In this episode of the Bridging the Gap Podcast, Rachel Nelson sits down with Andrew P. Miller, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress (CAP) and former deputy assistant secretary of state for Israeli-Palestinian Affairs in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs at the U.S. Department of State. They discuss his experience shaping U.S. policy toward Israel/Palestine, including sanctions targeting perpetrators of violence in the West Bank, regional diplomacy, and the evolving role of U.S. engagement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, especially concerning Israel’s war in Gaza.
Rachel Nelson: Hello, everyone, and welcome to Bridging the Gap, conversations on Israel and Palestine, a podcast from the Middle East Center at the New Line Institute for Strategy and Policy. I’m your host, Rachel Nelson. When it comes to US policy on Israel and Palestine, much of what the public sees are the headlines, statements, press conferences, aid packages, but what happens behind those decisions? Who’s shaping them, and how are those choices made in real time under immense political and moral pressure?
In this episode, we go beyond the public talking points for an inside look at how the State Department approaches one of the most enduring and contentious issues in US foreign policy. Our guest brings firsthand experience from within the system, offering a perspective not just on what the US says, but how it actually operates when dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
I’m pleased to welcome our guest, Andrew P. Miller. Andrew is a senior fellow focused on the Middle East in the National Security and International Policy Department at the Center for American Progress. He most recently served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Israeli-Palestinian Affairs in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs at the US Department of State from 2022 to 2024.
Before this, he served as a Senior Policy Advisor to US Ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, covering the Middle East and North Africa, counterterrorism, political-military affairs, and intelligence. His previous government assignments included serving as the Director for Egypt and Israel Military Issues on President Barack Obama’s National Security Council from 2014 to 2017. Andrew, thank you so much for being here today. I’ve been wanting to have you on for a really long time.
Andrew P. Miller: It’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Rachel: Yes. I’ve read your bio to our listeners already. They might not know much about the inner workings of the State Department, and I have a lot of questions about your assignment. I wonder if you could walk us through your time as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Israeli-Palestinian Affairs. First, how did you come into that role? It’s a fantastic-sounding job. Who did you spend the most time working with? Was it the Israelis, the Palestinian leaders? Then this is a question I get asked a lot, and I think it’s a funny question, but why did you want to work on this extremely polarizing and oftentimes dangerous issue? It means some people might say that that’s crazy, and why would you want to do that?
Andrew: As the Deputy Assistant Secretary, I was the senior-most official at the State Department who was exclusively responsible for Israeli-Palestinian Affairs. There were officials who dealt with it who were of higher rank, but they also had other issues in their portfolio. I became the representative on these issues at not working levels, but mid-levels of interagency discussions within the US government, and then with foreign partners, including the Israelis, including the Palestinians, but also other countries that have an interest in Israel, have an interest in Palestine in the conflict.
As we know, there are many, so I spent a fair amount of time dealing with countries other than those in my portfolio because almost every country had some degree of interest, and some had an intense interest in Israeli-Palestinian issues, including the Vatican. It was very interesting to go there and meet with some of the diplomatic staff who were focused on it. It is one of their top issues for obvious reasons.
As the DAS, I oversaw the Office of Israeli and Palestinian Affairs, which is the desk, as we say in State Department parlance, the officers who are responsible for managing all of the paperwork, preparing for meetings, conducting working-level, but absolutely crucial diplomacy and engagement with other people in the building, with other people in the US government, and then with their counterparts in Israel, their counterparts in the Palestinian Authority, or the PLO, or however you choose to describe it.
I certainly spent more time working with the Israelis than with the Palestinians. That’s just a structural reality of the relationship. We have this unique relationship with Israel that is so multifaceted, that has so many different levels. A day wouldn’t go by without some interaction with part of the Israeli government, whether it was their embassy or Israeli officials based in Israel. Had a fair amount of interaction with the Palestinians.
That relationship is less institutionalized and tended to be held by a smaller number of people. I was probably one of four or five individuals at the State Department who had regular interaction with Palestinian officials, with Palestinian civil society, and with a variety of organizations that were advocating both for Israel and then for Palestinian interests. A lot of the job is supervising and editing documents and trying to develop a vision, but you don’t have much time for writing yourself, which was a different experience for me.
In all of my prior jobs, I was the one at the computer writing most of the time. In this case, I just didn’t have the time, so I was editing work that was done by people reporting to me or by other people in the bureau. Most of the job involved interaction, so there was a human dimension to it, whether it was in the US government, meeting with other offices, with other bureaus at the State Department, or in interagency meetings convened by the NSC, interacting with other departments and agencies.
Certainly, meeting with Israeli officials, meeting with Palestinian officials, meeting with embassies around town, and then occasionally meeting with senior officials from other countries as they visited or as you would go out. At one point, I became the de facto representative to the working-level G7 group on Israeli-Palestinian issues, which we used as one of the primary fora to coordinate responses on those issues. Historically, that would have been played by the Quartet, but since Russia is no longer in good standing, the Quartet was no longer a viable framework.
The G7 became a logical place, working with the UK, with France, with Germany, with the Italians, and several others, as well as with the EU, to try to devise common approaches. What was positive about the G7 is that it includes Canada and Japan. We had another non-European country, and then a country from East Asia involved, so it wasn’t purely a US-European dialogue. That was important. It certainly was a challenge.
Earlier in my career, even when I was in positions where I had comparable influence, I didn’t have a staff reporting to me. That requires a different set of skills to manage. It’s another thing when you’re the one who’s always typing at the keyboard or the one always coming up with the ideas. I was only as good as my staff made me. My staff only got justice when I delivered on what they were preparing for me.
Rachel: It sounds like a job where you had to balance a lot of– It’s competing parties. You’re dealing with an issue that no one’s been able to solve for almost 100 years now. Obviously, your assignment was cut in half. You have the first half of your assignment, and then after October 7th, which I think a lot of people in the field feel that way. They have their job before October 7th and their job after October 7th. Was there a particular moment or a particular assignment that you took on that you felt like you had the most impact?
Andrew: That’s a great question. There were moments where I had great– I don’t think I can limit it to a particular assignment. I think a few experiences, a few policy developments or engagements that really stood out to me. Among them are, one, playing a role in the Israel Visa Waiver Program, which was a very prolonged exercise before October 7th. We were within the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, and on behalf of the State Department, there was basically a consensus within the building trying to ensure that all Americans would receive equal treatment by the Israeli government.
That included Americans who are of Palestinian descent, who are of Arab descent. We believe strongly that the standards of the Visa Waiver Program were such that all Americans needed to be treated the same way. The expression that was used, Ambassador Nides has said it publicly, blue is blue, referring to the color of the American passport. It doesn’t matter what your heritage is. As a general principle, it wasn’t necessarily a challenge. It was much more difficult with Americans who had Palestinian national IDs.
I think it wasn’t the case that other agencies like DHS, Department of Homeland Security, were uninterested. It just wasn’t the same priority. They were focused in part on ensuring better treatment for Americans who wanted to travel to Israel quickly. They were concerned with creating opportunities for Israelis to contribute to the US economy. They also were focused, from a very practical perspective, on DHS consular officials that state are overworked. If we have this system with Israel that exists for other countries, those are fewer visas that need to be processed.
That opens up some spare capacity in both organizations. State played a really instrumental role in ensuring that the agreement that was eventually signed, or the understanding it’s technically not a formal agreement, enshrined that concept. Even at the time, provided for a future pathway for Palestinians in Gaza, or Palestinian Americans in Gaza, to be able to leave and travel more easily than they had previously. Then, to allow for Americans who were resident in the United States or in third countries who had family in Gaza to see their family, which they hadn’t done.
Had this been implemented, had it not been for October 7th, I think there would have been a substantial improvement. I was proud that we stuck by our principles. Not entirely thrilled with implementation, but a large portion of that has to do with the war. I think I played an important role on drawing attention to extremist settler violence. Certainly wasn’t the only one. I give General Fenzel, who was and is the US security coordinator, the most credit for that.
We made it a point of elevating that issue in the pantheon of tensions and sources of conflict in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and ultimately, contributed to devising, at first, a visa policy that prohibited the issuance of visas to Israelis who were involved in acts of violence against Palestinians. Then, after October 7th, to the executive order that imposed both financial and travel sanctions on many of the same individuals, which was unfortunately overturned very early by the Trump administration, and one of the individuals whom we designated went on to murder a Palestinian.
That is disappointing, the end story, but I was proud to participate. Then I do think that during the conflict, while it was very difficult to make progress with Israel and then with Arab countries on arrangements for the post-conflict period, I do think that we played an important role in educating and socializing Israeli security officials to the risks associated with the long-term presence. Then we played a critical role in helping Palestinians who were in Gaza and needed to get out for reasons that were immediate, whether it was a health issue or they were being targeted by Hamas.
Under normal circumstances, they wouldn’t have been able to leave. I could play a role in interacting with my Israeli colleagues with the security services to arrange for their exit. To be clear, as you know, the Biden administration never supported the displacement of Palestinians from Gaza. We were very careful that we didn’t want to open the door for a mass departure. This was individualized cases. In one case, which I think received the most attention, we were able to work with some folks on the ground to not only get Israeli permission to leave, but we actually arranged for the mother and the uncle of an American service member to be picked up in northern Gaza, in Gaza City, driven to Ratha when it was still open and exited.
This was after the father of the serviceman had perished in the conflict. He wasn’t a combatant, but he died earlier in the conflict. I don’t know whether that woman and her brother would have survived without it. I know that private and his brother were deeply appreciative. High-ranking officials in the Defense Department and the US military were appreciative of what we did because we went out of our way to help the family of an American service member, even though they weren’t Americans. While we also had success with Israeli hostages and bringing some of them home, my role was more focused on being a contact for hostage families.
I met with them on at least a monthly basis, where they would come in. I can’t say that I necessarily made a huge difference in the resolution of their loved one’s captivity, although we did get some out. It was clearly important to them to be heard and to know that someone was looking out for them because many of the people with whom I spoke did not have confidence their own government was earnestly acting to try to secure the release of their loved ones, even though they were Israeli nationals.
Rachel: We’re seeing that a lot now with these protests. You’ve touched on a lot of what I want to talk to you about today. You and I have had a lot of coincidences. You talked about the visa waiver program. I was living in the West Bank when the demands by the Biden administration were made to actually get the visa waiver program to be implemented. Additionally, when there was a massive attack on the Palestinian village of Turmusaya, I visited the village the same day that you did, but we passed like ships in the night, and I did not meet you. We met much later. As DIS for Israeli-Palestinian Affairs, you had to travel frequently to the West Bank, only to Palestinian villages. I’m wondering if there’s something that you saw there that impacted you the most that’s really stuck with you?
Andrew: The most affecting experience that will never leave me is on that day in Turmusaya when I met with the wife of a Palestinian green card holder in the United States who was killed by settlers, and her two young children who were also American citizens. I had no idea that there was going to be any press coverage– I thought there might be some press coverage outside of the house, but there was even press inside of their home when we sat down in their majlis and we were speaking.
Their daughter came up to me, and she was about the age of my daughter. She was at the time probably two and a half years old. She just wrapped her arms around my legs. I remember at the time struggling in a way that I’ve never before to not cry knowing that I was one on television or I was being recorded and this would be played on at least some Palestinian Arab outlets. Also, while crying is a source of empathy, I also wanted to be respectful to the family and tried to be supportive rather than breaking down myself.
That just hit me at such a visceral level where it was so easy for me to, unfortunately, seeing this poor little girl who lost her father, my daughter, and to recognize that under different circumstances, my daughter could have been in that place. I could have been in that position where I was killed. That more than the physical destruction I saw, it’s awful to see burnt out buildings. It’s awful to hear the stories, but to have that physical contact with someone who was harmed, in this case indirectly, but particularly probably the most defenseless thing on the face of the earth, a two-and-a-half-year-old child, was overwhelming.
That scene is seared into my mind. I didn’t come new to this issue. I had been working on Israeli-Palestinian issues for a good 20 years before I entered the position. Some of the things that might surprise people in the West Bank didn’t surprise me just because I had seen them before. I found them objectionable, but there wasn’t that surprise element. Separate roads for Israelis and Palestinians, the checkpoints that existed, the clear disparity in living standards between Palestinians and Israelis from just a few meters away, all of that to first-time visitors, to people who’ve only been there a couple of times.
Psychologically, it just has a more powerful effect at first. You never lose that. You don’t become desensitized to it, but you anticipate it, and you expect it. In a certain way, expecting it, and when you recognize that you’re expecting it, is a different source of pain, a different source of emotional stress because you’ve come to realize that this is now the normal situation.
Rachel: Absolutely. I saw it, and I continue to see these devastating scenes. As you mentioned, one of these settlers that was sanctioned, which I’m going to get to in a little bit, murdered this Palestinian activist that I’m sure you met when in the West Bank. I met him as well. It’s heartbreaking, and it’s every day. I don’t know how to reconcile it with myself. Moving on to sanctions, because this is another avenue where you and I have passions, on settler violence. You worked on EO 14115. I always forget the numbers.
I think where people get this sanctions package or this executive order wrong is that they think it only targets Israelis when the language on it was written so clearly that it targets anyone causing instability and violence in the West Bank. Of course, the majority of the sanctions placed by OFAC were on settlers and settler organizations because those are the people that we can actually identify as having committed these acts. Meanwhile, Palestinian terrorists in the West Bank are often apprehended by the IDF already. There is a clear disparity here about Israel holding its own citizens and its own IDF soldiers in the West Bank accountable, versus the way that they hold Palestinians who commit violence.
Andrew: No, that’s exactly right. It was important to me that we applied it on both Israelis and Palestinians. There were fewer Palestinian candidates simply because they had been designated or otherwise imprisoned or killed in combat before, but we wanted to be clear that this was a tool that was not previously available that enabled us to affect the calculations of a group of individuals who were having a deeply destabilizing effect.
We also recognized that at the same time, settler violence was increasing, we were also seeing this increase in Palestinian terrorism that was not affiliated with the major terror groups. A lot of the attacks that were occurring, we could not trace back to Hamas, to Pidge, to other terrorist groups. It’s not that they opposed it. They may even have encouraged it in the way that ISIS encouraged actions against the United States and other Western interests. That’s not a new phenomenon. We saw that during the 9th Intifada.
We’ve seen it in a few other instances. Second Intifada, certainly, moving forward, it was more organized. It was these major organizations. Our sanctions were designed to go after Hamas, to go after Pidge. There were individuals we were able to identify. It still was a small number as compared to the number of Israeli settlers who had committed acts of violence. We didn’t want it to be tokenism. We theoretically could have sanctioned someone who had already been sanctioned under another authority.
As a general practice, we don’t do that because we think that sanctions are a tool. They’re not supposed to be merely a naming and shaming device. They’re supposed to affect the calculus of individuals. We weren’t willing to do that just to put a Palestinian on the list. As soon as we found someone who met the criteria, who had sufficient information, we made sure that person was included in a designation list.
Of course, it was one of those situations where certain members of Congress who were portraying the action as anti-Semitic as focused exclusively on Israelis asking why aren’t Palestinians being sanctioned. As soon as you sanction a Palestinian, they don’t really mean that. They’re just doing that to get us off their backs rather than it reflecting a legitimate intention on our part to apply the law equally. They aren’t going to give us the benefit of the doubt. We didn’t expect that, but it was the right thing to do either way.
Rachel: Meanwhile, if a Palestinian living in the West Bank was designated on this list, I wouldn’t believe that Israel wouldn’t have already put them into their arbitrary detention system.
Andrew: They were more likely– As a practical matter, the terrorists who are affiliated with Hamas, Pidge, were more likely to have international accounts and therefore to be affected directly by the sanctions. Whereas these individual Palestinian terrorists were more likely to be from impoverished families, they probably wouldn’t have bank accounts that were linked to the international banking system, so they wouldn’t necessarily have the same effect.
Whereas it depended on the Israelis, we saw with some of the settlers, they did have accounts with Israeli banks that had correspondent relationships with the US system. They weren’t directly affected. In other cases, they were from impoverished backgrounds themselves, and they didn’t have much funding, much money to their name, so they weren’t going to be affected financially. They would be affected if they tried to travel to the United States.
Rachel: On these sanctions, do you feel like they actually ended up being effective? Did OFAC actually put in the work to investigate to see if Israeli organizations or the Israeli government were violating these sanctions to provide financial support to these settlers who were sanctioned? Because some of them were cut off from these bank accounts, but there had to have been back channels for them to continue.
Andrew: There were back channels, and we did see Israelis use various crowdfunding sites to try to support them, and we responded. We saw that, and we would then designate these crowdfunding sites in response. There was an active monitoring of how and whether they were accessing bank accounts, what they were doing with it. OFAC did follow through on it. State Department did a lot of the initial groundwork in terms of identifying candidates for designation, building the evidentiary package, which we needed to put forward so that if the case were legally challenged, we would be able to explain why we did it and show that it was done on the basis of individualized evidence, not just a broad aspersion against settlers or a particular outpost.
We put in that effort, and we responded. What I heard from both Palestinians and from Israelis who supported the sanctions, just as a matter of policy, is while they were in place, they didn’t think they were effective. As soon as they were lifted, they said, “Oh, we are noticing a difference. They are becoming emboldened. They are becoming more aggressive again.” I guess they did have an impact. We didn’t know whether they would have the effect or not. It was a theory that we wanted to test, and we did test it.
Based on what I’ve heard most recently, they appear to have had some effect. Now, it’s hard because you can’t just look at the overall levels of violence, which were trending upwards anyway. Had it not been for the sanctions, even if it could have increased 10 times more, you just don’t know. Your best source of evidence often are the people who are following these individuals, seeing what they’re doing, trying to observe changes. These were folks who were willing before to say, “Even though we supported it, we don’t think this is working.”
They changed their perspective. Even some Israeli officials would say, “Look, one, you are going after people who deserve it. You did not designate a single individual who did not qualify according to the EO. Two, it is having an impact, but there are more important people.” When you hear that, I remember asking, “If you know who’s more important, tell us and we’ll do it.” Obviously, they weren’t going to do that. They weren’t authorized to do that, even if the individual wanted to share that information.
I think it’s clear it did have at least some type of an impact. It’s just unfortunate that it was wrapped up so quickly, and the entire policy was misrepresented by politicians and other people with various axes to grind in a way that was very insulting. As someone who’s Jewish, I do not like being called anti-Semitic. I heard that more than once from various non-Jewish Republican members of Congress, but that is the political environment in which we operate in DC.
Rachel: Absolutely. I’ve been seeing it myself. We know that the Israeli government reacted pretty harshly to these sanctions, said they were ridiculous. I’m wondering what you heard directly from them, if there was maybe a different response that you got through the non-public channels. Then some critics of the executive order have been critical that they didn’t go far enough, that states like the UK or Canada have sanctioned now Ben Gvir and Smotrich. Can you walk me through the decision not to sanction them?
Andrew: Sure. The Israeli reaction differed. The political establishment within Israel said privately what they were saying publicly. They were outraged. The only different argument they would make is, “This is actually counterproductive. If you think this is a problem, this is going to backfire,” which is not what they said publicly. They said it’s an outrage, these are innocent individuals. They were privately conceding that, yes, some of these guys were bad, but this is not going to help in solving the problem.
Then there were some professionals who were saying they’re supportive is too strong, but they recognized that they had value and they recognized the severity of the problem. I think had I asked them and had they been free to talk, would have said that they supported the measures that were being instituted. There was an appreciation from the Palestinian leadership and from average Palestinians in civil society who, up until that point, every time I met with was saying, “You say the right things, but you don’t do anything.” In this case, we did something.
Was it enough? No. It was not going to be sufficient to change the trajectory in and of itself. That was not going to resolve the underlying problem, but at least they saw that we were willing to take some steps to address it, and there was genuine appreciation. I think that increased their confidence in the Biden administration a little that they saw we were actually taking action and not just talking a good game, which is what they largely thought about the policy.
In terms of not going far enough, there are two dimensions. One is the executive order only applied to individuals who didn’t have American citizenship. We know from extensive research and reporting that some of the violent settlers are, in fact, Israeli-American. We were aware of that, and we would have preferred to include the Israeli-Americans on the list. Under our legal system, whether you agree or not, American citizens are accorded more rights than foreigners.
The assessment from our attorneys, the government attorneys, was that if we designated Americans, that would increase the likelihood it would be challenged in court. It would also increase the likelihood that they would be successful. It was safer discretion was a better part of valor to stay with Israelis and Palestinians who did not have American citizenship because they were less likely to challenge. Even if they did so, they did not enjoy the same protections under US law.
We recognized that due to that decision, the sanctions would not address a demographic within this movement that was problematic. We were thinking of ways to potentially address the problem of Israeli-Americans and to a lesser extent, Palestinian-Americans who were engaged in acts of terrorism, but we never got around to actually moving forward with anything there. The second question was, who do you go after? We limited ourselves to going after individuals who were not government officials.
Personally, I supported pursuing government officials if they met the criteria. I didn’t think that government officials should be immune from being listed simply because they held- a government position. That’s not to say that there were dozens of government officials who potentially qualified, but there were individuals like Smotrich, like Ben Gvir, who I’m fairly confident we would have met legal sufficiency. Had we moved through with designating them and had they challenged it in US court, we had sufficient evidence that it would have withstood the test of the judge.
For our lawyers, the standard is always risk-averse. We want to be nearly 100% confident that we’re going to win. I think we did get to that point with both Smotrich and Ben Gvir, as well as some other individuals who were affiliated with Smotrich and Ben Gvir. They didn’t hold office in their own right, but they were on their staffs or had some other affiliation. With Ben Gvir, it was easy in that he had already been convicted. When he was convicted by an Israeli court for acts of ethnically motivated violence against Palestinians, the Israeli legal system already acknowledged that this person committed the act that would be sanctionable.
With Smotrich, it required more work because while he had charges against him, they never were brought to fruition, but we eventually reached that point. With our counterparts in Europe and elsewhere, they were able to reach the same decision, and they did move forward. That is one of the limitations of the effectiveness of the sanctions regime. It had less to do with the design of the sanctions, but there’s no question that the presence of Smotrich and Ben Gvir in this Israeli coalition and their access to power, to resources expanded the reach and damage that violent settlers could cause.
It served a legitimation function where it sent a signal to more and more settlers that they could engage in that type of violence and they wouldn’t face consequences, either legally or in terms of the court of public opinion internationally, where the United States would call them out. It’s important that other countries move forward after the fact. I think it was particularly important that they did so after President Trump rescinded the order because at least it demonstrated that this general approach to violent extremism was not going to completely disappear with the Trump administration. If a new administration comes into power in the future, there’s at least a model to work from. Certainly, changes could be made to make it more effective.
Rachel: I want to pivot a little bit. It’s something that I don’t feel like enough people talk about. It’s not that Israel has seven fronts of its war now, not that it has hostile relations with almost everyone in the region, but that it is behind the scenes trying to grow its influence and mend maybe or grow new relationships with some of these countries. You are an expert on Israeli-Egyptian relations. I want to start with Egypt. They have the longest-standing peace agreement in the region, but it also looks like they have a growing friendly relationship.
Their agreements have always been hostile, even still, but it looks like now the Egyptian government is coming to terms with its peace with Israel, and it’s becoming a little friendlier. They’re piloting new trade agreements. Given your expertise, I’m wondering what you think Egypt’s role moving forward on the Palestine issue is, especially concerning this current war as Egypt used to control its own border, now it doesn’t. It seems like Egyptian society is also growing really upset with this current government’s stance, just letting Israel completely walk all over it, which has been the norm. I’m wondering where you feel Egypt’s role will move going forward.
Andrew: I think Egypt is the single most important external player in Gaza. Both Egypt and Qatar have played invaluable roles as mediators in negotiations over ceasefires, hostage exchanges, and continue to do so, but Egypt has a better understanding of the various actors in Gaza than the Qataris do. The Qataris have very close relations with the political apparatus of Hamas, which is important, but they’re not the most influential within the terrorist group now. It’s the armed actors. It’s those in Gaza. Egypt has more of an entree with them.
Not out of sympathy, quite the opposite. Egypt does view Hamas through the prism of its origins as a Muslim Brotherhood organization and has a hostility to it. Egypt, having operated Gaza for 19 years in between the 1948 war and the 1967 war, had that experience. Then because Egypt is the only country other than Israel with a border to Gaza, Egypt was able to get in and out and meet with officials. They became a choke point where the Israelis were cutting off Hamas. They were cutting off average Palestinians.
Egypt was the only way to get out, and that afforded Egypt leverage over what was taking place. If there’s going to be any success in persuading Hamas to meet some of the terms that are rightly expected, including demilitarization, forswearing any role in government, and the turning over of weapons, I think Egypt has a crucial role to play. Yes, military force is a factor in that. If Israel hadn’t dealt such severe damage to the apparatus as a military unit, Hamas may be less inclined to negotiate.
Egypt is in the position where they have leverage where they can squeeze Hamas. At the same time, Egypt has enough of a track record of working with Hamas that they might actually listen to the Egyptians. They have an important role to play in that regard. There’s no question that after Abdel Fattah Sisi took power in the 2013 coup and then became president in 2014, Egypt’s attitude towards Israel started to warm. It was different under Mubarak where in private there was a lot of cooperation, but he did not want to be too associated with the Israelis because of the Egyptian population’s hostility towards Israel.
Then, with Sisi, in part because his predecessors in the Muslim Brotherhood, who were and are his boogeymen were so close to the Palestinians, Sisi felt he had more freedom to deal with the Israelis publicly. He also believed that he could leverage the authentic nationalism that was present in Egypt at the time to differentiate Egyptians from Palestinians. The 2013 to 2017 or 2018 period really was a period of Egyptian nationalism, not Arab nationalism in Egypt. He was less circumscribed, although he still had concerns, and he proceeded carefully.
Since October 7th, however, we’ve seen a change in Sisi’s willingness to deal with the Israelis publicly. We’ve seen a cooler attitude. Yes, the Egyptians did reach an agreement on natural gas with the Israelis. That was a necessity. Egypt’s economy is on the brink of failure, and they had no choice but to do that. In all other areas, Egypt is being much more cautious about dealing with Israel. My concern is that, in particular, if Palestinians, the Palestinian population in Gaza is concentrated in and around Rafah, and they eventually break through into Egypt, which has happened before, Egypt will respond by suspending the peace treaty.
I don’t think Egypt wants to do that. Egypt values its relationship with Israel, but the level of hostility towards Israel within Egypt, within the Arab world more broadly, is acute. It really is at a fever pitch. When looking back at the Abraham Accords, I think it’s pretty clear that a number of people tried to extrapolate Arab attitudes from somewhat unique cases. There’s a reason that the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco cut those agreements and other countries didn’t. It’s because the dynamics within those countries were different.
In the UAE, you have, what, 200,000, 300,000 citizens. The vast majority of people who are there are not actually citizens, and most aren’t even Arab. They’re from other parts of the world. That gives the UAE government more flexibility to implement its policy. If you’re in Egypt and you’re dealing with a population of 100 million that is Arab, that does care about this issue, you don’t have the same flexibility. If that were to come to pass, if the treaty were suspended, that would actually be the antithesis of normalization.
Rather than Israel’s acceptance expanding regionally and globally, it would be contracting. I view the steps taken by the ICC in the same light, where regardless of what your views are on ICC jurisdiction or the nature of the charges, the mere fact that Israel is being prosecuted in the ICC and individual Israelis have to consider carefully, whether it’s safe to travel to certain countries in Europe, in Asia, where they had previously gone because they were concerned they could be arrested, indicates that the world of the average Israeli is shrinking, not growing. That’s one of the casualties of the war, that Israel’s acceptance has eroded. Maybe that bounces back when the war ends, but I don’t think it’s going to be immediate, and I don’t think it’s going to be entirely accomplished in a short period of time.
Rachel: You touched on it a little bit, the Abraham Accords, brokered by, of course, Trump 1.0, Jared Kushner, between Israel, the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco. The Biden administration really shied away from, especially using the term Abraham Accords. Even though it still was working towards normalization with Israel’s big fish, Saudi Arabia, which, of course, would give it massive legitimacy, as they are seen as the leader of the Sunni Muslim world. Was there a reason that the Biden admin shied away and scrapped the Abraham Accords? Did it just not align with the vision the administration had or the approach that you all wanted to take towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Did that evolve after October 7th?
Andrew: We started to use the term Abraham Accords more often in response to the negative reaction. The reason we were not using that term initially was misunderstood. The conclusion many made, not particularly Republicans, particularly those in Trump’s orbit, is that we didn’t want to acknowledge an accomplishment by the Trump administration, so we wanted to diminish it. While I think the significance of those agreements is substantially overstated in terms of the impact on the region as a whole and certainly Israel’s place within the broader world, it nevertheless was an accomplishment that was good for Israelis.
It could be good for those countries if the benefits are broadly shared, which is what we tried to work on with the Negev Forum. We didn’t use Abraham Accords as freely because other Arab countries that wanted to potentially normalize relations did not want to follow in the footsteps of UAE and Bahrain, partly because it had a negative connotation, but also out of just pettiness. The Moroccans didn’t sign the Abraham Accords because they weren’t going to play second fiddle to the UAE.
Morocco views itself as a much larger physically, but they view themselves as an ancient civilization unlike the Gulf shakedoms, and they didn’t want to be seen slowly trotting behind the Emiratis. The same would have been true of the Saudis. If the Saudis had normalized relations, I find it hard to believe they would have cast it in terms of the Abraham Accords because they wouldn’t play second fiddle to the UAE. Particularly given the tensions between MBS and MBZ, that’s not going to play out.
That was the reason that we favored normalization. The formulation we would often use is the Abraham Accords and other normalization agreements. The other normalization agreements that was Morocco and Israel, because Morocco explicitly said, “We do not want to be considered part of the Abraham Accords.” It wasn’t an opposition. In fact, a lot of effort was devoted to normalization. Before he became a deputy assistant secretary at DOD, Dan Shapiro, our former ambassador to Israel, was a senior advisor in the NEA front office with me, focused on normalization. Prior to that, my old boss, Yael Lempert, who was the ambassador to Jordan, and like Dan Shapiro, was a senior director at the NSC in the Obama administration, personally took on the assignment of trying to organize a Negev Forum, bring these countries together.
There actually wasn’t a hostility to it, and I think there was a desire to show that we could do more, but there was a current of thought that said, “Yes, it’s important, but this is not tantamount to Camp David. This is not the equivalent of Jordan and Israel. Arguably, it’s not even the equivalent of the Oslo Accords in that the UAE and Bahrain were never at war with Israel. Morocco was never at war with Israel.
You’re making peace in a legal sense, but there was never an actual state of war. Again, I’m not diminishing it. I think it was significant. It’s just we’re basically calling an apple an orange. That imprecision not only is a matter of concern because it’s less coherent, it was going to have an effect on our ability to expand it because other countries that wanted to potentially move along the same path didn’t want to do it the same way.
Rachel: Now, Trump 2.0, obviously, October 7th happened, so then any chance of normalization with Saudi Arabia during the Biden administration wasn’t going to happen. Still, it might not. It doesn’t look like it’s trending in a good direction. Trump 2.0 is begging on a stage in Riyadh for MBS to normalize with Israel. MBS nods along. Doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. I’m wondering if you see Abraham Accords moving along during Trump 2.0. I think that we’re living in a really specific context now. We have Israel in what can be argued as a really expansionist mindset.
It’s now occupied part of Southwest Syria, which the Saudis are incredibly invested in. They’re looking at annexation of the West Bank with the E1 settlement plan, which it looks like the Trump administration has greenlit to some extent. Do you think the Abraham Accords, one, even possible at this point, but would even be a sustainable piece if it really doesn’t address a long-term solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which was what critics had said all along, was that it wouldn’t be sustainable because it does not address this fundamental issue that is holding the region behind?
Andrew: I think the major weakness of the Abraham Accords is that it treated the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an anomaly, as an aberration from the other relations that would naturally exist between Israel and neighboring countries when, in actuality, it was the most acute manifestation of the same problem, which, in some instances, was a genuine concern about the ability of Palestinians to have their own state or neighboring countries to regain the land that they once possessed. In some instances, it was about whether Israel should be accepted, should be acknowledged as a state in the long term in the region.
That view does exist. Netanyahu’s not completely wrong. I don’t agree that it’s the majority or the dominant opinion among Palestinians or any other group. That current certainly exists at a certain level. The notion, though, that you could either bypass the Palestinians in order to achieve integration between Israel and the rest of the region, or even that by pursuing normalization with other countries, you could put the Palestinians in a place where they would have no choice but to make concessions because they’d be in a weaker position, I think, was fundamentally mistaken.
It ignores the reality that this is– I wrote an article about this back during the first Trump administration. I believe the title was something like Israeli-Palestinian Peace Is Not a Real Estate Deal. In a real estate negotiation, yes, if you’re boxed in and your competitor is buying all the territory, at some point, you just are going to sell at a lower price before it declines any further. You’re going to accept that and move on. You move on to the next transaction. When you’re talking about a nation, and the Palestinians do view themselves as a nation, all nationalities are socially constructed.
The only point that matters is Palestinians think that way. They think of themselves as a single people. They don’t have a backup plan. They don’t have a “Oh, let’s start again in another place.” There is no alternative. There is no “We lost this transaction, but we’ll get them on the next transaction.” If their homeland, or the parts of the territory that they view as their homeland, are essentially taken off the table or no longer available, there is nowhere else for them to go.
I think that was very, very difficult for President Trump and for the people around him to understand, because they assume, like many people in the private sector who’ve had no prior government experience, that government shouldn’t be any different from the private sector. They’re a bunch of idiots. They’re wasting money. They don’t know what they’re doing. We could do this much more efficiently. They don’t understand that efficiency isn’t always the most desirable outcome. Sometimes it’s fairness. Sometimes it’s ensuring that everyone gets part of the pie because you have an obligation as a government.
You don’t have limited liability corporations. You’re not going to see a boss say, “Okay, we’re going to declare the Palestinian Authority bankrupt, and we’re going to form a new national movement, and we’re going to establish a state in South Sudan where Israel’s apparently trying to displace Palestinians.
Rachel: Or France, where [unintelligible 00:56:45].
Andrew: [crosstalk] Or France, or it doesn’t matter where they’re considering. I think it just fails to understand the reality of the situation that even if the Palestinians were basically completely cornered, it’s not clear that they would concede. We have seen this before. This is not the first time in modern history where the Palestinians have found themselves with few regional partners, or at least prior to October 7th, where they were in that position. You saw that earlier, ’67, and then ’73, and the Egyptians, they felt they were constantly getting undercut.
They ultimately agreed to negotiate with Israel, to recognize Israel, and that was a concession, but they were advocating for that even before the losses took place. It’s not that the Palestinians are completely insensitive to costs. It’s simply that you’re not going to get them to abandon something that is fundamental to them any more than we would just say, “Okay, I’m an American today. Tomorrow, I’m fine with not being American.” No. There are some people who might say that, but there are many more who’ll say, “No, that’s my identity. I’m proud to be American, and I want to stay American, and I’m not going to let someone else tell me I can’t be an American.”
Rachel: This is something we’ve seen, particularly in what is the most tragic instance that we’re seeing now, which is in Gaza. We’ve seen horrific scenes, innocent men, women, children, dozens and dozens of journalists being slaughtered. There’s no end in sight. Every ceasefire deal doesn’t seem to materialize. You’ve talked a lot in other interviews about red lines and weapon shipments, but something that’s faded from memory is the Gaza pier.
We’ve seen really harrowing scenes and heard chilling testimony from Gaza humanitarian fund contractors about killing at aid sites, that they could be complicit in war crimes, but we haven’t talked a lot about the Gaza pier. It was only operational for around 20 days. I’m wondering, can you take us through what that pier was meant to do, and why it was ultimately dismantled, and what were the major challenges there?
Andrew: The pier was discussed as one of the Hail Mary options when we were struggling to get sufficient aid into Gaza, along with the airdrops. I would put both airdrops and the pier in the same category of well-intentioned, well-meaning gestures that were never going to deliver the results that we hoped they would achieve. The initial idea with the pier was that a company would build a pier and operate it, and it would remain there indefinitely. There simply weren’t companies that were capable of building such a pier. Some claimed they were, but they were companies that often had no prior history. They were being formed for this purpose, so there was no track record.
When we reached the conclusion that going with a commercial option was going to be too risky, we stumbled upon the JLOTS, this system that the US Navy operates and uses to deliver goods in expeditionary combat settings. The problem was the Navy only has one of them across the entire world. If there’s a crisis in any other part of the world where we want to deliver aid, it’s either staying in Gaza or it’s going somewhere else. We did not have a spare capacity, and we did not build one or build another for this purpose.
They’re extraordinarily expensive and require a lot of time and effort to operate. When we moved from the commercial to the military option, we knew at that time it wasn’t going to be permanent because we simply couldn’t justify keeping this vital asset tied down in Gaza indefinitely, in particular, knowing that the amount of aid that could be delivered was certainly more than dropping from the air, but still paled in comparison to what could be delivered through the borders. The discussion was a little frustrating where I think there were differences of opinion within the administration.
Again, not over whether we should try to do more, but whether that was something more we should be doing. It was particularly apparent to us that the plan, when the pier was not operational due to weather conditions or anything else, was that we would just send the items through Ashdod in Israel, which is just 10 or 15 kilometers north. We said, “Why don’t we just send everything through Ashdod?” Ashdod is a port. It’s established. You can have customs there. They already have most of the equipment they needed. We were essentially building something that already existed. We were doing something redundant.
Ashdod was capable of handling more daily shipments than the pier was. Yes, it would require putting it in trucks and then driving it into Gaza, but it’s not that far away from the Gaza border and could have entered. Israel had complete control over the area around Israeli territory. There was some concern with the pier that Hamas could target it, or there could be Palestinians who rushed the facility, not out of malintent, but because they’re so desperate they need to get food. I don’t think we ever had complete confidence we would be able to do that.
More than anything, the problem we encountered was– We didn’t know this at the time, the JLOTS had never been installed in open water before. It had always been installed in harbors. The movement of the waves in open water is much more stark, is much greater than it is in a harbor where the water is protected. There were times where the waves moved the pier so violently that it broke, and it had to be put together. There was even an instance where one individual was injured on the pier and later died from their injuries, an American service member. It was not an ideal operating platform.
This is one of the classic ideas where you hear it, and in theory, it sounds great, and the more you look at it, you see the problems. There was something like only a handful, literally a handful, of people in the entire world who were commissioned to drive the trucks on this pier because it moved, which is not easy to do. There were so many limitations on it where it became, in effect, like the air drops, where yes, we could do it, yes, we would add to the amount of aid that was coming in, but it was never going to be efficient. It was never going to be reliable. It was never going to be a substitute for the land routes.
Once the full extent of the problems became apparent, there was a desire to just pivot back towards “Let’s get the land routes open.” That’s ultimately what the solution is. Not everyone was there. There were still people who were committed to the pier, in part because President Biden announced it at the State of the Union. Ultimately, that was a policy decision that I think would have come out differently had we had full knowledge of that apparatus at the time. This was something that 99% of the people who were working on it had never heard of before.
Rachel: I completely agree. The land routes do need to be the way, but we’ve seen scenes of the UN Food Aid sitting there. The land routes aren’t open, and Palestinians are forced to use GHF. We know that it’s a little shoddy. It’s not necessarily built. Contractors are putting in this one contractor who’s come out and been public about what he saw. He says that, really, the client isn’t the US government. It’s the Israelis. The Israelis are running the scene over there. That’s incredibly concerning, especially considering they won’t open the land routes and allow the UN Food Aid to come in. Of course, with land routes needing to be open, there also needs to be a genuine movement towards a ceasefire.
It seems like a ceasefire agreement is announced every other week. One party publicly announces, “We’ve accepted a ceasefire.” The other party doesn’t say anything, and it just gets dropped, and we see one happen every other week. I’m wondering what you think the path forward is for the US government. What steps does the Trump admin have to actually take to get Israel and Hamas to agree to any kind of ceasefire? Then also, Trump said that he was going to get a ceasefire within a month of coming into office. That obviously hasn’t happened. Do you think Trump hasn’t been able to get control of this situation because of a lack of capacity or true inability, or is it really just a lack of trying?
Andrew: On the humanitarian aid delivery, I would just say that obviously, a ceasefire and end to the war would create optimal circumstances for aid delivery. That was the goal all along. I don’t accept the proposition that we couldn’t make the delivery system work better even while the war was continuing. There were three ingredients that were lacking, but I think we could have found a way to achieve. One of them was this problem we’ve seen of looting, where the trucks are being picked clean before they reach their destination. That is, in effect, like a run in the bank.
Starving people, not knowing when food is going to come next, when they see it, they’re going to take as much as they can. The solution to that is more trucks, is to send in and have a reliable supply. The second problem was de-confliction with the Israelis, where the movement of the trucks would be hit by Israeli fire, whether it was from the air or more often from soldiers on the ground. We should have been able to do better on that score. My belief all along was that we needed to have a direct line of communication with Southern Command in the IDF.
We worked through COGAT, which was well-intentioned, but they’re not the ones who make operational decisions. COGAT cannot instruct battalions or units to hold fire or to do anything for that matter. That’s Southern Command. We were essentially using an intermediary, which slowed down the process. Even if COGAT got everything right, you were going to have a slower process in de-conflicting. We should have been able to get there. We should have insisted on having that connection, and we just didn’t. We occasionally made the pitch, but we lost focus on it.
The third was security within Gaza itself. The problem was less Hamas, although Hamas was a problem. It was local warlords, clan leaders, who were trying to profit off of the situation. The basic challenge was, who is going to provide security? The Israelis aren’t going to do it and shouldn’t do it because they’re going to be a source of friction and create more problems. They understandably didn’t want to do that. We didn’t have an international force coming in. There were Hamas police who were willing to do it. Our assessment was that Hamas police, like police in any authoritarian state, are different depending on who the individuals are.
Not everyone is a committed ideologue. Just like in Iraq, as we saw, not everyone within an Iraqi school was truly a Ba’athist. Everyone was registered as a Ba’athist because you needed to in order to get the job. That didn’t mean they actually believed it. Even the Israelis would admit that privately. They wouldn’t say it publicly. There was an opportunity where, I think, particularly earlier in the conflict, before Hamas started looting some of the trucks. By the way, it was almost always non-UN trucks. UN trucks tended to be respected. Hamas didn’t touch them.
There was an earlier point in time where, if the Hamas police were just allowed to do their job, we could have delivered it more effectively. That’s partly why, when I wrote a piece with Phil Gordon in Foreign Policy criticizing the Trump administration’s approach, we acknowledged we didn’t do enough. Yes, it’s true that maybe no aid would have gotten through without the efforts of the Biden administration, but there still was much more we could have done and should have done. With the Trump administration and trying to reach an end of conflict, there’s always a matter of competency at play, and you can’t dismiss that.
Ultimately, I think it’s a matter of will. Trump is actually in a stronger position than Biden to do what’s necessary to get a ceasefire because Biden, by taking any action that was perceived as applying pressure on Israel, would immediately and automatically incur the wrath of Republicans in Congress who controlled the Senate, or a large number of Senate seats, and controlled the House. With President Trump, he has effectively neutralized his own party for the sake of it.
The mere fact that members of the Trump administration met with Hamas and they’re still serving in government is a good indication that Trump can handle the domestic political pressure better than any US president prior to him on this specific issue because of both his past actions that were viewed as pro-Israel and because of his degree of control, almost absolute power within the Republican Party. Had I met with Hamas for the same purposes, to get an American out, I probably would have been tarred and feathered on the national wall.
If they thought there was an opportunity to get Americans out and that required meeting with Hamas, they were right doing it. I also know that the reaction would have been different from Republicans had I, as a Democrat, been the one to do that. We just have not seen the follow-up from Trump. We’ve seen this time and again. It’s not just Gaza. It’s also Ukraine. We’ve also seen it in terms of his efforts in Syria, in Lebanon. Anytime he becomes involved in international conflict, there will be a moment, a peak, where he’ll get involved, and it will look like things are happening, then he takes his eye off the ball and everything goes, because he can’t sustain that attention.
It’s a lack of willpower. It’s also a constitutional inability to have the discipline to follow through on this. If Trump really wanted to, he could apply the necessary pressure on Netanyahu to make concessions, to at the very least get to another partial ceasefire or temporary ceasefire, and probably get to a permanent ceasefire. My belief all along was that if the United States demonstrated it was willing to put pressure on Israel to get a ceasefire, our Arab partners would be in a much, much stronger position to apply pressure on Hamas without having the fear for their own publics.
I do think that not only did Trump have an opportunity to bring this conflict to an end quickly, maybe not in a month, but certainly within a few months, he should have been able to do it. It’s a failure. This isn’t just a roll of the dice, and things didn’t work out the wrong way. He handled the negotiations in a systematically, wrong way. We saw what he could do in January before he was president. President Biden played an important role in getting that ceasefire. The Biden administration as a whole did, but it required Trump saying, “Yes, I’m behind this. You better not screw around because I do not want this conflict going on when I get inaugurated.”
He got inaugurated, and then suddenly you’ve just seen these moments where, “Oh, Palestinian children are dying. This is awful. We should do something about it. Listen, don’t worry, we’ll handle it.” They haven’t handled it. He’s just ill-suited for the position. He’s not temperamentally suited for the position. He, for whatever reason, is not prepared to apply the pressure that’s required, even though he can afford to do it at a lower cost than anyone else.
Rachel: I actually think his domestic appeal is slipping a little bit with some– We’ve seen Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, which it’s comical almost, this massive horseshoe effect. I want to end the episode with this final question. Given your experience at the State Department, and I’m sure it’s an issue that people have told you, “You’re never going to solve this issue, no one’s ever going to solve this conflict,” what do you think the State Department consistently overlooks when approaching the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
Andrew: The one thing that not just the State Department, but the US government as a whole has overlooked over the last 16, 17 years is Netanyahu’s true nature. Now, I don’t believe that Netanyahu is the full extent of the explanation for why we are where we are today. It’s entirely fair to point out the outrageous views that are articulated by other Israelis, and the fact that you have opposition members within the Knesset who, privately, are prepared to talk about a Palestinian state, but won’t say anything publicly. That’s a problem.
That shows that even if Netanyahu weren’t in power, you wouldn’t have a smooth pathway. You wouldn’t necessarily have progress. You had the Obama administration, you had the Trump administration in the first term, and then the Biden administration, Trump’s second term, all enter office believing that Netanyahu was someone you could deal with, that he was ultimately just an opportunist, he was a politician, and if you align the incentives, you could get him to do what was necessary to get the peace. That fundamentally misunderstands Netanyahu, in my mind.
He is a brilliant politician. He is opportunistic. That is part of how he operates. To assume that he doesn’t have his own ideological convictions is a good demonstration that you haven’t read anything about his past or know anything about his father and his views on the– Netanyahu truly believes peace through strength, that the Palestinian people aren’t really a people. While he is more sophisticated, while he’s smoother in articulating these positions than a Smotrich or Ben-Gvir would be, his views are closer to them than they are to most American politicians.
Democrats and Republicans labored under an illusion and squandered years where a different approach would have been costly. It would have entailed conflict with Netanyahu, who is capable of exacting a price in Washington more than any other Israeli prime minister, but was ultimately necessary to establish a new trajectory that could lead in a better direction. Now, we are where we are. We have the president, we do. We have the leaders we do. Obviously, Hamas also is responsible for where we are, particularly post-October 7th, but even before their efforts to sabotage the peace process during the 1990s played a major role in the failure to reach an agreement at that time.
The PA has hardly been exemplary in all respects. There are other factors that explain what happens. That is part of the challenge at the moment in that you don’t have leadership in the United States, in Israel, or in Ramallah that is capable of moving towards an agreement. Now, in Abbas’s case, I think he genuinely does want peace. While I’m offended by remarks he’s made about the Holocaust and frustrated with his authoritarianism and how he treats other Palestinians and his inability to condemn violence quickly enough, he has consistently supported peace for 50 years. He was one of the first members of Fatah to support a two-state solution.
His problem is, he does not have the legitimacy. He cannot carry the Palestinian people towards peace. Until you have different leaders, I think, in all three countries, it’s going to be hard to make progress towards any outcome, whether that is a two-state solution, whether that’s some type of confederation. I’m very skeptical about how a single state would work because there’s a danger that either it would be a single state where the Palestinians are second-class citizens, or you could have a state where it’s equal rights, but the populations are at each other’s necks like they were during the 1920s and 1930s.
It’s not especially auspicious. I always think there is hope to move forward. In my personal experience, in both work and life, things are never actually over until you stop trying. It’s incumbent on the United States to continue trying because for everything that has changed in the world, for everything that’s changed in the United States, in Israel, in the Palestinian territories, the United States still has to be part of the answer. We may not be enough alone. We may need the help of our allies to a greater extent than we would have 30 or 40 years ago, but we are a key part of that final equation, and we can help to lay that path.
Particularly because of our relationship with Israel, we can instill a degree of confidence in the Israeli public that we are going to support them, we are going to protect them if things go wrong, but we need you to try. We need you to take risks for peace. We know it’s not easy, but we’ll do whatever we can to help to mitigate them. That is the best way forward still. It’s just very difficult to see at this moment in time. When there is a change configuration, then we’re going to have to take a fresh look at it. It could result in a different policy.
We may discover that two fully independent states are impossible, that you need essentially a Confederation or a Swiss model or something, or you need to look at this conflict in a fundamentally different way so that you can both fulfill the Israeli people, the Jewish people’s aspirations, and the Palestinian people’s aspirations, so that you can have equal rights in some shape or form or another, whether it’s in different entities or the same entity. We’re going to need to challenge some of those sacred cows moving forward. Unfortunately, until we see the change in leadership, the best we can hope for is that the damage is limited.
Rachel: Andrew, thank you so much for coming on. Your insights are invaluable. As always, and I agree, we do need to continue trying, no matter what.
Andrew: Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure.
Rachel: Thank you all for listening today. If you liked this episode, remember to subscribe to New Lines on SoundCloud, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Visit www.newlinesinstitute.org if you’d like to hear more from our experts on all sorts of topics in global affairs. We’ll see you in the next episode.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not an official policy or position of New Lines Institute.
