Haviv Rettig Gur - 100 Days into Israel's 'Forever War' - Part 2
This past weekend, Israelis marked 100 days since the Hamas massacre -- and 100 days that 136 hostages, of all ages, still remain captive in unimaginable conditions.
We resume our weekly conversation with Haviv Rettig Gur of THE TIMES OF ISRAEL to discuss where the war goes from here. Does it end? Can it end? How? And what has Israel learned about how to proceed?
This conversation is divided into two parts.
PART I focuses on what we are learning about Israel’s vulnerability now and going forward.
PART II focuses on what we are learning about the divide inside the Arab world in its reaction to these past 100 days, but also the reality that Israel may be in a 'forever war.'
Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
[00:00:00] This is part two of my conversation with Haviv Retig Gur, 100 days into Israel's forever war. If you have not listened to part one of the conversation, we recommend you listen to part one first before listening to this conversation.
Haviv, I want to talk about the Arab world a hundred days in. You will recall, in the days immediately after October 7th, there was all this speculation. Is this a pause in the Abraham Accords? Is this the end of the Abraham Accords? Is the path to Saudi normalization frozen, or at least very much cooled?
Basically, this whole idea of Israel integrating into The Middle East and normalizing relations with the Sunni Gulf. That notion was most observers were quite pessimistic about the future of these arrangements. Here we are today. [00:01:00] Nothing has changed about Israel's relations with the Abraham Accord countries in that Bahrain, the UAE, these countries have not withdrawn their ambassadors, uh, economic integration between these countries are full steam ahead.
This organization I'm involved with on the board of called Startup Nation Central, which tracks Israel's Innovation, it's tech ecosystems, integration, not only with the global innovation economy, but with countries in the region with where relations have opened up. By and large, nothing or not much has changed on the economic track.
As it relates to Saudi normalization, it's not moving full steam ahead, but it's not in reverse. And in fact, just this past week, the Saudi ambassador to the UK was interviewed on BBC and he was asked about the future of Israeli Saudi normalization. All the talk, the Mohammed bin Salman and the Netanyahu comments at the UN General Assembly in September of 2023.
[00:02:00] Obviously, before October 7th, where they were talking openly that things were moving ahead and, and as I've said on this podcast, things were moving faster and more dramatically than even the public reporting was reflecting. And then everyone, as I said, thought it was dead. And then you have the Saudi ambassador to the UK being asked about it.
And the question was asked in a way that suggested or implied that obviously, the war has made this topic over as a, as an actual topic. And the Saudi ambassador says, absolutely. That was his word. Absolutely moving forward. It's absolutely happening. It's absolutely possible. Absolutely. And this was not him speaking off the cuff.
This was not him going rogue. It was clear that he, he was either instructed to make this statement, he was given guidance to make this statement from Riyadh, or if he wanted to make this statement, no one was waving him off it. So. Would you have thought a hundred days after what we have watched Israel do in [00:03:00] Gaza and this International reaction as though Israel, you know, like why I don't need to even characterize it There are legal proceedings in the Hague right now based on charges of Israel committing genocide So I need I don't need to say anymore.
I could point to all the ridiculous criticisms of Israel and the images on Al Jazeera and the And, and, and other media organizations, including mainstream Western news organizations that are totally and utterly hysterical and disproportionate. You want to use the word disproportionate? The media reaction to what Israel is doing is what is where there is a lack of proportion.
And yet the Saudi ambassador says, absolutely, it's moving forward or can move forward. Does that surprise you? It does not surprise me. The reason it does not surprise me is that I think that when there's something that frustrates me generally and for a very long time, I think that when Western diplomats talk about the Middle East, they themselves are fascinated [00:04:00] with process because they all get degrees.
at universities that teach them to think of international affairs as process, as complex, layered strategies, as, as, as interest and power and all of these paradigms for looking at how people think through what is happening to them and how they're going to react to what is happening to them. But in the Middle East, and I think everywhere, and I think that's true of all people, but I'll speak to people I kind of know, people think in stories.
People think identities and they think about grand strategy and stories and identities. The Abraham Accords are something very very deep and it took me quite a long time to understand how deep and it took me being led by the hand by some Muslim friends and people thinking about it who know a great deal more than me to really get to a sense of it.
If you are the Saudis, what does the Middle East look like to you right now? What does the Israel Gaza war look like to you right now? And I think that the answer is that for, [00:05:00] we talked about this a little bit in the past, so I apologize, I'm going to maybe cover a tiny bit of ground for half a second just to just to make the point.
The Muslim world for, Well over a century has been asking itself one immense, overpowering, enormous question. And it's a question whose answers have produced a lot of what the Arab and Muslim, larger Muslim world is today. And the question is, what happened to us? What happened to Islam? Why is the Muslim world generally, this is, you know, the Muslim world is so vast that to talk about it as a single thing is a little silly.
I have to do it just for the purpose of conversation. Apologies to Muslims. This is obviously a cartoonish simplification of very big and complex and massively diverse discourse. But this question of what happened to Islam is fundamental and the great thinkers and the great theologians of the Muslim world have been talking about it for 150 years because of European imperialism, because of power, moving out of Islam, because of the science moving out of Islam, because of economic progress moving out of Islam to [00:06:00] other parts of the world.
And the reason that this really bothers theologians is that Islam is born as a conquering empire. The Prophet himself in his lifetime is a conquering emperor. For centuries, one of Islam's fundamental arguments, its basic arguments for its own divinity, for its own truth, is the astonishing success on the battlefield.
It's the astonishing expansion of the religion, in ways that Muslims themselves couldn't explain in real time in the 7th and 8th centuries. And so, the question today that Muslims ask, or a hundred years ago that Muslims ask, of Islamic weakness is a profound question, because it's the question, essentially, Are we and our God detaching?
Are we distant from our God and God's plan for history? And what do we do to get back to divine grace, to get divine grace, which is proven to us, shown to us by our worldly power, because that's how Islam begins. My favorite example of that really wraps up this [00:07:00] discourse in terms of Israel. Everything that the Muslim world thinks and talks and says about Israel.
It helps me a great deal to think of it in that lens, because suddenly it becomes rational. And suddenly a lot of the hypocrisy that we see in the Muslim world, the Muslim world is protesting in massive numbers in all these cities and all these capitals about Gaza. You didn't have these protests. for the Houthi war in Yemen, where 85, 000 children were starved to death and the Houthis didn't care, or for the genocide underway by Assad in Syria, where he physically just tried to physically destroy or push out enough Sunnis that they could never threaten the Alawites.
To be clear, hundreds of thousands of Sunnis in Syria, Sunni Muslims, like Sunni Palestinian Arabs, so all this concern about the the plight of And the suffering of Sunnis. Hundreds of thousands of slaughtered, millions driven out, and barely any attention given to it, and Assad now welcomed [00:08:00] back into the Arab League.
Right. And by the way, the scale of the Syria disaster, I mean, people just decided to forget. Instantly. 10 percent of Syria's population was Christian in 2011, before the civil war. It's now 2%, and the population itself has shrunk. And so, why doesn't the Muslim world care? Never mind why doesn't the West care, or Western progressives who draw a lot of their discourse from this oppressor oppressed decolonization kind of paradigm, but why don't Muslims care?
And it isn't even a question of Muslim on Muslim violence versus Muslim on non Muslim violence. In other words, it's not that non Muslims are doing the killing of Muslims in Gaza, because you have Myanmar committing essentially a genocide against the Rohingya, Buddhist Myanmar against the Muslim Rohingya people in, in, in the North, pushing 700, 000 of them brutally into Bangladesh.
And the Muslim world doesn't utter a peep. In other words, it just didn't matter. It wasn't the suffering of Muslims at the hands of non Muslims. Israelis look at [00:09:00] that and they say, Aha, they don't care about Gazans. They don't really care about Gazans. If my name was Assad, I could kill three times as many Gazans.
They wouldn't care. I try not to, they would, they, Assad didn't try not to. His whole point was to. So they don't really care about Palestinians. This is about anti Semitism. It's not that simple. In other words, that's a very comforting thought for Israelis, but it's more complicated. And what it actually is, it explains Iran today, explains a great deal of the war that is coming, explains what Israelis woke up to on October 7th.
In 1898, there was a theologian, one of the most important founders of, of the, of Salafi, thought of, of this kind of radical aesthetic, pious Islamic renewal thinking that produced the wahhabi of Saudi Arabia and produced Al-Qaeda and produced the Muslim Brotherhood over the decades and, and would come to produce a lot of these.
what movements that would be called extremist or radical or whatever, but what they really are is an answer to the question, what happened to us? And what happened to us was that we grew far apart from deep Islam, real [00:10:00] Islam, original Islam. And if we return to a pious old Islam, if we, for example, do away with the nation setting, states that the Western imperialists forced on us, right?
The British literally invented the idea of Iraq. The French invented the idea of Lebanon. If we sweep all that away and we are one unified caliphate, we come back into our own. We come back into God's grace and therefore we come back into power in history. And that basic idea, which was borrowed from the Sunnis by the Shia regime in Iran, by the ideological movement that would found this revolutionary regime in Iran, that basic idea Rashid Rida in 1898.
He's a very serious and thoughtful and deep thinker. He's also a jurist in Islamic law, and he's sitting in Cairo, British controlled Cairo, in 1898, and he's following very carefully the first Zionist Congress minutes of the year before. And his response to the Zionist movements founding in Basel was fascinating.
By the way, at the beginning he is pro Zionist. He thinks that the Zionists, the Jews, will come [00:11:00] here and they'll help the Arabs in their effort to kick out the imperialists. But then he begins to understand that they really actually are going to found a nation state in Palestine. And he writes in a journal, a very, very influential journal that he founded that very year in Cairo, Al Manar.
This is a letter he is writing in his journal to Arabs. He writes you complacent non entities. You're going to allow the weakest, the most impoverished, the most pathetic of all peoples to come and to take your land and to be masters in that land. His problem with Zionism, this is a man living in British controlled Egypt.
He is not desperately upset that one of the most powerful empires in all of human history controls him. That's just a question of, you know, history going back and forth. But the problem of Palestine, for him, is the problem of Islamic weakness. You know how you see Islam weak? If [00:12:00] the Jews, the refugees, the refuse, he literally writes there, they're kicking them out from every country, penniless and weak, and they're going to come and take over and push back Islam and conquer a piece of Islam.
How weak is Islam? That the penniless undesirables and paupers of the West can push it back. So the problem with the Jews, it's not about the Jews. It's about the fact that even Jews can push back Islam. And so, for example, for the Iranian regime today, the problem of Israel isn't that Israel exists. It's that Israel cannot be destroyed by Muslims.
If it could be destroyed by Muslims, it wouldn't have to be destroyed by Muslims. Because it wouldn't be the standing symbol of Islamic weakness and therefore of distance from God. And so the path to Islamic redemption and renewal and a return to history as a powerful agent of history cuts through a bloody path through what they call Jewish [00:13:00] arrogance, which is what Israel is to them.
And they use that word arrogance all the time. Khamenei uses it in every speech. And so the reason that a lot of these crowds in Muslim countries, it isn't everyone, it maybe isn't every, it maybe isn't most, but the reason that Muslim communities, Muslim countries will see these massive protests against Israel, ostensibly for suffering, because of suffering, or for Palestinian rights, why would the Iranian regime, which doesn't believe in rights for its own people, bother with Palestinian rights and invest in it billions and billions that it doesn't have?
And a years long, expensive, multi front war for Palestinian rights, because it has nothing to do with Palestinian rights. It has to do with allowing Islam to come back as a force in history, and proving that they are not far and distant from their God. Their whole point is to return Islam to God's embrace.
And as long as Israel exists, that's obvious evidence. That's incontrovertible evidence. Because the Jews are so weak, that's [00:14:00] incontrovertible evidence that Islam does not. In fact, have God's grace. And so for Hamas, on October 7th, the humiliation, the videotaping, and the broadcasting live of the humiliation, was the core message.
And for Israelis, the sense of vulnerability was the message they took away. Because that was the message Hamas was sending. By the way, also rhetorically, they were saying it openly. Now you see that we are opening the gates of hell and you see how weak you are. You are the spider's web, as Nasrallah calls it.
What is the Abraham Accords over the last 20 years the Saudis and the Emiratis? And others, the conservative Sunni regimes, Jordan, Morocco, they have understood the destructive, the disastrous potential contained in these visions of Islamic renewal that we often call radical or extreme. It's the Muslim Brotherhood axis of [00:15:00] Sunni governments, Qatar, Erdogan's government in Turkey, the Muslim Brothers of Egypt.
Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brothers of Egypt. And these conservative regimes have understood how utterly devid These are, these are regimes that destroy their own countries. And these are ideologies that destroy countries and have perpetual war at their heart. And they've turned on them. After 9 11, this began with the Saudis in a big way, where it turned on the Islamists, it turned on the Salafis and the Wahhabis and all these different kinds and turns and shades of groups.
It stopped funding Madrasas. It stopped funding extremists. not only in Saudi Arabia, but around the world, everywhere from Islamabad to London. It had been the primary sponsor of what you're describing, and they shut it down. Absolutely. And so, validating Israel, accepting Israel, isn't a geopolitical step only.
It's really convenient to have Israel on your side if you are any way going to be the arch [00:16:00] enemy of Iran within the Arab world. Because Israel is powers analogous to America, you know, an order of magnitude smaller, but still similar in tech, savvy and things like that. Israel also has a huge advantage that America doesn't have, which is that Israel can't leave.
And so Israel is a more useful ally in that sense than America, if you're the Saudis. Israel is a great thing to have, you know, in your quiver if you're ever facing the Iranians again, like they were in Yemen. There's a much, much deeper and more long term point that they're making. And it's almost a battle for the soul of Islam within the Arab world.
And it's the argument that I, that we refuse to measure the value of Islam or the value of our faith or the value or God's judgment and plan for history, or our closeness to God, and whether we are still within divine grace, we refuse to put that, to hang all of that on whether we managed to massacre all the Jews.
That itself, that measuring stick, is pathetic. That measuring stick is [00:17:00] a powerful signal of Islamic weakness. You, the regime of Iran, you, this radical ideology, is our weakness, is our shame. We want to build, and we want to show the world what we can build, and we want to have companies, and investments, and high tech, and that's what You want to show Islam modern?
Show Islam modern! Don't turn Islam into Daesh, into ISIS. And so there is an argument here that is louder and is serious and is deep and accepting Israel is a kind of recovery. If you accept Israel, you don't have to be obsessed with Israel. If you accept Israel, you don't have to measure your own spiritual validity.
By your relationship with Israel. It's just another little country. Not even a big one It's like it's just another place in the world and it's not our story Our story doesn't have to be a story of whether we can or cannot destroy Israel And so the Abraham Accords are a kind for the people advancing it What was what surprised me about the Emirati peace the normalization with the Emiratis wasn't that they made the peace?
Okay, they made the peace that makes sense There are other Arab countries that made peace with us for strategic reasons never [00:18:00] luck liked us They invited Israelis. They made a point of showing that Israelis can come to Abu Dhabi and have fun and relax and enjoy themselves and do business. They sent an ambassador and then that ambassador visited museums with, with journalists in Israel.
It was about showing that this is real peace. It was about recovering from the addiction to the question of Israel as a proxy for the question of Islamic weakness. And so the Saudis are still on board. I wouldn't say they're still on board. I would say they are tripling down. They're desperate for us to win this.
Because the argument within the Muslim world that Israel is the testing ground for Islam coming back into God's grace, that argument has to die. And the only way for that argument to die is to fail disastrously. And so they want Israel to make that argument fail disastrously. So I do think that the Abraham Accords are still there.
They're still powerful They're still ready to double and triple down [00:19:00] as long as Israel succeeds If Israel really is on the retreat for the next 10 years by all these proxies and by the Iranian strategy Then they'll abandon us like a failed experiment But if they're not if we're not then they're they'll triple down on us But Haviv are some of those Islamists Are they emboldened by the Israeli vulnerability they unleashed and demonstrated on, on October 7th, or are they deterred by what is, what they're watching happening to Gazan Palestinians through Israel's response?
They're not at all deterred by what's happening to Gazans. What's happening to Gazans is not at all a function in their calculus. That's, they're not thinking about it, they're not worried about it, they're no more worried about Gazan suffering than they are about Yemeni suffering. The only question is, what happens to Israel?
By the way, where would it fit into the ideological question? Where would it fit into their narrative? It simply doesn't. It helps that there's this ability to say, look how cruel and [00:20:00] evil Israel is, but it's a propagandistic issue. The Qatari regime does not care about Gaza and suffering. You know, the, I don't know, Erdogan, and not, I certainly don't think Tehran, the Ayatollahs of Tehran who, who, funded and armed and fought.
A lot of the Syrian genocide that we saw between 2011 and, you know, recently care about the suffering of Gazans on the ground. But they do think that the Israeli experience of vulnerability is a rallying call, is a beginning of an end. They are broadcasting, Al Jazeera is obsessively broadcasting every little meme, every little suffering, every victim, every real victim, every real horrific, you know, victimizing of any Gazan, any family hurt, killed, uh, by demolished buildings, constantly, constantly broadcasting it to shift Arab public opinion throughout the Arab world.
I just saw the Arab barometer, uh, which is this big study of Arab public opinion ongoing, came [00:21:00] out with numbers for Tunisia and, uh, Tunisians are, have, have tilted toward Iran by 10 points because of the sense that Israel is, is being. Horrific in Gaza, and therefore Iran is supportable because it wants to destroy Israel.
At a very simple level, it's just a public opinion. So there is that game, but that's a strategic game. It's not an actual, what, they think, yes, they think our vulnerability may be. They're people of faith, so they think it is the beginning of our end, of our collapse, and of Islam's proof that it can overcome at least the Jews, if not, you know, the West.
But they're wrong. And they're not just wrong, they're uncurious. And they're not just uncurious, They get stupid when they think about us, because our vulnerability is our secret weapon. And that's something that none of those authoritarian countries have ever been able to do, is have everyone rowing in the same direction, because they're not democracies.
Genuinely threatened. Genuinely aware that people want to destroy them. And so, yeah, they're doing exactly the very things that empower us. Haviv, I want to ask [00:22:00] you, because what you just laid out is very I'm potentially optimistic that this is sort of the end of the beginning of the Saudis trying to force a correction, if you will, on the Islamist extremist factions within the Muslim world.
But you and I spoke this past week, not on the podcast, where you talked about that this is going to be a long war. This is not a classic Israeli war the way you were talk. 'cause and, and the way I feel about it's, there's all this talk about the day after, right? Is there gonna be a two state solution?
There's gonna be a pal, there's gonna be this, there's gonna be that, there's gonna be a trusteeship, is there gonna be peacekeeping force is there. And my sense is the Israelis and the Americans know, despite what they say or have to say, they know it's none of these things, that it's a muddle and it's going to be a muddle for a while.
Because Israel can't reoccupy Gaza, but Israel can't just walk away from Gaza. So what does that mean? It means not declaring that they're reoccupying Gaza, but they can't actually [00:23:00] declare that the war is over. And this really does feel like this is possibly one of the first Israeli forever war. That Israel doesn't have a solution to Gaza.
Nobody has a solution to Gaza. Yeah, I think the question of, uh, what comes after really is not the right way to understand what's happening. Not because it isn't important, it's absolutely vital. The future of Palestinians, and therefore, by the way, the future of my children, which is deeply intertwined with the future of Palestinians, whether I want it to be or not, whether they want it to be or not, depend on what happens the day after.
And so this is a fabulously important question, but it's being asked now and in the ways it's being asked, mainly for domestic political reasons on all sides. Bibi has to show that he, for his, you know, right wing constituents who are fleeing him in droves, he has to show that he's going to be tough the day after.
And Biden has to show that he's going to bring the Palestinians a better future after supporting Israel through this war on Hamas, which is killed so many Palestinians. And so everybody for their domestic reasons is having a [00:24:00] conversation about the day after with a lot of this talk of process and a lot, a lot of information about what they don't want.
But I think that that's the wrong framing just because it's not open for us. It's not an option that we have to really figure out the day after what, what is open to us, what is given to us to choose is whether we create the possibility of the day after by clearing off the table, the thing. that has prevented a day after.
And if you're anti Israel and you think Israel is what's prevented ever coming to any kind of conclusion that's a reasonable day after, fine. Keep up your campaign. Hope it works. But for Israelis, what has prevented a day after is Hamas. And everything Hamas is and represents, that vision of us as something that can be wished away, and add to that the religious layer that Hamas adds, which Fatah does not, but Hamas does, of everything we talked about now.
In other words, of, of, of this Islamic renewal vision. When that's cleared off the table, When the [00:25:00] logic of never ending violence against civilians, even in the middle of the peace processes, even at the height of the peace processes, shattering catastrophically all Israeli left wing dovish movements and efforts and initiatives and political parties, when that's off the table, that kind of violence, that logic for violence that requires violence, then the Palestinians suddenly have options that they didn't have before.
non violence. A world campaign that looks at them and says to the Israelis, What's your excuse now for the military rule? What's your excuse now for the blockade in Gaza? Or, you know, for any of those measures which are a response to this kind of politics of violence, this strategy of violence. So, clearing Hamas off the table is the first precondition.
This is, I think, the vast mainstream Israeli view. for having a real conversation about the day after. The reason no one can imagine the day after right now is that no one can imagine a day when [00:26:00] there isn't a Hamas there. And the basic impulses, the basic logic of Hamas isn't there. Palestinians are not extremists, and they are not reactive, and they are not small people with small minds who cannot have deep visions and pursue with tremendous initiatives and cleverness serious efforts.
to shape their future. They are all of these things. They are deep, three dimensional, smart thinkers with real profound stories and analyses of what has happened to them and what will happen to them in the future. And until they see the collapse of the Hamas strategy, They will not have an interest in pursuing a different strategy simply because of the sunk cost they've already invested in the old strategy of Constant violence and martyrdom and all of that.
So we need a new vision from among Palestinians And then we have multiple days after available to us And then we have a way a path to come to the Israelis and say to the Israelis Here's what Palestinians [00:27:00] need. Right now, the only thing Palestinian politics tells Israelis is that they need us to die, and that's not something we know how to give them.
And so we need a new path, a new way to do that. So the day after begins the day after. It does not begin before the day after. I think that's the first point. The second point is this really is a very different war. The very fact that we are at a hundred days. is, I think, unique in Israeli Arab wars generally, certainly in the Israeli experience.
Just, just to be clear, even, not just wars that Israel has had with Gaza, you're talking even conventional wars that Israel has had. They're typically quite short, in and out, and not fought on Israeli territory. Right. There is a, um, historian of, of, uh, classical warfare, Victor Davis Hanson. He's now a conservative writer.
He wrote a book I think 30 years ago that I read in high school and I absolutely fell in love with. It was called the Western way of war. And what's really interesting about the Western way of war is that he takes the Greek hoplite tradition and he says the Greek hoplite was a farmer. That's the [00:28:00] most important thing you need to know about the Greek hoplite.
And so when two Greek city states went to war, at least democracies or oligarchies, where the, what the farmer thinks matters, where they were perceived by those people as a momentary way to decide something diplomats couldn't decide. But let's do it quick because everybody's got to get back to the farm because nobody's bringing in the harvest if you're not bringing in the harvest.
And so there would be, there was this idea of war that went deep into the Western tradition of war, of decisive. Powerful, terrifying, but nevertheless extremely limited battles, in which one side wins, one side loses. And then everybody goes back to their farms, because the main business of living is the farm, not the war.
And since basically the founding of the Pax Americana, since the end of World War II, largely as a function of massive American power, there haven't really been those kinds of decisive wars. The Israeli Arab wars were those kinds of wars. 67 was [00:29:00] an immediate, decisive war. 73 was an immediate, decisive war.
Since 73, when the Syrian economy was bombed 30 years back in the last two weeks of the war by an Israel that wanted to explain to the Syrians that they can never invade again, Since then, Syria has never declared war on Israel, has never launched a war on Israel, has never attacked Israel in any serious way.
Others have done it through Syria, Iran, Hezbollah, et cetera, but not Syria itself. And so we have encountered as a kind of tinier version of the Pax Americana point where the wars we are now encountering are wars that are long, that are guerrilla, that are counterinsurgency, that are exhausting, whose strategic vision is exhaustion.
That is how the war works. We have had our boys in the war for a hundred days. My brother in law has been in the war, and my other brother in law has been in the war. And one of them had his first child born and hasn't seen that first child more than a few days in the [00:30:00] totality of the hundred. And it drags, and it drags, and it drags, and we still don't know when they're coming out.
And so this is the beginning, and this is something every Israeli family is experiencing. We are now in a war that doesn't look like the wars that we grew up learning about, the wars that are noble wars. To this way of thinking, this sort of Western way of thinking about war, the guerrilla war feels less than noble and placing civilians in harm's way, which is fundamental to guerrilla strategy.
It all feels a little dirty. It feels wrong. I think that over the last hundred days, Israelis have begun to become used to this very foreign idea. And they've stopped thinking of Gaza as, you know, even the wars in Gaza, 2014, 2009, they were fast wars, to achieve some specific end, and then stop, because you don't fight a war for no reason, the point of life is not the fighting of the war.
I think the Israelis have understood, and we're seeing it in the incredible resilience of these soldiers, and in the families [00:31:00] living without their soldiers, without their husbands and fathers and sons, and of the hundred thousand Israelis, or whatever the number is, who are living in hotels. Because they were taken out of the north, because we don't know if Hezbollah is going to use the opportunity to invade.
And they're all a family, started the school year in a hotel room, not a nice hotel room. Whatever hotel room the government will put you up in when it's moving 80, 000 people out of their homes. And everyone is okay. Everyone is sticking with it. Partly because, you know, high levels of social capital and solidarity, everyone's helping everybody and all of that.
Stuff that, you know, your book is about. But partly because there is also this understanding that that's just not the world we're living in. We are fighting the long war, an awful war, a war whose strategic premise is to exhaust us. And therefore it will be won by those who are not exhausted, or by those who are exhausted second, not exhausted first.
And that's the challenge, and Israelis are meeting it, and they have a very, very clear understanding of it. And so we're at a hundred days. It's a moment to [00:32:00] reflect. I think it's a new country in many ways. It's a country that reclaimed the old ethos of individual debt to society of, I have to actually do for my country, for my people, for my family.
That ethos of early Israel is massively back. And the basic vision of this war is lasting a very long time. This is a forever war. We have to solve the problem of Hezbollah. We have to solve the problem of Iran. We have to because we have to survive and the alternative they give us is to not survive. And so all of that is true all at once, all of the things that are being said now about Israeli vulnerability are true.
I think that they are half the story. And if you don't catch the other half, Israel will continue to surprise you. Not you, Dan, you have written a book about the other half. But nevertheless, it will continue to surprise all these observers. Especially, and most tragically, our enemies. Because they're going to launch new wars, without understanding that our strength flows from the very [00:33:00] vulnerability they're trying to impose on us.
Haviv, we will leave it there. Thank you, as always. I want to pick up on a number of these themes in future conversations, but this really, I think, helped us set the table for how to think about process, how to make sense of where we're at 100 days in. I look forward to speaking to you during the week and then back at it for our Formal, official conversation on the podcast, one week from now, do not worry, listeners, Haviv, we will be back, we will be back on schedule.
Until then, Haviv. Thank you. I appreciate it very much. I'll just say this, we're all suffering. And if people are responding to this podcast as something that connects them to each other and connects them to Israel, I am just a conduit conveying literally what's happening in my neighborhood. So come visit.
You want to feel better about Israel's situation? Be in Israel for a minute. Perfect way to end this conversation. Thanks, Haviv. Thank you.[00:34:00]
That's our show for today. To keep up with Haviv Retiguer's work, you can find him at The Times of Israel. At their website, or on X at Times of Israel, or at Haviv Retig Gur. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.