Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - The Fog of Waiting - with Haviv Rettig Gur

Episode Date: October 23, 2023

Haviv Rettig Gur returns for our weekly conversation from Israel to provide real-time reporting and analysis on the war, and invaluable historical context. We wanted to check in with Haviv on increasing questions we are hearing from within Israel and the U.S. about -- as it relates to the call-up of reserves and the deployment along Israel's southern border - why 'hurry up and wait'? In this conversation we explore the 'known knowns' of equities that Israeli decision-makers must be balancing. Haviv, who is the political analyst at The Times of Israel. He was a long time reporter for the Times of Israel. He’s also working on a book. Haviv was also a combat medic in the IDF where he served in the reserves.

It's not clear that time isn't working for our advantage. Now, to outside observers, especially diaspora Jews, every day that passes, the Palestinian campaign kicks up, you know, gear and everything feels more, right? It's more distanced from the massacre. And Gazan civilians are more in the news and everything feels like the window is closing. And that's a difference in perception, because to the Israelis, they do understand that a window is closing around the world. But they're still finding bodies, so they don't care as much. They don't feel that window closing. It is Sunday, October 22nd, 10.30 p.m. here in New York City. It is 5.30 a.m. on Monday, October 23rd in Israel. Aviv Retikur returns for our weekly conversation from Israel

to provide real-time reporting and analysis on the war and invaluable historical context. I want to check in with Haviv on increasing questions and growing worries I'm hearing from friends within Israel and also from within the United States about why, as it relates to the call-up of reserves and the deployment along Israel's southern border, why the sense of hurry up and wait? Well, there could be a number of known knowns when it comes to all the equities that Israeli decision makers must be balancing. There's the desire, if not the operational need, for a swift and devastating operation to eradicate Hamas's terrorist and weapons infrastructure, while allowing time to exhaust all possible options for the return of the hostages before the ground warfare commences.

And also at the same time trying to collect and analyze more intelligence and prepare for an operation that hopefully does not get bogged down in Gaza. And it also means getting the requisite training done for all the reservists that have been called up to a level sufficient for an operation on this scale. And also, at the same time, planning for the possibility that the northern front opens from an invasion from Hezbollah at the same time the IDF is on the ground in Gaza. Or maybe the answer is a preemptive strike at Hezbollah in the north before deploying to Gaza, as news over the last few days reported that Defense Minister

Gallant was advocating. All at the same time, they're trying to surge the supplies and supply chains necessary to support this record level of reservists being called up. These are just some of the issues that must be under consideration right now. And of course, there are plenty of known unknowns, too. Can't imagine what it must be like in that war cabinet, trying to consider all the various trade-offs on all these matters. Very, very difficult. But our weekly guest today, Haviv, does help illuminate some of these issues and considerations. He's the political analyst at the Times of Israel. He was a longtime reporter for the Times of Israel, and he's also working on a book. Haviv is also a combat medic in the IDF, where he served in the reserves,

and a large number of members of his family are deploying right now. Haviv Retikur on the fog of waiting. This is Call Me Back. And this morning, I welcome back to our conversation Haviv Retikur from the Times of Israel, senior analyst for the Times of Israel, who is a regular weekly guest during this war on our podcast. Haviv comes to us from Jerusalem. Haviv, thank you again for being here. Dan, thanks for having me.

Haviv, I want to start with what felt like, from at least over here, this—how can I characterize it?—this hurry up and wait. That is, it seems that within days of the October 7th massacre, we were told, and it appeared based on movements, that hundreds of thousands of, 360,000 to be precise, reserves being called up, soldiers being deployed on the Gaza border or just north of the Gazan border, lots of talk, war cabinet meetings, planning, and it just, the impression is the IDF has been organizing and preparing to invade Ghazan now for over two weeks. And again, from here, and just based on people I'm talking to where you are, no decisive action has been taken other than bombing from the air, which actually may be

decisive or may be more decisive than we think. What do you know about what's happening inside Gaza and around the border and with regard to Israeli war planning? I think we know a little bit about Israeli war planning at this stage. We've been watching very carefully. There's been some conversations. The defense minister, Yoav Gal Galant spoke openly about a vision for Gaza. It's going to be a long war. There are going to be stages to the war. connected to the Israeli economy, the Israeli electrical grid, the Israeli water. That'll make Gaza more independent in the medium or long term. But in the short term, of course, you know, good luck with Egypt. So those are the war goals. And if those are the war goals, the arm—

Can I just stay on that for one second? Just for sake—for purposes of explaining. So 2005, Israel unilaterally disengages from Gaza. So withdraws from Gaza, gets out of Gaza, no more occupying Gaza. And they basically tell the Gazan Palestinians, or they tell the Palestinian Authority, which at the time was in control of the West Bank and Gaza. So Mahmoud Abbas's government, he basically says, you're in charge. And then two years later, Hamas drives the Palestinian Authority out of Gaza and takes full control. So the perception is that Israel's out, but you're saying Israel is out, but Gaza was still sort of dependent to some degree. Most of the water, most of the electricity. Gaza should be independent and capable of managing itself. There's a water aquifer under Gaza.

There is an ocean and plenty of solar. And many Gazans also have generators and solar panels on their roofs because of this dependence on electricity from Israel and because of the lack of electricity. And because essentially Hamas has refused in the, what is it, 2007, so 16 years that it has ruled Gaza, has refused to invest in any of that infrastructure. The water pipes that have been laid down to bring Israeli water into Gaza, Hamas has actually lifted out of the ground and used for rockets. We know this in part from Hamas videos showing the rocket making process and bragging about it. And those are water pipes that they're destroying as they're making these rockets. Hamas has not extended the infrastructure to make use of that aquifer, has not expanded the electricity grid beyond the single

power plant that Gaza already had. And so Hamas really has invested everything, everything in this holy war, and done nothing. And it's not for a lack of funding. I mean, the Gulf, the Sunni Gulf was investing, or willing to invest, enormous amounts of resources in the development of Gaza, other Arab countries, the international community. It's not like there was a lack of... And the United States, and the European Union.

I mean, everyone wants to invest in making Gaza's life better, and they want to invest vast sums. And has wanted to for the last couple decades. Yes. And the fear of investing has been that Hamas takes all these investments and turns them to the war, to this permanent war. There is now, there's plentiful fuel in Gaza. There are many, many generators in Gaza, and there are hospitals shutting down. There's something like 30 hospitals in Gaza. That sounds like a lot. They're very small. Gaza has many hospitals that each has 50 or 60 or 70 beds each. So a hospital in Gaza is a little bit of a different kind of construct from what it is in the West. But there are these 30 capable medical institutions in Gaza, and many of them are running out of electricity.

And Hamas's bunker system, Hamas has a city underground of bunkers and tunnels that are just overflowing with fuel and generators and can last months, but the hospitals don't have access to them. And that simple sort of momentary reality is basically the Gazan economy of the last 17 years. So when you say Gallant is saying we're going to completely cut off Gaza, meaning we're done playing this stopgap role, this band-aid role, while Gaza's leadership chooses not to develop its own territory, its own critical infrastructure, and they're not using the funding that's made available to Gaza to develop its own critical infrastructure, basically essential services, electricity,

water, gas. So Israel has been left to do it, and Israel is now saying we're not even going to do that. So either Gaza's leadership does it, or Egypt does it, or who knows. But we're not doing it. Israel saying we're not, we're out. Exactly. And it goes deeper than that, because everything that goes into Gaza goes into the hands of Hamas, just literally everything. And if there are UN officials who claim otherwise on the ground in Gaza, they're scared. And so there's just no, you cannot under a Hamas regime not serve Hamas. There's simply no such thing in Gaza. And every Gazan knows it. And every honest person who understands the political situation in the Gaza Strip knows it.

And that has been the Israeli rationale for the blockade. So the Israeli idea is we get rid of Hamas. The blockade is lifted, or to some extent is lifted, but Israel is gone. I mean, gone, gone. No water, no electricity, best of luck to them. They have plenty of, you know, oceans are a place you can make energy, solar, you can make energy, electricity supplies, you can make energy, build your economy, develop your water infrastructure, Egypt will supply you whatever you want. We're no longer. By the way, workers, thousands upon thousands of Gazans work in Israel.

And that will no longer be true either, it appears. That seems to be the plan. The Israeli economy is the only prosperous economy in the area and so that would be probably a massive blow to Gaza I remember before the second intifada in 2000. My uncle was the CFO of a textile Firm a textile company that owned some clothing stores in malls and all their stitching was done in Gaza And then the second tifada began the suicideings, not just Hamas, but also Hamas. And with this massive wave of terrorism and the Israeli military, you know, crackdown in the Gaza Strip, among other places, they simply closed down the shops, the textile, you know, the stitching shops and moved them all to Jordan. Any Israeli investment that could happen in the future

to Gaza, Gaza's only real future of prosperity, is a future of some level of integration with the Israeli economy. That's gone. And that was the message. The message is, we're going to get rid of Hamas because they're a threat to us. And then we're sealing this border up and best of luck to you. What does it mean when you say, again, because this is something I think people in the West don't entirely appreciate, thousands of Gazans, so even between 2007 and October 7th, 2023, meaning during this period that Hamas was governing Gaza, there were thousands of Palestinians every day going to Israel to work. Yeah, tens of thousands in certain periods, yeah.

And also Israelis in southern Israel would volunteer to help Gazan families, help with medical issues. There was the story of this woman, I think, who would go to the Gazan border every day to take something like 20 or so Palestinian kids for the dialysis to an Israeli medical facility. There was lots of activity in southern Israel of Israelis, not obviously fully integrated with Palestinian life, but very involved in helping these Palestinian communities with their needs. Yeah, you know, the blockade, I think most Israelis felt was necessary because Hamas, right? What we always believed Hamas was, because we remember the second intifada, the world generally forgot.

And so Israelis generally justified the blockade and were okay with the blockade. But the blockade wasn't perfect. It was worse than not perfect. No blockade could possibly be perfect. When the Americans placed sanctions and blockade on Saddam Hussein, most of the suffering was by the civilian population. One of the problems that are easily solvable is medical. And so there are many medical things in Gaza that can't be dealt with by Gaza's own medical

services. And when those issues came up, when there were children who had certain diseases that the Israelis could deal with, but the Gazans couldn't, there was an entire, exactly like you're saying, an entire volunteer organizational sort of ecosystem to help take these Gazans out of Gaza, get them to the Israeli hospitals. And there were many, many people taken care of like that, including family members of Hamas leaders, who were treated in Israeli hospitals with this system. And some of the people killed or kidnapped or tortured on October 7th,

I mean, not that any one story is more horrible than another, but some of these stories of the people who populated these communities in the south, and these kibbutzim and other areas, were the very volunteers that were helping these Gazan Palestinians. They were the ones being killed, raped, tortured, kidnapped. This is a point that is really often missed. In the Second Intifada, the suicide bombings began this wave of 140 suicide bombings. Imagine 140 suicide bombings in America and carried out on an issue that is a dividing line of a culture war, in other words, on immigration, on race, right? Imagine that being the subject of 140 suicide bombings targeting children, targeting pizzerias, targeting literally, you know, one of the most famous attacks was the bombing of

the Dolphinarium, which was a non-alcoholic nightclub for teenagers in Tel Aviv. And it's 24 dead kids, dozens wounded. No Israeli forgot that. That building, that building is the only building built over the water on the Tel Aviv beach. It's probably the single most expensive piece of real estate in all of Israel, maybe in this half of the Mediterranean. And that building stood for something like 17 years empty, a haunted house on the Tel Aviv boardwalk because of that massacre. And 140 of these took place beginning in September of 2000, with nobody in Israel, in Israeli dialogue, in the Israeli discourse, really being able to explain why, because this was the height of the peace

process. Everything was working out. They were negotiating a Camp David shared sovereignty on the Temple Mount. We were told by Bill Clinton peace was imminent. There were Palestinian officials telling us the Palestinian economy was doing well. Palestinians respond that settlements kept growing throughout that period. But we know from the Egyptian peace and we know from the Gaza withdrawal that was to follow that Israel is capable of pulling out settlements when there's a peace made for that territory, or when they expect there to be peace afterwards. Long story short, the left hasn't won an election since. And it hasn't won an election since this decimated the Israeli left

because it made this argument that we owe the Palestinians their independence. That's a moral debt that we owe them. And if we give them that moral debt, we have to give this to them. And if we do give it to them, they'll give us back the only thing we need from them, which is peace, or at least quiet. The Second Intifada shattered that whole equation, and the left hasn't had a story to explain what to do with the Palestinians. In other words, it's not enough for people with a lot of sympathy toward the Palestinians around the world to say, oh, look at this right-wing Israeli government, look at, I don't know what violent extremist Israelis somewhere who are attacking Palestinians.

The problem, the strategic problem Palestinians have is the decimation of the Israeli political left, which happened in the second 85, a Palestinian strategy of violence against civilians at the height of the peace process, decimated the Israeli left. This is echoing through the Israeli body politic, the October 7 massacre, as a re-educate, as a re-affirmation of that lesson. Because these kibbutzim are that left. You're talking about Vivian Silver, who lived on, I believe, Kibbutz Kfaraza. I hope I got that right. And these gunmen, the atrocities they committed, targeted left-wing communities, targeted communities that oppose this government's policies all over the place,

including people who oppose the blockade on Gaza. And so to the Israeli left, to the liberal Israeli left that wants today to see a Palestinian state, this is a reaffirmation of the very thing that made them stop voting left 20 years ago, which is that Palestinian politics cannot reciprocate an Israeli withdrawal with peace. Because every time peace comes, or every time, you know, this very right wing Israeli government and that Barak government of the left negotiating shared sovereignty on the Temple Mount at Camp David back in 2000, both received the same Palestinian response. And so Hamas's anti-colonial vision and Hamas's willingness to target civilians in that way

has collapsed the Israeli capacity to even imagine what a peace might look like. And Vivian Silver's, you know, it goes deeper than just the irony. You're attacking someone whose work rescued Palestinian kids from Gaza. It's not just that that's ironic or that that's awful in some simple sense. That's a strategic collapse for the Palestinian cause. At the end of the day, somebody has to convince Israelis. You want to make a Palestinian state? You want to change the conditions of this conflict? Israelis will eventually have to be convinced. There are many ways to convince a people. I'm

sorry, this is turning into a speech. You can convince a people by doing what NATO did in Bosnia, which I'm not comparing us to Bosnia. What I'm comparing is how NATO responded. You can bomb Belgrade. I don't think you can bomb us in that way. And so you have to do it with what? Boycott divestment sanctions? But if you want to boycott me out of the West Bank and Hamas is promising to take over the West Bank and kill my kids from the West Bank if I pull out, you're not arguing with me. Inside my psyche, which is the arena where boycotts actually are trying to be effective, you're debating Hamas and Hamas is louder. And so the death of Vivian Silver, the kidnapping, the torture, all of these things that happened to these left-wing communities

is a strategic setback for the Palestinians that I don't think they will understand for a generation. Okay, so now I want to come back to the situation right now on the Gazan border in terms of what's happening. So we've had two weeks of buildup of anticipation of a ground invasion. As you said, Galant, Defense Minister Yoel Galant has said part of the endgame is complete disconnecting from Gaza entirely. This is not our problem anymore. Okay, so he's articulated that. And I don't mean to sound like I'm gunning for action here if there's good reasons for Israel not to have made a move yet. But why hasn't Israel made a move yet?

The simple answer is that Hamas has everything in place to exact a very high price from an Israeli invasion. You, quote unquote, soften up from the air, so to speak, right? Let's take, for example, the American and Iraqi attack on Mosul against Islamic State. Mosul was placed under siege. There was this, you know, America- So this is 2016. Yeah. And America provided the air cover and provided some intelligence and some commandos, and then Kurdish and Iraqi forces moved in on the ground, and the city was, you know, decimated. But it did rout Islamic State from that city. The problem is here that Hamas has spent 20 years preparing.

Islamic State showed up. It was brand new. You basically had that urban combat, which is awful and extremely difficult, and the defenders have immense advantages. Hamas has been magnifying those advantages for a decade and more. And it has this tunnel system that will constantly be producing attacks on the Israeli forces as they advance. Gazan cities and towns are booby-trapped to a massive extent with IEDs. And so the entry of those ground forces will be very, very difficult and very bloody. On the other hand, you have about 30,000-40,000 Hamas fighters right now underground, eating, sleeping, going to the bathroom, trying to ration their food and supplies, using up fuel.

And Israel loses very little from that weight. And then if it can force even some of them up to the ground, up to ground level, and then engage them that way, that's an advantage. Ideally for Israel, if there were no civilians in Gaza, the ideal situation for Israel would be a siege, a siege that we can handle for, you know, 15 years for all we care and let them have vitamin D deficiency from lack of sunlight. There are hundreds of thousands of civilians now. Now, after 700,000 moved south, there's still 400,000 in northern Gaza, which is where Israel says it's going to launch that ground invasion. But it's not clear to Israel that every day that passes is a disadvantage. The more you choke the Hamas forces underground, the easier it will be to deal with them. Those tunnels will

have to be detonated, those tunnels will have to be cleared, and that will be messy and destructive. And it's not exactly clear how they're going to do it. They've been preparing and preparing, and they have whole specialized units that just have learned how to, thought about how to do that for the last few years. But so the simple answer is, it's not clear that time isn't working for our advantage. Now, to outside observers, especially diaspora Jews, every day that passes, the Palestinian campaign kicks up, you know, gear and everything feels more, right, it's more distanced from the massacre. And Gazan civilians are more in the news and everything feels like the window is closing. And that's a

difference in perception, because to the Israelis, they do understand that a window is closing around the world. But they're still finding bodies, so they don't care as much. They don't feel that window closing. 400,000 Palestinians still in northern Gaza, despite hundreds of thousands that have already moved to southern Gaza. That's the numbers that we have from, I believe those are Israeli sources, yeah. But it's a pretty good estimate also from what we're watching happening on the ground. And why? Why have those 400,000 stayed put? A great deal of it is because Hamas told them to, asked them to, and in many, many cases forced them to,

literally by setting up roadblocks, preventing them from going. Hamas has a whole system of forcing people to do what they say, or their families can be cut off from electricity, from food. We have testimonies from Gaza about Hamas controlling the Gazan population that way. The use of civilian shields has been perfected to an art form by Hamas. And this is something that profoundly disinterests the Western press. Their only force multiplier, other than the tunnel system, their only force multiplier against the Israeli invasion is those civilians. And so they have a whole system set up where you can, you know, Hamas

will tell somebody you have to go to the border back when they were doing those border marches, and you have to go to the border. And the person would say, I'm a father of kids, I don't want to go to the border. And then they would say, well, you go to the border, your kids stop eating, and your electricity is cut off. And then this person goes to the border. And then there's, there's a stipend that the family gets if he's wounded. I think it's $150 a month, and if he dies, it's I think $500 a month. It's somewhere in that range. And that's the situation. That's how those Gazans are living. Hamas's ability to enforce what's happening above ground is a little bit limited now that its entire fighting force essentially is underground, but it's still there. So the civilians will be there, much,

much fewer than would have been otherwise, but they're still going to be there when the army moves in. And so as far as the Israeli defense establishment leadership's concerned, to your earlier point, they're in no rush. Like there are know at some point hamas operatives hamas leadership is going to have to surface one way or the other and israel's not really giving anything up by waiting yeah there's also the point that um the hamas revealed um how much it had managed to understand israeli intelligence methods and create this entire force structure outside of the visibility of Israeli intelligence. And so, I know for a fact, but any idiot knows for a fact, it's not a clever thing that the

Israeli intelligence agencies have been building new capabilities and working feverishly to see all that stuff that had been invisible to them now that they understand how much had been invisible to them. That's true in Gaza. And that's also true in Lebanon, of course, where, you know, we assume that everything Hamas pulled off, everything Hamas managed to do, Hezbollah has tenfold, right? Hezbollah has a much larger force, the Radwan force. It has trained to capture Israeli towns and villages after crossing the border in that way. It has tunnel systems. It has rockets buried under villages, all at a much larger scale.

And so any intelligence success of Hamas was probably taught to Hamas by the close training and intelligence sharing of Hezbollah and Iran over the years. So this incredible rise in competence that we've just witnessed from Hamas is something that I think Israel wants to build institutional responses to before the war begins. That's something that's been happening. And I think the last point about the Israeli delay, I'll just say it out loud because I haven't said it out loud. I think you and I talked about it maybe off the podcast, or maybe we mentioned it obliquely, was the north. I mean, in a sense, Hamas really ruined Hezbollah's party, because Hamas woke us up in an attack that killed 1400 or 1500 people. Hezbollah, had it pulled off, the very same surprise would have killed 15,000.

We would have been a week later still fighting back to take back Israeli towns on the border, potentially, if their success had been as great as the success of Hamas. I suspect the Israeli forces on the northern border are much more alert. There's much more actual manpower there. Maybe it would have played out much, much less horribly than in Gaza, where literally they caught 70 infantry in their beds when they stormed in. But it could have gone as badly, and that would have been 10 times the death toll and 10 times worse. And so they cost Hezbollah the surprise. And now Israel's awake, and it's awake on all the borders. And the very central lesson that Hamas has taught us is you don't respond to your understanding of their psychology. What

happened was the Israelis were convinced that they had Hamas's psychology all figured out, and there was no way they were going to attack. And if there's no way they're going to attack, it doesn't matter that they could attack and that that attack could be devastating. They're not going to because I figured them all out. So you no longer respond to your understanding of Hezbollah's psychology. The only thing that matters is Hezbollah's capabilities. And if that's true, then Hezbollah is now an existential threat. And so I thought that Israel was waiting because it needed a strategic surprise coming out of that kind of thing.

It needed to show the Middle East that it was a wounded tiger. And that that surprise would take place in the north and maybe even in Iran. reported what it reported this week, that Defense Minister Gallant apparently thought what I thought and wanted a serious operation, surprise operation in the north, but that Benjamin Netanyahu, because of American pressure, had canceled that idea. And now the focus really will be on Gaza, and it will be a months-long slog. And the idea is, do Gaza right, and then Israel will want to do Hezbollah right. But do them one at a time. Hezbollah might force a two-front war. Hezbollah might give Galant the war that he wants, but let Hezbollah do it, was the American message. I believe that New York Times report. There have been a lot of New York Times reports over the last few days that I don't just not believe have been outright fictions vis-a-vis the hospital bombing, vis-a-vis the lack of oversight of the aid that went into Gaza. There was oversight. media is operating in a massive misinformation environment and doesn't seem up to that task.

In other words, it runs with stories it thinks will make a splash, not stories it thinks it has enough evidence to back up. And so, long story short, everything that was reported about, you know, apparently leaked from the Americans about what's going on in the Israeli cabinet rings true to me, is confirmed by sort of things on the side that I have heard. There is an Israeli desire to open up the northern front, and that could also be a big part of the delay. What role does some 250 hostages play in this delay? There's too many of them. And the problem with hostages is you're always setting the exchange rate

for the next hostage exchange. And it just got too expensive. This got too expensive. We once gave 1,100 prisoners, including mass murderers, who needed a special pardon. In the 2011 exchange. In the 2011 exchange for one soldier. And if that meant that children are now hostages, Hamas, you know, this whole hostage situation is a little bit astonishing that the

world doesn't really care. It cares about its own citizens. You know, Germany is a little bit concerned about some German nationals. The president of the United States is very worried about American nationals. I understand it. It's appropriate. But they're children. You'll get out your German nationals, you'll get out your American nationals, and you'll leave three-year-olds behind. Hamas went too far. There is, you know, when you, you can hit somebody,

and hit somebody right up until they believe that they have nothing to lose. This is an argument that some in the West are making for Hamas, right? Israel has been so terrible to Palestinians. People who don't know the history of the Second Tifada, people who don't, or they're just, they're committed, they're tribal, they're on one side, that Hamas had no choice but to gleefully butcher children. But it works in the other direction. Hamas has left me no choice. I cannot have hostages factor into the war plans.

Because if I do, there'll be more hostages. To protect children of the future. I simply cannot fight for these children. I can give tactical, you know, advantages to Hamas. I can't give strategic ones. They're not going to survive this. But I will pay something for these. I mean, they really should release those kids. By the way, imagine if Hamas, something like, you know, I don't know the exact number, but there was one estimate that said that of the 212 confirmed, by Israel confirmed, hostages in Hamas's hands, something like 50 are soldiers. Hamas has a slightly higher number, but the numbers are relatively similar. An Al Arabiya interviewer of the Al Arabiya channel spoke with Hamas's political leader, Khaled Mashal, last week. It's an amazing interview, by the way. We'll post a link in the show notes that interview.

It's wonderful journalism. This reporter, she's not pro-Israel at all. She's extremely critical of Israel. But she came to Mashal, to this interview with hard questions. And among the questions were, you know, you behave, you attack civilians,

you attack children, you filmed yourself murdering children and then posted it to social media. What is this? She even asked him, do you want to apologize to the Israelis? He did not. But in this interview, she asked him about the hostages. And he corrected her. And he said, prisoners. It was very important to him. Twice he corrected her and said prisoners, not hostages. Well, not a three-year-old. A three-year-old is not a prisoner of war. A three-year-old is a hostage. If Hamas released the civilians, the children, the elderly, then it would be left with prisoners of war.

What it could call, Israelis would still call it terrorism and hostages, but it would allow its own supporters overseas, its shocking number of supporters in the West who have been defending the massacre of innocents, of children, over the last two weeks, on college campuses and sometimes in university administrations in the West, it would at least allow them to say they're not taking children hostages, they're just holding prisoners of war. That would be a huge advantage for Hamas, in my view. Hamas doesn't see it the same way, and it's holding on to every kid and every grandmother.

So it's made it too expensive. And so I can't, if I'm Israel, pay attention to these, to the hostages when I make my war plans. So just on that interview, Al Arabiya is a pan-Arab satellite channel, just for our listeners, a little background. I used to deal with Al Arabiya all the time when I was working in the Bush administration, when I was working in Iraq. They are headquartered in the UAE. They're mostly in Dubai, their studios, their headquarters. And think of them as a competitor to Al Jazeera, which is headquartered in Doha in Qatar. But the bottom line is,

Al-Arabiya, while sometimes producing good journalism, sometimes not good journalism, but by and large, nothing is pumped through the al-Arabiya pipes without some sort of editorial blessing of the government of the UAE and representative of what a lot of the Gulf states, Sunni Gulf states, believe, from Bahrain to the UAE to, you know, to the Saudis. So that an anchor on al-Arabiya was pressing Khaled Mishal, the head of, former head of Hamas's political wing, the way she was, was a statement. Okay, I want to ask you about something you and I talked about offline. I take your point that if Hamas released all the quote-unquote civilians and kept the soldiers, it at least would have a, you know, to some at least a better talking point than it does.

But what it seems to be doing is with the release of the two Americans within the last couple of days, there is this possibility they're going to start dribbling out the release of some hostages to incentivize the Biden administration and other governments to, I mean, the video from the other night, uh, for a few days ago of that one Israeli being held, I understand she's a French, Israeli French citizen, uh, and so the idea there was to put pressure on Macron. So by dribbling images out, by dribbling out the release of hostages with foreign passports, meaning non-Israeli, or passports in addition to an Israeli passport, they are incentivizing governments to put pressure on Israel, slow down, slow down on Gaza. We're getting our people out bit by bit. Please don't jeopardize that. That is my reading of the situation. My reading of the situation is that Hamas believes that the international political window is limited. In one sense, it has a point, which is Biden administration military

aid, resupply of Iron Dome missiles, things like that, might be sensitive to international opinion, might be sensitive to the Muslim world blowing up in a way that Israeli domestic politics simply aren't right now, because we're still in the shock of the massacre, right, which the rest of the world seems to have moved on from to some extent. But Hamas, I think, is thinking that delaying is good, is smart for it. And the way you delay is you, yeah, exactly like you said, you drip out the American hostages in a way that allows the Biden administration to always believe that there are in a couple of days another potential breakthrough, you know, and pressure the Israelis not to launch the ground invasion and ruin that

breakthrough right two days before. So it's a way of creating daylight, so to speak, between the Biden administration's interests and the Israeli government's interests. And it's a very smart way to do it. When the Israelis need to start the ground war, the ground war will start. And I think the Biden administration itself knows that. And I don't think ultimately it'll work for Hamas. But it is, I think, what they're trying to do with that release. And Israeli families of hostages are also organizing. So it's not just pressure from

the US administration and from other governments. It is Israeli families that have created a movement, if you will, to say what to the Israeli government? What are they arguing for? Yeah, I've spent part of the last two weeks as part of a large group of over 100 volunteers trying to help just one Israeli family that still has eight members in Gaza, including an eight-year-old boy and a three-year-old girl and a 12-year-old girl and a 12-year-old girl.

And their message is not really to the Israeli government. There is a message to the Israeli government. Some of these families have been protesting outside of government ministers' homes or outside of cabinet meetings and asking, demanding that something be done. Obviously, if Israel has intelligence on the location of a hostage and thinks that a commando raid in that location could successfully rescue that hostage, that'll be done. They'll take that step. There are already reports that in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, there were a handful of Israeli special forces raids into Gaza before Hamas was able to organize and get everyone, all the different hostages to different places in Gaza. They were scattered throughout Gaza to prevent any kind of mass rescue.

And so there were a handful rescued according to these reports. These are not things like we can get confirmed, you know, or I think a couple were confirmed, but not all of them, something like that. But generally, those hostages are out of Israel's reach. If they weren't, they would be rescued. But what these families are trying to say to the Israeli government is, please prioritize this. Please make this, you know, a major part of the war effort. Please, for example, delay if you can buy off these hostages. In other words, let Hamas release. Let's delay. And then, you know, with the vengeance of God, we go after Hamas.

But let's get as many out as possible. So there is that message. But their main message isn't to the Israeli government. Because these families understand what just happened and what the Israeli government must do. Their main message is to the world. Hamas is violating the laws of war at a strategic level. I'll say more than that.

The entirety of their strategy is to violate the laws of war in ways that are costly for the Israelis, if they were to follow them down that path, but that are not costly for Hamas. The hostages are a strategic weapon. Hiding underneath civilian populations and forcing the civilian populations to stay is a strategic weapon. And Hamas doesn't have many other strategic weapons.

That is the central strategy it is pursuing, is a war crime. And if that cost Hamas something, if it cost Hamas something in the Arab and Muslim world, which is a ridiculous thing to say, why would the Arab and Muslim world that was utterly silent on Assad's genocide, but now is screaming about the horror of Israel, why would they care? But that's the family's hope. They hope that there'll be an international dimension that incentivizes Hamas to release their families. Before we wrap, I guess I just, I mean, when we check in with you, we always ask a version of this point, a version of this question, so I'm just going to, I'll just ask it. It's a little open-ended, but, you know, it's been now over two weeks. And this is, I mean, it's easy to

oversimplify what I'm about to ask in an answer, or the question may be easy to oversimplify, but I'm going to make it simple. What is the mood of the Israeli public right now compared to where it was when you and I were talking in the first few days or the day after the attack? And then we spoke again a week later. Just how would you—so now we're over two weeks in. What is the mood of the Israeli public, A? And, B, can you talk a little bit about the power and the impressiveness, something I've been struck by, and Saul and I wrote a little bit about this in our book, obviously not knowing about this war, but just the building blocks we wrote about in our book about Israeli society. Not the war fighting part, but just the civilian mobilization, the way people are coming out of the woodwork to help out and fill critical needs and fill critical gaps.

It's hard to imagine something like we're witnessing on that front, on the civilian home front, the volunteer civilian home front. It's hard to imagine that in almost any other Western country. And I just thought maybe you could describe that a little bit. Yeah. It's all become a very sort of comfortable routine. My brother-in-law was called up to a combat unit on the border. He'll be part of a war when it, you know, of a ground war.

He's in the infantry. And his wife is eight months pregnant. And she can't stay home alone, and they live about an hour's drive from us. It's hard for us to take care of her. So she came to live with us. I've got four kids. My house is crowded and messy in the best possible way. So our neighbors have an upstairs bedroom and bathroom

with a kid who lives there, their oldest lives there. And the oldest moved down to the bottom floor, moved in with a sibling. And she has the floor to herself, a bedroom and a bathroom for an eight-month pregnant woman who's probably going to give birth during this war. In other words, there's very little chance the war ends before that and with her husband, you know, potentially across the border. And so she now has everything she needs and is surrounded by a family. I have sisters-in-law who today took care of my kids because I had to work. My wife was called into reserve duty, so she's off in the army. All the neighbors are taking care of each other. We have a neighbor who gave birth two weeks ago, and everyone's cooking for

them. They're not cooking for themselves. The army has delayed the call-up of the husband because she just gave birth, but the delay is not going to be forever. So we're just a bunch of families living on a street, and it's immediate, close. We're all living in each other's living rooms, and we're taking care of each other to the point where anybody who's missing, you know, I don't know what shampoo is sharing them with the rest of the neighbors. And that is a reality forced on us by the fact that there's such a large call up by the fact that the emergency is real by the fact that everyone is taking care. For example, one of the things that we all saw on those in those videos from October 7th was how important it is to be able to lock your bomb shelter in your home.

Because the inability to get into the bomb shelters is what saved most of the families who were saved on these kibbutzim. So we have had people going house by house in our neighborhood, just showing people how you properly lock the bomb shelter door. There's a sense that there's a neighborhood patrol everyone's volunteering for. There's a sense that everyone is taking care of everyone else. And that is everywhere. That is everywhere. In the tiniest village and in the biggest cities in metropolitan Tel Aviv, on the left, on the right, in ultra-Orthodox towns, we have seen people asking to be drafted at immense numbers. Thousands of Haredi Israelis who, you know, two years ago thought ideologically that it's not okay to serve in the army, have been begging to be drafted and are being drafted for all kinds of emergency

services and rescue jobs. The closing of the ranks and the solidarity and the understanding that this is going to get very bad. There are 140,000 rockets in South Lebanon waiting to fall on us. There are thousands in Gaza. There is a war coming that is bigger than what has been before. There's already the air campaign.

The Gazans are feeling the war. There will come a point where the Israeli civilian population as a whole feels the war. We know it. Iran and Hezbollah and Hamas are convinced that that will drive us out. That is their one great message.

It has rallied us and united us and not united us in some kind of, you know, grand ideological sense. They're still left wingers, they're still right wingers, we still disagree on judicial reform, and we're going to go right back to tearing each other apart as soon as the war is over. But for this moment, the unity is immediate and personal and intimate, and it is literally my neighbor. I just, that was very moving, and thank you for that. And I want to stay close to you on that point and how that's going as we talk week to week.

But one thing you mentioned in particular, which I probably at some point I'm going to dedicate an episode to, which is just you mentioned the Haredim, who the critique, one of the primary critiques of them was that they had this enclave. They were cut off from the rest of Israeli society. I think that point was overstated generally, but that said, they were not part of the national Israeli Zionist project to the extent that other Israelis were or other Israeli Jews were. And part of this manifested itself in the fact that they didn't work, they didn't serve in the military, they didn't serve the state in any way, provide any service to the state. I mean, in terms of national service or security role. And I am reading these pieces. I read a piece in your publication, The Times of

Israel, about now thousands of Haredim volunteering to do something, in many cases for a security role. Now, I'm curious how real and deep that is, A. And B, if that's true, if that's part of a new trend, yes, after the war, you'll go back to arguing and debating and judicial reform and all these things. But that creates, that establishes a marker, like a new marker. That's like a new world in which, that you just don't flip back from, for instance, with the Haredim. It's not to say that overnight all the Haredim are signing up to serve the IDF, but it does tell you that certain things become more acceptable in certain parts of a community like that than it may have been before. I think so. My instinct is that a lot of Israelis, ordinary people, not the chattering classes like myself,

but ordinary Israelis, are concluding that there were these forces dividing us, these very manipulative forces, these political campaigns, these social media echo chambers, etc., all the things that worry us so much about this modern age, have been driving us apart, and we can't afford to be driven apart in that way. And I think there's a new discourse. I think there's a new discourse among the rabbinic leadership on the religious right. There's a new discourse, certainly in the Haredi community, open, visible. It's not just that 3,000 Haredim have literally gone online and registered for the draft so that they can be ambulance drivers. It's that 150,000 Kharidim support them. In other words, it's, you know, or, you know,

hundreds of thousands, the whole community, you know, just that's a number of yeshiva students, but the whole community actually supports them. That's the drama. And so there are these deep changes. The Israeli left is elitist a little bit. It's certainly the part of the country, they'll call it the liberal half. I don't know what's left or what's right, and many of them call themselves centrist. But the liberal half of Israeli politics is the most productive part of the Israeli economy. These are the people who created, they live in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area, they created the high-tech miracle, they serve in the most elite and strategic units, they have the highest rates of military draft. Cities like Ra'anana or Kfar Saba, These are cities with 90% draft rates. The right has had

this campaign over 20 years that the left is somehow no longer serving, is somehow no longer willing to fight for a Jewish state. And everyone has watched the heroism of the left in these kibbutzim, the heroism of all of these grandpas who are former, you know, commandos, Russian and, you know, and also on the right, you know, we've really seen an opening up of a willingness to debate and discuss. Macquarie Shon is the highbrow intellectual newspaper of the religious right in Israel. And all it has talked about for two weeks is the terrible, terrible thing we have done to ourselves. Not a mea culpa. terrible, terrible thing we have done to ourselves. Not a mea culpa.

I mean, all Israelis have done to ourselves in misunderstanding where we are and thinking we have the luxury to fall apart. And so everywhere across the country, there's a new consciousness. Now, the day after the war begins Netanyahu's political survival battle, which will swing all of the old identity politics into action. The day after the war, the opposition protesters are still there. And they're not just still there, they blame Netanyahu for what happened, because Netanyahu was a central architect of the understanding of the strategy and the understanding vis-a-vis Hamas, that they are deterred. And so all of that will swing back into action the day after the war. And I don't know if the new consciousness will survive it, will push back against it. I'm optimistic that it will. We can only hope. Yes, we can, Haviv. And obviously, it's sadly a long way from here to there in terms of when we will be able to see if that comes to fruition,

but we look forward to talking to you along the way. Grateful for your time, as always. I know you're juggling a lot, and we'll check in with you again next week. Thanks for having me, Dan. All right, talk soon. Thanks, Aviv. Stay safe. That's our show for today. To keep up with Aviv, you can track him down at at Aviv Retik-Gur, all one word, Aviv Retik-Gur on X. And you can also find his work at thetimesofisrael.com

or at timesofisrael.com or at Times of Israel on X. And in the next couple of days, we'll be having a couple of episodes, one that looks at the northern front, the threat from Hezbollah and how Israel should assess that. And we'll also be doing an episode on rising anti-Semitism in the West that we are witnessing in real time in response to this war on Israel. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.