Ep. 164: Author: Hostage Deal Continues Mistakes of October 7th
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How was it possible for Hamas to achieve such complete surprise? Everyone became complacent that Hamas is a bunch of guys that jump through hoops and do lots of training where they try to pretend they're cool. But there's kind of nothing to fear from them. I think the tragedy of all this is when you look at it and you look back in October 7th, the state unfortunately almost ceased to exist. ♪♪

Hello, and welcome to Think Twice. This week we have an important conversation for you with Seth Kronsman, the author of a new book on the October 7th war. But before we start today's program, I want to remind you, as always, to like this video and podcast, subscribe to JNS, and click on the bell for notifications.

Also, you don't have to wait a full week for more of our content. There is a Jonathan Tobin Daily podcast where I share more news and analysis with you about the most significant issues we're facing today. You can find The Daily Show under Jonathan Tobin Daily on the JNS channel wherever you get your podcasts. And now to today's program. It's possible, though not likely, that the ceasefire and hostage release deal agreed to by Israel and Hamas

will hold and that the post-October 7th war is actually over. But whether the fighting soon resumes or not, the questions that the war's outbreak posed about the assumptions held by Israel's military, intelligence, and political establishments still require answers. But even as Israelis still grapple with the trauma the war brought to its society,

and how to resolve the dilemma posed by hostage negotiations that force leaders to choose between their country's security and general good and demands to pay any price for hostages. The rest of the world has not merely moved on from October 7th, but

but has descended into denial about Hamas atrocities or sought to argue that any atrocities committed against Israelis are defensible because they are acts of justified resistance against a white oppressor nation. Even after nearly 16 months, the gap between the reality of the war that Israel has been forced to fight for its survival and the way the war is reported and commented on by much of the Western press continues to grow.

That is why it is more necessary than ever to take a deep dive into the events of October 7th and the war that followed to learn the truth about the conflict, as well as the suffering and heroism of the Israeli people and its armed forces. The only way to answer the big lies we hear from the left and the media about Israel committing genocide, of all things, is to tell the truth about the war that Hamas started. One person who has been reporting about this war has now produced a new book about it.

its origins, and the course of the fighting in its first month. And we're pleased to have him with us today. Seth Fransman is an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. He's the author of three books, the 2019 After ISIS, America, Iran, and the Struggle for the Middle East, the 2021 Drone Wars, Pioneers, Killing Machines, Artificial Intelligence, and the Battle for the Future.

and the recently published The October 7th War, Israel's Battle for Security in Gaza. He's also a senior correspondent at the Jerusalem Post, as well as Israel correspondent for Breaking Defense. Seth Ransom, and welcome to Think Twice. Thank you for having me. Well, Seth, thanks so much for taking the time to join us today.

You've written a gripping account of the October 7th attack and the war that followed. I want to start by asking you the question I think capsulized the initial reaction of so many people, including those of us who are familiar with Israel and have even visited the border with Gaza many times over the years, and which you attempt to answer in your book.

How was it possible for Hamas to achieve such complete surprise? And why was the IDF so poorly prepared to meet this particular challenge on October 7th, 2023? And I guess the other question is, what were the basic assumptions behind the conceptia inside Israel and the defense establishment that led them to believe that something like this couldn't happen? Why were so many smart, experienced, brave Israeli security intelligence and military experts so wrong?

Well, that is the key question. I think actually you've kind of hit on it a bit, which is that these people were incredibly brave. This was in some, you know, you could say the best and the brightest to some extent, very smart people. An ominous phrase when talking about a war, when you think back, that's the title of David Halberstam's, you know, classic account of the Vietnam War. That's right. Well, that's the problem, I think, as I was going to say is that

And sometimes that is the issue. When you have in a room really smart people and all sorts of the best intelligence and everything seems like, you know, you are just so much dominant over an enemy that seems so simple and primitive.

I think it's very common in history for states or the Roman Empire or whoever to find out all of a sudden that everything that they thought is a bit wrong. And sometimes that is because you don't have enough people in the room who are either skeptics or people that maybe just take a much more simple approach, which is like, for instance, if I were to present you with a story of what things looked like on October 6th,

There are 30,000 armed Hamas members on the other side of the border. These people are sworn to kill you. They're sworn to genocide you and the people in your community. There are 30,000 of them. And I were to tell you, well, what do we have on our side of the border? Well, we have a very nice expensive fence with lots of artificial intelligence. We have some remote machine guns that can shoot relatively slowly.

And we have 500 combat soldiers with M16s. I think you'd say, well, that's not enough. What do you mean 500 combat soldiers? Do you have tanks? Yes, we have 12 or 24 tanks, but most of the crews are actually at home. Ah, do you have any reserves or helicopters? No, we haven't. We don't. Most of them are up north because we have a threat from Hezbollah. So I think that...

It would take a very simple person would raise their hand and say this is not possible. But I think unfortunately, Israel had fought Hamas so many times over, you know, let's say almost a 20-year period by that point, going back to the Second Intifada, and Israel was used to winning. And if you look at all the conflicts, 2009, 12, 14, some of the flare-ups in 2018 and then 2021,

Israel always walked away from these conflicts with very few casualties, almost no civilian casualties. There was, of course, a few kidnappings of Gilad Shalih and there were several hostage takings, but in general, nothing like October 7th. So everyone became complacent that Hamas is a bunch of guys that jump through hoops and do lots of training where they try to pretend they're cool.

But there's kind of nothing to fear from them. And I think anyone who's been to the Gaza border sensed that because I remember taking interns down there who had come to work at the Jerusalem Post. They had come to be interns at the paper. And, you know, I took them down to the border. We went right up to the border. You know, we felt completely safe. And as everyone did, we felt that there's an Iron Dome air defense system over our head. And, you know, there's kind of nothing that can get to us.

Even though, you know, we understood, okay, if there was Hamas snipers on their side of the border or something, yeah, we could be in trouble, but...

I think the sense was just that everything was totally safe. And unfortunately, that's exactly how systems fail in any surprise attack, whether it's the Tet Offensive in 68 or the Pearl Harbor attack. Of course, at Pearl Harbor, I mean, there were some warnings. But imagine they kept the entire fleet sitting there like sitting ducks.

You know, the military historian Alistair Horne wrote a book, Hubris, listing just a few of the examples that you cite. And of course, then there's the example of just almost exactly 50 years earlier in Israel with the Yom Kippur War. But yet the same thing happened, didn't it?

Actually, what's fascinating about Yom Kippur War is that I, after October 7th, I had, you know, I was very busy going back and forth to the front line and even to Gaza and things like that as I wrote in the book. But I did have some time here and there to look over things and kind of try to think about it. And I went back and read Abraham Rabinowitz's book about the 73 War. And I was fascinated by some of not only the similarities, but the differences. And what was fascinating me was actually the

In the drumbeat up to 67, there was a whole bunch of people that came forward and said to the prime minister or the chief of staff or defense minister, listen, you know, we got to do something. These guys are preparing for war. They're moving divisions. They're mobilizing troops.

And you know what's fascinating? I saw, I learned was that actually there were several key decisions made prior to the war starting in which they did begin to mobilize reserves. They began to send a few key units around and they evacuated the children of the communities in the Golan Heights. And that's a key decision because if Israel had evacuated some civilians on the border with Gaza or the Nova Festival,

Instead of 1,000 people killed and 250 taken hostage, it would have been a devastating attack of hundreds killed or something, and some hostages, probably military people, but not the mass killing. So I think that in 1973, there was actually a lot more questioning of the Concepcion, and maybe a little bit less arrogance, oddly enough, than unfortunately on October 6th.

In which there's basically, from what I could tell in reading, in trying to understand this, there was basically no one that questioned, you know, what could happen. There was the fact that the intelligence community had received the information about the potential attack that Hamas was planning and they had basically dismissed it as saying it's not really possible.

But there really wasn't anyone else that was raising a hand in Southern Command or on the Gaza Division or Brigade or Battalion Commanders saying, "Listen, we got to do something." The only people that did were some of these younger female observers who ended up being massacred and taken hostage, the IDF women soldiers. But they were very low ranks. I mean, you're talking like corporals and privates saying, "Listen, General, sir, I think there's going to be an attack."

You know, it's not high-ranking officers. And that's one thing that's really noticeable. That's very true. Now, you know, as we just acknowledged, stories about military surprises and failures, as well as heroic battles, are part of history and they're part of Israel's history. And since October 7th, those of us who have been to Israel and covered the story have heard so many harrowing as well as so many inspirational tales.

But as you reported and then began to write this book, in a world where there were so many shocking things, what was the most shocking aspects of this terrible story to you? And what aspects of it are the sort of hardest to live with? Well, I think the one that always gets me, I guess, is that, you know, Israel was created as a Jewish state with the

You know, the remnants of people that were fleeing the Holocaust. Obviously, the Zionist movement goes on before that. It's not that the Holocaust immediately led to the creation of the state, but the whole, the structure of the state existed almost. But in a sense, you know, there is a very strong feeling of never again. Israel is a state that is there to protect the Jewish people. That's its raison d'etre. That's what it does. It's always done a quite good job of that, I think, actually.

And it's always been a state that always, you know, was willing to risk everything to protect Jews, whether it's Antebe or bringing the Ethiopian Jews to Israel or whatever it is. And what's, I think, the tragedy of all this is when you look at it and you look back in October 7th and the videos and the people being cut off, the hostages, which are still many of them in Gaza,

you know, the state unfortunately ceased to almost cease to exist on that morning. I remember being down there. I drove down to Gaza on October 7th because we were awake, awakened in Jerusalem by the rocket fire. And I'm a reporter. So I went to report and

You know, we got down, I got down to the border and I had a friend of mine who I mentioned in the book, a doctor, Eric Mandel, who had gone to sterile the same morning. He talked about seeing all these bodies. He kept sending me pictures of bodies everywhere. He said he thought they were terrorists. Now we think that they were probably civilians. Uh, and the same thing happened to me when I got down there, you know, we, I saw a dead body in the middle of the street and he, there was no one who's going to move that person because the assumption was we don't have, we have so many wounded, we can't deal with the dead.

um and look this the the sense was not only that day but the next day october 8th that whole key parts of the state had kind of ceased to exist um that doesn't mean that israel ceased to exist the israeli people were there on the border and many of them were trying to do their jobs you know whether it's ambulance drivers or or soldiers who showed up to fight or civilians who went to save people who had side arms or whatever i mean

the huge volunteerism in the state and the ethos of the country was still there. But the things that you rely on, you know, to kind of, were kind of missing. And I think that's what was shocking, especially when we talk about, you know, a state that has always been about never again. I think the sense that

you know the videos we saw from the nova festival and things like that um or that the body of shani loot being dragged through gaza's streets and with men spitting on her and stuff i mean this is stuff that's really right out of the holocaust i mean it's right out of the pictures the einsatz group stripping jews taking them to dig their own graves and just massacring them so

I think that's what gets me. The helplessness when you see the girls be, the idea of soldier women in their pajamas being dragged into Gaza, one of them by their hair. It's that helplessness you feel, and you feel that that's been there throughout Jewish history. And you wish it would not be there again. Yeah, I think so many people, even people who have not been and not seen the ruins of the communities, been to the festival,

I think ordinary Jews everywhere kind of have felt this, just as they were encouraged and stood a little bit taller because of Israel's triumphs. I think that's very true. I mean, it was a moral defeat on that day.

And the question is, you know, can Israel recover? Now, you noted in your book the fact that this war, which was in many ways Israel's most difficult and largest conflict, or at least since the ones that it fought in its first decades, and which was like them, I think rightly perceived as existential, didn't produce any military celebrities or heroes such as Moshe Dedayan or Ariel Sharon as the IDF had in the past.

Why is that? And is the widespread belief that I've heard from many Israelis that the rank and file of the army performed brilliantly, but it was the generals who failed accurate? And what are the implications of that kind of conclusion for Israel's future security if that isn't reversed in some way? I think the IDF is the most trusted institution in Israeli society. And that is an important notation because Israel

You know, Israel is a very divided country domestic politics-wise and religiously other things. And over time, a lot of other institutions in Israeli society have been eroded in terms of the public's respect for them or trust in them, whether it's the Supreme Court or media and things like that. And so...

The army is the one institution that exists and therefore the army, you know, in some way is the state in the sense that, you know, most people in Israel, a majority are conscripted to it. They serve in it. And, um,

It provides so much. It's not just like we would think in the United States as, you know, most people don't know someone in the Army in the United States. Imagine a country where every person you know has served. I mean, in many communities. It's a completely different experience from living in the United States. Absolutely.

Right. So not different from the United States of the past, you know, the era of World War II. But, you know, that's Americans today. Only a tiny percentage of Americans serve in the military in Israel. It is, if not universal, it is, you know, prevalent, shall we say.

Right. I mean, the only similarity you could imagine is your question that began this discussion was the failure of the generals. I was thinking back to the First World War, the Great War in France or in the UK where many people would have gone, especially in a country like France or Germany. And there is that famous story, they say lions led by donkeys in the sense that the soldiers were lions, but the men leading them were donkeys. And I think, I wouldn't want to say that I wouldn't, I don't

I don't think it'd be fair to characterize the IDF general staff like that, but because many of the generals are heroic and many of them went to the front line that day and some of them fell fighting. So it's not that. But I do think there is a sense that the general staff in Israel, because the IDF is such an institution, there is, I think, a sense that unlike the founding generation,

They don't want to have people that rise up too much. They want to have a kind of leveling within the IDF, and that leveling goes up to the staff, general staff level, so that it's not about one person. It's about the institution going forward, and the institution has to survive. Unfortunately, that also means when the institution makes mistakes like it did on October 7th,

It's an institutional mistake. And there's a lot of groupthink involved, which is why you don't see a certain general raising their hand and saying, listen, this is all screwed up. We've got to do the opposite thing. There's very few examples in the war of generals who spoke out. One of them was a general named Goldfuss who did give a speech. I remember when he came out of Gaza, he'd been fighting for like, I think it was 100 days he'd been fighting Khan Yunus, some of it underground.

And he came out of Gaza and he gave a speech where he said, you know, something about the politicians need to make sure that what we've done here actually matters, something like that. And he said, he had this line at the end in English because the speech was in Hebrew, but he has a South African background. And he said in English, make it worth, not make it worth it, which I think we would say, but make it worth. And it was interesting. He was then reprimanded, of course, for it. So, yeah.

I think there's a sense that they don't want people to have too much flair at the top level. And the last chiefs of staff, as far as I can remember, most of them don't have a lot of flair. It doesn't mean that they're not heroic or they're not great people. They just...

they don't have that marcia diana eric chiron type of thing of you know there's not not like eric sharon crossing the canal or something i think it just doesn't it's not the same israel however at the lower level you know you do find a huge amount of heroism and fascinating people in terms of the some of the battalion and company commanders and brigade commanders um i can tell one of the stories if you'd like one of the people i interviewed for the book um there was a commander

I met in the course of doing some of the research for the book. He was a deputy commander of a tank, an armored brigade. So he was a deputy commander and that would usually mean obviously you'd be in charge of a whole bunch of people. He's a Druze, so he's a member of one of the minority groups in Israel that serves in the IDF. And

On the day of October 7th, in the morning, he was in the north with his family, like most of the members of the brigade, even though the brigade had several, some tanks down there in the south, but most of them were at home or in other places. And he got up in the morning and he saw on social media, all these pictures that we all saw from Gaza of people being killed and stuff. And he immediately understood, because he knows Arabic fluently, this is a huge operation that Hamas has launched. He understood the implications. So he got in his Jeep. He had a

a command officer's jeep that he brought home with him. He got in the jeep and he began driving to the south. Now, he's far in the north, so it probably took him two hours to get there. And as he was driving, he began calling up members of the unit. And he began collecting them one by one as they got towards the south. And when they got, you know, within 30 minutes of Gaza, he already felt that, listen, Hamas could have penetrated this far. And the guys put on their tactical vests and got their rifles chambered with bullets and stuff.

They understood that they were driving into just a maelstrom, a hurricane of death. And again, he's a deputy commander of a tank brigade, but all he had was a Jeep and a few guys. He had no tank. And he drove into battle with his Jeep. He got down to the border and he ran into a bunch of other IDF units. It was a huge chaos. And they began to fight. And they eventually ended up in Kibbutz Beri, which is where there was a site of a huge massacre.

And, um, he went in, they rescued, he, he estimates they rescued, you know, dozens of people, him and a few guys and, and the other units that were there, which was a mishmash of a lot of elite units. And eventually, um, he got to a point where he was, he was shot and wounded.

And he remembers being in a little alleyway with a tank. There was actually at that point a tank that was next to him. And as a tank officer, he understood, the tank can't see me down here next to the treads. They could run over me. But he didn't want to tell the guys next to him when he was wounded because he was worried it would take away their morale and they'd have to take him out. And so he debated this for a while. Eventually, he said to one of the guys, listen, I've been shot. I can't really move. He was sitting down at this point, losing blood.

So they carry him out. He got two of the ambulance to be taken to a collection point. The ambulance was then shot at on the way by terrorists. He got eventually to a helicopter, which took him to Jerusalem. And right before he was wheeled into the operating room, he asked the doctor for a phone. And the doc said, listen, you could die. I need to get you into the operating room. What's with the phone? He said, no, no, no, you don't understand.

My family has no idea where I am. I got up in the morning and left. I never bothered to tell them. They don't know where I am. They don't know what hospital I'm in. If I die here, I need to at least tell them where I am. So he sent a quick text message. And then he went in and he met me a few months later when he'd recuperated. And he was going back into Gaza to lead the unit that he had fed by this time. So...

There's a lot of people like him that have this kind of iron will that you meet, that I met during the war, and they're kind of extraordinary stories. Yeah, and there's so many extraordinary and really inspiring stories, as well as the horrifying ones. Now, in your book, you write about the war for Gaza, not just what happened on October 7th.

And from its start, there have been loud voices outside Israel, as well as some inside it, and in the IDF as well, I think, that believe that Hamas really couldn't be destroyed. Others disagreeing. Do you think the events of the last 15 months and the current ceasefire prove this warning? Was it correct or was it false? Everything can be destroyed. I think whether it's Nazi Germany or the KKK,

or any movement, any country. It doesn't matter. So I think that Hamas can be destroyed. It's a question always of whether or not you have the political will to do it, whether you want to do it, and whether you think it's a good thing to do it. And I think when we look at Hamas, we understand that I think the current government of Israel has chosen, for very differently, very complicated reasons,

That it's that Hamas it's okay to leave them in Gaza. They took over Gaza illegally of city as a seven of us Brutally and Israel had just left Gaza in 2005. So the sense was well, we're not gonna go back there and get rid of them That's the Palestinians problem. That's the international community problem. Well Unfortunately, the international community decided it'd be great to have Hamas there and then someone decided be great to have Hamas you know leaders move to Qatar and then have them be massively funded and

And unfortunately, you know, Israel's leadership just calculated that this is kind of the lesser of several bad options. Let's just leave them there. And when the attack on October 7th happened, you know, one could have said, OK, now is the time to throw this idea out the window because it didn't work.

It's like appeasement before Nazi Germany, before the invasion of Poland, right? And I might add an appeasement that was supported kind of across the board of Israeli politics. I mean, who in Israeli politics on October 6th was calling for Israel to return to Gaza? Right. No one wants to return to Gaza. And what's fascinating about Israel's politics is that the left doesn't want to go back into Gaza.

The center doesn't really. I mean, they'd like to destroy Hamas, the center, but they don't really want to run Gaza. They don't like a two-state solution. And the right, which you usually count on the right to be the hawks and the crazy people that say, well, let's just go in and take it over. But the right in Israel doesn't want to run Gaza either because they don't really want to have the Palestinian Authority run it and have two states. So

It's weird. The large swath of Israeli society is kind of Janus-faced on this. They say, yeah, Hamas is awful. But if you say, okay, well, how do we get rid of them? They're not really sure on it. And so, unfortunately, I think, you know, it's like that. Appeasement was judged to be wrong in 1939 when Hitler went into Poland. But in Israel, I wouldn't say that, you know, I wouldn't characterize it necessarily exactly as appeasement, but...

The concept of leaving Hamas in control of Gaza, if you ask people what to do today in Israel, after 15 months of a grinding, difficult war,

I think a lot of people would kind of say, well, I don't know, looks like we can't get rid of them. We'd like to get the hostages back. I mean, so that's kind of where Israel is. And I personally would say that I think it's probably a mistake. I think that once an organization kills 1,000 of your people and kidnaps 250 of them, you just have to destroy that organization. I don't think we would allow, you know, a cartel in Sinaloa to do that to America. There'd be a point where you say, okay,

okay, we're just going to erase this cartel from the face of the earth. But that's a choice that people have to make that are in charge. And to be willing to pay the price for it, if they do make that decision, which whether it's foreign or domestic criticism, but it's worth paying. Netanyahu seems to say that he does. He's still sticking to it. But yet, if the ceasefire holds, I don't see how he can eradicate Hamas.

You know, the same cognitive dissonance is in the Trump administration too, isn't it? Well, yeah. I mean, look, the question is not a question just of eradication, which is, again, you can kill lots of Hamas members and they keep coming apparently. But it's a question of the vacuum of power. Nature abhors a vacuum.

If you get rid of something like Hamas, you have to replace it. Now, we all know how that worked in Nazi Germany or Japan after the war. We know how it didn't work very well in Iraq in 2003 or 2004, right? So we can look at history and see where it doesn't work, where it does work. What happened to Gaddafi's Libya? That didn't work out very well, right?

Unfortunately, a lot of people look at Gaza and they say, okay, well, if we get rid of Hamas, well, we don't want Fatah running it. So, well, we don't want chaos. Okay, so let's let Hamas back in. I mean, that's kind of where they get to at the end of the day. They don't have the answer to what to do with the vacuum. Hmm.

Now, most Western news reporting of the war against Hamas, on which you've spent so much of your life, the last 16 months, is focused on Palestinian suffering and has helped fuel the notion that Israel overreacted and is even committing genocide inside Gaza, which is ridiculous. But nevertheless, that's the nature of a lot of the coverage. How far off the mark is

Not just in terms of the ideology, the ideological roots of these accusations, but from the reality of the actions that you personally covered and researched. Well, what happened in Gaza during the war is obviously not a genocide because no one set out to eliminate the people. What the government or the army set out to do was to eliminate...

a lot of terrorists and terrorist infrastructure. And unfortunately, Hamas built 500 miles of tunnels or something under Gaza, many of them underneath UN schools and things. So, you know, unfortunately exploiting every part of the international community. What I mean is Hamas basically looked at a map of Gaza and said, okay, where are their schools? That will be all of our command and control areas. And that's really what they did. I mean, and hospitals as well.

So, unfortunately, when an enemy does that, you know, and if you send in the army to try to destroy that, you end up destroying a massive amount of civilian stuff, whether it's schools or buildings. And look, the level of destruction in some areas of Gaza that I've been to, I mean, you know, it is like, you know, what you see in cities in the Second World War at the end of the war. I mean, it's just total destruction.

That's not always, not everywhere. There's places where it's not, but Gaza's a big urban landscape. In many cases, what the IDF did, as we know, is they tell people to leave an area before going in. That problem with that, of course, is the enemy just leaves as well. And so you go in, tanks drive around, destroy lots of things and dig up roads and they find tunnels and blow them up.

And the enemy comes back. And what Israel found in Gaza is that the enemy always comes back. And, you know, that's what we learned also in the Vietnam War was when you send in, you know, a Marine division or whatever to search around in a bunch of jungle, then they go and they leave and the enemy returns. So it's very difficult. It certainly was not a genocide. But if you were to ask me whether I think that the level of destruction was necessary in terms of what the goal was, I

I think there is, again, we get back to the problem of where there was not a clear strategic goal. There was a tactical goal. I think that the history of Israel tells us Israel succeeded best in history when it fought short wars of massive power over like six days or two weeks. It would have been preferable, I think, to wage a war of massive intensity quickly and destroy Hamas.

than a 15-month grinding war and not destroy them, unfortunately. So I think there was a point where the levels of destruction didn't meet the goals. And I don't know...

look, someone's going to have to rebuild it, right? So I think that's a problem. Are you going to have the same people pay to rebuild it that paid to build the Hamas tunnels the first time around? And we're going to run into that problem in the next few years, I think. Yeah. Well, I guess that's sort of it's the follow-up actually to the first question I asked you, which was about the conceptia that led to October 7th and the lack of preparedness for that attack.

I guess there was an equal lack of preparedness for what Israel would have to do if such an attack happened. The IDF wasn't preparing for a Gaza war, was it? No. The IDF, it seems to me from what I understand, is that if you go back to...

Around 2015 or so, when the Syrian civil war was at its height, the IDF basically said, listen, Gaza is not a priority. It's what they call the first circle or second circle threats that are very close to Israel's borders or inside the border. Basically, Israel is focused on Iran and Iran's proxies like Hezbollah.

And Israel decided it would focus 90% or something of its intel and security resources on dealing with Iran and Hezbollah and that threat in Syria. I don't mean the Assad regime, which actually I think Israel did not view as much of a threat. They viewed the proxies of Iran in Syria as a threat. So Israel began bombing the proxies in Syria. And that's where all of Israel's energy went. And unfortunately, we now know Israel ignored Gaza.

And that's where the real enemy was. But no one thought that. They thought Hezbollah was the big problem, the big beast. So that's kind of where things went wrong. And I think the...

As well as where some things went right when Israel eventually, as it did late last summer and the fall, turned its attention to Hezbollah and were really very well prepared to do them great damage. Well, you saw how that war worked, right? I mean, once Israel decided to click the switch of let's destroy Hezbollah, basically Hezbollah was just ripped apart, you know,

you know, like someone eating a steak at dinner. I mean, it didn't have much of a chance, despite the fact that everyone was worried that it was this huge boogeyman. Well, since 2006, there had been this idea that Hezbollah is invincible. Exactly. Which apparently, you know, in another chapter on hubris, Hezbollah believed too. Right. And that shows you when the IDF wants to do what the IDF is good at,

The IDF actually can do it quite well. The problem is, of course, as you mentioned with Gaza, was there just weren't plans to go back into Gaza. When the attack happened on October 7th, the army spent two weeks preparing to go back in because they didn't know what to do. And they had to retrain a lot of hundreds of thousands of reservists to do urban warfare, which you think, well, isn't that something you should have trained them for? Well, no. They were training for something else. So...

They had to retrain them and they had to dust off plans from the 2009 war. And unfortunately, to be honest, one of the reasons the war was kind of plodding the way we saw it over the 15 months was Israel was fighting a 2009 style campaign and didn't really rethink the whole idea of, okay, let's do this totally differently. That's why Israel went into the Netzerim corridor first and it didn't go into Rafah. There's a lot of, that's exactly how the war unfolded.

That really does sound like a failure of the generals. I mean, you know, OK, we don't call them we won't call them donkeys, but, you know, leading lions. But that does sound like a very good parallel in the U.S. civil war. You know, failure at the highest levels of the military and intelligence establishments, doesn't it?

You know, it's 100%. I mean, I think the parallel I would draw is just the U.S. Civil War. If you remember Abe Lincoln and trying to fight when he had to work so hard to find General Grant, how many generals did he go through to get to him? A lot, right? So the generals that the Union Army, and the Union Army was not a bad army. And General McClellan, by the way, was not a bad man. He was not a great

He's a great organizer, that's for sure. We're going to go into that. Exactly. Well, that's right. So I think Israel has a lot of that, has a lot of McClellans to be, I think you mentioned in the book, Israel has a lot of McClellans and they're very good people. They're great at lots of things, but in terms of, yeah, the initiative. Netanyahu hasn't found his, has Netanyahu found his ground? No, he hasn't. And look, that may just be a Netanyahu problem because he may just not be

He may not be Dave Lincoln, but in the end of the day, that's where his roots are.

Yeah, that's true. So I guess, you know, getting back to the, you know, where we started a few minutes ago with about, you know, the way the war is covered, you know, and you're somebody who has covered the war, you know, very much. Not just those of us who go there periodically and look, but you've been there. But the way the war is covered in the Western press, in the American press, it's very different

from the reality and the stark contrast between the reality of the war and the discussion in the international media and the U.S. What are your thoughts about that? What's the problem there? Well, look, Israel always suffers an impossible uphill battle of being the country that is seen as Western and therefore some media tends to be just overly critical of the self, i.e., if it's the West, then it must kind of be bad. You get that mentality a bit, which comes out of college classrooms and things.

Israel is seen as the powerful one. And look, anytime you have a military up against a bunch of people that look like civilians, because all the Hamas guys basically dress as civilians, and then when they fight, I mean, they hide. Except when they dress up for things like the parade where they're releasing hostages.

Exactly. It's all very... Hamas is a very smart, evil organization, and they know exactly how to choreograph this. So when things are peaceful, they all strut around in uniforms like they're all heroes. And then the second they have to fight, they chuck out the uniform and they hide the rifle and they wander around as if they're just a guy selling vegetables in the street. So it's the worst kind of enemy to have to fight. And Israel is an incredibly professional army.

and does everything I think it can, you know, in general, to not have civilians get killed. But it's super difficult. And Gaza's the worst place to fight, by the way, in terms of killing civilians because there's so many of them in a small space. Compare Gaza to the war in Lebanon, the two months of intense fighting. Very few civilians were killed in Israel's campaign in Lebanon because most of it was done in this rural environment. So that's just the nature of it.

Yeah. Well, in your book, you note an incident which stuck out to me in the fighting on October 7th in Kibbutz Beri, where terrorists were holding Israeli hostages when they were counterattacked by IDF units, and that one officer ordered a tank to fire on a house where there were terrorists and hostages, resulting in the deaths of many of the hostages, but all of the terrorists.

You know that it was a controversial decision, but doesn't that sum up the debate?

about what Israel needs to do about hostages and hostage deals. What is the most important value, defending the country or saving Jews being held as captives, even if it means helping terrorists? I know this is something you've written about even recently after you finished your book, but is Israel always doomed to be forced to give in to damaging terrorist demands if its citizens are held hostage?

Well, yeah, it's very difficult. I would say that you have to change the mentality a bit, which is Israel has to, I think, would have to say, listen, hostage taking is unacceptable and we're going to have the highest level of priority in terms of preventing it at every level, from the generals to the lowest platoon or squad commander, and including security teams that are in these kibbutzim and stuff or communities.

We will never allow people to be taken hostage and everything will be done to stop it. I mentioned the word broken arrow, which is from that film We Were Soldiers Watch, which is the code word for when a US unit was being overrun in Vietnam.

Israel needs a system like that, which is when you have a hostage being taken, that all the resources of the entire state work to prevent that. And you mentioned a difficult situation, which is, you know, what do you do when they're holed up somewhere or where you might fire on them and they might be harmed? I would say that historically, prior to the Shalit deal, Israel always...

was willing to put soldiers and hostages in harm's way to save them. And I would say that in terms of the Entebbe raid was not an easy thing. It could have resulted in disaster and everyone could have been killed. But Israel said, no, that's fine. We'll just do this. And if people die, they die. But this is the way to do it. And I think that's a mentality that you can choose to do.

It's not a nice thing to tell people, "Listen, we're sorry. Your son died in the rescue operation and also the hostages died and everyone died in this operation. We're very sorry it didn't work." But I don't think the other option is great, which is, "Listen, we are sorry. We're going to leave your daughter in Gaza for five years because we don't really want to risk her life or the guy's life to save her." I mean, I think a lot of people would maybe prefer—it's hard to say, but I think a lot of people would prefer

The other one, which is to try your best quickly early on and be willing to take the much higher risk associated with it. Yeah. Now, anyone who has spent time in Israel during the last 15, 16 months knows that what the country has been experiencing is a collective national trauma in which the healing has barely begun. What are your thoughts about that? And as part of that, do you think all the border communities...

Your book is focused on Gaza, but obviously the border communities in the north were basically depopulated.

and haven't really been restored? Do you think all of the border communities in the south and the north will be restored? And have Israelis gotten back their confidence in the country's security services, the confidence that, as you noted in your book, made Fauda so popular by the events of the past several months? Or will it take more than exploding beepers on the fall of Syria to accomplish that?

I think there's a huge national trauma that has not even begun to be addressed or understood because I think that, you know, people are just coming back from this war. I mean, 500,000 people or so were called up. Depends, it depends. And they were, or there's just so many human beings were affected in people in the service, soldiers.

People in the border communities, that's hundreds of thousands. And then just people in random, any place like Tel Aviv, you know, being under sirens all the time is just a total, just totally traumatizes you anyway. So I don't think the country has even begun to address this. And trauma and PTSD take a very long time and a very big toll on people. So we, you know, this could go on for years. I think the trauma of the second antifa went on for a very long time.

And it resulted in all sorts of changes in mentality. So that'll take time to change the country. But I think when you ask about the border communities, in many ways those communities were the toughest in Israel because they were already on the border. The older generation in most of those communities had moved to them at a time when

they were under terrorist threat all the time. That meant they would go into the fields carrying Uzis back in the day. I spoke to guys in the north who remembered, you know, they talked about sometimes the good old days in the 60s when they used to go to Lebanon and play soccer with the kids over there. And then Fatah showed up and then Hezbollah showed up. They were used to decades of this, you know, so they think...

The older generation there was kind of made of steel, and they just kind of accepted it. The younger generations will have a difficult time. Some people will not go back or want to raise children there. But the Israeli people are an incredibly resilient people, you know, far more than I can even imagine because the difficulty of this work gets to me deeply.

But when I deal with the Israelis, it's just, you know, it's just a lot of people are just made of steel. And what's the, you know, it's like the idea of the Sabra or whatever, you know, prickly on the outside, but cute on the inside or something. I mean, it's an incredibly tough country. And I think it will get through this. Yeah.

Now, in the United States, especially among the foreign policy establishment, there was a very quick pivot from October 7th to familiar formulas for political solutions, namely a two-state solution. But while that's been unlikely in Israel since the second intifada, do you think October 7th truly killed the possibility of a Palestinian state for the foreseeable future?

Well, I would say that the Second Intifada destroyed the possibility in many ways. Well, let's say it was one of many nails in a coffin, because once Israelis saw the Second Intifada, they thought to themselves, wait a sec, you know, this really is not acceptable. It wasn't like peace. Yeah.

No. And then remember 2005, the disengagement? I think that was like the last chance where someone said, okay, you know what? Let's try to just give the Palestinians what they want. Here's Gaza. Good luck governing it. And I think people might have been willing, some people in Israeli society, I would not, I would not, not the right or the far right, which is just against the Palestinian state in general. But the center and left, I think, said, let's see what happens with Gaza.

And we all know what happened. Immediately the rockets started falling and then Gilad Shalit was kidnapped and it became a huge disaster on October 7th. So I just think the ship of a two-state solution for most people in Israel has sailed. I'm not necessarily one of those people. I think actually a two-state solution, I don't think a one-state solution is good and I don't know how Israel, I don't exactly know what the future holds if you don't have two states. But I just think for the vast majority of Israelis,

That ship has sailed, and I don't see any way, I don't see how it comes back. Yeah, I think that you could argue that Gaza, as you say, after 2005 being the last gas, you can argue that before October 7th, Gaza was an independent Palestinian state in all but name. And obviously it led to the worst possible outcome.

Now, as difficult as it may be to make predictions or fully see the implications of current events that we're still learning about, and as you note in your book, we're still learning about

What happened on October 7th, we don't know everything about what Iran's involvement was, just to take one example. But what do you think are the most important conclusions about the future of Israel's struggle against its adversaries that Israel's political and military leaders need to draw from the October 7th war? And can any of these dilemmas be resolved so long as Iran is still actively seeking to foment a multi-front war against Israel?

I think that one or several of the most important things Israel has to need to try to learn, I hope, at a leadership level is to

you know, to be a little bit less, let's say a little bit less arrogant or sure of itself, which is strange because it's such a part of the Israeli mentality is just to be very sure of yourself. But it requires a bit of internal skepticism. It requires more questioning. It requires never underestimating enemies. And I think that's a big one. Israel needs to stop looking at groups like the Houthis and say, well, it's a bunch of random people in Yemen. Well, it's not. It's people with ballistic missiles. They're very dangerous, these people. I mean,

So I think Israel has to be careful not to underestimate these enemies again. I think, again, it requires more questioning at the top of the system. Iran is always going to be there as an enemy. But let's remember that even if Iran's regime collapses or Iran just changes course a bit,

There's going to be other enemies out there. Hamas is backed by Turkey, which is a NATO ally of the United States. It's backed by Qatar, which is what they call a major non-NATO ally.

Hamas is many ways- As well as a major ally of Iran, so which makes its position even more anomalous. Right. Well, the big thing here is that means Hamas has friends in high places, right? So that's not good for Israel because Israel also has friends in high places, but you don't want to have to compete against these things. And I would say that that's a big elephant in the room. What happens when the Palestinian Authority collapses, which-

Look, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, is going to die eventually. He can't live forever. And the Palestinian Authority could collapse and Hamas could wiggle its way in there, the way it wiggled its way into Gaza. And then Israel would be stuck with a very bad fait accompli of Hamas on two borders, backed by Turkey and Qatar, with Qatar and Turkey having, you know, again, friends in high places in Washington and the West.

Basically, you know, telling Israel, play nice. And I think Israel will be in a very difficult situation there. And again, it won't be about Iran. It will be about the threat that Israel didn't think about. So again, that might not happen, but it's important to imagine that as a scenario, as opposed to just the Iranian thing, which is the known evil enemy, evil empire that we all just know what it is.

That's an excellent point and, quite frankly, a good argument for not letting Hamas survive in Gaza.

Seth, thanks so much for joining us today. And good luck with your new book, The Octopus Seventh War. It's an interesting read. I recommend it. We also want to thank our audience. Please remember to tune in every day for Jonathan Tobin Daily Edition, whether you're listening to us on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Music, or any of the other podcast platforms, or watching us live on Facebook or X, or on the JNS YouTube channel. Please like and or subscribe to JNS, click on the bell for notifications, and give us good reviews.

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