Sam Harris speaks with John Spencer about the reality of urban warfare and Israel's conduct in the war in Gaza. They discuss the nature of the Hamas attacks on October 7th, what was most surprising about the Hamas videos, the difficulty in distinguishing Hamas from the rest of the population, combatants as a reflection of a society's values, how many people have been killed in Gaza, the proportion of combatants and noncombatants, the double standards to which the IDF is held, the worst criticism that can be made of Israel and the IDF, intentions vs results, what is unique about the war in Gaza, Hamas's use of human shields, what it would mean to defeat Hamas, what the IDF has accomplished so far, the destruction of the Gaza tunnel system, the details of underground warfare, the rescue of hostages, how noncombatants become combatants, how difficult it is to interpret videos of combat, what victory would look like, the likely aftermath of the war, war with Hezbollah, Iran's attack on Israel, what to do about Iran, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.
Well, it's been pretty crazy out there on college campuses.
I will have much more to say about that shortly, but today I'm bringing you a podcast that I promised in a previous episode, where I said I would talk to someone who is an expert in urban warfare, who could help me analyze just what has gone on in Gaza.
Today I'm speaking with John Spencer.
John currently serves as the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point.
He is the co-director of the Urban Warfare Project and host of the Urban Warfare Project podcast.
He's also a founding member of the International Working Group on Subterranean Warfare.
John served 25 years in the Army, having held ranks from Private to Sergeant First Class and Second Lieutenant to Major.
He was an active duty Army officer during two combat tours in Iraq.
His research focuses on military operations in dense urban areas, megacities, and urban and subterranean warfare.
John also holds a Master of Policy Management from Georgetown University.
And his writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, and in many other publications.
And he's the author of the book, Understanding Urban Warfare.
John and I cover Israel's response to October 7th from top to bottom.
We discussed the nature of Hamas's attacks on October 7th, what was most surprising about them, the difficulty in distinguishing Hamas from the rest of the population in Gaza, combatants as a reflection of a society's values, how many people have been killed so far in Gaza, The proportion of combatants and non-combatants.
The double standards to which the IDF is held.
The worst criticism that can be made of Israel and the IDF so far.
Intentions versus results.
What is unique about the war in Gaza.
Hamas's use of human shields, what it would mean to defeat them, what the IDF has accomplished so far, the destruction of the Gaza tunnel system, the details of underground warfare, the rescue of hostages, how non-combatants become combatants, how difficult it is to interpret videos of combat, what victory would look like,
The likely aftermath of the war, a possible war with Hezbollah, Iran's attack on Israel, and what to do about Iran, and other topics.
This one is a PSA, so no paywall.
As always, if you find what we're doing here valuable, and you want to support the podcast, you can do that by subscribing at SamHarris.org.
And now I bring you John Spencer.
I am here with John Spencer.
John, thanks for joining me.
Sam, thanks for having me.
So, I will have introduced you in the intro here, but perhaps you can state what your background is and how you come to this conversation.
Sure.
So I spent 25 years in the US military as an infantry soldier and officer, and then spent two combat deployments to Iraq, both in the invasion and at the end.
But then I went, you know, throughout my career, I went, my last job was teaching strategy at West Point, where I stood up a research center and started researching, you know, all urban battles.
And I became this chair of urban warfare studies that I am now.
Really, when I left the military, I began this endeavor to travel the world into combat zones to understand them in real time.
That has led me to where I am now, where I can uniquely provide people, I hope, understanding of Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza, which is overwhelmingly urban, which is what I specialize in.
Yes, I want to get your expertise here on urban warfare and use that to analyze what's happening in Gaza and what isn't happening.
I think there's a lot of misinformation about the nature of the war and how it compares to other conflicts.
Where else have you witnessed urban warfare beyond being in your own tours in the military?
When I left the military in 2018 and really took full direction of my new job to study it academically, I went to Mumbai to study the 2008 terror attacks, which it was on 10 terrorists took down a whole city.
I went to Israel multiple times studying past wars, so like the 2002 Battle of Jenin, the The Battle of Suez City.
When the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia started, I started going into Ukraine.
So, I've been four times since the war began studying the urban battles.
So, Kiev, Bakhmut, Mariupol.
And then, of course, I've been to Gaza twice since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas War.
Interesting that you went to Mumbai.
That's something I've thought a lot about in the aftermath of October 7th, because it's really this pure case of jihadism that has nothing to do with Israel, obviously, has very little to do with Jews, except for the fact that they did manage to find some Jews to kill in Mumbai.
But I'm interested to hear what that was like before we hit our main topic.
Sure.
I forgot to mention that I also went into Nagorno-Karabakh.
There was a war there in 2020, and there's been another one, but I went in after that war.
It ended in a major urban battle over the Battle of Shusha.
But going back to Mumbai, it was Just fascinating in the planning that went into it.
And like you said, they basically hit five targets simultaneously at the exact same moment with small teams of terrorists dressed as civilians trying to blend in.
And one of them being the Chabad, two hotels, a train station.
But overwhelmed the systems and there are, you know, totally at a different scale.
A lot of similarities between the invasion of Israel on October 7th and the Mumbai attacks on how it kind of overloaded the system.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That was, um, it's all one thing that's fascinating about this is that, um, to my knowledge, India did not respond.
Am I right about that?
At least I haven't heard about what India has done in response.
Not in a direct action, because it was verified by intelligence that it was a Pakistani-led operation, so really a state-backed operation, but using these proxy forces.
And this was a That traveled from Pakistan into India to conduct the attack.
There was a lot of political things that happened to include, you know, demanding responsibility, but there was such plausible deniability.
It was really frustrating with the terrorist group who did it, but you're right, no direct action.
There are lots of, you know, history there between India and Pakistan.
And the concern of, just like we've seen other places, the concern of escalation in that direct attack.
But this is the kind of the Iran situation in the Middle East too.
There is always this plausible deniability, even if in these cases where it can be proven that the terrorists were trained, financed, and launched by a state actor.
Okay, so on to October 7th and Gaza.
I was thinking we would start our conversation with the war in Gaza just so post Israel's response to October 7th, but is there anything you want to say about October 7th itself before Israel did anything in response?
Sure.
I spent a lot of time walking the ground on October 7th.
From my lens, as somebody who studied urban combat from Mumbai to all wars, I think that the world really still has it wrong on what happened on October 7th.
I've done a lot of work on walking the ground and going to all the different sites and understanding the scale, the intention, the magnitude, the tactics, everything from October 7th.
I think the world wants to put it in the terrorist bucket, right?
To put it in the bucket with 9-11, 26-11 or the Mumbai attacks and other terrorist attacks.
There are some similarities, but it's more like a full-scale invasion.
I mean, there are over 4,000, you know, both Hamas and Palestinian civilians that cross the border between Israel and Gaza, 22 breach sites along the border wall, 4,000 rockets launched in the first few hours.
With the intention of moving much farther north than they did.
I mean, it was a, and I've struggled with what was October 7th.
And as from a military lens, it is as clear as an invasion as you can get.
Interesting.
It's somewhat confounded just optically and conceptually by the fact that, as you just pointed out, that there were Hamas fighters.
I mean, not properly thought of as soldiers in the state actor sense, perhaps, but they were obvious insurgents.
But then, as you pointed out, there were almost as many or even as many or more Palestinian civilians who came across the border and participated in the violence to one or another degree.
How do you think about that?
I mean, we all want frameworks in which to think about it.
I think about it as in a war lens.
It's hard in this situation, like what was Gaza?
Was it a state?
And was this the launch of a state attack, right?
It's not, so it falls into these two buckets of whether internationally armed conflict or non-internationally armed conflict.
But I view it, like I said, as an invasion with different forces.
Yeah.
The first wave of forces were these Hamas, Nuqba, some even wearing uniform forces with clear instructions.
I mean, they had guidebooks on how to create as much suffering.
They had guidebooks on how to wear their GoPro cameras.
There's just so much uniqueness.
But I view, if you cross the border, I view you as a combatant really.
So in war, there's two categories.
Non-combatant and a combatant.
And yes, you can get into like illegal combatant and all of these things.
But if somebody crossed the border from Gaza into Israel with the purpose of partaking in the hostilities, they immediately make themselves a combatant.
Yeah.
So let's move forward into, and I think as we talk here, I'd like both of us to be alert to any topics about which we think many people are confused.
So if I just raise something about which you think there's a lot of misunderstanding out there in the public, please flag it and let's linger on it so that we don't miss any opportunities here to rectify some of the confusion.
So now that the war has started, we're talking now where there's been a lull in the fighting and really the question, the open question still, perhaps it'll still be open when we air this, is whether or not the IDF is going to go into Rafah.
I'm sure there's some conflict happening even as we speak, but there's definitely been a lull in the fighting.
What do we know about the war in Gaza and how do we know it at this point?
How is information getting out?
How do you view the quality of the information?
On some level, this is the most witnessed conflict in human history, judging from social media.
But in other ways, we know that there's an astounding amount of misinformation and confusion about it.
What is going on in Gaza, and how do we know what is going on?
Sure.
I think that's a great question, and it's hard to say, you know, from October 7th until today, how have we known what is going on, and how has that shaped our, you know, basically our information about the war.
And I agree with you.
We used to have these terms like TikTok wars.
They're calling this the first open source war after Ukraine.
But the evolution of being able Basically being bombarded by information, not through kind of the traditional means, but through social media and other aspects where we can see into the battle continuously.
But we're also looking through a soda straw and a lot of people are interpreting what they're seeing where I agree with you.
We can really start from October 7th.
We talked about that and how I think people have gotten that wrong on terrorist attack, it was oriented towards the military, all these different immediate disinformation campaigns that seem to be gaining traction to sticking even in Israel's response.
But once, you know, on October 8th, Israel declared war against Hamas, such a really great framework, a state, because they went on the news and made a formal declaration of war against Hamas in Gaza because of what happened on October 7th.
That's pretty straightforward.
They set forth their goals, which again, as time has gone in different media messages or information operations, what we call them, social media trends or whatever, there's been so much of the truth that has been translated.
You asked me, how do we know what we know?
So for like October 7th, we know because Hamas uploaded all their videos a lot of time in real time.
So we can pretty much, you know, people were starting to make their own opinions on October 7th based on the overwhelming information being uploaded.
But it's really interesting how despite even Hamas' videos, everybody formed their own opinion on, you know, it was resistance, it was oriented towards the military, there wasn't this, you know, no rape happened, all these things, despite the overwhelming evidence we all had access to.
Is all that video still up there, or has it been, in some ways, taken down?
No, you can go to like, you can just go to October, there's actually a video, I forget the name of them, like October7th.com, where people have collected, unfortunately, all the Hamas video they can find and put it on as a record of, because you know, you as the thread of X or Telegram, whatever, it can get lost in the threads, but you know, people have, it's all still available.
I saw the video that the Israeli government put together.
I saw it back in November and it was really shocking and I wrote about how much it jarred me despite how much I've seen of war, my own experiences.
Yeah, I haven't seen that video and perhaps I should.
I think I've been sparing myself the experience.
But what did surprise you about it?
One of the biggest surprises was just the unique, because of the fact that Hamas recorded so much of the atrocities they were doing, but also the fact that there were so many sensors, as we call them, you know, traffic cameras, dashboard cameras, victim cell phones, What Israel did, which nobody has access to unless they've seen this video, was to take all those different points of view and then put them in time and location.
So like if you're at the Nova Music Festival, the video shows you the Hamas GoPro approaching the festival.
It shows you the dash camera of somebody there trying to get away and of the frightened teenager who's recording it.
It brings it all together, which I think really creates this very mixed reality experience, which is unique to war reporting.
I've watched my fill of evil things happening around the world, but how this was put together I think was really unique.
So it really jarred me.
I mean, other things that I saw in the video that were very unique to me was like the video of Hamas rolling through the border, really jubilant about what they were about to do.
And I've led a lot of soldiers into combat, and that's not normal, even for soldiers, for anybody to be really excited, euphoric about what they were about to do.
And then lastly, I found some of the videos of like the children crying out in pain.
There's one scene where there's two young boys, the Hamas members had just killed the father and they had brought them back into the house and you can hear the boys moaning, which is something I as a soldier have heard, you know, enemy combatants do on the battlefield.
Like it's like the death moan, I call it.
And to hear that coming from a boy was really traumatic, but I've also seen innocent civilians being caught in war and how the soldiers will overwhelmingly stop to give aid.
And to have a little boy crying out, his eyes missing, his dad's dead, and for the Hamas member to be standing there like, shut up, be quiet, and then goes to the fridge.
And that's the scene that everybody talks about where he grabs the Coke out of the fridge and starts drinking it.
That was really, you know, very unique.
Yeah, I was just, we're talking now on the day that Sheryl Sandberg released her documentary on the violence against women on October 7th.
It's available on YouTube.
And I just started watching it, I only got maybe 15 minutes in before we had to jump on the microphones here.
It shows some of the footage which I had seen before, which many people have seen and I really think everyone should see, of some of the hostages being dragged across the border into Gaza and some of the young women who almost certainly have been raped.
I mean there's one who's got obviously blood around her pelvic area on her pants and actually it looks like her Achilles tendons might have been cut, which is a diabolical detail if true.
But the thing that's so striking about so much of this footage of the hostages being dragged across the border is that so many of the people in the scene are absolutely ecstatic and basically all you hear are shouts of Allahu Akbar.
And it's coming from, I guess, many of these people, certainly some of the people are official members of Hamas, but judging from the sheer numbers in many of these shots, it really seems like a lot of these people are just Palestinian civilians who are getting caught up in the mob violence.
But it does strike me as unusual.
I can imagine a lot of things.
I can imagine, based on some experience of being a victim and wanting vengeance, I can imagine being on the other side of violence, even wrongful violence.
I find it very difficult to imagine is a scenario where an obvious non-combatant, you know, in this case a girl or a mother clutching two children to her breast, being taken hostage, and finding the taking of these hostages a cause for celebration, right?
Like, this is the win I've been hoping for.
This is the thing that's going to get me shrieking to heaven in jubilation.
That we finally grabbed one of these, you know, mistreated girls who's, you know, already bloodied, maybe grievously injured in some cases, in some cases dead, where you have people, you know, rushing forward to spit upon the corpses of, again, in many cases, obvious non-combatants.
I mean, you can understand it, you know, if this, you know, really fully lean into the principle of charity here.
Perhaps you can understand it if These are soldiers being taken hostage.
But when you have a woman clutching her kids being dragged onto a motorcycle, and you have people shrieking in jubilation over this...
I have a, I mean, I know why I think people are capable of this, but it's, you know, I would say you have to believe some very specific things about the moral order in the universe and your place in it to find these sorts of moments the fulfillment of your aspirations, right, and a cause for Happiness.
Not grim, murderous determination or sadism, but just joy.
And so it's something that I think people find it very hard to interpret, these scenes, and I think they've just averted their eyes from them.
But they do suggest that any bright line we want to draw between evil, mustache-twirling terrorists, i.e.
the core members of Hamas, And other Palestinians is in fact difficult to draw.
I'm just wondering how you view those scenes because they do strike me as surprising in ways that echo the surprise you just expressed over the jubilation of the combatants coming across the border as kind of a non-standard mood for soldiers.
Yeah, it's an interesting, so it's not the first time I've seen it, to be truthful.
Now those who crossed the border and engaged in the activities in any way, to include the looters who even came forward and walked over the dead children's bodies and took their clothing back into Gaza.
I'm a very law of war, rule of law, a realist basically.
So have I seen similar?
Of course, it's disgusting to see.
It reminded me of scenes of Mogadishu 1993, the entire population celebrating the death of American soldiers, Fallujah 2004, the entire Seems like the entire city coming out to dismember Americans, burn them, drag them, hang them from their bridge and celebrate.
Yes, I 100% agree with you.
It's a massive problem with You know, Islamic radicalization of populations and to where you can bring yourself to be celebrating the rape of women and taking of babies as hostages.
There's so many fundamental issues with that.
But I also draw a clear line because I understand the history of war.
And this is again where I think people have gotten it wrong.
They think that To think that those videos didn't lead to like Israel's quest for vengeance and the way they act, that is all stemming off of what happened on October 7th.
I strongly believe from being on the ground, you asked me, how do I get my information or other people from being on the ground with the IDF?
That is also not how soldiers approach, even after, you know, the battle of Fallujah or other instances, which is very similar.
And the difficulty of distinguishing between, okay, who's a combatant or non-combatant innocent civilian, it doesn't lead to nations or like the IDF in this case, where no matter what they do, people think they're intentionally trying to target people because of those videos, which is not the reality on the ground.
Yeah.
I mean, can you imagine the reverse case of the IDF dragging obvious non-combatant women and children out of Gaza, across the border into Israel, and, you know, random Israelis celebrating their rape and abuse?
It's just, there's some glaring asymmetries here, which people are losing sight of.
There's just no... I'm sure we'll get into the details of what the IDF has done and what they may have done wrong.
And I really have no doubt that there are examples of war crimes to be found in the war in Gaza on the IDF side, because it seems like it would be impossible for some soldier or soldiers not to have gone haywire in certain circumstances, right?
And this is just the nature of war as I understand it.
What I don't think you would find is an appetite among the Israelis to have raped non-combatants paraded before jeering crowds in Tel Aviv.
There is just a cultural asymmetry here that is quite glaring and almost never remarked upon. 100%.
And I agree with you.
This is really that, you know, the misinformation is so shocking that you have so much misunderstanding of who the Israelis are, as in the IDF, the people of Israel, how there is an aspect of, of course, the law of war.
I'm sure we'll talk about following the law of war and all of its intricacies in the execution of a war, but also the moral ethical code of your society.
Militaries are a reflection of their societies.
So like you're right, the asymmetry here is that you think that the Israel society would be okay with any of that.
And clearly they're not.
And they want to hold soldiers, if they do go wrong and were accountable.
There's so much of that that's not who we are, that people don't understand that militaries take into war the reflection of their society's values.
There's so much misinformation out there that it becomes confusing to people who have never been there.
They couldn't tell you what the difference between Gaza and the West Bank is.
They couldn't tell you what the size of Israel is.
There's so much they don't know, but they form these immediate So, back to the information question, let's just focus on the raw numbers here.
Like, what are you talking about? - So, back to the information question, let's just focus on the raw numbers here.
How many people have been killed in Gaza, and what is the proportion of combatants to non-combatants?
And because one thing we're dealing with here is that for the longest time people have simply been restating numbers that have come straight out of the so-called Ministry of Health, which is really Hamas in Gaza.
You know, I don't think anyone can doubt that many thousands of people have died and that many thousands of non-combatants have died.
But what do we know about the numbers and the proportion, or do we simply actually not know with any confidence at this point?
Yeah, that's a great question.
It's interesting how many times I've gotten that question, unique to this war only.
What is the combatant to civilian kill ratio?
It's just, I of course, having studied so many urban battles can tell you what it was in the past.
I can tell you, so the question was how many have died?
The answer is nobody knows.
But for some reason, unique, war is a contest of will, we have to fight what the narrative is.
So because unique to this war alone, and I don't say this based on opinion, just empirical evidence, this is the first war in history.
Where anybody has had a running count of the civilian casualties down to the single digit in real time.
I mean, if you just imagine... A fake running count.
Correct.
I mean, if we're taking the actual opinion of a third party who is affiliated with the enemy, Hamas, the Gaza Health Ministry is a Hamas, because Hamas wasn't just the military force, it was the government, and you couldn't be part of the institution if you're not... It's complex, but...
To get a number from within the environment, from the enemy, and say that's the number that the entire world runs with, with no caveats.
One, it's physically impossible to know how many civilians have died in Gaza.
It has never been done in the history of war.
The greatest battle since World War II was the Battle of Mosul in 2016 and 2017.
And a year after the battle, the Iraqi government still did not have a number in which how many civilians had died.
Now, it went all the way from 9,000 to 40,000.
The mayor of the city said it was over 40,000 because of how many people are in the rubble, how many people are unaccounted for, who left and there's no report on where they went.
You can imagine in a very dense urban environment, how could you possibly have a number?
But if I ran with the numbers that we all use, so let's say the Gaza Health Ministry as we're talking says 33,000 civilians have died.
Actually it's not, let me caveat myself, is that the Gaza Health Ministry says that 33,000 Palestinians have died in Gaza since October 7th.
That number, if we are truthful and we used Hamas's numbers or the Gaza Health Ministry's numbers, it accounts for every death that has happened in Gaza, no matter the cause.
It includes all Hamas members, anybody who died of natural causes, anybody who died actually from Hamas's hands because of the 12,000 rockets that Hamas has launched out of Gaza towards Israel.
Since October 7th, 20% of those have landed inside of Gaza and killed many Palestinian people of Gaza.
But if we ran with the 33,000, which includes everybody that's died, and we took Israel's number, because if we're going to believe Hamas, why don't we believe Israel, who says, given our battle damage assessments, we believe we've killed 12,000 Hamas combatants.
So you subtract 12,000 per 33,000, you get about a 1 enemy to 2, if not 1 to 1 of enemy to civilian ratio, which would be historically low to any urban battle.
And this is a war, not a battle.
So it's actually really interesting how Somebody will try to take a battle from the past, especially the last 30 years, and compare it to the war in Gaza, which includes, you know, like 10 massive urban battles together.
But they aggregate the numbers to kind of tell the message they want.
It would still be a historically low, given all the context of urban combat, where you have a civilian population, where no matter what you do, many of them still stay.
You're trying to identify, separate enemy from civilian or combatant to non-combatant.
Like the Battle of Mosul where, you know, it took nine months for a hundred thousand Iraqi security forces to get four to five thousand ISIS members out of the city.
And they killed 10,000 civilians in the process of that nine month battle to liberate the city.
So that's a one to two ratio.
But this is, I mean, the fact that every person that I ever interview asked me this question is really shocking.
Because it's never been the question.
That's not how the law of war works, but we have this number in our head.
Clearly this means everything that's going on is illegal and Israel is purposely killing civilians, but look how high the number is.
Irrelevant of the context of the war, we're not even talking about the numbers, the challenge that the IDF faced in Gaza.
Nobody wants to talk about that, like the 40,000 Hamas members, tens of thousands of other terrorist members buried in 400 miles of tunnels, intermixed between a population of 2 million who Egypt won't let into Egypt.
There's so many complexities to this battle that no military has faced in the history of war, but nobody cares.
They just want to know, what's the civilian death toll?
And there is no number.
Yeah, well obviously I asked the question very much in the spirit of echoing the observation you just made, which is that the very question shows how upside down everyone's analysis of this conflict is, and became really immediately, even before Israel responded, there was already a massive distortion of moral and political priorities.
In how people were thinking about the ensuing violence.
And I just want to continue to flag what is unique about this and just the ways in which people focus on... I mean, it's almost like we have at this moment something like a billion people, maybe two billion people, maybe three billion people, for the first time discovering that war itself is intolerable.
And the onus is on Israel, really.
And the onus is on the Jews, if you want to get down to it.
But there's a kind of a layer of anti-Semitism here, which we can table.
It's really not my focus.
But when you ask about what is the origin of all of the double standards here and the weird inversions of priorities and the, you know, for the first time in human history, the seizing upon details that no one ever thought about in any other conflict, You know, the standards to which the IDF is being held, which no other army has ever been held, you know, especially in the face of the challenges they're facing, which we're going to talk about, which you just began to reference, i.e.
400 miles of tunnels.
The strangeness of all of this is something that I want to keep in view, but I do also want to just simply deliver the information insofar as we have it, and to concede whatever can be conceded to the people who are horrified by the images they're seeing coming out of Gaza.
Because it's understandable that people are horrified, and especially if they're for the first time looking at the evidence of war, the evidence of urban war, As I've said before, there really is no argument for the justness of any war, and its even necessity, that makes sense of the image of a child being pulled out of rubble, right?
It's unacceptable, whatever the rationale for it, and some billions of people are having that experience on an hourly basis.
Because of social media, and it's all being framed in the most invidious way possible against Israel and against support for Israel defending itself in this case.
Well, I guess a high-level question here.
It is because of this imagery and because of the way the discussion is being framed, again largely on social media, there's this widespread allegation against Israel and the IDF that they're guilty not only of war crimes, but the very war is itself a crime.
And they're guilty of genocide, they're guilty of the collective punishment of the Palestinians, the deliberate murder of non-combatants, and even the deliberate murder of journalists and aid workers, right?
So they're like when you have, you know, the seven employees of Jose Andres' humanitarian organization killed.
It is analyzed so as to suggest that Israel has intentionally killed those aid workers, as though the killing of those aid workers worked to the advantage of Israel in some way.
It would be a colossal act of self-harm for them to have killed those aid workers on purpose.
Given the consequences for world opinion, but people seem to effortlessly interpret every casualty as something that the IDF has intended.
What, if anything, in this downpour of disparagement of the IDF and Israel is true?
I mean, what is the worst thing that can be honestly said about how Israel has been waging its war in Gaza?
So the only thing that I can say would be the most honest, fact-based criticism of Israel is that it has done a horrible job on fighting the counter-narrative of what they're actually doing.
One of the main reasons that is, is because they did not embed foreign media journalists And this is the example I usually give when I'm teaching a class.
The first battle of Fallujah, 2004, four American citizens were killed.
The US president orders the military in to get those who did it accountable.
The world says that there is too much use of force, too many civilians are being hurt, they're committing war crimes.
So six days into the battle, the US military is Defeated and told to stop because of the perception of the use of force.
Very minor example of the totality that is the war against Hamas in Gaza, but it's a great example where they were defeated and there were zero media embeds in the first battle of Fallujah.
Six months later when they redid the same operation, 60 media embeds.
So, that's the honest criticism, but I could help you kind of go through every narrative, every accusation, to include the targeting of journalists, aid workers, or civilians in general, where the U.S.
government, not even me, John Spencer, who's been there but doesn't have access to all the classified information, said there's, based on their investigation, there is zero evidence of a single event in which Israel intentionally caused harm to civilians, journalists, or even the World Central Kitchen event, journalists, or even the World Central Kitchen event, where people don't want to accept the fact that accidents do happen, especially in the fog and friction of urban combat, which people just don't have a clue of, like, of what it actually takes, and they get to this
combat, which people just don't have a clue of what it actually takes.
And they get to this point where they interpret situations, right?
And I think that was really important you said that because even the way that war crimes work from the ridiculous use of the word genocide, a big factor is to intention that Based on the information you have at the moment, you take your action, not the results.
So everybody sees footage of Gaza, especially Northern Gaza, or sees, like you said, the unfortunate.
Every one of them is a travesty, a civilian destiny.
They interpret Well, of course that means Israel did all that on purpose and that there was no alternative, which I think could be a part of the conversation is that people who have no information on how war works, like you said, people woke up to Not the Syrian war, not to the last 30 years of wars, not to real massacres of Russia taking 20,000 babies out of Ukraine.
They woke up to and want to start interpreting based on their knowledge, the wars that they see based on short clips and videos.
Or they think that there's an alternative, which I actually think is, I've been arguing with literally like national leaders who have propositioned that there was another way And that's not the history of warfare.
One example I'll give is there was another news story of Israel has used more 2,000 pound bombs than any other military in the last 30 years, which is a true statement, but it is given as a negative.
To paint the picture that Israel had a choice.
It could have not used those bombs.
It could have just not did bombing at all.
And the actual evidence shows that that has been a feeling in many wars, that if you just bomb less, there'll be less damage, less civilian casualties.
It's actually the inverse.
Like in the 1945 Battle of Manila, where there were 4,000 Americans and UK internees, prisoners of war, being held By the Japanese in the city of Manila and the general, General MacArthur said, no air power.
I don't want you destroying Manila.
I don't want inappropriate civilian casualties.
And still the military moved forward and there were 100,000 civilian deaths.
Because of the complexity of urban combat, you think that if there would have been just less bombing or the fact that The actual nomenclature of a 2,000-pound bomb, we haven't talked about it yet, but one of the things, the difficulty for the IDF is that the enemy, there's no enemy on the surface.
They're underground and they're deep underground.
So yes, Israel has used more 2,000-pound bombs because they're the only military in the history of war who's faced an enemy so deep underground under civilian structures in which a tool like that is the weapon that can get to that military target.
Okay, so talk to me about, I guess you can talk about urban warfare generically and guerrilla warfare generically, but what is unusual about this war?
What is Israel facing that we didn't face in Iraq or Afghanistan or didn't face to the same degree?
What is novel about what they have done in the direction of being more scrupulous, more averse to producing collateral damage than we or any other army has been in the past?
Sure.
If you're going to say just that all that Israel has really done wrong is to fail to anticipate how colossally badly the PR war was going to go for them, and they failed to embed journalists who could give credible real-time information about all the efforts they're making to not kill the wrong people, And I agree.
I don't know if it would have mattered had they done that.
I certainly hope it would have mattered, but I agree that they have not done a good job at all of changing the narrative.
But if that's their only crime, what have they done that has been scrupulous and compassionate and beyond the usual course of action for an army launched from a democratic state into combat?
Sure.
So two easy actually things to pick apart.
One is what did they face that no military has faced and what did they do that no military has done.
So on what they have faced, one is just the proximity to the enemy, right?
That this is not hundreds of miles away.
So if you want to use a US military example, it just fails step one, just a proximity to the actual national security, the existential threat.
So that's October 7th, right?
But the war is being waged In eyesight of the homes of those, you know, the size of the combatants, so 4,000 combatants launching rockets over the head of the military.
So no military in modern history has faced a combatant who is launching 12,000 rockets over their heads headed for their homes behind them.
The tunnels, of course.
What Hamas had built over 15 years hasn't been seen in war, period.
Yes, there's been tunnels in war before, but the fact that there were 400 miles of tunnels ranging from 15 feet to 250 feet underground where no military munition could reach, But solely under civilian sites, so civilian homes, hospitals, schools, UN facilities, on purpose, so they could deploy this, what they call this human shield strategy.
Because, you know, non-state actors, terrorists, whoever, have learned from the history of It's really modern wars in which you have a military who follows the law of war against a combatant who doesn't, that they use the laws, which in urban combat, you immediately enter and you already have restrictions on the use of force, right?
That's the underlying thing is do not target civilians and only target military sites.
And that's really hard to do in urban areas, but there's lots of rules that we can talk about on that.
So Hamas deployed this human shield strategy, but also a human sacrifice strategy where, and I don't know why the world just won't take for on its head what Hamas says, like literally they tell you these things and the world's like, yeah, but they're the fact that they say they want as many of their civilians to die as possible.
And one evidence of that is the fact that there are 400 miles of tunnels in Gaza and not one civilian is allowed in them.
The entire population, 2.2 million, could fit in Hamas's tunnels with ease.
Where you take in another example, in another war, like Ukraine's war, where the civilians did seek refuge in the subway tunnels and underground.
And the hostages.
So, the fact that Hamas immediately took over 240 hostages, which really gets to the time variable, right?
So, in understanding the challenge that the IDF faced, you have to factor in the rockets, the tunnels, the hostages, which really get to your alternatives on, well, just wait.
Just pursue some other strategy and just leave your hostages in captivity.
So, all those variables, no military has faced that in modern times.
None.
And I could go back to World War II and give you Some variables like the Battle of Manila in 1945, the 1950 Battle of Seoul, which will get you close, but not all those variables, and especially not the variables in which Israel relies on the support of the United States.
Now, all wars are contests of will, so Israel knowing that, of course, everybody agreed it had the right of self-defense and to launch the war, but to know you have to maintain The will of the international community in how you respond.
That's a little different than, let's say, post 9-11 when, of course, the United States saw a coalition, but it was going to, and it did, take action.
Now, what did the IDF do, which again, is unique to actually a novel in preventing, we call it civilian harm mitigation.
So, Everything you do to not have civilians hurt.
And the biggest thing that really the only thing that has been very effective in wars in modern history or even World War II is if the conditions allow, wait and evacuate the cities of the civilians.
So this is a very like the biggest thing you can do.
So Israel waited after October 7th One, it had to mobilize, but then it still waited three more weeks and sent notice, especially to Northern Gaza, where the greatest meat of these 40,000 Hamas members organized in 30 different battalions, the greatest population of them were in Northern Gaza.
So, it evacuated the entire Northern Gaza.
And they got criticized for doing that and telling the civilians to please leave these combat areas.
And they evacuated 850,000 of the million population in northern Gaza, and they were criticized for that.
But it was the standard.
And how you do that through the dropping of flyers was pretty straightforward.
Of course, Israel, because they have the capability and they've developed What nobody else in war does started also using phone calls, text messages, pre-recorded voice messages to help with those evacuations.
Then they deployed drones with speakers and then they deployed speakers dropped out of the sky on parachutes to help evacuate with a very high level of fidelity.
So that way when you enter the environment, there's less civilians caught in the middle of it.
So they waited.
I heard reports that Hamas tried to prevent people from evacuating to make their human shield and human sacrifice strategy more effective.
Are those reports credible?
A hundred percent.
I mean, and again, we have to believe those reports as much as we believe the other reports.
Of course, the IDF told the civilians what road to use.
and where to go, and Hamas targeted them or sent them messages, took the cars, preventing the civilians from leaving.
And most of that comes from the civilians in the environment where the information comes. - When you say Hamas targeted those points of egress, do you mean like Hamas snipers shot people on those roads?
Correct.
And bombed, mortared those roads.
And this is the thing where people will say, the other report is that Israel targeted the exact areas in which they told the civilians to go, which is usually misinformation as a kernel of truth where Like Hamas would set up a rocket firing position next to a humanitarian zone and then launch rockets.
So Israel would respond to that and then the world would only pick up on Israel is targeting the humanitarian areas they told civilians to go to get out of the combat area.
Really the only, you know, that's a safer area, but Hamas again using the human shield has one of that narrative.
And this is also the difference to Hamas as a combatant, as opposed to most other urban combatants, even ISIS, right?
So ISIS in the Battle of Mosul used human shields, but its purpose wasn't to get as many civilians killed as possible, nor was there A way to really hold the people into the area.
So this again gets to the uniqueness to this war is the fact that the civilians can't get out into Egypt, but they were identified this place in southern Gaza that was identified, which is now the al-Mawassi humanitarian zone.
It was picked Because it was one of the few areas that the IDF believed there were less Hamas tunnels or Hamas military in general.
And initially the civilians wouldn't go there, but yes, the Hamas.
And really we can talk about what Hamas did during the temporary ceasefire that happened for the hostage exchange, which nobody comments on, is that during that ceasefire, Hamas sent hundreds of thousands of civilians into areas and repopulated them with over 300% of the civilians that were there before the war.
So like in Khan Yunus, Hamas increased the population of Khan Yunus by 300% before the IDF could start their operation in that area.
What do you make of the difference, albeit a subtle one, in how ISIS, the Islamic State, used human shields versus how Hamas is doing it?
You say that the Islamic State wasn't seeking, though they used human shields, they weren't seeking to maximize the loss of civilian life.
I mean, the only way I can interpret that is to imagine that Hamas recognizes that in this conflict with Israel, the role that global opinion plays is a lever that they really have in hand and can easily pull, and the way to pull it is to maximize
The loss of civilian life because they know Israel will be blamed for every single body and that the blaming of Israel will matter in a way that I can imagine the Islamic State did not imagine they had that same kind of leverage in fighting the U.S.
and much less local Iraqi forces being led by the U.S.
Yeah, it's a great question as you really have to look at in war the strategy of both sides.
So this has been trying to have people understand that the Hamas military strategy in the war is not to defeat the idea as in military force.
It is also not to hold terrain.
Just in those two objectives, it's different than ISIS, who is trying to hold the terrain that it had captured to include Mosul, which is the capital of their self-proclaimed caliphate.
They were really trying to hold the train.
The Hamas strategy, in accordance with what they have done, has always been about just biding time.
And why they built this vast tunnel network was to be in the tunnels when IDF came.
I don't think they assumed that Israel would maintain the will to continue even this far.
But it was always about biding time for the world to stop the IDF, like which has happened in Israel's previous wars.
ISIS didn't have that strategy as their military strategy or their grand strategy, where Hamas, again, according to them, their grand strategy is all this is just in the pursuit of a political objective to Israel not existing and for there to be a Palestinian state, which includes everything that Israel is currently sitting on right now.
That gets into this military aspect where you see a vast difference between ISIS and Hamas.
Both use terror tactics.
One was a full-out government of this region, received billions of dollars to improve the region, funneled most of that money into building this terror military that had the intention of just causing the idea to not be successful.
And that has been where, again, they say that the civilians should die to achieve that goal.
And they're fine with all of them dying.
In the pursuit of this, like you said, there's a fundamental misunderstanding of what Hamas and this radical interpretation of Islam, which leads them to pursue this strategy in real time.
Yeah.
I don't think I can really recover from my astonishment that people can't see this More easily than they have.
I mean, when you look at the protests on college campuses, which now have devolved into, in many cases, explicit support for Hamas, right?
They're not even trying to draw a line between the Palestinian cause and Hamas, right?
There's just, needless to say, there's no concern for a return of hostages and all these calls for a ceasefire.
But they're just nakedly supporting Hamas.
And yet, what should be obvious to everyone is that there's nobody who cares less about saving the lives of Palestinian non-combatants than Hamas.
I mean, this is, when you're looking to see who is the most callous about the lives of Palestinian children, it is Sinwar and his colleagues down there underground.
And I just find it so remarkable that people have, you know, either lost sight of that or have never seen it, and that we're seeing it, it somehow doesn't matter in how they're interpreting the situation.
Yeah.
I mean, this is the uniqueness.
I agree with you.
It's shocking and concerning where our world's best academic institutions are creating the dumbest students who can't critically think or get access to their own information.
This has been basically the survey-based analysis of the protesters.
Like, do you know which river in the sea means?
Do you know who Hamas is?
Do you know what happened on October 7th?
It's just shocking.
But you have to analyze it almost empirically on how Hamas has been able to tap into all these human storytelling techniques of the weak versus the powerful, the oppressed versus their oppressor, and the idea that there is just an alternative.
If you just stop You know, just cease fire now.
Everything will be better if we just cease fire.
And this has been my position from the beginning as a student of war, is that if Hamas was allowed to survive the war, period.
As in Hamas, not the ideal, which again, I think the world, to include military analysts, have just every day since October 7th tried to compare this to a counterinsurgency, counterterrorism campaign.
Which we just are comfortable with over the last 30 years is what we know, rather than a conventional war mindset of this is a political body with a military holding terrain with political objectives.
But the fact that the world thinks that, you know, if you just stop fighting, just stop the war, right?
Like you said, they woke up to what war looks like and that it's intolerable.
War is hell.
It is death and destruction.
But one, they want to fail or recognize what the IDF have done to limit and restrict themselves and to prevent civilian harm.
But they also think that the world will be a better place if the war just stops.
That if Hamas, who they are today, the Hamas that was October 7th, in my interpretation, if they survive the war, they have achieved a massive victory in the history of war.
They struck Israel, and as they say, as Iran says, Israel and then through Israel, the United States, if they survive that, they become these giant legends.
I mean, they'll make statues out of them.
There'll be celebration days in Iran for Hamas leadership who pulled off October 7th and survived it.
And that we will see a much more violent Middle East and world if they survive.
Yeah, I fully agree with that premonition.
I just think it's the only answer to the triumphalism of jihadism is to defeat it, right?
There's no, it has to be a stark defeat.
And so I guess my next question for you is, How likely is that?
I mean, I guess before you answer that, you can perhaps tell us what the IDF has actually accomplished thus far in Gaza.
And now, as I said, we're waiting to see if they're going to go into Rafa, and I think we both think they should.
But what has the IDF done?
What is left to do?
And how likely is it that they can destroy Hamas?
And what does destroying Hamas actually mean?
Does it mean killing every last member of Hamas?
Does it mean just killing the leadership or otherwise bringing them to justice?
And then we should talk about what conceivable aftermath there might be if they do what can be done here.
So, what have they done, what can be done, and what does it look like afterwards?
Sure.
So, what they have done, and especially keeping in mind what the objectives were, you know, return the hostages, destroy Hamas as a military organization with the ability to harm Israel And secure Israel's borders.
So if we compare to has Israel been successful thus far, right?
I can't tell you who's going to achieve ultimate victory in the war yet.
Thus far, Israel has historically cleared dense urban terrain at a pace and with a, despite the numbers, low collateral damage, low civilian casualty count.
They, of the 30 battalions, 24 of those being light infantry battalions of Hamas, they have destroyed 20 of the 24 active battalions.
They have cleared 75% of Gaza, as in broken apart those functioning military organizations.
They have identified the weapons capability, right?
Because the rockets are a big part of Hamas's military capability that they had immense to include the manufacturing capabilities of these deep buried weapons manufacturing as in rocket production plants underground that Israel has found.
It has destroyed much of Hamas's terror tunnel networks.
It has returned half the hostages home through military pressure, which led to negotiations.
And it has now created a situation in which there's only four battalions, the Hamas leadership, and the remaining, at the time we're talking, you know, 133 Israeli hostages left to fulfill the objectives of Israel.
So, that's what they've done so far.
Now, the question of destroy Hamas that gets everybody going, right?
Actually, let me just add one footnote to what you just said.
So, obviously, we started this conversation talking about how unreliable all the numbers are, and now you just kind of went through confidently detailing the numbers in some basic sense and giving a proportion of Hamas fighters versus non-combatants.
But again, what you're doing here is basically taking Hamas's numbers Of dead at face value, which we can't really do, but one can imagine it's something like a worst case scenario number, like at the moment 33,000 dead, and we're taking IDF's claim to have killed something like 13,000 combatants and just using those numbers as the framework for the proportion, right?
Right.
And this really gets to a bigger question on that we're in a world in which nobody trusts anybody, right?
So they're not going to trust anything Israel says, the United States says, United Kingdom says, but they'll trust Hamas says, which is unique.
But let's say I trust everybody's numbers.
That's where I get to and everybody's statements to include Hamas'.
I'm taking all the information available and making these statements based on what we know, like the 33,000 Are we confident that Hamas had 40,000 fighters in the first place?
I mean, are those Hamas numbers?
Are those IDF numbers?
Or do both sides agree on the number of Hamas fighters?
Yeah, that's a great question.
No, it's a combination of both.
Hamas leadership, both the political wing in Qatar and the military wing in Gaza and the IDF and US and other intelligence agencies estimates based on a collection, right?
What we call all source analysis.
A collection of both what Hamas says, what the IDF says, what we can gain and we have to achieve some type of, okay, we will agree that this is the number.
Right.
So when you say they have, remind me, the proportion of Hamas battalions that have been destroyed or fatally compromised is what?
So 20 of the 24 basically infantry kind of terrain holding battalions.
Before the war, there was an estimate of 30 battalions, which includes like the people who shoot the rockets, the headquarters, everything.
So of the Hamas military, 20 battalions of their 24 battalions that they had on October 7th have been destroyed.
And by destroyed, it means broken apart so they're no longer functioning as a military unit able to do their assigned mission, whether it's defend or attack.
And how do we know, in terms of the damage to the tunnels, what are you picturing or what are you aware of being true there where, I mean it's 400 miles of tunnels, it's just staggering.
When I say that number or hear it, I can't shake the feeling of incredulity, right?
It just seems impossible.
But accepting that something like that is true, Israel could not have destroyed, no matter how many 2,000 pound bombs they dropped, much of that network.
Maybe they Took out crucial nodes in the network.
What do you imagine has happened and what is the result?
I mean, are we now talking about Hamas fighters and Israeli hostages trapped inside tunnels and, you know, dying of starvation or what?
I mean, what is the reality of that destruction?
Yeah.
It's really hard to get a true estimate.
Nobody's given the sheer number, miles of tunnels that have been discovered and destroyed.
But given the way urban terrain is cleared, the reporting of over a thousand shafts identified, the number of tunnels in which the IDF have controlled, destroyed, as in using explosives to destroy.
I mean, I was in one in December, along the border of Israel and Gaza, that was two and a half miles long.
It was an invasion tunnel.
If you were just to take up the number of ones that they have publicly announced and shown the world, it's still many, many miles.
But it is a great question.
And I've gotten this question as somebody who studies underground warfare too.
It's like, when is, will they ever be able to destroy all the tunnels?
Absolutely not.
And if you get to the realization of like, how is it possible to have hundreds of miles of tunnels underneath a space that is only, you know, Gaza Strip is 25 miles long at the widest part, seven miles wide.
And That is really the uniqueness to what Hamas has been digging over 15 years, so many different levels of tunnels.
And the IDF have shown the world much of that and shown how they both identified, like, here's a two-mile, here's a three-mile tunnel, here we are destroying it.
It's really hard to get that estimate, but in the clearing of, this is why you couldn't have done it with just bombing, right?
You could not have bombed your way to this, nor could you, it's going to be hard, do it quickly, identify every tunnel, and you have to prioritize what is a certain level of a tunnel, and you won't ever be able to destroy them all, because you're not going to find them all, but you get to a certain level of fidelity.
And what they have discovered is more than anybody thought that was ever there.
Are IDF soldiers going down into the tunnels and engaging Hamas fighters in shooting battles underground?
Or are they simply finding shafts and dropping explosives into them and considering that part of the tunnel destroyed when it all collapses?
Or are they sending robots down there?
Or are they doing all of those things?
What is Yeah, all above.
So absolutely, like it started like we were talking about, you know, with identifying known key bunkers and underground spaces and hitting those with aerial munitions, moving forward.
And as the IDF moved forward, like in Northern Gaza, if they found a tunnel shaft, they would stop Bring up the special to Israel, the unique forces trained only for underground warfare.
They have underground dogs or dogs made for tunnel warfare, and they actually lost over 30 of a very large military working dog.
Because once you find a tunnel, then you bring up these special units.
There were firefights that happened in tunnels.
There are very few though, because once the tunnel has been found, Hamas has booby-trapped it and moved on to another tunnel.
And there was a uniqueness to the approach in northern Gaza versus by the time I visited in February in Khan Yunis, there was a different approach.
At one point, the IDF were flooding the tunnels with both seawater and freshwater to flush the Hamas out and to clear the explosives.
Everything has been tried.
But By the time I get to Khan Yunis, this is a Hamas space and Hamas is using the tunnels.
By the time I visited the IDF just a month and a half ago, they were entering the tunnels before Hamas knew they were in the tunnels and basically taking control of the tunnels and maneuvering on Hamas at the same time they were moving above ground.
But this is the challenge of underground warfare.
You have to develop new types of equipment.
Yes, they used the robots, the drones that could work underground.
Yes, they destroyed.
And really, there's only a few ways you can truly destroy a tunnel.
Like the flooding that did not work to destroy a tunnel because the tunnels are made of concrete.
Some of them have drainage in them.
It's just not a solid tube, so the water's not going to stay in there, where explosive force is really the only tried and true way to destroy a tunnel.
And you have to string mines together along the full width of a tunnel, which if you imagine is two miles long, it takes a lot of explosives.
And how are they doing any of this while keeping the lives of the hostages in mind?
What sort of intelligence do you think they have about the location of the hostages?
When they're simply blowing up a tunnel, how can they be confident they're not killing hostages or burying them alive?
Is this information you have?
And if so, what do you know about it?
It seems to me that the existence of the hostages, as is intended, complicates this picture immensely.
It complicates the prosecution of the war immensely.
In all kinds of ways, as you pointed out, it sets the clock ticking in a way that wouldn't otherwise be true.
And the idea that you can just sort of bide your time and decide how you want to respond over the course of weeks and months and years, that goes completely out the window once you've got hundreds of people now being held hostage and mistreated underground.
But it also, it's very hard to imagine how they can be confidently Destroying tunnels with Hamas in them knowing that the hostages are somewhere underground.
Right.
No, it's a great topic from really the highest strategic level down to that tactical level where you're not going to especially destroy a tunnel without first investigating what's in the tunnel.
So most of the destruction outside of the aerial bombardments, which are intelligence driven, like they know what they're targeting, a military target underground, And they have some form of human intelligence, signals intelligence, some other aspect to know whether or not a hostage is present with the enemy combatant that they're striking.
But once you get close and you're sending those drones, the dogs, everything in the tunnel, the destroying that I was talking about is really after you've exploited what's in the tunnel because of that immense risk that I agree with you complicates every aspect of the war.
is the fact that you know your enemy's underground, but there is also the possibility of your citizens, the hostages in there, which leads to even the highest level, which I argued in a Wall Street Journal article, that the ideal that there is an alternative to the way that Israel has done it, which does, like you said, would be just to wait a few years, use intelligence to find the hostages and do raids.
Which is really a fallacy.
It's never happened where you have an enemy environment like that because a raid relies on lots of intelligence and immense surprise and some type of like a permissive, because you've surprised, whether it was the Osama Bin Laden raid into Pakistan, Pakistan didn't know we were coming for him.
They didn't, they say they didn't know he was there.
But to imagine that you were going to build enough intelligence to one day just to do a bunch of raids into Gaza, a hostile environment, by definition, who knows you're coming, and that you could eventually achieve your goal of bringing the hostages home a different way is not true.
It's just never, it's not historically backed up.
But that has led to this idea of, like you said, this is going to take a lot of time, just leave them in captivity, let Hamas survive for now, and we'll figure out a different way.
It's just not backed up by history.
Yeah, especially what to return to, again, probably the least comfortable topic here, the imaginary line between the public sentiment of the Palestinians and Hamas.
I mean, you're talking about a population that If it's not entirely supportive of the project of keeping these hostages, enough people are supportive of it that the problem is shrouded by a hostile population that seems happy to collaborate with Hamas's project of keeping the hostages for as long as they want to keep them.
Yeah, but I think this, again, I definitely 100% that factors into what could be done about the situation.
But in war, I'm in such a proponent for the law of war, people just don't understand because it's meant to put bounds on the brutality of war.
And that there is such thing as an innocent civilian or noncombatant, but people don't understand what it takes for that person to partake in the hostilities and make themselves a combatant.
You don't have to be carrying a weapon.
You could be reporting on the enemy that's coming.
You could be doing Building things.
There's so many other aspects of being a combatant versus a non-combatant where yes, in this world of Hamas, where they wear civilians, use human shields, use the hospitals, use everything they can to make Israel look bad.
It is the greatest challenge for any soldier, let alone an Israeli soldier to operate within these, all these different challenges.
Actually, let's linger on that point for a second because this might help people interpret some video, which is really, any way you look at it, it is a shocking video that I've seen.
I think at one point I saw Joe Rogan on his podcast show the video and respond to it as really any untutored person would, as just, he believes he's seen clear evidence of IDF war crimes.
And the video is just men who do not appear to be armed being bombed, right?
I mean, for all I know, this could be video from some other theater of combat.
I mean, it could have been a drone attack by us, on men in Iraq.
I don't know, actually, the provenance of the video.
But assuming these were Palestinian men, you know, walking amid rubble, being killed, and they're not in the process of firing RPGs or rockets, and they didn't even appear to be armed, How is it possible that a strike like that could have been justified?
On its face, it looks impossible to justify.
Right.
Really, especially with somebody who's never seen, doesn't have any comprehension of the way the law of war works, war works in general.
And I watched Joe interpret that video.
And just by the words he was saying, I knew that he didn't have a framework in which to understand what the world was watching in that 20 second clip.
Right.
He said unarmed kids.
He actually said kids, which is getting to this definition of what is a kid or an adult, where that line is drawn.
In that combat situation, right, which everybody would acknowledge, it's a combat zone.
That 30-second clip doesn't give me any ability to understand what was going on, other than there is somebody who was struck with a bomb.
No idea on what that person was doing before that video started.
Did they come out of a tunnel?
Did they do something before it?
And then did the IDF already know who those individuals were?
Again, you can be a member of Hamas, like a designated member, and that makes you a combatant.
It has nothing to do with if you're carrying a weapon at the moment, Or if you're shooting at the IDF at the moment, you're a member of the enemy force.
There's so much to that video that is unknown, especially like what were they doing before?
Where did they come from?
Who were they?
What were their intentions?
That clearly, yes, the IDF meant to hit them.
So they have to, let's say if you did an investigation say, and this is again where people look at the end results, but the IDF under question would have to show like, okay, how did you know that was a military target?
Because clearly they use precision guided munition to strike just those four individuals, which again, gets you to the kind of the false negative that you would have to prove is, and of course they're targeting civilians, right?
That's what they do.
Like no, you have to see what the war, the law of war, the war crime accusation requires you to know what they were doing.
We want to interpret, we see the explosion, like clearly they were targeting those unarmed civilian kids.
Like there's so much wrong with that statement.
It's a crucial detail that you just, you don't know what they were doing moments or minutes before.
I mean, perhaps the full video is showing People who just planted an IED or did something that was obviously the behavior of combatants, and now they're walking away, and then they get targeted.
Or who they were.
Like literally, the fact that Joe says, look, clearly they're not carrying any weapons.
Like, okay, that's a data point, but that doesn't mean that you're not an enemy in this combat area.
I mean, the power of facial recognition and all these other aspects, you have to know what the IDF knew at the time they took that strike.
And clearly they targeted those individuals.
That's a fact because they did it very precisely.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, again, that, for those who haven't seen the footage, this is, the footage was not at night, right?
So it's not, it doesn't suffer from the same, and there were no, these people weren't hidden inside of cars, right?
So it's not analogous to the World Central Kitchen false ID problem, where they were clearly striking people they were intending to strike, they just were the wrong people.
In the world kitchen, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, so you've spoken about what the IDF has already done, and you seem to believe that Hamas really does have to be defeated at the end of this.
What is reasonable to hope for there?
I assume this means that the IDF, by definition, has to go into Rafah.
What would destroying Hamas look like and what would the aftermath look like?
If they have destroyed Hamas, perhaps not down to the last man, but rendered the whole Hamas project obviously a failure, And now Gaza is this hellscape that has no one to rule it except whatever lunatics can rise up out of the ashes and be nearly as extreme and irresistible as Hamas.
It's not going to be a stable victory and certainly world opinion will continue to cut against Israel there.
What does destroying Hamas look like in the best case?
How can they conceivably manage the aftermath?
Yeah, it's a great question and it really gets to this, I guess, this misinterpretation of what does it mean to destroy Hamas where people say it's not possible, right?
Because they mix, you know, destroy the idea of Hamas versus the destroy what Hamas was on October 6th and its military capabilities and all of its resources that it created and immersed and smuggled in and it was sent in, everything like that.
One thing is that what the best case scenario is, and I don't agree, although it is the most likely scenario, that it requires a full ground invasion into southern Gaza, right?
Rafa city, Rafa refugee camp, the other areas, because Hamas could surrender tomorrow.
Hamas could surrender to include disarm, agreement to disarm themselves and surrender anybody who partook on October 7th and committed those heinous crimes.
They could give all the hostages back.
And that would lead to a much lower intensity operation that would still, in my opinion, be required.
Because in order to destroy Hamas, what it was on October 7th, you have to search for its military capability, its remaining rocket supply, its remaining smuggling tunnels, its remaining weapons manufacturing capability.
You would still have to search southern Gaza, in my opinion, to achieve the goal of Destroying Hamas as both the ruling power, because you don't fight an insurgency against the ruling power.
You fight an insurgency for the people or a government against an insurgency.
But you have to remove Hamas from power.
You have to remove their military capabilities.
The best case scenario is that The remaining four battalions are destroyed as functioning units able to do their mission.
The Hamas military leadership remaining in Gaza is killed or captured.
All the hostages are returned home.
Then, like you said, is absolutely the next phase that will determine whether the world views it as success or not because The challenge of Gaza is that next phase, the post-conflict phase of rebuilding, reestablishing a different framework, right?
This is the ideal, which I know will be a big challenge because it hasn't been there yet, is a viable partner who actually has the pursuit Of a better life for the people of Gaza as their number one priority and not the destruction of Israel as their number one priority.
This has been the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, right?
Is having a viable partner who will acknowledge Israel should exist to disavow terrorism and pursue a path To a clue by action of really caring for the people.
So once Hamas is destroyed, which in my opinion has to be done, then Israel has to help in creating the next governance, the power structures, the security framework, but also And I think they will ensure that whatever comes next in self-determination isn't able to gain that much military capability for the sole purpose of doing October 7th or launching rockets as their primary goal.
Yeah, which suggests that even in an ideal world, a two-state solution can't really be two states in any normal sense.
We're not talking about a state That has its own army, etc., because we would have to have a very different set of facts on the ground for Israel to imagine they can live next to a Palestinian state after October 7th.
Right.
The great lie is the ideal that Israel has been the only hurdle to a two-state solution with Palestinians and Israelis living side by side in harmony.
The great lie is that the greatest hurdle to that was Israel versus organizations, whether it's the PA, Palestinian Authority, Hamas, whatever it is, Whose sole, you know, ideal, it's construction, everything it does is actually to attack Israel rather than pursue a better life within the, it's almost like diplomatic laziness.
Just two-state solution has been, especially the US administration's goal, right?
But they can't, nobody can articulate what that actually is.
In reality, in real terms, and it has been, which is now leading the uninformed of the world on that's the solution to the violence, two-state solution, which October 7th can't become Hamas's Independence Day, right?
It can't become Palestinian Independence Day.
They did October 7th, and then they should get all the things in return just to make the violence stop.
That would just lead to a much more violent world as well.
But it's really like diplomatic laziness to think that that's the solution, like without any recognizing the decades of administrations who have pursued that objective and failed.
Yeah.
I mean, the reasons for that failure, as you point out, have almost never been acknowledged, but it is another one of these The obvious and absolute asymmetry is that, strangely, everyone seems to ignore, which is that Israel has wanted a two-state solution.
I mean, not everyone in Israel, but a majority of Israelis certainly have wanted a two-state solution.
They have wanted to live in peace with a Palestinian neighbor that would live in peace with them.
That has not been reciprocated.
On the other side, there has been a pervasive commitment to not the Palestinians getting the state they want alongside of Israel, but rather for the annihilation of Israel.
The existence of Israel has been the thing that has always been put in question on the Palestinian side.
And that's just not a symmetrical situation.
So you would need a Palestinian regime and a Palestinian population that actually wanted to live in peace alongside Israel for there to be anything like a basis for a two-state solution.
Right.
And this is, I mean, to get back to the now, what is, what is, what comes after Hamas?
I don't know.
And I don't think Israel knows, but it knows, like I can talk in certainties versus the uncertainty, that Hamas has to be destroyed for the peace of the Middle East and the peace of Israel and the Palestinian people.
Like that's step one.
What comes day after, the day after really matters and how the war will be viewed.
So Israel has a lot of decisions, but so do the people of Gaza.
But don't you see the untenability of it being a prolonged Israeli occupation of Gaza?
I mean, the picture of the aftermath that you're envisioning, does that include an internationalization of the whole project where you bring in Some of the Arab states to figure out how to pacify and rebuild Gaza, or are you actually picturing a many years of Israel?
essentially being the government in Gaza or backstop and the Whatever the Palestinian government is.
Yeah, that's a great question So I don't envision that all because not because of my own thought because Israel says they don't want that that was tried and And then they left in 2005, and Hamas was elected in 2008, and said, that's not what we want, despite the accusations of occupation since then, and the blockade and apartheid and all these misinformed opinions.
But the other proposition you provided with, like an Arab nation, all these other actors, is also not present, right?
This is the, Egypt wants nothing to do with the people of Gaza.
They're a part of this.
If there was a multinational Arab nation coalition who could assist, and of course there'll be rebuilding, but for Israel not to have a part of that as in for another terrorist regime to, because the United States wanted there to be an election in Gaza and Hamas was elected Both in Gaza and the West Bank, and the Palestinian Authority just said, we don't do that as a legitimate election.
That whatever comes next, Israel says they don't want occupation, but they will, of course, be a part of ensuring that another Hamas Which they're having to do in real time.
And they do own that, right?
They own some of that to prevent another Hamas, not just to destroy and leave it in chaos.
Absolutely, I agree with that.
And that's the history of such operations as well.
And I agree with you that in order for this to work, there has to be multiple other nations involved on identifying who is the other viable partner in Gaza, how to rebuild all the structures, not just the buildings, so that they're on a path to a better life than what Hamas was giving them.
I know we're getting to the end of our allotted time here, but I just want to ask you the not-so-simple question of what do you think Israel should do, must do, will do about Hezbollah to the north?
Yeah, that's a great question.
I wish more people would ask it and recognize and tell the facts about how Hezbollah, and in my last trip back in February, I went up to northern Israel to the Blue Line.
I walked the line.
of where Hezbollah is attacking.
Since October 8th, it entered the war.
A second front was there and Hezbollah has been attacking since October 8th with not just rockets, but taking out all the security posts and cameras and sending people across the blue line and violating the UN Security Council.
They say, and again, if you want to listen to them say, the reason they did that was because of the war in Gaza, which is interesting since they started on October 8th and Israel hadn't even declared and conducted operations in Gaza yet.
But the situation I can say with certainty can't continue.
There's 80,000 people just in Northern Israel who haven't been home in the last six months, who are living in hotels.
When I go there, they're in the hotels that I stay at.
Because of the daily threat of Hezbollah, and Hezbollah is a much larger problem, and Israel and other nations have been pursuing a political solution because it all doesn't have to turn into war for Hezbollah to back up to the UN Security Council agreed framework and stop attacking Israel.
But if they're not willing, I don't see how Israel doesn't have to also use force to secure its northern border and allow its citizens, which 80,000, the number almost surpasses people's ability to imagine what that looks like on the ground with all these cities evacuated.
80,000 who can't go home because Hezbollah attacks every day.
I know Hezbollah is a larger problem in that they're a larger force, a better trained force, a better armed force.
They have more rockets, which is to say it's a, in the end, it's probably a more important problem to solve.
But I'm wondering, is it as large a problem with respect to the prospect of civilian casualties if they decided to launch a war into I mean, if the IDF woke up tomorrow and was fully committed to destroying Hezbollah as quickly as possible, with all the applicable force available to it, would they be, by definition, creating as much collateral damage as they have in Gaza?
Or are things different up in the north?
And are the combatants much easier to target without the same kind of loss of civilian life?
Right.
Yeah, it's a great question.
Of course, it's less density.
There are still urban areas in southern Lebanon that would require their restraint on the use of force, but there is a lot more military real because Hezbollah didn't develop the same strategy as Hamas.
Of course, it went underground and it's actually called the land of tunnels in southern Lebanon.
Of course, that's what militaries do to protect their systems, and there's hundreds of miles in southern Lebanon.
But unlike Hamas, Hezbollah didn't build them solely underneath civilians to get civilians killed.
Yes, it would be a much different situation, although the scale is 10 times, right?
Hundreds of thousands of Hezbollah fighters with estimates of tens of, if not hundreds of thousands of rockets.
But They are also much more targetable from a military stance without the civilian harm, but they're in mountainous terrain.
They're more protected.
It would still be a very big challenge for the idea to defeat Hezbollah.
But you get to this question, which again, people won't recognize that October 7th was an existential threat to Israel, not just to Southern Israel.
They wanted to get to Jerusalem.
Hezbollah poses an existential threat to Israel.
So it has to respond, hopefully not with military force, but if you have to, then you have to.
And it would take an immense war to defeat Hezbollah, let alone just push them back to their no longer threatening Israel.
I hesitate to pull the question of Iran in here because I know we're short on time, but do you have an encapsulated version of what you think can and should and will be done with respect to Iran, either by Israel alone or by some coalition of forces?
Yeah, I mean, I do, and I think I can do it shortly.
Of course, Iran is the head of all these snakes.
First, we have to acknowledge that Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis are all Iranian-backed organizations who are trained, funded, financed, and directed by Iran themselves.
So Hezbollah says it.
Can we at least believe these groups when they say that they act in accordance with Iran's direction?
Iran is the big disruptor of the Middle East.
Some people believe October 7th came about because Israel was close to a bilateral relationship with Saudi Arabia, like it has with Jordan, Egypt, and other Arab nations.
And that was too much of a threat to Iran, who has its ideals of the Middle East and has pursued this proxy war using its proxies to attack Israel.
And what it did On April 14th, when it attacked Israel with 300 drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles, people just kind of, it was a part of the news, but it wasn't like, that's huge.
That's historic.
Like that Israel as a nation was attacked by Iran directly, not through its multi-year, decades long use of proxies to attack Israel, but it directly attacked.
And it was kind of like, it was in the news, everybody wants to deescalate.
So it kind of, We'll just keep moving forward.
The world has to deal with Iran, not Israel.
The United States has to change its position with Iran.
And what would that change look like or what should it look like?
I mean, do you think... I'm sort of mystified as to why Even prior to the attack on Israel, just with the Houthi attack on shipping, why we didn't decide to just exact some price directly on Iran at that point, right?
Like just destroying their ports or their ability to export oil.
It seems like the deterrence has completely failed with respect to Iran.
In fact, it's reversed.
Iran has effectively deterred the United States up until this moment.
Strangely, the United States seems more averse to and worried about and just frankly scared of a war with Iran than Iran does.
No, I think it's a great assessment that what we've seen in the last six months has been a failure of deterrence.
It was a failure of Israel to deter Hamas.
It was a failure to deter Iran.
It's a failure of U.S.
foreign policy to deter Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons to using its proxy forces to attack countries in the Middle East.
A hundred percent.
But I do understand because I understand the significance of state on state warfare, where why can't the U.S.
just strike Iran?
Well, there are reasons why, because that would open a whole Pandora's box of second and third order consequences.
But this is the lunacy of Iran attacking Israel and everybody's like, yeah, just let it go.
Just let go.
Well, is the letting it go moment, to what degree did Iran engineer a flamboyant but nonetheless benign attack on Israel by telegraphing what they were going to do, making it as easy as possible for the US and the Jordanians and the Israelis to nullify everything that was incoming?
How sincere an attack do we think that was, and how much of it was just a kind of a face-saving maneuver which was meant to say, okay, let's not have a war.
After we do this, let's settle down.
Yeah.
No, I think it's a great question because it has been the great, again, interpretation of the facts.
Um, the fact that even the United States, like we had no warning, there was no telegraphing.
Yes, because it's really hard to move stuff around in Iran without somebody seeing it, you know, from satellites and everything, but there was nothing that was telegraphed and by the intentions of what was shot at Israel.
And yeah, so everybody uses the 99% of it all shot down thanks to Israel's defensive capabilities and the fact that United States helped and Jordan helped and Saudi Arabia helped and like, What world are we living in where, no, that was a legitimate attack with full intention to really cause a massive amount of damage and civilian casualties in Israel.
I mean, 300 drones isn't a, oh, I know you'll shoot all this down, ballistic and cruise missiles.
I know you'll get all these.
We all know I'm just trying to save face.
No!
No, the fact is that they actually had, and that was a technique that has been used in like Ukraine, send a wave of drones to overload their defense, then send in crews and ballistic missiles.
Just because it was all knocked down, doesn't mean that where intention and actions really matter, but we're living in a world where the result matters.
That's not the way it works.
Yeah, so that's another interesting asymmetry here.
The effectiveness of Israel's defense, Israel's defense in this case in concert with their allies helping them, the effectiveness is being held against Israel as a sign that any further engagement with Iran would be by definition an overreaction, because nothing happened.
You know, like they tried to kill you, but they didn't succeed, so you're the one who's now hysterical.
What are you doing responding to this?
It's the same thing that's happened for years with Israel having invested so much in Iron Dome and in their bomb shelters that the ineffectuality of Hamas' rockets and Hezbollah's rockets has delivered the message to the whole world that Israel doesn't really have an existential problem because everyone can just keep going to bomb shelters and the Iron Dome seems to work.
So, there's really no factor over there.
All the while, Hezbollah and Hamas are really trying to kill civilians in Israel.
It's an amazing situation.
Well, John, it's been fantastic to get you on the podcast and to get your expertise here.
You've cleared up, I think, a lot of confusion, and some of my own confusion, frankly, on many of these points.
So please keep doing what you're doing, and as the chaos proceeds, I would love to get you back here at some point to bring us up to the minute and help us understand what's been happening.
