Israel Is Giving Hamas What It Wants

Oct. 7 was Israel’s Sept. 11. That’s been the refrain. I fear that analogy carries so much more truth than the people making it intend. 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 audio essay for “The Ezra Klein Show” was fact-checked by Michelle Harris, with Mary-Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. The show’s production team also includes Emefa Agawu, Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones and Carole Sabouraud. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

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

• 0:27Ezra Klein?

  Lo primero que mi madre me preguntó cuando me vio después de la masacre de Hamas en Israel fue prometer que no escribiría ni hablar sobre ello públicamente, que no me convertiría en un objetivo para algún antisemite violento. Tuvimos esa conversación con ella, solo un día o dos después de hablar con mis amigos sobre si o no iban a mantener a sus hijos en casa esa semana porque sus hijos van al cuidado de día en un synagogue y se preocupan que el cuidado de día sea bombardeado o que un disparador armado abra fuego. Eso debería darte una idea de cómo se siente ser judío en las últimas semanas. Israel es el 11 de septiembre. Eso ha sido el refrenos. Y temo que esa analogía lleva más verdad que las personas que la están haciendo querer. ¿Qué fue el 11 de septiembre?

• 1:10Ezra Klein?

  Fue un ataque que derramó a un país entero, nuestro país, mi país, América, en terror y en rabia. Nos puso locos con miedo y en respuesta, nos deshijimos de nuestras propias libertades. Invasamos a Afganistán, invadimos a Irak. Nuestra respuesta al 11 de septiembre llevó a la muerte de cientos de miles de personas inocentes. Nos hizo weaker, nos hizo perezosos, nos odiaron en todo el mundo. No retiramos nuestras fuerzas de Afganistán hasta 2021, veinte años después, y cuando nos fuimos, lo hicimos con humillación y catástrofe y derrota, abandonando el país al Taliban. Nuestra política todavía no se ha recuperado de las desastres de esa era.

• 1:50Ezra Klein?

  En gran parte fue la invasión de Irak que descartó la clase de liderazgo del Partido Republicano, llevando directamente al ascenso de Donald Trump. El 11 de septiembre creó una estructura de permisos en la política estadounidense para hacer cosas increíblemente estúpidas y brutales y todavía estamos pagando los costos. Quizás siempre lo seremos.

• 2:10Ezra Klein?

  In the days after Hamas's attack, I was in Tokyo, of all places. I was far from the people I would gather with to grieve and to process and to hurt. So I was confined to following along online, which I don't recommend. And what was so striking was to see how fast we were turning on each other, how we became obsessed, not with what should actually be done, or even what was actually being done, but with what was and could be said and by whom. I read and heard more about the idiocy of student groups and random academics than about what the right response here actually was. And it's tempting to call that a distraction, or a waste of time, or a derangement driven by social media. But it's not.

• 2:53Ezra Klein?

  This too was an echo of what happened in America after 9/11, that era of flag pins and freedom fries. Cancel culture is endlessly debated today, but the boundaries of speech and the penalties for stepping over them were stronger then. And there's a purpose to that, there always is. What can and cannot be said shapes what can and cannot be done. So it's worth listening to what the people in power are saying right now. Yehovah Galant, Israel's defense minister, said, "We are fighting human animals and are acting accordingly." Israeli Major General Gusan Aliyan warned, "There will be no electricity and no water. There will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell."

• 3:35Ezra Klein?

  Senator Lindsey Graham said that Israel should, quote, "level the place." And of the civilian death toll that could bring, he said, "Every death going forward, I blame on Hamas, not Israel." Biden's State Department released a memo to its diplomats, warning them not to use phrases like "an end to violence" or "bloodshed," not to call for a ceasefire, or even for calm. And I was so struck by this exchange between a reporter from Real Clear Politics and Joe Biden's press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  Well, there have been some members of Congress who have called for a ceasefire, and they have not gone as far as backing the administration's call for support for Israel.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  So, look, I've seen some of those statements this weekend, and we're going to continue to be very clear. We believe they're wrong, we believe they're repugnant, and we believe they're disgraceful. Our condemnation belongs squarely with terrorists who have brutally murdered, raped, kidnapped hundreds, hundreds of Israelis. There can be no equivocation about that. There are not two sides here. There are not two sides.

• 4:39Ezra Klein?

  Notice the change there right at the end, from where our condemnation belongs, to whether there are two sides in this. I would say there are so many more than two sides. Israel is itself a fractious and divided country. There are countless Palestinians who loathe Hamas. But the point being made here is just the opposite, that there is only one side, at least right now. But hundreds of thousands of Gazan residents are being driven from their homes at pain of death in an Israeli airstrike. They know, and we know, they may have only rubble to return to. They know, and we know, that that is part of the point of this policy. When the Biden administration says there are not two sides here in that framework, which side are these people fleeing their homes on?

• 5:21Ezra Klein?

  And more to the point, who is on their side? In a way, it was almost inevitable, fitting, that George W. Bush himself would reemerge to apply the logic of 9/11 to the moment. This from a video posted by Axios.

• 5:35Speaker 03

  My thoughts were that we need to support Israel. No ands, ifs, or buts. This was an unprovoked attack by terrorist people willing to kill innocent people to achieve an objective. Hamas is a political organization. They do not reflect the majority of the Palestinians. And don't be surprised if Israel takes whatever action is necessary to defend herself. And it's going to be ugly for a while.

• 6:01Ezra Klein?

  If you follow Bush's reasoning closely there, it's a remarkably telling statement. Hamas does not reflect the majority of Palestinians. But Israel's reprisal needs to be supported without any ands, or ifs, or buts, ugly as it may be, implicitly whatever it may be. What was so repulsive to me in some leftist commentary after Hamas's massacre of Israelis was a belief in collective guilt and collective punishment. There was no debate over whether Hamas targeted and slaughtered civilians. No. The argument was that there was no such thing as an Israeli civilian, no such thing as being an innocent in Israel. It's repugnant. But does repugnance of that logic not go both ways? Is there no such thing as a civilian in Gaza?

• 6:45Ezra Klein?

  And put aside the morality of the collective punishment being meted out on Gaza, what of its wisdom? Will this reduce support for Hamas or something yet worse than Hamas? If so, then why did Hamas want to goad Israel into it, into raising and possibly reoccupying Gaza? They were not unclear that launching a massive attack capped by a pogrom, they spread videos of, and then taking hostages, they were not unclear about whether or not that would elicit an overwhelming Israeli response. What Isayn Abish wrote in The Atlantic Reads is obviously true to me. "Iran and Hamas are counting on Israel to attack Gaza with such ferocity that the international sympathy of the past week toward Israel, even in the Arab world, evaporates quickly

• 7:29Ezra Klein?

  and is replaced by outrage at the suffering inflicted on the 2 million residents of Gaza." Why might Hamas want this? Why would we not want to at least loudly ask that question? How do we make sure they do not get what they want? And what does or should Israel want beside vengeance? And I want to be clear about this. I think vengeance is a legitimate and even necessary goal here. It cannot be safe. It cannot be safe to murder Israeli civilians. But vengeance cannot be the only goal. Israelis, no less than Palestinians, deserve peace and security. Those need to be considerations too, and that requires considering things. I've been thinking lately about something that Spencer Ackerman, author of the book

• 8:11Ezra Klein?

  Reign of Terror, which is, I think, the best book by far on how 9/11 deranged America, something that he said, which is that the essence of the politics of 9/11 was, quote, "to make scandalous the presentation of context." To make scandalous the presentation of context. There's a deep truth to that. To add context is, in this kind of regime of thought, to undermine the purity of condemnation, to add sides. That's an absurd way to think. The brutal facts of the occupation, the architecture of control and humiliation and checkpoints and work permits and blockades that Palestinians live under, it does not justify Hamas’s murders.

• 8:53Ezra Klein?

  But it helps explain Hamas’s strength, its persistent appeal to at least some of the Palestinian people. Hamas is built on Palestinian despair, and if you radically increase Palestinian fury and despair, if you create a new wave, a new generation of fathers who lost their sons and brothers who lost their sisters and people now dedicated to revenge, have you actually made Israel safer? Or have you made Hamas, or something like it, stronger? Hardliners feed on each other. Hamas’s political strength has been an excellent excuse for Netanyahu’s government to abandon even the pretense of a real peace process. If Hamas is on the other side of the table, then there can be no peace process, because there is no partner for peace. Israel is right that it cannot make peace with Hamas, that Hamas’s actual aim is

• 9:38Ezra Klein?

  Israel’s eradication. That helped justify the path Israel has chosen in recent years. A policy that tried to achieve safety through subjugation. This vast architecture of walls and missile defense systems and intelligence operations and checkpoints and imprisonments, the promise of all this was not justice, it was security. Itamar Ben-Gavir, Israel’s Minister of National Security, once said, “My right, my wife’s, my children’s, to roam the roads of Judea and Samaria are more important than the right of movement of the Arabs.” That was the point of all this, security and freedom for Israelis. And now this policy failed in the most horrible of ways. Netanyahu failed, Ben-Gavir failed, there was a body count.

• 10:21Ezra Klein?

  And we’re being asked to trust that a government still led by Netanyahu will respond appropriately and wisely, to not, under any circumstances, question the decisions they make? Hamas and its backers in Iran want this war. They fear the normalization of Israel’s relations with the rest of the Middle East. The misery of the Gazans is and always has been their strength. If they’re the only ones seen as trying to change a status quo that is unrelentingly hellish for those living inside it, then they stand alone as the champions of those who feel no hope. We’ve spent decades testing the proposition of whether inflicting more punishment on the Palestinians will strengthen the moderates or the extremists in their midst. The answer is known. It is folly to forget it now.

• 11:03Ezra Klein?

  There are two immovable facts here: the daily oppression the Palestinians live under, and the daily threat that Israelis live amidst. And I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I know what Israel should do, or how the deep structure of this conflict can be solved. I'm not among those who think there is some simple set of concessions, or even at this point, an imaginable deal, that could or would lead to lasting peace. Not now. There's an old joke, though not very funny, about a tourist who asks for directions to Dublin, only to be told, "Well, if I were you, I wouldn't start from here." But here is where we are. And we shouldn't be fooled into believing that we cannot find ourselves somewhere much worse. If you loathe Hamas, and you should loathe Hamas, you should assume that the place they're trying to lead us is not where we should be trying to go.

• 11:48Ezra Klein?

  If you don't think Netanyahu's rule has made Israel safer, or more united, or closer to a resolution of the fundamental threats that face it, and it hasn't, you should not let yourself be cowed into trusting his instincts in this moment. That's a lesson Americans learned, or should have learned, from 9/11, the one we have to pass on now. Terrorists want you to act in a haze of fury and fear. The only antidote is to open yourself to criticism and second-guessing. If you don't, you find yourself doing exactly what they wanted you to do, and you can do terrible damage to yourself, and terrible damage to the world, damage they could have never inflicted on their own. I was reading an essay by Ariel Angel, the editor-in-chief of the Journal on Jewish Currents. And she was reflecting on the story of the exodus from Egypt,

• 12:32Ezra Klein?

  the slaying of the firstborn, children, and adults and elderly. And she writes, quote, "It seems that hiding in our liberation myth is a recognition that violence will visit the oppressor's society indiscriminately." But there's something else lurking in that story, too, something that has upset me since I first read it in Hebrew school as a child. After some of the early plagues, the Pharaoh agrees to let the Israelites go. But then he, quote, "hardens his heart and keeps them captive." But later, later, as the plagues worsen, it is sometimes God who steps in and hardens a Pharaoh's heart after he agrees to let the Israelites go. After the plague of Locust, it reads, quote, "The Lord hardened Pharaoh's heart, and he would not let the Israelites go. This happens repeatedly after the darkness. But the Lord hardened Pharaoh's heart,

• 13:17Ezra Klein?

  and he was not willing to let them go." I will not attempt any amateur theology here. There are many interpretations of these passages. I haven't found one that really resolves a problem for me. But what I will say is that story is also a parable of the relentless destructive escalation that comes when our hearts harden, when fury makes it impossible for us to find a way out. What could have ended with darkness, or locusts, or frogs, instead ends in mass death. I have for years felt nothing but despair when I stand to the abyss of this conflict. There is no country in the world that would not hunt Hamas's leaders to the ends of the earth right now if their savagery had been visited upon them.

• 13:59Ezra Klein?

  And that is to say, nothing of the hostages Hamas is still holding captive. But the idea that you will destroy Hamas this way? I doubt it. Particularly if this becomes not just a generational trauma for ordinary Israelis, but also for Gazans, with thousands dead and who knows how many maimed and homeless and displaced. When I was young, the first trip I ever took anywhere without my parents was to Israel. My grandparents took me, and they were so proud. They were the Holocaust generation. It was a defining fact of their lives. And Israel's security, its existence, meant everything to them. Because they felt it could one day mean everything for us. And I want for Israel what they wanted, what they saw in it: safety, a haven.

• 14:42Ezra Klein?

  And I want that for Palestinians, too. And one thing I believe is that there's no chance of it until power is held by different forces on both sides. So that's one question that's going to animate the conversations I'm working on now, that will release soon. How do those who want something different than this, something closer to peace, become strong enough to matter again? The hardliners make each other stronger. Is it possible for the peacemakers to do the same?