Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - ISRAEL AT WAR: The multi-front probability - with Bret Stephens

Episode Date: October 9, 2023

Bret Stephens, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for The New York Times, returns for a conversation immediately on Day III of this war. Bret came to The New York Times after a long career with The Wall Street Journal, where he was most recently deputy editorial page editor and, for 11 years, a foreign affairs columnist. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post. And prior to working in Israel, he was based in Brussels for The Wall Street Journal. Today, Bret is also the editor-in-chief of Sapir Journal. You can find the Sapir Journal here: https://sapirjournal.org/ You can find Bret's most recent column here: "Hamas' Control of Gaza Must End Now" -- https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/07/opinion/gaza-israel-hamas.html

I'm sorry, I'm usually more eloquent, but to be perfectly candid, and I think this is true of probably a lot of the people who listen to your podcast, my sense of fury as well as helplessness has kind of overwhelmed my circuits in the last 48 hours. And now I welcome back to this podcast, Brett Stevens, New York Times columnist, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, former international global affairs columnist for The Wall Street Journal, and former editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post, who lived in Israel in the early 2000s, running the Jerusalem Post there. Brett, thanks for coming on. I'm sorry about the circumstances in which we're speaking.

So, yeah. So let's start with what we know now. There's some reporting coming out which sort of confirms what we thought, which is that Iran was involved behind this invasion of Israel. What do we know, and what's your sense of what we know? The news from Hamas, the admission that they had coordinated this, and in fact gotten the permission, the green light from Iran, didn't surprise me at all. We've known for a very long time that Hamas has been, I mean, more than 20 years that Hamas has been getting arms and aid from Iran. It may be a terrorist group, but Iran's interests go beyond their parochial religious differences and seeking to destroy Israel. The admission, however, is significant in that it's essentially an invitation to war. And that's how I think we

should look at this. What has transpired so far as we speak, as horrific as it is, is I think going to be, I'm sorry to say, one front in a multi-front battle that is going to unfold, not over days or weeks, but potentially over months. And Iran, one would think, they've publicly admitted that they were involved? Yes, they have publicly admitted. And would they not... They're boasting of it. They're boasting. Boasting.

Would they not have anticipated that this could lead to a multi-front war involving them by boasting of it? I mean, it takes away any kind of veneer of, you know, speculation. No, there's no question it's an invitation. I mean, first of all, they're boasting of it because they're proud of the carnage and the murder and mayhem they inflicted. But they're boasting of it because I think that it is a way of signaling to Israel, come get us, which means that they have probably very carefully prepared a northern option in Lebanon, potentially in Syria, and maybe in other theaters. So the Iranians clearly see this as a kind of a decisive confrontation with Israel. You know, there have been occasions in the past where there have been conflagrations, particularly in the north between Israel and Hezbollah. And when the sides did not

have an interest in escalating, they very quickly brought down the level of violence. There was a kind of a deliberate, almost an understanding between the two sides. This is a, you know, a kind of, come try to get me if you're brave enough to do so. And Israel needs to be very thoughtful about how it seeks to confront Iran and how far it wishes to escalate what already is going to be as large a war as you and I have seen in our sentient lifetimes. So, Brett, let me just pick up on that particular point. Does Israel have the option on whether it fights a multi-front war? And what I mean by that is all the focus

right now seems to be on Israel taking on Hamas in Gaza and doing what it needs to do in Gaza. And then there's the question, as you've stated earlier and others have pointed to, that Iran may want a multi-front war. And what I'm hearing from you is Israel can choose whether or not it has that multi-front war. Does it have a choice? Can it say, look, we're just going to focus on Gaza and we'll deal with Iran later or we'll deal with Hezbollah later? Or is all of this going to start boiling up really quickly outside of Israel's control on the timing? Well, you know, there's the adage that in every war the enemy gets a vote. And so whether it has a choice will depend to a large extent on whether Hamas or other Palestinians in the West Bank try to start an intifada.

It will depend on whether Arab Israelis will riot as they did two and a half years ago during the last conflagration over Gaza. We're seeing skirmishes on the northern border that were started by Hezbollah. So Israel may have no choice but to engage a multi-front war. It has to be thoughtful if it doesn't have to escalate about the extent to which it chooses to do so, ultimately this is going to lead to a major confrontation with Iran. But whether it happens this month, next month, next year, or in five years, that's a harder question to answer. You know, I have been thinking about what Israel needs, and it doesn't need—it cannot gain an unconditional victory,

because that suggests unconditional surrender on the part of its enemies. But it needs, in this conflict, to gain an unequivocal victory, if you understand what I'm getting at by that. Israel surrounding the Third Army in the Sinai, the Egyptian Third Army in the Sinai in 1973, and Israeli tanks 20 miles from Damascus was an unequivocal victory, which evened the score, more than even the score for Israel in 1973, and strengthened its hand as it went ultimately from that debacle to a lasting peace with Egypt. Israel will need an unequivocal victory now if it's going to emerge from this disaster, from this crisis and tragedy in a state that isn't significantly weaker than it had been in just a few days ago. In terms of other fronts, so obviously Hezbollah is a proxy of Iran, and Iran could light up Hezbollah at any moment. When I had Haviv Retigur from the Times of Israel on my podcast the other day on the weekend,

he said that he's not so sure Hezbollah is eager to strike, that their situation, even though they have 10 times the capability that Hamas does, 10 times the rockets they have, but their situation in Lebanon is precarious. Lebanon itself is a mess, and there is enormous risk for Hezbollah getting embroiled in this. So is it, despite the rhetoric and despite a few symbolic artillery shells, you know, fired over the weekend from the north, is it your sense that Hezbollah is trigger-happy to get in the fight or is not so sure? Look, Khabib is a very bright guy, a very good analyst, and I hope he's right. But the equation in Lebanon, I think, is significantly different from where it had been 17 years ago, 16 years ago, 17, I guess, during the 2006 war, in that, I mean,

Hezbollah is now Lebanon. There aren't other, I think, significant factions within Lebanon that can stand up to Hezbollah. So how they assess their political position in Lebanon today, which is a completely failed state, is just different from where it had been in 2006, when their position was somewhat more precarious, and there were at least viable countervailing forces within the Lebanese state. Look, at the end of the day, what Hezbollah thinks doesn't matter. What matters is what their masters in Tehran think. And so that's a calculation that lives within a black box, and we'll just have to see how it turns out. And in terms of other fronts, so there's Hezbollah, there's Iran. You know, Hezbollah in the north, Iran obviously is Iran.

And then there are other fronts that are almost potentially more scary. So a third front could be Palestinians in the West Bank, and a fourth front could be Israeli Arabs living inside the Green Line, inside, you know, within Israel's 67th... Yeah, and there's an additional front I should point out, which is areas around the world where Israelis tend to congregate, vacation. So think of the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires in, what was it, 1994. They're vulnerable Israelis all over the world who are almost surely at risk or at heightened risk today. So the a spiral of anti-Israel, anti-Semitic violence is as vast as it's ever been.

Well, over the weekend, two Israelis in Egypt were attacked. That was what I was about to mention next, and that's going to be true, you know, not just in Arab states, but throughout the world. Okay. In terms of Israel's, and you wrote about this in your column over the weekend in the New York Times, which we'll post in the show notes, you talked about the concept of Israeli security, the concept around the Yom Kippur War, post-Yom Kippur War, the change in thinking about the concept of Israeli security, the security paradigm. There was another security paradigm that existed basically sometime after Hamas. So Israel

withdrew from Gaza in 2005 unilaterally, and Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, Abbas, took over, was in charge of the West Bank and Gaza. Then they were driven out by Hamas in 2006, 2007. They formally took over. Hamas took over in 2007. Can you describe what Israel's security posture was with regard to the Gaza border once Hamas took over, basically beginning 2007 till this weekend? Well, you know, the basic concept was that Hamas control in Gaza was acceptable and in some ways advantageous so long as it was contained and contained and containable. And, you know, Israeli policymakers seem to feel very sure that on the whole, it was a containable

threat that was, you know, obviously bad, but preferable to all the other alternatives for Gaza. There was no appetite in the Israeli security establishment to take Hamas out of power, much less to reoccupy the Gaza Strip after disengagement back in 2005. And there was a belief that technical solutions could effectively solve most of Israel's problems, and for many years they did. You had not just the technical solution of Iron Dome, which seemed to work almost magically until it didn't, But then the technical solution of the technology that stopped or appeared to have stopped some of the tunneling efforts, you know, it's a bad thing when states substitute technical solutions for strategic thinking. And I think that's largely what happened here. Having a terrorist statelet sworn to your destruction hard on your border is ultimately going to have serious consequences.

And I remember interviewing Benjamin Netanyahu in 2009, just after Operation Cast Lead, conducted mainly by the Olmert government. And Bibi at the time was very critical of Olmert for allowing Hamas to remain in power and for not retaking the so-called Philadelphia Corridor along the border with Egypt, which meant that the supply— Just for our listeners, the term the Philadelphia Corridor has actually nothing to do with— it was just a code name for this particular area. It's not a U.S.—

No, it's Philadelphia, not Philadelphia. It's just the six miles or whatever, however many kilometers of the Egyptian-Gazan border. And when Sharon withdrew from Gaza in 2005, he also withdrew from the corridor, which meant that there was a brisk trade in munitions and, you know, supplies taking place in underground tunnels that richly fed the Hamas's war machine. And so when I interviewed Bibi in 2009, a few years after disengagement, he was strikingly critical of that. But he allowed that to persist to the point that he was allowing the Qataris to fund Hamas to the tune of hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars every year, ensuring that Hamas could keep its war machine going

and maintain basic standards of living in Gaza, perpetuating its rule. And that was the concept of Israeli decision-makers, that Gaza was containable, that having Hamas's control in Gaza effectively divided the Palestinians into two hostile, if not warring, political camps, that Israel had no interest in retaking the Strip and being responsible for its two million-odd people. And so that's what they were going to do. And the only thing that wasn't planned for in this otherwise brilliant concept of theirs was a bulldozer through the gates and hundreds of Hamas terrorists streaming in and massacring people at will. So it's once again a reminder of how cleverness fails in the face of obviousness. In terms of the next phase, Israel has announced there will be a major operation in response to the attack, to the war

that was launched on Israel over the weekend, including, it sounds like, a major ground invasion, something like over 100,000 troops called up. Assuming Israel does have the time and space, and I want to come back to whether or not it has the time and space to do what it needs to do, but let's pause it for a moment. Let's just assume that it does. You've lived in Israel. You've been a journalist in Israel. You've also been a journalist covering lots of wars, conventional wars, insurgency wars. You obviously cover geopolitics. What is, and I know you don't have a crystal ball,

but you know Israel, and you know how shaken the Israeli population is. And shaken is different than being humiliated. Shaken is a sense of feeling vulnerable. And you know when Israelis feel vulnerable, no matter how divided they may be at any given moment with their political debates or whatnot. When the Israeli population feels vulnerable, they have a certain determination. What is that, assuming that determination persists, which I think it will, what do the next few weeks look like? Well, I think that, you know, I hate questions like this, Dan, because it's easy if you ask me what the next hundred years looks like, and then nobody remembers the answer.

Right, there's no accountability. But there's accountability. I'm caveating this, that you and I have no idea, but just, you know, you've covered the skirmishes on the Israel-Gaza border, which you talked about earlier, which is what populated most of the recent conflicts. And what I'm just trying to explain to listeners and get people to understand is this will be different. This will probably be different, much different. Well, this will be different in the sense that I think having sustained the kind of casualties they just have, Israelis will not—will accept that there will be serious serious military casualties that have to follow in pursuit of a decisive military outcome that doesn't simply result in a bunch of damaged or destroyed buildings in Gaza, but a fundamental change in the status quo there, the end of Hamas's regime, the capture and killing, probably the latter of

its entire leadership, all the efforts that can be made to rescue the hostages, but those efforts, I suspect, are going to be very complex and heartbreaking, and a willingness to take the fight wherever it presents itself. I mean, we're talking about the call-up of 300,000 reserves. That is, by any standard, certainly Israel's standard, a huge number of forces that are now being mobilized and fielded. And my sense is that they're going to be employed. And just judging from my conversations with my dear Israeli friends, and I think all my truly close friendships right now are in Israel. The mentality seems to be there will be judgment and accountability about our own failures in due time.

And right now we have a war to fight and win. And so there's a kind of a sense of very grim determination to change things very dramatically. I'm sorry, I'm usually more eloquent, but to be perfectly candid, and I think this is true of probably a lot of the people who listen to your podcast, my sense of fury as well as helplessness has kind of, you know, overwhelmed my circuits in the last 48 hours. Before I let you go, two final questions. One, we have been told that, it's my understanding, that when Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Biden spoke over the weekend, they spoke more than once, but on Saturday, at least, in the list of requests that the Prime Minister had for President Biden, one of them, and I guess the most important, was give us space and time. Give us space and time to do what we need to do. This is not going to be a quick operation. And you know, when these things

start, whether it was Lebanon in 2006, or when it was any number of wars with, you know, or skirmishes with Gaza over the last 20 years, the U.S. has Israel's back until it doesn't, right? And not in 2006, it was like 32 days, and then Bush and Condi told Israel, enough, you got to stop. And in spring of 2021, skirmish military escalation with Gaza, Biden administration had Israel's back. And then after X number of days, they said, okay, now time for diplomacy. And the most dangerous words I think right now is, now is the time for diplomacy. Because Israel is, you have explained, is not, this is not normal. This is like not just one 9-11, but many 9-11s happening in Israel. And no one after 9-11 was telling the U.S., hey, before you do anything,

it's the time for diplomacy. Yeah. Look, if I had been in the shoes of the prime minister, I would not have said, give us space and time. I would have said, we will take all the time we need to accomplish the ends we require. So it's not a moment to ask for America's diplomatic permission or diplomatic blessing. The Biden administration, by the way, the president spoke well, at least in his initial response. So did Secretary of State Blinken. But this is an existential crisis right now for Israel. And when you're in an existential crisis, you don't need anyone's permission to secure your life and sovereignty. What Israel really should be asking for right now is the kind of munitions they're going to need, particularly in the event of a wider war with Iran, larger conventional bombs,

bunker busters, the sort of stuff that the United States produces, you know, in such quality and abundance that can help the Israeli war machine accomplish, you know, decisive ends. Finally, Brett, can you—I just want to end on this question. We're going to hear two things. In addition to it's the time for diplomacy, which is inevitable, the other word we will use is proportional, that Israel's response should be proportional. People are a little more careful now about using that absurd term, but we will hear it. We've always heard it in the past. Can you explain what that means, proportional, and why Israel is held to a standard in quote-unquote

proportionality that no Western government is ever held to when confronted with a war like this? Look, it's proportionality that has, in effect, brought Israel to its current crisis, which is to say that knowing that it faced a mortal threat in Gaza, it repeatedly restrained itself to limited military operations that didn't achieve decisive results. It's like fighting cancer and saying, we're going to just get the cancer down to a more manageable size, and when it starts growing back again, we'll irradiate it, but only, you know, we won't actually remove the cancer itself. The United States did not behave in a proportionate fashion when it responded to the attacks on Pearl Harbor. We didn't say, okay, we're going to bomb

the Japanese Navy in Yokohama and therefore have a proportionate result. We endeavored to rid the world of Japanese militarism, fascism, and Nazism, and that's what we did. And that's why we look back at World War II, which, by the way, involved American military attacks, which were the essence of disproportion, like the Tokyo fire raid or the bombing of Dresden, or not to mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And we look back on it as the good war, because we were fighting an evil enemy, and we were fighting for our safety and our existence. And I think Israel should look at it in the same way. Proportionality sounds like a morally and legally reasonable doctrine, but the result is not just perverse, the result is that it guarantees future conflict and future tragedies.

So I hope that that is a word that the Israelis, and ideally Americans too, jettison. By that standard, the United States should have, in 1944, stopped at the edges of the old German borders once French and Belgian and Dutch sovereignty had been restored. It's just absolutely absurd to conduct war by those terms. have sort of been emboldened to do what they've done, because they always feel that their adversaries and enemies are going to abide by a set of rules and concepts of proportion which ultimately serve their interests but not ours. Okay, Brett, we will leave it there. Thank you, as always, for your insights and actually the rawness of some of your reactions, which I totally sympathize with and share. So I hope to have you back on. Sadly, at least this crisis is not going away anytime soon. And your voice is

extremely important. So I'm grateful. Okay, Dan, sorry that we have to have a conversation on a subject like this. But here we are. Yeah. Thank you.