RON DERMER, Minister of Strategic Affairs - Part 1
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You are listening to an art media podcast.
Right now, what we're trying to do is get to the ceasefire.
We have a team in Doha right now as we're speaking.
I spoke to them twice today before this podcast, and we'll have another conversation tonight.
I hope that we can move this thing forward and get into temporary ceasefire that hopefully can lead to a permanent ceasefire if we can achieve the minimal conditions we need to end the war, which is that Hamas cannot continue to be in power.
It's 8 p.m.
on Sunday, July 13th here in Jerusalem as Israelis get ready to wind down their day.
It's 1 p.m.
on Sunday, July 13th in New York City.
Just a few days ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his delegation, to include Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer, just wrapped up their meetings in Washington, D.C., where they met with President Trump and other senior officials in the Trump administration following the extraordinary and historic success of the Israeli and U.S.
military operations against Iran.
Now there are questions about whether or not there will be announcements about possible normalization of Arab states going forward beyond just those in the Abraham Accords and whether or not there's any progress on a hostage ceasefire deal, all against the backdrop of continued Israeli warfighting in Gaza and tragically continued casualties.
So with those questions, on to today's conversation.
If there is anyone who has been up close and seen events develop firsthand and actually been shaping many of these events himself, it is Israel's Minister of Strategic Affairs, Ron Dermer, who joins me today in Jerusalem, returns to the podcast.
I think this is his third or fourth time on Call Me Back.
Ron, thanks for being here.
It's good to be with you.
I think one of those times you gave me COVID.
So hopefully.
This is true.
Yes.
Hopefully you won't give me COVID this time.
So that would be a success from my point.
You can actually stop right now.
That's right.
I stopped recording now.
That's right.
It was that one was recorded in New York.
I gave you COVID.
Yeah.
Okay.
So let's jump into things.
I want to talk about where you were on October 6th.
And when I say where you were, not where you were physically, but where you were in terms terms of your thinking about Israel's position in the region, you know, the threats arrayed against Israel, Israel's geopolitical position in the region.
You know, if you were like go back in time and say, where was Ron Dermer's thinking on October 6th versus now, 22 months later, where how your thinking has changed?
It's a very good question.
What is it?
Churchill talked about the confirmed unteachability of mankind, that we don't really learn anything.
And it's interesting when you speak to people about what they think Israel should do now, you do that on the the podcast all the time.
And ask them, what do you think Israel should be doing?
And then ask them, well, what did you think on October 6th?
And you will find that 95% of the time, their thinking is exactly the same.
They're just more certain than ever than they're right.
So I have to ask myself that question, where have I changed my view?
And there's really two things that I've changed my view on.
The first thing is I think we face, certainly on October 7th, more than one existential threat.
Because my belief for decades is that, yes, Israel has many challenges.
We have a lot of security concerns.
We have a lot of issues that we have to resolve, both external issues and internal issues, but we really have one existential threat.
I think people use that word too flippantly: a threat to the very survival of the state.
And here, Israel is a problem because it's too small.
I know most people think the biggest problem in the Middle East is that Israel is too big, but actually, our small size creates strategic issues for Israel that would not be strategic issues, like rockets coming right across a border for a country the size of the United States, which is 500 times the size of Israel, would not be a strategic threat to the country, but in Israel it's a strategic threat.
But an existential threat, that is a bunch of fanatics in Iran that are developing nuclear weapons and are calling and working for the destruction of Israel.
That's an existential threat.
So one thing I changed my mind about is that on October 7th, that attack, I think, did pose an existential threat to Israel because it kind of pierced the wall.
that we had built.
And here I'm going back to an essay that was written, The Iron Wall, about 100 years ago.
It may be the most famous essay written in Zionist history by
Jabotinsky, where there was a debate that he had with other people at the time, his political opponents, and David Ben-Gurion and the labor Zionist movement were part of that, where there was a belief among his opponents that by simply showing the goodwill that we will have towards Arab neighbors, local Arabs, that would improve the quality of life, that that would slowly but surely bring them towards some sort of an accommodation with Israel.
And he actually thought differently.
He said, look, the Arabs are a real nation.
They're going to fight us.
They're going to try to prevent us from establishing a sovereign Jewish state.
And what Israel has to do is build up a wall, an iron wall.
And the stronger that wall is, when they attack us, they're going to kind of bang their heads against it over and over.
And eventually, when they realize that they can't beat us, that's when they will actually open the door towards a peace.
And for a century before October 7th, that essay, I believe, was written in 1923.
So it was actually one century.
the Iron Wall theory looked pretty good because what was happening is when Israel established a state, five Arab armies tried to snuff it out in the cradle.
And then two decades later in 1967, you were down to three Arab armies that tried to do it.
Then in 1973, you were down to two.
So Israel's strength had deterred more and more countries from risking in a potential attack against it.
And in 1973, when we turned the tide on this, the awful opening of the surprise attack in the the 1973 war, and then found ourselves close to Cairo and Damascus, there's no question about it, that opened the door to an eventual peace that we had with Egypt in 1979.
And then Israel didn't face this sort of conventional threat to the destruction of the country for many decades.
And we made the peace with Egypt in 1979, made the peace with Jordan in 1994, which had a de facto peace with Israel for about 25 years.
And I think the Abraham Accords 25 years later, which happened in 2020, is the kind of the culmination of the Iron Wall, where Israel's strength, its security strength, its technological strength, economic strength, led to a peace where Israel wasn't making these big territorial concessions in order to make peace.
And so the hope is that we were going to continue in that path.
And remember that on October 6, 2023, it looked like the prospects for a peace between Israel and the Saudis were closer than they've ever been.
And those aren't my words.
That's what Mohammed bin Salman, that's what he said in an interview two weeks before.
During the UNGA, he was in the U.S.
for the UN General Assembly, and I think he said to to Brett Baer, he said to see an interview on Fox House.
He and the Prime Minister both said back and forth.
Exactly.
And that wasn't by coincidence.
It still smoothed the same
thing.
And we were working with the then Biden administration to see how we were going to push this forward.
And that's one of the things I tried to do as soon as we established the government.
Because my job, Minister of Strategic Affairs, I must confess, I wanted to be Minister of Tactical Affairs because everyone's a strategist and no one's a tactician.
I figured there'd be more use for it.
But the Prime Minister wanted me to focus on three things.
One is dealing with Iran and preventing that regime, which has been what has connected us for basically a quarter century, to work with him to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
That was job number one.
Job two was the whole U.S.-Israel relationship.
So he entrusted me with that, working also, of course, with whoever our ambassador was in Washington at the time, Mike Herzog, and now Ambassador Leiter.
And the third thing was to try to expand the Abram Accords and to get this breakthrough with Saudi Arabia.
So I was working on it.
We could talk about that where we were, but there was no question that September came around at the UN.
And it seemed like there was a very high prospect that we could actually get to that agreement within weeks, certainly within a month.
And so, the first thing from my point of view was I saw the existential challenge as being only Iran.
What happened on October 7th, 2023, if you think about that iron wall, is that a hole was punched through our wall.
And it's like those movies that you see in the Middle Ages.
When you breach the wall, all of a sudden you can have a flood of people going through that, what is seen seen as that point of vulnerability.
And that's what I was really worried about.
I didn't think that Hamas could destroy Israel on October 7th.
They couldn't then and they certainly can't do it now.
But the perception of Israel's weakness, how that's going to affect calculations in the region can be very, very dangerous because all the buzzards that are circling at Israel that would love a chance to attack a bleeding Israel, that was my big concern.
And we needed to kind of reverse that tide.
And I feel some people dismissed it at the time, and they may even dismiss it now.
How do we resolve that existential threat?
How do we deal with that existential threat?
Iran is a different issue.
What we need to do is to make sure that that force that attacked us is no longer in Gaza, that we remove that threat.
Because in five years, in 10 years, in 15, 20 years, when people look back, October 7th happened, you know, what came next.
The question is, is Hamas in Gaza or not?
Has Hamas lost Gaza?
We can talk about what that means to lose Gaza.
It doesn't necessarily mean to kill every Hamas terrorist who's running around there.
But if Hamas lost Gaza, that's the minimum necessary in order to achieve a victory, in my view.
Other people can add things to it.
They could talk about territory.
They could talk about if there's a voluntary relocation of people.
That all may be the case.
But the minimal requirement is the force that did that to you on October 7th is no more.
They've lost control of Gaza because of their decision to act.
And I think, in a sense, what was done for the 11 months that followed, October 7th, if I look back now, we're about 20 months into the October 7th War.
And here, your listeners should separate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has gone on for a century, versus the October 7th War, which is a war of seven fronts that we've been fighting.
And we see slowly but surely, we have sequentially gone from front to front to front.
And now we're kind of back where it started.
And hopefully, this will help us finish the seven front war, what we're doing now in Gaza.
And we can talk about that as well.
But for the 11 months between October 7th and September, on the eve of the Bieper attack, I think what Israel did, thanks to the resolve of its people, definitely the military and the soldiers, the courage of our soldiers, and also the leadership of the Prime Minister, because there were many people who wanted to throw in the towel and say, we'll stop the war and we'll leave Hamas in power.
And he refused to do that.
Thanks to that combination of the resolve of the people, the courage of the soldiers, and the leadership of the Prime Minister.
And if we played some small role in helping that happen, then I'm glad we did, those around the prime minister who supported his policy, we were able to plug the hole in that wall because of what happened in Gaza.
We were in a stronger position then.
Rafach was, I think, the key turning point.
When we went in, this was a very important thing.
It was like
kind of spring 2014.
Yeah, where there was an effort to kind of stop the war, leave Hamas with these battalions untouched in Rafah, and it was going to lead to a rupture in the relations with the United States.
And the decision to sort of push through there, I think, was a turning point.
And I think we plugged that wall.
I think what happened in Lebanon subsequently is we've added stories to that wall.
And I would argue that Israel today is in a stronger position, actually, a much stronger position than it was before October 7th in terms of the perception of Israel's deterrence.
It started in Lebanon.
You also have the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria, which wouldn't have happened had it not been for what we did in Lebanon.
But then, of course, ultimately moving to Iran.
Right now, Israel is stronger than it's ever been, at least since I wasn't born in 1967, but at least since 1967.
And it might be, people argue who are historians about this that the perception of our strength is greater than it was even in the wake of the Six-Day War.
But I believe that where we are today is a stronger position.
And on October 7th, it looked like we were in the weakest position that we had been in decades.
Were you worried at that time?
I'm just like trying to get in your head.
Were you worried that Israel was perceived, because you go back to the 73 War, which you mentioned, the Yom Kippur War.
You know, after 1967, when Israel was triumphant and was, you know, very self-confident, 73 comes, and suddenly the perception is, wait, maybe Israel's a paper tiger.
Were you thinking, gosh, we look like a paper tiger?
And then suddenly they look at Israel and they say, how did they let that happen?
And that was punctured.
No question.
I was thinking I was deeply concerned about it because of that perception.
Now, I didn't think that that was the reality, but obviously because of what happened on October 7th, we let our guard down.
You had this attack.
It wasn't a sophisticated attack, but it was a surprise attack.
And they went in with the trucks and the Kalashnikovs, and it looked like an ISIS force.
And that's kind of what they are.
Hamas.
People tend to dismiss it, but that's what they are.
And there was a perception.
I think the prime minister may have said it in one of his conversations with the president.
I think it was the president early on, that President Biden at the time, that in the Middle East, if you're weak, you're a roadkill.
And so that was the fear.
The existential fear that I had is not, okay, we're not going to rally and take Hamas on and defeat it.
I was very confident that we were going to be able to do that.
It was the fear that the perception of Israel's weakness would lead to a ganging up on Israel and a nightmare scenario.
Now, don't forget, on October 7th, there was a genuine concern that a northern front could open up.
October 8th, Hezbollah started firing.
And so the idea of a coordinated attack against Israel on all of its borders that would combine invasion and missile attacks against Israel was very real.
And we found out later on that that was part of a war plan that Iran has.
Meaning, Iran has a commitment, an ironclad commitment, to destroy the state of Israel.
The question is, how do they do that?
So, one way is to do it with nuclear.
They, you know, when what did Ruffs and Johnny say?
The so-called moderate in Iran, he said Israel's a one-bomb country.
One-bomb country.
Or they could do it with a nuclear business.
One nuclear bomb could take down the entire country.
Right.
They could do it with a nuclear umbrella and use conventional means under a nuclear umbrella and sort of arm Hezbollah to the teeth, arm Hamas, arm the Houthis, Shia militias in Iraq and in Syria.
But they also had a plan, a combination of the rocketing of Israel and the invasion of Israel from multiple fronts, because your listeners may not realize this.
America is 500 times the size of Israel.
Egypt is 40 or 50 times the size of Israel.
We are a very small country.
You know, we say the size of New Jersey, and people kind of remember that.
Well, think about it.
Think about that.
You're completely surrounded.
If you're a small country and you got wonderful neighbors, you know, you got Canadians around you, well, you can make do.
But when small countries are faced with big countries and Iran is, I would say Iran is somewhere between 80 and 100 times the size of Israel.
That's a whole different story.
You see what happens to Belgium and the Netherlands and Luxembourg when the Nazis, a very powerful Germany, was determined on conquering them.
There's nothing that they could do.
Now, we're a much stronger country than some of those countries.
We have a very capable military, but still, we can face an array of enemies, which for most small countries, they could not address it.
They could not deal with it.
And so I saw the puncturing of that wall and the fear that now everyone was going to rush in.
And reversing that, I think, was very critical at the beginning of the war.
And so on October 6th, if you're speaking to me, the one lesson for me was we face another existential threat.
And it's the combination of...
kind of militant Islamic forces on our borders combined with the very small size of Israel.
So it's not a border problem.
It becomes a strategic threat to the whole country.
Because if you go in 10 miles, 20, 30, 40, 50 miles.
You're in the middle of the country.
You're in the middle of the country.
And people don't understand that.
You know, I tell people it's like 40 miles from Tel Aviv, which is like the nerve center of the country.
You know, if you go if Mexico, I don't want to offend any Mexicans, but imagine that you had some sort of force in northern Mexico that would be a terror force that were going over America's border.
It would be a problem for San Diego.
It would be a problem for El Paso.
It's not a problem for Washington, D.C.
It's not going to be a problem for the center of the country.
You have huge strategic depth.
And so weaponry that looks like it's weaponry from 50 years ago and say, wow, that's going to be a threat to Israel that has F-35 planes and has the latest hard.
Yeah, Yeah, it can be a threat.
And so you have to guard against it.
And you have to make sure that that force is not there building up its power so that they can actually just invade you again.
And right from October 7th, we went to October 8th, and we have Hezbollah starting in the north.
And now you don't know, is Hezbollah going to go in?
Is Hezbollah not going to go in?
Are we going to go all in?
They were partially in, but that became a very big concern.
And on October 8th, it was the first time I felt there was an existential threat beyond Iran's military nuclear capability that Israel had to deal with.
And I think we have dealt with that threat.
And at the time, you saw Iran, you had talked for years and years, the Prime Minister talked for years and years, about the importance of stopping Iran's nuclear program.
Yes, they support proxies.
Yes, they were a problem, a nuisance perhaps, a security nuisance for Israel.
But you guys, you were focused on the nuclear program.
Was that a misjudgment in that thinking Iran is just the nuclear threat is the essence of the Iranian threat when in fact they were this ring of fire you're describing?
We knew the ring ring of fire.
No, Mai, I had spoken about this actually years ago, well over a decade ago, when I was ambassador, I said, you know what?
What Iran wants to do is Iran wants to turn Tel Aviv into Seoul, Seoul, Korea.
Now, you have to ask yourself, why was it that North Korea's nuclear program was not stopped?
America has the military power to do it.
It's the price that you'd have to pay to take that action.
And I believe that what Iran's strategy was, is to surround Israel with this ring of fire.
And this is another reason why I was so opposed to the nuclear deal that was done in 2015.
And by the way, the attack that happens now does not happen if Prime Minister Netanyahu doesn't show up and confront that deal then.
People don't make the connection.
I do because I've lived it every day since then.
And, you know, and you have all the scars and the lashes to prove it.
But why?
How did this thing sort of play out?
What Iran wanted to do was to be able not to sneak in or break into the nuclear club, but to walk into the nuclear club.
And what the JCPOA, the nuclear deal with Iran in 2015, would have enabled them to do, remove all the sanctions and allowed them basically to build their military nuclear capability.
It allowed them to do R ⁇ D and then the sunset clauses kick in and in five years it's arms and in eight years it's missiles.
In 10 years it's centrifuges and in 15 years it's the stockpile.
So they can actually maintain their military nuclear capability, advance it under the deal, produce, research, and then produce the most advanced centrifuges while you're under a deal, no sanctions, and then they can build this ring of fire around Israel.
And then, what's going to happen?
Because a lot of people, you remember at the time, said, hey, we're going to have all the options available to us in 10 years, in 2025.
We'll have everything.
So, what's the big deal?
We're hitting a pause button.
You're not hitting a pause button.
Actually, they're advancing their military nuclear capability under the deal.
What would have happened had Trump not withdrawn from the deal and not put those pressures?
And if he would have stayed into it, and I don't see Trump withdrawing if Netanyahu doesn't take a stand, because no one's going to be more Catholic than the Pope, and no one's going to be more pro-Israel than the Prime Minister of Israel.
Mind you, you, I think it's in the U.S.
interest as well.
It's not just an Israeli interest.
But if Netanyahu doesn't stand up against that deal at the time, I don't think you would have had the dynamic happen that ultimately led to President Trump.
He entered the race, remember, two months after that speech.
But I don't think the dynamic would have led to Trump withdrawing from the deal.
Yeah, we didn't know it at the time.
But Netanyahu gave the speech in March.
In May, Trump enters the political arena.
He enters into arena where the biggest foreign policy issue is the nuclear deal with Iran, and he takes a very strong position against that deal.
But what would have been the strategy of Iran?
And this is why everyone was wrong.
They'd say, well, hey, with 10 years, we're going to have the same options.
No, you won't.
Because they're going to surround us with a ring of fire.
And then when it comes time to take action against Iran, when its breakout time is zero, which would have been in year 12, as President Obama once said in a moment of candor, which is 2027, what would happen?
He said that in an NPR interview.
He said the breakout time will be close to zero, which is, you know, for the last couple of years, their breakout time has also been around two weeks.
And everyone says, aren't you worried about that?
Don't you think it was a mistake to withdraw from the deal?
I said, what?
The deal let them have that time.
In the deal, it was just two, three years before they would have had it.
But what would have happened?
What would have been the political argument in Washington?
We can't confront them militarily because if we confront them militarily, Tel Aviv will become sold, meaning they're going to be destroyed conventionally.
Because there were no limits in the deal on what Iran could do with regard to its proxies.
No, and they surrounded it with Hezbollah, and they'll continue to fund all of their proxies around the region.
And then, when you come to the point of a decision, no one would be willing to act.
Mind you, we acted after we dealt with Hamas in a significant way.
We haven't finished, but in a significant way, after Hezbollah was cut down to size.
What was the fear of a potential strike against Iran?
That Hezbollah was going to unload tens of thousands of rockets at Israel.
You know how many rockets Hezbollah fired at Israel during the 12 days?
Zero.
Because there's no Hezbollah.
Zero.
Because of what we did to Hezbollah.
So this whole thing, I think, is a big turning of the tables against it.
But the fear that I had was they're going to create a conventional threat against Israel while they're working for their nuclear program.
Because if they have 10,000 missiles, which is what they were planning to do in three years and to produce 300 of these a month, if Israel doesn't act, they wait, they wait, they wait, they wait, then they have a huge threat.
It would be a greater threat than Hezbollah with its 100,000 missiles, 10,000 of those one-ton missiles that you saw land in different parts of Israel.
And you're going to have 10,000 and you're going to strike it.
And then everyone's going to know you can't act against the nuclear program because they're going to have all these missiles.
So us taking the action when we did was critical.
And frankly, this is why I think the prime minister said it very early on.
He said that Sinoir jumped the gun because they wanted to do a coordinated attack.
And in the end, he jumped the gun and attacked Israel before they had a fully coordinated attack.
Why were they not fully coordinated?
It seemed like there was an effort by Sinoir to coordinate.
Yeah, it's a good question.
There were several meetings of the Iranians with key members of the proxies that they did, several meetings, because there's no doubt that when Sinoir went, it surprised Hezbollah.
It might have been that they were very worried about the story leaking.
Because remember, only a handful of people in Hamas knew about the attack.
That's why it was a surprise.
And our intel didn't pick it up.
And that will all come out, I think, in a commission of inquiry.
We're going to have to study all those issues.
Why were they not coordinated?
What was the threat at the time?
What did we know at the time?
Why were only three or four or five people in Hamas?
Why were they aware of it or not aware of it?
But I think it's safe to say that Sinoir jumped the gun and he acted on one front before the other ones put themselves in a position to act as well.
Because if it happened coordinated in all of these fronts simultaneously on October 7th, the situation could have been infinitely worse, infinitely worse.
And fortunately, we rallied and our military rallied very fast and were able to strike back in Gaza and then systematically deter in the north, Hezbollah, act in Gaza very forcefully and sort of grind Hamas down in Gaza and then turn its attentions to the north, which had the result that it had in Syria, and then ultimately turn the attention towards dealing, which is the big threat, which was Iran, which the Prime Minister and I discussed right away, right after October 7th.
So that's what I'm going to ask you.
So you're back at October 7th, October 8th, October 9th.
You obviously have your hands full.
Are you already thinking, like, could you have imagined that 20-plus months later you would be contemplating a
full frontal war with Iran?
I thought we could do it earlier.
Things took a lot longer.
But there was discussions back then.
That was right away.
I don't know if it was October 8th, October 9th, October 10th, but I remember having conversations with him early that we need to turn the tables on this.
But ultimately, the address is Iran.
If you don't deal with Iran and you don't deal with its support for the proxies, then what is the impact that you're going to have if they can just sort of rebuild this stuff over and over and over again?
But if the question is, was the Prime Minister aware in the immediate aftermath of October 7th that we needed to turn the tables and ultimately deal with Iran?
100%.
Now, he was there before October 7th.
That was his main focus.
I mean, I've been with the prime minister for 25 years.
The first meeting I had with him, I had a brief meeting with him when he was prime minister in 99 when
I was working for Natan Sharansky at the time.
And I went to him and told him he was going to lose based on the polls that I had read and seen, he was going to lose.
That was the first meeting.
I'm sure he really appreciated it.
He didn't really appreciate it.
But the first significant meeting that we had, it was in, I think, June 2000.
And I went to his office in Jerusalem Technology Park.
He was there, and we we had a very long conversation, about an hour and a half, two hours, about all sorts of strategic issues facing Israel.
And at the end of it, you know, we saw it eye on a lot of issues, and we've been working together since then.
But at that first meeting, he said to me, help me prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
I mean, his eye was always on that ball, always.
So we could deal with rounds in Gaza, and we could deal with the Abraham Accords, and we could achieve something with Jerusalem or the Golan High, all of these other issues.
The main issue for the Prime Minister and the main issue for me was always how are we going to remove the existential threat that we face?
And you know, we in a Jewish tradition, we say in every generation, there are those who rise up to destroy us.
That's the generational threat.
It was Iran's military nuclear capability.
And I think that we have removed that threat for the foreseeable future, particularly if we do the things that we need to do now in the aftermath of that attack.
But Iran is not the same country that it was last month.
All right.
During this time, you had this volley back and forth with Iran before the June attack.
October, right.
April of 24
and then October of 24.
A senior official in the Biden administration told me that from your perspective and from I guess the prime minister's perspective, that experience of the back and forth with Iran was the sort of aha moment, the big reveal for you and I guess your colleagues in the government that we can do this.
Iran is much weaker than we thought.
You don't really know until it's tested.
But what April and October did was A, test their capacity to maintain their air defenses and B, their abilities to hit Israel hard.
Tell me about that.
So I don't know if April revealed that as much as October.
April, you remember, they fired 100 ballistic missiles.
They fired also cruise missiles and a lot of drones at us.
And there was only one life that was lost, which was this Palestinian who has somehow left Gaza.
I think he was a worker on October 7th.
He had been in Israel.
And then I think he stayed.
And I think he was in Jericho crossing a street, and a missile like comes from the air.
I don't know if you saw that video, and it hits him.
I thought it was fake because I was like, what are the odds that this is going to happen?
I think that was the only casualty that there was in Israel.
And on October was 200 of these ballistic missiles that were fired.
In the 12-day war, the highest number, I believe, was 153 on day two.
of the war.
So this was more than was in any single day.
Of course, they wanted to do more, but because of our strike, we were able to actually lower those numbers pretty significantly.
And that helped us both on offense and on defense.
But yes, they were vulnerable.
I think it's the wrong way to look at it.
When you're dealing with an existential threat, you have to act.
The price may be higher.
The price may be double or triple or quadruple what you think it is, but it's existential.
It's a threat to the survival.
If you don't act, it's a catastrophe.
So it's not that October or April gave the prime minister the confidence to go act.
You have to act to remove this threat.
It may have given some of the other people in the military more confidence that they could deal with this, but the prime minister was determined to act.
Listen, had the prime minister been commander-in-chief like the American president is, he would have acted 15 years ago.
He came in in 2009, determined to deal with this threat, and he came up against the wall of opposition.
And they had the view that this should be done by the Mossad, and there can be delaying operations and all stuff.
But all of the senior security people were against it.
But that in itself is not this positive.
If you have all the politicians and the ministers for you, ultimately, people don't understand it.
We're a country with an an army, not an army with a country.
And if you have all the ministers behind you, then you can pass that decision.
He did not have them all.
He did not have a majority.
And actually, he built his security cabinet in such a way when he came back now that he would have a majority.
And he does have the majority for these big decisions.
They supported him, and he was able to get that off the line.
By the way, another thing that's important to understand in the way Americans sort of judge an Israeli prime minister, because I encountered this on many, many issues, a lot of it that has to do with the Palestinians.
You know, a president gets elected, he goes for four years, he gets elected again, and then he goes for another term.
A prime minister every Monday when the Knesset is session has to pass a vote of no confidence.
And so things that are very small things in a confidence-building measure, you're going to do this or that very small thing, it can create huge political instability, which is one of the reasons why a lot of diplomatic agreements have to be done secretly.
Because if they're not done secretly, the turbulence until you reach it, because, you know, a press report will say we gave up this concession or that concession, everything is kind of half-baked.
And then that creates all sorts of turbulence in a coalition.
Whereas if you come and you present something full, then people can judge it as a full piece.
And then you just stand on it because it's big enough that you can stand on it.
It's a story, I'll tell you that President Biden was then vice president.
This is in 2010.
And you remember we had this whole crisis over Ramach Lomo.
Wow.
Right.
A name from the past
of the settlements.
Junior official in the Jerusalem municipality decided to authorize some planning decision, and then it turned into a whole great crisis.
Well, several hours before that, we're having lunch, and Vice President Biden's having lunch with the Prime Minister, and I'm at that lunch, and the Vice President asked Biden, asked the prime minister to do something for the Palestinians that was essentially a confidence-building measure.
To be honest, I don't remember what it was.
But I remember it wasn't like a huge deal.
And the Prime Minister told him, you know, Joe, what you're saying, it's not a big deal.
But that in itself is going to topple the whole coalition.
And what am I getting for it?
Am I getting a peace agreement for not?
And then Biden understood it right away.
I mean, he's been in politics for decades.
And he says to the prime minister, he goes, Prime Minister, you remind me of what Joe Biden Sr.
always used to say, never crucify yourself on a small cross.
Okay.
And I fell off my chair laughing.
Okay.
And Biden looks at me.
He's like, you know, what was so funny?
And I said, sir, here you got a Catholic vice president telling a Jewish prime minister in Jerusalem to never crucify yourself on a small cross.
And it's the most succinct understanding of Israeli politics that I've heard.
Israeli prime ministers cannot crucify themselves on small crosses.
Big crosses is something else.
And when you make a peace agreement, let's say, and you've cooked it behind the scenes, well, then, of course, you put it on the table and you let everybody judge.
But you don't have to pay the constant price that you have to pay where you can't even get to the finish line because you're toppled before you get there, which is why the Abram Accords, people don't believe me when I say it.
There were three or four people in the country, in all of Israel, who knew about the accords 24 hours before they happened.
That's it.
That's it.
So, you think we have a good intelligence service?
Maybe not that good, or at least we're not spying on our own people.
But the Prime Minister knew, the National Security Advisor at the time, Meir Ben Shabbat, knew, and I did.
And the Prime Minister brought one person in from the political colleague, Zariv Levine.
He found out that was it.
Nobody else knew.
The military did not know.
The Mossad did not know.
The Shabbat, no one knew.
That enabled us to actually work this agreement out with the Trump administration.
And Jared Kushner played the key role in the Trump administration at the time, to work it out and then present it to the public.
That's why we succeeded.
Or else what you have all the time, and I'll tell you something else that's important to understand about Israel, you know, this place leaks a lot.
Makes for good podcasting.
It makes for podcasting.
But guess what?
I think we surprised the world with what happened in the attack on Iran.
Now, the number of people who knew about that attack is measured in many hundreds.
Hundreds, maybe more than a thousand.
I never looked at the exact number.
A lot.
And it didn't leak.
Okay, just so people understand, you're referring to military planners, military operators, aviators, intelligence people.
That's what you mean.
When you say a lot of people, about a thousand people knew, it was the people who were going to be responsible for conducting the operation.
Only a very small group of ministers.
And then, of course, you have to have the broader cabinet that has to vote on it.
And so they knew before, and
we were all in the room until the attack happened, you know,
kept them close.
Took their phones away.
Exactly.
You're laughing, but that's exactly what we did.
But you had hundreds and hundreds of people who knew about it.
It's not a small operation.
It's a big operation.
Now, that didn't leak.
Now, that should give you confidence that we can keep a state secret.
But a lot of people see the diplomatic side as the something of a currency that you can play with journalists.
And they're constantly leaking things all the time.
All the time.
And it undermines Israel's national security.
These leaks prevent major strategic things from happening.
I mean, most people will say, the Abram Accords, it's a big deal.
It has shifted Israel's strategic position.
And many people will say, well, if we have an agreement with Saudi Arabia, it would be a game changer for you won't get to the agreement if all we're doing is talking about every event that happens in the press.
That's frustrating for journalists, but that's the fact.
What I have seen is that people in the system say life and death security issues, we're not going to leak that.
But yeah, we'll give you a throwaway line of a meeting that happened between this one and that one there, and they'll toss it to them.
And that has huge negative consequences.
And then our Arab partners, they don't want to do meetings with us because these meetings leak.
And then it puts them in an impossible situation.
So that's why I know it's frustrating for journalists, but that's why I think you got to talk less and do more and work behind the scenes.
And then you have a breakthrough where people will see and then they will be able to make their judgment.
In the weeks leading up to June 13th of this year, there was lots of press leaks, leaks in the press, about tensions between the Prime Minister and President Trump.
So my question is,
much of those were what you're describing, which is people like a little colonel here, a little colonel there, here's a little breadcrumb, and then the press extrapolates out something much more significant than it actually was, or how much of it was orchestrated to throw everyone off, especially the Iranians?
It's a good question.
I haven't looked at all the percentages of these things, and I don't want to get into the details of what happened in the run-up to it, but I will tell you as somebody who's been involved at the highest levels of the U.S.-Israel relationships as 15 years, I guess, as ambassador, almost eight, diplomatic advisor, the prime minister, four, and now as minister, coming close to three, two and a half, so around 15 years.
You've never had a level of coordination and cooperation that you have.
But sometimes stuff gets out.
I think it may be because you have a part of the press that is inherently hostile to Netanyahu.
So their willingness to believe, I mean, it's a large part of the mainstream press, let's say, their willingness to believe and to look for any sort of crisis.
I I remember, just to give you one example, the Monday, I think, before the strike, the strike happened on a Thursday, night between Thursday and Friday.
I don't remember if it was the Monday or Tuesday, there was a conversation between the prime minister and the president.
And 50 years from now, people will say that was one of the best conversations ever between a prime minister and a president.
And the next day on one of the major news stations, if not the major news station, they had quotes from the call.
And it was a really
tough call.
They cast it as a tough call and a terrible call and a breach and a rupture and all this kind of stuff with quotes.
And all of it was false.
And I went to the prime minister the next day asking him, did we leak that to make it look like it was a terrible call?
He's like, no, no.
Somebody else came and just assumed that this was a very, very terrible call, who had no knowledge of the call, obviously, because the truth was just the opposite.
But we didn't say anything at the time because we thought it would help us
ultimately with what we were trying to do.
But yeah, you have that all the time.
The rush to take a kind of kernel of truth and turn it into something that it's not.
But I, look, I've had it happen to me sometimes where journalists will quote me as saying something that I never said.
And then what you have is 500 stories about that.
And that assumption is now like a bedrock assumption of everybody trying to understand it.
And it's all based on a complete falsehood.
It was never said and yet they report it.
And I don't know.
You just have to, I guess that's the price of living in a free society where you're going to have to deal with all that stuff.
I made a decision a long time ago that instead of me wasting all my time trying to correct false stories, I just have to move forward and, you know, it'll be what it'll be.
One area where there's a lot of leakage, it seems, and that's been the case since soon after October 7th, which is on the on again, off again, on again, off again, God willing, on again.
hostage negotiations.
That every I mean, I've heard complaints, by the way, from, as you said, from officials in the Arab world who say, you know, the U.S.
conducts all these hostage negotiations.
They get the U.S.
citizens out of Russia.
They get U.S.
citizens out of Venezuela.
They conduct all these hostage negotiations, and nobody knows about it until the American citizen is on the plane home.
And yet with the Israeli negotiations, and this was true, obviously, at the beginning of the war, it just seems that every phase, every round, every trip to Doha, every trip to Cairo, it's like not only do we know the negotiations are happening, but it appears that we have the details.
Aaron Powell, Jr.: Yeah.
So, look, obviously, there's a difference there because most of, if you asked Americans, can you name, you know, three Americans who are being held hostage abroad, you're not going to get 2% of the American public that's going to be able to name them.
And Israel, because of the scale of this, of what happened on October 7th, and 255 hostages, and the hostage families, the difficulty within Israeli society and the desire to bring these people home, it's nothing like you're going to see in any other country.
So I wouldn't compare it to the- I mean, the level of scrutiny that these negotiations are.
Scrutiny and also that the whole country is focused on it.
I mean, you have your sign, I have my son, and people walk around and we want to bring all these hostages home.
And even when there was one, you know, I could say, well, you want to be able to name one American hostage who's being held aboard.
But it was Gilad Shalee.
He's a household name.
It took years, but it was a household name.
And I think it has to do with the Israeli ethos more than anything else.
And it's something that affects our internal national resolve.
And this is an issue that has to be addressed.
And we're committed to bringing all these hostages home.
But
the leaks in the negotiation process process undermines the ability to bring the hostages home.
Like, I think good intentions, frankly, it's irrelevant.
What matters is results.
Are we able to bring these people home or not?
And a lot of times what happens is people position themselves saying, well, I wanted to do this and he didn't want to do this and I want, and all it does is undermine it because we have asymmetric information.
We have much better intelligence on our enemies.
And in this case, it would be Hamas than they have on us.
You know what their source of intelligence is?
Channel 12 News.
Exactly.
Now, a lot of times that's wrong, but sometimes it's not, or sometimes there are pieces of information.
So you're giving information about what potential positions could be in the negotiations, and that undermines our ability to get a deal.
Now, I can't really come and complain to journalists about it because, frankly, that's their...
They're doing their job.
But for the people who are involved in the negotiations, them leaking.
information for the negotiations, that actually can cost people their life.
And they have to be extremely sensitive, which is why I don't really like to talk about it, about where we are in the negotiations, because anything that I say can and will be used against, and it will not help me achieve the objective.
The Prime Minister asked me to deal with this issue of the hostages now, ever since the previous deal, soon after.
He understood that the United States' connection with Israel, because that was my portfolio, is going to affect this hostage negotiations in a very dramatic way.
And that's why he asked me to get much more involved.
Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And the U.S.
explained that because of Trump's engagement and Witchoff and just the weight of the presidency that was being put into it and the U.S.
negotiating directly with Hamas, I mean, suddenly the U.S.
had a much more
that was even after, but it was clear that this was going to be an important factor.
And he wanted me to play a larger role in helping to figure out how to get a hostage deal and to bring these people home.
And that's what we're trying to do now.
And I hope that we'll have good news soon enough.
I mean, nothing is certain.
And the fewer leaks there are, the better chances we have.
And if you go around Israel, you will see people, and I hear from them all the time, that say, you know, forget about the hostages, just finish the war.
And there are other people who say, forget about the war, just bring the hostages home.
But the polling, I mean, there's this poll out from Channel 12.
Speaking of Channel 12, 60% of those surveyed who voted for parties in the government back an agreement with Hamas that would release all the hostages in exchange for ending the war.
An even higher percentage of the elected...
I think, you know, I know a little something about polls.
Okay.
When you say ending the war, everybody in Israel wants to end the war.
The question is, are you going to end the war with a victory for you or a victory for Hamas?
Because when you dig down and you ask people, people, wait a second, Hamas will stay in power.
We're not going to have any troops in Gaza.
They will be able to rearm and they'll be able to do October 7th level attacks again.
I think the numbers will be different.
But frankly, you know what?
I have one advantage or maybe a disadvantage.
I'm not an elected official.
I wasn't elected to the Knesset.
So the polls could be this way or that way from my point of view.
What I want to do is achieve the objectives that we set out to go, and I agree with them, to make sure that Hamas's military capabilities are destroyed, it ends its political rule, and that Gaza no longer poses a threat to Israel.
We set that out at the beginning of the war, and we set out a goal to bring back all the hostages.
And that's what we have to achieve.
Now, at the beginning of the war, there were very senior military officials who said to the cabinet early on in the first days, I don't remember if it was October 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, I can't remember exactly, but they said, Listen, we may not be able to bring any of these people home.
That was a statement that was made to the cabinet.
I was sitting there, and we had 255 at the beginning of the war, 251 who were kidnapped on October 7th, dead and alive.
Around 50 of them were not alive.
And we had four who were there before.
255.
Where are we today 20 months later, after statements were made at the beginning, we may not get anybody back, is 148 of those hostages have been brought back alive.
There were probably somewhere between 200 and 205 who were alive on the day of October 7th.
148 have been brought back alive.
Total over 200 have been brought back because we've recovered many of the remains of the hostages.
And we have, to the best of our understanding, 20 hostages who are alive and 30 who are not alive.
And there's a couple that there was still a question mark, but we believe it's highly unlikely that they're alive.
But 20 were alive and we're committed to bringing them home.
Now we have a deal on the table that, according to that agreement, half of those people would be brought back during a 60-day period.
During those 60 days, we would begin negotiations immediately.
It's actually, I think, on the second day.
We would begin negotiations to see how we can bring about an end to the war.
Now, when we talk about an end to the war, Hamas is going to come with its positions, and we're going to come with our positions, and then you're going to have to figure out a way where you can square that circle.
Is there a way to end the war that will meet the minimal conditions of Israel?
And that's a question that we have to pursue during those 60 days.
I'm more optimistic now than that's possible than I was, let's say, two or three months ago.
But your listeners should know.
We have not had a single day of discussions yet with Hamas, even through indirect talks, of what are the conditions to actually end the war.
We were supposed to, in the second hostage deal that was done in January, those discussions were supposed to begin on day 16, and we were supposed to finish around three weeks later on day 35.
And people think, well, we avoided the discussion.
Not true.
It's totally false.
On day 16, I was with the prime minister in Washington.
I remember I spoke to Steve about how we're going to proceed with Steve Witkoff.
And we sent a team to Doha to begin negotiations.
And our cabinet met five days later.
I think it was on day 21, that evening to set out Israel's position for how we're going to end the war, to begin those discussions.
That morning, that same morning, Hamas came out and said, we're not returning the hostages for that Saturday.
And what happened was for the next three weeks, we were constantly getting into a discussion of what was going to happen that Saturday.
So one of the reasons why I think this framework lends itself to having a more serious discussion, if we do get into this deal now, is because we will get a very significant number of hostages on day one, and then we get more hostages towards the end of the deal.
I don't want to get into specifics, even though there's been reporting on it, but at least we will have, I think, several weeks where we should be able to negotiate because these negotiations are not going to be simple negotiations, and they're going to be ups and they're going to be downs.
And you don't want a situation where every week all you're talking about is what's going to happen that Saturday rather than actually getting to those negotiations.
And I would prefer to exhaust all possibility around the negotiating table to see if it's possible to end this war without having to go in again.
And that's what we should explore if we get to the 60-day deal.
Right now, what we're trying to do is get to the ceasefire.
We have a team in Doha right now as we're speaking.
I spoke to them twice today before this podcast.
And we'll have another conversation tonight.
And I hope that we can move this thing forward and get into temporary ceasefire that hopefully can lead to a permanent ceasefire if we can achieve the minimal conditions we need to end the war, which is that War Hamas cannot continue to be in power as it was before October 7th.
I want to come back to that.
But you said before you're a student of polls.
I'm a student of polls too.
I hear you.
It's all about how the question is asked and it's all about who you ask.
That said, I've been to Israel, I don't know, every two to three months since October 7th.
And every conversation, this is anecdotal, but every conversation I have had on this visit relative to any other time I've been here, you know, numerous times since October 7th, the level of exhaustion I hear when I talk to people.
And I talk to people from all walks of political life.
And there's a level of,
and I think actually the inflection point was success in Iran.
I would say the three inflection points that I would say cumulatively were getting Sinoir in October, the success of the Pager operation, and then the extraordinary military operation against Iran.
And it's not just the military operation against Iran, it was the, is the cooperation between Israel and the U.S.?
People were like, wow, like the U.S.
is really in this with us.
Is this not the time?
And you have, you know, Milawim reservists who have been 100, 200, 300 days.
I have a family member's boyfriend who just was just notified he's being called back up to go into Gaza in the middle of September.
And like the family's like, oh, gosh.
I just feel it this time.
It's like palpable that people just want it to end.
And I know that's easy for people to say because it's more a sentiment than it is a strategy.
And you have to deal in the world of policy options and policy trade-offs and strategies.
But
you're not an elected official, but you are an official in a government.
Do you sense what I'm talking about, what I'm describing?
I think that that's definitely the momentum of public opinion.
But at the end of the day, if you're a leader, and I definitely think the prime minister is, you have to say, here is strategically what we need to do.
And sometime the polls are going to be with you, and sometimes they're not.
But you have to persist.
And it could have been that a lot of people believed that a year ago.
And there were people, I don't know exactly what the polls were one year ago, but I'm sure you could cite polls from last April or May where they say more than 50%.
But had the prime minister taken that course, everything that we've seen happen would not have happened.
So you couldn't have opened up, you couldn't have pursued the successes on other fronts if you had been in a ceasefire?
No,
it wouldn't have happened.
I think Hezbollah is clear that, because remember at that time they were talking about let's do a ceasefire in Gaza so that we can get a ceasefire in Lebanon.
The idea was to go from one ceasefire to the other.
You get a ceasefire in Gaza, and then if you get a ceasefire in Gaza, there's no reason not to have a ceasefire in Lebanon, and then we bring about in, you know, and then you wouldn't have been able to take out Nasrellah and Israel.
For sure.
But, I mean, that's in practice the dynamic that happened.
But I think beyond that, look, if I remember correctly, around two-thirds of the Israeli public were for the disengagement from Gaza.
Poll that now.
2004.
2004.
2005.
2005.
Yeah, when that happened.
What percentage of the Israeli public was for the withdrawal from Lebanon?
You know, you have decisions, they're very popular, and in any single moment, they could have a massive majority, even Shalit.
The Shalit deal, I think, was 65, 70%.
Ask people, do you think it was right to do it then or not?
Or did it affect what happened later?
Or the terms of the, yeah.
Yeah, there's a lot that you can discuss about it.
But if you're just going to stick your finger in the air and follow the polls, you're going to make a lot of bad decisions.
Right now, I think the vast majority of people would think that the disengagement in Haiden was a huge mistake.
Either the way it was conducted, the timing it was conducted,
and we're suffered.
I mean, you can't really disconnect the disengagement from October 7th.
Now, it could be, well, you could have had your force posture in a certain way and you could have your intelligence, but look at what they built up.
Look at what has been in Gaza.
You don't have that in Judea and Samaria.
Why do you not have that?
Because we did Operation Defensive Shield, not after 20 years, but in 2002.
And since then, we've been doing operations all the time.
And that has prevented a monster from growing.
Yes, we have terror threats there.
Yes, you have terror attacks, but it's nothing like the scale you have in Gaza.
In Gaza, they basically, we had rounds where from the air, and the prime minister authorized several of these rounds against in 2000, 2008 actually was before he came in.
That was in the outgoing Omer government, 2012, 2014, 2021.
We had rounds of confrontation.
But when you went in there with our troops on the ground, what we saw they had built up was shocking.
And we even knew that there was a lot that they had.
But look at the tunnel network that they have built up.
And look how long it's taken to actually go through that because it's very painstaking work to deal with all of the destruction of the tunnels.
Why did that happen?
Because we didn't control the external perimeter.
You don't have that problem in Judea and Samaria.
You have that problem in Gaza.
By the way, you have that problem in Lebanon.
That was one of the problems in Lebanon.
If you don't, we're fortunate right now because the land bridge, at least temporarily, has de facto been blocked by the new Syrian government because, you know, they may not love us, but they also dislike Hezbollah and Iran, where they see as partners to Assad, and they're right about that.
So that land bridge has been taken off.
But that corridor, removing our presence from that line that separates Gaza and Egypt, you know, the Philadelphia Corps and the Rafa Corps, without us being there, all of these weapons came in and they developed the manufacturing capabilities and we weren't operating over 20 years, day after day or week after week, in order to do operations.
And now we're paying the price for not having acted for many, many years.
And I think what you have to ask people is, what are the actual terms of ending the war?
Has Israel now removed itself from this line?
Is now Hamas going to be allowed to rearm?
Are then we going to, and a lot of people say, say to me, who come see me, say, well, we should leave, get all the hostages, and then, you know, three months later or six months later, we'll just go back into the fight because they're going to violate the deal.
And then you got to ask yourself, that's what you think.
Okay, hold on.
I want to stay on that for a moment because that I hear, that's the most common criticism or counterproposal I hear.
So I just want to spell it out.
There are many who argue, just end this thing.
Again, back to people who are exasperated, exhausted.
End this thing.
Get the hostages back.
Get all of them back.
Get as many as you declare an end to the war.
There'll be some kind of ceasefire, and Hamas will violate it.
And Israel will have
the opportunity to go back in and finish off Hamas.
The only difference is Israel will have all its hostages.
Yeah, what's the opportunity?
What's going to be the opportunity?
They're going to violate it.
What are they going to do?
Who knows?
Try to fire rockets.
I'm not going to go to the bottom.
Okay, they're going to fire.
Let's say they don't fire a rocket.
Let's say they just
use the opportunity of not having an Israeli troop in Gaza because that's their demand to end war to just rearm, to have stuff go.
So you're telling me you're going to catch them smuggling in one operation, and then we're going to mobilize all of the Israeli reserves to go off and finish off Hamas because of that.
And the international community is just going to sort of accept it.
Let's think about what actually happened on October 7th.
1,200 Jews were murdered on October 7th, right?
People were beheaded.
Babies were burned.
Women were raped.
Where was the international community after October 7th when the hostages were in there?
How much support did we have?
And how long did it last?
Two weeks?
Three weeks?
Maybe?
Four weeks?
So now you're working on the assumption that you're just simply going to walk out.
You're going to leave all the Israeli troops out.
There's going to be some minor violation because it won't come all of a sudden one day.
And if they're smart, they won't fire a rocket for you in five years.
They'll just build up their capacities again.
Now, when we go back, we're going to have to start from scratch to go back.
Now, let me ask you something.
If you lose another 200 soldiers going back, does it make sense?
Well, if you lose 400 soldiers going back, does it make sense?
These are decisions that a prime minister actually has to make.
They're very difficult decisions.
But part of the, in my view, October 7th, the symptom is don't focus on tomorrow.
We're only focused on today.
And it's dangerous for us to go back to the same attitude.
We cannot be only focused on today.
What will happen in the future will happen in the future.
You know, we'll leave Lebanon, all be good.
You know, we'll leave Gaza and hey, they're firing rockets at us from Gaza.
You remember what some of the leadership of Israel said at the time when they supported the disengagement?
There were rockets that were fired.
Yes, there were rockets that were fired.
So we left.
Now it's a thousand times worse.
People always say, let's do something different.
And their hope is they're going to take something that is difficult and they're going to improve it.
But he can also make it much worse by orders of magnitude, 10 or 100 times.
That's what the disengagement did.
It took a tactical threat where we were paying a price because you had communities there.
They were protected.
Soldiers were there.
There was a price to see.
You had settlements in Gaza that were being protected by the IDF and soldiers were getting killed.
And soldiers, now look at the numbers.
I haven't checked it before the podcast, but look at the numbers and ask yourself: okay, what was the price that we paid for having that presence there?
And what is the price that we have for leaving?
And look at the difference.
The same thing I would argue in Lebanon.
Now, if you have a peace agreement, which is not some unilateral withdrawal, if you have an understanding, and if you create security understandings that can actually hold and meet some sort of sniff test that you don't have UniFil, which is a farce in Lebanon, or U-BAM, that like disappears in five seconds, it's a different story.
But I think I understand the desire, and I think here is what you'll find in every Israeli on either side.
Every Israeli, no matter where they're on the debate.
And I don't know if they're number 70, 30 or 50, 50, whatever.
Finish it.
One way or the other, finish it.
You know, if you're going to finish the war, don't go back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.
We have the issue of the reserves.
And what people should know outside of Israel and understand something.
Ministers in the Israeli government, their sons serve.
When we're making decisions, we're not making the decisions for...
President company included.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I have it.
And, you know, and Gotti Eisencott, he lost a son.
He lost the nephew.
Yeah.
Okay.
So when you make these decisions, it's not like it is in many other countries.
And, you know, the United States, I don't know exactly, you know, the decisions of how many people served in the military at the time, but you're talking about something thousands of miles away where World War II, the percentage of the U.S.
population that was serving is actually lower than the percentage of the Israeli population that's serving now.
Right.
And so with all the difficulties and the ultra-Orthodox draft issue and all that, when you're making these decisions, they are taken very seriously.
And what I think we need to do is stay the course.
There were those who, like I told you at the beginning, that thought we're not going to get any of these hostages out and just, you know, go through it.
And at a time, maybe
a lot of the population could have been there.
I think the prime minister made the right decision in the first deal that was done.
And by the way, not everyone agreed with him.
In that first deal, one of his coalition members, Ben Ver, he voted against it.
In the second deal, he lost.
Ben Vir and Smolch.
Yeah, both of them were against it.
And I think, and Ben Veer left the coalition for a period of time.
But the prime minister is determined to achieve both of those objectives.
And it's very hard because one, we have many virtues as a people.
Patience is not one of them.
And that's very hard.
And especially because the hostages are suffering.
You know, every day is an eternity for the hostages and for their families.
And I want to say I understand.
I don't understand it.
I don't think anyone can put themselves in the shoes.
When you have a son, now all the women are out of Gaza, the women are hostages.
But you have a son, you have a nephew, you have a brother.
No one can understand what they're going through.
And I understand it.
And that's why we have to work to do everything we can to bring them home.
And we're working on it.
But don't you worry that they're not.
You cannot sacrifice the future for the sake of the present.
You cannot do that.
And I believe that at the end of the day, we will be able to achieve both of those objectives.
It's hard to do it.
It takes a lot of persistence and a lot of fortitude.
But here, again, I give credit to the prime minister.
And
everybody thinks his decisions, it's all a political calculation because they don't ascribe to him the fact that.
The New York Times Magazine has like thousands of words on that this weekend.
But substantively,
do you agree or not agree?
And this is really the question: are you going to leave Hamas in power to rearm and grow stronger?
That's the decision that you have to actually deal with.
So let's, do you imagine a world when you see when you hear from Israelis who say, finish it?
I don't want to go back.
I don't want my son going back.
Just finish it.
Whatever was started on October 7th, finish it so that we're not revisiting this one year, five years, 10 years later.
What is finishing it actually mean?
Well, that's when you have to have a strategy and a plan for what the day after is going to be.
Do you really imagine Hamas could disappear?
I think the question is, how do you demilitarize Gaza and end Hamas's political rule?
Like the goal, from my point of view, and I have never heard this from the prime minister, is that we're going to kill every single Hamas terrorist in Gaza.
That would require us to take over everything and to stay there indefinitely.
That's not what the goal is.
Hamas exists today in Judea and Samaria in the West Bank.
You have Hamas terrorists, and we operate against it.
But they don't control it.
They don't control it de facto, like Hezbollah was doing before October 7th.
And they don't control it de jure, which they do in Gaza.
Now, it might be that Hamas is willing to give up de jure control of them and they say, well, somebody else will take out the trash, but we'll continue to have this militia again.
That's something that's not acceptable.
And what we need to do, I don't want to, again, I don't want to drill down too much on this issue because that's one of the questions that has to be resolved during the 60 days.
And again,
can our minimal security requirements, can our minimum hit the maximum that they're capable of living with?
And we're not going to know that until you have that engagement.
And that's the engagement that you need to have in the 60 days.
Because is there only one answer for what Gaza can look like the day after?
No.
I think there are several potential answers of what could happen.
I worked on this last year, I mean, very quietly, of a potential plan that could work.
And we will continue to work on it now.
But I think during those 60-day period is when it's going to become super relevant.
From when a lot of people say they have a day after plan for Gaza and there's no strategy, really what they say is let's give the keys to the PA.
Okay.
It is asymmetrical where you're ⁇ Israel's a rational actor and you're talking as though there'll be a point at which you will break Hamas.
They'll be so weakened.
They're a rational actor and they will fold and agree to a deal.
But, you know, as I've heard and I believe from many, I've heard many.
Permanent ceasefire or temporary ceasefire.
Permanent, temporary, that they would agree to basically not rule Gaza at the end of the war.
That they could be broken to the point that they just give.
If you believe that they're not messianic, that they don't believe, you know, we will will just keep, we will never be broken.
Like, is that not a factor that they have this asymmetrical advantage that they don't mind?
They don't care how many of their people are killed and they can keep recruiting new people.
I don't agree with that.
I think
the senior official in the Biden administration that I may have discussed it with you on the podcast.
I don't remember the last one we did, but I remember him coming in December 2023 and said, you know, Hamas is an idea and you can't destroy an idea.
And I said, Nazism is an idea.
And you have Nazis in Charlottesville walking around with tiki torches that they got at Bed Bath and beyond, but they don't have a country called Germany.
And ISIS is an idea.
And you have ISIS flags probably in many places in Europe and probably in some college campus dorm rooms.
But they don't have a state between Iraq and Syria.
So we have to deny this idea, its territory, to hatch those plots and to build up their forces in order to perpetrate these attacks.
That's what you can do.
I'm not, I'm going to destroy the idea of Hamas, which is effectively the Muslim Brotherhood, when you say what is the idea of Hamas.
That's not.
We have to figure out a solution for Gaza, which means that they don't have de jure control or de facto control of Gaza.
Is that possible?
We're only going to know whether it's possible if we get into that discussion.
And I hope we'll be able to get to a temporary ceasefire, have that argument.
There'll be a lot of back and forth and ups and downs.
Hopefully, it won't play itself out in the press.
And we'll see if we can exhaust all the possibility.
Because I think we need to exhaust the possibility for many reasons.
One is to be able to return all our hostages because we're committed.
I mean, even if you get the first 10, you're still going to have 10 left over and you have the remains of the existing hostages.
And that's very important for all the families as it should be.
The difference is the element of time because the time for living hostages is different, even though the families are suffering tremendously.
Even I met families who have lost people in hostage, and they cannot close.
They can't have any closure whatsoever without actually bringing the remains and to bury them in Israel.
So we have to be able to get them out.
But what we hope to do is get into that temporary ceasefire and then have this conversation of the permanent ceasefire, which can bring all the hostages home, which will save us from having to do a much broader military operation with our soldiers.
And that could be not 10, it could be scores to finish the job in Gaza.
And the other third is you're talking about a lot of Palestinians on the other side, that if you do a major operation, you look at the numbers of how many soldiers we lose and how many they lose, there's going to be a lot of people who are going to get caught in the crossfire because Hamas uses them as human shields.
So, my view is: first, try to exhaust the possibility of reaching an agreement during those 60 days before you have to move on to that decision.
And I think, look, the U.S.
is committed to getting into the temporary ceasefire and finding a formula to bring about a permanent ceasefire.
The other mediators want to get there, whether we'll succeed or not.
But I think the chances of succeeding in the wake of what happened in Iran and what happened to Hezbollah are greater than they were before.
The chances of succeeding at finding that formulation, because I think there are also a lot of regional players that want to see how this can end.
And almost all the regional players, almost all, and I'll be a diplomat and not say who's on the other side of this, does not want to see Hamas continue to rule de jure or de facto Gaza.
Now, what is Hamas willing to do or not willing to do?
A lot of it depends on what the alternative is.
If they see that if they fail to do this, Israel will have full backing, not just from the United States, which we have had, thankfully.
And we're very grateful to the Trump administration for the backing they give us, because it didn't happen all the time with the Biden administration.
You know, I say I will give credit where credit is due, and it was good that the relationship did not break, but it bent.
I mean, we had an arms embargo on one, at least one weapon systems, and a lot of things were slowed down in the American system because of what we did in Rafah, where we were told, you know, thousands of people are going to die.
And I think we had one incident of civilians were killed where 1.4 million people or 1.5 million people that were in Rafah, and they moved out of harm's way.
And we were able to go in and clean out a lot of this territory, which is good for us, but also good ultimately for what's going to happen in the day after Gaza.
So I think we need to see in the next few days whether or not we can reach this temporary ceasefire and then immediately start the discussions on a permanent ceasefire to try to find a formula that will work, that will meet our minimal security requirements.
We're going to wrap the first part of our conversation with Minister Dermer here.
Please look out for part two of our conversation with Ron Dermer.
That's our show for today.
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