Jonathan Schanzer

The race to contain the Israel-Hamas war, this week on Firing Line. It was a historic move, the first ever trip by a U.S. president to Israel during wartime. President Biden reiterated unwavering U.S. support…

 

Biden: Justice must be done…

….and also encouraged caution…

…while you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it.

 

His visit came after a deadly explosion at a Gaza hospital. The U.S. and independent experts say evidence shows the rocket was a misfire by Islamic Jihad militants within Gaza, but the Arab world blames Israel, fueling protests across the Middle East.

 

SCHANZER: The way that things are unfolding in the region right now. This cannot be allowed any longer.

 

Dr. Jonathan Schanzer is a senior vice president at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a terrorism expert, and the author of multiple books on Gaza. He is focused on a key question.

 

SCHANZER: Was this 10/7 slaughter, was that a preamble to war that Iran planned? 

 

As more than 200 hostages remain trapped in Gaza,  preparations for a ground war intensify, what does Dr. Jonathan Schanzer 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: Dr. Jonathan Schanzer, welcome to Firing Line. 

SCHANZER: Thank you. 

HOOVER: After the October 7th attack, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu swiftly vowed to eliminate Hamas. And we’ve seen troops building up on Israel’s border with Gaza for nearly two weeks. What factors have caused Israel’s delay entering Gaza? 

SCHANZER: Well, I think there are a number of things that Israel is balancing right now. Number one: I think the Israelis didn’t want to launch an invasion before President Biden arrived. At the same time, we are aware of a diplomatic channel that is being conducted out of Qatar. The optics of this are actually somewhat crazy. The Qataris are themselves sponsors of Hamas. And they right now are acting as a trusted American ally, if you will, to try to help negotiate the release of these hostages. I have my doubts about the Qataris intentions, but it appears that the U.S. and Israel are allowing for this channel to play out. That may have something to do with the delay. And then finally, there has, I think, been some concern expressed by Israelis within the security establishment that a ground war is not as simple as one might think, that there are, as I heard it, hundreds of kilometers of underground tunnels, some of which have been unexplored by the Israelis. They don’t have all of the intelligence needed in order to conduct a war underground. It could be close quarter combat. And so one gets a sense that the Israelis are gathering what they can in terms of intelligence before they go in. And then there’s one other factor. And that is that there is the potential right now for a multi-front conflict. You’ve got to remember that the regime in Iran has multiple proxies that it has funded over the years, groups like Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and others. And so there is a concern that should Israel enter into the Gaza Strip, that other fronts could erupt. These are all, I think, weighing heavily on the mind of Benjamin Netanyahu, who does not like to take significant risks, not in the military realm. He is fearful of quagmires. And that also may be part of what has prompted him to delay. 

HOSTAGES

HOOVER: Let’s go back to the hostages. You have suggested serious concern with the ability of the Qataris to be effective as hostage negotiators. Is there a better way? 

SCHANZER: You know, it’s a good question. There is something sort of Orwellian about all of this that the Qataris, for really the better part of a decade have been playing arsonist and firefighter in this conflict. You cannot be a sponsor of Hamas and then also offer your good offices and expect to be respected in this way. They seek to legitimize Hamas. That has always been the Qatari goal. And I don’t think this is the moment to be legitimizing Hamas. It may not even be the moment to negotiate with the terrorist group given the slaughter that it has just perpetrated. 

HOOVER: And yet, where does that leave the hostages? 

SCHANZER: Well, look, there are 203 of them by last count. The Israelis are obviously sick to their stomachs about the prospect of what it would take to get them out. What we hear is that they’re being held underground in military facilities that have been created by a Hamas shadow unit that is tasked with monitoring their health and well-being, which is, of course, a relative term here. I think that at some point, and I don’t know when that point comes, but the Israelis will come to the conclusion that the negotiations have reached a point of diminishing returns and that action needs to be taken regardless of the hostages. In other words, there’s no way that Israel can fight a war in the Gaza Strip, urban warfare, brutal fighting. They can’t fight with one hand tied behind their backs. And they may need to just assume that there will be significant losses as they go in. There may come a time where the Israelis determine that the well-being of 9.9 million other people must override the concern and heartbreak associated with these kidnaped Israelis. 

HOOVER: And what about the American hostages? 

SCHANZER: Look, that is also part of the constraint. And I do not envy Benjamin Netanyahu or his chief of the military chief of staff Herzi Halevi. These guys, I think, have gut wrenching decisions definitely before them. 

HOOVER: You wrote in your book, quote, “Though Israel is a far superior military power, there is no clear military solution to the Hamas threat.” Do you still believe that? 

SCHANZER: I don’t know if it’s true now. In other words, when you hear the rhetoric of the Israelis, which is, if Hamas can perpetrate a pogrom, a slaughter, of 1400 people, that there is no way that Israel can live next to this group any longer. The Israelis, I think, have made it clear that there is no other solution other than a military one. And this is what they appear to be preparing for. 

HOOVER: So there’s been a paradigm shift. This changed everything.

SCHANZER: A hundred percent. There is no other way to look at it. I mean, up until two weeks ago, the Israeli military establishment looked upon Hamas as what they called a tactical threat, an annoyance that can be deadly, but that was manageable. It’s no longer manageable from Israel’s perspective. I heard one former Israeli official say the moment that they killed that many people was the moment that they lost the right to exist. Very stark language. 

HOOVER: President Biden said that he spoke with Prime Minister Netanyahu about alternatives to a ground operation. What are the alternatives? 

SCHANZER: There are lots of options that Israel has in terms of direct confrontation, but also gray zone warfare, cyber warfare, ways to destabilize the regime in Iran. All of these things, one gets a sense, are going to be on the table. Maybe they’re even on the table now. We just have not yet seen the first steps taken in this war other than the aerial bombardment of Gaza, which has been ongoing almost from day one. 

IRAN

HOOVER: Do you believe that Iran is helping Hamas prepare for Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza? 

SCHANZER: One hundred percent. 

HOOVER: How?

SCHANZER: There is no question that Iran knew that hostage taking and a slaughter of the scale that was witnessed on October 7th, there’s no question that Iran knew that this would elicit a significant response from the Israelis. You know, Iran has a strategy of arming and training all of these proxy groups for a war of the nature that we might be seeing right now unfold before our eyes, a multi-front conflict. This has always been Israel’s nightmare scenario, in my view. And of course, there’s a sad irony here. This is taking place on the 50th anniversary of the last major multi-front conflict. Of course, I’m referring to the 1973 Yom Kippur War. 

HOOVER: President Biden was in Israel this week. And you’ve said that President Biden’s aim this week was to do exactly what you just referenced, to prevent a multi-front conflict with Iran. How did he do? 

SCHANZER: Well, we don’t know yet. Whether the US has effectively deterred Iran remains to be seen. I think the President has done– he’s taken the right steps. He has deployed the military assets that are designed to stare down the Iranian regime and to stare down Hezbollah. And then he arrived in Israel and he embraced the Israeli public. He voiced support for the Israeli military, for the ground invasion that we expect to come. The strategy here is to try to isolate Gaza from all of the other action that could occur. In other words, deter Iran, convince it that it could actually suffer consequences by entering this battle; do the same with Hezbollah. And, you know, if this works the way that I think the Israelis want it to. And maybe the Americans as well, it would be a situation where the Iranian axis looks on somewhat helplessly while Israel, with assistance from the U.S. in some way or another, removes one of Iran’s chess pieces from the board. In other words, they have nothing that they can do but watch as Israel destroys Hamas and frees up one of its borders from the Iran-backed threat. This would be, I think, the soft landing that the Israelis are looking for. Whether it’s an easy battle is another story entirely. But the last thing Israel wants, I think, is that multi-front war. That said, I think the Israelis, they’ve made it clear that if they need to fight a two front battle, they will. And it will be tough. 

HOOVER: You’ve been critical of the Biden administration for its past appeasement of Iran. In your estimation, does Iran want a multi-front war with Israel? 

SCHANZER: Look, that’s the big question. Was this 10-7 slaughter, was that a preamble to the war that that Iran planned? In other words, did they see this as a moment that they were going to try to galvanize the Muslim world and try to draw in as many actors as possible and to set the region on fire? There’s also the question of whether they might use this opportunity while everyone’s eyes are on Israel and the attacks that are taking place there to make a dash for a nuclear weapon, which we know, of course, has been one of the objectives of the regime. And I think there’s also perhaps another motivation here, which is to try to derail the normalization process that we have watched unfold in the Middle East since 2020 with the signing of the Abraham Accords. And of course, right before this war broke out, there were multiple reports that the Saudis and the Israelis were drawing closer to a normalization deal. All of that has been derailed by Iran. And, you know, to get to your question about my critique of the Biden administration, look, there has been an effort, an ongoing effort by the Biden administration to separate out Iran’s malign activity and support for terrorism from the nuclear track. And so the administration, just as the Obama administration did before, has been offering all manner of financial inducements to the regime to try to convince it to stop its nuclear advances and to, you know, at minimum, hold steady. What that has amounted to, in my view, has been appeasement and the financing of a terrorist state. And I do hope that in light of all of this, and in light of the president’s embrace of the Israelis and the recognition of Iran’s hand behind all of this, that maybe it’s time for a policy review, that the way in which Democrats in particular have approached the Iran challenge, maybe it’s time to revisit some of these assumptions. Because I believe that it has ended in failure. And I’ve got to think that Biden administration officials are starting to come to that realization as well. 

HOOVER: Iran has enough highly enriched uranium to build several nuclear bombs. How do Iran’s nuclear ambitions factor into this moment? 

SCHANZER: Ultimately, you know, we talked about Hamas being a piece on the chessboard. The ultimate chess piece here, right, the queen, the most powerful piece on the board, is an Iranian nuclear weapon. If it gets a bomb, then that is the ultimate insurance policy. It’s an umbrella for the Iranians to be able to continue to engage in this kind of activity, this sponsorship of terrorist activities that utterly destabilize the region and harm American interests and allies. 

HOSPITAL BOMBING

HOOVER: I want to ask you about the explosions at a hospital in Gaza. U.S. intelligence and independent experts say Palestinian militants are responsible for the Gaza hospital blast this week, not Israel. Israel released audio from a conversation they say was between members of Islamic Jihad realizing their own rocket hit the hospital. They’ve also released video that is said to show the misfire. So how conclusive are these findings in your estimation? 

SCHANZER: From what I can tell –and I am not a ballistics expert – but from what I can tell, there is wide agreement across the Israeli military establishment. And I don’t think it’s just for PR purposes, because the Israelis have actually claimed responsibility at times for mistakes that they have made on the battlefield. And we’ve seen in the past that Islamic Jihad has misfired its rockets. 

HOOVER: In the aftermath of the hospital explosion, there were anti-Israeli demonstrations throughout the Middle East. And the king of Jordan canceled a summit with President Biden and other Arab leaders. To what extent, Jonathan, is the Arab world able to consider the evidence that the blast wasn’t Israel’s fault? 

SCHANZER: There is no accountability here. None. 

HOOVER: So the evidence doesn’t matter? 

SCHANZER: It clearly doesn’t. I mean, the Israelis had provided evidence within a short amount of time. And yet we saw massive protests unfolding in Lebanon, in Turkey. Look, I was making some comments about the Arab street, as it’s called. I believe the Arab street in general has enabled Hamas. It has given a green light for Hamas to carry out these kinds of attacks against Israel. The palpable hatred for Israel that we see in these angry mobs is what ultimately comes through above all else. And the facts really don’t matter to most of these people. 

HOOVER: Jonathan, you warned there’s an even bigger hospital in Gaza City that’s home to Hamas’s command center. Is that an inevitable target for Israel? 

SCHANZER: We’ve long been aware of the fact that the al-Shifa hospital, which is based in Gaza City, it is the command center of Hamas. It is several stories below ground. It’s where the leadership operates. And it is the ultimate human shield. It is the ultimate war crime. And, I mean, Hamas deliberately built this facility with that in mind, with the assumption that Israel could never bomb the largest hospital in the Gaza Strip. Really what the Israelis have said is every military target will be struck. Every means of decapitating the leadership will be used. And so one has to imagine that there will be a lot of discussion at some point about the al-Shifa hospital and what lies beneath it. 

EGYPT

HOOVER: There’s ongoing confusion about border crossings and when they will be open to those fleeing Gaza. Why does it appear as though Egypt is reluctant to open its borders and why are other Arab countries refusing to accept Palestinian refugees? 

SCHANZER: Look, you know, again, the Egyptians, they’ve got a bad economy right now. They’ve got their own challenges. And they don’t want a refugee problem in the Sinai. They don’t want this humanitarian corridor. There should be a meeting of the Arab League, or perhaps even the UN, that pushes for the absorption of some of these refugees in, in the countries that have been Hamas financiers. So the Qataris, the Turks, the Iranians, the Lebanese. Malaysia is another jurisdiction where there is Hamas support. Why we’re not holding these countries to account right now and forcing them– really, I mean, putting pressure on them to take accountability for the crisis that they have created. If the concern is for loss of life, the concern is for trying to prevent catastrophic events from befalling this community, the idea would be to get them out, to establish a humanitarian corridor and at some point in the future to facilitate their return without Hamas in the Gaza Strip. This, in my view, is the clear objective of what’s going on here. But the Arab world, the Arab street, are really voicing their opposition to this rather logical response to what was, I think, by all accounts, one of the most horrific acts of terrorism witnessed in decades. 

HOOVER: Humanitarian aid has been amassing at the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza for days now. And Israel announced this week that it will not block the aid’s passage. Why is getting food and water and fuel to civilians who need it so complicated? 

SCHANZER: Well, it’s complicated for a number of reasons. One, I mean, the Israelis have also said, almost in the same breath, that they don’t want to allow anything to go in so long as, you know, as of right now, there are 203 Israeli hostages being held against their will by Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The way the Israelis have put it, that’s their fair trade. Of course, Hamas is not interested in this. And so there’s ongoing debates about exactly how this will unfold. But then there is the question of when assistance comes through, you know, is it actually humanitarian aid? Are there dual use items that Hamas can use to buttress its military capabilities? So the Israelis are, you know, for them this is a high stakes proposition here, allowing for truckloads of material to go into the Gaza Strip right now during a hot war where there is probably a better-than-average chance that people have tried to insert military material or dual use material into these trucks. And so the Israelis are very wary. And they’re trying to use this as leverage right now to get the release of these hostages that were taken on October 7th. 

DETERRENCE OF WIDER CONFLICT

HOOVER: You’ve been warning for days that the skirmishes at the northern border indicate that Hezbollah is pushing the region into a wider war. We’ve also seen reports of clashes at the Syrian border and violence in the West Bank. What does the US and its allies need to do next in deterrence efforts? 

SCHANZER: Yeah. I mean, look, you know, the deterrence process is already underway, or at least the attempts to deter; Biden’s meeting with the Israeli cabinet, and his warning to Iran and Hezbollah, you know, ‘don’t even try it.’ And all of these things, I think, are the right steps toward deterring other other fronts from opening potentially. Israel would like the ability to fight in Gaza without having multiple other fronts erupt. And the US appears to be actively trying to steer things toward that outcome. The Brits as well. The French. The Germans. But it is, it’s complex. There are a lot of moving parts. And the real big question is, will Iran stand pat? 

HOOVER: A month after the surprise attack on Israel in 1973, William F Buckley Jr. sat down with Hans Morgenthau, an expert on international relations, and they both agreed that Israel was a client state of the United States at that time. 

MORGENTHAU: This is, of course, the tragedy of Israel, that it cannot afford to pursue a foreign policy at variance with the basic objectives of the United States. And the basic objectives of the United States are now to gain a foothold in the Arab world, to push the Russians out of the Middle East, at least to diminish their influence, in order to prevent the Russians from controlling the Middle East strategically and, more particularly, in terms of oil.

HOOVER: We are no longer in the Cold War. But while Biden was in Israel, Vladimir Putin visited China. What is the connection from your perspective in the United States, between our priority of supporting Israel and our priority of supporting Ukraine? 

SCHANZER: It’s a great question. As I view it, there are three embattled American democratic allies right now that are under threat: Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan. And there are three aggressors that are actively trying to challenge the U.S.-led world order. And they are, of course, Iran, Russia and China. The U.S.-led world order has been incredibly beneficial to the world, the access to technology and food and medicine. And it is now being challenged, and increasingly so. And this attack on Israel is part of that picture. The attack on Ukraine is part of that picture. And you can see that our three primary adversaries continue to cooperate with one another. The Iranians are providing UAVs and missiles to the Russians for them to be able to continue their assault on Ukraine. The Chinese are providing cover to both the Iranians and the Russians at the U.N. and elsewhere. The financial flows are clear. The diplomatic support is clear. There needs to be a congressional response and an administration response. And even in polarized Washington, D.C., one gets the sense that a foreign policy may be coalescing amongst those that inhabit the center, the center left, and the center right. There will be, I think, always the extremists and the outliers within both parties. And they have their voice, and that’s probably not going to change. But with any luck here, we’ll start to see a coalescing of centrist foreign policy views in Washington that rally around this notion. 

HOOVER: Dr. Jonathan Schanzer, thank you for joining me. 

SCHANZER: Pleasure.