A Different Path Israel Could Have Taken — and Maybe Still Can

Before Oct. 7, Israel appeared to many to be sliding into a “one-state reality,” where it had functional control over Gaza and the West Bank, but the Palestinians who lived there were denied full rights. In 2021, a group of hundreds of former senior defense and diplomatic officials in Israel published a report warning that this was a catastrophe — for Israel’s security, its democratic values, its international standing, and its very soul. And they argued that there was another way, that even without a Palestinian “partner for peace,” there was a huge amount Israel could do on its own to create the conditions for a two-state solution to emerge in the future. Nimrod Novik is a fellow at the Israel Policy Forum and a member of the executive committee of Commanders for Israel’s Security, the group behind the report. He was a senior policy adviser to Shimon Peres when he was prime minister, and was involved in all forms of negotiations with Palestinians and the Arab world. I wanted to talk to Novik about the plan proposed in the Commanders for Israel’s Security report, and how they might have changed in light of Oct. 7 and the war. We also talk through what the “day after” might look like in Gaza, the immense anger of the Israeli public over the intelligence failure that led up to the attacks, the alternative coalitions building against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and much more. Mentioned: “Initiative 2025” by Commanders for Israel’s Security Book Recommendations: The Back Channel by William J. Burns Master of the Game by Martin Indyk Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Emefa Agawu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Efim Shapiro.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ezra Klein?

  From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:23Ezra Klein?

  Well before 10/7, the dominant narrative in Israel was that there's no hope of a two-state solution, not anytime soon, because there isn't a partner for peace. I think there are ways in which that's been true. I think there are times in which that has been true. And I think it's also a bit of a dodge. It absolves Israel of responsibility for what it has done to make sure there's not a partner for peace. And it has taken too much pressure off of Israeli policy towards Palestine in the present. It allowed a lot of people to become comfortable with a kind of stasis. And the ones who weren't comfortable, the ones who still had the power and the energy

• 1:03Ezra Klein?

  to act, were settlers in the West Bank, was the radical right in Israel, who have done everything in their power explicitly. They've said this explicitly, to try to make any kind of two-state reality impossible. And so Israel has been moving towards what people call a one-state reality, not the one state that the left sometimes imagines, where you have equal rights across all of Israel and Palestine, and it becomes one multi-ethnic nation. But the one-state reality of apartheid, the one-state reality in which Israel does have functional control over Gaza, over the West Bank, but the people in it do not have anything like real rights. I would say, and I think this is a very common view, that was a reality before 10/7.

• 1:48Ezra Klein?

  And in that reality, for years now, a group of hundreds of former senior defense and diplomatic officials in Israel have been saying this is a catastrophe, that it is a catastrophe for Israeli security, a catastrophe for Israeli democracy, a catastrophe for Israelis' international standing, and a catastrophe for Israel's soul.

• 2:10Ezra Klein?

  Their warnings seem quite prescient now. And they've argued there was another way. There was a huge amount Israel could do on its own and should have been doing. That if Israel is not going to tip into a kind of single state that it did not want and could not ultimately defend, that the conditions had to be created now for something else to emerge in the future. One of the people working on that project was Nimrod Novik. He's my guest today. Nowick was a top aide to Shimon Peres when Peres was prime minister and vice premier. In that role, Nowick was involved in all manner of negotiations with the Palestinians, with the Arab world, with the international community.

• 2:52Ezra Klein?

  He's on the executive committee of commanders for Israel's security, which is a group I mentioned a minute ago, and he's an Israel fellow at the Israel Policy Forum. I want to talk to him about those plans and how they look now in light of the attacks on 10/7 and the war in Gaza, the unimaginable horror of being in Gaza, the amount of grief and fury and vengeance that is building there, that has built there. And the question that is inescapable. This war eventually will end. It has to end, hopefully soon. Who is going to govern Gaza? How can they govern Gaza after this?

• 3:36Ezra Klein?

  We've been hearing very different things on that from Netanyahu, from the US, from the Arab world. But of course, there's a question of who will the Gazans allow to govern them? And if Israel is simply going to be occupying Gaza indefinitely, that is going to be a security risk and a horror of its own. So I want to talk about that day-after question, which of course is being decided in different ways right now, in this day, with the bombs dropping and in a number I found just shocking, about 80% of Gazans now displaced. I want to talk with Nimrod about what might be politically possible in Israel, given

• 4:21Ezra Klein?

  the unpopularity of the current government and the possibility that it could collapse in the coming months or certainly in the coming years. Before we go to the show, I should mention we're still taking questions for the Ask Me Anything, so you can email us at ezra kline show at nytimes.com.

• 4:41Ezra Klein?

  Nimrod Novik, welcome to the show.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 4:45Ezra Klein?

  So I want to begin with the document you helped to write in November 2021. It's called Initiative 2025, and it had these two premises that I think are important. One was that there was no prospect for a two-state solution then, or for that matter now. And two is that even so, there was still a lot that Israel could and should do. So tell me about what that proposal was and what that coalition that you're a part of recommended.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  The group that worked on it called Commanders for Israel Security. It's over 500 Israeli retired generals, as well as their equivalents from the Mossad, Shin Bet Internal Security, National Security Council, the entire Israeli security establishment. And we formed a team. We felt that Israeli policy was far too reactive and far too conservative for the good of the country, national security, short and long term. We had not anticipated the trauma of October 7th, but we certainly anticipated things getting from bad to worse unless Israel changes course.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  So we came up with a plan that suggested even though a two-state solution, as you said, is not on this side of the horizon, but given that eventually it's the only solution that we believe serves Israel's security and well-being long-term as a strong Jewish democracy. We mapped out what can and should be done in the coming two, three years to reverse the slide towards the disaster of a one-state solution.

• 6:28Ezra Klein?

  Tell me about that. How would you describe what Israeli policy towards Palestinians, towards West Bank and Gaza, was in 2021 when you wrote that? What was the governing theory? And why do you believe it was going to slide into what you call a one-state solution?

• 6:45Speaker 01

  There were primary two governing concepts, if you will, of the Israeli policy. Again, calling it policy is giving it more credit than deserved. Israeli governments have been reluctant to determine the end game of our relationship with the Palestinians. Where do we want to see ourselves and them? Two years, five years, fifty years from now? No decision has been made since the Oslo era. As a result, what we've seen was a policy based on insisting on separating the Gaza Strip, ruled by Hamas, from the West Bank,

• 7:28Speaker 01

  ruled sort of by the Palestinian Authority. Separation was one principle. And the other one was dubbed status quo, even though it was an illusion. Because nothing was static about it. As a matter of fact, creeping annexation has been accelerating under various governments. And the prospects of separating Israelis and Palestinians into a two-state reality was becoming less and less possible. The more territory was taken by settlements, the more extreme settlers were conducting violent raids

• 8:11Speaker 01

  into Palestinian civil populations, the more the Palestinian Authority internally defective, becoming more and more authoritarian, more and more detached from its own constituents, less responsive, less capable of governance, losing control over large thwarts of West Bank territory, forcing the IDF to enter more and more. And it became a daily and nightly raids into areas that were supposed to be controlled. And law and order was supposed to be maintained by the Palestinian Authority.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  It was a slide into a state where the Palestinian Authority would cease to function as the promise of the nucleus of the Palestinian state. You know, if you look at it today, it's already perhaps the municipal government of the city of Ramallah rather than of the West Bank. And weakening the Palestinian Authority by choking it financially, by not allowing it to demonstrate to its people that it is the vehicle that will bring them one day to their aspiration of statehood on the one hand,

• 9:36Speaker 01

  and making sure that Hamas controls Gaza. The two tracks spelled disaster. So I must confess, we had not anticipated that the disaster will look the way it did on October 7th. But we certainly realized that the policy in Gaza of rounds of violence every year, every two years, every 18 months, and buying off relative tranquility by funding Hamas through the auspices of Qatar, allowing it to arm and rearm. The inherent contradictions in the policy were quite apparent.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  And we thought that it's time for Israel to change course by taking the initiative and reversing the policy, both on Gaza and the West Bank.

• 10:31Ezra Klein?

  So one thing I have noticed is that there are different versions of the one-state fear, hope, and expectation floating around. There's a left-wing one-state solution you'll hear about sometimes, right? A state where everybody within the territory of what is thought to be Israel and Palestine will have equal rights, everybody will vote. I call that a little more utopic theory, but it is something you hear on the left. There's a right wing, one state solution. I think when you mentioned the Finance Minister, Bezale Smotrich, I think if you read things he has written in the past, he is looking for a one-state solution. He wants to crush Palestinian dreams of statehood and repress Palestinians sufficiently that they stop believing

• 11:15Ezra Klein?

  they can ever have anything better and eventually content themselves to Israeli rule and live quietly within that in order to gain better lives. And then there's a kind of, I might call it a realist, one-state idea, that there is no more chance. There's no more realism to two states. It would not be possible to create functioning two states here. And so whether it is a state of equality or a state of inequality, that a one-state solution is all that exists because Israel just simply has too much control and does not have the political capacity anymore to roll that control back. And so this argument would be, this is already done. There's no plausible political horizon for a two-state solution. And the only question is what kind of one state you're going to get.

• 12:00Ezra Klein?

  How do you think about that?

• 12:02Speaker 01

  I'll put it bluntly. I believe that a two-state solution is inevitable, not because we wish it and not because it's nice, not because Palestinians deserve self-determination, which they do, but that's not a historic imperative. I believe that the two-state solution is inevitable because these two people are not going to live happily ever after under one roof. For that to happen, for the two people to stay in one state, one of two things have to happen. Either Israelis will agree to grant Palestinian equal rights in that one state and therefore become a minority

• 12:46Speaker 01

  or at least a slim majority in our own country. And that's never going to happen. Israelis are not going to agree to be less than an overwhelming majority in our own country. Or Palestinians will agree forever to forego equal rights, which I suspect is as unreasonable expectation as the other. So we will separate. The question is, are we going to separate because leaders led us there? Or because we bleed ourselves so much and for so long, until both peoples come to their senses and go for the inevitable deal?

• 13:32Ezra Klein?

  Let me key in on a word you just used, which is separation. When I read some of these documents, separation is an important word. I think people here think about peace deals and settlements. But separation is actually, it seems to me, more how this is spoken about politically in Israel. You go back to Rabin's campaigns, where his slogan was, "Take Gaza out of Tel Aviv." That's a slogan of separation, not an argument for peace. Tell me about the language and the ideal of separation, and how that might be different than some of the other ways this gets spoken about.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  Civil separation with overall security control, continued security control until a two-state agreement assures in alternative security arrangements, is a concept that basically suggests reversing the creeping annexation, which is no longer creeping, it's now galloping. So the idea is to start reversing the slide towards one-state reality in the opposite direction of reducing the friction between the two populations, increasing the capacity of the PA to perform,

• 14:47Speaker 01

  while maintaining the overall security control by Israel, until a deal is struck.

• 14:58Ezra Klein?

  So let me get into what you actually recommended there, because I think something you got at the end was important. You often hear, when you talk to people in Israel, about different paths that could be taken. Well, we don't have anybody to negotiate with. The Palestinian Authority doesn't have credibility. Hamas wants our destruction. And the core premise of the report is that there are things Israel can do unilaterally, that it doesn't need a partner to do things that will make the situation better from its perspective and create conditions maybe for deals in the future. So tell me, what is in Israel's power here? What did you actually recommend it do tangibly?

• 15:34Speaker 01

  It's not a genetic deformation of the Palestinians that they cannot govern themselves. This is nonsense. We had a period, after the Second Intifada, the years 2007, 2008, where the Palestinian Authority, there was a prime minister by the name of Salam Fayyad. First he was finance minister, later on prime minister, who revitalized the Palestinian Authority in a dramatic way. The Authority was on the rise. People were proud in it, its own population. They could have won elections at that point. And then Netanyahu was elected in 2009. Now, obviously, we are the strongest party. We hold most of the cards by far.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  And when we decide that we are going to choke the Palestinian Authority, the Palestinian Authority will choke. If we decide to give it space and to give it the possibility of demonstrating to its own constituency that it can deliver, that it can govern. Now, the second trend that happened was that Mahmoud Abbas Abbas, President Abbas, known as Abu Mazen. The early Abu Mazen was a very different person than the late one with whom we're dealing today. He became increasingly non-democratic, authoritarian, autocratic, paranoid,

• 17:02Speaker 01

  removing from his vicinity and from position of power all the best and brightest that were working during that era, fearing competition. He exiled them either out of politics or out of the West Bank altogether. Things went from bad to worse. Israel doing its share in weakening the PA, and the PA leadership became more claustrophobic. All these can change. On the Israeli side, what we felt was essential was allowing the Palestinian security agencies to perform their duty without embarrassing them in front of their

• 17:46Speaker 01

  own constituencies. They used to be the pride and joy of the Palestinian street. When they walked into the street in the uniform, they symbolized state in being. And with time, our conduct presented them as subcontractors of the Israeli occupation. When there is no political horizon, they are no longer serving Palestinian national interests, they're serving the Israeli occupation. And with that, morale goes down and performance goes down. So, one thing was to strengthen the Palestinian security agencies by virtue of the way we treat them and our conduct. We suggested to expand the territory that the Palestinian Authority controls.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  We believe that nothing demonstrate sincerity of a commitment to a future two-state reality, then reversing the annexation by taking small chunks of the West Bank that are now under Israeli control, redesignating them and turning them to Palestinian Authority control. Specifically, and we mapped it out, areas that allow for contiguity among Palestinian areas. At the moment, the West Bank is a Swiss cheese. It's 169 islands of Palestinian-controlled areas, surrounded each by Israeli-controlled

• 19:16Speaker 01

  territory. So we wanted to reduce that by half, so that contiguity will have a security, law and order, and economic well-being effect. We suggested... A host of economic measures that enable the Palestinian Authority to deliver for the people, which is the opposite of what's happening now when our Minister of Finance is choking the Palestinian Authority by withholding funds that are theirs. By the agreement, Israel collects taxes for the Palestinian Authority, VAT and others, and we are supposed to automatically transfer them to the Palestinian Authority. It's the main chunk of their budget.

• 20:01Speaker 01

  So we recommended a host of economic measures of that nature, security measures, but the umbrella for it all was supposed to be a political horizon. We believe that Palestinian Authority cannot have legitimacy in the eyes of its own population and therefore will not be able to function properly if it is not perceived to be the vehicle that is leading the Palestinian people towards statehood, however long it might take and however arduous the road there. And therefore, we recommend that the government of Israel will find a way, and we have some suggestions, to indicate an Israeli commitment to an eventual two-state solution.

• 21:10Ezra Klein?

  We're talking in terms here that feel similar to how we could have been talking a few months ago, a few years ago. But right now, you have a full ground invasion of Gaza. You have 80-some percent of Gazans displaced, according to the UN. You have polling among Palestinians showing a rise in support for Hamas. And you have Israel with, it seems to me, no real theory of its way back out. Netanyahu says the army will have to be in Gaza until it finishes the job. That apparently means destroying Hamas. I hear a lot of disagreement from counterterrorism and military experts as to whether or not that's actually possible. But even once that is done, the Palestinian Authority cannot just be installed by Israel. That would not be credible to Gazans.

• 21:54Ezra Klein?

  Netanyahu has come out and said that he believes the creation of the Palestinian Authority was a mistake, that nothing in Gaza can be given back to them, that there is not a sufficient difference between them and Hamas. So what do you understand is happening now? I mean, I was reading back and preparing for this, and I read this 2019 piece by Commanders for Israel Security that, again, the group you're part of, that was talking about Gaza. And it warned then that, quote, "A military-only approach may lead to the reoccupation of the Gaza Strip and to Israel's retaking control over its 2 million residents with no exit strategy in sight." Is that not where Israel is now?

• 22:33Speaker 01

  Absolutely. That's exactly where we are right now. Let's assume that IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces, are able to accomplish the mission of undoing Hamas governance and ability to threaten Israel by demolishing its military capabilities. We're not there yet, and I'm not sure we'll get there for reasons that are not up to us. Okay? We may not have the time before the international community says, "Stop," in order to accomplish this objective. But let's assume that we did.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  The morning-after strategy in Washington as well as elsewhere, including among commanders, Commanders for Israel Security in Israel, we all reached the same conclusion. The only solution that will allow Israel to exit the Gaza Strip is the Palestinian Authority. Now, nobody is naive and nobody assumes, as you said correctly, that the Palestinian Authority in its current miserable state can hardly control the West Bank, let alone Gaza. And it will take years before the PA can be rehabilitated, revitalized, and its symbolic role becomes substantive. And it really runs the Gaza Strip.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  And besides, it cannot walk into Gaza on the shoulders of the Israeli tank. It will lose all credibility if it does. And therefore, there's the need for an interim something, some third-party interim arrangement under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority. And two, it's all within the context of a political horizon. What they need initially, knowing that the PA is incapable of doing the job, they need the PA to grant legitimacy to whatever third party walks into Gaza when the IDF is phased out.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  It has to be invited by the PA. It has to be coordinated with the PA. Funding for rehabilitation should go through the PA. And here, the Prime Minister, as you correctly quoted, says, "No, no PA." Now, no PA, there's nobody.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  There's nobody. And therefore, if indeed he and this government last for more than a few months, then the prospects of a prolonged Israeli occupation of Gaza and need to manage not just security, but civil affairs, to run the lives of 2.3 million Palestinians, from street cleaning to schools and hospitals and what have you, seem frighteningly realistic.

• 25:38Ezra Klein?

  You say frightening, but why would Israel not just do that? Why would it not just decide, well, it's occupied and run Gaza before? It does not trust that leaving it to the PA to say nothing of Hamas will keep it safe. There are more right wing figures in Israel who want Israel to run Gaza because they feel that that is part of Israel attaining full control over, you know, what they think of as Greater Israel. So why not just keep it? Why would that not be what the Israeli government decides to do or wants to do? Or if it does try to do that, why would you oppose that decision?

• 26:13Speaker 01

  We've been there. We've been there both in Gaza, but another example is an Israeli government that instructed the IDF to go into Lebanon for 48 hours.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  And it took a very courageous prime minister named Ehud Barak to get us out 18 years later.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  Prime Minister Sharon, who took us out of Gaza in 2005, didn't do it as a gesture to the Palestinian Authority or Hamas. He did it because the price of staying there was far too high for the Israeli public to be willing to continue paying. He did it the wrong way. He did it unilaterally. He allowed Hamas to take credit for it, and that helped Hamas win the elections thereafter. Never mind that. In the younger Palestinian generation on the West Bank, the popularity of Hamas is sky high. Why is that so? Why wasn't it the case 10 years ago?

• 27:20Speaker 01

  Why is that so? Because Hamas seems the only one who can do something about Israeli occupation.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  They supported the Palestinian Authority as long as the Oslo process seemed vibrant, seemed to offer an end to the occupation. But one generation after another of Palestinians witnessed an endless situation that they want to put an end to. So if negotiations or moderation like the Palestinian Authority is not rewarded, then we'll go for an armed struggle. Sure, if I were under occupation, I would go for an armed struggle.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  So it's not that I justify Hamas, God forbid, but I blame us for teaching Palestinians the wrong lesson. For a decade, Netanyahu's policy was to reward Hamas after every round of violence. More concessions, more easing of the closure, after every round of violence. And at the same time, the Palestinian Authority, that is being praised by the Israeli security establishment for fighting Hamas on the West Bank, is being choked in so many ways rather than enabled to flourish.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  So yes, we taught Palestinians a lesson that the only language we understand is the language of Hamas.

• 28:57Ezra Klein?

  I can't myself imagine the fury of Gazans right now, right? I can imagine in many ways the fury of Israelis. I know more Israelis, I'm Jewish myself. But when I look at the death toll, when I look at the displacement, when I look at the destruction, when I look at how many people have lost how much, homes and family members and jobs and livelihoods...

• 29:21Ezra Klein?

  And I think of what comes after this. I mean, it's not like the population of Gaza was well disposed to Israelis before. But it does seem to me that it is hard to imagine the desire for vengeance, for recapturing just of dignity that will follow this. And one thing I really don't hear is any theory of what is to be done with that, how that will in any way be calmed or given space or recognition. I mean, this has always been bad, but I think that there is a recognition internationally,

• 30:04Ezra Klein?

  but also domestically in Israel and in America of the power of Israeli grief after 10/7. And I don't see any recognition of the power of Palestinian grief, but there is certainly a tsunami of it building. How do you think about that?

• 30:24Speaker 01

  First, I completely agree with you. I think that the consequences are devastating. I think the human misery in Gaza, I can't even begin to imagine how people feel. I felt mistakes have consequences. Let me put it this way. I have a lot of complaints to all third parties. But as an Israeli, I channel my primary complaints to my own government.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  With all due respect to the others, mine is supposed to serve my, as an Israeli patriot, best interests: the security, the well-being, and the future of the country.

• 31:17Speaker 01

  We hold most of the cards vis-à-vis Gaza and vis-à-vis the West Bank. And when we play our cards wrong, the consequences are the ones that you described. A wrong policy of 15 years may take 15 years to rectify. I don't know. I have no idea. We are in uncharted territory. This is all unprecedented. Everything that has happened over the last year, the 10 months of the attempt by Netanyahu for a judicial coup against democracy in the country, the response to it, unprecedented demonstrations,

• 32:02Speaker 01

  the enormous trauma of 10/7, when it turns out that the government didn't exist the morning after October 7th, and the needs of the population were met by the same groups that protested the government a few days earlier. All of it is unprecedented, as is the devastation of Gaza. So when you deal with something that is unprecedented, you don't have something to fall back on and say, "Well, this is how it's going to happen, how it's going to transform." I have no idea.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  The only thing that I can do is try to advocate a different course that I believe that eventually will lead to a different reality.

• 33:24Ezra Klein?

  There is a way in which it, I think, is simply true that a huge number of people, Gazan specifically, but not only Israelis too, have paid an unimaginable price for, among other things, a tremendous intelligence failure. I'd been following the reporting on this and, you know, early on it said things like, "Well, people could see Hamas training exercises," and, you know, they had heard some chatter. But more recently, the reporting has been that the Israeli intelligence services had gotten their hands on functionally the plan here. Somebody, somehow, had gotten Hamas's description for planning something very much like this.

• 34:09Ezra Klein?

  And this had been sent up the chain and was dismissed as aspirational, that they would never attempt something like this. And then when they saw training exercises that looked like the plan they already had, they reported that and said, "This sure seems like they're training to do the thing that we got this information that they want to do." And that was also dismissed. And it actually seems kind of staggering to me that the government that was not able to hone its own intelligence correctly, to hear what its intelligence was saying to it, is still the one prosecuting this war and is still trusted to know what the right response is. Because it feels like there's this alternative reality we could be living in, where, you

• 34:54Ezra Klein?

  know, the right analysts were listened to and the relevant IDF forces weren't pulled out of Gaza to protect West Bank settlers. And 10/7 doesn't happen, or it happens at a very, very, very limited scale. And we're living in a very different reality today. I'm curious how the politics of Israel are absorbing these kinds of reports, because when I read this piece in The Times and seen it reported elsewhere, I was genuinely shocked.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, certainly. All the heads of the security establishment relevant to intelligence, the chief of staff, the head of the Shin Bet, the head of the IDF Military Intelligence, all of them took responsibility. The one who repeatedly refuses to take responsibility is the prime minister. So that's one thing that happened. He's politicking the war, preparing for the investigation commission the day after, preparing his alibi, and doing almost exclusively politics. The reaction of the public is interesting. You have something close to 80% of the public that want him to go.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  There is an overwhelming consensus in the country that he has to go. I ascribe it not to politics and not to hate, but to a healthy Jewish survival instinct. If you cannot trust the prime minister to conduct the war with exclusively national security interests in mind, if anybody in the public, and so many do, suspect him of a conflict of interest,

• 36:49Speaker 01

  of injecting his legal predicament, he should go. Even if all those who are suspecting him are wrong. But the very fact that he gave them the possibility of even suspecting the prime minister to conduct a war with a conflict of interests, he must go.

• 37:17Ezra Klein?

  I want to pull out something you're saying there because if you're Netanyahu, when this war ends, you have a series of quite, I think, terrifying things waiting for you. First is that you either resign or very likely are defeated in disgrace. You go down to see the prime minister who allowed this to happen. You have, as you mentioned, legal troubles, corruption investigations. It could leave you in jail. And you have the end of your legacy. I mean, Netanyahu, of course, understands himself in a certain way and does not want his final act to be falling on the sword for this, does not want this to be the way he goes down in history. And so I think if you're him, he has a real incentive to keep this going, to keep ratcheting

• 38:02Ezra Klein?

  up the threat, to keep holding himself up as a wartime leader in the hopes it's something about his conduct in the war will change the public's perception of him. And Israel, you know, the elections are not the way they work in the US, they're not cleanly scheduled in the same fashion. And so the fact that he's the incentive to potentially extend the war, he also has something of the power to do it. So what checks are there on him?

• 38:32Speaker 01

  I share the suspicions and the analysis that you so eloquently put out. I was hoping, and I still am, that the combination of the two former chiefs of staff, Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, having joined the war cabinet, and the fact that they and the defense establishment will prevent irrelevant considerations from affecting decisions. That was my hope. It still is.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  I am beginning to doubt that he is not more sophisticated than all of them. We may end up paying a price for not insisting as a public on him gone when fateful decisions are made every day, literally every day.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  So I'm counting on Gantz and Eisenkot and the professionals at the top of the IDF and Mossad and Shin Bet to see to it that there's no mischief in national security decision-making.

• 39:59Ezra Klein?

  Because the system is very different there, for those unfamiliar with it, how does an election happen in Israel? What has to happen for the Israeli public to have the opportunity to replace Netanyahu?

• 40:11Speaker 01

  Either the Knesset runs its course for years and then its predetermined date, which rarely happens in Israeli politics. I don't remember the last government that lasted that long. Or the Knesset votes itself out and elections are called for. Or the prime minister resigns and with him, the Knesset is dismissed. But you don't need elections to have an alternative coalition. In our system, it is called constructive non-confidence.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  If a majority of the Knesset, which is 61 or more, votes for another prime minister, then a new coalition is formed. So if today, the opposition in the Knesset is 56, which is five short of this 61 minimum, theoretically, if you have five members of the Likud who say, you know what? Bibi really got to go. And we are joining the constructive non-confidence vote. Then Benny Gantz, or Yair Lapid, or someone else from the Likud, may form an alternative coalition without Netanyahu.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  Now, I'm presenting it more easy than it really is in real life, but others might bring down the government, including some of his coalition partners, who see him collapsing in the polls. And the gentleman who used to be the greatest asset, the greatest political asset, is becoming a great liability. And they're beginning to distance themselves from him, distinguish themselves from his policy. And they might bring the government down, including one of the two lunatics, Smotrich or Ben Kvir. Of the two, my money is more Ben Kvir because

• 42:24Speaker 01

  he is both a street thug, not really an ideologue. He's out for himself. And he thinks that he's losing votes now to Smotrich, who as Minister of Finance is implementing his horrible agenda. While all eyes are on Gaza and Lebanon, he is doing horrible things on the West Bank in implementing the agenda, as you said, that he wrote in 2017, his plan for making sure that there is no two-state solution and that there is one-state solution of a close-to-apartheid nature,

• 43:08Speaker 01

  where Palestinians are deprived of the right to vote for the Knesset. So he has no reason to leave because while everybody is busy, he's doing his thing. And he's promoting his agenda in very impressive way, frighteningly so. But Ben Kvir has already indicated to Netanyahu in more ways than one, that he is distancing himself, distinguishing himself. And if Netanyahu does something that provides him with an excuse that his base would applaud, he's out.

• 43:44Ezra Klein?

  So when you said a few minutes ago that you think within a few months Netanyahu will be out, that is the pathway you see, that it's this sort of constructive, alternative approach?

• 43:54Speaker 01

  I'm less presumptuous than that. I can see various scenarios.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  And I have no idea which one of them will materialize. And I see the driver...

• 44:09Speaker 01

  Unless it happens this way, the way I described it, internal knesset by its own dynamics, the driver might be double the number of Israelis in the streets, double the number that we had last year. I'm sorry, earlier this year, when we used to have anywhere between 250, 300,000 on every Saturday night, which is huge for a country our size. It will double. And it will not be led by the leadership of the protest against the judicial coup, but rather by the families of the victims

• 44:53Speaker 01

  and the hostages of October 7.

• 44:59Ezra Klein?

  So there's no doubt that a majority of Israelis see 10-7 as a failure of the government, a failure of Netanyahu. But do they see it the way you do? As a failure of the last 15 years of Israeli drift towards the right or towards apathy on Palestine? Do they see it as an indictment of ceasing to try to find some other kind of solution? Or as a view that we just need tougher security and we need a more competent government? We should never have missy intelligence, right? You can imagine a way this could be interpreted that says, "All we got wrong was incompetence. It was not a structural mistake that should make us reengage

• 45:42Ezra Klein?

  with a very different policy towards Palestinians."

• 45:46Speaker 01

  I believe that there are three layers to public sentiment. Layer one was pre-October 7.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  And that was when you had a situation when 60, 65% of the public opposed the judicial coup.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  And Likud was declining in the polls. You know that sixty, sixty-five percent in Israel is not the left. The residual left is negligible. Sixty-five percent bites deep into the moderate right.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  And that was one layer of people were frightened by the effort to undermine our democracy, clearly visibly in the service of agendas that came from the far fringes of Israeli society, the most outrageous of homophobic, of annexationist, of messianic, of anti-Arab, including Israeli Arab citizens, of anti-women, you name it. The whole coalition of the fringes that was brought together only because they had one common denominator.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  They were willing to provide Netanyahu with legislated way out of his legal predicament in return for him allowing them to pursue their crazy respective agendas. All of them needed the Supreme Court to be weakened, so that was the initial common denominator. Served them all. So that was one layer of where the change from Bibi King, which he was,

• 47:41Speaker 01

  to selfish, selling us out Bibi came. The second was the impact of October 7th, the day, the occasion. Suddenly, it was Bibi built the Hamas. This monster.

• 48:02Speaker 01

  Was the product of a policy, deliberate policy, of funding Hamas. Thirty-five million dollars a month, coming in in suitcases. Every election eve, you said, "The previous government failed to destroy Hamas, you will." And then you come to office time and time and time again, and you created that monster. So that was October 7th, that layer two. Layer three is since October 7th. When it turned out that not a single government ministry was able to rise to the occasion

• 48:49Speaker 01

  of performing its duties for the devastated population from the south, from those evacuated from the north. Nothing. It was all voluntary organizations that organized the hotels for those who whose homes were burned in the south and for those evacuated from the north, that arranged for them. They left their homes with nothing, everything burned. Clothes, food, medicine. They organized search and rescue in day one, two, and three. They brought in geniuses of high-tech

• 49:33Speaker 01

  to develop on the spot an app

• 49:38Speaker 01

  that searched and rescued people. They organized the teams that went to the field

• 49:45Speaker 01

  to find those hiding somewhere. You can't imagine the magnitude of voluntary energy that rose to the occasion. And suddenly people realize that when a prime minister appoint incompetent ministers just because of loyalty and legal problems, and those ministers appoint their own hacks to run their ministries, and they castrate the professionals.

• 50:25Speaker 01

  And when this goes on for year after year after year...

• 50:30Speaker 01

  Then the professionals get tired of suggesting legitimate proposals, reforms, whatever. So suddenly, the realization of how his leadership deformed the entire government structure sunk in. There is a cumulative sense that he is responsible for a major disaster and therefore must go.

• 51:04Ezra Klein?

  When you look at polls, his most likely successor is Benny Gantz. How does Gantz differ with Netanyahu in his broad approach to Palestinian issues?

• 51:16Speaker 01

  I would say that Gantz shares the ideas promoted by commanders for Israel's security. Now, it tells you that once a person is exposed to national security at the highest ranks, with very few exceptions, they reach the same conclusions. It's no brainer. If we don't separate from the Palestinians, we're doomed. There are seven million Jews between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River and seven million Arabs. Either they separate, or the Zionist dream is over.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  So the question is how to do it? How to do it in a secure way, in a careful way, with all kinds of safety valves in case things go wrong and so on? So Benny Gantz shares the same ideas. So my question is not where is his heart or where is his mind? The question I ask myself is, is he the leader to make it happen?

• 52:28Speaker 01

  And I, having watched so many leaders close by and from a distance, we cannot predict until one is tested. He has not been tested yet. If he makes it to the premiership, that will be the moment that we will find out if he is the one that will steer the ship in a reverse direction from what we already said did now.

• 52:59Ezra Klein?

  I think one question that brings up is whether or not, forget the the long term horizon of a two state solution, the the short term horizon of a revitalized Palestinian Authority, a more open and humane policy is what people want. I mean, go all the way and you know this history so much better than I ever will. But after the Oslo Accords, this moment of great hope, Rabin is assassinated by a right wing extremist and then Shimon Peres, who is your boss, loses the election a few months later to Netanyahu. Power is traded back and forth for some time, but now Netanyahu, you know, has been back in power for quite some time, returning again later on with a very right wing government. And there's an argument that I hear from Palestinians

• 53:41Ezra Klein?

  that the Israeli people don't want this. The Israeli public reveals what it wants by who it votes for and it has repeatedly voted for Netanyahu and has been accepting even more right wing versions of Netanyahu than we initially saw. And if you look at polls of young Israeli Jews, they are more radical and more conservative and more dismissive of a two state solution. How do you see that that side of it? The the actual question of of what the Israeli public wants?

• 54:10Speaker 01

  You know, commanders, we've been, for quite a few years, we've been commissioning public opinion polls for ourselves to study the issues. And since October 7th, we've been discussing this with a group that we trust on in terms of polling on a weekly basis to try and understand what's the effect of the trauma is on Israeli public opinion. I'd like to say the following. First, in a macro approach, over the years, the conclusion that Israelis are sliding to the right on the Palestinian issue was an optical illusion.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  People took voting patterns to represent positions on issues. And it has not been the case for many, many years. Israelis did not vote the Palestinian issue. Israelis voted primarily BBS, BB no, and maybe economy. The Palestinian issue was number six in the minds of the voter when he entered the polling booth. And you know better than I that number six and number five and number four and number three don't determine one's voting decision at the polls. It's the number one and maybe two.

• 55:40Speaker 01

  Israelis had good reasons to vote for Netanyahu, who is a master politician and an exceptional campaigner, with whom I disagree on everything. But I can understand why people would vote for him more than for his competitor. But when you check positions on the issues, you will find at least a plurality, if not a majority, depends on the circumstances and atmosphere of the time, of the four options on the Palestinian issue, which are annexation, status quo,

• 56:21Speaker 01

  civil separation without a deal with security control, and two-state solution. You will find at least a plurality and mostly a majority for the two pragmatic options. And this is consistent for years. Now, you ask them, how likely is this to happen in your lifetime? And they will tell you, no, it's not. Mostly because the other side is not a partner. And you have a mirror imaging of that on the Palestinian side. It's not going to happen because of the Israelis. But if we had Israeli leadership that will go for it, that decides that for Israel's future, we have to separate from the Palestinians.

• 57:07Speaker 01

  They will have a majority support for it. So I don't believe that the problem is the public, nor do I believe that the core issues of security, settlements, Jerusalem, borders, refugees are insurmountable. I think the problem is leadership.

• 57:31Ezra Klein?

  I think that is the place to end. Always our final question. What are three books you would recommend to the audience?

• 57:37Speaker 01

  I was thinking of two books that are relevant to the moment. One is CIA Director, William "Bill" Burns, The Back Channel, which is memoirs of an exceptional diplomat. But more than that, the lessons of the importance of diplomacy, the failures not to deploy it and the successes when it is deployed rightfully. The second one, we just mourned the passing of Henry Kissinger, who invented shuttle diplomacy,

• 58:22Speaker 01

  or at least he invented the title, of shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East. And Martin Indic wrote an exceptionally good book called The Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy.

• 58:38Ezra Klein?

  Nimrod Novik, thank you very much.

• 58:40Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 58:54Ezra Klein?

  This episode of the Ezra Klansh is produced by Roland Hu, fact checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Gald. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Emma Fagawu, Annie Galvin, Roland Hu, and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones, audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Andy Roestrauser, and special thanks to Efim Shapiro.