Public sentiment on the eve of invasion - with Haviv Rettig Gur
Haviv Rettig Gur returns to our podcast to provide real-time reporting and analysis on the war, and invaluable historical context. He will be a weekly guest on our podcast through the duration of the war. Today he is focused on Israeli public sentiment as the country mobilizes, and also looks at how the October 7 is perhaps changing perceptions in and of the Israeli Arab community.
Haviv is the political analyst at The Times of Israel. He was a long time reporter for the Times of Israel. He’s also working on a book. Haviv was also a combat medic in the IDF where he served in the reserves.
Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
[00:00:00] They dragged out the bodies, these people, they tied their hands, then they stabbed them, then they set them on fire, and then they shot them. There are among the 1, 300 dead, hundreds of bodies, where the point was torture. Salah Haruri, one of Hamas's leaders, interviewed Nal Jazeera and said, uh, they love life and we love death.
To the West, that sounds horrifying, but what he meant was We believe. We're true believers. We know that after death you go into the bosom of a good God who appreciates your sacrifice. And so death doesn't scare us. And these Jews, they don't have that. They don't have that faith. They don't have that belief.
And so death terrifies them. And so they don't love life so much as they cling to it desperately. And which side is gonna win? The one that can face death with courage, or the one that can't? And that's how they think about all of this. [00:01:00] They're wrong, and they're gonna discover that they're wrong. And the tragedy here, after the atrocity committed against us Gaza's civilian population is going to suffer, and Hamas is going to make sure of it.
As Israel prepares its main offensive on the Gaza Strip. There's a palpable feeling that Israel is on the precipice of a major war that has a wide range of potential outcomes and consequences. At this point, no one can rule out the possibility of a regional war that would include Hezbollah in the north in southern Lebanon and Syria and Iran in the east.
The spirit of [00:02:00] Israeli society, even as it mourns, is impressively and unmistakably united and strong. A steady stream of heroic stories have been surfacing since the attacks of October 7th. People from all walks of Israeli society joined the war effort. Reservists, who have long passed the service age, have put on their uniforms and showed up on the front lines, including former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.
Much of the high tech industry has allocated their tech to help mobilize the efforts of the tens of thousands of volunteers. The consensus around the need to destroy Hamas is so resounding that the only comparison I can draw from in U. S. history is the decision to enter World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
As we've been doing over the past week, we will begin with a brief overview of the latest developments from Israel. The IDF has said that more than 1, 400 Israelis have been killed in the October 7th massacre. [00:03:00] There are still 455 bodies that have not yet been identified, leading to a potential final count of 1, 855 casualties, 1, 500 of which were civilians.
4, 000 Israelis have been hospitalized and 200 more are confirmed to have been kidnapped, although Hamas announced today that the number of hostages is 250. According to Israel's public broadcaster, a document has been circulating among Israel's war cabinet laying out four aims for this war. One, toppling the Hamas government and destroying its military capabilities.
Two, removing the terror threat from the Gaza Strip on Israel. Three, maximum effort to return the hostages, and four, defending Israel's border and its civilians. Nearly all Israeli civilians living near the Gaza border have been evacuated, including Sderot, population of 30, 000, [00:04:00] and 25 agricultural communities around the Strip, population of 13, 000.
The IDF is set to evacuate civilians from 28 communities along the Lebanese border in Israel's north. The number of Americans killed in the Hamas onslaught has risen to 30. Another 13 are missing. U. S. Senators Chuck Schumer and Mitt Romney, who are visiting Israel in a bipartisan delegation, were twice forced to shelter as Hamas rockets targeted Tel Aviv.
In a press conference, the Senators promised to push legislation in Congress for more support for Israel. We say this to the Israeli people. We have your back. We feel your pain. We ache with you. And we and our country will stand by you. In these difficult times, you are not alone. The United States has organized a ship to transport U.
S. citizens [00:05:00] this morning from the Haifa port to Cyprus as the fighting heats up. Hamas has released the first clip showing one of the hostages being held in the Gaza Strip. In the short video, the young woman stated her name, where she was when she was captured, and ended by expressing hope that she will return home.
Captured documents reveal that Hamas's plan was even more extensive than the one that actually unfolded. The amount of weapons, ammunition, food, and even blood transfusion units reveals that they planned to invade the cities of Ashkelon and Kiryat Ghat and hold them for weeks. Here's a partial list of the captured arsenal.
3, 000 hand grenades, 1, 000 anti tank RPG rockets, 100 machine guns, 50 explosive devices, 1, 000 IED explosives, 100 land [00:06:00] mines, 1, 500 assault rifles, and the list goes on. As Israel opens another safe passage for Gazan Palestinians to move south, 600, 000 Palestinians have fled south of the Gaza River. Hamas is trying to prevent the flow of Gazans to the south by blocking the corridor, confiscating cars and spreading news that the IDF is attacking the corridor, which is not true.
This comes after reports of Hamas stealing humanitarian aid sent to Gaza's civilians. In a high stakes trip, President Biden will visit Israel on Wednesday, signaling to Iran. Syria and Hezbollah that Israel has the power of the United States behind it. For the second time this week, Israel has bombed the Aleppo and Damascus airports in Syria.
Following rockets fired from Syria at Israel. According to the Wall Street Journal, Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps is moving [00:07:00] forces closer to the Syrian border with Israel. This comes amid increasing Hezbollah attacks on Israel's defense warning systems, indicating that the likelihood of a second front is increasing.
Haviv Ratigour is joining us today from Israel. My friend, Haviv, who, after an overwhelmingly positive reaction to his previous appearances on this podcast, will now be joining us on a weekly basis for the duration of the war. Haviv, as you know, is a long time journalist and analyst for the Times of Israel.
He's working on a book, and he has served in the IDF. Haviv Retikur. on the spirit of a nation at war. This is Call Me Back.
And I'm pleased to welcome back to the podcast, Haviv Retikur from the Times of Israel, who joins us from Jerusalem. Hi, Dan. Thanks for having [00:08:00] me. Thank you. Thanks for coming back. Uh, I want to start, Haviv, really pivoting off a piece that I thought was quite powerful that you, that you just wrote for the Times of Israel that gets into some of these issues and I'll, and I'll go a little further with them.
I just want to get a sense from you to begin with about the sentiment right now in Israel. Because it, I mean, from my perspective, it seems that Jews. all over the world are still grieving, but we're also, we're grieving and we're also moving to another phase. It was almost like a, you know, like a Shiva. So Shiva for, for non Jews is the seven days of mourning, um, that begins with the, with the funeral.
And if, if the sentiment last week was, was grief and rage and mourning, how would you describe the sentiment in Israel right now as the IDF is is preparing to invade Gaza. I do think that some of [00:09:00] the, uh, intensity. Is waning. It's not waning, it's transforming into other things. That initial shock, which over really, I mean, three or four days until everyone really understood the scale.
But that's still happening. We're still learning what happened. Um, the police only, uh, uh, I think two or three days ago finished the CSI, uh, uh, reports. You know, they actually went body by body and figured out how everybody was killed. Um, the crime scene investigators of the police. And so the, those reports are coming out.
And, uh, and that's the first hard. Um, you know, scientifically oriented kind of understanding of what happened, and it's worse, uh, than we had known. And so that, the, that deepening shock, that deep, that sense of the, the, the animalistic, uh, massacre, the way it was done, the, the enthusiasm, the bloodlust, um, is still [00:10:00] being driven home in real time to the Israeli public.
So that's, that has not gone away. The army, uh, has been mobilized, uh, to an extent, uh, that it has never been mobilized before. There are more reservists now on call than have ever. been, uh, called up, and that has an immense effect. One of the, uh, simplest consequences of that is that every single Israeli family has someone at the front.
Uh, my family has two people, one on the northern border and one on the southern border, ready to go into Gaza. Both of them in combat roles. And so there is also that, um, anxiety. I, I was once, uh, myself in the infantry and I once had, uh, not, uh, not a very significant, you know, combat experience. I didn't fight in a, some kind of a drawn out war.
Uh, but I had some combat experience and I have, I, I never. in the actual ranks of the army felt the anxiety that I feel [00:11:00] for those family members who are themselves now going in. In other words, it's, it's, um, it's new to me. Um, and it's an anxiety that Every Israeli family feels, and it's very, very intense.
And so there's all of this. There's fear for the soldiers. There is, uh, the continuing horror and shock. Um, among many Israelis, the unfolding tragedy of Gaza. My neighbors. have, and I have had conversations in which the civilians of Gaza really, they're not just seen as victims of Hamas and Hamas's strategy of hiding behind them, which is Hamas's only survival strategy at the moment.
It has no other strategy. They are Israelis are almost seen as, you know, they support these. We have polls of Palestinians that tell us that Palestinians generally support terror attacks against Israelis. And so there, there's no love lost between the Israeli public and the Palestinian [00:12:00] public. But Hamas is hiding literally behind children.
Uh, UNRWA today, Published that, uh, Hamas stole fuel from, um, the aid organization that was supposed to help the, the, the, uh, the refugees and those who are fleeing their homes. Hamas is literally torturing the Gazan population as a force multiplier against us. And there is a response in Israel. It just crystallizes that Hamas is evil toward everybody.
But there is, the initial shock is worn off. The intensity has crystallized into something very hard, and I think with, with a lot of, um, I think that's going to stay there a very long time. And it's different, when I think about major wars that Israel's fought in your adult lifetime, whether it was the 2014 invasion of Gaza, whether it was the 2006 war in Lebanon, what is called the Second Lebanon War.
This feels much different? Oh, [00:13:00] utterly. The Second Lebanon War was an Israeli attempt to restore deterrence after Hezbollah crossed the border on July 12, 2006, killed four Israeli soldiers, I think it was four, maybe it was three, and kidnapped two more. And, um, and, and had slowly built up over the years this massive rocket arsenal that Israel wanted to then also destroy as it began to launch against Israeli towns.
Um, and, and so it was very much a, you know, a terror organization had gotten a little out of hand. We have to We have to, you know, crush it until, suppress it until it is no longer as much of a threat. And that was true of every, um, Israeli engagement, every Israeli, uh, operation, uh, including the large one in 2014 in Gaza.
This isn't that. We can no longer afford, not just for those specific Hamas gunmen to exist. There are, I don't [00:14:00] know, some educated guess that I have seen says about 30, 000 Hamas gunmen. They're all going to be killed. They'll be killed now, they'll be killed later, they'll be killed in 10 years. They will all be killed.
But the idea of Hamas has to be killed. The idea that Hamas has of us. That we are something that can be pushed out of here through incessant, permanent, sort of death of a thousand cuts kind of terrorizing of our civilian population, and that cannot be satisfied. This is the suicide bombings that began at the height of the peace process.
You can hate the Netanyahu government, you can hate Israeli policy, you can rage against the occupation and settlements. Israeli public is convinced that this violence, Hamas violence, isn't about those things, uses those things to engage in a completely different kind of violence that is implacable and unsatisfiable.
And so no, Israelis really do have, right now, have given their [00:15:00] government, in my estimation, infinite credit to get the job done. Whatever they need, they have the Israeli public's support. Including at the northern border, and including if all 140, 000 rockets Hezbollah has are launched, including multiple fronts, including thousands of civilian dead.
There is a willingness now, because if we don't take care of it, it will come back to haunt us. It will, we, we've discovered that those years of quiet were bought with the death toll on October 7th. And so there is a willingness to suffer. It, it's to that extent. So, if this idea is the enemy How do you destroy or kill or abolish an idea?
I mean, if you, if you define the idea as an enemy, how do you, what does that mean? Because, because you can kill Hamas leadership, you can wipe out their military infrastructure, but ideas have a way of surviving and being passed on to, to future generations. Yeah, uh, that's true. But ideas also do die. They die when it's [00:16:00] no longer arguable that they serve the needs of their believers.
The The idea of Hamas is two pieces. One piece we cannot kill. It's a certain vision of Islam. It's a certain vision of history. It's the argument that has, you know, quite a bit of history in the Muslim world over the last century, that Muslims have been asking themselves for 150 years. The main great intellectuals and thinkers and philosophers of the Muslim world have been asking, why are we?
so weak? Why are we so behind? Why is the West so ahead of us? And their answer, one answer, has been we've lost that original, authentic, pan Islamism that, that, you know, we have borders now, we have nations now. Uh, Saeed Qutb, who is one of the great, uh, thinkers of this, of this whole, um, kind of train of thought, of this Islamic renewal, that, that tries to go back to a romanticized early Islam.
Uh, said that a Muslim's only nationality is his faith. [00:17:00] And so it's about doing away with the nation states of the Arab and Muslim world, and it's about building this trans Islamic caliphate. Hamas believes in that deeply. It's a, it's a, it's a child organization of, of the, uh, Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, which has that faith and belief.
A different version of this idea is the Al Qaeda idea, and again, a different version of this idea inside Shia Islam and not Sunni Islam is essentially the animating idea of the Iranian regime. Hamas has this Islamic idea that is infinitely patient because it is looking for a restoration of Islam by a return to a kind of early piety in the past.
That is, by the way, Hamas's political power in Palestinian society. Where Fatah, which is ostensibly sort of nationalist and decolonialist and very modern, elitist and very wealthy over the years, and went to a peace process with Israel that saw Fatah officials stealing a lot of foreign aid money, but also, you know, uh, drinking [00:18:00] cocktails in Geneva with, with, with international diplomats.
I think I once read that when Ismail Haniyeh, one of the major leaders of Hamas today. When he flew from Gaza to Egypt, after he was already Prime Minister, he got on a plane to fly from Gaza to Egypt because of some indirect talks with Israel, um, about 15 years ago. That was his first time on a plane.
This was a man who came from the bottom, who had grown up in the streets of Gaza. There is this very Muslim, very, um, sort of bottom up kind of ethos to Hamas. That was true 15 years ago. It's no longer true today. Today, they're exactly the kind of corrupt administration that Fatah became in the West Bank.
But nevertheless, there's this Islamic idea that we're never going to kill. Islam needs to kill that. Islam needs to have a debate within itself in which it says, we're going to stop trying to conquer the world by murdering civilians. That is a piece of Islam. It is not all of Islam. It's not most of Islam.
But it's the part of Islam that keeps murdering civilians. So they really need to get on that. But there's a second part to Hamas's idea. [00:19:00] the decolonialist paradigm. The Jews are colonialists. They come from Europe. They have settled here just like the French settled in Algeria for 130 years. There are a dozen or so of these kinds of colonialist projects and all of them were ousted in the 20th century in the same way.
Hamas believes that if it just terrorizes us non stop, eventually it just won't be worth it and we'll all leave. And that idea has to be killed. So it's obvious to Israelis that Hamas brutal strategy cannot liberate Palestinians. We hope at some point it will be obvious to Palestinians in Gaza. What about Palestinians in the West Bank?
It's very interesting. We, there is a, um, there's a Palestinian pollster, a very important one, named Khalil Shikaki. Um, who has over the years done these, uh, qualitative polls, these long interview polls with [00:20:00] Palestinians. And he has found some very, very interesting responses. Palestinian responses, when you ask them, is a Jewish state legitimate?
Should there be a Jewish state? And he uses the word Jewish. Um, Palestinian responses are very dependent on how you frame the question. So, he asks, you know, is there, is it legitimate to have a Jewish state? And a huge majority say no. And then he asks, well, what if the Jews recognize the Palestinian state?
Can the Jews then have a Jewish state? And then he gets a significant number, I don't remember if it was a very, you know, if it was 45 percent or 55%, but it hovered in that area. Um, that said, well they can have a Jewish state if I get a Palestinian state. During periods of, uh, violence, during periods of, um, uh, there are some extremists, uh, Israelis in the West Bank, uh, in certain areas of the West Bank, in certain settlements, uh, when they carry out an attack [00:21:00] on Palestinians near them, on some Palestinian village near them, um, that is something that Israelis are You know generally horrified at but also it's it's it doesn't make the headline news that it's not the top story It'll be even if it's on the front page.
It's not the top story of the front page, but among Palestinians those kinds of attacks Are on the front page and they're very very even if they're small in terms of the actual number of people they affect They have a huge role in Palestinian consciousness and so when you have That kind of rise in tension a kind of rise in Jewish violence in the West Bank or when you have a war in Gaza For example those numbers plummet And so Shikaki argues, I hope I'm citing him correctly, I've spoken with him over the years, I've read what he's written about this, but I think he would argue, um, that there is a Palestinian understanding in the West Bank, where they live closer to the Jews, where it's harder to see the Jews as some kind of a colonialist construct that's leaving.
I'm talking about ordinary Palestinians, not ideological. That get you know degrees in, in [00:22:00] colonial studies in uh, you know, parisian universities, but ordinary palestinians don't think the jews are leaving and don't trust elites that promise them that. And so there is this willingness there. Under Hamas for 17 years, the education system has been controlled by an organization that doesn't just believe the colonial paradigm that the jews can leave but believes it's a long term God's will as part of the redemption of history, right?
So There's not going to, you know, under Hamas, there isn't this kind of, of, of questioning of discourse. There is never a point where the numbers for any kind of reconciliation, recognition or two states ever rises in Gaza.
You wrote in your piece that supporters of the Palestinian cause in the West, and when I say supporters of the Palestinian cause, these are people who, who witnessed the horrifying images of the massacre. They, they still believe in the Palestinian right to self determination, they still believe in the cause of, of [00:23:00] Palestinian statehood, and they, they ask some, not all, fewer today than I think, you know, before events of, of October 7th.
But there are still who, some who say, look, I, I'm not defending what We witnessed on October 7th. I'm not, I'm not, um, making the case for it. I'm not even sympathetic to it. But, what would you do if faced with decades of Israeli occupation? How do you blame these, these young people who get indoctrinated and get sucked into a cause after living under such, with such despair?
Uh, in, in this, what they call an open air prison in the, one of the most geographically dense places in the world, in the Gaza Strip. What, what would you do? Um You know, it's hard to have this conversation in this kind of cold, calculating, analytical way. Um, we're still burying the dead. I'm, I'm now working on an article.
I will answer the question, I promise. I'm working on an [00:24:00] article about, uh, those crime scene investigators and, and what, uh, and what they saw. So I'm, I'm still with I'm still with, um, bodies that, um You're still processing. They, um, they dragged out the bodies, these people. They tied their hands. Then they stabbed them.
Then they set them on fire. And then they shot them. There are, among the 1, 300 dead, hundreds of bodies. where the point was torture. People who say, what do you expect the response to occupation to be are arguing in a sense that it's about, that it's a kind of emotional explosion. But this wasn't an emotional explosion.
It was intentional horror. That's the first thing. The second thing is that unfortunately for Palestinians, um, this has happened before. Not exactly this and not exactly in this way, but we [00:25:00] had a period in Israeli history, uh, where over about three years, beginning in the September of 2000, 140 suicide bombings blew up in our cities.
And they blew up on, on buses carrying school children. And they blew up in, in, in restaurants, and they, they blew up in, in one, one, one of them blew up in a, a non alcoholic nightclub. That's a nightclub for teenagers. They had to seek out that nightclub to choose to blow up there, killing 24 kids in one explosion.
A hundred and forty of these over three years. That wasn't After 20 years of Benjamin Netanyahu, maybe, you know, Benjamin Netanyahu stalling the peace process or under a government with, you know, the far right Itamar Bengvir's far right Otzma Yudit party, or when settlers had grown to, I don't know what the numbers are, everybody has different lines, so the numbers are different, but let's say 400 or 500, 000.[00:26:00]
That was in 2000. When peace was allegedly imminent, when there were no Israeli soldiers in any Palestinian city because they'd just been pulled out in the previous three years, there was a brand new Palestinian authority, there were negotiations for shared sovereignty on the Temple Mount between the new Palestinian state and the Jewish state.
over in Camp David. Everybody was told, we were told by Israeli officials and Palestinian officials who interviewed in the Israeli press, that peace was really close, was almost imminent. You know, there was, I remember going into the army, um, as an 18 year old in November of 1999, and having that thought, uh, that, what am I doing this for?
There's going to be peace. I'm not going to have anything to do. I'm not going to have any of the glory of previous generations, which is, of course, a stupid thought. But 18 year olds are, of course, you know, stupid. And then Those 140 bombings begin. And to this day, Israelis don't know why. There are scholars who understand the internal Palestinian ideologies and processes that launched them, but ordinary [00:27:00] Israelis have no idea why.
And so to the Israelis October 7 made perfect sense, because the same thing happened during peace, and on the verge of peace. And when the Palestinian college education rate was at the highest in the Arab world, and the economy was soaring. And also it happened now, in this government that Palestinians hate, and that the liberal West hates.
The actual terrorizing of Israelis, it happens in all situations. It's as likely to happen against a peace process as against a war. And so Hamas isn't responding to a failed peace or to occupation or to, you know, Israeli crimes. Hamas sustains that security regime around the Gaza Strip, that blockade, or that siege.
You want to give, call Israel names? You want to call it apartheid? You want to talk about an inhumane siege? It's now becoming popular to use the word genocide because apparently it no longer [00:28:00] means anything specific. Fine. Go for it. Enjoy it. Call Israel whatever name you want. As long as Hamas is guaranteed to massacre civilians whether we go one way or go the other way.
Nothing you say matters. It won't work. We're always going to hear Hamas louder than you. I want to talk about the, the shift in mindset in Israel. And for the past three decades, there's been a kind of a slow dying process of peace talks with the Palestinian Authority, in some respects culminating with the period you just described that was followed by the suicide bombing campaign, the second Intifada.
But there were even sort of shoots of peace processing, if you will, in later years that never really went anywhere. And, and while so, so while a lot of it has been set aside for the past decade or so, many Israelis, at least on the left and the center left, have been, have been clinging onto it as, as if it would one day, you know, kinda wake up from its coma, it would, it would come back to life.
[00:29:00] Has the October massacre changed that sentiment? In other words, is the, would you say most Israelis to include the Israeli left have disabused themselves of the idea that there could be some kind of two-state solution anytime soon. That's interesting. It's a very interesting question. I think everyone's view is very, very mixed and very confused.
There are a great many Israelis that when you, when you frame the question the right way, In an ideal situation, is separation between the two peoples into two different polities, so they don't have to constantly look at each other and talk to each other, and have that friction that is inevitable with each other a good thing?
Most Israelis will say yes, and in the West Bank, it's, you know, in the better periods, most Palestinians will say yes. Let's call that the two state solution. It's not, it's not the peace they say, you know, the word peace that you hear in Washington, but it is a kind of coexistence that maybe someday can mean something more akin to peace.
There is support for that. [00:30:00] Then you say to Israelis, will it ever actually be safe to do that? And they say no, in huge majorities. And so I think what, I think that the view in Israel, uh, among the Israeli people and the Israeli people is diverse with many voices and there are many views. But if I have to try and find a single thread that unites the majority, then I think that thread is we cannot see a path toward a safe separation.
If there were such a path, There'd be a conflict within us. There would be this debate. But as long as there isn't such a path, how do you start the debate? The Israeli political left was decimated in the second intifada that I just talked about back in 2000. It hasn't won an election since. And it hasn't won an election since because it can't explain what happened.
And it can't explain why the Palestinian political world's response to the peace process was that kind of mass murder. And so it can't tell [00:31:00] Israelis, look, here's a better strategy, a better policy. The Israeli political right, by the way, tried a different path, which was the unilateral withdrawals of Ariel Sharon, and Ehud Olmert, who really almost ran on a unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank.
He called it the convergence plan. Um, and he talked about it already leading up to For our listeners, this is what we For our listeners, just, this is what we talked about with, uh, with Jonathan Schanzer and with Elliot Abrams, the, the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005. That is to say, leaving the Gaza Strip, not in the context of a bilateral deal with the Palestinian leadership, but just Israel just pulling out and saying, we're out.
This is yours. You're in charge, we leave you tremendous resources here, the homes of the Israelis that lived here, the greenhouses, the, you know, whatever else we're taking, we're forcing the Israelis out, and you have this strip on the Mediterranean now, it is yours to develop, it is for the Arab world that wants to invest enormous resources in developing it, It is yours.
So [00:32:00] that, that is, Aviv, what you're referring to when it was like the rights version of giving the Palestinians what could have been a state. Right. And I don't say it to give Israel credit. I really don't care if Israel has credit or doesn't have credit. Um, I just say it because it raises a diagnostic question and it's a question that Israelis are asking.
If the bilateral peace that Bill Clinton championed and led between Arafat and Rabin and then Barak collapsed in rivers of blood, it didn't just fail. And then the unilateral withdrawal, which is the right wing idea, and had the same end result, was supposed to have the same end result, and that the right had expanded it to the West Bank under Olmert, who won the 2006 election, talking about the convergence plan from the West Bank, and something similar to what happened in Gaza.
And that ends in the Second Lebanon War, which is a war with both Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon that saw tens of thousands of rockets falling on Israeli cities, hundreds of thousands of Israeli civilians fleeing their [00:33:00] homes. In other words, the two places from which Israel had withdrawn. Lebanon in 2000, South Lebanon in 2000, and then Gaza in 2005, Israelis suddenly found we're now filled with The vacuum hadn't been filled by Jeffersonian Democrats, so to speak.
It's filled by Hamas. It's filled by Hezbollah How can we then pull out of the West Bank? Israelis asked. The West Bank is 16 times the size of Gaza. The West Bank is the highlands that overlook all of our cities. The West Bank, you can, with a weapon you can put, carry on your shoulder, like an 81 millimeter mortar, you can shut down almost every Israeli city.
Major Israeli city, including our international airport, from the West Bank. You don't even need to carry it on a vehicle. It's so much more dangerous. And the western, the western edge of the West Bank It's nine miles. It's a, uh, healthy person's jog. So, the West Bank is a place from which, if I withdraw, and what happens to the West Bank is what happened to Gaza with Hamas takeover, or South Lebanon when I left, which is [00:34:00] Hezbollah's takeover, and they shoot those rockets and shut down my country, I have to retake it.
In other words, either a pullout from the West Bank is either safe, or it's impossible. From that experience, beginning in September of 2000 and leading to the summer of 2006, and the collapse of the Oslo idea, the bilateral idea, and the Sharon withdrawal from Gaza unilateral idea, all the left's ideas We're tried.
That's the Israeli experience. Again, I'm not giving you the objective, absolute, comprehensive historical truth. I don't know the objective, absolute, comprehensive historical truth, but I can tell you something more important than that, which is what Israelis, the vast majority of the Israeli mainstream, probably 80 percent of Israeli Jews, certainly, believe happened to them.
They think they tried all of these things. They think all of these things end in rivers of blood. How does Netanyahu come to power in 2009? He isn't running as a hardline right wing government, which I think is how the New York Times described him. when that government was sworn in. I apologize to the New York Times, it might have been a different newspaper, but I remember that [00:35:00] headline distinctly.
Hardline right wing government takes power in Israel, in 2009. Um, what he actually ran on was a campaign that he called Responsibility. And to paraphrase it, 14 years later, he essentially said to Israelis, as his campaign message, I'm going to do absolutely nothing at all. That's my promise to you. I'm not going to invade anything.
I'm not going to withdraw from anything. I'm not going to make peace. I'm not going to make war. I'm going to do nothing at all. From when he came to power in 2009 until about 2020, that decade was the quietest decade in the history of Israel. And so the stagnation of the peace process that outsiders see, Israelis experienced as, as, as, as oxygen, as, as, as a time to breathe, as an end to all the great experiments that all end in rivers of blood.
This attack on October 7 taught Israelis that even that period was [00:36:00] purchased on credit. Even that quiet had to be paid for afterwards with the blood of children. And so the Israeli public now, and this is, I'm not saying this to defend Israel, mainly because I'm actually Israeli and I actually don't care what the world thinks.
Truly. Here I am speaking to you in English and I've been on MSNBC and, but, but, I feel it is important for Palestinians to understand because this is their single greatest challenge, strategic problem. Israelis believe they have no out. They might be wrong, explain that to them, but they believe truly and deeply that there is no options.
There's no path they can take that doesn't end in Hamas murdering their children, except at this point, the decimation of Hamas. And so what's happening in Gaza isn't an Israel that just thinks, Hey, this is our best option. This is what we're going to do. This is going to be a huge price to pay for Israel.
[00:37:00] I have blood on the line. My family is going to war. My family is physically going to war. And everybody's family is physically going to war. 350, 000 men were called up. This is an Israel that doesn't know any other way. And nobody out there can, can give us another way. Pull out of the West Bank? When I, when I saw what Hamas did in Oslo and ending the Oslo process, when I saw what Hamas did now, you want to tell me this was about being in the West Bank?
Hamas openly, Mahmoud Azhar just now gave an interview and Mahmoud Azhar is one of the co founders of Hamas. In which he says, our vision doesn't end in Palestine, our vision is that all the world will be Muslim, and he has a wonderful little line, and there will be no more Jewish and Christian traitors.
This is in keeping with that Muslim renewal theology. This is the ISIS vision, Al Qaeda vision, Iranian regime [00:38:00] vision. It is a messianic vision. These are all very different parts of Islam and kinds of Islam and versions of this vision, but the basic messianic impulse is the same. And they will not stop.
Israel can't give them anything. To get them to stop, except dying, and we're not willing to die. And the problem here is not the pain that Israelis are suffering. That's my problem, and I'm going to take care of it. I have an army going into Gaza. I'm going to solve my problem. But if you care about Palestinians, Israelis have to have another option.
And if you want to give Israelis another option, Hamas has to go. Because Hamas will make sure that Israelis never have another option. What about Palestinian Israelis? For our audience to understand this, there's a, there's a population, a minority population of Arab citizens of Israel that make up about 20 percent of Israel's population.
And they mostly, they enjoy a Western lifestyle in a democratic country. They are represented in the Knesset by Arab [00:39:00] parties. They've had members of their community on Israel's courts, on the Supreme Court. They populate some of the most elite universities in Israel. They have influential roles in journalism and popular culture.
And yet many of them have often sympathized with, if not Actually sided with the Palestinian cause. And I've seen, I mean, I saw some of this with the, one of the leaders of, of one of their parties, uh, Mansour bas in in last couple of elections say things I never thought an Arab, uh, leader in Israel would say in terms of making peace, if you will, with with the Jewish state and the Jewish statehood of Jewish state of, of the Jewish state of Israel.
Uh, and then I've also seen some of them. Since October 7th, speaking out in ways I've never seen before, uh, and is, you know, an Israeli Arab anchor, uh, on, um, one of the Israeli television stations, speaking out, telling Hamas, we are not with [00:40:00] you. We do not stand with you. We are, you know, not just siding with Israel, but almost identifying with Israel.
And I've just seen this, I've been in touch with friends who are Arabs in Israel who've never talked this way. What's going on? Is the kind of earth shifting beneath our feet as it relates to Israel's relations with Arab citizens of Israel? It's been a ray of light in all the darkness. Hamas declared Friday, last Friday, a day of rage.
And, uh, there were pretty horrific, uh, marches in Sydney, Australia, and in London, people shouted, gas the Jews, because of course they're not anti Semitic, they just care about Palestinians. Among Israeli Arabs, among Palestinian citizens of Israel, the opposite happened. Not only was there almost no, um, expressions of the day of rage, massive numbers, thousands, volunteered to help the families of the victims of the Hamas attack.
People spoke out [00:41:00] against it. Um, and so much so that there were, you know, some of the radical or very conservative elements of the community, um, had to fight back. There was one, um, Arab, uh, man who owned a bicycle shop and he donated 40 bicycles to the children who had survived the massacre. And then the next day, his shop was burned down.
Apparently, not just by extremists, but also by an Arab crime organization that has been terrorizing the Arab community itself, but also was connected to some of these extremist Islamist parts of the community. And there's been this huge, um, fundraise for, you know, among all Jewish, among all Israelis for, for this man.
Um, Lucia Harish, you mentioned, uh, gave that speech that went viral among Israelis. Druze citizen. So Lucy, Lucy is an Israeli Arab news anchor. She's a very prominent news anchor, but she's very proudly Arab. She's very Very proudly Arab. Unapologetically so. And she [00:42:00] Very progressive. Very left wing. Very critical of this government.
Extremely critical of this government. And Hamas committed a crime against humanity. And she is horrified at the prospect that anyone would imagine anywhere on Earth that that in any way represents her. And, and it made her feel Israeli. I'm sorry that I'm using my microphone to send a message to the world.
As a journalist, this is my only weapon. Since Saturday morning, the state of Israel is under attack. Our beloved country is under attack. And we, the citizens of the state of Israel, all of us, left and right, secular and religious, Jews, Christians, Druze, Muslims,
We're fighting for our lives, for our future, and mostly for the future of our Children [00:43:00] and for everyone out there who's not condemning this inhumane massacre. Try to imagine for a second that you're waking up on Saturday morning with your Children sleeping next to you, and then in a split of a second, a terrorist attacks A terrorist comes into your home, your safe shelter, and starts murdering your family in front of your eyes.
Can you imagine that? Look into our eyes, in the eyes of all the citizens of this land, and stand with us on the right side of history. It's a remarkable message. Um, it's a message that Lucy Harish herself could have given beforehand. She feels profoundly Israeli, and also Arab. And she also feels that part of her job is to challenge the Israeli Jewish majority to make sure that it [00:44:00] is inclusive and can include Arabs in all walks of life, the media, etc.,
and also in the consciousness of the country. You had the probably, I think, the most well known influencer in the Israeli Arab community. He goes by the codename Nass. He comes from a town in the north. And, uh, he put out a statement, he, he's never political, he deals with tech, he deals with communities around the world, he travels the world and puts together fascinating videos of, of parts of the world you've never seen.
He's a wonderful, fun, interesting, you know, online content maker. Um, and he went political, uh, after the Hamas attack, and he wrote, um, I've always been both Palestinian and Israeli, those were two halves, and I was Palestinian first. I was Palestinian Israeli, and today I'm Israeli Palestinian. I don't want to live in a state of Palestine.
Mansour Abbas, who you mentioned, the Arab Israeli politician who really has led this, we have to get more [00:45:00] integrated into Israeli society, get into politics, demand our seat at the table, demand our share as citizens, be part of this democracy because it will take us far. That he has put out statements that said don't go to violence.
Violence won't help. Hamas committed an atrocity. He says it outright. It's a powerful thing because he comes from a very deeply conservative Muslim party and he says it from that Muslim place. And so we saw all of these phenomenon. Almost no, um, online you had obviously always you had people supporting, you know, writing things in support of the Hamas massacre, but On the ground, in the communities, you had exactly the opposite, at a level we had never, we never imagined would have happened.
Haviv, uh, last question for you before we let you go. You wrote that Hamas does not yet seem to realize how deep the Israeli public determination goes. And I guess my question is, what makes you so sure? I mean, Hamas seems to have [00:46:00] had pretty good intelligence to have carried out the October 7th massacre and they are probably prepared for an Israeli invasion, if not hoping for it.
What makes you so sure they're so, they're not dialed in to Israeli determination? They say so. They, um, have a long standing argument, very public, very open, delivered in huge amounts of bombast, uh, that the Israelis are weak, they're fragile. This comes from a few things, one, anti colonial theory, uh, they look strong, they look strong, they look strong, and then suddenly they collapse, like the French in Algeria, um, who won every single battle against the FLN for eight long years and then left.
So there's a deep, there's an internal sort of weakness to the Israelis because of that, because they're not authentic and real and rooted and belong here. Uh, but also the Israelis gave 1, 100 security prisoners, including mass murderers, sitting in prison for, you know, for murders, [00:47:00] uh, for one soldier. That, that's, that's a weakness.
Salah Haruri, one of Hamas's leaders, uh, interviewed Nel Jazeera and said, uh, they love life and we, love death. Why do we? Now, to the West, that sounds horrifying, but what he meant was, we believe. We're true believers. We know that after death you go into the bosom of a good God who appreciates your sacrifice.
And so death doesn't scare us. And these Jews, they don't have that. They don't have that faith. They don't have that belief. And so death terrifies them. And so they don't love life so much as they cling to it desperately. And which side is going to win? The one that can face death with courage or the one that can't?
That's a rule restatement on Al Jazeera, I think, three or four days ago. And, um, and that's how they think about all of this. They're wrong. And they're going to discover that they're wrong. And the tragedy here, after the atrocity committed against us, the next tragedy is that they're going to make us prove it [00:48:00] to them on the Gazan civilian population's back.
They are hiding behind them. They have set up literal checkpoints preventing them from leaving. Israel besieged Gaza entirely because every single aid corridor and aid convoy and aid of any kind will be taken by Hamas and not given to the civilians. And UNRWA posted this morning a tweet, an angry tweet, saying Hamas has just stolen aid, fuel, and supplies.
UNRRA is the UN relief. Right, that's the UN agency that helps Palestinian refugees. And then the tweet was suddenly deleted. I suspect that UNRRA staffers in Gaza told UNRRA offices outside of Gaza, what the hell are you doing, you're going to get us killed, and so the tweet was deleted. Um, and Hamas is, uh, bleeding it dry, uh, to divert all of the supplies it has for Palestinian civilians to the war effort.
Gaza's civilian population is going to suffer, and Hamas is going to make sure of it. Hamas also doesn't understand the [00:49:00] scale of the lesson Israel learned. Israel didn't just learn the lesson that it can't tolerate Hamas, or Hamas's strategy or vision on its border anymore. Israel just learned the lesson that quiet isn't quiet.
Quiet is just a massacre to come. And so Hezbollah now looks different to the Israelis, and it gets even larger than that. Hamas would be much less effective, have much less firepower, much less money. The regime would be much less stable without massive Iranian support. Hezbollah would barely exist without massive Iranian support.
Iran is everywhere. It's surrounding Israel, it's surrounding many countries, but it's surrounding Israel with these various proxy terror organizations. And it's engaging in a strategy of trying to bleed us to death with, you know, the Chinese phrase, the death of a thousand cuts. That is now very clear.
And so, if a thousand three hundred Jews are not, are [00:50:00] murdered in cold blood, And the Jewish state doesn't have the capacity and doesn't have the will to stand up and then exact a strategic cost from Hezbollah, from Iran, and obviously from Hamas. Then the Jewish state is not the protector of Jews that it claims to be, that is its DNA.
And so Israel is now Preparing strategic surprises that throw the enemy on the defensive. Iran is no longer tolerable, Hezbollah is no longer deterrable, everything is changing. And I think that those strategic plans that Israel once had, of how to go into Gaza, what to do in Gaza, how to deal with Hezbollah, everything has been thrown out the window and is being rebuilt from the bottom up.
All right. Thank you, Aviv. We will leave it there. Grateful for your time as, as always, but especially now. I know you're, you're juggling a lot between work and work from home and kids at home and family deployed. It's just, uh, I can't even imagine. So, [00:51:00] um, we will, we will check in with you again, uh, next week until then.
Stay safe. Dan, thank you very much. Thanks for having me. We are, uh, we're gonna get through this if, if only because we, uh, we have no other choice.
That's our show for today. To keep up with Haviv Retikgur, you can follow him on X. That's at Haviv Retikgur. You can also follow him at the Times of Israel, timesofisrael. com. Call me back. It's produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.