The Honest Take

THT Elliot Kaufman — corrected transcript
English (US)

00:00:00.040 — 00:00:31.160 · Elliot Kaufman
If you are Hamas, you have to be laughing at how easily you can play the international and American news media. You can see even after just ten days since Hamas's October 7th massacre, the media was fully ready to move on to the story that it that it knew so well and was so comfortable telling, which is Israel has gone too far.

Israel is unleashed, vindictive. Israel is bombing without a care in the world.

00:00:34.600 — 00:00:59.080 · Ben Chertoff
This is The Honest Take, the show that goes past the headlines to find out what's actually true about Israel, and about the people covering it. I'm Ben Chertoff, and my guest today is Elliot Kaufman. He's on the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal and along with his co-writer Yonah Jeremy Bob of The Jerusalem Post.

He spent two years getting into the room where Israel decided how to fight the war, and he wrote the book on.

00:01:04.309 — 00:03:05.620 · Ben Chertoff
Quick favor before we start. Hit the subscribe button wherever you're listening, and if you've got 20 seconds, please rate the show. That's the one thing that gets us in front of new people. Okay, here we go. There's a version of the last two years you already know. You've seen the casualty numbers, the word genocide, the hospital that was bombed on October 17th.

That version got written fast, and most of it got written before Israeli troops had even set foot in Gaza. Elliot Kaufman and his coauthor, Yonah Jeremy Bob, spent the war building the other version, the one assembled from the inside. Between them, they got all three members of the war cabinet: Netanyahu, Gallant, Gantz.

They got the intelligence chiefs. They got Jake Sullivan and Steve Witkoff on the American side, and more than 100 senior Israeli military officials, and they did it while a war was still going on, which is the astounding part and which is where we'll start. But what comes out is a Netanyahu most people would not recognize. Not the man who wants to invade anything that moves, but a prime minister who spent the opening weeks of the war putting the brakes on over the objections of his own defense minister.

It's an IDF that had no plan on the shelf for invading Gaza at all. It's an aid operation that Israel, in the words of one of Elliot's own sources, quote, effed up royally, unquote. And it's a press corps that ten days in started taking a terrorist's word for it and never really stopped. We get into the strike that almost happened in Lebanon on October 11th, and the monopoly Hamas was handed over what the world was allowed to see.

And at the end, we come back home to Brooklyn. And how a protest last year has eerie similarities to another story. Elliot has reported at length on the Crown Heights riots of 1991. Elliot Kaufman, welcome to The Honest Take.

00:03:05.860 — 00:03:07.060 · Elliot Kaufman
Thanks for having me on.

00:03:07.660 — 00:03:49.380 · Ben Chertoff
So this book is incredible in terms of the access that you and your co-writer Bob got, in terms of the number of people you were able to interview. You're in New York. You're an editorial writer. Your your coauthor is in Jerusalem, a reporter. Between you, you, between the two of you, you got the prime minister, the defense minister, Gantz, the intelligence chiefs, Jake Sullivan, Steve Witkoff and north of 100 senior Israeli military officials during a war while it was still going on.

Can you start at the beginning? How do you get that kind of access?

00:03:49.580 — 00:05:57.800 · Elliot Kaufman
And that's what makes our book unique. I think, uh, you know, there have been already several books, good books about the October 7th massacre, but there's really nothing else like this available on the war that followed, and together we really can claim to offer this inside story based on inside material from all of Israel's top leaders.

Uh, one way to get it is to write for the Wall Street Journal editorial page. That certainly helped, and to have been doing so all throughout this war from October 7th on. Another way, uh, my coauthor is the senior military correspondent at The Jerusalem Post. He's the he's often the only English-language reporter in the room for these top IDF briefings.

Uh, and so, um, together we are writing on this topic, constantly working with Israeli officials all the time over the course of the war, I would publish, um, major interviews. We call them weekend interviews at the Wall Street Journal with Prime Minister Netanyahu, uh, Defense Minister Yisrael Katz, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar, uh, Israeli ambassador to the US Yechiel Leiter, and even Israeli historian, uh, Benny Morris.

Uh, and so I was speaking to all these people, their staffs, um, and I think from their point of view, they want to tell the real story of what's happening and not the, you know, the sort of anti-Israel propaganda that is flooding all of our social media feeds and so much other media. And so to be able to speak to reporters who are aiming at the truth, but at the same time are not totally hostile to them.

That sounded like a good deal. Uh, and so, uh, I developed those sources and relationships as we went.

00:05:58.280 — 00:05:59.120 · Ben Chertoff
Well, you.

00:05:59.320 — 00:06:14.680 · Ben Chertoff
Being in the room and seeing the coverage that exists in the rest of the world, where did where was that gap the biggest in terms of the rift between what was actually going on and what was being reported?

00:06:16.240 — 00:06:30.920 · Elliot Kaufman
Well, I could point to a few things, but I think, um, number one would have to be and really, for a long time has been the understanding of Prime Minister Netanyahu himself.

00:06:31.120 — 00:06:31.560 · Ben Chertoff
Mhm.

00:06:31.760 — 00:09:02.540 · Elliot Kaufman
In the West, especially, his reputation is, as you know, wanting to invade anything that moves and send Israeli troops all over. And he is a hawk. It's true when it comes to his to the national security threats facing Israel. But, um, if you'd ask how he views himself and certainly how many Israelis viewed him, especially before this war, it would be as a conservative when it comes to the use of military force into sending Israeli troops.

Uh, he he himself has been wounded several, several times in combat. His brother, famously, Yoni, killed during the hostage rescue mission in Entebbe, Uganda. Um, he worries about Israeli soldiers and sending them into into harm's way. And so, so much of the story that hasn't been told about this war, for better or for worse, is his hesitation or his caution.

At the very start of the war, when the question was, should Israel strike north first and fight with Hezbollah in Lebanon rather than Hamas in Gaza? And then also once Israel had chosen Gaza, why did it take three weeks from October 7th until October 27th until Israeli troops entered Gaza? These are crucial weeks while the world's media, um, turned on Israel.

I think you I think you could argue that happened ten days in, but certainly by three weeks in that turn had already happened, and Israeli ground troops hadn't even started their mission. So there was this real caution from Prime Minister Netanyahu, and it continued for the early part of the war. I think so much of the story of the war, though, is how that changes over time and how Netanyahu comes to outlast, exhaust or simply fire all of his internal rivals.

Um, and really, uh, persist in his determination to keep the war going. And it's at that point that he and that he ends up making some of the boldest decisions of the war, some of the riskiest decisions of the war in Lebanon, in Iran. But I would argue some of the most successful decisions of the war.

00:09:02.980 — 00:09:37.780 · Ben Chertoff
Do you think that the media coverage in that time period after October 7th, before the ground invasion started, when the media, when really the whole world was suddenly calling it a genocide, a war that hadn't happened yet? Um, do you think that that actually did that affect the course of the war? Netanyahu's decisions, the war room's decisions?

Um, and how did that. I'm curious as to how the the misreporting of the war shaped the actual war on the ground.

00:09:38.180 — 00:09:44.940 · Elliot Kaufman
You know what? I think it affected certain people in the war room more than others, for instance,

00:09:46.060 — 00:11:47.480 · Elliot Kaufman
Yoav Gallant, uh, Israel's then defense minister, uh, believed after October 7th that Israel would have significant international support and be able to fight a much longer war than usual because the world had seen what happened on October 7th. Interestingly, Prime Minister Netanyahu was always more skeptical of that.

I think his greater exposure to the West, understanding how quickly the world could turn on Israel despite what it had seen, and therefore when the world was changing, especially when the atmosphere in the in the United States was changing, I think that had more of an effect on Gallant and also on Benny Gantz, who was that third member of the initial war room triumvirate.

Um, both of them had expected more and therefore had more to be disappointed. You know, it's worth looking at the different the different audiences here. I mean, on the one hand, you can focus on the anti-Israel movement, and I think it is fair to say that the anti-Israel movement, even in the US, backed Hamas's October 7th attack, invasion, massacre.

And that sounds like a, you know, strong, provocative statement. But I think it's just a simple fact. If you look at, for instance, the leading anti-Israel protest movement in the US, SJP, Students for Justice in Palestine, its national organization on October 8th, 2023, sent out the most remarkable toolkit to all of its campus chapters, instructing them on how to handle what had just happened.

And these are the campus chapters that would lead the protests at campuses across the country, encampments and so forth. And in that, in that toolkit. What was said?

00:11:48.680 — 00:13:41.270 · Elliot Kaufman
This was a historic win for the Palestinian resistance. Glory to our resistance. Glory to our martyrs. There is no right way to resist, and there is no wrong way. All of it is legitimate, SJP said. And if that wasn't clear enough, they actually included a sample flier again, sent out to every campus chapter to advertise events.

And on that flier was a depiction of a Hamas paraglider. Right. Okay. Paragliding into Israel to carry out that October 7th massacre. I can give you similar examples from Columbia University. From Harvard University. Epicenters of this protest movement from those very first days when it really was just Hamas's October 7th massacre.

I can also give you examples from the Democratic Socialists of America. Now, this rising force in American politics, which backed Hamas's October 7th massacre, uh, endorsed and advertised events by pro-Hamas groups and communist groups celebrating the massacre and then sent its own representatives there to hear speakers do that, celebrate and praise that massacre.

More examples from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, American Muslims for Palestine. The list goes on and on. That's where that movement was. But what I would tell you is Americans were not yet were not yet there. Americans weren't immediately calling this genocide. That would take time. And it was very interesting to watch over the course of this war, how that hard-line anti-Israel critique would develop and win people over.

Who weren't there from the very start.

00:13:41.790 — 00:14:03.550 · Ben Chertoff
How much did, um, did Netanyahu, did Gallant know about the campus atmosphere and that stuff that was happening? I mean, from somebody who consumes probably more social media than is healthy. I knew about that immediately, and it was shocking and terrifying to see. How much of that affected decisions, do you think, inside, inside the war room, if it did at all?

00:14:05.350 — 00:15:52.900 · Elliot Kaufman
Well, if if it had really affected the decisions, you might expect them to have planned for a much shorter war. In the end, that isn't really what happened. Right. So I think, uh, what they were focusing on was the Biden administration itself, and Prime Minister Netanyahu would tell me, um, President Biden actually deserves extraordinary credit, despite all of the disagreements they had, precisely because Netanyahu knew Biden had that left flank.

Biden was under extraordinary pressure from within his own party, from his own Democratic Party base, activists, younger voters. And so Israel was watching that insofar as it had an ability to pressure President Biden. And over the course of the war, they would see that. I mean, one of the jokes that I would hear, um, from the from the Prime Minister's Office in Israel was that President Biden is working in support of the two-state solution: Michigan and Nevada.

Those two, those two, those two states. Worrying about the anti-Israel opposition in Michigan in particular. And there was one month in particular of the war where it was just decision after decision coming down to put pressure on Israel on the war, but also unrelated issues to the war. One after the other.

And it was clear to Israel's decision makers that President Biden was under pressure and was and was responding to it in ways that made their jobs more difficult.

00:15:53.420 — 00:16:19.299 · Ben Chertoff
One of the things that's fascinating to read in your book is, is how Gallant originally had almost immediately wanted to attack Hezbollah in the North. I because assuming that there was going to be an attack from the north, which eventually there was, and that Netanyahu was the one who was kind of putting the brakes on that, how how did he want the war to unfold differently from how the prime minister

00:16:20.580 — 00:16:21.820 · Ben Chertoff
reshaped it?

00:16:22.420 — 00:20:26.950 · Elliot Kaufman
So Hamas attacks October 7th, kills 1,200, takes more than 250 hostages. Hezbollah attacks October 8th. But not in the way that it could have. Hezbollah is sitting there looming over Israel with 150,000 missiles. It could have launched thousands of missiles on day one, and if it had, Israel's best estimates were Hezbollah would kill 5,000 Israelis, dwarfing what Hamas had done.

And that would just be day one. Haifa would be devastated. The North smashed up. Ben Gurion Airport severely damaged. About a third of the of the national electric grid taken off. And as we've heard, towers toppling in Tel Aviv, all of that or all of that was a realistic assessment. And so Gallant seeing Hezbollah fire only uh, it was, uh, several dozen mortar rounds, mostly, but also, um, anti-tank missiles and rockets.

Gallant makes a prediction in Israel's war room in those early days. And what he says is, um. Hezbollah is just waiting. Hezbollah is waiting for us to send all of our forces to the south toward Gaza at that point. That's when Hezbollah is going to strike with all it has. And so for weeks into the into the war, months, actually,

Israel kept an incredible, uh, proportion of its forces deployed on the northern front such that Israel had more air power waiting there than it was using in Gaza for the first several weeks of the war. Gallant's argument was that Israel cannot allow Hezbollah to strike hard first. Israel must do that itself.

And he had an entire plan ready to go for Israel to take that fight to Hezbollah, activating not so much the the pagers, which weren't actually fully ready at that point. But the walkie-talkies. Specifically sabotage. They had previously been sabotaged, ready to blow them up and start a really remarkable sequence of strikes which would destroy much of, uh, Beirut, really send its entire population out of there, um, and, uh, uh, decimate Hezbollah's missile arsenal.

Go after Nasrallah, all the senior leaders. I would say it was everything that you saw in September 2024. Ultimately, when Israel did fight Hezbollah in a serious way, except more so and more strongly and right at the start of the war, when the whole world was looking at Gaza. Israel would instead strike north at Lebanon and it came very, very close to happening.

I'm not sure everybody appreciates this, but, um, Netanyahu, even though he was opposed to it for various reasons, I can go into, mostly because it was such a massive risk, uh, right at the start of the war. But Netanyahu at one point sent Israeli planes in the air to carry out that that, um, campaign on October 11th, 20, 2023.

He did so because Israeli radar had picked up what they thought were Hezbollah paragliders flying into Israel. In the end, he had to call those planes back because it turns out on the radar, those weren't paragliders, those were geese, those were birds flying in the air. And the entire war could have turned on exactly that misreading of the of the situation.

00:20:27.110 — 00:20:43.109 · Ben Chertoff
Do any of your sources have I mean, obviously this is more armchair quarterbacking, but what would have happened had that attack been launched? Would it have significant? I mean, obviously it would significantly change the course of events, but is there any kind of

00:20:44.510 — 00:20:46.830 · Ben Chertoff
plus or minus talk on that?

00:20:47.310 — 00:23:04.139 · Elliot Kaufman
Oh, absolutely. And you know, from Gallant more than anyone because he still believes in this fervently. And what he would tell you is, given the success Israel was able to have ultimately in Lebanon with the pagers, with all the strikes, uh, in September 2024, it could have had that same success, if not more so right at the start of the war.

And what does that what does that then mean? Number one, Israel's north doesn't have to be evacuated and fully depopulated for ten, 11 months. Israel shrunk in those months. I mean, this was a vision of the destruction of Israel, where one region after another suddenly becomes uninhabitable. Uh, none of that would have happened.

But I think more to the point about the war, Israel could have then shifted its forces to Gaza rather than having to leave so many of them waiting, sitting around in the North for most of the crucial part of the Gaza war. And let me just tell you practically what that means. One question I get often is, um, why didn't Israel invade Gaza from the north and the south at the start?

Why did it wait so long to fight in Rafah, at the very south, Hamas's crucial arms-smuggling hub with Egypt? Um, and the answer which people don't like to hear is that Israel didn't have the manpower. It simply didn't. It had spent years making its army smaller, so that it wasn't as much of a financial burden, and it had to keep so many troops ready for this big escalation in the North.

That whole time, if Israel could have its full, its full forces, it might not have had to have done this sort of plodding, destructive military campaign in Gaza. Start at the top and slowly make your way down to the bottom, allowing Hamas to flee at every step of the process. It could have done both north and south at the same time.

But what all of that analysis there leaves out is that if it all goes according to plan, I think we forget that this was only four days after October 7th. The IDF

00:23:05.220 — 00:23:54.850 · Elliot Kaufman
was in shock. All Israel's leadership was in shock. Could they pull that off? Could they trust Israeli intelligence to be exactly right after they had totally missed Hamas's October 7th invasion? These are all huge gambles. And not only that, given what we know about how the war went, it is likely that starting this massive, destructive war in Lebanon, Israel would have very quickly run out of diplomatic capital with with the US, which was dead set against such an attack.

And it also would have quickly run out of ammunition. And then the question becomes, what do you even do with Gaza? At that point, when you've used up so much politically and militarily right at the start of the war?

00:23:55.290 — 00:24:18.770 · Ben Chertoff
Yeah, the the decision going back to Rafah to what you just mentioned, but like the the delay in that decision alone, just to to go into Rafah because of the diplomatic repercussions that would come from it, which ended up, you know, not being as you report it was not nearly what people had predicted it would be in terms of the length of time it would take to clear, etc.

00:24:19.210 — 00:24:20.680 · Ben Chertoff
Um, you.

00:24:21.520 — 00:25:11.840 · Ben Chertoff
Argue that Israel handed Hamas, uh, quote, a near monopoly on reporting from Gaza by not allowing foreign press. And, and you quote our own Gil Hoffman, an HonestReporting alum, in saying that that was a costly error. You know, I had I had Matti Friedman on the on the show a couple of months ago. He's argued that even if you did let reporters in the foreign press into Gaza, just the nature of being in under a totalitarian regime like Hamas there wouldn't they wouldn't have any freedom to just walk around and report as things are.

And it would just give the imprimatur of, of ABC News, whereas it's actually still Hamas. Is there any way that that could have been played differently that would have been more effective?

00:25:13.400 — 00:26:03.320 · Elliot Kaufman
Friedman may be right about that. Um, I'm not sure it's a silver bullet, but what I was looking at there is the hard-line anti-Israel critique which I had, which I had mentioned earlier, and the way it succeeded is actually very simple. It simply pretended Hamas was never there. Hamas was not even a part of the story that was told.

And I mean that in every way. Uh, first, none of the videos that flooded our social media feeds had Hamas in it. It was never seen because the only journalism coming out of there was Hamas journalism coming out of Gaza.

00:26:04.640 — 00:27:51.140 · Elliot Kaufman
It was there in terms of talking about the casualty toll, the death toll of the war. We would hear 20,000 Palestinians killed, 40,000 Palestinians killed and so forth without even, you know, without even mentioning how many of them were Hamas terrorists, were fighters in the war. Uh, it's sort of obvious and astonishing, but when you never mention it, it's as if they weren't even there in talking about aid.

You know, you can say that Hamas was stealing aid, diverting aid, taxing aid. And yet still Israel did various things wrong in how it handled the aid situation in Gaza. That's a totally legitimate point of view. But the Gaza genocide activist would never even mention any of those things in simply, in, in and simply, um, pretend that Israel wasn't facilitating the transfer of massive, massive quantities of, of, uh, humanitarian aid.

And so the picture of the war that was transmitted wasn't of Israel fighting a terror army of tens of thousands fighting with more than 400 miles of tunnels built under every Gazan city, with hospital headquarters, tunnels, um, underneath cemeteries, fighting out of schools and mosques using human shields instead.

The story of the war that emerged and that was talked about constantly and that was shown via images, was Israel versus Palestinian civilians. And I think that's what most of the world ultimately saw.

00:27:51.940 — 00:28:23.060 · Ben Chertoff
Yeah. Not only did that was that activists who were saying that and making that point, but I mean, it was it was large news organizations who weren't reporting that Israeli aid was going in or putting up photos on the on the front page of emaciated children who had preexisting conditions and, and claiming that that was because of aid not getting in.

You you work in one of the larger legacy media worlds. Granted, the the Journal has been much better on a lot of this. Um,

00:28:24.660 — 00:28:34.340 · Ben Chertoff
it seems endemic now, not only to the activists, but to the actual reporting itself. You're inside those rooms as well. How do you square up the two?

00:28:35.460 — 00:28:51.700 · Elliot Kaufman
Well, I mean, I should clarify that I, I am a member of the editorial board. So we are kept separate from the news side, really on all things. And so I'm not in those rooms. Right.

00:28:51.700 — 00:28:52.500 · Ben Chertoff
You're in the building.

00:28:52.540 — 00:30:03.930 · Elliot Kaufman
You know, in our rooms. Um, I think we were very clear on what was happening from the start. But I wouldn't argue with you that the news media. Um, it was. I mean, if you are Hamas, you have to be laughing at how easily you can play the international and American news media. I mean, let's start ten days into the war.

October 7th, uh, 17th, uh, the bombing of al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza. That, to me, is when the coverage shifts decisively. And from that point on, the new narrative is already set. And so what happens then? You have news reports break out from Hamas reporting out that at least 500 dead. Israel just bombed this hospital in the heart of Gaza.

And those are all the news headlines. Some of them, at the end, would have "Hamas says." More often it would be "Gaza Health Ministry says," or just stated as fact. You had the BBC say on the air, this must have been an Israeli bomb. We can't even really think of what else this could.

00:30:03.930 — 00:30:11.810 · Ben Chertoff
That was one of the most telling moments, because that it just it's such a window into how they're thinking this has to be that immediately.

00:30:11.810 — 00:31:59.720 · Elliot Kaufman
Right away. Take the terrorists' word for it. And what ended up happening is that it wasn't Israel. It wasn't even a bomb. It was a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket. It didn't even hit the hospital. It hit the parking lot next to the hospital, and there weren't anywhere near 500 dead, which, by the way, didn't stop Hamas's Gaza Health Ministry from including, I think it was 471 dead in the death toll supposedly from that strike.

So everything about that story was wrong. And yet the media, you could see, even after just ten days since Hamas's October 7th massacre, was fully ready to move on to the story that it that it knew so well and was so comfortable telling, which is Israel has gone too far. Israel is unleashed, vindictive. Israel is bombing without a care in the world.

That was their story. And even though they hastily corrected what happened on October 17th, that narrative stuck and was and, um, was with us, uh, for the rest of the war. And I would just emphasize, we're talking about in Gaza, two years of this being the high-salience, let's say top three, top five issue in the news every single day in America.

And so if people want to talk about diplomatic damage to Israel, that's why it was so high-salience every single day. Israel knew it was going to lose that PR war. Really, whenever it has to fight in Gaza, it has to fight Palestinians. Um, but to have that go on for so long like that, um, it dealt tremendous damage.

00:32:00.280 — 00:32:26.350 · Ben Chertoff
You count 33 BBC headlines on the GHF shootings and you say the IPC cherry-pick, cherry-picked its data, but a senior Israeli official told you, quote, we effed up royally on the PR with the aid, unquote. How much of the famine story was the press just cherry-picking, which we obviously know is happening, and how much is the responsibility of Israel's PR machine?

00:32:27.110 — 00:33:06.030 · Elliot Kaufman
I guess I would put it this way. Um, I don't think Israel messed up on the PR there. I think Israel messed up, period. Um, I think Israel knew that it was going to get unfair treatment on that issue, and therefore it can't mess up in that way because every, every single failure, even if really the blame should be shifted among, you know, three parties, all of it is going to go on Israel.

And what I would say is the move to roll out the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

00:33:08.150 — 00:35:45.290 · Elliot Kaufman
Supplying aid directly to Gazans rather than allowing Hamas to steal, divert and tax it every single day of the war. That came way too late. It also didn't really make sense to roll it out after there had already been a couple months of aid cut off. Now that controversial aid cutoff happened right after Israel had flooded Gaza with aid during the second hostage deal.

But if you're going to roll out a new aid program, do it while Gaza is flush with aid, not after two months, once those supplies have started to dwindle. What ended up happening was the GHF had no runway to get off the ground, and so was the food situation in Gaza deteriorated. The GHF was taking huge blame and was not able to ramp up and scale up as quickly as was us was needed to put that story to rest.

And so there wasn't famine. The media got played over and over again, but the situation was getting worse and Israel allowed Hamas to make it get worse. And so the question for Israel how to handle that militarily, strategically, it can blame the press and it's right to do so, and yet it still had to plan ahead for that and be better on that issue than it ultimately was.

Um, the only other thing I would add there is that, uh, President Biden's statement upon the introduction of aid to Gaza, October 18th, 2023 is worth remembering, and it is always forgotten, I find. President Biden said, we are going to be sending this aid, but if Hamas steals it, it will end. And he said, just as a matter of practicality, we won't be able to keep on providing this aid if Hamas keeps on stealing it.

And so, in Israel's war room, there was huge frustration when Hamas would steal it. And the Biden response would be, well, now you have to provide even more aid to account for Hamas stealing it. And so while Israel's hostages were languishing, Israel found itself supplying its own enemy so that so that Hamas could continue the fight.

00:35:46.210 — 00:35:47.690 · Ben Chertoff
What was.

00:35:47.850 — 00:35:48.130 · Ben Chertoff
Of.

00:35:48.130 — 00:35:54.610 · Ben Chertoff
Of all the things that you learned with all this access and what ended up in the book, what.

00:35:54.610 — 00:35:54.970 · Ben Chertoff
Was.

00:35:55.010 — 00:36:07.450 · Ben Chertoff
What was one of the things that, um, you didn't really believe before you started the book that that you, you know now or one of the really surprising things for for you.

00:36:08.290 — 00:37:10.479 · Elliot Kaufman
You know, one thing I had heard, but I could only credit it so much. And then I found out it really was true and just how much it shaped the war is that the IDF had no plan for a full invasion of Gaza on October 7th. The the IDF had nothing that it could pull off the shelf for: this is how we invade Gaza, and we've all trained on this, and we're all ready and we're going to do it.

And I think what that tells you is just how far from everybody's minds it was the IDF, Prime Minister Netanyahu himself. I mean, you can read his 2022 memoir in which he writes about why he wasn't countenancing a full invasion of Gaza, by the way, he actually predicts pretty much what happened. He says, um, we would lose thousands of Israeli troops.

We would end up killing tens of thousands of

00:37:11.520 — 00:39:22.270 · Elliot Kaufman
Palestinians at huge diplomatic costs, and we had bigger fish to fry. Iran. He actually mentioned Syria at that time, um, as well. But, uh, so October 7th happens. The thought is, okay, let's not do the same thing that we've already done. The Biden administration is actually advocating and pressing Israel hard.

Do not do a full ground invasion of Gaza even right after October 7th. What they say is do special forces raids and airstrikes. Prime Minister Netanyahu answers. But we've already tried that four times in four previous Gaza wars, and that's what led us here. So they, you know, have to do something more, uh, to put an end to this threat, overthrow Hamas.

And yet the IDF has no plan. And so that crucial first week of the war. Gallant, IDF chief Halevi, are actually just working on taking something old from 2008 and up and updating it so that it even fits the current IDF and could even theoretically be actionable. Then, after that, Prime Minister Netanyahu is getting all kinds of advice from the Biden administration, saying that your troops are going to be walking into a death trap.

You're going to lose on the ground in Gaza City, because Hamas has prepared this territory for more than 15 years precisely to bleed you there, precisely to trap you. And so Prime Minister Netanyahu says, shouldn't we at least train our soldiers on the plan before we send them in? Um, and so that's what Israel does subsequently.

And that's how you get those lost weeks of the war, when you could have done, when Israel could have done so much. In those first weeks after October 7th, there were so much harder to do, let's say, in May 2024 when people were yelling about Rafah. Okay, what you could do in the first week of the war is not what you could do.

A year later or two years later, it would be at a much greater cost. And so,

00:39:23.590 — 00:40:07.660 · Elliot Kaufman
you know, when I think about Israel's lack of planning in Gaza, what I think is it showed constantly. Israel seemed to be halting, unsure of what to do next, whether it was going to go all the way or not in the way that you'd never saw in Lebanon or in Iran in the 12-Day War, when Israel executed things that had been planned for more than a decade, and really stunning sequences of strikes that left Hezbollah unable to respond.

That left Iran looking like a paper tiger in the 12-Day War. And so I think planning had everything to do with how this war went on every front.

00:40:08.300 — 00:40:49.340 · Ben Chertoff
It is the book is a series of, you know, astounding victories and then setback and astounding victories and then setback. And it really, you know, like you were just saying, it's not that there was never the, the, the, the one fell swoop. Um, if you, if you will, you know, as the war went on, Hamas uses its own population, uh, sacrifices its own population as a strategy.

Um, how how does Israel, how do Western countries fight a war like that? Is there a way to do it better than they did?

00:40:50.420 — 00:46:28.420 · Elliot Kaufman
Well, I don't think there's a way to do it that escapes this kind of criticism. When you're going to have a response like, say, the one from Amnesty International. Okay. Amnesty International's October 7th, 2023 headline was civilians pay the price on both sides for an unprecedented escalation in Gaza and Israel on October 7th itself.

It's both sides. Then you you know, fast forward to an Amnesty International accuses Israel of genocide, changing its own definition of genocide in order to be able to do so. The first sentence and people think I'm making this up because it's so on the nose. But the very first sentence of that Amnesty International report is on the 7th of October, 2023, Israel launched a ground invasion of the occupied Gaza Strip.

Now, if that is your framework for what happened on October 7th and the war that followed. Then you can see it the way they do, but it becomes very, very difficult to see how you're going to have any kind of successful war against an enemy like that. But what I'll tell you is that, uh, I think, you know, I was asked, did Israel go too far in Gaza?

And I said, no, I don't think Israel went too far. I think it fought for too long. And a big part of why it fought for too long is because Israel had this raid-and-leave strategy for most of the war, such that it would raid one area of Gaza, root out all the Hamas from that area, and then leave the area, and then, lo and behold, Hamas would go back in.

Hamas would flee somewhere and then return once Israel's troops left. And so Israeli troops would have to come back and they would have to fight in the same neighborhoods. Two, three, four, even five times. And that's partly why you see so much of the destruction in those areas, because they had battle after battle there instead of just one.

And so the question is, they're not stupid. Why did they leave these areas? And very quickly you get some interesting answers. One is, well, the Biden administration was in charge. Any Israeli attempt to stay in an area and even start governing the people of that area, providing them services and so forth.

Sticking around that would have been seen as the start of an occupation, and that would have been a red line for the Biden administration. But it wasn't just the US, you know, the IDF itself, with the support of a great many Israelis, opposed any kind of occupation at all costs. The last thing that they wanted was to have to rule over more Palestinians.

And so they really, really avoided that, which left really only two options. Are you going to let Hamas stay in control of these people, or will you install the Palestinian Authority, which Hamas easily defeated in Gaza, uh, 17 years prior? And the PA has only gotten weaker since and less popular since.

So presumably Hamas could easily do that again. Neither of these were good options. Um, and you know what? One thing I learned reporting on this war was that General David Petraeus in the US, who had commanded the surge in Iraq, actually told Yoav Gallant, Israel's defense minister, exactly this before Israel invaded Gaza.

Gallant went to Petraeus for advice. Petraeus told him, uh, you have to do an Iraq-style civil-military counterinsurgency campaign. Take territory, govern the territory, build up the territory. And Gallant said, we've never done that before. We don't have a we don't even have a counterinsurgency manual.

How can we do this? And that's, you know, a fair point, and I'm not sure there was there was support in the world or in Israel for that kind of plan. And you can point to Iraq and say even there there were difficulties with that plan. You know, God knows. Um, uh, but in the end, I think Gallant's raid-and-leave strategy was left with very few defenders in Israel on the right, on the left, in the center.

And once Trump came into office and after that second hostage deal, we saw Israel abandon that strategy and start holding 25% of Gaza, 50%, 75% and then closing in on Gaza City, what could be close to 100%. And that's when we saw Hamas buckle under pressure. And I think that's also where we see many of the biggest achievements of the war in that even after that final hostage deal, Israel returning everyone, which top IDF command hadn't seen coming.

Um, Israel was still able to now hold on to more than half of the Gaza Strip until Hamas disarms. I think it had to hold that territory earlier. Um, and that would have helped the war go quicker and be less destructive for Gazans.

00:46:28.980 — 00:46:31.540 · Ben Chertoff
So while your book was coming.

00:46:31.540 — 00:47:10.300 · Ben Chertoff
Out, um, a film premiered at the Venice Film Festival called NAZA. It's going to be premiering in New York, I think this week or the week that we're recording this. It, of course, broke records with a 25-minute standing ovation. Um, the. In the trailer, an anonymous witness is asked about the largest number of expected civilian deaths ever approved in a single strike in Gaza.

And he says there were there was approval for up to 500. Is this, you know, you interviewed the people who would have been making those decisions. Does that square up at all with anything that you were you were reporting?

00:47:12.020 — 00:48:25.410 · Elliot Kaufman
So 500 would be very surprising to me because, uh, one incident that we go into in some depth is the strike on Hamas's military commander, the guy who led the October 7th massacre, Mohammed Deif. And there Israel had authorized for 70 or 50 civilian casualties along with him. And this is Hamas's legendary number one right military guy.

And so for someone else to be 500, I would be surprised. But if that were the case, I don't think necessarily it would prove what they are trying to prove. For instance, I remember hearing a very senior US military legal advisor discuss how the US had the ability to kill the top Taliban leadership early on in the war in Afghanistan, but decided not to because there would be some 100 to 200.

If I'm remembering this correctly, civilian casualties along with it. Okay, fine. They, you know, backed off. We won't do it.

00:48:26.610 — 00:50:45.630 · Elliot Kaufman
The Taliban was able to cohere as an organization and keep on fighting in a war that would drag on and on and kill thousands and tens of thousands and many more than that. And now you have the Taliban in charge of Afghanistan again. So military decisions like that, you can always say, be more cautious. Accept less and less collateral damage.

But that isn't always the most moral decision. And I think that's something that military commanders have to grapple with. And what this film seems to do is take that grappling with civilian casualties and say it was too cavalier, and therefore what Israel was doing was genocide. Rather than look at what Israel had just faced on October 7th, and the need to accept higher risk both to Israelis and to Palestinian civilians in order to carry out a suddenly far more urgent military campaign.

It's precisely that calculation of civilian casualties that shows you that Israel wasn't operating indiscriminately, that Israel wasn't trying to kill as many Palestinians as it could. As people say, I think that narrative of the war is one that has become popular, but that cannot survive scrutiny that crumbles at first contact with reality, with specificity, and with deep reporting into Israel's war room and the decisions that it was actually making, which is to say, whether to invade Rafah at all, if it wanted to just kill Palestinians.

What? Why was that even? Why? Why was that even a question? Why did it come so close to fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon first, and just telling Gaza and the Palestinians there, you know. We'll leave that off to the side. The reason is because Israel and its war room were making difficult military and strategic decisions, faced with often impossible choices precisely because of the way Hamas structured this war, guaranteeing it to become the kind of deadly, destructive battle that it that it was.

00:50:45.670 — 00:50:49.070 · Ben Chertoff
What what is your takeaway from this war as a whole?

00:50:49.830 — 00:51:53.190 · Elliot Kaufman
Well, I think a big part of it is what perspective you look at this from. You know, often we think about, let's say, Netanyahu's perspective. And he was very clear that Hamas had to be overthrown and Hamas hasn't been overthrown. And therefore, you can you can tell yourself this war was a was a failure. And certainly there were failures, especially in Gaza.

But try to look at this war from the vantage point of Iran's regime, okay? Their intention was to destroy Israel. The regime had been working on this for decades, making multibillion dollar investments on all the fronts Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, even, certainly Iran itself working on a nuclear weapon, a ballistic missile program to surround Israel with this ring of fire that would one day engulf it, destroying Israel.

00:51:54.310 — 00:51:58.389 · Elliot Kaufman
Hamas was part of that plan, but its leader, Yahya

00:51:59.430 — 00:54:49.489 · Elliot Kaufman
Sinwar, didn't want to wait. Sinwar figured he could set this all into motion himself, and in that way, bring in the rest of that Iranian terror axis. And so what happened once Sinwar knocked over the one domino? What else fell? If you are Iran's regime and you are looking at this, what you see is Hamas has been smashed.

It's lost more than half of its territory. It's lost its crucial arms-smuggling hub on the border. Its leaders killed, missile arsenal a fraction of what it once was. Hezbollah has been devastated. That existential threat looming over Israel, which, by the way, that missile arsenal was supposed to defend Iran itself and deter Israel from ever attacking Iran.

Hezbollah is no longer that existential threat to Israel. It's lost its leaders, commanders, most of its missile arsenal and its elite invasion force that was looming on Israel's border because Israel took Hezbollah out of the fight, knocked it out of the fight. Syria's Assad regime fell, allowing Israel to destroy most of the Syrian military.

That means Iran's proxy axis has lost its critical supply hub. And then you look at Iran itself. And even though Iran has scored some victories in this latest Iran war. Already we see the Strait of Hormuz starting to, um, slip away from its grip, and we see Iran under a US naval blockade. Who would have seen that coming on October 6th, 2023?

And all of the immense economic devastation of of Iran, together with its industrial base, defense, industrial base, political leaders, commanders and all the rest. And of course, more important than any of that, Iran's nuclear program. Because of that 12-Day War in June 2025, Iran's nuclear program lies in rubble.

As a result of this war, which Sinwar set into motion. So while Israel has faced, you know, has borne immense diplomatic costs, has suffered in terms of public relations. Those are two existential threats. Iran's nuclear program, Hezbollah's missile program you can even throw in Iran's missile program, although results there are somewhat mixed.

But you have these existential threats that have been pushed off by some years. Which

00:54:51.290 — 00:55:29.640 · Elliot Kaufman
is which I think if you had if you had told somebody that before this war that Israel could could do that against Iran's nuclear program and against Hezbollah's missiles, uh, that would be seen as a tremendous strategic victory. And so we don't know right now, between those military victories and those diplomatic defeats which will last and which will prove ephemeral.

My own view is that it's what Israel and what the US does now and, you know, for the next couple of years, which will ultimately answer that question.

00:55:30.040 — 00:56:16.839 · Ben Chertoff
I want to segue to something a little closer to where I'm sitting right now in Crown Heights in 2025, Within Our Lifetime, which is one of the more militant pro-Palestinian anti-Israel groups, organized a protest at 770 Eastern Parkway, which of course is the the headquarters of Chabad-Lubavitch. And the.

The poster said that they were going to flood Crown Heights to drive Zionists out of Crown Heights. It ended up there was some confrontation, some of the reporting then, uh, portrayed it as a mob of angry Lubavitcher attacking protesters, which, if you watch the footage, was kind of the opposite of what actually happened.

You reported on

00:56:17.880 — 00:56:40.680 · Ben Chertoff
really in admiration of that, that event, the Crown Heights riots in 1991 for somebody who is too young to remember that, or who has never heard of of what happened. Can you give me a quick summary of the Crown Heights riots, and then what you found in terms of the the discrepancies in reporting after the fact to what actually happened?

00:56:41.160 — 00:56:57.560 · Elliot Kaufman
Sure. So I wrote about that for its, uh, 30th anniversary in 2021. And I did so because people don't believe it when you tell them that

00:56:58.600 — 00:59:21.579 · Elliot Kaufman
arguably the worst antisemitic attack incident, call it what you will happened in 1991, in New York City. They can't believe it when you tell them that for three straight nights. Jews had to hide in their homes as people outside yelled for their blood and tried to tear down their doors and threw bricks through windows and destroyed their cars.

Um, you have Jews getting beaten up and stabbed in the streets. One of them, Yankel Rosenbaum, would die. Um. Uh, it could have been many, many more than that. And the NYPD, until the final night of the riot, uh, would really stand by and let it happen. And that New York's political leadership would stand by and let it happen.

And the media writing about it would try to fit it into a preexisting narrative, which was racial clashes in Brooklyn. You know, 20th-century America knew that story. Okay. Uh, racial clashes, whites and blacks. And there's a whole narrative, and each side knows what side they take of that story. How do you understand?

How do you know? Understand? It is a riot. Unacceptable. It was the voice of the unheard. And we have to look at what social problems caused this. And, you know, the New York Times launched into the whole familiar story when the actual story was one minority group, uh, really carrying out a sort of pogrom against another.

Well, the actual story wasn't white-Black racial tension wasn't something about racism, but was antisemitism. And right at that event, you have all the slogans of, say, the Nation of Islam attacked, um, attacking Jews about, uh, various imagined things historically really crazy, crazy things like that, and people openly claiming to be finishing the job that Hitler started, um, that was happening on the streets of New York City.

And the reason why it wasn't confronted sooner than it was

00:59:22.580 — 00:59:36.220 · Elliot Kaufman
is because of, I think you would have to say, political factors. And as I speak to Jews in different parts of the country, of the world, in Canada, say, they ask questions like,

00:59:37.300 — 01:01:27.440 · Elliot Kaufman
is the police on our side anymore? Would people come to our neighborhood and and attack us? Um, or are there political factors holding back the police? And at that point in time, the early 1990s, New York City, it had been made very clear to any senior police officer that the that the quickest way to throw your entire career in the garbage was to seriously confront.

At that time, black rioters in New York City, that was the way to do it. And so whatever you do when that happens, do nothing until you have been given an explicit order from the political echelon, which at that time there were all sorts of conspiracy theories, had there been some order to stand down? There's no evidence for that.

But the truth of what happened is, in a way, even more damning. There were no orders given at all. They simply sat back and let it happen. Um, hoping that somebody else would solve the issue. And I think that now is something that a lot of Jewish communities can relate to, uh, political leaders who might say the right things but aren't going to take action.

Uh, and then when it when it comes down to it, the police, I think lessons have been learned. But police really needing political guidance before they do something politically controversial. And if if those orders if that instructions if that isn't there, well then Jews really can be, uh, abandoned, even in the heart of New York City.

Night after night, when there are rioters, uh, coming for them in the streets.

01:01:27.640 — 01:01:44.000 · Ben Chertoff
So with all of this, with what's going on stateside in terms of the rise in antisemitism, what's going on in Israel, in terms of successes and failures in the war? What is giving? What gives you hope? Uh, after coming out of all this reporting and writing.

01:01:44.640 — 01:06:21.810 · Elliot Kaufman
What gives me hope is that the interest based case, the realist case for supporting Israel, has never been stronger. Okay, not only have the Abraham Accords survived this war, which was not at all guaranteed, and they're actually going stronger. I think we'll be hearing more about that before too long.

But, um, but Israel itself has shown what it can do as an ally. I mean, to be able to take that risk at the start of the 12-Day War. Go to war with Iran, America's leading regional adversary. And own the skies of Iran and actually pave a path to Iran's most defended nuclear facility, Fordow, um, such that American bombers would have a clear shot.

I mean, right now, for instance, America needs Saudi Arabia to act against the Houthis. America really needs it. Okay. For the sake of this continuing Iran war, the Saudis spend $70 billion a year on defense. That's more than Iran. That's more than Israel. And yet, do they have the will to fight? Have they ever shown.

We haven't seen that from them. And so if you're an American president who needs a regional ally to be able to take care of various threats and fight, so that in large part, the US doesn't always have to. Who are you going to build that regional order around? It seems clear the answer is Israel. And Israel has demonstrated that on front after front, remarkable capabilities, military, intelligence and the like.

And so that does give me optimism. When I look at the political scenario, I do see cause for pessimism, but I wonder if it will last. And here's what here's what I mean by having such a high-salience war go on for so long. There's no question Israel has paid a price with US public opinion. And yet we did see something like this coming.

I mean, it's not exactly a new story in the Democratic Party, a decline in support for Israel. When you have somebody like Bernie Sanders, say, be, you know, a leading figure or even the leading figure in the Democratic Party. You do wonder how long before there will be a turn like this, uh, in the Republican Party, you see weakening as well.

Uh, and when you and when you look at somebody like Tucker Carlson, for instance, what he was able to do is, I think, give young Republicans permission to go with the cultural flow on Israel by telling them that actually adopting the far-left narrative on Israel is even harder right, is even harder right-wing on Israel.

If you pair it with a paranoia about Jewish subversion. And so when I look at that show, the subtext of, say, the Tucker Carlson show isn't that all Jews are evil, it's that all evil is Jewish, and that is a message that is being that is flooding. Let's say, um, social media feeds on the right, on the left. So there is real reason for worry.

Real reason to fight back on these questions. What I want to see is what happens when, for the first time in three years, Israel isn't the number one or the number two story in the news every single day. I think then you could see that some of these military victories in what Israel has shown itself capable of, that lasts that realist base case for Israel is as strong as ever, and some of what I think can only be described as a moral panic and a real hysteria about Israel.

You talked about a 25-minute standing ovation. You know, a sitcom could be 22 minutes. So a full 25-minute sitting there. That sounds to me like a moral hysteria. Once that gives way, I think we will see large regional opportunities for Israel going forward.

01:06:22.450 — 01:06:25.170 · Ben Chertoff
Elliot Kaufman, thank you so much for joining us today.

01:06:25.290 — 01:06:26.210 · Elliot Kaufman
Thank you.

01:06:31.130 — 01:08:01.290 · Ben Chertoff
So the first draft is never corrected. And that's the thread running under all of this. Al-Ahli was a rocket that landed in a parking lot. And the correction never caught up to the headline. Crown Heights was a pogrom that got filed as a race riot, and we still think of it that way today. But I asked Elliot at the end what gives him hope?

And I want to leave you with his answer rather than mine. He said the case for Israel that's actually getting stronger isn't the moral one that everyone is fighting over. It's the practical one. A country that can own the skies over Iran and clear a path to Fordow is the ally you build a regional order around, and he thinks that fact outlasts the argument.

His bet is that a lot of what we're living through right now is a moral panic, and that panics end. I don't know if he's right, but it's worth sitting with the idea that the loudest part of this might also be the most temporary. If this gave you something to think about. Do me a favor and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify.

It's genuinely the thing that helps new people find the show. Subscribe on YouTube, Apple, or Spotify so you don't miss the next show and follow @HonestReporting on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and X for the work behind these conversations. Elliot's book, written with Yonah Jeremy Bob, is The War Room, and it's out now.

I'm Ben Chertoff. This has been The Honest Take, and we'll see you next time.