← Call Me Back - with Dan Senor
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- [00:04]
Dan Senor
You are listening to an art media podcast.
- [00:08]
Ari Shavit
Yehoshua wanted not was willing. He wanted to sacrifice the Palestinian civilian population in order to break the spirit of Israeli civilian population and turn Western civilian population against Israel. We ironically and tragically played into Sinoir hands and we walked into Sinwar's trap. And now we're faced with the consequences.
- [00:47]
Dan Senor
It'S 11pm on Wednesday, July 30th in Israel as Israelis wind down their day. It's 4pm on Wednesday, July 30th here in New York City as many in the local Jewish community mourn the unfathomable loss of one of our local leaders and friends. In the introduction to these podcast episodes, I often mention the names of Israelis killed fighting in the war. I want everyone, especially here in the Diaspora, to know their names. Today I'm doing something different. I want to spend a few moments talking about an American who was murdered at a mass shooting in Midtown Manhattan two days ago. Her name is Wesley Lapatner. She was 43 years old. She's the wife of Evan Lapatner and the mother of two young children. Wesley was a senior executive at the Blackstone Group. It's how many in the business world knew her. But in the Jewish world, Wesley was the energetic, no nonsense, wise and inspiring member of the UJA Federation of New York's board and as I knew her, a fellow trustee of the Heschel School. In the past couple of days, as so many people in the community have been comparing memories about Wesley, one thread throughout all the stories I have heard was about how Wesley elevated everyone around her. She was fully engaged in Jewish life. She completely got Jewish day schools and why they matter, not just for her family, but for the continued flourishing of Jewish life. She dedicated a ton of time and energy to our day school. Wesley was unapologetic in her support for Israel. She led a solidarity mission to Israel after October 7th. I'm sure many of you know Jews that support Israel but kind of keep their heads down. That was not Wesley. I got the sense that Israel was front of mind for her all the time, especially the hostages. Back in January, as we learned details of a new hostage deal, she wrote me an email after Shabbat. Hi Dan, she wrote Shavuotov. As I'm waiting with bated breath for news around the first hostage release, I took great comfort in listening to your and Nadav's dissection of the current state of play on the ground. I've been closely following the five female soldiers and am waiting anxiously for news of their return but also, frankly, I'm frightened of what we will learn about their conditions and circumstances over the past 15 months. Wesley was honored in December of 2023 by the UJA with the Young Leadership Award. Here's a short clip of her remarks upon receiving the award. We are in the midst of two wars as Jews, the war happening on the ground in Israel and a very real war on antisemitism outside of Israel. Make no mistake, as Jews, we are fighting for our lives. In both instances. We are so fortunate in this room, both Jews and non Jews alike, to have the platform and the ability to make a difference, to call out equivocation, to demand our institutions, provide moral clarity, declare right from wrong, and do what is needed to protect and defend us as a community. To be clear, we not only all have the platform, we also all have, and I repeat, we all have the responsibility. As her friend Caroline Tell wrote on her substack today, and I quote, Wesley used her voice to champion Jewish causes, advocate for Israel, and show up fully and passionately for her family and friends. She carried the weight of it all on her 5:1 frame and made it look not just possible, but purposeful. Close quote we talk a lot on this podcast about Jewish peoplehood. In describing the pain we all felt after October 7, the Jewish educator Michal Bi Tun said, that pain you're feeling is peoplehood, and it's the same pain peoplehood so many of us in the Jewish community feel with the passing of Wesley. May Wesley Lapatner's memory be a blessing. Now, onto today's episode. On Tuesday, in a first since the beginning of the war, the Arab League, which includes Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Egypt, signed a declaration that finally condemned Hamas terror attack on October 7 and called on Hamas to release all remaining hostages. This declaration was issued at a UN conference on reviving the two state solution today. Wednesday, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that the Canadian government will recognize a Palestinian state at the United nations meeting set for September. On Tuesday, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that the UK will do the same. That is, unless Israel takes steps to end the war, resolve the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and recommit to a peace process. These are all conditions for Israel. He did not issue any conditions for Hamas. This follows French President Emmanuel Macron's declaration a few days ago that France will recognize the Palestinian state at the September UN meeting. And all this comes as a new Gallup Poll was released with only one third of American adults supporting Israel in this war, the lowest level since October 7th. As countries around the world pile on condemnation of Israel's conduct in Gaza. US Special envoy Steve Witkoff is is en route to Israel to discuss the situation in Gaza. Joining us to discuss how Israelis are internalizing the images coming out of Gaza as well as the world's rapidly increasing isolation of Israel, is Ari Shavit. Ari was a senior correspondent at Haaretz. He's the author of the award winning book My Promised Land and continues to be a prolific writer and commentator today. Ari, welcome back to the podcast.
- [07:00]
Ari Shavit
Pleasure to be with you, Ari.
- [07:01]
Dan Senor
As I mentioned in the introduction, France had already issued a statement about its push for a Palestinian state and is organizing these efforts. And now the UK has joined. In a sense, I think the UK's approach is even more problematic in my view, and irresponsible because the UK has indicated that it will support a Palestinian state unless there's a ceasefire, unless there is resolution to the humanitarian crisis, getting humanitarian aid into Gaza, unless there's a path to a 2 solution. So it's creating all these conditions, but all the conditions are for Israel to meet and not for Hamas. So it creates some, I would argue, some perverse incentives for Hamas in all of this. There is this pressure mounting formally, obviously, with these moves by France and the UK and others, and then there's the. Just the informal pressure that I think we're all feeling. I want to ask you what impact you think all this has on Israel and Hamas. Let's start with Israel.
- [07:54]
Ari Shavit
Okay, first of all, I think that what we see is two developments that are related here. One is the Western approach, specifically UK and France now, and the other is the Arab approach because there is a Saudi dimension to what you just mentioned. So first of all, I think both countries, or all the countries involved, France and UK especially, are making a huge mistake. I mean, this is the wrong approach to what's happening in Gaza. This is to play into the hands of Hamas and other extremists. But from an Israeli point of view, this is a political diplomatic avalanche. This is something we feared. For years, 15 years ago, I remember my friends and myself warning of a tsunami, of a political tsunami. And for 15 years our friends on the right said, you are fear mongers. This won't happen. What happened is for 15 years, Israel weakened gradually and now the events in Gaza create a real wave that is extremely dangerous now. Why is it so dangerous? One is the isolation of Israel. The whole point, what Sinwar and others, other Palestinians have tried to do for years, is to make Israel the new old South Africa and tragically we played into their hands and this is the outcome. It's basically the lack of political dimension of the war that enabled this. I want a sentence about the Arab dimension because the hope, Netanyahu's hope, everybody's hope in Israel was that this terrible war would lead to actually regional peace. I mean, we wanted regional peace, was closed before the war. Regional peace is one of the reasons the war broke out. The bad guys wanted to destroy it. And now the option of regional peace, mainly with Saudi Arabia, becomes much more difficult because the pictures from Gaza, the combination of the attack on Israel, the isolation of Israel make it much less probable that MBS will take the risk of doing regional peace. So we have two crises here, one our standing in the west and one, the option, the possibility of actually ending this nightmare with regional peace.
- [10:11]
Dan Senor
Let's come back to Hamas here because it's now widely understood that Israel and Hamas were getting very close to a deal. A ceasefire, 60 day pause, return of some hostages, and everyone's acknowledging that Hamas scuttled the deal. I mean, it's not just the Israelis and the Americans that are acknowledging this. The Qataris are saying this, the Egyptians are saying this. Everyone was saying that Hamas didn't want to do a deal. Why do you think Hamas did not want to do a deal?
- [10:36]
Ari Shavit
In my mind, Hamas never really wanted to do a deal. Hamas was willing to consider a deal in the past and in the present. Only when totally surrounded, when having no other option. In the past, what stopped deals was their hope to have a regional war. When that didn't happen, they were willing to go for a deal. Then they were hoping for an Israeli collapse. When that didn't happen, they were willing to consider a deal. Now their wet dream of a political collapse of international isolation of Israel is happening. So there is no reason right now for Hamas actually to go for the deal. So I think that Yehis Sinwar's strategy, Yehya Sinwar wanted not was willing, he wanted to sacrifice the Palestinian civilian population in order to break the spirit of Israeli civilian population and turn Western civilian population against Israel. That was it, that was a strategy. It was a bit like the Viet Cong strategy. Now he failed in breaking Israeli society, but now this option of isolation, it's happening in a sense. Yikya Sinwar is now beginning to win the war after dying and this is what scares me. We ironically and tragically played into Sinwar hands and we walked into Sinoir's trap and now we're faced with the consequences.
- [12:04]
Dan Senor
So I just want to stay on what Europe is doing here, at least the UK and France and some others. I just want to be clear. The UK position is not just about rewarding Hamas in some general sense. It has the effect of actively and very specifically incentivizing Hamas not to agree to a ceasefire. And by the way, as I said earlier, this is done when it was known that Hamas had already just scuttled a deal. Regardless of the UK's grand statements, their denials, their justifications, what Starmer's done, Prime Minister Starmer is effectively, he's making the UK complicit in creating conditions for Hamas to not release hostages. Think about that. The hostages forum, by the way, put out a statement today effectively saying that, that basically Hamas is better off if they don't release hostages. They're better off if there's no ceasefire, because that's how they get statehood. Starmer said if there's no ceasefire, they get statehood. And as we discussed in our last episode, in my last episode with Amit Nadav, that makes October 7th Palestinian Independence Day. So it basically tells Hamas, keep scuttling these deals and these negotiations and you will get to declare October 7th Palestinian Independence Day. That is, I'm not being dramatic by the way this feels to me. This is like exactly what it does mechanically.
- [13:19]
Ari Shavit
I couldn't agree more. But let's put it in context. For decades, people in the west were naive about the two state solution. I'm not ideologically opposed to it, but I was aware that the way it was framed and, and it was tried was flawed. And people insisted that that's the only way. What happened is that because of the drama in Gaza now, the waking up of the world that understood that the old way of doing peace is wrong and actually we should try something more realistic, more creative that perhaps would lead to two states, but in a gradual way, all kinds of more realistic thinking, all that vanishes because people in the west are in a state of ra. Think that what happens with Britain more than France, as you said, is that the public pressure on the government leads it to take steps that are foolish and counterproductive and disastrous. This is the outcome. Ironically, people in Israel who wanted totally to destroy the idea of a Palestinian state, brought back the idea of the Palestinian state. Again, I'm a guy who believes that we should move forward towards something like that, that should have a process. I don't want a one state catastrophe. But I realized 20 years ago that the old notion, the way it was tried, was flawed. Now, because of the tragedy in Gaza, you see the world Going to a totally unrealistic idea which, as you say, helps Hamas.
- [14:51]
Dan Senor
Not that I would ever expect this of the UK and France, but the irony is, if they had said to Hamas, unless there's a ceasefire and a release of hostages, we'll move the UK Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, or we will bless Israel annexing a small piece of territory in Gaza. In other words, it would create incentives for Hamas about things that Hamas and the Palestinians actually care about.
- [15:12]
Ari Shavit
I totally agree that there wasn't enough political pressure on Hamas. I think that the key was Qatar. There should have been much more pressure by America, by the west, on Qatar. I think they hold the key. I think we should have had a political offensive actually putting the pressure in that direction. And I think that would have forced Hamas to be much more flexible. We are now deep, deep in a tragic situation.
- [15:39]
Dan Senor
Okay, so I want to talk to you about what's going on in Israeli society. Israeli society is obviously processing a very grim picture coming out of Gaza on so many fronts. I'm not just talking about the images, but just, you know, every week it seems that Israel loses one or two soldiers or more, and Israelis don't really have a real roadmap of where things are going. It was interesting. We did this two part conversation with Ron Dermer and I was struck not so much by the reaction to it over here in the US I was struck by the reaction to it in Israel because a number of Israelis said, oh, finally we're hearing someone in the government explain the big picture, where it's going, whether you agree with them or disagree with them. It was just that they don't really understand where this goes. So you are totally like a gps, if you will, helping people understand where Israeli society is at. What has changed from your perspective in terms of how Israelis are processing this period that we're in right now?
- [16:32]
Ari Shavit
First of all, let's talk about how Israelis see the tragedy in Gaza right now. I think that the heart of the problem is that while the world forgot October 7th, Israelis are obsessed with October 7th for very good reasons. And I think that what has happened, that because of the horror, because Hamas, in my mind, I insist on saying it every time. Hamas are the new Nazis of the 21st century. And what they did and what they do and how they behave and they never change. They are pure evil. The problem is that we are so much in our pain and it's ongoing pain because of the hostages, because of so many casualties, because so many people died. We in a sense lost some of our Sensitivity and we live in a kind of bubble and we don't see things happening around us. So I think this is what led to through the Gaza tragedy. And what I think what you see today in Israel is that people are beginning to wake up. In the last week especially, things are a bit changing. But still I think there are two things that Israelis find it difficult to internalize. One is the human tragedy in Gaza, and two is what we discuss, the political avalanche which is endangering Israel more than most of its enemies. There is a beginning of a waking up in Israel in the last week, and you see the new actions taken by the af, by Netanyahu, but it's still a kind of too little, too late. We had a conversation then, months ago, when they were considering the Gaza operation. I said, you don't go to war or you don't renew or escalate a war without international legitimacy and internal legitimacy, with all of the hypocrisy and anti Semitism after October 7th. Still, October 7th gave us basic legitimacy for a certain period of time. When we began this operation, or renewed Operation March April, we had minimal international legitimacy and not internal legitimacy because Israeli society was already split. So we walked into this operation in this kind of weakness. And then what happened with the food and the mistakes, they're done, that probably we will discuss have created terrible strategic catastrophe. There is no other way to describe it from an Israeli point of view. You are experiencing a blindness that reminds the one of October 7th. Just in October 7th, we didn't see. We had an intelligence failure and an operative failure. Now you see a political failure. I talked to a very senior Israeli about a week ago, 10 days ago, and I said to him, wake up. No military achievement in Gaza right now is worth the price. And I'm leaving us out the moral issues which we should discuss just in pure strategic terms. Winning in Khan Younis and losing in Washington, New York is bad strategy and this should not have happened.
- [19:42]
Dan Senor
The reason I'm stuck on this point and I'm hearing it from a lot of people, a version of what you're saying. On the one hand, I totally relate to it. I get what you're describing. On the other hand, I say to myself, everyone we know or everyone we care about believed that Israel had to respond on October 7th or after October 7th, that Israel was going to respond intensively, that it was a just war. I don't mean to sound glib here, and I don't mean to sound dismissive of the human catastrophe we're seeing every Day I'm not. I am saying war is by its very nature ugly and a thousand things go wrong in war and people make bad decisions and, and not everyone has excellent judgment. And anyone who's operating in good faith could go look at any war in the history of any country and believe that those countries are good and well meaning, are justified and moral, and yet make massive mistakes in war. Somehow I think we're too tolerant maybe of this emerging consensus that has taken everything I just described that happens in every war that has happened in this war and then determined that the war is no longer moral and just. And that's a leap I'm not ready to make.
- [20:54]
Ari Shavit
First of all, I'm talking as a Jew and as Israeli, as an Israeli patriot. Every hungry child in Gaza is a human disaster. Every hungry child in Gaza is an Israeli strategic disaster. We fulfilled Yikya Sinwar's dream. These are the pictures he wanted. People with strategic understanding should have understood that you don't come close to anything like that. We walked into Sinwar's trap. I'm telling you from his grave. This evil Nazi is putting out his hand and he's dragging us down. Now he was not around. Now we made the mistakes. How did happen? The most just war ever. There was no war that is more just. And I think the war is still fundamentally just. But how did it come to that, that it is perceived the way it is perceived right now? So I'll tell you a few things. It was criminal negligence to go to war with Bezales, Modric and Ben Gril. You don't do that. You don't do that. You need unity in Israel, you need support in the world. You have to capture the moral high ground. Two, you take steps with all the fact that the world is hypocritical and there are anti Semites there. The old Zionists always understood we are small people, hated people. We always have to combine streng power with morality and legitimacy because we are not America, we are not Russia, we cannot do Chechnya. We are Jews. We are also a democracy. We must fight as Jews as we must fight as a democracy. So on the one hand we have to be very, very tough and we have to do even very harsh things. We did it in the past and we have to do them. There is no other way. It's a horrible neighborhood, it's a horrible conflict. But we always have to keep that other dimension. And I don't know, did you hear moral speeches capturing the moral high ground from Israel in the last months?
- [22:52]
Dan Senor
But, Ari, what would it mean? Honestly, I think Israel's fighting this war as. I mean, if you want to use the term, as morally as one can fight a war. I know you speak to soldiers serving in Gaza all the time, as do I. I was just with a group of them a little over a week ago in Israel, and they were just describing in passing, by the way, and I hear stories like this all the time. You know, they're sitting there rolling it through some kind of armored vehicle in Gaza, or they're in a tank or whatever, and an old Palestinian man walks over right near them for something. Their instinct in. They said any other fighting force in any other part of the world would just kill the guy. Why take the risk of letting him get close to them? Who knows what he has? But yet they do, and they don't kill him and they don't shoot him. And these are moral dilemmas that Israeli soldiers are making every single day. You talk to these young men and women. They have a moral frame through which they are trying to execute this war. So there's a sense that we've accepted this narrative that's out there that Israel's kind of lost the plot and it had the moral high ground and now it no longer has it. And I'm like, based on what?
- [23:58]
Ari Shavit
We are right against evil and we are life against death. I totally believe in that. But also, I agree that contrary to what many people thought, the IDF is one of the most moral armies in the sense that it's really doing its best to limit the unnecessary killing. And they are going to. They're doing amazing work in trying to do that. The problem was the mistake. It was one mistake, one major mistake. You don't play with food distribution now. No one intended it. I totally reject anyone claiming that Israel intentionally wanted to go for starvation and famine.
- [24:36]
Dan Senor
No, I agree with you. It's not. There was like some starvation strategy. So can you just explain what you mean by that?
- [24:43]
Ari Shavit
Look, there was a kind of strategic logic here because Hamas maintained its control by controlling the food. So there was kind of logic in trying to take away the control of distributing food from Hamas, but you don't. If there is a 10% risk that your alternative solution will create, indirectly, unintentionally, hunger, you don't do it. You don't do it. This was a major mistake. Again, I don't think there was any evil, any malice, any intentions. When we. Combining things that we talked about, there was a kind of lack of sensitivity. And because of this determination, everything we talked about all combined into accepting this plan. People believed in this plan, and this plan was disastrous. And in my mind, that's the call. I believe in Israel. I believe in Israel as a just country. I believe in the idf. I believe in the just war. But we cannot close our eyes to human catastrophe when human catastrophe happens.
- [25:46]
Dan Senor
Okay, so there are two sides of the issue you're raising or the question you're raising. Was Israel too slow? So you're saying Israel didn't use food aid as an instrument of warfare, but they were too slow to realize that they were responsible for the humanitarian situation of Palestinian civilians, and therefore they should have taken action sooner? That's one way to look at it. Now, the other way to look at it is in what war? Not to mention a defensive war, but in what war where a country is attacked and there's an attempted massacre, one could say attempted genocide against one country's peoples, waging an attempted genocide against another. The other country, Israel responds to remove the threat. And while it's waging that response, it has to contend with the fact that over 250 of its citizens are being held hostage. So the challenge of Israel having to fight such a complicated war, A, B, it's also having within days fighting on multiple fronts of the war starting, and C, knowing that any aid, humanitarian aid, that gets into Gaza, the enemy you are fighting and the enemy you are trying to destroy, will likely hoard that aid and use it to maintain its position of power inside the territory where you're trying to fight them. In what world, in what war, is it incumbent upon that country that's been attacked to be responsible for distribution of aid when you know the enemy is holding your citizens hostage and torturing them, and you know any aid you get into the area is going to be used as a tool of repression on the Palestinian people to maintain power so it can continue to fight against Israel?
- [27:29]
Ari Shavit
Israel took this responsibility. Immediately after October 7, the deal struck between Netanyahu and Dermer and Biden and his administration was that Israel will get all the support needed and they go ahead to attack. But the one thing that will be kept is the humanitarian aid. Within the context of this war, Israel took upon itself this commitment. But beyond that, I think that while your argument is a valid argument, we have to be smart. Not only just. But smart. You just made the worst mistake you made in this war. You just gave potential victory to your enemies. We should have stuck to our original strategy. What was the strategy? Because there are Nazis, we want to do what America did in Germany. In 1945 to defeat them and then de radicalize, demilitarize and rehabilitate Gaza. The mistake in the last few months was that people began talking about moving the population, about getting rid not only of Hamas, but perhaps of the Palestinians. All this poisonous talk is damn stupid. If you have to do Dresden, you need an Adenoa. You need a horizon of hope. America bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It led to a Japanese democracy.
- [28:53]
Dan Senor
But they weren't talking about that when they're firebombing Dresden and when they were not.
- [28:58]
Ari Shavit
Totally true, if I want to correct you in a sense, because in 1941, Churchill and Roosevelt endorsed the Atlantic Charter which talks about the democratic world after the war. In 41, when you have to do cruel things in war, you have first to capture the moral high ground and at the end show that you're leading to a horizon of peace. And that is beyond that. The extremists in the Israeli government, I don't want to repeat what they were saying. You know what they were saying, Ari.
- [29:25]
Dan Senor
Their rhetoric is toxic. I agree. They are not making war policy.
- [29:29]
Ari Shavit
We should have had a very clear horizon, that while we do cruel things, it leads to peace and that we are absolutely determined to destroy Hamas. We are not into destroying the Palestinian people and actually we want to free the Palestinians. The entire strategy of the war, I don't know if you remember, there were neocons once upon the time. The real goal of the war should have been free the Palestinians from Hamas the moment we lost that talk and then the mistake with the food distribution that created this mess. And again, you have to understand that just killing terrorists and just destroying infrastructure is not winning the war. Now again, I'm not confused for a moment. We are the good guys, they are the bad guys. But we as good guys, we made a horrible, horrible mistake. And we have to admit it and we have to correct it.
- [30:22]
Dan Senor
You keep talking about that. Israel should have had the political vision of how this ends. What is it gonna mean ultimately for the Palestinian people when this war ends? I understand that. However, I think there's a limit to how much Israel can actually do in Gaza. We can get into a whole debate. Do the Palestinian people support Hamas? Sympathetic to Hamas, Tired of Hamas? We don't tried to have many conversations on this podcast over the last 20 plus months trying to figure that out with different experts. But at the end of the day, Israel can't deradicalize Palestinian society if we believe there is this radical pathology that has permeated, is pervasive in Gazan society. Israel cannot de. Radicalize Hamas sympathizing Palestinians. Other countries in the region have experience doing that. Other governments. The Saudis have experience doing that. The Emiratis have experience doing that. The Egyptians have experience doing that, dealing with Sunni Islamist extremist threats within their own societies. Israel's in the worst of both worlds because on the one hand, they can keep fighting Hamas and keep removing the threat to Israel inside Gaza, but they can't do the last mile, which is the toughest part. And yet no one else wants to join and risk the lives of their own citizens from their own governments, be it the Saudis or whomever. So what's Israel supposed to do? Just pull the plug and say the war's over?
- [31:42]
Ari Shavit
No, no. I think we should have fought and we should fight, and I think we still need to find a way to win this war. But ironically, what happened now is that the one hope we had has been diminished dramatically by this tragedy. Because the hope, as you so correctly say, the hope is the moderate Arabs, okay? The ones who can really eventually deregadize Palestinian society are the moderate Arab. The actions now have actually made it impossible for the moderate Arabs to be our partners, not only in regional peace, but also on this project. The war would look different. When this is the horizon, you can bring partners, even they won't support you right now. And perhaps I'll say something difficult. Perhaps you need a bit of patience. Perhaps you cannot achieve the total victory of Hamas within two months, so you'll achieve it in a year or two. Okay? We must defeat Hamas. But right now, we achieved the opposite of defeating Hamas. We actually strengthened Hamas and we made the war worse.
- [32:48]
Dan Senor
Okay, Ari, I want to play a clip for you from one of our Archimedes shows, for heaven's sake, with Yossi Klein, Halevi, and Danielle Hartman. I want to play this clip, and then I want you to respond to it.
- [33:00]
Ari Shavit
It occurred to me the other day that we made a fundamental mistake in framing October 7th through the Holocaust. Everyone said the largest, and we're still saying it, the largest number of Jews killed since the Holocaust. And that's not the issue. That's not the framing. The framing is this was the largest number of Jews massacred since the creation of the state of Israel. That's what was important about October 7th. And it was a threat not to. To our victim. It was a threat to our power.
- [33:36]
Dan Senor
Okay, now I'm struck, Ari, because I counted two, maybe three times in this conversation that you referred to Sinwar and Hamas as the Nazis. So even you are an Israeli who's using the Holocaust, the Shoah language to describe this. And what Yossi is saying there is. That was a mistake. Now, by the way, I'm not sure it's a distinction with a difference which we can get into, but what is your reaction to this? This idea that it triggering this Shoah anxiety as opposed to it triggering. No, no, no. This is not a Shoah moment. Israel is a powerful country, and what it punctured was the world's perception and Israel's own perception of its power.
- [34:16]
Ari Shavit
Look, in Hebrew we say gum vegam, right? Both are true. The Shoah is part of us. As Jews in Israel anywhere, Shoah is.
- [34:24]
Dan Senor
Part of us, meaning anytime there's some kind of attack, it triggers that.
- [34:28]
Ari Shavit
And when you see an event that is clearly, you know when. Again, a very senior Isra called me on October 7, before we knew, and he tried to describe me what happened, his first words were, this is Shash time. That's a sabra Israeli hero. Okay, so it's in us. On the other hand, I totally agree that it's about Israeli sovereignty and the attack on Israeli sovereignty. But my explanation of the deep problem we experience now is the problem of Israeli sense of victimhood. And if you allow me, I want to say something about our history.
- [35:01]
Dan Senor
Go ahead.
- [35:02]
Ari Shavit
My admiration for the Zionist projects for Israel is that when we were the ultimate victims of the world, we've decided not to be victims. In 1945, 1948, 1955, we have any right to just feel sorry for ourselves, but we took an amazing decision not to feel like victims, not to think like victims, and not to act like victims. We did not poisoned the water in Nuremberg and Munich. We brought water from the Galilee to the Negev. We did not want to destroy Germany and the Germans, and we did not want to murder Arabs. We built the Weizmann Institute and the best health service you can think of. We had a deep understanding that our revenge should not be violent. Our victory over Hitler was to choose life. And we created the most phenomenal entity of life against all odds. Sadly, something happened after October 7th that was different. Again, I totally understand it, but there is something deep, because the tragedy of the Israeli condition is that we are faced with death, but we have to celebrate life. We are faced with evil, but we have to remain moral and just. That's a challenge. It's not easy in our environment. And I go back to what I said about Sinhuang. He understood that the Israeli success story is based on this ethnic Sparta balance on this frontier democracy on the one, democracy in the Middle East. All these cliches are true. That's what Israel was about, what Israel is fundamentally about. And this was the terrible damage he caused us after October 7th. Whether it's a sense of victimhood or rage, never mind he made us so emotional that we lost some of our clarity, we lost our strategic, and we lost some of the understanding of the world we live in. And the outcome is what we see today.
- [37:06]
Dan Senor
I think there are two ways to think about what Sinwar was trying to accomplish, and I still don't know if we know the answer or if we will ever know. One path is what you're describing, which is to drag Israel into the mud that is the Middle East. And in your op ed, you talk about the way Jordan's King Hussein slaughtered Palestinians in, what was it, 1970 Black September, whether it was the way Bashar Assad Assad slaughtered Sunni insurgents in the context of the Syrian civil war. That we can point to all those things and say, you're blaming, you didn't blame any. You didn't take action against any of these other countries and now you're holding Israel accountable for the way it's fighting its war. And your response is, no, that's not who we want to be. That's not who we want to be compared to. And if Sinwar puts Israel into that category, Sinwar has won in that sense. I think what you're saying, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but what we're seeing play out right now is in service of that Sinwar strategy. Now, I could argue there's another Sinwar strategy. The other Sinwar strategy is he wanted to eradicate Israel. He wanted Hamas to plant a flag, if you will, in the center of the country and have the ultimate one state solution. And he thought Hamas would attack Israel from the south, Hezbollah would join the war from the north. They would, as we've learned from intelligence, the plan was, or the hope was that they would meet and shake hands in the middle of the country. And by the way, Israel would have been completely unprepared to defend against the Syrian Hezbollah attacked from the north, all reinforced by the Iranians and the Houthis and militias elsewhere in the region. And that was his real strategy, which is a real war aim, wipe Israel out. Which is different than this psychological manipulation and messing with Israel's identity and Israel's image and its self identity and dragging to the muck. I think they're two different things. I don't know which it was.
- [38:57]
Ari Shavit
No, no. First of all, again, I don't think there's a contradiction. So Obviously, specifically on October 7th, he wanted to launch the scenario. You're talk. But because you realize that he may not succeed in that. The grand strategy, the deep strategy is the one I'm talking about. For years, for decades, what Hamas wanted to do is to drive out of Israel the startup nation. That's what his strategy, he wanted to take out of Israel's startup nation. It's no wonder the Iranians attacked the Weizmann Institute. That's what they want to destroy. Now, Israel should not fall into that trouble again. On the one hand, look, this is the dilemma we face, which is a serious dilemma. We have to be rough, we sometimes have to be the beast in the Middle east, but we have to remain the beauty. First of all, we have to remain the beauty in the Upper east, but we have to keep our vow. We cannot be dragged there. Because again, one, because of moral reasons, two, because of strategic reasons. Because the source of our strength, our ability to be the only democracy in the Middle east is based on science, on technology, on free market, on being part of the oecd. If they manage to harm that and destroy that, they'll destroy us. The Israeli challenge is to keep two ideas in mind and two goals in mind. Not to be simplistic, if you are simplistic about the Israeli condition, you don't get it. So my hope is that we'll find a way to strike this balance again. Be tough on the one hand, but be just and moral on the other side.
- [40:31]
Dan Senor
Okay, so that's the long term horizon. But just in wrapping up short term horizon, what does Israel do now? I agree with you. Israel's got a mess of a situation. We may disagree about how we diagnose how it got here, but Israel's in a mess of a situation. What's the Ari Shavit plan for getting Israel out of this mess?
- [40:46]
Ari Shavit
I think we are bleeding in such a way that we have to stop the bleeding. Therefore, what I think should be done is Benjamin Netanyahu is a great speaker speaker. He should give one of his great speeches. But this time it should be an empathy speech. Not taking a blame but saying some horrible mistake happened here. Whatever the reasons for that, we didn't want it to happen. We take responsibility for solving it. And he has to make a grand statement that totally changes Israel positioning and the takhlis of it. It. The practical part of it is a unilateral humanitarian ceasefire for a month that will allow to bring all the food in, distribute all the food and put the closure to this terrible, terrible event. And then we go back to if it's war, if it's a deal, you know, we have to go back to all that.
- [41:47]
Dan Senor
I think you want Israel out of the headlines, you want a month of quiet, you want Israel off of television news and off of TikTok screens. And you get that during a ceasefire because there's quiet. You are basically describing a ceasefire. You want to give a one month ceasefire. The only difference between the Ari Shavit cease fire and the two previous ceasefires we've had is during the two previous ceasefires, Israel has gotten hostages back for the ceasefire. And you are proposing giving Hamas a ceasefire for free. The hostages are still in the dungeons of Gaza. They're still the ultimate leverage against Israel. Except Hamas now gets to bank keeping those hostages and still get the ceasefire.
- [42:27]
Ari Shavit
What you described now was exactly the argument three, four months ago, it didn't release one hostage. It weakened Israel, it played into the hands of Hamas. It's time to think in a multidimensional way. As long as we stick to just thinking of war in a military limited way, we will lose it. We will lose it.
- [42:47]
Dan Senor
So how do you look at the hostages forum and the hostage families and say the lesson that Hamas will take from this is that they should negotiate in good faith going forward for a release of hostages? Cuz I don't think they will. I think their lesson from this will be if we hold out long enough, if we guarantee there are images coming out of Gaza of human catastrophe, which one way or the other, they can always generate, whether it's real or not. And I concede in this situation, in the last few weeks it's been real. But even when it's not real, they can generate those images. And there's a momentum to the pressure campaign being mounted on Israel internationally, as you say. And so now Hamas has new leverage. They don't have to give up hostages, they just have to make sure there's enough pressure on Israel and they get peace and quiet. I don't know about peace. They get quiet without releasing hostages.
- [43:32]
Ari Shavit
After the 20 or 30 days of the humanitarian ceasefire, you say, I'm going to kill every Hamas leader, whether he's in Qatar or anywhere else. I'll break all the rules. I'll be much more hawkish. But not where children starve. I won't be hawkish there. We should kill them. We should haunt them, we should destroy them. Hamas, not the Palestinian people. And not hungry Palestinian children.
- [43:56]
Dan Senor
All right. All right. We will leave it there. Thank you for a spirited conversation. Not the last time, I'm sure. I'm not sure if we came up with a cohesive plan, but I hope we gave one another things to think about. And thanks for being here.
- [44:10]
Ari Shavit
Thank you.
- [44:20]
Dan Senor
That's our show for today. If you found this episode valuable, please share it with others who might appreciate it. Time and again we found that our listeners are the ones driving the growth of the Call Me Back community. So thank you. And to offer comments, suggestions, sign up for updates or explore past episodes, please Visit our website, arcmedia.org that's ark media.org where you can deepen your understanding of the topics we cover. Call Me Back is produced and edited by Elon Benatar. Sound and video editing by Martin Juergo and Mariangelis Burgos. Our director of operations is Maya Rakoff. Research by Gabe Silverstein. Our music was composed by Yuval Semo. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.