Editor's note: This interview was conducted by Pamela Paresky in July 2024.

Gadi Taub: This war is just chapter one of what is going to be a very long struggle. I compare it to 56, not to 48. In 1956, the Suez War came in the aftermath of what was known as the ‘Czech arms deal,’ in which Egypt acquired Soviet equipment. That completely changed the balance of power here, and Israel initiated a war along with Britain and France in order to weaken the Egyptian army.

Ever since, the struggle has been over a noose that Egypt was trying to tie around us. There were three more wars: the War of 1967, the War of Attrition between 67 and 1970, and the Yom Kippur War, all of which were different acts in the same drama. These were all chapters in a drama of Israel fighting against the noose that radical Egypt was trying to tie around our neck. That struggle ended only with a peace accord in 79. So it took 25 years.

Now, Iran is trying to tie a noose around us, and this is just the prologue. This is the first act in what is going to be a series of wars. The next one, clearly, is going to be with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Now, the American administration is trying to isolate this war as part of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, but this is the first Iranian–Israeli war. This is what it is.

So this is the prologue to a long struggle and it’s our weakest enemy. People who are now supporting a ceasefire are basically trying to manoeuvre Israel into a situation, even if they don’t intend it, in which our blood will be left in the water. A tiny terror organisation, the smallest of our enemies, is going to get away with a massacre in Israel and retain power in the Gaza Strip. That’s what a ceasefire means. It means defeat for Israel. Now, if that happens, not only will our enemies smell blood in the water, and there are much stronger enemies, but our friends, or half-friends, will also smell that blood and will start manoeuvring away from us. Nobody wants to be the ally of a victim in the Middle East. You can already hear grumbling noises from some of our erstwhile partners in peace. I wouldn’t say “allies”—that’s not a good description of these peace accords. 

So this is existential danger. If Israel does not defeat Hamas clearly, and it should be clear to Hamas, and it should be clear to the Arab world, not just to Israelis. It’s not enough to somehow engineer a picture of victory. We don’t need a picture of victory. We need a victory that would be clear to everyone as such, or else our blood is in the water and the State of Israel is in mortal danger. Make no mistake. This is a struggle for survival. And now we are stuck in a situation where the soldiers clearly understand this, but the leadership of the army much less so. And the media, which is all influenced by America and infused with this progressive spirit, is not getting it at all.

Israelis also don’t understand the American policy in the Middle East, which is the appeasement of Iran. They buy the rhetoric instead of looking at what the administration actually does. I don’t think that our elites, some of whom have bought into the construction the Americans are trying to create, in which this war somehow ends in a two-state solution, understand. People who are buying into that are just living in La-La Land. They don’t understand. And the media amplifies the wrong thing. So if you’re sitting in America, you see: “Oh, the families of the hostages are demanding a deal that will end the war and return our hostages.” These are political manipulators who are cynically using the pain of the families. And I have nothing to say against people who are willing to do anything to return their loved ones from the torture of Hamas atrocities. But these cynics are using that in order to promote a ceasefire.

Let me connect this to what I started saying before: that crowd has been dreaming of bringing external pressure on Israel in order to force it to do what it doesn’t understand it must do, in their view, which is the two-state solution and partition. They’ve been dreaming of that ever since the Right took power. There was briefly a different spell with the Rabin administration that brought the Oslo Accords, which were supposed to be the prelude to partition. But certainly after the Right took power again, they have been placing their hopes on American pressure. Now look at how they think the stars have aligned: the split between Hamas and Gaza will be over because Hamas has been weakened, and we will be able to do what the Americans want and impose the Palestinian Authority on Gaza. Now you have a single partner controlling all the Palestinians, and you can strike a deal with them for a two-state solution—to which they’ve never agreed, by the way—but it looks good. Israel will be chastened and humble, and America would then be able to force it to do what these people think we must do and don’t understand.

To go back to Amos Oz’s metaphor: the surgeon will be the Biden administration. Now we’ve laid Israel prostrate on what I mistakenly called the slab but it’s the operating table. But the difference is rapidly closing, and the Americans will perform the cut, because we have been chastened by losing this war. This is a complete misunderstanding of what is going on here. And the fact that these elites are promoting this, and that they’re using the hostages for it, is what everybody hears outside. But they don’t see the grassroots that’s not pumped up by the press. Some of the families of the hostages are blocking the aid convoys to Gaza and are clashing with the police over that. The reservists have started a movement saying, “We’re not taking off our uniforms until we win this war. You’re not bringing us back.” And they’ve already been chastised or reprimanded by IDF PR, who, by the way, didn’t mind refuseniks when they fought against the reforms. Back when they were fighting the Right, it was fine. But when they’re promoting the hawkish position, suddenly they get reprimanded.

There was a letter just published in the press, I quoted from it for Tablet, from mothers of IDF soldiers to President Biden saying: “Israel has to win this war. A ceasefire is out of the question.” So the majority of Israelis get this. But our progressive elites are still so inert and so blinded by their trust in the United States that they don’t see the trap lying ahead for us. The Biden administration, which is in complete darkness when it comes to the Middle East, is actually very savvy about manipulating Jews and Israel. They know how to say all the things we want to hear. So Joe Biden comes here quoting from the Bible, “We’ve got your back,” and “How we love Israel,” and all the rest of it, while what his visit actually did was forbid us to pre-empt Hezbollah. That’s what he was here for. Because if this war spreads and people realise that this is not a small conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, then the minute it spreads, it will be clear that the Democratic administration’s Middle East policy, called “regional integration,” or appeasement of Iran in plain talk, is a complete failure. It has set the region on fire. And by the way, this war is a direct result of the appeasement policy of the Democratic administration. The fact that they have opened the door for Iran, financially, by loosening the sanctions, and diplomatically, to infiltrate with their proxies deeper and deeper into other states in the region, the fact that they are not deterring Iran has emboldened all our enemies.

Gadi Taub: I disagree with the idea that everyone wants to minimise civilian casualties. Hamas wants to maximise civilian casualties because its calculations rely on the fact that the lever to create pressure on Israel is to maximise the deaths of their own population. A population about which they care very little, mind you.

They’ve had all this money to build tunnels, and they’ve not built a single bomb shelter for their population, because they want as many dead women and children as they can later use for their propaganda ruthlessly. 

Now, Israel doesn’t aim at civilians. Ever. Israel abides by international law. And, by the way, international law puts the blame squarely on Hamas. According to international law, if you immerse your combatants inside a civilian population, the other side does not lose its right to self-defence. It should strive to minimise casualties but those that still occur are your responsibility. If you go to the Pentagon and read the manual on the rules of war according to international law, which the United States has adopted, it’s very, very clear about these things. 

Now, that doesn’t mean the world won’t act in a hypocritical way and blame us for everything, despite the fact that we are making an effort to minimise those casualties.

We are protecting our women and children from rockets, as our Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said, while they are protecting their rockets with women and children. That’s what they’re doing.

There are several considerations here. One is: if you look at the letter that mothers of IDF soldiers sent to President Biden, they said, “We should not risk the lives of our soldiers any more than necessary in order to protect the human shields that Hamas is putting in harm’s way.”

That’s not our business. We, who have sent our sons and daughters to this war, don’t want them to take one iota of extra risk in order to protect the civilian population that’s being used on the other side. 

And this is a big controversy in Israel. Because, you know, we didn’t conduct carpet bombing from the air. We put our soldiers at greater risk because we sent in infantry without flattening buildings, because we wanted to spare civilians, unlike what other states usually do. And here, the United States in the war against ISIS is a clear example: you don’t risk the lives of your infantrymen. You first flatten everything from the air, as other peoples would do. We do not do that. Part of the calculation, I’m sorry to say, is a realistic one, saying: we need to maximise the diplomatic period in which the pressure does not force us to end the war. So we don’t want to increase civilian casualties. We want to minimise them not just because we’re more moral, but also because we know how this is used against us.

But it’s completely unthinkable, as some idiot in Israel still say, who are super-moralistic, they claim, “The lives of their civilians are just as important as the lives of our soldiers, and there’s no difference here.” Well, there is a great difference. We cannot create a situation, because this individual, who, by the way, wrote the moral code for the army, has published an article stating these are equal, in which, if their combatants are hiding among civilians, we cannot attack them.

Imagine what that means. It would means that someone can come into Israel, slaughter hundreds of women and children, burn people alive, put a baby in an oven, open a mother’s belly and remove her foetus, and then, if they hide in a civilian population, we say, “Oh well, we can’t do anything now.” That is completely unthinkable.

There’s another school of thought, I don’t completely endorse it, but I see the logic, that advocates for no proportional response, but rather a completely disproportionate one. So that everyone in the region understands: if you touch us, let alone commit a massacre, we will go wild and stampede. Richard Nixon, not a particularly popular president in hindsight, called this the “crazy president theory.” He believed that the enemy should think the president could go completely bananas, and thus, should tread very carefully. This is precisely what Donald Trump did when he eliminated Soleimani. He projected unpredictability, suggesting, “I might go completely wild, so you’d better be on alert.” I spoke to Mike Pompeo, who was Trump’s Secretary of State, about the time the US first assembled the coalition against the Houthis. It was a defensive coalition with missile interception systems, designed to protect maritime traffic. I asked, “What would Pompeo have done?” And he answered, “We would have attacked the Houthis.” In contrast, when Biden took action against the Houthis, they telegraphed their intentions in advance and even suggested, “Why don’t you clear it with the Iranians before we strike?”

Then I asked, “What would Pompeo have done after the massacre?” His answer: “We would have sunk the entire Iranian fleet the next day because it’s their proxy.” 

And that is how you achieve deterrence. You don’t achieve it by saying, “We want to de-escalate. Let’s find a peaceful resolution.” Because now American servicemen are being killed, precisely because they know this administration will retreat. If you listen to the Iranians, and this pressure is arriving via Tony Blinken on us, the Iranians are saying: “We will continue attacking you until you restrain Israel. If you don’t, we will continue attacking you.” And what does this administration do? It tries to restrain Israel. They’re playing the wrong game, in the wrong region, and they have no idea what they’re doing.

Our conclusion should be, first and foremost, that we must begin, we have the technology, manufacturing our own weapons. We cannot rely on a Democratic administration to protect us, because they’re playing a different strategic game. Their vision for the region involves sacrificing our interests in order to appease Iran. And we should begin saying this out loud.

Pamela Paresky: You’re saying this because currently Israel doesn’t produce its own weapons independently, it relies on the US?

GT: Exactly. The idea of American foreign aid is essentially a subsidy for the American weapons industry. We receive aid, but it must be spent on American equipment. As a result, we’ve developed such dependency that we only had ammunition for the first two days of the war and not much more. Since then, we’ve been scrambling to resupply ourselves, partly through American aid, which, thankfully, has been arriving, but it’s also used as a lever against us. We will have to diversify our sources of weapons and scale up domestic manufacturing. It’s absurd that the country that developed the Iron Dome cannot produce bullets. It’s simply ridiculous.

My friend Dan Schueftan says Israel has always been Athens internally and Sparta externally. So we should be like Goliath in the Middle East, not David to the West. I think we should present our democratic, liberal, modern face to the West, but we shouldn’t appear as victims. Maybe David is still a good example, because David fought back, but we must not project weakness in any direction, not even towards the West. The West is in deep crisis. It doesn’t understand that this war is also the front line in a broader civilisational struggle. 

Dan Schueftan on the Palestine-Israel Conflict

Pamela Paresky interviews the outspoken Israeli academic.

QuillettePamela Paresky

The West is suffering from an autoimmune disease called wokeness. It is unable to protect its own interests and uphold its own values. This is the core issue: if you don’t defend your values, you end up with the values of the Muslim Brotherhood.

What happened during the massacre, and this is something Westerners don’t grasp, is that much of it followed the rituals of the Muslim Brotherhood. Some of these acts of slaughter were modelled on what they believe to be the original Muhammadan religion. There’s a recording—perhaps you’ve heard it—of a young man ecstatically calling his parents: “Mum, I just killed ten Jews with my own hands!” So when Israelis say, “This is worse than the Nazis,” what they mean is: the Nazis tried to hide the Final Solution. These people broadcast their sadism on social media and are celebrated by their communities. This is what we are up against: real barbarians. And the West fails to see it. It’s still playing with its own guilty conscience, rather than realising it, too, is under threat.

To begin with, we should stop talking about “solutions.” This conflict must be managed. At least for the foreseeable future, perhaps until there’s a generational change. Hamas must not wield any power in Gaza. It should cease to exist as an organisation and a military force. Israel must retain security control over the entire territory and should extract a serious price in terms of land. It should take part of the Gaza Strip. Because when your enemy glorifies death, death isn’t a deterrent. The true deterrent is: if you start a war with Israel, you lose land. Since their war is territorial, the appropriate consequence is territorial loss. That’s the only language they understand.