Haviv Unplugged!
In recent days, there have been a lot of war-related developments that have taken place in Israel and outside of Israel. So it was good that we had the opportunity to catch up with Haviv Rettig Gur as Shavuot came to a close in Israel. In this episode, we wound up having a spirited conversation about:
I.The mood in Israel days after after Operation Arnon, and also why the day after the successful resuce operation we saw Benny Gantz's long anticipated exit from the unity government;
II. The ultra orthodox or 'Haredi' IDF exemption bill that passed in the Knesset; and
III. Hamas's rejection (yet again) of Israel's ceasefire proposal.
Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
HRG: Hamas said no. Now that Hamas said no, what do we do? There is no ceasefire coming. There is no hostage release coming. Now what? Netanyahu needs to stop campaigning for 10 minutes and start doing the job. And in the north, the escalation is serious. Missiles fell on Safed today. Missiles fell on Tiberias today. Either the north faces an Israeli statement, a clear Israeli statement, that we can escalate and will escalate and the damage will be disastrous. Or we're going to actually end up escalating and the damage will be disastrous. The only way Hezbollah pulls back from the brink is if we stop telling them, we refuse to fight. And so there is a indecisiveness to this government that has dragged everything out, hurt everything and driven Israeli morale into the dumps, even as the army has delivered one success after another. And that has to be reversed. So, Gantz is gone. Everything is now in Netanyahu.
DS: It's 11:45 PM on Wednesday, June 12th, here in New York City. It's 6:45 AM on Thursday, June 13th, in Israel, as Israelis get ready to start their day. In recent days, there have been a lot of war related developments that have taken place inside Israel and outside of Israel. So it was good that I had the opportunity to catch up with Haviv Rettig Gur from the Times of Israel, just as Shavuot had come to a close in Israel. In this episode, we wound up having a rather spirited conversation about, one, the mood in the country in the days following Operation Arnon, and how the day after Operation Arnon, which resulted in the rescue of four Israeli hostages - we saw Benny Gantz's long anticipated exit from Israel's war cabinet and from the unity government. Two, we saw the ultra Orthodox or ‘Haredi’ exemption bill, their exemption from the IDF, pass, at least the first round of it, pass in the Knesset. And then three, we saw Hamas's rejection, yet again, of Israel's ceasefire proposal. I can't remember if this is the eighth or ninth rejection by Hamas. I've lost track. Haviv had some pretty impassioned takes on every single one of these issues, so I just wound him up, and let him go. Haviv unplugged. This is Call me Back.
And I'm pleased to have one of my regular check ins with Haviv Rettig Gur, who joins us from Jerusalem, coming out of the Shavuot holiday in Israel. Haviv, we were going to talk earlier in the week, but we decided to push back a little bit because we had some real time reporting on this extraordinary operation into Gaza and the rescue of four hostages, which we will get into with you as well, but it's good to be with you.
HRG: It's good to be here. That was a good episode. If people want the play by play of exactly how that went down, it really was an astonishing operation. Nadav brought it. That was something that I still can't imagine actually pulling off. And several times it almost didn't work.
DS: Right. Well, not only several times it almost did not work, but there's so many things that struck me about it. One was that, two was how many decisions, micro decisions, had to be made by the leadership of Israel in the context of the big decision about whether or not to go or not. And each one of those micro decisions were like on a knife's edge. They could have gone one way or the other. And had they gone the wrong way, we would have been talking about a much different story, as Nadav said in our conversation. And if one of those decisions had gone the wrong way, he, Nadav, and analysts like him would be sitting there on podcasts like mine, basically saying the government and the military are incompetent, and that we would have had a situation that instead of four rescued hostages, we could have had more hostages, soldiers, casualties.
HRG: Yeah. I want to caveat that. What we've seen over the last eight months is that, even though there have been seriously questionable decisions from the highest levels, including several times decisions not to allow the IDF to carry out rescue operations that the IDF planned, the actual soldiers on the ground have been astonishingly competent. It's less astonishing in that sense. In other words, the IDF's top units could carry off, just literally pull off these incredibly complex, sophisticated, dangerous operations. And they can do it consistently and they have done it consistently. People should just try and find, Google, right? Detailed, tactical overviews of the Battle of Rafah, versus, you know, the Battle of Gaza City, eight months ago, it's a whole different army. And it's an incredibly competent army. So in that sense, if the political leadership ultimately made the call that it's going to trust in that, in the army's capability, nine times out of ten, that's the right call. And nine times out of ten is as much as you can ask for in the battlefield. But I do agree that it took courage, nevertheless, to do that. You know, well done, the political courage.
DS: By Israel's leaders.
HRG: By Israel's leaders. Mostly, it's just astonishing, the sheer competence and audacity and boldness of the actual operation itself. You know, there's a lot of debate now in the world about the cost of civilians who died. We still don't know how many civilians died. The Hamas death toll of 270 civilians is definitely a lie. There's no question.
DS: I love the way they calculated it. They calculated that, initially it was 234, and they calculated within minutes of the operation, they managed to determine that there were 231.
HRG: Yeah. Well, that's what they typed on the keyboard. Cause they're next to each other, two, three, four. But Israel estimates roughly a hundred killed, including the attackers who attacked. There was one of the most really, truly delightful little bits of propagandistic fallout from that operation was when Ken Roth, the former head of Human Rights Watch, tweeted that this was a ‘crime of perfidy’. The crime of perfidy is when soldiers on a battlefield dress like civilians, because it's a war crime, or it's a violation of the law of armed conflict, because it would lead enemy armies to then attack civilians. Perfidy, A, doesn't apply to a hostage rescue. It applies to attempts to attack or capture enemy soldiers. B, if you're really worried about perfidy, it is literally Hamas's grand strategy. In eight months, roughly, give or take, 10,000 Hamas fighters, not one of them has been taken out in any kind of uniform. So for the former head of Human Rights Watch to discover the crime of perfidy in that particular operation, I actually think it's kind of adorable. But yes, the Israeli estimate is about a hundred, uh, that includes Hamas fighters. DS: And they were mostly killed, most of those fighters that were killed, were killed as the IDF and the commandos and the units conducting this operation were taking the hostages out. In other words, they were exiting with the Israeli hostages, trying to get them out, and that's when they started to get shot upon. And that's when they returned fire.
HRG: Yeah, right, exactly. Hamas was trying to prevent a hostage rescue. But also, we shouldn't trust the Israeli number. The Israelis themselves said it was a kind of battlefield estimate by the command. In other words, it's not that Israel sat and counted. So, you know, we don't actually know. And the fog of war remains, and certainly we're not going to get real actual numbers from Hamas. We've already seen the UN count down the estimate from 35,000 dead to 25,000 dead, that's 10,000 nobody can find having died. In other words, no missing persons reports, no unidentified bodies. The UN called that 10,000 gap ‘unidentified last month just because they were saying it was a way to cover for their own, just a complete wholesale adoption of Hamas propaganda. But ‘unidentified’ doesn't mean there are 10,000 bodies they can't put a name to. What it means is there are 10,000 numbers listed in media reports that's drawn from Hamas, statements that nobody can find missing people or dead bodies for. In other words, 10,000 who haven't died, right? So anyway, a lot, a lot of noise. There were definitely civilians killed when Hamas began to launch a battle over the withdrawal of the forces and the rescued hostages. We don't know how many, we'll probably never know how many. So all of the hand wringing and pearl clutching and screaming and shouting is over numbers people don't actually know, but it traveled the world. The IDF, even when it does something unquestionably legal, and right, and just, and kind of astonishing, still the same media, the same activist world, swings into action pretending like some horrific thing happened. And that was a little bit annoying to watch.
DS: My favorite of all these items, which is with the international media focusing on the wrong news, was when Jonathan Conricus, who you know, he's the reservist who was at the beginning of the war, the international spokesman for the IDF and goes in and out of reservist, but he was giving an interview soon after the operation. And he was asked by a British presenter interviewing him, ‘shouldn't have Israel warned Israel the Gazans, that they were about to do this surprise rescue operation?’ Did you see this thing? This was amazing.
HRG: I saw it, yes.
DS: And he was like, ‘we're supposed to tell them ahead of time that our surprise rescue operation is about to happen?’ I mean he was so genuinely perplexed by this exchange.
HRG: Yes, in this sort of mental imagery of the international debate about this war, Israel's hostages are supposed to die. If they don't, that's somehow an insult to the morality of the world. And Israeli soldiers are supposed to fail, and Hamas is supposed to win. And we're supposed to all disappear. And anything that isn't that is highly suspect of being somehow phenomenally immoral. It's funny to talk this way, because I'm actually accusing CNN, Human Rights Watch, the whole analysis advocacy activist world of just being phenomenally stupid, and I don't want to accuse these people of that, because I know that the problem isn't low IQs, but here we are, and here are their reactions, and here are just literal mistakes. I mean, Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch, okay? Spent a career, a fairly illustrious career, he's widely respected, I think he has a teaching gig at Princeton, pointing to war crimes. So for him to not actually understand what war crimes are, like perfidy, is… it is what it is. And we should move on.
DS: Not to dwell on this point, but here we are. What was most unbelievable about the reaction is that here, and we'll get to this, but here Israel is repeatedly trying to get into a negotiated… ceasefire, temporary ceasefire, whatever you want to call it, with Hamas in order to get its hostages back. And Israel seems to be negotiating with itself. It can't get Hamas through these intermediaries to say yes. And so on the one hand, Israel's trying to negotiate and get a diplomatic resolution to its return of hostages, making no progress. Then Israel tries to launch a rescue operation to get its hostages back, and the hostages, by the way, being held in a highly dense civilian area by civilians. So there's no way to get the hostages back without going through civilian areas. That's a choice Hamas makes. Israel does that. And there's all this blowback against Israel for launching this hostage rescue operation. So no progress with diplomacy, no acknowledgement that it has a right to do what it did in the military rescue operation. So what's the answer? That Israel is just supposed to learn to live with the hostages never coming back? Like, it’s as though all these international actors are saying the quiet part out loud. Which is, ‘sorry Israel, we don't have a diplomatic solution for you. We are going to try to prevent you from having a military success in getting your hostages back.’ So the answer is, therefore, what?
HRG: Hamas wins. That's the answer. The hope, the goal, the only moral solution is for Hamas to remain in power in Gaza and Israel to retreat with its tail between its legs. And anything short of that is too immoral to even contemplate.
DS: Yeah. Here we are, whinging. I love that word, British word, for our British listeners.
HRG: Some of my favorite people are whingers.
DS: Lest our British audience thinks we're ignoring them. So there's all this, here we are whinging about the international reaction to what Israel did. But I want to spend a moment asking you what the mood is in Israel. Because in those initial days after the operation, as you mentioned, we did a big episode with Nadav Eyal. And he very, in a quite moving way, I thought, not only did an analysis of what happened, but I think he captured the mood in the country, and it was quite inspiring. And of course, there are still some 120 hostages in Israel. Of course, Israel's not going to get every hostage back by doing operations like Operation Arnon. These are all, obviously, these are statements of the obvious. And yet, there was something so moving, so morale boosting about this operation, and that was - you know, Ilan and I, when we were talking about this, we just thought we'd have a few episodes talking about, with different guests, about the lasting effects in Israel of the operation, and yet, it's starting to feel to us like, even inside Israel… to say people have moved on is probably too stark a characterization, and yet, it feels like people are moving on.
HRG: I think people have moved on, yeah.
DS: Why? How do you explain that?
HRG: It only solved 3 percent of the problem. It's not a small thing that it's 4 out of 124. When you ask Israelis, most - every time I have to get into this, I give the caveat that it hurts and I don't want to, but to understand where Israel is going and what Israel is thinking, you must understand this, and before you learn any other fact, most Israelis today believe we will not win. Most Israelis today think that this war is not something that this country is capable of winning against Hamas, against our weakest enemy. Never mind Hezbollah, which today saw the largest volley in eight months, right? And seems to be, you know, massively escalating going forward. The reason Israelis think that is kind of interesting, and we've talked about it before. They don't think the army can't do it. They don't think society can't do it. They think the government can't do it. They have a profound distrust. We have polling on this from everyone - pollsters on the left, pollsters on the right, you know, every imaginable news outlet. And it all confirms the same simple fact. Israelis think that the government, namely Benjamin Netanyahu, not just Benjamin Netanyahu, but primarily Benjamin Netanyahu, he scores the lowest on these polls, is politicking instead of fighting the war. To the point where some significant number of opposition voters, I mean, most opposition voters, actually think he's delaying the war on purpose to stay in power because he hasn't won an election poll in, you know, since the beginning of the judicial reform fight in January of last year. Not a single poll, right? So he's trying to avoid elections, and when the war ends the pressure to call in election will be enormous. And so he's trying to make sure the war never ends. That's the argument, among some of Netanyahu's fiercest opponents. And I mean, you know, the polls are different depending on how you ask the question, but it's pretty clear that that's well over a third of the country, probably much more than that. And so, you have an Israeli distrust in government decisions. Now, the operation was astonishing in its competence. The battle for Rafah is astonishing in its competence. The incredibly steep drop in the rate of Palestinian civilian deaths over the last eight months is astonishing in what it reveals about the army's competence, the learning curve, the military’s capability to make itself a learning organization. We saw last week, the head of the Gaza division, the man who's most on the ground running the actual war, the main coordinator between the IDF and other security services and intelligence services when it comes to running the war. One of the main thinkers behind the Israeli war plan - resigned. He said, you know, ‘I failed on October 7. This was my one life's duty, my life's work, and I am going to take responsibility.’ But first he made sure the battles were fought and went well, and the army learned the lesson, and the army also, the army in Gaza, learned how to fight in Gaza, which is something that, at the beginning, it didn't really know how to do. So, we have seen an army that A, has taken responsibility and B, has become astonishingly competent at the war it needs to fight. So when the army is able to pull off that kind of a rescue, it doesn't move the needle in terms of public morale, because public morale has never doubted the army.
DS: Well, that's not entirely true. I think there were serious questions about - I mean, just to be consistent. There were serious questions about where the army was on October 7th.
HRG: No, absolutely. Not were, there still are. I mean, that's something that it's gonna take a generation to even just parse through emotionally.
DS: So it's understandable if Israelis doubt the army from time to time, given this complete shock and collapse the weekend of October 7th.
HRG: No, I actually think there has been a profound process of forgiveness that you see, again, in polls, the least trusted politician in Israel right now is Netanyahu. The most trusted politician in every poll where you test trust of politicians is Yoav Gallant. Well, Yoav Gallant, the defense minister, was the defense minister on October 7th. What's the difference between - and they are from the same party. This isn't even a partisan poll. It doesn't show any partisan correlation to whether you trust or distrust Bibi because the guy next to him at the head of Likud running the defense ministry is the most trusted. Gallant openly, publicly, and multiple times took responsibility, and said, ‘we really screwed up and we're going to fix it and we are going to do what needs to be done.’ And Netanyahu still hasn't. Incidentally, we are, I think, roughly two months and a week, I'm not counting day by day, into the latest long stretch in which Netanyahu hasn't given an interview to the Israeli press. He went on your podcast. He went on many podcasts. He went on just about every major American network. He won't talk to me, he won't talk to my colleagues, he won't talk to the Hebrew speakers.
DS: So, can I respond to that?
HRG: That wasn't an accusation toward you, right? If I had a podcast and Bibi wanted to come on, it would be my responsibility to have him on. That's Bibi, right?
DS: Right. I get a call on a Thursday saying, you know, ‘can he come on?’ It was before the Rafah operation. I will say this though, in his defense on this point, because I heard this exact argument from a lot of my friends, you included, who are in the Israeli journalism community. And my response is the following. The Israeli prime minister, when it comes to dealing with the media, basically has two jobs. One job is obviously to deal with the local media, and that, obviously you're a better judge of that than I am, in terms of how he's how he's handling the local media and dealing with the local media. His other job, though, is to communicate with the world and to communicate with the international media and make the case for Israel, and make the case for Israel's decisions, and make the case for Israel's strategy, and make the case for the dilemmas that Israel is weighing. That's the job of any Israeli prime minister.
HRG: Okay, let me give a defense of the local press. Today is all complaints, right? Complaining about Ken Roth. I'm complaining about Bibi Netanyahu, I’m not usually a complainer. Maybe you caught me on a bad day.
DS: That's not true. You you have a lot of kvetch in you. And people are getting to listen to Haviv rip, the real Haviv. Haviv Unplugged, we'll call this episode Haviv Unplugged.
HRG: There are two parts to the complaint. The part about him going on to international media wasn't the important part of the sentence. The important part of the sentence was he hasn't spoken to the Israeli public in any challengeable or serious way in over two months. And it's a war and morale has collapsed. When the polls show morale collapsing and you won't talk to the people, you're the problem. So that's A. If I had to ask you, honestly, to step back and just strategically ask, what's more important for the future of the war? Whether or not Netanyahu goes on CNN a few more times and explains what he thinks is at stake or is happening in the war, or whether the Israeli public thinks he's actually running the war and successfully managing it and is focused on the war, not on his own political survival. Very, very few Likud voters today think he's focused on the war ahead of his political survival. I would suggest to you that domestic morale is much more important, strictly for the war effort, just to win the war, at the most prosaic, literal level, than whatever is said on CNN or MSNBC or podcasts or anything else internationally. So, A, nobody is complaining that he's going on CNN. The argument that he's going on CNN but won't speak to the Israelis, the only part of that argument that's the complaint is he won't speak to the Israelis. And he truly won't. And that is true when our kids are in battle. And that's true when we all have family that has sacrificed terribly and businesses are closed, and tens of thousands of Israelis aren't home. This isn't some kind of a peacetime complaint about whether Joe Biden gives enough press availabilities. This is a very serious point, and a very profound and felt thing. The lack of a sense of leadership is terribly damaging in this war. It's probably the single greatest weakness Israel has in facing this war. That Israelis can't tell you what the strategy is. Israelis can't tell you why the army basically paused in Gaza for three months. Israelis can't tell you what the hell we're waiting for when Hamas says no to a deal 11 times, and we still have to play games with the Americans about there still being a deal to be had. Israelis can't tell you why the north is on fire. We are speaking on Wednesday. Wednesday saw the largest barrage from Hezbollah in the Middle East. History of this entire, in eight months. And we haven't had anyone explain anything about the resilience we're going to need, about how long it might take, about how it might get worse. Netanyahu styles himself a Churchill. What was Churchill's great contribution to the war effort? He didn't shoot a gun. Churchill explained to the people what was going to happen. And he told them it would get worse, and he told them that that's okay, and he told them that they will win. And he told them there's a long haul, and he told them that they might even lose, but this is the only path available to them, and therefore this was their finest hour. And all of that is totally missing, because Netanyahu simply won't stop politicking. He won't go in any place that might not look good for the next political campaign. He is out to survive.
DS: But Haviv, Haviv, you say all he's doing is politicking. We're going to get to other topics, but you just, at the beginning of this conversation said that the decision to launch this operation in Gaza, this hostage rescue operation, took incredible courage, political courage, it took real leadership. So, that doesn't sound like a guy who's purely thinking about politics, because had it gone wrong, as you and I know, had it gone wrong, it would have been a political catastrophe.
HRG: Yes, and that's why it's so unusual. There haven't been a lot like it. We've already had reports leaked out of the army. That the army had several planned rescues that were turned down at various levels of the political arena. Yes, well done. Well done for taking some decisions that might have backfired. That's not remotely enough. Incidentally, I might be completely wrong. In other words, if this is my view, fine. It's my view. Who am I? I'm no better or smarter than any other Israeli. I don't tell people who I vote for. You know, it's probably hard to convince anyone I vote Bibi, but I share with Israelis the trust in Gallant and the trust in many others in Likud. But I do think that at the end of the day, most Israelis, and every poll says this, think what I am describing. And that's a catastrophe. And so, if Netanyahu does actually want to stop campaigning and start actually focusing on the war, and nothing else, because so many Israelis have so much at stake every single day of the week, and so many soldiers, hundreds of thousands, have gone off for months into a battlefield. He needs to show that. He needs to show Israelis he's running the place and not appear at every single turn to be politicking. And it's a tragedy. I can get into details. I mean, just the simple fact that press releases only go out when they're politically useful and don't go out when Israelis are wondering what the hell is happening.
It's something that everybody is seeing and has seen constantly throughout. And it's frustrating because it is a weakness we don't have to have. And it's probably significantly hurt the war effort.
DS: Let's talk about other political figures.
HRG: I can complain about anybody.
DS: As much as I would love to dwell on Netanyahu. You know, that's what's so good about you, Haviv. That's my point about you. If I want some kvetch, you know, it's like, press track seven. So I'm going to give you a different track.
HRG: I swear I can do multi partisan complaining. I promise, and if anybody wants to know what any political party has done wrong, hit me up on Twitter and I'm going to tell you.
DS: Haviv, I'm going to give you one right now.
HRG: Yes.
DS: Benny Gantz.
HRG: Yes.
DS: Okay? What exactly was the benefit for Israel of a competent, military minded, moderating figure, within the war cabinet, exiting the war cabinet, along with his colleague and friend Gadi Eisenkot, these two men with combined, I don't know, 50, 60, 70 years of military experience, who understand the war Israel is fighting as well as anyone, in any war cabinet at any time in Israel's history. And their leaving is helping who and what?
HRG: I can't tell you if it was a good idea or a bad idea. I can tell you what they were thinking. There's a substantive reason that Gantz's national unity faction left the emergency unity government or whatever they called it. And there's also political reason, and they overlap quite a bit. The substantive reason is that Gantz no longer believed that he was doing any of the things you just said. That he was seriously listened to, that he was moderating, that he was helping win a war. And a lot of his critics on the center left have said to him, well, you know, Mazel tov that you just woke up to that, right? Everybody knew this was happening. But what he in fact thinks was happening was that he ended up giving Netanyahu political cover, rather than actually influencing the conduct of the war. The political timing is also something that I think is profoundly substantive for Gantz, but nevertheless is also extremely politically useful to explain his leaving the unity government at that moment, which was the bill that Likud voted on over ultra Orthodox military enlistment.
DS: So can you just briefly explain the history of the issue of Haredi, the ultra Orthodox, their service or role in, or lack thereof in serving in the IDF? And then we'll get into this development of this Knesset action.
HRG: Yes, it is one of the most important and I think controversial and really painful issues in Israel today. In the very early years of the state, the ultra Orthodox community came to the government, they came to Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, and they sought an exemption for exceptional seminary students, yeshiva students from military service because leaving, you know, the yeshiva and going to the military would really hurt their development as intellectual and spiritual leaders. At the beginning, the exemption was given to something like 500 young people. It was part of the same legal structure that gives exemptions to the universal draft to exceptional athletes, to exceptional artists.
DS: For instance, you got the exceptional athlete exemption, right?
HRG: I did. I did, several times. I'm actually surprised the Army put me in an athletic unit. That was the surprise in my case. But, um, it was a - I'm going to get Dan back. Don't worry, everybody. It was a small thing because it was a small group of people. Over the years, that exemption grew and grew and it then, you know, by the 1990s had already reached something like 30,000 yeshiva students had exemptions. We are now well into the, I believe, 70,000. And so it's an exemption that has essentially come to mean the entire cohort of ultra Orthodox young people doesn't serve. Now, that has long been a profound complaint alongside the Haredi welfare state, which is, huge amounts of money are transferred from productive parts of the Israeli economy to less productive parts. And so there's long been an accusation, and I don't know how to put it differently. I have a tremendous affection for the community. It is nevertheless a community that, the statistics don't lie, lives off of others. It lives off of others in very specific ways. There's a Bank of Israel report from last year that says that the average secular Israeli Jewish household net loses into the system something like 2,000 shekels a month. The average Haredi Jewish household takes out of the system about 2,000 shekels a month. It is a community that, not all of it, 50 percent don't work. That means that 50 percent of men do work. Most women work, something like 80 percent or 75 percent do work, but, the complaint is nevertheless true. There is a huge transfer of wealth from other parts of Israeli society to the Haredi community and the Haredi community's refusal to serve, even in wartime, and its refusal to go to the workforce, participate in the workforce at the rates that others - it's a lifestyle choice, and bringing it back to the point about military service, there have been attempts over the last 30 years, including a committee chaired by Supreme Court Justice Tzvi Tal, the Tal Committee, to produce a bill that would create tracks that bring the ultra Orthodox community into military or national service. National service can be civilian service and rescue services and ambulance services, things like that, to try and find a solution. There is a lot, there has always been anger in secular Israel, about the fact that they don't serve, in vast numbers, basically since the 80s. That anger has grown over the last eight months. And it's grown for a very simple reason. It used to be a theoretical question of justice and equality and fairness. ‘How could they not serve when we serve?’ ‘I, Haviv, am going to send my four children to the military. Why do they have to be called upon to do that, and the Haredi children not?’ Very simple question that a lot of Israelis ask. And there have been attempts to produce legislation that solves this problem with carrots and sticks. In other words, we're taking away a yeshiva's funding if it doesn't send some percentage of its students to military service in, you know, a given year. Things like that. Bills that try to find that kind of formula, that would be a stick. The carrot would be that if they go to military service, they can, you know, get, I don't know what, a negative income tax. All kinds of carrots and all kinds of sticks have been proposed. Nothing has ever moved the needle. Nothing has ever actually brought about any real change. Over the last eight months, that anger has become immense. And it's become immense for a very simple reason. You have reservists. Many reservists, tens of thousands, maybe into the low hundreds of thousands of reservists, who spent three months, five months, maybe seven months in reserves. And they're asking, ‘how can the army not have the manpower?’ Now, if we're facing a potential war in the North, which, you know, we're speaking on a day of massive escalation in the North, these people who I'll say it very personally. My brother in law, my wife's little brother, started school this year and has managed, we're in June. We're a week before the end of the school year. He has had three weeks of school because he's been called in and out of the army over the course of the last eight months for this war. So, who else has to pay that price? And if that's just the beginning of a very long war against multiple Iranian proxies over the next 10 years, how can 13 percent of the population - the army says it needs something like 3,000 more enlistees every single year, in each new cohort. Well, where are they going to come from? So it's no longer theoretical. It's no longer about fairness. It's no longer an emotional question. The country needs them. Can they step up? And if they can't step up and won't step up, why are so many of everyone else's children dying for them? How does that work, in terms of just basic responsibility for each other? That vote, last, I think it was three days ago. Likud, at three in the morning made, you know, there was a debate and there was a lot of parliamentary business to conduct.
DS: 63 votes in favor of this bill, of a 64 member government. The only person who did not vote with the majority that was in the majority was Gallant, the defense minister, which was interesting.
HRG: Gallant didn't vote. And Gallant specifically said a month ago that if the bill doesn't have the full agreement of the entire coalition and isn't a bill that everyone can sign on to -
DS: Meaning, including the war cabinet, which means Gantz and Eizenkot.
HRG: Including Gantz and including - I think he meant basically that this could be a mainstream bill that actually tried to solve the problem and had broad agreement. He would not vote for it. And then the bill came up and Netanyahu pulled all the stops, and his people called every MK and they cajoled, and they sometimes threatened, and they made everybody understand that their political future was at stake if they, you know, they're not going to survive the next primary if they don't toe the line. And Gallant held out. And he was the only vote in the coalition of 64 seats to vote no. Everyone else voted yes, with dozens of them taking to the press, taking to social media and saying, ‘obviously, I didn't mean it. Obviously, I think it's terrible that there isn't shared service’. This is, by the way, an issue that the Likud base hates, the Likud space believes in military service. And so this was an attempt to hold together this coalition where the ultra Orthodox political leadership - I agree with what you said about the difference between the political leadership and the people on the ground. Most Haredim are identifying more and more with the state. The political leadership takes its line from the religious leadership, and the religious leadership still is a little bit detached from what everybody is feeling. And there's a very clear sense that the politicians are driving the Haredi community off a cliff on this issue, where it's not at all clear that that's where most Haredim actually are. So that was the political timing for Gantz's withdrawal from the coalition.
DS: Yes, plus polls showing that this huge boost that Gantz got in the polls soon after October 7th seemed to be declining. He wasn't holding this massive majority in the polls, that he had been earlier on, on the question of who's best equipped to be prime minister. He was not polling as high as he was earlier. And Gallant sort of maybe outfoxed him a little bit by making this announcement a few weeks ago, before Gantz did, with his very public complaint against the government, his own government, and then Gantz was sort of having to do a follow on act. So, you know, I think Gantz had political reasons for having to make a move, show that he's breaking - I don't blame him, he's a politician, as much as he is anything, he had to make a political move. However, tell me where we are with the decisions Israel has to make now, as you and I were talking about offline, around these possible multiple fronts in the war that it is going to have to engage, or it is being engaged on.
HRG: Yeah.
DS: And what Gantz would do differently?
HRG: That question is a very good one. What would Gantz do differently? Because I think that Gantz's decline in the polls has tracked with the general sense that the government isn't delivering. So, when Gantz came in, there was a sense of palpable relief among his voters. But, according to polls, the people who were relieved that he joined the government were something like four times the actual voters that he ever drew on election day. Huge numbers of Likud voters as well, that he was coming in and it would be a substantive government that dealt with the war. And as faith that that was true has declined, Gantz's popularity has eroded. And so Gantz is also leaving what he politically has to think of as a sinking ship at a moment that he framed as about this unconscionable Likud vote refusing to deal seriously with the question of the draft. The basic Israeli public complaint about this government. This is something that, you know, when I get complaints from Netanyahu supporters, on my complaints about him during this war, they kind of accuse me almost instinctively - it's just this basic, if somebody's complaining about Bibi, they're doing it from the left. But in fact, my complaint, and the complaint of, I think most Israelis, including farther to Bibi's left, is a right wing complaint. Get the war done. What would Gantz do differently? I don't know what the man himself would do differently. Maybe he would make every mistake Netanyahu makes. But right now the war is at a stage where we have reached a decision point. And it's getting harder and harder to escape it. And I'm almost glad that Gantz left. Not for Gantz, I don't care about any specific politician. But because of Bibi. Bibi is now no longer able, as he has tried to do repeatedly, as Likud's statements to the media have tried to do repeatedly, which is to blame Gantz and Gantz's, you know, half of the coalition or piece of the coalition, for everything everybody is upset about in the war. For example, that it drags on for so long, that the army was basically frozen in place in Gaza for so long, that the IDF and the political leadership appear to be so susceptible to American pressure and not just pushing ahead and getting the job done. Why didn't we go into Rafah three months ago? Why did we do it last month? All of these questions that Israelis are asking, there's a sense that Netanyahu, and essentially, in many ways, the Likud campaign has been blaming on various partners, including and especially Gantz. He can't blame it on anyone anymore. Whatever happens in the war going forward is on him, and he knows it. And so there's a much higher chance, this is my hope, that he's going to be a lot more decisive. And just because of his fear of his legacy, and because I tend to agree with his critics, he is, his first priority in his own head is the campaign. And for the campaign, he will run the war better.
DS: That's fascinating. This, Haviv, I have heard from his typical critics. That you actually think there's a shot that he will be more bold, perhaps take more risks because he's alone.
HRG: It's all on him. He can't oust Gallant. He tries, but Gallant has too much respect and too much credibility in the public.
DS: Gallant commands too much respect.
HRG: Commands too much respect.
DS: He's untouchable.
HRG: He's proven himself untouchable. Netanyahu tried to fire him in judicial reform, and failed. And the entire country came out for Gallant. And that tells me that Netanyahu feels vulnerable. And that vulnerability is what everyone counts on. When Smotrich and Ben-Gvir ran their campaign back in November 2022 to form this government, their election campaign was essentially, ‘Netanyahu is vulnerable, therefore vote for us, you'll get what you want because we'll be able to squeeze him.’ They literally said, ‘you can get,’ that was me paraphrasing. What they actually said was, ‘there are many Netanyahu's. You want the Netanyahu that you want? The right wing one? Vote us.’ Right? And so the sense that he's incredibly susceptible to pressure is the literal campaign of people around him, among left and right, for support. ‘Support me and I'll make sure it's the Netanyahu we want,’ because Netanyahu is whatever he needs to be to survive. And so that's what everyone banks on at this point. The whole political system is kind of built around it at this point. I hope that domestic political pressure will become much greater on him than the foreign pressure that has prevented us from doing what we need to do to see this war to a more successful conclusion. The right is right about the need to not pause, not freeze, not delay everything, whatever the Americans ask. I think they're wrong about this sort of deep fear of presenting a day after, or talking about future Palestinian independence, even just as political cover to get the Saudis in and to get some Arab involvement that we need to actually have a better future for Gaza. This whole idea that we shouldn't present a plan, there shouldn't be a day after, there's no day after until Hamas is defeated, Netanyahu told, I think, CNN. It's going to be awfully hard to defeat Hamas if there's no political horizon to sell Gazans on. Even just to sell Arab world forces, and Gazan Social stratas that are willing to challenge Hamas. But if there's no day after, if Israel can't actually articulate it, you're going to have a hard time doing it. So I hope that what we are going to see is a bolder military posture. And I worry that we're not going to have anyone around Netanyahu who's going to push through the day after question and some of the things that, let's call them left wing issues, that you also need to win this war. This is a government that needs to be both more right wing and more left wing at the same time in order to be successful. But that's the whole point about Netanyahu. That's the failure. There is a left wing argument about this war and there's a right wing argument about this war. And we have a man in the middle who's refused to choose, refused to make a decision.
DS: Well, you're not saying he should choose, you're saying he should actually pick from both sides.
HRG: Yes. Both are right. But he's refused to do either. And so he won't push through militarily. Right now we are at a decision point. The decision point is very simple to explain. Hamas has said no to the deal, to any deal. And it did it really about as resoundingly as you possibly can. The Egyptians have leaked to the press, I think an hour ago, as we record, that Hamas's demand is that stage A of the ceasefire for hostages deal would involve Israel withdrawing from the Philadelphi corridor, from the Egypt Gaza border. If the IDF withdraws from that border, Hamas’s weapons supply line is restored. Well, that's not what we can possibly allow. According to the Americans, Hamas's answer has, to the Americans, who have been pressuring them for two weeks. For two weeks, there's been no answer from Hamas. President Biden gave a whole speech.
DS: It's embarrassing. On May 31st, Biden gives this speech. The imprimatur of the president of the United States on this Israeli proposal, makes it clear that this is important to the president of the United States, to the White House. Every government's weighing in and Hamas is still saying, nah.
HRG: It wasn't that the president said something and then a bunch of governments said it and then Hamas didn't care. Because Biden put so much of his credibility and capital on the line, Hamas drew the conclusion that it's winning. The Americans are so eager and passionate, it's such a, it's the most important question on the world stage, it turns out, is whether Hamas survives this thing. That's Hamas winning. So of course they then did nothing for two weeks, and after two weeks said, according to the Americans, ‘if there aren't American guarantees that this is an absolute end to the war and we survive this thing, then we are not going to even negotiate.’ Well, Hamas has been led to believe by this massive American pressure, by the way that I have to tell you, I don't understand it. The Biden administration seems to negotiate by conceding everything and then asking politely for something in return. I don't understand how this is supposed to work. Hamas heard from the Americans that they are winning and then nobody understands why they are actually making their position more extreme and difficult to work with. Hamas said no. Now that Hamas said no, what do we do? There is no ceasefire coming. There is no hostage release coming. Now what? And that's a decision the government has to make, and it has to buck American pressure, and it has to get the job done, and it has to broadcast that to the Israeli public. It has to speak to the Israeli public. Netanyahu needs to stop campaigning for 10 minutes and start doing the job. And in the north, the escalation is massive. The escalation is serious. Missiles fell on Safed today. Missiles fell on Tiberias today. Either the north faces a clear Israeli statement that we can escalate and will escalate and the damage will be disastrous - or we're going to actually end up escalating and the damage will be disastrous. The only way Hezbollah pulls back from the brink is if we stop telling them, we refuse to fight. And so there is a indecisiveness to this government that has dragged everything out, hurt everything and driven Israeli morale down into the dumps, even as the army has delivered one success after another. And that has to be reversed. So, Gantz is gone. Everything is now on Netanyahu. Is it too much to hope that he wakes up?
DS: I'm not sure, I don't believe he's asleep, but I take your point. Some, not all, of the criticisms you're laying out are fair. I also think he's managed this American pressure about as well as any Israeli Prime Minister could. I do agree with you that Israel lost valuable time, basically kind of February, March, April… but May, June, despite the lost time, I have been impressed both with what's been happening on the ground militarily and also with some, not all, some of the decision making from the leadership. But we are going to have to leave it there, A, because it is really late where you are, B… Don't give me that look, like it's not that late. I'm exhausted, and it's not really late where I am. Although, I'm exhausted because I had to teach, I had to do a Tikkun class. From 11 o'clock to midnight last night for Shavuot. My friend Jeff Feig talked me into doing a lecture at the JCC for Shavuot. And, you know, I'm exhausted.
HRG: Dan, don't throw the Jew thing at me, okay?
DS: But, two weeks ago I was complaining about my back.
HRG: I also had to teach at a Tikkun Lein Shavuot last night.
DS: Doing, you know, about the horah, the kids had to do the horah for me.
HRG: I also had to do that. And your kids are older than my kids, and I'm more tired than you, and it's your afternoon and it's my late night. Don't throw the Jewish thing at me as an excuse that you're tired, you think I wasn't teaching on Shavuot?
DS: Alright, fine. Fair enough. For our listeners who don’t know what we're talking about, it is a tradition to teach through the night and attend lectures and lessons through the night on the holiday of Shavuot, which -
HRG: Which was Tuesday, Wednesday. Dan, can I suggest that you actually say that at the beginning? Because I don't think everyone understands that you and I are actually exhausted recording this. And it would explain so much.
DS: All right.
HRG: All right. Okay.
DS: Haviv, we'll leave it there.
HRG: Thank you.
DS: I'll talk to you soon.
HRG: Have a good one.
DS: Bye bye. That's our show for today. To keep up with Haviv, you can find him on X, at havivrettiggur, or you can find him at timesofisrael.com or @ timesofisrael on X. Call me Back is produced and edited by Ilan Benatar. Our media manager is Rebecca Strom. Additional editing by Martin Huergo. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.