← Call Me Back - with Dan Senor
Call Me Back - with Dan Senor
Live with Tal Becker and Nadav Eyal (INSIDE Call me Back sneak peek)
00:14:17
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You are listening to an art media podcast.
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It's 4:00pm on Friday, December 26th in New York City. It's 11:00pm on Friday, December 26th in Israel where Israelis are immersed in Shabbat. This week we mix things up a bit on Inside Call Me Back, which is the members only edition of the Call Me Back podcast. Usually Amit Nadav or I take challenging questions from subscribers. But this week we released the recording of an in person conversation between ARC Media contributor Nadavael and Tal Becker, who's a Call Me Back regular and Vice president of the Shalom Hartman Institute. It took place a couple weeks ago at an event at the JCC in New Jersey. The event was titled Where Do We Go from the Future of Israel and Jewish Peoplehood. We discussed the different roots of antisemitism in the west, the resilience and defiance expressed in living a Jewish life, and the changing attitudes towards Israel among American Jews. The conversation covered so much ground that I wanted to share a sneak peek with our listeners. If you want to catch the full conversation, consider joining Inside Call Me Back by using the link in the episode description or going to arc media.org. It's 7:45pm on Monday, December 8th. See, this is how I can tell if they're, you know, they all say they listen, but until you until they.
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React to the timestamp, I don't know if it's legit. So first of all, thank you all for being here. This is a wonderful turnout and I'm especially grateful to be here with my friends Tal and Nadav. And so we're going to jump into a conversation here and we are going to be free flowing as Tal reminded.
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Me before we walked on the stage.
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What's the topic tonight? What's the head? What's it?
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Something simple, I think. The future of Israel and Jewish people.
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There we go. So our goal Tonight is within 45 minutes to just wrap that up like a tidy bow, like we'll have that all for you. The future of Israel and the Jewish people. So I want to start start with a question. I guess I'll start with Utah and then go to Nadav. I guess if I had had a conversation with yechiasinwar on October 6, not that I would have had a conversation with Yehisinwar, but if I had a conversation with Yahya Sinwar the night before October 7th and I said to him, you're going to launch this war, you're going to launch this massacre tomorrow morning. And let me tell you what Israel, Gaza and the Middle east will look like in exactly two years. In exactly two years from this attack you're about to launch, Hamas will be largely decimated. The entire leadership structure of Hamas. Sinwar, you, Sinwar death. Mohammed Sinwar, the whole leadership structure, gone. This whole 24, 25 Battalion Command and control structure, largely wiped out. Hamas, not really posing a strategic threat to Israel. And your sister organization on Israel's northern border, Hezbollah largely wiped out its rocket.
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And missile arsenal, basically wiped out the.
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Charismatic leader of Hezbollah, Nasrallah, gone. You look over at Israel's border with Syria, which was a client state of Iran's. The Assad regime, which had been in power for 53 years, gone. The Houthis and the militias in Iraq, still kind of a nuisance, but on their back foot. Iran, while the regime is in power, seems to be kind of wobbly. And this nuclear program they were building is. Is at worst severely set back and at best obliterated. And Israel stands, Mr. Sinwar, two years from this war you're going to launch as the most powerful geopolitical actor in the Middle East. There's no comparison of any country in modern history facing the array of threats that Israel is facing that will have responded to your attack and accomplish what it has accomplished. And I should say, parenthetically, we all owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the men and women of the IDF and the Israeli intelligence community and the United States government, which has stood shoulder.
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To shoulder with Israel.
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Now, whether or not Mr. Sinwar would quibble with my analysis, these are the facts. But he could then respond and say, okay, Dan, I hear you on where we would be exactly two years at October 2025. But let me tell you what December of 2025 is going to look like, because this whole implementation of the future of Gaza and Hamas being gone is not as crystal clear as you thought it was in October of 2025. Your reaction to Sinwar would be, what?
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C
So, thank you. It's lovely to be with the two of you on the stage. And I feel like I have to start, Dan, by just saying, you know, I've said this to you personally, but I want to say in front of a group of people, how much call me back has meant to the Jewish world. You may have thought you were launching a podcast, but you were creating a community of, I think, especially after October 7th, Jews who felt alone and divided and not sure how to hold things together. And the role you played was incredible. Thank you. So, I mean, I've lived in Israel for about over 30 years now, but I still haven't acquired that Israeli characteristic of speaking with certainty about things you can't know. Well, I think there are two things to say with respect to the direction we're headed in Gaza in particular. The first thing, I think it's fair to say that even if Simoir were to say that Hamas at the moment primarily is not a threat to Israel, it's a threat to Palestinians, it's a threat to the capacity for any kind of alternative governments to emerge. And a challenge fundamentally of phase two of the Trump Plan is can it succeed in creating the conditions genuinely for disarmament, demilitarization, and an alternative Palestinian governance to emerge over time? And how you feel about that really depends on an assumption that nobody knows the answer to. There's no university, you can get a degree in it. There is one group of people who think that only the IDF can disown Hamas. And that group of people, significantly, was in the Israeli government for a long time and thought the war should just continue to achieve that objective. There's a second group, I think, who believe that now the isf, the International Stabilization Force, if it comes into being, given all the success that Israel has had militarily and the pressure of Israel being in 53% of the west bank and only withdrawing if there is development and the linkage between reconstruction and demilitarization and the pressure maybe of the Arab world, these things altogether can disarm Hamas. And then there is a third view which says essentially there is no such thing as Gaza devout from us. There's no really such thing as Palestinian society without some element of what they would call resistance. We consider, and rightly terrorism. And then the question is only how much capacity did I have to shape the Egypt? And where you fall on those three really depends on what you're thinking. It's going to look like if December, January and so on. We Israelis have more than a healthy dose of cynicism and pessimism in the way we tend to analyze things. Israelis, I think, tend to think cynicism or pessimism and wisdom are the same in theme. And in the Middle east, you're not always off that you have that assumption. But I think right now our posture is let's give a chance to the Trump player. The last thing I'll say, I don't want to talk too much, is that another thing Tsinghua might tell you beyond Talking about in December 2025, Varian he said, you might think you won in the midd least, but you lost in the West. And what matters more And I do think that we need to ask ourselves whether, from a national security perspective, at the moment, Israel is more challenged in the west than it is in the Middle East. We're in a bizarre moment. I'm not sure how long it will last. Where we used to rely on the west to support us in confronting our enemies in the Middle east, now with the help of the US we have confronted our enemies in the Middle East. They're still there. They're not going anywhere. They may come back, but there is an opportunity to shift things in a different direction. And then we look to the west and we ask ourselves, are you still with us? I was just in the uae, in the Emirates, and one of the young Emirati put their hand up and said, why do you spend so much time talking about the West? Why do you even bother? Why is everyone criticizing Israel's public diplomacy? Don't you know the west is lost? And so I think Sinwar Mike said that, and that may have a more difficult answer to it. I feel like I want to tell a story to this audience very briefly. Some of you may know, but I think it speaks to the Israeli spirit. It's about Bar Kupershtim's mother. If you haven't heard this story, it's worth knowing. Bar Kupishtim was one of the hostages released in this last round. Of the 20 hostages being released, Bar tells a story that one of the Hamas terrorists who was holding him called Hizbaba and said to her, you are not protesting enough against the government. We expect to see you out on the streets. We want you to go to the Hague and protest in the Hague. We have your son in our hands. And if you want to see your son again, we want to see you protest. She responds in an instant, you do not have my son in your hands. God has my son in his hands. And God has you in his hands as well. Dead silence on the other end of the line. And then the Hamas terrorist says, So when you have mothers like that in Israeli society, there's something you know about Israeli society that's just incredible. Now, to your point, Dan. So at some level, I think, yes, it's true, and Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke about it today, in fact, that Israel be a military success story. It's defense tech, its resilience of its society. These things matter a great deal for Israel's relations in the region, for their relations in the world. And I think you can make the case, as you said, that as the war recedes, we hope, and as things shift in the news, then Israel, there'll be some kind of correction. Here's why I'm a little worried about it more than the way he described it, maybe, I'll say. A few months ago, a young student from Connecticut actually came up to me and she said, I'm a rich, white Jewish girl. I have a cloud of oppressor class hanging over my head. Nothing you say to me is interesting. I'm not interested in Tal Mecca's talking points because that does not remove the cloud from my head. The only thing that removes the cloud from my head is if I'm anti Israel and dilute my Jewish identity on campus. And I want you to understand, while that is saddening and it's important for people like me, the recovering lawyers, and all of us who think that we affect people by effective arguments, what matters fundamentally, especially for a younger generation, especially in the era of social media, is what is socially acceptable, what is cool, and what is not cool. And this student is basically saying to me, your arguments won't matter, because in my social circle, associating with Israel is a costly, embedded. And I think you mentioned Sinwar. If we took Khamenei aside and we asked him, you know, how was your last year and a half? He would say, I didn't have such a good year. But where I get comfort, he would say, is that the cost of association with Israel in the west has gone up tremendously. If you pull someone off the street today and you say to the word, say to them, name the first word that comes to your mind. When I say the next word, Israel, what are you going to hear? I think you're probably not going to like what you're going to hear in many, many streets and many cathedrals. Now the question is, can that be changed? Can that dynamic be changed because of interests? You know, there's a famous saying that politics is downstream of culture, and if the association people have socially with Israel remains problematic, that will have expressions in a lot of different places. So it's not something we could be nonchalant about and say, well, as the war proceeds, this will change. So I think the challenge is a lot bigger. And it really goes back to the idea of how this new generation forms their opinions as opposed to, that's it.
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For the sneak peek. In the rest of the episode, Tal Nadav and I continue discussing a variety of topics, including Prime Minister Netanyahu's political future, the future of the Abraham Accords, and whether the golden age of American Jewry is coming to an end. If you're curious about the full conversation, join us on Inside Call Me Back by following the link in the episode description or going to arcmedia.org. Call Me Back is produced and edited by Ilan Benatar. Arc Media's executive producer is Adam James Levin Aretti. Our production manager is Brittany Cohn. Sound and video editing by Liquid Audio. Our associate producer is Maya Rockoff. Community management by Gabe Silverstein. Our music was composed by Yuval Semo. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.