Yossi Klein Halevi was interviewed for The New Yorker’s Q&A column.

“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.”

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