What motivated the Hamas terrorist attack? How did Israel fail to stop it? What role is Iran playing in this conflict? What should Americans know about the state of Israel’s chaotic internal politics? And what comes next? Today’s show has two guests. Dan Raviv is the author of several bestselling books on Israel, Israeli-American relations, and Israeli intelligence. He was a CBS News national and international correspondent for over 40 years. He’s here to provide context on Hamas and Israeli politics. To help us understand some of the regional political dynamics, we have Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, who has been an adviser for several accords and peace talks in the Middle East in the past decade. He is also the president of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute.
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In the following excerpt, Derek and Dan Raviv discuss the context for the Israel-Hamas conflict.
Derek Thompson: I don’t always do an explicit table of contents for these podcasts, but there’s so much for us to talk about here that I want to keep myself and listeners focused on the goals of this conversation. There are three pieces of context that I most want to understand better from the next 45 minutes to one hour of our talks. No. 1, I want to know a little bit more about history—Gaza and Hamas and their relationship to Israel. No. 2, I want to understand a little bit more about the political context, Israel’s relationship to its neighbors and the internal politics of Israel and how they might be relevant for our discussion of this war. And finally, no. 3, I want us to talk about the future, the implications of the invasion of Israel, implications for the Middle East, implications for regional war and peace, and even global markets, international relations. Does that table of contents make sense to both of you?
Dan Raviv: Sounds good to me.
Thompson: Good. Dan, let’s start with you. In the open, I’ve already outlined the horror of this past weekend. Before we go forward, I’d like to go backward and to level set on a few topics for our audience. Hamas and the Gaza Strip: How would you characterize the relationship between Hamas in Gaza and Israel just before this weekend’s invasion?
Raviv: Well, just to be clear, no direct communication at all. Hamas is a radical Islamic faction in Palestinian society. It’s been ruling the Gaza Strip since 2007, the result of a civil war in which Hamas fighters were killing Palestinian authority. Al-Fatah fighters, that’s the late Yasser Arafat’s longtime movement, they’re still pretty much in charge of most of the West Bank. But the Gaza Strip became Hamas territory. Very radical group, absolutely committed publicly to never accepting a Jewish state of Israel, saying that historic Palestine, all of it’s been occupied by the Jews, not since the Six-Day War, not since a few years ago, but since the creation of Israel in 1948. Hamas doesn’t accept Israel; therefore, Israel won’t talk to Hamas.
So, is there constant fighting? No. Skirmishes from time to time. Israel spent a lot of money, reported to be $1 billion, building a wall and security fence around Gaza. Gaza residents and their supporters around the world say, “It’s a prison. Biggest prison camp ever.” And by the way, on the other side, on a smaller border with Egypt, the Sinai Peninsula, there’s also a wall. The Egyptians also block Gazans from leaving without special permission, so Gazans are locked up—their misfortune because of the way the Hamas government has been since 2007. Now, these occasional skirmishes, they make it in the news. Hamas, sometimes another radical group in Gaza, Palestinian, Islamic Jihad fires rockets across the border, over the border fence, especially at nearby Israeli towns. There’s an area in which tens of thousands of Israelis live. Some of them, by the way, used to be settlers. They were Jewish settlers in the Israeli army in Gaza, occupying Gaza until Israel left in the year 2005.
So, a lot of Israelis still live close to Gaza. Do they feel safe? Yeah, on the whole, till this past Saturday. Sometimes there’d be rocket fire, but especially since Israel invented the Iron Dome missile defense system, Iron Dome shoots down more than 90 percent of the rockets overhead. It’s an incredible thing. It made the Israelis near the border feel safer until this past Saturday. So again, until this past weekend, things were bad as usual, but the border gates usually had a little official opening. You’d be absolutely checked. U.N. aid workers could go in. Some Gaza residents had medical permits and could go out for treatment in Israel or in the West Bank. And aid was coming in in the sense of food trucks, cash aid from the country of Qatar. Things were normal—tense. But again, this past Saturday changed everything.
Thompson: You said the people in Gaza are locked up, and Gaza has been characterized by some as the largest open-air prison in the world. And their movement is clearly constricted on both sides, on the Egyptian side and on the Israeli side. Can you tell me a little bit more about their movement? Can they get out? How do they get out? And this is obviously a question that’s really important, given that Israel is now, having been invaded, now potentially marching their own soldiers into the Gaza Strip.
Raviv: It’s a small area considering there are 2 million Palestinians living in Gaza, and some of it’s very crowded, the city of Gaza and the Khan Younis refugee camp, which has real concrete buildings, by the way. But then there’s a lot of open space kind of heading down the coast toward the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula. There’s open space. But can they go into Egypt? Like I say, Egypt considers Gaza Palestinians to be a security problem, so Egypt’s not easygoing about it. But if you buy a ticket, if you were a Gaza Palestinian and you got a ticket to Cairo for medical treatment or to catch a flight to the outside world, you’d probably get a permit from the Egyptians in normal times.
And on the Israeli side, as I said, in more quiet times, also, you could get a permit for medical treatment or even perhaps to see your family in the West Bank. And by the way, Israel also granted, on a typical day, as many as 20,000 work permits, Palestinians in Gaza do construction work in Israel. Yes, it’s known they’re paid relatively little, they’re not members of the labor union. But again, in normal times, there was this kind of modus vivendi where the Hamas government or faction hates Israel, Israel totally distrusts Hamas and generally would rather work with the more moderate Al-Fatah faction that runs the West Bank, but there was kind of a balance. But again, from the Israeli point of view, who knew what Hamas was planning for October 7?
This excerpt was edited for clarity. Listen to the rest of the episode here and follow the Plain English feed on Spotify.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guests: Dan Raviv & Jeffrey Sonnenfeld
Producer: Devon Manze
Subscribe: Spotify
