Preet Bharara:
From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Stay Tuned in Brief. I’m Preet Bharara. It has been one year since the horrific Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th, 2023, which took 1,200 Israeli lives and 250 hostages into Gaza. Since then, a brutal war that has claimed tens of thousands of Palestinian lives persists, with violence still escalating between Israel, Lebanon, and Iran. On this somber anniversary, I’m joined by Franklin Foer. He’s a staff writer at The Atlantic, and recently published an in-depth report on the last year inside the Biden administration and their efforts to contain a war that has yet to be contained. Frank, welcome to the show.
Franklin Foer:
Thank you for having me.
Preet Bharara:
So just at the outset, before we get into anything of substance, I want to point out to folks that we’re recording this on the afternoon of Wednesday, October 2nd, five days before the actual anniversary of the attack. Lots of things can happen between now and then, so I just want the audience to know when we’re having this conversation. So can I start, before we get into the Biden administration and policy and any of that, what’s on your mind, and how are you feeling on this one-year anniversary?
Franklin Foer:
October 7th was… I’m Jewish, and it was this incredible emotional blow, and also a psychic blow, because there was so much in Jewish history that felt like Jews had transcended, the world had transcended. One of the promises of the state of Israel was that it would provide a sanctuary for Jews. And obviously, on October 7th, it spectacularly failed to do that, and in the aftermath of October 7th, all of these demons were unleashed around the world, and especially in spaces that American Jews considered to be quite intimate. So, for instance, I live in Washington, DC. I live next door to my rabbi. Sometime in the past year, she was walking down Connecticut Avenue, which is a block from my house, and somebody rolled down their window and started heckling her about being a kike. At the foot of my street, graffiti appeared comparing the IOF, the Israel Occupying Forces, not the IDF, to Ku Klux Klan.
And my daughter’s school, there’d been a spate of swastikas. And so antisemitism, which was something that was clearly in the air and on campuses and stirred up by Donald Trump, and we all saw Charlottesville and the like, and it suddenly felt like this intimate thing. And all through this year, I’ve told myself a reassuring story that this war, which is the proximate cause for all of this, would go away eventually. And I kept thinking that an end to the war was just around the quarter. And here we are, nearing October 7th, and not only is the war in Gaza not over, it appears to be escalating in quite significant sorts of ways, and in ways that could reverberate and keep escalating beyond imagination, beyond control.
Preet Bharara:
Yeah. This idea of the war ending is a totally different context in a different region of the world, but I think nobody expected that the war in Ukraine would still be going on and would’ve lasted as long as it did, some people initially, because they thought that Kiev and Ukraine would be overrun right away. How do you think the people of Israel are thinking about the war one year on, and then how do you think the Palestinians are thinking about the war one year on?
Franklin Foer:
So, I think just to take it in reverse order, one of the tragedies of the war escalating in the north and potentially with Iran is that the fate of the Palestinians is something that becomes increasingly ignored by diplomats, increasingly ignored by international organizations. And you have these two groups. You’ve got the Palestinians, you’ve got the hostages and the hostage families, and Israel, whose fates are intertwined because any end of this war is going to involve both a ceasefire and the release of hostages. And these two groups have suffered so much over the course of the last year, and it’s kind of their fate now to be shoved from the front lines shoved from the top of the agenda. And when I talk to diplomats, I ask, “What are the prospects of us getting a deal done now?” And they’re so dim. No diplomats I talked to think that it’s very likely that a deal will get resolved before the end of the Biden administration. So it means we’re going to speak with-
Preet Bharara:
Can I ask why?
Franklin Foer:
Yeah.
Preet Bharara:
So what are some reasons for that? Because there had seemed to be moments of hope in the interim. Is it because of the brutal assassination of hostages a few weeks ago, cruel and barbaric? Is it because Israel is now taking the offensive in a massive and aggressive way against Hezbollah? Is it because Iran has a different thought about these things? I mean, am I right that there seemed more hope-
Franklin Foer:
You’re absolutely right.
Preet Bharara:
… at various inflection points-
Franklin Foer:
Yeah.
Preet Bharara:
… some months ago? So why is it getting worse?
Franklin Foer:
Not only some months ago. It’s like some weeks ago.
Preet Bharara:
Some weeks ago.
Franklin Foer:
At-
Preet Bharara:
So why are the prospects getting worse?
Franklin Foer:
At the end of August, I think the administration felt, if not confident, they felt like they were on the cusp of a deal.
Preet Bharara:
They were bragging about it.
Franklin Foer:
Yeah. Unfortunately-
Preet Bharara:
Didn’t Biden openly talk about being on the precipice of a deal?
Franklin Foer:
I think it’s almost a tactic of his to wishfully say that they’re on the cusp of a deal in order to apply pressure to the process. And in the end it just feels empty when he talks about it.
Preet Bharara:
Well, if you do it multiple times, it certainly can, right?
Franklin Foer:
Right. I talked to one hostage negotiator, or one piece negotiator, and I went over the arc of the entire year since October 7th with them, and I tried to get him to hone in on the moments when a deal seemed within reach. And there were a couple of these moments, including November of last year when there was actually a deal where hostages were released and there was a seven-day ceasefire. It’s the one real diplomatic achievement of this past year. And he said what’s required is you need to have a convergence of interest. And those convergence of interest seem to be pretty rare because it’s not just about military aims, it’s about the way in which the external world perceives the crisis. So there was a time when a lot of diplomats, not just American diplomats but Arab diplomats were telling me that they feared that Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas in Gaza, was watching the campus protests in the United States, and he saw that Israel was being delegitimized as the war went on.
And so he felt as if it wasn’t in his interest to take advantage of Israel’s weakness at that moment in order to push for a deal. He felt like he’d rather just let events take their course because events were going in his favor. Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, exists within a very tenuous political coalition where ever since October 7th, he’s played this game with American diplomats where he said, “Look, I want a deal. I want to help you achieve all of your ends, but I have this coalition and they won’t let me do this.” And so we need there to be a convergence of military interest, we need there to be a convergence of political interest, and those are just hard to line up.
Preet Bharara:
You mentioned Netanyahu. In a piece you wrote in July for the Atlantic, you talked about the interactions between Netanyahu and Biden and the administration generally. And you wrote, “If American politicians become reluctant to throw their being into the defense of Israel, it is because they will have studied this object lesson. They will be intimately familiar with Netanyahu’s shabby treatment of Biden, and Netanyahu will bear the responsibility for the consequences.” Could you elaborate on that? How shabby, and why, and what is the reason why an Israeli prime minister would treat an American president shabbily?
Franklin Foer:
Yeah. I just want to begin with one really interesting aside I had when I was in Israel reporting a big piece that just came out in the Atlantic, and I was talking to a very, very senior Israeli official, and he said something that surprised me. He said, “Look, all of us in this government, you would think would be aligned for Trump. But when we look at Joe Biden, we see how he came to Israel at a moment of greatest need. He made this trip in the middle of October right after October 7th, and he wrapped his arms around the country when they were reeling at a moment when Benjamin Netanyahu was nowhere to be seen. He was exhausted, he was in a state of shame, he wasn’t visiting hostage families, he wasn’t speaking to the nation, and Biden stepped in and he played that sort of role.”
Joe Biden:
I come to Israel with a single message. You’re not alone. You’re not alone. As long as the United States stands, and we’ll stand forever, we’ll not let you ever be alone.
Franklin Foer:
There was some bona fides of friendship that were displayed in that moment, and I think throughout this war, and they haven’t really been reciprocated by Benjamin Netanyahu, that Netanyahu is a figure who has existed on the scene almost as long as Joe Biden. And he’s had this history with democratic presidents of almost baiting confrontations with them for his own political benefit. There was a moment in the nineties when Bill Clinton was in the saddle and was pushing to a peace deal, and Netanyahu made steps towards that peace deal, and then he got attacked and dethroned from the right, and he vowed that that would never happen to him ever again. And so in the course of this last year, I think it would be… I would take probably a lot of flack in certain quarters for saying this, but it’s hard for me to imagine a president being more pro-Israel than Joe Biden has been. But Netanyahu has really very rarely reciprocated that with ostentatious displays of gratitude. And in Joe Biden’s-
Preet Bharara:
Are there some risks in that? What are the risks inherent in the Netanyahu shabby strategy?
Franklin Foer:
The risks are that the next time an American president wants to go out on a limb for Israel, they’re going to be less likely to do that because they’re going to be worried that he’s going to turn around and smack them.
Preet Bharara:
And does Netanyahu just not care about the long-term, because he’s caring about his scalp in the near term?
Franklin Foer:
It’s not just caring about his scalp. I think there is a lot of that, but Netanyahu is somebody who is an excellent tactical thinker and not really a great strategic thinker. And I think the same could be said of Israeli political culture in general that given their crazy parliamentary system-
Preet Bharara:
There’s a short-term, long-term divide.
Franklin Foer:
Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And so he’s good about making the calculation about what will get him to the next week, and he’s bad about thinking about, “Okay, what is in my country’s best interest over the long run? What’s in my own strategic interest over the long run?”
Preet Bharara:
You talked about the arc of the war, and I wonder if there are particular inflection points that you think have been important, and we didn’t realize how important they were when they were happening, and whether there were moments where, in retrospect, you see that they inflamed things more than they could have or there were opportunities that were missed.
Franklin Foer:
All right. So the most interesting inflection points happened to me at the beginning of the war, and in the first couple months. At the very, very beginning of the war, when Biden paid his visit to Tel Aviv, he was trying to get the Israelis to dial back their war plans, because when October 7th happened, and this is very hard to believe, but there wasn’t a plan on the shelf that the IDF had for invading Gaza. And so they were improvising wildly at the beginning of the war. They didn’t know how many troops they needed to send in, they didn’t know which parts of the Gaza Strip they should invade. They certainly didn’t have any sense of what an end game for an invasion would look like. And Biden actually didn’t want the Israelis to go in on the ground. And he told the Israelis this point blank. He said, “You should conduct counterterrorism raids, you should try to dismantle the infrastructure and kill the architects of October 7th, but you should do so in a very targeted sort of way.
And so the Israelis considered this advice, they rejected it. They ended up going into Gaza in a much more scaled-back way than they had originally intended when they started to improvise their plans. I think they talked about going in with 30,000 troops, and in the end they went in with 6,000 troops, and I think they made more provisions, as hard as that is to believe at certain points, to protect civilians than they initially planned to do. So that’s one major inflection point. Throughout the early months of the war, the Israelis were convinced that they were about to be attacked from all sides, in the North by Hezbollah, which had started firing rockets at Israel, almost at the start of the war, they were worried that Hamas’s invasion was part of some grand Iranian scheme, and that suddenly there would be riots breaking out in the West Bank.
And so there was a moment, four days after October 7th, when Israel almost went to war with Hezbollah, because they mistook a flock of birds for paragliders who they believed were repeating Hamas’s invasion, but from the north. And so that was an inflection point, because Israel could have very easily overextended itself at the very beginning of the war and made some huge blunders in its moment of greatest anger and shame.
And then the third point I’d point to is the Israelis initially said that the war would be wrapped up by Christmas of last year, and that was their plan. But I think the war plan was so ill-conceived at the beginning that they didn’t consider that one of the most important objectives of an invasion of Gaza would be to close off the smuggling corridors in the South by which Hamas was constantly being resupplied, and they should have done that at the beginning of the war. And by leaving that objective till the very, very end of the war, they just kept extending the timeline in a way that was maybe strategically justifiable, but really hard to sustain in terms of global opinion and the cost of waging continual war for the Israelis, and certainly for the people of Gaza.
Preet Bharara:
What do you say to the people who argue that another error, and they would go beyond the word error, was that at some point fairly early on, Israel ceased to be careful enough about the death of civilians?
Franklin Foer:
I think that that’s a fair criticism of Israel, but it’s also a fair criticism of the United States. And there was a moment where the American Embassy in Jerusalem embedded within the IDF to try to go over all of the provisions that they were using when they were bombing Gaza and when they were going after high-value Hamas targets. And what they realized was that they were using essentially the same set of procedures that the United States used when it was in Iraq or battling ISIS or in Afghanistan. And some of your listeners may justifiably say, well, those aren’t the best procedures, and there’s a case to be made that that is true, but I don’t think that they were dramatic-
Preet Bharara:
Didn’t Biden say publicly and also to Netanyahu, “Learn what we have learned”?
Franklin Foer:
It’s true.
Preet Bharara:
In Iraq, which is a terrible counterexample in a lot of ways, we had most of… a majority Americans now believe we had no business being there in the first place.
Franklin Foer:
Yeah. I’m not saying these are great. The inherent problem is that-
Preet Bharara:
It’s like saying a little bit, Iraq, it was a while ago now, nobody would say, well, America did X or Y in Vietnam, therefore you can’t blame us now. So is that a fair response?
Franklin Foer:
I think that’s fair. I think that’s fair. I think that war is about killing. When warfare takes place within urban confines, and especially against enemies that are exploiting civilians and hiding and intermingling with civilians in order to protect themselves, there’s almost no way that it would be possible to avoid massive civilian casualties. Even the most ethical army in the world would be brutal and destructive because there’s no alternative in that type of environment. So the war is either more-
Preet Bharara:
The alternative is if all the leaders have pagers. We can be more precise.
Franklin Foer:
That’s an alternative. And even then, there’s civilians who get killed.
Preet Bharara:
Yeah. Can I ask you, the recent aggressive tactics and successful, by war standards, by Israel against Hezbollah, it has taken out, I think, dozens of the top leaders. We mentioned the pager attack that some people have an issue with and other people think is perfectly appropriate in this kind of a conflict. Is that military and intelligence success emboldening Israel with respect to the war against Hamas? Or is it a distraction and taking away resources from the year-long conflict with Hamas? How does that factor into the picture?
Franklin Foer:
I think most importantly, as far as Israel’s concerned, is that Israelis have good reason to feel demoralized by the war in Gaza, even though they’ve killed a lot of Hamas soldiers, they failed… They’ve killed four of the top six folks at the top of the Hamas hierarchy. But the guy who planned October 7th, who gave the green light to October 7th is still alive, and there is no end game in Gaza right now. So Gaza, despite their military victories, is no closer to ending than it was several months ago. And there is no plan for what will happen to Gaza.
Gaza is just this open, gaping wound, and at some point somebody needs to govern Gaza because it’s anarchic and going through suffering an incredible humanitarian crisis right now that despite a year, nobody, the Israelis, the international community, have gotten only marginally better at delivering humanitarian aid into Gaza. And so rather than having to fix that really difficult, demoralizing problem in Gaza, Israel has undergone these very dramatic operations in Lebanon that have restored the myth of Israeli military cleverness and effectiveness. And so I think that that’s a big domestic boost for Israelis.
Preet Bharara:
An opening line or an opening question at the vice presidential debate that happened this week was some version of the question, would you support a preemptive Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear capability? I don’t know if you caught it.
Franklin Foer:
I did.
Preet Bharara:
What do you make of the question? What do you make of the answers? What do you make of the issue? And could it happen before people hear this podcast?
Franklin Foer:
I’m not going to… You’re setting me up to look like a fool.
Preet Bharara:
No, no.
Franklin Foer:
My guess is that it won’t happen before this podcast. When I talked to sources within the administration yesterday, they thought that whatever the form Israeli retaliation would take, it would not involve attacks on nuclear sites. But as we know, there are all sorts of cross pressures on the Israelis.
Preet Bharara:
Yeah, but why not? But explain why not. Why not? You have all this maelstrom of hostility. This is not my view, but I’m making the argument. You have Hezbollah, you have Hamas, you intensified aggression on all sides. You have Iran that sent a series of missiles that didn’t do much damage, and they’re desperately trying to get that capability. And the country that is capable of doing the pager attack and the walkie-talkie attack and has all sorts of other capabilities, what would be the downside? Explain the downside diplomatically and regionally and otherwise of such a preemptive strike by Israel.
Franklin Foer:
Let me just first outline why it would be an attractive option to the Israelis, which is that Hezbollah was basically this guarantor of Iranian security. So Israel was unlikely to launch a preemptive strike on Iranian nuclear tracks because they knew that Hezbollah had this enormous arsenal of rockets that could overwhelm Israeli air defenses and inflict incredible damage on Central Israel. And so now that Hezbollah has been-
Preet Bharara:
Do they not have that anymore? Is it sufficiently degraded?
Franklin Foer:
Hezbollah’s arsenal is probably about half of what it was a couple weeks ago. And so that’s one-
Preet Bharara:
So now the the Iron Dome can withstand it?
Franklin Foer:
It’s not clear. I think it would still, from what I understand, it still would be possible for Hezbollah to launch an attack that could overwhelm the Iron Dome and the various systems that the Israelis have deployed. And if that happens simultaneously with an Iranian strike, and if it became a full-born war between Iran as proxies in Israel, I don’t know if those air defenses would be able to perform quite as effectively as they have now. There really is a possibility that it could be overwhelmed. And so that’s the big reason-
Preet Bharara:
Is one reason, is one purpose of the aggressive onslaught against Hezbollah for the purpose of clearing the way and making more palatable and less risky a preemptive strike on Iran?
Franklin Foer:
It’s hard to say. I think that that is…
Preet Bharara:
It’s just a side benefit?
Franklin Foer:
No, it’s definitely a possibility that there are going to be people within the Israeli national security establishment who are going to argue at a certain point that this is the moment, that Iran has never been more exposed as a paper tiger, Hezbollah has never been more weakened, and that this is the moment to make a play. Israel couldn’t possibly tumble even further in international esteem, that this is just events have lined up where maybe the cost of such an attack won’t ever be lower than they are right now. And Iran has never been closer to getting a bomb, so this is the moment.
Preet Bharara:
So it’s going to happen, you’re saying.
Franklin Foer:
I’m not saying that, because I think that…
Preet Bharara:
You made a pretty good case.
Franklin Foer:
Hezbollah still has a ton of rockets. I think that when you’re dealing with a country… And Iran and-
Preet Bharara:
But Israel is continuing to degrade Hezbollah, and it seems to me that if what you’re saying is correct, that part of the mission must be to degrade Hezbollah further and further and further for, among other reasons, making an attack on Iran more palatable and acceptable, no?
Franklin Foer:
Yeah. Well, one of the data points that says support that is that the contrast between battling Hamas and battling Hezbollah and Iran, which is that Israel had just not spent that much time thinking about how it would go to war with Hamas. It felt like Hamas was doing its bit to preserve stability in Gaza and allowing Israel to focus on all of these other problems that it had, and allowing Netanyahu to degrade the Palestinian authority in the West Bank. And with Hezbollah and Iran, Israel has spent all of this time thinking about how it would execute a preemptive strike, how it would take out Hezbollah, and I do think that there is… There’s almost an inevitability that these ideas are going to start to gather prestige within the Israeli national security establishment, and they’ll become more thinkable in the coming weeks.
So I’m not saying that this is off the table. I think that this is a real possibility. But then again, the cost of escalation are also real and hard to tabulate, and it’s easy to get carried away, and even if the United States seems to be encouraging Israel to exact revenge on Iran for the missile attack that happened, I think there’s maybe… Israel is totally dependent on the United States in order to defend itself against Iran and Hezbollah, and if the United States starts to back away in any sort of meaningful, measurable way, even though that’s very hard to imagine, given the events of the last year, that would leave Israel in an incredibly precarious position.
Preet Bharara:
Yeah. When this podcast airs, we’ll be just about four weeks away from the American election. Starting with Kamala Harris, you’ve obviously spent a lot of time and you’ve written a lot about the Biden administration, how they’ve handled this aspect of the Middle East. What, if anything, changes in Harris administration? And then I’ll ask you about Trump.
Franklin Foer:
I think maybe the answer to these questions is the same, because there’s a point at which it becomes unsustainable for the world to continue to have these conflicts going on, and no matter who is the next president, the big question is going to be how to get to a world after the conflict. And I think whether it’s Trump, whether it’s Kamala Harris, I think there will be a president who is going to be forceful about wrapping this up and pushing the world to the next phase. I think there are so many complexities about how to initiate that next phase, namely in, if we just start with Gaza, in order for there to a new government, a new governing authority in Gaza, there needs to be some measure of security. And Israel, I think, I couldn’t say with a hundred percent certainty, I don’t think Israel wants to be a long-term occupying force in Gaza, because it’s not equipped to do that, it would come at incredible human cost for the IDF, and I think the United States would never sanction that. So I think that that’s not a plausible path.
But I think the other plausible path, which you have some sort of international force coming into Gaza, occupying the country, dealing with security, getting a handle on the humanitarian situation, and then providing a medium-term bridge to some other Palestinian governing body, that’s also very hard to imagine, so long as Hamas continues to exist as a fighting force, and there’s no evidence that this war could eliminate Hamas as a fighting force.
Preet Bharara:
Is that your answer for Trump also, then?
Franklin Foer:
I think that’s my answer for Trump as well. I think Israelis worry that Trump will give them an even… I think a lot of Israelis pine for Trump. It’s true, when I travel in Israel, do reporting, I hear a lot of Israelis say this. But I hear the Israelis who are in the defense business, the national security business, also worry that Trump will be the guy who gets on the phone on day one and says, “Wrap this up. You’re making me look bad here, and let’s just get this over with,” without really helping them come up with a plan for how to get beyond the war.
Preet Bharara:
In the immediate term, is the proximity of the American election, it doesn’t look like it is, but is it causing, in any way, Netanyahu either to hold his hand or play his hand more quickly? Is the four- or five-week timeframe having an impact on the Israeli decision-making or not?
Franklin Foer:
I think it is in certain ways. I think that he knows that Biden is a lame duck. He knows that Biden is giving him a much longer leash right now in Lebanon than he was a week or two ago, that I think a week or two ago, the Biden administration was pushing for a ceasefire in Lebanon, and now that Israel has achieved these victories, and because Biden is a bit of… He’s a lame duck, I think it’s very hard for him to assert control over whatever Israel is doing. The election also dictates, I think, his actions there as well. And so Israel has more running room to do things, and that’s maybe one reason why they would engage in a preemptive strike against Iranian nuclear strikes in the next couple weeks, because they know we’re in this small window. But I think the most important thing shaping the way that Netanyahu is behaving right now is that in recent memory, he hasn’t been as popular as he is right now because he’s presiding over a string of military successes after a pretty terrible year of failures and flailing.
Preet Bharara:
Do you think we’ll be here a year from now talking about a retrospective of the second year of the war?
Franklin Foer:
God, I hope not. It’s really for the sake of civilians in Gaza, for the sake of the global economy, for the sake of all of our nerves, for the sake of the ways in which this war continues to reverberate abroad and stoking up dark demons in America, in Western Europe. I really hope that this is over. But the one mistake I’ve made perpetually over the course of this last year is thinking that the end was within sight when, really, that was a pure illusion
Preet Bharara:
On that half-hopeful half-not-hopeful note, Franklin Foer, thanks for your time, thanks for insight. Really appreciate it.
Franklin Foer:
Thank you.
Preet Bharara:
For more analysis of legal and political issues, making the headlines become a member of the CAFE Insider. Members get access to exclusive content, including the weekly podcast I host with former US attorney, Joyce Vance. Head to cafe.com/insider to sign up for a trial. That’s cafe.com/insider. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me @PreetBharara with the hashtag #AskPreet. You can also now reach me on Threads, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-24-PREET. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The editorial producers are Noa Azulai and Jake Kaplan. The associate producer is Claudia Hernández, and the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Nat Weiner, and Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, stay tuned.
