Bret Stephens

Shock, horror, and war after Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel…. this week on Firing Line. It took Israel and the world by surprise. Hamas terrorists launched airstrikes at dawn and penetrated Israel’s borders by land, sea, and air, where they slaughtered hundreds of Israeli civilians and captured more than 150 hostages, including young children. 

 

Major General Itai Veruv: “it’s not a war, it’s not a battlefield, it’s a massacre.”

 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed an unprecedented response… 

 

Netanyahu: We will exact a price that will be remembered by them for decades to come.

 

…and the US has pledged its unwavering support.

 

Biden: We must be crystal clear: We stand with Israel. 

 

Bret Stephens is a New York Times columnist. He’s also the former editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post who has written about Israel for decades.

 

STEPHENS: This wasn’t a plane just going into a building. This was face to face, hand-to-hand. Every single one of these atrocities was, was, was a one on one transaction. 

 

With Israel at war, and monumental consequences for the Middle East and beyond, what does Pulitzer prize winning columnist Bret Stephens say now?

 

‘Firing Line’ with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by: Robert Granieri, Stephens Inc. Vanessa and Henry Cornell, The Fairweather Foundation, The Tepper Foundation, The Asness Family Foundation, Kathleen and Andrew McKenna Through The McKenna Family Foundation, Charles R. Schwab and by The Rosalind P. Walter Foundation and Damon Button. 

 

INTERVIEW

 

HOOVER: Bret Stephens, welcome to Firing Line. 

STEPHENS: Thank you for having me. 

HOOVER: Hamas’s attack resulted in the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. We are still learning about the horrors that Israelis endured. More than 100 people were murdered in one Kibbutz, children and grandparents taken away as hostages. There are reports that entire families were shot in their homes, and babies found murdered. How are you processing the horrors? 

STEPHENS: You know, I lived in Israel a number of years. I have extended family there. My closest friends are Israelis. And when events like this happen– Imagine if all your family had been living in Lower Manhattan on September 11th. It’s a similar feeling. Israel is a small country. It has just over 9 million people. It means that the degrees of separation between victims and people who are close to them are very small. I would wager to everyone watching us who remembers 9-11, I would wager very few people actually knew someone who died on 9-11. They watched it. But very few people actually knew a victim. Every single person in Israel knows, is close to, is related to, someone who was dead or someone who’s being held hostage in Gaza. 

HOOVER: What insights are you, can you share with us from your Israeli contacts? 

STEPHENS: You know, there’s a saying in Israel that Israel is strong. And Israel does not feel strong right now. I think that what is happening among the Israelis that I speak with is that their heartbreak is competing with their rage. And their rage itself is divided. First of all, against Hamas, the people who perpetrated what has to be called the most barbaric atrocity imaginable. This wasn’t a plane just going into a building. This was face to face, hand-to-hand. Every single one of these atrocities was a one-on-one transaction. And the depth of Israel’s rage I don’t think can be underestimated. That’s why so many calls at the moment for Israeli restraint seem really misplaced and misjudged. But there’s a second form of rage not far behind, which is the rage that Israelis feel at their own government. This happened not in a vacuum. This happened after nearly a year in which Israel had been bitterly divided by legislation that hardly anyone asked for. You know, if you go back a year to the last electoral contest, no one was talking about judicial reform. They were talking about the economy. They were talking about internal security. They were talking about threats from Iran. And instead, this country was needlessly divided in a way that materially hampered their readiness. And there are report after report from current and former Israeli military leaders saying our readiness is suffering. So when an attack of this nature occurred and the response from the military and internal security forces was so dilatory, so slow, there’s a reason for it. So there are going to be two reckonings coming Israel’s way. One against the enemies who hit them, and the other against the politicians who failed them. 

HOOVER: Are you saying responsibility for this attack lies in part with Prime Minister Netanyahu and the political division he sowed over the last year? 

STEPHENS: Look, I want to be clear. The full weight of moral responsibility lies with Hamas and an attack that was wholly unprovoked and historic in its barbarity. But when you’re prime minister of Israel, you’ve got one job, which is to safeguard the lives of the Israeli people. And what happened was in the last year, on account of his legal travails, because there are criminal indictments against the prime minister, and his very narrow majority in government, which forced him into a coalition with extreme right wing parties, and his pursuit of a judicial reform bill that nobody asked for, he hopelessly divided a country whose greatest strength has always been a kind of a fundamental unity, a sense that they’re alone in a boat and they sink or swim or float together. That was, in my view, unforgivable governance. And people had been saying this loud and clear for over a year. So my sense is Israel, because it’s in crisis, is going to give the prime minister and now an emergency cabinet, including his opposition leaders, time and space, to hopefully reach a result, an unequivocal result in the battle with Hamas. And after that, I cannot see him surviving. He does not deserve to survive politically as prime minister. 

HOOVER: The attacks eluded not just Israeli intelligence, but U.S. intelligence as well. 

STEPHENS: Well, American intelligence failures are less surprising because there’s a longer history for them. One of the problems here – and and a lot of people shared in this misconception – is that was the idea that Hamas, as dangerous as it was, was a containable threat,  a sort of a nuisance threat in the spectrum of the threats that confronted Israel. And that concept was fundamentally mistaken. What happened here is a demonstration of the danger when you substitute technological solutions for strategic thinking. Because the Israelis said, ‘Well, we’ve got Iron Dome and we have this thing that detects tunnels or stops tunneling underground, and we have all of these cameras. So the technology solves our problem.’ But when you think that technology solves the problem, it is an invitation to an opponent to use asymmetric means to defeat your seeming technological advantages by playing by wholly different rules. And that’s what seems to have happened here. 

HOOVER: You have said that Hamas’s goals in this attack go beyond terrorizing and killing Israelis. What is the larger strategic goal? 

STEPHENS: Well, first of all, for Hamas, killing Israelis is not just incidental– 

HOOVER: It’s an end in and of itself. 

STEPHENS: It’s what they do. This is, if you will, a values driven organization, the worst values imaginable, but the value is: kill Jews with the aim of eradicating the state of Israel and the Jews inside of it. But I think there were other aims. One was the sheer shock, the ability to destroy the kind of placid Israeli idea that they had now become the startup nation, they were launching into a new Middle East with peace deals with various Arab neighbors and partners, they had become too big to really worry about the Palestinians. That was one goal. The second goal, I think much more significant, was to incur such a massive Israeli response, which we may or may not get, that it would destroy the hopes of a peace agreement, the burgeoning hopes of a peace agreement between Israel and the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. 

HOOVER: Netanyahu has vowed to, quote, “eradicate Hamas.” In your view, is this the right objective? 

STEPHENS: Yes. Now, how they do it tactically, whether they can do it by minimizing civilian casualties, I hope so, by not, you know, starving Palestinians to death or cutting them off from water and electricity. I hope so. But that goal that Hamas must not be allowed to remain in power I think is one that no prime minister in Israel can get away from. 

HOOVER: But what does eradicating Hamas look like? 

STEPHENS: First of all, it means taking Hamas out of power in a way that they cannot return to power. Secondly, eradicating Hamas probably means eradicating their leadership, killing them, capturing them. There are lots of Hamas fighters, about 10,000 to 20,000 people, we don’t really know for sure. A lot of those guys are going to be in pitched battles and it’s very unlikely that they are going to survive. But there’s a fourth layer, which is eradicating Hamas as an idea. And Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. It subscribes to a particular ideology. And that is not eradicated. That might dissipate over generations, but I don’t see that going away, you know, tomorrow, next year, a decade from now. 

HOOVER: The UK says that it supports, quote, “proportional response.” 

STEPHENS: Yeah

HOOVER: I know you’ve criticized this idea saying that it sounds morally reasonable, but it emboldens adversaries and, quote, “guarantees future conflicts. “

STEPHENS: So there are, I think, a variety of definitions of proportionality. But often the idea comes down to something quite simple: If 1200 Israelis are dead, then roughly 1200 Palestinians should be dead. And you get a proportional response. But the logic of proportionality, even though there’s something quite inviting about it doesn’t work in war. What works in war is achieving a result which is conclusive to guarantee that there isn’t going to be a next war. The United States did not seek proportional responses to Pearl Harbor. Proportionality involved the Tokyo fire raid, the bombings of, of course, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, horrific casualties inflicted on the Japanese – of course, similarly with the Nazis and the fascists – in order to achieve victory. And I think proportionality as a concept, one of these sort of alluring ideas, has done more to perpetuate conflict than it has to end it. 

HOOVER: What does the political landscape of Gaza look like with Hamas removed? 

STEPHENS: Well, that’s a great question. And you can ask what it looks like or what an ideal scenario may be. 

HOOVER: You have suggested a zone of shared interest. 

STEPHENS: Right. So Hamas has more than Israel as an enemy. Hamas has Egypt as an enemy because the Egyptian government, regime really, suppresses the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas has Saudi Arabia and most of the Sunni states as enemies because although Hamas is religiously a Sunni organization, it’s increasingly aligned strategically and politically with Iran. Hamas is obviously a terrorist organization as far as the United States is concerned. So Hamas not in power in Gaza is a very good thing. I might add one other point, which is Hamas is the adversary of Fatah, the ruling party of the Palestinians in the West Bank. Lots of people would like to see Hamas go. So can you imagine a post Hamas Gaza, in which the Palestinian authority – not my cup of tea, but certainly not Hamas – returns to a position of civilian authority. Some kind of Arab League force led by the kingdom of Saudi Arabia with help from partners like the United Arab Emirates, perhaps Egypt, puts in a kind of a peacekeeping police force to guarantee that the Strip does not become, once again, a zone of the export of terror. The United States and Europe, particularly Europe, pony up money for economic reconstruction. And, by the way, Gaza is beautiful. It has a long beach. You know, it’s not a huge place, but neither is Singapore. There are lots of small places that can be successful places if they are not so terribly misgoverned. The money that Hamas spent on building rockets, on building tunnels under the border with Israel, that represented probably tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars that could be spent on schools, health, businesses, creating something like a genuinely future-looking and more prosperous state. The principal despot, the principal oppressor of the Palestinian people in Gaza has been Hamas for 16 years, which won an election, then threw its opponents out of buildings, and then ruled despotically ever since. 

IRANIAN INVOLVEMENT

HOOVER: The Wall Street Journal has reported that Iran helped plan Hamas’s attack and gave it the green light. Hamas and Iranian officials are denying Iranian government involvement. What is your assessment of Iran’s involvement and motives?

STEPHENS: I don’t believe Iran for a second – the Iranian regime, I should say – for a second in saying they had no hand in, in planning this. It was far too convenient for them. They have been funding and arming and helping Hamas in multiple ways now for many, many years. The idea that they would not have foreknowledge, that they wouldn’t be involved, I think is implausible. I could be wrong, but it’s unlikely. I think it is significant that the Iranians are furiously denying it, and significant because they may not feel like they are prepared to get into a war either directly or from one of their other proxies with Israel right now. My guess is they had a large hand in it, but I don’t want to get ahead of the intelligence. 

HOOVER: Secretary of State Antony Blinken and others have suggested Hamas attacks were aimed to derail Israel’s normalization with the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. What is the future of those negotiations right now? 

STEPHENS: Look, the conventional wisdom is if Israel responds in a big way, and inevitably and tragically – I need to understate that – tragically there are a lot of Palestinian civilians caught in crossfire and killed, that it will put paid any hopes of a Saudi Israeli deal. I think that’s false. Look– 

HOOVER: Why. 

STEPHENS: Well, I’ll tell you. Because the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, even Sudan, did not sign the Abraham Accords with Israel because they suddenly woke up and thought, ‘Gosh, you know, the Jewish people are such exciting people, and the state of Israel as this great startup nation, and what have we been thinking?’ They looked to Israel because Israel today seemed like the strong horse, particularly in leading a common front against Iran and its proxies. That was especially so in an era when American power and influence in the region appeared to be in retreat. So the Emiratis were looking around and asking themselves, ‘Well, if it’s not going to be the Americans, if we can’t quite rely on them, if America’s kind of sick of the Middle East, who can we rely on?’ So they went with Israel because Israel seemed like the strong horse. If now you have a situation in which 1200 Israelis or more are dead and Israel still cannot displace a militia like Hamas from the Gaza Strip, it will create a real and I think justified impression that Israel is not, in fact, the strong horse. It’s a weak horse. It’s not going to be a good and strong and willful ally in the fight against Iranian encroachments. 

HOOVER: So you have just suggested that the cautionary tale for Israel is responding too softly. 

STEPHENS: Right. 

HOOVER: There is an argument that this was intended to provoke a very, very strong response, which would then undermine Israel on the world stage in some way. 

STEPHENS: Right. And I think in that sense, Hamas potentially miscalculated very badly. If Hamas’s goal, or one of their goals, was to derail the prospect of a Saudi-Israeli peace deal by inviting massive Palestinian casualties– And by the way, just stop to consider the cynicism that Hamas thought it could profit first by killing Israelis and then by Israel killing Palestinians. But if that was indeed their calculation, and if Israel responds in a way that is unequivocal in destroying Hamas as an organization, they, I suspect, maybe I’m wrong, I suspect they would have done more to advance the prospects of a Saudi Israeli rapprochement than to destroy them. 

HOOVER: Let me ask you about the Biden administration’s posture. 

BIDEN: Let there be no doubt. The United States has Israel’s back. We’ll make sure the Jewish and democratic state of Israel can defend itself as it always has. 

STEPHENS: You know, I’m a little reluctant to score the Biden administration at this moment because I think the president made an excellent statement. I am grateful that there is moral clarity in the White House. It is a resource that is in short supply in Washington these days. And I was glad to see him stand unequivocally with Israel and condemn the barbarity. I criticized the Biden administration because I want it to do better. But I am rooting for its success. Sending an aircraft carrier to the Eastern Mediterranean is the right thing to do. Expediting a thousand smart bombs for the Israeli Air Force is the right thing to do. The kind of statement the president made in the White House, lighting up the White House in blue and white, these are the right things to do. So at moments like this, I think we have to take a bit of a step back from kind of the non-stop criticism machine, ‘you should have done it this way, you shouldn’t have done it that way,’ simply appreciate an administration that at least has its moral bearings and understands just how serious this is, not just for Israel, but for anyone who cares about terrorism and the threat it poses to their own people. 

HOOVER: Benjamin Netanyahu was a guest on the original Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr. in 1986. He had just published a book entitled, “Terrorism How the West Can Win.” And Buckley asks Netanyahu to define terrorism. Take a look. 

NETANYAHU: My definition of terrorism is the systematic and deliberate attack, the murder, maiming and menacing of innocents, of civilians, for political goals. 

BUCKLEY: Well now, was under that definition terrorism committed in Israel between say 1945 and 1948? 

NETANYAHU: Well, then, on that basis, you can check anyone, including Israel. I think that you can tell a lot about terrorists by what happens when they come to power. Those who fight for freedom and come to power do not impose terrorism. Those who do, who fight with terroristic means, end up as being masters of terrorist states: in Libya, in Algeria, and other countries that support and practice terrorism.

 

HOOVER: So, those who fight with terroristic means end up masters of terrorist states. He describes Gaza. 

STEPHENS: Of course. Yeah. And, by the way, it describes so many other postcolonial states that came into existence from people who describe themselves as freedom fighters but use terroristic means and then ended up creating despotisms in their own, in their own societies. It’s not unique to the Palestinians. 

PRO-PALESTINIAN RALLIES

HOOVER: Your latest column is about the growing anti-Israeli left. 

STEPHENS: Mm hmm.

CHANTING: “From the river to the sea Palestine will be free!”

HOOVER: You went to Times Square, midtown Manhattan, to observe a pro-Palestinian rally. What did you see? 

STEPHENS: I saw euphoria. The rally was on Sunday, a day after the massacres. And there was one speaker who was jeering and laughing at the killing of the young people at the dance party, the rave. This wasn’t people who I might disagree with saying, ‘we want peace,’ or ‘we want a Palestinian state.’ This was people who were celebrating mass murder the way Argentina celebrated its victory in the World Cup. And if you don’t see in this all the classic tropes of anti-Semitism, thinly disguised, very thinly disguised as anti-Zionism, I think you’re just failing to see reality. Now, does this describe, do those protesters describe the majority of the American left? No, of course not. But I think they’re more influential. There has been a kind of mainstreaming of the demonization of Israel far in excess of the state’s sins, real or alleged, that contributed to this atmosphere. The left needs to take a very hard look at itself because they have normalized a level of demonization of Israel, and a level of excuse-making for the Palestinians, that creates moral conditions in which a protest like that can happen. These guys didn’t just emerge from nowhere. What I witnessed in New York was every bit as repugnant and repulsive as what the world witnessed in Charlottesville, just on the other side, both sides demonizing the Jews. 

HOOVER: As you know, for decades, there have been deep disagreements amongst Israeli citizens about the question of Palestinian autonomy. How do these attacks impact those debates? 

STEPHENS: Look, I think the average Israeli would say, if you were to tell him or her, ‘Well, now is a good time to move to a Palestinian state,’ a typical Israeli would say, ‘Just look. Just look.’ And so Hamas has set the cause back of a Palestinian state by generations. But anyone who spends time in Israel understands how profound the yearning for, for peace is. And that yearning will be fulfilled when a generation of Palestinians comes of age and says to themselves, “What Hamas has bequeathed us we don’t want.” That’s when this conflict will finally come to an end. 

HOOVER: Bret Stephens, thank you for joining me. 

STEPHENS: Thank you for having me.