Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs

Magazine. I am joined today by Jerome Slater. He is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the

State University of New York at Buffalo. He's also the author of the book Mythologies Without

End, the U.S., Israel, and the Arab-Israeli conflict, 1917 to 2020, available from Oxford University Press.

And to my mind, if anyone is going to read just one book to understand as much as possible about the background to the Israel-Palestine conflict, they should pick up mythologies without end because it is truly comprehensive. It's also very easy to read and clearly argued.

Professor Jerome Slater, thank you so much for joining us on current affairs today.

Thank you for having me.

Your book was published a few years ago now, but I was rereading it,

and you make a couple of side comments that are rather prescient,

or look rather prescient now in retrospect, I want

to just quote from your preface, you say, I've become convinced that Israel with essentially

blind U.S. Jewish and government support is well along the road to both a moral and security

disaster, and you say that Israel needed to come to terms with

historical truth, which is a lot of what your book is about, in order to perhaps even literally

save itself from an attack by fanatical terrorists.

So let me start by asking you, looking back on those words, why was it that back in 2020,

you thought that Israel was on the, well along the road to a security disaster?

Well, I mean, Israeli and others were predicting that, not in 2020, but in some cases in

1947 and afterward, because the reason that for a moral and security disaster is that

Israel has been occupying and repressing the Palestinians from the very outset of the creation of Israel or before the creation of Israel in seizing territory and occupying the West Bank and so on.

And there have been, as you know, a number of wars which have ended in Israeli victories, but which have only created the context

for future wars. So if you regard, as I do, the root cause of this conflict, not as an

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