The Dispatch Podcast - Israel's Ghost Towns

Episode Date: November 6, 2023

Graeme Wood is in Israel to report on the aftermath of the October 7 atrocities for The Atlantic. He joins Jamie to share his impressions of Israel from before and after the attack, including: -records (and recordings) of the pogrom -the alienation between the Israeli state and the Israeli people -the participation ultra-Orthodox Jews in the war effort -the Hamas/ISIS comparison -civilian deaths in Gaza Show Notes: -Graeme Wood's profile at The Atlantic Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

During the Volvo Fall Experience event, discover exceptional offers and thoughtful design that leaves plenty of room for autumn adventures. And see for yourself how Volvo's legendary safety brings peace of mind to every crisp morning commute. This September, leased a 2026 XC90 plug-in hybrid from $599 bi-weekly at 3.99% during the Volvo Fall Experience event.

Conditions apply, visit your local Volvo retailer or go to explorevolvo.com. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Jamie Weinstein. You may have heard me last week hosting the Monday edition of the Dispatch podcast, but this is actually my official launch date. Let me just give you a little bit of an introduction for those who may or may not know me. Some of you may know me from hosting the Jamie Weinstein show, the creatively named a podcast. I hosted for many years doing long-form interviews with people all over the ideological spectrum from Roger Stone to Tanahasi Coates, where I tried to have civil. but pressing conversations, pose questions that brings out something different with each of the guests and challenge sometimes preconceived notions. I'm going to try to bring a little bit of that here to the dispatch on Mondays, try to bring on people that disagree with me on some issues. And even those who agree with me try to press them to clarify their ideas. So you'll see me interview newsmakers, as well as do what we call explainer podcast, try to bring on an expert to explain something that's

happening in the news, kind of like we did on my soft launch last week on international law. So I'm super excited to be joining the dispatch team hosting on Mondays. So I hope you will enjoy the episodes that I put out each week here every Monday. Today, we're talking with Graham Wood. He is a staff writer at the Atlantic. He has covered many different topics over the years, but particularly he has focused on ISIS and international terrorism. We talk about what is going on on the ground in Israel where he is covering the Israel-Gaza conflict, and we got into a lot of different issues. But let's get right into it. Without further ado, I give you Mr. Graham Wood. Graham Wood. Welcome to the dispatch podcast. Thank you for having me. Well, it's a real pleasure to

have you. I've been following your work in the Atlantic closely as this conflict in Israel and Gaza has unfolded. I wanted to go back to when you arrived in Israel. Was it just after October 7th? And if so, what was the mood like when you got there? And if you could, compare it to what I presume have been other trips to Israel, the mood in the country? Yeah, I had been in Israel actually just a few weeks before. So I was able to do an A-B comparison that was a few weeks before and then a few days after the October 7th attack.

I got off the plane in Amman, actually. There were all these flights that were getting canceled. So even just getting in, unless you were taking L.A.L., which pretty much went steady, but it wasn't flying from where I was, was still going. Otherwise, you had to figure out

how to improvise a way in. So I crossed in from Jordan, got to Jerusalem. And the atmosphere was kind of creepy, honestly. I mean, I've been to Jerusalem many times. It's a tourist city. It's obviously a city of pilgrimage, a holy city. And it had the atmosphere of mourning.

And also just a lot of silence. You know, you walk around a city that you're used to being filled with, you know, souvenir salesmen, touts. And then you get the sense instead that there's been literally a death in the family. and then also that a lot of the people who are usually there are just gone. So I walked through the old city one day and met zero tourists, and most of the salespeople had closed up. So the few people I spoke to, many of them had the same comment,

which was we thought we'd never experienced this again after COVID, but the streets are empty. Now, the other interesting thing about Jerusalem, of course, is that it has a pretty large ultra-Orthodox population, And curiously, that population seemed to be going about business as usual in their neighborhoods of the city. So Israel is always a funny place. It was funnier than usual then. Have you made it to Tel Aviv?

And is it the atmosphere the same there? And obviously Tel Aviv is known to be a much more lively city, certainly in the evenings. Do you see the same mood in a city like that? Yeah, I've been in Tel Aviv too. And it's quite different from Jerusalem, always, of course. one way it's different nowadays is that it gets many more rocket attacks. So Hamas throwing rockets at Jerusalem is very likely to hit areas that are sacred or that are filled with Palestinians.

Tel Aviv is less likely. The other thing about Tel Aviv is that it doesn't have the same number of ultra-Orthodox. The ultra-Orthodox Israelis, Israeli Jews typically don't serve in the military. So in the days after the attack, when I arrived, all these reservists were being called up. All these soldiers were showing up for duty, whether they were called up or not. And that meant Tel Aviv was disproportionately feeling that. So it's both more often hit by those rockets and more hit socially by the fact that many people were going off to war and no longer on the streets having a good time. There are some reports that the ultra-Orthodox actually for the first time,

or, you know, one of the, you know, they're actually showing up to serve. Have you seen any of that, or is that an exaggeration? No, it's not an exaggeration. It's true. I've not actually seen the ultra-Orthodox showing up to serve, but actually even before October 7th, there was more talk about it than one might think. You know, these communities, the deal is they get these exemptions. The men are supposed to be studying Jewish sacred.

text. That's what they do all day. And if you have that exemption, you don't have to serve in the military. And there was this understanding that this couldn't really go on forever in the following sense. The ultra-Orthodox population was growing as a share of the population so fast that if you have 8% of the population not serving in the military in a security state like Israel, can manage that. But if they're growing, doubling every, I don't know how many decades, then eventually you get 50% of the population that's not serving in the military, and that's unsustainable. So I think the ultra-Orthodox community, they understood that this couldn't go on forever, and there was on the kind of down low some talk about, okay, we've got to figure it out a way

so that we are part of a sustainable Israel that also is Israel that is friendly to our way of life. So that was already happening, and it's definitely accelerated since October 7th. The story of, let's say, October 6th in Israel was a divided country. And let's say October 8th is a more united country. What is the unity towards other than obviously defeating Hamas? Are they unified in other ways that, you know, we watching from abroad might not realize? Yeah. The first way that they're unified is that they all hate the Israeli state.

They're unified, of course, despising Hamas, despising the massacres. But also, you would be amazed at the range of Israeli political persuasion, demographic origin that just come together and thinking that the Israeli state, not just the government, but the state, failed them. So, like, if you look at, there's a, the current government is well known to be quite right wing. and it had a strong backing from working class, ultra-Orthodox, as well as Mizrahi, that is Middle East, North Africa, rather than from Europe population. And some of those people who were reliably pro-government just expressed hatred toward the government and toward the idea of Israel that they thought had shortchanged them in the extreme. They thought, there's no point in Israel other than to be a place where this kind of thing doesn't happen.

And we had signed on completely to the idea of Israel, to this government. They let us down so completely that we're simply disgusted. And then to add to that, of course, there was the hundreds of thousands of people who opposed the right-wing government, who already hated the government, and who were just confirmed in their view that the government was incompetent, that it was failing at its most basic, basic tasks. So everybody agreed in the days afterward that Hamas had to be destroyed, and everybody agreed that the state of Israel was not something that they could look at with anything but cynical eyes going forward.

Well, that's a difficult situation you would think to be in, to all believe to want to take on a very difficult mission to dismantle Hamas, but at the same time not believe the government who's in charge of, you know, formulating a plan with the military to do so is competent to do it, how does that get reconciled? Do they just, you know, allow the government to continue on to try to accomplish this mission and wait until afterwards to see what happened on October 7th? Or is it possible that you could have a transition of leadership in the midst of war? I think it's unlikely that the transition would happen. You know, the last thing I did before I left Israel before the attack was

see the Helen Mirren movie Golda. And I've spoken to a lot of Israelis who have seen that recently. And they think back to it because they saw Goulda Mayer and the Junkipur War of 1973 also have an extreme intelligence failure. And this is the template that's in people's minds about what to expect of their leaders. That is that the war will happen. There will be no change, at least in the very early days of the war, probably not even in the middle. But afterward, there will be a reckoning. And a lot of the people who thought they

and their cohort would be around and leading Israel forever will be kicked to the curb. There will be a commission. There will be a recrimination and there will be change. But I don't think that's something that anybody expects to happen right now. But in a year, in two years, I would be shocked if Benjamin Netanyahu is still in charge of the government. I would also be shocked if the different command chiefs of the IDF are still in power. It was a failure unlike anything. And if there's not any follow-through and responsibility taken, then, well, that cynicism is surely justified. That kind of leads into your most recent piece, the theory of Hamas's catastrophic success in which you suggest from your reporting, which goes against some conventional wisdom.

You read about Hussein Eubish's idea that Hamas was trying to draw the IDF into Gaza. That you write that they were shocked almost that the IDF's Gaza wing just was nowhere to, in a large sense, to stop them. And this will obviously go into the hearings that ultimately will come into what happened in October 7. But it's still a question that puzzles someone like me who has been to Israel six times. It's hard to go very far without seeing a lot of IDF soldiers. Is there any sense of how Hamas was so successful in that awful sadistic operation on October 7th? Yeah, I mean, there's a bunch of different answers to that. There are tactical questions.

Like, how did they blind the IDF on the Gaza border? You know, there's some borders of Israel that famously, they're so tightly locked down electronically that a bird cannot fly over without the IDF knowing what species it was. Just to that point, on the Gaza fence, I mean, it used to be the government would brag about, it was 100% successful in stopping tariffs getting through the fence. I don't know if that was the case up into the date, but I think it probably was that no terrorists had gotten through the fence until October 7. I mean, there had been attacks.

There had been attacks on checkpoints in particular. So, but an actual penetration onto Israeli territory, that was unheard of, unforeseen, let alone keeping that territory over the course of hours. And, you know, I suggest in my piece that Hamas didn't expect that success. Israelis didn't expect that kind of failure. either. I've been to some of those. It would seem along the Gaza fence and in happier times, as well as since. I've visited them, their wreckage since. And these communities were not set up as lockdown communities for security purposes. It's not like they were some kind of outpost,

medieval outpost. They were like bedroom communities. There were pleasant little places where, where, you know, seniors live. So there was no expectation of this. Now, there's going to be, I'm sure, inquiries about what those tactics were that were so successful. It was partially numbers, so huge numbers of people going through who were armed and who had detailed tactical knowledge of what was going on on the other side. There was also a bit of a bum rush of the border, which, you know, now, in fact, even on

the day, we could already see that there were ordinary guys. going in and at the very least looting, you know, taking back kids' bikes to their homes and so forth. There's also a level of speculation and maybe a little bit more than speculation about what it was that allowed this to happen strategically. That is, the government taking its eye off the Gaza border because it had other priorities, specifically the West Bank. I've done some reporting on this as well over the course of the last 10 months or so, which is in the West Bank, there's been more and more settler activity, more outposts being built illegally. And I say illegally, meaning illegally under Israeli law.

You're not supposed to build anything. And to do that means that there's going to be more clashes with Palestinians in the West Bank. And it's a matter of objective fact that there was a lot of attention that had to be paid. paid to the West Bank because of those clashes. And attention is a finite resource. So there's a lot of recrimination about what the priorities of the government were if those resources were taken away from Gaza and left the Israelis on that border undefended. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can

take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain on top of everything else is why life insurance indeed matters. Ethos is an online platform that makes getting life insurance fast and easy to protect your family's future in minutes, not months. Ethos keeps it simple. It's 100% online, no medical exam, just a few health questions. You can get a quote in as little as 10 minutes, same-day coverage and policies starting at about two bucks a day, build monthly, with options up to $3 million in coverage. With a 4.8 out of 5-star rating on trust pilot and thousands of

families already applying through Ethos, it builds trust. Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch. That's eth-h-o-s-com slash dispatch. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, your writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place. With Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools, you can launch a website that looks sharp from day one. Use one of their award-winning templates or try the new Blueprint AI, which tailors a site for you based on your goals and style. It's quick, intuitive,

and requires zero coding experience. You can also tap into built-in analytics and see who's engaging with your site and email campaigns to stay connected with subscribers or clients. And Squarespace goes beyond design. You can offer services, book appointments, and receive payments directly through your site.

It's a single hub for managing your work and reaching your audience without having to piece together a bunch of different tools. All seamlessly integrated. Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

You write about the videos themselves. You were part of a, I guess, a group of international journalists and maybe local journalists who the government showed some of the videos from October 7th. And you described them in some gruesome detail. I'm sure there's more there that you left out. for some of the listeners may not know, you covered ISIS quite, you know, extensively. The brutality of that day, at least projected so openly to the world by the terrorists themselves. And on that scale, I had not seen before. But someone who has covered ISIS and other terror groups, was this on a scale and sadism that you had not seen before?

Or was it in line with the type of attacks you saw by ISIS? The sadism was comparable. You know, the film critic Roger Ebert, he has this story about going to, in his early years as a journalist, covering a carnival. He was told that there's a guy, the Barker said, we have the best geek in the world. What does a geek do? He says, he bites the heads off of chickens. And Ebert asked, what's the difference between a good geek and a bad geek? And the Barker said, do you want to look at the chickens?

It's kind of like that where you could draw gradations between the barbarity of ISIS and of Hamas, between the grotesque things that you see in the videos of one group and the other. To some degree, it doesn't matter. I mean, they're both maximally sadistic organizations at the moment they make these videos. What I noticed as someone who spent years watching everything that ISIS put out, and trying to understand why they were doing this, talking to their members. What was striking to me is that with Hamas,

the videos are indeed sadistic. They are much less ordered than the ISIS videos tended to be. ISIS would have, first of all, much greater production values, but they would kind of explain why they were doing what they were doing. They would pronounce a sentence. they would read the scriptural basis for their sentence, and then they would carry it out. That sentence might be burning someone alive.

It might be cutting someone's head off. But there would be this kind of high-minded explanation in an ideological way of why they were doing what they were doing. And it was always done in cold blood. The Hamas videos are different. You see them doing things that are every bit as grotesque, like chopping someone's head off with a cold blood. blunt gardening instrument.

But they're doing it in a, you know, they've gone berserk. Not that they didn't intend to do these things when they went in, but the, the evidence of premeditation is different and the high-mindedness of the violence is also not really there. The desire to do the will of God because the end of the world is coming, that's pretty high-minded And then with Hamas, it looks like random people in track suits in some cases who have gone in and are doing the most unspeakable things. And you just catch yourself wondering, why would you do this? I know you don't like Israelis, but there's lots of people I don't like who I wouldn't do this to.

It's not clear how this is really in the end going to get you your bland back if that's what you want. So it's a very upsetting 43 minutes of a video that have been released for the eyes of journalists. And I still am upset by it and have trouble figuring out exactly what's going on and why. Are you surprised by the denialism that still exists about what occurred? You see some people question whether babies were burned and whatnot. with the extensive video and the journalists that have seen it and reported on it, does that surprise you at all? No, only because I guess I have a pretty dark view of human nature and of people's willingness

to believe what they have to believe to continue with their political priors. I mean, there's a lot of people who are simply incapable because of their commitment to one side of this conflict, incapable of believing that the side that they're on would do horrible things. And so when they see, you know, when they're told that there are images of a Thai farm worker being beheaded, then the only way that they, as a matter of self-protection, the only way that they can can deal with that cognitive dissonance is to deny that it's happened. And, you know, this is a contemptible reaction, but it's one that human psychology would would predict. I mean, the way that a lot of people who, you know, are tearing down posters of

kidnapped children who are in Gaza, I don't believe that these people are uniformly sociopathic. I think that when they see these posters, many of them, you know, they react like a Westworld robot who you just showed an iPad. Like, I don't, I guess I don't believe, I don't know what that is. And then they, they do these, yeah, they react. act accordingly and just slide back into those political priors and take them what they think of as the posters of their enemies. I guess I meant to ask this up front. Have you ever been in Gaza in any of your trips to Israel? I have. It would be false to say that I know Gaza well. The only area of Gaza that I've been into is Rafah, which is the city that is on the edge of the Egyptian

border, and that was about 20 years ago. You write in one of the earlier articles and what is Israel's goals in their response in Gaza. And my question is you see a lot of people here in the U.S. and sometimes understandably, you know, isn't there another way to go about dismantling Hamas or responding without the consequence of civilians dying in Gaza? And I guess my question for you is having talked to people on the ground, I presume security officials,

is there a possible way to accomplish defeating Hamas? They're dismantling Hamas without massive destruction of both terrorist and innocent life in Gaza. You could also ask, is there a way of defeating Hamas with that devastation? Hamas has external offices, and there are a lot of people who just believe in it. So that's one end of the analysis that you have to think about. Now, could Hamas be taken apart without massive civilian casualties? no one I've spoken to believes that that is possible. It was, especially in the early days after the attack,

there was this air of sadness and resignation that, yes, we're just going to do this. There was a sense that in the past, we were going to feel out the possible political solutions. We were going to have some conversations, maybe even just behind the scenes. And instead, Israelis thought, we're not going to have any conversations because we can't trust them at all. Apparently, what they're willing to do is way more than we thought they were willing to do. And so all we can think about is destroying their capability, what they can do rather than what they will. Those are the things that we can deal with. But there was also an understanding that the number of Israeli IDF dead in such an operating,

could be in the thousands and an understanding that Palestinian dead, which I don't think were weighed or are weighed the same way that Israeli dead are, but that there was also an understanding that there would be civilian dead on that side that would be quite a bit higher. But no, not a way to deal with that. I will be delighted to discover that that's not true and that the invasion, which now is we're about a week into it, bears enough root where they can pull back. But as of now, that does not seem to be what's being planned for. There's at this point only 23, I believe, Israeli fatalities in the invasion,

but they haven't gone into the first tunnel yet as far as we know. So it could still be truly awful going forward on the Israeli side, and it's already awful on the side of Gaza. I can say, at least for my part, in the West, and I think there's a lot of people like me who like to think that there's some trick up Israel's sleeve, like 1976 and Entebbe, that they're going to do some incredible rescue operation

that no one thinks of and shocks the world. Is there any scenario where, I mean, I think there was one report from probably a not trustworthy outlet that I saw some people on Twitter mentioned they're going to put some type of gas in the tunnels and they're going to, you know, put sleeping gas or something and go in there and try to rescue hostages and get rid of the terrorists. Is there any sense that there's some secret surprise that Israel has other than a conventional

type of war that we saw in some cities in Iraq, like Fallujah and Mosul, that is really bloody and really brutal? It's funny how the speculation that you hear from both sides sort of meets in the middle. So there was speculation in a Qatari outlet, which is Qatar as a sponsor, a friend of Hamas, saying that there's going to be gas that's piped into those tunnels and everybody's going to be killed, prepare for the worst, chemical weapons. And then, yes, on the side of the Israelis, there's also, thank goodness, there's going to be chemical weapons. And so we're going to pipe in, who knows what, and it'll be a magic elixir that is going to allow us to be victorious without massive casualties. So much of this is either wishful thinking or, I don't know the opposite of wishful thinking is, but, you know, piping in a gas. You remember in the early 2000s, in the earliest years of Putin's reign, there were,

terrorists from the Caucasus who seized the opera house. And Putin piped in his special sauce, probably some kind of early fentanyl derivative. It killed most of the, all the hostages, everybody was knocked out, and a huge number of the hostages died too, because if you give someone a gas that makes them fall asleep, there's a very good chance that they stop breathing to and they need to breathe. And so you have to go in there. and if there's someone you want to save, pull them out. So it's really, I think, unless there's some incredible secret innovation in anesthesiology

that the Israelis haven't told us about, then it seems pretty unlikely that there's going to be a solution that allows the 240 hostages who are somewhere subterranean. in Gaza to survive, that saves IDF soldiers from dying in large numbers and that neutralizes Hamas fighters without killing a whole bunch of civilians too. I don't see any way around this that keeps things from being pretty awful. Now, there was, and there's an IDF general named Yair Golan, who just a couple days ago was on, I believe it was Army radio, and who said, the IDF is not going into the tunnels. If you go into the tunnels, you die.

Luckily, we're not stupid. We knew these tunnels were there. And we do have plans to not go into the tunnel. Those tunnels will be death traps for Hamas. That was the most optimistic comment that I've seen from any informed Israeli. I don't know physically how it's possible to not go in and to distinguish between enemy combatants.

and the people you want to save. Well, I guess there was a thought that once they run out of fuel, they need the fuel to operate, lighting and I guess other oxygen-type devices in the tunnels that would be a death trap there. But is it the belief that most of the hostages are also in the tunnels as well? You know, I don't know. If I were the type of person who had no interest in following international humanitarian law, then I would absolutely bring my human shields in there in the tunnels with me.

So I think it's a reasonable expectation that they're down there. Now, Israel has basically encircled at this point Gaza City, which is the stronghold of Hamas' fighters. And so it would be, it'll be interesting to see what happens if Israel decides, okay, we're not going in those tunnels, but that encirclement is done. And now time is on our side. We will allow humanitarian aid, food to get in. But we're going to wait for you to pop up and say that you prefer to see daylight again rather than die slowly in those tunnels. that might be a long wait. You're not on the ground in Gaza, obviously. It's not easy to get on the ground in Gaza. Is there any evidence that the Gazans are blaming Hamas for the plight versus Israel?

Or, you know, there was, I remember during the Lebanon war, there was some anger at Hezbollah within Lebanon for bringing that massive destruction upon the country. Is there any evidence that it's really Hamas that's getting a large part of the blame for what's going on in Gaza? Jamie, it would be wrong of me to speculate on what Gazans thinks I'm not able to be there. And I will say this. We know this is demonstrated empirically that Hamas is pretty unpopular in Gaza. There's this funny crisscross that happens with public opinion. in West Bank and Gaza with the Palestinian Authority, which is in charge of the West Bank and Gaza, which is ruled by its enemy Hamas, where the Palestinian Authority is relatively

popular in Gaza, and Hamas is relatively popular in the West Bank. And it really just has to do with, as far as I can tell, the fact that people don't like the people who are actively misgoverning them. If you get someone who's ruling you and who's corrupt, you do not like them. And so it wouldn't be shocking if there's a lot of people in Gaza who are really angry at Hamas, there already were. But that said, you also tend not to like the people who are bombing you for much the same reasons. And so I wouldn't expect that that demonstrated political preference would extend to any charity toward Israel, which, you know, by all counts as killed. thousands of people in Gaza so far in this war already.

Regional war, that seems to be something that lurks as a fear in the background. I would assume for Israel, certainly for even us in the United States, we don't want to see a large war break out. Today, Hassan Norsrala, the leader of Hezbollah, gave this much-anticipated speech, which did not seem like he was about to enter this conflict. Have you heard any reaction within Israel, whether that speech has kind of calmed the potential fear of a larger regional war? So that speech was just a couple hours ago. During the speech, I was listening on my phone as I was walking by Damascus Gate.

I bought some kebabs in the street. The kebab seller was also watching on his phone while he was serving me. I would say my reaction was deeply unimpressed. His reaction, as I watched him, listening to exactly the same words at the same time, was also unimpressed, even bored. So I think that the interpretation universally of that particular speech has been pretty consistent, namely that it was not a speech declaring a new phase of the war. It was more a speech saying, don't blame me for this.

I'm in favor of it, but I'm going to sit back. I do think, though, that the possibility of regional upheaval might be underrated, and it worries me a lot. there's just so much about this war that goes way beyond a incremental change in the politics of the region. It's way beyond what people predicted, including Israel, including Hamas. I don't think they expected that there would be an invasion after what they did. And the invasion could be so bloody that it causes an uprising that extends beyond the borders of Gaza, West Bank, and Israel. Think about, say, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia.

These are countries with, in one case, a very large Palestinian population and in the other cases, a lot of people who are extremely sympathetic to Gaza, to the Palestinian cause, and in many cases are also jihadist, even Islamist, and even jihadist in their orientation. So I think those countries are, they're always, they're perennially concerned about popular discontent and the potential for that discontent to rise to the level whereas a threat to the stability of the regimes that rule those countries is there. And if things get really, really bad,

that's the level of upheaval that we're talking about. I'm going to get you out of here with these last two questions. One is, what is the feeling of how the United States has responded, the United States government to October 7th, how Joe Biden has responded on the ground? What do Israelis make of the government's response? This is a complicated question because the United States has not stopped Israel from doing what it's going to do. It has counseled restraint, the repeated visits from Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, or a red as being just try to hold back.

Try to hold back, please. But one aspect of the mentality of Israelis, I think, during the last month that it's hard for people to understand from the outside is how little they care about this. Of course, Israel wants to have friends and certainly wants to satisfy its closest ally, the United States. But there is a belief that we just don't have a choice in these matters. If you've got a statelet right next door that will, if it has the chance, do this, that is happy that it did it, that says, as Hamas officials have said as recently as a few days ago, we're going to do it again and again and again, then yes, it would be nice to keep your allies happy, but you just don't have a choice. You have to stop them. You have to go in and reduce their capabilities of Hamas to zero. And so the concern over American elite and mass opinion, I don't know if it's ever been

lower than it was in the week or two after October 7th. I'm going to end with this question. It sounds like there have been a number of things that have surprised you since October 7th. Is there anything in your reporting that has surprised you the most? The thing that surprised me the most was probably the surprise and the days after October 7, the immediate aftermath of October 7, that other fronts did not open up. You know, just like on September 12th, 2001, Americans were wondering, okay, what's next? Is the anthrax next?

Planes are on the ground, but what else could they do? there was a similar mood of wondering, surely an enemy that is stealthy and smart enough to have outwitted the IDF on the border of Gaza had a plan for the next day. And that plan could be ruinous for Israel. It could have been ruinous for Israel. That could have meant some kind of action in the West Bank that was, unmanageable. It could have meant the entrance on October 8th of Hezbollah into the war. That would have been the moment to do it. If Hassan Nasrullah, the head of Hezbollah, gave that speech today,

really wanted to enter the war and make it matter, that would have been the day to do it. So I think that the biggest surprise was that none of that ever happened. And I think as we, with almost a month's hindsight look back on what what Israel and Gaza have been living through. That might be the most important thing to notice, was that this was a day of absolute catastrophic carnage. But it was not, as far as we can tell, a day of strategic thinking or a plan. that is unfolding. And Israel still has to sort of stagger around trying to get its bearings again. But it does mean that the enemy that they're facing and the plan that they're trying to

counter is not quite as thought through as it seemed like it might have been. Graham Wood, thank you for joining the Dispatch podcast. I'm going to be able to be.