From "Prairie Pulse," Dr. Thomas Ambrosio, an NDSU Political Science professor, discusses the Israel/Hamas conflict with John Harris. Tom Isern presents "The Songcatcher," a Plains Folk essay from Grand Forks. The show also explores the environmental cost of using Eastern Red Cedar as Christmas trees, as reported by Harvest Public Media. Additionally, Sue Balcom shares her unique approach to Christmas decor: adorning her tree with spider-themed ornaments.
Transcript
John Harris, Prairie Public
Dr. Ambrosio, thank you for joining us today.
Dr. Thomas Ambrosio, NDSU
Thank you for having me. Well, as we get started, tell the folks a little bit about yourself and maybe your background, maybe where you're originally from. Sure, I'm originally from New Jersey, but I've been here since 2000.
I consider myself a Midwesterner at this point. I got my PhD at the University of Virginia and my topic originally was ethnic conflicts and the wars between different ethnic groups and nations. And then I kind of transitioned a bit from that into Russian foreign policy and Russian authoritarianism, which of course is also back in the news.
So, yeah, it's been a busy time in international politics and always is busy.
John Harris, Prairie Public
Well, it is. And today you're here to talk about the Israel-Hamas crisis. And with that said, I understand you follow it pretty closely.
I do, yes. And so let's back up a little bit and set the stage. Go back to October 7th or so and talk about what's going on and the failure of Israeli intelligence in not knowing that attacks were coming.
Dr. Thomas Ambrosio, NDSU
Sure, on October 7th, you had the group that runs the Gaza Strip, which is called Hamas, launch a massive attack, a surprise attack against Israel. This was the largest intelligence failure that Israel has had since the 1970s Yom Kippur War, in which Israel was completely taken by surprise. There are reports coming out now that Israel may have had some warning about this, not specifically that they had some plans that they had intercepted, but Israel never believed that Hamas could actually carry out such an operation.
This was a massive success by Hamas, a brutal success by Hamas, and an incredible failure for Israel. And Israel, once this is over, is gonna go through and clean house, clean house of their intelligence community, clean house of their political system, and there will be ramifications for this moving forward. And Israeli society will not be the same after this is all resolved.
John Harris, Prairie Public
With that said, and when you talk in the US about the situation in the Middle East, it's kind of always been a complicated one. And can you maybe try to explain to our viewers what and where Gaza is, and why is this region so in dispute?
Dr. Thomas Ambrosio, NDSU
Sure, I'll actually start with the second part first. One of the core problem of this region, in particular the Palestine-Israel issue, is that we have two people who want to be in the same space, and they consider that their homeland. And as we know from physics, two things cannot occupy the same space at the same time.
And that is the core problem. We have a problem that there's no real way for these two groups right now to live together. The Palestinians were there before the current wave of Jews came to the region.
They are descendants from Arabs who came in from the Arabian Peninsula in the 5, 600 AD. But of course, the Israelis had already been expelled from there. They always saw this as their historic homeland.
And in the 1800s, you started having this migration of Jews to Palestine, to this area that was occupied by the Ottomans, part of the Ottoman Empire at the time. And they began buying up land, kind of displacing the native Arab population there. And then, of course, that intensified during World War I.
And then, of course, after World War II with the Holocaust, you had a large number of Jews migrate to this region. And then you had the establishment of Israel in the late 1940s. So what we have is we have kind of three territories.
We have Israel proper in the middle. And then on the east side, we have the West Bank, part of which is Palestinian-run, part of which has Israeli settlements on it, part of which is controlled by Israel. That is run by the Palestinian Authority, which is different than the group that runs Gaza.
Gaza is a small strip of land, not much larger than kind of the greater Fargo, Moorhead region, a couple of times that size, but really relatively small kind of strip of land on the Mediterranean, where you have over two million Palestinians living there. There were Jewish settlements there as a result of the 1967 war when Israel occupied that, but Israel withdrew from that territory and took the Jewish settlers out of it. So since the, now for about a generation, there have been no Jews living there.
It's just Palestinians run by this group called Hamas, which is seen as a terrorist organization and is different than kind of the Palestinians who run the West Bank. So it's really complicated. So you think of it as you have three groups.
You have the West Bank Palestinians who are run by the Palestinian Authority who work with Israel and also against Israel at the same time. You have Israel proper, and then you have Gaza, run by Hamas, which is itself much more radical in its makeup and it's much more, it has the thinking kind of of a terrorist organization. They want to inspire a global Islamic movement in their charter, they explicitly state they want to eliminate Israel and we saw what happened on October 7th.
John Harris, Prairie Public
So what is the end game for Israel in this invasion of Gaza?
Dr. Thomas Ambrosio, NDSU
Well, yeah, given the brutality that we saw from Hamas, reports are still coming out about how absolutely brutal the list of war crimes, crimes against humanity, these are kind of lists what they hadn't committed when they invaded into Israel proper. Israel cannot live with Hamas. They thought they could.
They thought they could live with this terrorist organization on their border that would occasionally launch missiles across into Israel, they could handle that, there's something they could manage. Just as the United States thought we could manage Al Qaeda before 9-11, Israel thought they could manage Hamas after this Israel realizes there's no living with Hamas. And as a result, their goal, their stated goal is to eliminate Hamas from the Gaza Strip.
What comes afterward, no one knows. The Palestinian Authority that runs the West Bank is largely seen as illegitimate by the Palestinian people because it is seen as a collaborator with Israel. It's kind of worked with Israel since the 1990s and moving them in is gonna be almost impossible.
So we know, so Israel kind of knows what it has to do. The United States supports eliminating Hamas, but no one knows what happens the day after, or even if that's even possible.
John Harris, Prairie Public
So what responsibility does Iran bear in all this, in your view?
Dr. Thomas Ambrosio, NDSU
Yeah, so Iran is one of the main backers of Hamas. So, and there has been some reports that Iran helped to train some of its operatives and to potentially work on some of the plans. Now there are also reports coming out that Iran, now there's no question that Iran supports Hamas and has always supported Hamas, financially and militarily.
But the question is whether or not Iran actually knew about this operation. And there are some reports that have come out, and again, we don't know what's going on behind the scenes, that Iran was not happy with Hamas, given the nature of the operation, given the brutality, because that is gonna force other actors, in particular the United States, into the mix and ultimately is going to have Israel eliminate one of Iran's allies, which is Hamas. So when all is said and done, Iran will most likely lose ground, geopolitically, in the region.
John Harris, Prairie Public
Do you think some of the anti-Israel rage is based on anti-Semitism, or is it based on the actions of Israel, sort of militarily over the years, or some of both, obviously?
Dr. Thomas Ambrosio, NDSU
It's gonna be a mixture of the two. Anti-Semitism is really rife, especially in the Middle East, as well as we're seeing now in other places, like Western Europe and even on college campuses. But it's, one of the things that, I come at this very much from, as an outsider, but also as someone who's studied ethnic conflicts throughout the world and throughout history.
And it's hard to say, kind of, who threw the first stone in a situation like this. In some ways, we have to deal with the present rather than the past. And yes, many would say that Israel has occupied these territories.
Israel has kept Gaza in a blockade, and has essentially besieged Gaza, even long before this operation began, because Hamas had controlled Gaza. And therefore, this is kind of just retribution. Some would say that.
But I think at this point, it's kind of hard to separate these two out. At this point, the rage against Israel is so extreme, and we would never have seen the actions by those who committed these atrocities in Israel, unless that rage had reached such a level. At this point, the level of brutality is something that we hadn't seen, except, quite frankly, unfortunately, with groups like ISIS and those types of terrorist organizations.
John Harris, Prairie Public
So is a two-state solution essentially a pipe dream, or could it become a reality?
Dr. Thomas Ambrosio, NDSU
That would be the goal. And when Israel was founded, it was supposed to be a two-state solution. There was supposed to be a state for Israel and a state for the Palestinians.
But in the 1940s, the Arab states invaded, tried to eliminate Israel's existence, and that dream went on the back burner. In the 1960s, Israel occupied the Palestinian territories, and we did not have really any idea of what kind of a two-state solution. In the 1990s, it was revived.
So this has always been the goal now, which is we need a two-state solution. But the problem with two-state solution is you have to have another partner on the other side. Israel is there, it's not going anywhere.
But who is the other partner? It can't be Hamas, because Hamas wants to wipe Israel off the map. It's explicit in their charter, and certainly their activities on October 7th make it so that Israel can never work with them again, or never work with them.
The Palestinian Authority has almost no legitimacy amongst the Palestinian people. So who do you make peace with? So the two-state solution is an idea, and you will have diplomats talking about it, but the reality is it's impossible at this stage, unless there's a fundamental change in the Palestinians, but also a fundamental change in Israel.
A support for a two-state solution has declined every year in Israel since the wave of terrorist attacks that occurred in Israel in the mid-2000s. So the Israelis really aren't on board for a two-state solution, the Palestinians aren't on board for a two-state solution. We can talk about it, and diplomats will, but it's not gonna go anywhere.
John Harris, Prairie Public
So with all this taking place, how do you think the U.S. and the Biden administration has been handling the situation so far?
Dr. Thomas Ambrosio, NDSU
I think they've done as good of a job as they could. From a geopolitical standpoint, the United States made it very clear we're backing Israel 100%. We sent aircraft carriers into the region in order to ensure that no other groups, in particular Iran and their allies, or other allies of Iran, interfered.
So geopolitically, we've done as much as we can with Israel. So I think in that sense, they are an ally of the United States, and therefore we have backed our ally. Within the Democratic Party, we're seeing a division between those who support Israel, mostly the older generation, and then the younger generation who support the Palestinians.
So President Biden also has to deal, not just with the geopolitics of this, but also deal with the domestic politics of this, and in the internal politics of the Democratic Party. And we're starting to see some fractures within the Democratic Party over this issue. And it could even, depending on how things go in some of the swing states, like Michigan, for example, which has a very, very large Arab population, could actually cause Biden to lose the election.
John Harris, Prairie Public
Well, you answered my next question right there. But can you explain to viewers how Israel views all this, and coming at it from their perspective, that there are states surrounded by neighbors who potentially want to harm them?
Dr. Thomas Ambrosio, NDSU
So yeah, I've been to Israel, and I went on a tour to kind of study how they do counterterrorism. And one of the things that they made very clear was that they don't consider the war for their independence and their survival starting and finishing. They see it as a tempo going up and down.
However, October 7th fundamentally changed that. Very much a sea change in Israeli society that we had in the United States after 9-11, and we had in the West after ISIS's attacks in Paris, in which we thought we could live with these terrorist groups, and then we realized we couldn't. And Israel's in that same spot.
Israel's society has fundamentally changed. And we have to see how this all shakes out. But there is gonna be less of a willingness to live with the Palestinians and to work towards peace now than there was on October 6th.
So Israeli society has hardened as a result of this. And it had been hardening for several decades leading up to this. So they see themselves as surrounded by enemies, surrounded by groups that wish to eliminate them as a people.
And in the case of Hamas, it's very clear that that is the case. They look to the north and they see a group in Lebanon, and they see something very similar. They see Iran within the region and Iran's influence.
And for the Israelis, this is a war of survival. It's not a war of territory. It's not a war of geopolitics or anything like that.
For them, it is all about survival.
John Harris, Prairie Public
Are you at least somewhat hopeful by the recent hostage releases that we've seen?
Dr. Thomas Ambrosio, NDSU
I think Hamas released some hostages for a pause in conflict. And this was really pushed by one of the other backers of Hamas, which is Qatar. Qatar, a country in the Persian Gulf, is a close ally of the United States.
The United States kind of worked its pressure on Qatar. But I'm really not hopeful. Again, there is no living together anymore between Hamas and Israel.
And therefore, having these hostages released gave Hamas a pause in the Israeli operation. But at this point, I think probably everyone who's been released is the ones who are gonna be released. And therefore, Israel is gonna move to the next stage.
And we're already starting to see that next stage of military operations. How do you see all this end? We're going to see a grinding military campaign for the next couple of weeks, possibly months.
At a certain point, the United States is going to say it has to stop because the United States is ultimately playing a larger game. The larger game is a geopolitical game in the region and in the world. And the longer this goes on, the more opposition is gonna be and the more problems gonna be for the United States.
So Israel's gonna go as far as it can until the United States says stop.
John Harris, Prairie Public
Well, we are out of time, but if people want more information, where can they go?
Dr. Thomas Ambrosio, NDSU
One thing I would be careful about is looking at podcasts. Be very careful because there's a lot of heightened emotions and a lot of tension about this. One thing I would do, the BBC actually has pretty good coverage about this.
I would stay away from sources in the region pretty much because they obviously have a great stake in it.
John Harris, Prairie Public
Okay, well, thanks for joining us today. Thanks for having me.
NOTE: AI tools created this transcript. It may not be 100-pct correct, so the audio of the broadcast is the official record.