Is Israel Alone? With Haviv Rettig Gur
The new edition of The Economist Magazine features a photo of an Israeli flag, blowing in the wind…all alone. The cover title of this issue’s editorial is just that — “Israel Alone”. The editorial reads: “Today Israel has destroyed perhaps half of Hamas’s forces. But in important ways its mission has failed.
“As estrangement from the West deepens, so deterrence may weaken. Firms could be blacklisted. Bosses could move high-tech businesses abroad or, if they are reservists, be arrested there.”
But is Israel actually alone? This is what we unpack today during our regular check-in with Haviv Rettig Gur. And in the first part of the conversation, we wound up discussing why the criticism of Israel today looks almost identical to criticism of Israel in previous wars, regardless of which politicians are leading Israel.
Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
[00:00:00] It's 7 30 p. m. on Sunday, March 24th in New York City. It's 1 30 a. m. on Monday, March 25th in Israel. I was struck by the new edition of The Economist magazine, which features a photo of a frailing Israeli flag blowing in the wind all alone. Indeed, the cover title of this issue is just that, Israel alone.
The editorial reads, and I quote, Today Israel has destroyed perhaps half of Hamas's forces, but in important ways, its mission has failed. The editorial goes on, As estrangement from the West deepens, so deterrence may weaken. Firms could be blacklisted. Bosses could move high tech businesses abroad, or if they are reservists, be arrested there.
Close quote. So the [00:01:00] piece says Israel is currently alone, Yet, in fact, it just describes all the ways that Israel could become isolated. It doesn't actually describe concrete ways in which Israel is actually isolated today. I'm skeptical that Israel is isolated, as some, like those of The Economist, believe, or as some might wish Israel to be.
And that's even with the Vice President of the United States popping off over the weekend about quote unquote consequences for Israel. Which were clearly meant for a narrow domestic political audience in the U. S. Even with all of that, I still don't see any neon lit signs pointing to Israel's actual isolation.
To the contrary, I actually think that most economic actors and most geopolitical actors around the world are more or less sticking with Israel, despite everything, or at least are on a path. of having Israel be further integrated internationally and certainly further integrated into the Middle East. If Israel, [00:02:00] however, appears to be losing its fight against Hamas, which was responsible for an attempt at a genocidal war against Israel, that is when I fear Israel would be alone.
I worry about the isolation of an Israel that appears weak. Not an Israel that appears strong. And this is what I wanted to unpack today during my regular check in with Haviv Retikur from Jerusalem. We do get into whether Israel is alone. We both agree, more or less, that Israel's not, but we disagree, at least to some extent, on what the implications would be if Israel were to be suddenly, truly isolated.
But in the first part of our conversation, we wound up discussing why the criticism of Israel today looks almost identical to criticism of Israel in previous wars, in previous decades. Same histrionics from the same cast of characters. It's like a playbook, regardless of who is leading Israel. It could be Benjamin Netanyahu, or it could have been Shimon Peres or Ehud [00:03:00] Olmert.
Ultimately, these criticisms of Israel are not really about the politicians leading Israel, as much as Senator Schumer and other political leaders in the U. S. may say, but about Israel. These criticisms are about Israel's existence, how it exists, its willingness to take matters of its own security into its own hands.
I think it's important to keep that in mind as you read these critics who appear to have fresh criticisms and new insights of Israel. But they are actually rarely fresh. Haviv Retikgur on Is Israel Alone? This is Call Me Back.
And I am pleased to welcome back to this podcast for our regular check in. Haviv Retikgur from the Times of Israel. Haviv, how are you? You're now back in Israel after a little bit of whirlwind travel. We were last together in Washington, DC, and now you are back in Jerusalem. Dan, it's good to be home and let's get into it.[00:04:00]
We are going to talk about Israel's increasing isolation or the perception that Israel's increasingly isolated. But before we do, you and I were talking offline about how the war is actually going. It was a topic of focus of my conversation with Ron Dermer when I was in Jerusalem last week. You have some strong views on how the war is going.
Can you share that with us? I have positive views about how the war is going on the ground. Pretty much everything I could hope for is happening on the ground. My concerns are with the political framework, and with our government, and the American government, and various allies, and even our opponents in the region.
I think that the army on the ground is doing an astonishingly good job in all the ways that matter. Palestinian civilian deaths are way down. Still, sometimes, you know, awful videos or awful pictures come out of Gaza. But the fact is that the numbers are way down. The fact that Hamas numbers aren't just [00:05:00] contradicting reality now about the death toll, but they're contradicting Hamas own numbers from two months ago.
The 6, 000 dead Hamas fighters Hamas acknowledged, is astonishing. a couple months back, have now been shrunk down to 4, 000 dead fighters as the civilian numbers that Hamas releases go up. So it's just, there's a lot of fake out there from their side. And that's just based on you matching new numbers relative to old numbers, so these numbers wind up contradicting each other?
Yeah, there's some numbers that came out of some Hamas official. I don't think it was even tagged the health ministry, but it did spread around a bit that the Palestinian civilian deaths are now. continuing to climb precipitously, but now Hamas, or the people at least spreading the numbers from Hamas, are claiming that some 90 percent or something like that are civilian deaths.
But Hamas itself admitted that there are 6, 000 Hamas fighters dead, and that's way more than 10 percent of the new numbers. And so the whole, uh, The whole numbers game out of Gaza is just utterly fake and false. And [00:06:00] that's true, irrespective of whether Israel's right or wrong. It's true, irrespective of what you think of the war.
It's true, irrespective of, frankly, the numbers could be higher. I don't think they are, but they could be, we would have no way of knowing because Hamas isn't counting. It's inventing numbers out of whole cloth. So. What we know from the ground from the Israeli side, and we don't know it just from official Israeli reports, which there aren't really a lot of actually, what we know from soldiers, what we know from commanders, what we know from the way the war is being conducted, and what we know from simple questions of the fact is aid agencies aren't Dealing with, you know, massive numbers of casualties ongoing, that the civilian death toll is way, way down.
The rate is way, way down, and the Israeli soldiers' death rate is way, way down. And that has been interpreted in some places as the Israeli army standing in place, which to me is a little bit of a weird thing to say because. You and I, based on [00:07:00] Israeli officials, knew five months ago that this war was going to have several stages and that after the above ground territory of Gaza is taken by the army and Hamas's sort of official infrastructure of battalions and various headquarters and arms caches and things like that are destroyed, Then Hamas will pivot to an insurgency, to small cells attacking and disrupting.
And the Israeli army will take a long time to degrade them. Everyone can go back to the podcast, almost every podcast that you and I have recorded in five months and know that that's the next stage. And I think we talked about nine months to two years of that stage. We saw this past week, the battle at Shifa.
So, just explain, Haviv, Shifa Hospital, in which part of Gaza? It's in the Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City, a well to do neighborhood where Hamas and other elites of Gaza live. It's, I think, the biggest hospital in Gaza City and one of the most significant healthcare [00:08:00] institutions in the Strip. Okay, so, Haviv, what happened at Shifa this past week?
We saw now a battle of a completely different type, where the army is now in northern Gaza It's not in every place. It's not maintaining a stranglehold over, you know, all these institutions and buildings and neighborhoods. It is in many, many places in Northern Gaza and in Gaza city, including in around Shifa, laying low and engaged in basically anti tunnel operations, systematically destroying tunnels, gathering intelligence, looking for Hamas cells, but not engaged in massive, you know, Visible warfare in most places.
That's not true in certain parts of Khan Yunis. It's true in Gaza city. And because of that Israeli posture and because of the international pressure that Hamas believes is on Israel right now, Hamas returned to Shifa massively with major commanders and hundreds of fighters and a command center and [00:09:00] the Israeli army.
Did something kind of astonishing, massive numbers of troops from an armored brigade and one or two battalions of infantry surrounded Shifa in something like 15 minutes. They were ready. It was a trap and they sprung the trap and there was a gun battle. There were maybe 170 Hamas guys killed. Some of them very defending the position, actually quite courageously, knowing that their position had been compromised and that the whole thing was a trap.
And then the IDF gets in and it manages to arrest hundreds and hundreds of people. of Hamas fighters on the Hamas rosters, including major commanders and to shut down a major command post that Hamas set up thinking it was safe because it was protected. And it was protected in part by that international pressure.
We saw the army on the ground, take the international pressure. We want to talk today about whether Israel is isolated. We want to talk [00:10:00] today about the international pressure on Israel. The army has used the international pressure on the ground As a kind of feint to let Hamas sink into a sense of safety that is leading Hamas to make mistakes and is allowing Israel to degrade the forces on the ground faster, even than I think it expected to.
So we saw Secretary of State Blinken in Israel this week telling the Israelis, we don't have faith in your capacity to defeat Hamas. We don't have faith in your capacity to fight that fight on the ground and win it. In the long term, I don't know exactly what Blinken said to the cabinet. We're living off of leaks and those leaks are not always trustworthy.
But if what he was talking about was the fighting on the ground, rather than, for example, a larger political horizon that has to be set by the political echelon, if what he was talking about was the fighting on the ground, he's simply mistaken. The army is using its time in Gaza to degrade Hamas systematically.
It is doing it more effectively, more [00:11:00] safely, more safely for Israeli soldiers, more safely for Palestinian civilians. Does that mean no bad pictures are going to come out of Gaza? Absolutely not. But, at the larger level, at the war fighting level, that is what is happening. So, I'm very, very pleased with the progress on the ground.
Hamas has to actually be uprooted from Gaza for any of this to ever end. For The place I think where it's a much larger question of whether Israel is Doing the right thing is at the larger strategic political level. And we've talked about this. Okay. So Haviv, I want to now talk about this perception that Israel is increasingly isolated in the world.
And we've seen a lot of noise. And I do think it's noise, that's my view, which is distinctive from actual real signals. So what are we seeing? We're seeing the cover of The Economist, the new issue of The Economist magazine, Israel alone. And there's an editorial about how alone Israel is. Now, [00:12:00] interestingly, they don't provide any real data or facts to point to Israel being alone.
It's a series of sentiments expressed in the editorial, almost like they think Israel should be alone. They're prescribing Israel's increased isolation if Israel doesn't change course, but they're not actually demonstrating that Israel's alone. We can discuss that. That's one strand. The other strand is increasing noise of complaints from some corners in the American Jewish community, mostly the Reform Progressive Jewish leadership.
Big story last week about some of these voices were the ones who influenced Senator Schumer to give his speech calling for, uh, elections or a change in government in Israel, which was sort of astonishing and unprecedented. We are seeing this come from certain governments, like the one that got the most attention.
What I talked about with Ron Dermer was Canada announcing last week, a decision to ban all future arms sales and now concerned that more countries. Obviously, Canada is more consequential than others because [00:13:00] it's a G7 country, but we're seeing more and more European countries talking about similar things.
So, we're seeing what I call the noise of Israel alone. I actually don't think it reflects reality. And I think Israel will be alone if Israel loses this war. Which we can talk about. But my sense is, Israel's not alone. And, I can get into some of why I'm skeptical of this narrative, but I'm curious for your reaction.
I'll tell you the truth, I'm not entirely sure what to make of all of it. The Economist piece read, I kind of had the same reaction that you had, which was, it wasn't so much an analysis of what's happening as a kind of fantasy of what the threat is in order to get the right reaction from the Israelis.
It was almost like, here is what is definitely going to happen if you don't act the way I want you to act. Therefore, please act the way I want you to act. A lot of the stuff that we've seen from Senator Schumer's speech, a [00:14:00] lot of the things that we heard, Ezra Klein wrote this, uh, piece about Tanyaw, why young people are turning away from Israel.
Blaming Netanyahu, I think, is part of this, and as we've covered extensively, I blame Netanyahu for this. Quite a few things. He's a prime minister for a very long time. A lot of Israel situation should rightly be put at his door. But at the same time, it doesn't feel as though it's an analysis. It doesn't feel diagnostic.
It feels as though people are coming to Israel and saying, they're asking to keep loving Israel. And they're telling Israel that Israel is making it hard. Does that make sense? In other words, the images coming out of Gaza, the rhetoric of the Israeli government, of certain parts of the Israeli government, the lack of any other rhetoric from the Israeli government, Israeli officials don't get to scream and shout, how dare the media cover, you know, Israel as a, some kind of malicious entity.
When so many Israeli ministers said so many silly things that sound so [00:15:00] malicious, and nobody said anything else, Netanyahu went to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee for a closed door classified meeting, and some of the things said there were immediately leaked, which is about how classified meetings in Israel work.
And the members of Knesset asked him, why don't we tell our story properly in the press, in the international media? Why doesn't the media know certain basic things about the war on the ground? Why don't we make an effort to show that we want international humanitarian aid to go in, that we're going to lean into this instead of begrudgingly let the Americans Send aid.
Why do we look bad for no reason? There's no strategic benefit to us pulling back on some of these issues and We have almost nobody who can speak competent English and is out there making our case. Now We Jews are outnumbered a hundred to one by just about every nation on earth So we're not gonna drown out our opponents.
They will [00:16:00] drown us out as well always. But we can be effective and we can be ineffective in making our case. Netanyahu's response in the leak that I suspect, I have no proof, but I suspect came from Netanyahu because it was very favorable to Netanyahu. And it included the sentence, if I'm not prime minister, then bad things will happen, right?
Where he then lists some bad things that happened. So I suspect it's a Netanyahu leak that's part of the Likud campaign now. But Netanyahu's response, apparently, was, We don't have enough people out there speaking English in Israel's defense, because I can't find the people. By the way, that's the same week that the English language spokesman of the government, Elon Levy, was reportedly let go.
And there's a lot of internal politics. Sir Netanyahu doesn't like him. He was once a protester against the government over judicial reform, etc., etc. So, Can you not find the right people? Are you looking? Why is there no focus on this? And it brings me back to the fact that the public diplomacy ministry of the government of Israel, which maybe was an ineffective ministry that had barely been established, but nevertheless was a budget, and that budget [00:17:00] was shut down because the war started.
I don't know if people remember that story, I don't want to get into it, but Israelis are bad at public diplomacy because culturally they're bad at explaining themselves in ways that feel like justifying themselves. The world comes at us, we say, Screw you world. We don't justify ourselves. We're not that kind of Jew.
That creates a culture that has trouble building serious and effective communications. And so maybe this is Pollyannish, not taking it seriously enough. I think everything you're talking about is tactical and tactics are important. And trust me, I'm all for Israel improving its strategic communications.
And I've been hopeful that they would do that for a long time. The narrative coming from the economists, we'll use them as a foil because they're most prominent with this argument right now. And the noise coming from certain Jewish leaders in the U. S. And you mentioned Ezra Klein. So I pulled up the piece, which here it sums it up.
He's basically arguing that young [00:18:00] people's perception of Israel today is shaped by Netanyahu. And he says, it is not in America's interest to support Netanyahu as long as that is the vision he is pursuing. And he talks about the vision Netanyahu has for Israel. And he says, Biden knows in Israel that Gen Z does not, but Gen Z sometimes seems to be listening more closely to what Israeli leaders are saying than Biden is.
So what Ezra does in this piece is he basically says Netanyahu has effectively been in, leading Israel, been the face of Israel since 2009. And other than the short interregnum in 2022 when there was a, Bennett Lapid government. But other than that, Netanyahu has basically been the face of Israel. And what he argues in the piece is for many young Americans, Gen Z, that is the Israel they know.
The Israel they know is the face of Netanyahu. And it's not just Gen Z, it's the economists, it's every major Tom Friedman, Nick Kristof, I mean, the New York Times editorial board, the Washington Post editorial board. They're all [00:19:00] basically saying the same thing. Ezra Klein is doing it. They're not just saying it's young people.
It's even them, these sort of center left supporters of Israel, but we just have a problem with Netanyahu. And the reason I find this argument unserious is, and I may be showing my age here, and I apologize to piggyback you onto my self consciousness about my age, but I probably think I'm showing your age here too, is I think back of previous fights and debates in the United States about Israel that predate Netanyahu.
And I remember those debates and those criticisms saying virtually the exact same thing I'm hearing today. When there were leaders of Israel who were the face of Israel, like in the 1990s, when it was Rubin and Peres, Yitzhak Rubin, Shimon Peres, who were the architects of the Oslo peace process. Peres was literally the chief.
visionary, architect, advocate for a two state solution with the Palestinians, Israel's full integration into the Middle East, a new Middle East, as Peres called [00:20:00] it. And by the way, I'm quite fond of Shimon Peres and I'm grateful to him too. I think he made some very important contributions to Israel's history and he was just at a very parochial level.
He was a very Huge champion of our, mine and Saul's first book, Startup Nation. And he was a character in it and spent a lot of time with us and helping us with it. And he wrote the forward to the paperback edition. So I have a tremendous debt of gratitude to Shimon Peres. You know, Shimon Peres was treated like a hero in like the Davos crowd and the Council on Foreign Relations and the Washington Post and New York Times editorial boards.
And they compare the Israel of Netanyahu to the Israel of Shimon Peres, or even the Israel of Netanyahu to the Israel of Hud Omer. I know had a complicated post prime minister period inside Israel, but internationally he's viewed as this guy who speaks the truth. Right now he's one of Netanyahu's fierce critics and he's constantly being put on Christiane Amanpour's show and all these other shows to bash Israel's government.
So I went back and looked at, it's because I remember them. This is the part about me showing my age and I apologize for showing yours too, [00:21:00] about how those leaders were talked about when they were the faces of Israel. So I want to go back to 1996. So. Haviv, do you remember the Israeli operation, the Israeli military operation into southern Lebanon in 96?
Yes. Grapes of Wrath. Yeah. And Paris was prime minister. Okay. So what was the basis for the operation? Why did Israel go in? Yeah, there was a massive escalation in Hezbollah rocket attacks on the north in 1996. Israel still had the security zone. It was in Lebanon. The Israeli army operated within Lebanon.
And in response to that escalation, Israel launched a concerted, focused offensive against Hezbollah. I think lasted two and a half weeks, something like that. And it ended, and I think this is what you're getting to, with the airstrike in Kfar Qana. Right. Karkana is in southern Lebanon, and there was an airstrike that resulted in over a hundred Lebanese civilians, the deaths of something like a hundred plus Lebanese civilians.
Right. That's the general outline of the story. The [00:22:00] details are on Wikipedia if people are interested in looking it up. Okay. So If you go back to that, and I was a young Senate aide, U. S., working in the U. S. Senate at the time, and I remember the heat on Israel for its operation in Lebanon and ultimately this catastrophe at Kfar Qana, this compound.
The Thomas Friedman, who, you know, every year or two, you know, He writes a column about, he's worried about the soul of Israel, and Israel's lost its way, and, you know, we can, um, come up with these Tom Friedman column headers. He's been writing them now, too, and people who are starting to follow Israel for the first time are paying close attention, are saying, Oh my gosh, Israel's lost Thomas Friedman.
I'm like, come on. Tom Friedman, he's actually a friend, but he, he's been writing the, his versions of Israel having lost its way, and things have changed, and there's no turning back for Israel. I don't know, 30 years, but here's Tom Freeman in 96 and the column is titled Lebanon's Aftermath. And he talks about the reaction of many around the world, [00:23:00] including the region who may have been sympathetic to Israel's need to strike Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon in 1996.
Freeman writes. And I quote here, They understood Israel's need to retaliate for terrorist attacks. They understood that Hezbollah, with serious backing, was trying to provoke Israel. They were ready to cut Israel some slack. It's just that Israel's retaliation was so out of proportion. There we go. The disproportional, that buzzword, was, predates Israel's response to October 7th.
So, Friedman writes, in 96, It's just that Israel's retaliation was so out of proportion, its apology so lacking, its effect on Lebanon so devastating, in a mini war that didn't involve a single Israeli civilian death, that it became a symbol in Arab eyes for how much Israel can get away with these days, days when the U.
S. is extraordinarily close with Israel, when there is no Soviet Union to speak up for the Arabs, and when the need to get Mr. Peres reelected [00:24:00] to keep the peace process alive seems to override all other considerations. So here Friedman is saying, everyone's furious at Israel because Israel's gone too far.
It's responded disproportionately. And in fact, there may have been political motivations. That's kind of amusing because we hear that all the time that Netanyahu is running this war based on his politics. And this is what Friedman is lobbying at Shimon Peres. And this is 96. This is when Perez is the face of Israel.
So then you go to the Washington post about Israel's incursion into Lebanon. And I quote here at the moment. The Washington Post writes, The public focus is strongest on the Israelis. They have inflicted severe collective punishment on Lebanon. So there's the other one. There's disproportionality and then there's collective punishment.
They have inflicted severe collective punishment on Lebanon, especially On Lebanese civilians, far from closing down the elusive Hezbollah, they have apparently given it new appeal to the peaceful Lebanese [00:25:00] mainstream. An operation that Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres may have approved with electoral as well as security considerations in mind is turning out to provide mixed credits at home and some heavy debts abroad, meaning Israel is increasingly isolated.
So this was the Israel of Shimon Peres. And by the way, I can go on and on with. Similar pieces by the same cast of characters in Omeret was prime minister. This is before Netanyahu took over, criticizing both the second Omeret conduct of the second Lebanon war and Omeret's operation in Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009.
Same criticisms. So I'm making these points here, Haviv, not to establish that Netanyahu should be excused from criticism on this issue or that issue. My point is this argument. It's like the but if argument. But if Israel just does this, the world will be okay with Israel. But if Israel just does that, the world will be okay with Israel.
And the new rant is, but if Israel just gets rid of [00:26:00] Netanyahu, then we'll be okay with Israel. with Israel. And that is effectively what The Economist argues. That's what Chuck Schumer argues. That's what some of these rabbis speaking out are arguing. That's what some of these other countries, which we'll talk about momentarily around the world, are arguing.
And my only point is nonsense. They don't have a problem with an Israeli politician. The criticism is with Israel, because you could take the pieces I just quoted for you, you can look at the pieces I just quoted, and you can take out in these pieces the word Hezbollah and put in Hamas. You can take out the names Peres and Omer, and you can put in Netanyahu.
And it's rinse and repeat. It's like a chat GBT generation of the kind of criticism we're hearing today. And so I first just want to. Say, love Netanyahu, hate Netanyahu. The criticisms of Israel are about Israel, and about Israel needing to defend itself, and Israel isolating itself in the world so the rap goes, no matter who is leading Israel.
Yeah, I mean, it's annoying that a discourse can be so disconnected from the reality. Any [00:27:00] kind of serious argument, what was Israel supposed to do about Hezbollah? By the way, Israel pulled outta South Lebanon overnight in 2000, in May of 2000, and then the second Lebanon war was painful enough to the Israeli public.
Hundreds of thousands of Israelis fled their homes for the entirety of the war. Tens of thousands of rockets fell on Israeli cities and towns from Lebanon, and that was the last time Israelis were willing to do a unilateral withdrawal from everywhere, even after all. announced before the election in 2006 that he was thinking about a West Bank withdrawal and still won the election.
So, here's the thing. What are they doing? What are these people doing when they come at us and they say, you're going to be isolated and they say the Israeli government had a right to respond, but it went too far? Well, obviously it didn't go too far. Hezbollah remained in power and no international agreement was reached.
By the way, in 2006, every single bridge in Lebanon was destroyed. Half of Beirut lost electricity in that war. Olmert was trying to show Israelis he can deter Hezbollah because Olmert wanted to push a withdrawal from the [00:28:00] West Bank. So, anyone who loves Palestinians but then came to the defense of Hezbollah to stop the Israelis, Security Council Resolution 1701 in 2006 said Hezbollah is absolutely required to pull back to the Litani.
Lebanon acquiesced to this resolution. It's a security council decision. Israel stopped the war based on the guarantees of that resolution. And Hezbollah never even pretended to obey it. And no one even pretended to ask it to. So when people say Israel is doing too much or going too far, but it's not actually achieving the war aims.
Israel now has a war aim. That is the end of Hamas's capacity to ever again do an October 7, not the end of Hamas's ability to do an October 7 if we're once again caught with our pants down and with a bad, you know, strategic concept and with the army unprepared. No, actually to end Hamas's ability to use Gaza as a base from which to carry out another October 7 ever again.
Absolutely, guaranteed, no matter what. That's the Israeli war aim. And you're going to tell the Israelis after their [00:29:00] experience of this kind of language, of this kind of, oh no, you're going to be alone. Here's the thing. It's really simple. I don't understand why people don't understand how simple it is.
There's a kind of tendency for these discourses to get very solipsistic, to get very echo chambery. People like Tom Friedman, and I hate to pick on him. He's just the most prominent one, but it's, it's 10, 000 people in the American elites who constantly do this. And the fact that we pick on him is a sign of his importance within that group of 10, 000.
So apologies, Tom. Well, he apparently has Joe Biden's ear, so if he's establishing himself as the person who can whisper into the ear of the President of the United States on a major foreign policy issue, then he deserves to be scrutinized. Great. Perfect. So I have an excuse. It's a fair game. Yes. And oh, by the way, Haviv, and I say this with love, but so many of my friends who argue with me about Israel, it is usually prefaced by forwarding me Tom Friedman's most recent column, whatever the week, like the Friedman column of the week about Israel gets forwarded to me.
And then that's their [00:30:00] piece. That's the basis upon which they yell at me. So I have a Great. Perfect. So he's the absolute paragon of this and the exemplar of this. Conventional wisdoms that are adopted for their moral power, for the moral purpose they serve. Basically, people want to say, look, I know that Israel's enemies are coming for it.
I know it. Hamas makes it too hard to pretend that it's not going to kill every last Israeli, including every last child. They kidnapped babies. I know that that's what they are. I also know that there's this immense emotional investment in the evil that Israel is doing or that Israel is doing. It is an enormous pressure on the liberal mind.
It flows from the Arab world. It flows from the left. It flows from a lot of tribal places that are responding tribally, people who wouldn't care if every last Jew was killed. They're angry at Israel for being a Jewish state and for existing as it exists, and some of them are, frankly, we have Paul's on [00:31:00] this of the Arab world, angry that Israel exists, the Jews survived.
And these are also places that expelled every last Jew. That Muslim world and not all the Muslim world, but nevertheless, large parts of it, that Muslim world anger is echoed in the left and it is echoed loudly. And it is echoed louder as the left adopts this sort of 1960s post colonial anti colonial kind of understanding of the world and ideology.
And so there's this pressure in the zeitgeist. A lot of people respond to what they think people are generally thinking. This is not a clear analytical framework. And so they're trying to have it all, these Jews. And they're often Jews. Not always Jews, but often Jews. They're trying to have it all. They're trying to say, yes, these people want Israel destroyed.
Yes, Israel gets to defend itself. It has to stop before our media Or too many of the people in our social world get upset at them because that hurts us. [00:32:00] And they're almost memes, these kinds of responses. You know, the fact is that Israel in 1996 didn't fight Hezbollah enough and should not have stopped because Hezbollah was able to grow and strengthen.
And when Israel pulled out in May of 2000, from Lebanon that essentially brought the 2006 war in which 300, 000 Israelis had to flee their homes because tens of thousands of missiles were falling on their homes. And this was a period before Iron Dome. This was a period before Northern cities and towns had enough bomb shelters in homes and in streets.
So it created a trauma in 2006, this expansion of Hezbollah, this allowing Hezbollah to fester, created a trauma in 2006 that actually shattered the Olmert government's ability to do something that it wanted to do, which it called the convergence plan, which was a unilateral withdrawal on the Gaza model from the West Bank.
So Israel withdrawals from Gaza, it was called the disengagement plan under Ariel Sharon, who was prime minister at the time, and Ehud Omer was deputy prime minister. [00:33:00] They unilaterally withdraw from Gaza so they can be quote unquote done with the occupation of Palestinians in Gaza. And then Omer runs for election after He takes over as prime minister because Sharon fell into a coma.
He had a stroke. He wasn't able to finish his term as prime minister. Omer takes over as prime minister, and then Omer has an election coming as prime minister and he runs on. I'm going to do in the West bank, what Sharon and I, Omer argued did in Gaza. Yeah, he talks about it in speeches before the election that there's going to be this pullout and he comes to call it the convergence plan and people should google it and it is the right wing answer to the collapse of Oslo.
It was the center right Ariel Sharon, he left Likud after the Gaza withdrawal because Netanyahu was leading a rebellion against him within the party, blah, blah, blah, all these different reasons, mainly because he was polling better than Likud itself, so it actually would have gone much better for him to be his own party.
He founds Kadima in late 2005. Israel has just pulled out of Gaza and then Tehran has this catastrophic stroke and Olmert's [00:34:00] Running as head of Kadima. Olmert is a profoundly unpopular figure. The best numbers we know on, at the national level was that he once ran for Likud leader and got, I think, 2 percent of the Likud primary vote.
Olmert is not a beloved leader in Israel, but he is running as, on the coattails of a now incapacitated Sharon at the head of Kadima. And here's the thing. He says there's going to be a West Bank withdrawal. And here's the other thing. He takes two thirds of Likud with him or some significant, maybe half of Likud with him.
Likud drops to 12 seats in the 2006 election. And Netanyahu was running as leader of Likud in that election. With Netanyahu at its helm. Right. And so Netanyahu bleeds Likud votes in that election and those votes go to Omer. So Omer really does build a Center, center right governing coalition. Exactly. And then forms a government, I believe it was in March 2006, with the Labour Party.
Which no longer can win elections, because after the 140 suicide bombings of the Second Intifada that shattered Oslo, nobody trusts the Labour Party anymore [00:35:00] to make peace. Because peace ends in rivers of blood. Well, this new right wing idea of unilateral withdrawal wins the election. It's a massive centrist coalition, and it forms a government, and the Labour Party even gets the defence ministry, meaning people who want a withdrawal from the West Bank will be the ones carrying out a withdrawal from the West Bank.
And that's when Hezbollah, that's when Hamas, frankly, in 2006, I think it was in late June, carries out its first ever tunnel attack from Gaza. crosses the border, pops up out of the ground on the Israeli side, kills two Israeli soldiers, kidnaps Gilad Shalit, Corporal Gilad Shalit, who will spend five years in a Hamas dungeon in Gaza before the exchange in 2011.
While there's that shooting war in Gaza sparked by that attack, um, Hezbollah on July 12th 2006, six years after a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, Hamas attacked something like 10 months after a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, and Hezbollah then on July 12th, six years after an Israeli unilateral withdrawal from [00:36:00] there, from Lebanon, Hezbollah attack, I believe four soldiers are killed in Gaza.
Two soldiers are kidnapped, Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser. Those are household names in Israel. Every Israeli knows those names. And then the second Lebanon war is underway. And the Israeli Olmert in that war has the exact same pattern that you just pointed out. There's this immense bombardment of Hezbollah positions and of the infrastructures Hezbollah uses, like bridges, like roads.
And Lebanon is genuinely suffering. And taking out rocket launchers. Taking out rocket launchers. Absolutely. But every single rocket is being launched from a village in South Lebanon. Every single one is from inside a home. There are no rocket launchers out in the field somewhere. That's not how Hezbollah works.
And so Lebanon is suffering terribly in this war. And Olmert finishes the war with Resolution 1701 of the UN Security Council. And we hear exactly the same thing. The Israelis are going wild and crazy. But here's the thing, because the Israeli public perceived in that war that Israel [00:37:00] was not able. Was not allowed, maybe it wasn't capable internally.
Huge criticism of Olmert, of the chief of staff of the IDF, Dan Halutz, but also a criticism of the world to actually push back the Hezbollah threat because tens of thousands of rockets ring down on Israeli cities because Hezbollah didn't care how much damage was caused to Lebanon. Because hundreds of thousands of Israelis had to flee.
their homes for the entirety of the war because there was no Iron Dome in 2006. That's the trauma that leads the Israelis to take this whack a doodle idea of shooting down rockets in midair and try and make it a real thing. So Iron Dome flows from that trauma. There aren't enough bomb shelters in Kiliach Monad, the northern border.
This is something that it becomes Israel invests billions in building these bomb shelters and building Iron Dome in building these systems. because of the 2006 experience. Leaving Hezbollah standing created the next war that turned the Israeli public away from any potential for the Olmert centrist [00:38:00] coalition, which had already talked in the election about a withdrawal from the West Bank.
I think it was something like 90 percent of the West. But the point is. There are consequences to this kind of enemy surviving, massive consequences, and if the best that you can muster is the argument, oh no, people will not like you, and therefore we should allow Hamas to survive in Gaza, we should allow Hamas to stay alive in Rafah and sweep back into Gaza as soon as Israel is finally pushed out by international pressure, because what the heck is it doing there, trying to reoccupy the place?
If that's the story, we're going to have another war in Gaza. We're going to have a worse war in Gaza. We're going to turn the Israeli public more away from the very fact that right now you have very left wing soldiers and very right wing soldiers unified and happy together for 160 days fighting shoulder to shoulder in Gaza is because Israel has not.
settled these problems in the past. Now you can talk about the Palestinian arena and you can say, until the [00:39:00] West Bank is sorted out, until Palestinians have independence and self determination, how dare the Israelis claim they have the right to destroy Hamas in Gaza. You can take that moral stance.
That's fine. But if you want to actually change something, you want to actually change something, you need to think about how Israelis, the Israeli public, ordinary Israelis, the most ordinary people in the world are going to respond to an outcome. The Israeli public believes, maybe it's wrong, I don't know the objective, historical, comprehensive truth of all things, but in the Israeli Jewish narrative, certainly, and among many, many Israeli Arabs as well, there's this belief that we tried, we tried again and again, our entire politics were flipped upside down, a prime minister was assassinated, the defining issue of left right politics for a generation and a half.
Was this Palestinian question, was unilateral withdrawal questions? When you say a prime minister was assassinated, you're talking about Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin assassinated by a Jewish Israeli. Opposed to the Oslo peace process. Yeah. Now this guy [00:40:00] who killed him was, who assassinated Rabin was also crazy.
So it wasn't a mainstream response to the Oslo peace process. But your point is, it speaks to how tense Israeli society was, the political climate. in that period. And even after Rabin's assassination, there was for some period, something like, Saul and I talk a lot about this in our most recent book, that in that period, like half the country blamed the other half of the country for not the assassination of Rabin, but for letting a political climate get so hot that something like this could happen.
That's how much the country was debating, wrestling. Absolutely torn apart. And was consumed by this question of how do we get to peace? How do we get to normalization with the Palestinians? Right. And by the way, when Ariel Sharon launched Operation Defensive Shield into the West Bank, this massive infantry invasion of Palestinian cities in 2002 to end the second intifada after there'd already been, I think, a hundred suicide bombings.[00:41:00]
The last one, the spark for Defensive Shield was the Passover Massacre. The bomber who walked into the Park Hotel in Netanya in a Passover Seder with huge numbers of people celebrating together in a hotel ballroom and blew up and I think killed 30 people, something like that. That was the trigger. And Sharon launches this operation and it is a year and a half, something like that degradation of Palestinian terror groups and infrastructures in the West Bank.
And it is bloody and brutal. And it awakens a lot of anger at the Israelis. The second Intifada. is where the BDS movement starts. It starts with Durban in 2001. By the way, before defensive shield, it starts as part of that second intifada of those suicide bombings. The Israelis relate BDS to the massacre of their children.
Why? Because they're started by the same political movement in the same political time in the same kind of event. Now, Sharon defeats the second intifada, crushes the second intifada with an infantry invasion of cities. And then Sharon turns around and pulls out of Gaza. And here's the thing, [00:42:00] Israelis loved him for the first thing and loved him even more for the second.
The withdrawal from Gaza was seen as a, finally a solution to this Palestinian thing that flows from a right wing we can respect because when the enemy comes, they know how to crush it. They will actually protect us. Sharon could protect us. And if he says we can pull out of Gaza and be safe, he's right.
On the coattails of that, with Sharon already in hospital, essentially brain dead after that stroke, in 2006, Olmert wins an election. Make it furthering that promise, and that is shattered by the fact that Hezbollah is still there, still powerful. We've pulled out six years earlier, but Hezbollah is now dislocating 600, 000 Israelis from their homes.
Hamas begins its tunnel wars in 2006. And throughout that process, as you say, It was the same damn rhetoric and the same damn editorials. You know what I want to hear from the same group of people now putting everything, now just saying, [00:43:00] we want to love Israel, but I just wish Israel made it easier for us to love it by not voting Netanyahu, forget Netanyahu.
He's a politician. He works for me. I criticize him for thinking I work for him, but that's me and him arguing in Hebrew, forget Netanyahu. If Gantz is in power, the fundamental policy won't be different because the Israeli public won't be different. Now, here's my question. How do you come to an Israeli public, absolutely convinced, maybe wrong, maybe it's totally wrong, but it is convinced from years of experience and bloodshed and experiments that fail in rivers of blood.
How do you come to that Israeli public? How do you rebuild, let's call it the Israeli left, I say that with quotes because nobody knows what left is after Oslo. But how do you rebuild an Israeli capacity to believe that any withdrawal that we make won't be filled by the same jihadi insane people bent on our massive destruction?
How do you do that? If you don't know how to do that, you're not [00:44:00] contributing anything to the conversation. And that brings me just to say one thing about Israel alone. I don't think Israel alone is a serious analysis. I think it's an aspirational analysis. Is that the right word? Yes, it's what I call wish casting.
It's not forecasting. That's what the economist piece is. No, but I'm going to disagree with you, though. I think Israel may well grow to be quite isolated from this. My argument isn't that Israel won't become isolated. This kind of discourse is the elite discourse in the West right now. My argument is it won't matter.
It won't change anything. It's a cost benefit problem. Okay? It's a very simple, simple problem. And that's the only thing I have to say to these people. And their internal discourse is too disconnected from basic Israeli social and political reality for it to matter to me any more than just this one thing that I have to say to them.
The Israelis, Believe that the benefit they get from their current behavior is that they get to continue to live their children aren't massacred You want to raise the cost on [00:45:00] them? You better make sure that the deliverables the thing you want them to give you in exchange for reducing that cost again, right?
What ostracization isolation sanctions boycotts? These are all by the way terrorism These are all levers of pressure on the population. You want israelis to feel pressure for their current policy and behavior So they change their behavior Here's the thing. If they believe that the costs of changing their behavior are higher than the costs of not changing the behavior that you're trying to impose on them, they're not going to change their behavior.
I really wish that simplest of sentences were clear to people. What Israelis think is happening to them, how Israelis understand the cost benefit Calculation here, leaving Hamas in power means more dead Israelis. You're not going to be able to pressure them because they think it will lead to the death of their children.
There is a Palestinian political folly. You know, every political world has its follies. One of the great follies of the Palestinian [00:46:00] political world is a refusal. Ideological and cultural refusal to develop a theory of mind of the Israelis. The Israelis don't have ideas, they don't have discourses, they don't have visions of the world, they're not intuitions, they're not informed by experience.
The Israelis are big, demonic, and always malicious, and there's nothing else to know. That's the essential Palestinian message to the world. Palestinian political elites. Ordinary Palestinians know this not to be true. Ordinary Palestinians live alongside Israelis. But that's the political elites and that's the pro Palestinian argument.
How horrible and evil are the Israelis? Oh my God, you won't believe it. Here's a video of somebody doing something wrong. Terribly wrong. By the way, there are videos of many Palestinians doing terrible things wrong. You shouldn't watch those videos. That's helping the bad guys. The whole story of this discourse that refuses to have a Palestinian theory of mind in 30 years of on again, off again, peace talks, even when they were real peace talks back in the nineties, no Palestinian leader ever gave a [00:47:00] speech to the Israeli public.
There's no Palestinian acknowledgement that there is an Israeli public. Like Anwar Sadat during the Egyptian Israeli rapprochement in the late 70s. He flew to Israel. He came to Jerusalem He spoke before the Knesset and said I recognize Israel's right to exist. I want peace I'm so glad you brought that up because when Sadat did that the Israelis were still fearful and skeptical and suspicious and were thinking in Nasserite terms and There was actually a fear that he would get off his plane in Israel And it would be some kind of secret attack.
Actually, there's polling from before his visit where Israelis were asked, were surveyed, do you support a peace agreement with Egypt that would result in Israel returning the Sinai to Egypt, which was three times the size, the Sinai alone of Israel. And the Israeli public was overwhelmingly against it.
And then Sadat comes to Israel, comes to the Knesset, gives the speech. Another poll was taken overnight, overwhelming majority of Israelis support giving the Sinai back to Egypt. Here's the thing. [00:48:00] The Palestinians believe that they can push forward with a strategy, any strategy, terrorism strategy, peace talk strategy, without influencing, shaping, speaking to the Israeli public.
Do you know who is speaking very directly and consistently and powerfully and effectively to the Israeli public? Hamas. Do you know who is speaking powerfully and consistently to the Israeli public? Hezbollah. So you are talking to an Israeli population, again, from pretty deep in the left. to pretty deep on the right, the huge majority of the Israeli population, certainly of the Jewish population.
Also, Arab Israelis are deep into this. It's not an accident that after October 7, rates of Arab Israeli, who are also Palestinian, their identity is this very complex, liminal thing. Rates of their identification with Israel surpassed 70 percent for the very first time. If they're saying, I identify with Israel with its, the story here is of an Israeli population that for some reason, nobody thinks matters to the fundamental question of how [00:49:00] we move forward.
There is no other arena in which Palestine will be freed, in which Palestinian self determination can be achieved, other than in Israeli hands. political psyche. And so, the world has to talk to, think about the Israeli political psyche, dumping it all on Netanyahu, complaining that it went a little too far.
Folks, a world that doesn't give a rat's patoot to what America did in the Middle East, to, I would say, what the Houthis did in the Middle East, or the Assad, or Iran is doing in the Middle East. In America, they want a detente within Iran of that type. You know, but then people say, so you're comparing yourself to Iran or to the Houthis?
No, of what anyone does. War is war. War is horrible. But that doesn't mean you lose it because you can't afford to fight it. No one scrutinizes any war on earth in the history of warfare, like they scrutinize us. And a lot of Jews feel caught in the middle of this moral emotions from the left and of the understanding that Israel does actually have these enemies.
Jews abroad. It's not Jews in Israel. I mean, you live this. I was just in Israel a few days [00:50:00] ago. I continue to be struck by, Jews on the Israeli left. We had a not will fund a couple weeks ago talking about this. It's not Jews in Israel. It does apply to some, although a very, I think a loud minority of Jews in the diaspora, not the majority, but I want to take issue with one point you're making.
First of all, let me say what I think this exchange demonstrates is that the Ezra Klein's and the Tom Friedman's are disingenuous. They say, just solve your BB problem, Israel, Schumer, just solve your BB problem and we'll be good. And it's just not true. Because it's the same rap against Israel when the face of Israel are different leaders, like the example I put before is Shimon Peres, but we could come up with many more.
There's one thing I do want to say about that. They're not stupid for feeling like Bibi is the problem here. Because Bibi is the guy who could create a very different Israeli discourse, a very different public posture, lean into things like aid, talk explicitly and constantly about the need to protect civilian lives.
Bibi could create the paper trail for [00:51:00] American liberal Jews to say, look, they're trying, look, here's six places where they failed, but they're not crazy monsters. And he refuses to for domestic political reasons. And so Israel is silent when there are. 30, 000 airstrikes in the Gaza war so far. Something, give or take 5, 000.
Something in that order of magnitude. I am absolutely sure not all of them were perfectly fine. I know it. I know it for sure because that's what war is. But Israel needs to say, we're trying. Sure. It would be directionally better. If Israel's government did some of the things you're saying, sure. Do I think it would ultimately make a difference?
No. Because, is Bibi managing coalition politics? Sure. Point to me a Western democracy where its leader is not managing coalition politics. Is Joe Biden today, in the statements he's making about Israel, not managing coalition politics? Is he willing to confront the squad? He's pandering. I'm asking because I don't know.
When America went into Iraq, was there a [00:52:00] section of the American Congress that said just nuke all of them? The stupidity of it. Now the guy who said it. Of course, there's some random member of Congress popping off saying crazy stuff. But he's in the cabinet! The member of Knesset that you're citing is not a major player in the Israeli government, and he doesn't speak for the Israeli government.
No, he's a guy Israelis discovered exists only when he started yelling that we should nuke Gaza.
No, he's minister of heritage. Nobody knows what he's the actual minister of. He's nothing. Okay. The point isn't that the point is foreigners don't know that he's nothing. So my criticism of the government without exact example, you're citing is the vacuum because the Israeli government does not speak as directly, as clearly in English.
To the world, about what it's doing, on a consistent basis, it creates a vacuum. And when there's a vacuum, vacuums are filled by small people with big [00:53:00] microphones. Yes, it's not just speak, it's also act. The Israeli army hasn't stopped aid from going in, but the Israeli army also hasn't been instructed, very publicly and visibly, To invent, now, you couldn't get the aid in, in such easy ways.
People think that you can just randomly get aid in. Egyptian truck drivers aren't willing to drive the trucks in because they've been attacked by Hamas. But the point is, where's the Israeli army making the visible effort, looking like it's trying? That wouldn't go a long way. We've talked about this in the past on other issues.
I am an Israeli. I am a firm believer that Israel has a lot of ability to shape its environment. I'm a firm believer that Israel's government doesn't do it for political reasons. And so I'm very frustrated. Now you're actually out there in the world and you're saying to me, Israel could have done a whole lot and still not actually shape the environment all that much.
I don't believe the Ezra Klein's and the Tom Friedman's would change their tune at all if Israel were doing the things you're doing. I just don't believe it. And the reason I don't believe it is because no matter what Israel [00:54:00] does, and no matter who's leading Israel, the same symphony of voices, in their voices, Whether it's literally the same ones, or the previous generational versions of them, have the same criticisms of Israel.
In other words, you can tweak this leader, you can tweak this tactic, but at the end of the day, Israel fighting back, and Israel refusing to be rolled over, or on October 7th, refusing to actually be literally, entirely wiped out, and Israel doing what it has to do, is unacceptable. Now, you seem to be arguing that Israel will be alone.
They maybe wind up being alone. And if they're alone, that's life. I actually disagree with that. I think there's real risks to Israel being alone. I'm not suggesting that Israel is alone. I don't believe they are. And we'll get into that, but I do think if we were heading in a path towards Israel being alone, that would be a problem.
I think Israel's. position, its geopolitical position, its economic position over the last couple of decades, especially fueled by the tech boom, which created all sorts of economic opportunities for Israel. It virtually doubled Israel's per capita [00:55:00] GDP, which grew its economy, which enabled it to make larger and larger commitments as a percentage of GDP to its defense budget, to its military.
It has given it geopolitical reach in the region. The Abraham Accords. And the growing path to soft normalization with Saudi Arabia is as much about Israel's innovation superpower being a regional economic superpower as it is the aligned interest between Israel and those Sunni Gulf countries as it relates to the threat from Iran.
Israel has benefited immensely from its integration. into the region and its integration into the world. It has benefited immensely from the fact that there are 450 multinationals with operations in Israel. It's, there's nothing like it anywhere in the world, a country of 9. 3 million people that does not provide a logistics hub for companies that want to do business in the region.
Israel is not a logistics hub to do business in the region like it is if you set up say in Dubai and Israel has no domestic market to speak of because it's a population of 9. 3 million people. So it's [00:56:00] not like any of these companies are setting up shop in Israel to penetrate the local market. market.
No, what they do in Israel is what they do in virtually no other part of the world, which is they set up shop in Israel to solve their biggest problems, whether it's Apple or Meta or Intel or Medtronic or, and we could go down the list or non tech companies like auto companies or companies like Procter and Gamble and Coca Cola and Walmart.
All these companies have one thing in common. They have big innovation problems to solve and they want to solve it in Israel. This organization I'm involved with called Startup Nation Central. I'll Posted on the in the show notes. We have a platform called the startup nation finder that we can literally see every Multinational that has set up shop in Israel.
The data is staggering They're employing large numbers of Israelis and they're solving their biggest problems in Israel And when Saul and I wrote our first book startup nation, there were about a hundred and sixty of these companies global companies That set up shop in Israel and today Like I said, there's over 400 of them.
Not a single one of them, Havif, not a single one of them has said they're shutting down because of the [00:57:00] war and Israel's response in Gaza. To the contrary, many of them put out statements after October 7th standing with Israel. Some of them made some extraordinary statements like the CEO of Intel who gave this incredible interview talking about his support for and the resilience of the Israeli people.
These companies are not bailing. Israel is not alone. I would be worried if they were bailing, because I think these companies and Israel's, the relationships Israel has developed diplomatically and economically are important for Israel's strength, but they're not bailing. And it's an interesting question to ask why they're not bailing, and the reason they're not bailing is not because of love of Zion.
I mean, maybe for some of them it is, because it's in their interest. It's in their interest to be in business with Israel. It is in Saudi Arabia's interest, as I know firsthand from senior officials in the Saudi government, in the royal family, who say that MBS has his vision, his 2030, 2030 goals for Saudi Arabia.
He can't achieve them without normalizing with Israel. [00:58:00] It's in their interest. All these Gulf countries that want to do business with Israel, they say, look, there's a Silicon Valley that's a 17 or 18 hour flight from us in the Gulf. And there's a Silicon Valley that's a three or four hour flight from us in the Middle East.
Why can't we be doing business with the Silicon Valley in our backyard? It's in their interest. Ron Dermer, when I was interviewing him at the PM's office in Jerusalem last week, he was careful, you know, he can't talk about the unofficial relationships that Israel has with some of these countries. But it was clear from the conversation, and we both know, Israel has unofficial relationships with many of these countries.
Sort of Israel has friends, like the Abraham Accords now, and it has future friends. It has countries that will normalize with Israel, because it's in their interest. So you want to say Israel's alone? Show me! Because here's the test of Israel being alone. When countries and companies are willing at their own expense to cut off with Israel, not in some kind of performative way, but will actually hurt their competitive edge, whatever, however they define it, [00:59:00] in order to make a statement against Israel.
Because they're so morally torn about Israel's behavior. We feel so strongly about it that we are going to actually injure our own position. We are going to undermine our own interests to make a statement against Israel. I haven't seen anybody do that. Not only do I share with you the view that Israel is unlikely to find itself alone.
And that the wish casting of, I think I know who, I mean, the economist doesn't put bylines, but I think I know who contributed to that piece. And I think I know what part of Israeli politics that came from, and it had a lot more to do with internal Israeli domestic kinds of political projections than with the reality of Israel's actual position, which for a magazine that calls itself The Economist is a shame because telling us what's actually happening is more useful.
I'm telling us what certain political camps, you know, want people to think is happening. And by the way, and it's always been true, everything you're saying now is true of American support for Israel. American [01:00:00] support for Israel kicked in once Israel was a regional power capable of fending off enemies and stabilizing the region.
American support for Israel was not there. Before that, we were under an American arms embargo and a British arms embargo in 48, which was an existential, desperate, dire war where we could have easily been outclassed in that war by our Arab enemies, the Arab armies that invaded, etc. By the way, we were under French also that weren't helping us out in 67 when our army was basically kind of built out of French purchases.
You know, we have fought alone, and we have fought and succeeded tremendously. Even when we were alone. And if we are alone, we will fight. And if we don't have the swankiest, most modern, most precise American weapon, we'll fight with whatever we can get our hands on and we will fight more fiercely and we will fight less accurately, a lack of support from the West won't mean we don't fight because Hamas will still start the fight because Hezbollah and Iran will look at the lack of support from the West and say, aha, [01:01:00] now we can destroy them.
Now the real war begins. And that real war. We will be much, much more fierce and the war will be probably more decisive because our backs are against a wall. I don't actually think that we are losing our supporters. I think that all this talk about Bibi is a way to avoid talking about breaking up with Israel.
By dumping it all on Bibi, who will be eventually cycled out in the natural order of things. Great. Why not? If I have to choose between a politician and my country, I'll dump every politician there is under the bus. Why wouldn't I? I think most Israelis share that view. We're real people. People sometimes forget that.
We're not moral cartoons. All of that, I agree with you. I agree with you, and I also think that even if we are alone, it changes very little. Because of the cost benefit calculation that Israelis make, our enemies actually want to destroy us. That is an astonishing source of clarity, an astonishing source of unity, and an astonishing source of strength.
And if our enemies don't understand that, then we're going to have to [01:02:00] explain it to them when they Try and find out. Anyone who thinks that making Israel alone in the Middle East makes it want to go away itself, the fact that there is no Palestinian theory of the Israeli mind, no serious Palestinian exploration of the Israeli cultural, historical, social reality or experience, it leaks into the pro Palestinian advocacy world in the West, which chooses to ignore it.
The Israeli psyche, the Israeli historical experience, Israeli society, Israeli strength, all of those things disappear in favor of a kind of moral wish casting that ignores reality, avoids reality, and therefore offers its own side no way to actually grapple with the reality that Palestinians actually face.
So, Palestinians live in a kind of Hurricane of moral emotions that never distills into serious strategic thinking or engagement with the arena where their future is most going to be decided. Not only, but the most important arena, [01:03:00] which is the Israeli political arena and the Israeli political psyche.
So here's the bottom line for me. I need Palestinians to come around. I need them to look at us. I need them to see us, understand us. I need them to understand that terrorism doesn't work on us. It might work to engage the entire anti colonial Western academic establishment, but it doesn't work on us. And I need them to therefore choose better strategies that will actually have a discourse with us, and lay their case in front of us, and stop threatening to murder our children because it shuts us down.
I need that to change. And how do I change them? Here's the flip side of being alone. Damn it, sanction us, boycott us, make us completely alone in this world, so that we have that final decisive fight, and the Palestinians can finally see that everything they could bring to bear, and us shorn of all supporters, we are still standing, and then maybe they can wake up.
I agree with you, the world's not going to give us that chance to show the Palestinians that they're fundamental. Thank you. Concept of us [01:04:00] is wrong. Because they need Israel. Okay, so maybe that's a tragedy, and maybe I am now wish casting that Israel stands alone, because our strength is real and innate, and the Palestinians have to deal with it.
And I want them to understand that, because I deeply, care what happens to them because what happens to them is a great deal of what happens to my kids because they're not going anywhere and because I have to live with them and so all of this talk it's so useless it's so performative it's but it's not even performative to us it's performative to themselves you know who is the audience of this stuff yeah but haveev you want to see israel alone israel alone is an israel that is living side by side with the gaza strip which out of the rubble of this war A remnant of Hamas can stand itself up.
Yehia Sinwar climbs out of the rubble and says, Yeah, they turned Gaza into Stalingrad, but I'm still here. Hamas 2. 0 will be here. They didn't finish us off. We got to do what we did on October 7th, and we're still [01:05:00] standing. And every enemy of Israel in the region will look at that and say, Wow, you can do what Hamas did on October 7th, and you can still be at it?
Against Israel intact ability to rebuild and reorganize that will be Israel alone Because as I said so many of Israel's new friends are friends with Israel because of its strength not because of its weakness You know, Dara Horne wrote people love dead Jews No, actually, what October 7th reminded us is they don't love dead Jews.
They're happy to pile on and criticize dead Jews and criticize Jews who refuse to be dead, but to actually respond to the slaughtering of their fellow citizens. And in Israel that doesn't respond, we'll be an Israel that's alone. Yes, I agree with the last part. I disagree with the first part. In Israel that's alone is an Israel that there won't be a Sinuar left to stand up.
in Gaza and say that. An Israel that's alone fights like the Middle Eastern tribe that we are. An [01:06:00] Israel that's alone wins. And what leverage are the Americans going to bring to bear when Blinken comes to the war cabinet? An Israel that's alone is a less powerful Israel on paper, and a much more powerful Israel on the ground in Gaza.
And that's a terrible thing. I don't want that Israel. I don't want it to be alone, and I don't want us to have to fight fiercely because Iran opens up on six fronts, and then we don't have the ability to look carefully and watch where we're bombing, and then civilians do die, not at the scale that progressive, certain elements of the far left progressive parts of American politics pretend that we're killing, but that actually becomes the kind of war that this is.
We shouldn't get there and we're not going to get there because we're not alone. So many Arab states, you talked a lot about what their interest in us, but there's a deep interest separate from us for Hamas to die. Saudi Arabia really wants to push back that brand of Islam, that entire axis of radical Islam that threatens it.
So there's a lot of reasons that we have friends and killing [01:07:00] Hamas will increase the number of friends, not decrease them. But if we are alone, this is not an argument to America. This is not an argument to Israelis. This is not an argument to anxious American Jews. This is not an argument to the Saudis.
This is an argument to Palestinians. If you succeed in this impossible task that your national movement has now set itself of making us alone, that's when you collapse. You cannot win this, because we can't go away. And so, I need you to understand we can't go away. Then you can come at us with a strategy that might actually work.
So, if we are not alone, if we have allies, we're gonna be okay. And if we are alone, and all of this wish casting comes true, somehow, magically, magically, magically. Then we are more decisive. I don't know about okay. It's gonna be very painful, but we're still gonna be standing. I'm nervous about that scenario.
Before we wrap up, I keep saying that the criticism of Israel is performative. It's not concrete, and [01:08:00] I feel like I have to put a little bit of meat on the bones just for our listeners, if I'm gonna make a statement like that, because when I was in Israel last week, the topic of Canada announcing that it's cutting its arm sales was a big story.
Ron Dermer obviously reacted quite partially to that news in our conversation on our podcast and are hearing it from a lot. And I think the sense is Israel's Canada, as I said, is a G7 country. It's, you know, what Canada does sort of matters. So I've seen some data on this, this gentleman by the name of Yoni Leviathan, who's a writer in Israel, and he compiled some data and I'm just going to quote from it here.
He posted this on Excel. I'll put a link to it. He says in 2022, Israel exported 6. 72 million in weapons to Canada. 6. 72 million while importing a whopping 191, 000 in return. What is that? That's one crate of Uzis. What is that? That's nothing. Yeah. While importing, hold on. Here's the key point. Importing a whopping, he writes 191, [01:09:00] 000 in return.
He says overall trade in 2022 saw Israel. So outside of arms, keep in mind, Canada. All they did was limit arms shipments to Israel, which we're now learning is like nothing. That's my point about this being performative. So he writes overall, not just arms overall trade in 2022 saw Israel export 1. 33 billion to Canada with the top products being special purpose ships and medical instruments.
Overall trade in 2022 saw Israel import 506 million from Canada with the top products being perfume plants and electric eaters. Canada may be multiple times larger than Israel. Israel, he writes in terms of geography, but when it comes to the, and I guess also population, but when it comes to the economy, Israel is the senior partner here.
And that trend is only growing from 2012 to 2022. So during that decade, Israel's GDP grew by 99 percent while Canada's. grew by 17%. They basically goes on to argue that [01:10:00] he says here, I will say it again. We are not your grandparents Jews. We will defend ourselves on the battlefield in the streets and in the economic arena.
As far as I'm concerned, he writes, Canada can keep its perfume parts and we'll be happy to sell our world class medical instruments to the countries who don't play domestic politics on the backs of murdered and kidnapped Israelis. So his point is. Canada makes this big chest thumping statement about its cutting arms sales to Israel.
Now, I don't know if his numbers are exactly right, but even if his numbers are off by a decibel point, the point is the same. If countries want to really impose pain on Israel, the real test is whether or not they're willing to impose pain on themselves, too, in pursuit of that goal. If they want to send a message to Israel, if they're so morally outraged by what Israel's doing, they will do things that will even harm themselves, and so far, they have not.
And I don't want to jinx this, and then suddenly they'll start doing it, but I'm just telling you between what countries are actually doing to Israel versus what they say they're doing, what [01:11:00] multinationals in Israel are actually doing, Tells me, and what the Gulf countries are actually doing. No country has left the Abraham Accords.
Saudi Arabia is still figuring out how to normalize with Israel. So these are all countries and companies and enterprises around the world that I believe will not let Israel be alone because it's not in their interest to be disconnected from Israel. So what you're saying is everything's gonna be okay because it is just not gonna happen.
And what I'm saying is, if it does happen, Everything's going to be okay because we don't disappear. So there is such a long journey for the Palestinian national movement down this path, and there is almost no chance it can succeed. And if it succeeds, it fails because we're still here and they will still be dominated by the narrative of Hamas.
By the way, some of this equation changes if Hamas is gone. If the Hamas story is seen by Palestinians to fail. And then [01:12:00] some of this narrative changes and then it can come at us in ways that will influence us. That isn't about choking us and isn't about murdering our kids, but is actually about a campaign in Israeli politics of the kind that the Palestinians have never even attempted to engage in.
Because they don't believe in having a theory of mind of us. So either way, our message today, is this correct? It's gonna be okay. And you don't have to put a teetering Israeli flag on the cover that is all of it is wish casting. Right. Haviv, As always, that's a constructive note to end the conversation.
You're willing to meet our American Jewish friends halfway. Always constructive, and it's always in our hands. We hold our fate in our hands. There is no other truth to this moment in Jewish history except that one.
All right, Aviv, thank you as always. Look forward to talking to you soon, my friend. That was a, uh, that was a, um, Therapeutic conversation, uh, for me, and I And for me. [01:13:00] You can send me the therapy bill. I might as well have been lying on a couch for that conversation. I felt like I was in a doctor's office just venting the absurdity of some of the narrative we have to deal with.
In any event, Talk to you soon. Thank you, Dan. I'm going to go talk to my, um, more left wing, uh, journalist colleagues and explain to them all the things you explained about the Israeli economy, and I'm sure they're going to also, uh, feel better. Okay. Have a good one.
That's our show for today. To keep up with Haviv Rettigur, you can find him on X, at Haviv Rettigur, or at The Times of Israel. Call Me Back is produced and edited by Ilan Benatar. Our media manager is Rebecca Strom. Additional editing by Martin Huergo. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan [01:14:00] Senor.