30 days, 3 pressure points - 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 focus on three pressure points facing Israel, and we also touch on some good news about Jewish-Arab relations inside Israel.

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Transcript

DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.

[00:00:00] Mosul was surrounded, the U. S. came in with airstrikes, the Iraqi and Kurdish forces came in on the ground, and for nine months that city was pummeled until ISIS was extracted by force from a population of a million people. It was a kind of warfare very similar to Gaza, and Mosul was flattened. I mean, that has to be said, and there are at least 11, 000 civilians killed by a conservative estimate and there wasn't any of this pressure when it wasn't Jews doing it.

Okay, Assad killed 5, 000 Palestinians, no Muslim community anywhere on earth marched in any real numbers on Assad. There was a lot more international, you know, attention paid to the fact that they killed a single journalist in Turkey than to the fact that they were well over 100, 000 dead in Yemen. It sounds like an excuse, right?

It isn't an excuse. It doesn't mean Israel didn't do something wrong if you think it did something wrong. But it does mean that the world, as it [00:01:00] sits in judgment, isn't a judge. It is something else. Some other dynamic is happening here, other than moral concern for civilian lives, because that moral concern for civilian lives is just too selective, and too selective in very specific ways for it to really be pure about that.

It is 4 p. m in New York City on Sunday, November 5th. It is 11 p. m. in Israel. Today is day 30 of the October 7th war. Before we get into events in Israel, one housekeeping note. In just one week, my and Saul Singer's book, The Genius of Israel, The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World, will be published.

As the subtitle suggests, it is a book primarily about [00:02:00] Israeli resilience. The same resilience we're seeing. Today play out in Israel following an extraordinary setback on October 7th, and it is that same Resilience and solidarity. We believe that we're about to see all across Israeli society in the weeks and months And hopefully years ahead, ultra Orthodox, secular Jews, Jews from the East, Jews from the West, Jews from the center, booming metropolitan areas of the country, to people from struggling towns in the periphery, really all across society, are working together and mobilizing.

In our book, we endeavor to uncover the origins of this and try to look forward in terms of where Israeli society is going. We think there's a lot that the West, and especially the United States, can learn from the Israeli societal experience. We hope you'll order the book today. It would mean a lot to us.

I'm sending the proceeds to an [00:03:00] organization in Israel working on the rebuild, working to help the hundreds of thousands of evacuees from the South and the North that will have to rebuild to begin anew. Now on to today's conversation. In Israel, and for many Israelis, at some point this week marks the end of the Shloshim.

Shloshim in Hebrew literally means 30, as in 30 days, as in 30 days after a loved one has died. It is the end of the 30 days of mourning, in which there is more of a transition back to normal life. for the mourner, at least an attempt at it. And we'll talk a little bit more about the shloshim and the process and what it means for Israel today with our regular guest, Haviv Rettigur.

But it's hard to imagine how Israelis can actually transition back to any kind of normalcy on this particular Shloshim, on this one month anniversary of the brutal attack of [00:04:00] October 7th. The Shloshim comes as Israel is fighting a war to eliminate Hamas in Gaza, hardly normal. The Shloshim comes as there are over 230 hostages in Gaza, including children, like Kfir Bibas, who was kidnapped by Hamas and is often referred to as the nine month old baby.

That's how he's referred to in the press, in the Israeli press, in the Western press. Well. Kfir is now a 10 month old baby, having spent 30, God knows how miserable, nights in Gaza under the quote unquote care of Hamas. So this is hardly any kind of normal transition from mourning. For many, the pain is just being extended.

In addition to mourning or dealing with a gradual transition from the mourning period, Israelis in Israel are also dealing with some very specific time fuses, some time pressures. There's the time pressure to execute the military [00:05:00] campaign. to eliminate Hamas. There's the time pressure on Israel's economy.

How long can the country be kind of frozen with 360, 000 of some of its most productive citizens called up, many of whom are deployed, many of whom are standing by, while whole parts of the economy and labor force are shut down? And the third time fuse is the international community, and specifically, and most importantly, the United States.

How much time and space will the U. S. government, the Biden administration, give to Israel to do what Israel thinks must be done? These are three of the questions I had on my mind when I checked back in with Haviv, who joins us for our weekly check in. As you all know, he's 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, he was also a combat medic in the IDF where he served in the reserves until he was 40 years old, and now he's sort of getting dragged back [00:06:00] in a little bit, even though he has aged out.

Haviv Retikgur. Israel's 30 days and its three pressure points. This is Call Me Back,

and I am pleased, very pleased, to welcome back to this podcast for my weekly check in with Haviv Retikgur from the Times of Israel. It's actually, it's been a brutal time since October 7th, but one thing I look forward to every week are these conversations. Haviv? Good to see you. Good to be here, Dan. I, I, I have to say the same as well.

It's been, it's been good. It's been, we've been getting great feedback. Thank you for having me. Haviv, one other thing I, is worth noting, since October 7th, your wife has been called up for reserve duty, uh, for some period of time, not, not a long time, but still called up. And this was obviously challenging because you have four little kids, uh, at home [00:07:00] and now you were called up for Something, we don't have to get into the details, and that's also why you haven't been writing for the Times of Israel.

A lot of people ask me, when's his next piece coming out? So that, that helps explain it, but obviously we are grateful that you still squeeze in this, this call, without getting into the details of what you're working on. Just the notion that here you are, you're aged out of reserves, so the reserve, the miloim in Hebrew is what it's called, reserve duty is supposed to go, I think it's supposed to go to about age 40, and, and then after that you're supposed to be out, but you know, it's like that line from The Godfather, you know, you, they keep sucking you back in.

How common is that, to be out and then just be brought back in for projects? How common is that right now, generally, how disruptive is that to people's lives? My, um, terrible mistake as a very young man was to go out to the medics course. The Army Combat Medics course is one of the most interesting courses in the Army.

It's one of the most, [00:08:00] um, I thought exciting. There's a tremendous amount of learning. They also sent me, uh, to it from my, um, from my company because, uh, there's a lot of it's in English. A lot of medicine is in English. And they figured they'd send someone who knows English while I have the other guy who's, you know, gonna struggle.

But the Army holds on to Medics longer. The army then, in a war, has, you know, things for, you know, medics to do, and also there's guard duty of, you know, all over, you know, there's, there's neighborhood patrols being set up and all these things. There are entire towns and villages in the north that are emptied out, and the towns near the areas that are emptied out in preparation for a potential Hezbollah attack of the kind that we saw on October 7th from Hamas, well, the towns near them are also preparing for those attacks.

And what they're doing is, the population isn't emptying out, but they're preparing these. Um, these essentially neighborhood watches that include guards and patrols. And it's just of the local, you know, moms and dads. Um, and some of that, the army, because people are leaving their jobs to do this, or they don't have enough people to do it full time, the army is [00:09:00] actually allowing them to be drafted into, uh, reserve duty essentially as a way to pay them.

Um, to take on those roles and so all of these different ways, uh, that people are in the reserves now, even people like me who are aged out and, you know, not that useful in combat anymore, um, we, we are having, we're finding that we have these roles right now. In terms of the shloshim, you know, the, in Judaism, the 30 day period, that is the 30 day period of mourning, 30 days of mourning, and that there's, there's a sense of transition after the shloshim for.

For our listeners who don't speak Hebrew, shloshim literally means the transition is 30 in Hebrew. It means that there's a transition for the mourners after the 30 days back into some semblance of normalcy. That they're supposed to begin returning to their lives. So, in a sense, we're marking the one month anniversary of the war, so It's, [00:10:00] it's like the end of the Shloshim.

It's certainly the end, it will be the end of the Shloshim this coming week for many, for many Israelis who lost loved ones. But also just, it's like almost like the Shloshim for the country. And, and yet you're transitioning to anything but some semblance of normal. What's the, how do things feel? Uh, yeah, Shloshim is kind of a moment of, um, of stock taking, of taking stock of where you're at, right?

You, a person is, uh, dies, passes away, you bury them. immediately, within 24 hours in Jewish tradition. And then you have the Shiva, which is Shiva, which is seven. The seven are those seven days in which you literally sit at home and receive people who visit and mourn full time, so to speak. And then, um, after the seven Uh, and then the 30 period becomes, um, the period that you're in.

And at the end of the 30, you visit the grave of the person you buried on day 1 or on day 2. And then visiting the [00:11:00] grave is a, is, it's almost a kind of saying goodbye, because Then you're, you're in a whole different, then there's, you know, if it's a close family member, your parent, your sibling or whatever, then you, you still have 11 more months of, of saying Kaddish, saying the prayer for the dead in synagogue and things like that.

But the 30 is when you. When you come back to the gravesite and say goodbye. And so it is this very poignant, powerful moment, um, of introspection, of coming back to, you know, they're now on television, on the news channels. A few of these, you know, really sort of going back to these talking to people who survived, who have now been 30 days living in some hotel or in some family members.

You know, people getting over the trauma, a lot, a lot of people, dozens and dozens of families, maybe hundreds, not at all getting over the trauma. We just saw a couple who lost legs, uh, in the massacre to one, lost one leg and never lost both legs. Uh, just get out of the hospital, you know, on their various crutches and mechanisms.

And, and so we're, [00:12:00] we're, we're in a moment where. It's not a fresh shock anymore. It is not an intense mourning anymore. Everyone is looking for ways to now live with it going forward, because that's what you do at this point. Um, and, and so it's a looking back, a stocktaking in preparation for moving forward.

There's a massive war on. There are soldiers dying. Uh, we are watching the footage from Gaza, which includes the suffering of Gazans, which is very real and very Um, I have felt it very powerfully, um, and I have a lot to say about Hamas and I have a lot to say about, you know, the magical way that Gaza's numbers never seem to include a single Hamas fighter and all of that, but that doesn't mean the thousands of those numbers aren't civilians and, um, and so, you know, there's all of this pain, all of this trauma, this war is not going to end Hezbollah wants a war in the north or wants to Pretend it wants just enough to [00:13:00] not be accused of not wanting or whatever the hell's happening there.

Excuse my French. Um, and yet nevertheless, there's this moment where we're transitioning from a period of just reeling from what happened to a period of trying to figure out how we move forward in some kind of a routine. And you see that in businesses, you see that in schools. And you also have the families of the 230 plus hostages who for them, there's no trying to transition.

to something new. They're, they're now, every day is excruciating because it's, now it's like one month that they're imagining if you're the, if you're the parent of a, of that nine month old who is in Gaza, who's taken hostage that you think, well, that nine month old is now 10 months old and, and you start to think, I got to believe since the ground incursion has started that this is a new phase for those families because It could be now months before they have any information about what happened to their loved [00:14:00] ones who are taken hostage.

There's still 40 missing. We now know everything. In other words, we're not, you know, for two or three weeks there were still bodies being found. There were still homes burned so badly that, you know, there were people identified by their spinal cord. I mean, there were still Right. But that part, that stage is all over, right?

All the bureaucrats have gone through all the lists and all the IDs and all the, we know who's been missing for a month, right? So by we know who's been missing for a month, we know what the list looks like. We might not know every tourist who was visiting and everything like that, but basically we know everything.

And there are still 40 completely missing. We can't confirm they're in Gaza. They're nowhere to be found in Israel. They're not among the dead bodies, even when they took DNA samples of essentially ash. And so there are families that will never wake up from this moment that are in that. First day and yeah, I mean you rightly pointed to the kids I mean, you know, I've been following one of these families.

A lot of people know a lot of these families [00:15:00] a four year old and an eight year old and a twelve year old and a month old and there's just Children who are literally sitting day after day in some dark tunnel somewhere being you know fed or cared for only because of their usefulness, not because of humanity by people who have just murdered a bunch of children.

So they are not moving on in that way. Even just emotionally, I don't think Israelis are moving on, but they're moving on emotionally a little bit. All right. So I want to talk to you about, I want to talk about three pressure points right now, uh, sort of, since this, since this began on October 7th, there were, by my lights, three, three fuses, three time fuses.

One is the military fuse. When was, when was Israel gonna go in? Once it went in, how long would it have to achieve its objectives? The second fuse is the economy. I mean, tourism is a big part. of [00:16:00] Israel's economy that's all but shut down, and the tech exports are a big part of the Israeli economy, and it's not shut down, but big part of it is dormant.

And, um, 360, because of the 360, 000 people that are called up, a lot of them are from the tech community and other, and other parts of the economy. So how long can that high percentage of the labor force just be pulled out of the labor force? And then the third is the diplomatic pressure on Israel or support depending on from where, but let's take the United States, which is the, does Israel, is there, Are we chipping away the time and space that Israel has to do what it needs to do?

So I want to take each of these three separately. Let's start with the first. How do you feel Israel is doing on the achieving its military objectives. I know it's hard to really know, but based on what you know and how you're following things, you know, was it right to wait as long as they did before they went on the ground?

And how's it going now? [00:17:00] Well, we already know that Israel is showing that it has some capabilities. Um, Hamas, uh, imposed on us the, this battlefield. And Hamas has done nothing over the last 15 years except prepare this battlefield for precisely this battle. So there are hundreds of kilometers of tunnels.

Uh, I think Yigit Sinwar, Hamas military leader in Gaza, actually said that it's 500 kilometers of tunnels, something like that. I don't know if that's an accurate number, but it's, you know, intelligence estimates have it in that ballpark. Bunkers, you know, massive amounts of fuel. Um, experts are estimating that they have fuel for three months, maybe four months.

Um, underneath, uh, you know, on underground, uh, we don't entirely know exactly what installations they have underground. Right? So if they have rocket producing factories underground, they'll use up that fuel faster, right? If they have a hospital underground for their fighters, they'll use it up faster. But, um, nevertheless, uh, these are immense, immense installations.

And for the IDF to go in [00:18:00] means to fight on Hamas's terms, to walk through Hamas's traps. The IDF doesn't want to do that. And what the IDF has managed to do using robots, using dogs, using airstrikes that are, um, capable of penetrating tunnels, not the deepest tunnels, but the tunnels that are closest to the ground from which, um, Hamas fighters are ready to spring out when the army moves past them and catch the army, you know, military formations from the rear.

Um, Those, the army has been able to neutralize pretty much consistently. Not in every case, we are taking losses. There have been IDF soldiers killed, but there have been many, many, many, many more, uh, Hamas fighters killed. And the army, I think is very satisfied. Now we know that there was a thrust cutting the Gaza Strip in two down the middle.

And we know that there was a thrust from the northern end of the Gaza Strip southward. And what that means, if you know, while you're listening to this, you look at a map of Gaza. What that means is [00:19:00] that the army has essentially surrounded Gaza City. And as it surrounded Gaza City, it started to move in and it started to.

As it moves in, seal up tunnels, um, and tunnel entrances that it's finding. It doesn't necessarily, it doesn't necessarily have to actually go down into every tunnel entrance, but if it can seal them in a way that's permanent, and then it, it essentially corrals Hamas into only a very few exits. And if you can control the exits to the tunnels, um, then, then you do have, uh, you are able to reshape the battlefield in ways that reduce your losses.

So the army is very happy with its progress, very satisfied. It did a lot of intensive training. Uh, it built a few solutions that it didn't have before. For example, some APCs and tanks have a special roof attached to them now against, um, incendiary drones or, you know, explosive drones. Um, So, uh, you know, what we're hearing just from commanders on the ground is that it's working, is that the progress [00:20:00] is working, it's going slow, steady, and they have solutions that they didn't have three weeks ago to the problems Hamas has presented.

And morale of the soldiers? extraordinary. Probably the most important story here. Those soldiers want, and we're hearing that, I hear that personally from soldiers who come out who are neighbors of mine, family of mine, um, they want to do this. They want to respond to October 7th by removing the threat of Hamas.

Um, and that's true of left wing soldiers. It's true of right wing soldiers. Uh, there is a unity here that we haven't seen before. We haven't just seen, you know, Druze and Bedouin soldiers going in, Arabic speaking Arab soldiers, Muslim soldiers. They haven't just gone in with The whole rest of the army, they've put out special music videos telling [00:21:00] Hamas, you know, Hamas killed dozens of Bedouin from the South in the massacre.

And the Bedouin Israelis are saying, we're coming for you now. We are an Israeli battalion. We are capable, and we will show you that you can't kill our people. And so They've been putting out these music videos. The morale is incredibly high. They want to finish the job. Uh, and that brings us to, of course, the other windows, the other, uh, fuses that you talked about.

But before we do, I will say there's some, I mean, I'll post some of these. There have been some fantastic images. leading into Shabbat, uh, on social media of IDF soldiers from all walks of life. I mean, I'm particularly moved by this because it's a big focus of mine, Saul's next book, about where you see the solidarity of, of, uh, Israelis, which is not always obvious to outsiders, uh, Kochavi, General Kochavi, who's former IDF Chief of Staff, told us, you know, the kind of solidarity you see of people from all walks [00:22:00] of life in the hull of a tank is the image he gave us when we interviewed him for the book, which we quote in the book.

And literally on Friday, there were these images of these videos flying around of these soldiers. You know, Mizrahi, Ashkenazi, secular, religious, I mean, you know, some from affluent parts of Tel Aviv, around Tel Aviv, some of them from the struggling towns of the periphery, and they're all just bundled into these tanks celebrating Shabbat and they have wine out and they're saying Kiddush and they're singing Shalom Aleichem and they're having a little impromptu dinner.

I mean, it doesn't look like much of a dinner, but whatever. And they look, it's, it's like an image that you, look at that and you say, only in Israel. Listen, there is, it's indescribable. I was in a combat unit, and I saw a little bit of combat in, um, in defensive shield during the second intifada, you know, chasing after suicide bombers and things like that, but nothing.

Remotely as [00:23:00] dramatic as what's happening now in Gaza is what those boys are experiencing right now in Gaza, but that experience is the most astonishing sense of camaraderie and brotherhood and shared fate. And the fact that it's all also projected onto the much larger screen of the nation as a whole.

And the fact that, um, those soldiers can't walk ten feet anywhere in Israel without someone shoving food in their face. Um, and that someone isn't, necessarily Jewish. Druze people have opened, entire communities have opened, you know, their communities to families that, you know, were survivors of the massacre.

They've opened their kitchens to soldiers all over Israel. Everyone, everywhere is doing this and taking part in it, and it's, and it's astonishing, and it's distilled and intensified among the soldiers themselves. And so that is It's, it almost sounds like an advertisement of some kind, but if you don't have that experience, if you don't have a [00:24:00] tribe in that way once in your life, then, then you should get one, because it is, it is an astonishing experience and a very powerful one.

It's exactly what the theme of our book is about, but you just, I mean, that's exactly what we read about, that, that, why is Israel, not to digress, but why is Israel not facing the, the social decline and doom, sense of doom and doomism that's, Being experienced by so many societies and wealthy affluent democracies, lost sense of loneliness, loss of belonging, loss of connection to country.

It's, if I had to sum it up, it's because most countries don't have what you just described. Uh, sense of purpose, that their lives have purpose, they're part of a country that has a purpose. Uh, anyways, you just, you just really described that beautifully. Um, just staying on the time though, the time this will take.

Do you have any sense for how long this will take? Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, what is accomplishable, what is achievable whenever you go into battle? Um, [00:25:00] in officer's school, I didn't go to officer's school, but, uh, many of my friends did. Um, and, in officer's school, one of the first things you learn is that all your great plans fall apart as soon as you meet the enemy.

The enemy's entire purpose is to surprise you, and they surprise you, and, and so, um, the enemy will be able to this is true of Hamas right now. It's true of every enemy any army has ever encountered in the history of war, which is that the enemy will get to shape the schedule and get to shape the battlefield to some degree.

And so I know what Israel wants. I know what the Israeli generals sort of optimistic scenario is. I know what a pessimistic scenario looks like. They might get none of that. They might get all of it much faster. We have had those kinds of wars as well. Uh, faster than we expect and better than we expect.

Um, the Israeli army is moving slow because Hamas built the battlefield. Um, but, uh, it is doing everything it can do to deny Hamas everything. In other words, Hamas needs to breathe down there. Hamas needs to eat. It needs to drink. It needs to have sewage. It needs to [00:26:00] have pumps. It needs to have, uh, you know, oxygen filters.

It needs to have fuel. All of those things, Israel is working. It's doing, its best to deny them. It's trying to reshape the battlefield in, in return. Um, and we can hope, you know, the Israeli Defense Minister put out an interesting statement a couple days ago. He said, um, we're gonna get s Noir, we're gonna kill s Noir.

But if you goins, get to him first. So for our listeners, s Noir is the, he's the head, he's the head of Hamas. Right. And he's the planner of October 7th. He, he was the architect of the Octo October 7th. Right. And, and he was released from an Israeli prison. in 2011 as part of the prisoner swap to get Gilad Shalit.

He had cancer while he was in prison, he was treated for his cancer by, by Israeli physicians. He got back to Gaza, and he is not just an architect, it sounds like he was the architect of Oct of the October 7th Massacre. Yeah, he's the head of all Hamas military forces in this, in Gaza, and this is [00:27:00] their central activity for the last few years, and this is their greatest success in, in the history of the organization, and Possibly, if you call that a success, if that, that is what you strive for, the biggest success in the history of the Palestinian National Movement, in terms of, you know, military achievement, terroristic achievement, et cetera.

Um And defense minister Golan said, we're going to kill Sinwar because he's the chief architect of that massacre. But if you Gazans get to him first, you'll shorten the war, which, you know, win, win. Um, and that kind of message is being sent by Israel into Gaza. Uh, there is a grim determination to get this done.

Um, by saying it, of course, they set up Sinwar to succeed, to be able to declare victory if he merely survives. But Sinwar will be hunted to the rest of his days. In any case, he's, you know, he's not going to be above ground much for the rest of his life. Um, but, um, but there is this desire that the Israelis have to try and shorten the war.

In other words, we're seeing that [00:28:00] desire. It's going to depend on how the war goes, because if the Israeli military pulls out without having accomplished a shattering of Hamas. The Israeli public, I know that there's this international pressure, and there are these protests, and there's this huge upswell in social media, and the genocide that Israel's committing is something that all of these people, you know, on the far left in many countries are talking about, that it's a genocide.

I get that there's this pressure, and I get that there's this discourse. Um, if you're an Israeli general, if you're an Israeli politician, You are hearing it, but you are hearing the Israeli public louder, and the Israeli public wants Hamas dead. And so it is not going to stop, and it's not going to stop soon.

In terms of day to day life, you, you've told me offline that Israeli life is not like it was on October 8th, 9th, 10th, or 11th, when, when everything basically stopped, and everyone was just focused on the response. Now you're, you've told me you're seeing, and I hear this from my sister, and Saul, and My [00:29:00] mother in Jerusalem, just a general sense that things are, parts of Israeli life are, as we talked about at the beginning, when we talked about the end of the Shul Hashim, are returning.

Does that apply to the economy? Are people feeling like they're able to contribute to the One, one, uh, venture capitalist I spoke to told me something like 10 percent of his Tel Aviv based, uh, VC told me something like 10 percent of the employees, senior level employees at his portfolio companies are being called up to reserve.

So they're not there now. Can others sub in? Sure. Uh, but you know, if you're an. middle of important work, a fundraising round, a venture capital raising round, uh, closing some big sale, dealing with some big business development opportunity, you have one person on point for it, that person is suddenly called up, disappears, it's not so seamless, and, you know, to find someone else to sub in, and this could be the status quo for a while.

How long Do you think the [00:30:00] economy and regular Israeli life, civilian life, can handle this larger percentage of the labor force out of the economy? It's a great question. Um, I'm not an expert on the economy, but I do, there are, there are data points, there are sort of touchstones of Israeli history that we can look at.

One obvious one is COVID, right, where we had Shutdowns of the economy again and again and again, um, the fundamentals of our economy are good. We have a low, uh, debt to GDP ratio. We, you know, in so many fundamental ways, we are a healthy economy and we recovered very, very quickly. Um, we also had a six month reserve call up on a massive scale right after the 73 war, which was the Yom Kippur war, where we were similarly surprised by our enemies and, uh, There was this sudden massive call up and the call up stayed at the borders for months and months and months.

Uh, and that was incredibly expensive, but the country felt it was, you know, necessary, right? It doesn't matter how much you hurt your economy. [00:31:00] If you die, you know, if your enemies destroy you. So, um. So, the simple answer is, uh, we can afford it. But what's interesting, we can afford the 360, 000 call up. We can afford the slowdown in the economy because of the loss of those workers.

The call up is some of the most productive workers. You mentioned high tech. High tech is really important. There are other incredibly expensive parts to this war. First of all, there's the conduct of the actual war. Tanks cost money to run. Men's amounts of fuel are being spent, you know, material, armaments, um, flight hours, all of that.

But then there's one other cost, which is well over 100, 000 Israelis. We're told to leave their homes because the entire northern line of villages and towns was emptied because of the expectation that Hezbollah is going to join the war. And so those people have to be housed somewhere, and the government that ordered them out of their homes is the one paying the hotel bills, essentially.

And so there's this another, [00:32:00] right, many, many millions are being spent on that. And so it's very expensive. We're in a very expensive situation. Uh, the economy is going to have to borrow for, the government's going to have to borrow for a while to, to pay all this off. You know, we have relatively low debt.

We are a fiscally responsible country and we will be able to afford it. So that's, that's, that's something I think is okay. What's interesting to watch is the, the need to save money, the need to spend that money on the victims, on the evacuees, on all of those groups has actually reshuffled Israeli politics in some ways, the ultra Orthodox community is now.

losing some of the special coalition funds that they managed to squeeze out of this coalition as a condition of their membership to their school systems. Um, the extra, you know, 200 million shekels or whatever it was and other many other groups. I just happened to read something about, about their budget today.

I don't mean to pick on them, but there are many, many other groups and many other sort of narrower interest groups that are all that coalition money is, is being shut down [00:33:00] and diverted. Three members of Knesset, including one from the coalition, have presented a bill to shut down all the extraneous, ridiculous ministries that Netanyahu created to essentially satisfy the egos of people he needed in his coalition, a minister of tradition, a minister of, you know, I'm not, if I start, there's more ridiculous ones than real ones.

So I'm not going to name a minister of intelligence who doesn't do anything with intelligence. So there are these, there's this push to shut them down, uh, just to save the money. And, and so that, that also, you know, It's a sign that the government is feeling the cash crunch, but it does have credit lines.

It does have good, you know, good credit ratings, and it's not a bad thing to force the government to feel a cash crunch. And there will be assistance, obviously, hopefully, depending if Congress gets its act together, which I think they're working on, uh, uh, an assistance package from the United States, which will, um, only help.

And I want to ask you about the third fuse, time fuse, which is [00:34:00] international pressure on Israel. to do what it needs to do, however it defines, that it has for, you know, what Prime Minister Netanyahu apparently asked President Biden on October 7th when they first spoke, when he gave him his list of requests, he said, I need space and I need time and I don't need you knocking on my door, you know, 10, 15, 20 days in or whatever it is and saying it's time to stop like what happened in October 7th.

May of 21, or like what happened in, you know, go back during every one of these, uh, flare ups, that this was not a normal flare up, uh, this was a war, and it's not just about doing some bombing from the air and then negotiating a ceasefire. It's a war. How are you thinking about the pressure Israel is under from the international community, and specifically the United States?

The international community is It's responding very powerfully to the images of civilian dead in Gaza. [00:35:00] Um, some of that, some significant part of it, is part of the larger, you know, propaganda war. Obviously, there's no way to fight a war without that element. I understand it. I'm not even angry about it.

I'm not upset about it. Um, but also underneath the propaganda, there is very real suffering, and, and a very real sense in the world that I think is absolutely appropriate, that there needs to be everything done to rein in that suffering. At a very simple, straightforward level, Israel's war aim is legitimate.

It is legal, you know, where every time you say something is legal by international law, some expert steps in and says, Well, you can't really determine if it's legal by international law until I have told you whether it's legal by international law, because lawyers like to think that if the rest of us don't know what's going on, then they're much more powerful than us and get to tell us.

But, in fact, international law does allow you to destroy your enemy, and if your enemy hides underneath a civilian population, your enemy is committing the war crime and not you. You do need to be proportionate. So, you know, don't [00:36:00] kill thousands of Gazans to reach just Yehia Sinwar, but you can actually fight the Hamas army hiding under those civilians.

Um, and that international legal question is, um. It's not the legal question itself, but the moral discourse around it, um, is something that I think the Biden administration is feeling. It's feeling the pressure, uh, it is feeling the pressure of Biden's progressive sort of far left edge of the party. It's not clear if it's a third of the party or a quarter or 10%, but it is some part that he needs and he needs it.

Um, you know, as you're going to, you know, as he starts to think about the next election, he can't lose Michigan in the next election because, um, the Arab or Muslim community stays home. Yeah, I will say, just not, not, not, not to digress, but I think if President Biden loses Michigan, it's not going to be because the Arab American community in Dearborn, Detroit, stayed home.

I think it's, this risk is, is [00:37:00] so overstated, even if all of them stayed home or didn't vote for Biden, you're talking about less than 1 percent of the voters. Michigan, I don't, I mean, this is a whole separate subject. I think, I think the administration and the political advisors around President Biden are completely overreacting.

How, and, and certainly among electeds, by the way, among the elected Democrats, there's, there, there are some exceptions, but they're pretty strong, um, in terms of supporting the president. The, the, the problem is This noisy, young, progressive part of the base, that's, that's noisy, they're really noisy, they're noisy on social media, they're noisy at rallies, they have very strong views about Israel, they have very strong views about other issues too, uh, do I think that it comes to November of 2024, they're going to, um, make their electoral voting decisions solely based on their frustrations with what happened with regard to Israel and Gaza in the fall of 2023.

I'm, I'm highly skeptical, but um, okay, you know, I, you know, I, a little bit of a digression, but I just think the White House is overreacting. These are [00:38:00] questions we don't know the answers to. Um, we don't know if this is another step on a pivot, a larger generational pivot, um, that we're not going to see.

you know, the results of in November 2024, but maybe we will see the results of in, you know, 2032, right? And, and that'll be a very dramatic result in 2032, something like the arc that happened to support for gay marriage, which was once a minority of Democrats, and then quite quickly became a majority of Democrats, and then even a plurality, or maybe even majority of Republicans.

And so There is this tilt. Now, we, we don't, again, we don't entirely, there are polls that say it's very small, there are polls that say it's quite significant. Staying out of that, the point is that the Biden administration itself is experiencing, and maybe it's more psychological than real, maybe it's exactly what they say, what they feel it is, but it is experiencing a tightening of that It is experiencing itself, holding a door open for the Israelis to [00:39:00] finish off Hamas.

The United States wants Hamas gone from the region. Hamas is gone. prevents the United States from being able to pressure Israel on almost anything it wants to pressure Israel on. In other words, if the Biden administration believes in two states and wants to pressure Israel on settlements and wants to sort of really lean into the question of restoring the PA in the West Bank as a serious interlocutor and a Serious, you know, organization in control of the Palestinian parts of the West Bank, um, towards some kind of two state process.

If that is something the organization, the, the administration believes in and it is talking in those terms, and it has been talking in those terms out loud, um, then that, that means Hamas has to be off the chessboard, right? Hamas serves Iran. It is funded by Iran. It isn't, it doesn't, didn't attack because of Iran, but it is part of the Iranian, um, that Iran is trying to surround Israel with.

And so for all these reasons, Biden does actually want the Israelis to succeed. But there's a limit to how much political [00:40:00] price he's going to pay. And so that is a window closing. And by the way, the influence America has over us isn't sticks. It isn't that they're going to take away Money. We can afford to make all of our weaponry indigenously.

Maybe not the airplanes, but everything else. We literally could survive and we could probably be quite a powerful regional power without American military support. But, right now, the American administration is willing to Fly the flag in the Eastern Mediterranean with two aircraft carrier strike groups that are holding back Iran.

And they're allowing us to deal with Hamas. First, without having to also deal with Hezbollah, and they're giving us this window. In other words, the Biden administration started with carrots, and now it's saying, help us keep these carrots coming, which is a much more effective way to deal with the Israelis because the Israelis want those aircraft carriers.

They want that. Ability to [00:41:00] deter Iran and so now they're coming to the Israelis and saying lower that civilian death toll and there's been a bit of a fight between the Israelis and the Americans the Israelis are feeling a little put upon because The civilian death toll by percentage is lower than in many American engagements of similar right of similar kinds of battles For example, Mosul in 2016, etc um, but yeah, the obama administration's fight against isis was exactly that mosul 60 2016, I mean There were massive civilian casualties, which is understandable that happens in, in, when, when the U.

S. government, when the Obama administration decided it had, was going to go after. ISIS, and that was after a couple of very gruesome, very visual beheadings, not slaughtering 1, 400 people and burning them alive and torturing them, but two, two, a couple of beheadings. I'm not minimizing them. I'm just saying when the U.

S. decided to pivot on, uh, in its approach to ISIS, it went in with not a lot of sensitivity. Muscle was [00:42:00] surrounded. The U. S. came in with airstrikes, Iraqi and Kurdish forces came in on the ground, and for nine months that city was pummeled until ISIS was extracted by force from a population of a million people.

It was a kind of warfare very similar to Gaza, with, by the way, some very important differences. But nevertheless, It was the same kind, basic kind of warfare, and Mosul was flattened. I mean, that has to be said. And there are at least 11, 000 civilians killed by a conservative estimate. And over nine months, it isn't even that this is a kind of war where those kinds of numbers are killed.

That is absolutely correct. That is true. That is ISIS's only strategy for survival. It's today Hamas's only strategy for survival. It isn't just that. It's that there wasn't any of this pressure. When it was happening to, when, when it wasn't Jews doing it. Okay, Assad killed 5, 000 Palestinians. No Muslim [00:43:00] community anywhere on earth marched in any real numbers on Assad.

There are, you know, Palestinian towns and refugee camps in Syria, and they empty out during the war, and there are people killed there, and there are battles there, and nobody marches for any of it. The Saudis in Yemen, there was some concern, some concern here and there. There was a lot more international, you know, attention paid to the fact that they killed a single journalist in Turkey, than to the fact that they were Well over a hundred thousand dead in Yemen, and so there is this vast international attention on Israel and no international attention if Israel isn't doing the killing.

And that is, it sounds like an excuse, right? It isn't an excuse. It doesn't mean Israel didn't do something wrong if you think it did something wrong, but it does mean that the world, as it sits in judgment, isn't a judge. It is something else. Something, some other dynamic is happening here, other than moral concern for civilian lives.

Because that moral concern for civilian lives is just too selective, and too selective in [00:44:00] very specific ways for it to really be pure about that. Long story short. There is an international window and that international window appears to be closing. And what we don't know is what happens when that international, and I think we have time.

In other words, I think, I think we have a month. Um, and it does depend by the way, on, on, on. mm-Hmm, the images that come out of Gaza. In other words, if there are some spectacular, horrific, you know, bombing of something that was a terrible mistake, then it'll close faster. But what we don't yet know is what happens when the window closes.

When Biden says, Okay, you're done. I gave you a lot. Now you got to give me not to, you know, lose me my base in certain parts of the country. And Israel says no. And that we don't know. And I suspect Israel will say no, because the determination now in the public to go after Hamas isn't something any Israeli government knows how to step back from.

Well, there's one time fuse I should have mentioned, which I didn't. We talked a little bit about at the beginning about the hostages. What about the time [00:45:00] pressure on the Israeli government? To deal with the hostage situation and the, the fuse that the government is dealing with, with the families of the hostages.

What's going on on that? I think, I think the Hamas problem in that regard, it took these hostages, including as we said, children, um, as psychological lever. I think the problem is that, uh, Hamas, um, you know, how should I put it bluntly, Hamas doesn't have a lot of trust in the Israeli public discourse right now.

And so, there isn't a sense among the families of the hostages, there is a sense among the families of the hostages that the government needs to prioritize the hostages, and maybe it isn't prioritizing the hostages because it's an inconvenience in the battlefield, and they want them to, and so Israeli leaders including Benny Gantz and Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Galant and all these people who are actually running the war have come out and made these very strong declarations that one of the central war aims is rescuing the [00:46:00] hostages.

Um, But no Israeli leader is willing to have the hostages transform the battlefield into Hamas's battlefield. They're not willing to play Hamas's game with the hostages. And so Hamas warned at the beginning that we're going to start killing hostages if the ground war begins. They'd warned at the beginning we're going to release them.

very slowly. We're going to trickle them out, hoping to delay the ground war. All those things Israel completely ignored and did its own schedule and started the ground war. And now, Hamas is trying to leak that it'll start releasing them for humanitarian pauses, or for ceasefires of five days, or things like that.

And these leaks are kind of coming out, but not directly, not publicly. It's another game. No Israeli, including the families, trusts Hamas's games. And so no Israelis willing to stop the war effort for Hamas's games. But there is a moment in which Hamas can come and say, Hey guys, here, standing at the border, you can take pictures of them.

Here's five kids. Give us a [00:47:00] day. And these five kids walk across the border. Don't give us a day. We shoot them right here. What are you going to do to us? Kill us. That was right. That was already on the tip. There is a Hamas That you know as Galen said we will exchange humanitarian pauses In Gaza, there are there been humanitarian, you know whole, you know No attack zones and and and corridors for civilians to flee, but we will give a respite to the actual assault on Hamas itself in exchange for hostages.

In other words, it's front loading it, right? Hamas gives us hostages, it buys a couple days to breathe. That, Israel's willing to do. Less than that, Israel's not willing to do, because there isn't the trust. It's not willing to stop shooting and then discover that it'll take a week to get a hostage out, right?

So the families are trapped in that, and they're trapped essentially in their own knowledge that, as Galan said, the best way to get them out is to go after [00:48:00] Hamas mercilessly. I don't know how many we're gonna end up getting out in that kind of game of chicken almost. Two names I want to ask you about for different reasons, uh, you talked a little bit earlier about Hezbollah.

Hassan Nasrallah gave a speech on Friday, a much hyped, much anticipated speech. We had our own conversation on this podcast with Matt Leavitt from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where he laid out why he thought the speech was basically a nothingburger, that there was a lot of buildup, but at the end of the day it was Hassan Nasrallah saying Bye, didn't I hear you?

We're not getting involved, or at least we're not getting involved now. What was the sense in Israel? The response to Nasrallah's speech, was it that, that folks were, people were, the public was cautiously, cautiously relieved, recognizing that cautious relief is inherently fragile? No, I don't think there was relief.

Um, I think there are two camps. Uh, one camp is a little [00:49:00] sad to find out Nasrallah won't start the war. Um, what Israelis learned on October 7th, and we've talked about this before, is that if they can do it, they will do it. And you don't put any trust in your own, you know, psychological analysis of the enemy.

Because we did, and we based our entire defensive doctrine on it, and 1, 400, you know, civilians, 1, 400 people paid their lives. Um, and so, nobody believes Nasrallah. If Nasrallah pretends to be asking for a ceasefire, the army ramps up preparation for a Hezbollah assault. Um, there, there isn't, you know, we're not in, we're the only thing that Israelis are looking at now.

And that's true of ordinary citizens, pundits on TV, and politicians and military leaders. The only thing we're looking at is what could he do? We, we don't listen to the words anymore. So, there was very little interest. Really, there was very little interest in Israel for what he has to say. And then what he actually had to say Was essentially it was totally Hamas.

[00:50:00] It was all Hamas had no Iranian connection. We didn't do it You know it's like and it was all a lot of bravado Israel's weak and Israel's own media is now saying that Israel is you know spiderweb That you could just you know brush out of the way and all of that the usual Nasrallah stuff since 2006 Nasrallah has basically been in hiding and he's aged poorly Uh, in hiding.

And so, you know, I think that if that was not a ruse, then what we saw, uh, was him in decline. If it was a ruse, the Israelis are assuming it's a ruse. And so it's in the same sense, him in decline. Hamas, if Hezbollah, we know Hezbollah is prepared. Pairing this fast, um, you know, attack on Israel that takes over towns and shows that Israel's weak.

Um, we know it because Hezbollah has been advertising it for many, many years now. Um, and Hamas just stole their thunder. Hamas just did it, and it did it on a scale much smaller than Hezbollah would've done it. And so [00:51:00] they kind of stole their element of surprise and ruined their whole party. And so, you know, the Israeli sense, I think is that.

Nasrallah and Hezbollah generally are less than, um, they like to pretend, not because they're not incredibly dangerous and not because they don't have 150, 000 missiles, including some precision missiles that could cause tremendous harm in Israel, but because we are willing to fight that war. And we don't believe that they're deterrable, and so there's a kind of grim determination rather than, you know, a willingness to just play the psychological game and sit and sift through his little speeches, and it's a different Israel, and, and he doesn't seem to have understood that yet.

Uh, we talked earlier about what's going on in the Bedouin community. I do, before we wrap, I did want to ask you about Mansur For our listeners, as the leader of the Ram party in Israel, which is a, uh, Arab, Muslim Arab party in Israel and historically, the [00:52:00] Arab parties, political parties in Israel have not formed coalitions with Israeli governments, Mansour Abbas broke that, uh, uh, broke that up.

That record, that history, and he joined the last government, the Bennett Lapid government. So Mansour Abbas's party, the Ram party, had four seats in the, in the Bennett Lapid government. In the last election, it gained votes after him cooperating with and joining the, the Israeli government. Now he has five seats.

And he said some very constructive things. over the last couple of years about, beyond, longer, farther back, but no one was paying attention, about his community's role in a Jewish state, in a Jewish society, and his recognition that Israel is a Jewish state, but, but wanting to play a role in it, and have influence in it, and be constructive in it.

I spent some time with him when Saul and I were working on our next book. We, we interviewed him quite extensively. But in the last 24 hours, there's been news out of Israel That he, a member of his party, Iman [00:53:00] Khatib Yassin, had said that videos being circulated by the IDF of the atrocities committed by Hamas did not show, quote, rape of women, nor did they show, quote, slaughter of babies.

So here, Khatib Yassin was echoing or, you know, kind of carrying the Hamas propaganda, and Mansour Abbas demanded that he quit the Knesset. He's effectively kicking him out of the party, or at least trying to. Uh, that seems like a pretty big moment, but there's, there's a swirl of news generally on everything related.

To the war so I worry that this kind of tidbit gets lost and eclipsed in the swirl of news But I do think it's more than just a tidbit It's actually pretty important. Well, what, um, what Hatib Yassin said, um, she actually, um, was asked, it was a news interview, and she was asked, did you see the screening of the unedited, uncensored footage?

Um, [00:54:00] because it was screened to members of Knesset. And she said, no, I wouldn't watch it. And, but I heard from a trustworthy source that, in fact, it showed nothing that, you know. Um, so she, she did this very, very, very, uh, irresponsibly, and it's not clear what she was thinking. And um, Mansour Abbas has been an astonishing figure.

It's an important thing to understand, Mansour Abbas's party is an Islamist party. What does that mean? That means that his party is not just Muslim. but is, in fact, a party that seeks Islamic renewal and Islamic politics. It's a party that belongs to that large, um, um, milieu, or, you know, large group of ideologies and visions of Islam in modern, in the modern times, that essentially try to answer the question of what the heck happened to Islam, how did the Muslim world and the Arab world collapse, and how did they become so backward, and how did they, right, and they can't compete with the West, and it answers [00:55:00] it by saying We have lost our mojo because we have lost our authentic original Islam that used to make us powerful.

And so we want, we need to get back to an Islamic politics and away from this modern nationalist politics and nation states and borders and all these ideas that are imposed on us by imperialists and colonialists in the West, uh, and get back to an original authentic Islamic politics. He belongs to that movement.

Now, so does Hamas, so does the Muslim Brotherhood, so does in its Shiite iteration. the Iranian regime, and, um, you know, Hezbollah, but there are pieces of that world of that movement. There is a huge diversity in that Islamist world, and some parts of it are, are pacifist. Mansour Abbas is the, uh, student of Sheikh Nimr Darwish, um, in the 1980s, as a religious point renounced.

violence, renounced decolonization as a strategy, as sort of an Algeria [00:56:00] style terrorism strategy, and developed a, a peaceful version of that Islamist politics. And what, what becomes fascinating is that And I would say that Darwish, Darwish started out as a radical. Right, he went to prison, he planned terror attacks.

He went to prison and went to an Israeli prison, planned terror attacks, and then wound up where you're describing, and he even went farther, although what you're saying is extremely important, he criticized other governments, especially the Iranian government, for denying the Holocaust, so he became this, this public educator.

About what the Jews went through. Right. And the Israeli political right, unfairly, in my view, unfairly because it was politically easy and politically convenient and so they ran with it even though it really doesn't reflect what's happening. Um, they said, you know, he is a terrorism supporter because he has these ideological overlaps with Hamas, Hezbollah, etc.

But what There are moments where religious conservatism can be more [00:57:00] moderate than even secular liberalism. And those moments are those places where religious conservatives, especially if they believe in a redemption like all monotheists do, um, say to themselves, hey, you know what? I believe in this redemption.

This redemption is for sure, right? Eventually the Israelis will all be Muslim. Eventually the world will all be Muslim. Eventually the Messiah is coming. But. I believe in it because God will bring it about. I don't have to bring it about. And that distancing of that redemption to a divinely ordained future can, is, is a tool used by religious movements throughout the ages, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim, to become deeply moderate in the immediate present.

And Mansur Abbas is that, and has been that his entire career, and is that as a religious leader, not just as a political leader. And so Mansur Abbas Uh, has spent this entire war while p Arab politics all over the region are roiled. And there's, you know, there's, there's, there's [00:58:00] crowds in the streets screaming, and the, and the, and the governments of, of, of Egypt and Jordan and many other places in the region are actually afraid of another Arab spring sparking if the killing in Gaza doesn't stop.

And all of this discourse that's happening in the Arab world, Mansor Bas has stood his ground and he has said that he literally today, literally said these words. There is a day after. And in the day after, the Jews are going to be here, and the Arabs are going to be here, and we're going to have to live together.

And so we're not going to do things, right? He was responding to Amichai Eliyahu, an Israeli minister, who said something very silly and very, uh, offensive. We're going to nuke Gaza. About nuking Gaza. Yeah, something, and he's a minister of tradition. He's one of these fake ministries, and nobody took it seriously in Israel, except to be horrified at him.

Him and Netanya criticized him and put, put out. So anyway, the long story short, Abbas Yeah. Marginalized him. Didn't Netanyahu kick him outta the cabinet room? Yeah, but it's a fake kicking out because legally he has the right to vote. So they just called him in the phone. It wasn't, but anyway, it, it was a, it was a little bit of a damage control.

Got all right. Without actually kicking him out. The point is, and [00:59:00] he's been roundly criticized for that Netanya, but nevertheless, the point is. That Mansour Abbas's response was, we're all going to be here the day after. So any Jew who thinks that he has a solution to Gaza that just involves, you know, leveling Gaza, or any Arab that thinks he has a solution for Israel that involves smashing, right?

And so Mansour Abbas has held that line. He took Khatib Yassin's comment and he did something that Netanyahu has failed to do. with every single person who has said something insane and damaging. Damaging to the war effort, damaging to the country, damaging to public unity in the middle of a war. All of the far right and all of the extremists in Netanyahu's coalition, Netanyahu has let stand.

He has, he has refused to push them out because he needs them to He thinks he's going to survive the war afterwards, right? After the war, he thinks he's going to survive politically. And so, um, he's refused to this, but what Mansour Abbas did is he announced that Khatib Yassin is no longer a member of the party.

She's not going to be on the next Knesset list. She's not going to run. And he, uh, and the party leadership of Rahm, at his instruction, ordered [01:00:00] her to resign. for saying, I heard from somebody that the video doesn't even show those things that the Jews claim it shows. And so he really has taken a stand, and he is paying a political cost, and he is clarifying to his own rank and file this, um, alliance, this coexistence with the Jews.

This is what we're doing now. And if you disagree with me, that's why there's a ballot box. But that's what we are. And that, to me, is astonishing. In other words, he has proven all of his Jewish detractors from the Israeli political right, from the Israeli Arab political world, he has proven all of them wrong.

And he really does seem to be committed now, when there's blood on the line, when there's immense political cost to be paid for it, he really still now is committed openly and publicly, and in actions, not just words, to coexistence. It's something we didn't think we would see, and it really is astonishing to [01:01:00] watch.

There are also all these indications that what Mansur Abbas, first of all, Mansur Abbas's party has been doing this, right, for two Knessets already. This has been the line, and, um, or slightly more even. And it has grown to become the single largest Arab political party, while, while holding this line. And we've seen Huge amount of anecdotal evidence that this is a powerful, a powerful thread in Arab Israeli politics today.

One sign, for example, um, was, uh, a Bedouin man, uh, Hisham, who was, uh, in the, uh, rave in the, in the music festival in the desert that was hit by the, uh, Hamas paragliders, and Four of his cousins from the Bedouin city of Rahat, in the south, in the Negev desert, they are watching the news on Saturday. They get in a car, they drive to try and rescue him.

They understand there's this attack by Hamas, and along the way they keep meeting people fleeing the Hamas gunmen and just running in the middle of the desert. They pick these people up, drive them [01:02:00] back, drive back to the festival, pick more people up, drive back, drive back to the festival, and they keep running into people.

They don't want to leave anyone behind. They drive them back. These four Bedouin cousins saved 40 people at that festival, um, and the stories of Arabs who saved those people, of the Arab paramedic who charged in knowing there's a Hamas massacre going on, seeing if he can rescue people, and then getting gunned down by Hamas.

The story of Arabs saying to the Hamas gunmen as they meet them, I am Arab, what are you doing? And then Hamas beating them. Um, those stories are everywhere. And we mentioned at the beginning, the Bedouin Uh, battalion, the Bedouin, uh, infantrymen going into Gaza, feeling Israeli, feeling like they have to give Hamas, teach Hamas a lesson, putting on music videos about it.

Um, Mansour Abbas is His stance, his new posture runs deep and reflects a real feeling. And so I think it isn't just [01:03:00] astonishing, and he isn't just showing that he's sticking to it with real integrity, even at moments where he has to face down people who disagree with him in his own party. He isn't just fighting for it.

I think it comes from a deep place in his constituency as well. You know, Haviv, we have, um, managed in most of these conversations to end with rays of darkness, but, uh, today we, we ended with rays of light. I, um, I mean, I'm, I'm moved by it because it speaks to the promise of what true Israeli solidarity could look like across not only intra Jewish worlds, but also between Jewish and Arab worlds, but also, um, at a practical level.

I gotta tell you, it gives me some hope. Uh, that there, you know, we talk about the different fronts. There's the front in the South, there's the front in the North, there's the front in the West Bank, and then there's always this question, is there going to be a front with the Israeli Arabs? Like we saw in May of 21, it wasn't a full on front, but there were, there were skirmishes.

This gives me [01:04:00] some hope that, that maybe at least that fourth front won't be, uh, Won't present itself as a real threat. We saw in 2021 that there are some streaks of some pockets of Hamas support, real outspoken Hamas support among Israel's Arab citizens. Um, and what we are seeing now is that there's a much larger and deeper, um, desire among many more of them to be Israeli, to be rooted and integrated into Israeli society.

And that's of course, a challenge for the Jewish majority because it has to deliver that for them. Um, and You know, it is, it is absolutely a ray of light. Uh, we started talking about the Shloshim. The Shloshim is when you stop looking back, and you start looking forward. So, Maybe that's appropriate. As always, Haviv, uh, thank you, and I will look forward to checking back in with you in a week.

I will too, and happy birthday, Dan. This is going out on your birthday. That's also looking forward. It's important to stick to the optimistic things, [01:05:00] uh, right now, so. I hope you have a great one. You know, I will say, I, we we're not doing, we're, we're having dinner with some friends and, uh, I couldn't imagine, uh, doing anything too celebratory these days just feels weird.

But, uh, you know, my my kid said to me a couple weeks ago we're, we're very ritualistic about going to NFL football games, the jets. And, uh, we never miss a game. And there was a big game a couple weeks ago and my kids were insistent on going, and I was like, you know, I'm really not up to it. Given everything going on in Israel.

This would be like the first time we've ever missed a, uh, a Jets home game, I think, for as long as we've been following, uh, the sport as a family. And I, and my kids are like, no, Dad, you gotta go, you need a break from all this, you gotta go, you gotta go. I said, no, I'm just not out in the right headspace.

And at one point, one of my sons said, Dad, if you don't go to the Jets game, The terrorists win. And, I thought, you know what? There's some truth in that. You got some politicians. You're raising some politicians in that house. I know. So, there's some wisdom. So, we [01:06:00] will do a low key honoring of my birthday, I guess.

But, uh, anyways. Thank you for the good wishes. Yeah, thank you. Alright, take care, my friend.

That's our show for today. To keep up with Haviv, remember you can follow him on X. It's at Aviv Retic Gore. You can also follow him at the Times of Israel. That's times of israel.com. Please remember to order our book, the Genius of Israel, which you can do today. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar.

Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.