Israelis Are Not Watching the Same War You Are

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On Tuesday I got back from an eight-day trip to Israel and the West Bank. I happened to be there on the day that Benny Gantz resigned from the war cabinet and called for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to schedule new elections, breaking the unity government that Israel had had since shortly after Oct. 7.

In Israel now, the left is not viable. Nor is there a party or coalition of real size that I would even call center-left. There is a coalition that Netanyahu leads stretching from right to far right and a coalition that Gantz leads stretching from center to right. Pinning down the differences between Gantz and Netanyahu is a challenge.

So one thing I did in Israel was deepen my reporting on Israel’s right. And there, Amit Segal’s name kept coming up. Many consider him the most influential political analyst on the right and deeply rooted in the right. He has a book coming out in English called “The Story of Israeli Politics.”

Segal and I talked for an episode of my podcast. This is a transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

We’re talking on the day that Benny Gantz resigned from the war cabinet. How do you read the politics at the moment?

This coalition was formed a year and a half ago without Benny Gantz, and it can survive without him. Maybe even it will strengthen the coalition, because Gantz came from the outside, with contradicting ideas about how to manage the conflict or the war.

But in terms of Israel itself, I stick to what Josephus Flavius wrote 2,000 years ago, that when Jews are united, usually it’s much easier for them to defeat their enemies. And dismantling this unity government sends a very bad message for our enemies and allies alike.

Does Gantz’s leaving create division or reflect division?

Both, I think. It’s not the case in which one says, “I want to establish the Palestinian state” and the other would say, “No, I want to annex all the settlements.” Or “I want fiscal cohesion, and he wants to spend everything.” No, it’s about a mistrust between Gantz and Netanyahu and between the two camps.

I have found it personally very hard to locate Gantz’s politics.

So did he.

In 2023 there was this big fight over judicial reforms, with hundreds of thousands of Israelis protesting in the streets. Gantz rose as a candidate arguing for Israeli unity. I would call him, in the American context, a pro-system candidate, a candidate who does not want to break the way the system works. Netanyahu has become an anti-system candidate.

But after Oct. 7, the topic in Israel is no longer judicial reforms; it’s security. You have Hezbollah on the northern border. You have the war in Gaza. You have tensions in the West Bank. I’ve asked a lot of people to lay out how these coalitions or these figures see security differently. I still could not tell you the answer. Can you?

It’s more about the music than the lyrics. I’ll give you an example. Of the two people, Netanyahu and Gantz, Netanyahu was the only politician to articulate a support for Palestinian statehood. He was the only one, in 2009 in the Bar-Ilan speech. Benny Gantz never articulated the support for the Palestinian state.

Yet if you ask Israelis from both sides, they will locate Benny Gantz way to the left from where Netanyahu is, because people from both sides don’t believe Netanyahu when he says that he is for a Palestinian statehood, and they don’t believe Gantz when he doesn’t.

You say “pro-system.” In Israel there is a very important word, “mamlachti.” By the way, that’s the name of his party, HaMahane HaMamlachti, “pro-system camp,” OK? “Mamlachti” in Israel means “I am for the kingdom,” although we don’t have a kingdom. But this is the name in Israel for supporting the institutions. So Gantz is a bit center to the left.

The coalitions now feel, to me, they are kind of a center-left-to-moderate-right coalition and a right-to-further-right coalition. I think Americans would be surprised to hear that if Gantz’s coalition wins, Avigdor Lieberman would be a significant partner in it. Even in Israeli terms, Avigdor Lieberman is on the right. What happened to the left in this country?

It vanished. According to a new poll, 65 percent of the Israeli public define themselves as 50 shades of right wing and only 12 percent as left or center-left. So for every leftist in Israel, you have five to six right-wingers.

What happened is that the left promoted two ideas. In the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, it was for social justice — socialism, if you want. And in the ’80s, ’90s and the first decade of this century, it was about a bilateral agreement with the Palestinians.

Now, those two flags were stained. First of all, Israelis are way more capitalist than they used to be. No one sends his children to the kibbutz. Everyone wants to grow up their own children. This is one thing.

Second, Israelis ceased to believe in the two-state solution, which would be achieved through a bilateral negotiation, because they saw what happened last time. In 1993, following the Oslo Accords, Israelis experienced an awful lot of suicide bombers. And following the Camp David summit in 2000, when Ehud Barak offered Yasir Arafat, give or take, everything, including half of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, we got the second intifada.

Now, what happened is, it’s not that the right wing grew. It’s that the center was born. The center promoted a unilateral option, which says, “We’re not going to marry the Palestinians with a new Middle East, like France and Germany following World War II. We are going to divorce them.” And that failed as well in the eyes of the Israeli public.

We saw that the unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 and from Gaza in 2005 didn’t lead to a new equilibrium in which everyone can live happily and freely but to more tense times of security.

And what you see now is the final stamp on it. The fact that this horrendous terrorist attack came from Gaza, which Israel ceased to occupy in 2005, and that only gave them time and money to actually create a monstrous terrorist army — it’s the last time unilateral withdrawals will be experienced in Israel. So we don’t have a left here.

You asked why Lieberman isn’t perceived as a far-right leader. Because the discourse moved. It used to be not about the territorial question but about questions of identity.

In this respect, finally, you see Lieberman as a center-left liberal leader. His voters, who came from Russia, they are for civil marriage; they are for nonkosher meat sold in the streets; they are for public transportation on Shabbat.

Over and over again, I’ve heard from Israelis that both the idea of a peace process and the idea of unilateral withdrawal have been discredited. But no new theory of security has arisen. Do you think that’s right?

Yes, people are very disturbed because we tried everything. We got used to Israel’s calmest decade, in terms of security and casualties. And all of a sudden, people understand that this was not feasible for the long run.

That is to say that we will probably have to see more soldiers fighting in the north and in the south for the coming years, maybe decades. And there will be a death toll. It’s not going to be a permanent war but maybe a permanent state of ongoing operations.

It sounds more like a return to a theory of occupation.

You call it occupation from the perspective of the Palestinian population. But I’ll try to explain from the Israeli perspective. Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip, evacuated each and every settlement, took out dead from the graves and withdrew from the international border. And Israel, at the same time, stayed in Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, in order to preserve its security in a bearable condition.

Now, how come all the international criminal investigations, international committees, condemnations, etc., came from operations in Gaza? How come the Goldstone report in 2009, the arrest warrant against Tzipi Livni in 2009 in the U.K., the I.C.C. now — how come it emanates from a situation in Gaza?

So Israelis say, “Perhaps we should stay there as much as needed, pay the price and prevent the situation in which we are attacked. Perhaps the attempt to buy international legitimacy with the currency of territory doesn’t pay.”

I would describe what happened in Gaza since 2005 as a policy of managed, quite difficult containment. You have Hamas, a theocratic and repressive regime operating in Gaza. They’re building tunnels. They’re stockpiling weapons. You have a blockade on them. The population is extremely poor. Many things can’t get in, can’t get out.

For instance?

There are different lists. I mean, you can look at lists online of what was allowed in and out.

So I would suggest you talk to Israeli soldiers in Gaza and watch TikTok accounts of Palestinians in Gaza describing how Gaza looked like before the war. And all of a sudden, the world’s biggest open prison looks quite attractive. Soldiers who serve there say it’s not like Tel Aviv, of course. But Gaza City was the prettiest Arab town between the river and the sea, much more than Ramallah, for instance. There was no shortage of commodity. And the equation that says Israel blockaded Gaza, which is not the case, and all of a sudden, it created poverty, which —

What do you mean, it’s not the case that there was a blockade on Gaza?

Did you see which commodities entered Gaza?

Are you saying it was not a blockade because the tunnels were sort of tacitly permitted?

No, no, no. There were hundreds of trucks every day entering Gaza with everything from the Israeli side and, by the way, the Egyptian side. There were poor people, and there were houses with swimming pools. There were very rich neighborhoods with cafes and cinemas and no alcohol because they prevented it. The only commodity that did not enter Gaza was for religious reasons by Gazans.

So the attempt to claim that Israel created a blockade — I mean, it just helps the Israeli right wing to claim that nothing will happen if you withdraw from Gaza, thus enabling them to prosper.

I’m going to put the question of the blockade to the side, because I’ve heard many different things and I’m not the person to argue it with you.

I want to go back to this question of theories of security. Because that is what Israeli politics is ultimately going to have to be about for some time. There’s going to need to be a theory about Gaza, a theory about the West Bank — or Judea and Samaria, as you call it — and a theory about the north. How different are these theories between the Netanyahu and Gantz coalitions?

I think for many years that this question was politicized in Israel. To be honest, I don’t think that a different government would act differently under these circumstances. Gantz and Netanyahu voted exactly the same for the consecutive 91 meetings of the war cabinet, which means that there is a consensus in Israel of management rather than ideology.

I think the tragedy is that this consensus does not lead to a consensus within the political system. We are still divided, and we cannot allow ourselves this division.

Let me ask about the West Bank. In the past couple of weeks, Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, cut off tax revenues to the Palestinian Authority after it went around the world trying to get recognition of statehood.

After they tried to put Israeli leaders under arrest warrants, you mean.

Well, I heard both arguments for —

After serving Hamas’s purposes in order to stop the war.

Well, I think the Palestinian Authority sees itself as serving its own purposes. But either way, Smotrich cut off their tax revenues, which is making it so they can’t pay their employees and —

The salaries for murderers of Israelis.

Well, among other things.

What a pity — 7 percent of the budget.

Do you want to describe what you’re saying there? Because I think many people don’t know what you’re talking about.

Seven percent of the budget of the Palestinian Authority goes to the pockets of murderers of Israelis. The more you murdered, the more money you get. Just imagine 7 percent of the budget of the U.S.

The attempt to create a differentiation between Hamas and its population in Gaza or between Hamas and Fatah ignores basic grim facts that put it in a different way.

You would say there’s no differentiation between those.

I would say that the differentiation between Hamas and Fatah is for political reasons. Fatah was thrown from roofs in Gaza in 2007. But it’s not that Fatah wants Israel to exist. When people chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free,” it’s not a Hamas phrase; it’s a Fatah phrase. When 72 percent of the Palestinian population in Judea and Samaria in the West Bank support the massacre of Oct. 7, it’s horrifying.

The only differentiation between Fatah and Hamas, in terms of the way they treat Israel, is the fact that, 20 years ago, the Israeli Army operated in the cities of the West Bank exactly the way it operates now. So it took the will from the Palestinians to fight there.

Now, the reason that they don’t operate against Israel or cooperate against Hamas is because they fear the moment Israel leaves, Hamas will throw them from the roofs of Ramallah and Hebron, not from the roofs of Gaza only. We all have a dream about two Western democracies living side by side in peace and harmony. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

It’s very hard for the Biden administration — who’s partially the Obama administration, who’s partially the Clinton administration — to admit the grave mistakes it had made. And the grave mistake was, when President Clinton, it’s amazing to remember, came to Gaza as the president of the United States to stand alongside a mass murderer, Yasir Arafat, they wanted him to be Nelson Mandela. But unfortunately, this very specific Nelson Mandela didn’t want to be Mandela, didn’t want to play the role. He wanted still to be a murderer of Israelis. Maybe time will come when they will want to live with us. It has not come yet.

I’ve heard from many Israelis about the fury over those payments. Those payments didn’t begin a month ago when the tax revenues were stopped. The thing I want to get at here is security. One theory, you might say, is: Look, Fatah, the Palestinian Authority, we don’t like it. It’s a problem. But for whatever reason — not because it likes Israel but, in your telling, because it’s afraid of being thrown off a roof —

Sure.

— it does do security cooperation. The West Bank has not been lit on fire. I was just in a bunch of settlements over there that are very near Palestinian cities. You’re not seeing people from the cities come into the settlements and massacre Israelis. It does seem to me that if you wanted calm, you wouldn’t start squeezing their finances. Hamas is becoming more popular. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, is extremely, extremely unpopular. Smotrich feels to me like he is pushing the Palestinian Authority toward breaking. Putting aside whether the Palestinian Authority is good, is it good for Israeli security if it cannot pay salaries?

It’s complicated. There are two parts. One, yes, this is Smotrich’s ideological purpose. He doesn’t want, in the long run, the Palestinian Authority to exist, because it’s against his idea of sovereignty on every single inch of Greater Israel.

But there is something else which enables Smotrich to promote it. The Palestinian Authority has gradually started losing control over wide areas in Judea and Samaria — for instance, Jenin. Two years ago, three years ago, Israel tried to create a pilot to enable the Palestinians to have their economy there. Israeli soldiers would not be allowed to enter, in order to create a situation for a prosperous economy, because there was this equation that Israeli soldiers, in the sentiment of occupation, prevent economic development. And exactly the other way around happened. Jenin became a hub for terror.

So it’s very complicated. I would say that the Palestinian Authority might collapse anyway. I’m very worried about the situation.

I think this is sort of embedded in what you’re saying. The Palestinian Authority governs with Israel’s help. In addition to whatever cooperation it offers, there’s a widespread belief that if Israel left the West Bank tomorrow, the Palestinian Authority may not survive.

It would collapse in seconds.

And what could take over would be extremely dangerous. A few years ago, there was a theory that was popular in Israel. It came from Micah Goodman, who is a sort of centrist philosopher. And the idea is shrinking the conflict — that, look, there’s no two-state solution, there’s no one-state solution, there’s no deal. Let’s just try to make the roads better, make more Palestinian roads that are not going to have checkpoints, push for economic development. It has some resonances with an old idea from Netanyahu, which is economic peace, which is different from actual peace.

A lot of Palestinian Authority city council members and people I spoke to on this trip said: Look, Israel could help make me successful; they could make it easier for me to build things, give more water to my people. Has that theory lost traction here?

In times of conflict, people less listen to theories about making good for the other side, especially when the other side gave candies for children when Israelis got massacred.

Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon are three very different situations. But there is one principle that most Israelis accept, in my opinion, which is that the only guarantee for the lives of Israelis is the fact that there would be an Israeli soldier in each and every place. Not prudential commitments, bilateral, unilateral — I don’t know — promises, etc., foreign leadership. Israelis see it from the perspective of security rather than from the perspective of mutual cooperation.

You have to remember that prior to Oct. 7, the last government, Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett’s government, which was — I mean, their manifesto was Micah Goodman’s book. It fell because there was a wave of terrorist attacks from the West Bank. And Israelis started to understand that the West Bank is not as calm as they thought. So I think it lost popularity. But as you said before, it’s not that there is an alternative solution these days. No one wants to annex three million Palestinians to Israel.

Let’s talk about the north and the Lebanon border. Most Israelis I speak to tell me they are more worried about what Hezbollah represents, which, to them, is Iran and a much more sophisticated plan to, in the long run, destroy Israel than anything Hamas or the Palestinian Authority could muster. How do you see it?

It’s a dramatic problem because prior to Oct. 7, no one thought that Israel would invade Gaza. But it’s feasible. You can cut the lifeline of Hamas from Egypt. You can destroy each and every tunnel you see. You can kill as many terrorists as you see. And you can stop Hamas from being a terrorist army. By the way, it has already happened. They lost 97 percent of their rockets, etc.

But it’s not the case with Lebanon. You can never cut the lifeline of Hezbollah, because Lebanon is connected to Syria and then Iran. So you can’t stop Hezbollah from getting more weapons and more soldiers. And you can’t eliminate Hezbollah. Plus, Lebanon is a country. It’s not like Gaza or the West Bank. It has more legitimacy in the world. It’s way more difficult.

Well, there are two ways of thinking about what’s happening with Hezbollah right now. The more dominant theory in the West is that Hezbollah is acting in sympathy with Gazans. The other theory that I hear a lot is, “No, you Americans completely misunderstand this. Hezbollah is Iran. Iran is connected to China. It’s connected to Russia. Americans don’t understand countries with imperial pasts or even countries with current imperial ambitions. And it is, in a way, implacable because its ambitions here are ideological. It doesn’t care about the Palestinians.”

From a tactical perspective, of course, they want to sympathize with Gaza. And their way of doing it is to drag more forces from Gaza to the north. And I mean, if the war ends in Gaza, it will end in Lebanon as well. But what we learned, the tragic lesson from the last decade is that peaceful periods do not equal a peaceful future.

What I’m trying to say is that they will spend the time in order to prepare for the last mission of destroying Israel. There is a square in Tehran in which there is a clock counting down to the year 2040, in which Israel would be eliminated. And the intelligence in Israel says that they no longer see 2040 as the date but way earlier. So not tomorrow but maybe 2030, 2032.

Hezbollah is a very important ingredient in this scheme, because they got 200,000 rockets that will land here in Israel.

This is a place where how Israel sees the south and the north is a bit in tension. Israel could occupy Gaza even if America, I think, were not providing it with ammunition. Iran is a different kind of situation. It would need international support. How do you see the kind of tension between Israel’s international legitimacy, support alliances that it needs for that threat and the way that resource is being depleted right now in Gaza and the West Bank?

I think the world appreciates strong countries, and Oct. 7 was a terrible showing of weakness. So Israel has to finish the Gaza thing, with each and every battalion eliminated. And then, in my opinion, we have to take a pause for a year to build a new army with new figures, maybe to go to an election, build a coalition that will reflect the consensus of the real threats to Israel — with all due respect to the debate about the judicial reform or social justice and other things that are very important — to build an army that is well equipped and well trained to fight the Iranian octopus — Hezbollah, the Houthis, maybe the threat that comes from terrorists who come from Jordan — and to prepare for the next war, which will come.

By the way, it will help Israel to build cooperation, both with the U.S. — remember, remember the 5th of November, maybe Trump will come — and with the moderate Sunni countries.

You made the argument in your Wall Street Journal opinion essay that President Biden has become a potent issue for Netanyahu — not a problem for him but actually an advantage. Why?

There are two sentiments in Israel. There is an earthquake in Israel going on these days. Two tectonic plates are colliding. One is Israel is moving from the left to the right, people who ceased to believe in the two-state solution, unilateral withdrawal, bilateral withdrawals, etc.

But on the other hand, there are those Israelis who move from the right to the left. They voted for Netanyahu and his allies, and they no longer want to see them due to the failure. So Israelis want two things: They want right, and they want change.

Do they move from the right to the left or just from the right to the anti-Netanyahu right?

Exactly. This is exactly the thing, this sentiment. They are angry at Netanyahu because he failed to be as hawkish as they wanted — not because he was too hawkish but because he was too dovish. So they want right, and they want change. Now, Bibi gives them right, and he doesn’t give them change. Gantz gives them change, but he doesn’t give them right because he’s center or center-left.

So Israel is still waiting for a new party to come. Something in between, something that will reflect those two values and will gain huge ground in political terms, maybe will be Israel’s biggest party.

But meanwhile, when Israelis are forced to elect between their distrust of Netanyahu and their distrust for yet another international pressure, they choose Netanyahu. President Biden wants Israelis to stop the war when Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader in Gaza, is still on his feet, and most Israelis don’t want it. Biden still believes in the idea of two-state solution. Seventy percent of the Jewish Israeli population is against it. Netanyahu would invent those debates with Biden. And I mean, he has to thank him.

Something we were tracking earlier was: What are the differences here between Netanyahu and Gantz? And it seems reasonable to me to believe that Gantz would put more weight on closer relationships with America, with Europeans. And so in the Israeli public’s mind, he’s more likely to try to play ball.

To be pro-system with the American system. I think the gist of it lies in a sentence that Yair Lapid, the head of opposition and the former prime minister, usually tells Bibi: Stop fighting with the Americans publicly; do it behind closed doors.

But Bibi believes that the way to handle the situation with a hostile U.S. administration is to go public because the American public will always be more favorable of Israel than a Democratic U.S. administration.

By the way, this is Netanyahu’s last remaining advantage. Because following this awful massacre of Oct. 7, Netanyahu’s terms were stained for being one of the deadliest terms in the history of Israel. So he can’t be Mr. Security, but he can be Mr. Anti-Palestine, Mr. Hawkishness.

Biden has been very pro-Israel. He also comes from a different era, and Americans — especially the younger generations — seem to be turning away from Israel. Are Israelis worried about that?

They are very worried. I had a terrible conversation with one of the former Israel Defense Forces chiefs of staff, who said that when Israelis buy an air jet today for the Israeli Air Force, the life expectancy of those machine tools is 40 years. So they take into account the fact that during the coming 40 years, there will be a hostile U.S. administration that will not provide the pieces needed to be replaced.

And how is that taken into account in Israeli security, politics or thinking?

It’s not that the Saudis like Israelis, right? They need the Israeli weapon, the Israeli way of thinking and the Israeli cooperation. So we have to be very strong. This is one thing.

The second is to put as much money as possible on fostering the relationship with the Hispanic community, with the African American community, with youngsters, universities, etc. and, of course and first and foremost, the Jewish community.

Tell me about Saudi Arabia. They’re still interested in doing a normalization deal. There has not been an end to the Abraham Accords. And there’s possibilities there that weren’t there before.

They were there before. But I mean, 20 years ago, 22 years ago, Tom Friedman promoted the Saudi initiative that included withdrawal from Jerusalem and evacuating almost each and every settlement. Twenty years passed, and Saudis want to come for free, almost.

And this is Netanyahu’s greatest victory, the claim that the way to have a peace with the Middle East is not going through Ramallah. You can have peace with the moderate Arab countries based on interests against Iran.

Israelis and Saudis and Jordanians want Israel to defeat Hamas. They want Iran to be defeated. They want Hezbollah to be defeated. And I think there is a real chance of doing it. And I hope this will be the real victory over Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran.

What do Israelis think the Saudis need to do that deal now?

An excuse.

What would be an excuse?

They don’t want the world to end. They want Hamas to be eliminated. But the funniest thing I heard was from a senior figure in the United Arab Emirates. Remember that in the last government, there was a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood here. And he was furious. And I said, “Why?” I mean, finally, an Arab-Jewish cooperation. He said, “No, the Muslim brotherhood — the only place they are allowed to be in office is in Israel. You’re crazy.”

I mean, the way of thinking is different. They can distance themselves from the Arab public opinion, who is very pro-Hamas, but they are horrified from Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. So they want lip service to be paid there and something still marginal but maybe not in the eyes of the Israeli right wing in terms of the West Bank, Judea and Samaria.

For the first time, I heard last week from a very senior Israeli figure — not someone that likes Netanyahu — that they don’t really want the payment in terms of the Palestinian question. But ending the war will enable them to sign a peace treaty with Israel.

You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Claire Gordon. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

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