Israelis anticipate the response — with Haviv Rettig Gur
Is the region ready for an Israel-Iran war?
Is the U.S. ready?
What is the state of readiness of the IDF for such a war?
Is Israeli society ready for such a war?
Could such a war be avoided? What would de-escalation look like?
Most Israelis we have spoken to over the past few days have struck a balance between (tensely) trying to anticipate Iran’s next move and expressing confidence in Israel’s capacity for this new phase. One of those Israelis joins us for this episode. Haviv Rettig Gur of the the Times of Israel returns to the podcast.
Full Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
HRG: I don't know what more Iran has to do to countries that, frankly, nobody cares about, like Syria, like Lebanon, like Yemen, before the world takes seriously the massive destructive capacity of this regime. But this situation now, in which America and Europe cower in fear and incompetence, and the enemy feels they can march in this way across the Middle East and destroy us, in its own good time and its own slow and steady pace, that is not tolerable. We have reached a point where we have concluded that they haven't left us options. Our only option is to call their bluff, in the hope that they're not calling our bluff. And that we actually have the capability to see this through.
DS: It's 6:00 PM on Sunday, August 4th, here in New York city. It's 1:00 AM on Monday, August 5th in Israel as Israelis transition to their new day. And I'm pleased to bring back to this podcast for one of our check ins Haviv Rettig Gur from the Times of Israel, who joins us from his home, just outside of Jerusalem. Haviv, good to see you.
HRG: Dan, it's good to be here. How are you doing?
DS: I'm okay. A little stressed these days because of developments in your neighborhood, in your neck of the woods, but we'll talk about that. Just to summarize where we're at, late last week, according to some sources, Israel made a bold move by assassinating Ismail Haniyeh in Iran. In what is like the Blair House of Tehran during the week long inaugural ceremonies of Iran's new president. It was a highly symbolic attack that some are observing was a huge hit to Iranian pride, a major embarrassment to Iran's leaders and Iran's security establishment. And the question is, is that move going to force Iran into a counter move that could just quickly have both countries racing up the ladder of escalation that could possibly lead to a regional war? So some of the topics I want to hit with you today, Haviv, is one, is Israel interested in a, in a direct war with Iran now? And is it ready for what that could look like? Meaning a regional war? Where's Iran? Does Iran want that now? What's the state of Israel's readiness? Not only for the war, but for protecting the home front. And then where are Israelis in all of this, and then obviously we can talk about the U S role. So a lot to get to, I want to start with just the mood right now. You've just come out of Shabbat. There was, was a Shabbat where on Friday, every Israeli I spoke to was wondering what their world would look like by the time they came out of Shabbat. What's the mood you're sensing right now among Israelis? Does this time feel different?
HRG: I think there's certainly some of that. I talked to friends in Yaffo, in Tel Aviv today, and they expressed a certain anxiety, a certain concern, but there's a lot less than people think. The, uh, the malls are full, the markets are full, the people are, you know, went to work, uh, there was the same traffic on the way into Tel Aviv in the morning. There's a sense that, you know, a shoe is about to fall, and we are in that moment between moments. It's a very liminal moment. The Iranians are gonna try and do something that shows that, uh, you know, we thumbed our nose at a regime that claims, wants to be an empire, and it has to Show that it is, like any dictator, not somebody that can tolerate that and can exact costs from us. At the same time that there is this sense that the shoe's about to fall, I think that Hezbollah and Iran have spent the last 10 months convincing Israelis that they're definitely going to maintain this war. This long, permanent, sort of low intensity, constant, never ending war against us until we're destroyed. And the problem with telling the other side that you're going to continue until they're destroyed is that you don't really have anywhere to escalate from there. If you are an Israeli and you think that Iran will never stop and this only ends with their defeat or your destruction on their terms, they have given you an interest, a fundamental existential interest in escalation. Escalation doesn't serve them. They want low intensity permanent conflict. Escalation serves you, because then you can begin to exact massive costs from the other side and not just pay massive costs yourself on their schedule. So there is in Israel today a twofold a definite sense that we're going to see how they respond. Are they going to respond in a way that we can contain and move on until the next round? Or are they going to actually escalate massively because they feel their regime and their pride is desperately hurt and that is having geopolitical costs that they can't tolerate and so they're going to respond in a way that's escalatory. So there's an acceptance among Israelis that this is an enemy that is undeterrable, this is an enemy that is implacable, and therefore we have to tolerate what we tolerate and move forward in whatever way the enemy demands of us.
DS: Does the Israeli public, and I hate to generalize too much with this, but I strenuously resist doing that, but I'm going to violate that here. Does the Israeli public generally support or understand the government's moves? And I'm going to lump a few things together. One, the hitting the port in Yemen in response to the Houthi attack. Two, getting Mohammed Deif in Gaza. Three, getting Shukr in the Dahieh area in Beirut. Four, getting Haniyeh in Tehran. If you add up those four hits all in a matter of what, three weeks, it's an astonishing level of assertiveness taking out high, high, high value targets and symbolically valuable, not only operationally high value targets, meaning these are all people who had, or, or places that have operational implications for the war on Israel, for the multi front war on Israel, but they're symbolic hits. Meaning in many populations in the Middle East, people know these are household names. Mohammed Deif is a household name among Palestinians. Shukr is a household name among many Lebanese Shiites and certainly the Hezbollah grassroots. Obviously, uh, Haniyeh is well known throughout the region. So these, these are hits that have practical implications and symbolic implications. So they're impressive, but in another moment in history or in another part of the world, if this were another country doing these things, you would think these would be controversial decisions. Are they controversial in Israel?
HRG: There's been no controversy whatsoever. There's a sense, you know, that the enemy strategy, and this is something the enemy talks about a great deal, the Iran strategy, Hezbollah, the strategy is a war of attrition, a long war of attrition, based on a profound belief that they have about us, that we are fundamentally fragile. And then ultimately we will disband and disappear. And that depends on a willingness on their part to sacrifice massively. And it depends on our unwillingness to sacrifice and our great, you know, cowardice and ultimately weak society. And so they expect this to, this exacting of costs from us to be the great strategic boon, that will eventually lead them to this ultimate victory over us. And again, Iranian officials talk about this routinely and exactly in those terms. And so this is a well known point that all Israelis are basically aware of. The last three weeks, as you say, has felt like we're finally taking the war back to them. I'm always afraid that my own sensibilities will bias my assessment of other Israelis. So, let me go to polls. We have fairly good, consistent polls over the last ten months, in which Israelis, even as they, roughly four or five months ago, turned against, or became pessimistic over Gaza, remain supportive of a war with Hezbollah. They don't want the vast, massive, incredibly costly war in which everybody throws everything they've got at each other, which is a war that will potentially take out the Israeli electric grid and the Israeli water system and set cities on fire and all of that, and cause, you know, tenfold that damage in Lebanon. But they do want an exacting of massive costs on the enemy for emptying out Israel's north, for bombarding towns and villages to the point where entire kibbutzim, 10, 12 kibbutzim are destroyed and a third of the homes of Metula are basically demolished by constant rocket fire over 10 months. They want an exacting of costs. And so there's popular, not just support, celebration. I mean, you know, we don't have some of those silly public spectacles of handing baklava out to people to celebrate the enemy's fall. A few Israelis tried to do that after the killing of Haniyeh and most Israelis just thought that was kind of a silly little copycatting of Hamas people after October seven, handing out baklava to people in the street in Gaza. We don't do that celebration, but if you go by social media memes and humor, there was a lot of celebrating. And there's a hope that we will continue to exact massive costs. My frustration with Israeli strategy, or with the lack of Israeli strategy as I see it over the last 10 months, is that we've been fighting on Iran's terms in multiple Iranian theaters that Iran imposes on us to cause terrible harm to everyone except Iran. And so we talked about this, about April 13, 14, the missile attack. Finally, Iran comes out from behind the curtain. And finally, Iran has to step up to the plate. I don't just not fear the Iranian response. It might be horrific, it might be tragic. It might be terrible and a tragic response, but here's the thing, if I have to fight Iran on Iran's terms, I have to have a bloody war in Lebanon. I have to have a bloody war in Yemen. Or I die. That's the Iranian terms being imposed on me. Why not impose all those costs not on the poor Lebanese and not on the poor Yemenis? Why not impose those costs on the Iranian regime directly?
DS: I have heard speculation that there is some concern or at least some questions that specifically hitting Haniyeh was going to negatively impact the prospect for a hostage deal. Now, I, for one, full disclosure, I'm skeptical of that for a variety of reasons, not the least of which what I've heard from some Israelis who are close to the negotiations process, that at best, Haniyeh was incidental in the negotiations. He was a bit player and actually not a very constructive force. So getting him out of the picture doesn't make a difference. The other view is it just puts more pressure on Hamas and we have seen Hamas's willingness to negotiate when it feels that it needs to bring the temperature down and the pressure of mounting on Hamas quite intensely as it has over the last number of weeks, really for the first time in a number of months, by I guess, beginning with the Rafah operation is when pressure really started to pick back up on Hamas taking out Haniyeh was part and parcel of that. But I just curious your reaction, because I want to give a fair hearing to any views you may be hearing that actually hitting Haniyeh is a problem for the negotiations.
HRG: From families of hostages, you hear all the different opinions and in part because the deal on the table only really focused on the subsection of the hostages. We were talking about the so-called humanitarian release, the women and the sick and the elderly and all of that. And they were going to be released in the first six weeks and in those six weeks the IDF pauses but doesn't leave Gaza and then they negotiate the next phase two in which the IDF leaves Gaza and everyone basically assumes that part won't happen. So, today I watched a statement by a mother of a soldier, of a male soldier, held by Hamas, who is not going to be released in phase one of the proposed deal, who doesn't want the proposed deal, because there's no chance in hell that her son will get out, and there's no chance that phase two will ever happen, or happen within a reasonable amount of time where she can still hope that he survives. And so she wants the all or nothing deal, and to pressure Hamas until Hamas has no other choice. That's a mother of a hostage. That is as much a mother of a hostage as the parents of the hostages who would get out in that six week deal. I'm not going to step in there and tell them who's right. Also because we've talked about this many, many times over ten months, and generally I think you and I agree that Defense Minister Gallant's theory of the case back in October was that massive pressure is the only way to get hostages out in any real numbers. I think that's basically still in force. And if we had had that massive pressure, and Hadn't operated for months at a time in Gaza at 50% capacity, maybe we would be there today. That is all water under the bridge in the sense that I can't change it. The fact is, if Hamas wants a deal, Ismail Haniyeh couldn't have stopped it if Sinwar wanted a deal, for example. And, um, if Sinwar doesn't want a deal, Ismail Haniyeh doesn't have all that much leverage over him from Doha to prevent the deal. Sinwar is desperate, Sinwar is surrounded by enemies, Sinwar is under siege, and Sinwar decides whether or not the deal happens. If Hamas wants a deal, that deal is still possible, you know, Hamas knows how to negotiate with or without Haniyeh.
DS: Have you thought at all about how Sinwar may respond, I mean, he may want to accelerate the negotiations because he needs some kind of temporary ceasefire because he realizes how much Israel is on the march. Or he could decide he needs to strike back at the Israeli government, foment more internal dissent inside Israel, take a symbolic act against Israel the way Israel has, it may be perceived to be taking a symbolic act against Hamas, and that's a scary thought when you think about the tools he does have at his disposal, as I've heard speculated, including access to hostages.
HRG: His only leverage is hostages. Hamas launched a rocket volley in response that itself said was in response and it hit, you know, it was directed at Kiryat Gat. It couldn't launch anything at Tel Aviv or any real numbers. Hamas's capabilities are really profoundly shattered. It's been unable to do anything serious in Gaza for many months now. And so the one thing he has is those hostages. And that could go two ways. One way would be smart and clever and he's totally incapable of doing it. And the other way would be traumatic and tragic and horrifying and also terribly, terribly mistaken for Hamas. The first way that would be smart would be to suddenly become very liberal and generous on a hostage deal. Becoming very liberal and generous on a hostage deal would really put Netanyahu in a bind and really increase the opposition to Netanyahu saying sign a deal. Including within the military, not just in the streets. That's not something Sinwar is capable of doing just in terms of his personality and his basic instinct and Hamas's own narrative, in my estimation. The second way he could do it, and I think this is what you were hinting at, and it's horrifying to talk about, but I'll just be the one to say it, you know, bluntly so we can discuss it, is he could kill a hostage on a video and release the video. If he does that, he does certainly exact political costs from Netanyahu. There will be tremendous blame brought to bear on Netanyahu. I don't think it'll matter all that much because the political system is arranged as it's arranged, and the Israeli public willingness and desire and need, the political forces within Israeli society, demanding retribution and demanding massive additional and new and sustained pressure. The pressure on military commanders to show successes against Hamas will also increase. And so he won't lead to a breakthrough in any talks. He won't give Hamas the one thing they need, which is calm or a ceasefire or a respite of some kind leading potentially to an end to the war, and he will redouble and triple and quadruple Israeli, the willingness of Israeli commanders on the ground to show that they’re exacting costs for that kind of a step. So, he’s not capable of doing the clever thing, he is capable of doing the monstrous thing, that is his basic way of operating. Not for nothing, the Palestinians call him ‘The Butcher of Khan Younis” and it’s his only leverage. Hamas is really quite, quite shattered. Hezbollah and Iran have huge room to maneuver. Hamas has very, very little. And we've seen that just in the last few days.
DS: Haviv, it's been a long time since Israel has been in a regional war with a formidable enemy or set of enemies. I'm thinking of 1948, I'm thinking of 1967, the Six Day War, June of ‘67. I'm thinking of the Yom Kippur War, fall of 1973, where Israel was facing a multi front war. Each moment, it could have been existential. Obviously the, on the eve of 67, the Israeli government felt that they could be facing an existential situation, which is why Israel had to make a move. In the case of ‘73, Israel didn't have an eve of the war, they were completely surprised. They didn't have an eve before the war to see what was coming. They were completely surprised, and at least for the first couple of weeks, it felt to most Israelis, like everything hung in the balance. Is there a sense that this moment is comparable? Because, I will tell you, just from afar, me watching it, it feels like one of those moments. It feels like we are steps away from something escalating into something that resembles one of these multi front wars that will feel regional. No point in my lifetime, as someone who follows events closely in Israel, I have, as you know, close family and friends in Israel. I've never felt in any of the conflicts Israel has had, as long as I've been an observer of Israel, which is like a close observer, which is like 30 to 40 years, the past 30 or 40 years, they are tactical struggles. The second Intifada, obviously the second Lebanon war was, I guess, had major strategic implications, but at no time did I look at it in that moment and say, well, should I be comparing this to ‘73? Should I be comparing this to ‘67? This one, to me, feels different. This moment we're in right now feels like a number of parties in the region are moving up the ladder of escalation and we could be waking up in a matter of days or weeks to a moment that feels like a existential moment. Obviously, the sense is heightened by the experience of October 7th. What's your reaction to that? Do you think most Israelis are comparing it to those past wars or the feel in the country resembles those past periods?
HRG: I think we are closer to that kind of serious threat, serious war that actually could have existential implications, than we've been in 50 years. The question I don't have an answer to is are we actually close? I think that we face enemies who have been pursuing for 15 years now, a very clear strategy they talk about openly, and we've done almost nothing to prevent that strategy, to disrupt it to, you know, we've bombed a lot of missile shipments to Hezbollah, so we cut the rate of shipping of missiles by half. But for a decade, they've still been for a decade shipping missiles to Hezbollah. We've taken certain steps and, and they have not been serious steps. The way it was described to me by an Israeli analyst and official is that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard basically has two fundamental missions. One is to safeguard the regime, and the other is to export the revolution. Exporting the revolution, fundamentally, focuses on us. That's the primary, immediate goal of exporting the revolution. Eventually it'll go everywhere, but it, this immediate moment is about us. We have allowed Iran, the Revolutionary Guards, to be 80/20, this person said, on exporting the revolution. And we have not actually exacted the kinds of internal domestic costs or dangers, we, the West, allies, anyone in the Middle East, that would actually force their bandwidth to return domestically and not spend their entire time building out these proxies, building out these capabilities, and preparing this permanent low intensity war that they expect eventually to destroy us. And so, yes, absolutely unquestionably we face a moment where a serious war is at hand. The frustrating thing for me is that we have tremendous strength and agency, and we have not used it. The good news of the last three weeks, and I really can't emphasize enough how good news it is. I have been a little bit frustrated, tremendously frustrated for quite a few months, and you and I have talked about this with the sense that Israel was reactive and not initiating and not seriously tackling this great threat in the region, it looks like Israel has made a strategic decision, and that strategic decision that it has made has been either we now disrupt capabilities leading us into this war, or the enemy brings us all to a war it planned, prepared for, thought about carefully, and on its own terms, schedule, and, and with its entire logistical apparatus intact. And so we are now going after this circle of enemies that are all really essentially one enemy. And we're going after them in a serious way. And the more we can do to pull Iran out from behind that, the shadows and the curtain that they're hiding behind, the more we actually limit the war. Some escalation is to Israel's benefit. If it doesn't go all out and actually become devastating. No escalation is to Israel's tremendous detriment and danger because it means Iran sets the schedule and Iran sets the level of destruction at every turn. I'll give you a specific example. We bombed the Hodeidah port under the Houthis in Yemen. That was a devastating response to 220 missile attacks on Israel. The Yemenis have shut down shipping to Israel from the south. The Eilat port has gone bankrupt. But we can afford Eilat's port to bankrupt itself. The Houthis can't afford for Hodeidah not to ship the few tens of thousands of daily barrels that it was shipping. That's their main source of foreign currency in a country whose currency in a piece of Yemen, whose currency is not usable in the foreign international markets. So we cost the Houthis a devastating cost, but the main reason we bombed Hodeidah Port, the oil port there, was as a message to Iran because Bandar Abbas is closer, Iran's main export facility, is closer than Hodeidah Port of Yemen. And Gallant said that practically explicitly. He said the entire Middle East is watching Hodeidah Port burn. The Iranians convinced us we have no choice. And so everyone's worried about the danger of what Iran can do escalation wise. I think it's time for the Middle East to worry, I say this very hesitatingly because this is a government like 70% of Israelis I don't fully trust, if this government is doing what I think it's doing. And if all of these things that you laid out for us, are a sign of what is to come rather than a one-off, you know, show of force without strategy behind it, then the Middle East should be more worried about what Israel's capable of than what Iran is capable of.
DS: Let's talk about Israeli readiness for war with Iran, and the IDF’s readiness, is we've talked about on this podcast in the past, both with you and other guests, the entire military doctrine going back to Ben Gurian and the founding of the state was predicated on when Israel fights wars, it should mostly be fighting away games, not home games. Meaning even if Israel's attacked the war needs to be moved from right off and outside Israeli territory as quickly as possible onto other countries, territories, sovereign territories, A. B, not fighting wars anywhere near, I guess it's the first part of the doctrine, uh, Israeli civilian population areas, and C, short wars, short, quick, rapid, that Israel does not have the capacity to do what the US does in virtually every war. It fights even wars, it loses as I saw firsthand when I was working for the US government during the second Iraq war, where I watched the Pentagon move 150,000 troops halfway, you know, 8,000 miles away from, you know, across the globe. Set up a whole with these bases, one of which, which I worked at, at CENTCOM and Doha at Camp As Sayliyah, which is the the ALU data air base just outside of Doha and Qatar. I was just stunned when I showed up there in February of 2003 with, you know, it was like a city was built around this us base to accommodate these tens of thousands of American military personnel. The U.S. has this capacity to do this. Israel has never had this capacity to do it. And there was never planned to have this capacity to do it. And suddenly Israel is in the kind of war it's never really been in since at least the war of independence, which is, 10 months in, in Gaza, multiple fronts opening up, again, as we're talking about signs of a possible regional war. Is the IDF ready to fight a war against Iran?
HRG: As you said, there have been these intertwined doctrines, some of them have by Ben Gurion. Some, one of them called the Begin Doctrine, no nukes anywhere in the Middle East except Israel's undeclared nukes, allegedly according to foreign sources. I haven't seen the nukes, but you know, in Israel, they're a big state secret that everybody knows about, apparently. We only fight away games, we fight fast, and we don't allow nukes in the Middle East. And our enemies have therefore built out a strategy that is essentially the opposite of those three things. Forcing the fight onto our territory, both in the south and the north, that was fundamental. And it's two decades, at least on Hezbollah's side, it's at least a decade and certainly a little bit more in the planning. Forcing the fight onto Israeli territory, forcing long wars that are costly. We are a small country, a small population, a small economic base, incredibly successful and prosperous, but nevertheless small. We can't sustain these kinds of things forever and ever. And forcing a nuclear standoff. Iran, according to the IAEA, now has the fissile material for 15 bombs. We're no longer asking how long it'll take it to develop that amount of material, can it launch it yet? Can it put together a bomb yet? We don't know. Presumably not, possibly yes. Iran is trying to challenge us on all these fronts, and the question is, does Israel now know itself how to counter a strategic environment, a strategic conundrum that is the opposite of everything that its own basic fundamental doctrines have been for decades and decades and decades. Look, the very fact, okay, that we now live in a world in which we have to face the exact kind of war our entire strategy for decades has been premised on not fighting, is a signal of our success. It's not that they didn't try fast wars of maneuver in the desert with tanks. They did. It's not that they didn't try terrorism. It's not that they didn't try, you know, all kinds of home games and slow wars and all these other things. We were able to prevent it. We have destroyed two Middle Eastern nuclear programs over the decades. And now we face an enemy that did nothing but build itself to not be the thing that we know how to deal with, and so now we have to face this new strategy. The irony of our success is that it drove the great enemy that we face today to shape itself to the things we haven't yet faced, and we have to build out an answer. And if we can't meet it they have discovered the way to defeat us over time. And so we have to meet it, and we have to find new doctrines that serve this new kind of enemy. The army started the Gaza War without a good idea of how to fight it. And the army today has shown that it is capable of defeating everything Hamas can lay, every trap, every problem, every tactic that Hamas has thrown at the Israeli army over the last 10 months in Gaza. The army has met and defeated. And as a learning organization, the State of Israel, its security services, uh, have proven to be astonishing. The killing of Haniyeh, the killing of Shukr, all these different operations.
DS: The killing of Deif, that to me is really extraordinary. This guy has been impossible to find.
HRG: Right. The other piece to it, and I want this to be part of the answer, but I have no idea. And I turn to you, Dan, and people like you and in your orbit to, to find out. We face these enemies. If we face them alone, then we have tremendous capabilities, but nobody has any idea if we can do it. We don't, I think, have an idea if we can really pull it off. But if we face it with allies, I think there's no question. Do we have that strategic depth?
DS: So if you look at the maximum pressure campaign that we saw during the Trump administration, and even the, some of the very important sanctions that Congress passed, Before the JCPOA and the Obama administration, when you've seen periods of pressure put economic, mostly economic, and diplomatic isolation campaigns unleashed on Iran, they have had some effect in slowing Iran down. And in some cases, which the Obama administration, the one thing they got right, although I didn't like the outcome, those efforts did help bring Iran to the negotiating table. We're in a new world now. This is different. The idea that we can look at 20, the period sort of between 2015 and 2020, and say, we need to go back to that. I think that's over. Iran has made the decision to activate proxies, to escalate the path to a regional war in the region, and to accelerate its nuclear program. Like those three things are happening and they're happening right before our eyes. And oh, by the way, they're happening in close coordination with Moscow and Beijing. Those three countries, Iran, Russia, and China's interests are all aligned here in reigning in American hegemony, especially in the Middle East. So we are not in the 2015 to 2020 period or 2012 to 2020 period. We are in a new period. Iran is on the move and America needs to think about this. It's not just, oh, can we slow Iran down? Oh, can we de-escalate the possibility of a war between Israel and Iran? This is America's problem too. Now what that actually means is a conversation for another day operationally. I just can't imagine Israel can make the decision to go to war with Iran without America fully involved. Now what is fully involved with me? I'm not saying American boots on the ground. I'm not saying maybe American boots in the air. I mean, I, you know, quote unquote. But the way America has supported Ukraine in the war against Russia, which is getting Ukraine the military capabilities it needs, often too late, by the way, parenthetically. But getting Ukraine the military capabilities. training Ukrainian military forces in constant touch with Ukrainian leadership, rhetorically supporting Ukraine's case and Ukraine's defense. I don't believe that would be sufficient in a war between Israel and Iran in terms of America's support of Israel comparable to America's support of Ukraine. I think America will have to be more directly engaged and so again, I just think we in the United States here and you and Israel need to rethink that. Because that violates in many respects as you're alluding to the nature of how Israel thinks about itself It's on defense and the US Israel relationship. I will say separately but it's connected to this, I think right now the US government is sending very mixed messages. If you look at, uh, President Biden spoke to Prime Minister Netanyahu last week, the readout from that call clearly leaked by the White House was to convey that Biden was, you know, finger wagging at Netanyahu and telling him that this, these moves against Haniyeh and Shukr and other steps Israel's taking that you and I are, are applauding here are escalating into a dangerous place. And blaming the Israelis for this situation. And I think that is highly, highly irresponsible. If that is actually what transpired on that phone call between Biden and Netanyahu, and that the administration went a step further and leaked it out, as they seem to have done to Barak Ravid at Axios. I think that is very dangerous, because it sends a message that the U.S. is opposed to these moves that Israel's making. And that if things do spiral out of control, the The U.S. will blame Israel, which is exactly what everyone from Sinwar to Khamenei to Nasrallah want. They want Israel to be blamed for the escalation. I will say, Haviv, what blows me away is that every step of this war since October 7th, the U.S. has, at times, sometimes very aggressively, sometimes sort of passively, warned Israel against the strategy Israel was pursuing. In most cases, not all, but in most cases, Israel has gone forward with the strategy they wanted to pursue, and Israel proved right. The U.S. warned Israel at the front end of the war, learn from our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, these are difficult wars to fight, you're going to have ten times the casualties that you anticipate, or that you're forecasting. The U.S. was wrong. The casualties, every casualty in the war in Gaza since October 7th has been horrendous. They've been a fraction of what the U.S. government, the U.S. Biden Administration had forecast. The U.S. said you can fight this war, but you can't go all the way to Rafah. There's a massive civilian population in Rafah. You have no plan to get them out of Rafah. And there's going to be massive, massive civilian casualties when you try to fight the war all the way to Rafah. Israel went to Rafah, they waited too long in my view, and I think it caused real damage for the war, but they went into Rafah, and they did it only after moving about a million people in a matter of ten days to a different part of Gaza, despite the administration saying you won't be able to do it, and if you do try to do it, it's going to take you three to four months. They told Israel not to respond to Iran launching 300 projectiles in Israel, on Israeli sovereign space in the middle of April, which if 10% of those projectiles had broken through the multilateral and multinational defense capabilities that stopped them off. 10%, if 5% had broken through, it would have been a catastrophe for Israel. So Iran had to have known they were risking imposing a catastrophe on Israel and the Biden administration tells Israel, take the win, don't respond. Can you imagine how Israel would look right now in the region if it did not respond? And one of the prescriptions that the Biden administration and specifically President Biden has given Israel in not doing what it's doing in Gaza is you can do targeted operations. You don't need a military presence in Gaza. You don't need to fight the war the way you're fighting it. You can basically leave Gaza and then when you need to go in and out and take out a particular targeted operation here and there, you can do it. And that will a impose less wear and tear on your own country, in your own military, in your own population, and it will impose fewer casualties on Gaza's civilian population. Well, let's look at what Israel did in Tehran, assuming Israel did do this operation in Tehran. They took out Haniyeh in the most targeted way one could imagine. They didn't blow up an entire neighborhood. They didn't blow up an entire building. They had a bomb planted in one apartment, in one building, that took out one Ismail Haniyeh, and I think a guard as well. And that's it. It's the most targeted operation you could imagine. It's really more targeted than I've seen anything the U.S. do in, in recent years. And yet, The U.S. is angry at Israel for having taken that step. Isn't that exactly what the U.S. had been saying Israel should be doing and the kinds of operations it should launch? So if the United States is saying Israel can't do that either, what the U.S. is saying is Israel can't do anything. Just think of the scenarios I just walked through. Every one of those, the U.S. had a problem with, and when Israel does something that is in line with what the U.S. had been prescribing, it gets criticized for that too. So I am very concerned about the message this is sending to the region right now. Now, that said, just to be balanced here, my sense is based on folks I'm talking to, the Pentagon has been very strong. The Pentagon, the Pentagon bureaucracy has been very strong in working with Israel, as has CENTCOM. I think the CENTCOM commander is in Israel right now or is about to arrive in Israel. Secretary Austin actually has been quite good in getting Israel what it needs. So the machinery is working. But the messaging is horrendous. And I worry about what the me the message that the messaging sends to the region. And I think that in and of itself has the potential to escalate things. So I am very concerned about the U.S. right now in this exact moment.
HRG: I got to tell you, to face this enemy, to understand that complete non escalation is the enemy's strategy. And so there has to be some escalation to exact cost from the enemy for the strategy. That is, emptied Israeli towns, emptied Israeli cities, killed Israelis, destroyed Israeli infrastructures. There has to be a cost, or it will continue forever, and this is the new normal, and if this is the new normal, we are losing. And so there's going to be an escalation, and if the best the Americans can muster at the political level, is mealy mouthed failure to communicate any serious strategy of any kind. It created a sense in Israel of sort of flightiness and incompetence, which is not a good sense to create in the Middle East if you're America and want to be treated as America and want to want to have want to be able to influence things without conflict, you need to have people believe that you're fundamentally competent and serious. And so a lot of the stuff you're saying, it really hurts America's standing and it hurts America's capacity. Biden said to Hezbollah or to Iran, ‘don’t’ and then they did, they did all the things he said ‘don't’ about, and now what? Well, if there's no response, if there's no cause, don't say don't, because then you just undermine yourself. Better to look disinterested than incapable. I believe that we deal in this discussion with worst case scenarios. In other words, Hezbollah can launch tens of thousands of missiles and destroy the Israeli electric grid, ideally for Hezbollah. Everything less than that is Hezbollah's incompetence, serious Israeli responses, and preparation. We have to assume there's going to be some incompetence and some serious Israeli response and preparation. After taking out General Zahedi in Damascus, right, which was the trigger for the Iranian missile attack, that's the Iranian Revolutionary Guard General in charge of Syria. And Lebanon, he's the man who gives the orders to Hezbollah to bomb Israeli cities. We took him out. After that, and then that missile strike that then failed to penetrate the missile defense systems, Iran looked vulnerable and incompetent. And now it has to prepare a response, which by the way, I think will take quite some time. I might be proven wrong in the next two hours, but everyone's expecting it on Shabbat. Everyone's expecting it on Sunday. Everyone's expecting it on Monday. It might take a little longer than that, just because they can't have it look ridiculous like the missile strike looked back in April 14. And so we have enemies that have proven themselves to be much less competent than our worst case scenarios that we're banding about and preparing for would suggest. I think Israel can fight these enemies. I think it'll be terribly painful. I think a serious intervention with all kinds of non kinetic capabilities by Western powers, especially and primarily, always the United States, will prevent rather than cause more escalation. If Iran thinks that Bandar Abbas is going to be destroyed in a serious altercation, it will not enter those altercations. It doesn't believe that, and it's right not to believe that. The Israelis might destroy it, nobody else will. And so it's terribly frustrating to me because the incapacity of the West to understand that Israel has been placed in a position, it's very nice for Joe Biden to say, don't escalate. Joe Biden doesn't have towns and houses destroyed, and he's not holding back the military. Well, most Israelis want to end the war in Gaza, mainly out of distrust of the government. Most Israelis want to go to the war in Lebanon, because the alternative is to let them for 10 months demolish our cities without a response. So here's the thing. We don't have a hundred different options here. Our enemies are not leaving us a hundred different options. This is the escalatory problem Hezbollah is encountering. Hezbollah has this amazing strategy it's planning. Back in June, I know you talked about this on the podcast, back in June Hezbollah, Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, gave a speech in which he said, Cyprus, if you enter this war, we're going to go to war against you, Cyprus. And everybody started scratching their heads. What, why is Hezbollah suddenly declaring war on Cyprus? And the answer was the Hezbollah is preparing a massive drone strike on Israeli Air Force bases to prevent the Israeli Air Force from being able to launch and operate in a preemptive strike, or even in a response to a Hezbollah escalation to take out the Israeli Air Force from the battlefield is a major goal of theirs. And so the Israeli Air Force has an entire battle plan with which it trained earlier this year or last year with Cyprus. To land in Cyprus and conduct operations from Cyprus. Now, does that mean Hezbollah, at Iran's orders, is going to now go to war against a European Union member state? Is that really a Hezbollah plan? They believe that scaring the EU into believing that that's a potential scenario is enough to keep the EU out of the game. And so that tells us so much. It tells us, first of all, that Hezbollah is preparing for a full on war in which it needs to destroy the Israeli air force because it intends to actually create vast costs on Israel that Israel cannot afford, and it means that it is willing to telegraph that fact out there to the West, and it means that it believes that the West will cower and run away. I don't know what more Iran has to do to countries that frankly, nobody cares about, like Syria, like Lebanon, like Yemen, before the world takes seriously the massive destructive capacity of this regime. But this situation now, in which America and Europe cower in fear and incompetence, and the enemy feels they can march in this way across the Middle East and destroy us, in its own good time, in its own slow and steady pace, that is not tolerable. We have reached a point where we have concluded that they haven't left us options. Our only option is to call their bluff, in the hope that they're not calling our bluff. And that we actually have the capability to see this through.
DS: Haviv, just wrapping things up, one question, if Israel's headed for a regional war with Iran at the center of that regional war, isn't that what Sinwar wanted all along? Is to catalyze the region on fire? Does he ultimately win?
HRG: Yes, that was the strategy. That was the goal. They built the battlefield. They built the strategy. They, uh, Sinwar intended, Haniyeh himself said it out loud, the destruction of Gaza to draw Israel in, in a way Israel could not avoid going in. And the only way to get to Hamas was to go through cities, hoping that that would catalyze regional war. In Gaza, the pain was tremendous. The cost to Palestinian civilians was tremendous. The cost to Israel is quite high. And it looks at the moment like we're going to succeed. Certainly, Hamas is worried that we might be succeeding. What's good for Sinwar might not necessarily be good for Iran. Sinwar wants a regional war. Massive costs on Israel right now to save Hamas, to make his own sacrifice and his own strategy of the destruction of Gaza pay off in some significant way. Iran was doing great. Iran was building capabilities steadily. Iran was preparing the destruction of Israel in slow, steady ways that had exacted almost no cost from Iran itself. And so by forcing the issue, Sinwar forces a regional war. It's exactly what he wanted. It might be the thing that saves Israel, because if we can pull off a victory now, or at least an Iranian failure now, which is not identical to an Israeli victory, but nevertheless is a big deal, that's a failure, an Iranian failure that might not have been an option for us ten years from now when Iran had built much more in terms of capabilities to destroy us. So yes, we have to fight a war they started on their terms, and we have to win it. Or at least not lose it.
DS: Last question, Haviv. I know we're talking openly and kind of loosely about the possibility of a war with Iran. May not happen. God willing, it won't happen. But it's hard to forecast not only a war with Iran, but what the outcome of a war with Iran would be. But what's your sense about what Israelis need to see at the end of a war with Iran?
HRG: What is an Israeli victory in a war with Iran? That we're still standing and safe when the dust settles, that's it. That's victory, because what's Iran's goal? Our destruction. So that a tremendous advantage of only having to survive flips to our side in this particular scenario. The dangers for Israel are enormous and we are focused on them. And it is correct to focus on them. But the dangers to Iran are astronomically huge! I think part of the reason that the Iranian axis and all of its various allies, including Hamas, thought that that kind of protest movement and kind of political divide weakens us and leaves us tremendously weak, is that those kinds of protests within Iran would be a desperate threat to the regime. They would be about toppling the regime. They would be about changing the fundamental political order. But they didn't notice that the protesters in Israel carried Israeli flags everywhere they went. That the demand was over a debate over the powers of the Supreme Court to limit the parliament or whether or not the parliament should have other powers or who exactly has checks and balances. This was not an anti regime protest movement. This was deep, deeply a fundamental culture war debate about the structure and nature and purpose of Israeli democracy. And so when the war came. They were astonished at the closing of the ranks and how every failure of every state institution to take care of the displaced or of of the wounded was made up for by the very activist organizations founded to protest the government suddenly became military units instantly. So I submit to you that every pretend strength that these tyrannies that stand against us claim in us are real strengths, and that all we have to do to win is survive.
DS: I hope you're right. I have to think more about that before the next time we speak, because two things may be true. It may be a failure for Iran, for Iran to have a war with Israel, and Israel still standing at the end of that war. I take your point. It also may be a huge problem for Israel that at the end of that war, Iran's regime is still intact. Iran's military, however damaged, is still intact. Iran still has the capacity to support proxies in the region, and its program for doing so is still intact. And that its nuclear program is not more than just a little delayed or experiencing a moderate setback. The question for me is, from Israel's perspective, is if Israel goes for, through a war that is ugly and bloody and imposes enormous pain and suffering and casualties on Israel at the end of it, If the Iranian regime is still intact, with all those capabilities that I just summed up still basically intact, even if damaged, I'm not sure it's such a win for Israel.
HRG: You're right. The kinetic answers are disastrous. And we may survive, and we may inflict massive costs that even win us 20 years of quiet. They're too far away. We're too far away. We're hopefully too powerful. They're definitely too big for a kinetic war between these two countries to be the thing that solves the problem once and for all. Ultimately, it's political. Ultimately, it's about regimes. Ultimately, it's about international pressure. I wish there was an international community that could swing into action and act. But there isn't one so far.
DS: There isn't. So, yeah. Alright, Haviv, we will leave it there. Thank you, as always. And, uh, look forward to being back in touch soon.
HRG: Thank you, Dan.