Pod Insights The Ezra Klein Show How Biden’s Middle East Policy Fell Apart About this episode On Oct. 6 of last year, the Biden administration was hammering out a grand Middle East bargain in which Saudi Arabia would normalize relations with Israel in exchange for a Palestinian state. And even after Hamas’s attack the following day, the U. S. hoped to keep that deal alive to preserve the conditions for some kind of durable peace.
But that deal is now basically unviable. The war is expanding. Israel may be on the verge of occupying Gaza indefinitely and possibly southern Lebanon, too. So why was President Biden ineffective at achieving his goals? In the past year, has the U. S. been able to shape this conflict at all?
Franklin Foer recently wrote a piece in The Atlantic trying to answer these questions. And he starts with the Biden administration’s attempts to de-escalate tensions in the Middle East — an effort that began well before Oct. 7. In this conversation, Foer walks through his reporting inside the diplomatic bubble of the conflict and the administrations of other Middle Eastern states that have serious stakes in Israel’s war in Gaza.
Book Recommendations:
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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. 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 Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair . Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Efim Shapiro, Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith 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 Emma Ashford, Shira Efron, Natasha Hall, Richard Haass, Michael Koplow, Selcuk Karaoglan and Switch and Board Podcast Studio.
Transcript 13,811 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:03 Ezra Klein? From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.
0:23 Ezra Klein? Today's episode will publish almost a year to the day after October 7. I have tried writing different versions of this introduction, tried to write something up to that moment and failed. Nothing I write is up to memorializing the horror of that day or of what's followed. So what I'm just going to try to do is say what has actually happened. On October 7, a year ago, Hamas launched an invasion into Israel. Its fighters butchered Israeli citizens and non-Israelis and took hundreds hostage. Many things can
1:06 Ezra Klein? be said about Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas. One thing I have never heard said, including by Israelis, is that he is irrational, or emotional, or impulsive. He has agreed by all to be an icy tactician. He has aims, plans, and he is willing to sacrifice lives, including Palestinian lives, by the tens or hundreds of thousands to achieve them. Like many Americans, my frame of reference after October 7 was 9/11, when America was attacked, when civilians were killed by an adversary who wanted to provoke us into disastrous
1:46 Ezra Klein? reaction. In my first audio essay after October 7, I was one of many who offered a warning based on that. Don't give Sinwar what he wants, what he is trying to get you to give him. What did Sinwar want on October 7th? At a moment when Israel was normalizing relations with other Arab countries and the Palestinian cause was dimming geopolitically and in the region, he wanted to re-center his people, their suffering, their fight. He wanted to show Israel could be attacked, that it was vulnerable. He wanted, in doing that, to call in his allies, Hezbollah, Iran, into the fight.
2:26 Ezra Klein? He wanted to lure Israel into a massive, brutal invasion of Gaza. They would become an occupation with no obvious end. They would shred Israel's international legitimacy and, over time, sap its strength. They would begin, or continue, depending on how you look at it, the work of turning Israel, in international eyes, into the modern equivalent of apartheid South Africa, a pariah state. He wanted to make the Palestinian Authority look weak, ineffectual, a subcontractor of Israeli control, while his Hamas at least was fighting for liberation as they saw it. And so where are we then, a year later?
3:09 Ezra Klein? Israel's possible peace deal with Saudi Arabia has vanished. Israel's invasion of Gaza has left more than 40,000 Palestinians dead and many, many more homeless, wounded, grieving, exposed to famine and disease. Gaza itself is leveled, the destruction immense, almost beyond what the human mind can comprehend. Israel has no idea what to do next there. They have no plan for who is going to run it, except for them. They do not admit they are reoccupying Gaza, but it is clearly what they have done. Occupations get harder as time goes on. They have no off-ramp for this occupation.
3:52 Ezra Klein? They have no theory of what to do after or next. Hostages remain in Gaza. The hopes of a deal to bring them home have failed. Six are recently murdered in Gaza's tunnels. Israel is now at war in Lebanon. It has been exchanging fire with Iran. Its international reputation is abysmal. South Africa brought genocide charges against Israel in international court. Global opinion is solidly with the Palestinians. The Palestinian cause has been revived as a central matter of international concern and activism. Even in America, support for Israel is now generational. Older Americans largely stand with Israel. Younger Americans do not.
4:38 Ezra Klein? That Sinwar got much of what he wanted does not mean Israel does not believe it has achieved much in its war. Hamas is eviscerated as a military and political organization. Much of Hezbollah's leadership has been killed. Iran's proxies are weaker, have been shown to be weaker. Iran's responses have been largely ineffectual. Israel's deterrence power has been restored. The strength of its military, the reach of Mossad, is undeniable. The much-talked-about "Day After" plan remains hazy. "Hazy" is probably too strong a word. It doesn't exist. Israel may be on the verge of needing to occupy both Gaza and southern Lebanon indefinitely,
5:20 Ezra Klein? but if there is anything at all that onlookers agree to about Benjamin Netanyahu, it is that he does not live in the "Day After." He lives today, and he figures out tomorrow, tomorrow. And Netanyahu's days have gotten better. He has gone from reviled to seeing his Likud party leading impulse. His political obituary has been unwritten. There is a strange way in which, right now, one year on, both Sinwar and Netanyahu might be feeling victorious. Their people suffer terribly. Their losses are undeniable. But so too now are their victories.
6:04 Ezra Klein? The same cannot be said for America. There is so much that we wanted to shape here. We wanted to avoid a regional war. We wanted to bring home the hostages. We wanted to create a political process for the Palestinians and the Israelis, to create some kind of durable peace, durable settlement, durable stability. We wanted to protect innocent Palestinians from the ferocity of Israel's response. We wanted to show that America could still influence and shape and broker events in the Middle East. And on all of that, we have failed. And that is not just my view. Richard Haas, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, he told us
6:45 Ezra Klein? that the point of foreign policy is to influence the policies of foreign governments. By that measure, America's failed. The things that we wanted to influence, by and large, we have not. In the Atlantic, Frank Foer has reconstructed the last year of American policy. He talked to dozens of people in the Biden administration and across the Middle East. And he called it, he described what he was doing at the end, as the anatomy of a failure. Foer is a longtime journalist. He's the author of a book on Joe Biden's presidency called The Last Politician. And even as someone who's covered this extensively, I learned a lot that I didn't know from his reporting.
7:28 Ezra Klein? And so, why does he call it the anatomy of a failure? On what did we fail and why? As always, my email, [email protected] .
7:44 Ezra Klein? Frank Foer, welcome to the show.
7:46 Speaker 01 I'm happy to be with you and sorry to be with you.
7:49 Ezra Klein? Yeah, I understand that feeling. So there's this sense of opportunity, of tragedy. At the beginning of your piece, it ends up haunting the rest of it. You opened on October 6th, not October 7th, so the day before the Hamas attacks. And you have Brett McGurk, the White House coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, sitting with these Saudi diplomats, working out, quote, "a grand bargain. In exchange for a Palestinian state, Saudi Arabia would normalize diplomatic relations with Israel." Tell me about the deal that they were trying to figure out on October 6th.
8:26 Speaker 01 So we have to begin beyond the Middle East, which is that the United States is contesting large chunks of the world with China. And there was a sense within the administration that Saudi Arabia was about to slip into China's sphere. And so even though the Biden administration came into power, really prepared to be hostile to the Saudi government, to its Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the killing of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, they also wanted to make sure that the major producer of fossil fuels in the world, this country that sits in a strategic place that has all these resources, didn't slip into the wrong sphere. And so it begins talking to Mohammed bin Salman,
9:10 Speaker 01 who is very, very keen to normalize relations with Israel. Because over the course of his career as Crown Prince, he's observed American politics. He's seen how his reputation has started to slide. And he realizes that he'd rather bet on the United States as a military power. He'd rather bet on the United States as an economic power. He'd rather have American AI than Chinese AI. And so he wants to create a deal where he's able to enter into a defense pact with the United States, where we agree to protect his kingdom essentially against Iran. And we provide them with air defenses and other things in exchange for tethering himself to the US dollar.
9:54 Speaker 01 And he realizes that the centerpiece of this plan has to be normalizing relations with Israel. Because there's no way it's a treaty, a mutual defense treaty is going to pass the US Senate unless there's some carrot, some enticement for progressives who abhor Saudi Arabia to join. And so a Palestinian state is that enticement. And on October 6th, the US is sitting with the Saudis and hammering through what a blueprint for a Palestinian state would look like. And this was largely broad stroke, but there were some very specific things that they were starting to hammer out only hours before the attacks of October 7th.
10:35 Ezra Klein? So it's gonna be a theme of this conversation that I'm curious about when America was operating with a realistic view of Israel and Israeli politics and when it wasn't. And I guess this is very early here in our conversation, my first moment of skepticism, that nothing I understand to be true about Israeli politics on October 60 years ago, suggests that Netanyahu or the people in his cabinet, or the mainstream of Israeli society, would have accepted anything that would have been legible or recognizable as a Palestinian state. So you suggested McGurk here thinks he is closing in on this, thinks
11:17 Ezra Klein? that this deal is real. Do you? Do you think this deal was real?
11:23 Speaker 01 First, I think I want to just explain a little bit about what the Biden administration was really thinking, or more particularly, what Joe Biden was thinking as they began to pursue this. So Joe Biden is somebody who really does love the state of Israel. He is, he's a bona fide Zionist. And I think where he saw Netanyahu leading Israel before October 7th was in a very dangerous authoritarian direction, where all possibilities for a two-state solution were shutting down. And so he saw this as an opportunity to basically get a toehold for a Palestinian state. And more importantly than that, he wanted to tether Israel to a two-state solution because it would be good for the democratic soul of
12:08 Speaker 01 Israel, that it would be something that he saw as mitigating its turn towards right-wing theocratic authoritarianism. I mean, the question you're asking pointedly is about, I think, Israeli politics and whether Benjamin Netanyahu would ever sign off on a deal that culminated in a Palestinian state, given his lifelong aversion to uttering the words Palestinian state, and given the political coalition that he resides in.
12:38 Speaker 01 But I know a year before, almost a year before October 7th, there were conversations that Netanyahu was having with President Biden. Call it eight months before October 7th. And Netanyahu is privately telling him, look, I want to get this deal. I'm willing to ditch the far right of my coalition in order to get this deal. This is going to be the capstone achievement of his career. It would stitch him into a defense alliance with Saudi Arabia and the United States. There are all sorts of objective reasons why Israel should want this. And again, he was telling Biden, he's willing to chuck Ben Gavir and Smotrich from his political coalition in order to get this. Is he sincere in this?
13:20 Speaker 01 You know, I think that there's part of Netanyahu who always believes that he can wheedle a better deal out of whoever he's negotiating with. So will it be a real Palestinian state? You know, I think he thinks that he can keep twisting and twisting and twisting till it's a nub of what you and I might consider to be a legitimate viable Palestinian state. And he knows on the other end that the Saudis have their own domestic political reasons for achieving a nominal Palestinian state, but the Saudis don't actually care about the substance of it.
13:55 Ezra Klein? My sense from foreign policy circles around this deal was a lot of people believed it was about sidelining what gets called the Palestinian issue, that the reality of this deal was that Saudi Arabia wanted the relationship with Israel and the US, Israel wanted the relationship with Saudi Arabia. And they were kind of trying to figure out what the kind of fig leaf was that would make that sellable. But this was part of a process kicked off by the Abraham Accords, where you had Israel normalizing relationships with other Arab states without the Palestinian question and Palestinian statehood being at the center of it or being an impediment to those other sort of regional alliances. And this is thought by many to be one of the things that Sinwar and Hamas
14:39 Ezra Klein? are taking into consideration when they decide to launch this attack. They feel their cause and their possibilities kind of being besented and they need to do something to upend the chessboard. In your reporting with the administration, do they believe that? Do they think that there was some relationship between these negotiations and the sort of more desperate move Hamas then attempts?
14:59 Speaker 01 I do think that this played, you know, there's no way to know what role this precisely played in triggering Sinwar's thinking, the invasion of Israel on October 7th. I happen to think that it pretty clearly played some significant role in the timing there. And, you know, as it relates to how he would have considered Iran would have responded to this, I mean, this deal would be fundamentally threatening to Iran. So even if Sinwar didn't directly ask Iran for permission to invade Israel on October 7th, he would have known that this would have suited their geopolitical thinking at that moment.
15:39 Ezra Klein? So then comes October 7th. What is that day like inside the Biden administration?
15:45 Speaker 01 So October 7th really happens on the waning hours of October 6th because of the time lag. Brett McGurk, who'd been in his office a couple of hours earlier negotiating with the Saudis about what a Palestinian state would look like, receives a text message from Israel's ambassador to Washington, Michael Herzog, saying, "We've been attacked." And his instantaneous response is to say, "We're with you." And over that day, Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor, was actually just about to go on vacation in Europe. And so he's up through the night talking to the Israelis. And over the night, as the scale and scope of the attack start to unfold, officials
16:26 Speaker 01 are woken up and they go to their computers and they start to cull the intel. In the Situation Room, Jake Sullivan asks the military aides who are there to start going through the intelligence to see if there was something that the US had missed because the attack took the administration by as much surprise as it clearly took the Israelis. And in the morning... At about 9:00 AM, several hours into the attack, the president is officially briefed. And over the course of that day, they start showing him video footage of the atrocities that were captured and showing him photos and telling him stories.
17:07 Speaker 01 And Presidents of the United States tend to be hardened against the reports that they get about terrorist attacks. But he was visibly shaken. He starts to talk to Prime Minister Netanyahu, who also is clearly shaken by what's happened. There was this sense of fear that officials felt like they could hear in his voice. Because at that time, in these early conversations, the war within Israel was still taking place. That battle was still happening. Villages were being cleared. And the scale of the atrocities became more apparent with each passing hour. But at the very outset, Netanyahu tells the president, we're going to have to respond
17:52 Speaker 01 in some sort of severe sort of way, or we're going to be roadkill, and we need the US to be with us. And the president says, of course, we'll be with you. But what was striking to me was that even in those very, very early hours, where the sense of solidarity was the strongest and most uncomplicated, there was this sense of foreboding that members of the administration, the president's inner circle, started to feel, because they could see traces of what was coming in the coming months.
18:24 Ezra Klein? I want to bring in some of the other players here. Right now, we're hearing a lot about Israel's incursion into Lebanon and the conflict with Hezbollah. But Hezbollah begins firing rockets on October 8th. It's almost immediate. And in your reporting, this is not a coordinated...
18:45 Ezra Klein? Alliance, that there's actually annoyance on Hezbollah's part that they did not have more of a heads up from Hamas, were not prepared for this. So tell me a bit about Hezbollah early in the war here.
18:58 Speaker 01 So Hassan Nasrallah learns about October 7th, and there's no doubt that he's happy with the achievement of having delegitimized Israel, of catching them with their pants down on October 7th. That gives him great satisfaction. But on the other hand, he is irked that he got no heads up about this, that essentially he'd hoped to execute someday a version of Hamas's game plan, and he knew that he would never be able to go into that well again because Israel would be prepared for that kind of attack. So at the same time, he's under pressure from his own base to show that he's willing to be strong in the
19:39 Speaker 01 face of this opportunity. And so he starts lobbing missiles, projectiles in the direction of northern Israel. But he's always calibrating his response because he knows that in the wider Lebanese polity, there's no appetite for war, that the traumas of the 2006 war are lingering, and he doesn't feel like he's in a position to fully join the fight. And so from his perspective, he's going through the steps. They're terrible on the Israeli end because there are a lot of people who are being driven from their homes, but he's not escalating to his fullest capacity at the start of the war.
20:21 Ezra Klein? When you say he's under pressure from his base, I don't think the politics of Hezbollah are well understood here. I would not say I understand them well. It is sometimes spoken about as a terrorist group. It is sometimes spoken about as a direct Iranian client. It has been in Lebanon in a somewhat strange way. How would you describe what Hezbollah is?
20:46 Speaker 01 It is an army. It is a religious organization. It is a quasi-governmental organization that presides over large stretches of Lebanon, and it is indeed a client of Iran. It's all of these things. So there's a balancing act that Nasrallah is constantly going through, where he's trying to calibrate his interests in order to promote his long-term ideological and theocratic goals while he's trying to maintain Hezbollah's place within Lebanese society.
21:25 Ezra Klein? There's a view among Israelis that really all of these players are working under the direct orders of Iran. I heard this about Hamas early on. Certainly you heard it about Hezbollah, about the Houthis. The way this emerges in your reporting, though, is much more fractious. So you mentioned already that Nasrallah doesn't have a heads up from Hamas about the attack. But you also write that after Hezbollah begins launching rockets, that McGurk received a message via back channel that he used to communicate with the Iranians. They wanted the White House to know that they opposed Hezbollah's entry into the war and were trying to calm tensions. So should I take that at face value? Should I take that as Iran playing a double game?
22:09 Ezra Klein? Like, how do you, at a number of points in this piece, Iran seems to not want escalation. Did reporting the story change your view of Iran and its role and its desires here at all?
22:22 Speaker 01 I think Iran does wish the destruction of Israel. Iran is an enemy, a sworn enemy of the United States. But I was pretty surprised to learn about the the real activity that's happening behind the scenes. That the back channel that you just alluded to is one of several back channels that are used to communicate between the United States and Iran. And that there are these moments where Iran can see that the world is about to move in what from its Perspective is a dangerous direction and it's trying to signal to the United States very clearly what its intentions are. And so the event that you're alluding to was four days after October 7th.
23:08 Speaker 01 And Israel was convinced that it was seeing all of these signs that Hezbollah was about to do more than launch rockets in its direction, that it was about to launch a major campaign against the Israelis. They felt that they could see significant mobilization that was happening close to the Israeli border. And so they have to make a decision at that moment. Do they launch a preemptive attack against Hezbollah? And they were distinctly not in a strategic frame of mind four days after October 7th. And they were seeing shadows in that moment because they were so spooked by their failure to miss all the signals that preceded October 7th.
23:49 Speaker 01 They were determined not to let that happen again with Hezbollah. And so they called the White House. They say they're about to launch this attack. And the United States is scanning the intelligence and they're just not seeing what the Israelis are seeing. And at that moment, McGurk gets this message from the Iranians saying, look, we don't want Hezbollah to attack at this moment. And the administration relays that to the Israelis. And the Israelis were so close on October 11th to launching an attack. The airplanes had been scrambled. They were just minutes away from launching this. And one of the telltale signs that they thought that they saw on that day
24:30 Speaker 01 was that they felt like paragliders were mimicking the attacks that Hamas had launched. But this time they were coming from southern Lebanon. And they called the White House and they said paragliders are flying into Israel. Well, as it turned out, those paragliders were a flock of birds. And it was really by the thinnest of margins that that wider war was averted four days after October 7th.
24:57 Ezra Klein? One thing that's going to come up as we continue going through this is what kind of both support America is giving Israel and what kind of leverage it has in this relationship, really. But this is a moment where the support seemed to me to have been very consequential, right? As you say, Iran has a stated goal of destroying Israel. I don't think there's any real reason to doubt that they believe that sincerely. But the Biden administration is extremely clear and moves warships into place to make clear that if there is a significant Iranian-driven effort to sort of open up a northern front, that they're not just fighting Israel, they're fighting the US. Can you talk a bit about
25:37 Ezra Klein? the role the Biden administration played and what it did materially to sort of shift the balance of power and threat that Hezbollah or Iran might have been seeing at that moment?
25:50 Speaker 01 So the administration shifted carrier groups into the region, and the administration had been practicing in anticipation of a confrontation with Iran. There were war games, military exercises, that they had conducted at the beginning of the year called Juniper Oak. And so they figured out how to best message to the Iranians that there would be a serious cost that the Iranians would pay for escalation. And so they go through those steps right after October 7th. And I think that that does have an effect of deterring Hezbollah, deterring Iran. That's meaningful. On the other side, the administration sends a message to Israel. And so I just described to you October 11th. One thing
26:33 Speaker 01 that Biden told Netanyahu very, very directly was, if Hezbollah preemptively attacks you, we're with you. If you go and preemptively attack Hezbollah, well, then you're on your own. And that's a message that the administration delivers repeatedly to Israel over the course of the year. And I think it's one of those places where the administration's leverage actually is, as you say, successful in deterring Israel from going deeper and deeper into the regional war that the United States is determined to avoid.
27:29 Ezra Klein? You say that a agenda emerges inside the Biden administration fairly quickly and that there's a set of tensions really at the heart of it. They want to fully support Israel, particularly at that early moment. Israel's been attacked in a genuinely brutal, horrific way. They want to avoid a regional war. They want to liberate the hostages and Americans are among the hostages. They also believe that there is no long-term answer for Israeli security. That is not a peace deal and a sort of self-determination deal for Palestinians. So they want to sort of build out some kind of political horizon here so that there is some answer for Palestinians.
28:14 Ezra Klein? And they want to revive the Saudi deal. So that's pretty quickly a lot of different goals that maybe don't all fit together.
28:23 Speaker 01 I think the question that gets asked of Israeli officials and that basically everybody in the world starts to ask themselves as it becomes clear, okay, Israel's going to respond to October 7th. The question is, how is this going to end? And what's the escape from this war? Does it result in Israel reoccupying Gaza, which is a terrible outcome that not even the Israelis seem prepared to entertain? Does it result in Hamas, the perpetrators of this attack, staying in power at the end of this war? I spent a lot of time with diplomats over the course of the last five or six months as I reported this story. And being in the bubble of diplomacy is...
29:10 Speaker 01 Kind of an incredible thing because diplomats are essentially paid to be optimistic. And there's this very dire question of how does it end is something that almost immediately starts to stoke elaborate blueprints, elaborate visions for how there can be a better world on the other side of this conflict. And that's the thing that I think ultimately stokes US policy, that they know that they're looking for these short-term wins very early in the war. They want to reduce the scale and scope of Israelis' invasion plans so that it's not just 30,000 troops barreling through Gaza.
29:52 Speaker 01 But they want to get to this place where there's some way to reconstruct Gaza, to get a better government there, to get to restore the possibilities of this Saudi normalization deal, because that's the prize at the end for the United States, for the Israelis, and in their view, for the Palestinians, because it revives the prospect of a Palestinian state which is languished for so many years.
30:17 Ezra Klein? So let me pick up on that because now we're back in this early period, Israel's deciding what kind of response to do in Gaza. The administration wants them to do something more limited and counterterrorism oriented, don't do a major ground invasion, do surgical raids and strikes against Hamas' leadership and infrastructure. Israel refuses on that, right? They basically don't do that. But what they do, and I guess I hadn't read this before, is they do try to, or at least Netanyahu tries to signal he's taking a middle path. And what I guess he tells the Americans, according to you, is that Israel would send a fraction of the soldiers it initially intended in order to capture Gaza City.
31:02 Ezra Klein? After a brief pause there, the army would continue to con unis, which they thought of as the epicenter of the tunnel network, and the war would be over by Christmas. So in your reporting, this is what the Biden administration is hearing in late October, that Israel is planning a ground invasion that will be over within functionally eight weeks?
31:26 Speaker 01 Yes. It's actually one of the things that really stunned me the most as I was reporting this story is that when I talked to Israeli officials, they kept going back to this conversation that Netanyahu and Biden had had where Biden told Netanyahu not to go in, where he insisted on a counterterrorism model of fighting this war. And I was really surprised that he'd been that direct. I mean, it was clear when he went to Israel right after October 7th that he was telling them to avoid all of the mistakes that the United States had made in Afghanistan and Iraq. But I assumed that he wanted Israel to launch some sort
32:07 Speaker 01 of invasion against Hamas because he talked about dismantling Hamas. So I was kind of dumbfounded that this conversation had happened and American officials were really somewhat reluctant to talk about that conversation because I guess in some sense, it shows that there was this bigger gap between the United States and Israel at the very earliest phases of the war. And Biden was direct sometimes, but so much of his approach right after October 7th, and I think throughout a lot of that first stage of the war, was to conduct his foreign policy through Socratic questions. He would give Netanyahu advice, and it was
32:48 Speaker 01 pointed advice and it was clear what he wanted, but it was mostly done in the way of nudging him in the right direction as opposed to insisting or dictating or lecturing or any of the other alternatives. And so there is this scaled back version. I mean, the other thing that dumbfounded me is that Israel didn't have a plan on the shelves for invading Gaza, that Israel had spent all of this time clearly thinking in a very deep sort of way about what a war with Hezbollah would look like. They were planning for that war. They were thinking what it would be like to engage in a full-scale conflict with Iran. But they'd overlooked this major strategic question. And so they were wildly improvising in the
33:32 Speaker 01 aftermath of October 7th. You know, in the state of shock and of trauma and of exhaustion, they were drawing up plans for invading Gaza and there were major omissions. They never talked about how they would end up shutting down the smuggling tunnels that resupplied Hamas. It's a very, very glaring omission in their war plan, but their war plans were just not that well conceived.
33:57 Ezra Klein? This is another point, though, where when I read what I guess United States officials believed, or what you're saying they believed, it strikes me as implausible, right? I don't, I don't believe they really believed or should have believed that they had some path to Palestinian statehood on October 6th. If they did, I think they were working with an out of date understanding of Israeli politics. And, and maybe that's true. I sort of think they have been working with an out of date understanding of Israeli politics. But when the ground invasion began, nobody I talked to thought it was going to be over by Christmas. You have Israel going into Gaza, into urban fighting. They are never going to allow Hamas to rule there.
34:41 Ezra Klein? They have no day after plan. They will not talk about a day after plan. They will not privately speak about a day after plan. They're going to have all kinds of unforeseen things happen. I think hearing that the Biden administration, at least in your reporting, was told and maybe even bought that this would be over by Christmas, even though nobody would tell them how it was going to be over, or what was supposed to happen after it was over, and some, I guess, other authority is ruling in Gaza to be determined later, which part of the administration is fooling itself here?
35:17 Speaker 01 I think you're pointing out this contradiction or this naivete in a way that's extremely persuasive, especially in retrospect. The one thing that I could say in the administration's defense here is that foreign policy is conducted by human beings, and it's conducted in this cauldron where the United States and this administration, because of emotional attachments, because of strategic attachments, is kind of locked in this alliance with the Israelis.
35:56 Speaker 01 And it is like a naive, wishful optimism that they have about Israel's capacity to pivot to its next phase. I think that- The administration always harbored this sense that once Israel got over the shock and trauma of October 7th, there would be a moment where the country would start to recalibrate and would start to achieve some sort of equilibrium that would permit strategic thinking. And they would be able to think about the way that the country is perceived in the wider world. And they would be able to recognize that the possibility of completing this grand project of reconciling
36:40 Speaker 01 with the Sunni Gulf states was such a powerful enticement that they would be able to at least go through the process of starting to establish the scaffolding for Palestinian statehood. And so in their head, they thought, okay, they're going to win these two battles that they've promised that they're going to fight, that they're going to exact all of this damage against Hamas, maybe at a terrible cost in the matter of two months. And then they're going to pivot to what we've been telling them they should do all along, which is counterterrorism. And that they continue to prosecute this war, but in a much more targeted and strategic sort of way.
37:22 Speaker 01 And the relationship between the United States and Israel at the level of a military to military relationship is so deep, it's so embedded, it's so intertwined. And so it's not just Netanyahu telling Biden this. It's the IDF telling CENTCOM this. And so there are a lot of relationships there that are fully trusting and that are professional. They're not political.
37:50 Ezra Klein? But there is a way in which reality keeps intruding on this. I mean, what you describe as a process here, and it was revelatory for me. I didn't know this. Is a repeated process by which war aims are expanding modestly every couple of months. The war timeline is expanding modestly, at least in what Israelis are telling Americans, every couple of months. One of the dynamics you describe, particularly on the Israeli side, but it appears to have been influential on the American side, too, is that one reason their war aims are expanding is because they are taking fewer casualties than they thought they would be, that in some ways, the war is going more easily for Israel than was expected.
38:35 Ezra Klein? At the same time, everybody knows, everybody can see, that it is proving much more destructive and lethal for Gazans than was expected, than was hoped. By, you know, the March State of the Union, Biden is talking about this in pretty clear ways. I want to play a clip from that.
38:56 Speaker 02 Israel has a added burden because Hamas hides and operates among the civilian population like cowards, under hospitals, daycare centers, and all the like. Israel also has a fundamental responsibility, though, to protect innocent civilians in Gaza.
39:19 Speaker 02 This war
39:25 Speaker 02 has taken a greater toll on innocent civilians than all previous wars in Gaza combined. More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of whom are not Hamas. Thousands and thousands of innocents, women and children, girls and boys, also orphaned. Nearly 2 million were Palestinians under bombardment or displacement. Homes destroyed, neighbors in rubble, cities in ruin, families without food, water, medicine. It's heartbreaking.
39:56 Ezra Klein? So that's Biden.
39:57 Speaker 01 Yes.
39:57 Ezra Klein? Even as this war has become bigger than what the Biden administration initially signs on to, it doesn't ever seem that there is a view that it needs to be constrained, right? If it's less costly on Israel, they can keep going. If it's more costly on the Gazans, I guess that's sad. Like, how is the administration thinking about these two things internally and intention? And whether to do anything about it?
40:23 Speaker 01 So I think there's two parts to this. There's the question of humanitarian aid, where you have at least quarters of the administration. And I think the president himself, after a certain point, start to get super frustrated with the Israelis about their inability to let humanitarian aid in. And when the year turns, I think the administration begins to believe that they've made progress with the Israelis on the aid question. They start to see an uptick in the delivery of aid. And then there is this fundamental problem with the Israeli war plan, which is that it clears territory, but it never holds territory. And therefore, anarchy ends up following the Israelis.
41:07 Speaker 01 And just given the state of pure desperation that exists in Gaza, it becomes very, very hard to distribute aid. And they never really solve the problem of humanitarian aid. Then there's this second problem of bombing and of civilian casualties in the war. And I think the administration feels like the battle for Gaza City was especially brutal. And they think that Israel may be following essentially the American playbook for how they think about hitting high-value targets in densely populated areas. But they also know that the toll is extremely high. And I think that they think that they've guided Israel, after a certain point, to
41:51 Speaker 01 a better model of how they fight war, where they're more concerned about civilian casualties. And so, everything that the administration warned about on October 8th, about conducting warfare in densely populated areas. Populated areas is true. It's just inherently horrific. It just results in the type of heartbreaking, staggering casualty counts that we've seen in this war. So again, I mean, maybe we're bumping up against your frustrations with the administration. They believe that they're racking up small wins, but they're not ending the war.
42:30 Ezra Klein? You talked about reporting inside the diplomatic bubble, and it made me think about something I've often found in my own reporting on government work. Which is, you often have people working incredibly, incredibly hard internally or in bilateral negotiations or in difficult processes. And to them, they're racking up these big wins, right? We got X number more trucks of aid delivered. But to the rest of the world, they're barely changing the situation at all, right? What can be heroic in terms of the amount of work it took to, say, in this case, get the Israelis to agree to something. To people watching the bombing of Gaza seems like not only doing nothing, but actually, I mean, you're still giving the weapons. I mean, there's this almost perverse thing that happens.
43:15 Ezra Klein? Biden, I believe, announces it at the State of the Union, where because Israel's not letting in aid, America builds a pier. Right? It builds its own pier into Gaza to airlift food in. The appearance of being a disaster, we end up, I think, taking it down after 20 days. There are food drops from our planes that because so many people are starving, there, people are fighting each other on the beaches to try to get these military rations. But but throughout this whole period, there's just this very, I'm sorry, from the outside, this very strange thing happening. Where America is saying to Israel, you need to let in more aid, like humanitarian aid is one of our central tenants here.
43:56 Ezra Klein? But we're giving them the bombs used to flatten more and more of Gaza and not demanding changes in the war structure or the war aims in any major way. I think to a lot of people, you know, who have just been following this, it felt incoherent. I'm curious how you understand it.
44:15 Speaker 01 I think your description of the way that government officials work is probably a pretty accurate one. I traveled with Blinken to the Middle East at the beginning of May, and he was meeting with the UN coordinator for aid in Gaza. He was getting all of these numbers. He was actually meeting with Palestinian refugees from Gaza who ended up in Jordan. And it wasn't just him. It's the whole apparatus. When you look at a problem and you start to make incremental gains, you start to feel good about them because you know you're dealing with kind of intractable problems and you're stuck in the weeds. And there are certain metrics that look like they're sometimes ticking in the right direction, and you take
44:59 Speaker 01 those wins. And I do think the other thing that should be said is, what is the counterfactual here? Is the counterfactual that the United States ultimately withdraws its military assistance to Israel and that Israel then switches its policy, right? That's kind of the counterfactual vision, right?
45:25 Ezra Klein? I can imagine a lot of counterfactuals here. But yes, I think one counterfactual that was often proposed is that the US sets very sharp limits on what Israel can do or makes clear demands about what it has to do if it's going to keep receiving the flow of American weaponry.
45:45 Speaker 01 Right. And so that then depends on a willingness in the administration to essentially push their relationship beyond the brink, and they have to be willing to tolerate that relationship going over the brink. And I just don't think that they were ever prepared to do that for reasons that are kind of built into the relationship between Israel and the United States, but also have to do with the nature of the Middle East, where the United States is involved in a proxy war against Iran. And the administration may not have wanted to be In this proxy war, and they may have desired to escape it, but that there's a
46:29 Speaker 01 certain point when they decide that it's in America's interest to continue fighting this proxy war. And so there are these larger geostrategic questions. And I kept asking in my reporting, was there ever a moment where this was seriously considered? Was there ever a moment where the United States was intent on essentially willing to go to the breaking point in the relationship? And that that never really happened. The closest you get is to the delay of shipments in arms, which didn't really change Israeli policy. And I don't think that they were ever willing to go much beyond delaying that
47:10 Speaker 01 shipment. It was, as I report in the piece, it was something that was decided essentially in spiteful anger without ever figuring out how they were going to message it to the Israelis. And I do think that that is a big administration failure is that they do get misled by Netanyahu pretty consistently. And then they keep going back and treating him like a good faith actor. That is a core problem in the way that the administration has conducted its foreign policy. But I don't, I don't think that they were ever able to imaginatively consider an alternative to that approach.
47:47 Ezra Klein? There's this moment in March when Israel is considering invading Rafa. And Biden gives an interview to Jonathan Capehart on MSNBC. And he says that invading Rafa would for him cross a quote red line. What is your red line with Prime Minister Netanyahu? Do you have a red line? For instance, would invasion of Rafa, would you have urged him not to do? Would that be a red line?
48:14 Speaker 02 It is a red line, but I'm never going to leave Israel. The defense of Israel is still critical. So there's no red line. I'm going to cut off all weapons so that I don't have the Iron Dome to protect them. They don't have. But there's red lines that if he crosses, he cannot have 30,000 more Palestinians dead as a consequence of going after. There's other ways to deal, to get to, to deal with the, with, with the trauma caused by Hamas.
48:41 Ezra Klein? That's strong language for the US president to use in public.
48:47 Ezra Klein? Then Israel invades Rafa and nothing happens. In some very straightforward way, isn't that a weakening of America's influence? A sort of signal that the words are empty?
49:03 Speaker 01 I mean, I can explain to you what happened from the perspective of the administration, which is that when they delivered the red line to Netanyahu, it was delivered as you need to come up with a plan for protecting civilians in the course of invading Rafa. It wasn't that the invasion itself was the red line. Now, I think the president expressed it differently in this interview with Capehart, and there's no resolving that disjunction. But when I would talk to people in the administration, their response would be, you know what? Actually, Israel altered its invasion plans. Instead of going into the city and clearing the city in a block-by-block neighborhood neighborhood
49:46 Speaker 01 sort of way, they did it in this much more pinpoint way where they encircled, they focused on the smuggling tunnels and battling Hamas battalions without the same sort of casualties that they had in Khan Yunis in Gaza City. And I think that there's a case that they could make to themselves plausibly that they were successful in reshaping that plan. And the problem is, is that they were very sympathetic to the aim ultimately. They felt like, OK, you know, we don't want this war to continue, but we do want them to deal with these smuggling tunnels. And so there's no getting around the fact that this is all extremely muddled policy
50:29 Speaker 01 that makes the United States look weak because they are establishing these limits, and then those limits are being transgressed.
50:38 Ezra Klein? I think sometimes people overstate the leverage America has over Israel. My view is that if Biden had said, you can do counterterrorism operations in Gaza. If you can't invade, if you invade, we're not arming you. Even if Biden had the capacity congressionally to do that, I think Israel still invades Gaza. I think something that the Biden administration is endlessly balancing here is the fear that, yeah, they will just rupture the relationship and then they don't have influence over Israel at all. That said, the critique I'm getting at in all this is from my reporting, talking to people with all kinds of different foreign policy views on this, the view is really, America's abandoned nothing, right? Small alterations to war plans, yes, maybe.
51:23 Ezra Klein? But to give a good example, throughout this whole disaster, one of America's and Biden's continued views is that one of the only plausible answers to Gaza is a revived Palestinian authority, that there need to be Palestinian governing partners that America can work with, that Israel can work with. During this period, Israel, under Smotrich, is withholding tax revenues from the PA and allowing for quite a lot of settler violence and doing quite a bit more to break them. And one thing that America never just does, which I think is well within its power, is to say that if you keep doing this, then we are not behind you, right?
52:06 Ezra Klein? We are not going to arm you while you foreclose the political horizon and the political partners that are core to, in this case, Joe Biden's long-term view. But America doesn't do that. In the end, it seems like it functionally was a blank check. And now the Biden administration or anybody else looks around, there's nothing of what they wanted to build out some kind of alternative political pathway out of this. It never seems like we were committed, we were committed to their strategy, but we were never committed to our own.
52:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, I called my piece in anatomy of a failure because despite all of the energetic, earnest diplomacy that the administration has committed over the course of the last year, they don't have really anything to show for it. And I kept thinking about the counterexamples. And I agree with you that America's leverage over Israel is vastly overstated. And we have some counterexamples where the US cut off military aid in Egypt and Bahrain, and we weren't able to achieve any of the policy ends that we wanted to achieve in either of those instances. I keep thinking about past chapters of American
53:21 Speaker 01 diplomacy. And whether it's Kissinger, Baker, or Holbrook, or many others, when you have diplomacy that is forceful, you're able to thread needles, you're able to achieve multiple ends. And what's especially painful to me, after having done all of this reporting, is that there is a vision of a better world on the other side of this war. It may not be the most plausible vision, but it beats all of the alternatives. And having that vision in your head, and then it seems to me that it's incumbent upon the administration
54:02 Speaker 01 to use every tool, every bludgeon, every wrench and screwdriver in their diplomatic toolkit to achieve those sorts of results. And sometimes that would mean having very contentious arguments in public with the Israelis. But it doesn't necessarily mean abandoning the alliance. I think that there is, it's not even a middle ground, there's some sort of, there is an alternative path. It's hard to imagine, and it would be hard to achieve, but I refuse to believe that it doesn't exist.
54:36 Ezra Klein? But it doesn't seem to me like it was ever tried. So I think you see this very clearly in the various negotiations for a ceasefire and hostage release.
54:48 Ezra Klein? And there are many iterations of this, but I think very notably, there's this period over the summer and Joe Biden comes out, it's the middle of the day, I remember sitting in the office when this happened, and he gives this to me very surprising speech where he says, "We have this deal negotiated. It is the deal that came from the Israeli negotiators." And he describes it and outlines it and really puts his own weight as the president behind it. And the sort of read of this is he's trying to box Netanyahu in. It is a deal that has been heavily crafted by Israeli negotiators, but not a deal Israel, or for that matter, on some level Hamas was quite ready to respond to. But then you report on this quite a bit. I've talked to a lot of people on multiple sides of the ceasefire
55:33 Ezra Klein? negotiations. You can argue that there was never an alignment of views on that that could have worked at all in the sense that Hamas does not want to be destroyed and Israel is not going to accept anything but what Netanyahu views to be the destruction of Hamas. But to the extent there was something endlessly being negotiated, it seems like they keep getting to agreement and then Netanyahu comes back with three more conditions, five more conditions, seven more conditions. So Biden puts his prestige behind the deal, the deal keeps failing and Biden does nothing.
56:06 Speaker 01 He doesn't do nothing. I mean, he is involved in arm twisting along the way.
56:12 Ezra Klein? Well, what arm twisting? What is used here to twist the arm? What leverage is brought to... The complaint that has been given to me by people who've been trying to make this deal happen is that the Americans never use any leverage.
56:22 Speaker 01 Yeah. I mean, there is a point at which I think that that critique is true, but there's this disjunction that happens throughout where the negotiators, David Barnett especially, the head of Mossad, who's leading the Israeli negotiations, keeps signing off on plans. They would present Hamas with an offer that's within the range of what Qatar and Egypt expect would be acceptable to Hamas. And so that happens. And then there are various moments where Netanyahu undermines his own negotiations. And in July, he undermines them by creating a whole litany of new demands that he wants to see
57:06 Speaker 01 accomplished. And then there's the Haniya assassination. But by the middle of August, Biden has had tough conversations where you're correct, he's not using any threats beyond saying that he's ready to blame Netanyahu for scuppering the talks. But that seems like it's enough to get Netanyahu to scale back the demands that he's making. And he's committed, at least in private at that point, to something that seems like it's very close to what Hamas is willing to accept. And it's important to remember that over the course of this war, Hamas is a very difficult negotiating partner, that their demands continue to fluctuate throughout this period. They go
57:49 Speaker 01 through periods where they seemed more inclined to negotiation and less inclined to negotiation. So I don't think it's, you know, we're not pinning everything on Netanyahu here. But there is tragically this moment, you know, in the middle of August, where it feels like they're within realm of settling some of the trickiest parts of this. And there was a lot of optimism that they were going to get there. And there was a faith, untested, that Netanyahu's private commitments would end up yielding out. We can never know, because the killing of the hostages at the end of that month ended up essentially destroying the talks. And I don't hear anybody talking about anything getting done before the end of this administration.
58:35 Ezra Klein? I spent time talking with families of hostages in Israel and kind of following the political fighting over this. And this, I think, reflects real division in Israeli society and one that I think if I were a policymaker there, I would find very hard to know how to think about, which is, on the one hand, you want to bring the hostages home, that should be an overriding. Not just political priority, but humane priority. And on the other hand, October 7th, on some level, traces its existence back to these very lopsided deals that Israel made to get a soldier back.
59:18 Ezra Klein? And Hamas's view that it is profitable to keep Israeli hostages. You get huge, you know, and in your view, very favorably termed swaps. And I don't believe there was ever a deal that Netanyahu was going to accept. In part, and I think is on some of those reasonable, that he didn't want the aftermath of that. And also to somebody who wanted the war to continue, or so that's a widespread belief about him. But I guess that's one question here that that many people have suggested to me that Netanyahu's interest in the ceasefire negotiations is to maintain American support. He's got to be in the negotiation. He doesn't need the negotiation to conclude.
1:00:00 Ezra Klein? He just needs to be seen as continuing in it because that's part of what the Biden administration needs in order to feel like there is some kind of political horizon here. But that in truth, he was never inclined, never wanted to, it never fit even his war aims for this to conclude in a way that he has a political deal with Hamas, that the only end to this is when he decides Hamas is gone. It cannot declare any kind of victory.
1:00:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think that that's probably the case. I think that Netanyahu is somebody over the course of his career, as I know has been discussed on the show many times before, is somebody who loathes making these wrenching decisions that resolving this war requires, that to get the hostages back, to declare a ceasefire would mean leaving Sinwar alive. It would mean that there was a convincing argument that his political opponents that Hamas could make that Israel lost the war, no matter how much damage they inflicted.
1:01:10 Speaker 01 Did Hamas's capabilities over the course of it. And he seems, not just for matters of his own political survival, but out of, I think, an even deeper inability to make such a tough strategic decision, frozen by this moment, frozen by the moment where he's forced to choose. And that freeze comes at a terrible human cost. You're correct that he is, he's not the only obstacle, but he is, he is an obstacle.
1:01:45 Ezra Klein? I think this parcel also reflects the absence of any answer, really on either, on any side of this, for a theory of what the, the so-called day after looks like. I've begun to find that language frustrating. Um, one thing that has surprised me is, so Netanyahu has never come up with a view. There was demands in his war cabinet by Benny Gantz and others that he needed to come up with some kind of day after plan. Eventually, Gantz leaves the war cabinet in part over, you know, or says in part over the absence of that plan.
1:02:22 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:02:22 Ezra Klein? Gantz never offers a plan of his own, right? Uh, you, you, there's no Gantz plan for the day after, which I think is one reason his star is somewhat fallen. He, in Israeli politics, he's not found an alternative theory of this to offer people that actually sets him apart from Netanyahu. The Biden administration, a number of times, suggests things that it thinks should be a day after plan, like having the Palestinian Authority partially in charge of Gaza. Netanyahu rejects that publicly and we just kind of shrug our shoulders and move on. And so one thing that has always struck me as strange about these deals, and, and one reason that there never was going to be one, is that there's never been any alignment in what is supposed to happen at the end of the war.
1:03:07 Ezra Klein? And no power, including the United States, ever seems to have been able to force some kind of, even internal to the Israelis' vision of it.
1:03:17 Speaker 01 Any sort of plan that would have happened would entail bringing Arab allies into Gaza. And so I would talk to diplomats from various Gulf states or various other Arab countries, and they would draw up their own elaborate white papers. They were earnestly participating in a group called the Quince that brought several of these Arab countries together in consultation with the United States to begin thinking about what a post-war would look like. And I think that the biggest unreality was that Hamas would disappear significantly enough from Gaza that some other entity would be able to come in and replace it, or would
1:03:58 Speaker 01 be willing to secure the Gaza Strip, knowing that they would be targets for Hamas. And so these countries would commit to doing various things, but then they would kind of laugh behind closed doors about those commitments that they'd just made because they knew that they were fundamentally implausible.
1:04:41 Ezra Klein? So I think this brings us to the last month, when the thing that the administration seems to have long feared, the expansion of the war to the north, happened. Israel has gone full force into Lebanon. Massive airstrikes decapitated much of Hezbollah's leadership. There are now ground operations. There are now missile exchanges with Iran. And this thing that we have been telling Israel not to do, Israel is doing. And it's not like America is saying, "Stop." America is absolutely four-square behind Israel, is coordinating on knocking down Iranian missiles. I'm not saying it shouldn't be. I'm pretty, compared to other things happening,
1:05:25 Ezra Klein? I'm actually quite sympathetic to Israel's need to strike Hezbollah. You can't just plausibly have, you know, a group firing rockets and keeping the entire northern side of your country uninhabitable. But again, this expansion happened, the thing that America keeps saying, which is like the need for some strategic theory of like what to do next is not there. So it seems incredibly plausible right now that Israel's barreled towards this thing that I know America wanted to prevent, which is simultaneous occupation of Gaza functionally, and even maybe southern Lebanon for some indefinite period of time.
1:06:08 Ezra Klein? And even as Israel did the thing we told them not to do, including quite recently, we are fully there with them. As a relationship, it just has made us seem, I think, very weak.
1:06:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, there's no, there's no question about that. And I think that the big problem was is that all the diplomacy around Lebanon essentially hinged on there being a ceasefire in Gaza, that there was a side agreement that was negotiated that would have allowed Hezbollah to walk back as soon as there was a ceasefire. And so all of the diplomatic eggs were in that one basket. And then when ceasefire talks collapsed, there was really no longer any plausible mechanism for reining in the conflict in the north. There was no vision for how Hezbollah would be walked back. And so at a certain point, I think the United States is fundamentally sympathetic to the
1:07:07 Speaker 01 aims of pushing back Hezbollah. But I think the other part of this is that the US actually tends to underestimate Israel's military capacity. When Israel invaded Gaza just after, after October 7th, the United States thought that Israel would take pretty heavy casualties in Gaza, that it didn't want to see Israel take. And they were pretty surprised by how well. Israel performed in Gaza. And I think the same is true right now as it relates to Lebanon. I think part of what the United States feared was that Israel would enter into a war with Hezbollah, where they would not be successful, and that that would be the thing that would end up dragging the United States into a conflict.
1:07:50 Speaker 01 And so as the United States has watched the pager operation, watched the Israelis take out rocket sites, watched them take out, decapitate Hezbollah's leadership, I think the United States has been genuinely surprised by Israel's success. And having seen that success, they're prepared to let Israel go further than they initially thought they would be willing to let them go. Even though these big questions occur to American diplomats as well, there's no real diplomatic plan that they have at this point for reining this in.
1:08:22 Ezra Klein? Is there any red line for us? I mean, let's say that tomorrow or next week Netanyahu decides it is time for something that he has often entertained, which is this is the moment and they're going to destroy the Iranian nuclear facilities, or what they believe to be the Iranian nuclear facilities, and further degrade Iran's just military capability, right? Within the Israeli arguments right now, there is a view that this is a moment to simply reshape the balance of power between Israel and all of its significant enemies there. Israel believes that an Iranian nuclear weapon would be an existential threat to Israel.
1:09:05 Ezra Klein? They don't believe America's been serious enough about stopping it, and maybe now is the moment. America doesn't want Israel to do that. It really does not want an Iranian-Israeli war. But is there actually a line here?
1:09:21 Speaker 01 I think that there's just so much ambivalence within the administration. So this is the theme, I think, that follows throughout all of this. At the same time, they say that they don't want any of these things. There is this fundamental sympathy to the Israeli strategic perspective. And this would not be a universal view, but it wouldn't surprise me if Israel had a plan for actually taking advantage of Iran's moment of strategic weakness to inflict some sort of lasting severe damage on Iran, that there's not a huge part of their brains and their hearts that would be Cheering that on or would be supportive of it. But on the other hand, there is all this.
1:10:02 Speaker 01 Joe Biden is defined by this extreme caution that he has about escalation. That no matter how sympathetic he is to the Ukrainians or to the Israelis, he's a child of the atomic age who remembers hiding under his school desk and who fears the prospects of escalation. So I think, from what I understand, and I have to plead a huge amount of humility here, in order for Israel to take out the Iranian nuclear sites, say, they would need some pretty hefty measure of US support in order to pull that off. And if Biden says publicly he's not going to provide it, I have a hard time imagining that privately he would provide it.
1:10:46 Ezra Klein? Why do you have a hard time imagining that? I mean, isn't that the story of the last year in a lot of respects?
1:10:53 Speaker 01 I don't think that he's actually affirmatively supplied Israel with such a significant set of American assets in order to accomplish something that he truly wants to stop.
1:11:08 Ezra Klein? I've talked to a number of both Israeli and American policymakers about what the goal has been in Israel's response, right? What are they trying to achieve? And what should the goal be? And I would describe, I think, the core divergence as the Americans think Israel will only, can only be made safe through a deal with the Palestinians. And the Israelis believe that what will make them safe is deterrence.
1:11:43 Speaker 01 Right.
1:11:44 Ezra Klein? And the Israelis do not believe that what happened on October 7th was that they had not come to a deal with Palestinians early enough. They believe that their, the sense of deterrence for them in the region, the belief that if you attack Israel, you will be met with overwhelming force and you will die. And the people around you will die. That that had diminished. And when I talked to a number of people in Israel, you know, when I would push on this, and you know, they were never really that interested in entertaining day after plans. What they felt they were reestablishing, and what it looks to me like explains a lot of their actions, is they always say, we live in a different neighborhood than you do.
1:12:25 Ezra Klein? And in our neighborhood, the sense of weakness is lethal. And even the people we want to make deals with, like the Saudis, they want to see us as strong too. And so the thing that we need to reestablish is a sense that to try to harm us will bring down enormous consequences. And that that difference between what the Israelis think they were fighting for here and what the Americans wanted them to be fighting for, seems to me like it has been really at the heart of the last year.
1:12:58 Speaker 01 I think that's right. I think that's right. I think that, yeah, there are all these moments that I heard. There's one moment last March, Tony Blinken was suffering personally because of the war. There was an encampment outside of his house. His, his wife's car was getting splattered with paint. He was, there was all sorts of terrible things that were being chanted about him. And so he was feeling the war personally at home. And he goes in to talk to the cabinet, the Israeli cabinet, and he says, look, I've been traveling all around the world. I've been taking all of these hits on behalf of Israel. And I have to tell you that at some point in the future, you're going to come to regret
1:13:43 Speaker 01 the way in which you've allowed your image to be degraded around the world. You're going to regret some of the things that you've done during this period. And I know that's going to catch up with you at some point. So I'm asking you, and this was in the context of humanitarian aid, to take these steps now in order to prevent that. And of course, he wasn't met with agreement. And there's this fantasy that I think the administration had, where there would be a moment where they would negotiate a deal with the Saudis for normalization. And then Biden would present the deal to the Israeli public. And he would force the question, in essence, are you going to choose this pathway for yourselves
1:14:27 Speaker 01 where you're rejecting this brighter future? Are you going to choose this other pathway where you're integrated into this larger American strategic fabric, where you get to reap all of these benefits of this alliance, where you're no longer a pariah in the Muslim world? And he was going to try to use his rhetorical power in order to convince the Israeli public to take a different path, because he knew, I think, on some level that Netanyahu was never going to agree to whatever plan he hatched as it related to Saudi Arabia. At least, that was his view at some point in the middle of this last year.
1:15:06 Ezra Klein? One thing Palestinians say to me about their view of America over the last year is that just Palestinian life has not figured into American thinking with the weight that Israeli life does, and specifically that Israeli security is non-negotiable. And Palestinian security, to say nothing of then self-determination, freedom of movement, right, just basic human rights, is negotiable. Israeli security is intolerable. The need to get humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza is negotiable. If it's not getting there, it's unfortunate, but it does not stop America from supporting Israel.
1:15:50 Ezra Klein? And that, to them, there's just been a really profoundly different weighting. And that, to them, you know, they have felt disposable, right? That it is, I think they think maybe the administration is sad if bad things happen to Palestinians, but it doesn't seem to shape their actions in the way that Israeli interests shape their actions. Do you think they're right?
1:16:14 Speaker 01 I mean, they're right in the sense that... America on October 7th picked a side in a war and rooted in deep alliances and in politics and in geo strategy. And when it picked a side in that war, it kind of knew from its own experiences that there were going to be huge amounts of civilian casualties. And Brett McGurk, who we mentioned before, who was the coordinator for the committee, said, look, I oversaw the campaign in Mosul. I oversaw the campaign in ISIS. This is what
1:16:54 Speaker 01 when the United States goes after terrorists, this is essentially what we do. We've flattened cities in order to accomplish our objectives. So this sort of criticism is, in his view, hypocritical. I, you know, that doesn't encapsulate the totality of the administration position, but I think it encapsulates maybe one main strand of the administration's thinking.
1:17:23 Ezra Klein? I've often listened to President Biden or other members of the administration and talk about, you know, now is the time for a two-state solution. Now is the time we need these negotiations. And, I mean, they know, you know, Israeli politics and leaders in a way I certainly don't. But in my own reporting, they always sounded fantastical to me. And one of my theories has just been that because of who America has relationships with and how long those relationships go back, in this administration particularly, that they sort of have a relationship with the Israel of 15 or 20 years ago, right?
1:18:07 Ezra Klein? The sort of rise of Netanyahu period more than the period we were really in. There's been just illusions about what's possible, right? If America wants to say geopolitically, we are aligned with Israel, the way geopolitically we're aligned with Saudi Arabia, and that's it, right? That whether Israel is liberal or not is actually not a test we impose on many of our allies. Whether Israel comes to a deal with the Palestinians or not is, we might have views on it, but it's fundamentally their business, not ours. We've acted like that's not where things are. And I guess one question I have for you after all this reporting you've done is if
1:18:46 Ezra Klein? you think that the part of what has happened, part of why you are anatomizing a failure is because Israel is not what Joe Biden thought or thinks it is, that what Israel's willing to do, the kinds of futures it is willing to imagine, have now diverged so completely from the kinds of futures that animated Joe Biden's views of this for his whole life in politics, two-state solutions and so on, that he's just sort of, you know, still in a conversation that Israel simply stopped having. And the administration sort of refuses to believe that or admit it because it doesn't
1:19:27 Ezra Klein? know quite how to reimagine its relationship with Israel for that truth. But the part of what's just been happening here is that, you know, there's been illusion that, you know, sometimes feeds it for his own purposes, but there's been a sort of self-deception on the American part.
1:19:42 Speaker 01 One of the things that I think is most poorly understood about Joe Biden is that even though he talks about defining his presidency as a battle against autocracy, I think at core, when it comes to foreign policy, he's essentially a realist. And I don't mean that as a defense of his foreign policy that he's extremely realistic about assessing the outcomes of policy. What I mean, of course, is that he's somebody who thinks in terms of geostrategy and thinks in terms of interests. And even though I think the policy towards Israel is driven emotionally for him and
1:20:23 Speaker 01 out of this deep connection that he feels for the Israeli people, for the Israeli state, I think that as he thinks about an ally and a proxy, he's not thinking about humanitarianism or civilian deaths in a way that values it quite as highly as you might think he values it. I think that he styles himself somebody who's playing chess on the grand strategy board and that that's a huge part of the way that he thinks about this. And I do think that you're probably right. I don't know if he's completely unrealistic about the state of Israeli democracy.
1:21:04 Speaker 01 I know when it came to the constitutional reforms that were being, the judicial reforms that were being pursued prior to October 7th, he clearly was opposed to them because he saw them as threatening to the fundamental integrity of Israeli democracy. I think that his view, and this is just a deep view that he carries based on his own personal experience, is that public rifts with Israel are bad and unlikely to significantly shift Israeli policy or opinion. And he's done everything in his power to avoid that sort of rift.
1:21:43 Ezra Klein? Joe Biden has his history and intuitions on Israel and Palestinians. He's got his team. He's only going to be president for another couple of months.
1:21:53 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:21:54 Ezra Klein? And he'll be succeeded by either his vice president, Kamala Harris, or by Donald Trump. I want to start here with Harris. She has, in my reporting on this, somewhat different intuitions here that her primary foreign policy adviser, Philip Gordon, has been in a slightly different place than some of the Biden team. How do you understand how she and the people she is likely to elevate if she becomes president differ? Where have they been inside the administration and where do you think they might go?
1:22:27 Speaker 01 Right. So Phil Gordon, one of her primary national security advisers, is somebody who has written books about the Middle East. And in internal administration debates, he's taken the more progressive side and he's been among the people who've been more critical of Israeli tactics in Gaza and has argued for elevating the prevention of civilian casualties. I couldn't say for sure if he would be the primary foreign policy voice within a Harris administration. There've been moments where it felt like she was inching towards staking out a position that was more to the left of the administration. She gave a speech in Selma.
1:23:08 Speaker 03 So before I begin today, I must address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
1:23:18 Speaker 03 What we are seeing every day in Gaza is devastating. We have seen reports of families eating leaves or animal feed, women giving birth to malnourished babies with little or no medical care, and children dying from malnutrition and dehydration. As I have said many times, too many innocent Palestinians have been killed.
1:23:50 Speaker 01 And I know, based on my own reporting, that that was a speech that irked Biden because he didn't like the fact that she was being perceived as somebody who was to his left on these questions. But I never had a real clear sense that within the Situation Room or within all of the debates over policy, that she was pushing for a significantly different position than the Biden administration's position. She's been, by all accounts, a very, very loyal vice president. And even as she's talked about this on the campaign trail, I think her position has shifted. When Netanyahu visited and she had just become the nominee, she made a point of very publicly
1:24:34 Speaker 01 standing with Netanyahu. And at least, you know, while saying all the right things, she also chastised him in that setting.
1:24:44 Speaker 03 It is time for this war to end, and end in a way where Israel is secure, all the hostages are released, the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can exercise their right to freedom, dignity, and self-determination. There has been hopeful movement in the talks to secure an agreement on this deal. And as I just told Prime Minister Netanyahu, it is time to get this deal done.
1:25:16 Speaker 01 And then her position has evolved where it's pretty hard to see any daylight between her and Biden on this issue now.
1:25:24 Ezra Klein? So then how about Donald Trump? And I guess I ask this on a couple of levels. I know people who are quite to the left on this issue and say they're going to vote for him, not because they necessarily think he'll be better, but because they just insist that just something else is worth trying, that after the Biden administration, they don't feel they can reward that. And the other thing, the sort of case Trump makes for himself on all of this is that he is what Biden is not, which is strong and credible when he threatens both allies and enemies. That Trump's view of himself, that J.D. Vance's case for Trump, that the
1:26:05 Ezra Klein? case I've heard some more right wing voices on foreign policy make, is that Trump embodies the madman theory of foreign policy, which is that kind of everybody has to tread more lightly around him because he's more erratic, and that maybe that changes the situation in some significant way. How do you think about Donald Trump in this, if he becomes president on this issue?
1:26:28 Speaker 01 I've talked to a lot of top Israeli officials about this, and their answers somewhat surprised me. I had always thought that maybe Netanyahu was holding out for a Trump administration, and hard to know how to decipher the conversations that I've had. But what I've always heard from Israelis is that they're just so unsure about what Trump actually believes, that ultimately, he makes them nervous as an ally in wartime. And that Israelis can imagine Trump calling them on the first day and saying, you need to wrap this up. This is making me look terrible. I'm insisting that you give me a big diplomatic win on day one. How
1:27:13 Speaker 01 Trump navigates Hezbollah and Iran, I have to say, I have no earthly idea, because the thing that fundamentally defines Donald Trump is his erraticism. And maybe you could make a case that there's some strategic virtue to being somebody who is completely unpredictable and capricious and impossible to decipher. But that's also a recipe for miscalculation and for things to escalate even further up the ladder.
1:27:49 Ezra Klein? Then always our final question. What three books you'd recommend to the audience?
1:27:53 Speaker 01 As I was reporting this piece, I kept thinking, is there a different style of diplomacy that could have achieved a different result? And I went back and I started to read biographies of American diplomats. And one of my favorite biographies, full stop, is George Packer's biography of the diplomat Richard Holbrook. The book is written in the style of a novel. It's an incredibly intimate portrait of a larger-than-life, deeply flawed human being who was able to negotiate peace in the Balkans, what was considered to be then an intractable conflict.
1:28:34 Speaker 01 I was going to suggest also David Grossman's novel See Under Love, which it's a sprawling novel that kind of responds to the Theodore Adorno's question about whether art is possible after the Holocaust. And it narrates, begins narrating the story of a nine-year-old boy who is the son of Holocaust survivors in Jerusalem in 1959. And he grows up and is shrouded by the trauma that his parents have experienced. And that trauma is something that is passed down to him. And we see it as it travels with him through his life. And I think it's a gorgeous inventive novel,
1:29:19 Speaker 01 but also instructive for understanding the Israeli national character. And then the final suggestion I was, is Rita Dove's collective poems. She's a black poet who writes about history at its most brutal and despair-making. But she also writes about the pleasures of life, of family, of picnics. She writes morning poems. And her ability to counteract despair is something that I certainly found that I needed to turn to as I reported on this conflict.
1:30:03 Ezra Klein? Frank Faur, thank you very much.
1:30:04 Speaker 01 Thank you.
1:30:15 Ezra Klein? This episode of The Ezra Klein Show was produced by Annie Galvin, fact checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing by Afim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu, Elias Siskwith and Kristin Lynn. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Sami-Lusky and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Roth Strasser. And special thanks to M. Ashford, Shira Efron, Natasha Hall, Richard Haas, Michael Kopplau, Selchuk Kara Olan and Switch and Board Podcast Studio.
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