DISASTER PRONE:

[Current Affairs editor in chief Nathan J. Robinson]

There's an incredible quote you have from an admiral saying, "It will be a catastrophe if we win." That's an interesting thing to say. Why would it be a "catastrophe if we win"?

SLATER 

If "we win," it means that we've just created more resentment and hatred, and it's going to come back against us in the future. I'll read you a few of the quotes. There are a number of high officials who said specifically that we can and should negotiate with Hamas. Now you have this incredible fanaticism, and we'll get to that later on. But earlier, there were Hamas leaders who were in some cases hinting--in some cases more than just hinting--that they recognized that they were not going to be able to defeat Israel, they're not going to be able to achieve their maximum goal, and then they reluctantly but nonetheless came to the conclusion that they needed a settlement. And there were Israeli top security officials--heads of Mossad or Shin Bet--who said, this is almost too good to be true, we must act on this and start negotiations with Hamas.

But the all Israeli prime ministers absolutely ignored and shut down a number of efforts that were being made, including by journalists and others, to start a dialogue between Hamas and Israel. So, even in the case of Hamas, let alone in the largest sense of achieving a two-state solution, you have a phenomenon of top leaders making these kinds of arguments.

ROBINSON 

Your book is, in many ways, the story of a lot of frustrating, tragic missed opportunities. The phrase of "missed opportunities" is kind of infamous in the context of this conflict. Because [Israeli diplomat] Abba Eban said that "[The Arabs] never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity." But in fact, what your book does, in many ways, is highlight opportunities that Israel had if just a few key concessions has been made to the Palestinians, and you enumerate them.

What are the concessions that you think successive Israeli governments refused to make, that if they had been made could have massively increased the chances that there would have been a lasting peace and avoided the current catastrophe?

SLATER 

The main one is withdrawing from all the territory they conquered in 1967 and allowing the Palestinians to exercise sovereignty over that, primarily the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Since the 1967 war, the main problem has been Israeli refusal to withdraw. It withdrew from some of the territories, from Sinai in the context of the peace agreement with Egypt 15 years after the end of the 1967 war, but they refused to withdraw from the West Bank. Gaza is a little more complicated. They had settlements in Gaza, and Ariel Sharon, Israel's leading military hawk, decided when he became prime minister that the cost of hanging on to a few settlements mostly manned by Israeli fanatics was too high. So, they withdrew from Gaza, in the sense of there's no longer any settlements on the ground in Gaza. But they control access to Gaza; they control water, electricity, and the airways. And they've used this control on a number of occasions, not just now, to punish Palestinian acts of terrorism. And of course, what we're going to see now is the most devastating use of Israeli control and power over Gaza. 

Tweet   @brothersjudd