Hamas Isn't Surrendering, It's Evolving - with Yonatan Adiri

Speaker 1 You are listening to an art media podcast.

Speaker 2 Israel right now is busy with how to prevent another October 7. While that is very important on the ground,

Speaker 2 you never win a complete victory. Once you win militarily, you're actually exchanging an old set of problems to a new set of problems.

Speaker 2 And where countries fail over the long term is that they think that the solution to the old problem is going to hold to the new problem. They're planning the next war.

Speaker 1 It's 3.30 p.m. on Sunday, November 9th here in New York City.
It is 10.30 p.m.

Speaker 1 on Sunday, November 9th in Israel, as Israelis marked the return of IDF soldier Hadar Golden's remains after 11 years in Gaza.

Speaker 1 Overnight, on Friday, deceased hostage Lior Rudayev was returned by Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group to Israel.

Speaker 1 Lior was the deputy security coordinator at Kibbutz near Yitzhak and was killed fighting Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists on October 7, 2023.

Speaker 1 And as I mentioned earlier today, Hamas returned the body of Hadar Golden, an IDF soldier who had been held captive in Gaza since 2014.

Speaker 1 His family has been fighting for his retrieval for the past 11 years.

Speaker 1 Meanwhile, over the past few days, the IDF has been carrying out a series of strikes on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon. The European Union condemned these strikes, calling it a breach of the ceasefire.

Speaker 1 Many within Israel are questioning whether the Lebanon ceasefire will hold as Hezbollah rearms and the Lebanese armed forces are slow to intervene. Now, onto today's episode.

Speaker 1 In a recent piece for Yiddiot Akhronot, ARC media contributor Yonatan Adiri argues that while Hamas's military capabilities have been largely destroyed, it has realized that real power has shifted from the battlefield to the international arena by integrating into the institutions of the Palestinian Authority and leveraging its support from Qatar and Turkey to gain legitimacy.

Speaker 1 Hamas can manifest its charter through political and diplomatic means, trading its rockets for stamps and its tunnels for offices.

Speaker 1 Yonatan is the host of ARC Media's very own What's Your Number podcast, where he and his co-host, Michal Levram, talk about Israel's economy and tech sector. They host a range of interesting guests.

Speaker 1 I listen to the podcast weekly. I encourage you to do so as well.
There is a link to it in the show notes to subscribe.

Speaker 1 Yonatan is also a health tech entrepreneur and served as a senior advisor to then-Israeli President Shimon Peres.

Speaker 1 Before today's conversation, one housekeeping note: Arc Media is looking to hire an experienced production manager.

Speaker 1 If you want to be part of our team, you can follow the link to the show notes to see if you match the job description and apply. And we'll be back with Yonaton after this word from our sponsor.

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Speaker 1 Yonah Dunn, welcome back to the podcast.

Speaker 2 Great to be back.

Speaker 1 And as our listeners know, What's Your Number is among my favorite podcasts.

Speaker 1 I don't want to pick among my children on the actual Arch Media platform, but in the weekly diet, What's Your Number has a fixed slot. And I want to ask you, how is podcasting life treating you?

Speaker 2 Look, it's first, it's an honor to be a descendant of the family, a member of the family. But, you know, it's, I learned how to pack my suitcase always with a mic and my earphones and camera.

Speaker 2 As we end up sometimes, Michal and I recording from different areas on the planet, but it's great to get the feedback and help folks understand where the Israeli economy is, what the opportunities are.

Speaker 2 The Windex, which ended up being an interesting hit among investors. So, overall, a great experience.

Speaker 1 You also have learned is podcasting, while it's sometimes going to be a pain in the neck, always having to travel with a microphone and have your gear.

Speaker 1 There was a time when we did this where it was only in audio. There was no video, which is when I agreed to sign up to podcast.
It was a simpler time. It was just audio, but now we're on video.

Speaker 1 And I should acknowledge that if those watching on video, including you seeing me on video, are wondering why I'm banged up, I have learned, and Yonatan, you have children who play sports.

Speaker 1 My son plays tackle football. And Campbell and I always thought that the dangerous part of tackle football for our family would be our son playing, not us watching in the stands.

Speaker 1 But I was the dutiful father trying to get a key video angle at his game on Friday. And I won't go into the gory details, but I jumped up on something to get a better angle.

Speaker 1 I might add at my wife's urging, she was saying I need to get a better angle. And I splattered.

Speaker 1 I'll spare our viewers and our listeners from the gory details, but let's just say I spent the better part of the weekend in the hospital.

Speaker 1 I'm going to be okay, but it does look like I was the one playing football rather than the one who was operating the iPhone camera.

Speaker 2 You know, there's a Hebrew song, famous Hebrew songs talking about parenting being the second childhood and grandparenting being the third childhood.

Speaker 2 So, you know, my kid plays tennis, my daughter does gymnastics. I totally get your second childhood experience when you're with them at game time.

Speaker 1 I mean, again, I don't want to dwell on this, but my wife did, Campbell did say, you didn't get a good shot that last play and he had a good play. So you got to get a better angle.

Speaker 1 And that is what prompted, like, that's what kicked off the dominoes falling that wound me up in the ER. But you know what? We endure.
So here we are.

Speaker 1 In any event, to our listeners and viewers, if you see me in the days ahead, you will know what happened, but you'll know that I'm okay.

Speaker 1 I'm not some sort of victim of the mean streets of New York City or what may become in the next couple of years, the mean streets of New York City. I'm okay.

Speaker 1 All right, Yonatan, let's get into this conversation.

Speaker 1 Before we dig into this question, as I referenced in the introduction of where Hamas is heading and what it means for Israel, what it means for Gaza, I want to ask you, how would you define this vague and somewhat counterintuitive status quo between Israel and Gaza, Israel and Hamas, right now?

Speaker 1 Like, how would you describe this moment we're in?

Speaker 2 At a practical level, we have the living hostages back. We control more than 50% of Gaza.
But there is this new animal around called the CMCC, run by the U.S. Central Command.

Speaker 2 We had Admiral Cooper here at the grave of Omar Nutra.

Speaker 1 He's the head of Central Command.

Speaker 2 Yeah, who's a very frequent visitor now in Israel, very prominent figure, by the way. We saw him yesterday supposedly playing basketball with Al-Jolani in one of the tweets that came out of there.

Speaker 2 But overall, tens of countries represented at the CMCC here. Some are arguing arguing this is a degree of freedom that Israel lost over Gaza.

Speaker 2 In parallel, we have an American-led UN Security Council proposal for the establishment of the interim international force that is supposed to go into Gaza once Phase 2 is formally kicked out.

Speaker 2 So we're in a bit of a stalemate right now with quite an international presence on the ground.

Speaker 1 What's the UAE doing? They're part of the CMCC?

Speaker 2 I think two things to kind of look into what happened once President Trump left the region.

Speaker 2 We saw Saudi Arabia and the UAE disengage and in back channels, letting the White House know that if phase two, that is the disarmament of Hamas west of the yellow line, is not taken seriously, both Saudi Arabia and the UAE will not engage in funding, financing, and helping the reconstruction west of the yellow line.

Speaker 2 And so that's a very strong statement. And obviously, as you know, nature abhors vacuum.
And so in that space, we see Turkey and Qatar stepping in.

Speaker 2 And there's quite a bit of a back and forth between Jerusalem and Washington around, you know, Turkey and Qatar's active involvement in what's going on beyond the yellow line.

Speaker 1 And now that the dust has settled to some degree, what would you say are the attitudes of Israelis coming out of the war beyond what you just said? Anything else you want to add to that?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think, you know, overall, there's been a huge sigh of relief here in Israel once the living hostages have returned. And that does two things in Israel.

Speaker 2 On one side, you go back to the sort of internal quarrels of the Israeli political system, the recruitment of the ultra-Orthodox, all of that issue, and sort of the societal dynamics.

Speaker 1 Whether or not the ultra-Orthodox should serve in the army.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And so that's back in center stage.
We've had, you know, all these internal issues, the judge advocate general story.

Speaker 1 This is the story of the chief military attorney who's caught up in a pretty bad scandal of leaking. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So I think we're kind of back to our vices, right? And that's to me part of the sort of lean back dynamics that I'm very much afraid of because the other side is not leaning back.

Speaker 1 But I'd add one other dimension, which when I talk to Israeli family, Israeli friends, there's also just this sense of Israelis like badly needed break, meaning they've been, you know, for two years, over 300,000 Israelis served in some way in the war, the wear and tear on all these families.

Speaker 1 That's after you get to the stress of the hostage families.

Speaker 1 And the, so there's just this sense of like for the first time in two years, which is a long time for a country with as short a history as Israel has, meaning the longest war they've ever fought.

Speaker 1 For two years, the entire country felt like they were just on and on edge and being stressed. And for the first time, I feel like that has really kind of receded.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And, you know, a personal story from yesterday, it's November, right? And it's still very hot in Israel.
And yesterday I took my daughter and went to the beach in the morning.

Speaker 2 And for two years, The beach was never too crowded because it's one of those places that if there is a siren coming from Yemen or wherever, you don't really have any place to go to.

Speaker 2 And it's the first time in two years that I went to the beach and it was packed and people were so happy. And no one was kind of worried, you know, when the siren comes, what should I do?

Speaker 2 And my daughter was actually telling me, Abba, I'm so happy we can just spend our day here and we don't have to worry about sirens. My daughter is five years old.
She's my youngest. Wow.

Speaker 2 For her, it was the toughest, you know, mental recovery.

Speaker 2 And yesterday was the first time where she kind of looked up at me and said, you know, I'm so happy we can be at the beach and we don't have to worry about anything. Wow.

Speaker 1 And if you asked an average Israeli, you know, just you're on the beach yesterday, you're talking to some Israeli on the beach in Tel Aviv, and you said to them, You know, hey, did Israel win the war?

Speaker 1 What's the general sentiment on that?

Speaker 2 I think they're busy with the day-to-day for now, being kind of happy to take whatever wins we have, right?

Speaker 2 The fact that there are no sirens, the fact that we can go continue with our day-to-day, but people still have a kind of an open eye. Like we sleep with one eye open still.

Speaker 2 Nobody really feels it's really behind us. There's the MBS visit coming up.
There's some questions in the Israeli media around whether or not normalization is coming.

Speaker 2 And I think that would really steal the sense of, was this a victory or not on the Israeli right?

Speaker 2 And kind of when you look at mainstream media, actually Netanyahu is being attacked from the right in terms of the sense of victory.

Speaker 1 Okay, so now I want to go to the piece you wrote for Yiddiot Ahrunot, which was excellent. We'll link to it in the show notes.

Speaker 1 You wrote this piece for Yiddiot titled, Hamas is Evolving, Not Surrendering, in which you describe what you think is what Hamas is morphing into. So what do you see Hamas evolving into and how?

Speaker 2 Well, the learning competition hasn't ended. In Israel, as you've described it, we're breathing a sigh of relief.
We want to lean back. Hamas is not leaning back.
It is morphing.

Speaker 2 I called it on the piece neo-Hamas. Like, you know, like we have neo-Nazis.
They're not sending Jews to death camps, but they are around and they are very capable at what they do.

Speaker 2 So Hamas is undergoing a very interesting and a very alarming process. I would say there are three things happening on the factual basis.

Speaker 2 The first, which Israel drove it into, is turning its back to its Iranian backers and seeking support in Ankara and Turkey, where it had basis before, but now that seems to be the main backer and the main area where Hamas is seeking controlled bounce back.

Speaker 2 That has a lot of diplomatic coverage. You know, Ankara-Washington relationships seem to be really rosy at this point.

Speaker 2 So, you know, it may be looking at a better diplomatic back now than it had before.

Speaker 2 And obviously, Qatar remains a strong supporter.

Speaker 2 The second piece for Hamas is it realized that while they were fighting the war in Gaza, Fatach, the Palestinian authority led by Abu Mazin, who also is the head of the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which is the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, fought a diplomatic war with Israel and actually succeeded really, really well in kind of laying the groundwork for the next episode of the Israeli-Palestinian dynamic, which is first and foremost going to be, I think, the next episode diplomatic, the Mamdani dynamic, the ICJ, the ICC.

Speaker 2 And so Hamas is openly speaking, and that's the third kind of fact to look into right now. Look, we're going to take a step back.
We're not going to be called Hamas anymore.

Speaker 2 You saw them also on the street in Gaza. They're wearing hats that say in Arabic, Al-Amniel Dakhili, the internal security forces, they don't say Hamas.
You don't see the emblem.

Speaker 2 You don't see the green anymore.

Speaker 2 And they're morphing into the technocrat, you know, government, which may allow them, and I think that's where they're aiming for, to take over the Palestinian national movement and basically climb up to the diplomatic level and continue the struggle from there.

Speaker 2 I don't think Hamas gave up on an inch of its overall agenda of zero Jewish sovereignty in the state of Israel.

Speaker 2 but before october 7th 2023 this is not how hamas operated just to be clear right this is a real evolution or a real modernization of how hamas thinks of itself in terms of interacting with palestinian society it's hamas's fourth morphing let me maybe parallel this so folks who are listening would understand let me take an example from the corporate world right think about google that everybody knows right First iteration, Google does search.

Speaker 2 They do it so well. By the time everybody else tries to figure out search, Google has already morphed into ads, right? They figured out how to monetize.

Speaker 2 By the time digital groups succeed in monetizing, Google buys YouTube and becomes a media company.

Speaker 2 By the time people figure out media, Google buys a small company called Android, steps into mobile phone operating systems, right? And so on and on.

Speaker 2 If you don't morph very fast in the context of modern counterterrorism, much like it is in the modern of, you know, modern digital competition, you don't survive. Hamas has been super adept at that.

Speaker 2 In the 80s, it's this Muslim Brotherhood, non-national movement.

Speaker 2 That's how it gains the Israeli defense administration's kind of, I don't say, you know, allowing them to grow in Gaza predominantly, as they say, we're not national.

Speaker 2 All we care about is Muslim Brotherhood type. Let us pray.
Let us, you know, have social, societal rights.

Speaker 2 In the 90s, it morphs into, you know, the suicide bombing entity that we all are familiar with, as it actually calls the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, being basically, you know, traitors of the Palestinian cause because Yasser Arafat goes through the Oslo process.

Speaker 2 In the 2000s, they step up, they become even more ruthless.

Speaker 2 But after the disengagement from Gaza, Condoleezza Rais pressures the government of Israel to allow Hamas to run as a political party in the Palestinian Authority, which, by the way, was contrary to the Oslo agreements.

Speaker 2 This is a terror organization. It doesn't accept the state of Israel.
It should not have been allowed to run.

Speaker 2 But there was this concept in DC, right, saying let them run they'll moderate hamas definitely runs presents itself as a you know morphs again it's a third morphing into a political movement i remember these debates in dc if hamas suddenly has to be responsible for being mayor and not martyr they'll moderate and they sold the story really well right i mean would you agree i mean they they were very convincing the same way that they are convincing right now And then we saw them two years later, you know, aggressively.

Speaker 1 I think they're a little less convincing right now, given the past two years.

Speaker 2 I would hope. I would hope.
You know, I I think Hamas as a brand is less convincing for sure.

Speaker 2 But the new morphing, this idea that now they have a fertile ground, anti-Israeli ground on the diplomatic side, and they can kind of climb up to that legitimate element of being, you know, a member of the Palestinian national movement is something we need to look for because, you know, Israel right now is busy with how to prevent another October 7.

Speaker 2 While that is very important on the ground,

Speaker 2 they're planning the next war. It is not an October 7 modeled type type war.

Speaker 2 And Israel's been very adept in previous hostile engagements that we've had with the Palestinian movement, with Hezbollah, and others to learn lessons and not to prepare to the last war, but actually prepare.

Speaker 2 You know, it could be, you know, the beepers and everything we saw in Hezbollah was actually a very clever way in which Israel doesn't get ready for the last war.

Speaker 2 It actually tries to be a step ahead of its adversary. I think with Hamas, we're not there yet.
Okay.

Speaker 1 So, in terms of how Israel is processing this new threat, do you think Israel is ready to deal with this new Hamas?

Speaker 2 I think we're in an inferior position. And Hamas, Turkey, Qatar identify that in the new space, in the diplomatic arena.
You know, you had Scott Galloway recently discuss that with you.

Speaker 2 Sort of the Israeli brand has been severely hurt.

Speaker 2 And I think Hamas realizes, Hamas and its new backers realize that if they can, you know, kind of swing or throw the center of gravity of the struggle against Jewish sovereignty into the diplomatic realm, that's where they stand chance of beating Israel, because I think militarily it's very clear they've lost the war.

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Speaker 1 Okay, so now I want to come back to Turkey and Qatar, which you mentioned earlier. So what are the interests of Turkey and Qatar Qatar and Gaza?

Speaker 1 And well, first, what are the interests of Turkey and Qatar? Then I want to get to Israel's response to it.

Speaker 2 Bernard Lewis, the famous Middle East expert historian.

Speaker 1 Princeton historian. Honestly, Bernard Lewis, we should do at some point a whole episode on Bernard Lewis because talk about someone who I call him the most honest historian about the Middle East.

Speaker 1 I mean, book after book after book were just so relevant to like every moment we've been through, especially these last few years. So we should link to the Bernard Lewis books, but go ahead.

Speaker 2 So I think it was about a decade ago where he said that the way he looks at the first half of the 21st century, it's very likely that Iran will become Turkey and Turkey will become Iran.

Speaker 2 And he said it very profoundly in the sense that there will be secularism in Iran that will get it to be like the Ataturk Turkey that we knew.

Speaker 2 And Turkey will go through Islamic radicalization that would turn it into something akin to what we know of Iran of 2020, call it. And I think that's exactly what we're seeing.

Speaker 2 At the end of the day, Israel succeeded in exercising a 20-year-long preparation of pushing back the Shiite axis, right?

Speaker 2 Hezbollah, Syria, and severely crippling the nuclear and ballistic missile program of the Iranians. But again, nature abhors vacuum.
So now the Middle East is reforming.

Speaker 2 And here looks Turkey and says, oh, I mean, I've been building my neo-Ottoman. right kind of make turkey great again type strategy i took over libya i took over somalia right?

Speaker 2 Leveraging, you know, the weakness of Europe, leveraging the weakness of, you know, that area in Africa. And as we spoke last November, I'm pushing the third part of this triangle in Syria, right?

Speaker 2 I'm trying to build this triangle. But Israel is out there preventing me from doing that.
And Hezbollah, Assad, and Iran are preventing me from doing that.

Speaker 2 So ironically, Israel's success in its war against the Shiite Crescent has actually relieved a lot of the constraining factors from Turkey's reach into reclaiming its role in the Middle East.

Speaker 2 So I think that's what's really happening vis-a-vis Turkey. So Turkey wants to make Turkey great again.
It is engaged in Central Asia with Azerbaijan and all that part.

Speaker 2 It is operating what it called the Mavivatan, which is the strategy of the blue homeland from the Black Sea all the way to Libya, the Mediterranean, claiming that as its own waters, by the way, severely crippling Israel's ability to export natural gas to Europe.

Speaker 2 This is already a big issue.

Speaker 2 And trying to set up the third part of that triangle in Syria, so far without much success, because Israel is insisting on holding on to that veto in order to have Turkey at bay.

Speaker 2 And so, from Turkey's perspective, there's one proxy that it wants to build, which is in Syria, that is part of that triangle, and Israel is preventing that from happening.

Speaker 2 The rationale there is that any corridor from east to west has to go through Turkey. That's its official policy.
So it wants to own Syria, not related to Israel.

Speaker 2 That's not the case when it comes to Gaza. Turkey's actions in Gaza are geared to basically allow for Turkey to meddle in what it actually sees as its own backyard, which is Jerusalem.

Speaker 2 And being the sort of modern host of the Muslim Brotherhood, that's where Turkey is right now, vis-a-vis Hamas and vis-a-vis Gaza. It wants to be the guardian of the Neo-Hamas.

Speaker 1 Okay. And what about Qatar?

Speaker 2 So Turkey is, in many ways, you could look at Turkey as a genuinely strong and prominent Qatar, right?

Speaker 2 Qatar at the end of the day is a few hundred thousands of indigenous people owning this massive gas fields and building this empire of retainer diplomacy, bribes, and massive influence campaigns throughout the West.

Speaker 2 Turkey is an 80 million people country, a million babies born each year, $1.5 trillion economy that has no natural resources, massive industrial, military, industry capacity.

Speaker 2 Qatar looks at Turkey and says, we have the money. You guys have 20, 30% inflation each year.

Speaker 2 You need to see, you need to weather the difficulties of your economic policy as you kind of stretch into the Middle East. We'll be your bank.

Speaker 2 You be the infrastructure player, the geopolitical giant that holds the Muslim Brotherhood capacity.

Speaker 2 And I think that Israel's attack in Qatar actually threw Qatar further into Turkey's hands because they they realize it is at the end of the day, kinetically, right, a small island.

Speaker 2 Whereas Turkey is a member of NATO, the biggest military NATO outside of the U.S.,

Speaker 2 a country where America allegedly holds nuclear capacities on the ground in Turkey.

Speaker 2 And so I think Qatar is now kind of looking into this synergy with Turkey that can help it further enhance its global posture.

Speaker 1 Well, also with the decimation of the Iranian regime's offensive military capabilities, not complete decimation, but near decimation, to the extent that Iran was regarded as the most powerful geopolitical player in the region, other than Israel and maybe Saudi Arabia.

Speaker 1 There's also this sense that Turkey has now, you know, replaced Iran in the region as, I mean, again, you could put Saudi Arabia in proximity to Turkey in terms of its reach, but in terms of its ambition, Turkey is like the new Iran in the region.

Speaker 2 It is in a way. And part of the challenge for Israel right now is that you know, you never win a complete victory, a total victory.

Speaker 2 Once you win militarily, you're actually exchanging an old set of problems to a new set of problems.

Speaker 2 And where countries fail over the long term is that they think that the solution to the old problem is going to hold to the new problem. I'll give you an example vis-a-vis Iran.

Speaker 2 The strategy Israel put in place to deal with Iran had three legs, diplomatic isolation.

Speaker 2 Washington, Europe, sanctions to cripple the regime's economic infrastructure, and intelligence operations and kinetic operations on Iranian soil. None of these three can happen in Turkey.

Speaker 2 I don't think there's anybody who can challenge the DC-ANCARA relationship right now.

Speaker 2 The Tom Barack dynamics, the American envoy and the ambassador in Ankara is gaining, you know, has incredible sway in the White House.

Speaker 2 I don't think there's a way to sanction Turkey or to hurt any of its economic activity because Europe depends on Turkey. Just to give you a number here, 27% of Europe's steel is imported.

Speaker 2 16%, more than half, is imported from Turkey, right? The entire green revolution, I don't know if you saw last week Bill Gates walking back from 20 years of a focus on global warming and so on.

Speaker 2 That dynamic created two winners, Turkey and China, right? Turkey is this polluted backbone of the European economy.

Speaker 2 Everything you want to manufacture in Europe but can't because of green standards ended up in Turkey. So you can't sanction Turkey because Europe depends on Turkey.

Speaker 2 And the third, Europe is a NATO country. We can't operate kinetically without triggering, you know, Chapter 5.
We can't operate on an intelligence basis.

Speaker 2 We can't collect intelligence in a NATO country, right, in an aggressive way. So we're at the point that none of the three pillars that worked with Iran can actually work with Turkey.

Speaker 2 And we need to figure out how to A, leverage assets that we do have, which is India, which is Saudi Emirate relationships, which is the strong position we have in Syria, to drive Turkey into some kind of a modus vivendi, some kind of an equilibrium and push them out of Gaza.

Speaker 2 Or, that's a decision that I think Prime Minister Netanyahu will have to consider over the next few weeks, find a way to convince the Turkish regime that, by the way, yesterday also issued an arrest warrant to Prime Minister Netanyahu and to the leadership of the Defense Administration in Israel.

Speaker 2 So they are not only emboldened, they're pushing the envelope even further. And this is quite a challenge for Prime Minister Netanyahu.
This is not something that you solve in one go.

Speaker 1 Why is the U.S., from Jerusalem's perspective, why is the U.S. allowing this access to enhance its role in post-war Gaza?

Speaker 2 I think it's a broader dynamic. The U.S.
has its competition with China being, you know, front and center. We saw the Xi Jinping President Trump session last week.

Speaker 2 And that's, you know, the North Star. So when it kind of draw back the strategy for the Middle East, the U.S.
wants energy. It wants a stable Middle East.

Speaker 2 And the way to do that, at least when I look at it from the outside, this is not something that I know for a fact.

Speaker 2 The other depictions I gave you are very much based on what I talk to senior officials in Israel and also the facts that you see on the ground.

Speaker 2 I think America wants to prevent a winner-take-all dynamic in the Middle East. It wants to see an equilibrium shaping up.
Call it Saudi Emirates, Israel, Axis, Qatar, Turkey, maybe Egypt, Axis.

Speaker 2 And that sort of keeps the Middle East at a point of equilibrium as opposed to the dynamics that I think of many experts in the world, you have very intimate knowledge of that dynamic, what happened in Iraq, right?

Speaker 2 When Iraq kind of collapsed and imploded, suddenly you created that vacuum where Iran stepped in and became a very prominent actor.

Speaker 2 I think, if I have to speculate, America doesn't want to see a winner-take-all dynamic. And that means curbing Israel.

Speaker 2 We may not like it, but if that's the rationale, it means you also curb israel while you build the alliance of the abrahamic accords and try to expand that into saudi arabia potentially indonesia

Speaker 2 so what are the counter forces here then to this qatar turkey new hamas neo hamas hamas 4.0 whatever you want to call it alliance so i think on one hand you have this evolving hamas side you have turkey you have qatar who are going to push very strongly on the diplomatic arena against israel we'll see it front and center this is gonna I think, intensify.

Speaker 2 But Turkey and that axis also has a lot of weaknesses. On the other side, are the Emirates, Saudi Israel.
I would even say India.

Speaker 2 We saw Turkey being a staunch public supporter of Pakistan in the flare-up in July in ways that were hard for me to reconcile. I mean, why would Erdogan jump into that pool?

Speaker 2 I mean, he has enough issues to deal with right now. And that was not well received in New Delhi.

Speaker 2 So I would even say there's this sort of India-Saudi, the whole IMEC dynamic on one side, and Turkey-Qatar and Neo-Hamas on the other.

Speaker 2 The thing that Turkey fears most is a sort of Syrian independence that is backed by Israel, supported by Saudi Arabia, and then an immediate kind of path to normalization with Saudi.

Speaker 2 And then an IMEC decision that's out there on the open by India, because that would mean...

Speaker 1 You keep referring to IMEC. I just want our listeners to know it's an acronym that...

Speaker 2 Yeah, sorry, the India-Middle East corridor.

Speaker 1 And just explain why that term now is taking increasing prominence.

Speaker 1 And by the way, for our listeners, this is something Yonatan yonatan talks a lot about with michal on what's your number podcast the imet corridor is a topic that has implications for the future of israel's economy so if you want to learn more about it we actually could link to a couple of episodes where he talks about it but so all the more reason to listen to what's your number but sorry go ahead i think that if you're ankara and erdogan said it a few weeks ago the traditional ottoman dynamic was that all corridors east to west go through Turkey.

Speaker 2 And he actually said that a few weeks ago. There will not be any corridor that doesn't go through Turkey.

Speaker 2 If you think about it, if indeed Syria is outside of the immediate sphere of influence of Ankara, supported by Saudi Arabia, supported by, you know, a quiet understanding with Israel, and on November 18th, President Trump and MBS, Mohammed bin Salman, declare a path to normalization, kind of like the Declaration of Principles of Oslo, not an agreement, not normalization, not a signature, but the path, okay?

Speaker 2 Then suddenly Turkey looks up and sees India, Saudi, Jordan, Israel creating a corridor that goes through Cyprus and Greece and doesn't go through Turkey. This terrifies Ankara.

Speaker 2 And so on Israel's side, the normalization with Saudi Arabia is not just in and of itself related to the war in Gaza.

Speaker 2 It is related to a broader architecture, which I think over the next 20 to 25 years is going to be the Middle Eastern kind of struggle.

Speaker 2 It is going to be a struggle for hegemony, whereas you have Turkey on one side with Qatar and with some other allies hoping to stir Hamas and stir the Palestinian issue as a token.

Speaker 2 And you're going to have India, Saudi, Jordan, Israel, hopefully Cyprus, Greece on that path on the other side. And I think Israel is not aligned in that space.

Speaker 2 We are thinking how to prevent the next October 7. We're very much kind of villa in the jungle rationale.
We need to go into sort of a set of alliances that start in India and end in Ethiopia.

Speaker 2 And we can talk also about that because there's a reason Turkey has its biggest naval base outside of Turkey in Somalia. That's the edge of that triangle.

Speaker 1 Why aren't the Saudis and Emiratis playing a larger role in Gaza right now?

Speaker 2 Look, I think they're basically saying we're speaking truth to power. There's a 20-point agreement here.

Speaker 2 Israel, by the way, in point 17 or 18, I don't remember the one, actually gave the Saudis that reference that they were looking for path to Palestinian statehood with all the caveats, but it's there and Prime Minister Netanyahu signed on it.

Speaker 2 And they really want to see demilitarization.

Speaker 2 They don't want to see a situation whereby everybody's now, you know, want to just move forward, lean back and create effectively the next seedbed for Neo-Hamas.

Speaker 1 Amit Segel said on one of our episodes of our Inside Call Me Back episodes, the subscriber conversation, his sources have indicated that the Saudis were not thrilled about the 20-point plan because they were worried that Hamas wasn't finished off.

Speaker 1 Exactly. Ironically, they're concerned about the version of events transpiring that you're describing right here.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And I think that we have to applaud the Saudis and the Emiratis for sticking to their guns.

Speaker 2 This started off, we spoke about it also at What's Your Number, because we tried to understand the economic implications of the Sharm al-Sheikh summit with President Trump.

Speaker 2 There were two guests that didn't show up. It was MBS and MBZ, both Emirati and Saudi leaders.

Speaker 2 And I think that was already the first signal telling Washington: look, we love that this has come to a halt, but we don't want this to be a bluff.

Speaker 2 We don't want Hamas to leverage that to morph and to come back stronger five years from now. We actually want this thing concluded.

Speaker 2 Look, in the UAE and in Saudi Arabia, and as of a couple of months ago in Jordan, the Muslim Brotherhood is illegal, illegal.

Speaker 2 Whereas we saw Hakan Fidan, the foreign minister of Turkey, who used to be the head of their Mossad, the head of their CIA.

Speaker 2 literally the architect of the playbook from Libya to Somalia to Syria, the godfather of Al-Jiolani, the other week hosting Hamas leadership.

Speaker 2 And again, giving them the sort of big sister treatment, not only that the Muslim Brotherhood is not illegal in Turkey, it wants to position itself as a neo-Ottoman leader, the leader of the Ummah, of the Islamic movement, and not just of certain countries or certain alliances.

Speaker 2 And again, I think we need to applaud Mohammed bin Salman and MBZ for taking a principled approach here, which I think is critical for the region to actually step into a better future.

Speaker 1 So what does this all mean, Yonatan, for the reconstruction of Gaza at a very practical level?

Speaker 2 Look, I think everybody wants to see phase two happening very quickly. If I had to bet, I would say that given where the CMCC is right now, you know, led by the U.S.

Speaker 2 here on the ground in Israel with all those foreign countries here and with the United Nations Security Council resolution coming forward, we may end up seeing what is referred to here in internal corridors as West Gaza-East Gaza dynamics.

Speaker 2 We're going to see the east of the yellow line starting to see humanitarian aid exit and real economic development projects starting to step forward.

Speaker 2 And I think that's going to be the path forward over the next few months.

Speaker 2 Now, I think it also depends, and sort of this is my analysis, I would say speculation, and I don't know that for a fact, but I've been having conversations recently with folks in Jerusalem around what may happen in what I call Kaftet November, November 29th, by the end of the the month, usually the end of November has significance to Israel and sovereign Jews.

Speaker 2 That's the time where the UN voted for the partition plan.

Speaker 2 I would bet that there is a dynamic in which there's going to be kind of like a constructive ambiguity launched on the November 18th session with President Trump and MBS.

Speaker 2 And we're going to be seeing a direction towards a formal path to normalization, followed by, if that actually happens, Netanyahu declaring a fast election.

Speaker 2 Because for Netanyahu to come out and say, hey, the Saudis are now open. There's going to be a path for conversation between Israel and Saudi Arabia after the next election.

Speaker 2 Kind of like, again, the DOP Declaration of Principles under the notion of if until everything has been agreed, nothing has been agreed. So no one is really paying a price.

Speaker 2 It works for Smot Reach in Israel. It works for Bengvir.
They can present themselves in the next election as elect us to keep Netanyahu, you know, to be right of Netanyahu.

Speaker 2 It will help Netanyahu claim that victory that he wants to claim.

Speaker 2 So that would, in my view, create a dynamic where Israel will be willing to undertake certain compromises on the ground in Gaza in order to enable this dynamic and go into the election cycle.

Speaker 2 If I had to kind of speculate where we're headed over the next 90 to 120 days, if indeed there is a breakthrough on the 18th or 19th with MBS, probably that's the path and Gaza becomes in a way secondary.

Speaker 2 I am afraid, though, that if that's the path, and if we don't end up realizing the Saudi normalization, which as I said before is critical vis-a-vis Turkey and vis-a-vis Neo-Hamas,

Speaker 2 the selection cycle, which may actually weaken Israel.

Speaker 1 Last question for you, Yonatan. What hard choices would Israel have to make that is quietly building in an adversarial way to Israel? What would Israel have to do?

Speaker 1 What hard choices would it have to make to turn this around?

Speaker 2 I think the broader momentum in Europe, in the U.S., and in Israel is that we are at the twilight of the old political paradigm that worked well after the Soviet Union collapsed, but stopped working.

Speaker 2 That's also why you see Mamdani rising. You see Bardella in France, kind of similar dynamics.
We are really living in a twilight of the old political paradigm that is not working anymore.

Speaker 2 So for Israel, there are two tough choices to make. One, vis-à-vis Gaza.

Speaker 2 Are we willing to live with Hamas 4.0 or a neo-Hamas in order to facilitate the normalization process with Saudi Arabia, to create the corridor to push out Turkey so that we're actually fighting the next war, as opposed to focusing on the reconstruction of Gaza and allowing that to be the thing that draws our attention, distracting us from the big picture.

Speaker 2 I think that's a set of tough decisions that have to be made. And the second one is the decisions that relate to the political process in Israel.

Speaker 2 Is Israel willing to recognize the death of its old political paradigm that got us October 7th and be brave enough to embark on a new political path, new political ideas, and so on.

Speaker 2 You're familiar with my thoughts on that, or not? Because if we end up with, and this happened to us in 1974, remember? After the Yom Kippur War, Goldameyer won 51 mandates.

Speaker 2 One out of two Israelis voted for the status quo, and we had three years.

Speaker 1 So everyone says there's no way the incumbent government of a country that just went through what Israel went through post-October 7th could get re-elected.

Speaker 1 And Goldemeyer's Labor Party, this actually happened to, there is precedent in Israel.

Speaker 1 Goldemir's Labour Party got re-elected after the humiliation and the massive strategic setback of the Yom Kippur War.

Speaker 2 And so these are the two hard choices we're going to have to make.

Speaker 2 One, are we ready to not prepare how to kind of prevent the next October 7th as the core kind of compass of how we manage our national security, but actually prepare for a hegemony fight vis-a-vis Turkey and other countries and pay certain gambits in Gaza in order to gain the bigger picture and gain the upper hand morally in the diplomatic arena that is very much needed.

Speaker 2 So that's one set of tough choices.

Speaker 2 And the other is, is the Israeli public or the Israeli politicians there to avoid a 1974 dynamic, that we are actually embarking on a political process that recognizes that we have to put an end to this twilight zone of the old political paradigm and set forth a new vision for Israel that is brave, that leverages the, we're a $600 billion economy after the war, leverages the enormous strength of Jewish sovereignty that is now, after two years of war, very much an empirical fact when you look into Israel's future, but we have to make those tough political choices as well.

Speaker 1 When you say we're a $600 billion economy after the war, you're not saying because of the war. You're meaning the strength of the Israeli economy survived and endured.

Speaker 2 I'll just give you kind of like a crazy and unexpected. You know, if we spoke two years ago, and I would tell you that two years into the war that cost North of $100 billion, unexpected, right?

Speaker 2 The chairman of the Israeli Fed, right, the head of the central bank, Amir Yaron, as he has to decide whether or not to increase or decrease the interest rate, would say, one of the reasons I do not decrease the interest rate is because the shekel is so strong vis-a-vis the dollar.

Speaker 2 We started the war with 4.10 almost shekel dollar, and now we are at 3.25. is a 25% strengthening of the shekel, right? There have been incredible exits during the war.

Speaker 2 There have been incredible IPOs. There have been incredible investments into the Israeli economy.
Nvidia chose to double its engineering power in Israel.

Speaker 2 There are more open NVIDIA roles in Israel than there are in the entirety of Europe right now.

Speaker 2 So how do we leverage the incredible resilience of the Israeli society to make the tough political choices? And I'll say one last thing, what we can't do.

Speaker 2 And this is a term where I sort of get a rash.

Speaker 2 The Israeli opposition leadership is now offering the public what can be referred to as the the national therapy government, in Hebrew, memshele taripui, as the vision for the next election.

Speaker 2 Well, I don't think, you know, by default, when you're telling me that the next best thing is the national therapy government, you're basically telling me I'm sick or ill as a society.

Speaker 2 I would venture to say that the Israeli society showed and demonstrated it is the most resilient democratic society in the world.

Speaker 2 Not only that we came into this invasion after nine months of almost 10% of Israelis protesting on the street the fundamental changes of the fabric of our governance system, the invasion, loss of sovereignty, massacre, and then an entire population enlisting and fighting this war over two years, including in Iran, getting out of that cycle.

Speaker 2 The vision for the next episode could not be a national therapy government. It has to be a vision of the third founding moment of Israel or the third republic or however you'd want to call it.

Speaker 2 That's a tough choice to make, as are the tough choices around Gaza, gambits in order to win the India, Saudi, Ethiopia type of axis we must create in order to fight the relevant next war, as opposed to the war we fought on October 7th.

Speaker 1 All right, Yonatan, thank you for that. That was a great sort of tour of the region and the challenges ahead for Israel, obviously.

Speaker 2 And the opportunities. Yeah, and the opportunities.

Speaker 1 Again, I'll remind our listeners to listen to and subscribe to What's Your Number, the podcast that Yonatan co-hosts with Mikhail Evram, which is a weekly podcast.

Speaker 1 And you should add it, as I said, to your podcasting diet. Thanks, Yonatan.

Speaker 2 Thanks, Dan.

Speaker 1 Call Me Back is produced and edited by Elon Benatar. Arc Media's executive producer is Adam James Levin Aretti.
Sound and video editing by Martin Huergo and Marian Khalis Burgos.

Speaker 1 Our director of operations, Maya Rockoff. Research by Gabe Silverstein.
Our music was composed by Yuval Semo. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Cena.

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