We'll just release the hostages, and that can be the end of all this." So take it from there.

The final parts of the war are so fascinating.

You know, an underappreciated reason why Israel did stick with the raid and leave strategy in Gaza throughout the whole, uh, length of the, uh, Biden administration during this war, um, is because, and I have this from the, you know, uh, senior IDF, that if the Biden administration had seen Isr- uh, Israel holding territory in Gaza, leaving troops in Khan Yunis, l- let's say, they would say, "That's an occupation.

That is the start of a new occupation of Gaza, and we will cut all US support for the war effort." And so you had this Israeli strategy until the Trump administration of raiding one area of Gaza, you beat Hamas there, and then you leave that area of Gaza.

And then Hamas returns to that area of Gaza, and then you have to raid it once again.

And that's why so many of these areas of Gaza are so destroyed, because they were the site not of one battle, two or three or four or five or six different battles for the same neighborhood.

Immensely frustrating.

Yes.

Reading your book, you know, once I stopped hearing, uh, you know, the, the Benny Hill theme music, that da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da, like, that really kind of funny, incompetent, you know, circus sound, uh, I started thinking seriously about this notion as like, yes, look, uh, things worked out very well, but w- what are we looking at? Are we looking at a sort of team of rivals situation in which all these scuffles actually bring better decisions and more kind of accountability, or are we looking at a freaking miracle that these guys got anything done while constantly also having, you know, one eye out on who leaked what to the media, and who said what because of the election that might come up, and the Americans, and the pressure, and all these kind of, you know, considerations that are not unimportant, but are not life or death matters?

I'd incline more to the latter.

We got lucky.

Because if you look at these three guys who lead the war room at the start, Netanyahu, Gallant, and opposition leader Benny Gantz, who joins the unity government at the start, all three, it's not that they're rivals, okay? Uh, they despise each other in every possible permutation of that relationship, and they all have very good reasons.

And so you would get into situations where Gallant, say, would arrange a deal with the Americans at the Pentagon to resume certain weapons shipments to Israel, but he would not have let Netanyahu in on that information that he was making this deal.

So that once he finally surprises Netanyahu with this, the prime minister doesn't like it, doesn't like the idea that, you know, Gallant might get the credit for this sort of thing.

But at the same time, Gallant also hadn't told Benny Gantz, who would've been his ally in this fight, and they could've won this argument two on one because Gallant still hated Gantz from when Gantz, in this sort of complicated, murky process, elbowed out Gallant for the title of IDF chief of staff years earlier.

Uh, is it just- Some kind of, you know, a, I don't know what to call it, a relic of the Oslo mindset that, oh, these are "partners in peace." Why, by now, don't we have a very concrete kind of blueprint to what to do next time some Palestinian terror organization launches a major assault?

What, okay, what have you done?

And so I, I think to answer this question properly, you would really have to go deeper into American Jewish history and the kind of politics that has worked for American Jews.

I mean, to take this in a direction that might seem strange, okay? Meir Kahane in America, before he went totally off the deep end on all manner of things, was arguing that Ameri- uh, American Jews needed to stop practicing a politics that went with, "Our important people are going to get in a room and talk with the important people in the country, in the city, wherever, uh, and speak with them, and we're gonna work something out," and instead should have a sort of politics of the street to really get our way on these questions.

A mass mobilization, uh, let's, let's get out there, let's become a problem for the people in power.

Okay, let's make ourselves into a problem.

And the closest he got to really getting traction on that issue was with the Soviet Jewry movement, fighting for the freedom of Soviet Jewry.

But even then, there was immense resistance to that.

What about the raging, insane antisemitism that hounds Jews online? What about the marginalization? What about the fact that you can't be anti-anybody, but you can be anti-Jews? And when you have that becoming normalized in politics, how could there not be American Jews raging? So what would it take? What is that? Is it just not bad enough? Uh, will there be a point where it's bad enough that American Jews wake up, that young people start organizing on, on social media, or is this American Jewish culture? They're doomed to be quiet and polite about it no matter what happens.

Yeah

... and the message because there is no plan, and there is no message, okay? And so some Jew somewhere is going to say something with no comprehension at all of how it sounds to somebody outside, and this is going to be rocketed in to some other online ecosystem shorn of all context as evidence of look how horrible the, uh, the Jews are, whether for a left-wing reason or for a right-wing reason, and that happens every day, all the time.

And so you want everyone to just get on the same page, but we're Jews.

We're never on the same page.

I mean, uh, uh, it's not going to function that way.

One interesting point.

Uh, Vice President JD, uh, Vance recently spoke to the Republican Jewish Coalition, and he made the argument that the old way of talking about Israel, it just isn't working anymore.

And my number one concern is, like, what's the Jewish vision for the Jewish state? I'm curious for you if you have hopes, dreams, or, like, a prototype of an image of what the state of Israel can and should be for the Jewish people.

Sure.

Okay? Um, and I, I think it'll give listeners, viewers a taste of kind of, uh, what we have in the book, the kind of access that I think does make it special.

Um, so I was speaking to Benny Gantz August 2024.

Um, he, you know, he had begun to slip in the polls after riding so high for so much of the war, but he's still on top at this point, and he tells me something very interesting.

He says, "Netanyahu is a better politician than I am." And being a former IDF chief, of course Benny Gantz meant that as an insult.

He said, "He's a better politician." But I couldn't help but thinking even then, "But you're in politics.

Might that be a problem for you?" And I think what Israeli opposition voters came to realize over time is that Gantz never quite understood that, never quite understood that he was in politics now, and so their view of him became someone who was just taken advantage of b- by, uh, Netanyahu.

Um, what's the craziest thing?

What was the conversation like behind closed doors when that came to a head?

Well, at, at a certain point, the others in the war room were telling Prime Minister Netanyahu that he was going to get all the hostages killed.

And again, at a certain point, especially after the 12-day war with Iran, so after June 2025, when Israel was, um, preparing another Gaza offensive, uh, the very top of the IDF was, um, assessing, "This is going to endanger the hostages.

Um, we need to take whatever we can get now and not keep fighting." And so it got, I mean, yelling at each other, banging, banging on the table in the, um, in the war room over this issue.

There's no question.

Um, one of the first times where I think it really, the real moment was summer 20, uh, summer 2024, in which many Israelis thought, I would say the greater Israeli defense establishment thought, "We have to end this Gaza war, um, and therefore that'll end the fighting in the north with, um, Hezbollah, and we can get our hostages back." And, and, uh, this was also Yoav Gallant's view.

And the argument he made at the time is, "This is going to spiral out of control.

Mm-hmm

Mm-hmm

... uh, Iran's terrorist group in Lebanon, rather than fighting Hamas in Gaza, even though it was Hamas that had just attacked Israel.

The reason was very simple.

Hezbollah had 150,000 missiles looming over Israel, which could do even more damage than Hamas ever did.

But four days after that October 7th invasion and massacre, Prime Minister Netanyahu felt, could he trust Israel's military on an entirely new gamble? Could he go against the United States? President Biden was dead set opposed opening up another front at that point.

Uh, he was dead set opposed to just about every kind of Israeli-

As the response from Israel unfolded and proceeded, what surprised Israeli leaders, if anything, about the response, uh, not just from their enemies nearby, but also, I guess, from their enemies around the globe?

Well, one thing that surprised them was just how quickly the international media, uh, American media, and many others were able to switch from feeling bad for Israel after that October 7th attack to immediately resuming the nin- the, you know, preexisting narrative which they had had for other Gaza wars of just blaming Israel for fighting back.

First of all, would you agree with that? And then second, if you believe that's the case and that the Iranian strategy begins to unravel at that point, did October 7th ultimately destroy Iran's model, this ring of fire model, to surround Israel with proxies while keeping that Iranian homeland insulated? I do agree with you

that the tide turned when Israel really took the fight to Hezbollah.

And what that shows, I think, is just how long it took.

Because we're talking about September 2024.

The war started October 2023.

So that was a tough first year.

In other words, but where I would pinpoint it is to not even the beepers and not even when Israel took out Nasrallah, but sort of in between when Israel took out Hezbollah's missile arsenal.

What was Israel trying to do? How were they trying to convince Vance and ultimately Trump to do that? So there are

How does Israel, how do Western countries fight a war like that? Is there a way to do it better than they did?

Well, I don't think there's a way to do it that escapes this kind of criticism when you're going to have a response like, say, the one from Amnesty International.

Amnesty International's October 7th, 2023 headline was civilians pay the price on both sides for an unprecedented escalation in Gaza and Israel.

On October 7th itself, it's both sides.

Then you, you know, fast forward to when Amnesty International accuses Israel of genocide, changing its own definition of genocide in order to be able to do so.

The first sentence, and people think I'm making this up because it's so on the nose, but the very first sentence of that Amnesty International report is, on the 7th of October 2023, Israel launched a ground invasion of the occupied Gaza Strip.

Now, if that is your framework for what happened on October 7th and the war that followed, then you can see it the way they do.

For somebody who is too young to remember that or who has never heard of what happened, can you give me a quick summary of the Crown Heights riots and then what you found in terms of the discrepancies in reporting after the fact to what actually happened? Yeah.

What was that debate going on about the decision to strike Hezbollah? And then how was Netanyahu kind of dodging Gallant and also perhaps even wielding American pressure as a kind of cudgel to win this internal debate?

Yeah, what a country.

Let's start there.

One would assume that right after Hamas's October 7th attack, of course, Israel is going to invade Gaza, where the attack came from.

And yet, Yoav Galant and most of the IDF generals high command actually preferred a different option.

They were looking north at Hezbollah in Lebanon and seeing a far more dangerous enemy wielding 150,000 missiles sort of looming over Israel on the understanding that that is what's coming next.

And so the question becomes, should Israel... send its troops south into Gaza, and then risk being surprised from the north by an even more powerful attack than it had received on October 7th.

It all happened to be carrying at the same time, which everybody knew meant it wasn't just a technical delay.

How do you score the war in Gaza, both strategically... militarily, public relations, big picture, small picture.

Israel's aim in Gaza was to overthrow Hamas.

That hasn't happened.

It simply hasn't happened.

Now, you can point to other successes.

More than half of Gaza's territory is now controlled by Israel.

Hamas is a shell of its former self.

I mean, am I crazy about that?

The question

that I want to ask here is, what has President Trump learned from that experience of the MOU? Because I think what he learned is that he can't rely on whatever regime officials are telling his negotiators through back channels.

That is to say, if it isn't absolutely spelled out with unmistakable clarity in the text of a deal – Iran is going to walk all over you in its interpretation of every ambiguity, even if somebody told you that they wouldn't.

I think that's what we saw.

Another point I would make is that when that MOU was signed, we heard from Vice President J.D. Vance A little from President Trump himself, but especially J.D. Vance, making the argument that Iran's regime, the people running it, even in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, are ready to turn over a new leaf.

They had 40, however many years of fighting it out with the US.

They don't want it anymore.

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Okay.

Is there any reckoning about that? Or is it just like a lucky break or, you know, we fought back and that's how it is among the Israeli thinking?

I think what you are describing might actually be Israel's greatest success of the war.

Because you could speak with left-wing generals, you could speak with right-wing generals.

For most of 2024, they were telling you, if we do this, if we fight Hezbollah, Israel will never be the same again.

And in the end, I think that threat was real.

But what was so amazing and part of what we show in the book is how Israel came up with the plan to ward that off, to preempt it, to have such an effective first strike or really a series of first strikes that Hezbollah could be totally thrown off its feet, command and control disrupted.

It's it's launch units unable to coordinate.

Were there any surprises that you and Yonah came across in writing In the War Room, the inside story of Israel's fight against Hamas and the Iranian access? Anything that like you completely didn't know before and were surprised to discover?

Tell us a little bit about that dispute.

Well, there have been... several books already about the October 7th attack itself, what this book does is tell that inside story of what happened next.

What about the war that followed? And so immediately you would think Israel would have to respond to Hamas.

Hamas attacked it, as you said, out of Gaza, massacred 1,200 people, took over 250 hostages.

Of course, send the troops into Gaza.

And yet, Galant...

the defense minister, and most of Israel's top generals advocated a different path.

I guess the question is, in your view and in the war room, what's the Israeli view of that hostility, emerging hostility? And could it have been

Is the case for ground troops gaining ground inside the administration?

I think that it gains ground in the absence of serious alternatives.

That is to say, if Iran is rebuffing negotiations, rebuffing American terms, if it's not going to allow renewed traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, and not just ten ships, not just twenty ships, all the ships, what are you gonna do? The answer is, you are going to have to impose more serious costs on the regime.

And so that's when you start hearing more talk about what would that look like.

Some of it, by the way, does not involve ground troops.

President Trump threatened strikes on Iranian electricity, energy facilities.

Israel has been escalating its attack against Iran's industrial base, not just defense industrial base, but all of its steel plants, which have, of course, dual uses.

And in general on the military targets.

And it's, uh, it, and it's very significant because if it succeeds in imposing these costs in such a way that the President and Israel feel they have to stop, either because, uh, the, they can't sustain the domestic political pressure, or fears of the election coming up, the midterms, and what high costs of gas would do, gasoline, or pressure from the rest of the world, then that would be, I think, a pretty big victory for Iran, potentially a victory, notwithstanding all the damage being done to its, uh, military infrastructure.

That right there is how Iran could win this war.

That is probably its only path right now, it looks like, to victory.

Because if you look at all the other facets of this war, you see steady, continuing American-Israeli progress on the missile front, on the drone front, on missile production, attacking regime targets.

We're even seeing now a few strikes on the remaining nuclear targets.

A few also remain on that front, but the US and Israel appear to be carrying out their planned four to five-week campaign and proceeding well apace.

They have aerial supremacy.

Yes

I guess what I'm asking more specifically is has the number of nationalized scandals the past few years, Ferguson during the Obama era and obviously George Floyd a few years ago, if that is... decreasing the legitimacy or the ability of police to enforce the laws that are in place? And how big of an issue or worry should that be for people?

Oh, I think it absolutely is decreasing the ability of the police to act.

especially on those issues where they know something controversial could happen, which in the U.S. simply means racial issues.

I think people were asking, for instance, with this latest national story in Minneapolis, where an ICE agent tragically shoots a woman who was driving, maybe into the guy, maybe turning away.

Okay, it's an argument.

And the question was, will there be riots in the streets? Will that, you know, or, you know, all across the country? And the answer is no.

If it's not a racial issue, you don't get that kind of energy on these questions.

Maybe get your thoughts on how views about immigration have changed and how that's impacted anti-Semitism from the position of the right.

So, that cooperation to help against ISIS, what else came of this meeting that was substantive to your eye?

So first, I just want to agree with you on the Russia point that, you know, post-Cold War Syria continued in that same anti-Western pattern, turning to Russia, turning to Iran in a big way, and even turning to North Korea to help it build a nuclear reactor, which Israel bombed in 2007.

So, that was totally consistent with Syrian political history.

What's new now is coming to the White House, trying to work with President Trump, and I think evicting the Russians from those naval bases.

That would be massively significant and a concrete step that would help to explain Syria's evolution.

In terms of what concretely came out of this meeting, I think there, it's more limited.

So, you're right to cite this political agreement to join the coalition to fight ISIS, although, as the Syrian foreign minister was quick to clarify, that is not yet a military commitment to fight ISIS.

So, where do you land on the debate about whether to lift sanctions on Syria and how is the Trump administration looking at it?

How much of, uh, the territory will Israel have to move out of here in the first stage of this, uh, deal?

So right now, they're in a little more than three-quarters of the territory.

So we're talking about leaving a quarter of Gaza for this, but then staying in over 50%, being able to remain there until Hamas is disarmed and Gaza is demilitarized.

So major concessions there.

Your question is a great one.

Why? And there, I would look to two things.

One, Israeli military pressure, and two, pressure from Hamas's patrons, Hamas's allies, Qatar, Turkey, Egypt.

TikTok.

Right, right, right.

"...tone it down."But at the same time those disagreements with the Biden Administration were kept private in those early days.

It hadn't yet been the sort of daily public confrontation between the US and Israel.

And so Hamas saw this unprecedented military pressure, and also political backing for Israel's war effort and said, "Okay, we have to stop this, reset things." And it released a lot of hostages in that first deal and on worse terms than it got later on, and on worse terms than Israel is, you know, willing to give now.

So that's how they got a first deal.

Following that, military pressure weakened, Israel's political backing weakened and there was a long period without a deal.

And that probably would have continued because Hamas figured, "Israel's paying a worse price than we are from this, and that Israel will buckle first," until President Trump got elected.

Mm-hmm.

Recognizing the State of Israel and its right to exist.

And not only that, but, uh, the State of Israel's right to exist as the nation state of the Jewish people, because the Palestinian Authority and the, uh, Palestine Liberation Organization, PLO, had, after many years, come to say, "We'll recognize Israel's right to exist, but we would like to bring back every Palestinian refugee, descendant of a Palestinian refugee, and therefore make Israel another Palestinian state." So they said, "No word games here.

Israel exists as a Jewish state." They could recognize that.

They want some things in return, their own emirate, number one, to be able to rule themselves, their own people, govern themselves, but also work permits, economic opportunities.

What they told me is that they want to co-exist with Israel and actually prosper, which isn't possible under Palestinian Authority rule.

Okay.

... several days before getting an answer on each thing.

So, things are moving at this point.

What is the latest happening on the ground and what prompted this latest round of fighting in Gaza?

Let me start with the second part of that first.

What prompted it? What prompted it is that for two and a half weeks, Hamas had a free ceasefire in exchange for nothing, not giving up any hostages, merely sitting down at U.S.-led talks, but saying no to U.S.

offers, Israeli offers, dragging out talks, and that, I think, was simply untenable.

Israel was not going to be able to sit back and let Hamas talk in peace and quiet without using its leverage, which is military force.

And the ceasefire deal that Israel had signed previously allowed it to more or less break off the deal at the end of phase one rather than move into a more permanent phase two, so long as it and Hamas couldn't agree on larger questions.

And, of course, they can't agree on larger questions.

What do you think?