PREMIUM: “The Palestinian Delusion: the 'Right of Return' & the Mirage of Peace” with fmr Labor Knesset parliamentarian Einat Wilf
Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps
Josh Szeps
4.5 • 905 Ratings
🗓️ 26 June 2025
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What if the problem for the Palestinian people was not Israel, but the encouragement by the international community of a fantasy that, one day, Palestinians will return to Israel proper?
That’s the thesis of 'The War of Return’ by former Labor parliamentarian and foreign policy advisor to Prime Minister Shimon Peres, Einat Wilf. She opposes settlement-building but is otherwise a left-wing hawk. Wilf argues that the main reason why the conflict endures - and why Palestinians remain stateless - is the ongoing refusal by every Palestinian leader to accept that Israel is here to stay and there's no coming back.
To discuss her views and how the conflict has unfolded since October 7th, Einat joined Josh in our Sydney studios. This conversation took place at almost exactly the moment Israel began striking Iran, before the Iran news broke.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Gahey, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. Here's a dangerous idea for you, |
| 0:08.3 | or certainly a counterintuitive one. The problem for the Palestinians, the problem that Palestinians |
| 0:14.3 | face is not Israel. It is rather the international community's indulgence of an encouragement of a Palestinian fantasy |
| 0:25.3 | that someday they'll be able to return to Israel proper. |
| 0:29.1 | That is the thesis of the book The War of Return, written by today's guest, who's a very |
| 0:34.2 | prominent Israeli. |
| 0:35.5 | She was a member of parliament in Israel. She entered |
| 0:38.3 | the Knesset in 2010 with the Labor Party. She was a foreign policy advisor to Prime Minister |
| 0:44.3 | Shimon Peres. She left the Labour Party along with Ehud Barak. They set up an independent |
| 0:50.4 | party, a new left-wing party called the Independence Party, a more centrist left-wing |
| 0:54.4 | party, rather, that wanted to continue collaborating with the Netanyahu government at the time. |
| 0:59.5 | It's all a bit into Nissan, as Israeli politics always is. Suffice it to say that she lost her seat |
| 1:04.6 | in 2013 when her party no longer contested elections. She was educated at Cambridge. She was educated at Harvard. |
| 1:13.0 | She was a political theorist and is a leading voice for the Zionist perspective. She supports a two-state |
| 1:19.4 | solution. She does not support settlement building by Israel in the West Bank. But she does |
| 1:24.6 | fundamentally place the core of the problem. She thinks everything else is |
| 1:28.1 | basically window dressing around the fact that the Palestinians have never accepted that Israel |
| 1:33.6 | has a right to exist within its own borders, and they have been indulged and encouraged by the |
| 1:38.6 | international community to continue with that fantasy. So this is time for some real talk. |
| 1:45.5 | Einart and I obviously disagree about a number of things here. |
| 1:48.5 | She actually was put on my radar by a follower, a listener, a reader. |
| 1:53.2 | So thanks to all of your feedback because it actually does land and I do consume it. |
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