Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - A Shift in the War - with Haviv Rettig Gur

Episode Date: December 24, 2023

The Hamas-Israel War, nearing its three month mark, is now the longest war in Israel’s history since Israel’s War of Independence (1948/49). The first phase of this war, which took place over the three weeks following October 7, was largely conducted from the air. The second phase, the ground invasion, began almost two months ago (on October 27), in which the IDF took over most of Northern Gaza and a few pockets in southern Gaza. During the past week it has been reported that the IDF is preparing for a third phase in the war, expected to last many months, if not longer. What will this new phase look like? What are the many considerations shaping this new phase? How are Israeli society and Israeli politics reacting to this emerging shift? These are some of the issues we discuss in our weekly check-in with Haviv Rettig Gur of the Times of Israel.

About a month ago, the Foreign Minister Eli Cohen submitted to the UN a demand to implement Resolution 1701 that ended the 2006 Second Lebanon War and stipulates that He know they believe it? They're paying the hotel bills of a hundred thousand Israelis So that they don't have to live in their towns on the northern border Israel wants to finish the Gaza war at least the massive You know four division period of the Gaza war that it's planning to finish in January Free up a lot of soldiers send them home for a couple of months to rest, and then take care of that northern border problem. I know that that's what everybody wants. And by everybody, I mean Gallant down to the grocer at your local grocery store. It is 6 p.m. on Saturday, December 23rd in New York City. It is 1 a.m. on Sunday, December 24th.

The war in Gaza is nearing its three-month mark and is now the longest war in Israel's War of Independence in 1948. That war lasted nine months, three weeks, and two days. We tend to think of Israel's Yom Kippur War as also a long war, but in reality, it was nearly three weeks, actually just 19 days. The longest IDF military operation in Gaza was in 2014, Operation Protective Edge, which lasted 51 days. Israel's second Lebanon war in 2006 was 34 days. So just keep all that in mind as we discuss today's topic at the three-month mark. During this war in 2023, some 250,000 Israelis have been internally displaced and 1,345 Israelis to date have been killed. That includes 833 civilians, 440 soldiers, 59 policemen, and 13 rescue workers. 128 Israeli hostages are still being held in Gaza. 20 of them have been killed while in captivity.

Most of Gaza is practically in ruins, and the death toll, while hard to pinpoint with any specificity, is at least reported by the Hamas-run Gazan Health Ministry to be approximately 20,000. The first phase of this war, which took place over the course of three weeks following the October 7th Hamas massacre inside Israel, was largely conducted by the IDF from the air over Gaza. The second stage, the ground invasion, began almost two months ago on October 27th, in which the IDF took over most of northern Gaza and a few pockets in southern Gaza. During the past week, it has been reported that the IDF is preparing for a third phase in this war, a new framework where instead of deploying four IDF divisions holding most of the area of the northern Gaza Strip and pockets in the south, a much smaller

force of a few IDF brigades will be based in a smaller area and conduct focused raids against the remaining Hamas strongholds. This phase is expected to last many months, if not longer. There are many considerations shaping this new phase, not the least of which is the drain on Israel's economy from the deployment of hundreds of thousands of reservists. Also, remaining inside Gaza in such large numbers could lead to a constant stream of IDF casualties. I have a lot of questions about phase three of this war, which I wanted to get into with Haviv Retik-Gur from the Times of Israel on our weekly check-in where he joins us from Jerusalem. Haviv Retikur on a shift in the war. This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome back to this podcast my friend Haviv Retikur for our weekly check-in, something I look forward to each week. And it

turns out a lot of other people look forward to their own check-in with Haviv. Haviv, welcome. Hi, Dan. Thanks once again. It's good to be here as the year draws to a close. Yeah, as the year does indeed draw to a close. We won't go near topics of wishes for a happy new year. Let's just hope for a better 2024 than 2023. Haviv, speaking of winding down 2023, you just, and we'll get into the substance of our conversation momentarily, but you just spent your Shabbat, your weekend in Israel, up north with your family. Can you just explain to our listeners what you were doing up north and why you thought it was important to do it? Yeah, we took the kids and we went to Dalyat al-Karmel, a town in the north of Israel, in the Galilee.

It's a Druze town. The Druze are a fascinating minority. They are Arabic speaking. They have a religion that is an offshoot of Islam. It is a... Half of Shiite Islam, right? Yeah, it's a very complicated story. They have a religion that is an offshoot of Islam. It is a... Half of Shiite Islam, right? Yeah, it's a very complicated story.

But yeah, and they have their own story from how the biblical prophets sort of stack up in different ways. And the religion is actually secretive. Long story short, the Druze have, since the founding of Israel, at the community's own request, at the request of the religious leadership of the community, been serving in the Israeli army, see themselves as proud Israelis. Dalia Tel Kamel has got Israeli flags in every corner, alongside the very colorful Druze flags. We went to a bed and breakfast run by one family, the father of the family, explained that of 7,000 people in his family, he used the word family, it's usually translated into Hebrew, Hamula, which is a clan, basically. Of 7,000 people, 1,000 are right now in Gaza, with the forces in Gaza.

With the IDF forces, 1,000 with the IDF. With the IDF, and they have seen many killed, and there are pictures of them in Dalia del Carmel. And their economy is also suffering terribly because so many men are gone. So we wanted to take a weekend away and relaxing and just being with the family. I was traveling. My wife is going to be traveling, so it was a good opportunity. And we wanted to do it up there, to drop some shekels there, to meet, again, the Jewish community. And it was just, it was fun, it was beautiful. We got caught in a torrential downpour, which in Israel is extraordinarily special.

There are special prayers of gratitude for those kinds of situations, just so we understand how rare it is. And yeah, and it was amazing. We spent the time in the woods, in the Galilee. Beautiful. Well, thanks for sharing that. And it's just another reminder of the complexity and highly diverse population. And I just hope as people visit Israel, both with the solidarity missions that are taking place right now, post-October 7th, and just generally as people travel to Israel long-term, long beyond this period, that they try to get those kinds of experiences and meet the diversity of the people of this country.

Because I just think from afar, there's often a one-dimensional, very surfaced view of this population and this society. And we're going to return in a future episode to a discussion about these different communities, the Druze community and how it compares to the larger Israeli Arab community, and the, anyways, we can go on and on and on. It's its own topic. I don't want to get into it today. It's very complex, but I just wanted to spend a moment on your weekend, and now get into the substance of today's episode, which, Haviv, over the past week or so, there have been many indications that the IDF seems to be preparing for a new phase in the war. We'll call it the third phase. And just to recap,

the first phase was the air campaign, which lasted a few weeks, and then it was followed by a massive ground operation, larger than Israel has ever conducted in Gaza. And it's gone on longer than any ground operation in Gaza. And now we are entering the third phase, which, based on reports, is a much smaller force, much smaller IDF force, which would be based on the IDF standing army rather than reservists. And it would converge to a—it would basically be based in a smaller defensible area, and it would conduct focused raids against the remaining Hamas strongholds over a very long period of time,

months, if not more. So the theory being that Israel could not maintain this presence in Gaza for months, if not more, but a smaller presence of the standing army based in a more defensible area going in doing these targeted operations. And this long new phase will have tremendous impact on how the war is fought. It will be much different, it seems, in the way the war has been fought so far, and certainly how will be discussed inside Israel and internationally. It will look a lot different, and therefore will have implications, of course, on domestic Israeli politics as well. And that's what I wanted to discuss with you today. So first, can you paint a picture of this new deployment and fighting routine? And I know the details are, for obvious reasons, still vague, but it sounds like the IDF will be in these smaller areas inside and outside

Gaza and enter periodically with a few brigades, focused on some tactical goals aimed at Hamas militants and infrastructure. So can you just like describe a little bit about what this looks like? Yeah, this has been sort of the leading topic of Israeli media over the last few days, the major columnists have been talking about it, which is that the army has told a lot of reservists over the last week and some that they're getting out in January. So it's going to massively reduce its footprint sometime in January. That is something that an increasing number of soldiers and families are finding out. And of course, therefore, that's making it into the press. What that tells us is actually a very great deal. The great problem of the war, the great problem going into the war, was of course that Hamas is buried underground under two and a half million civilians.

And how do you get to even the beginning of the ability to actually engage this enemy? This is an enemy that uses guerrilla tactics, which is to say they attack and then fade away into the civilian population, but at a scale never seen before in the history of guerrilla warfare, because it built an underground, essentially city network almost, right, to the tunnel entrances. And that involved a massive ground maneuver after the airstrikes. And now comes a stage that you could call the tunnel war, you could call it the counterinsurgency. The army is calling it the low intensity stage. And that involves hunting out Hamas strongholds. There will still be serious urban warfare in Chanyunis. There will still be, you know, battalions of hundreds and sometimes thousands of men moving in on entire sections of a city. But it will no longer be four massive divisions, right, which is just a couple hundred thousand strong. I'm not saying

exact numbers here, but just to understand the scale of things. So it's going to be massively reduced footprint. And one of the other critical points to understand is there's not going to be a schedule. So until now, there was a lot of pressure. The civilian death toll was very high. That created tremendous diplomatic costs and diplomatic pressures, not just on Israel, but also on allies of Israel and the U.S. especially, but also Britain and France and elsewhere. And so there was this demand, there was this pressure on Israel to get to this next stage, to the low-intensity stage, the stage of much more targeted operations that are much more

focused on specific Hamas targets, on building intelligence. Israel has reached a, I mentioned criticism. The criticism has essentially been, you know, maybe Israel's most famous columnist is a gentleman by the name of Nachum Barnea at the Yediot newspaper. And he wrote a column about this shift this week that I think reflects, I'm just going to say it, he has a platform, if he wants to respond, I'd be delighted to engage him on it. But I'm just going to go ahead and say it because these are his published words. It reflects exactly the kind of habit that journalists sometimes get into of trying to sort of grab the lowest hanging rhetorical fruit because you always have to be saying something. So his column is a criticism that the north of Gaza isn't yet pacified, by which he means

Hamas units underground are still able to launch targeted attacks on IDF troops once in a while and usually unsuccessfully. The army smells the end is a quote from his column, and it wants more achievements before the ceasefire. That's how he understands this reduction to low intensity. I think that's all a very silly, it's not just silly, I think it's ultimately a political way to think about what's happening. Because the political echelon of this government has said Hamas will be destroyed, Hamas will be decimated. The actual cabinet decision back in October said Hamas's regime will be toppled. And the army has been speaking since then of the Hamas regime being toppled in Gaza, not of the destruction of the leadership of Hamas, which is Sinoir, Yechia Sinoir, Mohamed Sinoir's brother who built the tunnel system, and the seven or so deputies to Sinoir, as I understand it, and DEF, and basically the leadership structure,

and then the whole governing mechanism of Hamas over Gaza. Is that what the IDF and the Israeli government are referring to when they say the regime? Absolutely. And the cabinet decision makes it clearer. It's more vague, but also more specific in an odd way. It says the capacity of Hamas, the military and governing capacities of Hamas in Gaza, that is going to be destroyed. In other words, not every last member of Hamas, not every Hamas website, and not every Hamas, you know, idea, and every Hamas mosque, but the capacity to engage in, essentially the capacity to ever threaten Israel again. That is what's going to be destroyed. There was the first stage and a second stage, you laid them out very clearly, and now is the third stage. refused to set timetables. And it has even discussed last Tuesday, I think it was, there was a cabinet meeting with the chief of the IDF, Herzia Levy, and he talked about how the Americans took 10 years to get Osama bin Laden. And that was him explaining to the ministers, folks, Sinoir is a dead man. And every day of his life,

it will be lived with the knowledge that he's a dead man. And it could take a while. And it could take a while because he's literally doing nothing else with his life except hiding. And so fine, that's great. That's okay. This is now that stage. This is that long, slow, grinding, you could call it pacification even. This is that long, slow grinding stage. And one really important thing to understand about it is if we're entering a counterinsurgency, then you want as few targets for the enemy as possible. So a much lower idea of footprint on the ground deep inside cities and inside urban areas is an advantage, not a disadvantage. You don't need to hold massive amounts of territory the way you did before.

The simple fact that so many thousands of Hamas fighters are dead, and so many are arrested and interrogated means that there's a vast new intelligence bank to work with in Gaza for this new kind of war that will focus on elite units and intel. So that's the new stage. It was going to be the third stage from the beginning. And it looks like it's going to clear a huge number of soldiers out, massively reduce the burden. I have, as I mentioned before, members of my family who have just literally been called up now for eight weeks. And their jobs are frozen, their lives are frozen, they've had kids born, and they still haven't gotten out except for 24 hours once in a while. So they're going home, that's going to be something that all Israeli families and the Israeli economy is going to have a, you know, feel that relief. And that's, that's looks like that's all going to happen in

January. Haviv Kochavi, the former IDF chief of staff, Herzli Levi's predecessor, back in summer of 2021, after there was an Israeli operation in Gaza against Hamas, against Palestinian Islamic Jihad, he made some comment about that this was a turning point or so. I don't know the exact words, but effectively, Israel had reached a new stage in its knowledge and discovery of the tunnel system after summer of 2021, which in retrospect, given what he was referring to, relative to what Israel, relative to what the IDF is discovering now, seems to be day and night. Can you talk a little bit about how surprised you are, how surprised the IDF seems to be by the scale of this subterranean network in Gaza? And the reason I'm asking is, should the IDF and the Israeli public be horrified by how much Israel did not know about what had been built underground? I don't think anybody was surprised by the sheer scale because as a headline,

just knowing that this is a thing that is happening at a vast scale, all of us have known that. But it is, yes, I think horrifying and worrying and really, I think, inspires a sense of vulnerability to understand how little the IDF knew in detail. It was tracking, you know, cement shipments. It was tracking, you know, the workforce deployed by Hamas. Its scale, not in any great detail, but the scale of the workforce

deployed by Hamas to some of this construction. People closest to Sinoir were working on it. All of that we all understood very well, and my newspaper covered it very well. But what we did not understand was that the IDF's knowledge remained almost entirely in that sort of 30,000 feet, that sort of Wikipedia article level of knowledge of what the heck was going on down there. And it is constantly surprised throughout this Gaza operation, that just the literal tactical competence of commanders on the ground, including sometimes lowest level officers you can imagine, just literally platoon commanders, have prevented a great many Hamas attempts to use these tunnels to exact massive

costs on the Israeli forces. But they prepared for those surprise raids, they prepared for finding these tunnel entrances, they found a couple that were booby-trapped, soldiers were killed, they then began to deal with tunnel entrances differently. So all of that stuff was a learning process, And these tunnels have not served Hamas well, in terms of allowing them to attack Israeli forces, as probably they were expecting to be able to. But in that sense, there's a success here. But as they've moved along, they've found new tunnels, and they found new kinds of tunnels. And they found tunnels with just the enormity.

The tunnel near the Erez Crossing is, I think, one of the things that really stunned people. You can drive cars through that thing. That was something that we did not know. And the army is telling us that it did not know. It didn't know where it went. It didn't know what it could handle. It didn't know how big it was. So, yes, Hamas managed to compartmentalize itself so well. It obsessively compartmentalized itself for, you know, 15 years now, to the extent that none of Hamas's political leadership knew October 7 was coming, to the extent that all of the intelligence that Israel was able to get out of Hamas. And Hamas was penetrated with Israeli intelligence,

couldn't deliver a basic map of these massive constructions underground. And so that compartmentalization in Hamas is a lesson we walk away with. A lot of what happens since October 7 is lessons in humility. We don't know enough. And we, of course, are taking that lesson to other fronts. We don't know enough about Hezbollah. We have to assume that level of compartmentalization in Hezbollah and massive strategic level tricks up their sleeves, so to speak,

in the next war with them, whenever that happens. Can this war be won, to the extent it can be won, can this war be won with that tunnel system intact? And I guess related to that is what has prevented the IDF so far from destroying this system during the second phase of the war? There are engineering challenges that we've been reading a little bit about, and I really don't understand. So I'm going to leave that to people who understand it better.

In the spirit of humility. In the spirit of humility. In the spirit of humility, and in fear of the fact checkers. But I think that a lot of the problem with getting down into those tunnels, a lot of the problem with infantry maneuvers in those tunnels is that they're massively booby trapped. Hamas's great hope was that Israel go into those tunnels, the soldiers actually go into those tunnels. And you'll be fighting not only on their turf, you'll be fighting on turf they literally created. They built. It's not even into a city where they're hunkered down.

They're not just, you know, bunkered in a city. They built the entire space in which you will be operating. So sure, you could train a thousand dogs and start, you know, doing it that way. If you don't want to kill soldiers, you can deploy some massive, you know, fleet of robots and drones into those tunnels. And that has been happening in very small quantities all around Gaza, as the army has moved forward. But the simple solution has essentially been to seal the tunnels to bury them in those tunnels. But you're not going to get all the tunnels and they know the map and you don't. So the basic story, I think, has been as you get more control of the tunnels, as you get more control of the entrances of the tunnels, and they know the map and you don't. So the basic story, I think, has been, as you get more control of the tunnels, as you get more control of the entrances of the tunnels and of the ground above, you can start to cut supplies, you can start to cut electricity,

you can start to cut water and food and basic supplies to tunnels where the good news from the perspective of both morality and law is that it's all fighters down there. Fighters and, of course, some Israeli hostages. But mostly entirely fighters. You don't have to worry about the civilian population when it comes to the tunnels. So there's been this attempt to seal those tunnels, not to fight on their turf, on their terms.

One of the ironic elements of fighting those tunnels, there was this, I believe it was a colleague of mine, the military reporter at Haaretz, Amos Arel, I think I read it in his reporting, was an incident where the army captured a company commander of Hamas fighters, I believe in Shajaya, the Hamas fort, really stronghold, massive stronghold in Gaza City. And he hasn't received orders for quite a while, for many, many days from his battalion commander. And he did not even know that his battalion commander had already been killed by Israeli forces. And so this is an incident that the army released, and it was reported in a few places, he continued to fight.

And he said that if he had known that his battalion commander was killed, and it was reported in a few places, he continued to fight. And he said that if he had known that his battalion commander was killed, and then in fact, there was no larger battalion framework that he was now fighting as a part of, that he was a small pocket of resistance left, and he was doomed, then he would have surrendered, as many, many forces have surrendered. So the compartmentalization is part of the battlefield, and it makes it very, very dangerous. You can defeat Hamas strategically, rout all of their massive forces, and still have 150 little pockets that you will have to expend the lives of your soldiers rooting out and pulling out of those tunnels. And they might not even know they're supposed to stop fighting at this point. And so all of those factors make the tunnels very difficult. And they also mean that if you want the Israeli army both

to do it right and with a minimum of cost, you need time. And that's the decision. The decision that has been made was we don't enter the tunnels, we don't rush anything. We switch to this low intensity stage of the conflict, and we give the army all the time it needs to do it right and to do it safe. It's an eerie echo of Allied forces arriving at Japanese islands in the war in the Pacific after World War II was long over and finding Japanese soldiers there who didn't know the war was over and they were still fighting. Yeah, absolutely. That metaphor is used all the time these days to make all sorts of analogies to a whole bunch of different issues.

And it's almost used in a comical sense. This has real operational implications for how Israel fights the war, that fighters way down the totem pole have no idea that their commanders are gone or that the chain of command has been broken. And this has real security implications for the IDF, because these guys are still fighting. Absolutely.

They'd known they wouldn't be fighting. Hamas has inculcated in its troops, for tactical reasons that are very good and smart, a kind of discipline without control. When the control isn't there, the discipline remains, and the expectation is that. And so there isn't a scramble to figure out, you know, if I should still obey my previous orders, because the loss of the command and control apparatus that you're answerable to does not, from the beginning, from your very earliest training, doesn't mean that the basic discipline, the basic tactic is changed. And so yes, that is part of what makes Hamas,

if you understand your organization, not as fighting a classical war, but as fighting a guerrilla war, that makes you more effective, because the cost on the enemy remains even as you are starting to crumble. And that's part of Hamas's basic structure and strategy. And that's part of the challenge of the tunnels. The leaders of Hamas, both in Gaza and abroad, have declared that there will be no additional hostage exchange without a total end of warfighting, and that the IDF has to make a complete and total return to Israeli territory, basically, you know, north of the Gaza border. So I want to talk a little bit about this because this gets to a very sensitive topic about where the pursuit of another round of hostages returning and the negotiations that have been starting and stopping and then starting again, and I think stopping again fits into the overall Israeli strategy. To the extent that this is the position of Hamas, of the Hamas leadership,

does this effectively drive a wedge between those in Israel who are prioritizing the eradication of Hamas and those who are prioritizing the release of hostages? What is it doing inside Israel to the debate about the best way to fight this war and what actually Israel's trying to achieve? Yeah, I think it's actually a really surprising mistake on Hamas's part that reduces the pressure on the Israeli leadership. And it's not clear where the mistake comes from. Why would Hamas say that there will be no more hostage exchanges until the entire war is ended? Meaning the whole war is ended, Hamas remains in power in Gaza? That is telling us there won't be any hostage exchanges, period.

Because that is a cost that the Israeli government simply can't pay. It can't pay it politically. It's not that there's some ethic at work here. Just you don't have to believe politicians are ethical. Just public opinion won't allow the war to end now, like this, with Hamas still very much in power, and, you know, 70% roughly intact. And so for Hamas to stake that position, I think suggests, I'll say a couple of points that are, if not true, if not the correct way to understand what Hamas is doing, then at least the question that we need

to be asking moving forward, because Hamas is capable of making that kind of declaration. First of all, if command and control has broken down to the extent that we believe it has, if in fact, Sinoir can't communicate all that well with the outside world because of the way he has to be in hiding either in Khan Yunus, or some have already begun to suggest that maybe he managed to escape Gaza, then this is a Hamas holding pattern. What these people are, you know, in two weeks, there's no reason not to then float to the Israelis the idea that we can do a week long hostage exchange for a ceasefire that just lasts a week, doesn't end the war, right? Doesn't cost them anything to make the declaration. That's the first thing. And the second thing is, as long as that really is the stated Hamas position, which at the moment it is, then the Israeli leadership is

free. The war can continue. The whole hostage question can be taken off the table. It comes at a time when the questions of the hostages are becoming more acute, more visible, the time has passed. I think, as you said, the trauma of October 7, the intense, immediate trauma of October 7, is receding into a kind of collective ethos, collective memory. But we're not still reeling from the sheer shock of it all. So the ability of the families, the ability of the organizations working to launch a real campaign to pressure the Israeli government to be more conciliatory for the hostages is beginning to be felt. There are protests that you're beginning to feel. My personal view is none of this is going to go anywhere. The Israeli government will not

concede, will not be more conciliatory. The defense minister has argued from the beginning, and we've talked about this, that the only way to get hostages out is to put massive pressure on Hamas. And that is still going to be the strategy to the end. And we're not going to get every hostage out. And that's basically the story. That story is not going to change. But this Hamas demand that the war end or there'll be no hostage exchanges

is so ridiculous that I think it's the opposite of what it looks like. It isn't Hamas upping the pressure. It's Hamas taking a step back because it's either incapable or doesn't want to even begin to talk about a hostage exchange. You mentioned Amos Harrell, who is a writer, an analyst for Haaretz, long time, one of the most experienced veteran journalists covering the Israeli defense and national security scene. He's been a regular guest on this podcast. between the IDF's repeated messaging about the war's achievements and pursuit of those achievements so far, and then the reality on the ground and how the reality is. It's not that the IDF is misleading the public, but how the IDF is talking about where this is going in pursuit of the objectives is just disconnected from what's actually happening on the ground. How do you

respond to that? And then also, what effect is this all having on what Amos is describing, to the extent that you agree with his characterization? What effect is this having on public opinion in Israel? I'll say this. First of all, I respect Amos very much. My complaint about newspaper columnists just starting to take a negative, you know, depiction of how the war is going as part of their, essentially, there's a kind of fear among the left-leaning political columnists that if the war is very successful, it rehabilitates Netanyahu from the catastrophe that his own Gaza policy led to on October 7. And so politics has, as you know, as the shock, right, fades away in the distance,

the trauma still there, but not the shock, politics has come back in full swing. I mean, Likud is now in full campaign, Netanyahu is in full campaign mode. And everybody's starting to debate whether or not we're still united and all that kind of stuff is coming back and i think that's bleeding into a lot of these columns now i most i want to put aside from that because he really is by the way you're you're just just for for disclaimer purposes you're not saying this in any way as a defense of netanyahu you're you're you're often a fierce critic of his you're just contextualizing how the analysis and reporting out there is feeding into, or is being fed by this political reality. Yeah.

By the way, I don't think Netanyahu survives this politically, not even a little bit. I'm happy to debate that and discuss that and try and make the argument. But I do think it is shaping not just right-wing rhetoric around the war, which it is now shaping. It's also shaping left-wing rhetoric about the war, which it is now shaping, it's also shaping left-wing rhetoric about the war, including a lot of these newspaper columnists. And so it doesn't mean we shouldn't read them and listen to them. And it doesn't mean that they're not pointing to important gaps, especially, by the way, between the political rhetoric on the political class and what's going

on on the ground. It isn't that the IDF has been selling Israelis that everything is done. When the IDF took Sheja'iyah this week, this past week, it didn't say Sheja'iyah is our mission accomplished, we're all done, we're all out of here. What it said was we have control above ground of Sheja'iyah, full stop. And just explain why Sheja'iyah is so important. Yeah, Gaza City is the major city of northern Gaza, and it was surrounded by the IDF at the very beginning of the war, and they began slowly moving in and clearing more and more parts of essentially Hamas attack tunnels and Hamas fortified positions above ground. And it was a horrific battle. It was really very intense

fighting, and it involved, first of all, obviously, the movement of many hundreds of thousands of Gazans, civilians to the and Shajaya, which are essentially the last areas where these two famous longstanding, I mean, for 20 years, strongholds of Hamas, Jabaliya and Shajaya. And so the taking of Shajaya is really dramatic in terms of showing how Hamas has essentially by the way, the major hostage release was through Shajaya. In other words, Hamas took hostages to Shajaya, the best kept ones, the healthiest ones, the ones released early, the children, the women, were kept in Shejaya. By the way, at some cost in IDF lives, because there were booby-trapped buildings. There was all the stuff you would imagine was completed this week. And that's a very dramatic pushback against Hamas.

But the army has been very laconic and very careful and has not, you know, flown the flag and pushed out fireworks and all that. The army has spoken very carefully about an operation that will take a very long time. And there's something, you know, there's something cultural that needs to be said. All of the glitz and glamour of PR, which people like you and I are very sensitive to, we deal with journalists, we are journalists, we have these debates in public, we're on a podcast, that way sort of that public relations is managed and political campaigns are managed, there is no mood for that in the public right now. And so if the army begins to sell, to seem to Israelis like there's something inauthentic

about what it's saying, the blowback will be fast and furious. And the army is being very careful not to appear to be PRing this. And it is speaking modestly, humbly, clearly, specifically. People's families are on the line. People's family members are in real danger. Everybody wants information. Nobody wants public relations. And so I don't think that it's fair to talk about the gap between the military leadership

and the reality on the ground, because those have generally been the same. There is a gap between the bombastic comments of politicians who want to show that they're more anti-Hamas than the other politicians and the reality on the ground. And that is something that's fair to talk about. Amos Arel, from my reading, generally agrees with our depiction of what's happening in the war up to now. In other words, he does think we're moving to a third stage. That stage will last a long time. It is a necessary stage. It's good we've gotten to that stage. It means a lower death toll for Palestinian civilians. It means a lower death toll for Israeli soldiers. It also is the kind of long sustained operation that will actually uproot

Hamas from those tunnels. There's not going to be a fast whiz bang operation to pull everyone out of those tunnels. Except I don't know what flooding everything with lava there there is no such option there's not it's not an obvious right solution. But that's all this all this speculation about flooding seriously flooding the tunnels with seawater, and this stuff is leaking out into the press about the IDF is experimenting with this and experimenting with that to flush out the tunnels without having to send in a lot of ground forces into what otherwise is your characterizing earlier in this conversation is more of like a meat grinder underground for awaiting Israeli troops. Is all that science fiction, the idea that the IDF has an option? It's not science fiction. But if you know about it before it happens, and you know about it from pictures the IDF showed you of pumps

that it then put on social media, then the point is the telling. The point isn't the doing. I suspect, I have no proof, no evidence. If I knew, I couldn't tell you. So luckily, I don't know. I suspect that the IDF wanted to throw the threat out there of flooding. It absolutely can flood those tunnels

very easily. It's a little bit of engineering work underground. It's not a big deal. You know, the Israelis have been moving water around for generations. We're great water engineers. It's part of our national ethos. It's not an actual problem. The problem isn't logistical. The problem isn't an engineering feat. The problem is the hostages. The problem is making sure you get every last tunnel. The problem is, you know, we might actually do it. In other words, there might be so few problems that we might actually, in the end, decide to do it, at least after the next hostage exchange, something like that. But the point of announcing we're going to do it was to see what pops out from underground and starts running away. That, I think, was the point, was to force a kind of movement on the Hamas side from the bunkers to develop more intelligence information. I know it's not easy to speculate how public opinion may shift going forward it's easier to analyze what public opinion is now but how do you expect the public discourse and the general story Israelis are observing to change during this next phase during this coming third phase which you

know there's there's no perfect analogy, but it's somewhat similar to Israel's position in its fighting in Lebanon, in southern Lebanon during the 1990s, which was, it was there, it was happening episodically, it was not on high tempo, but it certainly wasn't on low tempo or no tempo. That was just a feature of Israeli life, that it had this position in southern Lebanon. And I guess maybe describe, can you spend a moment describing what that was like and then get into how the Israeli public opinion may shift if this is the Palestinian political factions, Palestinian terror groups in Lebanon. The Begin government declared what Israel called Operation Peace for Galilee. We have since come to call it the Lebanon War. This was a war to remove those Palestinian factions in southern Lebanon from the area of southern Lebanon so that they could no longer

launch these horrific terror attacks that they were launching. The war has been much discussed and libraries have been written about this war. A listener would do well to just literally read the Wikipedia article about it, just to get the basic outline. The Israeli forces move in. Ariel Sharon, the defense minister, gives the order to continue all the way to Beirut, probably, apparently not without, you know, the consent of the larger cabinet. And Israel, you know, he has these designs on transforming Lebanon, making Lebanon a more pro-Israeli, more comfortable for Israel kind of buffer. Israel gets bogged down in this whole, you know,

because they had a theory and an idea and ideology. The Israeli army ends up getting bogged down for 18 years in this, what they call the security zone, which is a strip of land inside Lebanon on the Lebanese side of the border. And that sparks the creation of the Four Mothers Movement. These are mothers of young men, soldiers who were killed in Lebanon, to pull out. And it is successful. Shia militia that essentially is built over the course of the Israeli period there, Hezbollah, takes over South Lebanon, the areas that we left behind. So the question in Gaza, you know, everyone's using different comparisons. The Americans are looking at Gaza and saying, hey, don't have another Afghanistan. Some Israelis on the left are saying, hey, don't give us another South Lebanon security zone. All of that is it's it's important.

It's important to learn from our mistakes. And we've made some whoppers of mistakes. And so not to learn from them would be ridiculous and catastrophic. But something different is happening in Gaza right now is not a kind of, you know, engineering of our strategic environment kind of impulse that you saw in the Lebanon War in 1982. Israel does not need an empire in Gaza. That's not why it's in Gaza. Sorry to say something so silly, but that is something being said now by all kinds of

fancy people at fancy think tanks. What is Israel doing in Gaza? It doesn't need Gaza for any ideology. It doesn't need Gaza to be one way or another. The only thing it seeks in Gaza is quiet. It needs from Gaza safety. It absolutely needs from Gaza safety, and it cannot ever again compromise on having safety from Gaza. But that's it. That's the goal. There is no other goal. That need is so overwhelming and overpowering that all public opinion is focused on it and nothing else matters. And public opinion, as long as the perception is that the Israeli state is seeking safety out of Gaza to create an order in Gaza, and it doesn't matter

if it's the Palestinians run it, and it doesn't matter if it's the Palestinians run it, and it doesn't matter if the Emiratis and the Saudis temporarily run it. There are all these opinions and all these theories running around in the press. None of that matters to the public. What matters to the public is safety, fundamental basic safety. Incidentally, that's the Israeli priority in the north. There are tens of thousands, something around 100,000 Israeli residents of the north who are not in their homes for eight weeks now. They're in hotels paid for by the Israeli government. And the same soldiers being released in the Gaza Strip and told, hey, in a month you're

home, go home. They're being released with call-up orders later in the year. February, March, April, we don't have details. We don't know. If I had the details, I wouldn't be able to say them. But there is already an IDF plan to take care of the same exact kind of threat as Hamas in the north, because safety is the absolute priority. So public opinion is very simple. Everything on every border has to be safe. If it isn't safe, we have to make it safe. I want to, I'm sorry, I want to one poll,

just one poll. And it's not a public opinion poll in the regular sense. It's a poll for another podcast of an Israeli journalist or ex-journalist, Nadav Peri. And the poll is fascinating because it asked people about politics. And it asked people about trust. And the question was, who do you think is more worried right now, more playing politics versus managing the war? And it gave four Israeli leaders, Netanyahu, Gantz, Defense Minister Gallant, and opposition leader Yair Lapid. Who is more worried about politics and who is more worried about the war? The most trusted Israeli politician to be focusing on the war and not on politicking is Defense Minister Gallant.

People who thought he was politicking is 8%. People who thought he was focused on the war is 85%. The next most trusted is Benny Gantz. 19% thought he's politicking, and 74% thought he's focused on the war. The next person is Lapid. 64% think he's politicking. He's, by the way, not running the war, so what would focusing on the war look like? And 18% think he's focused on the war. And third place is Netanyahu. How many Israelis think that he's primarily politicking and only after that dealing with the war? 57%. Just 37% think he's primarily focused on the war. That's trust. This is a government that went into this war with a trust deficit from the judicial reform fight.

Israelis look at Netanyahu and they say about Netanyahu, he is politicking now. And they look at Galant and they say Galant is actually running the war. And Gantz is right there at his side running the war. And these are numbers that tell us that that opinion goes very deep into the right, very deep into the voting base of Netanyahu himself. And so public opinion is not going to be shattered by the war taking a long time. And it's not going to be broken, as long as there's a perception that it is a real war being fought for a real and basic premise and purpose that everybody understands, which is to deliver safety on our borders. And the second that people believe, frankly, that Netanyahu is running it rather than Gallant, the second people

believe it has become a political war, it is Netanyahu trying to avoid an election, it is being extended in all these different ways, The second people believe that, then public opinion breaks. Don't measure public opinion by how long it will take in Gaza. Everybody understands it will take a long time. This isn't South Lebanon. Israelis know exactly, after October 7, what the war is about. But you can measure public opinion on the war by tracking these politicization questions in the polls. And that, I think, is where you're going to find the moment where the Israeli public starts to turn away from the war, starts to worry about the war, and starts to think that the war isn't

being handled well. Okay, so now fast forward to right after October 7th, there were reports that leaked out of the War Council deliberations that Gallant was advocating for a preemptive strike in the north against Hezbollah rather than going straight into Gaza. And this was very controversial. The Biden administration was uncomfortable with it. Netanyahu was apparently uncomfortable with it. And he was overruled, Gallant, with regard to this proposal. Given the stature that Gallant has, had he made this case to the public, do you think the public would have rallied? So, okay, so, you know,

there are a couple questions that have to be unpacked in that. First of all, leaks from the cabinet. What are they? What do they mean? Who leaks? What are we missing from the leaks? There's no question that the IDF woke up on October 8th and said, whoa, we did not understand Gaza. If we didn't understand Gaza, what don't we understand about Lebanon? And Lebanon looms much larger because Lebanon has, Hezbollah in Lebanon has capabilities that are an order of magnitude greater than Hamas. And so the immediate Israeli response in the highest echelons of the IDF and of intelligence and certainly Galant, the IDF and of intelligence, and certainly

Gallant, the immediate response was, whoa, Lebanon, right? If this is Gaza, what's in store for us in Lebanon? What don't we know? And in that initial call-up of 350,000 troops, give or take a few tens of thousands, a six-figure number, I don't know the exact number, but I know it's a six-figure number, were sent to the northern border and have been sitting on that northern border training and preparing and striking back at these small Hezbollah attacks ever since. And so no question that Galen raised Lebanon in that cabinet meeting. Did Galen say, let's do it, let's strike, let's

hit them, let's smash them? I don't think he said it that way. I'm certain he raised the question. I'm certain he raised the question. The cabinet has been leaking like a sieve from the very beginning. It has certain members, we know who they are, who leak constantly. And an actual war plan is almost never presented in the cabinet until after it's already underway. So that's, you know, it's important to give that background. But having given that background, the short answer to your question is yes. If Galen tells Israelis we need a war in Lebanon, and we need it now because

Hezbollah is the same threat as Hamas, only worse, Israelis will follow him to that war. Absolutely. And I'll say another thing. It's extremely likely to happen by the spring, because every Israeli family knows that there's a call up later in the year. When exactly, we don't know. But soldiers who were being released in January were told that there's going to be a call up later in the year. So I don't think the IDF is going to allow a threat that is Hamas times something to just remain and directed directly by Iran with massive, you know, armed strategic weapons like the Hezbollah's massive arsenal of missiles and rockets to remain on the northern border. That is not something that's going to happen.

So you're saying embedded in the Israeli conversation right now is this understanding that there will likely be some action, real action in the north. About a month ago, the foreign minister, Eli Cohen, submitted to the UN a demand to implement Resolution 1701 that ended the 2006 Second Lebanon War, and stipulates that Hezbollah has to move north of the Litani River, away from the Israeli-Lebanese border. Israel didn't tell the UN to implement that resolution because it has the slightest faith in the UN. Israel told the UN to implement that resolution as a beginning of making the case for the Kasus Beli that it has in the north. Now, why is it telegraphing a war in the north? Is it to warn off Hezbollah? Is it to literally set up the Kasus Beli because it plans to go to that war? Is it to warn off Hezbollah? Is it to literally set up the caskets barely

because it plans to go to that war? Is it to throw everyone off balance because in a war, why not telegraph all the things all at once and keep the enemy guessing? I don't know. What I do know is simple. I go back to simple principles. I go back to simple lessons. I try to go back to simple people because that that, I think, is where history is made. What I know is Israelis will not live with that threat. The government believes that this problem is going to be solved. How do I know they believe it? They're paying the hotel bills of 100,000 a massive threat by sustaining a low level of actual shooting war on the northern border throughout the Gaza war. Israel wants to finish the Gaza war, at least the massive four-division period of the Gaza war that it's planning to finish in January, free up a lot of soldiers, send them home for a couple of months to rest,

maybe six months, and then take care of that northern border problem. I know that that's what everybody wants. And by everybody, I mean galant down to the grocer at your local grocery store. How it's going to happen, when it's going to happen, that's another question. But absolutely, Hezbollah, the threat it represents to Israel, is no longer tolerable after October 7th. Okay, I want, that's a topic we're going to come back to in another episode. I just, in wrapping up, Aviv, I just want you to describe the political environment. And we've, on this, these weekly conversations you and I have had, we've strenuously resisted getting into the politics of the moment because we've been focused on understanding

the war and the decision makers and the decision making and the reality on the ground and what's happening in Israeli society and rather than who's up who's down politically but this next phase of the war is is going to be a new normal in terms of forecasting what the political environment would be like and how the political discourse could drive decision-making about certain issues, whether it's a two-state solution, which you and I have talked about on this podcast, or when you actually say the war is over. And again, I know it's hard to get granular in this forecasting, but just generally try to imagine what the environment would be like in this politically inside Israel for this next phase of the war, because it really could determine who's in power and who's making these decisions. The vast majority of Israelis, including 30% of

voters for the government, told a poll by the Israel Democracy Institute earlier this month that they want an election immediately after the war. What is immediately after the war? If the war is going into a year and a half long counterinsurgency in Gaza plus something in Lebanon, it's obviously going to be potentially quite close. We could be going to an election in the spring. We could be going to an election when the intense fighting in Gaza dies down and it turns into this different kind of war that we discussed. One sign that that's coming is that Netanyahu has literally launched the Likud campaign. Likud social media, Channel 14, which is an Israeli television channel that is just massively, deeply pro-Netanyahu. It has begun, not begun, I mean, it has never stopped,

but it has begun very intensively to have discussions and debates and messaging that is part of that Likud campaign. Part of the campaign is, what do you want for Netanyahu for October 7th? Why do you blame him? The army failed, and intelligence failed, and the Shabak failed, and all these other people failed. Part of the campaign is, it isn't Netanyahu's fault. But the center, the heart of the campaign is Netanyahu, he told this about a month ago to a bunch of Likud members of Knesset. In the Knesset, he said, if I'm not in power, when the war in Gaza ends, then the Americans will impose on us a Palestinian state.

And I will, if I am in power, I'm the only one, and you saw this between me and Obama, etc, etc, who can say no to the Americans. The Americans have paid a lot of political capital for us, they have helped us, and they're going to cash in those chips after the war. And I'm the only one who can resist that. That's the campaign. Dear right-wingers, I'm paraphrasing, dear right-wingers, this war, we will win the war and lose the strategic environment by having a Palestinian state established in Gaza

and in a significant part of the West Bank if Netanyahu loses the election. And so you must rally to Netanyahu, no matter how much you blame him, no matter how much you hate him, no matter how much you think he's politicking now, mid-war, while soldiers are dying in the battlefield, you must support Netanyahu because the alternative is a strategic catastrophe, an ideological catastrophe. That is the campaign. It has been launched. It has been uttered, uttered from Netanyahu's own mouth.

And we're watching that move forward. So the fact that that's now underway tells me, first of all, Likud's strategists, planners, you know, pollsters, and Netanyahu himself believe that the shock of October 7 is worn off. Israelis are in a place where political debate can resume, that itself won't hurt them. I think, by the way, they're wrong, but let them try. And they also conclude that there's an election coming. And the longer they wait at this point to campaign, it'll already hurt them on election day. And so there's no choice but to campaign. All of that is to say, my day job is political analyst. So all of that is to say,

you connect those dots, there's an election coming sometime after the major part of the war is done, when the Knesset calls an election that triggers 90 days, and then you actually have election day. So if it's late January, early February, we're talking about late April, early May, something in that ballpark. If it's six months after that, that's a significant thing that we'll all be trying to interpret that and understand that maybe it'll mean that Likud's polling, internal polling tells it they're going to lose spectacularly and therefore they're doing everything they can to cling to power. But that's what you should be watching. So we're absolutely entering. We're already in pre-election season. It looks like

we're going to be entering election season pretty soon. Given how recently Netanyahu's government was formed, unless Netanyahu decides he wants an election, he has a lot of time and the only mitigating factor could be a part of his coalition, one party in his coalition pulls out of the coalition so the government falls. So what is the precipitating event that you're imagining that would lead to the government having to go to elections or the government being forced to go to elections? It can't just be because they're polling poorly. It would have to be that someone actually leaves the government. Yeah, no. Some party. Polling poorly is always a reason to stick to each other, to stay in power, to hope the polling turns around, right? Because polling poorly is not a moment to go to elections. That is usually the political logic. We knew this government was stable because the judicial reform fight cost it something like 10-15% of its electorate in polls. And Netanyahu hasn't won an election in any poll since January. In other words, that's his political situation before October 7th, right? So that stabilized the government.

But this is different. It's a different order of magnitude. When the families, not just the families of hostages who we're used to hearing from, because they're in this desperate effort to mobilize global pressure on Hamas to get Qatar to pay attention. But when the families of the victims, when thousands of Israeli families, of everyone who died on October 7th, starts campaigning against Netanyahu, and it's all politics, it's not about the war, it's not about unity. It's not about facing it together. It is about Netanyahu specifically and about what we call in Hebrew the conceptia. The conceptia.

The concept, right? The concept was Hamas was deterred, contained, etc. This was the heart and soul of Netanyahu's strategy. Time is on our side. Our enemies are destroying their own societies much more than they're destroying us. Our GDP per capita since 2007 when Ham Hamas took over Gaza, has doubled. Time is on our side. We grow more powerful, more prosperous.

We make more friends in the world while Hamas itself destroys the Palestinian cause. It doesn't need our help. Why would we intervene in that process? That's Netanyahu's deep and insightful and thoughtful and careful. It's not a stupid concept. It's not that he just ignored everything. There were real numbers. He's a very economically minded leader. And he thinks in long term. And he had this concept. This concept exploded every year of quiet under his rule. And by the way, his governments since 2009, between 2009 and 2021, I think, were the quietest, safest decade in the history of Israel. And Israel is a country with wars, constant wars. There was a decade out, sort of carved out of Israeli history, in which Palestinians experienced some pretty significant wars in Gaza over that time. But for Israel, those were minor skirmishes to suppress this problem called Hamas, which was contained and deterred fundamentally.

And it turned out on October 7th that we had bought those years on credit. And when the bill came due, it was enormous. And so Netanyahu is responsible. That campaign, that campaign, when it begins with thousands of families of victims, it will have, you know, every single Israeli leader has taken responsibility for October 7th. Every single one. Defense Minister Gala, the head of the army, the head of military intelligence, the head of the Southern Command, the head of the Gaza division, the head of the Shabak.

Every single relevant leader has taken responsibility, except for one man who has refused at every opportunity to take responsibility in that chain of command. And that's Netanyahu himself. And the reason was, he didn't want that seven second clip in which he says, I take responsibility to be in the videos, the campaign videos of the opposition in the next election. So in a sense, he was campaigning from day one. Literally from October 8th, he was already campaigning. Or he would have done that decent thing.

But the opposition, and I don't just mean literally the opposition, Yair Lapid, I mean these families, I mean everyone angered and horrified at how his concept failed on October 7th, won't need a seven-second segment of Netanyahu taking responsibility. That's the one thing that could have gone his way. Gallant took responsibility. Gallant was the defense minister on October 7th. Gallant is deeply trusted because he addressed it directly. And he told Israelis, this was shameful, this was catastrophic, this was me. Netanyahu's failure to do that is going to work against him. Because you know what videos those families are going to have? Every single video from October 7th. And so this campaign is going to launch, they're going to do their best, Netanyahu is going to go down fighting. This is my estimation. Political pundits

who predict are idiots, because eventually they're going to get it wrong even if they're good at their jobs. But nevertheless, I try to imagine, ordinary Israelis I know, ordinary Netanyahu voters I know, I try to imagine how they will respond to that campaign. They'll vote for Netanyahu so that they don't vote for someone else. But not that many. And not passionately. And on election day, will they actually cast a vote for Netanyahu? Or will they say to themselves, can the Israeli right really not produce another leader, another politician? Is the Israeli right really locked in on Netanyahu for decades and decades?

Is that really our fate, even after October 7th? That sentiment is powerful. And the poll that I referenced from last week by IDI, 29% of coalition voters, of voters for the right-wing parties of this government, want an election after the war. And so I think that we're going to see an earlier election. This is a different moment from the usual political logic, which, because the government is collapsing in polls, favors stability.

Not this time. All right, Haviv, we will leave it there. Thank you, as always. I will see you next week. Until then, Christmas will have come and gone. And so this is a happy era of Christmas, eve of Christmas, when people will be listening to this. And I look forward to connecting with you in a week. Thank you. Merry Christmas to all our Christian listeners. That's our show for today. To keep up with Haviv Reti-Gur, you can track him down on X at Haviv Reti-Gur, and you can also find his work at the Times of Israel, at Times of Israel or timesofisrael.com. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host,

Dan Senor.