Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - The Price of Israeli Hostages - with Haviv Rettig Gur

Episode Date: November 20, 2023

Haviv Rettig Gur returns for our weekly conversation from Jerusalem to provide real-time reporting and analysis on the war, and invaluable historical context. More than 240 people, including a number of U.S. citizens, were taken hostage during the Oct. 7 massacre. More than half of the hostages have foreign nationalities (either as dual citizens or solely as foreign nationals). Four hostages, including two U.S. citizens, have since been released, one has been rescued and two others were found dead. In this episode we discuss how Israeli decision-makers are working through options to return the hostages. How is the IDF trying to prosecute this war knowing there are hostages? Do the twin objectives of eradicating Hamas and returning the hostages reinforce one another or conflict with one another? Where is the Israeli public on these horrific decisions and trade-offs? The families of the hostages have become a critically important voice in these deliberations -- what has been the effect?

Israel has made a demand to receive a huge number of hostages in exchange for some small measure of ceasefire. Why would it be willing to have any ceasefire at all if the logic is that the military pressure is what's actually getting Hamas to agree to release hostages in the first place? And the simple answer is, the Israeli leadership understands this war is a very long term war. This is not going to take days or weeks. It's going to take months. And if it's going to take months, then even if five days or seven days will give Hamas time to regroup, over the course of those months, we can afford it if it means getting out a significant number of hostages. But it has to be significant enough to dramatically lower the pressure on the cabinet

going forward so that the war can continue with less hostage pressure. The deal in which Hamas gives that up for a few days of ceasefire is hard to imagine. And so we're a little bit stuck. My guess is there won't be a hostage deal anytime in the immediate future, unless Hamas really is that desperate. It's 7 p.m. in New York City on Sunday, November 19th. It's 2 a.m. in Israel on Monday, November 20th. In today's episode, we're going to have a more comprehensive discussion than we have had on an issue that has been front and center and extremely deep and understandably very raw in the diaspora and around the world when it comes to the overall war in Gaza. And that is the question of how Israeli society is working through what to do about the hostages in Gaza. More than 240 people, including a number of U.S. citizens,

more than half of the hostages have foreign nationalities, were taken hostage during the October 7th massacre. Four hostages, including two U.S. citizens, have since been released. One has been rescued and two others were found by the IDF to be dead. Now, just to state the obvious when discussing this topic, we are going to be talking about the ongoing negotiations. There are reportedly breakdowns and talks, and then they pick up again. And so the obvious observation is that there is probably much more that we do not know going on in these negotiations than we do know. So with that caveat, here's what is being publicly reported. Yehia Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza, who was one of the two architects of the October 7th massacre, and he himself, Sinwar, returned to Gaza in a prisoner

exchange in 2011. He's been leading the negotiations via Hamas's political leaders based in Doha, who are dealing with the government of Qatar, which is in turn dealing with the U.S. government and the government of Israel. Qatar is serving a mediating role between all the negotiating parties. And it's not entirely clear, but SINWAR may be actually dealing directly with the government of Qatar rather than going through the Hamas officials in Doha. According to Israeli journalist Barak Ravid, if a deal is reached, it will be implemented in two phases. Now, again, another caveat, I'm basing this on Barak Ravid's reporting, which is the most current reporting I am tracking. Again, it's a fluid situation, but

Ravid seems to be reasonably well-sourced. And according to Ravid's reporting, in the first phase, Hamas would release approximately 50 women and children in exchange for a five-day pause in the fighting and for release of all Palestinian women and minors held in Israeli prisons. That number is estimated to be approximately 150 Palestinians. As the five-day pause continues, Hamas would be expected to locate more women and children being held hostage in Gaza for purposes of release in a second phase. It's not entirely clear what else would be part of that second phase. Another ceasefire, another pause, it's not clear. But the point is the number of Israeli women and children released could increase to more than the 50 being discussed now.

But some important buts here. It's not just a halt in fighting that Sinoir is apparently demanding. He's also demanding that Israel halt its aerial surveillance of Gaza for six hours per day during the pause so that Hamas operatives will be able to locate hostages without being spied on by Israel. That is to say, there are apparently a number of hostages that are not in Hamas's control. They're in control of Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other ragtag groups of Gazans. This is apparently a problem for Israel because it does not want to lose aerial visibility into what's going on on the ground in Gaza, especially as these leaders of Hamas may try to flee, move around, and move around other hostages. According to Barak Ravid,

Israel doesn't know the exact number of women and children that Hamas is holding or that Hamas is aware of, but Israeli officials believe there are around 20 to 28 more than the 50 Hamas has said it is holding. Obviously, Israel wants to know specifically how many would be released in the second phase. So that's the gist of what we know. Again, it's a fast-moving situation. Details don't just change daily. And according to various people I've spoken to who are following this very closely from the outside and inside, sometimes things change hourly. So the question for today's discussion is how are Israeli decision makers thinking about all of this? How is the IDF trying to prosecute its war against this backdrop? Do the twin objectives

of eradicating Hamas and returning the hostages reinforce one another or conflict with one another? And where is the Israeli public on all of this? These are some of the questions we had for Haviv Retigur on our weekly check-in. As you all know, Haviv Retigur is a senior analyst with the Times of Israel. He's a longtime journalist, and we have been having a regular ongoing conversation with him each week since October 7th. Before we move to the conversation with Haviv, I just want to say a word about Shachar Friedman, who in recent days was killed in battle in Gaza. He was 21 years old. Shachar served in the 101st Battalion of the Paratrooper Brigade. He was the longtime boyfriend of the stepdaughter of Avi Issacharoff. Many of you know Avi. He has been a frequent guest on this podcast, especially since October 7th.

He's a close friend of mine. He's a longtime journalist in Israel. He's the co-creator and writer for the show Fauda, and he and Shachar were very close. Shachar was getting ready for his release from the army in early October, having completed all of his service, and then, well, October 7th happened. To Avi and to Merav, Avi's stepdaughter's mother, and Noga, Avi's stepdaughter, and to the parents of Shachar, Doron and Liat, we just wanted to express our condolences, and may Shachar Friedman's memory be a blessing. And now to our conversation with Haviv Retikur on the price of Israeli hostages. This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome back to this podcast for our weekly check-in, Haviv Retikur from the Times of Israel, coming to us from Jerusalem. Haviv, good to see you.

Dan, hi. Thanks for having me. Thank you. Before we get into the topic I want to focus on today, just an update from you. Where do you think things are? We're now commencing the seventh week since the October 7th massacre, since this war was unleashed on Israel. Where do you think things stand now? I think that on the ground itself, we've seen the army pretty successfully surround northern Gaza, the city of Gaza, begin to move in. Probably more than 500 separate tunnel entrances have been located and destroyed. Hamas is experiencing a tremendous amount of pressure. It seems so far, I think we're what, three weeks into the ground incursion, to be unable to mount any kind of serious

response. The Israeli army, the Israeli intelligence thinks that Mohammad Def and Yechia Sinwar, these are the two leaders of Hamas in Gaza and the planners and actually probably commanders of the October 7th raid in terms of crossing the border and the massacre that ensued, that they have probably fled to southern Gaza, the Khan Yunis, an area where the Israelis have not yet gone. The Israeli encirclement of Gaza City and the slow move into the center of the city while dismantling all of this Hamas tunnel entrances and exits and infrastructures and trying to really build out the intelligence understanding of that tunnel network under the city is going apace. And Hamas appears to have done as much as it could to flee this Israeli sort of reconstruction of the battlefield in response

to Hamas's initial construction of the battlefield with the intent that the battle goes a certain way. So the Israelis have been able to really deny Hamas the strategic advantage of everything it has built in Gaza. And we already know that because Gaza is now, Gaza City, is now kind of essentially surrounded by the Israeli army, but also the tunnel network is slowly being sealed to the point where it is no longer strategically effective. As far as we know, again, Hamas could be, probably is, in one way or another, in one place or another, planning a big surprise. That's part of the battlefield.

But nevertheless, it appears that Gaza City is being taken off of the basic Israeli sort of hunt for Hamas. And now we're starting to look south. We now know that, you know, the Israeli army has already launched, you know, specific targeted intelligence commando raids to try and begin to build out the intelligence understanding in the surrounding areas, the suburbs of Han Yunis and in southern Gaza. And we know that the Israeli war effort is beginning to shift into a move into that southern half of Gaza, where they expect the battle to really be. In other words, the air campaign began with an effort to destroy as much infrastructure that Hamas had constructed, as much of the battlefield Hamas had built, tragically,

horrifically, under the civilian population of Gaza. There's no denying it. There's no looking away from it. Some of the images that came out of Gaza have kept me up nights right alongside our hostages and the images and stories that are still coming out from October 7th. And that's important to say, and it's important to know. But that air campaign's theory was all this Hamas infrastructure in places like Jabalia, the tunnels were bombed there to the point, and then because the tunnel was bombed, and a couple dozen, we think, Hamas fighters were killed in that bombing,

the ground collapsed into the tunnel and two buildings actually fell in. So we're talking about a battlefield that Hamas built. Now that the war has really been on the ground, that kind of civilian death toll has gone away. We're hoping, I'm hoping, I think most Israelis, certainly the Israeli military, you don't have to believe the Israeli military are nice people to understand that civilian death toll in Gaza is not helpful to the Israeli case. But I think we're hoping that everything goes from now on goes much, much better for Gazan civilians, as well as even as we approach southern Gaza, where we think Sinoir and death are hiding, and where probably

the last real pitched battle of Hamas will be. So that's where the war stands. We're not looking at it ending next week. Okay, but let me ask you two questions. One, much attention focused

on al-Shifa Hospital in or adjacent to Gaza City. Much focus on al-Shifa Hospital, how much infrastructure was underneath al-Shifa Hospital, possible command center, lots of armaments. Do you think what we've seen so far validates that view, that theory about al-Shifa Hospital? Or should we be underwhelmed by what we've seen

in or underneath al-Shifa hospital so far? Yeah, I don't take a lot of this debate very seriously in the West. You know, the Israeli army produces some not very well-made video in which they show some firearms, you know, in some room. And if you were not inclined to believe the Israeli army, you just saw random firearms produced by the Israeli army in some room. And if you were not inclined to believe the Israeli army, you just saw random firearms produced by the Israeli army in some room. And if you are inclined to believe the Israeli army, this is absolute evidence. I don't think any of that really matters. Israel telegraphed its intentions to go into Shifa hospital for three weeks. If Hamas, if we had gone in there and found

an operational Hamas command center, then Hamas would have been blithering idiots. I mean, we didn't want Shifa to go badly. We didn't want images coming out. And in fact, in the entry of the Israeli forces into Shifa, there are no civilian deaths because it was done in that way. There was a massive tunnel, a tunnel entrance discovered there. It was used, according to officials, aid officials from the past, American intelligence officials. It was used as a Hamas command center. There were areas of the hospital to which doctors were told you can't go. And that's enough. And Israel, you know, has been

this whole sort of popularity contest that everyone thinks is happening on Twitter with all the different proofs and all the different little videos. There's something deeply silly about it. Israel is willing to pay vast costs, vast costs to its international reputation, but vast costs on the ground to its own blood, vast cost in soldiers' lives to destroy Hamas. If people think that, you know, with Israel ready to pay those kinds of costs, the very idea that, you know, whether or not we prove that there was this or that or the other in Shifa, Shifa was used there. There were even reports of, you know, officials at Shifa Hospital saying the Israelis had taken bodies.

And the first reactions by, you know, pro-Palestinian activists was, that's horrible. What does that even mean? What are they, stealing random bodies? Like, what is happening? But of course what is happening is that the Israeli forces are checking the bodies

at Shifa Hospital to see if there are any of the roughly, I think it's 236 is the official number of hostages still believed to be held in Gaza. And not all of them by Hamas. And we're looking for the people, we're looking to find out what happened to them, if any of them have died, if they have died at Shifa. So that's the story of Shifa Hospital. The global obsession and the global sort of, it's a hospital in a war zone. Israel is targeting Hamas, and it is not stopping.

Even when Hamas operates from inside, under, or near a hospital, it will not stop going forward as well. Hamas has made those hospitals legitimate targets for military operations. This is, by the way, international law. It is the view of organizations like Human Rights Watch when it came to Islamic State. But then, of course, when it comes to Hamas, Human Rights Watch's position is different.

So that's the story with al-Shifa. And do you worry that for all the reasons you said,rael's give i mean using al-shifa as a as a sort of uh a proxy for how israel's fighting this war giving lots of warning broadcasting where it's going to you know hit next that israel going after these senior leaders like siena and these others there's a world in which they never find them because they've just given them so much notice about we're going to go here, and then in a couple weeks we'll go here, and then we'll be going there. And it makes it, I don't want to say it makes it easy, but it certainly is suboptimal from the military that's fighting an offensive operation to get the bad actors it wants to get who are listening closely to all

those broadcasts. I think that the people thinking carefully about how to manage, we're talking here about the actual management of the forces on the ground. So I have been critical of the very sort of carelessness of the Israeli PR campaign, the propaganda, the public diplomacy, which is part of war. It's unnecessary. How you frame your message, how you frame your war is part of that war. The Americans going into Iraq had a message and they pumped that message out, including an American run and led, you know, and that's true of everyone in Britain and Afghanistan. You go anywhere, you know that part of the war is framing the message. And I've been very critical about this sheer incompetence with which Israel has tried to do that. But here we're talking about something else. They actually held the troops back. They

actually didn't go in. And they explained that they're going in for a long, long time to make sure that al-Shifa didn't turn into a bloody battle. And so I don't think they thought they were going to catch anything significant. If they thought there was something really significant moving around inside Shifa that needed to either be killed or captured, they would have moved in and there would have been a bloody scene at al-Shifa hospital. They didn't think that. And so, you know, I don't think it's an example for what will happen moving forward. If you go south, I think there are 30 hospitals in Gaza, something like that.

Most of them are very, very small. A hospital in Gaza is usually, al-Shifa is the exception. It's by far the largest hospital. But if you reach another hospital where, for example, the Israeli army believes Sinoir is sitting on the roof sipping Mai Tai, that roof is going to be blown up from the air and nobody's going to ask questions or wait for anyone. So al-Shifa, I think the Israelis didn't want that battle. And so they moved in very slowly, Hamas cleaned out, and somehow that still became the talk of the day, even without civilian casualties in the Israeli

incursion. Haviv, I want to move to the, you brought up the degree to which pursuit of hostages is front and center. And that is what I wanted to focus with you on today. As I said in the intro, there's a deal that's seemingly closing in. Who knows? These negotiations appear to have a one step forward, two steps back tempo to them. But be that as it may, it sounds increasingly like there's talk about release of 50 hostages, women and children, in exchange for five days of a ceasefire, plus the release of 150 Palestinian prisoners, female prisoners from Israeli prisons. And then there's been reports about a divide in the Israeli war cabinet between

Netanyahu and Defense Minister Gallant on one side and Benny Gantz and Eisenkot on the other, saying that Israel should take the deal and Netanyahu and Gallant saying no. And anyways, we don't need to get into the who's, the speculation on the, you know, who's for what and what even what the specific details are, because whatever the details are, it sounds like some version of release of Israeli women and children in return for some release of female prisoners in Israeli prisons and some kind of ceasefire. The details are less important than the bigger questions, which is, if Israel's in this kind of negotiation, does it expose a contradiction between the war's two objectives? On the one hand, destroying Hamas,

which would mean no ceasefire and keep the pressure on and don't stop till you get Sinwar and the other members of the leadership and wipe out all of Hamas's military capabilities. That's one objective. And releasing the hostages, which means taking a version of the deal I just outlined or something like it, which strengthens Hamas's hand in its defense against what Israel is trying to achieve on the first objective. So is there, I guess, is there an inherent contradiction here that is impossible to reconcile? I think Hamas is trying to play the old game. It has 236 hostages. It feels under intense pressure. It's been begging for the last three or four weeks for Hezbollah, for Iran, for various other allies and proxies of Iran to step in and help save it

by creating, opening a new front. Everyone, of course, has refused. Khamenei has said to Iran, to Hamas, you started without consulting us, now you deal with it. By the way, in the Israeli high command, that message by Khamenei, rejecting publicly and leaking it to the press, publicly rejecting helping Hamas, and blaming Hamas for it, was seen as both saving Iran's saving face, because if Iran plans to rescue Hamas, why hasn't it done so, right? Iran comes off cowardly, but also possibly as a feint, as a lie. In other words, Hezbollah is about to open that front, Israeli officials are thinking, and therefore they're trying to

keep everyone calm, right? The Israel after October 7th is an Israel that no longer believes anything the enemy says and is no longer interested in the enemy's psychological games. And so that is an Israeli response to when Khamenei talks, when Hamas talks, it is emphatically the Israeli response to all of these offers that have been put on the table by the Qataris, by Hamas. The very fact that at the very beginning you saw two hostages released, and then a few days wait, and then two more hostages, and Hamas tried to condition the release of more hostages with that kind of one-two trickle on Israel not launching the ground incursion.

And today we're talking about a Hamas offer of 50 hostages, women and children. Israel has responded to that offer. And by the way, the people who keep saying to the press that there is an offer, and it's on the cusp, and we're right there, are the Qataris, mostly. And when the Qataris say that, the Qataris are working for Hamas, in support of Hamas. So the goal of leaking this constant leakage of, there is a deal, it's about to happen, we're close, we're almost close, we're going to get there, and then the Israelis refuse, that is a psychological campaign to serve Hamas' interests, to increase the cost for Israeli officials, for the Israeli leadership, the psychological pressure internally to help empower and strengthen the campaign of the families within Israel, the utterly legitimate and powerful and important Israeli family campaign of the hostages.

But that's part of the game. It's part of the psychological torture, and it's part of Hamas's maneuvers to try and win some space, some time to breathe using these hostages. The Israeli response has been very, very clear. And it was a response, by the way, accepted publicly and openly by Brett McGurk, President Biden's advisor, I think on Friday. And the Israeli response was, first of all, we're not splitting families. The 50 women and children being sent out, like the previous hostages who were released they kept other family members

in other words, Hamas wants even in the release not to actually release families from the circle of pressure on the government the goal is to keep torturing as many Israelis as possible even in the release and you do that by splitting families so the Israeli demand is A. no families are split

you let out the mother and children when you're letting out a mother or a child, you're letting out the mother and the children together. And B, all the women and children, all the mothers and all the children. And when that is on the table, Israel is willing to talk. Now, in theory, we talked about this way back at the beginning. Why would Israel be willing to talk at all? Why not just keep the pressure on?

And when Hamas is desperate enough that it's offering 200 hostages just to live out the day, then you sign on the deal, right? And the answer isn't just political pressure from within, although that is a factor. We're seeing that factor. Benny Gantz met with families of hostages. By the way, Netanyahu has largely refused to meet families of hostages, because he's afraid that'll turn into a kind of media event that won't look good for him. But Gantz and Eisenkot, two former chiefs of staff who are part of the five-member war cabinet, both met with families of hostages yesterday.

Gantz said, look, there are no good decisions. Any decision we make, some family will be, you know, for one family a tragedy, even if for another family it's a rescue. And then Eisenkot said something very, very strange. He said the supreme goal of the war cabinet is to return the hostages, more than the toppling of hamas now he said this to the families but that is not the declared hold on hold on hold on yeah so i got it got it got it eisenkot said this in the meeting with with the families of the hostages

he said the mission is to get the hostages back. And this was then leaked out? This came out in the press? Yeah, it was reported by a journalist named Yaron Avraham, who was a very reliable journalist. And I don't know if his sources were the family's. That's an amazing, that's an extraordinary statement. It is an extraordinary statement. It suggests that you referenced other reports that we had, that Netanyahu and Galant, the defense minister, had said no to a deal that Gantz and Eisenkot had wanted to accept. It's possible there's such a divide. It's also possible that leak was essentially politics. And it's also possible, in other words, Netanyahu trying to look tough, and trying to show Gantz and Eisenkot as people who still think of Hamas as, you know, as if it was October 6. It's also possible that Galant was, not to put too fine a point on it, was lying. He

wants the families, Israel needs that there to be as little pressure on hostages as possible, so that it has a higher chance of increasing the military pressure on Hamas and actually getting more hostages out. That is the declared position of the cabinet. In any case, you know, you can try and maneuver around this problem from 16 different angles, and you always come up with the same point. Israel has steadfastly said one thing and one thing only. The war against Hamas continues. Israel has made a demand to receive a huge number of hostages in exchange for some small measure of ceasefire.

Why would it be willing to have any ceasefire at all if the logic is that the military pressure is what's actually getting Hamas to agree to release hostages in the first place. And the simple answer is, the Israeli leadership understands this war is a very long-term war. This is not going to take days or weeks. It's going to take months. And if it's going to take months, then even if five days or seven days will give Hamas time to regroup, over the course of those months, we can afford it if it means getting out a significant number of hostages. But it has to be significant enough to dramatically lower the pressure on the cabinet going forward so that the war can continue with less hostage pressure. A deal in which Hamas essentially gives up the most, I hate to say that impolitely, but essentially photogenic,

essentially the most, you know, the hostages that hurt the most, the children, the deal in which Hamas gives that up for a few days of ceasefire is hard to imagine. And so we're a little bit stuck. My guess is there won't be a hostage deal anytime in the immediate future, unless Hamas really is that desperate. But when you say Israel plowing ahead and maintaining the military pressure is the reason Hamas is effectively begging for a deal, which makes sense on the one hand. On the

other hand, I've heard others argue like Amos Harrell. I heard him on the Unholy podcast the other day make the point that the risk, of course, of Israel keeps up the pressure that it scrambles its ability to find hostages because the more war fighting it does, the more Hamas with the hostages scrambles to new locations. Any intelligence the Israelis have or what they think they have in terms of a sense of where the hostages may be, more destruction means that hostages could get killed, or as I said, people scatter the hostage, the people guarding the hostages scatter with the hostages. So it does make a very messy situation messier in terms of getting the hostages. Does it not?

It does, but I think the priority for the Israelis is to keep the initiative on the Israeli side. They have proven that they can shatter Hamas's capacity to operate, at least so far. And there is a fear that those hostages will be lost. The war cannot stop. And so there has to be a way. They're looking for, they're really trying to thread a needle through an incredibly small hole in which the operation continues.

Hamas is given just enough and is pushed to the brink enough to understand that it needs to buy space with these hostages. It needs to buy time with these hostages, but all the hostages and not to get into this kind of, you know, not to let Hamas using the hostages get the initiative back. This is a moral point as much as it is a tactical one, or at least a strategic point going forward. The price of hostages has to be brought down. If the price of hostages remains what it was in the Shalit deal back in 2011, 1 to 1,100, then there will be more hostages. But if the price of a hostage means that Israel will shatter you, and just to let you breathe a minute before you're captured, agree to a hostage deal, then hostages will be less

likely to be taken in the future. And so the very fact that Hamas took 240, the very fact that they took children, makes it harder to negotiate for their release, not easier. So they're trying to thread this needle. And, you know, thank God I'm not a member of that war cabinet. You know, there is no decision that isn't tragic in this story. Okay, but to many in the U.S., it's clear that destroying Hamas should be prioritized. At least many people distant from it argue, just destroy Hamas, that has to be the priority over the hostages. It's not articulated in a kind of cold clinical way. It's just that

for all the reasons you just said, if you prioritize hostages over prosecuting the war against Hamas, you repeat what you just said, this perception that we live in a world of the 2011 Shalit deal repeating itself. How do you explain to Americans why Israelis historically have operated under a different paradigm when it comes to hostages? Because there's this perception that Israelis are the toughest, shrewdest, most deft military risk managers and sort of calculators of risk in the region, in the world, that they're the best. And then there's always this issue about these lopsided hostage deals where people say, except for hostage negotiations where Israelis completely undermine their own effectiveness by being softer, quote unquote, I'm not saying they're

softer, but just being softer. So the characterization goes on negotiating for hostages and therefore rewarding hostage takers than almost any other country in the West. This is a unique Israeli characteristic or attribute or paradigm. Can you explain where it comes from? It's, I think, our founding ethos. It's an ethos of solidarity. When I went into the army, I was drafted in November of 1999 at the age of 18. And I had a bunch of classes and basic training. We had a class on, I don't know, you know, Israeli war crimes and international law. They taught us moments in Israeli history when Israeli forces committed war crimes. Just the Supreme Court decisions about them so that we would recognize them and not do them, right?

They taught us famous battles. They taught us to understand what went well in the battle, what went poorly. How you, you know, you have a bunch of, you have a whole, most of basic training is running around and being screamed at, but some basic training is sitting in a classroom. And one of the things that you learned in those classrooms was that there are these ethics of the army that are foundational to the army. And the ethics include, essentially, that the army, you know, you won't be left behind. The army, the state, the country, the civilian population believes that it will do everything

possible to get you back. It's part of that ethos of solidarity. When you're charging into gunfire as an infantryman, you don't charge because of grand ideals. You don't charge because you think the war is just and the prime minister is prosecuting it intelligently. When you risk your own life, you're risking your own life for the guy next to you who you've just spent six months training with. That is the only thing that actually drives you to get up because otherwise he gets up on his own and he's exposed. That sense of solidarity is the discourse.

It's actually what Israelis talk about when they, back in the day, in 2011, talked about Shalit. And so what is happening now with Hamas and with these hostages, and one of the reasons the Israeli army is so grimly determined to get the job done, we'll try and get every hostage out,

but Hamas can't survive this because of the hostages. And the reason is the making us risk the hostages, because there's so many that we no longer can just begin to open negotiations for them. And so that is a violation. That is, you know, a dagger in our hearts. That Hamas is very intelligently twisting. Hamas thinks that every time it causes us pain, it weakens us. It thinks that every time it throws us back, every time it forces us to choose between military, what's intelligent to do militarily, and our most basic ideals and values and ethos, that it hurts us and that it weakens us. It doesn't yet understand that that strengthens us.

In other words, we are a people that is now facing an enemy that is doing to us what in our value system is by far the worst thing you could possibly do to somebody, which is forcing us to choose between destroying the kidnapper of children and the lives of the children. And so I wrote in favor of the Shalit deal back in 2011 as a young journalist, not that anybody read me and therefore that was the reason the deal happened. But I do want to acknowledge that, you know, we're all criticizing it and it

was apparently a disastrous mistake. But, you know, when I served in the military, I knew, I knew as a basic idea, as a basic, you know, assumption of my service, that if something happened to me, the country would, you know, would lift every stone and go to any length and travel across half the world to get me back, to rescue me, to protect me, to rescue my dead body so that it could come to Israel for burial, which is something Israel did in the deal with Hezbollah. So it's part of our ethos. I don't think it's going away. And one of the reasons the Israelis are so bitter and so determined with Hamas, to an extent Hamas did not expect and doesn't really know how to respond to at this point, is that they tread over that ethos

so profoundly and so enormously and with such high numbers of hostages. Javier, you talked a little bit before about the families of the hostages in the campaign they have mounted. And I just want to come back to that because I have just been struck watching that. I've never seen that in a—obviously, there's never been a situation like this where there have been so many Israeli hostages. I've never seen this—in Israel, this kind of national campaign, organized grassroots, grass tops, some of it quite organic, most of it quite organic, but sophisticated, and a big part of the national story inside Israel about this war. Can you just talk a little bit about the uniqueness of that in Israeli life, the idea of having this movement, if you will? You know, it's interesting. In the last, in 2023, we've seen these movements that didn't exist before in Israeli politics. you know, other organizations adjacent to Brothers in Arms who are the nucleus of the

anti-judicial reform protest movement. That became like a new movement in Israeli politics. The Families of the Hostages is like a, it's like a political movement now, it seems, in Israel. Yeah, it's, I mean, I'll tell you what, you know, it has a history in Israeli political life. There was the Four Mothers Movement, the mothers of four soldiers killed in Lebanon who campaigned to get out of the Lebanon, you know, quagmire, essentially, that launched shortly after the 1982 war in Lebanon. And the Four Mothers Movement was a similar kind of public campaign. Essentially, these campaigns, they're different times. They affect different population groups. They're launched by different people in response to different policies or problems.

But these campaigns all share throughout Israeli history one basic feature, which is that they are a conversation about our ethos of solidarity. All of them. So, you know, the Four Mothers movement that said, what the heck are we doing in Lebanon? This was some kind of military adventure by Ariel Sharon or by the Begin government. And our soldiers are dying there for no reason. And why is that a crime? Because we as a country have a debt to those soldiers, a debt of protection and

solidarity. And that sense of a debt to the soldiers sometimes brings Israel to a bit of a silly extreme. The fear over soldiers' deaths means that civilians can live under the threat of rocket fire, right? But it is that same ethos of solidarity. And you saw that, remember the judicial overhaul, the judicial reform fight that nobody now remembers from back in six weeks ago when it was tearing the country apart? One of the central features of the protest movement against that was the different groups of soldiers, pilots, infantry, intelligence, commandos, different groups of soldiers in different parts of the army, all of them reservists, all of them civilians, no enlisted soldiers were involved in this. But these civilian reservists were signing petitions

that said, if this country is no longer democratic, they were arguing that the judicial reform was a retreat of Israeli democracy. We can leave that question aside, that debate aside, but they were saying, if this country is no longer democratic, I am not going to serve anymore. And that petition, that argument, was the talk of the country for months. And it was the thing that supporters of judicial reform, of the government's bills, lambasted the hardest. It was the thing that opponents of the judicial reform thought was their most effective weapon. But what was it actually about? Because as soon as October 7 happened, every single one of those movements, of those signatories, of those soldiers,

all came to fight. So people who had sworn that they would not fight, or if this government was still in power, would not fight, or would not fight if the judicial reform wasn't cancelled, which it has not yet been. They would not fight. But then they immediately came to fight. And I suggested, you know, for months, that it isn't that these people won't fight. It isn't that some fighter pilot is going to, when Nasrallah's 150,000 rockets buried under South Lebanon

start firing at Israeli cities, this fighter pilot is going to look at his kid in the face and say, I'm sorry, I can't fly against the Nasrallah and I can't fly against Hezbollah and protect you because judicial reform. That's not what this was. What this was was a way of Israelis to talk to each other about their most fundamental ethos, which is the ethos of protection, the ethos of solidarity, the ethos that after the 20th century, Jews are here for each other, protecting each other. What the center left was saying in these petitions,

they were saying to the other side, dear right wing, you think that you're doing something political. You think you're doing something minor. You think this maybe is a little bit of a populist move. Politics as usual. I want to tell you from over here on the opposition, on the center left, I want to tell you that you're breaking something fundamental. I compared it in a piece during the height of the judicial reform fight. I compared it to when my six-year-old son, when he gets angry, he had this phase where he would come to me and he would say, I hate you. He would say to me, his father, I hate you. What he meant wasn't I hate you. What he meant was,

I love you. I need you. You are not noticing me because you're doing work. You're, you know, whatever it was, what he meant was, please be here with me. And how did he express it? He expressed it with I hate. In other words, something big is happening to me. I'm feeling big feelings. Please notice. That's what he meant. And that, you know, neither side of the judicial foreign debate are children. But in the Israeli vocabulary, to talk about military services, to talk about solidarity

and protection and self-reliance and our duty to each other. And so all of these movements ultimately follow that thread. And now you come to this movement, these families. And here, the families' case, it actually took them a very long time to get moving. We're six weeks in. And the first really effective protests have basically been this week. And the reason that this movement has actually had a harder time getting going is that Hamas has kind of scrambled what solidarity means in this case.

What is solidarity? Is solidarity not destroying Hamas because we have to rescue every last hostage? Well, if that's the case, we'll never destroy Hamas because Hamas is going to just peter them out. It's going to trickle them out for the next 10 years. Why wouldn't they? Is saving the hostages going to be achieved by raising their cost? By telling Hamas, you survivedas's new strategy, new tactic, essentially a luxury, which is to try to rescue them all. And that's the bind. And that's the tragedy. And that's the anger.

And that's why this is a movement that is coming to the government and saying, prioritize the hostages. At a very simple level, what they're saying is if the Qatari prime minister, who I think yesterday said, there's a deal very, very close, obviously saying it for Hamas' sake, right, for the part of the Hamas campaign. But those families are saying, well, if there's a deal close, sign the damn thing, get us whoever we can get as soon as we can get them. That is the simple level of it. The deeper level is, please don't give up on them completely. Please still take risks for them. And that's what this campaign really is about. All of it is pain.

All of it is torment. It's a special torment that Hamas is inflicting on us. Hamas thinks this is a clever new layer of its anti-colonial war, of its war to torment us until we someday leave this land. Hamas is discovering that it is the glue and the focus and the lens that has focused us completely on their destruction. I want to ask you about Netanyahu, because ultimately this is Prime Minister Netanyahu's decision to make. And on the one hand, he probably bears some responsibility, and the team around him, for the Shalit deal,

or at least he probably realizes that, that what he agreed to, it can be characterized as a big setback and that it incentivized Hamas to carry out this operation because of the high price Israel conveyed that it puts on a single hostage. So the legacy effects of the lopsided nature of the prisoner exchange. So that's like on the one hand, and obviously Sinoir was part of that deal. So the architect of this, of the October 7th massacre was serving something like three life sentences in an Israeli prison. And he returned to Gaza as part of the 2011 deal that occurred on Netanyahu's watch. So I can't even imagine everything weighing on Netanyahu based on that 2011 deal. On the other hand, so much of the

mythology around Netanyahu and the Netanyahu family is around the story of Yoni Netanyahu, Bibi Netanyahu's brother, who was killed in action while commanding the Entebbe raid that released, that saved 102 Israeli hostages. So the whole issue of hostage taking was a big part of Benjamin Netanyahu's role in public life, his sort of public intellectual status, even before he was an elected official. The Yoni Netanyahu story was a big part of Benjamin Netanyahu's story. And now here he is under his watch with 240, 250, we don't know the precise number of hostages that were taken. Again, I don't in this podcast ever try to get into kind of getting people's heads. You ultimately don't know what's in people's heads. I try not to get into pop psychology. But wow, I can't imagine what is weighing on Benjamin Netanyahu on this, which would

weigh on any Israeli leader, but especially one who has his story and his history and the legacy of his family. I, like you, I, you know, I try to avoid pretending like I know what's in someone's head, especially someone as complex and experienced as Netanyahu, someone who has gone through so many different eras of his own life, someone who probably wouldn't do such a good job interpreting himself any better than the rest of us are doing interpreting him. But I could tell you this much. If I was Netanyahu, I would be jealous of Yoni. Because in a sense,

Yoni paid the highest price, obviously. Yoni was killed in Entebbe in that astonishing raid. He commanded the main force that actually literally went in and liberated the hostages. But in a sense, he had a very simple task. There was a raid. There was a military plan. They had intelligence. They had maps of the airport in Antebi. They had the equipment, the planes, the trained troops, the command and control. There were a couple planes up in the air with commanders on the radio trying to sort of manage the operation. And he just had to get this one job done that was sitting right in front of him. What Benjamin Netanyahu right now has to try and manage, while the entire political system is breathing down his neck, while every poll since

October 7 shows him collapsing, and that's something he has never been able to look away from. So I can't imagine that now he's somehow, I mean, we know, we know his political campaign is still active. We know his social media people sitting in the US are still pumping out social media messaging to try and rescue him from, you know, the coming election after the war. All of that is happening all at once. And he has to manage this war. And he has to manage a brand new strategy because he really identified with the old strategy that collapsed on October 7. He advanced it, he defended it. And he has to do all of that all at once, while rescuing somehow through all of that complexity, 240 hostages who are for Hamas, probably, they're starting to probably understand that they are their main lifeline, their main means of survival. So when Netanyahu's task now is infinitely more complex than the task given to Yoni Netanyahu

back in 1976. Final question, Haviv. I've heard from some friends of mine who are serving right now in this operation, basically not saying this is the official line, but just where their mindset is on this whole debate about what to do and what not to do in pursuit of the hostages. And again, I strenuously resist the pop psychology

that said, here we are, we're doing it a little bit. And what I sense in talking to these people is, yes, it's a bad policy to engage in these kinds of negotiations for hostages because of the precedent it sets. And yet, the reason Hamas has so many hostages is because of us. The IDF dropped the ball. We dropped the ball, they say. There was a gap in Israeli security presence for too long a time in the south on October 7th. That's on us. That's why Hamas was able to get so many hostages. And yes, there are implications for Israel's security doctrine going forward.

But there are this many Israeli families that are being tortured right now, both literally tortured in Gaza by being there and their families in Israel that are having to live with this trauma because of our errors, because of our gaps, and we got to fix this now. It's on us. Is that something you're sensing as well? I think so. I think we've heard from what they call OC Southern Command, the theater commander of the Southern Command, who's the overall military officer in charge of the actual war in Gaza. And he's the one responsible for the military posture around the Gaza Strip on October 6th, right? He's the one, ultimately, the commander on the ground under whose watch all of this happened. And he's at the level of a major general, the second highest rank in the army. He's one of the major theater commanders. So

there has been talk in Israeli press and in the Israeli public debate about maybe he should resign, and not because of the mistake. Obviously, he should resign because of the mistake. And I think that he basically said he'll resign right after the war because of the mistake. Obviously, he should resign because of the mistake. And I think that he basically said he'll resign right after the war because of the mistake. But that he should resign right now. Because someone with that amount of guilt, how could he function psychologically in a way that we need the current theater commander in Gaza to function? He has stayed. He has stuck it out. He has also thrown out all the old textbooks and rewritten

Israel's strategy together with a lot of other people, obviously Israel's strategy in Gaza. And he so far has managed this war, apparently, we don't know what surprises the enemy has in store. I keep saying that. But it's really vital to say that. But he has apparently managed this war much better than anyone expected it to go. We have so far really, you know, if Iran wants to save Hamas, it looks like they're going to need a new front. Or it doesn't, at this moment, look like Hamas really has the wherewithal to respond to this new Israeli, the new Israeli tactics, the new Israeli capabilities. Soldiers who went into Gaza three, four weeks ago, didn't know how to engage Hamas in urban warfare. The urban warfare experience of Israeli elite units and

infantry battalions was very, very limited. And it no longer is limited. And every engagement, Hamas loses men. It's one of the really silly things coming out of Gaza's horrific civilian death toll numbers is that somehow, magically, not a single Hamas fighter has been killed, according to Gazan death toll numbers. But we know that thousands of Hamas fighters have been killed. There are different estimates. One I saw recently was 2,000. Again, I don't know how reliable that is. Long story short, there is this question about the leadership that was there that messed up. It's part of the discussion about how the war is going. As far as I can tell, the commanders under whom all of this failed and the politicians who oversaw this catastrophe want, desperately need to prove

that they can fix it, need as an apology to fix it. And that is, again, another layer of Israeli determination. We have an enemy that profoundly misunderstands us and tortures us in ways that don't actually topple us. They strengthen us, they unify us, and this is another layer of that. Haviv, we will leave it there. Thank you, as always. It's great to hear you wrestle with these issues, wrestle with them with me, because there are certainly no easy answers in any of these topics, wrestle with them with me, because there are certainly no

easy answers in any of these topics, but especially this one. So this has been, I think, very helpful for me and I think for our listeners. And I'll look forward to checking in with you next week. Thanks for having me, Dan. That's our show for today. To keep up with Haviv Retik-Gur, you can find him at Haviv Retik-Gur on X. And you can also find him at thetimesofisrael.com or at timesofisrael on X. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.