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The Gist
The War After the War: Hamas and Israel
00:59:13
Times of Israel analyst Haviv Rettig Gur discusses the next phase of the war in Gaza and Israel's many enemies. Also discussed are the ideological roots of Hamas’s mission to destroy Israel, settler violence in the West Bank, and the difficulty of...
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- [00:00]
Mike Pesca
I'm doing a sub stack live on Wednesday. I enjoy doing these, especially when you could get a person on top of the news and you could hash it out, chop it up, struggling to come up with third piece of diner lingo. Adam and Eve on a raft. Anyway, my guest is Sam Stein. He's the managing editor of the Bulwark and I watch a lot of his videos where he talks to people in the Bulwark. And now I'm taking him out of his Bulwark zone, his MSNBC zone, and I'm inviting him and you to Substack Live. If you, if you don't follow me on Substack already, please do. I also have the Gist list every day and it's a way to join me as I join with some of the more interesting people in the news today, Sam Stein, who's a longtime friend of mine. I haven't talked to him in many years, though I've been hearing from him as has as he's been covering some of the, let us say, excesses of the Trump administration. 3pm all times Eastern Standard Wednesday. It's Tuesday, July 15, 2025. From Peach Fish Productions, it's the Gist. I'm Mike Pesca. I'm going to do a short segment here at the top of the show because we have a long show today and it's with one of the best thinkers and talkers on the subject of Israel. He's Haviv Rettig Gur and he's a Zionist. He's Israeli. He's also an American. He also knows a hell of a lot. This interview will displease the many anti Zionists that I hear from frequently in the audience. But that's o because he says things that are true and when they're not true, he tells you this is his opinion and lays out his thinking. I think it's all very, very useful and I need something useful because there are so many stories in and around Israel and Gaza that confuse me. And you'll see, we'll get to one. The story of Israelis firing on people, desperate people trying to get food. Gur tackles this head on over and over again in our interview. He has maximum compassion for civilians and real, I think, deserved hatred of Hamas. We need smart people to figure this out, to cut through the conflicting stories because you're not going to get it from the Hamas Ministry of Health. And let's also be clear, Israel is quite, quite incentivized to portray everything going on in its own best interests. I was reading and you'll hear me quote this Economist headline today, Hamas looks close to defeat. If there's another cease fire in Gaza, it may not be able to regroup as before. This comports with a lot of the news I'm hearing out of Gaza and Israel. And yet just last week, Peter Beinert, who is a Jewish, anti Zionist, very prominent, huge critic of Israel, has a story called now they Tell us Israel's defenders finally admit that the assault on Gaza has failed. How could both be true? I suppose you could say, well, Beinert's lying. But he's not lying. He's quoting Nadav Ial, who's a columnist that I listen to on Dan Sinore's Call Me Back podcast. He act Beinert accurately quotes him how to make sense of all of this was my exact mission in talking to Aviv Retigger. I think you will enjoy the conversation. Listen, I can't help you with everything in the bedroom, like different sleep numbers or different comfort zones, different climates, sometimes not even climates that touch each other, tundra rainforest, that sort of thing. But I can help you, or at least give you some advice for what happens between the sheets. Or if you're feeling frisky, without a sheet at all. Which brings me to Hims. Through Hims, you can access personalized prescription treatments for ED, like hard mints and sex remedy plus climax control. Hims offers access to ED treatments that cost 95% less than brand names. And they're not even shy about saying the brand names. Viagra, Cialis, HIMS will get you those with a doctor's prescription. 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Featured products include compounded drug products which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness or quality. Prescription required. See website for details, restrictions and important safety information. At True Classic, the mission goes beyond fit and fabric. It's about helping guys. Guys like me, maybe guys like you or a guy like, you know, show their confidence, show their purpose, their stride. Right now I'm wearing a True Classic T shirt. This thing looks great. I have a black one. I got like an off gray one. I wear them all the time. I don't really even have to think so much about anything other than they're gonna look good, they're gonna go with almost everything I wear. They're casual yet classy enough to get the job done. They make me feel good about myself, feel amazing, and the price is fantastic. True Classic, of course, has remarkable fit, remarkable fabric. They also have a lot of intention behind everything they do. It was built, the brand was built to make an impact. So it's helping a guy like me show up better in my daily life. And with you on the show, they also give back to underserved communities. They make people laugh. Maybe not me today in this ad read, but you know, potentially the ads don't take themselves too seriously, though. This is a serious. I really have to show off how classic this True Classic shirt is. I want you to feel the difference the moment you throw one on. No bunching, no stiff fabric, just. What's the word for it? True Classic. Built for comfort, built to last, built for to give back. You grab them at Target, at Costco or head to trueclassic.com the gist which helps us the most when you peruse their wares. Trueclassic.com the gist and get hooked up today. Haviv Retic Gur is just about the most learned and best communicator of everyone that I pay attention to on the question of Israel. He is the Times of Israel strong recommend for that publication by the way. He is their senior analyst, shows up in their podcasts and elsewhere. And we'll teach you about history, we'll teach you about the current situation. Israel, I think does it very fairly, but you'll hear certainly from a very pro Israel perspective. But that doesn't mean my country right or wrong. Welcome to the Gist, I think for the first time.
- [07:43]
Haviv Rettig Gur
Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here.
- [07:45]
Mike Pesca
Is Israel winning its wars?
- [07:48]
Haviv Rettig Gur
Well, I'm glad you Said that in plural. Because that makes it really easy. Yes, yes, massively, tremendously. Over generations. And also in the immediate current moment, its enemies have a theory of it. Wars aren't won on the battlefield. The battlefield is where the battle is won. Wars are won in what that battle means in the larger political context. A war is politics, but an extension of politics with political goals. So you can win every battle and lose the war. A classic example is French Algeria. The French army beat the National Liberation Front of Algeria in every encounter over eight years. And then at the end of the eight year war, 1962, the French all left. In other words, the Algerians won the war but lost every single battle. The battle, the 12 day battle with Iran was an astonishing military success and reset the bar for what a successful military campaign can look like and kind of re engineered how armies and missile arsenals function together and air forces. And like so much innovation was seen there, so much was surprising, so much weakness that we suddenly saw on the Iranian side that nobody had really understood in the Middle east. All of that came out in that battle, but it was nevertheless one battle. But there is a grand war, a large war, and it's essentially for the other side, for the enemies of Israel in the Middle East. Essentially at its heart, at its core, its driving impulse is a religious war. And it comes from a particular branch of Islam, not all Islam, but a particular branch of an analysis of some Sunni theologians of the last century and a half that argues that Islam needs to overcome its weakness. It needs to push back against everyone who ever pushed Islam back. And it needs to retake the initiative as a conquering, powerful force in history. And the first target of that vision, which sometimes I call them restorationists, they talk about going back to original Islam of the first generations of Muslims who were this massive conquering army. Some people call them Salafis. And so there are many different names. Basically the Muslim Brotherhood is how a lot of people talk about this ideological movement. Their vision, and in a Shia version was adopted by the Iranian regime. Their vision says that Islam can't really get its mojo back until the Jews of Israel are crushed. Because the Jews of Israel, many different forces pushed Islam back in history. Islam has generally a history of expansion, but there are forces occasionally here and there that push it back and in modernity more than at other periods. And the weakest of those forces, the smallest thing that ever pushed Islam back were the Jews of Israel. And so they have to be overcome.
- [10:40]
Mike Pesca
So therefore it's. This is the most irritating, hard to live with force among the forces that are aligned against Islam.
- [10:48]
Haviv Rettig Gur
According to this, in this vision of Islam, which again, it's not, it's literally not how Saudis think of Islam. It's not how, you know, Indonesians think of Islam. It's this, it's a specific ideology.
- [11:00]
Mike Pesca
The Salafis would be the breakaway fraction that opposed the House of Saudi.
- [11:05]
Haviv Rettig Gur
It's the Muslim Brotherhood. Yeah. Today, yes, absolutely. In other words, 100 years ago we would have been a little bit different. The Saudis were very much in this Wahhabi camp, et cetera. But yes, but everybody who sort of thinks the way the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt thinks, which are the Qataris, the Turkish government, the party of Erdogan, Hamas, very much so, profoundly so. They're literally the Muslim Brotherhood branch established In Gaza in 1987, these enemies of Israel that unified and Iran in the Shia version. And there's a whole history, I did a podcast episode about how Iran borrowed these, that particular branch of Iranian Shi' is, and borrowed these ideas from Sunni Islam. I'm sorry to get into the weeds, but just to pull out and give the bottom line here. The destruction of Israel is the necessary precursor to Islam's return into history as a powerful force after centuries of weakness. Every Muslim thinker, theologian knows that Islam is weak today, that Muslim countries are weaker than European countries, than the west generally. And that is against the natural order of things, because Islam is true and Islam needs to take over the world because it is the divine ordained truth. All missionary religions believe that. And so to restore Islam to that place, this branch of Islam says step one. Not the only step, there's a whole vision, but step one is overcoming Israel. That has been the heart of the war. In other words, if you were to now take Hamas for example, and you were to say to Hamas and you were to make every single fact and everything about history exactly the same in the Israeli Palestinian encounter for 140 years. But you were to say that you were to change one factor, which is Israeli Jews aren't Jews, they're actually Muslims. And the actual fight is between two ethnicities within Islam. Hamas would not fight. And Hamas, in fact would never have been founded. The problem is that they're Jews. And the problem is that Jews having sovereignty and power represents a retreat of Islam. And that is that mobilizing vision, that war, that war is a century old war. And it has had many specific battles and many encounters with armies in the desert and many terror attacks and many campaigns and many operations. That war the Israelis are winning absolutely so it's not just the battle, it is that war. That idea is becoming harder to seriously argue that the destruction of Israel is the measure of Islam's strength and return and redemption of Islam from weakness. The measure of it is the destruction of Israel for the simple reason that Israel doesn't seem to be destroyable in the foreseeable future.
- [13:41]
Mike Pesca
So I take your point about the grand ideologies and the millennia old motivations. But at the same time, there certainly are, as you know, there certainly are internecine Muslim conflicts. I mean, just look at Lebanon, where Hezbollah, which is Shia but opposes so many, of course Lebanon is a Christian and Druze, but there is Muslim on Muslim conflict there. And I would think that there would be some expression of a liberation movement within Gaza or within the Palestinian territories. And it's quite plausible that there'd be a very radical expression of it and this would take root. So whether Hamas, I'm not discounting you or saying that you're wrong, but something like Hamas, some radical, fervent terrorist group that terrorizes its own people and has sought to use martyrdom to hit the Israelis, they would exist. And you could comment on that. But the question I want to get to is how is Israel's war fracture the war, ongoing battle with Hamas in Gaza, where does that stand?
- [14:55]
Haviv Rettig Gur
That's a great question. You know, in, in some ways I feel very, very hawkish and in some ways I feel very, very dovish. I think that the Israelis have done very badly in Gaza. They fought the war poorly. The war has been subject to a tremendous amount of politicking and a tremendous amount of delay and a tremendous amount of pressure, mostly from the outside, some of it internal to Israelis, to Israeli politics. And that has been to me, very frustrating. I argued a year and a half ago that you can't move Gazans out of Gaza to destroy the tunnel system that is the most extensive, fivefold bigger than the next tunnel system ever built in war or for a war. It's 500 kilometers of tunnels in a 25 kilometer territory. You can't destroy that with civilians in the way. It's simply physically impossible. You'll kill tens of thousands of civilians. And so I thought you also can't move.
- [15:55]
Mike Pesca
And guess what?
- [15:56]
Haviv Rettig Gur
And guess what? And you also can't move Gazans out of the way because you can't move them out of Gaza. They'll accuse you of another nakba. Never mind they'll accuse you. It'll actually be hard to bring them back and it'll be hard to Find someone to move them to because the Arab world isn't willing to accept. And so I suggested, why don't we build a refugee camp essentially where we can provide all the services in Israel. In other words, move them. It's not a nakba to move from one part of historical Palestine as they see it, to another part of historical Palestine, is it? I mean, why would that? Right? And then you can take care of the civilians in a serious way. Have Israeli Arabs who are also Palestinians, who have both Palestinian Arabic and Israeli Hebrew, be that service provider, so to speak, and then go to town in Gaza destroying that tunnel system. That was a silly idea. It was a crazy idea. It was a nutty idea. Now the Israelis are looking for an idea very much like it to try and figure out how the hell to do this thing 21 months later. Right? So I think that the war was fought very badly. It's a new kind of war, totally new kind of war. No one has ever fought a war where civilian casualties was the strategy of the enemy with their own civilians. In other words, Hamas only practice the.
- [17:08]
Mike Pesca
Idea of human shields. The idea of human shields goes back as far as war has existed. But what you just said, and I'm not for a second going to engage the debate that human shields is simply a byproduct and not the purpose of or not the strategy of Hamas. But what you just said is extremely important. No one has ever fought a war with this tactic. And I wonder if Israel was caught flat footed not believing that this tactic would be, as I guess you could say, successful or would enrapture the attention of the public, of the world to the extent that it has.
- [17:51]
Haviv Rettig Gur
I don't think the Israelis are at all surprised by the world's reaction because they assume the world is going to obsess. During the Gaza war, Sudan has suffered an order of magnitude more. While there were fake starvation reports by the UN during periods with no hunger of any kind in Gaza. And literally the UN was not counting any institution bringing in aid that wasn't UN actual UN bodies. And therefore it issued a report saying only a third of the food is getting in that is needed, when in fact all the food that was needed was getting in and everybody knew it. A month later when that was happening, there were people literally dying of starvation in large numbers in Sudan and nobody cared. So Israelis are very aware, and there are French weapons in Sudan and American weapons in Sudan. And there are places where, if you pay attention to all these other places in the world where tremendously important things are happening. Those places could be affected and the world doesn't pay attention because Jews aren't involved really what Israelis see in the world's attention. And I respect that Israeli view, I share it usually. But I think what we were surprised at was Hamas itself. We knew Hamas would massacre us as soon as they got the opportunity. We did not realize what the tunnel system meant, which was that they were willing to have the total destruction of Gaza placed on the altar of the destruction of Israel. That was a shock to us. That was what, October 7th. That was the surprise of October 7th for Israelis. Not that they would massacre Israelis as soon as our guard was down and they had a chance, but that they would be willing to sacrifice God's. Hamas leaders have said this a dozen times at this point on television. So it's not like something like I used to have to convince people this is true, then Ismail Haniyeh said it and I no longer had to convince anyone. But what does it mean? I mean think about it, just the simple mechanics of it. 500 kilometers of tunnels. These are, it's an astonishing achievement. It's the biggest thing Palestinians have ever built. And it was built over half a generation. And all of Gaza's economy was bent to it. And skyscrapers worth of concrete were sent into it just from four year period between the 2014 war and the 2018 war. I don't know if they count as wars now that we've seen this war. They were battles between Israel and Hamas. 16 Burj Khalifa's the tallest building in the world. 16 Burj Khalifas went into Gaza in concrete. There's no skyscrapers in Gaza, in other words, all of it went underground. And so they spent for 17 years of their rule in Gaza. They built almost nothing except this tunnel system. And in 21 months of war, Gaza has had the single biggest bomb shelter system in the history of warfare. Bigger than the Israelis per capita by far. And not a single Gazan was allowed to step foot in it.
- [20:46]
Mike Pesca
Right, because the Vietcong had tunnels. And many of our enemies, many throughout the history of warfare there have been tunnels. And usually people are invited into the tunnels to avoid the shelling of the enemy. It's quite the opposite in this case.
- [21:01]
Haviv Rettig Gur
And this, the purpose of these tunnels, they're literally purpose built to survive shelling by the enemy, and yet no civilian has been allowed into them. And they're vast, vast, vast and expensive and have factories and have facilities in them anyway. So yes, Hamas wanted Gaza destroyed, wanted Gaza's civilians dead. Now does that exonerate the Israelis. If you genuinely think the Israelis are monsters, absolutely. It should not exonerate the Israelis for then doing it, for then going in, not destroying Gaza, but certainly hunting every tunnel and every tunnel entrance, which there are thousands of in these cities. And, and also, frankly, if you genuinely believe the Israelis are evil people, not that they're fighting the best war, they know how to fight against an enemy that still today promises to murder their children publicly, actively to them, they hear it, even if CNN doesn't tell the world about it. If you think the Israelis are not good people dealing with a bad enemy in a bad situation, but actually bad people. Hamas's strategy of building this vast tunnel system under their own population unlike anything else in warfare, and then carrying out October 7th to make it impossible for the Israelis not to go after them while making Gaza, building Gaza into the kind of battlefield where the only way to go after them is to cut through cities. If the Israelis are monsters, Hamas is even worse for that than if the Israelis are good people doing their best. Hamas couldn't. If Hamas genuinely believes that we're evil people, it couldn't have relied on our own morality to prevent the destruction of Gaza. And so, yes, Hamas, absolutely. And there's no way to escape it logically. And there's no way to escape it if you really take seriously Hamas actual work of the last 17 years in building to this war. Hamas wanted the destruction of Gaza. The Israelis have no plan for an enemy that wants their own destruction, their own polity's destruction, because Hamas believes it's fighting this much larger religious war and the sacrifice of Gaza is worth it for the redemption of Islam. You asked me if Israel was winning Iran, Hezbollah. Yes. In Gaza victory means. It means a day after it means destroying Hamas claim that we're removable Hamas hold on the Palestinian imagination, the Hamas story. And I don't know that Israel has a good strategy for that. I know there are good strategies for that. It's doable. But it remains to be seen whether the Israelis really know how to do it.
- [23:20]
Mike Pesca
Do these basic facts, did these basic facts elude Israel? Because I had not heard any Israeli politicians, leaders, anyone who's serious in from the center that the center left, anyone who would possibly get elected or sniff power in this particular version of Israeli politics say anything about Hamas that indicated they were anything less than, you know, brutal monsters. And yet you're painting a picture that still the concepcia right to use a phrase that or a word that is used in Israel about the idea of what the enemy could be up to. It was surprising to them.
- [24:03]
Haviv Rettig Gur
You're saying we know about the tunnels? I think that the Israeli intelligence estimate was something like 60% of the actual system that they discovered once in Gaza, which is, you know, 300 kilometers. I mean, they knew the basic facts of the tunnel, and we knew that. We thought, we misunderstood. Hamas had a better understanding of how deterrence works than we did. We thought the Israeli security establishment, not me, I was never consulted by the Israeli army on this question. But the Israeli security establishment thought that Hamas had built these tunnels and had invested so much in them, shocking amounts in them. But nevertheless, Hamas were deterred, and they were deterred by our enormous firepower. Right. What we discovered on October 7, all the pieces suddenly clicked into place. In other words, they had built that tunnel system so that we would be deterred by our own firepower. In other words, what we could do to Gaza or to Lebanon or to Iran was a reason for them not to attack us unless they had already written off the cost of the destruction of their polity. And then what we could do, we were too scared to do it. In other words, we would never go into those tunnels. There's nothing Hamas could possibly do to us or any threat they could pose to us. We thought that would make it worth the cost to us to Gazans and the knock on cost to us of us going into those tunnels. And so we were deterred by our own firepower. That's what that tunnel system really represents. And we did not understand that they actually meant to use it. And on October 7, we discovered they actually meant to use it. And we know now Sinwar wanted Hezbollah to then come in in the north and Iran to then come in, and the Houthis to then come in altogether. And they refused to all of them, they did these token entry into the war. They refused to. But the Israelis went off to systematically dismantle the Iranian proxy system because it was no longer a tolerable threat. But they would not come to the rescue of Hamas. So, yes, Hamas, we knew all the facts and completely misunderstood the enemy and the Israel today that is now fighting these wars. What the world, I think doesn't understand is that it is a much, much more humble Israel. We no longer have a conversation in the Israeli public debate that says, oh, don't worry, they're deterred. Oh, don't worry. I have a psychoanalytic profile of this leader. I know, it's okay. There's no such conversation. We no longer trust our own ability to Psychoanalyze our enemy. If they have a capability, they're going to use it, and therefore they can't have it. So you see Israeli strikes in southern Syria at a regular basis to remove capabilities being built there by various proxies of Iran, branches of this or branches of that organization. No monster is allowed to rise on any border ever again. And that's the Israeli understanding.
- [26:57]
Mike Pesca
The Economist has a headline out today, and the Economist has had very tough coverage of Israel. Hamas looks close to defeat. If there is another ceasefire in Gaza, it may not be able to regroup as before. What's your assessment of that?
- [27:10]
Haviv Rettig Gur
Inshallah, May it be God's will. It would be really nice if we could have a ceasefire, get our hostages out, and Hamas still falls.
- [27:23]
Mike Pesca
So what is falls is falls. They surrender guns, they allow Israel or don't obstruct Israel from entering the tunnels. What is fall?
- [27:34]
Haviv Rettig Gur
Never rule anything ever again. Hamas is two things that are relevant to Israel. It's many things. Hamas is a generally Palestinian culture, is arranged in various ways that are hard to see from the outside because they're not official. They're not. But there's a clannish aspect to the Fatah Hamas divide. There's a cultural aspect. There's this class aspect. One of the reasons the Hamas became popular early on in its life was that it genuinely came from the streets and from the slums, and it built out charities that took care of the poor in ways that the elites that had coalesced around Arafat or the urban elites of Palestinian society never really had taken care of those groups of Palestinian society. And so Hamas is many, many things. There are pieces of Hamas that I need destroyed. I, the Israeli, not I Khaviv, although I do believe myself as well, need this. And those pieces are the pieces that have any capacity to threaten Israel. And that is to say two things. One, the actual organization that comes for our children, it has to die. This is an organization that bombed every peace process, bombed massively in hundreds of bombings. This is an organization that will not rest until we are dead, refuses any compromise and any ability to reach any kind of agreement that has two states, that has one state and some kind of confederation of two people. There is no solution anyone in the world can conceive of that Hamas will accept, except temporarily, tactically, before launching the next war. The organization has to go. It has to die. Every member of it has to die or agree to be exiled for some reason and then be hunted down by the Mossad if they had anything to do in any way, with October 7th, for all time. That's a. And that's achievable. It's just a long, grinding war. By the way, America did this to ISIS in Iraq. It took five years. Cities were demolished. But it happened. And the Iraqis today are grateful for the help that has to happen. The second thing that has to happen is the idea that Hamas tells Palestinians, sells them on. For 17 years, Palestinians learned this idea in their schools, and half of Palestinians in Gaza are under 18. Hamas taught half the Palestinians in Gaza in schools run by Hamas. Excuse me, run by unrwa. But everything taught there was approved by Hamas. It taught them that we are removable, that we are an artificial thing. You can call it sometimes colonialist, sometimes they call it imperialist, sometimes they call it Western outpost and all these things that is so fashionable in Western academia. They get it from the ideologues of the Muslim world, and they get it from these people in the Palestinian space and Palestinian diaspora, intellectuals and activists. And the idea is that we are something artificial. We're not a people that has nowhere else to go, that has a real life, a culture, its own language. It's stuck here. I'm sorry. I apologize for existing. I can exist nowhere else. We're all stuck here together. Let's figure it out. No, that is not what's happening. What's in fact happening is a settler colonialist system, an apartheid system, an imperialist system, a class, a white settler colonialist system. Tell that to my Yemeni friend and neighbors and bosses. It's an argument that at its core isn't about the details. When they say you Israelis are imperialists, it's not specific or colonialist or apartheid. They're not worried about whether literally it is what South Africa had, or literally it is what French Algeria was. The point is, you're removable. Like those were removable in Arabic. They constantly talk about us as Nazis. Compare us to Nazis. Again, it's not the technical specifics. They'll then go find some semantic thing, but it's about the argument that we're removable. That idea has to die. The Palestinian elites, ideological factions, generation after generation, for a century now, have been selling their people on the idea that if you just attack us enough, hurt us enough, make us bleed enough, we are the kind of weak, fragile thing that will roll up and move away, like the French in Algeria, like the British in Kenya. And that idea has to die. And when that idea dies and they stop trying to murder us constantly, repeatedly, in the height of peace processes, I just asked Bill Clinton what happened to Camp David, to his process in 2000, when 140 suicide bombings. This massive wave begins in the fall of 2000 that kills the Oslo peace process. When that idea that we're removable dies, the Palestinians can then come to the Israelis and say, hey, wait a second, we don't threaten you anymore. Why is there military rule on Palestinian cities in the West Bank? The Palestinians start to win when they finally agree that the war to destroy us is lost. And so that idea is the idea that we have to kill. And obviously Hamas, the organization as well, those are the pieces. And I can do it. And it'll take time. It'll take as much time as Hamas needs it to take, by the way, right now in Gaza. I'm sorry to just rant. You caught me on vacation, so I'm more ranting than usual. I haven't had a chance to.
- [32:37]
Mike Pesca
You're in an expansive mood.
- [32:39]
Haviv Rettig Gur
Expansive mood. But this is my last rant, I promise. What the hell is Hamas going to achieve from now going forward? You look at the situation in Gaza, you look at the negotiations with Trump and Qatar and Netanyahu and the Hamas people, what are they hoping to achieve? What could they possibly get by holding out for more? That thing that they're hoping to get by holding out for that whatever little change in the Israeli deployment, in the agreement that they're holding out for, that's what Gazans are suffering for right now, that little possible advantage to Hamas, the organization, because none of it's going to help Gaza or Gazins, that's the only reason Hamas is still holding out and none of this moves forward. What prevents Hamas from saying, okay, we screwed the pooch completely, we are releasing all the hostages, let Gaza's rebuilding begin. We're going to go live in Cairo. What actually prevents him from saying that? And if you can't articulate what it is, other than the ultimate destruction of Israel, which is what Hamas thinks it's about, if you can't articulate any other goal, Hamas are holding Gaza hostage right now much, much more than any other piece of this puzzle.
- [33:43]
Mike Pesca
And we'll be back in a minute with more of Hafiv Retigh Gur. We'll be talking about Israel's neighbors who support Hamas and a question about strategy that I just don't understand. Foreign this message is sponsored by Greenlight. Money is at the core of at least half of the issues we covered and a little bit deeper down with all of them. Financial stress is a major part of life. The finances of our nation drive our nation, drive our people, and can drive our children a little mad. Teaching kids about money isn't just smart, it's the right thing to do. For them, it's essential. So what Greenlight does is offer a debit card and a money app for families. It's a safe way to teach kids and teens about money, preparing them for bigger financial decisions later. They learn to save, invest and build money confidence. They're not scared of it. If I Greenlight when I was growing up, I'd probably be a bit savvier. I know people, people close to me in my own life who, if they had green light growing up, things would massively have changed. So this is why I recommend that you give your kids the financial education many people didn't get. Green light is the easy, convenient way for parents to raise financially smart kids and families to navigate life together. Maybe that's why millions of parents trust and kids love learning about money on Greenlight, the number one family finance and safety app. Don't wait to teach your kids real world money skills. Start your risk free Greenlight trial today at greenlight.com/the gist. We're back with Haviv Retiguer. His title is Senior Analyst for the Times of Israel. He's a man who knows and has thought a lot about the conflict and the existence of Israel. So I wanted to ask you, as I teased before the break, Hamas is not just Hamas, it's of course funded by the Iranians. I don't know how much you could do about that. But what about Hamas's other backers? I don't know what you could do about Israel, but these relationships that they have with the Qataris, other states that are neighboring Israel, can every country that's not around be convinced to wash their hands of these guys?
- [36:17]
Haviv Rettig Gur
There are much larger questions at stake for the Middle east, for a lot of the Muslim world, the Arab Muslim world. The relationship between the Qataris and Hamas is very deep, very old, very old. Two decades old, roughly. And it has a lot to do with the Qatari financing of a certain vision worldwide of a certain vision of Sunni Islam, which is essentially the Muslim Brotherhood vision. It's this century and a half vision of Islam being redeemed through a return to the way our forefathers were, this originalist kind of Islam that will fix all that ails us. Because back then, when we were under Muhammad or the first three generations after him, we were powerful, we were conquering, we were successful geopolitically and now we're not. And so if we go back to what we were then, then it'll fix itself. It's a whole big, complex theological discourse for generations of Sunni theologians. And it's a huge debate underway. And so Qatari support for Hamas has these big, deep, old kinds of threads to them that the Israelis are not going to sever. The Jews are not going to walk in and say, hey, your Islam is not great for me. Could you please change your Islam? That'd be really great. That's not a thing that's going to happen. But the Israelis can do something else, something simpler and more blunt, which is there used to be this grand idea in the Arab world called pan Arabism. And Nasser actually created or created, led this vision. And the idea was basically that the Arabs were weak because they were divided. And most of the borders of the Middle east were drawn by European imperialists. They were the British or the French. And the idea was that if we Arabs unite into a grand Arab coalition or an Arab state, Syria and Egypt, actually, for a time, people should look this up, united into a single state called the United Arab Republic, as part of this vision of having this pan Arab kind of unity, then we will come back to ourselves and be strong again. And how will we see that we're strong? We will defeat Israel. And Nasser talked constantly about the defeat of Israel as the signal of Arab unity and strength drawn from that unity, and then went to war on Israel again and again. And Israel defeated them again and again. And when these armies lost the wars, the idea that propelled them also died. Pan Arabism died. It died in those tank battles in the desert and in wars like 1967.
- [38:55]
Mike Pesca
And didn't the Muslim Brotherhood arise as critique? Well, for a lot of reasons. They were oppressed, but they were religiously oriented, not pan Arabist, and not. They were opposed to bath parties, for instance, like Saddam Hussein, who was a pan Arabist for a long time.
- [39:10]
Haviv Rettig Gur
Right. So the Muslim brothers are born in the 20s, but they come from these lineage of theologians who said we have to go back to being pure Muslims, and then all our modern problems are solved. A discussion, by the way, that begins basically when Napoleon lands in Egypt and the Arab world suddenly encounters massive European power set against the Ottoman weakness. And so the weakness of Islam becomes this intolerable theological problem. And they start having this conversation for the last 200 years. And what basically happens is pan Arabism causes this Muslim unification, this sort of Muslim restorationist idea, to take a backseat. They're not very popular throughout the 50s and 60s with the crushing fall of Pan Arabism, both because internally the Arab states were led by just incompetent dictators, but also because the Israelis, from the outside, the Israelis, defeated their army. So it wasn't doing the thing that was going to be the signal of its success when that all happened. The thing that comes in to fill the gap is this Islamist idea, is this jihadist idea. And yes, that begins to really get into stride in the 70s because of the fall of these other ideas and these other arguments for how we get our mojo back, how we become successful again. And so that's all playing there. In other words, the AKP party of Erdogan, who is the president of Turkey, is a Muslim Brotherhood adjacent. Right? The Muslim Brotherhood theologians. The ideas were brought into Turkey by certain thinkers who established certain political parties. The officially secular Turkish state banned one party after another that held these ideas, and they kept establishing a new one with another name. And the AKP party, the Welfare and Development Party, I think it translates to, is like the, I don't know, fourth, fifth, something like that party to establish itself exactly from the people of the old parties, but a new version that slightly tempers it down so that the army won't intervene in the secular. And then Erdogan started winning elections. Now Turkey is majority Muslim observant now. In other words, Erdogan is going to keep winning elections. It's not clear. Also, he lately arrested his, his leading opponent in parliament, so that helps to win elections. But also the demographics of Turkey are changing in a more Islamic conservative direction. Islamic conservative doesn't necessarily mean Islamist jihadist, but the deep ideas animating the AKP party are these old restorationist ideas. And so Turkey, Qatar, we're not going to detach them from Hamas, but we can make Hamas lose on the battlefield in ways that clarify that. This jihadism destroys everything it touches. By the way, everywhere it goes, it ruins. As Erdogan takes deeper control of Turkey and Turkey becomes slightly less democratic with each passing year, Turkey also becomes slightly less competent and slightly less fun to live in and just slightly less serious of a country. And so these ideas, by the way, what the Ayatollahs have done to Iran, you know, this is not a competent state. This is a state that just went through a terrible winter without gas. And it's one of the most oil rich countries on earth. They have crushed the Iranian economy, crushed the Iranian people's potential. They are a pathetic economic catastrophe. And this regime did it by fighting random, unnecessary wars and demanding a nuclear program that they definitely aren't going to use. You know, they claim. Right.
- [42:43]
Mike Pesca
Half a trillion dollars to that.
- [42:45]
Haviv Rettig Gur
Right, Right. So everything jihadism touches, it destroys. Israel has to keep making sure that's the case and that will make the case against this jihadism. When the Emiratis, the Saudis, they come out and say, we don't want Qatar, we don't want Muslim Brotherhood, we want Hamas to go away, they're reflecting. They're not Zionists, they're not pro Israel, they don't like Israel, they'd love to do business with Israel, but they don't have any other emotional reaction to Israel. They hate the kind of Islam that places Israel on this pedestal as the great test of Islamic resurgence and we have to spend ourselves and destroy our country is what Hezbollah has done to Lebanon. This internal demolition of Lebanon, they hate this. Everybody who obsesses about Israel in the Middle east self destructs, destroys their own society because of the way these ideas work. So that's what they're at war against. So there's inside Islam in the Middle east this battle over whether or not we are Muslim Brotherhood radicals or just conservative, normal, you know, calm, which the Saudis, the Emiratis and others want to be.
- [43:51]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, yeah.
- [43:53]
Haviv Rettig Gur
So I don't think Israel can detach from Hamas is the short answer.
- [43:57]
Mike Pesca
Right. But it's also important to note that in the Muslim world and Arab world, there's more of an interplay between geopolitics and religion. I mean, maybe it was similar to the west in the days of the Crusades, but if your war efforts keep failing, the religious interpretation of that is that we no longer have the favor of God. And so that may take centuries to cement, but it is a fact and a factor. I just want to throw that out there, but I have to get to two things that very much bother me and I know bother you, that are Israel's own goals or what Israel is doing to itself that undercuts any sort of. That undercuts the premise that we are the most moral army or country in the world. One is, I do not understand and I do not take on faith all the descriptions of firing to into crowds of people who are desperate to get food. Maybe the answer is every bit of this is as exaggerated as can be and it's just not the case that the Israeli military is doing this. But they don't quite totally deny it. And they say we fired some warning shots. And I don't know what the numbers are, but I don't understand the strategy Maybe you can explain it to me. And maybe it's just the best of bad choices of having food distribution centers, but also mowing down the people that you're trying to feed with food. What's going on?
- [45:34]
Haviv Rettig Gur
This is a very tough question. Tough to know what's actually happening. As soon as somebody dies, six different versions come out within a day. And the Israeli argument claim is always two days behind everybody else. We know for a fact, we have video footage, we have Gazans telling us, we have Israelis telling us. When Israelis and Gazans agree on something, it's probably true that Hamas has shot at people trying to get to these distribution centers, has infiltrated the people going into the distribution centers, has actively attacked the distribution centers. We know for a fact that there have been shootings at outside these distribution centers. I don't know if there's ever been one inside. Hamas has literally mounted an assault that killed Americans at these distribution centers because it doesn't want aid to be brought in, not because it opposes this kind of aid. It doesn't want any aid to go in that it can't steal. And that's what these distribution centers represent. And we know for a fact, also, I think it is at this point of fact, if only because the army has basically acknowledged a great deal of it, that some incidents of these shootings have been IDF soldiers. It is, in other words, much, much less. And by the way, the international community doesn't. The pro Palestinian activist world doesn't care that Hamas murdered Palestinians and intentionally is trying to deny them aid because mass starvation among Palestinians serves the Hamas war effort. It doesn't care about that for all kinds of fascinating reasons that I think should be the subject of many, many PhDs in social psychology, but they're not our topic here. But we know for a fact that the Israelis also shot at people coming to these places. Now, as I have tried to get to the bottom of it, there was a big expose in the Israeli press in Haaretz, a big study that really talked to officers, talked to soldiers, and got some of this information. And then when the army's response came, it was clear that there were some of these incidents. And the army learned lessons from them, changed orders from them, as far as I can tell. Here's what's happened. First of all, the Israelis are desperate for this aid system to work. It is the last source of income for Hamas. The stolen aid and the Gaza Humanitarian foundation distribution centers are aid Hamas cannot steal. And that's the whole point, and why Hamas attacks them and why everybody is invested in making them fail. Except Israel and Gazans looking for food. And so Israel is desperate for this to work. The soldiers deployed to protect the outer perimeter soldiers are not allowed inside the Gaza. The GHF compounds themselves for aid distribution. Israeli soldiers are not allowed to have that. Excuse me, that level of friction.
- [48:25]
Mike Pesca
GFS is the acronym of the aid distribution program, right.
- [48:29]
Haviv Rettig Gur
They're not allowed to have that level of closeness and friction to the Palestinian civilians to prevent the soldiers from being shot at from among the civilians by some Hamas Nikki who's snuck in, but also to prevent them from harming the civilians. And so there's that distance. They form a ring around the distribution centers to protect them from a potential Hamas attack. When civilians have gotten too close to the soldiers, the soldiers are ordered to fire warning shots in the air. If they continue approaching, they are ordered to fire at the ground. And if they continue after that, they can fire to kill. That is because they are dressed as Israeli soldiers. They look like Israeli soldiers. They are yelling that they are Israeli soldiers. And Hamas has routinely attacked Israeli soldiers and killed them. We have something like 20 dead in the last two weeks or, you know, give or take of Israeli soldiers killed by Hamas in this guerrilla war. And so they're not allowed to approach the soldiers, and they're absolutely not allowed to approach the soldiers. And the soldiers are allowed to take steps to prevent that. The soldiers are engaged in gun battles against Hamas, and then they're cycled through, away from some gun battle in some place like Jabalia, which has a lot, a lot of Hamas tunnels and Hamas installations, and then cycled over to this humanitarian foundation without retraining, without clarity, that here they're looking at crowds of essentially representatives of each family group that are coming to get a box that has five meals for the family or whatever the box has. And they are not Hamas battalions sneaking in among civilians that are coming to threaten. They are actually civilians trying to get food. And you err on the side of caution rather than on the side of threat. There needs to be a retraining of those Israeli. There have been therefore, incidents. The idea that they're all Israeli is simply mistaken. Gaza is saturated with cell phones. We have endless footage of every possible imaginable thing, some of them real, some of them false, but so very much. And there isn't any footage of an Israeli soldier shooting a person, a civilian, outside of these distributes centers. And so if it was happening routinely, there would be tons of footage of it. But it has happened occasionally. Now, how many of the roughly 800 people reported.
- [50:53]
Mike Pesca
Sorry to interrupt. There are. There's much footage of bloody people in hospitals afterwards that has happened. But what you're saying is true. And I've looked for the footage. And I recently watched an NPR piece by an NPR reporter who is a Palestinian who lives there and talked about his harrowing journey down to get food. And he said that we were shelled by tanks or tanks started firing at us. And I was interested to see that. But that was also not a tank would be de facto definitive proof that it is Israelis firing upon them. Hamas does not have tanks sitting there. And that footage didn't exist. So I wondered about that.
- [51:31]
Haviv Rettig Gur
Yeah, and my problem here is there is a massive, insane propaganda campaign that is full of lies. When it tells the truth, it's because the truth is convenient. It still uses that truth as a lie. And there is also a bitter, painful war with massive numbers of civilians caught in the middle and an Israeli army that is not perfect. Not only not perfect, that has had real major failures in this specific regard. And here it's a failure, not so much of the specific soldiers, because it happened again and again. And it's so utterly antithetical to the Israeli war effort that it is very clearly a failure of commanders. It turned out that there was a meeting in the Southern Command by senior officers after several of these reports came out. And the international press was talking about it because Palestinian activists were pushing this stuff out, obviously without mentioning that it's quite possible that most of the dead aren't Israeli because of Israeli fire. It's also possible that a majority are from Israeli fire. We don't have any way of really knowing. So the Israeli Southern Command leadership was meeting and they discovered from soldiers in the field that there was at least one incident in which artillery fire was used to threaten people who were getting too close to the Israeli soldiers to go back onto the permitted path to get into the distribution center. Now, artillery fire is insane and ridiculous, and it's not even clear if they meant artillery or mortar, which is very different. But nevertheless, neither of those is useful in that particular situation. This was a failure of competence. It was a failure of discipline, and of course, it was a moral failure. The high command was surprised that that had happened and hadn't heard of it until they had these big meetings because of international press attention. So that tells me the fact that the high command of the Southern Command doesn't realize that protecting the distribution centers and not letting Gazans die. And by the way, why isn't there Israeli footage of Hamas shooting. Why isn't that part of the Israeli war effort, which is, in a profound way, at least according to the enemy, an information war? So there's a level of incompetence here.
- [53:44]
Mike Pesca
That's a good point, too. If I was critiquing the lack of footage from one side, that. That is a good point, too. Israel.
- [53:50]
Haviv Rettig Gur
So there's an incompetence here that I find Hasbara, as they say, that I find very frustrating. The army understands that. Now. It has said publicly that there have been these mistakes, and it has said publicly that it is correcting. That's as much as I can tell you that I think I trust, in other words, that the Israelis. It's just not serious to argue, as some Israelis want to, that there hasn't been any Israeli shooting of these civilians. And we know for a fact that Hamas has. And if you don't care about both, you don't care about the Gazans themselves. But the Israelis are trying to correct, I think for moral reasons as well as it's just disastrous for their own strategy.
- [54:32]
Mike Pesca
So, last question. You've been so generous with your time and insight, but I must ask you about the question of the settlers and violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians. Now, you did an entire podcast on this with Amanda Borchal. Dan.
- [54:49]
Haviv Rettig Gur
Yeah.
- [54:50]
Mike Pesca
Who it was, it was great. And you talked about your history. And we don't have that half hour to go into it, but I recommend that people listen. So ocha UN agency says since the, since October 7th, a thousand settlers. Sorry, a thousand Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank. I know the Israelis have a different term for that area, but most of these, the vast majority is by the idf. And we can't ascertain, we don't know. Legitimate illegitimate overkill. Literally. I'm putting that aside. I'm talking about the Israeli settlers and sometimes the tit for tat violence between Palestinians living in the west bank and the settlers. And this occurs. And there are what should be defined as murders. And there was even a recent incident where Jewish Israelis attacked the idf. And my question is, why doesn't Israeli leadership take this with the ultimate seriousness? Why do they brush this off? Or am I, you know, being sold a line on that?
- [55:55]
Haviv Rettig Gur
No. So first of all, the thousand dead is mostly in major gun battles between Palestinian ideological factions, including some related to Hamas in places like Jenin and the idf. And, and that, that's a serious, you know, these are urban battles. And that's not what we're talking about. That's something Else that. That is where the bulk of those thousand. The. The. The terror.
- [56:18]
Mike Pesca
You're right, it's not. But the reason I said that was I was listening to a report and there was a conflation and they just put that statistic out there, a thousand dead since October 7th. And I said, whoa. And then I looked into it and found out exactly what you said. Major gun battles that should be considered terrorist counterterrorist operations.
- [56:36]
Haviv Rettig Gur
Yeah. When people feel, and this is true of the distribution center deaths, when people feel the need to turn everything into this vast, monstrous thing, and therefore everything is a genocide, and therefore everything is. They actually end up doing harm to the actual subject. Because we can't actually fix and we can't actually. Actually we're having a conversation off in left field about our feelings rather than a conversation about the reality. But I would just say that you're right to point this out. You're right to talk about it, you're right to raise it. It's terrorism. It's terrorism. There is an extremist group of Israeli Jews that has been at war with the Israeli state as well as at war with Palestinians and Palestinian villagers. And they are, you know, tiny, but a few hundred of them, maybe a few thousand of them who are in some way supportive or somehow, you know, give moral support. But the problem isn't that they exist. The problem is that the Israeli state doesn't rein them in. There are a couple of reasons. One, Israelis genuinely think that they're a small thing. They're very small phenomenon. And anybody who obsesses about them is just not being serious. Because on the Palestinian side, there's, you know, all of Hamas, right, all of the pieces of Palestinian politics that would launch suicide bombings. And we know from the second intifada that that's just about all of Palestinian politics. 80% of Palestinian politics. And with us, you look at 400 extremists who, by the way, it's meaningful that there aren't that many deaths. It's actually rare that these attacks, which are terroristic, the purpose is to terrorize the Palestinian population. In their vision, they see this as also an attack on the Israeli state because the Israeli state, they think, protects Palestinian civilians too much. And this is a group of people radicalized in the withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 and people who have joined this group, this ideological faction since. So they are terroristic, but they're not all that deadly and they're a marginal phenomenon. I disagree with this general Israeli view for a simple reason. It doesn't Take a lot of terrorists to produce the effect, the psychological effect on a population that the terrorism seeks to produce. Produce. And that's obviously true on the Palestinian side when they are terrorists at multiple orders of magnitude larger scales come for the Israelis. And it's true here. It's true here. We have polls of Palestinians that tell us that a majority, and it depends how you phrase the poll. I think it ranges between 50 and 80%, depending on how you ask. And this is polls over the years. I'm not talking about last month, I'm talking about over the years. A majority of them are afraid of Israeli violence and feel vulnerable to Israeli violence. And so it doesn't take a lot. Most Palestinians don't have any encounter with these people, will never encounter these people and will never even, you know, only learn about it the way you and I learn about it. But nevertheless, they're having an effect. And so it is a terrible thing. And the other piece is 5% of the Israeli public is sympathetic in any way to these people. The furthest right edge of 5% of Israeli politics. That 5% has a deciding vote in this current government and coalition. And so there's literally a party of the public security minister, a guy named Itamar Bengvir in this government who is the most right wing party in Israeli politics. There's nobody to, there's no human beings. To the right of him is the edge of the edge of the edge. And he sits in this government because it's a very narrow government. It's complicated because some factions have come in since it was formed and now some of the old orthodox factions are personally.
- [60:37]
Mike Pesca
And he personally left, but his party is there.
- [60:39]
Haviv Rettig Gur
He left and then he came. No, he's since come back. It's such a. Yes. And it's not your fault for not knowing. It's such a labyrinthine thing that Israeli political pundits have to keep, you know, keep little charts. But long story short, he basically runs defense for them. And it's a political problem in the Knesset for the government if, if people do a serious.
- [61:00]
Mike Pesca
Meaning, he runs interference for that.
- [61:02]
Haviv Rettig Gur
Yes.
- [61:02]
Mike Pesca
Is that what you're saying?
- [61:03]
Haviv Rettig Gur
He runs interference for them?
- [61:05]
Mike Pesca
No, no, no. Yeah, right. Because he also has a top minister job where he is in charge of security.
- [61:11]
Haviv Rettig Gur
He is theoretically in charge of arresting them. Yes. I mean, the army has, has, has that purview under the Defense Minister, who is a Likud minister, not a member of Vitamin Bing Virginia party, but Itamar Benvir is in charge of the police and the police do have the ability to just arrest these people for crimes which they are committing. And it's very hard to get that moving. And there are members of Knesset who act outright in his party, in Bengvir's party, who have outright defended these people and their actions. Some of these places, it's several different phenomena all at once. We don't have to get into the details, but just some of these really are tit for tat between two villages. But most of it isn't. Most of it really is this ideological group that goes out and decides to burn down a village or to burn down a house in a village and to do it in the middle of the night and to puncture tires and to purposefully terrorize. And some have died, a handful of people have died from these attacks and more will die for sure if they don't crack down on it. And they don't crack down on it for sheer incompetence. I have to say, when I came out, I did an episode of my podcast. I did an episode with the Science of Israel. You're right, that was about this topic. And I got a lot of angry responses from some Israelis who said, you make too much of this stuff. You call it terrorism. You said, it's a rebellion against the state of Israel. A week later, this group had an ambush for Israeli soldiers from a battalion of reservists in the Ramallah area who were on their way or just coming back from an operation that destroyed an arms manufacturing laboratory of a terror group that was hidden away underneath some building in Ramallah. This is a group that was doing. This is a unit that was doing something very much for the safety and defense and protection of Israelis. And then on their way home, they face this rock throwing ambush by these extremist Israelis. These Israeli soldiers, they have attacked Israeli soldiers dozens of times. And there's history to that, which again, we don't want to get into. But you know, people, one person had the guts to then say to me, sorry about that last email, you know, yes, these people are genuinely crazy people. And it is a shame that it is shameful that we don't crack down on them. So this is something the Israelis have to get to doing and to doing immediately.
- [63:32]
Mike Pesca
Aviv Ratigur is senior analyst for Times of Israel and let's plug his own podcast, Ask. You could imagine that he'd be adept at answering those questions, just judging by this back and forth. Aviv, thank you. Thank you so much.
- [63:47]
Haviv Rettig Gur
Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.
- [63:55]
Mike Pesca
And that's it for today's show. Cory Wara produces the gist. Astrid Green is in charge of our socials. Kathleen Sykes, also a social person. Person. But she helps me more than helps me with the gist list. Michelle Pesca oversees it all. Their coordinating production is Ashley Khan. And thanks for listening.