Ask Haviv Anything - 153: Where was Netanyahu on 7/10? With Elliot Kaufman

Episode Date: October 12, 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).--On October 7 and in the months that followed, Israel’s leaders were fighting Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran -- and each other. Where was Netanyahu on October 7 and its aftermath? Did Washington’s push for de-escalation prolong the fighting? And why have American Jews struggled to mobilize against the rising antisemitism that followed October 7?The Wall Street Journal’s Elliot Kaufman joins the podcast to answer these questions and discuss his new book, In the War Room: The Inside Story of Israel's Fight Against Hamas and the Iranian Axis, written with Jerusalem Post military analyst Yonah Jeremy Bob. The book explores the bitter rivalries, catastrophic failures and bold and successful decisions that have shaped the war and reshaped the Middle East.In the War Room is available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/War-Room-Israels-Against-Iranian/dp/B0G2JWY3TG--This episode is sponsored by the Tikvah’s Millstone Scholars program. A unique program designed for those middle-school years when young people begin deciding what they believe and who they want to become.For parents and grandparents wondering what comes after the bar or bat mitzvah, Millstone offers substantive, serious learning. This isn’t more Hebrew school; it’s a selective national honors program for seventh- and eighth-graders. Students meet weekly in small cohorts to study Jewish civilization, modern Israel, and the Jewish ideas that inspired America. Through primary sources and guided, seminar discussion, they develop the confidence to become proud Jews, proud Americans, and future leaders.Millstone offers in-person and online cohorts across thirty cities. Classes begin the week of October 18. You can learn more and apply at https://tikvah.org/haviv.--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. Welcome to a new episode of Ask Haviv Anything. It is my pleasure to introduce today, first time on the podcast, Elliot Kaufman. Elliot Kaufman is a Wall Street Journal editorial board member and co-author of a new book, In the War Room, the inside story of Israel's fight against Hamas and the Iranian Axis. He wrote in the war room with Yonah Jeremy Bob, the Jerusalem Post Senior Military Correspondent. It's an excellent blow-by-blow of the war, but we're also going to take a step back from it and look at some of the larger issues that are raised there. So I'm very glad that Elliot is here with me. I am also proud to share with you that this episode is sponsored by Tikva's Millstone Scholars Program. That's of the Tikva Fund, a unique program designed for those middle school years when young people begin deciding what they believe and who they want to become. For parents and grandparents wondering what comes after the bar or bat mitzvah,

Millstone offers substantive, serious learning. This isn't more Hebrew school. This is a selective national honors program for seventh and eighth graders. Students meet weekly in small cohorts to study Jewish civilization, modern Israel, the Jewish ideas that inspired America. Through primary sources and guided seminar discussion, they developed the confidence to become proud Jews, proud Americans, and future leaders. Millstone offers in-person and online cohorts across 30 cities. Classes begin the

week of October 18. You can learn more and apply at ticva.org slash chaviv. That's Tikva with an H-T-I-K-V-A-H. Dot org slash Chaviv. That link is also going to be in the show notes. Thank you to Tikva for sponsoring this episode and for all the amazing educational work that the Tikva fund does and has been doing, and some of which over the last 15 years I myself have partaken in and learned a great deal. I also would love to invite everybody listening to join our Patreon community to subscribe to our Substack. If you're interested in asking the questions that guide the topics we talk about, that's where you do that. You can also take part in monthly live streams where I answer your questions live.

That's at patreon.com slash ask chaviv-anything or chavigur. Those links are also in the show notes. Elliot, thanks for coming. How are you? I'm very well. Thank you so much for having me on. So let's dive right in. Why did you write this book? What does this book give us that is beyond the, you know, endless news reporting about this war? And there's now an efflorescence of books about this war. This is a play-by-play of the decision-making leadership, I would say almost. Is that a... Is that right? That's right. I would say there's an efflorescence of books so far about the October 7th attack.

But what there is not yet, and what I think this book has in a way where there's really nothing else available like it, is the inside story of what happened after October 7th. And I can say that because myself, my co-author, through our work at the Wall Street Journal, Jerusalem Post, we have inside material. from all of Israel's top leaders. That's political, military, intelligence, Bibi, gallant, Gans, Halavi, Zemir, and so forth. And I guess that's not quite like those reports

that we've been reading all through the war, where it's kind of one faction typically getting its story through, trying to influence the narrative in that way. By having this comprehensive approach, we can actually tell the real story, inside story, of what Israel's war room was facing. All the decisions it had to make. And I think when you get into that, you realize very quickly that the hardline anti-Israel narrative, let's say, that Israel was just trying to kill as many Palestinians as it could, or all the Palestinians, simply cannot withstand scrutiny.

It crumbles on first contact with reality, with specificity, and with deep reporting into Israel's war room. There were real dilemmas faced by these decision makers. I was interviewed on a very left-wing media outlet where I tried to explain some of the thinking of some of the Israeli decision makers who looked at Hamas and said, this is a model that Chizbala also follows. This is a kind of undeterability because they're not really influenced by the potential pain to their own polity and to their own side of the Iranian regime.

The Israelis understood something very big and they felt they really had to actually defeat these kinds of enemies because they're not deterrable. And so it's not, you can't live next to them. And then the answer of this interviewer was, well, why couldn't you just not go to the Gaza War? I was extremely open to somebody saying to me, okay, but this in the Gaza war was deeply wrong, mistaken, tactically, morally. Those are really important conversations, but well, maybe don't fight a war against somebody who genuinely out loud says they're going to come to kill you and does everything possible to get it done. So this question of what was happening in the minds of the decision makers, it's not small, it's the question, right? And when there's an argument about it, it's, it's, being a genocide, for example, that's a crime of intent. That's not a crime that says a lot of people died. That's not what a genocide is. A genocide is a purposeful intent to destroy a people. And so you bring us into the minds of decision makers. What do we learn when we get into the minds of the decision makers? How do you think, what would surprise most people about how this war

played out in their minds? You talk a lot there about the tensions inside the Israeli cabinet. what's the, as we say in Hebrew, what's the innovation, what's the new thing that we learn when that's the focus of the book? Well, the tensions is actually a great place to start on that point because people know that this war cabinet

was riven with tensions. But the way they look at it often I think misses so much of what happened. First of all, this wasn't just a team of rivals or something like that. This was a war room of bitter enemies. But second of all, people look at it as Netanyahu and the rest. And they know that there was this tension, there was this rivalry between Netanyahu and all the rest. What they miss is

the all the rest despised each other also. Okay. So if you look at Galant and Gantz, they had reasons going back years about who was made IDF chief, about who became defense minister of Israel to truly resent each other in ways that lasted deep into this war. And so even when they were seemingly aligned fighting off Netanyahu on some or other point of the war, they couldn't unite in so many cases. They couldn't work together, which actually goes part of the way to explaining why they often didn't get their way, even though they held that numerical advantage of the voting members of the war cabinet. But that's just the sort of...

So, no, give us an example. A specific example where, you know, Netanyahu had his way, even though he was outnumbered in the cabinet, but also give us an example of what, how these tensions affected the war itself. What was the cost? What was the cost to the war effort, to the Israelis, to the soldiers, to the Gossens of these kinds of tensions? So one example would be, um, after the Rafa.

invasion. So after May 24, of course, everybody in the U.S., President Biden, Vice President Harris had said it was going to be this massive disaster. They had embargoed various weapons to Israel. They said it was just one type of weapons. It was actually

much more. We detail that in the book. But basically, everything for Israel had to go right in Rafa, or there would have been a massive break with the U.S., and almost everything did go right. There was no margin for error, and Israel pulled it off, evacuated Raffa's population, fought there successfully. Okay.

The question then is, how do we get these American weapons sales to resume? That's what Israel's war room was facing. Now, each of these main characters had an equal interest in this, okay? Everybody wanted these weapons. The problem was, the Biden administration at that point wasn't really interested in, in speaking with Prime Minister Netanyahu and certainly not interested in giving him any sort of political victory.

And so they wanted to work with gallons. They felt, you know, him, he's more reasonable in some ways. We can work with him. That was their view. And also, it can maybe undermine Nathaniel if he gets more of the credit internally for this, especially when relations with the U.S. was sort of Netanyahu's calling card.

Okay, so they work with Galilee. Gallant. Gallant doesn't tell Netanyahu about this. Okay? So he's sort of working behind his own prime minister's back as he negotiates a deal, which by the way would be very good for Israel, this deal, resuming American weapons. When he finally tells Netanyahu, instead of being very happy that some sort of solution has been found, he is very upset, that he was not informed and you find some problem with the terms which in my assessment was mostly immaterial, okay, and finds a way to blow up this deal temporarily. And what ends up happening is Israel does get most of these weapons in the end, but later on, it sets it back. But

Gallants, during that whole time, never informed Gantz of this either. So they didn't have that 2-1-1 dynamic, even though Gantz would have been totally on Ghalen's side in that instance. He didn't work with him because there was still that resentment of through this murky, politicized process, Ghalent ended up getting elbowed out for IDF chief. Gantz got the job years ago, right? That feud between them had never fully healed. And that ended up costing Israel in that specific instance. See, the slowing down of weapons arriving in Israel or the potential falling off a cliff because they weren't coming in, so whatever was stockpiled was what they had,

that changed how the army fought. And that changed risk assessments for soldiers' lives. And so working through the description of the politics between these guys, so little of which was substantive and purpose. I'm not opposed to politics. I'm not opposed to politics guiding a war. In the end, you know, the solution to a war is almost always a political, even total defeat, how you handle the enemy's total defeat is a political question. And so being the one to decide that politics and maneuvering to be on top when the when the dust settles, that's part of war.

That's part of policy. That's part of running a country. This stuff is petty. This stuff is shallow. This stuff is, you know, the Ganla Netanyo gap was often a policy gap. And it was an American trust or lack of trust in Netanyahu. There might have been some reasoning there. What the heck's the reasoning between guns and Gallant not being able to cooperate?

And that helped slow down the shipments, which affected the soldiers on the ground. That's, to me, that's very, that's really damning. That's an indictment. Is that your assessment or am I over-reading into this story? I think it is damning. And I think, you know, people, especially in America, are shocked to find out that this sort of politicking was happening about questions of war. And so I think you're right to say that politics continues during war. What some people might not expect is how soon it reasserts itself, such that in the days after the October 7th attack, when Gallant is trying to push that Israel should strike,

North first take the war in a big way to Hezbollah in Lebanon rather than Hamas in Gaza, he can't get a hold of Prime Minister Netanyahu, meaning he is calling on the phone. Netanyahu's aides, whoever he can, and nobody will put him through, even though he's the defense minister of the country, and the country is at war. And Gallant would actually march all the way to Prime Minister in Netanyahu's office, and for several hours couldn't get in. Instead, he had to be met outside in the waiting area by Netanyahu's right-hand man, Ron Dürmer.

These sorts of things were happening constantly because in that instance, Nathaniel knew he was going to have to say no to Gallant and wanted to delay that as much as possible until he had brought Gantz and Eisenkut into the war cabinet, and they could say no. as well. Or he could have President Biden on the line saying no as well. And so it wouldn't be

just him stopping some aggressive, you know, initiative seizing military action. That was happening all the time precisely because in Israel everything leaks. And so Prime Minister Netanyahu knew this stuff was going to leak, was going to be used against him. And so all of this maneuvering was happening from the very start. Probably the most talked about aspect of October 7 during this election campaign that's underway right now, we have an election at the end of October, is whether Prime Minister Netanyahu, he often talks about this as well, was woken up on the morning of October 7 by the security leaders, by the heads of the security services, how much he was told, how quickly he was updated, whether they, you know, what exactly stopped? There are some reporting that the army and the sheenbed were telling his office,

but his office didn't want to wake him up before 6.30 in the morning. There were some reports that they didn't really understand the scale of it, and so they weren't urgently trying to get his office and his staff to wake him up. And he has claimed they didn't tell me. And that's why on October 7 itself during the day, we were so slow in getting a response together. I think it's fair to say that your book, in great detail, I really love people committed to detail.

When the details tell the story, you've really told the story. you've really told the story. Your book clearly demonstrates that the delay wasn't 6.30 in the morning. It wasn't the beginning. It wasn't whether or not somebody could wake him up or not wake him up. Nizeniao only arrives at the war room at around 9. He only meets Halevi at around the chief of staff at around 10. The armies only really started mounting a counterattack around 1 p.m. They sent in small elite teams early on. Those elite teams were devastated. They were met in gun battles. The borders only closed by the Air Force at around 10 a.m. So they're basically, what I take from your book, and I want you to correct me if I misunderstand something, but also respond to this. What I take from the book is

there were basically two great failures. One is the failure to foresee October 7. That is the huge grand strategic failure. Everything that's happened since is a response to the failure to see, to understand how the enemy actually works, thinks, functions, and plans. But then there was a failure on the day of to respond in time. Gioja Island, former Israeli Major General, has said that by 10 a.m., there were more idea forces in the South than there were Hamas forces. But an organized response only really begins to coalesce around one o'clock. So my question to you is, why? Why was there so much chaos? What could have been done differently? Was Netanyahu in charge on that day? This one question that has made up maybe a third of all campaign

videos of both sides. What is your take on it? It is a fantastic question. And, you know, when I speak to Prime Minister Netanyahu about this, you can really feel the passion in his voice. He says, 629. They only woke me up at 629. He'll sort of yell that 629 over and over again when the rockets were flying, when it was too late to start. that initial invasion. And so that is central to his own personal understanding of what happened on that day. And, you know, when there are all these stories

about warnings in advance, I feel like I have to remind people, there were warnings on that day itself in the hours before. All the warnings you could have ever needed, and yet every single person at each step in the process systematically couldn't understand what those warnings meant. And so if you ask me, would Netanyahu, contrary to all the advice from everywhere in the

system, uniquely have understood what happened if some of his own staff didn't even and chose not to wake him up earlier, I think it's doubtful, but it's the fact that he wasn't even given a chance that I think drives him so mad about that and understandably. So, but you're right to focus in on what happens afterward. Prime Minister Netanyahu makes his way to the war room. Okay? Defense Minister Gallant makes his way to the war room actually is one of the first to get there. When the war actually breaks out, by the way, the mid-level IDF commanders who are there

are in total disarray, are actually can be seen on video, screaming at each other about what's happening as their screens are blowing up and all sorts of indicators are coming in and they don't know what's happening. Okay. So total chaos, you know, in the 6 o'clock hour, at the 7 o'clock hour, but you're right. What about at the 9 o'clock hour? And these are the questions that I think haunt Israelis. And Prime Minister Nathanielo delayed his meeting with IDF chief, Hertzi,

until his own chief of staff could be there. And that chief of staff had been pinned down at his home by Hamas rockets. Okay? And so he was following the, you know, proper instructions. You don't move. Why? Why is the chief of staff of Israel, of the army, have to wait for the chief of, when there's a great national emergency before these are the questions.

So these are the frustrating questions of why it took hours and why Prime Minister Nathanielo and IDF, Chief of Staff, Halevi, were, you know, a matter of meters away from each other for so long before they ever spoke. Okay? Infuriating. But then you know what the detail is that clinches it in my mind? When they actually spoke, they didn't really learn much, in fact. It didn't change all that much, in fact, because even at the very top of the army, they still didn't at that time have a clear assessment of what was happening. And I think that gets to the answer to your question. The Army didn't know, in fact. Elliot, there was a wonderful book I read about 10 years ago by Elliot Cohen from West Point,

professor, deeply thoughtful historian. He read a book called Supreme Command. And it was a book that traces, the civilian leadership in wartime of Ben-Gurion and Lincoln and Clemenceau. and I believe there was a fourth one. I forget. The name escapes me. And these are civilians without military background, military training. They're not grizzled generals elected to the post like Eisenhower. They are civilians. And they know their military is underperforming. They get into the weeds of the military questions. They force a military to explain, you know, the whole meme explained to me like I'm five. Well, it turns out that when you have to explain something to someone who's five, it's actually very difficult to explain. and you discover that you yourself don't understand the fundamental meaning of the thing.

Netanyahu, at that moment when the conversation with Herzia Levi is not very effective, the army is running around mad, not knowing what's going on, Netanyahu waits to learn that he's not learning anything from the army until his chief of staff of his office can show up. This is not Clemenceau. This is not Ben-Gurion. This is not the civilian on top of the army. Netanyahu happens to have quite a bit of military.

He's an officer and an elite commander unit as a young man. But he's the civilian leader who did not look into this thing in real time and say, why aren't there 100,000 soldiers in the South by now? It's been hours and hours and hours. Why not put out a call? Every soldier with a gun, go south with your private car. We'll sort everything out tomorrow. Where was that, Prime Minister?

Where the hell is Netanyo? Even when he shows up, where is he cracking the whip? Being the Abraham Lincoln who looks at his generals and says, the Battle of Richmond, if you'd just been willing to lose 5,000 more men, we wouldn't have had 600,000 dead in a civil war. If you were just willing to understand how this war actually has to be fought, we'd be done here, and he cycles through generals until he meets a general, willing to burn everything down to actually end the war, and that's Grant.

Where's the Clemenceau in World War I, telling the French forces what they actually have to be doing, because they're not understanding this new kind of war they've stumbled into, and Ben-Gurion in 48 was the same story, his seminar where he begins to interview the officers and he forces the army, a brand new army, but an army that's not delivering the goods to completely rethink what's going on and start delivering the goods. Where was that, Netanyahu on that day, is my question.

Any thoughts on that from everything you found in this book? Yes. All of that energy that you are talking about from Netanyahu, we see it when it comes to Iran. on that front he poured all of himself into the planning for years for decades you could say his focus making sure that all the right

people were in the system who viewed that threat in a way that he thought was serious enough who pushed that forward who pushed the defense establishment at different points in order to get his way so that Israel could confront that threat, which he sees and has seen before, you know,

pretty much anyone else did, as the threat to Israel. But when it came to Hamas, Netanyahu was never there, and consequently, the whole system was never there. You know, I tell people, you can read Nathaniel's own memoir, published in just 2022, so not so long ago. look into what he says there about Gaza. He actually takes on this question straightforwardly. Why didn't you ever overthrow Hamas do a full invasion of Gaza,

as he once promised as an opposition leader? The truth is, it's easy to say as an opposition leader harder to, you know, do when you're in power. But what he says is straightforwardly. We looked at it, and, you know, we would lose thousands of Israeli troops. We would end up killing tens of thousands of Palestinians at extraordinary diplomatic cost, and we have bigger fish to fry.

He uses that phrase, and he says Iran, and he actually cites Syria as well, interestingly. But he's very clear, we had bigger priorities. And so when it comes to October 7th the day itself, he is so behind the eight ball on that issue, that in a way he isn't able to assert himself in the same way that Ben-Gurion could, on the issue of his day, which he was so intimately plugged into, which he knew more than all of his commanders on the spot, you know, and he actually could assert himself in that way. What Prime Minister Netanyahu says about this,

and what his staff say is that on all the issues that were brought to him that day, he made the right call. And we can even grant that that's true. For instance, on the question of how many troops should Israel call, It's now come out publicly. We had it in our book first. He was told by the top of the army, oh, you know, probably still don't need to do a full military call up. Let's do a large one, 100,000 troops. And he said, no, let's do the 300,000. Let's do as much as we can right away, okay? A good decision by Nathaniel. And there were a few other points in which questions were

brought to him, and he can say truthfully that he made the right. right decision for Israel. And yet, I think what your question gets to is that there were so many other decisions that were never brought to him. And he can say, he can say that's the fault of the whole defense establishment. In some way, I guess it is. But it's also his fault for not pressing on those choices, for not bringing to himself all of those decisions and making the right ones on that day. If my question as a citizen is, where were you, when the security establishment collapsed, then don't blame me, the security establishment collapsed is a bad answer.

Let's move on. Now let's get to everything the Americans did wrong. There are two themes. I don't mean to have a pessimistic conversation, but it is a book about Israeli decision-making after October 7 during and after. So it's not going to be a fun, you know, happy conversation. There are two themes that run through the book that come up repeatedly. The first is the American constant American desire for de-escalation.

It comes back as like a repeating sort of litany of what the Americans keep saying. They're always looking for de-escalation, obviously, especially mostly during the Biden period. And to the Israelis, this is a very bad idea, this whole always de-escalate. because the Israelis understood on October 7 that the enemy, the Muqawama axis, the resistance axis of Hamas Hezbollah, the Iranian regime, had developed a strategy of slow escalation. This is the heart of the Mukawama strategy by which they thought they would destroy Israel. Slow escalation that never jumps too fast to trigger an Israeli counter-escalation. And that's how you would quietly escalate your capabilities to the point where in October 7 was possible. And the Israelis looked at Hamas and said, you know, holy shit, that's exactly what

Hezbollah is doing in the north, with its tunnels and its crack commando forces and the Redwan forts and all of that. And so the Israeli response was escalation on all fronts, mass mobilization. We will remove these threats that seek to destroy us on our borders and never make themselves so right until it's good for them, right until the moment they're ready. They keep the escalation on a slow burn. Why didn't the Americans get that? Like, why didn't the Americans understand under Biden?

I think that's different under Trump, but not among all the Trump people. Why didn't the Americans understand after October 7 that you can't win a war? You can't win a negotiation. You probably can't win an argument with your spouse, assuming you want to win it. It's not always a smart thing to win that argument with your spouse, but if winning is the goal, you're not going to win it. if you can't escalate, if you lack the capacity or the will to escalate, if everybody knows you cannot escalate, you've lost before you've even begun. And that's why, for example, when President Obama, when the JCPOA was being debated in Washington, and he kept saying,

look, if it fails, if the Iranians fail on this, all options are on the table. No one ever believed him that all options, no one in the Obama administration ever believed the president that all options are on the table. Obama was not going to go to war with Iran, and that, that for many people really profoundly shaped how they understood the JCPOA as a concession rather than a negotiated agreement, because nobody, not the Iranians and not the Americans, thought there would actually be an escalation on the American side. Why didn't the Americans get that? There's this constant drumbeat to de-escalate, but no actual solutions coming from Washington on how you actually remove Hezbollah, if that's actually a goal. You actually have to do it. Now what?

Now what actually happens? Why do the Americans not grasp that there might need to be a war and it might need to be won? I should say, by the way, in the war room, we do speak to senior American officials as well, not just Israelis. So that's, you know, Jake Sullivan, for instance, on the Biden side, Steve Whitkoff on the Trump side. This question of yours, why don't the Americans get it? I feel like there are so many people in so many different countries who ask, who asked this question and have, you know, paid the price for this question.

The best answer that I've heard comes in a definition of American exceptionalism that was shared with me by Tal Becker, who's the longtime senior Israeli government lawyer, diplomat, a very, very impressive guy. He told me he can define American exceptionalism very simply. Ocean, Ocean, Canada, Mexico. Okay? That is American exceptionalism right there. Tal Becker's a genius.

He's been on this podcast. I say this with a lot of love, but he apparently looked at him out. And it could not be... In other words, America has no threats? It could not be more different from what Israelis see when they look at the map. And so the American critique, you know, you could focus on the Biden administration, which is a particularly, you know, pronounced instance of this. Jake Sullivan's mantra was de-escalation.

Not just with Israel, but even Ukraine, Russia, and in many ways the Biden administration's actions there ended up contributing to the prolonging of that war and missing opportunities to speed up that war and take decisive action. I would say the same thing happened because of their actions with Israel and Gaza, with Israel and Lebanon, with Israel and Iran.

But it's not just the Biden administration. You see it across administrations, such that even now, you know, you'll hear from the sort of Kushner, Wittkoff, orbit. The Israelis just don't understand that force can't be the answer to all of their problems. That force aren't going to, you know, isn't going to solve their problems. And, you know, they're not necessarily wrong about that. I mean, Israel can trounce all of its enemies greater than it will ever trounce them, like in the Six-Day War, 1967, and it still won't solve the larger political problems. That's true.

And yet it did solve a number of other discrete problems for Israel, such as, say, strategic depth, you know, important things like that. And I think what also the American officials never seem to confront is the, counterfactual. That if Israel hadn't taken this action, what problems would it then face? Would it immediately have this diplomatic off-ramp to solving its problems? Or would the hostile nations or non-state actors around it instead have understood Israel can easily be pushed around? Let's do even more war. I think the Biden administration, at so many points in this war, ended up pursuing policies counterproductive to their own intentions, policies that pushed off a, you know, hostage deal.

We have this now that, you know, Israeli officials were saying this, but we don't need to listen to Israeli officials. We have documents from Yachia Sinwar himself saying, I'm seeing all of this American pressure on Israel, I'm seeing domestic Israeli pressure, I'm seeing Israeli war room divides. based on that, he tells his own hostage deal negotiators, don't make the deal yet. Hold out for more. He saw this because we all saw it. Of course, it was clear as day. And the question that Israelis were asking over and over, which is if the Biden administration wants this war done with, if they want the hostage deal ceasefire to happen, why did they keep saying so out loud so clearly?

because that's only going to lead to the opposite result. And that kind of counterintuitive process ended up being beyond them in a lot of these instances. Okay, but why is it beyond them? Why do the great negotiators of the great superpower of America who gave the world the internet, the car, and the airplane, why is this wise and brilliant people incapable of doing this consistently across arenas across it?

Why do Americans get dumb at foreign policy? That question has a much longer answer. But this question specifically about Israel. But you just described a truly simplistic mistake. Don't tell Sinoir, hold on, we're going to pressure the Israelis. It's better for you to hold on. And they constantly told Sincor that while thinking they're what, talking to their own selves about their morality? What is happening there?

Why didn't they understand the pressure on Israel was countervailing? In other words, it was anti-pressure. It was loosening the pressure on Hamas, by definition. Some of it, I think I can explain, and some of it I just can't. So let me start with what I just can't. After Israel took out Nasrallah, okay, in Lebanon, you have the hardest phone conversation of the war between Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in the U.S. and defense minister, Yoav Galant, in Israel.

Austin starts off this conversation saying WTF, what did you just do? And Gallet, by the way, had thought that maybe the U.S. might actually support this idea because Nisraela had so much American blood on his hands, which I think showed that Gallant didn't have the best understanding of where the Americans were on these questions. One thing Austin tells Gallant on this phone call is, you know, after this fight, which you guys are now exploding into something larger in the north, you're going to still have to live with these people. Your enemies aren't going to go away.

You're going to have to live with these people and make peace with them. With Chisbella. Galant is just sitting there listening to this and thinking, what the hell am I hearing right now? I'm going to have to think about, you know, how I can work with Hizbella. No, I'm going to push them off of, off of, off of my border. And yes, it's true.

Maybe I'm not going to destroy the whole organization. But why does Lloyd Austin think that Hezbollah is something amenable to anything other than permanent war to death and genocide, which is Qa's plan for Israel? Right. That one I simply cannot explain. And how even after 10, 11 months of Hezbollah missile fire into Israel, in which every U.S. diplomatic effort had been tried and failed, still. the U.S. was telling Israel, don't escalate, de-escalate. Okay. But let me get to what I can explain. So,

I think when it came to the Gaza hostage deal, okay, the U.S. wasn't speaking to Hamas, at least not yet. The Trump people would, interestingly. But the Biden people would speak to the mediators. And the mediators, I think, played a crucial role in misleading them about what was really going on. Because what they are hearing from Qatar, from Egypt, is we can get Hamas to agree to this, that, and the other thing. But these Israelis, Netanyahu is the problem. Netanyahu doesn't want the deal. Nathaniau is doing whatever he can. We need pressure from you on him.

And this is being echoed, of course, by Nathaniau's opponents in Israel, in America, of whom there are a great many. and for many reasons. And I think they really believed this at a certain point, and they took what they were hearing from the mediator and said, we need the pressure on Israel, or BB is just going to take advantage of us over and over again here. And they viewed it through that lens,

and then we're continually disappointed when they could get Netanyahu over the hump finally on something, well, then Hamas would shift the gold posts, okay? And then Qatar couldn't actually deliver Hamas in the way that it said it would. But I think trusting these mediators in the first place was a huge mistake when you have Qatar's foreign ministry on October 7th

itself blaming Israel, adopting the Hamas narrative entirely about Al-Axa and so forth. I mean, that's the camp they were in and that's the best intel that the U.S. was getting. Okay? about where things stood in the hostage talks. The thinker Ed Lutwak, great strategist, very politically incorrect. What he says is that all great powers are autistic, okay?

In the sense that there's something that they can't quite see things from the point of view of others, okay? Because they themselves are so large, are so dominating. He says, by the way, China is the worst at this. They simply cannot understand the rest of the world's perspective on these issues. But I think America suffers from some of that as well. There are primaries coming up very soon in the United States. There's an election two years later, a full-on four-year presidential election.

What is in store for Israel? Obviously, you know, we're looking at an anti-Israel shift. It happened profoundly in the polls, so we have to expect it to happen at the ballot box. Are we looking at a more anti-Israel House and Senate, potentially presidency in the next few years? And what do you think that means? You sit on the Wall Street Journal editorial board. You handle a lot of these issues. You follow a lot of these politics very closely, more closely than I'm capable of.

Are we looking at a future U.S. Israel relationship where there will be more pressure, more skepticism, but also a desire to be constructive and have a constructive relationship? or something closer to sanctions or arms embargo. How do you understand this political moment for Israel? I'm asking for Israelis. What should Israelis think of this political moment in America? If Democrats were to take power right now, okay, in this political moment right now, the question wouldn't be one of pressure, okay? Democratic voters, certainly the Democratic activist base,

they're not looking for pressure on Israel right now. They're looking for punitive action against Israel right now, which is to say more than pressure, okay? To some extent, Israel has become the enemy for them, and they are not looking at it at all in terms of American interests. Okay? So you can very easily right now make the interest-based case that, if America wants to take its great power competition with China seriously right now. The last thing it should do is distance itself from Israel, a high-tech, defense tech superpower with a habit of learning rapidly from its frequent combat experience. That's precisely the ally America needs right now in this competition on every front with China. And yet... Democratic voters are not thinking that way. They're thinking that Israel needs to be punished

for all that it did these past few years. And the reason is, Israel has been such a high salience issue in American politics. Not just as is usual for, say, the one month or the few weeks or the two months of a Gaza war, of a Lebanon war, but for two years.

And then with this Iran war, it somehow erased the kind of distinctions between the different wars. And so it feels like three years. For three years straight, they've been hearing about this one country and all the bad that it does. And that's been flooding their social media feeds every single day. Okay. That's Israel in American politics right now, such that even Republican politicians,

even the ones who are pro-Israel, no, it's not a good idea right now to be speaking too loudly about that. if they have national aspirations. Okay, maybe they're in a safe seat somewhere and they can do it. But if they have national aspirations, they shouldn't be seen embracing Israel too much. Okay? That is this moment in American politics.

I think the question for Israel is how much of that is lasting and how much of that is ephemeral. Okay? How much of that is because it's a top of the news. So if I were Israel and I'm thinking about the diplomatic issue, alone, the best thing I could do isn't to change people's minds, it's to get Israel out of the news at the moment, okay? Have it not be such a pressing thing for Americans so that more reasonable assessments

of both the moral situation and the interests, the American interests at play, can reassert themselves. And so if you ask me, what's the situation right now? I tell you that. If you ask me, what's the situation in two years? years, you know, with another presidential election, I think it's very much a different question. How things could change, how the underlying basis of the U.S.-Israel relationship could reassert itself in time, in some peace and quiet.

I'll finish with this. You are an American Jew. I have been alerted to this by the Mossad. And the Keepa. And the Keepa. You can't trust the Keepa. You have to check with the Mossad first. You're a member of the American Jewish community,

and you are very aware and read and write about some of the ways that American Jews are handled this moment. And so I want to end with something that for me has become very personal and very frustrating. and frankly, I don't know what you're going to say, and I hope to learn. Why has the American Jewish community failed so profoundly to meet this moment? I have emails from well-known American Jews who are not well-known as Jews. They're not in the Jewish world, in the Jewish, I don't know what, organizations or Jewish leaders. They're just very successful, well-known Americans who are looking to understand what's happening, looking to find community because they kind of know that there's a war to destroy Israel

somewhere out there in the Middle East. They don't think Netanyahu has done everything right, but they certainly don't think that the attempt to demonize Israel as something worthy of removal is legitimate. They perceive it as a war on them, but they won't speak because there's tremendous costs, they believe, social costs to speaking. There's a sense of being pushed out of the public space. There's a sense of Jews being marginalized. We know that the percentage of Jews in the student bodies in the Ivy League are in in decline because of a policy decision over the last 20 years.

We know that the story of the Jews of what millions of Jews actually went through in the 20th century that produced Israel, but also that produced a lot of other phenomenon, is not taught in university, can't be taught in you, is actively avoided, especially in elite universities. the Jewish story is being marginalized and pushed out of the public eye. Synagogues, I know, have been hiding their Israeli flags, especially in liberal synagogues, but not only in liberal synagogues. There's been real threats. Every synagogue I go to, and I've been to dozens in the last three years and all over America,

have guards whenever the Jews have to gather to pray. American Jews spend so much money on defense, whether it's organizations or advocacy, But they haven't as a community of millions rallied to their defense while anti-Semitism is spiking, while FBI figures show that the biggest religious hate crime target in America are Jews, not Muslims and not anybody else. What's happening to American Jews? Why are they motionless? Why are they struggling to get on their feet and, you know, shoulder to shoulder push back? I think motionless is such a good word there. And that's not emotionless. They have plenty of emotion about these questions. Anxiety, yes.

But it feels motionless. And what crystallized it for me was a 2024 meeting between Ron Dermar from Israel and the leaders of many American Jewish organizations in New York City. and Ron Dermar was berated at this meeting by the American Jewish leaders saying, Israel needs to do more for us. Israel needs to help us. Israel needs to give us the information that we need to fight this battle, win the arguments and so forth. You need to be working with us, helping us in this and that way.

And I suppose they're not wrong about any of that stuff on the, merits, but something in me, I just couldn't understand, Israel needs to do more for you. Well, it's fighting this war on all these fronts. Maybe you have it backward. Maybe you need to take care of your front in this war, okay, and say that Israel is focusing on some other important questions at the time. And there was a little bit of... Just to add to that, I think Israel has been disastrously incompetent in doing its part on that front, on the information more on just telling what the hell is going on to. I have a hard time finding out. How do I expect a rabbi in New York to know? But that doesn't erase anything of your responsibility to do what you need for your

purposes in your, you know, you're right, even if they're completely right. If they're 100% right, you're still, you're still right. Okay, what have you done? And so I think to answer this question properly, you would really have to go deeper into American Jewish history and the kind of politics that has worked for American Jews. I mean, to take this in a direction that might seem strange, okay, Mayor Kahana in America, before he went totally off the deep end on all manner of things, was arguing that American Jews needed to stop practicing a, you know, politics that went with our important people are going to get in a room and talk with the important people in the country, in the city, wherever, and speak with them and we're going to

work something out and instead should have a sort of politics of the street to really get our way on these questions. A mass mobilization. Let's get out there. Let's become a problem for the people in power. Okay, let's make ourselves into a problem. And the closest he got to really getting traction on that issue was with the Soviet Jewry movement, fighting for the freedom of Soviet Jewel. But even then, there was immense resistance to that.

It never really caught on, because that wasn't American-Jewish-style politics. Okay? For better and for worse. You know, you can compare it if you want to with black American politics in the U.S., which in some ways has been more successful at getting themselves heard. Of course, there are more black Americans, but getting themselves heard in this way by being willing to take to the streets, by being willing to show up in force in that way.

But has it worked out for the community as a whole in terms of their economic advancement on a individual level, in terms of where energies are directed? You could say no. You could say the American Jewish way has actually been the better way overall. But when you come to this moment where you really need something from the people in power, where you need them to understand this issue, and you find that your abilities to make yourselves into a problem have atrophied. And your whole approach, the kind of establishment approach of we have these very good, relations with the relevant people, that ends up becoming as much of a liability as a strength when you're not willing to threaten those relationships and actually put them in danger

for an issue like this. And so I think American Jews, you know, okay, one big rally in Washington or two big rallies in Washington. But why wasn't this frequent? Why weren't they outside the doors of the relevant people? Let's say, you know, Chuck Schumer's door. Why were people, why was it only people from the anti-Israel side making his life miserable? Okay?

Or Representative Adam Smith, a Democrat very important on the Armed Services Committee, has said that these people hounded him day and night and have actually moved him on some issues. Why was there not that countervailing pressure? There was only people in meeting rooms who it became apparent couldn't actually. hurt these politicians, the others could. On social media, in a primary, in something like that, APEC began to assert itself in primaries in specific instances, okay, for people on the far left fringe, okay? It could, it could sort of target them, challenge them. But for others, there was no willingness to make yourself into a problem. And I think that's just a long-term story of the American Jewish experience, American Jewish politics. We saw it again in this instance.

How do you fix it? How do American just forget Israel, all right? There's this incredibly difficult, painful war. The wars will continue. The Iranians still want to destroy us. That is toxic, that is big, that is also not American Jews. What about the raging, insane anti-Semitism that hounds Jews online? What about the marginalization? What about the fact that you can't be anti-anybody, but you can be anti-Jews? And when you have that becoming normalized in politics, how could there not be American Jews raging? So what would it take? What is that?

Is it just not bad enough? Will there be a point where it's bad enough that American Jews wake up that young people start organizing on social media? Or is this American Jewish culture? They're doomed to be quiet and polite about it no matter what happens. American Jewish culture has immense strengths. I just think this isn't one of them. I also don't think that it will keep getting worse on this front.

I mean, I see the trend line, okay? I even see anti-Semitism seeping into the youth culture, meaning you could once say, on the far left I see it, on the far right I see it, I think that's not the way to look at it anymore. It has become such a prominent thing on social media that it is becoming a part of youth culture. conspiratorial anti-Semitism, a negative association with the Jews.

Certainly a conspiratorial association with the Jews. So all of this is happening, but I think it is going to become lower salience in the years that follow, and we're going to see that have an effect as well. What I would say, one thing that I think American Jews can do, and I think are going to be forced to do, perhaps as a result of the next Israeli-Israeli of, election, but we don't know, is stop looking at Israel in a political way, okay, and look at it in a manner of domestic, sorry, a manner of solidarity, okay, simply solidarity with the half of the world's Jews who live in Israel, who a great many people want to deliver into the hands

of their worst enemies who care absolutely nothing for their lives. That is the basic solidarity that I think Jews everywhere are called to show. And when Jews in the diaspora start getting political about it, this government, that government, I think they miss what is happening, which isn't about this government at all, the anti-Israel pressure. I mean, Netanyahu has been demonized for so long that he makes an effective demon figure. Okay? So maybe it'll be harder to demonize someone whose name nobody has ever heard of. Okay, I grant that. But I think you're going to see it assert itself if other things don't change in the same manner.

And I'd also say much of that critique ends up being misinformed. So there was so much that American Jews were saying that Netanyahu won't end this war. He wants to keep it going for his own political purposes. he's sacrificing the, you know, hostages. They were saying the summer of 2024. And hearing that, I think that actually filtered in to a lot of the media coverage where the sort of smart set would hear this

from their Jewish friends, even from their knowledgeable Israeli friends. And it acted to totally delegitimize Israel's war. But if you think about that now, and I've been tough on Netanyahu on this call, so I think it's worth saying this. If you think about that now, If Israel had ended that war,

September, or sorry, summer of 2024, that's before Israel confronts Hezbollah and takes that existential threat off of its border. That's before the 12-day war, which was so successful and left Iran's nuclear program

in rubble, another existential threat. That's before the final Gaza City operation, the final offensives in Gaza, which the whole IDF high command was against, but which actually proved crucial to pressuring Hamas into making this final hostage deal in which, to everyone's surprise in the IDF high command, they actually released all the hostages.

They all came home, alive or tragically dead. And they allowed Israel as part of this deal to keep more than half of Gaza and sit there, which I think nobody saw coming and which would not have been the case for that earlier deal. And so much of that criticism of Netanyahu at that time, which felt so urgent,

I think in hindsight, doesn't look as good, actually. And it was precisely keeping open the war that kept that option alive to make some of the boldest, some of the riskiest, and ultimately some of the most successful decisions of the war.

And so much of the story of this war is Netanyahu's caution at the start, giving way over time, gaining confidence in the IDF and looking to other fronts where Israel could be far more successful in this war. Nathanielo outlasting his rivals, firing them, exhausting them, whatever, but outlasting them in his determination to keep the war going and accomplish those objectives. So I think if we can look past some of the politics, acknowledge there's good and bad on each of these Israeli sides and focus on the core question of solidarity, which is how Israel's enemies come at us, American Jews or Jews elsewhere. But focus on that. I think that is the attitude that will allow a greater involvement, more action, more motion, as you put it, and not emotionless. response. Elliot Kaufman from the Wall Street Journal. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Good luck with the book. Well done on writing it. And I really appreciate it. Thank you so much.