← The Lawfare Podcast
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- [00:00]
Noah Efron
Did I talk too much?
- [00:01]
Benjamin Wittes
Can't I just let it go?
- [00:04]
Noah Efron
Thank you so much.
- [00:09]
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- [00:31]
Noah Efron
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- [01:04]
Benjamin Wittes
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- [03:28]
Isabella Royo
I'm Isabella Royo, intern at Lawfare, with an episode from the Lawfare archive for October 11, 2025 this Tuesday marked the second anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attacks against Israel. On Friday, following diplomatic efforts and the publication of a peace plan by the Trump administration, the Israeli Cabinet ratified phase one of a ceasefire deal with Hamas to end two years of hostilities in Gaza and to return all remaining Israeli hostages. For today's archive, I picked an episode from October 10, 2023, in which Noah Ephron and Benjamin Wittes discussed the scale of the October 7 Hamas attack, its immediate and expected impact on Israeli society, and the Israeli response in Gaza at the time. They also discussed whether the attacks would lead Israeli society to come together or pull apart, how Hamas holding many hostages would impact the way the war would be fought, and more.
- [04:30]
Benjamin Wittes
I'm Benjamin Wittes and this is the Lawfare podcast special edition October 10, 2023 this morning I woke up and connected with my old friend Noah Efron about the weekend's events in Israel. Noah is a professor at Bar Ilan University. He is a prolific essayist and writer, and he is the host of the Promised Podcast, one of my favorite podcasts on Israeli life, politics and culture. In an interview punctuated twice by missile attacks, we discussed what had happened over the weekend, the magnitude and horror of the Hamas attack, the impact on Israeli society, and the coming Israeli response in Gaza. We talked about the weird interregnum between the violence over the weekend and the violence that's to come and how quiet things are right now. We talked about whether Israeli society is coming together or whether it is coming apart. And we talked about the implications of Hamas holding many hostages for the way the war is going to play out, and a lot of other things. It's the lawfare Podcast Special edition of Noah Efron on the awful quiet of this moment.
- [06:04]
Interviewer (possibly Benjamin Wittes or another Lawfare host)
So Noah, I want you to start just by telling me what happened to you Saturday morning. When did you know something was happening and what happened?
- [06:18]
Noah Efron
I was awakened at about 7 in the morning, maybe a little bit before, by sirens here in Tel Aviv, which was shocking. And so I quickly got up and got dressed and dragged the dog out to the stairwell, as we do, because we do not have a fortified room in our apartment in our old building that was built in 1936. But we do have very, very reinforced stairwells and sat there in the corner, we with the dog shivering as she has been the entire three days since, and the neighbors from one flight up with their dog sitting on the stairwell in front of me and they began scrolling through their phones, and there was no real sign of anything, except save for the fact that there were announcements on the news that there had been these sirens and that there were missiles being launched all up the coast as far north as Tel Aviv. So we were more or less the northern border of the range of these missiles. And so that's. That's how I found out. And like a lot of people, including my neighbors upstairs, I figured that it was something that was going to pass almost immediately, an errant missile. Occasionally it happens that the Islamic Jihad launches missiles that, over the best judgment of Hamas, and usually those. Those kinds of firings are last for one round, and then they stop. And so it. Every few months, it happens that we're sent to the stairwell, in my case, with a shivering dog. So that's how it began. And it really was a number of hours before it began to become clear that things were happening. I mean, my neighbors let me know because under normal circumstances, on Saturday and holiday, I don't have the phone on and I don't have the radio on. So they let me know that something was going on. And the initial reports were that there were terrorists in the kibbutzim in the area of Gaza, which is also not a very unusual thing to hear. And then the reports were that there were some deaths. And then after that, it became clear, by now it's noon or one in the afternoon, it became clear that there was something that was different than anything that we'd seen before that was happening, and that the extent of this thing was much, much bigger than any of us had imagined or then. Past precedent led us to believe what was even possible. It was around that time when, just as it was sinking in, that this was something different and more serious and more horrid and more worrisome than anything that we'd experienced in the past. I got a call from my boy, from my son who's in college and at usc, and he had been. I mean, it was the middle of the night there. I don't know exactly why he was up, but he had been alerted to what was happening, and he had started to get messages from his army unit, and he had decided that he was going to get on the first flight. And so he wanted a credit card and wanted to know what airline to use. And he booked a flight and made his way to the airport on a United flight that was canceled when he got there. And so he booked a new flight on El Al, which was the only airline that was continuing to fly to Israel from the United States, which flew out the next day. So as the news was mounting and as it became more and more clear and as the first of the horrendous. Horrendous videos began to make it to social media, my son let me know that he was dropping out of the semester and he was. He was coming back to join his army unit, which, frankly, surprised me. I mean, I was still absorbing this. I was still coming to realize that this was something quite serious of an order of magnitude different than anything that I had known before. And so that one of the. One of the first ways that really hit me was that in 24 hours or in 48 hours, there was certain to be a massive Israeli military response to this. Since then, more than 48 hours have passed, and the response hasn't come yet, but it will. And that my boy would be somehow involved in this as an infantry soldier, which he is. And. And then the full gravity and the full terror, I'm embarrassed to say, because it was already clear. They were already announcing at this time that 20 people had been killed. That's what they were saying on the news at around 12:30 in the afternoon on Saturday. And every person, of course, is this universe of. I mean, it was just incomprehensible that as many as 20 people were killed on one morning. But what it took for me was to have the image of my own boy wearing a uniform, holding a gun, going into Gaza. And then. Then it began to become, like, desperately serious. And the news just kept coming and kept getting worse. I. I thought on Saturday, that Saturday was the worst day of my life. And then on Sunday after, you know, after most of the terrorists, though surprisingly, shockingly not all of them, had either retreated back to Gaza, some of them with hostages on motorcycles or in jeeps, and some of them just on their own or been killed in these Jewish settlements that they attacked outside of Gaza. Even then, there were still parts of kibbutzim that were in control of Hamas fighters on Sunday. But as that was beginning to die down and as the IDF was beginning to gain control over that, then every few moments brought another story of someone who you'd met, someone who you knew, a friend of a friend, the daughter of a colleague at the university. The.
- [13:17]
Interviewer (possibly Benjamin Wittes or another Lawfare host)
The.
- [13:18]
Noah Efron
Then later Sunday, two more children of people at the university who were in the army, and you just started hearing these horrible stories, and then seeing these videos, which at first I avoided looking at and then could not convince myself to avoid looking at. And they were videos of women being dragged by the hair into, into jeeps and then being dragged by the hair out of the jeeps in Gaza in front of cheering crowds and dead bodies being paraded through the streets and piles of bodies in kibbutzim. And so that's how Saturday was leading into Sunday. And that's been how it's been like until now as well, where it's just been a steady stream of stories. And I think that I, because I did not grow up here and I do not have a big family here or really very much of a family at all, and because my wife did not grow up here and she doesn't have very much of a big family, I think that I probably know only a fraction as many people or am connected to only a fraction as many people as most people here. But even still, just story after story after story of that person I was on the panel with last year, well, he's not here. Or that woman who was the, who I grew up with in my youth group, my Jewish youth group who moved to Israel, or the head of that peace group that I'm involved with, or the, the chairperson of the board of think tank that I was involved with just one story after another of people whose hands, you know, I've shaken and whose rooms I've been in and who we've exchanged photos of our kids or our parents. And that's the way that these days have been.
- [15:24]
Benjamin Wittes
Wow.
- [15:25]
Interviewer (possibly Benjamin Wittes or another Lawfare host)
All right. You wrote, I thought, one of the most beautiful pieces that, that has been published in the Times of Israel on Sunday. I think time is blurs together a little bit about the interregnum that we are in between the violence and the attack of Saturday and the major Israeli operation that's coming. You have alluded to that interregnum earlier today as well. There were a set of things that you wanted to say before the second wave of, of violence and horror begins. What are they? What were the, what was the. And why is it urgent to say it now as opposed to, you know, three days from now when there's a major Israeli ground operation in Gaza?
- [16:28]
Noah Efron
Well, thanks for the kind word about what I wrote about this interregnum. As you say, it's exceedingly odd. It feels as though the biggest thing that any of us can remember, that I can remember, just happened. And as we're trying to grasp that you can already feel coming something that is likely to be even bigger. And at this moment, it's really quiet. And it's really quiet metaphorically, but it's also really quiet literally. So this morning I Took my boy to the. To his army base. And the roads were empty. And the roads are never empty in the middle of Israel in the middle of the week. And the first day after, on Sunday, I went out for a walk, even though we were supposed to be staying near our homes and everything was closed. And save for on Yom Kippur and on the evening of Memorial Day for the fallen of Israel's soldiers, except for those two days, then Tel Aviv is never quiet. Things are never closed here. There's never a moment where. And nobody had issued an order. There were no instructions that stores should be closed or. Or that coffee. I don't know if you hear the. Well, the sirens are going off, so I guess I should.
- [18:17]
Benjamin Wittes
I will let you go.
- [18:19]
Interviewer (possibly Benjamin Wittes or another Lawfare host)
I will keep the line open and go. Be safe. And we'll be here when you get back.
- [18:27]
Noah Efron
Excellent. Lucy, come.
- [18:30]
Interviewer (possibly Benjamin Wittes or another Lawfare host)
All right, first of all, what happened during the air raid or during. During the. This is now 7, 10 minutes later, what happened?
- [18:41]
Noah Efron
Right. Well, the dog was terrified and she was shaking. We went out into the hallway, as we do, and met with the neighbors and their dog, as we do. And then we heard the explosion of what could be a Patriot missile or an Iron Dome kind of missile, or it could be a rocket from Gaza, we don't know. And the news has not yet reported in detail specifically where was fired upon. But the. The sirens here in Tel Aviv are very geographically delimited. It's really only if it's in your neighborhood that you hear a siren very often. We hear sirens from one neighborhood over, so something must have happened, but we won't know for a little bit what it was.
- [19:34]
Interviewer (possibly Benjamin Wittes or another Lawfare host)
So you were talking about the inner regnum and how quiet it is and how weirdly quiet it is, and yes.
- [19:41]
Noah Efron
Just how odd because it's so fraught, it's so pregnant, both with, obviously with meaning, but also with foreboding. And during this odd time, it is possible to see things that are probably always there, that are definitely always there, but that we almost never see. This attack comes obviously after 10 months of the. The most fierce division that Israel, political division that Israel has ever experienced, as everyone knows, and most of the past 10 months, we have been in the streets screaming. People who view the world as I do, screaming at the government and trying to stop the judicial reform and other people screaming at the people screaming at the government. But in any instance, the feeling that the society is being torn asunder and that there's some fundamental rift and that we do not share values and we do not share a vision of what the state should be. And we do not even anymore share a whole lot of concern one side for the other. That feeling which we've lived with and which has grown for the last 10 months is suddenly belied in a moment like this interregnum. Because for one thing, what you see immediately is how desperately everyone cares for the victims and about the victims. So some of the most moving coverage of this, of these attacks I found on an ultra Orthodox website that I like to go to to try to understand how they see the world and the, the way that they describe the, the murders of these people who are really quite in every way on the other side of whatever political and cultural and social divides the country has. People are just to be, to be.
- [22:06]
Interviewer (possibly Benjamin Wittes or another Lawfare host)
Clear, for people who don't know, the, the kibbutzim around Gaza are kind of left very secular. And a lot of the victims are. These are disproportionately secular people. And the, I think the proportion of ultra Orthodox that have been killed in this is quite small. Is that, is that fair?
- [22:33]
Noah Efron
Yes, it could well be that. There have been no ultra Orthodox people killed, though there have been religious soldiers who have been killed. The head of the Khativat Hanah, my own son's infantry unit, was killed and he has a kippah on his head. He's religious and probably right wing for all I know. But the outpouring of grief has been universal and completely undifferentiated. I mean, to be, to be really crass about it, the, the, the thousand people who are killed are almost all of them are the kinds of people who you would see on a protest, at a protest on a Saturday night. They're almost all leftists, they're almost all secular. And the outpouring of grief among the people who have a real brief against these protester sorts has been huge. So immediately you see that underneath the stratum of our divisions, which is huge and the divisions are gaping and they're real underneath that there is some, some straight or stratum of identification, of affinity between people that we just have not seen a sign of for the past 10 months. And then it's everywhere. And then immediately thereafter, a funny thing is happening all over the country and in Tel Aviv maybe more than anywhere today and beginning yesterday, where everyone is going out of their mind seeking ways to volunteer. There are people who are out driving their car in hope of finding someone who needs to get somewhere. I mean, I think that they have in their minds that maybe there's some Some reserve soldier who needs to get to his unit and they'll drive them there. But also maybe there's some, there's some kid in Tel Aviv who needs to go and join the, their family who are now sitting shiva over the people who are murdered in the south, near Gaza, and they will drive them there, too. I just spoke with someone who was, he was so excited that he had found someone, in fact, a reserve soldier who needed to join up with his unit way up north in the Golan. And this was here, and I think that it was in Ranana, Kfar Saba, where he picked him up. And he was so happy that he had found this person who desperately needed a three hour drive. So he drove him three hours and then drove back. This one person, just because. And he, he, he was self aware about it, as most of the people are. It's like, obviously I'm doing this more for me than I am for anyone else, but the streets are filled with people. Yesterday I went to a place where they're, where they're packing meals to bring to soldiers who, between you and me, probably don't need the meals and to bring to families from the settlements in the south who have been moved to various places around the country who probably don't need these.
- [25:47]
Interviewer (possibly Benjamin Wittes or another Lawfare host)
Just to be clear, when, when, when you say settlements, you don't mean, you know, west bank settlements outside the Green Line? You mean little towns, little kibutzim, little agricultural settlements?
- [26:01]
Noah Efron
That's right. Some of them kibbutzim, you know, socialists, some of them moshavim, cooperative settlements, as they're called here. But yes, they're all, all of the places that were attacked are all within the Green Line. And I think that they're all uncontroversially part of Israel. So I went to the place where they're packing meals. And in addition to the fact that there were a hundred Eritrean refugees who had come all dressed in the same blue T shirt to show their solidarity and to work in whatever way they could. And they, they, as I got there, they were holding a moment of silence for the victims, and they were there to help. Basically it was one volunteer, like asking another volunteer, please, please, is there something that I can do? And the streets are filled with people who are just trying to help someone. And there's something almost comical about that, but there's something exceedingly beautiful. But besides the judgment, there's just something that I think illuminates or illustrates a truth about this society that we have not seen for a long time. The degree to which people are committed one to the other. So what I, I wrote in that little essay is that if Israelis have a genius, it's not for high tech, and it's not for. For military daring do, or for any of the things that we often present ourselves as being particularly excellent in right or wrong. The. The only genius that I really consistently find here is a genius for fellowship and a genius for empathy. A genius for looking at other people and saying, ah, yes, this is. This is who you know, that person is somehow connected to me and I must help that person. And so when I picked up the boy at the air. My boy at the airport, he said, oh, I'm so glad that you. You came, because I realized I have no currency and I don't have a credit card. And I said, you know, today you could just say, I came back, I flew back to be here now, but I don't have 200 checkers for a cab. And you would have people fighting one another to give you that money. And I think that very, very soon after this interregnum, it will be gone entirely. And it will be gone because Israel's response is going to be overpowering and it's going to be horrible in some ways. And I use that word as a description of the emotion that it will produce. Not, not a value judgment, because I'll wait to see what Israel does before I judge it. But there will be. There will be just picture after picture of people who are homeless and worse. And we will receive story after story of soldiers, our own soldiers who have died. And people will be judging every move that the army makes and every move that the government makes. Is it humane or inhumane? Is it effective or ineffective? Is it too weak? And they will be screaming one at the other. They will be dissatisfied. They will be angry. And then within the country as well, it will not be long before, and in fact, we've already begun to see some of this before. Some people in the government say, you know, the reason why Hamas launched a thousand people with handheld rockets and with automatic guns to go house to house and murder children and their parents is because those left wingers who are protesting every week gave them the idea that we are weak. And there will be people on the other side who will say the only reason why this, why Hamas felt empowered to do what it did is because Benjamin Netanyahu is heedless of anything that does not directly involve saving his own political career and keeping him out of jail. And that the religious members of the coalition parties in the coalition are concerned only with advancing their agenda of keeping secular Israelis from being able to live the lives that they want to live, the way that they want to live, be they queer or be they straight. It's going to happen, you know, it's going to happen immediately, and then this moment will be forgotten. It will be hard to conjure, and I just wanted to stick a pin in it for one second and say, this stuff too, is. Is there, it's always there. And just. It. It will be helpful. Maybe it will be comforting to remember when, in a few days or in a few weeks, when it's all yelling and it's all ambivalence and it's all harsh judgments of anyone who does not see the world exactly the way that you do or act in the world exactly the way that you do. When that moment comes, as it is just about to do, it would be helpful to have some memory of the fact that at some level, deep down, we remain deeply connected. How those two things fit together and how they will fit together. And whether the. The bellicosity, the rage, the anger at one another and the anger of the world that Israel and Israel at the world won't overwhelm in the long run. The fellow feeling that we're seeing so clearly and so beautifully now, I don't know. But I do believe that what we're seeing now is so extraordinary, an expression of affinity, of love, of empathy, of ability to care for people who are strangers, of. Of a wish only to make a very, very broken world a little bit better. It's so powerful what we're seeing now that I myself am entirely persuaded that that is the. That is the foundation, that's what's underneath the earth, that all that other stuff rests upon, and that it will be there. And that it will also, by the way, I think that it will be our greatest political asset in the long run. I mean, it sounds ridiculous to say this now, but I will say it anyway. When it finally comes, as I still believe it finally will come, that there will be peace between Palestinians and Jews in this piece of the land. And also that there will be a state where Palestinians are full participants and full partners. Either a Palestinian state, which is what I hope, or a state that includes both Jews and Palestinians on the entire land, which would be okay as well. When that happens, it will happen because that same ability to feel affinity that is our genius here, will be applied as well to Palestinians. And you can see it's never the case that that possibility is entirely absent. As one of the big stories over the course of yesterday was about the driver at this rave party where hundreds of people were murdered, hundreds of young people. And the story is about the driver of a bus, a Drew's driver, who was under fire but refused to drive away himself until he packed the bus with as many people as possible and then kept stopping on the side of the road to collect himself, to go out and collect wounded people and bring them into the bus as people were firing on them. And the reason why, and there are a lot of stories of that magnitude of heroism in an event as big as this. You know, it was, it was 20 settlements that were attacked. But the reason why this was so important was because so many people wanted, wanted to imagine the future in terms of a present in which a Palestinian Israeli would risk his own life over and over and over again to save the lives of Jewish Israelis. And it mattered to people. And the reason why it matters to people is because I think that a lot of us feel as though all of this will will end only when, of course, this is a necessary but not a sufficient condition, but only when we do find a way to expand this genius, this kind of cultural, national genius we have for affinity to, to include Palestinians and others. And I think that that will happen. But this is of course a huge setback to the possibility of any of those fellow feelings really developing anytime soon.
- [35:47]
Interviewer (possibly Benjamin Wittes or another Lawfare host)
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Noah Efron
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Benjamin Wittes
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- [39:59]
Interviewer (possibly Benjamin Wittes or another Lawfare host)
So I want to ask you about another aspect of your piece, which was the application of this idea through the lens of this fervent identification with the families of people whose relatives are hostages. Israel has, in a way that is hard to understand for Americans, turns itself upside down over individual people held captive in Gaza or or held hostage or captured anywhere. It it really this the salience of the political issue of a hostage is Very hard to overstate in Israeli society. And here you have a situation where there's 150 of them, most of them civilians, a lot of them elderly or children or some of them very small children. And I, like you, expect an Israeli ground operation that will be huge. But I'm actually puzzled how a society like Israel does that, given the constraint of the intense empathy that people have with people whose family members are being held. And, and of course, Hamas knows this and knows how to play it. They're threatening to kill individual hostages in response to individual targeting operations. How does the issue of hostages play in this? And at both a high strategic level, but also at just the emotional level at which Israelis engage it?
- [41:56]
Noah Efron
Well, that's an excellent question, and it's a diabolical situation. Obviously. I think that what makes it possible to go forward at all in this situation is the fact that despite there being many reasons why this shouldn't be so, and despite the fact that there's evidence that it's becoming less so, I think that Israelis still do, to a surprising degree, trust their, if not their political leaders in a political mode. They trust their military leaders, including politicians, when they're in a military mode. And I think that if the generals come to the conclusion that there's no way of saving the lives of the hostages by waiting and negotiating and that their best chance, the best chance of the hostages, which of course is a terribly slim chance in any case, is. Is to attack and to go from house to house and to find these people, then I think that Israelis will accept that. I mean, right. Right now, there's, There are efforts underway, as I know, you know, and the, you know, the Kuwaitis, I think, suggested or proposed that there be an immediate prisoner exchange for the women and girls who are being held in Gaza.
- [43:43]
Interviewer (possibly Benjamin Wittes or another Lawfare host)
I think it was the Qataris.
- [43:45]
Noah Efron
Oh, I'm sorry, the Qataris, Yes. In exchange. In exchange for. For women who are. And children who are being held under administrative detention and in jails in Israel, which was rejected by Hamas and, And is certainly unlikely to go forward as it was. But I think that, that here in Israel there is great skepticism that something like that will be possible. At the moment, people still seem to believe that, or, and one hears military experts say this on the radio and television these days, that it may be that Hamas will be persuaded that holding so many hostages is more of a liability than it is of an asset to them. And so maybe some kind of deal can be worked out quite quickly. But I think that in answer to your specific question, what will allow Israel to go forward is experts saying credibly that going forward with a ground attack is actually the best chance to save hostages, which I think is probably a code for saying, without ever saying, because no one could let these words leave their lips, that those hostages are mostly going to die in any case. So I think that's how it could happen, that tomorrow or the next day or the day after that, there's a massive ground incursion into Gaza. Hamas announces that they have killed all of the hostages or most of the hostages, and the Israeli populace does not immediately revolt against their own leaders for having brought this disaster. I think that were that to happen, then people would come to the conclusion that it was inevitable and nothing could be done to stop it.
- [45:48]
Interviewer (possibly Benjamin Wittes or another Lawfare host)
So one of the interesting countervailing factors in cutting against your narrative of the degree of coming together is the concurrent rage being directed by some of the people who were escaped from the southern communities at the political leadership. And some of this is they didn't stop it, they didn't anticipate it. A sort of a familiar kind of post 911 kind of, you know, how did this intelligence failure happen? But some of it is a little bit more politically inflected than that. You know, accusing Netanyahu of, of having believed in sort of bulking up Hamas as a, as a means of counterbalance against the pa, a kind of sense that he, for all his tough talk, never really did anything about Hamas. What is the, There's a kind of understanding in Israel that you don't do political accountability for something like this in the middle of things. Golda Meyer served out the as prime minister of the 73 war. But Aretz has been braying for Netanyahu's deposing in the middle of the thing. And so talk about the other, the side that the world that's not coming together, but that, you know, Israeli political anger and demands are playing out even as the conflict ramps up.
- [47:40]
Noah Efron
Yes, well, the, the rage is, is huge and it's real and it's not, it's not just something that one hears from people who live in the south or who lost loved ones. It's something that's very, very broad and my God, is it understandable and justified. I mean, there, there were, there are things that are about what happened on Saturday that are almost impossible to make sense of at the, the most simple level. So you had, we all saw the video of the, of the, the bulldozer inside the Gaza Strip coming and knocking down a piece of the barrier between you Know, at the border of Gaza that divides Gaza from this area, which barrier, by the way, costs billions, and we were told was absolutely safe because in the areas where it's fencing and not concrete walls, it's covered absolutely with sensors where within moments of being touched, there will be units of the army there to. To defend the country. And we all saw the video of this, this simple bulldozer like the kind that you'd find at any construction site, ramming into the thing, creating a hole. And then we watched as hundreds of people, guns in the air, ran through that, which is unbelievable, completely unaccosted by anyone from the idf, and they continued to run for long minutes through that hole. Okay, so that's image one. Then they got to these settlements and the army was nowhere. And then we all, over the course of Saturday, listened to, on the radio to the sounds of people begging on their phones. Where is the army? We're here in this spot. We need. There are people outside our door. Come, come, come. Over and over again in all of these, in Most of these 20 settlements, and no one from the army showing up for hours. And then they load up these kids and old people and people in between who are going to be hostages from age under 2 to over 90 years old. They load them up into jeeps and onto the backs of boats, motorcycles, and they drive back through the same holes they made 14 or 16 or 18 hours later that are still unattended by the IDF. And so the questions that the raise that people feel and the questions that people are asking, like how could this happen in the army? Are, you know, that all makes complete sense. It's worth noting that that kind of shock and disbelief and rage reflects two things at once. It reflects this enormous decline in your faith in these institutions, like the IDF and like the government. But at the same time, it reflects an enormous fundamental faith in these institutions. Because all of us were 100% certain that this was impossible, because how could this possibly happen? Because we had people, people looking after us.
- [50:47]
Interviewer (possibly Benjamin Wittes or another Lawfare host)
So if you didn't have faith in the institution to begin with, you wouldn't live within a literal stone's throw of the Gaza border.
- [50:56]
Noah Efron
Absolutely. And these are the same people, as I was saying before, who politically are. Are opposed to this government and have been quite, you know, it's left leaning. They think that this, that Netanyahu's government is basically illegitimate, or certainly that its agenda is illegitimate and a real threat to democracy itself. And they're protesters, and yet they went to sleep every night, you know, a few meters from their kids bedrooms and they didn't have trouble falling asleep because they believed that they would be protected by this government and by this army. And you're right that there is a long standing tradition to keep political dissent at bay during the course of, of wars or, or widespread military actions. And for the most part that is there. But at the same time you're, you're clearly right that there is this rage at the government and a feeling as though the, the faith that, that people had, of which I think a lot of us were unaware of, how much faith we had, that we were fundamentally protected, that that faith is, is really deeply, deeply shaken. So what that means is that probably in Israel there probably will be something like a national unity government. Probably. Probably Benny Gantz and probably Avigdor Lieberman, two of the. Of the three biggest leaders of the opposition right now, will form, will join with Netanyahu's government in some fashion or another. But when this ends, which will be in three weeks or three months and the dust begins to settle, that is when these political criticisms and this political rage will find full expression. Whether that means that this government will topple and there will be new elections or not is hard to say because this government has a majority that is not difficult to maintain for its full five years. But there will be, there will be investigations, there will be reports. The anger will grow. The feeling that, that Netanyahu and his government is responsible for these thousand to twelve hundred to fourteen hundred deaths, we still don't know what the final number is, will, will grow and will translate itself into additional political energy and to political divides. Whether that means that the like fundamental affinity that I feel now will cease to exist or not is an open question. I believe that all of this other stuff will continue to exist atop a fundamental agreement and that it will not be destroyed by this. But, but who knows? This rage is going to be huge. And the, the Yom Kippur War, like you brought up in that analogy is I think in this particular regard about a, the, the, the vast feeling of having been tray be been betrayed by a government that proved incompetent and heedless in that way were, were a little bit similar, were quite a bit similar to the way that Israelis felt in after the 1973 war. It waited until after the war and then there was an election after the 1973 war and the labor government won again and Golda Meir was still prime minister. And, and only then did the, the feeling that this, that this government, that these people have got to pay and they've got to go grew. And that's what led to Menachem Begin being elected and for the first time in, in Israel's history, in the first time after 30 years, a non socialist government being elected. And I suspect that something like that will happen to the Netanyahu government as well, partly as a result of this. I, I suspect that Netanyahu himself is quite aware of that. And whether he can hold together his government for the, for the three and a half years that it has left and only then pay the price or whether he'll need to pay it sooner is, is an open question, but it's a question that we won't even really begin seriously to address until, until my son is back at California going to college again.
- [55:44]
Interviewer (possibly Benjamin Wittes or another Lawfare host)
Before we break, I want to ask you about the Palestinian side. You've alluded to the deferral of the desire to extend the sense of empathy. This as a setback to that. You've also stated correctly the point that there's going to be a major operation and we all know that a lot of Palestinians are going to get killed in that operation, including a lot of Palestinian civilians. It's simply impossible to operate in Gaza without major civilian impact. I'm curious for your reflections on, on that. The, the combination of the knowledge that that's going to happen, the belief, I assume that that is a necessary and legitimate response, but also the desire to extend the kind of empathy that the bus driver had with victims in an ongoing way and the sense of, of his inclusion in the society that he's within the circle of empathy. How do you square that circle?
- [57:04]
Noah Efron
Yeah, that's in the long run, that's the biggest of the questions and probably the most important. And everything that you said is true. And it's even worse than that because as my friend, I think our friend Miriam Herslag, who runs the, the, the opinions page at the Times of Israel, said when she watched those videos she felt as though there was something medieval going on. This horde, this vast number of people running over the border and then running into these settlements and going door to door and just literally one by one, murdering everyone they saw, women, children. There are very horrible stories that I didn't mention at that rave of rape, systematic rape of the women before they were murdered as well. And a lot of Israelis watching that, I think feel as though an image that they had of Palestinians that they have spent years trying to eradicate in themselves as somehow being less humane, less decent, less concerned with human life and human dignity than we are As a cultural matter. And, you know, this, this image that is like so horrible and so complicated that they're somehow less civilized than Westerners are. That image was confirmed over and over and over again in this way, in the most powerful way. And so that you hear this discourse that used to exist. When I first came to the country in the 1980s, people would talk about Palestinian culture that way, say, look, you don't understand these people. You know, I, I know, you know, I grew up in Morocco. I know what these people are like. They're. They're vicious. They're. They'll smile at you and then they'll cut your throat. These kinds of things used to be said quite often, I think they were commonly believed. And then over the years they've become, I think, less widely believe. Certainly it's become something that one no longer says out loud. But I think that. That now you hear it again, people saying, aha. What we said 40 years ago, what we've always said, what we've always known in our heart of hearts is true. And because. Because of the enormous power, because for, you know, if there were save. We don't know what the numbers will be, but say 1200 people were murdered on that morning. And throw in, however, many of the hostages end up being murdered, and each of those people is a close friend or cousin of another hundred people or thousand people. Then there are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people for whom that image of the people running through the hole in the fence with screaming and then going into the. Into these beautiful, beautiful kibbutzim and moshavim and bursting into the doors and shooting, as one case shot a grandmother and then took a picture on the grandmother's own phone and uploaded it. Trouble to upload the picture of the dead bleeding grandmother to her own Facebook page so that all of her Facebook friends and family would see her dead on her own Facebook page. Those images are going to be attached. Attached to the most visceral memories of the worst day of anyone's life forever until we all die off. And that is. Makes all of this. That so much harder. The fact that so many of the, you know, so many that a good number. Dozens and dozens and dozens of. Of like major peace activists that one of the heads of Women Wage Peace. This woman, Vivian Silver. This lovely, lovely woman, Vivian Silver, who devoted her life to try to. To build deeper human connections between Gaza and her own settlements outside of Gaza. She's now a hostage in. She's probably 70 years old and she's a hostage in In Gaza, all these images are just going to be there and they're going to be knocking around and they're going to make it that much harder to, to build trust again. And then the opposite is what you said is entirely true. I mean, there are going to be, I don't know what it's going to look like, but there are going to be Palestinian parents, Gazan parents, who will remember the day tomorrow or a week from now or three weeks from now as the day when they're beautiful daughter was murdered. And there will be the beautiful daughters who remember it, who remember it as a day when their parents were murdered by the Israelis. And that's, and that is inevitable. In answer to your question, I personally don't know. I don't necessarily think that it's justified. I mean, I do think it's inevitable. I do think that in order to get rid of Hamas, many, many, many Palestinian civilians are going to have to die. But, and I think that some of those civilians are not exactly innocent. They're implicated. But I think some of those civilians are exactly innocent or worse. They're people who have grown up as victims, immiserated by their circumstances they did nothing to create, who only want to live lives of quiet or loud decency. And they are going to suffer terribly. And I don't know if that's a price that is worth paying to get rid of Hamas or not. So yes, that is going to happen and it is going to be that much worse on both sides. And it makes it that much harder to imagine the moment when each side manages to extend its empathy to, to the other side. But I do think that always the potential for that is there. And I do think that when it finally happens in a small number of years or a very big number of years, then that's the only way that it can happen, is by people understanding that we've all suffered. And I know that, you know, and have probably been to those really moving memorial ceremonies on Memorial Day where 5,000 people come to celebrate or to mark or to memorialize the loved ones that they've lost. And there's no division between the Israelis who have been killed in this conflict and the Palestinians who have been killed in this conflict. And the ceremony is in Hebrew praying to a Jewish God and in Arabic praying to a Muslim God and a Christian God. And that's, that's the only way that this thing ends. But that end point has just been moved that much further by this horrible day and three days that we've had and the horrible week that we're going to have, and month and maybe three months that we're going to have. With all the suffering that it's going to bring, that's just going to last for lifetimes that stretch long beyond my own.
- [65:11]
Interviewer (possibly Benjamin Wittes or another Lawfare host)
On that relentlessly upbeat note, we're going to leave it there. Noah Efron, you're a great American and a great Israeli. Stay safe. May your boy stay safe and keep in touch. And we're sending love.
- [65:31]
Noah Efron
Thank you, Ben. It was good to talk to you. As it always is.
- [65:38]
Benjamin Wittes
The Lawfare Podcast is produced in cooperation with the Brookings Institution. Our audio engineer. This episode was me. I did it myself. Hope it sounded okay. You are our publicity department, so tweet the Lawfare Podcast. Share us particularly an episode like this. No one else is bringing you content like this. Send it to everybody you've ever met. The Lawfare Podcast is edited by the redoubtable Jen Patya Howell. Our music is performed by Sophia Yan. And as always, thanks for listening.
- [66:27]
Podcast Advertiser/Host
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- [66:31]
Noah Efron
Wait, is that Glow in the Dark underwear?
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Noah Efron
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