Dan Schueftan on the Palestine-Israel Conflict

Quillette contributor Pamela Paresky interviews Israeli academic Dan Schueftan about the Israel-Palestine conflict, why he wasn't surprised by October 7th, and his hopes for the future of Israel.

Dan Schueftan was an advisor to Israel's National Security Council, and to former Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Ariel Sharon. He has served as a lecturer and researcher at several prestigious institutions, including the University of Haifa and the National Defense College of the Israel Defense Forces.

Dan Schueftan: People usually tell themselves stories about themselves that are sometimes funny and it doesn't really matter if something is archaeologically true or not. To give you an example about the Jews, say the archaeologists prove that the Jews have never been in Egypt or the Israelites have never been in Egypt. I don't care. It's the story I decided that is mine. I'm a Jew, not in the religious sense of the term, but in the sense that I've decided that the Jewish past is my past and the Jewish presence is my presence and the Jewish future is my future and it's my decision. We are a people because we behave like a people, and it quacks like a people and it walks like a people so it's a people.

A people is neither something good or bad. Some people say, oh, the Palestinians are people because they're a bad people. It's strange. Now, when the Palestinians want to tell themselves stories about being the descendants of the Canaanites, I don't really mind. Saab Erekat was the chief negotiator for the Palestinians for 30 years, and he comes from Jericho, and I told him that he insists on being the son of the only person who remained alive in Jericho, and you remember what her profession was. That's fine with me, I don't care. It's funny, it's okay, but it's ridiculous because they have nothing in terms of linguistic or cultural ties. But by the way, neither have the modern Greeks to ancient Greeks, neither have the modern Egyptians, with the possible exception of the Copts, have something to do with ancient Egypt. But it's okay for people to tell themselves stories.

The Palestinian people was created about 100 years ago when they couldn't be Syrians or Lebanese or Egyptians or Transjordanians. So the only thing left was to be what they called Palestinians at the time. By the way, the Jews called themselves Palestinian Jews and the Arabs called themselves Palestinian Arabs and my father and mother had a Palestinian passport.

Okay, so this area was called by the Romans Palestine in order to eradicate the names Judea and Israel. So they took the Philistines and they called it Palestine. This term was used again and again. Even the early Zionists called themselves Palestinian Jews and you had Palestinian Jews and Palestinian Arabs. So this people is about 100 years old.

The problem with these people is not that they don't have roots going back to thousands of years. Neither have the Americans by the way. The Chinese and we , and maybe a few others, are the only ones who can claim something thousands of millennia back, but again, it doesn't really matter very much because the assumption is that if you are a people, then you deserve A, B and C and so on.

It is limited for everybody and the political implications are not clear. So you can look at it objectively and say there is a Palestinian people for about 100 years. At a certain point, a very early point, the Jews were willing to partition the land so that you have, once you have states here, once the British mandate leaves after the Ottomans that were here for 400 years already left, you could have a Jewish-Palestinian state and an Arab-Palestinian state, which is, from the Jewish point of view, Israel, and they could have had a Palestinian state. I mean, even in the 1930s, it could have had the embryo of a state, and then in 1947, an independent state.

The Palestinian perspective is, and this did not change in the last 100 years, that the very collective existence of the Jews here in the Middle East is illegitimate, except as individuals of the Jewish religion. They deny the existence of a Jewish people. Even today, the so-called president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, gave a speech. It's so ridiculous, it's unbelievable. I mean, he tells stories about there's never been a Jewish people and so on, and the Khazars and the Caucasus, and it's ridiculous. They even deny the existence of a Jewish people, and of course they believe that Israel is a product of a colonial British act and the very existence of Israel is illegitimate and they make the option of national coexistence of a historic compromise impossible. Therefore, they don't have a state.

Now the way they behaved in terms of violence, persuaded the Jews, and after October 7th more than any time in the past, that since whatever they have they weaponise, what they want in the final analysis, and they say it openly, is to obliterate the state of Israel. Hamas even speak about obliterating all the Jews. Their charter relies on the protocols of the elders of Zion. So this is an attempt by the Palestinians to terminate the existence, not only of the state of Israel, but also of the Jews as a national collective, as a sovereign entity in this region.

This is a problem that, at least in the foreseeable future, doesn't have a solution. You see, one of the problems Americans have, and you said you're a psychiatrist.

Pamela Paresky: Psychologist.

DS: Psychologist, so you should be aware of it. Americans have an operational-oriented mind. They look at problems like engineers do. There's a problem, what's the solution?

If you want to be a historian, if you want to understand human behavior, you say to yourself, this is the kind of operational thinking, while strategic thinking is: What do you do when a problem doesn't have a solution? In other words, what is the response or the damage control that you can apply if a problem doesn't have a solution?

I tell people that most serious problems don't have a solution. Poverty doesn't have a solution. Crime doesn't have a solution, but if you have a good law enforcement system, you can bring crime from an unacceptable level to an acceptable level. If you have a good welfare state, a well functioning welfare state, you can bring down poverty from an unacceptable level to an acceptable level.

People speak in terms of the two-state solution. By the way, in my recent visit to the U.S. Congress, I suggested to a number of senators that the United States should adopt a two-state solution for a state for the Republicans and a state for the Democrats because the polarisation in American society is alarming. Okay, but the whole idea of a solution, the only thing in life that has a solution is a crossword puzzle. For people who insist that every problem has a solution, I remind them of their marriage, and then they finally understand that there are some problems that have no solution and that don't even always have a damage control system. Not all marriages have that.

So you need to think in terms of what can you do when a solution is not available. Any serious thinking about the Palestinians or about Israel should start from that assumption. If somebody feels good about himself by playing with himself intellectually or politically, and he wants to think about solution, it's okay. I mean, Americans come to Israel now and say, tell us what your end game is, and I tell them, oh, we really need to learn from you. You had an end game bringing democracy to Iraq. Then you had an end game bringing women's rights to Afghanistan. Let's learn from you. Tell us how after bringing democracy to Iraq and women's rights to Afghanistan will you bring peace to the Palestinians.

PP: So what is the acceptable level of violence for Israel to achieve its goal?