Flipping the Script -- with Haviv Rettig Gur
Haviv Rettig Gur returns for our weekly conversation from Jerusalem to provide real-time reporting and analysis on the war, and invaluable historical context. Today, we talk to Haviv about the hostage crisis in the context of Israel's war fighting. And we also discuss Haviv's contrarian view of how Israel is reacting to the growing international pressure it is encountering – what it means for Israel and what it means for Jews around the world.
Transcript
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[00:00:00] Ironically, paradoxically, the very fact that so much world opinion has turned against Israel serves Israel's purposes right now. Because Israel needs to show Hamas, one of the great ways that you defeat this kind of warfare, is to show that you are actually implacable. To show that you are actually irremovable.
In other words, Hamas brings to bear everything it's got. And once it's brought to bear everything it's got, and every ally has said everything they're going to say and done everything they're going to do, Israel is still hunting them down because they stole and massacred children. And so what Israel's leverage in northern Gaza is going to be, to make sure that Hamas understands that if it wants to survive it has to leave Gaza altogether, uh, Israel's leverage is that it's going to stay a long time.
That it is not going to bend to world opinion. It is not going to bend to the pressure from the West, or from anyone, or from the Arab world. And once [00:01:00] Hamas understands that, I think this war changes.
It's Sunday, November 12th, at 11pm here in New York City. It is Monday, November 13th, at 6am, just as the day is starting, in Israel. Today is our weekly check in with Haviv Retikgur in Jerusalem, something I look forward to every week for my sanity. Plus, Haviv always has some provocative analysis combined with his soulfulness that makes these interesting conversations.
I wanted to talk to Haviv about how Israeli decision makers are factoring the hostage crisis into the context of its warfighting strategy, especially now that the IDF is moving farther and farther along, closer and closer. into the center of Gaza and how Israel is reacting to [00:02:00] the growing international pressure it is encountering.
Everyone I speak to here in the U. S. who's following this, especially those in the media, keep asking how long can Israel continue to withstand the mass protests, the condemnations, the U. N. votes. And other actions and statements by leaders of governments from around the world and what it means not only for Israel But what it means for Jews around the world Haviv has a contrarian take on the impact of the global backlash against Israel He thinks it might actually backfire on Hamas rather than actually weaken Israel, but I'll let him Explain it.
Finally, last week we released the new book by Saul Singer and me called The Genius of Israel, The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World, which you can now purchase from your favorite bookstore. Haviv Retikur from the Times of Israel on flipping the script. This is Call Me Back.
And I [00:03:00] very much look forward to these weekly check ins with my friend Haviv Retikgur from Jerusalem. Haviv, thanks for being here. Dan, good to be here. How are things before we jump into How are things in your world? My world just got a lot better. My, uh, brother in law's wife gave birth. Um, so we have a new baby in the family.
Mazel tov. Mazel tov. Thank you. Thank you. It's pretty, uh, wonderful. He also managed to get out. Uh, he's in the paratroopers in the reserves on the front. So, he managed to get out and he was with her. The family is doing great. Uh, moment of real, real light. You know, in a rough six weeks, obviously. And does he now have to go back in?
Yeah, yeah. He'll get as many days as they can spare, but he then has to go back to his unit. He's not alone. There are hundreds of young fathers whose wives gave birth while they were in, and this is something that, yeah, it's, it's, you know, it used to make the news, but now it's just happening so much [00:04:00] it's not making the news.
A friend of mine's nephew came in for his wife's birth from the front lines and then had to go back in and he has these images of his nephew's wife in the bunker, in the, you know, bomb shelter with this newborn baby. They live closer to where the rockets are being taken out. So, you know, just the idea of a newborn baby.
Spending her first days in this world in and out of bomb shelters and sirens. It's just eerie. You know, Dan, I agree with you. It's crazy. It's a crazy world we live in. But at the same time, it's a happy thing. It's a kid. It's a family. They're taking care of them. Their country is taking care of them. We're, you know, it's, it really is, you, you feel the grind, you feel the pressure, you feel the tension.
My wife was in and out of reserves, I'm in and out of reserves. We all have family, we all have work. Everything is kind of piling on, and we're [00:05:00] grinding week after week after week, and the news from Gaza is terrible, and the soldiers are dying, and everybody knows somebody, and massive marches in the world, some of which have had And unbelievable antisemitism involved in them in one place or another, and all of that weighs you down.
And then a baby is born, and then suddenly you can go forever. So it's um, life doesn't always give you exactly the situation you want, but I think we feel very strong and very uplifted by it. Good. From, from uh, strength to strength. New babies arriving in the world. If anything can give you hope, it is that.
I, I want to, um. Haviv talked to you about this question I've been wrestling with, which is watching from afar the Israeli deliberations on whether to pause or not to pause and the pressure Israel is under to pause. They've agreed to these, I think, daily pauses for four hours. This rubs up against something we talked about a week ago, where there are these [00:06:00] three pressures, time pressures, fuses, time fuses that Israel is dealing with.
And, uh, and one of them was the international pressure to slow down the fighting, pause the fighting, reach some, reach some kind of ceasefire. I don't think there's any possibility for a ceasefire and. That obviously rubs up against Israel achieving its war aims, and then there's the question of where the pursuit of hostages fit in to either, you know, to, to those scenarios, and that's what I wanted to focus in on today.
But before we get into the hostages, where are you on the whole question of to pause or not to pause? Basically, um, Hamas built the battlefield, and Hamas built it for no other reason than to survive. No matter what the civilian death toll in Gaza is, uh, no matter what it costs to destroy Hamas to get them out of there, um, their goal is to survive.
Their mission, their vision of the, sort of, their basic strategic vision is the death of a thousand [00:07:00] cuts. This is something that, you know, Hezbollah is part of, Iran is part of. It is why they get that support. You make Israeli life so miserable that first the elites leave, and then eventually all Israelis leave.
It's sort of classic anti colonial war. And the way you sustain it is you only have to not die. You only have to not disappear. You only have to not, um, be crushed to the point where you can't continue to threaten the enemy again at all costs. Now, part of the cost to Israel is the civilian death toll in Gaza in Hamas's strategic frame.
It sounds monstrous to us. It's very standard for anti colonial. conflicts. And so, um, the way Hamas frames its war as an anti colonial war, um, you know, when the FLN in Algeria, um, carried on its bombing campaign, its terror campaign against the French, one of the things that eventually weakened and drove the French out of Algeria was the French bombings of civilians and the massive death toll to civilians in Algeria, which the French [00:08:00] in their internal discourse couldn't explain.
Therefore, that push to crush Hamas This, that constant pressure, the only way to respond to this kind of constant attacks on Israel, no matter what, no matter the cost, the higher the cost, both for Palestinians and for Israelis, the more Hamas strategic vision is being realized. The way to respond to that pressure is to create a situation in which reshapes it, pressures on Hamas permanently, it is never lifted.
Right up until the end. And so, in Israel, there's an understanding that a three day pause means that all of the tunnels that are currently next in line for Israel's destruction Israel has destroyed something like 150 entrances to these tunnels It's slowly shrinking Hamas's operating room It appears, you know, this, it's very hard to tell from the outside But as far as we can tell, um, Hamas is actually unable to mount very serious and effective operations against the Israeli [00:09:00] military in northern Gaza, not just because the army isn't descending in massive numbers into the tunnels yet, but actually because they literally haven't been able to launch rockets.
The rocket launches are dwindling down. And so Hamas seems to be broken. Its basic chain of command seems to be broken in northern Gaza, and that's a function of the constant pressure. You give them three days to regroup. You have to claw back that, you know, uh, initiative that you have in shaping the battlefield, because they'll have responded by reshaping it in return.
Although that was a long way of saying, this war is costing too much to slow it down. This, this, this, this, taking the war to Hamas as successfully it has gone, as it has gone so far, has been too expensive to now let up. On that, on that effort. So if the Israeli military and the Israeli political leadership agrees to some kind of a ceasefire, that's longer than, I don't know, six hours, I would be very surprised.
And I think they would, that would be a, the beginning of a real failure in their management of the war. And can you, for our [00:10:00] listeners, just spell out the current arrangement as we understand it, in terms of pauses that's been agreed to? There's been something agreed to. Yeah, there's been a lot of, um, different things sort of thrown into the air.
What appears to be happening on the ground is that, um, Every day, you know, there's a window in which the IDF stops, you know, in a significant way. Obviously, if there's an attack, and there have been attacks during these periods, the IDF responds with gunfire. But there is a stop of any IDF initiated operations in northern Gaza, in the area where the IDF is operating, mostly Gaza City and its environs, a little bit beyond it as well.
Uh, and Palestinian civilians are encouraged, and I mean really heavily encouraged, with loudspeakers, with pamphlets, um, with phone calls, with phone calls to the hospitals. We're talking now about the IDF is coming up to Shifa Hospital, uh, the largest hospital in the Gaza Strip, and asking them to remove, to, you know, to leave.
We know that the army has been talking to the heads of that hospital. Uh, the army has [00:11:00] given them diesel fuel just today, about 300 liters of it. Um, there is this conversation with them to try and get them and to try and give them what they need. You know, they have, they have babies there that need hospital care.
So try to be able to remove all those people from the hospital and get out of the battle zone so the IDF can then prosecute its operation and reach, for example, what we know to be a massive Hamas bunker, a massive Hamas headquarters underneath that. Hospital. So right now we have several hours a day.
It's I think officially four. Sometimes it's a little more if they're still walking out. Sometimes it's a little less if people aren't there or if there's gunfire launched by Hamas and the rest of the time the army initiates operations. And the idea that what Hamas is demanding is a significant, you know, three days, five days, uh, complete pause, complete ceasefire in addition to many, many other things in exchange for some kind of a prisoner exchange, some kind of a hostage exchange.
And that is not something I think. You know, everything we've heard from the Israeli [00:12:00] army, that is not something that's going to happen. And by the way, I, I mean, we've heard that from Netanyahu, we've heard that from Defense Minister Gallant, we've heard that from Benny Gantz, the, the three people at the top of the decision making apparatus.
And we've also heard that literally in just the, the um, the morale speeches of colonels on the ground, leading the actual fighting forces, have been telling their men, we're going to do this and we're going to do this until the job is done. So Hamas's interest is to extend the war's timeline as much as possible by using the hostages, and Israel's pressured by the international community to end the war, basically, or to reach a ceasefire, as we mentioned.
Hamas's lever here is pretty effective. Uh, they, they have, they, there's a lot of moves they can make with the hostages. They could say, if you want us to do some kind of hostage exchange, we need the fighting to stop. Or they could use the hostages as a deterrent, uh, against Israel in certain areas. Oh, don't bomb here.
We have hostages. It just seems that the hostages give Hamas a lot of optionality that in a way that Israel has [00:13:00] never had to deal with before. Um, I'm going to say something that tears my heart out. I don't think it does. I think if they had taken five soldiers, then we all would have been tormented, worried, thinking about how to get them back.
That would have been the primary aim of the operation or the war. But they took 240. They took children, they took babies, they've sent us Videos of the children. They're glorying in the kidnapping of babies. By taking 240, I think they have made the cost of allowing them to continue to exist so unimaginably high in our minds, that our only alternative to secure the safety of the future hostages, not of these.
If hostages are worth What they have been worth until now, then this is the first round and this will always be the purpose of every future operation. [00:14:00] And so we now have to reduce the cost of hostages. And the only way to reduce the cost of hostages is to, is to flip the script. And to say, the only way they'll release hostages is if it saves their literal skins.
As if it is a pause from death. The Hamas organization is in full blown collapse. I'll let them survive and flee to Egypt and go live somewhere in exchange for 240 hostages. I'll do that. I'm not going to leave Hamas intact in Gaza, planning the next hostage taking, planning the next surprise. The enemy always surprises you.
That's the definition of warfare. Every officer and every army worth its weight, you know, worth its salt knows that the enemy surprises you. I'm not going to wait for them to surprise me again. So Hamas with 240, you know, if it had taken five, then you would be right, I think. It really would be a real important and difficult question that we'd be asking ourselves.
But 240, [00:15:00] we're not asking ourselves that. This threat to Untold numbers of future children has to be wiped out. And so they've actually simplified things by making the hostage problem so vast. And I don't think they understand that yet. And so they're still playing the old games. They're still trying to send us little messages of psychological torture for the parents.
I don't think anything, anything short of 240, anything short of all the civilians or maybe all the kids, I don't think anything short of a massive gesture from Hamas that actually would be hard for the Israeli government to tell the Israeli people why we're not stopping for, for this gesture, uh, won't stop it.
If they bring all the kids, all of them, forward, uh, and then say, you know, we need three days for this. I think they'll get it, but anything short of literally putting the kids in front, right front and center where we see them and walking [00:16:00] them across the border, anything short of that, the Israelis will interpret.
And we've seen that repeatedly. They have interpreted, the Israelis have interpreted every single Hamas offer, every single dangling, every single negotiation as Hamas psychological game. That can be ignored because the only thing that will explain to Hamas that it has to release hostages is more military pressure.
So, in a sense, the hostages are a big driving force of this war. In a larger sense, the hostages are no longer the Israeli strategy. They can't be simply because they took so many is the Israeli presence in Northern Gaza. Assuming Israel takes over Northern Gaza, a new lever that Israel has, that the IDF has.
I mean, right. We're talking about all the optionality that Hamas has. I'm trying to think of the optionality the IDF has. It's an interesting question because the IDF has vowed to destroy Hamas. And that takes away a lot of levers, right? If this really is an all or nothing fight, [00:17:00] you fight all or nothing.
What, what can the IDF give Hamas that would be, right? You only have pressure. You only have leverage over someone. If, if they change their behavior, you will change yours. But if you're not going to do anything except destroy them, you have no leverage over them. Which, by the way, is Hamas's problem with Israel right now.
It's lost all its leverage over Israel because the Israelis now understand that it's simply genocidal. There is no. Talking to them. There's no negotiating. And so Hamas no longer really has that leverage over the Israelis. Hamas still hopes that world opinion has leverage over the Israelis. It still hopes that, you know, I don't know what, if the Saudis really get too allergic to the Israelis because of what's happening in Gaza, that will matter to the Israelis.
But Hamas no longer has that leverage. Um, I don't think that the Israeli presence in northern Gaza is something Israel is going to negotiate with Hamas over. Ironically, paradoxically, The very fact that so much world opinion has turned against Israel. [00:18:00] serves Israel's purposes right now. Because Israel needs to show Hamas, one of the great ways that you defeat this kind of warfare, is to show that you are actually implacable.
To show that you are actually irremovable. In other words, Hamas brings to bear everything it's got. And once it's brought to bear everything it's got and every ally has said everything they're going to say and done everything they're going to do, Israel is still hunting them down because they stole and massacred children.
And so what Israel's leverage in northern Gaza is going to be, to make sure that Hamas understands that if it wants to survive it has to leave Gaza altogether, uh, Israel's leverage is that it's going to stay a long time. That it is not going to bend to world opinion. It is not going to bend to the pressure from the West, or from anyone, or from the Arab world.
And once Hamas understands that, I think this war changes. That point you just made, Havif, is certainly [00:19:00] original. It is fresh. I have not heard anybody make that point, and you're really getting me thinking in real time, because every person I know who cares about Israel, who I'm talking to over here in the U.
S., is completely freaked out by the global backlash against Israel. They have the same reaction that I have, which is, how is it that the outrage against Israel commenced? Even before Israel even responded to the massacre of October 7th. So Jews in the diaspora, but not just Jews, people who care about Israel.
The first reaction is how is it that Israel is the target of all this hate and they haven't even responded. Then once Israel started to respond and there was all this outrage. People over here were like, wait a minute. So people are outraged that Israel, that Jews object to being slaughtered. And then the outrage was, well, there, there are too many Palestinian civilians are being killed.
And of course the reaction [00:20:00] is Israel does not choose. How Hamas structures this battlefield, if it chooses to, as we were talking about earlier, if it chooses to structure its battlefield locates Palestinian civilians with schools and mosques and hospitals, the UN run facilities, Israel can go out of its way to minimize Palestinian casualties, as by the way, President Biden said he is confident Israel's trying to do, based on the briefings he's received.
But still, it's war. And especially the way Hamas fights wars, it's very hard for Israel. And with each step of the way, you just watch, no matter what happens, Israel's being attacked and Jews over here are being attacked globally. And I just sense for many of my Jewish friends and Jewish colleagues that they're, they're just, they're upset by what is happening because they think it's the, a, they think it's, it's morally confused at best.
At worst, it's outright antisemitism, uh, the position that many in the international community are taking. Uh, secondly. They think it's [00:21:00] unsustainable. They think Israel cannot keep fighting this war effectively in the face of this international backlash. And what you're saying is that backlash helps Israel, which I'd never considered before, because Israel can say, that's all you got.
Hamas, it's all you got. You revved up the whole world against us, and we're still going. I'll tell you, I'll put it real simple. I personally, me, Khabib, don't care. What the world thinks of me. I don't trust the world. I don't think there is an international community. I know that's a shocking, horrifying piece of heresy to say that.
I look at the weak and small peoples of the world, the Uyghurs, Bosnians, Tutsis, time after time after time, dozens and dozens of times. We just watched a big Arab summit in Saudi Arabia condemn Israel for violations of international law while welcoming Bashar Assad back into the ranks of Arab legitimacy.
[00:22:00] So, you know, this whole thing of international community and international law and international legitimacy, I just don't trust it. I remember being a young man, this thought first occurred to me, I'm a young man in the army, I'm in uniform, I'm standing on the Lebanese border, I'm looking at Hezbollah positions.
All of which are within or near or inside or under, uh, villages. And I know the Hezbollah's one, you know, method of operation, their MO, which of course is also true of Hamas, is to have their entire arsenal under civilians so that the Israelis have to go through civilians to get to them. And I, I know that that's their plan.
In other words, international law in this case is the strategy of the bad guys. And, and, and where's the international law defending me. Right? We saw in the Syrian civil war, I think there were, um, uh, peacekeepers on the Golan Heights. I think they were, uh, from Fiji, from Ireland, and I believe from India. I hope I got that right.
And then Jabhat al Nusra takes the Syrian two thirds of the Golan. Um, and, uh, this is a group affiliated with al Qaeda. This is a very, very extremist [00:23:00] group. And what do the peacekeepers do? The peacekeepers run behind the Israeli military line. And are protected by the IDF, uh, for the duration of the Syrian civil war.
And so, uh, international law, international community are not things that will save me. And therefore they're not really things that get to decide what will make me safe. So I, you know, international opinion, it a little bit matters to me, it doesn't matter existentially. But you know what does matter? You know what will change my children's future?
What will affect it profoundly? What Palestinians think. What Palestinians believe. Our future, for better or worse, is intertwined. I'm not getting rid of them any more than they're getting rid of me. And so the problem we have, in my view, is every single theory here that claims that one, we can get rid of the other one.
Hamas is the embodiment, the reification. It's not just Hamas. There are other factions in the Palestinian political and ideological elites that, that have these views. But Hamas is the big one and the powerful one and the [00:24:00] popular one that says to Palestinians, we can still get rid of the Jews. I need to show Palestinians that that's wrong.
Now I could do it by, by being very clever and how I talk to Palestinians, but they're not listening to me. I need to show them that it's wrong. You know what the best and fastest way to show Palestinians that I'm not going anywhere and therefore they need a different politics. There've been many strategies of liberation in the 20th century.
One was anti colonial terrorism and it worked. It worked beautifully. Algeria, many, many, uh, you know, Southern Africa, Southeast Asia, Kenya, they worked in different places. Anti colonial terrorism. If it works, the world doesn't come to the, to, to the terrorists with, you know, moral demands. It worked. You, you, you know, some colonialist actually left your country.
Your country is independent. Well done. It's not going to work on me because I have no mother country. It's literally, I'm literally categorically, maybe I'm a bad guy. Maybe I'm evil. Okay. They can think that about me, but I'm not the kind of evil they think they're fighting them, a different kind of evil.
So the war they're [00:25:00] conducting against me is a war doomed to failure. And if it's. It's doomed to failure. It's doomed to endless rounds of suffering, and it's doomed to, by the way, these massive waves of terrorism happened at the height of the peace process. In other words, it also crushed the Israeli left in time after time, this Palestinian misunderstanding of us, and it's a misunderstanding.
Fortified and bolstered by left wing, especially academic Westerners who keep saying they're definitely colonialist, and this is definitely decolonization. My point isn't that that's immoral, or not nice, or an epithet, or how dare you, or anti Semitic. My point is it's just literally not going to work. And therefore I need Palestinians to grasp that I have nowhere to go and I need them to grasp that they need a new strategy.
And you know the best way to do that? Is to test it in real time. Test it. Do your anti colonial strategy. Do your worst. Let the world do its worst. I'm upset that the world isn't even tougher on us. Because if the world gets tough on Israel, and it works, and we all get up and [00:26:00] leave, then they were right all along.
Now I happen to know that's not going to happen, but I need Palestinians to know that's not going to happen so we can have a different future together. And so I don't think that Israel's strategic situation now, because it looks bad, I think it's good. Speaking of, uh, this meeting you mentioned in Saudi Arabia, uh, where they welcome back Bashar al Assad, uh, into the broader Arab community, which I agree is outrageous, a man who's responsible for the, for the butchering of, of hundreds of thousands of innocent Syrian civilians using chemical weapons, uh, and, and suddenly, you know, no, no one, no one is protesting anywhere in the world, uh, against Bashar al Assad being welcomed back into, uh, quasi Saudi Arabia.
Dan, it's, it's more than that. He killed hundreds of thousands of Sunni Muslims in an effort to rid, as in Alawi, to rid Syria of massive Sunni populations. He actually carried out a [00:27:00] purposeful, I mean, if, if we go with the definition of genocide, that's not quite the Holocaust, not quite the Armenian genocide, but something a little less, which is sort of the modern version of this idea.
Yeah. He committed a genocide against Sunni Muslims. Palestinians are Sunni Muslims. The Muslim world didn't march. So there is a, there is a sickness there. Right, right. The hypocrisy is even sharper. And it's, and it's a, it's a hypocrisy that, that devalues themselves. It's not even a hypocrisy has anything to do with me.
I'm not even complaining. Therefore don't march for Palestine. March for Palestine, but for God's sake, march for hundreds of thousands, massacre. Sunni Muslims march for those hundred, please. In other words, it's a devaluation of themselves in favor of these other political stories and narratives. And something, something bad is happening there when Assad walks onto that stage and is just perfectly kosher and everybody's fine with it.
You're, you're right to, to put a spotlight on it. The repetitiveness and the frequency of the hypocrisy and the double standards. [00:28:00] Like with me at least, I sometimes get numbed by them, you know what I mean? It's like, it's so, it's so, you forget how crazy it is. You know how crazy it is, but you feel like it doesn't bear.
It's not worth mentioning over and over and over again, but you're right, it is so outrageous. Well, speaking of outrageous, Aviv, the, specifically these protests going on, and I don't even want to call them protests anymore, because they're not even protests, that are happening in, in the West. Uh, they are, they are mobs, they are violent, they are targeting Jews, they are targeting Jewish owned businesses and properties, including on the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht by design.
By design, you know, at first it was a thing, it still is, to tear down posters of, of, Israeli hostages that are children. That was a thing and it continues to be a thing. And now the new thing is identify Jewish owned businesses and properties and try to destroy them. That is what has been happening at Indigo, which is a large bookstore.
chain in Canada. [00:29:00] Uh, the CEO of which is Jewish. Uh, that is what's happening to all sorts of businesses, coffee shops here in New York City, Jewish owned businesses, attack them, boycott them, pressure the employees to wear the Palestinian flag pin. I mean, just, it's all about targeting the Jew, the Jewish owned business and timed to Kristallnacht.
This week was the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht, and this is when a lot of what I'm describing right now ramped up this, this new wave of activity, uh, at MIT, the, the, the lengths they went to disrupt Jewish students ability to actually go to class, participate in class, the administration had the complete wrong response, and basically tolerating it.
uh, effectively, without saying it, tolerating these mob intimidation campaigns against Jews, that it's not like, oh, we probably shouldn't do it this week because it's the anniversary of Kristallnacht, and, [00:30:00] and it'll look like too, too much in common with Kristallnacht, and we don't want to be stigmatized by that.
It's the opposite. It's, it's too. It's to double down on the barbarism. It's to double down on the on the depravities. It's to double down on what one would used to think was untouchable or too hot to touch to like, Oh, we don't be associated with that. And now it's not only that they're not afraid of being associated with that.
They almost want it. Own it. They want to own the association. And where this all came together for me, and it's been bothering me all week, but we're really, it's been incredibly upsetting. The, the timing of Kristallnacht and the deliberate association with Kristallnacht by these people who are hunting Jews around the U.
S. and, and Canada and Europe. But Nasrallah, coming back to Nasrallah, General Secretary of Hezbollah speaks to this meeting in Saudi Arabia of The one we're talking about where, where Bashar Assad was and he, and he's [00:31:00] criticizing the U S and the UK for standing by Israel, but basically reports to the group.
Don't worry. The whole world is against Israel, except for the U S and the UK, everyone else is against them. So good check, you know, report card, you know, check we're winning. And then he says, and I'm quoting here, we see thousands of people in Washington, New York, London, and Paris protesting against Israel.
And he's. Basically saying, these are our useful idiots. These are, without saying the second part, that part I'm not quoting. But it's almost like, look, look at all these useful, ignorant idiots. We have storming the streets of the major cities of the West to attack the Jews. and attack Israel. It's all coming together.
And I think about these people who are in these protests, some of whom I think are sinister and anti Semitic and know exactly what they're doing. And some of them are just that, useful idiots. [00:32:00] And this is where Nasrallah says the quiet part out loud. I think he wants to own those protests, be associated with those protests.
I think he wants to say my cause and their cause are the same cause. And I think he wants to say that because he has a really big problem. He, uh, and his ideological and political and financial and military masters in Tehran, um, believe that the destruction of Israel is the beginning of Islam's return into history as an agent of history that is coherent and, and powerful and can compete with the, the West.
And that is their, you know, vision for lo these many generations. Um, it is an entire sort of branch of Islamic theory and ideology and strategy and politics, uh, of this Islamic renewal vision. And he has been fighting Israel his entire life, and he hasn't got much to show for it. In the years [00:33:00] since the second Lebanon war, or since Hamas took over Gaza in 2007, the second Lebanon war, I believe, was 2006.
In the time since then, Israel's GDP per capita has doubled. Israel's grown more powerful. Lebanon has collapsed. Everywhere where Iran's proxies operate are essentially in collapse. And Israel doesn't look like it's leaving, and not looking like it's being destroyed suggests that the future of a stronger and healthier and happier and more powerful and assertive Islam might not rest with the destruction of Israel.
And that's where, you know, you have a lot of these other Sunni conservative regimes who are not radical, who are not activist in that way, saying, Hey, maybe we just make peace with Israel and move on with our lives. Nasrallah. needs this, needs Hamas's attack, needs those protests for Gaza to be about the destruction of Israel.
He needs it to be the next ramping up. He wants to make those protesters. By the way, I share with you there are, uh, absolute [00:34:00] anti Semites. Um, there is that whole substrata of, um, Muslim culture. It's not Islam. I live among Islam. I have friends who are Islam. I had a commander in the army. I have neighbors.
It is not Islam, but it is a major Muslim political movement that it crosses borders crosses cultures in the Muslim world and Some of the marches are that and they reflect that and they reflect that discourse when they sing You know phrases out of the Quran or they declare certain things that mean When Israel is destroyed Islam comes back into its own and it's the beginning of the return of Islam But huge numbers of them aren't I'm absolutely convinced it's a majority, but I think it's even a large majority.
Many, many, many Westerners, liberal left wing Westerners, aren't even those college students talking about decolonization. Many of them are just decent people who see the suffering in [00:35:00] Gaza. Here, that Israel has no, offered them, you know, no option to the Palestinians for independence, conclude that that's the story, and march on that.
Because what else are they going to do? They can't come and help anybody, right? In Gaza, right? So they march. Most of them are marching. When Nasrallah claims those marches for himself, Nasrallah doesn't do Israel a disservice. And maybe I'm overly optimistic in all the things I'm telling you today. But what is he saying?
He's saying that those decent liberals, oh, no, no, they're, they're actually part of the Hezbollah vision of the future of right of history, in which after we take down Israel, we destroy America in which, you know, um, I mean, everything we know from Iran, a government that. It massively oppresses women, massively oppresses minorities.
All of that, that's the future, right? He's trying to own the protests. And it's part of his psychological warfare, but I think it's also part of his attempting to, even now, the tit for tat on the northern border is beginning to escalate a little bit. I don't think [00:36:00] it's escalating because he wants the war.
I think it's escalating because he's feeling the pressure of gods of suffering while he does nothing. What the heck has he been building an army for 20 years for if he doesn't now step in? But he also understands from what he's seeing in Gaza that if he steps in now, he'll be meeting an Israel a lot more grimly determined to remove threats on his border than it was two months ago.
So Nasrallah is caught in a vise, and one of the ways that he's trying to get out of it is by owning those protests. There is a lot of pressure on Israel to try to articulate what its vision is for Gaza post Hamas. And my sense is Netanyahu, in the interviews he's given, has sort of been a little bit all over the place.
And he's, he's, I think where he's landed is Israel would want to move to a world in which the political And civilian and governance, sovereignty and responsibility for Gaza be given to [00:37:00] a Palestinian leadership. But that Israel, which has learned these lessons in too hard of a way, will have to be responsible for the security, or at least of the borders of Gaza, that Israel is going to have to be responsible for the Gaza border and probably have some role in the Gaza Egyptian border to make sure.
It has some control over who and what is getting into Gaza, but otherwise Gaza can govern itself how you get from here to there will take some time. There'll be some transition. Israel has no long term ambition to govern Gaza to run Gaza. There's no religious significance in Gaza for Israel. There's no political significance in Gaza.
There's no historical significant. I mean, Israel doesn't want to be in Gaza, and there's there's a tragic legacy of Israel's presence in Gaza, which is a lot of Israeli soldiers were killed during Israel's occupation of Gaza up until 2005. So Israel does not want to be in Gaza. Now, who is that political leadership?
If it's not going to be Hamas is not [00:38:00] clear. It could be the Palestinian Authority, but Netanyahu seems to at least be saying that's not likely or not likely in the near term, because the Palestinian Authority leadership has not condemned the October 7 attacks, and the Palestinian Authority still educates young people with hatred towards Israel, so it's very hard to now put them in charge of this other, uh, Uh, piece of geography may make sense, may not, I don't know if that's just a bargaining position by Netanyahu.
So, he's basically saying, we'll be responsible for security, Palestinians will be responsible for running the place, and we haven't figured out all that out yet, but. Give us time. Yeah, I think Netanyahu, uh, doesn't quite know what to do afterwards. I don't, I haven't heard a convincing explanation from Lapid either, or Gantz, or anybody in Israel what to do afterwards.
The only people who seem to know are the real radical extreme, the three percent of Israelis on the far right, uh, who think we should just You know, rush [00:39:00] back and build the settlements and figure out, you know, how we deal with two and a half million Palestinians, uh, somehow going forward in some strange way, they refuse to explain to any of us.
So, um, and there's a deep, deep conviction among the rest of Israelis that that's not going to happen. So essentially Israel has no idea what happens. Just to be clear Aviv, I just want to put a pin on that, because there have been some very extreme elements in Israeli politics who said, well, we should reoccupy Gaza.
And the press over here is jumping on that and saying, aha. And I, I just want to be clear. I've tried to explain to the press, you cannot focus on one nut job on the fringes of Israeli politics and try to extrapolate out from that, that that is somehow anything approaching the new Israeli consensus about what to do about Gaza.
So can you, can you just Yeah, it's true about resettling. It's also true about, um, dropping a nuke on [00:40:00] Gaza. It's also true about the, the, a new Nakba in Gaza. We've had this whole string of populist rhetoric from, um, various incredibly irresponsible and unserious, uh, people, including some people who we have known as serious people, like Avi Dichter, but who, there is on the Israeli political right, because, There's a history to this, and there's, there's some deep background to this.
Because, um, the Israeli political left really put all of its eggs in the basket of the Oslo peace process. It, it, it ran and won elections arguing to Israelis that if we, um, withdraw territorially, the Palestinians, Palestinian politics can reciprocate our withdrawal with peace or security or quiet. These are all right.
Synonyms. Um, and that collapsed in rivers of blood. In the second intifada, in the 140 suicide bombings that begin in the fall of 2000. And the Israeli left [00:41:00] hasn't won an election since the fall of, since the 1999 election, because of that second intifada. And that has been a very unhealthy Phenomenon for the Israeli right because the fact that the Israeli right can't lose an election Means that it never really had to compete for the center for the middle ground The left was unelectable And so the right the way you won a seat on the Likud Knesset list in the party primaries or the way You ensured that your coalition was very very loyal Rather than a coalition across the aisle with people who might leave you if you're Netanyahu was to constantly reach farther and farther and farther to the right.
And so the right has kind of sent itself into this tailspin of rightist rhetoric, um, over the last 20 years, and slowly. I mean, it's really picked up in very noticeable ways, probably since 2015. Um, and now we have some of that culture and moment in a moment where that's actually [00:42:00] genuinely profoundly damaging for the country, right?
Avi Dichter, for example, is a member of Knesset from Likud. He knows he's competing in primaries. He's also a serious man who has deep knowledge of Palestinian society. Okay, just, just a little bit on Dichter's background. He was in the Sharon government. He was in the Omer government. He was a member of the Kadima party.
He has a history in the Israeli center slash center right. He's not Ben Gvir. Right. And he was on television and he says Palestinians are moving south. Now, he is praising the army for allowing civilians to leave the battlefield in the way that they're doing. It means they can go after Hamas much more seriously, it means there'll be less civilian casualties.
And I think he's trying to say, I think, because he said it so poorly that, you know, I don't want to defend him if this wasn't what he was trying to say. But I think he was trying to say, Palestinians are watching. Palestinians leaving this area and thinking Nakba. The imagery is the imagery of the Nakba, the displacement of 1948 [00:43:00] 49.
He ends up saying, this is the Gaza Nakba. Now, that little clip, and then the Israeli journalist interviewing him turns, turns to him and says, wait, what do you mean Gaza Nakba? You mean they're not coming back? And then his response was, I don't know. Now, absolutely every single part of that. is profoundly silly.
He doesn't get to make the decision. He has no say in the decision making. It's not something Israel can not allow them back. Israel tells them and tells other Israelis. The Israeli public knows that they're coming back. That is something that is the reason the Israeli public is utterly unified behind this government.
Center and center left forces have joined this government to stabilize it for the purposes of the war. They're definitely coming back and Avi Dichter is the last one who doesn't want them to come back. So what the heck was he doing? And when Amichai Eliyahu When you say coming back, just explain what you mean by that.
[00:44:00] The Palestinians who are leaving the battlefield, northern Gaza, Gaza City, for southern Gaza, so that the Israeli army can operate against Hamas with much lower civilian death tolls, they're coming back. Right. The statement that they're not, but the civilians are coming back right now. The statement that they're not went out all over the world.
Yeah. At the era. I'm trying to be clear, there's what, what you're saying is there's a consensus the civilians are coming back. Yes. Everywhere. I mean, just all across the board. You have to reach into the really 3% edge of Israeli politics to find someone who disagrees with that. The problem is that he still said it and just, and just for our listeners, when you say the Naba that you're referring to, the Palestinian humiliation of Arabs, who'd left?
What is now Israel, in the lead up to 1948, and never came back. Yeah, it means different things to different people. But it, it, it, um, It, it, to some Palestinians, it means the founding of Israel. That is the disaster. It translates as disaster. Um, to some people, the disaster is the displacement, the becoming [00:45:00] refugees.
To some people, it's a mix. Um, how you understand Nakba is how you understand the future that you want to reverse. So, it matters, right, the different, the nuances and the complexity and the The powerful way this word is used in Palestinian identity and historical memory, but for Dichter to use it is essentially for Dichter to convince people around the world who are those decent middle ground people who just want people You know, civilians not to be killed on their television screen.
That actually the Israelis have nefarious designs. We saw that with a minister named Amichai Eliyahu from the extreme right, just literally the farthest right you can get in Israeli politics, political party called Otzma Yehudit. And this man, you know, goes on a radio interview in Hebrew, and he doesn't make any decision of any kind.
No one's listening to him. But he's the minister, I believe, of tradition, which is an totally invented ministry. And he gets up and he's, and he's talking about, you know, what we're going to do to Gaza. And then the interviewer [00:46:00] says, well, you sound very bellicose. What are you going to drop a nuclear bomb?
And he says, that's an option. And he says it with this absolute deadpan tone and that traveled the world as well. The Arab leaders in Saudi Arabia. over the last couple of days, talked about the nuclear bomb Israel was planning to drop. But also, if he actually was in the decision making circles, he wouldn't admit Israel has a nuke, right?
So the whole thing was, was just, it was, it was, it was so profoundly childish. It was so profoundly childish. And to the rest of the world. And, and just the impracticality of Israel using a nuclear weapon in Gaza, which is, you know, just like a couple miles from an Israeli city. Exactly. So the whole thing, the whole thing.
But when you, when you begin to parse out all of these people, we had a spokesperson for the Israeli prime minister, the bombing of the hospital. that was blamed on Israel with 500 dead that turned out to be maybe dozens of dead and actually it was a rocket by [00:47:00] Islamic Jihad and the New York Times and everybody was very chagrined by how they actually mishandled it and had to kind of apologize while trying not to apologize.
All of that drama within minutes of reports of the actual of the actual explosion at the hospital. An Israeli spokesperson of the Israeli Prime Minister wrote, this is what happens when terrorists operate from inside a hospital. You had this guy, this essentially right wing activist who got a job, right, in the, who, who did the same thing.
He first, he, he seemed to admit Israeli culpability where there wasn't Israeli, but he has no idea. He's not involved in actually the military planning. He didn't check. It took the army three or four hours to get out a proper answer. And it took this guy about 90 seconds on Twitter to, in the name of the Israeli Prime Minister, admit that Israel bombed something it didn't bomb.
You, we are in the Israeli state right now and the Israeli governing apparatus surrounded by, um, I don't know how to put it. I apologize, uh, to [00:48:00] people I might offend. absolute incompetence. People who are absolutely convinced that they can still that they're only speaking to Israelis, and the only thing they need to tell Israelis is that they're more right wing than their competitor in the next primary.
And so there's this bellicosity to the rhetoric that seems to confirm what the worst of the worst of people are saying. And it is systemic, and it is structural, and it is constant, and we're constantly producing it. And that's on us. That is not, I wish I could blame the world for looking at us and seeing the wrong thing, but wow, why can't our people shut up?
Why can't they be competent? Why can't they say what we actually need to say? The Israeli army over the last two weeks has steadily and dramatically escalated. It's operations for civilians. It has called more. It has, um, you know, today brought field to Shifa Hospital. It needs to scale. It understands that it needs to do much more on the question of the civilian death toll, civilian [00:49:00] suffering, generally taking care of civilians.
And by the way, both. For moral reasons, Israelis would like to have an answer to the rest of the world when it sits in judgment of them. Israelis would like to feel that their army is doing right things as they fight a war that is absolutely good and legitimate and necessary against a monster like Hamas.
But also tactically, if we're going to be there for six months, eight months, a year, if we're going to be there for as long as it takes, Israel has to be seen to be worried about civilians. It's something, you know, Joe Biden put a lot of political capital up for us. We can't abuse that political capital by not being the kind of thing that's legitimate to defend in democratic circles in America.
And so there's this sense that we have to, this country and this government and this army has to seriously look and think and work on that. And in the meantime, our political class is still full of these people who are still spinning and still in their primary mode in their brain and haven't yet, haven't yet switched.
I, I, I wish Prime Minister [00:50:00] Netanyahu, I asked for it on Twitter, I don't think he read my tweet, uh, had fired. I wish he had censured in a real way, Avi Dichter, including firing. This is a sensitive moment. If the window closes, if the world really crashes down on us and the Israeli government decides that it's not worth the diplomatic price, as that window closes, the Israeli army will be under a lot of pressure in Gaza to deliver faster.
And delivering faster means more civilian dead, more Israeli soldiers dead. These people, who think they're fighting a primary race instead of understanding that we're in a serious war, carefully watched by the rest of the world. Is it unfair that they watch us, but didn't watch the battle in Mosul as closely when it was American forces?
Who cares? Right now, we need those soldiers not to have to die, and not to have to kill, except Hamasnikim. And so, we are disserved by this political culture that leads us right now. [00:51:00] All right, Haviv, we will, uh, we will leave it there, uh, always giving me stuff to think about, which I appreciate, especially the idea that the world's reaction is actually, oddly, an asset, uh, for Israel, which I hadn't really thought about.
To be continued. Thanks for having me.
That's our show for today. To keep up with Haviv Retikor, you can follow him on X, you can follow him at thetimesofisrael. com. And you can pick back up on him in our weekly conversation here. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.