Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - The 'Day After' in Gaza - with Haviv Rettig Gur

Episode Date: December 11, 2023

In today’s weekly check-in with Haviv Rettig Gur of The Times of Israel, we discuss Israel's current thinking about what a post-Hamas Gaza might look like - from a governance perspective and a security perspective. It's a topic we'll return to from time to time as the planning is fluid, but we are beginning to learn about early thinking from Israeli officials.

The Abraham Accords countries, and I include for the moment the Saudis, even though that normalization isn't a done deal yet, they desperately want, and Israel desperately wants, both sides really desperately want an alliance, and as explicit and as robust as they can make it, against the great existential threat that they both perceive in Iran. And that means an alliance also against all the proxies that Iran has built to essentially dismember the Sunni Arab world. The Abraham Accords countries would invest massively, would build Gaza, and would be trying their best as a matter of fundamental policy, as a front against Iran, to rebuild, stabilize, and essentially get the Gaza question off the table as a point of disagreement with

the Israelis, as a front against Iran, and turn Gaza into a Palestinian option that isn't the Iranian option, which isth in New York City. It's 5.30 a.m. on Monday, December 11th in Israel as Israelis get ready to start their day. Looking back at the pause in warfighting, which feels like it was many weeks ago, in fact, the end of the pause was just about a little over eight days ago, there was a sense in the midst of that pause, at least among some U.S. officials and among many in the media, that this just might be where the war begins to end. The ceasefire would be extended and extended and extended, and Israel would slow walk itself into a permanent ceasefire. Ultimately, though, Hamas broke the ceasefire, and the U.S. government supported Israel's resumption of military operations. But even with the pause, we got a preview of the

questions being asked of Israel and a preview of the pressure on Israel for its plans for Gaza for the day after the warfighting, because during the pause, there was a scenario where the end of the warfighting could be just around the corner and no longer appears to be that way. This is a question that Israel's leadership was hesitant to answer at the time. But following pressure or cajoling from the Biden administration and from the international community and scrutiny from the press, Israel has started dropping hints about what a post-Hamas Gaza might look like based on a few guiding principles. One, complete removal of Hamas. Two, demilitarization of the Gaza Strip. And three, deradicalization of the Palestinian people living in Gaza. Now, these principles are indeed vague. And as long

as the war continues, this rhetoric should be read to some degree as some form of information operations in the overall war, rather than the starting point of actual talks between Israel and other Middle East regional governments about Gaza's future. But in order to really have a day-after vision, we should define what the day-after means as a time frame. Is it literally the day after a ceasefire and the following weeks and months? Or is it the next few years? Or is it the actual long term for a real path to the end of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as distant an outcome as that may seem? And perhaps the best way to unpack this loaded

question is to do so with these three time frames, the short term, immediately after a ceasefire, the medium term, months and next few years perhaps, and then the long term, the long, long term, possibly a permanent resolution. These are issues around the day after and the evolving thinking about the day after that I want to get into today with Haviv. To be clear, it's a topic we'll be returning to from time to time on this podcast, because I said it is a fluid topic. The day after in Gaza with Haviv Retikur. This is Call Me Back. And I am pleased to welcome back to this podcast for our weekly check-in, my friend Haviv Retikur, who I've seen a lot of in the last couple days we were together in the United States. Haviv, good to see you again. Dan, good to be here. Thanks as always. I want to focus this conversation on this term that is loosely thrown around, the day after. I know you got this a lot while you were here.

What's the plan? What's Israel's plan for the day after, the day after, the day after? U.S. officials are asking that. The international community is asking that. The Arab world leaders in the Arab world are asking that question. So I just want to set the table here that for the past 23 years, really since the second intifada, Israel has adopted what was effectively a strategy of containment, which included a border wall with the West Bank to prevent or dramatically reduce the number of

terrorist attacks in Israel coming from the West Bank, a security fence with Gaza, a security collaboration with the Palestinian Authority, and a whole range of defense and geopolitical strategies designed to contain the conflict while focusing on economic prosperity. Now, this strategy or paradigm or concepia, as they called it, or concept, was shattered on October 7th. And any discussion of the day after is ostensibly a new security paradigm, meaning we're in a whole new world, right? Any discussion about what the contours of a security paradigm looks like is new. And so, Haviv, with that in mind, I'd like to hear

your thoughts, which are obviously speculative at this point in time. I think all these conversations are speculative about what happens on quote-unquote the day after, but what this new paradigm can look like. Now, in order to digest this big question, the big day after question, I think the best way to do it is to break it down into three time frames. The first is the short term, meaning the weeks or months after the war. What happens, actually, the weeks or months after Israel says, we've met our goals, the war is over. Then the medium term, which is years. And then long term, which could be thought of as the long term solution for the Israel-Palestinian conflict. But at a very high level, what do we know about

Israel's intentions for the day after Gaza? Like, what are Israeli leaders actually saying about what they're going to do after the war's objectives are met? So before answering the question, a little caveat. For Israel, the day after the war fighting is a secondary priority. It's important, but it nevertheless isn't the priority. You can fight a war to reshape a strategic environment, and then you really need to know how you're going to reshape it. But also, you can fight a different kind of war, and that is a war that you perceive to be a war of survival. And when the United States fought against

Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, the day after was important, and there were good people thinking about it. And the American answer ultimately created the period of greatest peace and prosperity for the world that the world had ever seen. But nevertheless, the critical priority was ending the existential threat of Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. Israel believes itself to be not in a war of choice, where knowing the outcome is critical, but in fact in an existential war of defense. It sees not just Hamas, it sees all of the Iranian proxies surrounding it as a noose that has developed around it. So that's first of all. The Israelis are thinking about the day after, there's people doing that thinking, but the first priority is removing the existential threat.

And now to the actual question you asked. The best, I think, explication I have heard was Defense Minister Yoav Galant. Galant gave a talk to some Israeli soldiers. And he said there are three stages to the strategy. The first stage is we topple the Hamas organization. We destroy its military and its governing capabilities. The second is demilitarization of Gaza, which means essentially destroying Hamas's infrastructure, Hamas's organizational capacity. Some of that organizational capacity is civilian, some significant part of it.

And so either you change the people running that civilian infrastructure, or you destroy some of it, if it's destroyable, if it's not, you know, necessary. That, I think, includes, I mean, what Gallant said was that that includes creating a situation in Gaza in which, as he put it, there's no threat from Gaza to Israel. And it includes complete freedom of operation. That's a quote from him in Gaza. So that's the demilitarization element. That also includes a counterinsurgency, presumably. After Israel destroys the Hamas regime, there will probably be some significant period of insurgency, and that counterinsurgency will be part of that second stage. It will, he said, take longer than the first. And then finally,

de-radicalization. De-radicalization is removing Hamas as a political force in Gazan politics, in Gazan discourse. This is a stage that even though Galant talked about it, it's not at all clear exactly how Israel does that. It's not clear to me, at least, that Israel is capable of doing that, that the outsider coming in is capable of doing that. But in as much as Israel is thinking of the day after, those three stages are the Israeli thinking. I just want to stay on this point for a moment, because I hear it all the time. You can eliminate Hamas, but you cannot eliminate an idea. And the criticism against Israel is, you have no plan to extinguish this idea that clearly has resonance with some segment of the Palestinian people. And so even if you

eliminate Hamas for this generation, out of the rubble of this war, there will be a new generation for whom the idea of Hamas, or what is basically the Palestinian version of Muslim brotherhood, will have resonance. And you, Israel, have no plan for that. And my response to that is, you're right. The point is, in any of these wars, whether it was America's, the Allies' war against Nazi Germany, whether it was America's war and the West's war against the Soviets during the Cold War, the Cold War, whether it was the war against Imperial Japan, whether it was the war against ISIS, whether it was the war against Al-Qaeda, you never can fully extinguish an idea 100%.

But by eliminating the infrastructure and the enforcement mechanisms of regimes, it makes it harder for the idea to pose a real threat. You always have to be on guard and be mindful that the idea could catch fire again. But it's a lot less likely to catch fire if that idea is not backed up and enforced by large numbers of armed people, armed men, with funding, and with a government. I think that's, first of all, I think that's absolutely true. It's not just true. It's what Palestinians tell us. We have polls, wonderful polls, really reliable polls, from October 6th, the day before the massacre, the Arab barometer poll, which was

conducted by Palestinian pollsters, that showed that Gazans hate Hamas. They think Hamas has robbed them dry. They see themselves as human shields of the Hamas regime. They think of Hamas as essentially a kind of tyrannical movement. When I say they, obviously there's some significant support for Hamas in Gaza, but a some significant support for Hamas in Gaza, but a majority do not support Hamas in Gaza. A majority do not today support Hamas in Gaza. Now, there's a big debate, you know, how responsible are Palestinian civilians? They were elected back in the day, you know, what is it, 18 years ago? Most Gazans weren't yet born 18 years ago. So, you know, Gazans are not Hamas, and Gazans don't like Hamas. Just before the picture comes out too rosy, in these polls, the one thing that there is a majority support for among Gazans related to Hamas is Hamas's attacks against

Jewish civilians. That question in the Arab Barometer poll, if I'm remembering it right, actually asked specifically Jewish civilians. Those were the words used, and that was actually majority support. So it's not a rosy picture in which the Palestinians are just waiting for Israel to destroy Hamas. Separately from the Israel question, they despise Hamas. And so I think that the de-Hamasization of Gaza, I hope I pronounced that right, is emphatically doable. And the replacement of that with a new kind of leadership that seeks a new kind of relationship with Israel, I do think is attainable. Will we attain it? Do we have that wisdom? Does the international community or whatever other players there are in Gaza who will come into this situation, can we pull the shit together?

Is there a Gazan civil society that can step up to the plate? These are huge questions. I don't know we can talk about them. But you can remove Hamas from Gaza. Okay, so now let's talk about these different phases. I want to start with the near term, weeks, months after the warfighting stops. What do Israelis feel like they can live with in three areas I want to talk to you about? One is Hamas. So we've just said that the idea is Hamas infrastructurally as a regime is wiped out. Does that mean there are any easily identifiable Hamas sympathizers thriving or in positions of responsibility in Gaza?

Or does that literally mean like any ties to Hamas means you're gone? I mean, the way we did it, just for what it's worth, in Iraq, the criteria was the top top three levels of authority in the Ba'ath Party, you were deemed not that influential. And so even if you were sympathetic to the Ba'ath Party, maybe you weren't actually that sympathetic. You were forced to be part of the Ba'ath Party. But you didn't have much agency. It was the senior players that were the U.S. position was, you know, debathification is not going to be debathifying the lower, lower, lower non-influential players of the Ba'ath Party. How do you see that here? Right. America also learned from that was essentially America's policy in Nazi Germany.

It was modeled after denazification or the debathification policy. I think denazification was very wise, the way it was handled, because the problem was real. Like Hamas in Gaza, there was support, and there was support for the worst things the regime did. I once read, I hope it's correct, that one in eight Germans was in uniform. And, you know, 30% of Germans at one point or another voted Nazi. And so de-Nazification needed to, and it was America had to pretend like that wasn't true to set Germany on a better path. And so that was probably a very wise policy.

And if denazification had been deeper, then there would have been much more of a war on many more layers of Iraqi society. And we already did have our hands full with the war. And that was only with the top three layers removed. social welfare programs. A few tens of thousands are the fighting forces, but there are many, many other aspects and elements to Hamas in Gaza. You're not going to start mass arrests of tens of thousands of people over the long term in some ideological war in Gaza. That's just not reasonable. But you also cannot allow the ideological infrastructure to remain, even if that ideological infrastructure is religious, is mosques. If you destroy the political leadership and leave the mosques of Hamas in place, and essentially spouting what they're spouting today about the endless, never-ending religious war, and that Israel's a rebellion against God, and that there's an

anti-colonial struggle here in which the Jews can actually be removed, and if they can be removed, it is collaboration and betrayal to ever make peace with them. If that remains the majority view among the mosques in Gaza, then you have a serious problem. And so you have to be, I think, very thoughtful in how you target your efforts to de-radicalize. You can, again, even in the ideological world, the ideological religious leadership, you can target for arrest or other kinds of pressure. You can target the religious leadership that is that particular religious leadership and allow other religious leaderships to step in. It's not simple. It's not easy. It will take tremendous wisdom, clarity, a firm hand, but also another option. Israel does have to, if it wants to, carry on de-radicalization,

which I have to say, I am very skeptical that Israel knows how to do this. But just to think through as a thought experiment what it would involve, with Hamas, it also means a religious element, which it didn't mean in denazification or debathification. So it's big. With Hamas, it also means a religious element, which it didn't mean in denazification or debathification. So it's big, it's deep, it's complex. You're not going to arrest 100,000 Gazans. But maybe there's a way to target the leadership across these different elements of Hamas's organizational existence that can give you that de-radicalization over time. Just the recent polling shows that over 60%, I mean, the methodologies of these polls are tricky. You mentioned that one poll. Over 60% of Gazan Palestinians support Hamas and support the October 7th attacks, and over 80% of West Bank Palestinians support Hamas's October 7th attack.

Not necessarily Hamas, but Hamas's October 7th attacks. What's that about? When you ask them about killing Israelis, the support rises across the board. And when you ask them about other elements of their lives, that support implodes. Now, that was true before the war. I think deep down it's true now. But I think that in the middle of the then we know that it's deep and a profound shift toward Hamas by this war. And that's possible. Israel has no option to leave Hamas in power. And if that creates more Hamas in Gaza, then Israel has to take that out as well. This idea that there is no way to destroy the Hamas regime in Gaza over the long term. It's an idea, you know, thrown at Israel quite a bit in the West. There's also no way to leave Hamas in power and give Israelis security.

Hamas is not the part of Palestinian politics that would respect an Israeli withdrawal, let's say, from the West Bank. It is the part of Palestinian politics that actually undermines Western pressure on Israel for a Palestinian state, because it tells us Israelis, and it literally tells us Israelis to our faces, openly and publicly and explicitly, that everywhere we pull out of, Hamas will take over and try to kill our kids from that place. So, you know, I've had some conversations with American progressives over the past week in which I had to really

kind of try to explain that they're not actually arguing with me. They are arguing in the mental space of my psyche with the other voice that's pressuring my psyche, which is Hamas. They are having an argument with Hamas in my head. And Hamas are louder than they are. They're saying pull out or I will pressure you, and Hamas is my head. And Hamas are louder than they are. They're saying pull out or I will pressure you. And Hamas is saying anywhere you pull out of, I'm going to kill your kids from that place. They're losing to Hamas, not to Israeli, you know, resilience or anything like that.

So I hope those polls don't show a permanent Hamasization of Palestinian society. And I think Israel can do a great deal to make sure that that isn't the future. Because if it is, things won't get better for the Palestinians. How should we think about the possibility that the war fighting stops, but not all the hostages are returned? Is that an actual scenario where Israel and the United States and all the other interested parties say the war is effectively over, but all the hostages are not returned, either because some of them are not alive or Hamas doesn't have control of them or remnants of Hamas want to keep control of them or some of the other terrorist factions like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or some of these civilian, quote unquote, crime families are choosing to keep them. I mean, think of the number of years that Hamas held Gilad Shalit, where Israel just went on to function, never for a day skipping a day and thinking about how to get Gilad Shalit back, but it still took a long time. And there could be a period of time after the war fighting stops where

there's another version of that. It's a very sad question. I can't imagine a scenario in which we get them all back. I just don't think that's a reasonable expectation. We have learned over the last two months that Hamas will only trade large numbers of hostages quickly when it's pushed to the wall and desperately needs the respite to regroup. And so pushing Hamas to the wall has proven the most effective way of getting hostages out by far. We heard last week Ismail Haniyeh in Qatar say publicly, openly, that Hamas is ready for another hostage exchange on the model of the last one. Hamas is the one that ended that hostage exchange, by the way. So I hope, I have a lot of optimism that we're going to go back to that. I think Ismail Haniyeh was responding to the fact that the Israeli entry into Khan Yunus, about a month ago, you and I spoke about how the big battle, the more dramatic

battle, the pitched battle in which Hamas fights for its survival in Gaza is not Gaza City. It's going to be in the southern city of Khan Yunus. And we're now deep into the Khan Yunus battle, and it's going terribly for Hamas. There are entire battalions of Hamas, or at least companies, that are surrendering to the Israelis. And I don't think they're surrendering because they lack courage. I don't think it's cowardice. Hamas have proven courageous fighters on the ground. I think it's that, well, what they've told interrogators since they were arrested was that they have no orders.

They've lost all contact with headquarters, with the leadership. Israel has been able to disrupt command and control in ways that prevented Hamas from mounting any serious offensive in Gaza so far. And so they're surrendering because they don't know what to do. They don't know the situation on the ground as the Israelis surround them with much superior forces. They're losing men 10 to 1 in engagements with Israel. Nobody's telling them, you know, where to go, how to withdraw men ten to one in engagements with Israel, nobody's telling them, you know, where to go, how to withdraw, when to attack, and so they're starting to surrender. That pressure led Ismail Haniya over the past few days to

come out and say, we hope and expect for another hostage exchange. So the best we can do is prosecute the war as best we can and tell Hamas that it can buy time, it can buy respite, it can buy escape for its leaders. It can't buy from us with the hostages and end to the war. We don't leave that threat intact. Okay. So, and then my last question in the short-term scenario, or the near-term scenario, after the fighting stops, are there any governing authorities, are there any Palestinian governing authorities inside Gaza that Israel could work with or that Israel could help establish? You mean including the counterinsurgency stage?

Yes. When the sort of fast kinetic war ends, let's say in a month, hopefully, if things don't go as well as we hope, two months. When that stage ends, we go to a counterinsurgency. That counterinsurgency will take longer. It will be difficult. It will be less bloody. It will be less enormous. It will be less enormous. But it won't be easy. After that counterinsurgency, then we're looking at the beginning of a search, I think a very frantic even search.

The world will be watching. The political costs for Israel will be rising just because Hamas is gone. And now that Hamas is gone, Israel has to prove that its intentions are not what, for example, the left of the Democratic Party suspects they are, that they're not what the pro-Hamas protests in some places in Europe have claimed they are. And so there will be this pressure, and Israel will have to face a choice, broadly speaking, of which direction to go in. You know, we can talk about the choices. I don't want to predict what will happen, but I can say some things about what Israel prefers to happen.

I take this from the Israeli analyst Michael Milstein, who teaches at Reichman University and from whom I and many others have learned a lot over the last few months, but also a few years. Who's become a very well-known, I mean, I guess he was already well-known, but doubly so well-known figure in Israel because he was one of the few analysts who apparently, before October 7th, was predicting that the security paradigm that Israel was living with or working with with regard to Gaza was not going to hold up, that Gaza was going to explode and there was going to be some kind of attack. And the intense militarization of Hamas was going to be not only activated, but it was going to be activated in some kind of war that Israel experienced.

And Dr. Milstein was a military analyst of Palestinian society, but also of Palestinian terror groups and Palestinian politics. He recently wrote a book about the young generation of Palestinians who are in some ways more conservative, becoming more religious, in other ways becoming more liberal. Gender roles are a little bit breaking down. They're more sort of attuned to the social media landscape. He's a very important Israeli analyst that a lot of Israelis are learning from, and a lot of what he writes is also translated into English. So I do recommend learning from him like the rest of us are. He has suggested four options for Israel the day after. And two of them are terrible options, and two of them are various degrees of

better than the terrible options. The first option is direct control of Gaza. Israel has, you know, fought Hamas, destroyed Hamas's regime, removed Hamas, successfully waged a counterinsurgency, let's imagine that's where we are, then what does it do? It could take over direct control, but it's direct control of millions of civilians. It is becoming not just their sort of overarching government, it's becoming their municipality. The Israeli army has to suddenly supply water and electricity and sewage, you know, and everything that UNRWA provides, everything that the Hamas government should have provided, but didn't because of the nature of Hamas. President Biden has already been asked about that option and has called it, quote, a big mistake. I think that that's a view shared by everyone I know in Israel.

I have not heard an Israeli advocate essentially to return to the immediate aftermath of the 1967 war, where Israel really is in direct control. That is not good for Israel, not good for Israel internationally, but more importantly, it's not a successful way to guarantee a safer Gaza going forward and a happier Gaza going forward, which is part of a safer Gazan border for Israel. The second option is leaving a vacuum. Israel destroys Hamas, and then Israel pulls out, the thinking being Israel doesn't know how to fix Gaza, so why would it stick around and try and incur all those costs? The immediate costs to pulling out are disastrous, potentially. There is ISIS in the Sinai Peninsula, and it could move in very quickly. There are both ISIS elements,

small ones, but they do exist in Gaza. But there's also Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, which Hamas has allowed to exist in order to have a second group that isn't Hamas that can launch rockets at Israel, but still give Hamas plausible deniability. Islamic Jihad takes orders directly from Iran, and there could be a takeover of the insurgency by those kinds of groups with basically an infinite money supply from Iran. If you leave Gaza, Gaza probably does not transform itself into a Singapore. It's probably taken over by elements worse from Israel's perspective than Hamas. It would look more like Syria. Which, by the way, was our experience in Iraq. I mean, in 2003, 2004, there were big internal debates in the Pentagon, and many in the Pentagon's view was our job was to decapitate the regime. Saddam and his sons and the senior leadership of the

regime and the Ba'ath Party are gone. Our work is done. And let's have a very light footprint and let's disappear and let the Iraqis, let's let the Iraqis figure out their own politics and figure out basically their own security. And that created a massive vacuum where a bunch of bad political actors and extremist groups moved in. I mean, Zarqawi, who was the leader ultimately of al-Qaeda in Iraq and other extremists like him and other former members of the Ba'ath Party, seized the moment. So a vacuum was created and a lot of bad actors filled it. Right, exactly. And, you know, Iraq is a good scenario, it's a good case, because maybe because America was there to move in afterwards and strengthen Iraqi governance

and things like that. But it could turn into Somalia very easily. And so leaving a vacuum is, you know, the second disastrous option. The third option is the option that apparently is preferred by the American administration, which is the option that apparently is preferred by the American administration, which is the Palestinian Authority. It essentially takes us back to 2007 before Hamas's takeover. The problem here, there are two problems. One is Palestinian and the other is Israeli. The Palestinian problem with the Palestinians taking control of Gaza is that, A, the Palestinian Authority is an incompetent organization in the middle of collapsing.

It doesn't control, even in the territories it controls in the West Bank, it has lost all control of Jenin. It has basically, has a tenuous grasp in Nablus. How could it possibly ride into Gaza on the back of an Israeli tank, utterly delegitimizing it further? It's already pulling incredibly low in terms of trust over in the West Bank. How could it possibly ride into Gaza and take over? Gaza, faces a rebellion inside Gaza against its rule because it comes on the wake of, because of this destructive Israeli war in Gaza. And that rebellion actually seeps over into the West Bank. And so instead of stabilizing Gaza, it destabilizes the West Bank in a kind of essentially Palestinian spring, which we don't have to think is going to end any better than the Arab Spring in most places where you saw these uprisings. So the PA already is walking

between the raindrops, right? It coordinates in terms of security with Israel. It favors stability. It favors economic prosperity. It does believe in these things, which Hamas does not. Hamas has shown and never cared about the specific condition of Gazans. It essentially constructed Gaza as it exists today to face the destruction that this war is wreaking as a protective measure to keep Hamas alive. So the PA hasn't done that, doesn't do that. Now, that's a very low bar for a better regime, but it is a difference. So the PA, you know, that's the Palestinian problem. Can it? And would it actually stabilize rather than just destabilize it further?

There's also an Israeli problem. Benjamin Netanyahu has said the PA won't take over Gaza as long as I'm prime minister. And that's become the start of his reelection campaign. Keywords, as long as I'm prime minister. So all you Likudniks thinking about toppling me in a Likud primary, I'm going to stake my ground. I'm the only leader that will make sure the PA does not take over Gaza. So I'm the only one who can stand up to the Americans under that pressure in the international community. And that is my political agenda, governing agenda. And therefore, the right wing can't abandon me, etc. So, you know, can the PA move in in

Palestinian terms? Can the PA move in in Israeli political terms? And then there's a fourth option is a new local leadership in Gaza. This is not as silly or overly hopeful, gumdrops and rainbows kind of a scenario, not in the Western model. It has extended families that you could call clans, and they matter in Gazan politics and in Gazan culture and society. It has institutions, it has religious networks, and there is a leadership on the ground in Gaza. Incidentally, Hamas's Gaza leadership started there. Back in the day when Ismail Haniyeh was prime minister in Gaza for the first time, he had to take a flight to Cairo to engage in some negotiations with the Egyptians. I think it was some indirect negotiations with the Israelis. I don't remember the exact scenario. But what was astonishing was that that was his very first time on an airplane. In other words, Hamas's Gaza leadership, one of the ways it sold itself to Gazans was that unlike these Fatah honchos who are all in Geneva sipping cocktails with global diplomats, we are not corrupted by that international support.

We are local. We are children of the Gazan street. That's no longer true of Hamas. Hamas are now a bunch of billionaires, very well fed in their tunnels. Even the fighters, not the billionaires, the fighters themselves are very well fed in their tunnels, while Haniyeh himself is living, or was until the start of the war, living in the four seasons in Qatar. But that social reality and that authenticity you buy by coming from the bottom, from the street still is true in Gaza. And it's possible to imagine a solution to Gaza, to governing Gaza the day after that is that. Now, if Israel announces that kind of a solution, there's been

a lot of pressure from the Biden administration, from Secretary Blinken, to say, what is your day after scenario? I don't know what to make of that from the Biden administration, because that seems to me a very silly thing to ask of Israel. Anything Israel now says is Israel's vision for the future, Israel delegitimizes in Palestinian eyes. In other words, if these local clans can become a governing structure for Gaza going forward, the last thing they need is Israel saying this was Israel's plan. It's just a terrible way to start. I don't think the Biden administration means it seriously. I think it's a way for the Biden administration to start signaling some distance from Israel for domestic politics, which I am a political analyst, I respect the needs of domestic politics. Well, it's also a way for the administration to tell,

you know, various constituencies in the US and in Europe and elsewhere, we have a plan. Don't worry, we have a plan. That doesn't involve Israel being in charge. One of the really fascinating things that has happened in the last really two weeks is that there are these quiet signals from the Saudis and from the Emiratis, sometimes not so

quiet, sometimes explicit statements by leaders, and from the Egyptians that they would be willing, they aren't just willing, they expect to be part of that kind of day after scenario. In other words, if that is the direction, that new local leadership in Gaza, that isn't saddled with the kleptocracy and the dysfunctions of the PA, that isn't Hamas, right, but is local and is indigenous and is potentially something that could stabilize Gaza going forward, then the Saudis and the Emiratis and the Egyptians are willing to step in and play a serious role in a little bit of policing. They probably don't want to get bogged down in any counterinsurgency. That part Israel would have to do, but they would be

willing to stabilize, to fund, to rebuild, to do all of that. Okay, but Haviv, let's stay on that for a minute, because let's just say, I've always thought that Israel is allergic to those kinds of peacekeeping forces. I know that you're not exactly talking about a peacekeeping force, but generally speaking, they've been allergic to international peacekeeping force. That includes any international forces, especially Arab forces, because the last thing the IDF wants to do is have to get into a coordinating situation with other governments about what Israel can intervene in and what it can fire at, and that these other governments will have other considerations

when their soldiers and their uniforms will have their lives on the line, and they would make maybe different decisions, more risk-averse decisions than Israel would be willing to make. And it's just a mess of decision-making trees for Israel every time it has to deal with a security situation and better for Israel just to have unilateral decision-making authority and just deal with it rather than having to coordinate with others. Yes, that has been the Israeli preference.

Nothing the UN forces or any international forces on Israel's borders have ever done has given Israel any reason to trust them. I remember during the Syrian civil war when Jabhat al-Nusra, which is essentially affiliated with al-Qaeda, took over the Syrian two-thirds of the Golan Heights, the United Nations forces that are on the Golan Heights to separate Israeli and Syrian forces. Essentially, I think the Irish army was there. There was a unit and the Fijian and maybe the Indian army. I don't remember exactly. They essentially ran behind the IDF line. And the IDF actually sat there protecting

the international forces that were meant to be separating Israel and Syria. And, you know, when Nasser was going to the 67 war, that was, you know, that was as true in 2018, or whenever it was, as it was in 1967, when he just said, you know, leave and the UN all left. As I think it was Abba Eben once said, the UN is an umbrella that folds in the rain, right? It's an umbrella that doesn't work when you need it. So there isn't any Israeli faith in international forces. But the Abraham Accords countries is a whole different story. Because the Abraham Accords countries, and I include for the moment the Saudis, even though that normalization isn't a done deal yet, they desperately want, and Israel desperately wants, both sides really desperately want an alliance

and as explicit and as robust as they can make it against the great existential threat that they both perceive in Iran. And that means an alliance also against all the proxies that Iran has built to essentially dismember the Sunni Arab world. And so Israel wouldn't have to trust in the well-meaning cosmopolitanism of these forces. Like if you'd have an Irish battalion in Gaza, why would the Irish soldiers patrolling Gaza fight to protect Israelis? That just wouldn't be their interest on the ground, even if in some sense it's their diplomatic interest or the UN's interest. But the Abraham Accords countries would invest massively, would build Gaza, and would be trying their best as a matter of fundamental policy, as a front against Iran, to rebuild, stabilize, and essentially get the Gaza question off the table as a point of disagreement with the Israelis, as a front

against Iran, and turn Gaza into a Palestinian option that isn't the Iranian option, which is what Hamas has become. It's become a subsuming of the Palestinian, in terms of Saudi strategy and Israeli strategy, a subsuming of Palestinian interests into the larger Iranian war. So Israel would, I think, have a much easier time trusting the basic instincts and the basic impulses of the Emiratis and Saudis and Egyptians in Gaza than it ever did, you know, international forces. So I do think there's a window there. Again, I hope I'm not overly optimistic, but everything else is a much worse option. And this is the only option that offers real long-term serious stability for Gaza. And incidentally, it's also good for, you know, there's a fear among Western progressives,

there's a fear among just people who don't like Israel very much, that if Gaza stabilizes, it somehow no longer pressures Israel. But I think it works the opposite. Maybe because I'm Israeli, I don't know. But I think that if Gaza can stabilize and not be a threat, the case against Israel in the West Bank, the case that a large part of the security regime in the West Bank is unnecessary, the case for Israeli withdrawal becomes possible. You can make the case. Today, the Israeli left, pretty deep into the far left, thinks that any inch of the West Bank that I withdraw from will be taken over by Hamas. And it thinks it because Hamas says it.

And so if you can stabilize and make Gaza safe, there is a chance even from the left. I think it's good for the right. I think it's good for the right. I think it's good for Israel generally. But I think that in terms of Israeli political consciousness, it rebuilds some of the faith in the future with the Palestinians. It makes Israelis more able to listen to a global campaign that Israelis can't hear over the screaming of Hamas. So I think it's a positive development in direction that for everybody. I don't think there's an argument against it.

Okay, so last question. What about long term? There are some who still cling to a two-state solution. Is that just an aspiration? Or is there anything realistic and practical in the path to a two-state solution for the long term? And here we're really speaking speculatively because we're still-state solution for the long term. And here we're really speaking speculatively because we're still a ways away from the near term and we're a ways away from the medium term. So the idea that we're actually talking about the long term is

kind of like science fiction. But that said, let's spend a minute on it. Okay. We know nothing about what the future holds. It's hard to see past the horizon of, you know, the counterinsurgency in Gaza, never mind three, five, ten years ahead. But if I go to fundamental things, it's hard not to notice that all the options other than two states violate a fundamental impulse of the two peoples. If Israelis and Palestinians could live together in one state and share that state, and most importantly for both, because both have deep experience with and a deep fear of vulnerability, which means they would have to live together in a state where they would together protect each other. Can you imagine? Protect each other in a larger Middle East with real profound threats.

Can you imagine a single state, a binational state, in which Israelis and Palestinians pivot from this century-long contest that the other is a mortal threat to yourself, to suddenly saying, we're in it together, and you know, like all Israelis suddenly becoming Palestinian, or all Palestinians suddenly converting to Judaism. It violates the most basic premise, which is that the Jews came together to protect themselves, and that was the moment they stopped dying. That's what Israelis know about themselves. How could Palestinians be part of that state and genuinely be a part of the story of that state? How could they suddenly love each other

and respect each other that much? So I just don't understand the one-state argument. I understand the one-state argument when it's told by some nice Jews on the Upper West Side dreaming fantasies of joyful civic democracy throughout the Middle East. But I don't understand how it would work on the ground with actual living, breathing Israelis and Palestinians. There are other options to two states in the classic sort of Clinton parameters model. There's a federation, a federation with Jordan, some kind of shared federation between an Israel and a Palestine. But again, that federation would still, if Iran comes to destroy Israel and finds that federation to not be in keeping with

its ideology, and Israel goes to war with that Iran, what is the Palestine element of that federation doing in that war? How does it work? How does it function? These are not small questions. These are not details. This is not something for lawyers to hammer out as you write some kind of constitutional process. This is the only question that matters to Israelis and Palestinians. How does the answer that you are proposing solve my problem of vulnerability in a horrifying Middle East? A Middle East where in the last 15 years there have been, you know, well over a million dead, if you count the wars in Yemen and Syria and all the things that Iran is trying to do in this region, where whole nations are gutted by proxies of far

away powers trying to destabilize and destroy each other. How in that Middle East do Jews and Palestinians, these two small nations, protect themselves? If you want to tell me that there is a solution other than the two-state solution that can offer that basic protection, which is the raison d'etre certainly of Israel, but also of a Palestine, I can't imagine what it is. No one has presented at that basic fundamental level. I don't believe in intellectualism. I don't believe in having a clever policy idea. I simply don't believe that that's how the world works. Humans live in stories. They have experiences, they have intuitions, and they have stories. And

how they function over the long term and how societies develop over the long term follows the path of these stories. I don't know an Israeli-Palestinian shared story that could facilitate this kind of polity over the long term. I'm not saying a two-state solution is available to us. I'm saying no other solution has ever even really been seriously proposed that solves the problems that need to be solved for the conflict to actually end. Is what you just said, do you think reflective of the consensus right now in Israeli society? I'm not saying it accounts for every single voice everywhere, but generally speaking, the majority consensus? What's going on right now in Israeli public opinion, and we see this in the polls. First of all, it's wartime polls that still are being taken in the shadow of October 7th, and that's probably going to be

true for a long time. But the basic point that Israelis are making in these polls in which the belief that a two-state solution is possible is extremely low. But what Israelis are reflecting in that is that the belief that a two-state solution is safe is extremely low. Because when Israelis look at Palestinian politics, they don't hear another voice other than Hamas. When Fatah speaks to Israelis, they speak in a voice that sounds an awful lot like Hamas. And so that's where things stand right now. I know how it sounds, and so I hesitate to even say it, but Palestinians have agency here. Sometimes the weaker party has the agency. The Israeli left believes that it tried the peace, the two-state bilateral peace. At Camp David in 2000, which has

been analyzed to death, and Israelis think one thing about it, and Palestinians think a different thing happened there. But basically, the Israeli left believes that it was for peace, and the Palestinians destroyed that peace with the 140 suicide bombings of the Second Intifada. The point isn't what the objective historical truth was, which is complicated and not agreed upon, and go read about that, dear listener, right? But the point is that until the Israeli left or the Israeli center or even parts of the Israeli right comes to believe that there's another option from within Palestinian politics, nothing will move. And so there has to be that foundational change in Palestinian politics that, again, doesn't accept the Israeli narrative. I don't need Palestinians to become Zionists, but I do need

Palestinians to accept that the strategy that says violence until they leave is a disaster, is never going to work. And if it's not going to work, then it's worth adopting another strategy, not because terrorism is immoral. Who cares about morality? Everybody here thinks they're protecting their kids. Morality is not a luxury we can afford. But simply because it won't work. When that becomes a Palestinian discourse toward Israelis, when Israelis hear that from Palestinians, you unlock a whole lot of potential in Israeli politics and in the Israeli mind that right now is completely sealed up. Haviv, we will leave it there.

Thank you, as always. Safe travels. And by the way, when you're back on, the next time you're back on, you'll be back in Israel. And I do want to have a big debrief with you on your perspectives on the U.S. experience and the U.S. Jewish experience because you spent a lot of time with members of the U.S. Jewish community during this war, more so than most Israeli journalists. And so your impressions will be, I think, very informative based on conversations you and I had in terms of the difference between how Israeli Jews are dealing with this and American Jews. But we will save that for next week. Until then, safe travels, my friend, and I look forward to talking to you soon. Thank you, Dan. Chanukah Sameach. Chanukah Sameach. That's our show for today. To keep up with Haviv Retik-Gur, you can find him at at Haviv Retik-Gur

on X, and you can find his written work at the Times of Israel at Times of Israel. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.