Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Israel’s escalating internal debates — with Haviv Rettig Gur

Episode Date: January 22, 2024

In today’s weekly check-in with Haviv Rettig Gur from the Times of Israel, we discuss intensifying debates within Israel over the leadership of the government, how to reconcile seemingly irreconcilable war aims as Israel transitions to a new phase in the war, is there an actual disagreement on concrete policy objectives between different members of the War Council, and what to make of the growing protest movement. If you are in London on Monday, January 22, Haviv and Dan will be in conversation at 7:30 pm at JW3. Details here: https://www.jw3.org.uk/genius-israel#

The trust is evaporating. The reason that that is evaporating is that Netanyahu, in one sense or another, since October 7th, has never stopped campaigning next three weeks. He is now launching a campaign against a Palestinian state. No matter the interests of the Israeli country in wartime, no matter what those soldiers are doing in Gaza, no matter who's suffering, no matter how many tens of thousands of Israeli families are living in hotels, he's launching it because that is his election campaign to make sure that the far right doesn't abandon him. The 100,000 people who came to the hostage family protest in Tel Aviv are people smelling this campaign and saying, wait, on our backs in wartime, he's going to try to survive by repolarizing us all

by pretending that this is a fight about a Palestinian state. And so the politics are back. And that, I think, is dangerous and cause for concern and frustration. Our elites are failing us, even as our soldiers are at the front, even as our society is as strong as any society has ever been in wartime. It's Sunday, January 21st at 6 p.m. in New York City. It's 1 a.m. on Monday, January 23rd in Israel. Today we have our weekly check-in with Haviv Retikur from the Times of Israel. In the past week, there has been growing debate within Israel,

a debate about what it means to actually meet the war's objectives, that is eradicating Hamas, its leadership and its fighters, destroying its military infrastructure that has been built above ground, but mostly underground over the last couple of decades, and securing Israel's border with Gaza, while also returning all of the Israeli hostages. This debate is occurring as it appears that the IDF is zeroing in on Hamas's leadership inside Gaza. But so the assumption goes, some subset of the Israeli hostages are being used by Hamas to protect Hamas's leadership from the IDF. This internal debate is playing out in protests in Tel Aviv and in public statements by IDF generals and even by a member of the Israeli government's war council in an on-the-record

television interview. I wanted to better understand what the debate was about, as there still seems to be no real divide within and across Israel's political spectrum on the actual war objectives and on Israel's commitment to the war strategy. The IDF also just wrapped up a transition to a new phase of warfighting, and I wanted Haviv to explain the change, what is different now and going forward relative to what we have seen since October 7th. Before the conversation with Haviv, a few housekeeping notes. If you are in London, England, on Monday night, Haviv and I are having a live conversation co-sponsored by the Jewish

Chronicle and Stand with Israel at the JW3 at 7.30 p.m. And to purchase tickets, you can do so at jw3.org.uk. Also, if you have not listened yet, I hope you will listen to our last two episodes of this podcast. Most recently, my conversation with John Podhoretz on the end of A Jewish Golden Age. That's the title of the episode. John, in that conversation, really does connect the dots of what has been happening in the U.S. over the past two decades that led to this insane post-October 7th backlash against the Jews. It has implications for what we as Jews in the United States and in other parts of the diaspora do going forward. And then the episode before that is my conversation with Sherry Mendez. That conversation is titled On Sexual Violence

and Silence. Sherry is an IDF reservist in the Army unit that prepares the bodies of female IDF soldiers through all the steps in preparation for burial. And in that capacity, Sherry has seen firsthand the evidence of Hamas's orchestrated campaign of sexual violence on October 7th, and she describes what she has seen and her observations about Israeli society more broadly during this time are vital. So I hope you will listen to both conversations. They are important for very different reasons. Finally, many of you have told us how meaningful this podcast is to you. Some of you have rated and written reviews at Apple Podcasts, which has had the effect of these conversations reaching more and more listeners around the world.

So your ratings and reviews are having a real impact. When people search for podcast content about Israel, there is a range of options and a range of views that can be directed to them. You can only imagine. But the odds of this content being recommended to them goes up when we have more and more comments and ratings. So weighing in on your reactions to individual episodes or to the podcast more generally help a lot, making sure more and more people see this. For those of you who feel that it's important that these conversations are heard by more and more people, including people with different views who are trying to learn, we ask that you join in providing a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

Now on to my conversation with Haviv Retik-Gur. This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome back to this podcast from Jerusalem, my friend Haviv Retik-Gur. Haviv, we will be together in London for an event. So we get to have this conversation live. I look forward to it. Yeah, it's going to be a lot of fun. I think we're doing it to plug your wonderful new book.

And this is not a paid spot. Dan did not tell me to say that. It was a great book. This is true. This is true. We will not just be talking about my book, but I appreciate that. We will also be talking about your take on what's happening in Israel and your trenchant analysis of events there, which are fast moving and even will probably new developments by the time we're together. But I do want to talk about some of

those developments now. And the first thing I wanted to talk to you about is what is actually happening in the war effort? It's a little confusing to follow from here. The war seems to be de-escalating relative to what it was in the immediate months after October 7th. Thousands of IDF reservists have been discharged, and there is this internal debate in Israel about whether or not the objective of actually destroying Hamas by military means alone is achievable. Apparently, Defense Minister Gallant has, for the first time, raised that question or raised that tension. The U.S. is advancing a day-after vision, a regional treaty, apparently, that would include Saudi Arabia involved in rebuilding of Gaza and a revamped PA and a path to a two-state solution.

I'm skeptical of how all that will shake out. And then there's a debate about the hostages and a perhaps reorientation, at least with some within the hostage families movement, about how to go about returning Israeli hostages. And there are some cracks politically in the Netanyahu government, but I don't know how real those are. So there's just a lot going on. But I think the most prominent issue we need to unpack is what is actually going on in the war effort? The short answer is I don't understand what's going on. And I don't understand in roughly the same way that most Israelis I know don't understand. In some ways, the war is proceeding exactly as planned, exactly as we've been told to expect.

I think earlier today or yesterday, the Israeli forces discovered a Palestinian Islamic Jihad missile production factory and destroyed it. There are tunnel entrances being closed down. There are gun battles in places where different elements of different organizations are attacking Israeli troops. Israeli troops are pursuing them. The war on the ground is going forward as it has been going forward really for the last month, certainly in the north. That is to say, we are in the counterinsurgency phase in large sections of Gaza. In Khan Yunis, there's still areas that are being taken.

And everything is exactly as we have discussed multiple times. Large parts of the reserves are being cycled out. They are exhausted. They've been in the 100 days. And others are still very much remain. Large elements of the paratroopers are still in Khan Yunis. And so, you know, there is a war on the ground. Just this sort of staccato of tiny reports from the front

is unchanged as far as I can tell. So just specifically, this is what I see from public reporting in the Israeli press. An entire division, Division 36, has pulled out of Gaza. Thousands of reservists have been discharged. Many Gazans have been returning to previously IDF-held territories in northern Gaza. So there does seem to be something changing. You said you were confused. What do you mean by you're confused? Well, then there's a whole nother discourse. Back home in Jerusalem, there is a debate and a politicking and a discussion among the Israeli political elites about whether the war can be won. Suddenly, out of nowhere. And what's strange about that debate is that it doesn't

seem connected to any specific event. It's not that the strategy isn't working or isn't bad. We're still in the window that we gave ourselves to try the strategy. It is entirely possible that Hamas is just too dug in under civilians to ever be removed. It is possible that Hamas, which has taken the basic guerrilla strategy of hiding behind civilians to a level of building, you know, I think Hamas's tunnel system is twice London's subway system. It's this enormous, astonishing, immense, and soldiers going in there will die because the whole thing is also booby-trapped. And so maybe if you build that, maybe if the civilian death toll is simply too great to get to you, you are immune. And if you are immune, that is now what Hezbollah is going to do and

the Houthis are going to do, and there will be no way to dislodge these groups. If you are willing to have your civilians die en masse, you are now rendered immune by that strategy. It's possible that it is simply impossible to do so. But nothing that happened between two weeks ago and today has proven that point. And so why is Eisenkot, a member of the five-man war cabinet, why are some other officials coming out and saying, I'm not sure we can actually uproot Hamas completely from Gaza? Army officials reportedly told the New York Times, the army says Army officials reportedly told the New York Times, the army says they didn't,

the New York Times says they did, I don't know what happened there. But army officials reportedly told the New York Times that we're reaching a point in the fighting where we have to choose, essentially choose between hostage rescue and demolishing Hamas. So are we at that pivot point?

That's a fascinating question, which suggests that maybe in order to really finish Hamas in Gaza, top of the Hamas regime in Gaza, which is the official war goal is the regime, maybe we need to be willing to have the hostages killed in the final battle in Khan Yunis, which we all expect is going to be the battle where Hamas is actually up against the wall, actually fighting for its survival. That's a discussion happening among the Israelis now that isn't connected to my knowledge and understanding to what's actually happening on the ground in Gaza. To your earlier point, I just want to put a finer point on this,

comparing it to the London Underground, to the tube system. The London Underground system, I just saw this stat the other day, is 250 miles long, which means it is only 55 to 70 percent, somewhere in that range, the length of the network of military tunnels Hamas built under Gaza, which has shafts poking out in homes and schools and mosques and hospitals and UN facilities. So the underground tube system, quote unquote, although it serves a military function, in Gaza is considerably larger than the underground tube system in London. Right. Pulling a guerrilla group out of a system like that is a challenge never

before faced in the history of warfare. And so we are at the cutting edge of warfare, which you often are. Often warfare changes to new horizons as you have the ability to defeat them one way, so they're fighting a different way. But we are at that cutting edge, and we are testing whether it is also possible. Anyway, that is an important thing to just lay out there. There is a thing that we are testing now, and it is possible that we don't understand what it will take, and that Hamas really is willing to have all of Gaza demolished, and we are not willing, not willing internally, not willing because of international pressure, which we feel, and Hamas doesn't. There are these factors and questions. Now the question is, is that what's making the Israeli officials who are speaking to the press lately start to say Hamas can't be rooted out?

What exactly is going on there? I think that's a fascinating question. I think it's worth talking about. To just be clear, so the understanding is that the leadership of Hamas is using the hostages for different reasons, but the leadership, among other things, is using the hostages to, as almost like a defense mechanism, a fort around the most senior leadership of Hamas. We know from hostages that were released, they met Yehia Sinwar early after October 7th because there were hostages in close proximity to him. And Hamas's strategy all along was, as long as we've got these hostages as a human shield, as human shields around us, the IDF will not take us out. And that is the crux of what the IDF is wrestling now, which is what these generals who spoke to the New York Times are referring to.

Right. And that really drives home a stark question. And it's a stark question at the heart of what Hamas is. Hamas' fundamental strategy, what those tunnels are. Those tunnels are all that Hamas built in Gaza in 17 years of ruling Gaza, controlling Gaza, and taxing Gaza. That's what they built out of all of that. And what that is, is forcing the Israelis into a choice of to kill Hamas, how many Palestinian civilians are you willing to kill? Because there

is no other way to get Hamas out of those tunnels. That's what those tunnels were built for, and for nothing else. They're one vast human shield experiment. And that's exactly the question Israel now faces with hostages. All of Hamas's top leadership in Gaza, because there's this understanding that the Israelis are going after them, all of them are now surrounded in ways that cannot be removed from them, that cannot be separated from these hostages with Israelis. And so now Hamas is asking the Israelis, how many of your own are you willing to kill to get us? But it's all Hamas is. This strategy is the identity of the organization. It doesn't have another strategy,

another vision for winning a war, another vision for Gaza's future. This is the strategy. And so Israel now faces this strategy with the hostages, and it has become very clear, Hamas has made it very clear, the fact that those generals were talking, assuming we can trust the report, which is not clear to me, but assuming we can trust the report, then what is happening here is that Hamas has clarified to the Israelis, this is the point where if you come after us, the hostages die. And then among the Israelis, there is a debate, and there has always been this debate, and the debate has been happening inside closed doors, in army high command. If we want to prevent future hostages from being taken, if we want to destroy the Hamas that we know will commit more October 7th as soon as they can, we have to be willing to bomb those hostages. If the hostages are what keeps Hamas

alive, there will be more hostages. Their value to Hamas has to be removed, which means Hamas has to be bombed even with those hostages. I'm not saying that's the answer. I'm saying that's the debate. So some factions within the hostage families movement or campaign, and I'm not an expert on this. I speak to a number of families who have loved ones that are being held hostage. And it goes without saying, but I'll say it anyways, one can't possibly imagine what they are going through. And I can't say I'd be doing anything different if I were in their situation. And I'd also don't want to generalize because there are different

families who have different views and some are very critical of the Israeli government and some are very you know have trust that the Israeli government is doing whatever they have to do to win the war and get the hostages back and so there's it's very hard to summarize where the hostage families community or movement is but what we do know is that their protest of the government has been gaining steam recently. There was a massive protest of 100,000 people in Tel Aviv. And then I'd say escalating rhetoric from some of the families who are basically saying, you know, you've fought this war for 100 days, it's now done. Do whatever you have to do

to get the hostages back. And by the way, because a number of reservists are now going to be coming back and reintegrating into Israeli civilian life, I do think you'll have many of those who served in reserves in Miluim who now join protest movements. I'm not saying it's going to be anything like the protest movements against the Begin government in the early going to be anything like the protest movements against the Begin government in the early stages of the early to middle stages of Israel's first Lebanon war. But there was that dynamic where soldiers would come back from fighting, take off their uniforms, and join the protests. They would even do that on weekends during reserve duty, they'd go fighting, and they come back on the weekends and join the protests. And so I think there is a

lot of frustration even among those who served in reserves who are frustrated with the government, who are now going to be reintegrating. So you could get a little bit in terms of the, could it look like the peak of the anti-judicial reform protests in 2023? I don't know, but it does feel like you're getting a little bit of a powder keg in terms of potential for hot protest activities and hot politics. I think for the first time in our shared podcast conversations, I'm going to be angry. In every other recording, I have felt profound optimism, profound unity, profound strength in Israeli society. And over the past couple of weeks, that has slowly started to be replaced by a real sense of frustration and of anger.

And it's very specific, and it's directed in very specific ways. The hostage families who are protesting now, as you said, I can't judge them. I can barely understand what they're going through. I followed one family very closely, a couple other families who I am familiar with, and the life of uncertainty is in some ways more painful, more traumatic than death, than just mourning, than just grief. And so that urgency, that's all real. I say that at the beginning. It's all real.

But what the movement to release the hostages is actually trying to say isn't at all clear. What specifically do they want the government to do? How does this government now come to Hamas and say, hey, we have no choice. The price for us politically, because there are now protests in Tel Aviv, is massively high if we don't get the hostages out. So now that you know we're going to pay any price,

what's the price? Is that the argument? If you really want to get the hostages out, you have to lower their cost. And if you're not lowering their cost, you're making it harder to hostages out, you have to lower their cost. And if you're not lowering their cost, you're making it harder to get them out, not easier, because Hamas speaks Hebrew just as well as ITF intelligence speaks Arabic. And so the families who are protesting, it isn't a careful, thoughtful, strategic kind of advocacy movement that is forming around these families. I think

that it is about trust. What those families are saying is that they, for the first hundred days, had a real sense that there was profound national unity. The sheer trust that everyone was willing to give each other, that we're really in this together, that everybody's rowing in the same direction, that would see us through. Huge trust statistics in polls on these questions for Defense Minister Gallant, for Minister Benny Gantz when he came into the government to stabilize it so that the war could be prosecuted without petty politicking. All of that you felt and the families felt, and that made it okay that we're 100 days in. The enemy is holding them hostage, not the Israeli government. And if you don't actually basic trust that the Israeli government is not politicking, that the Israeli government is genuinely running a war and not thinking about anything else,

the reason that that is evaporating is that the Israeli government is actually now politicking. And it's politicking at a high level and constantly. And I think the number one culprit, and he's not the only one, but he's the main one, and he's the one who's tilting the system back into the polarized politics that we had before October 7th, that main culprit is Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu, in one sense or another, since October 7th, has never stopped campaigning. Journalists tried again

and again and again, first of all, to interview him. He wouldn't give interviews to Israeli journalists who weren't flattering of him, right, who weren't Channel 14, who weren't journalists who he knew well. He went on American television shows and not on Israeli television shows. And when he did give some interviews, journalists asked him, will you take responsibility for what happened under your watch? And he refused flatly, repeatedly, time and again. He has never said the words, I take responsibility for what happened. And he's never said those words because he doesn't want that seven second soundbite appearing in any of his opposition campaign videos in the next election campaign. But what's important to understand about that is he's the only one. The entire command hierarchy

on October 7th, the defense minister, the chief of staff of the army, the head of the Shabak, the commander of Southern Command, brigade commanders, division commanders. I have seen a captain, 26 years old, he looked about on television say, this was my fault. Everybody up and down the chain of command took responsibility except for Benjamin Netanyahu. He never, not for one minute on the day of the massacre, when he was calling around asking, is this really happening? What exactly is happening? He was completely confused, completely unaware of what was going on, and did not manage the government that first day. Civil society stepped in since then to take care of these families of victims and hostages. But the government has taken weeks

and weeks and weeks just to get around to taking care of the people in the most basic level. That government, led by Netanyahu, has never, ever stopped campaigning. Not for a minute. I want to suggest, I'm going to, you know, this rant has now earned me, cost me a few friends, maybe. That's okay. I want to suggest that what is happening now in Israeli society and Israeli public debate, the hostage protests, Netanyahu's fight with the Americans about whether or not there's going to be a Palestinian state as though there is any sense in which that is anywhere near a near horizon as though fighting with the Americans now while they're still supplying the weapons we need to

fight while the Biden administration still holds the door open against pressure from his left while the world is still watching and we are arguing that we have to get rid of Hamas, and that will bring a better day for Palestinians, not just for Israelis, to now have a fight in which he declares time and again and time and again that we are not okay and will never be okay with any Palestinian state, that that's a political campaign. About a month ago, Netanyahu got in a room with members of Knesset, of his Likud faction, and he launched his campaign, his re-election campaign, for the election that will inevitably come after the war.

That campaign says, after the war, the Americans are going to come to us and they're going to say, we expended tremendous political capital for you, now we want payback. And payback is our ability to go back to our base, the Democratic Party, and say, this all helped the Palestinians in the long term. We had to get rid of it is everything that he is doing on television at every television appearance. It is this campaign. the judicial reform, he has been shedding voters to the center, from the center-right of the Likud party. And on October 7th, he began shedding voters to the far-right parties. The far-right parties have been saying, look, Netanyahu's policy, this was Netanyahu's policy that just blew up in our faces. Containment, deterrence, time is on our side, we can have the Qataris fund them massively, they can build those tunnels till the end of time. It doesn't matter.

Everything's going to be okay. We just contain them, and they're deterred by our firepower. That's Netanyahu. That's the essence of Netanyahu's policy toward Gaza for at least 12 years. There's no difference, the far right is saying. Parties, just to be clear, political parties to the right of Likud that are part of Netanyahu's government, that they are now publicly saying that the failure of October 7th was not us, quote unquote, I'm paraphrasing here, right-wing

parties to the right of Netanyahu, even though we're serving in his government, it was Netanyahu's policy. So they are, you're saying there's, you're starting to see some space between them and Netanyahu as it relates specifically to the failure of October 7th. Exactly. Bitzalah Smoltrich's Religious Zionism Party and Itamar Ben-Gvir's Otzma Yudit Party have been saying this concept was Netanyahu's concept. And just for our listeners, Smoltrich is the Minister of Finance, Ben-Gvir is Minister of Internal Security.

What's his exact ministry? Basically the Ministry of Police. Ministry of Police. So Smoltrich and Ben-Gvir, who lead small factions within Netanyahu's government, but ultimately were key to the formation of Netanyahu's government, who are extremely to the right of Netanyahu, they are now criticizing him publicly. position because of this perfect pincer that is happening, that he's in a vice, he's in a political vice. He won the election with slightly less than the popular vote. He won by the skin of his teeth because left-wing parties ran in a tactically bad way. And he then runs this government that proposes a version of judicial reform. Judicial reform itself is pretty popular in the Israeli public or was on January 2023,

but his government proposed a version so radical that it lost huge numbers of the public, including his own voters. And so he sheds votes leftward. And then on October 7th, he begins to shed votes rightward. Votes he can't afford to shed. If he loses a single one of those factions, even the furthest of furthest right parties in Israeli politics, there is nobody to the right the furthest of furthest right parties in Israeli politics. There is nobody to the right of Itamar Ben-Gvir in Israeli politics. There's simply no humans beyond Itamar Ben-Gvir in Israeli politics. If Itamar Ben-Gvir leaves his government, his

government falls. And so he has no room to maneuver here. He is in this vice losing to both ends, and he entered October 7th with a trust deficit because of judicial reform, again, including among significant, unlosable parts of his own constituency. And now he has, that's why he essentially has been keeping his head down since October 7th. On October 8th, he made the decision, I don't survive this if I don't just wait out the anger and bring back the polarizing politics of the judicial reform. Because if all of Israel is united, I'm not a unifier. I don't know how to win an election that's about national unity.

Then Gantz wins. And so he now has been launching this campaign against a Palestinian state. Not because there is any danger that somebody is going to figure out how to build a Palestinian state in the next three weeks. Not because there's any danger that the Biden administration is going to manage to find a Palestinian political solution that can actually produce a Palestinian state internally to the Palestinians, irrespective of what Israel wants or doesn't want. Before you even factor Israel in, the Palestinians can't build this thing in the foreseeable future. He is now launching a campaign against a Palestinian state. No matter the interests of the Israeli country in wartime, no matter what those soldiers are doing in Gaza, no matter who's suffering, no matter how many tens of thousands of Israeli

families are living in hotels, he's launching it because that is his election campaign to make sure that the far right doesn't abandon him. His argument is, hey, far right parties, you blame me for October 7, that's fine. But if you leave me in the lurch on election day, you should know Gantz is going to win, Biden is going to demand a Palestinian state, and Gantz is going to give it to him. So you will have an ideological catastrophe if you don't stick to me. And that's what we're seeing. That has created the blowback among the hostage families. Absolutely, it's not 100% authentic. It's 10,000% authentic.

But there aren't 100,000 people in the hostage families. The 100,000 people who came to the hostage family protest in Tel Aviv are people smelling this campaign and saying, wait, on our backs in wartime, he's going to try to survive by repolarizing us all by pretending that this is a fight about a Palestinian state. And so the politics are back. The polarized politics are back. And that, I think, is dangerous and cause for concern and frustration. Our elites are failing us, even as our soldiers are at the front, even as our society is as strong as any society has ever been in wartime. Haviv, there's a lot you said in there, and I want to unpack a few things. First of all, I think it's important for our listeners to understand that even though there is this frustration with Netanyahu for the reasons you're articulating, it does not necessarily translate into broad public support for a

strategy in this war or a desired policy outcome in how Israel deals with Palestinians, Hamas, and Gaza that is different than this government is pursuing. So I'll just, there are so many, there's so much polling on this, I'll pull up one poll that Jonathan Shanzer from FTD recently cited, which I'll put in the show notes. 49% of Israelis want to keep fighting while negotiating for hostage release. 39% want to keep fighting and crush Hamas. 11% want to stop the war to negotiate for the hostages. 1% have no opinion. The reason I mentioned Shanzer is because he commented on social media that the 1% that have no opinion makes no sense because he's never met an Israeli with no opinion. But be that as it may, what's striking about this is-

That is extremely true. What's striking about this though is the 49% want to keep fighting while negotiating, okay. 39% want to keep fighting and crush Hamas with no preference for negotiating for hostages. 11% want to stop the war to negotiate for hostages. So approximately one in 10 Israelis surveyed here are for stopping the war, which means close to 90% want to keep fighting while trying to keep channels open for hostage negotiations. That's basically the government's policy. So even though you're articulating this breakdown in trust and fierce frustration with Netanyahu, I think it's important for people to understand you can't wrap a policy outcome or strategy around that frustration. Even those who are frustrated

with Netanyahu are not advocating for a change in policy. Yeah, I'll say more than that. There is no policy difference between Netanyahu and Gantz. Gantz doesn't think that there's a Palestinian state available now. And Netanyahu has in the past already said a Palestinian... What even are we saying about a Palestinian state? We've had this fascinating Israeli right-wing discourse about, yes, Palestinians say no Palestinian state. but then you say to Israeli right-wing politicians who have campaigned against Palestinian statehood, okay, so who runs the sewage and who runs the schools in Ramallah? And their answer is, well, Palestinian autonomy. Oh, and does it have taxation powers and can it run itself or do we need to run them? No, no, they can run themselves. So what is an autonomy? Well, it's a state minus. Well,

once you actually get into the details, the idea that Israel should govern the what is an autonomy? Well, it's a state minus. Well, once you actually get into the details, the idea that Israel should govern the Palestinians is an idea right-wingers don't want either. And so this whole debate about as if we're having a debate now between Netanyahu and the fake pretense that there is distance between the Israeli government and the Biden administration, the pretense that we're seriously having a discussion about Palestinian statehood now. Who are we having it with? The Saudis are saying, we want to triple down on normalization, but there has to be a path to statehood. They're not saying state, they're saying a path to statehood. A path to statehood was Netanyahu's own stated policy for a decade. Right, which could be the Palestinian flag, you know, the bells and

whistles of statehood, but it doesn't actually mean, it doesn't mean that the Palestinian sovereign authority is going to be responsible for security on the Israeli-Gaza border and the Israeli and the Gazan-Egyptian border. We're going to dedicate a whole episode to the discussion about Saudi normalization and what they're actually pushing for. It's worthy of its own conversation. We'll do that later. But the idea that a path to statehood means a real sovereign Palestinian state is A, not accurate, B, as a policy objective that

is realistic is preposterous, anytime in the near or medium term. Yeah. I think, Dan, it's also important to say ordinary people don't think in these coded terms of elites. What does an ordinary Israeli want? They don't want to rule the Palestinians. They want separation. They don't want responsibility. They don't want terrorism and war. They don't want any of what's happening. And so if you say to them, is it a Palestinian state? They'll say to you, well, is it safe, right? Are you building some polity that Hamas will take over and try to murder my children from that polity? If you are, I oppose it. If you're not, maybe it's a good idea. I don't actually want to rule them. I certainly don't want them to attack me. And so I want that separation. Ordinary Israelis are neither in nor out of the Palestinian statehood camp. The idea that in some kind of policy prescription, in some way

of articulating that policy prescription in Washington, that's what we're fighting over, is profoundly silly, I think. It is not the reality on the ground. It is a manufactured fight for domestic politics. This is something Kissinger once said about Israel. Israel has no foreign policy, only domestic politics. Its domestic politics sometimes masquerades as foreign policy, but here in wartime, it's terribly damaging. What I think we're seeing in Israel, and what I think those generals, not generals, but I think people like Eisenkot are doing when they're talking about Hamas can't be absolutely destroyed, says a member of the war cabinet in a television interview. What those generals are saying, we have to make that choice to the New York Times. Why would

generals be making this point to the New York Times? What I think Netanyahu is doing with the Palestinian statehood, and what I think the hostage campaign, not the families themselves, but the campaign around them, is that people are finding new languages to engage in the old politics. You can't go back to the old politics and call the leftists traitors. You can't call the leftists traitors because they're about 45% of the fighting forces in Gaza right now. So you really have to find a different way to talk about how evil and terrible they are and how much they're going to destroy the country without saying it out loud. And you

can't call Netanyahu or the ministers propping up his government for stability in wartime like guns, traitors with a criminal who's indicted on charges of breach of trust and bribery and all that, which is how the left talked about Netanyahu before October 7th. So you talk about it through hostages. It is people using the trauma of the moment to bring back in full force the old polarized politics. Netanyahu is thrilling to this, eager for it. He has intentionally started to do it. And Likud's Twitter army is back in full force. Channel 14, which supports Netanyahu profoundly, it's this very right wing, really modeled almost exactly on Fox News in that way, as a political cable news system. They have begun to talk about

hostage families. There was a very popular anchor there who talked about how the hostage families and their campaign is pushing us all to t'vustanut, which means in Hebrew, defeatism. What we're seeing is not a debate about the war it is not the debate about the goals it is not an israeli withdrawal from gaza it is not even israelis questioning whether hamas can be defeated what we're seeing is the old politics coming into this new moment and using the verbiage the rhetoric of this new moment because you can't talk in the old ways anymore to do the exact same thing and i want to say i I read the Hebrew University Omnibus poll, a very, very significant poll with lots and lots of questions put out last

week. They polled Israelis on January 10 to 14, so just a week ago. On November 4, Israelis were asked, how do you think the Gaza war is influencing Israeli society? 86% said it made it more united. By December 9, a month later, it was 78%, eight points lower. And on January 14, it was nine points lower, 69%. Israelis are losing faith in the unity that they felt after October 7. The politicians are doing that. We are a country with astonishing strengths at every level of society, except for our political elites, which I think is beginning to become one of our great Achilles heels going forward in this war. I would just say that even though there are these growing divides, the actual political implications are not easy to forecast because right-wing governments in Israel don't fall because of moderate to left-wing factions that may exist in the government. They

fall when the hard right breaks from the government. And even though, as you said, that Ben-Gurion and Smoltrich are squeezing Netanyahu, until they actually walk from the government, that government still has 64 seats and is still intact. And I don't imagine a world in which Netanyahu is going to call for new elections. That's another path to elections in the near term. And I don't see a path to a constructive vote of no confidence. And I don't see the other way the government could fall is if there's a failure to pass a budget, but they're in the middle of a two-year budget right now. So they still got until spring of 2025. So I just want to be clear, unless someone from the right, a major player who can pull real seats from the right to bring this government down from 64 seats to somewhere below 60 seats,

I don't see the government falling. First of all, that's absolutely right. But there is another dynamic that is the reason that Netanyahu is actually frightened enough to launch this campaign. And that dynamic is in a parliamentary system generally, it's not just Israel, in a parliamentary system, a low-polling government is always more stable than a high-polling one. They don't go to the voters, and that coalition government tends to hold together for longer because they're polling poorly. Until there is a tipping point at which you only need one of these parties to say, everything's over anyway. We're not going to manage to hold it together. And the second they think that they're not going to hold it together, everybody needs to fall out looking like they're the ones who on some profound principled reason they want to campaign on are the party that broke up the coalition. So there's a, it's the glue, low polling numbers are the glue that holds together coalition government until the moment when there

is that tipping point at which point everything just cascades out of control and falls apart very, very quickly. Netanyahu was genuinely afraid, and polls tell us he's right to be afraid, that Ben-Gavir and Smotrich are looking at polls and saying, wait a second, if the right is collapsing anyway, and if Gantz is a shoo-in for prime minister anyway, then we want to be the ones who say, hey, we're the only authentic right. Netanyahu is basically a Gantz. What's the difference? He brought on us October 7th. We campaign against Netanyahu, we could grow 10 seats. And so they would launch that campaign, sit in the opposition for a year, four years,

seven years, but come back as much more central figures in right-wing politics. Ben-Gurion only made it into the Knesset because Netanyahu ran his campaign for him into the Knesset. That wouldn't be the case next time if he could pull that off. And so them starting to smell that possibility is why I think Netanyahu has launched this huge Palestinian state fight with the Biden administration to essentially tell right-wing voters, if we break up now, right, we're handing the Palestinians a state as a gift for October 7th. And so that is going to be the campaign. If Smotrich and Ben-Gur are convinced that that campaign might hold together a right-wing

coalition that could win the next election, or even has some chance to, they can't be the ones who are seen by right-wing voters as torpedoing that effort. And Netanyahu will succeed in bringing his right-wing coalition to election day, basically intact. That's the strategy right now. I understand it. I can think about it clearly. I can think about it calmly with one problem. There's a war on. My wife has two brothers fighting in Gaza at this very moment. My wife has said this week, she said to me, this is a government that is no longer making decisions on the ground in Gaza because they're too busy politicking. It's not clear to her that Netanyahu ever actually ran the war.

Galant was running the war. Was Netanyahu ever doing anything other than cooking this political moment up? And her brothers, a very good friend of hers, Mikey Levine, was killed in the 2006 war in Lebanon when the Israeli army took a village away from Hezbollah forces, and then were told to pull out, then took the village again, and then were told to pull out, and then were told to take it again. And soldiers died. And now she has two brothers in a war that she thinks is being led by indecisive politicians. Indecisive because they're focused on themselves. That's a new feeling. She didn't have that feeling three weeks ago or six weeks ago. So families with people in the war are seeing this politics and starting to worry.

Our one Achilles heel, our one weakness will be ourselves. And that's something that if we say it now, maybe we can beat back a retreat of some of these politics and keep everybody focused on the things that matter. Javier, before I let you go, I just want your reaction to what seemed like a big moment, this interview that Gadi Eisenkot, who is a part of the War Council, gave this week in Israel. He is, for our listeners, he's a former IDF chief of staff. He ran with Benny Gantz in Benny Gantz's political party in the last election. He agreed to join the War Council after October 7th. I think he has an observer role, if that's right. The key members of the War Council are Netanyahu, Gantz, and Gallant, and then Dermer and Eisenkot are observers, but he's present for all the meetings. Perhaps most notably and most tragically, he lost his son and his nephew in Gaza in this war that he has a role in supervising. So it's just very complicated, and he's a very extraordinary person. He gave this interview to Alana Dayan,

who is the anchor, the host of Uvda, which is like Israel's 60 Minutes. And he was extremely critical of the government. And it seemed like he wasn't winging it. There was something strategic to what he was doing. So what did he say in that interview? And what was its significance? Or what do you think the significance of his decision to give that interview is? I think that it was him rebelling against the politicking. Netanyahu has said repeatedly in public, the war will be prosecuted to the massive and total defeat of Hamas. It's the kind of language that we've heard in every round of fighting in Gaza from, again, Netanyahu. It bothers me to be talking like this,

because it's important to me to be able to talk across all the divides to people who support Netanyahu. There are good reasons over the years to support Netanyahu and his governments, thoughtful policy arguments that are valid and legitimate. I think that Netanyahu has shed so much trust among the right. He has, at every round of fighting in Gaza in 2009, he promised to destroy Hamas in 2012, in 2014, in 2018. There was never a round of fighting where the rhetoric of, we're going to definitely bring them down, we're going to definitely destroy them, we're going to show them, we're going to do that. And Eisenkot, who is a man who has just lost a son in this war, watching Netanyahu pivot to politics, wants Netanyahu to come back to a serious discussion. The more overdramatic, the more pathos you hear in Netanyahu's rhetoric,

the less likely it is he is actually pushing for the thing he is pretending to be pushing for. The utter and total and complete defeat of Hamas is not what a war like this looks like. It's a long, grinding degradation of Hamas capabilities until eventually something else takes over that Hamas cannot topple from beneath the ground. That is how this kind of war works. And for a man who just lost a son and a nephew in the war and is deep in the war cabinet to watch Netanyahu leave the war cabinet and give speeches that have very little to do with the reality on the ground, because he is already deeply engaged in a political campaign, I think feels roughly how a lot of us who have blood on the line in Gaza feel. And so that is his argument.

He did not say Hamas can't be defeated. He did not say Israel can't shape Gaza to a place where Gaza cannot threaten Israel while also creating a better day after for Palestinians than anything Hamas ever promised them as it built this future for them knowingly. He did not say any of those things. He did not actually turn his back on the fundamental war goals or say the war isn't going to be won. What he said was, there are certain options available to us and not this rhetoric that's coming out of Netanyahu, because that's basically campaign rhetoric. That's how I understood what he was talking about.

Aviv, we will leave it there. Thank you as always. I will see you in London. Safe travels and to be continued. Thanks, Dan. I want to say one thing. There's a great old Israeli song, Shir HaShayara, the Song of the Caravan,

and it has this beautiful line in it. We are stronger than all of our weaknesses. This is one of our weaknesses. We're still stronger than this weakness we have. That's an important thing to say. I'm absolutely convinced about it. We just trudge forward. איך ישראל צום אחת מסליבנו היא חזקה יותר מכל חסרונותינו וגם הנגב עוד יהיה פורח

ועוד נדעת שהזקן יהיה שמח וגם הנגב עוד יהיה פורח ועוד נדעת שהזקן יהיה שמח And we'll be happy when the old man comes And from all the days of the world And with all the problems of the day Around the world, the sorrow, the difficulties and the sorrow But there is a peace to be happy, there is still hope, there is still hope That's our show for today. To keep up with Haviv Retigur, he's at Haviv Retigur on X or at Times of Israel.

Haviv and I will be at the JW3 in London on Monday night, January 22nd at 7.30 p.m. To order tickets, we will provide the link to the show notes. And please remember to rate and write reviews at Apple Podcasts on our conversations. They really do mean a lot.

Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.