War Cabinet Member, Ron Dermer
In the days ahead, Minister Dermer will be flying to Washington with a small delegation to meet with the Biden administration about the IDF’s options for Rafah, which we discuss. We also discuss where the overall military operation in Gaza stands now, the hostage negotiations, whether the Israeli Government should be expected to have a day-after plan rolled out now, what role the Arab world can or should play in that day-after planning, and the Government of Canada’s decision to ban future arms sales to Israel.
Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
DS: And I'm pleased to welcome to this podcast, my longtime friend, Minister Ron Dermer, who I am pleased to be with in person. We've previously done these podcasts. Actually, we did one in person and then did one virtually, but it was before you were back in government.
RD: Well, we actually did one in person and if memory serves, you gave me COVID.
DS: That is true.
RD: Thank you very much. So hopefully I will survive this podcast.
DS: That's true. I gave you COVID. Without being inflicted by a potential life threatening disease. You left the United States and I, and then you left, called the Call Me Back studio with, with COVID. That was, that was my gift to you.
So here we are. So by the way, where are we right now?
RD: We, you are in a side room. Next to where the Israeli cabinet meets, the Israeli broader government, I should say, because it can be confusing with people because, you know, the Israeli government is the biggest forum and then we have the cabinet, which in Israeli lingo means usually the security cabinet. Right. Uh, and that's a smaller form. And then you have the war cabinet, which is even smaller form.
DS: Which is just a post October 7th.
RD: Right, exactly. So you have about 20 yards from here is the place where the Israeli government meets, usually every Sunday. And this is a room that the government secretary has used, and it used to be that the desk in this room was the desk that Ben Gurion had in the initial government. But now that I see the changes that they made to the desk here, I don't think that Ben Gurion used the desk with the plugs that you can -
DS: You just stressed me out because if I did give you COVID here, I'd feel really like the weight of history. Okay, we have a lot to cover. Where Israel is in the war right now, just because we hear a lot of things and there's a sense that there's a holding pattern, there's a hostage negotiations, Rafah, no Rafah, and we rarely get a snapshot of how it's going.
RD: Well, I think it's going very well in terms of prosecuting the war goals, you know, on October 7th, uh, the government, uh, the security cabinet met and we laid out some goals that we wanted for the war, which is to dismantle Hamas's military capabilities, to end its political rule in Gaza, to ensure that Gaza no longer poses a threat to Israel. To Israel and also to return the hostages. So you can look at each one of those categories and see where we are. Let's start with actually the last one, the hostages, because there's hostage negotiations going on now. We hope that it would lead to an agreement. You can never be sure. There's also a lot of problems on the other side because you're dealing not only with the mediators, but you're dealing with Hamas that has an outside Hamas and an inside Gaza Hamas and they don't communicate as quickly as you would like and so you don't get answers back as quickly as you'd like, but let's hope that we can get -
DS: Meaning it's not just like, this one call that one, it's messages have to be transmitted and then people have to travel with messages.
RD: It's very complicated to do it, you don't get it. Through multiple countries. You don't get an answer right away, and I hope that we will be able to get into, you know, a funnel that hopefully gets us to a deal. We had that first deal where we were able to get out, uh, 80 women, uh, and children as part of that first deal. Some of them were left behind. Hopefully in the second deal, they'll come back, those people who were left behind. And then we can continue on, uh, with this deal. And, um I'm, I'm cautiously optimistic that we can get there, but you know, you don't know because it's very complicated and they always see, I would say that, you know, Hamas, even though we're in a war that's five and a half months long, a lot of the war seems to me to have been waged in sort of one week or two week increments, like people looking two weeks down the road. And Hamas had some hopes at the beginning that Hezbollah would come all in and Iran would call them and come all in. And then they may have hoped that In terms of a hostage negotiations that the government of Israel would, would, would succumb to internal pressures or that the United States would stop the war and then they may have hoped that Ramadan would be an opportunity for them to ignite the whole region. So what their state of mind is, I don't know. And the person who's most relevant here in the negotiations is somebody who's not. around the negotiating table, but who's stuck in a hole somewhere, uh, or deep underground in a tunnel in Gaza, which is Sinoir, who ultimately will make the decision if we, uh, from the Hamas side, if we get to a deal, or if we don't, and we'll just have to see. What I would say is we, on October 7th, there were around 240 hostages who were taken, not all of them were taken alive, but we were able to bring back, I think it's 112 at this point. We have some 134 hostages that are there, unfortunately, not all of them alive and we're trying to bring everybody home and that's one of the goals of the war so we're about halfway towards achieving that goal, and hopefully after this hostage deal, we'll be well more than halfway.
Now, in terms of the first goal of the war, dismantling Hamas military capabilities, here, I think, we're well along the path to achieving what we set out to achieve, and that was against a lot of people not believing that we could achieve it. And, of course, I mean, I was of the view that, of course, we can achieve it. The question is, what is the price? I'm going to be in achieving the victory and I'd say the price has been lower than we initially expected and I'll take you through different categories if you're looking what does it mean to dismantle the military capabilities and also take a step back and people have to understand that the war on October 7th … The goal that we set out was not to kill every Hamas terrorist everywhere.
Obviously, the people who were responsible for October 7th, we're going to get to. Sooner or later, we'll get to them. And, you know, number four is gone. Number three is gone. Number two and number one are on the list. But Israel
DS: And number two is Mohamed Def, and number one is Yehoshua Siwar.
RD: I think those people who perpetrated, I think Israel has shown in the past that the people who perpetrate these horrific crimes, acts against our citizens, ultimately our has what do they say in the United States brought to justice? Yes, ultimately they will be brought to justice. But the goal of the war in my view at least was never and when we talk about dismantling hamas's military capabilities It was never You're going to kill every single Hamas terrorist in Gaza. And a couple months ago, a senior American official was here, and he came to our work cabin, and he said, you know, Hamas is an idea, and you can't destroy an idea.
And I said, in response, well, Nazism is an idea, and there are Nazis in Charlottesville that are walking around with tiki torches that they got at Bed Bath Beyond. But they don't have a country called Germany that they control. And the power of an idea combined with an army, and territory that they can control to lethal effect, is night and day.
ISIS, I said to this American official, ISIS is an idea. And there are people in the Middle East, and there are people in Europe, and even people in the United States, that if you probably went into their living rooms or bedrooms, you're going to find the black flag of ISIS on the wall. But they don't have a caliphate in Syria and Iraq. You have to deny them territory. So the goal when we talk about dismantling the military capability of Hamas, what we're talking about is not killing every Hamas terrorist in Gaza, because there's Hamas terrorists right now in Judea, Samaria, the West Bank. There's Hamas terrorists in Lebanon. There's Hamas terrorists all over the region. There's And they're certainly in Qatar, where they're in posh hotel rooms there. What we're talking about is destroying and dismantling the army of terror that is Hamas. Hamas in Gaza is an army of terror. It's a terrorist army. It's different than Hamas in the West Bank. And that's what we set out to do.
I'll explain to you how that army is structured.
DS: Yeah, that's what, because people, I think, in the West don't appreciate it. It's like a light Infantry army. It's not a ragtag terrorist organization. It is a real military organization.
RD: It's an army. It's an army. And, uh, those, that army is divided into battalions.
Battalions are roughly around 1, 000 people per battalion. Uh, the number of Hamas terrorists in Gaza at October 7th is probably around 30, 000. And then Islamic Jihad, which plays Robin to, uh, Hamas Batman there. They are, I don't want to besmirch Robin, you know, Batman and Robin, but 5, fighters. So let's, in, uh, terrorists of Islamic Jihad.
So you're talking about a terror army of about 40, 000. that on October 7th, we set out to dismantle. Now, how are we doing in that job of dismantling them? Well, let's think about battalions, which is the organized structure. Because even when you defeat a country in battle, you know, when, when Nazis were destroyed, and Hitler was, you got to Hitler's bunker, uh, and the Nazi army was, was taken out, not every single Nazi soldier was killed.
There were many soldiers, and there were many SS soldiers. soldiers as well. But there are 24 battalions. 19 of the battalions have basically been defeated, maybe 18 and a half. It leaves around five, five and a half battalions left. Four of those battalions are in Rafah, which is the southernmost part of the Gaza Strip, four of them. Under normal times, those battalions probably have around a thousand people. The best estimate that I've seen is they've probably doubled in size. Why? Because as you defeat the terrorists in the north and they go to the south, and you hit them more and more, they, the ranks in Rafah have swollen to the point where there's probably 8,000 terrorists in Rafah.
So, when, when the Prime Minister says we're going to go into Rafah, he means we're going to go in there and dismantle the remaining battalions of Hamas. Now what happens after you dismantle? When you say you've defeated battalions, it doesn't mean that you've killed a hundred percent. It means, I think, in military terms, and I'm not a military person, but this is what was told to me at the beginning of the war.
You defeat a battalion, and it means that 50 percent of that force is either killed or wounded. So the command structure is broken down. The command structure is broken down, and so therefore they don't do an attack, the people who are left, where you're bringing 100 men or 200 men or even 50 or even 20. But it still means that you could have, let's say in the northern part of the Gaza Strip, there were 10 battalions, if memory serves. 10 battalions, so about 10, 000 fighters. You've defeated all 10 battalions. So let's say 6, 000 were either killed or wounded. You still have 4, 000 people running around there, but they're not running around in the same structured way. So it means that three people can come out of a, Yeah, do an ambush, but they're not organized. do an ambush and do an RPG. And they're not organized in the command and control structure of the army. That's what happened when we finished the, uh, the Northern part of the Gaza Strip, the heavy stage of the fighting, which pre people you've probably had on the show says phase two is the heavier phase. You're in the Northern part in phase three. And you need a smaller and smaller force for you to fight smaller and smaller groups of terrorists. That's what's happening there. And actually our defense minister early on in the war got it right and he said, How would you know whether you're moving, when you're moving from phase two to phase three?
It's like the force structure we're going to need to fight terrorism is going to shrink. Okay, so what you did with a division, you'll be able to do with a brigade. And that actually is happening in the north. Meaning the force, look at Shifa. Uh, a hospital. I just watched the CNN before I came down here. I know, I, ten minutes, I have to have something to raise my blood pressure every day.
DS: What wound you up for this conversation?
RD: But I gotta tell you, it was like, it was like, the whole story was about how, basically, dare Israel go into a hospital, and not the fact that after we went to the hospital, After we got rid of a lot of this terrorist infrastructure, Hamas has gone back into it to try to turn it again into a command and control operation.
Dozens of terrorists were killed in the hospital or around the hospital. And we've arrested, I think, the last number I saw, some, around 200. And instead of the world's outrage saying, Guys, stop using hospitals. It's like the opposite. It's like, how dare Israel go into a hospital? The whole thing is absurd, but maybe we can have a broader conversation about it.
But what we're doing in the north, the force structure that we used to go in Shifa the first time, was much bigger than what we've used now to go in with special forces. Because you couldn't do that before. It's a much different operation. And the amount of troops that we have to use, the divisions, and also the amount of damage that it can potentially cause, collateral damage that it can cause.
You do everything, and we do, to keep civilians out of harm's way. But when you're using a smaller and smaller force structure, That becomes easier and easier to do. So what has happened in terms of the military capabilities of Hamas, 19 of the 24 are essentially been defeated. We've got four left in Rafah that have swollen to maybe twice their size.
And we have to go in there and finish that job. It's complicated by the fact that you've got somewhere. I mean, the numbers always change. It's either 1. 2 million, 1. 3 million, 1. 4 million. There's a lot of people in Rafah. Normally, I think there's around 300, 000. And so the population there is probably quadrupled because they've come from the north.
They come from other areas that Israel's military's operated in evacuating them. We evacuated them to Rafah. Now we have to evacuate them from Rafah to get them out of harm's way. That's in terms of the command and control organized structure.
Now let's look at terrorists. Okay. I mentioned before there are 40, 000 terrorists. Well, We don't have an exact number of the terrorists who killed, but I think we have a pretty good idea and you know, you follow it now when you have terrorists that are above ground. And they're engaging our forces. You kill them. You know the exact number when you're doing operations underground, and a lot of times you have a bombing that hits and, and collapses an underground tunnel.
You may know that there are three dozen or four dozen, but you don't know the exact number. That's why you don't have the exact uh, uh, specific specificity of the amount, but our estimate is, I think the best estimate is we have killed between 11 and 12 thousand terrorists in Gaza. I think there were 300 people who were killed, terrorists, who came in on October 7th.
That's in addition to that. So that's like twelve thousand three hundred. Then you have about another two thousand that have been captured. So roughly you're probably between fourteen and fifteen thousand that have actually been killed or captured. Now, how many are wounded? You don't know exactly the number of wounded.
DS: What's the typical ratio?
RD: Well, the ratio in Gaza Based on the Hamas ministry of health. Okay. Yes. I'm glad you laughed because people take these Statistics seriously and we should talk about that because I break down the Hamas ministry of health But the statistics they have in Gaza is slightly over two to one wounded So let's be super conservative and let's say it's one to one.
And as I said, we killed 11, 000 in Gaza. So let's say 11, 000 are wounded. That means, of that force of 40, 000, you've killed or captured between 14 000 and you've got another 11, 000 who are wounded, you're already at 25, 000, which leaves you about 15,000 terrorists in Gaza, across the whole Gaza Strip, maybe half of those, slightly more than half, are in Rafah right now.
And after that operation, you're still going to have several thousand, but they're not going to have any kind of organized structure. So we dealt with the battalions. Now we dealt with the terrorists. Now let's deal with rockets.
DS: And then I want to ask you about tunnels.
RD: And then tunnels. So the capabilities here, they have fired, I think the last number I remember, around 13, 000 rockets. The number of rockets that they fire has gone down dramatically from the early part of the war, simply because they fired a lot, we've destroyed a lot, and they have very few that are left. We've also gotten, which you may have seen, I think the IDF has released these videos, of the manufacturing sites of the rockets have been destroyed and to the best of my knowledge we've destroyed all the major manufacturing sites of rockets there may be one left, but I think we may have destroyed all of them So they don't have the production capacity to put rockets in now There's always a concern that used to be that rockets would go It was originally from Sudan through Egypt, you know, and under tunnels into Rafah and then through the Strip.
That's not happening, uh, as far as we know, and it's not happening en masse, as far as we know. The big capabilities they developed is that they, you know, give a terrorist a rocket, you know, they can do X, teach them how to make rockets, and they can do a thousand times X. Right. So we're destroying their capabilities. I would give you a rough estimate that in terms of their rocket capabilities, of longer range rockets, not very short range mortars, I would say around 90 percent have been destroyed. Over 90%. And short range, it's probably, uh, closer to three quarters have been destroyed because mortars are much easier to, you know, to stockpile, but they have very little capacity with rockets left.
Um, then you go into tunnels and tunnels, there are 500 kilometers. So for your American listeners, uh, you know, I'm just, I still think in miles, I don't think in kilometers and I've moved from meters from yards. I don't think in yards anymore, but I'm stuck on miles. There's 300 plus miles. A remarkable labyrinth of terror tunnels, and we are systematically, and this is what takes time, because people say, you know, what's taking so long, why aren't you going in? Because the work to get to the tunnels takes a long time to do it safely. You know, you could put your best fighter, your best soldiers into a tunnel, I don't know if they have much of an advantage over some, you know, fighter with an AK 47 who's sitting, you know, 30 yards into a dark tunnel.
There's explosives, they're mined. How do you go in there to make sure? I mean, we've lost soldiers at the beginning of the war with booby traps in different areas. There's shafts all over the place. I mean, this whole labyrinth of terror takes time. I don't know the exact percentage of the tunnels that have been dealt with.
I'm giving you a rough estimate because I haven't asked this for a while. My guess it's maybe 35 percent or something like that. But every day that number goes up and not all tunnels are the same. Some of them are just so that you have what they call attack tunnels. Then you have strategic tunnels, underground facilities where they make the rockets, like I mentioned before, places where the leadership was.
We had the case, uh, about a month ago. where we had a, a, a place where, uh, Sinwar apparently left in a hurry. I don't want to say that the steam was coming off the soup, but, uh, they left, uh, a lot of cash behind, a lot of valuable, uh, intelligence information behind, and so he was out of there in a hurry. Uh, it's one of those things when you're, When you're drilling from the top, you know, and you drill, start, drill down, you know, it's the, the tunnels could be 50, 60 meters down.
So, 200 feet or something like that down, like a 20 story building upside down. But it's not a building because it's an entire neighborhood. Because you could go down 50 feet and then all of a sudden you could have a tunnel and it goes another a third or a half a kilometer. Then you go down another 50 feet, then another one in another direction.
So you could be with a, with a tank. at this point, and it could be three kilometers over a mile away when they are actually underground. So that's why these things are much more complicated. And to destroy them, it takes time. It has to be done methodically and very carefully. Look, if we were rushing through and we didn't care at all about their civilians or our soldiers, it could be a different story. You'd be rushing ahead, but we care about both. And so therefore we have to be very deliberate. And the tunnel. That tunnel issue is, uh, is moving slowly but surely. So when I look at the war, and you say, I said, well, sort of halfway there and getting the hostages back, hopefully, if we get a hostage deal, maybe we'll be three quarters of the way, uh, there.
But, uh, With the military capabilities, I think we're much more advanced and we are very close to dismantling their military capability. And when we go into Rafah, and the Prime Minister said this about a month and a half ago, I think on American television, he said, once Rafah starts, we're weeks, weeks away. And why he says weeks away is, it doesn't mean that weeks away we're going to destroy all the tunnels that are in Rafah, but basically smashing through these battalions, given what we have done so far, given how long it takes once you have that clash. It's a question of several weeks. And then the heavy fighting part of the war is over.
Now there's a second issue, which we didn't discuss yet, which is about ending their political rule. And here. In my view, at least, you can't end their political rule in Gaza without dismantling their military capabilities. And it's nice to say you're going to do it simultaneously, but at the end of the day, if there are 15, 000 terrorists in the Gaza Strip, you're not going to have something else emerge.
And I know there's been a lot of criticism of Israel. Where's your plan? Why aren't you having somebody else go in? It's ridiculous. Nobody is going to step forward. until they know that Hamas in Gaza is finished.
DS: But how do you respond to that?
RD: And I have news for you. Yeah. Hamas in Gaza doesn't know that it's finished.
I know that it's finished, the Israeli government knows that it's finished, but Hamas in Gaza doesn't know that yet. And I think only when they realize that Hamas rule in Gaza is at an end, could you have the opportunity for something else to emerge. Because they will just not step forward, and if they do step forward, they're going to be shot in the head.
DS: So when people say, where's your day after plan, is your response, It's impossible to have a conversation about the day after plan until Hamas knows they're gone and the Palestinians living in Gaza know Hamas is gone?
RD: I think you can have a lot of conversations about day after plans. But to publicize a day after plan and to enact a day after plan before there's a day after Hamas, It's not going to work. And I'll tell you more than that about a day after plan because it's something that, you know, uh, the Prime Minister asked me to deal with and I deal with all the time. But I said at the beginning, I think a day after plan put forward by Israel, um, is going to be pretty much dead on arrival. I think the question is, can the international community put forward a day after plan that Israel can live with?
DS: And that America would back.
RD: And that America would back, right? International community, particularly the Arab states, especially in the Gulf, supported by the United States and that Israel can live with, and you have to have conversations all the time, and a lot of those conversations that we have had to deal with now is what not to do, and the problem is, is because there's a lot of bad, old ideas that people are just going to want to shove forward, you know, it's like, it's amazing how few people who are policy makers How few people have changed their mind about anything in October 7th.
What I find is nearly everybody that you have a discussion with, they thought what they thought on October 6th. And October 7th has made them more confident than ever that their plan is right. And they think it has to accelerate it. And that's crazy. It's what Churchill said, the confirmed unteachability of mankind.
And I'll tell you a best way to look at it. Let's look at the Palestinian Authority. We talk about the Palestinian Authority and the whole issue of the Palestinian state. But here, a lot of people say, well, you know what, October 7th, what we need to do now is we got to get the Palestinian Authority to retake over Gaza.
And we've got to take irreversible steps to a Palestinian state. So let's talk about the Palestinian Authority.
DS: Time bound and irreversible.
RD: Yeah. So On the issue of a Palestinian Authority, the Prime Minister put forward two principles that I think are pretty clear. Demilitarization and deradicalization. This is what we need in Gaza after October 7th. Demilitarization, conceptually, I think is pretty clear for people to understand. Uh, we are demilitarizing, the IDF is demilitarizing the Gaza Strip as we speak, in doing all that stuff we were talking about. But afterwards, what you're going to need are two things. One is you're going to need to close, to effectively seal, the border between Egypt and Gaza in terms of weapons. Obviously commercial goods and everything else. And you know, people's is something else, but you have to have an inspection mechanism and you got to make sure that they're not underground tunnels.
DS: And over the last decade to two decades, so much of this military industrialization of Gaza has come through Egypt, right? The cement trucks, the equipment, the weapons, the talent, the engineers, the everything, right.
RD: An auto strata. Right. Of Hamas's military machine and its capabilities and apparently when Morsi was in charge of Egypt There were a couple of years there where it was, you know, a hundred miles an hour, right? Because CC has tried to stop it but you know you have CC at the top wanting to stop it and then you have that soldiers that are on the ground and what's happening and what's coming in and not coming in and are there tunnels and not tunnels? We have to basically seal that we have to seal it underground and above ground We have to have an inspection mechanism That is an Israeli inspection and mechanism, you know, what kind of ribbon you put around it is a different story, but it has to be Israeli eyes there inspecting it to ensure that this monster doesn't regrow.
And the second thing you need is you need the ability, freedom of operation to continue to act, to continue to act in Gaza to fight terrorism. Now that is happening. Now in Judea Samaria in the West Bank. Israel's doing military operations in the West Bank. We've done it since October 7th around 400 They've been foreign to Palestinians who've been killed and you want to know how careful Israel was civilian casualties the last numbers I saw I think it was 380 terrorists were killed Palestinian terrorists in the West Bank and Unintended casualties of civilians.
Eleven. So you talk about ratios of two to one or three to one. This is like thirty eight to one. Okay? And, but you don't have to go in with massive troops to do it. And so in Gaza, in a future Gaza, the only force that we see in the foreseeable future that could do demilitarization and to take action - your intelligence picks up that there, there's an underground tunnel where they're trying to remanufacture rockets and weapons and bombs, whatever. You have to go in and you have to take action. You have what you have in Shifa, you have somewhere else. So you have to do it. Those two things prevent the weapons from coming in from Egypt and have those operations.
But on the issue of deradicalization, that to me is no less important. Because the most, or one of the most horrific numbers of October 7th is not simply the 1, 200 Israelis who were murdered in the most atrocious ways imaginable. It's not just the 240 who were taken hostage. It's the fact that 85 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank supported the October 7th attack.
Eighty five percent.
DS: And when you speak to your counterparts in Saudi Arabia and in the UAE and elsewhere in the Gulf, which is part of your portfolio.
RD: I don't speak to counterparts in some of those countries because we don't have relations.
DS: Okay, of course. According to foreign press reports when you communicate with these counterparts. They have experience dealing with de radicalization.
RD: Correct. And that's a great hope. Right. That's actually a great hope.
DS: I mean, after September 11th, Saudi Arabia started to get serious about these Madrasas and the Wahhabism and the exporting of Wahhabism. The Emiratis have been dealing with forces of Muslim Brotherhood now for a while, and these places are fundamentally different places now.
RD: And that's why I have hope. In the wake of October 7th, I have hope that it is possible to do something that is almost impossible to do when you're not dealing with a war that leads to a major victory on our side and a resounding defeat on the other side, which is to affect essentially a transformation, a cultural, social, and of course, political transformation.
Those are very hard to do. The United States did it in Germany. It did it in France. In Japan, that was effective, but you're right, you don't have to look to examples 80 years ago, and, and the defeat there was resounding, which is very important, because if you don't have a resounding defeat, you get a worse problem, that's the difference between World War I, with Germany, like, oh, they technically lost, but it didn't really help, and the hatred built up.
built up and they didn't because it has to be decisive and it has to lead to a de radicalization. You were smart enough, you the United States, were smart enough to listen to this thing that Churchill said about the war. A lot of things you didn't listen to Churchill about, uh, and one of those things was that I think FDR - I read this a few months ago. He went on unconditional surrender, and I think Churchill didn't like that language, unconditional surrender. Uh, but on that, I guess Churchill was wrong. But he was right. In his lessons of the war, he said, in victory, magnanimity. And America was magnanimous in victory. You did it in Germany with the Marshall Plan.
And the transformation and you did it in Japan,
DS: which is one of our most important allies right now
RD: Exactly and look at that change, but you don't have to look back 80 years. You said it, right? You've got the example of what the saudis have done You have the example of what the emiratis have done and are doing And that gives me hope that it is impossible in the wake of this War in gaza that has had a huge toll that we can actually have hope For a completely different process peace process.
Now, how does that affect the palestinian authority? Here's the problem the palestinian authority has not demilitarized or deradicalized the areas that they control. Okay? Demilitarized because we have to keep doing operations because they're not doing it, and we tell them. Which has been happening for years.
Remember, we did Operation Defensive Shield 20 years ago, which was a military operation that went through the West Bank. And it was two or three months of heavy fighting. And then it was a couple of years where we had to do continuous fighting. But since then, we've given constantly the Palestinian authority, you know, we give them intelligence information.
There's terrorists here. You got to go arrest them. And they say, no, you do it. Then when we do it, they complain to the world and say Israel's, you know, invading the territory because they don't fight terrorism. They don't fight terrorism there. And they're not changing, they're not educating their people for peace, they're educating their people for hatred and terrorism.
And this is the big problem. Ten days after October 7th, somebody sent me a clip and, uh, like a little Twitter video. The top said, look at what Hamas is teaching their children. And I opened it up and I'm watching the video and it's a 10 year old Palestinian kid saying, we gotta stab Jews and a 12 year old saying we have to murder Jews.
And But I looked at where he was speaking from and the person who sent it must have thought it's Gaza. It's not Gaza It's the West Bank, right? That's the 85 percent if we don't change it There is no hope of getting peace The hope now is maybe the international community will wake up and say, you know what?
We actually have to have that transformation because without it We're gonna get nowhere and we have regional partners now that can come in and do it That's the hope of the change that can happen now. And that's why we oppose the Palestinian Authority going to Gaza. Now, if the Palestinian Authority was demilitarizing and deradicalizing in the West Bank, we'd say, yeah, go to Gaza tomorrow. But they're not doing it there, so what makes us think they're going to do it in Gaza? So I think here, you need to find Palestinian civilian leadership, That is willing to be partners in deradicalization. And my own view, I'm speaking now, uh, personally, because not a, Prime Minister put out a document that had several principles to it. Deradicalization was one of them. But my own view is we need to link reconstruction of Gaza to deradicalization of Gaza. And de radicalization of Gaza is, in my view, schools, mosques, the whole issue of refugee camps and dealing with that, and the whole issue of the media. Those are the four legs that I would put on that.
DS: Okay. So now let me ask you, because this issue is a big deal in Washington. It's a big deal in London. Almost every Western capital is obsessing right now for the day after, for the ceasefire, for plan for a future Palestinian state. On this podcast, I have repeatedly, since October 7th, praised The Biden Administration's handling of October 7th. I say they deployed military assets here. The president of the United States, the commander in chief, the most powerful military in the world came here, sat with the war cabinet, making it clear whose side he was on. He has vetoed bad resolutions, critical of Israel that are calling for a ceasefire at the UN Security Council resolution, made sure munitions are flowing. And most importantly, unlike one of his predecessors, the Obama administration, it seemed to me that when there were disagreements, he kept them private. These were conversations that were had behind the scenes. No surprise to you in the last couple weeks, it feels like now some of the criticisms or disagreements are being telegraphed in a very public way.
The president said some things at the State of the Union, obviously Senator Schumer said some pretty harsh things a few days ago. It all seems to be bubbling up about around Rafah. Is Rafa going to happen? Is not Rafa not going to happen? Maybe it's bigger than that. Maybe it's deeper than that. But I guess my question is, A, I mean, you're an astute observer of U.S. relations. You were ambassador of the U. S. What's your reaction to this transition? Is like my first question. My second question is, Israel is broadcasting that it is going into Rafah. The administration is broadcasting that it does not want Israel to go into Rafah. Things have been pretty collaborative up until now.
Is there a point at which Israel says we're going into Rafah even though we don't have the U.S.'s support?
RD: Sure it can happen, because we're going to Rafah because we have to, we have to dismantle Hamas military capabilities. If you leave four battalions, In Rafah, you've lost the war. And Israel's not going to lose the war. With or without the United States, we're not going to do it. We have no choice. And I think what people don't understand is that October 7th is an existential moment for Israel. It's the first time in my lifetime we're about the same age where the existential nerve of the Jewish people is touched. And, you know, we remember, uh, this expulsion of the Jews from Spain in the 15th century, but that's 500 years ago.
The Holocaust is not 500 years ago. It's not. It's in living memory. You still have survivors of the Holocaust who are walking amongst us. What you saw on October 7th was a genocidal force that wants to wipe out all the Jews, and it's the first pogrom that we've had since the birth of the State of Israel.
And in a fundamental way, the promise of this country, in my view is not just that Jews return to their ancestral homeland, it's that we have the ability to defend ourselves. And in a fundamental way, that promise was broken on October 7th. And I think our job is to restore that promise. And that means utterly dismantling the terror organization of Hamas in Gaza.
It's going to happen. And it will happen even if Israel is forced to fight alone. Even if the entire world turns on Israel, including the United States, we're going to fight until the battle won. There's only one possible force that could stop Israel, and that's the Israeli people. And go around this country, and speak to them. And speak to them across the religious, across the ideological, religious, political spectrum.
DS: I've never seen anything like it.
RD: Yeah. We're united. To achieve the goal and there will be political differences and be different opinions about different issues, and the day after conversation is a very important conversation in the halls of Washington and London and elsewhere in Israel. It's much less of a conversation - what everybody knows and I think they understand that on a visceral level in their right that organization, that did what they did on October 7th, has to be wiped out. And it's not rage, which is sometime Israel is accused of doing. You know, you're 9/11 and we responded in Afghanistan.
I mean, Dan, look, this is on our border. And remember, we are a citizen's army. We're not sending You know, one or 2 percent of our, of our population, if you think military families writ large to some distant land to fight a war, it's literally hundreds of yards away from our border. And you have your own sons and daughters are fighting this war.
You know, one of the members of our war cabinet lost the son in Gaza. I mean, how many democratic countries around the world are decision makers -
DS: A son and a nephew.
RD: A son and a nephew. Yeah, and people, you know, you sit around the table and you, you know, I, my son is here and my son is there and my daughter's here.
That's what happens in Israel. And, and the absurd notion that the people of Israel simply don't know what's in our interest.
DS: And 200,000 people internally displaced who can't return to their home.
RD: Yeah, but the basic thing is we're going to go in and finish this job and anybody who doesn't understand that You doesn't understand that the nerve of the Jews, that existential nerve was touched. I was born after 67. So I don't know that moment in 67 when people were digging graves in Tel Aviv of what they thought could happen when a noose was being put on this country's neck before we had that miraculous victory in 67. But in my lifetime, this is the first time the existential nerve was touched.
And before October 7th, I would have told you if you were on a podcast, we have only one existential danger to Israel. For all I know, I might have said it to you when I, we, when you gave me COVID, I'm not going to let you get away with it.
DS: You really aren't.
RD: A nuclear, a nuclear armed Iran. Not just Iran and its proxies, which we've seen now. You've seen the Houthis, you've seen Hezbollah, you've seen them in the Shia militias, you've seen them with their proxies. This is a sneak preview of the danger that we could get if Iran would ever be a nuclear power. Now look at Ukraine. In Ukraine, you're dealing with a nuclear Russia, which is a very different type of problem.
But there was only one existential threat. That changed for me on October 7th, and it's not because Hamas can wipe out this country. They can't. But if Israel does not take care of Hamas in Gaza after what it did on October 7th, I truly believe that this country has no future. Because all the buzzards circling around this country are gonna think that you can pick apart this carcass.
And the only thing anyone's gonna care about in five years or ten years or 15 years or 20 years from now, forget about the news cycle, I don't know how many podcasts you do a week, but all of this thing will fade. The only thing that will last was October 7th happened, what happened to that organization? Are they standing, or they were taken out? And that's why the determination to take them out is so strong, even if it leads to a potential breach with the United States. Now, I will tell you about your broader question. This has been a long war, in terms of the wars of Israel, and certainly in terms of the U.S. Israel relationship.
DS: Longest in history for Israel.
RD: Well, the War of Independence is probably a longer war. But since the war of independence, it's the longest and it's not six days and it's not a couple of months of fighting or 50 days in the round of guns. It's a long time. It's five months. And I agree with what you said about President Biden out of the gate. I think when he came out of the gate and I think this was Biden with no other calculations This was you know, they have we have what's called a kishka test Where if your listeners don't know what a kishka is, it's like the gut test of the support of israel I mean the kishka test was kind of made for joe biden.
He's he's a kishka person in general He's a person from the gut and I think what he said
DS: I mean it was unfiltered You heard you heard the authentic Joe Biden what he feels about israel when they're under siege under…
RD: No question about it. And when he came here It was dramatic. And he met the war, I'll get to that in a second, but he came here and he met with the war cabinet and I, the first thing I said to him is, is Mr. President, I want to thank your father. Because I've had many discussions with the, with the, now President Biden, when I was ambassador, he was vice president and he was always, uh, uh, an interlocutor that you could talk to, try to understand the problem. And there has been a, uh, a friendship for 40 years between the prime minister and Biden.
He could always talk to him, even at the points of the greatest, uh, greatest, uh, arguments and difficulties with the Obama administration. So I have a lot of hours with then Vice President Joe Biden and President Biden. And I said, I want to thank your father because he would tell me stories about Joe Biden senior and how Joe Biden senior - you know, would tell him in the, I guess it was the 50s, around the dinner table, about the Jews, about the Holocaust, about the importance of Israel, about Israel always having a state. And he's, he said things, actually interesting, two things I think very strong statements. One is he said, if we didn't have an Israel we'd have to invent it.
And I think that shows an understanding of what Israel means to American interests, that is accurate and correct. And the second thing he says, there's no future for the Jews without Israel, which is something that Ben Gurion would like to have heard. But I don't know if all Diaspora Jews agree with that.
DS: When you said that, that's what I was thinking. I was thinking I, I hope American Jews understand that.
RD: Right, but, so it's very interesting. So he has that on that level, and he came out of the gate and he said, They're sheer evil. They're worse than ISIS. Good and evil. And that's what it is. And that gets lost.
Now, it's not going to get lost in history. In history, it will be there front and center, and that's why everybody, you know, you said the Canadians today, they announced, uh, No more arms sales. Yeah, they're not going to do it. It's going to be a badge of shame for Canada, and it's going to last for a really long time, because in years to come and decades to come, people are going to look back. On October 7th, when those Hamas fighters came in, and they beheaded people, and they raped women, and they beat women, Burned babies alive and killed children in front of their parents and parents in front of the children. Where was Canada? What's all the lines about Canada will support Israel? Really? Now you're going to deny weapons to Israel when we're fighting against sheer evil? Because it's still sheer evil and we haven't finished the job. And I'll tell you
DS: By the way, by the way, on Canada, which I've lived in for a number of years, there's, there's this book that the Canadians own the legacy of, which is called None is Too Many, which is about the debates in the Canadian parliament about how many Jews, To allow into Canada that we're trying to escape the Holocaust. And that was the line. None is too many.
RD: Yeah, well, listen, it's not going to wear well, historically. It might, for the moment, in public opinion, in their finger in the wind, because of the difficult pictures, and I get it, you know, you see from Gaza, and the difficulties, and believe me, the last thing we want is a single civilian to be killed in Gaza, but that should all be laid at the doorstep of Hamas, because if Hamas laid down their arms, and left the place, we wouldn't have a single civilian to be killed, but we're not going to tolerate that organization that did what they did on October 7th, calling to do it again and again. We're not going to leave a quarter of them in place. I think here actually was Gantz, uh, Minister Gantz said in, in, in one of the meetings, he said, you know, you don't take out 80 percent of the fire, leave 20 percent and then hope it's going to turn out for the best, right? It's going to come back and it's going to rage and it's going to take over Gaza and we're going to have a problem.
And just for the Canadians should know, I remember, once, uh, I was, I was upset with the Germans for leading the charge in the E3 on the whole nuclear deal. And, uh, I had a, I think a former German defense minister, I was speaking at some forum and he, he got up and he says, I'm so dismissive of what everything that Germany has done for, for the state of Israel and everything like that.
I, I said, what are you, what are you talking about? In 1973, 25 years after the Holocaust, 1973, Germany would not allow American planes to land on their territory on their way to helping an Israel that was waging that war. Okay? He didn't have anything else to say from that. That's going to be a moment that Canada is going to have to deal with now, for 40 years, that in Israel's darkest moment, they abandoned it.
That's what they just did. And I think, frankly, I think it's shameful. Now, in terms of the United States,
DS: I mean the question, Ron -
RD: I want to get back to the Biden where he is, because it's very important. Biden private versus now Biden very public. But I think Biden out of the gate, out of the gate, the most important thing for me is what he did, was moral clarity. Good and evil. And don't underestimate the importance of the leader of the free world, of the most powerful country in the world, speaking with clarity, good and evil, right and wrong. Because part of the problems we have in the world is the muddle that you have everywhere, and you lose sight of that. Then he came here. Now that I give him a lot of credit for not just because he's the first president history to come Israel time of war if he came here now, it wouldn't be as impactful as he's coming here, coming here 10 days into the war. Why? Because at that time, we thought we could be in multiple fronts. We might still be in multiple fronts, even though we prefer not to be.
I mean, we are fighting in the north. You have skirmishes in the north, but you don't have it. But at that moment -
DS: He put down a marker.
RD: There was a concern that this King could spread to a much bigger regional war. And he not only came with Air Force One, he sent the aircraft carriers here at the same time, and I think helped deter a potential flaring up of this conflict. Uh, and then there was the munitions. The U. N. Security Council, and I think Biden's approach in general, the President's approach has been to keep disagreements private, as you say, and I, and I have news for you. We haven't always been on the same page. I mean, for, I've had many conversations with my U. S. counterparts, and they have been very clear that they agree with our goal. of dismantling Hamas's military capability. Um, but they've had a different approach of how to do it. And there were times in this war where we've had disagreements and we were able to handle those disagreements and move forward without it behind closed doors, which I think is in the interest of the relationship.
DS: I think as an observer, I think it was a huge problem in the Obama years that so many of these disagreements played out in public. It made, it made Israelis defensive. It brought in all sorts of opinions and personalities, and it was like crowdsourcing people to start trying to shape the conversation. Whereas the two heads of the two governments, the two leadership groups of the two governments can just work behind closed doors, a lot more can get done.
RD: I agree with that. I think that's always true. That you should keep disagreements between allies, especially critical allies, behind closed doors and you figure out the best way to overcome them. I think to have disagreements come out in public view during a war is a thousand times worse. Because that can have an impact on miscalculations that people could have and they could see a breach when there's really not a breach. They could not understand the nature of the disagreement and think it's much bigger than it is.
So I think, uh, We've had five months. We have kept the alliance, you know, on the same track. They have supported us in our war effort, and we hope that continues. Now, could you have a breach over Rafah? You could. We hope you don't. But here you should know, technically, what is the U. S. position? They're saying, they don't, they haven't said we are against Israel doing a military operation in Rafah full stop. They haven't said that. They said without credible way of Moving a mass of people out of Rafah and surging humanitarian assistance to them. They don't see how this can be done Effectively, okay, and we're saying we agree with you that we have to move the people out We agree with you that you have to get humanitarian assistance to them and we believe we can do it And so it's sort of like we're quite confident that we can do this in a way that would be effective Not only militarily but also on the humanitarian side And they have less confidence that we can do it.
And I think the issue is, show us a way that this can be done. And I'm going to be going to Washington in a few days because the President asked the Prime Minister. Uh, that he has, they agree with the goal again, dismantling Hamas. They have ideas of what to do, what to do on the military side, what to do on the humanitarian side.
And we'll listen to them out of respect to the president. We'll listen to him and the prime minister right away. He says, you know, I'll send the team there and he asked me to go with our national security advisor and so we'll be in Washington to hear what they have to say. But I can tell you just as at the beginning of the war There were many people in the U.S. administration, many, many people who thought if we go in in a ground operation, it's going to be, you know, a hundred times worse than Mosul, you know?
DS: Well, the military briefers from the U. S. were predicting ten times the Israeli casualties.
RD: Correct. And have occurred. So, but we said when, so you had a, you had a difference of opinion of going in on the ground from the get go. And I asked the IDF Chief of Staff in the War Cabinet just one question. Can we achieve? Our objective of dismantling Hamas's military capabilities without going in on a ground operation. And the answer was no.
And the answer now, when you say, Can we destroy and dismantle Hamas's military capabilities without going in an operation in Rafah? The answer is no. Now, you tell me that there's some magical answer. I mean, I speak to people in the region, and all of these people in the region, they want us to wipe out Hamas. They just say, do it in three weeks, without any civilian casualties.
DS: Trust me, I have friends who work in the U. S. government who travel with Blinken and others to these Arab capitals, and they say, look, they really got to get these images off of TikTok of the suffering in Gaza, and they really - but not before Hamas is wiped out.
RD: Right. Don't, don't, don't. Get the sequencing right. Do it in three weeks without civilian casualties. And I said, well, give me that Harry Potter magic wand. Let's figure out how to do that. So they want us to win. And here, here, the victory is so critical to everything we, everything we want to do, in the day after, what it projects for Israel's deterrence in the region. All of this has to have a victory. And here, what I would say, Dan, is, is Israel's going to achieve this victory. We're going to achieve it. We have thus far with a lot of support from the United States. My hope as we get to the final stage of the war, when victory actually is in sight, that the United States is there right by our side, because it will be their victory as well.
I don't think it's good at the end if there is a Gap that we have in a breach over the issue of rafa It's not going to stop us from winning this war because we have no choice but to win this war… But I think it will undermine the U.S. More broadly because this is a battle not only that we're going to win But it's going to be a win for the United States of America. So do you want to be part of that victory?
Right, or do you want to see when israel goes and finishes that job that on that last quarter quarter turn? The United States said, you know, you're on your own. If we're on our own, we're on our end. We don't want to be there. I hope we're not there. Uh, I believe it is a U S. interest to back Israel until this is won.
And this will be a major military blow, not just to Hamas, to Iran, and to its axis. A major military blow.
DS: It has global implications.
RD: I think that defeat also will open the door to a normalization with Saudi Arabia. Without that defeat, normalization is going to be very difficult for me to, uh, envision. How can we achieve it? Because, you know, as the prime minister said for years, nobody makes peace with the weak. You have to have that victory. Victory will bring others to us, and then we can continue a process that we started with the Abraham Accords. But more than that, before October 7th, I thought that the road to peace is only outside in, because I didn't see any way to begin the transformation of Palestinian society.
DS: Meaning, get the Arab world on board, then the Palestinians would come on board.
RD: Get the, get the Arab world on board, and then the hope would be, if you make peace, especially with Saudi Arabia, which is the, the, the center of the Muslim world, the keepers of Mecca and Medina. If you're at peace with them -
DS: And, oh, by the way, the most powerful economy in the military
RD: Yeah, the most powerful economy in everything else.
But you make peace, you're doing a broader peace between Israel and the Arab world, Israel, the Jewish state, and the Muslim world. It has major implications. And the hope would then be that you'd find Palestinians who could emerge knowing that 99 percent of the Arab and Muslim world is at peace with Israel, that ultimately could emerge.
Now you have the possibility in the wake of Gaza, if we do it right, and you have a real plan of deradicalization, which is the key to everything. You have the ability to do peace from the outside in and the inside out. That's the new thing.
DS: Okay. I want to, I know we only have a couple of minutes left. I want to ask you about the most gut wrenching part of this entire experience, I'm sure.
And there's a lot of gut wrenching, which is dealing with the hostage negotiations. And my question is, The government has been criticized, and I had, you know, Nadav Eyal from Yidiot on my podcast who actually made the point that people criticize the intensity and seriousness of the Prime Minister on the hostage negotiations, and he actually made the point, look, it's important for in negotiating for hostage release, not to look, I hate to use this term, but it's going to, it's to be a little cold in your public communications about it, not to say being cold in, in your intensity about it, but cold in your public communications, because you don't want the other side to think that Israel will, will give, you know, everything away, including its own security, uh, for that deal.
And so there's a lot of tension. You've talked to me in the past about your dealings with these debates internally, just, just in terms of how then it's been reported in the press, how you have made the case internally during the last round of negotiations. So characterize the approach, like how do you and the prime minister and others around you think about, you know, Your public posture during this time.
RD: Look, I, I think you're right. Uh, you have to be careful about what you say publicly. And sometimes that's difficult because what can be very comforting to, um, the families of the hostages who are, it's just, it's tremendous agony. Every day is agonizing. Uh, and I understand it. And they just want to know, uh, if God forbid I were a parent, or a brother, or any kind of relative was a hostage… you just want to know that you're doing everything you can to get them out, and that's what they're focused on. And they have raised awareness, the whole world's awareness, of the issue of hostages. And certainly within Israel, but not just within Israel, I think internationally they have done that day after day after day, but I think it's agonizing.
And words that could very much comfort them might actually be counterproductive of getting their loved ones out. That's, uh, an irony of how, what is the best way of what you say publicly. Now, I don't really speak publicly that much about the hostage negotiations, because I don't want to say anything that can undermine the chances of getting as many people out as quickly as possible.
As quickly as I can and we can to get them out. So i'm very cautious about what I would say publicly. I did uh, you know in 2023, I think I only spoke once in the government in 2023. In the war cabinet I speak all the time and in the security cabinet, not every time, because there's a lot of people, a lot of people speaking. And I'm not, one difference that I -
DS: The security cabinet, just for our listeners, the security cabinet is five people.
RD: Yeah, and with the, with the Derry, it's six. Yes, five ministers and, and Derry and, um, Yeah, the security cabinet is probably, I think is 14 and maybe three or four, uh, observers. So it's, it's close to 18 and the government is around 38 or something.
Um, but for me, when the first hostage deal came about, I spoke in the government. It was the only time in, I think, in 2023 that I spoke, because usually when you speak in the government, it's like hosting a press conference. It all gets reported in the press and it's all distorted. And there are a lot of people who speak there and they want to speak to protocol, you know, to have it on record that they said this or that.
And I, you know, I'm unique in, uh, that in one fact is that I wasn't elected on any list in the Knesset. The prime minister asked me to become a minister in the government afterwards. And it was funny when I was sworn in. As a minister, my brother called me. And my brother, as you may know, was a three term mayor of Miami Beach.
And our father was a two term mayor of Miami Beach. And our father passed away 40 years ago. It'll be 40 years ago in a couple weeks. It was a couple weeks before my Bar Mitzvah. And my brother calls me up, right after he gets sworn in in the Knesset, and he says to me, Dad would be so proud of you. Think what you've accomplished without a single person voting for you.
Okay. So I don't have a constituency. So I don't speak for a constituency. And I think the, in the war cabinet, what I very much appreciate is the Prime Minister does never tells me, say this, say that, and I'm not in camps. I say exactly what's on my mind. And sometimes I agree with this minister. And sometimes I agree with that minister. And sometimes I agree with the IDF chief of staff. And sometimes I agree with the head of Mossad, but we have these discussions, which are sort of very good discussions anyway. In the government, the only time that I wanted to speak was when the first deal was on the table.
DS: The first hostage deal. So now we're back in November.
RD: We're back in November, and it's, uh, it's, it's the end of November, and here I also can express gratitude to Biden because he really helped close that deal. And the white, and Jake Sullivan was very important, Bill Burns, they really helped close that deal of getting the women and children. And there was a deal where about a hundred women and children, it was actually, I think, 97, and we went every four days, 50, Hostages returned and then each additional day, another 10 hostages.
And I remember walking into that meeting in the government and people were a little squeamish about that deal. Some of the Likud ministers were squeamish and then somebody, I don't want to talk about who I sat next to, but was definitely against it. Uh, and my attitude was, uh,
DS: And they're against it because they thought it was too generous?
RD: No, they were, they were against it largely because they thought it would end the war. And, let me tell you something, I would have been against it if I thought it was going to end the war.
DS: So they thought any kind of ceasefire will inevitably lead to a permanent ceasefire, and then the war is over, and you can't restart it. You can't restart the war.
RD: Exactly, and you're going to do it. And, and for me, This is the ultimate red line, you know, to not agree to end the war until you've achieved your objective precisely because what I told You as an existential threat to the country because if you don't do what you have to do against them Then all the buzzards flying around sees a very different israel This is this is an issue that affects not just the hostages but 9 million citizens of israel that I feel a responsibility to just Like I feel a responsibility that we have to bring all these hostages home. But when I asked to speak, and I asked to speak first - because I wanted to do everything I can to convince my colleagues that they should do this deal.
DS: And there was speculation in the press at that point, as I recall, that there were going to be a number of ministers who were going to vote against.
RD: Yes. And I think judging from the mood at the beginning of that meeting, there were going to be a number that were going to vote against. It ended up being a vote of 35 to 3. Whether or not what I said had any impact on it, I can't tell you. But I felt an obligation to speak and to try to convince my colleagues anywhere I can why they had to do this deal. And what I said was this, that I was against the Shalit deal. I told the Prime Minister, 15, 14 years ago, when they did the Shalit deal.
DS: So this was the, the deal, just for our listeners, Gilad Shalit for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners being released in return for Shalit in 2011.
RD: Correct. And I was opposed to it, and I was a diplomatic advisor at the time, and we had a disagreement on it. It's the only major policy issue that I had a disagreement with him. Now, he did it for strategic reasons that I don't want to get into. He writes a little bit about it, or he hints about it in his book.
DS: Something to do with Iran.
RD: Yeah. Maybe it has something to do with Iran, but, you know, knowing all these calculations and everything, I didn't want to do it because I was, not that I thought it would lead to October 7th, but I thought it was going to incentivize this behavior and it will be very bad long term.
Anyway, I said I was opposed to it. The reason I mentioned that is only because a lot of those ministers who were there were also opposed to that deal. The second thing I said is, I believe that the overriding objective is to dismantle Hamas's military capabilities. That we have to do that. That's like the reddest of red lines. But this, for me, that first deal was a, I said, a heavy issue, but an easy decision. And the reason it was an easy decision for me, a very easy decision, is it talked about something that happened in American history that you'll be aware of. And that is, in 1944, American Jews, and Jews elsewhere, petitioned the U.S. government to bomb Auschwitz. Uh, at that point, during that time, 10,000 Jews were being murdered every day in Auschwitz. And the Jews Tried to get the American Jewry, the leadership, tried to get America to bomb Auschwitz and the tracks leading to Auschwitz. And they got back a letter. It's on display, I think, in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. And the letter said, we're not going to divert resources to do this, you know, essentially we have to get to Berlin. We have to achieve our goal. We'll win the war and … and I said, well, they got to Berlin, they won the war, but it was too late for between a half a million And a million Jews.
And I looked at my colleagues in the government and I said, well, we're the leaders of the Jewish state. There is no way that we're not going to stop for a few days and we're not going to save these women and children. From my point of view, they were our Schindler's List. Those people we had to get out.
Of the hell that they're in. I said, well, will the international community try to stop Israel? The end of this break? Yeah. Uh, will the United States? Maybe. I hope not, but I didn't know. Does Sinoir, the leader of Hamas, think it's going to end the war? Probably. Will we end the war? No way. And that depends on us.
So because I was so confident that in the face of any pressure that's going to come, we're going to go and fight this war and continue it, to me, it was not a question that you have to do a deal.
So I don't want to get into the specifics of the hostage negotiations, but in terms of my mindset, the most important thing for me is that we achieve that victory, because for Israel's deterrence, the hostage issue is not going to be the thing that's going to move the needle.
For Israel's internal resiliency, for how our country feels, for our national solidarity, it's a huge issue. But for our enemies, who don't value human life at all, Another 30 hostages, 50, 70, it makes no difference to them. For us, every person's in their own world. And you see the families and the celebration and the rejoicing in Israel when they came back and how that lifted the spirits of the whole country.
So for me, we need to do everything to return these hostages. I will tell you that when the story is written, I think a lot of the skeptics and the cynics and the critics of the prime minister, of other people in the government, I think, you When the protocols come out, maybe in 50 years, uh, they're going to have a very different picture of what happened during this period.
And they'll understand that Israel's government was committed to bringing these people home, and that we will do everything we can to bring them home, uh, and we have to achieve all of those war objectives. It doesn't sound that way every time you turn on the evening news, but at the end of the day, the question is, as we say in Hebrew, Mifchanot otza'ah. You know, what's going to be the result? And I, and I'm confident that we're going to bring these people home. Uh, I think the best way to bring them home in mass is through a deal. We saved one hostage early in the war. We saved another two hostages in a, in a truly remarkable operation, uh, in Rafah, where we were able to do it.
And if an opportunity presents itself, we'll save more. But given the issues with that and the concerns, it's very hard to believe that you're going to save a whole bunch without having a deal. So I hope we can do that.
DS: Ron, we will leave it there. Thank you for this. Thank you for your time. And, you know, maybe if we come out of this with no COVID, you will agree to come back on the Call Me Back podcast.
RD: Well, I'll let you know in a couple of days.
DS: Exactly. My big fear when you said that.
RD: My throat.
DS: No, no, my big fear is you're, I know you're going off to Washington as is well reported for this important meeting with the Biden administration on, on Rafah and I don't want to jam that up with you getting COVID or you getting them COVID or then U.S.-Israel relations could deteriorate to a whole other level if suddenly you're infecting the senior national security.
RD: Well, I don't know. Some people could argue that if I'm taken out that it will all improve. Who knows? There's critics of everything. Uh, but it's always, it's always great to do your show. I hope next time maybe we can dig in a little bit to, uh, the demonization of Israel and how when people talk about, whether it's the civilian casualties in Gaza and how so much of this has been distorted, the rising tide of antisemitism that you see and what that means.
I don't want to say stay tuned next week. But I did make a reference to Batman and Robin. So I'm going to have to say that now for your older audience members.
DS: We will have you back. I, by the way, I introduced you at the beginning as a long time friend. Because a lot of people I have on I refer to as old friends. And then people got offended because they don't like being called old. Which is why I say long time.
RD: Well, I'm young enough to not mind.
DS: We will have you back.
RD: Very good. We will continue this.
DS: Alright. Call me back.
RD: I will do so.