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Podcast

#422 — Zionism & Jihadism

Making Sense with Sam Harris

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  • Israel’s Missile Strategy vs Iran
    • Israel has neutralized Iran’s missile launcher bottleneck, diminishing the missile threat despite thousands of missiles.
    • Israeli technological innovations in military strikes show unprecedented advancement and precision. Transcript: Haviv Rettig Gur There are two ways to answer that. There’s the immediate, the five days of war that we’ve already seen, and then there’s the 20 months of war against the various proxies that Iran built out essentially for this war and They’re no longer available to it. So I’ll just zoom in on those five days, and then we can expand out to 30,000 feet if that’s useful. But the war began five days ago on Thursday, Thursday night, so I guess Friday morning. And it was a culmination of decades of unbelievable competence and planning and the building of entire, you know, their factories on Iranian soil run by Mossad operatives, building Drones that then took off at the moment at each hour as the Israeli planes were overflying Iraqi airspace and took out a lot of launchers and a lot of Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities. Iran’s great threat to Israel in this kind of immediate kinetic war is its missile fleet. It has thousands and thousands, or arsenal, I should say. It has thousands of missiles, and they target our cities, and they’ve caused some damage in our cities already. But the great bottleneck for Iran, the Israelis understood very early on, and that has been sort of the foundational strategy for Israeli defense, is not even the missile shield, which Has actually performed fairly well against incredibly big, incredibly heavy, fast-moving, long-distance ballistic missiles, but it’s the launchers. They have a bottleneck of launchers. They have thousands of missiles, but they don’t have thousands of launchers. And so if you can keep destroying launchers, if you can keep forcing them to deploy new launchers out of their hiding places and find them, the Israelis very early, immediately, almost Immediately took out Iranian air defenses, what was left of them after the November operation last November, and gained air superiority over Iranian airspace and have been just flying Around Iranian airspace, tracking down those launchers while taking out many, many of the strategic assets of the Iranian revolutionary regime. That includes the chief of staff of the IRGC, and then four days later, the new, his replacement, the new chief of staff of the IRGC. It includes almost the entire leadership of the IRGC Air Force. It includes so many of the military advisors and people around the Supreme Leader. It includes the people in charge of the response of the missile command, of all the things that Iran needs to actually manage a serious counter to the Israeli war, to the Israeli attack. And it’s astonishing. It’s astonishing. There are technological achievements here that America needs to learn from. For example, Israeli planes carrying missiles. Missiles borne by planes don’t usually go ballistic. In other words, they shoot point to point. You point it at something and they shoot at it and they can sometimes track and sometimes not. But Israeli missiles, in order to increase the range of F-15s, which don’t have the range to take off from Israel and fly all the way to Iran. So Israel has created missiles for these planes that when they launch, they go up higher into the sky, and then they glide down. They use a ballistic trajectory to massively increase their speed and still manage to very precisely target. Israel has put missiles on the wings of F-35s, which are not designed to carry missiles on those wings. So it’s an air force of such astonishing competence and innovation that it’s stuff Americans can’t do with their own equipment, is what we’ve seen in this operation, and the sheer brazenness Of such a massive Mossad presence. I think one just last point, one of the really fascinating things to come out of it is what explains the Israeli penetration of Iranian leadership to the point where Israeli intelligence Actually engineered a meeting of the top command of the general staff of the IRGC Air Force in order to bomb that meeting. So they made sure that everybody’s schedules were cleared and they could all come to this meeting and they were all invited by the right people to this meeting. And this meeting took place in a place where the Israelis actually engineered the meeting to take place. And the answer seems to be that lots of Iranians, I know this is a shocking thought, don’t like the regime. And lots of pieces of the regime are set against the rest of the regime. And lots of minorities in Iran, it’s a country that’s only about 60% Persian, really hate Persian rule over them. And so you have all of these, it’s kind of an old multi-ethnic empire in that sense of the old model of the Ottomans or the Austro-Hungarians. And the Mossad knows how to make profoundly good use of that. And so Israel’s full capabilities of a competent state are on display. And this shocking incapability, the incompetence of the Iranian regime that has managed to frighten the world from the Obama administration to the Arab world for decades, turns out To be the paradigmatic paper tiger. How do you explain how deterred the U.S. Sam Harris In particular has been by Iran all these years? I mean, you know, I view Israel at this moment doing what America should have done many, many years ago and perhaps could never accomplish with this skill. I mean, in some sense, you know, I worry about the degradation of our own competence by comparison. But it’s also, there’s been a degradation of our, almost our moral competence. I mean, is doing something. I understand that this is an existential threat to Israel and nuclear-armed Iran in the way that it isn’t for America. But to my eye, America has been deterred in the face of Iranian belligerence for decades. It’s almost as though we have treated them like they’ve already had nukes. How do you explain our unwillingness, our unwillingness even now, even now that you have cleared the skies over Iran and it would seem we could simply drop our bunker-busting bombs To end this story on really, I think, just two sites would require it. How do you understand America’s relatively prostrate (Time 0:04:17)
  • Iranian Regime’s Betrayal and Discontent
    • The Iranian regime betrayed the original 1979 revolution’s promise by violently suppressing diverse social groups.
    • About 90% of Iranians desire regime change due to economic suffering and political repression. Transcript: Sam Harris Of these other countries where we thought we would be greeted with flowers we were greeted with, at minimum, some more ambiguity than that. In Iran, it seems a reasonable bet that most Iranians would be happy to be done with theocracy. Is that your impression of what’s happening there? Haviv Rettig Gur Yeah, I mean, it runs deep. What America encountered in the Middle East was societies whose basic identity structures are very tribal. And I’m not criticizing, by the way, I think that’s something that Israelis share with much of the rest of the Middle East in ways that make them a little bit strangers in the West, where Being Sunni or being Shia in Iraq was not a theological difference between Sunni and Shia, you know, I don’t know what, mystical traditions. It was a tribe. It was literally clans and groups and places that you live who fight together and will defend you and will protect you in a world that is still a Wild West. And America didn’t understand why they weren’t all rushing to the banner of the great ideas of the Western Enlightenment. And, you know, I don’t know how to put this. I’m a big fan of the big ideas of the Western Enlightenment. And I thank God every day I have a tribe. There’s some complex mixing of the two that produces a healthiest, happiest society. For example, frankly, forgive me for the flag waving here, but Israelis. Have all of the freedoms, the gay pride parades, and the self-expressions and the religious diversities of the liberal West. And they also have the solidarity and the high birth rates, including among secular high-tech engineers in Israel, have higher birth rates than the entirety of the rest of the developed World. And every other kind of Israeli has higher birth rates than them. And so we have that mix. And America encountered this thing that I think American culture didn’t really know how to comprehend, how to deal with. It wrote a beautiful constitution for Iraq without contending with this deep complexity of a whole other way of understanding human belonging in society. In Iran, you have a completely different story. You very much have ethnic tribes and religious tribalism and all of that, but you have a regime with a story that is essentially fundamentally a deep betrayal of Iran’s, of the very revolution That brought it to power. The Iran’s revolution has two parts. And I say this not to tell people the history, but to invite people to fact check me so that they begin this journey into the history, because this really matters to understanding what’s Going to happen going forward. The Iranian revolution, the Shah of 1978, before the revolution, was pro-American in the Cold War, but very much a tyrant with the secret police and abusive and oppressive. And the revolution that sparked in 1978 in December was a revolution that allied all the different elements of Iranian society, all of them, from the clerical religious movements And mosques and charities of that Islamist world of Khomeini to the liberals, the liberal nationalists, the feminists, the communists, various communist groups that all fought Against each other, obviously, the students, the wealthy, the poor, the bazaar merchants, the small shopkeepers, all these different elements of Iranian society came out to march In this revolution against the Shah. And what was amazing, it was literally millions of people marching over two days all over Iran. Something like 15% of the population of the country all turned out. In Tehran itself, it was something like two and a half million people, half the city. Half the city marched. And within six weeks, the Shah was gone. And two weeks after he was gone, Khomeini came back from exile. And what would then happen over the course of 1979, and then over the course of the next nine years was the slow removal from that coalition, almost always violently, of all those other Elements of Iranian society as the religious factions consolidated power in this new government. So the promise of democracy. As all those marchers marched, you had banners. People should look up these marchers from the Ashura rebellion, that’s the holiday it happened on, of 1978. There were people marching with banners about democracy and liberalism and elections and rights of women. And the religious clerics were the most organized of all these oppositions, of all these social subgroups, because they had networks that the Shah had a hard time suppressing. You could easily suppress student groups on campus. You had a very hard time suppressing what a cleric would say and an imam would say in a mosque on a Friday prayer. And so they were the best organized and the best ready to take advantage. And they turned into an incredibly brutal theocracy. They pushed the Marxists to the point where many were killed, many fled to Iraq, to the Shia Arabs of Iraq. And in the Iran-Iraq war actually joined Hamas, Hamas, there’s a Freudian slip of an Israeli nowadays, joined Saddam’s war on Iran. And so we’re seen as traitors by Iran. And in 1988, the regime actually went through the prisons of Iran and murdered all the people they thought, over 5,000 people, belonged to these Marxist groups over the border in that War. And so just a series of crackdowns and murders, the shuttering of universities, the firing en masse of all secular university lecturers, This regime came to power in one of the most Beautiful moments in the history of this nation, of this competent and diverse and fascinating nation. And the first thing it did and everything it did from that day one was the rejection and dismantling of all of the promise of a potential, you know, multi-party, multi-vision kind of Parliamentarism that Iran could have been. And since then, 46 years, there’ve been only two supreme leaders, Khomeini and Ali Khamenei, who is still the supreme leader now, as long as he’s still alive. And that regime has basically managed to drive Iran into the dirt over those 46 years. The only success it has had in 46 years, the only accomplishment Iranian society can point to is the regime sufficiently oppressing, sufficiently co-opting different elites to stay In power. So every poll we have, the polls published in state media of the regime tell the same fundamental story as polls in from outside. The vast majority of Iranians, probably 90%, want the regime gone. They express it as disaffection with the economic problems. In this moment, when the war began, Iran was facing mass trucker strikes, mass nurse strikes, mass strikes of bakeries, all kinds of pieces of the economy. It just went through a terrible winter (Time 0:28:02)
  • Israel’s Lost Information War
    • Israel suffers from a cultural inability to explain itself in the information war, damaging global Jewish perception.
    • Israeli public diplomacy institutions often fail or shut down due to this cultural reluctance. Transcript: Sam Harris Prior to that. Before, I mean, this is how we can dissect the level of moral confusion suffered by most of the free world at this moment. On October 8th, before Israel had responded, you had our most elite institutions effectively taking the side of Hamas, in certain cases explicitly taking the side of Hamas. So how did we get here, right? Again, we’ll get into the details of Gaza, we’ll get into many of the lies and half-truths that anchor people to this confusion, but how is it that this information war seems to have been Lost up until this point? Haviv Rettig Gur There’s so much to say, it’s hard to know when to start. Where to begin? I would say, first of all, the projection of one’s anxieties and concerns about the war in Gaza onto your local Jewish community is such obvious rabid bigotry that nobody in the West Would be confused on this question if you applied it to Muslims, or if you applied it to Hindus. Or the Chinese. Sam Harris I don’t see Chinese Americans being blamed for the behavior of the CCP. Right. Haviv Rettig Gur And so there’s just no, it’s just, and, you know, maybe China doesn’t claim to represent all Chinese, but there are plenty of Muslim states doing plenty of horrific things at scales In order of magnitude larger than Gaza, in the worst case scenario that you believe of Israel in Gaza that claim to represent Islam. And nobody comes to the Muslim community in America or in Britain or in Canada and says to them, explain yourselves. So no, none of that is legitimate in any way. It’s just an anti-Semitism that is permissible in elite circles because it has a cachet in Western civilization, given to Western civilization, an inheritance of the Christian tradition That makes it okay, makes it recognizable and therefore not something that feels dangerous and upsetting. So I don’t have to respect that even slightly. I don’t have to respect that at all. Israel will commit crimes. Israel will make mistakes. Israel is a country. I have never sat in a room with Americans and said to them, you know, America makes terrible mistakes and sometimes real crimes. And had any American ever fall off their chair, not a single one, no matter how patriotic they are. Israel’s a real country, and it’s going to make those mistakes. And if you then come to your Jewish community in Cleveland, Ohio with complaints, you are the bigot. And there’s nothing else to know about that situation. So that’s the first point. The second point is, a lot of it is Israel’s fault, he said, immediately after saying the first thing. And what I mean by Israel’s fault is, one of the most beautiful things about us is one of the most catastrophic things in wartime. And that is that we are a people culturally profoundly incapable of explaining ourselves. And it comes from a very deep and very old place. In the late 19th century, the pogroms begin. There’s a specific moment of the death of Tsar Alexander II at the hand of anarchist assassins in 1881 in St. Petersburg. He was this reformist Tsar who abolished serfdom and was this guy that many Jews hoped would deliver for the Jews, would end the Pale of Settlements, would end the anti-Semitic laws Of the Russian Empire. And when he dies, his reactionary son, Alexander III, takes over. This is 1881. And one of his first acts is to pass massively anti-Semitic laws that tighten the regime of restrictions on Jewish lives in the empire, the May laws of 1882. And that’s when we see the beginning of what would be 40 years and more of mass pogroms that would become something like 1,300 pogroms. It would begin not very deadly, and they would escalate in number and in deadliness over the course of the next 40 years, probably killing over those four decades a quarter million Jews, Including in World War I and the Russian Civil War, unrelated to the war itself, just villages burned to the ground. And that drove millions and millions of Jews to flight and millions of Jews to leave. And right at that period, you begin to see a serious consolidation of what would come to be known as the Zionist movement. And it literally begins, you know, people can look up a guy named Leo Pinsker, who is a Russian integrationist infatuated with this reformist czar, and then watches the sudden pivot After his death to mass pogroms. And he says, wait a second, the day, by the way, of the Tsar’s assassination, that morning he gave the order to establish a parliament for the Russian empire. He wanted to lead the Russian empire to what the rest of Europe, Western Europe, Central Europe was becoming. And he says, wait a minute, what if we’re living a fantasy? What if this new modernity and liberalism and science and people are discovering electrons and whatever, What if all of this is actually a veneer overlaying a much, much more real trend Of consolidation of national identities, of industrialization that was driving people from small places, villages, farms into big cities, and creating these new mass societies And mass identities and radicalized political movements. And all of this stuff, all of these changes would turn on the Jews and turn on the minorities, and we’re actually not safe anymore. And there’s this entire sociological analysis of modernization that develops that is basically Herzlian Zionism. And Pinsker writes a pamphlet in 1881 called Auto-Emancipation, meaning the emancipation is a series of laws passed by these European countries in the late 19th century that liberate The Jews from the ghettos, liberate the Jews from the restrictions on university and professions and all of that. And he says, what if it’s all not real? What if none of this emancipation ultimately will end well? You have to auto-emancipate yourself. That’s the only solution. Jews need self-determination. And one of the main arguments that these early Zionists make, these strategic Zionists who awaken because of this sudden turn of Europe on the Jews, is the idea that a Jew cannot stand Before the anti-Semite and explain himself. Now, they thought of an anti-Semite as someone to whom the Jew is some kind of moral cartoon, as some kind of antagonist or protagonist, and some kind of morality play happening in their Own head. In other words, not a human being in front of them, but part of a story they need for their own definition of themselves. That’s an anti-Semite. And when you stand before that anti-Semite and you say, oh no, I’m not this thing you think I am. I’m actually over here, this other thing, this complex three-dimensional human thing. You cannot, these thinkers, the Pinskers and the Herzl say, you cannot penetrate the fog of their morality play. And because you cannot penetrate that fog, you will stand before them and you will try to explain and you will end up trying to justify. And justifying yourself is dehumanizing. And so you are forbidden to justify yourself. That is not a thing that a Jew with dignity and basic human dignity is permitted to do anymore. And the Zionist movement creates a foundational culture of not justifying yourself. And you had this in the 1950s, David Ben-Gurion would say, when the UN would say something mean to Israel, Ben-Gurion would say, (Time 0:40:41)
  • Theological Roots of Jihadism
    • Islamist jihadism is deeply rooted in a 150-year theological narrative linking geopolitical success with divine favor.
    • Hamas sees destroying Israel as essential to Islamic redemption, not merely political liberation. Transcript: Haviv Rettig Gur Many Middle Easterners find their courage and come marching in and destroying us. But the nuance I want to add to that, and you will not find an honest, over in the diaspora, among sort of diaspora, I don’t know what professors of some of these nations, you will find people Pretending that they come from these deeply liberal societies and depicting their societies in ways that no one on the ground in their societies would recognize. But there’s a depth there. It is not animalistic animus. It is something profound. People live, this is my methodological sort of bottom line, and I developed it as a political journalist. People live in stories. People live in narratives of where they come from, where they’re going, what’s happening to them. And if you understand those stories, and those stories are always complex and rich and fascinating and produce contradictions within the minds of people and contradictions built Into the stories. And they don’t feel like contradictions to the people themselves, or they’re willing to live with these contradictions because reality is big and complex. And so real people live in these real profound contradictions. The stories that are told about us in the Arab world and the stories that are told about us in the larger Muslim world are stories that have very little to do with us and a lot to do with how Arabs and Muslims understand what has happened to them. And it’s a story that I could send people to a podcast episode of mine because we really lay out the theological lineage of five generations of theologians that produced Hamas. But this lineage begins in the middle of the 19th century with these Egyptian Egyptian theologians or Syrian theologians who moved to Egypt. It begins in Egypt, and it begins in Egypt because Egypt comes under British rule in the middle of the 19th century. And the disparity, as the Ottoman Empire is imploding slowly, but everyone understands how weak it is, once the British take over parts, once the French take over parts of this slowly Collapsing empire, it’s impossible to pretend that you can’t see the gap in power between Islam and the Christian West. And that gap in power takes explaining. And for Muslim theologians, it takes a special kind of explaining. Because Islam was born, it’s the only monotheistic religion, born as a conquering empire. And so it’s a monotheistic religion that very early on came to associate geopolitical power and success and extraordinary achievement as evidence, right? If there is a God, and then God oversees history and has a plan for history, and therefore history arcs toward justice and redemption. If you are massively inexplicably successful in history, you are in sync with that divine plan. And so if you find yourself in the 1860s a pathetic loser of history, I mean, these theologians talked very honestly in ways that are very courageous. And these are, you know, the muftis of Egypt. I mean, these are top mainstream serious theologians. And they talked in ways that are far more courageous than anything you can say in Western elite academia today about the Muslim world. And they said, what happened to us? How did we get so weak and backward? Our science is bad, we’re poor, and we’re geopolitically pathetic. And they developed this discourse on Islamic weakness as a theological problem, as a signal. If Muslim success was a signal of closeness to God and the truth of the revelation, then Muslim failure was a signal of distance from God. And so it created a movement of return to piety. Because of this special logic within Islam that doesn’t exist in Christianity or Judaism, it developed this pietistic movement as a path to a return to Muslim success and power. And it begins in real reformist terms. This theologian named Al-Afghani is talking about building consultative institutions and democratic institutions and economic and universities. And he admires the French for their learning and studies. And he wants to find these things, roots within Islam, and he begins to interpret Islam in those ways, in ways that will allow us to produce modern, successful universities, modern, Successful economies. And he has a student who has a student who has a student who is Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, who has jettisoned along the way all of the modernity stuff and just Clung to the pietistic return to this mythic original first generations of Islam back when we were successful kind of pietism. And is that. In other words, Hamas is literally, in 1987, the Muslim Brotherhood chapter founded in Gaza in 1987. That’s what it is. That’s how it begins. And so when Hamas looks at the Jews, it doesn’t see a colonialist oppressor. It sometimes uses language like that, especially when it’s talking to other Palestinian movements that were born in that kind of discourse. But it fundamentally sees a great, vast theological problem. In all of the weaknesses of Islam and all the indignities that Islam has suffered everywhere from European imperialism and various other retreats that Islam has suffered, the worst One was Zionism. And the reason the worst one was Zionism, and they talked about this openly and constantly in the 1890s already, was that the Jews were weak. They’re refugees. They’re the weakest thing that ever pushed Islam back. And so they’re the first thing that Islam has to overcome in order to get back to its rightful place in history. So Hamas develops an ideology and a foundational strategy. It is willing to destroy Gaza on the altar of destroying Israel. Because in its vision of the purpose of the war on Israel, it’s not about liberating Palestine. It’s not about creating a new Palestinian political world that is independent of Israeli military rule, which is something that significant numbers of Israelis would join in on. It’s about overcoming the Jews, ruling everything that had ever been lost to Islam as the beginning of the return of Islam into God’s embrace and the sign that our piety is enough and The sign that Islam is not taking its rightful redemptive place in history once again. It is overcoming centuries of retreat and weakness in Islam. And so, yes, the second we lay down our arms, they’ll come for us. They is some of them, not all of them. It’s big, it’s complex. There’s also the simple truth that when you talk about Islamic ideas and Islamist ideas, you’re not necessarily talking about the Muslim shopkeeper in some street in Amman, Jordan Or something. The people who belong to this religious world don’t necessarily subscribe to the grand ideas. There’s a lot of overlap, but they’re not the same thing. But with all those caveats, yes, we are cartoon characters in a vast redemption story that they think they’re acting out and living through. And the same is true in a different way, in a Shia version with a slightly different history, although borrowing a lot of these big ideas of the Iranian regime. (Time 0:53:31)
  • Israeli Extremism and Palestinian Fear
    • Most Israeli Jews reject extremist ideology, but Jewish terrorism and settler hostility create real Palestinian fear.
    • Palestinian fears about Israeli intentions stem from vulnerability and historical experiences, not mere conspiracy. Transcript: Sam Harris I haven’t heard. To what degree is the current government in Israel married to the far right and a group of ultra-Orthodox, messianic characters who, granted the religious claims are importantly Different in my view, but still, nonetheless, you have your own number of religious fanatics. To what degree is religious fanaticism distorting the project and the fighting of this war on your side? Haviv Rettig Gur In my view, not at all. They exist. They cause terrible harm. We have outright Jewish terrorism against Palestinian civilians in some parts of the West Bank. We have polls of Palestinians that tell us that most Israelis genuinely believe, Israeli Jews at least, genuinely believe, I think it’s different numbers among Arab Israelis who Are also, of course, Palestinians. Most Israeli Jews genuinely believe that that terrorism is a small phenomenon. And on paper, technically, it might be a small phenomenon, but we have polls of Palestinians who say that a majority, I don’t remember the numbers, this is a poll I saw a few years ago, But a very significant majority, in other words, upwards of 60%, if not more, think that this is an expectation that they have in life, that they will encounter this violence. And so, because it’s the, you know, it’s not a lot of kids get kidnapped in America by random strangers, but because of all kinds of TV shows about kidnappings of kids, all American parents Are terrified their kids are going to be kidnapped, so kids aren’t allowed outside, kind of a phenomenon. And I mean to mock those parents, but I don’t mean to mock the Palestinian expectation, because it’s not driven just by, you know, I don’t know what, not reading the statistics, it’s Driven by a sense of real vulnerability that is absolutely real and powerful for them. So there is an actual Jewish phenomenon of terrorism. It is marginal within Jewish society, religious terrorism about kicking out the other. It is marginal in Jewish society. It is sufficiently big and Palestinians feel sufficiently unprotected by the Israeli military and by the Israeli state and law enforcement and sufficiently vulnerable in a deep Way. I’ll give you an example. There was a poll taken a few years back, I think eight years ago, something like that, by a wonderful Palestinian pollster, Khalil Shikaki. He’s a sociologist and he runs this polling firm in Ramallah and Gallup uses him to poll Palestinians and everybody just kind of trusts him as the sort of gold standard of polling of Palestinians. And he had a poll where he once asked Palestinians this kind of conspiracy theory that Hamas was pushing for many years that the Jews want to take the Temple Mount, take Al-Aqsa, destroy It, you know, build a synagogue on it, build a temple on it. The radical portions of Israeli society that did want that happened to now be in the government, but they were, you know, 5% of the 95% of Jews who don’t want it, right? And he asked them, what do you think? Do you think they want it? And 80% of Palestinians are convinced that Jews are coming for Al-Aqsa, coming for the shrine that is their anchor of identity in the Muslim world and their source of dignity, their Claim to dignity in the Muslim world. And what he then did, because he’s a good pollster, is then he asked the conditionals, he said, well, what do you think they actually want from it? And some said they want to build a temple, either a temple or a synagogue, but they’re definitely not going to destroy the Muslim shrines. That’s about 20%. 20% said they want to destroy the Muslim shrines and build this. There are different versions of that story, but 80% thought they want to fundamentally change the status quo on the Temple Mount. And then he asked the great and powerful question, which reshaped how I understand this discourse among Palestinians, which is, will they succeed? He didn’t say, is there a chance? He didn’t say, will they actually, what do you believe will actually happen, succeed? And 50% said yes. Now that’s 50% of the 80, so 40% of the total. In other words, when Palestinians have this conspiracy theory that the Jews are gunning for Al-Aqsa, that’s not an expression of some anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, and there are Plenty of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in Palestinian discourse. It’s an expression of vulnerability. You could be cynical and say, if they were in charge and that was a Jewish shrine, that’s what they would do. And so they expect it from the Jews. And that’s what the Jordanians did to the Jewish quarter of the old city when they ruled it. They destroyed medieval synagogues. But it’s an expression of vulnerability. Sam Harris I would also point out it’s an expression of an ambient level of religious fanaticism to put that much primacy in the integrity of a building. The enemy you face is not just Hamas, is not just Hezbollah. It is a wider culture which would go absolutely berserk if something happens to that building, right? Haviv Rettig Gur But look, Sam, I told myself, coming to your podcast, I’m coming into your house, I’m not going to start a fight about religion. Because I happen to, that part I like, that part I respect on their side. I’m super pro-religion, which is a fascinating conversation I want to have in you, but it’s going to kind of derail all the things you want to accomplish here. But just to say next time. But it isn’t the building. It isn’t the building. I once saw a, it’s the story. It’s always the story. When secular societies lose religion, they lose the capacity, A, to understand that people live in stories, B, to craft powerful mythic foundational stories. Sam Harris Okay, but this is a detour. We can’t take this detour too long. 30 seconds. 30 seconds. Haviv Rettig Gur I once heard a sermon by a Palestinian imam in a mosque. And the sermon was, and I’m just going to cut it down to 10 seconds. The sermon was, right, the dome, the golden dome on the Temple Mount, stands on top of a boulder that in the Sunni tradition, Muhammad stepped on when he ascended to heaven. That was the stepping stone in his ascent to heaven. And this person said, this imam said, that’s not an accident. Palestine is the stepping stone that Islam must step on in order to take its ascend to its rightful place as a redemptive force in history. In other words, we are told by the rest of Islam, you are the pathetic weak link of Islam that was pushed back by the weakest thing that ever pushed Islam back. But no, my fellow Palestinians, in fact, we are the place where the decline stops. We are the sacrifice. We will be the people who can, because of our sacrifice, win back for Islam its rightful place. That is, when you look at polls of Gazans and they tell you, most of them tell you, we hate Hamas, they destroyed our lives. And then most of them tell you, and we love Hamas and we’ll follow them to war in October 7th was a glorious thing. That cognitive dissonance isn’t cognitive dissonance. It’s Hamas destroyed our lives, but the story they give us of our experience is the most dignifying story available to us. And so it’s really big and powerful. It’s not a small thing. And when they feel vulnerable to Israeli, that’s them questioning whether or not any of that is true. And in fact, their story actually is this degraded, undignified one. So it’s a richer discourse about the meaning of their lives (Time 1:22:19)
  • Settlements’ Role in Peace Process
    • The majority of Israeli settlers are near the green line and theoretically negotiable in peace deals.
    • Ideological settlers who oppose Palestinian statehood are a minority but impact political deadlock. Transcript: Sam Harris Is culpable for that, and Israel generally is culpable for that. What should we understand about the settlements? Haviv Rettig Gur The vast majority of Israelis don’t think that it has anything to do with God. It is a sense of belonging. It is a sense, there is a sense of belonging. It is the Jewish homeland, and that doesn’t mean it isn’t the Palestinian homeland, but it is also the Jewish homeland. The entire Bible takes place in the West Bank. None of the Bible takes place in Tel Aviv, which is why Tel Aviv is so much more fun, right? But the simple fact is that most Israelis, for the majority of the last three decades, have been willing, and in polls, if you do the follow-on polls, the follow-on questions, the conditionals That good pollsters like Khalil Shikaki do, you discover most Israelis are willing, in theory, theoretically, in principle, to pull back from the West Bank, from pieces, large parts Of the West Bank, if they thought it would mean peace. Real, actual, reliable, dependable peace that you would stake your children’s lives on. The great tragedy for Palestinians isn’t the ideological, religious, Zionist camp that is probably only 25% of the settlers, but they’re the settlements built between Palestinian Population whose purpose, deep within the West Bank, whose purpose is to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state, right? 75% of settlements are quite close to the green line and easy to exchange. There are 130 settlements, something like that. The two biggest ones are a quarter of all settlers, and there are two ultra-Orthodox cities that are within 2,000 feet of the green line. In other words, a huge amount of the settlement problem is solved, you know, with the most easiest, obvious land swap in which Palestinians would get better land in the Gidiboa, north Of the West Bank region. In other words, the foundational question is the ideological settlement movement. Now, that ideological settlement movement absolutely believes that this is the homeland and we hold on to it and God promised it to us. And there’s a redemptive story here. You don’t have to believe in it. And I don’t think this is the Messianic times at all, but I don’t think there are Messianic times. But nevertheless, every prophet in the Bible says that these times will be the worst and the best, the most good and the most evil. And that sure does seem to fit the 20th century. And also one signal of Messianic times is that all the Jews will come back to the homeland. And so the religious scientists come out and say, wait a second, what more could you possibly need to satisfy the actual predictions of these very powerful and eloquent kinds of prophecies Than this time? Now, most Israelis are not there. Most Israelis were willing to pull out. So much so that the Oslo process was meant to produce a Palestinian state with Barak in 1999 going to Camp David with Arafat. And then the second intifada begins and 140 suicide bombings that shatter the Israeli left and prevent the Israeli left really from ever coming to power ever again. And then a fascinating thing happens, which is that the Israeli right that replaces the Israeli left, Likud, then takes power in 2001 amid, you know, two or three bus bombings a week In Israeli cities, including buses of children. And what you have suddenly is an Israeli political right that reveals that it has secretly wished the left had succeeded in creating a Palestinian state and separating. And it goes to the Gaza withdrawal in 2005, which is in its moment, today it’s not popular, in its moment is deeply popular. Likud carries it out. After the Gaza withdrawal, Sharon leaves Likud and forms a new party called Kadima and planned, apparently, to withdraw from the West Bank or from 90% of the West Bank. And how do we know that? Because he proceeds to have a stroke. His number two guy who came with him from Likud, this is, I guess, December-ish, 2005, the number two guy becomes the candidate for Kadima Olmert. And before the election, which is in March of 2006, Olmert tells Israelis, I plan to pull out of the West Bank. This would come to be called the convergence plan. People should look it up. Right-wingers come in and say, the left failed to create a bilateral agreement with Palestinians on pulling out. We started these massive pullouts. Palestinians responded with mass waves of terrorism, but we still need to separate from them, even if they can’t reciprocate our withdrawals with peace. And Olmert says, I don’t want you to tell me I didn’t tell you. That’s the plan, the Convergence Plan, which is a 90% withdrawal from the West Bank. Olmert wins that election, Likud crashes to 12 seats under Benjamin Netanyahu. And Olmert then proceeds to have to face, within three months of his government forming with the Labour Party, with the left, in late June 2006, the very first Gaza tunnel operation, Where Hamas dig a tunnel under the border, kill two Israeli soldiers, kidnap a soldier, take him into Gaza. There’s now a shooting war in Gaza. Two weeks later, July 12th, there’s now a Hezbollah attack in the north. And we have this massive rockets war in Lebanon and Gaza. Lebanon, where we pulled out of in 2000, Gaza that we pulled out of in 2005, and an Olmert government that wants to pull out of the West Bank, having to show Israelis that they can, what, Restore deterrence, that it’s safe to pull out of this much larger area that’s the center of the country, that’s the highlands overlooking our cities. Olmert never is able to actually carry out the convergence plan. This right-wing version of the same peace process of separating from the Palestinians because we don’t want to rule them forever, that won elections right up until every withdrawal Turned into rivers of blood. So most Israelis, on the question of settlements, most settlers are just literally suburbs. They are close to the green line, they are solvable. The significant portion, maybe it’s 30% of the settlement movement out on the mountains between the Palestinian cities, meant to prevent a Palestinian state, would be solvable if The rest of Israeli society thought there was an option. And they have spent 30 years, the Palestinian national movement, led by Hamas, but also led by Arafat and sections of Fatah that very much belong to the same religious world as Hamas, Even if they dress it in more nationalist, secularist language. They’ve spent 30 years convincing ordinary Israeli cab drivers and shopkeepers that if we pull out of the West Bank, we shrink down to nine miles wide in the middle, they hold the highlands Overlooking all our major population centers, and we will face a catastrophic version of the disaster that is Gaza or South Lebanon. So that’s the question Israelis are asking, and nobody knows how to give them a Palestinian answer that isn’t Hamas will take over. By the way, if we have an election right now in the West Bank, Hamas wins, and it’s won in every poll in 15 years. So that’s the question of settlements to the average Israeli. You don’t have to tell us why, you have to tell us how. Sam Harris What does the average Israeli feel about resettling Gaza? Haviv Rettig Gur We have polls, you know, 90% opposed. (Time 1:34:38)
  • Complexities of Gaza War Criticism
    • The Gaza war is not an extermination campaign but reflects Israeli military struggles and political complications.
    • Israeli incompetence and political calculation have prolonged the war and complicated hostage rescues. Transcript: Sam Harris He described the war as pointless at this point and unwinnable. This is a direct quote. What we’re doing in Gaza now is a war of extermination, indiscriminate, limitless, cruel, and criminal killing of civilians. I can’t imagine that’s a popular view, but how do you respond to that claim? I mean, what’s the backstory for, I mean, I know Omer probably hates Netanyahu with a passion that can scarcely be described, but what’s going on there with that level of condemnation? Haviv Rettig Gur Ultimately, my reading of this kind of discourse among Israelis, in other words, if it’s coming from Amnesty International, it’s a whole different ballgame. It’s a question of trust. Palestinian civilians in Gaza are suffering terribly. The Israeli government has managed to be profoundly incompetent time after time after time. And the war has gone very slowly. One of the big problems and mistakes made in the war was that there was a decision made very early on, very understandable, rooted in the American experience of Afghanistan, where American Soldiers in Afghanistan had the strategy of clear and hold. You would take a territory, you would take a valley, you would hold it, you would leave Marines there, you would leave there, and then the Taliban couldn’t take it back. And what that ended up creating was thousands and thousands of targets all over Afghanistan for the Taliban guerrilla war. Lessons Israel drew from the American experience was that lesson. And the lesson was don’t take territory and hold it, but in fact, conduct a raiding war. So every single part of Gaza has faced an Israeli incursion, you know, three times, five times, sometimes 12 times. And one of the advantages that that created was that the Israelis didn’t have to go into the tunnels because Hamas would need to control some of the above ground. Israel would engage those Hamas people very quickly in a battle, kill some, take some prisoner, and then withdraw. And then a month later, Hamas are back above ground running the show in that place, and then they’d go in again. So the constant battles of Jebalia, one of the great Hamas fortifications and centers of power in northern Gaza, the repeat battles of Jebalia that kind of whack-a theory. That whack-a theory was not a bad strategy if you have five years to do it. That’s the kind of whack-a done against ISIS over the course of five years in northern Iraq by the Americans, Iraqis, and Kurds. But there is a view among the Israelis since Trump’s election, I think, basically, that they don’t have that kind of time. So they need to escalate. And what’s happened now is a very different kind of war, a war of holding territory, a war of occupying territory. And occupation in war, not the mean kind of epithet thrown out in the media, but the actual legal term, which is the military holds a territory in war, creates all kinds of legal obligations To the civilian population. That’s okay because one of the great reasons Hamas keeps fighting is that Hamas has this control leverage over the aid. So there has to be a system built out to deny Hamas aid. There has to be a system built out to remove Hamas’ stockpiles that it lives off of while supplying massive amounts of aid to a civilian population that is still deeply penetrated by Hamas and therefore somehow finding a way to separate. That’s the Israeli goal now. And I’ve just described an absolutely impossible strategy with massive civilian costs that is the only way to actually defeat Hamas. And if you understand the Israeli vision of what Hamas is and where it comes from, you understand that the defeat of Hamas is actually central to this question. So the civilian costs are huge. I happen to come to the Israeli government with a different critique, but it is absolutely visceral. Can you curse on this podcast? Don’t fuck up the aid. The aid distribution is the strategy now. You detached aid from Hamas by creating this Gaza humanitarian foundation. Well, now you better make damn sure nobody starves or you’ve made Hamas’s own case. And so the Israelis need to move in massively on this aid question. I’m someone who was gently mocked by people who love me back about, I don’t know, 18 months ago when I suggested publicly that Israel actually needs to create a humanitarian corridor Within Israel. The Egyptians would rather the Gazans die than move into Egypt. Nobody will take them. Nobody wants to give Israel that win. Nobody cares about Palestinians as people. They’re just sort of moral narratives that everyone’s jostling over. Fine. I’m not going to fix the Arab world. I’m not going to fix the anti-Semitism of the obsessive focus on Gaza without a focus on actually removing Hamas from Gaza. I’m not going to fix any of that. Move them into Israel. A, they’re not leaving Palestine, so it’s not an ethnic cleansing. It’s not a Nakba. You can massively feed them. You can put in AI cameras to slowly suss out the Hamas from within them. You can have Arab Israelis who are A, Palestinian, have Palestinian Arabic, B, Israeli citizens who know us, know Jews, know Hebrew, and know a few things that are the opposite of what Hamas teaches in its schools. For example, we’re not leaving. Holding out this hope that in a generation or two or three, the crusaders took 200 years, we’ll leave. That’s what Hamas tells Palestinians to explain the suffering it imposes on them. The Arab Israelis will tell them, guys, they’re not going anywhere. It would be a de-radicalizing thing. Israel could control the spigot of aid. Israel could fight in Gaza with totally free hand. Everybody told me that was stupid. We would be accused of creating a concentration camp in Gaza, but we’re going to be accused of an extermination war anyway. We’re to be accused of concentration camps anyway. Let’s at least fight the war intelligently. I think that if an Ariel Sharon or an initiative-taking kind of old-school Israeli prime minister was trying to figure their way out of this new kind of battlefield, I think that’s the Kind of thing they would have done. But that’s just to say, the challenge is that challenge, to get that aid, taking it away from Hamas, and actually crush Hamas, and time is not on our side. So my reading is the Israelis are not 100% competent. The pieces of Israel that are fighting the war in Iran are not the pieces of Israel of the Israeli security and intelligence apparatus that are fighting the war in Gaza. These are different parts. They’re not as competent and they don’t have a strategy. There’s 15 years of strategizing and expressing itself in Iran. And there’s the lack of any strategy on the day of, on October 7, expressing itself now in Gaza. So absolutely not an extermination war. But 40% of Israelis say Netanyahu is continuing the war for no other reason than he doesn’t want to face elections. I think that in the last five days that changes because Netanyahu’s war in Iran is extremely popular among Israelis. But the war in Gaza was being dragged out by Netanyahu. The incompetence of the war in Gaza again and again and again was being dragged out by Netanyahu. The hostages are being left to die and rot in dungeons of Hamas by Netanyahu so that there is never an end to the war in which he faces a political reckoning. That is a view I don’t share, but 40% of Israelis tell us they believe. And another 20 (Time 1:41:32)
  • Build Humanitarian Corridor in Israel
    • Israel should create a humanitarian corridor inside its own territory for Gazans to receive aid and de-radicalize.
    • Controlling aid distribution frees Israel to fight Hamas effectively and prevents mass starvation. Transcript: Haviv Rettig Gur To this question. So the civilian costs are huge. I happen to come to the Israeli government with a different critique, but it is absolutely visceral. Can you curse on this podcast? Don’t fuck up the aid. The aid distribution is the strategy now. You detached aid from Hamas by creating this Gaza humanitarian foundation. Well, now you better make damn sure nobody starves or you’ve made Hamas’s own case. And so the Israelis need to move in massively on this aid question. I’m someone who was gently mocked by people who love me back about, I don’t know, 18 months ago when I suggested publicly that Israel actually needs to create a humanitarian corridor Within Israel. The Egyptians would rather the Gazans die than move into Egypt. Nobody will take them. Nobody wants to give Israel that win. Nobody cares about Palestinians as people. They’re just sort of moral narratives that everyone’s jostling over. Fine. I’m not going to fix the Arab world. I’m not going to fix the anti-Semitism of the obsessive focus on Gaza without a focus on actually removing Hamas from Gaza. I’m not going to fix any of that. Move them into Israel. A, they’re not leaving Palestine, so it’s not an ethnic cleansing. It’s not a Nakba. You can massively feed them. You can put in AI cameras to slowly suss out the Hamas from within them. You can have Arab Israelis who are A, Palestinian, have Palestinian Arabic, B, Israeli citizens who know us, know Jews, know Hebrew, and know a few things that are the opposite of what Hamas teaches in its schools. For example, (Time 1:45:13)
  • Two-State Solution’s Declining Prospect
    • Few Israelis and Palestinians believe a two-state solution is currently possible due to mutual fear and distrust.
    • Both sides overwhelmingly believe the other aims to annihilate them. Transcript: Sam Harris It? I mean, if you ask most Israelis, is it still the ultimate endgame? Should you find a partner in some generation of Palestinians in peace? Or is the very notion of a two-state solution eroding on some level? Haviv Rettig Gur It’s important not to think of these things categorically. It’s not that it’s there or not there. Maybe. And if not, then that’s how people actually think about it in these kinds of narratives. I would say that any poll you’ll take will tell you that very few Israelis and very few Palestinians think it’s possible. There was a data point, a poll about four months ago, that polled Israelis and Palestinians both, including in Gaza, and produced the most tragic numbers I’ve seen since in the history Of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict of 140 years of any of this encounter of Jews and Arabs in this land. The poll asked Israelis and Palestinians about what they think the other side wants. And 89% of one side and 92% of the other side said the side wants to completely remove me, completely, I don’t know what, annihilate me or kill me or totally destroy me. That’s the basic thing you need to know, is that both sides are absolutely convinced. The Israelis are convinced of it because the Palestinian leadership that they hear, which is to say Hamas, they don’t hear the liberal Democrats who have three seats in some Palestinian Parliament that hasn’t met in 20 years. They hear Hamas. Says it all day long. And Palestinians are absolutely convinced of it and think the Gaza war demonstrates it. And so… Sam Harris Again, there’s an asymmetry there that everyone should be aware of, which is that for every day, for running back many decades, had the Israelis actually wanted to perpetrate a genocide In Gaza or the West Bank or both, they could have done that. And they didn’t. The fact that they didn’t should mean something. Yeah. I mean, the population grew. Haviv Rettig Gur The population within Israel of Arabs grew. The population in the West Bank grew. The population in Gaza grew. And it keeps growing. And apparently grew in this year of war in Gaza. So I don’t know, you know, I don’t want to take away so much of the discourse. It has been frustrating watching the world not care about Palestinians. And what I mean by not care about Palestinians is that almost everything said about this war by the activist world that allegedly cares about Palestinians has been false. I’ll give you an example, starvation. There hasn’t been mass starvation in Gaza. There hasn’t been serious hunger in Gaza beyond tiny little pockets for very limited pieces of time related to specific operations for 20 months. That was a complete fabrication. And there were reports brought up by the UN that said that 30% of the number of calories that the Gazans need to live are actually going in. And then you actually crack open the report, which no journalist ever has in the history of journalism, apparently, and you discover that the UN only counted what the UN itself brought In, which was only about 25% of the actual food going in. And so it’s just been a fiction. And one of the tragedies of the pro-Palestinian camp spending all of its energies, giving Hamas a pass, all of its energies, creating in Israel paradigmatic evil and this religious Sort of mode of thought about the Israelis, one of the tragedies of it is that it has disconnected Israelis from the capacity of the world to actually critique them. So right now, because the Israeli blockade was meant to remove Hamas’ stockpiles, there’s not a lot of extra food in Gaza. And right now, there’s a massive Hamas effort. First of all, incompetence on the Israeli side, on the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation side, that has to be said. Also, a sustained and massive Hamas effort to make it fail, make it not work, make any aid they can’t take not go in. We now face a situation where there is real hunger in Gaza and a potential for starvation going forward if things don’t get better, if the Israelis don’t get competent, if this doesn’t Solve itself. Gazans aren’t going anywhere. Egyptians won’t let them out. The world doesn’t have any, the Arab world won’t take them in. They’re not going anywhere. And by the way, if you open the border and there’s some sort of, I don’t know how trustworthy they are, but there’s some polls that say that half of Gazans would like to leave. Half of Gazans leaving doesn’t change anything. It brings the Gazan population back to what it was 20 years ago. That’s still a Palestinian Gaza, okay? So Israel needs to solve its part of the problem. But it’s hard to now come to Israelis and say, guys, there’s real starvation ahead because the Israelis say to you, oh yeah, are 14,000 babies going to die in the next 48 hours? You know, just a litany of hundreds of lies that have all been lies and all been this kind of moral panic around the only place in the world where you can have moral panic. So much of it hypocrisy, so much of it ridiculous. Nobody gives a rat’s ass what’s happening in Sudan, which is a war that is both genocidal, fought with Western weapons, and vastly more deadly, and has vastly actual starvation among Hundreds of thousands of people, and nobody even talks about it. And so the Israelis don’t believe the world. And that to me is a tragedy because right now I really want the Israelis to wake up and notice that actually in Gaza we have a real problem that Iran is a distraction from. I want (Time 1:49:40)
  • Israel’s Hostage Policy Dilemma
    • Israel’s ethos of mutual aid creates vulnerability but demands unyielding resolve against hostage takers.
    • Future hostage policies must ensure Hamas’s destruction to prevent incentives for kidnappings. Transcript: Sam Harris And what is the correct response to this tactic, do you think? I mean, the view from above, you know, not knowing any of the families and just looking at the efficacy of this tactic going back now many decades, is that at some point, Israel and everyone Else who gets victimized by this, we have to say, we don’t negotiate over hostages because otherwise you simply will take more hostages in the future. And the Gilad Shalit deal may, in fact, account for why there’s been such recourse to this used by your enemies going forward. But of course, you need only know one hostage family or one hostage to know how impossible that logic is to run through psychologically and socially and politically when you’re actually Confronted with the imperative to get the hostages out. I mean, what should Israel do going forward now? I mean, I guess in the current situation and imagining this situation is behind you, is there a new posture to take with respect to the eventuality of hostages being taken by Hamas or Any other jihadist organization? Haviv Rettig Gur I mean, this is the painful one. And I’ve talked about this in the past. We know we’re friends with families of hostages and people killed on October 7 and have also been part of the efforts to get the hostages out that the families have put together in various Places. My wife has been very active on this issue. We are a nation of refugees. We are not American Jews. We did not spend 100 years discovering the promise of liberalism coming true. We stopped dying when we started living on our sword. Living on our sword, protecting each other, standing shoulder to shoulder is redemption. That is what we are. That is our ethos. And therefore, we will go to the ends of the earth. It is our foundational idea and rooted in a century and a half of historical experience. And I have lectures on that online if people are interested. Our foundational idea is that we come to each other’s aid. The trauma of October 7, as I said, was that, was sitting for hours watching the WhatsApp groups in which people I know said, where the hell is everybody? We’re hearing them outside the door. That helplessness, we taught them, we taught our enemies that everything I just said, this great solidarity, this great love, this great support, which has allowed us to become strong, Which I think is the root of our democracy. We are not, again, English speakers. We come from Yemen and Tsarist Russia and Iraq and Morocco and pieces of Europe when they were at their worst. The Israeli Jews, the vast, vast majority of them, the first time they ever voted was when they voted as Israelis. It’s actually quite an interesting question how the hell Israel ever became a democracy and why it was sustained and stable until now. But solidarity is part of the answer. And so we have taught them that our Achilles heel, our strategic Achilles heel, is this willingness to pay any price for our people, is this sense of ourselves as holding onto each other In a very cruel and difficult and painful world that homogenized in the 20th century on all its minorities, but also on us in one of the cruelest ways. And we taught them, therefore, that it was valuable to take 251 hostages. So we did that to those hostages. And we can’t ever do that to the next hostages ever again. So the basic idea, and it’s an idea supported by the most, I think, of the strategic planning elites, strategic planning sort of thinking and institutions, is that you can strike any Deal to get out hostages except the only deal Hamas wants, which is its own survival. Because the lesson has to be, and this is Netanyahu’s line, and it’s a courageous line, and I have argued that he has been just in many ways, you know, the Iran war has been his glorious Triumph. I mean, so far, of course, but this has been what he believes his life’s mission is, and he’s been planning it for decades. But on Gaza, on hostages, on communicating with the Israeli public, he’s gone months at a time without interviewing in the Israeli press. He has refused to meet victims of his own failures on October 7. He won’t go to… Kibbutz Niroz is one of the great massacres of October 7, one of the three big massacres. And they have invited him, but it’s a left-wing kibbutz, and he doesn’t want them yelling at him on camera, so he won’t go. Every other politician around him has, including the far-rights, Mottrech, etc. So I’ve been accused him of being a real coward on these issues, on the issues of his politicking through the aftermath of October 7. However, he has held the line on this fundamental question, which is that Hamas will not give up the last hostage except for a return to Gaza, except for a reversal of the war. Except for its own survival. And the only thing we owe the next hostage is that Hamas not survive this one. In other words, the result of hostages until now has been you get Israel on its knees. And the result of hostages from now on has to be because they took 251, because they took babies, because they took old people. The next one going forward has to be, you will not survive the taking of Israeli hostages. And that might come at a cost of hostages. The whole theory of this is making us violent. By the way, their entire war strategy is playing a game of chicken with the lives of their own people where they’re willing to have their own people die. So I don’t know why I’m shocked at this cruelty they’d inflict on us. But the whole point is putting us in this moral Tandor’s, this moral Gordian knot, I guess. I don’t know where my metaphors went, but putting us in that position. My view is a minority view among Israelis, I should say. It’s really important to say. I think it’s probably the view of 30%, 70% are on the other side of that question. Make the deal. Get our people home. That’s the most important thing. And don’t worry, Hamas is the type of organization that will force us into another war. And our one job between now and then is not to let them take hostages. That’s the view I would say, if I were to articulate that sort of general consensus, that’s the view of 70%. My view, and I’m with Netanyahu on this, a big critic of him on a thousand things, but on this I think he’s gotten it right, is no, Hamas dies. And therefore you dig any deal they will give to survive another day, but not the deal to survive completely or permanently. And because they forced me into that place, into saying that, into abandoning my people, I’m going to destroy them all the more. That’s the conviction that Israelis have that are willing to see them continue to go in as reservists into Gaza until Hamas is dead. The absolute iron will. And we’ve been saying this out loud. I personally, every person (Time 1:55:45)