External pressures on Israel, and within - with Haviv Rettig Gur
Will there be a negotiated pause in fighting in advance of Ramadan, or will the IDF move against the remaining Hamas battalions in Rafah?
At the same time, what to make of the new external and internal pressures on Israel? Externally, there is mounting pressure on Israel regarding delivery of humanitarian aid, and increasing internal pressure — specifically on Prime Minister Netanyahu — relating to how he’ll hold his Government together in the midst of a new debate about exemptions of Haredim from military service.
To help us unpack what’s going in with these intensifying external and internal political pressure points, we are joined by Haviv Rettig Gur, for our regular check in.
Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
[00:00:00] We have reached the point in the war where it is now obvious to everybody that the questions, the center of gravity is shifting from the battlefield to politics. The army needs more soldiers. That runs headlong into Haredi politics and coalition politics. The hostages are in their last stretch. You know, they've been there four months.
Who knows if they're still alive three months from now. That question of the hostage deal runs into coalition politics. The day after question because of humanitarian aid. The day after question can no longer wait for the day after. That is a question for politics. Everywhere you look, the center of gravity is no longer on the question of what the IDF can achieve on the ground.
We know what the IDF can achieve on the ground, and we know it's going to achieve it. The question now is all the rest of it, and all the rest of it needs solutions, and those solutions are going to be political solutions.
12 o'clock noon on Sunday, [00:01:00] March 3rd in New York City. It's 7 o'clock PM in Israel. In recent days, it does not appear that there have been major IDF advances on the battleground in Gaza, as questions remain as to whether there will be a negotiated pause in fighting in advance of Ramadan or not, and whether a full scale military operation will advance against the remaining Hamas battalions in Rafah.
At the same time, the Israeli government is contending with new external and internal pressure. Externally, there is increasing international pressure on Israel following the humanitarian aid incident last week that left a number of Palestinian civilians dead. And increasing internal pressure, specifically on Prime Minister Netanyahu.
As it relates to how he'll hold his government together in the midst of a new debate about exemptions [00:02:00] for Haredim, or ultra Orthodox Jews, from their IDF military service. This has thrown a bunch of questions on the table. As different members of the Netanyahu government take positions that create new pressure points to help us unpack What's going on with these intensifying external and internal political pressure points?
We are joined by haviv retic or from the times of israel for our regular check in. This is call me back
And i'm pleased to welcome back for our regular check in. Haviv retic or haviv. How you doing? I'm doing. Okay How are you dan? I'm all right. I'm all right. Both of us are, have been in the midst of some intense travel, kind of exhausted, but the news has not taken a break while we have been on the road, and a lot of news has happened both inside Israel and outside Israel relating to Israel, and I want to take apart [00:03:00] Each of these topics because I think they're all in a sense.
There's a thread that connects them all to one another one relates to the increasing external pressure on the Israeli government and then the internal the domestic Israeli pressure that has been ratcheting up on Prime Minister Netanyahu. I want to start with the external events over the last few days.
Specifically around the aid truck incident, the aid trucks that were going in through the Israeli Gaza border in which there was an attempt for aid to be delivered that spiraled out of control and resulted in a number of Palestinian casualties as we understand it. Can you just Based on what you know, Haviv, describe what actually happened, and then we can talk about the implications.
Yeah, I'm basing this on media reports. I don't have first hand knowledge from any particular sources, either in Gaza or Israel. But it looks like what happened was that there was this aid convoy. The aid convoy was [00:04:00] swarmed by Gazans, desperate for supplies, desperate for, the supplies included food and other things, and the gunmen, possibly who were protecting the convoy, one truck at least, tried to escape the masses of people coming at them and ran over people.
Some group of the people trying to get at the supplies started approaching an IDF force that was Trying to protect the convoy, to prevent the convoy at least from being robbed by Hamas forces on the ground, the IDF commander said to open fire in the air. They were not deterred. This was already a little bit of an out of control, you know, very large group of people.
It's hard for large groups of people to turn, change direction, et cetera. He gave the order, which is an order that's supposed to be used in an extreme case of crowd control with real danger to the soldiers, which is what the officer believed was happening to fire at. The feet, there was fire. The IDF believes [00:05:00] there were as many as 10 casualties, but there were dozens and dozens more killed that the IDF says were killed by the stampede itself, the human crush, and by the truck.
Hamas's initial statement was actually an IDF airstrike. Then that statement was about IDF gunfire, killing dozens of people. So I personally am still very much in the fog of war. Probably by the time people hear this, they will know more than I know. But what it looks like to me, as far as I can tell now is that we had an aid convoy.
The aid convoy was supposed to be protected by gunmen of one kind or another. There was a, you know, mass attempt to grab the aid. And the aid truck was staffed by private contractors, right? These were private contractors bringing in the aid. Yeah. Who were supposed to protect the aid truck. And everything went crazy because these people are actually very desperate.
And there is a real need and [00:06:00] the aid coming in has been Very hard to actually distribute in Gaza, even if we assume good faith on the part of all parties, it's something that's unbelievably difficult to do. And I don't think we can assume good faith on the part of most of the forces on the ground, meaning Hamas has been stealing the aid.
We know that various clans that have been allowed to distribute the ages. So it doesn't get into Hamas his hands. We've seen some part of the aid less than when Hamas gets control of it, but some part of the aid disappear as well into a black market and just disappear completely in ways that can't be tracked.
So. There was this really terrible, terrible incident that the story of it that ran overseas was immediately taken to whatever direction served any side. Everybody is convinced that the moral calculus of the incident fits their narrative and it's tragic and it's horrible and it's hard to sift through the rhetoric and get to the actual event because there's very little actually coming out of Gaza right now that's really trustworthy that isn't part.
of one side or another's [00:07:00] war effort. Can you just spend a minute on why delivering aid to Gazan Palestinian civilians is so operationally difficult? I would say that this is actually the big story of this tragedy, and it's the important story because it isn't just about this tragedy. We're going to see this story unfold at a much larger level.
across Gaza, not just in these specific locations or incidents, until we solve this problem. It turns out it's extremely hard to distribute aid in Gaza right now. We have seen drivers, including UNRWA truck drivers, threatened by Hamas. We have seen attempts by the Jordanians and some others, the French, to airdrop aid.
The airdrops either are ineffective, some of them have actually fallen in the sea by accident. Well, it's very hard to do airdrops at scale in any efficient way. Right. Or it's just too small to really matter. Right. So it's nice of the Jordanians, but it's not going to feed two million people. And the IDF, you know, you talk to officers in the IDF, and they say, they accept that there is this responsibility to make sure that [00:08:00] in the areas of responsibility that the IDF actually controls, nobody starves, nobody goes hungry, but the IDF is absolutely unwilling to have Israeli soldiers protecting the actual convoys directly, and the reason is very simple.
It puts them in direct contact with civilian populations that are deeply infiltrated still by Hamas. Hamas has not yet been degraded at the counterinsurgency level that these populations that will come for the aid won't include Hamas fighters, and therefore It is not a danger. It is an absolute guarantee that IDF soldiers protecting these convoys will be murdered by the very people they're trying to feed, not by the actual people, but by the Hamas embedded among them.
And there's a very real danger when you create that friction between the IDF and that's the military term and civilian populations, that closeness between the IDF and civilian populations that these soldiers can get. which is one of Hamas's strategic objectives during this entire war, and they've failed to do it so far, and they want to do it.
And so the army is unwilling to [00:09:00] put soldiers in that direct and acute and immediate danger. And so nobody actually knows what to do. And not knowing what to do is Hamas's plan. Hamas does need the humanitarian catastrophe to escalate as much as it possibly can so that international pressure and Arab world pressure and Muslim world pressure is brought to bear.
And by the way There are some huge conclusions we need to draw from that. In other words, we can't have a situation where Gazans don't eat. And so we need to start thinking about the larger context and the day after question and who comes in, you know, even this early in the game. Essentially, there's been this conversation in Israel about the day after, right?
Who runs Gaza after the war? If you're looking just in the narrow focus of humanitarian aid, which is a desperately needed focus we need to look at, the day after is today. We already need that replacement for Hamas. The IDF can't beat it. And the larger picture of this incident of these deaths is that this is going to keep happening until we have some kind of a solution [00:10:00] to who's in Gaza, who's running the place, who's enforcing the place other than Israel.
The Biden administration has recently announced that the U. S. will airdrop aid into Gaza. The Pentagon is apparently set to begin some kind of humanitarian campaign in the coming days, so they will try it. But the press coverage Immediately after the incident, and I'm just going to quote a couple pieces here, the Associated Press headline, I'm quoting Gaza's health ministry, says at least 70 people were killed and 280 were wounded in a strike on a crowd of Palestinians waiting for humanitarian aid.
That's interesting, on a strike, meaning it reads like there was a, not some chaotic haphazard situation where warning shots turned into deadly shots, but that there was an actual military strike on innocents. Right. Which was Hamas's claim at the time. They're citing a Hamas claim. Without citing it as a Hamas claim.
It's the reporting it as their own. And then there's the New York Times. [00:11:00] Deaths of Gazans desperate for food prompt fresh calls for a ceasefire. Again, not any of the context that you are describing here. The subhead is international leaders and the aid group said the disaster on Thursday, last Thursday, reinforced the need for an immediate halt in fighting and more relief for Gaza.
So I guess my question, Haviv, is we keep waiting for the turning point. We keep waiting, those of us like you and me and others and some of our other guests were watching for what is the event that is the catalyst for things to turn, right? We know from the 2006 Lebanon war. It was 34 days and then there was an incident where the IDF bombed a building where a number of Lebanese civilians were killed and the Bush administration famously told Prime Minister Omer, okay, we got to wind things down 2014 Gaza war, Israel's in Gaza.
It was 50 days. And at some point, there was a catalyst for the Obama administration saying to Israel, We gotta [00:12:00] wind things down. Is this that event? Because the way you read the press, there's talk of ceasefire, talk of ceasefire, talk of ceasefire, not really going anywhere. And then there's this event that I think is getting outsized, but we'll see.
And we'll see the IDF investigation play out and we'll see what we learn. But based on what we know so far, based on what you're saying, I think the press attention is outsized relative to what actually happened, but what I think doesn't matter, it's what international leaders think it's what the president of the United States thinks and.
Is this the event that they say this is the point that you take that time clock and you turn it upside down and say we're over, we're out of time? I don't think so for a very simple reason. I don't think any of those arenas or audiences are the determining factor. I still think the determining factor is Israelis.
The Israeli public and by extension Israeli politics. This is not the event that grants Hamas immunity. If that's essentially the question we're asking, is this the event that forces the Israelis to say, well, you know, Hamas gets to survive this thing. Hamas isn't [00:13:00] destroyed, Hamas wins the war, and we're going to be back at this war in ten years.
If that's the question, then the answer is no. And the answer is not just no, it's an emphatic no, and an event ten times this size, the answer would still be no. This is an event that shows us that the purely military part of the war might be winding down. Winding down spectacularly successfully.
Spectacularly successfully in military terms. The humanitarian questions, the political questions, the geopolitics, those are separate questions. The diplomatic, public opinion in the world, these are, you know, separate questions, vital questions. We should talk about them constantly. But purely in the military terms on the ground, the IDF campaign has been more successful than the IDF itself expected.
Vastly more successful, we know this, than Hamas expected. And much more successful than the U. S.? Ever expected. You remember that the U. S. Biden administration, when it was trying to caution the Israelis before they went into Gaza, certainly before they went out [00:14:00] on the ground, they sent senior American military officers with a lot of experiences in various theaters in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in counterinsurgency, in dealing with ISIS, and basically said, if you do what you're planning to do, you're looking at least 10 times the number of Israeli casualties that Israel has experienced so far, right?
And by the way, those Americans were not stupid. We are trying to do something in Gaza That's an order of magnitude more difficult than anything America has ever done with similar kinds of guerrillas and insurgents Because Hamas has managed to build that underground infrastructure much harder and so this American argument that you know careful what you wish for it might not be as Easy as you think, it might not even be possible militarily, wasn't a stupid argument.
But the Israeli answer, like the classic Israeli answer was, you know, we don't know if it's possible, all we know is we have to do it. Right? That's kind of the Israeli response to the Pentagon, when there was this idea that Iron Dome isn't technically feasible. And the Israelis were like, well, you know, maybe we'll do it [00:15:00] anyway.
That was the Israeli attitude. When the Israelis get into that stubborn attitude, often they can pull off things that the conventional wisdom says isn't possible. The military phase was a dramatic and profound success. Hamas's last best hope is that the world's demand for a ceasefire, or the demand for part of the world, or the Muslim world, or the left in the international West, in the West or in the international community, that that saves them.
The Israelis remain as implacable as they were, and they remain that, and I wish I could convince Hamas of that, because it would end the war sooner. But the long story short is, I do think that what this event highlights is that we are reaching the point where it is massively and emphatically about the idea of continuing to pull Hamas out of those tunnels, the idea of continuing the counterinsurgency.
There's still the enormous problem of Rafah, where Hamas still has operational battalions that are hiding under vast numbers of Palestinian civilians and refugees from the rest of Gaza that won't be able to go home for a long time, [00:16:00] and we're not sure where to send them if we want to go in and get Hamas out of those tunnels in Rafah.
So they have this huge, huge problem. However, we are now shifting in places that we have already basically gained control on the ground, in Khan Yunis, in Gaza City, to the part where we have to actually run Gaza, manage Gaza, the Israelis thought they would go in, they would have whatever time they needed to crush Hamas through sheer blunt stubbornness and unwillingness to have Hamas survive this, they would just have the two years they need, but then the humanitarian aid issue proves that we don't, we need someone who can distribute humanitarian aid Now, and who can do it against Hamas's wishes, and who can fend for themselves in the face of Hamas disruption, violent Hamas disruption, and who can manage Gaza in our place.
And it cannot be Israelis. My thinking is leaning toward an Arab solution to the aid convoys, an Arab solution to Gaza's future. We've talked about this in the past. What we didn't realize and what [00:17:00] we are now realizing and what I wish Israeli officials had realized a month ago when We were already talking about these kinds of things is that we need it now.
We needed a week ago. We needed a month ago. The day after has already come. If we don't know what that end is, what our vision is for that, we can't work backwards to put in place now the kinds of things we need to make sure that the humanitarian crisis in Gaza doesn't become a catastrophe. I got to tell you, Aviv, if you listen to the language coming out of the Biden administration where President Biden himself has described what's happened with this aid truck incident as appalling, as tragic language that suggests that, you know, and the press wants to, is desperate to report that this is Biden's final straw, that he's stuck by Israel unconditionally since October 7th, but there was a moment where the Israelis would go too far and many analysts are bracing for that moment and Many friends of mine who are very supportive of Israel or many friends of mine who are on the political right in the U.
S. have a knee jerk [00:18:00] tendency to be critical of the Biden administration, have been waiting for that moment, waiting for that moment where Biden drops the hammer on Israel and says, you know, his version of the conversation with Omer in 2006 or the conversation with Obama. And his team had with the Israeli government in 2014 to say, it's over.
The hammer's dropped. Everyone's been bracing. They keep telling me it's coming. It's coming, it's coming, it's coming. And then the truck incident was, it's here. Here's what we know so far. We know that the administration has used tough language in reaction to what happened. We know that, as recently reported, the administration intends to dropping aid into Gaza into its own hands.
We also know that there was an effort to issue a statement from the UN Security Council that got pulled and was never issued, effectively criticizing Israel for what happened and yet again calling for a ceasefire. And the statement was pulled because the US didn't support it. Now, it's interesting that they went for a statement instead of a Security Council [00:19:00] resolution because the U.
S. administration, at the direction of President Biden, has been consistently vetoing all these resolutions. So they figure, okay, a statement. A statement is easier to get done, it has less weight than a Security Council resolution, but a statement from the Security Council still has to get drafted and issued by consensus.
And the U. S. was not on board. So therefore There was no statement. So I think the aid incident is a big story. The press is going to make it into a big story. I don't think it matters until the U S itself says we are changing course. We are shifting our approach. And despite the rhetoric coming out of the administration, I don't see any sign that the administration is shifting.
I'll say two things. One, I don't know what, my sense of the Biden administration from afar, you know them much closer, much better. But my sense from afar is that they understand that what's the alternative? In other words, what are we talking about? So therefore, what, the war stops and Hamas survives? If that's the call, if that's what, you know, the aim is here, [00:20:00] then it's not going to work.
I really don't know how to say it more bluntly and simply to the international community, telling the Israelis now Hamas gets to survive this. Won't work. It won't work no matter what costs you place on Israel. And it's a tragedy for Gaza that Hamas isn't aware of that, but it just literally won't work.
And I think that the Biden administration understands that and understands that its own options are limited unless it plans to literally take over Gaza and. Run Gaza and turn Gaza into the 51st American state. I think the Israelis might actually be on board for, I don't even know what people, in other words, I'm being ridiculous because I don't understand the point, what would you like Biden to do?
That's the first point. The second point is I'm sometimes accused of being optimistic. In my defense, I was optimistic about the Israeli military capacity to fight the war. And I was right. And I was optimistic about president Biden. And so far you were too. And so far we were. Right. I'm optimistic here.
Not [00:21:00] optimistic because we don't face tragedy. We face tragedy. This is going to be painful. It's going to hurt. It's already hurting terribly in Gaza. But Hamas is losing control. That's the other piece of this story. The Israelis desperately need to find a way to have something take over in Gaza, someone, somewhere, somehow, that isn't Israel, and has to start thinking about that much earlier than it wants to, at a time when Hamas can still disrupt whatever that replacement to Hamas is in Gaza.
Israeli politics are probably not capable of doing that right now at the speed that Palestinians and Israel's own national interests need it to happen. But at the same time, remember there was an incident, I think it was a month ago, when a group of Palestinians rushed another aid convoy and Hamas gunmen were protecting the aid convoy or stealing the aid convoy.
It's hard to tell which is which sometimes they do half and half and they opened fire on the Palestinians rushing the aid convoy and they killed a kid. The story of the death of that [00:22:00] Palestinian child, it wasn't just that they killed desperate people trying to rush an aid convoy. It was that that kid belonged to the very clan that Hamas had outsourced part of the protection of the aid convoy to.
That clan Then saw Hamas no longer as an ally that they're cooperating with or the powers that be that they're cooperating with, but in fact, part of the problem. And you started to see minor protests, occasional clashes with Hamas gunmen from that clan. This is that on a bigger scale. Hamas can cow UNRRA, it can scare UNRRA, it can kick UNRRA out of wherever it needs to take over the supply chain, et cetera.
But it's losing increasingly the capacity to do that. The fact that Israel now needs a solution is because Hamas is being pushed back. And more and more we're seeing these clans, these other power centers start to assert themselves, very hesitatingly, everyone's still scared Hamas is going to come back.
Nobody's entirely sure the Israelis really mean it and they're going to see it through. But nevertheless, Hamas is [00:23:00] losing control more and more. On the ground and we're seeing it. That's good news and it's good news, buried deep in a tragedy, but it is good news for the future. In addition to the Biden administration not having an obvious alternative to the war, Israel is fighting in Gaza.
I also think the. Over emphasis on domestic political pressure that President Biden is under from his own base is losing a little bit, not a lot, but is gradually losing some altitude from what I understand from reporters covering the White House closely and from folks who work in the administration.
While there are many people around president Biden who are very worried about progressive opposition to the war in Gaza, the president himself doesn't have a whole lot of patience for progressives, for the constant complaining and the histrionics of progressive leaders within his own party, and he is responsive to them.
To varying degrees, but he's often not responsive to them And one of the issues he has not been terribly responsive to them is on the issue [00:24:00] of israel's options in gaza a b There was a lot of build up a lot of pre game show leading up to the michigan primary a few days ago And oh my gosh, this is going to be a blow for President Biden.
What was the real blow for President Biden? The blow would be if a number of Democrats didn't show up or vote non committed in the Democratic primary or vote in surprisingly high numbers for Dean Phillips or Marion Williams, and it would show that the Arab American community largely in Dearborn, Michigan, was putting up a real fight, a real front against Biden's reelection, and that Biden risked losing them.
Turns out, those numbers were, in the end, as I thought they would be, inconsequential, certainly relative to previous Democratic presidents running for reelection, like President Obama in 2012, so there wasn't a meaningful difference, so it's a lot of noise, but not a lot of organizing, not a lot of turnout on this front, A.
B. Even if you thought it was [00:25:00] damaging, the number of people who didn't vote or voted non committed in the primary in Michigan a few days ago, that was the easy part because there were no consequences. It was a protest vote without consequences because it was a way of voting to make a statement, but the consequences were meaningless.
Because someone in their eyes worse than Biden couldn't possibly get elected as a result of their actions. The next time it will be protest with consequences. That is to say, if those who did try to protest in the Michigan primary, if they try to do the same thing in the general election, Donald Trump could wind up being President of the United States.
And I think President Trump, regardless of what one thinks of him, is a phenomenal foil for President Biden's re election campaign, who's trying to mobilize and energize the progressive base. So, okay guys, you still want to play games? You still want to make your statement about Gaza? Guess what? You get the guy who introduced the Muslim ban as president instead of me.
You still playing your protest games? So, I just [00:26:00] think this was the easy part, and they didn't even show up. I'm hard pressed to believe they're going to show up when it actually matters. Yeah, there's also something you taught me to pay attention to, which is the alternative vote. Trump took Michigan by a historically narrow margin in 2016, something like 10, 000 votes.
Between 000 votes. Right. And The story of that is the turn of the working class from left to right, from the blue ledger to the red ledger, that's a different constituency. And if Biden is seen in Michigan to go down the road of the progressive politics, you can like him, you can hate him, but they do have an elitism problem.
And it's a problem that. You know, every study bears out, and there's a huge debate within the Democratic Party about this, that the Democratic Party is shedding the working class, like there's no tomorrow. And so a Biden that campaigns in a way that would hold the progressive vote in Michigan is a Biden that has more danger of pushing working class voters who actually [00:27:00] decided Michigan for Trump last time, or two elections ago, to go the other way.
And so I agree, I don't think Biden thinks, which is the important question. That Michigan was a blow to him, even if the campaign against him in Michigan in the Arab and Muslim communities feels like it scored some kind of a point. I don't think Biden felt that, you know, Dan, that also we've talked a few times around this question of when the American Israeli alliance or American backing for Israel in this war, because Biden wants to see Hamas actually defeated, because that has huge implications for the region.
When it pivots on both sides Netanyahu to domestic politics. And I think we can safely say, and this is part of also the story of the aid convoy and the deaths in that incident in Gaza, that this pivoting toward politics is now well underway. It's true in America. It's true. I think also in Israel, not just on the question of the day after that is becoming an urgent question [00:28:00] long before the actual day after, because of the question of humanitarian aid, but it's also.
You know, we've been having debates now in Israel. I don't know if this is connected, but I'm just going to pretend like it's connected, because on both sides we're talking about politicians suddenly pivoting to domestic politics, and that's shaping the relationship and the war, and the political and geopolitical environment and the actual war fighting itself.
We're having a huge debate in Israel now about the ultra Orthodox draft, a debate of a type that we've never had before, because for the first time the army is coming and saying, we need 7, 000 more soldiers. We don't have a demographic place to take them. Okay, so, Haviv, can you just briefly explain the history of Haredim and army service in Israel?
Because this is an important issue, it's a loaded issue, and it's coming to a head right now in the context of a war. Yeah. When Israel was founded, the ultra Orthodox community, black hats, right, black coats, Folks know who I'm talking about. The terms are different, they talk about themselves in different terms, people talk about them.
But [00:29:00] broadly speaking, the ultra Orthodox community was something like 3 percent of the Jewish population. They also had a birth rate that was fairly close to the average, something like three children per woman. Most of them had jobs. 85 percent of men worked and quite a few of them served in the military in the wars in the early years of the state.
Over time, because of the political power of their political parties in Israel, we have a system in which there historically has been a large center left party, a large center right party, and then a bunch of satellite parties on left and right that they cobbled together to form a coalition. And because the large party is never a majority, in the history of Israel there's never been a single party that had a parliamentary majority all by itself, the small parties on which the larger parties depend for a parliamentary majority have had outsized power.
And the ultra Orthodox parties have used that power essentially to construct a massive welfare state and to ensure an exemption from military service for [00:30:00] vast numbers of students. So at the beginning of the state there was this exemption. offer to the ultra Orthodox community for exceptional students, seminary students, exceptional yeshiva students who were really the geniuses of their generation, something like 400 a year received exemptions.
This is the same exact military rule used to allow you know, world class artists or athletes. If you're an athlete on the Olympic track and you lose 18 to 21, those years of your life for training, because you had to go to the army, you're never going to get to the Olympics. Israel has a law that allows for really, truly exceptional artists and thinkers and students and scholars and athletes to skip military service, but they have to be the top of the top to get that exemption.
That was the exemption for 400 yeshiva students. By the seventies, it's still small. It's still 800, something like that. And then the ultra Orthodox became the linchpins of coalitions of the right from the late seventies. And it has now grown to something like [00:31:00] 16, 000 exempted young people who are studying in yeshiva and because of their yeshiva studies don't do military service.
The point is that. The ultra Orthodox community, which was 3 percent at the founding of the state, living essentially in this kind of internalized little welfare state that they built for themselves, separate from the general Israeli economy and not really contributing much in the way of taxes to the general Israeli population or economy, was not a problem when they were 3 percent of the population.
Living with their exemptions from military service or national service of any kind. Was not a problem when they were 3 percent of the population. Today they're 13 percent of the population. And that's a growing percentage because the average birth rate now is six and a half children per woman. And so the ultra Orthodox have become too big.
To live apart, too big to be paid for by everybody else, to not work. 85 percent of men worked among the ultra Orthodox in the 50s, and now it's 50%. [00:32:00] And parts of the ultra Orthodox community, it's much lower than 50%. And the army, we've had a debate over the last week, and it's a specific issue. There's a, the ultra Orthodox have essentially told Israelis, our students are not going to serve.
It's a religious reason. They cannot maintain their religious purity and their religious rituals in the military. And if you force them to serve, they will refuse. It simply won't work. Take it or leave it. It doesn't matter what Israel does. You can pass a law against it. You can throw 60, 000 kids in prison.
That's fine. We will not serve in the military. They're religious reasons. We have tried to, over the years, find There've been state committees established, all kinds of bills passed. Governments have passed bills and failed to pass bills. It's been a debate for decades, literally decades, how we get national service out of the ultra Orthodox for the simple reason that other Israelis, especially Israeli Jewish communities do serve and their children are in danger and they lose years of their lives to the military and it's unfair.
[00:33:00] It feels unequal. And in the name of equality. The ultra Orthodox have to do their part and they've refused. So there's been this political tussle for many, many years. The last bill, which was a temporary measure just to avoid forcing the police to start arresting people who aren't going into the army expired a while ago.
And there's a deadline now to pass a new draft bill. The ultra Orthodox parties have refused to agree to vote on an important budget amendment until the draft. and it's done with them involved. They want to control what it's going on. And so we're now having this political skirmish over the budget bill, and we've essentially gone over the deadline for the budget law.
The current Knesset is in breach of the budget law in terms of the deadline for passing a budget because of this new question of the draft law. All of this kind of tug of war, this tussle with the ultra Orthodox over whether to draft or whether not to draft, this is 30 year old politicking. It's been happening for 30 years.
The point now is, over the [00:34:00] past week, the Israeli military has come to the Knesset and it said, we have a problem. Here's our problem. We have, for well over a decade, been trying to become a more efficient and slimmer army. Less manpower, more tech. October 7 opened our eyes to the fact that we're just going to need a whole chunk of battalions.
We're going to need entire infantry brigades on the borders for the foreseeable future. I mean, for generations to come. And so we now need a much, much larger manpower in the military. We need to start drafting more people. There are a lot of secular people who get exemptions. A lot of religious Zionist people get exemptions.
We need them now to serve. But we also literally demographically Need the Ultra Orthodox. We need 7, 000 more soldiers every year than we're currently getting. We need something like 2, 000 more officer commissions every year than we currently are budgeted for. The army has to grow and it has to grow fast and it is [00:35:00] becoming harder this week.
is this discussion where it is becoming harder. It's, it's no longer politics. It's no longer about people screaming, this is fair, this isn't fair. We literally just need the kind of army that has the manpower that this 13 percent of the population need to help provide. Now, They don't have to provide combat soldiers, which is where really a religious lifestyle of their kind is very hard to maintain.
But they could provide all kinds of other services. The Israeli army has a medical corps, the Israeli army has all kinds of places where you can be ultra Orthodox while still serving. And that frees up other populations for combat roles. The point is, the question of the ultra Orthodox draft. Which in the past has toppled governments.
It's a foundational question in Israeli politics. Like the question of humanitarian aid in Gaza and generally the war in Gaza, which is now pivoting, its center of gravity is pivoting from the military operation into the political system. This question is now becoming [00:36:00] something the political system can't ignore anymore.
We have a cohort that's drafting in March. Before you get to the political system can't ignore it. I agree with most of what you're saying in terms of What the fault lines of the debate have been, but there have also been practical issues where I've talked to a number of IDF officers and senior officials in the defense establishment over the years about the Haredi issue, also in service of research for mine and Saul's latest book where we deal with the Haredi issue quite extensively, and there was always this practical obstacle from their perspective.
Yes, we would like Haredim or more of them to serve in some way. However, Not so easy to integrate them into a military that is largely, in terms of how it is organized for training and war fighting, from a secular perspective. That is to say, issues around separation of male and female, issues around compliance with Jewish laws, Jewish restrictions, to the level and detail that the [00:37:00] Haredi would require, trying to run an army on those terms.
It's one thing running a country in the context of those debates. That's one thing. But running a military, and particularly running a war fighting military, with that kind of pressure and constraint, some of these individuals in the IDF, senior levels, would say, We're just not equipped for it. We don't want it.
It's more of a headache, so they weren't in an actual rush to try to figure out how to recruit and integrate the Haredim. That was then. That was back in those good old days, when it was a nice to have, when it was a question of principle, when it was a question of other populations and communities feeling that the Haredim are carrying their share of the burden.
Right now, we literally just need the soldiers. We literally just need the manpower. And that's fundamentally changing the conversation. And now you're seeing, for example, this week a really big debate underway between Benny Gantz and Yoav Galant. Galant, a defense minister, who is also a member of this coalition and [00:38:00] doesn't want the Likud to fall, the government to fall, and so he needs to work with the ultra Orthodox parties.
Galant saying, we will find an agreed upon solution. And Benny Gantz who joined this coalition just for the purposes of the war, but actually is a critic of this government and its dependence on the ultra Orthodox parties, at least when it comes to the draft question, saying there has to actually be ultra Orthodox enlistment at a significant level.
And it, maybe we can find ways to enlist that aren't technically military, but some kind of civilian national service in the rescue services that can shrink the military's own rescue services and move soldiers around in that way. Maybe there are solutions like that. But the fact is we just need the manpower at this point.
And the Haredim have been protected for so long that they've grown used to the idea that other people protect them. And it's time for them to shoulder the burden. That used to be a principle debate. That's now an extremely pragmatic need. And so that question has now come onto the agenda of Israeli politics in a way that [00:39:00] is more urgent than it has ever been, more serious than it has ever been, because it's so much more practical and specific than it has ever.
It's not a principled debate now. It's just literally we need this army to grow very fast, and the ultra Orthodox are now such a large part of the population that they weren't 50 years ago, that it's hard to see how we do it without them. And so now this is effectively Netanyahu versus Gallant and Gantz, and I guess Eisenkot within the government on this debate.
How do you think it shakes out? I think that you can't draft large numbers of ultra Orthodox soldiers without the ultra Orthodox community. I also think I have less respect for the ultra Orthodox community's claims. Wait, you can't draft large numbers of ultra Orthodox without them being on board politically?
Without the leadership, without the culture, after October 7 we have seen, generally we've seen an uptick, slow but steady, in a willingness to serve. Not so much a willingness for me to serve, but a belief that it's okay for ultra [00:40:00] Orthodox to serve. I will tell you, Saul and I wrote about this in our book, in The Genius of Israel, that even if the political leadership of the Haredi community, those leading political parties in the Knesset, were staunchly opposed to Haredim serving, we were already sensing softening a little bit within the community, within the rank and file, among the grassroots, that this hard edged separation From the rest of Israeli society was becoming more permeable was becoming more penetrable and it was manifesting itself as we wrote about in a number of areas, including if not signing up at enlistment centers for the IDF in other aspects of participation in the Israeli state and not leading such separate lives.
And then, as you're saying, after October 7th, we're increasingly also seeing it in the enlistment centers. Right. And so you had 25 years ago, if a member of a Hasidic community, let's say, would join the army, before they went home from the army for a weekend, they had to change out of their uniform.
Because if they showed up in their community in their uniform, [00:41:00] they would face physical violence sometimes. They would definitely face Verbal abuse in the street. That's no longer true. In other words, now the ultra Orthodox community takes pride and shows off the soldiers in their community to the rest of Israel.
And so the change has been profound, but it hasn't yet translated into an actual rise in the numbers serving. And that has to happen. And that's a political just minefield that has now come to this government and it has come urgently to this government and there's no way to avoid. dealing with it, which is something that Israeli governments have generally preferred, all governments.
I mean, most recently it's mostly been Netanyahu governments, but that's also true of, you know, Olmert and other left wing governments has preferred to sort of kick the can down the road rather than actually tackle seriously the question. And so that's something we have to, you know, take seriously now that has not been something that we've had to take seriously in the past.
The government right now seems to be on one of two paths. One path is some kind of [00:42:00] hostage deal that includes some kind of ceasefire, and includes some Saudi role or Saudi cooperation or potential path to Saudi normalization. That's kind of one path. The other path is none of what I just described and Israel moving to its military operation for Rafah, which is where the largest part of the Gazan civilian population is concentrated.
It's also where the remaining Hamas battalions, according to public reports, are concentrated. It is where some number of surviving Hamas leaders are hiding. Everyone seems to be terrified of this scenario. The Egyptians are terrified of it, the Egyptian government, the U. S. administration seems very concerned, the international community seems horrified, the Arab world seems very concerned, but to me right now, in the near future, those are one of the two paths, either Hostage deal, ceasefire, some talk and path or increasing buzz about a plan for Saudi normalization for during the [00:43:00] day after in Gaza, or all those things are on hold and it's Rafa.
What is your reaction to that frame and which do you think it's most likely to be? It'll have to be all of them all at once. Talking to hostage families recently, it's really striking that they deeply distrust and dislike most of them. There's a diversity of voices, but most of them that I have met and talked to deeply distrust and dislike this government and Netanyahu and aren't sure that either the prime minister or the government itself really is trying to get their families out.
And then you say to them, so do you want elections to get rid of this crop of politicians who are polling very, very poorly? And the universal answer is desperately no. They desperately don't want elections because elections means that the government is weakened. It becomes a lame duck government and it probably will have a much harder time negotiating for the three to six months that it takes to win an Israeli election and [00:44:00] piece together a new coalition.
And three to six months is something that the hostages themselves don't have in Gaza. Many are already dead, we're fairly certain of that, however many still survive don't have three to six months, right? And so the hostage families are very much torn between distrusting the government but not actually wanting immediate elections.
And what's striking about that is that it joins all the other arenas. The government is again politically hampered. with creating a hostage exchange, by the way, politically hampered, I think, for honest reasons. In other words, there are different political forces. The far right in the Israeli government says we've shown Hamas that we will pay so much for hostages that we've incentivized the taking of hostages on a mass scale.
To now give huge numbers, to be very generous in the deal to get more hostages out, is to again incentivize another massive Taking them hostages in five or 10 years or whenever the next time is we let our guard down by accident. And so there's that debate happening where that's what's [00:45:00] coming out of the right on the center left.
There's more of a urgency to the hostage exchange in part by the way from demographics If you walk in the streets of tel aviv, you're much more likely to encounter someone who knows someone who is a hostage Than if you walk in the streets of KU cities, including cities close to the Gaza border like Nativo or you know, the working class cities of the South or Jerusalem, or the Ultra Orthodox community where there simply aren't any soldiers or so few that they're statistically irrelevant soldiers or hostages or victims of October 7th.
And so coalition voters. Don't feel the urgency of the hostage question as much as opposition voters for natural, good, honest reasons, just literally social realities. And so you have a debate over hostages right now that is a political debate. It is an honest debate. It's not a manipulative or dishonest, but it again comes back to the question of can this government thread exactly the needle you were talking about.
The government cannot stop the campaign against [00:46:00] Hamas. It can pause it. It can't stop it. It's own voters won't let it. The general Israeli public won't let it. Hamas can't survive this thing in Gaza. How do you get the hostages out? The theory until now has been very simple. Massive military pressure on Hamas will get hostages out.
How do you sustain massive military pressure on Hamas as the humanitarian aid problem, the humanitarian crisis, which in Rafah is going to reach its peak? It's something that the Israelis haven't in any serious way dealt with. There's been a lot of tremendous efforts to avoid civilian casualties in Gaza, especially in the Hanunis operation and in central Gaza.
And you've seen, you know, some scholars have called it unprecedented, but they've done it very quietly because they don't want to be attacked on Twitter. But nevertheless, in actual terms, what Israel has actually done. Moving around civilian populations in these ways is to avoid what Hamas's strategy of massive civilian casualties as a force multiplier and a means for their own survival.
But Israel never built out a serious humanitarian aid project. [00:47:00] Imagine a humanitarian aid project built by Israel on a massive scale with a brigadier general running it that, you know, takes a piece of the Israeli desert bordering Gaza, creates a tent city there, moves Palestinian civilians into that tent city to clear the battlefield in Gaza.
checks those people very carefully, filters them. The Israelis control them. You can have an aid organization working among them of Israeli Arabs who speak Arabic and are, in their own identities, also Palestinian. You could have an Israeli response to the aid problem. That helps clear the battlefield of Rafah.
It also helps with international opinion, maybe. I'm an Israeli. I have trouble paying attention to the world even when I try, and I'm literally paid to try. But still, it's really struggle with that. The point is, we have reached the point in the war. We are now at a point where it is now obvious to everybody that the questions, the center of gravity is shifting from the battlefield to politics.
The army needs more soldiers. That runs headlong into Haredi politics and [00:48:00] coalition politics. The hostages are in their last stretch. You know, they've been there four months. Who knows if they're still alive three months from now. That question of the hostage deal runs into coalition politics. The day after question, because of humanitarian aid, the day after question can no longer wait for the day after.
That is a question for politics. Everywhere you look, the center of gravity is no longer on the question of what the IDF can achieve on the ground. We know what the IDF can achieve on the ground, and we know it's going to achieve it. The question now is all the rest of it. And all the rest of it needs solutions, and those solutions are going to be political solutions.
And the question now is Do we have a government, a political class writ large, that can take on those questions, can see those problems, understands the vital importance of those questions to the war effort, to long term success, and can give us real answers. So, Praveev, just in wrapping, increased external pressure, we'll see where that goes.
Increased internal pressure, we'll see where that [00:49:00] goes. Where does that leave Benjamin Netanyahu? I'll put it very simply. Netanyahu's general way of operating, and it's hard to fault him for it. I mean, I fault him for it constantly, but it's hard to fault him for it in a simple sense that it's worked, has always been to take the path of least resistance.
He had a theory that stabilizing Hamas, allowing Qatari money to go into Gaza, ignoring essentially the tunnel network that was being built there. He had a decent, clever theory for why that was a good idea. He thought time was on our side, he thought our economy develops, our military power grows as our economy grows, and therefore time is on our side and we can wait out the Hamas regime in Gaza, and that's the theory that drove him to act the way he acted.
and build out Hamas in Gaza the way he allowed it to be built out. But, a lot of his Hamas policy wasn't that theory. A lot of his policy in Gaza was just picking the path of least resistance at every turn. [00:50:00] That habit of picking the path of least resistance means that if Itamar his coalition are screaming something about hostages, Netanyahu will probably cave.
It means that if there's sufficient pressure on him from a direction that matters to him, he will probably cave. He looks tough facing Biden, but in fact, looking tough facing Biden is for him, the path of least resistance because it holds the right to his banner when the right is starting to question whether it should stay with him.
And that habit of always taking the path of least resistance isn't going to be enough going forward. It's not going to solve the question of expanding the army quickly, which means pushing the Haredim on the question of military and national service. It's not going to solve the humanitarian question in Gaza, which is not just a vast moral question, which of course it is and it needs to be.
It's also now a strategic question of warfighting, and it's a strategic question of victory. It's part of the [00:51:00] Israeli potential victory that we want to see. It means that in hostages he's going to have to face down one side or another to have a serious policy going forward, and it's getting desperate.
It means that the day after, the question he has avoided, and even picked fights with the Americans over, just because it's good for him domestically, politically, It means to prevent the kinds of things we saw this week with the aid convoy, to prevent IDF soldiers fighting and dying for nothing. We need a day after, and we need it now.
And it means making hard decisions. If getting the Saudis in on the ground, getting an Arab world coalition that supports, not Israel, but at least the destruction of Hamas. In on the ground in Gaza as a competent day after coalition supported by Israeli military preventing Hamas from disrupting it, at least in the short term means that you have to have a conversation about a future Palestinians.
I'm not saying which specific solution that's a solution I happen to have been thinking of, but it means having solutions. It means making decisions. [00:52:00] The war is entering a stage where it no longer makes sense. It is no longer useful. It is in fact, probably a path to disaster, short term or long term, to not answer questions, to continue to remain on the path of least resistance.
At some point you have to make decisions. At some point, you reach a point where failing to make a decision is the decision, and it is a bad decision, and it is a decision with huge consequences and bad consequences. And so we're going to have to see the master of indecision, of strategic and willful and intentional and clever and planned indecision, indecision as policy, become a decider and become someone who moves ahead and pushes through.
Some really fundamental questions, building out the army, solving the humanitarian aid question in Gaza, thinking about the day after. We can't just know what Netanyahu is against. We can't just know what his campaign wants us to know, which is what terrible outcomes he's defending us from. We actually need to know what he wants.
I don't know if [00:53:00] he can deliver that. I know that that's the challenge. And if he fails to meet that challenge, All the sacrifices for this war, I think, will not have been in vain, but they will certainly have been partly wasted by a political leadership that can't make good use of them. All right, Haviv, we will leave it there.
Thank you, as always. And I will look forward to checking in with you in the days ahead. Thanks for having me, Dan.
That's our show for today. To keep up with Haviv Rettig Gur, you can follow him on X, at Haviv Rettig Gur, or find him at The Times of Israel. Call Me Back is produced and edited by Ilan Benatar. Our media manager is Rebecca Strom. Additional editing by Martin Huego. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.