And then there was Gantz - with Haviv Rettig Gur
Haviv Rettig Gur returns for a regular check-in, in which we analyze the emerging political scenarios that might emerge from the moves being made by Yoav Gallant, Benny Gantz and Naftali Bennett.
We also discuss the implications of the crash of the helicopter transporting Iran's president -- what does it mean for Israel and other stakeholders OUTSIDE Iran and what does it mean INSIDE Iran?
Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
HRG: If you don't have the Israeli public, you can't win this war. Netanyahu doesn't have to solve the problem. He just has to convey convincingly to the public that he can solve the problem. And he has spent seven months convincing the Israeli public that he can't. That he won't, that Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir have a veto over him, and that the American administration has veto over him.
DS: It is 1:00 PM on Sunday, May 19th, here in New York City. It is 8:00 PM in Israel on Sunday, May 19th, as Israelis wind down their day. I am pleased to welcome back to this podcast for one of our regular, but recently irregular, but God willing, re-regularizing our check ins: Haviv Rettig Gur. Haviv, good to see you.
HRG: Hey, Dan, it's good to be regular again. That means two things, right? I remember old commercials.
DS: So, Haviv, there's a lot for us to discuss. There's been a lot of news out of Israel on the political front, a lot of political maneuvering, that obviously has implications for the war, and for wartime policy, and for the survival of this government, and for the survival or cohesiveness of the war cabinet and decision making, with a lot of different characters involved. We had Nadav Eyal on, late last week, where he gave us a background on Yoav Gallant, given the move he had made, and who he is. And then, since then, as Israelis came out of Shabbat on Saturday night, their time, another Israeli leader in the war cabinet made a public statement: Benny Gantz, seeming to want to compete more with Gallant than with Bibi, which was interesting. He's made statements in the past. He made a statement two months ago saying that, you know, elections should occur, I think, by September. We did a rushed episode on it, turns out he didn't really say much, and it didn't have as much meaning as it may have seemed at the time. He's now made a new statement. Before we talk about that statement, I think it's helpful for our listeners just because they know of these figures, Gantz, Gallant, but unlike Bibi, our listeners, I think, know less, which is understandable because they just haven't been as dominant in Israeli politics over the last couple of decades. They know less about the history of these other men in the war cabinet. So can you just tell us a little bit about Benny Gantz? And his background, who is he?
HRG: Benny Gantz is a former chief of staff of the IDF, appointed by Netanyahu and praised back in the day by Netanyahu. Gantz had a reputation for being, I think, very politically, I don't know if centrist is the right word, maybe vague, not politically committed and not just, not a political animal. In 2019, when the, you know, five election cycle began, it began really around Benny Gantz establishing a party that suddenly unified, um, after many, many years of the center left, um, struggling to run in a cohesive and coherent way, unified a lot of those different factions in his blue and white party, or blue and white, uh, coalition, and he sort of became the leader of the Israeli center left, forcing Netanyahu to draw one election after another, right up until March of 2020, when, because COVID was hitting and because of the great national emergency, he and Netanyahu joined together in a rotation government with Netanyahu, you know, announcing there'll be no tricks and no schticks, you know, and on national television, and we changed our constitutional laws to ensure the rotation would happen.
DS: When you say ‘no tricks, no schticks’, because in the past there have been Prime Ministers agreeing ahead of time to rotations, like there was with one of Yitzhak Shamir's governments, there was a rotation with Peres, where they agreed to go into government together, one is Prime Minister for one period of time, and another one is Prime Minister for the next - they set a schedule ahead of time and they literally rotate in terms of who's Prime Minister. So your point is they reached an agreement to do that, Netanyahu and Gantz. And when you say ‘no gimmicks, no schticks’, meaning ‘I'm not going to manipulate the process. I'm not going to, I'm not going to change midway. We have an agreement. I'll be Prime Minister from this time to this time, and you'll be Prime Minister from this time to that time.’
HRG: Right. Well, over probably the 10 preceding years, Netanyahu had earned a reputation of being someone who - the way they put it in the Knesset is, you need capital to negotiate in politics. With Netanyahu, you can only take cash. Uh, because if he doesn't give it to you up front, you're not going to get it. And there's a deep distrust that surrounded the man in the 10 years that he led Israel from 2009 to 2019. And, and, and most factions he ever worked with walked away, believing they were betrayed, and agreements weren't upheld and all of that. So when he announced in March 2020, that he didn't want another, you know, indecisive election. So he announced that there would be a rotation agreement. And of course, he would go first. Israelis sort of in unison, supporters of Netanyahu as well, all kind of chuckled at the idea. And so we actually set about, you know, he proposed that there would actually be laws passed that changed our basic laws, our structure of government, to create a radically innovative kind of government called the parity government in which two people are both Prime Minister. One is the sitting and one is the alternate. Each controls half the cabinet that comes from their parties.
DS: Parity meaning P A R I T Y not P A R O D Y.
HRG: Yes. Parity, uh, I T Y that I think a lot of Israelis saw then and certainly came to see as a parody.
DS: Right.
HRG: And we changed our basic laws, probably a dozen different changes to different basic laws, to force a situation which Netanyahu has no choice but to actually fulfill the promise he made to the people on national television, to end the cycle. And then there was one last way for him to not let Gantz carry out the rotation, which was, there’s a provision in the basic law of the Knesset that if a Knesset can't pass a budget for a fiscal year it dissolves and we go to elections. And so 2020 was the first year in the history of Israel that didn't have a state budget for the entire fiscal year. So that's, uh, both Netanyahu, I think of a powerful statement of what kind of politician he's become and why he can't build coalitions except the coalition he has now, which is the far right and the ultra orthodox who control him in many ways and massively shrink his maneuvering room when it comes to policy in Gaza and all the rest of it. And it's also a statement about Gantz. In other words, because COVID was hitting, Gantz said in public, ‘I'm going to do what's good for the nation, not what's good for me politically’. He went into this coalition agreement with Netanyahu. There was a unity government that pushed through a lot of the COVID legislation and the COVID policy, which Israel was world leading at the time. And Gantz also broke up his own counter coalition against Netanyahu to do so. In other words, Yesh Atid did not join him going into that unity government, and the center left coalition that Gantz led, that had forced Likud to withdraw again and again, was shattered. And so, Gantz is a man who we already saw, then do this thing in which he knows Netanyahu is lying to him. The very fact that we need to change our constitution, simply in order to prevent Netanyahu from lying to us all, was clarified what Gantz thought of Netanyahu's rotation offer, and that happened again after October 7th. In other words, Gantz now heads a party called National Unity, and October 7th happened, and he said, Very, very early on in the first week, he said, ‘my party will lend a hand to this government in order to fight this war. We're not going to send the opposition. We're going to stabilize things. This is not a time for politics.’ Netanyahu is a beneficiary of that. It allowed Netanyahu to survive these political months, but nevertheless, Gantz thought that was what the nation needed. So he referenced all of this in his speech yesterday.
DS: Before we get to the speech, I just want to make one other quick point, just in terms of what Gantz represents in the Israeli political ecosystem, in the Israeli political mindset. There was this tradition for decades of these hardline strong military focused, or military credentialed, leaders within the Israeli left, or within the Israeli center left. Obviously the most recent one was Yitzhak Rabin, which is someone who had earned his credentials as a tough military officer, someone who's respected in the security establishment ,whose politics sat in the center left. And then I think since Rabin, that hasn't really existed. I'd greatly admire Bougie Herzog, but when he was leader of the labor party, he wasn't that. If you go through all the leaders of the labor party since Rabin, no one has really, I guess the last one is Ehud Barak actually. Barak was the last one after Rabin, but really over the last 20 years, that hasn't existed. And in the center and center left, I think Gantz has come to represent that style of politician, on the Israeli political spectrum.
HRG: Yeah, that's exactly right. You're bringing us back to some of the political history. Gantz is in many ways a reincarnation of an old, of the old Mapai. Mapai is the original labor party, the party that founded the state of Israel, and the party of the laborers of Israel. It was a Socialist leaning communist party that Ben-Gurion led at the founding of the state. And Gantz actually grew up in a little village called Kfar Ahim in southern Israel, which was a moshav that had been connected to Mapai, his parents - he's the child of Holocaust survivors. And his parents were among the founders of the Moshav. So it's a little bit of a complex picture. But he belongs to the elite of that center left, formerly socialist, they haven't been ideologically socialist since the 80s, but nevertheless, formerly socialist kind of military elite. A lot of Netanyahu's politics over the last 20 years are a politics of representing what Netanyahu calls, you know, the marginalized, the Mizrahi Jews who were sidelined in the early years of the state, in the early decades of the state, by the Ashkenazi Mapai left wing. And so there's very much also between Netanyahu and Gantz, that contest, certainly until Gantz broke up his coalition in 2020, there was a lot of elite Ashkenazi versus working class Mizrahi kind of dynamic. So. Yes, all of that is there. And Gantz today, you know, remains, he tries to position himself. You know, the question is how successful is he, he has been polling ahead of Netanyahu since the war began, because he stepped into the government and appeared to bring national unity as our soldiers were going off to war. But he has also been declining in the polls. A lot of the center right has been growing wary of center left politicians. It's not clear that Benny Gantz is as convincing as he was 7 months ago. That might have to do with his speech yesterday.
DS: Okay. I want to get to that.
HRG: Yes.
DS: Okay. Let's get to the speech yesterday. Or, speech Saturday night, after Shabbat in Israel, and Nadav Eyal, in our conversation last week said there would be something coming from Gantz, that Gallant had kind of forced Gantz's hand. So, Gantz had to do something. So what did Gantz do?
HRG: Gantz got up on national television. Yeah, he actually, uh, announced it very close to, to Gallant going on national television and talking about this. Gantz very much thought that he needed to be at the front of this and that Gallant had a little bit, you know, forced his hand. I completely agree with Nadav on that. And he got up and he delivered a speech that I think reflects what, 70%? Certainly 60, 65%? We know for a fact in polls, probably a little more, of Israelis actually believe is going on. There is a deep, deep distrust of Netanyahu right now. And that distrust is driving a loss of morale in the Israeli public. And it's frustrating, to people like me who really think that this war has to be won, before we get to politics, but the politics are back and they're back massively and they are shaping how the Israeli public sees the war, thinks of the war and wants to go to war. In the, you know, month after the war, when you asked Israelis, ‘are we going to win the war?’ 74 percent said, yes, month after month that declined steadily. And the last poll by the Madad website, which is affiliated with the Kan Public Broadcaster, the last poll said 38 percent of Israelis now think we're going to win the war. So, we're now at less than half of Israelis thinking we're going to win the war. And the loss of faith in the war is very deeply correlated - and I don't think correlated. I think it's causal. But what we know is that it's correlated with distrust of this government. Distrust of Netanyahu, distrust of his intentions. We’re almost eight months in. Why are we only at the gates of Rafah? Why did we stand still for three months? When do we just pull the trigger and get this job done? Why aren't we three months past the hard part, right? It's a question a lot of Israelis are asking. And the great tragedy is that a lot of Israelis are answering that question by saying, ‘the day the war ends, there's an election.’ And so Netanyahu is intentionally dragging out the war. I'm not saying this is true, I'm saying more than half of Israelis now believe this, according to polls. Netanyahu is dragging out the war in order to avoid the election.
DS: I'll tell you what's so absurd about that, Haviv, is, regardless of what one thinks of Netanyahu's intentions, I for one, am highly skeptical, highly, highly, highly skeptical that Netanyahu is extending the war in some way for political reasons, but we, we, we can get into that later or another time. What I do know for a fact though, is one politician and one political entity that has been pressuring Israel to delay Rafah has been the Biden administration. So for months, the Biden administration is saying, ‘don't do Rafah, don't do Rafah.’ ‘Okay. If you're going to do Rafah, do Rafah this way.’ And they came up with all these permutations for how Rafah could be done. If they were all impractical, based on the Israelis in the government that I was speaking to. Each proposal by the Biden administration on how to do Rafah was more absurd than the next, and completely impractical. And so there was this back and forth, Rafah, no Rafah, Rafah, No Rafah, that the driving force behind it was not Israeli politics, but American politics.
HRG: I completely agree with you, but what did you just say about Netanyahu? What you just said about Netanyahu is that he allowed the American pressure to stop the war, to freeze us in place. Soldiers were dying, Gazans were certainly suffering. Entire cities in the North are empty. The war is frozen and standing still while the Americans naval gaze and debate about whether or not they can support one thing or another. With a Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, famous for his decisiveness, sometimes bad decisiveness. The first Lebanon war, arguably, Sharon was a force for folly and terrible mistakes. A lot of people who think we should never have left Gaza, blame him for the disengagement and everything that followed. But. Decisive action, serious action that had serious results. There is a sense that the idea - if you're an American, you can be frustrated at Biden. Israelis don't have that right. Biden gave us a lot of support, and then Biden withdrew some of that support, and Biden is playing his political game. He's not going to lose an election for us, et cetera. We've discussed this at great length. There's a difference between what Israelis can expect from allies and what the allies can expect from themselves. You can have that conversation inside America. Biden gave me a lot and everything that we have failed to accomplish beyond that is on us. And so I don't think, Israelis don't blame Netanyahu for going to war too quickly. They blame him for not finishing the job. They blame him for not succeeding. And that is driving a loss of morale and faith in the war itself. In other words, we have seen, for example, a huge increase in the number of Israelis who say, take a hostage deal over going into Rafah. Well, that's a very silly thing to say for Israelis, right? You're going to leave Hamas intact in Rafah? You're going to put pressure on the Israeli government in mass protest, to sign a deal with Hamas, that's just going to drive up Hamas's costs. But what those Israelis are saying is they don't trust Netanyahu to get the job done. They don't trust him to even be doing it.
DS: Meaning it's going to drive up Hamas's costs that they demand.
HRG: Right, demands, right. It's going to drive up the price.
DS: Meaning it's going to make dealing with Hamas more expensive. It's going to drive up the cost for Israelis. Yeah.
HRG: Right. And then push the deal farther away. In other words, it's making it harder to get the hostages out, if you protest the Israeli government in Tel Aviv in a mass protest. But then you ask these protesters, what are you thinking? Why would you protest? The hostages in Tel Aviv. Why would you protest the Israeli government in a negotiating position with Hamas? Hamas knows Hebrew. Hamas is watching you protest. Hamas is saying to itself, ‘I can wait for these protests to bear fruit and bring down the government. I, why would I negotiate now? You're actually keeping the hostages in Gaza.’ And the answer of these protesters is, ‘Netanyahu anyway, is keeping the hostages in Gaza to survive politically.’ Now, that is a horrifying, shocking thing to say. I don't see into Netanyahu's soul. I'm not saying Netanyahu is literally delaying the war for months and months because he doesn't care that the hostages live or die. What I am saying is, half the people think he is.
DS: Or you're not suggesting that you actually think that he's keeping Israelis in Hamas dungeons in order to keep his government alive.
HRG: Exactly.
DS: I really don't believe that. I'm perfectly prepared to entertain all sorts of interpretations of Netanyahu's political moves, but I find that one, I don't find it credible.
HRG: But the point, Dan, is that half of Israelis do find it credible. And that's a tremendous liability in this war. And it has to do with trust. Netanyahu likes to compare himself to Churchill. Churchill stuck to his guns in World War II. Churchill did something much more important than sticking to his guns. Churchill framed the war for the people of Britain. Churchill convinced the people of Britain that victory was possible. Churchill convinced the people of Britain that he knew how to achieve it, that there was a strategy, that there was a theory. Netanyahu has not spoken to Israelis. You interviewed Netanyahu. He went on your podcast. He did that because your podcast is incredibly important and influential and serious and thoughtful.
DS: That wasn't paid product placement.
HRG: But to a lot of Israelis, Netanyahu going on your podcast and on CNBC and on all these different American outlets lately, when he won't be interviewed on Israeli media is part of the big problem. He won't frame the war to the Israeli public. He won't frame the war to the world. And so there's a deep distrust. Here's the thing about distrust. If you don't believe that this government can win the war, you just think to yourself, ‘let's get the hostages out and cut our losses.’ If you don't believe this government is trying to win the war, because you believe that, you know, Netanyahu can't create a day after scenario. He can't tell the world what Israel actually wants with Gaza the day after, because he'll lose Smotrich and Ben-Gvir if it's not right wing enough, or if it's not settlements, resettling Gaza, or things like that. And it works in the other direction too. He also can't take a very decisive stand and pushed into Rafah four months ago, because he also feels in response to American pressure. So we have a man who, I don't actually think his heart's in the wrong place. I don't think he thinks the hostages can wait out his political schedule. I just think he's a man who, for a decade now, has taken the path of least resistance at every point. It's always, he's gotten so used to political maneuvering at every moment and at every turn and pulling out all these, you know, incredible political rabbits out of hats, that he's still doing it now in a war. It's just a habit. And that habit means that we have a government that's just incredibly indecisive. It can't tell us what, how we finish Gaza. It can't hold allies. It can't convince the world we have good intentions.
DS: But, Haviv, I would say that Gantz, if he's the one who's polling highest, is also incredibly politically indecisive, because his statement Saturday night, well, let's, let's get into that, because I feel like he said something and said nothing, or he said something that requires nothing.
HRG: Okay. He said, uh, I'm just going to go over some bullet points that I think are important from the speech. It was 10 minutes. It was a very short, uh, little speech. He said, look, wars are won with unity. With a strategic compass, meaning, a clear sense of where we're going, with resilience, with good judgment. He says, at the beginning, we had that unity. At the beginning, we needed to push back Hamas, we needed to get hostages out. There were a lot of things that we accomplished that were very important. And then he says, ‘and then it stopped. And then something flipped.’ Some politicians, and he kept saying ‘some’, and emphasizing ‘some’, some politicians are no longer trying to hold unity, are no longer thinking about resilience and the war and working good judgment. ‘Some politicians,’ he says very bluntly, ‘are thinking of themselves only.’ He says ‘unity’, meaning the idea that we all have to stay in the government together and support each other no matter what. He said it explicitly, ‘can't be a fig leaf for indecision and politicking.’ Strategic decisions have to be made and they aren't being made. In other words, his entire argument was: Netanyahu is not giving us a day after, a strategy, a framing of the war to explain what it is Israel actually wants. And then he said, we need six things. And he just literally numbered them. For us to be able to fight, we need a plan that does six things. One, rescue the hostages. Two, toppling Hamas, disarming Gaza and ensuring Israeli security control in Gaza. Now, the main thing the right accuses him of is that he's willing to give up Israeli security control in Gaza. He said ‘we're going to ensure Israeli security control in Gaza.’ That's item two. Three, we need an American, European, Israeli, Palestinian authority, ‘minhelet’ means administration of some kind, to run the Gaza Strip that isn't Hamas and isn't Mahmoud Abbas. This is the line that Netanyahu, I think, really harped on, when he responded very dismissively of this speech, and he said, ‘Well, what's an American European Israeli Palestinian-? You just want to bring the Palestinian Authority in.’ Benny Gantz said it's not Mahmoud Abbas, it's also not Hamas, but it is some kind of Israeli American European Palestinian administration that will run the strip and make sure Israel doesn't have to actually control the strip. Four, return northerners home by September 1st. By September 1st, Israel has a goal that the northern residents can all go home, meaning, potentially, war with Hezbollah to free the northern border. Five, peace with the Saudis. We have to push forward on that quickly. It's big, it's important, normalization. And six, we're having a fight now about the ultra Orthodox draft, some kind of national service for all Israelis. That was basically the speech, he said there are no magic solutions, but if we don't set goals, we're not going to be able to walk the long path to get these things done. He says, we will hunt Hamas everywhere and always, that doesn't change. The security remains in our hands, always, security is the number one thing. He's a former chief of staff of the IDF, but, the nation cannot fight a war properly. The government cannot prosecute a war properly without a horizon of hope, without a strategic compass. That basically is the speech. And then he finishes it explicitly. He says, ‘Netanyahu, it's time for decisions. 10 years ago, you would have made these calls. Can you do it today?’ This, I have to say, speaking in that sentence to the perception among huge numbers of Israelis, most Israelis, that the Netanyahu we have today is not the Netanyahu 10 years ago, and that he's favoring personal interest over national interest. And that's, that was the speech.
DS: Okay, couple things. One, his talk of a ‘American European Palestinian Israeli alternative to govern’, that sounds like hell. The idea that, I mean, Tom Friedman has been writing these pieces, these columns now that are sort of the rinse and repeat columns. But one of them said that Netanyahu has to decide, Rafah or Riyadh, that he either does a Saudi peace deal that includes some path to Palestinian self determination, or he does Rafah, but he can't do both. And I actually think that's the wrong framing, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is, I think what Israelis, many Israelis are contending with in Gaza, is, what will be the future of Gaza? Will it be a terror organization running Gaza or a non terror organization running Gaza? It's that simple, right? Is Hamas 2.0 going to take over Gaza? Or, will something that can live with and help strengthen Israeli security interests going to be governing Gaza? And ‘European, American, Palestinian, Israeli-’, it sounds like a smorgasbord of a mess that could get rolled over in a heartbeat by Hamas 2.0 or the nucleus of a reconstituted Hamas overnight. So I think that's the dilemma facing a lot of Israeli decision makers, including Netanyahu, which is: ‘How are we going to get tens of thousands of Israelis to move back to southern Israel until we can tell them it's safe, security has been restored.’ And until the Israeli leadership can explain to the Israeli public what that looks like, these fanciful configurations, like the one Gantz laid out, ‘American European Palestinian Israeli’... I'm listening to that. I'm thinking, that's the kind of thing that could get rolled over overnight by a determined revival of jihadi politics in Gaza.
HRG: If you don't have the Israeli public, you can't win this war. Netanyahu doesn't have to solve the problem. He just has to convey convincingly to the public that he can solve the problem. And he has spent seven months convincing the Israeli public that he can't. That he won't. That, uh, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir have a veto over him. And that the American administration has a veto over him.
DS: But do you think - you watch this statement by Gantz, and do you think he's articulating a vision, that can win over the Israeli public?
HRG: I suspect that Gantz is on his way out. He's articulating the lack of a vision. My frustration with Gantz's speech, I think the problem with Gantz’s speech, and it's an enormous one, but it's not the one Netanyahu made. Netanyahu tried to pretend like Gantz just called for the PA to take over Gaza, and Fatah to take over Gaza, and Netanyahu’s response was, ‘I'm not gonna replace a Hamastan with a Fatah-stan.’
DS: Right. Just for our listeners to understand that terminology, so Gaza had been referred to, in the Israeli political ecosystem before October 7th, as ‘Hamastan’, meaning it's the part of the Palestinian territory that was effectively totally and wholly run by Hamas. And it was basically untouchable. It was impenetrable. It was Hamas, Hamastan, versus the Palestinian governing bodies in the West Bank, was Fatah-stan, which is Fatah, which is considered a quote unquote ‘more moderate’ and can work with Israel. And so what you're saying is, Netanyahu’s response to Gallant is, ‘I'm not gonna-’
HRG: ‘I'm not gonna exchange a Hamastan for a Fatah-stan.’ But Gantz explicitly said there won't be uh, Mahmoud Abbas, there won't be a Palestinian authority.
DS: Meaning the governing authority from the West Bank coming into, coming back to Gaza and taking over.
HRG: But then he also said there would be some kind of administration with Israelis, Palestinians, Europeans, and Americans that nobody understood. So, uh, you know, what was he actually talking about?
DS: Nobody knew what Gantz was talking about, with him talking about these Americans and the Europeans.
HRG: Right. But what Gantz is trying to say to Israelis is, we have to seriously be thinking about this. If we have now, seven months, we have been fighting in Gaza, every time we leave an area, Hamas takes it over again. It pops out of the tunnels and it takes it over again. That fact is part of the counterinsurgency. That's okay. The army doesn't want to keep Israeli soldiers on every street corner in Gaza for the simple reason that then there has a massive number of targets for Hamas. So it keeps pulling out. Hamas then comes and takes over. That gives the army new targets to destroy. That is a good situation in which the Israeli army slowly degrades Hamas. And we've seen it time and again. There's now a battle in Jabalia for the last few days that we had, uh, Shifa hospital battle, in which 500 Hamas fighters were killed in a single battle because it had become their main command center, because they were convinced the Israelis were gone not to return.
DS: But that was also, that works both ways, because it sounds like the IDF also allowed al-Shifa to, they saw what was happening there and it was, that was an interesting operation. It seemed like the Israelis were letting al-Shifa be a magnet for a quote unquote ‘quasi resurgence of Hamas’. They let Hamas gather in al-Shifa and then they struck. So it wasn't like it just happened completely behind their back.
HRG: Absolutely. And the officers pulling out of Jabalia now have said openly, ‘yeah, we'll be back. We just took about 10 percent of what we think is the Hamas forces actually embedded in and under Jabalia. So there'll be another battle in which we get another 10 percent and then another battle four months after that in which we get another 10 percent.’ That's the Israeli strategy, very low number of Israeli targets in Gaza, by pulling out all the time. And then you move in and destroy what takes over. And that's how you degrade Hamas over time. However, ultimately, you will have degraded Hamas enough for an Arab peacekeeping force to be a coherent proposal, for some kind of massive influx of European, American, and Arab money to rebuild. Ultimately, you will reach a point where you need an international alliance that will create a new Gaza, a Gaza that won't be a threat to Israel. Or, you're just going to constantly be patrolling a destroyed wasteland forever and ever. That's the current Netanyahu strategy, just because he refuses to propose a strategy. So, all the things are true at once. In other words, it's not that there isn't the argument - Gantz has been in the war making decisions until now. Gallant has been leading the war until now. It's not that people are saying, ‘how dare we still be at war?’ I think Rafah should have happened three months ago. I think that the fact that the Biden administration has so much pressure and influence over the Israelis is Netanyahu's fault. I don't know if that's a left wing critique of him or a right wing critique of him. I think he should be a lot more aggressive and a lot more assertive. And I think he isn't, even though he pretends to be, if you put him on mute, for the last 10 years, not just for the last seven months, his record is actually quite abysmal in terms of actually accomplishing serious policy issues. Even now, the government is run in incredibly politicized ways. For example, last week, the bank of Israel put out a report that talked about spending. Spending is through the roof. We're massively deficit spending. That's not a crazy thing to happen in the middle of a war like this. But here's the crazy thing. In the Bank of Israel report, when they neutralized out, they removed all war related spending of every kind, there's still a 12 percent increase in spending. And that's mainly coalition partners. That's coalition funds to the ultra Orthodox parties, to the far right parties. So Netanyahu is still playing politics with a budget that we don't have. In other words, it's all still - and there's inflation now happening, and these high tech industry is really clobbered. We have real problems and a government that has essentially only been playing politics until now. And there's a huge concern among many Israelis that Netanyahu isn't building a strategy for the day after thinking about it, negotiating. Go have those meetings with the Europeans and the Americans and the Saudis. Have it. And serious, the Saudis have said to us, we wanna move in. We wanna rebuild the day after. You gotta give us the political cover of saying there's a path to statehood here. And Netanyahu won't say the words ‘path to statehood’, because, Ben Gvir and Smotrich. Now what the heck's a path to statehood? I don't know. But I certainly don't want them to be Israelis. They don't wanna be Israelis. The only thing we agree on, the Israelis and Palestinians, is that they, we, we don't wanna live together. They shouldn't be Israelis. So you can talk about the need for separation and build out that political and diplomatic capital and have those allies for the day after. And he's refusing. And the only reason it's saying I was refusing is politics. And so we now have a war in which we are reaching the point where the war stops making sense. Look, Tom Friedman says, you can, ‘you have to have a plan for the day after.’ And then he says, ‘you have to choose between Riyadh or Rafah’, right? What's disastrous and unconscionably foolish in saying that, is that Riyadh desperately wants Rafah. They want us to win.
DS: Exactly. By the way, Haviv, Riyadh is not the one, the entity, pushing hard for a Palestinian state. It's the Biden administration that's pushing for it. They're just using Saudi Arabia to advance their case. This is not, this is not Saudi Arabia's brief.
HRG: Right. The Saudis need the cover to move in and deradicalize Gaza as part of their separate war against Salafi Sunni radicalism, which Hamas is part of, which they feel is a threat to them as well. So, it's such an Americanism, this idea that it's Rafah or Riyadh. Riyadh wishes we had finished with Rafah four months ago. So my complaint against Netanyahu, I don't know if this counts as a left wing American democratic complaint, or if this counts as a right wing hawkish Israeli complaint; somewhere along the lines, these categories fall apart. My complaint is, why aren't we moving forward massively, quickly, and assertively? And we can, why can't we clearly explain, not to the world, not to those who hate us, to our desperate allies who just wish we would, you know, imagine the Biden administration now desperately angry at us four months ago for disobeying them and going into Rafah, and even for three weeks not giving us weapons shipments. But we'd be four months after pulling that off, pulling off that Band Aid, so to speak. We'd be four months after, and we'd be in the counterinsurgency, and we'd be in a whole different stage. And why don't we look like we care about humanitarian aid? Why is that something the Americans have to look like they impose on us? All these things throughout the war have been politics preventing Netanyahu from building out the narrative of the war in a way that would have deeply served the strategic goals of the war. And that's the thing that Gantz said that a lot of Israelis resonated with. You have to have a strategic compass. You have to be able to frame it. You know, you have to convince Israelis it's winnable. He's losing Israeli public opinion on that.
DS: So Gantz and Gallant are basically saying a version of the same thing. So let's talk about political permutations.
HRG: Yes.
DS: How does an election happen? Netanyahu, the government has a 64 seat coalition. So even if Gantz walks, they still have a 64 seat coalition. They had a 64 seat coalition before Gantz joined the government, and they will have a 64 seat coalition after Gantz leaves the government. So unless you tell me how four or five members of the government disappear, I don't see how this government falls and moves to elections. But let's just say it happens. I don't see it happening, but let's just say it happens. Then what? And we understand what the left side of the political equation is. What does the right side of the political equation look like? There's talk about new parties, Naftali Bennett, Yossi Cohen, potentially Gallant splitting from Likud, who knows, who else? So talk to me about what the right looks like.
HRG: The simple answer is we don't know. We have been in uncharted waters basically since April 2019 with these on again, you know, off again, elections with just, whole new reshaping of Israeli politics, but the Mapai is back. I mean this, this large self aware center left coalition is back in a way it hasn't been since the second Intifada. Likud in 2006 collapsed down to 12 seats under Netanyahu. It lost two thirds of its voters. They went over to Ariel Sharon's new party, Kadima, back in 2006, after the Gaza disengagement. In other words, Ariel Sharon pulled half, two thirds of Likud's voters over to the center for a disengagement from Gaza after the disengagement. That kind of Likud that can split apart and two thirds of it can move to the center to a new party by its, by a charismatic leader, who Israelis believed could solve problems, I don't know that that Likud exists today, because that was experienced by the Likud that survived and that Netanyahu then slowly rehabilitated as a terrible trauma. Long story short, not to get too into the weeds, it's very unlikely that Likud can force Netanyahu out. Likud has, in the last 76 years, had exactly four leaders. And it has never removed a leader by force. It has never voted one out. So, that would be Begin, Shamir, Sharon, and Netanyahu.
DS: Right. By the time Olmert was leader, he was, it was Kadima.
HRG: He was Kadima. He left with Sharon and, right. There was a little period between leaders when Tzachi Hanebi technically was the party leader, but I don't think that counts. Likud has a, just generations long record and culture, of loyalty to the leader. So Netanyahu is the beneficiary of that culture of tremendous loyalty. When you walk around Likud today and you talk to Likud Ministers… after Gallant's Speech, you want to get into a little indication, a little weather vane from inside Likud. Nir Barkat, the economy minister, who fancies himself a worthwhile successor to Netanyahu, and who has been very openly loyal to Netanyahu, and has his own - by the way, he brought in a lot of people to join the party. He's himself a multimillionaire and has spent a lot of money running his political campaign over the years to become a leader of Likud. Nir Barkat released a statement after Gallant that didn't just challenge Gallant, it tried to do to Gallant what Gallant was doing to Netanyahu. Gallant was saying, ‘we're stuck in this war, we're emotionless, we're not moving forward. Netanyahu is actually preventing us from moving forward by not framing the war and giving us a strategic compass and clarifying the goals of the fighting.’ And then Barkat put out a statement that said, ‘we're not going to win this war with Netanyahu and Gallant.’ Now, that's a very interesting statement to put both those names together, because it means that Barkat doesn't feel he wants to defend Netanyahu, but feels he wants to hang the perception that the war's not going well on Netanyahu. In other words, the sense that Netanyahu can't win this war has penetrated deep enough into the Likud rank and file, that Likud internal sort of warring, between people who see themselves as future successors to Netanyahu is already there, is already talking about, why are we losing? How is Netanyahu losing? Gallant is the defense Minister. He doesn't get to not be part of the failure. There is a deep sense that Netanyahu cannot win this war and it reaches deep into Likud.
DS: So if there is an effort to create a new party on the right in Israel, to capture what you're saying are a lot of right of center voters in Israel who have Likud fatigue, they may have had - some of them may have had Likud fatigue after the overhang of judicial reform, but obviously October 7th may have taken it to another level. And there is this effort in the works, however, embryonic to create a new party on the right. If that party on the right wants to be able to compete in elections, soon, this government has to fall. And this new party on the right, whoever it's led by, Gallant, as I said, maybe Naftali Bennett, maybe the former Mossad director Yossi Cohen - they have to convince enough Likud members to come join them, to basically agree to leave Likud and collapse the government. Because again, you need a handful of Likud members to leave for this government to follow - or another party, but I just don't see another party doing it. Maybe it will. And there is this potential for a new right of center party to say to sitting members of Likud, ‘look. You're going to get decimated in the next election. All the polls show it.’ You just said, Haviv, in 2006, the Likud in 2006 got shrunk down to 12 seats. Today it has 32 seats. I don't know if it'll shrink all the way down to 12 seats, but polling does not look good right now for Likud in the next election. So if you see, think at a minimum, there's going to be real hemorrhaging and the Likud representation in the next Knesset is going to be a lot smaller. There are a lot of members of Knesset who are going to be left with nothing at those towards the bottom half of the 32 that are currently in the Knesset. And if they are reached out to and said, ‘look, come join us, come join this new right wing party, be on the ground floor of a new right wing party, because you're not going to have anything if you stick with Likud’ - you could get, you know, it could be catalytic. You could get events start moving in motion, and A, you can bring down the government, and B, you can create the basis for a new right wing party. Then the question for me becomes, what is that new right wing party? What does that new right wing party stand for? Take all these characters: Gallant, Bennett, Yossi Cohen. You start to ask, there's a history of these break off parties. You mentioned Kadima, which was probably the most successful of them, but most of these parties were a bunch of security minded former generals and others come together, band together, and form a new party. They usually compete in one election, there's a long history of them, and then they disappear. And maybe that'll be the, the pattern here too, the pattern will endure. The new party will be created, there'll be a lot of hype, and then they'll disappear. Or maybe October 7th changed things, and there actually really is, really is an enduring market for that kind of party.
HRG: I'm extremely skeptical. I'm skeptical about these new parties forming, uh, if only because it's been tried so many times. Netanyahu keeps kicking out any potential threats to his rule in Likud. So the Likud rank and file is almost totally, utterly loyal to the party leader. Certainly that's true of the Knesset list. That's also to a great extent true of the voters. Attacks on Netanyahu were perceived as attacks on them. And how do you build out a right wing political faction that opposes Likud, but also won't collapse very quickly, like previous ones always have? Right now, because we don't have the regular sort of parliamentary no confidence system in Israel, parliamentary systems generally have the ability of the parliament, has this power to vote no confidence in the government, and that topples the government. In Israel, we have something called ‘constructive no confidence’, which means that to topple the government with a vote in parliament, you actually need that vote to also appoint a new government in its stead. Well, that's a new government out of the same parliament. So there isn't really any other leader who can have a coalition in this government, except Netanyahu. The only people who could replace Netanyahu right now come from within Likud. In other words, you're talking about an election. Potentially, Netanyahu can hold off an election for two, two and a half years, and he's going to try to do that. I think he's going to have trouble, uh, holding off a coalition once the war's over. Once two million people can go into the streets and demand that he, that he resign, once the country is essentially brought to a complete halt because of this absolutely horrific year and a half that Israelis have experienced, many of which a lot of the bad parts of which were caused by his coalition. Judicial reform was, even if you support judicial reform, which most Israelis did before the government started pushing its judicial reform, it was handled so catastrophically badly that it caused terrible harm. And that's what most Israelis today believe in it, about the government's handling of judicial reform, even among those who support it, who support the idea. This war - look, as the public sours on this war, as the public sours on the government's ability or willingness to finish the war, to win the war, to resist pressure from the Americans, to resist pressure from the far right, to, you know, to actually do what it takes, not just to survive, but to not make our soldier sacrifices and our civilian sacrifices be for nothing. As the public sours on this government in that way, the protests that will ensue once there's a perception that the war is over will be immense, and then Netanyahu will just have, you know, by parliamentary procedure, it's going to be very hard to force an election. But it's hard to see how you don't force an election if two million people are in the streets. So I don't think we're looking at the establishment of a series of parties, of new parties. I mean, people will try, Naftali Bennett might come back and try, but there's so much sense among the center right that doesn't like Netanyahu, that these parties, these whiz bang parties, they come and go and don't represent us. You'd really need a leader that they could envision as a replacement for Netanyahu. If Gallant opened that party and teamed up in some way with Gantz, and with some hawkish, maybe Lieberman types. And they formed that kind of center right coalition that's anti Netanyahu, I could see something like that taking off, but these are known quantities. It's hard to imagine a brand new party. What I do think is potentially lies ahead of us is, and this, by the way, I think explains Gallant and Gantz, I think that there is a sense that if the war is no longer being fought seriously, by the government, with an effort to actually win it, then the protests can begin. And I think that Gallant and Gantz are starting to force Netanyahu's hand. They're saying, look, as long as Netanyahu thinks that he needs to serve Smotrich and Ben Gvir and then he stays in power and nothing can touch him, the war is not going to get to the place it needs to go. But if Netanyahu starts to fear two million protesters, if Netanyahu starts to break Gallant, everybody talked when he gave that speech, everybody talked about his speech back in March, March 2023, in which he froze the judicial reform. Moments before a major part of it was going to pass in the Knesset, he came out and said, ‘we can't support it. It's hurting our security. Our enemies are seeing it. Soldiers are going to have problems. Our national security is threatened by judicial reform.’ Netanyahu fired Gallant. Masses of Israelis came out to protest in the streets. The labor unions and the manufacturers association, the owners of capital and the laborers, all declared a national strike. The airport was, went on strike, and Netanyahu was forced to rescind the firing of Gallant, and basically to freeze judicial reform. So Gallant is now stepping out against Netanyahu, Gantz is trying to ride that wave with language that clarifies that it's just loss of faith in Netanyahu that's driving him. Nothing else. We still can win this war. And I think they're trying to force that moment sooner rather than later. Because as long as Netanyahu stays in power, Gallant and Gantz, and 60% of Israelis have come to believe, maybe even 70%, we can't win it. Because he's never going to stop politicking.
DS: Okay, Haviv, I want to, before we wrap, I want to just spend a few minutes on Iran. We've learned, and this is obviously fast moving news, but we've learned over the last 12 hours that there was a helicopter crash in Iran, helicopter crash, that the passengers on that helicopter included the President Raisi, of Iran, as well as Iran's foreign minister, I think they were flying out to one of the western provinces. As of the time of this recording, they had still not discovered the passengers, the bodies. They don't know if there's any survivors. In a world in which, I mean, the likelihood of survival is low according to public reports. Just a little bit of context, President Raisi was seen as one of a small number of possible candidates to succeed the supreme leader, Khamenei. However, he recently had an election where he did not perform up to expectations. So there are some who view the likelihood of him succeeding Khamenei as low. Which, in and of itself, the sort of succession drama there may catalyze all sorts of, maybe the source of a lot of conspiracy theories, that, we're not going to get into that business here. Let's just assume that Raisi is no longer president. There's a vice president, the first vice president, Mohammad Mokhber, who I think initially takes over. He's not well known outside of Iran. It's not clear if he would just be a transitional figure. He is close to the supreme leader. He's been involved with a number of his business enterprises. And I guess there would be elections at some point in Iran. And like I said, he would probably be some sort of transitional caretaker figure. I also understand that while this will put immense focus on internal Iranian affairs for its leadership, the way decision making is made on matters that affect Israel, which is, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Quds Force, you know, the security establishment. Ultimately, Khamenei is the, the Supreme Leader is the ultimate decider. And the decision making flows through him, and flows through his offices, for all those entities I just described. And Raisi no longer being on the scene doesn't change the decision making on matters related to Iranian foreign policy and Iranian security and Iranian proxy backing and Iranian terrorism, which is obviously what Israel is most concerned about, on the one hand. On the other hand, if Iran now has a domestic political crisis that has to resolve, potentially a little bit of instability in Iran in its domestic politics, it could distract the Iranian leadership from what it was otherwise an adventurous foreign policy and an attempt to have hegemonic dominance in the region. What's your immediate take, in terms of what all this means for Israel in the region?
HRG: I think first of all, exactly what you said. I mean, the Revolutionary Guard Corps is a separate army to the army of Iran. It has an air force, it has a, basically a space force, it's trying to, it's in control of all these Irani - or its various degrees of control of all these Iranian proxies all over the region. Its great mission is to advance the revolution by which they mean the, uh, Islamic resurgence and renewal that eventually reconquers, goes back into the job of early Islam of conquering the world and converting the world. That's the vision of the revolution. This is a state with two armies, one that works for the state and one that works for the Supreme Leader. So, you're exactly right. The Supreme Leader's great vision for Israel is that the beginning of the redemption of Islam, from its dilapidated state in the modern age lies, you know, on the other side of the destruction of Israel. That doesn't change, the Revolutionary Guard Corps doesn't change, Hezbollah doesn't change, none of Iran's proxies, its support for Hamas in Gaza, none of that changes. There are two minds in Israel, and it has to do with successors to Raisi. And this is very, very early, we're in the first few hours of this. The first view in Israel is: instability is good, like you said, turns Iran inward for a little bit, gives us some breathing room, maybe Hezbollah will pipe down a little, for a little while, allows the army to focus elsewhere. The second view is: actually, the best news that could come of this is that Khamenei appoints as head of Iran, elects, you know, the council allows the candidates to run in such a way that, elected after Raisi is a much more belligerent candidate, that that would be very good for Israel because: you know, Iran is the kind of enemy Israel can fight alone, but that's a very desperate and very long and very bloody and very costly war. And a Western backed Israel, in a war like that, that sees the whole region as essentially in play, and if it falls to Iran, it falls to allies of Russia and China, and it falls to really malignant forces that are going to destroy nations. A West that sees that is a West that supports that war and it's a whole different kind of war. Israel backed by America, Israel supported by Europe, is a whole different Iran war over the long term. And the Americans keep looking for ways out of conflict in the Middle East, but the Middle East keeps having conflict, and China's moving in, and Russia is winning against the Ukrainians, and to some degree because of Iranian weaponry. So everything is connected. You can't disengage from the Middle East. You disengage from the Middle East, the Middle East will follow you home. The more belligerent the regime, the more clear that is to the Americans, the less likely the Americans are to give sanctions relief that funds all of the massive destruction of the Middle East that Iran is pursuing, and of course, ultimately, the annihilation of Israel. So, the worse the Iranian regime, the better for Israel, long term. That is something that has also been said in Israel. I have to tell you, while we're focused on Gaza, and we're focused on Israeli politics, talking to soldiers, recently, who are serving in the north, is an absolutely frustrating experience. The Israeli army on the northern border facing Hezbollah, which is essentially a direct branch of the Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran, and Iran can calibrate its attacks as it sees fit. The Israeli army is preparing for a massive Hezbollah assault. People like Eitan Ben Eliyahu, a former head of the Israeli Air Force, have publicly said in the last week that it looks to him like there is a massive surprise assault from the north being planned. The army has built a line of fortifications south of the northern border, south of the northern towns, of the empty northern towns, in case of a massive Redwan force attack. Israel is preparing more and more for this enormous war. Hezbollah has been upping its attacks lately, including with these drones that the Israelis, they have solutions to all kinds of different weaponry, but these actually, these drones have proven very effective for Hezbollah and they've been attacking Israel with these drones over the last couple of weeks in an escalating way. I don't know what it means. I don't know that it means that there's Israeli involvement in taking out Raisi. We certainly saw the Israelis publicly willing to say that they took out the Iranian military commander, the IRGC commander of Syria and Lebanon, but I'd like to think Israel has a hand in that, but I suspect it doesn't. I suspect it's an accident involving the weather, but we are seeing an escalation and we're seeing a massive escalation, and the Israeli army is feeling that escalation. It would be good if Iran is seen by the Western world, not just by Israel, as a genocidal revolutionary regime bent on the destruction of entire nations. Just now, when, frankly, the war in the north is closer than it's ever been, even as Israel a little bit collapses into a political moment that it shouldn't be having right now, because it doesn't, I think, have that luxury.
DS: Okay, Haviv, thank you as always, and I will be seeing you in person in a few days, which I look forward to. And until then, stay safe.
HRG: Thank you, Dan. I want to just apologize to listeners that I came back after a couple of weeks and I have only sad things to talk about. How does that old song go? ‘We are still strong, we are still capable, we're going to face this moment, and it's going to be okay.’ But we do have to uncork our politics a little bit and move forward.
DS: Alright, look, our listeners don't come to you for good cheer, so don't worry, don't feel like you're letting them down. Remember, the number of people I mentioned to you, that when I was flying last to Israel, boarding the El Al flight, who told me that listening to you on this podcast is like you're like Israel's national therapist. You're like, you know, helping them think through. You don't always get good news from your therapist. You work, you work through bad news. So, you know, don't undermine your role in all of this.
HRG: Okay, good.
DS: Dr. Gur.
HRG: Okay.
DS: Take care.
HRG: Thank you.
DS: That's our show for today. To keep up with Haviv, you can find him on X at Haviv Rettig Gur. You can also find him at the Times of Israel. Call Me Back is produced and edited by Ilann Benatar. Our media manager is Rebecca Strom. Additional editing from Martin Huergo. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.