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What's going to happen here in New York in a couple weeks, Dan?
You're going to have a UN General Assembly, you're going to have a number of countries coming in, they're going to recognize a Palestinian state, from what I'm hearing.
And like, well-meaning in these capitals, but what does that do to stop the war in Gaza?
Nothing.
That empowers Hamas to hold out.
It is 7:45 p.m.
on Wednesday, June 4th here in New York City.
It is 2:45 a.m.
on Thursday, June 5th in Israel as Israelis transition to a new day.
I warned Brett ahead of time that I would be time stamping this because this will be an episode of the Call Me Back podcast.
And needless to say, in the few days between when we have this conversation and when we release it, there will be a thousand things that happen.
And I don't want people to think, this is why we timestamp.
I don't want people to think, why didn't they talk about this?
Why didn't they talk about that?
So people, listeners of the Comeback podcast, will know what time and date it was when we had the conversation.
It is a pleasure to be here.
I will say with my longtime friend, Brett McGurk, because we,
I know, I don't say that anymore.
I get cirrus from Rachel Goldberg, Poland, but I've actually worked with Brett going back 20 years.
We overlapped in Iraq in the George W.
Bush administration.
I was there from April April of 2003 to June of 2004.
Brett came in January of 2004.
And then Brett went on, as you heard from the introduction, to work for presidents from both parties.
In these highly polarized political times, the idea that someone, and he's a political appointee, he's not a civil servant.
He's not a career foreign service officer.
The idea that he worked for President Bush, President Obama.
President Trump, and President Biden is quite extraordinary, no small feat.
And he has been intimately involved, as you heard, in the hostage negotiations, among many other things.
And I want to get to that because that is very much what is foremost in our minds today.
But before we do, Brett, I want to talk a little bit about, or you talk, have you talk a little bit about your own trajectory, which we'll get into.
But before we do, I often ask my first-time guests on the podcast where you were.
Just place yourself on October 7th, 2023.
Where were you?
What were you doing as you were absorbing this news?
And if you can recall, what were you thinking as you were seeing all this take place?
Well, first, Dan, I'm so honored to be here with all of you.
And I know these are difficult times in the country, difficult times for your community.
And I am just truly honored to speak with you, share my views.
I will be as candid as I possibly can.
I think I owe it to everybody and all of you.
And it's great to be here with you, Dan.
Your podcast is awesome, man.
And
preparing for this, I've really been listening to them.
And when I jog or go to the gym or something.
2x or 1.5x or
I have a lot of friends now who say to me that it's really boring being with me in person because they're used to my voice at 2x and I don't talk 2x.
So they're like, Dan, come on.
I'm just on normal speed, honestly.
So yeah, so October 7th, I really divide my time.
I spent four years in the Biden White House and had a lot of jobs, as you've said, incredibly intense four-year period.
And divided into two parts.
I mean, and October 7th, obviously being the dividing line, everything happened from October 7th through the end of the administration, which we'll talk about in detail the most intense, complex, difficult, horrific, tragic situation I've ever been involved in.
But on October 6th, in my office at the White House, I actually had a Saudi team in my office talking about Israel-Saudi normalization.
And critics of our administration say we were like chasing this white whale of Israel-Saudi normalization.
I'll tell you exactly what happened.
Early in the administration, Israel and Saudi Arabia approached us and said, hey, we want to like try to get this done.
And they set the end of 2023 as kind of a timeframe.
So, okay.
Now, we had multiple Israeli governments through that process.
President Biden went to the region, you'll recall, in the summer of 2022.
He actually carried a letter from Prime Minister Lapid at the time to the Saudis.
And we were kind of doing what we could to help facilitate and put this together.
So, a Saudi delegation was in my office on the 6th of October 2023 talking about the kind of final pieces of this.
I still cannot say now like it would have gotten done, but it definitely had momentum and a historic agreement that I still believe eventually will happen because that kind of is the direction of travel.
But even in the months prior to that, let me just kind of set this up because we had when President Biden went to Israel in the summer of 2022, he went to Bethlehem, met with the leadership of the Palestinian Authority.
And in that meeting, the main conversation, that meeting, was that the Palestinian leadership should actually be on board with this trend of normalization, which they had not been.
And what happened in the months afterwards is they got on board.
And we had a number of meetings with the Saudis and the Palestinians.
The Saudis sent a senior diplomat to Ramallah for the first time since 1967.
We actually had in 2023, you might not recall this, but two political meetings with Palestinians and Israelis first time in 10 years.
This is all kind of happening.
So my wife and I put our daughter to bed.
And again, I just remember this so vividly.
It's kind of like remembering, you know, 9-11 and critical events.
And fairly late, midnight, 11 o'clock, I don't remember the exact time, but I got news flashed from the situation room about rocket attacks from Gaza, which is not totally unusual.
And of course, we had a very intense 11-day Gaza war early in the administration in 2021.
And then it kind of unfolded, started to look a little different.
And I immediately started getting messages from my Israeli counterparts, from the ambassador in Washington, Mike Herzog, who's a close counterpart, a friend of mine, Zaki and Negbi, the National Security Advisor of Israel, writing
saying,
We are at war.
This is war.
And then we saw the news of incursions from Hamas, very obviously well-organized combat units.
And it unfolded as the night went on.
And my Israel lead, Sam Sutton, who interestingly, I'll mention her name because she tried to get a ticket here, but we're sold out.
So she couldn't get a ticket.
You need to know people.
You need to know the right people.
So I'm sure she's listening to the podcast.
She's a brilliant, totally dedicated public servant.
And she was on her way to New York because her husband lived in New York and she turned around to come back.
Jake was trying to take a vacation with his wife and Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor in Italy at the time.
But I stayed up the entire night.
I went to the White House very early next morning.
And still, though, fog of war, like it was still unclear what exactly had happened.
And honestly, the horror of October 7th really unfolded over 24, 48 hours and the Nova Music Festival.
It just got worse and worse.
So that was my experience in October.
So I knew immediately we had, from that moment on, through the end of my term in the Biden administration, that was going to be my main focus.
We had to protect Israel, had to defend Israel.
And like anything like this, when that happens, you don't know exactly what you don't know.
And I don't want to fast forward, but it's only four days.
On October 11th, the Israelis honestly believed that Hezbollah was about to launch another attack, like the other shoot-a-drop.
It was all a coordinated campaign against Israel.
And there was almost a second front on October 11th.
We can talk about the merits of that, but that was a very intense day because we were in this just complete uncertainty, and the intelligence picture was pretty good, but not great.
But the one thing I remember, Dan, the President Biden said, I got to go to Israel, like early, and he wanted to go to Israel.
Did everyone tell me he was crazy?
Yeah, well, the Secret Service.
I mean, it was, I should have studied my timeline, but I think we went, what, 10 days out?
I think on October 18th, we were in Israel.
First president in a time of war to land in Israel.
I've done a number of presidential trips.
I flew with President Bush and Air Force One to Anbar Province back in like 2008.
I mean, I'll go way back on presidential trips, and you want to have them kind of scoped out as you possibly can.
And this one, well, on the day we were going to leave, we had the Al-Hali hospital attack in which everybody thought that was Israel, a major massacre.
King Abdullah said, Mr.
President, I really want to see you in Jordan, but please you can't come now because of this horrific massacre.
Turned out Israel had nothing to do with that attack.
That was a bit of a kind of an indicator of the uncertainty of what's actually going on.
But in any case, we went.
And I want to get to that trip.
But before we do, I just, because on October 7th, President Biden delivered what I thought was a very powerful statement, made it clear that the U.S.
was going to be standing shoulder to shoulder with Israel.
He made it clear, I think, in that speech, the military assets he would be deploying to the region.
There were press reports that Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Biden had a phone call, and basically virtually everything Prime Minister Netanyahu asked for, at least at that time, the president agreed to.
So there was clearly a decision by the president to just be completely locked arms with Israel.
It didn't have to be that way.
And there could have been a big effort to de-escalate right away.
That wouldn't have meant abandoning Israel, but certainly trying to just bring the temperature down.
All the arguments we have heard over the last year and a half, the potential for it to spread.
And you could have imagined that in the immediate days.
And yet, President Biden, the administration, just projected no daylight between the U.S.
and Israel.
So that was, again, that was not axiomatic.
That was a decision.
Tell me about that decision.
Given what was happening, it seems blindingly obvious.
I think any American president is going to stand with Israel.
At least I hope, I have to say.
I mean, and I think the critics of our policy of standing with Israel do not understand and appreciate the determined enemies organized by Iran.
that after October 7th were sharpening their knives at Israel.
That's what we faced.
What we faced from October 7th on was a multi-front war against Israel.
I wish that wasn't the case.
That was the case.
And there was a view early on that Israel's existence was at stake.
I remember Prime Minister Nanya who said to President Biden on one of those very early calls, Joe, this is the Middle East.
And in the Middle East, if you're weak, you're a roadkill.
And we are seen as weak.
You know, he was right.
And Hezbollah Nasrallah made a faithful decision to join in on October 8th with the rocket attacks in the north.
With the demand being, after this horrific attack into Israel, 3,500 trained Hamas fighters and organized military invasion of Israel, killing 1,200 people, kidnapping nearly 300 people, old women, children, bringing them back into Gaza with a strategy to then tie Israel's hands and say, you cannot now, you cannot fight us.
And what happened immediately was Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas saying,
we need a full permanent ceasefire.
We'll do a hostage trade, but basically go back to October 6th status quo.
And that was the core demand of Hamas early.
And frankly, we'll get to this.
It's kind of still their core demand.
Like, we get to stay in power.
Yeah, they get to turn the clock back to October 6th.
Yeah, I mean, that was basically what you had.
And you had the so-called axis of resistance, these proxy groups organized by Iran, all joining in.
And they started to attack us, and they started to launch UAVs and rockets and missiles from Yemen and Iraq and Syria.
That's what we were dealing with.
And if the United States of America is not going to stand with Israel in those moments, in that time, in that period, the risk of a much broader war, I have to say, if you go back, I even searched it in like ChatGPT.
How many times did the, what were the headlines of an all-out, on the brink of all-out Middle East war in the Middle East, from October 7th to like January 2025 when we left office?
And it's something like half a dozen times.
Brink of all-out Middle East war.
And there was not an all-out Middle East war.
And know, Eisenhower has a saying when he left office, he was kind of, after eight years in office in the 50s, and JFK came in, and they were all kind of all, you know, brash and confident.
And Eisenhower was asked, I'm paraphrasing, but that his foreign policy was kind of boring and didn't really accomplish much.
And he basically said something to the effect, you know what, in eight years, we didn't lose a single soldier.
We didn't lose a mile of territory, an inch of territory.
And he said, that didn't just happen.
By God, that didn't just happen.
And the policy we set early in October 7th to to help defend Israel, to help reduce human suffering, I have to say, and that was a core component of the policy, as horrific as this war has been, and to see Israel come out of this stronger.
I mean, that was basically the policy that we set, which looked very daunting at the time.
And I don't want to get ahead of things, Dan, but I will say, when we left office on January 20 and we handed the baton off to the Trump team, where was the Middle East?
We had a ceasefire in Gaza and a roadmap for getting to a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
We had a ceasefire in Lebanon, Lebanon, a new government in Lebanon.
Hezbollah had basically been completely knocked on its back.
A new government in Lebanon that wanted to assert Lebanese sovereignty.
We had the Assad regime had been toppled in Syria.
We had relations with the Gulf, I think, about as strong as they had ever been, which I think the Trump administration is now building on and rightfully so.
We had quiet in Iraq because the militias had declared a ceasefire.
because they were getting their asses kicked.
And you had Iran in the weakest position it had ever been because we helped defend Israel twice against against two massive missile attacks.
And Israel had a very successful counterattack that we were not a direct part of, but certainly were kind of a part of, which took out Iran's strategic air defense.
So you had a Middle East which had been totally transformed.
And that was because of a very consistent principle in American policy.
And for those who criticize our policy, and there's a lot of criticism, and believe me, I criticize things, it's hard.
It's hard when you're making these calls.
But I think there is a failure to acknowledge and really face down and confront the enemies of Israel.
And I have had folks who disagree with our Gaza policy.
I'll just tell an anecdote.
And we spent a lot of time in the humanitarian situation in Gaza.
And part of the president's trip on the 18th was he wanted to speak to the Israelis also like as a friend.
And he said in his speech, like, we made mistakes after 9-11.
I know the rage that you feel.
And Israel at the time was talking about having a siege on Gaza.
And President Biden said, I just cannot, that's something I cannot support.
You have to get humanitarian aid into Gaza.
And we focus on that a lot.
And I think it was the right thing to do.
But I just think you have to look at the full record.
But to this quick anecdote, we had an open door in the White House to people who criticized us and said we should do something different.
And we had an open door to all the NGOs.
And what I remember being in Jake's office and literally being lectured by a very senior international NGO official, I won't name, about everything happening for about 20 minutes.
And what struck us was that the word that was never mentioned in the narrative of what was going on, Hamas is not mentioned once.
Like Hamas gets written out of this whole thing.
As though they have any agency.
Even like right now, Dan, I want this war to end.
Okay.
This war has to come to a close.
Like Israel has to think about getting out of this conflict as it did in Lebanon in a way that leaves it stronger and does not just have an endless campaign in Gaza going nowhere.
We have to get to an end point.
And we have to get to an end point that can leave a foundation for something better.
And frankly, that means Hamas cannot remain in control of Gaza, security control of Gaza.
The scenes out of Gaza right now are horrific.
There is an offer on the table.
There's a readiness to write them out of the story.
There was a vote down here in New York at the U.N.
Security Council today, once again, and the U.S.
vetoed it.
That, again, doesn't mention Hamas.
It doesn't.
It calls for a ceasefire.
It calls for a ceasefire, permanent ceasefire.
Permanent ceasefire, by the way, permanent ceasefire means Hamas is basically the controlling authority in Gaza.
And then forget about if you care about two states or anything else.
There's no way forward there.
So your point is, with all these players you were dealing with internationally that was pressuring the administration, pressuring Israel, they operated like Hamas had no agency.
Like just Hamas wasn't a character in the story.
This was only for Israel to solve with pressure from the United States.
Trevor Burrus: That this awful situation could be solved by the United States telling Israel to stop or cutting off arms or whatever.
And like it's worth, and we went through every scenario of of thinking, like, first of all, a president cannot snap his fingers and tell an Israeli prime minister who is facing a significant threat to his or her country.
It doesn't really work like that.
Historically, it hasn't worked like that.
So that's, I think, just a very simplistic view.
I think an American president has significant influence and ability to kind of direct the course of events in a certain way, but to basically say you have to stop, and especially after October 7th, I think it's just naive and not realistic.
And then the one we always got was cut off weapons.
I believe strongly, and I know this because I read a lot of information at the time.
I know how adversaries of Israel think.
If that ever happens, I think you'll have a much longer bloody war in the Middle East because the adversaries of Israel are waiting for that moment, and they're not going to say, oh,
okay,
Americans just cutting off weapons from Israel.
So now maybe we'll stop and have peace.
You'll have the opposite.
And like, I believe me, I want this, everybody wants peace.
Well, I want to talk about, I want to go back to November, December, 2023.
You were, I think it's safe to say that there's only one person in this entire room tonight who's been intimately involved in hostage negotiations, and it's you.
Most people don't know what that's like to do what you had to do and what you did in the administration, what you did when you were handing things off and working closely with Steve Woodcoff.
And I want to talk about these different rounds of hostage negotiations.
But the hostage, the first round, you know, over 100 hostages back, late November, early December.
What was your thinking then as to what could produce what was ultimately produced, which was this, I think it was an eight-day, right?
It was an eight-day ceasefire, temporary ceasefire, getting all these hostages back.
Going into it, you thought what could get Hamas to make this kind of concession?
We realize, and I'm, you know, Dan, we were going to talk about a little bit of background, but like from that very difficult year in Iraq.
I think, Dan, you and I are sometimes like, oh, they were in Iraq, so therefore they must be total neocons and want to change regimes over the world.
I think anyone who lived through that experience comes out of it with a very, I hope is how I came out of it, a very disciplined approach to thinking through national security problems, a very careful approach of using the force of U.S.
military power,
and approaching a problem not from an ideological prism at all, but through a pragmatic, practical, problem-solving lens.
That was my spending almost a year there and seeing it and then being in the White House with President Bush as we tried to adjust the strategy to kind of align ends and means.
So, I look at a situation, and you do a net assessment of the who are the players, what are the interests, what are the power dynamics, and then what are the ends, ways, and means that you're what are you trying to achieve?
How are you going to do it?
What are the resources?
And when it came to the Gaza conflict early after October 7th, it was very clear: without a hostage
deal of some kind or arrangement, without hostages coming home, this war is not going to end.
You can't, like, the hostage situation was so awful.
And having been to Israel shortly after October 7th, so many times afterwards, like to end the war, you have to have an arrangement with the hostages.
Hostages have to come out.
That was what we settled on early.
I think that is still right.
And that led to the November deal.
The November deal was basically like, look.
And you got to go back in time to that because, you know, I was at the Manama dialogue before the November deal, like three weeks into the war.
And we're trying to get the deal.
I just come from Doha.
We're working on it.
I remember talking to President Biden around the time about what we had to do to try to get this done.
And already opinion was forming very rapidly against Israel.
We were trying to say, look, we want a ceasefire.
Everybody wants a ceasefire.
Release the women and children.
And there were a lot of women and children being held, including elderly women, grandmothers, four-year-olds, toddlers.
Release the women and children.
We'll have a ceasefire.
And Israel agreed, as they did a number of times throughout this process, that yes, if, and there's a list, agree to release women and children, we'll stop fighting, be a ceasefire.
And the ceasefire also enables a surge of humanitarian aid and everything else.
It's hard to do all this when you have an intense conflict.
So that was basically: okay, everybody is calling for a ceasefire to get a ceasefire.
Let's holland Hamas to release the women and children.
And I mean, I said it, Manama, like, I just stated that fact.
Like,
there's a ceasefire tomorrow if If Hamas will release women, including like 80-year-old women, children, including toddlers, there's a ceasefire.
And I would hope international opinion would then come down on Hamas.
Yeah, release the women and children and get a ceasefire.
But like, for some reason, it's not as simple as that.
In any case, eventually Hamas and I got it.
You know, we had President Sisi involved in this, and the Amir of Qatar and putting pressure on Hamas.
We got that deal, and women and children started coming out.
And it lasted eight days.
And where it fell apart,
another day I remember vividly because I was at home, me, Bill Burns, working on this.
And Hamas said it came down to the younger women, many of whom had just came out in the January deal, in the first, in the early days of the January deal.
Hamas said, you know what?
Tomorrow we're not going to release women.
We're going to skip to men.
And Israel said no.
And they said no, I thought at the time for very good reason, because why doesn't Hamas want to release the young women?
Because you can imagine all the horrific reasons.
They don't want their stories being told and everything else.
So Israel said no.
We had a discussion with the Israelis about to keep the ceasefire going.
Should we, but
had we done that, the fate of the women would have been sealed.
So, but that's what, I mean, Hamas broke that deal.
The deal was all women and children.
And Hamas on day eight said, no, we're going to move to men.
And Israel said no.
And that's when that ceasefire broke down.
And then we were back to trying to get a ceasefire hostage deal agreement in place, which, you know.
So I was with Minister Gallant after that, January of 24, and he was reflecting in Tel Aviv at the Kyrie, and he was reflecting on what made that deal work.
And he said he believed from the beginning, from October 8th, that the only way Hamas would agree to give up hostages is if they felt that they were under enormous military pressure.
Yeah.
So is that your view, too?
Hamas does not, yeah, they do not respond absent what got to, ultimately got to the deal and what happened last summer and there's been like so much written about i got all the receipts on this i was there okay i was there i still have people tell me well hamas accepted a deal on july 2nd last summer and israel's i'm like no they didn't accept the deal they like they said they accepted a deal and they announced they accepted a deal but they actually gave us back something with like 50 edits in every key place what got hamas to the table in a very serious way and i've lived through this and if i'm fair to myself in august of last year, I was hopeful and we put down a bridging proposal.
But what turned the tables was not the force of diplomacy and it was the force of arms in the Middle East.
And it was the death of Yahoo Sinwar.
It was what really moved the needle strategically was Hezbollah cutting a deal.
Because Hezbollah had said from October 8th on, we will continue to make northern Israel a no man's land until there's a ceasefire in Gaza.
They kind of linked it.
So we were trying to get a ceasefire in Gaza to also quiet down the north.
And after the process fell apart in August.
So following the successful deal, the late November, December deal, you're now talking about what didn't work this summer.
I've propelled a little bit.
Yeah, but you've asked me about Hamas and pressure.
Yeah.
Just what their incentives are.
Like what, from your experience, I mean, I guess do you agree with the gallant doctrine?
Yeah, of course.
Okay.
On the one hand, but also Hamas has a view that, and I've talked now to host.
You've talked to hostages.
I've talked to hostages about what it's like.
What are they doing every day?
What are they?
And this is what is so awful about this thing.
I mean, they say it.
They do not care about the destruction of Gaza, about the loss of life of Gazans.
It is part of their narrative.
And in fact,
in some ways, Israel can play into that a little bit because the worse it is in Gaza, the more international opinion turns against Israel, the more Hamas says to themselves, this is actually turning our way.
And I know Hamas leaders in the late summer of 2024 were saying to themselves and saying to people who would talk to them, who would tell us, you know, for the first time, we have a multi-front war against Israel.
We've been wanting this since 1948.
This is exactly what we wanted.
Like, they thought this is kind of going our way.
And so they're not going to cut a deal.
And that's their narrative.
It's all about their narrative.
It also makes it very difficult to get something done.
But Yahoo Sinoir, you know, there are little peeps that maybe in the summer Heath was thinking and wavering a little bit.
But again, I have all the receipts on this.
And like, President Biden put a deal down on May 27th.
The UN Security Council unanimously endorsed it.
Israel said yes.
Okay.
Hamas said nothing until July 2nd.
And they came in, and the headline was: Hamas accepts the deal.
They did not accept the deal.
They came in with like 50 years.
This is July 24th.
Yeah.
And then over the course of July, we were trying to
see what we get done.
And I got to say, yeah, like the Israelis would take a hard position on this issue or that issue.
But Hamas was never serious about a hostage deal until the December timeframe after Hezbollah cut a deal.
And how I know that is because what is this deal?
It's a hostage deal.
And in December, even after every little thing was worked out, and the reason I spent so much time in the Middle East was to call the bluff on Hamas.
Hamas would say, we want 600 trucks.
Okay, 600 trucks.
We're going to get you 600 trucks a day during the deal.
We'll work with the Red Cross.
You're going to have 600 trucks a day in the CISFAR.
We want this.
Okay, you got that.
It came down to the, okay, who are the hostages coming out in this deal?
And that's not even in late December.
Hamas would not commit to who the hostages would be.
They finally did because
we were going to totally walk away, but they were not engaged in the process of an actual hostage trade until very late in the year 2024.
Okay, I want to talk about that first phase, October, November, December.
U.S.
and Israel are locked arms, no daylight.
And then something seemed to change.
I pegged it around December.
I went back and looked.
The first time you saw, I saw pretty harsh criticism from the administration of Israel.
President Biden is speaking at a fundraiser, maybe wasn't intended to be a public statement, but he talked, it was the first time I had heard him talking about indiscriminate bombing, Israel's indiscriminate bombing in Gaza.
And then there were similar statements, some, you know, private, public, there was that.
Then there was, you go into the new year, there was enormous pressure on Israel not to go into Rafah for months.
And And then in May of 24, there was that UN Security Council vote that was extremely problematic because it, for the first time, it didn't link a ceasefire with hostages.
They almost treated like there were two issues operating in parallel.
And the administration did not veto the resolution.
There was a lot of expectation that the administration would veto it, and they abstained.
So in that period, I'm bookending it from like December of 23 with the indiscriminate bombing characterization and other comments that were critical to the UN resolution.
I guess my question is, was there a decision made by the president that we need actually a little bit of daylight?
We need to put some public pressure on Israel?
So I'm not going to get into every internal discussion, deliberation, and public statements here and there.
At the end of the day, I think you got to look at the record and the results.
Any diplomatic endeavor looks extremely messy in real time.
Any military endeavor, and you got to look at the results.
I do think to judge us fairly, you have to say, where were we when we left office?
And I just went through it.
We deployed the U.S.
military to help defend Israel.
We provided Israel with $24 billion worth of military assistance.
I mean, truly extraordinary.
We also stayed on the Israelis day and night on issues like humanitarian aid.
And yeah, we did have questions about some of their tactics.
Now, the conversation would go a little bit like this.
And I have to say, the Israelis early on said, after October 7th, we we are going into Gaza on the ground.
There was a debate about that, but like all of them, when we went to Israel, it was like in full surround sound, incredible Israeli leaders and friends of mine and Benny Gantz and Gaddy Eisenkad and everybody, they were unanimous in the war cabinet had just formed.
We're going in.
There's no way we're not going in on the ground.
And Israel wanted Gazans to be able to go to Egypt or somewhere else so that you could separate the population from the militants.
And that's kind of in wars, you actually try to do that.
But there's nowhere for gazans to go the un came to us and said we want to let's have a safe zone in gaza this area of mawasi and they had a map civilians can go there we'll flood it with aid we'll try to keep it secure to separate the population from the gazans and the u n said no we can't be a part of that and we didn't support that either in retrospect i think we probably should have but that's a whole other story because the challenge here in this horror that is gaza is you have an enemy that has 300 miles of tunnels tunnels underground, far more extensive than the Israelis even understood.
And you have a civilian population above ground with nowhere to go and a war.
And it has led to this horrific set of circumstances that people see on their screens every day.
And we had horrible events like the humanitarian aid workers being killed and it tears at you.
And anyone who's worked on this conflict can say it didn't tear at kind of the fabric of your soul as a human being on all sides of it.
It's not telling the truth.
So yeah, I don't even know all the pressures the president's under.
He's running for re-election, you know, doing fundraisers.
But I think you got to judge it by the consistency of the policy and what we tried to do.
And I, to critics of ours, I asked the question, well, what was your alternative?
What was the alternative to the ceasefire hostage roadmap?
And I don't, honestly, I don't hear very good ones.
But I just think I go back to that, Dan, I hear what you're saying.
I think you got to judge it by the overall results.
So let's go to May of 24, because by that point, Israel is going into Rafah.
So the administration had been pressuring Israel, don't go in, don't go into.
Rafa, let me actually take on two things you just said.
We never said don't go into Rafah.
We said the whole population is sandwiched in Rafah.
Like,
if you go in with three divisions without a plan, this is going to be a total humanitarian catastrophe.
And the ability of Israel to further sustain the war, I think, would have been called into doubt.
So we said, slow down.
Let's work through this.
We had a number of meetings with the Israelis about how to do Rafah.
And we never actually told them not to go in.
And in fact, the way they did it, and again, like you, you did have far less of a, again, it's reducing human suffering.
There's going to be human suffering, but our objective was try to reduce it.
And you had most of the population actually leave Rafah when the Israelis went in.
And even on the UN Security Council resolution.
Well, they got it.
They moved to over a million people in like 10 days.
It was extraordinary.
Yeah.
So there were some out there saying it should be Rafah or, you know, if they go into Rafah, that's it.
I don't, that was never our declared position and in fact where was Sinwar found in Rafah so you know there were hostages in Rafah and where was I mean you mentioned Rachel I mean look there's parts of this we just completely failed on and so Hirsch is one of them I I'll never stop thinking about that um so yeah Hirsch was killed in Rafah along with his fellow hostages in a tunnel underneath Rafah so anyone saying Israel has no legitimate military claim to dismantle Hamas's infrastructure in Rafah, I mean, of course, they do, because it was truly, that's where Hamas was.
I wanted to do it in a way that reduced human suffering to the extent possible.
Now, the Security Council resolution, look, we vetoed, I don't know, I think we vetoed four or five U.S.
Security Council resolutions because, just like the one today, the president had an op-ed early on in the Washington Post in which he said, you know, this could end tomorrow if Hamas would actually just surrender.
And like, that remains true.
Like, if Hamas would actually relinquish control of Gaza, this is all over.
And there is never an international call on Hamas to do that.
But in any case, and so the Security Council resolutions we vetoed because they always just called for permanent ceasefire, which would leave things at an October 6th status quo.
And that's not something I think the United States can accept, not something our administration would.
Trump administration is the same.
That one, when you look at it, if I recall, Dan, was I think it called for a temporary ceasefire over Ramadan.
It was to the point where we could abstain and not like, but then we quickly vetoed other resolutions.
But that all led up to this period that you and I have talked about, this May 24 onward period where the, and it's amazing to say this because the stuff is still going on now, where the craziness on the U.S.
college campuses, I mean, it had been building before then, obviously, but that's when you saw the encampments.
The spring of 24 is when things, the campuses were, pardon the phrase, on fire.
And I remember around the time speaking with one of your former colleagues who was in the intelligence community, who you know I'm referring to, and he said, we are seeing some intelligence that Sinoir is following what's happening on American college campuses, and it's inspiring him.
It's giving him, it's emboldening him.
He's saying, look what kind of pressure Israel is under in the U.S.
And we now know from one of the hostages that was recently released that during captivity, his captors would show him footage, I guess, from, I don't know, from CNN International or Al Jazeera or wherever.
They'd show footage and say, look what's happening.
Our people, like they literally said, our people are taking over your campuses and protesting against Israel and on our behalf.
And this, what was happening on American campuses was, as I said, I'll use the word emboldening.
When all that was happening, were you looking at what's going on in U.S.
campuses saying this is not only crazy, which it was, but it is actually undermining our efforts to bring this war to a close?
This is like fall of
spring, summer of 2024 is when it was really bad.
So first of all, we know Hamas follows international opinion extremely closely.
And I've talked to hostages who said his captors watched Al Jazeera all day long.
And I remember he said two things to me.
One, they would laugh.
He told me this episode where there was a hostage who came out in the January deal and told me his captors are watching Al Jazeera and there's like an elderly Gazan who, you know, just a horrific situation, again, above ground and talking about having to move again and it's awful.
And like they were laughing.
He said that my captors, they were like laughing at this because it's their narrative.
that Israel is causing all this destruction and therefore we, like world opinion is going to turn in our favor.
And the college, I think Tony Blinken has said this too.
I mean, yeah, the protests on the college campuses made the negotiation with Hamas more difficult.
It's not like I can say empirically, like, we would have had a deal if not for that, but like, definitely, because it's, again, it's their narrative.
Like, you have the war in Gaza.
Pressure's mounting on Israel, like, everywhere.
Yeah.
So why would Hamas cut a deal when they feel like the forces are behind them and not Israel?
And I just think that was just still hard to fathom about this is like the war can stop.
The war will stop if Hamas releases hostages.
That has been the formula from the beginning.
And Hamas says we'll only release hostages if we know it's going to lead to a permanent ceasefire and we stay in power.
We stay in security control.
That's basically what they want.
So that led to the phasing.
A phasing was let's get a ceasefire, stop the war, what everybody wants, stop the war, get hostages out.
And in the stoppages of the war, you negotiate that longer-term arrangement.
And we put in the May deal: phase one was sick and wounded and women.
Phase two are the harder cases, uniformed IDF soldiers, healthy males.
But to get to phase two in a permanent ceasefire, end of the war, we said in paragraph eight or 14, there was like this became like these formulations, people doing it.
And it was eight and 14 were the two paragraphs.
You have to set conditions for that.
And conditions meant Hamas could not retain control of Gaza.
And frankly, across the Arab world, and I'm not going to talk about diplomatic conversations, behind closed doors, everybody wants Hamas to relinquish control of Gaza.
Okay.
It's Hamas.
They're a terrorist group.
It's Muslim Brotherhood.
You know the the views in the region.
But publicly stated, it's very rarely here.
And that is the formula.
Release hostages, ceasefire.
War stops.
As the war is stopped, you have a negotiation for the ultimate end of the war.
I've seen recently there can be an independent council governing Gaza.
But who has the guns and controls Gaza?
It's Hamas.
And what worried me immediately after we finally got the ceasefire hostages are coming out is that, and you saw this, exactly what Hamas wants.
They came out of their tunnels in full military kit and did these grotesque displays of the hostages being released.
That's That's what Hamas wants.
When this war is over, they are back in power.
They will rebuild.
I can probably count on one hand the number of senior officials since October 7th that have senior U.S.
officials that have spent a lot of time, clocked many, many, many, many hours with Prime Minister Netanyahu.
You are one of them.
And you were working with him, particularly on these issues around ceasefires and proposed hostage deals.
This is an uncomfortable question to ask, but I just want to get to it because you have a perspective.
You and I have talked about it.
There is this perception or characterization that Netanyahu, who is ultimately never really serious, at least post the first deal, has never really been serious about hostage deals because they'll jeopardize his coalition, they'll jeopardize his government.
There's all sorts of theories as to why he is not serious about a hostage deal.
And that one way or the other, whenever it gets close, he'll make sure, again, so the characterization goes, he'll make sure that the hostage deal falls apart for his own, as the narrative goes, cynical, manipulative reasons.
You actually have spent time with him talking about these issues, and you also have had to think about the big picture in terms of how to make progress in getting Israelis out of Gaza.
How do you react to this characterization or canard or whatever it is, depending on how you look at it?
Yeah, I mean, Bibi is a tough guy to deal with and very strong-willed.
There's a reason he's been in power for so long.
I think the nature of his coalition right now is problematic.
Remember when he got re-elected and this coalition formed?
I was just coming back from UAE.
I actually went to see the president in the treaty room for something, I forget.
I had a sense of foreboding about the nature of this coalition, just like an Israeli coalition formed with such a narrow majority for a country that really needs unity for all sorts of reasons.
So the coalition is one thing.
And also two things can be true.
You can sit with hostage families, as I have done countless times, and got to know them and got to know them to such an extent.
I think I told them once, like, because, you know, until you have a success, and I've dealt with other hostage negotiations, it's like, it's horrible.
And the demand for many of the hostage families is just stop the war, get our hostages out, do the all-for-all prisoner deal, and deal with Hamas later.
That is like the view you hear from hostage families, which I completely understand.
The view from Israeli political leaders has other layers to it.
We want the hostages out.
We also do not want a post-October 7th environment in which Hamas is still in control in Gaza.
So the government is trying to square that.
And both can be right.
But that's what you're dealing with in your dealing with the Israeli government.
And very few Israeli leaders, I have to say, have said the view I just articulated from the hostage families would basically mean...
And at this point, I have to say, after Mohammed Summar is dead and everything else, there's an argument that, you know.
There's an opening, an inflection point.
Because I said early on, like, Israel has to find its way out of this.
Okay.
But you go back eight, 10 months ago, Yahoo Sinwar is still there.
And the idea that after October 7th, you're going to do a deal that basically allows Hamas to just regroup and retake control of Gaza is for any Israeli government, I think, almost an impossible proposition.
So you have to balance these two things.
Now, did Netanyahu prioritize a hostage deal over other interests?
I can't say that.
Did he say yes to a November deal?
Did he say yes to the May 27th deal?
Did he say yes to the bridging proposal we put down in August?
Yes.
Has he said yes to what Wickoff has on the table now?
Yes.
So each of those key points, Israel is a yes, and Hamas is a no.
And there were moments in which Hamas would say, we need to resolve issue XYZ in order to get to issue ABC, the hostages.
So let's get XYZ.
We had moments like that, and the Israeli government would take a very hard line on issue X or Y, and we'd never get to ABC.
There was never a moment in this process in which Hamas was a yes on a full deal, other than their demand for permanent ceasefire, as I said, in which Israel said no.
So I think you got to be fair about the record.
And there's a lot of politics in Washington.
I'm sorry, in Israel and in Washington.
But no, I think the main obstacle to the hostage deal has been the group holding the hostages.
It is Hamas.
Okay, I'm going to open it up in a moment for a couple of questions, which we'll have time for.
Before I do, I want you to take us to what's happening now.
There's been a back and forth.
It seemed like it was getting close to a new deal that would release 10 living hostages and a number of, I think it's 18 or 20 of the remains of the hostages that have been killed.
And it's something like a 60-day ceasefire.
And then just 48 hours ago, Witkoff said, Hamas is their counterproposal on this deal was completely unreasonable.
I spoke to someone involved with the negotiations on the U.S.
side and the Trump administration, which I was telling you about earlier, who basically said, we're pens down.
Like we told them, you're being unreasonable.
It's totally, your demands are just not going to happen.
So come back with something else.
And so, like, the ball's back in their court.
But what this official pointed out to me is that every time they've gotten close and then Hamas has been, has jammed up the negotiations, then time has passed and then they were able to do something like the deal you guys did in January, like the deal for Idan Alexander.
As time has passed, the situation has always gotten worse for Hamas.
And Hamas Hamas has always had to accept a worse deal than if they had just accepted the deal that was on the table.
So I guess I have a two-part question before I open it up.
One, do you agree with that?
And two, what is your general sense of this current negotiating process?
Do you think they're going to reach some kind of deal that approximates 10 living hostages getting out in a 60-day ceasefire?
Dan, I've been through four administrations.
I've seen transitions.
The worst time to serve is like the early months of a new administration, especially from one party to another, because there is a sense of confidence coming in, and then the world does not respond to what you might hope.
And you go through it like Eisenhower, I'm going to go to Korea and end the Korean War.
He did go to Korea before he came in.
It took him, I think, seven months until he got into an armistice.
It's still a state of war in Korea, but even historians have said he threatened nuclear war to try to get even just that deal.
Nixon, I'm going to end the Vietnam War, spent his entire first term unsuccessfully doing that.
The world is the world.
Adversaries, other leaders have interests that remain the same, even if a new president comes in.
So I'm watching.
I have tremendous respect for Steve Wickoff.
I tell you what, let me tell you a story.
I will answer your question.
Let me tell you a story of how this country should work.
Mild detour, civics lessons.
So Trump wins the election.
Okay.
We were in the middle of the Gaza talks, Lebanon, and like, okay, what could have happened in that moment?
Biden and the Biden team, us, could have said, Trump guys are coming in.
Good luck.
As like Biden would sometimes say, good luck in your senior year.
Like, good luck, guys.
And Trump could have said, I'm going to do better than these guys.
Instead, Jake Sullivan and I went up to Capitol Hill.
We met Mike Waltz, the incoming National Security Advisor, and Steve Witkoff in a secure facility, briefed them fully.
This is like right after the election, on where we were, and laid out what we thought was likely to happen.
I remember this, and others can correct me, but we predicted.
We think we're likely to have a ceasefire in Lebanon by Thanksgiving.
I think we got it around that time.
This is earlier in November.
This is right after the election.
Ceasefire in Lebanon, that'll mean Hezbollah has basically given up and has cut the cord from Hamas.
That's the moment we are going to push for a hostage deal in Gaza and ceasefire in Gaza.
And we have some stuff with the Houthis and other, but like, but to do this, we got to work together because you're now coming in.
They got it.
And like, Steve and I, from that moment, we're talking almost every day.
And that's kind of how it went.
We got the deal in Lebanon.
Amos did an incredible job, Amos Haqzadin, you know.
And I went to Israel on December 9th or something, saw Netanyahu, saw the Israelis, this is what we're going to do.
We're making the run, the final run for the hostage deal.
I think we got it.
And I stayed in, I basically stayed in the Middle East most of December through, frankly, most of January.
A couple breaks because I would leave when Hamas was like playing games and talked to Steve every day.
And then Steve came out at the kind of last moment.
We had like down to two issues and helped get it over the line.
Like, had that not happened, we would not have gotten any of that done.
So I'm seeing Steve now.
Steve now has Steve Wickoff, again, who have tremendous respect for, for, not only the Gaza Israel file.
He gets all the plum assignments.
He has Iran, which I also had, and he has Ukraine-Russia, which I did not have.
And what is happening?
The world is being, you know, Putin's being Putin, and Iran's being Iran, and Hamas is being Hamas.
So
now I'll finally answer your question.
So where are we?
We have a plan on the table.
It's called the Wickoff Plan, as I understand it from what's been said publicly.
It's basically the same template as we had in the Biden outline.
It's a 60-day ceasefire for 10 hostages and 135 life-sentenced Palestinian prisoners.
That's like serious.
That's a big offer for Hamas.
And I know these numbers.
Meaning, because in past exchanges, they haven't gotten that.
They've gotten kind of lower-level prisoners.
This multiple life-sentence prisoners is a lot of people.
We closed on life sentences in the last deal at like 110 or something for more hostages.
So that's a big number.
And those who are left, the life sentences are like, these are terrorists who've killed a lot of Israelis.
So that's a big offer offer that's on the table.
Okay.
And what happened?
Hamas came back and said, we accept.
The headlines are like, we accept.
Well, in fact, they didn't accept.
They came in with fundamental changes to the overall package.
And Witcoff came out very clearly, said what they came back with was totally unacceptable.
And that is basically the same thing we dealt with.
Like,
Israel is a yes, pretty generous offer.
It's not perfect, but Hamas is a no.
And then you have these horrific scenes going on in Gaza because it's a war and it's awful.
And, but it could stop if Hamas would release 10 hostages.
Five on, I think it's five on the first day.
I mean, it's like, what?
And so like, you come back to this.
It's like, what the just
to stop the war, Hamas has to release hostages.
Those who might do the bidding of Hamas would say, yeah, but in 10 weeks, Israel could just start the war again.
Well, okay.
But it's 10 weeks is a long time.
And in 10 weeks, you're going to have peace.
You're going to have a massive surge in humanitarian aid.
And you can do a lot of diplomacy in 10 weeks.
And I suspect Donald Trump is not going to want the war to start in 10 weeks.
And given what Israel's now done to him, now that Mohamed Sinwar, who was a real, you know, the brother of Yaha, one of the masterminds, is gone, I strongly believe and hope you get into that 10 weeks, that is the end of the war.
And you can actually negotiate an outline in which you have an arrangement in Gaza that Israel can live with.
But Hamas is saying, no.
What's going to happen here in New York in a couple of weeks, Dan?
You're going to have a UN General Assembly.
You're going to have a number of countries coming in.
They're going to recognize a Palestinian state, state from what I'm hearing.
And like, well-meaning in these capitals.
But what does that do to stop the war in Gaza?
Nothing.
That empowers Hamas to hold out.
You know, the Norwegians, who I work very closely with, I have great friends in Norway.
But in the middle of our negotiation, they recognized a Palestinian state.
And they thought this would somehow maybe, they literally called me and said, will this help your negotiation?
I said, no, this is like, what, for what?
Right.
This is the opposite.
If you want to stop the war, work with us, call on Hamas to accept the deal and again Hamas response international if there was international pressure right now calling on Hamas to accept the Witcoff deal and it was coming down from all corners and
that matters to Hamas but what are they hearing what's Hamas hearing well you know they're hearing oh more countries are going to accept a Palestinian state that's like and so why should we do a deal this is the trick this is the hard nut of the problem and I give Steve tremendous credit you got to stay at it you got to stay at it you got to stay at it you got to stay at it but uh it's tough all right.
We're going to take a couple questions.
I cannot really see.
Well, I see Jeff, though.
This is like, this is just like a normal podcast for me.
Jeff is right in there.
Go ahead.
Hold on.
Why don't you use the mic?
Can you tell us what it's like in the room?
What's the role of the Ataris?
What's the role of the Americans?
How do you communicate with Tamak?
How quickly do the answers come back?
How did the actual negotiation work?
It's funny because
this negotiation, I've done a lot of negotiations.
So I've done hostage deals with Iran.
I did the Jason Razayan deal, which you may know about, which was controversial at the time, but it's the right thing to do.
I've done other hostage deals with Iran.
I've negotiated with the Russians.
Sometimes you come back from being overseas, come back in the West Wing.
It's like, well, you got to close the deal, man.
And like, well, we're negotiating not only with Hamas, in which if we're meeting
in Cairo, they could be on a different floor of the Egyptian intelligence building.
If you're meeting in
Qatar, they might be down the hall or at their villa.
But that's not the real negotiation because the decision maker is in a tunnel in Gaza.
So,
and in these very tense days in January, like we were waiting on Mohamed Sinwar to give the, you know, the white smoke from his tunnel that we had a deal.
I mean, the whole thing is
right.
So even it takes three days at least.
The Hamas negotiator says, we're on board with this, but we have to have Sinwar sign off on it.
And then it takes days to get it to him.
Trevor Burrus, Jr.: They would need the guys in Gaza to sign off because the guys in Gaza have the hostages who have to actually organize the, you know, and the Hamas would say a bunch of bullshit about we actually don't know where the hostages are.
We need a week ceasefire to figure out where the hostages are.
We knew that was not true.
We're there with a text, and it's written down in detail.
I mean, I think the deal from January is public and go look at it, it's 8 p.m., however long it is.
Detailed negotiations, and either in Doha or Cairo.
And I got to say, you know, the Egyptians were generally helpful.
And I mean, I know Qatar comes under a lot of scrutiny.
I got to say, like, when we came into office in January of 2021, I learned about a policy to pay Hamas in Gaza, facilitated by Qatar, which is Israel's policy.
So, like, and it was, I think, Condi Rice that asked Qatar to have Hamas to have a political office.
So, like, it's not like
the countries actually play a very effective facilitating role in this process.
And if Hamas was not there, they're going to be in Lebanon or Turkey, or it was not necessarily a better situation.
So, it is bothersome that you have Hamas leaders living in Doha.
But I frankly think all of Hamas leaders, justice will come to all of them.
I honestly believe that.
And, you know, so I think Israel will see to it.
it.
A lot of hands.
Go ahead.
What stops the U.S.
from using diplomacy and its might behind closed doors to get other Western countries to put more international pressure on us
rather than doing what the Norwegian fails to use out on regions?
It's a great question.
And what worries me right now is international opinion is turning the opposite direction.
And this is where I got to say, members of the coalition in Israel, I do not believe, advance the national security interests of Israel.
I mean, talking the stuff that is said by Smokedrich and some of these guys is outrageous.
It causes the Brits and others to react.
I mean, I thought we did a fairly effective job.
And actually, it mattered when you see how Hamas thinks.
After the president laid out the May 27th, what became the deal, we had the UN Security Council unanimously endorse it.
And that mattered because the U.N.
Security Council is basically the council that is, you know, Hamas standing up for their interests.
I hate to say that, but they see it that way.
So having that like imprimatur helped.
And it was like, this isn't just the U.S.
deal.
It's like the U.N.
Security Council standing behind this.
It matters.
And I think the shortest way to stop the war right now is for the same thing to happen, stand behind the Wicoff deal.
I just, unfortunately, I don't see that happening right now.
I do think, I think Qatar and Egypt want to get this done.
And I actually am fairly hopeful that this will ultimately lead to over the coming period here, hopefully soon, of getting to this temporary, at least 60-day ceasefire.
And I just, I risk of repeating myself, I hope if you get to that 60-day ceasefire, you then actually have a path to really ending this war for good.
Okay, here's what we'll do in the interest of time.
We're just going to burn through a few questions and then just have you kind of pick and choose.
So they're actually all the time actually work.
Just like you guys coordinated.
So this is all, this is all, there's like a through line.
Gaza is going to need years, like a decade of international support and reconstruction.
Okay.
I think given the salience of this issue, there is mobilization for that to happen.
That will not happen if Hamas is still power in Gaza.
And so you have to come up with a formulation.
And the way I would think about working this, if I was to work in it, you get in the 10-week ceasefire, and you come up with a formulation where you actually do have Hamas no longer the controlling entity of Gaza.
And there might not be a ceremony where it hands over its weapons, but we did have experience in this in some of our conflicts in the ISIS conflict where people who might have been affiliated or something basically agree to work with a new authority.
So given the leadership of Hamas has just been now decimated inside Gaza, I think there's actually a decent chance for that.
But this is where it's linked.
If you want a better future for Gazans, and we do, you should want Hamas to give up power in Gaza.
And this is where some of the protesters on the campus, like, well, actually, what are you really talking about?
Because if you want Hamas to survive in Gaza, that means there's no path to peace or two states or anything.
If you get into the 10-week ceasefire that's on the table now, I think you have an opportunity to really build this international consensus to leading to that.
You know, Egypt has a plan that they came out with, 105 pages, barely mentions Hamas.
But the plan itself is something you can work from.
But you got to stop the war first.
Israel could do a better job of connecting its military strategy to an ultimate political end.
There's a consensus internationally, especially in Europe, that the path forward here ultimately is two states at some point.
And Israel, for reasons based on the horror of October 7th and also for political reasons, has not been able to articulate how they're going to translate their military success in defeating Hamas into a political aim.
And it makes it harder to rally.
It's apples and oranges, but we did the counter-ISIS campaign and built a coalition of like 80 countries.
We had the combination of shared interest in defeating a horrific enemy, but we were also able to like define where we wanted to go.
And we had a Iraqi prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, who came in and actually was able to speak to that.
Like, this is where I want to take things, which helped.
I don't disagree with it.
The double standard is completely true, believe me.
And that's why, as an American, I'm proud when we veto stuff in New York, because someone has to, frankly, do it, because the double standard is unreal.
But Israel needs to, I think, do a better job of articulating how they're going to translate military success into political gain.
A good friend of mine, an Israeli intelligence official, great guy, whose name I won't say.
I should have said this earlier on the pod, but he said, you know, he told me once the difference between Israeli and american strategic cultures he said americans spend 90 of your time planning we have plans for everything and we war game them and and like five percent acting say military operation whatever it might be and then five percent doing the after action like what are that's kind of american strategic culture israel strategic culture is 90 acting and 10 acting again to address the unintended consequences of their action and like there's something there's actually something really to this based upon the situation in which Israel finds itself.
And it's hard to tie, this is such an academic, it's hard, like, oh, just tie a
military has to lead to a political outcome.
Like, well, it's hard to do.
But in terms of rallying international support for what it would really help, this is a difficulty I had to deal with because I dealt with a lot of European capitals and trying to keep.
everybody on side, but it gets tough.
The challenge, I think, for Israel on this particular issue is that it's not just their own public having a hard time with the idea that Hamas gets rewarded with a Palestinian state.
But it's also in the region, the perception of Israel as a paper tiger is a real risk for Israel's existence if there's this perception that Hamas does what it does.
And at the end of it, that's your path to Palestinian sovereignty is October 7th.
I just think geopolitically, it's complicated for Israel.
Look, I think Israel has regained its strength, without a doubt.
But this gets to Saudi Arabia, and I do believe that deal eventually will happen because, again, I look at just interests.
And Saudis have an interest to be interconnected with Israel and into Europe.
This is the India-Middle East European corridor that we announced at the G20 in 2023, six months or so before October 7th.
But that remains like the direction of travel.
You're going to have to have something on a credible pathway to a Palestinian state.
I think that's something that can be squared.
And if I had to project ahead, I mean, Israel will have a new election.
If you read Israeli press today, it could happen in October.
But in any case, they will have an election at the latest, what, next October 26th?
October 26th.
That'll happen for that.
You'll have a new election, and you will have a new government or coalition, which I think will open up some more space.
And eventually, the Gaza War will come to a conclusion.
I think that agenda of integration is still very much something when you're in the region, you still hear about, and something where I think eventually it will happen.
To end on a somewhat optimistic note.
I want to thank Brett McGurk not only for his candor tonight, but also for his public service.
And God willing, you will continue to serve.
Well, thanks for doing this.
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Call Me Back is produced and edited by Lon Benatar.
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Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.
