After 600 days, is the appetite for continuing the war with Hamas waning among its supporters? This week on Identity/Crisis, Yehuda Kurtzer sits down with Tal Becker, Shalom Hartman Institute Vice President and former Legal Adviser of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to discuss war strategy, moral obligation, and the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza. 

Is the War Still Worth it?– with Tal Becker Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Hi everyone, welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute creating better conversations about the essential issues facing Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer, we’re recording on Tuesday, May 27th, 2025.

You know, there are some Jews out there who are moral exceptionalists, either convinced that whatever the Jewish people do in our own interest is fundamentally good, such that they can’t brook any criticism, or so obsessed with the moral behavior of Jews that they are constant critics of other Jews and their actions.

I identify as more of a normalist than an exceptionalist. When it comes to the question of the moral character of the Jewish people or the state of Israel, I tend to feel we are better morally than our enemies and worst critics think we are, and probably worse than our apologists make us out to be. I find that that kind of approach is a hedge against anti-Semitism from without, or even against the internalized kind, the kind that strips us of any agency. And it’s also a hedge against the kind of self-righteousness that sometimes comes with either chosenness or a sense of being against the world that doesn’t help you strive to get better.

This is the approach I’ve taken when I’ve been trying to evaluate, from a distance, Israel’s conduct throughout this war, a challenge made much more complicated by the fact that I am far away and that it’s hard to know what is real and what is not.

I’ve been quite sure since the war broke out that the instinct towards slandering Israel, that seems extraordinarily widespread around the world, that it undermined the credibility of some of the most trenchant of Israel’s critics and made it harder to take some of that criticism seriously. And it may have obscured some aspects of that criticism that was correct for those of us who were on the defensive. Meanwhile, it’s also been obvious to me that those who pretended that Israel’s conduct throughout the war was above reproach were working too hard to see, were working too hard to not see what was so obviously problematic.

Earlier in the war, I had my colleague Tal Becker on here on the podcast to talk about the ethics of war and to discuss what we were seeing. A lot of it even back in November of 2023, was already hard to watch. The military assault on Gaza was fierce and unsparing. And even though I felt then and argued that the war was a just war, that Israel had the right and necessity to go to war against Hamas, it was hard to watch even back then, even though it was a moral imperative to do so. You can justify a war, but you can’t then ignore its consequences. In fact, self-defense is justifiable because I am created in the image of God, but what I do to someone else in response also obligates me because they are created in the image of God.

I asked Tal near the end of that episode, back in November of 2023, how we diaspora Jews should engage in criticism of Israel during that first phase of the war, how to be, what Michael Walzer calls “connected” critics from afar. Tal said something then that surprised me, but which I took to heart. He said that at that phase, Israel already had sufficient critics around the world of its war conduct and didn’t need American Jews to join that chorus. He asked instead for solidarity and support.

I suppose, as I think about it, the premise of being a connected critic is that you’re already in an affirmed relationship of love and support. If you don’t have that in place, you’re not a connected critic, you’re just a critic. We’re at a different stage of the war today as measured by many different indexes.

The broad support for the war in Israeli society has given way to a lot more social division, with a significant percentage of Israelis saying in virtually every opinion poll that they would prefer that the government prioritize the cause of returning the hostages rather than pursuing more war aims right now. The war might have been described as successful in many ways beyond expectation, especially on the northern front, and the war aims in Gaza appear very difficult to quantify anymore beyond what has already been achieved, especially facing an army that will never concede defeat.

I’ve been wondering for a long time why it seems so difficult for Israel to declare victory, and it is especially maddening to see so visibly the political pressure from Israel’s far-right forces and the government who have hinged Prime Minister Netanyahu’s political viability on his insistence to continue fighting this war. Israel’s standing in the international community is declining steadily. Now the day goes by when another European leader who originally and for 18 months supported Israel’s right to defend itself right back at the outset of the war says something like, Israel’s war can no longer be characterized as defensive. And now Israel even confronts an American administration that it ostensibly thought would give them more of a blank check in Gaza, and instead seems to be pushing for an end to the war in ways that are sidelining Israeli leaders in the process.

The drumbeat of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza continues, with the threat of hunger, the decimation of the civil infrastructure, the continued assault on hospitals, the news this week of the killing of nine children in one family. The moral questions weigh more heavily every day.

Now, I don’t want to pretend that every news report we get is the whole story. For months, for instance, we’ve watched allegations and reports that get walked back, sometimes right afterwards and sometimes many months later. Even just last week, or maybe it was the week before, the UN contested its own report about malnutrition in Gaza, those warnings that said that there would be a massive crisis within 48 hours. Earlier in the war, similar reports, rumors of mass starvation turned out to be unfounded.

In other ways, specifics don’t really matter. We sit atop a massive question. Is it sufficient for Israel to do what it perceives as legal, or are we obligated to advocate for what we think is moral? In this respect, we’re confronting questions that have defined the Jewish people’s return to history and pursuit of normalcy throughout the rise of Zionism and the creation of the state of Israel.

And it’s precisely because I feel that Zionism is intertwined with my Judaism and vice versa, it’s unthinkable to me that the state of Israel would only do what it perceived as in its limited military interest, not in its supererogatory moral interest as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

Last week Israel relented and let aid trucks into Gaza. Times of Israel is reporting that aid still does not reach the Gazans at the sufficient levels. We know that this is largely because Hamas steals and controls the aid. This too is part of the complexity and the stuckness, and still, and still, and still.

Tal, thank you for coming back on the podcast and for engaging on these questions. I guess I want to start with how you think about the exceptionalism and normalcy divide. And I know you approach this both as a Jewish thinker and scholar, and you also approach this from the perspective of having worked on the inside of government for the state of Israel for so long. How are we supposed to think about that divide between the project of Zionism as doing what normal nation states do, and making calculuses that are political and legal in nature? And how much do you feel we’re obligated to take the moral exceptionalism piece of the story into consideration when we watch what’s going on with this war?

Tal: Thanks, Yehuda. Good to be with you, but a bit excruciating to talk about all this stuff. You know, I think, first of all, I’m one of these people, because I was in government for so long, that is always aware of the kind of discrepancy between what is reported and what may actually be going on. And there’s been so much misinformation and disinformation, it’s really hard to get a handle on what’s happening.

But I don’t think that excuses us from thinking about what are the moral principles we need to apply and how do we maintain our humanity in the face of Hamas’s inhumanity remains a relevant question even when you don’t exactly know the facts, or at least the facts are contested.

I think fundamentally the legal principles that make sense are the legal principles that resonate with a moral compelling rationale. And part of the dilemmas here and the complexity here is that there isn’t in my view an easy moral answer to these questions.

For example, the challenge of humanitarian aid, where it sits exactly I think, is in the, on the one hand, the danger of empowering Hamas by facilitating the provision of aid and that empowering Hamas means empowering not just your enemy, but empowering the force that is terrorizing the Palestinian population, potentially making a hostage deal more difficult, potentially making the end of the war more difficult, potentially enabling Hamas to reconstitute itself. So you have all that on the one hand.

And on the other hand, you have the suffering of Palestinian civilians that I think, even if you think, as I do, that this is a just war, to be cognizant of the costs and the suffering is a moral obligation, I think, of anyone, but certainly of Jews as well. So I don’t think about this in terms of moral exceptionalism. I think in terms of the legal obligations by and large represent an attempt to respond morally like any state should, but to an impossible challenge.

I think the scope of this challenge has been really hard for people to appreciate and understand in the way that Hamas spent 16 years creating a battlefield that really, in ways I think, even when you say it, you don’t fully comprehend it, has essentially made their entire civilian population and its suffering part of their war strategy.

What I think, and I’ll just, one sentence more about this is that what we, I think, are obliged to do, both as a Jewish state and as a country that wants to have partners in the world in dealing with these issues morally is to articulate clearly what the moral dilemma is and how we are trying to grapple with it. That I think, that kind of clear language, that says, you know, this is a real moral challenge. These are the moral questions we face. This is the approach we’re taking in an impossible dilemma, but really to be in communication with anyone willing to be in a moral conversation, I think is a really important obligation. Not to give up on that conversation. Yes, there are those who are critical of Israel no matter what. There are the anti-Semites out there. There are those who want to be deliberately ignorant.

But I think, you know, part of the aspiration of Zionism was to be in community with others. And that requires, you know, framing what you’re doing in the language of your values commitments. There’s that tension, I think, that Zionism is also a kind of product of a people who felt abandoned by the world. And October 7th has in some way put that on steroids, this sense of aloneness, who does it matter who we’re talking to anyway? Nobody understands us. The media is against us. The disinformation is there.

And it kind of reinforces this sense that we’re just on our own with our own trauma. But that is a betrayal, I think, of Zionism’s aspirations. And it forces us for our own health. And in my view, even for a kind of victory in this war that isn’t just a victory on the battlefield, but a preservation of our soul as we’re fighting this irreconcilably evil enemy requires us to use that language, to frame it in that language, and to engage in communication with others in those terms. And that I think is doable despite how difficult the dilemmas are.

Yehuda: I want to come back to the piece on the moral conversation; I think that you’re actually speaking more to Israeli society even than diaspora Jews; I want to come back to that. But I want to pick up on something that you said, which is your belief that this continues to be a just war. From my perspective, it felt very clear that it was a just war early on. And I wrote to that effect and said, we as diaspora Jews have to be comfortable with that language because a just war is rooted in the right to self-defense, and so on and so forth, and a whole set of regulations on what justifies a just war.

A growing number of people no longer believe this to be a just war. I mentioned some European heads of state and foreign ministers, a growing number of Israelis who would argue that actually, the either incapacity to definitively defeat Hamas or the moving goalposts on the war aims or the fact that you’ve actually done so much to degrade Hamas’s capabilities to actually constitute an existential threat on Israel eliminates the argument about just war, or at least forces the calculus of—does it continue to be valuable for Israel to pursue such a violent war when you can’t as fully or cleanly make the claim that it’s just war? Why do you continue to use that language in this context?

Tal: Well, I mean, this is a contested issue to some extent, even within Israel, though I think within Israeli society, it’s less about the justness of continuing the war and a kind of moral conversation that it is about the preferencing of a hostage deal to the continuation of the war, which for many is seen as a kind of trade-off between releasing the hostages and defeating Hamas in the different ways that that is understood.

Let me try to put it this way. If the purpose of the continued military operation is to prevent Hamas from being able to be a force within Gaza that denies the ability to create a post-Hamas reality, that denies Palestinians to have a governance that isn’t dominated by Hamas, if the purpose of this operation is to prevent Hamas from being able to reconstitute itself and create the space for a post-Hamas operation, that in my view is a legitimate objective. If the purpose is to create conditions that pressure a hostage deal by targeting Hamas fighters who are threatening Israeli soldiers and terrorizing the Palestinian population, I think there’s legitimacy to that.

And if one of the purposes, which I think is critical, and that’s the way, you know, it’s so hard in all the noise to decipher. If one of the purposes is to create better control over the distribution of humanitarian aid so that it actually gets to the civilian population and not to Hamas in that way, that also I think is an important objective. But in all the noise, there may be other objectives that are unclear. If the objective is the way some in the radical right are describing, that the actual purpose is to, you know, make, create conditions for a permanent occupation or create conditions for settlements in Gaza, then no, I don’t think that that would be a just purpose. I think that the way in which at least the establishment, right, there are loud voices and illiberal voices within the government itself, but they don’t determine in practice what the army is doing on the ground, right?

If the orders to the soldiers are, we need to undo Hamas’s infrastructure, create a situation where Hamas can no longer be the governing force in Gaza and enable an alternative, the option of an alternative Palestinian governance and to prevent humanitarian aid from empowering Hamas, those are all legitimate objectives.

Now, under the law of war, the question isn’t just whether you have a legitimate objective. The question is whether you are using means to advance that objective or other objectives. Now that is a factual test. And here I have to say I’m an annoying, I’m a recovering lawyer. I’m not trying to provide here a kind of definitive legal analysis, but I’m just annoying in the sense that I don’t trust the facts as represented by so many different people in so many contradictory ways. It’s hard to assess. It’s hard to assess what is true or not true. But the objective as described, for instance, by the prime minister in terms of preventing Hamas from being able to reconstitute itself. That in itself was an initial war aim. And in my view, neither Palestinians nor Israelis should end this war with Hamas, with the ability to reconstitute itself and do another October 7th.

Yehuda: You know, about a decade ago, maybe a little longer, there was this exchange of articles that Donniel wrote a piece, I think maybe it was in the Times of Israel or maybe the Jerusalem Post before there was a Times of Israel, wrote a piece defending the morality of targeted assassinations on the premise of tikkun olam. It brings about, you need to do this, it’s a complicated argument, but his argument was basically about the fundamental morality of targeted assassinations, even though it’s a kind of complicated argument to make.

And Charles Manekin, who is a professor at the University of Maryland, professor of philosophy and Jewish thought, said, I can go with that argument only to such extent that you’re asking me to trust the IDF spokesperson. Right? That there’s, that… and I think about that often because it goes to what you just said, that the government of Israel says this is their primary objective. But I have all of this noise and clutter. I have data of clear overreaches by the IDF in some places, you might call them mistakes. I have data from the right-wing forces in the government who are not irrelevant. They say things all the time. I have too many videos that soldiers post on Instagram of absurd things that they’re doing in Gaza. And I have Israel’s decisions around, for instance, the kind of blockade around aid that make it very, hard to tease this out.

I guess my push is is the only way to continue to think about this as a just war to say the things that make me not trust Israel are noise and the thing and I have to be willing to kind of suspend my disbelief, my critical inquiry, to trust that aim in isolation continues to be the moral aim, the morally legitimate aim?

Tal: You know, it’s a hard question to answer, because one of the challenges here is that the loudest voices are saying, some of them are saying really problematic things, and you don’t hear enough of the counter voice that says, actually, these are our objectives, this is what we’re trying to do, here are the instructions. I mean, you had the Ramatkal, Eyal Zamir say the other day, you know, we are seeking to prevent starvation. We’re targeting Hamas rule. Like really articulating that. Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke in a similar way a few nights ago.

And then yes, you have all the noise, right? And I think to some extent it does depend to some extent at least for observers on, I don’t know if it’s trust, but it’s a willingness to say, there are other ways to interpret this reality, right? And in fact, those objectives are legitimate objectives, to the extent, you know, notice the way that I put it, to the extent that that is the objective, then the objective is legitimate. To the extent that it isn’t, it isn’t.

And I go back to something I said in the podcast we did a long time ago now, which is, it is really frustrating to be an observer and say something definitive because it’s much harder to say something definitive. You can’t easily say that a specific action was this way or that way. I know from my own experience, my sense, my overall, first of all, I know that the IDF itself takes compliance with the rule of law seriously in terms of its training, in terms of its instructions. That doesn’t mean that in every incident, assault soldiers live up to that, but I know that it’s part of their training.

And I also believe from my own experience that most of the time the military establishment is trying to grapple with very serious dilemmas that the situation in Gaza presents. What’s lacking for me is the kind of framework within the discussion at the political level and at the societal level that is saying, yeah, we need to hear how you’re dealing with these dilemmas. We need to hear what’s legitimate and what’s not legitimate. And that’s more to do with the kind of pain within Israeli society, that feeling of aloneness, that it’s become, you know, almost political to talk about how we are making sure that we are dealing seriously with these dilemmas.

Yehuda, I do want to take a step back and just, you know, maybe for a thought experiment, just want to say that, you know, imagine if, imagine if Hamas after October 7th had somehow booby-trapped all two million Palestinian civilians and made a situation where Israel couldn’t take any action without devastating civilians, right? What would we say from a kind of principled moral perspective? Would we say that Hamas have kind of cracked the code? They’ve figured out a way to defeat Western democracies in the fight of war because they’ve made it so that there is simply no way to try to free hostages or to counter their threats without a really devastating reaction to the civilian population.

And if we did that, we would be essentially saying, you have found the way to defeat democracies. And I am troubled by the calibration in moral responsibility here. At the end of the day, again, I’ll go back to the issue of humanitarian aid. Humanitarian aid, for example, in my view, the law basically assumes that the enemy force you are fighting may not care about your civilians, but it certainly cares about its own civilians. So if you facilitate the transfer of humanitarian aid to the other side, it will then take care of the distribution of the aid to the other side.

You can assume that, or to some extent you can assume that this enemy force cares about the welfare of its own civilian population. And in fact, the laws of war say pretty clearly that there is limitations, if not precondition, there’s a bit of a dispute around that, for your obligation to facilitate the provision of aid, if it gets diverted to the enemy force. That is not something you have to do. You don’t have to empower your enemy. What do we do in a reality? What do we do in a reality where you’re dealing with an enemy that the suffering of their civilian population is inherent to their war strategy?

And when we discuss the humanitarian aid issue or Israeli action, it becomes incredibly frustrating the degree to which Israel’s response to the dilemma that Hamas created is the preoccupation, if not the obsession of the discussion. And so little is directed to the creation of that dilemma in the first place. Hamas could allow the distribution of aid to the humanitarian, to the civilian population. It could release the hostages, an ongoing war crime, daily, an ongoing war crime, it could disarm, right? And in those realities, none of these questions would emerge.

And yet the entire conversation, it seems to me, internationally, is how Israel is reacting to that evil, but not the evil itself. Now that doesn’t absolve us of our obligations. Hamas’s inhumanity does not absolve us of the obligation to humanity. But the context that it creates, I think, is critical to the conversation and it’s very lacking.

Yehuda: I agree, but you know when democracies fight back against terror groups they have to fight on two fronts. They have to both fight on the terms that have been laid out by the terror group and your horrific hypothetical gets at the crux of the problem because it’s not that far. What they’ve done is not that far from a booby trap. Right? So on one hand you do have to fight back for your own defense and the second thing you have to fight back is by preserving the norms of a democracy. Right?

Tal: Right, it’s almost not a hypothetical,

Yehuda: I understand it’s an, what you’re basically saying is this is unfair that we’re forced to ask these moral questions about what we are and what we do, but based on an enemy that is not playing by the rules. But that’s what we decide to be a part of by being the family of nations. And as Jews, we say, like every morning in our prayers, you know, it’s not like there’s no difference between human beings and animals because all is the same. We say, “anachnu amcha bnei britecha,” we choose to be the people of God’s covenant, meaning we tie ourselves to an aspiration of justice and righteousness. Too bad.

Tal: Yehuda, I know. I’m not saying it’s unfair. We have that obligation and we have to live up to that obligation. What I’m saying is the way that the issue is framed that looks at the response to the dilemma, but not the creator of the dilemma distorts the moral lens of the conversation. What do you do in a reality where the enemy you’re fighting is seeking the suffering of its population? That’s a real moral question.

Now we, I think you are absolutely right. That is a moral dilemma we have to talk about. We have to explain it, we have to engage with our partners in the world, with our own society and say, we have these moral obligations. And part of the pain of the post October 7th reality is the way that conversation feels so shut down and silenced in a lot of us, right? And I think we have that moral obligation.

First of all, I’m skeptical as to how much legitimacy it would give us if we had that moral conversation, because I’m a pretty jaded guy in terms of the way global institutions work when it comes to judging Israel. But even if it gave us no legitimacy, it is still our obligation to talk in that way and frame our actions in that way and make our decisions in that way. And what I’m trying to say is that I think quite a few very dominant people in the Israeli system who are actually involved in this process are doing that, right?

I don’t know much about the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in terms of its details, we’ll see that. But if its objective is to figure out a way to get aid to the civilian population without it getting to Hamas, that in my view is a noble objective in principle. But we also need to say we’re doing this because we feel an obligation morally to balance our sense of obligation to our commitments against the reality that Hamas created and not just put it in some kind of instrumental way or even hide it from the public because it’s not politically a good idea to talk too much about the efforts you’re making to live up to your obligation.

Yehuda: So I guess I’m curious how you make what you make of this particular argument. So back in January of 24, I wrote a piece about what it meant to support—continue to support the war after several months. And by the way, the disproportionate number of Palestinians killed in this war were killed in the first six months of the war. And I wrote something there that I regret the way I wrote it, even though I actually don’t think it was wrong. I regret the way I wrote it because it was so inflammatory, that it got screenshotted and tweeted a couple of million times as evidence of moral turpitude. I, yeah, so I have some regrets about that, but what I wrote was: “You cannot measure the morality of a war based on the number of casualties. Every casualty is a tragedy.”

And it’s not a question of like, well, there’s now more casualties than I wanted to, therefore this war is immoral. As you said, like if you have a morally legitimate objective, that’s what shapes what a just war is. And then you have to be sure that you are fighting that just war justly. And I think that goes back to your hypothetical. I essentially still think that is true. World War II was not a less moral war than, for instance, other wars in history because it had more casualties. That’s not a way to think about this.

But I think that one thing that’s shifting in the public discourse around the world, etc., is I agree that this is basically a just war. I was willing to endure the costs to my enemies, to civilians, and even to my own moral fiber in that process. I just am not willing to endure it anymore. I’m not saying that it was never legitimate. I’m saying that after 19 months, I don’t want to do it anymore. And I feel that’s what’s basically happening. You see the images of a family that loses nine children. And you’re like, I can no longer hold what you’re describing as a set of goals that may or may not be achievable. Hamas, one of its other villainies, is that it’s not like a normal army that’s going to hold up a white flag and start negotiating terms of surrender. It’s suicidal in that sense.

How do I think about that? Because I think that’s where, I don’t know, I could say personally that’s where I’m sitting and where I think a lot of people are sitting. I’m not characterizing Israel as genocidal. I’m not engaging in a retroactive question of the fundamental legitimacy of this. I just don’t think it’s worth it anymore.

Tal: Yeah, so I mean, I’m tempted first to kind of answer legally. Your description is a pretty accurate description of the way the law of armed conflict traditionally thinks about something. You have a legitimate objective in terms of the goal of your war. Preventing Hamas from targeting Israelis is a legitimate objective. Preventing Hamas, I think, from continuing to govern is a legitimate objective. Releasing the hostages is a legitimate objective.

And then the question of whether you’re pursuing that objective justly is a kind of incident by incident analysis that looks at, did you live up to the core principles? We talk about precaution and proportionality and distinction and so on. And that is a very difficult thing to decipher without knowing a lot of facts. We talked about that in the last podcast. And what you’re kind of describing is, you know, yeah, I get all that, but gee, it’s taking too long and there’s just too much. It’s too much.

And I think my initial reaction to that is to say, but it’s too much because Hamas created this battlefield for it to be too much. And what you’re essentially saying is I’m not willing to continue even at the cost of Hamas remaining in power, reconstituting itself and being able to do another October 7th potentially, even at the cost to the way this might embolden radical actors that they’ve found a way to so sacrifice their own population that the appetite to pursue a legitimate objective, even if it’s legitimate, is gone.

And I think the burden of that is so much more on Hamas than it is on us in terms of that. It does still mean to ask questions. We need to determine, can we achieve these objectives realistically? That’s an important question to ask. Can we actually prevent Hamas from benefiting from humanitarian aid, from using the revenue of aid to kind of… what’s being reported that they basically use that revenue to hire 15 and 16 year olds to pick up a weapon, terrorize Palestinians, and enforce their power. Can we do that? That’s an important question. So the first element of this is the legal thing, which you said rightly.

And I think the excruciating cost of the war is unbearable. It’s unbearable. And yet it falls more on the the actor that created this battlefield deliberately. And if we don’t follow it through as painful as that is, then I really worry about the consequences of that. It’s not wrong. Now there are, of course, within Israeli society questions about people’s intentions, right? How much they’re political and so on. I won’t speak to that. I don’t know how to speak to that. But it’s not incorrect to say this war needs to end without Hamas being in power.

To all of that, I want to kind of add a completely different way of thinking about this that I’ve been kind of preoccupied with lately. And it, based on something I read about the difference between Clausewitz and Sun Tzu in their definition of the victory, of victory in war, you know, two people, very different people who wrote a definition of the art of war and what victory in war looks like. And Clausewitz, in this analysis, I may not be doing justice to the original because I just read an analysis, but Clausewitz’s view according to this description is that victory in war is the physical domination of your enemy until you essentially take away both their capability and their will to fight.

And in that model, you know, victory in this war means defeating Hamas physically so that it is no longer a threat either to Palestinians or to Israelis, or to the prospect of creating a better future, which is what I think this war is ultimately about, which is denying the enemies of peace the ability to dictate the future of the Middle East.

Sun Tzu, though, gives a very different description of victory. It’s very interesting. He says in war, according to this analysis, you’re not fighting your enemy, you’re fighting the strategy of your enemy. And your goal is to dismantle that strategy. And in a way, if you can achieve that without using too much force, then that would be the ultimate form of victory.

And when you look at Sun Tzu and you ask yourself, what is Hamas’s strategy? Or what is the strategy of this entire kind of axis of radical forces? Well, one core component of that strategy, not just to take hostages, not just to kill Jews and Israelis, it is to create the framework in which the only way you can be authentically Muslim or authentically Palestinian is to be committed to Israel’s destruction. And that Israel should be seen as a pariah, as illegitimate, as precarious, and there isn’t a model where it is okay to be an advocate for coexistence.

And in that scenario of victory, you know, on the one hand, Clausewitz would say, well, we need to make sure that Hamas can’t threaten and reconstitute. But if you do that in a way that the only authentic view is that the battle against Israel continues, then you’ve set back. I think the interplay between those two is relevant here, right?

You know, I’m a big advocate of really doubling down as best as we can on the normalization process, because the essence of the normalization process is to create a narrative within the Islamic world that reconciling with the Jewish state is legitimate, authentic, necessary. If the consequence of this war is that that is put away, put aside, then we have done something very important in taking away the capabilities of our enemies to threaten us physically, but we will not have done enough, anywhere near enough, in taking away the appeal of the story that they tell.

So it’s a long answer to a short question. So one way of looking at this is that legal way. The other way of thinking about it is what is victory in this war and what is the right calibration between the physical victory and that victory of narratives or stories that makes it possible to create a post-Hamas reality in people’s minds so that it can happen in reality.

Yehuda: The problem though, as you’re describing these two approaches towards winning, is you may be signaling that independent of the Israel-Hamas war, neither of them actually applies to states fighting terror actors, that we actually have discovered a new frontier of war and therefore ethics of war in the second half of the 20th century, for which neither of those is sufficient answers.

It might be, right, that the ethics of this type of war is not defeat your enemy or even defeat their strategy militarily, but suppress them to the point that they can, at least in the short term, not do the same level of harm to you and pursue what you described, and I agree, is the longer term way of winning this war in the Middle East, which is creating alternative pathways and scenarios to long term coexistence and just acknowledge, and I know this is a horrific thing to say, that you will not get rid of Hamas and Gaza. They will not go anywhere. And to be honest, and then we have to also wrestle with the fact that the state of Israel for nearly two decades facilitated the presence of Hamas and Gaza because it was useful to them until it wasn’t useful to them.

Maybe like without the facilitation strategy, suppression is the only long-term way to do this. And then that question of the appetite for continuing to suppress it over a 19th, 20th, 20-month period of time with all of the costs that come to the civilian population, maybe then, that’s where the question of whether it’s worth it for that military objective actually starts to kick in.

Tal: Yeah, so, I mean, Yehuda, this is a legitimate conceptual conversation about what is the better version and what’s possible. So I just want to first of all acknowledge that this is not a conversation in the legal realm. You could think that in the legal realm you need to do it. This is a separate question, whether the most we can hope for is that kind of suppression thing.

And frankly, think a lot, certainly there are figures within the Israeli system who say that if the consequence of this war after October 7th and everything we’ve been through, is that the best we can do physically is set Hamas back, suppress it, but never create the possibility for a post-Hamas reality in Gaza. And just this constant back and forward that, to be fair, has shaped a lot of the history of this conflict as well. It’s kind of this idea that the best we can hope for is to set our adversaries back so we can pursue another agenda, but there’s going to be constant conflict with them.

Now, I think the opponents of that view that you’re describing would say in that reality, these groups will always have the capacity to spoil that better Middle East based on coexistence. And this is a strategic moment of opportunity to defeat that ideology and those forces in a way that creates an opening for a genuine change of the Middle East, that it doesn’t have to be that way. And they’re kind of hopeful that this is a possibility.

Now, which university do you go to to get a degree on who is right in those two views? I don’t know. People who are, I think optimists have probably caused more harm in the world than pessimists, generally speaking, right? In the sense that those who have this grand idea that there is a vision of victory over the forces of irreconcilable evil and therefore push this

Maybe they’re the ones who are gonna create more suffering and it won’t work. On the other hand, why do we have to be condemned to an endless conflict that will come back and again, when perhaps we have an opportunity to, for Hamas to be so cornered that it is no longer a force that shapes this conflict.

And I don’t rule out the possibility that in five years time, we could be in a reality where we have normalization with Saudi Arabia, which means normalization potentially with lots of Muslim countries, the legitimization of coexistence and of Jewish belongingness in the Middle East, such that this military defeat of Hamas was a critical component of that, even though right now it feels only excruciating. Neither of us know which view is correct in my view. We don’t know.

Yehuda: I guess that raises a different question, which is, if you see this, as you said, as a window of opportunity for the region, I guess two variables have to be there for us to use this moment as kind of a historic window of opportunity for Israel to emerge from this war and be in a totally new Middle East. You need Israel’s continued support from the international community, and you need an alignment between Israel and the United States on this front.

And it does feel as though the Trump administration wants that. They’re trying to remake the entire Middle East right now. And at the same time, it appears as though the government of Israel is being pushed in that direction by the Trump people and increasingly alienated from the Western democracies who are critical of the war effort. What would have to change to see the state of Israel get in front of that as opposed to being nudged towards it?

Tal: I mean, so much of this is in the eye of the beholder. So I don’t know that I ascribe to your assumptions about the description, at least, of the way Trump administration policy maybe appears to some, but it might be different. I think, again, I don’t want to be too definitive in where I come out, because I am myself torn about this. I think it’s critical to look at how we translate our military successes into sustainable diplomatic and strategic wins.

But I do understand the argument that if at the end of this process, the sense is that Hamas remains as a force in Gaza pulling the strings, that Israel may have caused serious harm to Hamas’s capabilities, but not to its ability to govern Gaza or to prevent an alternative from emerging. It’s not clear that the pathway to what you describe the Trump agenda as wanting will be that open.

Right? If the narrative at the end of this war is Hamas has not been defeated, those in the camp that think we still need a bit more Clausewitz here before we go to Sun Tzu to put that description, will say, no, we need more military action here. Right?

And if you buy the assumption that Hamas will always be a force within Gaza in one way or another, or that ideology, and so all you can do is suppress, then you do the move that you described. But that’s not necessarily the case.

There are some reports, right, that Hamas is on its, is really suffering, right? It’s on its last legs, that there could be a reality in which it really loses governance. It potentially even is willing to maybe not surrender, but consider exile. And in the consciousness of the region and of Palestinian society, we have reached a post-Hamas moment. That arguably would be a great contribution to the momentum behind creating that different Middle East. Alternatively, it could trap you in a endless counterinsurgency that doesn’t allow you to do that. So, so much is gonna be a function of what actually happens.

But I don’t think that the objective itself is because of that illegitimate. We have different views. I personally think that Sun Tzu needs to be in this mix a lot more, right? In terms of the Western democracies that you spoke about, I understand that I think because we’re not articulating ourselves enough in the moral language that might resonate with some of them explaining the dilemmas, explaining what we’re trying to do, this plays in those political forum in certain ways. I am kind of exasperated at the inability to see the degree to which the reality we’re facing in Gaza is the tragedy created by Hamas and the consequences of that tragedy.

You know, we had in the UN Security Council, the head of humanitarian affairs made this claim I saw that, you know, the UN can guarantee that aid doesn’t get to Hamas, right? Without any explanation as to why. And I saw that and I thought to myself, how can you guarantee it? Have you guaranteed it until now? Is UNRWA the one that is guaranteeing it? Because it certainly didn’t seem like Unra knew how to disconnect itself from Hamas—quite the opposite. And it seems to me that, you know, I’ve got quite a lot of skepticism about this idea that people know the answer to these dilemmas and Israel doesn’t know what it’s doing.

None of us know the answer. There are a set of dilemmas. One of them is how do you get humanitarian aid to a civilian population without empowering Hamas? The other is what is the degree to which you defeat Hamas militarily before you say I need to blend this with a political initiative? The question you asked about civilian suffering, I think it’s our obligation and I’m really strong believer in this. It’s not unique, but unfortunately in Israeli society it’s hard. We have an obligation to show compassion for Palestinian suffering. Whether or not that suffering is our responsibility, you can argue in all different ways, it is the tragic consequence of war, and it is a Jewish obligation in my view to show compassion for that suffering. It’s also much better policy. But I don’t care, it doesn’t have to be better policy, it’s just the thing to do.

Yehuda: So what does that actually consist of? mean, that’s the knock always on Israel was this phrase, yorim u-bochem, you continue firing, but you’re crying while you’re doing it, which is a way of being very cynical about the appeal to compassion. And you alluded to this earlier of like, what does a real moral conversation look like? I suggested, and I wanted to get your thoughts on, is the fact that like, they’re all against us and the allegations of genocide, has that gotten in the way for Israelis of being able to really reckon with the moral catastrophe that’s taking place miles to the south and their own role in that, even if you say Hamas is responsible, you still are responsible for firing back, right? What does that actually look like that’s not symbolic and it doesn’t look like a gesture and it doesn’t look like good strategy and it’s not good hasbara, what does it look like to actually foster a real moral conversation on what’s taking place in Gaza?

Tal: So first, I just want to acknowledge how hard it is in war to express compassion for the other side, to make that a clear part of how you’re presenting it. That’s a challenge that every country faces. It doesn’t make it not important, but it’s hard, especially after the trauma of October 7th. And frankly, especially after this feeling that the, it almost doesn’t matter what you say, you’re condemned anyway, right? That’s a pretty common Israeli sentiment, right? That there’s no, you can make these accusations against Israel in this anti-Israel frenzy, people join the bandwagon, and this feeling that what you say doesn’t matter, I think, is a problem. Because you want to believe, and it helps you to engage in this, that it matters, right?

And I have to say that I’m not sure that it matters. I’m not sure it matters to the UN response and I’m not sure that it matters to the response of the country. And that becomes additional to the trauma. It becomes a kind of drag on the ability to make the case. Now you asked how it gets expressed. So I don’t diminish the importance of simply framing the dilemmas we face in moral terms, talking to the public and to the world about how we’re trying to address that dilemma.

But it also gets expression in, okay, we have a problem of Hamas taking aid. And that is a huge problem. So what are we doing? How does the GHF work, for example, in order to address that problem? Why do you think the UN isn’t doing it effectively? That’s also part of it, right? And again, I go back to this point, Yehuda, that I think I can’t really share a lot of this information, but it’s surprising to me how much Israel deals with these issues on the ground, but it’s not really acceptable within the discourse in Israeli society to put a focus on it, right? Because what about the hostages and what are you doing to protect my soldiers becomes the dominant conversation.

So the things I think that the West in particular needs to hear from Israel and see, and the things that we, I think, have an obligation to talk to our public about are also the things that are the least politically acceptable in a society that is reeling from a hostage crisis, from soldiers dying, from a seven front war, from the trauma of the war. And all of that produces this kind of real disconnect, I think, between ways in which you could frame both what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, how you’re doing it. And here I’m not excusing violations that may have occurred and actions by soldiers that are reprehensible and those things unfortunately happen in war and they need accountability.

But the broader picture is we could in a different reality, in a different political reality, in a different emotional state, we could have done a much better job of framing what we’re doing in moral terms. We do not want the starvation of the Palestinian civilian population. We do not want Hamas to terrorize Palestinians or Israelis. We do not want Hamas to be the government in Gaza because in that reality we cannot move to a better future with the Palestinian people. We are not at war with the Palestinian people and here is a set of things we’re doing to try in the reality that Hamas created seeking to draw Palestinians in, here is what we’re doing to try to prevent it, even if we fail sometimes. That language is critical for the Israeli public to hear, it’s critical for the world to hear, but it’s been really difficult to say.

Yehuda: Yeah. And I would say it also matters. You said it doesn’t really matter internationally. And now it matters for two other reasons. One is, you have, 20 percent of your population are Palestinian in the state of Israel. The inability to talk about Palestinian suffering is actually corroding to the capacity of Israelis and Palestinians to live together long term.

And the second is, you know, the inability to look at and talk about Palestinian suffering in Gaza is becomes fodder for even more radical arguments around settling Gaza and other types of things where if you don’t really see the consequences of what you’re doing to another people it can kind of justify and rationalize even more radical sets of activities you might take towards that population.

Tal: Yeah, I would say to that, Yehuda, first, you know, just to be clear, I don’t know whether it’ll matter or not, right? I mean, I think there are institutions where it won’t matter. There are friends and allies that we have where it really will matter, including, by the way, Jews around the world who need to hear us speaking in this language. And it’s possible for us to speak in this language.

I agree with you also about what we signal to our own citizens about that. I don’t know if it matters or not. You know, it could have a good effect, but in a funny way, it’s something that’s always kind of frustrated me a lot about the way we speak about all different things in the world of Israeli advocacy. It’s as if when you’re doing the right thing, acknowledging that there is a cost to that thing, that there is potential downsides to pursuing the right thing is somehow a liability. So the whole thing has to be amazing and there can’t be any cost, right?

So I think that the assumption behind that is from a really painful place of a zero sum world that takes any admission of the cost and the vulnerability as a way to kind of show you see Israel, we told you, you were evil or whatever. But I think that first of all, for the health of a society, it is right to acknowledge that even when you pursue the right thing, there can be costs to those right things and they require a kind of moral reckoning and acknowledgement.

And in an even higher way, acknowledging that doing the right thing involves costs that you need to minimize and pain that you need to minimize but will nevertheless be, in a way makes that thing even more just. Because you’re saying even despite the suffering that it causes, it is the just thing to do. And I think it’s a much healthier Jewish people that is a much more kind of honest way of talking to say, yes, we are pursuing legitimate objectives, but they come at really difficult dilemmas and they involve suffering. This requires us to show compassion, to see how we’re doing this, to see, and a lot of that is happening, but if we don’t articulate it, we move into this zone of self-righteousness that becomes a betrayal of our moral compass and becomes very difficult for others to engage in.

Yehuda: So let me conclude on that, which is another piece of that, which I just feel is so critical and necessary, but it’s not forthcoming, is prosecutions of war crimes in Gaza and a serious inquiry of commission about October 7th, which has been suppressed politically for a thousand reasons. And those things actually have had a longer net positive effect when they’ve happened over the history of Israel for Israel’s reputation in the international community and they just don’t seem possible right now in Israel.

Do you think that there’s a foreseeable future where the Israeli public pushes hard enough for those kinds of processes to take place and do you think there’s a viable political reality in which we’ll see those kinds of things take place as well?

Tal: Yeah, I don’t know how to give a short answer to that question. So first, I want to raise the question about whether Israel engaging in that will provide the kind of international legitimacy that some people hope. I think, you know, so many of these institutions, I think, have become so politicized that, and this tendency of people, I think, to conflate the commitment to the rule of law to support for institutions who were meant to advance the rule of law internationally. I’m talking about international institutions, but in fact, they’re just political actors in a legal guise. That’s a real problem.

But the reason why we need to ensure compliance with the rule of law and to ensure that there’s accountability for wrongdoing and investigations is not because it will solve international problems. Either it will or it won’t. The reason is because we need to be a society committed to the rule of law. That’s the reason for it, because of who we want to be.

Now, in practice, we have a very sophisticated military justice mechanism, which I’m not going to go into the details of. The reality of war means those military justice mechanisms and the, you know, the judge advocate general has announced many criminal investigations. There are lots of things. The reality is even in the best Western democracies and Israel system is as good as any other country’s system in this regard, there are real problems in applying the rigor of legal accountability to war zones.

I sometimes say this idea that there’s a reason why there isn’t a TV show, CSI Gaza, right? Because it’s very, very difficult, even if you have the best system and the best willingness to investigate, to actually reach easy conclusions. And the US system and the German system and the UK and the Canada and all others, have found similar problems that their accountability mechanisms don’t often lead to successful prosecutions because it’s difficult to apply the rigor of criminal law to the mess of war. And so instead you find administrative actions or lessons learned exercises, accountability that is broader than that. And Israel is no different in that respect from other countries. And those mechanisms are taking place.

Going back to what’s not taking place is legitimizing for Israeli society those mechanisms as part of something that is not a weakness but a strength, the essence of who we’re meant to be. We are, you know, again, to take Sun Tzu a little bit here, what would victory in this war mean? Well, one of the forms that victory in this war means would be that Hamas did not succeed in taking away our commitment to the rule of law in our commitment to these ideals despite the effort to use that commitment against us. That would be one of the forms in which it would take. Those mechanisms are taking place.

What’s not taking place is the kind of discussion about them and the presentation of that to the world as our, expression of our values and our moral commitment. And that’s because of the kind of trauma which Israeli society is in and also to some extent the political dynamic that Israel is in where you are rewarded for language that is, you know, as committed to this kind of grand military victory over Hamas, but not at the same time the preservation of our spirit and our soul and our commitment to our values. That is what I think those committed to Israel’s future and to Israel’s victory in this war on every front, one of the fronts being our spirit and our soul, need to be active advocates for and articulating.

Yehuda: Thank you, Tal. Really appreciate it.

Tal: Thanks a lot.