The War is Real 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 from the Shalom Hartman Institute. And this is our podcast, now a joint production of the Shalom Hartman Institute and Ark Media, For Heaven’s Sake, Israel at War, Day 619 and Day four.

And we chose our title for today’s podcast “The War is Real,” because when we started to speak about this war on Friday, there was something unreal about it. There was something, we even used the word surreal. There was also something very celebratory. There was, I don’t know if you felt this, you’ll see, but Iran has always been this great threat hovering…

Yossi: Mythic.

Donniel: A mythic threat, hovering over our existence. All our enemy, all the pathways of our enemies led to Iran. And in its proxy war, we were always fighting the little Satans, if we use that as a play on word.

But we were, even though they were, in many ways, even Hezbollah in particular was very, very scary. But Iran was…

Yossi: The great Satan.

Donniel: They’re the ones who get up and on a regular basis speak about that, which is unspeakable even. You can’t be a member of the United Nations if you call for the destruction of another nation in the United Nations. That’s part of the United Nations charter. But there was just this blatant, we are praying for the destruction of Israel and we’re actually working on the destruction of Israel. And it was far, it’s 15, 1600 kilometers away to get there. The pathway, the highway, which we now speak about, was a highway filled with anti-aircraft, enemy armies, and it was just, and Hezbollah….

Yossi: Syria, Iraq…

Donniel: They were just sitting there and you knew it. And they’re developing slowly, they have 5%, 10%, 20%, 30% enrichment. Then they get to 60%. And nobody needs 60% enrichment for civilian nuclear use. And it’s just going. And they’re digging and they’re marching and they’re powerful. They’re not a terrorist organization. They’re a powerful army. Huge, huge. Over a million soldiers. Humongous, humongous. And they’re there.

And part of our existence here in Israel is to live in the neighborhood of somebody just beyond your reach who wants to kill you.

Yossi: That’s a great way to put it.

Donniel: And then on Friday, when we woke up Friday morning, whether you were for the war, against the war, whether you thought it was beneficial or not, it hit you at a more visceral place.

Yossi: Well, first of all, they suddenly were within reach and all of this obstacle course that the Air Force would have always had to cross, was gone. We’ve neutralized Hezbollah. Syria is no longer, and…

Donniel: So that feeling is huge. And then we start hearing a list of these remarkable achievements, these remarkable, remarkable achievements, almost these unthinkable things that the Mossad did, and all of a sudden their joint chief of staff are, and there was even the hope on Friday that maybe we had destroyed all their missile launchers. So it was like spoken about that we had these operations.

Now, when we spoke, we knew it wasn’t going to be so easy, but on Friday it wasn’t triumphal. But there was, I don’t know if there was a celebratory dimension, but I think it was celebratory as a result of this relief. There was something that we all knew we had to confront, but we never were able to. And then all of a sudden, in a few hours, the unimaginable became imaginable.

And as the war progresses now, and we’re in day four, I want to talk about, we want to talk about… this is, it’s not surreal. People are dying every night. And Iranian ballistic missiles aren’t like Hamas. They’re missiles. They’re not just vehicles of terror. They actually demolish buildings and blocks and people are dying. And so the war is real. It is very, very real, and that’s what we want to concentrate on.

But before we get to that, this is the transition that I find myself in right now. It was like, I know there was almost something silly, I feel like… almost like, in my feelings, almost immature, maybe.

Yossi: I think we all felt it.

Donniel: It was an immaturity.

Yossi: The whole country felt… You could feel this collective sigh of existential relief.

Donniel: Something, it was an existential release, maybe not even an existential relief. But how do you feel the difference between Friday and today, Monday?

Yossi: When we said there was something surreal about what was happening. It was having all of those cumulative fears of Iran and Iran really became the repository of the Jewish people’s existential fears. And the sense of relief that I felt, and I think most of us felt for me was reminiscent of June 5th, 1967.

I was a boy then, as were you. But I think we both remember what the morning of June 5th, 1967 felt like. And you can’t understand the euphoria not only in Israel, throughout the Jewish world, on the morning of June 5th when Israel launched a preemptive strike that determined the Six Day War, within the first few hours, without understanding the weeks leading up to June 5th, when the Arab armies of three countries surrounded and enclosed Israel. And there was this tremendous sense of foreboding. It was two decades after the Holocaust, and there was this feeling of, again? And there was something of that.

And there’s also the Entebbe rescue. That’s also something that came to mind in 1976 when Palestinian terrorists hijacked together with German terrorists, which added a whole Holocaust dimension, psychologically to Entebbe, they hijacked an Air France plane and kept a hundred Israelis prisoner in Entebbe airport, and we sent Commandos halfway across Africa to rescue them. There was also this feeling of undoing a kind of a mini reenactment of, I hate to say the Holocaust, but emotionally, I think Jews felt that in some ways,

Donniel: You know, like when you speak about Entebbe, I felt that Iran has been holding us hostage.

Yossi: Yeah. Oh, that that’s exactly right.

Donniel: Psychologically also not just psychologically, physically, we have been held hostage, and something shifted on that Friday, but now we’re in a real war.

Yossi: But you know, before we get to that, I don’t want to let this moment go just yet because I want to savor it a little bit more. Because in a way, Friday was the culmination, or it felt like the culmination of the post October 7th Israeli response because what we succeeded in doing after October 7th was to break Iran’s ring of siege around Israel. And that was Iran’s historic victory over Israel. It managed to surround us on almost all sides with its proxies and allies.

And when we went to the heart of the beast on Friday, there was this feeling, this Iranian plan to destroy Israel was being dismantled, and it was not an ordinary military victory. I think it’s hard for people outside of Israel to understand that there was this feeling of reprieve. It was almost like Purim, like the holiday of Purim.

Donniel: Interesting. And I think that explains also why…

Yossi: Which, of course, happens in Iran.

Donniel: I think it also is a way of explaining the almost… not the almost—if you look at the media, the unanimous backing of this war, unlike October 7th or October 8th, which was a war of self-defense in response to an attack, there is no doubt that this was a preemptive war. And preemptive wars by definition in the category of just war theory are always more complicated. There’re always more.

Michael Walzer and his book on just war theory speaks about how 1967 was a classic example of a legitimate preemptive war because preemptive war is not exactly a war of self-defense. Even today, if we hadn’t attacked Iran says, you attacked us. A preemptive war, you are acting as an aggressor. And so it is more complicated. And the question is, were there other paths which could have been taken?

Preemptive wars, by definition, are more politically fraught. And you speak about this a lot, about people’s ambivalence, about Netanyahu and whether we trust him or not. And last time you said, whether we do or not, it just doesn’t matter. But I think part of it is this feeling that we needed this. This is a legitimate war and a war that we have to fight. And everybody is, they might be arguing about whether Netanyahu is using it or not, but it’s a preemptive war that everybody is embracing.

And even though now, and this is what I want to get to, it’s not an easy war for us now, it’s not an easy war, and it’s very different than other wars. Our home front is not just exposed, the casualties, the destruction. If this war goes on for a month, our skyline is going to look different. Tel Aviv, Bat Yam, Rishon, Petach Tikvah, Haifa. There’s a level of destruction we haven’t seen beforehand in any of our wars.

And so on the one hand, our support, everybody’s behind it. On the other hand, as I look at this real war, there’s a comparison to October 7th and the war in Gaza, in the war in Gaza, the critical dividing line between different members of our society. Where… did you have a kid serving? Or did you not have a child? Did you have a husband, a wife, a child, a grandparent, grandchild? In your immediate circle of people, were they serving? Were they in danger? And there was a huge difference. We were all there together, but the line was, who’s serving?

And that’s why also the tremendous anger and animosity against the Ultra-Orthodox who don’t serve because this was the question, who is serving? Who’s under the stretcher? Who’s carrying the load?

And in this war, the critical distinction is not who you have in the army, even though if your kid is in the air force or not, makes a huge difference here. The critical question is who do you have in your safety room? Do you have a kid in your safety room or do you not have a child in your safety room? Because the experience of having to go to a safety room, have to stay there for hours, the concern, it’s a very big difference if you have young children or grandchildren who you’re worried about or going into the safety room.

It starts even in the supermarket lines that I spoke about the last time, everyone was buying the basic necessities, canned goods, whatever was necessary. But if you had young children, which you were buying was candy. And home front command, every night as they try to calm us down, speak about, yes, go into your safety room, bring water, talk, and bring candy for the children. It’s like part of the protocol. And you could see the levels of anxiety here in the country are divided between. Who do you have with you in the safety room? That’s one. And it’s a very different experience when Adina and I go down, or last night my granddaughter Mia is with us. And when she goes down and all of a sudden you have to worry about someone and their whole world of concerns.

And the second dividing line, which is not dissimilar to before, but I think it’s more intense, is where do you live? Do you live in a high rise? Do you live in Tel Aviv? Do you live on the coast? We in Jerusalem, we get woken up, but there isn’t that same level of angst. So the war is starting to evolve very, very differently.

Yossi: It’s a very strange experience being in Jerusalem because we get the sirens and the missiles are passing over the city. My son was out the other night in the middle of the night and he saw the missiles flying over Jerusalem. They didn’t stop here. They’re on their way somewhere else. But we get the sirens and we try to follow the rules. And so we go down into our safe rooms.

But there’s still this sense of we know that the odds are we’re not really going to get hit. And that’s been true. It was true during the Gulf War in 1991 when Saddam Hussein fired 39 scuds against Israel. We all went into the shelters no matter where we lived, but we sense Jerusalem wouldn’t be hit. And that in some way we’re being protected perhaps by Al Aqsa, the Dome of the Rock. I don’t think the Iranians really care about killing Palestinians, but they don’t want to be taking the chance of harming Muslim holy places.

So we live in this strange immunity provided by the Muslim holy places on the temple map. And so there is something of living at a remove, but this is such a strange country and the ways in which we live in such close proximity, it’s so small. And yet the geographical distinctions, first of all, literally we have different climate zones. You go one hour north, one hour south, you’re in a totally different climate.

Donniel: I never checked it, but is there any country this small with so many different… like, they speak about, we’re like Rhode Island, New Jersey, but you only really need one temperature for all of New Jersey. We have like 30 different temperatures from snow to desert, changes to desert.

Yossi: Drastic. And so that geographical experience is mirrored in our security experience. We mentioned earlier, Sderot. Sderot is an hour and 15 minutes drive south, and you’re still in New Jersey, but if you lived in Sderot for the last years, you were on the front line and your children grew up wetting the bed and living in dread with 15 seconds of notice before you can run to the shelter here no matter where you are.

And this war is also, this is also something interesting. This is the first war where we’re watching the missiles come almost in slow motion. We have a fairly reasonable lead time. And the way that the civil defense system is now working is we get one alert to tell us that the real alert is coming in a half hour or 15 minutes. You have time to prepare. You can prepare what you’re going to take.

Donniel: Last night it was four hours and there was a whole bunch of, there was all this black humor. I don’t know if you heard about where people, because it’s supposed to be 15 minutes. You give us a 15 minute, half hour, half hour passing and everybody’s up. So someone, people like, nu, why aren’t the missiles coming already? Get it over with? Wrong with you. Nu, we’re waiting. And they waited four hours and people like the whole, nu? So that’s only in Israel.

Yossi: That’s right. You’re not being fair to us. Come on.

Donniel: Like we have a plan nu? Where are you? Stop schlepping around, saw you’re going to fire some missiles, you might as well get it over with.

Yossi: I saw a great clip from an Israeli comedian, and it was titled “What Life in Israel is Like Today.” So he’s talking to his friend on the phone and he says, let’s get together sometime. And his friend says, well, I just heard there’s an alert. He says, oh, there’s an alert. Missiles are coming. He says, you know what? We have an hour and a half. Let’s go meet for coffee today.

Donniel: The assumption of, we should talk about these little myths of stability that we somehow preserve. But yeah, I’m sorry, you were talking about the strangeness of this war.

Yossi: Yeah, so we live in such close proximity, and yet we have such radically different experiences. So for example, I remember during the first Gulf War, people from Tel Aviv were fleeing and taking up temporary residents in settlements because the settlements weren’t being hit by the scuds. And so we tried to find this increasingly elusive safety in a country that’s just been getting smaller and smaller and more and more threatened. But even so today, there still is this geographical difference.

Now in Jerusalem we’ve experienced all these years, our main threat has been terrorism. And so we experienced this intensification of terrorism during the Second Intifada, for example, we got the brunt of the suicide bombs. And if you lived in the south, you experienced the terrorism less.

Donniel: Keeping unity when we have such different experiences is not a simple thing, very difficult.

But how do you feel, here it is, it’s four days. And I know, every time we’re going to do this podcast, all we could know is what we know at this time. We don’t know. We’re going to share what we and what we feel Israelis experiencing on the first day. Today, it’s on the fourth day. How do you feel about this war now, four days, now that it’s four days in, it’s not going to be a Six Day War?

Yossi: No, no.

Donniel: It’s going to be a long war and it’s going to be a painful war four days in. What are some of your thoughts?

Yossi: I have several concerns. One is the emotional stability of our government. This is a very erratic government. And to say that I don’t trust them is really… is really understated.

Donniel: We know, we know.

Yossi: But let’s as an example, okay, today the defense minister, the erstwhile defense, the alleged defense minister Yisrael Kaz, who’s the defense minister only because he’s a Netanyahu loyalist, but we’ll leave that aside. So he tweets saying, if you continue to hit our civilian neighborhoods, civilians in Tehran are going to be targeted.

Donniel: Tehran is going to burn, I think.

Yossi: No, no. He said that a few days ago.

Donniel: Oh, he’s keeping it up. I see.

Yossi: Now he’s saying, you civilians in Tehran beware. The government’s policy, the Army’s policy is to make a clear distinction between military targets and civilians. Now, that’s especially important in Iran where we know that the population hates their government, hates their regime, and you don’t want to drive them into the arms of the regime.

Netanyahu himself said this. He appealed to the Iranian public. When I heard that talk, I said, where has this guy been for years? Suddenly he’s acting like a real prime minister addressing the Iranian people. We’re not your enemies. The regime is your enemy, which is exactly right. And then Yisrael Katz comes along and threatens the Iranian people

Donniel: And you have to explain what the Minister of Defense is for Israeli society. There are ministers, each one who has a portfolio. The portfolio of the Minister of Defense is the country. And that’s why the person who’s chosen as Minister of Defense always has a certain or should have and usually has a certain amount of gravitas. Once you become Minister of defense, you’re no longer part of a party. Your party is now the country.

Yossi: That’s exactly right.

Donniel: Your party is the country. The Prime Minister is also supposed to be bigger, but the Prime Minister is still the head of a party, the minister of Defense. You’re now joining with the security forces who are supposed to be bigger, separate from the political.

Yossi: That’s a great insight. And our last minister of defense, Gallant, was exactly that.

Donniel: He did exactly that.

Yossi: He did that. Yisrael Katz is a very small man and he is in some ways the embodiment of the small politicians.

Donniel: It’s hard to see him at this moment.

Yossi: And Donniel, that’s such an important insight because I can’t think of another equivalent abroad of what the Minister of Defense means in Israel. You are entrusting the safety of your children

Donniel: And of our people and our future. There’s a different rule now that is supposed to apply to you. And he’s campaigning for his position in the Likud primaries and he’s using the war in order to do so.

Yossi: So that’s my main concern. And for me, it always comes back to this government. What’s your main concern, Donniel?

Donniel: Oh… I don’t… There’s so many things we don’t know, and I know how much I don’t know. We’re talking about these larger military geopolitical moves. We’re not at the table and we’re not sure. My biggest concern though right now is that on day one, I was certain that we had a strategy. It was clear. There was a plan. What we did on day one was play out a game plan that took months, if not years, to put in place.

And I hope… I’m following, I consume and I’m listening to different people and trying to pick up. I hope that we actually still have a strategy, a long-term strategy to actually win something or that we have some notion different from this complete victory language.

Yossi: Are you making a distinction, Donniel, between a military strategy, which we clearly had, and a political strategy?

Donniel: I’m… any strategy. What is it that we want to achieve? So I know when you say we want to destroy Iran’s capacity to produce nuclear weapons, okay, that’s a big deal. We want to destroy their missile capabilities. I find that less impressive because missile capabilities could be rebuilt. There’s no embargoes that you could stop them from building… you know, like, what, you’re going to stop them from having missiles. I don’t want them to have nuclear missiles, but you’re not going to be able to stop them. This is a very sophisticated, huge country. You’re going to stop them from trading with China and getting whatever missile parts they’re going to need and be able to put them together.

But right now, we started, it was very clear. We’re going after the nuclear sites. And now we’re expanding. And it’s different. On the first day in a preemptive strike, which was well planned, there were remarkable victories, remarkable successes. Now every day we’re bombing. We’re bombing again. We’re bombing again. It’s now two, three days in a row now where we’re speaking about, we own the skies of Tehran. Okay, I knew that already Saturday. What are telling me that on Monday for?

And we’re bombing. Now, could it be that the military has a plan? Right now, they have my trust, but my concern is, do we have the ability to achieve the end that we want to achieve? And you know, you worry.

Yossi: Do we have the technical ability.

Donniel: Do we have the technical, could we destroy? We all know there’s Fordo. There’s Natanz, there’s Isfahan. So we all know Fordo is the great danger. This is the nuclear site dug into a mountain and we know our Air Force can’t take it. Our Air Force can’t do it.

But that means, do we have another plan? Is there something… is what we’re doing now, trying to weaken their military capacity. Special forces are going to, it’s beyond my pay grade, but I’m wondering whether when we spoke the last time about what we have a right to do and whether we can in fact achieve it.

As I watch the days pass, this question arises, and I’m hoping that achieving it is not just based on counting on the United States and B-2s coming and dropping their 13,000…

Yossi: Well, that’s a big worry. If that was Netanyahu’s calculation that he would somehow be able to entice Trump into the war, I think that is a major miscalculation. Trump does not have the support of his own constituency for entering the war. I think that there is wide support in America for supporting Israel politically, maybe even supplying us with ordinance, but not for America joining. And in here, there’s very little difference anymore between Democrats and Republicans.

Donniel: So I wonder, so my concern is we need this and I believe we deserve it, and it’s a just war. But what do you plan on doing? And if on the one hand you’re counting on our job is to create the space so that victory will be achieved by a B-2? Was that the plan? Is that the strategy? Or now that I see us expanding the targets, are we going after regime change? Really? Is that the game? Is it regime change? Or America? Is there… I’m hoping that we have in our well worked out plan that we have other things up our sleeve. It’s beyond my pay grade.

But as I sit and watch, I’m with this country, I’m with us. I think we’re doing something critical. But at the end, what is feasible and what we can achieve and what are the limits of our ability is just a question that is in my mind somehow.

Yossi: I think there’s a…

Donniel: Do you have any concerns? Because I know this, in many ways, has been your aspiration.

Yossi: Yeah, there’s a third scenario here in terms of what the goals are. One, as you laid out, the first goal is the possibility of enticing Trump, which is a non-starter. The second is regime change, which we will not be able to affect, but we could trigger a long-term process, which will be out of our control. It’ll be in the hands of the Iranian public.

Donniel: So you can’t…

Yossi: You can’t build on that.

Donniel: That’s not a strategy, that’s a prayer. That’s an aspiration.

Yossi: That’s not a strategy. That’s an aspiration. You can adjust your tactics. So for example, don’t harm the civilian infrastructure. And that’s a debate that’s going on now among Israeli policymakers. Do we hit the electrical grid? It will cripple the regime, but it may also turn the public against the war. And what we hear, and this is anecdotal, but it’s widespread anecdotes, is that there is a fair amount of support in Iran for Israel’s attack against the regime, not against Iran. And that’s a crucial distinction for us to make.

But the third possibility, and this I think might be the most realistic of all, is that Trump will use Israel’s military successes to try to get a better deal with Iran. Now, in one way, that worries me tremendously because I don’t trust him and I don’t trust the…

Donniel: Them.

Yossi: The whole… I don’t trust the negotiating process. I don’t trust either side for different reasons. And in another way though, that may be a realistic possibility because the fatal flaw in the way that Obama negotiated with the Iranians is that he didn’t have a credible military threat. Everyone knew. The Iranians knew. The Saudis, he knew, the whole Middle East knew, that when Obama said, all options are on the table, we all understood all options are on the table except the military option.

And Trump, when he began negotiating with the Iranians, seemed to be taking a page out of the Obama playlist.

Donniel: He wasn’t presenting a credible military threat.

Yossi: What I felt he should have done was turn to Israel and say, you guys take out one nuclear installation, just one. We do that. And then he turns to the Iranians and say, okay, let’s talk. That’s how you negotiate with Iran. As it turned out, that may be actually how this plays.

Donniel: It could be. If that’s the case, listen, that is a third scenario. And as we’ve spoken about, the job of military, of a military operation is never to achieve the full victory, but it’s to put in place the possibility of a political process and what that might be.

But there’s one other stage of, that concerns me, and that is as we’re still watching it, the support for the war in many, many circles around the world, it’s very high. In the Arab world, it’s high, France, Britain, France is now thinking of sending planes to help defend. Britain is thinking, United States. There is an understanding, or Germany, there is this still, this lip service.

Yossi: There is an understanding that this is not the Gaza war.

Donniel: This is not the Gaza War, and that this preemptive strike is long overdue. But the other thing that concerns me is if that’s the case, why are we doing this alone? A nuclear Iran is not an Israeli problem. And even though, what is it Carlson Tucker, is that the one?

Yossi: Tucker Carlson.

Donniel: Tucker Carlson. I knew I was close, but there’s a reason why I blank on his name because it’s something very aggravating. This…

Yossi: Repulsive.

Donniel: Repulsive, between antisemitism and isolationism and anti-ISIS. Oh, a nuclear Iran is not our problem. He even said, that’s just not our problem. Really? It’s not your problem? It’s like, you have no Sunni Gulf states. You have no concern about terror in Europe. It’s really not your, in what universe are you living in? I think as the war progresses and the time clock continues to tick, whether the world accepts that this is in fact a world agenda, but we doing it makes it so easy to attack it again and to critique it again. And it’s never going to be perfect.

And I want a place for the world which is a little more significant than saying, I’m going to send some planes to help delay or shoot down some of the missiles. And so how this war gets communicated in the world and how the world takes responsibility for its own safety, why should we be… I don’t feel we’re big enough to be the tip of the spear for the universe. And so that’s… is there any other thoughts that you wanted to share for today, Yossi?

Yossi: Well, first of all, it shouldn’t be that way, but it is by default, and the West has betrayed a fundamental inability to defend itself. And something has changed and nothing exposes that as starkly as its response to Iran. I mean, I so much appreciate this conversation because it’s helped clarify for me certain… of the issues. And it’s very hard when you’re in the middle of it and you, you’re waking up every two hours and the sirens and it’s the strain and it’s very hard to get clarity when you’re in the middle of it. So first of all, I just want to say thank you for this conversation.

But one thing that I think it’s important for us not to lose sight of, even as we get into the complications and this war is going to get inevitably more and more complicated, not to lose sight of the historic achievement of the Post October 7th world, in which we succeeded in breaking this decades long siege of radical Islamism on our borders. That’s an extraordinary moment. And I savor that. Not in an arrogant way, not even in a defiant way, just with this deep sense of gratitude, that we’re able to defend ourselves. We’re able to recognize the threat and we’re able to act on it. And I wish that other democratic countries had the same capabilities, the same will the deal to deal with.

Donniel: It’s a big deal. We’re not hostages anymore.

Yossi: That’s it.

Donniel: Let’s see. Today is day 619 and day four. We’ll probably… If things progress, we’ll meet in a couple more days, and who knows what’s going to be, but something big is happening and something very important is happening and we have to embrace it. But as we know, everything here, it’s an emotional roller coaster and it is always accompanied with an infinite amount of uncertainties.

Yossi, pleasure being with you. Thank you.

Yossi: Always.