Making Sense - Sam Harris - #422 — Zionism & Jihadism

00:00:00.000 I am here with Haviv Retigur. Haviv, thanks for coming on the podcast.

00:00:25.660 Thank you for having me, Sam. It's good to be here.

00:00:27.340 We were just talking offline that we could be interrupted because you were in the middle

00:00:33.220 of a war. It's got to be intense over there. We scheduled this podcast some weeks before

00:00:39.080 Israel struck Iran, and we had too much to talk about even then, but now we have the current 0.98

00:00:46.160 front in the war to talk about. Let's just jump in. Many people will be aware of your work because

00:00:53.280 you have been, to my ear, the most eloquent spokesman and journalist covering what is

00:00:59.600 happening in Israel, both factually and just the moral logic of the war in Gaza. How do you

00:01:07.700 summarize your work as a journalist at this point?

00:01:10.220 First of all, thank you. It's an honor. I have had two hats. I've been a professional

00:01:17.540 working journalist since 2005, but I had this side hustle as a history teacher, whether it's

00:01:24.680 in English for American college students visiting Israel I've spoken to. We once estimated something

00:01:28.960 like 8,000 of them over the last 15 years and Israeli pre-military academies and other informal

00:01:34.180 frameworks. And when the war happened, something very strange happened, which was that I have these

00:01:39.840 lectures online. I have these lectures that some colleges put on YouTube, and they went insanely

00:01:44.920 viral. And suddenly everybody really, there was this hunger for the deep explanations. Nobody here is

00:01:52.800 stupid. Nobody here is a moral cartoon, even if some Westerners insist on making us so, whether Israelis 0.99

00:01:58.100 or Palestinians. And if you can give that story that Israelis and Palestinians and different kinds of

00:02:03.420 Israelis and Palestinians actually think they're living in, people find that extremely, extremely 1.00

00:02:07.380 valuable. So I think that's what I'm trying to provide. It's more teacher than journalist, actually.

00:02:13.360 Or maybe it's what journalism should be at its best. I don't know. It's certainly what I think is my

00:02:17.880 goal. And can you remind me, why is your English so perfect and unaccented? What's going on there?

00:02:24.880 Are you an AI that has perfected the simulation of human speech?

00:02:31.260 I keep trying to convince people it's Mossad training, but nobody believes it. No, half my

00:02:36.640 childhood was in the States because of my parents' work.

00:02:39.080 Wait, which half?

00:02:39.980 I went to high school.

00:02:40.760 What years were you in the States?

00:02:43.020 Something like ages 9 to 18, something like that.

00:02:45.900 Okay, great. Well, let's start with Iran. Ultimately, I want to talk about the war in Gaza

00:02:53.080 and the pervasive misunderstandings about it and really just the pervasive misunderstanding about

00:02:59.980 Israel's role in the world, place in the moral order of civilization at this moment. I mean, I have 0.74

00:03:07.040 not been shy about linking the fate of Israel to the fate of Western civilization in its contest with 0.96

00:03:14.580 Islamist theocracy. So I do view Israel, I mean, obviously Israel is fighting its own war, but 0.98

00:03:23.080 I think it's also fighting a much larger war for the West. It's even beyond the West. I mean,

00:03:29.960 really a war for open societies and liberal democracies. But we'll get back to that. I mean,

00:03:35.880 those topics are unfortunately evergreen or virtually evergreen. But let's start with the up to the

00:03:43.720 moment uncertainty about what is happening with Iran and what sort of assistance Israel is likely to

00:03:51.320 get or not likely to get from the U.S. at this point. What is the state of the operation in Iran

00:03:57.500 as you currently understand? And I should say we're recording on Tuesday morning Pacific time and the

00:04:04.960 17th of June. Yeah, Haviv, give me your sense of what's the current state of the Israeli operation

00:04:10.460 in Iran and what is Israel expecting the next steps to be both its own and coming from the U.S.

00:04:17.380 But there are two ways to answer that. There's the immediate, the five days of war that we've

00:04:21.220 already seen. And then there's the 20 months of war against the various proxies that Iran built

00:04:26.580 out essentially for this war, and they're no longer available to it. So I'll just zoom in on those five

00:04:31.420 days and then we can expand out to 30,000 feet if that's useful. But the war began five days ago on

00:04:38.160 Thursday, Thursday night, so I guess Friday morning. And it was a culmination of decades of unbelievable

00:04:46.420 competence and planning and the building of entire, you know, their factories on Iranian soil run by 0.60

00:04:52.980 Mossad operatives, building drones that then took off at the moment at each hour as the Israeli planes

00:04:59.760 were overflying Iraqi airspace and took out a lot of launchers and a lot of Iran's ballistic missile

00:05:06.100 capabilities. Iran's great threat to Israel in this kind of immediate kinetic war is its missile fleet.

00:05:12.060 It has thousands and thousands, or arsenal, I should say. It has thousands of missiles.

00:05:15.340 And they target our cities and they've caused some damage in our cities already.

00:05:20.200 But the great bottleneck for Iran, the Israelis understood very early on, and that has been sort

00:05:24.740 of the foundational strategy for Israeli defense is not even the missile shield, which has actually

00:05:30.920 performed fairly well against incredibly big, incredibly heavy, fast-moving, long-distance

00:05:36.380 ballistic missiles, but it's the launchers. They have a bottleneck of launchers. They have thousands

00:05:41.100 of missiles, but they don't have thousands of launchers. And so if you can keep destroying

00:05:44.720 launchers, if you can keep forcing them to deploy new launchers out of their hiding places and find

00:05:49.180 them, the Israelis very early, immediately, almost immediately, took out Iranian air defenses, what

00:05:54.400 was left of them after the November operation, last November, and gained air superiority over Iranian 0.97

00:06:00.640 airspace and have been just flying around Iranian airspace, tracking down those launchers while

00:06:05.380 taking out many, many of the strategic assets of the Iranian revolutionary regime. That includes

00:06:11.860 the chief of staff of the IRGC, and then four days later, his new, the new, his replacement,

00:06:17.280 the new chief of staff of the IRGC. It includes almost the entire leadership of the IRGC air force.

00:06:23.200 It includes so many of the military advisors and people around the supreme leader. It includes

00:06:27.900 the people in charge of the response of the missile command, of all the things that Iran needs

00:06:33.640 to actually manage a serious counter to the Israeli war, to the Israeli attack. And it's astonishing.

00:06:40.860 It's astonishing. There are technological achievements here that America needs to learn

00:06:46.420 from. For example, Israeli planes carrying missiles. Missiles borne by planes don't usually

00:06:53.440 go ballistic. In other words, they shoot point to point. You point it at something and they shoot at

00:06:57.120 it and they can sometimes track and sometimes not. But Israeli missiles, in order to increase the range

00:07:01.520 of F-15s, which don't have the range to take off from Israel and fly all the way to Iran.

00:07:05.800 So Israel has created missiles for these planes that, when they launch, they go up higher into the

00:07:11.560 sky and then they glide down. They use a ballistic trajectory to massively increase their speed and

00:07:18.020 still manage to very precisely target. Israel has put missiles on the wings of F-35s, which are not

00:07:24.220 designed to carry missiles on those wings. So it's an air force of such astonishing competence and innovation

00:07:30.320 that it's stuff Americans can't do with their own equipment, is what we've seen in this operation.

00:07:35.140 And the sheer brazenness of such a massive Mossad presence. I think one just last point, one of the

00:07:42.180 really fascinating things to come out of it is, what explains the Israeli penetration of Iranian leadership

00:07:49.400 to the point where Israeli intelligence actually engineered a meeting of the top command of the

00:07:54.580 general staff of the IRGC Air Force in order to bomb that meeting. So they made sure that everybody's 0.87

00:07:59.260 schedules were cleared and they could all come to this meeting and they were all invited by the right

00:08:03.020 people to this meeting. And this meeting took place in a place where the Israelis actually engineered 0.90

00:08:07.280 the meeting to take place. And the answer seems to be that lots of Iranians, I know this is a shocking 1.00

00:08:14.580 thought, don't like the regime. And lots of pieces of the regime are set against the rest of the regime

00:08:19.620 and lots of minorities in Iran. It's a country that's only about 60% Persian, really hate Persian 0.96

00:08:25.400 rule over them. And so you have all of these, it's kind of an old multi-ethnic empire in that sense,

00:08:32.160 or the old model of the Ottomans or the Austro-Hungarians. And the Mossad knows how to make profoundly good

00:08:37.200 use of that. And so Israel's full capabilities of a competent state are on display. And this shocking

00:08:43.520 incapability, the incompetence of the Iranian regime that has managed to frighten the world 1.00

00:08:50.160 from the Obama administration to the Arab world for decades, turns out to be the paradigmatic paper

00:08:57.340 tiger. How do you explain how deterred the U.S. in particular has been by Iran all these years? I 0.98

00:09:05.940 mean, I view Israel at this moment doing what America should have done many, many years ago and 0.99

00:09:12.340 perhaps could never accomplish with this skill. I mean, you know, in some sense, you know, I worry

00:09:17.940 about the degradation of our own competence by comparison, but it's also, there's been a degradation

00:09:23.300 of our, almost our moral competence. I mean, we, Israel is doing something, I understand that this is

00:09:29.680 an existential threat to Israel and nuclear armed Iran in the way that it isn't for America. But to my 0.84

00:09:36.100 eye, America has been deterred in the face of Iranian belligerence for decades, it's almost as though we 0.90

00:09:43.460 have treated them like they've already had nukes. How do you explain our unwillingness, our unwillingness

00:09:48.680 even now, even now that you have cleared the skies over Iran and we, it would seem we could simply drop

00:09:56.740 our bunker busting bombs to end this, this story on a really, I think just two sites would require it.

00:10:04.560 How do you understand America's relatively prostrate position with respect to an endless number of

00:10:13.920 explicit challenges and even, you know, combat maneuvers on Iran's part? I mean, Iran was killing

00:10:20.600 U.S. troops in our various misadventures in the Middle East, right? And to my knowledge, we didn't

00:10:27.800 really respond to that. I mean, apart from our killing Soleimani back in the first Trump administration,

00:10:32.580 how do you understand America's posture here?

00:10:35.940 Even that killing of Soleimani caused a tremendous amount of pearl clutching among the good and great

00:10:42.940 and wise. I have to say, it's such a fascinating question, I suspect you'll be able to answer it better

00:10:49.140 than me. So let me give something much less than an answer, which is the Israeli experience of this

00:10:54.980 American motionlessness, this culture of motionlessness. Innovation and a willingness to be brazen and bold,

00:11:02.540 maybe because everything is at stake, is kind of the defining feature of the Israeli organizational

00:11:07.180 culture of the Israeli security services. So for example, the Pager operation, the entire debate around

00:11:13.880 the world was immediately a moral one. Is it okay to take out the 1,500 top people of a terror organization

00:11:18.980 or just an antagonist combatant in a war with almost no civilian costs? Or is in fact the fact

00:11:24.540 that a single civilian can be found to have died mean that the Israelis are just evil monsters still? 1.00

00:11:29.400 Was the stupid, genuinely just ridiculous debate that immediately was sparked by the Pager operation. 1.00

00:11:36.340 But consider the debate that should have been there was, and it was in some places, but not 0.99

00:11:41.420 sufficiently in the major media, was the astonishing brazenness of the, just the boldness of it.

00:11:47.300 There was a, according to reports from journalists who are in the know on these things, there was a

00:11:52.340 young woman, 30-year-old woman in the Mossad who had this idea, and she came to the leadership with

00:11:57.040 the idea, and she said, what if we could do this crazy thing? And the Mossad is a big bureaucracy.

00:12:03.380 But nevertheless, in the Mossad, from the top levels down, they said, let's put it together.

00:12:07.900 And so they pieced together the entire supply chain of a fake Pager company that then had to go build

00:12:13.000 specially designed Pagers to put explosives in them in ways that would only detonate at

00:12:17.260 the right moment. They had to actually develop, one of the most difficult parts of that operation

00:12:21.100 was to have the radio signal from within Lebanon, in very different parts of the country that are

00:12:27.220 not within radio reach of each other, go off at the same time. It was this enormous operation

00:12:32.340 from a Taiwanese supply chain all the way through radars, radios broadcasting on the ground.

00:12:38.740 And then you ask yourself, what would it take for the CIA to okay that kind of operation?

00:12:43.260 To find a group within the CIA willing to put it together and then launch it. How many things could

00:12:48.660 go wrong and who would take the risks to have something like that go wrong? The Israelis, after 1.00

00:12:53.800 the 2006 war in Lebanon and Gaza, where tens of thousands of missiles fell on Israel, rockets fell

00:13:00.360 on Israel, and there weren't enough bomb shelters, and there was no missile defense of any kind,

00:13:05.280 of any meaningful kind, for short-range rockets and missiles. The Israelis decided to fix that,

00:13:11.100 and they began to develop this idea of the Iron Dome, which is kind of technically equivalent to

00:13:19.380 shooting a bullet out of the sky with another bullet that you fire out of a gun. And the Iron Dome

00:13:25.420 concept went to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon actually told the Obama administration that it's

00:13:30.500 unfeasible. Physics doesn't allow for this to be done. And there were advocates for this,

00:13:37.220 whether it's AIPAC or in Congress. There were advocates in Washington that said, no, no,

00:13:41.120 if we can do this. In other words, we trust the Israelis to be able to pull off this technological 0.51

00:13:45.620 wonder. And enough people had enough of a leap of faith to actually, including President Obama,

00:13:52.280 to actually put the kind of money behind it. And one of the things that Obama bought with that money was

00:13:56.560 also co-ownership of the system and of the technology by the United States. In many, many ways,

00:14:01.940 Iron Dome is representative both of the motionlessness of America and of this massively

00:14:07.400 innovative kind of culture in Israel, because the Pentagon has a very hard time putting out R&D

00:14:13.840 tenders and just having new things developed, crazy wild ideas examined for their strategic

00:14:19.660 advantage in war. And so the Pentagon almost has begun to treat Israel as a kind of easy R&D lab that

00:14:25.820 sidesteps all of the bureaucracy of the American military industrial world.

00:14:31.100 You have very, very few military companies that are producing serious military systems.

00:14:38.060 There's not a lot of competition, and there's not a lot of courage in the bureaucracy

00:14:41.440 to pursue crazy ideas. And the same is true in policy. You go to the State Department,

00:14:48.360 and people are saying the same just inane, empty pablum that they've been saying for 30 years. And

00:14:54.560 that's how you get ahead. And nobody's willing to say something different, something a little strange,

00:14:59.280 a little crazy, something that risks sounding neocon one week, or a little isolationist another week.

00:15:04.340 There just isn't a real serious... Whenever we encounter... I don't come from the State Department.

00:15:08.880 I'm talking about people I meet as a journalist from the outside. But there isn't a culture of real

00:15:14.420 debate, real discussion. I think that the monocultures you see in American elite academia

00:15:18.940 is a similar monoculture that you see in American government. And so the Israelis are just out there to 1.00

00:15:24.520 win. And anybody who has a new idea, a good idea, is... And by the way, the Israelis also have

00:15:29.380 groupthink and catastrophic misunderstandings of the enemy. That's the story of October 7.

00:15:34.120 But there's also the capacity to do the opposite. There's the capacity to really go after new ideas,

00:15:39.600 crazy ideas, and try to pull them off.

00:15:41.580 So this operation was obviously years in the making. Why did Israel finally decide to act now?

00:15:47.740 I believe the official reason. It's not the only reason, but it is also a reason. Iran is nearing 0.99

00:15:53.760 weaponization. Iran is nearing the capacity to take the enriched uranium, which during the Biden

00:15:59.900 years, because there was zero fear that Biden would ever possibly pull a trigger on any kind

00:16:04.080 of military response, Iran just moved ahead to 60% enrichment, which is very, very close to

00:16:09.640 weapons-grade enrichment. And the weaponization program, the technology of producing a bomb and

00:16:16.200 actually putting it on a missile, was very, very advanced. The scientists Israel targeted in this

00:16:21.680 operation were not actually part of the enrichment system. They were part of the weaponization system.

00:16:27.080 And Iran was going to have nukes. And the other reason was the missiles.

00:16:29.740 You don't need necessarily a nuclear device detonating over Tel Aviv, 400 meters over Tel Aviv,

00:16:36.520 if you can drop 10,000 one-and-a-half-ton missiles with conventional warheads on Tel Aviv.

00:16:43.200 It would have the same damage to physical buildings. It would have tremendous damage

00:16:49.120 to people. Not the same, but nevertheless, tremendous. Iran was on a path to produce 0.75

00:16:55.200 massive numbers of missiles very, very quickly, and to actually be able to get past the kinds

00:17:00.180 of bottlenecks that are allowing us to fight this war with minimal damage. So there was the simple

00:17:05.460 timeline of Iranian capabilities. And obviously, unavoidably, there was the timing of the political

00:17:12.220 window of the Trump administration. It turned out that Netanyahu and Trump saw eye-to-eye on the

00:17:18.580 question of the Iranian nuclear program. Trump did ask, allegedly, according to Israeli officials

00:17:24.580 reporting what they heard from the Trump-Netanyahu meetings back in the spring, back in March,

00:17:30.600 Trump told Netanyahu, just give me a home run. He doesn't want to have grinding wars in the

00:17:36.520 Middle East that drag America in. But if there's a home run, he'll back it. That's what the Israelis 1.00

00:17:42.040 were told back in the day. And I think that Trump now believes, and the reason he's willing to face

00:17:46.540 down the Tucker Carlson's on this question, is that he believes the Israelis came through

00:17:50.860 spectacularly in that regard. So that political window, I think, also was a big part of it.

00:17:56.020 Well, to continue with your baseball analogy, Israel has certainly hit a triple. But as far 0.86

00:18:02.200 as actually ending the Iranian nuclear program, it sounds like there's one more step, at least,

00:18:08.380 that has to be accomplished. What is the expectation on your side with regard to the U.S. coming in with

00:18:15.860 B-2 bombers and actually destroying the capacity at Fordow? And I don't know if Natanz is still

00:18:23.220 extant, but it sounds like there really is nothing, there's no armaments on your side that

00:18:29.320 you own or that you can wield all on your own that can accomplish the complete destruction of the most

00:18:35.320 hardened centrifuges. That is what everybody knows. And technically on paper, that is absolutely the

00:18:41.160 case. And there was absolutely no way for Israel to sidestep the Radwan force of Hezbollah and just 1.00

00:18:46.900 dismantle Hezbollah as a strategic mobilizable force without fighting the most hardened fighters.

00:18:51.960 who would exact thousands or hundreds of casualties, at least, from the Israeli military.

00:18:57.900 And then they did. Does the Mossad have something up its sleeve? We know that this

00:19:01.360 whole strategy of taking over supply chains has already been done vis-a-vis the Iranian nuclear

00:19:08.620 program. At one point, I remember reading years ago, there was a Mossad operation that

00:19:14.320 infiltrated the supply chain of furniture to one of these installations and managed to get a desk,

00:19:19.540 will be trapped with a bomb into one of the nuclear sites. And that desk exploded with tremendous

00:19:24.200 force and destroyed some significant portion. Does the Mossad have some trick up its sleeve

00:19:29.020 for Fordow? I'll put it this way. Everybody has known for 15 years that, I mean, since they've known

00:19:36.300 about Fordow, they've known that step two is Fordow. And so it is entirely possible that the Israelis 0.96

00:19:46.280 have a solution to Fordow have a solution to Fordow. I have no idea what it would be. But we had no idea

00:19:52.060 we had the current capabilities that we have. They've been, again, unprecedented in the history

00:19:56.240 of warfare. A lot of people were talking about how the new war of drones and missiles would make

00:20:01.420 air forces obsolete. The Israelis figured out how the integration of the two is vastly more powerful 0.72

00:20:07.380 than either one alone. So we're breaking new ground in the history of war. And there's reason

00:20:13.720 to believe the Israelis can handle Fordow. If the Americans do it, the Americans take on costs, 0.90

00:20:18.700 right? The Iranians will have to launch, just for the show of it, after threatening for so many 1.00

00:20:23.780 decades, they will have to launch missiles at American troop deployments in the region.

00:20:27.960 Ironically, that might actually bring the Americans in. In other words, even the fear that that could 0.85

00:20:32.800 happen. Or the theory that if something blows up in Fordow and it's Israeli, but the Iranians assume 0.73

00:20:38.580 in the first 45 seconds that it's America because they don't think the Israelis can, 0.82

00:20:43.340 then they attack American troops in UAE or Qatar. That would bring the American response.

00:20:49.500 And so it's a delicate question. I completely understand Americans who say, I don't want to get

00:20:55.380 in on this. And I fundamentally, almost as a question of identity, believe that Israel has to 0.95

00:21:02.660 be able to go it alone. But to take Fordow with Israeli capabilities might involve, assuming we

00:21:07.760 don't have some magical rabbit that the Mossad has already managed to pull out a dozen times in the

00:21:11.920 last 20 months, might involve ground troops and might involve real difficult battle with real

00:21:18.340 casualties for the Israelis, something that good planning has so far avoided. So I don't know to say 0.99

00:21:23.960 more than that, but that is the big question everyone is now waiting to hear. I should also

00:21:27.600 say, and this is really a rumor, but these rumors have all turned out to be correct. You know,

00:21:32.040 there's an old joke about Israeli secrets. A KGB spy comes to Tel Aviv to meet with an Israeli 0.51

00:21:38.360 connection in the Israeli security services. And he arrives at the apartment and he rings the doorbell

00:21:42.820 and the guy answers the door and he says, can I help you? And the guy says, the birds fly south in

00:21:47.820 winter. And the guy says, excuse me. And the KGB spy says, the birds fly south in winter.

00:21:52.540 And the guy says, oh, no, I'm Goldberg, the dentist. You want Goldberg, the spy. He's on

00:21:57.180 the second floor, right? It's this idea that everybody knows everything. Ultimately, right,

00:22:02.820 we journalists are required to only report on the Israeli nuclear program from foreign sources

00:22:07.360 that reveal things. But it's not like people don't know, right? And so I have to say that there

00:22:13.720 is now talk in Israel, make of it what you will, that the next two days are a significant pivot from

00:22:18.880 what has been up to now. That what has been up to now will continue. The hunt for the launchers will

00:22:22.680 continue. Maintaining the launcher bottleneck that has meant 50 missiles in a round instead of 400

00:22:27.720 will continue. The pursuit of the regime will continue and expand probably to the energy sector,

00:22:33.360 which it's already started doing. But there might be a serious pivot in the coming days. There have

00:22:37.400 been talk about that and a lot of speculation about that in Israel.

00:22:41.680 And troops on the ground, how would that be accomplished? Is that through Syria? Is that,

00:22:45.140 what is the access? Luckily, I don't know anything. So I can talk freely. Israel maintains 0.98

00:22:51.460 capabilities that have not made sense in war since the 1950s. They've not been used since the 1950s.

00:22:57.200 For example, active paratroopers trained to jump out of airplanes. The last time an Israeli soldier

00:23:01.720 jumped out of an airplane in a war in combat situation is 1956 in the Sinai. And it was not a

00:23:08.000 very useful operation then. And yet we have entire units and brigade level units, thousands of men,

00:23:15.140 able and equipped and trained to jump out of airplanes. It is not inconceivable. And this

00:23:21.940 is stuff that's out there on the military blogosphere and things like that. It is not

00:23:26.780 inconceivable that the Israelis have the capabilities to drop significant numbers of troops where they

00:23:32.600 need to in Iran, who can take a region, prepare a landing field there, hold it, and conduct massive 0.99

00:23:39.860 military operations while defending the place in ways that allow them to get into installations

00:23:44.580 like Fordo, things like that. It's utter speculation, the kind of speculation that's been out there in

00:23:51.260 public for decades. But Israel has those capabilities. And so one of the ways that Israel really

00:23:58.660 shines as a military is in the understanding that war is the realm of the unknown. That's something you

00:24:05.300 learn in their first week in office or school in the IDF. You come to the battlefield with all the

00:24:10.500 best laid plans, and then the enemy surprises you. And that is the nature and definition of the enemy

00:24:14.660 in war. And then you have to improvise. But the most of what you're going to be doing in the battlefield

00:24:18.720 is improvise. By the way, in that sense, what's happened so far has been astonishing. For the enemy

00:24:23.740 to have so easily fallen into all of our plans has been just a miracle and a gift. But the ability to

00:24:32.460 do those, the ability to have wild and crazy kinds of options, redundancies, far more forces than you

00:24:40.780 actually need on paper, is really important once you actually encounter that unknown in that battlefield

00:24:46.700 situation. And so we have that. And I can imagine six different ways it could go down just from my being

00:24:52.940 a junior sergeant in the Israeli infantry 25 years ago. But it is, I think, doable. Very,

00:24:59.180 very dangerous. We're going to lose people in an operation like that. America could do it cleanly

00:25:04.060 without any losses to our side, but America might not want to. And that's okay. Israel can handle 0.84

00:25:09.900 things on its own. Israel needs to be able to handle things on its own. 0.98

00:25:13.260 Yeah. I mean, I must say, speaking as an American, it wouldn't seem okay to me. I mean, I just view us

00:25:21.420 as rudderless. This isn't just a criticism of the Trump administration. You know, arguably, I think,

00:25:28.140 as you pointed out, Trump, all things considered, has been better for Israel's predicament than we had

00:25:35.760 any reason to expect a Kamala Harris administration would have been, at least with respect to the degree 1.00

00:25:40.680 which he would have been captured by the far left moral confusion that you alluded to early on. But

00:25:46.440 still, it's just that the clarity of this morally and geopolitically, I think, is impossible to

00:25:53.960 exaggerate. We have a regime in Iran that was sprinting to acquire nuclear capability. And for decades,

00:26:04.920 it has advertised its aspiration to use this technology to perpetrate a genocide in the Middle 0.79

00:26:13.140 East, right? I mean, it has been explicit in its, I mean, forget about its chanting death to America

00:26:18.260 at every opportunity. It has been explicit in its aspiration to perpetrate a second Holocaust 0.99

00:26:25.740 with the most powerful weapons it can get its hands on. And it's, you know, the mad work it's

00:26:33.080 accomplished in supporting all of its proxies and its culpability for October 7th and the depredations

00:26:40.840 of Hezbollah and the Houthis. I mean, it's just the idea that we were going to enter another round 0.74

00:26:47.840 of negotiate, fake negotiation and capitulation to this regime seems just morally insane to me. And

00:26:55.480 in addition to all of that, you know, I don't imagine this would be part of the calculus, but

00:27:00.220 politically, but morally, in addition to all of that, I think we have reason to believe that the

00:27:06.000 Iranian people, unlike many of the other Arab countries where we have meddled over the years

00:27:11.760 and only to find that a majority of the population was still hankering for theocracy, even though we

00:27:17.400 were spending blood and treasure to give them democracy. Iran seems like it is properly sick of 0.75

00:27:25.440 theocracy. I don't know if that's, you know, 60% of the population or 80% of the population, but

00:27:30.600 what you have in Iran, again, you know better than I, but it seems like you have in Iran a population

00:27:37.660 that is just, you know, under the cover of, you know, hijab-imposed silence. You have certainly a 0.96

00:27:46.460 population of women itching to live cosmopolitan, you know, reasonably secular lives. And presumably, 0.88

00:27:52.860 there are many men in their lives who share the same frustration with the last 40 years of life

00:28:00.720 in Iran. Again, unlike some of these other countries where we thought we would be greeted

00:28:05.140 with flowers and we were greeted with, at minimum, some more ambiguity than that. In Iran, you know,

00:28:14.120 it seems a reasonable bet that most Iranians would be happy to be done with theocracy. Is that your 0.78

00:28:20.740 impression of what's happening there? Yeah, I mean, it runs deep. What America

00:28:26.200 encountered in the Middle East was societies whose basic identity structures are very tribal.

00:28:32.660 And I'm not criticizing, by the way, I think that's something that Israelis share with much of the rest

00:28:37.860 of the Middle East in ways that make them a little bit strangers in the West, where being Sunni or being

00:28:44.000 Shia in Iraq was not a theological difference between Sunni and Shia, you know, I don't know

00:28:49.260 what, mystical traditions. It was a tribe. It was literally clans and groups and places that you live

00:28:56.740 who fight together and will defend you and will protect you in a world that is still a Wild West.

00:29:01.820 And America didn't understand why they weren't all rushing to the banner of the great ideas of the

00:29:06.920 Western Enlightenment. And, you know, I don't know how to put this. I'm a big fan of the big ideas of

00:29:13.640 Western Enlightenment. And I thank God every day I have a tribe. There's some complex mixing of the

00:29:19.160 two that produces a healthiest, happiest society. For example, frankly, forgive me for the flag waving

00:29:25.160 here, but Israelis. Israelis have all of the freedoms, the gay pride parades and the self-expressions and

00:29:32.100 the religious diversities of the liberal West. And they also have the solidarity and the high birth

00:29:38.980 rates, including among secular, you know, high-tech engineers in Israel have higher birth rates than

00:29:45.040 the entirety of the rest of the developed world. And every other kind of Israeli has higher birth 0.97

00:29:48.740 rates than them. And so we have that mix. And America encountered this thing that I think American

00:29:54.500 culture didn't really know how to comprehend, how to deal with. You know, it wrote a beautiful

00:30:00.280 constitution for Iraq without contending with this deep complexity of a whole nother way of

00:30:05.760 understanding human belonging in society. In Iran, you have a completely different story. You very 0.96

00:30:11.660 much have ethnic tribes and religious tribalism and all of that. But you have a regime with a story

00:30:16.840 that is essentially fundamentally a deep betrayal of Iran's, of the very revolution that brought it to 0.53

00:30:22.220 power. The Iran's revolution has two parts. And I say this not to tell people the history, but to

00:30:27.780 invite people to fact-check me so that they begin this journey into the history, because this really

00:30:32.540 matters to understanding what's going to happen going forward. The Iranian revolution, the Shah of 0.96

00:30:38.720 1978, before the revolution, was pro-American in the Cold War, but very much a tyrant with the secret

00:30:45.880 police and abusive and oppressive. And the revolution that sparked in 1978 in December was a revolution that

00:30:53.920 allied all the different elements of Iranian society, all of them, from the clerical religious movements and mosques

00:31:00.180 and charities of that Islamist world of Khomeini, to the liberals, the liberal nationalists, the feminists, the 0.67

00:31:07.220 communists, various communist groups that all fought against each other, obviously, the students, the wealthy, the

00:31:13.340 poor, the bazaar merchants, the small shopkeepers, all these different elements of Iranian society came out to march in

00:31:19.840 this revolution against the Shah. And what was amazing, it was literally millions of people marching over two days

00:31:25.380 all over Iran, something like 15% of the population of the country all turned out. In Tehran itself, it was something 0.95

00:31:31.320 like two and a half million people, half the city, half the city marched. And within six weeks, the Shah was gone. And two 0.63

00:31:38.780 weeks after he was gone, Khomeini came back from exile. And what would then happen over the course of 1979, and then over the

00:31:45.500 course of the next nine years, was the slow removal from that coalition, almost always violently, of all those

00:31:54.700 other elements of Iranian society as the religious factions consolidated power in this new government. So the

00:32:01.320 promise of democracy, as all those marchers marched, you had banners. People should look up these marches from the

00:32:07.460 Ashura rebellion, that's the holiday it happened on, of 1978. There were people marching with banners about democracy and

00:32:14.000 liberalism and elections and rights of women. And the religious clerics were the most organized of all

00:32:22.100 these oppositions, of all these social subgroups, because they had networks that the Shah had a hard time

00:32:27.580 suppressing. You could easily suppress student groups on campus. You had a very hard time suppressing what a

00:32:32.820 cleric would say and imam would say in a mosque at a Friday prayer. And so they were the best organized and the

00:32:38.960 best ready to take advantage. And they turned into an incredibly brutal theocracy. They pushed the

00:32:45.280 Marxists to the point where many were killed, many fled to Iraq, to the Shia Arabs of Iraq. And in the 0.65

00:32:53.040 Iran-Iraq war, actually joined Hamas, there's a Freudian slip of an Israeli nowadays, joined Saddam's war on 0.86

00:33:00.860 Iran. And so we're seen as traitors by Iran. And in 1988, the regime actually went through the prisons

00:33:06.860 of Iran and murdered all the people they thought, over 5,000 people, belonged to these Marxist groups

00:33:14.080 over the border in that war. And so just a series of crackdowns and murders, the shuttering of

00:33:19.060 universities, the firing en masse of all secular university lecturers. This regime came to power

00:33:26.880 in one of the most beautiful moments in the history of this nation, of this competent and diverse and

00:33:34.560 fascinating nation. And the first thing it did and everything it did from that day one was the

00:33:40.580 rejection and dismantling of all of the promise of a potential, you know, multi-party, multi-vision

00:33:47.700 kind of parliamentarism that Iran could have been. And since then, 46 years, there've been only two

00:33:53.720 supreme leaders, Khomeini and Ali Khamenei, who is still the supreme leader now, as long as he's still

00:33:59.260 alive. And that regime has basically managed to drive Iran into the dirt over those 46 years. 0.92

00:34:06.320 The only success it has had in 46 years, the only accomplishment Iranian society can point to 1.00

00:34:12.000 is the regime sufficiently oppressing, sufficiently co-opting different elites to stay in power.

00:34:18.540 So every poll we have, the polls published in state media of the regime tell the same fundamental

00:34:24.960 story as polls coming in from outside, the vast majority of Iranians, probably 90%, want the

00:34:31.340 regime gone. They express it as disaffection with the economic problems. In this moment, when the war

00:34:37.780 began, Iran was facing mass trucker strikes, mass nurse strikes, mass strikes of bakeries, all kinds of

00:34:47.360 pieces of the economy. It just went through a terrible winter without access to gas. It's one of the most

00:34:52.880 gas-rich countries in the world. One of the phrases that Iranians often talk about, especially in the

00:34:57.080 Iranian diaspora, is the tragedy of a very poor nation living in a very rich country. And that's 1.00

00:35:03.020 the story of this regime. So they hate it profoundly. And none of the tribalism matters because the whole

00:35:09.360 point that brought them to power was this unity that they then cracked down on and turned into this

00:35:15.000 running two-generation-long catastrophe.

00:35:19.280 So is it your understanding that Israel and its strikes so far has stopped short of trying to

00:35:26.760 engineer a fall of the regime? I mean, have they not been attacking the theocratic ruling targets?

00:35:34.840 It's such a complex question and such an important one. I believe that the Israelis would love for the

00:35:41.580 regime to fall. Solve all the problems in one fell swoop. There are plenty of governments out there

00:35:46.180 that don't like us, but also aren't massive, immediate, catastrophic dangers to us. Because

00:35:51.680 they're not this particular kind of regime. So, you know, if Iran was run like Turkey,

00:35:58.240 A, it would not seek nukes because it would be too busy building a serious economy. Now, Turkey might 0.95

00:36:03.600 be headed in a more Islamist direction. Turkey is certainly headed in a more Islamist direction.

00:36:07.740 But it's coming from a place of real democratic open tradition. There's still elections. There's

00:36:12.400 still local elections. Erdogan occasionally arrests his leading opposition leader. But there's enough

00:36:18.300 democracy there that there's still a kind of competence and a need to actually take care of

00:36:23.560 what the people actually need and not literally rob them blind at a mass scale over generations to

00:36:28.680 build a nuke that nobody understands why you need. So if Iran were a regime of the style of Turkey, 0.81

00:36:33.600 I don't need it to be Switzerland, it would already not be a danger to Israel in any way.

00:36:38.880 And so regime change is a shortcut. It's a wonderful idea. Let's do it. Great. I'm for it.

00:36:44.280 The problem is nobody quite knows how. And America is very scared of regime change because it's

00:36:49.140 failed repeatedly. Israel is not even able to imagine itself in a league where this is any kind 0.96

00:36:55.320 of option, right? We have the population of Austria. We are not going to now go into this country

00:37:00.520 nine times our population and many more times our size geographically and somehow re-engineer Iranian 1.00

00:37:06.980 political society and consciousness into a new regime. So what I think is happening-

00:37:12.500 We don't think that the thirst for a new government coming from the Iranian people themselves would

00:37:19.560 accomplish effectively a coup in the aftermath of some decapitation strike from Israel?

00:37:25.000 They've spent 46 years doing nothing but figuring out how to prevent that from happening.

00:37:29.940 And they have degraded the organizing capacity of every single power base in Iranian society to the 1.00

00:37:35.420 point where it may not be doable. But the hope is that we meet in the middle. The hope is that

00:37:41.940 we degrade that political elite and ruling elite and the IRGC and also the elements of the regime that

00:37:48.980 are not turned against us, that are turned against their own people, like this thing called the 1.00

00:37:51.860 Basij, which is this immense, it's a bunch of thugs who go to the streets to beat up protesters 1.00

00:37:56.620 en masse. But it's enormous and it has intelligence services. It's a kind of its own police as well.

00:38:02.220 Can we degrade these institutions sufficiently to seriously open a window for courage to come forth

00:38:11.740 and actually organize and take down the regime? The simple answer is, I don't know. We're going to

00:38:16.320 degrade them as far as we have to, to be able to take out the things that threaten us, the missile

00:38:20.680 production facilities and the nuclear program. And the people will have to make a choice. Now,

00:38:26.100 they've been under this thing for 46 years. Nobody doubts what the people want. There's simply no,

00:38:31.480 there's a debate over whether it's 75% or 91%. There's no debate about what the people want,

00:38:37.340 but the people will have to seize it on their own. We're not America and we are small people with

00:38:43.520 tremendous strengths, but, and thankfully Iran is tremendously incompetent as a state. But that's 1.00

00:38:50.500 the best I can do. Gosh, I hope so. But Iranians are going to have to do it. 1.00

00:38:54.420 Okay. Well, let's pivot to the war in Gaza and this longstanding fact that Israel is, 0.55

00:39:02.860 really is the, I forget who coined this line, but it has been treated as the Jew among nations for

00:39:10.340 as long as it has been a nation. Let's take that piece first. I mean, I want to talk about the war

00:39:15.100 in Gaza and what you expect there, but it seems to me that Israel has completely lost, I don't think

00:39:22.240 that's putting it too strongly, an information war with the rest of the world. I mean, there's

00:39:27.080 something about a failure of public relations here that is proving catastrophic, not just to

00:39:35.080 Israel and its standing in the world, but to the perception of Jews outside of Israel at this

00:39:41.320 moment. I mean, we've seen this explosion of antisemitism globally. To some degree, the war

00:39:47.600 in Gaza is a, one could imagine, a pretext to express something at an ambient level of antisemitism

00:39:53.600 that's already there. But I think in other contexts, it is creating an animus toward Jews,

00:40:01.420 certainly in people where you wouldn't expect it. So we just have this larger global problem of

00:40:06.920 the greatest efflorescence of antisemitism we've seen in our lifetime. And Israel's status,

00:40:14.600 virtual status as a pariah nation among nations that really should know better. I mean, because,

00:40:21.380 again, the moral asymmetries here between Israel and her enemies, and we'll get into them,

00:40:28.480 are beyond obvious. This is not a hard call, and yet everything is upside down. And crucially,

00:40:34.720 everything was upside down, not just in response to Israel's invasion of Gaza, but prior to that,

00:40:43.020 before. I mean, this is how we can dissect the level of moral confusion suffered by most of the

00:40:49.000 free world at this moment. On October 8th, before Israel had responded, you had our most elite

00:40:55.680 institutions effectively taking the side of Hamas. In certain cases, explicitly taking the side of

00:41:01.580 Hamas. So how did we get here, right? Again, we'll get into the details of Gaza, we'll get into many of 0.73

00:41:09.300 the lies and half-truths that anchor people to this confusion, but like, how is it that this

00:41:14.960 information war seems to have been lost up until this point?

00:41:19.180 There's so much to say, it's hard to know when to start. Where to begin? I would say, first of all,

00:41:26.360 the projection of one's anxieties and concerns about the war in Gaza onto your local Jewish community

00:41:33.240 is such obvious rabid bigotry that nobody in the West would be confused on this question if you

00:41:41.700 applied it to Muslims or if you applied it to Hindus or the Chinese. I don't see Chinese Americans being 1.00

00:41:47.440 blamed for the behavior of the CCP. Right. And so there's just no, it's just, and, you know,

00:41:55.280 maybe China doesn't claim to represent all Chinese, but there are plenty of Muslim states doing plenty

00:41:59.620 of horrific things at scales in order of magnitude larger than Gaza. In the worst case scenario that 0.78

00:42:05.140 you believe of Israel in Gaza that claim to represent Islam, and nobody comes to the Muslim 1.00

00:42:13.000 community in America or in Britain or in Canada and says to them, explain yourselves. So, no,

00:42:18.620 none of that is legitimate in any way. It's just an anti-Semitism that is permissible in elite 0.97

00:42:23.760 circles because it has a cachet in Western civilization, given to Western civilization, an inheritance of the

00:42:31.460 Christian tradition that makes it okay, makes it recognizable and therefore not something that

00:42:37.440 feels dangerous and upsetting. So, I don't have to respect that even slightly. I don't have to respect

00:42:43.060 that at all. Israel will commit crimes. Israel will make mistakes. Israel is a country. I have never 0.94

00:42:48.000 sat in a room with Americans and said to them, you know, America makes terrible mistakes and sometimes

00:42:52.340 real crimes. And had any American ever fall off their chair, not a single one, no matter how patriotic

00:42:57.220 they are. Israel's a real country and it's going to make those mistakes. And if you then come to 0.98

00:43:01.160 your Jewish community in Cleveland, Ohio with complaints, you are the bigot. And there's nothing

00:43:06.720 else to know about that situation. So, that's the first point. The second point is, a lot of it is

00:43:12.260 Israel's fault, he said, immediately after saying the first thing. And what I mean by Israel's fault is, 0.87

00:43:18.980 one of the most beautiful things about us is one of the most catastrophic things in wartime.

00:43:23.460 And that is that we are a people culturally profoundly incapable of explaining ourselves.

00:43:29.820 And it comes from a very deep and very old place. In the late 19th century, the pogroms begin. There's

00:43:36.400 a specific moment of the death of Tsar Alexander II at the hand of anarchist assassins in 1881 in St.

00:43:42.660 Petersburg. He was this reformist Tsar who abolished serfdom and was this guy that many Jews hoped would 0.99

00:43:49.100 deliver for the Jews, would end the Pale of Settlements, would end the anti-Semitic laws of the Russian

00:43:52.820 Empire. And when he dies, his reactionary son, Alexander III, takes over. This is 1881. And one

00:43:59.440 of his first acts is to pass massively anti-Semitic laws that tighten the regime of restrictions on

00:44:05.680 Jewish lives in the empire, the May laws of 1882. And that's when we see the beginning of what would 0.99

00:44:12.840 be 40 years and more of mass pogroms. That would become something like 1,300 pogroms. It would begin 0.77

00:44:19.760 not quite, not very deadly. And they would escalate in number and in deadliness over the course of the

00:44:25.020 next 40 years, probably killing over those four decades, a quarter million Jews, including in

00:44:30.780 World War I and the Russian Civil War, unrelated to the war itself, just villages burned to the ground.

00:44:36.380 And that drove millions and millions of Jews to flight and millions of Jews to leave. And right at that 0.82

00:44:43.500 period, you begin to see a serious consolidation of what would come to be known as the Zionist 0.58

00:44:49.500 movement. And it literally begins, you know, people can look up a guy named Leo Pinsker, who is a Russian

00:44:54.900 integrationist infatuated with this reformist czar, and then watches the sudden pivot after his death

00:45:01.140 to mass pogroms. And he says, wait a second, the day, by the way, of the czar's assassination, that morning

00:45:07.320 he gave the order to establish a parliament for the Russian Empire. He wanted to lead the Russian Empire

00:45:11.560 to what the rest of Europe, Western Europe, Central Europe was becoming. And he says, wait a minute,

00:45:16.620 what if we're living a fantasy? What if this new modernity and liberalism and science and people

00:45:22.820 are discovering electrons and whatever, what if all of this is actually a veneer overlaying a much,

00:45:29.020 much more real trend of consolidation of national identities, of industrialization that was driving

00:45:37.040 people from small places, villages, farms into big cities, and creating these new mass societies

00:45:42.160 and mass identities and radicalized political movements? And all of this stuff, all of these

00:45:47.060 changes would turn on the Jews and turn on the minorities, and we're actually not safe anymore. 0.54

00:45:52.680 And there's this entire sociological analysis of modernization that develops that is basically

00:45:56.800 Herzlian Zionism. And Pinsker writes a pamphlet in 1881 called Auto-Emancipation,

00:46:03.180 meaning the emancipation is a series of laws passed by these European countries in the late 19th century

00:46:09.980 that liberate the Jews from the ghettos, liberate the Jews from the restrictions on university and

00:46:14.780 professions and all of that. And he says, what if it's all not real? What if none of this emancipation

00:46:19.400 ultimately will end well? You have to auto-emancipate yourself. That's the only solution. Jews need 1.00

00:46:23.980 self-determination. And one of the main arguments that these early Zionists make, these strategic 0.86

00:46:29.400 Zionists who awaken because of this sudden turn of Europe on the Jews, is the idea that a Jew cannot 0.94

00:46:35.600 stand before the anti-Semite and explain himself. Now, they thought of an anti-Semite as someone who,

00:46:42.740 to whom the Jew is some kind of moral cartoon, is some kind of antagonist or protagonist in some kind 0.86

00:46:48.400 of morality play happening in their own head. In other words, not a human being in front of them,

00:46:52.600 but part of a story they need for their own definition of themselves. That's an anti-Semite. 0.73

00:46:57.520 And when you stand before that anti-Semite and you say, oh, no, I'm not this thing you think I am.

00:47:01.840 I'm actually over here, this other thing, this complex three-dimensional human thing.

00:47:05.840 You cannot, these thinkers, the Pinskers and the Herzl say, you cannot penetrate the fog

00:47:10.840 of their morality play. And because you cannot penetrate that fog, you will stand before them

00:47:15.560 and you will try to explain and you will end up trying to justify. And justifying yourself is

00:47:20.580 dehumanizing. And so you are forbidden to justify yourself. That is not a thing that a Jew with dignity 1.00

00:47:26.520 and basic human dignity is permitted to do anymore. And the Zionist movement creates a foundational 0.94

00:47:32.440 culture of not justifying yourself. And you had this in the 1950s, David Ben-Gurion would say,

00:47:38.160 when the UN would say something mean to Israel, Ben-Gurion would say,

00:47:41.760 Um Shmum, which means UN Shmuen, right? The Yiddishism of saying, who cares about the UN?

00:47:47.200 Amen. On October, I think it was October 15th, 2023, a week after the war began, a week after

00:47:53.720 October 7th, Israel had a Ministry of Public Diplomacy. Call it propaganda, call it public

00:48:00.280 relations, whatever. It's a ministry with that title on the door. And it had founded the Ministry

00:48:05.480 of Public Diplomacy five times over the course of its existence, and it keeps shutting it down

00:48:09.680 because it doesn't know what to do with it. And the Minister of Public Diplomacy, a member of

00:48:14.460 Knesset belonging to Netanyahu's Likud party, got up on television and said to Israelis, this is again,

00:48:19.980 a week into the war, maybe 10 days into the war, and says to Israelis, look, this is a fake ministry,

00:48:25.100 it's not a real thing. In coalition negotiations, you establish fake ministries to make it easier

00:48:29.180 to hand out, you know, positions to people, so the negotiations go easier. I don't mind wasting

00:48:34.620 public funds to make coalition talks easier in peacetime, but I'm not going to waste public funds

00:48:38.940 in wartime. And she resigned, right there on national

00:48:42.880 television. And she shut down her ministry. And it was the most patriotic

00:48:46.700 thing she had ever done. And so just to recap,

00:48:50.160 Israel shut down its public diplomacy ministry

00:48:52.900 because a war started, is how bad Israelis 0.91

00:48:56.900 at a fundamental cultural level are, at the understanding that they have to stand

00:49:00.720 before the world and explain what the heck is going on. In 20 months of war, Netanyahu

00:49:04.780 has not appointed a serious proper spokesman that anybody knows how to go to and turn to.

00:49:09.260 So you had the UN relief chief say on, I believe it was the BBC a couple of weeks ago,

00:49:14.320 that 14,000 babies were going to die within 48 hours.

00:49:17.560 Yeah.

00:49:18.360 Maybe it was a slip of the tongue. It took an awfully long time to issue a correction.

00:49:22.220 It was such a patent falsehood that was just not humanly possible for that to be even within

00:49:27.720 three orders of magnitude of possibility. Even if you hate Israel and wish Israel were destroyed,

00:49:33.620 that still should have actually rung out to you as an obvious lie. But when journalists came

00:49:38.900 looking, there wasn't an Israeli spokesperson they could have called. There just isn't one in

00:49:43.380 government. And they never bothered to establish them. And so this is a world, an entire arena of

00:49:49.600 war, that for Hamas is central to their strategy. And for all of its allies is central to their 0.98

00:49:54.640 strategy. And the Israelis, because of this cultural kink, we do not stand before the world 1.00

00:49:59.120 and justify ourselves. I love this about Israelis. And it is a massive strategic liability in wartime. 1.00

00:50:07.340 And that's basically the story. So we can't... By the way, you can get Israelis to take PR seriously 0.98

00:50:13.460 if you tell them, it hurts the Jews. In other words, you Israelis, great, you don't have to live 1.00

00:50:18.760 with these people over in, I don't know what, Denver or London. But the Jews of the diaspora do,

00:50:25.000 and you're hurting them by allowing whatever the most right-wing rabid politician says about

00:50:30.400 emptying Gaza to be the only Israeli voice out there in the world and not the voice of the 80% 0.85

00:50:36.240 mainstream of Israeli Jews. And then they say, yeah, no, we should probably do this. But they 1.00

00:50:41.520 still don't have the basic cultural sense that this is a thing. So a country with the competence

00:50:46.640 on display over the skies of Iran can't... And by the way, Netanyahu, when he wants to win the next

00:50:51.480 election is going to hire the best marketing firm that knows how to hack the human brainstem.

00:50:55.940 But they're not going to do it to justify themselves. They can't do it physically. It's

00:51:01.780 a thing that is extremely difficult for an Israeli to undertake culturally.

00:51:06.320 That's a fascinating answer and one that I had never heard before.

00:51:10.120 Okay, well, so you talk rather often about understanding people and tribes in all their

00:51:19.080 complexity and not default into the cartoon in your head. I would argue that the situation,

00:51:25.120 the moral asymmetry to which I just alluded, is about as... The real situation is about as

00:51:31.640 cartoonish as disparities in human motives and cultural qualities ever get. And so I'll just put

00:51:41.100 this to you, and none of this is going to be novel to you, but I just want you to defrag my hard

00:51:45.400 drive if you think there's any way in which I have this wrong. Because, you know, it's not often

00:51:49.560 that I'm speaking to someone who is as informed as you are about the details of life on the ground

00:51:55.280 there. But I think it sounds absolutely cartoonish to say, and I forget where this point originates,

00:52:03.100 but it sounds like wartime propaganda to say if the Palestinians simply laid down their arms,

00:52:10.680 there would be peace in the region. If the Israelis laid down their arms, there would be a genocide. 0.89

00:52:16.740 Right? That sounds insane. I think something, certainly to a first approximation, something

00:52:23.880 like that is true and has been true for as long as Israel has existed. I mean, perhaps just react 0.90

00:52:30.780 to that. I mean, that asymmetry is almost in crystalline form all that I think you need to understand

00:52:37.760 about the predicament in the Middle East.

00:52:42.520 First, if you, I know something about your podcast and your audience, and they're expecting

00:52:49.280 rich depth, which I'm going to, you know, so I'm struggling to deliver here.

00:52:55.080 But also, what I'm expecting, what I'm urging you to do is, please, if there's anything,

00:53:00.000 if there's any crucial nuance that you think I'm alight in by putting it that starkly, I really

00:53:05.820 want to hear it.

00:53:07.760 So it's absolutely that stark. That is exactly the truth. It is a simple truth. It is an accurate

00:53:12.720 truth. The parts of the Arab and Muslim world that are allied with us, not all of them, not the 0.82

00:53:16.820 Emiratis, but quite a few of them. Certainly, I think the Egyptians would not beat around the bush and 1.00

00:53:21.420 just admitting it. The day we lay down our arms and for some reason are incapable of lifting them

00:53:25.820 back up again and punishing anyone who takes advantage of that moment is the day that a great many

00:53:31.480 Middle Easterners find their courage and come marching in and destroying us. But the nuance I want to add 1.00

00:53:37.580 to that. And, you know, you will not find an honest...

00:53:42.540 Over in the diaspora, among sort of diaspora, I don't know what, professors of some of these nations,

00:53:48.720 you will find people, you know, pretending that they come from these deeply liberal societies and

00:53:53.540 depicting their societies in ways that no one on the ground in their societies would recognize.

00:53:58.160 But there's a depth there. It is not animalistic animus. It is something profound. People live,

00:54:08.080 this is my methodological sort of bottom line, and I developed it as a political journalist,

00:54:14.000 people live in stories. People live in narratives of where they come from, where they're going,

00:54:18.900 what's happening to them. And if you understand those stories, and those stories are always complex

00:54:23.260 and rich and fascinating and produce contradictions within the minds of people and contradictions

00:54:28.120 built into the stories, and they don't feel like contradictions to the people themselves,

00:54:32.120 or they're willing to live with these contradictions because reality is big and complex. And so real

00:54:36.480 people live in these real profound contradictions. The stories that are told about us in the Arab world

00:54:43.240 and the stories that are told about us in the larger Muslim world are stories that have very little

00:54:47.680 to do with us and a lot to do with how Arabs and Muslims understand what has happened to them.

00:54:53.340 And it's a story that I could send people to a podcast episode of mine because we really lay out

00:54:57.840 the theological lineage of five generations of theologians that produced Hamas. But this lineage 0.52

00:55:05.100 begins in the middle of the 19th century with these Egyptian theologians or Syrian theologians who

00:55:10.160 moved to Egypt. It begins in Egypt, and it begins in Egypt because Egypt comes under British rule

00:55:15.220 in the middle of the 19th century. And the disparity, as the Ottoman Empire is imploding slowly, but

00:55:22.560 everyone understands how weak it is, once the British take over parts, once the French take over

00:55:26.840 parts of this slowly collapsing empire, it's impossible to pretend that you can't see the gap

00:55:33.200 in power between Islam and the Christian West. And that gap in power takes explaining. And for Muslim 0.61

00:55:42.780 theologians, it takes a special kind of explaining. Because Islam was born, it's the only monotheistic 1.00

00:55:48.780 religion, born as a conquering empire. And so it's a monotheistic religion that very early on came to

00:55:54.520 associate geopolitical power and success and extraordinary achievement with, as evidence, right, if there is a

00:56:02.960 God, and then God oversees history and has a plan for history, and therefore history arcs toward justice and

00:56:07.900 redemption. If you are massively inexplicably successful in history, you are in sync with that

00:56:13.420 divine plan. And so if you find yourself in the 1860s a pathetic loser of history, I mean, these 0.96

00:56:19.720 theologians talked very honestly in ways that are very courageous. And these are, you know, the muftis of 0.94

00:56:25.800 Egypt. I mean, these are top mainstream serious theologians. And they talked in ways that are far

00:56:30.260 more courageous than anything you can say in Western elite academia today about the Muslim world. And they

00:56:34.660 said, what happened to us? How did we get so weak and backward? Our science is bad, we're poor, and

00:56:42.080 we're geopolitically pathetic. And they developed this discourse on Islamic weakness as a theological 0.99

00:56:49.780 problem, as a signal. If Muslim success was a signal of closeness to God and the truth of the 0.81

00:56:55.080 revelation, then Muslim failure was a signal of distance from God. And so it created a movement of 0.98

00:57:01.380 return to piety. Because of this special logic within Islam that doesn't exist in Christianity 0.96

00:57:05.700 or Judaism, it developed this pietistic movement as a path to a return to Muslim success and power.

00:57:13.880 And it begins as in real reformist terms. This theologian named Al-Afghani is talking about

00:57:21.320 building consultative institutions and democratic institutions and economic institutions and universities,

00:57:26.840 and he admires the French for their learning and studies. And he wants to find these things,

00:57:33.720 roots within Islam, and he begins to interpret Islam in those ways, in ways that will allow us to produce

00:57:39.100 modern successful universities, modern successful economies. And he has a student who has a student who has

00:57:45.080 a student who is Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, who has jettisoned along the way

00:57:51.340 all of the modernity stuff, and just clung to the pietistic return to this mythic original first

00:58:00.480 generations of Islam back when we were successful kind of pietism. And Hamas is that. In other words, 1.00

00:58:06.660 Hamas is literally, in 1987, the Muslim Brotherhood chapter founded in Gaza in 1987. That's what it is.

00:58:13.640 That's how it begins. And so when Hamas looks at the Jews, it doesn't see a colonialist oppressor.

00:58:22.820 It sometimes uses language like that, especially when it's talking to other Palestinian movements

00:58:26.640 that were born in that kind of discourse. But it fundamentally sees a great, vast theological problem

00:58:33.480 in all of the weaknesses of Islam and all the indignities that Islam has suffered everywhere from 1.00

00:58:38.880 European imperialism and various other retreats that Islam has suffered. The worst one was Zionism. 0.98

00:58:45.020 And the reason the worst one was Zionism, and they talked about this openly and constantly in the 0.97

00:58:48.820 1890s already, was that the Jews were weak. They're refugees. They're the weakest thing that ever pushed 1.00

00:58:54.740 Islam back. And so they're the first thing that Islam has to overcome in order to get back to its 1.00

00:59:00.480 rightful place in history. So Hamas develops an ideology and a foundational strategy. It is willing 0.90

00:59:06.660 to destroy Gaza on the altar of destroying Israel. Because in its vision of the purpose of the war 0.95

00:59:14.900 on Israel, it's not about liberating Palestine. It's not about creating a new Palestinian political

00:59:20.840 world that is independent of Israeli military rule, which is something that significant numbers

00:59:25.400 of Israelis would join in on. It's about overcoming the Jews, ruling everything that had ever been lost 1.00

00:59:32.740 to Islam as the beginning of the return of Islam into God's embrace and the sign that our piety is

00:59:37.960 enough and the sign that Islam is not taking its rightful redemptive place in history once again. 0.91

00:59:42.900 It is overcoming centuries of retreat and weakness in Islam. And so, yes, the second we lay down our

00:59:50.020 arms, they'll come for us. They is some of them, not all of them. It's big, it's complex. There's also

00:59:56.500 the simple truth that when you talk about Islamic ideas and Islamist ideas, you're not necessarily

01:00:01.620 talking about the Muslim shopkeeper in some street in Amman, Jordan or something. The people who

01:00:08.120 belong to this religious world don't necessarily subscribe to the grand ideas. There's a lot of 1.00

01:00:12.140 overlap, but they're not the same thing. But with all those caveats, yes, we are cartoon characters

01:00:19.360 in a vast redemption story that they think they're acting out and living through. And the same is true

01:00:25.260 in a different way, in a Shia version with a slightly different history, although borrowing a lot of

01:00:28.880 these big ideas of the Iranian regime. One of the most ridiculous things about this war is why the 0.60

01:00:35.480 heck does Iran even care about Israel? It has no border with Israel. It owes nothing to Israel. It 0.97

01:00:39.620 lost nothing to Israel. It has no interest in Israel of any kind. And it has spent hundreds of billions

01:00:45.600 of dollars its people don't have on destroying Israel. Why? And the answer is there is this grand 0.62

01:00:52.960 redemption story they think they're embedded in. So everything you said is absolutely correct.

01:00:58.240 The day we lay down our arms, they come kill us and think that it's a great miracle given to them

01:01:02.860 by God. And it's the beginning of a Muslim redemption story of the conquest of the world. 0.97

01:01:07.180 And it comes from a deep 150-year-old discourse that we have to understand, that we have to actually

01:01:14.180 respond to and deal with and ultimately also defeat.

01:01:17.920 Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm tempted to double down on a lot of that because that was

01:01:23.000 quite informative. And I really don't want my audience to have missed any of the detail there

01:01:30.880 because what you just ran through is the very clear account of the humiliation of a whole civilization

01:01:38.120 and humiliation as perceived and only made possible through the lens of theology and theological

01:01:45.060 expectation. And there are crucial differences between Islam and Christianity and Judaism such

01:01:52.840 that that leaves Islam expecting supremacy in this life, in this world, in a way that Judaism and 1.00

01:02:01.420 Christianity simply don't and haven't. It matters that, you know, if you look at... 1.00

01:02:05.460 I should say, lately. Christianity lately, in the last few centuries. This would have been 1.00

01:02:09.660 recognizable... Even 14th century Christianity, for all its flaws, was different in some crucial

01:02:16.300 respects theologically from Islam. I mean, just that you have a different example. Like, when you

01:02:20.840 look at the worst moments of Christianity and you try to map that violence, you know, let's say the 0.99

01:02:27.440 killing of heretics, say, or the burning of witches onto the ministry of Jesus, it becomes a bit of a

01:02:33.560 heavy lift, you know, in terms of the casuistry you have to do, though people accomplished it. It's

01:02:39.480 much less of a heavy lift when you look at the biography of Muhammad. I mean, Muhammad is like

01:02:43.940 Alexander the Great with a spiritual mandate, right? And, you know, had Jesus been cutting off

01:02:50.720 people's heads, it's a different example of the truly normative human life. And there's a reason why

01:02:57.540 the jihadist project makes so much sense in the context of Islam, by obvious reference to its

01:03:04.200 theology. I'm not saying it subsumes all of Islam, obviously, and it doesn't. And what we desperately

01:03:10.000 need are 2 billion Muslims to fundamentally reject jihadism and find a theological basis for that

01:03:15.580 rejection. And I know there are Muslims somewhere at work on that project, but it is a demonstrably 1.00

01:03:22.540 harder project than it would be in the context of even Christianity for all its flaws. And I'll grant 1.00

01:03:28.420 you that the roots of anti-Semitism go back 2,000 years to the roots of Christianity, however inscrutable

01:03:34.060 that is, because Jesus was Jewish, as you know, and as were the Twelve Apostles, and as was the Virgin

01:03:38.720 Mary. We can get into it. By the way, that's why anti-Semitism is so powerful and animating and

01:03:43.720 defining for Western civilization, because of that borrowing from Jewishness. Yeah, yeah, and the 1.00

01:03:49.460 living rejection of all Jews of the status of Christ and all of that. But I don't want to take

01:03:54.540 us too far afield. I'm just saying that there's a reason why this problem is so intractable. And I

01:04:00.560 think there's also a reason why any recourse to rival history, any debate about the last 75 years and

01:04:07.340 who did what to whom and whose land is it really, I think all of that is bound to be a political dead

01:04:13.040 end. I mean, there are irreconcilable accounts of the history on the Jewish and Palestinian side.

01:04:18.260 They will not be reconciled. So yes, some history is obviously more accurate than others,

01:04:24.760 but the only, and again, this is my opinion, feel free to disagree, but the only thing that

01:04:30.700 has to be focused on by Israel and its defenders at this moment is the question of what people want

01:04:39.160 now. What would people do, what would everyone do if they had the power to do it, right? What would most

01:04:46.060 Israelis want to accomplish now in the Middle East if they could only accomplish it? And I'm going to 0.98

01:04:50.500 drag you onto more nuanced ground because I want to talk about the extremists within Israel and on

01:04:58.200 the Jewish side that make any cartoonish version of this seem too simple. But the question is not what

01:05:05.000 happened in 1948 or 1967 or, or, uh, you know, where you can set your way back machine. The question

01:05:12.440 is what would people do now if they could, if they could accomplish anything they wanted, if they had

01:05:18.140 the weapons they wanted, if they had the power they wanted. And I think we know the answer to that.

01:05:23.040 And we know again, that cartoonish quality to this disparity is impossible to ignore. I mean,

01:05:28.820 we have on one side, a death cult using its own civilians as human shields, wherein the death of

01:05:36.260 its civilians is part of its plan. It's part of it. And it's articulate on this point. It's quite happy

01:05:42.080 to have more martyrs, right? And we have to whatever degree that deters Israel in its, in the way it wages 0.71

01:05:49.700 war. If you flip that around, if you imagined the IDF using Israeli civilians as human shields against

01:05:58.740 Hamas, if you imagine what a ludicrous strategy that would be, I mean, given Hamas's aims to, you know, 0.82

01:06:05.640 kill all the civilians and get his hands on that again, is this moral asymmetry. That's impossible to

01:06:12.040 exaggerate. There, there are groups of people on this earth who use human shields, not just captured

01:06:16.920 combatants, but their own women and children. And there are groups on this earth who are deterred to whatever

01:06:23.500 degree by that inhumane, uh, way of waging war, uh, and do their best to mitigate the loss of civilian

01:06:30.260 life. Right. So that like, again, that's another way of, of looking at what is currently true now.

01:06:35.560 Another detail that, you know, to which many people avert their eyes is just what happens when old women 1.00

01:06:43.900 and babies are brought as hostages into Gaza. Like how, how, how does the, the, the larger culture

01:06:51.940 respond to this, um, war crime? And imagine reversing that. Imagine the IDF bringing terrified old women

01:07:01.980 from Gaza and infants into Tel Aviv as hostages, right? I imagined Israeli society absorbing the 0.96

01:07:10.080 knowledge that this is what, this is a tactic that was being resorted to. What you have are radically

01:07:15.780 different cultures, radically different notions of, of ethics, uh, and radically different life

01:07:22.840 aspirations expressed in the, in these, in the differences at the level of behavior here. Um,

01:07:29.720 again, I just, I've gone on for much longer than I was expecting, hoping to echo some of, uh, what you

01:07:35.280 were pointing out there. But first, let me know if you disagree with anything I just said, because I,

01:07:40.400 I think it's crucial that my audience hear any disagreement, but then I want to, I want to ask

01:07:45.040 you about the extremists on the Jewish side and some of the other details that make it very difficult to

01:07:51.240 make the simple case I want to make here, because the moment you get one seemingly equally fanatic,

01:07:58.480 ultra-Orthodox person in front of a microphone on your side talking about, uh, you know, killing the 0.99

01:08:04.500 Amalekites and Gaza, it seems like there's some, all the disparities that, you know, that we both

01:08:10.100 just described no longer exist and you just have religious fanatics on both sides and there, there

01:08:15.540 is no moral high ground discernible anymore. So we'll get to that, but please tell me if there's

01:08:20.620 anything you, any place you want to demur on what I just said. No, first of all, that, that was

01:08:25.360 wonderful. That was a lot of things. The problem is that it was a lot of things. Uh, let me say about

01:08:30.440 Hamas. We, uh, have, there's a general structure to the history of Israeli survival, we'll call it, 0.68

01:08:37.320 or, or of the attempts of the region for various reasons, whether it's Pan-Arabist ideologies or

01:08:41.880 these kinds of, um, Salafist, uh, I call it Salafist a hundred years ago. This is what Salafist 0.93

01:08:46.740 meant. Uh, Salaf is a forefathers, forefatherist, meaning go back to the original, that pietistic, 0.97

01:08:52.240 go back to the original Islam. And there were, today they use the word Salafist to mean people

01:08:56.340 sort of more extreme than Al-Qaeda. I don't mean it in that way. I mean the broadest sense of Hamas 0.54

01:09:00.660 and, and, and this pietism, but all of these different ideologies and all of these different

01:09:05.520 attempts to destroy us all met their end. And I want to say this because this is really important

01:09:10.080 because all this theoretical stuff about, you know, digging up, uh, 1860s theologians in Egypt

01:09:15.400 matters profoundly because I literally, my brother-in-law literally has to go face them down in a gun

01:09:22.320 battle. And my kids literally have to run to a bomb shelter because they have spent their national 0.58

01:09:27.620 treasure on ballistic missiles. And so it's, it's really important for me to say that everything I

01:09:33.800 have described at a very, very shallow level, and my goal is for people to look it up. Okay.

01:09:38.300 Al-Afghani, whose student was Abdu, K-B-D-U-H, whose student was Rida, R-I-D-A, whose student was Al-Bana,

01:09:44.600 the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. And if people read about them, they'll discover these

01:09:47.980 fascinating, interested, multilingual, um, you know, worldly people who tried to find solutions

01:09:54.960 for real cultural crises. And it all ended up in Hamas and Al-Qaeda, but, but it comes from a big,

01:10:01.060 larger place that by the way, could have gone in other directions. And some of them wanted it very

01:10:04.940 much to go in other directions. Just to say that ultimately it boils down to, as you say, what's

01:10:10.740 going, what's going to happen going forward. The good news about this Salafism, we defeated in, 1.00

01:10:16.260 in 1948. Okay. We won that war, but we won that war because our enemies were incompetent and divided

01:10:23.400 and unable to field the kinds of armies they needed to field and unable to coordinate with each other.

01:10:28.380 The Egyptians and the Jordanians and Kaukji's forces coming down from Lebanon couldn't coordinate.

01:10:33.360 And in 1956, all of that had changed. Nasser was in charge in Egypt. The Soviets had now armed the Arab 0.97

01:10:40.840 armies and they were all coordinated together. And we suddenly saw ourselves still a third world 0.74

01:10:45.320 country. I think only three years earlier, we had stopped rationing eggs for children.

01:10:49.660 We suddenly saw ourselves surrounded by these brand new crack fighting armies that were absolutely

01:10:54.400 coordinated, could deploy massive numbers of troops. And we were existentially threatened.

01:10:59.240 And so the 1956 Suez war was a war of British and French imperialism, trying to claw back Nasser's

01:11:05.880 nationalization of the canal because they had these imperialist rights. And the Israelis fought the

01:11:10.340 ground war for them. But what the Israelis thought they were doing was pushing back this noose that 0.52

01:11:15.780 was closing in on them in the form of this pan-Arabism. Now this new unified pan-Arabism,

01:11:21.740 where did it go? Why did it disappear? What happened to it? And the answer is in 67 and 73,

01:11:26.820 we simply destroyed its armies in the desert and on the Golan Heights. And because it failed,

01:11:32.620 it evaporated as an idea. And then we faced this model from the Algerian war. Folks should read

01:11:39.820 Alistair Horne's The Savage War for Peace, the classic magisterial history of the Algerian

01:11:45.080 independence war, which was a pivot of history. It created all the decolonization discourse on

01:11:50.160 modern American college campuses because every new idea is about 50 years old on the modern American

01:11:55.200 college campus. But that war was a war of eight years of terrorism, brutal terrorism by the

01:12:00.720 National Liberation Front of Algeria against the French colonizers. And within eight years,

01:12:05.580 all the French colonizers, a million people who had been there 130 years, got up and left.

01:12:10.440 And the Palestinians founded the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO, modeled on the

01:12:14.820 National Liberation Front of Algeria 18 months after that immense victory of terrorism driving away

01:12:19.960 a grand colonialist project. And they said, that would work there, will work here. And they spent the

01:12:24.960 next 30 years terrorizing Israelis, hijacking airplanes, massacring children. People should look up the 0.94

01:12:29.880 1974 Maalot massacre. Terrorists came down from Lebanon, took over a school, and 22 kids were

01:12:35.080 killed by the time Israeli special forces made it into the school. And we defeated it. We defeated it

01:12:40.820 by meeting it on its own terms, developing new capabilities, and defeating it. And now we have

01:12:44.740 this Islamist war. And the Islamist alliance, the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas embedded, both a Muslim 0.55

01:12:50.240 Brotherhood group, Sunni group embedded in the Shia proxy system of Iran, two different Islamist worlds

01:12:55.420 joining forces against us. Their one great strategic advantage, besides the fact that they're clever with

01:13:01.880 drones and rockets and understand that the future of war is complex and not, you know, tanks, their

01:13:06.600 great advantage is what we see in Gaza and what Hezbollah was willing to do to Lebanon, which is the 0.95

01:13:11.980 destruction of their own polities and what the Houthis are willing to do in Yemen. And it's really 0.94

01:13:15.560 important to dwell on that. Hamas spent 17 years as the government of Gaza, ruling Gaza, and building

01:13:22.320 almost nothing in Gaza, almost literally nothing, except the biggest tunnel system in the history of

01:13:28.760 warfare. A 500 kilometer tunnel system in a 25 kilometer territory. And it's an amazing achievement.

01:13:35.540 It's by far the biggest thing Palestinians have ever built. And it's five times bigger than I think 1.00

01:13:39.620 the second biggest tunnel project meant for war. And the purpose of this project, these are electrified,

01:13:47.060 these are air conditioned, they have manufacturing facilities in them. The purpose of this tunnel

01:13:52.520 system is to force the enemy to cut through cities when they come for Hamas. The only way to get to 0.98

01:13:57.820 Hamas is to cut through the cities that these tunnel systems go under and have thousands of entrances in. 0.94

01:14:04.060 And that moment, after building that for 17 years, or intensively for roughly 12 years,

01:14:09.620 that's when Hamas carried out October 7. It's really important to dwell on this, because on October 7,

01:14:15.440 that means that Hamas actually carried out two atrocities, not one. One was against us,

01:14:21.240 and the bigger one, in sheer human suffering, I'm an Israeli who knows people who died on October 7,

01:14:26.700 and I'm saying this, the bigger one was the atrocity committed against Gaza. The destruction of Gaza

01:14:32.300 was purposeful. And if someone hears this and says you're blaming Hamas for your own destructive war 0.52

01:14:37.120 in Gaza, let me just say, if you hate me, if you hate Israelis, if you think Israel is monstrous,

01:14:43.520 that only makes Hamas' strategy doubly monstrous, because they built that tunnel system, forced an 0.89

01:14:48.720 enemy to come through cities to get to them. And then the single most important fact to Israelis about 0.95

01:14:53.280 the Gaza war is that no civilian in Gaza has ever been allowed to step foot in any of those tunnels.

01:14:57.820 There was some viral tweet about a week ago that argued that, you know, Israelis are now running,

01:15:04.540 I guess four to five days ago, arguing Israelis are running from Iranian missiles, but they have 0.96

01:15:08.700 these bomb shelters. And this person said, you know, you evil Israelis, Gazans had no bomb shelters.

01:15:14.440 And it was a fascinating admission, because Gazans have the largest bomb shelter system in the history

01:15:20.260 of the world. They're just not allowed into it. And so the new Islamist strategy... 1.00

01:15:25.820 Or still, we've had Hamas snipers kill people trying to evacuate.

01:15:30.140 Absolutely. And they'll continue to do it. And they'll kill the people trying to produce aid,

01:15:34.160 distribute aid that isn't through Hamas or not usable by Hamas for black market funding 0.90

01:15:38.000 of their continued operations. The death of Gaza is the strategy. Now, Israelis woke up on October 7 in 0.97

01:15:45.520 a few ways. One was the discovery that we failed catastrophically in our understanding of the enemy.

01:15:49.780 Another one was the just horrific trauma of the betrayal of those people. All we are,

01:15:54.600 we are the Jews who didn't get into the West by the time the West closed its doors. We are the

01:15:58.920 Jews who survived the 20th century by banding together and building our fortress. All we are

01:16:04.700 is that solidarity. October 7 was a trauma greater than any war, because it was our own failure to

01:16:10.660 save our own brothers and sisters. And there was a third way in which Israelis woke up. And that third 0.82

01:16:15.740 way was the discovery that our enemy is not willing to see the destruction of its own polity,

01:16:20.820 but that that is its foundational force multiplier in this war. And so you cannot deter this enemy.

01:16:27.680 These are undeterrable enemies if there's nothing you can do in Gaza that could ever deter this 0.91

01:16:32.000 enemy. In fact, the destruction of Gaza is seen as a cost on your side of the ledger.

01:16:36.140 We then looked at Hezbollah and we said, well, those 200,000 missiles and rockets under 300 villages 0.77

01:16:41.240 in South Lebanon, they're meant to be used. They're not deterred either. And we looked at Iran and we said, 0.95

01:16:45.780 they're going to use anything they have. They're undeterrable. We no longer believe in our own

01:16:51.140 ability to psychoanalyze the enemy. And so I argued on October 8, my first podcast after October 7,

01:17:00.340 interview at someone else's podcast, I argued that this was only ever going to end with Iran.

01:17:05.480 If you understood that basic insight the Israelis understood, which is that our enemies have the 0.92

01:17:10.180 strategy of the death of their own civilians, and it is their foundational strategy. There is no other 0.80

01:17:14.780 strategy for Hamas to survive and win this war except to create these costs on Israel. And by the

01:17:19.440 way, that's why failing to understand that we need a good PR strategy is a catastrophic betrayal of the

01:17:25.240 soldiers and the sacrifices of the society in this war. I love where it comes from. I understand

01:17:30.460 culturally where it comes from, but it is a catastrophic failure. So that was an important

01:17:34.980 thing for me to say. All this religious sort of deep dive has a real basic sort of pragmatic

01:17:41.480 meaning to how we prosecute this war, how we understand this war, and where we go.

01:17:46.680 But there's also a huge advantage, and I hope I'm not ranting too long. There's a huge advantage to

01:17:51.480 this understanding of the enemy, which is that the basic Salafist idea is, even the assumption

01:17:56.380 before you get into any basic ideas, is geopolitical success is a sign of divine will. I can work with

01:18:02.840 that. Because the corollary is exactly what happened to Pan-Arabism. Catastrophic geopolitical 0.99

01:18:08.780 failure is evidence that you don't have divine will. So all I have to do to kill this idea—people

01:18:15.500 keep telling us, you can't kill an idea—first you should find out what the idea is, and then you

01:18:20.220 can come to me and debate with me what ideas die and don't. Ideas die all the time. But this particular

01:18:24.600 idea is founded on the premise that I am defeatable and they are not. And if I can reverse

01:18:29.940 that, the idea is gone. The idea at its core foundational tenets are demonstrably removed

01:18:36.860 from the table. So this is a winnable war. We just have to rise up and go after the enemy.

01:18:43.180 And I'm going to stop talking just out of sheer politeness because I'm Israeli, so I won't 1.00

01:18:47.240 otherwise.

01:18:47.520 I'm going to demand brevity for some of these topics because there's just too many to get

01:18:51.760 through. But just to close the loop on what you just said there, that's why I think the

01:18:56.680 missed opportunity here is to this, to my eyes, a corrective to the failure of public messaging

01:19:03.040 that you explained on Israel's behalf there. This is about much more than Israel and it's

01:19:08.320 about much more than the fate of the Jews. It's about a very real zero-sum contest between

01:19:16.180 open societies and the theocratic aspirations of some subset of the Muslim world. Again, I'm 1.00

01:19:24.500 not talking about all Muslims, but I'm talking about anyone who is signing up directly or otherwise

01:19:31.180 supportive of the jihadist project. Anyone who is coming into the streets sincerely claiming

01:19:37.560 that we love death more than the Americans or the Jews or the infidels or the apostates love 1.00

01:19:42.760 life, right? And there are some number, I'm not going to put a number on it, but a percentage

01:19:47.920 of the Muslim world that's far larger than anyone wants and large enough to be consequential 1.00

01:19:53.460 can honestly utter those words. And if we're going to have a theory of mind of our enemy that actually

01:20:01.340 is predictive of future behavior, we have to take those utterances at face value. When members of

01:20:08.620 Hamas and their fans and the immediate concentric circle of Palestinian society that still supports 0.98

01:20:14.640 Hamas says something like, we love death more than the Jews love life, right? That is a, they're making 0.69

01:20:21.580 their minds transparent to us, right? They're making their cultural aspirations transparent to us.

01:20:27.340 It's not bluster. And, you know, I don't know, I don't know why an endless supply of suicide bombers

01:20:32.960 wasn't enough of a rhetorical device to convince everyone in the West that it wasn't bluster, but, but

01:20:38.200 it simply hasn't. If you stumble onto a university campus today, I mean, you don't have to be in the

01:20:43.060 Middle Eastern studies department. You can be in anthropology, you can be in sociology, you can be in

01:20:47.000 psychology, you're going to meet people who fundamentally doubt that anyone actually believes

01:20:53.500 in paradise, that anyone actually believes in, in the metaphysics of martyrdom. You know, I've met

01:20:58.740 anthropologists who claim to me that none of that was operative, even in the immediate aftermath of

01:21:03.420 9-11 or, or even when the Islamic state was at its zenith in winning recruits, when people are dropping

01:21:09.980 out of medical school and at the London School of Economics and, and flying to Syria for the pleasure of 0.99

01:21:15.560 taking sex slaves and cutting the heads off of apostates. They just think that these are psychopaths 1.00

01:21:21.280 who would do awful things anyway, and there's no role of belief and, and millenarian expectation

01:21:26.700 played here at all. And this is what happens to secular societies when they forget what it's like

01:21:31.320 to actually believe in God. And they think nobody really has the courage of their convictions

01:21:36.040 anywhere, even if they're blowing themselves up or celebrating the suicidal atrocities of their

01:21:41.180 children. It's just, it's so obviously so that, and has been for honestly, as long as we've been

01:21:47.180 alive, that it, it's beyond debating at this point, or should be. I'm not even gonna let you respond to

01:21:52.320 that. Come back to it if you want, but I, I need to get you onto more contentious ground. What do we do

01:21:58.000 with the extremists in your midst? And how, um, how to, how can you frame for an American audience,

01:22:05.000 an audience outside of Israel, the contributions to this picture made by people like, uh, Smotrich and

01:22:13.240 Ben Gavir? I mean, those, those are the, those are the two that, that are always named. I'm, I'm sure

01:22:18.300 there are other, other names I haven't heard, but to what degree is the current government in Israel

01:22:25.500 married to the far right and the, and a, a group of, um, ultra Orthodox, you know, messianic characters

01:22:34.580 who, um, granted the religious claims are, are, are importantly different in my view, but still,

01:22:39.640 nonetheless, you have your own number of religious fanatics. To what degree is religious fanaticism

01:22:46.600 distorting the, the project and the, and the fighting of this war on your side?

01:22:51.700 In my view, in my view, not at all. They exist. They cause terrible harm. We have outright Jewish 1.00

01:23:00.760 terrorism against Palestinian civilians in some parts of the West Bank. We have polls of Palestinians

01:23:06.400 that tell us that most Israelis genuinely believe, Israeli Jews, at least genuinely believe, I think 0.97

01:23:12.820 it's different numbers among Arab Israelis who are also, of course, Palestinians. Um, most Israeli Jews

01:23:17.660 genuinely believe that that terrorism is a, is a small phenomenon and on paper, technically it might

01:23:22.580 be a small phenomenon, but we have polls of Palestinians who say that a majority, I don't

01:23:27.920 remember the numbers. This is a poll I saw a few years ago, but a very significant majority. In other

01:23:32.080 words, upwards of 60%, if not more, think that this is a, an expectation that they have in life, that they

01:23:37.560 will encounter this violence. And so it, because it's the, you know, it's, um, not a lot of kids get

01:23:43.120 kidnapped in America by random strangers, but, um, because of, uh, all kinds of TV shows about

01:23:48.000 kidnappings of kids, all American parents are terrified their kids are going to be kidnapped.

01:23:51.460 So kids aren't allowed outside kind of a phenomenon. And I mean to mock those parents, but I don't mean

01:23:56.900 to mock, uh, the Palestinian expectation because that's, it's not driven just by, you know, I don't

01:24:03.540 know what, not reading the statistics. It's driven by a sense of real vulnerability that is absolutely

01:24:07.880 real and powerful for them. So there is an actual Jewish, um, phenomenon of terrorism. It is 0.68

01:24:13.760 marginal within Jewish society, religious terrorism about kicking out the other. It is

01:24:19.820 marginal in Jewish society. It is sufficiently big and Palestinians feel sufficiently unprotected 1.00

01:24:25.460 by the Israeli military and by the Israeli state and law enforcement and sufficiently vulnerable in

01:24:31.280 deep way. I'll give you an example. There was a poll taken a few years back, I think eight years ago,

01:24:37.300 something like that by a wonderful Palestinian pollster, Khalil Shikaki. He's a, he's a sociologist

01:24:42.780 and he runs this polling firm in Ramallah and Gallup uses him to poll Palestinians. And everybody

01:24:46.780 just kind of trusts him as the sort of gold standard of polling of Palestinians. And, uh, he had a poll

01:24:53.120 where he once asked Palestinians this kind of conspiracy theory that Hamas was pushing for many years,

01:24:58.000 that the Jews want to take the temple mount, take Al-Aqsa, destroy it, you know, build a synagogue on it, 0.95

01:25:03.620 build a temple on it. The radical portions of Israeli society that did want that happened to 0.56

01:25:08.080 now be in the government, but they were, you know, 5% of the 95% of Jews who don't want it. 0.74

01:25:13.740 Right. And he asked them, what, what do you think? Do you think they want it? And 80% of Palestinians 1.00

01:25:18.740 are convinced that Jews are coming for Al-Aqsa, coming for the shrine that is their anchor of

01:25:22.880 identity in the Muslim world and, and their source of dignity, their claim to dignity in the Muslim world.

01:25:27.280 Um, and what he then did, because he's a good pollster is then he asked the conditionals. He

01:25:31.600 said, well, what, what do you think they actually want from it? And some said they want to build a

01:25:35.200 temple, uh, uh, either a temple or a synagogue, but they're definitely not going to destroy

01:25:38.660 the Muslim shrines. Uh, that's about 20%. 20% said they want to destroy the Muslim shrines and build

01:25:43.100 this. And there are different versions of that story, but 80% thought they want to fundamentally 0.88

01:25:48.020 change the status quo on the temple mount. And then he asked the great and powerful question,

01:25:53.000 which we reshaped how I understand, um, this Palestinian, this discourse among Palestinians,

01:25:57.860 which is, will they succeed? He didn't say, is there a chance? He didn't say, is there a,

01:26:03.620 will they actually, what do you believe will actually happen, succeed? And 50% said yes.

01:26:09.620 Now that's 50% of the 80, so 40% of the total. Right. In other words, when Palestinians have this 1.00

01:26:15.020 conspiracy theory that the Jews are gunning for Al-Aqsa, that's not an expression of some

01:26:19.260 anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. And there are plenty of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in

01:26:22.500 Palestinian discourse. It's an expression of vulnerability. You could be cynical and say,

01:26:27.240 if they were in charge and that was a Jewish shrine, that's what they would do. And so they 0.93

01:26:31.360 expected from the Jews. And that's what the Jordanians did to the Jewish quarter of the 0.98

01:26:34.620 old city when they ruled it, they destroyed medieval synagogues. But it's an expression 1.00

01:26:38.840 of vulnerability. So, um, I would also point out it's a, an expression of an ambient level of

01:26:44.040 religious fanaticism to put that much primacy in the, the integrity of a building. The enemy you face

01:26:51.400 is not just Hamas, is not just Hezbollah. It is a wider culture, which would go absolutely berserk 0.90

01:26:58.840 if something happens to that building. Right.

01:27:01.840 But look, Sam, I told myself, I coming to your podcast, I'm coming into your house,

01:27:05.640 I'm not going to start a fight on about religion.

01:27:08.140 Yeah. Okay. Well, yeah.

01:27:09.500 Because I, I happen to, that part I like, that part I respect on their, in, on their side.

01:27:15.260 I'm super pro-religion, which is a fascinating conversation I want to have with you,

01:27:18.400 but it's going to kind of derail all the things you want to accomplish here. But just to say in like,

01:27:22.880 next time, but, um, it, it isn't the building. It isn't the building. I, I once saw a, um,

01:27:30.080 it's the story. It's always the story. When secular societies lose religion,

01:27:34.560 they lose the capacity, A, to understand that people live in stories, B, to craft powerful,

01:27:40.400 mythic, foundational stories.

01:27:41.560 Okay. But, uh, well, well, this, this is a detour that we, we can't take this detour too long.

01:27:45.800 30 seconds. 30 seconds. I once heard a sermon by a, um, Palestinian, uh, imam in a mosque.

01:27:52.640 And the sermon was, and I'm just going to cut it down to 10 seconds. The sermon was,

01:27:57.520 right. The, the, the dome, the golden dome on the temple mount stands on top of a, of a,

01:28:02.440 of a boulder that in the Sunni tradition, Muhammad stepped on when he ascended to heaven. That was 0.90

01:28:06.700 the stepping stone in his ascent to heaven. And this person said, this imam said, that's not an

01:28:11.620 accident. Palestine is the stepping stone that Islam must step on in order to take its ascend to 1.00

01:28:18.280 its rightful place as a redemptive force in history. In other words, we are told by the rest of Islam, 1.00

01:28:23.560 you are the pathetic weak link of Islam that was pushed back by the weakest thing that ever pushed 1.00

01:28:28.540 Islam back. But no, my fellow Palestinians, in fact, we are the place where the, the decline stops. 1.00

01:28:34.940 We are the sacrifice. We will be the people who can, because of our sacrifice,

01:28:40.120 win back for Islam, its rightful place. That is a, when you look at polls of, of Gazans and they 1.00

01:28:45.940 tell you, most of them tell you, we hate Hamas, they destroyed our lives. And then most of them 0.99

01:28:49.760 tell you, and we love Hamas and we'll follow them to war in October 7th was a glorious thing. 1.00

01:28:53.920 That cognitive dissonance isn't cognitive dissonance. It's Hamas destroyed our lives, 0.94

01:28:58.520 but the story they give us of our experience is the most dignifying story available to us.

01:29:03.260 And so it's, it's really big and powerful. It's not a small thing. And when they feel

01:29:07.800 vulnerable to Israeli, that's them questioning whether, whether or not any of that is true.

01:29:12.400 And in fact, their story actually is this degraded undignified one. So it's, it's a,

01:29:16.940 it's a richer discourse about the meaning of their lives and their experiences as a collective

01:29:20.860 than just, you know, dogma.

01:29:23.940 Okay. Well, let me, let me just introduce a little more cognitive dissonance into this picture

01:29:27.940 because it may surprise some people. So the charms of religious architecture and sake and

01:29:34.100 holy sites are not at all lost on me. And I've been to the Temple Mount and I love walking the

01:29:38.860 streets of Jerusalem and both for Christian and Jewish and Muslim reasons, all the echoes of that, 0.98

01:29:44.420 you know, get into my pores too. And I love it. And I can say more than that. I love the architecture.

01:29:50.300 I love the Muslim architecture in particular. I like, uh, my favorite music is mystical Muslim

01:29:56.720 music. I'm in Kuala music from Pakistan and in North African music, um, from Mali. I mean,

01:30:02.360 I just, so it's like, these are the sounds I want in my head. I don't translate the lyrics very often.

01:30:07.480 So I, who knows, they could be saying that they're going to kill the Jews, but in any case,

01:30:11.280 I know what it's like to feel ecstasy and meaning in the presence of these, these artifacts that not

01:30:18.180 withstanding, what we're living with now is a world that has been rigged to explode by superstitious 0.62

01:30:25.480 beliefs, right? So if you, if you just have a gas leak on the Temple Mount, I don't know if there

01:30:29.500 is gas on the Temple Mount, but if should, should there be a gas leak, it causes the, the destruction

01:30:34.380 of that building for reasons that no one has intended. No Messianic Jew, no crackpot Christian, 1.00

01:30:39.360 no, no false flag. An Iranian missile. An Iranian missile. Yeah, an Iranian missile hits it. And the 0.99

01:30:44.760 predictable conspiracy theory would be that the Jews have finally destroyed the 0.99

01:30:48.180 the Al-Aqsa Mosque. It is fundamentally untenable to live in a world where the destruction of a

01:30:54.340 religious symbol will galvanize whole populations to war in a way that no genocide ever would. No,

01:31:03.200 I mean, so you get, you get hundreds of thousands of people killed in Sudan or Syria. Nobody cares 0.68

01:31:08.440 apparently, but if we destroy one building by accident, we could have World War III on our hands.

01:31:14.020 But that's not, that's not religion. But it isn't the symbol, it's the story behind the symbol. In

01:31:19.960 other words, when the Spanish Civil War, right, because of the sinking of, I forget my 10th grade

01:31:25.020 American history, I'm sorry, Mrs. Keene from Nicolet High School, but there was some ship sunk and they

01:31:30.420 said, you know, we gotta, you know, there's always a symbol to the mobilizing ethos and you don't need

01:31:37.600 religion for it. In this case, the story is a big one and the symbol is religious, but that's not

01:31:42.680 religion. It's a, humans will, my feeling about religion is do it well because humans are going

01:31:47.240 to do it anyway. And what has taken over the American elite, the monoculture that has taken

01:31:51.280 over the humanities and the American elite universities is a religious monoculture. It's

01:31:55.600 a religion with, with, with good guys and bad guys and architectures of evil and dogmas. And if you stray

01:32:00.940 from those dogmas, you are, you're bad and you're evil and they divide up the way they, they're so busy

01:32:05.920 demoralizing about this place. They don't understand this place. I have not been able to discover

01:32:11.600 serious scholars dealing with this place, or at least serious ones there are. Famous ones are

01:32:16.500 never the serious ones. Famous scholars dealing with this place who can answer the seriously the

01:32:21.660 question, why is Iran want to destroy Israel to the tune of, you know, losing 20% of his GDP on that,

01:32:27.520 on that goal. And so it's a, it's a religious mode of thought. Religious modes of thought are

01:32:31.860 everywhere. We're not going to get away from them. By the way, if I may toot the horn of Judaism, 0.99

01:32:36.300 what we need is, is religions with less dogmas. We need religions that are more humble,

01:32:40.980 that no less. One of the great advantages, I was once on a panel with a Muslim and a Christian,

01:32:45.960 and it was, so to speak, kind of an interfaith panel, but not functionally, because we were

01:32:50.560 talking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Christian and the Muslim were both

01:32:53.500 Palestinian nationalists and I was representing the Jews. So it was like all the monotheistic world

01:32:58.260 against the Jew on the panel. And at some point, you know, one of them said, you know,

01:33:02.580 Israel is a colonialist oppressor state. And one of the other ones said, it's a settler colonialist 0.92

01:33:07.040 oppressor state, two completely different things. And then I said, with respect, and they talked

01:33:12.280 about the, you know, being, Israel being built on the, at the end of a British bayonet and without

01:33:17.280 the empires you would fall. And then I said, you know, with all due respect, as the Jew on the

01:33:21.660 panel with a Christian and a Muslim, I don't have to sit here and listen to a Christian and a Muslim 1.00

01:33:25.520 talk to me about imperialism. If you have more than a billion adherents, okay, I'm not the imperialist

01:33:31.360 here. Because Judaism is not a, it's a great, to the Jewish view, in as much as there's a single

01:33:36.820 one, I think on this there's generally a kind of one, one of the great failings of Islam and 1.00

01:33:41.680 Christianity that drive them to their moral collapses every once in a while in history is the 0.97

01:33:47.320 missionizing part, is the I have to take over the world part. And if you don't have that

01:33:51.880 missionizing part, you don't have a lot of those moral hazards and collapses. And so what the world

01:33:58.200 needs is, you know, a lot of small religions and less gigantic world-conquering ones.

01:34:04.120 All right, we're going to debate that on a future occasion. I've got to run you through some

01:34:07.320 questions that have a more rapid-fire character insofar as that's possible.

01:34:10.880 Let's go.

01:34:11.420 You can say whatever you want, obviously. But, all right, so the contributions of the settlements

01:34:15.300 in the West Bank to this picture, what should we understand about that? I mean, I'm not a fan of

01:34:20.780 the settlements. I'm not a fan of people thinking that land was given to them by God and they're

01:34:25.700 willing to kill or die for that purpose, as you know. But it's widely believed that the expansion

01:34:31.620 of the settlements in the West Bank is just this endless provocation of violence. And Netanyahu is

01:34:38.720 culpable for that and Israel generally is culpable for that. What should we understand about the

01:34:44.500 settlements?

01:34:45.420 The vast majority of Israelis don't think that it has anything to do with God. It is a sense of

01:34:49.700 belonging. It is a sense. There is a sense of belonging. It is the Jewish homeland. And that doesn't 0.93

01:34:54.060 mean it isn't the Palestinian homeland, but it is also the Jewish homeland. The entire Bible takes

01:34:58.880 place in the West Bank. None of the Bible takes place in Tel Aviv, which is why Tel Aviv is so much 1.00

01:35:03.320 more fun, right? But the simple fact is that most Israelis, for the majority of the last three 0.88

01:35:10.920 decades, have been willing. And in polls, if you do the follow-on questions, the conditionals that good

01:35:18.480 pollsters like Khalil Shikaki do, you discover most Israelis are willing, in theory, theoretically,

01:35:23.400 in principle, to pull back from the West Bank, from pieces, large parts of the West Bank, if they

01:35:28.660 thought it would mean peace. Real, actual, reliable, dependable peace that you would stake your children's

01:35:34.020 lives on. The great tragedy for Palestinians isn't the ideological, religious Zionist camp that 0.97

01:35:40.220 is probably only 25% of the settlers, but they're the settlements built between Palestinian population

01:35:46.100 centers whose purpose, deep within the West Bank, whose purpose is to prevent the creation of a

01:35:50.760 Palestinian state, right? 75% of settlements are quite close to the green line and easy to exchange.

01:35:56.440 There are 130 settlements, something like that. The two biggest ones are a quarter of all settlers,

01:36:01.100 and there are two ultra-Orthodox cities that are within 2,000 feet of the green line. In other words,

01:36:04.880 a huge amount of the settlement problem is solved, you know, with the most easiest, obvious land swap

01:36:10.140 in which Palestinians would get better land in the Giri Boa, north of the West Bank region.

01:36:14.160 In other words, the foundational question is the ideological settlement movement. Now,

01:36:20.500 that ideological settlement movement absolutely believes that this is the homeland, and we hold

01:36:23.680 on to it, and God promised it to us, and there's a redemptive story here. You don't have to believe

01:36:28.220 in it, and I don't think this is the Messianic times at all, but I don't think there are Messianic

01:36:33.540 times. But nevertheless, every prophet in the Bible says that these times will be the worst and the

01:36:38.360 best, the most good and the most evil. And that sure does seem to fit the 20th century. And also,

01:36:44.140 one signal of Messianic times is that all the Jews will come back to the homeland. And so, 0.99

01:36:47.820 the religious scientists come out and say, wait a second, what more could you possibly need to

01:36:52.500 satisfy the actual predictions of these very powerful and eloquent kinds of prophecies

01:36:57.760 than this time? Now, most Israelis are not there. Most Israelis were willing to pull out. So much so 1.00

01:37:04.100 that the Oslo process was meant to produce a Palestinian state with Barak in 1999 going to

01:37:10.080 Camp David with Arafat. And then the Second Intifada begins, and 140 suicide bombings that

01:37:16.320 shatter the Israeli left and prevent the Israeli left really from ever coming to power ever again.

01:37:21.280 And then a fascinating thing happens, which is that the Israeli right that replaces the Israeli 0.97

01:37:26.120 left, Likud, then takes power in 2001 amid, you know, two or three bus bombings a week in Israeli

01:37:32.640 cities, including buses of children. And what you have suddenly is an Israeli political right that

01:37:39.640 reveals that it has secretly wished the left had succeeded in creating a Palestinian state and

01:37:43.400 separating. And it goes to the Gaza withdrawal in 2005, which is in its moment, today it's not popular,

01:37:48.600 in its moment is deeply popular. Likud carries it out. After the Gaza withdrawal, Sharon leaves Likud

01:37:55.880 and forms a new party called Kadima and planned, apparently, to withdraw from the West Bank or from

01:38:02.380 90% of the West Bank. And how do we know that? Because he proceeds to have a stroke. His number two

01:38:06.760 guy who came with him from Likud, this is, I guess, December-ish 2005, the number two guy becomes

01:38:13.400 the candidate for Kadima, Olmert. And before the election, which is in March of 2006, Olmert tells

01:38:20.200 Israelis, I plan to pull out of the West Bank. This would come to be called the convergence plan. 1.00

01:38:24.880 People should look it up. Right-wingers come in and say, the left failed to create a bilateral

01:38:29.760 agreement with Palestinians on pulling out. We started these massive pull-outs, Palestinians 1.00

01:38:34.060 responded with mass waves of terrorism, but we still need to separate from them, even if they can't

01:38:38.740 reciprocate our withdrawals with peace. And Olmert says, I don't want you to tell me I didn't tell

01:38:45.000 you. That's the plan, the convergence plan, which is a 90% withdrawal from the West Bank.

01:38:50.180 Olmert wins that election. Likud crashes to 12 seats under Benjamin Netanyahu. And Olmert then

01:38:56.280 proceeds to have to face, within three months of his government forming with the Labour Party,

01:39:02.240 with the left, in June, in late June 2006, the very first Gaza tunnel operation, where Hamas dig

01:39:09.540 a tunnel under the border, kill two Israeli soldiers, kidnap a soldier, take him into Gaza.

01:39:13.620 There's now a shooting war in Gaza. Two weeks later, July 12th, there's now a Hezbollah attack in the

01:39:18.280 north. And we have this massive rockets war in Lebanon and Gaza. Lebanon, where we pulled out of

01:39:25.180 in 2000, Gaza that we pulled out of in 2005. And an Olmert government that wants to pull out of the

01:39:30.740 West Bank, having to show Israelis that they can, what, restore deterrents, that it's safe to pull 0.98

01:39:35.580 out of this much larger area that's the center of the country, that's the highlands overlooking our

01:39:39.720 cities. Olmert never is able to actually carry out the convergence plan. This right-wing version of

01:39:45.760 the same peace process of separating from the Palestinians, because we don't want to rule them 1.00

01:39:49.460 forever, that won elections right up until every withdrawal turned into rivers of blood. So most Israelis 1.00

01:39:57.880 on the question of settlements, most settlers are just literally suburbs. They are close to the green

01:40:03.940 line. They are solvable. The significant portion, maybe it's 30% of the settlement movement out on

01:40:09.720 the mountains between the Palestinian cities meant to prevent a Palestinian state, would be solvable if

01:40:15.100 the rest of Israeli society thought there was an option. And they have spent 30 years, the Palestinian 1.00

01:40:19.880 national movement, led by Hamas, but also led by Arafat. And sections of Fatah that very much belong to

01:40:25.960 the same religious world as Hamas, even if they dress it in more nationalist, secularist language.

01:40:30.520 They've spent 30 years convincing ordinary Israeli cab drivers and shopkeepers that if we pull out of

01:40:36.420 the West Bank, we shrink down to nine miles wide in the middle, they hold the highlands overlooking

01:40:41.320 all our major population centers, and we will face a catastrophic version of the disaster that is

01:40:48.700 Gaza or South Lebanon. So that's the question Israelis are asking, and nobody knows how to give them a 0.99

01:40:54.400 Palestinian answer. That isn't, Hamas will take over. By the way, if we have an election right now

01:40:58.460 in the West Bank, Hamas wins, and it's won in every poll in 15 years. So that's the question of 0.85

01:41:04.780 settlements to the average Israeli. You don't have to tell us why, you have to tell us how. 0.69

01:41:09.340 What does the average Israeli feel about resettling Gaza?

01:41:12.960 We have polls, you know, 90% opposed.

01:41:15.840 Okay.

01:41:16.600 Yeah, just total opposition. It's a ridiculous idea. 0.97

01:41:18.880 Why would you even imagine it, is the view of the vast majority of Israelis. 0.95

01:41:24.500 Okay, so you mentioned Omer. He recently published an essay castigating the current government for

01:41:31.340 war crimes. He described the war as pointless at this point and unwinnable. This is a direct quote.

01:41:39.020 What we're doing in Gaza now is a war of extermination, indiscriminate, limitless, 0.89

01:41:43.340 cruel, and criminal killing of civilians. I can't imagine that's a popular view, but how do you

01:41:52.080 respond to that claim? I mean, what's the backstory for, I mean, I know Omer probably hates Netanyahu

01:41:59.900 with a passion that can scarcely be described, but what's going on there with that level of

01:42:07.220 condemnation? Ultimately, my reading of this kind of discourse among Israelis, in other words,

01:42:14.560 if it's coming from Amnesty International, it's a whole different ballgame. It's a question of

01:42:18.520 trust. Palestinian civilians in Gaza are suffering terribly. The Israeli government has managed to be

01:42:25.420 profoundly incompetent time after time after time, and the war has gone very slowly. One of the big

01:42:30.660 problems and mistakes made in the war was that there was a decision made very early on, very

01:42:35.000 understandable, rooted in the American experience of Afghanistan, where American soldiers in Afghanistan

01:42:39.760 had this strategy of clear and hold. You would take a territory, you would take a valley, you would

01:42:43.880 hold it. You would leave Marines there, you would leave infantry there, and then the Taliban couldn't 0.98

01:42:48.280 take it back. And what that ended up creating was thousands and thousands of targets all over

01:42:53.280 Afghanistan for the Taliban guerrilla war. And one of the lessons that, that's a simplification,

01:43:00.700 but one of the lessons Israel drew from the American experience was that lesson.

01:43:05.000 And the lesson was, don't take territory and hold it, but in fact, conduct a raiding war.

01:43:09.860 So every single part of Gaza has faced an Israeli incursion, you know, three times, five times,

01:43:14.620 sometimes 12 times. And one of the advantages that that created was that the Israelis didn't 1.00

01:43:19.300 have to go into the tunnels, because Hamas would need to control some of the above ground.

01:43:24.440 Israel would engage those Hamas people very quickly in a battle, kill some, take some prisoner, 0.92

01:43:29.920 and then withdraw. And then a month later, Hamas are back above ground running the show in that 0.89

01:43:35.360 place, and then they'd go in again. So the constant battles of Jebalia, one of the great

01:43:39.280 Hamas fortifications and centers of power in northern Gaza, the repeat battles of Jebalia was

01:43:44.940 that kind of whack-a-mole theory. That whack-a-mole theory was not a bad strategy if you have five

01:43:50.840 years to do it. That's the kind of whack-a-mole done against ISIS over the course of, you know,

01:43:55.800 five years in northern Iraq by the Americans, Iraqis, and Kurds. But there is a view among

01:44:02.020 the Israelis in the last, since Trump's election, I think, basically, that they don't have that kind

01:44:06.540 of time. And so they need to escalate. And what's happened now is a very different kind of war,

01:44:11.840 a war of holding territory, a war of occupying territory, an occupation in war, not the mean kind

01:44:20.680 of epithet thrown out in the media. But the actual legal term, which is the military holds

01:44:25.860 a territory in war, creates all kinds of legal obligations to the civilian population. That's

01:44:31.560 okay, because one of the great reasons Hamas keeps fighting is that Hamas has this control leverage

01:44:37.040 over the aid. So there has to be a system built out to deny Hamas aid. There has to be a system built 0.64

01:44:42.760 out to remove Hamas' stockpiles that it lives off of, while supplying massive amounts of aid to a 0.69

01:44:49.680 civilian population that is still deeply penetrated by Hamas, and therefore somehow finding a way to

01:44:54.940 separate. That's the Israeli goal now. And I've just described an absolutely impossible strategy 0.98

01:45:01.440 with massive civilian costs. That is the only way to actually defeat Hamas. And if you understand 0.73

01:45:08.040 the Israeli vision of what Hamas is and where it comes from, you understand that the defeat of Hamas

01:45:11.800 is actually central to this question. So the civilian costs are huge. I happen to come to the

01:45:17.740 Israeli government with a different critique, but it is absolutely visceral. Can you curse on

01:45:23.500 this podcast? Don't fuck up the aid. The aid distribution is the strategy now. You detached 0.99

01:45:31.100 aid from Hamas by creating this Gaza humanitarian foundation. Well, now you better make damn sure 0.88

01:45:36.200 nobody starves or you've made Hamas' own case. And so the Israelis need to move in massively on this 0.93

01:45:42.420 aid question. I'm someone who was gently mocked by people who love me back about, I don't know,

01:45:47.840 18 months ago when I suggested publicly that Israel actually needs to create a humanitarian

01:45:51.940 corridor within Israel. The Egyptians would rather the Gazans die than move into Egypt. Nobody will 0.99

01:45:57.460 take them. Nobody wants to give Israel that win. Nobody cares about Palestinians as people. They're just 1.00

01:46:01.320 sort of moral narratives that everyone's jostling over. Fine. I'm not going to fix the Arab world. I'm not 1.00

01:46:07.200 going to fix the anti-Semitism of the obsessive focus on Gaza without a focus on actually removing

01:46:12.040 Hamas from Gaza. I'm not going to fix any of that. Move them into Israel. A, they're not leaving 1.00

01:46:16.260 Palestine, so it's not an ethnic cleansing. It's not a Nakba. You can massively feed them. You can put 0.69

01:46:21.600 in AI cameras to slowly suss out the Hamas from within them. You can have Arab Israelis who are A, 0.58

01:46:28.160 Palestinian, have Palestinian Arabic. B, Israeli citizens who know us, know Jews, know Hebrew,

01:46:34.420 and know a few things that are the opposite of what Hamas teaches in its schools. For example,

01:46:39.420 we're not leaving. Holding out this hope that in a generation or two or three, the crusaders took

01:46:44.560 200 years, we'll leave. That's what Hamas tells Palestinians to explain the suffering it imposes 0.92

01:46:50.220 on them. The Arab Israelis will tell them, guys, they're not going anywhere. It would be a 1.00

01:46:54.740 de-radicalizing thing. Israel could control the spigot of aid. Israel could fight in Gaza 0.70

01:46:58.940 with totally free hand. Everybody told me that was stupid. We would be accused of creating a 1.00

01:47:03.300 concentration camp in Gaza, but we're going to be accused of an extermination war anyway. We're

01:47:07.820 going to be accused of concentration camps anyway. Let's at least fight the war intelligently. I think 0.73

01:47:12.100 that if an Ariel Sharon or an initiative-taking kind of old-school Israeli prime minister was trying

01:47:17.260 to figure their way out of this new kind of battlefield, I think that's the kind of thing

01:47:20.700 they would have done. But that's just to say, the challenge is that challenge, to get that aid,

01:47:25.580 taking it away from Hamas, and actually crush Hamas, and time is not on our side. So my reading is,

01:47:31.180 the Israelis are not 100% competent. The pieces of Israel that are fighting the war in Iran are not 0.95

01:47:37.020 the pieces of Israel that are of the Israeli security and intelligence apparatus that are

01:47:41.240 fighting the war in Gaza. These are different parts. They're not as competent, and they don't

01:47:46.640 have a strategy. There's 15 years of strategizing and expressing itself in Iran, and there's the

01:47:51.880 lack of any strategy on the day of, on October 7, expressing itself now in Gaza. So absolutely not

01:47:57.760 an extermination war. But 40% of Israelis say Netanyahu is continuing the war for no other

01:48:03.120 reason than he doesn't want to face elections. I think that in the last five days that changes

01:48:07.480 because Netanyahu's war in Iran is extremely popular among Israelis. But the war in Gaza was

01:48:12.780 being dragged out by Netanyahu. The incompetence of the war in Gaza again and again and again was

01:48:16.780 being dragged out by Netanyahu. The hostages are being left to die and rot in dungeons of Hamas 0.54

01:48:21.740 by Netanyahu so that there is never an end to the war in which he faces a political reckoning.

01:48:26.600 That is a view I don't share, but 40% of Israelis tell us they believe. And another 20 to 30%

01:48:33.660 from the right, the Smotrich critique of Netanyahu, is he's not maliciously refusing to end the war.

01:48:41.480 He just doesn't have the guts to make the tough decisions to drive the war to the end. So when Biden

01:48:47.640 says to him, you can't go into Rafah because you have no plan for the civilians there, and Netanyahu 0.57

01:48:52.500 then freezes the war for four months, that's a kind of political cowardice that has tremendous

01:48:58.020 costs for everyone except Netanyahu himself. So Almir is absolutely wrong, but his argument is coming

01:49:05.540 from within the 40% who say, what if everything that's happening isn't a strategy but is just

01:49:11.340 Netanyahu's politicking? Then why are Palestinians suffering? And that's how he can then come out with

01:49:16.160 that kind of very visceral language. So that's the discourse within Israel that that comes out of.

01:49:22.800 Yeah. Well, I mean, we're paying the price in many places for a loss of trust in institutions and

01:49:29.760 political figures who seem compromised by their own political needs and dilemmas.

01:49:35.800 Absolutely.

01:49:36.780 What's the status of the two-state solution now or the aspiration for it? I mean, if you ask most Israelis,

01:49:42.240 is it still the ultimate endgame? Should you find a partner in some generation of Palestinians 1.00

01:49:48.640 in peace? Or is the very notion of a two-state solution eroding on some level?

01:49:56.180 It's important not to think of these things categorically. It's not that it's there or not

01:50:00.900 there. Maybe. If and if not, then that's how people actually think about it in these kinds of

01:50:07.300 narratives. I would say that any poll you'll take will tell you that very few Israelis and very few

01:50:13.760 Palestinians think it's possible. There was a data point, a poll about four months ago that polled

01:50:19.600 Israelis and Palestinians both, including in Gaza, and produced the most tragic numbers I've seen 1.00

01:50:25.900 since in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict of 140 years of any of this encounter of

01:50:33.160 Jews and Arabs in this land. The poll asked Israelis and Palestinians about what they think the other

01:50:38.340 side wants. And 89% of one side and 92% of the other side said the other side wants to completely

01:50:46.320 remove me, completely, I don't know what, annihilate me or kill me or totally destroy me. That's the 0.99

01:50:51.980 basic thing you need to know, is that both sides are absolutely convinced. The Israelis are convinced

01:50:57.960 of it because the Palestinian leadership that they hear, which is to say Hamas, they don't hear the

01:51:03.900 liberal Democrats who have three seats in some Palestinian parliament that hasn't met in 20

01:51:08.060 years, they hear Hamas, says it all day long. And Palestinians are absolutely convinced of it and 1.00

01:51:14.060 think the Gaza war demonstrates it. And so...

01:51:17.140 But again, there's an asymmetry there that everyone should be aware of, which is that

01:51:20.800 for every day, for running back many decades, had the Israelis actually wanted to perpetrate a 0.90

01:51:29.600 genocide in Gaza or the West Bank or both, they could have done that. And they didn't. The fact

01:51:35.680 that they didn't should mean something. Yeah, I mean, the population grew. The population within

01:51:40.180 Israel of Arabs grew. The population in the West Bank grew. The population in Gaza grew. And it keeps 1.00

01:51:44.300 growing. And it apparently grew in this year of war in Gaza. So I don't know, you know, I don't want

01:51:51.700 to take away so much of the discourse. It has been frustrating watching the world not care about

01:51:56.900 Palestinians. And what I mean by not care about Palestinians is that almost everything said about

01:52:02.060 this war by the activist world that allegedly cares about Palestinians has been false. I'll give you

01:52:08.080 an example. Starvation. There hasn't been mass starvation in Gaza. There hasn't been serious hunger

01:52:13.660 in Gaza beyond tiny little pockets for very limited pieces of time related to specific operations

01:52:19.420 for 20 months. That was a complete fabrication. And there are reports brought up by the UN that said

01:52:24.600 that 30% of the number of calories that the Gazans need to live are actually going in. And then you

01:52:29.800 actually crack open the report, which no journalist ever has in the history of journalism, apparently,

01:52:34.160 and you discover that the UN only counted what the UN itself brought in, which was only about

01:52:38.400 25% of the actual food going in. And so it's just been a fiction. And one of the tragedies of the

01:52:46.020 pro-Palestinian camp spending all of its energies, giving Hamas a pass, all of its energies, creating in 0.78

01:52:54.200 Israel paradigmatic evil and this religious sort of mode of thought about the Israelis, one of the tragedies 1.00

01:53:01.480 of it, is that it has disconnected Israelis from the capacity of the world to actually critique 0.82

01:53:06.140 them. So right now, because the Israeli blockade was meant to remove Hamas' stockpiles, there's not 0.86

01:53:13.620 a lot of extra food in Gaza. And right now, there's a massive Hamas effort. First of all, incompetence on

01:53:19.540 the Israeli side, on the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation side, that has to be said. Also, a sustained and

01:53:24.540 massive Hamas effort to make it fail, make it not work, make any aid they can't take not go in.

01:53:30.920 We now face a situation where there is real hunger in Gaza and a potential for starvation going forward

01:53:36.740 if things don't get better, if the Israelis don't get competent, if this doesn't solve itself. 0.60

01:53:42.940 Gazans aren't going anywhere. Egyptians won't let them out. The world doesn't have any, the Arab world 1.00

01:53:47.220 won't take them in. They're not going anywhere. And by the way, if you open the border and there's

01:53:51.700 some sort of, I don't know how trustworthy they are, but there's some polls that say that half of

01:53:55.420 Gazans would like to leave. Half of Gazans leaving doesn't change anything. It brings the Gazan 1.00

01:53:59.620 population back to what it was 20 years ago. That's still a Palestinian Gaza, okay? So Israel 1.00

01:54:05.520 needs to solve its part of the problem. But it's hard to now come to Israelis and say, guys,

01:54:11.280 there's real starvation ahead because the Israelis say to you, oh yeah, are 14,000 babies going to die

01:54:16.120 in the next 48 hours? Or, you know, just a litany of hundreds of lies that have all been lies and all

01:54:23.520 been this kind of moral panic around the only place in the world where you can have moral panic. 0.67

01:54:27.460 So much of it hypocrisy. So much of it ridiculous. Nobody gives a rat's ass what's happening in 0.98

01:54:33.600 Sudan, which is a war that is both genocidal, fought with Western weapons, and vastly more 0.98

01:54:39.160 deadly and has vastly actual starvation among hundreds of thousands of people. And nobody

01:54:44.980 even talks about it. And so the Israelis don't believe the world. And that to me is a tragedy 1.00

01:54:49.640 because right now I really want the Israelis to wake up and notice that actually in Gaza,

01:54:53.420 we have a real problem that Iran is a distraction from. I want Hamas destroyed. I want the war to 0.99

01:54:59.020 go forward. I'm an absolute hawk on the Gaza war. And massive aid now rushed to Gazans urgently

01:55:05.660 is how you get it done. And that's a conversation that Israelis are bad at having, in part because

01:55:11.400 it's hard to trust anything said about Gaza by anybody anymore.

01:55:14.420 Well, Javiva, I see that we've hit the two-hour mark. We've covered so much. I want to ask you a

01:55:20.380 final question, which morally, ethically, politically seems among the most fraught. I mean,

01:55:26.740 I honestly don't know how to think about it apart from, I mean, I have a sort of objective view from

01:55:33.180 above, relatively heartless view of it. And then I have the, when I confront its details, it just seems

01:55:38.440 impossible to think through, which is the role that hostage taking has played here. And what is the

01:55:48.500 correct response to this tactic, do you think? I mean, the view from above, you know, not knowing

01:55:55.220 any of the families and just looking at the efficacy of this tactic going back now many decades is that

01:56:03.000 at some point, Israel and everyone else who gets victimized by this, we have to say, we don't

01:56:09.360 negotiate over hostages because otherwise you're going to, you simply will take more hostages in

01:56:15.740 the future. And, you know, the Gilad Shalit deal may, in fact, account for why this has been so,

01:56:25.200 why there's been such recourse to this used by your enemies going forward. But of course,

01:56:30.500 you need only know one hostage family or one hostage to know that how impossible that logic

01:56:36.820 is to run through psychologically and socially and politically when you're actually confronted with

01:56:41.860 the imperative to get the hostages out. I mean, what should Israel do going forward now? I mean, 0.59

01:56:49.020 I guess in the current situation and imagining this situation is behind you, is there a new posture

01:56:54.860 to take with respect to the eventuality of hostages being taken by Hamas or any other jihadist

01:57:01.820 organization? I mean, this is the painful one. And I've talked about this in the past. We know we're

01:57:10.980 friends with families of hostages and people killed on October 7 and have also been part of the efforts

01:57:17.900 to get the hostages out that the families have put together in various places. My wife has been very

01:57:22.900 active on this issue. We are a nation of refugees. We are not American Jews. We did not spend a hundred 0.64

01:57:29.260 years discovering the promise of liberalism coming true. We stopped dying when we started living on

01:57:34.280 our sword. Living on our sword, protecting each other, standing shoulder to shoulder is redemption.

01:57:38.860 That is what we are. That is our ethos. And therefore, we will go to the ends of the earth. It is our

01:57:44.120 foundational idea and rooted in a century and a half of historical experience. And I have lectures on

01:57:50.720 that online if people are interested. Our foundational idea is that we come to each other's aid. The

01:57:56.460 trauma of October 7, as I said, was that. Was sitting for hours watching the WhatsApp groups in which

01:58:02.740 people I know said, where the hell is everybody? We're hearing them outside the door. That helplessness,

01:58:08.520 we taught them. We taught our enemies that everything I just said, this great solidarity,

01:58:14.740 this great love, this great support, which has allowed us to become strong, which I think is the

01:58:20.540 root of our democracy. We are not, again, English speakers. We come from Yemen and Tsarist Russia and

01:58:27.380 Iraq and Morocco and pieces of Europe when they were at their worst. The Israeli Jews, the vast, 1.00

01:58:33.260 vast majority of them, the first time they ever voted was when they voted as Israelis. It's actually 0.52

01:58:38.040 quite an interesting question how the hell Israel ever became a democracy and why it was sustained and

01:58:42.920 stable until now. But solidarity is part of the answer. And so we have taught them that our Achilles

01:58:50.200 heel, our strategic Achilles heel, is this willingness to pay any price for our people,

01:58:56.440 is this sense of ourselves as holding onto each other in a very cruel and difficult and painful world

01:59:02.160 that homogenized in the 20th century on all its minorities, but also on us in one of the cruelest ways. 0.81

01:59:06.980 And we taught them, therefore, that it was valuable to take 251 hostages. So we did that to those

01:59:15.660 hostages. And we can't ever do that to the next hostages ever again. So the basic idea, and it's an

01:59:21.400 idea supported by most, I think, of the strategic planning elites, strategic planning sort of thinking

01:59:28.680 and institutions, is that you can strike any deal to get out hostages except the only deal Hamas wants, 0.62

01:59:35.080 which is its own survival. Because the lesson has to be, and this is Netanyahu's line, and it's a

01:59:42.120 courageous line. And I have argued that he has been just, in many ways, you know, the Iran war has

01:59:49.000 been his glorious triumph. I mean, so far, of course, but this has been what he believes his life's

01:59:54.560 mission is, and he's been planning it for decades. But on Gaza, on hostages, on communicating with the

02:00:00.060 Israeli public, he's gone months at a time without interviewing in the Israeli press. He has refused

02:00:05.180 to meet victims of his own failures on October 7. He won't go to... Kibbutz Niroz is one of the great

02:00:10.580 massacres of October 7, one of the three big massacres. And they have invited him, but it's a

02:00:16.780 left-wing kibbutz, and he doesn't want them yelling at him on camera, so he won't go. Every other 0.72

02:00:20.720 politician around him has, including the far-rights, Motrej, et cetera. So I've been accused him of being a real

02:00:26.780 coward on these issues, on the issues of his politicking through the aftermath of October 7.

02:00:33.080 However, he has held the line on this fundamental question, which is that Hamas will not give up the 0.65

02:00:40.320 last hostage, except for a return to Gaza, except for a reversal of the war, except for its own

02:00:47.300 survival. And the only thing we owe the next hostage is that Hamas not survive this one. In other 0.72

02:00:53.060 words, the result of hostages until now has been you get Israel on its knees. And the result of 0.70

02:00:57.540 hostages from now on has to be because they took 251, because they took babies, because they took

02:01:03.540 old people. The lesson going forward has to be you will not survive the taking of Israeli hostages. 0.69

02:01:11.860 And that might come at a cost of hostages. They make us, the whole theory of this is making us

02:01:22.100 violent. By the way, their entire war strategy is playing a game of chicken with the lives of their

02:01:26.480 own people, where they're willing to have their own people die. So I don't know why I'm shocked at

02:01:30.100 this cruelty they'd inflict on us. But the whole point is putting us in this moral Tandor, this moral

02:01:36.620 Gordian knot, I guess. I don't know where my metaphors went, but putting us in that position.

02:01:40.680 My view is a minority view among Israelis, I should say. It's really important to say. I think it's 0.93

02:01:46.520 probably the view of 30%, 70% are on the other side of that question. Make the deal. Get our

02:01:51.980 people home. That's the most important thing. And don't worry, Hamas is the type of organization that 0.96

02:01:56.620 will force us into another war. And our one job between now and then is not to let them take

02:02:00.900 hostages. That's the view I would say, if I were to articulate that sort of general consensus, that's

02:02:05.400 the view of 70%. My view, and I'm with Netanyahu on this, a big critic of him on a thousand

02:02:10.220 things, but on this I think he's gotten it right, is no, Hamas dies. And therefore, you take any deal

02:02:19.020 they will give to survive another day, but not the deal to survive completely or permanently.

02:02:23.740 And because they forced me into that place, into saying that, into abandoning my people, I'm going 0.58

02:02:31.260 to destroy them all the more. That's the conviction that Israelis have, that are willing to see them 1.00

02:02:36.220 continue to go in as reservists into Gaza until Hamas is dead. The absolute iron will. And we've

02:02:42.040 been saying this out loud. I personally, every person who I think understands Israeli society,

02:02:47.800 has been saying this out loud for 20 months. And if the Gazans had understood it and the world had

02:02:54.000 understood it, we would all be in a better place because they wouldn't be testing us on this point.

02:02:58.600 But they tested us and now we have to demonstrate it. Gaza has a new day, a new dawn, a new future, 0.65

02:03:04.140 a better future, a rebuilding after Hamas is gone. Until Hamas is gone, nobody can rebuild anything, 0.74

02:03:10.380 not even because the Israelis won't let them. You literally can't send money in there, 0.99

02:03:13.820 concrete in there. There's no one to receive it if Hamas is in charge, if Hamas can even disrupt

02:03:20.240 the shipments. So we kill Hamas, we set a new standard of what hostage-taking of our people does 0.90

02:03:26.940 in the world, and we give Gazans that future that only the death of Hamas can give them. 0.94

02:03:33.120 Yeah. Yeah. Well, that sounds like wisdom to me. Habib, it's so great to get you on the podcast.

02:03:39.420 Thank you for your voice and everything you're doing. It's really, I mean, you are a beacon of

02:03:45.000 sanity. We need 10,000 of you out there. So clone yourself. That's the next project.

02:03:51.240 It's an honor to be here. Thank you.

02:04:09.420 Thank you.

Making Sense - Sam Harris - June 19, 2025

#422 — Zionism & Jihadism

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