The surprise attack on Israel by Hamas on Oct. 7 has scrambled an already volatile region. It also put Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s long and rocky tenure under new pressure. Just days before the new war began, journalist Ruth Margalit published a long investigation of Netanyahu’s past and future in the New York Times Magazine. Also a New Yorker contributor, she has since filed harrowing reports about the Hamas attacks and their aftermath. Margalit spoke with WAMC’s Ian Pickus.
We're speaking now a few weeks after the attack, but many hostages are still missing, of course. What is the mood like in Israel these days?
The mood is very tense. Everywhere you go, there are these signs with hostages’ photos calling to release them on park benches, street corners, really everywhere. Just the other day near where I live in the center of Tel Aviv, there were these teddy bears placed with the names of all the children taken by Hamas. So there are all these initiatives to kind of bring awareness to the state of the hostages there. There is a sense that Israelis are really kind of rallied behind this cause of bringing them back. This is really unprecedented numbers, we're talking over 200 hostages now. In Israel, back when there was just one soldier kidnapped by Hamas in Gaza, Gilad Shalit, all of Israel knew his name, there was this pressure campaign to release him. Now we're talking 200-fold that. And in addition to the hostage situation, you have these tanks lining up on the Gaza border and this expectation that there will be a ground invasion of Gaza happening sometime soon, and no one knows exactly when that will happen. Reservists have been mobilized; there are 360,000 Israelis (who) have been called up for reserve duty, and they're waiting for orders as to whether they're going into this ground incursion, which in itself is a really frightening prospect, while the Israeli military is bombarding Gaza at just record pace. Up until now, there were 7,000 strikes with Israeli bombs hitting Gaza. I mean, the numbers are just massive and this doesn't seem to be ending anytime soon.
To what extent do we know what Hamas wants springing from the attack of October 7?
In Israel, that's a huge question, and there's a sense that no one really knows. At first, it seemed almost like a suicidal act on the part of Hamas leaders to launch this attack, this surprise attack. And the idea that there will be this huge retaliation; now Israel is going after all of the Hamas leadership, its military capabilities, its underground bunkers and tunnel system, and mind you this is in a narrow coastal strip with 2 million civilians. So in a sense, the force that they will be met with in response to the massacres and the atrocities, it’s unclear what was going on sort of behind the scenes. What is clear, or sort of emerging in recent days, is this idea of a kind of regional conflict. And the question as to Iran's level of involvement in this, and whether Hezbollah will enter the conflict and then by proxy Iran will enter too. That prospect is even more harrowing than what we've witnessed so far.
Just to get some of the geography right for people who might be listening to this and don’t know; we've got Hezbollah to the north, an Iran proxy based in Lebanon, and then Hamas in the Palestinian area, especially in the Gaza Strip, and that's where this attack that we're talking about on October 7 came from, right?
That's exactly right, and then in addition, you have the West Bank, which is controlled by the Palestinian Authority. And of course, that authority has been very weakened in recent years, in part by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government — this idea that they did not want to enter negotiations with the Palestinian Authority for any kind of peace deal and concessions of land — and the result of that has been to sort of bolster Hamas by virtue of weakening the Palestinian Authority. And that is seen as a sort of fault of the Netanyahu government, that they allowed all this money from Qatar to enter the Gaza Strip, bolster Hamas, and all of that in order to weaken the hand of the Palestinian Authority, which is very different from Hamas. And so far the West Bank has been relatively quiet, and the hope is that it remains this way, but it's unclear.
So I know it's early days still, but is there any understanding about how this intelligence failure and this response to the attacks, which was agonizingly slow, happened?
The intelligence aspect of it is only now beginning to sort of unfold, and it's still unclear what exactly happened there on the part of the intelligence. What is clear, is that on the part of sort of government policy, there has been this shift in the priorities of the government. And what they have done is move battalions away from protecting the southern communities of Israel on the Gaza border, and at least three battalions were moved in recent weeks to the West Bank to protect Jewish settlements there. So this idea of kind of settlement expansion, and this maximalist view of Israeli of territorial rule, that's really a weak part on the part of Israel, because it failed to protect its southern communities; these kibbutzim, these communities lying on the Gaza border. So that's part of why it took the military so long to respond, is that they were not there. Like physically, they had to move from other parts of the country down south. Also, there was a Jewish holiday happening at the same time, and by all accounts, the military had a lot of soldiers at home. They sent a lot of soldiers home for the holiday, there was a kind of week-long sort of freeze on all activities and on all operations and Hamas knew that, apparently, we now know in hindsight, and took advantage of that. And then, of course, the breach of the Gaza fence, which was only completed last year to this great kind of bombast on the part of the government, and there was this idea that it was really reinforced, and nothing like this would happen, and yet you saw it breached in dozens of places, thousands of militants swarming in. So this was really unexpected and a huge surprise.
Well, you've done some reporting about the people who were living on kibbutzes in close proximity to the Gaza Strip, and many of them were just decimated by these attacks. Are people still living in that region? Do they have plans to go back to some of these locations?
You know, what's really sad is if you go to these places now, many of them were these sort of tree-lined kibbutzim, children running around, white homes, really beautiful locations, and now they are all military bases. They're charred, there's still smell in the air of what has happened there. They've all been taken over by the military and are just ghost towns right now. I've heard survivors from some of these places talk about the notion of going back home and sort of rebuilding and trying to re-establish their lives there. But no one thinks that this will happen if the current security arrangements stay in place. Everyone was caught by this surprise, and they're unwilling to go back as long as Hamas stays as the ruler of Gaza. Now, what this means in practice is very unclear, because Israel has put this as a goal for this coming operation, wiping out Hamas, eradicating Hamas leadership. And that's a very hard thing to do. When does it stop? How many leaders is Israel supposed to take out? When does this end? That's very unclear, but the sentiment in Israel is very much this line I kept repeating, I kept hearing over and over, this idea of ‘It's us or them.’
Well, President Biden and other leaders in the U.S. have been urging caution in conversations with Netanyahu about a ground war. I know we've got this pressing issue of the hostages who haven't been heard from. What would a ground war accomplish going into Gaza at this point?
Right. So far, Netanyahu and his wartime cabinet has delayed going in, and apparently that's in part response to Biden's call to wait and try to have these negotiations for the release of the hostages. So in the sense of kind of releasing the hostages, it's really unclear what the ground invasion would breed, and it's quite frightening to think about. But I think for the Israeli military, the stated goal so far, by having a ground incursion, is to go after Hamas leaders really one by one, just take them out individually. Some of them are in Gaza hiding in these underground bunkers, apparently, others are in Qatar in Doha. So there's even talk and whispers about Israel hitting them there, which would be in itself, going to Qatar and sort of acting there, would be quite unusual. And also getting rid of rocket launchers in Gaza, and wiping out the tunnel system. There's a huge underground tunnel system, and the idea is that by troops entering Gaza, you could actually sort of cement them down or even gas them. I mean, I've heard all sorts of theories as to how Israel would do it, but really just to kind of eliminate the tunnel system that they have there.
You've been obviously reporting on Netanyahu and he's established this wartime cabinet. How is his standing in the country now? It was precarious, as I understand, even before the attacks.
It was precarious before the attacks and now the numbers are record-low for him. If you look at recent polls coming out of Israel in terms of suitability for prime minister, if elections were held today, 48% say they prefer Benny Gantz, his rival, this centrist politician, to be prime minister. Only 28% say they prefer Benjamin Netanyahu. Now that’s still almost a third of the population supporting him, so he does have his base kind of locked in, but this base is shrinking. And even for him, that's an alarming prospect. I mean, so far whenever people have sort of written his political obituaries in every election cycle, he has somehow been able to sort of cling his way back, and come back and be triumphant and form these coalitions really out of nowhere at times.
But now, there's a sense that Israelis are fed up, and another poll showed that 80% of Israelis would like to see him take some kind of responsibility for his role in this attack, and yet he hasn't done that so far. And really, he's sort of standing ground and not shifting blame, but just not taking it on himself, even as in recent days, the IDF Chief of Staff, the military chief of staff, has taken responsibility, and it's clear, apparently, sources say that he has even handed in his resignation for the day after. So he's kind of seeing this war through, but it's clear that he will take responsibility for what has happened. The defense minister has said similar things, and even Benny Gantz, the opposition leader, he went to a funeral the other day or to a Shiva and made a speech in which he said that he was sorry, he sort of apologized to everyone who was there for the country's failure. Netanyahu doesn't really do that, you don't hear that language. It's all about Hamas. He’s very focused, and even sort of behind the scenes, he has his spokespeople attend these meetings of the security cabinet. It's clear that he's sort of still hanging on to power and trying to find a way out of this crisis, even just in a kind of PR sense.
Well before all of this, he had brought in elements of far-right politics in Israel to put the current coalition, the pre-war cabinet, coalition together and to stay in power. Where does the possibility of a two-state solution, which had been talked about but tabled for so, so long as Netanyahu countenanced the new settlements, and so on, where does that stand now?
I think so far, no one in Israel is talking about this. The left wing is but it's a shrinking camp, and I think liberal Israelis now are sort of waiting, and everyone's watching the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza. But the Palestinian authority is very quiet, the liberal camp in Israel is staying quiet, the notion of a two-state solution even on the part of the opposition, Benny Gantz, who leads the opposition and has been rising in the polls, even he isn't really talking in those terms. It's all about defeating Hamas right now, that seems to be the unifying goal. But one hopes that after this war, and when Israel grapples with the aftermath of all of this, then there would be this understanding that weakening a potential partner for peace, in order not to concede land, not to enter these negotiations, that that has been just really a weak standing on the part of Israel. And in that, Benjamin Netanyahu has bolstered Hamas and we're now paying the price for this.
Are there any Arab ally countries around Israel, among the countries that do recognize Israel right now, that Netanyahu and the Israelis can count on?
There are these Gulf states that Netanyahu has formed these normalization accords with, you see the role of Qatar playing a kind of mediator role in releasing some of the hostages. But even these countries, now there was this whole momentum behind this idea of perhaps Israel entering a three-way normalization agreement with Saudi Arabia, all of that is now on hold. No one's really talking about these agreements right now, and it's just the kind of wartime effort and very bellicose language. Diplomacy is kind of really being sidelined here, and I think two-thirds of Israelis, in other polls said they want to see a ground invasion of Gaza. So there is this notion in Israel of just sort of waiting with everything and letting the military do its part.
I think Israelis, correct me if I'm wrong, they've gotten used to living with a certain amount of violence or the threat of violence, and depending on where you are in the country, there's air raid sirens, and there's the Iron Dome, and that's just a part of life. What has day-to-day life been like for you in the city since October 7?
Yeah, there has been this strange routine in recent years where every once in a while, every few months or a year or so, we would have these air raid sirens, rockets launched from Gaza, we would go to, in my case, it's a staircase. I don't have a protected room in my house, it’s a very kind of old building in Tel Aviv. The newer buildings all have these fortified rooms, safe rooms, especially on the Gaza border. All the kibbutzes as you mentioned earlier, they all had these safe rooms to protect them against Hamas rockets. So we were used to that to some degree, but even that Saturday, October 7, even before the ground incursion or before we knew that there were these militants who had breached the fence, and were committing these massacres along the border, even that was unusual, just the level of the barrage, the amount of rockets coming in. So Hamas, even just the airstrikes were kind of unusual for what we're used to, and that showed that Hamas’ military capabilities were much stronger than anyone in Israel has anticipated. And of course, that is even without Hezbollah entering the war front. And as soon as Hezbollah does, if it does, then there's an expectation that central Israel, Tel Aviv and the area, will really be under assault because they have rockets that can reach central Israel and be very precise and direct in where they're targeted as opposed to the Qassam rockets coming out of Gaza. But for me, for my family, for everyone around, it's every day, a few times a day, sometimes dozens of times a day, we seek shelter, there are these sirens, we go, we take up our sleeping children, we pick them up, we run outside to the staircase, and we wait out the rocket attacks. Israel, as opposed to Gaza does have an interceptor system that's very good, an air defense missile system. And so, a lot of these rockets aren't hitting their targets, they’re being intercepted in the air. In Gaza, of course, that's very different. And Gazans have evacuated from their homes, they're fleeing down south, they have nowhere to go. We're very aware of that. In a sense, we're kind of in a privileged position, even as crazy as it is to say, given all of the atrocities that have been going on here.
