Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is deep background to show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. This May, the Israel Palestine conflict erupted into the most serious violence that we've seen in some years. Over the course of several weeks, Hamas and the Israeli Army traded rocket fire and missile fire, while simultaneously, and for the first time in many years, riots broke out between Israeli Jews and Israeli Palestinian Arabs within Israel itself. By the time a ceasefire was declared, more than three hundred people had died, most of them Palestinian. The issues behind this conflict are complex, and in particular, it's important to notice and to try to understand why this particular round of violence spilled over into conflict between Israelis and Palestinians within Israel, including within mixed cities within the country that have historically been very peaceful and have been treated by some observers as models of coexistence. These issues are complex and political, but they're also legal. Since one of the catalysts of this outbreak of violence was a property conflict in a neighborhood of Jerusalem called Czech Jarrah. Getting inside these complicated issues is never easy. But today, in order to take a first crack at some of them, I'm happy to introduce you to a special guest. You may not have heard his name before, but I am looking forward to introducing you to him. Rabbia Albaria is a Palestinian Israeli who's currently a doctoral student at the Harvard Law School. He is quite simply one of the most brilliant students I've ever taught in twenty years as a law professor. Before coming to Harvard, he was a civil rights attorney with Adalla, the Legal Center for our minority rights in Israel. In that capacity, he argued important cases before the Israeli Supreme Court, and he's also published fascinating and path breaking scholarship about the experience of Palestinians living in Israel as citizens. As you'll shortly hear, Robbia has a distinctive voice and a distinctive perspective, both personally and analytically on the conflict, and I'm very pleased that he was able to join us here on deep background. Rabia, thank you so much for joining me before we dive into our substance. I just want to begin by asking you how your family back home in Haifa are doing. Is everybody okay? Thank you for having me. No, I am doing fine. I've been going through all the recent events watching from the US. But my families in Haifa and they are currently fine, but it has been really hard times. Did they see or directly experience any of the violence that took place. My sister actually lives a nearer neighborhood called the German Colony in Haifa, and there has been a lot of Jewish supremacist moths that were roaming the streets, and so they were hearing the moths from their house while they were basically locked in their house for about two days. And in your memory and your living memory, has anything like this happened in Haifa before. It's a city that's often held up as a model of mutual tolerance between Palestinian citizens of Israel and Jewish citizens of Israel. Well, not in my lifetime that I remember. I'm obviously I want to say that I'm critical of this term of coexistence that is used many times to portray Haifa, and we can delve into that, but this eruption of violence to this extent, both by private actors, by mobs and by state sanctions, violence is something unprecedented. Let's take a step back and define terms for listeners who engage the question of Israel and Palestine. Let's say episodically, you know, in the moments when the media engages it. So let's start with just definitions. There are Palestinians who identify as Palestinians, are ethnically Palestine or nationally Palestinians, but are simultaneously citizens of the State of Israel. And then there are Palestinians who live in the West Bank and in Gaza who are Palestinians but are not citizens of Israel. And then there are even more Palestinians who live outside of those places, who are legally identified as refugees, who are also not citizens of Israel. What are roughly ballpark the numbers order of magnitude of each these groups, to remind to remind people roughly how many citizens of Israel identify as Palestinian. Okay, So, actually this is a great question. I usually when I try to explain, you know, what is the situation, I use the metaphor of a hand five parts, and there is five different groups of Palestinians. Basically, as you mentioned, there's Palestinian citizens of Israel, which are amount to about twenty percent more or less of the Israeli population. Of the Israeli people who have citizenship. In numbers, we're talking about somewhere between one point eight million to two million, depends how you count. Because there is the second category of residents, which applies only to East Jerusalem Palestinians, and it's a different legal status, very similar to citizenship, but with a lot of reservations. For example, people with residency cannot vote, and the residency can be revoked and effectively people will be banned from living in East Jerusalem. There's palestins in the West Bank, and there is Palestinians in Gaza Strip, which is categories three and four, and the fifth and last categories, as you mentioned, is refugees. Now, as for numbers research, it's been consistently shown that since the nineties, there's been an increase actually of Palestinians that identifies Palestinians despite having Israeli citizenship, and we're talking about roughly sixty percent of the population that clearly uses the term Palestinian in their identity. Sixty percent of which population the Palestinians citizens of Israel. I say so by implication, that means there are say forty percent of people who are ethnically or nationally Palestinian are citizens of Israel, but don't use the term Palestinian to describe themselves, right, what terms would they use to describe themselves? So there is actually a variety of terms here that are at play. You know, many people are familiar with the term Arab Israelis, and I think it's it's important to discuss this and put it on the table. It's actually a term. There was an official term used by Israel to to describe the Palestinian or Arab Palestinian minority with citizenship inside Israel. But it's been a little bit deceiving because it's a official terminology that was imposed on many Palestinians after the establishment of Israel. Now people might use a variety of other terms. It doesn't necessarily have to be either Palestinian or Arab Israelis. Some people say, for example, they are forty eight Palestinians or forty eight Arabs, which is a term translated from Arabic. Actually to refer to people who stayed in the land of nineteen forty eight after the establishment of Israel after the Nakada, which is a term referring to the Palestinian catastrophe. Literally, it means catastrophe by the establishment of the state of Israel in nineteen forty eight. Now, other terms can be simply an Arab. Many people refer to themselves as Arabs. In the Israeli discourse. Arabs are distinguished somewhat from Estinians. This is an important distinction because I think the Arab is sometimes invoked to erase the Palestinian identity or or marginalize the Palestinian identity. So some people may refer to themselves as Arabs, which is the wider category. Others may emphasize the Arab Israeli. Some would say only Palestinians, some would say Palestinian citizens of Israel, so it varies. Now. The reason I'm asking about these terminological issues is that they have a deep significance, and that team significance is especially noteworthy now because they go to the question of the relationship in mind and in identity between Palestinian citizens of Israel and the rest of the Palestinian population and Palestinian citizens of Israel and the State of Israel. They raise the question of what are the political identifications, the national identifications, and the political loyalty of Palestinian citizens of Israel, which are necessarily complicated, and in Israel there is an ongoing discourse in which some Jewish Israelis insist that Palestinian Israeli citizens are full equal citizens of the State of Israel and should be treated as such, and other Jewish Israelis insist to the contrary, that Palestinian citizens of Israel are necessarily subject to dual loyalties are not fully therefore loyal citizens of the State of Israel, and that's used often as a justification for, for example, refusing to include Arab parties in Israel in the coalition that becomes the ruling coalition of government, or other even more formalized practices of treating Palestinian Israelis as though they're not full citizens of the state. This is incredibly complicated, obviously, but say a word about how you think of Palestinian Israeli identity and citizenship, maybe just speaking yourself, since as you say, it's hard to make statistical analysis of what most people think. Yeah, that's a great question, and obviously it's it's it's multifaceted, right, So I think that generally speaking, and I'm obviously speaking myself, I personally identify as a Palestinian or a Palestinian citizen of Israel, depending on context. I think that the status of Palestina Israel is really complex, but at the same time it can be summarized as very clearly as a subclass. So it's it's a second tier citizenship, and it manifests really in almost every aspect of life in Israel. It's important to understand that most Palestinian citizens of Israel live in separate localities. There are few what's called mixed cities in which Palestinians and Jewish communities live side by side, for example in Haifa, where I come from. But most Palestinative in segregated towns or in separate localities, and they suffer from There is a clear infrastructure problem, There's a clear discrimination in allocation of resources. There is a clear poverty problem. More than fifty percent of Palestinus are considered below poverty line. There is a huge problem with crime that is now proliferating among Palestinian society in Israel. And on top of all that or could be as understood as a result of institutional policies that discriminate against Palestinians and that subjugate them to an inferior status enshrined also by law. I mean, the recent developments from research years we've been seeing is, for example, the enactment of a constitutional amendment the nation state law that quite simply or straightforwardly define the state of Israel or inshrine's claims and identity of constitutional status without even reaffirming it purported democratic character. And so there is a clear institutionalization that manifests in different aspects of life, from allocation of free sources to discrimination in housing that affects Palestinian lives in the every day. Tell me a little bit about how you've experienced that and seen that, because I mean, one of the fascinating things from the American standpoint about your education is that you have two degrees from top Israel University. Is a first degree of University of Haifa than a degree in law from the University of Tel Aviv, which is often said to be the fancist law faculty in Israel. Your professors loved you. I know that because I read their recommendations when you applied to be a student at Harvard Law School. You did your master's degree at Harvard Law School. Now you're a doctoral student there, and in between finishing law school in Israel and coming to the US to continue studying, you're a human rights lawyer for Adalla, one of the leading human rights organizations working on Palestinian rights. You argued cases in front of the Israeli Supreme Court. Obviously all this was in Hebrew. So you've been deeply in matched in a series of institutions within Israel, probably through a good part of your life. How has your identity been shaped and developed by that kind of interaction in pretty elite Israeli circles. Well, that's that's an interesting question because I think, and you know, I tried to reflect on these questions and some of my writings. I for example, wrote about legal education in Israeli law schools and being a Palestinian in that system. And it's a highly, highly complex situation because many Palestinians are coming to these Israeli elite circles or institutions and experienced a deep sense of alienation going through these experiences, we're using a language that is not ours. I was born and raised, you know, speaking Arabic, and I went to school in Arabic until I reach university, which is the trual path for any Palestinian defending Israel. Now, perhaps you know, I grew up in Haifa, which, as I said, is one of the mixed cities, so perhaps you're exposed a little bit more to Hebrew as a language, or and you acquire certain exposure that is limited otherwise in other localities. But yes, I think it's a highly contradictory situation where you go through institutions and you use a language that is not yours, and there is a language actually that many times you're experiencing it as as an oppressing language. And I'm emphasizing the idea of a language. But I think because I think it's really immedium through which you realize your subjectivity in the content of conversation and the terms in which the discourse is shaped. You know, when you go as a Palestinian student to an Israeli law school, one of the fancy and also sometimes described as a liberal law school, there is still a very clear limits to the discourse about how to talk about Palestinian experiences and how to understand how the law works, and then we give us aecond great example. Yes, absolutely so. For example, I love to give that very quickly about law school. For example, you know, property classes. When we talk about property classes, we analyze the doctrines and confiscations, but we never touch upon how crucial this doctrine has been to Palestinian lives. You know, Palestinians and israel have suffered mass expropriation of their property, of their land during the fifties, sixties and seventies. They were basically reproduced from an agricultural dependent class into a low skilled, unskilled labor in the Israeli market force during these years. And this has ramifications that are very clear until and striking until this day. And so everything in the class when as a Palestinian approaches law school is decontextualized many times. Other times, we never, for example, touch upon the fact it's a discourse that is very present in America, for example, massive carceration and the carceral state, and trying to understand the law enforcement apparatus, how it interacts with minority groups or with racial violence, and these kind of topics are never talked about, and these really law schools, and so this lens of looking at the law in context is very much absent many times from law schools. I would add, by the way, that I think a lot of students in American law schools would tell you that until the last decade, a lot of those topics were slighted in most of American legal education too, with respect to raise in the United States and particularly the history of white supremacy in the United States. But that that doesn't make it any better. I'm just noting that that that's the case. So with that very helpful context, I want to turn now to really the reason that I wanted to have you on the podcast, and that is to hear more about your view about why this particular iteration of violence between Israel and Gaza, which started in certain ways that were very familiar going back at least a couple of decades and in some ways longer so. Violence in and around Jerusalem, unrest at Alaxa, the Temple Mount site, rockets fired from Gaza Bahamas into Israel, retaliation from the Israeli side with air attacks in which lots of people die, including lots of civilians. This is a script that we've seen multiple times before. What seems most distinctive this time is the violence perpetrated in some instances by Jewish Israelis against Palasinian Israelis, in some instances by Palasinian Israelis against Jewish Israelis in a number of different cities and places around the country, including cities that you're describing as mixed cities. So the first question I want to ask is, and it's a really hard one, why this time? Why is this happening? In your view? Now, that's an important question. I think the for understanding it, we need to zoom out a little bit and understand what led to these escalations. And I think the immediate point of departure would be good. So let's let's talk about that. So that's Chechter has a neighborhood of Jerusalem in which there's been an ongoing controversy with lots of twists and turns, most recently involving a controversy that's headed for the Israeli Supreme Court. In fact, it's before the Israeli Supreme Court now, involving a number of houses. Do you want to give us the legal background? No, one, no one better for then you to explain the legal backgrounds since as as a human rights layer you've worked on these kinds of cases. Yeah, so I think I think the most important to put it simply, what's happening there is that there is families, Palestinian families living in this is Jerusalem neighborhood that are now being brought to court by Jewish settler organizations. And the idea is that these these families who were resettled, part of them were resettled there in the fifties before Israel even occupied, and they were resettled because they were refugees from internally displaced from Haifa, from other places. And now these settler groups or settler organizations are trying to claim this property by using a hook claiming that this property belonged to Jewish people before nineteen for eight, before the establishment of the state of Visions. So there is a complex actually legal situation. But what's important to understand is that this system works with two different rules applying to do different people. Palestinians cannot try to claim property that was Palestinians before nineteen forty eight. This path is only allowed for particularly in East Jerusalem. For Jewish that is usually even not the particular families of the Jewish people who lived in the houses, but Jewish settler and geo's or groups. And so what we're seeing here is illegal. To pause, Yeah, just to pause to clarify the legal battle for people who aren't you know, inside the inside the details of this as I understand it, the position of the settler groups is that these houses were lived in by Jews before nineteen forty eight, when there was neither an Israel nor a Palestine. There was a UN mandate administered by by Britain that that in nineteen forty eight this territory ended up after Israel declared independence and ended up in a war with a number of its neighbors, including Jordan, ended up under Jordanian control between nineteen forty eight and nineteen sixty seven. Am I right? Am I just correct me if I go wrong. I mean, and that during that period of time, no Jews were permitted to or chose to stay within what had become Jordan. And at that moment Palestinians who were internally displaced from other places within what had become Israel were resettled in these homes. They've been there since, and in nineteen sixty seven Israel conquered this territory back. It's subsequently annexed the territory, although it's annexation is not recognized by the international community, but it is recognized by the Israeli courts. And so in principle, under Israeli law, these homes are supposed to revert to whom Are they supposed to revert to the original owners? Are they're supposed to revert to the government. Somehow they were supposed to revert to somebody, which has led to a claim on them being made by these Jewish organizations. Yes, but these legal baties have been actually happening since the seventies in Sarah and elsewhere in Jerusalem, and we're seeing that there is on one hand, while the court allows bringing these cases when and these claims by Jewish groups, it does not allow any claims by Palestinians to reclaim their property before nineteen forty eight. And this is hugely problematic because these people, part of the Czech families, were resettled there by the un by the UNWA in conduction with the Jordanian government that was back then in the fifties. That neighbor and UNROWA is the United Nations especially designated institution that essentially only deals with Palestinian refugees. I mean that's basically its job. And it has existed since forty eight and still exists, yes, and so I really think that the words of the families themselves are put this very strongly, you know, they say you settled us even here. This has become a Palestinian neighborhood for generations now, I mean it was Palestinian in part as well before ninety four eight. There is no dispute that some Jews lived there, right, but the dispute becomes also more problematic when these not the exact people are claiming their their property. But under some legal constructions, it's enabled for settler, you know, organizations to advance a political agenda. And many people have seen the viral video of Jacob from the US, the settler who is now living in Czech saying, you know to the family, well, I'm not stealing your home. If I don't steal it, somebody else will. And this is part of the problem. There is people who are coming, you know, Jewish settlers coming from the US part of them and settling in this neighborhood with no ties whatsoever to the particular people who are living them, and they're destroying communities and forcing evictions and etc. Et cetera un Palestinian communities. We'll be back in a moment. So the chech Jar conflict was the catalyst here to drive this latest cycle of escalation. That seems clear. How does it relate in your view to the Again this underlying question of why this violence in both directions in mixed cities, because as you point out, there's been struggle in zech Jarrah for a while, and also there have been other instances in which there was you know, rockets fired from God Israeli aircraft firing missiles, as well as in in the more distant past, Israeli troops in Gaza. So we've seen this kind of military escalation before, but without the corresponding violence within Israeli mixed cities. So I think momentum is a huge part of it, and also timing. We should understand this came against the background of Ramadan, one of the holiest months in Islam for many people who are practicing their fasting and end with aid fu so and this evictions or forced evictions from Ze came against this background and as well as that escalated to raids into Al Aksamosk to one of the holiest sites in Islam, and this sparked a lot of tensions, a lot of protests, and the protests that spread across many different Palestinian communities in Israel. First before Gaza came into the the picture where started what started as actually peaceful protests where brutally suppressed by the police. I know many of my friends who protested actually in Haifa were arrested, detained, eventually some of them released. But what started as peaceful protests soon became the police crackdown on these protests, escalating the situation even more when Jewish vigilante groups started joining this picture and killed in led. The first incidents that led really to the further escalation in violence was a settler killed in art settler Jewish settler killed and led a Palestinian citizen and was later released by the court. He was suspected in killing but then later released by the court after a lot of political pressure as well. In the background, and so this is the released on the released on the theory that he had acted in self defense. Right, And there's are, if I'm not mistaken, that's the episode of which there's a video which also has been widely widely shared on the internet, Yes, which showed actually that he's shooting from far away. But I think that this situation where Musa Hassuni, the person the Palestine from let who was killed by the subtler. The next day, we see the eruption of violence even more. We see that police is cracking down on the funeral of this person, leading to even more tensions and etcetera, etcetera, and then it spread to many different localities. Obviously there has been also Palestinian violence, but I think we should understand here the forces at play. While Jewish vigilante groups we're roaming the streets, coming organizing on WhatsApp, telegram, etc. And going to Palestinian neighborhoods, there were actually no similar instances where groups were organizing Palestinian groups organizing to go to Jewish neighborhoods to attack them. Yes, there has been obviously Palestinian violence that as I understand, it's reacted to the attacks by mobs and as well as by the police. There has been I think the police has been doning these attacks while doing absolutely almost effectively nothing to prevent these attacts. And this is I think, what what is distinctive about this moment as well. We are seeing both private and state actors working on violence that is manifesting against Palestinian communities in Israel in an unprecedented way. Two thoughts on that analysis. The first is, you know, no doubt lots of Jewish Israelis would say that, you know, would say effectively, while the violence started on the Palestinian side, and no doubt, you know, most Palestinian Israelis and other Palestinians would have the view that the violence started on the Israeli side. This is characteristic to outsiders trying to watch the conflict. Right each side says, well, you have to understand the context, and each side says the other side started it, either globally or locally in a particular circumstance. And so one the challenges to outsiders is to try to understand the deep structures that are driving the cycle of violence, quite apart from the particularized incidents. A second point which you make, which I think is very it is significant to keep in mind, is that Israel has the state on its side, right, I mean certainly within Israel, it has the government digital on its side, and then with respect to Gaza, it has a full blown powerful military, whereas a Hamas does not have anything of the kind. It has a handful of rockets available at its disposal. So that I think is important context. Without a doubt, what I'm trying to get a hold on, and you know, because I don't know the answer to it, is whether over the longer run, say, over the last couple of decades, Israeli Palestinians have started to feel differently about their relationship to the state, about their relationship to other Palestinians, about the treatment that they're encountering than they have in the past, So that there's some structural cause, as it were, of the protests, for example, that you describe, which started peacefully and then you and then met resistance and so forth, or whether it really is a product of, in a more in coate way, of just building tensions and in the story that you've been describing, it is more a story of this happened, and then this happened, and this happened. I agree with that analysis. I get that that's what happened, But I'm trying to figure out. I'm puzzling over whether there is in fact a structural change in the self consciousness of Palestinian Israelis either they're identifying more with other Palestinians or less with the State of Israel, or that their identification hasn't changed but they felt more desperate, or alternatively, that they feel more secure within the State of Israel and therefore felt safer initiating protests and then were then surprised by the vigilante violence in the other direction, as well as the police response. I mean, these are all possible hypotheses. I don't have a view as to which of them is correct, if any, but I wonder if any of those ideas or similar ideas makes sense to you. That an interesting question, and I think it's a little bit too early, perhaps to judge on recent events how they will affect the deep structure. I think that Palestinians have over the since the establishment of Israel actually in nineteen forty eight, each generation of Palestinians has had at least one major protests that are very similar to what has happened recently in some sense, where they reaffirmed their Palestinian identity. It happened with the second generation after the Nakba in nineteen seventy six, where Palestinians protested what is often known as the Land Day against the confiscation of land. It happened again almost twenty five years later in the second Default, and it's happening now with a new generation. And I think it's important to understand this because each generation is reaffirming its commitment to Palestinian identity. So looking from a bird's view, you know, like each generation has had this defining moment in which Palestinian citizens erupted against structural violence of the state. And you're absolutely right for a person who's an outside that it's hard to follow these events from this. But what is important to understand that there is a subclass of Palestinians that is struggling with a state with its practices. And what has the recent events shown. It unleashed a militaristic structure that is still governing Palestinians. It's important to say, you know, Palestinus in Israel have always lived under the idea of a second class citizens, the idea of being heavily surveiled, heavily controlled, and heavily dominated. Let's turn to what this is going to mean going forward with this very sensible caveat that we don't know for sure, and it's soon to tell. One trend that has been going on in the series of elections that Israel has been holding over the last few years. Because there have been round after round after round after round of elections, because it's been impossible for any of the factions to produce a functioning coalition, Palestinian voter turnout has been going up, and the potential impact of what are called colloquially and Israel Arab parties or Palestinian parties has risen. They've even gotten some votes from Jewish Israelis. Maybe those are token protest votes, but there are a handful of them, and that too. Many observers who were more hopeful, myself included, suggested a kind of willingness on the part of Palstinian Israelis to try to use the levers of political power that are available to them as citizens of a democracy, to try to demand equal justice and equal rights for themselves and for their communities. How do you see these events playing out that way? Are they likely to cause Palsini Israelis to be less inclined to turn out to vote or more, are they likely to cause Jewish Israeli political parties to be open to entering into coalition with Palestinians or less open even than they have been in the past, which is what my instinct would would tell me. I'm trying to figure out, you know, where this is all leading. I have two things that I'm reflecting about this question. One is it's important to understand that the protests erupted mainly by young people. I'm not sure that there will be a major change in the election patterns because many Palestinian citizens of Israel also vote on different considerations, and so I'm not actually optimistic that we're going to see a deep change here. Perhaps yes, perhaps no, it's it's too early to judge. But I think that what we've seen is that it quote all the political readership of Palestinians in Israel by surprise. I think that we've seen in the last two years an inclination of Palestinians to cooperate or to consider joining a government. You know. The counterpart of legitimating Palestinians as a political allies is that Palestines for the first time are actually considering joining the government. And I think this the recent event have been blown in the face for many of these politicians that thought that, you know, we can gain some material benefits by joining the governments without discussing quote unquote politics, you know, or without discussing the Palestinian question or for the Palestinian problem. I think it's too early to to to see how this will implicate on future patterns of a voting What about on the broader sense of sort of social participation of Palestinians in Israeli life. I mean, when you appear in front of the Israeli Supreme Court as you have to argue a case. Part of your winning your case is the legal argument. Part of it is how you were perceived as a Palestinians citizen in Israel who's a graduate of a law school where a bunch of the justices or professors, you know, and where a lot of them went to law school. You're in some sense the same In the US Supreme Court, the people arguing in front of the court are part of almost by definition, a legal elite. When you think about how this is going to affect your career as a human rights lawyer or maybe as a scholar and an academic, how does it what's the sort of personal takeaway for you in how this shifts things, if it shifts them at all. I think that the recent events have really been a breaking point for many philistine is living in Israel. The experience, you know, of knowing that you can sit in your house and just hear mops chanting under their house. Death to adapts, it's really something else. It's not something normal. It's not something that we've ever experienced. And still I think that it surfaced a lot of the structural problems, and its surfaced discourse that has not been very present. And here I want to connect it maybe to the question of political readership. I think Palistina's in Israel are in need of a new discourse and new leadership and new imaginations. Not only Palestinians actually, but in order to break through this you know, impasse of violence and of this vicious circle of violence, we need new imagination and in new discourses, and we need to eradicate shift because otherwise this will just be you know, oppressed and put under the surface. And I think this invites us to really deeply reflect and try to reimagine what is the deep problems here at stake and how we can solve them. And I think the solution will only come from a radical reimagination of the situation, from recognizing the experience of Palestinian citizens of Israel, recognizing the injustice that Palestinians have been living through for the last seventy three years, and trying to correct it from there. Otherwise, these tensions will always accompany you know, Palestinians wherever they go, including me when I go to the Supreme Court. I mean, it's a highly problematic institution that is many times complicit and legitimates the ways in which Palestinians are expelled and are dispossessed between you know, the river and the sea, not only in Ghaza and not only in the West Bank, but also is Jerusalem and inside Israel. I think even more crucially inside Israel, because Palestina's inside are really suffering from a huge problem of permits, lack of permits to build and lack of accessibility to land. Rabbi, I couldn't agree with you more. And I think no matter where anybody is on the political spectrum, and even if they may not agree with exactly division that you have, I think we can all agree that we're in desperate need of new imagination, new leadership, and new conceptualizations in order to make progress in the ongoing Israel Pastine struggle, because without those things, I think we're pretty clearly doomed to a series of repetitions of the kind we've been seeing recently, and each repetition, in certain ways has the capacity to be a little more destabilizing and a little worse than the one that came before. I want to thank you for talking to me here. It capture I think some of the flavor of a lot of the conversations that we have one on one in the office. I was really glad to have an opportunity to share that with our listeners. And I hope your family stays well and that you have a good summer at home, and I look forward to seeing you in the fall when you come back. Thank you, Thank you so much enough for having me talking to Rabia. I was struck by two different impulses. One impulse is to look backwards into the history and context of the Israel Palestine conflict to try to understand the deeper roots of what's going on. Seen in those terms, every event has an antecedent. Everything has a before, and both Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Israelis, as well as other Palestinians, point to what has happened in the past as the real generative cause of what they experience is injustice and is unfairness seen from each of their perspectives, that history is determinative and needs to be understood and ought to be understood, ideally from the perspective that they take. When we look at the problem in that direction as outsiders, we can sometimes think that there cannot possibly be a solution because each time we look to what has happened in the past, we have widely divergent opinions of who is at fault. Meanwhile, the cycles of violence continue, and each time they get just a little bit worse. This way of thinking inevitably causes me to feel sad and depressed. And yet there's another theme that subtly emerged in our conversation and which Rabi'a particularly emphasized at the end of our conversation, and that theme is the idea that each generation of young people, whether it's Palestinian Israeli's, Jewish Israelis or others involved in the conflict, has the opportunity to make its own mark and impact, and to think in new and original ways about what's going on. That possibility of reimagining and looking at issues from a different perspective than merely the perspective of the past is the only credible chance that Israeli's, Palestinians and the rest of the world have at gradually making progress towards a solution that can be experienced by all involved, not as perfect, indeed probably not even as just, but as adequate to enable them to get on with their lives under circumstances and conditions of peace. To get there, we will need new voices and new perspectives. A final note in a long career of thinking about, writing about, and studying the Middle East, including Israel Palestine, if there's one thing I've learned, it's that no particular article, book, program, and certainly not one episode of a podcast can cover all perspectives, and none can be quote perfectly balanced. The reason for that, of course, is space and time, coupled with the reality that there is almost no statement or proposition, whether descriptive, historical, or moral, that anyone on any side of this conflict can make that cannot be actively disputed by someone on the other side. I therefore think it's always a mistake to imagine that one isolated conversation will be quote unquote balanced or quote unquote complete. That's why it's important to hear different voices from different perspectives, and I assure you you will hear different voices and different perspectives when we discuss this subject going forward further on Deep Background in the meantime, from the team here at Deep Background, be careful, be safe, and be well. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Mola Board, our engineer is Ben Tolliday, and our showrunner is Sophie Crane mckibbon. Editorial support from noahm Osband. Theme music by Luis Gara at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton, Lydia Jeancott, Heather Faine, Carlie Migliori, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weissberg. You can find me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. I also write a column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at Bloomberg dot com Slash Feldman. To discover Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts. Go to Bloomberg dot com slash podcasts, and if you liked what you heard today, please write a review or tell a friend. This is deep background

Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is deep background to show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. This May, the Israel Palestine conflict erupted into the most serious violence that we've seen in some years. Over the course of several weeks, Hamas and the Israeli Army traded rocket fire and missile fire, while simultaneously, and for the first time in many years, riots broke out between Israeli Jews and Israeli Palestinian Arabs within Israel itself. By the time a ceasefire was declared, more than three hundred people had died, most of them Palestinian. The issues behind this conflict are complex, and in particular, it's important to notice and to try to understand why this particular round of violence spilled over into conflict between Israelis and Palestinians within Israel, including within mixed cities within the country that have historically been very peaceful and have been treated by some observers as models of coexistence. These issues are complex and political, but they're also legal. Since one of the catalysts of this outbreak of violence was a property conflict in a neighborhood of Jerusalem called Czech Jarrah. Getting inside these complicated issues is never easy. But today, in order to take a first crack at some of them, I'm happy to introduce you to a special guest. You may not have heard his name before, but I am looking forward to introducing you to him. Rabbia Albaria is a Palestinian Israeli who's currently a doctoral student at the Harvard Law School. He is quite simply one of the most brilliant students I've ever taught in twenty years as a law professor. Before coming to Harvard, he was a civil rights attorney with Adalla, the Legal Center for our minority rights in Israel. In that capacity, he argued important cases before the Israeli Supreme Court, and he's also published fascinating and path breaking scholarship about the experience of Palestinians living in Israel as citizens. As you'll shortly hear, Robbia has a distinctive voice and a distinctive perspective, both personally and analytically on the conflict, and I'm very pleased that he was able to join us here on deep background. Rabia, thank you so much for joining me before we dive into our substance. I just want to begin by asking you how your family back home in Haifa are doing. Is everybody okay? Thank you for having me. No, I am doing fine. I've been going through all the recent events watching from the US. But my families in Haifa and they are currently fine, but it has been really hard times. Did they see or directly experience any of the violence that took place. My sister actually lives a nearer neighborhood called the German Colony in Haifa, and there has been a lot of Jewish supremacist moths that were roaming the streets, and so they were hearing the moths from their house while they were basically locked in their house for about two days. And in your memory and your living memory, has anything like this happened in Haifa before. It's a city that's often held up as a model of mutual tolerance between Palestinian citizens of Israel and Jewish citizens of Israel. Well, not in my lifetime that I remember. I'm obviously I want to say that I'm critical of this term of coexistence that is used many times to portray Haifa, and we can delve into that, but this eruption of violence to this extent, both by private actors, by mobs and by state sanctions, violence is something unprecedented. Let's take a step back and define terms for listeners who engage the question of Israel and Palestine. Let's say episodically, you know, in the moments when the media engages it. So let's start with just definitions. There are Palestinians who identify as Palestinians, are ethnically Palestine or nationally Palestinians, but are simultaneously citizens of the State of Israel. And then there are Palestinians who live in the West Bank and in Gaza who are Palestinians but are not citizens of Israel. And then there are even more Palestinians who live outside of those places, who are legally identified as refugees, who are also not citizens of Israel. What are roughly ballpark the numbers order of magnitude of each these groups, to remind to remind people roughly how many citizens of Israel identify as Palestinian. Okay, So, actually this is a great question. I usually when I try to explain, you know, what is the situation, I use the metaphor of a hand five parts, and there is five different groups of Palestinians. Basically, as you mentioned, there's Palestinian citizens of Israel, which are amount to about twenty percent more or less of the Israeli population. Of the Israeli people who have citizenship. In numbers, we're talking about somewhere between one point eight million to two million, depends how you count. Because there is the second category of residents, which applies only to East Jerusalem Palestinians, and it's a different legal status, very similar to citizenship, but with a lot of reservations. For example, people with residency cannot vote, and the residency can be revoked and effectively people will be banned from living in East Jerusalem. There's palestins in the West Bank, and there is Palestinians in Gaza Strip, which is categories three and four, and the fifth and last categories, as you mentioned, is refugees. Now, as for numbers research, it's been consistently shown that since the nineties, there's been an increase actually of Palestinians that identifies Palestinians despite having Israeli citizenship, and we're talking about roughly sixty percent of the population that clearly uses the term Palestinian in their identity. Sixty percent of which population the Palestinians citizens of Israel. I say so by implication, that means there are say forty percent of people who are ethnically or nationally Palestinian are citizens of Israel, but don't use the term Palestinian to describe themselves, right, what terms would they use to describe themselves? So there is actually a variety of terms here that are at play. You know, many people are familiar with the term Arab Israelis, and I think it's it's important to discuss this and put it on the table. It's actually a term. There was an official term used by Israel to to describe the Palestinian or Arab Palestinian minority with citizenship inside Israel. But it's been a little bit deceiving because it's a official terminology that was imposed on many Palestinians after the establishment of Israel. Now people might use a variety of other terms. It doesn't necessarily have to be either Palestinian or Arab Israelis. Some people say, for example, they are forty eight Palestinians or forty eight Arabs, which is a term translated from Arabic. Actually to refer to people who stayed in the land of nineteen forty eight after the establishment of Israel after the Nakada, which is a term referring to the Palestinian catastrophe. Literally, it means catastrophe by the establishment of the state of Israel in nineteen forty eight. Now, other terms can be simply an Arab. Many people refer to themselves as Arabs. In the Israeli discourse. Arabs are distinguished somewhat from Estinians. This is an important distinction because I think the Arab is sometimes invoked to erase the Palestinian identity or or marginalize the Palestinian identity. So some people may refer to themselves as Arabs, which is the wider category. Others may emphasize the Arab Israeli. Some would say only Palestinians, some would say Palestinian citizens of Israel, so it varies. Now. The reason I'm asking about these terminological issues is that they have a deep significance, and that team significance is especially noteworthy now because they go to the question of the relationship in mind and in identity between Palestinian citizens of Israel and the rest of the Palestinian population and Palestinian citizens of Israel and the State of Israel. They raise the question of what are the political identifications, the national identifications, and the political loyalty of Palestinian citizens of Israel, which are necessarily complicated, and in Israel there is an ongoing discourse in which some Jewish Israelis insist that Palestinian Israeli citizens are full equal citizens of the State of Israel and should be treated as such, and other Jewish Israelis insist to the contrary, that Palestinian citizens of Israel are necessarily subject to dual loyalties are not fully therefore loyal citizens of the State of Israel, and that's used often as a justification for, for example, refusing to include Arab parties in Israel in the coalition that becomes the ruling coalition of government, or other even more formalized practices of treating Palestinian Israelis as though they're not full citizens of the state. This is incredibly complicated, obviously, but say a word about how you think of Palestinian Israeli identity and citizenship, maybe just speaking yourself, since as you say, it's hard to make statistical analysis of what most people think. Yeah, that's a great question, and obviously it's it's it's multifaceted, right, So I think that generally speaking, and I'm obviously speaking myself, I personally identify as a Palestinian or a Palestinian citizen of Israel, depending on context. I think that the status of Palestina Israel is really complex, but at the same time it can be summarized as very clearly as a subclass. So it's it's a second tier citizenship, and it manifests really in almost every aspect of life in Israel. It's important to understand that most Palestinian citizens of Israel live in separate localities. There are few what's called mixed cities in which Palestinians and Jewish communities live side by side, for example in Haifa, where I come from. But most Palestinative in segregated towns or in separate localities, and they suffer from There is a clear infrastructure problem, There's a clear discrimination in allocation of resources. There is a clear poverty problem. More than fifty percent of Palestinus are considered below poverty line. There is a huge problem with crime that is now proliferating among Palestinian society in Israel. And on top of all that or could be as understood as a result of institutional policies that discriminate against Palestinians and that subjugate them to an inferior status enshrined also by law. I mean, the recent developments from research years we've been seeing is, for example, the enactment of a constitutional amendment the nation state law that quite simply or straightforwardly define the state of Israel or inshrine's claims and identity of constitutional status without even reaffirming it purported democratic character. And so there is a clear institutionalization that manifests in different aspects of life, from allocation of free sources to discrimination in housing that affects Palestinian lives in the every day. Tell me a little bit about how you've experienced that and seen that, because I mean, one of the fascinating things from the American standpoint about your education is that you have two degrees from top Israel University. Is a first degree of University of Haifa than a degree in law from the University of Tel Aviv, which is often said to be the fancist law faculty in Israel. Your professors loved you. I know that because I read their recommendations when you applied to be a student at Harvard Law School. You did your master's degree at Harvard Law School. Now you're a doctoral student there, and in between finishing law school in Israel and coming to the US to continue studying, you're a human rights lawyer for Adalla, one of the leading human rights organizations working on Palestinian rights. You argued cases in front of the Israeli Supreme Court. Obviously all this was in Hebrew. So you've been deeply in matched in a series of institutions within Israel, probably through a good part of your life. How has your identity been shaped and developed by that kind of interaction in pretty elite Israeli circles. Well, that's that's an interesting question because I think, and you know, I tried to reflect on these questions and some of my writings. I for example, wrote about legal education in Israeli law schools and being a Palestinian in that system. And it's a highly, highly complex situation because many Palestinians are coming to these Israeli elite circles or institutions and experienced a deep sense of alienation going through these experiences, we're using a language that is not ours. I was born and raised, you know, speaking Arabic, and I went to school in Arabic until I reach university, which is the trual path for any Palestinian defending Israel. Now, perhaps you know, I grew up in Haifa, which, as I said, is one of the mixed cities, so perhaps you're exposed a little bit more to Hebrew as a language, or and you acquire certain exposure that is limited otherwise in other localities. But yes, I think it's a highly contradictory situation where you go through institutions and you use a language that is not yours, and there is a language actually that many times you're experiencing it as as an oppressing language. And I'm emphasizing the idea of a language. But I think because I think it's really immedium through which you realize your subjectivity in the content of conversation and the terms in which the discourse is shaped. You know, when you go as a Palestinian student to an Israeli law school, one of the fancy and also sometimes described as a liberal law school, there is still a very clear limits to the discourse about how to talk about Palestinian experiences and how to understand how the law works, and then we give us aecond great example. Yes, absolutely so. For example, I love to give that very quickly about law school. For example, you know, property classes. When we talk about property classes, we analyze the doctrines and confiscations, but we never touch upon how crucial this doctrine has been to Palestinian lives. You know, Palestinians and israel have suffered mass expropriation of their property, of their land during the fifties, sixties and seventies. They were basically reproduced from an agricultural dependent class into a low skilled, unskilled labor in the Israeli market force during these years. And this has ramifications that are very clear until and striking until this day. And so everything in the class when as a Palestinian approaches law school is decontextualized many times. Other times, we never, for example, touch upon the fact it's a discourse that is very present in America, for example, massive carceration and the carceral state, and trying to understand the law enforcement apparatus, how it interacts with minority groups or with racial violence, and these kind of topics are never talked about, and these really law schools, and so this lens of looking at the law in context is very much absent many times from law schools. I would add, by the way, that I think a lot of students in American law schools would tell you that until the last decade, a lot of those topics were slighted in most of American legal education too, with respect to raise in the United States and particularly the history of white supremacy in the United States. But that that doesn't make it any better. I'm just noting that that that's the case. So with that very helpful context, I want to turn now to really the reason that I wanted to have you on the podcast, and that is to hear more about your view about why this particular iteration of violence between Israel and Gaza, which started in certain ways that were very familiar going back at least a couple of decades and in some ways longer so. Violence in and around Jerusalem, unrest at Alaxa, the Temple Mount site, rockets fired from Gaza Bahamas into Israel, retaliation from the Israeli side with air attacks in which lots of people die, including lots of civilians. This is a script that we've seen multiple times before. What seems most distinctive this time is the violence perpetrated in some instances by Jewish Israelis against Palasinian Israelis, in some instances by Palasinian Israelis against Jewish Israelis in a number of different cities and places around the country, including cities that you're describing as mixed cities. So the first question I want to ask is, and it's a really hard one, why this time? Why is this happening? In your view? Now, that's an important question. I think the for understanding it, we need to zoom out a little bit and understand what led to these escalations. And I think the immediate point of departure would be good. So let's let's talk about that. So that's Chechter has a neighborhood of Jerusalem in which there's been an ongoing controversy with lots of twists and turns, most recently involving a controversy that's headed for the Israeli Supreme Court. In fact, it's before the Israeli Supreme Court now, involving a number of houses. Do you want to give us the legal background? No, one, no one better for then you to explain the legal backgrounds since as as a human rights layer you've worked on these kinds of cases. Yeah, so I think I think the most important to put it simply, what's happening there is that there is families, Palestinian families living in this is Jerusalem neighborhood that are now being brought to court by Jewish settler organizations. And the idea is that these these families who were resettled, part of them were resettled there in the fifties before Israel even occupied, and they were resettled because they were refugees from internally displaced from Haifa, from other places. And now these settler groups or settler organizations are trying to claim this property by using a hook claiming that this property belonged to Jewish people before nineteen for eight, before the establishment of the state of Visions. So there is a complex actually legal situation. But what's important to understand is that this system works with two different rules applying to do different people. Palestinians cannot try to claim property that was Palestinians before nineteen forty eight. This path is only allowed for particularly in East Jerusalem. For Jewish that is usually even not the particular families of the Jewish people who lived in the houses, but Jewish settler and geo's or groups. And so what we're seeing here is illegal. To pause, Yeah, just to pause to clarify the legal battle for people who aren't you know, inside the inside the details of this as I understand it, the position of the settler groups is that these houses were lived in by Jews before nineteen forty eight, when there was neither an Israel nor a Palestine. There was a UN mandate administered by by Britain that that in nineteen forty eight this territory ended up after Israel declared independence and ended up in a war with a number of its neighbors, including Jordan, ended up under Jordanian control between nineteen forty eight and nineteen sixty seven. Am I right? Am I just correct me if I go wrong. I mean, and that during that period of time, no Jews were permitted to or chose to stay within what had become Jordan. And at that moment Palestinians who were internally displaced from other places within what had become Israel were resettled in these homes. They've been there since, and in nineteen sixty seven Israel conquered this territory back. It's subsequently annexed the territory, although it's annexation is not recognized by the international community, but it is recognized by the Israeli courts. And so in principle, under Israeli law, these homes are supposed to revert to whom Are they supposed to revert to the original owners? Are they're supposed to revert to the government. Somehow they were supposed to revert to somebody, which has led to a claim on them being made by these Jewish organizations. Yes, but these legal baties have been actually happening since the seventies in Sarah and elsewhere in Jerusalem, and we're seeing that there is on one hand, while the court allows bringing these cases when and these claims by Jewish groups, it does not allow any claims by Palestinians to reclaim their property before nineteen forty eight. And this is hugely problematic because these people, part of the Czech families, were resettled there by the un by the UNWA in conduction with the Jordanian government that was back then in the fifties. That neighbor and UNROWA is the United Nations especially designated institution that essentially only deals with Palestinian refugees. I mean that's basically its job. And it has existed since forty eight and still exists, yes, and so I really think that the words of the families themselves are put this very strongly, you know, they say you settled us even here. This has become a Palestinian neighborhood for generations now, I mean it was Palestinian in part as well before ninety four eight. There is no dispute that some Jews lived there, right, but the dispute becomes also more problematic when these not the exact people are claiming their their property. But under some legal constructions, it's enabled for settler, you know, organizations to advance a political agenda. And many people have seen the viral video of Jacob from the US, the settler who is now living in Czech saying, you know to the family, well, I'm not stealing your home. If I don't steal it, somebody else will. And this is part of the problem. There is people who are coming, you know, Jewish settlers coming from the US part of them and settling in this neighborhood with no ties whatsoever to the particular people who are living them, and they're destroying communities and forcing evictions and etc. Et cetera un Palestinian communities. We'll be back in a moment. So the chech Jar conflict was the catalyst here to drive this latest cycle of escalation. That seems clear. How does it relate in your view to the Again this underlying question of why this violence in both directions in mixed cities, because as you point out, there's been struggle in zech Jarrah for a while, and also there have been other instances in which there was you know, rockets fired from God Israeli aircraft firing missiles, as well as in in the more distant past, Israeli troops in Gaza. So we've seen this kind of military escalation before, but without the corresponding violence within Israeli mixed cities. So I think momentum is a huge part of it, and also timing. We should understand this came against the background of Ramadan, one of the holiest months in Islam for many people who are practicing their fasting and end with aid fu so and this evictions or forced evictions from Ze came against this background and as well as that escalated to raids into Al Aksamosk to one of the holiest sites in Islam, and this sparked a lot of tensions, a lot of protests, and the protests that spread across many different Palestinian communities in Israel. First before Gaza came into the the picture where started what started as actually peaceful protests where brutally suppressed by the police. I know many of my friends who protested actually in Haifa were arrested, detained, eventually some of them released. But what started as peaceful protests soon became the police crackdown on these protests, escalating the situation even more when Jewish vigilante groups started joining this picture and killed in led. The first incidents that led really to the further escalation in violence was a settler killed in art settler Jewish settler killed and led a Palestinian citizen and was later released by the court. He was suspected in killing but then later released by the court after a lot of political pressure as well. In the background, and so this is the released on the released on the theory that he had acted in self defense. Right, And there's are, if I'm not mistaken, that's the episode of which there's a video which also has been widely widely shared on the internet, Yes, which showed actually that he's shooting from far away. But I think that this situation where Musa Hassuni, the person the Palestine from let who was killed by the subtler. The next day, we see the eruption of violence even more. We see that police is cracking down on the funeral of this person, leading to even more tensions and etcetera, etcetera, and then it spread to many different localities. Obviously there has been also Palestinian violence, but I think we should understand here the forces at play. While Jewish vigilante groups we're roaming the streets, coming organizing on WhatsApp, telegram, etc. And going to Palestinian neighborhoods, there were actually no similar instances where groups were organizing Palestinian groups organizing to go to Jewish neighborhoods to attack them. Yes, there has been obviously Palestinian violence that as I understand, it's reacted to the attacks by mobs and as well as by the police. There has been I think the police has been doning these attacks while doing absolutely almost effectively nothing to prevent these attacts. And this is I think, what what is distinctive about this moment as well. We are seeing both private and state actors working on violence that is manifesting against Palestinian communities in Israel in an unprecedented way. Two thoughts on that analysis. The first is, you know, no doubt lots of Jewish Israelis would say that, you know, would say effectively, while the violence started on the Palestinian side, and no doubt, you know, most Palestinian Israelis and other Palestinians would have the view that the violence started on the Israeli side. This is characteristic to outsiders trying to watch the conflict. Right each side says, well, you have to understand the context, and each side says the other side started it, either globally or locally in a particular circumstance. And so one the challenges to outsiders is to try to understand the deep structures that are driving the cycle of violence, quite apart from the particularized incidents. A second point which you make, which I think is very it is significant to keep in mind, is that Israel has the state on its side, right, I mean certainly within Israel, it has the government digital on its side, and then with respect to Gaza, it has a full blown powerful military, whereas a Hamas does not have anything of the kind. It has a handful of rockets available at its disposal. So that I think is important context. Without a doubt, what I'm trying to get a hold on, and you know, because I don't know the answer to it, is whether over the longer run, say, over the last couple of decades, Israeli Palestinians have started to feel differently about their relationship to the state, about their relationship to other Palestinians, about the treatment that they're encountering than they have in the past, So that there's some structural cause, as it were, of the protests, for example, that you describe, which started peacefully and then you and then met resistance and so forth, or whether it really is a product of, in a more in coate way, of just building tensions and in the story that you've been describing, it is more a story of this happened, and then this happened, and this happened. I agree with that analysis. I get that that's what happened, But I'm trying to figure out. I'm puzzling over whether there is in fact a structural change in the self consciousness of Palestinian Israelis either they're identifying more with other Palestinians or less with the State of Israel, or that their identification hasn't changed but they felt more desperate, or alternatively, that they feel more secure within the State of Israel and therefore felt safer initiating protests and then were then surprised by the vigilante violence in the other direction, as well as the police response. I mean, these are all possible hypotheses. I don't have a view as to which of them is correct, if any, but I wonder if any of those ideas or similar ideas makes sense to you. That an interesting question, and I think it's a little bit too early, perhaps to judge on recent events how they will affect the deep structure. I think that Palestinians have over the since the establishment of Israel actually in nineteen forty eight, each generation of Palestinians has had at least one major protests that are very similar to what has happened recently in some sense, where they reaffirmed their Palestinian identity. It happened with the second generation after the Nakba in nineteen seventy six, where Palestinians protested what is often known as the Land Day against the confiscation of land. It happened again almost twenty five years later in the second Default, and it's happening now with a new generation. And I think it's important to understand this because each generation is reaffirming its commitment to Palestinian identity. So looking from a bird's view, you know, like each generation has had this defining moment in which Palestinian citizens erupted against structural violence of the state. And you're absolutely right for a person who's an outside that it's hard to follow these events from this. But what is important to understand that there is a subclass of Palestinians that is struggling with a state with its practices. And what has the recent events shown. It unleashed a militaristic structure that is still governing Palestinians. It's important to say, you know, Palestinus in Israel have always lived under the idea of a second class citizens, the idea of being heavily surveiled, heavily controlled, and heavily dominated. Let's turn to what this is going to mean going forward with this very sensible caveat that we don't know for sure, and it's soon to tell. One trend that has been going on in the series of elections that Israel has been holding over the last few years. Because there have been round after round after round after round of elections, because it's been impossible for any of the factions to produce a functioning coalition, Palestinian voter turnout has been going up, and the potential impact of what are called colloquially and Israel Arab parties or Palestinian parties has risen. They've even gotten some votes from Jewish Israelis. Maybe those are token protest votes, but there are a handful of them, and that too. Many observers who were more hopeful, myself included, suggested a kind of willingness on the part of Palstinian Israelis to try to use the levers of political power that are available to them as citizens of a democracy, to try to demand equal justice and equal rights for themselves and for their communities. How do you see these events playing out that way? Are they likely to cause Palsini Israelis to be less inclined to turn out to vote or more, are they likely to cause Jewish Israeli political parties to be open to entering into coalition with Palestinians or less open even than they have been in the past, which is what my instinct would would tell me. I'm trying to figure out, you know, where this is all leading. I have two things that I'm reflecting about this question. One is it's important to understand that the protests erupted mainly by young people. I'm not sure that there will be a major change in the election patterns because many Palestinian citizens of Israel also vote on different considerations, and so I'm not actually optimistic that we're going to see a deep change here. Perhaps yes, perhaps no, it's it's too early to judge. But I think that what we've seen is that it quote all the political readership of Palestinians in Israel by surprise. I think that we've seen in the last two years an inclination of Palestinians to cooperate or to consider joining a government. You know. The counterpart of legitimating Palestinians as a political allies is that Palestines for the first time are actually considering joining the government. And I think this the recent event have been blown in the face for many of these politicians that thought that, you know, we can gain some material benefits by joining the governments without discussing quote unquote politics, you know, or without discussing the Palestinian question or for the Palestinian problem. I think it's too early to to to see how this will implicate on future patterns of a voting What about on the broader sense of sort of social participation of Palestinians in Israeli life. I mean, when you appear in front of the Israeli Supreme Court as you have to argue a case. Part of your winning your case is the legal argument. Part of it is how you were perceived as a Palestinians citizen in Israel who's a graduate of a law school where a bunch of the justices or professors, you know, and where a lot of them went to law school. You're in some sense the same In the US Supreme Court, the people arguing in front of the court are part of almost by definition, a legal elite. When you think about how this is going to affect your career as a human rights lawyer or maybe as a scholar and an academic, how does it what's the sort of personal takeaway for you in how this shifts things, if it shifts them at all. I think that the recent events have really been a breaking point for many philistine is living in Israel. The experience, you know, of knowing that you can sit in your house and just hear mops chanting under their house. Death to adapts, it's really something else. It's not something normal. It's not something that we've ever experienced. And still I think that it surfaced a lot of the structural problems, and its surfaced discourse that has not been very present. And here I want to connect it maybe to the question of political readership. I think Palistina's in Israel are in need of a new discourse and new leadership and new imaginations. Not only Palestinians actually, but in order to break through this you know, impasse of violence and of this vicious circle of violence, we need new imagination and in new discourses, and we need to eradicate shift because otherwise this will just be you know, oppressed and put under the surface. And I think this invites us to really deeply reflect and try to reimagine what is the deep problems here at stake and how we can solve them. And I think the solution will only come from a radical reimagination of the situation, from recognizing the experience of Palestinian citizens of Israel, recognizing the injustice that Palestinians have been living through for the last seventy three years, and trying to correct it from there. Otherwise, these tensions will always accompany you know, Palestinians wherever they go, including me when I go to the Supreme Court. I mean, it's a highly problematic institution that is many times complicit and legitimates the ways in which Palestinians are expelled and are dispossessed between you know, the river and the sea, not only in Ghaza and not only in the West Bank, but also is Jerusalem and inside Israel. I think even more crucially inside Israel, because Palestina's inside are really suffering from a huge problem of permits, lack of permits to build and lack of accessibility to land. Rabbi, I couldn't agree with you more. And I think no matter where anybody is on the political spectrum, and even if they may not agree with exactly division that you have, I think we can all agree that we're in desperate need of new imagination, new leadership, and new conceptualizations in order to make progress in the ongoing Israel Pastine struggle, because without those things, I think we're pretty clearly doomed to a series of repetitions of the kind we've been seeing recently, and each repetition, in certain ways has the capacity to be a little more destabilizing and a little worse than the one that came before. I want to thank you for talking to me here. It capture I think some of the flavor of a lot of the conversations that we have one on one in the office. I was really glad to have an opportunity to share that with our listeners. And I hope your family stays well and that you have a good summer at home, and I look forward to seeing you in the fall when you come back. Thank you, Thank you so much enough for having me talking to Rabia. I was struck by two different impulses. One impulse is to look backwards into the history and context of the Israel Palestine conflict to try to understand the deeper roots of what's going on. Seen in those terms, every event has an antecedent. Everything has a before, and both Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Israelis, as well as other Palestinians, point to what has happened in the past as the real generative cause of what they experience is injustice and is unfairness seen from each of their perspectives, that history is determinative and needs to be understood and ought to be understood, ideally from the perspective that they take. When we look at the problem in that direction as outsiders, we can sometimes think that there cannot possibly be a solution because each time we look to what has happened in the past, we have widely divergent opinions of who is at fault. Meanwhile, the cycles of violence continue, and each time they get just a little bit worse. This way of thinking inevitably causes me to feel sad and depressed. And yet there's another theme that subtly emerged in our conversation and which Rabi'a particularly emphasized at the end of our conversation, and that theme is the idea that each generation of young people, whether it's Palestinian Israeli's, Jewish Israelis or others involved in the conflict, has the opportunity to make its own mark and impact, and to think in new and original ways about what's going on. That possibility of reimagining and looking at issues from a different perspective than merely the perspective of the past is the only credible chance that Israeli's, Palestinians and the rest of the world have at gradually making progress towards a solution that can be experienced by all involved, not as perfect, indeed probably not even as just, but as adequate to enable them to get on with their lives under circumstances and conditions of peace. To get there, we will need new voices and new perspectives. A final note in a long career of thinking about, writing about, and studying the Middle East, including Israel Palestine, if there's one thing I've learned, it's that no particular article, book, program, and certainly not one episode of a podcast can cover all perspectives, and none can be quote perfectly balanced. The reason for that, of course, is space and time, coupled with the reality that there is almost no statement or proposition, whether descriptive, historical, or moral, that anyone on any side of this conflict can make that cannot be actively disputed by someone on the other side. I therefore think it's always a mistake to imagine that one isolated conversation will be quote unquote balanced or quote unquote complete. That's why it's important to hear different voices from different perspectives, and I assure you you will hear different voices and different perspectives when we discuss this subject going forward further on Deep Background in the meantime, from the team here at Deep Background, be careful, be safe, and be well. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Mola Board, our engineer is Ben Tolliday, and our showrunner is Sophie Crane mckibbon. Editorial support from noahm Osband. Theme music by Luis Gara at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton, Lydia Jeancott, Heather Faine, Carlie Migliori, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weissberg. You can find me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. I also write a column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at Bloomberg dot com Slash Feldman. To discover Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts. Go to Bloomberg dot com slash podcasts, and if you liked what you heard today, please write a review or tell a friend. This is deep background