Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Haviv Rettig Gur (Part 1) - 100 Days into Israel's 'Forever War'

Episode Date: January 15, 2024

This past weekend, Israelis marked 100 days since the Hamas massacre -- and 100 days that 136 hostages, of all ages, still remain captive in unimaginable conditions. We resume our weekly conversation with Haviv Rettig Gur of THE TIMES OF ISRAEL to discuss where the war goes from here. Does it end? Can it end? How? And what has Israel learned about how to proceed? This conversation is divided into two parts. PART I focuses on what we are learning about Israel’s vulnerability now and going forward. PART II focuses on what we are learning about the divide inside the Arab world in its reaction to these past 100 days, but also the reality that Israel may be in a 'forever war.'

Why would the Iranian regime, which doesn't believe in rights for its own people, bother with Palestinian rights and invest in it billions and billions that it doesn't have in a years-long expensive multi-front war for Palestinian rights? Because it has nothing to do with Palestinian rights. It has to do with allowing Islam to come back as a force in history and proving that they are not far and distant from their God. Their whole point is to return Islam to God's embrace. And as long as Israel exists, that's obvious evidence.

That's incontrovertible evidence. Because the Jews are so weak, that's incontrovertible evidence that Islam does not, in fact, have God's grace. And so for Hamas, on October 7th, the humiliation, the videotaping, and the broadcasting live of the humiliation, the videotaping and the broadcasting live of the humiliation was the core message. What is the Abraham Accords? Over the last 20 years, the Saudis and the Emiratis, the conservative Sunni regimes, Jordan, Morocco, they have understood the disastrous potential contained in these visions of Islamic renewal.

And these are ideologies that destroy countries and have perpetual war at their heart. And they've turned on them. As Israel marks 100 days since the Hamas massacre, since the mass slaughter, torture, sexual violence, mutilation and decapitation of innocent people, burning them after they were dead and burning others while they were still alive. I say all this because there is a tendency to become numb to what occurred 100 days ago as time passes on. And I say this because there are still 136 hostages of all ages that still remain captive in unimaginable conditions for 100 days. However, those conditions are not unimaginable because we've heard reports from those hostages who've returned

what exactly those conditions are like. Today I resume my weekly conversation with Haviv Retikur from Jerusalem. Haviv and I have been wrestling with the question of where this war goes from here. Does it end? Can it end? How? Israel won't reoccupy Gaza along the lines of the occupation that existed from 1967 through 2005. But can it completely withdraw from warfighting in Gaza full stop without a fully secure border and the return of all the hostages? Given that remnants of this existential threat to the state of Israel and to the Jewish people remain right there on Israel's border, it gets harder and harder to answer this question. We want to believe that

warfighting reaches a binary phase, that the warfighting actually stops and there's a clear winner and a clear loser. But what if there's neither? This is among the issues I asked Haviv to reflect on on this 100-day mark. We cover a lot in this conversation, so we are dividing it into two parts. Part one focuses on what we are learning about Israel's vulnerability now and going forward. And part two focuses on what we are learning about the divide inside the Arab world in their reaction to these past 100 days, but also the reality that Israel may be in a forever war. Haviv Retigur on 100 days. This is Call Me Back. And I am pleased, pleased, I am relieved to welcome back Haviv Retegur to this podcast for our weekly check-in from Jerusalem. Haviv, I normally say pleased, but today I'm relieved given the reaction,

the sense of concern, if not outright panic, that our loyal listeners expressed to me at your absence last week. So first, I think everyone just wants to make sure you're okay. Are you okay? I'm doing fine. Yeah. It was nothing dangerous, nothing dramatic. So I appreciate very much the concern. It's really a big deal to know you're helping people. It's a little embarrassing because it came with compliments and really thank you. Thank you for first of all for Dan for putting this together and our listeners for

finding this meaningful and useful. So each week for those who are just joining for the first time, Haviv and I have this conversation. We've done it every week since we recorded the first one on October 8th and we haven't missed a release of an episode. We have not missed a Monday release or late Sunday night release since then, except

once, which was last week, and the fault was entirely ours, entirely mine and Haviv's. We had a conversation about where Israeli politics was heading in this post-October 7th world, the changes in the major demographics, political demographics in Israel, and we went down rabbit holes, and we really geeked out to the extent that these conversations have been half conversational and half sort of learning or relearning and sort of educational. we just we just forgot that we had an audience and the two of us just went went very deep in this conversation to the point that we didn't think would be that useful so i made that point when i uh recorded a subsequent episode and to explain your absence of eve and then and then there was this demand for those who were ready

to geek out with us to get the lost tape that where did they have to go people were asking on the dark web in the depths of the dark web to get the the lost tape of have even dan and the answer is stay tuned we will come back to you on this topic at another time have so much i want to talk to you about but it's all actually within the frame of the marking of the 100 days since October 7th, which is happening right now. And I have a few areas I wanted, I told you I wanted to discuss with you about what we've learned, what we're shocked by, should we still be shocked by at 100 days. But before I do, can you just describe, just to set the table, where Israel is with regard to its war against Hamas? Again, not necessarily where it's going. We're going to get to that.

But I just want to, just a snapshot, I just want to set the table of where we are right now. I think many things are true all at once. Israelis are exhausted. We have family members who have been in the war, fighting, in danger. We have slept poorly because of it for three long months, or more than three months. That's true of many, many Israeli families. We are still learning because different people are coming forward, because hostages are coming out, and because there are a lot of the journalistic investigations that are very serious and deep and have gone through the towns and villages on the

Gaza border and really mapped out October 7th, they're still discovering new fundamental realities of October 7th, and that's still making the Israeli press. And so we're still in it, and it's a long time to be in it, to not move on with life. But family is still in danger. Everyone still understands that this war is not going to end anytime soon. There is almost certainty, I think, among the Israeli public that the war is going to expand, that this is a very long war that we have now been forced into, and we are going to have to fight. So there's a grim determination coupled with, it isn't exhaustion, but it's the kind of tired of someone at the beginning of a long thing that they know they have to do. And they're going to do it, but they do feel the length of it. They do feel that this is going to be a long, long time.

It's a different country than it was on October 6th. And in terms of, just to put some numbers on it, how many reservists are currently fighting? We don't exactly know. We know 360,000 were called up, all told, through the last three months. Not all of them immediately. Many of them were then let out, and others were called up, all told, through the last three months. Not all of them immediately. Many of them were then let out and others were called up. So it's not clear that there are 360,000 reservists on top of the standing army all in. We also know that over the last two, three weeks, as a function of the northern Gaza campaign, the Gaza City campaign shifting to essentially a

counterinsurgency, a tunnel war, tens of thousands have been let out. A lot of the major reserve units aren't needed for the smaller kind of war that is involved in northern Gaza. And so educated guess based on those kinds of calculations, probably 200,000 reservists, maybe more, attached to the standing army. The technical number of the standing army is a state secret. I don't know it. So I'm going to hazard the guess of 300,000, 350,000. That's roughly the totality of Israeli forces. Not all of it, of course, in Gaza. Huge numbers of forces in the north holding off Hezbollah, and possibly also preparing for a war with Hezbollah, which is something most Israelis think has to happen and is going to happen because Hezbollah will start it. That's roughly

where the military stands. And according to reporting from your paper, Times of Israel, there are 12 battalions in northern Gaza and Gaza City that have been either outright defeated or massively disrupted. There are four in central Gaza, another four in Khan Yunis, and then there are four all the way down in southern Gaza, near the Rafah border, that are largely untouched. So the 12 in northern Gaza and Gaza City, either defeated or massively disrupted. The four in central Gaza and the four in Khan Yunis are either defeated or considerably disrupted. But then there's these four that are untouched, have been hiding out, now hiding out, embedded in a large civilian population by the Egyptian border and have had plenty of time to prepare. Is that,

by your lights and accurate snapshot of where the warfighting is? Is it really going to be now really concentrated on these four battalions in the Rafah area in southern Gaza? And if so, how worried are you about that fighting? Yeah, I mean, we know the fighting is concentrated now in Khan Yunis. We know that the next stage is Rafah. We don't know exactly what that means, or at least certainly I don't. That layout of Hamas forces is, I think, basically what Israel believes to be true. It's what we've seen on the ground. There's a lot, a lot of evidence of it. We've captured hundreds and hundreds of Hamas fighters. The intelligence picture is obviously much better than it was, you know, three months ago. But

I don't think they have much to prepare. In other words, we have shown on the ground that all of their booby traps and all of their efforts to disrupt and all of their tunnels and all of their planned operations are disruptible. And they tried to launch multiple times company-sized attacks and failed. And the only attacks they've really managed to produce against Israel's forces were tiny attacks, small, you know, five-man squads, 10-man squads at most. And so these battalions, if they're in Rafah right now, they are in Rafah with massive numbers of refugees, very angry refugees, people fighting them in the streets sometimes over aid shipments that Hamas tries to grab. they are only barely in control because they can't surface too much

because of the Israeli air war. And so they are probably not going to be a dramatically more difficult challenge than Khan Yunus. However, they are going to be, you know, Khan Yunus and Raffaq put together, and they're not far from each other, are Hamas's last stand. And so whatever Gaza City takes in the north, whatever that involves getting them out, and it could involve a month, and it could involve eight months, whatever that takes, we have to assume it's going to be more painful, more time, more death toll for Hamas, if not for civilians. Civilians will probably die much less than in the northern campaign. But Hamas certainly will have a higher death toll in the south. So it's going to be a real pitched battle, real painful, amid massive numbers

of refugees. Israel has new methods, new abilities, but it will probably try to ask the refugees to move. How do hundreds of thousands of people move again? There's not a whole lot of places to move in Gaza at this point. So yeah, it's going to be painful. It's going to look bad. It's going to be terrible for the people involved. It's going to be a really difficult fight for the Israelis. I think it's nevertheless going to happen. Haviv, I want to spend a moment on, I guess the question is, should we still be shocked?

What should we still be shocked about? Are Israelis still shocked in a few areas? And the first area I want to ask you about was the threat from Hamas. Are they still shocked by the threat from Hamas? Because the threat from Hamas represents many things. It represents missed intelligence or misanalyzed intelligence. So there's still the shock of how did this happen? How did we let Hamas build up for years and prepare for this very sophisticated operation against Israel? What else don't we know? What other intelligence are we missing now? What other battlefronts or potential battlefronts? What other intelligence are we misunderstanding or misanalyzing. So there's all of that, but underlying all of that, I think, Haviv, what Hamas revealed, both in its willingness to be so barbaric and its sophistication with which it was so barbaric, and what Israel revealed by not being prepared for it, is it's such a sea change. It's such a dramatic change in how Israelis have learned to live. Really, I was

thinking about this going back to some period in the 1970s. And that just happened. Like 100 days ago, that 50 years basically of deterrence just happened. And you can tell me whether or not people are processing it or how they're processing it. But I just want to quote, before you respond, from a piece that was written by my friend John Podhoretz, who's the editor-in-chief of Commentary Magazine. It's a long essay that I highly recommend. I'd say we'd post it in our show notes, but it's not going to be published until Tuesday of this week, I think. It's not going to be online until Tuesday of this week. It's in the next issue of the magazine. But it's called They're Coming for Us, the title of the piece. And he looks at how

this period in Israeli history is so fundamentally different than what Israelis have ever known in most of their lifetimes. And this period is so different in the lives of diaspora Jews, in terms of the threats and the anti-Semitism facing diaspora Jews, so different from what any of us have experienced in our lifetimes. I don't want to get into the diaspora right now. You're in Israel. I want to focus on Israel. Here's what John Podhordza writes. I quote here, the threat from Israel's enemies, the threat had either become too geopolitically large to affect their existences, like the existential risk posed by Iran's nuclear program, or could have only come so suddenly and unexpectedly that it

would have been absurd to disrupt your daily life, taking personal countermeasures. Palestinians engage in a bus-stabbing spree at one point. How do you defend against that? So what John's basically saying is the threat of Iran's nuclear capability, that Iran could have a nuclear bomb, is impossible to get your head around and how you should change your daily behaviors. You can't really change your daily behaviors. Or the randomness of a stabbing at a market or a bus stop is also so impossible to get your head around, the randomness of it, that in either of these situations, you just can't think about how to change your life. And then John goes on to write here, these kinds of perils were certainly haunting, and they played a significant political role in Israeli elections and Knesset debates, but they were more theoretical to nine million Israelis

than actual. So now, when an Israeli says, quote, I've never felt like this before, what he's describing is a loss of stability, as though the very earth under his feet is no longer truly solid, but might crumble beneath him. This is why the Hamas action, though not a terrorist attack in the traditional sense, may have been the most effective strike against Israel in the history of the Jewish state. It has destabilized people internally, which is terrorism's goal. It also helps us understand the ongoing traumatic effect of the continuing crisis involving the hostages in Gaza. They've been held in unknown conditions for months now by monsters whose vicious acts on October 7th and sadistic conduct during the captivity of those hostages who have been released

makes the thought of what they might be going through utterly paralyzing and terrifying when it crosses your mind even for a second. Israelis have the sense that, but for the slightest accident of timing and location, any of them might have been one of those hostages. The larger threat to Israel's existence and their own existences has moved from the theoretical to the actual. So that notion, the threat used to be so impossible to get your head around, that Israelis lived their lives. That combined with the fact that there was the Iron Dome and the anti-missile defense program, so there was a sense of safety even when there were military skirmishes. There was a stability, there was a normalcy. The other threats,

whether it was Iran launching nuclear war or it was random terrorism, were so impossible to get your head around in terms of how do you prepare for that. October 7th, that could have been any Israeli, and any Israeli could be saying to themselves, should I be preparing for that? There's a lot there. I think that some of that is absolutely true. In other words, that's definitely how Israelis feel. They feel that everything came home to them in powerful ways.

First of all, a lot of Israelis, especially parents, went out and got guns. They asked for gun permits. We have had a pretty strict gun control regime. It was loosened by this government. And a lot, a lot of Israeli parents have guns now because they watch the videos, the Hamas videos of the families of parents and kids sitting on a floor, weeping while Hamas gunmen decide who to kill. And then children after the parents were killed being taken by Hamas. And just the seeing that in a very ordinary Israeli home with very ordinary Israeli families and Israelis on television who knew those families. And often in Israel, you through some second cousin know those families because it's just not that big of a country. That brought it home in a way that no one who isn't maybe 70 years old really remembers. And not only that, that is how Hamas understands its great triumph on October 7th.

What it was able to do, which was to bring to every Israeli home the imagery to allow Israelis to imagine their own homes being invaded, having a grenade thrown in, being burned to the ground while they're locked in their bomb shelter room, is the great triumph of Hamas and showed Israelis their weakness and ultimately will convince Israelis they have no future here. But I want to add a layer to that, because that very experience of vulnerability is for Israelis also an experience of reclamation. We have become so powerful. Our military is so technologically advanced. We have these Iron Dome missiles that back in 2006-7, when the Israelis suggested to the Americans that it's possible to shoot down a rocket, the Pentagon concluded that it's actually not possible,

just literally technologically not possible. And it was an act of faith for the Americans to fund some of the R&D, by the way, also thereby partly own the Iron Dome project, but to let the Israelis try to build this impossible thing, and they did it. And they had this iron dome, and it's proven itself massively effective time and again. So we had become so technologically clever. And this is also true, by the way, of the Gaza fence. The Gaza fence was this unbelievably smart fence with 15 kinds of sensors, and layers, and heat sensors, and cameras, and all kinds of tech built into the fence to the point of detecting seismic tremors from people digging underground. Unbelievably clever fence.

And we've become so safe that that feeling of safety had allowed us to believe that nothing can ever be toppled and everything is therefore assailable. Everything can be attacked. So, for example, in our politics, as part of the polarization, as part of the anger and the bitterness, people routinely attacked the army. People routinely attacked the security services as part of a deep state out to bring down Netanyahu. army is attackable, but that the army is so powerful and impregnable and fine that we can afford to have big political fights over whether the army is part of an evil deep state. On October 7th, that vulnerability that I think John describes, and that your right to race, in other words, that really is one of the great legacies of October 7th that will reverberate for many, many years to come

for generations, I think. That sense of vulnerability brought back the old Israeli understanding. The old Israeli understanding is that we are not safe. We are not powerful. We are actually vulnerable. The Six-Day War was this immense triumph, but people forget that we didn't actually have any technological edge over our enemies. And going into that war, everybody knew a war was coming in 67. There were literally, I think, 13,000 graves were being dug in Yarkon Park in Tel Aviv, mass graves for the coming war, because the Egyptians declared on Egyptian state radio that they were going to go to war, because we were under naval blockade by the Egyptians, because everyone was talking about war among our neighbors. And so we were preparing for that war. And then to discover we're immensely powerful was part of the shock.

But it comes from the feeling leading into 67 that we're unbelievably vulnerable. And that duality mobilized. That duality meant that every Israeli was necessary. Every person could contribute. Every single person who got into a tank, and every person contribute. Every single person who got into a tank, and every person who cooked for the person who got into a tank, and every person who did the laundry for the person who cooked for the person who got into a tank,

were absolutely necessary for the nation to survive. And so there was a kind of unity and a sense of purpose that can't be created artificially, and that was given to us by the vulnerability. And then we became immensely powerful, and deeply divided, and deeply hateful of each other, and with massive cultural gaps and rifts in the politics that became more and more toxic as the years continued. On October 7th, we rediscovered that we are still vulnerable. The enemy is clever. Enemies are always clever.

It is in the nature of enemies to surprise you on the battlefield. You learn that in week one of officer school. And it's more than that. Democracies are always surprised by war. Democracies build a political elite that is answerable to a people that generally wants to live as well as they can. They can go to war, they can go to bad wars, they can go to that, but they usually don't. And then when an enemy that is driven by ideology, that is authoritarian, that doesn't ask the people what they want, attacks, democracies always are caught flat footed and always then have to figure out what their response is. And that's true dozens of times over the last 200 years. And so everything

that you quoted there, I think is true. Our enemies feel it, they see it, they smell it. And they think that that shows that this was a success. Israelis, every Israeli I know, feels it, smells it, and realizes and remembers, remembers every story they ever heard about the 67 generation, remembers what it felt like to actually be needed. And that's what you saw when in the week after October 7th, every single flight to Israel was packed by every single young person out there in the world desperate to get back to the war. To the point where Garry Kasparov, the chess genius who is also a dissident against Putin,

he's not in Russia, but he's an anti-Putin campaigner. He had this wonderful tweet about those flights. He said there's a joke in Russian right now that why are the Ukraine war, Putin's war in Ukraine, and Israel's war in Gaza similar? Both of them fill up flights to Tel Aviv. Anyone who could got on a flight out of Russia ahead of the Ukraine war or after the Ukraine war started, and anyone who could got on a flight back to Israel after Israel was attacked. And that's, I think, the most important takeaway. And it's the thing that Israelis are going to live with for longer than

the actual feeling of vulnerability. The month of October, Israel's population increased by something like, I think the number is 3%, I'll double check, but Israel's population increased considerably, certainly the biggest increase it's experienced in recent decades. It's extraordinary. A country faces an existential attack and the reaction is not to scatter. It's not to flee. It's to return. And that is something unique to Israel. So, Aviv, do Israelis worry about, you know, you say it's common for your enemy to surprise you. It's common for democracies especially to be surprised. How much do, in talking to Israelis now, 100 days in,

are they wondering, okay, so where else are we going to be surprised? We have lost confidence. I'll give you a metaphor. The Israelis in the South, and I've recently spent time with one family from the South, I won't mention their name, who survived on one of the kibbutzim, a family with young children. They were hiding in their mamad. I wouldn't call it a bomb shelter, but it's something between a safe room and a bomb shelter. But none of these mamads had locks on the door. If only there was a real lock on the door, then many of them could have hid on October 7th more safely. Many perhaps could have survived.

But no one thought, they thought they needed an iron dome, not the rudimentary basic necessity of a lock on the door. That really is a failure of imagination. And I'm not here to, I'm not trying to criticize and beat up on the Israeli government, but it's like a metaphor for how just one click off of thinking through what could happen could lead to a failure to implement a measure that could have been decisive in saving some lives? And how can that not then factor into how you think not just about Gaza and Hamas, but everything? It's almost paralyzing, actually. It's, you know, you're absolutely right to ask the question. And criticizing Israeli

security officials or the Israeli government is a wonderful thing to do, and a really important thing to do, and nobody should ever apologize for it. I certainly don't. But it's also infinite. There are infinite steps that could have been taken but weren't to prevent October 7th, and by the way, infinite steps throughout our history to prevent every time we ever lost anything, or ever failed to win as spectacularly as we would have liked. It's just, it's a truth built into conflict. You have a vision of the enemy's strategy, you build your response to it, and then the enemy sees you building a response and changes their strategy,

and you see them changing, and so you change your response. And it's a cat and mouse game in which everyone has an interest in having a cat and mouse game happening above the surface, and under the surface, a completely different cat and mouse game where they're all trying to come up with a strategy that is different from the strategy they want you to think you've just discovered, right? That made perfect sense, but you might have to play it over a couple of times. But the point is, the enemy, their goal, their fundamental war aim at the tactical level, at the strategic level, is to surprise. And so you will always, nobody built, these bomb shelters are built for rockets.

That's what they're built for. Nobody imagined an invasion. And if there's an invasion, nobody imagined that they would have taken the entire village. And if they'd taken the entire village, nobody imagined that the family then is hiding in the bomb shelter. And if the family is hiding in the bomb shelter, which isn't locked, because you don't want people accidentally getting locked in a bomb shelter, because after the first Gulf War and the fear that Saddam might bomb us with chemical weapons, and we distributed to every child in Israel a gas mask to take to school with them, you know, every bomb shelter is airtight, and you don't want people getting stuck in an airtight room with a locked door. So it's a level of thinking ahead steps, and it's a level of imagining a scale of failure. If you actually game out that much failure at every possible branch of eventualities in the actual conflict, there are millions of steps that you have to now take, and that in retrospect will be obviously terrible

mistakes for you not having taken. And so down that path lies madness. I don't think that that's true of, for example, having a massively sophisticated multi-billion shekel fence that is the most clever in the universe and not having a bunch of infantry battalions standing behind their ordinary grunts, like what I was in the army, who can just solve the problem. That to me is shocking. That to me is truly astonishing that that didn't happen, that there weren't just soldiers to solve the problem when things didn't go the way they should have gone. So that's point one. Point two is you're

not describing a reason to mourn and a reason to tear our shirts and be in sackcloth and ashes. You are not describing a reason to despair. What you're describing is a reason for humility. And that humility, I think, is central to Israel today, to this Israel that we're living in now. And it wasn't there before. What we were until October 7th was convinced of our power, comfortable in our power, and a little bit too overly relaxed and satisfied by our power. We never imagined a kind of threat could exist against us that couldn't be solved by this immense impenetrable wall called the IDF. And then the IDF turned out to be a bunch of people, and a bunch of people in a big

bureaucracy that can miss glaring oversight, you know, can have a glaring oversights of the mission that we give them and of their own defensive strategies and things like that. So today, Israel is much more humble. What does that humility mean? In practice, what does that humility mean on the ground? It means that Israel is much more fierce. It means that we don't take things for granted. It means that we don't assume that just because Gaza City, we didn't lose that many men by the Israeli count of Hamas dead, we killed 50 Hamas fighters for every Israeli soldier dead. That's not a bad ratio. In other words, the army in purely tactical military terms was incredibly successful so far.

That doesn't mean that that's what Rafiq is going to be. That doesn't mean that the battle for Rafiq is going to be easy and we're going to have 50 to 1 dead on Hamas's side. It could be the place where everything turns. And that's okay. Because humility tells you that that's okay. And it means that we cannot predict Hezbollah or pretend we have the cleverness to understand

what part of Hezbollah's mind games are the mind game and what part is the actual strategy. In other words, whether they will actually invade and therefore that war will be forced on us in the north, that much worse war than the Gaza war will be forced on us in the north at a time of their choosing instead of at a time of our choosing. We simply don't trust ourselves to know what the future holds. And therefore, we can't tolerate Hezbollah on the northern border in a way that we could before. Humility has made us stronger. We are not weaker for waking up to the challenge, to the threat. The threat was always there. We were just asleep. And so, yes, everything you have said is true. That sense of vulnerability is immense and

important. These are the hundred days. That sense of vulnerability is immense and important. These are the hundred days. That sense of vulnerability hasn't gone anywhere. But it has become the touchstone of our strength and our unity and of a kind of basic strategic humility that is making us much more effective in the war, much more united. Those soldiers in Gaza, recently there was reports of this young officer

in a very elite unit who was terribly wounded when a building collapsed, a booby trap building collapsed on him and I think three other soldiers under his command. And he was hospitalized and there was head trauma and he had trouble responding and speaking and he slowly had to go through a month and a half of physical therapy. And he came back. The mind, the brain's recovery was astonishing. And his physical recovery was very fast. He's young, he's healthy. But he really came back from the precipice. He came back from a potentially deadly situation, including severe head trauma, and demanded to go back into Gaza. And the people who talked about it were his parents. His parents who, I believe his mother had lost a brother in a previous war, and they're not sleeping at all. But their son will not sit this out. And that is an experience. I know that from my own brothers

in law who were in Gaza. Bringing this war to Hamas, ending that Hamas threat is an absolute, and not because of strength, but because of a feeling of vulnerability. The commitment to overturn it is absolute. So, you know, it's really important to say everything that you're saying. And it's really important to understand that this is a country that feels a lot more vulnerable. It feels a much larger war, by the way, than the Gaza war. It sees the entire Iranian array of proxies all out to destroy us

openly, explicitly, publicly. But it also feels that vulnerability, giving it the strength and the unity to actually meet the threat in a way that it simply wasn't before. We are safer now than we were before because of that new awareness. I mentioned earlier the Israeli families in southern Israel. What I've been struck in speaking to some of them is how completely altered their worldview is as it relates to the possibilities of coexistence with Gazan Palestinians. Now, the reason I'm fixated on them is because, as you and I have discussed many times, both on this podcast and just informally, the Israeli left's awakening, if you will, to the challenges of a two-state solution have really been in ascendancy since

the Second Intifada. That was the real wake-up call. But these Israelis living in these southern communities, these 20-plus kibbutzim in the south, right on the border with Gaza, within some cases less than a mile or within a few miles of the Gazan border, they have still been living in what we now may think was another world in terms of the possibilities of coexistence with Gaza, and their daily lives at a very practical level, in fairness to them, was part of that. They had, you know, tens of thousands in some cases of Gazan Palestinians coming into their communities, coming into southern Israel, sometimes almost every day to work. They were friends with them. They developed relationships with them. And those, many of those very same Gazans with whom they had interpersonal relationships that spanned years, were the

sources of intelligence for Hamas to plan this attack. And so on October 7th, I remember watching, for some reason, certain interviews stand out more than others. I was watching with my wife as we were watching minute-to-minute press coverage. I watched Merav Michali, who's the leader of the Labor Party in Israel, who's all the way on the left on the Israeli political spectrum. And to listen to her speak on October 7th, she sounded no different than Benjamin Netanyahu, Yoav Galant, or Benny Gantz. Obviously, she's not a fan of Netanyahu or Likud, but in terms of the policy towards Hamas, it was like complete lockstep.

And that, to me, wasn't shocking, given what Israel had just experienced. But the Israelis living in southern Gaza, their lives were more intertwined with Gazan life, Gazan Palestinian life, on a daily basis than political leaders in the Knesset, even political leaders on the left in the Knesset. And to hear them now, they are not only, it's not just a sense of despair and confusion, it's a sense of, we're done. What is your reaction to that and to them? I think that's very true. I do speak to them.

Some of them are journalists who I know for many years. The families from the South lean left, certainly from those kibbutzim, not so much from the city of Sderot, but certainly from the kibbutzim that were attacked. And sometimes dramatically, in other words, in the 2014 war, there was a campaign led by some of them to actually stop the war and the war, a campaign for the Gazans that, you know, was more effective, more heard in the Israeli public, certainly, than some of the protests abroad. So this is 2014 Gaza war. There were a lot of casualties, a lot of Israeli casualties. It was a real ground operation. And they were, these Israelis in the south obviously were saddened by the loss of Israeli life, but they were equally saddened by the loss of Palestinian life. And they wanted the war to end for that reason as much as the risk to Israelis.

Right. These were longstanding politics. Gaza was close. Gazans were people they knew, worked with them. There was an eagerness. A lot of the people taken hostage are older people who remember Gaza before the Second Intifada. They remember when Israelis just could go into Gaza, could work in Gaza, could build factories in Gaza, could invest in Gaza and trade with Gazans and buy from Gazans at massive rates.

And that was pretty recent, even in some cases. So there is that. There's absolutely that element. And then the question comes, you know, well, what now? I mean, what's left? I mean, what can we possibly hope for in the future? The Israeli left twice watched its basic vision, its civic religion collapse around its feet. And the first one was the collapse of socialism, which is the Israeli left was born and founded the country as a very Marxist and state controlled economy. And that all led to this unbelievably massive, just catastrophic financial crisis, fiscal crisis in the late 70s and early 80s with triple digit inflation year after year after year for I think like eight years. And what emerged after the big 1985 reform was that, you

know, not a single socialist essentially left on the Israeli left. I mean, Israeli left has still spoke with socialist discourse sometimes, but nobody meant it. Everybody understood that there needed to be a free market and an open economy. And so, socialism was gone in the mid-80s, and just in time for the first intifada to begin in 1987, and then the left adopts out of the collapse of socialism, it adopts the peace process, it adopts the vision of ending the occupation, of peace side by side, of no longer ruling the Palestinians as, again, a civic religion. But it does not survive the Second Intifada. In the Israeli-Jewish mainstream experience, the Second Intifada comes at the height of

the peace talks. So between 2000 and 2003, where Barak offers Arafat the most generous terms for a Palestinian state, including putting East Jerusalem on the table for Israel's capital. It's followed by 140-plus suicide bombings, over 1,000 Israelis dead. So that obliterates the left. But I feel like the Israelis in the south were living a practical experience. They were working day to day with tens of thousands of Palestinians who were coming into their communities to work. They were going to the Gaza border to help these Palestinians get their medical treatment.

They were intertwined with their lives. It wasn't some abstract academic intellectual discussion that, you know, that Shimon Peres and his deputies were having in Oslo. This was practical life for the Israelis in the south. The first rocket is launched in 2001 from Gaza as part of the second intifada. And the trauma of the rocket fire and raising kids when they know that they have 15 seconds if there's ever a siren, and there's a siren a couple hundred times a year, and they have to run to a bomb shelter and something explodes in their city. That is part of the second intifada that they do experience. And they still try, because these kibbutzim are traditionally belong to Mapai, belong to deep within the left, belong to that left-wing world that had been socialist.

Kibbutzim are founded as collective settlements. You know, when Be'eri, the families of Be'eri who were slaughtered and kidnapped, they did not own their homes. Because Kibbutz Be'eri is still completely owned. Everyone who leaves Kibbutz Be'eri, Be'eri is one of the most worst hit of the Kibbutzim on October 7. And these are people who they have jobs, they have fantastic successful businesses. One of the most successful printing presses in the country is in Kibbutz Be'eri. But their salaries don't go to them personally, they go to the general kibbutz. And committees of the kibbutz, like Good Socialists, give that money to whoever needs it within the society. Communism works wonderfully with 1000 people who all like each other. Just FYI, that's

the Israeli experience. So these homes that have to be rebuilt, it isn't that every family is not going to rebuild their home. The kibbutz together as a whole is going to make decisions about how to rebuild, I think, 250 homes that are basically unfixable and have to be bulldozed and rebuilt. And so that's an example of how this kibbutz really is very much a left-wing, old left-wing kind of place, kind of culture, that really doesn't exist anymore anywhere in the Tel Aviv metropolis, anywhere in the more conservative parts of Israeli society.

And they clung to peace as a principle, as an idea, as an idea of a better future for a long, long, long, long time. They were maybe the last real great holdouts who believed, not in peace, not as some kind of abstract thing, but specifically believed that Palestinian politics can produce a leadership that can reciprocate an Israeli territorial withdrawal with an actual end to conflict. And if you believe that specific belief, that makes territorial withdrawal worthwhile. And if you believe that specific belief, that makes territorial withdrawal worthwhile. And if you believe that specific belief, that makes ending wars as fast as possible worthwhile, because it's

not about defeating Hamas, it's about not making Gazans suffer so much that they hate us so much that it's harder to have that peace. That last great bastion of that faith, not in Israeli politics, but in Palestinian politics, in the capacity of Palestinian politics, that has been destroyed. That, in some cases, has been literally burned to the ground within Israel. And now the Israeli conversation on Palestinians has to move forward in some way without the last voices who seriously were saying that there's any kind of capacity in Palestinian politics to reciprocate anything we do short of leaving and dying. If we leave and die, Palestinian politics can reciprocate with peace.

But if we don't leave and die, and or die, depending on which Palestinian ideologue you talk to, then there is no Palestinian capacity to give us that quiet or that peace. And therefore, what are the options open to us? There just aren't that many. I'm talking now, like, imagine that I'm a representative of the mainstream Israeli left. Imagine that in theory, I do want a Palestinian state. Literally, how do I do it, given the Palestinian politics on the other side? So yes, they were shattered.

And there isn't a discourse for it. This is the complete collapse of what had already begun teetering in the Second Intifada, even on the deep left. And now when Israel wakes up to a Palestinian problem, question, a Palestinian political dilemma, that nobody even begins to have the vocabulary to start to seriously think about, because it doesn't look like there's anything that could possibly work. Nothing Israel has done back then when the left was pushing this two-state peace, or this one-state pullout, or this unilateral pullout of 2005 from Gaza, nothing Israel has ever done has brought anything but more bloodshed. And the left and right are now in full agreement of that.

This is where part one of my conversation with Haviv ends. We hope you join us for part two, where we focus on the Arab world and what some would say is a surprising reaction to these past 100 days. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.