Ask Haviv Anything - 150: The case for Netanyahu, with Gadi Taub

Episode Date: October 4, 2026

To support our work, please consider joining our Patreon community (https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything), Substack (https://havivgur.substack.com/), or Buy Me a Coffee (https://buymeacoffee.com/havivrettiggur).We have merch! Find our awesome new mug and hat at https://shop.askhavivanything.com.And be sure to check us out on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/haviv.rettig.gur/) and TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@haviv.rettig.gur).--Gadi Taub, historian, Hebrew University lecturer and one of the most serious defenders of the Israeli right, says October 7 was a wake-up call that half the country slept through. With elections on October 27, he and Haviv argue it out. Was Netanyahu the war's master strategist or the man who presided over the complacency before it? Was the information war lost or never winnable? They also clash over hostage deals, Gaza aid, Ben Gvir and Arab-sector crime, the attorney general, and whether Israel suffers from tyranny of the majority or of the minority.--This episode is sponsored by the Technion.Israel became the startup nation by turning talent into strength, ideas into industries. For more than a century, the Technion has trained the engineers, the scientists, the entrepreneurs who transformed Israel into the startup nation and delivered breakthroughs that changed the world.Now Technion scientists are advancing the next wave of innovation to help power Israel's next chapter.Israel, engineered by the Technion.Join us. Visit https://ats.org/rebuild.Thank you to the Technion for dedicating this episode.--If you like what we do here, please consider joining our Patreon community at https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything or our Substack at https://havivgur.substack.com/. You can also Buy Me a Coffee at https://buymeacoffee.com/havivrettiggur. It helps us keep the lights on. Patreon and Substack are also the platforms where you can ask the questions that guide the topics we cover on the podcast, join our great discussions where listeners share news and valuable resources, and take part in our monthly livestreams where Haviv answers your questions live.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail]⁠.Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Hi everybody, welcome to a new episode of Ask Khabi. Anything, thank you for joining us. It is my absolute pleasure to welcome today, Gaddi Taub, historian, author, sometimes controversial, always fascinating, Israeli political commentator. I myself have been, as you all know, occasionally a tiny bit,

smidgen, critical of this government. And Gadi is, I think, one of the more interesting and serious defendants. of the Israeli political right, not without a critique of the government in his own ways, but nevertheless, we are in election season. This is one of our continuing explorations of the deeper issues that are running through this election as we head over to October 27 to Election Day. I'm very grateful that Godi Agri to come on. He is a graduate of Tel Aviv University, a student of history and interdisciplinary studies. He has a PhD from Rutgers in the United States.

He teaches at the School of Public Policy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He's a regular commentator on Israeli media and in the international press. Before we get into it, I want to tell you that I am very proud that this episode is sponsored by the Technion. Israel became the Startup Nation by turning talent into strength, ideas, into industries. For more than a century, the Technion has trained the engineers, the scientists, the entrepreneurs, who transformed Israel into the startup nation, and delivered, breakthroughs that changed the world. Now Technion scientists are advancing the next wave of innovation to help power Israel's next chapter. Israel, engineered by the Technion, join us, visit ats.org

slash rebuild. Thank you to the Technion for dedicating this episode. I also would love to invite all of you to join our Patreon and subscribe to our substack. If you're interested in asking the questions that guide the topics we choose to talk about, that's where you do it. You also get to take part in monthly live streams where I answer your questions live. That's at patreon.com slash ask chavivov-ev-anything or chavvgur.com. Those links are in the show notes. Gadi, how are you? I'm good. Thank you for having me and thank you for the nice introduction. Thank you for coming on. I want to dive right into this moment in Israeli history. We have, you know, there's the daily political arguments, there's the daily sort of news cycle.

If you were to step back, let's set the stage a little bit. What is this moment? How do you understand the moment that Israel is in and we'll take it from there? I think we have received a very clear alarm wake-up sign, and I'm not sure we have all woken up. We have been very complacent. Our whole establishment assumed that Israel has generally won the struggle with the Palestinians, and now the question is, will we be generous towards them?

Will we reach out for peace? Or will we be stingy and humiliate them? And that proved to be a completely false picture. I think that what happened to most of us in the aftermath of October 7th is not just the horror, the rediscovery of the fact that the Palestinian national movement is deeply flawed. It's not, as we imagined, a mirror image of Zionism. Its aspiration is not political independence. It is the annihilation of the state of Israel and the genocide towards the Jews.

We thought we have at least erected Jabotinsky's. iron wall and convinced them finally that they can't do it. And on October 7th, we discovered that they have plans that could have been much more effective. And I think, Chaviv, the wake-up call was that, in a sense, it's hard to say lucky about such a display of a sadistic orgy of blood. but we all thought, I think, for a while, that we were in a sense lucky that Ihiya Sinwar jumped the gun. Because if this had been a coordinated attack of Hamas from the south, Hezbollah from the north, the Palestinian Authority, which by now has an army, it's supposed to have a police force,

It has an army of 70,000 people trained for things like parachuting and artillery, not usual police work, and they have armored vehicles. So if they were to join the two other fronts along with militias from Iraq and Syria, as was planned by the Iranian masterminds of the ring of fire that they created around us, all this under the. umbrella of a nuclear Iran, it is more than just doubtful whether Israel had survived. We were living in a sense of false complacency for a very, very long time, and whoever warned against these things was considered an alarmist. I'm sure you'll remember Roman Goffman, then a commander of a tank division standing in a, I think it was the occasion of the acceptance of a new chief of staff. And he was at the podium saying to all the brass of the IDF,

why don't you use us? An army loses its muscle if it's not operating against enemies. And they all sat there and laughed at this Oleg Hadash, this new immigrant with a heavy Russian accent, as if he was living in the past, because they all said, you know, wars are a thing of the past. There's just now asymmetric conflict. We know how to deter our enemies and all that. And Israel might have been on the brink of extinction.

I think that ever since October 7, one side of the political map has been working to bring back that complacency. And that is a very dangerous thing. These leaders of the opposition throughout the war demanded that we accede to all the demands of Hamas in return for hostages. You know, Habib I'm a historian, I don't know a single instance in history where a nation capitulated for the single benefit of returning its hostages or POWs. There's no such thing. And had we done that, that would have been suicidal. So I think that the lesson was not internalized by many Israelis. And if you want, I'll elaborate on how that happened because I think, and I've been saying

this for a long time, the problem is the media. The problem, the basic problem, our inability to wake up is that we are led astray by a media with a very clear progressive agenda. agenda. All right. Let's take these things. You raised all of the issues. Let's take them one at a time. Well, many of them. Let's take them one at a time. The waking up, you know, obviously, I share everybody understands that. Left wingers and right wingers poured into the army, into the armed forces, went to all the fronts. But the conversation that I heard among, let's say, opposition politicians about, for example, hostage negotiations. And I share, with you the very hawkish position when we were talking about hostage negotiations back in 2024, when we were talking about going into Rafa, etc. Nevertheless, the question was trust.

And the idea that you heard most often among protesters, opposition leaders, was, is Bibi fighting the war for the reasons you said in the, you know, making decisions based on the need to stand firm against Hamas on many fronts? Or is he terrified? of the political consequences of October 7 and trying to actually delay the war, delay hostage deals that are available. In the end, he did agree to hostage deals with Hamas and, in fact, is guided by his politics. Now, that distrust comes from many things, and it's old, but that distrust also comes from the fact that everything you described about that complacency, this was the government of that complacency. And Netanyahu, for

I don't know, 15 the last 17 years, I didn't do the math. So if that's wrong, just, is the man who decided on this particular policy of containment and of the Qatari money that flowed in? And he made at the end the call. Now, even if most Israelis agreed with it, we have good polling on that. There was no opposition, there was very little opposition critique of that, but he's the guy who, you know, the buck stops with him. He made the decision. So how much fault for that complacency do you place on this government? And how much is that what this election is about? Well, you raise quite a few issues. I'll start with the hostages. My problem with Netanyahu is he is always too eager to return hostages. He made a terrible mistake with the Shalit deal. He signaled to our

enemies that we would do almost anything to return hostages, anything used to mean then, giving them their terrorists back. Now they wanted to stop the machine of war with threatening us with our hostages. We should have been tight-lipped. We should have pretended the maximum of our ability that we don't care about the hostages, and we couldn't do it. As I said many times, the most morally disgusting thing that happened in Israel during the war is the campaign, to topple the government which disguised itself as a campaign for the hostages. Not even a child thinks that if you shout now, now you are actually promoting the return of the hostages. What it does is just encourages Hamas to persevere. And that's what that campaign did.

And we should never, ever forgive them for that. Netanyahu, as I said, was far too eager to return the hostages. If we could have played a harsher poker, we would have returned them. And he did. He insisted on better deals. And in the end, it's a customer in Israel, especially on the left, to give sole credit to Donald Trump for the deal. He surely deserves credit. But remember that before that, what really got us near a deal is the fact that the IDF moved into Gaza City and also bombed Doha, the capital of Qatar. And this is what isolated, this is what broke the connection between, I'll say this way, Qatar stopped supporting Hamas internationally after that. Now, as for Netanyahu's interest in running the war, I think we are extremely lucky that he was at the helm.

I am not going to evade your question about his responsibility before October 7, but he was the exemplary case of breaking out of the conceptia, of throwing aside all the complacency that we had before in completely changing his turn of mind. And, you know, I have an English-speaking podcast with Mike Duran called Israel Update. And we have been saying since the beginning of the war, when everyone was warning that Netanyahu's reckless behavior is going to continue the war, it is going to enlarge the war, is going to make it a regional war. And we kept saying Netanyahu is aiming for a regional war under extreme pressure to stop the war from Biden, from our irresponsible opposition, from our press. which served the propaganda of Hamas, more or less with its defeatism. All these pressures, Netanyahu alone insisted not on continuing the war, not just on continuing the war, but of enlarging it. Netanyahu treated every front until it stopped being an existential danger and then

moved the war to the next front. And he was doing this arch maneuver of enlarging. the war from Gaza to Lebanon to Syria to Tehran. This was the aim from the beginning. And if historians look back at this war, this would reveal itself to be the master plan. Now, I put it in very blunt terms, you know, when I interviewed the prime minister, I said to him, you know, Mike Durand, he knows him too. Mike Durand and I said from the beginning that you are aiming from a regional war.

He didn't like the terms, but he had this half smile and he said, well, it didn't all happen by coincidence. And the fact that this man, on the second day of the war, understood that this is not just a terrible disaster, but also an opportunity to turn the tables on Iran's drive to hegemony is, I think, the thing he would be most. remembered for. So any attempt to portray Netanyahu's conduct of the war as if it is just motivated by by politics or by political survival is I think grossly mistaken. Because if he had wanted to win points with Israeli voters, he would have finished at least Gaza before moving anywhere else. And then it would be total victory and a great celebration and the return of the hostages and whatnot. He never, he kept upping the risk of his political career with very bold decisions because this man for 40 years has got his eye on Iran as the

major danger. And I think that although the war with Iran has not ended, I think that Iran, the Iranian regime, would not be able to become the threat that it was before October 7. Gandhi, on October 8 on a podcast, I myself suggested something I had heard from many others in the Israeli conversation, that this war doesn't end in Gaza, it goes to, Hezbollah, goes to Iran. it was clear that that was the deep strategic depth of Hamas. It was clear that that had a big part of it, the whole mucoma axis that had come for us. And that was no longer tolerable because they are not deterrable because they're willing to bring this kind of destruction onto Gaza, onto Lebanon, onto Iran. And this was going to be the regional war.

And I completely agree with you. And it praised Netanyahu's decisions on expanding that war, on understanding that, ongoing for that. I'm not sure the opposition would have been as timid. as you portray them on the regional war question. I have not heard tremendous criticism of Netanyahu from the lapids of Israeli politics were going to the Iran War.

But I have heard, I have heard, I have made the following criticism in his management, for example, of the war in Gaza, which is a different kind of timidity. It's a timidity. It's a fearfulness toward his own coalition. It's a fearfulness for his political position. And that is his refusal to narrate the war in Gaza.

Israel went to a war in Gaza that, you know, our audience here in English is going to be foreigners. So just many are going to hear this and they're going to think about the demolition of Gaza, the destruction in Gaza. Let's imagine for a moment that that is absolutely necessary for the war effort. Nobody says the war is perfectly fought, obviously. But nevertheless, that is the strategy you need to take out that tunnel system and that kind of embedded, like with denotification of Germany, that kind of an embedded regime and ideology. that's the war you have to go to. Well, if the word you have to go to involves the practical demolition of cities,

shouldn't you be saying publicly to a world that's watching that the goal is a different Gaza, a different future, a better day after? Shouldn't the goal be framed clearly rather than have minister after minister on the far right reaching into Likud as well saying this is actually about kicking out all the Palestinians and they're all going to leave Gaza? Shouldn't Netanyahu be working on that aspect of the war? war, which the next American president may well impose sanctions on Israel. The next UN Security Council and the American veto is no longer on our side. The Europeans are shifting. I have not in this

war. He went just to finish the question two years without having someone in the only serious position of the prime minister's office even charged with dealing with a public information war. And that was a failure because I don't think he had a message that he could thread a needle between what he thought the Americans needed to hear and what he thought Ben Gavir needed to hear. That to me is one of the big failures of this war, and it's a failure we're going to be paying for for years to come. Yeah, my sole disagreement with that

is that I don't know that any spokeperson's trick or narrative would have done the job. And I'll just address briefly what you said about the opposition. The opposition wanted to stop the war from the get-go. From the get-go, they wanted to bow down to what Biden wanted. They kept talking about the day after Ophick-Medin, a political horizon, bringing back the Palestinian authority to Gaza, which was completely ridiculous because it had never had any strength.

And I distinctly remember that even at the moment that things were shifting in our favor, decidedly, Gaddy Eisencott went on a podcast four days after the Beeper operation and said, now is the time to strike a deal with Chisbalah. These people irresponsibly wanted to stop the war from day one. It's all on record. I am very sorry that Likud is not pulling this out and putting it in their faces day by day, because they all wanted to surrender. And these are, you know, the people who have, you know, Netanyahu is a master chess player in politics.

It's on the world stage. And then you have amateurs like Lapid, gallant, guns, people who went to the Americans and negotiated behind Netanyahu's back from within the cabinet or from the opposition. And what they kept saying is that we want a no-secret. policy with the United States because these are our friends. But note, if you understand basic geopolitics, if you say to a superpower, we have no secrets with you. Then what you create is a situation in which your voice no longer counts, and anyone who wants to deal with you goes to Washington, not to Jerusalem, because they know that any policy

that you are going to implement will need a permission from the Americans. Look, I interviewed Netanyahu at length about taking the decisions throughout the war, and especially under the Biden administration. And his whole cabinet said, well, let's tell the Americans first. And he kept saying, no way. He only allowed his people to disclose to the American that we are taking out Nasrallah while the planes were already on the way to doing it. So this is a critical thing,

and I don't think there is any politician who would have been able to play this complicated chess against a hostile administration like Bidens or with a friendly administration like Trump. Yeah. I share the sense that Nizeniao is much more competent at strategy. By the way, you see it right now in the Likud campaign. The first thing Nizaniao did was force and pressure and wield as much political power as he could

to close, to force a teaming up of small political factions to avoid losing votes below the threshold. Something that over on the opposition parties, nobody really has the authority to do and nobody is seriously talking and campaigning to do. He should have lowered the threshold while he had the Knesset for so long.

This is one of my questions. This is a major fault of his strategy. That threshold is a disaster. and it should lower that threshold. I agree. But I also want to double down on the question of the information war because, Gaddi, I have lived in the information war. It doesn't matter if I'm explaining that Netanyahu has a very good reason for going into Rafiak,

even when the Biden administration doesn't think he should. That's literally the main avenue for Hamas constantly rearming and the war dragging out interminably, and Gaza suffering vastly more. But every time I would issue that kind of an argument, somebody would bring me that week's argument by an Israeli minister that all Gazans should leave Gaza, that this was actually about ethnic cleansing. And there was never, the Israeli government never responded out loud to anything. There's zero capability. Netanyahu never said anything like that. He never joined that chorus. But he said cats did. And Ben-Vill and Smoltwich

saying it in Tanyao never saying that's not the Pahl. He did occasionally very late in the game when the Trump administration was paying a political cost, start to say a few things like that very hesitatingly. We have totally, for domestic politics, neglected that arena. I have to tell you, we did not starve Gaza at all. There was a real hunger crisis, but the Israeli government pretended to starve Gaza. The Israeli government declared an aid blockage.

The Israeli government thought there was a lot of food still there. The food dried up quickly because of hoarding, because of Hamas, because of all those reasons. And then the Israeli government is stunned when there really is. something of a hunger crisis last summer and never did did the Israeli government ever think that maybe that was the moment that the German chancellor who stood by us publicly and loudly for all of 2024 that might be the moment that breaks him and so we didn't just it wasn't just that another spokesman could have done something

clever this israeli government on this question of the information war which is the main arena in which Hamas was fighting this government and which we cannot win and which we cannot win which is an important thing and I and I'll say this, I share your criticism. It could have been handled much better, but Netanyahu has in the Israeli coalition system, which, you know, Ben-Dorimini once called Miutocratia. Help me translate that. Rule by minority.

Rule by minority. Yeah. Well, I wanted something more sounding like democracy. Minoritocracy is very good. It's the situation, especially with a high threshold, creates a situation in which, small parties can extort concessions from the majority with disproportional to their own actual weight among the electorate. And we saw the epitome of this corruption with the Bennett stunt in which he forced on

the Knesset his own premiership with six members of Knesset. So there is a terrible flaw in the system. And Netanyahu cannot always discipline all of his coalition, but he can enforce his decisions. And the decisions are, the decisions were, in my opinion, we gave way too many concessions to the pressure for humanitarian aid. In what war, tell me, Javiv, has the humanitarian situation of the enemy population being the responsibility of the victim of the beginning of the war, of the enemy. Why do you know in history a situation in which, I don't know, the British felt responsible for the well-being of the Germans in World War II?

We have taken way too much responsibility and we did not use aid effectively. how we got the, and this is according to international law, remember how we got the first hostage deal. We said, no aid, no water, no food until you give us back our hostages. This should have been our position. And if you go to the Rules of War manual of the Department of War in the United States, in the Pentagon, you will see that a siege is a perfectly legitimate instrument of war. We didn't even employ a siege. Well, we could have said, and this was what I was advocating, along with a few members of

Knesset like Amita Levi, we said, and the IDF refused to do it, because we need to be holier than the Pope in international law. What we advocated was perfectly legal. We said, divide Gaza into zones, create a humanitarian exit for everyone who is a civilian, create a safe haven for them, and then lock it and say, anyone who stays in this area is a combatant. You will get no food, no water, no gas until you come up with your arms above your head and give us back our hostages. And we did not do that. Why did we do that?

Because, Kaviv, the problem is we are always put in a situation of double standards where we, what is demanded from us is way over what is demanded from anybody. And I'll give you a vivid example. No army has ever made such efforts to avoid civilian casualties in the history of war. Ask General Richard Kemp, Colonel Richard Kemp. Ask a professional military men. The casualties, civilian casualties, in the ratio of civilian casualties to combatant casualties, is between one and one point four in this war. 1.4 civilians per combatant.

In the attack on Musul and Raqa by the American-led coalition, it was one combatant to between seven and seven and. nine civilian casualties. So we made unbelievable efforts to be humane, to protect the civilians of the enemy. And it is an enemy that deliberately put civilians in harm's way. And still, we need to apologize. And I think that at one point, we should just ignore the criticism because whatever we do will never be enough and just say, you know, don't like us, but fear us, because we need to protect ourselves, and we will exact a disproportional price from anyone who attempts a genocide of the Jewish people. I have been polite so far, because my frustration with Netanyahu is much, much deeper, and everything you're saying, the parts of what you're saying that I agree

with drive me to that most bitter frustration. The first hostage deal, which I followed very closely, friends of ours were actually taken hostage. And we were part of the family's campaign and helping them. Aid blocking didn't produce that first hostage deal. There were children among those hostages. That was very bad for Hamas, the old women among the hostages. And Qatar explained this to them and said to them, you'll have an easier time extorting more for the other hostages if you let go of these vulnerable hostages. And that's how in the end, Hamas was brought about to that deal for its own interests. And that's an important thing to say because blocking aid was never successful. It was vastly costly for Israel. And it's not just,

we're leaving the moral questions aside. You raise them, the question of aid in war and who owes who what, is critical and important. And I'm going to let all the lawyers and all the, I don't know what, rabbis or moralists figure that one out. But just as a strategy, Hamas's foundational strategy is Palestinian suffering. That tunnel system with 600 kilometers of tunnels under a 40 kilometer territory, the biggest bomb shelter system in the history of war, the most comprehensive bomb shelter system, history of war, and not a single Ghazan child is allowed into it in three years of war. And there's a reason for that. That is not an Israeli talking point. That's the foundation of Hamas' strategy is Ghazan civilian suffering. And at no point in any of that,

in three years of war, have I seen... from the Israelis, any understanding that if you play chicken with the well-being of Ghazan civilians, you will lose. Hamas is much more willing to have Gazans die than the Israelis are willing.

But they did this. They played this stupid game, this unbelievably incompetent game in which we're going to blockade, we're not going to blockade. Hamas wants Gaza destroyed because Hamas wins from Gaza's destruction. It has no other path.

It has no other leverage. It has nothing else. It can do to us. Khamas has lost. What do you mean? What do you mean Khamas has lost? It's still in power. In every piece of Gaza it controls, there's no other political power that can take over from it.

It's completely desperate and isolated. We control more than 60% of Gaza. We will not get out of there in the foreseeable future because what Netanyahu orchestrated, I was very critical of the deal when it happened. we've gone all this way in order to stop before we destroy them completely. And then after everything could, I said, well, this deal will be judged by its results. And what it achieved is an international agreement on the disarmament of Hamas. Hamas will not disarm itself and therefore Israel will not retreat.

The other option is that Israel will go in there. and finish the job at one point. So the situation now is Hamas is completely isolated and helpless and lives among the population that shows it, which is very hostile to Israel. Now what I would like to see is that the people who have orchestrated the so-called Palestinian refugee problem in which what was originally 700,000 people,

and now claimed 5.5 million refugees. This is the only people in the world in which a refugee status is hereditary, even when you get citizenship in another country. So the Arab world and the international community have labored to keep this problem festering in order to help it undermine Israel. That is the case, because refugees in any war zone are being reached. settled. Why did the Egypt and the international community refused to let Gazans who want to leave leave? That is the question we should be asking, and what we should be working for now

is helping those who want to leave, leave Gaza. Because what Israel cannot do, Habib, what it cannot do is repeat the terrible mistake which I regret supporting of you. unilateral withdrawal. And if anybody thinks that if you bring the Palestinian Authority back, let me tell you, the Palestinian Authority has spokespeople in Arabic bragging that their people, their security apparatus people, kill more Jews than Hamas in Judean Samaria. The Palestinian authority is not a solution to anything. And what people don't realize in my view, is that the struggle over today in Samaria is not over. The majority of the mountain ridge, which is area A and B,

is being repopulated by Palestinians with the aid of the European Union. And if you look at the map, the future of this process, if we do not stop it, is another Gaza six times larger. This is just the mountain ridge, because the whole of Judean's, Samaria is 15 times larger, overlooking the centers of our population, and anyone who wants another hit not-kut, another disengagement, is going to have another terror state overlooking Tel Aviv and the narrow nine-mile waste of Israel where the majority of our population is concentrated.

And this is why, Chaviv, I think there's a great difference between the left and the right, which I'll try to be as fair as I can in defining. And this was the beginning of our conversation. The left thinks that we have won the war and we are in a position of strength. And the right thinks that we are in mortal danger. And therefore, the moral image of Israel in the face of the world is an important consideration, but secondary to our. survival and we have to be excuse the term Machiavellian to an extent that is

remember that it is better to be feared than to be loved and in this region if we are not feared we will be destroyed and what will be done to us is what we saw on October 7 you know in the in the in the the days of being dazed after October 7 I don't know where you live. I live in Tel Aviv, but I found myself checking the hook, inner lock on my door and my keys. And I applied to the new regulations by Ben-Gviel to get a gun, which I didn't, because I live in a safe place. And it didn't help even that in those days, once a week, I was to go into Judean Samaria for Radio Call Israel, where I worked. But I remember looking at yuppies in Tel Aviv and saying, did these people check their locks?

Have any of them applied for a gun? Because this can happen. The Arab population of Israel has an estimate of one million long firearms now. Can we be sure that Shomer Khomot, the eruption of lynches against Israelis by Arab citizens in May 2021 will not repeat itself. Are we not sleeping on our

noses in the face of a growing army that the Palestinian Authority is training? So I guess the we are not the difference between us is not of values but of an

assessment of the existential situation. The PA going into Gaza is a stupid idea. I share with you. The PA is deeply hated by Palestinians and the West Bank primarily because it isn't Hamas.

It doesn't murder Israelis as often. It doesn't seek out violence. It has tried to cooperate with Israeli security services, for example. And that means that it pulls in the single digits. And so, you know, there's this discourse in the international press that Bibi won't let the P.E. into Gaza and that's part of BB not planning for the day after and it's profoundly silly because long before BB can be the obstacle Gazans don't want the

PA that is not a thing that they don't want the PA because it isn't actively trying to take home that what we need in Gaza and what we need in every Palestinian population is a deep devadicalization away from the idea that Israel is destroyable that Israelis are somehow a fake thing that can be wished away that can be murdered away. It's a bigger question and a bigger project, and I share that point. But, you know, I think you are describing what I hear from right-wingers, the sense of the scale of siege and the scale of being surrounded. But this government does almost nothing about any of it. For example, those guns held by Arab Israelis, that's mostly organized crime. And this government has not

failed miserably, it has deliberately, Benville has deliberately refused to tackle Arab organized crime, deliberately refused to enter and expand the program that was already underway of creating more police stations in the Arab community. Netanyahu has invested massively in all kinds of projects in the Arab community from public transportation to negative income tax for working mothers that drove some, I don't know, remember the details, but something like 10% of Arab households above the poverty line. And this government, the last four years, have been a reversal of almost in every way, especially on the question of crime. So we're not headed to a place where we're going to be safer if there's an ethnic

explosion on the model of 2021 that we saw in some of the mixed cities like in Jaffel. We're headed to a place where people like Benville want that, are actively hoping for that. My take on it that this government is far from being right enough, far from being right-wing. enough. And I just interviewed Ben Gvier a while ago, and I said, I said this to him. I said, you haven't, you haven't dismantled the crime infrastructure of a single Arab village. And he said, you know, we tried, but it was blocked by the Attorney General. That's a lie. And it's repeatedly blocked by the Attorney General. That's a lie. They wanted, they wanted to bring Shabak in, which to me is a very, I fear Shabak. Shabak is always

secret police is a very dangerous organization, and Shabakh operates outside the proper green line Israel in the territories, in Judean, Samaria, and it operated in Gaza miserably, as we now know, blindly, it is obsessed with Jewish violence and is making endless concessions to Arab violence. But the attempt to bring Shabak to bear, which is the only thing to do now the police is helpless, the only thing to do is bring Shabakh to bear is blocked by the Attorney General who is also the advisor. It's not advisor. It's the counselor. I don't know the term.

The legal counsel to the executive, which in Israel has powers like legal advisors have nowhere. It has a veto power. So this has not happened. But if you get a left-wing government now, which keeps talking about. talking about the murder rate in the Arab community, you are going to have Mansour Abbas. You are going to have Yaira Ghoulin, who is now saying that he will grant legality to all the illegal settlement of Bedouins inside the Negan. They are against the policy of reigning in Bedouin crime.

So you think that with Mansour Abbas in the government, which is basically the Muslim Brotherhood in another disguise, It will be better. You change the subject. We're talking about Ben-Ville's claim that the police can't possibly do it has never been true. The police did it. They did it with Jewish organized crime in a massive crackdown. And they were doing it with Arab-organized crime.

And he made a deliberate decision to avoid it. I agree with you. There are a dozen reasons. I'm not going to protect Ben-Gvir on this. But without proper backing, he cannot do it. Manso-Rabas, Rodin, you have Segalovich. The task force guy at the time. the Israel police on the question of Arab crime

to be his number two of his list. We saw how successful Yovsingalovic was. But the voters Islam's voters respond well to that. They're polling better because they think, Arab voters 70% say this is the big problem. Crime. Not Gaza, not

Palestinian nationalism, not anything. Crime. There is a willingness here. And I don't get, I don't believe Benville that it's literally not possible. I don't know if you saw. I agree with you. Shabak is maybe necessary, but the right-wing reasons not to do it. Left-wing reasons not.

The Shabak is not how you deal with crime. And building and strengthening the Israel police is how you deal with crime. There is no real difference between criminal and terrorist organizations. There's no clear line between them in the Arab sector. It's far more dangerous than we realize I share your criticism on this right-wing government. I'm only saying that a left-wing government, will be far more lenient, not more tough on crime in the Arab sector, and that when you actually look into the data, the problem is, yes, the Arab population is complaining.

However, it is extremely hard to find any witnesses. This is partly why the police is so helpless, because the snitching of fellow Arabs is still considered a taboo in most of the Arab society. So it's very easy to float slogans about how we should treat this. If we don't fire this outrageous Attorney General and if Netanyahu's next government does not put all its weight into this danger, then we are in mortal danger. If the Arab population Israel rises against us in October 7 manner, along with the enemy population of Judean Samaria, of the Palestinian Authority, then this is an existential danger. I completely agree.

I have a lot of criticism of this Attorney General. I once interviewed Amnon Rubenstein of Meritz, the author of the Basic Law, Human Dignity and Liberty, Minister of Education, law school dean, who said to me in the interview 15 years ago, the Attorney General's position is unconscionable. It is a conflict of interest built in, and it has to be split into two different institutions. This is left-wing, progressive, father of Israel's constitution, in as much as we have one, and said something that today is absolutely a right-wing. position about the Attorney General's position. Until the police minister wants to be a police

minister doing police work rather than the, frankly, racist policies that he is actually wants, that he actually advocates, until he wants to tackle Arab organized crime, nobody can be set in his way. Which racist policies? He refuses to serve the Arab community as a police force. He refuses. Oh, I don't think that's true. He defunds those departments. It's not something that's a priority. You talk to police officers who deal with the murders in the Arab community, and you will find that they feel that there's absolutely nothing. The orders from Mon Haid are let them deal with their problems. And when he's challenged on it, he talks in those terms.

Let them deal with their problems. I haven't heard it from him after I interviewed him. If he does speak in that way, I would like to hear the exact quotes. And if that's what he says, it's outrageous. But the problem is endemic. And it will not be solved by a decision of a single minister. The government has to deploy its whole apparatus of state in order to clamp down on this and disarm these crime organizations, which, as I said, are also potential terrorist organizations. But it will not happen unless Shabakh is brought into the picture, because police has to operate.

And this is unpleasant in a democratic state. But police has to operate only on the basis of suspicions. While the Shabak, I don't know what the English term is, can operate for what we call menia. Prevention. There are much looser evidence rules. They're much looser, holding, arrest rules. But there's more to it. Prevention allows you to spy on people without a specific suspicion.

And so it allows you to penetrate. It's a powerful weapon, which is very problematic in terms of human rights, but without which I don't think we will be able to penetrate these huge crime organizations, which have become an existential danger. And therefore, we need to employ the means of a secret. police in order to stop this. Now, as long as the Attorney General vetoes the ability to use Shabak, which I've heard from more than just Benville, for many ministers, is necessary to tackle this problem. If we do not get the permission of Her Highness, the true sovereign

of Israel, to use the Shabakh, the problem will not be solved by our rather incompetent police if you allow me to say so with its very weak chief of police that we currently have. I want to tackle a social question. You wrote a book that hurt my feelings. I did. I'm sorry, Habiz. Yes. That was not the intention. I'm surprised you would dare to do so. Neyadim and Nehadim, mobile and what were the translation? being mobile and rooted, sedentary, e-mobile, yeah, yeah. Right, where you're doing, please.

No, there's a much better translation, I mean, translation. It's basically rooted in. There are much better original terms by John Goodhart, who wrote a very different thesis based on the same sociological definition, and he called them the Anywheres and the Somewheres. And that's perfect, but I completely disagree with the rest of his analysis. But I wish I had thought of his terms before him.

The book frames a lot of the culture war, the cultural divide between basically, basically, coalition voters and opposition voters in this government. So in this, in this, Knesset, it basically divides the country into internationally mobile elites. who can leave, who have jobs waiting for them in Silicon Valley, who have a more global understanding of the world and of themselves. Global misunderstanding of the world, yeah. And Israelis whose lives, whose political position, who's standing in the world, whose understanding of the world, is deeply rooted in the nation, in the place.

Mobility means you can leave, and doesn't mean you're exercising it, but it means you live in a different world if you perceive yourself as able to leave. Now, we have over the last three years, this did not begin with October 7. This began with the fight over the judicial reform. We have seen a departure from Israel, a long-term departure from Israel, of we don't know the number, maybe 200,000. We know that tens of thousands are Ukrainians who used an Israeli visa or an Israeli-Ali-approval to get out of Ukraine and move on. We know also that there's a lot of turnover anywhere. There were economic changes that happened.

There were a lot of reasons, and they have nothing to do with politics, with culture war, with the sense of being pushed out. However, I did a live stream just a few days ago for my subscribers. We have thousands of them. We keep getting these questions. One person from Cholon, Israeli, listens to us in English, talks to us in English, but we have a Hebrew language conversation. It says, I feel increasingly squeezed out of my country. country. And I know I have friends who feel that they don't belong. And it's not about the war. He wants his children to grow up somewhere. He writes that he wrote this into the live stream

as his question. He wants his children to go up somewhere where they are rooted. But this country is becoming more religious and more religiously coercive. And the political world that rules this country and is going to rule it for a long time to come for the foreseeable future is pushing him as a secular Israeli who's not super left wing as a secular Israeli out of a feeling of belonging out of the argument that he belonged

he is the problem against that they are framing as the thing they are coming to solve and he says what place do I have in this country and the question did not was not I'm leaving screw this the question was this is pain

this is torment and we know that there are I don't know what of the 200,000 who have left are that, but maybe 70,000, maybe 150,000. I don't know, but real numbers. Where does your thesis, that mobile versus rooted? Is it coming to fruition? Is it a self-fulfilling prophecy? If the right thinks this way about what it calls the left, who are not all that left wing in the terms of any other country, what do you make of your thesis when we know that the skyscrapers of Tel Aviv emptied out into the army after October 7.

Have you rethought any of that thesis? I'll stop the question here. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. A friend on Twitter told me that I should revise the thesis and call the mobile classes, the imaginary mobile classes. They imagine that they are mobile. They like to threaten that they leave, but they do not.

The actual numbers in recent years, there's a decline. If we take out the Ukrainians that came and went, there's a decline in immigration outside of Israel. And the fear among these, the liberal elites stoked by the press as if a religious, a dictatorship, theocracy is upon us, is mostly the propaganda of the, of the, of the, of the radical left, mind you that the fact that we have a right-wing government with a religious and extremely religious flank is because of the boycott of the whole of the left on Netanyahu and his party. It's never actually just Netanyahu. So you are not willing to take part of the government and moderate it and you are pushing it to

to the right. And there's extreme demonization of the religious and the right wingers. They are portrayed as lowbrow idiots who follow their leader like a cult. And this always makes me laugh, Javiv, because if there is a herd in Israel, it's the Kaplan herd who did not know anything about judicial reform and were convinced that this is the end of democracy. They did not know anything. It was ridiculous. Watch the tiny snippets that Hadar Mukhtar does when she goes to interview him. I keep saying the Kaplan crowd, the protesters, are the sector with the lowest political literacy in Israel. You can sell almost anything to these people. You can sell them Qatargate that the Netanyahu office is infested with Qatari agents. Are they kidding? These

These people served Qatar all throughout the war. They went to demonstrate for stopping the war every single Saturday as Qatar wanted. And Netanyahu stood firm against Qatar and finally attacked Qatar. But you can sell anything to them because the press has deliberately turned their minds into puree. And so they fear this religious dictatorship. Mashed potatoes. That is mashed potatoes.

That is mashed potatoes, yeah. You know, I took, I'm not religious, but if there is a danger in the city where I live, the danger is the attack on religion where the municipality of Tel Aviv tried to forbid public Jewish prayers in separation between men and women, which is the traditional kind of prayer in Israel. And myself, along with a very religious friend, we took part. part in arranging after the Supreme Court supported us against the Tel Aviv municipality, because I'm not religious, but it's outrageous to me that a traditional Jewish prayer

cannot be allowed in the first Hebrew city that Zionism has created. Imagine if that was forbidden in Berlin. The whole world would shout anti-Semitism. You still see an elite that is unruited and easily uprooted. and will leave or thinks it can leave, but anti-Semitism keeps it here? I think there is an elite that has imagined itself as part of a global elite which rejects it. I've called this in my book I wrote almost 30 years ago. I call it people who think of themselves as citizens of the floating international

republic of Seinfeld viewers. Now it's Netflix viewers. They imagine themselves, and you're right, I should have revised it. the thesis because they imagine something that is non-existent and which will completely reject them. What my friend, Irit Lino, says, for them, the Jewish state is Sweden in Hebrew. They want to banish anything that is actually Jewish. And that's a very small elite. But if you see what is going on in the curricula of students in Tel Aviv, there is almost no Bible study.

and the minister of education, which has not done, the Likud minister of education, which has not done a good job, in my opinion, is fighting for a single hour of compulsory Bible studies in our Hebrew schools, in our state-sponsored schools. That is unbelievable, because what has taken over there is exactly what I call the mobile. They're teaching a citizenship classes, as if citizenship. with just a relation between individuals and a neutral state. There is nothing national. There is nothing of the historical.

Can I challenge you on this? Sure. I think that the secular see something very serious. For one thing, there's an Israel Democracy Institute study back in 23 of the 2022 election. And they correlated whether you voted for opposition or coalition to all kinds of different metrics, whether it's income, whether it's ethnicity, Mizrahi Ashkenazi and also Arab Jewish, they correlated it to every possible thing you could have.

And the single thing that is by far the most correlated to whether you voted coalition or opposition is your level of religiosity. The more religious you are, whether it's Masalti traditional or religious Zionist or Haredi. The more religious you are, the more you voted coalition. And that is, you know, 75% of all religious people in Israel who claim any kind of religiosity voted coalition.

The more secular you are, the more you vote. opposition. But that's what Lieberman, pretty hawkish on many things, is doing over in the opposition. It's secular. Israeli politics divided into a basically two coalitions, the religious one and the secular one. And if you dismantle, and this explodes in judicial reform, because we do have a ridiculously powerful, unhealthily powerful Supreme Court, and also the fewest actual checks and balances of any democracy in existence, anywhere else in the system, which, by the way, is how the Supreme Court became that powerful over the decades. And so I come to this as...

Oh, I thought you were saying there were no checks and balances against Supreme Court, which I agree with. I come to them as a huge supporter. The cabinet in Israel, the cabinet in Israel is the weakest branch of government, and this is our problem. The cabinet made up of five leaders of coalition parties who personally appointed the entire parliamentary majority? Yes, yes, indeed. They're very weak in the system because of the Supreme Court came up with their ever step. The executive is the weakest branch of government because it is susceptible to what we call mutatia, to minorityocracy, as you as you brilliantly defined it, because a single member of Knesset can take down the government, as happened with Ediths, and this is a situation which we must fix. The executive is susceptible to too many vectors of extortion by small parties, and the idea

that it controls the Knesset. The Knesset controls the executive far more than it should in a parliamentary democracy. I think that the court is far too powerful, ridiculously powerful. I agree. We did an episode here on Derri Pinkasi on how the court invented powers for the attorney general as the long arm of the court and they did it to Rabin. They didn't, this,

Aron Barak begins his stampede through the Israeli state with Rabin and before left ringers come at me, go to that episode, then come at me, happy to have that conversation. I'm sure I'll be happy to watch that episode because I completely agree. Don't do it without going through Deripin-Khasi first,

but that decision 35 years ago, whatever it was. But there are no other checks in the sense that we have a single constituency proportional representation system, that proportional representation is elects a Knesset, which elects a cabinet. And almost in every case, in Netanyahu's case, there are primaries in the Likud, but they're very weak primaries. He has immense influence over the list. He actually literally threatened to cancel the primaries this time to have more influence over the list.

The people sitting in the cabinet personally elected the parliamentary majority. You don't have personal election of MPs like you do in Britain or Australia or other places. We have very little Constitution, we have very few other checks. And if the danger of democracy since Aristotle is majority tyranny, which is a problem, the majority should have its way, but slowly while guaranteeing minority rights, if that's the great danger of democracy, we have nothing but the court. If the right wing of Israel wants seriously to do not to be dismantling democracy in favor of their power and the demographic future where they win everything, which is how it's talked about in many coalition conversations, but in fact to convince the secular left wing that it is going to be

a democracy, we are going forward with checks and balances, weakening the court is really important. It's unhealthy what it has become. A court that a couple of years ago actually overruled that basic law changed by the Knesset, meaning it no longer even accepts its own ground rules for its own power. It's a sovereign. It's a sovereign. But then on the other side, the political right has to come and say to a half of Israel that it doesn't represent, it doesn't claim to represent.

It runs against and demonizes in every election campaign, the secular who really are not represented in this coalition. It really is a religious versus secular divide more than any other thing that it could be. It has to say to them, ah, but here are actually your protections. Here's why I won't be able to come into Tel Aviv and change your existence in Tel Aviv to look the way I wanted to look like, I don't know what, Jerusalem. How do you build a real constitutional moment? How do you take responsibility? How do you force a Ben-Gvir to actually take responsibility for crime in Israel? How do you create a culture that says, I have an agenda.

I'm going to weaken this court. I'm going to fulfill my agenda that I'm elected to fulfill the education system, but I'm also going to guarantee and ensure that this will be responsible, that it'll be serious. We have a deep irresponsibility crisis in Israeli governance. You know and I know ministers who are not doing their jobs, and judicial reform is where it really becomes powerful. Those secular people are not idiots. They're not dumb.

They're not necessarily able to articulate. easily what it is they're responding to, but they're responding to a real problem that this right wing refuses to answer for, refuses to take seriously. I disagree on the premises. And the problem of the Israeli system is not a tyranny of the majority. It's the inability of the majority to bring its will to bear on politics. We have a permanent right-wing majority, and we are unable to be to implement a consistent right-wing policy which the majority of the public wants. Because the majority, the checks and the balances have been created by the fact that, you know, my friend Yotam Zimri jokes that the right-wing government is the actual only check on power

on Israel, because the power is not residing in electoral politics. The state is run by a Supreme Court which decides everything. at once and a powerful bureaucracy and a huge elite which threatens to burn down the house if any of its power is taken away. There is no danger of the tyranny of the majority in Israel that I know of. There is a great check on the tyranny of the majority, and the Israeli law is extremely careful with human rights. The people who are playing fast and loose with minority and individual rights is the Supreme Court. Israel has very humane protections for suspects in criminal law, and it has very stern legal protections against detention.

These are run roughshod over by courts with a conviction rate that is Soviet. and with a detention policy which wouldn't shame a dictatorship in South America. The parliament, the majority are the people I trust with human rights, not this alienated elite which thinks of the majority of Israelis as deplorable barbarians, which need to be controlled. That is our problem. My confidence in the generosity of the electorate and the ability of the electorate to protect the rights of minorities as well as of individuals is far greater than my confidence in the court, because the court thinks that its medicine, its cure for the theoretical danger of the tyranny of the majority is an action. tyranny of the minority. So I would more is, and there's a structural reason for this.

You know, I teach political philosophy in my university. And what is the secret of democracy? The secret of democracy and why it is, it ensures liberty, is that the people on whom the law is applied are the people who make the laws. So basically, it is a form of self-government. Now, these people think that they will be the stewards of our liberty, and as stewards, they're terrible. If you come up against the criminal courts in Israel, your case is lost before you even uttered one word. Your chances are nil.

That is terrible because this is where human rights are the most vulnerable, and this elite does not. care because part of our disease is a chifa bar erinit. The same laws. Selective enforcement, exactly. Just I'll give you one number, just to make the point. Extremely high conviction rates is what you're referring to if people don't know. Not just this, but they are not evenly distributed because when the right protested against this engagement, 700 of the protesters were indicted for.

for blocking roads and for disorderly behavior. How many were indicted among the Kaplan people who blocked Ayelon, lit bonfires and harassed police and all the rest? Zero, none, because there is one law for Israel's Ashkenazi, rich elites, and one law for all the rest of the deplorables. And if there is a social justice issue in Israel, this is it. And my book, Na'adim and Ahim on this point was not sharp enough. And I hope that I can correct this in future works. We have just opened all these things. I have 11 things I have written down to answer you.

Each of these has to be unpacked. This is a podcast where people come to learn. So I hope to have you back and we will open them all up. at your service. It's been a pleasure because fair and honest argument when in disagreement is necessary to our public health. And I appreciate you're bringing someone whom you disagree with on so many topics. So thanks for that, Khad. Thanks for coming on.