There is this pressure, this desire for Israel to say, Here's what's going to be the day after. We have it all planned out, so that the supporters of Israel in the West, the Biden administration, the governments of France and Britain and Germany and others can say, There is an end game. These people aren't dying because the Israelis are going crazy. This isn't about revenge. This is good, smart policy that will bring a better tomorrow at the other end of this admittedly awful, bloody war. Here's the problem. Israel doesn't think of Hamas the way America thought of the Saddam regime. This is not about, Why are we going to war? Democratization. Why are we going to war? A new Middle East. If we don't have that answer of why, we don't get to go to war. You know when they weren't asking, Why are we going to war? Against Nazi Germany. They weren't asking, Why are we going to war? Against Imperial Japan. The reason people weren't asking that is because it was obvious to everyone that at an existential level, the first priority is to remove the mortal threat that these governments and empires represented.

Israel facing Hamas sees a mortal threat. It is a mortal threat, not just because it's Hamas, but because it's part of the broader Iranian axis that has become a noose around Israel's neck. It is a mortal threat because it threatens to do it again and again and again. The war won't end and Hamas will be removed. That is the day after.

It is 11:00 PM on Sunday, December third, here in New York City. It's 6:00 AM on Monday morning, December the fourth in Israel, as Israelis get ready to start their day. Let's begin with a few updates on the war in Gaza. This past Friday, after the seventh group of Israeli women and children were released in the ongoing hostage negotiations and deal between Israel and Hamas, the ceasefire ended as Hamas resumed its firing of rockets on Israeli cities. The Israel- Hamas troops began on November 24th and lasted seven days before ending on Friday. Under the truth fighting was paused and humanitarian aid was allowed to enter Gaza as Hamas released hostages in exchange for the release of 210 Palestinian prisoners that were in Israeli prisons. In total, 81 Israeli hostages were released, as well as 24 Thai and Filipino hostages and one Russian national. An eighth group of women and children who were supposed to be released on Friday remains in captivity, adding up to a total of 125 hostages still being held by Hamas, some of which have already been confirmed to have died in captivity. The collapse of the ceasefire on Friday came after Hamas's insistence on increasing the number of Palestinian prisoners released in exchange for the elderly men it is holding hostage.

In response, the Mossad delegation holding talks in Qatar was instructed to return to Israel. The leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Yachiyah Sinwar, published a message to Israel on Thursday, according to which he intends to repeat the massacre. I quote here, Again and again and again. Some war fighting also renewed in Lebanon as Hezbolla launched anti-tank missiles and rockets at Israeli population centers and outposts near Israel's northern border, to which the IDF responded with airstrikes and artillery fire. At the same time, Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps said that two of their men were killed in an air force attack in Syria, near damascus. It does not appear that civilian areas were hit because I guess in this particular case, unlike Hamas and Gaza, the IRGC members were not co-located in densely populated civilian areas. During the week of the pause and fighting between Israel and Hamas, Israeli media focused on the saga of the release of the hostages, many of whom belonged to one small kibbutz called Niroz, which is right near Israel's border with Gaza. The blow suffered by Niroz was horrific. Twelve % of its entire population was murdered, and a similar number are still held captive in Gaza.

That's almost one quarter of the entire population of one kibbutz. On Thursday, US Secretary of State, Anthony Blinkin, landed in Israel and met with the Israeli War cabinet. Defense Minister Yov Galant presented to him, according to reports, military plans for several more months of high intensity fighting. According to reports out of that meeting, Secretary Blinkin reacted to the plans, the war plans, by saying something along the lines of, Your credit line is not that long, meaning you don't have that much capital from the US and from the international community to keep fighting that long. And another comment Secretary Blinkin made on his Middle East tour, he suggested that the US would begin to be putting some constraints on Israel. It remains to be seen what those actual constraints were, because based on what Secretary Blinkin laid out, there were all sorts of contradictions in terms of what the US was expecting of Israel. But the bottom line is, Washington seems to be reflecting that Israel's military clock may not be synchronized with that of the international communities, which is probably ticking at a much faster clip. That particular topic is one we will be returning to in a future episode.

In today's weekly check-in with Javi Retikour of the Times of Israel, we will discuss the volatility Israel experienced during these seven days of a pause as it pivoted from fighting the war to collectively embracing the vulnerable hostages, the mothers and children as they returned home, in some cases leaving fathers and brothers behind. According to Israeli media, many of the children are still reported to be whispering from fear of having a rifle pointed at them. Many of them are still crying themselves to sleep after what seemed like months, according to some of them, or even a year of abuse at the hands of Hamas. Before we move to the conversation with one housekeeping note, we will be discussing a number of these issues I've laid out, as well as where we think things are going in Israel on the ground, and also about the state of Israeli society and its trauma and its resilience. And a conversation I'll be having at Central Synagogue in New York City on Tuesday of this week, Tuesday, December fifth, from 6:30 to 7:30 PM. I'll be in conversation with Rabbi Angela Bukdal at Central Synagogue. If you are interested in attending, please go to the Central Synagogue website to register.

But now onto our conversation with Javiv Retik-Gur on Hamas's psychological warfare. This is Call me Back.

I'm pleased to welcome back to the podcast my friend Javiv Retikgour for our weekly check-in. This time I'm in New York and Javive is, let's just say, an undisclosed location, but the conversation is as important and urgent and I'm sure we'll be as rich. As always, Javive, good to see you.

Hi, Dan. Thanks for having me. Just so listeners know, I'm not doing anything secret. I'm just traveling on the road. I'm in a hotel room with a microphone, that's all.

Yeah. Don't want to freak anyone out. Yeah. Javiiv, when we last spoke a week ago, it was clear that the ceasefire and the hostage deal marked a new phase in the war. That's where I want to start because I just want to take a look back at where is where it was from October seventh to November 24th, which is when the ceasefire began. It wasn't clear what that first phase would look like, what the pause would look like, and if fighting would actually even resume after the pause. But before we move on to discuss the new phase, because I do want to get into with you where things are headed now, now that fighting has resumed and the pause is over, I just want you to look back, roll back the clock to pre-November 24th, right before the ceasefire came into effect. How would you summarize the first phase of the war? From October seventh to November 24th? How do you think, generally speaking, Israelis now look at that period?

I would even divide that period into two. There were the first three weeks, which were the stabilization weeks. The first thing the army did was throw everything it had at the wall, see what's stuck. It called up 350,000 reservists, give or take, a massive military, a whole army on the causal border, a whole army on the Lebanese border. It raised the level of readiness in the Air Force and in all other divisions of the army. It was preparing for October seventh to be the beginning of something. When you're startled and shocked and surprised by an enemy you thought you understood, you have to assume that you are more surprised than you even believe. In other words, it wasn't just that they managed to put together October seventh and completely pulled the wool over our eyes. It's that, in fact, this was also an entire larger, Iranian question. For three weeks, they really just worked on stabilizing, calling up reserve battalions. I have friends and family members who were called up and they tell me that they didn't rest for a minute. They were out training, they were arming, they were getting all those units ready.

The army really, truly believed that it faced potentially, had to be ready for just a massive conventional war on multiple fronts. That was the first three weeks. In those three weeks, another thing happened, which was that the military high command, startled, shocked by what happened on October seventh, threw out the playbook and threw out everything it had prepared. It didn't really have plans prepared for taking over Gaza, for moving in a long-term, consistent, changing the dynamic in Gaza on the ground, a ground war. There weren't plans. I mean, there were always plans. There were plans for everything. There were people in the army who sold jobs to come up with plans for things that everybody knows won't happen. But they weren't serious plans. Now the army actually had to say to itself, You know what? I actually have to take over this place. I actually have to pull Hamas out of these hundreds of kilometers of tunnels. I actually have to reshape the battlefield that Hamas built for 17 years underneath and in the middle of two million civilians. How the heck do I even do that? They began to put together. There was a piece of the army that worked on technologies that can go into tunnels, whether it's dogs or robots, various things.

There's a piece of the army that worked on how you fight ground wars and counterterrorism and urban warfare and counterinsurgency and all these different groups that all suddenly had to be brought into the room and you had to build a strategy for massive amounts of ground forces to move in and be able to do all these things all in the right way, all at once in an arena that we know well-no, right? The Israeli Army and the Shabak know Gaza, but not at the level of how do we actually take this neighbor? How do we take that neighbor? It's not an accident that now, after Gaza City saw so much fighting, including in places like Jebalia, Sheikhaa actually has not seen that fighting. Now the army is surrounding it and telling the battalion, the Hamas battalion in it to surrender because otherwise that's going to be really difficult, painful, and destructive fighting. Just mapping out how you would move in, that was something the army did in those three weeks. Then came the Ground War until November '24. That Ground War was us watching what the army had developed in those three weeks. First of all, the decision that there'd be a north and a south campaign, the surrounding of Casa City, the slow moving in and tightening of that belt around Casa City, and the basic concept of it being destroying infrastructure is meaningful to Hamas.

Every single one of which is civilian, next to civilian, under civilian, over civilian, every single one of which is adjacent to civilian. That's Hamas's story, right? Other armies have some percentage of their infrastructure in cities, but most not. Hamas is 100% inside a civilian population, but sealing up the tunnel entrances, beginning to limit Hamas's capacity to operate, and it was massively successful. Hamas showed us so far that it was not able to produce tactical and strategic surprises against the Israeli forces because they were operating in those ways. That was that period. It was reeling from the shock, calling up the reserves, stabilizing the situation, understanding what happened. I mean, in terms of military, not in terms of the massacre itself or cultural or social or political, but just militarily, what just happened. What do we know and what don't we know? What do we think we know, but in fact, discover that we don't know. Then moving from that into actually very, very quickly putting together a military strategy and beginning to implement it. That was what that period looked like for the Israeli war effort.

Now, let's fast forward from then. Once the ceasefire came into effect, we saw a new story begin to unfold, and that was the return of the hostages, which I don't care what anybody said it on the eve of the return of the hostages. I just think there is no way to anticipate what that experience was going to be like, obviously not for the families directly affected, but for the country as well, for the society, the collective experience of joy, of trauma, of fear, relief that these people were starting to come home, Israelis were starting to come home. On the one hand, on the other hand, I felt this anxiety about what are we going to learn? What are we going to learn about what they went through while they were in those tunnels? Now it was almost like this... There was like a game-like quality that Hamas was playing. Some to leave, some don't. Who gets to come back? Who doesn't? Then there was, I think, concern or an anticipation that once some hostages start to return, Israeli society would just be like, All right, get them all back. Do what you got to do.

Just get them all back. I thought to myself, That could be one sentiment. Another sentiment might be as they learn what happened to these hostages, stiffen Israel's spine in finishing the war and doing what it has to do, or could be both. Can you just describe for us how the story unfolded from your perspective? What was public sentiment as the hostages were starting to come out of Gaza? Maybe actually begin by just describing the first images of the hostages returning home. What was that like for you?

Yeah, well, it was very... First of all, it was a very long time. There was hours of it's happening and it's not happening. Day one happened fairly smoothly, smoothly, but it was the first day we didn't quite know what to expect. The Red Cross and the handover in Egypt. We saw pictures of Egyptian ambulances standing at the ready because they passed to the Egyptians and then from the Egyptians to us and the Red Cross vehicles going in and out and all of that. Then some of the staged Hamas being very kind and gentle and sweet to all these people in front of the cameras. Sometimes Hamas staged the opposite. Sometimes Hamas staged a crowd screaming at them and throwing things at them and things like that. All of these different images were all coming out and it took a long time. I stuck with it for a couple of days. On the second day, was it the third? I think it was the second day that the family members of the family that my wife has been helping for all these months came out. That was, of course, very intense for us. That was also the day where Hamas played the game where they suddenly delayed for five hours and there were rumors coming through the Qataris that there was some problem and this and that.

The Israeli cabinet said, Fine, the war is at 0.000 on our military watches, the war is back on. Hamas delivered those hostages. For a moment, I was despairing and certain that the whole thing had collapsed. But then it continued and it continued another day and another day and another day with every Hamas game. I stopped watching the transfers. I stopped watching the transfers because I really did feel like Hamas was playing us at every step. I was just watching three hours of footage of Egyptian ambulances waiting for them and all that was literally just the Hamas game. Day after day after day they came out, families are reunited. Every single one that came out reminded us. Hamas thought it could play this game. It still has not grasped that Israel that came out of October seventh is a different Israel. It tries to play this game. It tries to play the game in a way that shows that they are strong and we are weak, that we are psychologically weak, that we are dependent, that we're needy. Hamas has this whole rhetoric that it uses to talk about us as people without faith. You often hear Hamas fighters or leaders being interviewed saying we cherish death and the Jews cherish life.

Israeli spokespeople, just random Jews who hear that, they hear that the good thing, right? They hear that the Jews cherish life and Hamas cherished death, and that's why they're evil and we're good. But what Hamas means is we have faith and that faith holds us steadfast and there's no amount of suffering that anyone can inflict on us, up to, and including death, that will turn us away from our goal. The Jews can be turned away from their goal because they're needy, they cling to life, they're scared of death. Why are they scared of death? Because they don't have the faith we have. That's what the Hamas leadership thinks it's saying when it says that. It plays these games with the hostages that it thinks weaken us. We're done. We're done with those games. Every hostage that came out and every hostage that remained, every minute of playing, every minute of not playing, all of it was a reminder that Hamas must be destroyed. All of it shored up, not that the Israeli public's desire to see that happen was waning, but it's shored it up and convinced. We understood the very fact that Hamas kept up the pace.

The pace was for the first four days, 12 or 13 a day, and then 10 every additional day if it wants that additional day. The very fact that Hamas obey those demands to the letter showed us that Hamas was desperate for these days, which means that the military campaign was what got them out. Literally everything Hamas did, everything it said, every person it released, all of it was confirmation that the military campaign is the only chance to get the rest out.

When the hostages were released, there was a process by which they were providing the hostages were meeting with obviously their families, but also medical and psychological support, first responders, experts to help check on their mental state, their emotional state, their physical state. Then the hostages were debriefing to the Israeli intelligence bodies. Obviously, almost all of it is confidential, but some of the stories from the hostages were released to the public via were declassified and released to the public. What can you tell us about what the hostages went through? Now, we over here in the US know some of it, and a lot of us are both reading it and some of us are talking to various people over there, other families of hostages or people in government. We're getting bits and pieces, but it's just that bits and pieces. It's all piecemeal. Just generally speaking, what are the themes from your perspective that have emerged from what we've learned from those experiences?

Children sat in tunnels for 50 days. When they made noise, they were threatened with guns. Children came out of there sharing food, sharing food, meaning that they weren't fed enough. Everyone lost weight in those tunnels. The adults, the healthy adults at every meal would offer first food to the children and to the elderly. The children picked up that habit. They saw it. Of course, they copy the adults. The Irish-Israeli girl, Emily Hand, for example, at every meal now, she offers everyone her food first. They're quiet. It's taken them days to get back to speaking loudly because speaking loudly was something that for 50 days was a terrifying prospect.

Not even speaking loudly, just speaking normally. I mean, just speaking at a.

Normal like this. Speaking at an ordinary tone of voice.

According to the reports about Emily Hand, she would just whisper all the time because she just got her normal state for those close to 50 days was just to whisper.

All the time. Right. It's not just her. Every child is responding differently to coming out. Some children caught the first sight of their parents, or sometimes their parents are dead. They caught the first sight of the family member who was there and screamed in joy, ran to them. They responded more quickly to the changed circumstances, to the release, to the being surrounded by family and friends and psychologists and all the things that Israeli society knows to provide them. Some are responding very, very slowly and there's something more permanent there. There is violence. There are reports, they come out. There are reports of people being with family, but then being separated from family. There are hostages who are killed, who were taken. We have confirmed through various intelligence means that they were killed and other hostages know that hostages were killed, and so there's that permanent fear. It's a spotty picture in the sense that we're getting some reports from some people. There's also a tremendous amount of protection around the hostages that all journalists I know are participating in. In other words, a hostage wants to come forward. There's 15 journalists standing in line with microphones trying to get that interview.

But if they don't want to come forward, nobody's banging that door down. We have quite a bit of information from the parents of these children, and much more than half we don't really know in great detail because they haven't spoken yet.

There are two stories to come out of the reporting about the hostages, debriefing their experiences that gave me chills. They all gave me chills, I guess. One was some of those who were in charge of keeping the kids hostages, they would show them videos from October seventh. They'd make the kids watch the actual massacre?

Yeah. With the statement, This is what we did to you, to your family. Many of them were told, Nobody's trying to save you. That's why you're down here for so long. There are kids who think that they were down there for many months because there was no sunshine. There was no day, night cycle. They went through what would be considered torture in a prison for adults.

Just coming back to the effect on the public. One of the most sadistic and manipulative acts of psychological warfare by Hamas was the release of that footage in which the father of the Beibas family was being told that his wife, Shiri, and their two children, Ariel, four, and Kfir, who's 10 months, he was told they're all dead. I know you're not in Hamas's heads, but just based on following this closely, what do you think Hamas thought it would achieve by releasing this footage of this emotional torture of the father?

Hamas thinks it's playing us. It thinks it's found our weakness. It's a complex, sophisticated, profound, even, analysis of us. It comes out of Hamas's religious worldview that they have religion and that we allegedly don't, and that is our weakness. It can torment us psychologically to the point where we either act rashly or we are broken. It doesn't yet understand, and you really sense from Hamas this misunderstandingunderstanding. This real trying to grapple for a new theory of us because we're not behaving the right way. It doesn't quite understand why it can't torture us the way it did. It tortures us, but we remain implacable. It doesn't manage to make us beg for the hostages. The more it tortures us and the more we feel the need to get these hostages out and the more cruelty it employs against us and against the hostages, the more implacable the war becomes. Our willingness to fight that war becomes because we are reminded not of what it is doing and what it did on October seventh. We're reminded that it plans to do this a thousand more times. To the last is a rarely Jew.

The leader of Hamas, as we've talked about, Sinwar, published a message to Israel last Thursday in which he said he intends to repeat the massacre again and again and again. What's that about?

It's about Algeria. It's about decolonialization. It's about this theory that the Palestinians have been talking about since the early '60s, and that became fashionable on college campuses in the last 10 years in Western academia, because Western academia is no longer all that innovative in the humanities. It catches up to things the third world was writing back in the 1960s, like Frans Van Oyn's, The Wretch of the Earth. It learns that there's this thing called decolonization. The basic theory of decolonization, as a lot of people will now be familiar with, I wrote a piece in the Times of Israel back in 2014, where I said that Hamas, why is it fighting the 2014 war? Hamas thinks that we're Frenchmen in Algeria, and the French were kicked out of Algeria after eight years of war. Terrible, brutal, terrorist war. The FLN of Algeria, the National Liberation Front, carried out massive amounts of terrorism, fought them from the desert, faded away into the civilian population. The French army responded with massive brutality. Those eight years destabilized the French government more than once, brought de Gaulle back to power. Ultimately, the French, in 1962 were kicked out of Algeria.

The moment they were kicked out, the moment they left, and it really was almost overnight. I think it took three weeks, and a million and a half white French Europeans who had been in Algeria for 130 years and counted Algeria as a department of the French Republic, a million and a half people got up and left. The National Liberation Front of Algeria became iconic. It became a symbol to the colonized world, to the third world, to the global south, all these different references to different… But basically to anyone who viewed the West after colonialism and imperialism as an enemy. The third-world movement was founded in Algeria the next year and thenext year, the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, modeled on the National liberation front of Algeria, was founded by the Palestinians in 1964. The theory was we are going to model the Palestinian struggle on the Algerian struggle. Just like the French had been in Algeria a long time, the Jews were in Israel a long time. The Jews were powerful. The French were powerful. It didn't look like we're ever going to get rid of them. It didn't look like the Algerians were ever going to get rid of the French.

If we stick to our guns and we carry out the strategy of massively increasing the cost of remaining, ultimately, colonialists leave. So constant, never ending pain, torture, terrorism, murdering of the children of the colonialists, and the colonialist eventually leaves. Hamas has a slightly more profound, more clever version of that anti-colonial story because it has a religious story. It's not just that we are French colonialists and we can be defeated by terrorism like European colonialists. It's also that we're crusaders. We are unbelievers and our conquest of Muslim land is a rebellion against God and against God's arc for history. We will definitely be defeated by these means, if not because of modern nationalist, anti-colonialism, then because of Islam, because that's the promise of the Islamic vision of history. You torture them and torture them and torture them until they leave. Part of torturing is the expectation of torture. No pain is as great as the expectation of pain. Cine-oire, not for the first time and not for the last time, it is essential to his strategy. It's basically the one thing he has to tell Israelis. He doesn't say anything else to Israelis. What he has to tell Israelis is, I will torment you and I will hurt you and I will hurt you and I will hurt you.

The only way you can stop being hurt is by getting up and leaving as an entire society, going somewhere else, or dying, dying is acceptable as well. That is Hamas. It's its strategic vision. Hamas has a problem, and it is the problem that Arafat once had back when he was an anti-colonial fighter, a terrorist against the Jews. The problem is very simple. We have no friends. We have nowhere to go back to. We can't leave. Half of the Jews of Israel come from the Arab world. Where are we going to kick them back to? Baghdad, Yemen, Iran, all these countries fighting on Hamas's behalf now. The entire Iranian Crescent that basically with its militias in Syria, in Lebanon, in Yemen, all of these places are countries where Jews can't return to. By the way, if the PLO, instead of watching the FLN defeat the French and thinking, The Jews are the French, in our analogy, if the PLO had actually noticed what happened to the Jews when the French were kicked out of Algeria, which is that they were threatened by the FLN and fled to the last man, woman, and child, which is what happened to the Jews everywhere in the Arab world.

It's half of Israel's Jewish population today. If they had understood that and noticed that, they would have noticed that the FLN model might not exactly the problem the Palestinians face with an anti-colonial struggle that they want to be fighting is that for us, the founding of Israel wasn't a colonialist project. That was our decolonization. That was us no longer being conquered, no longer being abused, no longer being second class, no longer being people who could be destroyed and decimated and defeated at a whim, whenever the prevailing society around us went insane, and societies go insane every couple of generations. What they don't understand is it is our survival. It is our self-reliance. Hamas thinks that it's telling us this is what will happen to colonialists. What it is actually telling us is you better be thankful to your God that you have Israel because this is what people do to Jews until Israel didn't have a way to protect themselves. Hamas doesn't know how to talk to us because it doesn't understand us. It's fighting a version of us that only exists in its own imagination.

Did you ever see the movie The Battle of Al-Jeears? No. Oh, highly recommended. It came out in the mid-'60s. I think it was released in 1966. It's based on the insurgency against the French from 1954 to 62. Actually, a number of US military officers had suggested I watch it. This was after 9/11, when I was working in the Pentagon. This was a movie that was circulating. I highly recommend it. It describes or captures in film exactly what you're describing. And if Hamas thinks the logical outcome of what will happen in Israel is what is portrayed in that movie, they're living on another planet.

They are. The condition for getting rid of the colonialist is that they have somewhere to go. If they don't have somewhere to go, they're just a people with nowhere to go whose children are being murdered, and they react in the opposite way to a colonialist. There's that problem that they face. But there's another problem. They've sunk too much into this strategy. It's the sunk cost problem. Hamas can't wake up from this vision of us that can only destroy Palestine. It cannot destroy Israel. It can only destroy the Palestinian cause. It drives the Palestinian cause every generation into a brick wall. It can't wake up from it because it has invested so much in it. Every suicide bomber of the second Intifada that shattered the peace process and destroyed the Israeli left for a generation, it didn't destroy Israel. Just since Hamas's takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2007, Israel's GDP per capita is doubled. It didn't destroy Israel. What it did was destroy the Israeli left and destroy the political capacity of the Israelis and the political capacity of the Palestinians to deliver Palestinian independence. Every suicide bomber, if you understand that we cannot leave, then your war on us and every bomber and every martyr, every single one of those bombers, the 140 bombers, the second intifada from about 2000 to 2003 has something named after them.

Some streets, some soccer field, they're heroes of the Palestinian story. They're the martyrs, the sacrifice on which we will be redeemed. Every single person who died on that strategy becomes an idiot. If you understand that we are not colonialists, we can't tactically, we're not colonial. Never mind morally, you can think of us morally however you want, but just tactically, we can't respond to their war the way colonialists respond to their war, to that strategy, then the entirety of the Palestinian war effort and cause and sacrifice for generations was stupid. It was a mistake. It was worse than immoral. It was wasted. Hamas cannot wake up to who we really are and to the kinds of strategies that will really influence us. It is stuck with Sinoir telling us we have no choice but to fight this war against them because they're coming for our kids, which is not the best thing for the Palestinians to be telling us.

I want to fast forward now to last Thursday night, as Israel was waiting for the list of what was supposed to be the last group of women and children to be released on Friday, and then things fell apart. What do you know about how events unfolded and led to the end of the ceasefire and the Hamas's failure to produce any more women and children? And then Israel just got ghosted by Hamas.

That's exactly right. Hamas did not come forward with a list in which it was releasing the people we had agreed would be released. The women and the children first at 10:00, we know who it has. We know who it doesn't have. If they're dead, tell us they're dead. Bring us their bodies. If they're not, we don't trust you to tell us they're dead, right? And it could not produce the people. It didn't want to. It wouldn't even move forward with it. What does that tell us? Hamas bought the time it needed to prepare, to recover, to regroup, to resupply, and then stopped the deal and let the war come back. It wasn't willing to buy another day for 10 more hostages. It decided to stop. It decided to stop the deal, stop the trust, and return to the war.

But what about the speculation that the reason they didn't want to produce additional women and children is some of these women particularly have been, I'll just say it, some of these women have been raped and that Hamas is worried about owning, if you will, the stories that some of these women who are still being held may have. By the way, I have no insight into this specifically other than there's been speculation that this is why Hamas may be holding back this.

Last group of women. Yeah, I don't have any insight either or any actual information, but it's perfectly reasonable speculation. It certainly would fit Hamas's behavior and it fits what we've seen Hamas do to people. It is entirely possible that some battalions closer to Sinoir, more obedient to his political and strategic needs. Sinoir himself is a mass murderer. By the way, a mass murderer of Palestinians. He has killed more Palestinians personally than he has Israelis. This man is a ruthless, brutal, mass murderer, including of his own people. But he needed these hostages, and so battalions closer to him probably took better care. Battalions a little farther from him, not quite under his control. The very fact that we've seen very little Hamas organization to respond seriously to the Israeli military incursion tells us that some of their command and control capacities have broken down. That is something that the Israeli army has seen throughout. What happened to hostages for 50 days held by some battalion with no orders, with no accountability, with no real command and control? Yeah, what you described is horrifyingly an absolutely valid and reasonable scenario that may well be what is happening.

I want to talk about the return to the war. Again, just describing Israeli society's return for the war, because this is a very peculiar thing. We're going to war, we're pausing, then we're going back to war. I have an Israeli friend who's a venture capitalist, who was inGaza. And then there was a pause for four days. So he came to New York. He was in New York around Thanksgiving because in his day job. He's working on closing two venture capital deals, and he was negotiating over term sheets. So he asked his commander, Hey, can I go to the US? We have a pause for four days. And he says, Yeah, just be back. And he was with me and he was like, Wait a minute. They're talking about extending the ceasefire another day. Maybe I should change my flight. But he had to get back to Israel to go back into Gaza. I mean, I can't think of another country or society that deals with something like this. But I want to describe how the society pivots from a sense of vigor and resolve to vulnerability, which is the hostages returning and there's this weird, I don't know, it almost felt like a shiva, if you will.

Then the shiva is over and you've got to pivot back once again to we're back in war-fighting mode. It seems to me like whiplash.

The media coverage certainly felt that way, and the speculation overseas certainly felt that way. There's all this conventional wisdom that everyone is throwing around overseas in English that just has no bearing on what Israelis are thinking. Fifty days ago, I think I said the war is a larger war and it's going to be a long time. In the world, in the discourse and the pages of the op-ed pages of the New York Times or Washington Post, it was all about whether Joe Biden pulls the trigger and stops us from fighting, as Joe Biden has that ability to just decide we won't fight anymore. In fact, the Biden administration's embrace of Israel is as much an attempt to reign Israel in, given the Biden administration's belief that it can't tell Israel to stop. It simply will ignore it. But if Biden is close with Israel and working with Israel, he can incentivize the Israelis to have certain strategies and not others to limit the war in the north until to not create a larger regional conflict. In other words, it's the opposite because the Biden administration can't control us. It is being so friendly. I do think there's an affinity that President Biden feels.

I do think that's all very real and authentic, but it's also strategic. It's about the fact that they cannot actually stop us because this is existential for us. There's all this conventional wisdom that's, I think, been very silly in the media and in the media coverage. But maybe the biggest thing that the media have missed in English, certainly, I don't follow other languages—has been, except, of course, for my newspaper, which has been getting it right all along, I think. It sounds like a funny ad, but I do actually think that it has been getting this right because we are actually Israelis on the ground in Israel.

By the way, that is an important advertisement for the times of Israel, which has been an incredible resource for those following what's been happening since October seventh.

Yeah, accurate and quick and with very diverse viewpoints, which is rare in Israeli media and also generally in the media. But I think that Israelis understood the war has to happen, support for the war, if you ask Israelis, Is the army always doing everything right everywhere? That's not universally. You don't get yes from everywhere. But basically support for a war whose goal is the removal of the Hamas regime in Gaza so that Israelis and Southern Israel can breathe and live, that is almost universal. It's as universal as you can get in a democracy, well above 90%. That was not changed by the hostage exchange. In other words, that we let out some prisoners on terror offenses for these children, these hostages that Hamas captured and held, doesn't mean we no longer need to destroy Hamas. Every minute of it was a reminder of why we need to destroy Hamas. For the Israelis, there wasn't this psychological whiplash that there was in the narrative making. As the days of the hostages being released continued, you would read in The Guardian, you would read in The New York Times, Now there's pressure on Israel not to resume the fighting.

Every Israeli I know rolled their eyes. It was just an irrelevance and everybody knew it. We all said it. I said it. Every friend I know in Israel said it. Of course, there's not going to be an end to the war the minute Hamas doesn't provide more hostages. This was a window. They were providing hostages to stop the war briefly. Stopping the war now means you are defending the rest of the hostages to death. The hostages are not a reason to stop the war. They are only gotten out because the war continued. For the Israelis, there was war, war, war, a hostage release because that's one of the fruits of the war. Of course, we're back to the war and the war's goal is what it always was, the removal of the Hamas regime in Gaza.

Now I want to look ahead. Given that the southern Gaza Strip now populates something like two million people because Israel encouraged the north Hamasan residents to move south so it could fight Hamas while trying to minimize civilian casualties. That's why the idea of encouraged Palestinian civilians to get out of North Georgia. The situation now in South Georgia is going to be, one could argue, a lot more complicated because now some two million Palestinians are concentrated into an even more dense plays. How different will the military campaign be for Israel in this phase, in South Georgia, if we were to compare it to what it did in North Georgia?

First of all, it's important to say the Israeli Army is trying to do something no army has ever done in the history of armies. There has never in the history of armies, and we talked about this before, been an enemy quite like this enemy. There have been terror groups and there have been armies of states. But there have not been terror groups with so many features of armies of states, control of government, control of an economy, 17 years in which to build the infrastructure in which you operate as a terror group. There have not been armies with those kinds of terrorist attributes. For example, if I told you that the German Army in World War I begins the war by invading France, butchering a handful of French villages, and then getting wiped out by the French army on French soil. It committed the atrocity, and then most of its fighting forces on French soil were wiped out, and then France proceeded to the war that Israel is engaged in, in Gaza. If I had told you that that was the history of World War I, you would have concluded that the Germans lost the war catastrophically.

The Germans in 1914, if that had been what happened to their army on French soil, would have concluded that they were humiliated and lost disastrous. A state that goes to war, goes to war to conquer territory. It goes to war to defend itself. It goes to war to remove threats. It does not go to war just to terrorize. After terrorizing, it won't expend an army, literally lose thousands of some significant percentage of its fighting capacity for the purpose of terrorizing the other side. This is a terror organization with terrorist strategies and impulses and instincts that has the infrastructures and capacities and entrenchment in the civilian population. In Mosul, where at least 10,000, but potentially 40,000 civilians were killed over that nine-month campaign to uproot ISIS to get them out of there. Isis had exactly two years to create whatever it could build in Mosul to defend the city or to defend its presence in the city. Hamas had 17 and Hamas had massive international aid, literally billions that it could steal at will. It had that cement coming in and it had the support of Turkey and Qatar. We have never faced a terror organization that was a state to that extent.

To be clear, it's nothing like what the PLO and FETA were when the PLO was innovating in the Absolutely. In terrorism. It was nothing.

Comparable to that. It was not even close. It wasn't what the PLO once had in Jordan and it wasn't what the PLO once had in Lebanon. It's a little bit similar to what Hezbalah now has in South Lebanon, even then not so much. Gaza is very small. It's very concentrated. You can do everything in Gaza underground. It's small enough to make that Metro Hamas, his so-called Metro, actually be a strategic asset that can allow you to field forces throughout Gaza while keeping them underground. These are things no military has ever faced. It has never faced a terror organization that was such a so-much a state and a state that was so much a state and a state that was so much arorganization. Israel has to now pull that strange hybrid creature, that organization that has never quite existed, no one's ever quite fought that, out of a civilian population under which it is buried and has been burying itself for 17 years. Nobody knows how to do that. In the first steps of the war and the first stages, all Israel was trying to do was figure that out. It had a bank of targets.

There was an obvious impulse, and the obvious impulse was destroy anything the Hamas leadership needs. Destroy the neighborhood where the Hamas leadership keeps all of its command schools, its training areas. Destroy things it cares about. Destroy economic infrastructures that serve its war effort, primarily serve its war effort, destroy. If you can find those things and you can start to hurt the Hamas leadership, that's a big part of the war effort. You still haven't gotten into those tunnels. How do you deal with the tunnels? Time. There's a limit to how long someone can live underground like that. You can start to make it harder to live underground like that by limiting, for example, electricity access, by limiting, for example, water and food access to the tunnels, not to the civilian population, but to the tunnels. Well, how do you limit those things to the tunnels without limiting them to the civilian population? The simple answer was Israel didn't know. It literally didn't know how to do these things. But the basic theory has been we destroy the capacity of Hamas not to go into the tunnels, but to come out. Now we pivot to the south.

There's going to still be a war in the north. There's still Shia, there's important critical areas with what we know. We saw them in the hostage exchanges. They came up above ground with hostages, battalions, entire battalions of Hamas. But basically the war goes to the south. In the south, we have seen Israel learn the lessons and learn them fast from what happened in the north. One of the problems with moving civilians in ways that would prevent them from getting hurt was that the Israeli army didn't have a shared language with the Palestinians. The Israeli army has a map of Gaza. Palestinians living in Gaza have a map of Gaza in their heads, but they're not the same maps. We have these official names for roads and these official names for neighborhoods. But that's not how just Gozans live in their own city, in their own town. If you're a native of Philadelphia, you move around Philadelphia differently from how a Martian coming down with Google Maps is going to tell you to move around Philadelphia. There literally wasn't a shared language for where to go, how to go, how you know where you live, who should move where.

Israel wants to bomb three buildings that are used for some specific thing. It has to clear out four city blocks because the people living next to those buildings, it doesn't have the ability to tell them just this building, not that building, etc. It wants to create a shared language. What the Israeli Army did was it divided Gaza into small blocks of just a couple of city blocks each, a couple of neighborhoods, a few buildings, and it created an interactive online map. It now can tell Gozans in Arabic, in this interactive map, if you're in this specific spot, not this city, not this town, not even this neighborhood, if you're in this area, please leave immediately and please leave quickly and please don't come back for a little while, right?

It's quite sophisticated. It's right down to QR codes where Palestinians can scan the given information for how to scan QR codes to keep that. But for those Palestinians to have access to that feature, but for Palestinians who don't have internet access or don't have access to smartphones, the IDF, from what I understand, also dropped a lot of flyers, a lot of pamphlets with the same information too. It may not be up to the minute, but the point is they're going to extraordinary lengths.

It's not just they're going to extraordinary lengths. They're really trying to clear out, pinpoint the areas they're going to bomb, and then allow them to come back. Now, in some ways, technically, that's very stupid because they're telegraphing every airstrike against every target, right? But in other ways, it lowers the death toll. The Palestinian civilian deaths are a burden on the Israeli war effort, and they are a burden on Israel's allies to support Israel in that war effort. In the case of the Biden administration, which is under immense pressure because of that death toll, and Israel understands that it's under immense pressure and doesn't want Biden to not be able to provide the cover he's providing that's holding back Iran and Hezbole, etc, or at least contributing to holding them back. Even just tackling, you don't have to believe Israelis are good people. I don't ask anyone in this conflict to believe the other side is good people. It's just not a relevant part of the conversation. But just to understand that Israel is interested in lowering that death toll massively, but not at the cost of going after Hamas. It's looking for ways to fight a war.

No one has ever tried these ways. No one has ever… In Mosul, the Americans were not clearing civilians out of specific neighborhoods or streets that they were now going to go into. That was not a thing anyone ever expected an army to do, even when tens of thousands of civilians were dying. Israel is developing these new capabilities as lessons from the battle in the north. It's going to be a new battle. It's going to be a battle in which we shuffle around. One of the reasons we're shuffling people around locally or trying to figure out a shared language with Palestinian civilians to do that is that we can't let them return to the north, to Gaza City, and just let anything that remains at Hamas and Casa City essentially re-entrench itself and once again be under a civilian population that we then have to cut through again to get them out. We need to slowly clear the civilians from growing areas of Gaza to allow us to pull Hamas out. It's a challenge not faced by any other army in history of warfare because this enemy, that level of entrenchment by an organization that is, even though it is small, is nevertheless committed to the eradication of its enemy through terrorist means, that enemy has never been faced by anyone.

In the south, we're going to shift from mass movement of a million people to individual pinpoint movement that's going to shuffle around while the Israeli airstrikes go through and while the Israeli soldiers go through. We don't quite yet know what that's going to look like, but it's fascinating just to watch how Israel is trying to figure this out. By the way, it might fail. It might not work. But that's right now what the war in the south looks like it's going to be.

Final question. It's starting to emerge these three principles we're learning from the Israeli government that are guiding Israeli leadership's thinking as it pertains to some vision for for Gaza after the war. The principles are, one, the defeat and removal of Hamas, two, a demilitorization of Gaza, and three, a plan to deradicalize the population. These are vague principles, but they're principles nonetheless. I have been resistant, I've been strenuously resisting serious discussions about what Gaza looks like after the war, because I'm not sure this war is ending quickly. I think a lot of how the war is ultimately fought, and there's a variety of factors in terms of how one thinks about a transition period for Gaza after the war. But that said, any thoughts, reactions, insights into these principles, or just generally how you think about how we should be thinking about a post-Hamas, Gaza?

I am struck by those principles because I have no idea what they mean. I know what the removal of the Hamas regime in Gaza means. That's pretty clear. If we fail, it'll be obvious. What does deradicalization of the Palestinian civilian population mean?

I had the same reaction. I found that one in.

Particular- Let's imagine that we know what it means. Israel is not the state. I mean, not the people, not the nation, not the politics, the state, is not the organization that's capable of doing whatever the heck it is, imagining that that means. My impression of that document, of those three principles is that there is a pressure on Israel from the West, from its friends in the West, from the British government, the French government, the American government, to have a day-after scenario. That pressure, I think, comes from a real misunderstanding. The same misunderstanding that allows professors from very elite universities, professors of Middle Eastern studies in political science who've done nothing but study the Israeli-Palestine conflict in all their lives. Now we're saying incredibly stupid things like, We all know the Americans will eventually force a ceasefire, so why not do it now when there's 15,000 dead civilians and not later when there's 30,000 dead civilians? It's an incredibly stupid thing to say if you're one of these scholars, professors, because A, we don't know that the Americans are capable of forcing such a ceasefire. B, if the ceasefire goes into effect with Hamas intact, Israel goes into a political tail spin that replaces this Israeli government with a much more hardline, haqish Israeli government that will go back to the war.

It's not an end to the war. An end to the war that leaves Hamas in Gaza intact, threatening Israel, is a complete collapse of the Lebanon frontier and probably a war in Lebanon. There's so many knock-on effects. If your entire analysis of this war is the moral outrage and moral horror, you should have moral horror at 15,000 dead, but you should understand the cause and effect. By the way, you can pin it on different things. You can pin the cause on Hamas. You can pin the cause on 75 years of conflict since the founding of Israel. Why does Israel even get to be founded? Why do the Jews even consider themselves a nation? I don't care what ideological framing you give it, but the very idea, you should be worried about the civilian death. But if all you can see is the end of civilian death, then you have made Hamas invulnerable and you've made it invulnerable and immune after massacring people and after massacring people and promising to massacre more, it is immune because it is also going to ensure the massacre of its own people. That is a catastrophe and a collapse. There is this pressure, this desire for Israel to say, here's what's going to be the day after we have it all planned out so that the supporters of Israel in the West, the Biden administration, the governments of France and Britain and Germany and others can say there is an end game.

These people aren't dying because the Israelis are going crazy. This isn't about revenge. This is good, smart policy that will bring a better tomorrow at the other end of this admittedly awful, bloody war. Israel's friends want to say that, and that puts pressure on Israel to produce a day-after scenario. Here's the problem. Israel doesn't think of Hamas the way America thought of the Saddam regime. This is not about, Why are we going to war? Democratization. Why are we going to war? A new Middle East. If we don't have that answer of why, we don't get to go to war. You know when they weren't asking, Why are we going to war against Nazi Germany? They weren't asking, Why are we going to war against Imperial Japan? Do you know why they weren't asking what the end game is the day after, during the war? It was a huge part of the Cold War. It was an immensely important problem the day after the war. But during the war, people weren't asking that. The reason people weren't asking that is because it was obvious to everyone that at an existential level, the first priority is to remove the mortal threat that these governments and empires represented.

Israel facing Hamas sees a mortal threat. It is a mortal threat, not just because it's Hamas, but because it's part of the broader Iranian axis that has become a noose around Israel's neck. It is a moral threat because it threatens to do it again and again and again. It is a moral threat because it's multiple fronts. If it cannot remove Hamas from Gaza, Lebanon changes. Lebanon becomes a whole different threat, and so to Syria and Iraq and Yemen and Iran ultimately. The war won't end and Hamas will be removed. That is the day after. Now, what actually comes the day after? You start to piece together a vague image based on what Israel thinks its absolute existential needs are. You start understanding what will be the day after based on Israeli politics, based on Palestinian politics, for example. There's a lot of talk now about which Palestinian faction could take over in Gaza after. Can Fatah do it? Can the PLO do it in some constellation? Can it do it with some help from the Egyptians and the Emirates or whatever? All of that conversation, it's too early to do that. It's too early to talk about that.

It's hard to see any Arab government, including the Palestinian Authority, riding into Gaza to take over Gaza on the back of an Israeli tank and being legitimate in doing so and not facing its own insergencies in Gaza. There's a legitimation question here that's foundational to Palestinian politics. It's a whole mess, but it is a mess that comes after the defeat of the Hamas regime in Gaza. That's the Israelis mindset. If you demand, as a moral condition for the war, clarity on what comes after, the Israelis will ignore you. It's not a useful conversation to have right now. It's just not good policy to demand that right now.

I'll also add this whole notion of de-radicalizing the population is an interesting point, and I'd be curious where that originates from, because are we suggesting that we hear two things, by the way, we hear two different theories. Sometimes we hear that the Palestinian people living in Gaza are captured by Hamas as anyone, and don't blame them and they should be punished. And other times we hear but understand their frustration, their legitimate grievances, and those grievances are expressed by events like October seventh. So then October seventh was an expression of the Palestinian people. Maybe in that sense they do need to be deradicalized. But other times we were told they're completely disconnected from Hamas, and therefore they were not radicalized. So it's a little paradoxical. And the theories about how complicit large swaths of the Palestinian population was in the environment that produced October seventh, obviously it's not today's business, but it is interesting to get a better understanding of before Israel makes any serious commitments about what the future of God and its government looks like.

Look, I'll say this. You know what Israel could do to win over some Palestinians who don't love Israel, but wow, do they hate Hamas right now? It could just offer not an end game, not a clear statement of the post- Hamas, Gozen government, which nobody knows. For Israel to offer that suggestion is to delegitimize whatever option it is Israel offers at this moment. But what it could do is it could say outright to Palestinians. I want you to know that we won't end up in control of Gaza. We won't end up in control of you. There will be an indigenous Palestinian solution. I don't know what it's going to be. I don't know where we're going to find these people. I don't know why we would… You don't want the corrupt PA in charge? I don't know. I'm not writing the speech for the Israeli politician right now because what I just said would be a terrible speech for that Israeli politician. But I'm just saying there is a way to say to Palestinians, Some of your fears, don't worry about them. We're openly publicly on the world stage saying that is not what is happening.

There is too much confusion. Having that clarity wouldn't go over well in the Israeli body politic right now where it really is a grim determination to destroy Hamas and everything else looks like not just a distraction, but a sop and a weakening. It's complicated also by Israeli domestic politics. But I do think that it is valid to come at the Israelis with the criticism that you need to offer the Palestinians more clarity in your messaging toward them. The Israeli Defense Minister, some Israeli generals have said very mean, very hawkish, very belligerent words to Hamas. The gates of hell are opening on you, said one Israeli at the beginning of the war. He was, by the way, responding to Hamas. Hamas threatened, said October 7 was the opening of the gates of hell on Israel. The general was saying, You wanted the gates of hell opened. Here we go. There has been that belligerent language when they thought that they were speaking just to Hamas. But what you want to say to Hamas and what you want to say to the civilian population isn't the same. Part of the strategy should be to create good reasons for Gozins to turn away from Hamas to create that separation.

The Israeli government isn't very good at doing that, but there are such things that can be said. But that's not to say that we can just suddenly produce a day after so that our friends in the West can feel like all of this suffering is for some specific and good and knowable goal that is definitely achievable. The day after is going to be a mess and it's going to take wisdom and patience and mistakes will be made. The day after can be won. It can be won. The worst thing you could have for the day after regime that will rule Gaza, and let's hope that it's as liberal as possible and as competent as possible and as committed to the well-being of Gozans as possible, the worst thing that you could have for that to actually happen is for the Israelis to come out and say that is their goal, those people in control of that territory right now while they're bombing that territory undermines it before it even has a chance to take root. That whole discourse of the day after, I think, is foolish. I think it's a mistake. It's a misreading of Israeli politics, and it's a misreading of what it'll take to actually produce a good day after for Gaza.

You said at Imperial Japan and you said at Nazi Germany, in both of those cases, the objective was not only to win and eliminate the threat, but for the Japanese and the Germans living in those countries to believe that their country's defeat was unequivocal. That there was going to be no conversation about the future until they understood that there was not going to be a 2.0. There was not going to be a Nazi regime 2.0. There wasn't going to be an Imperial Japan 2.0, and there's not going to be a Hamas 2.0. But anyways, we'll leave it there. We've explored a lot of territory here. Javive, thank you very much, as always. I will be seeing you in a matter of days, which I'm looking forward to in person. And I will be with you again on this podcast as well for a weekly check-in next week. Thank you, sir.

Thank you. Thanks, Dan, for having me.

That's our show for today. To keep up with Javive Retagour, you can find him at X, @havivretikgur, or at the Times of Israel website. And do remember to register to attend either in person or virtually our event at Central Synagogue on the future of Israel, Israeli resilience, current events in Israel and my conversation with Rabbi Angela Bookdahl. That's this Tuesday, December fifth from 6:30 to 7:30 p. M. Call me back. It's produced by Lon Benitar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Seyner.