REPLAY: Lessons learned from the hostage deal - with Haviv Rettig Gur
On thousands of street corners in Israel today, there are banners that read: “bring the hostages back from the darkness.” It’s excruciating to think that this is the second Hanukkah since October 7th with hostages still in Gaza.
For today’s episode, we will be replaying an episode from a conversation I had with Haviv Rettig Gur during the 4th day of the pause in fighting during the last (and, to date, only) hostage deal, while hostages were being returned to Israel, back in November 2023. As Haviv put it in this conversation, it had been the first time since October 7 that he could “breathe”. It’s a feeling that we can pray will be alive again soon.
This replay episode is one way to reflect on where we were a year ago, and where we are now. Today, Hamas is only more desperate and Israel’s geopolitical and military position in the Middle East has never been stronger. There is a lot of analysis in this conversation with Haviv that is relevant to the hostage negotiations occurring right now.
Full Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
DS: It's 7:00 PM on Wednesday, December 26th in New York City, the second night of Hanukkah. It's Thursday, December 27th at 3:00 AM in Israel, as Israelis turn to a new day and soon to their third night of Hanukkah. It is customary during major holidays for most of the podcast hosts in your feed to take a break. Rather than record a new episode, these podcast hosts and their producers replay a previous episode, one of their favorites. And we here at the Call Me Back team must alert you, our loyal listeners and our community, that we too are mere mortals. We too are succumbing to a replay during the holidays. Of course, we'll break in with an emergency episode if it is needed. But for now, this week, we are posting a replay. But in searching for one of our favorite episodes from the archive to replay, we stumbled upon something much more important. A previous episode that is extremely relevant, even eerily relevant, to today. It was a conversation I had with Haviv Rettig-Gur during the fourth day of the pause in fighting during the last hostage deal, actually the only hostage deal, while hostages were being returned to Israel back in November 2023. I still remember how uplifted we all were as the images rolled across our screens of Israelis welcoming home hostages, family members reuniting with their loved ones, loved ones that had been stolen. As Haviv put it in this conversation you're about to hear, it was the first time since October 7th that he felt he could breathe. It's a feeling that, God willing, will be alive again soon. This conversation with Haviv centered on the lessons Israel and the West should take from what made that hostage release deal possible. Well, here we are a little over one year later. There has not been another hostage deal since that time that have even I had the conversation you're about to listen to but it does appear like Israel is close to another one now, at least based on conversations we're having with our guests with journalists and officials in government, both in the Israeli government and in the US government and even with the incoming administration, the transition team of Donald Trump's. But in this conversation you're about to hear, or watch from a year ago, Haviv says, and I quote here, “what got these hostages out was massive, successful military pressure,” close quote. That is something I also heard from Defense Minister Gallant directly soon after the release of the hostages, that the way to get the hostages out was to make the pain for Hamas so immense, that they needed a pause. As Haviv said, and I quote, “Hamas did this because it was desperate.” Well, think about where we are today. Hamas is orders of magnitude more desperate. It's military capabilities, it's leaders, and it's fighters have been vaporized. Hamas allies in the axis of resistance, like Hezbollah, have also been vaporized. Iran, Hamas primary sponsor, is as militarily vulnerable to Israel as one could possibly imagine. The Israeli Air Force has systematically degraded Iran's air defenses leaving it completely exposed, or as call me back regular Rich Goldberg put it as a result of Israeli actions The Ayatollah has no Clothes. Syria's half century long regime fell in 13 days just weeks ago and now it seems Israel is making serious work on the Houthis in Yemen. In fact I can't remember when in its history Israel's geopolitical and military position in the Middle East Has been stronger. I mean, maybe in the immediate aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War. So, back to Haviv's observation one year ago. If it made sense for Israel to do a deal in November of 2023 out of a position of strength, it likely makes at least as much sense now. Haviv also points out in this conversation that Israel did not make massive concessions in terms of the kinds of Palestinian prisoners it released from Israeli prisons in the context of that deal last year. That is a topic that is also relevant to today's negotiations. And there's one other development that wasn't present one year ago, the incoming Trump administration, which I believe will give Israel all the military resources and international diplomatic cover it needs in its multi front war. Now, of course, Hamas needs to stop disrupting the negotiations as it clearly did according to Biden administration officials, the last time there was real progress on a possible deal in the summer of 2024. That obviously goes without saying that Hamas here has to be serious about a deal. I'll just close by saying that last Hanukkah was a dark Hanukkah, but there was during the week that preceded it, some light as hostages came back home during the week-long ceasefire. This year on thousands of street corners in Israel, there are banners that say, bring the hostages back from the darkness. It's difficult to think that this is the second Chanukah with hostages still in Gaza. We have experienced since October 7th the first Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and Pesach and Sukkot, and I can go on, since October 7th, 2023. But this is now the second Hanukkah. This is the world we are in now, where we could potentially be living through the second round of holidays without our brothers and sisters and parents and aunts and uncles and grandparents and children and nieces and nephews home from the dungeons of Gaza. So today, as we take a break from our regular podcast programming, we replay the episode from last year with Haviv Rettig-Gur, on the lessons from the last hostage deal which are as relevant today. This is call me back. And as I do every week, I look forward to my weekly check in with Haviv Rettig-Gur from the times of Israel who joins us from Jerusalem. Hi Haviv.
HRG: Hi Dan. Good to be here.
DS: It is, uh Good to be with you each each week when we touch base. I think the week we're reflecting upon is like no other one could possibly imagine and yet I just watched these images of the last few days of the hostages returning and this one really feels like it will be no matter how many weeks we wind up doing this, this one really will be like something I, I just can't get my head around for a while. How are you processing things? How are you seeing things, uh, over the last few days, as Israeli hostages come up from 48 days, 49 days in captivity, uh, held hostage in tunnels underneath Gaza by Hamas, returning to their families, their fellow citizens, to their country. What does it mean to you right now?
HRG: For my family, especially for my wife, um, who has been helping, volunteering very intensively, roping me into it as well, um, to helping the Haran family, uh, last night was a coming home. It was an end to this whole disastrous, never ending saga. Um, the, um, Yahel, three years old, Neve, eight years old, Noam, twelve, they are home. They were, uh, they were brought home yesterday. Uh, for a few hours there, Hamas delayed and we all thought it had fallen through and there were things that they didn't agree to and there was all this unclarity, all this sudden last minute, um, essentially torture of, of the Israelis, uh, because that's Hamas, but in the end, they're home. And it's a kind of, um, it's a kind of relaxing of tension that caught us off guard. We were up very, very late last night, uh, following the news very carefully. Um, and we've been just, if people don't know what I'm talking about, we've been volunteering. My wife, especially has been doing a lot of work, uh, getting the story of the Haran family of Kibbutz Be’eri out. Uh, these, these kids, her friend Shaked, her sister and her daughters and a few other members of the family, um, were taken hostage on October 7th. Um, and so in a sense, my family wasn't in that massacre, doesn't have people abducted, but because I've been so closely following and tracking and because my wife has spent just, you know, days and days and days and weeks, um, working hard intensively, um, around the clock, leaving the house to, to be part of that group of volunteers, helping out that family. It feels like a personal connection, um, is now gone and it's almost easier to breathe now. It's also, as soon as you-
DS: Now just so, just so, you've referenced this family from time to time on this podcast without mentioning their name. So these are, just so I'm clear, um, what's the nature of your all, your guys relationship with them? Are they friends?
HRG: Yeah, they're friends. Um, Shaked Haran, the sister of the mother who was abducted, along with the children, is an employee of Lobby 99, which is where my wife works, and they, you know, it's essentially a consumer watchdog, um, NGO and, uh, they know each other and they are close and, you know, my wife has really accompanied the family, uh, setting up for them early on, uh, a lot of their media attention, international media attention. Um, she, uh, called me and said, I need someone to go on, on MSNBC real quick. And so I went, uh, she took them to Indian television and German television and CNN, and just built for them, um, that early international campaign and spent days and it was basically her reserve duty, uh, in a sense. Um, so we've just been very, very deeply involved in it. And by the way, other people in that organization, it's a very small organization. I think they're 12 or 13 employees. And, and so they're, they're close. And, and so we were a little bit, we were really deep in the event in that sense, because actual specific humans who we know and interact with were part of that circle of, of families with hostages in Gaza. So that ended last night.
DS: Thank God. Uh, and how are they? Has your wife been in touch with them?
HRG: Yeah, um, yeah, um, I, I don't, you know, I don't have permission from the, good is the short answer. Um, and I don't, I don't know that I can say more than that.
DS: Okay, that's all I wanted to know. Okay. And okay. So, so you have had this personal connection. So there's, there's sort of like the micro and the macro, the local and the, and the global. So you've had this local, very local connection. And now just as an Israeli watching your country reel during these first 50 days. From October 7th, and then having like a, a green shoot of some good news, which is just the images of these, of these people returning. Where does that, what does that represent to you, in just sort of the life of this nation, dealing with this war?
HRG: So to step back and be sort of, national strategic 30,000 foot perspective, um, as much as I can, I think the Israelis, um, first of all, there's just the simple relief that someone got out. Um, I think most Israelis think that not everyone is going to get out. It's just, that's not how Hamas operates. That's not how this war functions. It's just not part of this event. And so we're hoping the kids all get out. We're hoping their mothers all get out. We're hoping, um, not all the Haran family is out incidentally. Uh, the father is, is still there, is still hostage. Um, because men are not part of the, uh, first groups, uh, under the deal between that, you know, negotiated, uh, with Qatar. So, um, there is some relief that some of them are out. Hamas has still kept some of the youngest children, including, uh, Kfir, a 10 month old baby. At the same time that there is this relief, the Israelis understand something that probably is not healthy for Hamas. What got these hostages out is massive successful military pressure and nothing else. And it got them out at a cost Israel can tolerate, which is to say, not 1100 to one, like under the Shalit deal in 2011, not mass murderers, the people coming out, the people, the Israeli prisoners being released at a three to one formula, um, in, from Israeli jails, um, are attempted stabbers, attempted killers, um, not the big, you know, the mass murderers who have been convicted in serious courts and, and, and gone through that whole process. Um, it's worth-
DS: Not the equivalent of Sinwar. I mean, Sinwar got released in the 2011 deal, and he was serving at least one life sentence and then went on to become the architect of October 7th.
HRG: Exactly, and quite a few, quite a few of the architects and actual executors of October 7th, um, were released in the Shalit deal. And so that can't happen again, a Shalit deal. But this is something very, very different. This is very few, three to one. Um, people who are not Hamas fighters, no men, not, not people who are going to, um, go back into any kind of systematic terrorism. They might return to attacking some individual released now who had attacked, might attack again, but there'll be these lone wolf kinds of attacks. Um, and so that's, that's the first thing, right? But the second part is, um, Hamas did this because it was desperate. It did this because the Israeli military has surrounded Gaza City, begun to move in, has been destroying entrances to the tunnels, has been slowly burying Hamas alive under Gaza City. Hamas's great strategy of building those tunnels is being turned into their grave, and Hamas is desperate to rescue what it can from the forces stuck in Gaza City. Uh, it begins to understand, it has started to understand, that the Israeli presence in Gaza isn't going to be short, isn't going to end the way Hamas decides, and the Israelis are going to be very hard to play games with because they, they are more concerned with this never happening again than they are with, you know, however, I don't know what, how many hostages they end up getting out or, you know, the victory images, which Hamas is always obsessed with, show some image of, you know, that looks bad for the Israelis. The Israelis aren't playing any of those games anymore. And Hamas is beginning to understand that, and that's what drove this desperate need for these few days of quiet, of ceasefire, that allowed us to pull out, um, so far 26, uh, Israeli hostages. I think about 15, uh, also foreign citizens, foreign nationals. Um, that's the lesson going forward. Military pressure works. Defense Minister Gallant said that back in the day, and he was right.
DS: So, Haviv, I want to stay on that because Minister Gallant apparently, according to public reports, you're closer to the story than I am. In the first week of the war, from what I understand, there was some kind of offer put forth to the Israeli government about some release of hostages. It was a much smaller number, I think, and, uh, and Gallant was against accepting it. He was like the catalyst for the rejection of the offer because he argued we'll get it, we will get many more after we pound them for a while. Is that your understanding?
HRG: Well, I think they were playing a game. I mean it was their understanding as well I mean, that's what they said what they they released, um, early on-
DS: They being who?
HRG: They Hamas, Hamas and Islamic jihad as well.
DS: Yeah.
HRG: They wanted to release, you know, two every few days two hostages every few days while keeping other family members of those same hostages in, in Gaza, um, and they wanted to do that for just as long as Israel agrees to delay the ground incursion, for example. Um, that was part of what they were saying at the very beginning when they released those two grandmothers, um, but not the husband, right? Um, so they wanted to play this game where they wanted to say, look, we have these hostages. We know you Israelis have this weird weakness with hostages. You gave us 1100 for Gilad Shalit. What was that about? Right. And so we're going to play you. We're going to play you like a fiddle. And Gallant’s, uh, view, um, on October 27th, the ground maneuver begins and the families of the hostages are desperate. Hundreds of families in Israel are desperate to meet with him. And they said, what does this ground incursion mean? Does this mean our families are going to be killed? Uh, is it over? Um, and they meet with him at army headquarters in Tel Aviv on October 29th, and he said to them. Hamas is playing us and it's playing on these, these painful points, and it knows how to play those painful points. It has been studying us in that regard for a long time. The only way to get these hostages out in any serious numbers in any, in any certain way, the only way to turn this game into a real exchange is massive military pressure on Hamas. Now we need this massive military pressure to remove the actual threat. This war has to happen. But I'm telling you families, we're not sacrificing your family members in exchange for the war. The war that has to happen anyway is also what's going to get your family members out. Because nothing else is going to do so. Except letting Hamas off the hook, which isn't an option. Because then in the next operation, Hamas plans four years from now, it's going to again, do nothing but try to kidnap hundreds more. And so to save those future potential hostages, we have to adopt a strategy that's very aggressive now, but don't worry, because that's how Hamas will understand that the rules of the game have changed.
DS: Haviv, isn't there always a risk though, that, how far do you extend that logic? Because you could extend that logic as to say, no, 50 hostages is not enough. We're going to keep pounding till we get surrender of Hamas, unconditional surrender, or we get all the hostages out. Or, I mean, you could, you could take that logic pretty far. I had, uh, Amos Harel on a few days ago, and he made the argument that whenever Israel's offered hostages in any kind of deal, there's always a risk that if it doesn't take those hostages in the moment, as the conflict drags on, as the war drags on, Israel loses control of the situation and loses control of their ability to get those hostages down the road because they get scattered, they get killed, they get, you know, it's a fluid dynamic situation. The discussions, you know, go dormant. He, he talked about the, the story of Ron Arad where there was some negotiation. This is decades ago for the return of Ron Arad, who was an Israeli soldier, uh, captured and, and there was some negotiation and the negotiation went dark and then they just lost it. They lost the thread. They lost control of the situation and they never got him back alive there. Isn't there a risk whenever Israel has offered hostages that it goes the direction of Ron Arad? And so isn't Gallant under that logic you could take that logic pretty far, but there's massive risk in taking that log logic farther and farther and farther.
HRG: Yes, war is not math. Um, back in the civil war, I remember reading once that, um, generals, when you line up men early on in sort of modern warfare with the guns were part of modern warfare, but no, they still didn't quite understand how to use them. And what they would do is they would line up men. And what was pickett's charge in the civil war, right? It was essentially a calculation of, as we march forward, given how many, how quickly the other side can fire, given how accurate the other side is, I will lose for every four seconds or 20 seconds x percent of the men marching. And I have to start marching with enough of a force to reach the other side with the fighting force that can kill the other sides and beat the, you know, punch through the other side's lines. Uh, it was essentially an engineering problem, a civil war battlefield, and that's part of the death toll, right? Um, it's been a long time since, uh, war was an engineering problem. And certainly the kind of non conventional war we're talking about here. The kind of guerrilla war, the kind of urban warfare, uh, it's so complex. It's so, there's so many variables. There's so much opportunity to surprise. Um, it is not an open battlefield. There's nothing conventional about it. Um, and so you don't have control of the battlefield at all, ever. I mean, Israel's success is now, uh, essentially Israel has walked into all the Hamas traps, and managed carefully through competence and training and probably some luck, uh, to avoid any major Hamas trap. We think, right, unless the big traps are all in Khan Yunis and this is all a faint Gaza City, which is entirely possible in terms of Hamas's strategy. Um, long story short, We don't know how the war is going to go. We don't know at what point we are sealing, um, uh, some tunnel entrance and that's where the hostages we're going to be able to get out of. And so we've actually sealed them in. We don't know any of these questions. Um, at some point, uh, Hamas forces might, as they're being degraded by Israel, um, lose the ability to find hostages, to get the hostages out some place where they're being hidden might be the place that we've destroyed. So all of that is true all of you know, you you you wait a certain amount of time, you might not be able to get the hostages. You don't wait long enough, You'll get half the hostages. It is a guessing game. A very complicated one. There are no right answers. My view is we got some out, we celebrate it. We can try and get more out. We will always try and get more out. There'll always be an ability for Hamas to buy a little more time with hostages. What we're not going to do is allow Hamas to survive. They're not going to buy their survival with these hostages. That's simply not something Israel can afford.
DS: Uh, Haviv, I just want to stay on this point for a moment. When you say that this war cannot be done effectively until Hamas is gone, not, not a fraction of Hamas surviving, not a derivative of Hamas surviving, but any remnant version or future version of Hamas cannot be on Israel's southern border when this war ends. Because when I talk to folks here in the West, they, I just don't think they fully, many people don't fully appreciate that hundreds of thousands of Israelis have had to evacuate their homes in the South. And these are people who are living a kilometer or a couple of kilometers from the Gaza border. And they will not go back. These Israelis will not go back living in such proximity to that border unless they know October 7th can't happen again. And, and so, so when I say this to people, they say, oh, well they, you know, they can move to other parts of Israel. But again, this is something that I find that people in the West don't entirely appreciate that if Israelis can't live in some parts of Israel, they can't live in any part of Israel. It's not just about, oh, they'll, if they don't live in Sderot, they'll, they'll move up to Beersheva, you know, and then the folks who are already in Beersheva, if it gets too crowded, they can move up to Tel Aviv. And so the whole country can just kind of start moving north, migrating north, and we'll have this buffer. If Israelis feel insecure in any part of Israel, they will kind of feel insecure in all of Israel.
HRG: I think that's right. In other words, when the Israelis say Hamas can't survive because it's a threat, they mean Hamas can't survive because it is an intolerable threat. But I also think that there's, um, it's a little bit complicated. Let's see if I can try and lay this out. Um, what, what does Israel see in Hamas? What is the actual challenge of Hamas? And what is the challenge of the war in Gaza? Incidentally, how do Israelis, you know, Israelis see the civilian death toll in Gaza that everyone else is seeing? It's not something that we are avoiding. I mean, you can't physically avoid it. You can't log into social media and avoid it, right? How do we understand it? And I think it all connects. What is the threat of Hamas? How do we understand the war in Gaza? How does, what lens are we looking at the Gazan civilian death toll, the horrific civilian death toll in Gaza? How do we understand it? I think that basically there are, I'll put it like this. Um, and this is drawing from one of my teachers, a historian named Alex Jacobson at Hebrew university. Um, who points out that, um, Hamas is, uh, an enemy, unlike any enemy ever fought by any army in the history of warfare. It's similar to many enemies, but this particular combination of characteristics is unique. It is in some ways, a terror group, a guerrilla terror group that fades away into the civilian population, hides among the civilian population. Um, you know, Israel says Hamas hides behind, um, you know, I don't know, hides inside cities, right? And then the pro Palestinian crowd says, well, the military headquarters of the IDF is in the middle of Tel Aviv, right? So it's the same, right? But of course that is not true. The vast majority of military targets in Israel are not among, among civilians. Most standing armies, the vast majority, all standing armies, the vast majority of their military targets are not among civilians. Whereas with Hamas, where 100% of its targets are civilian targets. In other words, every single rocket launcher is next to a hospital or a school or a home or a mosque. Every single tunnel entrance is inside a residential building, every single installation, every single thing. There is nothing Hamas that is out in a field outside of Gaza City. Everything is in a built up, uh, residential area where civilians live. So in that sense, it's, it's a terror group, but there's another sense in which it's a state. It has controlled the government and it has controlled the economy of a particular strip of land for 15 years for 2007. So slightly more than 17 years, um, it has controlled the entire economy. It has been funded and trained, um, to have real sustained, um, military forces by Iran, by Qatar, um, it has absorbed billions in international aid, which it has simply robbed blind. I mean, everybody knows this now. Um, Israelis were saying it for a long time. Now everybody knows it. Um, but, um, it has taken in massive amounts of cement that it used to build these massive tunnel networks on the scale of a small city. And it did that because it has these features of a state. And so it is a, and, and one final feature that is unique. Um, it's a tiny strip of land that it controlled as this kind of city state, which is not true for example, of ISIS, we make the comparison of the, of the American led coalition in Mosul in 2016, where Mosul was essentially flattened and 11,000 civilians were killed by a conservative estimate. There are estimates by British intelligence, for example, that maybe up to 40,000 civilians were killed over nine months of fighting, massive, massive bombardment. As the Americans came in, you know, they were the envelope, the air, uh, the intelligence, the commandos, but the ground forces were either Kurdish Peshmerga or, um, or Iraqi army. And they moved in and they-
DS: Iraqi security forces.
HRG: Right. And they systematically pushed ISIS out of that city. And ISIS had been entrenched in that city. They had dug a few tunnels, a few bunkers, nothing remotely, with, with ISIS, um, huge amounts of ISIS activities had to happen above ground. And the Americans could sit there quietly and calmly with satellites and drones and wait for an ISIS fighter to pop up out of the ground and then take them out. Now, Hamas in Gaza can stay underground for months. They, they simply do not have to go above ground to maneuver in any way. And so the only way to get to them is to cut through a city. And this is a unique challenge. You know, it's, when people say to me, you know, I encounter a lot of, um, a lot of people expressing like urgent moral anger and urgent, you know, emotions at me because times of Israel and journalists. And, uh, Twitter and, you know, all those, uh, mechanisms that we have today. Um, and, and so I get a lot of this emotion and I say to them, my first thought is just, let's think a second. And so in order to think a second, I concede everything. Let's imagine the Israelis are heartless, callous, awful people. Let's just assume that for the purpose of the conversation. They're still facing a military challenge of getting through this very unique set of circumstances that Hamas has. So many of the advantages of a state, and yet the basic founding strategy and capacity to disappear behind the civilian population of a guerrilla group, of a terror group. And the combination is absolutely unique. It might be similar to what happened to what's happening with Hezbollah in South Lebanon, where 150,000 rockets lie under homes, under villages. There is no rocket, not under a village. Right. And so that's the challenge Israel faces. Now, Gaza city's buildings are essentially uninhabitable. I mean, that city essentially now cannot, it has to be rebuilt to a significant extent. I don't know all of it, every section, every part, but large sections of it just literally have to be built from the ground up again. The only way to get to Hamas, the only way to achieve the battlefield success the Israelis have achieved is that. That's, by the way, not an exoneration of the Israeli army for every single airstrike. You find an airstrike that's not okay, I might agree with you. It's not, you know, I'm not saying literally this was the right bomb to use in this occasion, but the basic military challenge is that until October 7th, because of these unique features of Hamas that make it almost impossible to actually remove from Gaza, it has built itself. It has done nothing for 15 years, except build this, this, this entrenchment under Gaza's very dense population. And until October 7th, there was nothing Hamas would do that the Israelis could imagine that was worth the cost of getting Hamas out of there. Because there is no way to fight this war in Gaza. Hamas made sure of it. There literally is no way to fight this war in Gaza without tens of thousands of dead civilians. And, and that's different from, it's far, far more difficult than ISIS. And ISIS was tens of thousands of dead civilians. And this is ten times harder. They've had 15 years in an infinite supply of cement and billions in aid and everything of the Gazan economy turned to that task for a decade and a half. And so the Israeli army until October 7th could not imagine undertaking the task of actually destroying Hamas. It wasn't worth the cost. It wasn't worth the cost to Gazans and therefore the knock on cost to Israel internationally, diplomatically, et cetera. After October 7th and after the understanding that this is Hamas and that Hamas are undeterrable because they thought they were safe because they thought we wouldn't come after them into Gaza. Because they thought that civilian death toll, which they have built, they have built all of Gaza's infrastructure to ensure that death toll, protected them. And after October 7th, the Israelis concluded that that was no longer the case and they would have to essentially take on that cost for the, for the Gazans and for the Israelis. So the challenge, what Hamas became on October 7th, and it had been doing it for years, that's what the rockets were. Terror groups don't control strategic weapons like rockets. That's unique to terror groups that control territory, that control city states, to this new version of terror groups that Iran has started constructing in the Middle East, of which Hamas is the most advanced, but there's also Hezbollah, advanced in terms of controlling the territory, there's also Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen are starting to do this. You have this terror group that buries itself under civilian population and has these strategic weapons and becomes a strategic threat and thinks that it's protected by those civilians. So, um, those Israelis who cannot live on that border, Hamas has made itself a threat. The very idea that you think across the border that you could be safe to threaten us strategically because you're hiding behind civilians to that extent and forcing us to go through the civilians to get to you. That premise has to be destroyed. That premise, now the Israelis need to make sure that every attack is justified. They need to make sure that they know what's happening. They can't flatten a city for no reason. The useful, um, the reason Mosul is a useful example analogy is that the Americans were unbelievably careful and still managed to flatten a city. They were unbelievably careful, but every time they struck one little building very carefully with very specific and very targeted and precise weaponry to get that one cell that was called in from the ground forces that was shooting at the ground forces, the ground, that cell relocated. And so they had to shoot at the next building and then that cell again moved. And then they shot at the next building. And so they ended up destroying an entire neighborhood chasing 150 soldiers who were shooting at the ground forces. But the whole neighborhood was flattened with extremely precise weapons. And so the example of Mosul just is a way of understanding how difficult it is to do when you're desperately trying to be precise. And the Americans bombed hospitals and the Americans did, you know, all the things that, right. But the intensity of the death toll is a feature of Gaza. Incidentally, it might be a feature of South Lebanon if that war goes north because Hezbollah has the same strategy. So those Israelis have to be safe. And if they have to be safe, the only way for them to be safe is to make hiding behind civilians militarily not useful, which means we still have to get Hamas out of Gaza, even at that cost.
DS: Haviv you just, in talking about Mosul you just reminded me of something that you've referenced in a conversation with me I think I'm trying to remember where I heard you talking about it, but I just want to, I've been thinking about it in recent days, so I just want to bring it up. You pointed out that the, in Mosul, because we're talking about Mosul right now, so just, I don't want to, I just want to put a pin in this. In Mosul and the U.S. operation against, and the Iraqi security forces in the Peshmerga operation against ISIS in Mosul, ISIS was like Hamas is today using medical facilities, hospitals as, you know, infrastructural human shields effectively and international human rights groups like Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International had put out reports saying this is in violation of the Geneva Conventions. What ISIS is doing by using hospitals as cover for command centers for storing munitions for whatever makes it a legitimate target now in the context of war. They've lost the protection allotted to afforded to medical facilities under the Geneva Conventions. And I think you cited that there were reports from the international human rights groups pointing that out in, in Mosul, and those same human rights groups today, on what's happening in Gaza, are silent. Do I have that right? In terms of you having referenced this?
HRG: Unfortunately, they're not silent. They're arguing that it is not legitimate, that it is not okay, um, to target, uh, hospitals if they're used as, um, active, not, not military installations in the sense that soldiers are being cared for there who are wounded, but active, but active military installations in the sense of their platforms for firing rockets, right? There are places that active fighting forces are organizing in, things like that. Um, yeah, that's, you know, the, the, the human rights world is a group of lawyers. I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and say they're deeply well meaning. Everything we just talked about until now, they don't understand. In other words, they, if you want to craft the actual laws of war, the actual laws of armed conflict, the actual Geneva Conventions were put together by people who tried to think as a soldier, who tried to say, one second, if I make it illegal to win a war, nobody's going to follow these rules. So I have to make war legal, and I have to make winning a war legal. Doing what it takes to win a war has to be legal. If I want to reduce the horrific costs of war, it has to be possible to fight a war under these rules. And what you have today is not that impulse. It's not that interest in the general's problem. Because you must solve the general's problem. If you were to come to Human Rights Watch, right, or there was some, I don't know, better version of Human Rights Watch, and you would come to it, right, and the Israelis would come to it and just say, look, I have this problem of Hamas. It's been digging under Gaza for 15 years. After October 7th, I can no longer afford for it to exist on my border. I'm going to destroy Hamas. That's the given. I'm going to destroy Hamas. Please help me do it gentler. But, but not at the cost of destroying Hamas, because then, you know, you're out of the room. If this Israeli government doesn't destroy Hamas, they'll be kicked out and somebody will be elected who will destroy Hamas. In other words, it doesn't even matter if you think that destroying Hamas is impossible under some laws of war. You've decided are the laws of war. If you don't let me win this war, I will not obey your rules, but I do want to think of myself. I do want to know that I'm doing what needs to be done to be moral. I don't want to commit crimes of war by which I mean, I don't want to do more damage than is necessary. So tell me how to do that. The answer you get today from these organizations is I don't have to tell you how to do that. I just have to tell you that there's no possible reason in human history or in logic or in, you know, that this particular family that we read about in the news report from Gaza that was killed in an Israeli airstrike should have been killed. That's just insane. The heart refuses to believe. And if you don't grasp what we're feeling about this dead family with these dead children, you're the monster. You're the callous monster. And when I put out the report, I'm going to write it in all these legal ways. I'm going to use legal language. But what I'm not going to try to do, and what Human Rights Watch doesn't try to do, is actually solve your military problem in ways that reduce the costs. So they're no longer accessible, like the international law as it is actually used, as it is actually advanced by these sort of self proclaimed, you know, moral advocates, moral judges of all human activity. Um, no longer helps me. I remember being a young soldier on the Lebanese border, looking at South Lebanon, and I had just read something about international law and, um, there I am, I don't know, 19, maybe, and I see the villages of Hezbollah and I know that under those villages are at the time, tens of thousands of rockets. And I know that the war that Hezbollah is planning, I know. That it will destroy those villages. Where's international law? What does it do? And I know that there's a UN force. There are UN forces after 2006. There's UNIFIL. I know on the Golan Heights, there's a UN force, which doesn't, again, do anything matter. It doesn't give reports that are honest or serious. It's basically just trying to survive itself, sitting there sandwiched between the Israelis and Hezbollah. And I basically come to believe I personally Haviv, came to believe that international law is a fiction of the very, very powerful people in this world, the Americas, the Britans, the Francis, the Germany's, it is a fiction of the powerful to, to talk about their power in moral ways. The Americans after World War II suddenly found themselves as this immense superpower. Americans always like to think of themselves and European, West Europeans after World War II like to think of themselves as profoundly moral societies and their political and strategic discourse has to be moral. And so international law is a way for them to say that their power is a moral thing rather than just immense power. Actual people who need international law, small nations, poor nations, abused nations, the Bosnians, the Uyghurs, the Tutsis, they are not protected by international law. The actual mechanisms of international law don't kick in. Nobody comes to save you. And so Human Rights Watch is, um, in my view, and I think this is the basic Israeli mainstream view, in as much as Israelis notice these people or think about these people, which they don't because they refuse to talk to us. Um, I have come to treat them as people who, instead of giving me solutions, that are more moral than the solutions I would otherwise adopt in wartime, uh, have just told me that my fighting itself is, is, is immoral. Don't know how to do that, say that to Hamas in a way that actually protects me from Hamas, and so just essentially have come to tell me that protecting myself is immoral.
DS: Ok. I want to move now we talked a little bit at the beginning of this conversation about the days and weeks ahead. I just want to come back to that before we wrap. Does Sinwar at least have a better control of the clock now? He didn't have control of the clock at the beginning, for the reasons you articulated at the beginning, because Israel said, we are, we're going in, we're going in hard, and we are going to delay conversations about hostage exchanges until we start unleashing the full force or some version of the full force of Israeli military might on Hamas. Now, the psychology of the images of hostages returning, it's like a new chapter. We Israelis basically other than that first week when those, when those, you know, fewer than five hostages were returned, Israelis have not really experienced what it's experienced over the last few days. It's like this is a story. It's like a new act in the story. It's a new, it's a, it's a plot twist. I hate, I'm not trying to trivialize it, but it's just a, it's a whole new dynamic. I've just been following the press coverage inside Israel. The press coverage inside Israel has just changed understandably so dramatically in the last few days. What can Sinwar do to capitalize on that change if I think it sounds to me like you're skeptical that he can capitalize on it, but I just want to stay on that for a little bit because I'm not sure you're right. I, he's, he's watching the humanity of, of the Israelis, the vulnerability of the Israelis in these images, what, what could he do with that? It cuts both ways. Um, he's got us by our most painful pressure point, um, our inability to protect those children, um, kept, uh, millions of Israelis sleepless for, I don't know, the first two weeks I wasn't sleeping. I don't know friends or neighbors who were sleeping. Um, that's what Israel is. Israel is, that's our civic religion. That's, um, and we, we violated it. We violated it when Hamas could walk into those homes and steal those children. And Hamas understands that. What it, I think, has begun to understand, the fact that it agreed to, uh, ceasefire. It, uh, early on, a month ago, it offered, uh, a few dozen hostages, roughly this number, in exchange for a month long ceasefire. And Israel didn't even bother to respond. And that has come down to 50 hostages for four days of, of, of quiet. Four days of, of essentially just standing still in the battlefield. Um, and, and that tells me that they've begun to understand the very thing that they did that makes me stop shooting out of a desperation to get another kid out and another kid out. Out of a desperation to claw back something of my own crime. Of my own, uh, betrayal. of those Israelis, of those kids, um, that is exactly the very thing that will be driving the war effort the day the hostages stop coming out. In other words, Sinwar has the ability to keep the quiet for as long as the hostages are coming out at a meaningful pace, he can play with us. He can cut 12 or 13 a day down to 10 a day, probably even 7 a day. If he goes below that, my assessment of Israeli psychology isn't just that the war is back, it's that the war is back and Israelis remember what it's about. Not about getting those specific hostages out, about removing the threat to all of our children, all of our towns, all of our families, which Hamas has vowed to be. So it's not that I think that, you know, Sinwar isn't clever. The enemy will always surprise you. It's in the nature of war. Hamas are going to have a few startling battlefield surprises, which is something that I know, and it terrifies me. I have family going into the battlefield. But it's that the very thing that is stopping our fire right now is the thing that will restart it. And so I don't think Sinwar has a lot of, um, a lot of maneuvering room here to manipulate us anymore. He's used up all, you know, he, he has done what is for us the worst thing that could be done. And that's very liberating to already be after the worst thing that could happen.
DS: Two final questions. One, at the beginning of this conversation, you said there are families who were released, but their father was not. That was because part of the deal was that men would not be released. It was, the focus was on children and women, but isn't part of the dynamic also is that they want to keep to the extent Hamas wants to keep families split so that when families return, Israeli families returned to Israel, they, they still live in fear and are somewhat restrained because they know they have an immediate loved one still in captivity?
HRG: Yeah, that has always been Hamas's strategy from the beginning. It was by the way, an Israeli demand, all the children come out with their mothers, the mothers with the children. There is no other alternative one of the child hostages that came out last night came out without her mother and Hamas said to the Israelis, we can't find the mother and so we're, we're, we want you to know we're sticking to the deal, but we literally just can't find the mother, um, but instead of the little girl, we'll let out a couple of, um, a couple of the older women, a couple of the grandmothers, and then the little girl stays with the mother, but we have the girl. We don't have the mother. We don't know where the mother is. And Israel said, no, no, let the little girl out. So that was an exception. But the very fact that that back and forth took place, which has been reported in Israeli media, uh, tells you, tells me that for Israel, let's make a break. In other words, you will not let out kids without a mother. You will not let take, let a mother out and leave her kids behind. That, that is not part of this game. And so you've seen, for example, on the first day, they were all from kibbutz Nir Oz, because they were all these, these family groups. Um, and. And last night they were all from kibbutz Be’eri. And, uh, and so, um, that's an Israeli condition, uh, but the men are excluded from that equation. And so, um, yes, Hamas has tried their best to, uh, keep family, as many families as possible tethered to the crisis to keep them as a pressure group on the Israeli government. Uh, because it is convinced that if there is a successful, you know, uh, campaign by these families, that's going to limit the Israeli war effort. And they don't yet grasp once more, um, that, uh, it's also validating the Israeli war effort in the Israeli discourse.
DS: And when you say that it's validating the Israeli war effort in the Israeli discourse, this is from left to right. In other words, if you look at the Israeli political spectrum represented by some political parties on the, on the most extreme right, some of which are populating this government, but all the way to the left, uh, you know, Mirav Mikhali, who's the leader of the Labour Party, who would never in a million years have anything to agree with this government, as it relates to the war being waged and how it's being waged, there's more or less a consensus, a political consensus we really haven't seen, I don't know the last time I've seen this kind of-
HRG: Ever. I have no memory. I've never read about such a moment in Israeli history. Um, yeah, it reaches leftward all the way into, uh, progressive anti occupation activists. Um, who have been writing over the last six weeks, um, things like, um, Hamas is the Palestinian rhetoric that defeated and destroyed the Israeli left. Hamas is, you know, they want to blame Israel. They think the Israeli, um, occupation, Israeli heartlessness is at the heart of the whole thing. And if you solved Israel, you would solve everything. And yet they say, here is Hamas validating to the, this is the far, far Israeli left, validating to, to the Israeli body you solve-
DS: Meaning if you solve the Palestinian problem, you solve everything.
HRG: No, meaning if you, the Israeli occupation is not a security need. The military regime in the West Bank is not a security need. It is because, uh, Israel is in thrall to its extreme right, uh, you know, whatever settler movement. And these are people who believe that, um, Israel is the agent here has agency. The Palestinians are, um, simply and very, you know, abused by basically a colonizing power. Uh, they don't think of Tel Aviv as colonizing. They are Israelis, basically sort of mainstream Israelis, but on the far edge, far left edge of that, of that Israeli mainstream. So they do think that in the West Bank, it's exactly that. And, and, and the occupation has to end. They have been writing over the last six weeks, uh, we destroy Hamas, then we can end the occupation much more easily and quickly because the moral calculus in Gaza is Hamas can't be allowed to exist. Um, the existence of Hamas makes us a fringe movement in Israel. Because Israelis think, left wing Israelis, Israelis who want a Palestinian state in theory, absolutely convinced that any inch of territory they withdraw from will be filled by Hamas and will bring on them more October 7th. And so, yes, this is an agreement when it comes to Hamas, if you isolate out this question of Hamas from the larger Israeli Palestinian conflict, if you do that, um, you have 90 plus percent of Israelis. Yeah. Incidentally, huge numbers of Israeli Arabs, surprising numbers of Israeli Arabs.
DS: Uh, we will leave it there, Haviv. Thank you, uh, as always. And I will check in with you again in a week, and then, God willing, in person soon after that. Uh, until then, may we continue to get more news like we've gotten over the last few days of Israelis returning home safely and hope you and your family stay safe.
HRG: Thank you, Dan.
DS: That's our show for today. Call me back is produced and edited by Ilan Benatar. Our media manager is Rebecca Strom. Additional editing by Martin Huergo. Research by Gabe Silverstein. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.