“Last week, Israeli forces killed Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, and the man who orchestrated the October 7th attacks, in which Hamas fighters killed some twelve hundred Israelis. President Biden responded to the news of Sinwar’s demise by expressing hope that the realization of this particular Israeli war aim would lead to a durable ceasefire in Gaza, where more than forty-two thousand Palestinians have been killed. But Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has given no sign that he will allow the war to end, despite the humanitarian toll; Israel is also engaged in an invasion of Lebanon, where its forces are battling Hezbollah.

Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, and the author of the best-selling book “Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor.” He served in the Israel Defense Forces, in the nineteen-eighties, including in Gaza. (Halevi and I were colleagues at The New Republic a decade ago, but have never met.) I wanted to talk with him about the way that many liberal Americans have come to see the war differently than even opponents of Netanyahu in Israel have, and whether Israelis are getting an accurate picture of the way the war is being fought. Our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, is below. We also discuss how the trauma of October 7th played out in Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza, whether Israeli centrists and liberals are placing too much faith in Netanyahu, and whether Halevi believes the military is targeting civilians in Gaza.

You recently told the New York Times, ‘This last year has been a slow and painful and essential attempt to reclaim the Zionist promise of Jewish self-defense. For me, the death of Sinwar is a culminating moment in that process.’ What did you mean by that?

What we lost on October 7th were two foundational elements of the Israeli ethos. The first is that we would be able to defend ourselves. This is a country that sent commandos halfway across Africa in 1976 to rescue a hundred Israeli hostages, and we couldn’t save twelve hundred Israelis within the sovereign borders of the state of Israel. The second thing that we lost was the Zionist promise to the Jewish people that we would create a safe refuge here. Israel on October 7th and since has become the most dangerous place in the world to be a Jew. And so what this war is about for me is reclaiming the credibility of these two essential elements of the Israeli ethos.”

Read the full interview with Yossi Klein Halevi in The New Yorker