Lawfare Daily: Joel Braunold on West Bank Violence and Israel’s New Lebanon Offensive

[Intro]

Joel Braunold: While everyone was focused on Gaza after October 7th, there were really significant, both Israeli army actions in terms of cleaning out refugee camps in the West Bank, but also an ever-increasing amount of attacks on Palestinian civilians that had been going on.

Scott R. Anderson: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson, joined by Joel Braunold, managing director of the Center Project, for the latest on our regular series on developments in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Joel Braunold: In the next administration, there's also gonna be this desire saying, what are you for when it comes to the Palestinians? What are you for? We need to be able to explain it and to talk about it.

And Netanyahu post, you know, October 7th has not said anything about what they're for, and the only people who have been able to say what they're for have been Bezalel Smotrich and their crowd that are for ethnic cleansing, right, for all the population to leave.

Scott R. Anderson: Today, we're discussing violence in the West Bank, the new offensive in Lebanon, and what it all may mean for Israeli elections later this year.

[Main Episode]

So Joel, the past several weeks, the world, and certainly here in the United States, people have been focused predominantly on Iran. It's dominated the headlines. We have an ongoing armed conflict that the United States and Israel are actively involved in with huge regional ramifications. But while that issue has been dominating the headlines, a lot has been happening elsewhere in the region, kind of beneath the water level, going largely overlooked, at least by kind of the mainstream top level media here in the United States and a lot of other corners of the world.

And really on the top of that list, at least for the issue set that we cover in the series of conversations has to be West Bank violence. Folks who've listened to our conversation before, listen to Lawfare Podcast before, know that the Biden administration thought before October 7th that West Bank violence was going to be the big flashpoint in Israeli Palestinian affairs.

They were worried about, Gaza has kind of subsumed that, but now the West Bank has come back. It's kind of always been percolating a little bit in the background, and now it's really come back in a big way.

Talk to us about what we're seeing happen in the West Bank and where it's leading this broader conversation about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Joel Braunold: Thanks, Scott, and it's good to be with you again. Really the level of, you know, extremist violence. Some people say settler violence, some people say extremist violence, some people say state violence, and I can walk to why people use those different nomenclature. But the reality is that the violence against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank has really peaked, and really came to a head over this past weekend, and I can talk a little bit about what the reactions have been from the Israeli government, which have been kind of interesting.

But the violence in the West Bank has actually been going on for quite a while. The general assumption, at least in Israel, is that it's a lot more unsafe to be Jewish within Judean Samara, which is how Israelis would call it, or the West Bank as Palestinians and the international community would call it. It's much more dangerous to be a Jewish civilian than a Palestinian civilian. But the reality is that the numbers just don't show that in any way, shape, or form.

The Palestinians have killed 378 Israelis in the West Bank since 2008, including 42 civilians from 2023, and those are according to UN figures. Israelis, whether the army or civilians, have killed 2,076 Palestinians in the West Bank since 2008, and of those, 840 Palestinian civilians have been killed since 2023. Which is 20 times the number of Israeli civilians.

So while everyone was focused on Gaza after October 7th, there were really significant, both Israeli army actions in terms of cleaning out refugee camps in the West Bank, but also an ever-increasing amount of attacks on Palestinian civilians that had been going on.

And interestingly, if you remember, one of the big stories around October 7th is that there were army units that were moved to the Northern Samaria or north West Bank town of Huwara, 'cause people wanted to celebrate Sukkot and that had been a huge flashpoint of subtle communities rioting against Palestinian communities who were throwing stones and backwards and forwards.

And this level of internal violence was going very high. And people said the reason there weren't soldiers on the borders of Gaza is 'cause they'd been moved to protect settler communities in the northern part of the West Bank, which was really part of the incentive structure around Otzma Yehudit, Likud, Shas sort of parties that make up it a key part of the coalition.

And so basically, since this government's been sworn in, you've got part of the coalition whose desire is to collapse the Palestinian authority, despite the fact there being a government resolution, claiming that it is not the decision of the Israeli government to collapse the Palestinian authority. All the time, and especially since October 7th, we've seen this opportunistic piece from Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, trying every opportunity to try and collapse to PA and thinking that this could be a historic moment to try and finally kill the concept of Palestinian nationalism.

And when the Gaza peace deal, the 20-point plan was put down and it spoke about a pathway to Palestinian self-determination and everything else, even the right-wing commentators feared that they've missed their opportunity. So at every chance, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, they have been trying to find opportunities and really Smotrich in this case because he's far more strategic than Ben-Gvir, try and push the Palestinian authority over. And part of that has been around financial issues, sort of restricting financial. Customs revenues and others to the pa. But Par it has been just this unleashing of violence by, you know what the right will say is a small minority of Hilltop Youth, 200 to 400, they claim of wayward youth who are going on, you know, riots against Palestinian civilians trying to push them off their lands.

Now if you read Tablet, which is a Jewish magazine here in America one of their editors at large claimed to you that there's a whole mythology about the violence settler and that it's not really real. There's really just a wild west and there's not really laws being implied there and that there's just land grabs going over area C that, you know, the Palestinian authority is trying to land, grab and place population centers. The settlement communities are trying to land, grab and try and place people there, and that this is all mythology.

And I think that, you know, including the Israeli government as of this week, thinks that's garbage and that there really is a problem. What we've seen over the past sort of few weeks is that these violent attacks by settler communities or wayward youths or Hilltop Youths or whatever are getting far more common and almost a daily occurrence where people are being killed, attacked, burned, beat into a bloody pulp on a daily basis. And it was happening at such a rate.

We've seen Palestinians with U.S. citizenship murdered. We've seen a constant push. And when it had been U.S. citizens, we had seen some sort of reaction from this Trump administration and it seems like settler violence was something that even though the Trump administration took away the Biden settler sanctions that were there to try and prevent this violence, though one could argue about the efficacy of those sanctions.

And if you are interested, we can go into why they were and why they weren't effective. Taking it away was definitely a signal that you can do what you want and there won't be a consequence. And so we saw a massive peak in this and a massive outrage and that also coincide with a CNN, Jeremy Diamond went to sort of review what was going on and while he was there, a battalion from the IDF basically, you know, beat up one of his journalists, arrested them, and basically said on camera, you know, from an IDF perspective, we agree with what's going on.

So this concept that this is all just a small minority fringe that, you know, it's a small amount and it's not reflective of the wider community. There were huge questions of like. Why isn't the Yesha Council speaking out? Where are the rabbinical authorities? Why isn't the government constantly condemning? And if it's such a small fringe and it's just 200 to 400 people, why can't the state stop it? It's not like we're talking about tens of thousands of people.

If it's 400 people, why can't you stop it? So it's very clear that the police that are under the authority of Ben-Gvir are not incentivized to stop it. And the Army wants to blame the police, and the police wants to blame the army. And so each are blaming each other and meanwhile, this is going on and you've got this entire question that's going on while this is happening, which is, you know.

Why are these wayward views even there? Why? Why are they there? And we've seen that there's been this move from the welfare ministry and from other ministries to try and put as much infrastructure into the settlements and into that place so that you've got this entire area where you've got people who are encouraged to go and seize hilltops.

And these are not stable individuals. And then they are given ATVs, like little ATVs to drive around and they're armed, violently enforcing what they think of their property rights by murdering or pushing people off with the aim of scaring the local population, the Palestinians, enough to scare them off their land.

And so this all reached ahead sort of after the CNN report. And a few things happened in very quick succession that was actually very interesting. So first we had key rabbis, Rabbi Yaaqov Medan and others all sort of start criticizing it. You had the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. sort of wail publicly, like, how can this continue to happen? Where's the Yesha Council? Why aren't people condemning this? You know, he's the official government representative. So there was that, that came out. You had, Amit Segal, who is really the spokesperson of Netanyahu in the media. He's a right-wing journalist on Channel 12. He even called it Jewish terror. So there's, even within the right-wing parliament, there was this concept that this is Jewish terror, right? And that this is something that needs to really be dealt with.

And the prime minister clearly got the message and he actually had a memo that he released internally to try and create a few different sanctions on these groups, even though there has been this push to try and establish new outposts in area B.

Which the West Bank is split into A, B, and C. A, the Israelis have civilian and security control. And B, the Palestinian authority is supposed to have civilian control even though the IDF has security control. So in this new memo that was leaked to Euro News, the Prime Minister said that it is banned to establish any new outputs in B, and that there will be fiscal sanctions on any settlement community that actually establishes that. There's also a push by—and others to reinstitute administrative detention on those who perpetrate violence, even if they're Jewish. And that's something that the current Israeli defense minister had taken away and now they want to sort of place back in.

So there's been like sort of these shifts in what's going. At the same time, you've had this huge push by the IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir, who last week in the cabinet meeting put up what he said was 10 red flags. And three of those red flags were, look, every time you establish one of these new illegal outposts, and the government, by the way, later on that meeting established another 10 or 10, 20, 30 of them is like, you stretch our capacity when we don't have a lot of capacity.

He goes, in addition, the violence that we have to deal with because of it is dragging troops from where we need them in the north and on the Iran file to deal with them here. And also said, we need the local communities to push back against this because we don't have enough capacity. And he then took the battalion that had attacks the CNN reporter and he dismissed the entire battalion saying that you all need to go back for retraining.

So this, you know, seemingly was a reaction by the Israeli establishment to start pushing back. But for many people they say, look, this is too little, too late. As long as you've got a police minister who basically backs the rioters and you've got institutional support for them.

And we saw that. IDF Chief of Staff was criticized by the chairman of the Foreign and Defense Committee in the Knesset for dismissing the battalion. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the head of the police back, the battalion fighters against CNN, saying we should not be punishing them for showing some strength. And so the institution is fighting yet back against itself ,again demonstrating institutional support for this.

And so the violence in the West Bank has been a massive problem, even bigger since October 7th. There are legitimate security worries in terms of what was going on in some refugee camps with sort of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. But what we're seeing across the West Bank is really a land grab and trying to prevent that ever being an established, contiguous Palestinian state.

And part of that strategy is terrifying and scaring the bedroom communities in the local Palestinian communities off their land. And this is—If it's not directed direct by the state, it is encouraged by the state, and we can see that through the different institutional backings from ATVs and others. And whereas this week there has been some pushback between 200 and 400, it'll be interesting to see how many people are arrested and convicted for what's been going on.

So that's sort of the mess of what's been going on, and I think that it has reached to a head. But whether it actually calms down or speeds up is really a decision about how much the government wants to wants to push back against this. So far they're saying the right things, but the question will be whether they do the right things.

Scott R. Anderson: At the same time, we've seen a pretty controversial measure get passed by the Knesset, the legislature, just yesterday, about the death penalty, which hangs over to some extent a lot of these military operations in the West Bank in terms of a potential application or consequence there for a lot of the Palestinians involved although in theory also potentially applicable to Israelis.

Talk to us a little bit about that and where that situates in the broader discourse around the approach to the West Bank.

Joel Braunold: So, yesterday the Israeli Knesset passed by 62 to 48. One opposition party joined in one coalition party, the Ashkenazi Ultra Orthodox rejected its hanging law. Why do I call it a hanging law rather than a death penalty?

So Israel has had a death penalty since its establishment that judges can use. They've only used it twice. Once was a spy back in sort of the early days of the state that they find spying against the IDF and the other was of course, for Eichmann a famously in sort of Eichmann’s trial that Hannah Arendt sort of documented in the New Yorker, and there was a feeling like the judges were not applying the death penalty for acts of genocide.

And so they wanted to force what they felt was the left wing judicial system to do it. So the doctors association NSO refused to ever take part in death penalty. So they said in the law that passed. That for those tried in military courts, which basically means only Palestinians in the West Bank who are convicted of murder, that.

The judge must, unless there's a special circumstance that they can give life imprisonment, though they don't say what the special PR circumstance is must apply the death penalty, which will be by hanging. This must be applied within 90 days, which is 90 days shortened in the Geneva Convention dictates it must. This doesn't need to be a unanimous decision. It can only be by a majority of judges, and there's basically no real leeway. And so it's forcing them to sort of hang Palestinians convicted in military courts of murder.

Now, military court convictions around 96%, so it's basically, if you are, if they think that if you've been charged with murder, 96% of the time, you're gonna be convicted of murder and now you're gonna be hung.

In addition, the law can be applied to Israeli citizens. If the crime was done in order to deny the existence of the Jewish state of Israel, so no one really knows what that means, but it's very clear, according to most legal commentators that this is basically to, to exempt Jewish extremist violence against Arabs and to have Arab extremist violence against Jews.

Could you twist yourself into a pretzel and say that you know someone who denies the existence of the state and wants to take the state into its own hands, like one of these Hilltop Youths could be convicted under such a thing. I very much doubt it, right? And so that's why it's seen very much as a law that only covers Palestinians.

And, you know, for the proponents of the law, they'll say, look, this takes away the incentive to kidnap people because if they know that all of the security prisoners who are in there for murder, who are, you know, serving the longest sentences are dead, then there's no incentive. The Shin Bet and the security forces and the NSC had pushed back against this saying, look, this is gonna create more revenge attacks against Israeli Jews. And so there's no real, there's a real dispute. This is really just a populous piece of legislation.

A few other interesting things. This is not retroactive, so it doesn't apply to the people who committed October 7th, who are currently in Israeli jails, and there is a different piece of legislation that is going through the Israeli Knesset to apply to them. That hasn't come up for a vote. When this passed, Lieberman who came from the opposition to join with this, said that he'd vote for this, and they needed his votes because UTJA wasn't gonna vote for this on the condition that Netanyahu and Deri, the head of Shas, personally, voted for this, saying that they had to personally vote for it. So you had the Israeli Prime Minister personally vote for this piece of legislation.

So. What happens next? Most people assume that the Supreme Court will strike this down because it, they say it's not equal. It takes away very critical things around the right to life and liberty and dignity, which are parts of the Israeli basic law structure by some of the, you know, the lack of unanimity about the judges, the inability to appeal.

By the way, once this has happened, there is no appeal, the speed of which this has to happen. So the assumption is the Supreme Court will strike this down, but of course, that again adds to the exacerbation of the divide in Israeli society between the court and the legislature, and doesn't really, you know, exacerbates the situation about, you know, that it's a secret left wing thing going against the will of the people.

You know, you saw these images of banger, the minister of police with nooses on their lapels. That was the image of this popping champagne bottles in the secure room that they were voting because they can't vote in the Knesset given the war with Iran. And you know, this whole concept that Jews celebrate life rather than celebrate death. It was really sort of seen as abusive. And so many pro are commentators and others say, you know, once again, Israel as acting as its own worst enemy you know, for something that the court's gonna strike down. And, you know, even if you've got different views on the death penalty, you know, this isn't the way to do it.

Whatever, whatever. But I think that what's very interesting is it really shows that in the lead up to the Israeli election, who's driving the bus. Ben got the support of the LA for this. He did to claim that the LA is status and sensible and smart and puts the state and transverse they're clearly agreeing to Ben's idea about a 90 day no appeal, majoritarian military court conviction that leads to hangings, right?

That it's just very clear and know that's a reality that people are gonna have to sort of start to comprehend about who's driving the bus in the lead up to the Israeli election. And when we look at like, what is the political space to maneuver, where will Bibi give and where will he not, it could be claimed that Bibi knows that the court's gonna, you know, take this out.

And it also adds to his own, you know, critics of the court. So he gets to have a two for one, but it just demonstrates that. They really don't, there is really no concern in terms of what the public image might be, and that's concerning for people who think that international pressure has any semblance of this.

I'll just lastly say, Scott, you know, proponents of the law point to the U.S. use of the death penalty saying, well, we're not any different from the U.S. I think it's very important to show the differences, right? You know, in the U.S. if you have a death penalty, it's normally a unanimous decision. There's multiple appeals that can go all the way up to sort of a Supreme Court level.

None of that is, is in this. And so you've taken away every single one of those potential outcomes on what is a final criminal penalty. And so, it's really a populous move that really demonstrates who's driving the bus right now.

Scott R. Anderson: So I wanna come back and talk about the Israeli domestic political context for all this, which is obviously an important part of the calculus.

But if we're gonna talk about Israel and its position in the world and its security, we have to talk about at least one other military offensive. And I'm not talking about Iran, we talked about a lot already, is hanging over all of this. Although we obviously that's gonna intersect a bunch of places.

That's Lebanon. We have seen over the last few weeks since the beginning of the Iran offensive, Israel faced a second front, not for the first time. We saw something similar happen multiple times since October 7th with volleys of rockets coming across from Hezbollah, Israel, responding with military action, including a pretty substantial offensive, but now it's begun again.

We have Israeli officials claiming that they intend to do to Southern Lebanon what they did to Gaza, the, which I'm paraphrasing, but not too indirectly at this point suggesting they're gonna occupy, you know, about a third of southern of Lebanon—potentially to try and uproot Hezbollah's infrastructure.

Therem, we're seeing strikes, you know, in Beirut and other parts of the country as well, hitting different parts of infrastructure. Talk to us about where this offensive is fitting into this broader picture, how Israel is trying to play the politics of it with Lebanon, with the governments in Beirut, and you know, where it looks like it might lead.

Joel Braunold: So let's go back to the pager sort of war where Israel actually remarkably, truly remarkably in the military tactic, took out Hezbollah in one, you know, phenomenal intelligence from an intelligence perspective sort of attack that sort of crippled their opponent. They killed Hezbollahs and sort of took out what they thought was the real, you know, noose, you know, going back to previous conversation around their neck that the Iranians could pull whenever they want.

And so for the Israelis, I think many of them thought that Hezbollah had been decimated and their ability to really fire tens of thousands of rockets at Israel had really been reduced. And before this current war with Iran, there was a sense that, you know, could you work with the Lebanese state and you know, the French and the Americans that, you know, were trying to monitor the ceasefire that could, they work with the Lebanese state to sort of disarm Hezbollah and in doing so, replace Hezbollah with the LAF and you know, you could have more peace on the southern border.

When the Iran War kicked off, you know, the ceasefire wasn't in a great place, but it was still there and there was still this understanding and desire to have the Lebanese state take that role. When the Iran war kicked off, there was you know, the Israelis were, you know, waiting to see if Hezbollah took part, and they knew that if Hezbollah shot one rocket, that the Israelis basically used that as a breach of the ceasefire to then go in and sort of take over and create a new buffer zone, basically all the way up to the Litani River.

Hezbollah shot a rocket. And you know, there's report, was it Hezbollah? Was it an Iranian IRGC commander who was there? Regardless, the rocket was shot and Israel started a ground maneuver to take over the whole of Southern Lebanon. And the aim being to try and basically give enough security buffer for the northern communities to go back to normal life.

Now, from an Israeli POV right? From an Israeli point of view, if you are in the north of Israel, life has been completely miserable since October 8th, whereas everyone 2023, whereas everyone spoke about the refugees and the war victims from the Gaza envelope on the south, there were also entire northern communities who were evacuated, and it took a hell of a lot to try and get them to go back to the north. But every time you tried to get them back to the north after you evacuated them, they wanted a sense of security that what happened on October 7th with Hamas wasn't gonna happen with Hezbollah, where they would run across the border and start masking people up there.

And so there was this sense that there needed to be. A physical buffer, a barrier to enable them to go back. And so the Israeli government finally got them to go back. And now we've got this that's going on where the Israelis therefore moved into Southern Lebanon during this war. And it turns out that Hezbollah still does have capacity and Hezbollah has been raining rockets on the north.

So you've got Iranian ballistic missiles hitting sort of centralized. You've got Hezbollah rockets sort of raining on the north that is making the north completely unlivable. You know, economic activity, people living there, you know, so there hasn't been an official evacuation because when you evacuate people it's very difficult to get them to go back home.

But you've basically got ghost towns across as Israel as well as North. And there were TV interviews and others sort of last week with mayors and city managers of the north just crying on television, being like, pick one thing or another. You know, either completely finish this off or make a peace deal.

But either way, what we're experiencing intolerable, and this is sort of the challenge that both the Israelis want no longer want deterrence, but want destruction of their enemies given after October 7th. And they want sort of a 10 to 15 year peace and quiet. This has been going on for three years. It's straining everyone.

No one's sleeping. Like, you know, we can hold on a bit longer if at the end of this it's over. But if you are telling me that this is the new normal, I can't deal with that. And this is of course against the shadow in Israel of elections where people are gonna go for elections. And this goes back to Netanyahu's promised in each of these military operations.

Absolute victory. We have absolute victory in Gaza. We're gonna have absolute victory with Lebanon. We're gonna have absolute victory with the Iranians. There'll be a new regime in Iran. There's gonna, you know, Hezbollah will be gone, Hamas will be gone. And yet, after all these military activities, if at the end, he's degraded them, but they're still there and they still have an ability to make life intolerable, if you are trying to crush them, only militarily without a diplomatic solution, then the entire toolkit post-October 7th is challenged.

If you actually do also need diplomacy alongside military might, if power projection alone doesn't actually create the peace and calm that your population requires, then it changes the math that Netanyahu has been selling since October 7^th. Netanyahu’s message since October 7th is that if we use enough strength and might, and especially when we do it alongside the us, we can create an environment where the region will respect us and no one will threaten us.

And that we don't need to have diplomatic arrangements. It would be great if the Lebanese state could come in and it could be great if it was no longer an Islamist, and it would be great if there would be a deal with the Iranians, but none of that's gonna happen. And so we are basically gonna bomb our way and power project enough that people are so scared of us about what we would do that, that's gonna terrify them. Now, if we create internal displacement of a million people in Lebanon, that's gonna put so much pressure on the Lebanese government that they're gonna have to do what they haven't done before.

And that's the operating logic of what's going on behind the current moves in Israel. The challenge is if it doesn't work, then you're gonna have to go back to diplomacy. And for the Northern Israelis, like the ones who are living sort of north of Haifa, who've just been living with just constant rockets right now through this war, they're like, look, one way or the other, this has to finish.

So either go back to diplomacy and figure it out or finish it off. But you know. To have this buffer, sure we need, but if Hezbollah can still fire from north of the Latini, then it didn't work, right? And so this idea that you can put enough military pressure on the Lebanese state that they're gonna have to do what they haven't done well, do they have enough capacity to do so?

Also, if you create that many internally displaced people and destroy all of their property, of course with no compensation, the Israelis aren't interested in compensating the Lebanese or anything else for that. You are the best recruiting sergeant for Hezbollah who says, look, LAF isn't defending you. No one's defending you against the Israelis, we’ll defend you.

So yes, they can be furious that Hezbollah pulled them in. But again, in many ways, and a lot of Israelis are worried about this is a trap like we've pulled back. And the trap is that you've now stepped into it. And you know, today there were four Israeli soldiers who were killed in South Lebanon, Israel as very used to soldiers being killed in South Lebanon.

This is why Ehud Barak pulled Israel outta South Lebanon. And you know, this Israel's. You know, potential invasion of South Lebanon is a game that's been happening since the early eighties. Right. And it's never gone particularly well. So why is this time gonna be different? And that's it. That's a huge question in terms of how this gonna go.

So that's what's been going on. The Lebanese folk, interestingly, if you listen to sort of the rumors and the leaks from the Iranian-U.S. potential talks that might be happening, might not be happening. Seems like the Iranians are very keen that anything that creates a ceasefire on their home front, should also cover Lebanon.

Now, the Israelis will not want to comply with that for a strategic reason and a tactical reason. The strategic reason is that post October 7th, they don't want to have a unity of fronts anywhere. They don't wanna see the Lebanese front linked to the Iranian front, just like they didn't wanna have a Lebanese front linked to the Gaza front.

During, you know, the active parts of the war in Gaza, they want to see each front separately. And because if there's a unity of fronts, they see it as like a fire belt around them. So part of their strategy is to delink these things so they don't wanna see these things as linked, because that basically creates strength and justification for proxies being able to act on behalf of states, which is one of the big things they're pushing back on.

And tactically, if it stops. Then what can they say to the people in the north? How can they promise it's not gonna start again? What's the diplomacy that's gonna be needed in order to try and keep that level of calm and how can they live with that? Especially in an election year.

So that's sort of what's going on in the north. The, you know, the Israeli state is somewhat trolling the Lebanese, you know, they have been very happy with what the Lebanese state has been saying, sort of banning the Iranian ambassador who doesn't seem to want to go anywhere, sort of the statements the banning of Hezbollah, all these things they see as very positives, but now they're like, does the state have the capacity to actually do that?

And again if the state needs support, who's supporting them? Is it the Gulf allies? Well, the Gulf's kind of very obsessed with themselves right now. They've got their own problems that they're dealing with. You know, is it the Turks that would be disastrous for the Israeli, who worry that Thes are gonna go into the space that. Iran has pulled back on and then there'll be a new fireball with a new different country that can, some somewhat run them. And this one's a member of NATO.

So in each case, the Israeli structure of how does it power project all these arenas are somewhat tied in. But I think that what you're seeing in the north of Israel and what you saw in comments about the 10 red flags. There is a capacity issue in Israel of the exhaustion of the population.

They're not exhausted yet. They're not giving up. They're not demanding an end to the war. That's not where it is. You know, you still got, though you've had support for the war drop and the support for the war drops far more if you don't have access to your own personal bomb shelter. Whereas if you do, you've got higher support.

There's a feeling like, we can do this if this is it. If it has to last another two, three months, four months, whatever. If at the end of this we're done, it's great. But if we're not done, that's a whole different kettle of fish. And so I'll conclude this by saying this is a real test case for the new operating philosophy that's going on.

If you had an operating philosophy pre-2009 of trying to make peace deals. That ended up with Annapolis, that didn't work. You then had coming in oh nine that basically said, we're not gonna do anything. We're gonna freeze things as in place and just sort of gr you know, divide, conquer, grind folks into dust, try enough for enough to keep going on with it and try and push regional deals.

That sort of concluded with the Abraham Accords, but that operating philosophy sort of collapsed on October 7th, where you know, Hama sort of imploded the idea that you could just wait this out. And so now the operating philosophy is that we can just power project regionally and even as a world power, as Netanyahu said, and that can change the operating environment, that can give us peace and quiet.

If that fails, then we're gonna have to shift into something new.

Scott R. Anderson: So there's one last home front for Israel we need to talk about. That's the one that was the focus for has been the diplomatic focus for the last several years, at least up until Iran conflict to some extent, the last Lebanon conflict spiked up.

That is of course, Gaza. We still have a formal ceasefire in Gaza. There are have been routine allegations of violations on both sides by both sides really since it started, but so far it seems to be holding. We've got some negotiations happening in Cairo about implementing the next step or some of the next steps in the broader 20-point peace plan.

Talk to us about the state of Gaza, bringing us up to date there as an area that frankly has not been in the news very much for the last few weeks, given everything else happening in the region.

Joel Braunold: So the latest is that Nikolai Mladenov, who's the high representative for Gaza. He apparently gave that take the offer to Haamas, surround a DR proposal for them to give up their weapons and sort of surrender their weapons, at least starting off with, you know, tunnels and weapons factories and heavy weapons.

And then later on it could be personal weapons and that they need to give those up. And then there could be a political process, so you know, some sort of DDR thing. And Hamas’s take or leave actually technically expires tomorrow. The question is, what happens if they say no? So the argument was that if they say no, that the Israelis were doing military maneuver in Northern Gaza and sort of take them out.

Do the Israelis, when they're operating in South Lebanon, now they're operating in the West Bank to try and prevent settle violence and you've got the Iran war going on—Do they have enough capacity to do all of these things at once? I dunno. And I dunno if they know, but it's definitely stretching them.

The aim is that Hamas will probably, in my estimation, a few others will say yes, but they'll say, sure, but, and then have a thousand sort of things they learn from the Israelis in that regards. Enable to try and move this on and then the Trump administration can use momentum to get momentum, try and move something, you know, forward.

I'll say, Scott, you know it, it seems very much that the Palestinian issue is very much in the background rather than the foreground, given the war in Iran, what's going on in Lebanon and everything else. But in many ways, I think that the Palestinian issue can be the unlocking maneuver and the off ramp for the Iran War because for the Trump administration, they need to demonstrate that the Iran war, you know, they've got their list of objectives. That changes depending on when Truth Social is operating, sort of what the particular things are, but alongside degrading Iran's capacity. Part of it is about reshaping a new face of the Middle East, that if you've taken out the Iranian threat, and President Trump said publicly, he expects Saudi Arabia to join the Abraham Accords and sort of to, to reshape the Middle East in a different way.

Prime Minister Netanyahu today spoke about building pipelines through the Gulf to Israel and exporting that waste, take pressure off the Straits of Hormuz, all of these different things. But in order to get all of those, you still have the Palestinian issue, and I can't imagine the Saudis moving forward with formal normalization without something there.

And so the ability to move the Gaza 20-point plan into the third stage, which is points 19 and 20, which basically is a political talks between Israel and the Palestinians that can lead to some level of self-determination is a necessary component to move forward on a new face of the region. And the war in Iran hasn't changed that in many ways. It just makes it even more explicitly necessary. And so how do you do that?

So on one side, on Gaza, you need to master, you know, with the Iranian patrons and the Qataris and the Egyptians being stronger patrons, or at least allied, or at least talking to Hamas, you need them to sort of move that up.

And so you've got that side. But on the PA side, you know the PA has made this pledge that they have to do these series of reforms. So my assumption is that there's gonna be some sort of agreement on what these reforms will look like. Saudi's main proxy in the region, I'd argue is the Palestinian authority at this point.

And so they'll wanna see if their proxy can actually do that. You know, they've been funding them. They've been guaranteeing some of the education reforms and other things. And so if you can work out what a reform package can look like and that enables them to potentially have a role going back into Gaza, then you can potentially deescalate between the PE and Jerusalem.

And in doing so, maybes another deal of the century or whatever else to begin a political process, there is enough to start a original normalization that can conclude sort of. The conclusion of all of this activity in the Middle East leads to a new face of the Middle East. So even if you didn't like parts of the process of how you got there, the end goal is something that everyone can support.

And so in order for there to be a narrative off ramp, my expectation is that the Palestinian issue is gonna come back into the forefront. And that requires an agreement on Palestinian reform. The PA is gonna have to do some reforms and actually be verified that they have done those as reforms and that leads into some level of de-escalation.

I can't see that before an Israeli election. I just, I think it's very difficult to imagine in the fits of an election they'll do that. But my expectation is very soon after the election that there's gonna be some sort of, again, deal of a century type thing that might not be a conclusion point, but the beginning point of a conversation.

How the parties can start talking to one another about what does that look like? As a way to draw in not just Saudi, but potentially other Gulf nations who understand for their own self-interest, need to have some sort of relation with Israel in order to balance their relationships with the Iranians and also others in the region.

Because without that, it's very clear that the Israelis won't take their interest into account if they decide to do additional military maneuvers. And it's very clear that the US after this isn't consulting with their golf allies before they start something, even if they start consulting afterwards.

And so, you know, the Gaza envelope, what happens in Gaza? The ability to mash that into a place where it creates an opening for regional integration is an important part of an angle for this Iranian construct. 'cause in the Israeli's heads, and I'd even argue somewhat in the American heads, you know, Iran was really behind the real puppet master behind October 7th, and that's the last sort of figure that you need to get rid of.

And then you can sort of adjust in terms of what everyone's been doing. And despite, I think, Gulf reticence at the beginning of this war, given what the Iranians have done to them, there is now clearly, and it's not just leaks now, there's like interviews and everything else. The Gulf want a new‚You can't leave a, an Iran that can threaten everyone.

So if the regime doesn't collapse, they're gonna need to reexamine their security sort of arrangements. And the Israelis, I'm sure will be part of that. In terms of how does that look like? But all of that in order for the street and the political situations for that to happen, you need to settle in some way the Palestinian issue.

And so the roads lead back to Ramallah and to Rabat and Gaza and everything else. And how does that also adjust in shape? So despite it being on the back burner now, in many ways, this is the off ramp, and at least narratively and politically as we move forward on this. And even if that is restrained currently by the fact that Israel might not move before October.

In terms of its own politics, there's much that can be done between now and October about getting the PA in a ready state about getting Hamas in a ready state, that you can actually therefore operationalize that once the Israeli election has happened.

Scott R. Anderson: So let's talk about the Israeli election then, because obviously Israeli domestic politics is sometimes I think overstated.

I'd be curious if you view that as a driver of all of this necessarily. And we a lot talks about Netanyahu pursuing things for strict domestic political gain or to addresses personal criminal woes. I think that can sometimes be overstated, but they obviously are part of the milieu in which these decisions are being made as are.

The elections and the difficult political position Netanyahu has been since the October 7th massacre. We've seen his popularity, or at least this public support for his role and his decisions around these conflicts spike. I think there's been a clear kinda rally around the flag effect of particularly the Iran conflict to some extent from my rough reading of public polling, some of the earlier steps to in Lebanon and elsewhere.

What does that seem poised to translate into? In this coming election, at least, you know, six months out, October, I think end of October is when it's scheduled a little less than a little more than six months out. Talk about what his political fortunes are and not just for him before the coalition behind him.

We've seen Netanyahu sit on top of a bunch of, all right governments, but slightly different structures of right governments. What coalition seems likely to follow behind him if he does succeed at getting across that threshold and remaining prime minister?

Joel Braunold: So we haven't seen a rally to the flag effect.

You know, the assu—you know, even though most Israelis trust Prime Minister Netanyahu on the Iran file, we're seeing high levels of support, mainly for the IDF more than him. But the concept that he's been the guy pushing the Iran thing since time I memorial, it's very clear you are not seeing a move in the pulse.

The coalition has currently set, hasn't polled in order to be able to get, you know, 60 seats in a long time and they still haven't got there. The opposition sort of floats and flirts with potentially getting enough seats. But you know, don't forget the opposition is a heterogeneous group of people.

And the big question is, will they rely on Arab votes and not just the Arab votes that they had before when it came to the Southern Islamic movement and Bass, who through rah arm, was the critical part of the Bennett government last time. But you know, when you look at the joint list which includes Palestinian nationalistic figures.

It's very difficult to imagine them forming a part of a coalition, you know?

Could you see a national unity government? Potentially. Then it depends who's the largest party, you know, to potentially be the Prime Minister for some of the members to be able to go and join with Netanyahu, you'd have to see some level of pardon. I think this is why you've seen. President Trump really push a pardon.

You know, could I imagine, you know, if part of the pardon agreement is that there's also sort of no more judicial reform, you need to have more than people's just promises. So could you imagine that a pardon could happen during the coalition negotiations? And as part of that, within the coalition agreement, there's also an agreement to pausal judicial reform. You know, maybe that's what people are holding out for. So you've got sort of a twofer, like, you know, they've tried to convict Netanyahu. It's not there. It would be deeply unpopular amongst the anti-Netanyahu camp for him to, to, for Netanyahu to get a pardon at this point.

But for some will say, look, we need national unity. We can't have Ben-Gvir and Smotrich hold the balance of power. Smotrich isn't passing threshold at this point, so you're seeing him. You know, Ben-Gvir is very comfortably so small. Smotrich is trying to, again, get himself in the news and do other things, but so far it hasn't been translating for passing threshold, you need to get more than 3.25% of the vote to pass threshold is well as a single constituency with proportional representation across the district. So you need to get a certain percentage per threshold percentage of the seats in terms of opposition.

Naftali Bennett is the former Prime Minister. His sort of flag is some somewhat waning and Gadi Eisenkot, he is now being seen in head-to-head with Netanyahu as the closest competitor with Netanyahu. He's still not winning those fights. You know, it's still, he still pulls around seven points lower is Israel doesn't, at least in this round elect its Prime Minister separately.

There were previous elections when it did, but it's not right now. So right now we're basically headed towards—If you look at opposition and coalition. So some people think there'll be national unity, some people think they'll not. In order for there to be national unity, you don't need all the opposition to agree with all the coalition. You just need enough to get to 61 seats.

So at the moment it's a mess. Right. It really is a mess. And so will Netanyahu managed to survive and come on top of the system? I mean, I wouldn't counter out the election coming hasn't really started yet. Now that the budget passed yesterday, we now know the date of the election should the budget have not passed.

The election would've been sooner, but now we know it's in October. People can start really ramping up for that and we're gonna see a real, I'm sure poisonous campaign again, from various different quarters trying to push this and we're gonna see more and more populous pieces of legislation pushed in the meantime to try and get as many potential votes—

I'm sure we're gonna see accusations of foreign interference left, right, and center. From everyone. I'm sure there will be massive amounts of money spent by everyone to try and get there, and in the end we're gonna have to see, but. For many in the anti-national camp, and especially after like the hanging law and a few other things, there's a real sense that's on one side.

The other, of course, the biggest motivator has nothing to do with what we've talked about today. It's about Haredi enlistment, about the Ultra Orthodox enlistment. So you've had people who have done 400, 450 days of military service over the past three years at the same time. You've got Ultra Orthodox, just got another 250 million dollars in sort of benefits from the stake coffers that passed as part of the budget.

So, you know, the, there's a lot of people are, like the, many of Israel, including a lot of liquid voters will be like, we can't continue with the Haredi not participating in their service. And this isn't viable. And so the divisions that were happening before October 7th is still very much there in terms of the, in terms about judicial reform and others. In many ways it's reflective of things like the US elections where everything feels like life and death in terms of who wins the presidency here, it's gonna have a real life and death feel like is there a future of the country if this government, after October 7th, after the Haredi enlistment, after everything else, if they still get in and they still win.

You know, who's really in charge> And on the flip side, there's a feeling like, you know, if there's no losers, then he could end up in prison. Right? And so he's very much like a burn it down assistant type. You know, I don't want to end up in that situation. And of course, the stakes are very high because of all of the regional dynamics that we've gone through today in terms of there are huge decisions.

Whoever's in charge is gonna have to deal with the Trump administration, who's gonna wanna try and move forward with regional integration? Which will require whoever's in charge to be able to say what they are for when it comes to the Palestinians. Everyone's very aware what Israelis are against.

There was a poll done in March, the asked Israelis, what do they felt that the war in Iran had vis-a-vis their relationships with America? So despite criticism of American media, 81% of the Israeli Jewish public thinks that the war will strengthen ties with Washington while only 7% disagree. So while I agree on like a military level, I just, you know, read a poll here and it's very clear that there's very different media environments and sort of, they're very much misreading the mood here in America.

You know, in addition, 70% believe that the war will increase the likelihood that the Abraham Accords will spread to additional Arab states. So they think that this is gonna lead to greater regional integration. Yet at the same time on the Palestinian issue, only 23% believe that the war will wither on, will improve the security reality in a way that enables negotiations involving territorial concessions and only 22% believe that it will help renew the peace process with the Palestinians.

So the Israeli population believes this is gonna strengthen ties with America and also believes that this is gonna lead to regional integration absent of the Palestinians that they think nothing's gonna happen with the Palestinians. And everything that I've just said goes completely against that. So either the Israeli population is correct and the whole region's gonna bend, and Washington's gonna bend to what they believe or they're out of step with Washington and the region.

Who's right? We'll find out. But I think that it's a real challenge. Therefore, if you're an Israeli elected official, how do you square that circle? How do you square a circle where an administration comes to you and says, what are you for when it comes to the Palestinians? And you've got a population where under a quarter is willing to even think that this is gonna have a positive relationship on them.

How are you gonna do that when the Israeli, you know, leaders gonna say, you know, guys, this has really damaged our relationships with the Americans. If we can't show a way forward when 70% of Israel thinks this has strengthened their relationships with the Americans. So you are gonna have a disconnect between the population and the leadership.

And you've gotta have a leadership who's gonna have to explain to their population, they need to make difficult decisions to maintain their relationships. And that's only while Trump's there.

In the next administration, there's also gonna be this desire saying, what are you for when it comes to the Palestinians? What are you for? We need to be able to explain it and to talk about it. And Netanyahu post, you know, October 7th has not said anything about what they're for. And the only people who have been able to say what they're for have been Ben-Gvir and Smotrich and their crowd that are for, right, all the population to leave.

It's very clear, and as we've said at the beginning of this and all clear direction. Being able to define what you are for is going to be a real challenge for the next government, but one that they're gonna need to do for regional reasons, for their relationship with America, for their relationship with the Trump administration, and frankly, Scott, for their ability to operate in the world at large.

I know that for Israel, this sort of America matters, the region matters and then, you know, everyone else somewhat matters. Well, everyone else is gonna somewhat matter even more when people are like, all of our energy bills have gone up. You know, we don't, you know, it's really destroyed lots of our economic growth.

What are you trying to do? What are you trying to, you know, your ability to operate in those spaces is essential that people understand you. And I would argue that fewer and fewer people understand this all today. And I think that's a critical problem for them when people are designing strategies for American administrations, for European, for, you know, Asian, whatever, to be able to understand what Israel wants.

Because if they don't understand it, they'll listen to where the populist messaging is and they'll assume that's what it's, they'll see the Moshiach patches on Israeli soldiers and said they've all become religious radicals. And if that's not the case, and I don't think it is the case, but if that's not the case, it requires a leader who can define what they're for.

And we haven't heard that in years, and that's gonna be a real challenge moving forward.

Scott R. Anderson: Joel, that is I think as good a point to end on as any. We are out of time, but we will have the opportunity to revisit this issue no doubt in the future. Until then, Joel, thank you for joining us here today on the Lawfare Podcast.

Joel Braunold: Thanks so much, Scott.

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