Ask Haviv Anything - Episode 28: The Gaza Paradox

Episode Date: July 14, 2025

As hostage talks seem stalled and the war grinds on into its 22nd month, doubts about Netanyahu’s strategy and intentions have become ubiquitous.Netanyahu has given many reasons to distrust him, including his simple refusal to explain the strategy for removing Hamas and Israel’s vision for a post-Hamas Gaza.But it isn’t enough to criticize Netanyahu’s strategy or even to argue he doesn’t have one. To offer an effective critique, critics need to suggest a better strategy for removing Hamas and securing a better future for Gaza.So far, criticism of Netanyahu has either avoided this step or suggested that Hamas cannot, in fact, be disentangled from Gaza, that Gaza’s future is inevitably a Hamas future.In this episode, we dive into these questions. We ask what it would mean for both Israelis and Palestinians if Hamas is, as the critics claim, unremovable.This episode was sponsored by Bennett and Robin Greenspan of Houston, Texas, strong supporters of Israel who recognize Israel’s centrality and vitality to the Jewish world. They asked us to say that they are proud to sponsor this episode of “Ask Haviv Anything” because this podcast makes understanding the Middle East a bit easier. They have dedicated this episode to the courageous and incredibly imaginative women and men of the Mossad, who make television look boring and simplistic in comparison to their daring exploits behind enemy lines.Please join me on Patreon to support this project: ⁠www.patreon.com/AskHavivAnything⁠.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail]⁠.Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Hi, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Ask Haviv Anything. Episode 28, the Gaza paradox. We're going to get into some of the questions raised by the latest round of negotiations over a ceasefire in Gaza. Really important and significant questions that we don't have good answers to. It appears to be that the negotiations were moving ahead very well. On June 29, President Trump said that it would take a week or within days. There would be an agreement. Netanyahu, I'm recording on July 14th, maybe you'll hear this or go out on July 15th.

Netanyahu said on July 10th that a deal would be struck within a few days. Everything we have learned since then has told us that a deal is actually farther away. The stickler, one of the major points of disagreement, is the question of the IDF's deployment during a ceasefire. It's really the question of Hamas's capacity to use a ceasefire to rehabilitate itself. It's a question of what happens at the end of the ceasefire. 60 days that gets out 10 living hostages. Well, what about the other 10?

All of these questions are things that are being debated right now among Israelis, and they're things we don't have good answers to. I think that one of the most important aspects of these negotiations is being missed. One of the really fundamental senses of how the Israelis understand what's happening. What's at stake for Gaza? And in the general debate, the public debate about these negotiations, I think some really fundamental things are missing. I think people are talking in ways that misunderstand Hamas.

There are a couple of things that the world is missing, the discussion is missing, that we have to put back on the table. Consequences to a deal, to a lack of a deal. Consequences to a Hamas that rehabilitates in Gaza. consequences that people who care about Gaza, I think, aren't noticing. Consequences that the debate around Netanyahu, especially after the big New York Times investigation this past week, that argues that he has essentially prolonged the war for his own political needs,

I think are missing. There's a lot missing from the debate. I want to try and add those things in, and just lay that out there. Hopefully it'll be useful to people. I also want to tell you that I'm tackling these questions now because on our Patreon community, many, many people have been asking about this, have been asking specifically about the negotiations, about Hamas,

about where the war stands, about what the strategy is, about what might happen next. And we try to take those questions that are asked on Patreon, and I invite you to join our Patreon community. There's debates, there's people sharing, you know, book recommendations, YouTube video recommendations, and help drive us in the direction that you think would be interesting and useful for you to learn about.

Before I get into the subject itself, I want to tell you that this episode was sponsored by Bennett and Robin Greenspan of Houston, Texas, who are strong supporters of Israel, who recognize Israel's centrality and vitality to the Jewish world, and they asked us to say that they are proud sponsors of this episode of Ask Haviv Anything

because the insights from this podcast make understanding the Middle East a bit easier. Thank you, Bennett and Robin. That is extraordinarily appreciated. And it's really wonderful that this episode was dedicated to the courageous and incredibly imaginative women and men of the Mossad, who make television look boring and simplistic compared to their daring and astonishingly clever exploits behind enemy lines. after what we saw in the Chisbalah operation, in the Iran War, I don't think anyone can doubt that. So where do things stand? Everybody expected a deal. At the moment, there's no deal.

Netanyahu went to Washington. He came back. Trump said on June 29 that he believed a hostage deal could be reached. Netanyahu said what he said on July 10. A deal is moving further away, as I said. In the meantime, nothing is moving forward on normalizing. on peace. People talked about Syria, about Saudi Arabia, obviously, Indonesia even, but everything is a little bit stuck. Nobody can sign on the dotted line as long as there's no horizon

for Gaza. There's no sense that something is leaning toward a direction for an end to the Gaza war. And the two sides, Hamas, needs this to be the end. It's crunch time. If it wants to survive in Gaza in any sense, it has to have some piece of Gaza left to control, to be able to retake, where it isn't being pulled out of the tunnels and it isn't being sifted out of the civilian population. Hamas is in a very weak state. There was a Reuters report last month that argued that Hamas was so weakened by Israeli military pressure, by internal dissent, by fracturing of its command structure, by the lack of – it could not – I mean, I don't think Reuters meant – this part, but it is a significant part, by the loss of the financial income from the stealing of aid, represented by a, the Israeli aid blockade, and the establishment of the Gaza humanitarian foundation system that Hamas couldn't steal. And that loss of that major source of income, of stealing U.N. aid, essentially international aid, and then selling it on the black market to

Gazans, has been a major, major blow to Hamas. The Reuters report was arguing, it was a polemic more than a news report. It was arguing that Hamas was so weakened that in fact the Israelis shouldn't be worried about a withdrawal because there was no chance of Hamas this week could possibly retake Gaza. Make what you will of the polemic. I didn't believe it for a second.

It seemed ridiculous, you know, wishcasting to me. But these are the same sorts of people who were shocked that the Taliban retook Afghanistan as quickly as they did. Don't, you know, analysts, especially in the... the Western media, but also in Western intelligence agencies, are notoriously bad at predicting anything in this region, just because they say so, and just because they say so, in elite prestige media outlets and with elite prestige titles, does not make it so. If you follow their

predictions that are always generally served the narrative they're trying to advance, you will generally find yourself surprised by events. But the report does nevertheless reflect the sense that is shared among many, including in Israeli intelligence, the Hamas really is weak. It is really genuinely weakened. The Israelis now control 70 to 75 percent of the ground in Gaza, and Hamas has lost ground, Hamas has lost capacity. Hamas is one real hope, and we saw them double down on this repeatedly and tragically in the last week, is the killing of Israeli soldiers who are no longer fighting a raiding war, but actually controlling the ground in Gaza,

providing opportunities to do what Hamas has struggled to do until now, which is strike them in a guerrilla war meant to demoralize the Israeli public. Hamas thinks it's succeeding, and many Western analysts think Hamas is succeeding in that guerrilla war, because 70% of the Israeli public have told pollsters for a long, long time now, many, many, many months, that they want to end the war. the war. But I don't think it's succeeding. Israelis would like to end the war not because of

anything the enemy is doing. They would like to end the war because they have lost trust in the leadership, in Netanyahu's ability to end the war, and it's Ennau's ability to reach any kind of victory under any terms that he has claimed he is reaching for. And that distrust of Israel's own leadership has always been a weakness. It's never really been the enemy can't demoralize us more than our own leadership can demoralize us. But nevertheless, you know, Hamas has this sense that it has this one strategy, which is a guerrilla war that has to work faster on demoralizing Israelis than the Israeli war effort on destroying Hamas' last regions, last areas, last actual infrastructures. We're going to get back to this question. Can Israel destroy Hamas? Because it's really fundamental.

But it's worth noting that the fact that Hamas is pretty clearly, weekend now is actually probably helping to stall the negotiations. Hamas cannot compromise very much. It can't bend a whole lot because it doesn't have a whole lot of things to give. It doesn't have a lot to lose. And so if it's down to the nub, right, what is it going to now negotiate with? It's basically down to negotiating Israeli victory conditions, which it can't give or it has to just admit defeat. And so there's not a lot of a maneuver for Hamas to maneuver with. It can, it has hostages, that is, it's one great leverage over the Israelis, and nothing else. And so the Israeli demands around the hostage deal

are essentially victory demands, and Hamas, therefore, is having trouble negotiating without making demands about Israeli redeployments that allow it to resupply that the Israelis are having a lot of trouble accepting. That Hamas weakness, that makes it hard for Hamas to bend at the negotiating table is also why Netanyahu can't really compromise easily. It's a decisive moment. It feels like a decisive moment. A lot of the military pressure is pretty much spent. That's what the military has to pressure. If it moves into the remaining 25, 30 percent of Gaza, it doesn't currently control. That's the civilian population. That's the areas where hostages are being kept. That's the last areas there are.

And so the military pressure has now basically reached its apex. There's probably more raiding that can be done in the rest of Gaza that isn't under the Israeli military's control at the moment, but how much? And so Netanyahu is also looking for an end. The public has turned against the war, as I said, many, many months ago. It costs every Israeli household, the ones that aren't paying in literal blood on the line and soldiers in the war in their sons and fathers and brothers being killed in that war. Well over 400 soldiers have died in the war after October 7 in Gaza.

But for Netanyahu, it has to end a certain way. That's true strategically. It can't end with the Hamas re-taking of Gaza. It simply can't. But it's also true politically. How Netanyahu maneuvers this moment will determine his political future to some extent. Now, that was the substance of the argument of the New York Times. The fact that the strategic question is not the only question on the line, but Nizaniao's politics are clearly part of

his driving impetus in making decisions on the war. That has, by the way, led many Israelis to distrust him. This is something we've talked about for a year and a half. Now that the New York Times noticed it, it's suddenly on the agenda of Western debate. But what we've talked about is how half of Israelis think his basic decisions on the war are driven by his need for political survival after October 7, not to be blamed for October 7, but to be the man who lifts Israel up and defeats the enemies that came out, and that we suddenly understood the scale of the threat they posed on October 7, and he is the one who then secures Israel. Yes, he oversaw the March 2 October 7, but as he has argued publicly explicitly in these words, it's everyone else's fault. but his, and he is the one who actually lifted Israel out of that low point and brought it to a safe place. The argument made by the New York Times report is that he, in fact, has extended the war just so that he wouldn't have to face an election before he had the polling to suggest

he might be able to survive that election in power. Israeli soldiers, in other words, died in Gaza and Israeli hostages languished in the dungeons of Gaza, and Gazan civilians died in the war effort in Gaza for Netanyahu's political campaign. That's the argument of the New York Times investigation, report, and that is the belief of half of Israelis for probably over a year now. But the bottom line, for our purposes, is Netanyahu does want the war to end, and he needs certain conditions to be met,

whether it's for himself politically or, strategically for it to end. And the tragedy of Israelis not trusting him in wartime, even as they send their sons and fathers to war, is its own tragedy. You know, Netanyahu is someone who has not stopped politicking throughout this war. And that's something that has enraged me. I am deeply hurt. I feel deeply betrayed by Netanyahu's behavior. And if there are pro-Nat-Nat-Nat-Nal people out there listening or watching who don't know what I'm talking about, you've got to do your homework,

because it's really been egregious. He has time for a war with every possible party in Israeli politics that is the most petty and the most unimportant right now, and he did not have time to go to near Oz for 630-something days before he visited the single biggest massacre site of a massacre that happened on his watch. And only when the polls said it wouldn't be a problem, did he risk it after almost two years.

So, no, Netanyahu has not behaved properly. He has not behaved like a leader in wartime. During this war, he's gone months at a time without speaking to the Israeli public once. That is not legitimate. That is not okay. But just because Netanyahu has politiced his way through the war doesn't mean his war decisions have been political.

Because, for one thing, when you're a politician, politics is never just politics. I get it. He's a man who lives off of other people's rage. He survives on division. His people sit and plan campaigns of rage. They build up visions of enemies, mostly imagined ones, not only, but mostly.

They try to rekindle Ashkenazi Sephardi animosity. He will do almost anything to stay in power. It's a deeply predatory kind of politics. that mocks people when they come to him and say, wait a second, you can't campaign against a left that's serving and dying in Gaza in huge numbers while you also hand exemptions to your own ultra-Orthodox coalition partners and call yourself patriotic and then traitors.

And he looks at people like that and his people, his political campaign strategists, look at people like that, people like me who say such things, and kind of mock them in like, laugh them out of the room because they're people without the kind of animalistic predatory instinct to survive in politics. If you don't want it enough, if you're not willing to overstep and trample every idea and ideal and patriotic duty on the path to that victory, you don't deserve that victory. There is that political side of Netanyahu. It's there. It drives a lot of people

to deeply despise him and distrust him. And anyone who thinks that disliking Netanyahu for those things is BB derangement syndrome, because the Israeli right loves to borrow everything it's ever seen on the American right, doesn't know simple patriotism and decency when they see them. Hating Nizuio is not unjustified. Hitting any politician is not unjustified, as long as it's about their behavior, their ideas, the things they do, not, you know, their identity. There's also the element of Likud loyalty. I've said this to right-wing Israelis many times since October 7. You're going to forgive him. No, we won't, they promised. Every single time. We just need to finish the war before we oust him and take a different leader for the right. Yes, you will, I said every single time.

You're going to forgive him. And they have forgiven him for October 7. And they always will forgive him. Here's the thing. The Israeli right, Lycoud, has never ousted a leader. Not in 77, years of Israel's existence. Not in all the years the Menach and Began led their movement from before Israel's existence. Not under Began, not under his successor, Yitzhak Shamir,

not under his successor, Ariel Sharon, and not under his successor, Benjamin Netanyahu. It's complicated. Shamir, Netanyahu, Sharon Netanyahu. None of them were ever ousted by the party. If the right has never ousted a leader,

that's too much loyalty. And that's a little bit of the explanation, a lot of the, maybe all the explanation, for the forgiving of Netanyahu after October 7. It's a loyalty I don't like. A politician doesn't deserve our loyalty. We deserve their loyalty. And the more loyal you are to a politician, the less likely that politician is to do what you want them to do.

I want to say something that many Netanyahu supporters now feel as I say this and want to say to me. It's not loyalty, they say. It's trust. We trust that he'll do right by us. Maybe not by everybody. Maybe not everybody like him. Maybe he doesn't behave the right way

every time, every minute. Not everybody can be a politician. Not everybody has the narcissism or the sociopathy, maybe it's to think that they're the solution to all the problems of their country. But among those who do, Netanyahu will look out for them in the end.

I have two questions to people who tell me we're not loyal blindly to Netanyahu at all costs. We trust him on the things that matter. I want to say to those people, what do I do if I don't trust him on the things that matter? What if I think he's already compromised so much? He's not entirely sure where it is that he can't compromise. What do I do then? And two, we've never seen Lycud voters not trust their leader, ever. We don't actually know what that would look like. We don't know what it would take for Likud to oust the leader, because it's never happened.

How are Likud voters so sure they're capable of voting a leader out if they've never done it? How are they sure that they're getting what they want, and not just living off of a culture of political inertia, letting him dangle invented enemies in front of them while he fails to actually do right by them? Do Likud voters want the Haredi welfare state and draft exemptions.

Do Likud voters want to live in a country with insane protectionist import policies? The Netanyahu vowed in videos put out during the election to change, but that nobody is changing in this government. They're too busy dealing with other things that aren't the war, like the Attorney General. Do Likud voters really believe

that he's doing right by them, sees them, thinks about them, or just notices them in an election, in time and knows that they're definitely going to vote for him. How do they know that they could topple him if they wanted to? If they've never done it, even once. All of that is true. The case against Netanyahu is powerful.

You don't have to be on the left to see it. And yet. And yet. Serious political analysis begins with the understanding that a politician genuinely believes they're necessary. that their leadership matters, that therefore their own victory in politics is in the public interest, not only their own interest, and therefore that a great deal can be sacrificed for that political victory. Yes, politicians are narcissists.

Who else would claim to be able to run a country? But Netanyahu believes he's necessary, and when the chips are down and terrifying decisions have to be made, he made them. the Chizbala operation, the Iran war. If his voters come out of that and say he was necessary, that was what was building up the whole time. What we saw the Mossad and the Air Force do in Iran, that wasn't built in the previous week or month,

that was built over years and planned most intensively in the months leading up to it. In the end, Netanyahu did the thing that needed doing. Even if you disagree with what he did, you can acknowledge the military success, the strategic courage involved in all of that. And he has arguments against a lot of the criticisms, the criticisms you can read in the New York Times piece.

For example, there's the argument reiterated there that people have been making for over a year and a half, that I myself have made, even though not in that way, in a different way, that he refuses to present a day after plan for Gaza because that day after plan will be opposed by his coalition members, Smotrich and Ben-Gvier. That's true. Benettoniao has argued in response that naming a day after governing system for Gaza, actually delineating what it would look like, would make it much harder to achieve.

For example, if he tells the world the Saudis are going to run Gaza after the war, or some constellation of Arab leaders, of Arab governments and Arab armies led by the Saudis, Well, by uttering those words, he makes Saudi Arabia in Arab political discourse complicit after he says that sentence for every Palestinian who might die in Gaza from that moment until the actual establishment of that government. He actually is making it harder for the Saudis to join that force, to lead that force. He might be closing the window on the Saudi political capacity to do the very thing that he's offering be done.

How does Netanyahu delineate a day after plan without undermining the day after plan that he is delineating? That's not a minor quibble with the complaint that he doesn't offer a day after plan. That's huge. It's then entirely reasonable to come back to him and say, yeah, but we don't trust you

because you've given us no reason to trust you ever. So if we could trust you, we would say, You've got a plan. You just don't want to say it because you don't want to ruin it. But we can't trust you, so how can we say that? What is the vision for Gaza? Criticism of Netanyahu is totally fair on Gaza. I've criticized him more or less constantly.

His opponents, however, have failed to offer serious alternatives. No one has a way out in Gaza. And that's the Gaza paradox. People think that it's enough to say, well, Netanyahu is not doing the job. Well, it can't be done. Well, Gaza is Hamas. Well, Hamas is Gaza.

You can't remove Hamas from Gaza. It's just not doable. It's easy to say. Just like you can't kill an idea. It's awfully easy to say. But then what is the way forward? A Gaza run by Hamas? It's easy to lay the blame at the feet of Netanyahu.

As if Netanyahu is the problem, the beginning and end of the problem. as if we can just figure our way around Netanyahu, everything falls into place. I want to lay out how I understand the problem of Hamas. And I think that will clarify how I understand the problem of the ceasefire and the problem of Netanyahu. Why you can feel deeply betrayed by Netanyahu's politics,

even if you don't think there's a better policy going forward, even if you're in search of a policy going forward, but haven't found it. And a lot of the people who share your disgust for Netanyahu haven't actually come forward and provided the response to Netanyahu's policy that has any hope or serious possible potential to actually replace that policy that doesn't actually explain how we get from here to the place where we want to be. The problem of Hamas.

I want to focus in on one of the statements that we often hear from critics of Israel, supporters of Hamas, campaigners for Gazans, however you call them, frame them. We often hear these catechisms, these little religious sort of dogmas that are uttered by these activists. And one of them is you can't remove Hamas from Gaza, because Hamas is Gaza, and Gaza is Hamas. Is it true? Is Gaza essentially Hamas? And Hamas, representative and even identical with Gaza? No. A little bit, yes.

Sort of. Let me explain. Yes, much of Gaza supports Hamas, certainly at the beginning of the war. But that kind of sentiment is true of most conflicts. In most conflicts, I saw one report that said that even in Russia today, the majority usually supports

a war for long enough to make the war a disaster. Hamas means many things. Hamas is a charitable movement. Hamas is a vision of the Israelis, a particular interpretation of Israel and Israelis and how Israeli society will eventually be destroyed. Hamas is a religious vision,

a specific religious vision rooted in a particular kind of stream of Sunni Arab Islam that we've talked about many times on this podcast. the restorationist, the Salafists, in the old sense of the term, whatever you want to call them, the Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas is an education system. Hamas is a section of Palestinian culture and society, a particular Palestinian class. Hamas began in part as a lower class rebellion

against the upper classes of Palestinian society, driven in some ways enmeshed in the first intifada. Hamas is many complex things. The Hamas I'm at war with. My definition of Hamas for the purposes of war is a simple and clear one. It is the idea, the theory, that I'm removable. Hamas argues Israel is something artificial and fragile and removable. You cause it enough pain. It will leave.

It might take time. God wants us to sacrifice. to prove our faith, but it will happen. And therefore, all the sacrifices are worth it. And on the back of Israel's destruction is the beginning of an Islamic resurgence, pan-Islamic resurgence. This is Hamas' argument. These are Hamas' explicit ideas.

That theory that I can be removed, I'm at war with that. I'm not at war with the pietistic return to early, generations of Islam, the return to a conservative Islamism, I'm not at war with that. I'm not at war with, you know, conservatives who are not at war with me. I'm at war with the theory that I'm removable. That is the narrow piece of the Hamas idea, this expansive, complex, theology, and political vision. The narrow piece of it that Israel is removable, I'm at war with. And I'm at war with the organization meant to implement that theory. The Muslim Brotherhood ideological world, the restorationist vision of Sunni Islam, seeking to build a better Muslim future, a conquering, dominating Muslim future, through a return to an idealized Muslim past is part of that. But you can be a restorationist Salafist in that old sense of the word without being Hamas. Social workers running around Gaza taking care of the elderly under the aegis of some Hamas charity,

not even remotely my enemy. Anyone in Gaza can wear the name Hamas. And someone always will call themselves Hamas as long as it allows them to pretend the thing is still intact just to show up the Israelis. And that's fine. Let them call themselves anything they want. Let them call anything they want by that name.

It won't be real. It'll be virtual. It'll be an honorific. No more meaningful in the real world than a tweet. I can make the actual organization, the institution, dedicated to my destruction, my children's destruction, my people's destruction, I can make that no longer real.

By militarily destroying every last inch of tunnel, even at the cost of destroying the street it was deliberately placed under. By hunting down the Hamas fighters, until they can't breathe and they cannot find hiding places, it can be done. What is Hamas without its tunnels? Gaza without its tunnels. can rebuild, can make real use of the world's sympathy and have a great new future.

But Hamas without its tunnels is nothing. Bullies, gangsters, vapor. Hamas can't do in the West Bank what it did in Gaza. And I can make the idea that I'm removable unconvincing. Those are the two planks. I can prove that it's incorrect. That's the deep victory. That's the only victory that matters.

On this theory that Israel is removable, Palestinian ideological elites of one version or another have shattered their cause and their people time after time, generation after generation. It's one of the foundation stones, the recurring themes of Palestinian history, from the great revolt of 36 to 39,

up to 48, up to Arafat, the PLO from 64 onward. Again and again, this vision of Israel is removable has made the second Intifada that destroyed the peace process the idea that there is value in attacking the Israelis permanently for all time to make them suffer because

ultimately they're removable has shattered the Palestinian cause again and again and by the way I'll spare you the suspense it's going to do it again in 20 years if the idea isn't disproven the way the pan-Arabist idea was disproven by its armies being defeated by the Israelis in the desert in the wars.

If the idea isn't disproven, by being shattering, by being self-destructive, to anyone undertaking it, if the world doesn't tell Hamas and Palestinians that Israel simply isn't removable, that it isn't true categorically, that it's a misunderstanding of who and what we Israelis are, a refugee people with nowhere else to go as well as a people at home, as well as a people with a story of indigenity and all of that stuff. But even if you don't believe our narrative, we have nowhere to go. Anybody who doesn't tell that to Palestinians doesn't help kill the idea that we're removable keeps the Palestinian cause crashing into the same brick wall.

They claim they claim I will grow tired eventually. But they also claim they're going to keep coming at me until they kill my kids. How am I going to grow tired? In all the past 21 months of war, no supporter of Palestinians I've read or heard has asked why in Gaza

a territory that possesses the single largest bomb shelter system ever built by any human society. those tunnels, purpose built to withstand air strikes, why no Gazan has ever been allowed to use any one of those tunnels to escape Israeli strikes? Or why, if the civilians of Gaza are so important to Hamas or to pro-Palestrian activists who love Hamas,

why Hamas doesn't just return the hostages and end the war? What is it waiting for? What could it possibly now get from Israel in exchange for those hostages that makes it worth any of this? more sympathy than it has now, that's what it's waiting for? The only thing on the table being debated are the minutia of how Hamas itself remains or leaves, how Israel deploys or doesn't redeploy in the course of a ceasefire. Gazans suffer for that stuff, for Hamas taking care of itself.

I know supporter of Gazans will say so. Most of the people marching for Palestinians are decent people moved by images of suffering children. Truly, I believe that. But they're too ignorant to understand that the movement they march with uses their sympathy, their righteous anger, their real pain at real war to prolong and expand that suffering.

That the movement needs that suffering. It sees that suffering as a weapon with which to destroy the real enemy, which is not Israeli misdeeds. It's not Israeli bad behavior. It's Islamic dishonor. Hamas bombed every peace process. It tells Israelis even now, as I said,

when it is most catastrophic for Gaza for it to be telling Israelis this, that they will suffer for all time until their final destruction. That's why I keep telling activists, there's nothing you can do for Gaza that Hamas won't undo. So my understanding of Hamas is simple. And this is the bottom line. it is eminently defeatable. The specific thing that when you pare down all the rest of it,

the specific thing in Hamas that is a danger to Israel is defeatable. And nothing good can happen for Gaza until it is defeated. And because Gaza isn't Hamas, it's downright immoral and disastrous for Israel a little bit, mostly for Gaza, to a catastrophic extent, to leave Hamas in power. But let me take that one step further. What if Hamas remains in Gaza? There's another strange catechism they keep telling us. Hamas, they say, is an idea and you can't kill an idea. As I said, Hamas has a great many ideas. It is a set, a spectrum, a funnel. Pick your metaphor of

It is a product of a tremendous and complex and sophisticated intellectual history. Some of it, the bare bones, the outline of it we've talked about on this podcast. And also, the people who say you can't kill an idea and Hamas is an idea are often people who know the least about what the idea of Hamas might actually be. About Hamas' history, its strategy, its religion, theology, its vision. they filled the lacuna of their own ignorance, this lack of knowing what the heck the idea actually is, with a kind of generic sort of Western sensibility

that Hamas' idea is some sort of liberation. But liberation isn't Hamas' idea. Not at all. Here's a thought experiment. If every single thing currently happening between Israelis and Palestinians were identical in every way, with the one exception that the Israeli Jews were Israeli Muslims.

In other words, that the religious divide didn't exist, but the identical conflict was there along ethnic lines. Hamas wouldn't fight. It would never even have been founded. And no one on earth would pay this conflict any more attention

than they pay Yemen or Sudan, which are intramalalum conflicts. For Hamas, this war is about Islamic redemption, not Palestinian independence. the crisis in the moral order of the world that Israel represents is not that Israel does bad things but that Israel is the reification

the instantiation of Islam's weakness that it is powerful while being Jewish the Jewishness of Israel is the problem that makes Israel need to be destroyed what happens if this idea this Hamas vision remains the animated

that has a long history and pedigree and reasoning and some of it begins in good places of reform and ends in bad places of Muslim Brotherhood eschatology basically what happens if this idea remains the animating impulse of the leadership of Gaza how long until the next war how does this war ever end

how is anything ever to be rebuilt in Gaza How does Gaza ever find that new dawn? This is the tragic paradox of Gaza. If the doubters are right, the anti-Israel crowd is right, and Hamas really cannot be disentangled from Gaza, then Gaza is locked into a permanent zero-sum conflict with a neighboring people that cannot lose. Gaza is well and truly lost.

The pro-Gaza position isn't. Gaza's only hope is that there is a difference between Hamas and Gaza. That Hamas is actually removable from Gaza. Because Hamas is incapable of doing anything that isn't just some version

or another of this war. It is incapable of doing anything that doesn't serve the basic eliminationist impulse of this one particular vision of how Islam is to be redeemed. That's why it bombed peace process is. It doesn't want an end

to the war, in which is isn't destroyed. That's not an end to the war that matters. As we've said here before, those tunnels are a willful strategy, a massive investment, the biggest thing Palestinians have ever built, whose purpose was to destroy Gaza. You don't build 500 kilometers of tunnels under 25 kilometers of territory. An unprecedented feat in Palestinian history and in the history of war. And then carry out October 7.

and then bury your forces in those tunnels for 21 months without letting a single Palestinian civilian step foot in those tunnels unless your purpose is the destruction of Gaza. This is what Hamas is. This is the idea of Hamas. It's not a liberation movement. It's a movement of religious redemption at any cost, whose definition of redemption includes, requires a genocide of the nation next door. Really. the theory that Hamas is not removable is, in my view, unconscionably racist. That this Israeli government would fail to remove it, possible. That removing it opens up a whole Pandora's box of other problems,

of governance, of education, of humanitarian aid? Absolutely. That Israel has made terrible mistakes along the way, definitely. That crimes have been committed. Quite possibly. some, no question. But fundamentally, if Hamas really is unremovable,

nothing changes. It's the most dire prediction of a bad future you could possibly have for Gaza. And ultimately for Palestinian society, if Netanyahu's strategy fails to dislodge Hamas, Israelis will be less safe, true, but Palestinians will suffer most of all. And it will be Netanyahu's fault,

and no one else is, because Hamas is actually removable. If you have a clear vision of what the enemy is, the part of what the enemy is that is the actual enemy, Hamas is removable. The part that matters, the part that threatens. Don't look for Netanyahu's faults in places where you can't offer a better path forward.

Don't look at Netanyo's faults in places where the only alternative you have to offer is that Hamas retakes Gaza. Look forward in the places on which a better future for Palestinians and Israelis actually depends. The New York Times has spent a lot of ink on Netanyahu's alleged mistakes in places where the New York Times has no idea what should be done differently. Not having a war, not having anyone suffer, isn't enough.

Chamas is an actor here. Chamas has agency. Chamas has never not chosen this path. And to have anything to say about this war that doesn't acknowledge that, I don't mind people who find terrible fault with Israel. It's a war, a painful war, with civilian costs that are huge. But if you literally can't bring yourself to see Hamas as part in this, then you're part of the war.

You're part of the suffering. You're part of the telling to Hamas that it's on the right path. That the cost to Gaza that Hamas itself has written off is worth paying. for the great redemption it is pursuing. We're negotiating a ceasefire. I hope they reach it. I want our people home. Ghazans need the ceasefire.

In conditions of ceasefire, it will be much easier to get aid, including the parts of the aid systems that Hamas cannot touch, the Gaza humanitarian foundation systems, scaled up. And then, I hope we remove Hamas from God.

Because I don't want to be doing this in a year. And five and twenty. Which is what Hamas remaining in Gaza means. And nobody has yet been able to articulate an alternative path that reaches a better place. Thank you for joining me.