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“This region is now going through what could be a thirty to forty-year war, in which the poles of that war are in Saudi Arabia and Iran. I think that it is important, while not ceding an inch to the intransigence of right-wing forces in Israel where the Palestinians are concerned, to have some sense of the regional catastrophe and how long it is likely to be,” David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, says on this week’s Political Scene podcast. Remnick joins Nathan Thrall, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group in Jerusalem, and the host Dorothy Wickenden, to talk about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reëlection and the likelihood of achieving a two-state solution. They discuss the role of Iran in the contentious relationship between the U.S. and Israel, the fear of a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, and the Palestinians’ refusal to acknowledge Israel as a Jewish state. “Currently there is no hope for further Israeli withdrawals and no hope for Palestinian statehood," Thrall says, "because the status quo doesn’t cost Israel and the Israeli voter very much. And until the alternative is worse, you’re not going to have Palestinian statehood.”
