A post-October 7th security doctrine for Israel - with Haviv Rettig Gur
Haviv Rettig Gur returns for our weekly conversation from Israel to provide real-time reporting and analysis on the war, and invaluable historical context. We wanted to check in with Haviv, who is the political analyst at The Times of Israel, where was also a long time reporter. He’s also working on a book. Haviv was also a combat medic in the IDF where he served in the reserves.
Transcript
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[00:00:00] Love of Zion didn't drive any single government in this region to make any kind of treaty or agreement with Israel. It was about strategy. It was about israeli power. It was about israeli stability. That has to be restored. That has to be seen to be restored and that's not something we can achieve in Gaza.
Gaza is a very high cost and low reward In other words, the cost to civilians, the cost to Israel's image, the cost, you know, in many, many ways, potentially to Israeli soldiers lives, will be high. We have to go after Hamas, and so we will. But that'll be high, and the reward in terms of our deterrence is not that much, even if we succeed spectacularly.
And so, no, this is, this is a larger, longer kind of war that Israel has now decided to join in a whole different way. We're not where we were two weeks ago.[00:01:00]
It's Sunday, October 29th at 10pm here in New York City. It's 4am on Monday, October 30th in Israel. From Cornell University, here in New York, to Russia, there are anti Semitic mobs raging, with images that are an echo of Kristallnacht. This week will be 85 years since Kristallnacht, the Night of Crystal or Broken Glass, which was the night One week in November, it was actually November 9th to 10th, 1938, when members of the Nazi party and other collaborators led a destructive campaign of violence against Jewish people.
You can look up more on what happened in Kristallnacht. Many Jews were killed. Tens of thousands were taken away to concentration camps and tortured. There's a lot of history to read about Kristallnacht, and it is a topic we'll be returning to tomorrow with Yossi Klein Halevi [00:02:00] and the comparisons to events we are seeing all over the West these days, from college campuses to major cities.
I also want to spend a moment talking about a different subject, which is International aid to Gaza. This has been in the news quite a bit in recent days. And I was reading this one article from the Associated Press, which I want to quote from here. This is the AP, Mainstream News Organization. The international community has spent billions of dollars in aid to the Gaza Strip in recent years to provide relief to the more than 2 million Palestinians living in the isolated Hamas ruled territory.
The aid is intended to ease the burden on civilians of an Israeli Egyptian blockade imposed on Gaza when the Islamic militant group seized power from rival Palestinian forces in 2007. [00:03:00] Israel closely supervises aid to try to ensure it bypasses Hamas. But the Hamas run government benefits from foreign countries footing the bill for schools, hospitals, and infrastructure, allowing it to conserve its own resources, including the taxes and customs it collects.
There are a few points that are notable here. One, as the AP reminds, it is an Israeli Egyptian blockade. Egypt is on the other side. of the border of Gaza. Egypt chooses and has chosen for a number of years to blockade Gaza. Egypt has chosen today and for years to not let any Gazan Palestinian refugees Just a reminder that Israel's not the only party here that has had to deal with Gaza.
Somehow they're the only ones, leading up to October 7th, that are in the news. But more importantly, over the weekend there was a New York Times article, yes, I'm quoting from the New York Times, titled, [00:04:00] As Gazans scrounge for food and water, Hamas sits on a rich trove of supplies. The article goes on to say, and I quote, Hamas has spent years stockpiling desperately needed fuel, food, and medicine, as well as ammo and weapons in the miles of tunnels it has carved out under Gaza.
This is a point that comes up in my conversation today about how Hamas and the leadership Political military leadership of Hamas is fully well supplied and resourced for the months ahead, while average Gazan Palestinians, civilians, are not. This has been one of the challenges that Israel and Egypt have had in dealing with Gaza and getting the relevant aid to the Gazan people, while it is ruled by Hamas, which staged a coup in 2007 and drove out the Palestinian authority and has since been in charge.
Finally, before we turn to today's conversation, where I do my weekly check in with Haviv Retikgur from the Times of Israel, I [00:05:00] just wanted to share my own thoughts, now that the ground incursion in Gaza has begun. And while the war in Gaza will be long, it is important for Jerusalem and Washington Not to take their eyes off Iran.
It should be obvious to everyone now, but I'm afraid it's not, that Iran is committed to destroying Israel as part of its war against the West. Iran now has an opportunity. to finish Israel off. Not in the sense of making Israel disappear, but by dealing such a blow that Israel could never fully recover its sense of confidence, its march toward greater strength and permanence, and its belief in its own future.
That is why October 7th could turn out to be a major setback. Now, you may ask, as others have asked me when I've tried to make this point, why wouldn't Israel simply recover from this war like it did in previous wars? Like in 1973 after the Yom Kippur War, [00:06:00] Israel bounced back. Or 1982, the First Lebanon War.
Or 2006, the Second Lebanon War. The difference is that these wars were fought Outside Israel and did not really involve civilian casualties, let alone a massive pogrom, and the destruction of multiple kibbutz towns and communities, massive internal displacement. None of these wars were as humiliating.
None of them gave Israelis such an utter sense of powerlessness. If Israel does defeat Hamas and even at some point defeats Hezbollah at tremendous cost, it still hasn't won because Iran, the real aggressor. Will have remained untouched. Iran will have dealt a debilitating blow to Israeli civilians.
Again, that is the big difference from previous wars. It will have dealt a debilitating blow to Israeli civilians. Demonstrating the IDF's inability to protect civilians. And it [00:07:00] will have done so for free, with no serious damage to itself. That will mean Iran won. And it will mean that Iran is the new dominant power in the region, likely backed by China and Russia.
At a terrible price, Israel has learned that it must defeat Hamas, and that containment was a catastrophic error. Yet containment is exactly the current policy toward Iran. Both the policy out of Jerusalem, And Washington, D. C. Yediot Aharonot is one of Israel's Hebrew language newspapers. And the cover of Yediot's weekend magazine, right after the October 7th attack, was black.
With an eerie blackened silhouette of a bulldozer, crashing through a large gap. in Israel's security fence. And the headline read, the 7th of October, in large letters, and then underneath, and I quote, the day when the state of Israel changed forever. [00:08:00] Now, that headline will be true even if Iran is soundly defeated or set back at some point, because the steady march of progress for Israel has been broken.
It may be temporary, but it has been broken. But if Iran is not defeated, if Iran is essentially unscathed, then Israel's march upward will not just have been paused, or temporarily broken, but stopped. This is one of the few times in living memory where the folly of containment has been demonstrated so dramatically.
There seems to be a consensus on this point in Israel, that containment is unacceptable. Because an Israel that is a shell of its former self means that the country is there, but the Israel we knew, and the Israel that would be, No longer exists. An Israel that goes back to being seen in its own eyes and in the eyes of others as weak, demoralized, and a global [00:09:00] pariah is not the same Israel.
Americans and Israelis need to do whatever we can to prevent that future. This means Israel must win in Gaza. It must destroy Hamas. And at some point, it will also have to deal with Hezbollah. And in some way, it will also have to deal with Iran as well. If it does not, Israel's friends and allies, its new friends, like the Bahrainis and the Emiratis, its future friends, like potentially the Saudis, and others, will not be drawn to deepening ties with Israel.
Remember, what happened long before October 7th is that many countries in the region were looking at Israel as a military, economic, and technology juggernaut. They wanted to be a part of it. And if Israel looks weak and a shell of [00:10:00] itself, they will not want to be part of it. Now on to my conversation with Haviv Retikur.
and a post October 7th security doctrine for Israel. This is Call Me Back.
I'm pleased to welcome back to this podcast, our regular check in with my friend, Haviv Retikor, who joins us from Jerusalem. Hi, Haviv. Hi Dan, good to be here. Always good to be with you and to see you. I guess let's start with you giving us a snapshot of where you think things are right now in this war before we get into the broader topic.
Sure. Well, there are, uh, ground forces, significant numbers of ground forces inside Gaza. Uh, there have already been, uh, attempts by Hamas forces to outflank them, surprise them, come out of various tunnels. Um, we have two Israeli [00:11:00] wounded, but we have many, uh, we don't quite know the numbers. Uh, Hamas never released their numbers, but also the Israelis.
just aren't bothering with it. There is a campaign on, nobody's, you know, too concerned with the specific details of reporting to the media, but there are at least a dozen Hamas fighters dead. We've seen, uh, footage of, uh, various Hamas positions being taken out. Um, and those, uh, fighters who attempted to, uh, pop up out of a tunnel behind the forces were killed very quickly.
So it looks like it's an operation that, uh, is going very well, very thoughtfully. The army used this time to prepare very well. Uh, public support is very, very strong. We have polling that shows when asked, uh, do you believe that the IDF can. Protect the country as the war begins. This is a poll from yesterday.
I believe 72 percent said very much and 21 percent said somewhat. So 93 [00:12:00] percent are confident to some degree of which the vast majority are very confident. Uh, that is all Israelis. So that includes Israeli Arabs and it's left and right and everybody. Um, so the war is progressing. The army has already said, the prime minister has already said that, um, it's going to go for a long time.
And that's something that Gazans understand, Hamas understands, and, uh, it's hopefully gonna succeed. That's interesting that, that polling, because you'd think in light of, one would think in light of October 7th and the, and the gaps that were exposed both in intelligence and in intelligence leading up to October 7th and in the operational, seeming operational lapses the morning for hours of October 7th, confidence in the Israeli.
Military and security capabilities would have plummeted as near as I can tell they're The public is distinguishing between intelligence and and the sort of fighting forces [00:13:00] and so for example the Shabak the Domestic security service that is essentially the central body that is meant to warn of Hamas activities, has a much lower, um, confidence level, uh, something like 53 percent in that particular poll.
Uh, the police are slightly under 50%. Um, and so it, the army is absolutely, you know, way above all those places. I suspect that if you had asked in the poll just about army intelligence, which failed right alongside the Shabbat. You would have gotten a much lower number, but the Israelis are extremely confident in the fighting forces going into Gaza.
So the, so the response time on October 7th, it sounds to me as implicitly being blamed on the lack of information our Israeli forces had. to inform their response. It wasn't their capability. This has been very, you know, richly and [00:14:00] constantly discussed, um, for the last 22 days. Um, and we have a pretty good picture, and I think most Israelis have the same picture of what basically happened.
It wasn't that, you know, 10, 000 fighting men on the border all ran away. It was that they weren't there. There were a few hundred, and they were scattered across a pretty lengthy border, uh, because the planners and the intelligence people, um, had come to the absolute conviction that Hamas couldn't possibly launch an attack.
And so there just weren't the, you know, once Hamas surprised everybody Attacked all the various technological installations on the border, all the different sensors, and then crossed the border with 1, 500 men and possibly many more, uh, you know, we know many more taggers on sort of civilians. There simply wasn't an infantry force that could meet them, right?
And so the planners, the intelligence, they have taken the blame in the public discourse. I think, by the way, correctly. I mean, I think that's what happened. [00:15:00] When you saw battles, when you saw my brother in law, for example, was among one of the first organized reserve battalions to actually arrive on the scene when there were still Hamas gunmen the next day in some of these villages, and they engaged them and wiped them out, the Hamas gunmen.
So I really think it is limited to the intelligence people. In terms of the operation now and the implications for the hostages, I guess two questions. A, what are the implications for the hostages of this incursion? And B, what is the mood among the community of families of hostages? That's a very good question.
Um, the defense minister has begun and, um, Minister Benny Gantz have, who is also himself a former chief of staff of the army, have made an argument over the last 24 hours as the ground operation begins to scale up. And what they've said was, Um, you know, [00:16:00] we're 22 days in. Hamas is trying to trickle them out to delay a ground invasion.
We've had these talks with Qatar, and one army official today said explicitly they weren't going anywhere. Hamas was playing a game. And when we concluded Hamas was playing a game, we decided that we're gonna, we're gonna change the rules of the game. I don't know if, by the way, that's the reason of the 22 day delay.
Other officials have told us it's to train, to prepare, to rebuild intelligence and all of that. But, now the argument is being made by Benny Gantz, by your Afghan anti defense minister, um, that this kind of pressure, is the best route to get hostages released. In other words, now if Hamas thinks that it can buy some momentary pause in the fighting when it desperately needs it by handing over ten people or just the literally, just the babies, that's the best way to get them.
You're not going to get them by playing Hamas game. And they made that argument on television. Um, and so, um, I think that [00:17:00] that's, you know, I don't know if they've given up on the hostages. Look, Hamas took too many. And it took them in too horrific a way. And for 22 days, we haven't had a sign of life of the children.
And so I think the Israeli desire among Israeli officials is to exact a cost so high that it doesn't try it again, rather than to pay for hostages. In other words, it's almost a giving up on these hostages. That's not something any Israeli official can say openly. Uh, but, but the cost that Hamas has to pay has to be clear to Hamas or hostages remain valuable and something to take and also something to keep.
So they're trying to change the rules of the game. I think the hostages are in terrible danger. I don't, I don't know a way around that. In terms of the Palestinians, the big debate over here in the West is, you know, It's understandable that Israel has to deal with the, [00:18:00] has to deal with Hamas and they have to take out the military commanders of Hamas and the political leadership of Hamas and, and, of course, Israel has to, to deal with the rot of that evil terrorist organization.
But, Israel Be very sensitive to the Palestinian civilian population, which, obviously, the last thing Israelis want to do, the IDF wants to do, is attacks against the civilian population. Ironically, the IDF wants to defend against attacks against the Israeli civilian population. population and minimize any kind of collateral damage against the Palestinian civilian population.
And Hamas has the exact opposite strategy. They want to maximize attacks against the Israeli civilian population and use the Palestinian civilian population for its own warfare. So they're for maximal civilian deaths. But I've been hearing more and more, as more and more information comes out about October 7th, that the scope of the community [00:19:00] The Hamas community slash Palestinian community that was involved with this is, we're going to learn is larger than we realized.
That there was, there was a lot of people involved, not only the couple thousand who penetrated the border, but All the support and logistics and fundraising and training, when you start adding all that in, and their families, it's, again, not that there should be any kind of collective punishment, that should not be the goal, but this idea that, oh, we're just dealing with a narrow fringe strand is also delusional.
Yeah, look, Hamas at this moment is the most popular political faction in the Palestinian polity. By the way, also in the West Bank. It would win an election in the West Bank if there were one, and that's why, of course, there hasn't been one for 17 years or so. Hamas is hated by Gazans. In much the same way that most dictators eventually come to be hated by the [00:20:00] people they rule over.
But that doesn't translate into hatred of what they did on October 7th. The attack on the Jews is the single most popular thing Hamas has done in 17 years of ruling Gaza. And so, um, it isn't true that Palestinians in Gaza, in the sense of this particular, you know, when it comes to October 7th, don't support Hamas.
They hate Hamas. They would like Hamas to disappear. They would like a proper government that actually runs the place. One of the best examples we have is a deep dive that our newspaper did. My colleague Jeremy Sharon and some others at the paper looked into the water supply. And it turns out that, uh, you know, Israel cut off water supply, but Israel only ever supplied 9 percent of Gaza's water.
Gaza has water. And, and the problem with the water supply, essentially, is that Gaza also has an underground aquifer that Hamas simply hasn't invested in tapping. And so, Gaza should have more water, and if it had a proper government that cared [00:21:00] about its people, it would have plentiful drinking water. Uh, and plentiful tap water, but, of course, Hamas has directed every piece of, you know, uh, hardware, every single, um, you know, kilogram of, of cement that it could muster to its tunnels.
It has hundreds of kilometers of tunnels. Um, Yigit Sinwar, the head of Hamas in Gaza. Has given speeches about those hundreds of kilometers of tallis. He's very proud of it. And there aren't pipes for water and there aren't, you know, there isn't enough, there aren't generators for hospitals and all of that.
So Gazans hate Hamas. Gazans support what Hamas did on October 7th. And the circle of actual involvement is at the very least tens of thousands. Hamas itself has about 40, 000 fighters. The most elite group of fighters, roughly 1, 500, maybe 2, 000 actually took part in the operation. You're exactly right.
The logistical in any given military force, even a guerrilla force or a standing army, you'll have, you know, for every two fighters, you'll have five support logistical people. [00:22:00] That circle is large. You want to say it's 200, 000, 300, 000 people. It's somewhere in that, in that, in that area. Um, that's still completely distinct from 2 million civilians.
Who, again, don't like Hamas, even if their hatred of Israel, their experience of Israel makes them celebrate the massacre of Israelis. I think that there are two points here to be made real quick. First of all, um, The Israelis are going to get Hamas, and Hamas, it's main strategy for survival at this moment.
It's desperately calling on Hezbollah to join in the war, it's desperately begging Iran, or, you know, there's a Hamas leader in, um, Iraq who met with some of the Shia militias in Iraq to try and get them to start launching rockets. It's desperate for other factions, other terror groups to open other fronts.
But It's main strategy for survival right now is to hide beneath and behind those civilians. And so Israel has to go through the civilians, there's, there's no choice, international law is [00:23:00] with Israel, Hamas is killing those civilians, not Israel, because Hamas is hiding under them as a fundamental strategy of its, its operational concept.
And every time those civilians die, every image that comes out of Gaza of a dead child. Hurts Israel. So you don't even have to believe the Israelis are good people to understand that it's a bad idea for the Israelis to kill civilians. But we have to get Hamas, and we're going to. The, over the last number of years, really since 2005, when Israel withdrew from Gaza, the Sunni Gulf, much of the Arab world, much of the European Union, has been funding billions and billions and billions of dollars.
It's sending billions and billions and billions of dollars into Gaza and I, I, I. Read the numbers off in the introduction. I'll, I'll, I can post a link to them in the show notes. They're staggering. What did the international community think that money was? I mean, we now know what it was [00:24:00] going to, which is what you're describing, which is it was building this whole infrastructure for a terrorist organization.
What, what did the international community think that money was going to? And what did, what did average Gazans think the money was going to? Like, they're hearing about all this money that's coming in and yet it's not showing up. I was just reading, by the way, that there's the, the underground mall, subway system, tunnel system, whatever you want to call it, where Hamas is, is hunkered down, has something like three, four, five months of fuel and water, and it has all the supplies it needs and food.
So all this talk that these, these resources are being denied to Gazans, they're not being denied to Gazans, it's just that Hamas is hoarding them underground to, to prepare for the long fight. What, what do people think all this money is going to? It's worse than that. All of that international aid funded, literally and directly, as directly as you could imagine.
I mean, not actually handing the [00:25:00] money to the builders of those tunnels, but, but, but one degree removed and everybody knew it. Funded the trap. In which Gazan civilians now find themselves because the entire purpose of that underground complex, of those tunnels and bunkers, is to hide under the civilians, is to allow Hamas's 40, 000 man army to hide under the civilians and the international community and all of its goodwill and all of its money and those taxpayer, you know, dollars and euros from Germany and America and everywhere else.
Funded the trap for Gaza civilians. And the civilians, it has to be said they are going hungry right now. They are suffering right now. They do lack electricity. There are in the hospitals, blackouts, but not because of Israel. Because there's months worth of generators and fuel underground, and there's months worth of food, and there's months worth of everything.
So they are being denied those things, but they're being denied those things by Hamas, and that is [00:26:00] an atrocity. That is a crime against humanity. It is a crime against humanity being committed against Gazans by Hamas. There is no other way to look at it. There's no other way in international law to look at it.
And by the way, if Israel is exactly as evil as every enemy of Israel claims It's still true. Hamas is still doing that, hoarding that while they suffer. In other words, you can believe Israel is Darth Vader's empire in Star Wars and still grasp that Hamas is doing this and it's doing it essentially with those donor funds.
Uh, from the past 17 years, before Israelis, I feel uncomfortable saying this and I'll tell you why. I don't know that Israelis have a right to come to the Americans and to the Germans and to the British, um, and to all the other donor countries, um, with this complaint, because this was of course also Israel's policy.
In other words, what the Israeli government's policy has been essentially [00:27:00] since, definitely since 2015, but to some degree since 2009, the, uh, the policy has been to allow this funding to Hamas, to stabilize Hamas, and by stabilizing Hamas, by making them understand that Israel can shut off the money spigot.
We buy quiet, some degree of quiet. That was the Israeli concept. None of these donor organizations or countries, when they spoke to Israeli officials, heard that the Israelis want them to stop. And so absolutely, this is a catastrophe. It's a catastrophe for the, for the, for Palestinians living in Gaza, for ordinary civilians, it, it empowered Hamas to create this vast.
You know trap for those civilians. Um, it led to the empowerment of hamas that led to october 7th All of that is absolutely true. Israel was part of the mistake So in light of israel being part of the mistake you have been thinking as as you've mentioned to me offline About this moment being a moment for a new israeli security doctrine and you have some historical [00:28:00] precedent to Point to for how israel needs to completely think differently about security doctrine.
I think it relates to gaza, but not Exclusively to Gaza. Can you, can you share with us your, your thinking? Yeah, I think on October 7th, um, we woke up. Um, we, there isn't a single fact that we didn't know, except of course, literally the planning of the operation. We believed, most, you know, 97 percent of the Israeli policy planning elite, of the pundits, I wrote in favor of the Israeli policy.
I am one of the, you know, I'm one of the wrongdoers in this story, uh, and everybody I know just about is in, is, is part of that. We believed that, um, Hamas was deterred. We believe that there was 17 years of relative quiet in the north after the 2006 second Lebanon war was because Hezbollah was deterred.
We believe that Iran was building and [00:29:00] building and building, but it understood our massive Firepower and it was deterred after October 7th. We don't just now have a different way of thinking about Hamas. We no longer believe that on any of our borders, any of those organizations, those militias are deterred.
And so suddenly we look around us and see an existential threat. a noose of militias all over the Middle East, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, of course, Lebanon. That's the big one, all tightening around us, all funded by Iran, all devoted to our destruction and every single missile and every single rocket and every single commando and every single tunnel meant to be used.
And so there is a moment in Israeli history, um, in 1955. In 1955, the Israelis, uh, were in this, you know, brand new state, six years old, or seven years old. Uh, the state was founded in 1948. Uh, in the 48 war, that was a real kind of haphazard kind of [00:30:00] war. There were all kinds of Arab armies that invaded after the Israeli declaration of independence in May 1948, but they never coordinated with each other.
The Jordanian army wouldn't You know wasn't coordinated with the egyptians even though there were attempts to and then there were these militias that came down from lebanon and they all fought kind of haphazardly and all misdirected and the israelis because they were on the defensive and because they had a coarse internal sort of coherence Um could could fight back with much more organization and much much more mobilization The israelis mobilized almost the entire civilian population.
I mean they they mobilized 16 year olds into the army. They They mobilized, uh, Holocaust survivors to, you know, who had been DPS in Europe for three years, who were two days off the boat. The Arabs armies actually had a lot of trouble mobilizing. And so the Israelis won the 48 war and it was a terrible war.
There were many dead. It was, you know, the Palestinians have their displacement from that whole war. Everybody has their story of that war, but the war itself, the actual military conflict, the Israelis won because the other side was, was disorganized [00:31:00] in 1954. Gamal Abdel Nasser, um, an officer in the Egyptian army, overthrows the king.
And he is this incredibly charismatic figure, who draws tremendous amount of support, public, popular support, from all over the Arab world. It's the beginning of the rise of Arab nationalism, the beginning of the call to push out the old colonialist and imperialist powers, the British, the French, from their influence in the Middle East.
And in 1955, he's beginning to draw massive amounts of Soviet weaponry. And so suddenly the Arab armies, the Israelis suddenly look around them. They're still a tiny country. They have a third world economy. The country's population had more than doubled in size between 1948 and 1952, because something like 700, 000 Jews from the Arab world had all fled to Israel.
And the country was literally having trouble feeding them. They were rationing food, um, at the time. And this, this small, um, [00:32:00] you know, poor. country looked around it and suddenly saw all these Arab armies, all these Arab countries, these Arab political movements unify and get massive amounts of Soviet support, and they began to see an existential threat in Nasser.
And that led to a whole rethinking. of the defense doctrine and was one of the major reasons that David Ben Gurion, the prime minister, gave the order to actually embark on the 1956 war, what the West calls the Suez crisis. A lot of, um, a lot of Western historians, when they look at that war between Israel and Egypt in the Sinai, the Israelis call it the Kadesh operation.
Um, they look at the British and French role, they look at the sort of Egyptian British tug of war over control of the canal because Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. They look at that aspect, there was an internal Arab dynamic, Iraq wanted to lead the Arab world, Egypt wanted to lead the Arab world.
That was part of the Egyptian sort of entry into that war. They look [00:33:00] at all these different elements of the war, but very few Western historians dive deep into the Israeli experience of that war. What were the Israelis thinking? And what the Israelis thinking was that there was a noose tightening around them that they hadn't noticed and hadn't seen.
And suddenly when Nasser came, it all coalesced around him. And so they went to that war. Since I believe 1949 or 1950, the Egyptians had also placed a naval blockade in the Straits of Tehran to Israeli shipping, right? The noose was real. It was felt. And they went to that war. And the goal of the war, the government's actual goal in that war, was to get to Cairo and to take out Nasser.
The Eisenhower administration intervened. Uh, the Israelis were successful, they were winning, they were crossing the Sinai. Eisenhower told them, go back. And how surprised was the Eisenhower administration? I've always been struck by that period in, in U. S. Israel, in the history of U. S. Israel relations. How surprised was the Eisenhower administration by [00:34:00] what the U.
S. was doing with Britain and France? I think that, um, I think that, first of all, the Israeli alliance with Britain and France so quickly after 48 caught the Americans off guard. I think the Americans had this sense of themselves as anti imperialist, and these are the two major imperial powers of the Middle East that had folded up and left, and now we're trying to stick around.
Um, and I think the Americans really saw it, essentially in the way that, uh, you know, Western historians have written about it since. Uh, it was a surprise, it was an Israeli, um, Um, you know, adventure, um, it was destabilizing, um, they were worried about the canal, they were worried about other things, um, and so Eisenhower really does push back and the Israelis are pushed, uh, Ben Gurion gives the order to stop.
The key point to come out of that war, and it's a point that has to be understood because it shaped Israeli defense doctrine. For generations, and I think we're looking at Israeli defense doctrine falling back on the assumptions they learned in that war. The key [00:35:00] point was that it worked. It didn't topple Nasser, but it convinced Nasser that the Israelis could field a force that he wasn't ready to deal with.
And that bought the Israelis. 12 years, till 1967, 11 years of quiet, of genuine quiet, quiet during which the Israeli economy grew massively, first of all stabilized, and then began to grow. Israel went into that war a third world country. By the time it hit in 1967, it was, it was a first world country in its basic fundamental sort of economic fundamentals and capabilities.
And so it bought the 11 years of quiet Israel needed to get on its feet. Then the 67 war happened and bought the six years till 73. One of the reasons 73 was such a surprise for Israelis was that 73, was that 67 was such a, such a blow to the Arab armies that they're deterred for 10 years. That was the concept.
And then 73 bought [00:36:00] quiet. Listen, after 73, Israel begins in during that war, bombed the Syrian, you know, industrial base so catastrophically that it took them decades to recover. And Syria has never engaged Israel directly since. The IDF demonstrated that they could've been in Damascus and Cairo, and they actually ultimately exposed the Egyptian and the Syrian armies to be paper tigers, which totally turned people's views of who was up and who was down in the Middle East, you know, literally upside down.
Right. So there is an Israeli vision of a defense doctrine that's very simple to articulate. Every few years, hopefully 15, if you're not so lucky, 6, every few years. You have to fight the war and that buys you and you win the war and the objective of the war is deterrence. And you win the next 10 years of deterrence.
What is returned to the Israeli military and policy planning and strategic planning elites [00:37:00] is the expectation of the 1950s. You essentially have to fight the war once every 10 years, if you're lucky 15, and that buys you. The Grand Prize, and the Grand Prize is some period of deterrence. And that period of deterrence is the period in which you grow and prosper, and then you do have to be ready for that next war.
In other words, the whole idea that we've been living in, it wasn't just that we could contain Hamas. It was that we were now in a period where everything was so called the, what did they call it, the campaign between the wars, right? And the campaign between the wars, but the actual army officials were actually convinced there wasn't going to be that big war because we were so powerful.
Well, it's now not a campaign between the wars. There are actual wars and you prepare for the next war and the war comes and you try and make the war decisive enough. to space out as much time as possible in which the enemy is deterred, has to rebuild. Um, what does that mean going forward? That means that Gaza is just the beginning.
That [00:38:00] means that Hezbollah is next. That means that those militias in, in Syria or Yemen, in as much as they threaten us, they get an Israeli response. That means a massive, new, aggressive posture by Israel toward all its enemies in the region in ways that are going to, I think, I hope, frankly, change the region.
So you're not Talking about just doing certain things in Gaza or in the south or potentially doing certain things and against Hezbollah in the north That creates a deterrent effect in the region You're going farther than that in what you're suggesting or prescribing which is that Israel actually doesn't just have to create deterrence It has to change facts on the ground in some of these sources of Major threats to Israel and other parts of the region.
Yeah, the threats aren't going away They're not deterred. These are not organizations or ideologies that can be deterred. They'll look for a moment of weakness. [00:39:00] But we're humans. We're not supermen. We'll have moments of weakness. And we don't want to wait for those moments of weakness. And so the lesson is, and again, you know, this is not an American style doctrine.
America has a military posture with tremendous amounts of sophisticated thinking and, you know, abstract, you know, framing and frameworking of all of the different regions of the world. What we learned on October 7th is that the more clever we get, the more vulnerable we could be, we probably are, because we're very clever, but we missed the basics, right?
They took out all of our fancy electronics on the border, and then we suddenly noticed we didn't just have three battalions there to meet them. And so from now on, we're going to have battalions there to meet them. If they can do something, they will do it. And therefore, whatever rockets Hezbollah has, it plans to use.
And so, the posture is going to be a completely different posture, and there's going to be a campaign toward Iran, everything I have said [00:40:00] now ultimately is Iran, that will buy, possibly in a five year war, long, drawn out, complicated, long distance, painful, expensive war, by ten years of quiet after. And that's all we get, because at the end of those 10 years, expect another war.
If you think the way we thought in the 50s, October 7th won't happen again. This is much more expansive than the Israeli defense forces and defense ministry budget, based on historical precedent, has ever imagined or accounted for. What you're talking about is I, I mean, I can't quantify it standing on one foot, but it's a, it's a massive investment.
It is, let's just say it's Israel playing many more away games than home games. Uh, Israel's been mostly in the home game business except for some very targeted operations. Quick, targeted operations. Does this Change the relationship, expand the relationship with the United [00:41:00] States in terms of the investment that Israel would have to rely on.
Not, again, not relying on the U. S. to expend blood, not to expend lives or risk lives of American servicemen and women, but in terms of resources from the carriers, uh, that are, that are in the region right now, just way more investment from the U. S. Deployment of assets and, and deployment of funds to Israel.
I'm, I gotta tell you, I'm, I'm not sure it is. I'm not sure that the defense structure was inadequate. I'm not sure that in the dozens of infantry battalions the Israeli army has fields every, every day. I'm just not sure they were in the right place. In other words, it's not that we didn't have these, it's not that, you know, um, is southern Lebanon an away game?
It's our immediate border. The militias in Syria are very, very close. The vast majority of the threats are very, very close. The damage we can do to those threats. is, is a home game. Um, Iran, obviously, is the big away game. And there we need allies. [00:42:00] Uh, or, put it this way, to make it, to keep it conventional and, and, and to keep it not destabilizing of the region, um, we, we need allies.
Um, but, but the threat itself has to be treated seriously. Um, as if every capability they have is meant to be used and not as if they're deterrable and, and, uh, frankly, kinetically, what does that mean for the Americans? My sense of it is that the Americans will want to hold stability in the Middle East.
If Israel, does this, pulls this off, takes this much more aggressive posture. I think it becomes a better ally for those Gulf States that want to be an ally of it because it actually has the capacity to put Iran on the defensive, which is not something we've seen Israel do recently. Um, and so all, all of these things that we're talking about, um, America would be getting a more stable Middle East ultimately after the first sort of unstable period.
Um, and I do think that those investments will. [00:43:00] be there. In other words, there will be aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf or in the Eastern Mediterranean. There will be an American attempt to deter. If this keeps ramping up, Iran keeps threatening war, right? It has threatened war half a dozen times over the last few days.
If it keeps ramping up, then I think we're going to see, uh, you know, the Americans potentially having to make some hard decisions. By the way, I just, one thing I would, I would expect the Israelis to now be Starting to think seriously about investing in domestic production of some of the basic things that we need to do this, for example, rockets and missiles that we currently buy from the United States.
Well, the United States is a political world that Israel obviously doesn't control. America is an incredible ally, incredibly, you know, close. But if America wants to tell Israel, don't do something, it has that spigot. It has that supply. It can shut off. So those kinds of things I think are being undertaken as a new discussion in Israel.
How do we have more indigenous? Uh, production, how do we make sure we can do this on our own, and we don't [00:44:00] want to. But we need to be able to. You, you, you cruised by it at a point that I think is extremely important. I mean, you made it, but you, but you just, you didn't dwell on it, but I just want to dwell on it.
Which is the importance of Israel not only winning big in Gaza, I mean winning, wiping out Hamas, doing it what it has to do, to send a message not only to other threats, but to friends, and to future friends. And future friends, current friends, could be countries like You know, like the Bahrainis and the Emiratis, but future friends are the Saudis.
And the Saudis look at what happened October 7th and they say, wow, Israel needs to send a message to the Saudis that you say publicly you want us to do less in Gaza because you have to do that to calm down the Arab street or whatever you have to do. But in reality, Beneath the surface, what the Saudis really need to do is see Israel finish the job.
Yeah, um, Saudi officials are only slightly obfuscating that point. I mean, they're basically saying it even as they tell Israel, stop, stop, stop, right? [00:45:00] Um, that is absolutely true. Um, The victory against Hamas is not going to be quick, and it's not going to be military, in the simple sense. It's not going to be some kind of, you know, flag flying over Iwo Jima.
The victory over Hamas is going to take time, but it's not just going to take time. The Israelis are genuinely committed, as a point of identity, it's gone way past, you know, tactics or strategy, to the decimation of Hamas. Every member of Hamas is a legitimate target everywhere on earth. And that is something that Israeli officials have said openly.
There are units established in the Mossad and in the Shabak whose sole job is to hunt down everyone who participated on October 7, everyone who helped, everyone who planned. Well, that's the entire military leadership of Hamas, and why the hell not the political leadership as well, right? The Israeli war on Hamas will be long.
It will be [00:46:00] everywhere, it will be persistent, it will be grim, and it will be determined. But Hamas isn't enough to restore Israel's deterrence in the region. Because Hamas is weak. Hamas is not one of the great powers of the region. And if Hamas could pull that off, for Israel to then wipe out Hamas is not a sign that Israel is a superpower.
It's just a sign that it can wipe out something small like Hamas. To the Israeli psyche, the threat of Hezbollah no longer is tolerable. Hezbollah is something that needs to be taken care of, and Israeli deterrence needs to be seen on these larger actors, on these larger players. Iran has to be made to pay a price.
And there are now people, many thousands of them, working ferociously. Thinking up ways and, and putting together plans to make Iran pay that price. And so yes, the, the, the question of deterrence, the rebuilding of deterrence that is foundational to the Abraham [00:47:00] Accords. The love of Zion didn't drive any single government in this region to make any kind of treaty or agreement with Israel.
It was about strategy. It was about Israeli power. It was about Israeli stability. That has to be restored. That has to be seen to be restored. And that's not something we can achieve in Gaza. Gaza is a very, um, high cost and low reward. In other words, the cost to civilians, the cost to Israel's image, the cost, you know, in many, many ways, potentially to Israeli soldiers lives will be high.
We have to go after Hamas, and so we will, but that'll be high, and the reward in terms of our deterrence is not that much, even if we succeed spectacularly. And so, no, this is, this is a larger, longer kind of war that Israel has now decided to join in a whole different way. We're not where we were two weeks ago.
Okay. Haviv, thank you. And, uh, stay, stay safe. And, uh, hope to see you in a week. [00:48:00] Thanks, Dan.
That's our show for today. As always, to keep up with Haviv Retik Gore, you can find him on X at Haviv Retik Gore. Gore, and you can find all his work at Times of Israel at at times of Israel or times of Israel dot com. Call me back. It's produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.