The View From the Israeli Right
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So I just got back from an eight-day trip to Israel and the West Bank. It was one of the more intense reporting experiences I've had by far. And it's going to take me a minute to sort of process my thoughts and represent what I saw in all of its directions and contradictions fairly. But one thing I really felt there, and I knew it from the polls, but feeling it is different, there's really no left-left in Israel. There's no center-left-left.

There's a coalition that Netanyahu leads, which stretches from the right to the far right. There's a coalition that Benny Gantz leads, stretching from the center to the right. So one thing I started doing in Israel was spending a lot more time reporting among Israelis' right, trying to better understand how the country and its politics and security look to them. And Amit Sehgal's name kept coming up. He's considered by many to be the most influential political analyst in the country, very rooted on the right.

He's got a book coming out in English in September called The Story of Israeli Politics. And I didn't initially intend this conversation as a podcast. I was going into it as reporting for this bigger piece I'm working on. But it happened to be that on the morning we spoke, Benny Gantz left the war cabinet, breaking the unity government, or the unity war cabinet at least, that has led Israel since very shortly after October 7th. Gantz is calling for elections. We're sort of beginning to see what will be the next big fight politically in Israel.

And I found Sigel's analysis of that really helpful. But even more broadly than that, I think it's important right now to know the narrative of the Israeli right because it is the narrative. It is the thinking driving Israeli politics. One thing you'll hear in this, and a lot of people will not like in this, but it was a theme of my entire trip, is how there is a genuine irreconcilability between

to not only the history or the narratives, but the views of reality right now. I saw this consistently. I can't tell you how many times Israelis and Palestinians would tell me something I saw with my own eyes or a video I could show them. It was just fake news or maybe it was AI or propaganda. I mean, this is true among Palestinians, many of whom don't believe Hamas committed civilian murders on October 7th at all, who dismiss evidence to the contrary as Israeli propaganda.

It's true among liberal Tel Aviv residents I met, like genuinely liberal ones, who dismissed a video of quite brutal settler violence that I had on my phone where I had spoken eyewitnesses as potentially just fake, right? You can't even believe what you see. In a way, you'll hear it here in Segal's view that before October 7th, Gaza was quite lovely, that Gazans could import nearly anything they wanted. And if you want the evidence, you can look at TikToks.

This is not my sense from talking to aid workers who were in Gaza before October 7th who have told me about widespread hunger and poverty and deprivation. Of course, there are always connected people in any society who can get around that. But for a lot of people, the sense that I have been given is there was quite a lot of suffering. But my sense of Gaza, it is not the point here.

The point is that there's nothing even close to a consensus reality right now among Israelis and Palestinians or really even among Israelis in much of the world. How the world sees Israel's fight and how Israel sees Israel's fight and its enemies, they've diverged profoundly. And that divergence has become a real source of pain to many Israelis, but it's also become a very potent driver of politics and political anger.

and increasingly a potent election issue for Netanyahu, a thing that he can again defend Israelis against and maybe use to make a comeback. As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com. ♪

Amit Sehgal, welcome to the show. Hi, Ezra. How are you? I'm good. We're talking on the day that Benny Gantz resigns from the war cabinet. I'm just curious how you read the politics at the moment. Well, I think it's more of a substantial question about Israel rather than its politics. I mean, when it comes to politics...

This coalition has been formed a year and a half ago without Benny Gantz, and it can survive without him. Maybe even it will strengthen the ingredients of this coalition because Gantz was someone who came from the outside with all the tensions and contradicting ideas about how to manage the conflict or the war. But in terms of Israel itself...

I stick to what Josephus Plavius wrote 2,000 years ago, that when Jews are united, usually it's much easier for them to defeat their enemies. And the message that was sent by dismantling this unity government, it sends a very bad message for our enemies and allies alike. Does God's leaving create division or reflect division? Is the leaving symptom or cause?

Both, I think. It's a symptom for a division within the Israeli society. Israel came or got to the war almost a year ago with the most divided situation, not in its history, because in the 50s, there were times which were more tense than a prime minister was murdered here in 1995, but very, very tense times. And it was like a remedy.

for an injured society, both from this debate, this fight, and, of course, October 7th. Now, the fact that Gantz lives, I mean...

I have seen in my life more ideological debates between two parties. It's not the case in which one says, I want to establish the Palestinian state and the other say, no, I want to annex all the settlements. Or I want fiscal cohesion and he wants to spend everything. No, it's about a mistrust between Gantz and Netanyahu, the persons, and between the two camps.

I have found it personally very hard to locate Gantz's politics. So did he. So

So I think for most of my listeners who don't follow Israeli politics so closely, you mentioned it was very divided in 2023. There's this big fight over judicial reforms, hundreds of thousands of Israelis protesting in the streets. Gantz rises a lot during that. He's a sort of candidate arguing for Israeli unity. I would call him in the American context a pro-system candidate, right? A candidate who does not want to break the way the system works. Netanyahu has become an anti-system candidate. Exactly. You have October 7th.

It is hard for me to locate the difference between their theories of security, right? The topic has changed. The topic in Israel is not judicial reforms. It's security. You have Hezbollah on the northern border. You have the war in Gaza. You have tensions in the West Bank. I don't speak Hebrew, so there's much I miss.

But I've asked a lot of people to lay out how these coalitions or these figures see security differently. I, at this point, could not tell you the answer. Can you tell me the answer? Well, it's more about the music than the lyrics. I'll give you an example.

Of the two people, Netanyahu and Gantz, Netanyahu was the only one, the only politician to articulate a support for a Palestinian statehood. He was the only one in 2009 in the Bar-Ilan speech. And years later, Benny Gantz never articulated the support for the Palestinian state. Yet, if you ask Israelis from both sides, they will locate Benny Gantz way to the left from where Netanyahu is. Because, I mean...

People from both sides don't believe Netanyahu when he says that he's for a Palestinian statehood, and they don't believe Gantz when he doesn't. So you said pro-system. In Israel, there is a very important word named Mamlachti. By the way, that's the name of his party. Mamkhani Mamlachti, the pro-system camp, okay? Mamlachti in Israel means I'm for the kingdom, although we don't have a kingdom. But this is the name in Israel for supporting the institutions.

So the fact that Gantz grew up in a country

Center-left leaning army, okay, and that he grew up in the right places, and that he's Ashkenazi. I know Netanyahu is as well, but then again, I mean, he's the leader of the second Israel. Second Israel. Which means Sephardic, lower classes, ultra-Orthodox, national Orthodox, etc. So Gantz is a bit center to the left.

You had an interesting piece in Wall Street Journal that came out on the six. And you said two things in there that I wanted to get you to expand on.

One is you called Gantz and some of the others in the war cabinet leftists, which is from my perspective, not how I describe them. Israeli politics looks to me. I would say center left. Well, you say you said leftist. So why? Why leftists are center left? From the left wing of the cabinet, because in this cabinet, even if you are for conquering Damascus, you are a bit left to the center. I mean, but yes, center left would define Benny Gantz.

And the coalitions now feel to me like they are kind of center-left to moderate-right coalition. Sure. And a right-to-further-right coalition. Sure. I think for Americans, they'd be surprised to hear that if Gantz wins, right, if his coalition wins, Avigdor Lieberman would be a significant partner in it. And I think even in Israeli terms, Avigdor Lieberman is on the right. Sure.

What happened to the left in this country? It vanished. According to a new poll, 65% of the Israeli public define themselves as 50 shades of right wing and only 12% as left or center left. So on every leftist in Israel, you have five to six right wingers.

What happened is that the left promoted two ideas. In the 50s, 60s, 70s, it was for social justice, socialism, if you want. And in the 80s, 90s, and the first decade of this century, it was about a bilateral agreement with the Palestinians. Now, those two flags were stained.

First of all, Israelis are way more capitalist than they used to be. No one sends his children to the kibbutz, to the building where they grow up children, right? Everyone wants to grow up their own children. This is one thing. Second, Israelis cease to believe in the two-state solution which would be achieved through a bilateral negotiation because they saw what happened last time. In 1993, following the Oslo Accords, Israelis...

experienced an awful lot of suicide bombers. And in following the Camp David summit in 2000, when Ehud Barak offered Arafat give or take everything, including half Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, we got the second intifada. Now, what happened is it's not that the right wing grew. It's that the center was born. The center promoted the

a unilateral option, which says we're not going to marry the Palestinians with a new Middle East like France and Germany following World War II. We're going to divorce them. And it failed as well in the eyes of the Israeli public. We saw that the withdrawal, the unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 and from Gaza in 2005 didn't lead to a

A new equilibrium in which everyone can live happily and freely, but furthermore, for more tense times of security. And what you see now is the final stamp on it. The fact that this horrendous terrorist attack came from Gaza, which Israel ceased to occupy,

in 2005, and that only gave them time and money to actually create a monstrous terrorist army, I think it's the last time intellectual withdrawals will be experienced in Israel. So we don't have left here. So now here's the question. You asked about Lieberman. How come Lieberman is perceived as not a far-right leader? And the fact is, because the discourse moved, it used to be not about...

the territorial question, but about questions of identity. In this respect, finally you see Lieberman as a center-left liberal leader because his voters who came from Russia, they are for civil marriage, they are for non-kosher meat sold in the streets, they are for public transportation in Shabbat. And all of a sudden you see a new generation

It's not a left. I mean, it's a liberal camp. That's what you saw in the protests in Israel prior to the war. As I've been speaking to people here, a couple of things that you were just talking about, it felt very present to me. The feeling that we, we being Israelis, have tried deals and the deals didn't work. Peace process negotiations, we got the second intifada. We signed a paper that Hezbollah would be kept backwards in Lebanon and there's a UN resolution there.

And here they are right on the border firing rockets. The UN did not keep its side of the bargain. And now Israel's under attack. There are between 50 and 100,000 refugees from the Israeli north. I was up near the border the other day. It's a ghost town. It's on fire.

So deals didn't work. There's no belief in deals and negotiations. Unilateral withdrawal didn't work. If you create that space, the feeling is now something like Hamas will fill it. It will import weapons. It will eventually commit a massacre. I have not felt in speaking to people that any new theory has arisen, not a new theory of peace, but a new theory of peace.

but a theory of security. Sure. Do you think that's right? Yes, people are very disturbed because we tried everything. And what we see now is that we got used to Israel's calmest decade in terms of security and casualties. And all of a sudden, people understand that this was not feasible for the long run. That is to say that

We'll probably have to see more soldiers fighting in the north and in the south for the coming years, maybe decades. And there will be a death toll. And we'll try to preserve the situation as calm as it can, but it won't. It's not going to be a permanent war, but maybe permanent state of ongoing operations from time to time. It's something more like a return to the theory of occupation.

You call it occupation from the perspective of the Palestinian population, but I'll try to explain it from the Israeli perspective. Israel, we strolled from Gaza Strip, evacuated each and every settlement, took out dead from the graves, and we strolled for the international border.

And Israel at the very same time stayed in Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, in order to preserve its security in a bearable condition. Now, how come that all the sufferings in terms of international criminal investigations, international committees, condemnations, etc., came from operations in Gaza? How come the Goldstone report in 2009, the arrests weren't against Tzipi Livni, not Itamar Ben-Gvir,

Against Tzipi Livni in 2009 in the UK, the ICC now, how come it emanates from a situation in Gaza? And the scope of legitimacy from the world is exactly as the death toll. I mean, if we got 1,200 casualties, we'll get four weeks.

If we get 50 casualties, we'll get two days. This is not how things work. We have the presidential seal on a letter sent from President George W. Bush to Prime Minister Sharon and confirmed by the House of Representatives, confirming the principles that not only Israel has the right to defend itself, but that the U.S. will do whatever it takes in order to prevent terrorist organizations from acting from this area. So how come?

In 2014, President Obama prevents Israel from hellfire missiles. And in 2023 and 4, we have to actually go through hell with President Biden with the ammunition. Why? I mean, so Israelis say, perhaps we should stay there as much as needed, pay the price and prevent the situation in which we are attacked. Perhaps the attempt to buy an international legitimacy with the currency of territory doesn't pay.

When you say that there were these deals with the Americans, there, I think, was a belief in the George W. Bush administration when this all happened. And in many ways, I believe the world continues to live in the wreckage of the George W. Bush administration. You have elections in Gaza.

Hamas is allowed to run. The Fatah does a sort of weird thing and runs too many ballots. Hamas sticks over. You haven't had elections there since. And I would describe what happened there since as a policy of...

managed, quite difficult containment. You have a very brutal, a theocratic and repressive regime operating in Gaza, Hamas. They're building tunnels, they're stockpiling weapons. You have a blockade on them. The population is extremely poor. Many things can't get in, can't get out. For instance? It's

There are different lists. I mean, there you can look at lists online of what was allowed in and out. So I would suggest you to talk to Israeli soldiers in Gaza and to watch TikTok accounts of Palestinians in Gaza describing how Gaza looked like before the war. And all of a sudden, the world's biggest open prison looks like quite attractive. Soldiers who served there say it's not like Tel Aviv, of course, but Gaza City was the prettiest Arab town between the river and the sea.

Much more than Ramallah, for instance. There was no shortage of commodity. And the equation that says Israel blockaded Gaza, which is not, it's not the case. And it created the poverty, which... What do you mean it's not the case that there was a blockade on Gaza? Did you see which commodities entered Gaza? Are you saying it was not a blockade because the tunnels were sort of tacitly permitted? No, no, they actually... No, no, no. There were hundreds of trucks...

every day entering Gaza with everything, everything from the Israeli side, and by the way, the Egyptian side. And there were poor people, and there were houses with swimming pools. There were neighborhoods, very rich neighborhoods, with cafes and cinemas, no alcohol because they prevented it. So the only commodity that did not enter Gaza was for religious reasons by Gazans.

So the attempt to claim that Israel created a blockade, I mean, by the way, it just helps the Israeli right wing to claim that nothing will happen if you withdraw from Gaza.

thus enabling them to prosper. Shimon Peres said, the moment we leave, they will have their high-tech industry. Yes, they had high-tech industry to spy on Israeli soldiers. I'm going to put the question of the blockade to the side because I've heard many different things and I'm not the person to argue with. But the broader point I wanted to make about that was that the

There was this attempt. There was this idea of elections. And I don't think there's any doubt that the whole thing failed. And so I want to go back to this question of theories of security, right? Because that is what I understand Israeli politics is ultimately going to have to be about for some time. There's going to need to be a theory about Gaza, a theory about the West Bank, or Judea and Samaria, as you call it, and a theory about the North. And so my question is, if these theories are first established,

how different they are and if they differ between the Netanyahu and Gantz coalitions? I think for many years that this question ceased to be politicized in Israel. To be honest, I don't think that a different government would act differently under these circumstances. By the way, you see that Gantz and Netanyahu voted exactly the same thing for the consecutive 91 meetings of the World Cabinet. There wasn't a single case in which Gantz and Netanyahu voted differently

in a contradicting way, which means that there is a consensus in Israel of management rather than ideology. I think this is the way to put it. I think the tragedy is that this consensus is

does not lead to a consensus within the political system. We're still divided between our version of Trump versus Biden, okay? Boris versus Kirsten Meier, I don't know, in the UK. And we cannot allow ourselves this division. ♪

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Let me ask about the West Bank. So here's a theory you could imagine there. Hamas, very, very, very dangerous, committed a huge massacre. Palestinian Authority, much more complicated, but there has been a fair amount of security cooperation with Israel. And you might want to make them kind of stronger or more successful. In the past couple of weeks, Smotrich cut off tax revenues to the Palestinian Authority after they...

sort of went around the world trying to get recognition of statehood. After they tried to put Israeli leaders under arrest warrants, you mean? Well, both. I heard both arguments. After serving Hamas's purposes in order to stop the war. Well, I think the Palestinian Authority sees itself as serving its own purposes, but either way.

Smotrich cut off their tax revenues, which is making it so they can't pay their employees. The salaries for murderers of Israelis. Well, among other things. What a pity. 7% of their budget. So do you want to describe what you're saying there? Because I think many people don't know what you're talking about. 7% of the budget of the Palestinian Authority goes to the pockets of murderers of Israelis. The more you murder, the more money you get.

7%. It's like the Israeli budget of the ministries of culture, agriculture, diaspora, and welfare combined. 7%. Just imagine 7% of the budget of the U.S. The attempt to create a differentiation between Hamas and Israel

its population in Gaza or between Hamas and Fatah ignores basic grim facts that put it in a different way. You would say there's no differentiation between those? I would say that the differentiation between Hamas and Fatah

is for political reasons. Fatah was thrown from roofs in Gaza in 2007. That's the way they solved their political debate. Okay? That's how they did it. But it's not that Fatah wants Israel to exist. I mean, when people chant, from the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free, it's not a Hamas phrase. It's a Fatah phrase. When 72% of the Palestinian population in Judea and Samaria, in the West Bank, support the massacre,

of October 7th, it's horrifying. I mean, what I hate the most is when people say, yes, you didn't expect them to be Zionist. Yes, I don't expect them to be Zionist, but in order to be against, to stand against murder, rape, and burning alive of people, you don't have to be Zionist. Now, here's the thing. The only differentiation between Fatah and Hamas in terms of the way they treat Israel is

is the fact that 20 years ago, the Israeli army operated in the cities of the West Bank exactly the way it operates now. So it took the will from the Palestinians to fight there. Now, the reason that they don't operate against Israel or cooperate against Hamas is because they fear the moment Israel leaves, Hamas will throw them from the roofs of Ramallah and Hebron, not from the roofs of Gaza only. That's the thing. But you can't ignore the fact that

I mean, we all have a dream about two Western democracies living side by side in peace and harmony. Unfortunately, this is not the case. It's very hard for the Biden administration, who's partially the Obama administration, who's partially the Clinton administration, to admit the grave mistakes it had made. And the grave mistake was when President Clinton said,

came to Gaza. It's amazing to remember. Came to Gaza as the President of the United States to stand alongside a mass murderer, Yasser Arafat,

They wanted him to be Nelson Mandela. But unfortunately, this very specific Nelson Mandela didn't want to be Mandela, didn't want to play the role. He wanted still to be a murderer of Israelis. Maybe time will come when they will want to live with us. It has not come yet. I'm not a believer right now in two-state solutions, one-state solutions, and frankly, in solutions at all. Like, this does not feel to me like a solutionary time. Sure.

And sometimes when I hear American politicians talking about that in this moment, it feels fantastical, right? Like a denial of what is happening. I want to go back to what you were saying about FATA. I've heard from many Israelis and the sort of fury over those payments. So let's take that as a given. That's a big part of how FATA is seen. That didn't change a month ago, right? Those payments didn't begin a month ago when the tax revenues were stopped. The thing I want to get at here is security, right?

One theory you might say is, look, Fatah, the Palestinian Authority, we don't like it. It's a problem. But for whatever reason, not because it likes Israel, but in your telling, because it's afraid of being thrown off of a roof. Sure. It does do security cooperation. Things have maintained calm in the West Bank. The West Bank has not been lit on fire. There is not. I was just in a bunch of settlements over there. There are very near Palestinian cities. You're not seeing, you know, people from the cities like come into the settlement and massacre Israelis. Right.

It does seem to me... It's happened in the past. It has happened in the past. And I was talking to some of those people. It does seem to me that if you wanted calm, you wouldn't start kind of squeezing the finances. Hamas is becoming more popular. Abbas is extremely, extremely unpopular. Right. Smocic feels to me like he is pushing the PA towards breaking.

Put aside whether the PA is good. Is that good for Israeli security if they cannot pay salaries? Well, so it's complicated. There are two parts for it. One, yes, this is Smotrich's ideological purpose. He doesn't want in the long run the Palestinian Authority to exist because it's against his idea of sovereignty on every single inch of greater Israel. Okay.

But there is something else which enables Smotrich to promote it. And the fact is that the Palestinian Authority has gradually started to lose control over wide areas in Judea and Samaria. For instance, Jenin. By the way, it's interesting. Two years ago, three years ago, Israel tried to create a pilot pilot.

to enable the Palestinians to have their economy there, Israeli soldiers would not be allowed to enter in order to create the situation for a prosperous economy. Because there was this equation that Israeli soldiers and the sentiment of occupation prevents economic development. And exactly the other way around happened. Jenin became a hub for terror. So it's very complicated. I would say that the Palestinian Authority

might collapse anyway. I'm very worried about the situation. Even before the war, I wasn't sure what is going on, but I felt the earthquake starting. One thing we're saying is, and I think this is sort of embedded in what you're saying, Palestinian Authority governs and maintains governance with Israel's help. In addition to whatever cooperation it offers, there's, I think, a widespread belief that if Israel left the West Bank tomorrow, the Palestinian Authority would

It may not survive. Would collapse in seconds. And what could take over would be extremely dangerous. So I just think that's an important part of the politics there. A few years ago, there was a theory that was popular in Israel. It sort of came from Micah Goodman, who is a sort of centrist philosopher, right, is a good way to describe him. And the idea was shrinking the conflict. And it basically said, and you can tell me if you think this is not the right way to describe it.

that, look, there's no solution for this right now. There's no two-state solution. There's no one-state solution. There's no deal. Let's just try to make the roads better, make more Palestinian roads that are not going to have checkpoints, push for economic development. It has some resonances with an old idea from Netanyahu, which is economic peace, which is sort of different than other kinds of peace. It got picked up by sort of the opposition to Netanyahu. There was younger politicians who were making this part of their platform.

The thing that I noticed when I was going through the West Bank, and particularly through areas like in Area C, which is, for people who don't know, in Area A, sort of in theory, the Palestinian Authority is in charge. Area B is a kind of mix. Area C, Israel is sort of indisputably in charge. And in Area C, it's very noticeable on the infrastructure that Israelis use. It's very well kept.

The infrastructure that Palestinians use is a lot of trash. It's not well paved, not a lot of lighting. I could name some other things like that. But you really see the way the two are governed differently. You have to bear in mind something else. You look at it from a perspective of ABC, from a territorial perspective. Imagine it from an urban perspective. In each and every state...

I mean, the city center is way cleaner than the suburbs. Some of the parts I saw here were quite, I mean, there are parts right outside of Jerusalem that are under area C governance and are quite urban. But putting that aside for a minute, a lot of Palestinian Authority city council members and people I spoke to on this trip, they said, look, like Israel could help make me successful. They can make it easier for me to build things, give more water to my people, right? Like I'm a moderate. They don't. Has that theory lost traction here?

In times of conflict, people less listen to theories about making good for the other side, especially when the other side, you know, gave candies for children when Israelis got massacred. You know, Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon are three very different situations. But there is one principle that most Israelis accept, in my opinion, which is that the only guarantee for the lives of Israelis is the fact that there would be an Israeli soldier in each and every place.

not presidential commitments, bilateral, unilateral, I don't know, promises, etc. Foreign leadership. Israelis see it from the perspective of security rather than from the perspective of mutual cooperation, for instance. So maybe it answers your question. But I think the question there was of security. To me, when I read Goodman's

perspective here, right? From a lot of perspectives, from the Palestinian perspective, that is not an answer, right? What they want is sovereignty, self-determination, freedom. That does not give them that. I understood that at least partially as a security project, right? A theory that if the daily lives are better, like this will work better. And I think there's some reason to believe that theory. I don't agree with an argument you were making earlier that sort of Gaza was in better shape than the West Bank. Every economic indicator I know of. Take a look on TikTok. TikTok, usually not the best space for, uh,

information about Israel. The West Bank was calmer. Palestinians living inside Israel has been quite calm, too. And that's a much stronger sort of economic situation. I understood the theory of that as a security theory, right? You make the economics better, you keep the situation calmer. This was the incentive for the Israeli public.

Sure. I am asking, I think, if that theory, if people now believe that theory does not work. It lost support over the last two years. You have to remember that prior to October 7th, the last government, Lapid and Bennett's government, which was, I mean, their manifesto was Micha Goodman's book. Yes, they believed that. Exactly. It fell because there was a wave of terrorist attacks from the West Bank. And Israelis started to...

understand that the West Bank is not as calm as they thought. So I think it lost popularity. But as you said before, it's not that there is an alternative solution these days. No one wants to annex three million Palestinians to Israel. Let's talk about the north and the Lebanon border. Sure.

For people who are not following this, since October 7th or very shortly thereafter and the invasion of Gaza, Hezbollah began firing rockets into northern Israel. They fired, I think, now over 7,000 rockets. And this has gotten, I think, less coverage in the states. And in Israel as well. And in Israel as well, but in some ways has disrupted daily life more. It's led to a huge number of kind of internal Israeli refugees. There's not really an obvious answer to it. And most Israelis I speak to tell me they are more worried about

about what Hezbollah represents, which to them is Iran. And Iran's sort of what they see as a more multi-tentacled and much more sophisticated plan to in the long run destroy Israel than anything Hamas can muster, anything that you might see among the Palestinian Authority. And that politics and that question of security feels like a quite different one. How do you see it?

It's a dramatic problem because, I mean, no one thought in Israel prior to October 7th that Israel would invade Gaza. There weren't plans in the IDF of conquering Gaza, but it's feasible. You can cut the lifeline of Hamas from Egypt. You can destroy each and every tunnel you see. You can kill as many terrorists as you see, and you can stop Hamas from being a terrorist army.

By the way, it has already happened. They lost 97% of their rockets, etc. But it's not the case with Lebanon. You can never cut the lifeline of Hezbollah because Lebanon is connected to Syria and then Iran. So you can't stop Hezbollah from getting more weapons and more soldiers. And you can't eliminate Hezbollah.

Plus, Lebanon is a country. It's not like Gaza or the West Bank. It has more legitimacy in the world. It's way more difficult. So to be honest, and I visited the north yesterday, it was very, to see the people in a desperate situation sitting in hotels rather than studying or working. But when you ask them, what shall we do? No one has an answer because, I mean, you can have a terrible war for two, three, four weeks, maybe months, but

And then what? At the end of the day, you'll have to end the war with an agreement, right? You can't conquer all Lebanon. So if it's an agreement, it's back to square one, because the whole situation began following the second Lebanon war in 2006, when we got a paper from the UN called Resolution 1701, which enabled Israelis to feel secure, but it was never fulfilled.

Well, there are two ways of thinking about what's happening with Hezbollah right now, right? One is, I think, the more dominant theory in the West, which is Hezbollah is acting in sympathy with Gazans, right? This began after the invasion of Gaza, and it will end when the situation in Gaza stabilizes or something, right? The so-called now day after. The other theory that I hear a lot is, no, no, no, no. You Americans completely misunderstand this. Hezbollah is Iran.

Iran takes opportunistic moments to attack, but there is a longer-term strategic plan here, right? You don't understand Iran is connected to China. It's connected to Russia. Americans don't understand countries with imperial pasts or even countries with current imperial ambitions. And it is in a way implacable because its ambitions here are ideological, right? They're not about, it doesn't want like a trade deal with Israel and doesn't care about the Palestinians. So how do you see it? From a

Tactical perspective, of course, they want to sympathize with Gaza and their way of doing it is to drag more forces from Gaza to the north. I mean, if the war ends in Gaza, it will end in Lebanon as well. But what we learned, the tragic lesson from the last decade, is that peaceful periods do not equal a peaceful future.

What I'm trying to say is that they will spend the time in order to prepare for the last mission of destroying Israel. You know, there is a square in Tehran in which there is a clock counting down to the year 2040 in which Israel would be eliminated. And the intelligence in Israel says that they no longer see 2040 as the date, but way earlier. So not tomorrow, but maybe 2030, 2032, 2040.

I mean, Hezbollah is an ingredient, a very important ingredient in this scheme because they got 200,000 rockets that will land here in Israel. And much more potent rockets than they're currently using. Sure. The thing that people in Israeli military circles tell me is that of the rockets they have, they're not using the most sophisticated ones. Like this is small. If there was a real war, they can hit Tel Aviv, they can hit... Every spot in Israel.

So I can imagine different ways of thinking about this. And it feels like this is a place where how Israel sees the south and the north are a bit in tension. There's a feeling that for Israel to do what it needs to do in Gaza, possibly even the West Bank, that the international community is not going to be there for it. And you know what? Screw them. Like, we have to do what we have to do. And if we lose international support, that is what happens.

Israel could occupy, invade, handle Gaza on its own, even if America, I think, was not providing it ammunition. Iran is a different kind of situation. If you imagine the future Iranian war, right, the kinds of things people are talking about here, that's a place where it really does need support. So how do you see the kind of tension between Israel's international legitimacy, support alliances, and

that it needs for that threat and the way that that resource is being depleted right now in Gaza to some degree in different ways in the West Bank. I think the world appreciates strong countries. And October 7th was a terrible showdown of weakness.

So Israel has to finish the Gaza thing with each and every battalion eliminated. And then, in my opinion, we have to take a pause for a year to build a new army with new figures, maybe to go to an election.

build a coalition that will reflect the consensus of the real threats to Israel with all due respect for the debate about the judicial reform or social justice and every other thing that are very important, to build an army that is well-equipped and well-trained to fight the Iranian octopus.

He's Bala. The hoot is maybe the threat that comes from Jordan, not Jordan, the state, but terrorists who come from Jordan and Iranian funded ones and to prepare the next war, which will come. By the way, it will help Israel to build cooperation, both with the U.S.

remember, remember the 5th of November, maybe Trump will come and with the moderate Sunni countries.

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Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. This goes back to a pin I dropped that people forgot in, which is I wanted to ask you about something else in your Wall Street Journal op-ed. Mm-hmm. So...

Biden was, from the beginning, extremely, extremely supportive of Israel. Over time, the tensions between him and Netanyahu have grown. He's pushing a sort of three-phase ceasefire to reconstruction plan. Netanyahu has been recovering the polls. Gantz has been losing a bit of altitude. Sure. You made the argument in the journal that Biden has become a potent issue for Netanyahu. Not a problem for him, but actually his path. An advantage. Tell me why.

I'll explain. There are two sentiments in Israel. There is an earthquake in Israel going on these days. Two tectonic plates are colliding. One is Israelis moving from the left to the right, people who cease to believe in the two-state solution, in unilateral withdrawal, bilateral withdrawals, etc. But on the other hand, there are those Israelis who move from the right to the left. They voted for Netanyahu and his allies, and they no longer want to see them due to the failure. So Israelis want two things. They want right-wing

And they want change. Do they move from the right to the left or just from the right to the anti-Netanyahu right? Exactly. This is exactly the thing, the sentiment. They are angry at Netanyahu because he failed to be as hawkish as they wanted. Not because he was too hawkish, but because he was too dovish. So they want right and they want change. Now, Bibi gives them right and he doesn't give them change. Gantz gives them change, but he doesn't give them right because he's center or center-left.

So Israel is still waiting for a new party to come. Maybe a combination of Bennett, Lieberman, Sa'ar, former head of Mossad Yossi Cohen, something in between, something that will reflect those two values and will gain huge ground in political terms. Maybe it will be Israel's biggest party. But in the meanwhile, when Israelis are forced to elect between their distrust of Netanyahu and their distrust for

Yet another international pressure, they choose Netanyahu. That's the thing. That's why when Biden pressures Israel to stop the war, most Israelis want Netanyahu.

a victory in the war. President Biden wants Israelis to stop the war when SINWAR is still on his feet, and most Israelis don't want it. Biden still believes in the idea of two-state solution. 70% of the Jewish Israeli population is against it. So Netanyahu would invent those debates with Biden, and I mean, he has to thank him.

Something we were tracking earlier was what are the differences here between Netanyahu and Gantz? And Gantz, it's not like he has said a bunch of things about what he would do with the Biden plan. But in terms of how he is perceived and in terms of the, I guess, orientation maybe of his comments, it seems reasonable to me to believe that he would put more weight on closer relationships with America, with the Europeans. Sure.

And so in the Israeli public's mind, he's more likely to try to play ball. To be pro-system with the American system. I think the gist of it lies in a sentence that Yair Lapid, the head of opposition and the former prime minister, usually tells Bibi, stop fighting with the Americans publicly. Do it behind closed doors.

But Bibi believes that the way to handle the situation with hostile U.S. administration is to go public. That's the thing. By the way, this is the idea of his father back in the Holocaust or in the fight for Israeli independence in the 40s. Always take it to the American public because the American public will always be more favorable of Israel than a democratic U.S. administration. That's the case. Now, Gantz is for...

I mean, doing it in smoke-filled rooms, if it's illegal in Washington. No, you can't smoke in a room in Washington. Yeah, exactly right. But to do it behind closed doors. And Netanyahu, and by the way, this is the last thing that remained Netanyahu's main advantage. Because Netanyahu can no longer be Mr. Security following this awful massacre of October 7th.

Netanyahu's terms were stained for being one of the deadliest terms in the history of Israel when on October 6th, it was the calmest period.

So he can't be Mr. Security, but he can be Mr. Anti-Palestine, Mr. Hawkishness, Mr. By the way, that's the way he began in the 90s. In the 90s, Bibi was, I don't know, a 46-year-old leader of Likud. His experience was the deputy minister, the deputy foreign affairs minister.

And he wasn't Mr. Security. He was Mr. Anti-Palestinian Statute. And that's exactly what he's doing now. Is there a distinction in the Israeli mind, in Israeli politics, between

Joe Biden and his sort of support for Israel and Joe Biden and what he would like to see here, if that makes sense to you, that Biden has been for American politics and for, I think, this moment in Democratic Party politics, which I do know well, he has been extremely pro-Israel. Now, he also wants something that most Israelis, whether they would have wanted it, no longer believe in, which is a two-state solution, a sort of negotiation track. How is Biden seeing those two sides of him seen here?

If Israel was the U.S.'s 51st state, it was something like Montana over the last 20 years, a very red state. With one exception, the months after October 7th. It was the only period since the Clinton era in the 90s in which a Democratic president was way more popular than the Republican candidate. I think he defeated Trump 2-1.

And then came those, I mean, it's not that Israelis are, I mean, just give us the money and the ammunition and leave us and we don't want to see you. No, they really appreciated it. I mean, the day President Biden gave his speech on October 9th, I think it was, all of a sudden there was an air in the room after 48 awful hours. But the moment Israelis started to recognize that,

that he wants the war to end without eliminating Hamas. And Palestinian pro-Hamas community in Michigan is more important for him than winning the war was the moment Donald Trump made his comeback in the Israeli Montana. I don't think that's a fair read of his or frankly American politics. But what I do think is true is that

Something you said a minute ago is that Netanyahu's view is that if you take things to the American public, they're always going to be more pro-Israel than the American president. The politics in America, I would say, are changing. It's not a pro-Homeless majority. It's not campus protests. And in fact, if you poll, Americans are, by a significant margin, still more sympathetic to the Israeli position here than the Palestinian. But less than it used to be. Less than it used to be. Generationally, young Americans are much less than they used to be.

And the thing that I sense in America is they're sympathetic to Israel, but they actually don't care about this that much. They're in a more isolationist mood. I mean, Trump is pro-Israel, but he's also kind of an isolationist. He doesn't want things that are problems for him. He's not committed in any ideological way. Biden will call himself a Zionist. Not 100% sure Trump knows what a Zionist is, right? And does not have a deep relationship to that idea. I mean, my read of it is that Biden is

Not necessarily he's more pro-Israel, but he is more committed to being engaged with Israel and using American capital to back Israel. Exactly. And the idea of going around him, I mean, it now seems to me that every time Netanyahu is doing that, he is spending down capital. It's not going to come back. He...

If the Democratic Party had nominated somebody younger in 2020, the politics would be different. Biden comes from a different era, and the Democratic Party senses that Israel is very far right now. The last pro-Israeli president from the Democratic Party for years. I don't know if it'll be the last one from the Democratic Party. But the last one from this generation, from Scoop Jackson's party. Exactly. You know what Biden said to Bibi in 2021, following the last military operation in Gaza? He told him...

Maybe it's no longer Scoop Jackson's party. So do Israelis appreciate that idea? Are they worried about that? They appreciate it. They are very worried. I had a terrible conversation with one of the former IDF chief of staff who said that when Israelis buy an air jet today to the Israeli Air Force...

you know, that the life expectancy of those machine tools is 40 years. So they take into account the fact that during the coming 40 years, there will be a hostile U.S. administration that will not provide the pieces needed to be replaced. And how is that taken into account in Israeli security politics or thinking? Um...

Usually the long run in Israel is the news broadcast of 8 p.m. in the evening. No, but the serious people say that it should be based not only about the cooperation, not only of values, but of value.

Okay, in terms of money, strength, etc. I mean, it's not that the Saudis like Israelis, right? I mean, MBS and MBZ did not have a father who was a priest and told them always protect Israel, right? They need the Israeli weapon, the Israeli way of thinking, and the Israeli cooperation. So we have to be very strong. This is one thing. The second is to put as much money as possible on Israel

fostering the relationship with the Hispanic community, with the African-American community, with youngsters, universities, etc. That's it, of course, and first and foremost, the Jewish community. Tell me, as we sort of come to an end here, about the Saudis, right? In terms of things that are positive for Israel that I would not have

Sure.

the neighborhood, so to speak. Whatever is going on with Iran, the rest of the neighborhood has changed quite a bit. And there's possibilities there that weren't there before. They were there before, but, I mean, 20 years ago, 22 years ago, Tom Friedman wrote that adopting the Saudi initiative, he was, I mean, he promoted the Saudi initiative that included withdrawal from Jerusalem and evacuating each, almost each and every settlement. 20 years passed, and Saudis want to come forward

for free, almost. Because, I mean, this is Netanyahu's greatest victory, his claim to...

that the way to have a peace with the Middle East is not going through Ramallah. You can have peace with the moderate Arab countries based on interests against Iran. And by the way, this is my... This is the way I criticize Biden the most, that in the year prior to October 7th, there was daylight between Israel and the States, and it was not because of the judicial reform. And he tried...

to appease Iran. And it failed. And Israelis and Saudis and Jordanians want Israel to defeat Hamas. They want Iran to be defeated. They want Hezbollah to be defeated. And I think there is a real chance of doing it. This will be the real victory over Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. What do Israelis think the Saudis need to do that deal now? An excuse. What would be an excuse?

They don't want the war to end, by the way. They want Hamas to be eliminated. But the funniest thing I heard was from a senior figure in the Emirates, you know, that he remembered that in the last government there were an Arab party, a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood here. And he was furious. And I said, why? I mean, furious.

Finally, an Arab-Jewish cooperation. He said, no, the Muslim Brotherhood, the only place they are allowed to be in office is in Israel. You're crazy. I mean, the way of thinking is different. They can distance themselves from the Arab public opinion, who's very pro-Hamas, but they are horrified from Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.

So they want a lip service to be paid there and something still marginal, but maybe not in the eyes of the Israeli right wing in terms of the West Bank, Judea and Samaria. Is there a sense of what that might

For the first time, I heard last week from a very senior Israeli figure, not someone that likes Netanyahu, that they don't really want a payment in terms, something feasible in terms of the Palestinian question. But ending the war following Rafah will enable them to sign a peace treaty with Israel. Interesting. I hope.

Always our final question on the show. What are three books you recommend to the audience? Of course, my book. It's going out in English in September, The Story of Israeli Politics. Crazy story. But really, I just read the last volume of The Biography of Lyndon Johnson by Caro. Wow. Amazing. Wow. So it took me a while because my English is not as fluent as...

It takes everybody a while. Those are big books. Luckily, yeah. But amazing stories about Linda Johnson buying horses for Kennedy's daughter in order to make her father more friendly. Stefan Zweig's books are always amazing, especially The World of Yesterday, about the lives in Vienna prior to World War I. And if you want to know about Israel,

A brutalism in Israel. It's very interesting that the architecture in Israel was brutalist in the first years of the country. Israel was a socialist country, and you saw here something that was perceived as communist. You know, Israel was in a desperate need for building for the masses, but the outcome was very impressive in terms of architecture. In Be'er Sheva, in Tel Aviv, in Jerusalem, very interesting if you know about yet another layer of Israel. ♪

I'm Ed Segal. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Claire Gordon. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Cade Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing by Amin Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin and Kristen Lin. We have original music by Isaac Jones, audience strategy by Christina Simulowski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrera.

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