The Meaning of Israel's Oct. 7 Failures

Summary

The Commentary Magazine Podcast: "The Meaning of Israel's Oct. 7 Failures"
Release Date: April 23, 2025

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Introduction

Host: John Podhoretz, Editor of Commentary Magazine
Guests:

• Abe Greenwald: Executive Editor
• Seth Mandel: Senior Editor
• Jonathan Foreman: Author and foreign correspondent

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Overview of the Episode

In this episode, John Podhoretz and his co-hosts engage in a profound discussion with Jonathan Foreman about his investigative report, "The Untold Story of How Israel Failed on October 7," which delves into the multifaceted failures leading up to the unexpected Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th. The conversation extends beyond the immediate events to explore historical parallels, systemic shortcomings within Israeli intelligence and military frameworks, and the broader implications for Israeli society and its future.

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Jonathan Foreman’s Investigation

Timestamp: [00:47]

Jonathan Foreman, a seasoned foreign correspondent and author, presents his comprehensive report commissioned by the UK Parliamentary Committee chaired by Lord Roberts of Wythmogenshire. The aim was to meticulously document and analyze the events surrounding the October 7th attacks, focusing on intelligence, military, logistical, political, and social dimensions.

Key Points:

• Methodology:
  Foreman and his team employed a combination of newspaper reports, TV footage, oral testimonies, and extensive video evidence, including materials from Hamas.

  Quote:
  “There's never been an event, you know, a violent event that has been as filmed, you know, as comprehensively as this by far, in all of human history.” — Jonathan Foreman [01:56]

• Challenges:
  Rapid burials due to religious obligations in Jewish law limited thorough forensic investigations, obstructing the collection of crucial evidence regarding atrocities committed during the attacks.

  Quote:
  “Because people were buried very quickly... it didn't really happen and all that stuff didn't really happen.” — Jonathan Foreman [25:24]

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Intelligence and Military Failures

Timestamp: [42:33]

A significant portion of the discussion centers on the intelligence failures within Israel that failed to anticipate the scale and nature of the Hamas attacks.

Key Points:

• Overreliance on Traditional Methods:
  The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) relied heavily on watchtowers and human surveillance, predominantly staffed by women, ignoring emerging threats like tunnel warfare and unconventional attack methods.

  Quote:
  “They essentially stopped having eyes inside Gaza largely because they did not know about the tunnel system... an enormous intelligence failure.” — John Podhoretz [44:23]

• Historical Parallels:
  Foreman draws comparisons to the British fall of Singapore in 1942, illustrating how underestimation and complacency led to catastrophic military defeats.

  Quote:
  “It's like people... think, oh, these people just are excitable. They don't really mean what they say. No, they mean what they say.” — Jonathan Foreman [40:16]

• Tunnel Warfare:
  Hamas's sophisticated tunnel systems, developed over years with knowledge gained from Israeli prisons, were underestimated, allowing for unprecedented infiltration and surprise attacks.

  Quote:
  “They had made all these Hamas people literate in Israeli life and then sent them back to Gaza where they could use their knowledge of Israel against Israel.” — John Podhoretz [59:32]

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Systemic Issues Within Israeli Society and Military

Timestamp: [70:04]

The conversation delves into broader systemic issues, including leadership, military preparedness, and societal impacts.

Key Points:

• Leadership Failures:
  Multiple Israeli leaders over the past 15 years are implicated in the failures, from prime ministers to defense ministers, highlighting a lack of accountability and cohesive strategy.

  Quote:
  “Every chief of staff of the armed forces, dating back to 2000... every defense minister is implicated. Every foreign minister, everybody who has served in major positions in the defense of Israel over the last 15 years is guilty.” — John Podhoretz [40:07]

• Conscription and Reservist Strain:
  The citizen army model has reached its limits, with reservists facing prolonged deployments that disrupt personal lives and economic stability.

  Quote:
  “They are exhausted. When you're a reservist, they have kids, they have wives, they have jobs, they have homes... it's a morally complicated question.” — John Podhoretz [86:16]

• Cultural Complacency:
  A cultural overconfidence in technological superiority overshadowed practical military preparedness, leading to a disregard of conventional threats.

  Quote:
  “We thought the enemy was too stupid to plan something like this. But actually, they were very attuned to our weaknesses.” — Jonathan Foreman [65:18]

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Human Cost and Societal Impact

Timestamp: [83:35]

The episode poignantly addresses the human toll of the conflict, sharing personal stories and emphasizing the societal strain caused by sustained military engagement.

Key Points:

• Personal Narratives:
  John Podhoretz shares a moving story about his nephew, a reservist whose life has been upended by continuous deployments, highlighting the personal sacrifices made by Israeli citizens.

  Quote:
  “His professional career was damaged and he was nearly killed four months ago... it was an extraordinarily moving tribute to him and he does not have to return.” — John Podhoretz [91:09]

• Public Sentiment:
  The Israeli population is grappling with frustration and fatigue over the prolonged conflict, with economic strains and disrupted lives adding to the burden of continuous warfare.

  Quote:
  “It’s a terrible situation... it's a terrible thing. We snatched defeat from not, maybe not from the jaws of victory, but from something for no reason.” — John Podhoretz [16:11]

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Conclusion and Future Implications

Timestamp: [100:03]

The discussion concludes with reflections on the necessity for Israel to undergo a comprehensive reassessment of its military and intelligence frameworks to prevent future failures.

Key Points:

• Reorganization Needed:
  Israel must rethink its military strategies, enhance ground forces, and integrate advanced intelligence methods to better anticipate and counter unconventional threats.

  Quote:
  “It's extremely important for people to understand... this goes to everything we know about how people fight wars and win wars and lose wars.” — John Podhoretz [98:34]

• Long-Term Consequences:
  The failures of October 7th not only have immediate military and societal repercussions but also long-lasting effects on Israel's global standing and internal cohesion.

  Quote:
  “This is an object lesson in an incredibly open society having to start reckoning with what went wrong.” — John Podhoretz [98:34]

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Notable Quotes

• “There’s never been an event, you know, a violent event that has been as filmed, you know, as comprehensively as this by far, in all of human history.”
  — Jonathan Foreman [01:56]

• “They essentially stopped having eyes inside Gaza largely because they did not know about the tunnel system... an enormous intelligence failure.”
  — John Podhoretz [44:23]

• “Every chief of staff of the armed forces... is guilty.”
  — John Podhoretz [40:07]

• “His professional career was damaged and he was nearly killed four months ago... it was an extraordinarily moving tribute to him and he does not have to return.”
  — John Podhoretz [91:09]

• “It's a terrible situation... it's a terrible thing. We snatched defeat from not, maybe not from the jaws of victory, but from something for no reason.”
  — John Podhoretz [16:11]

• “This is an object lesson in an incredibly open society having to start reckoning with what went wrong.”
  — John Podhoretz [98:34]

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Final Remarks

John Podhoretz emphasizes the critical importance of Foreman's report in understanding the intricate failures that led to the October 7th attacks and urges listeners to engage with the full article available at Commentary.org. The episode serves as a sobering analysis of military preparedness, intelligence oversight, and the profound human costs of war.

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Listen to the episode and read Jonathan Foreman’s detailed report for a comprehensive understanding of the events and their implications for Israel’s future.

Transcript

[John Podhoretz]

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[Jonathan Foreman]

Hope for the best the wor Some.

[John Podhoretz]

Preach and pain Some die of thirst no way of knowing which way it's.

[Jonathan Foreman]

Going Hope for the best Expect the worst Hope for the best.

[John Podhoretz]

Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Wednesday, April 23, 2025. I am John Pot Horace, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, Executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.

[Abe Greenwald]

Hi, John.

[John Podhoretz]

Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.

[Seth Mandel]

Hi, John.

[John Podhoretz]

And joining us today, a very old friend, a longtime colleague. We work together at the New York Post. We have worked together here at Commentary over the last 16 years. American, British, swashbuckling movie critic, foreign correspondent on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan and other places, and the author, primary author of the report issued by the UK Parliamentary Committee on October 7th that was chaired by our other mutual friend, Lord Roberts of Wythmogenshire, or known to you as Andrew Roberts, the great historian Jonathan Foreman. Jonny, welcome to the Commentary podcast.

[Jonathan Foreman]

Hi, it's a pleasure to be here.

[John Podhoretz]

Jonathan is here because he is the author of the Aside from All of the Good Reasons that he would be Here Otherwise, author of the COVID story in our April issue, which is called the Untold Story of How Israel failed on October 7, and is a narrative account of what he and this parliamentary commission discerned and discovered in the course of trying to render an accurate account of the intelligence, military, logistical and political and social events that led up to Israel being surprised on October 7th and what the consequences of those were. And it's an extraordinarily important article, and we will get to it in a minute before we talk about how 91 days into the Trump administration's promise that it would solve the war in Ukraine on day one, the declaration, and it's very hard to kind of parse the meaning of it. Basically, the declaration that they're done, they're washing it, there's going to be some negotiations today, but it's all like the cleaning lady and the garbage man and the fourth ranking person in the cultural affairs department are all going to sit around a table talking about things because Marco Rubio, secretary of state, and others have made it clear that there is no negotiation to be had. Nothing's happening. And so the, the, the solution to the war that nobody asked Trump to provide, right. This was his unilateral campaign promise that he would end the war on day one. That he has now failed to achieve this campaign promise that I don't think Putin was seeking nor, nor was Zelensky, very obviously, since the solution on day one would be to make Ukraine lose the war. And apparently it's now come a cropper on the entirely preposterous grounds. Preposterous in the context of entering the war on day one, that all, all Ukraine needs to do is accede publicly to the annexation of Crimea, which I think makes up 20% of the territory of Ukraine or something like that. All they need to do is just say, okay, you can have Crimea, thanks so much. That's why hundreds of thousands of us have died over three years is to assent to the partial destruction of our country by a completely, by a depraved and depraved Russian military. And Zelensky said we're not going to do that. Like, maybe not that he's saying this explicitly, but look, maybe you can win this in a war, maybe you can win, beat us in the war, but we're not going to ever say that. Crimea is not part of Ukraine. And just as the world did not accede to the Soviets taking over Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, if you will remember, we called them captive nations. We did not recognize Soviet dominion or Soviet, the Soviet takeover of them and we had, we accepted their currency. They had an exiled government that we recognized. The west recognized for more than four decades until the fall of the Soviet Union meant that those countries then again became independent. So independent that my daughter, who was studying abroad is about to go to Tallinn for a couple of days as part of her semester her junior year abroad. Imagine my saying that to you in 1987. Oh, my daughter's just going to go to Tallinn for a couple of days and then she'll be back.

[Jonathan Foreman]

I went to Vilnius last summer actually to sort of. Sort of.

[John Podhoretz]

I've never been but like everybody I know who is in the foreign policy, I go to lots of conferences world and sit and we have rapporteurs and we issue statements. Has been going to Riga and Tallinn and Vilnius and all these places and.

[Seth Mandel]

Tallinn is so hot right now, very hot.

[John Podhoretz]

But I've never been. But I will say that when, when I was looking at the pictures of Tallinn, I don't know why I'm going on this because just why not? Because it's A podcast. It, it looks like Cinderella's castle at Disney World. I, I, it's, it's, it looks like a storybook kingdom out of a fault pop up book that you fold open. And this is where Elsa and Anna live in Frozen. You know, it's kind of amazing. I hope she enjoys it.

[Jonathan Foreman]

I was there 20 years ago and it's, it's, yeah, it's a Cinderella castle. If the entire, if you can imagine the city being populated entirely by amazingly good looking people.

[John Podhoretz]

Well, I mean you think what Elsa and Anna aren't and Cinderella aren't good looking.

[Jonathan Foreman]

It's actually just like a movie. Like the girl selling you stuff on the sidewalk is like you think I could bring it to the US and make a fortune as her manager. You know that that's what it's like.

[John Podhoretz]

So anyway, anyway. And you know, so Ukraine not noted, especially noted for the pulchritude of its people but nonetheless Crimea is part of Ukraine. They're never going to give it up. This is, you know, they will lose it but they're never going to exceed to its. And Zelensky would fall if he said yeah you can have, you can have Crimea.

[Jonathan Foreman]

Do you think that they might be able to get with crime but eastern Ukraine isn't even, is even harder sell, isn't it when it's up?

[John Podhoretz]

Well, I don't even think they're, I mean that's not, I mean the focus of the conversation is Crimea. Anyway the idea, the whole point here.

[Seth Mandel]

The Trump, the Trump proposition is, is Crimea is Crimea but is not going the deal wouldn't ask the Russians to leave any place that they currently are so that the rest of Ukraine the, you know, Trump is sort of getting away with well, you don't have to turn the territory over to Russia. We don't, we won't recognize it as Russian territory, but we're not going to ask the Russians to leave.

[John Podhoretz]

So yeah, we're not.

[Seth Mandel]

Six months from now, six months from now that territory will also be annexed by hook or by crook.

[Abe Greenwald]

Look to the, to the outside world. I think if you're outside of Ukraine, you think, well Crimea began long ago, so that's a foregone. They can forget about that. But when you're over there, it's blasphemous to, to think to talk in those terms. There's absolutely no giving of Crimea. It's tempting to say that Trump went about the entire supposed peace deal the wrong way from the first step. Except the very proposition was wrong to begin with. It starts before the first step, you're not going to have a peace deal with Vladimir Putin and Ukraine when, as John, as you said, it would simply mean Ukraine saying, okay, we're done. We lost. We give up what hundreds of thousands have died to defend.

[John Podhoretz]

I hate to put it this way, because it sounds cold, but if Ukraine is willing to suffer the horrific losses that it is suffering, the idea that the President of the United States comes in and says, there's too many people dying there, so I have to stop it, is actually kind of jaw dropping when you think about it. Imagine if the same conversation had taken place about Afghanistan in 1983 or something like that. You know, Reagan had said, you know, it's just the poor Afghani people, they're just suffering. So. And the Russians, too. A lot of Russians are dying and the Afghanis. And it's like, no, no, we're fine. Look, I'm not going to talk about what happened after the Russians lost in Afghanistan. Bad things happened to the United States as a result of the, you know, follow on after that. But it's like, it's not our choice whether Ukrainians want to fight a war to save their country. And there is plenty of history, like Afghanistan, to assume that if they hold tight and bog the Russians down, the Russians will give up. They. They don't have any. They don't have anything to give up. Like, they're living where the war is taking place. All they can do is surrender and become, you know, live under the Russian jackboot.

[Jonathan Foreman]

So it's also very weird, isn't it, to come, you know, after all that isolationist rhetoric to sort of go like, we don't want to be the world's policeman. We're going to pull back to, like, then incredibly imperialistic thing where you go, like, oh, by the way, we think there's too much killing going on, so I'm going to make you stop and surrender, essentially.

[Seth Mandel]

And it's right now. But what's the plan with. With the nuclear, the area around the nuclear plant, right? Trump's like, well, we'll take it. America will, will, will have. Will buy in and we will have the area around the nuclear facilities. And that's what will protect the nuclear facilities from Russian attacks, because if they're American, they won't. So we went from America first, you know, and pulling back from the world to, we're going to occupy part of Ukraine, Russia is going to occupy part of Ukraine. Maybe Ukraine will get some of Ukraine. We'll see how things shake out. But, like, all of a Sudden, he's decided that America is going to set up shop at one area where they're worried about Russian attacks. So pick a lane.

[John Podhoretz]

Right? This is a very important point, because the one thing that we can say of a certainty from the beginning of the war in February 2022 until now, is that not a single American footprint. I mean, there's probably covert. There may be covert people running on, but not a single American military footprint has been in place on Ukrainian soil in the course of this war. And Trump, as you say, is talking about putting, I assume, what would be hundreds, if not thousands, essentially, of armed forces to protect whatever it's called. Graposhnichiya. I'm just making up words. This is the podcast in which I make up words and names and titles for Andrew Roberts's baronetcy or whatever the hell it is.

[Jonathan Foreman]

Belgravia, incidentally.

[John Podhoretz]

Well, Belgravia is even funnier, of course, because Belgravia is a series of houses in London, basically.

[Jonathan Foreman]

Yeah.

[John Podhoretz]

As you. It's white, beautiful white houses from the 1820s. That's like. That would be like calling me Lord Pothorts of the Upper west side, but, you know, or. Or 86th street or something. But anyway, it's not of Andrew Roberts, one of my favorite people, but I can't help it. Anyway, but I'm just making up words like the name of the nuclear plant, but. But yeah. So suddenly there's no Americans, and we're just giving them weapons so that they can try to win this war. And now they're going to lose the. According to the Trump philosophy, which is actually not going to take place here. They're going to lose the war. They're going to lose 20% of the country. The rest of the country is going to be. A lot of the country is going to be semi occupied by the Russians, and they're going to be totally at Russia's mercy, and there are going to be 5,000Americans surrounding the nuclear plant. So every single aspect of the Trump promise is betrayed. Biden didn't have Americans on the ground. Trump will bring Americans on the ground. Biden didn't. You know what I mean? Like, by whatever Biden did, he didn't say, you can have Crimea, you know, and again, the Ukrainians want to keep fighting. If they want to sue for peace, they can sue for peace without us. We have literally, no, this is not our fight. It's their fight. If they want to say to Russia, okay, uncle, we can't handle it anymore. It's one of the worst pieces of foreign Policy, gamesmanship we have ever seen, as far as I can tell.

[Jonathan Foreman]

And he doesn't mean it anyway, does he? I mean, it's bs, right? It doesn't really. Obviously doesn't really care about the amount of people who've been killed. I mean, it's not. It's just a sort of weird way of.

[John Podhoretz]

Well, he doesn't. Like, it's a mess, Right? It's a mess, and it's a mess, and he could clean up the mess, and then maybe he could win a Nobel Prize by cleaning up the mess or some version of that. And it was a theme. It was just a rally campaign theme, which is Biden's terrible at everything he screwed up. Afghanistan, he screws up everything he screwed up. I could solve this in a day. In a day, I could solve it. You don't have to vote for Biden. I'll fix it. And now it's 90 days in, and he's like, well, I guess I'm not gonna fix it. I have cockbainie schemes to fix it. And Marco Rubio, his Secretary of State, is saying, I'm not even gonna meet with these people, like, where. What we need to do is get the hell out of here and just get back to that. Now, it's terrible because it's either terrible because we're not going to supply them with the weaponry that they need, clearly. On the other hand, maybe. Maybe Europe will. Or maybe Europe will do what it can, or there'll be some kind of weird pipeline where Europe buys the arms and then it gives it gives them to Ukraine. And we're like, we didn't know they were going to go to Ukraine. I don't know how it's going to work. No, it's a horrible situation. It's a terrible thing. We snatched defeat from not, maybe not from the jaws of victory, but from something for no reason. Like a lot of what's happened now over the 90 days of Trump's presidency. Right. There's also cause you cause a stock market crash, and then the stock market comes back, and then you're like, oh, the stock market is coming back, but it wouldn't have fallen 6,000 points if it hadn't been for your stupid Liberation Day, you know? Yeah.

[Abe Greenwald]

And there's also not just the facts of the results of this process in Ukraine and what it means for Russia, but it's what the US has broadcast this whole time as well, during this failure that will have consequences for us. I mean, you know, we've been going around to, you know, Flattering Putin, trying to ingratiate him, trying to get him back into the G7. It says a lot about where we are now, too. It puts us in a different position vis a vis the world's bad actors with nothing to show for it.

[Jonathan Foreman]

And also the whole, I mean, I know Trump doesn't understand the whole idea of alliances at all. It doesn't mean, it's like, doesn't get it. It's like a lot of things he doesn't understand. But at some point it's going to matter that no one trust, I mean, this trust deficit, everyone is thinking, jesus, anything could happen. Do you know what I mean? It's like, maybe we should be friends with the Chinese. I mean, or maybe we should, you know, these, you know, they could, what if it gets worse? You know, what if he wakes up one day and, you know, you know, he probably.

[John Podhoretz]

That's happening, that's, that's happening right now. Right? We have, we have weird alliances being made. Iran and Saudi Arabia have made an alliance, or Iran and Russia have made an alliance. China is going all over the place and this idea, idea of, yeah, trying to secure your supply chain in the world of tariffs. If, if there's going to be this worldwide crisis engineered solely by one guy's flippancy. Anyway, it is an amazing set of circumstances and it is like Trump has now spent two months punching himself in the face. And then yesterday maybe he went on a new med and he stopped and was like, no, I'm not going to fire Jerome Powell. I have no intention of firing Jerome Powell. And Scott Besant is walking, going to Wall street and telling people that everything's going to be fine. And so things kind of calm down. It's like, hey, look, everything's great. I stopped punching myself in the face. Now I'm, now I'm not being punched in the face. Wow, what a victory for me that I stopped punching myself in the face. So that is, that is the three month mark of the Trump administration. Okay, let's move on to the untold story of how Israel failed on October 7th. So, Johnny, give us what was the commission that you went to work for and what was its purpose? And, and, and how long did you do this investigation? And, and it came out in March, right?

[Jonathan Foreman]

Yeah, it came out of March, mid March. Well, it was a, it was a report put out by, I think of the all party Parliamentary Group for UK Israel, which is a group of Members of Parliament and members of the House of Lords. And there are lots of these things. There's an APPG for Kurdistan. I went on a trip to Kurdistan with them and it's weird. They're not parliamentary, official parliamentary commissions which need the government to, you know, which have to be voted on. They're more like sort of caucuses, more like, I guess it's between a caucus and a lobby group within the parliamentary system. And this one has a lot of basically pro, you know, pro Israel, relatively pro Israel I'd say not some of them are, you know, not, you know, they're not. It's not an ardently Zionist organization but it's a sort of relatively pro Israel mp. The members of the House of Lords and there's a, I don't know, 40 of them. It's one of the largest ones actually in Parliament. They wanted to do a report that would, that would sort of establish what happened when, where precisely because you had a whole lot of news reports but we didn't have, you know, hadn't all been put together. I mean in Israel it'll happen in four or five years. There's going to be an official document and the National Library is doing it and it'll, you know, and everything will be put together. But what gave it the impetus was a poll that came out which said that something like at least a quarter of British Muslims believe that it hadn't happened at all, that nothing had happened, that the Israelis had just attacked Gaza for nothing. You know what I mean? They actually believe that. I'm sure there's a whole lot of other people who believed it happened but it was right to happen there. There's always that, you know, like 9, 11. But it's the. And people thought Jesus, we. And there was so much arguing about, you know, this is all just propaganda. Etc. Okay, let's do it. Let's just give it chapter and verse. Well, every single incident will have to be properly verified in a sort of quasi academic way with lots of stuff to back it up. And it will only examine what happened on the day and like the two or three days afterwards know that the actual attack and it won't ask why. So there's nothing about the long term stuff, nothing about Gaza. It won't ask what went wrong which is why articles about we didn't, I mean that came up but no, we just wanted to know what happened when. And it was before most of the Israeli idf. I mean any one had come out the one from Kibbutz Bahri. So it was just looking basically at all the sources that have been done and that includes endless newspaper reports of course and TV stuff, but also lots of oral testimony. You know, the Showa foundation at USC has been collecting hundreds of these things from people who lived out there, and all sorts of other private and public groups have been collecting testimonies and, of course, an incredible amount of video evidence. There's never been an event, you know, a violent event that has been as filmed, you know, as comprehensively as this by far, in all of human history. There's never been. That's the amazing thing about anyone doubting it. It's like it's all there, you know, and at least a third of the footage comes from Hamas itself, comes from the killers. You mean, it's, you know, it's like there's few incidents where the Nazis film themselves, you know, it's like. But here on a huge scale. So plus, you've got, you know, CCTV footage everywhere in Israel. You've got. Everyone's carrying mobiles and, you know, it's just this sort of. And dash cams, because Israelis all have dash cams on their cars, you know, that sort of stuff. And so there's this endless footage, so you just take it in and you put it, well, this happened where and when. And establishing the time where things happen in each place, you know, and giving. Making sure that, you know, because things happen in about 30 kibbutzim and moshavim, three cities, about 12 army installations. And to put it down for each one, because, you know, otherwise it's. Everyone knows about Bere and Kvaraza, but no one knows about these other places and stuff happened in those other places. And it. And it's just, get it down while it's fresh. And the idea, it's a bit like, you know, we were all very mindful of the fact that, you know, that whole thing with Eisenhower, when they arrived at Buchenwald and they were like, you know, they dragged all the locals in to see it. But then he had this thing where he brought a whole division of American troops to come through it, because he thought. He. As. He said, no one's going to believe this. And, you know, which came true, of course. He said, we've got to have. So it probably was an amazing thing that you had 10,000American troops who could come back to towns all over America and go, no, I've seen it. It's real. And so that was really part of the idea. Get it there and have chapter and verse and it'll be a useful document when anybody writes about it in the future. So that was the idea. And it took they'd start. I came on board in mid summer last year. They'd already. They've been thinking about how to do it. And we went to Israel for too short a time, just for a few days, and went by a team named Andrew, myself and a chief researcher called Sidney Arnold and some local people. When we went to. We went, you know, we went down. We saw Kfar Azerbai, we went to the Nova site and then we visited people like, we went to, you know, see the chief pathologist of Israel. And I don't know if you've ever been to a pathologist's office. It's kind of just like on tv, in the movies, because they're these weird. They are people with. Who are extraordinarily calm about really awful things. Do you mean. And make jokes about things like, oh, it's so rare to be, you know, near so many living people, you know, that kind of thing. And they do live in this so strange world. And then they showed us stuff which we couldn't take away most of it. But it was, you know, because a lot of people did get. All the military personnel were scanned, you know, that sort of thing with, like. With CAT scans and things. A lot of the civilians weren't, but, you know, you see these terrible things. Like you see a scan of a woman's body and it's got like, you know, nails throughout the whole, you know, reproductive tract, you know, that kind of stuff because someone used a nail gun. Unfortunately, there's not enough evidence of that stuff because people were buried very quickly. It was very hot.

[John Podhoretz]

Well, it's also Jewish law. It's also 24 hours. You're supposed to be buried within. People don't know this, but, yeah, according to religious Jewish law, the body is supposed to be interred 24 hours within 24 hours of the death. And so as a result of pathology, some of this pathology stuff was just not done because also there is a hesitancy to do autopsies. Like they be for this very reason, their religious objections to autopsy.

[Jonathan Foreman]

Actually, there's an amazing. There's a couple of. Actually should be interesting for you to meet. There's a woman who I met who was a reservist, but part of the kind of rabbinical chaplaincy in the army, kind of. They actually went through. Followed the bodies the whole way through to make sure that they were being sort of respected. And that was very important. Everyone. It's Israel. So everyone's so mindful of the families and stuff too. They were examining them. There was so Many coming in, they'd moved all these facilities down to the south that unfortunately at some point somebody, no one knows quite who, but possibly a police officer said, you know, there's not enough time, let's stop doing these, these checks on the bodies. And that meant, of course, when the whole rape discussion started, the evidence wasn't, you know, this sort of wasn't there anymore, so it didn't really happen and all that stuff. Of course, no one ever asked those questions about, you know, the rapes in Bucha or the rapes in the Balkans, but, but, you know, it's different and yeah, that was unfortunate. So there is this sort of, but the pathology stuff just showed some, you know, you've read the stuff, you know, you know, we showed us pictures of, you know, things, weird stuff where, you know, a couple of. Tied with wires to two sides of a mattress and then it set on fire and there's a lot of, there's a lot more burning. I mean, I have to say the one, you know, it's slightly unfair of me to do this, but I figured, like, I look, I watch so much horrible video and see so much stuff that I can't help but slightly share it and give everyone else a little taste of it. But it's, it was, so it was much more burning than you imagine and cars catching fire and stuff. And then as you point out, the thing with the 24 hours, it's the same in Islam, of course, and I think the Hamas people, one of the reasons they followers did so many revolting things in terms of mutilating bodies post mortem usually and chopping bodies up or mix is because they knew, and they knew it would be especially distressing. I mean that it's, it's, it's proper terrorism in that way. They knew. So we're going to mix up these bodies. It's going to take people ages to sort out which bits belong to whom. And, and also, and they knew about the whole Jewish idea of, of the wholeness of the body being important because it's the same in Islam. And so they said, well, I'm going to make this as distressing as possible. You know, it's, it's incredible. It's vindictive, even beyond the killing in itself. And that's a sort of, and it becomes very clear. That was the pathologist thing. And then, you know, we did other interviews and things. The, it was, I just want to.

[John Podhoretz]

Say, you know, there's a weird point about this in terms of the public, the question of the public Discussion of just how evil the attack was, you know, and just. Just the. The nature of the evil is and how people. It was impossible for me either to take it in or that the propagandists on the other side were so resolute about denying that anything had happened that at some point a report came out that they had discovered bodies of infants who had been cooked in ovens. And it was true. But as you say.

[Jonathan Foreman]

I'm not sure that was true. I think there were these things. Part of that. I mean, there were two problems, I think. One is that there were tons of rumors flying around, as you can imagine, and some of them were picked up. Yeah, There doesn't seem to be any evidence that we could find about anyone being cooked in an oven.

[John Podhoretz]

A lot of people, I mean, they. They didn't have. Yeah.

[Jonathan Foreman]

You know, I mean, so many people were burned, you know, and they used.

[John Podhoretz]

Or they stuffed in and whatever. And then. Then so I did a tweet where I said they burned a baby in an oven or something like that. And there were 2,000 angry responses about how I was a propagandist, you know, defaming the.

[Jonathan Foreman]

You know, there's enough. I mean, I guess.

[John Podhoretz]

Right. So even if it were not true, but. But I mean, the idea that someone might have shoved a. The corpse of a baby in an. In an oven somewhere. I mean, even if it wasn't burned in the oven, whatever it does, it doesn't matter. It's not like.

[Jonathan Foreman]

Well, that's the thing, isn't it? And we were very.

[John Podhoretz]

Several dozen babies weren't murdered on. On.

[Jonathan Foreman]

No, you know, exactly. I mean, it was a sort of. It's a shame that some of those things became. Got. Became so current because it undermines the stuff because there's so much real stuff that's just as bad or worse that, you know, that. That and it just. It spread through. And unfortunately, a lot of the stuff came from these guys from the Zaka volunteer organization. You know, do you know what they are? They're these. Yeah, they do a lot of digging.

[John Podhoretz]

People.

[Jonathan Foreman]

They're mostly ultra orthodox, weirdly. There's some Muslims in it too, but the. And they're not. They're not. They don't really. They're not. They don't do exact stuff, you know, that's not their culture in a kind of way. So they. They'd say things like. Even when we talk to them, you know, it's like, oh, it was really, really terrible. I can't even tell you how terrible it was. And you go, well tell me. You know, kind of, you know, it just is terrible. And then it was just this sort of.

[Seth Mandel]

And there's a modesty associated with higher purpose. Like why they exist is a sort of.

[Jonathan Foreman]

Yeah.

[Seth Mandel]

And the idea very hard mix the two and they don't.

[John Podhoretz]

We should explain because it go, it goes to the, it goes to the nature of a civilized society obeying or following very ancient rules.

[Jonathan Foreman]

Yeah.

[John Podhoretz]

Dealing with this very modern attack. So Zaka literally collects remains for burial. So and it had to find, because you mentioned this, they cut up by chopped things up in order to make this as difficult as possible. They had to essentially they pick up oh blood like scrape blood off a, off a, off a floor in order to bury the blood with the body that the blood came from. It is a, it is an effort to make sure that the whole body is buried because of all sorts of reasons but also ideas about what would happen should there come a resurrection at the, at the, at the end of times. And I. Ancient ideas about whether that the body needed to be whole and complete. Which is why Jews don't do cremate or religious Jews don't cremate bodies because the body is what you will be restored to at the end of days anyway. So the, so the Zaka like it's, it's unbelievably noble work. It's gruesome and horrible and very, you know, as I say the people who are doing it are unbelievably noble and self sacrificing. But as I say, but not, but, but maybe not rapporteurs, maybe not.

[Jonathan Foreman]

And they weren't even thinking, actually no one was really thinking about gathering evidence for any kind of legal thing or war crimes or any of that stuff. And it all had to be done at the same time. And people are of course it all happened within 24 to 48 hours of this stuff. You know, some of the bodies weren't.

[Seth Mandel]

There was so much of it. Right. I mean that's also part of the challenge is the overwhelming amount to go through if you're going to go through the evidence. Right.

[John Podhoretz]

Well, people don't know also but you know there were having funerals overnight at Mount Herzl at various places. They would have a funeral an hour to get the bodies into the ground. Like and you don't bury people at 3 o'clock in the morning but in order to fulfill this religious mandate. So like these, the, even the, even the cemeteries were overloaded and urgent and this, you know, so anyway, it's hard.

[Jonathan Foreman]

You Know, the mobile morgues are overwhelmed. I mean, and then there's sort of, and then there's all these people who are working on identification, which is really difficult. And they talked about that was a lot of stuff that the pathologists talked about. It is incredibly difficult. And of course people, you imagine, as explained to us, that, that having family identification is fine. It's not because people, people look different when they're dead. You know what I mean? You know what I mean? And a few, there were cases of people thinking this is my daughter and it wasn't. And then they find it through something else like, you know what I mean? And it happened several times.

[Abe Greenwald]

And cases where, you know, family members are thinking, well, either they, they're safe somewhere, they were kidnapped or they were killed and we don't know if they were killed.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah.

[Abe Greenwald]

So you have IDF crews sifting through ash, you know, for weeks to find.

[John Podhoretz]

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[Jonathan Foreman]

Yeah, very much not.

[John Podhoretz]

It was not secured. There were they did not know there were thousands of Hamas nicks roaming around southern in the Gaza in and around the Gaza envelope. Then they were on the run and so they were hiding and stuff or they went back in once when they could get to the fence. But it took three days for the for the military to declare that the invasion had been reversed or concluded. So now the question and then we get to the question of your piece, which is also which as I say, is very, very important and very painful for people, which is what were what were Israel what were the failures in Israel that led to October 7th happening? And for good and bad reasons. The good reasons being that Israel is in the middle of fighting a war and does not need to tear itself apart with a scourging internal investigation of 10 years of its conceptual failure to understand what Hamas was going for. That that can wait until the war is over and the reckoning can take place. Though many people who hate the government and would like to see it collapse would like this to have happened as soon as possible so that everybody could get blamed though it's a so many people are implicated because because it wasn't just Netanyahu wasn't just the leader of Israel, uninterruptedly from 2009 to 2023, because there was this year and a half in which Naftali Bennett and Benny Gantz were the year Lapid were the prime ministers of leaders of Israel. And they came from different parties. And so everybody. Everybody's implicated. Everybody's implicated.

[Jonathan Foreman]

And not just them. I mean, it goes back further. I think it's a sort of. Everyone's implicated. I mean, of course, Bibi's implicated.

[John Podhoretz]

I mean, there's this fight, for example, people may be reading about, that Bibi is trying to fire the head of the Shin Bet, Ronan, Ronan Barr. And he, Bizarrely, you would think that this would be an issue since he's the prime minister of the country, but because of the demented policies in which the only check on the government is the Supreme Court, Barr seems to think that he can evade being dismissed by the elected prime minister of the country by saying he shouldn't be fired, because that's bad, and there is actually a proceeding going on. But Barr. So he's the head of the Shin Bet, he's implicated. Every chief of staff of the armed forces, dating back to 2000, dating back to the beginning of the tunnel system, is implicated. Everybody. Every defense minister is implicated. Every foreign minister, everybody who has served in major positions in the defense of Israel over the last 15 years is guilty. Yes, everybody. I mean, this is kind of crazy. Yeah.

[Jonathan Foreman]

I mean, and it's left and right, because, I mean, of course, you know, Netanyahu, he's heavily invested in the idea that, you know, Hamas is tamed or, you know, whatever it is.

[John Podhoretz]

Right before. Yeah.

[Jonathan Foreman]

And he did have this idea that it was a sort of, you know, this is a way of preventing, you know, what. He would have got a premature or, you know, setting up of some kind of Palestinian state. You play them off against each other and all that stuff. Of course, that's the. But it's not. But it wasn't just that. I mean, that's true. The stuff that people said with that. But, of course, the left was also very invested in the idea of Hamas weakness, because then it meant you can make certain concessions and that sort of thing. So everyone wants that to be true, and it means everyone can. Then we can just concentrate on Iran. That's obviously a danger, and Hezbollah in the north, because, you know, if you have to deal with a real threat in the south, it complicates everything. It's more. We have to start thinking about that stuff and no one wanted to. I mean, it's like self deception on this huge scale. And it's very weird because it's. I mean, people talk about in terms of Hamas's intentions. It's not like they made a secret of it. I mean, it's like they say it again and again and again. You know, Sigma says no because, you know, when they ask him, so do you want to, you know, we want to end the occupation. They said, do you mean of Gaza? He goes, no, Palestine. The whole thing. You know, they say it, I mean, he's like, yeah, we want to kill them. I mean, it's not, it's very strange. It's a bit like the British at various times in their clinical history. It's like people, they think, oh, these people just are excitable. They don't really mean what they say. No, they mean what they say.

[Seth Mandel]

When you talk about, in the piece, you talk about literally there was this battle plan. Hamas produced a battle plan and it fell into the hands of the Israelis and they viewed twice. Yeah. Ronan Bergman, I think you mentioned in the piece reviewed. So it was already, you know, connected. Journalists had already seen this. So this was, this was not a super secret thing, but it was the battle plans. And then the spotters, the female spotters, I think it was, you say in the piece, noticed that Hamas was doing training sessions that looked like this battle plan. Jericho Wall or whatever, whatever. The first, the first iteration may have had a different name. I don't know, but we should explain.

[John Podhoretz]

What you mean by the spotters. So literally, physically along the border with Gaza, in the Gaza envelope, there were watchtowers. There are watchtowers and watchtowers and video cameras.

[Jonathan Foreman]

Yeah.

[John Podhoretz]

And the, and the people who man the watchtowers and were watching the video cameras were 80 or 90% of them were women. Yeah. IDF, who were not, you know, supposed to be in direct combat roles. And so they were women. And, and they were saying, I don't know, they're like doing troop movements and they're like marching back and forth and they're approaching fence and going back. And then everybody back at headquarters is like, hey, what do they know?

[Seth Mandel]

And the crazy thing is that they had these plans and they said, like, this matches this.

[Jonathan Foreman]

No, they did. I mean, it was, it was so crazy because you have in the sort of.

[John Podhoretz]

So this is Roberto Walstetter's famous. Roberto Wallstedter wrote a famous book about Pearl harbor called Pearl Harbor Command and Decision, one of the most important works in political science in the 20th century. Which is how, which is about how you could not have seen Pearl harbor coming. That in fact, ex post facto you can say there are 17 different data points that suggest that the Japanese are going to attack Pearl Harbor. But in fact, without knowing that they attacked Pearl harbor, those data points were not assembleable even. And this is the problem with hindsight being 2020 or, or like when they.

[Abe Greenwald]

The, the, you know, bin Laden determined to attack.

[John Podhoretz]

To attack. Right, yeah, yeah, right. Opposite of that. In other words, what they had was evidence that was irrefutable and that people saw with their eyes that was three miles away or you know, half a mile away from a kibbutz. And back at headquarters they said, nah.

[Jonathan Foreman]

Not even just at headquarters. The local commandos were like, oh yeah, you know, they're like, you know, it's those guys, you know, and it's true, they're 18, you know, they're conscripts. But it's been happening over months and months as they come through and in the weeks before they're seeing more and more stuff and they're telling their parents, yeah, they're saying things like we're pretty scared.

[Seth Mandel]

It's getting weird and scary whatever age they are. Yeah, you put them there to do that. Yeah, they didn't have to put them on the border. And you said, you're going to be our eyes on the border.

[John Podhoretz]

That's, this is a very important point which is they essentially, it's clear, stopped having eyes inside Gaza largely because they did not know about the tunnel system or the extent of the tunnel system. Which means that their human intelligence inside Gaza was either totally turned or controlled by Hamas which was feeding them false information, which is again an intelligent, enormous intelligence failure. But you don't do that and you're not doing all this high tech stuff. It's coming online, it's going to come online next year. We have all this things that are going to determine this and that and the other thing. So what you have is conventional old timey people watching with their eyes from a watchtower and then you don't listen to them.

[Jonathan Foreman]

Yeah.

[John Podhoretz]

Because they're not high tech.

[Jonathan Foreman]

They're not high tech and they kind.

[John Podhoretz]

Of coming from a satellite so it doesn't, doesn't count.

[Jonathan Foreman]

It's partly that they have that and of course they do have, and they have the balloons and they have all the cameras and these are people watching. They watch it 24 hours a day. Some of them are in the headquarters at Ray in base which got overrun. The others, and by the way there's no reason to have those girls right next to. They're watching feeds from a camera. They could have been in New York. I mean Arizona.

[John Podhoretz]

Right. Which is where the drone. Right, which is where we're droning people in countries from a base in Arizona. Yeah, yeah.

[Jonathan Foreman]

I mean it was weird to have them there except I guess you're invested if you're sitting right there and you're going to be the first person that gets. Gets it. But so they are watching it and it's like just baffling like well you can't be right because if you were right it would mean that everyone else is wrong and we. That just can't be that. You know, it's like we. And that's. It upsets our whole idea of the world. So you know, you must be just wrong. And. And they actually apparently people did use the word hysterical where you think oh my goodness. I mean, you know. Yeah, it doesn't have to be very woke to sort of find. You know what I mean?

[Seth Mandel]

Like calm down ladies.

[Jonathan Foreman]

Yes, calm down.

[John Podhoretz]

But you know I will tell you a funny story in this regard. My sister lives in Israel when they so ways gps, right. GPS started. Didn't quite start in Israel. But the. But the map that talked to you right in from your car late early 2000s where you know would say turn right or turn left or whatever. You program it into your car before ways that. That thing whatever Garmin or you put in your car. And so the first voice that was used in Hebrew was a female voice idea being it was non confrontational, more pleasant to listen to. And after six weeks or two months, according to my sister they had to change it to a male voice because the drivers would be going along and it would say turn left because there's traffic ahead. And the. The Israeli driver would go at. What does she know? Yeah, what does she know? I'm not listening to her.

[Jonathan Foreman]

It's like his wife on the way home.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah. It was like violated the entire spirit of having this in your car. And so they had to change the voice to a male voice because the female voice lacked authority. With too many people that in small bore. This is 20 years before. Before what happened with the. With the.

[Seth Mandel]

Now all Israeli GPSs are just Ariel Sharon's voice.

[John Podhoretz]

That would be good. AI and AI are El Sherrone voice.

[Jonathan Foreman]

Yeah you could easily do it. I mean it's like it's so crazy. I mean that stuff is so crazy. And there was.

[John Podhoretz]

Can you talk about. Talk about Singapore? You. You begin. Partially begin the piece with a fascinating analogy since I mentioned Pearl Harbor.

[Jonathan Foreman]

Yeah.

[John Podhoretz]

And we say, well, you know, Pearl harbor is the example of the thing that you didn't stop and there was a big surprise. But you say Pearl harbor is not the good analogy. There's an analogy that Americans do not know at all, which is Britain's. What happened to Britain in Singapore in 1942?

[Jonathan Foreman]

Yeah. So Singapore in 1942, it's the biggest British base, naval base in all of Asia. It's the heart of the British Asian Empire. You know, it's a sort of. It's, you know, there it is at the bottom of what was then Malaya. And, you know, they've got battleship space there. They've got aircraft. It's. And it's. It's been a fortress that had been recently rebuilt like 20 years before with huge cannons on the front. And it was supposed to be, you know, people. Somebody said a few years before, oh, it's impregnable. And the jet was pretty clear the Japanese were going to want to take it. But people. But they said, well, it would be impossible for the Japanese to take it, because to do that they'd have to come through the jungle, through Malaya, and there's not many roads, and that's impossible sort of thing. They certainly couldn't do it. And anyway, it's so strong that no one would. They wouldn't even dare. And there was, you know, there's a big garrison there and all the rest of it. It's strong. And also the Japanese, anyway, are they people who actually said this stuff? Sort of. They're not just. They're just not capable of doing this kind of thing, you know, they're just not capable of this kind of ground war. And then they come up against, you know, our serious troops. It's impossible. And because it's impossible, no one really planned for them coming down over land from the north because it's impossible. So you don't need to plan for it. You know what I mean? And what happens then? What happens is this awful thing where they start coming down with great ease down through the thing, a lot of them. And even then, weird stuff happens where they don't prepare properly to defend the colony. And the people who. Sort of smart planter types. You can't dig trenches on the golf course. It'll ruin everything. They're never going to get this far anyway. I mean, weird stuff like that happens. No one's prepared. They come down. And in the end, the Japanese storm it. The guns are sort of either facing the wrong way or just useless when it comes down. These ultra modern cannons they put in didn't make any difference because they didn't come by sea directly. They come in and a much larger British sort of empire force ends up surrendering to the Japanese, a small number of them and then taken to these prisoner war camps where many of them are killed and lots of, you know, this are horribly treated and it's this incredible humiliating thing. They're taken by surprise because they don't, they don't believe it's possible. They don't prepare for the unlikely. The, the quality of the actual fighting was terrible as well, with people running away and you know, all problems like that. There was, you know, so there's bad everything. This is what's so similar. So you have. Even at the ground level, the combat performance isn't great. All the colonels and generals don't do badly. They, they don't. They don't prepare for the worst. They don't. And as a result, it's a cat. It's a huge disaster. It's the beginning of the end of the British Empire in Asia. I mean, it's so humiliating. The only people who fight are some of the Chinese Communists who are there and Singapore. But everyone suddenly, oh my God, these people are a paper tiger. They're weak. And this huge army just surrenders. It's and radical underestimation of the enemy as well, which is one of the things that happens so much here. It's like. And almost on a racial sort of level. And it certainly was a racial thing. And Singapore, like these little Japanese. How could they possibly do it? I mean, and that people are still thinking that even after Pearl harbor, you know what I mean? Yeah, they got lucky there. But you can't seriously treat these people as.

[John Podhoretz]

So the errors, so the failings on October 7th and do have these eerie parallels to this. Right. You mentioned that the military. One of the military bases in the south, which is a military base, it's a garrison and you know, has troops in it and everything was not fortified. They didn't have foxholes, they didn't have. They didn't have trenches, they didn't have guns trained outward in case somebody tried to invade them. Because of course this had never happened. Right. It never happened that an Arab horde had invaded. Except, you know, during the war in 1948 when there wasn't even a country yet, there hadn't been fighting on the ground in Israel that wasn't a conventional tank battle or something like that. And so they Just didn't do it because it's like, well, we're not going to do that. What we do that for. Even though you're a military installation, at the very least you might want to do it because that's what you do on a military installation. And that also you're going to. May have to do it when you go to the field. So maybe you want to teach people in, on the base how to exist in a, in a foxhole before you have dig a foxhole.

[Jonathan Foreman]

And they had done it. I mean, for people I took to say it used to happen, you know, it used to be standard practice. Like in the beginning of the century, you'd have the stand two at dawn where everyone goes into their defensive positions, which is a standard thing in all militaries. You know, you go and do it one, which is the most time, you know, just before dawn. Because that's, you know, we did when I was an embedded in the U.S. army. You had to get up, you know, before dawn and stand, go and stand in the position you, even when you're out in the field, you have a sort of thing where the vehicles are in a circle and everyone goes to the position they would take if they were going to be attacked. And that had just sort of stopped. I mean, in theory, apparently in theory you're still supposed to. But no one had done it. It just gone away. No one bothered because like, what's the point? And some of those bases, like, I mean, it'd be harder to get into a U.S. you know, the sort of corporate headquarters, some of these things. It's just a gate, do you know what I mean? With a guy standing there and it's a sort of. And in that day there were. He wasn't even that. It was like they weren't proper. You know, you go to any American military installation in North America and there's going to be, you know, it'd be much harder to get. It's taken seriously, maybe too much so. But there they just didn't have enough. It's like this weird complacency and people.

[John Podhoretz]

Were away for, you know, got weekend passes, just as a matter of course. So like half of the active military is going home for Shabbat and it was a holiday.

[Jonathan Foreman]

Yes.

[John Podhoretz]

So they're like, yeah, go home.

[Jonathan Foreman]

Yeah. And it's like, go home.

[John Podhoretz]

It's not like there's any history of Arabs attacking Israel on, on Jewish holidays or anything that you might want to not do it then.

[Seth Mandel]

Just I mean, not like 50 years ago today, literally 50 years ago to the day.

[Jonathan Foreman]

To the day. And you might think, well, okay, you know, it's a different generation and all that stuff. But in Israel there've been all these, like, conferences all about, oh, the Yom Kippur, what are the lessons, blah, blah, blah.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah.

[Jonathan Foreman]

For the last previous year. So you'd think it would be on everyone's mind, like, oh, you know, sorry, that's a, you know, the. Maybe we should do stuff. And of course, the other side are very mindful of anniversaries. That's part of their culture, gentlemen, as well. So you'd think they would do. And again, like, you think someone go, well, it is, you know, it's possible it could happen. You know, the idea, like, they would never do it because it's unfair to attack on a. I mean, it just seems so strange. I mean, who could be that. I mean, you'd, you'd have thought there'd be, you know, that, that what Rumsfeld, you know, called out the known unknowns and the, you know, the known unknowns, like, well, it's really unlikely, but maybe just in case, we'll have some kind of plan for those. It'll never happen. But just, you know, they didn't do that. That's what's so baffling about it. There was none of that stuff like, you know, yes, the iron primary enemies are in the north, but it could happen just like every country supposed to have its plans for, like, you know, being invaded by Canada or whatever. I mean, it's sort of. You're supposed. You have to have it do you know, I mean, it's like in somewhere. But in this case, it's sort of dangerous border, you know, it is why you send everyone away. And people did say when we were interviewing that, well, you know, was it. It was. It was like. But it means. And there was so. Also there were so few there to begin with. That's the other thing. So you're cutting in half what really wasn't adequate anyway.

[Seth Mandel]

And one thing you keep describing is that is how well Hamas and the affiliated terrorist groups and Gazans in general know what Israelis are up to, know what Jews are doing, know what things mean. Right. You can't. I mean, that's one thing that I get from this as you keep describing how they know when the bodies are supposed to be buried and therefore they interfere with that in certain ways. They know what is happening on Jewish holidays. They pay very close attention to dates. They pay very close attention to anniversaries. And, you know, and the symbolism and all this stuff, and it feels like one side is paying. You know, you say in the piece, I think you say in the piece that Sinwar was far from the only. Yaya Sinwar who planned the attacks, was far from the only Palestinian terrorist who learned to speak fluent Hebrew in Israeli prisons. Like, that's not, you know, people look at that and go, wow, he really pulled something off there. But in fact, your point is that it's actually not that crazy. This is. It's normal for these guys to pay close attention and learn and study their enemy, which is the Israelis.

[John Podhoretz]

It is very important for people to understand. I know a lot of people listen to this podcast, understand, because you have been to Israel, Israel and all of that, but most Americans have not. Most American Jews have not, for that matter. You just. You can't grasp how close Gaza is. I mean, there's a. The city of stero, which is 22,000 people, is next to Gaza. Like, and so they can watch Israeli TV 24 hours a day from Gaza. They can watch. They can watch the news. The Israeli news is not at all hesitant about talking about all kinds of things. They. They can be incredibly intimately knowledgeable about life in Israel. And they were. And as you say, like Sinwar and hundreds and hundreds of Hamas leaders lived in Israel in Israeli prisons, which are not, I'm sorry to say, given who Sinwar is, as savage as people think they are. They are conventional work a day prisons in a. In a pretty informal country. I'm sure that life there is not horrific, by the way. I doubt that it's really direct, you know, like monstrous. It's not, you know, it's not some concentration camp. And not only did Sinwar learn Hebrew and learned and have these relationships with Israeli Arabs in jail and with Israelis and all that, but the Israelis cured him of his brain cancer and then released him to plan October 7, which itself is the proof of concept that the conceptia that Hamas was constrained is ludicrous. They had. They had made all these Hamas people literate in Israeli life and then sent them back to Gaza where they could use their knowledge of Israel against Israel.

[Abe Greenwald]

To say nothing of the Gazans who went in and out of the border and understood the kibbutzim and what was happening there.

[Jonathan Foreman]

Yeah, okay, people work the 15 or whatever. Thousand or whatever it is of the work permits. And then people have been doing it before. And then of course, people who are older knew that, you know, were there when. When the Israelis were still in Gaza, you know what I mean? There. So there was much more. There were a lot of interactions then for the, for the older generation. So of course. And by the way, it's the fact, the idea of these people, oh my God, it's so shocking that they speak Hebrew and they know us. It was one of the things it, that shouldn't have been a surprise because in the 2006 Lebanon War, one of the things that went wrong is they found out that Hezbollah were listening into the Iron Radio who just talked openly in Hebrew. They just, it didn't, didn't occur to them that anyone would, you know, would understand them. And like they weren't even using codes. It's like. Do you think it's like this idea that the, the enemy are sort of stupid and illiterate and you know what I mean, it's like they're not. And all they, they spend all their time thinking about this stuff, you know, I mean, they really are serious about it. So.

[John Podhoretz]

Right.

[Seth Mandel]

That was you about that, that in terms of social media. Can you go into the social media aspect of that? Because that was really interesting. Also in the piece where you, you met, you mentioned specifically watching social media was enough for them to figure out where people would be and when. Even around the bases and stuff like that.

[Jonathan Foreman]

Yes. And the Israelis use it so much and they would, yeah, they'd be on Facebook. They've been at sort of. And there've been these cases in Israel too where they found out, you know, people have been, were terrorists, terrorism cases, where they find out people being, you know, catfished or whatever you call it, you know, and that sort of, you know that. But no, they do social media and here's the weird thing is the Israeli intelligence about, I guess it was about four or five years ago, stopped doing open source intelligence gathering in Gaza, you know, reading the newspapers and following them on social media. I mean, it's like, oh, we don't need to do that. I think this is just bizarre. I mean, you're so overconfident that, that it's, it's, it's criminal.

[John Podhoretz]

Well, I mean, in terms of what it means when you have an implacable foe that actually has a goal. Right. That seems demented to us, which is the destruction of Israel. How are they going to destroy Israel? But they, they're implacable and they have a multi trillion. They have a, they have a, they have a country with a lot of oil that is sending them a lot of money.

[Jonathan Foreman]

Yeah.

[John Podhoretz]

They go there and they offer them. Right. The plan that Ron Bergman talks about give us $500 million and we'll destroy Israel. Here's our plan. They said to the Iranians, Hamas said to the Iranians, we have a plan. It's really good even thinking through in the supposedly unconventional way that Israel supposedly does these things. So you say, okay, on the ground. They can't beat us on the ground, really. Right? They can't really, they can't really. We can't do stuff in plain sight because they're watching. Although again, they didn't, they didn't take into account the military actions. But like we can't assemble a giant military complex because they have satellites on ground and we keep firing rockets at them, but they shoot them down with Iron Dome. High tech stuff is real. Like we're, we're in the Stone Ages, they're in the, they're in the 22nd century, but we can go underground. So there's the ground and there's the air. And then you know what, We've already signaled for 10 years that we understand that we have a, we have an advantage, we have an intelligence advantage if we go underground. That's how we got Gilad Shalit. Dug a tunnel, came out, pulled him through the tunnel back in, held him for five years. There were tunnels from the Lebanon into, into Israel. There were tunnels from Gaza into Israel. There's this incredible tunnel system apparently now that goes into Egypt. Smuggling tunnels that are wide enough for like literally 18 wheel trucks to go through. And the Israelis never cotton to the fact that they were building this underground city for 10 years.

[Jonathan Foreman]

Well, they got, they, they figured out about the attack tunnels. They build this amazing system of the fence that goes deep underground and they have, listen, things. You couldn't use attack tunnels anymore so that they, you know, they were able to.

[John Podhoretz]

So they sealed off the passageway into Israel, but they did not seal off the, you know, sort of like James Bond lair that was subterranean Gaza.

[Jonathan Foreman]

No, they didn't do that. They didn't and they didn't seem to. And they knew there was some, but so much more than they really because they knew they found some in 2021. But if it was much bigger, they built so many of them in such a short time. All that concrete and steel that obviously came in to do it and it's the. So they're not really, you know. Yeah, they're not really paying attention to that. You mentioned earlier, I think it was Seth, the idea of, you know, the women who are watching that. But it's not just that watching and seeing things. Hamas filmed it and use it as propaganda. Like here we've. Look here, we've made it. We've made a mock up of a kibbutz or an army base. Here are our super duper commandos taking it over. And then they use that as their own propaganda. So it's not, you know, you really don't have to be a genius to figure that they're practicing for this stuff. Even if it hadn't been for the women, that the evidence that, you know, there was still more evidence of them doing that. And of course the low tech, high tech thing is really to over, you know, have this faith in their high tech. But they somehow didn't notice that, you know, that the others, they didn't imagine somehow that the enemy would somehow get hold of a bunch of cheap drones, you know, on the Internet, build them, you know what I mean? Or whatever it is, or use a hang glider and the hang glider and the hang gliding things. You know, there'd been these hang glider attacks years ago, do you remember, from Lebanon to the thing. So again, it's not inconsistent. You know, it's not like this unimaginable thing, you know, that sort of. No one's ever.

[Seth Mandel]

And you have to practice, you have to train to use hang gliders. These are motorized. These are motorized flying objects. This. Yes. It's not like holding up an umbrella and you float. You know, you're.

[Jonathan Foreman]

And they must.

[John Podhoretz]

But you do it over the. Yeah, but you do it over the sea. So it's like obviously, you know, Gaza, they were, they were, they were doing it undercover of. But they must, you know, fun, fun Mediterranean Sea activity of a, of a, you know, of a Sunday.

[Jonathan Foreman]

They must have been seen though, when you consider how much they have to have seen them and just not put two and two together for that reason. So you've got that one thing that.

[Seth Mandel]

All this stuff reminds me of is, is, you know, my friend in, in high school was a fantastic chess player. And I watched him at his public school. He was, you know, one of the captains of this public school chess team. And I watched them play practice once and just. And he. After the game he would. He very rarely lost, but he lost once. I watched him lose and he reconstructed the game by memory. And after a while I realized he was only partially reconstructing the game by memory. He was relying on what would a good chess player do in this situation. In other words, there was a whole long chess game and he started from the beginning and he got to the middle and he was like, well, he wouldn't do that he would do. He must have done this. He must have done this. Right. And he. And he was right most of the time because this was the rare person on the chess team who could beat my friend. Right.

[John Podhoretz]

That is a brilliant analogy. My son is a chess. There's a brilliant analogy because of course, chess, which is a war game. Right. Literally a war game. The first war game. Or not the first, but like the first that was adopted in the West. So there are records of chess matches going back 300 years, and great chess players have memorized 300 years. You know, if you're Bobby Fischer, one of these people, you know, sort of like on the spectrum, you know, like with idiot sovereignty, you've memorized thousands of games. So, you know, this piece moves here, there. There are these move from previous chess games. And then how does somebody become a genuinely brilliant chess player? Because they do something different.

[Jonathan Foreman]

Yeah.

[John Podhoretz]

And you don't expect it because, you know, every possible permutation of chess except the new one. So every successful military action, almost like every successful presidential campaign, involves adopting an innovative tactic that you should have been able to see, but you didn't because you were too busy thinking about the 800 years of the chess games.

[Jonathan Foreman]

Yeah.

[Seth Mandel]

Beforehand and the underestimation. Right. I mean, you know, he would rebuild this game. It was this. He. You were essentially predicting the past.

[John Podhoretz]

Right.

[Seth Mandel]

What. What would he do here? And then you were right.

[John Podhoretz]

Right.

[Seth Mandel]

Because. But it sounds like Israel was doing something very similar. Well, in this position, you would move the bishop here. Nobody in their right mind would move Knight to F3 in this situation. And this seems to be a recurring theme in your piece, which is where, you know, the Israelis seem to be looking for a mirror image. If we were in Gaza. Right. What would we do? That sort of thing. And where it's like you have to start to think completely differently from the way you are trained to think.

[John Podhoretz]

Okay.

[Jonathan Foreman]

I'm not sure that's true. I think. I think that the sort of. One of the problems. I mean, there is. I think there was this thing, the projection thing was true in the sense of they thought, well, you know, we want. I think the projection was. It was. Happened in a different way. The projection was, look, they're making a lot of money now. That's becoming prosperous. Who's going to jeopardize all this stuff? You know, if you. If you're. If your main preoccupations are material ones and you built a prosperity and everyone being happy and normal, Western, capitalist, whatever you want to call it, sort of Society, of course, you don't want to wreck this after years of poverty, this new life you've got who would do that. And they projected that. On the other side, in military terms though, I don't think that was the case. They didn't do that. I think the big fault they had is they didn't do what the US Military calls red teaming. And red teaming is where you have, you know, the red is the, the, you know, it's how the US Air Force has its, you know, the red squadron is on the other side. Basically what you do is to figure out so you have a whole bunch of your best people. If you're doing it right and you say you put, you get to play the other side. You figure you go away and figure out a way to beat us, you know, us, because you're them and go and figure out. And that's how you figure out what the enemy is going to. They didn't do that. They didn't even bother doing that.

[John Podhoretz]

But the Israelis have a, had a fantasy and we know this from.

[Jonathan Foreman]

Yeah.

[John Podhoretz]

Our dear friend Dancing Orensal Singer's book Startup Nation, that the Israelis have that self understanding in part promoted by Startup Nation, that they're very flat and that they're very, they're not, they are not hierarchical and they are not controlled by bureaucracies and that the whole nation is red teamed and that if, if you're somebody in the military and you see a better way to do it, you have a very, very quick access sure to the top. And part of the reason that the country went into existential crisis after October 7th and the surprise nature of this attack is that its own vain self understanding was totally shaken. That they were innovative, that they were fleet, that they didn't have the hidebound problems of old European or even American militaries and things like that. They could do all kinds of things that no one else could do. And it's true, they can do all kinds of things that no one else can do. But faced with a conventional attack by a, by a conventional army on their border that they had decided wasn't a conventional army and couldn't stage a conventional attack in very much in a manner of like Manassas or something like that, like they were completely paralyzed. And that's where we get to the senior leadership thing and we're running long, but let's talk about this a little bit. So the term in Israel about where Hamas was and how Israel should deal with it is the concept, right? The, the, the concept and the idea was we're going to hold them in place. They're going to keep firing missiles. Every couple of years, we're going to have to go in and take out their missile sites and we'll, we'll say we're going to destroy them, but we're not really going to destroy them. And we want to. And that's the, and then we're going to affirm that we're going to get better and better at the high tech. And we really, what we really need to do is focus on Iran. We have to focus on the existential threat to the country from. And so Bibi Netanyahu, who is focused on Iran, would prefer not to have to think about Hamas if he can help it. He's, he's got, he's on the geopolitical stage. He's doing the Abraham Accords. He's doing, he doesn't want to have to focus on Hamas or the west bank if he can help it because that doesn't advance Israel's largest interest or his understanding of what he's doing as prime minister. And the concepcia is the thing that is the ultimate thing that links everybody together that I said at the beginning of the podcast means that they're all compromised. And that history, that Israeli history will say that the leadership of the country from 2010 to 2023, everybody was guilty to some extent of the failures that led to October 7th.

[Jonathan Foreman]

Yes, I think it's right. And it's a weird thing that sort of like a ball that's rolling gets, you know, it gets bigger and bigger. I mean, it's a sort of. So you have this, it is the Iran stuff. You're absolutely right. They're thinking about that. And even though of course looking back, you think, well, Hamas and you know, they, which is a state really of many kinds, they're terrified of the Abrahamic cause and are likely to try and stop it if they can. There's very few ways of them. And as are their Iranian friends. And so they were trying to figure out a way of doing it and that was part of the goal of their mission, but no one wanted to. They were being underestimated. The idea is that they're stupid. And even though of course eventually they had learned to stop talking on the phone and all the rest of it so that while they're being underestimated, that's a part of it. But one of the reasons why they didn't think they had to take care of and worry about Hamas at Bibi and all the others is. And have this system, as you say, where you do a punitive raid every two or three years when they get difficult and you're getting better at shooting down their missiles is because there's been this running down of the IDF's ground forces since the beginning of the century. The exception of Gabi Ashkenazi, you have a succession of chiefs of staff and defense. Defense ministers wanted to cut the military generally. The finance people wanted to cut the military generally. And it's like, well, we don't really need it. It's, you know, this is stuff from the old world. We don't need any of this. And we have these amazing, shiny, fantastic things. And, you know, it's boring and difficult to have to train up conscripts into decent troops. Let's not do. And we've got this amazing air force. We've got incredible intelligence. Our cyber people are fantastic. And we have our special forces. Wouldn't it be great if we can just spend all the money on that? And that's what they did. And running down the rest of it starts really early on. And when you do, when you don't have as good. When you know that your people aren't really that good at the other stuff, you don't even want to think about using that stuff. You think we'll have to figure out some way around it. Our intelligence people warn us anyway, because they're amazing and they are amazing, but you know what I mean, you don't have to be wrong once, really, don't you? And it's, you know, we'll deal with our.

[Seth Mandel]

Or ignore it. They knew, right, that intelligence was there. They had the intelligence that this was happening and they just didn't.

[Jonathan Foreman]

So similar to 73 in some ways. I mean, it's so similar except when it was one man there who sort of blocked it. But the difference is that the core Israeli military was in much better shape in 73. Those reservists were, you know what I mean? They were sort of. They didn't. They didn't have that. And there wasn't this weird attitude. I mean, you know, this weird thing. We don't need sentries anymore because our eyes will tell us when we're under attack and that kind of thing. And also, I mean, this is. This isn't in the piece, but one of these I did notice there, and I'm sure you've. No, because you know, Israel very well. Is this sort of, you know, there's the whole drug culture and everyone smokes, like weed and all the rest of it. And you just think, you can't help wondering like with the people who are watch, you know, how many of these guys were supposed to be keeping watch, were like getting high somewhere. Do you know what I mean? It's a sort of thing.

[John Podhoretz]

Well then there's the flip side though. You don't talk about this, which is that the Nova Festival, which I think as you, as you point out, it's not clear that Hamas even knew that the Nova Festival was taking place. So they had this other battle. They had just this other free. Free shot at unarmed civilians by the hundreds who were, you know, rave in the, you know, in, in the Gaza envelope. But there's an interesting flip side to the story which is that a bunch of people who were at the Novum Festival, not a bunch like a lot of most of the half of them were veterans, were, you know, had been. Had been id, had been through universal conscription, were IDF soldiers. And they actually, unlike if you, if that happened at Coachella.

[Jonathan Foreman]

Yeah.

[John Podhoretz]

I mean the f. Palestine thing comes out, they knew what to do. Like the training kicked in. They didn't, they weren't armed. But a lot of them figured out how to hide, where to go, how to, you know, there was this population of Israelis who saved themselves and others who would likely have been killed en masse. Oh otherwise. So. And you point out that the behavior of the Israeli citizenry that lived in the Gaza envelope or around this, you know, around those, those cities and the kibbutzim and moshavim was kind of staggering. Like they, they. Their heroism and their self sacrifice and bravery while they waited for the cavalry literally didn't show up for 24 hours. And there was that amazing scene of the IDF Chief of Staff going to. Is it Barry or Kvara, I can't remember which kibbutz went to. And this woman saying where were you? Where. Where were you? We were barricaded inside our. Where were you? This is Israel. Like we're an hour and a half from Tel Aviv. It's so were you.

[Jonathan Foreman]

And it's. Yeah. And it's still baffling. I mean it takes a long time to get. It takes longer than people imagine to get stuff together. I mean that is the thing, right? People and they're on holiday and it's, they're not answering their phones and although it's easier now than it was in 73 because everyone does have phones. Do you know what I mean? But yeah, but still it's like it is easy, but it is. There must have been Such, such confusion. And I remember interviewing one of these special forces guys who was a reservist who was sent down mid morning and they thought, and they knew that the regular people had already begun down which a squadron of 10 or whatever it is, they still thought they were going to be. They were dealing with an infiltration of five or ten people. I mean they somehow didn't get through the size of this thing and they are the reports coming from all these different places, but there's no one in. The people who are supposed to be in charge are in which has also been overrun and somehow there's no backup. There's no way of figuring there was no.

[Abe Greenwald]

They took it out. No one was sort of collating all the reports to put together this larger picture coming in.

[Jonathan Foreman]

No one's doing that because that's what the rain base is supposed to do. And somehow there's no one in. It's so unexpected. There's no one in charge. No one's saying, oh my God, if this has come up. But these WhatsApp calls are coming in. WhatsApp helps save things by the way, if they haven't had the WhatsApp. I mean they had helicopter gunships came in, were calling people on WhatsApp and they got into the phone, yeah, it's over there. You know what I mean? Go and do it. I mean if without that I don't know what would have happened.

[Seth Mandel]

I mean one of the scariest statistics you say is that because you say that you know, began at a certain kibbutz at let's say 8am or that's when the first calls for help went out. They came at 3pm and you mentioned that this place is a two and a half hour drive from Lebanon. Not. Yeah, so the Israelis who are thinking about. Right. They're, they're not thinking about Hamas enough maybe because they're thinking about the threat from Lebanon. You start to imagine, I mean you don't want to but perhaps how much worse believe it or not, this could have been had, you know, there been a combat, had, had Hezbollah been part of, you know, that.

[Jonathan Foreman]

And I think that's what Sima probably was actually banking on.

[John Podhoretz]

Oh, he was, he was, he thought, he thought Hezbollah would, would just like in 67 that, that there would be a multi front war. And if there were a multi front war and Iran decided to involve itself, then Israel really could fall.

[Jonathan Foreman]

Oh yeah. And if, and, and if you have a simultaneous attack from the West Bank.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah.

[Jonathan Foreman]

Arab risings in some of the cities. I don't I mean, then you're in a. Right.

[John Podhoretz]

No, you can see how things taken a twist the other way. But you know, the concepcy even went on four or five days later. I mean, that's a fascinating conversation between Dan Senor and. And Yoav Gallant on his podcast where Galant explains that he was one of the people who wanted after October 7, wanted Israel to attack Hezbollah a little like after 9 11. You remember that Paul Wolfowitz and others said we need to attack Iraq. We need to go after Iraq in the immediate wake of 9 11. Not that Hezbollah isn't a more direct threat and that there was reason to. But he. What Gallant said was we have the walkie talkie. Like we actually have. We've had this project for years to blow up the walkie talkies and we can press a button and take out thousands of Hezbollah fighters and then go in and mop up and fight and do this. And we have it. It's off the shelf. We can do it. And it was left to Bibi to say to him, we can't attack the people who didn't attack us on October 7th. We have to go at the people who attacked us on October 7th. Like, get this in your head. He didn't say it this way, but it's like, let's just make this clear. We have a task to get the people who get. And no one's gonna understand why we're shooting up here instead of down there. It doesn't.

[Jonathan Foreman]

Yeah.

[John Podhoretz]

Make any sense. And that's where the consent. That's where this world in which the divide between what's actually happening in the world and what happens when you're sitting in your headquarters thinking about things on a map as a. And. And in this kind of geopolitical way, as opposed to our country was attacked by this force. We have to go attack this force. That's. That's how it works. Like, we have to so that other people don't attack us later. Right. So. So that The Concepcia began 10 years early and continued in some ways.

[Jonathan Foreman]

Yeah.

[John Podhoretz]

Until Israel went in in earnest about two weeks after. After October 7th.

[Jonathan Foreman]

And they had to build up to do that. And you just think, well, the other thing is, of course is. I mean, you know, things. The word. There's amazing heroism and all the rest of. The other thing is it's a war. I mean, it could. It could have been worse. We now know. I mean, if. What if they had been. Had a conventional attack from. What if the Egyptians had a coup and then sent their army, you know, I mean, it's like they wouldn't have been ready. They couldn't handle a brigade from Gaza. They're definitely not going to handle the Egyptian army. I mean, it's. So they got to get their act together in that sense and they can, and I think they will, hopefully. Although, I mean, it's in the piece. The thing about where they're still not training the conscripts properly, you know, it's like that's.

[John Podhoretz]

Well, I mean, they are. Look, the situation as it stands, and we're now in the week weeks of there is a conversation going on in Israel about whether or not there is going to be a massive full scale assault on Gaza in which the reservists are all going to be called up again and that they're going to go for a final push and effectively say we've done everything we could to try to save the hostages. Now we just have to end this and end it thoroughly and find every tunnel and blow up every tunnel and you know, and reoccupy parts of Gaza and all of that. And this conversation is now taking place and I know from my own family and others that the reservists, many of whom are pushing 40, are exhausted. They are, they are. When you're a reservist, they have kids, they have wives, they have jobs, they have homes, they have to keep up. They. And they've been in for a couple hundred days since October 7th and now you're going to reactivate them and move them in because as you say, the standing army that Israel is supposed to have is insufficient to the task ahead. That probably shouldn't be the case. I mean, it's not Switzerland. They do have a standing army. You know, it's not that in Switzerland everybody is in the military. Right. So in theory, if Switzerland is ever attacked, everyone takes the gun there. They are obliged to have legally in their homes and goes out and starts shooting people in the street. But they've done that already and they can't rely on, they can't. I mean, obviously if there's an existential death, there's an. I don't think Bibi's speech over the weekend, I think was intended to work up the Israelis to understand that this might happen again. And I don't think there's going to be like a mass revolt against. But the story about the reservist is a lot of them aren't reporting back for their reserve duty. They can't afford to. Their businesses are going to Collapse their jobs are, you know, they're, they, their mother is on dialysis and no one can drive her to the doctor. Like, this is, you know, you can't disrupt an entire, an entire nation can't be at war like this in a first world country forever.

[Jonathan Foreman]

That's, you're, of course, it's like, that's, that's the big downside of this whole citizen army thing. I mean, it's great, but you can't, the cost must be, it's not supposed.

[John Podhoretz]

To last for 18 months. That's the whole point. Israel.

[Jonathan Foreman]

Yeah.

[John Podhoretz]

Israel's longest war had been four weeks or six weeks.

[Jonathan Foreman]

They need a bigger conventional. I mean, they're going to have to.

[John Podhoretz]

Have a bigger conventional army. I mean, it's hard to have a bigger conventional army. They do have universal conscription. So it's not as though every, every Israeli. Well, that's why there's a big fight over the, over the religious Jews and the religious Jewish exemption because, you know, several hundred thousand people have never served because they're, because they're, they get this religious exemption and, but nonetheless, I don't think that would, that would turn the tide.

[Jonathan Foreman]

What's your family's take as people who live there on this whole question? Because I, it's hard. I find it difficult to understand the whole thing.

[John Podhoretz]

Nobody except the haredeem think that it is anything but an absolute monstrous, nauseating, sickening outrage that they do not have to serve. I mean, I don't know. Seth is more attuned to the Orthodox community's feelings about these things, but I mean, I have never heard anyone, anyone, and I'm talking about very right wing Israelis and people who like, are, you know, who like, doesn't start to shake with rage when the subject comes up yesterday.

[Seth Mandel]

But Sala Smotrich got into a fight with the Haredim when he was, you know, meeting with them and they, and they were com, they were criticizing Smotrich. You know, again, when we talk about very right wing people, that's why I bring him up. They were criticizing him for having said that the hostages, the return of the remaining hostages are not the first priority, not the top priority in the war. And he said back to them, then send your kids to battle. Like how he was looking, you know, it was a room full of haredim. And he was saying like, well, how can you tell me, you know, you're telling me what the priorities for the war are. You want the war to go on and do this and this and this contribute to it, right? So I Think that it is something that is below the surface, right with viewer within the right wing coalition and within the religious coalition. It's sort of kept, you keep a lid on it because you have this coalition, but it is there. And even if you're but sallow Smotris, at the first opportunity that somebody comes at you, you're going to respond with, then join the party.

[Jonathan Foreman]

I mean, it's also this sort of. What is the issue by the way, also about the hostages? I mean, that's. You get the sense of that at least half the Israeli public or many more has always thought the hostage and that's has restrained, you know, it has made things.

[John Podhoretz]

Well, Bibi, look, you know, there's a horrible. I think actually, look, God, whatever fate, karma, Bibihu is being blamed for things that he should not be blamed for and is not being blamed for things that he might maybe be blamed for. And the main one is that he has restrained Israel from winning the war because of the hostages. That is an absolute fact. He has. The war has been conducted in a way to maximize the possibility of getting the hostages out before they're all killed in a way that has been extremely injurious to Israel's larger aims. And he is responsible for that. And his reward for that is being accused of prolonging the war for his own political purposes, which is unbelievably unjust. And yet because of the failures that he is responsible for, it's a little hard to feel sorry for him, even if you hold the view that I hold here. And similarly, if you're a pollster and you ask an Israeli do you want the hostages home or do you want to win the war? If you pose it as a, as an either or, it is still the case that The Israelis say 60% or more that they want the hostages home. But we don't know, because I know from everybody I know who talks about this, whether that is actually something that they think or whether they cannot say otherwise, because in this generation, let it be as though I have a hostage family member in Egypt, like that is. That is the feeling. And that it would be somehow a betrayal of this idea that that could be my kid. For you to say we've done as much as we can do and we have to win this war because 9 million people need this war to be over, whereas 20 living hostages are making that impossible and that this trade off is now become too costly. But you can't get that data. You know what I mean? You can't. There's no, there's no way for that to be expressed because people can't say it. They can't say it.

[Jonathan Foreman]

I mean, you know, when you think that they get. What about the families? You know, then there's the families of the people who've, of all the people who've been killed, quite apart from the other, the civilians, the rest of it. What about them? How many, how many of them were up to rescue? The 20s? I mean, it's a, it's a. Yeah, it's a morally complicated question.

[Seth Mandel]

You have families like family cracking, right? Family units crack. I mean, we all know people who are like, the husband has had to go back four times now in this war and she's got all the kids at home. And you know, it's, it's, it's not, it's not like, it's not like she's angry at him for being a soldier. It is a citizen army, but it's just, you can't, you can't you nurture your citizen army.

[John Podhoretz]

Never envisioned an 18 month long war.

[Jonathan Foreman]

Yeah.

[John Podhoretz]

That is not what a citizen army in a tiny country expects, is a war of attrition. It's not really a war of attrition. It's weird because it stops and starts and goes and goes and whatever. But I will conclude, because I've told this story intermittently, tell a story from yesterday about my nephew alone. Alone, who is 40 years old and has been since 2004, a soldier and then a reservist in the, you know, in the Givati Brigade, one of the main Israeli sort of elite fighting units, helped while, as he wept, pull people from the Gaza settlements when, in 2005, when Sharon ordered the dismantling of the Gaza settlements and was back in Gaza in 2009 and 2014, I believe in 2019, was in the war in Lebanon. He's almost 40 years old, he's divorced, he has two kids. He was back in Gaza for almost 200 days from October 7th onward. He had a business, a high tech business that he had to fold because it was him and his partner and a couple people and they were in, they were, they were serving their country. So his professional career was damaged and he was nearly killed four months ago in a. Five months ago in a raid that saw three people in his convoy, including two of his closest friends, killed. He was injured on his hand. Yesterday there was a ceremony in Ashkelon for distinguished combat veterans of this war in which he was for the second time honored for his service and his sacrifice. And it was Extraordinarily moving. His children got to see him celebrated. His children who were, you know, were nine and seven. Nine and six. Nine, seven. I can't remember. But you know, have, have suffered through his absences and, and you know his. Everybody was there and it's really a. Was a wonderful tribute to him and he does not have to return. I mean he's sort of like he's done his time and he is 40 and 40 is really the cutoff point. I don't know what he'll do if, if there is a major call up it will be up to him to go or not to go. But he just give you a sense of what this life can be like. A divorced man with a promising startup business with two children whose life has been dominated since October 7th by the need to do something that no one ever anticipated a 40 year old man would have to do, which is fight in a war for two years.

[Abe Greenwald]

Or.

[John Podhoretz]

You know, 18 months or whatever, you know. And Evelyn Waugh's great trilogy, the Sword of Honor trilogy novels deal with the comedy of Guy Crouchback, his basically his autobiographical character who is. Who joins in World War II and is called Granddad by his, by his conscripts because he's so old and I think, I don't think he's even. I think he's 38 if I remember correctly in the novel. So he's younger than Alona alone is not leading alone as part of a reserve unit with people around his age or people like that. But I mean this is not the way it is supposed to be. And Israel can't go online. One of the many reasons why they will take the measure of all this is because everyone in the country wants to know why this happened and how it can never happen again and what they can do not only to make sure it never happens again, but to reorganize the entire military approach. Yeah to the future so that their lives aren't destroyed by, by the need to defend themselves in this way. Because it's one thing to have to pay really high taxes which Israelis do and to sacrifice and to make. And to see your children go off into the military for three years which they do maybe to fight a hot war which they have and to you know, suffer through this experience. And it's, it's another to say your entire life is now turned over into military service for an indeterminate period of time. That can't happen again. I don't, I don't think. Anyway, Johnny, you're so the piece very important As I say, the untold story of how Israel failed on October 7, cover story of our Bay issue. You can read it at commentary.org Very proud to have published it. Very important summa of all of this. And it is very important, even if you are extraordinarily supportive of the war and of Israel's efforts and disgusted by the propagandistic. The fact that there's now a new encampment that's gone up at Yale overnight, a sign that the evil of anti Semitism and anti Zionism is still alive and well and kicking amongst our elites and that this is going to make Jews less safe and Israel less safe over time. Even so, it is important for lovers of Israel, fans of Israel or people who just to understand this because it goes to everything we know about how people fight wars and win wars and lose wars. And this is a sort of an object lesson in an incredibly open society having to start reckoning with what went wrong since the societies where things mostly have gone wrong, I mean, unless, you know, often are closed and so we don't, we don't know what went wrong in the Soviet Union, in Afghanistan. Right. We don't know that. We'll never know because they burned everything.

[Seth Mandel]

But what's that stat that Israel has the highest per capita rate of journalists of any country in the world?

[Jonathan Foreman]

Something like that.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah, something like. And psychiatrists, by the way, which is, which is interesting. Anyway, so great piece. Please go to commentary.org and read it. Please subscribe to Commentary by going to the subscribe button. Start paying. Read Johnny Foreman, Read him in the future. Go look at our archives. Read pieces he's written in the past. By the way, important piece that you wrote that is still reverberating in our time. Like wrote the first piece, I think, in the American Prince about the Rotherham ruling scandal in 2013, 2014, which you know is still playing this outsized role in, in, in British politics. So you could read that if you just search Jonathan Foreman's name. Anyway, it's great to have you. Great to see you. If you're watching on. If you're watching on YouTube, you can see that there's a. He's right. Over Johnny's shoulder is a table of children who appear to be playing a game in a Dutch master style painting.

[Jonathan Foreman]

Yeah.

[John Podhoretz]

At a table with the later hose and stuff. Anyway, so it's been a pleasure. Yes. From, from Barcelona.

[Jonathan Foreman]

Yeah, Goodbye. From. It's lovely to see you guys.

[John Podhoretz]

It's lovely to see you too. And so for Abe, Abe and Seth, I'M drawing, but horrors. Keep the candle bur.