David Remnick: Just days ago, I returned from a trip that took me all over Israel, including what's called Otef Aza, the Gaza Envelope.

Speaker 2: You can see this one also [unintelligible 00:00:17]

David: This is part of an RPG?

Speaker 2: Yes, this is [unintelligible 00:00:19]

David: This is where 1000 armed men from Hamas broke through the barriers surrounding the Gaza Strip and carried out a massacre that went on for hour after hour and left 1400 Israelis dead.

Speaker 2: You can see the collapsing curve. You can see another part of the RPG here. They shot on these safe rooms with all the civilians, the RPG. We were fortunate that most of them were not penetrated by the RPG, but afterwards, they broke the doors.

David: I was escorted by an officer from the Israel Defense Force, the IDF, into still working to secure the area after the unprecedented collapse.

Speaker 2: We're speaking a lot about the failure, and it was a deep and hell failure, but we also should discuss the bounce back. But it is the Israeli DNA that even if you are on the ground, you were hit, bounce back, very quickly.

David: What are we hearing?

Speaker 2: We are hearing the Israeli airborne bombs in Gaza.

David: You may have read comparisons between the Hamas attack and the historical pogrom known as the Kishinev Massacre more than a century ago in the Russian empire. Kishinev was one of a great many pogroms in Eastern Europe, but it changed the course of history, convincing many Jews that they could never again be safe in Europe. 49 people were killed at Kishinev.

The body count from the October 7th attack is, as I said, over 1400. Wait a second. Let me ask you a horrible question. You know that in parts of the world, people will say this is all fake, it's all [foreign language]. What do you say to that?

Speaker 2: Some people say that the Holocaust didn't exist. How do you respond to such people? Truth doesn't matter. I'm standing in front of you. I'm a reliable person. I saved dozens of people in my life all over the world.

David: In search and rescue?

Speaker 2: Yes, search and rescue. This is what I do. I have pictures, but these people also, if they would see it in their own eyes, they would say that we fake the situation. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Why should I care of people who choose to believe the evil.

David: In its shock and rage, Israel has responded with colossal force, with countless airstrikes on Gaza. As I record this, more than 5,000 Palestinians have been killed according to local authorities in Gaza, linked to Hamas, and the number goes up every day. The Israeli military has cut or reduced the flow of water and electricity, and hospitals are simply not able to cope. There is no sign of a ceasefire.

At the same time, Israeli troops have mobilized for a ground invasion into Gaza, and there are grave concerns all around the world of a regional confrontation that could involve Hezbollah and Iran. I've been to many places and seen many things, and yet I've never been anywhere where the grief, suffering, the rage and the fear are more profound. I'm going to speak today with two keen observers whom I've known for many years, the Israeli journalist, Yonit Levi, and Sari Nusseibeh, a Palestinian academic and intellectual.

We're going to spend most of today's program with them. We will begin with Yonit Levi. She's the anchor on Israel's leading TV channel, Channel 12, and I spoke with her last week. Yonit, I've just returned from Israel, but you've been anchor for Israel's leading station for 20 years remarkably. I want to get a sense from you what it's like to be in the country right now.

Yonit Levi: To be honest, David, it's the worst it has ever been. It's never been this heavy feeling of mourning, really. The whole country is engulfed in that. When you think of Jewish history, when you think of what we are imbued with and think of what happened to us in this shock attack of October 7th, then you realize that every single Jewish nightmare came true. It is a very difficult thing to deal with, quite honestly.

With all of Israel's challenges, I think we had this concrete floor of certainty that is pulled from us, and now we question so many things that we hadn't questioned before.

David: You question what? The very existence of the state?

Yonit: No, but the most basic ability to have a secure home for your family because if terrorists burst into communities and towns and small kibbutzim and murder families in their beds, then the one thing that you as a parent even need to ensure is for them to be secure. That is the one thing. This country, large part of it exists for that reason, to be a safe haven for Jews in Israel and around the world.

It is a question of that security because what happened on October 7th wasn't only a failure of intelligence, it was then for the other first couple of hours of operational failure, the families calling in two live television saying, "The terrorists are here. Where is the military?" It took a while.

David: The killing took place in Otef Aza, the Gaza Envelope, the kibbutzim and towns and in the music festival right near Gaza. That's obviously been evacuated. After visiting those places, I also talked to many of those evacuees in other kibbutzim in the North, and almost none of them said that they would go back and live there again unless Hamas was utterly defeated. What does that mean?

Yonit: The Israeli government and the military is pretty clear on saying Hamas can't rule Gaza anymore and it can't have the capability to do what it did again. That should be very clear. The world that is talking about Israel retaliating or Israel's revenge or Israel's rage, this is defense. This is to make sure that what we saw, this massacre can't happen again. You're looking at Hamas as a terror organization, so it has couple of thousands commando units called [foreign language].

It has another 25,000 parts of the military arm of Hamas. We're doing them quite a favor to still make that distinction between the political and the military. You can go after that, and you can say we will topple Hamas' reign of terror in Gaza so it will never endanger Israelis, and in fact won't threaten the lives of the people in Gaza. But it does speak to larger questions, a little bit I think what the United States had to deal with after toppling Saddam, which is, "And then what?" I think that is also a large question if we reach that point.

David: You mentioned Iraq, and I think implicitly Joe Biden did when he came to Israel. He showed immediate support for Israel, but at the same time, he very directly counseled against making mistakes out of a sense of rage, out of a sense of lashing out the way the United States did in the wake of 9/11, particularly in Iraq.

Right now, we're seeing a gigantic mobilization around Gaza, countless airstrikes, footage and reports of over 4,000 people dead already with more to come. Do you think the specter of a overreaction, a situation in which the stronger nation ends up doing things to defeat itself is a reality?

Yonit: First, the stronger nation was attacked brutally. I think that where as Israelis are still, and I think large parts of the Jewish world are still living that attack because the atrocities continue to be uncovered every single day. We are 18 days into this. On the one hand, the United States, Joe Biden, the president saying, "You should defeat Hamas." That should happen but also, and I think this is very important under international law, tragically doesn't mean that there won't be civilian casualties.

That moral equivalence that people are now looking at the casualty list and saying, "Oh, there are 1,400 dead in Israel and 4,000 dead in Gaza." That is I think a moral equivalence that is wrong to make with all.

David: Why?

Yonit: Why? I will explain this. Israel was attacked. Look, this is not another skirmish or another violent cycle. 3000 terrorists came into Israel, broke down the borders, broke down all of the walls surrounding communities, had specific targets.

David: This is a startling collapse as many Israelis said to me, a collapse of the state, a collapse of surveillance, a collapse of security. What is your sense as a journalist of what happened? Why did this happen? How could it?

Yonit: There are a few layers here. One is, obviously, colossal failure of intelligence because Hamas has been planning this for more than a year. Israel failed here. I think the failure, David, is not that the information didn't exist, but that the information wasn't analyzed properly, it wasn't understood. They thought that what they saw behind the fence was an attempt to pressure Israel, an attempt to pressure a part of Hamas that is outside of Gaza, all kinds of things.

They didn't understand what they're actually seeing, Occam's razor, the simple solution is actually the solution. Because of the intelligence failure and because Hamas managed to blind the military bases next to the communities that the military had no idea what the scale of it was. They actually conquered for a few hours something like 20 communities on the Israeli communities on the border.

It took a very long time, by the way, heroic responses by the civilians themselves in the communities by the first policemen and soldiers that arrived there, but it took a very long time-

David: How long did it take?

Yonit: -to actually stop it. In certain kibbutzim it took eight hours, in certain places, it took 24 hours. To this moment, I don't fully understand, I think no one fully understands why it took so long. I think the answer, again, is that the scale wasn't understood. I also need to tell you that, again, in Israeli media, the questions are not so much in that area right now.

Not that we don't understand that there was a huge colossal failure, but the military is fighting a war. It might have another front opened up in the north. Again, to the extent that I could represent the public sentiment, it feels like this is the wrong time to be asking all of those very good questions.

David: Yonit Levi is chief news anchor on Israel's Channel 12. We'll continue in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

[pause 00:13:33]

[music]

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and I'm speaking today about the conflict in Israel and Gaza with two deeply informed observers on the conflict. We'll continue now with Yonit Levi, one of the most prominent anchors in Israel. I want to ask about the leadership of Israel. For many months, the center of attention has been in this story, and on your podcast has been almost entirely domestic. The judicial reform and the huge demonstrations against it.

That revealed a profound split in Israeli society. Then on October 7th, something happened that many Israelis just describe as a collapse, and at the center of this is someone who's been the prime minister for over a period of time of 16 years more than David Ben-Gurion, which is Benjamin Netanyahu. The polls now show him in miserable shape, calls for his resignation.

His resignation at a certain point seems almost inevitable. He's under criminal indictment. The country is split, and yet he's there. He's leading this effort. What is the level of criticism against him or confidence in him?

Yonit: There is definitely a lot of criticism. As you said, the polls are not good. The polls are done in the middle of a war. That needs to be taken into consideration. It's important to--

David: Post 9/11, the polls for George Bush, let's forget Iraq [unintelligible 00:15:22] two years later, headed towards 90%. Netanyahu's are in the 20s.

Yonit: That's a good point, but as you already mentioned, it now arrives at this, and the whole Israeli society arrives into this, or this is forced on us, this war, when we are very divided over Netanyahu's plans for judicial overhaul.

The distinction I was trying to make just is to point out that all of the security, all of the IDF establishments, the head of the IDF chief of staff and the head of military intelligence, and head of Shin Bet, and even the defense minister Yoav Gallant, all of them said, this happened under our watch and it is our responsibility.

David: He has not. Netanyahu has not.

Yonit: He has not.

David: Why is that?

Yonit: He has not. If I'm trying to dive into his head, I think that he truly believes that he has nothing to do with this. That it was the fault of military intelligence. Nothing about his own policies vis-a-vis Gaza in his mind. I'm trying to describe what he's going through. I don't think he thinks it is at all his fault. He's trying to distance himself.

David: That seems incredible to me and politically not viable.

Yonit: I think he is very concerned about the public and the public reaction. There is a lot of rage that is not only because we talked about the failure of intelligence and the operational failure, but after that came the fact that the state of Israel and the different government ministries didn't seem to realize that what we have here is an evacuation of people from their homes and someone needs to help them.

There are tens of thousands of people who had to be evacuated in the south and in the north because we're still concerned about what Hezbollah might try and do. They feel like the government is not at all dealing with them. There is a lot of rage, and a lot of it is focused on Netanyahu.

Remember also that there were not specific warnings about something that Hamas will do, but warnings by military intelligence over the past couple of months that because of the judicial overhaul, because of the rift inside Israeli society, our enemies might use this as an opportunity to attack us. That is all [crosstalk].

David: It's an overall vulnerability. It's also a matter of policy. Against the recommendations of his own national security advisors, Netanyahu, in my understanding, has carried out what's called the [unintelligible 00:17:51], the conception of how to deal with the Palestinians to keep the Palestinian Authority on its back foot. He strengthened Hamas by allowing more people to come into Israel to work, to allow Qatar to send lots of money to Hamas.

In some ways, he strengthened Hamas in order to weaken the already weak Palestinian authority so as not to have the Palestinian authority build again momentum toward a resolution of the Palestinian question, which is plagued or lingered in this region for a century. On the level of policy, Netanyahu seems to have been badly mistaken.

Yonit: He is receiving criticism on that as well. I do want to be accurate about one thing, the Israeli establishment, Netanyahu being the head of it for, as you said, a very long time, but also parts of the security establishment.

The way that Israel thought, particularly in recent years, to deal with this was to say Hamas is deterred, doesn't want to start a war, it prefers improving the lives of its own citizens so we will placate them with not only money coming in from Qatar, but we will allow for workers to come in from Gaza to work in these southern areas, we will allow for a lot of commodities, and that will keep Hamas quiet. Hamas will give us quiet.

That part is not only Netanyahu, but you're right about the fact that Netanyahu in particular didn't want a strong Palestinian authority in the West Bank. It was in a weird way easier to keep those two separate. By the way, they are separate. They are two separate entities, the West Bank and the Hamas, just from the fact that stems from the fact that Hamas took over Gaza.

David: The Palestinian issue in recent years seemed almost to disappear from international attention. Obviously, pockets of it and various human rights groups were focused on it. How much do you think Hamas was motivated not only by protection of the Al-Aqsa Mosque or political prisoners, but in conjunction with Iran disrupting the entire picture on the Palestinian question?

Yonit: What you're saying is that they murdered Israeli civilians to get attention?

David: In some ways--

Yonit: This is a Jihadist Islamist extreme ideology that is set to annihilate the Jewish state. This is in their charter. They were playing a game with all of us. That is what they did. I think that any way of trying to see it other than this is what they intend and this is their ideology. I think we need to start with that.

David: Yonit, there's a view that Hamas is, like it or not, part of the fabric of Palestinian political life, and the only way to make extremism disappear or really diminish would be for a lasting resolution between Israel and the Palestinians, whatever that might be.

Yonit: I think that as someone who has followed this tragedy for decades here in this country, again, we could have had peace a long, long, long time ago if Hamas wasn't involved the way it was. They are the main reason Israelis and Palestinians don't have peace. I think they're also the main reason why parts of Israeli society have moved so far into the rights because in the Israeli state of mind and the Israeli soul, every time they reached out to try and sign an accord with the Palestinians, it blew up in their faces with terror.

David: What you are suggesting is that what happened on October 7th and its aftermath will for a very long time to come, a very long time to come harden positions radically, and a settlement piece in the region is impossible, and the only thing possible is higher walls.

Yonit: Tragically, walls didn't work on October 7th. It's hard to see beyond, first of all, the next couple of days and weeks for Israelis, to be quite honest. What Hamas attempted to do, when you murder children in front of their parents or parents in front of their children, when you post this on social media, again, you are trying to create this hate for generations. Will we have the power to overcome it? I sadly can't give you a definitive answer on that, David.

David: We've talked about Joe Biden and his reaction to what happened. We have a complicated country too, and there's been all kinds of different reactions to-

Yonit: I've noticed that you're a complicated country.

David: -what's happened and what's happening. What's your assessment of it from afar?

Yonit: The feeling is of heartbreak in some way from parts of the West that seem to automatically think in terms like Israel strong, ergo, bad, Palestinians weak, ergo, good, and this leads to terrible, terrible demonstrations that we've seen. Supporting Hamas, by the way, even before Israeli Air Force had one plane in the sky over Gaza.

That led to I think a beautiful letter signed by David Grossman and Cynthia Ozick and others exactly about this sort of heartbreak that they feel when they look at the inability to just show empathy for what happened to Jews in Israel. That is one part of how we see it. It's one heartbreak too many.

David: I know you've spent a lot of time in front of the camera and interviewing people in both studio and closer to where this horror took place and where this ground war seems to be about to take place. I wonder if there's any specific moment, any specific interview that you did, any encounter that you've had in the last few weeks that will stay with you to the end of your days.

Yonit: I don't think I'll ever be able to forget what the kibbutzim looked like after October 7th. We talked about the future of Israelis and Palestinians. Eyal Waldman, whose daughter Danielle and her fiancé Noam, were murdered at the party. He's a high-tech entrepreneur in Israel. He built offices in Rawabi, in Ramallah, in Gaza. He believes in that.

He stood in the studio still during a few days after his daughter's Shiva, and he said, "After all this, we will have to find a way to live together." I thought that was in a moment of someone trying to overcome his grief in such a poignant way. There are so many moments that are very hard I don't think will ever leave me.

David: Yonit Levi, thank you so much.

Yonit: Thank you, David.

[music]

David: Yonit Levi is the chief news anchor of Israel's Channel 12, and she also records the podcast Unholy with The Guardian's, Jonathan Freedland.

 

 

 

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