Pod Save the World - What’s next for Israel and Gaza?

Episode Date: October 11, 2023

Tommy and Ben talk about the latest from Israel and Gaza, including the Netanyahu government’s policy and intelligence failures, the devastating toll on civilians in Israel and Gaza, questions about hostages and reports that Israel may launch a ground offensive into Gaza. They also cover the varied international response to the attack, the history of Hamas, and conflicting reports about Iranian culpability. Then Ben talks to Gregg Carlstrom, the Middle East correspondent for The Economist, about political dynamics within Israel, the timing of the attack, and the unprecedented nature of this developing conflict. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast. To help those affected by the Afghanistan earthquake: Uplift Afghanistan Fund--https://www.upliftafghanistan.org/

Welcome to Pod Save the World on Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, I have no playful banter for you today. It's not kind of a banter world out there right now. No, it's been a dark, dark, dark couple of days. Well, yeah, I was about to say, and the Patriots lost 35-0, but maybe that's... Obviously, I was referencing that, but also the situation in Israel and Gaza has been horrible. Obviously, we're going to focus on Israel and Gaza almost exclusively today, including the latest horrifying statistics, the policy and intelligence.

failure by the Israeli government, the situation in Gaza as the IDF conducts this air strike campaign, Biden's response, the international response, and then a bit of an explainer on what Hamas is. And then, Ben, you did the interview this week. Who did you talk to? I talked to Greg Carlstrom, who's the Middle East correspondent for the economist and a really great Twitter follow on a website that's been unusually bad. Honestly, great. Yeah, but he's the one to follow. We talked about the kind of political dynamics in Israel.

Where is that going? Is there going to be unity government? How is Beebe in trouble? We talked about the Palestinian leadership and how we got to this moment, why Hamas is doing this, how weak the Palestinian authority is. And we talked about the region

and the fate of the Abraham Accords, the fate of the normalization deal of Saudi Arabia, how people are responding in the Arab world. And actually the most interesting thing he said, I thought, was he's been talking to some Hamas guys. And he makes his point that the Hamas guys seem like surprised that it went, I don't want to say well.

There are a couple articles where they're quoting saying that. And that speaks to the intelligence failure, right? That essentially the mosque I thought we're just going to throw a bunch of guys at the barrier. Maybe you get a couple hostages. Maybe you get a couple hostages. Maybe you get some guys in the hang gliders. And they were kind of shocked that all those guys got in. And so he said it was kind of a catastrophic success for Hamas.

And that rings pretty true, actually. Yeah, yeah, it does. One reason you should like Greg, he tweeted the other day. Just to add a note of humility to what I've been writing about for the past few days. I don't know what the fuck is going on. No one does. We're all trying to figure this out in real time. Covered this region for a decade and a half.

Cannot remember a time everyone was so confused. Anyone that approaches foreign policy with humility like that, I think is worth listening to it. Yeah, the most honest take on Twitter. Because, boy, is that rare. Yeah, yeah. Everyone else I follow is demanding their friends from high school condemn Hamas or talk about something else and it's very confusing out there. Two quick things before we get to the news, Ben. So the Supreme Court is back in session.

So you guys have to listen to strict scrutiny. Melissa Murray, Leah Littman, Kate Shaw. They are some of the smartest legal minds in the business, but they're also hilarious. So subscribe to strict scrutiny. That's very hard to say wherever you get your podcast. Also, if you like Karyuma shoes, you'll love the new Karyuma, love it or leave it collaboration. Check them out. Kyrkid.com slash store.

Great. Okay. Seamless transition to the horrible situation on the ground in Israel and Gaza here. So, Ben, the Israeli military finally this morning said that all Hamas fighters have been killed or pushed out of Israel, but there are still ongoing rocket attacks out of Gaza. I was watching CNN this morning. You know, reporters literally like having to duck in the middle of live shots. Some very grim statistics from the Israeli side and then we'll cover the Gaza piece of this

after. The latest Israeli death toll is estimated at between 900 to 1,000 people. people, at least 14 American citizens were killed. At least 2,400 Israelis have been reported wounded. Israel's UN envoy says that 100 to 150 people have been taken hostage. Dozens of foreign nationals are among those kidnapped, including Americans. The IDF says they have recovered the bodies of 1,500 dead Hamas fighters inside Israel that just like gets to the scale of this attack. I think when we were talking on Saturday, we were like, oh, could it be a couple dozen, maybe 100 Hamas fighters across the border? No, 1,500 dead Hamas fighters across the border. I know, 1,500 dead

Hamas militants in the Israeli military has mobilized 360,000 reservists out of a country of 10 million people. Yeah, I mean, I guess where to start here. You know, the images and stories that are coming out of the horrific nature of these attacks, you know, not only are they appalling, but they kind of reminded me of some of the early days of ISIS where there was this kind of intent to shock. And, you know, that's going to have a kind of traumatizing effect, you know, in Israeli society. I mean, it's clearly shaping the emotions over there now, understandably. And you just feel for, obviously, not just people who died, but the trauma that's been inflicted on people who had to experience that. I mean, on the other pieces, yeah, I was really struck by the 1500 number because,

you know, clearly some guys also got back into Gaza because they brought all these hostages back. So that number was probably, you know, 3,000. And I can't believe that that many people were read into this, you know. So it's almost like, as I was saying with Greg Carlstrom, like, they busted through the barrier and were like, wait a second, nobody's here, you know. And so then all these people poured in. So it speaks to this question of the intelligence and military planning failure, the kind of failure of imagination of what could happen there. And the call up to me, you know, I, as unfortunately, I think, you know, we'll talk about Gaza, like there'll be likely a ground invasion. 360,000 reservists to me doesn't, those guys aren't all going to go to Gaza. What that tells me is they're trying to send a message to Hizbala, you know, like we are fully mobilized. Yeah, we're ready for you. We're ready. And so I think a lot of those people are going to be partly having that deterrent effect.

And then also, sadly, we've already seen kind of like settler violence and, and, and, and, and, you know, the tax on Palestinians kind of, you know, happening sporadically, that could lead to kind of Palestinian response. So they may also need those reservists in the West Bank. So it just kind of foreshadows ominously like the scale that this war could be. Yeah. I mean, look, a battalion of soldiers is a thousand guys. Yeah. 1500. I mean, it's like a mini army. As you, we referenced at the top, a lot more information has come out about how just, just a massive this intelligence failure was and how big of a policy failure it was by the Israeli government. So on Saturday, we mentioned some like sort of small reports that military posts in the south of Israel near Gaza

were understaffed because the IDF had shifted units to the West Bank. That was confirmed in a bunch of places. The Washington Post quoted the former IDF military intelligence chief saying, quote, there was a need for more soldiers. So where did they take them from from the Gaza border where they thought it was calm? Not surprising that Hamas and Islamic Jihad noticed the low staffing at the border. Multiple Israeli outlets reported that Egyptian intelligence officials say they notified their counterparts in Israel with warnings that Hamas was planning something, quote, something big was the quote, I think. The Times of Israel said that that included a direct call to BB Netanyahu. Now Netanyahu's office denied that that happened, but notable.

And then Ha'Harets reported that part of Netanyahu's strategy to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state was over time to bolster Hamas. This is apparently a quote from Netanyahu. Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of the Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. Netanyahu told a meeting of his Lycud party's Knesset members in March 2019. This is part of our strategy to isolate the Palestinians and Gaza from the Palestinian in the West Bank. So Ben, I'll stop there. Again, this is not blaming the Palestinian government from what happened. Hamas is responsible for the terrorist attack that happened. But this is help me explain why you're seeing like major newspaper editorials in Israel saying things like

the attack is quote the clear responsibility of one person Benjamin Netanyahu this is an intelligence failure a policy failure a failure of leadership and the consequences have been horrific yeah I mean you know in Israel you see much more vocal discussion around this than even in the US you know and this much more and this isn't you know wacky leftist you know, these are people who fucking hate Hamas and know full well who is responsible, Hamas. But the vital context here is, look, as a matter of policy, I felt this when we were in government. I mean, Bibi seemed to want to weaken the Palestinian authority, at least relative to Maas, you know, like, because he didn't want a partner for peace. And so he was kind of constantly

humiliating Abu Mazen, you know, settlement announcements right after meetings, you know, things that made Abu Mazen, the leader of the Palestinian Authority, look, that's what we call Mahmoud Abbas. Yeah, yeah. When you're in the biz. Yeah. Sorry. And at the same time, you know, Hamas is who he wants to be the face of the Palestinians, right?

Because it justifies repression. And so that wasn't like a, that wasn't hard to figure out that that was kind of the play that he's pursued as a matter of policy for a long time. But the degree of failure around, I mean, Tommy, you're, I think, buddies with Amir Tobon, right? Yeah. The Halerette's reporter who was, you know, he tells this harrowing story of being nine and a half hours in the safe room with his two kids under four. And he has this very powerful line where he's like, we were alone. And he was, you could tell, like, really angry about it.

Like, where was the military? And you would think there'd be more IDF near the border of Gaza, but because these lunatics in the government have empowered these settlers and there are all these skirmishes in the West Bank, they sent those people up there. And that's just what happened, you know? I mean, we don't know the details of the Egyptian warnings. We do know that the military kept warning him that the protest movement, you know, the judicial coup was kind of threatening unity and that created vulnerability. So this is pretty clearly something, you know, B.B. in the United States, Niao has to answer for. And I think that the sad thing is, you know, even though Israelis will rally together and have rallied together, you just, I wish they had better leadership for their, for their sake. For their sake, this is not me because I don't like the guy. I just, I look at this and I'm like, man, I wish these people deserve better. You know, Amir T. Bonn's an amazing reporter for Horat's. You should follow him on Twitter. He's been on the show before. He moved to that community. I talked about this in Ponce of America. He moved to a community right near Gaza because he was so

inspired by his time he spent there when he was covering them in the wake of another clash, because the people are so committed to peace. And so he moved to this community and he said, like, the kind of deal that was struck by these, with Israeli government, was having communities along the Gaza border kind of helped protect the Israeli border, but in return, you're supposed to get security. You're supposed to have IDF support. And, you know, what the Israeli government did was they built a border fence and they built that fence deep into the ground with concrete to prevent tunneling, because that was the threat in the past. But this time, These Hamas guys just drove bulldozers into the fence and drove through.

And Amir tells this unbelievably harrowing story of being in a safe room with his one-year-old and his one-year-old and his three-year-old daughters, convincing them to be silent for 10 hours with no food, a little bit of water. And a mere 62-year-old father, a retired is really general, drove down from Tel Avivis, rescued countless people along the way and fought his fucking way to his son's house and saved their whole lives. I mean, it's the most unbelievable story I've ever heard. I mean, like, I told Amir, like, whatever the Congressional Medal of Honor is, like, his father should get it. But also, he never, you should not be, he also, he linked up with another 67-year-old Israeli retired general. Yeah. And the two of them and Amir's mom were fighting their way down from Tel Aviv. How is that the security status quo?

First of all, can you imagine the moment where that grandfather, like, you know, hugged his grandchildren? It's just hard to think about it. Hard to think about. I can't fathom it, Tommy, because, like, I have to imagine that the Gaza border is one of the most heavily surveilled places, right? There's got to be constant overhead imagery, right? And so I don't understand why, from the moment, bulldozers are, like, hitting these wall, it took nine and a half hours to get down there. How were they not, you know, Special Forces guys in a helicopter? Look, I realize, we all learned during Benghazi.

Like, Special Forces troops don't sit in their kids. It doesn't have to... In their kit and a plane all day long, right? But, like, Tel Aviv's an hour and 20 minutes from the Gaza border. Yeah. You know, you dispatch people. Anyway, enough from us. So we wanted to play for you guys some stories from Israeli citizens who live through

and experienced this tragedy firsthand. These are excerpts we took from interviews by, you know, CNN, NBC, PBS, an organization called Stand With Us. And I think, you know, what you'll hear helps explain why Oluf Ben, the editor of Haaret, said, this is the worst calamity that Israel has faced since the founding in 1948. So here are some of those clips. We understood that they want to kill me, to kill my friends, to kill everyone they see. So we eat in a little tree.

We didn't make any sound for nine hours. We stayed in the tree. and that's how we saved our lives. I was lying in the floor. It was the second hidden that I find. And they were just all around me. And they were going three by three and shooting. Pab!

Pabha! Everywhere from two sides. And I saw many people like people were dying like all around. I'll tell you one story that really hit home with me where I started to cry yesterday. I was treating people that in critical condition is intubating them doing chesty, compresses. when I met two kids that just were held hostage somehow we're in a closet for for 12 hours finally escaped the army came in and got them out and after that they said to me my parent I saw my parents get killed in front of me I'm hungry I haven't

eaten the last 12 hours I told them stop everything and go go to the safe room but in 735 we lost contact with them and we didn't know what happened and I talked with my brother that lives in Farasa as well. And he told me, after a few hours, he told me that my mom text him, there is a terrorist in their house. And he thinks my dad is dead. I didn't make it. Unimaginable. Okay.

So Ben, you know, since the Hamas attack occurred, there have been reprisal IDF airstrikes in Gaza. So we want to turn to the Gaza Strip. Health officials in Gaza say that so far at least 830. people have been killed and 4,250 people have been wounded. And again, we're recording this at like 130 on Tuesday, October 10th. That number is going to go up and up and up. So an already deplorable, unacceptable level of likely high civilian casualties. The Israeli defense minister announced there would be a complete siege of Gaza saying, quote, no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel would be allowed into the Gaza Strip. Of course, Gaza's already blockaded. What he's describing there, Ben, does sound like it would

lead to the collective punishment of the entire population of Gaza, which to me sounds like the textbook definition of a war crime, but we can get back to that. The Bush administration, remember Israel occupied Gaza until 2005. They withdrew. The Bush administration pushed the Palestinian Authority to hold elections in Gaza in 2006. Hamas won those elections. They've been in charge ever since. And Israel has had a blockade on Gaza ever since ostensibly to keep weapons out of the hands of Hamas, but obviously that has not worked. Two million people live in Gaza. It has been described as an open-air prison. Half the population are under 19. The unemployment rate is around 50%. 65% of the population lives in poverty. Gazans lack basic services like health care and

clean water. So Ben, Axios reported that Netanyahu told Biden that, quote, we have to go in. We can't negotiate now, meaning it sounds like he's going to send ground forces to Gaza. This has been described by BB as a long and difficult war to come. So, you know, kind of we talked about the Saturday, Ben, like, this is the worst case scenario. No water, no electricity, nowhere to hide, half the population near kids. They weren't alive to vote for Hamas at the time, let alone, like, you don't let kids vote, right? So I get that any country, any leader would do what it takes to rescue 150 hostages. And I think anyone would probably feel the need to retaliate to Hamas, to decapitate its leadership, to prevent an attack like this in the future. But where I'm struggling

to understand is I don't know that we can have confidence. confidence that the airstrikes at this clip can be targeted at militants only because it seems like Israel's intelligence about Hamas is not as good as they thought it was. We know that Hamas co-locates in civilian areas by design. That's a strategy. And there is so much pressure on Netanyahu to respond forcefully and respond quickly. But what is the endgame here? Is it to reoccupy Gaza? That's the right question, Tommy, because like one of the perplexing things is Netanyahu is not articulated any objectives.

yet? I mean, he comes on and he uses like tough sounding language about we're going to make these people remember this for generations and stuff like that. But are they going to reoccupy Gaza? Are they going to try to destroy all of Hamas, you know, essentially regime change? Are they trying to rescue the hostages? Like, we don't know yet what the objective of prospective ground invasion would be, but it does feel like it's building something very big. So it does feel like it's probably to destroy Hamas as the governing entity in Gaza. And the amount of people that would be killed in that scale of a ground invasion is just horrifying to think about.

And to your point, you know, I saw one of the IDF statements made reference to, like, hitting a target that they, you know, believe was associated with this attack. And it's kind of like, well, they didn't know that the attack was coming. Like, how do they know that's your point? Like, what does that say about their intelligence? You know, if you miss something that big, how do you know the address of all the Hamas military wing members, you know, when they've obviously been moving around? And you see already these apartment buildings destroyed where obviously not everybody could possibly be Hamas. And look, if we're all understandably and should be incredibly impacted by hearing innocent Israelis describe losing a loved one, I'm going to be horrified.

and already am that there are innocent people losing their loved ones in Gaza who didn't who are just as innocent as the Israelis like the they these are not like the whole city of two million people and one million whom are children are are in Hamas and you know living in Gaza doesn't mean you support Hamas Hamas governs by force yeah coercion by repression and corruption people probably fucking sick of them for all kind of reasons you know and like look if you conduct a siege of Gaza I guarantee you that the guys with the guns the Hamas guys will be the first in line to take whatever remaining gas and water and food is there. The women and children are going to be last, right?

They're going to be harmed first. Yeah. And when you cut off electricity, right, that's cutting off power to hospitals. I mean, you know, there's a reason that after World War II, you know, people got together and were like, you know what, we need some rules, some laws around war. And the principal rule is that you don't have collective punishment. You go after military targets. And look, the U.S. has not always followed that rule.

So, you know, Israel is not being singled out as the only country that does this, but to essentially announce a policy of collective punishment that, you know, that's a very ominous. And the rhetoric goes like, these are animals. These are, there's, yeah, dehumanizing rhetoric. And that's what people have to tell themselves to convince themselves to do horrible things. And look, like, you should care about that for a humanitarian purpose and just a human being purpose and a moral purpose, but also it's bad policy. Like, you know, we've seen the interest of protecting Israel, you know, and securing Israel. This policy of just no political track at all

and viscerating two-state solution didn't succeed in protecting Israel. You know, so I, it's a sincere, I know people will not agree with the idea that there should be any restraint here whatsoever, but it's it's both out of empathy for the people who did nothing wrong in Gaza, but also it's about what is the more sustainable and better way to protect Israel? And is it through some kind of ultimate agreement with Palestinians or is it just this constant cycle of violence? Because there are two million people there and you're either going to have to displace all those people or what or this somehow does repeat, you know? Yeah. And also like if you want those, the hostages to survive like indiscriminately bombing

the Gaza Strip seems like a very scary course of action. Yeah. But that's what we should say, like, decapitating, destroying the military wing of Hamas did this? Like, there are very legitimate military objectives that Israel has every right to pursue. I just, unfortunately, it feels like it might be going in a different direction. I agree. So President Biden delivered remarks again on Tuesday about the situation. Here's a clip.

Like every nation in the world is a little. has the right to respond, indeed has a duty to respond to these vicious attacks. I just got off the phone with a third call with Prime Minister Netanyahu, and I told him, the United States experience with Israel experiencing, our response would be swift, decisive, and overwhelming. We also discussed how democracies like Israel and the United States are stronger and more secure when we act according to the rule of law. terrorists, purposely target civilians, kill them. We uphold the laws of war, a law of war.

It matters. There's a difference. So the White House also said they're going to provide Israel with more interceptors for the Iron Dome missile defense system. And President Biden said that he will ask Congress for more funding for all their security partners. I assume they're going to bundle up aid for Israel and aid to Ukraine and try to get that voted on at once, which is smart. Ben, so far, Biden's public statements not included

a mention of urging restraint. The sort of law of war was the thing we just heard there was the closest we got to it. On Saturday, you know, you and I talked about how we hope behind the scenes that Biden was urging Netanyahu to show restraint. CNN reported that that is not the case, quote, we are not urging restraint right now. One official told CNN, they also reported that Biden didn't warn Netanyahu against the ground invasion. And so, Ben, again, like, given the history of IDF bombing campaigns in Gaza, given the death tolls we're already seeing, given the possibility that there might be American hostages in Gaza, like, I find it shocking, honestly, that the U.S. wouldn't at least privately call for some sort of restraint or proportionality, or at least just say, hey, let's not rush this. You know what I mean? Because there's going to be really strong political pressure on Bibi to do something quickly, but I don't know that that's the best course of action.

But again, what do you make of the public messaging? And I don't know, do you think the U.S. could be an active participant in some sort of hostage rescue? Biden said also that there are American hostages. Well, first of all, you know, I think overall Biden is really, you know, made it clear that he's kind of unequivocally siding with Israel. Yeah, no doubt. There's no gray area. Now there's another side to side with, but, you know. But, yeah, but he's owning it fully, you know, like more military support, the aircraft carriers.

sent to the region, you know, Isaac has a message to Hisbel and Iran. There was a joint statement yesterday that Biden put out with the leaders of France and UK and Italy and Germany. But yeah, I heard the law of war thing as like the message about restraint. But it was like he didn't want to say the word restraint because it has like a kind of more of a, I guess, a jargon connotation, right? But, you know, that's a message. But it doesn't yet, in fact, the reality that he said law of war not restraint shows that they're not that comfortable pressing Israel on this stuff at all. So I do worry that, you know, I mean, look, to your point, the decisions are going to get made in the next days, maybe weeks could determine not only like the fate for a lot of people in Gaza and the potential success or not of recovering hostages, but also, you know, does it escalate with Hezbollah, right? who said that a major ground invasion might bring them in.

And they have 150,000 rockets. Yeah. They're a real deal fighting force. Much more sophisticated than Hamas, right? And does Israel, you know, hit Iran in some fashion? So, like, these are not, like, the decisions in past Gaza wars where it's kind of like how many, you know, how much are we bombarding Hamas and those are important. These are bigger because they could risk wider conflict.

And so I do hope that there's quiet messaging around, think three times about this. like show some restraint here so as to not make this something even bigger than it already is. But yeah, like thus far, you know, you can feel that they don't want there to be any question that they are backing Israel and this. And, you know, you can understand why. But I do just hope that that other message is mixed in because U.S. interests are implicated. I don't know that, you know, U.S. Special Forces would, you know, it's not like rescuing someone in a compound if they're in Gaza. So if you, that's where these people are, like going into Gaza, you're going and you're going and

you're going to be fighting. It's urban warfare. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you mentioned this, but it does seem like Biden has repeatedly decided he wants to warn Iran and Hezbollah not to get involved. Interesting to know what kind of is backstopping that warning. Most of what the consequences might be. Or what the intel they're seeing is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you mentioned they they moved the USS Gerald Ford strike group to the eastern Mediterranean. It's a big ass aircraft carrier. Befitting Gerald Ford. Yeah. Weirdly, the State Department deleted a tweet urging a ceasefire. I was on Sunday.

The State Department Office of Palestinian Affairs deleted a tweet urging all sides to refrain from violence and retaliatory attack. So again, you know, no asking people to pump the brakes here. Just for context, you know, between 2008 and 2023, the UN thinks that Israeli airstrikes killed 6,407 Palestinians in the occupied territories, 5,360 of whom were in Gaza. So, you know, there's been quite a death pull from these airstrikes over time. Tony Blinken is going to Israel on Thursday. No surprise there.

I bet Lloyd Austin could make a similar trip to. You're going to be seeing a parade of U.S. officials going to Israel for consultations and support. Yeah. Yeah. You know, the military question will be interesting because does Israel, you know, there's some obvious things like financing the replenishment of Iron Dome that they'd want. But, you know, what they ask us for gives some indication of what. what they're planning to do as well. Good point.

And gives us some ownership of what they do. You know, if we're like directly supporting, not just with our kind of ongoing $3 billion a year in assistance. 38 billion dollar MOU signed by Barack Obama. Exactly, right? If on top of that we're providing kind of direct support for the military operation in Gaza, that would be a greater degree of US ownership

of what happens too. So that matters. So the international response has been more mixed. On the one hand, you mentioned the Western nations have been showing United Fronts. You got the U.S., the UK, France, and Germany, and Italy releasing a joint statement. They expressed their steadfast, united support for the state of Israel. There was unequivocal condemnation of Hamas, and they said they make clear that the terrorist actions of Hamas have no justification, no legitimacy, and must be universally condemned in their

support for Israel's right to defend itself. There's also a mention of the Palestinians writing that, quote, all of us recognize the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people and support equal measures of justice and freedom for Israelis and Palestinians alike, but make no mistake, Hamas does not represent those aspirations and it offers nothing for the Palestinian people other than more terror and bloodshed. German politicians have been emphasizing their country's duty towards Israel. The Israeli flag was projected on Saturday night onto Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, also on the White House. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said that they would provide intelligence, diplomatic, or security support if requested. But there's also been some

disagreement within the EU over funding to the Palestinian Authority. Initially, they announced it might be a freeze on development aid for Palestine. That was then unfrozen seemingly. I'm not totally sure where we are with that. But we shall see. Then the Saudis, Qataris, and Iran basically said Israel is to blame for the attacks. Iran actively celebrated this attack. the Mexican government didn't seem to condemn the, you know, there's a couple of Mexican hostages

too, so it's very complicated. But anyway, Ben, what do you make of this global response? It should also mention that there was no condolence message, no phone call to Netanyahu from Vladimir Putin and kind of a neutral statement from his spokesman. Yeah. Well, to start on Putin, I mean, first of all, Netanyahu spent a lot of years investing in this relationship with Putin, right? To the point that in one of, in his campaigns, he literally had billboards with him standing by Putin, you know. And, you know, what we've learned is, Russia's not a friend you can count on, you know. And the reality is that Russia stands to gain a lot from this. Like the more, part of what I worry about is, the more chaotic this is,

the bigger this war is, the better it is for Russia. It, you know, just kind of takes the eye off Ukraine, the U.S. gets more refocused down in the Middle East. And oral prices go up and that enriches him. So Putin has every interest to be kind of a chaos agent here. You know, and that's why when people asking about Iranian support for the attacks, you almost wonder, I mean, the Wagner group, I think, trained some of these Hamas guys, you know. So there's some fingerprints. I'm not suggesting that they trained the guys literally in this assault, but there was a relationship there in the past. So, you know, that was ominous from Putin in the sense that, like, you know, he's very close to the Iranians and they might have an interest in stirring up some more shit. The Saudi statements have been interesting

because in addition to kind of putting a degree of the blame on Israel, they've also clearly put out that like, we were trying to tell them in the normalization talks, like, you got to focus more on the Palestinians. And I don't know whether to believe that or not. Like, Saudis has some reason to be spitting that now. But if they were saying that, that's interesting. And then, I don't know, I think generally speaking, Europe, you know, has lined up. as you'd expect behind Israel, this weird thing with the aid, which was a manifestation of that, made no sense because the Palestinian Authority had nothing to do with this attack. I mean, nobody's saying that.

And that's who this money goes to. It doesn't go to Hamas. Some of it, I think, goes to the UN agency that's operating in Gaza. Why would you cut those people off now? There's going to be huge humanitarian needs, right? So, you know, that was just the wrong way to express solidarity. It doesn't help Israel to starve the Palestinian Authority more. That's part of the problem here, right?

Is it got – the Hamas got more empowered relative to them? So, you know, what will be interesting to see is in China was – I noticed studiously neutral and basically said we're not taking a side here. What it'll be interesting to see is if there is a very bloody conflict in Gaza. You know, that's when you want to see are there cracks in that European support. Do Russia and China start to try to take more advantage of this in the global? South with their message to look at the Americans, they're hypocrites, they complain about, you know, what Russia is doing in Ukraine. And, you know, like, you know, the arguments you'll hear.

And that, and does that kind of inflame Arab opinion a bit? Now, you'll hear in the interview, Greg says, you know, there's a lot of support for the Palestinians out there, but there's also some deep revulsion at the videos of what they've done. And, and so I think Israel currently has a lot of sympathy. But the question is how durable is that if, if, you know, you things go really badly and from the humanitarian perspective. Yeah. I'm also watching kind of how durable the Abraham Accords deals are, right? Like Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, the UAE. Will these Abraham Accord agreements, the normalization agreements endure a really bloody flight in Gaza? I don't think we know.

No, and you can't, I mean, you just can't really argue anymore that those are peace deals, you know? Because as we've been reminded, that's not where the conflict is, you know? And so at a minimum, I think it ends the notion that, you know, that that is somehow a substitute for an Israeli-Palestinian agreement. The dumb fuck Jared Kushner theory of the case, which was like you get Israel to make peace with all of its neighbors and then the Palestinian part of it solves itself by giving them basically no territory, no peace of Jerusalem and just screwing them out over every way possible. Obviously, that's manifest into a situation like this. Yeah, no, they want to move.

I mean, what's interesting is I saw some Israeli, I think security voices saying, well, maybe Egypt should open up that blockade to allow people out, which on the one end may sound like a humanitarian point, but also maybe, yeah, like, let's get, you know, make them refugees. And I don't know. We'll have to see where it goes. Yeah. So we also thought it might be helpful to do a little bit of an explainer on what Hamas is. So Hamas, the organization was founded in 1987 by a guy named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who is a Palestinian refugee living in Gaza. He'd spend a bunch of time in Israeli prisons. Hamas is an acronym for Islamic resistance movement. It's an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, but one focused on Palestinian nationalism. Its leadership today is fragmented both politically and geographically.

They've got the militant wing inside Gaza. There's this like diaspora leadership in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and political leaders in Qatar. Their goals are not subtle. They want to establish an Islamic Palestinian state that includes all. of Israel, all of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, so no coexistence with Israel. The U.S. designated Hamas a terrorist group in 1997, the EU and other Western countries have followed suit. As we mentioned earlier, Ben, the Hamas won those parliamentary elections in Gaza in 2006, but then they violently took control of the full Gaza Strip in 2007.

When, by the way, the Bush administration insisted that there be an election. Freedom Agenda. Yeah, yeah. Thank you, George W. Bush. Yeah, the freedom agenda was Hamas winning a majority of parliamentary seats and then sending armed gunmen to the Fatah their political opponents headquarters and taking it by force. So you'll often hear, you know, counterterrorism experts talk about the fact that Hamas and Hezbollah in particular have different elements. There's like a political offshoot. There's a militant offshoot.

In Lebanon, there's literally like government ministers and members of parliament who are Hezbollah. Hamas provide some limited social services in Gaza as well, but they have a very violent militant wing that has conducted suicide bombings, rocket attacks, now this attack. the State Department estimates that Hamas gets about 70 million a year from Iran. Ron also helps them build rockets, drones, in plan operations. Qatar and Turkey have backed them in the past. So, Ben, you know, I think a year or two ago, you probably would have heard people debating whether Hamas was moderating and trying to become more purely political. This seems to have put that idea to rest. I think Biden today compared them to ISIS, basically. So that's, you know,

the status quo. Yeah. I mean, on that point, one of the things it's always hard to get your mind around is that, you know, nobody's a monolith, right? The Taliban's not, Hamas is not. Now, I think they're all assholes. Everybody in Amas is an asshole. But there was a political wing and a military wing, and I'm sure there are a bunch of people in the political wing who really cared about just being these corrupt, you know, bosses in Gaza, had no idea this operation was coming and probably aren't happy about it. Yeah, because, yeah, actually, Some of them already have. I saw some of the political leadership has died. I'm not expressing sympathy for the, like, I'm just pointing out that this feels like an organization that had some compartmented decision making, you know, to plan something like this. And so part of the reason why everybody's surprised. And this is something else, Greg says, like, everybody is looking at this and just shocked that this happened, that they pulled this off and that they did it. But that may also be because there was like a particularly militant nutcase, you know, faction that just. And just decided to do this, you know. I think one of the interesting, you know, the Iran point,

what it's done over the years is, you know, Iran funds these resistance movements, Hamas, and Gaza and Hezbollah and Lebanon. Obviously, they also backed Assad. And what's interesting about that is it's changed the character of Palestinian resistance from a kind of Arab nationalism to a more religious-based and Iranian-backed thing, you know? And Greg gets into this a little bit, but that's interesting because, in a way, that's also diminished probably some of the support for Palestinian resistance on kind of what we used to call the Arab Street, because they are seen as, you know, the Hamas and Hezboa as Iranian-backed.

And even if Hamas is Sunni, not Shia, like that does color it a little bit. And also, again, it speaks to like the reason you should want the Palestinian Authority to be stronger because they're not like a religiously based. You know, I believe religious fundamentalism tends to lead to bad places. And Palestinian Authority is a bunch of, you know, multi-sect, you know, you've got Christians in there and Muslims too, obviously. You've got people that are religious and people aren't at all. Like, I mean, it, unfortunately, like Hamas's ascendance has kind of radicalized, obviously, the nature of Palestinian resistance and also undermined the kind of more secular, moderate-minded potential leadership. Yeah. And so, you know, we talked about Iran's sort of historic support for Hamas. There's been a lot of confusing reporting about what role Iran may or may not have played in this specific Hamas. terrorist attack. Here's Tony Blinken, the Secretary of State, commenting on it on CNN.

There's a long relationship between Iran and Hamas. In fact, Hamas wouldn't be around in the way that it is without the support that it's received from Iran over the years. In this specific instance, we have not yet seen evidence that Iran directed or was behind this particular attack, but there's certainly a long relationship. So, you know, there were a couple reports. Wall Street Journal in the Washington Post basically talked to sources within Hamas, maybe sources in Hezbollah, maybe like Western or Middle Eastern security officials who seemed to suggest that like there was a big meeting chaired by Iran where they were directing this. It sounds like the U.S. government is knocking that down to some extent or maybe we just

don't know yet. But, you know, if it comes out that Iran was planning, funding, directing this attack, that shit gets real scary because I think that Israel will feel the need to respond. Yeah. I just don't, I don't buy it. I mean, it's not to in any way, excuse Iran. who they fund Hamas, that's enough. Like, they do have blood on their hands, absolutely. But the Wall Street Journal report in particular, you know, describe, there are two things that really jumped out to me. One is describes these meetings as kind of like terrorist super counsel in Lebanon for something

that was so, like, tightly held. I mean, it's hard to have a meeting like that way, if the U.S. or Israel seeing it. That's what I would think, yeah. It just felt like, and that, you know, you saw the U.S. and Israel knock it down. But then the other thing, there was even a detail in there about like the Iranian foreign minister being in some of these meetings. I'm sorry, like everything I've ever learned about the Iranian system, including my eight years as an intelligence consumer, the foreign minister of Iran is not involved in any of this stuff. Yeah, that's not because the foreign minister's a good guy. It's because the IRGC people want to own this.

They don't want the fucking foreign ministry people poking around their accounts, you know. So the inclusion of the Iranian foreign minister, it just felt off to me. Now, again, it doesn't change the fact that they should scrutinize the Iranian role. And that gets very sensitive very fast, too, because does Israel feel the need to hit Iran, which again, like, triggers a conflict that Mike Braun-Hizbla, and suddenly this is a different scale war. Yeah. So a couple quick things. Things we didn't get to cover today because we were focused on this.

There's allegations that Bob Menendez, centered from New Jersey, might have covered up his wife killing someone with her car, very weird story in the New York Times. There's a report that Trump gave nuclear sub secrets to an Australian guy, Marlaco, who then told everyone he knew. Nigerre was finally declared a coup by the United States. A friend of the pod, Bobby Wine, he's a Ugandan opposition leader. Multiple time guests on the show was reportedly taken from the airport in Uganda and put under house arrest. All those things we'll try to get to next week. But we did quickly want to talk about this horrible earthquake in Afghanistan killed an estimated 2,500 people just suffering upon suffering upon suffering for the people

of Afghanistan. But there is a great aid organization that you can check out if you want to help. Yeah. I know I asked around because something really terrible when you're like reading the Gaza coverage and all of a sudden you see like earthquake and Afghanistan kills 2,000 people. And you're like, what else can happen to people of Afghanistan? I asked around for like, what is an organization that, you know, because it's hard with the Taliban there, that supports the kind of people that might be doing relief on the ground in Afghanistan. And I learned about an organization called Uplift Afghanistan Fund, which enables grassroots organizations and communities in Afghanistan

to respond directly to crisis. They try to fill gaps. They try to connect people. So if people want to support the Afghan people at a rough time, that is www.uplifghanistan.org. So it's what I'm checking out. Excellent. Definitely.

We'll check that out. Okay. We're going to take a quick break. We'll come back. You'll hear Ben's interview. with economist Greg Carlstrom. So stick around for that. Okay, joining us now is the Middle East correspondent for the economist, someone who is always worth listening to on these issues. Greg Carlstrom, thanks so much for joining us here. Sure, my pleasure. So I wanted to go through the

politics with you of the various different centers here, Israel, the Palestinians, the region, and just kind of get your first impression recognizing that none of us know, exactly what's happening now and what will happen, as you've rightly pointed out. But in Israel, okay, so clearly, you know, Israel's been going through a tumultuous political period. You've covered that, the divisions in Israel. There's also always, I think, within Israeli society, usually a kind of rally around the flag when threatened, and this is obviously the most acute attack Israel's ever faced. But now we're in this kind of interesting situation where Netanyahu is kind of called for a unity government without preconditions. You've had Bennett and Lapid kind of indicate

that they might be open to the unity government, but maybe not with some of the characters who are in it. And you also have some people like Moshe Yala and I saw today, you know, calling for BB's resignation over the intelligence failure. I mean, what should we be watching? I know you can predict. But what is important about how this all plays out? Right. I think in the short term, that rally around the flag effects is going to keep Netanyo in power for a bit. And so the question is really this idea of whether there are preconditions or not on a unity government. Netanyo wants the centrists, Jaire Lapid, Benigants, people like that, to join his coalition without having to dump the far-right ideologues

who are also in that coalition. That makes sense for Netanyo in a very cynical, political way, because this is a prime minister who is always concerned about his political future. He has an eye on, when the war is over, when the dust settles, there's going to be an inevitable early election if I cut ties with my far-right coalition partners. So he doesn't want to do that. He wants to be able to keep his grip on power. On the other side for Lepid, to join this government with the likes of Ben Gvier and Smotrich and these sorts of people, he would be legitimizing a government that he and his supporters have been protesting against all year. On the other hand, if he doesn't join. The rhetoric is going to be, well, you know, look, the center left doesn't want Israeli unity.

They're playing politics at a time of war. So this is meant as a poison pill. When Netanyahu says join with no preconditions, he means this to be a poison pill for people like Lapid. You have no good options here either. You can join this coalition, legitimize it, probably have not much say over government policy, or you can stay out, and then I can beat up on you for staying out. It puts him in a very difficult position. And do you, I mean, having covered this, you know, part of what was so striking in the recent, you know, judicial episode is that you had senior figures from the military or ex-military and intelligence really out of step with BB. Is that something, you know, there's a rally around the flag thing happening now, of course, but should be we watching the kind of civil military relations in Israel, given how kind of toxic some of that seemed to get as this plays out and some very hard decisions

have to be made? You know, it's interesting. If you look at Beebe's career, you can say it's been very striking over the past year, how the military and the security services seem to break with him. But if you go through a list, actually, of the former army chiefs or Mossad directors who served under Netanyahu, it's remarkable how many of them wind up being really vocal critics of the prime minister. He falls out with all of his security chiefs.

because basically when things are going well, he takes credit and things are going badly. He blames it on the army. He blames it on the intelligence services. He's trying to do that now. But I think it's not going to work as well now because this is the most spectacular security failure in Israel's history. Do I think we're going to get to a point where there's a complete breakdown in civil military relations? No, I don't think we're going to get there. I think what's going to happen is for a lot of Israelis, this is just going to bring them back to. I mean, at the end of the day, the most trusted, the most credible entity for most people in Israel is the army. This is something that so many Israelis serve in. It's something that so many Israelis respect. Obviously, there are some questions now about what seems like a very bungled handling of Gaza and of the tactical response on Saturday.

But I think Netanyahu trying to shift the blame to the security services isn't going to quite work in this case. I think people are going to hold him personally responsible for this. Yeah, no, that'll be really interesting to watch as this transpires. Well, looking at the Palestinians, you know, it felt to me like the Palestinian Authority was weaker than it ever had been before this took place. You know, no progress in Palestinian statehood, kind of this corrupt elderly sclerotic leadership in Ramallah that felt totally out of touch with everything. Now Hamas has cast the die here, but it's also, I think, good. going to be, you know, pretty relentlessly pursued, if not dismantled by Israel. What do you look for in terms of this vacuum in the Palestinian leadership? Is there just no other alternative than the PA? Could something else emerge? Did Hamas succeed in putting itself at kind of the vanguard of the Palestinians? I mean, how do you assess what we should be watching there? There is no alternative, and that's partly due to choices that the Israeli government has made over the past

decade and a half. I mean, the big question now for the Israeli government, for the Israeli army, as they're talking about whether to do a ground invasion of Gaza is what then, you know, even if you go in and manage to uproot Hamas, what happens after that? The Palestinian authority, I think, is entirely too weak to come in and exert any kind of control there. I mean, if you look at polls of what Palestinians think, a plurality of Palestinians and a majority of Palestinians in Gaza want to dismantle the PA because they think it is nothing more than its vehicle for corruption and it's a subcontractor for the Israeli occupation. So it has no popular legitimacy anymore. So I don't see any scenario where it can come in and take over. And this is what is, I think,

especially grim about this moment, is part of the reason it's so weak is because it's shot through with corruption and it's entirely its own fault. But part of the reason also is Netanyo is at a very clear policy as Prime Minister over the past decade and a half of trying to, on the one hand, weaken the PA, refusing any kind of negotiations about a two-state solution, imposing economic sanctions on the PA, for example, when they wanted to join the International Criminal Court, imposing sanctions on them. So he's tried to weaken the more moderate Palestinian body. At the same time, he has boosted Hamas because he treats it as a negotiating partner. They talk about prisoner swaps in 2011 for Gilad Shalit.

They've talked about various ways to ease slightly the blockade on Gaza. He's willing to negotiate with Hamas in a way that he's not with the PA. And so what message does this send? Broadly, this sends a message that if you are moderate and open to negotiations, you get nothing. And if you are militant and willing to every couple of years fire a lot of rockets at Israel, we talk to you like you're a legitimate sovereign. And so, again, some of this is the Palestinians' own fault, but some of this goes back to Israeli policy under Netanyahu. Yeah, no, I mean, I wouldn't get to the region in a second here, but one of the many tragedies that I see here, right, is that however big this war gets and it could get much bigger, on the back end of it, there's still going to be millions of Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank.

there's and there and there's no like the absent people coming into just building an entirely new Palestinian leadership and having a totally different mindset in the Israeli government about a two-state solution it's hard to see any pathway to some kind of political process that they can lead anywhere right I mean it it would have to kind of start from scratch essentially yeah it almost does at this point you know this is there haven't been elections in Palestine And since 2006 was the last parliamentary election, 2005 was the last presidential election, the median age for Palestinians is about 18. So that means the last time they had a chance to elect their government, most Palestinians

weren't even born yet at that point. And they're saddled with this leadership that on both sides, Abu Mazen in Ramallah does not want to hold new elections because he's worried about losing. But equally, Hamas and Gaza at various points has not wanted to hold elections because they don't want to lose their grip on what they control in Gaza. And so you have the situation where there's no chance through elections to change your leaders. And there's also an entire generation of old men in the Palestinian leadership who don't want to give up their grip on power. Abbas is 87. He's probably going to die in the next few years. But he will give way to one or

several potential successors who are old, who come from an older generation, who don't represent what is a very young population. You talk to a lot of young Palestinians, and they say, we're basically just waiting for all of these people to die off, because until they do, there is absolutely no chance of having any kind of different political approach here. Yeah, well, so to step back to the region, you know, part of what's happened in recent years, and we've been critics of them on this podcast, but you had the Abraham Accords,

these normalization deals with. Arab autocrats kind of cast as peace agreements, even though they're with governments that Israel wasn't at war with. But essentially, the idea is that you could ignore the Palestinians, essentially, cut some deals with these guys. Maybe they could sprinkle some money around the West Bank that probably line the pockets of the PA anyway and call it a day, right? And the big, you know, white whale of that process was Saudi Arabia. It felt like that those talks were ripening. what is this due to the Saudi deal? And also, what is it due to the whole concept?

I mean, that is, you know, selling these agreements as peace agreements and as a resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. I mean, you know, near-term Saudi deal, but also just stepping back, like, what do you think this does to the Abram Accords? On a Saudi deal, I don't think it completely forecloses making a deal, but I think it kicks it off ways down the road. The line that you always heard from Washington throughout this year was that if America doesn't get this done by the end of 2023, it's not getting done under Biden's first term because 2024, Washington is consumed with elections. It's not the time where a big foreign policy initiative is going to get done. So I think what happens now is, you know, we're in October 2023. Israel is about to embark on a large-scale military offensive in Gaza. The scenes of

devastation that we're all expecting, sadly, from Gaza, are not going to be the backdrop for Saudi Arabia to normalize with Israel. So this gets delayed indefinitely. Then we're into 2024. We're into election season. I think this is something that gets kicked down the road away. On the bigger question of what this means for the concept, I mean, there are two ways that people talked about the Abraham Accords, right? There was the, what I think was spin from countries in the Gulf and from some people in America who said, you know, this can be good not just for Israel, but for the Palestinians as well, because it will give Arab governments leverage over Israeli policy. We have clearly seen that not to be the case over the past few years. I mean, you've had a hard right government

in Israel for the past year, and no one in the Arab world has had any leverage over it. The other thing that people said about the Abraham Accords, I think the more realistic way of looking at the Accords was this is a security pact between countries that have a similar worldview that are worried about Iran and want to form some kind of alliance against Iran. But I think what's quite striking now is, you know, we have a conflict between Israel and Hamas, which receives support from Iran. There are growing concerns about escalation in Lebanon, where Hezbollah is, of course, backed by Iran. This could bring in Iranian proxies across the region. And you don't see any security coordination between Israel and its Abraham Accords partners.

So I think what's happened over the past few days is also exposed the fiction that this was a viable security alliance. And I think that's the really unfortunate thing about it. It hasn't helped the Palestinians. It also hasn't created a real security architecture in the region that might be useful at a time like this. Yeah. And do you see what is the reaction? You know, there's been so much understandable focus on obviously the horrific violence against Israelis and the fate of Palestinians in Gaza. What do you sense the reaction is in the broader Arab world, you know, in the Middle East there?

But, you know, both among kind of, is there a sense of solidarity with Palestinians? Are the leaders uneasy about this? Or should we be watching for, you know, protests in places like Egypt and Jordan? Or is that just kind of not happening? I feel like this is something that hasn't gotten a lot of attention yet. And it's a hard thing to, you know, I'll caveat it by saying it's a very hard thing to capture public opinion of hundreds of millions of people in more than a dozen countries in the region. We tried a lot in the Obama years with mixed results. I'm sure, yeah. But I will say just from

talking to people over the past few days, from watching Arab media, from looking at what's on social media, I do feel like there's a slightly different conversation than there was, say, in 2014, the last time there was a really big war between Israel and Hamas, the war that went on for about seven weeks that summer. One thing I would say is, of course, the majority of people in the Arab world are still deeply sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and maybe are not cheering what happened in Israel, but are glad to see Israel humiliated in a way that hasn't happened since 1973. At the same time, though, that was maybe the initial reaction on Saturday morning. As the images and videos started to emerge of bodies piled up in bus stations and hundreds of people

killed at a music festival and grandmothers being abducted and brought across the border into Gaza, there was some change in the way people in the region were talking about it. I think people, even people who were sympathetic to the Palestinians were horrified by the level of violence and the level of brutality. And I think that changed the conversation around this a little bit. I think another thing that's different is, you know, as someone put it to me yesterday, there's a feeling that supporting the Palestinian cause, as he said it, it's no longer an Arab cause. It's an Iranian cause because the groups that are fighting on behalf of Palestinians are Iranian-backed groups. Again, Hamas, Hezbollah groups like that.

And I think in a region where Iran has become so polarizing, where Syrians, for example, you know, spent the last decade suffering as a result of. of the Revolutionary Guard and Iranian-backed militias, that has shifted the way people look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well. So, you know, again, I don't want to say anything definitive or quantitative, but it does feel to me, as someone who's covered the region for a while, it does feel to me like there's a bit of a difference in the way people are talking now a decade ago. That's really interesting.

And obviously, this could change if the violence against the Palestinians is as horrific as I fear it may be. But that's a really interesting point because essentially even all the escalation risk in the near term feels like it's Hezboa and southern Lebanon, maybe Iran. I saw the Emirates warned Syria, although I'm not quite sure why Assad would get involved.

But it is along that axis of Iranian-backed resistance groups. I did want to just ask you, I mean, look, this region is one final question here. I, you know, the darkest, you know, parts of my government service were interacting with this region, sometimes interacting with this particular conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. It's hard not to become incredibly cynical when you watch the way that power is exercised in this region. Language kind of gets stripped of its meaning. There are these formulations, two-state solution this, or deeply concerned about that, that feel

totally inauthentic. And yet this event is so big. I'm just wondering how you as someone who kind of lives in and follows this part of the world. Do you feel like you're even able to absorb it? I mean, what has just been your personal reaction to seeing a conflict that we all knew could blow up, but maybe still seeing it blow up is hard for us to get our heads around? I mean, how are you just processing this? It's, I think people use the word unprecedented a lot, but this really is unprecedented. You know, waking up on Saturday morning to not just the reports of thousands of rockets fired in one morning, but, you know, these fragmentary reports in the early hours of this that militants had crossed the border and taken over various towns in Israel. This is

something, you know, as a journalist who's been in the region for a decade and a half who lived in Israel for years, not something I ever would have imagined. And the three and a half days since then have just been this constant struggle to try and figure out what is going on, why it's going on. And no one has an answer. You know, speaking with, we've talked with, for example, various Hamas officials over the past few days, trying to get a sense of what the strategy was here. What did you hope to achieve by doing this? And you don't really get a good answer to that. And it makes you wonder, was this, you know, the term catastrophic success, something that worked better than you intended and ends up having very negative consequences. You wonder if even they expected that the results of this

were going to be as bloody and as gruesome as they were. Then you talk to Israeli officials in the days since, and you ask them, you know, it looks like there's a buildup for a ground invasion in Gaza. You've mobilized 300,000 reservists. You're moving all sorts of military kit to the border. but what's your plan? You know, that old David Petraeus line from the Iraq War, tell me how this ends. Tell me how this ends. What are you trying to accomplish in Gaza?

And they don't know. So there's this feeling that, aside from the immediate human catastrophe, first in Israel and then in Gaza that we've seen over the past three and a half days, there's just this very ominous feeling of no one knows where this goes. And you feel like, you know, there's often a predictable, a very sad, but very predictable script in this region. we've thrown that script out the window now and I don't I don't know where any of this is going and no one knows where this is going. No, I think that's a very good note, and that's very well said because there's just something ominous about this and there's so many ways that this can escalate beyond what we can even think of, right?

I think about the holy sites. I think about the West Bank. I think about just all manner of scenarios beyond just. the, you know, obvious Iranian ones. And the only thing you're sure of, right, is that innocent people are going to die, Israelis and Palestinians. And that's what makes it feel so, I mean, you know, bad leadership. And in this case, obviously, Hamas is one that had the catastrophic success, but no secret to people, I'm no friend of Bibies. But, you know, ultimately, you know, it matters. You know, and, well, look, I really appreciate you helping us. sort through some of this. People should follow your work on Twitter and the economist, really one of the sharpest eyes on this part of the world. So thanks for helping us

sort through this a bit. Thanks for having me. Thanks again to Greg for joining the show. And thanks again to everyone who helped us sketch out and produce and then also listen to the bonus episode we did on Saturday. Yes. We are going to try to decide later this week if we should do another update, but events will kind of dictate that. Yeah, no, we'll see. We will if we need to. But yeah, many thanks to the people that, you know, can somehow pull this together on a moment's notice on a Saturday. Yeah, thanks to our amazing team. Speaks to how good our team is. Yeah, you're at Crooked Media for everyone working on the Saturday and working on a Monday after the day off. So thanks again, everybody, and talk to you soon.

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