Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - The world unites against Hamas... for now - with Yaakov Katz
Episode Date: October 12, 2023For analysis of the Israeli Government's formation of a (Netanyahu/Gantz) unity government and war cabinet, preparations for the invasion of Gaza, and anticipating the Hezbollah threat from the northe...rn border, we are joined by Yaakov Katz. Yaakov is a columnist for the Jerusalem Post and senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute. Previously, Yaakov served as editor-in-chief at the Jerusalem Post, before which he was the paper's military reporter and defense analyst. He is the author of "Shadow Strike: Inside Israel's Secret Mission to Eliminate Syrian Nuclear Power" and co-author of two books: "Weapon Wizards - How Israel Became a High-Tech Military Superpower" and "Israel vs. Iran - The Shadow War". He is currently working on a new book. Yaakov's most recent piece: "How Israel Got Ambushed" -- https://www.thefp.com/p/how-israel-got-ambushed
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This is what we call in Hebrew,
It is a war over our home.
That is what they did because what these Hamas murderers did,
they went into people's homes and they murdered families.
They butchered children.
They cut open the womb of pregnant women
and left the fetus hanging from the umbilical cord.
They burnt people in cars.
Jews are not supposed to be burnt anymore. But I thought when I heard President Herzog speak and talk about how on
Saturday, the most Jews died in a single day since the Holocaust, it's unimaginable. And the blood
is boiling. And Israel has this opportunity today to reset the equation here, to create a safer and more secure country.
As the fog of war continues to slowly dissipate over Saturday's massacre, a shocking picture is beginning to be
revealed. 1,200 Israelis murdered, including children, babies, women, and the elderly.
2,500 injured, many of them in serious and critical condition.
At least 150 Israelis are estimated to have been kidnapped and are in Gaza.
The IDF now estimates that approximately 1,500 terrorists from Hamas's special forces crossed the fence between Israel and Gaza on the southwest border of Israel,
followed by a mob that came to loot and hunt for Jews. The removal of the bodies from
Kibbutz Kfar Aza exposed the massive dimensions of the massacre. More than 100 people there
were butchered, something like 10% of the population of the kibbutz, among them 40 babies.
Families were burned alive in their homes. Similar scenes took place in other kibbutzim,
kibbutz near Oz, Be'eri, and kibbutz Nativ Asara, where massacres continued up to 10 hours
from when they began. On another site near kibbutz Re'im, where this music festival that's
been much in the news was held, terrorists piled up 260 bodies of young men and women
into a tractor wagon, and they tried to set these 260 bodies on fire. As a result, it is very
difficult to identify some of the civilians who were killed. At a nearby IDF base that was attacked, dozens of defenseless female soldiers
from the observation unit were murdered. In several cases, fathers who were experienced
reserve officers who had lost contact with their sons and daughters heard that there was something
happening. There was some kind of action arrived on the scene to fight, only to find their bodies.
All this is, of course, maddening, shocking, and there's not a
single Israeli I know of who doesn't know someone who has been harmed in the South in recent days.
In fact, I would say the same thing for most Jews in the diaspora who don't live in Israel but have
personal connections to people in Israel. They all seem to know someone or know someone who knows someone. These harrowing stories will continue to unfold
over the next months and years, each of them heartbreaking, gut-wrenching. As we say in Hebrew,
ain milim, no words. Amongst the grief that has struck the tens of thousands who've lost their loved ones,
the shock and paralysis from Hamas's massacre are starting to wear off. The IDF is mobilizing
reserve forces on a particularly large scale while attacking Gaza from the air and preparing
the possibility of a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip at an order of magnitude that has never been
seen. On the northern front, Israel's border with Lebanon, Hezbollah is testing
Israel, but so far all we've seen are small-scale attacks. Bears watching to see if that changes.
At this point in time, the objectives of the war from Israel's perspective have not been
explicitly articulated. Will it be limited to the denial of Hamas's military capabilities, or will it ultimately
end with the overthrow and removal of Hamas as the governing regime in Gaza? Will the ground
operation be broad and prolonged? These are the questions being debated in Israel and also by
Israel's newly formed war cabinet that is populated by leading members of its new national unity
government.
Around the world, 82 governments from 82 countries have expressed an unwavering support for Israel so far.
We've seen the images, the Empire State Building, the Eiffel Tower, the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, and in Washington, D.C., the White House have all been lit with the white and blue colors of the Israeli flag.
In an historic speech, President Biden offered extremely strong
and emphatic support for Israel. He made it clear that, quote, Hamas's bloodthirst is reminiscent
of ISIS's most horrific murderous campaigns. Hamas does not defend the Palestinians' right
to self-determination, President Biden said. Its only goal is the destruction of the state of
Israel and the murder of Jews.
The Biden administration has ordered the aircraft carrier Gerald Ford to the region,
alongside armed shipments that have already begun landing at Ben Gurion Airport. The addition of a
second aircraft carrier, the Dwight Eisenhower, is also being considered. The American message
and show of force seems to be primarily directed at Iran to restrain Hezbollah, but we will have to wait to see if the message is received in Tehran and will be backed up
by the United States. While Israeli political leadership has been questioned in the Israeli
press, Israel's civil society is proving to be nothing short of astonishing, very inspiring.
Hundreds of thousands of reservists showed up in unprecedented
numbers. A similar mobilization exists among many civilians and organizations taking on tasks
such as removing bodies, rescuing besieged civilians, providing food and shelter for
displaced families, collecting equipment for soldiers and raising funds. They did not wait
for the government. They organized themselves. To discuss
the latest from Israel on the security front, on the newly created war cabinet, and the state of
Israeli society, civil society, as it responds to this war, we welcome back to the podcast Yaakov
Katz, longtime journalist who joins us from Jerusalem. The world unites against Hamas for now.
This is Call Me Back.
And I welcome to today's podcast, live from Jerusalem, my friend Yaakov Katz, who has been
on this podcast many times before, former editor-in-chief
of the Jerusalem Post and currently a columnist for the Jerusalem Post and a senior fellow at the
Jewish People's Policy Institute. He has been on this podcast during what I guess one could call
more during happier times, but his voice is uh always important and i i
wanted to touch base with him now yakov cats thank you for being here thanks dan uh so yakov before
we get into the substance or the macro if you will uh let's start with the micro, um, you have family, very close family, uh, that is, um, that is on the front lines, both, you know, kind of metaphorically and literally, uh, of this crisis.
Can you talk about what's going on with your daughter and other members of the family?
So my daughter is currently in what's known as Badakhad, right?
The officer's training school down south based in Mitzpah Ramon in the Negev desert.
She had finished up one year in the army and she was about to, she's in officer's training
to sign on for a third year as opposed to just two years.
And of course, on Saturday morning,
we woke up to the news of what was happening.
She was called back to base.
To take your daughter,
I didn't drive her all the way down to Mitzpah Ramon.
They had a shuttle coming from Jerusalem.
But I can tell you that to take your daughter,
and she's not frontline combat,
but they upped their combat training
during officer's training.
And now she's in one of the cities somewhere in the, in the South, one of the cities where
there was the fighting.
I'm not sure what they're doing.
I think some sort of security and, and, and things like that.
But when you take your daughter to a bus and you know, they're leaving for a war and they,
she walks away with her gun and, and, that does something to you, right?
When I, my brother calls me,
my younger brother, about 10 years younger than I am,
lives out in Herzliya,
married with a two-year-old baby at home,
a young, not a baby, a two-year-old kid,
and calls me in the middle of the day
and says, I've been called up.
And he's going up to the Lebanese border and
he's been there and he texts me, you know, we talk throughout the day. He can't really be with his
phone, but he's spending a lot of the time in the bunker because of all the, his blah rockets and
mortar shells and anti-tank missiles. And then we have three nephews who are, uh, each one, these are triplet boys.
Each one is a more elite combat unit than the next one.
And the three of them are down there deployed along the border with those frontline units.
They're the ones who are going to go in first
when this offensive begins.
And, you know, obviously we're not sleeping.
I know my parents, my wife's parents, we're not sleeping i know my you know pair my parents my wife's parents
they're not sleeping our siblings everybody but we're no different dan it's a story that all
israelis have i mean you you have family here in jerusalem you know you have family who who
you have probably nephews and nieces that are also have also been called up yeah i've got i've got
i've got two nephews i've got two nephews who've been called up to reserves for reserves, one of whom he and his wife have both been called up, and they have kids.
So one of my sisters is just figuring out how to deal with making sure she can cover what both parents are going to be gone and, and, uh, in the reserves. And then, uh, I have other family
more distant, uh, close personally, but, but not, not nephews or nieces who are, um, what,
you know, one family of, I think five, one family of five kids, three of whom have been called up,
one of which is in a commando unit. And like your nephews is, it's pretty clear. He'll be on the,
he'll likely be on the first wave, uh, in, and, um, yeah, it's, it's, uh, you know,
one thing I've been trying to explain over here in the U S is, you know, Israel is such a small
country, uh, you know, numerically geographically. So everyone really does know everyone. Everyone
has a connection to everyone. So everyone knows someone who's like your family, typical, right? All these family members serving in different units. And so everyone knows someone who's like your family typical right all
these family members serving in different units and then everyone knows someone who knows someone
who's has a child or sibling who's been taken hostage or or has been killed or i mean everyone
so it's not it's numerically small and it's geographically small but it's also um um nationally
sort of communally small it's a a family, the countries. And I just
think people, and you and I have talked a couple of times on this podcast about the domestic tumult
over the last nine months, which we don't need to revisit now, but I do think people forget that
Israel is a family and it's a family that fights with each other a lot. There's a lot of intensity and noise
and contentiousness in this family.
But if you poke that family from outside,
if you threaten that family from outside,
don't bet on the division within that family
that you saw previously as an asset in your battle and your attack on that family,
because it's a family that comes together.
And I just think people are finding it jarring what they saw in Israel over the last nine months and what they're seeing now.
Saul, who you know, Saul Singer, who my brother-in-law, my sister's husband, and my co-author of our last book and
our next book, he told me last night that the numbers he's seeing, I don't know if you've seen
similar numbers, they did the reserve call-ups and they always overshoot on the reserve call-ups
because they assume they'll get most people, but some people are traveling. There was some talk
of some reservists stopping to perform their reserve training during because of their protests of the judicial reform proposals.
They didn't know if that was. So they they overshot.
He told me the latest numbers he had seen in terms of reserve number turnout, 150 percent, meaning they have way more people showing up than they need.
And that's those are the reservists that have actually been called up.
Then there's a lot of people who are just showing up saying, look, I know I wasn't called up, but put me to work. with their murderous rampage on Saturday, October 7th, is they went into people's homes
and they murdered families. They butchered children. They cut open the womb of pregnant
women and left the fetus hanging from the umbilical cord. They burnt people in cars.
Jews are not supposed to be burnt anymore. I thought when I heard President Herzog speak
and talk about how on Saturday, the most Jews
died in a single day since the Holocaust, it's unimaginable.
And the blood is boiling.
And Israel has this opportunity today to reset the equation here, to create a safer and more
secure country. That is what this is all about.
So let's talk about that. One of the developments since we last were on air, so to speak, in the
last 24 hours, has been some modicum of a national unity government formed. Not exactly a national
unity government because the formal opposition is Yair Lapid's yesh atid party which it sounds
like is not part of the national unity government but benny gantz's uh party uh who was not in the
government up until now has has joined the government so what what role will benny gantz
play can you tell us a little bit about benny gantz and um and what the significance the
implications are of him joining netanyahu's government, who Netanyahu is someone he, in any other context, despises. 13, 14, and then spent a couple of years outside and then decided to jump into politics
in the end of 2018. He, in 2020, if we all remember when COVID broke out, he decided
to join Netanyahu's government. And we all remember Netanyahu at the time said,
no schtick, no tricks. I'm going to hold to this rotation. I'm going to let Benny Gantz
become prime minister. Well, that never happened. So there's bad blood between these two men.
But what Benny Gantz has said is that if I was willing to join the government over a
flu, how could I not join the government now when our future is on the line?
And you have to commend the guy for it.
He was up in the polls up until now because of the judicial reform.
But so he could have said, I'm not going to join the government. Let this let the failures, whatever happens, stick only to Netanyahu. But he salutes the flag first. And you have to give him credit for that. During the judicial reform debates, fights, protests over the last nine months,
Netanyahu's party's popularity plummeted and Likud party, the right block, basically, and the non-right block had gone up. But the biggest beneficiary was Benny Gantz's party.
And I think it's probably because you had a lot of center-right voters who had traditionally voted
Likud moving to Benny Gantz. So you're right. Benny Gantz could have bided his time and said,
I'll be prime minister. What do I need to save you, Bibi? But you're right. It's
country first. And what role will he be playing in the government?
So for now, it's a government just for the war. There's a precedent to this, Dan. You remember
back prior to the 67 war, there was- Yeah. Menachem Begin joined Levi-Eschel's
government. Exactly. So we have this precedent at a time of emergency. I think, by the way, one of the reasons that the ground offensive had not yet happened until the merger or the establishment of this national unity government is because Netanyahu wanted first's going to be a war cabinet. The war cabinet where the big decisions will be made will consist of Netanyahu, Benny Gantz,
and Yoav Galant, who is the defense minister.
As observers to this war cabinet, you'll have Ron Dermer, former ambassador of Israel to
the US and current strategic affairs minister, as well as Gadi Eisenkot, another former IDF
chief of staff who is in Benny Gantz's party.
So if you look at this makeup of the war forum or this war cabinet, you got five men,
two of them former chiefs of staff, Jov Gallant, a former IDF general, was the head of Southern
Command, and then Ron Dermer and Bibi Nassario. Head of Southern Command, which is where the
Gantz of War- Everything is going on.
Exactly.
I mean, Gallant is exactly perfectly positioned.
So he was the head of Southern Command, by the way, during the 2008-9 Operation Cast
Lead when Israel went deep into Gaza.
So he has vast experience down there.
This is a very serious war cabinet.
And it's meant to reassure us that decisions will be made the right way.
And it's as notable for who's not in it as who is in it. Because some of the more polarizing
figures in Netanyahu's government who were in the security cabinet, I think up to now,
are not part of this war cabinet. I think that's an important statement too.
Netanyahu and Gantonz held a press conference today
announcing the unity government gonz said and i quote hamas needs to go extinct he also said
we'll do everything we can to bring back the hostages what does he mean by hamas needs to go
extinct like that's a pretty powerful statement yeah know, there's a lot of slogans being thrown around right now.
We need to topple Hamas.
We need to collapse Hamas.
We need to destroy Hamas or make Hamas go extinct.
What does that mean in practice?
That's very complicated.
I think that what Israel's goal here is to completely degrade Hamas's military capabilities.
Only so much can be done from the air.
This is sending the troops on the ground,
going house to house, door to door,
killing Hamas members, capturing Hamas members,
and destroying as much Hamas terrorist infrastructure.
Hamas will not be standing after this.
We can't have a situation where Hamas at the end
can fire rockets into Israel.
We can't have a situation where they can threaten us on the border.
But what happens after? We're not going to put our own puppet in charge of Gaza, right? That won't
work. The Palestinian Authority can't just come back to the Gaza Strip. They were kicked out back
in 2007. So what's really going to happen in Gaza that will be different the day after, besides for
having just a weakened Hamas? I think that is the big challenge here. And it's about getting the Palestinians to change their own reality. Can they do that?
We don't know. But can Israel create a more safer and a more secure reality for itself? That it can
do. Gantz also said in the press conference, this is not a political partnership, meaning he and
Netanyahu are not in a political partnership.
He said it is a partnership based on a shared destiny.
I mean, I honestly, Yaakov, I obviously follow Israeli politics very closely, but I also follow the politics of other countries.
One closest to me is the United States, which I've worked in.
I follow the politics of the
uk uh i follow you know i from afar i follow canadian politics i follow politics in many
countries i can't imagine two political leaders as fiercely oppositional to one another i gotta
tell you even in a time of crisis using language like we it's a partnership of shared destiny. But Dan, it really is.
Because when what Hamas is after, this wasn't, you know, people compared this to the Yom Kippur War.
This wasn't the Yom Kippur War.
Because the Yom Kippur War was the Egyptian military attacking the Israeli military and the Syrian military attacking the Israeli military.
The captives of the Yom Kippur War were prisoners of war.
They were soldiers.
What Hamas has done is they killed civilians.
They butchered and massacred Jews.
They could have been Orthodox, leftists, right-wing, secular, centrists,
wearing a kippah, not wearing a kippah.
It made no difference. They want to kill us all.
And we have to stand together to defeat this enemy that wants our annihilation. So I commend
Benny Gantz, but it's obvious, I think, to all Israelis. And by the way, I think the world now
finally recognizes what we've been trying to explain to them for decades, what we're really
up against. Sadly, we had to do with this this is how
they had to learn this lesson but today there's no doubt in the world what israel is facing as an
enemy uh you are an astute observer of israeli military affairs you've you've written a couple
of uh important books one of which i reviewed for the Wall Street Journal a number of years ago. And I think you're working on another book. And you're very dialed in with Israeli military
thinking and senior officials in the Israeli military and intelligence community. How was
President Biden's speech on Tuesday afternoon received in the Israeli security apparatus?
I think the Israeli officials who I've spoken to were blown away, were deeply moved by the way
Biden spoke about Israel. He could have said half of what he said about Israel and they still would
have been deeply moved. This speech that he gave set a new standard for what it means to be a pro-Israel
president, I think, in the United States in terms of how you stand with the country at a time of
need. To openly threaten countries like Iran, organizations like Hezbollah to send the amount
of firepower and forces that he's deployed to this region now, right? Reports that I'm hearing, I'm sure you're reading these as well about commandos and
Navy SEALs who are now stationed or deployed in the country.
Yeah, SEAL Team 6, yeah.
SEAL Team 6 is here.
The deputy head of the State Department's negotiations team is already making his way
here together with Blinken when Blinken's going to be here.
So they are all full force on, but the talk and the rhetoric
and the way to say,
there's no daylight,
we stand,
we understand what Israel's going through.
Israel has to respond.
Israel has to fight back.
That moved people.
And I think that what we're seeing right now
is this understanding
that we have the support
of the world's most powerful country.
And that gives Israeli military planners the
feeling right now that this will all change, Dan, and you and I both know that, that right now they
can go gloves off. But someone's going to tell them at some point that they got to put those
gloves back on. But for now, that feeling is important. Yeah. So I, my understanding,
and, you know, like I said, you're closer to these things than I am. But my understanding of all, you know, when Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke with President Biden on Saturday, it sounds like everything Prime Minister Netanyahu asked for, Biden agreed to give the most important of which was time and space. Give me time and space. This is going to be a long war. And, you know, in so many
words, these are my words now, no time soon will it be, quote, it's time for diplomacy. The time
for diplomacy has arrived. That's that's normally in these skirmishes with Gaza. There's fighting
the U.S. administration, whoever's and whoever it is, has Israel's back for some period of time.
And then it gets ugly, and then it's,
quote, time for diplomacy. And it sounds like Prime Minister Netanyahu says, we really need
you to stand with us, but back off and let us do what we're going to do.
And it sounds like he received that commitment, which in a sense is, we talk about Iron Dome and
the miracle of Iron Dome all the time. It sounds like what Netanyahu is looking for, what the Israeli government is looking for,
is like a diplomatic Iron Dome. It's like we need you not only to get us the hardware we need to
fight the fight, but we also need the software. We need the diplomatic Iron Dome. We need you to
basically tell the Western world to back off and give us space. We need you to give us diplomatic
cover at the UN because it's inevitable that something bad, there'll be players who try to
gang up on Israel at the UN. And it sounds like the government, Netanyahu et al, are getting,
or at least it sounds to them like they're getting what they're asking for.
But my fear is that's going to run out and there are military officials who are talking
about maybe a week or two that they're actually going to have on the ground.
And the reason is because once the casualty numbers start to climb on both sides, but
mostly for this purpose on the Palestinian side, the world's patience is going to run
out and the distance as it grows from the massacre of October 7 to where we'll
be in a couple of weeks, people have forgotten those images and the B-roll in all the interviews
is going to be from Gaza as opposed to from Kfar Aza, one of the kibbutzes that was burnt down.
That will change the conversation and the sentiment. Which means that the clock is kind
of ticking. And Israel, when it does go in, it's going to have to go in aggressively with strength
and force and going to have to plow through.
So it's going to have to be fast and very strong.
You're going to see a lot of military capabilities coming together.
Artillery is down there.
You have armored personnel.
You have the top infantry units.
You have drones and you have close air
force support. A lot of changes in the way that they work also today. The brigades in Israel,
if once upon a time you had an armored brigade, an infantry brigade, an engineering brigade,
today they work as teams. So they take a bit of infantry, a bit of armor, a bit of engineering,
and they put it all together in these special teams that operate as one to make them more effective, more firepower, and that they can get more done in a
quicker way. That's what we're looking at. And what is the practical significance of the U.S.
sending aircraft carriers, repositioning them nearby? Look, I think from Biden's perspective,
and I think that this was one of
Netanyahu's requests when they spoke for the first time on Saturday, what has Israel really
concerned, Israel can deal with Gaza. Israel will deal with Gaza. What Israel is concerned about is
what's happening in the north in Lebanon. And if Hezbollah will open up another front, to have to
fight a multi-front war will be very complicated for the state of Israel. Therefore, Israel wants to be able to be in a position that it can maintain this conflict
and keep it contained just to Gaza.
By sending the USS Gerald R. Ford, as well as these other vessels to the region, Biden
is trying to send a message and signal to Hezbollah as well as to Iran, don't you dare
get involved because we're here.
Now, does that mean that he's going to send missiles into Beirut if Hezbollah fires missiles
at Israel? I don't know. Personally, I would actually have recommended to Biden, don't send
that strike group to the Eastern Med, send it to the Persian Gulf. And if you're going to make a
threat, make it against the Ayatollahs in Tehran, that
if in Lebanon they launch missiles at Israel, you're striking in Tehran.
And if you do that, that's how you reset the region right now.
In terms of Iran, were you surprised that Biden didn't mention Iran in his speech on
Tuesday?
Look, it was interesting and it was notable that Iran was not there.
Hamas, we know, is a direct proxy of Iran. Hezbollah is definitely a direct proxy of Iran.
Iran is here behind pulling the strings, funding these terrorist organizations.
Biden could have mentioned them, but he didn't. This talks maybe to what the U.S. policy has been with the Iranians,
where they're trying to keep Iran contained. I think that my argument would be the world now
has a unique opportunity, Dan. Everything is different today after what happened on October
7th in Israel. The whole world can change now. Policies of containment will no longer work.
Israel tried for 20 years to contain Hamas,
and that blew up in our faces. Israel said, no, we'll hit them once in a while. They'll hit us.
We'll give them economic incentives. We'll just keep them in Gaza. It'll all be okay. We're good.
No, we're not good. You can't contain this. That's what blew up in our face.
And there were failures along the way, intelligence and tactical and operational all over the
place.
But we have this opportunity today to flip the equation and to say what was will no longer
be.
That's what we have to take advantage of.
Because if we just hit Hamas and then go back and rebuild the fence and build it 50 meters
in width now and another 100 meters in height, we didn't do anything different.
We have to flip this whole thing on its head.
What is happening on the northern border? I saw today there was some action.
How serious is it? How worried should we be?
Look, Hezbollah, it's unclear exactly what their strategy is. On the one hand,
it seems that Hezbollah is testing Israel.
Every time that something big happens in Gaza, they want to try to provoke Israel, respond,
show the Arab world and the Palestinians they stand with their Hamas brethren.
On the other hand, Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah,
is pushing the limits
a bit too much. Today, there's anti-tank fire. They sent some drones across the border.
There were fears of infiltrations into different communities. People at one point,
everyone from Haifa North was told to stay in their homes. And then the Homefront Command app,
I was sitting in my office and my daughter, my 12,
my 13 year old daughter walks in and says, Abba, dad, we got to go down to the bomb shelter.
I said, what are you talking about?
She said, on my app, it says that everybody in all of Israel needs to go into their bomb
shelter in the whole country.
It felt like there was like a, like suddenly what the whole world has unleashed missiles
from a lot all the way up to Kiryat Shmona.
There was a glitch there, but that's the anxiety that people are living with.
Hezbollah would be atrocious if that were to happen.
It would be a devastating war for Israel.
I hope that we can continue.
The truth is, Dan, I'll tell you something.
I'm of two minds here.
On the one hand, I say, I hope that war doesn't happen because they can cause some
serious destruction here. On the other hand, there's a part of me that feels like what I said
before. We have an opportunity to change everything today. And I tweeted before, or I posted on X,
that with tensions rising in Lebanon, I hope that if there's going to
be a war, it won't be called the third Lebanon war, because the last one was called the second
Lebanon war.
It will be called the last Lebanon war.
That's what this all needs to be.
It needs to be the last war in Gaza.
And if there's going to be a war in Lebanon, it needs to be the last war in Lebanon. Are you worried that we had been all
excited 2019 and then obviously in 2020, the warming of relations between the Gulf states
and then 2020, the actual Abraham Accords, and then there was all this talk and excitement,
and I think a lot of movement on the Saudi-Israeli normalization track over the last year or so,
especially over the last few weeks with Mohammed bin Salman and Prime Minister Netanyahu,
both in New York the week of the UN General Assembly,
both speaking openly about how fast things were moving on the normalization track.
It was quite extraordinary.
What is the implication of what's happening now for any hope of Saudi normalization soon?
And the reason I say soon is because I think it has to happen soon if it's going to happen.
Yeah.
Because, you know, some of this will require a major role for Washington in terms of potentially a new defense pact between Saudi Arabia and the United States, which requires Senate approval. Obviously, there's all sorts of technology and equipment and advanced arms that the Saudis will
want potentially as key ingredients to its civilian nuclear program. A lot of that will
have to go through Congress. And, you know, we're at some point Congress shuts down sometime before
the end of the year. And then we're next're in an election year. And the idea that you're going to get both parties working together on this will be very
difficult during a very tense U.S. election year. So one of the reasons you needed the Saudi
normalization plan to get so much momentum is because you needed that momentum to get it done
quickly because of the Washington calendar, not the Saudi calendar and not the Israeli calendar,
but the Washington calendar.
And I'm worried that the clock is running
on the Washington calendar, to mix metaphors,
and this may have blown it up.
It may have blown it up.
I think there's two ways to look at it.
You know, I think back to the second Lebanon war
when we didn't have normalized relations with the UAE or with the Saudis or
any of these countries and behind closed doors. And I remember hearing this from the prime minister
at the time and the defense minister, but behind closed doors, the Gulf states were saying to
Israel, hit them hard, give it to those Hezbollah guys. They wouldn't say it publicly, but they
would say it behind closed doors. I think that they have that same feeling today. Now, the Saudis won't come out publicly and say,
we support Israel's war and operation to take down Hamas. They also came out with, I would say,
not such a good statement when everything began on October 7th on Saturday. It was not a positive
statement. It called for restraint right away. But I think we do have to recognize that it's complicated for them.
But it could end it.
And it could have been that that's what Fumasa's agenda always was, was to kill this normalization.
But it also, Dan, and you know this just as well as I do, this could be the platform upon
which the normalization is actually sealed and the deal is done.
Because if we're really able to change the paradigm here, this could be something that
could actually be positive and change the trajectory of this region to not only help,
right, until all the Palestinians haven't come to the table.
Why not?
Maybe this will bring them even closer.
So we really can't tell for the next few weeks
until the dust settles from this war,
and we're only getting started, right?
This is going to take some time.
But if, I mean, one of the assets that Israel has,
I mean, you look at the reports about the intelligence
in the Arab world and the security assessments of Israel in the
Arab world, of Israel. And the four pillars that they typically point to are one, world-class
military and intelligence capability, Israel. This is why you shouldn't mess with Israel. Two,
Israel's closeness with the United States, the rock solid relationship that sort of seems
unbreakable. Three is Israel and economic and cyber and technology superpower startup nation
for the the unity of the people that that there's the solidarity of the Israeli people.
And and those are the four reasons why it's very difficult to attack Israel. On the first point, if Israel doesn't go in hard against Hamas in Gaza and doesn't work aggressively and competently, even if it's messy, even if it gets really ugly, I do.
I do worry that the Saudis will look at look at Israel in the first pillar and say, are we that attracted to Israel's
military and intelligence juggernaut? By the way, that's the big problem. One of the big problems
that comes out of what happened here on October 7th, right? When you look at the three main
failures, and actually I wrote a piece for Barry Weiss's Free Press about this, of what went wrong that led to this war.
You have three main failures.
Failure number one was the intelligence failure, right?
Think about this for a second.
We have a special intelligence agency called the Shabak,
which is supposed to be watching Hamas.
You had 1,000 to 2,000 Hamas fighters
who crossed into Israel on Saturday.
And we knew nothing about this?
How did they pull that off?
Now, some stuff has come out.
They've been planning it for years.
They did amazing compartmentalization.
Very few people knew the big picture.
There was no use of electronics.
So there was no signal intelligence.
It was very difficult to pick up.
And you got to remember, Dan, in 2005,
when Israel pulled out of Gaza, we have no physical assets on the ground. So it's very
difficult to run human agents on the ground in Gaza. So we rely pretty much solely on what we
can hear and what we can intercept in terms of emails, texts, et cetera. If you don't have that,
it's very difficult to know what's going on. So we didn't get the intelligence.
The second thing that should have stopped them was the defensive measures.
We spent billions of dollars on above ground barriers and even underground barriers.
We have special set radars and cameras.
We have a remote control gun that these Tazpitaniyot are called.
There are soldiers, women soldiers who sit in a room and look at cameras and screens, and they are the surveyors of what happens in Gaza. A cockroach can't walk by one
without an alarm bell going off, right? And somehow they managed to get through.
And then the third failure was after all of that. So if we didn't have the intelligence
and our defensive measures didn't stop them, what's the third thing? The rapid deployment
of the IDF. They should have been there to meet these guys and get them and stop them.
But we were still on Monday, almost 48 hours later, still trying to get some of these guys
out of the kibbutzes and the communities that they were in down south. So when the world looks at
this, what do you think today of the IDF?
What do you think today of the Shabak
and military intelligence?
Do you think that we're as strong as we thought we were?
This is a huge blow to the reputation
of the Israeli military.
It's going to be hard.
There's definitely that's on their minds now
as they embark on this larger offensive.
Yeah, that's encouraging, I will say.
And I will also say that on the fourth point of what the Arab world, specifically the Saudis,
look at is this solidarity of the Israeli people, which I know was in question over the last
nine, 10 months during this divisive debate inside Israel. You know, we've talked to you
about it. Saul and I wrote this book about the surprising resilience, resilience, underline the word resilience,
the surprising resilience of a divided nation in a turbulent world. They're watching that
resilience. They're watching that solidarity and they're watching that resilience. And I just want
to like end on that. I want to end on that point and get your take, because it is true that it took Benny Gantz and Netanyahu and the political leadership of Israel took them five days to unite, which is impressive just stepping up and volunteering to remove bodies,
rescue families, provide food, provide shelter, you know, mobilization of displaced families,
funeral and Shiva attendance. I saw something on social media last night that I reposted of
a Brazilian immigrant to Israel who made Aliyah and was serving in the army. And there's this
program called Lone Soldiers, where the Israeli society looks after Israeli soldiers, Israelis
who move and serve in the military who don't have family there. And this person heard that this
Brazilian immigrant to Israel was having a funeral, and he wanted to show up at the funeral.
And he'd heard word about the funeral, and he couldn't get in because there was thousands and thousands of cars lining up on the highways to get into the funeral of a stranger, of someone they didn't know.
And this was all happening in real time.
And you're seeing some of the content being created, the video content.
All these things the Israelis are doing on their own.
They didn't wait for the government.
They didn't.
They just they organized themselves in any other society. are doing on their own. They didn't wait for the government. They didn't, they just,
they organized themselves in any other society.
By the way, we saw some of this for what it's worth during COVID in Israel,
is the society organizing itself.
The world is watching that.
Dan, I could have said it better.
That's the beauty, that's the secret of Israel, right?
The secret of Israel is that we
know in times, sadly, you only really see it in times of hardship, but it happens all the time.
Where when someone falls down, there's going to be someone to help them get back up.
You see it in every place, every little sphere today of society in helping the other person in sending...
I'll share this with you after, but there's this great recording that's been making the
rounds on WhatsApp today of a soldier saying, hey, I'm serving in X a place and I'm calling
on Am Yisrael, I'm calling on the Jewish people to help me.
Take back all the food you've been sending me.
Take back all the underwear and socks you've
been sending us we have too much we don't have room for it anymore take it all away because but
but it's no joke i mean you know how many go i'm sure you're getting how many go fund me projects
there are and how many should we buy this and buy that but you know what it warms my heart and
that's why ultimately dan you know this that's why we'll prevail that's why we, Dan, you know this, that's why we'll prevail. That's why we will win because
we will, we sanctify life. We believe in the preservation of life and we believe in the beauty
of each other. And that is what will, that keeping us together is what's going to make us come out of
this stronger, more secure and a better people. Yeah. The world, the world thinks that the secret
weapon in Israel is a purported nuclear program. But what you're saying is they're wrong. The secret weapon of Israel is the health of its society.
Exactly. Exactly. the piece you just wrote that you referenced. And I know it's late there.
We will come knocking soon again to have you back on
because like I said, even before this horror show
of the last few days,
you're always a welcome voice for our listeners
and I think especially so now.
So thanks for being here.
Thank you, Dan. Thank you.