What Israel’s Leaders Can’t—or Won’t—Say About Biden’s Ceasefire Announcement

It’s confusing, because Biden said that it was an Israeli proposal, but Netanyahu is making conflicting comments about it, and Gantz doesn’t outwardly appear very supportive.

Well, Netanyahu did not deny it was put on the table with his knowledge. I had the dubious pleasure of seeing how he is prone to conflicting promises. What he likes most is to postpone decisions, and adding conditions so his coalition won’t fall. But this plan creates an almost unsolvable problem for Netanyahu, and I believe his hope is that Hamas will do what Palestinians have done many times in the past, and that is not accept the proposal and solve his problem for him. But if this proposal is brought to a vote in the Knesset, this will pass, and the coalition will fall. His political salvation will come either if Hamas says no, or if the situation becomes so murky and complicated that he can somehow wiggle his way out of it.

And Gantz will leave on June 8th, unless Netanyahu and Hamas accept the proposal?

If Netanyahu accepts, then maybe Gantz’s departure is postponed somehow, but he has reached the point where he has to get out of the government. The political damage to him has been done and will get worse.

You know Gantz well, and I know you’ve criticized him in the past when some of the previous efforts to unseat Netanyahu failed. When you look back at your efforts on this score in the previous years, and Gantz’s efforts, what do you think went wrong and why?

Politics in Israel centered around the Bibi question. When we had five consecutive election campaigns, the only issue at hand was Bibi or not Bibi. Amir Peretz, who was the leader of the Labor Party at the time, had a very famous mustache—this was his trademark since the eighties. And he shaved that mustache to guarantee that he will not go with Netanyahu. The only question was going to be, “Are you going to go with Netanyahu or not?” He didn’t shave his mustache so that people will believe that he will bring peace or change economics or society in Israel. The only question was Netanyahu or not Netanyahu, Bibi or not Bibi.

That created a very strange situation, where the only government that was without Netanyahu recently, in 2021, actually was led by the Israeli right, by people who are much closer to Netanyahu in ideology. They just had issues with Netanyahu personally. The only watershed that existed was Bibi or not Bibi. But the unseating of Netanyahu didn’t last long because parts of that coalition were extreme right, and also because an Arab party was part of the coalition, and that was taken very badly by a lot of Israelis.

If you go back to the failures of trying to unseat Bibi in 2019, we had a chance to form a government with what was called the Joint List, the Arab parties of the time, which had thirteen seats, and that would’ve created the majority. Actually, I was in charge of the very hush-hush negotiations with them and brought to the table a coalition agreement. Blue and White ran away from it because they knew how identity politics works and what it would mean to join hands with Arab parties. And this is prior to October 7th, and of course is a hundred times more so now.

When the only issue becomes Netanyahu or not Netanyahu, then you get what you get right now.

Is your sense that the next election campaign will also just be fought around Netanyahu, and thus is your concern that—

Of course, of course, that’s going to be the only issue, after October 7th.

If Gantz steps aside from the coalition government, what more needs to happen for an election? That would still leave Netanyahu with sixty-four seats out of a hundred and twenty.

Gantz does not have a plan, and neither does Yair Lapid or Avigdor Lieberman or Gideon Sa’ar, who actually met recently and said that they formed a plan to unseat Netanyahu. They don’t have one. Theoretically, you could have five members of Likud, let’s say, led by Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant, voting for elections. Theoretically, you could even have a different government within this Knesset without elections, but that’s very theoretical. It’s not going to happen.

The alternative to that is not in the Knesset but in the streets. If all the political machinations don’t bring about either a new government in this Knesset or elections, then it'll have to come from the streets. The sign for that, the symbol for that, would be Gantz and Eisenkot moving out of the government. Then you will see protests that will be like the protests before October 7th, but this time at the front row, there will be the bereaved families of more than a thousand Israelis. But I can tell you that the protests right now in Israel are much weaker than I thought they would be at this stage. There are various explanations for it. Once Gantz and Eisenkot move out of government, we’ll see about that.

Well, you seem to be saying about the internal situation within the Knesset that there’s not much chance, and the protest movement on the outside is weaker than you thought. It’s not exactly a hopeful picture.

I don’t know. You never know about these things. October 7th was the most shocking day of Israel’s existence as a state. This created such a shock to our system that the first response was, of course, to circle the wagons—“We’re going to go into war”—which was overwhelmingly supported.

We have not been successful in waging the war, and this is because of all the things that we’ve discussed. If you don’t have a policy for the day after, and you don’t have the continuation of policy by other means, which is what Clausewitz called war, then war is just killing and destruction. We have reached the point where this is very obvious to many Israelis. That shock to the Israeli psyche will manifest itself in Israeli politics. I don’t know how. Something may light this up if, let’s say, Gantz and Eisenkot move out.

On the other hand, even the strongest protest would not necessarily bring the government down because you still need at least five of the sixty-four to vote—I don’t think they’ll vote for an alternative government but to vote for new elections in Israel. New elections means that there won’t be a new government for at least five months because it’s at least ninety days from the vote to Election Day by law, and it’ll be at least two months, I think closer to three, until there’s the new government. So you will still have close to six months where the government will be the Netanyahu government at its present form.

And soon after that, there could be a new U.S. Administration that doesn’t even want a Palestinian state.

As you probably remember, there were talks of normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia before October 7th. The question was, what was Israel going to “give” on the Palestinian issue? On October 7th, in fact, it was clear what Israel was going to give. Israel was going to defeat Hamas. Israel was going to remove Hamas as the ruler of the Gaza Strip, which is in the interest of Egypt and Jordan and the Palestinian Authority and Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. In the second week of the war, I said that we could build the new Middle East. But the Netanyahu government is not going that way.

You know way more about Israel and the Middle East than I do, but I never thought there was going to be a new Middle East at any point, including on October 7th or October 8th. I don’t want to claim some unusual prescience here, but I just don’t understand how anyone looking at Israel in recent years and the current Israeli government could have possibly thought any of that.

No. I’m not talking about the Israeli government. I was talking about the interest of Israel.

O.K. So you’re saying not that you thought this was going to happen but you just hoped it would happen?

I also led a group at the I.N.S.S. that wrote a very elaborate paper on this, which was actually presented to the Netanyahu cabinet. I still think, as I told you before, that the alternative to Netanyahu is a regional deal, but it’s a theory full of holes. It’s full of practical holes, but the alternative to it is the United States and Saudi Arabia and all those other countries basically saying, “O.K. You want Gaza? Take it. It’s your problem.” And Israel sliding toward a de-facto occupation of Gaza.

A lot of the conversation in the United States and around the world since October 7th has been about the death toll in Gaza, and Palestinian civilians and children being killed. I understand that countries waging wars often see surges of nationalism, but I’m struck in our conversation, and just my reading from what I can tell of Israeli leadership and Israeli public opinion, that there seems to be almost no conversation internally about any of this. Countries at war, especially democratic countries, often see strong antiwar movements, particularly once those wars seem to not be accomplishing their objective and killing lots of people. Why has none of this happened?

Well, I’ll say this. First of all, Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan did not begin with—and this may sound like a cliché or propaganda—but it did not begin with mass killings and rape and kidnapping.

Re: Afghanistan, there were mass killings on 9/11, but go on.

Yes. O.K., and following 9/11, I think the analogy is pertinent. I don’t know that there were that many questions asked about going to Afghanistan. “How is this going to be different than what happened to us in Vietnam or to the Soviets in Afghanistan?” But the level of immediacy and shock, there’s not an Israeli that does not know somebody. I have friends who lost their sons on October 7th. This is very personal for me as it is for every Israeli.

I’m not ignoring the facts. We have removed, uprooted, millions of people. We’ve killed, I don’t know, definitely over ten thousand civilians, and in the background is the way Israel is viewed after sixty years of occupation, and we cannot ignore this. But you can’t expect Israelis right now in large numbers to express sympathy to what’s going on in Gaza because we are a nation in shock, and I’m not saying this is positive or negative. I’m just describing the way things are.

I would say it’s negative in the sense that the Israeli government is intentionally denying aid to starving people. I don’t know how anyone could deny that if they follow the news. I understand October 7th being just an absolutely traumatic and horrific day for so many Israelis, but fundamentally, if you pride yourself on being a democracy in a country that follows the rules of war, you can’t do this.

First of all, everything that you’re saying is very pertinent, of course, and there are all the automatic answers. Some of which are true. Do you want to go back to Tokyo? Do you want to go back to Dresden? I’m presenting it the way I’m presenting it in the Israeli internal discourse. This is a problem for us. O.K.? What I care about is that Israel has to be part of the liberal democratic camp. Therefore, I relate to it as a problem. I don’t think my opinion is very important on the question whether it’s right or wrong. It’s a real problem for us.

Out of curiosity, why don’t you think about it in terms of right and wrong?

Because I don’t know a way to fight an organization like Hamas, which spent billions of dollars entrenching itself within the civilian population. According to international law, if they fire rockets or even intend to fire a rocket from anywhere, it may be a kindergarten, you are allowed to strike that militarily.

Well, that’s not true.

Yes, it is. I'm sorry. Yes, it is.

You can’t just necessarily strike a kindergarten because someone has fired a rocket from there.

I don’t want to get into this argument here. I don’t know of an armed force that is going to such extremes to avoid collateral damage. [One basic feature of international law—the principle of proportionality—requires an assessment of whether civilian harm is likely to be excessive compared to the concrete military advantage anticipated. This holds true regardless of what your adversary is doing.]

Why are they denying humanitarian aid intentionally?

Because it became a political problem, but right now we are actually allowing any kind of humanitarian aid. [In May, the flow of aid into Gaza shrunk significantly, from rates that humanitarian organizations already considered grossly insufficient.]

You keep saying Israelis were attacked and feel vulnerable, and Hamas is awful, but you can imagine a Palestinian in Gaza saying, “We’re being denied aid. We're being bombed ‘indiscriminately,’ ” to use President Biden’s word about Israel’s campaign, which leads to the conclusion: “How can we fight an enemy like this? We have to be brutal.” And the cycle just goes on and on and on. But if you specifically are going to talk about democracy and international law, those principles are universal.

I understand. I agree. It goes against my core beliefs as a human being and an Israeli when they say there are no innocents in Gaza. I think I’m one of the staunchest critics of what Israel has been doing since October 7th. But I’m not criticizing, and I’m all for, the need to uproot Hamas as a military threat to Israelis.

You said earlier that if you don’t have a policy for the day after, then war is just “killing and destruction.” And you also say that Bibi has no plan for the day after. So why isn’t this just killing and destruction and why shouldn’t it immediately stop? That’s the cognitive dissonance I don’t understand when you defend the war. Biden even said in his speech that Hamas can’t launch another attack like October 7th.

Listen, Isaac, no country in the world can endure what Israel endured on October 7th and not retaliate forcefully.

The retaliation happened. Thirty-five thousand people are dead.

It is accepted by Israelis that the outcome of the war should be the removal of a security threat, be it Hamas or anyone else from Israel’s southern border. The objective is not debated. What you can debate is the strategy. We need an alternative strategy. If we don’t, we end up with a quagmire in Gaza, and standing alone against Iran, and we become an international pariah, and we will have lost the war because we did not present a clear vision to what comes after we kill and destroy.