Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - The Future of Gaza - with Haviv Rettig Gur

Episode Date: November 14, 2024

In recent weeks, with the IDF focusing most of its attention on the Northern front, the media has been paying less attention to what’s actually happening in Gaza. What would constitute the Gaza War being over? Is there any progress on a Day After Plan for Gaza? What is the status of hostage negotiations and other efforts to free the hostages? What would the future (medium-term/long-term) Israeli presence in Gaza look like? To help us connect these dots, Haviv Rettig Gur returns to the podcast.  Haviv Rettig Gur is the political analyst at The Times of Israel. He was a long time reporter for the Times of Israel. Haviv was also a combat medic in the IDF where he served in the reserves.

I think Hamas can be degraded enough for Gaza to turn the page into a whole different future, but only the Israelis can do it. The only question that worries me a little bit sometimes when I hear certain politicians talk is, is that how the Israelis are thinking? But if that's not what the Israeli government is going to do for political reasons or for ideological reasons or because that's how the various political contradictory political interests that make up every Israeli government happen to intersect this time around, then we are just building ourselves another quagmire, and a long-term one, and one that'll hurt Israelis and it'll hurt and it'll hurt Gazans, certainly.

It's 9 a.m. on Wednesday, November 13th here in New York City. It's 4 p.m. on Wednesday, November 13th in Israel as Israelis begin to wind down their day. These past couple of weeks, we've seen a lot of major developments unfold. The firing of Defense Minister Joop Gehlant, a pogrom in Amsterdam, potentially more violence, more anti-semitic violence elsewhere in Europe, key figures in the Prime Minister's office being detained, and of course the US elections. The political chessboard has been thrown upside down and the pieces are only beginning to fall back into place, including in Gaza, a war front that has taken backstage over the past few months as we all on this podcast have been focused on other fronts in Israel's

war and certainly as the IDF has been focusing most of its attention on the northern front and also the continued threat from Iran. But there has been a lot of debate about Gaza, even though we have not been featuring it on the podcast, and a lot of debate around the day after plan in Gaza. The Israeli government has been somewhat opaque about its plans, but on the ground in Gaza you can start to see breadcrumbs of what's beginning to emerge or what may come to be and so we're gonna try and connect some of those dots and draw an outline of where we are actually in Gaza I think we all need an update on what is actually going

on in Gaza certainly post the killing of Sinwar and the emerging Israeli plan. And to help us with all of this, I'm pleased to welcome back to the podcast, Haviv Retik-Gur, who has not been with us for a while. Haviv, good to see you. Dan, it's good to be here. You know, Haviv, I gotta say, you're not on the podcast for a few weeks,

and our listeners, who I love, can be a little crazy, because the conspiracy theories that emerged in response to your absence were a little both creative and shocking. But, I'm sorry, this is what we're doing now? I just wanna spend a moment. I'll love for it, I'm really curious. Yeah, so, no, we're gonna talk about God's on a moment,

but I have to spend a minute on this. So two friends of mine who you have met, I won't say their names, I'll just say J and D, they're for initials, so I was recently with them and they said to me, Aviv hasn't been on for a while and we know why. And I said, really? Because if you know why, that would help me,

because I don't really know why. And they said, no, no, no, no, we've figured this out. They said, in July, you had an episode with Nadav, with Nadavayel and Haviv, where they had a debate. And the debate got heated. And since that debate episode, we have tracked that Haviv's appearances have gone down, and Nadav's episodes have gone up.

And it was just because that debate got hot and went sideways that led to this rupture and they sort of talked in terms as though Haviv has been being airbrushed from Call Me Back. And I was like, guys, you're nuts. You're overthinking this. Haviv isn't going anywhere. If you actually look what happened in July,

from July through now, it's been some of the most intensive news developments Israel has experienced since the beginning of the war. The podcast has, for many episodes, morphed into kind of news reporting and analysis, which was not what we had planned to do from the beginning. And they're like, they were so crushed crushed because they thought they were so creative. They had painted this soap opera of what happens behind the scenes at Call Me Back.

They wanted the soap opera. The soap opera was exciting. I guess you're right. Look, I kind of give talks on the grand sweep of history. And so it's not my... I don't follow the day to day, minute to minute. I try and follow the sweep. And so it makes perfect sense.

But not to them. They wanted to believe there was like a Game of Thrones thing going on. I almost think we could do a spin-off podcast. Just like, remember on MTV, there was that show called Behind the Music that takes you behind the stories of these very successful musicians and all the you behind the stories of these very successful

Musicians and all the drama behind the making of their music we could do behind call me back it'll be its own podcast and we talk we take people behind the decision making and I think they will be horrified to learn that it is much more improvisational And a lot less Game of Thrones therefore probably a lot less entertaining But maybe we'll maybe we won't do that show because we want to maintain the mystique other alternative spin-off Just all your analysts mud wrestling There we go. There we go And and a lot will be thrilled because that creates YouTube content

Alana is making this big push to video for YouTube content. So are so so like you and the dove and Amit Segal Mud wrestling jump will throw in a little John Schanzer, that will be riveting video YouTube content. That'll bring in the audiences, okay. All right, Javiv, I wanna bring this conversation, really focus on Gaza and get an update from you on Gaza. It's been a while since we talked about that war front. Can you just begin by giving us an aerial view

of what has been happening there over the past few weeks? Right, so press attention has moved really to the war in Lebanon where there's now a negotiation to try and finish the war, but there are also signs that Israel is actually expanding the ground operation. But there are more troops in Gaza than in Lebanon, right? So Gaza is still, I would say, the most significant long-term question, long-term problem that the IDF is trying to solve, and is a lot more complex and difficult than Lebanon, if only because there is all the rest of Lebanon in Lebanon to work with. Right? So if you weaken Hezbollah, there's a hope, there's a dream, there's a fantasy that the international community, the rest of Lebanon, can fill vacuums of power, that as you weaken Hezbollah, you create. In Gaza, there is no rest of Gaza that isn't Hamas. And so Gaza is a whole different

kind of problem going forward. Right now on the ground, the IDF has created essentially three corridors, three enclaves within Gaza, and they stretch from the Israeli border in the southeast all the way to the Mediterranean coast in the northwest. They are the Gaza-Egypt border, the Philadelphia corridor as the IDF calls it, where buildings have been levelled and a safe zone, a flattened safe zone where nothing can sneak up on troops has been created the entirety of that border and soldiers are actively engaged there in essentially finding and destroying tunnels and launching specific operations as intelligence dictates to find Hamas cells and destroy them.

You say the Egypt-Gaza border. Why then did they call it the Philadelphia corridor? What's the distinction between the Philadelphia corridor and the Gaza Egypt border? Or are those two terms interchangeable? The Philadelphia corridor is the army's name for the route that follows that border on the Gazan side. A military map of an area gives a special military code name. In part, that's to be able to tell troops where to go without telling the enemy where you just sent the troops if they're listening in. But those codes are very quickly broken. And the second reason is that when you talk over the radio, it can be hard to distinguish one word from another. And so the names of the different routes, because it can be disastrous

if you send a unit in the wrong route in a military in an enemy zone, the names are very, very different from other names. So military code names are each word sounds radically different from all the other words that you can't accidentally say A and H and P and B and C and try to spell something out and the person on the other side gets it wrong. So it's to so Philadelphia is that military code for that particular line. And there are quite a few of those military codes for different routes in different areas in Gaza. Okay, so the IDF is there. There are three IDF zones that divide Gaza into two major sections. There's the border with Egypt that's very significant. The IDF went in in May.

Major fighting ended there in August and it's basically been a tunnel hunt ever since. Then there is in the north an ongoing six-week battle, quite a significant counterinsurgency battle. Several hundred members of Hamas have been killed, something like 300 have been arrested, and they've been arrested trying to flee the area with the civilian population. So they've been arrested when they were identified from among the civilian population, passing through an IDF checkpoint heading south. And there have been 24 soldiers killed in this battle in Jabalia, all the way, all the way in the north of Gaza in the last six weeks. And that includes a brigade commander, a colonel. This is the third battle of Jabalia, major battle in the last year.

We've talked about that. The IDF has this doctrine in Gaza of moving in and then leaving and then moving in again. You don't clear and hold because then you create more targets and you actually serve the guerrilla strategy of the other side. And then there's the most interesting, in terms of figuring out Israeli strategy going forward, the most interesting Israeli enclave in Gaza right now, the military fortifications and roads that form this enclave, which is what we call the Nitzarim Corridor. So it's in about the center of the strip?

Exactly. And just north of Dir el-Balach, and that puts it right in the center. Now this is an enormous, enormous area. It's like eight kilometers by eight kilometers? Yeah, I mean, in different areas, it's seven to eight kilometers wide and it stretches from Israel, from the Israeli border, right next to Kibbutz Be'eri, all the way to the beach. There is a major outpost, a major Israeli military base essentially on the beach, which includes a jail and is where soldiers pulling Hamas fighters that are recognized by IDF intelligence out of people moving between Gaza City and Dira'l-Balak in the south of Gaza, pull them out. There are bases, literal just military bases and cell phone towers now, and soldiers carry their cell phones on them in a way that they haven't for a year in Gaza. It's become a serious, established, settled military operation, military zone.

And it looks like it's still very slowly expanding. Now, what does expanding mean? It means that the neighborhoods of the southern neighborhoods of Gaza City, which are the north of the enclave and the northernmost neighborhoods of the Dir al-Balakh area, which are the southern border of this enclave, are being slowly demolished to expand essentially the buffer zone in which nobody can sneak up on soldiers and kill them. There were a few attempts by some Hamas cells to sneak up to soldiers. There was one soldier killed, I think, three months ago, but by and large those attempts

have failed. And that's the goal. The goal is to create this enormous military enclave that allows serious control of the Gaza Strip right in the center, and it's there. Can you explain why strategically this Netzerim corridor is so important? I think at the simplest tactical level,

Netzerim is fundamental. The taking the Philadelphia corridor, cutting off the massive, massive supply tunnels that some of them you could drive trucks through and Hamas was driving trucks through, between Egypt and Gaza, cutting that off, essentially choking Hamas in Gaza, is a big part of the story.

And the other part of the story is preventing Hamas from being able to move between Gaza city and the Hanunis, the southern half, let's say, of Gaza. And bisecting Gaza in that way and controlling what goes in and what goes out is really important if you understand the tactics of this war as essentially a degradation war. Hamas will be able to shoot at us for a very long time. Hamas will have little cells operating in different places for a very long time. Hamas will have little cells operating in different places for a very long time. It's not one of those tanks encounter in the desert and whoever has the most tanks left at the end of the big war of the big maneuver, they're the winners. It's not one of those conventional

kinds of battles. That long counterinsurgency degradation war controlling territory, especially territory that reduces the enemy's ability to maneuver, all of the efforts to reduce Hamas's capacity to rearm supply and fight and maneuver in Gaza is part of that long degradation war. So tactically it makes a lot of sense. Okay, now take me to the northern front of Gaza, the border between Gaza and Israel, all the way in the northern tip of Gaza. Right, so what Israel has been able to achieve in Philadelphia, which is to clear it of Hamas, destroy tunnels, and to achieve in Nitzahim, it's much harder in the north to achieve that

same kind of buffer zone, to achieve that same kind of creation of essentially a military area that is totally clear of the enemy and allows forward operations against the enemy deeper into the city of Gaza. And the reason it's much harder to do that in the north is that the north is highly built up and there's a lot of people living there. There are a lot of civilians in a way that specifically in the Nizilim corridor and specifically on the Philadelphia corridor there aren't. And Philadelphia is fairly narrow and Nizilim has grown but nevertheless these are areas that that don't have a lot of civilians. What the IDF is trying to accomplish in the north

is to surround a major, major position of Hamas that included hundreds and hundreds of fighters and probably still does. In Jebaliah, Jebaliah has long been famous for being a major Hamas position, a major Hamas fortress. And it's why in the very first ground operation, back in October of last year, the IDF essentially drove around Jebalia and then came back to Jebalia months later after a lot of the rest of Gaza

was cleared, at least above ground, of major Hamas forces. And there were battalions still intact underground in Gaza. And when the IDF isn't there, they're above ground. And so going in and out gets them to come back above ground. And then you can attack them above ground once again. So there has now been a major ground operation surrounding Jebaliah, Bet Lachia, Bet Hanun are part of this. And there has been a lot of criticism from the United States, for example, and the

international community because some of the aid that was coming in was prevented from coming in because this really was an attempt to choke Hamas. Israel ordered civilians to leave a great many. I don't know the number. These are estimates, tens of thousands left went south. Hundreds of Hamas fighters were caught among them as they moved south. So other Hamas fighters stopped moving south and they stayed and they urged civilians to stay. And there are tens of thousands who still remain of the civilians. And

the cut back in aid meant to starve Hamas out of the tunnels has also hurt those civilians. And so there is a military operation in Gaza. It's costing soldiers lives. It's hurting Hamas dramatically. It has to sort of kill Hamas, starve Hamas out, while not doing that to civilians. It's an incredibly complex operation. The goal of it is to clear a piece of northern Gaza

where some of Hamas's most important assets have survived for the last year. And, you know, this is a major push. It's worth, you know, in the IDF's opinion, it's worth the sacrifice of soldiers in time and effort to weaken Hamas in that way, to weaken one of the last major strongholds that Hamas actually has intact in Gaza. All right.

Another topic we tragically have not heard as much about in recent weeks is the fate of the hostages remaining in Gaza. On the one hand, killing Sinwar was this extraordinarily important development. I would argue one of the most important events, singular events in the history not only of Israel but of the Jewish people.

He really is a modern-day Hitler of sorts. But since then the talk about the hostages, at least over here, has declined somewhat. And I want to understand why that is and what are we missing? Is anything going on? What do we know about about the hostages, the remaining hostages? I mean I'm gonna just cut to the chase and try not to be flippant about it. The idea of doesn't know how to get the hostages. Yichiyah Sinwar, the one thing he did extraordinarily well, was to create in Hamas a culture of compartmentalization without which he couldn't have carried out October 7. I

criticized Sinwar for not coordinating with Hezbollah when he launched the attack on October 7. And we, a lot of people, a lot of analysts thought that if he had done so, there would have been a much larger Hezbollah, planned something five times bigger, the same sort of operation as October 7, but vastly larger. But Sinwar was always paranoid about Israeli intelligence penetration of Hamas, of Hezbollah. Ismail Haniyeh, the political head of Hamas in Doha until he was assassinated by the Israelis in Tehran, didn't know about October 7.

He was as surprised as any of us. And that obsessive compartmentalization, by the way, over the last two months, we've seen how deep Israeli penetration of Hezbollah was. Sinwar was absolutely correct. That's what we're seeing now. There are small Hamas cells holding hostages. They have their orders.

They can operate without any command structures. They are deeply compartmentalized. There's very few threads of intelligence that intersect between them that connect the different cells in the different areas. And so Israel has arrested, interrogated hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of Hamas fighters. It's into the thousands. I don't know the exact number. And not been able to track essentially the vast majority of hostages that they don't want tracked.

It reaches the point where the former CEO of SodaStream offered $100,000 after the killing of Sinwar for any Gazan who comes forward and protection for them and tells the Israelis where a hostage is. Right, protection and getting them out of Gaza safely. As far as we know, not a single one has come forward. And now the Israeli government has come forward with their own reward, millions of dollars.

Right, and not a single Gazan has come forward. And either we don't know because they're keeping it secret and we're gonna hear some amazing great news about a simultaneous rescue of 25 hostages because this all worked. Assuming that's not the case, it means assuming that if it had happened we would have heard about it, that means that Gazans probably don't know where the hostages are and neither does the IDF.

And so if the IDF doesn't actually know how to get the hostages because of Hamas's one great success in this year, which was that people have argued that the great success was bringing international approprium on Israel. But I submit that maybe Hamas thinks that's a success. I submit that's not going to help them, and we've seen that in Gaza. But their one great tactical success has been that compartmentalization, I think, has created a new way of thinking in the IDF that argues that giving up on them might be the only chance they have. Lowering their cost might be the only chance they have. Lowering their cost

might be the only chance they have. Not pursuing as a major fundamental war aim for which you will sacrifice other war aims, the rescue of hostages and the release of hostages, and might be the only way that Hamas no longer believes that they are useful to ending the war. Hamas's one demand has always been and it has not negotiated seriously and has refused to negotiate for anything except for its own survival. And into the war that leaves Hamas intact has been the only thing that Hamas has been willing to talk about hostage releases. And so there is a possibility that Israel wants other things that Hamas wants desperately to be able to offer Hamas for example control of large areas of Gaza as part of the Israeli toolbox as part of the Israeli offer in exchange for

hostages a willingness not to have them released and large areas that can be cleared by the IDF Might be part of the negotiating position for hostages. This is not, I'm not saying this is what's happening. This is part of the discussion in Israel that we're having in Hebrew about what it all means. What does it mean to make the Netzerim corridor eight kilometers wide? What does it mean that these areas are being cleared and held by the IDF? And one of those things might be that this is the only way anybody can imagine to actually create negotiating leverage over Hamas. There have been reports about large population moves, relocations of Palestinians from northern Gaza to southern Gaza, south of the Netzerim corridor.

What do you know of that? What is the IDF trying to achieve with that? I think the major moves are from the north, meaning north of Gaza City, moving them south to Gaza City, to clear out as much as possible Jebaliah, to frankly make it easier to go after Hamas. The intelligence apparatuses are in place to be able to sift through the population as it's moving and pull the Hamas people out of the population. And so when the population moves in that way, that's always an intelligence boon for the Israelis and it always costs Hamas a few hundred fighters.

There's no plan to empty Gaza City. That's not a thing. But you are seeing that IDF order in Northern Gaza and Jabalia and other places around it. There has been speculation that Israel is, in the early stages of a plan to settle certain parts of Gaza, particularly that enclave in the Netzerim corridor with new Jewish settlements. And then there's the topic of settlements in Gaza, generally Jewish population centers in Gaza. First of all, can you speak to whether or not there's anything to that about with regard to Netzerim?

And then I just want to talk about the whole question of Israeli settlements in Gaza generally. Yeah, the current generation of the Israeli right and especially the far right, one of its defining experiences was the Gaza disengagement in 2005. The August 2005 disengagement uprooted 8,000 Israelis from their homes, pulled them out, and both the settlements and the army and any Israeli claim to Gaza. The interior minister at the time actually signed a letter to the UN saying, if we ever had any claim, we relinquish it. It was a whole process of saying, we're pulling out of Gaza after the Second Intifada, the

140 suicide bombings at the height of the peace process that sort of shattered the Israeli left right up until today, there was no trust anymore in the Palestinian political elite's capacity to reciprocate any kind of Israeli withdrawal with peace. And in fact, the Palestinian political elites, especially Hamas, especially Arafat, concluded that Israeli withdrawals were a sign of weakness and you double down on violence. And so the alternative, if you don't want to control them and you can't negotiate with them a safe peace and withdrawal, then you withdraw on your terms to a border that you can protect and you do it unilaterally and you shoot anybody coming over the border. That was the concept of the Gaza withdrawal in 2005.

The right protested. It shut down roads of the Gaza withdrawal in 2005. The right protested, it shut down roads, it screamed, it shouted, it went to the High Court of Justice, and nothing that it did stopped the disengagement. And Israel essentially turned on them. In other words, the Israeli public was very supportive of the disengagement. It was a very popular policy in real time. That generation, people who literally were removed from Gaza, from those settlements, were the leaders of the judicial reform two years ago. That generation are the leaders of the religious of those activists, are the leaders of the religious Islamism party today, led by

Bitzalas Smotrich, who is talking now publicly, openly, especially after Trump's election, about building settlements in Gaza. Now, we have polls over the last year of Israelis. The vast majority of Israelis don't want to go back into Gaza. They don't want to settle Gaza. It's something like 90-10 do not want to build Israeli settlements in Gaza. But the idea, what Bitzal Esmotrich, the finance minister, the head of the Religious Zionism

Party, essentially the head of the Religious Zionist far right. What he has been trying to sell Israelis on is the idea that the vacuum you leave behind when you withdraw is not filled by Jeffersonian Democrats. In the Middle East of today, it's filled by these evil Islamists, and they will destroy their own societies on the altar of destroying our society. And the only way to really hold over time territory that prevents it from going to evil people is settlement. And that's a campaign that that part of the Israeli government has launched. It has launched it openly and publicly and with trumpets and fanfare. It is still unpopular, deeply unpopular among Israelis, but it is now on the table. Now the reason that I think serious people are starting to scratch their heads and worry

that this might actually be an Israeli policy, people look at Israel and they think that Israel makes a decision. The state of Israel, this is really fundamental to understand, is never a single body making a decision. It is always a coalition of very, very contested views that is moving in different directions all at once. And sometimes, you know, one policy is handed to the ultra-Orthodox as part of a big deal to hand another policy to Likud as part of a big deal to hand. And so you'll have policies that actually contradict each other by the same government as part of a coalition agreement to move forward on policy. So it's not that Israel wants to build settlements in Gaza, but that the political constellation,

somebody might agree to hand the religious Zionism the ability to build some settlement in the Nazarene corridor in exchange for allowing Bibi to do something else in the economy or in Iran or on other issues. So that kind of talk, that that might be in the future, has started to be heard. People are starting to wonder. And the reason they're starting to wonder is that we don't actually entirely understand. There's a lot of perplexity about what's actually happening in Gaza. What does it mean that we're taking all these territories? What does it mean that we suddenly control Nezareem? And Nezareem is almost the size of Gaza City at this point. Nezareem is huge.

What does that mean? What is that for? What's the purpose? Now, it's a perfectly reasonable tactical answer to the kind of warfare Hamas has imposed on the IDF. But is that all it is? Really? It's not more than that? It's not going to turn into more than that?

What's the political future of Gaza? When you actually game out the potential political futures for Gaza, it turns out that there probably isn't a non-israeli answer to solution to Gaza. The Saudis are not going to come in and de-radicalize Gaza, as some of us had hoped six months ago. First of all, they're now talking about genocide. They're now doing naval exercises with Iran and the Persian Gulf. They are now deciding that they want to reshape the whole question of the anti-Iran alliance because it's not working for them. I think it's important with the Saudi intentions. I think those joint military exercises are pretty, shall we say, uneventful.

And the statements that MBS and others are making about their harsh criticisms of Israel in public, which I think are geared towards, quote unquote, the Arab street, at the same time that there's a lot happening between Saudi and Israel, particularly with regard to defense against Iranian attacks against Israel is important. So I think that the public statements, while not pleasant by any means, can distract from I think a lot that's happening behind the scenes. So I agree with you, I'm skeptical too that the Saud Saudis wanna come into Gaza and be responsible for Gaza,

but I don't think that means they're completely upending the posture they were heading in with regard to Israel. And oh, by the way, I think that's doubly so now that the Trump administration is coming in, because the legacy of the first Trump administration was this extraordinary diplomatic and geopolitical success in the Middle East with regard to the Abraham Accords. And I know a number of incoming Trump officials want to build on that.

And I think the Saudi leadership are going to find the Trump team a more consistently reliable partner on that front than they felt that they had in the Biden team. I agree completely with everything you said. The Saudis would still like Israel to clobber Iran if it's at all possible. I just mean that's a sign of Saudi weakness. In other words, the Saudis are terrified. They're hedging their bets. As one official from a European country told me recently, there isn't a Saudi army. It doesn't exist. It's functionally, it can't do anything. There's a little bit of a Saudi Air Force. There's an Emirati Special Forces, but we saw them in Yemen. They were not so useful.

There isn't a Saudi force capable of going into Gaza and politically willing to suppress Hamas and militarily capable of doing anything in Gaza. There isn't an American willingness to do that. The Trump team will back Israel into great many things. I don't think they'll back Israel on troops on the ground and American blood on the line in any way and shouldn't. There isn't an international arrangement constellation that can come into Gaza, do the work of protecting Israel from within Gaza and also rebuild Gaza. That simply doesn't exist. And when you try and game it out, you can't build it. And God knows we've all tried.

So therefore Israel says this is our problem. This is our problem. And it's a long-term problem. And how do we deal with this long-term problem? We hold areas that allow everything to be accessible, that allow us to continue to fight Hamas, not for a week, not for a month, and not for a year, but for years going forward. The suppression of Hamas in Gaza will be a fundamental policy of Israel in Gaza for a long, long time to come, but maybe we will wait for some kind of solution to present

itself from within Gazan society. Maybe there's a level of degradation of Hamas that in two years we achieve and there's suddenly a flowering of new options in Gaza. Maybe the families, the clans, the great clans that are essentially large criminal networks in Gaza, Israel tried twice to use these clans to distribute aid,ans that are essentially large criminal networks in Gaza, Israel tried twice to use these clans to distribute aid, and they were massacred. The aid distribution convoys of these criminal organizations in Gaza, and they never agreed to work with the Israelis again.

So maybe a much degraded Hamas in two years won't be able to massacre them, and they will be able to become a new kind of governing body in Gaza. So it looks like, and I'm not saying this is what's happening, I'm saying I can't see anything else, any other explanation for the specifics of what the IDF is doing. There's a water pipeline was dug from Israel into the Nasserine corridor, so they're now working showers and toilets in the military bases along the Nasserine corridor. So they're now working showers and toilets in the military bases along the Nasserine corridor. That doesn't tell me the IDF is thinking

it's leaving in two months when Trump wants to see us out of Gaza. That tells me that this is the long-term policy. The long-term policy is to degrade Hamas and Gaza over a very long time, and the IDF is taking the positions it needs to do that. Given the continued commitment that the IDF is going to have to make to Gaza,

and this fantasy of some third party coming in gradually disappears, this means more wear and tear on IDF forces. And as you and I have discussed before now, Milowim, reservists in Israel, these are people who are not full-time professional soldiers, people plucked out of their civilian lives to serve. Many of them have families, children, working in businesses, running businesses.

You have family members who have been subjected to this. I have family members. Two of my three nephews in Israel are currently serving. They have families, they have lives. In one case, both the husband and wife were called up. People over here don't always appreciate the wear and tear on this segment of Israeli society that has been called up to serve in reserves and now north of 200 days. The scenario you're describing, Javiv, means that that same segment of the Israeli population,

there's even going to be more time and sacrifice and physical and emotional wear and tear subjected to them and taken away from them? There are at this moment three fighting brigades in Gaza. There are I believe two reserve brigades in Itzahim and the Nahal brigade is in Philadelphia. Can you just spell it in terms of numbers what that represents roughly? Probably somewhere on the order of 3,000 fighting forces in Philadelphia, probably on the order of that in Nizahim, again, it could be double that, but that's within the order of magnitude, and then a serious fighting force in the north, but a temporary one for the Battle of Jebaliah, but one that also might move

to other places if the battle moves elsewhere. So we're talking about, you know, a handful of tens of thousands. So yes, that is absolutely the case here. Absolutely right. Not only that, we saw the call up right after October 7 was the largest in the history of Israel. Something like 300,000 troops were called up into the reserves.

50% of that number again showed up demanding to be drafted to go into the war and to fight. Those people, a lot of them served a hundred days and a lot of them served 200 days. Students who missed a year of classes, jobs have been lost. I mean thousands upon thousands, tens of thousands have lost jobs, businesses, were away from their families. In my family, as you said, you know, a father was in Gaza and got out just in time within hours

of his first child's birth and then had to go back into Gaza a few days later. The army says it needs another 10,000 fighting men, that it is unable to get through the regular draft. That's why the big question of the ultra-orthodox draft has become a major source of anger and dispute in Israeli politics. But yeah, the army is in that sense, tired. And it needs to reign in and give people time off and lower the burden on the reserves. It's one of the reasons the army is eager to end the Northern War. It achieved a lot for very low cost. It can achieve a lot more, but at much higher cost. And so the just cost benefit analysis says that there's a diminishing return as the army continues

the war in Lebanon. And one of the factors in that is the exhaustion of the reservists. Just one little factoid, the vast majority of the dead in Lebanon are reservists. The worst fighting against the most powerful force on our borders, the Redouan force of Hezbollah, were carried out by 30-year-old and sometimes 40-year-old Israeli men

going into those battles. Why? Because the standing army was deployed at all the borders, taken up in Gaza and just literally didn't have the manpower. So there is a manpower problem, an exhaustion in that sense. People do need time off. There's a hope that the ultra-Orthodox can be brought around. didn't have the manpower. So there is a manpower problem, an exhaustion in that sense. People do need time off. There's a hope that the ultra-Orthodox can be brought around. One of the reasons that all these territories are being cleared in Gaza is to create a very easily held with relatively low manpower security situation on the southern border. I would also add to that that there are some 10,000 wounded soldiers who have also been

taken out of action. So it's both tragic because many of those soldiers are reservists. When I say wounded, I mean really wounded, people whose lives will be forever transformed, missing limbs, loss of one of their five senses. I mean, it could be anything, you know, loss of hearing, loss of eyesight, loss of a limb or all of the above paralysis in some part of their body. I mean, I visited the Shiba Medical Center.

I was stunned meeting patient after patient, and you talk to them, and these were people, as I said, they were just reservists, leading lives, had children, conducting their civilian business affairs, and one day they're plucked out of it, and now their life is transformed forever. All those people, in addition to this permanent tragedy that they will endure for the rest of their lives, they're also taken out of the pool of available personnel that can serve. AC Right. And post-trauma. A friend of mine is a psychologist who works as a military psychologist who counsels soldiers after battles and after their deployment ends.

And he has spent as much time in Gaza as the fighting forces. And he's actually called up at this moment. So absolutely, the post-trauma question affects tens of thousands. And it's one of those things where if you intervene well at the beginning, you prevent a lot. But there just aren't that many psychologists in the country to do that at scale. And so all of those things are true. The enemy is still there, certainly in Lebanon and Iran.

And the army will still have to be operating at a fairly high level for quite a while. But it does take a toll. Last question, Haviv. What is the Israeli societal, and I'm speaking in very general terms, but you can take it wherever you want, towards these questions we're dealing with?

I know you and I have talked about it, and I've talked in other episodes about general population, public opinion attitudes toward the whole issue of the Haredi draft exemption and changing it. But this whole topic of settling part of Gaza, and I don't want to overstate what it means to settle Gaza because a lot of it is purely, most of it, if not all of it, is of purely of a security necessity for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is there are no third party, appears to be no third party countries that are willing to step in. But when you just talk to Israelis

and you have your finger on the pulse of Israeli public opinion, how are they thinking, how are Israelis thinking about this reality? Because on October 6th, 2023, I don't think any Israeli was ever talking about a permanent presence in parts of Gaza going forward. Yeah, there's no desire for a permanent presence in Gaza by the vast, vast majority of Israelis.

It's costly in a thousand ways. It's costly for Gazans, obviously. How does a rebuilding begin while Israel is still engaged with Hamas in that guerrilla war in Gaza? But if Israel doesn't degrade it enough, pulling out is just handing it back to Hamas. It's one of these catch 22s that are basically Hamas's entire existence is creating a Catch-22 in which Gazans suffer. It's a little bit like the aid problem.

Right now there are 900 truckloads of aid sitting on the Gazan side of the Karim Shalom crossing and they can't be distributed. And they can't be distributed because it's not safe to distribute aid and so much of it is stolen. So Israelis think of Gaza as a kind of swamp where you can only sink. It's too dysfunctional. Hamas fundamentally never built anything in Gaza except tunnels. It sees its only purpose for existence and it understands Gaza's population, its purpose for existence,

Gaza's population, its purpose for existence as the great war for the redemption of Islam, blah, blah, blah, of which the liberation of Palestine is just this one battle. That's the basic political reality of Gaza, and Hamas is still the only thing there is in Gaza. And as Hamas recedes, there's just a vacuum. It's not that something else fills in. It's not like you can go to Fatah or the PA and say, hey, come on in, right? If there is today in Hamas's current state, a battle in Gaza for control between Fatah and Hamas, Hamas wins today. Never mind, you know, a month ago or six months ago or... So Gaza is a quagmire without solutions. And sometimes life

gives you no solutions, only quagmires. And you have to manage the quagmires as well as you can. I happen to think that, you know, I'm sometimes accused of being an optimist. I think Hamas can be degraded enough for Gaza to turn the page into a whole different future, but only the Israelis can do it. The only question that worries me a little bit sometimes when I hear certain politicians talk, is that how the Israelis are thinking. If that's what the Israelis are thinking, it's going to be awful, it's going to be terrible. I mean, most of the awfulness has already happened. Now we just, let's get out of it a better future.

But if that's not what the Israeli government is going to do for political reasons, or for ideological reasons reasons or because that's how the various political contradictory political interests that make up every Israeli government it happened to intersect this time around, then we are just building ourselves another quagmire and a long-term one and one that'll hurt Israelis and it'll hurt Gazans, certainly. So I think that we hold the line. It'll be a year, it'll be two years, maybe it'll be three years. Hamas will eventually be degraded enough and we will be able to choke off its supply of weapons. Today Islamic Jihad in Gaza released a video of a hostage, Alex Trufanov. It's a very heartbreaking

and sad thing to watch, but I watched it. And one of the interesting things was that he said and was given to say that the blocked aid that can't get into certain areas of Gaza where the IDF is fighting has hurt the hostages. And to me, that's a marvelous sign because Islamic Jihad telling him to say that on a video it releases now, first of all, it's a sign of life which they used to demand payment for. Second of all, that tells me that Islamic Jihad is desperately feeling that there's no aid to steal. Now, they are eager, perfectly willing and even eager for Gazans themselves to starve to death in a way that the Israelis can't afford. And so Israel has to navigate this situation where Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which is basically operates under Hamas right now, will steal all aid, any aid you let in supplies the Hamas war effort, drags out the war. Meanwhile,

you can't let people starve. How do you balance those things? But Haviv, just my question on the Israeli public's attitude towards some kind of settlement of Gaza or parts of Gaza. Specifically, settlement to me feels like a quagmire, and I think to most Israelis feels like a quagmire. I haven't seen a poll this week, but we've seen polls on this over the last six months, and there was wall-to-wall overwhelming opposition to building Israeli settlements in Gaza. We can't solve in any easy way the quagmire called Gaza when we're not there, when we

don't have to have army military units invested in protecting settlements, when we don't have to have a massive internal political civil war to pull a settlement out in the future, if that's possible politically. Why would we build for ourselves that deeper quagmire that we don't have right now? So I think a majority are opposed to it. It would be helpful to push back against it if the political forces of the center right,

the Netanyahu's, the Likud officials, said outright that this was a bad idea and held the line on that and explained why. For various political reasons, we are led by people who don't talk too much. And so they're not having that public debate. Smotrich is really the only voice being heard. The polls tell us that he's not convincing the public yet.

Haviv, we'll leave it there. Thank you. It's good to be back with you and most importantly, to puncture the conspiracy theories of some of our most loyal listeners, which I hope we have accomplished. Yes, thank you so much. And I am engaged in many other things involving education, building curricula for Jewish schools on Jewish history so that they can resist the war on our history that a lot of the ideologues in the West are trying to launch on again or have launched against us. I'm busy with other things and it is a wonderful thing to hear that people miss it and

that they don't realize you're gonna be they're gonna get plenty of Haviv. Glad to be back yeah and we'll talk. All right of Aviv glad to be back. Yeah, and we'll we'll talk All right, have you take care buddy? Thanks so much Call me back is produced and edited by lan benatar our media manager is rebecca strom additional editing by martin huergo Research by gabe silverstein until next time, I'm your host, Dan Sinor.