On 9 March, Pamela Paresky sat down with Gadi Taub in Tel Aviv to discuss the war in Gaza, the failures of Israel’s security establishment, and the ideological forces—both inside Israel and across the West—that have undermined the country’s ability to defend itself. Their wide-ranging conversation covers everything from 7 October and the erosion of Israeli deterrence to the rise of postcolonial ideology, the crisis of liberalism, and the battle for narrative power in a media-saturated world.

I. Israel’s Security Threats and Western Denial

Gadi Taub:
Our last conversation happened during some of the darkest days—probably the darkest. I felt like our blood was in the water, that we might not recover our deterrence. And in this neighbourhood, as you can now see in Syria, without deterrence—if you’re not strong—sooner or later, you’re dead.

That’s how it felt. We had a hostile American administration, something people are only now beginning to understand. Those of us who follow American politics already knew it was hostile. Biden was hugging Netanyahu over the table while kicking his shins under it. But we didn’t know the full extent. They were stepping on our oxygen supply—cutting off ammunition. It wasn’t just the large bombs. The army was even complaining about D-9 bulldozers—the armoured bulldozers that let you approach buildings without risking soldiers’ lives. If you can’t bomb from the air due to civilian risk, you use D-9s. We had bought 150 of them, but we weren’t allowed to receive them. I heard from people in the army that the lack of those bulldozers was costing us lives—daily.

It was a very dark time. If you remember, I said we were facing a decade of wars to break the noose Iran had been tightening around us—just like the noose Nasser tied around us in the mid-1950s. It took 25 years to break that pan-Arab effort to destroy Israel. Happily, I may have been wrong about the timeline. This war—we don’t really understand it here in Israel, partly because of the poisonous press—but we’ve almost destroyed “the Shi’ite axis of evil,” as the Prime Minister called it. That’s something I thought would take a decade.

I’d predicted the next war would be with Hezbollah, and it would be terrible—more terrible than any war we’ve experienced. We believed it was coming once Gaza was dealt with. There were 150,000 missiles pointed at us, and we knew we couldn’t allow this monster to sit perched on our northern border, driven by a Nazi-inspired ideology. We had to fight, even at the cost of 15,000 civilian casualties, as some papers predicted. No one anticipated the beepers.

I remember sitting in my studio doing the Israel Update podcast with Mike Doran, who called it the “Grim Beeper.” No one imagined we could turn the tide like this. What Netanyahu managed to do—facing a hostile US administration—was unprecedented. No Israeli Prime Minister has managed to continue a war for long under American resistance. Whenever we didn’t finish a war quickly—like the Six-Day War or the destruction of the Syrian army in two days—eventually an American administration would say “enough,” and we had to obey. But this time, we didn’t.

Netanyahu escalated very carefully. He targeted individuals already wanted by the US—people with bounties on their heads and the blood of Marines from Beirut on their hands. The US couldn’t criticise us for those strikes. That allowed Israel to escalate gradually and destroy key Hezbollah capabilities. We toppled the Assad regime through proxies, took out air defences in Iran—and now, the question is: Will we finish the job?

Finishing the job means taking out Iran’s nuclear program. Most people don’t know this, but when Biden was elected, Israel’s existence was in real danger. Back then, Iran had around 500 centrifuges enriching uranium. Now, under Biden, they have over 13,000. That’s just in four years. If Kamala Harris had won this next election, Iran would have had the bomb—unless Israel defied everyone and took action. But doing that without US backing is almost impossible.

We pundits talk about this, but the truth is, we don’t know what Israel’s actual military capabilities are. Taking out Iran’s nuclear program would require a sustained campaign. Without US support, it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible. Still, we are in a better place now. Things are changing daily, and while I don’t know if the next US administration will help, it’s clear they won’t protect Iran’s nuclear program the way this one has.

But Hezbollah is still there, and we haven’t finished the job. I worry we’ll end up with half-measures in Lebanon and a problematic situation in Syria, where Iran has been expelled, but Turkey is now dominant.

Pamela Paresky:
Talk about what’s happening right now in Syria. We’ve seen some disturbing images coming out of there.

GT:
Yes. If you look at the press now, everyone’s talking about this “new” Jolani—he’s showing up in a tie and tuxedo. But these jihadists all share the same murderous ideology. We shouldn’t expect Western values or behaviour from people aligned with Al-Qaeda or ISIS. And we shouldn’t assume the same kinds of incentives and deterrents we use in the West will work.

That was our big mistake with Gaza. All our intelligence said Hamas wouldn’t want to jeopardise their economic progress. But they are religious zealots. They take their religion very seriously—so seriously that it includes a horrifying sadism. Just look at the pictures. This isn’t a conflict you can manage with Western logic.

Yes, we’ve weakened Iran significantly, including kicking them out of Syria. But now Turkey is close to our border. And Turkey is more serious than Iran. It’s a stable state with a real economy and a real army. Iran has missiles, but not much of an army.

We’re now in a totally different situation. We thought we were about to be suffocated by Iran. But the world’s willingness to accommodate Iran has been a sobering reminder of how the West has lost its immune system. It doesn’t recognise threats. It doesn’t recognise the forces that can destroy it. It’s obsessed with its own conscience instead of confronting reality. Saying the right thing has become more important than doing the right thing. Grandstanding now trumps moral action.

I can give you a concrete example. Igal Carmon, head of MEMRI—the Middle East Media Research Institute—collected sermons from imams across North America. He found that about 95 percent of them were wildly antisemitic. Some even incited violence against Jews. He assumed Jewish organisations would raise the alarm. They didn’t.

Many were more concerned about seeming Islamophobic than about protecting their own communities. Carmon said he managed to get a hearing with the Conference of Presidents. But the focus of the meeting wasn’t the content of the sermons—it was how he collected them. Did he eavesdrop? Was it legal? But it was all public content, all online. He just speaks Arabic.

Nobody would touch it—except a few ultra-Orthodox groups and some on the political right. The Centre and Left wouldn’t go near it. And this wasn’t new. Back in 1994, when Yasser Arafat arrived under the Oslo Accords, Carmon was one of the first to sound the alarm. Arafat gave speeches in Arabic calling for jihad against Israel—while telling Western audiences he was committed to peace.

He compared it to the Prophet Muhammad’s treaty with the Jews of Khaybar—an agreement he later broke. Arafat was essentially saying, “Don’t worry, this isn’t real peace—it’s just a phase in the war.” Carmon translated those speeches and took the videotapes to journalists. One of Israel’s top journalists—Nahum Barnea—refused to publish them.

According to Carmon, Barnea told him, “There is no such thing as truth. Every story serves some ideological purpose—and yours serves the enemies of peace.” (Barnea denies saying that. When I republished it, I was threatened with libel—but nothing came of it.)

Back then, the press and political elites believed the public was too hysterical and untrustworthy to hear the truth. They thought they could bridge a temporary period of confusion until everyone came around to peace. So they hid the truth. They thought democracy’s problem was the citizens—that without citizens, everything would work fine. Give them only what the elites think they can digest—a vegan diet of news.

PP:
Is that what happened before October 7?

II. Israel’s Failures on 7 October

GT:
I think the peace mentality had penetrated so deeply that it created a mindset where the overarching assumption was: Everybody ultimately wants peace. One of my friends puts it like this—“In every terrorist, there’s a small inner Jefferson just struggling to get out.” So if we just create the right conditions, if we let them prosper economically, then everyone will come to see that we all share the same goals. That assumption misled our intelligence services into believing that economic betterment would naturally lead to peace. It went so far that on the night between October 6 and 7—when all kinds of warning signs were popping up of an imminent attack—they still didn’t act. One of those signs was the sudden activation of Israeli SIM cards.

PP:
Most people probably aren’t aware of this. Hundreds of Israeli SIM cards were activated in Gaza that night. What would the purpose be? Communication once they crossed into Israel?

GT:
Yes. There are two Palestinian cellphone companies, but reception inside Israel isn’t reliable. So if you’re planning an invasion, you’d need access to the Israeli network. When a large number of Israeli SIM cards were suddenly activated, it was a clear sign of preparation. They had done it before—it could have been a rehearsal—but there were other signs too. For the first time, senior Hamas leaders, including Mohammed Deif, went into the tunnels. The only exception was Yahya Sinwar. Intelligence knew they had gone underground.

Shabak—the Shin Bet, which is responsible for intelligence in Gaza—interpreted this the wrong way. They thought Hamas was preparing for an Israeli invasion, not launching one. And here’s the thing: Shabak had become addicted to technology like the rest of the army. As my colleague Mike Doran puts it, we were thinking in terms of Star Wars, and they beat us with Mad Max—low-tech versus high-tech. We thought we had it figured out, but Sinwar knew us well. He had studied us from inside our prisons. All operational orders were communicated through written notes. He used his phone only to feed us disinformation.

PP:
But even with low-tech methods, how do you hide thousands of people preparing to invade?

GT:
Exactly. You can’t. But Shabak’s obsession with signals intelligence meant they neglected human sources. We had none in Gaza—believe it or not, zero. While the Mossad could track Nasrallah’s every sneeze in Lebanon, Shabak was blind in Gaza. And it wasn’t just the over-reliance on tech—it was also the Western peace-process bias that shaped their interpretation of the data.

So when all these warning signs emerged—activated SIMs, leaders going underground, and others I can’t mention—they interpreted it as Hamas fearing an Israeli invasion. And here’s the shocking part: Shabak recommended to the IDF not to raise the alert level, believing that doing so might escalate tensions.

PP:
By “raise the alert,” you mean calling up more soldiers? Preparing tanks?

GT:
Not even that. They didn’t even wake the sleeping soldiers. The tanks were empty. Normally, in a high-alert situation, soldiers would be inside those tanks with engines running. But they feared a “miscalculation”—that we might start a war by accident. My interpretation is: They wanted to show Hamas our exposed throat, as proof that we had no hostile intentions. It’s the mindset of peaceniks who completely misunderstand the nature of the enemy.

So yes, according to my source—and others have confirmed this—Shabak advised the army not to raise the alert. As a result, our soldiers were slaughtered in their beds. And now, both Shabak and the IDF are trying to cover this up.

PP:
Let’s talk about that report. From what I read, the summary—translated from Hebrew—suggests Shabak and the IDF admitted they failed to recognise the signs, and that their concepcia—the framework they used—blinded them. But you’re saying they’re also avoiding responsibility?

GT:
Yes. The core failure lies with Shabak and the IDF, and they’re trying to deflect blame. They’re spinning a convenient narrative: that it was purely an intelligence failure due to faulty assumptions—and they’re also pointing fingers at politicians.

We don’t have the full report, just a press release. According to it, Shabak claims that after Operation Guardian of the Walls in May 2021, they assessed Hamas had won that round, and ever since, they had been warning elected officials. That’s a lie.

We have Nadav Argaman on record saying that Israel struck such a blow that “Hamas after Guardian of the Walls is not the same Hamas.” Shabak’s assessment was that we had won. So their current narrative is blatantly false.

They also claim they were warning political leaders and demanding action. But right up until the week of October 7, they were recommending more economic concessions to Hamas, including letting more Gazans work in Israel. They didn’t sound any alarm. Nowhere in the report does it ask: why didn’t you wake the Prime Minister?

This goes deeper. They didn’t view Hamas as truly dangerous. And they don’t trust this government either. To them, it’s composed of wild, messianic right-wingers liable to “miscalculation.” That’s the word they use.

If you read the report closely, there’s one sentence that says they feared a miscalculation. That’s the only real clue. So Ronen Bar (head of Shabak) and Herzi Halevi (IDF Chief of Staff) decided: There’s no imminent danger, and more importantly, don’t tell the Prime Minister—because he might escalate.

This mistrust extended into the war. Netanyahu wasn’t just defying the Americans; he was also overruling the military brass. The brass kept warning: “If we do this, it’ll trigger a regional war.” But we needed a regional war to take out Iran. We weren’t going to get another chance.

On the eve of the beeper operation, someone in the IDF—most likely Herzi Halevi—leaked to Ronen Bergman of Yedioth Ahronoth (and the New York Times) that the government was about to do something rash. That was fifteen hours before the operation. It could have sabotaged the whole thing. That operation had been in preparation for years.

These generals see themselves as “gatekeepers.” That’s why I named my podcast Gatekeeper—ironically. It’s the rotten mentality of bureaucratic elites who believe it’s their job to restrain the elected government. Imagine if someone in Hezbollah had read that article and realised what was coming—it could have ruined the entire mission.

Reportedly, Herzi Halevi told the Prime Minister, “Just because you have a gadget doesn’t mean you have to play with it.” On the night of October 7, the real story is insubordination. Why didn’t they wake the Minister of Defence and the Prime Minister when there was imminent danger? Because they didn’t trust them. They viewed them as reckless.

This reveals an anti-democratic spirit. It says elected officials—and by extension, the public—can’t be trusted. That only they know better.

PP:
What you’ve just described mirrors what you said earlier—about the Council of Presidents hearing reports of Islamofascist incitement in the US, and worrying that sharing that information would provoke something.

GT:
Exactly. It’s the same mentality. Look at the Democrats...

III. Democrat Failures in the Middle East

GT:
What was the Biden administration’s response to the antisemitic riots on campuses after October 7? They created a task force to combat Islamophobia. That’s their mindset. But it’s really the Obama approach to international politics: Don’t aggravate the aggressors.

This is what you get from postmodernists and students of Edward Said—which Obama clearly is. In my view, he was the first Edward Saidian president. The problem, according to this worldview, is always the West. It’s a narcissistic, self-centred way of thinking, where every problem in the Third World is somehow our fault—usually colonialism. And it doesn’t even matter whether colonialism ever reached that place. It’s always about pacification, appeasement—not deterrence.

If you look at Obama’s personal history, he was a South Chicago community organiser. In that mindset, if there’s a thug in the neighbourhood, you hug him. Give him a stake in society, and he’ll be fine. But this isn’t social work. We’re not taking these people seriously. And they are taking themselves very seriously.

When someone like Yahya Sinwar says he wants to eat the livers of Jews, he means it. It’s not a figure of speech. The horrors of October 7 showed us that. I interviewed someone on my podcast who had studied the Muslim Brotherhood closely and worked for the Israeli government. He said nothing on October 7 was surprising. If you’d read the Hadith and the Quran seriously—or understood the theology of Hassan al-Banna—you’d understand why a terrorist would take a child and cut off his right hand and opposite leg. They were repeating what they believe the Prophet did. It was, for them, a holy ritual. What looks to us like sadistic chaos is, for them, structured religious devotion.

If we took their worldview seriously, we’d understand the threat. When Iran says it wants to wipe Israel off the map, it means it. When they call America the devil and burn the flag, they mean it. And when they burn Israeli children, they would burn all of us if they could.

In the Israeli press too, people say, “Well, there’s context. This is what happens after sixty years of occupation.” Never mind that Gaza was not occupied—it was a pilot for a Palestinian state. And if a Palestinian state ever existed, this is what it would look like. Hamas is the majority party in Judea and Samaria. Worse, the Palestinian Authority rejoiced on October 7.

We don’t talk about this enough, but Fatah offshoots participated in the October 7 invasion. People like to distinguish between the radicals and the moderates. But the difference between Hamas and Fatah is just one of style, not substance. It’s all part of the same movement.

PP:
Remind us who these figures are. The leadership has changed in Hamas, but Mahmoud Abbas has been around for over twenty years. He was elected to a four-year term, and he’s still there—because if he stepped down, Hamas would win.

GT:
Exactly. The peace process created the fantasy that the Palestinian national movement has matured—that they now recognise Israel isn’t going away and want compromise. That’s not how the Palestinian Authority sees it. The PA is a terrorist organisation. For our own convenience in the West, we invented a “moderate” faction.

In reality, the PA brags that in Judea and Samaria, they’ve killed more Jews than Hamas. There’s even a report—of course ignored by the mainstream press—called Policemen by Day, Terrorists by Night. It shows how members of the PA’s security forces moonlight as terrorists. Many have ended up in Israeli jails.

There’s also the “pay-for-slay” program. If you’re convicted of killing Jews, your salary from the PA is tied to how long your prison sentence is. A life sentence gets the highest pay. If the terrorist dies, the family gets a lifetime stipend.

PP:
And that money goes to their family?

GT:
Yes, it’s a way of making a living. The PA incentivises terror. And here’s something most people don’t know: when the IDF or Shabak reports on a terror attack, they list the perpetrator’s organisational affiliation—unless they’re affiliated with the PA. Then they don’t mention it. They’ve been called out on this many times.

Parts of the security brass are also implicated in a fake news campaign about settler violence. Now, I’m not saying there’s no settler violence—but it’s wildly disproportionate to the violence coming from Palestinians. Some settlers feel unprotected by the IDF, and that’s a problem. But the media exaggeration of settler violence, combined with denial of PA violence, is designed to create the illusion that the settlers are the problem—and the Palestinians are potential peace partners.

Some of this campaign is funded by European money, funnelled to NGOs like Breaking the Silence. That group publishes anonymous testimonies, which are impossible to fact-check, and they’ve been caught lying multiple times.

For example, when Arab herdsmen steal Jewish cattle, and the Jews retrieve it, it’s reported as settler violence. That’s their M.O.

There was recent reporting that the Palestinian Authority had stopped directly participating in “pay for slay,” and instead set up a foundation to pay the stipends. But the PA funds that foundation. It’s a fraud. Abbas is on record saying that if they have only one penny left in their budget, they’ll spend it on these payments.

The heroes of the Palestinian national movement are only terrorists—only those who kill Jews. In Judea and Samaria, public squares, schools, statues—they’re all named after murderers. The idea that their aim is national independence—like our own Zionist movement—is completely wrong.

Their entire worldview is different. Their terms are different. Their epistemology is different. At the heart of their movement is the destruction of Zionism. They call it the “right of return.” But it’s not a right, and most of those claiming it have never lived here. UNRWA perpetuates the fiction of Palestinian refugeehood—not to help them, but to delegitimise Zionism.

The enemies of Israel understand our vulnerabilities. They use our own values against us. Members of Knesset who supported Arafat now preach to Israelis that they’re racists. And human rights organisations aren’t really about human rights anymore. They’re postcolonial ideologues. In their eyes, Israel is the colonial oppressor, and the Palestinians are indigenous victims. That’s the framework.

Real human rights should be universal. If you only care about the rights of one side, that’s not human rights. That’s activism.

Haaretz, for example, says it has a “principled” stance against population transfer. But they support removing every Jew from Judea and Samaria. Their “principles” only apply against us.

Take B’Tselem—Israel’s most prominent human rights group. When Bassam Eid, a Palestinian working for them, documented PA human rights violations, they refused to publish it. Because their motivation isn’t human rights—it’s delegitimising Zionism.

The same is true of parts of the peace movement, which have become openly hostile to Israel. It’s not pleasant to say, but many liberal American Jews have become enemies of the Jewish state. Groups like J Street—calling for a weapons embargo against Israel during an existential war—are enemies. There’s no other way to put it.

The Israeli media is consumed by hatred of Netanyahu. Parts of the Left treat him as the enemy, and Hamas as a lucky break—something they can exploit to bring him down. They blame him, saying, “It happened on your watch.” But the real mistake was leaving Gaza. That made October 7 possible.

The Left’s obsession is: How do we save the two-state solution, even after Israelis saw who the other side really is? So they continue the narrative: The problem is settler violence. The problem is Israel. This lets them avoid the uncomfortable truth that there’s no partner for peace.

According to this narrative, peace was possible—until Baruch Goldstein’s massacre in Hebron, and then Yigal Amir assassinated Rabin. That, they say, killed peace. So it’s our fault. And if it’s our fault, we can fix it.

PP:
There’s a psychological comfort in believing that. Because if you caused it, then you can stop it. But isn’t it also a historical Jewish pathology? That we always blame ourselves for the harm done to us?

GT:
Exactly. It’s consoling. If antisemitism is our fault, then maybe we can cure it. Jews internalise these ideas. For the anti-Netanyahu camp, “normality” means being post-Jewish. As my friend Irit Linor says, their idea of Zionism is Sweden in Hebrew.

They want to shed everything uncomfortable about Jewish identity. If we just become more like everyone else, the hatred will go away. But that’s a delusion. There’s a joke: what is antisemitism? Hating Jews more than is absolutely necessary.

The idea is: let’s distance ourselves from the “messianic,” “primitive” Jews and step into enlightened global modernity. And that intersects with the wider Western Left. Self-criticism becomes ritualised self-flagellation. It’s not about improving anymore—it’s about purification.

This trend is especially visible in academia. Postmodernism turned scholarship inward. Instead of studying indigenous societies—as Clifford Geertz once did—anthropologists just write endlessly about their own biases.

The field dissolved into epistemological hypochondria. And with Edward Said, it became something else entirely. I once read Orientalism cover to cover, looking for a single claim about the Arab world. I found two. He’s not interested in the Arab world. He’s only interested in attacking the scholars who studied it.

Postmodernism says: There is no truth. So we don’t ask what’s true—we ask who decides, and for what purpose. And the answer is always the same: the hegemonic group, for the sake of power. That’s the postmodern sausage machine. Put anything in, you get the same answer out.

My late mother used to say postmodernism will die of boredom. And I agree. I remember sitting in a Cold War history class analysing phallic metaphors in Kennedy’s speeches—while we nearly had nuclear war in Cuba! I eventually dropped out of seminars and did independent study. Professors couldn’t handle criticism. One even walked out mid-discussion when I challenged him.

PP:
That makes me think of how the postmodern lens is blind to the fact that it is a lens. It convinces people they’re seeing the world as it really is—while denying others are seeing it clearly. That’s what makes it so hard to argue with.

GT:
Exactly. Richard Rorty is partly to blame. He translated French postmodernism into American liberalism. He convinced people that being a relativist—believing no values are foundational—makes you more tolerant. But if you have no argument against Nazis because everything is relative, then you’re not more liberal—you’re just leaving everything to power.

That’s how academia ended up defending Islamofascists. That’s what I mean when I say the West has lost its immune system. The moment you embrace your enemies, and they scream “racism” when you criticise them—Ilhan Omar, for example, supports Hamas but is ultra-sensitive to racism—you’re lost.

The postcolonial Left isn’t against racism. They’re for racism—so long as it’s the right kind. They support affirmative-action racism. They excuse Arab racism against Jews.

You saw this clearly after October 7. As Batya Ungar-Sargon noted, the same feminists who insisted “believe all women” suddenly became sceptical. When Israeli women were raped, they asked for more evidence. Suddenly there was “context.” Judith Butler even questioned whether Hamas did anything illegitimate. She called the reports “unconfirmed” and said she was “uncomfortable”—and her own acolytes attacked her for even that.

Antisemitism, for them, is a trap. Their framework is amoral. It only understands strong and weak. If a Jewish baby is part of the “oppressor class,” then its murder becomes its own fault. This worldview reduces everything to power.

Judith Butler might be on the fringe, but her ideas seep into everything. And ironically, her ideology is just radical American individualism in a new form. Gender Trouble is just Ralph Waldo Emerson in drag. The self-made man becomes the self-made gender identity.

Even the Biden administration has absorbed this. Kamala Harris said she studied maps of Rafah and couldn’t imagine how we’d move civilians. Well, we did—we moved a million people out of harm’s way. No one has conducted urban warfare with more care.

And yet we’re constantly told that Israel is committing atrocities. Meanwhile, the IDF has kept the civilian-to-combatant death ratio between 1.5 and 3:1—in a war where Hamas uses human shields. The international average is 7:1. This is the most densely populated combat zone in the world. No army in history has shown more restraint.

And still, the media shows a dead Palestinian baby next to an Israeli soldier, and people blame us. The bullets might have come from Hamas rifles—they steal Israeli weapons and shoot their own civilians if they try to flee. But all the outrage goes one way.

We’ve been told over and over again that if we go into Gaza, there will be disaster. Especially Rafah. But we proved it can be done. In my view, we should never have allowed people back into northern Gaza. We should have annexed that land and resettled it with Jews.

They don’t fear death. They see it as martyrdom. They don’t fear destruction—foreign aid will rebuild everything. The only thing they care about theologically is land. That’s what could deter them.

We need deterrence—and deterrence is inherently disproportionate. You slap your wife, you get four years in jail. Is that “proportional”? No. But it deters.

PP:
Of course, in military ethics, proportionality means something different—it means not using excessive force relative to your goals.

GT:
True. But that’s not how it’s used in the liberal press. They say: “Israel lost 1,400. Palestinians lost more—therefore Israel is in the wrong.” They take numbers straight from Hamas.

PP:
Yes, you’re right. In popular discourse, proportionality gets misused constantly. But your point—that deterrence must be clear and costly—is important.

IV. Israel's Near Future

PP:
In the north, there’s a buffer zone now—a demilitarised zone. Is something similar being considered for Gaza?

GT:
In the north, the buffer zone isn’t nearly wide enough. We should be present in a much larger swath of southern Lebanon. And we need to stop thinking of the outcomes of war as reversible. That’s not how it works in most of history. If you start a war and lose, you lose territory.

Ask the Hungarians—they lost two-thirds of their country. They’re not getting it back. Ask the Germans—they lost territory in the east. No one’s asking to reverse that. No one’s demanding the return of refugees or the movement of populations.

If you start a war against Israel and lose, you should lose territory. And if it were up to me—and with support from a more hawkish American administration like Trump’s—I’d say Lebanon lost land, and we should annex it. You fought us. You lost. Now you pay a price.

But in Israel, everything is always reversible. If we gain territory, we give it up. If we make any military advances, we roll them back. Why? We weren’t the aggressors. In Gaza, we weren’t even the occupiers. And even the argument about a siege falls apart. Gaza had an open border with Egypt.

PP:
Well, Egypt kept that border closed, right?

GT:
They did, but we now know there were underground smuggling tunnels—entire underground highways—bringing in weapons and goods. So even that wasn’t a real siege. The so-called blockade was an embargo on weapons, not food or essentials. And by the way, even a total siege is legal under international law.

If Israel weren’t caught between a radical Left and a sympathetic US administration, we’d be saying: Not a single truck of humanitarian aid enters Gaza until all our hostages are returned.

PP:
But as it stands now, no aid is going in, right?

GT:
Well, we try. But Israel isn’t a real democracy anymore. It’s ruled by unelected judges who’ve taken sovereignty into their own hands. They now claim judicial review even over constitutional amendments—despite the fact that Israel doesn’t even have a proper constitution, only semi-constitutional Basic Laws.

Now, intermediaries representing Hamas—via Israeli NGOs—have appealed to the Israeli Supreme Court to stop the government from halting humanitarian aid to Gaza. The court accepted the petition for discussion instead of throwing it out immediately. That’s outrageous. The government should’ve said: this is a political decision, and we’re not listening. But they can’t—because we’re trapped in the grip of a permanent bureaucracy that has subordinated elected power.

PP:
Wait—someone representing Hamas brought this case to the Israeli Supreme Court?

GT:
Not directly. Hamas can’t do that. But Israeli human rights organisations and NGOs regularly file petitions in the name of Palestinian prisoners or civilians. There’s a whole legal industry built around this. So now, they’ve appealed to the Israeli Supreme Court—against the Israeli government—after the government had US backing to cut off aid.

Let me remind you: Giora Eiland, a former IDF general and no right-winger, said the reason we don’t have our hostages back is the Biden administration. They forced us to provide humanitarian aid, which undermined our leverage. Under international law, threatening a population with starvation to recover hostages is legal—if it’s the only way to win the war. But Israel went far beyond what international law demands.

The US framed this as a war crime and threatened to cut off our ammunition. So we were under their thumb. And now we’re also up against our own Supreme Court. The judiciary, over the years, eroded the buffer zones around Gaza.

PP:
It used to be that anyone who came close to the fence would get a warning shot. What was that policy?

GT:
Under General Doron Almog—whose family, by the way, suffered deeply in the Maxim’s bombing in Haifa and also in the Kfar Aza massacre—there was a shoot-to-kill zone in the south. In some places, it was a full kilometre deep. Anyone entering it was shot in the head.

And it worked. No one got close to the fence.

But then NGOs began petitioning the Supreme Court. The Court hides behind the fact that they eventually rejected the petitions—but they never threw them out immediately. That opened the door to negotiations, which led the state to constantly water down its policy in hopes of avoiding a ruling.

That process completely eroded the buffer zone.

Here’s how it worked: The state would say, “We need a buffer,” and the judges would respond, “We’re writing down your commitments.” Then it became: You can’t shoot to kill. Then: Don’t shoot above the waist. Then: Don’t shoot above the knee. Then: Only shoot the ankle. And finally: Only shoot if you have proof the person is a terrorist.

So what did Hamas do? In 2018, they launched the so-called “March of Return.” Civilians marched to the fence under the banner of the “right of return.” We responded with sharpshooters—highly trained IDF soldiers making precise shots.

And the media crucified them.

They were called murderers. And yes, some of the people shot were seventeen-year-old Hamas operatives. But they were in uniform, with weapons, on Hamas websites. They were combatants. Still, because they were under eighteen, they were called “children.”

These IDF sharpshooters did an extraordinary job. They almost always picked the right targets and almost never hit civilians. They managed to neutralise threats 95 percent of the time without killing.

But the media kept saying, “Why not use rubber bullets?” “Why not tear gas?”

Well, that doesn’t work in open terrain. Rubber bullets are wildly inaccurate—you’re more likely to blind someone by accident. In fact, live sharpshooting is often the safest method when done properly.

But the media twisted it. “Evil Israeli soldiers firing live rounds into crowds of children.” And then came the New York Times piece, centred on a baby named Laila al-Ghandour.

They claimed she was killed by Israeli smoke grenades. She was eight months old. But think about it: Who brings a baby to a war zone? At first, they said her twelve-year-old sister brought her and panicked.

Turns out the baby died of heart failure in the hospital before the clash. The family brought the body to the front, to blame the IDF.

The New York Times published it with a photo that looked like a Renaissance painting—like the Pietà. The dead baby in her mother’s arms, posed like baby Jesus. The entire composition was religious kitsch designed to provoke maximum emotion and hatred toward Jews.

PP:
Did the New York Times ever correct that?

GT:
I don’t think they did. I had an exchange about it in Haaretz. But Haaretz never apologised either. They felt justified. Because they believe they know who the “evil” side is. And if they exaggerate a little to serve the cause—so be it.

V. Haaretz– The Anti-Semite’s Favourite Israeli Paper

PP:
Wasn’t there something recently with Haaretz losing government funding? What's been going on there?

GT:
Yes. Amos Schocken, the publisher of Haaretz, spoke at a conference in London during the war and said that the people Israelis call Palestinian terrorists are actually freedom fighters. He argued that a Palestinian state is essential and called for sanctions—not just against Israel as a country, but also against Israeli leadership personally.

So here we are, in the middle of a war, and the publisher of Haaretz is publicly calling for sanctions against his own country. Haaretz is an anti-Zionist paper. They keep denying it, but that’s what they are. For over thirty years, they’ve used their literary supplements to promote postcolonial academics. They’ve published blood libels against Israeli soldiers. Their entire coverage of the occupation is shaped by the agenda of blaming Israel—for the wars and for the failure to achieve peace.

Right before the war, Haaretz editor Aluf Benn published an op-ed arguing that it was time to remove the word “Jewish” from the phrase “Jewish and democratic.” That was a direct call to abandon Zionism in favour of a non-national state—probably one that includes Gaza and Judea and Samaria—and renounces the Jewish character of Israel.

This wasn’t surprising. They’d been undermining Zionism quietly for years, but now they said it out loud. Why then? Because it was clear that judicial reform had failed, and the power of Israel’s Supreme Court had been cemented—maybe even expanded. The Court holds a radical, progressive, post-nationalist worldview that is sympathetic to a non-Zionist vision of Israel.

The only way to make Israel not Jewish is to subvert its democracy. If you have universal suffrage and a Jewish majority, that majority will always vote to preserve a Jewish state. So Aluf Benn likely saw an opportunity: The danger of democratic reform had passed, and now was the time to push the anti-Zionist agenda more openly. But then October 7th happened, and suddenly abandoning the Jewish state didn’t seem like such a good idea.

Also worth noting: the Israeli Left has shut down a right-wing media outlet. It was a radio station, and it’s the only case in Israeli history where a media outlet was shut down—and it was on the right. When Ben-Gurion tried to shut down a communist newspaper, the Supreme Court protected it. But only the right has ever been silenced like this.

Haaretz, on the other hand, screams “censorship” any time someone criticises them. But why should the government be giving them advertising revenue? Why should civil servants be able to subscribe to Haaretz at taxpayers’ expense? Why should we help fund a newspaper whose publisher is calling for sanctions against Israel in wartime?

So now, finally, there’s some courage to push back—because the case is so clear. But Haaretz is not in danger of being shut down. They can raise their own subscriptions. We just shouldn’t be forced to pay for it.

Even abroad, people are noticing. Jeffrey Goldberg—hardly a right-winger—said he cancelled his Haaretz subscription because he was getting too many links to it from neo-Nazis. And it’s true: if you look at neo-Nazi sites like The Daily Stormer, which sees itself as the successor to Der Stürmer, there are hundreds of references to Haaretz articles. Because when someone like Gideon Levy writes, “Stop Living in Denial: Israel Is an Evil State,” the antisemites say, “See? Even the Jews say it.”

David Duke has cited Haaretz hundreds of times. They’ve become one of the most effective producers of antisemitic material in the world. And because it’s coming from Jews, it’s treated as authoritative—as self-testimony.

What’s also collapsing now, hopefully, is the broader machinery of lies—the same system that promoted the Iran nuclear deal. That’s what Ben Rhodes was famous for: creating an “echo chamber,” planting narratives in the media, and manufacturing a false sense of consensus.

That machine began to fall apart during the Trump–Biden debates. People started to realise they’d been lied to for three years. “He’s sharp as a tack,” they were told. Then suddenly it’s Kamala Harris and Joy Reid we’re supposed to accept as the real voices. The whole thing started to unravel.

A big part of that was Elon Musk buying Twitter. He broke a huge piece of that narrative-control machine.

Then there’s Trump himself. And Netanyahu. And Netanyahu understands something that’s often missed: beyond the battlefield, there’s a war of narratives.

One narrative—promoted by the Biden administration, the Israeli Left, Haaretz, most of the liberal media, and academia—is that Zionism is a relic of Western colonialism. It needs to be dismantled.

The other narrative—Netanyahu’s narrative—is that Zionism is not the rear guard but the avant garde of the West. Israel is the front line in the battle between the West and its enemies.

According to the first view, jihad is just armed resistance—a reaction to Western guilt. And the solution is to make amends and offer reparations.

But Netanyahu’s view is: These are our mortal enemies. They must be taken seriously. And Israel is leading the struggle. That’s what he said in his speech to Congress, where he got 37 standing ovations: “Our war is your war. Our victory will be your victory.” The West needs to shake off its postcolonial illusions, see the threat clearly, and stand with us.