could be further from the truth. My personal safety was never in question in Jordan, in the West Bank, or elsewhere, or when I lived in Syria, for that matter. So it was just this, the human experience for me was just this encounter with racism that I had internalized. And it's been a long process of unlearning that.

Eddie Rester 13:00

You said a few minutes ago, that when we just ingest news about the Middle East, we really don't get the story at all. I traveled in the year 2000 to Israel. Spent a lot of time in Palestinian areas. And as you're saying, the food was amazing. And the hospitality was amazing. The hospitality, almost always with our group, was through food. But I learned how little I knew after I thought I knew a lot. I didn't understand settlements. I didn't understand West Bank Gaza. I didn't understand the Dome of the Rock. And one of the things somebody said on our trip was, well, "This conflict has been going on for thousands and thousands of years." And there was a Palestinian Christian scholar, traveling with us, and he said, "That's absolutely not true." And he began to kind of help us kind of reframe our understanding of the area in a way that doesn't get talked about in the news, or by politicians or anywhere. So one of the reasons we've invited you today is to help us begin to see what's the truth of history? And what are some terms? How do we define some terms? And so we'll get to some of the terms. I want to talk about Hamas and West Bank and Gaza and those things. But give us, just kind of as you think about the conflict that's going on today. Where is it rooted? What's the history we need to know about Israel and Palestine to help us understand what's happening today?

Graham Pitts 14:43

So a great place to start is that story that you were given, right? Like, why would somebody say that this conflict is thousands of years old? What interests do people have in selling that story? That for no historian is going to be accurate, right. Like we have to deal with modern problems on their bases arising during the last couple hundred years, right? This is really intuitive when we think about where we live, most places in the world. But so why, why do people suggest that the laws of history somehow function differently in the Middle East?

Eddie Rester 15:18 Yeah.

Graham Pitts 15:18
My sense is... I'm just curious...

Eddie Rester 15:21

I think the sense is just because we bring such religious weight to the nation of Israel. We bring such religious weight to the Middle East, because we're spoken to it through the stories of scripture, and a lot of the, particularly the Old Testament, you see Israel fighting for its existence against other groups and people. So I think that's why people have this sense of oh, this just goes back for thousands of years. That's my take on it.

Graham Pitts 15:48

Right. So take that word, like, "nation." It appears in the Hebrew Bible, in that to a layperson or perhaps a believer, it means the same thing. The nation of Israel that existed in antiquity is the same nation of Israel that exists today. From a secular, academic perspective, we would say that this is the same word, but it means something different. These were people who knew each other. They were a community of believers. The State of Israel is founded in the middle of the 20th century, by people who were secular, right? This is not a religious movement of Jews who came from Europe. So I don't want to be too dismissive of that story. But rather, you know, kind of stop and think, why did people tell it this way? Because it means something to them. People believe that, you know, so who am I to say that they're wrong about that? So the tomb of the patriarchs in Hebron, Hebron in the occupied West Bank. So, Hebron was a holy site for a very long time. Archaeologists tell us that the tomb of the patriarchs, where Abraham and Sarah and Rachel are said to be buried, was constructed during Herod's time, probably. Right? Two millennia ago. But it probably doesn't. So like, again, we have this conflict between things we know through faith, and things we know by other kinds of secular means. It's a big flashpoint. And there's, the situation now is that there's a side that's a mosque. And then there's a site that's, I don't know if it's a synagogue, or it's where Jewish people pray. And it's a holy site to the three Abrahamic faiths. But it's just the epicenter of like, the ugliest site of conflict. Hebron is the biggest Palestinian city, and a small number of Jewish settlers live in the middle of the city, and require a huge security presence to protect them, and to maintain their presence there. And so, for me, the tomb of the patriarchs, we think about truce a lot and we talk about Jerusalem. But that's kind of a great encapsulation of how people's ideas about their faith and history and sacred space are absolutely animating the conflict that's happening. So whereas people in the ivory tower sometimes like to just wave all this away, I think we have to take it really seriously. Because for Jews, for Christians, for Muslims, this is the Holy Land. And so like, that's, it's a really reasonable place to start. And so I would come to the word Palestine on that basis. This place has been called lots of different things. But the people calling it Palestine in the 19th century, among others, were missionaries, or travelers from the west, from Europe and the United States, who were interested in the Bible and the Holy Land and were going to Palestine on that basis.

Eddie Rester 18:56

So it's been Palestine, historically it was Palestine. How did... And you said that there was the secular state founded. Tell us a little bit of that history. How did it come into existence? When did it come into existence? And what compromises had to be made for the State of Israel to come into existence?

Graham Pitts 19:21

Sure. So there's always a Jewish population that lives in these places in Hebron, in Jerusalem, and in Safed--Tzfat, they call it the Hebrew. These people really appear in historical sources in the early modern period. So I'm giving this as a backdrop to the State of Israel. And we're gonna say some other things that are about the emigration of European Jews to the eastern Mediterranean. But we have to start with the fact of millenarian coexistence everywhere in the Islamic world, ie, including the part of the eastern Mediterranean that becomes the contemporary State of Israel. Jews, Christians and Muslims have lived in these places together since the rise of Islam. You have significant Jewish populations in Damascus, in Beirut, in Aleppo, in Egypt, in some of these--and these are diverse Jewish populations. But like the rabbinical Jews who lived in Cairo, they say, they use it as a euphemism, but I think it's helpful. They've been there quote, since Abraham. Don't take that literally. But you know, there were Jews who lived in Egypt for as long as anybody's lived there basically and identified with an Abrahamic faith. So there's an indigenous Jewish population. It's not huge but is an important and visible presence, especially in the holy cities of Palestine, historic Palestine. In the 1880s, for complicated reasons, that have to do with the rise of nationalism, but also antisemitism, violent antisemitism in the Russian Empire elsewhere, Jews begin to emigrate in the 1880s to a land they called Eretz Israel, a place they called Israel. That becomes... That was the Ottoman Empire then ,when that emigration begins. After the First World War becomes the British Mandate of Palestine. For reasons that probably need no explanation to any literate person who's listening to this podcast, during the 1930s, there becomes a bigger need for Jews to find refuge somewhere. So I don't want to paint with too broad a brush or give too simple a causal framework. But it's not wrong to say that European antisemitism from the late 19th century is giving juice as a collective with regard to the big diversity of those communities, right? People are saying, "We need a nation, too. We need to build a modern nation and it has to be rooted in a place." But not all Jewish people are on board with this. In fact, a lot of the rabbinical powers- that-be were opposed to it, because these people were socialists, and they were secular. But that accelerates over time, until the 30s. And the reason that plenty of Jewish people would have been happy to leave Germany and go to the United States, and go elsewhere, but they were barred from doing so. So the fundamental problem is discrimination and violence against Jews in Europe. But they have nowhere to go because of our all-white immigration policy, enacted after the First World War, in the United States. So Palestine is a refuge. But the indigenous inhabitants of the land began to resist, began to resist more and more as the numbers of Jewish immigrants increased in the 30s. And that's when you start having systemic communal violence break out in the 30s, and a revolt in 1936. And here's... So when Palestinians pick up arms and fight back, they're not fighting their Jewish neighbors. They're fighting British colonizers. The British, and this is a really helpful point to put in global context, the British did the same thing they did in Ireland and India, which is draw a line and say, this type of people should live on this side of the line, this other type of people should live on this side of the line. And by the way--and this is in India, of course, in '47. They say, 'We're out of here. There you go." And the carnage that ensued from that abdication of the responsibility in India just, like, defies the imagination, in terms of millions dead, the terrible relationship between India and Pakistan, and between Hindus and Muslims in India. They do the same thing in Palestine. They say, we're going to do something that flies in the face of the demographic reality. People lived all together. The British up and leave and a war ensues. The State of Israel is declared in 1948. 750,000 Palestinians are expelled from their homes. And the Arab armies hold the West Bank and Gaza. So that's the reality on the ground in '48. Those borders were decided in war.

Eddie Rester 24:22 Yeah.

Graham Pitts 24:23

And then Israel in the next war in '67. So they're... At that point, they're, they're occupying what we call '48 Israel, which has Jewish people from the Arab world from Euprope, but also Palestinians, Muslims, and Christians. And the Palestinian Muslims and Christians live under military occupation in '48 Israel as a minority, but 150,000 of them are left. Once Gaza and the West Bank are taken, suddenly, the State of Israel is in control of a massive population that it's colonized. They also take East Jerusalem. Jordan had been sovereign over the West Bank in East Jerusalem. Egypt had been sovereign over Gaza. And so since 1967, Israel has been the occupying power in these places. So we talk about settlements. Jewish Israelis were settled in area seized in 1967, which as is repeated over and over and over again, is against international law. That has not stopped the State of Israel from settling people there or seizing that land, in around Jerusalem, from making it part of the State of Israel. That's a long... So that's the long history in a small package.

Eddie Rester 25:41

I feel like you squeezed about 17 lectures into five minutes there.

Graham Pitts 25:47 There you go.

Eddie Rester 25:47

One quick thing about settlements that we were in Bayt Jala when we were there in 2000, and with this group of Palestinian Christians, and you could look... They didn't have water turned on in their area, but you could look up the hill at the settlement and see the water sprinklers going in the lawns. And it was, it was like a knife in the back that really drove a lot of frustration. So Chris, I'm sorry, I interrupted you there.

Chris McAlilly 26:16

No, that's okay. I mean, I think another... So I think what's helpful, I mean, there have been a couple of things that I'll lift up that I hear in what you're offering Graham. One is this kind of reframing the idea that the conflict is thousands of years old, and framing it as hundreds of years old, you know. Kind of the contemporary issues and conflicts have really arisen since the mid 19th century, or mid-to-late 19th century, and then continue to kind of escalate through these different kind of dimensions. I think one of the things that I wanted to move towards this kind of, you know, American interest in the territory, but really it seems like it's very much there are multiple reasons why the US, from a foreign policy perspective, has been interested in Middle East, but it seems like one of the chief factors within that is just oil. But I mean--like an economic interest. But I could be wrong about that. I mean, I guess, would you? It seems like the discovery of oil in the Middle East, and, you know, the rise of the automobile and kind of an economy that's really rooted in oil is a big factor. But you know, maybe I'm reading that wrong.

Graham Pitts 27:34

So I like a new book about the United States in the Middle East that speaks to that question you just asked. It's Robert Vitalis's "Oilcraft." So he takes "oilcraft" from Barbara Fields and Karen Fields, this book they have about race in America called "Racecraft," or basically, race is a fiction, something that humans invented. It's a very powerful myth that shaped our society in all kinds of systemic waste. So oil is a commodity, right?You can buy it, right, like anything else. Like gold, like silver, like wine, You know, whatever you like--coffee, chocolate. So why can't we just purchase oil on the global market like anything else? The answer to that question isn't simple. But I think one thing that gets confused is we import a very small amount, historically, of petroleum from the Middle East. So who needs the Middle East's oil? And historically, since the Second World War, it's been Europe, Japan. So I'm not saying the oil of the Middle East is irrelevant. But I think the fundamental motivation of the US engagement in the Middle East and the world falls down to, basically, is due to the fact that we're the--and I wouldn't ask everybody to use this language, but my language is going to be about empire. It's the US military that coordinates global economic activity, right, and the circulation of goods, money, people, the control over those flows. And there's a lot of money to be made in the circulation of commodities. But as regards the Middle East, a really important commodity that US industry is invested in, including in Mississippi, is the production of arms. So like, what's turning the wheel? The circulation of oil is a big thing. But also security, including selling guns. You know, for me as a Christian, I mean, this is something that I think we should be thinking really hard about, because this is what ties the United States to the rest of the world. In the positive spin on that is we're providing security and that's not wrong. You know, if you don't... Llike in the periods where there wasn't an imperial power making sure the seaways were safe for commerce, get pirates. So there's that, you know. So what are the ethics of the world system that we inhabit? But I leave that to each individual to decide. But I would say that the thing that ties us to Israel and our other partners and allies in the region is the security architecture that the United States primarily manages. There's a lot of debates and arguments about, like, is there some resonance between Israeli settler colonialism and settler colonialism in the United States? I wouldn't deny that. Lots of academics would give you that answer that like, of course, the settler colony is supporting the settler colony. I don't really think that explains why things are happening, though, right? Because circumstances have changed over time. The United States has continued to stand by Israel, although I would add something there. In '48, during the Suez Crisis..., and in 1967, the Israeli army defeats Egypt in all of those cases, in '48, and '67, combined Arab armies, allied Arab armies, who were fighting with Israel at the same time, without significant support from the United States. So there's a bit of a myth on the front end, if I can, that the United States was just dumping all these weapons on Israel, and that's why they won those wars. That's a common myth. It's true in '73 that the United States resupplies Israel at a critical moment. And we have done since, based on the memoranda of understanding that in the Yom Kippur War, the War '73. So we give lots of money to Israel, a lot of which is used to purchase American arms. But we don't just do this... Sometimes it's like, yeah, that's the biggest recipient of US aid per capita, but also the recipient of USA. But we do the same thing for Egypt. So that the original plan there was like, we're gonna fund Egypt's military and their ability to purchase wheat for their citizens as a way to encourage them to be at peace with Israel. This very corrupt, oppressive Egyptian regime has no intention of fighting Israel or anything like that. So just maybe if we frame it in the language of, you know, what's the taxpayer paying for here? It's the key, it's to maintain this kind of corrupt economy of arms and oil. And how did we get on the hook for that? And who in our country benefits from that equation? Oh. You know, I wish we were having a critical conversation about that in our society. But those are never the terms of discussion, unfortunately.

Eddie Rester 32:55
Right. We just see kind of the end pieces of it, not the lead into it.

Graham Pitts 33:01

Sure. And also, the realities of antisemitism are very real in our own country. And so on the far right, there's kind of a debate between people who support the State of Israel, and then anti Semites who offer this real caricature about how Jews control the government or something like that. In academic spaces, there's a lot of focus on the Israel lobby. I think it would be a huge mistake to think that that problem was particular, just a one issue. What confronts us here is that our system is susceptible to corruption by special interests. So wherever there's a motivated, well-funded, special interest group, they can shape policy. So the Cuban diaspora does that, the right-wing Cuban diaspora does that. Armenian Americans do that. Turkish Americans do that. You know, the beef industry does that. The arms industry does that. We have a problem across the board where special interests can shape policy. This came up, Senator Menendez from New Jersey, it turns out. It would be wrong to call him the victim of an Egyptian intelligence operation, when in fact, he was helping to coordinate an Egyptian intelligence operation in the United States. And I think that goes to show how much of a stake Egypt has in the maintenance of the status quo that allows the Egyptian government to receive a lot of arms and support with no sort of provisions about that country's responsibility as regards human rights. So this is something that we're facing across the board in the region. Israel is one of several governments that we partner with that abuses human rights.

Eddie Rester 34:48

As we think about, back to the current conflict in Israe, we have this moment out of Gaza, and I want you to talk a little bit about Gaza, because I didn't even know where it was until maybe 8, 10 years ago. But you have this group, Hamas, who pushes outside the boundaries of Gaza very violently. Tell us a little bit of what's Gaza? And who's Hamas? Where did they come from? Where did they emerge from? How did they become kind of this powerful entity that gets to negotiate with Israel and has enough power to really do significant damage?

Graham Pitts 35:33

Sure, so I'll say a couple of things. But which will also involve, and I'll apologize for this kind of digression about the regional context, which for me, is really helpful. In 1948, the state of Israel's declared. This is the Israeli war of independence on the one side referred to as the catastrophe, the Nakba by Palestinians. So most of the population of this small strip, which is 141 square miles, 25 miles long, four to seven miles wide. This is a tiny area. Most of the people who lived there were expelled from their villages in 1948 and settled there in refugee camps and elsewhere. Humans have lived in that little piece of the eastern Mediterranean, between the Levant and Egypt, for a very long time. So there were people living there, it's just that there's this huge refugee influx from people who were expelled in '48. To give context, the city of Memphis is 315 square miles. So Gaza is about half the size of the area of the city of Memphis, with 260% more people. More than 2 million people live in this tiny territory, smaller than half of Memphis. In density, just on the face of it, plenty of humans live in pretty dense urban areas, right? But Gazans can't come and go. They don't have control over their borders, their airspace, the sea. So the Mediterranean, always kind of, the Mediterranean is a dynamic space, because before modern transportation, it connects all of the different parts of the basin, but especially the Levant, Egypt, and Anatolia in Greece. So what's very strange about what Gazans have had to live under Israeli occupation since 1967 is that they don't control their borders. All of these people are stuck in what you might call an open-air prison. But Egypt controls one of Gaza's borders, and also doesn't let Gazans come and go freely. So the situation in Gaza, you know, I don't want to paint... You know, people have normal lives there, and
thrive. So in some ways, you know, I would always bring us back to the fact that this is a normal human landscape, but in very extreme circumstances, just because conditions there are, understandably, kind of desperate. I don't think it's surprising that that situation gave rise to the fundamentalist organization. Sort of everywhere after the Second World War decolonization, there was this promise that secular Arab nationalism and socialism would be kind of the answer for Arab-speaking peoples. The promises have been a bit unfulfilled, I would say, and so sort of in the malaise of secular governance, you have the rise of Islamist movements. This is the story that Americans tend to know pretty well. But--and I don't want to make Israel seem like a puppet master here. But Israel, like any other power would have, laid the secular nationalist movement that was the Palestinian Liberation Organization off Islamist parties, right? They were coming from very different places. And so they did that between the West Bank, controlled by the PLO, and the Gaza Strip, controlled by Hamas. Hamas won elections. And the United States--and this is not the first time this has happened--the United States in Israel said we didn't really mean for you to win the election in 2006, issued all kinds of stipulations. And so effectively, the Bush administration coordinating with Israel and the Palestinian Authority, which had been established in 1993, basically canceled Hamas's legitimately won election. And that was in 2006. Some fights ensue, like actual fighting ensues, between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. And the Palestinian Authority holds the West Bank. Hamas holds Gaza. They've been in charge since 2006. There's been lots of attempts to resolve that. And since that time, we've had a series of armed conflicts between Hamas controlled Gaza Strip and Israel. There were Israeli settlers in Gaza until 2005. So there was an actual military occupation. Now there's an occupation, it's just kind of on the edges, if that makes sense. I hope that a clearer picture for your listeners. Hamas started as an Islamic charity was the was the front in '87. And from the beginning, and there's great evidence that this is the case, Israel is interested in sort of encouraging Hamas as a counterweight to who they saw as the real enemy there, which was the secular--an enemy that had been fighting for a long time. And I would say, it's these populations, the West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem, that were... And quiescent isn't the word. They weren't engaged in militant resistance between '67 and the early 90s. We talk about the First Intifada. The word "intifada" means "uprising." And when we say there was an intifada that starts in '87, and there's an intifada that starts in 2000. We're likely to be confused, because the thing that happens in 2000, and in the 90s before that, was a campaign of suicide bombings against civilians. What starts in '87, was called the rock throwing intifada, was Palestinians who were under colonial occupation basically objecting, not with guns and bombs, but with peaceful--and you know, throwing rocks isn't peaceful, right. But it wasn't armed resistance against occupation. And President Rabin, Prime Minister Rabin of Israel, is associated with the peace game, was assassinated for trying to make peace, create a roadmap to peace. He instructed the Israeli military to go in and break bones, to quell non- violent resistance, or at least non-militant resistance against Israel's occupation. So there's no way to look at sort of the long evolution of Palestinian resistance, except to note that other avenues were tried first. And then the Palestinian leadership in the Al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000, this was across the board. So this wasn't just Hamas, or the PLO. This was all of the Palestinian militant organizations make a choice to cause maximum pain and attack Israeli civilians. Let's put the moral equation aside there. I do think that we should note that that's been a catastrophe for the Palestinian cause. Because they ceded, at least in the discourse, positive possibilities for holding the moral high ground there. But I don't, in saying that, I don't want to distract from the extremely unequal power relations between the two groups. People say like, "Why isn't there a Palestinian Gandhi?" That person would be in prison. Israel has, under no circumstances, tolerated organized, nonviolent resistance. But the targeting of civilians, innocent civilians, children, is inexcusable. And there's no... and I'm sort of stuck on that point. Whereas, you know, what the counter facts were like, what would have happened had they done that? The reason they decided to do that is because they put their cause on the map through international acts of terrorism. So there was a playbook there, right? From Munich into the 70s, hijacking airliners, spectacular kind of attacks across the border from Lebanon. And so I think that was the playbook that they felt like had worked for them. All of that said, the possibilities for coexistence were very real. Like people could just go to Gaza, and Israelis would go into the West Bank to shop for things because they were cheap, before 2000. Like, these were places that were interconnected. These were people that were talking to each other still. The idea that this could just be one place where people live together was very real. What happens with violence is that people take sides. And people remember even very isolated, violent, terrible events, and that shapes their understanding of possibilities, harms their priors. So I do think it's really important to say people could have gotten along, coexistence was still possible. Right now, I think the two-state solution is no longer viable. And people held on to that a long time after it was still kind of like this isn't realistically going to be a policy.

Eddie Rester 45:22
I don't hear that talked about anymore.

Graham Pitts 45:25

That's right. And I think politically, that's useful, right? Because it's, we have to acknowledge that lots of all these people live in the same polity, but only some of them have rights. So you know, people call that apartheid. Looks a lot like apartheid, the demographics are a little bit different. Of course, the white population of South Africa was small. The Jewish population of this territory is about half. Can't all these people live together? That seems remote right now. But the alternative is keeping people in conditions like we mentioned in Gaza. How do you keep more than 2 million people in this very small territory, without the possibility for life as we understand it? There's going to be a cost for that. And there's no--taking the right or wrong off the table--because people aren't just gonna live there and not find some way to resist. And so that's what we're seeing.

Chris McAlilly 46:20

One of the ways in, you know, reading the news has been complicated, layered, I mean. I feel like that, as you spend time in this, and you've been spending time in this region, just kind of thinking about it and exploring it both historically and in terms of the contemporary power and political dynamics, for years. I mean, this is your work. And, you know, I think for just a layperson that's kind of coming into the conversation, it's exceedingly complex. It's just complex. And then the complexity builds upon additional complexities. And it just becomes so difficult to understand. One of the ways in that I found helpful is this novel, "Apierogon" by this guy, Colum McCann. Are you familiar with this work?

Graham Pitts 47:09 I am not.

Chris McAlilly 47:10

So it's just, you know, the story kind of centers on a Palestinian father and an Israeli father both lose daughters over the course of the last 20 years, kind of on the other side of the Oslo Accords. And I don't remember exactly the moment when, I mean, they're both just not random acts of violence, but I mean, they just both lose daughters. And so the way that--and an apeirogon is a shape with an infinite number of sides. And the story is told as just a fractured novel. So it's told in a thousand and one different fragments, and it just kind of doubles back on itself. And you get all of these different storylines, and threads, and it doesn't make narrative sense at all. But at the center of it are these two kind of expressions, kind of testimonies, of grief and pain and lost at the center of it. And for me, it's just been, you know, I've been coming back to that image as helpful. Just a completely fragmented history that's rooted in all kinds of things that have gone wrong over the... Basically everybody's complicit, you know. There's a deep complicity kind of across the board in how we got to a place where this kind of conflict would arise globally. And yet, there's this deep pain. Like, it's just, it's so deeply painful for the people in the region, and then also to just kind of have our attention turned in that direction. I think one of the difficulties when you're engaging in any kind of a conflict in another part of the world, when you're thinking about it, you're trying to think of it faithfully, you're trying to think with care as a person who doesn't have, hasn't done a PhD on the region, but somebody who's trying to be just kind of a faithful consumer of the news. I wonder, I think there's certain kind of disciplines and certain habits, certain things that I'm sure you teach your students. And I guess, I wonder if you're just trying to encourage someone in terms of disciplined attention in that direction, what would you encourage?

Graham Pitts 49:22

The path, human paths can be the source of hope, in a few different senses. And I've touched on this already. So when we talk about, you know, a conflict that's been going on for thousands of years, I offer the counter narrative, which is no, coexistence went on for thousands of years, and people lived together. And you don't want to take human rights or tolerance, which are sort of contemporary understandings that we have and put them in the past. Because past societies didn't really live up to those, right? People didn't have rights in the way that we understand them today. But like, can these people live together? If we look at the breadth and depth of human experience, that's not even really a question. Of course people can. Why aren't they, in some particular circumstances? I think that's the right question. So let me come back to this issue of complexity that you were right to talk about. There's apeirogon of perspectives there, like you said, and a lot of difficult, painful historical contexts. But the issue doesn't need to be that complicated. So like, just take a series of analogies. Like how complicated was Jim Crow? Complicated in a sense, you know, what brought us there, but like, pretty simple. Like, how complicated was apartheid in South Africa? Or the colonization of the United States? Right, like, sure. There were some people who were there before. Some of those people, you know, and we don't want to... Native people always say "We're still here!" But the circumstances of the destruction of their civilization, attempted destruction of their civilization, let's say are also pretty straightforward. So I think the colonial realities on the ground are, you know that some people have rights and some people don't. And the place where we are now is that the illusion that Israel could be a democratic in a Jewish state, it's gone. It's over. And so where do we go now? Yeah, nobody knows. And so nobody has any idea what's going to happen tomorrow. It seems like Israel is preparing a ground invasion of Gaza. We can only conclude that that's what Hamas wanted them to do. So like, since Hamas takes over the strip, 2006, there's been a uncoordinated symbiosis between some right wing governments of Israel and Hamas. They need each other, right? For domestic political, for their... Again, with reference to the difference in power there. Hamas is fighting with improvised arms. Israel has the military abilities that defy qualification, or quantification. But they still kind of need each other because Israel doesn't want to govern the strip. But it doesn't seem like Hamas at the end of the day really had a plan to be the governing authority of Gaza. It's a bad deal, situation. They're really desperate. So they were left with their original mission, which was fighting Israel. So I think what we have to confront now is that, yeah, Hamas has baited Israel's government, who was happy to get baited into this. Netanyahu was in a very difficult political situation. And I think he'll be held responsible for this, honestly, so I don't think it'll save him at the end of the day. But some people in Israel are looking at this as a moment where they're united. So that's kind of the specific circumstances that led us here. And what will happen regionally is the big question. Iran, saying very clearly, with their ally Hezbollah in Lebanon, that Israel has to stop, that if Israel occupies the strip definitely, if they attempt to make the strip even smaller, that they're going to intervene. The United States has moved. So like, at first the United States starts moving aircraft carriers off the coast, and people were saying to help Israel defeat Gaza. That's not why they're there. They're there in case the war expands. And nobody planned for this. So no, I don't think... I can't speak for Hamas. I think they're thinking around this as like a little bit opaque. But Israel, the United States, Iran, Hezbollah, external actors definitely weren't courting the war that might happen. So the fallout for innocent people just defies words in terms of what could happen here. Lebanon has suffered a lot. Israel tried to hit the civilian population and civilian infrastructure in 2006 so hard in the war against Hezbollah, which was one that started for the same reason, by the way.

Chris McAlilly 54:27
But just so much fewer. I mean, it was just much smaller. It wasn't 1300 people. It was a much smaller engagement by Hezbollah.

Graham Pitts 54:36

Exactly. But first by Hamas crosses the border, kill some troops, kidnaps one. And then Israel invades Gaza, right. So to your point, a very small cross border incursion. Hezbollah, because their sort of legitimacy is based on confronting Israel, felt the need to respond, so they launched their own limited cross border raid, and kill a patrol, basically, of Israeli soldiers. This sparks a huge reaction from Israel, the point of which was to cause so much pain in Lebanon. So this is like, clearly the targeting of civilians. They make no, there's no pretense that civilians weren't being targeted, their civilian infrastructure wasn't. The point was to raise the costs so high for Hezbollah, that they would never do that again. Ditto for Hamas. That deterrence didn't work. Right. So we should draw our attention to the fact that like, like... The policy makes sense on the face, but if that doesn't work, then should the United States endorse such a clean violation of the human rights of civilians anymore? Because I mean, if it's true that and we can observe that Hamas hasn't been deterred, but if Hezbollah is also not deterred by that, Israel is going to double down and try to make that pain even that much greater in Lebanon in the next round of conflict. And that's something that nobody should want to see. That's why the administration's rhetoric in the first instance, discouraging any talk of de-escalation, I think people's outrage was understood, like the outrage that happens immediately. I think we all understand that. But the US government has enormous responsibility to act responsibly, and to make other actors act responsibly. And from Thomas Friedman to the biggest supporters of Zionism in Israel to the far left, everybody agrees that giving Israel just a blank check to do whatever it wants, has been bad for Israel, not to mention everybody else. But it hasn't, it's no favor to Israel, in the long term, and so they have to stop them from... The administration has to make them de-escalate. Because if not, this conflict doesn't even. has no bounds that we can even kind of... Yeah.

Eddie Rester 57:15

So as we wrap up, are there voices that if someone wants to dig in a little deeper, and just begin to understand, unravel some of the complexity, are there voices or books or podcasts, people that you'd say, go here. Read this. Listen to that. Anybody, any voices that you'd say, these folks are helpful?

Graham Pitts 57:35

So, and I appreciate that question and would just say that everything, that all of the insight, if it's right to call it that, that I've offered today is just my own perspective on these matters. Who to point you to, I don't know. The volume is really loud in the conversation right now. And people's prior politics are really shaping how they see things and what they're saying. Three Muslim and Arab anchors were removed from MSNBC during the conflict already. So I guess my word of caution there would be like, there's censorship that goes on around this issue. And it's real, and it affects mainstream or what, you know, liberal, the mainstream liberal media. So like, The New York Times opinion page, I think, has a very problematic stance on what's happening there. So just to recommend, like the one right outlet that will feel... "Objective" is the wrong word, but that won't feel like it's... compromised. Won't feel compromised in one way or another... Chris?

Chris McAlilly 58:47

No, I just think that might be the word, right. Just be aware that as you're, and I think this is not just this particular moment, this particular conflict, but just in general, I think there's this broader conversation about how we engage with the news. And just being aware that your prior politics shapes both how you view the news, and even the outlets that you go to. And I don't know, in some ways, I think one of the only ways I know to navigate that is just look at various sources. Look across the board, not just at one, but as many. Just take a look at what everybody's saying around, you know, if it's something that you're really interested in, just don't focus on the one true source. That's gonna... You're gonna have to take in a range of sources. And then be aware that your prior politics are probably going to be shaping. And you're gonna have some misconceptions along the way that you may need to work through to get to some working understanding what's going on. You know, that's one of the things that's been helpful to me through time. But, you know, I mean, there's only so much time in the day, you know. I mean, I think some of these conflicts are so immense and they have so much depth and, you know, again, complexity. I think the reason why I mentioned the novel is because it helped me, personally, cut through all of that and get to that there's the pain of the grief of one father that loses a daughter, who's Palestinian, and the pain of one father who loses a child on the Israeli side, having an opportunity to see and hear one another. That was a work of art. It was kind of, you know, not the current conflict. That was really helpful to me. That would be the one thing that I'd lift up, "Apeirogon." It's not, I don't recommend it as knowledge. It's really, really hard. But it was helpful.

Eddie Rester 1:00:47

Graham, thank you for your time today. You helped us shed a little light, I hope, for me at least, to kind of help us understand this. So thank you for your time. Thank you for what you've had to offer to us today.

Graham Pitts 1:01:00 Thank y'all for having me.

Eddie Rester 1:01:03
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Chris McAlilly 1:01:10

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