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Making Sense with Sam Harris
#422 — Zionism & Jihadism
02:04:11
Sam Harris speaks with Haviv Rettig Gur about Israel and her enemies. They discuss Israel’s war with Iran and America’s role in the conflict, Israel’s military capabilities, Iran’s nuclear program, what a ground invasion of Iran could look...
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- [00:00]
Sam Harris
Foreign. I am here with Haviv Retik Gur Haviv, thanks for coming on the podcast.
- [00:26]
Haviv Retik Gur
Thank you for having me, Sam. It's good to be here.
- [00:28]
Sam Harris
We were just talking offline that we could be interrupted because you were in the middle of a war. It's got to be intense over there. So you and I had, we scheduled this podcast some weeks before Israel struck Iran and we had too much to talk about even then. But now we have the current front in the war to talk about. So let's just jump in. Many people will be aware of your work because you have been, to my ear, the most eloquent spokesman for and journalist covering what is happening in Israel and both factually and just the moral logic of the war in Gaza. But how do you summarize your work as a journalist at this point?
- [01:12]
Haviv Retik Gur
First of all, thank you. It's an honor. I have had two hats. I've been a professional working journalists since 2005. But I had the side hustle as a history teacher, whether it's in English for American college students visiting Israel. I've spoken to, we once estimated something like 8,000 of them over the last 15 years and Israeli premilitary academies and other informal frameworks. And when the war happened, something very strange happened, which was that I have these lectures online, I have these lectures that some colleges put on YouTube and they went insanely viral. And suddenly everybody really there was this hunger for the deep explanations. Nobody here is stupid, Nobody here is a moral cartoon. Even if some Westerners insist on making us so, whether Israelis or Palestinians. And if you can give that story that Israelis and Palestinians and different kinds of Israelis and Palestinians actually think they're living in, people find that extremely, extremely valuable. So I think that's what I'm trying to provide. It's more teacher than journalists actually. Or maybe it's what journalism should be at. I don't know. It's certainly what I think is my goal.
- [02:19]
Sam Harris
And can you remind me, why is your English so perfect and unaccented? What's going on there? Are you an AI that has perfected the simulation of human speech?
- [02:31]
Haviv Retik Gur
I keep trying to convince people it's Mossad training, but nobody believes it. No, half my childhood was in the States because of my parents work.
- [02:39]
Sam Harris
Which half?
- [02:40]
Haviv Retik Gur
I went to high school.
- [02:41]
Sam Harris
What years were you in the States?
- [02:43]
Haviv Retik Gur
Something like ages 9 to 18, something like that.
- [02:46]
Sam Harris
Okay, great. Well, yeah, let's start with Iran. Ultimately I want to talk about the war in Gaza and the pervasive misunderstandings about it and really just the pervasive misunderstanding about Israel's role in the world place in the moral order of civilization at this moment. I mean, I have not been shy about linking the fate of Israel to the fate of Western civilization in its contest with Islamist theocracy. So I do view Israel. I mean, obviously Israel is fighting its own war, but I think it's also fighting a much larger war for the West. It's even beyond the West. I mean, really a war for open societies and liberal democracies. But we'll get back to that. I mean, those topics are unfortunately evergreen or virtually evergreen. But let's start with the up to the moment uncertainty about what is happening with Iran and what sort of assistance Israel is likely to get, or not likely to get from the US at this point. What is the state of the operation in Iran as you currently understand? And I should say we're recording on Tuesday morning Pacific Time and 17 June. Yeah, Havib, give me your sense of what's the current state of the Israeli operation in Iran and what is Israel expecting the next steps to be both its own and coming from the US?
- [04:18]
Haviv Retik Gur
There are two ways to answer that. There's the immediate, the five days of war that we've already seen, and then there's the 20 months of war against the various proxies that Iran built out essentially for this war and they're no longer available to it. So I'll just zoom in on those five days and then we can expand, you know, out into 30,000ft if, if that's useful. But the war began five days ago on Thursday, Thursday night, so I guess Friday morning. And it was a culmination of decades of unbelievable competence and planning and the building of entire, you know, their factories in Iranian soil run by Mossad operatives building drones that then took off at the moment at H hour as the Israeli planes were overflying Iraqi airspace and took out a lot of launchers and a lot of Iran's ballistic missile capabilities. Iran's great threat to Israel in this kind of immediate kinetic war is its missile fleet. It has thousands and thousands or arsenal, I should say it has thousands of missiles and they target our cities and they've caused some damage in our cities already. But the great bottleneck for Iran, the Israelis understood very early on and that has been sort of the foundational strategy for Israeli defense, is not even the missile shield, which has actually performed fairly well against incredibly big, incredibly heavy, fast moving long distance ballistic missiles. But it's the launchers. They have a bottleneck of launchers. They have thousands of missiles, but they don't have thousands of launchers. And so if you can keep destroying launchers, if you can keep forcing them to deploy new launchers out of their hiding places and find them, the Israelis, very early, immediately, almost immediately took out Iranian air defenses, what was left of them after the November operation, last November, and gained air superiority over Iranian airspace and have been just flying around Iranian airspace, tracking down those launchers while taking out many, many of the strategic assets of the Iranian revolutionary regime. That includes the Chief of Staff of the IRGC and then four days later, his new. The new, his replacement, the new Chief of staff, the irgc. It includes almost the entire leadership of the IRGC air force. It includes so many of the military advisors and people around the Supreme Leader. It includes the people in charge of the response of the missile command, of all the things that Iran needs to actually manage a serious counter to the Israeli war, to the Israeli attack. And it's astonishing. It's astonishing. There are technological achievements here that America needs to learn from. For example, Israeli planes carrying missiles, missiles borne by planes, don't usually go ballistic. In other words, they shoot point to point, you point it at something and they shoot at it. And they can sometimes track and sometimes not. But Israeli missiles in order to increase the range of F15s which don't have the range to take off from Israel and fly all the way to Iran. So Israel has created missiles for these planes that when they launch, they go up higher into the sky and. And then they glide down. They use a ballistic trajectory to massively increase their speed and still manage to very precisely target. Israel has put missiles on the wings of F35s which are not designed to carry missiles on those wings. So it's an air force of such astonishing competence and innovation that it's stuff Americans can't do with their own equipment is what we've seen in this operation and the sheer brazenness of such a massive Mossad presence. I think one just last point, one of the really fascinating things to come out of it is what explains the Israeli penetration of Iranian leadership to the point where Israeli intelligence actually engineered a meeting of the top command of the General Staff of the IRGC air Force in order to bomb that meeting. So they made sure that everybody's schedules were cleared and they could all come to this meeting. And they were all invited by the right people to this meeting. And this meeting took place in a place where the Israelis actually engineered the meeting to take place. And the answer seems to Be that lots of Iranians. I know this is a shocking thought. Don't like the regime. And lots of pieces of the regime are set against the rest of the regime. And lots of minorities in Iran. It's a country that's only about 60% Persian, really hate Persian rule over them. And so you have all of these. It's kind of an old multi ethnic empire in that sense, or the old model of the Ottomans or the Austro Hungarians. And the Mossad knows how to make profoundly good use of that. And so Israel's full capabilities of a competent state are on display. And the shocking incapability, the incompetence of the Iranian regime that has managed to frighten the world from the Obama administration to the Arab world for decades turns out to be the paradigmatic paper tiger.
- [08:58]
Sam Harris
How do you explain how deterred the US in particular has been by Iran all these years? I view Israel at this moment doing what America should have done many, many years ago and perhaps could never accomplish with this skill. In some sense, I worry about the degradation of our own competence by comparison. But it's also, there's been a degradation of almost our moral competence. I mean, Israel is doing something. I understand that this is an existential threat to Israel, a nuclear armed Iran, in the way that it isn't for America. But to my eye, America has been deterred in the face of Iranian belligerence for decades. It's almost as though we have treated them like they've already had nukes. How do you explain our unwillingness? Our unwillingness? Even now? Even now that you have cleared the skies over Iran and it would seem we could simply drop our bunker busting bombs to end this story on really, I think just two sites would require it. How do you understand America's relatively prostrate position with respect to an endless number of explicit challenges and even combat maneuvers on Iran's part? I mean, Iran was killing US troops in our various misadventures in the Middle east. And to my knowledge, we didn't really respond to that. I mean, apart from our killing Soleimani back in the first Trump administration. How do you understand America's posture here?
- [10:36]
Haviv Retik Gur
Even that killing of Soleimani caused a tremendous amount of pearl clutching among the good and great and wise. I have to say, it's such a fascinating question, I suspect you'll be able to answer it better than me. So let me give something much less than an answer, which is the Israeli experience of this American motionlessness, this culture of motionlessness, innovation and a willingness to be brazen and bold, maybe because everything is at stake is kind of the defining feature of the Israeli organizational culture, of the Israeli security services. So, for example, the pager operation, the entire debate around the world was immediately a moral one. Is it okay to take out the 1500 top people of a terror organization or just an antagonist combatant in a war with almost no civilian costs? Or is in fact the fact that a single civilian can be found to have died mean that the Israelis are just evil monsters? Still was the stupid, genuinely just ridiculous debate that immediately was sparked by the pager operation. But consider the debate that should have been there, and it was in some places, but not sufficiently in the major media, was the astonishing brazenness of the. Just the boldness of it. There was a, according to reports from journalists who are in the know on these things, there was a young woman, 30 year old woman in the Mossad who had this idea. And she came to the leadership with the idea and she said, what if we could do this crazy thing? And the Mossad is a big bureaucracy, but nevertheless, in the Mossad from the top levels down, they said, let's put it together. And so they pieced together the entire supply chain of a fake pager company that then had to go build specially designed pagers to put explosives in them in ways that would only detonate at the right moment. They had to actually develop. One of the most difficult parts of that operation was to have the radio signal from within Lebanon, in very different parts of the country that are not within radio reach of each other, go off at the same time. It was this enormous operation from a Taiwanese supply chain all the way through radios broadcasting on the ground. And then you ask yourself, what would it take for the CIA to okay that kind of operation, to find a group within the CIA willing to put it together and then launch it. How many things could go wrong and who would take the risks to have something like that go wrong? The Israelis. After the 2006 war in Lebanon and Gaza, where tens of thousands of missiles fell on Israel, rockets fell on Israel, and there weren't enough bomb shelters, and there was no missile defense of any kind, of any meaningful kind for short range rockets and missiles, the Israelis decided to fix that. And they began to develop this idea of the Iron Dome, which is kind of technically equivalent to shooting a bullet out of the sky with another bullet that you fire out of a gun. And the Iron Dome concept went to the Pentagon and the Pentagon actually told the Obama administration that it's unfeasible. Physics doesn't allow for this to be done. And there were advocates for this, whether it's AIPAC or in Congress, there were advocates in Washington that said, no, no, if we, we can do this, we trust the Israelis to be able to pull off this technological wonder. And enough people had enough of a leap of faith to actually including President Obama to actually put the kind of money behind it. And one of the things that Obama bought with that money was also co ownership of the system and of the technology by the United States. In many, many ways, Iron Dome is representative both of the motionlessness of America and of this massively innovative kind of culture in Israel, because the Pentagon has a very hard time putting out R and D tenders and just having new things developed, crazy, wild ideas examined for their strategic advantage in war. And so the Pentagon almost has begun to treat Israel as a kind of easy R and D lab that sidesteps all of the bureaucracy of the American industrial, sort of military industrial world. You have very, very few military companies that are producing serious military systems. There's not a lot of competition and there's not a lot of courage in the bureaucracy to pursue crazy ideas. And the same is true in policy. You go to the State Department and people are saying the same just inane, empty pablum that they've been saying for 30 years. And that's how you get ahead. And nobody's willing to say something different, something a little strange, a little crazy, something that risks sounding neocon one week or a little isolationist another week. There just isn't a real serious whenever we encounter. I don't come from the State Department, I'm talking about people I meet as a journalist from the outside. But there isn't a culture of real debate, real discussion. I think that the monocultures you see in American elite academia is a similar monoculture that you see in American government. And so the Israelis are just out there to win. And anybody who has a new idea, a good idea, and by the way, the Israelis also have groupthink and catastrophic misunderstandings of the enemy. That's the story of October 7th. But there's also the capacity to do the opposite. There's the capacity to really go after new ideas, crazy ideas, and try to pull them off.
- [15:42]
Sam Harris
So this operation was obviously years in the making. Why did Israel finally decide to act now?
- [15:48]
Haviv Retik Gur
I believe the official reason, it's not the only reason, but it is also a reason. Iran is nearing weaponization. Iran is nearing the capacity to take the enriched uranium, which during the Biden years, because there was zero fear that Biden would ever possibly pull a trigger on any kind of military response. Iran just moved ahead to 60% enrichment, which is very, very close to weapons grade enrichment. And the weaponization program, the technology of producing a bomb and actually putting it on a missile was very, very advanced. The scientists Israel targeted in this operation were not actually part of the enrichment system. They were part of the weaponization system. And Iran was going to have nukes. And the other reason was the missiles. You don't need necessarily a nuclear device detonating over Tel Aviv, 400 meters over Tel Aviv. If you can drop 10,000 1 1/2 ton missiles with conventional warheads on Tel Aviv, it would have the same damage to physical buildings. It would have tremendous damage to people. Not the same, but nevertheless tremendous. Iran was on a path to produce massive numbers of missiles very, very quickly and to actually be able to get past the kinds of bottlenecks that are allowing us to fight this war with minimal damage. So there was the simple timeline of Iranian capabilities and obviously, unavoidably, there was the timing of the political window of the Trump administration. It turned out that Netanyahu and Trump saw eye to eye on the question of the Iranian nuclear program. Trump did ask, allegedly, according to Israeli officials reporting, what they heard from the Trump Netanyahu meetings back in the spring. Back in March, Trump told Netanyahu, just give me a home run, right? He doesn't want to have grinding wars in the Middle east that drag America in, but if there's a home run, he'll back it. That's what the Israelis were told back in the day. And I think that Trump now believes, and the reason he's willing to face down the Tucker Carlson's on this question is that he believes the Israelis came through spectacularly in that regard. So that political window, I think also was a big part of it.
- [17:56]
Sam Harris
Well, to continue with your baseball analogy, Israel has certainly hit a triple. But as far as actually ending the Iranian nuclear program, it sounds like there's one more step, at least that has to be accomplished. What is the expectation on your side with regard to the US coming in with B2 bombers and, and actually destroying the capacity at Fordow? And I don't know if Natanz is still extant, but it sounds like there really is nothing, there's no armaments on your side that you own or that you can wield all on your own that can accomplish the complete destruction of the most hardened centrifuges.
- [18:37]
Haviv Retik Gur
That is what everybody knows. And technically on paper, that is absolutely the case. And there was absolutely no way for Israel to sidestep the ridwan force of Hezbollah and just dismantle Hezbollah as a strategic, mobilizable force without fighting the most hardened fighters who would exact thousands of hundreds of casualties, at least from the Israeli military. And then they did. Does the Mossad have something up its sleeve? We know that this whole strategy of taking over supply chains has already been done vis a vis the Iranian nuclear program. At one point, I remember reading years ago, there was a Mossad operation that it infiltrated the supply chain of furniture to one of these installations and managed to get a desk would be trapped with a bomb into one of the nuclear sites, and that desk exploded with tremendous force and destroyed some significant portion. Does the Mossad have some trick up its sleeve for Fordo? I'll put it this way. Everybody has known for 15 years that, I mean, since they've known about fordo, they've known that step two is fordo. And so it is entirely possible that the Israelis have a solution to fordo. I have no idea what it would be, but we had no idea we had the current capabilities that we have. They've been, again, unprecedented in the history of warfare. A lot of people were talking about how the new war of drones and missiles would make air forces obsolete. The Israelis figured out how the integration of the two is vastly more powerful than either one alone. So we're breaking new ground in the history of war. And there's reason to believe the Israelis can handle fordo if the Americans do it. The Americans take on costs. Right? The Iranians will have to launch missiles just for the show of it. After threatening for so many decades they will have to launch missiles at American troop deployments in the region. Ironically, that might actually bring the Americans in. In other words, even the fear that that could happen, or the theory that that'sif something blows up in Fordo and it's Israeli. But the Iranians assume in the first 45 seconds that it America because they don't think the Israelis can. Then they attack American troops in UAE or Qatar. That would bring the American response. And so it's a delicate question. I completely understand Americans who say, I don't want to get in on this, and I fundamentally, almost as a question of identity, believe that Israel has to be able to go it alone. But to take fordo with Israeli capabilities might involve assuming we don't have some magical rabbit that the Mossad has already managed to pull out a dozen times in the last 20 months, might involve ground troops and might involve real difficult Battle with real casualties for the Israelis. Something that good planning has so far avoided. So I don't know to say more than that, but that is the big question everyone is now waiting to hear. I should also say, and this is really a rumor, but these rumors have all turned out to be correct. There's an old joke about Israeli secrets. A KGB spy comes to Tel Aviv to meet with an Israeli connection in the Israeli security services. And he arrives at the apartment and he rings the doorbell and the guy answers the door and he says, can I help you? And the guy says, the birds fly south in winter. And the guy says, excuse me. And the KGB spy says, the birds fly south in winter. And the guy says, oh, no, I'm Goldberg the dentist. You want Goldberg the spy? He's on the second floor, right? It's this idea that everybody knows everything. Ultimately, we journalists are required to only report on the Israeli nuclear program from foreign sources that reveal things. But it's not like people don't know, right? And so I have to say that there is now talk in Israel. Make of it what you will, that the next two days are a significant pivot from what has been up to now, that what has been up to now will continue the hunt for the launchers will continue. Maintaining the launcher bottleneck that has meant 50 missiles in a round instead of 400 will continue the pursuit of the regime will continue and expand probably to the energy sector, which it's already started doing. But there might be a serious pivot in the coming days. There have been talk about that and a lot of speculation about that in Israel.
- [22:41]
Sam Harris
And troops on the ground. How would that be accomplished? Is that through Syria? What is the access?
- [22:47]
Haviv Retik Gur
Luckily, I don't know anything, so I can talk freely. Israel maintains capabilities that have not made sense in war since the 1950s, have not been used since the 1950s. For example, active paratroopers trained to jump out of airplanes. The last time an Israeli soldier jumped out of an airplane in a war in combat situation is 1956 in the Sinai. And it was not a very useful operation then. And yet we have entire units and brigade level units, thousands of men able and equipped and trained to jump out of airplanes. It is not inconceivable. And this is stuff that's out there on the military blogosphere and things like that. It is not inconceivable that the Israelis have the capabilities to drop significant numbers of troops where they need to in Iran, who can take a region, prepare a landing field there, hold it, and conduct massive military operations. While defending the place in ways that allow them to get into installations like Fordo, things like that. It's utter speculation, the kind of speculation that's been out there in public for decades. But Israel has those capabilities. And so, you know, one of the ways that Israel really shines as a military is in the understanding that war is the realm of the unknown. That's something you learn in your first week in office or school in the idf. You come to the battlefield with all the best laid plans, and then the enemy surprises you. And that is the nature and definition of the enemy in war. And then you have to improvise. But the most of what you're going to be doing on the battlefield is improvise. By the way, in that sense, what's happened so far has been astonishing. For the enemy to have so easily fallen into all of our plans has been just a miracle and a gift. But the ability to have wild and crazy kinds of options, redundancies, far more forces than you actually need on paper, is really important once you actually encounter that unknown, that battlefield situation. And so we have that. And I can imagine six different ways it could go down, just from my being a junior, you know, sergeant in the Israeli infantry 25 years ago. But it is, I think, doable. Very, very dangerous. We're going to lose people in an operation like that. America could do it cleanly without any losses to our side, but America might not want to. And that's okay. Israel can handle things on its own. Israel needs to be able to handle things on its own.
- [25:14]
Sam Harris
Yeah. I mean, I must say, speaking as an American, it wouldn't seem okay to me. I just view us as rudderless. This isn't just a criticism of the Trump administration. Arguably, I think, as you pointed out, Trump, all things considered, has been better for Israel's predicament than we had any reason to expect. A Kamala Harris administration would have been, at least with respect to the degree which she would have been captured by the far left moral confusion that you alluded to earlier, early on. But still, it's just that the clarity of this morally and geopolitically, I think, is impossible to exaggerate. I mean, we have a regime in Iran that was sprinting to acquire nuclear capability. And for decades, it has advertised its aspiration to use this technology to perpetrate a genocide in the Middle East. I mean, it has been explicit in its. I mean, forget about its chanting death to America at every opportunity. It has been explicit in its aspiration to perpetrate a second holocaust with the most powerful weapons it can get its hands on. And it's, you know, the mad work it's accomplished in supporting all of its proxies and its culpability for October 7 and the depredations of Hezbollah and the Houthis. I mean, it's just the idea that we were going to enter another round of fake negotiation and capitulation to this regime seems just morally insane to me. And in addition to all of that, I don't imagine this would be part of the calculus politically, but morally, in addition to all of that, I think we have reason to believe that the Iranian people, unlike many of the other Arab countries where we have meddled over the years, only to find that the majority of the population was still hankering for theocracy, even though we were spending blood and treasure to give them democracy. Iran seems like it is properly sick of theocracy. I don't know if that's 60% of the population or 80% of the population, but what you have in Iran, again, you know better than I, but it seems like you have in Iran a population that is just under the COVID of hijab, imposed silence. You have certainly a population of women itching to live cosmopolitan, reasonably secular lives. And presumably there are many men in their lives who share the same frustration with the last 40 years of life in Iran. Again, unlike some of these other countries where we thought we would be greeted with flowers and we were greeted with, at minimum, some more ambiguity than that in Iran, it seems a reasonable bet that most Iranians would be happy to be done with theocracy. Is that your impression of what's happening there?
- [28:23]
Haviv Retik Gur
Yeah, I mean, it runs deep. What America encountered in the Middle east was societies whose basic identity structures are very tribal. And I'm not criticizing, by the way. I think that's something that Israelis share with much of the rest of the Middle east in ways that make them a little bit strangers in the west, where being Sunni or being Shia in Iraq was not a theological difference between Sunni and Shia. You know, I don't know what mystical traditions. It was a tribe. It was literally clans and groups and places that you live who fight together and will defend you and will protect you in a world that is still a wild West. And America didn't understand why they weren't all rushing to the banner of the great ideas of the Western Enlightenment. And I don't know how to put this. I'm a big fan of the big ideas of the Western Enlightenment. And I thank God every day I have a tribe there's some complex mixing of the two that produces a healthiest, happiest society. For example, frankly, forgive me for the flag waving here, but Israelis, Israelis have all of the freedoms, the gay pride parades and the self expressions and the religious diversities of the liberal West. And they also have the solidarity and the high birth rates, including among secular high tech engineers in Israel have higher birth rates than the entirety of the rest of the developed world. And every other kind of Israeli has higher birth rates than them. And so we have that mix. And America encountered this thing that I think American culture didn't really know how to comprehend, how to deal with it. Wrote a beautiful constitution for Iraq without contending with this deep complexity of a whole nother way of understanding human belonging in society. In Iran you have a completely different story. You very much have ethnic tribes and religious tribalism and all of that, but you have a regime with a story that is essentially fundamentally a deep betrayal of Iran's, of the very revolution that brought it to power. The Round's revolution has two parts, and I say this not to tell people the history, but to invite people to fact check me so that they begin this journey into the history, because this really matters to understanding what's going to happen going forward. The Iranian Revolution. The Shah of 1978, before the revolution, was pro American in the Cold War, but very much a tyrant with the secret police and abusive and oppressive. And the revolution that sparked in 1978, in December, was a revolution that allied all the different elements of Iranian society, all of them from the clerical religious movements and mosques and charities of that Islamist world of Khomeini, to the liberals, the liberal nationalists, the feminists, the communists, various communist groups that all fought against each other, obviously the students, the wealthy, the poor, the bazaar merchants, the small shopkeepers, all these different elements of Iranian society came out to march in this revolution against the Shah. And what was amazing, it was literally millions of people marching over two days all over Iran. Something like 15% of the population of the country all turned out in Tehran itself. It was something like two and a half million people. Half the city, half the city marched. And within six weeks the Shah was gone. And two weeks after he was gone, Khomeini came back from exile. And what would then happen over the course of 1979 and then over the course of the next nine years was the slow removal from that coalition, almost always violently, of all those other elements of Iranian society as the religious factions consolidated power in this new government. So the promise of democracy as all those marchers marched. You had banners. People should look up these marches from the Ashura rebellion. That's the holiday it happened on of 1978. There were people marching with banners about democracy and liberalism and elections and rights of women. And the religious clerics were the most organized of all these oppositions, of all these social subgroups, because they had networks that the Shah had a hard time suppressing. You could easily suppress student groups on campus. You had a very hard time suppressing what a cleric would say and imam would say in a mosque on a Friday, at a Friday prayer. And so they were the best organized and the best ready to take advantage. And they turned into an incredibly brutal theocracy. They pushed the Marxists to the point where many were killed. Many fled to Iraq, to the Shia Arabs of Iraq, and in the Iran Iraq war actually joined Hamas. There's a Freudian slip of an Israeli nowadays, joined Saddam's war on Iran. And so we're seen as traitors by Iran. And in 1988, the regime actually went through the prisons of Iran and murdered all the people they thought over 5,000 people belonged to these Marxist groups over the border in that war. And so just a series of crackdowns and murders, the shuttering of universities, the firing en masse of all secular university lecturers. This regime came to power in one of the most beautiful moments in the history of this nation, of this competent and diverse and fascinating nation. And the first thing it did, and everything it did from that day one, was the rejection and dismantling of all of the promise of a potential multi party, multi vision kind of parliamentarism that Iran could have been. And since then, 46 years, there have been only two supreme leaders, Khomeini and Ali Khamenei, who is still the supreme leader now as long as he's still alive. And that regime has basically managed to drive Iran into the dirt over those 46 years. The only success it has had in 46 years, the only accomplishment Iranian society can point to is the regime sufficiently oppressing, sufficiently co opting different elites to stay in power. So every poll we have, the polls published in state media of the regime tell the same fundamental story as polls coming in from outside. The vast majority of Iranians, probably 90%, want the regime gone. They express it as disaffection with the economic problems in this moment. When the war began, Iran was facing mass trucker strikes, mass nurse strikes, mass strikes of bakeries, all kinds of pieces of the economy. They just went through a terrible winter without access to gas. It's One of the most gas rich countries in the world. One of the phrases that Iranians often talk about, especially in the Iranian diaspora, is the tragedy of a very poor nation living in a very rich country. And that's the story of this regime. So they hate it profoundly. And none of the tribalism matters because the whole point that brought them to power was this unity that they then cracked down on and turned into this running two generation long catastrophe.
- [35:20]
Sam Harris
So is it your understanding that Israel, in its strikes so far has stopped short of trying to engineer a fall of the regime? Have they not been attacking the theocratic ruling targets?
- [35:35]
Haviv Retik Gur
It's such a complex question and such an important one. I believe that the Israelis would love for the regime to fall, solve all the problems in one fell swoop. There are plenty of governments out there that don't like us, but also aren't massive, immediate catastrophic dangers to us because they're not this particular kind of regime. So, you know, if Iran was run like Turkey a it would not seek nukes because it would be too busy building a serious economy. Now, Turkey might be headed in a more Islamist direction. Turkey is certainly headed in a more Islamist direction. But it's coming from a place of real democratic, open tradition. There's still elections, there's still local elections. Erdogan occasionally arrests his leading opposition leader. But there's enough democracy there that there's still a kind of competence and a need to actually take care of what the people actually need and not literally rob them blind at a mass scale over generations to build a nuke that nobody understands why you need. So if Iran were a regime of the style of Turkey, I don't need it to be Switzerland. It would already not be a danger to Israel in any way. And so regime change is a shortcut. It's a wonderful idea. Let's do it. Let's. Great. I'm for it. The problem is nobody quite knows how. And America is very scared of regime change because it's failed repeatedly. Israel is not even able to imagine itself in a league where this is any kind of option. Right? We have the population of Austria. We are not going to now go into this country nine times our population and many more times our size geographically and somehow re engineer Iranian political society and consciousness into a new regime.
- [37:11]
Sam Harris
So what I we don't think that the thirst for a new government coming from the Iranian people themselves would accomplish effectively a coup in the aftermath of some decapitation strike from Israel.
- [37:25]
Haviv Retik Gur
They've spent 46 years doing nothing but figuring out how to prevent that from happening. And they have degraded the organizing capacity of every single power base in Iranian society to the point where it may not be doing doable. But the hope is that we meet in the middle. The hope is that we degrade that political elite and ruling elite and the IRGC and also the elements of the regime that are not turned against us, that are turned against their own people, like this thing called the Basij, which is this immense. It's a bunch of thugs who go to the streets to beat up protesters en masse. But it's enormous and it has intelligence services. It's a kind of its own police as well. Can we degrade these institutions sufficiently to seriously open a window for courage to come forth and actually organize and take down the regime? The simple answer is, I don't know. We're going to degrade them as far as we have to, to be able to take out the things that threaten us, the missile production facilities and the nuclear program. And the people will have to make a choice. Now, they've been under this thing for 46 years. Nobody doubts what the people want. There's simply no. There's a debate over whether it's 75% or 91%. There's no debate about what the people want, but the people will have to seize it on their own. We're not America and we are small people with tremendous strengths. And thankfully, Iran is tremendously incompetent as a state. But that's the best I can do. Gosh, I hope so. But Iranians are going to have to do it.
- [38:55]
Sam Harris
Okay, well, let's pivot to the war in Gaza and this longstanding fact that Israel really is the. I forget who coined this line, but it has been treated as the Jew among nations for as long as it has been a nation. Let's take that piece first. I mean, I want to talk about the war in Gaza and what you expect there, but it seems to me that Israel has completely lost. I don't think that's putting it too strongly an information war with the rest of the world. I mean, there's something about a failure of public relations here that is proving catastrophic not just to Israel and its standing in the world, but to the perception of Jews outside of Israel at this moment. I mean, we've seen this explosion of anti Semitism globally to some degree. The, the war in Gaza is, one could imagine, a pretext to express something that an ambient level of antisemitism that's already there. But I think in other contexts, it is creating an animus toward Jews, certainly in people where you wouldn't expect it. So we just have this larger global problem of the greatest efflorescence of anti Semitism we've seen in our lifetime, and Israel's status, virtual status as a pariah nation among nations that really should know better. Because again, the moral asymmetries here between Israel and her enemies, and we'll get into them, are beyond obvious. This is not a hard call. And yet everything is upside down. And crucially, everything was upside down not just in response to Israel's invasion of Gaza, but prior to that, before. I mean, this is how we can dissect the level of moral confusion suffered by most of the free world at this moment. On October 8th, before Israel had responded, you had our most elite institutions effectively taking the side of Hamas in certain cases, explicitly taking the side of Hamas. So how did we get here? Right. Again, we'll get into the details of Gaza. We'll get into many of the lies and half truths that, that anchor people to this confusion. But how is it that this information war seems to have been lost up until this point?
- [41:20]
Haviv Retik Gur
There's so much to say, it's hard to know when to start, where to begin. I would say, first of all, the projection of one's anxieties and concerns about the war in Gaza onto your local Jewish community is such obvious rabid bigotry that nobody in the west would be confused on this question. If you applied it to Muslims or if you applied it to Hindus or.
- [41:45]
Sam Harris
The Chinese, I don't see Chinese Americans being blamed for the behavior of the ccp.
- [41:50]
Haviv Retik Gur
Right. And so there's just. No, it's just. And maybe China doesn't claim to represent all Chinese, but there are plenty of Muslim states doing plenty of horrific things at scales in order of magnitude larger than Gaza. In the worst case scenario, that you believe of Israel in Gaza, that claim to represent Islam, and nobody comes to the Muslim community in America or in Britain or in Canada and says to them, explain yourselves. So, no, none of that is legitimate in any way. It's just an antisemitism that is permissible in elite circles because it has a cache in Western civilization given to Western civilization, an inheritance of the Christian tradition that makes it okay, makes it recognizable, and therefore not something that feels dangerous and upsetting. So I don't have to respect that even slightly? I don't have to respect that at all. Israel will commit crimes. Israel will make mistakes. Israel is a country. I have never sat in a room with Americans and said to them you know, America makes terrible mistakes and sometimes real crimes. And had any American ever fall off their chair, not a single one, no matter how patriotic they are. Israel's a real country and it's going to make those mistakes. And if you then come to your Jewish community in Cleveland, Ohio, with, with complaints, you are the bigot, and there's nothing else to know about that situation. So that's the first point. The second point is a lot of it is Israel's fault, he said, immediately after saying the first thing. And what I mean by Israel's fault is one of the most beautiful things about us, is one of the most catastrophic things in wartime. And that is that we are a people culturally profoundly incapable of explaining ourselves. And it comes from a very deep and very old place. In the late 19th century, the pogroms begin. There's a specific moment of the death of Czar Alexander II at the hand of anarchist assassins in 1881 in St. Petersburg. He was this reformist czar who abolished serfdom and was this guy that many Jews hoped would deliver for the Jews, would end the Pale of Settlements, would end the anti Semitic laws of the Russian Empire. And when he dies, his reactionary son, Alexander III takes over. This is 1881, and one of his first acts is to pass massively anti Semitic laws that tighten the regime of restrictions on Jewish lives in the empire, the may laws of 1882. And that's when we see the beginning of what would be 40 years and more of mass pogroms that would become something like 1300 pogroms. It would begin, not very deadly, and they would escalate in number and in deadliness over the course of the next 40 years, probably killing over those four decades a quarter million Jews, including in World War I and the Russian Civil War, unrelated to the war itself, just villages burned to the ground. And that drove millions and millions of Jews to flight and millions of Jews to leave. And right at that period, you begin to see a serious consolidation of what would come to be known as the Zionist movement. And it literally begins. People can look up a guy named Leo Pinsker, who is a Russian integrationist infatuated with this reformist czar, and then watches the sudden pivot after his death to mass pogroms. And he says, wait a second. The day, by the way of the Tsar's assassination that morning he gave the order to establish a parliament for the Russian Empire. He wanted to lead the Russian Empire to what the rest of Europe, Western Europe, Central Europe was becoming. And he says, wait a Minute. What if we're living a fantasy? What if this new modernity and liberalism and science and people are discovering electrons and whatever, what if all of this is actually a veneer overlaying a much, much more real trend of consolidation of national identities, of industrialization that was driving people from small places, villages, farms, into big cities and creating these new mass societies and mass identities and radicalized political movements. And all of this stuff, all of these changes would turn on the Jews and turn on the minorities and we're actually not safe anymore. And there's this entire sociological analysis of modernization that develops, that is basically Herzlian Zionism. And Pinske writes a pamphlet in 1881 called Auto Emancipation, meaning the emancipation is a series of laws passed by these European countries in the late 19th century that liberate the Jews from the ghettos, liberate the Jews from the restrictions on university and professions and all of that. And he says, what if it's all not real? What if none of this emancipation ultimately will end? Well, you have to auto emancipate yourself. That's the only solution. Jews need self determination. And one of the main arguments that these early Zionists make, these strategic Zionists who awaken because of this sudden turn of Europe on the Jews, is the idea that a Jew cannot stand before the anti Semite and explain himself. Now they thought of an anti Semite as someone who, to whom the Jew is a some kind of moral cartoon, is some kind of antagonist or protagonist and some kind of morality play happening in their own head. In other words, not a human being in front of them, but part of a story they need for their own definition of themselves that's an anti Semite. And when you stand before that antisemite and you say, oh no, I'm not this thing you think I am, I'm actually over here, this other thing, this complex three dimensional human thing, you cannot, these thinkers, the Pinskers and the Herzl, say you cannot penetrate the fog of their morality play. And because you cannot penetrate that fog, you will stand before them and you will try to explain and you will end up trying to justify. And justifying yourself is dehumanizing. And so you are forbidden to justify yourself. That is not a thing that a Jew with dignity and basic human dignity is permitted to do anymore. And the Zionist movement creates a foundational culture of not justifying yourself. And you had this in the 1950s. David Ben Gurion would say, when the UN would say something mean to Israel, Ben Gurion would say, um shmoom, which means un Shmuen, Right? The Yiddishism of saying, who cares about the UN? I think it was October 15, 2023, a week after the war began, a week after October 7, Israel had a Ministry of Public Diplomacy. Call it propaganda, call it public relations, whatever. It's a ministry with that title on the door. And it had founded the Ministry of Public Diplomacy five times over the course of its existence. And it keeps shutting it down because it doesn't know what to do with it. And the Minister of Public Diplomacy, a member of Knesset belonging to Netanyahu's Likud Party, got up on television and said to Israelis, this is again, a week into the war, maybe 10 days into the war, and says to Israelis, look, this is a fake ministry. It's not a real thing. In coalition negotiations, you establish fake ministries to make it easier to hand out positions to people so the negotiations go easier. I don't mind wasting public funds to make coalition talks easier in peacetime, but I'm not going to waste public funds in wartime. And she resigned right there on national television, and she shut down her ministry, and it was the most patriotic thing she had ever done. And so, just to recap, Israel shut down its Public Diplomacy ministry because a war started is how bad Israelis at a fundamental cultural level are at the understanding that they have to stand before the world and explain what the heck is going on. In 20 months of war, Netanyahu has not appointed a serious, proper spokesman that anybody knows how to go to and turn to. So you had the UN relief chief say on, I believe it was the BBC a couple weeks ago, that 14,000 babies were going to die within 48 hours. Maybe it was a slip of the tongue. It took him an awfully long time to issue a correction. It was such a patent falsehood that was just not humanly possible for that to be even within three orders of magnitude of possibility. Even if you hate Israel and wish Israel were destroyed, that still should have actually rung out to you as an obvious lie. But when journalists came looking, there wasn't an Israeli spokesperson they could have called. There just isn't one in government, and they never bothered to establish them. And so this is a world, an entire arena of war that for Hamas, is central to their strategy and for all of its allies, is central to their strategy. And the Israelis, because of this cultural kink, we do not stand before the world and justify ourselves. I love this about Israelis. And it is a massive strategic liability in wartime. And that's basically the story. So we can't, by the way you can get Israelis to take PR seriously if you tell them it hurts the Jews. In other words, you Israelis, great, you don't have to live with these people over in, I don't know what Denver or London, but the Jews of the Diaspora do. And you're hurting them by allowing whatever the most right wing rabid politician says about emptying Gaza to be the only Israeli voice out there in the world and not the Voice of the 80% mainstream of Israeli Jews. And then they say, yeah, no, we should probably do this, but they still don't have the basic cultural sense that this is a thing. So a country with the competence on display over the skies of Iran can't. And by the way, Netanyahu, when he wants to win the next election, is going to hire the best marketing firm that knows how to hack the human brainstem. But they're not going to do it to justify themselves. They can't do it physically. It's a thing that is extremely difficult for an Israeli to undertake culturally.
- [51:06]
Sam Harris
That's a fascinating answer and one that I had never heard before. Okay, well, so you talk rather often about understanding people and tribes in all their complexity and not default into the cartoon in your head. I would argue that the situation, the moral asymmetry to which I just alluded to is about as the real situation is about as cartoonish as disparities in human motives and cultural qualities ever get. And so I'll just put this to you, and none of this is going to be novel to you, but I just want you to defrag my hard drive if you think there's any way in which I have this wrong. Because it's not often that I'm speaking to someone who is as informed as you are about the details of life on the ground there, but it sounds absolutely cartoonish to say, and I forget where this point originates, but it sounds like wartime propaganda to say if the Palestinians simply laid down their arms, there would be peace in the region. If the Israelis laid down their arms, there would be a genocide. That sounds insane. I think certainly to a first approximation, something like that is true and has been true for as long as Israel has existed. I mean, perhaps just react to that. That asymmetry, it's almost in crystalline form. All that I think you need to understand about the predicament in the Middle east.
- [52:43]
Haviv Retik Gur
First. If you. I know something about your podcast and your audience and they're expecting rich depth, which I'm going to, you know, so I'm struggling to deliver here.
- [52:55]
Sam Harris
But also what I'm expecting what I'm urging you to do is, please, if there's anything, if there's any crucial nuance that you think I'm eliding by putting it that starkly, I really want to hear it.
- [53:08]
Haviv Retik Gur
It's absolutely that stark. That is exactly the truth. It is a simple truth. It is an accurate truth. The parts of the Arab and Muslim world that are allied with us, not all of them, not the Emiratis, but quite a few of them, certainly, I think the Egyptians would not beat around the bush and just admitting it. The day we lay down our arms and for some reason are incapable of lifting them back up again and punishing anyone who takes advantage of that moment, is the day that a great many Middle Easterners find their courage and come marching in and destroying us. But the nuance I want to add to that, and, you know, you will not find an honest. Over in the diaspora among sort of diaspora. I don't know what professors of some of these nations, you will find people, you know, pretending that they come from these deeply liberal societies and depicting their societies in ways that no one on the ground in their societies would recognize. But there's a depth there. It is not animalistic animus. It is something profound. People live. This is my methodological sort of bottom line, and I developed it as a political journalist. People live in stories. People live in narratives of where they come from, where they're going, what's happening to them. And if you understand those stories, and those stories are always complex and rich and fascinating and produce contradictions within the minds of people and contradictions built into the stories, and they don't feel like contradictions to the people themselves. Or they're willing to live with these contradictions because reality is big and complex. So real people live in these real, profound contradictions. The stories that are told about us in the Arab world and the stories that are told about us in the larger Muslim world are stories that have very little to do with us and a lot to do with how Arabs and Muslims understand what has happened to them. And it's a story that I could send people to a podcast episode of mine because we really lay out the theological lineage of five generations of theologians that produced Hamas. But this lineage begins in the middle of the 19th century with these Egyptian theologians or Syrian theologians who moved to Egypt. It begins in Egypt, and it begins in Egypt because Egypt comes under British rule in the middle of the 19th century. And the disparity as the Ottoman Empire is imploding slowly, but everyone understands how weak it is. Once the British take over parts, once the French take over parts of this slowly collapsing empire, it's impossible to pretend that you can't see the gap in power between Islam and the Christian West. And that gap in power takes explaining. And for Muslim theologians, it takes a special kind of explaining, because Islam was born, it's the only monotheistic religion born as a conquering empire. And so it's a monotheistic religion that very early on came to associate geopolitical power and success and extraordinary achievement as evidence, if there is a God, and that God oversees history and has a plan for history, and therefore history arcs toward justice and redemption. If you are massively, inexplicably successful in history, you are in sync with that divine plan. And so if you find yourself in the 1860s a pathetic loser of history, I mean, these theologians talked very honestly in ways that are very courageous. And these are the muftis of Egypt. I mean, these are top mainstream, serious theologians. And they talked in ways that are far more courageous than anything you can say in Western elite academia today about the Muslim world. And they said, what happened to us? How did we get so weak and backward? Our science is bad, we're poor, and we're geopolitically pathetic. And there developed this discourse on Islamic weakness as a theological problem, as a signal. If Muslim success was a signal of closeness to God and the truth of the revelation, then Muslim failure was a signal of distance from God. And so it created a movement of return to piety because of this special logic within Islam that doesn't exist in Christianity or Judaism. It developed this pietistic movement as a path to a return to Muslim success and power. And it begins in real reformist terms. This theologian named Al Afghani is talking about building consultative institutions and democratic institutions and economic and universities. And he admires the French for their learning and studies. And he wants to find these things roots within Islam, and he begins to interpret Islam in those ways, in ways that will allow us to produce modern, successful universities, modern successful economies. And he has a student who has a student who has a student who is Hasan Al Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, who has jettisoned along the way all of the modernity stuff and just clung to the pietistic return to this mythic original first generations of Islam back when we were successful kind of pietism. And Hamas is that. In other words, Hamas is literally in 1987, the Muslim Brotherhood chapter founded in Gaza in 1987. That's what it is. That's how it begins. And so when Hamas looks at the Jews, it doesn't see a colonialist oppressor. It sometimes uses language like that, especially when it's talking to other Palestinian movements that were born in that kind of discourse. But it fundamentally sees a great, vast theological problem in all of the weaknesses of Islam and all the indignities that Islam has suffered everywhere from European imperialism and various other retreats that Islam has suffered. The worst one was Zionism. And the reason the worst one was Zionism, and they talked about this openly and constantly in the 1890s already, was that the Jews were weak. They're refugees. They're the weakest thing that ever pushed Islam back. And so they're the first thing that Islam has to overcome in order to get back to its rightful place in history. So Hamas develops an ideology and a foundational strategy. It is willing to destroy Gaza on the altar of destroying Israel, because in its vision of the purpose of the war on Israel, it's not about liberating Palestine. It's not about creating a new Palestinian political world that is independent of Israeli military rule, which is something that significant numbers of Israelis would join in on. It's about overcoming the Jews, ruling everything that had ever been lost to Islam as the beginning of the return of Islam into God's embrace and the sign that our piety is enough and the sign that Islam is now taking its rightful redemptive place in history once again. It is overcoming centuries of retreat and weakness in Islam. And so, yes, the second we lay down our arms, they'll come for us. They is some of them, not all of them. It's big. It's complex. There's also the simple truth that when you talk about Islamic ideas and Islamist ideas, you're not necessarily talking about the Muslim shopkeeper in some street in Amman, Jordan, or something. The people who belong to this religious world don't necessarily subscribe to the grand ideas. There's a lot of overlap, but they're not the same thing. But with all those caveats, yes, we are cartoon characters in a vast redemption story that they think they're acting out and living through. And the same is true in a different way in a Shia version with a slightly different history. Although borrowing a lot of these big ideas of the Iranian regime, one of the most ridiculous things about this war is, why the heck does Iran even care about Israel? It has no border with Israel. It owes nothing to Israel. It lost nothing to Israel. It has no interest in Israel of any kind, and it has spent hundreds of billions of dollars its people don't have on destroying Israel. Why? And the answer is there is this grand redemption story they think they're embedded in. So everything you said is absolutely correct. The day we lay down our arms, they come kill us and think that it's a great miracle given to them by God and it's the beginning of a Muslim redemption story of the conquest of the world. And it comes from a deep, 150-year-old discourse that we have to understand, that we have to actually respond to and deal with and ultimately also defeat.
- [61:18]
Sam Harris
Yeah, yeah, well, I'm tempted to double down on a lot of that because that was quite informative and I really don't want my audience to have missed any of the detail there because what you just ran through is the very clear account of the humiliation of a whole civilization and humiliation as perceived and only made possible through the lens of theology and theological expectation. And the crucial differences between Islam and Christianity and Judaism, such that that leaves Islam expecting supremacy in this life, in this world, in a way that Judaism and Christianity simply don't and haven't. It matters that if you look, I.
- [62:06]
Haviv Retik Gur
Should say, lately, Christianity, lately in the last few centuries, this would have been recognizable.
- [62:10]
Sam Harris
Even 14th century Christianity, for all its flaws, was different in some crucial respects theologically from Islam. I mean, just that you have a different example. Like when you look at the worst moments of Christianity and you try to map that violence, let's say the killing of heretics, say, or the burning of witches onto the ministry of Jesus, it becomes a bit of a heavy lift in terms of the casuistry you have to do, though people accomplish it. It's much less of a heavy lift when you look at the biography of Muhammad. I mean, Muhammad is like Alexander the Great with a spiritual mandate, right? And had Jesus been cutting off people's heads, it's a different example of the truly normative human life. And there's a reason why the jihadist project makes so much sense in the context of Islam by obvious reference to its theology. I'm not saying it subsumes all of Islam, obviously, and it doesn't. And what we desperately need are 2 billion Muslims to fundamentally reject jihadism and find a theological basis for that rejection. And I know there are Muslims somewhere at work on that project, but it is a demonstrably harder project than it would be in the context of even Christianity, for all its flaws. And I'll grant you that the roots of antisemitism go back 2000 years to the roots of Christianity, however inscrutable that is, because Jesus was Jewish, as you know, and as were the 12 apostles and as was the Virgin Mary.
- [63:39]
Haviv Retik Gur
We can get into it, by the way. That's why antisemitism is so powerful and animating and defining for Western civilization, because of that borrowing from Jewishness.
- [63:48]
Sam Harris
Yeah. And the living rejection of all Jews of the status of Christ and all of that. But I don't want to take us too far afield. I'm just saying that there's a reason why this problem is so intractable. And I think there's also a reason why any recourse to rival history, any debate about the last 75 years and who did what to whom and whose land is it really, I think all of that is bound to be a political dead end. I mean, there are irreconcilable accounts of the history on the Jewish and Palestinian side. They will not be reconciled. So, yes, some history is obviously more accurate than others. But the only. And again, this is my opinion, feel free to disagree. But the only thing that has to be focused on by Israel and its defenders at this moment is the question of what people want now. What would people do? What would everyone do if they had the power to do it? What would most Israelis want to accomplish now in the Middle east if they could only accomplish it? And I'm going to drag you onto more nuanced ground because I want to talk about the extremists within Israel and on the Jewish side that make any cartoonish version of this seem too simple. But the question is not what happened in 1948 or 1967 or where you can set your Wayback Machine. The question is, what would people do now if they could accomplish anything they wanted, if they had the weapons they wanted, if they had the power they wanted? And I think we know the answer to that. And we know, again, that cartoonish quality to this disparity is impossible to ignore. I mean, we have on one side a death cult using its own civilians as human shields, wherein the death of its civilians is part of its plan. And it's articulate on this point, it's quite happy to have more martyrs. Right. And we have to whatever degree that deters Israel in its. The way it wages war. If you flip that around, if you imagined the IDF using Israeli civilians as human shields against Hamas, if you imagine what a ludicrous strategy that would be, I mean, given Hamas's aims to kill all the civilians he can get his hands on, that, again, is this moral asymmetry that's impossible to exaggerate. There are groups of people on this earth who use human shields, not just captured combatants, but their own women and children. And there are groups on this earth who are deterred to whatever degree by that inhumane way of waging war and do their best to mitigate the loss of civilian life. So again, that's another way of looking at what is currently true. Now, another detail to which many people avert their eyes is just what happens when old women and babies are brought as hostages into Gaza. How does the larger culture respond to this war crime? And imagine reversing that. Imagine the IDF bringing terrified old women from Gaza and infants into Tel Aviv as hostages. Right. Imagined Israeli society absorbing the knowledge that this is a tactic that was being resorted to. What you have are radically different cultures, radically different notions of ethics, and radically different life aspirations expressed in the differences at the level of behavior. Here again, I've gone on for much longer than I was expecting, hoping to echo some of what you were pointing out there. But first, let me know if you disagree with anything I just said, because I think it's crucial that my audience hear any disagreement. But then I want to ask you about the extremists on the Jewish side and some of the other details that make it very difficult to make the simple case I want to make here, because the moment you get one seemingly equally fanatic ultra Orthodox person in front of a microphone on your side talking about killing the Amalekites in Gaza, it seems like there's some. All the disparities that we both just described no longer exist. And you just have religious fanatics on both sides, and there is no moral high ground discernible anymore. So we'll get to that. But please tell me if there's anything, any place you want to demur on what I just said?
- [68:24]
Haviv Retik Gur
No, first of all, that was wonderful. That was a lot of things. The problem is that it was a lot of things, let me say about Hamas. We have. There's a general structure to the history of Israeli survival, we'll call it, or of the attempts of the region for various reasons, whether it's pan Arabist ideologies or these kinds of Salafist. I call it Salafist. A hundred years ago, this is what Salafist meant. Salaf is a forefather. Forefatherist meaning go back to the original. The pietistic. Go back to the original Islam. And today they use the word Salafis to mean people sort of more extreme than Al Qaeda. I don't mean it in that way. I mean the broadest sense of Hamas and, and this pietism. But all of these different ideologies and all of these different attempts to destroy us all met their end. And I want to say this because this is really important because all this theoretical stuff about digging up 1860s theologians in Egypt matters profoundly because my brother in law literally has to go face them down in a gun battle and my kids literally have to run to a bomb shelter because they have spent their national treasure on ballistic missiles. And so it's really important for me to say that everything I have described at a very, very shallow level. And my goal is for people to look it up. Okay? Al Afghani, whose student was Abduhebi Duh, whose student was Rida R I D A, whose student was Al Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. And if people read about them, they'll discover these fascinating, interested, multilingual, worldly people who tried to find solutions for real cultural crises. And it all ended up in Hamas and Al Qaeda. But it comes from a big larger place that by the way, could have gone in other directions. And some of them wanted it very much to go in other directions. Just to say that ultimately it boils down to, as you say, what's going to happen going forward. The good news about this Salafism we defeated in 1948, we won that war. But we won that war because our enemies were incompetent and divided and unable to field the kinds of armies they needed to field and unable to coordinate with each other. The Egyptians and the Jordanians and Kaukji's forces coming down from Lebanon couldn't coordinate. And in 1956 all of that had changed. Nasser was in charge in Egypt. The Soviets had now armed the Arab armies and they were all coordinated together. And we suddenly saw ourselves still a third world country. I think only three years earlier we had stopped rationing eggs for children. We suddenly saw ourselves surrounded by these brand new crack fighting armies that were absolutely coordinated, could deploy massive numbers of troops and we were existentially threatened. And so the 1956 Suez War was a war of British and French imperialism trying to claw back Nasser's nationalization of the Canal because they had these imperialist rights. And the Israelis fought the ground war for them. But what the Israelis thought they were doing was pushing back this noose that was closing in on them in the form of this pan Arabism now, this new unified pan Arabism. Where did it go? Why did it disappear? What happened to it? And the answer is in 67 and 73 we simply destroyed its armies. In the desert and on the Golan Heights. And because it failed, it evaporated as an idea. And then we faced this model from the Algerian war. Folks should read Alistair Horne's the Savage War for Peace, the classic magisterial history of the Algerian Independence war, which was a pivot of history. It created all the decolonization discourse on modern American college campuses, because every new Idea is about 50 years old on the modern American college campus. But that war was a war of eight years of terrorism. Brutal terrorism by the National Liberation Front of Algeria against the French colonizers. And within eight years, all the French colonizers, a million people who'd been there 130 years got up and left. And the Palestinians founded the Palestine Liberation Organization, the plo, modeled on the National Liberation Front of Algeria. Eighteen months after that immense victory of terrorism, driving away a grand colonialist project. And they said, that will work there, will work here. And they spent the next 30 years terrorizing Israelis, hijacking airplanes, massacring children. People should look up the 1974 Mailot Massacre. Terrorists came down from Lebanon, took over a school, and 22 kids were killed by the time Israeli special forces made it into the school. And we defeated it. We defeated it by meeting it on its own terms, developing new capabilities and defeating it. And now we have this Islamist war and the Islamist alliance, the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas embedded, both the Muslim Brotherhood group, Sunni group embedded in the Shia proxy system of Iran. Two different Islamist worlds joining forces against us. They're one great strategic advantage, besides the fact that they're clever with drones and rockets and understand that the future of war is complex and not tanks. Their great advantage is what we see in Gaza and what Hezbollah was willing to do to Lebanon, which is the destruction of their own polities and what the Houthis are willing to do in Yemen. And it's really important to dwell on that. Hamas spent 17 years as the government of Gaza, ruling Gaza and building almost nothing in Gaza, almost literally nothing, except the biggest tunnel system in the history of warfare. A 500 kilometer tunnel system in a 25 kilometer territory. And it's an amazing achievement. It's by far the biggest thing Palestinians have ever built. And it's five times bigger than, I think, the second biggest tunnel project meant for war. And the purpose of this project, these are electrified, these are air conditioned. They have manufacturing facilities in them. The purpose of this tunnel system is to force the enemy to cut through cities when they come for Hamas. The only way to get to Hamas is, is to cut through the Cities that these tunnel systems go under and have thousands of entrances in. And that moment, after building that for 17 years or intensively for roughly 12 years, that's when Hamas carried out October 7th. It's really important to dwell on this, because on October 7th, that means that Hamas actually carried out two atrocities, not one. One was against us and the bigger one, in sheer human suffering. I'm an Israeli who knows people who died on October 7th. And I'm saying this, the bigger one was the atrocity committed against Gaza. The destruction of Gaza was purposeful. And if someone hears this and says, you're blaming Hamas for your own destructive war in Gaza, let me just say, if you hate me, if you hate Israelis, if you think Israel is monstrous, that only makes Hamas's strategy doubly monstrous, because they built that tunnel system, forced an enemy to come through cities to get to them. And then the single most important fact to Israelis about the Gaza war is that no civilian in Gaza has ever been allowed to step foot in any of those tunnels. There was some viral tweet about a week ago that argued that Israelis are now running, I guess four to five days ago, arguing Israelis are running from Iranian missiles, but they have these bomb shelters. And this person said, you evil Israelis, Gazans had no bomb shelters. And it was a fascinating admission because Gazans have the largest bomb shelter system in the history of the world. They're just not allowed into it. And so the new Islamist strategy, worse.
- [75:27]
Sam Harris
Still, we've had Hamas snipers kill people trying to evacuate.
- [75:30]
Haviv Retik Gur
Absolutely. And they'll continue to do it, and they'll kill the people trying to produce aid, distributed aid that isn't through Hamas or not usable by Hamas for black market funding of their continued operations. The death of Gaza is the strategy. Now. Israelis Woke up on October 7th in a few ways. One was the discovery that we failed catastrophically in our understanding of the enemy. Another one was the just horrific trauma of the betrayal of those people. All we are, we are the Jews who didn't get into the west by the time the west closed its doors. We are the Jews who survived the 20th century by banding together and building our fortress. All we are is that solidarity. October 7th was a trauma greater than any war because it was our own failure to save our own brothers and sisters. And there was a third way in which Israelis woke up. And that third way was the discovery that our enemy is not willing to see the destruction of its own polity, but that that is its foundational force multiplier in this war. And so you cannot deter this enemy. These are undeterrable enemies. If there's nothing you can do in Gaza that could ever deter this enemy, in fact, the destruction of Gaza is seen as a cost on your side of the ledger. We then looked at Hezbollah and we said, well, those 200,000 missiles and rockets under 300 villages in South Lebanon, they're meant to be used. They're not deterred either. And we looked at Iran and we said, they're going to use anything they have. They're undeterable. We no longer believe in our own ability to psychoanalyze the enemy. And so I argued on October 8, my first podcast after October 7 interview at someone else's podcast, I argued that this was only ever going to end with Iran. If you understood that basic insight the Israelis understood, which is that our enemies have this strategy of the death of their own civilians, and it is their foundational strategy. There is no other strategy for Hamas to survive and win this war except to create these costs on Israel. And by the way, that's why failing to understand that we need a good PR strategy is a catastrophic betrayal of the soldiers and the sacrifices of this society in this war. I love where it comes from. I understand culturally where it comes from, but it is a catastrophic failure. So that was an important thing for me to say. All this religious sort of deep dive has a real basic sort of pragmatic meaning to how we prosecute this war, how we understand this war, and where we go. But there's also a huge advantage, and I hope I'm not ranting too long. No, there's a huge advantage to this understanding of the enemy, which is that the basic Salafist idea is. Even the assumption, before you get into any basic ideas, is geopolitical success is a sign of divine will. I can work with that, because the corollary is exactly what happened to pan Arabism. Catastrophic geopolitical failure is evidence that you don't have divine will. So all I have to do to kill this idea. People keep telling us you can't kill an idea. First you should find out what the idea is, and then you can come to me and debate with me what ideas die and don't. Ideas die all the time. But this particular idea is founded on the premise that I am defeatable and they are not. And if I can reverse that, the idea is gone. The idea, at its core, foundational tenets are demonstrably removed from the table. So this is a winnable war. We just have to rise up and go after the enemy. And I'm going to stop talking just out of sheer politeness because I'm Israeli, so I won't.
- [78:47]
Sam Harris
Otherwise I'm going to demand brevity for some of these topics because there's just too many to get through. But just to close the loop on what you just said there, that's why I think the missed opportunity here is to this, to my eye, is a corrective to the failure of public messaging that you explained on Israel's behalf there. This is about much more than Israel and it's about much more than the fate of the Jews. It's about a very real zero sum contest between open societies and the theocratic aspirations of some subset of the Muslim world. Again, I'm not talking about all Muslims, but I'm talking about anyone who is signing up directly or otherwise supportive of the jihadist project. Anyone who is coming into the streets sincerely claiming that we love death more than the Americans or the Jews or the infidels or the apostates love life. And there are some number. I'm not going to put a number on it, but a percentage of the Muslim world that's far larger than anyone wants and large enough to be consequential can honestly utter those words. And if we're going to have a theory of mind of our enemy that actually is predictive of future behavior, we have to take those utterances at face value. When members of Hamas and their fans and the immediate concentric circle of Palestinian society that still supports Hamas says something like, we love death more than the Jews love life, right? They're making their minds transparent to us, right? They're making their cultural aspirations transparent to us. It's not bluster. And I don't know why an endless supply of suicide bombers wasn't enough of a rhetorical device to convince everyone in the west said it wasn't bluster. But it simply hasn't. If you stumble onto a university campus today, I mean, you don't have to be in the Middle Eastern studies department. You can be in anthropology, you can be in sociology, you can be in psychology, you can be in history. You're going to meet people who fundamentally doubt that anyone actually believes in paradise, that anyone actually believes in the metaphysics of martyrdom. I've met anthropologists who claim to me that none of that was operative even in the immediate aftermath of 19, 9, 11, or even when the Islamic State was at its zenith in winning recruits. When people are dropping out of medical school at the London School of Economics and flying to Syria for the pleasure of Taking sex slaves and cutting the heads off of apostates. They just think that these are psychopaths who would do awful things anyway. And there's no role of belief and millenarian expectation played here at all. And this is what happens to secular societies when they forget what it's like to actually believe in God. And I think nobody really has the courage of their convictions anywhere, even if they're blowing themselves up or celebrating the suicidal atrocities of their children. It's so obviously so that, and has been for, honestly, as long as we've been alive, that it's beyond debating at this point, or should be. I'm not even gonna let you respond to that. Come back to it if you want, but I need to get you onto more contentious ground. What do we do with the extremists in your midst? And how can you frame for an American audience, an audience outside of Israel, the contributions to this picture made by people like Smotrich and Ben gvir? I mean, those are the two that are always named. I'm sure there are other names I haven't heard, but to what degree is the current government in Israel married to the far right and a group of ultra orthodox messianic characters who, granted the religious claims are importantly different in my view, but still, nonetheless, you have your own number of religious fanatics. To what degree is religious fanaticism distorting the project and the fighting of this war on your side?
- [82:54]
Haviv Retik Gur
In my view, not at all. They exist. They cause terrible harm. We have outright Jewish terrorism against Palestinian civilians in some parts of the West Bank. We have polls of Palestinians that tell us that most Israelis genuinely believe. Israeli Jews at least, genuinely believe. I think it's different numbers among Arab Israelis who are also, of course, Palestinians. Most Israeli Jews genuinely believe that. That terrorism is a small phenomenon. And on paper, technically, it might be a small phenomenon, but we have polls of Palestinians who say that a majority, I don't remember the numbers, this is a poll I saw a few years ago, but a very significant majority, in other words, upwards of 60%, if not more, think that this is an expectation that they have in life that they will encounter this violence. Because not a lot of kids get kidnapped in America by random strangers, but because of all kinds of TV shows about kidnappings of kids, all American parents are terrified their kids are going to be kidnapped, so kids aren't allowed outside. Kind of a phenomenon. And I mean to mock those parents, but I don't mean to mock the Palestinian expectation, because it's not driven just by. I don't know what, not reading the statistics. It's driven by a sense of real vulnerability that is absolutely real and powerful for them. So there is an actual Jewish phenomenon of terrorism. It is marginal within Jewish society, religious terrorism about kicking out the other. It is marginal in Jewish society. It is sufficiently big, and Palestinians feel sufficiently unprotected by the Israeli military and by the Israeli state and law enforcement, and sufficiently vulnerable in a deep way. I'll give you an example. There was a poll taken a few years back, I think eight years ago, something like that, by a wonderful Palestinian pollster, Khalil Shikaki. He's a sociologist, and he runs this polling firm in Ramallah. And Gallup uses him to poll Palestinians and everybody just kind of to tries trust him as the sort of gold standard of polling of Palestinians. And he had a poll where he once asked Palestinians this kind of conspiracy theory that Hamas was pushing for many years, that the Jews want to take the Temple Mount, take Al Aqsa, destroy it, build a synagogue on it, build a temple on it. The radical portions of Israeli society that did want that happened to now be in the government. But they were 5% of the 95% of Jews who don't want it, right? And he asked them, what do you think? Do you think they want it? And 80% of Palestinians are convinced that Jews are coming for Al Aqsa, coming for the shrine that is their anchor of identity in the Muslim world and their source of dignity, their claim to dignity in the Muslim world. And what he then did, because he's a good pollster, is then he asked the conditionals, he said, well, what do you think they actually want from it? And some said they want to build either a temple or a synagogue, but they're definitely not going to destroy the Muslim shrines. That's about 20%. 20% said they want to destroy the Montana shrines and build this. There are different versions of that story, but 80% thought they want to fundamentally change the status quo on the Temple Mount. And then he asked the great and powerful question which reshaped how I understand this discourse among Palestinians, which is, will they succeed? He didn't say, is there a chance? He didn't say, is there a. Will they actually. What do you believe will actually happen? Succeed? And 50% said yes. Now, that's 50% of the 80, so 40% of the total. In other words, when Palestinians have this conspiracy theory that the Jews are gunning for Al Aqsa, that's not an expression of some anti Semitic conspiracy theory. And there are Plenty of anti Semitic conspiracy theories in Palestinian discourse. It's an expression of vulnerability. You could be cynical and say, if they were in charge and that was a Jewish shrine, that's what they would do. And so they expected from the Jews. And that's what the Jordanians did to the Jewish quarter of the Old City when they ruled it. They destroyed medieval synagogues. But it's an expression of vulnerability.
- [86:40]
Sam Harris
So I would also point out it's an expression of an ambient level of religious fanaticism to put that much primacy in the integrity of a building. The enemy you face is not just Hamas, is not just Hezbollah. It is a wider culture which would go absolutely berserk if something happens to that building. Right?
- [87:02]
Haviv Retik Gur
But look, Sam, I told myself, I'm coming to your podcast. I'm coming into your house. I'm not going to start a fight about religion because I happen to. That part I like, that part I respect on their side. I'm super pro religion, which is a fascinating conversation I want to have in you, but it's going to kind of derail all the things you want to accomplish here. But just to say in like, next time, but it isn't the building. It isn't the building. I once saw A, it's the story. It's always the story. When secular societies lose religion, they lose the capacity A, to understand that people live in stories, B, to craft powerful, mythic, foundational stories.
- [87:43]
Sam Harris
This is a detour that we can't take this detour too long.
- [87:46]
Haviv Retik Gur
30 seconds. 30 seconds. I once heard a sermon by a Palestinian imam in a mosque. And the sermon was, and I'm just going to cut it down to 10 seconds. The sermon was the dome. The golden dome on the Temple Mount stands on top of a boulder that in the Sunni tradition, Muhammad stepped on when he ascended to heaven. That was the stepping stone in his ascent to heaven. And this person said, this imam said, that's not an accident. Palestine is the stepping stone that Islam must step on in order to ascend to its rightful place as the redemptive force in history. In other words, we are told by the rest of Islam, you are the pathetic, weak link of Islam that was pushed back by the weakest thing that ever pushed Islam back. But no, my fellow Palestinians, in fact, we are the place where the decline stops. We are the sacrifice. We will be the people who can, because of our sacrifice, win back for Islam, its rightful place. When you look at polls of Gazans and they tell you, most of them tell you, we hate Hamas, they destroyed our lives. And then most of them tell you, and we love Hamas, and we'll follow them to war. And October 7th was a glorious thing. That cognitive dissonance isn't cognitive dissonance. It's Hamas destroyed our lives. But the story they give us of our experience is the most dignifying story available to us. And so it's really big and powerful. It's not a small thing. And when they feel vulnerable to Israeli, that's them questioning whether or not any of that is true. And, in fact, their story actually is this degraded, undignified one. So it's a richer discourse about the meaning of their lives and their experiences as a collective than just dogma.
- [89:24]
Sam Harris
Okay, well, let me just introduce a little more cognitive dissonance into this picture, because it may surprise some people. So the charms of religious architecture and holy sites are not at all lost on me. And I've been to the Temple Mount, and I love walking the streets of Jerusalem. And both for Christian and Jewish and Muslim reasons, all the echoes of that get into my pores too. And I love it. And I can say more than that. I. I love the architecture. I love the Muslim architecture in particular. I like. My favorite music is mystical Muslim music. I mean, Kawali music from Pakistan and in North African music from Mali. I mean, I just. So it's like these are the sounds I want in my head. I don't translate the lyrics very often, so who knows? They could be saying they're gonna kill the Jews, but in any case, I know what it's like to feel ecstasy and meaning in the presence of these artifacts. That notwithstanding, what we're living with now is a world that has been rigged to explode by superstitious beliefs. Right? So if you just have a gas leak on the Temple Mount. I don't know if there is gas on the Temple Mount, but should there be a gas leak that causes the destruction of that building for reasons that no one has intended? No messianic Jew, no crackpot Christian. No false Iranian missile.
- [90:41]
Haviv Retik Gur
An Iranian missile?
- [90:42]
Sam Harris
Yeah. An Iranian missile hits it, and the predictable conspiracy theory would be that the Jews have finally destroyed the Al Aqsa Mosque. It is fundamentally untenable to live in a world where the destruction of a religious symbol will galvanize whole populations to war in a way that no genocide ever would. No. I mean, so you get hundreds of thousands of people killed in Sudan or Syria. Nobody cares, apparently. But if we destroy one building by accident, we could have World War three on our hands. That's a situation I.
- [91:17]
Haviv Retik Gur
But it isn't the symbol, it's the story behind the symbol. In other words, when the Spanish Civil War. Right, because of the sinking of. I forget my 10th grade American history. I'm sorry, Mrs. Keene, from Nicolet High School, but there was some ship sunk and they said we gotta. There's always a symbol to the mobilizing ethos and you don't need religion for it. In this case, the story is a big one and the symbol is religious, but that's not religion, it's a human's will. My feeling about religion is do it well, because humans are going to do it anyway. And what has taken over the American elite, the monoculture that has taken over the humanities and the American elite universities, is a religious monoculture. It's a religion with good guys and bad guys and architectures of evil and dogmas. And if you stray from those dogmas, you are bad and you are evil. And they divide up the world. They're so busy demoralizing about this place, they don't understand this place. I have not been able to discover serious scholars dealing with this place, or at least serious ones. There are famous ones, are never the serious ones famous scholars dealing with this place who can answer seriously the question, why does Iran want to destroy Israel to the tune of losing 20% of his GDP on that goal? And so it's a religious mode of thought. Religious modes of thought are everywhere. We're not going to get away from them. By the way, if I may toot the horn of Judaism, what we need is religions with less dogmas. We need religions that are more humble, that know less. One of the great advantages. I was once on a panel with a Muslim and a Christian, and it was, so to speak, kind of a interfaith panel, but not functionally, because we were talking about the Israeli Palestinian conflict and the Christian and the Muslim were both Palestinian nationalists and I was representing the Jews. So it was like all the monotheistic world against the Jew on the panel. And at some point, you know, one of them said, you know, Israel is a colonialist oppressor state. And one of the other ones said, it's a settler colonialist oppressor state. Two completely different things. And then I said, with respect, and they talked about Israel being built at the end of a British bayonet and without the empires you would fall. And then I said, with all due respect, as the Jew on the panel with a Christian and a Muslim, I don't have to sit here and listen to a Christian and a Muslim talk to me about imperialism if you have more than a billion adherents. Okay, I'm not the imperialist here because Judaism is not a. It's a great. To the Jewish view in as much as there's a single one. I think on this, there's generally a kind of one. One of the great failings of Islam and Christianity that drive them to their moral collapses every once in a while in history is the missionizing part is the I have to take over the world part. And if you don't have that missionizing part, you don't have a lot of those moral hazards and collapses. And so what the world needs is, you know, a lot of small religions and less gigantic world conquering ones.
- [94:04]
Sam Harris
All right, we're going to debate that on a future occasion. Now I got to run you through some questions that have a more rapid fire character insofar as possible.
- [94:11]
Haviv Retik Gur
Let's go.
- [94:11]
Sam Harris
You can say whatever you want, obviously, but. All right, so the contributions of the settlements in the west bank to this picture, what should we understand about that? I mean, I'm not a fan of the settlements. I'm not a fan of people thinking that land was given to them by God and they're willing to kill or die for that purpose, as you know. But it's widely believed that the expansion of the settlements in the west bank is just this endless provocation of violence. And Netanyahu is culpable for that. And Israel generally is culpable for that. What should we understand about the settlements?
- [94:45]
Haviv Retik Gur
The vast majority of Israelis don't think that it has anything to do with God. It is a sense of belonging. It is a sense. There is a sense of belonging. It is the Jewish homeland. And that doesn't mean it isn't the Palestinian homeland, but it is also the Jewish homeland. The entire Bible takes place in the West Bank. None of the Bible takes place in Tel Aviv, which is why Tel Aviv is so much more fun. But the simple fact is that most Israelis for the majority of the last three decades have been willing and in polls. If you do the follow on polls, the follow on questions, the conditionals that good pollsters like Khalifi Kaki do, you discover most Israelis are willing in theory, theoretically, in principle to pull back from the west bank from pieces large parts of the west bank, if they thought it would mean peace, real, actual, reliable, dependable peace that you would stake your children's lives on. The great tragedy for Palestinians isn't the ideological religious Zionist camp, that is probably only 25% of the settlers, but they're the settlements built between Palestinian population centers, whose purpose is deep within the west bank, whose purpose is to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state. 75% of settlements are quite close to the Green Line and easy to exchange. There are 130 settlements, something like that. The two biggest ones are a quarter of all settlers. And there are two ultra orthodox cities that are within 2,000ft of the green Line. In other words, a huge amount of the settlement problem is solved with the most easiest obvious land swap in which Palestinians would get better land in the Gilboa north of the west bank region. In other words, the foundational question is the ideological settlement movement. Now that ideological settlement absolutely believes that this is the homeland and we hold onto it and God promised it to us. And there's a redemptive story here. You don't have to believe in it. And I don't think this is the messianic times at all, but I don't think there are messianic times. But nevertheless, every prophet in the Bible says that these times will be the worst and the best, the most good and the most evil. And that sure does seem to fit the 20th century. And also one signal in the messianic times is that all the Jews will come back to the homeland. And so the religious scientists come out and say, wait a second. What more could you possibly need to satisfy the actual predictions of these very powerful and eloquent kinds of prophecies than this time? Now most Israelis are not there. Most Israelis were willing to pull out, so much so that the Oslo process was meant to produce a Palestinian state with Barak in 1999, going to Camp David with Arafat. And then the second intifada begins and 140 suicide bombings that shatter the Israeli left and prevent the Israeli left really from ever coming to power ever again. And then a fascinating thing happens, which is that the Israeli right that replaces the Israeli left, Likud, then takes power in 2001amid two or three bus bombings a week in Israeli cities, including buses of children. And what you have suddenly is an Israeli political right that reveals that it has secretly wished the left had succeeded in creating a Palestinian state and separating. And it goes to the Gaza withdrawal in 2005, which is in its moment. Today it's not popular. In its moment is deeply popular. Likud carries it out. After the Gaza withdrawal. Sharon leaves Likud and forms a new party called Kadima and planned apparently to withdraw from the West bank or from 90% of the West Bank. And how do we know that? Because he Proceeds to have a stroke. His number two guy who came with him from Likud. This is I guess December ish 2005. The number 2 guy becomes the candidate for Kadima Olmert. And before the election, which is In March of 2006, Olmert tells Israelis, I plan to pull out of the West Bank. This would come to be called the convergence plan. People should look it up. Right wingers come in and say the left failed to create a bilateral agreement with Palestinians on pulling out. We started these massive pullouts. Palestinians responded with mass waves of terrorism. But we still need to separate from them, even if they can't reciprocate our withdrawals with peace. And Olmert says, I don't want you to tell me, I didn't tell you. That's the plan, the convergence plan, which is a 90% withdrawal from the West Bank. Olmert wins that election. Likud crashes to 12 seats under Benjamin Netanyahu. And Olmer then proceeds to have to face within three months of his government forming with the Labour Party with the left in late June 2006, the very first Gaza tunnel operation where Hamas dig a tunnel under the border, kill two Israeli soldiers, kidnap a soldier, take him into Gaza. There's now a shooting war in Gaza. Two weeks later, July 12, there's now a Hezbollah attack in the north and we have this massive rockets war in Lebanon and Gaza. Lebanon where we pulled out of in 2000, Gaza that we pulled out of in 2005. And an Olmert government that wants to pull out of the west bank, having to show Israelis that they can what, restore deterrence, that it's safe to pull out of this much larger area that's the center of the country, that's the highlands overlooking our cities. Olmert never is able to actually carry out the convergence plan. This right wing version of the same peace process of separating from the Palestinians because we don't want to rule them forever. That won elections right up until every withdrawal turned into rivers of blood. So most Israelis on the question of settlements, most settlers are just literally suburbs. They are close to the Green Line. They are solvable. The significant portion, maybe it's 30% of the settlement movement out on the mountains between the Palestinian cities meant to prevent a Palestinian state would be solvable if the rest of Israeli society thought there was an option. And they have spent 30 years, the Palestinian national movement, led by Hamas, but also led by Arafat and sections of Fatah that very much belong to the same religious world as Hamas, Even if they dress it in more nationalist, secularist language. They've spent 30 years convincing ordinary Israeli cab drivers and shopkeepers that if we pull out of the west bank, we shrink down to nine miles wide. In the middle, they hold the highlands overlooking all our major population centers, and we will face a catastrophic version of the disaster that is Gaza or South Lebanon. So that's the question Israelis are asking, and nobody knows how to give them a Palestinian answer that isn't. Hamas will take over, by the way, if we have an election right now in the West Bank, Hamas WINS. And it's one in every poll in 15 years. So that's the question of settlements to the average Israeli. You don't have to tell us why. You have to tell us how.
- [101:09]
Sam Harris
What does the average Israeli feel about resettling Gaza?
- [101:13]
Haviv Retik Gur
We have polls. 90% opposed.
- [101:16]
Sam Harris
Okay.
- [101:17]
Haviv Retik Gur
Yeah, just total opposition. It's a ridiculous idea. Why would you even imagine. It is the view of the vast majority of Israelis.
- [101:24]
Sam Harris
Okay, so you mentioned Olmert. He recently published an essay castigating the current government for war crimes. He described the war as pointless at this point and unwinnable. This is a direct quote. What we're doing in Gaza now is a war of extermination, indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians. I can't imagine that's a popular view. But how do you respond to that claim? I mean, what's the backstory for? I mean, I know Olmeir probably hates Netanyahu with a passion that can scarcely be described, but what's going on there with that level of condemnation?
- [102:10]
Haviv Retik Gur
Ultimately, my reading of this kind of discourse among Israelis. In other words, if it's coming from Amnesty International, it's a whole different ballgame. It's a question of trust. Palestinian civilians in Gaza are suffering terribly. The Israeli government has managed to be profoundly incompetent time after time after time. And the war has gone very slowly. One of the big problems and mistakes made in the war was that there was a decision made very early on, very understandable, rooted in the American experience of Afghanistan, where American soldiers in Afghanistan had this strategy of clear and hold. You would take a territory, you would take a valley, you would hold it, you would leave Marines there, you would leave infantry there. And then the Taliban couldn't take it back. And what that ended up creating was thousands and thousands of targets all over Afghanistan for the Taliban guerrilla war. And one of the lessons that. That's a simplification, but one of the lessons Israel drew from the American experience was that lesson and the lesson was don't take territory and hold it, but in fact conduct a raiding war. So every single part of Gaza has faced an Israeli incursion three times, five times, sometimes 12 times. And one of the advantages that that created was that the Israelis didn't have to go into the tunnels because Hamas would need to control some of the above ground. Israel would engage those Hamas people very quickly in a battle, kill some, take some prisoner, and then withdraw. And then a month later, Hamas are back above ground running the show in that place. And then they'd go in again. So the constant battles of Jabalia, one of the great Hamas fortifications and centers of power in northern Gaza, the repeat battles of Jabalia, was that kind of whack a mole theory. That whac a mole theory was not a bad strategy if you have five years to do it. That's the kind of whack a mole done against ISIS over the course of five years in northern Iraq by the Americans, Iraqis and Kurds. But there is a view among the Israelis since Trump's election, I think basically that they don't have that kind of time, and so they need to escalate. And what's happened now is a very different kind of war. A war of holding territory, a war of occupying territory and occupation in war. Not the mean kind of epithet thrown out in the media, but the actual legal term, which is the military holds a territory in war, creates all kinds of legal obligations to the civilian population. That's okay, because one of the great reasons Hamas keeps fighting is that Hamas has this control, leverage over the aid. So there has to be a system built out to deny Hamas aid. There has to be a system built out to remove Hamas's stockpiles that it lives off of, while supplying massive amounts of aid to a civilian population that is still deeply penetrated by Hamas and therefore somehow finding a way to separate. That's the Israeli goal now. And I've just described an absolutely impossible strategy with massive civilian costs that is the only way to actually defeat Hamas. And if you understand the Israeli vision of what Hamas is and where it comes from, you understand that the defeat of Hamas is actually central to this question. So the civilian costs are huge. I happen to come to the Israeli government with a different critique, but it is absolutely visceral. Can you curse on this podcast? Yeah, please don't fuck up the aid. The aid distribution is the strategy. Now, you detached aid from Hamas by creating this Gaza humanitarian foundation. Well, now you better make damn sure nobody starves or you've made Hamas his own case. And so the Israelis need to move in massively on this aid question. I'm someone who was gently mocked by people who loved me back about, I don't know, 18 months ago when I suggested publicly that Israel actually needs to create a humanitarian corridor within Israel. The Egyptians would rather the Gazans die than move into Egypt. Nobody will take them. Nobody wants to give Israel that win. Nobody cares about Palestinians as people. They're just, they're just sort of moral narratives that everyone's jostling over. Fine. I'm not going to fix the Arab world. I'm not going to fix the anti Semitism of the obsessive focus on Gaza without a focus on actually removing Hamas from Gaza. I'm not going to fix any of that. Move them into Israel. A they're not leaving Palestine. So it's not an ethnic cleansing. It's not a nakba. You can massively feed them. You can put in AI cameras to track to slowly suss out the Hamas from within them. You can have Arab Israelis who are a Palestinian, Palestinian, Arabic. B Israeli citizens who know us, know Jews, know Hebrew and know a few things that are the opposite of what Hamas teaches in its schools. For example. We're not leaving this holding out this hope that in a generation or two or three, the Crusaders took 200 years, we'll leave that sustains a lot of. That's what Hamas tells Palestinians to explain the suffering it imposes on them. The Arab Israelis will tell them, guys, they're not going anywhere. It would be a de radicalizing thing. Israel could control the spigot of aid. Israel could fight in Gaza with totally free hand. Everybody told me that was stupid. We would be accused of creating a concentration camp in Gaza, but we're going to be accused of an extermination war anyway. We're going to be accused of concentration camps anyway. Let's at least fight the war intelligently. I think that if an Ariel Sharon or an initiative taking kind of old school Israeli prime minister was trying to figure their way out of this new kind of battlefield, I think that's the kind of thing they would have done. But that's just to say the challenge is that challenge to get that aid, taking it away from Hamas and actually crush Hamas. And time is not on our side. So my reading is the Israelis are not 100% competent. The pieces of Israel that are fighting the war in Iran are not the pieces of Israel, of the Israeli security and intelligence apparatus that are fighting the war in Gaza. These are different parts. They're not as competent and they don't have a strategy. There's 15 years of strategizing expressing itself in Iran, and there's the lack of any strategy on the day of. On October 7, expressing itself now in Gaza. So absolutely not an extermination war. But 40% of Israelis say Netanyahu is continuing the war for no other reason than he doesn't want to face elections. I think that in the last five days that changes because Netanyahu's war in Iran is extremely popular among Israelis. But the war in Gaza was being dragged out by Netanyahu. The incompetence of the war in Gaza again and again and again was being dragged out by. By Netanyahu. The hostages are being left to die and rot in dungeons of Hamas by Netanyahu, so that there is never an end to the war in which he faces a political reckoning. That is a view I don't share. But 40% of Israelis tell us they believe and another 20 to 30% from the right. The Smotrich critique of Netanyahu is he's not maliciously refusing to end the war. He just doesn't have the guts to make the tough decisions to drive the war to the end. So when Biden says to him, you can't go into Rafah because you have no plan for the civilians there, and Netanyahu then freezes the war for four months, that's a kind of political cowardice that has tremendous cost for everyone except Netanyahu himself. So Olmert is absolutely wrong, but his argument is coming from within the 40% who say, what if everything that's happening isn't a strategy, but it's just Netanyahu's politicking, then why are Palestinians suffering? And that's how he can then come out with that kind of very visceral language. So that's the discourse within Israel that that comes out of?
- [109:23]
Sam Harris
Yeah, well, I mean, we're paying the price in many places for a loss of trust in institutions and in political figures who seem compromised by their own political needs and dilemmas.
- [109:36]
Haviv Retik Gur
Absolutely.
- [109:37]
Sam Harris
What's the status of the two state solution now or the aspiration for it? If you ask most Israelis, is it still the ultimate end game? Should you find a partner in some generation of Palestinians in peace? Or is the very notion of a two state solution eroding on some level?
- [109:56]
Haviv Retik Gur
It's important not to think of these things categorically. It's not that it's there or not there. Maybe if, and if not, then that's how people actually think about it in these kinds of narratives. I would say that any poll you'll take will tell you that very few Israelis and very few Palestinians think it's possible. There was a data point, a poll about four months ago that polled Israelis and Palestinians both, including in Gaza, and produced the most tragic numbers I've seen since in the history of the Israeli Palestinian conflict of 140 years, of any of this encounter of Jews and Arabs in this land. The poll asked Israelis and Palestinians about what they think the other side wants. And 89% of one side and 92% of the other side said the other side wants to completely remove me, Completely. I don't know what, annihilate me or kill me or totally destroy me. That's the basic thing you need to know, is that both sides are absolutely convinced. The Israelis are convinced of it because the Palestinian leadership that they hear, which is to say Hamas, they don't hear the liberal democrats who have three seats in some Palestinian parliament that hasn't met in 20 years. They hear Hamas says it all day long, and Palestinians are absolutely convinced of it and think the Gaza war demonstrates it.
- [111:17]
Sam Harris
Again, there's an asymmetry there that everyone should be aware of, which is that for every day, for running back many decades, had the Israelis actually wanted to perpetrate a genocide in Gaza or the west bank or both, they could have done that, and they didn't. The fact that they didn't should mean something.
- [111:38]
Haviv Retik Gur
Yeah, I mean, the population grew. The population within Israel of Arabs grew, the population of the west bank grew, the population in Gaza grew, and it keeps growing and apparently grew in this year of war in Gaza. So I don't know. I don't want to take away so much of the disco. It has been frustrating watching the world not care about Palestinians. And what I mean by not care about Palestinians is that almost everything said about this war by the activist world that allegedly cares about Palestinians has been false. I'll give you an example. Starvation. There hasn't been mass starvation in Gaza. There hasn't been serious hunger in Gaza beyond tiny little pockets for very limited pieces of time related to specific operations for 20 months. That was a complete fabrication. And there were reports put out by the UN that said that 30% of the number of calories that the Gazans need to live are actually going in. And then you actually crack open the report, which no journalist ever has in the history of journalism, apparently, and you discover that the UN only counted what the UN itself brought in which was only about 25% of the actual food going in. And so it's just been a fiction and one of the tragedies of the pro Palestinian camp spending all of its energies, giving Hamas a pass, all of its energies creating in Israel paradigmatic evil and this religious sort of mode of thought about the Israelis. One of the tragedies of it is that it has disconnected Israelis from the capacity of the world to actually critique them. So right now, because the Israeli blockade was meant to remove Hamas's stockpiles, there's not a lot of extra food in Gaza. And right now there's a massive Hamas effort. First of all, incompetence on the Israeli side, on the Gaza Humanitarian foundation side, that has to be said, also a sustained and massive Hamas effort to make it fail, make it not work, make any aid they can't take not go in. We now face a situation where there is real hunger in Gaza and a potential for starvation going forward. If things don't get better, if the Israelis don't get competent, if this doesn't solve itself, Gazans aren't going anywhere. Egyptians won't let them out. The world doesn't have any. The Arab world won't take them in. They're not going anywhere. And by the way, if you open the border and polls, some, there's some sort of. I don't know how trustworthy they are, but there's some polls that say that half of Gazans would like to leave. Half of Gazans leaving doesn't change anything. It brings the Gazan population back to what it was 20 years ago. That's still a Palestinian Gaza. Okay, so Israel needs to solve its part of the problem. But it's hard to now come to Israelis and say, guys, there's real starvation ahead. Because the Israelis say to you, oh, yeah, are 14,000 babies going to die in the next 48 hours? Just a litany of hundreds of lies that have all been lies and all been this kind of moral panic around the only place in the world where you can have moral panic. So much of it hypocrisy, so much of it ridiculous. Nobody gives a rat's ass what's happening in Sudan, which is a war that is both genocidal, fought with Western weapons and vastly more deadly, and has vastly actual starvation among hundreds of thousands of people, and nobody even talks about it. And so the Israelis don't believe the world. And that, to me, is a tragedy, because right now I really want the Israelis to wake up and notice that actually in Gaza we have A real problem that Iran is a distraction from. I want Hamas destroyed. I want the war to go forward. I'm an absolute hawk on the Gaza war. And massive aid now rushed to Gazans urgently is how you get it done. And that's a conversation that Israelis are bad at having, in part because it's hard to trust anything said about Gaza by anybody anymore.
- [115:15]
Sam Harris
Well, Haviv, I see that we've hit the two hour mark, we've covered so much. I want to ask you a final question which morally, ethically, politically seems among the most fraught. I mean, I honestly don't know how to think about it, apart from, I mean, I have a sort of objective view from above, relatively heartless view of it. And then I have the, when I confront its details, it just seems impossible to think through, which is the role that hostage taking has played here. And what is the correct response to this tactic, do you think? I mean, the view from above, not knowing any of the families and just looking at the efficacy of this tactic going back now many decades, is that at some point Israel and everyone else who gets victimized by this, we have to say we don't negotiate over hostages because otherwise you simply will take more hostages in the future. And you know, the Gilad Shalit deal may in fact account for why this has been so, why there's been such recourse to this used by your enemies going forward. But of course, you need only know one hostage, family or one hostage to know that how impossible that logic is to run through psychologically and socially and politically when you're actually confronted with the imperative to get the hostages out. I mean, what should Israel do going forward now? I mean, I guess in the current situation and imagining this situation is behind you, is there a new posture to take with respect to the eventuality of hostages being taken by Hamas or any other jihadist organization?
- [117:03]
Haviv Retik Gur
I mean, this is the painful one, and I've talked about this in the past. We, we know we're friends with families of hostages and people killed on October 7 and have also been part of the efforts to get the hostages out that the families have put together in various places. My wife has been very active on this issue. We are a nation of refugees. We are not American Jews. We did not spend 100 years discovering the promise of liberalism coming true. We stopped dying when we started living on our sword. Living on our sword, protecting each other, standing shoulder to shoulder is redemption. That is what we are, that is our ethos. And therefore we will go to the ends of the earth. It is our foundational idea and rooted in a century and a half of historical experience. And I have lectures on that online if people are interested. Our foundational idea is that we come to each other's aid. The trauma of October 7th, as I said, was that was sitting for hours watching the WhatsApp groups, in which people I know said, where the hell is everybody? We're hearing them outside the door. That helplessness, we taught them, we taught our enemies that everything I just said, this great solidarity, this great love, this great support which has allowed us to become strong, which I think is the root of our democracy, we are not again, English speakers. We come from Yemen and tsarist Russia and Iraq and Morocco and pieces of Europe when they were at their worst, the Israeli Jews, the vast, vast majority of them, the first time they ever voted was when they voted as Israelis. It's actually quite an interesting question how the hell Israel ever became a democracy and why it was sustained and stable until now. But solidarity is part of the answer. And so we have taught them that our Achilles heel, our strategic Achilles heel, is this willingness to pay any price for our people, is this sense of ourselves as holding on to each other in a very cruel and difficult and painful world that homogenized in the 20th century on all its minorities, but also on us in one of the cruelest ways. And we taught them, therefore, that it was valuable to take 251 hostages. So we did that to those hostages and we can't ever do that to the next hostages ever again. So the basic idea, and it's an idea supported by most, I think, of the strategic planning elites, strategic planning sort of thinking and institutions, is that you can strike any deal to get out hostages, except the only deal Hamas wants, which is its own survival. Because the lesson has to be, and this is Netanyahu's line, and it's a courageous line. And I have argued that he has been just in many ways, the Iran war has been his glorious triumph. I mean, so far, of course, but this has been what he believes his life's mission is, and he's been planning it for decades. But on Gaza, on hostages, on communicating with the Israeli public, he's gone months at a time without interviewing in the Israeli press. He has refused to meet victims of his own failures. On October 7, he won't go to kibbutz. Niroz is one of the great massacres of October 7th, one of the three big massacres, and they have invited him, but it's a left wing kibbutz and he doesn't want them yelling at him on camera so he won't go. Every other politician around him has, including the far right, Smotrich, et cetera. So I've accused him of being a real coward on these issues. On the issues of, of his politicking through the aftermath of October 7, however, he has held the line on this fundamental question, which is that Hamas will not give up the last hostage except for a return to Gaza, except for a reversal of the war, except for its own survival. And the only thing we owe the next hostage is that Hamas not survive this one. In other words, the result of hostages until now has been you get Israel on its knees. And the result of hostages from now on has to be because they took 251, because they took babies, because they took old people. The next one has the lesson going forward has to be you will not survive the taking of Israeli hostages. And that might come at a cost of hostages. The whole theory of this is making us violent. By the way, they're their entire war strategy is playing a game of chicken with the lives of their own people, where they're willing to have their own people die. So I don't know why I'm shocked at this cruelty they'd inflict on us, but the whole point is putting us in this moral Pandora's, this moral Gordian knot, I guess. I don't know where my metaphors went, but putting us in that position, my view is a minority view among Israelis, I should say. It's really important to say. I think it's probably the view of 30%, 70% are on the other side of that question. Make the deal, get our people home. That's the most important thing. And don't worry, Hamas is the type of organization that will force us into another war. And our one job between now and then is not to let them take hostages. That's the view. I would say, if I were to articulate that sort of general consensus. That's the view of 70%. My view, and I'm with Netanyahu on this, a big critic of him on a thousand things, but on this, I think he's gotten it right, is no, Hamas dies and it. And therefore you'd take any deal they will give to survive another day, but not the deal to survive completely or permanently. And because they forced me into that place, into saying that, into abandoning my people, I'm going to destroy them all the more. That's the conviction that Israelis have that are willing to see them continue to go in as reservists into Gaza until Hamas is dead. The absolute iron will. And we've been saying this out loud. I personally, every person who I think understands Israeli society has been saying this out loud for 20 months. And if the Gazans had understood it and the world had understood it, we would all be in a better place because they wouldn't be testing us on this point, but they tested us. And now we have to demonstrate it. Gaza has a new day, a new dawn, a new future, a better future. A rebuilding after Hamas is gone. Until Hamas is gone, nobody can rebuild anything, not even because the Israelis won't let them. You literally can't send money in there, concrete in there. There's no one to receive it if Hamas is in charge, if Hamas can even disrupt the shipments. So we kill Hamas, we set a new standard of what hostage taking of our people does in the world, and we give Gazans that future that only the death of Hamas can give them.
- [123:33]
Sam Harris
Yeah. Yeah. Well, that sounds like wisdom to me. Haviv, it's so great to get you on the podcast. Thank you for your voice and everything you're doing. It's really. I mean, you are a beacon of sanity. We need 10,000 of you out there, so clone yourself. That's the next project.
- [123:51]
Haviv Retik Gur
It's an honor to be here. Thank you.
- [123:59]
Sam Harris
Sa.