From the Second Intifada to October 7th (with Daniel Gordis)

today is December 3rd 2023 and my guest is Daniel gordis of Shalom College Daniel is the correct distinguished fellow here at shalam his substack Israel from the inside is an extraordinary window into what is happening here I encourage you to subscribe Danny was last here in April of 2023 discussing his latest book impossible takes longer that conversation began with a 40-minute overview of Israeli history which I strongly recommend today we're going to talk about two things how the events of October 7th and the war that followed have changed you Danny and your perspective on this country and then we'll turn to the question of how the country has changed in response to the war and maybe where it's headed Danny welcome to econ talk thanks for having me US great to be back you've been living here for 25 years uh you moved here in 1998 from Los Angeles and you published a remarkable book a very powerful book titled if a place can make you to cry dispatches from an anxious State I strongly recommend it uh you moved your family from Los Angeles to what shortly after you arrived here became a war zone the middle of what is often called the second anapat so you've seen a lot of chapters of this conflict you've written about them you've lived through them and I want to talk about how this one is different at if at all and to do that I want to start with the Anapa uh what was that about and how did you experience it well as you said we got here in 1998 we came with three kids they were 129 and five at the time and uh we got here in 98 99 it's hard to believe but this guy named AUD Barak uh won an election and beat a guy named BB Netanyahu it was kind of amazing um and everybody assumed Barack made three promises he was gonna get the boys out of Lebanon as he put it he was going to make peace with Syria and he was going to make peace with the Palestinians uh the peace was Syria went nowhere the syrians had no interest in negotiating back then he did actually pull people out of Lebanon he got the Army out of Lebanon after about 18 years it's actually very telling that the uh the young men who actually were the last ones to come out of Lebanon in the north and lock the gate they literally got off their apcs and they closed the gate and they put a chain on it and they put a lock uh they were actually born the year that Israel went into Lebanon uh in 1982 uh and that seemed unbelievably positive but we didn't understand then was that every Israeli uh pullback whether it's from Gaza in 2005 whether it's from Lebanon in 2000 wherever is always interpreted as weakness uh and we didn't know this then but that was going to be interpreted as weakness so he pulls out uh in the summer of 2005 and by the fall of 2005 oh sorry 2000 2000 uh and by the fall of 2000 Israel is involved in a um what it first seems to be a kind of series of terrorist events and just like this year by the way Russ it starts on a Jewish holiday uh the Yom kipur war starts on Yom kipur obviously in 1973 uh the antifa which is an Arabic word which means popular Uprising or spontaneous Uprising which is by the way why it's complete misnomer there was nothing spontaneous or popular about the intifa it was very clearly choreographed by yaser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority when Israeli troops went into Janine and other places rala eventually they were able to uncover troves of documents that proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that though this was orchestrated to look a bit like a popular spontaneous Uprising in response to some Israeli provocation or another uh it was nothing of the sort it was a very clearly planned attempt uh to basically end Oslo or to create a new reality in the Middle East back up for a sec back up for a second and explain we got get list don't know what Oslo is give us a little go back a few more years okay so oo's in the 1980s and it's an agreement uh it's starts in the 1980s goes into uh the 1990s uh it is agreement when which Israel theoretically reaches an agreement which creates the Palestinian Authority until that point there was only the the PLO the Palestinian Liberation Organization and as a result of a whole series of negotiations which are very complicated which we won't go into right now they start in Madrid and they go on to Oslo um Israel at first through intermediaries and then directly negotiates with the PLO and agrees to a series of steps that would eventually lead to a Palestinian State uh the area called the West Bank many Israelis call it Judea and Samaria it's Biblical name but the Western World calls it the West Bank uh is divided into three areas a b and c area is area a is an area that's going to be controlled by the Arabs by the Palestinians they would be responsible for the day-to-day life taxes traffic the whole Shang C on the other extent would be those areas likely to stay in Israeli possession and therefore they would remain essentially under Israeli control and B was sort of a mix they were areas that would be negotiated down the road and the thought was that Oslo would lead over the course of time to Israel pulling out of sorts all sorts of areas Jericho and KRON and so on and so forth and it would eventually lead to the creation of a Palestinian State now one of the things that I think our listeners ought to understand because we're going to come back to the current conflict later on in our conversation is to understand the Israeli mindset then and the Israeli mindset now uh because in the late 1980s early 1990s as this whole thing is unfolding the RAB and the Prime Minister who oversaw this whole thing is assassinated in 1995 uh and that really is the end of the ASO Accords not really because of as assassination by the way he's on record in a book by bog alone who was also at shalim college or Shain Center back then Bogi writes in his book a long short road uh that he had indication that that Rabin was actually already preparing before he was killed to pull out of Oslo because he thought it was such a disaster and he himself had made a mistake uh because the Palestinian Terror in response to this idea of peace with Israel had gotten so out of control that Robin According to some believed that he' made a mistake but anyway to come back to our story The only reason I mention all of that now is because there's a lot of going on in Israel in which the rightwing Which object pulling out of Gaza in 2005 saying I told you so we told you 18 years ago this was going to be a disaster and by the way Russ if you go back to old videos which were taken in 2005 in the summer of 2005 when the Israeli Army went into the Jewish towns and settlements whatever you want to call them in Gaza and literally pulled people out of their houses and then bulldo them a few days later you see people unwilling to walk but also unwilling to use violence against the soldiers they just sort of lay their limp and the soldiers With Tears in their eyes carry these people out and the people are screaming at the cameras you don't understand what you're doing there are going to be rockets on sto and there are going to be RPGs coming on you know this Kuts and that Kuts and one day they're actually going to come in here and they're going to kidnap people it's unbelievable to go back and look at those old videos which I've unfortunately had occasion to do in the last eight weeks or so uh to watch these people who were totally right there's a lot of I Told You So going on in the right-wing in Israel and there was a lot of I Told You So going on in 2000 with the F with the second in TI About Oslo they said every time we give back territory it's perceived as weakness and it results in Palestinian aggression it's very hard to argue with that claim even though those of us who still hold out or held out I think is more appropriate some Hope For Peace uh thought well you know we should probably take this chance or that chance maybe it'll be different this time but so we're here in 98 come with three kids this one breaks out on Russia Shana on the first day of the Jewish year Russia Shana there is actually a a very strange incident at Joseph's tomb way up in the Galilee and um some Palestinians come and shoot some Israeli soldiers one Israeli soldier actually bleeds to death because they're unable to get him out uh which seemed ridiculous at the time again kind of military unpreparedness just like we've seen unfortunately two months here and that of course quickly escalates into what is a full-fledged Terror war and Israelis tend not to call it so much the second and TI they call it the war of Palestinian Terror between 2000 and 2004 now what was it and what was it not it was a terrible time in Israel um you know where we live because you've been to our home a bunch of times uh we live not far from a main Dragon Jerusalem called amim and on amim there were a number of terrorist attacks uh there was a very famous horrible one at a place called Cafe hilel which is no longer in existence but our house shook I mean our house literally Shook and our kids were in bed you know clutching their stuffed animals and wondering what was going on you heard all the sirens so our daughter started high school that year she was in ninth grade and she picked her high school because it was known to be a very open place where the girls could come and go however they wanted they were really treated like young adults and she got exactly the opposite of that they were they had to come in in the morning and it was locked down until they left at the end of the day cuz the school couldn't be responsible our boys were in school at a wonderful School in the old city of Jerusalem where they did training for what to do if terrorists came into the school and how to stay below the level of the windows if this is a kid in fourth grade it's just ridiculous so it was a very scary time it was a very sad time lots of buses blew up because they suicide bombers it was really a war of suicide bombings in buses in restaurants and so on and so forth but here's what we need to understand it was not an existential war on Israel's part nobody ever said you blow up enough buses and you destroy enough cafes you can bring down a country you can make a country miserable you can make a country angry you can create a generation of young children who are canna have PTSD and vote very differently by the way the people who came of age back then are the rightwing of Israel now and that's not incidental um but we never thought for a moment that Israel's existence was on the line Israel's happiness was on the line Israel's day-to-day life was on the line it was a terrible terrible time but it was not existential and when we come back to what's going on now we'll explain by what's going on now actually is existential but when that when that ended in 2004 why did it end so what we had the first Anapa was was the Palestinian response to the beginnings of Osa the second was the continuing of this process it was considered unacceptable to certain factions within the Palestinians why did it end in 2004 what changed we destroyed the Palestinian terrorist infrastructure uh we went into their Villages and we went into Janine for example a very major Arab City in the West Bank where where the IDF has actually in recent weeks also been very active um there was a horrible case when 14 um reservists when we say reservist people need to understand they fathers they their husbands their fathers they well we of course as you well know we've lost a student at shalim College who was a soldier um and people you know don't understand this but this guy was a father of two small daughters and that when we talk this is a People's Army this is an army when there is a problem like we have now everybody's called up and back then not everybody was called up I mean now we have about 350,000 people called up apparently just an unbelievable number back then it wasn't the same numbers but we called people up and in Janine one time the 14 reservists who were men in their 30s again married fathers you know lives not young men in the Army uh were killed in a battle engine but the the the inata ended fundamentally because we won the war we destroyed the terrorist infrastructure we started building the very famous separation barrier between Israel and the West Bank made it much more difficult for Palestinians to cross we never quite finished it but we built enormous portions of it and by the way you can go online and see the more kilometers of the wall that were completed the less terrorist attacks there were it's just very simple math I mean if they can't get in they can't detonate bombs um and so unfortunately Israelis learned the lesson that that separation barrier even though it was very problematic in many many ways and an international public relations Fiasco for Israel stopped the war we destroyed the terrorist infrastructure and we went back to our lives so just reminding listeners about two million Arabs Arab israelies live within the current borders of Israel not in the West Bank not in Gaza uh they are not the suicide bombers they work alongside us they go to our colleges they participate and I are there are Israeli there is Israeli as you and I are they are Israelis in every sense of the word although they serve less often they're they can serve in the Israeli Army but they don't have to uh they are an exception many do uh but I think again May it's a little confusing we we had a an episode with khabib rigur I want to make sure listeners understand when when we use the term Arab Israeli we usually are referring to uh Muslims and some Christians who are of Arab origin or not Jewish who live within the borders of Israel on our side of that wall that you're talking about right there are also a lot of Israelis who came from Arab countries in 1948 49 uh and they are Arab in culture but they're Jewish uh so they're also sometimes called Arab Israelis which is confusing so just want to make that clear okay so it ends in 2004 as you say it was it was a horrible time your book Chronicles it very movingly uh it was a horrible time for Israel it was a horrible time for the Palestinians of course the our efforts just like today Israeli efforts to dismantle that infrastructure of course had many innocent victims and so it was a terrible terrible time right but it ends in 2004 their their infrastructure is fundamentally um dismantled Arafat is going to die shortly thereafter and the West Bank stays more or less quiet there's lots of terrorist attacks during the course of the time of the years many people are killed but it's a shooting of two people here it's a bombing of four people there it's unfortunately just what life is like here the vast majority of Israelis went around their lives and were not affected by it it rarely affected Tel Aviv it rarely affected Jerusalem it didn't affect Kaa or Ben or or Beva in any way it was what happened in the West Bank or as I said before but what many Israelis call Judea and Samaria and life went on where the where the uh the the the spotlight moved was to the other side of Israel not from the East where the West Bank is uh but to the west and the South where the Gaza Strip is and starting not long after the second inamas well Israel pulls out in in 2005 and relatively quickly thereafter they hold elections in the West Bank um and many people had assumed that the Palestinian Authority which was fairly well entrenched in the West Bank would also more or less win in Gaza that is not what happened the the the actual machinations of the election are far too complex to get into right now but the the long and the short of it is is that Hamas wins the election I mean in certain areas they did they didn't but they emerg from this whole election cycle which by the way way the United States had pressured Israel to allow the United States said in order for this to move forward in a democratic way you Israelis need to allow the gazans to have a free election which Israel did and um Hamas wins now uh now what we know now in 2023 is that Israel mishandled that Hamas win entirely because what we assumed for a very long time was although we went to war with Hamas time and time again in 200 12 and 2014 time and time again and some of them were very massive bombings of Gaza with terrible civilian casualties on their side but also significant casualties on our side as well the fundamental Israeli assumption was we can contain Kamas we might have to batter them periodically and we did and we do but fundamentally there's a lot of Palestinians there including the Palestinian leadership who just want a better life for their people and as long as we allow foreign money through Qatar or other organizations countries to flow in and we keep a military presence that's significant along the border occasionally we're going to have to go to war and Destroy some of their rocket launchers but fundamentally we can live with Hamas at our side and that was what we call now the concepti the conception and that's a word that became very Central in Israeli life after 73 because in 73 the presumption was well we we beat three Arab armies Syria Jordan and Egypt in 1967 we tripled size in six days at The Six Day War uh and nobody's going to mess with us and we built the barlev line along the soz canal which was considered to be impregnable and Israelis were kind of you know sitting back quietly not worry too much about an Egyptian attack not worry too much about a Syrian attack there were overtures by Egypt we know this to be effect there were some overtures by Egypt in the Years prior to the 73 war that Israel just dismissed like why would we negotiate with you what are you going to do and most of that tripling was the acquisition of the Sinai uh correct the Sinai Peninsula after the 67 War which of course uh carry on gets given back in in a in the aftermath of the 73 War right so Israel captures three areas one of them let's go north to south the area in the north which is the goolan heights which is still a very strategically military important place because it's very high up and it overlooks the Galilee in Israel Israel annexed that just say that's ours we're never negotiating that um some people leave never is not never but isra has has said that's ours it's Israel and so on and so forth the West Bank uh which was the stuff that we discussed about before with Oslo is going to probably be split some Israelis some Arabs some whatever we captured East Jerusalem uh and the old city parts of the old city are clearly never going back but of course it's also a holy sight to Christians and it's a holy sight to Muslims and it was Bill Clinton who came up with a very kind of ingenious but impossible to understand Arrangement where Israelis would have the bottom part of the Temple Mount and then Muslims would have the top part of the Temple out way too complicated to actually be enacted even though on paper it looked great but that never happened and then going south Israel captured the Sinai Peninsula now um in 1973 Israel claw its way back to the original borders Henry Kissinger who passed away recently uh is the one who basically negotiated that ceasefire some Israelis think to Israel's benefit many israelies think not to Israel's benefit uh but that ends in 73 it's very clear now by the way Russ that that Anar Sadat who was the president of Egypt back then uh was not looking to destroy Israel in 73 he was looking to batter Israel badly enough that the Israelis would wake up from this cona from this like we don't have to negotiate with you and say oh actually maybe we should negotiate with you and in that regard he won the war in other words he did not win any territory and he lost huge portions of his army and thousands and thousands of Egyptian soldiers were killed but in 1977 min Bean a right-winger is elected the world is you know as we say a need a shrine gaval they're going oh my God Israel elected a former terrorist as a prime minister now the Middle East is really going to be in trouble but Anar Sadat goes to his Parliament and says I'm willing to go to Jerusalem and negotiate right now about a peace with Israel in exchange for the Sinai and so on and so forth and to make a very long complicated story short that's what happens and By 1979 the Sinai Peninsula is back in Egyptian hands um Arafat and bean share the Nobel Peace Prize sorry not arat anare Sadat and bean share the Nobel Peace Prize RFA will get it later undeservedly but nonetheless that's another story uh and shortly thereafter of course Sadat will be killed by his own Army for having committed the treasonous act of making peace with Israel but that Peace by the way has held I mean it's been a very long time since 1979 and amazingly enough that peace has held uh for almost almost half a century not quite but almost half a century um and Egypt has played a critically important role helping Israel contain Kamas on the Gaza Strip both in this current war and in previous Wars now let's just come back to now what's different now and then um so we said 2000 and 2004 is a terror War it makes Israelis miserable nervous there's thousands of casualties on both sides but again as I said before you can't destroy a country um by blowing up cafes and buses you just you can't you can't you couldn't win the second world war that way and you couldn't win this war that way either what we now know is that what started in 2005 2006 with Hamas is taking over the the West uh the Gaza Strip was the beginning end of a situation in which there was actually not a terrorist organization in Gaza but an army Israel did not realize that until October 7 we always have the sense yeah they have Rockets what are they going to do with rockets they're going to kill some people but they're not going to be able to take over our country but what happened on the morning of October 7th of course was that somewhere around 3,000 some of them fairly well-trained not terrorists soldiers I mean they are terrorists but they were they were soldiers they were trained they had equipment they came by land by sea and by air and people might say by air they don't have an Air Force well they came by hand gliders and it was pretty ingenious and just this weekend I'm sure you've seen on the news breast there Israel started to release the videos of them coming on land by sea and these little inflatable dingies outside the boots ofit and completely unopposed there's no Israeli response the just get out with their submachine guns and they you know they exit just like Normandy sort of you know they come onto the beach and they run into the Kim and we know what happened I mean they they killed 1400 Israelis uh they raped gang raped mutilated did all sorts of just unspeakable things to apparently dozens maybe hundreds of women um for Israel a very very sore Point here is that International women's organizations have been entirely silent about the sexual violence that was committed against Israeli women which of course would not be the case had that been committed against any other population anywhere in the world um and for several days I mean certainly October 7th and 8th and some of them survived the 9th and the 10th um Israel was actually taken over parts of Israel were taken over by Kamas terrorists that the Army had to go back and recapture army bases uh it did but not until many many soldiers were were dead hundreds of soldiers were killed before the war even started hundreds of soldiers and policemen together uh it was 200 something um were killed before the actual Army response open the war and so this is an existential battle why is this is an existential battle because we now have somewhere between 150 and 200,000 Israelis who are not living in their homes and I don't mean they move next door they mooved to an entirely different part of the country they have moved by the thousands and thousands to the Dead Sea area and been put up in hotels they've moved to aot where they're being which is the southern most tip of Israel these days where they're being put up in hotels they've left the north where Hezbollah Reigns from Lebanon um they've moved to areas around the Sea of Galilee and other parts of the Galilee in other words we have two major areas now in which Israel is fundamentally unable to keep its citizens safe so it has evacuated those citizens and the citizens now are saying we're never going back until you destroy the enemy that can re Terror on us we're not willing to raise our kids anymore running to the bomb shelters in the middle of the night we're certainly not willing to raise our children in the North or in the south in the North near the Lebanese Border in the South along the Gaza border with the possibility that people can come over the Border again and rape and pillage and burn and murder and and and and do horrible things we don't trust the government we don't trust the Army um so now all of the idfs efforts are focused on the South but if you listen to the news which I was just doing this morning the conversation is also about the North like when is the Army going to turn from the issue in the South to the north because the people in the north are not going to move back to kirona which is a fairly midsize City and to schoi which is a much smaller City and to dozens and dozens of kibuts and towns and Villages along that area until Hezbollah is either disarmed or moved some five kilometers back from the border uh not clear how that's happening going to happen it's apparently the case that France is very involved in internal diplomacy trying to get Lebanon to force heah away from the bord Israel does not open a military front there but we're in a very different situation here in uh now in the end of well the beginning of December 2023 this is an existential War if we cannot win this war and I'm gonna say something a little controversial it's not clear that we can it's just not clear that we can and if you look at the press this past weekend this was the first weekend since the war started started in which there was lots of stuff about how all these Army breathings are basically BS the Army is telling us what they want us to hear and they are not covering all of the military failures that have taken place since the beginning of the war I mean we won't go into it now but the country is sobering up after the first two months of a sense of huge unity and a huge you know on all the TV screens together we're gonna win we may win and we may not win and if we do not win it's not clear how any citizens move back to any place along the Gaza border or how any citizens move back to anything along the northern border which ironically and crazily means they don't have to have any boots on the ground and they can still have captured territory they can have nobody on our side of the border and still make huge swaths of Israel with important agricultural technological and tourist areas all included uninhabitable and that's where we are now this is not the second second in TI which was sad but not existential this is existential so we're not going to get into the weeds of the military but I I to in the campaign you know I look at the um I watch the news occasionally and the reason it's occasional is because my Hebrew is not very good but I like to look at the pictures and the pictures are very depressing we we see uh huge portions that appear appears of Northern G reduced to trouble it's not clear how that leads to Victory it clearly has um destroyed a lot of gazen infrastructure we don't know how many people have' been killed there but it's a lot and it's horrible um and it's not obvious what the endgame is right you know moving south and pushing two million people into smaller and smaller enclaves in hopes of focusing on the worst of them even the most optimistic view that that most of those two million hate Hamas many of them do uh but that somehow we're going to be able to distinguish the people who perpetrated this these atrocities and who want to perpetrate them again and I've said so bluntly uh without um without any hesitation that they want to do this over and over again uh it's not obvious how we're going to prevent that and that part of when I asked you to reflect back on the past is that the we've seen this movie before there's there's a little too much Groundhog Day in this for me as a newcomer and I assume for you as a 25 year veteran that it's hard to live in this neighborhood uh the so many there are a lot of people here who want to kill us and uh we don't want to kill them um irresponsibly but we do have to defend ourselves and that puts us in an awward situ awful situation the world is judging us us terribly right now parts of it have stood strongly at our side but many many people and perhaps correctly have said this is an unacceptable response uh I don't know what the right response is uh other than to leave and and I assume many people would like that too uh but but it just um to me it's a very dark there many things to feel dark about I'm just adding another one yeah there's no shortage of things to feel dark about I mean in the last couple of days I don't know if you saw this in the news the mayor of Paris I mean we're talking about Paris France Western Europe the mayor of Paris came out and said hard for me to see Jews living in Paris and France in the next few years not you know that there's going to wave of anti-Semitism and we're going to fight it with police and education just mayor came out and said very hard to me to see how Jews continue living in France um somebody in Spain I think a deputy mayor of a Major's friend Spanish City said exactly the same thing really hard to see why Jews would continue to live in Spain um that's an unbelievable thing to be hearing from public leaders in Western Europe in 2023 in the middle of the 21st century so ironically we're in a situation as a Jewish people where the world is saying yeah maybe this whole Jewish State thing really isn't so sustainable because the cost to the surrounding populations is so overwhelming and at the same time we're here and we're seeing this in America also um you know at the same time uh it's not clear that the Jews can live anywhere else you know my brother lives on the upper west side of New York and he and I were speaking last night uh he went to synagogue yesterday morning at an upper Westside synagogue where Brett Stevens was the guest speaker he said the place was packed you know there was no it was standing room only people were standing in the back and everybody wanted to hear Brett Stevens and their assumption was you know Brett Stevens The New York Times correspondent and columnist and you know brilliant guy is Gonna Come and talk about what can we expect to happen in Israel and he got up and he said I don't want to talk about Israel Israel's going to be fine uh not so quickly and not so pretty but Israel's going to be fine but I'm here to tell you that in the United States this is 1922 and it's going to turn into 1932 and it's going to turn into 1939 it is not entirely clear to me Brett Stevens said that Jews are gonna be able to continue living here now even if that's slightly you know exaggerated because of the Heat of the Moment that's an extraordinary thing for a cerebral thoughtful person like Brett Stevens to say to a group of Jews on the upper west side which has sort of been ground zero for the thriving of Judaism in the United States I mean it's a place where on simat T the Jewish holiday celebrates the Torah they would close West End Avenue so people could dance on the streets I mean it's just an unbelievable thing so we're now by the way if you just want to leave Israel aside for a moment as a Jewish people this has been an unbelievably devastating two months because part of the world is saying yeah Israel cannot be allowed to defend itself if the cost of Defending itself is so many innocent Palestinian lives so maybe Jew should think about something else but in France and in Spain and the United States and many other places around the world Jewish life is becoming dangerous nervous perhaps ultimately untenable I mean can you raise your child in America you and I work at a college together right mean you're the president I work at sham College can you raise your child in America if you know you fundamentally can't send your child child to an American University meaning that if your child is going to go to American University they have to hide their jewishness hide their proj Jewish Israel passion I mean that's not the colleges that you went to when you were an undergraduate it's not the college that I went to When I Was An undergraduate we were openly Jewish and openly you know proud of Israel and it was never an issue I went to Columbia in the late 70s graduated in 81 the Jewish we didn't have a hill L back then but the Jewish student office was literally right next door to the to the Muslim student office was perfectly fine we had our little posters about Israel and flyers about this and that it was totally fine there was never a single incident in the four years that I was at Colombia it's unrecognizable so I mean we're facing we're facing a Devastation for the Jewish people now in which Israel is just the canary and the coal mine and I to say one other thing about this because so then you say well what are we GNA do like if you can't defend yourself here and you can't defend yourself there is this where do you go what's the end game and I was in synagogue yesterday uh and a guy who actually is also a Columbia graduate but he graduated about 1015 years after I did tragically there's many people who graduated after I did um but uh any a brilliant guy lovely guy um in the tech world not surprisingly in Israel and he was saying something what you were saying about you know the horrible casualties in Gaza and it's just you know it's devastating to look at these pictures and then he said something that I thought was really interesting he said what they have forced us into is caveman morality it's us or them and that's just it either we're going to destroy Kamas whatever the cost or we can't live here and that's what I think that's the disconnect between what Joe Biden who's been unbelievable and what Kamala Harris said yesterday in Dubai which was less unbelievable but more expected which is you know Israel has a right to this but you have to you can't keep killing these civilians but what if there's no choice like what if it's either or either we kill Kamas we destroy Kamas but there's a terrible civilian toll or we're much more reticent to have a civilian to we don't it's not clear why Israelis would say to themselves this is a place where I can see my grandchildren growing up yeah and I I think it's important it's hard for me to hear those words I'm a newcomer I've been here two years our listeners don't know you as well as I do Danny you would you're not a right winger not at all no and you were a very outspoken uh critic of BB Netanyahu in the months leading up to the war over judicial reform leading up to the tragedy of October 7th your um your pessimism is important to be heard I don't think people outside of this country have any understanding or have a very limited understanding of the mood there is this is the way I sense it and then you I'll let you comment there is an immense resolve here that this cannot happen again um the antifa like you said yeah it happened again for years eventually we built the wall it helped but we pulled out of Gaza and every few years Hamas ratcheted up the unpleasantness of being an angry neighbor and we'd respond and and and it was sort of um a very depressing uh fatal theater that was played out over the years between the between Israel and Kamas it's different and the world I think the world's catching on how different it is I don't know if most people understand the mood here there's no and that you'll tell me if I'm wrong among my friends which of course is not a representative sample but of my friends of people like myself who've made alah who moved to Israel and Israelis that I've come to know through my being head of the college and and and getting to know people there's not a desire for vengeance there there's not it's remarkably un angry response it is resolve it is we can't put up with with this um we can't sit idly by and allow our daughters to be violated and our children to be abducted and we don't like I don't know anybody who likes the military response it's horrible uh and maybe that's not enough maybe disliking it is not enough maybe we have to stop it and say uh as many not not a large number but I have met people who say we shouldn't have responded militarily we should have just accepted this and done better job in the future of guarding the Border uh I think that's a mistake I'm going to try to write a long essay on that but most people don't feel that way maybe they should but they don't they feel uh violated and there is a um a salience of the violence that is I think again hard for people outside this country to understand a feeling that we were violated not you know when there was a school shooting in the United States everybody feels horrible there's a big argument then about gun control and and and people more in those losses but they're forgotten very quickly whether they should be or not doesn't matter but they are in America unless it was your town you forget about those things and your life goes on and it's a big country this is a small country it's it's 7 million Jews it's nine million people it's like a big town it's really more like a big family and you really have to go to Jerusalem but especially to Tel Aviv and walk the streets and see how many reminders are of the hundreds of hostages and kidnapped abducted people uh are in your face all the time and we don't take it lightly we don't say well that was too bad we go on with our lives no people are desperate to get those people back it is our greatest strength and our greatest weakness and um I don't know how long we can do what we're doing in Gaza and I don't know how long we can do it if it doesn't lead to anything productive right now it just looks like death and I don't think that's going to sell outside Israel and I don't see it selling for very long inside Israel yeah uh I think everything you said is exactly right um first of all let's just clarify I am definitely not a right-winger and end during this whole judicial reev reform thing was pretty much cancelled by a lot of the right by people that you know very well uh who just said you know he's kind of lost his mind he's gotten hysterical about how terrible this right-wing government is and he's gone overboard and but I think it was a terribly it was a terrible immoral right-wing government and it was also incompetent which we're now seeing and not because of the war part but it's been unable to take care of people's medical Financial employment needs I mean in a whole aray of ways we're seeing what a complete disaster that government was by the way u bi's in a very very bad spot because he's articulated two gold go for this war the destruction of Hamas and returning all of the hostages very easy to see a world in which he accomplishes neither of those get some hostages out but not all of them batter Hamas very badly but leave sinir and Muhammad de in place in in Gaza and then Israelis have to look around and say my god really even when we decided to pull out all the stops we couldn't win Israelis don't know that feeling there's no such thing as we we did everything we needed to do and we didn't win we've just never had that I mean we sort of had that in the Lebanon war the second Lebanon war but um well really the first Lebanon war but but Lebanon was a a bit more of a of a war of choice in other words we had to go in and try to stop some of the the terrorist attacks on kirat which is a town in the very North but it was a different it was a different set of circumstances it was not perceived by most Israelis as being existential I don't know a single Israeli who does not think we should be fighting this I don't know a single one I mean maybe you do and I'm sure they're out there I know one okay well it's probably that's probably the one I you know I just don't I just don't know any Israelis who think that we shouldn't be pursuing this war and by the way I know a lot of American Jews who say to me like where's where's the Israeli left like where are these Israeli progressives that normally I talk to all the time and now I'm not hearing from and I actually said to some person last week I said oh I can tell you where they are they're actually in the cockpits dropping bombs on Gaza that's where the Israeli I mean and that's not cute that's actually true the people who were the head of the protest movement are the pilots who said they weren't going to fly who are now flying 247 they I mean they they went right back to work right away they said they said they weren't going to fly because they did not feel that netanyahu's Coalition represented them and so they stopped doing their Reserve training uh in the months uh of judicial reform that that were so contentious and then as soon as the October 7th happened they ran to their planes and two and a half hours later after it started at 6:30 in the morning 2 and a half hours later they were in the cockpits and everybody else was in their Convoy and truck and car getting to their bases and Reporting and others outside of Israel who had been supporting the protests and been anti BB anti- Netanyahu uh were fighting their way to get back here to defend their country so it it's an extraordinary moment do we have any do you have any optimism Danny do you have any you said before that my pessimism is a little surprising I'm not pessimistic uh uh I think we're gonna I don't know that we're going to destroy Hamas and I don't think we're g to get all the hostages back unfortunately um but I think that certain things have happened to this country that at the end of the day are going to make us much stronger we have been reminded that um we did not move Israel from the Middle East to Western Europe in other words we pretended Tel Aviv that you know you give enough High high-tech companies and enough startups and a lot of you know fancy cafes and bars and and restaurants and you know Tumi stores and you know we don't have an Apple store but you know the closest thing to it and you know you live that kind of a life and you think yeah back in the 40s and 50s and 60s we were in the Middle East but now we're kind of in Western Europe well we're not we are um as people have been calling it now bavil B Jung meaning we're in the Villa that's in the jungle and Israelis are recognizing tragically if you want to survive in the jungle you got to act like you live in the jungle you can't act like you live along the sin or you can't look act like you live along the TS you've got to actually act like you live where you are um and I think this is going to bring Israelis back to where we were 75 years ago a profound conversation about why Jewish sovereignty was an important project in the first place a profound conversation about what kind of a country this needs to be um I do not believe that all of the divisiveness that preceded October 7th has been washed away uh there's in fact polls that are beginning to come out now that show that just below the surface the resentments are still there we're gonna have to figure this out very carefully if B doesn't resign I think we're in for a very ugly political period and it's quite possible that the hundreds of thousands of protesters that we saw about judicial reform are going to seem ply compared to the millions of people who could take to the streets at the end of this war I'm not pessimistic about the future of Israel I'm actually very optimistic about the future of Israel and always have been I think that this is going to spark A Renewed Devotion to the project called the Jewish State and if it seemed you know kind of oh that's cute that's the kind of way my grandparents used to talk about the importance of Jewish sovereignty and building the country and going back to the roots and you know today's Young Tel Aviv startup guys and women saying yeah whatever we don't talk that way anymore they do they do talk that way and the sense of as you pointed out so rightly the sense of um shared Destiny and our determination to get these hostages back um so many people wearing these dog tags that the hostages have asked that we wear um the hostage families of course have asked that we wear I think something very profound is going to come from this but I don't think it's going to be pretty I don't think it's gonna it's going to be horrible for gin and there are many innocent Gins not as many by the way as I think a lot of people think think support for Kamas is much more widespread in Gaza than people want to acknowledge but we don't really know it's like trying to do a a you know a survey in North Korea how in the world are you really going to know what people think of the supreme leader they're not going to tell you one way or the other and the statistics are meaningless so I think we really don't know what people think in Gaza um but it doesn't matter at this point we have to destroy Kamas or we can't live here and uh it has reduced us to doing things that we don't want to do that make us very sad uh but I think there's a determin ation to do it and I think that you know six months from now a year from now two years from now whatever this thing ends uh Israel is going to start over and there people are asking you know what should we call this war well you can't call it the Gaz the Kamas War because we've had a whole bunch of those and can't call it the Gaza War because we've had a whole bunch of those and some people say well you can't call it the Sim Tora which was the Jewish holiday in which the war broke out but it means the joy of the Torah so what you're going to call the joy of the Torah war that seems a little odd and the number of people have said we should call this war the second war of independence and um people say that's ridiculous but it's not there's the second world war there's the second Lebanon war um second war of independence because this was the war where we had a fight an existential battle for our right to exist all over again but not only that this was the war in which a fundament a society came together determined to rebuild we got to rebuild the Army we got to rebuild all those areas especially on the southern border with Hamas but some in the north as well we've got to rethink our entire strategy we have to ask ourselves in the aftermath of the most divisive events in Israel's history in the first months between January and October of 2023 when we almost came to Civil War and now we're fighting as a completely unified unit we have a lot of questions to ask ourselves so I'm not pessimistic I think we're in for a a dark period we're in a dark period but I believe that the Israel that's going to emerge from this is going to be stronger more determined more Jewish self-conscious in a positive way conscious this is not just a Hebrew speaking European country but it's the country of the Jewish people um it's even possible that we're going to emerge with a much deeper relationship with diaspora Jews because we're going to say when we went to war look what happened to them it didn't cause it but it was the excuse for the anti-Semitism to rise up uh we're in this together I think diasp Jews may change Israel M change it's its reaction to some of them the Jewish world is hitting controlled all the basically Mac users have no idea what that means but that means you know reboot your computer um the Jewish world is rebooting everything and I think what we're going to look like in 2026 very very hard to know but I really believe that um you know two three four thousand years into this our darkest periods have always led to periods of Revival and Resurgence the Holocaust led to the state of Israel destruction of the temple led to the birth of what we call rabic Judaism and we have a way as a people of taking very very dark moments and turning them into moments of light and rebirth and what that light and rebirth looks like you never know in the midst of the darkness uh but looking back you can see that it happened and I believe it's going to happen here too let's turn to this question of our relationship with our neighbors uh as you say our relationship with Egypt was pretty good um our relationship with Jordan there was some talk but they've been pretty quiet uh Syria is Syria it's not pleasant lebanon's a mess um they don't have real sovereignty relationship with Iran is awful uh they're a real existential threat they may fall they have a lot of internal problems uh so that's unpredictable but we do have these people in Gaza and we do have these people our neighbors in in the West Bank and the world seems to think that uh there's an obvious solution to this which is that the so-called moderate Palestinian Authority which is Mr abas is is the head of it let's let them to we made a mistake in 2005 we had an election to our disappointment the radicals won the fundamentalists won Hamas but now we have a chance to rectify that we we'll give that to the Palestine Authority and then they'll have the West Bank and Gaza maybe their ways to connect them either uh digitally V virtually corridors there's things that could be done I don't think the world understands that that's not going to work here um aboss has refused to condemn the attacks of October 7th there will be zero correct me if I'm wrong Zero Tolerance of a Gaza that's run by the Palestinian Authority at least right now maybe that'll change um so I am hope my optimism which is it's thin is that at least with Gaza there will be a chance to rebuild it using a governance model that is not a reoccupation God forbid I don't think there's any taste for that here uh the pre2 2005 world where the Israeli Army patrolled the streets of Gaza to protect those the towns and settlements that you mentioned earlier that we eventually took out removed be by the military Jewish settlements because we could not protect them and we wanted to give Gaza the best chance it could have to have some kind of independent life we're going to have to start the world is going to have to start over there with a realistic Vision there are only two positive examples Nazi Germany and wartime Japan somehow the post-war world that followed their destruction turned out really well um I don't know if they're if they're reliably analogous they don't seem to be but but maybe there's something that could be done I expect to have some Epis on this uh down the road to talk about what creative things the world could come up with that would avoid having um people committed to the death of Jews and Israel in charge that's the world we're in right now uh in in Gaza and that's why the statements like we have to eliminate Hamas make sense even though I'm not sure it's possible and I'm not sure what it means it's a lovely aspiration but I think something radically different has to come to Gaza um in the future if this ends with Israel in some sense uh Victorious whatever that ends up meaning you have any thoughts on any of that well I completely agree with you that the Palestinian Authority taking over Gaza as a non-starter I know that everybody in the international world is talking about that Biden says it and I can't tell if he's just saying it because he's got to keep his political opponents and the Democratic party at Bay I think when Kamala Harris I don't think understands the region very well at all uh says it I think she actually believes yeah they're kind of moderate and they can take over the West Bank First of all they're not moderate second of all they're very weak and they're only inow in the West Bank because Israel props them up and Israel props them up because without the without the Palestinian Authority it's going to be Hamas so Israel has always kept abas Ironically in power and but you point out correctly abas um says still says to this very day you know there was no second temple meaning the Jews are fundamentally the Crusaders here in other words the the idea that um the idea that the Jews are indigenous to this land in any way is a hoax the Crusaders are gone the Jews will be gone um he's a holocaust denier he's a holocaust dissertation wasd in Russia yeah but whatever it's it's it's ridiculous he's 88 I don't know how many people who were hardliners their whole lives became you know somehow very different at the age of 88 uh I can't think of a lot of examples of that so while the International Community is talking about um the pH taking over I think there's exactly zero Israeli appetite for that um there's much more isra there's much more Israeli appetite actually for occupying Gaza uh than there is for letting the PA now the question are what are the Alternatives well one alternative that gets laughed at of course is the UN the Hezbollah in southern Lebanon has accumulated about 150,000 Rockets many of them Precision rockets that can hit any Hospital any power grid any Bridge any anything in Israel uh under the un's watch there's and nobody here thinks that the UN is anything meaningful so that's a non-starter there has been a suggestion of NATO troops what if NATO troops actually came into Israel and into the Gaza Strip and patrolled it NATO is a a more serious military force possible NATO along with the IDF maybe I mean is NATO really gonna send faren soldiers into tunnels to track down stuff that Hamas is trying to accumulate it's a little hard for me to imagine an American mother or a French mother or a German mother wanting their kid going into a tunnel and some godforsaken Backwater of the Middle East to protect the country that they don't really care about that much in the first place I am far from convinced that this is not going to be a reoccupation in some way in some way it's hard for me to imagine that the day comes and Israel says okay we're done we're pulling out and we're going back to the old Border first of all it seems to me we're you need to clear out some sort of corridor kilometer wide two kilometers wide so even if they can lb Rockets they can send 3,000 people across the border to burn to pillage to rape to maim to do whatever this is the buffer zone idea there would be a demilitarized doesn't yeah you're right that's the buffer zone but the buffer zone of course is nothing about Rockets you know that's the problem and people think well okay then they won't be able to come across the border but their Rockets can Israeli children would still grow up with bomb shelters as part of their life and that's not what Zionism was about Zionism was about changing the existential condition of the Jew not to be afraid anymore and I think that's what people around the world need to understand that this is existential because it is it is upended the fundamental assumption that Zionism was successful because in creating a state we created a new reality for the Jew how was the Jew of October 7th different than the European Jew in programs in the late 1880s and the 1890s and 1903 in kishinev the answer not at all nobody came to their aid nobody stopped they were butchered they were everything that we've mentioned before we don't have to go into it again um that's the wakeup call for this country and I think that the idea that uh somehow this is just going to go back to the old normal it's not and so if we have to occupy to keep our kids safe I think we're going to occupy to keep our kids safe terrible terrible for them terrible for us we pulled out of Gaza because our soldiers were coming back in body bags daily it was a disaster and that's why arel Chiron pulled out the irony is is that pulling out ended up making things much much much worse than anybody then could possibly have imagined we have to figure this out um well the economist to me occasionally still speaks up there no Solutions only tradeoffs um and I want to say another thing about I think what people hope for what you hear occasionally is we need a Palestinian anir Sadat we need a brave man be a woman we need a brave person to stand up and say this war is not this war that's now 75 years old between the people who lived here when we arrived uh in large numbers we've been here forever but we got a state in 1948 uh the people who are already here didn't like it the people living nearby didn't like it and so we've been fighting that war now for 75 years and we just need someone to stand up and say this isn't good for either side we need somebody to uh say something positive about the potential for peace from both sides a lot of people on the Israeli side have tried and failed very few on the Palestinian side um the reason I think that's true there two possible explanations one is um there aren't very many or any i i i reject that hypothesis I don't think that's true the the problem is is that takes an inordinate amount of courage to stand up against a thug ocracy because they'll kill you uh the threat of violence and the potential to use violence to maintain power um is very very stifling of of descent now the the Soviet Union fell which is an extraordinary historical phenomenon they were a authoritarian uh group of thugs they had an enormous prison system that was uh they put people in without hesitation they put people in for you know wrapping a fish in a piece of newspaper that had a picture of Stalin up against the fish and a neighbor would report that and then you'd go to the goog for five to ten years and you'd say well five 10 years is horrible but it often was a desence because you were treated so poorly there so that it that that system collapsed we can we're not going to talk about why but we have something similar tragically in in Gaza if you have a group of people who are willing to use violence to stifle descent at the level that they do you don't get need to send and it's remarkable to me that in this moment I seen a handful but a handful is actually an enormous number a handful of of video clips of people being interviewed in Gaza or in the West Bank but it's mostly in Gaza complaining about Hamas they're interviewed on Al jazer which is a Qatar uh news station and they cut off the interview but the clip somehow gets gets captured that this person despite the threat to their life was willing to say that the people who perpetrated October 7th brought Hellfire on the people of Gaza which yeah you can debate till the cows come home whether it's Israel's fault that there are civilian casualties or whether it's hamas's fault for embedding themselves in civilian areas and I wish I lived in a world where we would say no we can't we'll just take it we don't live in that I don't want to live in that world again it's a interesting ethical and philosophical and Theological question I hope to write something about it others will too but if you don't in in in a world where weakness or or a spirit of compromise is punished with death you don't get a lot of people willing to stand up so somehow My Hope which is unrealistic My Hope Is that we can create some kind of governance of Gaza maybe the West Bank or people who are who just want to have a better life for their children can can Thrive and become the leaders of their people and there are such people there are a handful of those people many of them are not on the ground they're they're outside of those areas because they know they'll be killed if they live there but maybe we could have that world someday and and we could live side by side that's the Hope um I'm less optimistic about that than than you are point out the I think the the Soviet Union fell but it kind of still exists I mean Putin's world and if you look at Russia and Ukraine these things have a way of coming back so yes it's not quite as big as it was before but it's every bit the Menace that it was before forward to the international order uh this at the end of the day I think is a battle not between Israel and the Palestinians this is a battle between the west and an axis of China Russia Iran we're just fighting Iran it just doesn't look like we're fighting Iran but we're being attacked by houis in Sudan who are funded by Iran we're being attacked by kalbah in the north which is funded by Iran we're being attacked by obviously Hamas in the South which is a is a is a an extension of Iran not directly funded is quite the way that Hezbollah is but still it's Iran um and the United States which has got aircraft carriers defending us which we're very very very grateful for um this is really the West versus the Iranian Chinese Russian access axis and um this is really at the end of the day not really about Israel and Kamas at the end of the day this is really about whether or not the West has it in itself to defend the idea of liberal democracy um and that is both the potential for the spreading of this thing much wider than the regional conflict that currently is but it's also a I think a hope for people to come to understand that and to understand that Israel is just the canary and the coal mine if the West allows Israel to go to a place where it cannot defend itself as a liberal democracy um they're coming for the rest of the West too and um which makes this not only about Israel but it makes it about good versus evil to a very legitimate to in a very real way that doesn't make it any less horrible to watch what's happening in Gaza it doesn't make the civilian casualties in Gaza any less heartbreaking because they really are heartbreaking uh but I think it adds to a sense of determination that we have to win not only for Israel and the future of the Jewish people uh but we have to win somehow or another for the future of freedom and for the future of democracy um I believe we will my guest today has been Danny gordis Danny thanks for being part of eon talk Russ thanks for having me it's always a [Music] pleasure this is econ Talk part of the library of economics and liberty for more econ talk go to econt talk.org where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation the sound engineer for econ talk is Rich Goyette I'm your host Russ Roberts thanks for listening talk to you on Monday [Music]

Channel: EconTalk

Views: 5,569

Keywords: EconTalk, Russ Roberts, Podcast, Liberty Fund, Econlib, Economics, Daniel Gordis, Israel, Shalem College, Oslo Accords, Second Intifada, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Hamas, Jewish

Id: jqYMG8BYScE

Length: 64min 9sec (3849 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 01 2024