The Dispatch Podcast - Inside Israel’s Leadership Crisis | Interview: Matti Friedman

Episode Date: May 27, 2025

Seasoned journalist Matti Friedman joins Jamie Weinstein to unpack the current state of Israel’s war against Hamas, exploring the tension between military objectives and the return of hostages. He also delves into the role of American leadership, the morality of warfare, and what the future might hold for Israeli-Iranian relations. The Agenda:—Public trust in Israel's government is at an all-time low—The dilemma of the hostage return—Perception of American leadership and Donald Trump—Qatar: friend or foe?—Taking out Iran’s nukes—Is there a Leonard Cohen in today’s war? The Dispatch Podcast is a production of ⁠⁠⁠⁠The Dispatch⁠⁠⁠⁠, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including members-only newsletters, bonus podcast episodes, and regular livestreams—⁠⁠⁠⁠click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Jamie Weinstein. My guest today is a returning one. Mati Friedman, he is one of the most insightful commentators on Israeli society, an author of many books about Israel, and probably the most influential essay that I have ever read and that our previous podcast was on. He is a seasoned journalist who understands the failings of covering Israel. in the West by many media organizations. He is also the author of books like Fies of No Country, The Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel, and his most recent one, Who by Fire, Leonard Cohen in the Sinai.

We get into a lot of different subjects in this podcast, including what Israelis think about a number of issues that are going on right now, including the war in Gaza, the potential attack on Iran, Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, and more. Also about the difficult situations and moral dilemmas Israelis face in this fight against Hamas. And finally, I ask Mati if there is a Leonard Cohen of this conflict.

I think you will find this podcast interesting, informative, and as always, with Mati Friedman insightful. So without further ado, I give you Mr. Mati Friedman. Maki Friedman, thank you for joining the Dispects podcast. Thank you for having me, Jamie. Marty, I always love having you on this show because I think you're one of the keenest observers of Israeli society. It's one of the topics you write extensively about.

And I think there is sometimes a disconnect between what Americans understand of what's going on ground in Israel. and what we see as going on. So I was hoping to get you to provide some insight into what is going on in Israeli society. I just want to start by basically asking, what is the mood on the ground in Israel right now? So it's been a pretty rough year and a half for Israelis.

We have a war that's been going on since October 7th. Much of the war has been going on in Gaza, which is about, I guess, an hour and a half driving from where I'm sitting right now in Jerusalem. And there have been other fronts in the war. Yemen. We get hit with ballistic missiles fired from Yemen at the moment on a more or less daily basis. Most of them are intercepted before they lands. And we've had, you know, part of the war unfold in Lebanon against Hezbollah and part of it unfold in Iran. So it's been a tough year

and a half. At the moment, I think that you're asking that question at a moment where there's a real mood shift going on in Israel about the future of the war. It's kind of very amorphous thing to kind put your finger on the mood of a country, but it seems to me that many Israelis have kind of reached the outer limits of their patience with the war and the way it's being prosecuted. Just thinking about a poll that I saw several weeks ago just earlier this month, Israelis were asked, do you trust the government? And the number of people who responded, yes, was 24%. So that would indicate that a bit more than three quarters of Israelis do not trust the government that's currently running this war. There are signs that the reserve army

is under incredible stress and might be kind of burning out the bulk of Israel's military strength is reserves. So we have a small standing army that's mostly young men and women between 18 and 21 and then reservists who are older people in the combat reserves. It's mostly men, not all men, but

mostly men, people with families and businesses and people have done 200 days, 300 days, 300 days in some cases, 400 or 500 days of reserve to be since the beginning of the war and there are signs that Israeli society is just reaching a point where maintaining the level of combat is becoming less and less tenable, particularly given the fact that many Israelis don't quite understand what the goal of the war is or when

it is going to end. So if you talk to Israelis this month, May 2025, I think you'll find that people, after more than a year and a half of war, have had it and are hoping that our leaders, maybe with the help of others, their leaders can figure out a way to stop the fighting and allow people to get on with their lives. The stated goal of the war at the outset was two primary objectives, one defeating Hamas, destroying Hamas, and the other obviously the return of the hostages. Sometimes they are seen as in conflict.

How do Israelis weigh the relative importance of each? What I'm getting at is, you know, would they be willing to downgrade one of those objectives if the other was able to be achieved quicker and more fully. One of the earliest critiques of government policy in the war was a critique of those two objectives

returning the hostages. And at the beginning, we're talking about 250 hostages who were seized by Hamas. Some of them, kids and people taken from their kitchens and elderly people. Some of those hostages have died in captivity,

including one who I knew. Some have been returned in prisoner swaps. And at the moment, we're talking about 58 Israeli hostages who are still being held by Palestinians. Of them, we think about 20, are alive. And for Israelis, the dilemma that you mentioned is a terrible one, do you prioritize returning the hostages, which might mean ending the war and leaving Hamas in some

form in power in Gaza and able within, you know, some period of time to launch another October 7th style attack? Or do you abandon the hostages to their fate and go after Hamas until you can declare something that looks like victory? I'm not exactly sure what that would really look like with an organization like Hamas, which clearly is not going to surrender and doesn't care about civilian casualties. So that's the dilemma. And if you look at polling information, and I think we should all take polls with a grain of salt, and remember that polls, sometimes say one thing and sometimes say another, but the polls in Israel consistently show that the Israeli public prioritizes returning the hostages. So if people are presented with a stark choice,

do you get the hostages back, even if it means ending the war or ending the war for now, Israelis, most Israelis, not all Israelis, would say yes, that we have live Israelis being held by terrorists and we need to do whatever we can to get those people back. What we do about Hamas can be postponed, but the lives of these people are in danger right now. And if we wait too long, we might not be able to get them back. So it's a terrible dilemma. I happen to fall onto the side that would prioritize a hostage return, but I take very seriously the position of the other side, which is to say that we're, you know, we can prioritize the lives of about 20 Israelis who are being held hostage. But, you know, in a year, two years or whenever it is, we will lose, you know,

10 times that number in a renewed war waged by Hamas, which we're going to leave in place in Gaza. So it's a terrible dilemma for Israelis. And I have a lot of criticism of the current Israeli government and the way it's handled the war. But I don't envy them their dilemmas. These are terrible things to have to decide, really, you know, decisions that no other leaders certainly in the West has to make in 2025. Another change that has occurred since October 7th in the last few months, and almost the last 100 days, is that Israel's number one ally in the world has had a change of leadership itself. How is Donald Trump viewed in Israel? Obviously, I mean, you had that meeting with Netanyahu, which I think went much differently than anyone

ever would have imagined with some of the proposals that Donald Trump put out there. How is he viewed on the ground in Israel as a figure and as an ally of Israel? I think most Israelis perceive Trump as an ally and certainly leading up to the American election. I think the current leadership in Israel was definitely pulling for a Republican victory. If you're in Israeli right now, we're caught in a very tricky war on a half dozen fronts, maybe more. And our priority is, you know, we need an uninterrupted supply of weapons and we need our enemies to be afraid. That was not the case. And it would be at the end of the Biden administration. And it was the case or seemed to be the case once Trump took power. And most Israelis even of, you know, very liberal leanings, I think

perceived Trump to be the preferable candidate of the two who were on offer in the most recent American election. And I think that the enthusiasm for Trump among Israelis of the right, people who tend to vote for this coalition was, I think, maybe a bit unrealistic. I think that maybe people had a picture of an American leader who was just going to sign on with whatever the current Israeli leadership wants to do. And that was never who Donald Trump was. And you're seeing in the past couple weeks, maybe in the past month since Trump embarked on his Middle East trip. You're seeing some discomfort among members of the governing coalition about the moves that Trump seems to be making in the Middle East. For example, we've been hit on a daily basis, more or less

by ballistic missiles from Yemen. Most of them we managed to intercept before they hit us. But yesterday we had a siren, the day before we had a siren, I spent quite a bit of time with my kids in a safe room when the rocket sirens go off. And then the Americans signed a ceasefire deal with Yemen that would prevent the Houthi militia, which is an Iranian proxy, him firing at shipping, but did not require that they stopped firing at Israel. And I think many Israelis were surprised by that. And there's a kind of growing, I think, concern that the American interest in the region right now might not dovetail completely with the Israeli interest. And if you speak to people in the government, you're going to hear that concern very carefully expressed. Obviously,

the Americans are our most important ally. Obviously, this. is a very friendly American administration, but because the character of the president is so unpredictable, and because his style of diplomacy, if it can be called diplomacy is so different than any of his predecessors, no one really knows what to make of it. And people are kind of very much on their toes and trying to figure out what direction this administration is going to take.

I'm curious. When he did the press conference with the prime minister, Prime Minister Netanyahu, and his proposal for Gaza, which was somewhat unclear, whether he was talking a permanent removal and creating a resort town, a Dubai in Gaza of some sort, or a temporary removal until the Gaza was built up

and then the right, was that taken seriously in Israel? Has that become something that they're trying to implement in some way? Or is that no longer, you know, something that faded away, an idea that Donald Trump put out there that's now no longer operative? I think many Israeli observers have adopted, the formula. I'm not sure who came up with it, but someone said early on that that President Trump should be taken seriously, but not literally. And, you know, all kinds of plans are floated. I mean, I was born in Canada. And of course, there was a plan to

annex Canada. I haven't heard about that one in a while. So clearly all kinds of, you know, ideas are floating around and not all of them are meant to be taken 100% literally. Perhaps they need to be taken seriously, but not literally. Most Israelis want this war to end. And they don't want to see the population of Gaza displaced. They just want just to stop happening and are willing to do more or less what it takes to make this stop happening, including, you know, military action that we've seen over the past year and a half, which has been costly, of course, for Palestinians and Gaza, and costly for Israelis as well. We've lost hundreds and hundreds of soldiers, and Israelis are looking for a solution to that.

They're not looking for, you know, I don't think anyone really thinks there's going to be Dubai on the Mediterranean in Gaza. However, I should say that Netanyahu, in a recent press conference, he almost never gives press conferences, but gave one a few days ago and mentioned the Trump plan as one of the objectives of the war, war. And that was kind of the first I'd heard of it. That wasn't presented to the Israeli public as one of the objectives of the war. And I'm not exactly sure what it means. Does it mean that the population of Gaza, which is about two million people, will be moved temporarily so that Gaza could be rebuilt and rehabilitated? Does it mean that they will be permanently moved out of Gaza, which would be very problematic for any reason? So I'm not sure, to be honest. What I do know is that most Israelis, and again, looking at polls and just, you know, gauging the pulse of the society where I live. Most Israelis are not looking for some kind of dramatic solution here. They're looking for an end to the war and a guarantee of our safety, whatever, whatever that means. And if Donald Trump's creative thinking can make that happen faster and more effectively, they'll go for it. And if someone else comes up with some other ideas, they'll go for those.

People are kind of at, I would say they're kind of at the outer limit of their patients with the war and with their abilities that come up with great solutions to the predicament that we're in. It's a very sticky situation. I mean, we have a group that's committed to religious war. They are still holding live Israeli hostages despite the destruction in Gaza and the damage to civilians and the kind of unbearable images that we're seeing coming from Gaza, they show no indication of being willing to surrender and they fight out of pauses and hospitals and schools and out of tunnels that run under civilian areas. And they've forced us into this very kind of brutal war. war, which is very hard to win.

And I think that if you find an openness among Israelis to solutions that may sound wild, it's because people, you know, don't see any other rational solution to the current dilemma. I wonder if there's a consensus Israeli view on Qatar in the United States. Certainly among pro-Israel think tanks, they believe it's the font of all terrorism. And if Qatar wanted the hostages home, they would be home tomorrow. obviously Donald Trump just had a trip to Qatar where he reaffirmed the U.S. relationship with Qatar before the war, you know, one way to paint it nefariously is that Benjamin Netanyahu allowed money to go through Qatar to Hamas in order to, you know, prevent further peace negotiations.

A more positive way to frame it perhaps would be to say that he was trying to keep the status quo and not see another war, you know, launch from there. But how do Israelis view Qatar? Are they a government, a emirate that you can work with? Or are they really the font of terror that the funders of terror in Gaza? So I think there's a difference here between some Israelis in government circles and the average Israeli. The average Israeli thinks like Qatar is an enemy state. I mean, they're quite clearly a state that's hostile to Israel.

and they fund and control Al Jazeera and they've been funding Hamas for years. One thing that we noticed on October 7th was that the Hamas leadership was in Qatar, and yet, if you want to make a move against Qatar, you find yourself immediately hemmed in by some very interesting geopolitical realities. For example, Qatar, in addition to housing the leadership of Hamas,

also houses a crucial American military installation that cannot be moved. And if you weighed into some kind of debate about Qatar influence, then you'll find people associated with Qatar on all kinds of sides of all kinds of different debates. And they've done business with all kinds of people, including, you know, one of the main negotiators for the Trump administration. The Qataris have been very smart in how they've deployed their capital. It's a very small country.

I mean, basically, it's an oil well in a bank account. And they've been extremely strategic. And I think it's oppressive. I may not be on their side, but they've been, they've done a very, a cany job of spreading their influence around the West. They're in colleges, they're in real estate, they're in think tanks, they're in government. A lot of people owe the Qatari's favors. And if you try to really go out them head on, you're going to find yourself hemmed in. Their fingerprints, this is a kind of an ongoing scandal in Israel over the past couple months,

but their fingerprints have reached into Israel. It turned out that some of Netanyahu's closest aid, some of the people who do Netanyahu's messaging, were also doing a kind of side hustle for the Qataris. They were running campaigns for the Qataris and getting paid by the Qataris. So people in the office of the Israeli Prime Minister were involved with the Qataris. And this is something that we've all had to figure out. Over this past year and a half, the Qataris are this very ambiguous actor. And they kind of show up everywhere.

And if you want your hostages released, you might have to go through the Qataris. And, you know, I'll talk to Hamas. You might have to go through the Qataris. The Qataris are funding Hamas. And the Qataris seem to be in pretty tight with the Americans, including the current American president. Of course, they just announced that they're going to give him an airplane. So, you know, it's kind of, I guess, It's one of those cases where the average person gets that this is a hostile actor

and people who are higher up in the government system have an idea that they might be able to work that relationship in some way in Israel's favor. I think they're deluding themselves. But clearly some members of the Israeli ruling establishment, not just liberal, not on the liberal side, but actually on the right wing side, have become engaged with the Qataris in a way that I think has been very damaging to Israel's national intros. You alluded to Steve Whitkoff, who is the chief. negotiator who has had some deep relationship with Qatar, both in real estate. I think the prime

minister of Qatar, or I don't know if the current one or the former one, attended his son's wedding. How is Steve Whitkoff viewed? Is he viewed as a neutral arbiter? Do they view him as pro-Israel? How is he viewed by Israelis? Is he trusted? I think that Israelis in general see this administration as a friendly administration and, you know, treat the initiatives coming from this administration positively, I think that people assume that, but their Republican administration would like to see things work out in Israel's favor and have not really been given a concrete reason to think otherwise. Israelis tend to think that Americans, and this is speaking very broadly, this is kind of a cultural stereotype, but Israelis, people in the Middle East in general,

tend to think that Americans are naive. And, you know, you can see an American tourist here in the open market, like the vegetable market in Jerusalem getting ripped off in six different directions by by people selling all kinds of things that inflated prices. And I think people always suspect that Americans are getting fleeced by the canny operators in the Middle East, in this case, the Iranians. And I think that there is some suspicion like

that about Whitkoff. There was a moment at the beginning of the negotiations when he seemed to indicate that there was going to be a massive American concession toward the Iranians in terms of their ability to enrich. And that was later walked back. So I think people are here are in a kind of wait and see

attitude. The general impression of this administration is that they're on Israel's side, Israelis have a very complicated position in the world. And when they look at America, basically all they're asking is, is this president on our side? You know, Israelis know very little about the difference between Republicans and Democrats. I'm talking about the average Israeli, not, you know, people in the government, people don't really get the difference between right and left and in the United States. Israeli politics by American standards are very progressive. So, you know, in terms of abortion, which is legal here, state health care, which everyone has here, gun control, which is very tight.

here. I could go on. So the right-left division doesn't really line up if you copy American politics onto Israel. So what Israelis are really looking at when they look at America is, does this president have our back? And to this day, Israelis have a positive impression of Bill Clinton, who had Israel's back. So Israel remembers and George W. Bush, people have the same impression of Bush that he was on Israel's side, and that allows Israel to make, in some cases, dangerous compromises. So it's in the years of Clinton that Israel pursues the Oslo Peace Accords. And we're withdrawals from territory, turning, turning territories over to the Palestinians. I mean, the term of Bush, it's a withdrawal from Gaza. Many of these moves are now seen as errors of judgment,

but they're done because Israel trusts the American president. Israel did not trust President Obama to have Israel's back. I think President Obama had a different take on America's position in the Middle East. And although I think Israelis are quite surprised maybe that Donald Trump is the president, it seems like a strange, kind of a surprising choice for America. But Israelis have the impression that he's on Israel's side. And And the last Trump term, you know, we all remember that he recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital, which is a consensus position in Israel. It's the position of the Labor Party. And it's something that was celebrated across the political spectrum. Here, he recognized Israeli sovereignty

over the Golan Heights, which is also a consensus position in Israel. And Israelis have the impression that this is a guy, maybe it's kind of a strange development that he's the president, but for whatever reason, he's on our side. And that is more or less where things stand right now. They could change, but that's where it is right now. Benjamin Netanyahu, in America, people have people that, no matter what he can do, they hate him, no matter what he can do, they can love him. I think for a class of observers, I would include myself in this. After October 7th, it seemed like he would go down as the worst prime minister in Israeli history, such an egregious failure. Then the beeper attack with Hezbollah and then were like, wow, maybe he's doing something right there.

How do Israelis view him? Did anything change from October 7th when they probably also viewed it as an egregious failure? Or does he remain not necessarily beloved? Netanyahu has a lock on a certain section of the Israeli electorate, depending on what poll you're looking at, it's between 20 and 30%. If an election were held now, polls, again, again, grain of salt here, but polls would seem to indicate that he would lose an election. It's not 100% clear who's going to run against him. So it's way too early to make calls like that. But the polls are not looking good for Netanyahu

because he's seen as responsible for the greatest security failure in the history of the state. Netanyahu has been president, a prime minister for 15 years with a short break when Naftali Bennett was prime minister for about a year and a half. So 15 years, we don't have term limits in Israel. So the entire security situation that explodes in our face on October 7th is one that's built under Netanyahu.

And, you know, the idea that Hamas can be allowed to be, can just kind of be left alone in Gaza. Katari money can be funneled to Hamas. Netanyahu took a very cautious attitude toward Hamas and kind of let them grow stronger and stronger, believing that our high-tech defenses on the Gaza border would provide the defenses that we need and we didn't have to have a more aggressive policy against them

and that was a terrible misunderstanding, which we're still paying for. And it's unclear if Israeli voters will forgive Nathaniel for that. There have been ups and downs in this war, You mentioned one of the ups for Israelis, which was the beeper attack that basically ends up decapitating Hezbollah, which Israelis saw as their most potent, proximate enemy. Hezbollah is another Iranian proxy. It's a Shia group inside Lebanon. Hezbollah was taken much more seriously by Israel than Hamas before October 7th.

That was part of what happened on October 7th. Israel was always more concerned with Hezbollah and did not take Hamas seriously enough. And then with this incredible series of attacks, the beeper attack knocks out a pretty big section of the Hamas. Hezbollah command chain, and then there's another attack where walkie-talkies explode, and then within a very short period of time, Israel in an air strike takes out the leader of Hezbollah. And that was an up moment for Israel. But that attack, the Beeper attack, which is something that will go down in the history of intelligence as one of the great intelligence operations of all time. That's not Netanyahu. That's the Mossad, which is Israel's

intelligence service. So when you're looking at this from the outside, just as Israelis he's looking at America from the outside, they see Donald Trump. They see the personality of the leader. And Americans, when they look at Israel from the outside, they see Netanyahu. Netanyahu seems like the representative of Israel. And whatever goes on here must be his, either his fault or to his credit. But if you're in Israel, then you understand that there are many different parts of the Israeli governing system and there are many different parts of the Israeli military and intelligence system. And that brilliant attack was carried out by the Mossad. And if you know people in the Mossad, they don't necessarily, I think highly of Netanyahu.

And Netanyahu, I think, has made some good decisions in this war. He's made many poor decisions in this war. But there's no question that he bears responsibility for the outbreak of war. And just as Neville Chamberlain had to be moved aside when the scope of the disaster became clear in 1940, then the leader who owns the disaster has to be moved aside to make room for a new leadership that can, you know, take on the challenge of the time. And because Nathaniel is such a tenacious politician and because the Israeli opposites, position is so feckless. He's been, you know, he's been able to maintain power more than a year and a half into the war. And the big question for Israelis is what happens in the next election.

His chances don't look good, but you can never, you can never count it to now out. He's, he's a politician of real genius. I think he's a leader. He's not the leader that we need in this time. I think he's a much better politician than a leader. Sometimes a leader has to make decisions that are unpopular and work a counter to his own political interests. That was certainly true of Churchill, who, you know, we may remember, was voted out of office after four or five years after saving the world. So, you know, sometimes that's what happens to a leader. Netanyahu is a great politician, so, you know, you can't count him out.

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Well, I want to get into a recent essay, a book review you wrote. But before I do, one more along these lines, Iran, what is the sense on the ground in Israel? Is there a desire is the wrong word, but a willingness or a need, they believe, to take out Iran's nuclear program? Is there, after this, as you mentioned, long war in Gaza. Israeli society up to another front in the war, I guess, is the question.

That's a really great question. And as we were discussing at the beginning of this conversation, Israelis are at a very low point at the moment. And the society has incredible stamina. I don't think most societies could have persevered through what we've been through over the past year and a half and maintains kind of relative sanity and the society functions. But can we take another major round of violence. If we take out the Iranian nuclear program or attempt to, presumably there will be a major response from Iran and whether Israelis have it in them to deal with that at the moment is a very good question. I think the answer is yes, because the Iranian nuclear program is seen as an existential threat. That is, the Iranian government regularly threatens to

wipe Israel off the map. Nuclear weapons would allow them to do that and certainly allow them to do whatever they want because they would have a nuclear umbrella. And then Israelis have perceived that as an existential threat. So even if there would have to be, you know, another round of violence in this case would probably look like massive barrage as a ballistic missiles, I believe that Israelis would be willing to deal with it because it would be seen not as an inconclusive slog of the kind we're seeing in Gaza, but as the removal of a threat with which Israel cannot live. And I, I know that that's one of the dilemmas that's being debated right now. I mean, it's very much a live issue and very much depends on what the Americans decide to do. Israel can't really carry out that attack

without a green light from the Americans. And clearly the Americans are trying to reach some kind of negotiated settlement with the Iranians. I believe that that's a point of tension right now between the Israeli leadership and the American leadership. And we'll see. I mean, we keep hearing these reports of an imminent attack against Iran. We've been hearing these reports for about 15 years to become inert to them at this point, but eventually it might have to happen. if they're about to cross the threshold and become a nuclear power, then you would have one of the most dangerous regimes in the world with a stated intention to destroy this country and stated hostility to America as well. You'd see them become a nuclear power. And I think

Israelis, most Israelis believe that whatever needs to be done to prevent that from happening would be justified. You wrote an essay recently on, I guess it was the first book written by a soldier from Gaza, an Israeli soldier in Gaza, Asa Hazani, I might be pronouncing that wrong. I also listened to the podcast you did discussing it with the editor of the publication. It made me want to do people in the West and people in the media, which you've written a lot about,

just not appreciate that no war to defeat an enemy like Hamas is going to be pristine. I mean, is there a romanticization that you can do something as difficult as removing Hamas without bad things happening. Yeah, such a great question. I wrote a review of a book, as you mentioned, by an officer named Dasav Khazani,

actually a pretty high-ranking officer, a colonel, who's also an anthropologist. So he's a reservist. You know, he's kind of called from his civilian pursuits and spends a few months running one of the divisions in Gaza at the beginning of the war. And you wrote a book, which I reviewed, mainly as a way to discuss the moral questions

that have arisen from this war, which he touches on in the book. And I think that we Israelis have to be able to have a discussion about the morality of warfare. And one of the things that interferes with that is this incredible just wave of propaganda and hostility and hostility that hits Israel whenever we go to war and we're accused of the most heinous crimes known to man. And, you know, I spent time in the international media myself. And I found that the Israeli dilemmas and Israeli actions were completely misrepresented by people who were fundamentally activists and looking for a kind of political outcome to coverage rather than,

the, you know, more than they were interested in explaining what was going on. So, so this is just kind of one of the facts of the world as Israelis experience that whenever we go to war, our actions are taken out of context and twisted into the most negative way, you know, that they can possibly be understood. And one of the problems, I think, as you touched on, is the fact that we have to have this discussion, we have to explain ourselves to people in the West who have not fought a war in several generations. So I think that, you know, where this war to unfold in the generation of our grandparents, for example, I think that the discussions would be easier because those people remembered what a war was. And now we've had a few quiet generations in the West and people

look at Gaza and they see terrible images and they see children being killed and legitimately terrible images, which are heartbreaking and awful and damage to civilian towns and entire neighborhoods that have been erased. And people say that has to be wrong. That can't be right. There must be some other way to do it. And many people in the West no longer have the ability to differentiate between war and war crimes because anything they see to to them like it must be a crime. And if you actually have to fight a war and I've been in, I have, you know, I have served in the military, not in a war like this one, but you're faced with impossible moral dilemmas, particularly when you're fighting people who don't wear uniforms and

who hide behind civilians and who want to cause harm to their own civilians because they think that that will generate outrage that will tie, tie Israel's hands and let them walk away from the war, which they've done several times in the past with success. So yes, I think there's a real misunderstanding about what is and isn't possible in warfare. If we could have live streamed the Second World War, I think Americans would have been shocked to see what was done to Japan and what was done to Germany in order to win that war. I mean, the number of fatalities, if I'm remembering this correctly at Pearl Harbor was just over 2,000. And the number of dead in Japan, I think, is around 2 million in the Second World War. And I might be getting that

wrong. But the numbers are somewhere around there. And what that looked like was horrific, but you didn't see it. And now we're in a media landscape where you're seeing images. Many of them are propaganda. I'm not saying that they're manufactured, but they're taken into context. Or they're broadcast to elicit a certain political response. And it's very hard for people in the West stomach. And I understand that. I mean, if I were just a guy living in America or Canada or something and seeing these terrible pictures, I would also want it to stop. I would say, you know, I don't care who's right or wrong. I just need this to stop right now. And if the, you know, if it's Israeli jets that are causing this damage and they have to stop doing it. And as an Israeli,

I have to explain that if we don't fight Hamas, then we're going to see a repeat of October 7th again and again. Why do I think that? Because that's what Hamas's leadership says explicitly. And, you know, that if we must fight Hamas, then this is what it looks like. There is no war against Hamas that doesn't look like this. This, you know, you fight the enemy where they are and where they are is hiding among civilians and not wearing uniform. And working out of 300 miles of tunnels under the civilian landscape of Gaza. So a war against Hamas is by definition horrific. And it's a very difficult conversation to have with people in the West, not just with average people in the West, but with leaders in the West.

I mean, the West today is led by people who have not fought wars. they've just never experienced what that is. And it's a lonely position to be, and even if you're an Israeli, more liberal tendencies and someone like me has a lot of criticism of this government and thinks things could be done somewhat differently. Fundamentally, I agree that we must fight Hamas

and we must destroy Hamas. And because I've served in the military, I understand that the destruction of Hamas looks like this. It doesn't look like anything else. And as long as Hamas doesn't surrender, and as long as they don't return the hostages, then you're going to see a war that looks like this. And it's awful.

I think we do a better job of explaining it. But I don't think we have many other choices militarily. One of the interesting points that you raise, at least in the podcast, is the reservist nature of the Israeli military, which, again, is another point I don't think is appreciated in the West, that most of the people fighting in Gaza have jobs that they have left to go fight in Gaza. That this isn't just, there's a professional army, but the bulk of the fighting are reservists.

Just explain what that effect is on society. How much more connected, I would imagine, the society is to the war. And how does that affect even the Israeli economy? How does Israel function when so many of the people who are fighting are people that just left their jobs and had to go to battle? It's very different than the way it looks in America. first of all, the war is much closer. I think I mentioned that Gaza is about an hour and a half,

maybe two hours away from where I'm sitting right now. And the Lebanon border is about three hours from where I'm sitting right now. And the border with Syria is also about three hours. So we're talking about wars that are going on here. So it's not, you know, like in America, where you have to fly 8,000 miles or whatever it is to Iraq or Afghanistan or Vietnam until you get to the war zone. It's right here. And the military is us. I mean, I've met Americans, many Americans who've never even met anyone who's serving in the military. And in Israel, that's, that's, I'm thinking about, at least for mainstream Israelis, where we have a draft. You, not everyone is subject to the draft, which is a point we can discuss if you'd like,

but most Israelis are, which means that when you're 18, you head off and you do your military service. I have two 18-year-olds. I have twin sons who are finishing high school this year, and next year they have to go into the military. So it's very close, it's very close to us. So decisions made about war and peace are not theoretical decisions for Israelis. They're decisions that will impact your life. I mean, your husband can disappear for 200 days and maybe not come back and your kids, you know, vanish after high school

and have to do all kinds of hard and terrible things. So it's much more immediate for Israelis. It makes decisions about war and peace much closer to home. And I think that's also something that's not necessarily appreciated in Western societies where war is very, very distant and they don't necessarily understand

what it feels like to have children in the army, the nephew who's in the army right now, the guy who runs the grocery store down the street where I go every day. His son was killed fighting with the military engineers last year. The guy who runs the bakery where I shop, his son was killed fighting with the paratroopers. The son of good friends of mine was kidnapped from the music festival,

from the Nova Music Festival, a kid named Hirsch Goldberg, Poland, actually an American citizen. He was murdered by Hamas. And I could go on it. The war is very close to us. So when Israelis fight about what to do in this war, they're not fighting a theoretical battle about how to handle geopolitics. They're literally talking about,

the people who are, who are closest to them. And the war, when it's as prolonged as it is, causes immense difficulty to the society because it's not being fought by a small or a proportionally small professional military. It's being fought by, you know, your lawyer and your accountant and, you know, your son and your son's math teacher. And that's, you know, that's really the way it looks. I mean, the principal of the school where my son's study of the high school, the principal of the school went off to the war and was killed in a booby-trapped house about a month into

the war. So it's all happening around us. And the longer the war goes on, the greater the strain on Israeli society. And that's why, you know, the government's declarations that it's going to pursue total victory and that they keep announcing, you know, massive new call-ups of troops and new dramatic operations. I mean, much of this is, and it might be an extreme to call it fictional, but much of it is for PR purposes. The society is stretched to the limit. There are no more soldiers. The very small number of Israelis who make up the combat reserves are at the end of their tethered. There's not that much more to work with. And I understand why Israel does not want to say that publicly. And we want to have, you know, we want to have a big stick at our disposal. But the Israeli

Reserve Army was designed to fight wars that lasted at a maximum 60 days and were more than a year and a half into this war. So we're fighting a war that the army was never designed to fight. you know, one of the other interesting aspects of certainly the podcast discussion after the article was you talk about what some of the very negative things that this gentleman writes about in his book. And you assume there are much worse that have occurred because they occur in any war. And some of which you mentioned Israel is investigating because that is what a society like Israel does. I wonder, how does Israeli society? How does Israeli society? deal with the inflated charges that you hear in the West of genocide.

I mean, how do Israelis do they have time to even think of what these charges are? I mean, how do they land in Israel? I think they're generally interpreted as part of the broad hostility to Israel that people have almost come to expect. I mean, we're used to hypocrisy from Western countries and, you know, naked hostility from countries in the Middle East. And I don't think people here have many expectations of, international organizations, certainly people are very cynical about the United Nations and about anything that sounds like international law, because we've seen it applied ludicrously to

Israel and very selectively. And Israelis have learned to tune it out. And as I wrote in that review, which I guess I should say appeared in the Jewish review of books, it's a review of this book that we were talking about before by Asaf Khazani. The problem with that is that it ends up shutting down the moral discussion that we need to have. Because any country engaged in a war needs to be able to talk about the morality of war and we're sending our kids into war and we want to know, are they differentiating between civilians and combatants? Are they, you know, being forced into situations that are morally untenable? Are our soldiers committing war crimes? The answer, you know, because of it's a war is yes, of course, in any war. You have hundreds of thousands of people in

uniform and the violence is not going to be controlled. Do we have the institutions that are capable of prosecuting when necessary of reigning people in and making sure that the violence can be controlled to the extent that violence can be controlled? And it's a very important discussion that we need to have because we've been in constant war since the state was founded and because we're engaged in a very trying kind of war at the moment where differentiating between combatants and civilians is virtually impossible because the enemy disguises itself as civilians and in some cases they're holding our civilians behind their civilians and in many cases on October 7th the people who came into Israel to murder and rape and pillage were civilians they

weren't even combatants whatever that means so the distinction is not really viable So Israel is expected to observe international law, and I certainly expect Israel to observe international law, but we're fighting an enemy that not only does not observe international law, but actually uses international law in order to bring Israel into disrepute and achieve its own war goals. And it does that using Western media, and it does it using kind of fellow travelers in international organizations

like amnesty or human rights watch. So it's a very complicated situation for Israel. And there's not a whole lot I can do about it except point out the hypocrisy of the international discussion. as an Israeli, I care deeply about the discussion that we have in Israel about warfare. And I don't want to see that discussion shut down. So when Israelis are bombarded all day with ludicrous charges like genocide and apartheid, and every euphemism for evil is thrown at this country, what it ends up doing is it associates

in Israeli minds the term human rights with hostility. Like, people just don't want to hear about human rights because they interpret that as an attack on the state. When, of course, we have to have a discussion of human rights because we want to have a society that respects human rights. So one of the unfortunate consequences of this is not just to libel Israel across much of the Western world. And that has been done quite effectively, unfortunately. But it's to shut down our own moral discussion and to kind of implicate our own human rights advocates and our own left as part of this kind of hypocritical world that's opposed to Israel. So that's one of the reasons

that I wanted to write that review. And that's one of the reasons that I was happy that the book was written, even though I didn't agree with much of it, because I do think that we have to have, we have to be able to have this kind of discussion. We have to be able to win this war and Israel must win the war, but we have to do it without losing our soul. And that's our challenge. That's the challenge that we're facing right now. And when I think of beyond defending Israel's, you know, good name abroad, when I look inward at the society, I think that we really need to be having those discussions, and I don't think we're having them enough. Famously after the 1982 Lebanon war, Ariel Shroon was held accountable, not for something he did, but something that he should have

known was going to happen. Do you think there will be similar, if not trials of leadership, but do you think there will be held accountable for people that didn't uphold the standards of the IDF to the extent that there were issues that you mentioned that in any war there must be? Are there any ongoing now investigations of areas where soldiers went beyond what their scope is? I just don't think there's enough understanding in the West of how Israel holds itself accountable. There's a military justice system that has been, you know, I guess you could argue whether it's

effective enough, but it certainly functions. And there are many dozens, to the best of my knowledge of cases that are currently being conducted into the conduct of Israeli soldiers. There was a case of abuse at a prison facility. And there have been other cases inside Gaza. Again, if you send, you know, hundreds of thousands of people into a violent situation, you are going to see breaches of orders. You're going to see indiscipline. And not that that makes me happy as an Israeli, I find it very depressing, but that's just what a war looks like, and it's unrealistic, I think, to expect that a war would look like anything else. And we can remember that there was a massacre of German POWs by American soldiers in early 1945. And, you know, these things happen in every

war, but we need to be able to, we need to, of course, keep them to a minimum and have institutions that are capable of prosecuting them. And one thing that's happened in Israel over the past couple years is that the judicial system, not just the military judicial system, but the judicial system in general has been under fire from the right, including from this current government. So the system that is meant to enforce the rules of law and enforce Israeli law is itself being attacked as kind of unpatriotic by members of the current coalition government. And that's one of the things that I, like other Israelis, am worried about. But Israel does have an effective justice system and a justice system that challenges power.

That's one of the reasons that we're seeing the blowback we're seeing right now. but it's a judicial system that has put prime ministers on trial and some of the jail and is currently trying the sitting prime minister Netanyahu is facing trial on corruption charges. And we'll see this unfold. The real question for Israelis in that regard is whether when and whether we are going to see a state commission of inquiry into what happened on October 7th. And the commission that you were mentioning that found Sharon culpable for what happened in Beirut in 82 and specifically referring to the massacre by Christian militiamen,

of Palestinians in two refugee camps, Sabra and Shatila. It was a massacre that was not carried out by Israelis, but the Israeli army was there and did not do enough to intervene, according to this commission. So, you know, many Israelis are waiting for the commission of inquiry that's going to look at October 7th and tell us what happened. How is it possible that what is meant to be the most sophisticated military in the Middle East failed to detect and prevent an invasion

by thousands of terrorists who rampaged through Southern Israel for several days, actually, until the last ones were killed and murdered 1,200 people and took 250 hostages. And it's an investigation that has to include, of course, the heads of the military and the relevant military commanders, but it also has to include the political echelon, mainly the prime minister who's been in power for 15 years. And because the commission will almost certainly find that it was the policies of Netanyahu that played a key part in leading to October 7th, Netanyahu is doing everything he can to avoid a commission of inquiry. has announced that there will be no state commission of inquiry into October 7th.

State commissions of inquiry are a legal tool in Israel. There's a standard format for them. They're headed by a retired Supreme Court justice. And Netanyahu, because of his own culpability, is doing everything he can to avoid it. And again, that too is riding on the next election. So if Netanyahu can somehow pull out a victory in the next election, I don't think we'll ever see an objective investigation of October 7th. If he loses the next election, I think one of the first things that the new government will do is establish that commission, which is supported by a vast majority of Israelis who need to know how on earth this could have happened, not just so we can settle accounts with the people who are responsible a little bit so that we can make sure that it never

happens again. Mati, and finally, you wrote a wonderful book on Leonard Cohen and his journey in Israel during the 1973 war, a really remarkable tale. I wonder, is this? I wonder, is this Is there a Leonard Cohen of this conflict? So I spent a few years writing this book about Leonard Cohen's kind of wild concert tour in the middle of the Omkipur War in 1973, kind of shows up at the front, at the Egyptian front in the Omkipur War and gives one of the greatest concert tours of all time, in my opinion. And it's a great rock and roll moment. And I've been thinking about that a lot because I thought a lot about Cohen, who really

kind of offers comfort to Israelis. He shows up out of nowhere and sings his kind of vaguely depressing music. And there's this really intense connection that's formed between Cohen and Israeli soldiers at the front. And his absence has really been felt. So the answer I think is no. There's no one of Cohen's stature who has, you know, come from abroad to kind of sing to Israelis. Jerry Seinfeld did show up. I'm not sure that's exactly the same thing. I'm not sure exactly who we have in the world of Cohen's stature at the moment. Maybe Springsteen or someone like that. But I think that, you know, they're unlikely to come. I think that Israel's standing in. in much of the liberal West is different than it was. At the time, even then, it was a bit tricky, by the way. But now I think you'd be hard for an artist to really, you know, wholeheartedly say, I support you.

I'm coming to sing, you know, not just for civilians, but I'm coming to sing for your soldiers. The whole political world of the West has become much more fraught and binary. And Israel finds itself on the wrong side, a lot of those politics. So the answer is no. Leonard Cohen or his equivalence has not shown up this time. Mati Friedman, thank you for joining the Dispatch Podcast. You know, Thank you.