Does Benjamin Netanyahu need Hamas — and even this war —for political survival?
This week on Identity/Crisis, following Israel’s puzzling strike on Hamas leaders in Qatar, Yehuda Kurtzer and Michael Koplow, Chief Policy Officer at Israel Policy Forum, try to get inside Netanyahu’s head and understand the ways in which he and Hamas may be inextricably linked.
A transcript of this episode is available below.
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In a frenzied media cycle, Identity/Crisis creates better conversations about the issues facing contemporary Jewish life. Host Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, talks with leading thinkers to unpack current events affecting Jewish communities in North America, Israel, and around the world, revealing the core Jewish values underlying the issues that matter most to you.
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 Friday, September 12th, 2025. I realized earlier this week, sitting in a session at the Hartman Institute board retreat, and thinking about this podcast recording—I apologize to those who were speaking at the time that I was spacing out—that that week we were hitting the 20th anniversary of Israel’s disengagement from Gaza. It had kind of arrived, in some ways unannounced. I found that kind of interesting. I wanted to explore it. By September 12th, 2005, 20 years ago as of this recording, all of the settlers had been removed from Gaza and all of the residential buildings in the settlements had been demolished. The full dismantling of the settlements and military installations took a little while longer. I started thinking then about all of the complexities, historical, sociological, political, of the disengagement, both at the time and now, including the long tail of its legacy among religious Zionists and the nationalist right in Israel, all of the causes and consequences for the rise of Hamas in Gaza, what it all meant for the peace process that the architects of the disengagement were actually trying to prevent from growing at the time, and all of the ways in which that disengagement constitutes one of those useful punctuation marks in the history of this tragic and unending conflict. The punctuation marks help us see a larger story, but they’re also kind of exasperating, preventing us from getting free of that very history so that we could start building a different future. Then, during the break of that board meeting, I checked my phone and saw the latest news of the Israeli airstrike on Hamas leadership in Qatar, and I was yanked back from reflecting about 20 years ago into the present as seems to happen all the time these days. It’s trite to keep talking about the whiplash of the news cycle. Even between the time we decided to pivot to Qatar and now, the Charlie Kirk murder has taken over the airwaves, yesterday was the anniversary of 9-11, more and more news out of Israel, including, as of about an hour and a half ago, a stabbing attack that took place outside of Jerusalem. But maybe there’s something to say about the irrepressibility of the relationship between history in this conflict and the present, as much as we try to keep our focus on one and not the other. Anyway, I’m running out of things to say about the decisions of the Israeli government in perpetuating this war and finding seemingly endless new targets in more and more countries in pursuit of its elusive goal of, quote, “winning.” Over these 20 years, Israel’s approach to Hamas and the Qataris has been rife with paradoxes. In striking Hamas officials in Qatar, Israeli public officials have been insisting belligerently that there is, and this is a quote, “no sanctuary for terrorists,” “no sovereign immunity.” This is after 20 years of failed policy of the Netanyahu government that kept Hamas in power, with Israel facilitating the travel of money to its leaders from Qatar. You hear a lot of noise from American Jewish leaders about the rot at the heart of the Qatari leadership, the ways they facilitate anti-Zionist ideas from taking root in American universities, all the while the same leaders giving Prime Minister Netanyahu a pass for his history of entanglements all this time with the same Qatari leadership. Even now, who knows who between Israel and Hamas is negotiating in good faith about the hostages and the end of the fighting? It’s fair to say that the Israelis and Hamas will continue to fight and negotiate and mostly fight. And the Qataris, it seems, will continue to be the third or fourth wheel in this impossible relationship. I need Michael Koplow to help me make sense of this. Michael is a repeat guest here on the podcast. He is the chief policy officer at Israel Policy Forum, an organization that I have a tremendous amount of admiration for. He’s also a senior research fellow here at the Shalom Hartman Institute. Let’s start from the beginning. What’s the strategy? Before you come to the judgment about the decision to attack Hamas leadership, let’s at least just get into the mind of what you think the Israeli government is doing in trying to kill not only Hamas’s political leadership, but the negotiators themselves. Michael: I think there are a few things that are happening here. The first is that in the wake of October 7th, of course, the Israeli officials preserve the right to kill Hamas leaders, whoever they are and wherever they are. And unlike their prosecution of the war in Gaza, in that, I think they have almost blanket support from Israelis. So leaving aside the wisdom or nature of this particular strike, you’re not going to find Israelis who were shedding any tears over a strike like this. I think that’s first and foremost. But it is also the case that it’s clear to me and I think to most Israelis, if polling is any indication, that this Israeli government also has no intention of ending the war in Gaza. And the strike in Qatar comes against the backdrop of what was a new US effort with reportedly a new US offer to end the war. And that offer was also reportedly a comprehensive deal as opposed to a partial deal. So if you are Prime Minister Netanyahu and other ministers in the government and you, for political reasons, want to keep the war going, there are different ways of doing that, but one way of doing it is by killing the negotiators on the other side. And one of the things that I find so vexing here is that if that’s what you’re going to do, then own it. But there’s this messaging coming from Israeli government officials in the aftermath saying, well, actually this is going to make negotiations easier, because it’s going to put pressure on Hamas to agree, which is the same thing that they said after killing Ismail Haniyeh, something by the way that again, I think was completely justified, but it came with this rationale. Similarly, they’ve said it when they’ve killed Gaza-based Hamas leadership, that this is gonna get the organization to back down. Now, there are lots of reasons to kill these guys, but it hasn’t made them back down, and I’m not sure that this will either. And then you also hear, what is to my mind an even stranger argument, which is not that killing any of them in general will get Hamas to back down from demands, but that the political leadership in Doha were actually the hardliners, and that now the military-based leadership, in the form of Izz al-Din al-Haddad in Gaza, he’s really a moderate. So now that you’ve gotten rid of the political guys in Doha, the military guys in Gaza who were being held back by the political leadership, they’re going to agree to end the war. And that I find to be even more implausible. Yehuda: Right, because it wasn’t at the opposite message for the last two years? Michael: It was the opposite message for the last two years, although let’s keep in mind that, we also for a year and a half had the Israeli government say only a partial deal, not a comprehensive deal. And then a few weeks ago, they started saying only a comprehensive deal, not a partial deal. So, you know, we’ve seen the Israeli government flip on things when they need to. And I think, you know, we’re, seeing that here, in a way that, like I said, I find completely implausible. Yehuda: How do you see the place of the administration right now here? Because the administration’s message appears to be twofold. One is, it doesn’t really want this war to continue. President Trump has made that clear on many occasions. It’s very clear that he wants to be able to take credit for the negotiation that would end this conflict between Israel and Hamas. And second, going back to the first Trump administration, the priority of the administration in the region has been advancing the Abraham Accords. And this is like the last piece of that, especially given the fact that the other Arab states have been kind of doing all of the right things over the last couple of months in trying to marginalize Hamas, support an end to the conflict that involves the elimination of Hamas from leadership and so forth. And there have been, as far as I could tell, conflicting news reports about whether Trump actually endorsed this strike on that Hamas leadership or possibly warn them that it was happening, which is why they may not have killed who they intended to kill. Am I wrong for feeling unbelievably confused by this? Like what fears to be like a kind of global shell game as it relates to this conflict? Michael: No, you aren’t wrong. And I have to say that this question about whether the United States knew or didn’t know is far and away my favorite discussion topic over the last couple of days, where I’ve had so many conversations about it and frankly have been flipping back and forth in my own mind as to what I think. So we’ve all seen the messaging, right? The messaging from the administration is that they did not know. And there’s this reporting that they found out once the planes were in the air and they called the countries and that may be why the targets seem to have emerged, if not entirely unscathed, at least emerged with their lives. And then you have Israeli officials, at least all, maybe not publicly, but I’ve had conversations, who early on insisted that the US knew about it. No matter which one it is, I find either story extraordinary. So on the one hand, let’s assume that the U.S. didn’t know about it, and knew about it ahead of time, not just when planes were in the air. That means that the U.S. would have given a green light to an Israeli strike on an officially designated, major non-NATO U.S. ally while the countries were hosting Hamas leadership—at the request of the Trump administration, who, people might recall, asked the country when president Trump returned to office to keep Hamas there explicitly for this purpose. That would be quite an extraordinary thing to do. And you know, if that was the case, then all of the public imagination since with the effect of us condemnation, the fact that president Trump and secretary of state Rubio are meeting with the country’s prime minister in Washington today, that would be pretty remarkable. The flip side, and, and I’m actually at this point, I think on the, on the flip side in terms of what I think happened is that the Israeli government didn’t notify the administration until it was too late. And that says an enormous amount about where Prime Minister Netanyahu’s head is at, because this was a huge risk. This is not the same thing as hitting Iran. This is not the same thing even as striking in Syria, which President Trump isn’t happy about either. So to do this and basically take the gamble that the U.S. will be okay with it, that U.S. air defenses in Qatar where CENTCOM is based won’t be activated, it’s a huge risk. And no matter which version of these events is the correct one, it’s extraordinary either way. Yehuda: To what do you attribute the fact that Trump has not acted towards Netanyahu the way that he conventionally acts towards anybody who does something that, you know, I guess at the moment Trump decides he no longer agrees with, which is to turn against him? Is it that within the Republican Party and within the administration there is such a default reflexive support for Israel that it can’t be overcome? That feels wrong to me, given the isolationist branch that’s growing within the Republican Party. What do you make of it? Michael: I agree with you. I don’t think that that’s quite the right explanation. And I honestly struggle to figure out exactly what it is. It may be that President Trump and a lot of people in his circle and a lot of people whom he respects, including Steve Witkoff, including Jared Kushner, do have strong relationships with Prime Minister Netanyahu. And that has an impact. It may be that he genuinely sympathizes in a deep way with Israel generally, but particularly after October 7th. You know, President Trump, without question, seems to be personally moved by the plight of the hostages. He meets with hostage families regularly, including this week. And it may be that he views October 7th as such a horrible event and one that is really unique that he does not want to bring the hammer down on the Israeli government. I don’t quite know, but it is striking to see so many world leaders who have run afoul of President Trump for presumably lesser offenses. And Prime Minister Netanyahu, while they have had some rocky patches, seems to get away with a lot of things that other world leaders do not. He has a lot of leeway. Yehuda: It’s also striking that if it’s correct that President Trump has deep regard for the hostages and the hostage families, that he is parsing what the hostage families actually want in ways that run afoul of them. I mean, the hostage families don’t speak in one voice. There are hostage families who are supportive of Prime Minister Netanyahu and the “All Out” campaign in Gaza. But many of them are very public and very outspoken in wanting the war to come to an end and the prioritization of the release. So either he is not hearing that standing up for the hostages is not the same as standing up for Bibi and the continuation of the war, or he takes Bibi at face value that this is in, that what the prime minister is doing is in pursuit of advancing negotiations, but both of them seem foolish. Michael: I would be surprised if when he meets with hostage families, they come in with a screed against the prime minister. I think that they’re almost certainly focused on trying to make President Trump feel important and feel as if he is the only person who can save their loved ones. And in fact, he may be the only person who can save their loved ones. So he may not be hearing that from them. And it’s also not clear to me that President Trump actually understands where the Israeli people are at and where Israeli politics is at. And this actually, I should have thrown this in my last answer. He very clearly has an affinity with Prime Minister Netanyahu that is born out of this sense, and we’ve seen him put this on Truth Social, that they have both undergone the same sort of persecution from the leftist deep state, that they are both being unfairly targeted by the judicial system, that they are both heroes to their countries and that they are not recognized as such and that’s an enormous tragedy. So it’s not actually clear to me that he understands or knows just how unpopular Prime Minister Netanyahu is with Israelis. And even if he does see that polling, he may view it the same way he views things here, which is that he actually has a huge well of support and that the people who are opposing the prime minister do not have the country’s best interests at heart, which are all things that he seems to believe about opposition to him here in the United States. Yehuda: You said something earlier that I want to come back to, which is, you don’t believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu wants to bring the war to an end. Michael: I do not. Yehuda: So I want to understand what you mean by that, how much of that you think is about his own political motivations holding together a coalition together with extremists who clearly want the war to continue. But what I really want to unpack is the difference between not wanting to bring the war to an end versus wanting the war to yield some sort of absolute winning outcome. And the reason I want to frame it that way is I felt early in the war that in contrast to the positions that emerged quite quickly, who said you have to move quickly to ceasefire, that the Israelis actually had what felt like a plausible argument, which was the goal in every war in human history was winning. Israel went to war against its enemy and wanted to win the war. For them, that meant the elimination of the threat of Hamas and Gaza. And obviously, as a second priority, we know as a second priority because they never prioritized the return of the hostages. That strategy has its own logic, right? Continuing to want to eradicate the capacity of Hamas and Gaza. You’d have to then have a plan of what happens afterwards, vis-à-vis not only Hamas but the Palestinian people, but to say that their goal is absolute victory is something very different than the absolute perpetuation of the war. So I wonder if you could respond to the distinction between these two things and also unpack a little bit what you think the what I think it means when you talk about a desire for absolute perpetuation of the war. Michael: I think there is a distinction between these things. Early on there was indeed a very strong argument for taking the fight to Hamas in every single way possible and not letting, not letting up, not giving them any sort of out. Listen, I will say that I was extremely skeptical of that first hostage deal back in November, 2023 for this very reason. It was, it was fantastic to see Israeli hostages come home, and the ones who came home in that first deal were also blessedly in pretty good condition, all things, all things considered. But I was worried that that would give an opening to Hamas at a time where it seemed like defeating them could still happen. But we’re now almost a full two years beyond that. And it should be crystal clear at this point, as it is, by the way, to the IDF and the IDF leadership, who for months now have been urging the acceptance of a partial deal, not the comprehensive deal that’s now there, although I’m sure they would like that as well, but they wanted the prime minister to accept a partial deal because I think that even the IDF understands that something has to change and you simply are not going to be able to have this, nitzachon muchlat, the total victory that prime minister Netanyahu talks about by just killing every last Hamas fighter that you can find. So I don’t find it plausible anymore to argue that a total victory, simply through the use of the IDF’s awesome military power and capabilities, is possible. Now, that isn’t the same thing as wanting the war to go on perpetually for different reasons. And I think that that second camp is where the prime minister is now. He very clearly wants to keep his coalition together. He very clearly wants to avoid accountability, because let’s not forget, it would be easy to mistake this if you listen to the rhetoric coming from Israeli government ministers, but this is the exact same government that was in place on October 7th. Exactly. And they were not a new government. They’d been in place for nine months and with the exception of the prime minister, almost every single person who was in a position of authority, whether it was the defense minister at the time, Yoav Gallant, whether it was the IDF chief of staff, Herzi Halevi, whether it was the head of the Shin Bet, the heads of Southern command, IDF military intelligence, go on and on. They have all been forced out or replaced. Prime Minister Netanyahu is still there. And we saw something actually very telling, earlier this week or last week, which is that the Israeli state controller, who by the way was appointed by Netanyahu, issued a very tough report on the Israeli government’s home front response to October 7th. And the report said that because of decisions this government made, that the country was just not prepared and did not respond in an adequate way. The response from the prime minister was twofold. It was A, we contest every single thing you’ve written on the merits. And B, and this is the more important part, how dare you issue a report like this when we are still fighting and when we are about to embark on a new operation in Gaza City? You are going to contribute to the failure of the war. And I think that right there revealed exactly why the prime minister wants the war to continue. He does not want to have to face accountability for it. And he continuously uses this argument that as long as the fighting is going on, we can’t have any sort of commission, no accountability, no investigation. And it’s a terrible thing to have to say about an Israeli prime minister. But I think that’s where we are. And I don’t think it’s particularly controversial to say it. Yehuda: Here’s a more terrible thing to say. I’ll frame it as a thought experiment so that I can walk it back if anybody is really, really mad. There’s a longer 20 year arc around the relationship between Prime Minister Netanyahu and Hamas, which, using a word that we oftentimes talk about in different contexts, almost seems like they are inextricably linked. Prime Minister Netanyahu rose to power in 1994 and 1995 as the violent opponent to the peace process, the most trenching critic of Prime Minister Rabin before he was assassinated and then ultimately rose to power immediately in the aftermath. You know, Peres was in power for a little while and then Netanyahu took over. And the kind of driver of Israelis against the peace process was the rise of terror that came from Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other sources. In other words, opposition to the peace process was facilitated both by the Israeli right, which Netanyahu became the head of, as well as by Hamas and Palestinian terror. They set themselves up as both ends that squeeze the moderate center from having any plausibility structure to govern effectively between Israelis and Palestinians. Then you watch a 20-year period of time where it becomes vital to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s strategy to stall the peace process to keep Hamas in power in Gaza and keep the Palestinian Authority, Fatah in power in the West Bank. It almost feels as though, here’s my thought experiment, it is necessary for Prime Minister Netanyahu to govern the state of Israel the way he wants to govern it, to actually ensure there’s a perpetual war against Hamas, because to defeat Hamas would put him in a position of having to empower, effectively, Palestinian moderates, and have to confront the inevitability of negotiating a different outcome for the president. Is that a crazy theory? Michael: I think there are a few data points that support it. So there is the now infamous comment that the prime minister made to a Likud party meeting a few years ago, before October 7th, where he said that it is important Israeli policy to keep the Palestinian Authority in place in a weakened state in the West Bank, and Hamas in place in a weakened state in Gaza, because as long as you have Gaza and the West Bank being governed by separate entities, then there’s no pressure on Israel to negotiate with the Palestinians over a peace process. And that is very clearly a policy he pursued. We’re speaking in the wake of big events in Qatar this week. The prime minister’s policy was to have the Qataris give Hamas $30 million a month for years that was facilitated by Israel in all sorts of ways, which kept them where they were. And I think that fed into this strategy of making sure that they would stay in place in what he thought was relatively weakened state, because I certainly don’t think he wanted to empower them to a large degree, but he clearly understood the benefits of having them there. And post-October 7th, what we’re seeing is an interesting corollary or an interesting flip to this policy, which is that you’re never going to catch Prime Minister Netanyahu now saying anything along the lines of Hamas having to be in place. I take him at his word, I don’t think he actually, you know, does want to keep Hamas in place at the moment. But what he’s come up with as a formula, and this is now one of Israel’s five official conditions for ending the war, is this idea that Hamas and the Palestinian Authority are the same. They’re no different. And he says that because he can no longer say, well, we should have one here and one there, but because he can no longer say that we should have Hamas in Gaza, he therefore then has to say, also can’t have the PA anywhere else either, because then it’s on someone else to come up with a different entity that doesn’t exist. Palestinian politics is a two-party system. You know, if you don’t want to deal with Hamas, you got to deal with the other guys. And so this is what he’s come up with. And I think it does feed into this idea that if he were to ultimately defeat Hamas, something that I would love to see happen, he would be left with this political bind. And so now he has decided that the Palestinian Authority, which without question is deeply problematic in all sorts of ways, is now as treif as Hamas. It allows him to preserve this overall theory of the case. And at some point, this shell game will have to end. It isn’t possible for Israel to continue along this vein. And I worry that this new socialization of this idea, you know, Hamas—terrible; they cannot be left in place. And the PA is just as bad, no difference at all. It’s going to lead Israel into a hole that is impossible to climb out of. Yehuda: One of the things that Netanyahu has done very well for a long time, though, is also… he has managed to kind of allow far-right viewpoints to percolate in sufficient ways that the far-right parties stay connected to him, they ride on his coattails, they keep him in power. And at the same time, oftentimes their most radical or most audacious ideas never actually come to pass. This happened over decades, and you would see it, it’d be reported in English news media: “Knesset advances a bill to…” I don’t know, actually there’s no theatrical version of what I could suggest that’s worse than what they actually were proposing. But then it would go through the process of the legislative sequencing of the Knesset, you go through a first reading, a second reading, a third reading, and then Netanyahu would figure out a way to get it buried, change the channel, promise something else in return. So you now have a whole set of unbelievably dangerous ideas being advanced about the forced exile of Palestinians from Gaza, the Gaza Riviera, so forth. It would also seem to be, though, that the argument for a perpetual war against Hamas and Gaza paradoxically prevents those things from happening, because those are also day-after activities, right? Is that a plausible piece of this? Or do you think that there’s something more substantial and more real to some of those ultra-nationalist threats that are coming? I am very skeptical that we’re ever going to see settlements again in Gaza, but maybe I’m being too sanguine. Michael: I’m skeptical of that too, but I’m not sure that it requires the end of the war to happen. Listen, the savviest minister in the Israeli government and maybe the savviest individual inside of all of Israel is Betzalel Smotrich. And so if you look at what he says and does, you can generally see a few moves ahead. And the thing that he has been doing now for a while, which is very smart—I think it’s terrible, but it’s very smart—is to say the IDF should be providing humanitarian assistance in Gaza. We should be doing it ourselves. And the reason he says that is because he understands that that is the first step, even while the war is going on to then saying, well, we now have to establish a military administration in Gaza. And then the next step is, well, you these are the areas of Gaza under our control, time to bring back Gush Katif. So I don’t rule it out, even as the war goes on. But Prime Minister Netanyahu—you are correct—has often promised things and he lets them get up to a point and then he kills them. And in the past, his partner for doing that was the United States. He used democratic presidents extremely effectively in that regard to say to the Israeli, right, I would love to do this thing that you’re asking me to do. I’m completely with you, but hey, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden won’t let me. And he doesn’t have that now. And so it’s possible that this is one of the things that he’s using in Gaza to not have to do the things that Betzalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir are demanding. But I also worry that we are misjudging where Prime Minister Netanyahu is right now, because the Prime Minister Netanyahu of September 2025 is not the same guy as three years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago. And the fact that he has been indicted, that he has been on trial, that he is going to be seen as ultimately responsible in many ways for October 7th and the response, it seems to have shifted something in him over the course of years. And he does things now that seem far more reckless to me, including the striking Qatar, which again, nobody should shed a tear for any Hamas anyone who was killed, but it’s a reckless move that you wouldn’t have seen from him before. And it makes me cautious about looking at the way he operated for a period of decades and assuming that it’s going to continue forever. I worry about it in very serious ways, more so in the West Bank than in Gaza, but I don’t think radical things that we in the past wouldn’t have contemplated as coming into being. I worry that those things may actually happen. Yehuda: So let’s go back to Qatar for a minute. So maybe it’ll make sense of who they are, who they even are in this story, because even the response that they exhibit towards the Israelis felt weirdly tepid. “We’re very mad.” It has not seemed to lead to significant regional escalation. Even with the violation of their own sovereign immunity, it has not gotten all of the Arab states particularly angry. And I don’t really know what to make of it. And I want to layer onto that the depiction of the Qataris of having like a weirdly disproportionate influence around the globe as a rising story among the pro-Israel community here in North America. They’re the ones who are underwriting all of the anti-Israel activity universities. And yet, as you described, they have kind of played an essential role both for the Americans in housing Hamas’s leadership as well as for the Israelis in this process. Can you disentangle a little bit about what’s going on with the Qataris? Michael: Yeah, I agree with some of what you said and I disagree with, I disagree with other parts of it. The countries are indeed fascinating. And my guess is I have this experience more than you do because I’m usually talking about policy things, but you may have had this as well. When I travel around the United States and I speak to many Jewish audiences, one of the most common things that I hear from people is “the Qataris.” “We have to do something about the Qataris.” And early on in President Trump’s current term, I’d have people come up to me and say, can you believe the way the Qataris have bought off Steve Witkoff? Why doesn’t President Trump understand that the Qataris are buying off his closest advisors? People have it in their head that the Qataris are behind every single, you know, the Iranians are kind of foe number one, and the Qataris are only slightly behind. So they definitely loom large. And I also want to bring into this conversation the fact that in Israel, there is a big scandal right now, Americans may not be on top of it, but it’s known as Qatar-gate, which is that the prime minister’s inner circle, including Jonatan Urich, his previous, now deposed foreign policy advisor, were being covertly paid by the Qataris, since October 7th, to disseminate pro-country messaging. So it’s a huge problem for the prime minister, this issue with Qatar. Now, the Qataris in terms of their reaction, I think they want to be seen as the reasonable party here, right? They want to turn to the United States and say, the Israelis are saying all sorts of terrible things about us, look at, look at how reasonable we are. You asked us to be mediators and we’ve been mediators. You’ve asked us to deal with the Israelis, even though we don’t have normalized relations with them, and we deal with them face to face. They just struck us in the heart of our capital. And three months earlier we were struck by Iranian missiles as a result of something the Israelis did. And we are effectively turning the other cheek. We are going to continue to act responsibly. I think that’s the line that they’re trying to push. But the part that I disagree with is, I do think we’re actually seeing some important responses in the region, which is that all of these other countries who don’t particularly like the Qataris are now flocking to Qatar. The Emirati-Qatari relationship is really bad. The Emiratis and the Qataris do not like each other. But you’ve got Emirati leadership going to Qatar this week. You’ve got Saudi leadership, and they also don’t particularly like the Qataris, going to Qatar this week to show solidarity. And even with the Emiratis, who far and away have the strongest relationship with Israel in the Arab world, you know, the relationship with Egypt and Jordan is more important, but it’s not as warm. This week, the Emiratis banned all Israeli defense forces from the Dubai Air Show, which is a very big and important air show that takes place every single year. Yehuda: It’s like the Catalina wine mixer. Michael: Exactly, exactly. I love the Stepbrothers reference. Today, they summoned the Israeli ambassador, or I should say they summoned the Chargé d’Affaires, because the Israeli ambassador has actually been kicked out of Abu Dhab. They summoned the Israeli Chargé for a formal reprimand over what happened in Doha. So we actually are seeing the states coalesce around Qatar in ways that wouldn’t have happened before. And you know, when we say, what’s the fallout from the strike in Doha? Did it put the region on fire? No. And frankly, I didn’t expect it to, but when we think about the ways in which these States were very legitimately and genuinely bringing Israel into the fold. And they’re now coalescing around Qatar, which, for the Israelis, and I think for many American Jews, is a foe of Israel, even if they’re dealing with them, that is not a very good development. It’s not a good development for the future of Abraham Accord’s expansion. And it’s not a good development for the general regional balance, especially if you view the Turkey-Qatar Muslim Brotherhood access as being the next emerging threat after Iran. So it’s why I think that despite the fact that killing Hamas leaders wherever they are should be completely legitimate, this wasn’t necessarily a smart thing to do in the wider scheme of things. Yehuda: So let me ask you a last question, which is to kind of come back full circle to where I started. Looking back on 20 years of disengagement, there are some very clear plot points to be able to say, oh, the disengagement led to this, right? Obviously, the empowering of Hamas and Gaza, the building of the tunnel system, right, the story that emerged in the West around this idea of Gaza as an open-air prison, a place that is, according to the Israelis, not under occupation; according to everyone else in the world, yes, under occupation, because of the control of entry, exit, et cetera. Netanyahu, et cetera. There are also so many subtle things that happened in Israel as a result of this engagement. One of the most fascinating is the rise of this kind of hybrid, nihilistic, apocalyptic thread of religious Zionism, which had to confront something it had never had, which is, receding from territory of the land of Israel, it’s always been kind of amassing more and more, and had to kind of confront partial redemption as a piece of its story. And at the same time, it’s just a totally different story now. There feels like some things, you know, change and some things stay the same. When you look back at the story of the disengagement, what stands out to you as the pieces that we have to keep thinking about, in terms of that story, and what parts of it do we just chalk up to just another place in the timeline of this impossible history of Israelis and Palestinians and kind of try to forget about the past and talk about the present? Michael: I think particularly after October 7th, people want to view the disengagement as a very black and white and linear issue. Israel pulled out and that led directly to October 7th. I think it’s a lot more complicated than that. And I’ll say something that I’m sure I will hear about from lots of people as soon as this podcast gets released. If I were the Israeli prime minister, if I were Ariel Sharon back in 2005, even knowing then what I know now, I would do it again. Now, I would do it very differently. And that’s why I think this is not a black and white story. I don’t think that it inevitably led to October 7th. The fact that it was done unilaterally, in a way that there was no coordination, in a way that was guaranteed to empower Hamas instead of the PA. The fact that when Hamas then took over Gaza two years later, there wasn’t really an Israeli response to get them out and then in fact as we discussed there were years of Israeli policies designed to keep them there. These are all lessons that should be learned. I don’t think that the lesson of the disengagement, the one that I think almost all Israeli Jews now take, is that giving up territory can never happen. I think that giving up territory in the manner in which it was given up should never happen again, but that’s a very different thing than saying Israel can never withdraw from anywhere. The lesson of all of this is that we have to be in place, the IDF and maybe Israeli settlements, wherever that is. And we’re now seeing this extension of Israeli policy and all sorts of other fronts that stems, I think, from this lesson they’ve taken from 2005, which is why we now see Israel on the ground in Lebanon and in Syria and making noise about what they may or may not do in the Sinai. This new Israeli policy is “we have to be on the ground beyond our borders,” and it stems directly from this vision of what the 2005 disengagement led to. And I think that it really needs to be rethought. It’s even harder to do now than it was before October 7th, but I do think it’s necessary because there are important lessons to be learned from that episode. Some are lessons that the Israeli right is correct on and some of them are lessons that the Israeli right is not correct on. But if we take this black and white view of 2005 as this absolute mistake, then I think we’re going to be missing some important things that I would hope would guide Israeli policy in the future. Yehuda: Thanks for doing this. Michael: My pleasure.
Michael Koplow
Does Benjamin Netanyahu need Hamas — and even this war —for political survival?
This week on Identity/Crisis, following Israel’s puzzling strike on Hamas leaders in Qatar, Yehuda Kurtzer and Michael Koplow, Chief Policy Officer at Israel Policy Forum, try to get inside Netanyahu’s head and understand the ways in which he and Hamas may be inextricably linked.
A transcript of this episode is available below.
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In a frenzied media cycle, Identity/Crisis creates better conversations about the issues facing contemporary Jewish life. Host Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, talks with leading thinkers to unpack current events affecting Jewish communities in North America, Israel, and around the world, revealing the core Jewish values underlying the issues that matter most to you.
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 Friday, September 12th, 2025. I realized earlier this week, sitting in a session at the Hartman Institute board retreat, and thinking about this podcast recording—I apologize to those who were speaking at the time that I was spacing out—that that week we were hitting the 20th anniversary of Israel’s disengagement from Gaza. It had kind of arrived, in some ways unannounced. I found that kind of interesting. I wanted to explore it. By September 12th, 2005, 20 years ago as of this recording, all of the settlers had been removed from Gaza and all of the residential buildings in the settlements had been demolished. The full dismantling of the settlements and military installations took a little while longer. I started thinking then about all of the complexities, historical, sociological, political, of the disengagement, both at the time and now, including the long tail of its legacy among religious Zionists and the nationalist right in Israel, all of the causes and consequences for the rise of Hamas in Gaza, what it all meant for the peace process that the architects of the disengagement were actually trying to prevent from growing at the time, and all of the ways in which that disengagement constitutes one of those useful punctuation marks in the history of this tragic and unending conflict. The punctuation marks help us see a larger story, but they’re also kind of exasperating, preventing us from getting free of that very history so that we could start building a different future. Then, during the break of that board meeting, I checked my phone and saw the latest news of the Israeli airstrike on Hamas leadership in Qatar, and I was yanked back from reflecting about 20 years ago into the present as seems to happen all the time these days. It’s trite to keep talking about the whiplash of the news cycle. Even between the time we decided to pivot to Qatar and now, the Charlie Kirk murder has taken over the airwaves, yesterday was the anniversary of 9-11, more and more news out of Israel, including, as of about an hour and a half ago, a stabbing attack that took place outside of Jerusalem. But maybe there’s something to say about the irrepressibility of the relationship between history in this conflict and the present, as much as we try to keep our focus on one and not the other. Anyway, I’m running out of things to say about the decisions of the Israeli government in perpetuating this war and finding seemingly endless new targets in more and more countries in pursuit of its elusive goal of, quote, “winning.” Over these 20 years, Israel’s approach to Hamas and the Qataris has been rife with paradoxes. In striking Hamas officials in Qatar, Israeli public officials have been insisting belligerently that there is, and this is a quote, “no sanctuary for terrorists,” “no sovereign immunity.” This is after 20 years of failed policy of the Netanyahu government that kept Hamas in power, with Israel facilitating the travel of money to its leaders from Qatar. You hear a lot of noise from American Jewish leaders about the rot at the heart of the Qatari leadership, the ways they facilitate anti-Zionist ideas from taking root in American universities, all the while the same leaders giving Prime Minister Netanyahu a pass for his history of entanglements all this time with the same Qatari leadership. Even now, who knows who between Israel and Hamas is negotiating in good faith about the hostages and the end of the fighting? It’s fair to say that the Israelis and Hamas will continue to fight and negotiate and mostly fight. And the Qataris, it seems, will continue to be the third or fourth wheel in this impossible relationship. I need Michael Koplow to help me make sense of this. Michael is a repeat guest here on the podcast. He is the chief policy officer at Israel Policy Forum, an organization that I have a tremendous amount of admiration for. He’s also a senior research fellow here at the Shalom Hartman Institute. Let’s start from the beginning. What’s the strategy? Before you come to the judgment about the decision to attack Hamas leadership, let’s at least just get into the mind of what you think the Israeli government is doing in trying to kill not only Hamas’s political leadership, but the negotiators themselves. Michael: I think there are a few things that are happening here. The first is that in the wake of October 7th, of course, the Israeli officials preserve the right to kill Hamas leaders, whoever they are and wherever they are. And unlike their prosecution of the war in Gaza, in that, I think they have almost blanket support from Israelis. So leaving aside the wisdom or nature of this particular strike, you’re not going to find Israelis who were shedding any tears over a strike like this. I think that’s first and foremost. But it is also the case that it’s clear to me and I think to most Israelis, if polling is any indication, that this Israeli government also has no intention of ending the war in Gaza. And the strike in Qatar comes against the backdrop of what was a new US effort with reportedly a new US offer to end the war. And that offer was also reportedly a comprehensive deal as opposed to a partial deal. So if you are Prime Minister Netanyahu and other ministers in the government and you, for political reasons, want to keep the war going, there are different ways of doing that, but one way of doing it is by killing the negotiators on the other side. And one of the things that I find so vexing here is that if that’s what you’re going to do, then own it. But there’s this messaging coming from Israeli government officials in the aftermath saying, well, actually this is going to make negotiations easier, because it’s going to put pressure on Hamas to agree, which is the same thing that they said after killing Ismail Haniyeh, something by the way that again, I think was completely justified, but it came with this rationale. Similarly, they’ve said it when they’ve killed Gaza-based Hamas leadership, that this is gonna get the organization to back down. Now, there are lots of reasons to kill these guys, but it hasn’t made them back down, and I’m not sure that this will either. And then you also hear, what is to my mind an even stranger argument, which is not that killing any of them in general will get Hamas to back down from demands, but that the political leadership in Doha were actually the hardliners, and that now the military-based leadership, in the form of Izz al-Din al-Haddad in Gaza, he’s really a moderate. So now that you’ve gotten rid of the political guys in Doha, the military guys in Gaza who were being held back by the political leadership, they’re going to agree to end the war. And that I find to be even more implausible. Yehuda: Right, because it wasn’t at the opposite message for the last two years? Michael: It was the opposite message for the last two years, although let’s keep in mind that, we also for a year and a half had the Israeli government say only a partial deal, not a comprehensive deal. And then a few weeks ago, they started saying only a comprehensive deal, not a partial deal. So, you know, we’ve seen the Israeli government flip on things when they need to. And I think, you know, we’re, seeing that here, in a way that, like I said, I find completely implausible. Yehuda: How do you see the place of the administration right now here? Because the administration’s message appears to be twofold. One is, it doesn’t really want this war to continue. President Trump has made that clear on many occasions. It’s very clear that he wants to be able to take credit for the negotiation that would end this conflict between Israel and Hamas. And second, going back to the first Trump administration, the priority of the administration in the region has been advancing the Abraham Accords. And this is like the last piece of that, especially given the fact that the other Arab states have been kind of doing all of the right things over the last couple of months in trying to marginalize Hamas, support an end to the conflict that involves the elimination of Hamas from leadership and so forth. And there have been, as far as I could tell, conflicting news reports about whether Trump actually endorsed this strike on that Hamas leadership or possibly warn them that it was happening, which is why they may not have killed who they intended to kill. Am I wrong for feeling unbelievably confused by this? Like what fears to be like a kind of global shell game as it relates to this conflict? Michael: No, you aren’t wrong. And I have to say that this question about whether the United States knew or didn’t know is far and away my favorite discussion topic over the last couple of days, where I’ve had so many conversations about it and frankly have been flipping back and forth in my own mind as to what I think. So we’ve all seen the messaging, right? The messaging from the administration is that they did not know. And there’s this reporting that they found out once the planes were in the air and they called the countries and that may be why the targets seem to have emerged, if not entirely unscathed, at least emerged with their lives. And then you have Israeli officials, at least all, maybe not publicly, but I’ve had conversations, who early on insisted that the US knew about it. No matter which one it is, I find either story extraordinary. So on the one hand, let’s assume that the U.S. didn’t know about it, and knew about it ahead of time, not just when planes were in the air. That means that the U.S. would have given a green light to an Israeli strike on an officially designated, major non-NATO U.S. ally while the countries were hosting Hamas leadership—at the request of the Trump administration, who, people might recall, asked the country when president Trump returned to office to keep Hamas there explicitly for this purpose. That would be quite an extraordinary thing to do. And you know, if that was the case, then all of the public imagination since with the effect of us condemnation, the fact that president Trump and secretary of state Rubio are meeting with the country’s prime minister in Washington today, that would be pretty remarkable. The flip side, and, and I’m actually at this point, I think on the, on the flip side in terms of what I think happened is that the Israeli government didn’t notify the administration until it was too late. And that says an enormous amount about where Prime Minister Netanyahu’s head is at, because this was a huge risk. This is not the same thing as hitting Iran. This is not the same thing even as striking in Syria, which President Trump isn’t happy about either. So to do this and basically take the gamble that the U.S. will be okay with it, that U.S. air defenses in Qatar where CENTCOM is based won’t be activated, it’s a huge risk. And no matter which version of these events is the correct one, it’s extraordinary either way. Yehuda: To what do you attribute the fact that Trump has not acted towards Netanyahu the way that he conventionally acts towards anybody who does something that, you know, I guess at the moment Trump decides he no longer agrees with, which is to turn against him? Is it that within the Republican Party and within the administration there is such a default reflexive support for Israel that it can’t be overcome? That feels wrong to me, given the isolationist branch that’s growing within the Republican Party. What do you make of it? Michael: I agree with you. I don’t think that that’s quite the right explanation. And I honestly struggle to figure out exactly what it is. It may be that President Trump and a lot of people in his circle and a lot of people whom he respects, including Steve Witkoff, including Jared Kushner, do have strong relationships with Prime Minister Netanyahu. And that has an impact. It may be that he genuinely sympathizes in a deep way with Israel generally, but particularly after October 7th. You know, President Trump, without question, seems to be personally moved by the plight of the hostages. He meets with hostage families regularly, including this week. And it may be that he views October 7th as such a horrible event and one that is really unique that he does not want to bring the hammer down on the Israeli government. I don’t quite know, but it is striking to see so many world leaders who have run afoul of President Trump for presumably lesser offenses. And Prime Minister Netanyahu, while they have had some rocky patches, seems to get away with a lot of things that other world leaders do not. He has a lot of leeway. Yehuda: It’s also striking that if it’s correct that President Trump has deep regard for the hostages and the hostage families, that he is parsing what the hostage families actually want in ways that run afoul of them. I mean, the hostage families don’t speak in one voice. There are hostage families who are supportive of Prime Minister Netanyahu and the “All Out” campaign in Gaza. But many of them are very public and very outspoken in wanting the war to come to an end and the prioritization of the release. So either he is not hearing that standing up for the hostages is not the same as standing up for Bibi and the continuation of the war, or he takes Bibi at face value that this is in, that what the prime minister is doing is in pursuit of advancing negotiations, but both of them seem foolish. Michael: I would be surprised if when he meets with hostage families, they come in with a screed against the prime minister. I think that they’re almost certainly focused on trying to make President Trump feel important and feel as if he is the only person who can save their loved ones. And in fact, he may be the only person who can save their loved ones. So he may not be hearing that from them. And it’s also not clear to me that President Trump actually understands where the Israeli people are at and where Israeli politics is at. And this actually, I should have thrown this in my last answer. He very clearly has an affinity with Prime Minister Netanyahu that is born out of this sense, and we’ve seen him put this on Truth Social, that they have both undergone the same sort of persecution from the leftist deep state, that they are both being unfairly targeted by the judicial system, that they are both heroes to their countries and that they are not recognized as such and that’s an enormous tragedy. So it’s not actually clear to me that he understands or knows just how unpopular Prime Minister Netanyahu is with Israelis. And even if he does see that polling, he may view it the same way he views things here, which is that he actually has a huge well of support and that the people who are opposing the prime minister do not have the country’s best interests at heart, which are all things that he seems to believe about opposition to him here in the United States. Yehuda: You said something earlier that I want to come back to, which is, you don’t believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu wants to bring the war to an end. Michael: I do not. Yehuda: So I want to understand what you mean by that, how much of that you think is about his own political motivations holding together a coalition together with extremists who clearly want the war to continue. But what I really want to unpack is the difference between not wanting to bring the war to an end versus wanting the war to yield some sort of absolute winning outcome. And the reason I want to frame it that way is I felt early in the war that in contrast to the positions that emerged quite quickly, who said you have to move quickly to ceasefire, that the Israelis actually had what felt like a plausible argument, which was the goal in every war in human history was winning. Israel went to war against its enemy and wanted to win the war. For them, that meant the elimination of the threat of Hamas and Gaza. And obviously, as a second priority, we know as a second priority because they never prioritized the return of the hostages. That strategy has its own logic, right? Continuing to want to eradicate the capacity of Hamas and Gaza. You’d have to then have a plan of what happens afterwards, vis-à-vis not only Hamas but the Palestinian people, but to say that their goal is absolute victory is something very different than the absolute perpetuation of the war. So I wonder if you could respond to the distinction between these two things and also unpack a little bit what you think the what I think it means when you talk about a desire for absolute perpetuation of the war. Michael: I think there is a distinction between these things. Early on there was indeed a very strong argument for taking the fight to Hamas in every single way possible and not letting, not letting up, not giving them any sort of out. Listen, I will say that I was extremely skeptical of that first hostage deal back in November, 2023 for this very reason. It was, it was fantastic to see Israeli hostages come home, and the ones who came home in that first deal were also blessedly in pretty good condition, all things, all things considered. But I was worried that that would give an opening to Hamas at a time where it seemed like defeating them could still happen. But we’re now almost a full two years beyond that. And it should be crystal clear at this point, as it is, by the way, to the IDF and the IDF leadership, who for months now have been urging the acceptance of a partial deal, not the comprehensive deal that’s now there, although I’m sure they would like that as well, but they wanted the prime minister to accept a partial deal because I think that even the IDF understands that something has to change and you simply are not going to be able to have this, nitzachon muchlat, the total victory that prime minister Netanyahu talks about by just killing every last Hamas fighter that you can find. So I don’t find it plausible anymore to argue that a total victory, simply through the use of the IDF’s awesome military power and capabilities, is possible. Now, that isn’t the same thing as wanting the war to go on perpetually for different reasons. And I think that that second camp is where the prime minister is now. He very clearly wants to keep his coalition together. He very clearly wants to avoid accountability, because let’s not forget, it would be easy to mistake this if you listen to the rhetoric coming from Israeli government ministers, but this is the exact same government that was in place on October 7th. Exactly. And they were not a new government. They’d been in place for nine months and with the exception of the prime minister, almost every single person who was in a position of authority, whether it was the defense minister at the time, Yoav Gallant, whether it was the IDF chief of staff, Herzi Halevi, whether it was the head of the Shin Bet, the heads of Southern command, IDF military intelligence, go on and on. They have all been forced out or replaced. Prime Minister Netanyahu is still there. And we saw something actually very telling, earlier this week or last week, which is that the Israeli state controller, who by the way was appointed by Netanyahu, issued a very tough report on the Israeli government’s home front response to October 7th. And the report said that because of decisions this government made, that the country was just not prepared and did not respond in an adequate way. The response from the prime minister was twofold. It was A, we contest every single thing you’ve written on the merits. And B, and this is the more important part, how dare you issue a report like this when we are still fighting and when we are about to embark on a new operation in Gaza City? You are going to contribute to the failure of the war. And I think that right there revealed exactly why the prime minister wants the war to continue. He does not want to have to face accountability for it. And he continuously uses this argument that as long as the fighting is going on, we can’t have any sort of commission, no accountability, no investigation. And it’s a terrible thing to have to say about an Israeli prime minister. But I think that’s where we are. And I don’t think it’s particularly controversial to say it. Yehuda: Here’s a more terrible thing to say. I’ll frame it as a thought experiment so that I can walk it back if anybody is really, really mad. There’s a longer 20 year arc around the relationship between Prime Minister Netanyahu and Hamas, which, using a word that we oftentimes talk about in different contexts, almost seems like they are inextricably linked. Prime Minister Netanyahu rose to power in 1994 and 1995 as the violent opponent to the peace process, the most trenching critic of Prime Minister Rabin before he was assassinated and then ultimately rose to power immediately in the aftermath. You know, Peres was in power for a little while and then Netanyahu took over. And the kind of driver of Israelis against the peace process was the rise of terror that came from Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other sources. In other words, opposition to the peace process was facilitated both by the Israeli right, which Netanyahu became the head of, as well as by Hamas and Palestinian terror. They set themselves up as both ends that squeeze the moderate center from having any plausibility structure to govern effectively between Israelis and Palestinians. Then you watch a 20-year period of time where it becomes vital to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s strategy to stall the peace process to keep Hamas in power in Gaza and keep the Palestinian Authority, Fatah in power in the West Bank. It almost feels as though, here’s my thought experiment, it is necessary for Prime Minister Netanyahu to govern the state of Israel the way he wants to govern it, to actually ensure there’s a perpetual war against Hamas, because to defeat Hamas would put him in a position of having to empower, effectively, Palestinian moderates, and have to confront the inevitability of negotiating a different outcome for the president. Is that a crazy theory? Michael: I think there are a few data points that support it. So there is the now infamous comment that the prime minister made to a Likud party meeting a few years ago, before October 7th, where he said that it is important Israeli policy to keep the Palestinian Authority in place in a weakened state in the West Bank, and Hamas in place in a weakened state in Gaza, because as long as you have Gaza and the West Bank being governed by separate entities, then there’s no pressure on Israel to negotiate with the Palestinians over a peace process. And that is very clearly a policy he pursued. We’re speaking in the wake of big events in Qatar this week. The prime minister’s policy was to have the Qataris give Hamas $30 million a month for years that was facilitated by Israel in all sorts of ways, which kept them where they were. And I think that fed into this strategy of making sure that they would stay in place in what he thought was relatively weakened state, because I certainly don’t think he wanted to empower them to a large degree, but he clearly understood the benefits of having them there. And post-October 7th, what we’re seeing is an interesting corollary or an interesting flip to this policy, which is that you’re never going to catch Prime Minister Netanyahu now saying anything along the lines of Hamas having to be in place. I take him at his word, I don’t think he actually, you know, does want to keep Hamas in place at the moment. But what he’s come up with as a formula, and this is now one of Israel’s five official conditions for ending the war, is this idea that Hamas and the Palestinian Authority are the same. They’re no different. And he says that because he can no longer say, well, we should have one here and one there, but because he can no longer say that we should have Hamas in Gaza, he therefore then has to say, also can’t have the PA anywhere else either, because then it’s on someone else to come up with a different entity that doesn’t exist. Palestinian politics is a two-party system. You know, if you don’t want to deal with Hamas, you got to deal with the other guys. And so this is what he’s come up with. And I think it does feed into this idea that if he were to ultimately defeat Hamas, something that I would love to see happen, he would be left with this political bind. And so now he has decided that the Palestinian Authority, which without question is deeply problematic in all sorts of ways, is now as treif as Hamas. It allows him to preserve this overall theory of the case. And at some point, this shell game will have to end. It isn’t possible for Israel to continue along this vein. And I worry that this new socialization of this idea, you know, Hamas—terrible; they cannot be left in place. And the PA is just as bad, no difference at all. It’s going to lead Israel into a hole that is impossible to climb out of. Yehuda: One of the things that Netanyahu has done very well for a long time, though, is also… he has managed to kind of allow far-right viewpoints to percolate in sufficient ways that the far-right parties stay connected to him, they ride on his coattails, they keep him in power. And at the same time, oftentimes their most radical or most audacious ideas never actually come to pass. This happened over decades, and you would see it, it’d be reported in English news media: “Knesset advances a bill to…” I don’t know, actually there’s no theatrical version of what I could suggest that’s worse than what they actually were proposing. But then it would go through the process of the legislative sequencing of the Knesset, you go through a first reading, a second reading, a third reading, and then Netanyahu would figure out a way to get it buried, change the channel, promise something else in return. So you now have a whole set of unbelievably dangerous ideas being advanced about the forced exile of Palestinians from Gaza, the Gaza Riviera, so forth. It would also seem to be, though, that the argument for a perpetual war against Hamas and Gaza paradoxically prevents those things from happening, because those are also day-after activities, right? Is that a plausible piece of this? Or do you think that there’s something more substantial and more real to some of those ultra-nationalist threats that are coming? I am very skeptical that we’re ever going to see settlements again in Gaza, but maybe I’m being too sanguine. Michael: I’m skeptical of that too, but I’m not sure that it requires the end of the war to happen. Listen, the savviest minister in the Israeli government and maybe the savviest individual inside of all of Israel is Betzalel Smotrich. And so if you look at what he says and does, you can generally see a few moves ahead. And the thing that he has been doing now for a while, which is very smart—I think it’s terrible, but it’s very smart—is to say the IDF should be providing humanitarian assistance in Gaza. We should be doing it ourselves. And the reason he says that is because he understands that that is the first step, even while the war is going on to then saying, well, we now have to establish a military administration in Gaza. And then the next step is, well, you these are the areas of Gaza under our control, time to bring back Gush Katif. So I don’t rule it out, even as the war goes on. But Prime Minister Netanyahu—you are correct—has often promised things and he lets them get up to a point and then he kills them. And in the past, his partner for doing that was the United States. He used democratic presidents extremely effectively in that regard to say to the Israeli, right, I would love to do this thing that you’re asking me to do. I’m completely with you, but hey, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden won’t let me. And he doesn’t have that now. And so it’s possible that this is one of the things that he’s using in Gaza to not have to do the things that Betzalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir are demanding. But I also worry that we are misjudging where Prime Minister Netanyahu is right now, because the Prime Minister Netanyahu of September 2025 is not the same guy as three years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago. And the fact that he has been indicted, that he has been on trial, that he is going to be seen as ultimately responsible in many ways for October 7th and the response, it seems to have shifted something in him over the course of years. And he does things now that seem far more reckless to me, including the striking Qatar, which again, nobody should shed a tear for any Hamas anyone who was killed, but it’s a reckless move that you wouldn’t have seen from him before. And it makes me cautious about looking at the way he operated for a period of decades and assuming that it’s going to continue forever. I worry about it in very serious ways, more so in the West Bank than in Gaza, but I don’t think radical things that we in the past wouldn’t have contemplated as coming into being. I worry that those things may actually happen. Yehuda: So let’s go back to Qatar for a minute. So maybe it’ll make sense of who they are, who they even are in this story, because even the response that they exhibit towards the Israelis felt weirdly tepid. “We’re very mad.” It has not seemed to lead to significant regional escalation. Even with the violation of their own sovereign immunity, it has not gotten all of the Arab states particularly angry. And I don’t really know what to make of it. And I want to layer onto that the depiction of the Qataris of having like a weirdly disproportionate influence around the globe as a rising story among the pro-Israel community here in North America. They’re the ones who are underwriting all of the anti-Israel activity universities. And yet, as you described, they have kind of played an essential role both for the Americans in housing Hamas’s leadership as well as for the Israelis in this process. Can you disentangle a little bit about what’s going on with the Qataris? Michael: Yeah, I agree with some of what you said and I disagree with, I disagree with other parts of it. The countries are indeed fascinating. And my guess is I have this experience more than you do because I’m usually talking about policy things, but you may have had this as well. When I travel around the United States and I speak to many Jewish audiences, one of the most common things that I hear from people is “the Qataris.” “We have to do something about the Qataris.” And early on in President Trump’s current term, I’d have people come up to me and say, can you believe the way the Qataris have bought off Steve Witkoff? Why doesn’t President Trump understand that the Qataris are buying off his closest advisors? People have it in their head that the Qataris are behind every single, you know, the Iranians are kind of foe number one, and the Qataris are only slightly behind. So they definitely loom large. And I also want to bring into this conversation the fact that in Israel, there is a big scandal right now, Americans may not be on top of it, but it’s known as Qatar-gate, which is that the prime minister’s inner circle, including Jonatan Urich, his previous, now deposed foreign policy advisor, were being covertly paid by the Qataris, since October 7th, to disseminate pro-country messaging. So it’s a huge problem for the prime minister, this issue with Qatar. Now, the Qataris in terms of their reaction, I think they want to be seen as the reasonable party here, right? They want to turn to the United States and say, the Israelis are saying all sorts of terrible things about us, look at, look at how reasonable we are. You asked us to be mediators and we’ve been mediators. You’ve asked us to deal with the Israelis, even though we don’t have normalized relations with them, and we deal with them face to face. They just struck us in the heart of our capital. And three months earlier we were struck by Iranian missiles as a result of something the Israelis did. And we are effectively turning the other cheek. We are going to continue to act responsibly. I think that’s the line that they’re trying to push. But the part that I disagree with is, I do think we’re actually seeing some important responses in the region, which is that all of these other countries who don’t particularly like the Qataris are now flocking to Qatar. The Emirati-Qatari relationship is really bad. The Emiratis and the Qataris do not like each other. But you’ve got Emirati leadership going to Qatar this week. You’ve got Saudi leadership, and they also don’t particularly like the Qataris, going to Qatar this week to show solidarity. And even with the Emiratis, who far and away have the strongest relationship with Israel in the Arab world, you know, the relationship with Egypt and Jordan is more important, but it’s not as warm. This week, the Emiratis banned all Israeli defense forces from the Dubai Air Show, which is a very big and important air show that takes place every single year. Yehuda: It’s like the Catalina wine mixer. Michael: Exactly, exactly. I love the Stepbrothers reference. Today, they summoned the Israeli ambassador, or I should say they summoned the Chargé d’Affaires, because the Israeli ambassador has actually been kicked out of Abu Dhab. They summoned the Israeli Chargé for a formal reprimand over what happened in Doha. So we actually are seeing the states coalesce around Qatar in ways that wouldn’t have happened before. And you know, when we say, what’s the fallout from the strike in Doha? Did it put the region on fire? No. And frankly, I didn’t expect it to, but when we think about the ways in which these States were very legitimately and genuinely bringing Israel into the fold. And they’re now coalescing around Qatar, which, for the Israelis, and I think for many American Jews, is a foe of Israel, even if they’re dealing with them, that is not a very good development. It’s not a good development for the future of Abraham Accord’s expansion. And it’s not a good development for the general regional balance, especially if you view the Turkey-Qatar Muslim Brotherhood access as being the next emerging threat after Iran. So it’s why I think that despite the fact that killing Hamas leaders wherever they are should be completely legitimate, this wasn’t necessarily a smart thing to do in the wider scheme of things. Yehuda: So let me ask you a last question, which is to kind of come back full circle to where I started. Looking back on 20 years of disengagement, there are some very clear plot points to be able to say, oh, the disengagement led to this, right? Obviously, the empowering of Hamas and Gaza, the building of the tunnel system, right, the story that emerged in the West around this idea of Gaza as an open-air prison, a place that is, according to the Israelis, not under occupation; according to everyone else in the world, yes, under occupation, because of the control of entry, exit, et cetera. Netanyahu, et cetera. There are also so many subtle things that happened in Israel as a result of this engagement. One of the most fascinating is the rise of this kind of hybrid, nihilistic, apocalyptic thread of religious Zionism, which had to confront something it had never had, which is, receding from territory of the land of Israel, it’s always been kind of amassing more and more, and had to kind of confront partial redemption as a piece of its story. And at the same time, it’s just a totally different story now. There feels like some things, you know, change and some things stay the same. When you look back at the story of the disengagement, what stands out to you as the pieces that we have to keep thinking about, in terms of that story, and what parts of it do we just chalk up to just another place in the timeline of this impossible history of Israelis and Palestinians and kind of try to forget about the past and talk about the present? Michael: I think particularly after October 7th, people want to view the disengagement as a very black and white and linear issue. Israel pulled out and that led directly to October 7th. I think it’s a lot more complicated than that. And I’ll say something that I’m sure I will hear about from lots of people as soon as this podcast gets released. If I were the Israeli prime minister, if I were Ariel Sharon back in 2005, even knowing then what I know now, I would do it again. Now, I would do it very differently. And that’s why I think this is not a black and white story. I don’t think that it inevitably led to October 7th. The fact that it was done unilaterally, in a way that there was no coordination, in a way that was guaranteed to empower Hamas instead of the PA. The fact that when Hamas then took over Gaza two years later, there wasn’t really an Israeli response to get them out and then in fact as we discussed there were years of Israeli policies designed to keep them there. These are all lessons that should be learned. I don’t think that the lesson of the disengagement, the one that I think almost all Israeli Jews now take, is that giving up territory can never happen. I think that giving up territory in the manner in which it was given up should never happen again, but that’s a very different thing than saying Israel can never withdraw from anywhere. The lesson of all of this is that we have to be in place, the IDF and maybe Israeli settlements, wherever that is. And we’re now seeing this extension of Israeli policy and all sorts of other fronts that stems, I think, from this lesson they’ve taken from 2005, which is why we now see Israel on the ground in Lebanon and in Syria and making noise about what they may or may not do in the Sinai. This new Israeli policy is “we have to be on the ground beyond our borders,” and it stems directly from this vision of what the 2005 disengagement led to. And I think that it really needs to be rethought. It’s even harder to do now than it was before October 7th, but I do think it’s necessary because there are important lessons to be learned from that episode. Some are lessons that the Israeli right is correct on and some of them are lessons that the Israeli right is not correct on. But if we take this black and white view of 2005 as this absolute mistake, then I think we’re going to be missing some important things that I would hope would guide Israeli policy in the future. Yehuda: Thanks for doing this. Michael: My pleasure.
