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Thoughtful debate elevates us all. Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi revive the Jewish art of constructive discussion on topics related to political and social trends in Israel, Israel-Diaspora relations, and the collective consciousness of being Jewish. 

The podcast draws its name from the concept of machloket l’shem shemayim, “disagreeing for the sake of heaven” and is part of the Institute’s iEngage Project.

From Gaza to Lebanon Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.
Donniel: Hi friends. This is Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi. And this is our podcast For Heaven’s Sake, from the Shalom Hartman Institute. And for a few weeks maybe we wanted to dilute ourselves that were Israel and turmoil. Maybe we preferred it a little bit.

Yossi: Only turmoil.

Donniel: Only turmoil, but we’re at war again. And so this is Israel at War, Day 354. And while it’s day 354 for the hostages, it’s not the same war. There’s a continuum, but there is a difference between the war in Gaza and the war in Lebanon. And so we’re calling today’s podcast “From Gaza to Lebanon.”

And in our discussion, I want to figure out, what are the differences? And not for theoretical reasons, but what do they really mean? What are the things that are different about this? This war with Hezbollah and what we experienced in Gaza, I feel it’s really important to be aware of these differences because my greatest fear is that we’re going to fight Lebanon as if it’s a continuation of Gaza, and it’s not. But we’ll get to that.

But let’s start with you. What do you sense is different, both in the war, What it means for Israeli society, what are the implications and consequences of it. When everything seems the same, that’s when the biggest mistakes happen. It’s not the same. And having one also makes you understand what maybe more deeply what you experienced in the other. So how do you understand this? Where does Gaza and Lebanon, what are the distinctions and what do they mean to you? Or are they meaningful to you?

Yossi: Well, first of all, Donniel, I have to say that in retrospect, I really enjoyed the respite of mere turmoil.

Donniel: Of mere turmoil. Notice like we’re, this is not a laughing matter, so, but maybe that’s our biggest defense mechanism that we’re actually laughing about it. You know, back in war, you know, I was, what are you on the wall? A bird on the wall? Or what are you on the wall?

Yossi: A fly.

Donniel: A fly on the wall. Listening to my two grandchildren, my 13-year-old and my 10-year-old. My daughter’s looking into buying a house and the house she’s thinking of buying doesn’t have a safety room. It only has a bomb shelter downstairs, and listening to the two of them in light of the war debating what’s better. Now, my older granddaughter wants to buy this house and so she’s all in. The other, “but there is no shelter. There’s no safety room,” you know, and says, oh, but it’s better. We have this. It’s much better. She says, no, I want a room which I can get to really quick.

Hearing a debate as to what’s better reminds you that you’re not in turmoil right now. This is this, you know, as they’re listening to where the missiles are hitting. What’s better for you, a safety room? So we’re, this is a little more than turmoil and unfortunately it’s not so much of a laughing matter. But you enjoyed, I know, it was nice thinking that we’re at the next stage of the conflict.

Yossi: Which God willing we will be, but we’re nowhere near there now. And that’s the truth. You know, thinking about the difference between how we’ve fought in Gaza and how we’re fighting in Lebanon, the most stunning difference is the level of intelligence. I mean, the failure of October 7th was, first of all, a collapse of our intelligence. And the extraordinary successes of these first days of the Gaza War is one intelligence achievement after another.

And so there’s an interesting question here. I mean, let’s, just for a moment, look at the string of achievements. It begins with the most pinpointed mass attack on terrorists or maybe anyone else that I can think of, and certainly in modern history. And then, forgive me for using this word, especially in the context of death and killing, but the elegance of the next stage.

Hezbollah, because of of this pinpointed attack, Hezbollah leaders can’t use any form of electronic communication, so they have to meet in person. That gives us the opportunity to take out in one blow the entire upper command of Hezbollah.

Donniel: Of their upper military unit. Of their special forces.

Yossi: Of their special forces, which is the unit that was going to invade northern Israel. And so the next, the question there is, how did we have the intelligence? How did we know? And now the Air Force is engaged in, unfortunately, less of a pinpointed attack, and air war is always less pinpointed. Nevertheless, we seem to know the locations of, oh, there’s a cruise missile in that house in that village. So why is it that we were so unprepared? We were such, you know, a wonderful Hebrew word, shlumielim. How would you translate that?

Donniel: Shleptsach. That’s Latin.

Yossi: Schleppers, in Gaza.

Donniel: Schleppers. That’s Latin. Fumbling.

And here, we were the good soldier schweig, in Gaza. And here, you know, we’re rambos.

Donniel: So our colleague, Tomer Persico, who’s my Yossi Klein Halevi for my Hebrew podcast, he shared with me the terms, which I hadn’t heard. He said, the 7th of October felt like the Yom Kippur War. This felt like the Six Day War.

Yossi: That’s exactly right. Exactly right. And I think that, that what it tells us is something really important about the nature of intelligence gathering. But beyond that, about how one should actually look at reality. What Israeli intelligence did, the great sin of Israeli intelligence, was to downplay the threat of Hamas. What we call in Hebrew the you know, conceptziya, the strategic conception.

And Hezbollah was the great threat, and the army has been trying to prepare us for years. They said, they’re going to cross the border. You remember they said they’re going to take over a village in the north, you know, little did we know, 25 villages in the south. And so all of the attention was focused on the north, and we’re seeing the extraordinary results of that.

But when you look at only one problem obsessively, and you totally neglect other areas of your life, this is the result. You end up with this profound lack of balance, and one side of your life is a total tragedy, and the other side of your life is the same. It’s a super success story.

Donniel: I want to expand on this with you for a few minutes, if it’s okay with you, because I think it has very serious implications also on what we’re going to be doing in the future. There’s no doubt that we belittled the danger of Hamas. Israeli intelligence knew everything. We knew about their plans, and we knew what they talked. We even had all the light bulbs were going off, the attack is imminent, the attack is imminent. But when you underestimate, you’re not even prepared to assimilate the data that you have.

We don’t underestimate Hezbollah. Hezbollah in Israeli political culture is almost the only enemy which we don’t underestimate. We fought with them for many, many years. We have a great respect for them. I think we also have a great fear from them.

Hamas was part of the status quo that we could manage. And even though they said they wanted to kill us and they, they could hurt us, they could fire a few missiles against Sderot, but we underestimated their ability. And again, after October 7th, their greatest ability is their ability to hide and to survive. And, you know, Sinwar’s greatest success since the beginning of the war is the fact that we haven’t been able to catch him, yet. And that we can’t catch all of Hamas. So their great success is to be able to maintain a very low level of war of attrition against an Israeli society who has decided that it is our sacred responsibility to destroy them.

When it comes to Nasrallah and comes to Hezbollah, it’s a completely different war. And so the language is not the same, precisely because we underestimated. And I think in a certain sense, still underestimate Hamas and the complexity of Azza, that we have a language of complete victory.

It’s interesting, if you look at the war since it started with Hezbollah, the war’s been going on since October 8th, but it’s been, you know, they fire, we fire, 100,000 Israelis have had to move. The security zone in the north has had horrific consequences. They fire. And we’re firing principally against military targets. There was no desire to escalate it. Once we created a security zone in the north, Hezbollah achieved its victory. And we haven’t been trying to escalate it, nor have they tried to escalate it.

But as we move forward, I think Israeli society understands, I’ve been noticing in the news, people are saying, you know, we’re going to escalate and I hope Hezbollah gets the message. And so in many ways, what I was most frightened about last podcast turns out a week later, I’m a little less frightened. I was very angry at the bombing of the pagers because I felt it was forcing us into an all-out war.

But it turns out that Netanyahu and the army are actually working in stages. Whether we should have used it or not is a separate question, but it wasn’t meant to force us into war. It was meant to try to create, the word in Hebrew is harta’ah, in English it’s deterrence.

Yossi: And with a very clear, immediate strategic goal of pushing Hezbollah back from the border so that, so that people can get to their home.

Donniel: No, that’s true. We’re going to get there. But the idea is we want to frighten them. We believe that Hezbollah, we could deter. Now the goal is to deter them so that the people in the north could go back home. But it’s not about a complete victory. You don’t hear Netanyahu saying complete victory. The army keeps on saying, yes, if they elevate to each stage, we’re going to elevate until they understand. So there’s an attempt to reason with Hezbollah, which we have to see whether that’s coherent or not. But there’s an intent to reason with them in order to achieve some new status quo, which will enable the North to come back, without the fantasy of complete victory, which I don’t know if Israeli society’s gonna be able to adjust to when it comes to Gaza, we’re still living in the fantasy of complete victory.

Yossi: Alright, so there are two issues here. The first is that unlike Hamas, which is, it’s pretty much an independent player. Hamas is armed by Iran, but it doesn’t take its marching orders directly from Tehran. Hezbollah does. Hezbollah has Iranian revolutionary commanders. They don’t move without coordination from Iran. Hezbollah, in effect, is Iran’s frontline force against Israel.

Donniel: It’s a unit of Iran.

Yossi: Absolutely. The other piece of this is that Hezbollah has a complicated relationship with its host country. Hamas is in its own territory. Hezbollah, yes, Hezbollah is a Lebanese organization, but it is in another sense a foreign body imposed on Lebanon. It is Lebanon’s real army. Lebanon has a pretend army, but Hezbollah is the real military force. And so Hezbollah understands that provoking all out war with Israel is the last thing that Lebanese want. So we don’t quite know what the Iranians want, although it seems that they do not want all out war. So between the hesitation of Iran and the deep fears of the Lebanese, Hezbollah has less room to maneuver.

So that would be pointing to your scenario of a limited achievement, and let’s pocket it and leave it for now. If Hezbollah were to withdraw behind the Litani River, which I think is, is about 20 kilometers from the border.

Donniel: 10 to 20 kilometers.

Yossi: Then I think most Israelis would say, for now, dayenu, for now, that’s about all we can achieve, including the government, including the army. But there’s another problem here. Our strategic issue is not only restoring people to their homes, it’s dealing with the missiles, 150,000 missiles, that are now beginning to be removed from their launching pads, slowly, not in massive numbers yet.

Donniel: You mean being removed by the Israeli Air Force?

Yossi: No, no, no, no, by Hezbollah. They’re slowly being launched.

Ah, small numbers. And none of their accurate missiles.

Donniel: Small, small numbers. Okay, right. But what happens if Hezbollah begins to incrementally escalate? Look, they tried to fire a cruise missile the other day. What happens if they shoot a cruise missile to Haifa? It’s not inconceivable. And so, the escalation has its own dynamic.

Now, when you look at the considerations, this is something, we talked about this last week, you know, you had your deep reservations about the beeper attack and the timing. My concern was the question of whether this government can take us to the worst phase of this war, and this government has so totally divided Israeli society. It’s alienated America.

Donniel: You want to go over the list again?

Yossi: You know, no, it’s something that’s very deep. It’s very deep and it’s part of the strategic consideration. And it’s a long list. Can we really rely on the American resupply given the relationship between Washington and this government and on and on and the loss of moral credibility and okay. So part of me really hopes this doesn’t mushroom into the bigger war.

On the other hand, that war, from my perspective, is ultimately unavoidable. And war has its own dynamic, Donniel, and if this does escalate to the point where we find ourselves before a major war, I would be forced to put my reservations aside and say, okay, this is how it’s played out. Where are you in that?

Donniel: Fair enough. You know, this last week has tempered me a little bit. I was afraid that we were starting to fight in Lebanon as if Lebanon is a continuation of Gaza, that this language of complete victory and wiping out. And I heard the language. I was frightened. And that’s why I was upset at the beepers because I didn’t want us to force a full fledged war on Israeli society. You didn’t want it because you don’t feel that there’s legitimacy. I don’t want it because I don’t think it’s winnable. And I believe that politics has to be, and negotiations has to be an integral part of Israel’s security plan for the future, and that force is not always the only solution.

But over the last week, Israel has been working in a very gradual way. We’ve been threatening, we’ve been prodding. We’ve been saying, do you really want to fight with us? Look what we, we just did this to you. And we just did this to you and look at your limited, do you want to now engage? We have given what I was afraid we weren’t going to do. I thought we were going to start launching ground troops. We haven’t. We’re giving Nasrallah the way to step down and like, you know who this is? This is the old Netanyahu. This is the way Netanyahu used to fight wars. He never desired to use all the force, never ran to complete conflict. That’s why Gaza is such an aberration. And that’s why we all know that the complete victory that he keeps on talking about in Gaza is not even a complete victory for Israel. It’s a complete victory for his coalition. It’s a different agenda.

But the way he’s handled these stages, if Nasrallah, in fact, takes the next step, which we hope you won’t do our podcasts are, you know, every day, they, they’re relevant, insightful, or silly within 24 hours or 48 hours.

Yossi: I hope we don’t have to keep canceling and doing them over.

Donniel: Like we did last time, but it’s, you know, you don’t know the pace of change. But right now, there are stages, there are stages which Israel’s taking and stages which Nasrallah’s taking. But at some point, I’m frightened that we’re going to constantly be pushing Nasrallah to take the next step. That’s what I felt about the beepers, like there’s the next step that you have to take because we’ve pushed you too far. Could be that we’ve done that already and then we’ve miscalculated. But this week, there’s been those stages. Because if Nasrallah goes to the next stage, Israeli society, because there’s a feeling the government is handling it responsibly. The military has our confidence again.

And I too, you know, my problem, okay, we’ll have to attack. You know, part of my problem is I feel that we have to live with an unsolvable reality, which I wish that we would be able to move to the next stage in which military power and political negotiations merge together. But this week has been a different, and my feeling about the pagers has changed. Because it wasn’t an unleashing of something that forced us. Maybe it still will, but at least for a week, there seems to be some reasonableness, which is quite remarkable that with our enemy, Nasrallah, we feel that there is room for reasonableness. When it comes to Hamas, we feel there isn’t.

Yossi: Because Nasrallah is, again, is under certain constraints that Hamas is not.

Donniel: I think there’s a different reason for it.

Yossi: Why?

Donniel: I don’t think there’s the, because I think Hamas always had constraints, too. Or at least that’s what broke apart on the 7th of October, but that’s true. But I think that a deep motivation for the war in Gaza is we experienced an evil. Antisemitism exists. People talk evil. When you see the slaughter, the word pogrom, it’s like we, we experienced this presence of evil in our midst.

It’s not that we thought that they were going to destroy Israel. Gaza was not a war to defend Israel from destruction. It was a war in defense of our right not to have evil threatening us every day.

Yossi: You and I, you and I have argued this point. I think that’s a terrific way to describe part of what the Gaza war is about. I think another very practical goal is the restoration of our deterrence, whether we have or not, whether we have or not.

Donniel: Fair enough.

Yossi: But, but no, it’s connected to Lebanon because the question in Lebanon is, look, we all know that in terms of evil, there’s no difference between, between Hezbollah and Hamas.

Donniel: Sure there is. Sure there is.

Yossi: You don’t think Hezbollah is capable of 7th?

Donniel: No. The difference is that we Jews are used to anti Semitic talk, people telling us they want to kill us, people telling us that we should be destroyed. We’re used to that conversation. The difference between Hezbollah and Hamas is at the end of the day, Hezbollah never did in October 7th.

Yossi: They were preempted by Hamas.

Donniel: You don’t know that.

Yossi: Well, that’s, that is…

Donniel: I don’t trust any of the so called reports, oh, where we destroyed all the senior officers. One said because they were planning. And then the other one says, because maybe they’re, I want to tell you, it isn’t just, because, if you look at people in Israel, there isn’t the same emotion, there isn’t this desire, there isn’t the same desire.

Yossi: Okay, yes, fine, so Hamas did it already.

Donniel: Exactly. So what happens is that we are living with different levels of evil around us and Jews, we adjust. We know there’s different levels of antisemitism. The moment Hamas went from genocidal talk to genocidal action, Israelis experienced an evil and then revenge became a part of it. There is a calmness to our work. I’m frightened that we’re going to use that. It’s not just that we’re going to look for complete total victory. It’s this. blind sense that the only solution is the wiping out of chizmalah, because we cannot allow this evil on our doorstep. That conversation is going to lead us to a place that I don’t want to go to.

Yossi: Okay. No. So what’s interesting about what you’re saying is that the emotional element that was so old, and so much animated us in Gaza, which was hatred, rage, revenge is not as acute. And here, I wouldn’t say it’s absent because Hezbollah has ravaged the north. For me, emotionally, I didn’t feel this overwhelming need for revenge and certainly not hatred. I felt driven to destroy the Hamas regime, and I feel that same imperetive in the north. I feel it’s one front. A single front.

Donniel: It’s interesting, I don’t. See, I feel that Hezbollah is like the Soviet Union in the United States. We as Israelis, there is a religious fundamentalism. Not a political conflict. There is a religious fundamentalist ideology with Hezbollah, even though Hamas shares it, but it has a, it has more of a political, there is a religious fundamentalist.

Yossi: I’ll tell you what, you’re right. Because for Hamas, the Palestinian nationalism is also very central.

Donniel: They’ve brought the two together. But here.

Yossi: It’s just fundamental.

Donniel: It’s just, and you can’t, this Iranian fundamentalism, whether they have a nuclear weapon or not, that’s going to be a constant threat. And the only solution to that is not, it’s not the wiping out of Hezbollah, which we can’t do militarily anyway, is the creation of a Sunni coalition. And as long as we still keep our eyes on that prize, that’s our ultimate defense.

And when you look at Israel, this last week, there’s, it’s been a strange week. On the one hand, as you know, there’s this Six-Day euphoria of the successes and the successes have been tremendous. But all the voices that called for a mass, you know, immediate attack have been quiet. The army’s doing its job. Even the voices in the Likud, forget that the chief of staff said this, I, fine. But when the foreign minister says, I hope that they’re going to learn their lesson, And that they’re going to choose to solve this diplomatically, and if not, these are conversations that we don’t have, unfortunately, with Hamas, and even with the Palestinians.

Donniel: It’s the first time that our foreign minister spoke diplomatically.

Yossi: Which is also interesting. It’s like, I don’t know what happened, but, and he, it’s not from him. He was told to. So there is some horizon here.

Another interesting difference is Netanyahu comes out yesterday. In a way that he never came out with Hamas and with Gazans where he says we have no war with Lebanon or with the Lebanese people. And the Israeli army is telling Lebanese, please, if Hamas has hidden a weapon in your house, has a missile in your house, move 1000 yards from your house because we’re coming. There’s a sense that there’s a way to separate. Not all Lebanese are our enemy. It’s interesting. It’s not a total war. It’s a war of civilizations.

Yossi: I think you’re right. But part of the strategy that I sense playing out here is that the army is preparing the ground for the possibility of all-out war by trying to ensure that the war has legitimacy within the Israeli public. And they’ve succeeded. And when I listened to you this week compared to last week, I realized just how smart that strategy is.

Donniel: See, I just don’t think that that’s their agenda.

Yossi: It’s not necessarily what they want, but they understand that that’s a real possibility.

Donniel: I don’t know. I don’t think that getting Donniel on their side was, was perceived to be, or the Donniels of Israeli society.

Yossi: No, last week we were so deeply divided and today, you know, I study Israeli social media. And especially the opposition. And there’s virtually no opposition to this war against Hezbollah. Last week, there was a great deal of snide comments. You’ll appreciate this, as a veteran of the 1982 Lebanon War. Some were calling this war Shlom Netanyahu, so I’ll have to unpack that. The Hebrew term for the 1982 Lebanon War was Shlom HaGalil, peace for the Galilee. And so now some were calling it peace for Netanyahu. That in other words, this was one more Netanyahu maneuver. That’s not the way it’s being perceived today. And that’s, strategically, that’s very important.

Donniel: That’s correct. But I want to give him even more, I want to give Israel, you see, I don’t think it was just a strategic move. I think there’s a decision.

Yossi: No, no. I, I, I agree with you.

Donniel: And there’s, there’s a cautiousness. But like Israeli society right now, as we’re sitting and talking in this studio, which is also a safe room, a million and a half, 2 million Israelis now. We’re talking about the, the missiles have extended from 10, 5 kilometers, 10 kilometers.

Yossi: This is, this is one of the Hartman Institute’s safe rooms.

Donniel: This is a safe room. So we’re, you know, we’ll always be able to keep our podcast going. So audience, don’t worry if there’s a siren in the middle of this episode, we’re okay. We’ll be okay. But the amount of Israelis living now under sirens and under threats of missiles has gone down to Afula, it’s now, we’re 30, 40 kilometers from every day, every day it’s expanding.

So the challenge that we’re going to face, and this is why I wanted to also talk about from Gaza to Lebanon, is there’s been stages. We’ve made distinctions between civilians. Is it going to stop? Because it could be that tomorrow, if tomorrow they start firing on Tel Aviv and Dimona and every, the whole, everything will change. But do we have the wisdom, as we did in the past, to take a victory? And a victory is stopping the immediate threat on the cities in the north, enabling them to come home, but knowing fully well that Hezbollah is still there. Don’t fantasize that they’re going to leave.

Yossi: The question is where are they still there?

Donniel: Fair enough. Siberitani.

Yossi: Okay. If that’s where they are, the Israeli public, and I believe the military and political systems, will pocket the victory. If Hezbollah remains on the border, it’s untenable.

But there’s another element here, Donniel. Until now, we’ve really been talking about the consequences of the first stages of this Lebanon conflict internally. But look at how this is playing out around the world. You’re talking about a measured Israeli response, the return of sobriety, a calm rhetoric, and our moves are so precise. That’s not how this is being perceived in the world at all.

Donniel: I know. It’s very interesting. This is the great victory of Hamas. We have no credibility with anybody. We have no credibility.

Yossi: That’s the tragedy.

Donniel: That’s the tragedy. We have every one of our Air Force, this is not like, you know, finding 70,000 military installations in the 400 square kilometers of Gaza, which is sort of insane. We were going after missiles. And according to reports, we might have destroyed 10, 20, Sky News says 50 percent of their missiles. I have no idea. Percentages don’t really matter because at the end of the day, it depends on how much they have. So there’s an absolute number. And if the absolute number is in the hundreds of thousands, doesn’t really make a difference, but we’ve been going after missiles, not tunnels, missiles that are literally parked in people’s houses. It doesn’t register.

Yossi: It’s actually the equivalent of the pinpointed beeper attacks of the pin. It’s very specific. With more civilian casualties.

Donniel: It’s specific. But you know, the nature of it, this is, if you bomb in Dahieh and you’re going after a number, it turns out that they have 17 number twos. Like each time we kill a number two, they find another Nasrallah number two. So we’ve been killing all the number twos that Nasrallah has. But when you bomb in the suburb of Beirut, Dahieh, you’re going to kill civilians.

Now in the context of war, you know, the language of “it’s tragic, but,” no one, we’ve lost that. The great, from Gaza to Lebanon, fighting in Lebanon after our battle in Gaza, we are fighting from place of no moral credibility. We’re not fighting from the place of a people who believes in political solutions. So even though internally we think that there’s a nuance going on, which I appreciate, outside there’s no nuance. Even, you know, our colleague Michael Walzer, who is my teacher and is the world’s teacher on issues of morality of war and just and unjust war, one of the great, great friends of Israel and a Zionist, he wrote in the New York Times that the beepers was a war crime.

Yossi: That was devastating to me, and I revere him.

Donniel: And that was a measure of what we’ve lost. Because in a different context, we’re at war with Hezbollah. We’re at war. If they’re planning that they became noncombatants because at that moment they weren’t firing on us.

Yossi: Yeah, it was not a compelling argument.

Donniel: I didn’t find, in the context of the nature of this war, which is a multi front war in Lebanon with missiles being fired, the war is not being fought at the border. There is no notion of just war where it’s, it’s like, you know, the old, each one is on this hill. So I also did, I didn’t find it compelling, but I feel that it was almost a crime.

Yossi: It’s a measure of our inability to explain ourselves.

Donniel: But we’ve earned that, Yossi. We’ve earned it.

Yossi: Yes, yes. Yes, we have.

Donniel: And anything we do now in my, the whole need to, not justify the war for Israeli society, but to reclaim our moral position in the world as a country that pursues peace, as a country that uses power only as a last resort, that the army is the Israel defense forces. Nobody buys that anymore. We still do. And so we see nuances. But you’re so right to raise it because it is, it’s by the way, that is a great strategic danger. We have Germany, we have England. They are an integral part of our defense, of our arms procurement.

So we’re in a very complicated place. There’s a continuum here between Gaza and Lebanon, but itt’s not the same war. It might not be fought in the same way. The outcomes are going to be different. And by the time you’re at day 354 in Lebanon, it’s very different than in Gaza.

Last word, Yossi.

Yossi: My last word, Donniel, is that it’s premature for a last word. We are in such a fluid situation, that we’re just playing catch up every day.

Donniel: Every day. I hate playing catch up. It’s part of our experience. It’s, you know, who’s determining our future? Is it in our hands, or is it whatever Nasrallah decides to do is going to lead us to the next stage and the next stage? How much intelligence, not of the type of intelligence that you mentioned at the beginning, not military intelligence, but how much political wisdom, political thoughtfulness are we going to have over the next few days?

Yossi: So there is one thing, actually.

Donniel: Oh, so you want a last word?

Yossi: Yes, I actually do, that connects to that idea and brings us back to the point we began with, which was what was the difference between our intelligence capabilities in Lebanon and the collapse of intelligence in Gaza? And that is preconceived notions.

What I hear you saying is that what’s really, on a deeper level, what’s different about how we’re approaching this war in Lebanon compared to how we approached Gaza, is that we’re not imposing a very complicated reality, our preconceived ideological notions. There’s a flexibility. And that is really a life lesson that’s applicable to so much more than what we’re talking about. Look at reality. Don’t impose your preconceived ideological ideas on life.

Donniel: Or your preconceived fears, preconceived nightmares. Because when you do, they become self fulfilling.

Yossi: Stay open. Stay flexible.

Donniel: So I hope from Gaza to Lebanon, we’re counting the days, but that we recognize that this is a different enemy, a different war. But as you said, from day to day, we have no idea. There’s tremendous uncertainty. Yossi, as always, it’s a pleasure being with you.

Yossi: Thank you, Donniel.

Donniel: This is Israel at War, again. Today’s day 354. We’re talking about Lebanon, but we haven’t forgot that our hostages are still in tunnels. And may the next few days be okay.

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