Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - External pressures on Israel, and within - with Haviv Rettig Gur

Episode Date: March 4, 2024

Will there be a negotiated pause in fighting in advance of Ramadan, or will the IDF move against the remaining Hamas battalions in Rafah? At the same time, what to make of the new external and internal pressures on Israel? Externally, there is mounting pressure on Israel regarding delivery of humanitarian aid, and increasing internal pressure — specifically on Prime Minister Netanyahu — relating to how he’ll hold his Government together in the midst of a new debate about exemptions of Haredim from military service. To help us unpack what’s going in with these intensifying external and internal political pressure points, we are joined by Haviv Rettig Gur, for our regular check in.

We have reached the point in the war where it is now obvious to everybody that the questions, the center of gravity is shifting from the battlefield to politics. The army needs more soldiers. That runs headlong into Haredi politics and coalition politics. The hostages are in their last stretch. You know, they've been there four months. Who knows if they're still alive three months from now? That question of the hostage deal runs into coalition politics. The day after question, because of humanitarian aid, the day after question can no longer wait for the day after. That is a question for politics. Everywhere you look, the center of gravity is no longer on the question of what the IDF can achieve on the ground. We know what the IDF can

achieve on the ground, and we know it's going to achieve it. The question now is all the rest of it, and all the rest of it needs solutions, and those solutions are going to be political solutions. It's 12 o'clock noon on Sunday, March 3rd in New York City. It's 7 o'clock p.m. in Israel. In recent days, it has not appeared that there have been major IDF advances on the battleground in Gaza, as questions remain as to whether there will be a negotiated pause in fighting in advance of Ramadan or not, and whether a full-scale military operation will advance against the remaining Hamas battalions in Rafah. At the same time, the Israeli government is contending with new external and internal pressure.

Externally, there is increasing international pressure on Israel following the humanitarian aid incident last week that left a number of Palestinian civilians dead, and increasing internal pressure, specifically on Prime Minister Netanyahu, as it relates to how he'll hold his government together in the midst of a new debate about exemptions for Haredim, or ultra-Orthodox Jews, from their IDF military service. This has thrown a bunch of questions on the table as different members of the Netanyahu government take positions that create new pressure points.

To help us unpack what's going on with these intensifying external and internal political pressure points, we are joined by Havivra Tagur from the Times of Israel for our regular check-in. This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome back for our regular check-in, Haviv Rettigur. Haviv, how are you doing? I'm doing okay. How are you, Dan? I'm all right. I'm all right. Both of us have been in the midst of some intense travel, kind of exhausted, but the news has not taken a break while we have been on the road, and a lot of news has happened both inside Israel and outside Israel relating to Israel, and I want to take apart each of these topics because I think they're all, in a sense,

there's a thread that connects them all to one another. One relates to the increasing external pressure on the Israeli government, and then the internal, the domestic Israeli pressure that has been ratcheting up on Prime Minister Netanyahu. I want to start with the external events over the last few days, specifically around the aid truck incident, the aid trucks that were going in through the Israeli Gaza border, in which there was an attempt for aid to be delivered that spiraled out of control and resulted in a number of Palestinian casualties, as we understand it. Can you just, based on what you know, Haviv, describe what actually happened, and then we can talk about

the implications? Yeah, I'm basing this on media reports. I don't have firsthand knowledge from any particular sources, either in Gaza or Israel, but it looks like what happened was that there was this aid convoy. The aid convoy was swarmed by Gazans desperate for supplies, desperate for the supplies included food and other things, and the gunmen possibly who were protecting the convoy, one truck at least, tried to escape the masses of people coming at them and ran over people. Some group of the people trying to get at the supplies started approaching an IDF force that was trying to protect the convoy, to prevent the convoy at least from being robbed by Hamas forces on the ground. The IDF commander said to open fire in the air. They were not deterred. This

was already a little bit of an out-of-control, you know, very large group of people. It's hard for large groups of people to turn, change direction, etc. He gave the order, which is an order that's supposed to be used in an extreme case of crowd control with real danger to the soldiers, which is what the officer believed was happening, to fire at the feet. There was fire. The IDF believes there were as many as 10 casualties, but there were dozens and dozens more killed that the IDF says were killed by the stampede itself, the human crush, and by the truck. Hamas's initial statement was actually an IDF airstrike. Then that statement was about IDF gunfire killing dozens of people.

So I personally am still very much in the fog of war. Probably by the time people hear this, they will know more than I know. But what it looks like to me, as far as I can tell now, is that we had an aid convoy. The aid convoy was supposed to be protected by gunmen of one kind or another. There was a mass attempt to grab the aid. And the aid truck was staffed by private contractors, right? These were private contractors bringing in the aid. Yeah, who were supposed to protect the aid truck. And everything went crazy because these people are actually very desperate and there is

a real need. And the aid coming in has been very hard to actually distribute in Gaza. Even if we assume good faith on the part of all parties, it's something that's unbelievably difficult to do. And I don't think we can assume good faith on the part of most of the forces on the ground, meaning Hamas has been stealing the aid. We know that various clans that have been allowed to distribute the aid just so it doesn't get into Hamas's hands. We've seen some part of the aid less than when Hamas gets control of it, but some part of the aid disappear as well into a black market and just disappear completely in ways that can't be tracked. So there was this really terrible, terrible incident

that the story of it that ran overseas was immediately taken to whatever direction served any side. Everybody is convinced that the moral calculus of the incident fits their narrative. And it's tragic, and it's horrible, and it's hard to sift through the rhetoric and get to the actual event, because there's very little actually coming out of Gaza right now that's really trustworthy, that isn't part of one side or another's war effort. Can you just spend a minute on why delivering aid to Gaza and Palestinian civilians is so operationally difficult? I would say that this is actually the big story of this tragedy. And it's the important story because it isn't just about this tragedy. We're going to see this story

unfold at a much larger level across Gaza, not just in these specific locations or incidents, until we solve this problem. It turns out it's extremely hard to distribute aid in Gaza right now. We have seen drivers, including UNRRA truck drivers, threatened by Hamas. We have seen attempts by the Jordanians and some others, the French, to airdrop aid. The airdrops either are ineffective, some of them have actually fallen in the sea by accident. Well, it's very hard to do airdrops at scale in any efficient way. Right. Or it's just too small to really matter. Right. So it's nice of the Jordanians, but it's not going to feed 2 million people. And the IDF, you know, you talk to officers in the IDF and they say they accept that there is this responsibility to make sure that in the

areas of responsibility that the IDF actually controls, nobody starves, nobody goes hungry. But the IDF is absolutely unwilling to have Israeli soldiers protecting the actual convoys directly. And the reason is very simple. It puts them in direct contact with civilian populations that are deeply infiltrated still by Hamas. Hamas has not yet been degraded at the counterinsurgency level, that these populations that will come for the aid won't include Hamas fighters. And therefore, it is not a danger, it is an absolute guarantee that IDF soldiers protecting these convoys will be murdered by the very people they're trying to feed, not by the actual people, but by the Hamas embedded among them. And there's a very real danger when you create that friction between the IDF and, that's the military term, and civilian

populations, that closeness between the IDF and civilian populations, that these soldiers can get kidnapped, which is one of Hamas's strategic objectives during this entire war. And they've failed to do it so far, and they want to do it. And so the army is unwilling to put soldiers in that direct and acute and immediate danger. And so nobody actually knows what to do. And not knowing what to do is Hamas's plan. Hamas does need the humanitarian catastrophe to escalate as much as it possibly can so that international pressure and Arab world pressure and Muslim world pressure is brought to bear. And by the way, there are some huge conclusions we need to draw from that. In other words, we can't have a situation where Gazans don't eat. And so we need to start thinking about the larger context and

the day after question and who comes in, you know, even this early in the game. Essentially, there's been this conversation in Israel about the day after, right? Who runs Gaza after the war? If you're looking just in the narrow focus of humanitarian aid, which is a desperately needed focus we need to look at, the day after is today. We already need that replacement for Hamas. The IDF can't beat it. And the larger picture of this incident of these deaths is that this is going to keep happening until we have some kind of a solution to who's in Gaza, who's running the place, who's enforcing the place other than Israel. The Biden administration has recently announced that the U.S. will airdrop aid into Gaza. The Pentagon is apparently set to begin some kind of humanitarian campaign in the coming days,

so they will try it. But the press coverage immediately after the incident, and I'm just going to quote a couple pieces here, the Associated Press headline, I'm quoting Gaza's health ministry, says at least 70 people were killed and 280 were wounded in a strike on a crowd of Palestinians waiting for humanitarian aid. That's interesting, on a strike, meaning it reads like there was not some chaotic haphazard situation where warning shots turned into deadly shots, but that there was an actual military strike on innocents. Right, which was Hamas's claim at the time. They're citing a Hamas claim. Right, without citing it as a Hamas claim. They're reporting it as their own. And then there's the New York Times. Deaths of Gazans desperate for food prompt fresh calls for a ceasefire. Again, not any of the context that you are describing here. The subhead is international leaders and the aid group said the disaster on Thursday, last Thursday, reinforced the need for an immediate halt in fighting and

more relief for Gaza. So I guess my question, Aviv, is we keep waiting for the turning point. We keep waiting, those of us like you and me and others and some of our other guests, we're watching for what is the event that is the catalyst for things to turn, right? We know from the 2006 Lebanon war, it was 34 days. And then there was an incident where the IDF bombed a building where a number of Lebanese civilians were killed. And the Bush administration famously told Prime Minister Omer, okay, we got to wind things down. 2014, Gaza war, Israel's in Gaza, it was 50 days. And at some point, there was a catalyst for the Obama administration saying to Israel,

we got to wind things down. Is this that event? Because the way you read the press, there's talk of ceasefire, talk of ceasefire, talk of ceasefire, not really going anywhere. And then there's this event that I think is getting outsized, but we'll see, and we'll see the IDF investigation play out, and we'll see what we learn. But based on what we know so far, and based on what you're saying, I think the press attention is outsized relative to what actually happened. But what I think doesn't matter. It's what international leaders think. It's what the President of the United States thinks. And is this the event that they say, this is the point that you take that time clock and you turn it upside down and say,

we're over, we're out of time? I don't think so, for a very simple reason. I don't think any of those arenas or audiences are the determining factor. I still think the determining factor is Israelis, the Israeli public, and by extension, Israeli politics. I still think the determining factor is Israelis, the Israeli public, and by extension, Israeli politics. This is not the event that grants Hamas immunity. If that's essentially the question we're asking, is this the event that forces the Israelis to say, well, you know, Hamas gets to survive this thing. Hamas isn't destroyed. Hamas wins the war, and we're going to be back at this war in 10 years. If that's the question, then the answer is no. And the answer is not just no, it's an emphatic no.

In an event 10 times this size, the answer would still be no. This is an event that shows us that the purely military part of the war might be winding down. Winding down spectacularly successfully. Spectacularly successfully in military terms. The humanitarian questions, the political questions, the geopolitics, those are separate questions. The diplomatic, public opinion in the world, these are, you know, separate questions, vital questions. We should talk about them constantly. But purely in the military terms, on the ground, the IDF campaign has been more successful than

the IDF itself expected, vastly more successful, we know this, than Hamas expected. And much more successful than the U.S.? Ever expected. You remember that the U.S. Biden administration, when it was trying to caution the Israelis before they went into Gaza, certainly before they went in on the ground, they sent senior American military officers with a lot of experiences in various theaters in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in counterinsurgency, in dealing with ISIS, and basically

said, if you do what you're planning to do, you're looking at at least 10 times the number of Israeli casualties that Israel has experienced so far. Right. And by the way, those Americans were not stupid. We are trying to do something in Gaza that's an order of magnitude more difficult than anything America has ever done with similar kinds of guerrillas and insurgents, because Hamas has managed to build that underground infrastructure much harder. And so this American argument that, you know, careful what you wish for, it might not be as easy as you think, it might not even be possible militarily, wasn't a stupid argument. But the Israeli answer, like classic Israeli answer was, you think, it might not even be possible militarily, wasn't a stupid argument. But the

Israeli answer, like classic Israeli answer was, you know, we don't know if it's possible, all we know is we have to do it, right? That's kind of the Israeli response to the Pentagon when there was this idea that Iron Dome isn't technically feasible. And the Israelis were like, well, you know, maybe we'll do it anyway. That was the Israeli attitude. When the Israelis get into that stubborn attitude, often they can pull off things that the conventional wisdom says isn't possible. in the international community, that that saves them. The Israelis remain as implacable as they were, and they remain that, and I wish I could convince Hamas of that because it would end the war sooner. But the long story short is, I do think that what this event highlights is that we are

reaching the point where it is massively and emphatically about the idea of continuing to pull Hamas out of those tunnels, the idea of continuing the counterinsurgency, there's still the enormous problem of Rafah where Hamas still has operational battalions that are hiding under vast numbers of Palestinian civilians and refugees from the rest of Gaza that won't be able to go home for a long time and we're not sure where to send them if we want to go in and get Hamas out of those tunnels in Rafah. So they have this huge, huge problem. However, we are now shifting in places that we have already basically gained control on the ground, in Khan Yunis, in Gaza City, to the part where we have to actually run Gaza, manage Gaza. The Israelis thought they would go in, they would have whatever time they needed to crush Hamas

through sheer blunt stubbornness and unwillingness to have Hamas survive this, they would just have the two years they need. But then the humanitarian aid issue proves that we don't. We need someone who can distribute humanitarian aid now, and who can do it against Hamas's wishes, and who can fend for themselves in the face of Hamas disruption, violent Hamas disruption, and who can manage Gaza in our place. And it cannot be Israelis. My thinking is leaning toward an Arab solution to the aid convoys, an Arab solution to Gaza's future. We've talked about this in the past. What we didn't realize and what we are now realizing and what I wish Israeli officials had realized a month ago when we were already talking about these kinds of things, is that we need it now.

We need it a week ago. We need it a month ago. The day after has already come. If we don't know what that end is, what our vision is for that, we can't work backwards to put in place now the kinds of things we need to make sure that the humanitarian crisis in Gaza doesn't become a catastrophe. I got to tell you, Aviv, if you listen to the language coming out of the Biden administration, where President Biden himself has described what's happened with this aid truck incident as

appalling, as tragic, language that suggests that, you know, and the press wants to, is desperate to report that this is Biden's final straw, that he's stuck by Israel unconditionally since October 7th. But there was a moment where the Israelis would go too far, and many analysts are bracing for that moment. And many friends of mine who are very supportive of Israel, or many friends of mine who are on the political right in the U.S. have a knee-jerk tendency to be critical of the Biden administration, have been waiting for that moment, waiting for that moment where Biden drops the hammer on Israel and says, you know, his version of the conversation with Omer in 2006, or the conversation that Obama and his team had with the Israeli government in 2014 to say, it's over. The hammer is dropped. Everyone's been bracing. They keep telling me it's coming, it's coming, it's coming, it's coming. And then the truck incident was, it's here.

Here's what we know so far. We know that the administration has used tough language in reaction to what happened. We know that, as recently reported, the administration intends to dropping aid into Gaza into its own hands. We also know that there was an effort to issue a statement from the UN Security Council that got pulled and was never issued, effectively criticizing Israel for what happened and yet again calling for a ceasefire. And the statement was pulled because the US didn't support it. Now, it's interesting that they went for a statement instead of a Security Council resolution because the US administration, at the direction of President Biden, has been consistently vetoing all these resolutions. So they figure, okay, a statement. A statement is

easier to get done. It has less weight than a Security Council resolution. But a statement from the Security Council still has to get drafted and issued by consensus. And the U.S. was not on board. So therefore, there was no statement. So I think the aid incident is a big story. The press is going to make it into a big story. I don't think it matters until the U.S. itself says we are changing course. We are shifting our approach. And despite the rhetoric coming out of the administration, I don't see any sign that the administration is shifting.

I'll say two things. One, I don't know what my sense of the Biden administration from afar, you know them much closer, much better. But my sense from afar is that they understand that what's the alternative? In other words, what are we talking about? So therefore, what, the war stops and Hamas survives? If that's the call, if that's what, you know, the aim is here, then it's not going to work. I really don't know how to say it more bluntly and simply to the international community. Telling the Israelis now Hamas gets to survive this

won't work. It won't work no matter what costs you place on Israel. And it's a tragedy for Gaza that Hamas isn't aware of that. But it just literally won't work. And I think that the Biden administration understands that. It understands that its own options are limited unless it plans to literally take over Gaza and run Gaza and turn Gaza into the 51st American state. I think the Israelis might actually be on board for, I don't even know what people, in other words, I'm being ridiculous because I don't understand the point. What would you like Biden to do? That's the first point. The second point is, I'm sometimes accused of being optimistic. In my defense, I was optimistic about the Israeli military capacity to fight the war, and I was

right. And I was optimistic about President Biden. And so far, you were too. And so far, we were right. I'm optimistic here. Not optimistic because we don't face tragedy. We face tragedy. This is going to be painful. It's going to hurt. It's already hurting terribly in Gaza. But Hamas is losing control. That's the other piece of this story. The Israelis desperately need to find a way to have something take over in Gaza, someone, somewhere, somehow that isn't Israel and has to start thinking about that much earlier than it wants to at a time when Hamas can still disrupt whatever that replacement to Hamas is in Gaza. Israeli politics are probably not capable of doing that right now at the speed that Palestinians and Israel's own national interests need it to happen. But at the same time, remember there was an incident, I think it was a month ago,

when a group of Palestinians rushed another aid convoy and Hamas gunmen were protecting the aid convoy or stealing the aid convoy. It's hard to tell which is which. Sometimes they do half and half and they opened fire on the Palestinians rushing the aid convoy and they killed a kid. The story of the death of that Palestinian child, it wasn't just that they killed desperate people trying to rush an aid convoy. It was that that kid belonged to the very clan that Hamas had outsourced part of the protection of the aid

convoy to. That clan then saw Hamas no longer as an ally that they're cooperating with or the powers that be that they're cooperating with, but in fact, part of the problem. And you started to see minor protests, occasional clashes with Hamas gunmen from that clan. This is that on a bigger scale. Hamas can cow UNRWA. It can scare UNRWA. It can kick UNRWA out of wherever it needs to take over the supply chain, etc. But it's losing increasingly the capacity to do that. The fact that Israel now needs a solution is because Hamas is being pushed back. And more and more, we're seeing these clans, these other power centers start to assert themselves very hesitatingly. Everyone's still scared Hamas is going to come

back. Nobody's entirely sure the Israelis really mean it and they're going to see it through. But nevertheless, Hamas is losing control more and more on the ground, and we're seeing it. That's good news. And it's good news buried deep in a tragedy, but it is good news for the future. In addition to the Biden administration not having an obvious alternative to the war Israel is fighting in Gaza, I also think the overemphasis on domestic political pressure that President Biden is under from his own base is losing a little bit, not a lot, but is gradually losing some altitude. From what I understand from reporters covering the

White House closely and from folks who work in the administration, while there are many people around President Biden who are very worried about progressive opposition to the war in Gaza, the president himself doesn't have a whole lot of patience for progressives, for the constant complaining and the histrionics of progressive leaders within his own party, and he is responsive to them to varying degrees, but he's often not responsive to them. And one of the issues he has not been terribly responsive to them is on the issue of Israel's options in Gaza, A. B, there was a lot of buildup, a lot of pregame show leading up to the Michigan primary a few days ago. And oh my gosh, this is going to be a blow for President

Biden. What was the real blow for President Biden? The blow would be if a number of Democrats didn't show up or vote non-committed in the Democratic primary or vote in surprisingly high numbers for Dean Phillips or Marion Williams, and it would show that the Arab American community, largely in Dearborn, Michigan, was putting up a real fight, a real front against Biden's re-election and that Biden risked losing them. It turns out those numbers were, in the end, as I thought they would be, inconsequential, certainly relative to previous Democratic presidents running for re-election, like President Obama in 2012. So there wasn't a meaningful difference.

So it's a lot of noise, but not a lot of organizing and not a lot of turnout on this front, A. B, even if you thought it was damaging, the number of people who didn't vote or voted non-committed in the primary in Michigan a few days ago. That was the easy part because there were no consequences. It was a protest vote without consequences because it was a way of voting to make a statement, but the consequences were meaningless because someone in their eyes, worse than Biden, couldn't possibly get elected as a result of their actions. The next time it will be protest with consequences. That is to say, if those who did try to protest in the Michigan primary, if they try to do the same thing in the general election, Donald Trump could wind up being president of the

United States. And I think President Trump, regardless of what one thinks of him, is a phenomenal foil for President Biden's reelection campaign, who's trying to mobilize and energize the progressive base. So, okay, guys, you still want to play games? You still want to make your statement about Gaza? Guess what? You get the guy who introduced the Muslim ban as president instead of me. You still playing your protest games?

So I just think this was the easy part, and they didn't even show up. I'm hard-pressed to believe they're going to show up when it actually matters. Yeah, there's also something you taught me to pay attention to, which is the alternative vote. Trump took Michigan by a historically narrow margin in 2016, something like 10,000 votes. Between 10 and 15,000 votes. Right. And the story of that is the turn of the working class from left to right, from the blue ledger to the red ledger. That's a different constituency. And if Biden is seen in Michigan to go down the road of the progressive politics, you can like him, you can hate him, but they do have an elitism problem. And it's a problem that, you know, every study bears out. And there's a huge debate within the Democratic Party about this, that the Democratic Party is shedding the working class, like there's no tomorrow. And so a Biden that campaigns in a way that would hold the progressive vote in Michigan is a Biden

that has more danger of pushing working class voters who actually decided Michigan for Trump last time, or two elections ago, to go the other way. And so I agree. I don't think Biden thinks, which is the important question, that Michigan was a blow to him. Even if the campaign against him in Michigan in the Arab and Muslim communities feels like it scored some kind of a point, I don't think Biden felt that. You know, Dan, that also, we've talked a few times around this question of when the American-Israeli alliance or American backing for Israel in this war, because Biden wants to see Hamas actually defeated, because that has huge of also the story of the aid convoy and the deaths in that incident in Gaza, that this pivoting toward politics is now well underway. It's true in America. It's true, I think, also in Israel, not just on the question of the day after that

is becoming an urgent question long before the actual day after because of the question of humanitarian aid. But it's also, you know, we've been having debates now in Israel. I don't know if this is connected, but I'm just going to pretend like it's connected because on both sides, we're talking about politicians suddenly pivoting to domestic politics and that's shaping the relationship and the war and the political and geopolitical environment and the actual war fighting itself. We're having a huge debate in Israel now about the ultra-Orthodox draft, a debate of a type that we've never had before because for the first time, the army is coming and saying, we need 7,000 more soldiers.

We don't have a demographic place to take them. Okay, so, Haviv, can you just briefly explain the history of ha-redim and army service in Israel? Because this is an important issue, it's a loaded issue, and it's coming to a head right now in the context of a war. Yeah. When Israel was founded, the ultra-Orthodox community, black hats, right, black coats, folks know who I'm talking about. The terms are different, they talk about themselves in different terms, people talk about them. But broadly speaking, the ultra-Orthodox community was something like 3% of the Jewish population.

They also had a birth rate that was fairly close to the average, something like three children per woman. Most of them had jobs, 85% of men worked, and quite a few of them served in the military in the wars in the early years of the state. Over time, because of the political power of their political parties, in Israel we have a system in which there historically has been a large center-left party, a large center-right party, and then a bunch of satellite parties on left and right that they cobble together to form a coalition. And because the large party is never a majority, in the history of Israel there's never been a single party that had a parliamentary majority all by itself, the small parties on which the larger parties depend for a parliamentary majority have had outsized power. And the ultra-Orthodox parties have used that power essentially to construct a massive welfare state and to ensure an exemption for military service for vast numbers of students. So at the beginning of the state, there was this exemption offered to the ultra-Orthodox community for exceptional students, seminary students, exceptional yeshiva students

who were really the geniuses of their generation, something like 400 a year received exemptions. This is the same exact military rule used to allow, you know, world-class artists or athletes. If you're an athlete on the Olympic track and you lose 18 to 21, those years of your life for training because you had to go to the army, you're never going to get to the Olympics. Israel has a law that allows for really, truly exceptional artists and thinkers and students and scholars and athletes to skip military service, but they have to be the top of the top to get that exemption. That was the exemption for 400 yeshiva students. By the 70s, it's still small, it's still 800, something like that. And then the ultra-Orthodox became the linchpins of coalitions of the right from the

late 70s, and it has now grown to something like 60,000 exempted young people who are studying in yeshiva and because of their yeshiva studies don't do military service The point is that the ultra Orthodox community which was 3% at the founding of the state Living essentially in this kind of internalized little welfare state that they built for themselves separate from the general Israeli economy and not really contributing a much in that way of taxes to the general Israeli population or economy Was not a problem when they were 3% of the population. Living with their exemptions from military service or national service of any kind was not a problem when they were 3% of the population.

Today they're 13% of the population, and that's a growing percentage because the average birth rate now is six and a half children per woman. And so the ultra-Orthodox have become too big to live apart, too big to be paid for by everybody else, to not work. 85% of men worked among the ultra-Orthodox in the 50s, and now it's 50%. And parts of the ultra-Orthodox community, it's much lower than 50%. And the army, we've had a debate over the last week, and it's a specific issue. The ultra-Orthodox have essentially told Israelis, our students are not going to serve.

It's a religious reason. They cannot maintain their religious purity and their religious rituals in the military. And if you force them to serve, they will refuse. It simply won't work. Take it or leave it. It doesn't matter what Israel does. You can pass a law against it. You can throw 60,000 kids in prison. That's fine. We will not serve in the military. There are religious reasons. We have tried to, over the years, find there have been state committees established, all kinds of bills

passed. Governments have passed bills and failed to pass bills. It's been a debate for decades, literally decades, how we get national service out of the ultra-Orthodox for the simple reason that other Israelis, especially Israeli Jewish communities, do serve, and their children are in danger, and they lose years of their lives to the military. And it's unfair. It feels unequal. And in the name of equality, the ultra-Orthodox have to do their part, and they've refused. So there's been this political tussle for many, many years. The last bill, which was a temporary measure just to avoid forcing the police to start arresting people who aren't going into the army, expired a while ago.

And there's a deadline now to pass a new draft bill. The ultra-Orthodox parties have refused to agree to vote on an important budget amendment until the draft bill is done, and it's done with them involved. They want to control what it's going on. And so we're now having this political skirmish over the budget bill, and we've essentially gone over the deadline for the budget law. The current Knesset is in breach of the budget law in terms of the deadline for passing a budget because of this new question of the draft law. Now, all of this kind of tug of war, this tussle with the ultra-Orthodox over whether to draft or whether not to draft, this is 30-year-old politicking. It's been happening for 30 years. The point now is,

over the past week, the Israeli military has come to the Knesset and it said, we have a problem. Here's our problem. We have, for well over a decade, been trying to become a more efficient and slimmer army. Less manpower, more tech. October 7 opened our eyes to the fact that we're just going to need a whole chunk of battalions. We're going to need entire infantry brigades on the borders for the foreseeable future, I mean for generations to come.

And so we now need a much, much larger manpower in the military. We need to start drafting more people. There are a lot of secular people who get exemptions, a lot of religious Zionist people get exemptions. We need them now to serve, but we also literally demographically need the ultra-Orthodox. We need 7,000 more soldiers every year than we're currently getting. We need something like 2,000 more officer commissions every year than we currently are budgeted for. The army has to grow, and it has to grow fast, and it is becoming harder. This week is this discussion where it is becoming harder. It's no longer politics. It's no longer about people screaming, this is fair, this isn't fair. We literally just need the kind of

army that has the manpower that this 13% of the population need to help provide. Now, they don't have to provide combat soldiers, which is where really a religious lifestyle of their kind is very hard to maintain, but they could provide all kinds of other services. The Israeli army has a medical corps. The Israeli army has all kinds of places where you can be ultra-Orthodox while still serving, and that frees up other populations for combat roles. The point is, the question of the ultra-Orthodox draft, which in the past has toppled governments, it's a foundational question in Israeli politics. Like the question of humanitarian aid in Gaza, and generally the war in Gaza, which is now

pivoting, its center of gravity is pivoting from the military operation into the political system. This question is now becoming something the political system can't ignore anymore. We have a cohort that's drafting in March. Before you get to the political system can't ignore anymore. We have a cohort that's drafting in March. Before you get to the political system can't ignore it, I agree with most of what you're saying in terms of what the fault lines of the debate have been. But there have also been practical issues. I've talked to a number of IDF officers and senior officials in the defense establishment over the years about the Haredi issue, also in service of research for mine and Saul's latest book, where we deal with the Haredi issue quite extensively. And there was always this practical obstacle from their perspective. Yes, we would like Haredim or more of them to serve in some way. However, not so easy to integrate them

into a military that is largely, in terms of how it is organized for training and warfighting, from a secular perspective. That is to say, issues around separation of male and female, issues around compliance with Jewish laws, Jewish restrictions, to the level and detail that the Haredi would require, trying to run an army on those terms. It's one thing running a country in the context of those debates. That's one thing. But running a military, and particularly running a warfighting military, with that kind of pressure and constraint, some of these individuals in the IDF, senior levels, would say, we're just not equipped for it. We don't want it. It's more of a headache. So they weren't in an actual rush to try to figure out how to recruit and integrate

the Haredim. That was then. That was back in those good old days when it was a nice to have, when it was a question of principle, when it was a question of other populations and communities feeling that the Haredim are carrying their share of the burden. Right now, we literally just need the soldiers. We literally just need the manpower. And that's fundamentally changing the conversation. And now you're seeing, for example, and so he needs to work with the ultra-Orthodox parties, Galant saying, we will find an agreed-upon solution. And Benny Gantz, who joined this coalition just for the purposes of the war, but actually is a critic of this government and its dependence on the ultra-Orthodox parties, at least when it comes to the draft question, saying there has to actually be ultra-Orthodox enlistment at a significant level.

And maybe we can find ways to enlist that aren't technically military, but some kind of civilian national service in the rescue services that can shrink the military's own rescue services and move soldiers around in that way. Maybe there are solutions like that. But the fact is, we just need the manpower at this point. And the Haredim have been protected for so long that they've grown used to the idea that other people protect them, and it's time for them to shoulder the burden. That used to be a principled debate that's now an extremely pragmatic need. And so that question has now come onto the agenda of Israeli politics in a way that is more urgent than it has ever been, more serious than it has ever been, because it's so much more practical and specific than it has ever been. It's not a principle debate now. It's just literally,

we need this army to grow very fast. And the ultra-Orthodox are now such a large part of the population that they weren't 50 years ago, that it's hard to see how we do it without them. And so now this is effectively Netanyahu versus Gallant and Gantz, and I guess Eisenkot within the government on this debate. How do you think it shakes out? I think that you can't draft large numbers of ultra-Orthodox soldiers without the ultra-Orthodox community. I also think I have less respect for the ultra-Orthodox community's claims. Wait, you can't draft large numbers of ultra-Orthodox without them being on board politically? Without the leadership, without the culture. After October 7, we have seen, generally we've seen an uptick, slow but steady,

in a willingness to serve. Not so much a willingness for me to serve, but a belief that it's okay for ultra-Orthodox to serve. I will tell you, Saul and I wrote about this in our book, in The Genius of Israel, that even if the political leadership of the Haredi community, those leading political parties in the Knesset, were staunchly opposed to Haredim serving, we were already sensing softening a little bit within the community, within the rank and file, among the grassroots, that this hard-edged separation from the rest of Israeli society was becoming more permeable, was becoming more penetrable, and it was manifesting itself, as we wrote about, in a number of areas, including, if not signing up at enlistment centers for the IDF, in other aspects of participation in the

Israeli state and not leading such separate lives. And then, as you're saying, after October 7th, we're increasingly also seeing it in the enlistment centers. Right. And so you had 25 years ago, if a member of a Hasidic community, let's say, would join the army, before they went home from the army for a weekend, they had to change out of their uniform, because if they showed up in their community in their uniform, they would face physical violence sometimes. They would definitely face verbal abuse in the street. That's no longer true. In other words, now the ultra-Orthodox community takes pride and shows off the soldiers in their community to the rest of Israel. And so the change

has been profound, but it hasn't yet translated into an actual rise in the numbers serving. And that has to happen. And that's a political just minefield that has now come to this government, and it has come urgently to this government, and there's no way to avoid dealing with it, which is something that Israeli governments have generally preferred, all governments. I mean, most recently, it's mostly been Netanyahu governments, but that's also true of, you know, Olmert and other left-wing governments has preferred to sort of kick the can down the road rather than actually tackle seriously the question. And so that's something we have to, you know, take seriously now that has not been something that we've had to take seriously in the past. The government right

now seems to be on one of two paths. One path is some kind of hostage deal that includes some kind of ceasefire and includes some Saudi role or Saudi cooperation or potential path to Saudi normalization. That's kind of one path. The other path is none of what I just described and Israel moving to its military operation for Rafah, which is where the largest part of the Gazan civilian population is concentrated. It's also where the remaining Hamas battalions, according to public reports, are concentrated. It is where some number of surviving Hamas leaders are hiding. Everyone seems to be terrified of this scenario. The Egyptians are terrified of it, the Egyptian government. The U.S. administration seems very concerned. The international community seems horrified, the Arab world seems very concerned. But to me, right now, in the near future, those are one of the two paths. It's either hostage deals, ceasefire, some talk and path or increasing buzz about a plan for Saudi normalization for

during the day after in Gaza, or all those things are on hold and it's RAFA. What is your reaction to that frame, and which do you think it's most likely to be? It'll have to be all of them all at once. Talking to hostage families recently, it's really striking that they deeply distrust and dislike, most of them, there's a diversity of voices, but most of them that I have met and talked to, deeply distrust and dislike this government and Netanyahu and aren't sure that either the prime minister or the government itself really is trying to get their families out. And then you say to them, so do you want elections to get rid of this crop of politicians who are polling very, very poorly? And the universal answer is desperately no. They desperately don't want elections. Because elections means that the government is weakened, it becomes a

lame duck government. And it probably will have a much harder time negotiating for the three to six months that it takes to win an Israeli election and piece together a new coalition. And three to six months is something that the hostages themselves don't have in Gaza. Many are already dead, we're fairly certain of that. However, many still survive, don't have three to six months, right? And so the hostage families are very much torn between distrusting the government but not actually wanting immediate elections. And what's striking about that is that it joins all the other arenas. The government is, again, politically hampered with creating a hostage exchange. By the way, politically hampered, I think, for honest reasons. In other words, there are different political forces.

The far right in the Israeli government says, we've shown Hamas that we will pay so much for hostages that we've incentivized the taking of hostages on a mass scale. To now give huge numbers, to be very generous in the deal to get more hostages out, is to again incentivize another massive taking of hostages in five or ten years, or whenever the next time is, we let our guard down by accident. And so there's that debate happening, where that's what's coming out of the right. On the center left, there's more of a urgency to the hostage exchange, in part, by the way, from demographics. If you walk in the streets of Tel Aviv, you're much more likely to

encounter someone who knows someone who is a hostage than if you walk in the streets of Likud cities, including cities close to the Gaza border, like Nativot or, you know, the working class cities of the south or Jerusalem or the ultra-Orthodox community, where there simply aren't any soldiers or so few that they're statistically irrelevant soldiers or hostages or victims of October 7th. So coalition voters don't feel the urgency of the hostage question as much as opposition voters for natural, good, honest reasons, just literally social realities. And so you have a debate over hostages right now that is a political debate. It is an honest debate. It's not a manipulative or dishonest, but it again comes back to the question of can this government thread exactly the needle you were talking about?

The government cannot stop the campaign against Hamas. It can pause it. It can't stop it. Its own voters won't let it. The general Israeli public won't let it. Hamas can It can pause it. It can't stop it. Its own voters won't let it. The general Israeli public won't let it. Hamas can't survive this thing in Gaza. How do you get the hostages out? The theory until now has been very simple. Massive military pressure on Hamas will get hostages out. How do you sustain massive military pressure on Hamas as the humanitarian aid problem, the humanitarian crisis, which in Rafah is going to reach its peak, is something that the Israelis haven't in any serious way dealt with. There's been a lot of tremendous efforts to avoid civilian casualties in Gaza, especially in the Khan Yunis operation and in central Gaza. And you've seen,

you know, some scholars have called it unprecedented, but they've done it very quietly because they don't want to be attacked on Twitter. But nevertheless, in actual terms, what Israel has actually done, moving around civilian populations in these ways, is to avoid what Hamas's strategy of massive civilian casualties as a force multiplier and a means for their own survival. But Israel never built out a serious humanitarian aid project. Imagine a humanitarian aid project built by Israel on a massive scale with a brigadier general running it that, you know, takes a piece of the Israeli desert bordering Gaza, creates a tent city there,

moves Palestinian civilians into that tent city to clear the battlefield in Gaza, checks those people very carefully, filters them, the Israelis control them. You can have an aid organization working among them of Israeli Arabs who speak Arabic and are in their own identities also Palestinian. You could have an Israeli response to the aid problem that helps clear the battlefield of Rafah. It also helps with international opinion, maybe. I'm an Israeli. I have trouble paying attention to the world even when I try, and I'm literally paid to

try. But still, it's really a struggle with that. The point is, we have reached the point in the war. We are now at a point where it is now obvious to everybody that the questions, the center of gravity is shifting from the battlefield to politics. The army needs more soldiers. That runs headlong into Haredi politics and coalition politics. The hostages are in their last stretch. They've been there four months. Who knows if they're still alive three months from now? That question of the hostage deal runs into coalition politics. The day after question, because of humanitarian aid, the day after question can no longer wait for the day after. That is a question for politics. Everywhere you

look, the center of gravity is no longer on the question of what the IDF can achieve on the ground. We know what the IDF can achieve on the ground, and we know it's going to achieve it. The question now is all the rest of it. And all the rest of it needs solutions, and those solutions are going to be political solutions. And the question now is, do we have a government, a political class writ large, that can take on those questions, can see those problems, understands the vital importance of those questions to the war effort, to long-term success, and can give us real answers.

So, Paviv, just in wrapping, increased external pressure, we'll see where that goes. Increased internal pressure, we'll see where that goes. Where does that leave Benjamin Netanyahu? I'll put it very simply. Netanyahu's general way of operating, and it's hard to fault him for it. I mean, I fault him for it constantly, but it's hard to fault him for it in the simple sense that it's worked, has always been to take the path of least resistance. He had a theory that stabilizing Hamas, allowing Qatari money to go into Gaza, ignoring essentially the tunnel network that was being built there. He had a decent, clever theory for why that was a good idea. He thought time was on our side. He thought our economy develops, our military power grows as

our economy grows, and therefore time is on our side and we can wait out the Hamas regime in Gaza. And that's the theory that drove him to act the way he acted and build out Hamas in Gaza the way he allowed it to be built out. But a lot of his Hamas policy wasn't that theory. A lot of his policy in Gaza was just picking the path of least resistance at every turn. That habit of picking the path of least resistance means that if Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bitzal Esmotrich and his coalition are screaming something about hostages, Netanyahu will probably cave. It means that if there's sufficient pressure on him from a direction that matters to him, he will probably cave. looking tough-facing Biden is for him the path of least resistance because it holds the right to his banner when the right is starting to question whether it should stay with him. And that habit of always taking the path of least resistance isn't going to be enough going forward. It's not going to solve the question of expanding the army quickly, which means

pushing the Haredim on the question of military and national service. It's not going to solve the humanitarian question in Gaza, which is not just a vast moral question, which of course it is and it needs to be. It's also now a strategic question of war fighting, and it's a strategic question of victory. It's part of the Israeli potential victory that we want to see. It means that in hostages, he's going to have to face down one side or another to have a serious policy going forward, and it's getting desperate. It means that the day after, the question he has avoided, and even picked fights with the Americans over just because it's good for him domestically, politically, it means to prevent

the kinds of things we saw this week with the aid convoy, to prevent IDF soldiers fighting and dying for nothing. as a competent day after coalition supported by Israeli military preventing Hamas from disrupting it, at least in the short term, means that you have to have a conversation about a future Palestinians. I'm not saying which specific solution, that's a solution I happen to have been thinking of, but it means having solutions. It means making decisions. The war is entering a stage where it no longer makes sense. It is no longer useful. It is, in fact, probably a path to disaster, short-term or long-term, to not answer questions, to continue to remain on the path of least resistance. At some point, you have to make decisions. At some point, you reach a point where failing to make a decision is the decision. And it is

a bad decision. And it is a decision with huge consequences and bad consequences. And so we're going to have to see the master of indecision, of strategic and willful and intentional and clever and planned indecision, indecision as policy, become a decider and become someone who moves ahead and pushes through some really fundamental questions, building out the army, solving the humanitarian aid question in Gaza, thinking about the day after. We can't just know what Netanyahu is against. We can't just know what his campaign wants us to know, which is what terrible outcomes he's defending us from. We actually need to know what he wants. I don't know if he can deliver that. I know that that's the challenge. And if he fails to meet that challenge, all the sacrifices for this war, I think, will not have been in vain, but they will certainly been partly wasted by a political leadership that can't make good use of them. All right, Haviv, we will leave it there. Thank you, as always.

And I will look forward to checking in with you in the days ahead. Thanks for having me, Dan. That's our show for today. To keep up with Haviv Retigur, you can follow him on X at Haviv Retigur or find him at the Times of Israel. Call Me Back is produced and edited by Ilan Benatar. Our media manager is Rebecca Strom. Additional editing by Martin Huego. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.