LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Yesterday, we took you to the area where Israel plans to annex more Palestinian land. That land will be an Israeli settlement that would split the occupied West Bank in two and sever it from East Jerusalem. Israel's Western allies had long seen this settlement as the line that would kill a future Palestinian state. That's even as other settlements were built across the occupied territory, settlements that global bodies from the United Nations Security Council to the International Court of Justice deem illegal. So today, we're taking a closer look at the geopolitics surrounding this decision with Daniel Levy. He was an Israeli negotiator during the Oslo peace process. He now runs the policy institute U.S./Middle East Project.
DANIEL LEVY: I think many people would look at this latest Israeli government decision and almost shrug and say, of course there's not going to be a Palestinian state that's sovereign or viable. Where it also, I think, really matters is we have been told the problem is Hamas. Hamas has to be destroyed. Finish Hamas, et cetera. Well, let's look at this. The West Bank, where this plan is being approved, is where you have a Palestinian authority that recognizes Israel, cooperates on security with Israel, essentially manages the Palestinian population for Israel. So the message you're sending to Palestinians is, whether you resist or collaborate, your fate is the same. You will get relentless Israeli settlement, land expropriation, expulsion of your people and the choice - in Gaza, genocide; in the West Bank, apartheid.
FADEL: Now, Israel's far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, former settlement leader, said at a press conference that, quote, "this reality finally buries the idea of the Palestinian state because there's nothing to recognize and no one to recognize." So is that the point of this settlement?
LEVY: That is almost certainly a driving impetus. Some in the Israeli government, Smotrich included, much of Netanyahu's own party, are well beyond the place where the goal is killing the Palestinian state. The goal is making these territories unlivable for Palestinians. Killing a Palestinian state has almost become the low bar of what the Israeli government is trying to achieve. And in a way, this is the reality that has now been created and has been even more formalized by the latest Israeli decision on this very strategic settlement.
FADEL: How much of this do you think is a reaction to the number of countries that are now recognizing a Palestinian state?
LEVY: I think the crucial question here is whether recognition itself matters very much. What Israel constantly is doing is testing what it can get away with. And so there is a letter of condemnation, notably - as one would expect, I think - not signed by the U.S., but signed by 22 countries, plus the EU. The Israeli government looks at all the ink that's been spilled on paper and they say, OK, are they still trading with us? Yes. Are our assets being frozen when they're held in overseas bank accounts? No, they're not. Do we still have visa-free travel to these countries? Yes, we do.
FADEL: I mean, what is the U.S.' role at this moment?
LEVY: Interestingly enough, the area we're talking about - E1 - it was the area where apparently successive administrations had said, whatever else we're doing, we've been convinced that this one is the tiebreaker. It seems that that is not going to be the position of the current administration.
FADEL: So if E1 was the redline for the Western allies of Israel, and E1 is being built, what does that mean?
LEVY: You know, at one level, I'm tempted to say what a bizarre redline. The redline isn't the killing of 60,000 Palestinians. The redline isn't the starvation policy. The redline isn't decades of occupation. And perhaps the reason, more than anything else, that this was the redline is that the outside believed in a Jewish and democratic state much more than the Zionist leadership in Israel did.
FADEL: Daniel Levy is the president of the U.S./Middle East Project, a nonprofit policy institute focusing on Palestine-Israel relations. Thank you so much for your time and your insights.
LEVY: Pleasure.
FADEL: You heard our guest use the term genocide to describe what's happening in Gaza, and there's a growing consensus among scholars that that is what's happening. Top human rights groups inside and outside of Israel from Amnesty International to B'Tselem have reached the same conclusion and have deemed that Israel has created an apartheid system. Israel denies both of these accusations.
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