A little help for Ezra Klein

“The Ezra Klein Show” hosted two activists on July 7—Rula Hardal, a research fellow at the Kogod Center at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, and May Pundak, an Israeli human rights attorney—who are part of an organization called “A Land for All,” which promotes an Israeli-Palestinian confederation as a solution to the conflict. The opinion-section interview appeared under the title “A Radical Vision for Israelis and Palestinians.”

The obvious problem is Klein’s false assertion that confederation is a “new political vision.” The idea of forming either a Jewish-Arab confederation or federation is not new at all. In fact, the idea of confederation is at least as old, if not older than, the idea of territorial partition—namely, “the two-state solution.”

Klein’s misrepresentation of the novelty of the confederacy idea is not merely a historical matter. It affects the quality of his journalism: Ignoring history makes him ask his interviewees the wrong questions and deprives readers of important knowledge. Klein might be ignorant of that history, or worse, might know it and choose to ignore it.

He stated at the beginning of the interview that he wishes to discuss the confederation as an “imagined solution” to the conflict “because if you don’t have any idea of where you’re going, how do you get there?” But if you want to get somewhere, you might also want to remember where you came from.

A Jewish-Arab federation/confederation has been proposed in various forms since 1920, when it was brought up by Herbert Samuel, the British High Commissioner of Mandate Palestine. In the 1930s, it was raised in conversations between Zionist leaders and prominent Arab-Palestinian figures.

In the late 1940s, the U.N.’s Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) discussed the idea of confederation, as did prominent Zionists and American Jews, including Aubrey (“Abba”) Eban and Judah Magnes. The latter was part of an organization called Ihud (“Union”) that advocated Jewish-Arab cooperation and a confederation. Yasser Arafat also considered a confederation in the 1980s, and Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas discussed the idea in 2012 and 2018.

In addition, Klein’s “new” solution is one that both the Israeli and Palestinian public have considered for decades. The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research has long been polling attitudes toward the idea of confederation, and it was not popular.

All this history and proposed solutions are absent from the interview. Instead, Klein spends a lot of time asking Pundak and Hardal questions such as why they decided to support a confederation; the details of their plan; and how they think it might work after the terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

Because Klein erroneously situates confederacy as a novelty, he does not ask questions that must be asked: Why do Pundak and Hardal think that their initiative would work when other similar initiatives never came to fruition? What is the difference between their initiative and other past and contemporary efforts? Readers simply don’t know.

At one point in the interview, Pundak says that without a clear end goal that can work—“you just repeat mistakes of the past.” Instead of bringing up that past by asking about previous proposals for a confederation, Klein asks about Pundak and Hardal’s vision for West Bank settlements.

This is not the only time Klein was uninformed about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A previous episode of his show, aired on April 14, was titled “Reckoning With Israel’s ‘One-State Reality.’”

Klein hosted scholars Shibley Telhami and Marc Lynch, who, together with Nathan Brown and Michael Barnett, edited a volume titled The One-State Reality, and published an article of the same name in Foreign Affairs.

Klein noted that this one-state reality argument “might have been a controversial claim when it was made” by the scholars in early 2023; however, after Oct. 7 and the ensuing war, it became “an undeniable reality.” Klein suggests that U.S. politics has “not yet fully grappled” with that reality.

Once again, Klein demonstrates his elementary level of awareness of the subject. Scholarly arguments regarding the irreversibility of the occupation go back at least over 40 years—to the early 1980s.

Klein claims that “American politics has not grappled at all” with the reality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This statement too is questionable. Former Secretary of State John Kerry explicitly warned against a dangerous “one-state reality” at least three times: in2015, 2016 and 2017.

In 2016, Congress heard the testimony of former Representative Robert Wexler, who also warned from the creation of a one-state reality. There were other instances in which this exact phrase was used by the Middle East Quartet and former U.S. peace negotiators. Well-known research institutions also warned of a “one-state reality.”

So, arguments about the one-state reality are not new, but Klein’s framing of this argument as a novelty once again precludes asking important questions.

Had Klein been serious about probing this argument, he could have asked the following: Were early analysts wrong when they declared partition is nearing impossibility more than 40 years ago? If so, why? What is the major difference, if any, between the authors’ arguments regarding the one-state reality and prior ones, or the repeated warnings regarding the demise of the two-state solution? Is it wrong to suggest that a one-state reality was already implied in these warnings?

These questions do not come up.

An interview is not a history course, but readers and listeners should still get quality journalism. Klein gets a lot of real estate from the Times, producing very long interviews and podcasts. This is clearly a disservice to news consumers—and to Israelis and Palestinians.

Get the latest updates in our WhatsApp group.

Test yourself on one question pulled from JNS reporting. New puzzles daily.