Three important things from our podcast this week with the Times of Israel’s Haviv Rettig Gur:
The concept of Israel and Jews as colonialists is integral to the Palestinian education system, and to its theory of liberating the territory of Israel.
If territory is to be liberated with violence, and it hasn’t worked, more violence is needed.
Israel is changed. Outside pressure will not work. This war will go to its end, as Israel’s leadership plans it. Period.
We’ve got a serious chunk of our transcript below, because Haviv is so eloquent, so thoughtful, we reckoned he says much of what we could say better. A couple of things will really pique your interest… He says Americans are sweet innocents (our words) who see themselves in every conflict. They don’t imagine evil, don’t believe overt threats, hope that talk is talk and terrible terror is an aberration. Israel knows differently. Israel believes Iran, believes Hezbollah, believes Hamas when they say Israel will be destroyed. And by the way, they add that America will too…
We focused a lot on history, because until you understand the provenance of the desire to decapitate babies, disembowel pregnant women, and torture and burn people alive, you can’t understand Hamas. Hamas knows that violence has ousted “colonial” powers in the past; but it’s not working in Israel. The Jews are still there. So more is needed, whatever it takes. Because history says that at some point, the “colonizers” will leave. Just because this is wrong, doesn’t mean it can’t motivate an entire movement.
One last point to emphasize: To Israel, this is 1943-4. There is a war to win, and it must be won. They’re not thinking about a limited war to achieve limited aims. They’re thinking about an all-out assault to destroy the enemy forever. Like the Brits and the Americans vs. the Nazis, they will do what it takes. Whatever it takes. For as long as it takes.
HIGHLIGHTS
You told us about an interview with a forensic investigator…?
HRG: My very good friend, who I have known many years, and our kids are in the school together, is a head of a crime scene investigation mobile unit in the Israel police. And he was called up by Saturday night that October 7th, by the night, the word already went out and they needed to identify bodies. They needed to identify a lot of bodies very quickly and not just to identify them, which was the urgent question because they needed... The police were charged with developing that database of who's dead and who's missing and who's kidnapped. They also needed to develop that initial report, professional CSI report on what actually happened to these people.
And then he went to the body collection, essentially a kind of cold warehouse. And his job and the job of other CSI units from the police from all over the country was then to spend the next five days going body by body 1300 bodies and figuring out how they died. And he describes things that are hard to listen [to]. I don't know how he lived through them, but there would be a body bag that would come in from the field and you don't know what you're going to get when you open it. Sometimes bodies were placed in bags with whatever clothes were around them, objects were around them. And there were smaller bags that had either things with DNA evidence on them, blood or a single body part. A hand was found disconnected from a body somewhere, but the smaller bags also had the babies and the children.
…There was so much evidence of torture. There was so much evidence of you get a single body and the body would be bound hand and foot and also stabbed and also burned and also shot. And it wasn't a killing spree, it was something much worse than a killing spree. I don't know how to even say it. There are bags of disconnected body parts and there are a few people missing who we don't know that they're in Gaza. There is a discrepancy of maybe a few dozen people between the different lists who are just not found. Maybe their bodies are somewhere. The festival was literally in the desert and there are just hyenas in the desert. And so there are discrepancies that Hamas may have lost people as it took them into Gaza. So there are families who will never have answers.
Why? Why now? Why such brutality?
HRG: With the caveat that I'm an Israeli trying to understand myself. This is what an Israeli thinks Palestinians are thinking. So that in itself is information worth knowing what Israelis think Palestinians think is going to affect how this plays out. I think that the Palestinian national movement writ large has an enormous intellectual problem, an enormous intellectual, cognitive dissonance that they are struggling with and it is eating at them. They have a vision of us and they have had it for a century. In 1913, there were members of the Jerusalem Arab elite who were sitting in the city council and they were watching the Jewish migrants coming in. And these were refugees fleeing brutality in Eastern Europe. And they said, "Well, if they're brutalizing them there and that's making them leave, if we just do to them here..." This particular member of the city council said, "We'll just do to them what they do to them in Romania and then they'll leave here as well."
There's been a theory of the Jewish immigration of Zionism, of Israel, of the millions of Jews who came here over the last century, that we are colonialists. We are some kind of imposed artificial identity pushed into this land by imperialist designs, by colonialist designs. Every Palestinian schoolchild, every Palestinian textbook focuses on this gap, this difference between the very rooted and real Palestinian identity and the very artificial, fake, not true, invented by Europeans, which is the worst kind of invented, Israeli or Jewish identity. And because Israel is fake, it is fate. It will be the fate of all fake things. Its fate is to collapse. It doesn't have the anchor, the rootedness of an authentic true deep.
It sees us as this artificial thing. And this foundational Palestinian ideology sees the Palestinian Arab identity as true and us as fake. And that has a policy ramification. It means that you get rid of the Jews, this great problem that has arrived on your doorstep with a way you get rid of other colonialist, imperialist, fake nations. And you do that with massive terrorist violence. The great example in the Palestinian education system is Algeria, the Algerians in an eight-year violent, horrific war. By the way, the French were equally or maybe even more horrific in that war, hundreds of thousands of Algerian Muslims were killed. But nevertheless, in this horrific eight year terror war, the Algerians actually forced the French out. There were a million and a half French in Algeria. They'd been there for 130 years. And then in 1962, they all leave.
And that moment catalyzes the foundation of the Palestine Liberation Organization modeled on the Algerian National Liberation Front. The French were here 130 years. So it doesn't matter that the Jews have been here a long time. There were a million and a half French people, entire cities. So it doesn't matter that there's lots of Jews, this will work here and it will work there.
And the problem, the cognitive dissonance, is that it isn't working. It isn't working. The terror continues and it spikes during peace processes as much as during moments of stagnation. When Israel does something bad, there's terrorism. And when the Israeli liberal left wins an election where the campaign is about founding a Palestinian state, for example, in 1999, and they go to Camp David and there's Bill Clinton offering them billions of dollars just to agree. And they're talking about shared sovereignty on the Temple Mount. And the Israeli army has pulled out of all the Palestinian cities and we're at the height of the peace process in the year 2000. And then suddenly in September begins a wave of 140 suicide bombings from which the Israeli political left still has not recovered. Not because those Israelis no longer feel liberal feelings or have liberal instincts, but because they literally don't know what those bombings were about.
That was the height of the peace process. And so now it's very easy for Palestinians and Palestinian supporters to say, "Well, this is about this terrible Israeli government and this is about occupation and this is about settlement growth." And you know what? I give it to them. But if they can't explain to me what the hell that was about, those 140 bombings back then, all I've experienced as an Israeli is bombings no matter what I do. And so there's this Palestinian ideology that drives this terror that is independent of Israeli action. Now, you can believe that Israelis are horrifying. You can't believe that Israel is this evil entity. Enjoy. If it makes you happy, have go for it. But the Israelis have experienced Palestinian terrorism as completely immune and independent to any of actual Israeli action on the ground
So Hamas’ aim was to terrorize more because previous efforts failed?
HRG: Hamas was trying to create unspeakable hatred. Hamas was trying to terrorize. The Palestinian theory of us is that we can be kicked out with massive violence. The violence is independent of what we actually do. This theory says that any peace agreement with us is a betrayal of the great hope of actual liberation from us completely. That we can actually be completely pushed out. It never works. And so there are two Palestinian reactions.
Every time there's a terror wave, Israelis unify and they win and they grow. And so there are two ways for Palestinians to understand the fact that Algerian style terrorism keeps failing for them to deliver the Algerian result. The first way is that everything they have ever known about us is wrong. That we're a nation of refugees with nowhere to go, and therefore every sacrifice they have ever made and every cruelty they have ever inflicted was stupid, which is much worse than being immoral, was self-defeating or that they just haven't tried hard enough. They haven't massacred enough, they haven't been cruel enough. Hamas, on October 7th went with the second version. It's trying harder. It wants to draw us into a war of cruelty that will test the theory that we can be pushed out to the limit. That's what it tried to do and that's what we're still living with right now. It is still waiting and watching or planning to inflict on us more in cruelties, push us into more rounds of fighting, hopefully start a multi-front war. Anything to convince Israelis they cannot live here and have to leave. That's what I think it was about.
What the hell happened with the Israeli response/intel on October 7?
HRG: I also speak from my own experience being a soldier, being an infantryman on the borders. What's astonishing isn't that they took out all of our sensors all at once. It's a level of competence we've never seen it Hamas, and so we didn't expect, but the enemy will always surprise you. The first thing they teach you in your tactics' classes and basic training is that all your plans survive right up until you meet the enemy. That's when all your great battle plans fall apart. By definition, your battle plan survives right up until the moment you meet the enemy who's been doing nothing but planning to subvert your plans. The Hamas could surprise us with an extremely competent multi-front assault across the border on all the sensors, the cameras, the thermal. I think there's seismic sensors that were taken out that are meant to detect tunnel digging. That's not shocking. What's shocking is that when all the sensors were gone, there were no grunts, there were no simple soldiers, there were no battalions. The Israeli borders are patrolled by infantry, and the infantry were gone. But as far as I can tell from what I have been following, and I've been following very closely, Hamas, the Israeli military and the Shabak had a theory that this technology was going to solve all its problems. And the technology was how they had astonishing successes in intercepting weapons to Hezbollah in the Iraqi desert and destroying the Iranian nuclear program, major pieces of it again and again and again and cyber. And they had invested in this and built it out and have astonishing capabilities. But on the ground, on the border, in the kinetic environment, the environment of actual fighting, battlefield fighting, they had gotten so used to the technology and so addicted to the technology that they forgot to actually put a bunch of grunts on the ground to swing into action if everything fell apart.
What do Palestinians think of this unspeakable horror?
HRG: What do they think about terrorism? What do they think about murdering Israeli civilians? And we have Palestinian polls of this from Palestinian pollsters. People say, "What do you think about the resistance killing Israeli non-combatant civilians?" That's the question, and that is a majority support among Palestinians. You can respect it as a function of a conflict, which of course many college students it turns out do. You can be horrified at it. You can feel any emotion you want to feel about it, but that is a factor. Support for terrorism is actually very, very high. I wish I had the numbers here in front of me, but people can look it up. He has a center called IPRCRI, I-P-C-R-I, in Ramallah. And again, this is a research center of Palestinian public opinion trusted by Israelis, trusted by American pollsters, trusted by Palestinian leaders,
And so those are findings that show that there is widespread support for terrorism. What he has shown over the years, and I take a lot of strength from these findings, is that Palestinian support, both for terrorism and for two states, depends to some significant extent on the Palestinian perception of what Israelis want. Palestinians believe Israelis want to destroy them, and that makes Palestinians... When you ask a question, when you say to Palestinians, "Do you think Israelis want to destroy you?" and then you say to them, "Do you think there should be a Jewish state," using the word Jewish, "next to a Palestinian state?" there's a very heavy correlation between people who think Israel wants to destroy them, and people who say, "No, there shouldn't be a Jewish state."
And then when you ask a follow-up question, he's done this in qualitative polling over the years, "What if Israel recognized the Palestinian state? Would you then recognize the Jewish state?" and it wasn't a huge majority, but I think he did have either a very large plurality or a slight majority said yes, and he's had those findings among Palestinians. And we have findings among Israelis that are similar, that you ask Israelis, "Do you support a Palestinian state?" the majority, even large majority, say no. And then you say to them, "Well, what if it were safe?" and then suddenly you have a majority yes. And then you say to them, "Will it ever be safe?" and then you have a majority no.
So the elites of Palestinian society, who are so deeply ideologized, that there isn't a peace with them. But ordinary Palestinians really are responsive to their sense of the Israeli threat, and ordinary Israelis are deeply responsive to their sense of the Palestinian threat, and therefore there is a reconciliation possible there. Now because Israel's a democracy, Israeli politics is responsive to ordinary opinion in a way that Palestinian politics are not responsive to popular opinion in that way.
But how did everything go so wrong so quickly?
HRG: [The relative peace with Hamas,] it was bought on credit; and when the bill came due, it was too big to bear. It was too painful. Israel can no longer afford that kind of quiet, the quiet that is on credit, and that translates into a very, very clear understanding of Hezbollah. It translates into a very clear understanding of the Syrian militias in Syria that are utterly and totally controlled by Iran, and are there for that war in which Iran is able to open as many fronts as it can. And the Houthis in Yemen and the militias in Iraq.
The Chief of Staff of the State of Israel, when he woke up on the morning of October 8th, assuming he slept that night, woke up to a world of clarity. Iran's strategy of the death of a thousand cuts, so to speak, of forcing a small war here, and a small conflict there, and a small terror attack here, and a small... That Iranian strategy has surrounded us
Just this Monday, nobody has any idea what they're planning. Nobody knows what the Chief of Staff is planning, what the generals are planning, what the security cabinet is planning. All the incompetence and unfortunate politicians who now sit in our cabinet, and routinely leak cabinet meetings, none of them are included in that five-member war cabinet, so there's actually serious secrecy about Israeli war plan. But the call-up that just happened was the largest call-up in the history of the IDF. There's something like 350,000 men called up. The whole country is mobilized, and every single Israeli.
What about Biden’s visit?
HRG: The bear hug that we're seeing, Secretary of State Blinken in the war cabinet today [10/16], why? President Biden coming tomorrow, you can talk to me about solidarity, but that's very silly. What can he do here that he can't do there? The bear hug we're seeing is the sense that the Israelis might go out of control, and if they're going to go out of control, let them go out of control with us because then it won't be too far out of control, rather than letting them go out of control without us. Israel has the firepower to do immense things in the Middle East and America would like that to be productive and maybe not out of trauma. So that's the American sense, and the American massive investment, which really has no... There's nothing those aircraft carriers can do on Hezbollah. There's just no tactical relevance to Gaza with those carrier groups. It's about Iran. I'm not sure that it's about deterring Iran.
What are Israel’s plans?
HRG: I think there's a desperate desire in the Israeli leadership to create strategic surprises, painful strategic surprises, shocking strategic surprises. I think that there's a sense that something big has gone wrong, not a tactical mistake, not an over-reliance on technology, not the little things. We no longer... Would today's Israel do the Entebbe raid? Would today's Israel initiate and have that level of, not just initiative, but daring and that level of strategic surprise? Moshe Dayan used to speak about the wounded tiger, Israel must be a wounded tiger. A wounded tiger is a much more dangerous animal than a healthy tiger because, out of fear, wounded tigers will lash out insanely. It's better to be a wounded tiger for deterrence than to be a healthy tiger.
Is Israel going to respond to international pressure?
HRG: I think there [is] a transformation. This is a different country. The public is different. If the political class doesn't... Now, I don't have security clearance and the generals don't talk to me. If they're not in that headspace that the Israeli public is at, then they will be replaced with someone who is. In other words, that is what the Israeli public feels, needs. I think that's also what's happening. It explains the delay. It explains the sense that there's a tremendous amount of time. We're not on anybody else's schedule. We don't care about the political window of the world. You want to sanction us? This is the time. Enjoy it. Have fun. We're not going to notice. This is a different Israel, and I think that the Biden administration's bear hug reflects that, reflects fear of that, or at least a sense that that has to be a little bit reined in so that it doesn't overdo it.
Why do you think the US will pressure Israel to hold back?
HRG: I say this with truly immense love, but Americans suffer from a failure of imagination. Americans have a deep faith in ordinary things. It's a little bit like how Tolkien describes Hobbits. They love simple. They don't have great, redemptive messianic ideologies, and they don't really believe, as a kind of civic religion, They don't have cults of personality. They accuse each other of having them, but they don't. They have a hard time believing or imagining someone who genuinely, authentically believes that there is a divine arc to history and that that arc calls them to do things that are painful and cruel and difficult, but otherwise the divine plan for history won't be carried out. That can sound very silly in English. It didn't use to sound silly in English. It used to be something that people believed also in the Christian West, but maybe it's modernity, maybe it's post World War II, maybe it's many, many things.
So Americans live in a world in which they constantly see themselves in everyone else. Right now, a lot of Palestinian supporters look out at Hamas and they look out at Gaza from America, and they just see really kind of nice Americans who are in this awful situation. And there isn't that sense that maybe some deep differences, some profound differences, maybe there is agency among those Palestinians for what's happening to them. You can believe Israel is terribly, terribly wrong, but 90% wrong, not 100%. Maybe there is something that they can do to correct. Maybe Hamas is actually awful for Palestinians.
So that is something I urge Americans, left and right... I have to say left and right to be polite... To get over and to be able to look at an Iranian and hear an Iranian leader say, "America's the great devil, and the Mahdi is coming, and we're going to destroy you, and we're going to do it slow because we don't have the power right now because God asked us to do it slow." And believe him.
Full transcript here.
SHOWNOTES
Hamas does not yet understand the depth of Israeli resolve (Times of Israel, October 16 2023)
A wounded, weakened Israel is a fiercer one (Times of Israel, October 8 2023)
Retired General Explains How an Israeli Invasion of Gaza Could Unfold (WSJ, October 13 2023)
FBI Sees Jump in Threats against Jews, Muslims (WSJ, 2023)
Majority of Americans say Israel’s response to Hamas attack is justified, CNN poll finds
Just another battle of the Palestinian war of liberation? (Electronic Intifada, October 8 2023)
Young Jews Brace for ‘A Day of Global Jihad’ (The Free Press, October 13 2023)
The Shame of Academe (National Review, October 13 2023)
Haviv Rettig Gur: Israel at War (Danger Close Podcast, 10/13/23)
The New Axis of Evil: Condoleezza Rice on War in Israel and a Changed World (The Free Press, October 13 2023)
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