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Ask Haviv Anything
Episode 17: The Gaza war began 25 years ago, a conversation with Matti Friedman
00:52:36
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- [00:05]
A
Hi, everybody. Welcome to Ask Khaliv Anything. We are recording on May 25, Sunday on May 24, yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the Israeli withdrawal from South Lebanon from an 18 year military presence in South Lebanon. That taught us a great deal about this moment in Israeli history, about the sort of enemies we face. And we're going to dive deep into that experience and we're going to dive deep also into those lessons, how those lessons have changed Israel, how those lessons really echo profoundly in the current conflict in Gaza and with Iran and Hezbollah nowadays. And we're going to do it with somebody who is absolutely the best person to talk to about these issues, Mati Friedman, who wrote the bestseller Pumpkin Flowers about his experience as a soldier in Lebanon, and I think also about so much more. That book is a remarkable book and I highly recommend it. Before we get into the conversation, I want to tell you that we have a sponsor for this episode. Julian. Frank Cohen asked me to just say that they believe this podcast is a way to teach our story because understanding our past and present is key to building a better future. That is basically the philosophy of this podcast distilled into a single sentence. Thank you, Julie and Frank. And they, like many of our sponsors, dedicated this episode to. To someone who we lost on October 7th. This episode is dedicated to Karmel Gat. She would have turned 41 last week. She was killed last summer. She was murdered by the Hamas fighters who held her. She was kidnapped from Kibbutz Be. We don't know K, but we know people who know K. She's a friend of friends and she was 40 when she was killed. An occupational therapist from Tel Aviv who was actually visiting her family in Kibbutz Beri on October 7 when the terrorists attacked. They killed her mother, Kineret. We had a separate episode dedicated to Kyneret, and she was taken captive together with her brother Alon, sister in law Yerden, and niece Geffen, who were also visiting the kibbutz. So we remember Komil today and thank you for these dedications. It means a lot to us and I think it means a lot. It says something important about the kind of community this podcast is building. Mati, how are you?
- [02:45]
B
I'm okay. Hard to follow that intro with a cheerful answer, but given everything that's going on, I'm fine.
- [02:54]
A
Yes, we have to be able to smile or it's going to be a long time before we smile. Right. Yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon. I remember how surprising it was. I was just Finishing up advanced training, I don't know, month six, I guess, in the infantry. And they were training us for Lebanon. We were learning to lay ambushes in the kinds of low bushes that sort of dot the mountainsides of south Lebanon for Hezbollah. There was this kind of ambush war where Hezbollah would lay ambushes and then the Israeli infantry would lay ambushes. And we spent weeks and months learning how to fight that kind of a war. And then on May 24, 2000, Prime Minister E. Barak gave the order and we were out of Lebanon overnight. Literally overnight. So I want to start with. You were there that night, my company.
- [03:58]
B
I served in the anti tank company of the Naha Brigade. So my company blew up our outpost, which was called Outpost Pumpkin. But by that time I was already out of the army and I'd been very recently discharged. And I remember hearing about the withdrawal when I woke up very early that morning for my job at a post army job, growing roses in a greenhouse very close to the Lebanon border in Western Galilee, which is pretty close to where my parents live. So I remember biking out to the. To the greenhouse to get started. It must have been 5:30am or something. And one of the other workers said, did you hear that they pulled out? And I said, what?
- [04:35]
A
And you were as surprised as the rest of us?
- [04:37]
B
I was as surprised as everyone else. And as someone whose whole military service was shaped by Lebanon, and the Israeli army had been in Lebanon for 18 years by the time it pulled out. I don't think I ever really thought that it could end. Even though there's a lot of talk of withdrawal at the time that the army pulled out, it didn't come out. It didn't come out of nowhere. But the idea that all those outposts could just be blown up and this entire Israeli world that existed in south Lebanon over a period of almost two decades, the idea that it could just disappear overnight was quite shocking. And I. I still remember it. So my friends were there, they blew up the outpost. And I remember thinking about them that morning. Where are they? What did that feel like? It took me years to put it all together, but it was a big night for me personally and for Israeli society. I think in many different ways it made sense.
- [05:24]
A
It made sense to pull out that quickly, right, because it prevented Hezbollah from sort of attacking the forces from behind. It prevented a lot of danger for those forces as they withdraw. At the same time, it. It looked a little bit like running away. That's certainly how Hezbollah played it, right? And Hezbollah really put it out there, and it made Hezboll reputation for the next two decades. So I want to take a step back. Tell us your story in Lebanon.
- [05:57]
B
So I moved to Israel when I was 17. I came for a year to work on a kibbutz. I meant to milk cows for a year. That was the plan. And basically I never went back. And I've been here ever since. It's hard to imagine that it's 30 years, but at the time, the kind of most potent military experience was service in Lebanon. And I think it's important to say for listeners that when we say Lebanon, Israelis don't think about it that much. But when we say Lebanon, we're not really referring to a foreign country, which is Israel's neighbor to the north. We're referring to an experience that many Israeli men had over a period of one or two generations serving in Lebanon up up to the current day. So when we say that the society was shaped by Lebanon and our lives were shaped by Lebanon, I think we're. We're referring to something very specific, which is military service south Lebanon, and not the fact of, you know, a country and a society called Lebanon, which I got to experience later on as a civilian visitor. But Israelis say Lebanon, kind of using that word because we don't have another word for what we experienced. That war, until very recently, did not have a name. But when I came to Israel, if you were a serious combat soldier, that's what you were doing. The kind of the serious war was against Hezbollah, which was in the process of turning from. Transforming itself from a kind of ragtag militia, which it had been in the 1980s, into a very potent kind of army. Basically, it's an arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. It's staffed by Shia Muslims from Lebanon. And it was a very. By the end, it was a very potent military force. And I went into the army in the summer of 97, and by the very early winter of 98, I was in Lebanon, in south Lebanon at an outpost that was, again, in. In a different country. It was in Lebanon, and it was part of the string of outposts that marked the far extremity of what we called the security zone, which was a buffer zone north of Israel's border that was designed to keep guerrillas or terrorists, as we would have called them at the time, to keep them away from. From Israel's border. And there was, you know, there are many outposts in Lebanon, and they all, or almost all of them, had strange names of vegetables and flowers. The whole world was very floral. So my outpost was called Outpost Pumpkin. And nearby was Outpost Hadda or Citrus. And there was also Outpost Red Pepper and Outpost Basil. And there are many other outposts with these funny kind of bed and breakfast names which kind of obscure the reality of these places because these were very grim military bases. They have ringed by earthen embankments and machine guns and concrete bunkers and things like that. And I very quickly was in kind of introduced to this Middle Eastern, very confusing Middle Eastern conflict that had very little to do with the Israel that I learned about in Canada and the Israel that I thought I was moving to when I came here in 1995, which was very much Israel of the Kibo. It's a very European place according to my understanding. You know, Herzl in Vienna, he loomed very large in my story of Israel and the Shoah, of course, and the kibbutz idea and David Ben Gurion and people like that. And then I found myself in this very Middle Eastern war where we were fighting Shia gorillas. Shia Islam did not figure into my day school education about Israel. Our allies in South Lebanon were Arabic speaking Christians. I did not know that there were Arabic speaking Christians at the time. And even the soldiers who were with me in my, in my company at this outpost were, were Jews. I mean, most of them, there were a few Jewish guys, but most of them were Jews. But even the Jews seemed pretty Middle Eastern. Some of them were Moroccan, some of them were Iraqi, some of them were Yemeni. And that was kind of my introduction into this very confusing world of, of the Middle East. And I spent some formative months, I guess many formative months at this outpost in Lebanon. And in a very weird way, I became Israeli in Lebanon, which is kind of something that's been shaping my life as a journalist and as a writer since then.
- [09:49]
A
I think it's interesting to read Pumpkin Flowers. I never served in the draft army in Lebanon at all. It was almost entirely for me. I was in the Nachod Brigade. We were in the west bank and a little bit Gaza. And I served also in most of my service actually in this new unit established to bring Haredi soldiers into the army, which was almost entirely in the West Bank. So I'm profoundly curious because I genuinely don't know what was that experience like.
- [10:22]
B
It's a kind of warfare that I think is more familiar to us now than it was at the time. Because what I think what we saw Lebanon was really the birth of 21st century warfare. And of course we didn't know that at the time. And you know, we were 19 years old, and we couldn't be expected to understand anything. But at the time, we really didn't even understand Lebanon as a war because it didn't feel like the Om Kippur war and didn't feel like a mobile war where tanks are advancing and tanks are retreating and territory is being captured. And it was treated as something. Then we did this thing in Lebanon we didn't know even to call a war. And it wasn't called a war. It wasn't defined as a war until a few years ago. And actually I had something to do with it. We could talk about that if you want, but, you know, we didn't get a ribbon of any kind. It was considered just this weird thing that we were doing. In retrospect, what we were seeing was the laboratory in which 21st century warfare was being invented. And what it was was a kind of war that, that didn't involve territory changing hands. It was kind of a hit and run war where there were IEDs, which was a term that was not in use at the time. But we dealt with them a lot, including, including me one night that I still remember. But we called them mit anim, which in Hebrew means payload. It's kind of just a very technical term. You know, mortar fire. The. The other guys would kind of pop up and disappear. You never really saw them. And they weren't really interested in facing the Israeli army head on. And I think the last component. So of course this is all very familiar to anyone who follows Iraq and Afghanistan. I. It's just, it is what we think of now as warfare. But at the time, it wasn't yet clear that this is what warfare was going to look like. That, you know, it was going to be armed guys popping out of civilian homes, wearing civilian clothes, you know, hiding their gun under the bed, taking it out to shoot at the soldiers, hiding it back under the bed. And then you have to kind of figure out in the civilian landscape who the terrorists are and who are the civilians. And this is just warfare, as we know, and in its tragic 21st century form. And we're seeing it literally today in the Gaza Strip. But we've also seen it over many years and the American experience in Iraq and the American experience in Afghanistan, and there are many other examples. But the last component that I would say, and maybe one of the most important ones, is the use of media, which is something, again, we take it for granted in 2025, but in the 90s it was new. And in fact, the force that really pioneers it is Hezbollah. And they don't get enough credit for it. But Hezbollah understood the importance of video before almost anyone else. And in fact, the most kind of potent illustration of this, the most effective use of this early on, happened at the outpost where underserved Outpost Pumpkin. And it happened at the very end of October 1994, October 29, when Hezbollah attacks the outpost. They managed to get up on top of the earthen embankments of the outpost. The soldiers were disorganized. They weren't really, you know, paying attention, and they were caught off guard and a bunch of them were wounded. One of them was killed. The Hezbollah guys get up on top of the outpost and they plant a flag on the outpost and then they run away. And one of the Hezbollah guerrillas who attacks the outpost is not carrying an RPG and he's not carrying an assault rifle. He's carrying a video camera and he films the whole thing. And within a very short period of time, less than a day, they had broadcast the video of what looked like the capture of an Israeli outpost across the Middle East. This is the beginning of satellite television. This is 1994. It's the beginning of commercial television in Israel, which had only started a year or two earlier. So now you can really move information across national borders in a way that was not possible before. And Hezbollah understood that this had a. That if you're a weaker side fighting a stronger side, then one of the equalizers is this battle for people's brains. And if you can produce images that kind of galvanize your supporters and demoralize the enemy, then it doesn't really matter what your battlefield accomplishments are. So they didn't capture the outpost. They, they planted a flag and ran away. But they cut that part from the video so you don't see them running away. It looks like this act of heroism. It kind of looks like Iwo Jima and Hezbollah does this again and again throughout the 90s, until Israelis become convinced that they're actually losing the war against Hezbollah. Even though it wasn't really a military contest, Israel couldn lose the war in South Lebanon, but Israelis were convinced that they were being out fought and outsmarted. So Israelis are subject to this kind of information campaign over a prolonged period of time before people really realize how these things work. So this is pre smartphone, it's actually pre Internet. And Israelis still think that if you know, the hill isn't captured, then the enemy hasn't won, which makes sense if you're an old fashioned military person. So after this incident at outpost pumpkin in 1994, the army says nothing happened. You know, we lost a soldier, a few people were wounded. But there's been no change to the deployment of the IDF in South Lebanon. And Hezbollah is just showing this video, which is kind of reality tv. It's before anyone ever used the term reality tv, but they've completely run circles around the IDF because it doesn't matter if you capture the hill or not. It matters whether people think you're winning or not. And you can really play with people's perceptions. And Hezbollah was one of the first actors of this kind to understand that the real battle, the real terrain you're fighting for is mental terrain and not physical terrain. In many ways, the 21st century was being born in South Lebanon. And I think if you. If we understand this strange war as it evolves throughout the 1990s, this kind of weird black box for Israelis, which no one really knows how to talk about and is barely discussed, and there are very few books about it, if we understand what happened In Lebanon, the 21st century makes a lot more sense.
- [15:53]
A
One of the really remarkable things to me about that war, generally, the Lebanon War, 1982 onward, in other words, the entirety of the 18 years, is that Hezbollah had one huge advantage that that kind of psychologically based warfare could play off of, which is that Israelis did not entirely understand as a people what the heck the fighting was for. In other words, when Begin launches the war. But in the spring summer of 1982, it's called the Peace for Galilee war. And the goal is to push the terror groups that have been absolutely horrifically terrorizing northern Israel, including massacres of children by commandos who get into a school in the Mailot massacre, for example. And there's been this constant, constant spate of terrorism from Lebanon and mostly from Palestinian terror groups. And Begin and Defense Ministeron launched this war. And from the very beginning of the war, there is a question of what are the goals? Where are we going? Sharon famously pushes the forces all the way to Beirut. It's not clear if Begin even knew. There were a lot of different parts of Israeli governance that had very different goals. That's something that will seem familiar to Israelis right now. Where you can a finance minister who declares, we're going to resettle Gaza and various other parts of the government, that that is exactly not what they want. And certainly an Israeli public that is not there. Girahelnik was part of this elite unit that had taken this fortress called the Buffoor, and he was killed there. And one of the really tragic moments of the very beginning of the war was when Begin and Sharon on June 7, 1982, go to visit the Buffoor. And it's supposed to be a sign. The Buffoo was. It's Beaufort. It's French for beautiful fortress. And it was supposed to be a symbol because from the Beaufort, Palestinian terror groups had just been shelling Israeli towns in the Galilee. And the capture of it very, very early in the fighting was supposed to be a symbol of the success of the speed of the efficiency of this war. And so Begin and Sharon visit. And. And one of the things that comes out of that visit, which is televised and broadcast on Israeli television, is that they don't seem to know that six soldiers died in the battle to take it. And so they say things like, nobody died. And Goli Halnik's mother, for example, her name is Raya, she goes to sleep that night having watched a broadcast of the prime minister and defense minister saying nobody died. And early in the morning, I think it was, officers knock on her door and tell her her son had been killed in battle. And she is a poet who had written poems, never published all through Ghoni's life about him. And then she publishes this book, this very mourning kind of book about her son's death and becomes one of the leaders of the opposition to the war, of the protest, to the war that is this movement that slowly gathers steam. Again. If you're hearing a little bit of this, the protests today are different, and I really want to get into why and how they're different. But it's a war that unlike 73 where they invaded, unlike 67 where they placed a naval blockade and declared they were about to invade, unlike 48, unlike 56 where they were suddenly unified, all the Arab states around us were unified under Nasser and threatening Israel constantly. And there was this sort of imperialist French, British thing to try and get the canal. But the Israeli participation in the 56th war, people can look it up. If this is all Chinese, it's fine. It doesn't matter. The point is there was real sense of being surrounded and desperate and up against a wall. 82, there wasn't. 82 was a radically different kind of war of a very powerful country that knew it was powerful, that was going to reshape the region, reorder the region. And it produced from day one a kind of social protest. Mothers of soldiers who died in Lebanon would produce the Four Mothers movement that would really seek to complet, fundamentally change how Israelis think of war. When Hezbollah was producing those videos, when Hezbollah was showing one Soldier dying, another soldier dying. This sort of staccato of attempts at convincing Israelis they were losing, they really played on a thing that was really profound in Israeli society and was already happening in Israeli society. There already were protests. There already were grieving parents who were not playing the role the grieving parents played in 48 or 67, where their job was to be silent and hold everyone together and show the strength of the nation. What was the war for? In other words, it wasn't that Israelis were weakened in the sense that they weren't willing to fight for Israel. It was that it wasn't clear that sticking around in Lebanon for 18 years was fighting for Israel. It was producing enemies that had not been there before. Do you think Hezbollah's kind of war in that time, in that period, was a success?
- [21:01]
B
It depends what you mean by success. I mean, I think that's one of the key points here. If success is building a good society where your citizens can live good lives and make some progress and send their kids to school, I mean, then Israel is succeeding and our enemies are failing. And you can see it in Lebanon, you can see it in Gaza, and you can see it in Syria, and you can see it basically everywhere. I mean, we define success in Israel, most of us, as having a decent country where we can live and speak Hebrew and express our culture and be safe most of the time. And that's really been the way Zionism sees success. And that's why Zionism has been successful, because we aim for a kind of practical success in the real world. I think Hezbollah, like Hezbollah, which I guess we should say literally means party of God, or a group like Hamas, which means the Islamic Resistance Movement. It's an acronym. These groups have a completely different idea of what success is, and they have a religious script in their head, and they think that they're channeling the will of God as expressed through scripture. And for success means the eradication of the infidels and the construction of some kind of Islamic government. And that might take one generation or two generations or 10 generations, and it doesn't matter. And it's not about good lives for the people who are, you know, in Gaza or in Lebanon or in the west bank right now. It's a completely different vision, and there's a real clash there. And that's. I mean, I think you can interpret it as an Achilles heel for Israel, because Hezbollah will film themselves standing on a pile of rubble, waving a flag and say that they've won. And what are you supposed to do with that? As an Israeli, you can keep hitting them until they stop videoing themselves on a pile of rubble and claiming victory. But they never will. And we're seeing that in Gaza right now. They're not going to surrender. There's no moment where they kind of come out and say, okay, you win. It just doesn't work that way. So we have to, I think, remember that we define success in a different way. And for us, success is not, you know, videotaped victory parade of soldiers walking through the street. For us, success is basically what I did this morning, which is to get up in Jerusalem and take my kid to school and he's gonna, you know, learn today. He's gonna learn Hebrew and he's gonna learn Tanakh and he's gonna learn math. Then he's gonna come home from school. And that's kind of what the Jews here have been out for. And it's why we've been successful. But our enemies interpret success in a very different way. And that really becomes clear in Lebanon too, which is we really misunderstand what Hezbollah wants. A lot of Israelis, including me, by the way, and I was very young, so I kind of give myself a pass. But we understood Hezbollah as a kind of Viet Cong type movement. So it's kind of an ideological movement. But they're interested in a piece of territory. So if you give them the piece of territory that they want, then the war will end. Not really under underlies the protest movement which you mentioned, which is such an interesting episode in Israeli history, called the Four Mothers. But it's happening at the same time, the 1990s, when, you know, the Oslo peace process is happening. So a lot of Israelis have the idea that the Palestinians are also interested in a piece of land. And if you piece of land, then the war will end. And ceding that land is very painful for Israelis. But a lot of us believe that if it ends the war, it's worth it. And that understanding of movements like Hamas and Hezbollah is a complete misapprehension of what they are. And all you have to do is kind of listen to what they say and you can understand what, what they want. They have a religious idea, and our presence here is anathema to their religion. And, you know, I respect their honesty, but I think we have to take it very, very seriously. So there's this real surprise, I think, among many Israelis when Israel withdraws from Lebanon in the. And at that time we have the most left wing government that we've ever elected. It's the Barak government. And Barak's trying to strike a peace deal not just with the Palestinians, but also with the Syrians. And he pulls out of Lebanon and it erupts in the worst explosion of violence that we'd ever seen. And it's this real kind of epic change which in a very cosmic way happens in the year 2000, which, I mean, if you were kind of writing the script, it would have to happen in the year 2000. But in the year 2000, the Israeli left and the dreams of peace that had always animated the Zionist movement and the idea of a two state solution and the idea of partition and the idea of a kind of, you know, compromise that allows people here to get on with their lives, which had really been part of the Zionist vision since the 1930s, maybe even before. It's blown to pieces in the year 2000 because Israel pulls out of Lebanon and that fall, Hezbollah attacks again along the border and they kill soldiers and they kidnap soldiers and Abarak is making these very, very dramatic and kind of dangerous peace offers to the Palestinians. And. And the second intifada erupts that fall. And then we have suicide bombings on buses and cafes and they blow up the cafeteria at the university campus where I was studying Islamic studies a year or two later. And we're in the new Middle east of the 21st century, which is very different from the new Middle east that we'd pictured in the 1990s. And all of this has a lot to do with the Lebanon withdrawal because Hezbollah shows what is possible. Hezbollah shows everyone that you don't have to negotiate with Israel. You don't have to make accumulating compromises, you don't have to cede land. All you have to do is keep hitting the Israelis and you have to keep killing soldiers and you have to keep producing these videos and you have to keep demoralizing the Israelis and eventually overnight they will pick up and they'll run away. And I remember that fall, the fall of 2000, I was a student at Mount Scopus studying Islamic studies at Hebrew University. And I saw. I would watch Palestinian television sometimes and I saw these videos that interspersed shots of Palestinian protests in the west bank with shots of the Israeli withdrawal from South Lebanon. So, you know, the message was obvious, right? We just have to do what Hezbollah did. So no more negotiations now we're going the root of the party of God and indeed the Palestinians very much do. And Hamas becomes even more influential. And that all kind of leads us to the current disaster in Gaza.
- [26:50]
A
This is a completely new kind of enemy. We had had wars with our Arab neighbors, and they were limited wars with specific objectives, and the Arab armies knew when they were defeated. So you're describing the beginning, the invention through this Shia revolutionary concept that Hezbollah took from the Iranian regime of a religious revolutionary forever war. And. And maybe the tragedy is that Ehul Barak did not grasp that if you pull out In May of 2000, by September of 2000, Palestinian politics will have understood that, and that will have become the primary objective of the Palestinian ideological movements and ideological factions as well. And by the way, everything hamas did on October 7, it drew from Hezbollah the alliance that was at first sort of, what do you know strategically. What do I know strategically? And then it became a deep and close alliance. Hama and Hezbollah believe that the other one is. Each believe the other one is absolute heretics who will be judged, you know, will burn in the hellfire. But nevertheless, after the Jews are dead, in other words, first you kill the Jews, then you turn on each other. And they're both very comfortable with that situation. And so they've become really deeply intertwined. The money for October 7, a lot of the wisdom and preparation is something the Hezbollah itself was preparing and was putting videos on the Internet of it, training to cross the Israeli border that way, take mass numbers of hostages, build tunnel systems. So we've spent 25 years in the shadow of the decision to let Hezbollah win. In Hezbollah's own sense of the conflict. Do you think Israeli society now. Now knows that? Now knows differently? And let me just maybe put it a little bit of a different way. For Hezbollah, it doesn't matter if you actually capture the hill. It's about affecting perception, creating this sense of a long arc of despair for the enemy. For the Israelis, I think it did the opposite. As long as the Israelis thought there was a way out, the Israelis pursued it hungrily. Even when the left collapsed in the second intifada, the right then picked up that baton of unilateral withdrawal in a big way in 2005. The Gaza withdrawal was Likud. And Sharon himself appears to have thought that he was next going to withdraw from the west bank, because that's what his deputy after he had a stroke, his deputy, eudolmert, in the 2006 election said it openly. Sharon was going to also pull out of something like 90% of the west bank. And Olmert ran on that platform and won in an election that crashed likud down to 12 seats. So the Israeli political right tried the territorial concept that the enemy wants certain amount of territory, and that's something that maybe in the long term, we can actually give up and everything every. And then came the Second Lebanon War, the kidnapping of Shalit that starts a fighting in Gaza in June. And then July 12, 2006, Hezbollah crosses the border, kills four Israeli soldiers, kidnaps two, and the second Lebanon war is underway. And so that's when we really begin to learn and we do nothing. Since then, Netanyahu's essential political careers do nothing, because the enemy is not an enemy that is willing to negotiate. That's their whole concept. And that brings us to October 7th. And on October 7th, we discovered they will burn down Gaza. So I guess my two questions are they were wrong. In other words, their limit, what they thought they were doing to the Israelis was causing tremendous and deep despair, because this will never end. What they ended up doing to the Israelis is create this grim determination to actually destroy the enemy, because leaving the enemy alive is untenable. If Hamas on the ruins of Gaza will still stand up and fight, then we haven't finished the war. And if that's all Hamas is, Gaza cannot. And by the way, what Hezbollah was doing to Lebanon over that period when it was heroically causing despair among the Israelis by its own propaganda vision of itself, was actually demolishing Lebanon from within. And that's true everywhere you go, everywhere where you have this permanent, forever war of the revolutionary jihad. Those are societies that were crashed by those very forces. Everything this kind of idea touches, it destroys. Are you optimistic today? In other words, have we figured out the path out which is just determined grimly to destroy that enemy? Or do you think it's still working? Or how do you understand that?
- [31:27]
B
I think you're right in your analysis of what this kind of ideology has done to the societies where it festers. I mean, I was just actually up north yesterday, very close to the border with Lebanon, near Metula, and you can see on the other side of the fence, just ruins where there used to be villages because these vil were militarized by Hezbollah. And, you know, a lot of people living there weren't Hezbollah fighters. And they've lost everything because this kind of. This tactic, the, you know, the endless war tactic, takes root in their towns and builds tunnels. Oh.
- [32:08]
A
That was an alarm. That was a siren. But for five seconds. What do you want to do?
- [32:11]
B
Do I still have it here? I guess I should go to the mad.
- [32:15]
A
Okay, we'll pick up.
- [32:16]
B
I'll be back in 10 minutes.
- [32:26]
A
Yes, I'm with you.
- [32:28]
B
I guess it depends what you mean by working. You know, what we think working is, is not necessarily what they think working is. So for a group like Hamas, if you think that their goal is to create, create viable society, then yes, clearly they're failing. Gaza is in disastrous shape and the images that we're seeing from there are heartbreaking and normal life is impossible and a lot of innocent people are caught up in the carnage, and it's terrible. If you think that their goal is endless religious war to further the direct commands of God, then, you know, I think we have to accept that for them it might be working. I think we have to kind of be willing to accept these are people who see things in a very different way and not to impose Western frameworks onto them. I think that the Israeli left did that for a long time, and I would place myself more or less in that camp, although I don't know exactly what it means anymore. But I think that for many, many years we just wanted them to want what we want. So we decided that they should want a two state solution and that they should want some kind of society built along Western lines and that they should want more or less what we have in Israel. And then we just decided, decided that that is what they want. And then we kind of acted accordingly in our own politics. Whether it was the Oslo Peace Accords or the withdrawal from Lebanon or the withdrawal from Gaza, and the kind of unilateral idea that replaced the Oslo Peace Accords, that this was all based on the idea that if the Palestinians or the Lebanese or whoever could only have a piece of territory to work with, that they would, that they too would be free to build a state that looks like Israel. And I think we have to accept that many people in those societies, not all of them, and I don't know what the real numbers are. Many people in the societies do not want this. What they want is to obey the will of God no matter what the price. And if that means they die, okay, and if that means their families die okay, and if that means that tens of thousands of people die, then that's okay, because they are obeying the will of God. And the leadership of Hamas explicitly says this. And I don't think it's, you know, just rhetoric for the base. I think that these are true believers. And I think that anyone who grows up with religion in their own home, whether you're Jewish or Christian or Muslim, and you're used to this kind of thinking, I think you can understand where they are. So I think we have to accept that for Hamas this might be working right. If the idea is to kind of stoke the endless religious war and fan the flames of enmity to Israel and Jews, not just across the Islamic world, but in the West. It's working. Whether this has been a short term for. Whether this has been a short term success for Hamas, I think it's hard to argue that whether this will be a long term defeat for Israel, I think that's an open question. I think it, you know, very much matters how our own leadership handles it. But I think if we zoom, you know, if we fast forward ahead one generation and two generations, we'll have. We'll have to see. I'm not sure that Hamas is wrong about the long game that they're playing. So that's why I'm not too quick to say that what they're doing isn't working. And a lot depends. And you asked if I was optimistic. And a lot depends on what our own leadership does. And I think that here too, Lebanon has a lot of lessons for us. And you mentioned them, you touched on them. I mean, Lebanon was an incredibly divisive war because the army is sent into this war that doesn't enjoy a national consensus. And people are not told the truth about what the war is about. Right. They're told we're only going into Lebanon a bit to push the PLO away from the border. It turned out that the plan is actually to get all the way to Beirut and try to engineer a replacement of the Lebanese government to install a government that will sign a peace agreement with Israel. And the plan goes completely off the rails. And the Israeli army finds itself kind of engaged in this, this very complicated civil war inside Lebanon and ends up getting stuck there for 18 years. And there's this incredible protest movement in Israel, and the army kind of seems like it's coming apart at the seams. And what we learned is that you can't really fight a war in Israel without a national consensus behind it. And it's very hard for leadership that isn't trusted to lead the nation into some kind of prolonged and costly conflict. And we're seeing a very close repeat of that right now because, as you know, Khabiv, and you've written about it so well, there's an incredible determination in the Israeli public. And the government was given a year and a half of just kind of almost a blank check, public support, reservists showing up. A lot of people who didn't like this government set aside those reservations after October 7th and went to save the country and did so. And now a lot of that has been squandered. And if you look at polling information, more than two thirds of Israelis don't trust the government that says sending our children and in some cases us, into war. And that includes about a third of the people who voted for this coalition. So you have a leadership that does not enjoy the public trust and does not enjoy the trust of all of the reservists who are currently being sent into battle to possibly die for war aims that seem very unclear. So we're seeing a repeat of this attempt to run a war without unifying the country behind the goals of the war. And just as it didn't work in Lebanon, it's not going to work now. And Israeli society is under incredible stress because of. Because of this. You have this kind of external darkness which, you know, we just tasted a few minutes ago, and we had an incoming ballistic missile from Yemen, which is more or less a daily occurrence these days. And we have, you know, the threat from Gaza, and we have various external threats. But I think what people are more depressed about is, is the sense that we. That our society is coming apart, that our. That our leadership can't be trusted, that we look at our leaders and we don't see people who have a competent sense of where this war is going to. We don't necessarily trust their goals. And we love this country and are willing to do a lot to save it, maybe almost anything to save it. But we feel, many of us feel that this willingness to sacrifice is being squandered by leadership that doesn't deserve it. And that has very clear echoes to anyone who knows the story of Lebanon beginning in 82.
- [38:05]
A
I think that's a really important point. You can fundamentally agree with Netanyahu's strategy and vision and leadership and still grasp this point and still agree with this point, which is that we're led in this time when morale is a major arena of the war and the enemy has built out a fast and complex and sophisticated strategy for undermining Israeli morale. The whole story of those hostage release ceremonies, those humiliations, the whole point of taking hostages, everything that Hezbollah began with those videos in the 90s, is about morale. And then you have a political leader whose fundamental objective, one of his certainly fundamental objectives since October 7, was to survive politically to the point where he won't visit victims of these great strategic mistakes, he won't visit massacre sites and communities who were massacred on October 7th, and he won't address the Israeli public for months at a time. That's a huge hit to morale. And people don't understand that when you're talking about the they you talk about Netanyahu's failures in this war. And I think there have also been tactical and strategic failures caving to Biden, things like that. But we're not. I have two brothers in law in Gaza. I have family. I have a friend who was killed in Gaza in a tank on a specific operation to try and rescue hostages where there was intelligence that hostages were in a certain place. And so the idea that we where people criticizing Netanyahu now are suffering from an Israeli version of Trump derangement syndrome, or that we're having an elite war with a deep state, all that stuff borrowed from the American discourse, as though the Israeli left isn't completely and massively mobilized to the war, as though everyone doesn't have family in the war, as though the opposition isn't by percentage more mobilized for the war than coalition voters, the ultra orthodox parties, et cetera. So, so it's such a different discourse within Israeli society than the English language discourse about Israeli society in places like the American, for example, the American right that really wants to like Bibi and don't understand why even Israelis who are fairly hawkish like me, see in him one of the great weak links of this actually incredibly courageous and mobilized society that knows the enemy, understands the enemy.
- [40:34]
B
I agree, I agree. By the way, I think that was very well put. And I think that's something that doesn't often it's not translated enough to, even to Israel's supporters abroad. I think people kind of assume that it's more or less like America where these, where these issues tend to be more theoretical. Do you support the war? Do you support the leader? Do you not support the leader? And people maybe don't completely understand what Israeli society is, which is a tiny society where know a part of this society which is probably not the majority is neck deep in this war. And I just came back, as I mentioned, I was just up north by the border with Lebanon, near Metula, and I was up there for a family Shabbat with my wife's family and just looking at the kind of the, the young males in the family. So I'm 47, so I'm already out of reserves. But looking at the guys who are in their 20s and 30s, one of them is leading a Givati squad in, in Gaza, one of them was just shot in both hands in Gaza and is recovering. One of them is doing reserve duty on the Hermon and the list goes on. And that's just a regular Israeli family. So the idea that, you know, this. Of this deep state thing, which has been imported, or the idea that there's an elite fight, you know, against the. The people, and this is all just an import from America, imported, I think, quite intentionally by. By Netanyahu and by the people around him as a way of staying in power. And, you know, there are some people who have an admiration for that kind of political tenacity and that kind of Machiavellian and ability to kind of spin everything in your favor, but I have zero respect for it in the middle of a war where literally people are dying every day. And I have a nephew who's in Gaza in a very kind of frontline type unit. And the son of the guy who runs the grocery store in my neighborhood was killed in the engineers, and the son of the guy who runs the bakery that I go to was killed in the paratroopers, and the son of good friends of mine from our synagogue was killed in a tank a couple months ago. And I could go on. So this is a very personal war for Israelis. It's not a theoretical war. And then the same was true of Lebanon. So when people, you know, opposed the kind of, you know, the 82 invasion of Lebanon, it wasn't some kind of theoretical debate about, you know, geopolitics. It was, is. You know, I. I've gone into the army. I've signed up for combat duty. I'm willing to die for the country. Is my life going to be treated with the respect and the gravity that that deserves by leaders who deserve our trust? And the answer for many Israelis in 82 was. Was. Was no. And the answer, I think, for many Israelis right now is no. And what remains to be seen is how that will play out in. In an election. It had a political price in the 1980s, and it. It will have a political price here, too, whenever we have an election. And I say that Israel has to defeat Hamas, which is really, It's. It's surprising to me how strange that sounds to Western ears, but Israel actually has to win like the allies won in World War II. Israel has to defeat Hamas. And I think that we could have been much more sophisticated about it. And I think this government has made many bad decisions on how to handle the war and how to prioritize the hostages. I think we could have done much better on that front. But I fundamentally agree with the aim of defeating Hamas. It might involve stopping the war for a time and then resuming it. It might involve being smart and kind of light on our feet in a way that this leadership is incapable of doing. But I don't think that there can be any other outcome to this war. It has to be the defeat of Hamas, whatever that looks like.
- [43:51]
A
That's such a profound part of this. 90% of Israelis tell pollsters they're they Palestinians will not stop Palestinians meaning Hamas. But they do say this about the Palestinians writ large and that that's a tragic number will not stop until we are dead. And so if they will never stop, we actually have to destroy that, that piece of, of of Palestinian politics.
- [44:12]
B
Certainly, I mean, one of the ironies of my work at, for the Western Press and I worked for, for years as a reporter for the American media was this constant critique of Israel for refusing to accept a two state solution. That was the critique of Israel. It's hard to remember because it's kind of been vaporized over the past year and a half, but for several decades the critique of Israel was that the Palestinians wanted a two state solution and Israel did not. That the Palestinians were interested in a kind of compromise or kind of partition and that the problem was that Israel was not giving them am the compromise. And I myself wrote that as boilerplate, hundreds, if not thousands of times. Boilerplate is text in a news article that doesn't need to be attributed. So the idea that this was, you know, the goal of the Palestinian national movement was a compromise with Israel. And the problem was that Israel was led by right wing leaders who were unwilling to compromise. That was the basic critique of Israel over decades. And it was completely fictional. It was a complete fantasy. And some Israelis believe that fantasy. But after the second intifada starts in 2000, in this year that we're talking about, this cosmic year of the Lebanon withdrawal in the beginning of the second intifada, Israelis really get it. They get it. It takes a while before, you know, everyone completely understands what's going on. But Israelis understand in the year 2000 that it's not about withdrawals, that you can't withdraw your way to peace. And it's interesting to see since October 7th that that pretense has largely been dropped. So the term two state solution is not really, you know, heard that much. And now it's about Israel as a fundamentally evil society or, you know, whatever the euphemisms for evil being kicked around in the west are. Apartheid, genocide, you know, those are euphemisms for evil. This is a society that has no right to exist. It's not about a compromise. Peace. Of course, the goal of the Palestinian national movement, whether it is embodied by Fatah or embodied by Hamas, you know, whether it's stated implicitly in the former case or explicitly in the latter case, it's a zero sum game game. And that's tragic for Israel. I would love to see a compromise that ends this conflict. And if it were possible, I would sign one tonight. But for our enemies, who are not just the Palestinians, but hundreds of millions of people who not just support them tacitly, but also fire missiles at us on a pretty regular basis, it is a zero sum game. And if it's a zero sum game, then it's a zero sum game for us, too. We can't be expected to keep pretending that it's something else and that we can just compromise. And we're going to elect a moderate leadership and we're going to go for compromise. If it's a zero sum game, it's a zero sum game. And I think everyone needs to accept that that's what it is. And you're going to have to watch us win at the zero sum game. And it's going to be ugly and it's going to have unpredictable and possibly terrible moral consequences for us as a society. And I think that we need to think about that a lot more than we do. But I think that fundamentally there's an agreement among Israelis about what's going on. And that's very, very important. And that's one of the reasons that I think that we have the wrong political leadership, because there is a fundamental unity among Israelis, which is, which is new. You know, we're not fighting about Oslo anymore. We're not, it's not actually clear exactly what we're fighting about anymore. So a smart government would see that and create a new Zionist majority that could have 60, 70 seats, conceivably under one political umbrella in Knesset. And then we're in a completely different and a much stronger situation. So that kind of fundamental, very grim, very depressing realization that this is a zero sum conflict is, you know, you can work with that if you're a smart Israeli politician looking to the future. And we don't seem to have very many of those, but I hope that's.
- [47:41]
A
I think the great Palestinian tragedy is that the transformation in the minds of both Israelis and Palestinians, or it was always that way. And the Palestinian, certainly ideological elites of a zero sum game, if we're not actually, if we can't be crowbar out of here, that was a catastrophic thing to do to Palestinians to make the conflict that way. And yeah, I agree with you, there has to be a victory before there can be anything that isn't zero sum. So that's what makes so much of the pro Palestinian ideological world in the west, anti Palestinian push, throwing Palestinians into that brick wall. Last question, and thank you so much for your time and patience. Arguably, we're succeeding. Nasrallah is dead. Most of his subordinates are dead. Assad is gone. That great pipeline between Iran and Hezbollah is gone. Iran is fragile. Everybody knows it's fragile. That makes it more dangerous because now it's more eager to pursue a nuke because it's actually perceived as the fragile country that it always was, the fragile regime that it always was. Lebanon is not going to threaten Israel for a while. Israel no longer has any illusions. We are going to live on our sword. We are going to smash Hezbollah every time it raises its head. There won't be a willingness, an Israeli willingness, not for a generation, to let the enemy slowly build up new capabilities in the forever war. Are you optimistic? And are you optimistic that a day after the victory, if there is a victory, there can be a new relationship with our neighbors, with the Muslim world? Is Palestinian politics capable of producing another answer, another narrative, assuming we can actually show just how catastrophically destructive this narrative is?
- [49:35]
B
My take on the events here has always, or not always, but in recent years has been regional. I don't think we're going to get anywhere with the Palestinians in terms of their political leadership. It's just not. They're not going to be able to accept the kind of solutions that are going to be acceptable, even to the Israeli left. I think we're going to see some progress, or we at least could see some progress with countries in the Gulf, like we saw in the Abraham Accords, maybe with the Saudis. We're seeing interesting things going on in Morocco and elsewhere. That is, the chaos in the Middle east often works against us and can also work in our favor if our leadership is smart. But I think we have to understand that it's not going to be a compromise with the Palestinians. There isn't going to be that handshake on the White House lawn that ends this conflict. There isn't going to be a peace agreement. The world doesn't work like that, and the Middle east certainly doesn't work like that. There has to be an acknowledgement by enough people in this region that Israel isn't going anywhere and that fighting a war against Israel is a very unwise idea that has to sink in. And as that sinks in, I think there will be other opportunities that will arise which could ameliorate the situation of Palestinians over time and make their lives better. And over a generation, maybe we'll see the kind of change that makes other possibilities kind of become clear. But sad. I don't think Israel can depend for its future on the emergence of a moderate Palestinian leadership. I'm not looking for dramatic military victories. I just want to live peacefully. Our neighbors can do whatever they want as far as I'm concerned, as long as it doesn't have any effect on me and as long as we can live safe and happy lives in Israel. So when I look at our society, I think that winning really depends on what we do with ourselves. And that is both depressing because we're looking at a society that's very divided and at odds, but it's also there's reasons for optimism there because it's completely in our hands. What we do next, in our hands, what the Jews in Israel decide to do next with our sovereignty is a decision that we have to make, create a leadership that, that expresses that. Then I think Israel's future is very bright. And I say that not as a kind of, not as a starry eyed optimist, but as someone who studied the history of this place over many, many years. And if you look at Israel 77 years ago, what you see is a refugee camp in a war zone, just full of traumatized people who were thrown here and didn't speak the same language and had very few reasons for optimism. And here we are. And what is, is what I think what is in many ways one of the most successful societies on earth. And I think this is a place that's much better than our grandparents or great grandparents could have expected. So if we pull that off, we can pull off the same kind of success in the next 77 years. But it's predicated on having competent leadership, which we have had until maybe the last five years or so, which we do not currently have. So whether or not we're winning, I think is up to us, us. And I hope that we make the right choice.
- [52:21]
A
Matthew Friedman, thank you so much for joining me.
- [52:24]
B
Thank you so much for having me.