Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - ISRAEL AT WAR: The Hostage Dilemma - with Haviv Rettig Gur

Episode Date: October 8, 2023

Haviv Rettig Gur returns to our podcast to provide real-time reporting and analysis on the war, and invaluable historical context. His insights on how Israel might prosecute this war -- and the possible end of Israel's security paradigm with Gaza and its approach to Israeli hostages -- are especially important. Haviv is the political analyst at The Times of Israel. He was a long time reporter for the Times of Israel. He’s also working on a book. Haviv was also a combat medic in the IDF where he served in the reserves. We discuss his most recent piece from the Times of Israel: "A wounded, weakened Israel is a fiercer one" -- https://www.timesofisrael.com/a-wounded-weakened-israel-is-a-fiercer-one/

I, uh, yeah, another brother got called up. I just got notified outside the, uh, my, uh, office. Um... He's your brother? My wife's brother. My wife's brother. It is the morning of Sunday, October 8th. This is a special episode of our podcast. Here's what we know as of this morning in Israel. There are 600 confirmed killed Israelis.

There are thousands wounded, many number of them in severe condition, as well as critical condition. There are dozens of Israeli hostages in Gaza. In a coordinated assault on land, through the air and sea, hundreds of Palestinian militants, terrorists, infiltrated more than 20 Israeli towns, cities, kibbutzim, and army bases, burning houses, killing and kidnapping soldiers and civilians, including women and children. And to be clear, the hostages that have been taken are largely women and children. Battles between Hamas and the IDF inside 20 villages and cities are still raging over 24 hours since this began. Hamas had taken over two IDF bases that contained tanks and armored vehicles and other military

equipment. Hamas had stormed an outdoor party near Kibbutz Reem in the south, which 3,000 young Israelis participated in. And as I said, they killed and kidnapped dozens of them. Thousands of rockets have been fired on Israeli targets, including in Tel Aviv, in the center of Israel. This is like no war Israel has ever fought before, in that the enemy is inside Israeli territory conducting operations. Yes, there have been wars like the 67 Six-Day War and the 73 Yom Kippur War, some of which was fought on Israeli territory, but not like this, where you have the enemy going door to door, village by village, in towns, in cities, in kibbutzim, just systematically rounding up, either slaughtering or rounding up innocent Israelis and taking them back over the border. This is new, which means a 20-year defense paradigm has collapsed. That paradigm is how

Israel has conducted its operations and effectively its coexistence, its military operations and its coexistence with Hamas-run Gaza. It's also a new paradigm in terms of how Israel deals with hostages taken by its enemy. And that is one of the topics we are going to discuss today. if Israel's entire approach to dealing with hostages is about to change. And if it does, was that a major miscalculation by Hamas? It is one of the areas of focus in our conversation today with our guest, Haviv Retegur, who our listeners have heard before. He's been on this podcast to talk about the judicial reform crisis. He's a senior political analyst at the Times of Israel. He was

a longtime reporter for the Times of Israel. He's also working on a book. Haviv was also a combat medic in the IDF. This is an informative conversation. It is an intense conversation. As Haviv and I are speaking, he has very close family and very close friends who are being called up in the reserves in real time. In fact, we had to take a couple breaks during the conversation because he was getting updates, and all Israeli schools, understandably, are closed in Israel today, so his four young children are at home with him while he's recording this, so if you hear a little bit of background, please indulge it. One housekeeping note, we typically release episodes on Mondays and Thursdays. We will change that tempo in the days ahead. We will be releasing

episodes much more frequently. Tomorrow, Monday, we will have a conversation with Brett Stevens from the New York Times, who has a piece out now that we will be discussing. We will also have analysts and officials from Israel and from the United States in the days ahead. But right now, Haviv Rettigur on Israel's war. This is, I welcome back to this podcast, Haviv Retigur, who is a senior political analyst for the Times of Israel. He was a longtime reporter for the Times of Israel. He's also working on a book. He was a combat medic in the IDF where he served in the reserves until he was 40 years old, which means he's just out of that age bracket, but has not only been reporting and writing about what is happening on the ground,

but has lots of family and friends who are serving, who are being called up, and tragically who have been killed. Aviv, thank you for being with us this morning. Dan, thanks for having me. Can we begin by just telling us where things stand now, Sunday morning? Sunday morning, New York, Sunday mid to late afternoon, Israel time. What do we know now? Well, we had just updated the death toll up to 600, almost entirely civilians. Yesterday at 6.30 in the morning, Hamas launched an attack that was very, very well planned. We understand quite well now how it happened. It started with strikes on all kinds of technological cameras and sensors and specific guard towers along the Gaza border.

And then proceeded to a ground assault on a border crossing, at which point distracting the IDF in that way, in other places, the border was breached and hundreds of Hamas fighters crossed over and spent the next 10 hours, something like that, hunting down Israeli civilians, essentially just massacring everyone they could find, kidnapping dozens, including little children, and filming all of it, filming all of it and placing it all on TikTok, sending it on Twitter, making sure it gets to Israelis, making sure the world sees, celebrating it, desecrating bodies. There are reports of much worse things, verified reports, and at least 1,500... When you say verified reports of worse things, what can you... I mean, just so people understand what is an example of a worse thing. You know, it's...

I'm just going to say it. I don't know if the audience or listeners will understand, but it's hard to talk about this outside of Israel right now. We're having an internal Hebrew language experience, and then there's the world watching, and it's hard to then translate and go out. It feels different. We are a family in mourning, and it is hard to...

But what I am referring to is places where the Hamas terrorists walk into a family home, shoot dead the two parents, and take the child's cell phone, and open up a Facebook Live broadcast on the child's Facebook account of everything that they're doing. I'm talking about taking a family with two little kids, loading them into a car to take them into Gaza. And as the Hamas are filming, the little kid says to his mother in Hebrew, are they going to kill us? And the mother says they said they won't. I'm talking about footage Hamas released from inside Gaza of a bleeding young woman in the back of a car that they grabbed by the hair and essentially paraded through the streets. And I'm talking about bodies that were found of women who had been raped. I'm talking about more than that. For hours upon hours upon hours on Saturday,

Israelis watched their phones and watched their Twitter, Hebrew language Twitter, Hebrew language Facebook, Hebrew language TikTok, and saw this footage, and not just the Hamas footage, but Israeli families sitting in these homes, trying to hide in these locked homes, begging to be rescued. And the IDF was nowhere to be found. There were many places where local police, you know, just faced off against the gunmen. And the gunmen were there with assault rifles. The local police pulled out their handguns. Some 30 police officers, including very senior ones, were killed in these engagements. But they're police, they're traffic police, you know, they were not equipped

to deal with this. The collapse of the IDF in that moment was catastrophic. And the experience of sitting hour after hour after hour and watching in that way the massacre. And it was a thrilled massacre. There was jubilation. There was laughter. There were parades in Gaza with these bodies. There are children right now, living children, four years old, six years old, in tunnels under Gaza, held by Hamas. And Hamas has even said, probably as part of its psychological warfare, maybe it's even true,

that it doesn't even know where all of the different, you know, to prevent an Israeli rescue operation, it spread them throughout Gaza, the dozens of hostages that it took. And so we are the day after and trying to understand what has happened. The death toll of just bodies found within Israel is now 600, almost entirely, as I said, civilians. There's more than 2,000 wounded, many of them. I don't know the exact number. Last time I looked, and that was 500 wounded ago, but last time I looked, there were over 100 that were serious or critical. So there's going to be more dead by the time, you know, by the time this all ends. And that's it. That's where things stand right now. Haviv, I just want to better understand the casualty count

because when we went to bed here in the United States on Saturday night, the number that was all over the press was 300. I had spoken to people during the day in Israeli security circles and in the U.S. government, and they were saying they expected the number to escalate considerably on Sunday, the casualty number. And it wasn't clear to me why that was the case, and I certainly didn't expect a doubling of casualties, although someone did say to me it's going to get to 600 pretty quickly. So what accounts for this dramatic uptick in casualties?

There were hundreds missing. There were hundreds of people missing, and Israeli social media, especially Facebook, was filled, filled. My entire feed was pictures of family members nobody could get in touch with. Some families got lucky. And there were people who slept in the desert overnight after fleeing the Hamas gunmen, and then in the morning showed up in the nearby town police department. And a few dozen, then the police called their families and told them they were fine. But just in the last couple of hours, they found 240 more

bodies. Those are people that everyone's been looking for. So the missing have turned, of course, when you have hundreds of people missing, every passing hour, right, increases the likelihood that they're dead. And what do we know about the number of hostages taken to Gaza? We think that there are several dozen, maybe around 50, maybe more. We know the stories of quite a few individuals, so we can say for sure that there's an 84-year-old grandmother. We can say for sure that there is a 4-year-old boy.

We can say for sure that there are two little girlsyear-old boy, we can say for sure that there are two little girls and their mother. We don't know if they're still alive. They were alive when Hamas got them, when Hamas kidnapped them. And that's the story. So there's quite a few bodies that Hamas has, and probably two or three dozen, obviously, hopefully as high as possible, the number who are still alive. I want to now move to the piece you wrote for the Times of Israel, which you titled, A Wounded, Weakened Israel Israel is a fiercer one. The assault on Israeli towns was as cruel as Hamas could make it, and every agonizing minute was broadcast to Israelis as a message and a humiliation. Now comes the Israeli answer. Can you explain to us why this was a humiliation by design?

This was not just a military confrontation or a military attack or attempted military defeat, but it was clearly designed to be a humiliation. And it sounds like what you're saying in this piece is that's exactly how Israelis are feeling it. And that will change what will be the form of the Israeli response. Yeah. Hamas, I'm going to take it from the abstract down into the very, very concrete. Hamas has a theory of Israelis. The Palestinian national movement for over a century, essentially, has had this theory of Israelis. And sometimes people call it colonialist. But it has different terms. Palestinians used to call the Israelis imperialists

and then colonialists and then various other names. But they all share a basic idea that Israelis are rootless. They don't belong here, they're inauthentic, they are a European project imposed for imperialist or colonialist reasons on the Middle East. And that theory is not just a put-down, that's not just an insult to Israelis. It is a strategic vision, and the strategic vision essentially says that the Israelis can be pushed out. Israeli Jews can be pushed out of Israel in the same way that other anti-colonial projects were pushed out. The French were pushed out of Algeria in 1962 with an eight year terror war by the National Liberation Front. The British were pushed out of Kenya by the Mau Mau uprising.

There is this anti-colonial struggle. Everywhere it was tried, it was successful. All the colonialist projects in the 20th century collapsed in the face of this kind of violence. And the Palestinian vision, since the 20s and 30s, they've been saying this openly and discussing it, and it's sort of the grand strategy of the Palestinian national movement, is that Israelis will respond the way other colonialists have responded.

And that drives, today, Hamas's behavior. What is the actual point of the rocket fire? What is the point of the suicide bombings? Because Western supporters of Palestinians can't justify the act, and they don't understand the psychology behind it. They don't have a theory of mind of the Palestinians. They imagine that the story is despair, anger, an explosion of emotion. Palestinians are as strategic as anybody else. They have emotion, they have folly, but they have a vision of Israelis that tells them that this will work, and that's why it's justified. The problem is, you know, if you want to call Israel colonialist as an epithet, you know, go for it if it makes you happy, enjoy, have fun. But as a diagnosis, as just an analytical vision of Israel, it has a problem. You could kick the French out of Algeria

because they had France to go to. You could kick the French out of Algeria because they had France to go to. You could kick the British out of Kenya because they had Britain to go to. If Israel is exactly what Palestinians claim it is, at the worst case scenario, right, and we are absolute evil and totally illegitimate and completely rootless and don't belong here and it's not our homeland and in some strange way my entire nation is somehow fake, which is Palestinian discourse on us and has been for a century, I still have nowhere to go. In other words, there is a hole at the heart of Palestinian strategy that they refuse to talk about. Because if I am what I actually am, which is a nation of refugees with nowhere else to go, all the

terrorism is silly and meaningless. Long story short, that vision drove the thinking yesterday. Hamas arrived at every place that it got to, something like 22 different locations saw Hamas massacring civilians, and it started massacring those civilians, and it uploaded videos of those massacres so that Israelis could see it. And the whole point was to show us that we're weak. When you show a colonialist that they're weak, when you raise the cost vastly higher than the benefit the colonialist perceives from their policies, the colonialist always leaves in every single situation. The problem is that Israelis, Israeli Jews, respond to weakness, to being shown their weakness, in the exact opposite way that

Colonialists generally respond because we are a nation of refugees with nowhere to go. That's our story. That's our national sort of collective consciousness and so what Israelis just saw And this is my argument Was that they are now much weaker than they expected and And they're not safe. They're deeply vulnerable. And therefore, if you are a people with nowhere to go who just face this kind of an attack, you don't respond as if you're a colonialist and flee. You respond as if you are a weak, wounded tiger,

incredibly dangerous for your weakness, because you will lash out much, much more aggressively than if you were not weak, than if you perceived yourself to be strong. Hamas just convinced Israelis that they're weak. And my argument is that a weak Israel won't feel it can afford to be precise in its pursuit of Hamas in Gaza.

Won't feel it can afford to spend a lot of resources thinking about the humanitarian cost of a ground war, won't feel it can afford to worry about anything other than having Saturday's events never happen again. And so an Israel that is now going to war is a very, very fierce Israel, made fierce by Hamas's success, not by Hamas having failed. Hamas and the Palestinian national movement generally profoundly misunderstands us. And that's about to cost Hamas, unfortunately, to cost just Gaza's population a great deal. So just to put this in historical comparison, we are accustomed to military skirmishes that turn into something much more than a skirmish on the Israeli-Gaza border, 2008, 2009, 2014, 2021. I mean, we can just go on and on and on with these every couple of years, it seems, going back to 2005, close to 2005,

when Israel pulled out, withdrew from Gaza. In fact, there hasn't been a real military, serious military invasion with serious, you know, boots and vehicles on the ground in Gaza since, I think, 2002 in the Sharon government, which was the last real battle on the ground in Gaza that then was followed by Israel's disengagement from Gaza in 2005. And since then, there's been these skirmishes that were mostly fought via special operations or from the air, but nothing like a serious war. And can you just describe for us what, pivoting off what you just said, what this therefore will look like? This is not, we are not, we are not accustomed to what we're about to see, is I think what you're saying. Yeah, I don't want to predict too much. There's

an enormous and very anxiety-ridden debate right now going on in Israel, whether this government really knows what it's going to do and has a vision and has a strategy or is competent enough to develop it. The policy that Israel has adopted of managing Hamas, containing Hamas, having these periodic but very low-level conflicts with Hamas, something Hamas seemed willing to do, something Israel seemed willing to do, something Israel seemed willing to do.

That's essentially been the policy of the Netanyahu government from the very beginning, from 2009. Netanyahu is very averse to military conflicts, and that aversion has, until yesterday, been seen as one of his great advantages. After the massive bloodletting and fear and terrorism of the Second Intifada of the 2006 Second Lebanon War, Netanyahu comes to power in 2009 promising Israelis what he called responsibility. That was his campaign theme.

But what he meant by it essentially was I'm not going to make peace. I'm not going to make war. I'm not going to invade. I'm not going to withdraw. I'm going to do nothing. I'm just going to hold the line. Everything we have attempted. This is the Israeli narrative, right?

And the Israeli experience. It's deeper than a narrative. Most Israeli Jews believe this and feel that this is what they experienced for the last 30 years. Netanyahu comes to power in 2009 saying, We tried the peace process. It ended in rivers of blood and 140 suicide bombings in our cities, in dead children. We tried the unilateral withdrawal, and it ended in the second Lebanon war, hundreds of thousands of Israelis fleeing their homes for a month,

because tens of thousands of rockets fall on them, and nothing Israel does in Lebanon or Gaza can deter Hamas and Hezbollah from firing those rockets. And so we're not going to try anything ever again, or at least not until something changes on the other side. That's Netanyahu. And the next decade, from 2009 to roughly 2020, are the most peaceful, quiet, lowest death toll in the history of Israel. Netanyahu is a man who took charge of a country with, you know, the old Chinese curse, may you live in interesting times. Israeli history is immensely interesting, and it is a curse. Every three years, a war, constant conflict.

Netanyahu then delivered Israelis, and the policy that achieved that, that decade of quiet, that decade for Israel, relatively, the quietest period of our history, was this kind of quiet quid pro quo with Hamas, where there would be these very low-level conflicts. Very low level doesn't mean it's not a bad thing for people killed in a rocket volley or for Palestinians killed in Gaza and an Israeli airstrike. But it was a very low level compared to the capabilities of both sides. And that concept, that policy, if that whole policy gave us today, then those 10 years were not the quietest years.

Those 10 years were bought at the expense of what just happened. And so there's this view, and I think it is the mainstream view, and I think it is the view of the vast majority of the Israeli right, and I think it's the view of the vast majority of the Israeli left, that 10 years of quiet were bought at a cost that wasn't worth it. And now things have to be changed, and Israel has to act. And it's weak, and the enemy thinks it's weak, and that is what makes the enemy able to launch something like this.

And so we have to explain to the enemy, I say that in air quotes, explain to the enemy that Israel is not weak, and that it can extract a cost for this Jewish blood that is too high for the enemy to bear. And that is so broad of a consensus right now that I don't think this government, I don't want to say specifically, you know, wait three days, there's going to be the ground assault. And then in two weeks, there's going to be this. And then, you know, I don't

want to give the details. I don't think the Israeli leadership really knows the details. There are many plans. They've been doing nothing else for the last 30 hours but thinking about this stuff. that is felt by Israelis, then this government will collapse. And it will collapse not for a day, not for a week. The 1973 war crushed the Israeli left for a generation. And that's the scale of what we're looking at today. In terms of other actors in the region, and I don't want to come back specifically to the days and weeks ahead and the war, but I just, for listeners to understand the broader picture here, obviously you explained how Hamas

is viewing Israel as colonialists and you can intimidate and humiliate colonialists out of their colonial-run territory, colonial-occupied territory in their formulation. But there are motivations of other actors in the region. Do we, to what extent do we think other actors in the region were involved in this, coordinated on this, in some matters orchestrating this? The simple answer is that we don't know. There are a lot of clever people who say this is an Iranian-ordered effort by Hamas

to disrupt Israeli-Saudi normalization. The problem is that this was prepared, they've been preparing this for years. And we know they've been preparing this for years because my own newspaper reported this kind of plan. This is exactly the Hezbollah plan. The Hezbollah has broadcast footage of its training to cross the border in multiple points, overwhelm Israeli border positions, take Israeli towns, massacre Israeli civilians.

Hezbollah has produced videos. It has uploaded to YouTube about this threat. And Hamas just carried it out. And so it has been prepared long before, right? Iran needed to prevent its isolation by the Israeli-Saudi normalization. Also, it might work out opposite to what they expect. It's not clear how that works out, right? If Israel now goes massively into Gaza, and there's a high Palestinian death toll, that will be very uncomfortable for Saudi Arabia in terms of normalization with Israel for a year. But the Saudis have vast interests, and Iran looms very, very large over them and its

nuclear program, especially. And Israel for them is essentially a nuclear umbrella. And so a year later, right, I'll put it a different way. What the Saudis now need to see from Israel is not gentleness toward the Palestinians, but the capacity to change what is happening on the ground, power. And so if this is about disrupting Israeli-Saudi normalization, it might turn out to be the opposite. Israel might demonstrate the kind of strength that the Saudis are actually looking to see. And as soon as they can from a PR perspective, they'll double down on normalization. All of these theories that it's, I even saw one expert suggest that it was Moscow.

Moscow has, Russia has come out not in favor of Hamas, but not critical of Hamas at all, and is dependent in Ukraine on Iranian drones, right? And so Russia is essentially on the other side of this now. But Russia didn't give, you know, didn't give the order to Hamas. Many, many things happened all at once. This is very convenient for Iran. Iran helps fund Hamas. Hamas might have wanted to look useful to Iran by showing it can do successful operations and then get more support from Iran. Hamas has its own reasons for something like this. The leaders of Hamas, Mohammad Def, the military like this. The leaders of Hamas, Mohammad Def, the military leader,

and Yechia Sinwar, the political leader in Gaza, hate Israel. They hate Israel for deep ideological reasons. They've been massacring Israeli civilians for generations. And they hate Israel because Israel's retaliatory strikes against them have cost them dearly. Mohammad Def's family was killed in an airstrike against him, targeting him.

He managed to survive, terribly wounded, but still survived. Yechia Sinwal sat in an Israeli prison for 22 years for planning deadly terror attacks against Israelis. They have their own reasons to launch something like this, to plan it, to launch it. They don't need any geopolitical, you know, theory. So all of that's true, all at once. Hamas also probably wants to take over

Palestinian politics. Everyone is angling in domestic Palestinian politics for the day Mahmoud Abbas dies. There's going to be a Fatah-Hamas civil war in the West Bank. That's in the West Bank. So when Abbas passes, whenever he does, he's not a young man,

in the West Bank, there will be a power play for his succession. And your point is Hamas is positioning for that as well, which could be... Hamas just pulled off the single most spectacular Palestinian success in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If you understand Palestinian success in terms of Israeli death toll, which I think has consistently for 100 years been a Palestinian catastrophe, but Palestinians don't ask me. In terms of what we could expect from the north,

I know what has happened so far today coming from Hezbollah in the north? Because that is the fear, obviously, that Israel suddenly finds itself in a multi-front war. Yeah, everything Hamas has in Gaza, Hezbollah has tenfold. And Hezbollah has a rocket, something like 140,000, 150,000 rockets in the villages under, obviously, the villages and homes of South Lebanon. It has those units trained and really that had become apparently considered pretty competent military units trained in the Syrian civil war that trained essentially for what Hamas just did, but all across the northern border. If Hezbollah comes in, and Hezbollah, by the way, has notified Israel through the Egyptians

that if Israel has a ground invasion in Gaza, Hezbollah will start that war. Three days ago, the idea that Hezbollah would start a war with 140,000 rockets falling on Israeli cities would have given the Israeli government pause. Today, the idea that someone sits across our border with 140,000 rockets feels to Israelis like something you need to trigger before it's 240,000 rockets. In other words, if the quiet is bought at the cost of worse events down the road, then quiet isn't worth it. And so Hezbollah is trying to threaten. I believe Hezbollah is much weaker than it pretends.

It is hated in Lebanon. Lebanon is collapsing in part because of Hezbollah, essentially co-opting Lebanese politics for Iranian purposes. And if Hezbollah brings that kind of war to Lebanon, and by the way, if it causes us the damage that Hezbollah claims it can cause us, then the damage we will have to cause back will be a kind that Lebanon will never again forgive Hezbollah. And so there is a bloody kind of mad logic that is coming into being before our eyes. But it will only come into being before our eyes

if the Israelis express what they're feeling on the ground. And so, you know, Hezbollah is playing this game where it fired a few rockets at Israel. It said, it put out a message that said it's in solidarity with Hamas, which is a way of it saying, we didn't mean to start a war, please don't start a war. And the Israelis responded with some artillery fire. Everybody is signaling quietly that they wanted to stay that way. When you shoot a little bit on the Lebanese border, that's a message that we don't want a war. But there's a moment where that, you know,

you pass that red line, you pass that tipping point, and the war begins anyway, right? Because nobody can afford to step back from the brink. So yeah, so we're all watching for what happens. I am one of those Israelis who thinks that a Hezbollah war, if it must come, I don't know if it must come. I don't know if they're deterrable forever. Based on yesterday, I suspect not. And if it must come, let it come soon. The Israel Hezbollah will face today is a different one from the one it would have faced on Friday. You mentioned that we talked about the hostages and you talked about how security forces that don't normally fight wars like police and others are among those being killed or wounded. because Israel is fighting it on their territory rather than someone else's territory in a very deep way,

deep physically, meaning deep geographically, deep into Israel. How does that change the nature of Israel's response, A? And B, the question I keep wrestling with is, I don't think, and you'll know better than me, I don't think Israel has ever fought a war with this many hostages, certainly not in Gaza, being held in the territory that Israel has to go fight that war, which is, to me, is a dramatically new sort of theater and how it thinks about its theater in prosecuting its war. Not in this non-conventional way, not in the hands of terrorists. I mean, there were POWs in the 73 War. The Syrians on the Golan overwhelmed the Israeli defenses, things like that. But those were military POWs. But those were people in, Israelis in uniform, not women, children, grandmothers. Right. Hamas has just kidnapped

children after killing their parents. That has never happened to us before. It was done for the shock. It was done because it is horrifying. That was the rationale for doing it. That has not happened before.

I don't understand Hamas. I mean, I think I understand Hamas. I really, they have this vision of, by proving the Israelis are weak, the faithful will rally to the cause, and if the faithful believe, then Islam can do anything, and there's this great Islamic renewal coming, and Hamas is part of the Muslim Brotherhood vision of Islamic renewal, and all, you know, I have the academic understanding of what Hamas says and thinks about itself and how it understands in the grand strategy

its own strategy of cruelty when it deploys that strategy of cruelty. It's not that I don't understand Hamas intellectually. But I don't understand why Hamas doesn't understand that we change.

As long as we could buy our hostage for a thousand prisoners, for a thousand prisoners with blood on their hands who were released in the Shalit exchange back in 2011 for one single soldier of ours, as long as we could do that, have a prisoner exchange, and that would put our boy back in our hands,

bring him back to his family, we'd do it. But if doing prisoner exchanges means they'll start kidnapping our children, then they have just ruled out prisoner exchanges. And they have created a new equation for us. What do you mean by that? I think this is an important point. So Gilad Shalit, Israeli soldier, was taken hostage in what year?

Gilad Shalit was taken hostage in the summer of 2006 in june that was the hamas's first tunnel attack that began the fighting in gaza that on july escalated because of the hezbollah attack on the north into the whole second lebanon war he was held in gaza for five years the prisoners yeah yeah 2011 for for something like 1,100 over 1 1,100 Palestinians released from Israeli prisons in return for one Israeli soldier. Including mass murderers of Israeli civilians. And there's a lot of criticism of Netanyahu's decision to do that deal. I supported that deal back in 2011. I should say that up front. I thought that our boy is worth it. We Israelis, our ethos, our basic understanding of ourselves is that until Israel was founded, Jewish blood was cheap. And since Israel was founded,

Jewish blood has been very, very expensive. And that's the theory. And it worked. This has been the safest period in Jewish history since, I don't know, middle of the 19th century, since modernity. And that equation, Hamas thought it understood. It understood that if it kidnaps another one, they'll get a thousand more. And if it kidnaps another one, it'll get 10,000. It doesn't matter how high it raises the cost, including people convicted in a criminal trial for mass murder and sitting in prison for six life terms, it'll get them out if it just kidnaps some Israeli.

Until now. Until that means that it is engaged in mass kidnapping of children. Because if it's engaged in a mass kidnapping of children, basically until today, the general Israeli public felt that Hamas is a tolerable, containable threat. The general Israeli public, you know, leave aside for the moment the chattering classes, the frenetic sort of popularity contest on Twitter, where everyone is convinced that if the other side is evil, then they win in some kind of cosmic sense. The ordinary Israeli public, the regular parents of Israel, now today, after what happened yesterday believe that that equation has to be completely upended. And if that means we lose those hostages, then it means we lose those hostages.

But it means we burn a path to wherever they're being held. And we exact a cost that changes that equation. Because Hamas has made that equation essentially a target on our children. In terms of Israel in the days ahead, do you expect there to be a national unity government formed? No, I don't think so. I don't think a national unity government is, of course, I't think so it's a decision of exactly three people so you know uh it's easier to predict what a million people will do than what three people will do but um the the

the three people are nothing yahoo yayerair Lapid, and Benny Gantz. That's right. Opposition leader Yair Lapid, Benny Gantz, who is this very centrist party, leads a very centrist party and is polling quite well, even though he didn't do that well in the last election. He's polling much, much better now. And Benjamin Netanyahu, the head of this coalition, the prime minister and the head of the right and of Likud. Yair Lapid was the first to say we can have a coalition government, but he called it a professional coalition government. It's Netanyahu of Likud, it's my party, Yishatid, from the center-left, and it's the centrist party of Benny Gantz, and that's it. You get rid of the far right from your coalition, we can leave the far left out, but it's a coalition to fight this war. The day after the war, we break apart. This is about fighting this war. And Netanyahu, of course, can't afford to j in the way Menachem Begin joined the unity government right before the 67 war, which is he just joined it, and the government didn't change.

In other words, I don't have to jettison the far-right parties that I need to remain in power after, right, the war. So there was... So just for the historical context, Levi Eshkol, Levi Eshkol, 67, Prime Minister of Israel, fierce, fierce political opposition in the form of the Likud party headed by Menachem Begin, I mean, to call it fierce... In the run-up to the Six-Day War... Fierce opposition is an understatement. Sorry? Right. I mean, I want... just the background is in the days leading to the Six-Day War, to the 1967 war

Everybody knew there was a war coming egyptian state radio was announcing that there was a war coming There was a naval blockade on israel, which is the most ancient casus belli, right? and um And the israelis were digging mass graves in the middle of tel aviv Yarkon park in tel aviv had 13 000 mass graves done because everyone expected a war nobody knew how bad it was going to be. And that's a moment where Levi Eshkol, the left-wing Labor Party, asked for a unity government. Menachem Begin of the right-wing Herut or Likud party agreed and joined the government.

He sat at the cabinet table. He didn't take a ministry. He was a very humble man personally. He was a minister without portfolio just to sit in the government, to stabilize israeli politics so that this war everyone saw coming that the egyptians announced they were going to launch would have stable and to send a message to the world right right and to send a message to the world that even if he if bagan didn't have an operational role i'm i'm standing here with my fierce political opponent because we are one people today. Right.

And that was a very successful move by Begin. But Netanyahu using that example today is essentially Netanyahu protecting himself politically the day after. It's about having a war cabinet with Itamar Ben-Gvir of the Otzmay Yudit party in it, which Yair Lapid can't afford to sit in. And so, long story short, without getting too much into the weeds for all the listeners, Yair Lapid can't afford to sit in the only government, unity government that Netanyahu can afford to have. The good news is that we don't need a unity government in that sense.

There is nothing this government needs to do in Gaza or feels it needs to do in Gaza that former IDF chief of staff Benny Gantz and center-left leader Yair Lapid won't agree to, won't vote in the Knesset to, you know what I mean? There's no, it's not like there's some budget the army's going to ask for that the members of the opposition won't agree to vote for in some Knesset committee.

So unity government, I think, is unlikely. Okay. I want to ask you about, Israel says it's at war, which it's never said in any of these military skirmishes or operations since it left Gaza in 2005. It's never used the term war. Israel is at war. You're laying out in this conversation what war could look like, which is different from anything we've seen before in its comprehensiveness and its sense of determination. And I think you mean also in sense of its endgame, which is there is no way Israel can live with the Gaza Strip governed by Hamas at the end of this war. Is that right?

Yeah. I mean, Netanyahu, I think Netanyahu is, you know, when you do something a very, very long time, it's hard to not do it mentally. It's just a kind of pathway paved in your neurons. Netanyahu is always thinking politics. And I think even at this moment, he knows and understands very, very clearly that this is his war. This is at his feet from his own voters. In other words, he has been prime minister since 2009 for 13 of the last 14 years. And this is his Gaza policy that has produced this result thus far and so he needs to show that he can roll this back politically or he won't survive politically and that matters to him

so he got up and he said it took him hours to go to get on television this was this whole event was already happening Hamas's attacks were already five six hours in before he put out a video of himself in which he essentially said I promise this will never happen again. I will do what it takes for this never to happen again. It was a very strange way to say it. It was not a successful public relations moment. Certainly not what Israelis needed to hear in that horrifying moment with hours still to go of soldiers failing to arrive to save people, begging on social media to be rescued. Netanyahu's political

position is desperate. And so a lot of his talk of war needs to be understood in that way. We don't yet know how this government's going to function. I can tell you there was a cabinet meeting yesterday evening, about 5pm Israel time, in front of the cameras. And the generals were called in to brief the Israeli cabinet, which is two and a half dozen people. And there were leaks from the cabinet meeting. And it was all in front of the cameras of the Minister of Tourism and the Minister of Public Diplomacy, who didn't do a damn thing all day, excuse my French, complaining and arguing and bickering and debating and shutting each other up in the middle of this cabinet meeting while yesterday was not the finest hour of the Israeli political

class. So a lot of this talk of war, we don't know what it means. We just literally don't know what this government will actually do. It's not clear the government has any idea, even now, what it's going to do. The Israeli army was caught with his pants down yesterday, but the Israeli army is not incompetent, and it is not weak. And they had just called up dozens of battalions, entire divisions. And there's well above 100% call up, 100% showing up rate for these reservists. We've been talking about judicial reform and how a lot of Israelis said they were no longer going to serve in reserves because they were angry at the government and afraid that democracy was collapsing. They're all there. to stop doing reserve duty because Israel is turning into a dictatorship, as they put it,

put out a statement about three hours after the start of the Hamas operation yesterday that everybody goes to do reserves because this is an outside enemy. Remember when we talked last time, I said... Just to be clear, the organization, Brothers in Arms, urged the reservists that they had been organizing to boycott their reserve training and the reserve service. They put out a statement saying, reservists turn out. So what was all that about? No, and they put out WhatsApp. They established a WhatsApp group helping people find units in case their own unit isn't called up,

but they can't stand not going to. There are Israelis banging down the doors of the army call-up offices to get into a unit to go into this war. Hundreds of thousands. And we're seeing that. So, yeah. So just on that, I mean, again, I don't want to dwell on, it's not the time for the impact of the judicial reform crisis and the debates.

It's not the time for that right now. But this one particular piece I found most striking because when I saw the Brothers in Arms statement, I thought, so the whole pressure tactic of telling the Israeli government we will organize reserves to not show up for training, what was the—I mean, was that all just never to survive the first point of contact? The first time they needed— The first military confrontation where you actually need them reserves well what i argued last time um both in the newspaper and also i think in our conversation was that uh this is a this is a vocabulary for talking about fundamental things the solidarity uh that military service represents for israelis is a way of saying this matters this is big you're breaking something you don't see what you're breaking i want you to know you're breaking the most fundamental things and so saying i'm not

going to show up to fight is saying that is saying you're breaking our solidarity in a way that i would be breaking it if i wasn't showing up to fight the moment the enemy comes to the gate the the call up is 110 and so that that that should make it clear what that was back then. But, but the enemies could have misunderstood it. You know, they could have, they could have, uh, Hamas, Hezbollah, Tehran could have, could have, um, really miss, misjudged. Yeah. The enemy always misunderstands it. We have an enemy that thinks our democracy is our weakness. We have an enemy that thinks that the fact that we would give a thousand prisoners, including mass murderers, for one single soldier is a weakness. We have an enemy that thinks that the fact that every one of those soldiers that is begging to be called up knows that they want to protect their families and their country and that they know that all the rest of the country will protect their family and so they're willing to go fight and risk their lives for everyone else's families thinks that that's a weakness and we have an enemy that has managed to be convinced itself that we are weak

for 75 years of our prosperity and success and strength and and and i am if if i any day in which the iranian leadership or the hamas leadership are convinced that I'm weak, I'm doing something right. I don't worry. And I don't ask Israeli protesters to worry about what the enemy thinks, because the enemy has misunderstood us every step of the way for a century and a half. Last question for you, Haviv, is there's a tendency to compare this to previous fights, previous military operations in Gaza. But as this conversation, I hope makes clear this, this one will be much different. It will be probably in some form unrecognizable. That said, in all these previous operations against Gaza, as was the case in the 2006 Lebanon war, there is, the moment operations, Israeli operations start, there's a clock that starts ticking. And what I mean,

internationally, meaning it was very moving over the weekend to see the Brandenburg Gate. I don't know if you saw that image of the Brandenburg Gate in Germany with the Israeli flag and the president's prime minister's home in Rome with the Israeli flag. I mean, not just the Israeli flag, very powerful, illuminated image that was visible in most parts of the city. And you could see this in just the expressions of solidarity from around the world with Israel. And it's very moving and it's very inspiring, and I think it's authentic. However things, once the Israeli response starts to kick into high gear, that'll be the true test of that solidarity, because things will rightfully get very aggressive in terms of the response, appropriately, very quickly.

And that's what I mean by the clock starting to tick, because at some point, wise, quote-unquote, air quotes, wise leaders from around the world, the UN Security Council and Western capitals and finance ministries and chancellories start talking, it's, quote-unquote, time for diplomacy. It's time for diplomacy. And I feel, you know, my sense is there is, this is not a time for diplomacy. That would be like after 9-11, if you compare this in proportional terms to 9-11, this would be like, you know, not 3,000 Americans being killed, but tens of thousands of Americans being killed on a single

day on its territory with terrorists still roaming inside the United States, killing more people. It would be like at that moment, as soon as the U.S. began its response, international leaders starting to say, well, it's time for diplomacy. You just, it's unimaginable. It wouldn't have happened. And I fear that we are going to hear that soon. And I think it's very important to establish now, very early, that the time for diplomacy is no time soon. It shouldn't even be in the conversation.

There is a war. And I just, I guess my question for you is what do you, you know, apparently President Biden and Prime Minister Netanyahu had a very good conversation yesterday where President Biden agreed to everything Prime Minister Netanyahu had a very good conversation yesterday where President Biden agreed to everything Prime Minister Netanyahu asked for, including, and most importantly, time and space. Give me the time and space to do what I need to do. But, you know, we often hear that. In 2002, with, you know, George W. Bush and Gandhi, they were supportive and stood in solidarity with Israel dealing with Gaza until it was the time for diplomacy. We talked about 2006. There was a time for diplomacy.

We hear this all the time. Are leaders in Israel thinking through how to establish publicly, not just in their private conversations with leaders, publicly, there will be no time for diplomacy? I want to say one thing, and I think it reflects something that every Israeli understands instinctively, but it's hard to see from the outside. Ever since the founding of the Zionist movement, before the founding of the Zionist movement,

the very earliest Zionist proto-thinkers, the 1880s, the early 1880s, people like Pinsker, wrote a book called Auto-Emancipation. This was an East European Jew who was really excited about the new liberalism, the new parliamentarism, Russian reforms in the Russian Empire, the general trend of modernization and liberalization. And after the beginning of the mass pogroms in the East in 1881, after the Tsar was killed by anarchists, he turned against that idea.

He thought that actually the Jews did not have a future in Europe and that the Jews had better find a way out. And he wrote a book called Auto-Emancipation. You don't get emancipated by others. You emancipate yourself. Ever since Pinsker and throughout all the thinkers and the builders and the refugees who actually built modern Israel, there's been this thread, this founding ethos that defines us more than anything else. And it is the ethos that we no longer live at the pleasure, at the agreement, with the support of anybody else. Jews don't ask for permission not to be safe,

not to be alive, not to be any of it. That is what Israel is. It isn't anything else but that. And that's created a culture that sometimes hurts us. For example, we're very bad at explaining ourselves. We're incredibly bad at it. This Israeli state has founded a ministry of public diplomacy something like six times, and then it never quite knows what to do, and it disbands itself. And Israelis don't tell their story. They don't like to tell their story. They don't want the sense that there's something they need to explain to the rest of the world.

Because it violates that deep-seated ethos. The Jews don't live at other people's acceptance. There is no popularity contest between Israelis and Palestinians. The illusion of a popularity contest has done terrible damage to Palestinians because the world doesn't actually care. International community pretends to care. It cares as much as it needs to care to feel righteous. And then it stops. And that sense of the Israeli sense of the world, the sense of the world built by the experience of the last 150 years, basically, is deep.

And it makes it hard for me, me sitting here now, I am testifying to my own mental state after yesterday. This is a hard conversation for me, because I feel like I want to teach the world about my people, but I don't want to justify my people to the world because I refuse the very idea that my people need justification. You want to understand us? Happy to explain. You don't like it? You're welcome not to like it. You like us? Great, I like us. But that's it. That's the relationship. The political window for an operation in Gaza depends on many things.

One of them is the international community. It's really important to convey how little willingness there is among the Israeli public today. After watching those little children tormented in Gaza in videos uploaded by laughing Hamas fighters, how little interest the Israelis, who are already primed by their history, not to care what the world thinks Not to believe in the world not to believe there is such a thing as an international community to think of the idea of an international community as as as as a way for the powerful and the safe to to Speak about their power and safety in moral terms

But not actually to step out into the world and defend the weak and defend the world, by the way, does nothing for Palestinians, just as much as it does nothing for Jews, just as much as it does nothing to the Bosnians or to the Rwandans or to the Uyghurs or anybody who is ever threatened. The whole concept in the Israeli mind, especially at a moment like this of an international community that has to be on your side or you can't act is a concept that is part of a kind of narcissistic internal Western safe discourse about Westerners' own safe morality. I've heard scholars talk about the liberal gaze, the liberal gaze out into the world. Well, that's part of that liberal gaze and it is not okay and it is not legitimate, and most importantly, it makes you fail to understand what's about to happen. Israelis care what the world thinks of

them right up until they don't. And Hamas has pushed them now to that point. They don't. And so there is a political window. But Netanyahu has two audiences. He has that international audience. He has the Israeli audience. The Israeli audience matters. The international one doesn't. He must satisfy the basic Israeli need for this to change, for the basic framework on the ground to change. This Hamas cannot exist after this.

Our children cannot be scared to go to sleep at night. This cannot happen. And that has to change. And the pro-Palestinian listeners to this podcast, if there are, or tweeters out there, will say, well, Palestinians get to sleep well at night. Absolutely they get to sleep well at night. You know who's preventing them to sleep well at night. You know who's preventing them to sleep well at night?

You know who oppresses them in Gaza? Let's call Israel the worst possible things we can call them. You know who's right up there with Israel? The oppressors of Hamas who have kept Gaza. It is impossible to convey how much Hamas is hated in Gaza. Just like Hamas wins the poll, any poll that you do in the West Bank between Fatah and Hamas, Hamas keeps hated in Gaza. Just like Hamas wins the poll, any poll that you do in the West Bank between Fatah and Hamas, Hamas keeps winning those polls. If you do that poll in Gaza, Hamas loses.

Palestinians are convinced Hamas has decimated them and decimated Gaza. In 2013, Gaza's under Israeli blockade, but not under an Egyptian one. And then Egypt descends into a civil war between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian army. And Hamas enters that civil war. It drags beleaguered Gaza into a civil war on its last open border. Until 2013, you could get KFC in Gaza from El Arish. After 2013, the army wins that war.

And the army shuts that border. And it doesn't just shut that border. It demolishes a neighborhood along the border to clear a border zone that it can keep shut. And it floods with sewage the 1,500 tunnels that Hamas built under that border for smuggling. And it seals the border tight because Hamas is now an enemy of Egypt.

You care about Gazans, you cannot support Hamas. And if you do support Hamas, then you care about your own morality. You don't care about Gazans, about your own moral emotions. You don't care about Gazans, about your own moral emotions. You don't care about Gazans. And so, Hamas is the factor in this equation

that has to change. And you know what? Dear world, and dear world's deep moral emotions, once Hamas is the factor that's changed, come after us. Go for it. Pressure us.

Boycott us. Hate us. Scream at us. Do whatever you want. Build that psychological pressure as high as you want it to go. Because until Hamas is out of the equation, you're not pressuring me. You're not competing with my own desire to continue my own policies. You're competing with Hamas. You're telling me pull out of the West Bank. Hamas is telling me I'm going to do this to you from the West Bank, which is 16 times the size of Gaza. If you don't understand, dear pro-Palestinian activist who wants to boycott Israel, that you're competing with Hamas for space in my psyche,

then you don't understand anything that's happening here. So Israelis will not accept, certainly not because of some international community, which is never there to save you, no matter who you are, that this equation remains after today, after yesterday. And if you support Palestinians, and you want Hamas to win this, then either you're an idiot idiot or you're just cruel. Haviv, we will leave it there. That was quite powerful. I know it's brutal, brutal every day.

Yesterday, today, the next days will be brutal uh for you so um i i really great grateful for you taking the time uh to help us understand thanks thanks so much for having me and um and uh i i hope if if you have the time we we can get you back on because i just think your your voice as always is extremely important. And we'll keep posting whatever you're writing and be safe. Thank you. That's our show for today. If you want to keep up with Haviv Rettigur which I highly recommend you can find him on the website

formerly known as Twitter at Haviv Rettigur and of course you can also find his reporting and his analysis at Times of Israel timesofisrael.com or at Times of Israel and be sure to listen to our next episode with

Brett Stevens which we'll be posting Monday morning. Call Me Back is produced by Alam Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.