Israel's Sophie's Choice - with Haviv Rettig Gur
There are two major decisions Israel is contending with right now: I) proceed with the military operation in Rafah; or II) pause the fighting, perhaps for an extended period of time, in service of a hostage deal. Of course a hostage deal would also most likely include the release of a large number of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli prisons.
These decisions are coming to a head right now for Israel and for Hamas. All while Secretary of State Blinken is in the Middle East. All while Riyadh is working on some kind of defense pact with the U.S. and the possibility of normalization with Israel. And all against the backdrop of Hamas and Hezbollah issuing statements of solidarity with American college kids.
Fortunately, we’ve got Haviv Rettig Gur back, as we resume our regular check-ins.
Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
HRG: It feels like the decision is between the hostages, whose names and faces we know, and future hostages, whose fate we are guaranteeing. My sense is that the very fact that Hamas presents us with a Sophie's Choice like this is why, even if a deal happens, the war resumes. Some of these questions require the wisdom of Solomon to see through. Can our politicians, with what we've seen of them in the last couple of years, pull off that kind of moment of wisdom and decision? I don't know.
DS: It's 11:00 PM on Wednesday, May 1st, here in New York City. It's 6:00 AM on Thursday, May 2nd in Israel, as Israelis get ready to start their day. There are two major decisions Israel is contending with right now. Proceed with the military operation in Rafah, or pause the fighting, perhaps for an extended period of time, or perhaps even permanently, in service of a hostage deal. Of course, a hostage deal would also most likely include the release of a large number of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli prisons, in addition to a pause in fighting. These decisions are coming to a head right now, for Israel and for Hamas. All while Secretary of State Blinken is in the Middle East. All while Riyadh is working on the prospect of normalizing with Israel. And all against the backdrop of Hamas and Hezbollah issuing statements of solidarity with American college kids. Fortunately, we've got Haviv Rettig Gur back, as we resume our regular check ins. No more vacations, Haviv. Lots to discuss, Haviv Rettig Gur on ‘Israel's Sophie's Choice’. This is Call me Back.
And I am pleased, very pleased, to welcome back, relieved to welcome back, Haviv Rettig Gur to our regular check ins. Haviv, my friend, it is, I know we've spoken, while you were gone, but we haven't spoken in front of our larger community here. And so, on behalf of that community, I want to welcome you back. I was just in Israel, as you know, and I cannot tell you how many people would stop me places with one question. And one question only, which is, “when is Haviv going to be back? Where is Haviv?” So I'm pleased to tell our listeners that Haviv is back. Welcome back.
HRG: Thank you, Dan. Thank you. It's a little embarrassing and very, very gratifying. And we've built up what really feels like a community over the last seven months.
DS: Was the time away badly needed and sufficiently therapeutic?
HRG: Yes, we bought tickets 11 months ago, something like that. It seemed strange, a weird time, a difficult time, the war started, all this terrible stuff's happening. And then we took a look at our kids about three, four months ago. Our kids have been living this just as much as everyone else and I, in a funny way, I feel like I've paid more attention to all the adults in the room, the Jewish communities that I visited, the people we've talked to online and over the podcast, than to my own kids going through these processes. So we went for three weeks, no cell phone, there were literally, uh, places where even if we had turned our phones on, we would not have gotten - we hiked through the jungle in Southern Thailand, on some islands. It was wonderful. We got back, felt a lot more like a family, and like, uh, the last seven months were a little bit faded away. Thank God, in the week, uh, and something since we've been back, we managed to dive right back in, and everything's back at the same frenetic pace. So, yeah, it was good. It was necessary.
DS: Good. I'm glad. And I will say, you didn't miss much while you were gone, except for, the IDF withdrew most of its forces from Gaza. Iran attacked Israel with 300 ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and UAVs. Then Israel attacked targets on Iranian soil. The UN, there's the UN of course, they voted in favor of a Palestinian state, got a majority for the first time. There is a new hostage deal on the table, which among other things is giving a sense of hope to the hostage families. And is also threatening the stability of the government of Israel. So, not much, nothing new.
HRG: Yeah, it's been a busy month, April.
DS: So, what I want to focus on today is what feels like a pivotal moment, and a pivotal political moment in Israel, and if I had to boil it down, it's between invading Rafah now, or going for a hostage deal now. Now on the going for a hostage deal, this is not solely up to Israel. It sounds like Israel is increasingly prepared to go for the hostage deal. So the difference between the decision to go into Rafah, and the decision to go for a hostage deal requires more than just one party. It requires Hamas to be on board for it. You and I were talking about earlier, Nahum Barnea, who's a prominent Israeli columnist who writes a regular column in Hebrew in Israel, summed up the scenarios. In the immediate near future as one, Israel goes into Rafah and there's no hostage deal, two, there's a hostage deal and no operation in Rafah, at least in the near term, and three, no Rafah operation, and no hostage deal. And I want to explore those with you, but to begin with, Haviv, can you just sort of empty your reporter's notebook here to set up the conversation and let us know what is actually going on on the ground with this holding pattern Israel seems to be in as these decisions are being sorted out.
HRG: The broadest brushstrokes are as follows: The Israeli army pulled out just about the entirety of the sort of warfighting machine out of Gaza. It's basically completed. There are forces still there holding the Nitzanim corridor, which is what the Israelis call it. It's a corridor between northern and central Gaza, which essentially the Israeli army uses to make sure Hamas doesn't move in large numbers back to northern Gaza, where Israel believes Hamas has basically decimated their pinpoint, maybe, uh, units or insurgents, very small squads, but basically Hamas has gone from northern Gaza. And that's it. Now, that made a lot of, a lot of news and a lot of, sort of, waves through the media and the, uh, punditry of the West. But it's a lot less than it looks like because Gaza is a very small place, and Israel is a very small place.
DS: Right.
HRG: And so the army is 10 minutes, 15 minutes, from any operation it has to carry out in Gaza at any given moment. So does withdrawal mean? Withdrawal means they're not literally ferreting out Hamas from the tunnels.
DS: I just think this is an important point because I hear analysts make this point - “Well, Israel's pulled out of Gaza.” They make it sound as though it's equivalent to the U.S. pulling out of Afghanistan. Right. Which is, in the case of the U.S. pulling out of Afghanistan, the U.S. is something like, you know, 8,000 miles plus from Afghanistan. So for the U.S. to pull out of Afghanistan is meaningful, even if U.S. forces are pulled back, redeployed to Central Command forward, and Qatar at the Camp Ossalia, the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, or whatever, that kind of has more regional proximity to Afghanistan than the U.S. to Afghanistan, but still even that's really far away. What you're talking about here is, when Israeli forces pull out of Gaza, it means, first of all, they don't have work to do at the moment, so they're basically sitting ducks. So to pull back means to pull back a few kilometers, which means, the moment they need to return to Gaza in a meaningful way, it's flipping a switch and they're there.
HRG: Right, so the first thing is exactly what you said, it reduces the footprint. It makes them safer from any potential insurgents, and they are still 15 minutes out, right? Able to come in any time they need to. But, it does another thing, which is what we saw with the Shifa hospital battle last month, the army pulled out, not because it had actually withdrawn from the area, but because it was laying a trap. Hamas wants to bring forces above ground, wherever the Israeli army pulls out, to show that it still exists, it's still a fighting force, that sort of the Israelis are playing whack a mole and losing. That's the narrative Hamas would like to create. And the Israelis allowed Hamas to retake Shifa, establish a command center there, bring hundreds and hundreds of fighters there. And then when Israel sprang the trap and closed in on Shifa, the gun battle was engaged within something like 15 minutes from the Israelis being too far for Hamas to see and believing that Israel was far away, to springing that trap and taking out a massive Hamas force that it had pulled out of the tunnels that way. There is something complex happening with a tunnel war, which I think this is, to some degree, part of, which is that there's some glass ceiling to how much of the tunnels we can destroy from above ground. At some point, we do have to draw the Hamas fighters out, and so pulling out allows us in some places with some units potentially to pull the Hamas fighters out. I hope I'm not giving Hamas intelligence information. I know this from sort of analysis, not from direct intelligence, but it's something the Israelis have done several times, and so I think Hamas knows. So, there are all these reasons why pulling out is a much less than it looks smart policy for the Israelis, and doesn't tell us anything about Rafah. The Rafah fight still has to happen. It is still 40 percent, give or take 10, 15 points, we don't quite know of Hamas's fighting forces in the Gaza Strip. It is a place from which they will retake the Strip in about half an hour, if Israel leaves Gaza with a Hamas force in Rafah not destroyed.
DS: So you're saying, about four battalions, Hamas battalions, in Rafah and presumably the political, the leadership of Hamas, including the leadership that orchestrated and architected October 7th, is in Rafah. So, the nucleus of what could be a reconstituted Hamas post war, if left unchecked and undefeated is there.
HRG: It's there. And it's more than four battalions. There are four standing battalions in Rafah that have not been engaged by the Israeli army because they're in Rafah, but there's all the forces that fled the battlefield in the north and in the center of Gaza, to Rafah, who are sitting there with them. I think Hamas is something like two dozen battalions, all told in the force structure before the war. Four battalions sounds like one sixth of Hamas. But if you include all the forces that fled south, it becomes a lot more than 1/6, and they potentially could have organized new battalions underground there -
DS: And the forces, you mean forces that were serving in other battalions, that, while the battalions may have been crushed and broken, it doesn't mean all the fighters in those battalions were killed or captured, which means they have scattered, presumably, to Rafah, and if they've scattered to Rafah, they, again, they could join that nucleus of a Hamas 2.0.
HRG: Many thousands of Hamas fighters who would retake Gaza in, again, half an hour. So, if Rafah doesn't happen, Israel has utterly surrendered the war. The war was for nothing. The Palestinian suffering doesn't even have the consolation of giving the Palestinians a post-Hamas Gaza. And the Israeli soldiers who were killed and all of the trials and tribulations the Israeli population has undergone will all have been meaningless.
DS: So assuming, again, going back to Nehum Barnea, assuming Rafah operation and no hostage deal, I just want to get a sense of what Rafah looks like. Based on your understanding, what does it mean for Israel at this point to go into Rafah, given that the Biden administration - while it's not comfortable with, it seems like its public position has been a preference not to go into Rafah - I'm more skeptical that that is actually the case based on the sources I've been talking to, that at least at the White House and the key players around Biden in the White House, which I include to be Jake Sullivan and Brett McGurk, and then obviously Secretary Blinken at the State Department, that they all basically understand that Israel has to go into Rafah in some way. And they are working with Israel on how Israel goes into Rafah, in a phased approach, in a performance based approach, with a real strategy to move as many Palestinian civilians as possible out of Rafah before they start ramping up these operations. That is where the core of the discussion is with the White House. It's not about Rafah or no Rafah. It's how you do Rafah. So that's what I want to get at. In Israel, when you're talking to Israelis. I mean, I was just with family and friends in Israel last week, some of whom, they've been called back up for a possible operation in Rafah. No decision has been made, but they're clearly preparing for that. So from your understanding, what does a Rafah operation look like, if it happens?
HRG: Look, we know that the preparations are extremely advanced. We know that there are huge complexes of tents built out by the Israelis in Gaza to absorb the civilians. We know that there is Facial Recognition Software installed in checkpoints in central Gaza to make sure that Hamas fighters aren't part of that civilian group that will be removed from Rafah for the fight. We know that battalions have been called up. We know it because there's been a debate in Israeli press on the margins. It's not central to the, it's not page one, but it nevertheless has been happening, about a lot of, uh, reserve soldiers from, uh, very, uh, elite combat units that would take on the fight in Rafah - who have not shown up to the units, not a lot. It's in the single digit percentages, but the debate isn't about them not agreeing with the war. These are people with small businesses that because they disappeared for five months to Gaza, their business has collapsed and their families are struggling. And there's this whole now debate about how we take care of the soldier - that debate is sparked by the new call up for Rafah. In other words, so much that is happening right now, clearly points to a Rafah operation. And by the way, Hamas told us - two weeks ago, that it absolutely rejects any kind of hostage agreement. It doesn't want one. It doesn't need one. And then suddenly it does want to have a discussion about hostages. That is a very clear signal that Hamas understands from what's happening on the ground in Gaza, that a Rafah operation is real, imminent, and that the Israelis are capable of doing it and want to do it. And so we don't have a signal that it isn't happening. Every single signal we have points to it happening.
DS: Okay, so now let's talk about a hostage deal. What are the parameters or details? And again, I know it's fluid, although, it's noteworthy, that one Israeli I met with last Friday in Tel Aviv, venture capitalist who's also very involved with security matters in the country, pointed out, he says, the difference between Israel and every other country is the rumors are usually true. In Israel, it's such a small country that rumors aren't actually rumors, they're people, most people trafficking rumors are actually trafficking in well sourced information. So unlike in most countries, gossip is pretty well sourced and usually factually based.
HRG: And also, uh, corollary to that, is that, if you don't actually know, you can talk, right? If you do know because of your job, you can't say it. So it's much more fun to know but not actually know from official sources. So you can talk about it, right? This is how Israelis talk about nuclear warheads that we, according to foreign sources, right?
DS: Right, fair enough. So what do we know about a possible temporary ceasefire / hostage deal?
HRG: Okay, the rumor mill is exactly what you said. It's a rumor mill in this case, some of the rumors have to be wrong because they contradict. There is a suggestion that it's, the ceasefire that Hamas is demanding is a year: if that is part of the deal, that is an end, essentially to the war. A year is an awfully long time. It's a lifetime in Israeli politics, it's a lifetime in Palestinian politics, in the international campaign. There are rumors that it's something much smaller than that, shorter than that. We don't know if we're talking about 20 hostages. 33 was the number that came out. 40, Hamas says, it doesn't have 40, but again, Hamas hasn't publicly said it doesn't have 40 hostages to give over. This is a rumor. And the Israelis said, we want to deal for some set amount of time and then you can buy more time, but with a hostage a day, that's an Israeli position - again, that's a rumor. So all these things are being talked about. And if I had to sketch a kind of outline of the, sort of, what each side wants the deal to be and what's on the table from the different sides without knowing the details, which is very tragic that we don't know the details, because everything depends on the details. Hamas wants an end to the war. And it thinks that this might be the last moment it can get it. And it thinks that it faces a Rafah operation, which the Israeli army, strictly in military terms, on the ground, probably can pull off fairly easily. In other words, it'll be a pitched battle. It'll be Hamas's last hurrah on Gazan soil. Hamas will fight desperately, we'll see things we haven't seen before. They'll probably be able to get in a few good shots at the Israelis and there’ll be Israeli dead; but, nevertheless, the Israeli army knows how to pull this off, and the Israeli chief of staff said this week, probably three or four times, to the war cabinet, “We're just waiting for you to make a decision. Everything is doable. We can do it. We have the forces.”
DS: And in fairness to the, Halevi, the, Herzi Halevi, the IDF Chief of Staff, who said that, who said, what you just said, they do, at least on this front, on this particular issue, not on events leading up to October 7th, but on post October 7th, they have some credibility, because - there were all these projections and forecasts, including from the Biden administration, about how badly, and including surrogates from the Biden administration, like Thomas Friedman at the New York Times, were constantly forecasting how badly the war in Gaza would go for Israel. And reality is, as tragic as every Israeli civilian casualty has been, the numbers are about 10 percent what many, including the Biden administration and the U.S. Military had projected to the Israeli war cabinet, about what would happen if Israel went to Gaza - and that just hasn't happened.
HRG: Absolutely, and not only that, but the army that is going to go into Rafah is an army that will kill fewer civilians on the other side, despite the fact that this is a kind of warfare essentially constructed to kill civilians. That's why Hamas chose it. That's why insurgencies everywhere from, you know, ISIS to Vietnam, choose this kind of warfare to impose on their enemies. So our army has shown that it in fact is capable of fighting in ways, uh, that will reduce that. So it's going to be an extremely competent operation. Hopefully a very fast one, it has to be a very fast one. And I know the army knows that it can be a very fast one. And if you've already made the decision to do it, and you're already taking the flag internationally and with the Biden administration, just get it done. Just pull the bandaid off as fast as possible. So, all of that is right there on the table. Hamas is desperate to avoid that. Hamas wants a hostage deal. It doesn't want a hostage deal in which, in three months, the Israelis come back. Hamas believes that it has found an Israeli weak point with the hostages. It also believes that Netanyahu is very weak, politically, for various reasons we can get into. And it also believes that it has an opportunity to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, in the simple sense that it can impose costs on Israeli leaders, specific Israeli leaders, namely Netanyahu, that they're unwilling to pay. Because some of his far right elements will be pulled out or, or force him into a Rafah operation that isn't quite a Rafah operation because he's very susceptible to American - there's a lot of this in Hamas. We're seeing a lot of this attempt to sort of psychoanalyze Netanyahu, and try and figure out from which point you can attack his weaknesses politically. And so there is a chance they survive this. They hope for a hostage deal. They're afraid of a Rafah operation. They need the hostage deal to be something more than a 30 day ceasefire.
DS: But just to be clear, when you say they hope for a hostage deal, you mean they hope for a ceasefire deal, which they know can only happen with a hostage deal.
HRG: They’re desperate for a ceasefire.
DS: I just want to be clear where Hamas’ angle is. If Hamas can get a deal, that's not just a pause, but a pause that they believe can be leveraged to basically Israel ending the Gaza war with some remnant, and an important remnant, of Hamas still in Gaza that, as you say, could retake Gaza in a matter of hours or days - that's what Hamas wants, and if it has to return hostages in order to get that, you're saying they will probably do it. But if they have to return hostages to get something short of that - t hat's a different situation.
HRG: They probably won't.
DS: Right.
HRG: And here's the point. It looks like a hostage deal is quite likely if you're listening to Israeli politicians, because the Israeli political system is now intensely debating and fighting and people are taking sides. Ministers in the government are actually taking sides, whether we go into Rafah or take that hostage deal. But if you actually look at the minimum Hamas needs, which is to survive, and at the maximum Israel can give, which is, not allowing Hamas to survive. It cannot give Hamas enough time, for example, a year, that actually makes a renewal of the war to destroy Hamas, to remove the Hamas regime from Gaza, a possibility. You know, all the news says that a deal is imminent. I don't know how a deal is imminent. I don't know what kind of deal they could - if the, at this point I would even say, if the Israelis sign off on giving Hamas a year free, a year ceasefire, in exchange for the last 40 hostages, assuming they can be found, living and available, the Hamas, Hamas already setting us up for not having hostages, that they can't give us more than 40… If that happens, then frankly, I hope the Israelis are lying and those Hamas battalions are removed from Rafah. I don't understand the leaks, in the sense that I don't understand how it's possible for Hamas to get the minimum it needs out of any hostage deal.
DS: So I want to go through each of the players here, internationally, and then we can talk about the domestic Israeli players and considerations. So you have Hamas, who you and I agree, Sinwar, basically wants to figure out a way to stay in power and to stay in Gaza and to live to fight another day. So any deal that is in service of that is probably worthwhile for them. Anything that falls short of that, at least from, by their analysis, is less attractive, so it seems. From Israel's perspective, the option to go back into Rafah, at some point, and to finish Hamas, even at the end of a pause or a ceasefire, just like in the first deal at the end of November, they had the option to return to warfighting, a week after the deal was commenced, and in fact, as Ron Dermer told us on this podcast, when I interviewed him in Jerusalem a few weeks ago, he said, that was inside the cabinet, inside the security cabinet. And inside the full cabinet, when they were debating the first hostage deal, the real concern among opponents of that deal was that this would mean, any kind of pause would mean, Israel would not go back in, and that the way he, Ron, and others who supported the deal, made the case to the more hardline opponents of the deal was: “don't worry. We're going back in. So we will take this pause to get as many hostages out as we can. And then when this pause is over, we're going back in. You have our assurance.” So the question is, can Israel make the same pledge now, depending on how, quote unquote, is the U.S. administration calls it, how “generous” the deal is to Hamas? From Israel's perspective, in addition to the length of the pause, and whether it actually is code for end of war, is, who is going to be released from Israeli prisons? Which Palestinians, as part of the deal, are going to be released from Israeli prisons? Obviously, there's never going to be a deal as lopsided as 2011, when 1027 Palestinian prisoners were released from Israeli prisons in return for one soldier, Gilad Shalit. It's not going to be like that. But there would still be a lot of numbers released from Israeli prisons. And so, what are the numbers? And what are the profiles of the people being released? And that will be subjected to a lot of scrutiny, don't you think, in Israel? It seems to me in 2011 with the Shalit deal, Haviv, there was so much euphoria about the deal that there wasn't that much attention given, I don't think, but you were closer to it - given to who actually was being released from those prisons. But now that we know that some of the people who were released from the prisons, namely Yahya Sinwar, turned out to be the architect of October 7th, so talking about living to fight another day. Don't you think the scrutiny by players in Israeli politics and the Israeli media on who is actually being released from the Israeli prisons this time will be more intense and therefore raising the stakes?
HRG: Absolutely. The fact that Sinwar only managed to become who he became because of the Shalit deal, changes how deals work in the Israeli mind. And so, who is coming out, how many, how much time we pay in terms of ceasefire, whether Hamas survives this, because of the deal, those are the big questions. And everyone will be asking these questions. And in fact, Israeli politics is right now roiling over these questions. And these questions at this very moment have the power to topple the Netanyahu government, right at this minute. So I think that’s absolutely correct that Hamas is gambling that the Israelis can be still be squeezed the way that they were squeezed in the past. Over the last week, we've seen Hamas release videos of hostages, to try and pressure the Israeli political system in one direction. Those are exactly the videos of Gilad Shalit, released shortly before the deal back in 2011, by Ismail Haniyeh, who was then head of Hamas in Gaza, and is now in Doha or wherever he's run to.
DS: Roaming around the world. So wait, they released video of Shalit right before the final deal? I didn't realize that.
HRG: Yeah, a few weeks. But as part of that pressure campaign, Sinwar remembers obviously very closely, very clearly that moment, because that's the moment that got him out of an Israeli prison, where he was serving, you know, life sentences for murder. Murder of Palestinians, by the way, not Israelis. And that's something that he's very clearly trying to do now. From the perspective of the hostage families, there's an interesting dynamic within Israel, which is that, whether you support a deal with Hamas to get the hostages out, even at the cost of stopping the war, stopping temporarily, maybe risking stopping permanently with Hamas still in power in Gaza - support for that and absolute rejection of that idea very closely aligns with trust in the government. And so people who think that Netanyahu is, in any case, playing politics with the war, and is not going to see the war through because it's, there are basically two narratives developing around Netanyahu that really shape how people are responding to the hostage deal. The hostage families want the deal and they don't care what happens after. I understand that. Yair Lapid, the opposition leader, head of the Yashatid party, has now come out and said, “Even at the cost of ending the war we need to get those hostages out.” Because he thinks his voters want that and if you don't trust Netanyahu to be running the war properly - it's dragged on for seven months. Soldiers are, reservists are, exhausted, and how could seven months go by without it being finished already in Gaza? Is a question a lot of people are asking of Netanyahu, and so if you distrust Netanyahu, you want to get this deal and finish as much as possible the hostage situation, and the future with Gaza, you know, if we leave Hamas in power in Gaza - that's a bad thing for Israel. It's a bad thing for Israeli deterrence. It's a bad thing in six different ways, but it's catastrophic for Gaza, because what's Hamas gonna do? It's gonna take ten years, rebuild, and have another war in ten years, if that. And so the hostage families, they're not saying, let's make a deal, let's have a ceasefire, even at the risk of not actually finishing Hamas in Gaza, out of any kind of hatred of the war or, or support for a ceasefire or hope that somehow Hamas survives this. They simply don't trust the government enough, that it's prioritizing the hostages, or that it is literally just focused on the war and what's good for the country, rather than what's good for the politicians, and want to get those, those hostages out. So that's a divide that we're seeing in Israeli politics. I think Sinwar understands that, and sees that. And I think the release of those videos that we've seen now of three hostages is in order to try and catalyze more of that kind of pressure on the Israeli government. And the Israeli government faces a momentous choice. It's a choice, it's a choice with real consequences in Israeli politics. It's possible that it's a choice that the government won't have to make because the deal will fall through on the Hamas side, which is quite likely.
DS: And it's not just the release of the videos, it's Sinwar and the Hamas leadership seeing the pressure mounting on Israel internationally. I mean, it's not lost, I think, on anyone in the Israeli leadership, that Hamas has been all too pleased to issue statements in solidarity with the U.S. college encampments, the protesters, the pro Hamas protesters on campuses of top American universities that are getting unbelievable wall to wall press coverage internationally. This is not a one day, two or three day story. It's non stop on cable news, non stop on Al Jazeera and the Arab satellite channels, all throughout the Arab world, all throughout Europe, BBC. I mean, it's everywhere. And so, Hamas has issued statements of solidarity with the students, thanking them. There's signs in Gaza, people posting signs thanking American college students. I mean, it's all so creepy. Talk about these students being useful idiots for the Hamas propaganda machine, and then Hezbollah issuing statements and obviously there was the U.N. vote, even though the U.S. vetoed it. It was a majority vote necessary - it passed the threshold for a U.N. Security Council resolution to pass, again, and had the U.S. not vetoed it, it would have passed. There was a previous vote that the U.S. didn't veto, that delinked a hostage deal from a ceasefire. There's all this news, and I saw it moving through, you know, obviously Thomas Friedman, quasi surrogate for the Biden administration, wrote this column over the weekend, while thinking that Sinwar is in the tunnels of Gaza reading Thomas Friedman's latest column. It drove press coverage in the Israeli press and the Arab press what Friedman said, which is, Friedman said, “The administration is contemplating suspending arms sales in some form to Israel, if Israel moves forward with Rafah.” And so, Sinwar is seeing all of this and saying, “why do I need to go for any kind of deal now that in any way that falls short of giving me options to stay in power?”
HRG: I think that Sinwar is seeing that international pressure. Palestinians have a story about international pressure, that Israel only survives because it has an international patron, namely the United States, but in past decades, it was other international patrons and disconnecting Israel from that international support will make Israel collapse. And the corollary of that story is the international community will save them. The Muslim world, the Arab world, the liberal West will come in and rescue them from Israel, but not rescue them in the sense of - force Israel into a two state solution, rescue them in the sense of, allow them to not compromise and in fact force Israel into essentially dissolving itself. So there is this Palestinian narrative. It isn't really Hamas's narrative. I do think that Sinwar is sensitive to international pressure on Israel because he thinks Israelis might be sensitive to it. He himself, of course, is not sensitive to it. And I think that the preparations on the ground for the Rafah operation pushed him into talking about, I think that's why he was delaying the deal, but then he now wants to have this conversation about a deal and to negotiate a deal because the preparations on the ground show him the IDF doesn't care, really isn't susceptible to that pressure. I don't know what to do with, you know, campuses around the United States in which kids are essentially taught that the entire world is divided between the powerful and the powerless, privileged and oppressed. Privilege means the ability and therefore, its automatic desire to oppress those who are not powerful and privileged. And if the whole world is divided into the privileged and the oppressed, then you're either good or evil. It's a permanent war in the world between good and evil. And therefore the world is this Manichaean place where you have to take sides. And therefore, if the Palestinians are weaker than the Israelis, the Israelis are the evil and the Palestinians are the good. It doesn't matter what Hamas does or who Hamas kills, because massacres by Hamas, even of Palestinians, is a function of the oppression by the Israelis. And if you think that about the world and everywhere you look, you see that, that is a religious, moral infrastructure, mental infrastructure, mental architecture that you impose on everything around the world, then you will take the side of Hamas. And you know what? This is, this is stuff that is Marxism adjacent, sometimes literally Marxist, but some of these people have never really read Marx. And they're just, you know, they're just sort of, going off of TikTok videos that summarize for them who's good and who's bad, but, this is old, old stuff. This is stuff we've seen before. We've heard it before. The obsessive focus on Israel is hard to, for Israelis, to take seriously because there's so much evil in this one region, just very close by us. There's so many oppressed people, but if the wrong people are doing the oppressing, then it doesn't matter. And so, you know, Israelis do sense this happening. We have some pretty good data now. Israeli researchers and universities are quietly not being invited to publish, to conferences, things like that. There's a kind of, because of public -
DS: Haviv, I'm not so sure it's so quiet. It's in some ways not quiet at all.
HRG: I think within academia, it's been a little quieter.
DS: Mmmm, I think it's, it's bubbling up yet in a major kind of way. Yeah.
HRG: So all this stuff is happening, but also, we have to understand the limits of it. In other words, if you're going to lose the international press, if you're going to lose the international debate, and I have criticized the Israeli government, including on this podcast, for not even, not even entering, not even giving the narrative of the war to anyone, not to Israelis in Hebrew, not to the world in English, Um, I think the Israeli government has miserably failed in doing that. And I think it's had strategic effect on the war and I'm very sad about it. But even if the Israeli government was Winston Churchill, in terms of framing the war, we're being shouted down in the world 200 to one, we're a small people. And we live in a small place, and the world is hearing the, and the Muslim world, unlike 25 years ago, is online now. And so we're going to anyway be shouted down 200 to one. If you cannot win the information space, you better win the ground war. And so in a way, the fact that the information war is pro Hamas, the fact that these students are telling Palestinians, what is the message coming out of these campuses, that they're hearing in Gaza? The message is - give nothing, surrender nothing, recognize nothing, accept nothing of Israel. And if you do that, we will be here to put the kind of pressure on Israel that'll make it crumble like Algerie Francaise or South Africa's apartheid government, and don't worry, Israel is on its way out of history. Please don't surrender because if you, please don't, in other words, compromise or reconcile because that's a surrender and in a sense a betrayal of our own moral emotions. That's the message. Well, if that's the message, the Israelis have exactly one option, which is to win the ground war. And then none of it matters. You want to hate me, you can hate me. I'm not going to leave Hamas in power to murder my kids. It's that simple of an equation. It's a debate that the West is having with Hamas, not with me. As long as the only option Palestine offers me is Hamas. And at the moment, that's what it is. All this stuff in the West isn't going to matter. I'm not giving here like a moral, like, it's not meant to be a little moral sermon. What I'm saying is, in the Israeli mind, the reason to stop a war is if you don't trust Netanyahu to prosecute it properly, because then why are our boys dying? But the reason to stop the war is not because of what's happening on college campuses, because the people on college campuses who are pro Hamas and supporting Hamas won't care if every last one of us is massacred. And we believe that. They might not know it about themselves, but we know it about them. And it fits in their oppressor oppressed kind of ideology. And so, Rafah is going to happen no matter what happens on college campuses, and Rafah is going to happen no matter what happens with the Biden administration deciding to limit arms sales in some way. The only thing that will stop Rafah is Israeli politics.
DS: I want to come back to the Biden administration because there's two points that are getting lost in the debate. One, this Tom Friedman article that got all this attention. I don't want to overstate its importance because it's being interpreted here as though this was the Biden administration speaking with one voice, through Tom Friedman, to put pressure on Israel. And of course, as you and I were just discussing, when you put pressure on Israel in any way, including that way, it also backfires because it gives fuel to Sinwar in affecting and shaping his decision making and other players in the region. However, having spoken to folks in the administration and around the administration, the Thomas Friedman column represents one point of view in the intra-food fight happening right now inside the administration. As I said, there are some in the administration like Brett McGurk, Jake Sullivan, to a large degree, Tony Blinken, who understand that Israel has to go into Rafah in some form. There are others in the administration who don't want Israel to go into Rafah or want Israel, if it's going to go into Rafah, going in a much different, lighter way. And that voice represents the school of thought, that latter voice, that Friedman is writing about. Friedman is not representing the kind of universal consensus view of the Biden administration. Friedman knows there's an intra administration fight going on about this, and he's making himself a conduit for the perspective that he agrees with, which is the group that wants no Rafah. A. B, this idea about restricting arms sales or sanctioning Israel in some way. A, I don't think the U.S. would do it, and I'm going to come back to that in a moment. But B, if they were to do it, this would not be the first time it's been done. You'll recall, after Israel launched under Menachem Begin, under Prime Minister Begin, launched the military operation to take out the Osirak nuclear facility in Iraq, to prevent Iraq from building a nuclear bomb, Menachem Begin launched that unilateral preemptive strike, and Caspar Weinberger, who was Reagan's defense secretary at the time, this is 1981, was furious that Israel had done this, and they suspended arms sales. I think it was, fighter jets, to Israel for six months as punishment. The Reagan administration punished Israel in this way, using this tool after Israel went into Iraq. Now, I don't think the Biden administration is going to do that. A, because I think those closest to Biden are opposed to it. B, they're opposed to it because they recognize ultimately that Israel does have to, in some way, finish off Hamas. The idea that Israel is just going to end this thing and Hamas is still going to be intact in Rafah, and everyone's just going to move on, the Israeli leadership is going to move on, the Israeli public is going to move on - I think there are several players within the administration who understand that's not realistic. And lastly, when you restrict arms to Israel, which arms are you restricting? Obviously, there are defensive weapons that Israel has, like all the components of Iron Dome. And then there are offensive weapons that Israel has, like the JDAMs. Now, if you restrict weapons like JDAMs, those are precision guided and precision oriented weapons, meaning they make hits, military operations that Israel conducts, cleaner and more focused and with fewer civilian casualties. We restrict those kinds of weapons, which Israel gets from the U.S., Israel, as you said, is still probably going to go fight the fight it's going to fight, whether it's in Gaza or the fighting it has to do up north. It just means even more civilians will die.
HRG: Yeah, and a weaker Israel, an Israel that appears weaker, is more likely to find itself at war. Because we're not facing Switzerland. We're not now sitting in front of, you know, some kind of array of enemies that is deterrable in some meaningful, ordinary way. We're facing an Iran that wants to redeem Islam with our destruction. We're facing a Hezbollah that is demolishing Lebanon in order to demolish us. We are facing enemies who have one message for us, for 25 years now, and that message is, “we are undeterrable and we will ultimately crush and destroy and exterminate you.” In other words, this is not, you know, when the Iranian regime believes it has to, it pretends that it wants some kind of civic democracy in Israel, with all the Jews and the Palestinians living together in happiness and joy. But when it actually speaks Farsi to itself and talks to itself, including in public, about what it wants from us, it wants every one of us to drown in the sea. And in operational terms, it's building the capabilities to destroy us. So, you make us look weak by restricting arms sales - our enemies are going to use that as an opportunity to scale up, to escalate the conflict, and not to scale down. I'm sorry that there are such enemies in the world, that seems to really insult American sensibilities that there are people who don't want stability and calm and prosperity and commerce for everyone -
DS: Or at least inconvenience the Americans.
HRG: No, I really think the Americans have trouble wrapping their head around this idea. I mean, all this talk about all these years of, finding a way, a modus vivendi with Khamenei. Khamenei is a revolutionary out to overturn the order of the world. You know, you can delay certain things, but unless your plan is for Khamenei to ultimately fall in some way, it is not sustainable. What you do will be - Iran just launched, while I was on vacation, launched the single largest drone attack in the history of drones, uh, one of the largest missile attacks, maybe the largest - in the history of ballistic missiles. And the whole thing was intercepted by the Americans, but what does that tell Iran? And what did Iran suffer in response? It suffered very little in response, it suffered a very dramatic Israeli response in the sense that the Israelis showed that they could, with finesse, cut through literally every defense Iran had -
DS: With Israel using 10 of the projectiles, shall we call them, that Iran used in its attack against Israel.
HRG: Right. Israel was saying to Iran, let's, you know, if we get into this game, you're going to suffer more than we suffer. But that was a very subtle, careful, targeted statement to Iranian policy planning and military elites. That wasn't an Israeli appearance to be drawing, exacting a massive cost. Now, Israel began this escalation in the sense that it's becoming really intolerable for Israel, for Hezbollah to keep large parts of the Israeli north uninhabitable, and so Israel is starting to exact a cost directly from Iran, and it killed very senior Iranian officials, including the general literally in charge of all Iranian operations in Syria and Lebanon. And that's an Israeli escalation. Iran was counter escalating. The Israeli response was, maybe don't counter escalate in that direction. We can clean the floor with you in that direction, just FYI. But, on the public, sort of the public projection of all of this, what did the Middle East see? What did Hezbollah see? Did it see an Israel that can exact massive costs for this kind of missile attack? Because CENTCOM and Middle Eastern allies and Israel's own unbelievable, uh, missile defense system managed to block just about all the rockets, and certainly to prevent any real damage from the rocket attack, Israel didn't feel it needed a massive response. But deterrence in this region decides the next war. The next war is coming. It's not an option. It's not that Hezbollah has built out all of its, Iran has built all these proxies to not use them. All of the wars are coming. The question is when and how, and so if the Americans weaken the Israelis, that brings those wars closer. If you don't understand that, go ahead and do it, and you'll learn very quickly. And we can take weapons shipments very fast and turn them around to the battlefield. So, it was reported in Israel, this Thomas Friedman column, and it was reported because it comes out of the Biden administration, but, in as much as it does represent the Biden administration, and I take your point that it's a debate within the Biden administration and the people that Tom Friedman was channeling in that particular column are losing that debate, at least for the moment. But in as much as it does channel, it's a Biden administration that just, it can't find its feet in this region and doesn't have any idea what the consequences are going to be. The fact is that American pressure has slowed this war effort and that has made it last longer. And that has made it more costly to Israel, more costly to Palestinians, more costly to the American administration in its own political problem with this war. A feeling the Israelis don't care enough about civilians, therefore have to be pressured on that point. Do it. Great, you know, they're generals fighting a war. I'm very up for, you know, pressure to fight as gently as possible, but don't slow the war. Don't end the war. Don't prevent the war from being fought well and precisely and with as much high tech as possible to actually prevent civilian casualties. And don't play a game that's going to only backfire out of sheer fear, out of just the inability to imagine a kind of initiative that gets the job done, ends that - you know, sometimes you have to pull off the bandaid, you have to take the pain and end it as fast as possible because it's massively less damaging.
DS: At a very parochial, local version of what you're talking about, I think the same applies to how the Biden administration is dealing with this flare up of the college campuses that we were talking about, because here we are, end of April, early May, so, these pro Hamas protesters are taking over American college campuses, but it's all going to be meaningless in a few weeks because the school year's ending. Okay, so the question is, if the Biden administration forces Israel to drag out this war or prolong it, let's then just assume the fervor of this protest movement in the United States maintains the same level of energy. But it has nowhere to go because the school year ends. Or does it have nowhere to go? Because I'll tell you where I think it goes next. It goes to Chicago this summer at the Democratic National Convention. And the Democrats have a bitter history with conventions, that the whole world is watching, and that the American electorate is watching, that go off the rails. Because that's exactly what happened to the Democrats in 1968, oh, by the way, in Chicago, in the middle of the Vietnam War, and played no small part in electing Richard Nixon President of the United States. Where are all these kids going? These kids don't have jobs. They're not working. They're like, basically, have made themselves professional revolutionaries. And if their campuses are emptied out, then they will go somewhere. And I think they are going to migrate to Chicago. Now, they could also try to migrate to the Republican convention, too. But I think that Biden has to figure out how to deal with these people. He issued a pretty good statement last week, finally, but it's not enough. And he's got to appear to be confronting - calling them protesters is sort of too kind to them. If he doesn't confront them, I think he has a political problem that's much bigger at home than just the sense that the world has kind of unraveled, in these geopolitical hotspots. I want to ask you, separate from the Biden administration, there are other decision makers that have a role in all of this: namely Saudi Arabia and Iran. So in the Friedman piece, he uses this formulation that Israel has to choose between Rafah and Riyadh; If it does Rafah it loses Saudi Arabia. If it focuses on ending the war then it gets its hostages back. This is Tom's very simple formulation, and it gets a normalization deal with Saudi Arabia. And so therefore there's your choice, Rafah or Riyadh. And the idea that it's that simple, that Iran, for instance, if there's suddenly new momentum for a Saudi Israeli normalization deal, which I'm all for, and I believe there is too much momentum, general energy and genuine energy for it, both in Jerusalem and in Riyadh. But just because there's energy for it, doesn't mean Iran is just going to sit back and watch that play out any more than they sat back and let it play out before October 7th. So there are other players in the region who get a vote on all of these things. It's not just up to Israel. And so it bears acknowledging that this is not so simple. Israel either goes to Rafah or gets its normalization deal, but it can't get both. A. B. If Israel just walks away from Gaza, and walks away from Rafah, Friedman and others argue, “well, there'll be an Arab force put into Gaza to provide security for Gaza. Israel, we know you're worried that Hamas is still there, but don't worry, we'll send in an Arab force.” Which Arab country, really, is sending their forces as quote unquote “peacekeeping forces”, in a Gaza in which Hamas is still operating? Really? I mean, I could understand that possibly happening, once Hamas is completely defeated and dismantled. But the idea that any Arab government is going to send their forces into Gaza to operate there, let alone how complicated this would be in terms of rules of engagement between whatever that force is in the IDF. Leave that aside, because that presents its own level of complexity. But just the idea that some Arab country is going to send their forces into Gaza to, to duke it out with Hamas so Israel can walk away -
HRG: If Hamas wins this, if Hamas is still standing at the end of this in Gaza, Hamas will have the claim that it faced the entire Israeli juggernaut supported by the Americans, supported by the West, you know, the Western governments, not the Western college students. And it is still standing. And therefore it is invincible. And therefore, who's going to take them on? Some corrupt, uh, you know, I don't want to use, uh, you know, demeaning language, but, uh, ineffective military from somewhere in the Arab world. These are not competent, serious militaries. They're going to come into Gaza and actually fight Hamas. Anybody who comes into a Gaza where Hamas is still in operation after the Israelis have left will work for Hamas or they will die until they leave. Find me the Arab force. Every Arab, by the way, military and government knows this. Find me the Arab force.
DS: By the way, just look at what's happened with the US setting up this humanitarian -
HRG: The pier -
DS: corridor. Hamas has been firing rockets at them, at American forces. So you don't think they'd be firing rockets and trying to kill Arab forces?
HRG: Tom Friedman owes us to have it front loaded. Find me the force. Find me the Arab army that'll go in, and then you've challenged me. Right now it's just the most ridiculous idea by a faraway American, who, just somehow, there's this American habit - I just want to remind everybody, I'm a philo American. I have a passion for America. I love America, and I think that some of America's intellectual history is the solution to the Israeli Palestinian conflict. I got a whole speech on YouTube about Martin Luther King and the solution to the Israeli Palestinian conflict, but - genuine love and deep admiration for President Biden, bipartisan admiration, okay? But, America has this habit of looking at the world and thinking very simple thoughts that would make sense if the whole world was made up of Americans, and then insisting that must be how the world works. Find me the Arab force that'll step in before you ask me to pull out; if I have to leave Hamas standing in Gaza, find me someone else who will fight the Hezbollah war. If I have to leave Hamas standing in Gaza, find me an internal Israeli domestic military reservist, willing to go to a war where they know the Israeli government is going to lose it because it's that susceptible to international pressure. How do I pull Israelis out of their daily lives to go to a war if they don't know the war is going to end with a safer country and with their children being safe? Find me solutions to these unbelievably huge questions that I have, about all of your silly policy prescriptions. Not liking the fact that it's uncomfortable, not liking the images out of Gaza, which is a war, a war terrible, a war is disastrous. Hundreds of thousands of Israeli soldiers took part in this war. I am absolutely sure that some of them did things that are not okay. You want to find that evidence and you want to have that debate and you want to take that debate to court and you want to have -? Great, fine. God knows America had abuses in Iraq and abuses in Afghanistan. That doesn't mean that is the war, and images coming out of a war, that look like a war, there's something astonishing about this American inability - you know, I say that. And then I remember Biden is still on our side in this, right? So it's, it's an inability, but nevertheless, they have bucked this. But then you get these columns from people who think they'd have it all figured out when they can't answer the first question that the actual people on the ground, Israeli or Palestinian, are going to ask them. There is no way around getting rid of Hamas in Rafah. There is no way around it. Find me a way around it. Otherwise, Hamas wins. If Hamas wins, what do you think happens to Hezbollah? You think Amos Hochstein, the American negotiator up in Lebanon, is going to manage to convince Hezbollah to pull back from the border and stop shooting at Israeli towns? The town of Metula on the northern border is half demolished basically, from Hezbollah rocketing and fire. Israel has pulled those people out. They can't go home. They haven't been able to go home for seven months. You think that's sustainable? How long before that war? And if we leave Hamas standing in Gaza, Hezbollah fights harder. If we leave Hamas standing in Gaza, Hezbollah is convinced it'll win. If Hamas is decimated in Gaza, Hezbollah thinks differently about the war and calculates a much more careful war and doesn't actually want that escalation. If we don't look fierce, more war comes. And here's the thing, we can't actually be destroyed. So the more war that will come won't actually give victory to the other side. It'll just bring more bloodshed to the other side. If you care about Palestinians, if you care about Lebanese civilians, we'll be caught in between Israel and Hezbollah, and Hezbollah built itself for that. Every single rocket is under a village. Not a single rocket is out on a mountaintop in a place where it's easy to destroy it. And so, if you think that by making Israel weaker, by convincing the other side that Israel might actually be defeated, you are preventing a war, then you don't understand the first thing about the Middle East. And by the way, after Syria, after Iraq, after Iran, and the nuclear deal, and then going back on the nuclear deal, and then trying to get back into a nuclear deal. America doesn't really understand this region. So we have to finish Rafah. And we need a hostage deal because we owe those people everything. And if we have to choose between one or the other, again, Israelis want the destruction of Hamas. But if destruction of Hamas is something that seems to them not necessarily in the cards because of distrust of the politicians running this country right now, then they tilt directly and very powerfully toward the hostage deal, even at the cost of leaving Hamas in power. That's still not a majority opinion. And it's only a majority opinion because of this leadership. In the end of the day, if Hamas stays in Rafah, there's another war in Gaza. And nothing anybody does, and no amount of sanctioning of Israel. And no amount of, you know, I don't know what, pressure and campus anger, is going to prevent it because Hamas will assure it, it will guarantee that it happens, that is all Hamas is.
DS: So in wrapping up, Haviv, I guess this is not only a decisive moment in military terms, in domestic, Israeli political terms, but in terms of the domestic considerations, where all the different political players line up on this question of Rafah, Rafah no hostage deal, hostage deal no Rafah, or no Rafah no hostage deal, to keep coming back to Nahum Barnea. The two columnists we keep referring to here are Nahum Barnea and Thomas Friedman. I hope they refer as much to Haviv Rettig Gur and Dan Senor as we refer to them. Uh, but, uh, but, you know, you have, Ben Gurion, Smoltrich, who are the hardline right in Netanyahu's government that are saying if they would pull out if there's no Rafah operation. You have Benny Gantz saying, if there is a deal to be done and the government misses the moment, he would pull out. And then you have Yair Lapid saying if the government were to fall based on Netanyahu pursuing a hostage deal, he, Yair Lapid, who's the head of the official opposition, would join the government in order to, you know, enable the government to survive, in order to do this deal. So a lot of considerations, a lot of different players. What's your take on where all their incentives lie?
HRG: Yeah, um, I think that you can summarize the whole situation with Netanyahu personally. Netanyahu's incentives make clear everyone else's. Netanyahu right now has faced exactly what you said. Smotrich, Itamar, Ben Gvir of the far right religious Zionism, parties have told, you know, “if you don't go into rough, if you cave to this American pressure and sign this deal and leave Hamas in power, that is a historic loss of the state of Israel. And we will topple your government, because then there's also no difference between you and some center left government with Benny Gantz, and the right will be strengthened in opposition. You are actually destroying the Israeli right in your current way of governing the country. And so we're toppling the government.” That was their explicit threat. Smoltrich said that openly this week. Netanyahu, therefore, is afraid of the hostage deal for his own political future. But that is, unless Netanyahu concludes that the government's anyway going to collapse on the military draft question with the ultra Orthodox parties. In which case, Netanyahu has an opportunity to do a pivot away from Ben Gvir and Smotrych toward Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid, and to have a centrist government, just for the purposes of the war, all these people hate each other and don't trust each other, but just for the purposes of the war, that jettisons the ultra Orthodox, jettison - and therefore that whole question, jettisons the far right, and goes into Rafah, signs the deal, and then goes into whatever it is. Gantz and Netanyahu and Lapid are people who are willing to finish the war, even if it's in three months because of a hostage deal.
DS: Haviv, I just want to put a spotlight on this point that you're making, because I do think, I'm just struck in my conversations over here, there's this sense that Netanyahu wants X, and then all the other security minded, but through the American lens, more responsible, more constructive, more restrained players, like Benny Gantz, Yoav Gallant, Yair Lapid, that they're somehow in a, you know, they're a different category. They want to finish this war. Lapid, Gantz, Gallant. As much as Netanyahu does. In that sense, again, these are different men, they have tremendous personal animosity towards each other. They have, you know, let's just say different characters. They're different people. But they are, on this particular point, details obviously are details, but on the grand strategy on this particular point, they're more or less aligned.
HRG: Yeah, there has been an argument on the Israeli left, which I think is shared by a lot of critics abroad, that Netanyahu's politics vis a vis Ben Gurion and Smotrich have prevented also from the Israeli government and the Israeli military from laying out a serious humanitarian push. That is something you hear among Netanyahu's critics in Israel. Yeah, I don’t see into Netanyahu's soul, we've talked on this podcast about some of the hard real problems with deploying a massive humanitarian aid program in Gaza, where at every turn it has been stopped by Hamas. And in areas under Israeli control, you know, we've heard about six months now of imminent starvation. But there hasn't actually been starvation and that's because there is a massive amount of aid coming in And so, I'm not saying it's true. I'm not saying it's not true. I frankly think it's a side point, it's already so politicized that it's hard to know on the ground exactly what's happening, in those terms of what's been going on for seven months. The point is you can argue that Netanyahu fought this war worse than Gantz and Lapid and Gallant alone would have fought it. I have argued that in writing, but, fundamental strategy is identical. And it's identical from Lapid to Netanyahu. Lapid this past week said, I, exactly as you said, “I will come in and all of my party will vote and we will save the Netanyahu government to pass the hostage deal,” if Netanyahu is worried that he'll fall because of the Smotrich Ben Gvir pulling out because of the hostage deal, because he then doesn't go into Rafah for some significant amount of time. Lapid is also playing politics in the sense that, Netanyahu is thinking the day after the vote for the hostages, Lapid will come in, stabilize his government, they'll have a vote for the hostages. The hostage release will happen. That minute Lapid will leave and topple him and Smotrich and Ben-Gvir won't come back to his rescue. So he still falls -
DS: and Lapid gets the election.
HRG: - and Lapid gets to say, “I brought out the hostages”. He now can't even have the credit for pivoting centerward, right, for that. It's also a way for Lapid to then outstrip Benny Gantz, finally Gantz has been polling better than Lapid among centrists, basically since the war began - There's a lot of political maneuvering happening here. It's interesting to note in terms of political maneuvering that, we've seen from within Likud, Foreign Minister Yisrael Katz, for example, has said this week that there is a capacity within Likud to sign the hostage deal, and that that's the right thing to do, and that we'll still get back to destroying Hamas. It looks like within Likud, there's almost a hunger to have that happen, even if it means toppling the government, even if it means going into the opposition. Likud now finds itself opposed to a hostage release deal, which is unique in Israeli history. It's strange in Israeli history. It might be rational, and it might be the right thing to do, but Salah Smoltrich makes powerful arguments, roughly your arguments, on the Shalit deal. But, nevertheless, it's strange. It's different. It's new. Likud now finds itself on the wrong side, in terms of most Likud voters, of the military draft question, of just question after question after question. And so the Likud itself, it looks like most of the ministers are in favor of a hostage deal. If you were to only listen to Israeli politicians in Hebrew, you would conclude that a hostage deal is imminent. I still don't understand how Hamas would agree to a deal that wouldn't end the war and therefore backfire on the Israeli government that signs the deal. But nevertheless, that question is a question that's now reshaping Israeli politics. Look, going forward, what we might see, we might see Netanyahu say, “Hamas won't bend as far as we need it to. Therefore, Rafah goes ahead.” He'll face a tremendous amount of flak. The opposition will have a campaign: “You left the hostages to die.” Netanyahu might think he has to, just for war reasons, war fighting reasons, it's the right thing to do, even if it's horrible, swallow that and move ahead. Uh, or, you might actually see Netanyahu say “my government is doomed anyway for reasons unrelated to the war because of the ultra orthodox in the draft. I might as well pivot now, and try and build something else in another section of Israeli politics.” That's where Israeli politics are. And so like the war itself, Hamas’ fate is about to be decided based on what happens with going into Rafah or not going into Rafah. Netanyahu's fate may well now be on the cusp for the same reason within Israeli politics. We are at the beginning, sort of at the bottom rung of a very dramatic time.
DS: But what about society, the societal impact, though? I mean, how, because in a sense, Israelis now are deciding, in these decisions you're laying out, because they're not just political decisions, they're also societal. The lengths Israel would go to to get hostages back, in the past, how it maintains its fidelity to that, at the same time having learned a lesson from October 7th. That making too lopsided or too generous deals with entities that seek Israel's destruction could wind up with those entities being in a stronger position to seek Israel's destruction, and that's also a legitimate issue for Israeli society to deal with, wrestle with.
HRG: I'll say more than that, the Shalit deal gave us October 7th. So the question is, to many Israelis who are not, I would say, on the hawkish right, and absolutely know what should be done, or on the dovish left, and absolutely know what should be done. But the majority, who are somewhere in the middle, it's a brutal kind of decision, because you're trying to pit the - assuming it's even in our power to decide. This might be a Hamas thing, they may not be able to give it to us, and we're going forward with Rafah, and the hostages are all dead, and that's a horrible, horrible, horrible idea, but nevertheless, that might be one of the things that happens here. But assuming it is in our power to make that decision: it feels because of our experience of how Shalit led to Sinwar which led to October 7, it led Sinwar taking over Gaza, which led to October 7th: it feels like the decision is between the hostages whose names and faces we know, and future hostages whose fate we are guaranteeing. So there's this game that's being played in the Israeli mind. My sense is that the very fact that Hamas presents us with a Sophie's Choice like this, is why, even if a deal happens, the war resumes. The very fact that we understand that A, the Americans are not going to be able to get Hezbollah behind the Litani. Hezbollah are currently in violation of a UN Security Council resolution from 2006, forcing them to be behind the Litani River, north of Litani and away from the Israeli border. We're going to go, have to go after Hezbollah. And if all that this ceasefire does is provide Hezbollah an excuse to de-escalate on the border, without having to pay any cost for emptying the Israeli north of its population for seven months, for shooting massively, for, you know, violating all these residents - if all this ceasefire does is give Hezbollah a way out, then this ceasefire is a disaster. It's getting hostages out in exchange for serious, profound, strategic setbacks in two critical arenas for our security and for our future. So, Netanyahu's right now, political position, I don't know which way he'll go. He doesn't, I think, know which way he'll go. His political fate is on the line. Hamas's fate is on the line. And the future of the war in Lebanon is on the line. What Israelis would like to happen is for Hamas to be destroyed in Gaza, for some miraculous rescue of the hostages that doesn't involve giving Hamas a way out, and for pushing back Hezbollah in ways that give us deterrence for the next 15 years and send a message to Iran. That's the optimistic, you know, outcome. I don't know if this government knows how to deliver it. This war has dragged on a very long time. There's a lot of distrust among the Israeli public of this government pushing, you know, toward a better future. Better ending, a better solution. So we need to see real competence. Some of these questions are, require the wisdom of Solomon to see through. Can our politicians, with what we've seen of them in the last couple of years, pull off that kind of moment of wisdom and decision? I don't know. I'm optimistic. So, hopefully.
DS: All right, Haviv, we will leave it there. It'll teach you not to, you know, disappear on us for a few weeks, because there's just too much to, uh, unpack, uh, once you return from your absence. But it nonetheless was well deserved. And in the next few weeks, Haviv, we will see where Israel, and not only Israel, the other players that get a vote here, take us, as Israeli leaders contemplate, and Israeli society, wrestles with this Sophie's Choice. Thanks for being here and for being back.
HRG: Thank you Dan.
DS: That's our show for today. To keep up with Haviv, you can find him on x @ Haviv Rettig Gur. You can also find them at The Times of Israel. Call me Back is produced and edited by Ilan Benatar. Our media manager is Rebecca Strom. Additional editing from Martin Huergo. Until next time, I’m your host, Dan Senor.