The execution of six hostages - with Haviv Rettig Gur & Wendy Singer
Over the past 24 hours we learned the devastating news about Hamas’s slaughtering of 6 hostages. The families of two of these hostages – Hersh Goldberg-Polin and Carmel Gat had been guests on this podcast over the past few months.
The news of these executions followed news in Israel last Thursday of a heated debate within the security cabinet over a clause that the prime minister had introduced – to be voted on – into the negotiations over any final deal. Some critics are arguing that the introduction of that clause was part of a pattern that doomed the negotiations. Last night, hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets to protest – among other things – these moves by Israel’s Government. Others inside Israel are arguing that the principles that the Prime Minister is establishing in these negotiations are necessary conditions for Israel to defeat Hamas and prevent another October 7th-like war being launched (at least from Gaza).
This is the debate happening inside Israel right now. To better understand each of these positions we had a conversation on Sunday morning with Haviv Rettig Gur from the Times of Israel from Jerusalem.
But before we listen to the conversation with Haviv, we want to play for you a conversation I had late at night Israel time on Sunday night, with Wendy Singer, a Jersusalemite who is part of the Goldberg-Polins' community in Baka, their neighborhood in Jerusalem. In the days ahead, we’ll hear from others connected to those six hostages murdered.
Wendy Singer is an advisor to several Israeli high-tech start-ups, including Re-Milk — https://www.remilk.com/ Wendy was the executive director of Start-Up Nation Central since its founding in 2013 — https://startupnationcentral.org/ Previously, she was the director of AIPAC’s Israel office for 16 years and served in AIPAC’s Washington office before immigrating to Israel in 1994. Earlier in her career, Wendy was a foreign policy advisor in the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives.
Haviv Rettig Gur is the political analyst at The Times of Israel. He was a long time reporter for the Times of Israel. Haviv was also a combat medic in the IDF where he served in the reserves.
Full Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
DS: It's 12:15 AM on Monday, September 3rd here in New York City. It's 7:15 AM on Monday, September 3rd in Israel as Israelis start their day, a day that will be filled with funerals. Over the past 24 hours, we learned the devastating news about Hamas's slaughtering of six hostages. The families of two of these hostages, Hersh Goldberg-Polin and Carmel Gat, are friends with whom I had been in regular contact since October 7th. They were also guests on this podcast over the past few months. It's all soul crushing. The news of these executions followed news in Israel last Thursday about a heated debate within the Israeli security cabinet over a clause that the prime minister had introduced to be voted on by the Security Cabinet into the negotiations over any final deal for hostages. Some critics are arguing that the introduction of this clause was part of a pattern that doomed the negotiation. Sunday night in Israel, hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets to protest, among other things, these moves by Israel's government. The critics and the protesters argue that these moves are dooming the prospects for the Israeli hostages. Others inside Israel are arguing that the principles that the prime minister is establishing in these negotiations and with this security cabinet vote are necessary conditions for Israel to defeat Hamas and prevent another October 7th-like war from being launched, at least another October 7th-like war from Gaza. This is the debate happening inside Israel right now. And to better understand each of these positions, we had a conversation on Sunday morning with Haviv Rettig Gur from the Times of Israel. He joined us from Jerusalem. But before we listen to the conversation with Haviv, we want to play for you a short conversation I had late at night Israel time on Sunday night with Wendy Singer, my sister. She's an advisor to Israeli high tech companies like Remilk, but she's also a Jerusalemite who was part of the Goldberg-Polin’s community in Baka, their neighborhood in Jerusalem. In the days ahead, we'll hear from others connected to those six hostages just murdered. So we'll hear from Wendy and then from Haviv on the execution of six hostages. This is Call Me Back. I'm now welcoming my sister from Jerusalem, Wendy Singer, who has been on this podcast before to talk about life in Israel as an Israeli since October 7th when I was visiting with her, what was really just a few months into the war. Now we're coming up on a year and Wendy wears many hats, including in the startup world in Israel. She's joining us as a Jerusalemite tonight and not just a Jerusalemite, but as a neighbor of Hersh Goldberg-Polin’s family in Baka, a neighborhood in Jerusalem. We see Rachel and Jon all over the media and as major figures on behalf of the hostage movement internationally, but we rarely get a window into their lives, which I've gotten through you, Wendy, and through Rachel and Jon, their lives in Baka, which is what I wanted to talk to you about. Wendy, can you talk a little bit about the last 24 hours in Baka, in this wonderful, cozy, dynamic neighborhood in Jerusalem that you have been a part of for a number of years. Our mother has been a part of it for a number of years. Your daughters have grown up in. And Hersh Goldberg is from.
WS: The neighborhood of Baka is a residential neighborhood in southern Jerusalem. There's about 13,000 people in the few square miles of this area. And it's a combination of residential. There's a couple of more commercial streets, some bakeries, some boutiques, very diverse set of families, then professionals and students and people from other countries that have immigrated to Israel. And the Goldberg-Polin family live in this area. There's this synagogue called Hakhel, which is a liberal Orthodox community, again, right in the heart of Baka. And if you were to walk through the streets of Baka any time since last October, you would see many, many homes with these huge red posters saying, “Bring Hersh home.” You're really in the beat of the neighborhood. You already get a sense just walking around how much this whole community is signed up, is enlisted toward this struggle to bring Hirsch home.
DS: There were all these community events that you and I have talked about over the last 10 to 11 months in Baka around Hersh and around his family. And Jon and Rachel and I talked about that when I interviewed them for the podcast last April. I referenced one that you had described to me. Can you just give us a sense for what those were like?
WS: Well, let me just first say the Goldberg-Polin family had this remarkable team of volunteers that were literally managing this global campaign. And even as they were on a global stage at the UN in New York, at the UN in Geneva, at the DNC, at the rally in Washington in November, and even as they were out in the world engaging with global leaders, there was something uniquely local about this whole struggle. So if the team, the Polins, put out a notice, or if Hakhel, their synagogue, put out a notice, then hundreds of people in the community were ready to march, were ready to gather, were ready to sing, to lobby, to meet, to speak, to implore. And that is really what happened at all these different events that they planned in order to basically give a massive embrace to the family that's been going through hell. On Day 100, I remember telling you about this earlier this year, one of the nights of Hanukkah, it was a blistery, cold winter night in January, pouring rain and they organized a prayer gathering on the promenade overlooking the city of Jerusalem. And I will not forget what it was like to stand there huddled with a couple hundred people, again, raining, freezing. Day 100 did not have a lot of hope around it. And we were all just singing and praying. And I felt that even though it looked and felt so bleak, that there was a sense of warmth and light that was just emanating from this group of people being together. And the other one that stands out in my mind was actually a couple months ago, in June, when they organized a sing-along. It's called a “shira betzibur” in Hebrew, which is a public singing gathering where they announced to the whole neighborhood that there was going to be this sing-along at the train station in Jerusalem. It's this outdoor urban space. And they put up a screen with the words of the songs. Hundreds, a couple thousand people were pouring in. And Jon and Rachel were sitting there in the front row and this entire community was joined in song. Some of the songs were very sad. Some of them were uplifting, some of them were hopeful, some of them were about despair. But I just remember sitting there thinking, if all of these voices come together in one song then there's no choice but for this story to end well. And it didn't.
DS: There was a sense, Wendy, that I heard this from you, I heard this from so many people in the community, that I know that there was a sense that like Hersh could have been everyone's son in Baka. And it was just a matter of time before everyone would see Hersh in some future day bouncing around the neighborhood again when this horror show was behind us. Can you describe a little about that, that sense of connection everyone felt to this young man?
WS: Rachel and Jon, what they managed to do was to bring a phenomenally powerful story or a powerful message to life. The fact that Hersh had dual citizenship, and I know they really played this out so beautifully at their speech at the DNC a couple weeks ago, where they talked about Hersh was born in California, which is where VP Harris was born, and he grew up in Chicago. And he lived a life in Israel with very strong American roots. And it became a story that resonated just as powerfully with an American audience. They also had, when you talk about how they lit like a lightning rod around Hersh’s message, is that they managed to broaden the story about Hersh and who he was and his hobbies and his origins. And they also managed to keep a delicate balance between this desperate struggle for their own son and the other 200 and some hostages in captivity. And I feel that one of the most remarkable things that they did to bring that to the fore was to remind the world again and again that there are 33 countries represented among the hostages. Eight American citizens. And then Rachel would just say: there's Christians, there's Jews, there's Muslims, there's Buddhists. They're all injured, they're all starving, they're all struggling to stay alive in these airless tunnels. And somehow this family managed to keep this remarkable balance between the particular and the broader story. And the fact that it was so many different religions and ethnicities among these hostages. I think that Rachel, even though the whole family was mounting this global campaign, Rachel somehow became a symbol of not just the mother of Hersh, but this lioness that was both out in the world telling the story of how they're living on this planet of despair, this planet of tears, and then coming home to their local community and somehow letting themselves being enveloped in the community's embrace. I also think that what happened is that it was a multi-generational struggle in the neighborhood, in that you had grandparents that were involved in this struggle and you had 10-year-old kids. I ran into a friend named Jordana at the event tonight, which was the first of many I'm sure that will be in his memory, which was again, praying and singing with a couple of thousand people. So my friend Jordana said, ‘Yeah, in my son's school in the Old City, they were saying Psalms every single day in honor of Hersh and hoping that Hersh will survive.’ And her son just couldn't compute that Hersh didn't make it. And you heard these stories in the street tonight, again, when we were all walking to the Baka Community Center.
DS: Can you describe what this was?
WS: Well, tonight at the Baka Community Center, they decided to have a gathering of song and prayer just for the community to be together and to envelop the family with love, with support, with pain. Some of the songs were so painful in that all the other events, there was hope. And tonight, there wasn't hope. Tonight was about pain. It was a couple of thousand people. You couldn't even get into the gate of this outdoor space. It was prayer. It was the evening prayer. And then it was singing these very moving songs. The one that I find very tough is called Acheinu Kol Beit Yisrael, which is about how all of Israel are united and we're all praying to God to be saved and to be redeemed and to be brought home from captivity. And it's painful. I have to say at one point I was texting with our mutual friend, Tal Becker. And I was mentioning to him that it was just hard to breathe because it was just so, it was soul crushing to have the whole Goldberg-Polin community together in one space and to have this be the end of the story. And Tal texted me back, he goes, ‘Yeah, it is hard to breathe. We mourn, we grieve, we hold the pain. We also remember that we are an eternal people and we love each other.’ And I think that Tal's text captured what happened this evening in Baka.
DS: Broadening out the perspective here out of this place called Baka, there were questions throughout the day today about whether or not there'd be protests erupting in a significant way. And it is now close to midnight on your end. We will let you go to sleep soon, Wendy. How has that story developed throughout the day in Tel Aviv and also around the country?
WS: Look, a few days ago, we had five bodies that were found and brought back to Israel of five hostages. And today there were six. And in the background, you have this drumbeat of this almost, maybe yes, but no hostage deal, which I know you and Haviv talked about extensively. And something in the Israeli public today was unglued in a way that I haven't seen in all these months of protests. Since this afternoon, you've had Be'er Sheva, Haifa, Rehovot, Ra’anana, Eilat, Karkur, Jerusalem, and in some cities, in some intersections, in great numbers. So I think that there's something that has lit up a new level of pain, of abandonment, of anger that has caused something to shift in the street. And then when they announced that there was going to be a general strike starting tomorrow morning, I think one kept feeding into the other. And so you have these pictures of the demonstrations at all these different locations and we don't yet know where it goes. So we're going to have to see how that plays out in the coming hours. But does feel like that in light of the six bodies that were discovered, the fact that the news reports are saying that those hostages were executed somewhere between hours to a couple of days before they were found by the IDF was just too sharp a reminder for the Israeli public that this could have ended differently. I know that, Dan, one thing that I want to end with, because I know that one of the more powerful scenes from the gathering tonight in Baka was at the very end, the whole community stood up and sang Hatikvah, the Israel national anthem. And I know that the same thing happened in Tel Aviv. 100,000 plus people that were there, they also stood up and sang Hatikvah. And I think that that's just a reminder if there's Hatikvah, the song of hope, the national anthem at the protests in Tel Aviv, and there's Hatikvah at this memorial gathering in Baka, that really the thread there reminds me of something that was spoken in a eulogy at the funeral of Ben Zussman, who was one of the soldiers that fell in Gaza several months ago. And his mother gave this incredibly painful eulogy and at the end of it she just said this story has to have a good ending. So I'm just going to leave you with that.
DS: All right, Wendy, we will leave it there. I will talk to you tomorrow. Not on this podcast, but–
WS: Daily check in.
DS: Thank you for taking the time really tonight.
WS: No problem, Dan. Take care.
DS: And now here's my conversation with Haviv Rettig Gur.
And I'm pleased to welcome back to this podcast someone I've been having an ongoing conversation with since the earliest days, including the day after October 7th, Haviv Rettig Gur, who joins us from Jerusalem on what is a very dark day. Haviv, hi.
HRG: Hey, Dan.
DS: I want to start with you telling us what you know at this point about the retrieval of the bodies of the six Israeli hostages from Gaza and the circumstances of their death. And I know that the information is fast moving, so details are still emerging.
HRG: We started getting the first details, they were becoming public, mainly actually through rumors and social media. And then by late evening, we had the names from the army. The army hurried up to release the names because people were already sharing and all the rumors turned out to be true. Soldiers yesterday in a tunnel underneath Rafah found six bodies. They didn't expect to find them. They didn't have intelligence that they were there. They were making their way through tunnels that Hamas forces had fled as the Israeli forces advanced. And before they fled, which apparently took place roughly on Friday, there's an estimate of maybe 48 hours, so Thursday, Friday, before they were found that they were killed. I believe that's an estimate of the doctors who examined the bodies. Some of them have been mentioned. Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23. Eden Yerushalmi, 24. Alexander Lubanov, 32. Almog Sarusi, 27. Ori Danino, 25. That's five of them, all of them taken from the Nova Music Festival on October 7th. And the final one, 40-year-old Carmel Gat, she was taken from Be'eri. She had left her bomb shelter where her family was hiding. Her two-year-old niece had been sitting in this mammad, in this safe room in the house for, I don't know, a dozen hours. So she and the little girl's grandma, her mother, went looking for food and water. They risked leaving the bomb shelter and she was caught. The last thing she saw before being put on the kind of a golf cart on which she was taken into Gaza was the Hamas person shooting her mother dead. And they had been alive three days ago, four days ago. So they were found, their bodies were brought into Israel, their families were notified, and the country is now in deep mourning.
DS: The retrieval of those six bodies on Saturday took place two days after what, according to reports, was a very intense security cabinet meeting or full cabinet meeting, which very much dominated press coverage towards the end of the week going into Shabbat. Can you tell us about what we know from reports about what was happening in this cabinet meeting between this exchange between Netanyahu and Gallant?
HRG: Yeah, it was a very dramatic security cabinet meeting. There is tremendous and very intense and loud disagreement about what actually was said there and what it all meant. The basic story as we know it. Now, leaks from the security cabinet are illegal. And so they are, you know, by nature hard to pin down, hard to confirm and verify. They also haven't been challenged, not by Netanyahu's people, not by Gallant’s people. As far as I know, nobody has challenged what happened in the room. And it makes sense. It really is the disagreement we've seen between these men over the last nine months or so. According to the leak, there was a debate about the hostage deal and where we go from here. And the prime minister very suddenly ordered that a map of the Philadelphi Corridor, the border between Egypt and Gaza, where Israel is now digging to find tunnels and has already destroyed huge numbers of tunnels. And the destruction of those tunnels and really the cutting off of Hamas from that supply route into Egypt has really put Hamas in a bad place in Gaza. Netanyahu asked the cabinet, suddenly, surprising the army, surprising the defense minister, to vote on a map of where the army would remain in the Philadelphi Corridor in a hostage deal. That was not what the army had suggested, was not what Gallant wanted, wasn't the maps the army itself had presented and recommended, and was actually opposed by the heads of the security services. There are contradictory reports that we really don't know how accurate they are, that, for example, the head of the Mossad, the original leak said, was mystified about why the cabinet needed to make a public loud sort of vote on policy on Philadelphi now, when Philadelphi wasn't at the heart of the specific negotiations underway at that particular moment last week with Hamas or with the Egyptians or the Americans. And so it felt to him, he suggested, according to these reports, that the prime minister was taking a stand that would make it harder to negotiate and not actually taking a stand on the substance of the negotiations themselves. I think that the bottom line is that according to the leaks, it got heated to the point where they raised their voices. Netanyahu ordered the maps he ordered drafted brought in. Gallant said these aren't the maps the army had recommended or proposed or drawn up. The prime minister said, we're voting on these right now. There was a vote. The cabinet voted to approve the map, which essentially was the Israeli security cabinet saying, we are not leaving the Philadelphi corridor in any deal. And then Gallant is alleged to have said the prime minister can make any deal he wants, including a decision to kill the hostages. And that was a moment when, again, according to the leaks, the other ministers started attacking Gallant. Gallant's people, when they were challenged by reporters after the fact the next day, Gallant said difficult, painful things, but he wanted to clarify that this was a decision point. This was a moment where, if Israel could not agree to leave Philadelphi temporarily in the case of a deal, and the army insisted in the meeting and afterwards that the army knows how to go back in when it needs to, then there wasn't a deal. And so we were literally voting on the hostages dying. According to these leaks, the quote from Gallant was, all my life I was taught, and I myself taught, that you don't leave the wounded in the field. And he said, this is a clear decision point. This is a six week deal that afterwards we retain the right to return to fighting anywhere in the Strip, including Philadelphi, just like after the last deal. But this is the decision point. And again, according to these reports, Netanyahu replied, we're going to stay in Philadelphi even at the cost of no deal. That was a blunt, direct back and forth between the two men on exactly the fundamental question. And Netanyahu put it all on the table and Gallant put it all on the table.
DS: From the perspective of the Israeli public, big chunks of the Israeli public are taking to the streets. This is a very intense moment. From the perspective of the Israeli public, what is the significance of the sequence of these two events, of the cabinet meeting you just described as we understand it and the details of the execution of these six hostages as we understand it. The Israeli public sees in the sequence of these two events what?
HRG: I think Israelis are asking themselves two questions, asking many, but two questions on the specifics of this duality of a cabinet decision not to leave Philadelphi, not to present a deal that some in the security services, or even I would say most of the heads of the security services, think is a viable deal Hamas is likely to accept, and Netanyahu arguing it's just not worth it if we leave Philadelphi. So there's a question on that debate, right? Israelis are saying, what is the cost and should we? And then there's the question also of trust and of intentions. And what does it mean if the government is willing to leave those people to die? To die in tunnels in Gaza? What does that mean for Israel? What does that mean for Israeli society? The trauma of October 7th, it wasn't simply the death toll. It was the sense among Israelis that they were helpless. They couldn't get it together to save them. And that is such a fundamental piece because of Israeli history and because of where they come from and the refugee experience that built this country. It's such a fundamental piece of our understanding of who we are and that feels violated. So when Netanyahu argues, and his defenders argue, and there is a serious substantive debate and we can and should get into it, but before the substantive debate, the emotions and the intensity of the emotions around it are because the very argument that there are costs we won't pay to get our people out feels like a violation of that deep ethos and that sort of fundamental sense of who and what we are. What does it mean that we can't defend those people or rescue those people or get to those people? There's no question that Hamas is the perpetrator. But if this government leaves them there, is the government also to blame, also guilty, also at fault? And that's a lot of the language and a lot of the intensity and why you're starting to see a lot of people going to protest. There's been a lot of protests in the last couple of days and also, or certainly today, and also you're starting to see a political moment that might turn out to be a watershed, a pivot. An hour before we started recording, the National Labor Federation declared a strike. It's not 100% clear on what, what the demand is. That the government offers more to Hamas? But it certainly is clear that it has a lot to do with a deep sense that this government is leaving Israelis to die and what that means for this country.
DS: And the last time there was a strike of this scale that's being organized was in March of 2023 at the peak of the debate over the judicial reform. So can you just describe what that was like, that moment, because that was considered quote unquote “the nuclear option” of the Israeli workforce, at least the public workforce, just shutting down the country, which sounds like, again, as of when we're recording this, that that's about to happen again. So can you just describe what that looks like.
HRG: Yoav Gallant, almost alone among Likud leaders. There were a couple others that expressed reservations with the judicial reform, usually not the substance, usually the political fallout and the damage to the country as they saw it. People like Nir Barkat or Yuli Edelstein. But Yoav Gallant came out openly and publicly on the eve of the passage of a piece of the reform in the Knesset. And he said, this is hurting our deterrence, this is hurting our military posture, this is dangerous for the country, and this needs to pause. And Netanyahu declared that he was firing him. And that act of firing the defense minister ignited what had already been, since January, a massive protest movement against this reform, which its opponents saw as a massive destabilizing of checks and balances in the country. Supporters, of course, saw it as weakening a very, very powerful court that was unhealthy and overbearing. But nevertheless, the other side, and the other side had grown over the course of the two months from January to March. A lot of people opposed the reform because they thought it was a threat to democracy. A lot of people, including on the center right, opposed the reform just because it was causing so much political havoc and was advanced in a way that seemed to them very irresponsible. And that all came to a crux in that moment when Netanyahu fired Gallant, and suddenly hundreds of thousands of people literally within hours were in the streets. The National Trade Unions had gone on strike and the National Manufacturers Association, the representative body of the unions and the company owners, the factory owners were both declared on a strike. The Ben Gurion airport closed as part of that strike. And Netanyahu retreated. And in fact, the vast majority of the judicial reform basically froze, I would say died, but saw there are some efforts to bring it back, but froze on that day. I'm not sure that that's going to happen, but I am absolutely sure that there are powerful forces in Israel, including the trade unions, that want to recreate that moment that are specifically aiming for that outcome.
DS: And in terms of the polling, the public polling, what do polls in Israel tell us about the public support for a hostage deal as we understood it before this Philadelphi clause was reportedly added on the Israeli side.
HRG: The simple answer is a majority support a deal, a large majority. But when you ask people, they don't quite know what's in the deal. It's not a specific – you know, the negotiations have dealt with a dozen different elements and questions and things. Can Israel return to fighting after or is it only an end to war or there's no deal? That's something that Hamas has moved on. Israel demanded the Philadelphi Corridor. You leave out these details, which are fundamental and really important, but you leave those out and you just say, do you support a deal? There was a Friday poll just two days ago on Channel 12 that asked, “Do you support or oppose the hostage deal discussed at the Qatar summit?” And it was 63-12. 63% support the deal, 12% oppose, 25% don't know.
DS: Yeah.
HRG: So the support is again, overwhelming. The support isn't just on the center left. The support is huge. And even among the right that don't support it, they don't oppose it. The right ‘don't know’ is double the size of ‘opposed.’ And so there's no question that Israelis want a deal that gets the hostages back. But there's still a question of what price they're willing to pay.
DS: Okay. And I mean, if you pair that with the earlier part of this discussion about what was happening at the cabinet meeting, to many Israelis, there was the sequence of these two events, the cabinet meeting and then the bodies of the six hostages being retrieved. The way it's being interpreted is, you know, fairly or unfairly, the way it's being interpreted is that there was this presentation of a new clause for the deal that Israel has to stay in Philadelphi, in the Philadelphi Corridor. And then six bodies were pulled out of Gaza. So that, to many Israelis, the prime minister was sabotaging the deal. Now, he may have been sabotaging the deal for, as many are characterizing it, for his own political survival, but there are merits as to why Israel should stay in Philadelphia, which we can get into. But I just wanted to get a sense of how it's being played in many corners in the US media and it's being reflected in these public protests. That is the sequence. There was a path to a deal and then it was upended.
HRG: Back in October, Yoav Gallant, the defense minister, made an argument, and it was the government's argument until very recently. And the argument was that massive military pressure would bring out the hostages. Hamas will hold them and hold them and hold them until they have no choice but to let them go to survive. Otherwise, they will just raise the cost infinitely high, right? They'll take the Shalit deal as an example, a thousand to one, or even eleven hundred to one, and they'll never come out. And massive military pressure worked very quickly. That first entry of the Israeli ground forces that Hamas didn't expect to happen in November worked. And then nine months went by and the army was kind of paused for many months in Gaza. And then up until May, there was massive pressure not to go into the Rafah area by the Biden administration. And the government basically caved to that pressure. And then in May, possibly because of domestic political pressure to do so, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich saying, the far right of the coalition, saying they'll leave the coalition if Netanyahu doesn't move. The army did begin once again to carry out just massive pressure on Hamas. They went into Rafah. It began systematically demolishing the tunnel systems under the Philadelphia corridor. Hamas could no longer rearm. It could no longer have that oxygen of being able to flee, of being able to resupply. And then you started getting from Hamas new offers and new ideas and a new willingness at least to discuss. And everything seemed to be going the way that the original theory, right? Massive military pressure will get out hostages, that original theory had dictated. Thursday was an astonishingly profound watershed moment in this 11-month debate in Israel. Because on Thursday, Gallant, who had been saying massive military pressure would bring out the hostages, then came to Bibi and essentially told the cabinet, reading between the lines of the leaks of what happened in the cabinet meeting, but essentially told the cabinet, we've done it. We put in the massive military pressure. The cost is now down, Hamas needs this, the cost is now down to something we can pay, now we get the hostages out. And there are sentences that came out of there like Galant saying, these people, what are we doing? These people were taken out of their beds, right? In other words, this is our responsibility. This is fundamental, we have to do this. And Netanyahu, appearing to people like Galant, who have said the massive military pressure on Hamas, a major point of the war of that pressure was to get those hostages out. And suddenly Netanyahu is adding new demands, is creating new things that make it impossible for Hamas to negotiate. Not impossible, just in the simple sense that Hamas now has no interest. In other words, if Israel doesn't leave Philadelphi, then Hamas needs those hostages held close to save the last leaders at the last moment, right? There's no interest anymore. Opening Philadelphi is something that Hamas deems as valuable and existential. Anything else Israel just no longer has anything to give if it can't leave Philadelphi. So in Gallant's experience and in the experience of huge numbers of people now going to protest, what Netanyahu basically did was, as the pressure built up and was becoming successful, raise the cost higher and higher and higher to make sure that that deal, as they see it, to make sure that that deal didn't happen. So that's an arc that these people feel proves. And that's the talk over the weekend among, I don't know, 60, 70% of Israelis. We have some polls on this that give us hints that it's at that, at those levels. And we can detail the polls, but the proof that to these people's minds, Netanyahu is just trying to get away from a deal. He doesn't want a deal.
DS: So, Haviv, we're going to present both of these arguments. Let's start with the one that you laid out on October 8th. I mean, one could argue an extension of what you said on October 8th is the prime minister adding the Philadelphi clause. There was a rationale to it because the price of retreating from Philadelphia in exchange for the hostages is on a path to losing the war.
HRG: Okay. Let me try and defend and lay out Netanyahu's currently, according to polls, very unpopular position in a way that I think he and his people would do so because it is a very serious argument. The Philadelphi corridor is fundamental to making Gaza safe for Israelis, frankly, for, Palestinians won't be impressed by me saying this, but for Palestinians. If Hamas still rules Gaza, the day after this war, whenever that is, that is worse for Gazans than it is for Israelis. And without Philadelphi, you can't do it.
DS: So Haviv, just briefly explain why Philadelphi is so central to Hamas?
HRG: It's not complicated. You cannot defeat a guerrilla force that can escape the battlefield at will and can resupply freely. That's probably why for a lot of Israeli military planners, Hamas looks defeatable, eminently doable. Hezbollah does not. Hezbollah, there is no way to surround Hezbollah and cut off its supply routes. So people who think seriously about what do we do with Hezbollah are starting to look at Iran, starting to look at hitting other frameworks, escalating so that you can de-escalate. With Hamas in Gaza, because you can close Philadelphi, you can actually choke Hamas and you can begin to seriously dismantle it in that way. That's, by the way, the terrible tragedy. People who agree with Netanyahu have this piece of criticism at the government and not just Netanyahu, also at the army. Why didn't we go in earlier? If choking Hamas means taking Philadelphi, why didn't we go into Philadelphi five months ago or eight months ago? It's not clear why. Maybe we didn't realize. Maybe we relate to the sort of understanding that maybe we thought the fighting there would be very costly. We moved from the north to the south, systematically taking territory. Maybe we were afraid of Egypt and the US stepping in and pushing us out with massive pressure.
DS: To be clear on that point, Haviv, both the US government, the Biden administration, and the Egyptian government were strongly, strongly resisting Israel going that far south. I mean, that was the basis for Israel holding back for almost three months.
HRG: Right.
DS: You know, in early to middle 2024 from going into Rafah when it was clear that the government wanted to go in.
HRG: There was also a suggestion that I have to say I can't verify, but just to give a sense of the complexity, that maybe we wanted Hamas to smuggle some hostages out toward Egypt or something because we might have good intelligence on the Egyptian side and that might have been seen as a way to capture signals. The point isn't that we know exactly why we didn't go in. It might have been three or four of these factors all at once, but the discussion about why we didn't go in is a discussion being had by people who are saying now we can't leave,and it's a shame it took us this long to actually hold the place. And then you have the army's response, right? The army has answered, including in the cabinet meeting on Thursday night, we can take it. Herzi Halevi said specifically, we can move in, back in any time we want in any place we want in Gaza. People around Netanyahu are arguing the opposite. People around Netanyahu are arguing that it's actually not so easy to move back into a territory you have given up, right? When the Oslo process was advancing and the PA was taking hold and developing large security services, defenders around Rabin and Peres would say things like, the IDF can take the West Bank in 24 hours if it needs to. When 140 suicide bombings started blowing up in Israeli cities beginning in the fall of 2000, the IDF took a year and a half or something like that, Defensive Shield was a very long, drawn out, painful invasion of civilian cities. It actually was incredibly difficult and vastly costly for Israel and of course for Palestinians. So this idea that you can easily reverse it. If you're out of, you know, Philadelphi for three days, you could probably go back in very easily. What if you're out for three months? What will Hamas have been able to accomplish on the ground? What tunnels can they have dug by then? What bombs can they lay? So it's not at all clear that you go in as quickly and easily. This is something that when Sharon pulled out of Gaza in 2005 and Barak pulled out of Lebanon in 2000, you heard similar kinds of things where they said, we’ll restore Israel's deterrent ability if they attack us. We can go back. So there's a lot of skepticism that we can go back in. And this, by the way, came up in the meeting explicitly when the security chief said, we can go in whenever we need to. Netanyahu was reported to have said, but this isn't a military question, whether we can go back in. It's fundamentally a diplomatic, strategic one. And therefore, explicitly saying, and therefore my decision and not your decision, it's not a professional military question because the pressures on us will include massive diplomatic pressures, which are not something you deal with or have experience with.
DS: Meaning it's Netanyahu who's the one who's got to deal with the US administration if the US administration were to threaten withholding munitions supplies if Israel goes back into Philadelphi or whatever maybe that's not what the security leadership is going to have to deal with. That's what the prime minister of the country is going to have to deal with. He's the one dealing with a Biden administration or a Harris administration or whomever on these issues.
HRG: Right. You can't degrade Hamas without taking Philadelphi. You can't go back into Philadelphia without massive costs once you pull out. And so the degrading of Hamas may require holding Philadelphi at all costs. That's the argument. And it's, you know, the fact that the head of the army thinks that we nevertheless can afford to pay this cost doesn't mean he's right. The head of the army was as wrong about October 7th as Netanyahu was. You know, he did not expect it as much as the civilian leadership did not expect it. There was no benefit to the great military expertise of the military very, very recently in a very big tragedy. The political system, serious people not playing Netanyahu's politics, are primed to think that maybe pulling out of Philadelphi is a lot more dangerous than the security chiefs are saying at the moment.
DS: And specifically, Haviv, issue of Hamas assuming they can extract a very high price from Israel for the return of Israeli hostages.
HRG: Right. So that was the, we'll call it tactical question of Philadelphi. And then there's the much longer term question. The Shalit deal in 2011 didn't just release 1100 to 1. The Shalit deal in 2011 released the entire command superstructure that built, planned and carried out October 7th from Sinwar on down. And so there is a direct line between that deal and the catastrophe of October 7th. And it is not possible to forget. What do we do now? What do we do now when we know Israelis are going to die? And the last time we knew that and it moved us to action, we created the enemy. We gave the enemy the capacity, the strategy, the understanding of our weaknesses that produced a vastly, vastly larger, three orders of magnitude larger tragedy for us. So do we now do that at an even larger scale? Do we confirm that taking Israeli hostages– if we confirm to our enemies that taking Israeli hostages, even if you're our weakest enemy, which Hamas is, can take Israeli hostages and then have us at their beck and call, why would Hezbollah not then build out that strategy to do that in 10 years? So we are inviting the next horrific tragedy on a larger scale. That's the argument about you have to lower the value of Israeli hostages and not raise them for future hostages, for future lives that won't be taken. It's awfully hard to make an argument about future events you're preventing when you're watching people die in front of you. But it's not less serious or reasonable a position just because it's hard to see.
DS: Assuming this argument is correct, that the price of hostages has to be lowered, or at least that has to be considered, how does one think about the acceptable price? I mean, and I'm getting into a deep philosophical question, not just a strategic or tactical question. It's almost like a halachic question. I mean, how do you think about the price of a hostage? And then maybe beyond the scope of this conversation, but what does that actually mean that Israel has to change the way its enemies think about how Israel values the lives of hostages in the crush of a real-time security event.
HRG: How do you make it not worthwhile to kidnap Israelis? That's the question. Assuming you can't solve the conflict, right? There's going to be voices from certain foreign, you know, left-wing audiences are going to say, well, solve the conflict and end the conflict, have a Palestinian state and a Jewish state and everybody's happy and there's no worrying nobody will ever get kidnapped. Let's assume that's not on the table. Okay? Blame whoever you want. Solution to the conflict is not on the table. Militarily, strategically, tactically, how do you make it not worthwhile to kidnap Israelis? Step one, exact a massive cost from any organization, any terror group that kidnaps Israelis. Step two, or maybe the step zero, make the other side understand that they're not going to benefit. There's a cost and there's a benefit. The benefit will be lower and the cost will be higher. And those are two sides of the very same coin. You have to lower the benefit and raise the cost. How do you lower the benefit? The only way to lower the benefit is not to pay any price, not to pay a high price. It's so simple. And then when you have to do it, it becomes infinitely complex. Because what does that mean? What are the prices you won't pay? I think that the serious argument on Netanyahu's side is essentially the argument at this point that thinking about it as how many convicted murderers in an Israeli prison we're going to release for each hostage, which is the way generally it's talked about, is not the right way to talk about it. The major thing that Israel needs from any hostage deal is safety for Israel, for Israeli society as a whole. And so military advantage is what you're buying in a hostage deal alongside the hostages. And so we'll sign a deal, but we have to make sure we keep Philadelphi. We'll sign a deal, but we have to make sure we can go back into Gaza after the six weeks or whatever it is. The basic idea is you don't measure the cost by a one to one, or a ten to one, or a thousand to one. The number of people released is secondary. The most important question is the strategic safety of the State of Israel. And therefore, that's now going to be our focus. You haven't really seen the government negotiate intensely on the numbers, at least not publicly. It's not something that people feel a desperate need to know how many we're releasing in exchange for how many we're getting. I think there's no question today among Israelis, we have polls on this, there’s no question today among Israelis that the Shalit price was unreasonable, actually astonishingly bad and dangerous and with terrible consequences. But then you're right, then the question becomes, well, what is a valid price? How much is it okay to pay for these hostages to get them out? And I think we're still steelmanning Netanyahu, right? I think that the basic idea is that it's not actuarial. It's not three to one, seven to one, fourteen to one. It's not a numerical question of how many, you know, I don't know what convicted murderers in an Israeli prison you release in exchange for these hostages. The basic fundamental question is what's the Israeli bottom line for Israeli security? What makes Israel safe? And there, things basically go pretty bad for the hostages. And that's the tragedy of the Netanyahu position. People who advance the position say it. There is a case, for example, the last big demand of Netanyahu that in the end was accepted because the army really was closing in and choking Hamas in Rafah. But the last demand was, we will not accept that after stage one there's no return to the war. That red line Hamas presented, we don't agree to. So there's no deal. Well, that red line apparently was lifted. Hamas wants a deal, at least it wants a deal of certain conditions, but they don't include that red line of ‘war’s over, Israel can't go back in.’ Israel can go back in and America knows it and says it publicly. And then Netanyahu brings out this Philadelphi question and he a little bit ambushes the defense establishment in the Thursday cabinet meeting with a sudden map and a sudden vote. Now, you can argue the politics of it are disastrous or terrible or dishonest, everybody distrusts Netanyahu and this is why and all that kind of stuff, but on the fundamental military question, if we're steelmanning the argument, without Philadelphi you don't destroy Hamas. Never mind hostages, what about soldiers' lives? Soldiers who have to, for the next year, degrade Hamas in a guerrilla counterinsurgency war, in Gaza, where Hamas can resupply through a Philadelphi Israel doesn't control, will die at levels that might reach the number of hostages. And if we control Philadelphi, that could be a much lower number. If we control Philadelphi and Hamas is weakened for it, how many fewer Palestinian civilians die? Because those battles have to be much smaller and those battles can actually be more directed and more precise and they can't control buildings or lay that many IEDs in the middle of civilian areas. So there is that case for Philadelphi and the cost, I think, has been converted from that actuarial kind of question to a fundamental question of national security.
DS: Okay. So now I want you to present the other argument that the events of the last few days prove that the prime minister is sabotaging the negotiations because his coalition will fall and he will be out of office. What's the basis for that argument?
HRG: The argument that Netanyahu is guilty and he has no logic that can support him. And you know, what's interesting about it is this is an argument made on the center left, but a lot of the specific elements of it, you find a tremendous agreement even on the right. The basic argument is the reason the army took so long to get where we are now is Netanyahu's weakness in decision. There was American pressure, so we stopped moving. Then there was Ben-Gvir-Smotrich pressure, and then we started moving. It was a constant response to pressure. Well, that's why Netanyahu doesn't believe we can go back into Philadelphi. Because he doesn't want the pressure of making that decision three months from now or six weeks from now to be on him. That's not a good enough reason. We sign a deal, we get out for six weeks, we can go back in, there's some costs. We get 30 hostages out, the humanitarian, that's the humanitarian group as they're called, which is women, the wounded. It was supposed to include Hersh, it was supposed to include Carmel. And the idea is we get them out, we give up Philadelphi, we retake Philadelphi in six weeks. There's tremendous international anger and pressure coming down on Netanyahu and for the first time he stands up to it. Netanyahu has this big selling point, this big marketing campaign that says, ‘I am going to stand up to the Americans. I am going to make sure we win. I am refusing to cave.’ But it's only when Ben-Gvir and Smotrich force him. When they don't force him, he caves a lot and constantly and in fact is not the guy who stands firm. And if you don't listen to him, if you put him on mute, he actually is responsible for many, many of the failures and disasters of recent years. And so the idea is twofold. One, if Gallant is right in the cabinet meeting, and we can do this and we can go back in, and this is the last chance to get them out alive, because Hamas is on the run, and if it doesn't think it can sell the hostages for some moment of breathing, a lifeline, the hostages are either useless to them or only useful to them at the end. And so they're not going to give them up, and they might kill them all. And so this is the moment where you decide Philadelphi or the hostages’ lives. And we can go back in if Netanyahu is the man he should be and not the man he is. That's the basic frame. And there's another piece to it, which is the very idea that Hamas can hold its ground and make demands 11 months into the war. That makes the government more at fault for failing to bring to heel the weakest of our enemies. What are you saying? Why is Hamas still standing and able to make these demands? Right? It doesn't see itself as defeated. That's A. Or it understands the critical need of Philadelphi and it understands that Philadelphi will make or break the war. Now you could make that an argument not to pull out, but you could also make that an argument for why we definitely will go back in. Over the last 11 months, you were asked and I was asked all of the chattering classes talking about this war were asked, can the Israelis really go into Rafah against Biden's pressure? Can the Israelis continue the war, back in November, after the seven-day ceasefire for the hostage release. And all of us answered, of course. What are you, crazy? You think we're not going in? Please don't think we're not going in, because you're going to misunderstand everything that's happening. Well, that applies to Philadelphi going forward as well. So we can go back in. There's no reason to put Philadelphi on the table now. There's certainly no reason to say, now at this decision point where, as Saturday night's discovery of the bodies really reifies, really drives home, this is the moment where we decide if they live or die. And now to say, I will not be strong enough, which is how it sounds to his opponents to make the decision in six weeks, therefore they die means you have to go. You are not the man who can run this war and you're not the man who can save our people.
DS: Okay. Haviv. It's hard to evaluate these various arguments and issues inside Israel right now without also factoring in, as we've alluded to earlier, the US role. The US government, the Biden administration, has been pushing hard for this deal, A. And B, for many months, the US was effectively preventing Israel from going into Rafah when Israel had some military momentum much earlier in 2024. And we now know that there's a reason why Hamas didn't want Israel in Rafah, because that's where a lot of the hostages were. That's where a lot of the war was being commandeered from. So can you talk about the US role on both of these fronts?
HRG: Right. Well, as we said, it's fundamental to the question because Netanyahu's argument that it will be harder to return to Philadelphi than the high command of the army believes or than Gallant believes has a lot to do with the potential American pressure that will come, that will be brought to bear, possibly no matter who wins the election, but certainly arguably if the Democrats win the election. And so the American logic is a big question here. It also plays in how Israelis understand Netanyahu's culpability because if you believe that Netanyahu is standing as firm as possible, doing the best job possible, if it had been a Gantz prime minister, or Lapid prime minister, or a Bennett prime minister, or any other kind of contender for the prime ministership, instead of Netanyahu, then Israel would have caved more. And therefore, we need Netanyahu, and Netanyahu is telling us it'll be too hard to go back in because of diplomatic pressure, trust me. If you think that the reason Israel froze in Gaza in the face of that American pressure was because Netanyahu was weak and that in fact if Netanyahu had bucked that pressure, the Americans would have gone with him. And that therefore Netanyahu is the very problem, then you don't trust his argument that we can't give up Philadelphi for six weeks and you don't believe his reasons for letting the hostages remain in Gaza. So the American pressure question is really important. And I think a lot of Israelis have been very frustrated by it, right? To the Israeli view, the strategic analysis, but even for very ordinary people, to argue for the deal, but also to pressure Israel to slow down are contradictions. Because Hamas needs an interest to give up hostages, to give up leverage. And that interest is massive military pressure. It wants that to stop. But if there isn't a massive military pressure because the Americans are stopping it, why buy it with hostages? And so there's a contradiction and I would even say a confusion to how the Americans have been trying to come at this from different directions and a prime minister in Israel that has not stood up to that pressure, this according to his critics, as much as he should. And then Israel is paying a terrible price, both for the American confusion and for the prime minister's failure in that regard.
DS: Ok Haviv, wrapping up this conversation, where's the Israeli public on these two arguments that we laid out?
HRG: Right. Good question. Unfortunately, pollsters don't work for me, which is something that for years I have lamented. So they don't ask the specific question I want them to ask. But we have good polling that contains very strong signals in this regard. The question that I want to ask, and I'll say what the polls actually tell us, the question I want to ask is, do you think Netanyahu believes his own argument? And do you think Netanyahu's argument is correct or sufficiently coherent and reasonable to risk pursuing at the cost of hostages' lives? And on the other side, if you don't believe in Netanyahu's either motive or capacity to actually pull off a war strategy that would be victorious in the war, what do you think should happen? How bad is it? In other words, how much do you distrust Netanyahu? How much is mistaken and how much is malice? And how do you frame that? And the long and short of it is the news is not good for Netanyahu. First of all, he, since January of this year, has been recovering about one Knesset seat in polls every month. And so he was below 20 seats for Likud. There are 120 seats in the Knesset, but if he doesn't go above something like 25 and drive his whole coalition slightly higher, maybe three seats higher, six seats higher than it is now, he can't win the next election. He hasn't really won a poll that I haven't seen. I haven't seen every poll, but I've seen most for about 18 months now since judicial reform began. And October 7th only dropped him further. But the Likud party has actually been gaining, it's probably gained six seats in the last six months, something like that. And really it's very, very steady and very, very slow. There's a slow process of forgiving, of forgetting, of moving on in his base. But the general public is still deeply opposed. So for example, we talked about support for a hostage deal or whatever was presented at the Qatar summit. This is a poll from Friday, 63% support the deal, 12% oppose. In as much as now Netanyahu is coming out more and more clearly, lowering the cost of hostages, raising the price for Hamas of a deal to the point where deals become a little less likely or arguably much, much less likely. That seems to favor the opposition over Netanyahu. But then Channel 12 this weekend asked two really straightforward questions. Do you believe that Netanyahu should run in the next election or that this should be his last term? 69% of Israelis said ‘last term.’ 22% said he should stay and run again. Now, that means that most of his coalition does not want him to run again. And then they narrowed it down to the coalition voters. Do you believe that Netanyahu should run in the next election or that this should be his last term? 46% said this should be his last term, of coalition voters, of voters of the right wing, religious parties and Likud. 46% said it should be his last term, 43% that he should run again. So my takeaway, most Israelis want a deal. We have old polls that show levels reaching 70% in some cases of Israelis who just don't say they trust Netanyahu. They don't believe what he says and they don't trust his intentions. And now he's trying to ask Israelis to sacrifice and do very painful, very difficult things and he has a trust deficit that's making that very, very difficult to do. And if his argument is correct, then that trust deficit is tragic. And if his argument is incorrect or not actually honest, then the trust deficit is fully justified and doubly tragic. But at the end of the day, not even inside his own coalition does he have a majority of people who hope he sticks around. There's an exhaustion with him. There's a sense that certainly the last five years of Israel has been Israel stumbling from one tragedy and disaster and kind of collapse to another. And that's a kind of discourse you hear not among the protesters. That's a kind of discourse you hear in Shas, in Likud, in the mainstays and base of his power.
DS: Okay, Haviv, just in wrapping, where do you think things go from here? And I know you don't have a crystal ball, but just what's your sense based on your feel for how things are going as we're recording this?
HRG; We still haven't absorbed any Iranian retaliation for the killing of Haniyeh, assuming that was Israel. The North is still unpopulated, almost. And we are not focused on Hezbollah, which is a much larger and more serious threat. And we are having political fights about Gaza that are as much fights about trust as about actual policy, because we don't trust our leadership. I'm going to say this very, very simply. There is a very serious, thoughtful policy case, tragic and painful and agonizing though it may be, for Netanyahu's actual policy arguments. But there's not trust. In war, the government has to demand sacrifices. You can't do it without trust. And then Netanyahu, who lied about Gantz, the rotation deal, and Netanyahu, who just systematically over the years lied to just about every coalition partner you ever had, to the point where on the far right the campaigns are, he’s lying to you, vote for us and we'll force him to stay right wing because if he could he'd go anywhere he wants.’ That's the Smotrich-Ben-Gvir campaign in the last election. A man who isn't trusted can't ask a people to suffer when they don't know why they're suffering and don't believe him when he tells them. The Labor Federation may go on strike, the country may shut down, Israelis expect a war in the North. I should say, I think it's reasonable to believe that a war with Hezbollah would be much, much more difficult, that we can defeat Hamas and it's not clear that we can defeat Hezbollah. And so that's a war that has to escalate to Iran if we have any hope of having a strategic impact and actually shaping the end result of the war. Israelis think that Gaza can't be won at high levels, about half and half. It's a number that, depending on how you ask the question, changes. Sometimes it's 70-30, sometimes it's 60-40 the other way. Give or take, the country is evenly divided between whether Israel can win this war in Gaza. Israelis are very optimistic, 80-20, that we can win against Hezbollah. And I just think it's because we haven't been slogging through Lebanon for a year. I don't want to slog through Lebanon for a year. But if we have to be called upon to face that larger conflict, we need a government with trust. I don't mean this as a partisan statement. I don't think Likud should be kicked out of power. There's a great front bench in that party. There's a great front bench in just about every party in parliament. A man who isn't trusted is a man who can't make these decisions and can't make these demands of Israelis. I don't think we move forward in a significant way and achieve what we need to achieve in this war. I just don't know how it's accomplishable without fundamental public trust that this current prime minister doesn't have. So, we're going to slog and we're going to suffer and we're going to fight and bicker about all the wrong things until we have a political reckoning. And when we have that political reckoning and there's a surge of trust in government, again, as you saw at the beginning of the war, which Netanyahu then lost because he played politics, and as you saw in other governments in the past, then we can accomplish everything we need to accomplish. We can face down Iran. We can not just fight in Gaza. We can find a solution, a regional solution that rebuilds Gaza and we can make hard decisions.
DS: Okay, Haviv, we will leave it there. To better days ahead, but I have a feeling we are in store for some pretty rough days ahead. But thank you always for your insight and your time.