Full Episode: Washington Week with The Atlantic full episode, 10/13/23

Jeffrey Goldberg: Mass murder in Israel and anger in Washington.

Six days after the deadliest pogrom since the Holocaust, Israel is going on the attack and Gaza's civilians are in danger.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Prime Minister: What we will do to our enemies in the coming days will reverberate with them through generations.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Israel's leaders promised to eliminate the terror group Hamas entirely, but the question is how? Hamas operates from neighborhoods, schools, and mosques.

Lloyd Austin, U.S. Defense Secretary: I was the guy that initially put the ISIS campaign together. This is worse than what I saw with ISIS.

Jeffrey Goldberg: For now, the U.S. supports an overwhelming response. Washington is united behind Israel, even as it fractures along many other lines, next.

Good evening and welcome to WASHINGTON WEEK. It's been a tragic and terrible week. Israel and Jewish communities around the world are reeling from an attack that saw babies murdered and grandmothers kidnapped.

Hamas is the target of a fearsome Israeli counteroffensive, but the group's weapons and command centers are located in densely populated civilian neighborhoods, and as much as half of Gaza's population is under the age of 15.

So far, 1,300 Israelis and more than 1,800 Palestinians have been killed in addition to the 1,500 Hamas terrorists killed inside Israel. The U.S., Europe and much of the world, in fact, is aligned with Israel, but how long will that unity last? What happens next will test President Biden, among others, in ways he's never been tested before.

Here to discuss with me are David Ignatius, the global opinions columnist at The Washington Post, Susan Glasser, staff writer for The New Yorker, Vivian Salama, national security reporter for The Wall Street Journal, and Mary Louise Kelly, co-host of All Things Considered on NPR.

So, David, one of the most difficult weeks in memory, in world affairs, I want to start with you because you've been covering the Middle East for quite a long time. Your first war -- the first war you covered, was the 1982 Lebanon War.

And I want to start by asking you to frame this up for us, go up to 30,000 feet, if you will. It feels like we've entered a completely new era in Middle East history, a pretty fraught and terrible one. But can you give us a little context for what you've seen over the last six days?

David Ignatius, Columnist, The Washington Post: So, Jeff, it's excruciating if you've been following this story for as long as I have to be in another cycle like this of Israeli rage at Palestinian terrorism against their citizens, and Palestinian rage, in part, at their powerlessness, their inability to stop Israeli assaults on Gaza.

I was in Beirut during the 1982 siege, and I remember the Israelis racing toward what they thought would be a devastating solution to their Palestinian problem, but by forcing Yasser Arafat and the PLO out of Beirut, Arafat stayed put along with his fighters, and the Israelis were forced into a siege, which lasted nearly three months.

And what I remember most clearly was that the wires got crossed. The Israelis wanted to show the Palestinian fighters that they were absolutely serious, determined, shelling, aircraft bombing. Palestinians ended up thinking that they were safe if they hunkered down. The Israelis wanted to tell the world that they were doing something righteous and just, and the world ended up getting more and more angry as they watched the city under siege. I feel as if we're seeing something similar now --

Jeffrey Goldberg: But let me ask you this.

David Ignatius: -- be the reaction.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Let me ask you this, though. It's different in the sense that the predicate in the 1982 invasion was the assassination, attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador in London, which is a terrible thing, obviously. I'm not discounting that. But here you have a situation in which more than a thousand Israelis, mainly civilians, raped, murdered children in their -- babies in their cribs and these kidnappings, taking literally out of some horrible story from the medieval past, taking women across their border. The predicate act seems to have united the world or much of the world with Israel.

Does that change your calculus at all about how much running room the Israelis have to try to dismantle Hamas?

David Ignatius: I hope they have -- they're not running room to deal with this problem. I wrote a column tonight saying that Israel, in effect, is demanding, as Franklin Roosevelt did, the unconditional surrender of an evil adversary. Hamas, without question, is a terrorist group.

I am struck by the growing international concern when you have the secretary general of the United Nations calling on Israel for its policy that's worrisome, and it may constrain Israel's freedom back. But there's no question that it's different, like everybody watching our show, I'm sure. I found the video evidence of what these Hamas terrorists did. It just rips you apart. It's painful to watch. You can hear it in the voice of President Biden. You can hear it in the voice of Secretary Blinken. This is awful for us all to watch. And so I do think that's galvanized world opinion.

We'll have to see a siege of a city is hard to watch. I remember that from 1982. I just caution you, as it goes on, it will trigger reactions of its own.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. I want to come to the subject of President Biden and his emotional reaction to the events of last Saturday and Sunday in a moment.

But, Susan, let me ask you this. The Israeli goal is the dismantling. And, by the way, I'm using a word that President Obama, of all people has used to say, this is what the Israeli goal has to be. He said he supports the dismantling of Hamas.

But saying that you're going to dismantle an organization like Hamas and doing it are two different things. And so I'm wondering, just give us your sense of what's even possible here.

Susan Glasser, Staff Writer, The New Yorker: Well, I think, Jeff, that's right. The shock and horror has created this moment of unity and solidarity. President Biden has been very clear in articulating that.

But there was this sort of cautionary note, right, the international law, the rule of law, should be followed by Israel as well in its response. The problem here is that Israel has occupied Gaza in the past, chose to leave it. It was a nightmarish situation, no good options.

Ever since 2005, Hamas has ruled this enclave. And it's been, frankly, a disaster for those people who have been essentially trapped, the metaphor of the open air prison is often used. There is no clear indication right now, either from Israel, I should say, or from the United States, to answer your question, which is the question.

I don't think there's anyone who doubts that, militarily, the Israelis are more than capable of wreaking death and destruction in Gaza, of taking out all possible targets inside of this heavily urban area. But to David's point, once you go into a war, you may come out or find that there are different goals along the way. That is certainly what Israel's experience was. It was the U.S. experience in Iraq with urban warfare.

And so I think, you know, I received a very simple short message from a mutual friend of ours, who is a longtime American official involved in the Middle East. He said there's one word to explain the situation right now, and it's hopeless.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Hopeless. Vivian, talk to us about -- you're an expert on the region, expert on Egypt. Talk to us about the Egyptian role for a second. It's true that Gaza is blockaded, but the southern border of Gaza is shared with Egypt, not Israel. Egypt will not, it seems, let any Palestinians in, in advance of this Israeli invasion that seems to be coming. Talk about the calculus there and bring us to the American role in getting some humanitarian relief for the Palestinians who are about to experience this wave.

Vivian Salama, National Security Reporter, The Wall Street Journal: So as we sit here, intensive discussions are underway and Secretary of State Blinken is actually in the region and added Egypt to the end of his itinerary in real-time while he was out there just because it is such an important element of this whole, broader picture right now.

So, the Rafah border crossing is what is shared between Gaza and Egypt, and that has been a source for Egypt of a lot of pain and a lot of frustration over the years because the Egyptians have found Hamas digging tunnels, illegal tunnels underneath it. They have found it to be a source of infiltration for extremist activity. And this is a country that is already worried about its own domestic extremist activity in the Sinai, which is that region right there, that borders Gaza and Israel, but also more broadly in the country.

And so they are very worried about potentially opening that gate for the broader public, the civilian public, because of potential infiltration. But the Americans right now are talking to the Egyptians mainly about what to do about American citizens in Gaza because they estimate that there are between five and six hundred Americans in Gaza right now, and they're essentially trapped.

Jeffrey Goldberg: I assume that the Americans will force there, to put it bluntly, client state Egypt to assist in at least the extraction of those Americans, assuming Hamas lets them go.

Vivian Salama: It's easier said than done. I've been speaking to Egyptian officials the last few days, and the thing is they're willing to do it and they're willing to do that for European countries as well. The problem is two things. There is a very deep hole on the Gaza side of the Rafah crossing right now because of an Israeli missile that hit the Gaza Strip. And it is logistically --

Jeffrey Goldberg: A literal hole, yes.

Vivian Salama: A literal hole in the ground, and it is logistically very difficult for people to access it. There's also some damage on the Egyptian side as well, but they say that they're going to take care of that in the next few days.

So, logistically, even just to get people to the crossing is going to be extremely difficult just to show you the layers and layers of complications in this.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Mary Louise, I want us to talk about the Washington response to, first, the attacks, the pogrom, the murders, and then to the Israeli plans in response. But I think all of us were struck by the emotion and the passion, the revulsion that Joe Biden was articulating in a number of public events. I want you to listen to one such moment, and I want to talk about that.

Joe Biden, U.S. President: Let there be no doubt, the United States has Israel's back.

It's as simple as that. It's atrocities and I'm sick of it. We're with Israel. Let's make no mistake.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Talk about Joe Biden, the Democrats, the Republicans, and the issue of Israel as a bipartisan issue.

Mary Louise Kelly, Co-Host, All Things Considered, NPR: So, shortly after that speech, we just saw a clip of President Biden at the White House. I called Aaron David Miller, who's an old Middle East hand in Washington, has served six administrations, Republican, Democratic, and said, have you ever seen an American president, not just that forceful but that angry in defending Israel? And he thought about it and said, no. And I've been there and watched a lot of them.

So, that anger, I think, is real. Now, the Biden administration is treading a very fine line between, okay, it's not just words. We're actually going to do stuff. We're sending a carrier group to the Eastern Med. We are putting military equipment on the ground. We are not being critical of Israel. In any way, we're going to fly the defense secretary and the secretary of state to the region at the same time. When was the last time that happened? And yet, they are dealing with everyone understands Israel is going to need to respond with force to defend itself.

But they're also seeing the pictures we're all seeing of the suffering of people in Gaza, most of whom, many of whom -- I don't know. I don't know when the last reliable poll was conducted in Gaza, but fair to say many people there aren't Hamas, don't support Hamas and are children, so don't know anything other than that their houses are being destroyed.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. And, obviously, this whole event started because of this merciless attack on children.

So, I want you to listen to Tony Blinken also. It's not just Biden. And I have a very specific question about what Blinken said. Just listen to this short clip.

Antony Blinken, U.S. Secretary of State: A baby, an infant riddled with bullets, soldiers beheaded, young people burned alive in their cars or in their hideaway rooms. I could go on but it's simply depravity in the worst imanigable way.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Susan, it's a question for everyone. Susan, his comments there, Lloyd Austin saying that this is worse than ISIS. That's a pretty big statement for an American official to make, worse than ISIS. Is part of this emotion and part of this strategy? In other words, when the rubber meets the road in this assault on Gaza, do the Americans -- are they calculating that they need Bibi Netanyahu, the prime minister, to listen to them? So, they're showing him right now that they understand Israel, but are trying to create conditions in which he's responsive to their calls for restraint? And you know eventually those calls are going to come.

Susan Glasser: Yes. No, Jeff, I think this is a really important point. Someone who knows Biden very well said that this was exactly his belief on how to not only conduct diplomacy, but specifically diplomacy with Prime Minister Netanyahu, whom he knows for a very, very long time. He's had extensive dealings with. And I think his view is the sort of hug him tight view.

And that that is why you've heard not only from the president, but from all of his top advisers, we are not going to be second guessing this in real-time, we're not going to be essentially playing Monday morning quarterback for each round of this. The implication is that they're going to use that goodwill that they have bought with the prime minister, with the Israeli public.

I mean, there are -- you know, Joe Biden's picture is on, you know, advertising boards on the side of the road.

Jeffrey Goldberg: He's far more popular in Israel than the prime minister of Israel, right?

Susan Glasser: Well, that's right, that we could talk about the second guessing inside Israel.

But I think this is a very important point. But I also wouldn't want to sort of diminish the real shock and horror. What you saw, I think, from the secretary of state there was a very genuine, almost a kick in the stomach.

Remember that this is someone with two young children. The prime minister's office, Netanyahu's office, actually tweeted out, if we're allowed to still say tweet, as opposed to X out.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Here we are.

Susan Glasser: Right, okay. Good. Yes, it's a safe --

Jeffrey Goldberg: This is a safe space for using the accurate word, Twitter.

Susan Glasser: So they sent out on social media the photographs, horrifying photographs of atrocities, that they said that they had shown the secretary of state in the private meeting, that he then came out and spoke to the public. I imagine something like that also occurred in some of President Biden's phone calls with Prime Minister Netanyahu.

These are disgusting images, and I do think that these are genuine expressions. But also, Biden -- somebody said to me, this week he's of a different era, politically, when there was a much more bipartisan rally round effect.

And my final thing is look at some of the incredible partisanship that you've seen from Republicans, like Tim Scott saying, Biden had blood on his hands, this very sort of overheated rhetoric. I feel like Biden is more what we would have expected from any American president.

Mary Louise Kelly: I think, and I'll throw this open to the table an interesting question when we try to parse what are Biden and Blinken really saying, like what's the U.S. plan here, is how central is the U.S.? The U.S. is used to being very central to what happens in the Middle East, but there's no indication that anybody wants American boots on the ground. It's not clear that Netanyahu -- it's not clear that if Biden were to call Netanyahu and say we need you to do this, that that will happen.

Vivian Salama: The other thing that I've found talking to officials this week is that, in the past, Israel has been blamed of failing to use proportionality when it comes to hitting Gaza. This time around, they say it's different because of the nature of this attack. And so when I go to U.S. officials and say, are you going to urge restraint with regard to hitting Gaza? They say no one could have urged restraint to us after 9/11, so we can't do that this time.

Jeffrey Goldberg: But what does proportionality even mean, you know, when people went from town to town just murdering people in their beds? It's a hard thing to parse.

Vivian Salama: Well, absolutely. And that's why the nature of it is completely different this time around where they say, oh, that's rough.

Jeffrey Goldberg: But let me ask you, and let me actually first go to David and then open it up to you all, important, important question here. We know that Iran plays an important role in supporting Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon. So, the question is, what are the chances? I'm asking you to speculate a little bit, but what are the chances that America gets drawn more directly into this conflict? And we have a wider war, a war that some people in Washington have sought for quite a while, a direct confrontation between the United States and Iran.

David Ignatius: So, the chance is significant. I can't -- I was like, I don't want to put a percentage on it. The reason we have an aircraft carrier task force in the Eastern Mediterranean and other assets, I think, on the way is to deter Iran, to deter Hezbollah, to caution people about the dangers of a wider war. It's a terrible irony that the president who really wanted out of the Middle East, who pulled our troops out of Afghanistan, ends up closer to this big conflict than even any of his predecessors.

I do think that the Iranian role as mentor, tutor of Hamas, is apparent in these attacks, the skill with which they were executed, the operational security, they really -- Hamas has gone to school, much as al-Qaeda did on America's intelligence capabilities. They used couriers. They probably talked underground. They did things in a way that signals couldn't be collected.

So, I do think Iran is likely to stay on the sidelines. That certainly is what the analysts I talked to think, but there's no way to know.

And as this goes forward, I talked to a number of Arab officials today. In Amman, Jordan, there were 20,000 people in the streets in the capital, chanting support for the Palestinians. Jordan is a country that badly wants to support Israel. It hates Hamas. It sees Hamas as a poison in the Middle East, love to see it removed. But there they are with those crowds chanting. There were crowds in Cairo across the Arab world. You have this sense of anger.

So, I think managing it is going to be a key task for the United States. I'm really glad to see Secretary Blinken going to all these capitals. I think he's speaking with unusual power for secretary of state. I've never seen Tony Blinken do his job better than he has these last few days.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Vivian, to stay on this subject just for a minute, what are they saying inside the administration and the Pentagon about the chance of a wider war? Obviously, one of the first things they did was move that aircraft carrier task force right off Lebanon, essentially.

Vivian Salama: They're very concerned about this, and especially for Lebanon flaring up, which is probably the most immediate likelihood. You see already some skirmishes going on across the border between Hezbollah fighters and Israel.

But, interestingly enough, Jake Sullivan, President Biden's national security adviser, this week came out and said, Iran is complicit in this, but we do not see a direct link between Iran and the plotting, the immediate plotting of this.

And so it's very interesting to see the rhetoric that they're coming out with, because they obviously do not want to suggest or use any rhetoric that escalates the situation any further. And that's why Secretary Blinken and others are going around the region now trying to talk to other allies in the region to say, hey, we all need to work together here to make sure things simmer down and do not get worse, because Washington is very worried about that right now.

Mary Louise Kelly: Although this little notice development just recently of the $6 billion in Iranian assets that had been unfrozen and is now refrozen as punishment for past support to these extremist groups, if you were trying to calm the waters with Iran, that ain't going to help.

Susan Glasser: Well, I think that was probably also responding to the domestic politics of this, and this is something that they're very attuned to.

But to David's point about the people in the streets, one of the things that we can say for sure -- it's very hard for us to know what's going to happen in Gaza. I think what we can say is that some of the illusions or even delusions leading up to this, right? That's what happens in a catastrophe. You realize that if you convinced yourself, if Israel convinced itself that it had managed an unmanageable problem, that they had sort of put successfully Gaza in a box and they were going to forget about it, or that they were going to make peace.

The Biden administration, remember, what was its policy until one week ago? It was to make a sweeping deal with Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel, and it was premised in a way on this notion that the Netanyahu government advanced, that essentially we've moved on, that the rest of the Arab world has moved on from the Arab -- from the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, and we'll just make a separate peace. And I think that illusion is gone today.

Jeffrey Goldberg: And it's a fascinating and horrifying subject, and we'll be talking about it again and again as the weeks go on. And, unfortunately, we need to leave it there for now. But thank you to our panelists for joining us and for sharing your reporting.

For more on the crisis in the Middle East, stay tuned for a one-hour special, War in the Holy Land, which airs immediately following WASHINGTON WEEK tonight on most PBS stations. Check your local listings.

And tomorrow, PBS Newshour's Nick Schifrin talks with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. To read The Atlantic's ongoing coverage of the Israel-Hamas war, including Bruce Hoffman's article, understanding Hamas' genocidal ideology, visit theatlantic.com.

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg. Good night from Washington.