153: Where was Netanyahu on 7/10? With Elliot Kaufman

Haviv Rettig Gur (0:05)

Hi, everybody. Welcome to a new episode of Ask Haviv Anything. It is my pleasure to introduce today, first time on the podcast, Elliot Kaufman. Elliot Kaufman is a Wall Street Journal editorial board member and co-author of a new book, In the War Room, the inside story of Israel's fight against Hamas and the Iranian Axis. He wrote In the War Room with Yonah Jeremy Bob, Jerusalem Post's senior military correspondent. It's an excellent blow by blow of the war, but we're also going to take a step back from it and look at some of the larger issues that are raised there. So I'm very glad that Elliot is here with me.

I am also proud to share with you that this episode is sponsored by Tikvah's Millstone Scholars Program.

That's of the Tikvah Fund, a unique program designed for those middle school years, when young people begin deciding what they believe and who they want to become. For parents and grandparents wondering what comes after the bar or bat mitzvah, Millstone offers substantive serious learning. This isn't more Hebrew school. This is a selective national honors program for seventh and eighth graders. Students meet weekly in small cohorts to study Jewish civilization, modern Israel, the Jewish ideas that inspired America. Through primary sources and guided seminar discussion, they developed the confidence to become proud Jews, proud Americans, and future leaders. Millstone offers in-person and online cohorts across 30 cities. Classes begin the week of October 18 You can learn more and apply at tikvah.org/haviv.

That's Tikvah with an H, T-I-K-V-A-H dot org slash Haviv. That link is also going to be in the show notes. Thank you to Tikvah for sponsoring this episode and for all the amazing educational work that the Tikvah Fund does and has been doing, and some of which over the last 15 years, I myself have partaken in and learned a great deal. I also would love to invite everybody listening to join our Patreon community to subscribe to our Substack. If you're interested in asking the questions that guide the topics we talk about, that's where you do that. You can also 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 also in the show notes. Elliot, thanks for coming. How are you?

Elliot Kaufman (2:27)

I'm doing well. Thank you so much for having me on.

Haviv Rettig Gur (2:31)

So let's dive right in. Why did you write this book? What does this book give us that is beyond the endless news reporting about this war? And there's now an efflorescence of books about this war.

This is a play-by-play of the decision-making leadership, I would say, almost. Is that right?

Elliot Kaufman (2:55)

That's right. I would say there's an efflorescence of books so far about the October 7th attack. But what there is not yet, and what I think this book has in a way where there's really nothing else available like it, is the inside story of what happened after October 7th. I can say that because myself, my co-author through our work at The Wall Street Journal, Jerusalem Post, we have inside material from all of Israel's top leaders, that's political, military, intelligence, Bibi, Gallant, Gantz, Halevi, Zameer, and so forth.

I guess that's not quite like those reports that we've been reading all through the war, where it's kind of one faction typically getting its story through, trying to influence the narrative in that way. By having this comprehensive approach, we can actually tell the real story, inside story of what Israel's war room was facing, all the decisions it had to make. And I think when you get into that, you realize very quickly that the hardline anti-Israel narrative, let's say, that Israel was just trying to kill as many Palestinians as it could, or all the Palestinians, simply cannot withstand scrutiny. It crumbles on first contact with reality, with specificity, and with deep reporting into Israel's war room.

Haviv Rettig Gur (4:36)

There were real dilemmas faced by these decision-makers. I was interviewed on a very left-wing media outlet where I tried to explain some of the thinking of some of the Israeli decision-makers who looked at Hamas and said this is a model that Hezbollah also follows. This is a kind of undeterrability because they're not really influenced by the potential pain to their own polity and to their own side of the Iranian regime. The Israelis understood something very big and they felt they really had to actually defeat these kinds of enemies because they're not deterrable. So you can't live next to them. Then the answer of this interviewer was, well, why couldn't you just not go to the Gaza war?