Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - How Hamas fooled the world - with Matti Friedman

Episode Date: February 22, 2024

Every day we see news accounts “reported” by reputable journalists. There is typically one frame in the post-10/07 War: ‘Gazan Palestinians are the victims of Israel.’ How does this happen? How do journalists actually operate in Gaza and around the world? And is this a window into what had Hamas figured out long before 10/07 — that the forces of barbarism could manipulate the intentional press reaction to their massacre of 10/07? That is why we wanted to sit down with Matti Friedman, who is one of the most thoughtful writers when it comes to all matters related to Israel, the broader Middle East, and also trends in the world of journalism. He writes regularly for The Free Press is a regular contributor to The Atlantic. His newest book is called “Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai.” Before that he published "Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel," and before that "Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story of a Forgotten War.” Matti’s army service included tours in Lebanon. His work as a reporter has taken him from Israel to Lebanon, Morocco, Moscow, the Caucasus, and Washington, DC. He is a former Associated Press correspondent and essayist for the New York Times opinion section. But it was his time covering Hama’s takeover of Gaza that led him to study with great detail how Hamas manipulates the media, NGOs and the international community, and how they are working from the same playbook right now, perhaps quite masterfully. Matti Friedman's published works that we discuss in this episode: “The Wisdom of Hamas” — The Free Press — https://www.thefp.com/p/matti-friedman-the-wisdom-of-hamas “What if the Real War in Israel Hasn’t Even Started?” — The Free Press — https://www.thefp.com/p/matti-friedman-israel-hezbollah-war "There Is No 'Israeli-Palestinian Conflict'" -- The New York Times -- https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/16/opinion/israeli-palestinian-conflict-matti-friedman.htm "An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth" -- Tablet Magazine -- https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/israel-insider-guide "What The Media Gets Wrong About Israel" -- The Atlantic -- https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/how-the-media-makes-the-israel-story/383262/ That is why we wanted to sit down with Matti Friedman, who is one of the most thoughtful writers when it comes to all matters related to Israel, the broader Middle East, and also trends in the world of journalism. He is a monthly writer for Tablet Magazine and a regular contributor to The Atlantic. His newest book is called “Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai.” Before that he published "Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel," and before that "Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story of a Forgotten War.” Matti’s army service included tours in Lebanon. His work as a reporter has taken him from Israel to Lebanon, Morocco, Moscow, the Caucasus, and Washington, DC. He is a former Associated Press correspondent and essayist for the New York Times opinion section. But it was his time covering Hama’s takeover of Gaza that led him to study with great detail how Hamas manipulates the media, NGOs and the international community, and how they are working from the same playbook right now, perhaps quite masterfully. Matti Friedman's published works that we discuss in this episode: "There Is No 'Israeli-Palestinian Conflict'" -- The New York Times -- https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/16/opinion/israeli-palestinian-conflict-matti-friedman.htm "An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth" -- Tablet Magazine -- https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/israel-insider-guide "What The Media Gets Wrong About Israel" -- The Atlantic -- https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/how-the-media-makes-the-israel-story/383262/

A lot of people in the West watching this incredible event on October 7th, this massacre of hundreds of civilians, 1,200 people killed on that day, plus about 250 people taken hostage. And people were watching this saying, what are they thinking? This was clearly some kind of miscalculation. No one, of course, could support the kind of atrocities we'd seen on October 7th. I think that four months in, it seems pretty clear that they understood things about the West that many Westerners didn't understand. I think that the idea that they miscalculated was a bit facile. I think that they understand something deep about

the world that we have learned in the past four months, but which they clearly knew on October 7th. Every day we see news accounts and mainstream print publications flashing across our phones on social media and on television, reported, and I put the word reported in quotes, reported by reputable journalists. There's typically one frame for all of these stories. That is, in one sentence, the post-October 7th war is a story about Gazan Palestinians as the victims of Israel. I mean, to give one recent example, during the early morning of February 12th, Israel rescued two hostages, two Israeli hostages, 60-year-old Fernando Simon Marman and 70-year-old Luis Har. Marman and Har had been kidnapped from Kibbutz near Yitzhak on

October 7th. The IDF, the Shin Bet, and special police forces rescued these two innocent men from a building in Rafah in southern Gaza. Rafah, the place that the international community has been lecturing Israel that they cannot wage military action. Well, according to public reports, one Israeli soldier was injured in this daring operation and 37 Hamas terrorists, including the hostages' guards, were killed. But what received the most press attention internationally in the days after this rescue

operation was a report, according to Amnesty International, that the operation and airstrikes by Israel to rescue these two elderly men led to the deaths of at least, according to the reports, 95 Palestinian civilians. That was the story that broke through over here in the diaspora in the West. So two innocent elderly men are being held hostage by Hamas in a civilian neighborhood in Gaza, a civilian neighborhood where Israel had to fight with a Hamas battalion that was based there in order to get to the hostages. And the story becomes Israel kills Palestinian civilians. Now, we all have examples of stories like this, dating back to the first days of this war following the October 7th massacre by Hamas. And we can be outraged at this coverage, or we can ask, how does it happen? How do journalists operate in Gaza and around the world that produce a frame like the one I just described?

And is this a case study into what Hamas had figured out long before October 7th? The mechanics of how they, the forces of barbarism rather than the forces of civilization, could manage the international press reaction to their massacre of October 7th. Well, there's one person above all that I've been wanting to discuss this with. His name is Mati Friedman, and he's one of the most thoughtful writers and analysts when it comes to all matters related to Israel, the broader Middle East, and also on the trends in the world of journalism. His newest book is called Who By Fire? Leonard Cohen in the Sinai. And I had him on the podcast a couple of years ago on a trip to Jerusalem to discuss that book. Before that, he wrote another book called Spies of No Country,

Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel, and before that, Pumpkin Flowers, A Soldier's Story of a Forgotten War. That book is about his service in Lebanon. Mati's army service has included multiple tours in Lebanon. His work as a reporter has taken him from Israel to Lebanon, Morocco, Moscow, the Caucasus, and Washington, D.C. He's a former Associated Press correspondent and an essayist for the New York Times opinion section. But it was his time covering Hamas's takeover of Gaza that led Mati to study with great detail the mechanics of how Hamas manipulates the media, NGOs, the international community, and any stakeholder that does business or government work of some sort in Gaza. And according to Mati, they are working from that same playbook right now, perhaps quite

masterfully. Mati Friedman on How Hamas Fooled the World. This is Call Me Back. And I am pleased to welcome back to this podcast my longtime friend, Mati Friedman, who joins us from Jerusalem. In fact, the last time I was with Mati was in Jerusalem when we recorded an episode about his terrific book, which was, in many respects, a simpler time, and now we are in anything but a simple time. Mati, thanks for being with us. Hi, Dan.

So, Mati, this piece you wrote for the Free Press called The Wisdom of Hamas. I read and I got a hold of you. It really shook me for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is I feel like this piece was actually here in 2023 when you published this piece, was a sequel to your 2014 tablet piece about your experience covering Hamas in Gaza and understanding the model for how the Western press covers Hamas, which I want to get to momentarily. But before we do, I just want to quote from your piece here. You wrote, in many ways, Hamas understood the world better than we Israelis did. The men who came across the border and those who sent them may have grasped the current state of the West better than many Westerners. More than anything,

they understood the war they're fighting when many of us didn't and still don't. So what do you mean by that? What did Hamas get that the Israelis didn't? And not just the Israelis. I think a lot of people in the West watching this incredible event on October 7th, this massacre of hundreds of civilians, about 1,200 people ultimately killed on that day, plus about 250 people taken hostage. And people were watching this saying, what are they thinking? And this was clearly some kind of miscalculation, because what this is going to do is draw an incredible Israeli response. The world at the time seemed to be pretty staunchly on Israel's side. No one, of course, could support the kind of atrocities we'd seen on October 7th. And this was being discussed as

a miscalculation by Hamas. If you look at the coverage in the first few days after the attack, the word miscalculation recurs. Meaning in the press coverage, it was all about Hamas's miscalculation. The smart set over here on my side of the world was, ah, they've overshot. They don't understand what they've gotten themselves into. And what you're saying is they knew exactly what they were getting themselves into. anti-Israel demonstrations immediately after the Hamas attack. On the same day, in fact, on October 7th, there were already demonstrations against Israel. It's very strange that an attack against Jews, in fact, the most costly attack on Jews since the Holocaust, ends up eliciting very fierce demonstrations against Jews. Now, that's very mysterious. You'd think that the demonstrations would be against the perpetrators of the attack, and that didn't happen. And I think that Hamas understood that the media response to this was a very short period of initial sympathy, followed by an intense moral critique of Israel's response.

The international community, the organs of the United Nations, the NGO world, human rights organizations, which you would expect to understand the kind of violation of human rights that occurred on October 7th, they, within a week or two, are back into their customary critique of Israel. And Hamas understood that all of this would happen. Hamas understood that after an initial period of sympathy, the criticism would be directed at Israel. And the organs of the international community, whether it's the UN, whether it's the NGOs, or whether it's the press, would be focused on restraining Israel's response, which would mean that Hamas would ultimately be able to weather the Israeli response, remain on its feet at the end of the war, and declare victory. Why do they think that? Because that has happened repeatedly

in the past in the smaller wars that have led up to this one. So I think that the idea that they miscalculated was a bit facile. I think that they understand something deep about the world that we have learned in the past four months, but which they clearly knew on October 7th. I just want to take issue with that because I, full disclosure, was one of those people who on October 7th, in the immediate days after October 7th, thought, okay, now the world is finally going to see what Israel is dealing with in Hamas, because unlike the previous conflicts, unlike, you know, May of 2021, unlike 2018, unlike 2014, unlike, you know, we can go down back through all these skirmishes between Hamas and Israel,

many of them were awful, but they were skirmishes. They didn't have the civilizational struggle element to them that this one seemed to have. They didn't have the barbarism that this one had. They didn't have the mutilation and the dismembering and the live burning of Israeli innocents, the raping, the sexual assault as a military campaign tool. They didn't have the unbelievable brutality towards children. And then obviously the kidnapping of massive numbers of just the most vulnerable people. The taking hostage of Israeli soldiers is awful, but then taking hostage of a Holocaust survivor in her mid-80s and of little kids of a nine-month-old baby. It all broadcast. They wanted the world, it seems, to see all this.

They had their GoPro cameras and they wanted everything telegraphed. So I actually felt, Mati, this was different. And that sadly, tragically, thanks to the depths that Hamas was willing to go in this war, unlike it seemed that they were not willing to go in previous wars, and the fact that they wanted it all, you know, available in a theater near you, so to speak, that everyone could view it, it did feel different. By the way, when I say full disclosure, right, because I feel like an idiot, because I said, okay, now everyone's going to see what Israel's dealing with.

And then I watched the outrage in the West, in my own city, in New York City. I saw the outrage being directed not at the people who did these things, not at Hamas, but the outrage was being directed at Jews for objecting to being slaughtered. So I am victim to exactly what you're describing. But I still feel like this was different. So one could understand why we thought they may have overshot. Absolutely. I mean, I think that was quite a logical conclusion. And if I didn't know the world of the international press from the inside, I spent about six years as a reporter and editor for the AP here in Jerusalem and got an insider's

view of the world, not just of the Western press, but of the whole international world that really generates the news story from here. And again, it's the world of the press, of big NGOs like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty, the United Nations, the diplomatic core, the European diplomatic core, to some extent. If I didn't know that world quite well, and if I hadn't had the experience of trying to cover these events for a big Western news organization, I would have concluded what you concluded, which is that now it's going to be very clear, not only what Israel faces now, but what Israel has always been facing. Because if you understand what happened on October 7th, you get a pretty clear picture, for example, of why there is a military occupation in the West

Bank. The reason that there's a military occupation in the West Bank. The reason that there's a military occupation in the West Bank is because Israelis are afraid that if we cede territory to the Palestinians, this is what's going to happen. And the fear is based on our experience in the years 2000 to 2004, the years of the second Intifada, where the most left-wing government Israel had ever elected ended up being on the receiving end of the worst wave of terrorism that we'd ever experienced. So, you know, my 30 years or so in Israel and my time in the press showed me that that expectation that now people will see is an expectation that will never be realized. One of the moments for me was 9-11, which you certainly remember, it's the middle

of the second intifada. So Israel's in this wave of suicide bombings and attacks that ultimately kill more than a thousand Israelis. And in the middle of all this, America is hit with a spectacular suicide attack coming out of the same ideology, coming out of the same part of the world. And many of us said, okay, now everyone is going to get it. And that's not what happened. And in fact, fast forward 20 years, and we can see that the forces that generated 9-11 and that generated the suicide bombings of the early aughts and that generated October 7th, in some bizarre way, those circles are more popular in parts of the West than Israel is. So obviously, there's some deep and complicated and disturbing mechanism at play here. That's one that I think Hamas is more closely attuned to than many rational observers are.

You mentioned your time as a reporter, and I want to talk about that. You wrote a piece for Tablet in 2014, which was a long piece. I will say, I'm not just saying this because you're my guest today, I say this all the time. If I had to pick a half a dozen pieces, long form pieces, for those who have been awoken, I hate to use that word, awoken by October 7th in terms of they're shaken to their core and they're thinking, wow, how did I miss this story or miss important aspects of this story? And these are many people who are very sympathetic to Israel who feel this way. They want to read and they want to understand. Your essay for Tablet in 2014, which we'll link to in the show notes, is one of the pieces I

recommend. It had a huge impact on me because it was the first piece that I think was written in, you know, there were people who beat up on the press all the time, and some of them I don't always think are operating in good faith. You know, they have like an ideological axe to grind. Whereas I felt like your piece was written in perfectly good faith. You were a reporter. You were happy to have a career as a reporter, meaning as at a mainstream Western news organization, you were a reporter for the Associated Press. And you were then covering Hamas in Gaza, Hamas' takeover in Gaza. And you were watching how your colleagues were covering Hamas, you were watching how you were sort of being supervised to cover Hamas bureaucratically,

like how your news organization was sort of organized to handle news coming out of Gaza. And you slowly realized that Hamas had completely manipulated the Western press coverage, which you've alluded to earlier in this conversation. And then I want to get into how that's a model for other organizations working in Gaza. But can you first just summarize that 2014 piece? Because it's extremely important, and it really sets up, I think, a lot of your thinking about what's happening now. Sure. I mean, this should only take six or seven hours. So I assume that all of your listeners will just bear with me. Was at the AP between 2006 and the very end of 2011. Went in pretty naive about the Western press. I had a

very kind of Woodward and Bernstein impression of what news reporting was and found myself in something very different. I'm an Israeli of left-leaning political sympathies and didn't expect to have any trouble at a big international news organization, and I did. And to make a very complicated story much simpler, what I found was that news decisions were being dictated not by journalistic considerations, but by a form of ideological activism that seemed to have taken hold in part of the press. At the time, I interpreted this as a problem that was limited to Israel. And if you read that essay that I wrote for Tablet in 2014, which was followed up by part two, which appeared in The Atlantic a few weeks later. So it's really two essays that are part of the same argument. If you read those essays, you'll see that I'm very focused on Israel. I

didn't yet understand that this was a much broader phenomenon. And it took a few years to really grasp that the move of the press corps to a kind of ideological activism was something that was happening across the board. And we really saw it in the 2016 election. And we've seen it since then. I mean, now it's really hard to find any journalism that isn't a form of ideological activism on the left or the right. And at the time, I didn't quite get that. And I was just focused on the events that I had seen in my bureau, which were events which were representative of something broader that had happened in the press here. And I felt that I was being asked to write a story that wasn't true, that the considerations that my superiors were using to decide what should be covered and how were decisions that were unrelated to the facts

of the story I was supposed to be covering, that they were connected to some very strange ideological fantasy that was being dictated mainly by editors from the United States. And I just couldn't hack it. After a while, I laughed at the end of 2011 and struck it on my own and tried to detail those experiences in writing a few times, not just to blow off steam, but to explain to consumers of news that what they're getting is not what they think. What you're getting when you read a lot of news coverage, not all, but a lot of news coverage is not a description of reality. It's rather a kind of political campaign that's designed to sway you to the right political conclusion. And that's not

only true of Israel. We can think of many other examples, but Israel is certainly one example, and it's a prominent example because of how heavily the story is covered. I've written this numerous times, but when I was at the AP, we had 40 full-time news staffers covering this story, which is Israel and the Palestinians. It's about 14 million, 15 million people on a piece of land that is one one-hundredth of one percent of the surface of the world, and one-fifth of one percent of the landmass of the Arab world. I'm at a very small place, and we had more people here than we had in China at the time. That's a country of 1.3 billion people. We had more people here than we had in all of the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa combined.

Meaning you had more journalists for the AP covering their story than you had covering China. At that time, that's right. This is between 2006 and the very end of 2011. We had more people here than we had in all 50-something countries of Sub-Saharan Africa combined. And this was the AP's biggest international bureau at the time. And the AP is the world's biggest news organization, according to the AP. So we're talking about a story that gets massive amounts of coverage, which makes it a very prominent example of what's gone wrong in the press.

But the problem is not limited to Israel. And what we're seeing now with the coverage of the October 7th and post-October 7th story, if we can call it coverage, because a lot of it isn't really coverage, but it's a broader ecosystem. It's coming not just out of one bureau. It's not coming just from the press. It's coming from the academy. It's coming from the NGO world. It's coming from just out of one bureau. It's not coming just from the press. It's coming from the academy. It's coming from the NGO world.

It's coming from the United Nations. It's coming from the kind of ideological ecosystem that drives a lot of what passes as news coverage and what I think makes so many events in the world impossible to understand for news consumers in the West. You can read the story that the New York Times writes about this place and try to use it as a map to understand what's going on here. If you come to Israel, get off the plane with the New York Times story as a map to events here, events won't make any sense because the story has very little to do with the actual events. It won't help you understand what's going on. And most journalism, I think on the left and to a large extent on the right, is no longer designed to help you understand what's going on. It's part of an ideological messaging system that's unrelated to events in foreign countries. And I couldn't be

part of it. So that's why I left. And I've tried to shine a light on it since then, you know, obviously without any great success in affecting the course of the deterioration of the press over the last decade, but I have tried. So I take the disproportionate number of people covering the story. But again, if these people saw what you and I saw in October of 2023, on October 7th, just the images and the depravity of the approach to warfare, a lot of people covering it shouldn't detract from what's happening right in front of their eyes. So how does that change? It depends what you think the job of journalists should be. I mean, if you think that the job of a journalist is to explain what's going on,

then yes, it's a problem. If you think that the job of a journalist is actually to fight for justice using coverage, that news coverage is actually a weapon in a fight to make the world better. Then you make different choices of what stories to cover and how to present it. So, you know, if you look at October 7th, through our eyes, we see an act of medieval barbarism that is, you know, carried out by a group of religious fanatics who have their own ideology, which they're quite open and honest about, I guess you could say, to their credit, but which is very far from any liberal Western values that we're familiar with. And it seems like a pretty clear-cut example of a very regressive

and violent force attacking a democratic country, murdering civilians, raping women, kidnapping children. And it seems fairly clear-cut. It seems obvious that the military of that country is going to have to do what it can to eliminate the threat. And it doesn't seem necessarily that complicated. But if you think that news coverage is actually a kind of parable about oppression, and that in this story, Palestinians are oppressed, and the Israelis are oppressors, then your news coverage has to be calibrated to help your reader reach the right conclusion. And in order for that to happen, you have to play down Israel's concerns to the extent possible. You have to play up Israel's faults to the extent possible, and you have to play down Palestinian faults and present them as something approaching perfect

victims. And that has been the case in news coverage here for the past 20 years, at least. Certainly was the case when I was involved in it. And I blame myself as much as anyone else. I was party to it. And it's the case now. So if you know how the system here works, you knew that within a week, two weeks, three weeks after October 7th, the whole system would swing back to its comfort zone, which is a story about Israel oppressing, harming, killing Palestinian civilians for no reason other than, you know, cruelty and Israel's own innate evil. And it seemed impossible to believe that on October 7th or October 8th, but here we are. So it clearly happened. And I think that's something that Hamas understood quite well, having been through this a few times in the past. And I think

that they understood the response. They knew that within three weeks, a month, some Western leaders would already be very bluntly criticizing Israel for civilian deaths. And that happened. Macron, after five weeks, within a day or two, Trudeau in Canada saying the same thing, that Israel is needlessly killing civilians. But the circle has widened. And of course, the American administration seems to be wavering after four months. So Hamas understood that if he can just hang on while the international community swings against the Israelis and ties Israel's hands, then there's a good chance that they're still going to be standing at the end of all of this. And I'm not sure that they're wrong.

Last question on this particular point. You also explain in your piece how reporters in Gaza, which you observed firsthand, how they're sort of captured by Hamas, not just for because of their ideological predisposition, meaning the reporters or the news organizations they represent, but also because Hamas sets up a system in Gaza that, as a reporter, you can't really do your job unless you're willing to play ball with them. And I think this is important for two reasons. A, I think it helps explain what you're describing here. And B, we now realize it's also a model for how other organizations that aren't the media, like UNRWA is very much in the news right now. It's a very similar dynamic. I think about your piece. UNRWA can't really function in Gaza without working

with Hamas. So can you explain how it worked with the media and then extrapolate out to other entities, NGOs, human rights groups, UNRWA, other UN agencies? I was an editor on the AP desk in Jerusalem at the very end of 2008 during the first really bad round of violence between Hamas and Israel. Hamas came to power in Gaza in 2007. I guess you'd call it a war, although compared to the one we're having now, it seems pretty small, but there was a war that began at the very end of 2008. And at the time, we had a very good Palestinian reporter, a native of Gaza, and he'd been excellent up to that point. And he reported that Hamas fighters were wearing civilian clothes and being'd been excellent up to that point. And he reported that Hamas fighters were wearing civilian clothes and being counted as civilians in the death toll. And that was a

very important piece of information because the death toll had become the center of coverage. So, you know, the reporters will describe different events in the war on a given day. The punchline or the thrust of the article will be how many people are being killed, particularly on the Palestinian side where the death toll is always higher. So the fact that many of the people who are supposedly civilians are actually armed fighters, that's an important piece of information. And I put it in the story. And then a few hours later, he called and asked me to take it out. And it seemed very clear that someone had spoken to him. Of course, I took it out. I wasn't going to get a reporter hurt over a piece of information in a story, but I suggested at the time that we append an editor's

note to the story that made clear to readers that we were now cooperating with Hamas censorship. And I was overruled. So the piece of information came out. We never informed our readers that we were now playing ball with Hamas press restrictions. And since that point, more or less, the AP, like the rest of the Western press, plays ball with Hamas. You'll almost never see video or photos of a rocket launch from a civilian area. There's a reason for that. I spoke to TV cameramen who covered the 2014 war, and they told me that they would stand at the entrance to Shifa Hospital, which is where the casualties come in. It's the biggest hospital in Gaza. And they were allowed to film civilian casualties coming in. But when Hamas casualties came in, there was a Hamas minder

at the door to the hospital, and he would signal to them to turn off their cameras, and they would. So, Hamas became very adept at presenting an image of a war that wasn't really a war. It was just Israeli violence directed at Palestinian civilians. Hamas just made itself disappear. So, you just don't see Hamas. And they've done it again, I think with some success. I mean, the Gaza health ministry, which is Hamas, will release casualty figures that don't differentiate between civilians and fighters. And that's to give you the impression that the civilian death toll is extremely high. And Western reporters play along with it. So part of it is censorship. Most of the work of the Western press in Gaza, and at the

moment, all of it, is done by Palestinians who are from Gaza and who live under Hamas control. That means that these people cannot cross Hamas. I'm not saying anything about their integrity. I'm just saying that if you live under Hamas rule, you do what Hamas says because the consequences for you can be very severe. The Western press thus is limited. And we were told at the AP that we couldn't report certain things because it would put our staff in Gaza at risk. So you have staff in Gaza, in theory, to help you better cover the story. But in fact, the fact that you have staff living

under Hamas control allows Hamas to put a gun to your head and decide what you can and cannot cover because you can't get your staff in trouble. But the truth of the matter is that the details that Hamas is trying to censor are generally things that the Western press doesn't want to cover anyway, because the story as it's been set up is a story about Israeli oppressors and Palestinian victims. So the details, you know, like the Hamas military buildup, this incredible subterranean city that they've built over the past 10, 15 years, the incredible amount of weapons they've managed to smuggle, and you know, all this stuff is irrelevant to a story about Israeli oppressors. So it's ignored. You haven't

heard much about this incredible infrastructure project under Gaza, which is quite an accomplishment for Hamas. All the big Western organizations have permanent presences in Gaza. You haven't heard much about it. It's mind-blowing. It blows my mind. I think about that. I think, wait a minute, you guys built, this organization managed to build 350 miles approximately of tunnels deep underground in a tiny space, tiny geographic space. You know, I just think about the logistics involved. I think about the amount of, you know, cement and cement trucks and all sorts of equipment. I mean, the disposal of the earth that's being removed, talking about thousands of workers. And we're talking about a very impressive strategic plan. I mean, these weren't just people digging under their garage. Someone had a plan for the way this was going to work. Someone who

is clearly some kind of ruthless genius of some kind. And they webbed the entire Gaza Strip with this subterranean city. That necessarily means that in any war with Gaza, there will be a civilian catastrophe because Hamas is operating literally under civilians. And you would have expected that to be covered because it's clearly one of the key developments in the context of this story over the past decade, and yet it's barely covered. And again, part of that is censorship, and part of that is just the ideological inclinations of the press, which are looking for stories of Palestinian victimhood. And they're not really interested in looking at Hamas, what it's up to in Gaza, what the ramifications of that will be, or what its ideology is. If you look back over press coverage,

you know, over the past decade and a half, you're not going to see a lot about that. So now put this in the context of what we're learning about UNRWA, which, you know, literally UNRWA employees not only involved with Hamas and sympathetic to Hamas, but actually participating in the October 7th massacre and taking Israelis hostage. And the reports are available for everyone to see now. The most recent story that just rocked me a few, you know, a week or so, a couple weeks ago about how the UNRWA headquarters was literally the data center for Hamas. So Hamas' like IT center is directly underground the UNRWA headquarters, so much so that the electrical cords from the Hamas data center go right up into the UNRWA facility. So when you say that Western reporters just want to

look the other way because it's not the story. You could say the same thing about UNRWA, but it's even worse. It's like a worse version of what you described in 2014. I think Hamas is very canny at using the organs of the international community as force multipliers. And the media is one example. The media, by collaborating with Hamas over the past 15 years or so, turned itself into an amplifier for one of the most regressive and dangerous ideologies in play on planet Earth. And that has certainly happened. You have organizations like UNRWA, which is the UN organization specifically dedicated to Palestinian refugees. And when people think of a UN agency in Gaza, I think they're imagining a

bunch of Swedish people distributing bags of rice or something. But UNRWA is a Palestinian organization that's funded by the international community. That's functionally what it is. And part of being a Palestinian organization in Gaza is collaborating with Hamas. So not only did UNRWA personnel take part in the October 7th massacre because they were members of Hamas, there are many examples of Hamas using UNRWA facilities to protect their military assets. And the most blatant example was the one you're describing where the Hamas using Uyghur facilities to protect their military assets. And the most blatant example was the one you're describing where the Hamas data center is literally underneath. I mean, it was obviously constructed at great expense. It obviously made a great deal of noise. You don't

build a massive structure underneath a building without people in the building noticing. They ran the cables, as you mentioned, from upstairs to downstairs, and it was all very blatant. And not only did the UN turn a blind eye or actively cooperate with it, but of course the press, which you'd expect to be covering the UN, also somehow missed it. Very interesting. So you have the story in Gaza, which is basically not being reported. The only safe story for reporters to cover is a story of Palestinian victimhood. Hamas will let you cover that. Politically, it's the right story to cover because it'll fit in with the prevalent ideologies on the left, which is the world that generates most of the reporters. So that's a safe story to cover. You're going to get a lot about Palestinian suffering and Palestinian anguish.

By the way, much of it true. What's going on in Gaza right now is a tragedy. It's a catastrophe, and many of the dead are civilians, and it's awful and horrific. And it's the result of a decision that Hamas made on October 7th and the result of a battlefield that Hamas constructed in Gaza. So I'm not trying to suggest that there isn't a tragedy in Gaza. I'm just trying to allocate responsibility in the right direction and point out that the organizations of the international community, including the press and including the United Nations, have not only ignored it, but have actively abetted Hamas in creating the world that leads up to October 7. One observation you make in the Free Press piece, the article titled The Wisdom of Hamas, is you describe there's a misunderstanding of what Hamas actually is. And I guess my question for you is, we're coming to believe that Hamas is a religious jihadist movement, but the way the press reports on it and the way the West seems to understand it is that of a national movement. Because each definition offers a completely different idea of what motivated Hamas on

October 7th. Is it a jihadist movement or is it a national movement? One thing that I encountered during my time in the press was an unwillingness to simply listen to what Hamas was saying. One of the admirable things about Hamas is that they say what they mean, and all you have to do is listen. So for example, when Hamas won the Palestinian election in 2006, it was a good time to profile Hamas and explain what this group was, which seemed to be the most popular faction among Palestinians. And Hamas has helpfully provided us with its founding charter, which explains exactly what it is. And the charter is a fascinating document

that's drawn in parts from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And it explains that Hamas is at war with Jews, not with the State of Israel, that Jews are responsible not just for both world wars, but for the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution, and that they operate using the media, they operate using B'nai B'rith, and they operate using the Rotary Club. This is such an amazing quote you wrote here in the piece. When I was a reporter for an international news agency at the time of the Hamas takeover in Gaza in 2007, I discovered that it was impolitic to mention what Hamas clearly announced in its founding

charter from 1998, namely that, quote, our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious. And the Jews were behind the French Revolution, the Communist Revolution, and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about here and there. With their money, they formed secret societies such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions, and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests. So I actually had never seen that language. That was like an earlier iteration of the Hamas charter, I guess. But they're fixated on basically Jewish country clubs in suburban areas of the Midwest in the United States.

And rightly so. The ideology presented in the charter and presented by Hamas leaders when they're speaking is very clearly a religious ideology that sees Jews as a kind of cosmic evil and that believes itself to be channeling the word of God. They think that the sovereignty of non-Muslims in this part of the world is forbidden and that anything is permissible to reverse it. Jews need to be murdered until Jewish sovereignty is dissolved. And the charter says all of this and Hamas leaders said and say all of this quite openly. This isn't about creating a Palestinian state, certainly not one alongside Israel. It's about Islam. And this is an Islamic movement that believes itself to be listening to God and serving his will. And I think that's

easier for religious people to understand than for very secular people. So sometimes when I explain this kind of stuff to people who grew up with scripture at home, people who are believing Christians, people who come from religious Jewish homes, it's not that hard for them to understand because you grew up with the idea that God is speaking to us through holy texts and we try to understand God's will and we try to perform his will, whatever it takes. And that's what Hamas is saying. They're not saying we want some kind of rational solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

that allows people to move on with their lives. This is a deeply religious movement and it's Western interpreters who often disguise that or refuse to listen to it and explain to us, yes, this is just very belligerent rhetoric that's designed to energize the Hamas space. What they really want is, you know, timely garbage collection

and a government that isn't corrupt. And by the way, after the 2006 election of Hamas space. What they really want is, you know, timely garbage collection and a government that isn't corrupted. By the way, after the 2006 election of Hamas, I literally heard those sentences from some people in the press. They were saying Hamas is basically about good governance. And meanwhile, Hamas was saying, God is commanding us to kill the Jews, even if they're hiding behind trees and stones, which is almost verbatim, a sentence that appears in the Hamas charter. So there's an unwillingness to listen to what they say. And then October 7th happens and people are kind of flabbergasted, but that's actually what Hamas has been saying all along. Hamas leader in 2019 is on tape calling on supporters across the world to find a Jew, buy a knife, and do what needs to be

done. And this is all very open. It's the press that has not covered it because it's interested in a story where the Jews are the oppressors and this is just a complicating factor. So, you know, I think that clearly there have been very broad failures in coverage and in understanding which are leading to this intense confusion or which maybe are contributing. There are other factors which are contributing to this intense moment of confusion in the West. But I think that one of the key things that Hamas understands, you can kind of dismiss the charter and dismiss the Rotary Club business as insanity. But I think that's something that Hamas understands is that they see themselves as part of a war against Jews that is global in its scope and historic in its chronology. And they understand themselves as

having hundreds of millions of allies, maybe billions of allies around the world. And they understand themselves as having hundreds of millions of allies, maybe billions of allies around the world. And I think they're right. Because if you look at events over the past four months, then you'll see that a disturbingly large number of people on earth believe that Jews are a problem that they must confront. And this includes people like Hamas and the radical Islamic world and its sympathizers. But it also includes French labor unions and British labor unions and Russian nationalists and their sworn enemies among Ukrainian nationalists. And it includes ideologues and influencers from the Chinese Communist Party. It includes most of the population of Indonesia, where there are no Jews. And it seems to be a sentiment that is prevalent across

large swaths of the globe. And I think that Jewish people like me have not really wanted to look that in the face. And if you grew up in a nice city in the late 90s, like I did, I grew up in Toronto, and you could dismiss all of this as the fevered memories of your grandparents. And on occasion, you'd see a swastika spray painted on a gravestone somewhere or, you know, some boycott of Israel or someone would say something off color and you would just dismiss it as being unrelated data points, maybe holdovers from a different time. What's clear now is that these are indicators of a very powerful and popular ideology that brings together vast numbers of people from very different backgrounds in very different parts of the world. And Hamas knows that because they operate in that

world. So they understand that if they attack Jews on October 7th, a lot of people are going to applaud it. And we're kind of flabbergasted by it. We couldn't understand why on October 7th, Hamas attack triggers protests against Jews. That surprised us, but it didn't surprise Hamas. Last question for you, Mati. You recently wrote a piece, also for the Free Press, just a couple weeks ago, called What If the Real War in Israel Hasn't Even Started? That's the title of the piece. Take the current war with Hamas and multiply it by 10. That's what war with Hezbollah would look like. And Israelis are not asking if it will begin, but when. I don't want to get into the whole

possibility of a war with Hezbollah. Maybe we'll have you back on to have a separate conversation about it. But I just, what you're just describing about Hamas, do you think the same thing applies to Hezbollah? That it is also a global religious movement rather than an organization that was created just for the purpose of the social welfare of the people it serves and for some kind of national self-determination, although I don't even know what their national self-determination would be because they're Shiite Muslims that exist in Lebanon and other parts of the Levant in the Middle East that don't pretend to have claims on what is today Israel. So is Hezbollah just another version of what you're describing with regard to Hamas? Well, first of all, I hope we never have a chance to have that conversation. And I hope it's never necessary. And I also apologize for writing very dark articles recently.

I wish we could meet to discuss something more cheerful. But Hezbollah, like Hamas, is very open about what it is. Hezbollah means the party of God. That's what it means in Arabic. And Hezbollah is an arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and part of the Islamic Revolution that's represented by the Islamic Republic in Iran. And they don't claim to be out for rational solution

to the problems of the Middle East. They certainly don't claim to be out for democracy and liberalism. They believe that they are serving the will of God and that the will of God is for this part of the world, if not the entire world, to come under the rule of Islam. And Israel is really a symbol of what they hate because it's a non-Muslim power in a part of the world that they interpret as being theirs. It's a liberal country. It's a country where women have rights, where gay people have equality, and all of this is anathema to them. So they're very open about it. If you listen to what they say in Arabic and often in English, they're very clear about what they're up to and what they want. And I don't blame them. I don't think they're hiding who they are. I blame Western observers for creating a fictional story about what's going on here. The idea that there's an Israeli-Palestinian

conflict and that that's the story here is fiction, a fiction that's designed to create an easily comprehensible news story. Most of Israel's wars have not been fought against Palestinians. Israel's fought wars against Syrians and Egyptians and Jordanians and others. And Israel's most potent enemy at the moment is Iran, of course, and those forces are not Palestinian. So clearly there's a regional conflict going on here that isn't an Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and that's the way Israelis see it. I mean, if you're a Jew whose grandparents had to run away from Yemen, for example, came to Israel, and now you're on the northern border fighting Hezbollah, which are Shia Muslims from Lebanon, are you engaged in an Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Your story is about the Middle conflict? Your story is about

the Middle East. Your story is about a Jewish minority in the Middle East being forced from its ancestral homes and driven back to the national homeland where we kind of set up, saw up in the late 40s and 50s and try to hack out a space for us in the Middle East as 6 million Jews living among 300 million Arab Muslims and about 2 billion Muslims. And that's the way Israelis see it. And the story that we're facing right now is a story of Iranian encirclement of Israel using proxies. We have Hezbollah in Lebanon. We have Iranian forces on our northeastern border with Syria. We have Iranian forces just over Jordanian territory in Iraq. We have an Iranian proxy in Yemen that is attacking,

shipping in the Red Sea and shooting at our southernmost city, which is Eilat. So we have a Middle East that's being shaped by the rise of Iranian power. And if you say that to a consumer of Western news coverage, they're kind of bewildered. They look at you like they've never heard any of this before because they're being told some story about Israeli oppressors and Palestinian victims. And it's not that there's nothing to that story. It's not that it's a completed invention. It's just that it won't help you understand the broader sweep of events in the Middle East. And I think anyone hoping to understand this place needs to zoom out and look at what's going on across the region and not be seduced by a simple and mostly fictional story about good and evil. All right, Mati, we will leave it there.

I can attest to the fact that you don't only write about darkness, even though you have been writing about darkness. I referenced your book when I brought you into the conversation called Who By Fire? Leonard Cohen in the Sinai, which was published two years ago. Does that sound right? Man, anything that happened before October 7th is very, very blurry. I feel like since October 7th, we're all living in three-day weeks. Everything is yesterday, today, and tomorrow. So trying to understand way out to the future, way in the past is very hard. But it's an excellent

book. It's certainly not dark. It's very moving and deep and illuminating about a person and his role in a time that is Leonard Cohen's role in a time and a place that I didn't know much about. You and I had a conversation about when I was in Jerusalem soon after the book came out. We will link to it in the show notes just so people don't come away from this conversation thinking that you just live in this orbit of incredible darkness, although it is a dark time. Mati, thanks for this. I hope to have you back on soon. This was a very important conversation for people to understand the forces that are actually shaping what we are seeing and understanding, which is to your point, Hamas certainly had this figured out before we did. Thanks for coming on. Thank you so much for having me.

That's our show for today. To keep up with Monty Friedman, you can find him on X, at Monty Friedman. That's M-A-T-T-I Friedman, F-R-I-E-D-M-A-N, or at MontyFriedman.com. And you can also find his work at The Atlantic and at Tablet. Call Me Back is produced and edited by Ilan Benatar. Our media manager is Rebecca Strom.

Additional editing by Martin Huergo. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.