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

Gadi Taub: First of all, we need a clear victory in this war. And then we need to show that it was a bad idea to start it, so that the price would be heavy. The price that, according to their theology, makes jihad unprofitable is if you lose land. In Muslim Brotherhood theology, there are two conditions where you get a waiver from the responsibility to fight jihad. That’s when you’re too weak and you can’t do it, and when the war would desecrate hallowed Muslim land.

So Israel should exact a price in land. I’m not sure that we can do it, because Israel has not yet internalised the seriousness of the situation. I think there’s something comforting in the fact that we keep talking about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict as if that was in any way the issue now. The two-state solution is pie in the sky. It’s completely off the table. No one in Ra’anana is going to live five minutes from the next terror state. This is a fantasy. The very fact that we are discussing this as if this was the issue is testimony to the fact that people have not internalised what has happened, namely, that this is not another round in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. This is the first Israeli–Iranian war.

What Israel needs to do now is prepare for a decade of wars, some that we will initiate, some that we will have to initiate. Think of the international environment. The international community and the United States are pressuring us to stop a war that we didn’t start. But we need to start a war with Hezbollah. We can’t have those Nazis on our border. They’ve moved the security zone into Israel. We’ve evacuated part of Israel. They’ve virtually conquered part of Israel. And we have this monstrous force, which the United States is now protecting, on our border. 

Pamela Paresky: You just said that the US is now protecting a monstrous force. You mean the US is protecting Hezbollah?

GT: Yeah. Yeah, the US is protecting Hezbollah. This is what they’re doing. People here, first of all, people have fantasies about the US. The US is a mythical entity that is our benevolent overseer. The whole Israeli Left has learned to count on the United States to be the responsible adult, to force us to do what we don’t yet understand we should. The Left is not able to win elections with the two-state solution. So it hopes that this will be imposed on us by the Americans. The assumption is that the Americans have got our back. But that’s not a correct assumption. People here think of the United States only in bilateral concepts, as if this was a marriage, as if this was a sibling relationship. They don’t look at what’s going on around us.

So the Americans, the current American administration, can easily fool Israel with just some nice talk. And people are not realising that they’re doing here what they’re doing all over the Middle East, which is appeasing Iran.

The whole philosophy, and I think the American public certainly doesn’t understand this because it’s not interested enough in foreign policy, and Democratic American administrations don’t tell the truth about appeasing Iran to their public because it’s not a popular cause, but what they’re doing in the Middle East, ever since Obama, is their working assumption is that the problem in the Middle East is America’s allies. That’s us, the Israelis, and the Saudis, the Egyptians, the Jordanians. These are the problem. Because these are the ones capable of dragging America into yet another war. And the coming war is going to be with Iran. So the danger, in their view, is that the Saudis and the Israelis will drag America into war. Therefore, the basic idea is America should move away from its allies and closer to Iran, and appease it. Because that’s generally the progressive and postcolonial view of the world. You hug the bully. They are the victims, so they need a hug. This is Obama’s infamous Cairo speech. It’s the same philosophy. The idea is that the Third World, the indigenous people, are like children. They’re like bullies, and we should understand that bullies are bullies because they’re in pain. And so we should hug them.

That’s exactly the same philosophy in international relations. And that is what they are doing. They’re appeasing Iran. They’re talking about “regional integration.” What is regional integration? Who is going to be integrated? Iran is going to be integrated. Obama used to say that the Saudis need to learn that they will need to share with Iran.

The Saudis need to learn that they will have to share the neighbourhood with Iran. That is what they’ve been doing all along. What is going on now in the region is that, over our heads, the Americans and the Iranians are vying for power positions and negotiating an accommodation. The Americans keep signalling: “We will not attack Iran. If you exaggerate, we will hit your proxies mildly, but we will not destroy them.”

PP: What do you mean by “if you exaggerate”?

GT: If you exaggerate means if the Houthis keep hitting shipping in the Bab al-Mandab Strait. This is a major international commerce artery. If you exaggerate there, we will bring our Iron Dome and we’ll protect the ships. Why bring in the Iron Dome instead of attacking them? This is a little terror organisation. A little terror organisation that the Biden administration took off the terror list to signal to the Iranians: “We are not after you, and we will turn our backs on the Saudis if we need to.” That’s the first thing they did when they came into office: remove the Houthis from the terror list.

So, when the US say “exaggerating” they mean if Iran or its proxies kill American personnel. They’ve attacked American forces since 7 October about 120 times, perhaps more by now. And America generally did nothing.

PP: You mean escalating? When you say exaggerating, you mean escalating?

GT: No, because they are escalating, but when they escalate too much—

PP: What is “too much”?

GT: If you actually kill American servicemen. Three were killed. Then we’re going to talk a lot about retaliation and warn you long enough in advance so that nothing really happens. Because what we really want is de-escalation. That’s their mantra everywhere: de-escalation. 

But if you’re a superpower and you declare you’re going to de-escalate, you’re doing the exact opposite of deterrence. If you’re saying, “We will not escalate, don’t worry, we’re, if not your friends, we can be partners,” then Iran is undeterred. It’s getting more and more audacious.

Now, think of what the Americans did. Right after October 7, the President arrived here after giving a speech in which he said that any state or organisation that thinks it can take advantage of the situation, I have one word for them: “Don’t.” Israeli officials applauded this because they said, “Oh, they’re now saving us from Hezbollah; we don’t need a second front.” But this was directed at us too. He made clear it was directed at us too, that we should not take advantage of the situation and pre-empt Hexbollah. So “Don’t” was also directed at us. 

And the American force that arrived here came to prevent a war. The Israelis asked that the joint statement after the Netanyahu–Biden meeting would state that Iran is behind this. The Americans vetoed it and refused to say anything about Iran. Ever since, they’ve been framing this as another act in the long Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Therefore, they are talking about an Israeli–Palestinian solution: the two-state solution. But that is not a solution. A solution is to break the ring of fire that Iran has circled us with. We now know what their strategy is. The ring of fire was Qasem Soleimani’s life work. He laboured to surround Israel with proxy forces to deter Israel from attacking Iran’s nuclear programme. That was the philosophy. 

This is what the Iranians taught Hamas. Hamas has tried it. There’s an inner ring that Hamas employs, and there’s the outer ring. My friend, Professor Kobi Michael, calls it the “Iranian insurance policy.” Ever since Hamas was trained by the Iranians and learned to think like them, it’s been thinking in terms of a multi-front eruption. This is what they tried to do on October 7. It didn’t succeed the way they thought, because they’ve tried it before in what they called ‘The Sword of Jerusalem,’ and what we called ‘Guardian of the Walls.’ Hamas gave Israel an ultimatum in May 2021: if you don’t clear something from East Jerusalem, something related to the Temple Mount, they would attack. And they did, right on the hour they said they would.

Then there were pogroms inside Israel, which the Israeli media tried to portray as violence on both sides. But a few Jews were lynched in Arab–Jewish cities.

PP: When you say “lynched,” that means something different here than in the US, what does it mean?

GT: I’m not sure it’s that different. It means ganging up on someone and beating them to death. I think there was one casualty and two seriously wounded in such lynchings. I saw a video shot by a son of a friend of mine while reversing his car and there were Arabs in Ramla chasing them with axes in their hands. People were lynched. People were beaten up. People were attacked by Israeli Arab citizens who had been radicalised. 

Then there’s Judea and Samaria, that’s a second front where the eruption should come. Then there’s East Jerusalem. That is the third front. There is Gaza, and there is Hezbollah in Lebanon. Lebanon is already the entrance to the larger ring, which consists of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shia militias in Syria and western Iraq, the Houthis in the south, and in the southwest, Hamas.

The idea is that all these should erupt together, and Israel should be ready to start breaking that noose which will soon have a nuclear umbrella.

So what I’ve been saying, and people don’t really want to listen, is that this is not just back to 1948, which means existential danger. It’s also like 1956. In 1955, the Egyptian regime under Gamal Abdel Nasser struck a weapons deal with the Soviet Union, known as the Czech weapons deal. This tilted the balance of power in their favour. Ever since, Ben-Gurion understood that we would have to intercept the noose that Egypt was trying to build around us under the pan-Arab philosophy: uniting the whole Arab world into one nation state, and then eradicating Zionism.

So we initiated war, along with the British and the French, to the chagrin of both the United States and the Soviet Union, who, in rare cooperation, passed a joint resolution in the UN Security Council demanding all forces retreat to the status quo. Israel managed to exact some advantages, some of which we still cite. Ever since, we have weapons of mass destruction, according to the foreign press. That was one achievement, apparently, according to the foreign press, of that war. But also, it was a massive blow to the Egyptian army, which gave us ten years of quiet in order to establish a very new state that had to absorb an immigration population twice the size of its citizenry.

That immigration was from surrounding Arab countries and from displaced persons in Europe after the Holocaust. So in the first seven years of Israel, from 1948 to 1955, we tripled the population. That’s an amazing feat, considering that it didn’t topple the structure of the regime, not to mention that we stayed democratic after that large shock.

PP: And it was about half from Europe and half from the neighbouring countries?

GT: No, I think from the neighbouring countries it was more. I think the numbers were around a million. But don’t quote me on that.

So that was the first in a series of wars. It was initiated by Israel. Then came the Six-Day War. Then the image of a siege around us was really strong. People talked about jokes like, “The last to leave the airport should turn off the lights,” because people felt this was the end. There was a joint command under Nasser, with armies in Jordan and in Syria. Then came the War of Attrition. Then came the Yom Kippur War. And only after all these came peace in 1979. So it took 25 years to break the encirclement that Egypt tried to strangle us with. 

Now we face a new noose being tied around us. So how long will it take? I don’t know. If there were a different American administration, one not appeasing Iran but deterring Iran, we would have been in a completely different place. Maybe the Iranian regime would collapse. Maybe there would be a revolution in Iran. Maybe there’d be another war in, I don’t know, five, ten years from now, with other forces. But for now, what it looks like is Iran is getting stronger. It’s getting backing from the Russians and the Chinese. And we are facing mortal danger without a major, consistent superpower alliance. As long as the Americans are appeasing Iran, the danger is just increasing.

So we are in a very dire situation. I think we need to completely change our frame of mind. Stop bickering about Netanyahu or anti-Netanyahu, this solution or that solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. It’s not the issue. Talking about a solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict now is like arranging furniture on the deck of the Titanic after it has sunk. It’s completely irrelevant to our current situation. It has nothing to do with the dangers we’re actually facing. But people are not willing to let go of their habits of thought.

PP: One thing that happens is that people in the US get very upset about anybody here rejecting the idea of a Palestinian state. What is the case for rejecting a Palestinian state?

GT: The Palestinian national movement is not focused on nation-building. It doesn’t want a state. So the idea is preposterous, because there is no Palestinian partner in the effort to build a state. What they are doing is attempting to destroy Zionism. That’s not the same thing.

PP: Destroying Zionism means destroying the state of Israel?

GT: Absolutely. They are not willing to accept any sovereign Jewish presence anywhere in the land of Israel.

PP: Let me just back up for a moment. A two-state solution requires essentially being a Zionist, right? Because you have to accept the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state for there to be two states, Israel being one of them. But when people ask why there’s no two-state solution, they don’t say, “Because you have to accept Israel, and that’s not on the table.” On the other side, people say, “Because Netanyahu has declared that there will be no Palestinian state, and he never wanted one.” What’s the answer to that?

GT: Both. After 7 October, there will be no way to convince the Israeli public to agree to a Palestinian state.

PP: OK, but assume for a moment that there was a way for a Palestinian state to peacefully coexist with Israel and accept Israel as a legitimate, sovereign Jewish state. Wouldn’t the people of Israel accept that?

GT: If there were no gravity, they would accept flying.

PP: I see. But just hypothetically?

GT: What do you mean, hypothetically? We already showed we want to. We went for the Oslo agreement from the first moment. They never for one moment intended a two-state solution for two peoples. There was an instruction from Saeb Erekat, who ran the negotiations for a while, he instructed his team never to say “two states for two peoples,” but only “two states living side by side in peace.” What is the difference? The difference is that the Palestinians demand one nation state for the Palestinians, ethnically cleansed of any Jewish settlers, and another non-national state into which the Palestinian diaspora will return. That is what they call the right of return. They never once, there was never a Palestinian leader who was willing to give an inch on the so-called right of return, which is neither a right nor a return. These people are not refugees. They call it the right of the Palestinian refugees to return. But these are not refugees. They have been resettled. They are the sons, daughters, grandchildren, perhaps great-grandchildren, of refugees from the 1948 war.

Basically, they want two Muslim-majority states, that’s what they’re talking about. And we don’t listen to them. When Arafat came here, he said to his people, “Remember, this is like the agreement that the Prophet Muhammad made with a tribe. He signed a peace accord, and then, the moment he was strong enough, he broke it, attacked them, and killed them.” So from the start, Arafat was saying to his people, “Don’t worry. We’re not actually going through with this.”And Israel refused to acknowledge that. The press ran a massive disinformation campaign. I know this because my friend Eyal Carlin, now a well-known case, was an adviser on terrorism to two prime ministers. When Arafat arrived in 1994 after the Gaza and Jericho First Agreement, he gave speeches about how the Palestinian mission is jihad against the Jews.

Eyal brought the speeches, recordings, clunky videotapes with Hebrew subtitles, to the top columnist at Yedioth Ahronoth, at the time the leading daily, and he said, “Listen to this.” But the journalist refused to publish it. There’s controversy over why. The columnist allegedly said, “There’s no such thing as truth. There are only versions. And your version promotes the enemies of peace.” He denies saying this but has threatened to sue Eyal without ever doing so. What he doesn’t deny is that he refused to publish it.

Another friend of mine went to the Channel 1 television station. They also refused to publish it because they were so set on the Oslo dream. We imagined the Palestinian national movement in our own image. We understood Zionism as a project of self-determination and state-building, and we assumed that’s what they wanted. This is a mistake the West repeats constantly. That’s why we weren’t ready for Hamas. We had the Obama philosophy: everyone wants to raise children in peace, enjoy a decent living, own a nice home. Well, no. Apparently not. And based on that assumption, we believed they were deterred. One former head of National Intelligence, who had been head of Army Intelligence, said, “I don’t even have to look at the intelligence to know that Hamas will not attack Israel.” He had retired and was at INSS. He said this just weeks before the attack: “People are calling me hysterically saying Hamas is going to attack Israel.” He replied, “I don’t even have to look at the intelligence to know they’re not, because I know what their interests are. And their interests aren’t to attack Israel.”

PP: You mean he said it wouldn’t be in their interest?

GT: Yes, because they were supposedly deterred. We gave them carrots and sticks. We gave them employment. We allowed them Qatari money. So they wouldn’t give up prosperity for a war they couldn’t win.

This was a complete misunderstanding. Hamas is a very religious group, and we don’t take their theology seriously. But in Western academia, particularly American universities, you can’t say Islam isn’t a religion of peace. But the Muslim Brotherhood, who openly say, “We love death more than life,” take their theology seriously. So when you hear a young terrorist call his father to brag that he just killed ten Jews with his own hands, and the father passes the phone to his mother, who says, “I wish I was there with you,” this is not our mentality. We cannot understand this based on our values. We live in a world obsessed with the Other and diversity. Yet no one is as deaf to true otherness as the progressives. They imagine everyone to be exactly like them. 

PP: Except Jews? They don’t imagine Jews to be just like them. 

GT: No, because Jews are the hegemonic oppressors. So the world is divided into oppressors and oppressed, and we’re the oppressors. As Bassam Tawil put it so well: the women mutilated and raped by Hamas, that was their fault. They were the oppressors. Even death doesn’t relieve them of that burden.

We were completely unable to imagine the Palestinian national movement. The Palestinians support the atrocities of October 7 in massive numbers, a great majority. Recent polls show 72 percent support. Perhaps more. More in the West Bank than in Gaza. But even in Gaza, there’s still a majority supporting Hamas and the atrocities of October 7, which they view as a great victory. Someone who studies them told me: Yahya Sinwar is now the new Salah ad-Din. He is the new grand hero of the Arab world.

PP: My recollection is the last numbers I saw were something like fifty percent in Gaza and 83 percent in the West Bank. I don’t know if there have been updated figures.

GT: There’s a very recent poll by Khalil Shikaki, I don’t remember the exact numbers, but you can check. It was about ten days ago.

PP: And were the numbers about the same?

GT: About the same. 

PP: That illustrates, in a way, that the campaign in Gaza may be changing minds, if not hearts.

GT: I wouldn’t say that. While people are displaced, or their homes destroyed, or under danger, they react to the present. Once the war is over, if we don’t win it decisively, then this will be seen as a victory. Imagine this: President Sisi of Egypt once said that Egyptians should be proud of the Yom Kippur War because they nearly defeated a Mercedes with a Susita. That’s a car. “We had nothing, and this was the monster, the high-tech army, the IDF.” So imagine if little Hamas brought Israel to its knees. If the Americans get their way and prevent victory in this war, our blood will be in the water for all the big sharks.

And remember: Hamas is the smallest of our enemies. If we can’t defeat the smallest of our enemies, you can bet that in Iran, right now, they’re planning the next round. And it will be better coordinated.

PP: So you started to say what the plan should be to manage this threat. Because, as you said, they love death more than life, so death is not a deterrent. But land is what they want. So land is the deterrent. What is the plan? I won’t say “solution,” but what would be the tactic involving land?

GT: I’m not sure Israel has the stamina to do it. Don’t forget, our government is too dependent on a military raised in progressive universities. A military more focused on morality than on victory. We have a serious problem, and it’s just been extended. The Chief of the IDF, responsible for the unbelievable impotence on the morning of 7 October, has just completed a round of appointments. That means people in his own image will now lead the army: people from a culture that has internalised a defensive, progressive philosophy, relying on technology instead of mass. And that will be perpetuated unless we act.

It’s urgent. If we had the necessary stamina, and we may get there gradually. I don’t know what will happen in the next election. But five years from now, Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, and Smotrich may be remembered as the moderate government we once had. Israelis are shifting massively to the Right. The more they internalise the danger, the more they shift to the Right. What we need to do is transfer the remaining population in the northern part of Gaza, all the way up to the Gaza River, south of Gaza City. The upper third of the Gaza Strip should be annexed to Israel.

PP: Wow. That’s probably a very controversial statement.

GT: It’s not that controversial among Israelis. Politicians aren’t saying it because international public opinion is not letting us win the war much less annex any territory. But I think Israel should be bold, like Ben-Gurion was.

PP: And what happens to the southern two-thirds and the people now living there?

GT: Resettled there, for now. We should also encourage emigration. Many people will want to emigrate. We should support that. And in the long term, inasmuch as we can think that far, it should be governed locally, with Israel fully responsible for security.

We also need to dismantle the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. The PA is a terrorist organisation. There’s a new report detailing how many members of the PA’s security apparatus moonlight as terrorists. Not only that, PA spokespeople brag that they commit more attacks on Jews in the West Bank than Hamas does. They brag about having 400 security prisoners in Israel, PA personnel, and over 2,000 “martyrs” who were employees of the PA security forces.

And the Americans keep training them. They’re meant to be police. So why are they doing parachute training abroad? They’re preparing an army. There are 30,000 of them. We keep thinking they will help suppress terrorism. But what they are doing is paying people to kill Jews. The more you kill, the more money your family gets. If you die, your family gets a stipend for life. If you’re in an Israeli prison, the longer the sentence, the higher they pay. This is official policy. Everywhere in the PA-controlled territories, the only heroes are jihadists and terrorists. Schools, public squares, streets, they’re named after them. Look at Palestinian schoolbooks. In grammar, a punctuation lesson includes: “Do not think of the occupiers as human.” In maths: A rocket leaves Gaza at this speed, how long until it hits Tel Aviv? Or worse: calculate the strength needed for two men to carry a martyr’s casket. Thirteen-year-olds study this. 

I interviewed Itamar Marcus from Palestinian Media Watch. He said: people think October 7 was about Hamas indoctrination. It wasn’t. It was Palestinian Authority indoctrination. For thirty years, since Oslo, they’ve raised children to believe that killing Jews and dying in the process is the highest moral good. The Gaza Strip has been in Hamas’s hands only since 2007. The attackers on October 7 were raised on PA schoolbooks. And now we want the PA to be the solution? Who will revitalise it? Swedes? What do they think will emerge from this terrorist organisation in suits, who are glorifying the slaughtering of innocent Jews? 

That is their philosophy. We must stop guessing their intentions. We must plan based on their capabilities. And their capabilities now pose an existential threat to Israel.

PP: With one minute left, what are your final thoughts in this interview?

GT: My hope is that, first, we in Israel will recognise that this is a war between civilisation and barbarism. And eventually, the West will wake up, or at least read Samuel Huntington, and realise this is a global struggle. It’s happening everywhere, even on Harvard campuses. We need to fight this war, not just navel-gaze on the purity of our conscience or engage in moral grandstanding. The danger is real. Europe is committing suicide. The US is in denial, but it may be next. And I believe we’ve lost our immune system. Maybe it’s up to Israel to try to wake it up.

PP: Thank you.