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Episode: Is Israel Winning? - with Haviv Rettig Gur

Author: Ark Media
Duration: 00:47:55

Episode Shownotes

HOUSEKEEPING NOTE: The Jewish Food Society is a nonprofit whose mission is to preserve and celebrate Jewish culinary heritage in order to deepen connections to Jewish life. As part of their annual fundraising drive, the Jewish Food Society is holding an auction to support their work. To place a bid

on any of the items up for auction (including a lunch with Dan Senor), visit: https://givebutter.com/c/JFSFallAuction/auction To learn more about the work of the Jewish Food Society, visit: https://www.jewishfoodsociety.org TODAY’S EPISODE: Is Israel winning? This is a question we kept running into in our conversations in Israel with Israelis last week, especially as Israel reached a ceasefire agreement with Hezbollah. To help us assess, Haviv Rettig Gur returns to the podcast. Haviv Rettig Gur is the political analyst at The Times of Israel. He was a long time reporter for the Times of Israel. Haviv was also a combat medic in the IDF where he served in the reserves.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_00
Lebanon stood up. Lebanon saw Hezbollah weakened enough that it could manage to stand up and signed a deal with Israel in which Israel is fully empowered to continue to smash Hezbollah as necessary.

00:00:12 Speaker_00
Israel has now set a status quo in which it gets to do the bombing. And that's the secret reality, the secret truth that nobody can say out loud but is very obvious to everyone in the region about this deal. And that's why it's a fantastic deal.

00:00:26 Speaker_00
But we're seeing a failure of the state to take care of most of the civilian needs even as the military successes continue and are astonishing.

00:00:49 Speaker_01
It's 6 o'clock p.m. on Sunday, December 1st, here in New York City. It's 1 o'clock a.m. on Monday, December 2nd, in Israel, as Israelis turn to a new day. Before today's episode, one housekeeping note. Some good news. Jewish food.

00:01:08 Speaker_01
The Jewish Food Society is a non-profit organization whose mission is to preserve and celebrate Jewish culinary heritage in order to deepen connections to Jewish life. If you love Jewish food, as I do, and Israeli food, as I do,

00:01:24 Speaker_01
Not only how it tastes, but also what it tells us about Jewish history and Jewish life today, then you need to learn about the Jewish Food Society.

00:01:33 Speaker_01
Importantly, this organization played an important role in Israel and in the Diaspora after October 7th.

00:01:39 Speaker_01
The name the Jewish Food Society and its executive director, Naama Sheffi, may be familiar to some of our listeners because they feature prominently in mine and Saul Singer's most recent book, The Genius of Israel.

00:01:53 Speaker_01
You can go back and look and see the connection because we have a whole chapter on Jewish food and Israeli food.

00:01:59 Speaker_01
In any event, as part of the annual fundraising drive for the Jewish Food Society, they are holding an auction to support the work of the organization.

00:02:07 Speaker_01
And you can bid on priceless culinary and cultural experiences, including a lunch with yours truly. That's right. You can bid on this lunch. We can get together, hopefully eat Jewish or Israeli food and talk about whatever you want.

00:02:23 Speaker_01
Israel, the Middle East, U.S.-Israel relations. I'm open to anything. You should also check out some of the other items that are up for auction.

00:02:30 Speaker_01
They have curated an enticing array of dinners and culinary tours and gifts and more that showcase the best of the Jewish food world. If you'd like to bid on lunch with me or any of the other items, follow the link in the show notes.

00:02:45 Speaker_01
And I'll also be posting that link on X and Instagram. Now on to today's episode. Is Israel winning? It's a question I kept running into when I was in Israel last week, especially being there while the Hezbollah ceasefire was announced.

00:03:03 Speaker_01
Is that agreement a win for Israel? And I can apply that question to just about every issue Israel is wrestling with because it kept coming up in virtually all my conversations with Israelis.

00:03:14 Speaker_01
So to help me unpack some of these questions I had for my trip, I sat down for a conversation with Haviv Retik Gore.

00:03:22 Speaker_01
One topic, though, that we will be dedicating a separate episode to, not today's, is the escalating situation in Syria, all these developments in Syria.

00:03:31 Speaker_01
We've received a lot of requests from you, our listeners, over the weekend asking for an emergency episode on Syria. The truth is, We are very selective with our emergency episodes.

00:03:45 Speaker_01
We only drop them when there's actually news to report and analyze, and when we think we have a unique and concrete understanding of what is going on, and also when we have a sense for what we're rooting for.

00:03:57 Speaker_01
We at Call Me Back are not there yet with regard to Syrian developments, as the picture is still murky. But we are working on it and hope to have an episode on it this week. Until then, here's Haviv Rettigur on Is Israel Winning? This is Call Me Back.

00:04:16 Speaker_01
And I'm pleased to welcome back to this podcast, Haviv Rettigur from The Times of Israel, who joins us from his home just outside of Jerusalem. Haviv, how are you?

00:04:27 Speaker_00
I'm good, Dan. Good to be here.

00:04:29 Speaker_01
I'm sorry we didn't connect in person when I was in Israel this past week. It was a very hectic trip. It was a very short trip. I was only on the ground for a little under three days. But I know I'll be seeing you in person soon.

00:04:42 Speaker_01
And in the meantime, one of the reasons I wanted to connect with you on the ground when I was in Israel, and since we couldn't have this conversation here,

00:04:49 Speaker_01
is I was in Israel when the ceasefire agreement with Hezbollah was announced and I was spending a lot of time with friends and family who have loved ones who have been serving, deployed in Lebanon, and also family and friends who have loved ones who have had family members that had been serving or are currently serving in and around Gaza.

00:05:16 Speaker_01
and also with family members of hostages or those who are very involved with the hostage movement.

00:05:21 Speaker_01
And in all these conversations, Haviv, I was experiencing a blend of objectively when you look back and you look at the geopolitical reshaping of the Middle East that is happening before our eyes and that has been taking place since October 7th, there's no question that the region is being reshaped in a way that Israel's enemies are being weakened.

00:05:46 Speaker_01
and Israel's position is much stronger.

00:05:48 Speaker_01
I spoke to one Israeli government official who mentioned to me that the Biden administration recently conceded to Israeli officials that Israel is the strongest power by any and every measure in the Middle East today.

00:06:02 Speaker_01
And that wasn't necessarily their view in the days and weeks and months after October 7th. And it is their view today. So Israel is in a very strong position and its position is only growing stronger.

00:06:13 Speaker_01
And yet there was this heaviness in every conversation I had that when you would absorb these conversations and try to make sense of them, You did not feel like you were talking to people who believed their country was winning this war.

00:06:29 Speaker_01
And I want to quote two people who helped crystallize this point for me. One is Alon Benatar, who's our producer and you know quite well, Aviv. When I was mentioning this to him upon returning from Israel,

00:06:42 Speaker_01
I said, you know, Israel's clearly winning and yet it doesn't feel when you talk to Israelis that they feel they're winning. And Alon messaged me back and I'm going to read from it here.

00:06:50 Speaker_01
He said, there's a manic aspect to this past year from the depths of grief and desperation to triumphant 1967 like moments.

00:07:00 Speaker_01
But Alon writes, but we were never going to defeat Hezbollah because it is spread throughout Lebanon and we don't have the land army necessary to take over more than a few miles from the border. Reality doesn't have mood swings.

00:07:14 Speaker_01
It's just not as obedient as narratives are. That was one message that I've been thinking about. And the other one was from my sister, Wendy Singer, a family member that has been on this podcast.

00:07:25 Speaker_01
And as I was leaving Israel, I had commented to Wendy that of all the trips, I've taken a number of trips to Israel since October 7th, this one was the hardest. Because here we are now 14 months in, 101 hostages in Gaza.

00:07:38 Speaker_01
It would be like 3,500 Americans being held hostage for 14 months. That reality settling and how would we in the U.S. feel if 3,500 Americans were just sitting there somewhere being held hostage for over a year? Would we feel like we were on the march?

00:07:56 Speaker_01
How does a country go back to normal when that reality continues?

00:08:00 Speaker_01
And so Wendy wrote to me after, I'm seriously struck by your comment about how hard this trip was, of all trips you've taken since October 7th, that the hostages, all 101 are just part of the landscape. it's still physically sickening," she writes.

00:08:16 Speaker_01
It's just, how do you stay sick for 13 months or 14 months? How do you scream out, this is not okay, for over 400 days? And so what Wendy was basically saying is, of course it's not okay, And yet Israelis are trying to figure out what do you do?

00:08:32 Speaker_01
Are you physically sick for over 400 days and then 500 days and then 600 days? Or do you try to resume some semblance of normalcy? Can the human mind do all of that, strike all those balances?

00:08:45 Speaker_01
And so, Haviv, these are some of the issues I was dealing with and these observations got me. And so before we get specifically into the agreement with Hezbollah, the ceasefire agreement, just at a high level,

00:08:57 Speaker_01
What is your reaction to these observations, both mine and the ones I just read to you?

00:09:02 Speaker_00
Well, you know, I agree with Elon. Reality matters more than narratives. Narratives can shape reality. Narratives certainly try to shape reality. We invest our interests in building narratives.

00:09:14 Speaker_00
And by the way, this is, you know, maybe the deepest thing the human mind does, right? We have this social radar that constantly checks our status in society. and constructs out personal and familial and communal narratives that validate us.

00:09:28 Speaker_00
And so we are built to build narratives and we are built to build self-justifying narratives and we all do it and we all do it every day. And then the narrative meets reality and crashes inexorably against it.

00:09:42 Speaker_00
And that's the experience that Israel, I think, faced when some of its policies turned out to be totally incorrect and have gone awry. And that's the experience that our enemies have faced, more or less ever since.

00:09:54 Speaker_00
I would just point out that both sides of the reality are true. In other words, we don't have an army that can literally root out every last of our enemies everywhere they exist. But we don't want that army. We don't want that investment.

00:10:09 Speaker_00
We don't want to spend ourselves in that kind of a hunt after, you know, every potential enemy that could possibly be.

00:10:16 Speaker_00
And so the reality is that the beginning of the Lebanon war was the beginning, I mean, three months ago, not Hezbollah's beginning on October 8th, but the beginning of our serious entry into that arena.

00:10:26 Speaker_00
We had tremendous, tremendous gains at incredibly low cost. Now that incredibly low cost, I think we're at 79 dead soldiers.

00:10:37 Speaker_00
It's a high cost, but it's not a high cost compared to what we expected the Great War in Hezbollah to be, compared to the astonishing gains. The longer we stay in Lebanon, the higher the costs and the lower the gains. We have already achieved so much.

00:10:50 Speaker_00
Our friend Nadav Eyal had a column, I think in this weekend's paper or in the last couple of days, in which he quotes an Israeli official telling him, look, you can only kill Nasrallah once, right?

00:11:00 Speaker_00
There's a limit to the achievements Israel can now achieve in Lebanon. And so there's a point of diminishing returns. And that is why there is a deep logic to the agreement with Lebanon.

00:11:11 Speaker_00
The weakness that we have shown in the Iranians has begun to reshape the Middle East in ways that we're all going to keep being surprised about over the next three years.

00:11:19 Speaker_00
And it's already happening in Syria and changing the conversation about Syrians happening in many places.

00:11:24 Speaker_00
And the last point that you raised, which is the most painful one, because it has to do with our internal divides, there is a reason Israelis are depressed, despite astonishing success.

00:11:34 Speaker_00
And depressed in the sense that they no longer understand exactly what the wars are about. In other words, there is a sense that we've achieved a lot in Lebanon. Why sink further into Lebanon?

00:11:44 Speaker_00
There's also a sense that in Gaza, what's the government's goal? the government won't say. You have views. Dan, I have views.

00:11:51 Speaker_00
We have to sort of read the tea leaves and check the maps and look at the satellite footage and try and scratch the surface in conversations with politicians or with military officials.

00:12:01 Speaker_00
But in fact, Israel doesn't say and doesn't entirely, I think, not because it's hiding something. Many, many different people want different things, but in fact, it doesn't actually know what it wants. And so it's not exactly talking.

00:12:12 Speaker_00
So it's not clear the government knows what it wants. And when you're not sure your government has a clear strategy going forward, then the only way left to ask yourself, you know, do I trust these people to be doing the right things?

00:12:24 Speaker_00
Are they going to waste the successes that Israelis have sacrificed for? Are they going to use them well? Well, if you don't know the plan, you have to trust the people.

00:12:32 Speaker_00
And the problem with trusting the people is that every time I get into this, it bothers me. It hurts me. It also brings some of the angry hate mail, which is fine. People definitely should continue to express themselves.

00:12:43 Speaker_01
Haviv at gmail.com. I don't want the hate mail coming to call me back. So that's why I just want to direct it right to you.

00:12:50 Speaker_00
Yes, this government is passing wildly unpopular bills even among its own voters. It is passing bills to extend draft exemptions for the Haredim.

00:12:58 Speaker_00
It is passing bills to ensure that the Prime Minister can appoint a political committee of investigation to avoid a state committee of investigation for October 7.

00:13:07 Speaker_00
It is advancing bills to protect leaks because a staff person close to the Prime Minister now stands

00:13:15 Speaker_00
accused and under investigation of actually leaking secret documents to a foreign newspaper to build in Germany in order to change the Israeli public conversation on the hostages. There is a bill expanding immunity for members of Knesset.

00:13:28 Speaker_00
There are bills targeting media outlets that the government thinks are left-wing, for example, the state public broadcaster. Again, legitimate policy questions, but they're not being handled like policy questions.

00:13:39 Speaker_00
They're being handled in these quiet backroom discussions, and probably two dozen bills that are just political bills.

00:13:48 Speaker_00
And the bills that are not advancing in this Knesset are bills to help the reservists who have spent 200 days, and many of them have a lot of financial problems, and bills talking about the tens of thousands of people who are now being asked by the government to go home in the northern border.

00:14:03 Speaker_00
but have no homes to go back to, or don't want to go home, or don't know how to go home, or their small business collapsed in a year of being away, and entire sections of cities are demolished and so it's not clear how you're going to rebuild all that.

00:14:15 Speaker_00
That stuff is not advancing. And so we have a political class that I think is focused deeply on itself, has not run the wartime economy competently,

00:14:26 Speaker_00
And that contributes to a sense that we don't know what the government's plan is to make use of the successes of the war. We don't know what the future of Gaza is because nobody's saying it in Hebrew, never mind in English.

00:14:38 Speaker_00
And we're seeing a lot, a lot of this petty politicking instead. And so there's a sense of being adrift amid these astonishing military successes and a strategic reshaping of the region. And, you know, I go back to the old point.

00:14:50 Speaker_00
Netanyahu still hasn't visited Kibbutz Niroz, one of the three great massacres of October 7, 14 months later. And so distrust is the main story of that depression, as far as I can tell.

00:15:01 Speaker_01
But Haviv, that same political class negotiated, or at least part of that political class, the leadership of the political class negotiated this deal with the Lebanese government and the totality of the political class, or at least of this government supported it.

00:15:16 Speaker_01
And I just want to spend a moment on this ceasefire deal. So what does the ceasefire do?

00:15:21 Speaker_01
And I'm going to be very brief here because we, we talked about it at length with David Horowitz in the last episode, we went through all the details, but basically, Neither Hezbollah nor the IDF can engage in military operations in either direction.

00:15:34 Speaker_01
Hezbollah can't engage in any kind of military operations or firing into Israel. It gives Israel 60 days to withdraw its forces from southern Lebanon.

00:15:44 Speaker_01
Hezbollah has to move north, about 18 miles north of the Litani River, which is approximately 18 miles from Israel's border, depending on where you are on Israel's border, but roughly 18 miles.

00:15:56 Speaker_01
The Lebanese army and UNIFIL will come into this vacuum, into this area between the Israeli-Lebanese border and the Latani River to provide some security.

00:16:07 Speaker_01
And so many of these elements are eerily similar to the 2006, post-2006 Lebanon war situation, which UN Security Council Resolution 1701

00:16:18 Speaker_01
mandated a version of what we're just laying out here and it failed miserably and also Hezbollah was supposed to disarm, which it never did. But one aspect of this deal that didn't exist in 2006 is Israel apparently has a side letter with the U.S.

00:16:31 Speaker_01
that there's going to be some monitoring of whether or not the terms of this deal are being enforced. And if they are not, Israel has the right, the flexibility to go back into Lebanon and take care of business.

00:16:44 Speaker_01
And that would not be a violation of the deal.

00:16:47 Speaker_01
So I guess that's one mild positive and what Netanyahu and the leadership of the government Argues in terms of what Israel has achieved in this ceasefire agreement is one It allows Israel to take a break take a step back regroup and focus on Iran That's the part that doesn't entirely make sense to me because this isn't Hezbollah effectively an army of Iran But be that as it may it allows Israel to focus on Iran one

00:17:13 Speaker_01
Two, it allows Israel to replenish itself, the IDF to replenish itself. Both its personnel need a break, and they are really overstretched, and the IDF was never designed to fight that long a war.

00:17:27 Speaker_01
And it de-links the war with Hezbollah from the war with Hamas, that Hamas had been hanging on strategically to this idea that Israel was being squeezed from both sides, from both ends, from the south and from the north.

00:17:40 Speaker_01
And now Hezbollah says, uh, Hamas, you're on your own. We're going to cut our own deal with Israel and you figure out your own stuff with Israel. And that of course puts more pressure on Hamas.

00:17:52 Speaker_01
So I've just laid out all the wins and how one could characterize the outcome and the current state of the ceasefire as a win. And yet when I talk to Israelis on my trip to Israel, They didn't feel like it was a win.

00:18:08 Speaker_01
You listen to the quotes of the mayors, the various town council leaders in places like Metula and Kiryat Shmona and these towns up north, right at the border. They weren't talking like it was a win.

00:18:18 Speaker_01
They weren't saying they're going to race to get their residents, the 60 plus thousand residents back to these towns and villages in Israel's north who've been outside of their, out of their homes for over a year.

00:18:29 Speaker_01
They weren't thinking, Oh, this is our path back to normalcy. So, Haviv, when I'm trying to reconcile these two different perspectives, one thought I had is, were expectations set too high for Israelis?

00:18:40 Speaker_01
Was there sense that Hezbollah would be completely vaporized from Lebanon?

00:18:45 Speaker_01
When you're listening to these mayors and city council leaders from the north, were they misled or did they mislead themselves in terms of what could ultimately be achieved on this border?

00:18:54 Speaker_00
I think you're pointing at exactly the gap that really is at the heart of this Israeli experience at the moment.

00:19:01 Speaker_00
The expectations were not set too high in the sense that we achieved vastly more than ordinary Israelis expected for vastly less of a cost than anyone even dreamed.

00:19:12 Speaker_00
I did not imagine that we would do it so well, so fast, so comprehensively and be at this point right now. In that sense, Israelis were under-promised and over-delivered.

00:19:24 Speaker_00
But if you're the mayor of Metula, 50% of the homes in your city have to be demolished because they were bombarded for so long. People literally can't go back and live in them. They can't fix them up. They have to be removed and rebuilt.

00:19:35 Speaker_00
The communities along the northern border are shattered. They spread out all over the country. They were not tracked by the government properly. They're not cared for by anybody.

00:19:44 Speaker_00
There are no bureaucracies that are seriously handling the question of how we uphold, you know, how we hold up the home front, so to speak. the civilian population that has to actually go through this ordeal.

00:19:55 Speaker_00
The mayor of Metula is absolutely convinced that people are not going to come back. And if they do, they'll stream in very slowly. He's got a vast project ahead of him of clearing rubble out of sections of the city. Who's going to pay for it?

00:20:07 Speaker_00
It's a whole war he now has to engage in with the government. The government is divided into these sort of different, really different elites. And some of them are not even pretending to care or try and just deeply corrupt and inept.

00:20:20 Speaker_00
And those parts are the parts that cause people despair, the parts that have to do with rebuilding, the parts that have to do with social help, with transportation, with infrastructure, with all the stuff that you need to build that resilience by rebuilding.

00:20:35 Speaker_00
The war was handled, I think, brilliantly. I mean, I have a lot of complaints about the war, mostly having to do with the Israeli response to American pressure. But on the northern border, everything over-delivered massively.

00:20:47 Speaker_00
But ordinary Israelis living their ordinary life, you know, it's hard to see from the outside sometimes, and I'm not talking about you, because you have been on the inside quite a bit.

00:20:56 Speaker_00
But for most of our listeners, you know, when they look at Israel, everything looks very clean, right?

00:21:00 Speaker_00
So there's a Hezbollah bombardment, and then there's an Israeli airstrike, and then everybody picks up the pieces, and then we're on to the next day's news cycle, right? But we're not on to the next day's news cycle. Twelve kibbutzim are demolished.

00:21:13 Speaker_00
Sections of major cities are gone. And so we're only beginning a long and painful rebuilding. In southern Lebanon, that rebuilding depends on whether Hezbollah decides to continue fighting forever and ever.

00:21:25 Speaker_00
It is my belief that the Israeli success in this deal goes way beyond just the deal itself. The actual stipulations of the deal are almost irrelevant because there's no chance in hell that Hezbollah is going to follow the deal.

00:21:38 Speaker_00
It wasn't part of the deal. There's also no chance whatsoever that anybody's going to enforce the deal. UNIFIL and the Lebanese army aren't even going to pretend to enforce the deal.

00:21:47 Speaker_00
and the committee set up headed by the Americans and the French that will decide who's against whatever, none of that matters. The important thing to know about the deal is that the IDF retains the right to act in any action not defined as offensive.

00:22:01 Speaker_00
And the IDF gets to decide what's offensive. And that's how you know Israel won.

00:22:06 Speaker_01
And that element did not exist in the post-2006 ceasefire.

00:22:10 Speaker_00
Post-2006 was Israel pulling out and Israel unable to do anything. And watching as Hezbollah built out 150,000 rocket arsenal intended to destroy our country, intended to mass murder our children. That was the purpose, it had no other purpose.

00:22:22 Speaker_00
And they talked about it openly and they discussed it gleefully and Nasrallah gave entire speeches in mosques about the religious obligation to do so. That was 2006.

00:22:30 Speaker_00
2006 was a world pretending to come to the rescue of Lebanon, right, while also pretending to come to the rescue of us.

00:22:36 Speaker_00
And by pushing those UNIFIL forces in the middle to observe and report, never mind that they haven't protected Israel, never mind that they haven't protected Lebanon, never mind that they haven't ever engaged Hezbollah, they've not even observed and reported.

00:22:48 Speaker_00
They have completely, next to UNIFIL positions, there are massive Hezbollah entrenchments. that Israel has to be surprised by because they just never bothered to even do the one pretend fake thing that they did.

00:23:00 Speaker_00
This is if you ask the Israelis about the international community, there's a lot of noise, there's a lot of rage, there's a lot of moralizing, but functionally, the international community doesn't actually exist when it isn't people coming out yelling and crying and weeping and pretending

00:23:15 Speaker_00
to suddenly care about something they didn't know about before, and isn't even the most difficult and painful conflict within a hundred miles of our borders, when it isn't that noise, it isn't actually available to us.

00:23:26 Speaker_00
The international community can't protect us, so it doesn't get to make demands of us. The story here is the opposite of 2006. Because the story here is that the international community doesn't matter. It's a facade. It's a little gimmick.

00:23:39 Speaker_00
What actually happened was that we actually hurt Hezbollah so much that the rest of Lebanon discovered its voice and discovered its backbone.

00:23:48 Speaker_00
And the rest of Lebanon, through the French and the American as intermediaries, which is adorable and thank you for that, but they didn't need that. They would have come to Israel as well.

00:23:58 Speaker_00
And by the way, there are mechanisms of communication established in this deal between Israel and Lebanon. in order to expedite that ability to communicate. Well guess who wants to be able to talk to Israel quickly? Lebanon. Not so much Israel.

00:24:10 Speaker_00
And so Lebanon stood up. Lebanon's sohezbola weakened enough that it could manage to stand up. and signed a deal with Israel in which Israel is fully empowered to continue to smash Hezbollah as necessary.

00:24:23 Speaker_00
And in the time since the deal has been approved, I personally have read about a dozen airstrikes, including in Sidon itself, not just in some three guys get into a car with an RPG somewhere in south Lebanon where they shouldn't be.

00:24:36 Speaker_00
Within cities, infrastructures of Hezbollah. And so the Israeli campaign has actually reached a point where it's actually kind of ideal for Israel. Hezbollah was allowed to set a status quo in which it could bomb.

00:24:49 Speaker_00
And Israel, if it responded, got this Biden administration admonishment, don't escalate. Israel has now set a status quo in which it gets to do the bombing. And any movement on the part of Hezbollah is something Israel can strike at.

00:25:01 Speaker_00
And that counts as a ceasefire. And so it's a ceasefire that doesn't care what Hezbollah thinks. That's the new reality. And it is not a new reality empowered just by Israel's own success and demands or American support.

00:25:14 Speaker_00
It's a new reality empowered by the fact that Hezbollah is weak enough for Lebanon to want Israel to be able to continue to weaken it.

00:25:21 Speaker_00
And that's the secret reality, the secret truth that nobody can say out loud but is very obvious to everyone in the region about this deal. And that's why it's a fantastic deal.

00:25:31 Speaker_00
Prevents Israel from having to pay massive costs, allows Israel to continue this slow degradation of Hezbollah, Every attack of Hezbollah on Israel at this point will be weak. Every attack by Israel in response will be massive.

00:25:42 Speaker_00
And it still gets to count as a ceasefire deal, meaning it is stable. It has the support not just of the Americans, but even of the French.

00:25:49 Speaker_00
And to be allowed to stay at the table, the French basically had to agree that if Netanyahu lands there, despite the fact that they made a lot of noise about agreeing with the ICC warrants, the French will not actually arrest him.

00:26:00 Speaker_00
I don't think he's going to test that statement by the French government that was an official statement.

00:26:04 Speaker_01
He should, he should, by the way, that's a parenthetical point. He should start showing up in these countries. He won't believe me. And send a message to the ICC about how impotent they are. But sorry, I digress.

00:26:14 Speaker_00
Right. But that's the French begging to stay at the table.

00:26:17 Speaker_00
And by the way, the only reason Netanyahu, I believe, I don't know this from Netanyahu, but the reason I believe just because of the sequence of events, Netanyahu in the end allowed the French with that price that they had to pay to stay at the table.

00:26:28 Speaker_00
was that Lebanon asked for it, because Lebanon wasn't entirely sure that the incoming US administration will be an honest broker between Israel and Lebanon.

00:26:36 Speaker_00
And so to get Lebanon to be able to do it and agree to the French at the table on the condition that the French make this rather humiliating concession to him in public. So this is a massive Israeli win. It doesn't get better than this.

00:26:48 Speaker_00
And that's the story of the Lebanon ceasefire deal. We can hit, they can't, and our freedom of operation remains perfectly intact. and going forward this war hasn't ended.

00:26:58 Speaker_00
It's just basically Lebanon has in some significant and fascinating ways actually joined the Israeli war effort.

00:27:06 Speaker_01
Okay. But for the first time in Israel's history, this already very small country, Israel, which is one hundredth of 1% of the world's landmass. So very tiny, tiny, tiny geography.

00:27:20 Speaker_01
There's a sense that over the last 14 months, that geography that was already tiny has been shrinking further that it's borders.

00:27:27 Speaker_01
Those, if you lived in the North, you had to move farther South because if not officially Israel's informal border was shrinking.

00:27:36 Speaker_01
If you're a resident of those communities who live near that shrinking border, if you are looking at this deal and you're saying, I'm in no rush to move back,

00:27:46 Speaker_01
effectively speaking were expectations that come back to this point like was the goal of returning residents to the north soon overstated or over interpreted that the reality is I take your point that geopolitically it's extraordinary what Israel's accomplished and yet will that border in the north for the average Israeli who lives in the north or lived in the north feel like things have changed?

00:28:11 Speaker_00
No, the North will not feel like people can properly live there for quite some time. And nothing this government has done will make it so. And the reason is not the military reason. The military can provide quite a bit of security.

00:28:28 Speaker_00
I don't know how to say it otherwise.

00:28:30 Speaker_00
There are huge legislative needs that the Knesset has to legislate to give reservists from these areas, families from these areas, local councils and local government in these areas, the tools and the funds they need to start the rebuilding.

00:28:44 Speaker_00
And those bills have been held up by the government's obsession with about a dozen other bills that are advancing now that are entirely political and have to do with even judicial reform, which is now back in a big way.

00:28:55 Speaker_00
The North doesn't feel... You felt the gap viscerally. And I'm trying to explain the gap because if people don't understand this gap, they won't understand. The Israelis have weakened the Iranians so much that Syria is back in play on the world stage.

00:29:10 Speaker_00
And the Israeli people are absolutely convinced that their government is driving them into the dirt.

00:29:16 Speaker_00
Now, enough on particular areas are coming slowly back to Likud, that Netanyahu's political position is improving slightly, a Knesset seat a month roughly, over the last 10 months or so.

00:29:27 Speaker_00
But huge numbers of Israelis say that the government has actually failed them. and is poorly run and is not prioritizing their needs. And we're seeing that.

00:29:36 Speaker_00
We're seeing a failure of the state to take care of most of the civilian needs, even as the military successes continue and are astonishing.

00:29:46 Speaker_01
I just want to now move to the South. What are Israelis expecting on the Gaza front? And to say Israelis, I'm speaking very generally, we could start breaking it down different demographics.

00:29:55 Speaker_01
But just generally speaking, the Israelis you're speaking to, and the public opinion polls you're following, what are Israelis expecting on the Gaza front? And can those expectations be met?

00:30:06 Speaker_00
I think the most common view that I know, that I have heard, is that Hamas is shattered enough that we can afford a deal to get hostages out, if such a deal is possible.

00:30:18 Speaker_00
It's very common for people who criticize Netanyahu's handling of the war effort, or just his politicking after October 7, or in fact, the fact that he is the prime minister on October 7 and his strategy gave us October 7.

00:30:29 Speaker_00
It's very common to then say he's also not trying to get the hostages out. I respect those people. It's a distrust that goodness knows our leadership has earned. But this government, whether or not it wants a deal, is irrelevant.

00:30:40 Speaker_00
Hamas has never been sufficiently there to actually make the choice for the Israelis a relevant choice. Now, when the Philadelphia corridor is not in question,

00:30:50 Speaker_00
The vast majority of Israelis are willing, including a large majority of coalition voters, of Likud voters, of government voters.

00:30:56 Speaker_00
And so the difference between three months ago and now is a difference in the perception of the Israeli public that Hamas really is crushed.

00:31:06 Speaker_00
And that doesn't mean there isn't now a two-year degradation war as the last, you know, bits and pieces are brought out.

00:31:13 Speaker_00
That doesn't mean we didn't have to go into Jabalia for two months now and probably we'll be there another month and take out hundreds and hundreds of Hamas fighters that were underground in a vast network of tunnels, etc.

00:31:24 Speaker_00
But it does mean that it no longer poses a strategic threat of any kind. And if we can go back in, most Israelis, 70 to 15 against,

00:31:35 Speaker_00
7415 against are willing to end the war in exchange for a hostage deal So that tells you how they think we've won in Gaza They think we can move forward and they think that the question of hostages is now the preeminent question Okay, I need to ask you the perception among Israelis about Iran.

00:31:54 Speaker_01
I Ultimately, Iran is, to quote Naftali Bennett, the head of the octopus.

00:31:59 Speaker_01
And without dealing with Iran, there is no real geopolitical transformation, no real security transformation in the region to Israel's medium to long-term advantage without dealing with Iran.

00:32:12 Speaker_01
When you talk to Israelis and you again, you interpret public opinion polling, what does victory actually look like there?

00:32:19 Speaker_01
Is there anything short of taking out Iran's nuclear program that could be considered a victory and or the regime being changed in Iran?

00:32:27 Speaker_00
I can tell you simple things. I don't have data here in front of me, but there are things that every poll basically has revealed to us the same thing. Iran is perceived, I think, by most Israelis.

00:32:39 Speaker_00
I hope I'm depicting this correctly and not just projecting myself onto it. But this is something that we have seen hints of in many, many polls, and some of them very explicit ones.

00:32:48 Speaker_00
Iran is seen as a much simpler problem than Gaza, even though it's this immense and powerful empire. In Iran, I don't have to build. There is this idea that if you break it, you own it.

00:32:59 Speaker_01
When I was in Iraq, that was Colin Powell's line, the Pottery Barn rule. You break it, you own it.

00:33:04 Speaker_00
You break it, you own it. In Gaza, the outside has to come in to build something else.

00:33:09 Speaker_00
Now, the outside, hopefully, is an alliance of the international community in the Arab world and the Israelis and something that makes Gaza a better future and is not Hamas.

00:33:19 Speaker_00
But it's incredibly difficult to even imagine how that would work, how you would build it, what that would look like.

00:33:25 Speaker_00
In Lebanon, there's all the rest of Lebanon that can do it, especially with serious help from a world that doesn't want Lebanon destroyed, doesn't want endless war with Israel in a period where the Israelis are not playing games anymore.

00:33:36 Speaker_00
Iran, all of that question, all of that problem, all of that complexity just doesn't exist. I don't have to build it. I don't have to own it. I just have to break it. And so that basic sense that it's simple.

00:33:49 Speaker_00
Iran's air defenses were destroyed in a single Israeli strike. 140 planes flew circles around Tehran. Everybody knows it. Everybody saw it. They can't hide it. They can't pretend it didn't happen.

00:34:00 Speaker_00
And everyone everywhere is starting to recalculate in this region. And so the Israeli public supports taking the fight to Iran.

00:34:09 Speaker_00
The best way to ensure Lebanon has a better future and our border in the north is secure, because Hezbollah actually cannot mount a massive campaign like it did now, can't take Lebanon's decisions to fight or not fight wars hostage, is if we take away their patron, their main source of money, their main source of training, their main source of weapons.

00:34:31 Speaker_00
So hit Iran. There's no future that we have to worry about. It's not just that it's fragile in the sense that it's an incompetent regime and it actually doesn't have the ability to defend itself from Israeli strikes.

00:34:42 Speaker_00
You can hurt the regime surgically in ways that don't hurt the people. For example, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps owns a vast amount of the energy sector. So smash the energy sector and the IRGC budget dries up.

00:34:57 Speaker_00
The Iranian regime has already spent billions it doesn't have on its proxy war to destroy Israel because of a, you know, redemptionist kind of religious idea that involves our destruction, unfortunately. Well, make that money dry up even more.

00:35:10 Speaker_00
Make it not have it even more. And these are very simple and easy. So the Israelis feel strong in the regional calculations. And with Iran, it's hard to make an argument against hitting Iran.

00:35:21 Speaker_00
It's hard to make an argument that the Middle East will be worse than what Iran has already been doing to the Middle East in Syria and Yemen and places that are being demolished. Let's hurt Iran.

00:35:31 Speaker_01
Yet Haviv, it is hard for Israel to do a lot of what it wants to do to Iran or what many Israeli decision makers I've spoken to thinks it needs to do to Iran without some considerable cooperation with the U.S. The U.S. has to be involved.

00:35:47 Speaker_01
I'm not talking about U.S. forces being on the front lines of any kind of engagement, but the U.S. has to be on board to some degree at a very meaningful degree with what Israel is doing.

00:35:58 Speaker_01
And one of the things I was struck by my most recent trip to Israel, is the enthusiasm for the incoming US administration. Now I expected to hear enthusiasm from officials in this government and the Netanyahu led government.

00:36:13 Speaker_01
I was struck by the enthusiasm I heard from Israelis across the political spectrum, from right to left about the incoming administration. I spent time with many people this past week who are very hostile to the current Israeli government.

00:36:30 Speaker_01
And I would think very hostile to the American political right.

00:36:35 Speaker_01
I spent time with hostage families that have been very involved with the protests against the Israeli government, including those hostage families who've migrated from the very focused hostage form protest movement and agenda to a much more political agenda.

00:36:50 Speaker_01
I'm not criticizing, I'm not judging, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not even observing. I'm not even commenting on what they're doing. I'm just saying that this is a, this is a thing now. This has been a development where many,

00:37:00 Speaker_01
Families within the hostage families movement are, some are still focused exclusively on bringing the hostages home in terms of those protests and others are taking that message they have to more political protests that are very, almost like political opposition to the current government.

00:37:15 Speaker_01
And even among those families, I hear enthusiasm for the incoming Trump administration, their sense of frustration.

00:37:21 Speaker_01
with the Biden administration, and maybe, and I hear words like they're ineffective, they're incompetent, they mean well, their hearts are in the right place, the Biden team, but they were ineffective.

00:37:30 Speaker_01
Anti-Israel and anti-US forces in the region were running circles around them, and you know what?

00:37:35 Speaker_01
We may not agree with everything Donald Trump stands for, and there may be many reasons to oppose, you know, be critical of the Trump presidency, but for us in Israel, they were saying, Trump presents a fresh approach, potentially, the potential to really shake things up,

00:37:50 Speaker_01
an approach that doesn't have itself tied up in pretzels to rationalize standing unapologetically. I was hearing different things from different people. So I don't, I don't want to generalize too much.

00:37:59 Speaker_01
I was just struck by the enthusiasm I was hearing for this transition to a new administration from sectors in Israeli life that I didn't expect to hear that from.

00:38:10 Speaker_00
I think that's exactly right. It's worth saying something like nine, 10 months ago, a poll comparing Joe Biden to Donald Trump among Israelis, Joe Biden won by 20 points.

00:38:20 Speaker_00
There was a sense that Joe Biden had our back, that he understood that we face not just Hamas in Gaza, but that we in fact face this entire Iranian proxy system attacking us on five or six or seven fronts.

00:38:33 Speaker_00
And today, Donald Trump's approval among Israelis has passed, the last poll I saw on its way up, I haven't checked in the last week or two, but it was 66%.

00:38:43 Speaker_00
It's wildly high, far, far higher, two or three times higher than support for Kamala Harris going into election week. And, by the way, roughly double the favorability rating of Netanyahu among Israelis. So you're absolutely right.

00:38:59 Speaker_00
Huge swaths of Israeli society that aren't necessarily in love with this government have high expectations and hopes and express high favorability for Donald Trump.

00:39:08 Speaker_00
I think this story basically boils down to Israelis came to conclude that the American bear hug was just that. It wasn't just backing us. And the backing us was very real and important and critical and the missile supplies and all the things.

00:39:24 Speaker_00
But it was a bear hug also to rein us in. And it was a part of an American addiction to status quo.

00:39:33 Speaker_00
And so there was this constant American fear of escalation, constant American fear of movement, constant American fear of any kind of initiative or serious decision being made on anything. And that extended the war and extended everyone's suffering.

00:39:46 Speaker_00
By the way, including Palestinians in Gaza.

00:39:49 Speaker_00
When the Israelis didn't go into Rafah for four months, the Palestinians in Gaza for four more months have to live through a war in which it's impossible to, you know, in any sense, degrade Hamas and remove it eventually from Gaza.

00:40:03 Speaker_01
By the way, Haviv, that four months, I also think hurt the Biden-Harris team because they had four months where there was this lag where Israel could have taken care of business and it delayed Israel, quote unquote, taking care of business.

00:40:16 Speaker_01
So Israel going into RAFA ultimately got delayed way deeper into the U.S. election cycle. And you had those four months of craziness on U.S. campuses and all the rest. The reality is everyone would have been better off had Israel gone earlier.

00:40:30 Speaker_01
Israel would have been better off. and the US administration would have been better off.

00:40:34 Speaker_00
Yeah, and they were telling us things like in the north, like Hezbollah, right? Don't escalate. It could lead to regional war.

00:40:40 Speaker_00
I can't tell you how many thousands of people have tweeted at me and emailed me and talking about the terrible danger of World War III, the terrible danger of an escalation to regional war.

00:40:53 Speaker_00
And I didn't want to sound, you know, dismissive or silly or flippant or glib or any of those other words I pulled out of a thesaurus.

00:41:00 Speaker_00
But I, in fact, welcome taking the war, exacting the cost from the people actually generating the never-ending conflict, rather than from the poor civilian stuck in the middle.

00:41:09 Speaker_00
I welcome a regional war with Iran, because it'll lose it quickly, and Lebanon doesn't have to get destroyed along the way. But this American The American administration was saying the opposite.

00:41:18 Speaker_00
It was saying every step at every turn, no matter how much Hezbollah's missiles were still there, no matter how much it could still claim a victory, no matter how much that we would just have to fight this war again in three months or three years.

00:41:27 Speaker_00
It kept saying never escalate, never move and never escalate.

00:41:30 Speaker_00
And so there came to be a point where for the Israelis, the Biden administration, for all the good that it did us, came to be seen as the problem, came to be seen as one of the major obstacles to actually reshaping the environment, our strategic environment in ways that make us safe.

00:41:46 Speaker_00
And the bear hug is now something Israelis are not willing to countenance, not willing to tolerate. And so there is, I think, tremendous hope that when Trump comes in, we don't actually need that much from the Americans.

00:42:00 Speaker_00
We don't, I think, need aircraft carrier battle groups in the eastern Mediterranean. That is a show of force meant to dial us down. What we need is a massive American pressure campaign on Iran.

00:42:14 Speaker_00
If you properly sanction the Iranian oil exports to China, the Iranian pipeline to Oman for natural gas, the Iranian ability to siphon its oil through Iraq, all of that stuff that everybody knows is happening, all of that sanction skirting that Iran is doing at a massive scale,

00:42:32 Speaker_00
A proper sanctions regime to be maintained, and Dan, you know more about this than I do, but a proper sanctions regime to be sustained, to be static, just to stay at the same level, has to constantly pivot around the other side's building out of all kinds of mechanisms to skirt the sanctions and avoid the sanctions.

00:42:50 Speaker_00
Squeeze Iran. If you squeeze Iran, America will bring the Middle East into a new and better day. And if you don't squeeze Iran, just arming us means you're arming two sides of a war. America, I hope, continues to support us.

00:43:02 Speaker_00
I hope remains very close to us. I think it will. I think we're going into a much better period as Gaza basically switches over the next year into a rebuilding phase, hopefully.

00:43:12 Speaker_00
But the Middle East will continue to sink if America doesn't understand that Iran is the bad guy and remains addicted to the old lessons of the Gulf War, which is that you never escalate. Don't trust military power.

00:43:25 Speaker_00
Always try and cling desperately to the status quo. Our enemies have built out their entire grand strategy around the American inability to escalate, desperate fear of escalation. And that has been frustrating to watch.

00:43:37 Speaker_00
So there is hope that Trump, because he will be willing to escalate, won't have to. The Israelis now have taken to the rest of the region. We flew planes over Tehran.

00:43:48 Speaker_00
Three months earlier, every clever person on Earth would have said, you'd have no idea what you're talking about. A, it's impossible. B, it's dangerous. C, it's going to start a regional war.

00:43:59 Speaker_00
D, China is going to chime in to protect its proxy Iran in the region against the American empire. And then America and China are suddenly going to find themselves in a nuclear exchange in Taiwan.

00:44:09 Speaker_00
I was told that on a panel when I said, guys, we can actually bomb Iran. We have that capacity. If you actually track the Israeli neutralizing of air defenses throughout the Syrian corridor, and you actually track what Iran actually has.

00:44:23 Speaker_00
And this is stuff I got from studies published and press releases made me aware of them by think tanks in Israel. This is not like my, I never commanded the Israeli Air Force, but I read people who once commanded the Israeli Air Force.

00:44:36 Speaker_00
And so we knew what we could do. We had that capability. There is in Israel a Northern Command, Southern Command, and Central Command.

00:44:42 Speaker_00
And there's a whole nother command nobody ever talks about called the Depth Command, headed by a major general of the IDF. It's not a secret. It's on the IDF website.

00:44:50 Speaker_01
Just briefly explain what the Depth Command is, meaning it's a command focused on Israel's strategic reach into the region, right? The depth the IDF can have outside of Israel's borders.

00:45:02 Speaker_00
Yes, but they're not talking about Libya. The depth command is the IDF's institutional response to the challenge of the Iranian proxy system. How do you hit Yemen? How do you track Hezbollah?

00:45:11 Speaker_00
How do you reshape Syria if Syria is already up for reshaping? And how do you deal with Iran? And that depth command is one of the most serious elements of the IDF.

00:45:21 Speaker_00
The entire Israeli Air Force has been shaped to the needs of this Iran question over the last 30 years. The Israeli Air Force has no other purpose than this purpose, and we can do it. And that's the new Israel. And Trump is there. That's how he thinks.

00:45:37 Speaker_00
So if we have an America willing to act, America won't put boots on the ground in the Middle East. It learned that lesson. That's an American thing. I think every Israeli understands it. No Israeli expects it. No Israeli wants it.

00:45:48 Speaker_00
But America can do everything else. And so Trump can do a lot. And he can do a lot on the back of the Israelis doing the hard work, the dirty work on the ground, which should be the Israelis. They're defending themselves.

00:46:00 Speaker_00
That should be something the Israelis do. But the Americans now have an opportunity to step in. And Syria, obviously, is the place to watch. The Assad regime is suddenly weakened. You want to know how much the Israelis have succeeded?

00:46:13 Speaker_00
That's how much people are going to be constantly surprised by this over the next three years.

00:46:18 Speaker_00
All kinds of different forces that once felt they could not rise up against Iran are suddenly going to rise up against Iran, its proxies, its allies and its policies.

00:46:27 Speaker_00
And America can be the finger that on that fulcrum, I hope I got that analogy correct, that tilts everything in the right direction and just marshalling the resources of government to it.

00:46:40 Speaker_00
I think is a very good sign that the Israelis and the Americans are going to be coordinated on the one big strategic existential thing that lies ahead of us, and that is the Iranian regime.

00:46:50 Speaker_01
Haviv, we will leave it there. Thank you always for a range of original insights on a range of topics and look forward to picking back up with you soon.

00:47:01 Speaker_01
These next few weeks and months are going to be a wild ride, at least ride for me, because I'll be observing, but you are living it. So look forward to picking back up.

00:47:11 Speaker_00
Thanks, Dan.

00:47:16 Speaker_01
That's our show for today.

00:47:18 Speaker_01
Just a reminder, if you want to bid on those auction items I mentioned, including Lunch With Me, all to support the important work of the Jewish Food Society, please check out the link in the show notes or look out for it as I'm posting it on social media.

00:47:34 Speaker_01
Call Me Back is produced and edited by Alon Benatar. Our media manager is Rebecca Strom. Additional editing by Martin Wargo. Research by Gabe Silverstein. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.