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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Rabbi.
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Chaviv Rette Gour
I'm Rabbi Ami Hirsch of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York. And you're listening to in these Times.
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
We are strong and we still act and think as though we are weak. But we're the strongest Jews who ever lived. And we are heirs to generations of Jews who worked and bled and suffered to make us this strong, to give us Israel, to give us the vast institutions, institutional edifice of American Jewry, to give us everything that we have the capacity to do and to be.
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Unnamed Host
I've been looking forward to today's conversation for a very long time.
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Chaviv Rette Gour
One of the most thoughtful thinkers in.
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Unnamed Host
The Jewish world today is Chaviv Rette Gour, a senior analyst and writer for the Times of Israel. A veteran journalist, Haviv has been at the forefront of covering Israeli politics, foreign policy, the U. S. Israel relationship, and Israel's relationship with the Diaspora. He's been doing this since 2005. He has reported from over 20 countries and has served as a director of communications for the Jewish Agency, Israel's largest ngo.
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Chaviv Rette Gour
Welcome to in these Times. I've been looking forward to speaking to you for many months.
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here.
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Chaviv Rette Gour
You're one of the key experts in the Jewish community and in the Israeli community about what's happening in Israel on a daily basis. Of course, things are more intense and acute for us since October 7th, and you've really assumed a central leadership role in trying to explain all this to Israelis and to American Jews and to the world community. Can I ask you, First Aviv, just what's your mood personally and your circle of friends and family and what's going on in Israel?
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
I think that people adapt a lot of things that, you know, everything was very traumatic, everything was very complex at the beginning, in the immediate aftermath of October 7th, of that sense of Israeli collapse, right. That inability to explain how our people were so vulnerable, the war that followed, the terrible fear for our family members in the war, the images coming out of Gaza, Gazan civilian suffering during the war, which I have very complex feelings about, but at the end of the day also is Hamas's fundamental strategy. In other words, facing an enemy not only that could do October 7th and October 7th isn't horrifying in the grand picture, it's horrifying in the details. Tracing the path of individual Nukhba Force fighters. That's where you really. But that Hamas grand strategy was actually the destruction of Gaza, and now we have to get them out. Frankly, there's no future for Gaza without It all of that, all of that horror and ambiguity and complexity, and we know people, individuals. Something strange has happened over the last 11 months, which is that we got used to it on the northern border. We are used to it. The northern border is emptied out. 100,000 Israelis or some number around there is no longer able to go home. Villages, entire kibbutzim, several pieces of cities have been demolished. And we're used to it in the sense that there's a larger war coming. We're used to that too. One of the interesting things was over the last 11 months, one of our priorities, my wife and mine, was to keep the kids out of the news, out of that understanding of what's happening. We have kids who are small. My oldest is 13, my youngest is 5, she was 4 when everything began. In the effort to keep them out of it, we found an escape for ourselves. So there's a normal home, even as our professional lives and our families, extended families and friends are all sort of swallowed up by events. So I don't know if that's an answer to your question of the mood, but life soldiers on.
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Chaviv Rette Gour
In many respects it's hardest to be in Israel, but in some respects it's hard for those who care about Israel. It's hard to be abroad as well and not to be in on the daily life. And we sense such pain and turmoil and rage and anger and resignation and impatience. Do you think all of that has deepened in Israeli society? Or has the immediate trauma dissipated and longer term trends set in what is the health of Israeli society, in your view?
- [04:56]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
I'll tell you for professional reasons and also because that's how I feel. I have done my best over the years to avoid taking a partisan position on Israeli politics. I have written long essays about why the left and the right, or what their deep thoughts are, what their policies are, the coherent thing, the successes, the failures. And I believed that the politics of division, the politics of creating enemies out of other parts of our political world, which is a strategy that, frankly, Israeli campaign strategist imported from the United States and has really taken over the democratic world everywhere. And the reason that demonizing each other is popular in democracies today is that it works astonishingly well. It hacks the human brain stem and produces the outcomes you want, the mobilizing outcomes you want. And sometimes it's ugly, but it's still better than any other alternative. And you can criticize it from your position as some kind of political columnist and all of that, and it's okay. We're marching on. And then the war came, and the unity expressed itself left and right and Ashkenazi and Mizrachi and Jew and Bedouin and. And every other kind of Israeli, just about. Not every kind. And that's been part of the culture war. But just about every group in Israel closed ranks and went to this war. And in many ways, I think our political system did not. And they're still playing the same games, and they're still futzing around with budgets, and they're still finding people who are the enemies of us all, right? Among us.
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Chaviv Rette Gour
So you think this is something that I've felt a lot, that the people of Israel is just so much better than the government of Israel?
- [06:45]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
I believe so. And I believed so in the past. I thought that we had a political system that rewards slightly sociopathic behavior. And so our political leaders. You have astonishingly good people in Israeli politics like Yuli Edelstein. Yuli Edelstein faced down the Soviet authorities and went to the gulag for three years. I mean, the courage of the man is impossible to doubt. If he's found, and he really has held the line, he has not fallen into the kind of cheap populism. I guess the question I'm trying to answer is our weakness. The thing that is not going well. That's the one thing.
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Chaviv Rette Gour
What is the one thing that's not going well?
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
I have seen in the last 11 months our astonishing strength, our unity of purpose, our capability. We are unified. We are dangerous. We have a story that holds us together. And there is one weakness at the heart of our political life, at the heart of our communal life and our shared identity, and that is the politics of setting one another against each other. We have a political leadership that does that as a profession, and that was totally fine and tolerable in peacetime and in wartime. It's turned out to be our great weakness. It's turned out to be the thing that has hampered the war effort, the thing that is driving Israelis to despair. We are tracking in polls over the last 11 months a decline of public morale and faith in the war effort. And it tracks very closely with decline in trust in government. And so this is maybe the oldest insight. Chazal, tell us about the Second Temple, all the great empires that might come and destroy your country. But in fact, the reason the kingdom fell was Jews set against Jews. And we see it now. It's a country of such astonishing strength that it really hurts me that this reality is there within that strength. We have been accompanying families that have had hostages taken from the family on October 7th. We have friends whose son was killed in battle in Gaza. And we have experienced our political leadership as totally check out. Our friends with hostages managed to meet the German chancellor before they ever got to meet a junior Israeli cabinet minister. You have. Kibbutz Niroz is the most extreme example, but it is indicative a quarter of Kibbutz Niroz was killed or taken hostage on October 7th. And they've invited ministers, including the prime minister, to visit, and they've refused. And there was a funeral of a soldier killed in Gaza. His father was a political figure involved in politics. So ministers came to the funeral. After the eulogies, the ministers all fled because they didn't want to do the part in a Jewish funeral where after the eulogies, you walk to the gravesite with the family to bury the dead. They didn't want to do that part where they rub elbows with people because they know they will be accosted because they are deeply distrusted and hated, and there's a lot of anger at them. So we have a leadership that is cowardly. But it isn't the cowardice that bothers me. It's that they're not here with us in this event. All of these 11 months, they have still campaigned. They've not stopped campaigning for one minute in these 11 months. You see that in the hostage family protests against the government. They're not actually about a specific policy or reaching a specific deal. You go to those protests and talk to people, they don't know what the debates are, what the negotiations are, what Hamas agreed to, didn't agree to, what's the. What deal was tentatively agreed to in Doha. None of the details matter. They're just saying, I don't trust the government to be trying to get them out. On the other side, you see a campaign revving up to delegitimize that distrust. And it is the oldest weakness Jews have. And I wish we were bigger than it right now.
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Chaviv Rette Gour
So let me ask you about maybe at this point in time, the place where the most tension around what you've just described is being played out, and that is the hostage negotiations. To the extent that there are negotiations and the mass protests which have grown in size in the last few weeks, especially since the execution, been brutal murder of those six hostages. Do you think part of those protests are about a distrust in the government? Do you think there's an actual deal on the table? And do you believe that the government has other than national security interests that is guiding them?
- [11:19]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
I myself am torn deeply, and I'M torn for a very simple reason. I am firmly of the belief, and I don't know how to game it out any other way, that the government is absolutely correct, that Netanyahu's position is right, that we cannot leave Philadelphia, that massive military pressure has been the only thing that got hostages out, and that every minute that we spent acquiescing to American pressure to slow down has cost the lives of hostages and, by the way, increase the suffering for Palestinian civilians. Because the longer this takes and the harder it is to pull Hamas out of Gaza. And it's going to take a long time, and it's going to be very hard. But the longer it takes and the harder it is, the more they suffer. No aid can flow in, and any food aid, keeping people alive, aid can flow in, but no rebuilding can begin until Hamas is gone. It simply won't. It'll just swallow it all up and make it all fail. And so the idea that there's any future for Gaza that is a slow, careful, gentle Israeli war effort in terms of protecting civilians, yes, we have to be as careful as possible, but fast and hard, and pulling Hamas out as soon as possible is the best future for Palestinians and the best future for the hostages and the best future for Israelis, and everything other than that is a bad idea. And holding onto Philadelphia is fundamental to that war effort. Otherwise, they're resupplied. I have in my own mind no doubt that the government is right. Every single thing this government has said, every action, every. The timing, the fact that Philadelphia wasn't brought up. We didn't go in for eight months, then suddenly we did, and it was never explained. Benjamin Netanyahu has gone three months at a time without speaking to the public. The fact that the way it came up was in a kind of ambush of the Defense Minister in a Cabinet meeting in which Netanyahu forced a fast vote on a map he introduced that the army didn't know about and the Defense Minister didn't know about. And all of this stuff leaked, leaking from the Security Cabinet is a crime. Everything leaked from more than one person in the room. And so there's so much politicking on questions of desperate life or death and who lives and who dies. I come to the protesters completely disagreeing with them on the substance and entirely agreeing with them on everything else. I don't know if Netanyahu's decisions aren't shaped by the fact that if the far right leaves his coalition, he falls. I know that he has broken every other red line and he has betrayed every other coalition agreement he ever signed just to survive and just to win and just to emerge on top to the point where you can't sign coalition deals with him. Nobody on right or left thinks coalition deals are worth anything. There's a joke in the Knesset that you need a lot of political capital to sign a deal with Netanyahu. It had better be cash. And that's something that Bezelus Smotrich on the right says of him, just like Yair Lapid over on the center left. So, you know, my view is they are right and they are behaving in these sociopathic ways that have convinced half of the country in the middle of a war, half a country that is fighting that war. The protesters there are many among them who went into Gaza, fought in Gaza for 150 days, came out and are getting call ups now in November to the northern border. And they're protesting the government, but they will go to fight. So a government without trust, a government that doesn't want trust because it's too busy engaging in these, in these politics of division, can't fight a war, is going to make the war more difficult to win. And so I am profoundly disturbed by this government whose fundamental argument about the future of defeating, of how we defeat Hamas is absolutely correct.
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Chaviv Rette Gour
I want to press you on the, on the hostages, Haviv. We're recording this probably a couple of weeks before, before it'll actually be broadcast. So God willing, something might develop. Although at this point in time when we are speaking, it doesn't look like there will be any kind of dramatic change. Your observation is that on a security basis, the government is right, despite what is reported, that most, if not essentially all of the entire security establishment is in favor of accepting conditions that would lead to an Israeli withdrawal for the time being. So your position is different, at least in nuance, if not in substance, from much of the security establishment. And on the other side, let me press you on the protesters. So you said you were with the protesters, not on the security, but on everything else.
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Unnamed Host
What else is there?
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Chaviv Rette Gour
I mean, that's all they want, right? They just want their loved ones back.
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Rabbi Ami Hirsch
I think that the security establishment believes it's such an interesting debate between Netanyahu and Gallant and essentially in the army. One of the reasons Gallant is willing to sign a deal without Philadelphia, without the Egypt Gaza border, is that he says we can go back in immediately. We're signing a 42 day deal that gets out 30 hostages and we go right back in. And Netanyahu says actually we may not be able to go back in. And the army says, what do you mean? You think I can't go back into Philadelphia? You've seen what this army can do over the last 11 months. It'll go anywhere in Gaza it wants. You think it really can't? And Netanyahu says to them, you're saying a military statement. But I'm telling you that in diplomatic terms, in geopolitical terms, we might find ourselves in a situation where, depending on who is in the White House, depending on the politics of Europe, it is incredibly costly to go back in at that moment. And actually we will find ourselves preferring not to. And so if we leave, it may not be that easy to go back in. And that's not a military determination that you're qualified to explain better than me. I add to Netanyahu's. I accept Netanyahu's argument, and I add to it another layer. Over the last 11 months, we've seen Netanyahu be incredibly weak in the face of pressure. We basically stood still in Gaza from February to May to April because of American pressure. Biden put pressure on him and he stopped. And I was very frustrated that he stopped because his one job, the American administration, has proven that it actually doesn't understand Gaza all that well. And his job is to know Gaza better than President Biden, who also has to think about Taiwan and Venezuela and Ukraine and every other place on earth. My critique of Netanyahu strengthens Netanyahu's argument. In my view, it isn't just that there'll be pressure for us not to go in. You will fail to withstand that pressure because you're not good at withstanding pressure. We've seen that over the last 11 months. And it's kind of Nintanyahu's reputation for many, many years. So because I don't trust Netanyahu to hold off that pressure, we might not be able to go back in. And if we can't go back in, Hamas's resupply routes open wide up. I don't trust this government to make the hard decision. If Gallant was in power and Gallant was prime minister, and he said to me, I will go back in. They won't be able to pressure me. Otherwise I might trust him enough to let him pull out. In other words, as we say in Hebrew, right, you flip twice and arrive at the same place. So that is the debate, can we go back in after. And there. I don't think there's an advantage to the military militarily. We can go back in after that. Absolutely true. But diplomatically is the real question. And as for what else is left? Everything else is left. Hamas is willing, not willing. Its fundamental strategy was the destruction of Gaza. It built hundreds of miles of tunnels under Gaza over 17 years. It built nothing else. This is the single biggest thing Palestinians have ever built. The tactical concept of these tunnels is to build the Gazan battlefield so that when the enemy comes for Hamas, the only way to get to Hamas is to cut through the civilian population. And then hamas carried out October 7. October 7 was not one atrocity, it was two. One committed against us and a larger one committed against Gaza purposefully. Almost two decades in planning. And that's the astonishing thing about Hamas in Gaza. And so there isn't a cost to Gaza that will matter to Hamas. Hamas doesn't care if every last Gazan dies. They're the altar on which Hamas seeks some kind of vast religious redemption. Hamas itself is susceptible to pressure on Hamas itself. You want to get those hostages out, you need to be pressuring them constantly and hard the organization, while doing your best to avoid civilian deaths, because the civilians are even just tactically, never mind morally. Morally is critical, but tactically, massive destruction of Palestinian lives and cities and infrastructure is Hamas's strategy. And is there force multiplier on the battlefield. And so you need to avoid that as much as possible and go after the organization as powerfully as you can. The very idea that Qatar can host Hamas leaders without them being assassinated by Israel because there was some kind of diplomatic fallout that we were worried about. Shocks me. Shocks me. That cost us Hamas thinking it can come to us with demands. If they were on their last breath, they would give us hostages in exchange for a short pause. And that's the plan. And that was the strategy. That was the original strategy that Gallant laid out back in October where he said, when their back's against a wall and we have them by the throat, they'll give us hostages and not before. And that brought us the November hostage release. And then they stopped. Then they lost that initiative. So I say to those families, a completely different Israeli strategy that hunts down Hamas mercilessly everywhere is the proper strategy. When Haniyeh was killed in Tehran, that is exactly the right strategy. We are capable. We are dangerous. You want to attack us. What we did to Hodeida in Yemen, we can do to Bandar Abbas in Iran. How is the IRGC going to sell oil to China and Russia if we destroy the oil depots? And we can. And that should have been the message on day One, and not just in the last six weeks. So those families have been betrayed. But the fact that they have been betrayed doesn't mean we can give Philadelphia and reopen Hamas supply routes and lose far more than 100 soldiers in the war to defeat a Hamas that can completely resupply. So, no, the government failed. The government's right on this point now. And we need a much larger and better strategy and frankly, better leaders to implement it going forward. And that's how everybody can be right all at once.
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Chaviv Rette Gour
I want to move on to other topics. Just one more question about this topic. You said you had complex feelings about Palestinian civilians. Could you elaborate on that? And I wonder if you can address the suggestion that at least in the west, we're underestimating the degree of Palestinian society collaboration with Hamas. Are we underestimating the degree of support amongst the Palestinian civilians for Hamas?
- [22:43]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
It is complicated. Huge numbers of the civilians are completely innocent of that. I think there is absolutely no question they don't love Israel, but they had no part and no decision and no desire and certainly didn't want this war and are suffering catastrophically for it. Not catastrophically. The way that they're suffering is magnified. People are suffering as much as the descriptions of Gaza suffering. In places like Sudan, there's actual famine and in Gaza there isn't. There were problems in specific places. But we've been hearing about this catastrophic famine in Gaza that has yet. Not. Hasn't yet killed anyone. You know, over the course of 11. It's, it's. They're suffering terribly. They are families with children shuttling for 11 months between tent encampments to avoid airstrikes. There have been some number of. Of dead in the five digits. We don't know if it's 25,000 or 35,000. Almost every Hamas number ever cited has been just a flat out lie. They're not even counting. That doesn't mean there aren't thousands of dead kids. In other words, that's not therefore what? There's no dead gods. In other words, there's terrible suffering. The rhetoric around it is completely ideological and activist, but nevertheless, the suffering is also there and real. So that's a b. A very significant portion of Palestinian civilian society supports Hamas right now, roughly because of various polls that say various things, depending on how you ask the question and depending on how the war's going. And something like 70, 30. 70. 30. 70% want Hamas to not rule Gaza after the war. 30 want them to still rule Gaza after the war. The Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki puts it at 42% support for Hamas. So 30, 42. This is the range, I think that is roughly people who now at this time say, we support Hamas even now, but they don't support specific things Hamas does October 7th. They're very proud of large numbers of Gazans. Even Gazans Hamas are proud of October 7th. But there's a reason they're proud of October 7th. And there's a reason that there's so much support for Hamas, even among people who say they've catastrophically destroyed our lives. And the reason is the story. Hamas tells Palestinians a beautiful story of dignity, of redemption, of divine love, that their suffering is part of a restoration of Islam to its rightful place in history. And no other faction, no other ideological movement, no other leadership elite in Palestinian society tells a story nearly as dignifying. And that's the source of Hamas power. So when we come to measure support for Hamas, it's really important to understand the internal Palestinian terms of what support means. If Hamas says to them, we are that stepping stone on which Islam comes back as a powerful force in history. And therefore. And that means the destruction of Israel. But the destruction of Israel will cost. We will be the sacrifice on which Islam is restored and the redemption of humanity comes. And they even use basically a midrash. Islam and Judaism have similar. I'm talking about people who want to commit a genocide against Jews, but they are Muslims, so they do use basically midrash. The rock of the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount is, in Islamic tradition, the stone that Muhammad stepped on as he ascended to heaven. Well, that's not an accident. Say Palestine is the stepping stone on which Islam steps to return as a powerful redemptive force in human history again, after several centuries of weakness and decline. And it begins with the destruction of Israel, because Israel is the weakest thing that ever pushed Islam back. And so in Israel will be fought the great war to bring Islam roaring back into history. Fatah and Abu Mazen, Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah tell Palestinians that they are a people defined by weakness and defined by displacement and the betrayal of the Arab and Muslim worlds. And because the Israelis are so powerful, we have to make do with their existence. And Hamas tells Palestinians, never we are people of faith. Our story is not a pathetic one. Our story is the great story of Islam. And if we know that and cling to it, it'll be a year, it'll be 20 years, it'll be a. But the redemption is assured. Now you're an ordinary Palestinian Even who's had their home blown up in Gaza. Which story do you choose? And when we understand that, we understand two things. One, I don't blame Palestinian civilians. Two, I have to destroy every last thing that is Hamas because the story has to die. No, the genocide of the Jews is not the only path for Islam to redeem itself from four centuries of weakness. And that idea has to be shown to fail. And both of those things can be true. I don't know if that's left wing or right wing, but. So that's how I approach that question.
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Chaviv Rette Gour
It's also, as I think, implicit in what you said. It's impossible actually to reach a negotiated settlement, some kind of political compromise. If you have this maximalist ideology, religious and political ideology of no accommodation.
- [28:07]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
They cannot. If they don't kill me and my kids, the redemption of the world can't happen. That's who they are. That is their fundamental idea. Either they go away or we never stop fighting.
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Chaviv Rette Gour
Let me move to the north. If you can just share with us again, we're recording this a couple of weeks before we're broadcasting, so it's possible that the situation in the north will be different. But it looks from here that that war is getting ever closer. I just state for the listeners, for context, it's been almost a year now that tens of thousands of Israelis, I think 60 or 70,000 or so Israelis are homeless in their own national home and are not in the north. That situation is very difficult to conceive that it can be sustained for that much longer period of time. Where do we stand? How do you see the developments in the weeks and months to come?
- [29:08]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
It's exactly as you said. Israel prefers not to open that second front, but it has responded to Hezbollah in kind. Something on the order of 400 Hezbollah fighters, including some top top leaders, the chief of staff of their military forces and many others, the son of the parliamentary faction chief, who is also commander in Hezbollah, have been killed by Israel. But none of that matters, of course, to the enemy. We face enemies for whom the mass destruction of their entire polity is not deterrent. And so the loss of their own forces is, you know, not as big a deterrent as it is for democratic armies. Armies of, I would say, polities where the government is responsive to the people. So it's been a kind of low grade war in which over time, with sort of slow, deliberate shelling that doesn't stop. Entire kibbutzim have been basically wiped out. 10 or 11 kibbutzim are just completely demolished they have been scattered to the winds, their population, and they're not coming back. People have already found new homes. Their kids have been signed up to the school year. They don't live together. Where they went, these communities have been just broken up. So we have polls of Israelis. One poll last week, I think it's something like 70% of Israelis want to escalate in the north. They want to exact a cost for what Hezbollah has done, that Hezbollah will feel. There was a tremendous sense of wind in our sails from a few dramatic successes in the last couple of months. The killing of Haniyeh under the nose of the Iranian regime, the killing of Shukr, the Hezbollah chief of staff, the response to the Houthis, finally, that is a real genuine destructive response to their economy and capacity to continue to frankly govern by taking out the Hudaydah port. I welcome that. That development and the very fact that our enemies have seen that what everyone said to us was a terrible escalation and irresponsible and how could you do it? And in fact, our enemies absorbed it. We're terrified, basically in hiding for a little while while threatening and saber rattling on the world stage. And we weaken them. And I think we could do that a lot more. I would like to see a much more aggressive stance. The polls say that most Israelis are with me. So there is in my mind, because they won't stop, quite a strong chance that we're going to what will be a very significant and painful war. Hezbollah's capabilities are two orders of magnitude above Hamas's, especially their missile capabilities that can wreak real, genuine havoc in Tel Aviv. And if we do go to a war like that, just to prevent it, we're going to have to have a response that will be very, very painful in Lebanon, may very easily escalate to Syria and Iran. In fact, it's hard to see how it won't. So hopefully we can avoid it. We face enemies who don't want to avoid it.
- [32:11]
Chaviv Rette Gour
So it's been 11 months. You explained a little bit of your understanding of the hesitation that was politically induced or motivated. But one of the things that, you know, looking from afar that is noteworthy at least is it's 11 months and you have this vaunted Israeli military and they haven't finished the job in Gaza. It doesn't look like they're that close to finishing the job. And it's been 11 months of non stop tit for tat war of attrition in the north. If the Israeli military goes out to change the situation in Southern Lebanon. Do you trust the idf?
- [32:56]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
I absolutely trust the idf. Back in November, Defense Minister Gallant said publicly that the war is going to have three stages, the air war, the ground war, and then what I think of as the counterinsurgency or the degradation war, where we slowly degrade Hamas's guerrilla version that survives the ground war. And the first two stages, he said, would take between six to 12 months, and we're in month 11. And arguably when we went into Rafah and took the Philadelphia corridor, that's toward the end of the month, Basic ground invasion, part of the war. And then now we have a counterinsurgency, guerrilla degradation war. America fought this kind of a war in Vietnam and lost disastrously after many, many years, by the way. Won the military aspect, but lost the political aspect. And I'm not sure that's a bad thing. In other words, that the politics, you know, swung in because the costs were high, et cetera, but it was unable to win the war. The French in Algeria couldn't win this kind of guerrilla war. The Americans in Afghanistan more recently couldn't win this kind of war. And that fact drives people to think that we will eventually. We were just sink in that. In that muck and mire. We ourselves were stuck in Lebanon for 18 years, until 2000. But I don't think so. And the reason I don't think so is twofold. After October 7, the willingness to destroy Hamas is infinite in the Israeli public mind. If we leave Gaza in the hands of Hamas, that is vastly, vastly worse for Gaza than for Israel, because we'll go back in again and again and again and again, as long as it takes, as long as any threat pops up, as long as we see anything problematic, as long as we have a good chance of taking a proper shot, Gaza will not recover, will not rebuild, as long as Hamas sticks around. That is not a future I wish on my worst enemies. Certainly, I don't wish it on innocent civilians. And so I think that we have the sticking power. Gaza is close. Gaza threatens in a way that Afghanistan doesn't and if Vietnam doesn't, to the Americans. And so we have that sticking power in the north. I'll put it real simple. I was worried. And then the last two months happened, attack after attack after attack, in which the Israelis said, we're not going after Lebanon in that war. We're not playing Iran's version of that war. We're going after Iran. And you know what we're going after? Putin went on television publicly or his office released the statement publicly. That he had told Khamenei, don't draw an Israeli response. Don't kill Israeli civilians in your response. He doesn't want the Israeli counterattack to an Iranian counterattack because that Israeli counterattack might take out the drone production factories on which his Ukraine effort depends. That Israeli counterattack might take out the oil shipping facilities. It might take out strategic assets of the Iranian regime. They are scared of us. And I think that we can escalate that fear tremendously. They are a dictatorship. Dictatorships are scared. They're cowardly regimes that always calculate their own survival. And I think we need to understand that better and I think we need to act that way. If we are more dangerous to Iran, we can do a lot less actual war fighting in Lebanon. And the IDF was built for nothing else. That air force, that is what it was built for. That intelligence, that's what it was built for. There's an entire command in the idf. I don't think I'm telling any secrets. That was established about a decade ago. That's called the depth command. You have central Command, southern Command, home front command, Air Force, Navy, and then there's something called depth command. Depth command is a major general level command that consolidates all of the different capabilities and forces the IDF would need for a war with Iran. So the willingness to fight the larger war is the best chance we have to avoid the larger war. And that I trust the IDF to do. Everything you saw on October 7, that failure, that collapse on the border was because it was an army that had, that no longer thought there were such threats in the world anymore. And everything it had was invested. All the many tens of billions were invested in that bigger, larger sort of strategic war. So, yeah, I trust the army in Lebanon more than I trust it in Gaza. I'm not, I don't think Gaza has been lost or is being lost. I think we're moving forward if we can stick it out. I wish it had gone faster because Palestinians would suffer less and Israelis would suffer less. But, but nevertheless, I think we can, we can do the job on all sides. We need leadership that can make the hard decisions.
- [37:44]
Chaviv Rette Gour
The last area I want you to relate to is looking towards the West. First of all, to the American administration and the Europeans and secondly towards American Jews. And in both respects, especially with respect to American Jews, you have a kind of expertise that very few people do about the American administration and the West. We saw glimpses of what might be a possible coalition against the Axis of Iran during that first wave of attacks several months ago. And it was mobilized Again, and that probably played a role in convincing Iran not to respond at all, or at least not in the manner that it wanted to. What do you think about this international coalition? And do you think there've been so much criticism. The British, for example, imposed some kind of limited arms embargo. There was even a embargo from the American administration on certain types of bombs. Do you think Israel can trust the Western coalition to be on its side.
- [38:50]
Unnamed Host
At what it considers to be its existential issues?
- [38:55]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
I don't know. And I can tell you that in the Middle east, what we saw back in April when this coalition of Israel and some Sunni Arab states, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, little Bahrain, joined forces with centcom, with the United States to push back to take down those drones and missiles of the Iranian attack. What we saw was, was astonishing. First of all, it was a willingness to stand up in that moment, even if only defensively. In other words, Bahrain doesn't say out loud, we're going to help the Israelis attack, but we will help defend. We also saw the Americans as the platform, right? CENTCOM has interoperability with all of those different air forces. I don't know that the air forces themselves have the ability to coordinate with each other. We saw the critical role of America. We saw the willingness of these others to stand up. Those two are intertwined. There is an anti Iran coalition. It is powerful, it is real. It is willing to sacrifice if it thinks it has strategic depth and American support and if America is clear. If American policy is overtaken by all kinds of very clever people who read a lot of books in college but don't really have any experience in these kinds of wars and in the region. And these people start to talk about maybe Iran can be dissuaded from what is its fundamental ideological identity and mission, this regime. And they start looking for ways out that don't involve building this coalition or supporting this coalition. And in fact, if we throw them half the Middle east, maybe they'll stop their expansionism and stop the slow demolition of Lebanon and Yemen and Syria and all the rest. If that is the voice that overtakes American policy, then this coalition quite possibly will dissolve. And then to each his own. The Middle east becomes a much more dangerous place because everybody feels much less safe.
- [40:50]
Chaviv Rette Gour
Isn't that the current approach of, say, the UK government and the current American administration?
- [40:56]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
The UK government is, I don't know. You know, forgive me, Britons, I have tremendous respect for you and I love Terry Pratchett novels. A basket case. There's no policy There because of the alliance with America, they will aid in some marginal way facing down the Houthis. If all the navies of the west can't stop the Houthis from raising the cost of every container coming from China to Europe, then why are there all those navies there? And if you don't understand that when the Houthis start blowing up ships in the Bab El Mandeb Straits, that cost has to be exacted, not from the Houthis who will very happily starve their entire nation, it has to be exacted from Iran. If you don't get that, you're not going to solve it. And right now we have a British policy and frankly I think an American policy where you see a lot of people in the system who do understand it. You get a lot of these statements from people like Petraeus and McMaster and some Biden officials speaking in Congress. You get Kirby has said things where it is clear that within the administration there are very clear eyed voices who understand and who also understand their own power. It's America. Don't put boots on the ground, don't give them targets, but exact costs. You can exact immense costs at no cost to you. And if you cannot exact costs, if you are seen as a schizophrenic polity that is off talking to itself, facing a wall and is so unsure of its steps in the world that it cannot exact cost, Iran will run roughshod over the Middle east. Nations will collapse into genocides. Everybody talks about Iran as if it's some kind of a great power game. The Syrian civil war could not have gone the way it went without Iran. And the way it went was the destruction of one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. That was 10% of Syria's population 13 years ago and is today far less than 2%. Syria's Christians faced a total genocide and nobody gave a shit. And now the world is pretending to think that there's a genocide in Gaza and also care about it. I don't even believe you that you care about a genocide. Dear world, South Africa sued Israel for genocide at the icj. South Africa's relations with Syria, with Assad have gone up. They have upgraded. None of it's real. And so the cost of letting Iran run through this region. America is trying to stabilize Lebanon, to stabilize Lebanese monetary policy and currency, to stabilize Lebanese economy, to get that government working again, to get the garbage cleared out of the streets, to make people have faith in the country again. Well, guess what Hezbollah is doing. It's Demolishing Lebanon's capacity from within. It is a non state actor that needs the state as a parasite from which to act while protected by the fact that it's in a state. That's what Hamas would like to be in Gaza. They would like there to be an international regime of some kind in Gaza where Hamas can still do whatever it wants and nobody can stop it. And on board the. The Houthis are functionally the same thing. And there are militias in Syria. Iran is trying to build into that exact non state actor using a state as cover. Iran is demolishing states as a fundamental strategy of war. And it is doing it across the region. And nations are collapsing and entire populations are being destroyed because of it. And the best America can do is a conversation about responsible government. And it's so startling to me that don't do in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, every time US forces took a valley, they left a detachment of troops there. So they created all through Afghanistan a huge number of targets without actually the capacity to actually control the place. And everybody understood that. The population, the local population understood the Taliban would be coming back. The Taliban were in the hills. They can survive there forever. And so they never actually turned to the Americans in sufficient numbers. There's a snake here and there's a head of a snake. And you can go to the head of the snake and exact those costs. What did Israel suffer for taking Haniyeh out in what is basically the Blair House of Tehran? For embarrassing Khamenei to the point where Khamenei had to go on television and say, we're going to take revenge. And now the Iranians are locked into some revenge and they're terrified to take the revenge because the next Israeli escalation is their ability to ship oil to China. What did we actually suffer? America can do a hundred times more and suffer not one hundredth of what they can actually or what the Iranians could actually do to Israel. So I do want a better American policy and British policy. And if that backing and that support is there, the Israeli Sunni alliance has already flown for the first time. It has already shown that it wants to exist.
- [45:52]
Chaviv Rette Gour
I have one final question, but my last big topic for you is, is American Jews. We started a new academic year. We're on the cusp of a new Jewish year. What do you want to tell American Jews, the overwhelming majority of whom are liberal, they're not conservative and they're not Orthodox. What do you think the community at large needs to know about Israel in the weeks and months to come?
- [46:24]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
I just think, frankly, we need to know our story. American Jews landed in America. The bulk, the demographic bulk landed in America from about 1881 to 1921, when the quotas came in and Jews could no longer go to America. And that's when something like two and a half million Jews came. And they discovered in America, for the first time in Jewish history, a polity, a country, an identity, a way of understanding identity that saw in the Jews who had arrived Americans. And it is impossible to exaggerate how unusual, how shocking, how redemptive that felt to a generation of American Jews. Jews have been in the Russian Empire for as long as there's been a Russian Empire, much longer, actually. And they'd been in German lands, and they'd been in Polish lands and French lands, and they had never been German, Polish or French. The other, the nations they lived among always saw them as something else, and they saw themselves as something else. And we have 10,000 texts and we have polls on this. And this is all something very famous about the Jewish experience. And in America for the very first time, probably because America was radically individualistic, all these other America was a different. Is a strange place compared to the rest of the world. In beautiful ways, the Jews found a homeland in that American individualism and liberalism. And because it felt like history had ended for them, Jewish history, the pain and troubles of Jewish history had ended, they made an almost conscious decision to stop teaching it and to stop learning it. I have been In America probably 40% of the last 11 months, and I've met American Jews, hundreds and hundreds of American Jews. And one of the shocking things for me was the discovery that they genuinely American Jews do not know their story. They don't know their history. They don't know our history. They don't know that 90% of Israeli Jews are refugees who had nowhere else to go. They don't know that they treat Zionism as if it's one ideological choice among 15 ideological choices. You could have become ultra Orthodox, you could have become socialist, you could have become Zionist. They're just, you know, six ways to be right. And if Zionist is costly for Arabs and then don't do it. It's not nice. It's why do the thing that cost someone else something? As though the choices for the Jews who didn't get into the west, who didn't manage to get into America before the Emergency court Act of 1921, or into Canada or Britain or Australia before their quotas went, as though the choices before them were these safe, the luxury of Having these multiple ideological choices. The Jews who arrive in Israel are refugees fleeing death and destruction and mass persecution and having literally, literally no other place to go. And so to be an anti Zionist to an Israeli makes no sense. I don't even understand what the argument is. I have been giving talks on college campuses and there are two encounters that I just, just it's worth saying because I. And I've talked about these encounters and they really kind of changed my professional direction also over the last 11 months to focus on teaching history to Jews. Because I met this kid at GW in dc, the student, and he said, everyone on campus is anti Zionist. My professors, the students. I can't make friends who's not anti Zionist. And I tried to convey how strange that sounds to an Israeli. So I said, you know, I'm an idiot Israeli. What's an anti Zion Zionist? And the kid says, it's someone who doesn't believe Israel should have been founded. And I said, okay, but if you're Israeli, you can't help noticing that outside of the English speaking world, you're the last Jew alive. Apologies to some Russian Jews, apologies to some French Jews, but statistically the vast majority. Right. Is the argument we should also have been dead after the 20th century? Well, say that out loud. Say that you wish there'd be 8 million dead Jews, Jews in addition to the ones killed. Or is the argument that there should have been other options? Jews should have been able to flee other places. America should have taken in more Jews. Well, great, say that. But that's not a criticism of me. That's a criticism of America in the 1920s. Again, what's the actual argument? So the only way to seriously be anti Zionist is to be ignorant. That doesn't exonerate Israel of anything. Of any action, of any mistake, of any crime, of anything you think it did wrong at all. But it just doesn't mean anything to say I wish the Jews weren't there. Okay, mazel tov. You wish the Jews weren't there? I wish Norwegians all lived in Sweden. So who cares? It doesn't. It's not a thing. It's not an argument. One other student I met, and I've told this story, and I'm going to keep telling this story, is a kid at Harvard Law. I gave a talk at Harvard Law where after the talk, a kid comes up. It was a fun talk. I had a protest. It's nice to have a protest. You don't want to be the Israeli speaker who does the college course of America and Doesn't get a single protest. Then you find out nobody knows who you are and you don't exist right now.
- [51:39]
Chaviv Rette Gour
That is really offensive.
- [51:41]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
That was. Yeah. So I had the people take photos and I showed it to my wife. It was a wonderful thing. But afterwards, the kid comes up to me and he says to me, I can't cross Harvard Yard, which is where the big encampment was. I. I think, without them screaming at me, zionism is colonialism. And I said to him, you know, well, I'm sorry to hear that. That's. That sucks. And he said, no, it really hurts. So I said to him, I mean, okay, with respect, right? It really hurts. My wife has two brothers in Gaza in the war. You know, you can handle this. You, you're. You, you're good. This is. You're going to be okay. And then he says, no, what hurts is that I don't know the answer. They're yelling at me, zionism is colonialism. I don't know that. That's not true. That's what hurts. And because I'm. I can't emphasize this enough. I'm an idiot Israeli. I didn't understand the moment I was in until after. And I got annoyed at him. And I said to him, what, you. You don't know why Zionism isn't colonialism? I also thought, he's like a pro Israel student. He's coming to my talk. He was sitting politely. He comes to me afterwards to ask a question. He's our crowd. He doesn't know why Zionism isn't colonialism. So I said to him, zionism isn't colonialism because 90% of Israeli Jews are refugees who had no other option. There's no such colonialism. You don't even need to accept the Zionist's own narrative to my story that this is my homeland. You don't need that. I'm still not. What kind of colonialism is 90% refugees? There's an ancient tradition of belonging. Every synagogue on earth faces Jerusalem for 2000 years. And I'm done with his 92nd rant. And he takes a step back. He's a little, I think, sort of annoyed. And he has this embarrassed smile on his face. Embarrassed for me, not for him. And he says, holy shit, I'm invincible. And then he walks away. I had one version or another of that encounter 20 times. And I think that we have sent our kids to these campuses, we, the Jewish people all over the world. It's happening in London, it's happening in Sydney. It's happening In Cape Town, we have sent our kids to these campuses without their own story. I did not reveal unto him great mysteries of Jewish history and he did not know them. And when he knew them, he was invincible. And so our kids face on those campuses, and I think American Jewry generally faces from this part of the left, a sustained systematic war on our story. And our kids are utterly disarmed. And if we teach a lot of Jewish history real fast to a lot of Jewish kids, I don't know about you, I do not have a TikTok account. 50% of American college age kids, their number one source of news is TikTok. And we are losing on TikTok. I am informed by people who know such things. We're losing 200 to 1 on TikTok. I don't know how you measure it. I think with hashtags. I'm not going to fight that TikTok war. I don't know how, right? But if I teach our kids their story, they will teach us how to fight TikTok wars. And so what American Jews need is to know where they came from so that they have a sense of rootedness, a sense that they stand on an old dramatic the story of 1300 pogroms and six figure death tolls and destruction and poverty and flight with nothing but the shirts on their backs, millions of people fleeing mass displacement. That's the story that created American Jewry. And all American Jews remember from that. History is fiddler. And that's it. There's just. It's history has been swallowed whole and we need to reclaim it. And if we reclaim it, we become invincible.
- [55:29]
Chaviv Rette Gour
My last question to you very briefly. We're entering a new year. Where do you think we'll be a year from now?
- [55:38]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
We are strong. We have to know we're strong because then we'll become dangerous to our enemies. And then we will feel safe enough to be magnanimous to our friends, to the part of our enemies that we actually have a moral debt to, specifically, I mean Palestinians. But not just we are strong and we still act and think as though we are weak, but we're the strongest Jews who ever lived. And we are heirs to generations of Jews who worked and bled and suffered to make us this strong, to give us Israel, to give us the vast institutional edifice of American Jewry, to give us everything that we have the capacity to do and to be. And so, you know, I often people ask me, you know, what is the government going to do in this issue or that issue? Because by day job I'm a political analyst and my answer to get out of it is always the same. It's very easy to know what a million people are going to do. It's very hard to know what two people are going to do. How the government tackles a particular question really depends on about three people making a decision. And so it's almost impossible to know a year from now what things will look like. Well, it depends on individuals. So I don't know where we'll be, but I know that our, our mission, mine as, as a, I don't know, history teacher slash journalist, yours is a rabbi and all of the sense making elites of the Jewish world. I keep railing against elites, but at the end of the day I'm a journalist in a newspaper and that's usually considered one of these elites. I have to, you know, our job is to remind Jews that they are strong and that they can handle it. And then they have to stand up and do what needs to be done. And if we have that, then in a year we'll be in a good place.
- [57:31]
Chaviv Rette Gour
It's a great way to end this discussion. Incomparable Chaviv Rettek Gore. Thank you very much for your time. And we send to you and your loved ones our fervent prayers for a Shanah Tova good year and a year of health and productivity.
- [57:49]
Rabbi Ami Hirsch
Thank you. Thank you.
- [57:54]
Unnamed Host
I could listen to Chaviv Rettegur all day. He's one of Israel's foremost political and cultural analysts and is especially articulate in explaining Israel to American Jews. He knows our community as well as Israeli society. I want to emphasize one key point Chaviv conveyed. He said that American Jews need to know our story. He mentioned how shocking it is to encounter young people who simply know history. Now, to be fair, Americans in general tend to be ignorant of history. The past doesn't really matter that much. The future is down the road. Americans like to focus on the here and now, but not only that. Nowadays we have very short attention spans, especially younger generations. According to recent studies, 50% of TikTok users half admit that videos longer than 30 seconds are stressful to them. Herein lay the tension at the heart of modern society. Anything worthwhile and long lasting requires time. Relationships take time. Learning takes time. Understanding takes time. 3,000 years of Jewish history have come into our laps. We are the recipients and the products of what came before. We did not appear from nowhere. We are Jews because our ancestors passed Judaism on to us. They wanted us to be Jews. There will be Jews in the future because we want to pass Judaism on to our posterity. There's a Talmudic passage describing Honi the Righteous, who once saw a man by the side of the road planting a carob tree. Honi asked the man, how long does it take for this tree to bear fruit? The man replied, 70 years. Honi then asked, are you certain that you will live for another 70 years? Suggesting that the man will be long dead when the tree bears fruit and therefore implying that planting it today is a waste of time and effort. The man replied, I found carob trees in the world as my ancestors planted them for me, so I too plant these for my children. It's the way of the world. One generation plants for the next and the next in perpetuity. In so many respects, our generation of Jews is unique in all of Jewish history. Not only are so many of our young people ignorant of their own story, but their parents do not know enough to teach them, nor are they committed enough even to try. Think about it. In every previous generation of Jews, it was parents who taught Judaism to their children. And as the Passover Haggadah states, if our children do not know enough even to know what to ask, parents should explain it to them. But what happens when the parents also do not know enough? That situation was never taken into account by Jewish tradition. It was simply inconceivable to our ancestors that parents would be so Jewishly illiterate. In the course of my career, I've met the most amazing people. Brilliant, accomplished, prosperous, at the top of their field, in every field of human endeavor. And I love our young people in so many ways. They are so much better than my generation at that age. But who will teach them Judaism? That is why they are like deer caught in the headlights on campus. It's not that they are intellectually incapable of defending themselves or the honor of our people. They are among the most brilliant and accomplished of young Americans. It is that they are ignorant and illiterate about Judaism. My message to our young people and their parents in this new post 10-7- Reality we now find ourselves in Rediscover your Jewish pride. You are not the first generation of Jews to endure anti Jewish animosities. You will not be the last. Study Jewish history. For some reason, God has decreed us rocky and thorny road for our people. Looking back through the centuries, it has been a long, hard, tragic march from Sinai. But the journey has also been filled with exhilarating accomplishment, transcendent meaning and noble purpose. I hope you feel this, sense this, and are empowered by it. I hope that you too will do what our ancestors did. Walk the long and winding Jewish road with faith in the ultimate redemption of our people and all people. To young American Jews, do not begrudge these seers. They can make you better. Nothing inspires us more than the fight for principle, moral sentiment and grim resolve. Lift the heart and stiffen the spine. We get better through a moral struggle. Fight back and fight back hard. Fight as hard as our opponents. You will find many allies, both Jewish and non Jewish. Do not ignore the outrages perpetrated against you and fellow Jews on American campuses. We have learned throughout Jewish history that if we allow these anti Jewish mindsets to fester, eventually antisemitism worsens. To ignore antisemitism is to allow the culture of Jew hatred to settle in institutions rendering its eradication much more difficult. Antisemitism devastates not only Jews, but also the institutions and societies that allow or encourage it. And finally, it's time for all American Jews to return to the Jewish community. You cannot be a Jew from afar. It is a contradiction in terms. To be Jewish, you must live Jewish lives. Rediscover your Jewish inheritance. Raise your children to be proud and knowledgeable Jews. Engage the Jewish community. Be part of a great, great and good people that contributed so much to humanity. Give of your time and your resources. It should be clear to us now how decades of neglect have corroded the spirit of successive Jewish generations. Do not give up on efforts to improve the general welfare of our world. We can never give up on our responsibility to help make life better for all. But now is the time to give back to the Jewish community. Be generous, stay committed and revive that age old Jewish spirit that accounts for our still being here. While all the other nations of antiquity that live by our side disappeared long ago. Never give in and never give up. Until next time. This is is in these times.