Ask Haviv Anything - 151: Could the hostages have come home sooner? With Brett McGurk

Episode Date: October 6, 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).--What actually brought hostages home, and why did it take so long? Brett McGurk, who led Biden’s efforts to free the October 7 hostages, joins Haviv to discuss his new book, Brink: Inside the Race to Free the October 7th Hostages. From secret Saudi talks to the showdown over Rafah, he describes the decisions, failures and breakthroughs behind the negotiations -- and why he concluded that a deal would remain out of reach while Yahya Sinwar was alive.--This episode is sponsored by a friend of the podcast, Professor Robert Hockett, a Rhodes Scholar and professor of law and finance at Cornell University, who wishes regularly to support this podcast and this community, he writes us, which in his words “demonstrate with astonishing frequency that theology and history in the Middle East do not code easily as Western left or right, and that treating these subjects deeply, not facily, actually makes them more comprehensible, not more obscure or intractable.”Thank you so much to Prof. Hockett for his support.--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. On Patreon and Substack, you can also 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. It's my pleasure to introduce Brett McGurk. He served at the highest levels of American national security across four presidential administrations. Most recently, he was deputy assistant for national security affairs to President Biden, where he coordinated policy for the Middle East and North Africa. And very centrally to this conversation, right ahead of October 7, he was charged with heading the American efforts to free the hostages during the October 7th. War, the war that followed October 7. Brett served earlier as special presidential envoy to

presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump. He led the global coordinated, led the global coalition against ISIS. Under President Obama, he also led secret talks with Iran to free several American hostages held in Iran's notorious Evan Prison and received the James Foley Freedom Award for hostage diplomacy. He is currently a global affairs analyst for CNN, a distinguished fellow at Harvard's Belfar Center and at the Atlantic Council. He is most recently, and this is our topic today, the author of Brink, Inside the Race to Free the October 7 Hostages. It is publishing today, October 6, and is the basis for our discussion. Before we get into it, I just want to say, I personally, as an Israeli, want to say thank you

for the unbelievable work you did. And there's something heart-wrenching about reading this book because it describes in detail the policy, the fight, you know, but also the personal aspect, the amount of time you spent away from home, the amount of effort you put in to get those hostages out. So I want to say that before we get into it. We'll be asking questions, critical questions of the Biden administration and the American policy. The fundamental thing to know is that gratitude that Israelis have. Before we get into the conversation, I just want to tell you all this episode is sponsored

by a friend of the podcast, Professor Robert Hawkeett, a Rhodes Scholar, Professor of Law and Finance at Cornell University, who wishes regularly to support this podcast and this community, he writes us, which, in his words, demonstrate with astonishing frequency that theology and history in the Middle East do not code easily as Western left or right, and the treating these subjects deeply, not facially, actually makes them more comprehensible, not more obscure or intractable. Thank you so much.

to Robert Hockett. I'd also love to invite everybody listening to us to join our Patreon, subscribe to our Substack. If you want to ask the questions that guide the topics we 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 as chaviv-anything or chavivgur.com. Those links are in the show notes. Brett, thank you so much for being here. How are you? Thank you so much, Jav. It means a lot to be here. And I really enjoy the podcast. And I'm grateful for the opportunity to talk about this book. Let's start with why did you write this book?

How did you come to write such a detailed history of this very painful, very controversial, very serious topic that too many people have opinions about without knowing enough about? Yeah, it's worth it. It's pausing on that for a second because I did not, I did not plan to write this book. I did not necessarily want to write this book. I was working on a book about experience from 9-11 through the Bush administration, my work with President Bush on Iraq, my time in Iraq, the Obama, ISIS, Trump. And during COVID time, I was at Stanford working on that project. I had an editor and a publisher, and I was making a lot of progress on it.

When I went back in the Biden administration, obviously put it all on hold. And when I came out of the Biden administration and my editor, Kevin Doughton, the crown, got back in touch of me, I said, hey, look, I don't, right now, I don't want to think about what I just went through. I want to let's get that book out. I think there's some important lessons in it, historically speaking, Bush Obama Trump. And he said, look, you have to write three Biden chapters. Okay, you can't.

You just served four years in the White House. with Biden. You have to write three Biden chapters. And so I grated my teeth and sat down and wound up for about three months of Eve doing nothing but the Biden years on the October 7th crisis with the central narrative arc being the hostages.

And so that that's what became Brink, a book in itself. And I think and when I had it all, When I had it down in a very rough form, I realized, and I talked to my editor, this is an important book because this firsthand history of such an important historical event needs to be down, needs to be put down through the eyes of a participant. And I make clear in the opening, I'm not omnipresent. Others will write their accounts. but this is a firsthand account. That's how it came to be.

And I wrote it in a very raw, very raw personal way, Haviv, about what this was like. Because I didn't, at the time coming out of it, there was no other way to write it. And so that's what we now have. I found your book fascinating. It focuses almost entirely on the topic of the October 7,

the war that followed October 7, and on the hostage negotiations, which are obviously a topic that this audience knows fairly well, more than the average news consumer. It's still profoundly enlightening to see the war unfold from the perspective of a senior American diplomat who was so involved in all the efforts. Your book opens with an anecdote set in 2021 at the beginning of the Biden years. You are sent on a secret mission to Saudi Arabia, a one-on-one meeting with MBS.

And you're sent to tell MBS that President Biden is going to fulfill his campaign promise to take the Houthis off the terror list and to limit arms sales to the Saudis. And the arms limits are described as being limited to offensive weapons, but then MBS tells you that the lack of arms is going to prevent them from defending themselves from the Houthis and what's exactly the distinction

between defensive and offensive. You assure him that this is a temporary rupture. Relations are going to improve in six months. By your account, he is very frustrated. He feels that the Americans are very naive. He says six months is too long to waste in the Middle East. He asks who was going to defend them from the Houthis if the U.S. won't sell them missiles. He says this is going to empower Iran and that he's ready now to recognize Israel with a full detente,

regardless of Palestinian objections. In that tent where you meet him, he offers to change the world in exchange for a defense treaty with the U.S., some kind of NATO-likes. There's so much there. And what you tell him is, let's revisit it in six months. Those are your instructions. He was ready to lead some really profound changes, but it didn't fit the American political schedule,

the American administration's policy debates. A year later, relations are still deteriorated. Iran continues to arm the Houthis. U.S. sales to Saudi Arabia are still very low. They're decreasing. It is now more vulnerable than ever to endless attacks on its oil refineries and other civilian infrastructure. Russia has now invaded Ukraine.

Oil markets are destabilized. You are then sent to ask MBS to increase that oil production to compensate for what's happening in Russia, Ukraine. And his ambassador answers you, as you recall it, with a simple chart of Houthi strikes. It's a sharp rise since Biden took office a year earlier. 78% increase in drone attacks, 62% increase in ballistic missile attacks. Biden pledged that you wouldn't permit Saudi Arabia to become a shooting gallery for Iran. And that's what happened. for Iran through the Houthis. So my question is, this sort of politicization or political discourse around foreign policy is so common in American and maybe especially democratic administrations where the morality of the issues, Khashoggi is such an important factor in Saudi U.S. relations in that moment. It hinders good policy, smart policy. It was pushing, it created distance between the U.S. and the Saudis. And then when the U.S. needed the Saudis, it was hard to bring them on board.

Can you speak to that dynamic that, for me, just was this glaring thing in the book that you keep raising and demonstrating? How do you see that? Do Americans really struggle to produce serious policy in the Middle East? Yeah, Havip, well, thank you. It's a good place to start because what I've tried to do in this book, and I've tried to do it uniquely, is to bring readers in some. the rooms as much as I possibly can or inside the tent with Muhammad bin Salman. And also inside my head and my eyes as I'm experiencing this and thinking through it. And yeah, I when Biden won the election, I was at Stanford and I was not looking to come back to Washington, but his team wanted me to come back to head the Middle East file.

I kind of said, I want to do anything but the Middle East. I have worked for Trump. I worked for all the way back to Dr. W. Bush. I had known MBS for about a decade, and there was this very difficult needle to thread because Biden had made some campaign promises that he wanted to fulfill. So I was dispatched to see MBS to lay out what was, you know, we're going to make some changes in U.S. Saudi policy. And I discussed it with him.

And it was a very good constructive conversation. He understood. He also understood the Saudi relationship had to be on a more bipartisan footing. It couldn't be, and I used to discuss this with him and others on the Saudi file. It couldn't be a red state country or blue state country. So we kind of walked through this, and this is about three days into the Biden administration in Al-Ula, during COVID, we're sitting in a tent on the floor. And the conversation got a little testy. And I said to him, you know, look, tell me where you want to be in two to three years.

And he laid out a vision that he wanted to work with us on. He was kind of in like a peacemaking mode. So he said, look, I'm ready to open a channel with the Iranians through Baghdad. The prime minister at the time was a guy named Mustafa Academy, who we both knew well. I think I can actually do some things to help resolve the Yemenan conflict. But for both of those things, we have to be seen as joined together. it's not going to work. And then he said, and you know, I'm actually ready to establish diplomatic relations with Israel.

And we had a detailed conversation about that, about the history of Egypt and the Jordan Treaty and everything, how Saudi is so different. And what would come as part of that deal, which, Haviv, think about the time is hard. I mean, you think about a defense treaty with Saudi Arabia, and it's very honest, that's going to be a very heavy lift. that takes two-thirds of the Senate. We have a lot of constitutional rules. But he very much put that on the table. But my instructions at the time was to try to work through this very difficult first six months of we're going to cut off offensive weapons. And we can talk about the merits of that, which we did. Obviously, we did the Khashoggi report. We could talk about the merits of that and a number of other steps. But also in that period of even that first year, there was a sense in the Middle East and in the Gulf of almost a U.S. abandonment because we withdrew our military presence significantly, including air defense systems, including our naval presence. We also, the focus in the White House was very much domestic. This is COVID, focus on the economy. But I used to make the point, and this is the point about the Middle East generally.

for those who might argue the U.S. should just kind of get out of this mess. One reason we have these partnerships is because we actually really need them. And in any administration, every president comes in thinking this is how the world's going to be is what we're going to do.

But, you know, the world is the world and it tends to intrude. And when the shit hits the fan, you really need your friends. So in one anecdote, not in the book, is Afghanistan. when Afghanistan went, we had the crisis in Afghanistan, the phone calls came into my office for Brett,

we got to call our golf friends and get permission to land our planes with tens of thousands of Afghan evacuees. And I did that, and they all said yes. Saudi said yes, Ui said yes, Qatar, Kuwait at a critical moment. And without that, we would have been an even deeper trouble. But then what really kind of was the break glass moment was the Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And what that was going to do to global oil markets. And that kind of forced the issue of we need to repair this relationship.

And at the time, just to get to the point of your question, things were in a very bad spot because as we had pulled back and as we had stopped. these weapon systems, which then our allies kind of follow suit, and it's kind of a domino. The Houthis, armed by the Iranians, escalated their attacks. And so, yeah, the crown prince sent me a chart through Princess Rima, showing this escalation, kind of where his head was at.

And, but this, to your kind of broader point, I think every administration struggles with this. And, I mean, the United States were the only great, power that we do, values come into the room and we're having a difficult diplomatic conversation. Human rights is out on the table. I don't think many diplomats from China, Russia, they don't have that on the table. We have it on the table. And unlike middle power, whether France or anyone else in Europe, and I'm not speaking of them disparagingly, they don't have the power behind them that we do. And yet we do have those issues on the table. But there's an epigraph in the book, Haviv.

and I spent some time on the epigraphs because, you know, history so permeates everything even in the immediacy of the moment in which this book is written is very much written in the immediacy of the moment. But there's a speech by John F. Kennedy, and he gives us, he's in Utah. It's about two months before his death. And it's a great speech to read if you're a practitioner of foreign policy because here's JFK who entered, he came into office after eight years of Eisenhower thinking that those Eisenhower guys were stuck in the moment. and, you know, they had all these procedures and they didn't really get much done. We're going to kind of change things up. And here is JFK after a few years, and he says, I want to talk about foreign policy. And I want to talk about the world. And this is a president who's now gone through Bay of Pigs.

He's gone through the Cuban Missile Crisis. And he says, you know, some say to me that we should only support countries in the world that share all of our values. or who look just like us. I'm paraphrasing his speech. And he says, let me tell you what the world will look like if we do that, given at the time the Soviet Union and given competition with great powers, given what he talked about at the time of rapidly expanding technological change. And he says the purpose of foreign policy,

this is the epigraph, the purpose of foreign policy is not to provide an outlet for our hopes or indignation. The purpose of foreign policy is to shape real events in the real world. And it really encapsulates if you're a practitioner for 20 years just how difficult this stuff is. And that's really what this book is about. It's about what it takes to actually get those things done. Everybody wants this war to end. Everybody wants the hostages to come home.

How do you actually do it and move from A to B? And it's a very difficult question. And foreign policy is always a mix of Yves of, uh, of values and politics and interests and and just multitudes of calculations that makes it so difficult. But yeah, I say in the book when we got back to engaging with the Saudis, and when President Biden comes to the Middle East in the summer of 2022, and if you think about at that time, we had started a process with Saudi and Israel, and we solved an issue that had been pending for years in the Red Sea.

islands about American forces were on Tehran Island all the way back to the Camp David Accords, then the islands transferred to Saudi sovereignty. It was a big issue. We actually solved it in a almost a trilateral negotiation with Saudi Israel, thus quadrilateral and Egypt. That opened up, the Saudis agreed to open up their airspace for all Israeli planes and going to Thailand or any destination, which was a big breakthrough. And these, this process was moving by the time Biden got to Israel and then Saudi Arabia. And also because the relationship of Saudi was improving, although still had some ways to go, and the prospect of that Saudi Israel deal was there, you know, Biden believed he could

start to move even the Israelis and Palestinians in a process of direct talks, which we actually did, as difficult as it was. So I say in the book, we kind of missed an entire, higher of year, almost a year and a half, where we maybe could have come out of the gates and embraced this opportunity. Given that, the Saudis came to us and asked, and the Israelis came to us and asked, and we kind of, we waited for the time. Can I double down on this question? I think there's a little bit of frustration in Israel when the murder of Khashoggi, as

horrifying as it was, was made into, in the Washington conversation, was made to this enormous thing. The Saudis have done a lot worse than that. And this one single individual's death is a bad policy will cause many more, you know, that foreign policy conversation you find in the Washington Post chases after, forgive the word, bibles. And by bables, I mean tragedies, but tiny tragedies while ignoring, not dealing with, not having serious policy conversations about enormous ones.

And part of that, and by the way, again, you are the antithesis of it, but please explain this to us. Part of that is the, is the, you know, whiplash-inducing partisanship of American foreign policy, if you're an ordinary Israeli, Saudi and Maradi, Iranian, you know, Middle Easterner, the transfer of power from Bush Jr. to Obama was a foreign policy whiplash. And the transfer of power from Obama to Trump was, again, this unbelievable flip where each administration explained, I, by the way, had this conversation with some American diplomatic spokesperson who was speaking to journalists at

the time when Obama comes in, I was a young journalist, and we were saying, well, what is the foreign policy? And the answer we heard was not Bush. And so Obama was not Bush. Trump was not Obama. That's how they framed many of these things. President Biden, that year and a half delay that you raise now, that was about the Abraham Accords being identified with Trump, right? What was the cause of that delay? There's a sense that it's American foreign policy is so political that it, it struggles to get much done in the Middle East. I think it would be the whiplash you identified is right. I first came to Washington in the summer of 2001 just after the Supreme Court decided Bush v. Gore. So at the time, I was in the Supreme Court. Supreme Court basically decided the

election. I remember feeling how partisan things felt. And we had red state, blue states kind of coined for the first time. And then we had 9-11. And looking back, it feels so quaint. And really, since then, we have had this whiplash. I talked to leaders across the Middle East. I've known them for all many years. And yet, they need to deal with this unfortunate reality of the United States. So every two to four years, you have now a total whiplash affecting change. And to your, look, Kshoggi was a horrible, shocking crime. And he wrote for the Washington Post.

You mentioned the Washington Post. So there's even more attention to it. And I think there was a view among many Democrats that Trump basically brushed it under the rug. So this became a campaign issue and campaign promises were made. But I was always very clear with the Saudis on how massively the setback everything they were also trying to do. It was a disaster. And the reforms they made to ensure it can never happen again and everything else. So I don't think it's something you can just simply ignore.

And I think we dealt with it in a fairly smart way. And we were very direct about it. We did issue a series of sanctions. We followed up with Saudis as they made a number of internal reforms. But I think you could still have done that. And every country has interests. And looking back, I think it was in our interest. and the interests of the Saudis and others

and the interests of a more integrated, more peaceful Middle East to try to move on that bargain. And what was key about what the Crown Prince wanted to do was there wasn't a precondition of a Palestinian state because that means a precondition you're actually never going to get there. But the Palestinian issue was kind of wrapped into the process.

It was not an end run. And as we started to work on it in 2022, I mean, I have a scene in the book of Eve where President Biden is sitting with a boss in Bethlehem and he's about to go to Saudi Arabia. And he says to a boss, hey, look, he had just seen Lapeed, it was the prime minister at the time. And he said to Lapeed before they went out to the cameras,

Joe Biden believes in his soul, two states is really the only answer, as difficult as it might be, as difficult it might be to define. That has to be the path we're heading on. He says to Lepid, you've always been for two states. Now you're the prime minister, but you haven't said it. If you don't say it as the prime minister, I'm going to think you're a phony. Biden used this word a lot with leaders. If you don't do X, Y, Z, you're going to be a phony. And Lepid went out and then a Q&A said, I continue to believe in two states, and he repeated that at the UN General Assembly.

So when Biden is sitting with a boss, he says, hey, look, I know how hard this is, but I'm going to go to Saudi Arabia and I'm going to try to work on this deal. You can either work with me or against me, but I think you should work with me. And after a long back and forth, and a boss laid out all of the demands from the Palestinians going back, even before 1967, and Biden has done this for a long time, he says to him, you know what, Mahmoud? He literally says,

this building we're sitting in has a better chance of sprouting wings and flying off into the sea than any of that happening. Like, let's get real, all right? Let's go real. And by the end of the meeting, Abbas agreed, with the urging of his aide, Hussein al-Shake, okay, we're going to work with you on this.

And if you move up, this chapter that you're talking about now ends on October 6th. And I had the Saudis in my office on October 6th. And of course, we had the Saudi official visited Ramallah for the first time, 55 years, first time since 1967. We were kind of making progress on the whole set of issues that encompassed the Saudi Israel deal. And that kind of way went through this process. The question is, could we have started this earlier? I think the answer is yes. But could we have just swept under the rug, the issues of Khashoggi and others?

I don't think so. Let's get to October 7. You describe in the book how hard it was to figure out what was even happening in the first hours. The Israelis downplaying the severity of the attack, this false sense of bravado that was coming from them. And then the real fear that this was the opening Sabao in a much broader Iranian attack that included Hezbollah and maybe even, you know, Iran directly. And also how the Israelis then asked America to back them with Biden sending all the naval assets into the region. That was something that in your description is very much led by President Biden himself. He was insistent.

There was a debate within the administration. He was insistent. We're moving in. were backing the Israelis in this very, very delicate moment. Why was he that insistent? What did he understand? Tell us about that sort of first American response after October 7th. So, and you know, it's hard to write.

It was hard to write about. And I've tried to write it through what we're seeing in the White House, through what we're discussing with Israeli counterparts at the time, and through the eyes of, some of the hostages, particularly Keith and Aviva Siegel who have gotten to know quite well. And in that chapter seven chapter,

Abigail Don and the family and Capraza and everything that happened. And from the White House, how do you, how do these events unfold? I mean, in October 6th, I had the Saudis in my office. I shook hands with Princess Rima about a kind of time frame for trying to roll out the Saudi Israel deal.

Tony Blinken was on his way to the Middle East. And, you know, I put my daughter to bed, and I was staying up a little late to catch up on things on a Friday night. And around midnight, you started to get these reports of rockets at first, which are terrible, but unfortunately not terribly unusual. And then reports of incursions by Hamas militants and Mike Herzog, who was the ambassador, the Israeli ambassador in Washington, it was a close contact of mine,

was sending messages into me, and then he sent a message, this is war. And events kind of unfolded through the night, but in on his describe it in very jagged pieces. It was not entirely clear. And what, in talking to Israeli counterparts, there was a sense of, it was a bad attack, but we have it under control.

We're going to have it under control. under control. And as they came up in Washington as I went to the White House and I'm seeing everything I can possibly see from social media to intelligence to everything, it was still totally confusing. And a question that I heard first from the Israeli side, Zaki Anegbi, Yoav Galant and others, this must be a coordinated attack. you know, this is not a one-off, this is not a one-off event.

And so very early, a focus on what's has all about to do. But by the time I walked into the Oval Office that day, I think late morning or so, Biden was there. Again, this is the thing about working for presidents. You don't know everything on their plate. So Biden's preparing, I learn later, for his, you're sitting down with a prosecutor, Robert her about the issue of classified documents in his garage. So, like, his head is, and he's preparing for a presidential campaign. It's kind of the last thing the president needs. And I've been in the Oval Office going back to the George W. Bush administration. I have an anecdote in the book about

just briefing presidents in the Oval Office. And, you know, Josh Bolton, Bush's chief of staff when I really began regular morning briefings, I asked him, what's your advice for this? And he said, just, he said, right always, simple. Tell the president the truth in five minutes every morning. And if you don't know, say you don't know. And so the president asked me, he looked at me and said, how bad is this? I said, honestly, we don't, it's bad, but the full scope of it, we're not, we just don't know.

He made calls that day. And with Netanyahu, there was a sense of defiance. but also, you know, the quote I'll never forget was, was Netanyahu saying to, and they've known each other again for decades, Netanyahu's saying to Biden, you know, Joe, one thing is, I'm here in the Middle East, and in the Middle East, if you're weak, you're roadkill. And they think we're weak, which meant by implication, and Israel was roadkill.

And the thought was of a new front in the north. And, you know, Hizbollah's better organized, better armed, 30,000 shock troops as Israel's reeling. And so the question came very early to Biden about deploying an aircraft carrier strike group at the eastern Mediterranean to kind of deter Hizbollah immediately. And I have to say, Biden immediately said we got to move these assets in. And we did. And I think it was important we did. But Haviv, I mean, this is, as you know well and your viewers know well. In those early days and the full scope of the Nova Festival I didn't learn about until a few days later.

The number of hostages, the number of American hostages, we had a list of eight, nine, then it got up to 17. who's alive, who's dead. Just horrific. But in the moment, you're also thinking about how worse it can get. And that got into the Hezbollah Front and Iran and what they knew. And when Biden eventually went out and spoke publicly, I think he was in the East Room or the state dining room. I was standing just to his side.

I mean, he gave a very firm, you know, we're going to stand with Israel, period. I think we know more now. This was not an overall coordinated plan. However, Iran had been building these networks for decades. And when Iran sensed Israel's vulnerability, they were, wanted to join in and kind of think about multi, multifiliform. pressure against Israel. That was very real. And you could feel that pretty early. And then how can we deter the Iranians from making this an even broader conflict and try to contain it to Gaza? That was

really the chief focus in those initial days. You reflect in the book on the cultural differences between Israelis and Americans, specifically when it comes to planning, you know, strategy, et cetera. There was one conversation where you have an Israeli counterpart explained that Americans spend 80% of their time planning, 10% of their time acting, and 10% of their time studying the lessons from having acted. I hope I'm quoting that right. Whereas the Israelis spend 90% of their time acting and 10% of their time acting again to address the unintended consequences of acting in the first place. And, you know, it's an adorable quip about cultural differences, except that we're talking about a very serious question of war, and I think the debate was about Rafa, specifically going into Rafa, right?

Can you address that more broadly? The Israelis are now going to war. Criticize, you know, tell us what's good, what's bad, how it was handled, how you understand the American role in that. What is your assessment of that Israeli response in those early days? So shortly after October 7th, we have October 11th in which I get a phone call at 630. the morning that the Israelis are about to do an airstrike in Lebanon to take out Nasrallah, a number of Iranian advisors, in order to preempt a potential second front because his ball is organizing. And so I go through that day, that October 11th day, in some detail, just about how much, the title of the chapter is verge. We were on the verge of something

much larger. And over the course of that day, a number of conversations between Biden and Netanyahu, Jake and Dermar, and all of us are trying to make the sense of what's real and what's not. There's still a debate in Israel. Yoav Galant, he's a former very close colleague, believes that maybe Israel should have opened the northern front that day. It might have been a shorter war. I think in our judgment at the time, and I still believe this, I don't think, Israel was ready for that moment and we were not ready. We were not positioned. We were not postured. But that was a like a incredibly intense day in which if you live through one of those

days in the West Wing, that's like almost a career. And that was just one day that we, we knew that was one day in the early earliest stages of this crisis. It was out of that, it was out of that day that Biden said, I got to get to Israel, which seemed crazy because, uh, You know, Israel's under missile and rocket attack, including at Ben-Gurian airport. But he was insistent on getting out there early to sit down with Netanyahu and what by then was the war cabinet and talk through this very question you ask. And in the book, I try to describe this and what it's like and being on Air Force One flying to Israel on very uncertain trip. And thinking through the question, and there were some views in the administration, we somehow have to keep the Israelis out of a ground attack into Gaza, because that will be all sorts of reasons. And I go through, obviously, the humanitarian consequences because Hamas has planned for this.

and Haviv, I tell this story fairly vividly, as after October 7th, the war that Hamas started and Israel is gearing up for response. How do we, what is the answer to the two million people in Gaza? And I had some experience with this in the ISIS campaign in the Battle of Mosul, which was absolutely horrific. But we were able to get a million people out of the city before the battle. and working with the UN and others. In Syria, 7 million refugees fled Syria.

In Gaza, there was nowhere for people to go. And I pressed UN colleagues. There's a scene in the book where I call it Bascomal and Egyptians about letting Gazans into the Sinai temporarily. The answer is absolutely not. And one example of kind of misinformation, really having potentially a strategic impact. I mean, that trip that Biden took to Israel,

we're going to go to Amman first and see Cici and King Abdullah and Abbas. And one of the issues was this very issue. Can we, is there a formula that we can allow Gazans to flee the battle space, as has happened in almost every other war in recent decades, but that meeting was canceled because of the Al-Ali hospital attack, which the whole world thought was Israel,

and so that the Amman stop was pulled down. Turned out that attack was not Israel. But as we're flying over, we're having a question about, can we actually influence the Israelis not to go into Gaza at all? And I have to tell you, Aviv, it was my view. I was concerned about Israel going into Gaza on the ground, getting bogged down. And then Hezbollah opening a northern front, and the West Bank being unstable,

and Iran and the Houthis and the Iraqi militias and kind of seeing this unfold. I was concerned about the strategic logic of where things were heading. So I have that anecdote around this time of, you know, a counterpart from Mossad, this difference in strategic cultures is very real. We in America could be the national security business, the same job in Israel, you're in the national survival business. It's the mindset. And sometimes trying to engraft American strategic calculations onto Israel,

it's like a square peg round hole. But we wanted to encourage the Israelis to think smartly about what they were doing. And when we got to the basement of the Kippinski Hotel on that visit, which I describe as almost a funeral scene. It was the black curtains because we were in the basement for security reasons, and it was just so quiet. And Biden went off with Netanyahu and a kind of small tete-a-tete. And I had sidebar conversations with Gantz, Benny Gantz at the time,

Gaddi Eisenkid, who I had known from years before, Yo of Galant and others. And what was very clear was Israel's going into Gaza. There's no question. In fact, Benny Gantz drew for me on a note card, a perfect map of Gaza and bifurcated in threes and then a buffer zone. And kind of this is Gaza after the war. And he said, like it or not, no Israeli citizen will ever face Gaza,

without seeing the back of an Israeli soldier after what they did. And the unanimity of whatever, the end of this has to be Hamas out of power. I mean, I didn't hear any Israeli leader say, we can maybe accept some arrangement where Hamas remains in power after October 7th. So what came out of that trip to me was Israel's going into Gaza, period. There's no way for an American president to stop it. And then it's a question of kind of how and the pacing and how do you coordinate that with getting the hostages out, which becomes the focus of the rest of the book. But yeah, this is a key question of strategic paradigms and thinking.

And we certainly don't get it right all the time, to say the least. But that 80-10-10 and 90-10 is very apt. What do you think about the Biden administration attempting repeatedly to sort of ride shotgun on Israeli decision-making? I'm specifically thinking about the point in the war that was very frustrating for me, and which anyone listening to this podcast knows about, which is Rafah. I mean, the Hamas is still arming through those tunnels into Egypt. until Israel takes that, Israel, that Ghazan Egyptian border

and demolishes those tunnels systematically over quite a bit of time. And the Biden administration's struggle to permit, or it was perceived in public as saying, and I know you don't think that that's actually what it said, but it's perceived in public as saying, don't you dare go into Ratha.

By the way, that's how, that's the reporting I read in Hebrew and what I said on podcasts, two and a half years ago, whenever it was. So can you tell us that story on Rafah, the American strategic problems, the Israeli response, it was a long delay. To me, that extended the war. Now, it could seem silly looking at Gaza and saying, well, what do you mean extended the war? Like the war was ever going to be something less than however long it takes to get that money rebuilt and get Hamas disarmed. Gaza might be in the state for a while.

But I did want at the beginning fast, fast, hard and short, right? And that is the most moral war. You smash Hamas, you smash those tons, you cause whatever damage you're going to cause, and then you stop. And the total toll for civilians is much, much lower in that case. What were the American considerations? How do you understand that whole episode? So there was a debate within the Israeli War Cabinet about speed and sequencing. But I can bring this question back to the hostages, because by the time we get to February,

there's a concerted focus to try to get back to the hostage deal because we had the deal in November, which collapsed when, I tell this history because it's important, that November deal collapsed because Hamas refused to release younger women, which had agreed to release. And by February we were trying to get back to a framework, And Israel is trying to set up a sharp decision point for Hamas. And I have a scene of a meeting with myself and a Bascomal and Ronan Bar where he lays it out on a map. He said, look, here's the deal.

We're going to go into Rafah, the largest operation of the war, which the Egyptians also did not want the Israelis to do. Or you can start releasing hostages again, and we're going to buy time and get back to that. It was trying to set up this decision point for Sinwar, who was a decision maker, who we now know Haviv was in Rafa. Okay. And this is where the debate in Washington just ran completely counter to that strategy and where the friction with the Israelis really built up. because whether or not they were about to go in within 48 hours, they were setting up the sense that this is inevitable and coming in a massive way. And we, because of some very, and I've just legitimate concerns about how this is going to go.

I mean, the entire population is in Rafa. If you do cut off access at the Rafa crossing, what does that do humanitarian aid? And so we had very legitimate questions for the Israelis. But this became a very tortured public debate, which seeped into the hostage talks in a very negative way. And at the end of the day, I don't think benefited anybody. I mean, eventually the Rafa operation started as the Israelis had designed it. We had a number of military advisors talking to their strategists, and a million people left Rafa before. the battle began, and yet Sinwar was still there. And of course, six hostages, including

Hirsch Goldberg, were tragically killed in a tunnel under Rafa. So I think the Rafa public debate, as it played through the hostage talks, to me, is a very significant part of this story. And actually, Ronan, in the epilogue, we're having dinner at Tom Niz's. this house, former ambassador to Israel with a number of former Biden colleagues were now out of office. And one of my former colleagues asked Roane, what could we have done differently? Particularly to, you know, end this sooner or get the hostages out sooner. And one of the things he said was, uh, Rafa was a huge, that the way that the U.S. statements on Rafa was a huge mistake. He said it was one of your biggest mistakes. I have to tell you, that is not a conventional view

here in the United States, Havif, but that in being very close to it. And again, comes back to how do you get something done? How do you get the hostages out? How do you end the war? It is not by making statements. It is by, in this case, giving Sinwar a binary choice and or else. And I think a lot of times, ourselves and the Israelis worked at cross-purposes on that.

Let me get into the details here. I have been very critical of the government of a huge number. First of all, how it narrated the war, talked about the war not offering day after plan for Gazans. As part of a war on Hamas, you need to tell Gazans when Hamas is gone. There's a better future. If not, you are not getting rid of Hamas so easily. I want to skip that stuff.

And I want to get to this core question. about that policy, because on this question, I think I was with Netanyahu every step of the way. You have nothing to offer Sinwar. Signoir literally engineered the destruction of Gaza. He apparently wrote that he expected an Israeli nuke on Gaza. He built a tunnel system totally unprecedented in the history of war. No Gazan civilian, child was allowed into that tunnel system in three years of war.

and the whole purpose was that Hamas could wait out everything that would happen above as the Israelis claw and dig their way through Gaza to get to their hundreds of hostages. And so you can't face Sinwar with an either-or with any kind of... There's nothing you have over him if he himself, his own strategy,

is Gaza's demolition. And this is the monstrous. If you think the Israelis, this is not to you, but just generally, if you think the Israelis are monstrous and how they handled the Gaza war. What must you think of Sinwar who wanted this exact war? So what were the options?

What got the hostages out in the end? What leverage over Hamas actually worked? Was there an option to actually get the hostages out in any better way, any faster way, any easier way? Let me try to answer that in two ways and their themes that go through the book. One is on just the perverse nature of a hostage negotiation, And then second is the correlation of leverage and diplomacy and outcomes and power. And on what's so pernicious about any hostage negotiation, and I've done them in other contexts,

is that the hostage taker will put demands down on the table, extortion is demands, sometimes outrageous. And yet those are the demands. If you want the hostages freed and you want to see them walk out tomorrow and be with their families, you just meet my demands. And then over time, the moral loan is put on the negotiator. Why aren't you meeting the demands? And you're dealing with families. And it is, I make very clear a hostage negotiation fails or succeeds. And in many cases here, I have to say we failed because the hostages are not here, particularly Persh.

but you know my mona i have a epigraph of of my monadies and i'm not i don't want to i'm a christian boy from connecticut haviv so you can you can go through chapter and verse but anybody can put my monoties on this podcast but there's an absolute uh there's no higher miswa than the redemption of captives and that's often cited and i cite it and it's true you've got to get hostages out of this horrific circumstance. But he also has a utilitarian formula of, but basically not a too high a price, not a price that is going to jeopardize the safety of the society.

If I paraphrase. And this is, this plays out throughout the book. It plays out throughout Israeli decision making. I think it plays out in Israeli society. there's never necessarily a right answer. I mean, it plays out, Haviv, in the home of the Seagulls. I mean, Keith and Aviva Seagull,

and they were kind enough to share so much about their home, and there's a sticker in their home. On October 7th, Galad is alive, because they were very much, much, I wouldn't describe them as activists, but they were proponents of the deal to free Galad Shalit. And the price, of course, was a thousand Palestinian prisoners, including Yaha Sinwar. And here you have on October 7th, the elite units from Hamas are approaching their kibbutz on the orders of Yaha Sinwar, who would not have been freed other than that deal. So this gets

to that, my mom, that kind of scale. And it is, It is torturous. I eventually came to the conclusion after the horrific death of the six hostages in Tunnel and Rafa, and I described the scene in the Situation Room on Labor Day, 2024, with the president, Vice President Harris is to my left, Bill Burns everybody, just to address your question. We will not have a hostage deal so long as Yaha Sunwar is. is alive and is making the calls, period. Because his core demand, we, we, permanent ceasefire, we remain in power.

October 6th status quo. You can dress it up, whatever they might have said. That was their core demand. And in the talks in summer, we get hung up on a certain issue here and there, and I'd go through the whole negotiating history. But that was the core demand. and it did not change. The negotiating dynamic did not change

until the whole power equation in the region changed. Yajan War was killed in October. Hassan Nasrallah is dead. And Hezbollah, a key moment in this, because Hezbollah, which from October 8th, was firing into Israel saying, we are in solidarity with Hamas,

and we will keep this front open, until basically Israel meets Hamas' demands. They cut their own ceasefire. They basically were out of this. In October, we defeat a second missile attack, and then Israel very effectively takes out the S-300s in Iran. So Iran is now in a significant weakened position, and we could see the Iranian starting to reel.

So by the time we got back to the talks, and this is also after Trump's line, election, but the whole, the regional, the whole situation had so fundamentally changed that you could feel in the negotiation, there was a new opening. So I, it is my view that the key breakthrough in ultimately in the hostage talks was that change in the overall equation and the elimination of Yaha Sinwar. And you can go back to some times and, say, was there a larger offer the Israelis could have put down? And it got hung up on this.

You can talk about Philadelphia corridor and that's three corridor. I mean, all the issues, which we knew in such tremendous detail. At the end of the day, Hamas never said yes to a deal. There was never a moment in which Hamas is at a yes. You know, hey, Hamas said yes to this. I have their signature. Israel, you just need to now say yes. It was always the opposite.

Israel said yes, signed on to a deal. Hamas would come in. and say, well, we agree to these eight things. We don't agree to these three things constantly. We went to see Netanyahu in early December, 2024. And we basically have an agreement negotiated, and it's down to one issue, which is always a fundamental issue. Who are the hostages coming out in this deal?

Because there was always a clause that said, there will be 33 hostages at Israel names. And Hamas always said, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll get to that. Well, wait a minute. We're now at the moment. Who are the hostages? And they would not say who the hostages were. And they eventually put down, of the 33, only 12 will be living.

And I describe... This is Hamas. This is Hamas. So I describe in December of 2024, again, this gets into the moral quandaries. I don't know what you want to call it. No, but you're describing, people had a conversation about Gaza for three years now that is detached from what Hamas is. You describe, for example,

Hamas releasing the videos of the killings of those six hostages that include Hirsch and releasing them publicly during the funerals. That is what the families are being sent on social media during the funeral, burying their loved ones. Hamas made sure at every turn to hold the hostages, to hold the war going, to keep the Israelis looking and hunting, and also to keep radicalizing the Israelis at every turn. The hostage humiliation ceremonies,

literally telling a hostage whose family was murdered on October 7th of Hamas knows it. Now you can go out and meet your family again, this starved and maciated Israeli on a state. You understood this, right? Until Sinwar is dead, you write this. There's not going to be an opening. And then he died, and then there was an opening. But the conversation in the U.S., I don't know what to say about inside the Biden administration,

but what every Israeli was hearing from the American conversation doesn't understand what Hamas is. How does somebody who knows what Hamas is firsthand in 100 different incidents and ways in conversations tell this story of how this organization, if you care about the future of Gaza, if you care about Israel, if you care about everybody, this organization. organization wanted this war and worse and will only ever produce these kinds of never-ending zero-sum wars. How do you tell that story, which is so consistent in everything you describe, in the details where you really see that Hamas really drove this and wants this and more of this because

it thinks ultimately it'll bring Israel down? Yeah, and this is not to ignore, belittle, or suggest. that the suffering in Gaza is not enormous. I mean, I describe this entire thing working on it. It's a tear in your soul in every dimension. But the agency of Hamas throughout this crisis and the agency of Mastrala and the agency of Haminae and the agency of the hoot.

And all these other actors that are acting in real time as we're acting have almost been written out of the story. And there are central actors. in the story. And it's not as if they were passive and just then reacting to things, Zizro's. No, they were active participants throughout this story. And Sin War in particular, not just from October 7 on, but from what he prepared and planned for for years. And the tunnels and everything else that you know so well. And then Hamas's positions throughout these talks, which I've tried to detail.

And to the point in December of 2024, okay, there's a deal. We were released 12 living hostages. It was the women and the older men. We will not release any of the, what were the ill and wounded category, including Sikitakl-Chen, who was shot twice in October 7.

No, no, they're not on the list. If you want hostages, we're going to do a hostage deal. This is at the end of everything's done. We've negotiated everything. We have an agreement on Philadelphia, or everything. You'll have 12s. And I describe, I'm in Doha and I have, okay, there's like a deal if you want, 12, and Keith is on the list and Pete, you know, I'm dying to get Keith out and these other hostages out. I've been looking at their names for, uh, and Emily and Dorone and the women and that we've been, that should have come out in November. They're on the list. You can have them 12. But wait a minute, there are nine other sick and wounded that should be on the list. And the debate is, well, do you take the birds in hand, or do you demand the full list?

And the decision was to demand the full list, which was the right decision. And frankly, I don't think the Israeli government, Anakur-Huda Prime Minister, could have accepted a deal with only 12. But this gets to how Hamas played these negotiations. And then even after, you know, I tell this story vividly because it was so vivid and the details matter. You know, I left Doha right before Christmas. This thing's basically over. Sheikh Mohammed, the Prime Minister of Qatar, he leaves because he spends his, he spends Christmas with his family traditionally here in New York. And the Israeli team basically disbanded, went home.

This thing is over. And I said to Muhammad, call me if you get the hostage list, the full list. And the Israelis, again, are from Netanyahu on down, the deal's there if we get the full hostage list. And January 4th, I remember the date because it's my daughter's birthday. I'm at her birthday party. And Mohammed, Jake Mohammed and Doha and the Egyptians own deal with Abdulahelik, who is the kind of Hamas whisper on the Egyptian side. They think the list is coming and I'm kind of packed.

I'm ready to go back to, ready to go back to Doha to close the deal. Just get the list. And I finally get a call from Sheikh Mohammed. I have the list. Come back. Okay, let's close the deal. We have everything now. We have negotiated this deal for a year.

It's five pages, single-spaced text. It's about 17 pages total. There are maps. There are annexes. There's hundreds of pages of Palestinian prisoners. It is all there. I've sometimes seen this described

as like a framework deal that was not detailed. No, no. This was detailed work done over painstaking months. And I go see the Qatari side and they say, well, there's a new demand from Hamas.

So yes, they've added the nine to the list. So we now have 33. We have, I think, 24 living, including Sigi and others. But for the nine, Israel must release 300 Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences. And if you read the book, you'll understand how significant this is, because we've been negotiating this deal for a year. Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences, and these are guys who have killed, in most cases, a significant number. of Israelis, mostly Hamas operatives, would be exchange for soldiers.

Civilians, it's 30 Palestinian prisoners, not serving life sentence, less than life sentences. So this demand is totally new and was a poison pill because you needed the pool of life sentence prisoners for the second stage of the deal, which were the male soldiers, okay? I'm just, and I point that out because this war is awful. Everybody wants it to end. And it could have ended at multiple points without these kind of tactics. And even then we negotiate that down to 110 life sentence prisoners. And I go through some of them in the book just for who these guys are.

And by this time, Haviv, Steve Wickoff has joined the talks, and we kind of, he is in Jerusalem with Nanyahu. I am in Doha called into the meeting in which we lay this out. The final deal is we have the list of prisoners, we have everything worked out. It's 110 additional life sentences for the nine

and a compromise on the buffer zone. And Netanyahu, except. accepted that. And we finally had a first phase deal. And those 33 hostages living and dead came out. And the first three women came out the day before the inauguration. But I go through this negotiating history from my perspective and how it went to tell the story. And I'm not, I, I, the Israelis are not blameless at every stage, certainly. There are points when these Israelis, these Israelis, the Israeli side took a position I might have thought was far too rigid. But I described that period when the Israelis might have taken a rigid position on issue of it was like trying to unlock a door into a room of locked doors because once you solved an issue, you had five more locked doors. So I hope, you know, a reader takes out of this both what it actually takes to end a war like this and to hostages home. And to your big question, could this have just gone faster in terms of like

a faster Israeli attack? And I mean, historians can answer that. There's a lot to that. There's a lot to that question. But to have the formula in which the hostages come home and the Israelis are not accepting Hamas remaining in power in Gaza, these are the irreconcilable positions we were trying to bridge over the course of that intractable period. Let's finish up. Your book closes with a sense of real exhaustion of that I can relate to. First of all, the personal price you describe, the nightmares, the years you missed in your

daughter's childhood. And the feeling that even though, even though, you saved lives in this region. Nothing here ever seems to get better. There's always the next great collapse and conflict around the corner. You recall in the book how your counterparts either in the Mossad or in Qatar, your Mossad counterpart named Ben, not his real name, presumably, are, you have this urgency to get this done. There's an American political turnover, although the Trump administration would continue this work. But that's not always true in policy and there is this urgency. But the Qataris, the Israelis, they seem a little resigned to it. It feels in the book

as if your experience in the room is that you're trying to push these guys forward and they are much more concerned about not giving ground. That was an interesting dynamic to me and I wonder if you would reflect on it. The sense that the Israelis, the Arabs, whether it's the Palestinians or the Qataris or anybody else, really feel like they have a lot of time ahead of them. They're not going anywhere. This is their home, their lives, whereas the American policy conversation is on a very fast-paced schedule, maybe because of political turnover. That's a mismatch that comes up repeatedly in your really fascinating telling of this story. Yeah, so, Aviv, in that anecdote, it's late in the process.

And we're in what a negotiator calls a Zopa, zone of possible agreement. So we're within that, how many life sentenced prisoners will it be? And the boundary of the buffer zone. There's the two last issues. And I think we had like six days left to the inauguration. And the proposal was another night of proximity talks with Hamas on one floor, Israel, another floor. And like you do this till three in the morning.

And it just felt to me like the definition of insanity. And I didn't want an excuse for Israel or Hamas to open up anything. And I was very impatient. And I let it show. I think I let us show in those final weeks, even when I was back in Washington. I was like, we're close to a deal to end this war. The entire focus should be on how do we get this deal? And that meant how do you get Hamas to release the hostage list and get to these final issues?

Because that's how you're in the war. If you're going to end the war, that's how we're going to end the war. There's no other path right now that there's no other. path to ending the war. But I thought if you don't get this done by the inauguration, obviously I felt, I think it's fair to say. I wouldn't have acknowledged it at the time. I want to get this done by the time I have left by the inauguration. Trump had set a deadline. And if in a negotiation, a deadline can be effective. If you miss it, you can kind of be off in the wilderness. I actually, I really thought it was important for Trump to enter with this deal in place,

just given how difficult it was to put together. But to your larger point, you know, I've read a lot of kind of books like this and I have them on my shelf at home. And there's usually a last chapter of here are the five things we could have done and this is the path to the future and like a kind of nice clean. I don't have any clean answers. And I very much describe it that way. Is that the takeaway from this book? Are you walking away from the Middle East? Very few people have as much face time with the deep innards of Israeli national security establishment and also.

Qatar, Hamas, as you, are you walking away just saying, it's broken? This place is broken. No, I mean, I do say in the epilogue, there's only now a glimpse faint sense of the path that we have been talking about. But it's still there. and investing, I say invest in the builders and not the records. I will say, have a precondition for anything, if you believe in two states, whatever it is, is Hamas cannot be in power.

If Hamas remains in power anywhere, this is completely stuck. That is a precondition to a better future. And I've been in the Middle East a lot, even last few months. And there's now a consent, I mean, there's a consensus in almost every capital. Here in Cairo, here in Deng, you know, in Doha, they've signed on this new UN Security Council resolution. That is very important. That's the so-called Board of Peace. This essentially plan that the UN and the Arab world and Netanyahu may be pressured by Trump, I don't know,

are on board with the rebuilding of Gaza, but it demands the disarmament of Hamas. Yeah, Hamas is going to claim to power. Hamas has to be out of power. I mean, one big American policy mistake, and Condi Rice on the record, she said this publicly, was the 2005 elections in Gaza, and that Hamas, despite being an armed terrorist group, was allowed to run in those elections. And Hamas seizing power in Gaza has been tragic for decades since. Israeli politics, too, of you. I defer to you on this one. You have an election coming up. It's a key inflexion. point. And, you know, they're extremists on the Israeli side and who would be obstacles to any better future. So, but no, I do not want, I do not, the conclusion is not that this is hopeless at all. The conclusion is, this is so incredibly difficult. And if anyone is presenting some easy solution, you know, they're just full of it. It takes incredibly hard work, but also recognizing some fundamentals, and one of the fundamentals is that, just going back to what I just said,

Hamas cannot be the power in Gaza, no way, or Hezbollah on the borders in the north. There's no way after October 7th, I don't care who the future government of Israel is, will ever accept a threat to gather on the borders like that, ever. I can't see any, you know, constantly be in a state of war if you have Hezbollah organized on the northern border or Hamas organized in Gaza right on the border. There's just no way. So there should be a consensus by those who seek a better path. I don't care what side of the issue you're on. That in Gaza, we cannot have Hamas.

And in Lebanon can't have his bullet. It is a path to perpetual war, which these groups want. But to get to there, that's very hard. So no, it's not a message of hopelessness, V, but I tried to present the story, again, in a way that I wanted to be a compelling, propulsive narrative of what this is actually like in the room. So when 10 years from now, if someone's about to embark on something like this, they read the book and can understand a little bit of what exactly this is going to be like and what they're getting into.

And maybe I can close on an anecdote that's in the book, Haviv, of, you know, Gadi I went to Gadi Eisenkatz. I was in Israel, the last day of the Shiva for him. his son who was killed in Gaza. And I went to his home. I was there with Jake. And he talked a lot about gal and what he was like. And he pulled a book from his shelf that was earmarked and her dog ear on the page that he had written after fighting in the second.

and defada. And I don't want to quote off the top of my head. I have the scene in the book. But he basically says, you know, we pay a price, and I'm the father of a five-year-old son, and I know the price and the cost of war. And that son was gal. And he folded the book and put it back on his shelf.

And it's a story of Israel. And Gadi also talked about, you know, thinking about the future and what it can be like and having some vision for a path. It is exceedingly difficult when you're dealing with groups like Hamas, Isbola, and all backed by Iran. So, but that's the book of Eve. And I, it would be, it would not be honest if I ended it on a, on a hopeful, this is the path to, this is the path that we can now all travel on and all will be fine.

I think this is core and foundation on fascinating in your book. There is this tendency, this belief. You know, we all know how it should all get done. So just get it done. What the heck's wrong with all you people over there in the Middle East? And, you know, you'll hear someone on the Palestinian side

or on the Israeli side say, sure, yeah, no, just everything I say is true. And we've got it done, right? but your book is an antidote to that casual sort of, I don't know what to call it, a know-it-all tendency when people talk about the Middle East. Actually, none of it is simple. Actually, it's all really deeply complicated. If you want an antidote to simplistic thinking, that's this book.

Thank you so much for writing it. Thank you so much for everything you did for the Israeli hostages, among many things that you have done in your career. And thank you for coming on the podcast. Thank you, Aviva. That's been an honor to speak with you. Thank you so much.