Ask Haviv Anything - Extra Episode: Back to war in Gaza

Episode Date: March 19, 2025

Warfighting has resumed in Gaza. Israel's message is clear: Gaza's future depends on Hamas releasing hostages and surrendering its control of the territory.But there is a larger pivot underway, a regional strategic realignment. Hamas once hoped its attack on Israel would trigger a broader regional war. In a sense, it succeeded, relegating Gaza to a marginal arena in the larger strategic struggle. That alone, gives Israel a freer hand to resume war whenever it wants. Hamas is now truly strategically alone.Thank you to Joe and Shira Lieberman for sponsoring this episode in honor of those we lost on October 7th.Please join me on Patreon to support this project: ⁠https://www.patreon.com/AskHavivAnything⁠If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at ⁠[e-mail]⁠.A podcast by Haviv Rettig Gur

Hi, everybody. Welcome to a quick emergency episode of Ask Habib Anything. This is really going to be quick and dirty. There's back to war in Gaza. There's a resumption of war. And we've all heard the news and the very senior Hamas officials and leaders and military planners, the spokesman of the Islamic Jihad group in Gaza, killed by Israel. It's escalating fast and things are changing profoundly. And what we're seeing happening in Gaza is a tip of the iceberg of a really profound pivot. that's happening right now in the Middle East. So I want to walk us through that really quick. Things for you to watch out for. It's going to be short. It's going to be quick. I think it's going to be fascinating and important because this is one of those pivot moments. But first, I want to thank Joe and Shira Lieberman for sponsoring this episode and a string of episodes.

And asking that their sponsorship, their ad read, so to speak, is remembering. Someone who died on October 7, we just went through the holiday of Purim. And I want to remember a five-year-old boy whose favorite holiday was Purim and who was gunned down in his car with the rest of his family. Both parents are single children. And so two families ended that day on October 7. Aitin Kapchita was his name. He is five years old from Dimona. his father

Evgeny, Mother Dina and sister Aline, who was eight years old, had spent a Simchatala holiday on a camping trip in Park Ashkelon nearby. The next day on Sunday was going to be Aiton's fifth birthday.

There was a barrage of rockets. They heard sirens. They packed up their camp. They got in their car, and they were trying to drive home to Steyrot, thinking they would be safer at home than in an open campground, and they ran into an ambush by Hamas terrorists on the road who gunned down the entire family. Aiton was a sweet boy. There's a picture of him next to me right now of the

family in their porn costumes. He was always smiling. He loved his kindergarten. He was remembered as a very sweet young boy. So there's a war in Gaza. It's back. And it looks dramatic in the sense that the Israelis are saying we're going to escalate. It's not stopping. And we're going to escalate until all the hostages are out. We had an end to the first phase of the hostage release deal.

It ended, but without anything replacing it, the Israelis refused to go to phase two, because that would have meant ending the war. and Hamas stopped releasing. And so the Israelis are now saying, you know, that deal is gone. That deal is no longer relevant. Hamas doesn't get to survive this thing in Gaza. The hostages that are remaining come out or the suffering of Hamas and Hamas fighters and Hamas leaders is going to increase very, very dramatically. Israel cats, if we're trying to figure out what it is the Israelis are thinking, what they hope to accomplish.

The Israel Cats, the defense minister, issued a statement today. that, you know, didn't beat around the bush, Hamas must understand that the rules of the game have changed, and if all the hostages aren't released immediately, the gates of hell will open. He's purposefully quoting Trump here, or channeling Trump. And it will find itself, Hamas will, facing the full power of the IDF in the air in the CNN land

until its total elimination. And then he said an important sentence. We won't stop fighting until all the hostages are returned home, and the threat to the residents of the South is lifted. Now, the Israeli government has also said that Hamas can come back to the negotiating table, negotiate seriously for more hostage releases, and then the fighting ends. But Israel is perfectly willing and eager to go to a massive escalation right now. Senior leaders have been taken out.

Very many fighters, apparently, according to Israeli reports, have been taken out. And so Hamas really now faces a situation in which Israel is coming after it once again with military force. But folks, all of that sort of. of reporting on what Israel is saying, what Hamas is saying, the analyses of what options everybody has. My sense of it is very simple. I don't think that any of that really fundamentally matters. Israel is sending a much, much deeper message, even if it's a simpler message. And the message is this. We can do this forever. You thought that the fighting was over. You thought that we were worried about what, Trump, we were worried about the ICC, we were worried about the

world, we were worried about political pressure, we were worried about even hostage. lives that you can threaten. Well, no, actually, we can do this forever. And that's Hamas's real problem. Hamas wanted to show in the last four weeks or so that it's back on top, it's back above ground. It reconstituted the police. It tried to reopen schools. It began to police the markets and reopen markets in Gaza. And it was saying, this is it. The war's over. We've won, in the sense that we've survived, and now we rebuild, and there's nothing Israel can do about it. And the Israeli message is, actually, Gaza can't be rebuilt, and we go back to fighting anytime we feel like it. And you either play our game, or this is Gaza's new normal, and you don't get to reconstitute and take over again.

It's a game about the long term. Neither side is destroyable quickly. And so now it's a game about demonstrating to the other side that you have the sticking power. you have the resilience. And watch for that. The Israeli message is that there's nothing Hamas can do if Israel resumes the fighting. And Israel can resume the fighting indefinitely. And by the way, that extends to rebuilding Gaza.

You can't send money. You can't send concrete. You can't send anything into Gaza as long as Hamas rules there. And as long as Israel can destroy it. And nobody's going to send those billions that are required to rebuild Gaza. As long as Hamas rules there. continues to say it will threaten Israel and Israel continues to have rounds of war with it.

And so Israel has Gaza where it wants it. It has Hamas where it wants it. And the only way for ordinary Gazans to come out of this into a better future is if Hamas is removed. All Israel needs to do in order to accomplish that at this point is the status quo, is just maintain things as they are now.

And so Hamas has actually boxed itself into a trap laid by the Israelis that Hamas thought was being laid by itself for Israel. It wasn't that Israel moved into Gaza, took on massive international opprobrium and anger, and now Israel has lost. This, this situation, this slow burn, this place where Israelis are going back to their lives, and Gazans cannot, and nobody knows how to rebuild Gaza with Hamas in charge. Literally how. It doesn't matter if you love Israel or hate it. this is an Israeli victory.

And Israel is showing that. And it's showing that by another round of decapitations of the Hamas leadership structure. So that's the game between Hamas and Israel. Israel would like Hamas to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, big mistake. We should have been continuing phase one. We're back to the table negotiating. Here's two more hostages, six more hostages, ten more hostages. Israel would stop for that.

But if Hamas doesn't want to stop, Israel's fine with that. That's the message Israel's trying to project. I want to submit to you that it's working. Here's how I know. Chizbalah released a statement today. It's long and it's got a lot of pathos. It's Zionists are evil. Americans are evil.

The international community has to raise its voice to rein in Zionist American barbarism. Of course, the Americans are now bombing the Houthis in Yemen who are disrupting international shipping. the Houthis are close allies of Hizbalah. They're both proxies of Iran. What's fascinating about this very long and pathos-filled, a dramatic statement, is that nowhere in it, is there a single word of threat? Nowhere in it does Chisbalah say we're coming to help you.

We're going to bomb Israel. We're going to resume the resistance. Nowhere. Nothing. Chzbollah is playing this. We're going to shame the international community game. An organization of brutal killing and mass murdering of civilians and an organization whose very strategy in existence as a violation of international law now backs up, is stepping back and leaning on international community.

Everyone is telling Hamas you're in this alone. That to me says it's working. And the real kicker is Israel has to take almost no costs. There's no ground assault, no casualties. The supply from America is back. So there's no worry about what the army used to call the missile economy. If we bomb and we can't replace those missiles, we're going to be weaker down the road. The Houthis are going to have trouble getting back into the game,

fighting for Hamas, hurting the Israelis because the Americans are keeping them very, very busy. America has actually gotten sick and tired of the disruption to international shipping. And Centcom finally, finally is allowed to take its gloves off. Something that Israeli journalists have heard quietly. from sentcom officials under the Biden administration, which was the embarrassment, that they're not allowed to seriously engage the Houthis and not allowed to actually do their fundamental mission, which is hold open the commercial trade routes of the world, and they were not allowed to do so. And so now they are, under Trump, much more allowed to do so. So folks, Hamas has spent its

weeks, recent weeks, trying to send the message, it was back in charge and things were going to be normal again, and that's victory. And the Israelis are now demonstrating that that's not true. This is the status quo, and only Hamas moving out, leaving, dismantling, disarming, or being killed is going to change it. In the kind of war, Hamas created in Gaza, imposed on the Israelis in Gaza, a strategy that very carefully built out Gaza as a kind of battlefield that imposed on the Israelis tremendous disadvantages, military, tactical disadvantages. That particular, kind of war with the most extensive tunnel network ever built out for war underneath a civilian population in a very densely populated area. In that kind of war, this is what victory looks like.

I submit to you, and I've been a big critic of Israeli strategy, and I think that it has been halting, and I think that it took much longer than you needed to to get here, but the Israelis are demonstrating that they've won. And the only question is how long before Hamas realized is it and Gazans realize it and come to Hamas with demands. And from the Israeli perspective, it could be two generations, or it could be two weeks. It doesn't actually matter. This is a very low-cost strategy for Israel. But even that's just the beginning.

And this is the point that I'm sorry it's so far in. And if we've lost any viewers or listeners, somebody is going to have to tell them that this is the exciting part. Gaza is basically a footnote in a much larger process underway in the region. And this is Hamas's real problem. There's a process that is going to free Israel's hand going forward in Gaza, but also elsewhere toward Iran, and diminishes Gaza's importance and sets Gaza back and Gaza's allies back at a strategic scale. Hamas actually is in a very bad state. And what I'm talking about is a dramatic strategic exchange.

The Trump administration is trying to push through with Putin, an exchange. an exchange of Ukraine for Iran. This is what's happening de facto. I think it's planned. I think there's a serious strategy here. I can't prove that it's a strategy. If it's not the conscious strategy, it's what's happening in practice on the ground anyway

because of American actions. The basic idea is that the Ukraine war comes to an end. Some of the sanctions are lifted off of Russia. Russia is allowed to detach itself doesn't no longer needs to be quite as much attached at the hip to the Chinese. And Ukraine takes that loss, loses some of its eastern areas, mostly eastern areas populated by ethnic Russians, by people who speak Russian, but Putin gets to draw a line in which part of Ukraine is part of Russia. And the war ends and Ukraine survives and no longer gets to join

NATO, presumably. But what's the value of NATO nowadays? It always was about American willingness. If the American willingness isn't there, NATO isn't really functionally significant and exists. And in exchange, Russia detaches from Iran. Here's what you need to notice about this great game. The Saudis are a linchpin in all of this. Last week, Saudi Arabia offered Donald Trump to invest $1.3 trillion in the U.S. economy. And to do it quickly, to do it over four, years. It's not an accident that it's over four years and that that's a presidential term. The Saudis have been hoping, desperately begging, trying to find ways to finagle and create, forge a U.S.-S.-Saudi defense pact. Part of normalization for the Saudis, what they were going to get

from a peace with Israel. A, was an Israeli-Saudy alliance that's much more robust, which they need for economic terms. They want to move their economy off oil. That's the whole Vision 2030 program of MBS, but also just putting on the table much more significantly the military and intelligence alliance against their enemies, Iran and Qatar and a few other enemies that they have, Sunni radicals and the Shia proxy system of Iran, et cetera. But the jewel in the crown of that strategy was an American commitment to defend them. That was the great hope. And $1.3 trillion dollars invested in the American economy under President Trump that helps secure that Senate agreement to a treaty and that drives the Saudis and the Israelis into an alliance that President

Trump has serious hopes and we're hearing that from multiple reports could net him a Nobel Peace Prize. That story, the building of an American-backed, pro-American, loyal to America, alliance in the Middle East. While Russia detaches from Iran and America comes in on a maximum pressure strategy on Iran, there's a shadow fleet of 21 tankers that carry Iran's oil skirting sanctions over to China. Well, you can sanction them into oblivion. You can blow them up. You can prevent Iran from being able to do that.

The Rial is crashing. The Iranian economy is crashing. And if Russia detaches, and the Americans build out this alliance and the Saudis make it lucrative to America itself, it's a whole new Middle East. If that happens,

if the Saudis move ahead with their investments in America and Trump pushes through a defense treaty and normalization results from that because it's valuable to everybody and America effectively without actually spending in the Middle East builds a pro-American

powerful alliance in the Middle East, the most powerful, the most capable access within the Middle East is the pro-American one. And America actually gets money for it rather than spending money on it. This is very different from the way American administrations in the past have just spent on Europe, spent on Ukraine, spent all over the world. USAID, a lot of the concern is that this is America's spending on soft power. We're here we have a hard power alliance, pro-American, loyal to America, and very lucrative. for America. The Saudis and the Israelis together have the ability to build that and they want to build it and Trump wants it. And that corners Iran. That puts Iran in a terrible spot. And Russia, detached from Iran

and no longer is dependent on China, is a grand strategic American benefit. Russia is a very weak power. It's not the Soviet Union of old. It's not the threat it was. Not to America. And not to most of America's allies. Donald Trump had this to say when news reports about the Saudi offer began to be published last week. I'm going to Saudi Arabia, he said. I made a deal with Saudi Arabia. I'd usually go to the UK first. Last time I went to Saudi Arabia, they put up $450 billion. I said, well, this time they've gotten richer. We've all gotten older. So I said, I'll go if you pay a trillion dollars to American companies, meaning the purchase over a $4.50 billion. four-year period of $1 trillion, and they've agreed to do that. So I'm going to be going there.

I have a great relationship with them, and they've been very nice. But they're going to be spending a lot of money to American companies for buying military equipment and a lot of other things. Maximum pressure on Iran, ending the Ukraine war with Russia less in China's pocket, building a powerful pro-American Middle Eastern alliance that's an economic gain for America. And all of it, all of it, pushing against China on multiple fronts. That's the vision. And if it's not the vision, it's happening anyway. I presume that this kind of ability to move in two fronts

in different seeming directions that have a synergy between them in one direction is purposeful. I think America finally has a strategy on the world stage. A few quick points about that. Ukraine. What do Israeli leaders think about this sense of their being a Ukraine for Iran exchange. Ukraine's sacrifice is relatively small. Israeli leaders, I believe, are telling themselves, compared to the threat Israel faces from Iran or from its enemies, or the

Middle East generally faces. It's being asked to sacrifice some places, some parts of the country, and it's being asked to live under Putin's shadow in future. But it also has an opportunity to rebuild and to rebuild militarily and to be even more robust and dangerous for Russia going forward. It's creating distance between Russia and China, and that's a net gain for the global security architecture generally. This marks a dramatic American retreat from European defense. That is true. Putin will not feel that America is going to rush to Europe's defense in the way that it has in the past. And I'm going to say something that I believe, but also that I hear from Israeli officials.

Good. Good. It's a kick in the pants to Europe. And Europe needs that kick in the pants. What right do Europeans have to spend 1.6% of their GDP on defense, as Germany has for many years? When America that protects Germany spends 3.6, what right do you have to have someone else spend billions and billions and billions on your defense? Israel gets it in cash. That doesn't mean Europe doesn't get it. It's just not in cash. It's in actual deployments. But it's a vast amount of spending that the American taxpayer has to spend. and because Germany was protected for so long

and Italy was protected for so long in Austria and Chequia and Switzerland and France they did not have to spend if the people protecting you spend more of their own GDP on defense than you spend on your defense you're dependent

and you're taking advantage I am told I have heard from Americans in the know about the thinking of the Trump administration on Israel, that even among Trump officials who are opposed to foreign aid money, Trump officials who care about the American taxpayer and are sick and tired of funding everybody everywhere's defense, which may be made sense when there was a Soviet Union. Why does it make sense today? Even American officials will talk like that. They look at Israel, and they look at Israel's

5% of GDP spent on defense. And they say to themselves, the Israelis first invest massively for their defense, sacrifice for their defense, and then come asking for help because they have genuine enemies and genuine security threats. But that's the process that makes sense. You want American help? First pay up for yourself. It's countries whose percentage outlife for their own defense is so much lower than the American taxpayer has to spend on their defense that insults the Trump administration. I also think that a stronger Europe, a Europe that has to actually be able to fight off Putin, is a Europe whose voice will be heard and its soft power will matter more. You want to advance liberalism and democracy around the world?

Make it matter what you feel and think and say. Make people know that if they piss off Europe, Europe has teeth. It's not just going to whine about it. And then when it does speak, people will listen. I think it's healthy for Europe. I think it's good for America. I think Israel is an example of a kind of alliance where you can take American military aid

and not have it ruin you and not take advantage of it and not become dependent on it and not become, as Tolkien described, the Shire and the Hobbits once, protected for so long, they forgot they were being protected. So those reasons, all of those reasons,

that Europe needs to fund its own defense, that Ukraine is being asked to sacrifice relatively little to make this piece, that exchanging that small sacrifice for a Russian-Iranian detachment and a Russian-Chinese distancing, even if it's a small distancing, is just such a vast advantage to America, to the world, to the West, to the free world on the global stage. There's a real strategy here. There are moral costs to it. I once learned from Edward Lutvac that a strategy is about cost.

If there are no costs, you're just taking something you want. It's when there are costs that you have to start strategizing and deciding what cost you're willing to pay, prioritizing benefits, prioritizing costs. Well, that's a cost worth paying for this vast realignment and the building of a new alliance in the Middle East that is loyal to America, pro-America, and lucrative for America, which is important to the Trump administration. it's a strategy America finally has one and Israel in Gaza

Israel is now such a powerful actor in the larger scope of this strategy that it isn't just that Gaza doesn't matter strategically Israel's got Gaza right where it wants it

it's forcing a choice on Gaza which is where Israel wants Gaza the future of Hamas of never recovering, of never being anything other than what it is now, or a radically different future, but without Hamas. At which point some of that Saudi money goes into Gaza, but only into a different Gaza,

a Gaza that no longer has a politics organized around the destruction of Israel. A huge pivot is underway. And this resumption of war, if Hamas is smart, will end very quickly. in a new quick hostage talks and new hostages coming home. And if Hamas is stupid, we will feel a terrible pain for our hostages. But Gaza, Gaza is the one that will suffer. Thank you for listening. Join the Patreon, and I will see you in the next episode.