150: The case for Netanyahu, with Gadi Taub

Haviv Rettig Gur (0:05)

Hi, everybody. Welcome to a new episode of Ask Haviv Anything. Thank you for joining us. It is my absolute pleasure to welcome today Gadi Taub, historian, author, sometimes controversial, always fascinating Israeli political commentator. I myself have been, as you all know, occasionally a tiny bit smidgen critical of this government.

And Gadi is, I think, one of the more interesting and serious defenders of the Israeli political right, not without a critique of the government in his own ways. But nevertheless, we are in election season. This is one of our continuing explorations of the deeper issues that are running through this election as we head over to October 27 to election day.

I'm very grateful that Gadi agreed to come on. He is a graduate of Tel Aviv University, a student of history and interdisciplinary studies. He has a PhD from Rutgers in the United States. He teaches at the School of Public Policy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He's a regular commentator on Israeli media and in the international press. Before we get into it, I want to tell you that I am very proud that this episode is sponsored by the Technion. Israel became the startup nation by turning talent into strength, ideas into industries. For more than a century, the Technion has trained the engineers, the scientists, the entrepreneurs, who transformed Israel into the startup nation and delivered breakthroughs that changed the world. Now Technion scientists are advancing the next wave of innovation to help power Israel's next chapter. Israel, engineered by the Technion, join us, visit ats.org/rebuild.

Thank you to the Technion for dedicating this episode. I also would love to invite all of you to join Patreon and subscribe to our Substack. If you're interested in asking the questions that guide the topics we choose to talk about, that's where you do it. You also get to take part in monthly live streams where I answer your questions live. That's at patreon.com/askhavivanything or havivgur.substack.com. Those links are in the show notes. Gadi, how are you?

Gadi Taub (2:10)

I'm good. Thank you for having me. And thank you for the nice introduction.

Haviv Rettig Gur (2:14)

Thank you for coming on.

I want to dive right into this moment in Israeli history. We have, you know, there's the daily political arguments, there's the daily sort of news cycle. If you were to step back, let's set the stage a little bit. What is this moment? How do you understand the moment that Israel is in? And we'll take it from there.

Gadi Taub (2:36)

I think we have received a very clear alarm wake up sign. And I'm not sure we have all woken up. We have been very complacent. Our whole establishment assumed that Israel has generally won the struggle with the Palestinians. And now the question is, will we be generous towards them? Will we reach out for peace or will we be stingy and humiliate them? And that proved to be a completely picture.

I think that what happened to most of us in the aftermath of October 7th is not just the horror, the rediscovery of the fact that the Palestinian national movement is deeply flawed. It's not, as we imagined, a mirror image of Zionism. Its aspiration is not political independence. It is the annihilation of the state of Israel and the genocide towards the Jews. We thought we have at least erected Jabotinsky's Iron Wall and convinced them finally that they can't do it.

And on October 7th, we discovered that they have plans that could have been much more effective. And I think, Haviv, the wake up call was that, in a sense, it's hard to say lucky about such a display of sadistic orgy of blood. But we all thought, I think, for a while, that we were, in a sense, lucky that Ichi Sinwar jumped the gun. Because if this had been a coordinated attack of Hamas from the south, and Hezbollah from the north, the Palestinian Authority, which by now has an army, it's supposed to have a police force, it has an army of 70,000 people trained for things like parachuting and artillery, not the not usual police work, and they have armored vehicles. So if they were to join the two other fronts along with militias from Iraq and Syria, as was planned by the Iranian masterminds of the ring of fire that they created around us, all this under the umbrella of a nuclear Iran, it is more than just doubtful whether Israel had survived.

We were living in a sense of complacency for a very, very long time and whoever warned against these things was considered an alarmist. I'm sure you'll remember Roman Goffman, then a commander of a tank division, standing in a, I think it was the occasion of the acceptance of a new chief of staff.