The Axe Files with David Axelrod

And now from the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago and CNN Audio, The Axe Files, with your host, David Axelrod.

This week marked the anniversary of the horrific, devastating October 7th massacre by Hamas in southern Israel, in which more than 1,200 men, women and children were killed or taken hostage. So I wanted to double back with Ilana Dayan, one of Israel's most celebrated broadcast journalists, almost a year to the day on which we spoke in the immediate aftermath of that scene. Here's our conversation. Ilana, it is so good to see you. I think about you often, but we haven't really spoken since almost exactly a year ago.

Yes, it's, it's good to be with you. And I know you have us in your thoughts, and I hope we'll be able to share them in the coming hour.

Well, I watched you, your interview with Christiane Amanpour a few days ago. And, you know, the thing that distinguishes you among many things as a journalist is your ability to speak with tremendous clarity, even when that clarity is all about lack of clarity. But I was stunned, I have to say, a year ago, it really made an impression on me. As you struggled to articulate your feelings about what had happened on October 7th. Tell me what your feelings are now and what you are thinking now, a year later, and did you imagine then that we'd be, where we are now?

I'll tell you how my day started, David. My day started when my husband had a phone call from his best buddy who told him that his son was gravely injured in the front in the battlefile in the north. And so we traveled to the hospital immediately. He was after two surgeries already. Thank God he's going to be okay. A 24 year old reserve soldier. And then I entered my car and on the radio, I read about the terrorist attack in Hadera, just an hour north of Tel Aviv. A terrorist was stabbing bystanders all over. And then half an hour ago, a man and a woman in their 40s were killed in Kinyat Shmona in the border north of the northern border with Israel from a rocket that hit them. So we are apparently in another kind of reality. I'm sure we're going to talk about what's happening with Hezbollah, with Iran, and Israel all of a sudden changing the geopolitical reality. But still, we're in the midst of this unclear, ambiguous, ongoing war with no end in the foreseeable future and with 101 hostages still in Gaza, most of them apparently still alive. And for me, that's the single most defining issue of this war. And as far as feelings go, I'll tell you one more thing. Last Wednesday was Rosh Hashana, the first day of the Jewish year. But the truth is that the last year is refusing to go away. I remember telling you a year ago that many of us are still stuck in October 7th. Many of us are still stuck on October 7th. It's like that 367th day of October and it's like the the reality is not obey the calendar. Yesterday I was, the day before yesterday, on on October 7th, I was in Kfar Aza, a kibbutz that lost more than 70 of its residents. More than 70 were murdered. 19 were kidnaped. Five are still there in Gaza. And I stood in front of the tiny apartment of Nitzan Libstein, who was 19 years old, living there in the youngster's neighborhood of Kfar Aza that became a living hell on that October 7th. His mother and the rest of the family were in the family house in the kibbutz. His father was the head of the regional council. He was killed in the first minutes of the attack because he went to get his weapon. And Nitzan was texting with his mother and the older brother, telling them that he's afraid, that they are already out there. He can hear them. They are shooting. He's gravely injured. And you know, he wrote, I'm losing tons of blood, I'm going to die. And Vered told me back then that when they rescued her with their sons after 30 hours in the safe room, she said, I want to get my son. And they told her, you cannot get to this neighborhood. It's full of terrorists. They found his body a week and a half later. David, Vered lost her husband, their son, her mother and her nephew. And if you asked me, where are we a year later, they say that you have five phases of grief, right. There's the denying and then the bargaining and then the depression and then the acceptance, I think, and the anger, of course. I think we are still in the midst of all of them together. Nothing is easy process processed and then it's still October 7th for many of us.

One of the things that struck me about your conversation with Christiane is you talked about what Israel represents to Jews and to people who live there. It was created after World War Two, and it was a refuge, a sanctum, a place where Jews could live and feel as if they were safe and protected. And that is that was the compact with the the government, the military, that that above all, that that was the mission. And that was what was so shocking about October 7th that such a thing could happen. How much is that still resonating? And, you know, you talked this morning about the casualties today. Has that been shattered?

Yeah, it was shattered. And I'll tell a story, David. I was not born in Israel. I was born in Argentina.

Yes.

And I was a very young girl when we made Aliya, when we emigrated to this country. But they were telling me that when there was a farewell party, my father made a speech and he said, When my parents let you left Ukraine to come to South America, and when Vilma, his wife, my mother's parents left Hungary to come to South America, they left Europe with a curse on their lips. So he said in Spanish, we said, when we make Aliya, Vilma and I said, we are leaving South America with a blessing on our lips because South America was good to us as Jewish people. Much as America is good to you, I guess. So why did they leave, my parents? Why did they come here? The candidate for the single, very basic reason that this is home. That this is the single place in which we can feel at home in the very primitive and basic sense that, no bad people will be out to kill us. Well, on October 7th, they were. They invaded our hometowns and they murdered and butchered and raped and beheaded 1200 Israelis. They raided over 30 peaceful communities. And there were cases of rape and group rape and disfiguring of female bodies. And, you know, there's one sentence that never leaves me that was said by a six year old girl from from a southern town in Israel. Her father was murdered at the beginning of the attack. Her mother was trying to rescue her two little girls. A policeman and an Arab citizen that rescued them were murdered by the terrorists, along with the mother. So the two little girls stayed alone in the backseat of the car. And then a policeman approaches them and they're afraid and she's shielding her younger sister. And she's asking you, do you belong, she she's asking him, the policeman, do you belong to Israel? Because for her, if he belongs to Israel, he comes to save her. And that's the social contract that was breached. That's the sense of security. That if something happens to me in the jungle in Colombia, in an earthquake in Nepal, or if a snake bit me in Brisbane, Australia. Somebody from Israel will come to rescue me. And they didn't. And this is something that will take years to heal because it's not only between us and the military, which is now performing much differently, and we'll talk about it. It's between us and the state. And because Israel represent something more than merely the physical protection of a physical existence, it should represent for us so much more. And for that, we have to fight not only for our lives, but for our souls, not only for our physical existence, but for our moral existence. And this it's truly tough and complicated when you experience so much evil and you consume so much rage. So the basic question that I'm asking myself as Jewish people, as Israelis, as human beings, what kind of people will we be when all of this is over? Thing is, it's not over and it's not going to be over for the foreseeable future. So the question is still there.

Yeah. You know, that question that you're asking yourself obviously is relevant to the aftermath. You said, and I was, I'll never, ever forget our conversation a year ago where you said we can't live with monsters across the border who are sworn to kill us. And, you know, it's a very simple and understandable statement after what had happened. Now we're a year later and there are 40,000 people dead in Gaza and, I don't know, 13, 14,000 of them children. Is that part of the moral complexity? But let me ask you two questions. Is that part of the moral complexity? Because these images are searing. I tell people as a Jew that I was devastated by what happened on October 7th. My father fled, you know, the pogroms, his home was blown up. You know, he stepped over dead bodies to escape all of that. I was devastated by what happened on October 7th. But that doesn't mean I can't weep for the children of Gaza. But I'm sure that it's a more it's more complicated for you. How do you reconcile and how do you reconcile that?

'And, you know, I've been to, I've been to the US in the spring and I've seen the students in the encampment in Columbia University. Then I've been to Oxford University in the U.K. and I met their pro-Palestinian students. And I figure the point is that the criticism against Israel in the world does not correspond with the criticism that many of us here have against the government of Israel. The point is that those protesters, I think, don't differentiate between the question of what this war is all about and the question is and the other question that is regarding the way this war is conducted. You can criticize the way the, the way this war is conducted. Yes, you can criticize the way this war is covered. But I dying to ask those protesters, what if what if your country was attacked from the north and from the south by a monster that ruled the other side of the border by people who hide men and ammunition in schools and clinics and mosques in a way that makes you have, you know, that mandates launching a war, which is complicated. It is complicated. And those people don't really criticize the way this war is waged. Those people, I think their criticism ranges everything between the unbelievable to the ignorant, to the vicious, to the plainly sometimes anti-Semitic. And I think that the one thing that they they miss is a question that I think I mentioned back then when we talked. What did Sinwar think, what did they expect that would happen if he launches such a terrible, horrifying, atrocious and cruel and savage attack? Didn't he expect that Israel will launch a war ten times bigger? Didn't he expect this calamity that will meet his own people? Didn't heexpect these vast numbers of casualties? And David, let me tell you. There's nothing that will make me rejoice the loss of innocent lives. There's nothing that will make me rejoice in the loss of young kids lives. And I know no Israeli soldier and I know many of them have been to Gaza, to Rafah. I know of no Israeli soldier that will rejoice with the loss of of innocent lives. But I. I beg those people who keep criticizing not the way this war is waged, but the the sheer fact that is is waged, I begged them to so understand that in the front of such a monster, you have to do something. And doing something in the context of Gaza is is complicated. And and when you see the leaflets, you know, showered from the airplanes, and when do you see the text messages to the to the residents both in Gaza and in Lebanon. When you see, David, the planes, David, from Hezbollah in the north, to conquer the Galilee. When you see the tunnels in the north, not in the south, in the north that were getting to the border of the state of Israel. You understand that we have a business with a very, yeah, very cruel kind of enemy. And I'll tell you one last thing. You know, as a journalist. I remember bouncing at the beginning of this war between the trauma and the duty. Between experiencing and and believing the pain and between the calling of my porofession to tell the truth, to look for the fact, and to give our audience the true picture what's happening both on our side and on the other side of the border. And yes, I think that the Israelis should know what happens on the other side of the border. If we want the world to know what we experience, we need to know what they're experiencing. So therefore, I think we need to cover, we need to cover more of what's happening on the other side of the border, especially because we shouldn't let those who are out to take our lives, we shouldn't let them take our values. And our values are still values of care and compassion and of seeing the other, part'y because we used to be the other, the ultimate other. And so, yes, it this is the more complexity. And I can understand part of the criticism. But part of it is is plainly ignorant and vicious.

Yeah. I mean, look, I, I know some of these young people, and I think that they are filled with sort of, and they've been encouraged in some instances by social media and otherwise to be filled with rage about what's happening in Gaza and less so about what happened that propagated the whole thing or the tactics that Hamas has employed to shield them selves and use their own people. That said, do you feel, and I'm asking you a hard question because I feel like I'm talking to you as an Israeli, as a as a mother, as a mother in law. I know you and your son in law's in the reserves there. And but also, as an unflinching journalist, do you feel that the war has been prosecuted as surgically as it could?

The short answer is that for the most part, I think yes, it was. The longer answer is that there are instances that you can look into and check and recheck. And I'll tell you, I tell you something, David, that as a journalist, I know that even when it came to covering ourr own fiasco, the fiasco of the Israeli intelligence, the fiasco of the military. I felt that the beginning of the war, that perhaps there is no, there's no ability to listen. That our audiences so emerged and and and and so many of us we're drowning is dysfunctional pain that they have no patience to listen, you know, to the wrongdoings, to the fiascos. And I felt that, you know, our duty is to doubt. Yes, to doubt also the actions of our own government in our own military. But our audience needed clarity. And, you know, I felt that our duty is to criticize and our audience needed unity. Any in times of emergency, you tend to take your own tribed. But then I realized as reporters, we have to uncover and to expose and to show the facts of those who failed us from within or the enemy from without. And yes, of some cases in which, as you said, perhaps the war should have been or could have been conducted in a more surgical way. But, David, I. I know I know our soldiers and commanders and generals who aborted actions and military operations because of the will and the wish and the and the the mandate, the moral mandate not to cause any civilian casualties. Again, on the other hand, I've seen them, David. I've seen the family. I've seen the mosques, I've seen the universities in Gaza. I've seen the places under which hostages were hidden. I know that the commanders of Hamas nowadays, those who are still alive, are wrapping themselves, are shielding themselves with hostages. Young female hostages. Elderly woman. Young men, fathers. Spouses. Grandfathers. This is a reality. It's not sterile. It's not a war conducted in, you know, conditions of a laboratory. But I think as a reporter, I, you know, I keep telling myself, you have to ask the hard questions both with regard to what the world is saying and both with regard to what your own government and your own militants are doing.

We're going to take a short break and we'll be right back with more of The Axe Files. And now back to the show. I want to talk about the hostages. But before, just as we're talking about this, I have a a friend who was a fellow at the Institute of Politics, as you were at the University of Chicago, named Wajjeh Abu Zarefah. And he was a stringer for NBC News, which is how he came to me. And he had been trying to create some sort of institute in Gaza where they could, where he could through Zoom connect people with the outside world. So, because his experience here in the U.S. was pretty formative. And he actually made some strong contacts with leaders of the Jewish community here when he was here and it was moving and so on. Anyway, I was worried about him and I wrote him. I write him periodically. And this is the latest letter that he wrote. I just thought I should read it to you. And because it is the other side of the equation. He said, Thanks very much you, my friend, for asking about me. We are fine. Me and part of my family are now in Cairo. We succeeded to leave Gaza before the closure of Rafah Crossing. NBC News helped us to leave to Egypt, but part of my family is still in Gaza. They couldn't leave, including my son and my wife and my sons in law. We escaped with our lives from this desolation, but many of our loved ones did not survive. We lost everything we built during the 35 years, my houses and my office, but losing the hope is more dangerous. We've lost hope in the future. Anyway, we will still live and we will continue to survive and have a dream of peace and justice. I hope this crazy war will end soon to save people's lives and to save the world. I hope you will succeed, we will succeed to see you again, dear. Thank you again for your support and thoughts. Lot of lives shattered there as well. It's painful and we know how this began. And we know that Hamas is a terrorist organization and its sworn to Israel's destruction. We know the tactics they used, but it's painful to read a letter like that as it is for you to hear the stories of people on the 7th of October.

I'd like to meet this guy.

I would love to get you guys together. Would be a great thing.

'And I and and, you know, to ask him truly to ask him truly, how come support for Hamas kept being so high, perhaps now less so, by the way, but kept being so high, even in the West, that even after the massacre of October 7th. I'd like to show this guy. And again, notwithstanding the fact that I don't rejoice the loss of innocent lives, I don't rejoice the suffering of people who were displaced or orphaned or hurt in any other way. I don't rejoice in the tragedy of innocent people, but I do ask myself, when I see a heartbreaking and breathtaking documentary that the special report we aired on our program a couple of weeks ago by one of our finest documentaries. His name is Ben Shani, and he has seen, David, almost all of the footage that you could think of from Kibbutz Be'eri. Kibbutz Be'eri is one of the most prosperous, most beautiful kibbutzim in Israel. The kibbutz lost 102 of its residents in the massacre of October 7th. We assembled all the footage of the security cameras, of the body cameras of the terrorists, of every camera we can think of, and we assembled a report that let you see almost minute, minute by minute what happened in this kibbutz on October 7th. You know, one thing that you can see early in the morning, the car of three young boys, young men, were rescued, who were fleeing the music festival. And they look for refuge in Kibbutz Be'eri. They are executed at gunpoint. And then you see a guy in a black T-shirt who later was identified as an employee of Unwra, the U.N. Refugee Agency, taking the body of one of them and kidnaping it to Gaza. And so I really want to know, I'm anxious to know, not to attack, just to know. I'm curious to know, who are those people? What does this guy that you're corresponding with, what does he think about that? How come Hamas had such a grip on the population? And who are those people? Those single people who are suffering but yet couldn't get free of the grip of Hamas? And how can we change reality? Perhaps on that we can speak later.

Yes. Yeah, I know. I want to have that discussion because imagining a better future is hard under these circumstances in the middle of all of this. Let's talk about the hostages, because and again, when you were talking to Christiane, you were so moving in articulating what those hostages mean and the fact that they're there and you called that a stain that cannot be bleached. I know from the bottom of my soul that Israel will not be able to heal if our hostages don't come back.

I'll tell you, David and I, I have a very warm connection with Dr. Ayalet Levy. She's the physician of a women's soccer team. Her daughter Naama Levy is a young soldier kidnaped in Gaza he held hostage for over a year. You could see Naama on a video released on October 7th, blood on her pants and she was being dragged to a Hamas jeep. You could see her later in a video released just a couple of months ago held hostage in Gaza. And you could see that she was hit and she's bruised. And I was talking to her mother a couple of months ago, and she was telling me about the mornings that are particularly hard. That you get up and realize this nightmare isn't over. And I interviewed on the radio and she was talking to Naama, she was telling her, I beg you to hold on and you, we will get you back, and we will heal you. And when she said when we heal you, I was asking myself how will we heal ourself? how come that I, as an Israeli, as a reporter, as a woman, as a mother, how come that I have to convince other people in Israel that it's not a political issue? How come that the rabbi, a prominent rabbi yesterday on the radio said, we lost so many lives, we might as well lose 101 more. How come that sources from within the negotiating team tell me that this deal was possible in January, in April and in June or July, but it was torpedoed by the Prime Minister. Now, I'm sure that Netanyahu wants them back, but I'm afraid that he might want his political survival more. By the way, some people say that Netanyahu is aiming now to this biblical notion of total victory because he wants to reclaim his legacy. And that is why that goal of beating Hamas is more important than the goal of getting the hostages back. David I think the reasons for which the leader is driving us at the certain point are less important than the place he's driving us. And yes, I think this stain will never be bleached if the Israeli government doesn't act by the basic Jewish and Israeli ethos of caring for our own and caring for the other. If we don't bring these people back, Naama, and Liri, and Agam and Shlomo and so many others. If we don't do everything in our power to make the government understand that this society will not be able to heal, that we will never be the same if they don't come back, then I'm afraid that the future is bleak. And I tell you one more thing. What? I know that you love Israel, you're interested in Israel, and you try to understand things. When you try to understand Israel, you have to understand this is not merely a political discussion between hawks and doves, between hard liners and softies, between coalition and opposition. It's really a deep debate between two kinds of Israel, between the Israel of now and the Israel of ever, between those who opt for this biblical notion of total victory and those who opt for saving lives. Between those who, you know, would put life above land and those who put land above life. This is the real this is the real debate. And I know that Netanyahu might be stealing the Philadelphia route. And I know that he might not have been negotiating in good faith. And I know that he might be, you know, preferring his political future over the future and the lives of these hostages. But the deeper question is how come his partners and how come the people of Israel let this happen? And this is something that I feel so deeply. I was texting with the grandmother of Romi Gonen. She's 24 years old. She was injured in the music festival and taken hostage. And I was texting her and telling her, I was asking, how is she? And she said, I'm trying to regain some strength to communicate with you. And I said, do you have also good moments? And she said, I don't have moments because I cannot breathe. And and I live I live these tragedies so deeply. And so very personally that I am sure this is the one thing. Listen, David, I spoke last day, last week with someone who is very close to the decision. He told me, he told me a deal was possible. Now, don't forget, Sinwar is cruel. He's cynical. He did reject also.

He's also free. But he's also free, by the way, because Netanyahu authorized a prisoner exchange in 2011 for one hostage.

For one soldier, and Netanyahu released 1027 terrorists, 280 of them with blood on their hands. One of them was Sinwar, the ruthless leader of Hamas. And he's still ruthless and he's still alive and he's still refusing and he's still not communicating, although they say that in the last couple of days, perhaps he'll renew communication with the mediators, with Qatar and so forth, and he doesn't really care for the future of his own people and he doesn't go for a deal. But that's on us to do everything. But he's not accountable to me. Sinwar is not accountable to me or to the hostages' families. Our Prime minister is.

Well, let's talk about him for a second, because obviously I almost it seems almost profane to talk about the politics of all of this given everything that you've said and how eloquently you've said it and passionately you've said it. But when you talk about Bibi Netanyahu, it's really hard to separate the politics from all these other discussions. He was in terrible political shape. And, you know, it struck me. I know that. And you know much more about this than I. Perhaps you can illuminate this, that the attack on Hezbollah fell over this anniversary of October 7th, which represented a shocking failure on the part of Israel's intelligence and military and the government itself. And now comes this sort of next generation military operation that reestablishes Israel's superiority and its capacities and so on. And so it was a serendipitous from a political standpoint, serendipitous occurrence, I guess you could call it serendipity, that this should happen, because otherwise the stories would just be all about the failure of October 7th. But now you're you're in a full out war, probably one that has is a unambiguous in the minds of Israelis. I mean, Hezbollah is a another threat across another border. You've had to evacuate 70,000 people from northern Israel. As you said, you lost to today two missile attacks. But it has implicated Iran, which is the sponsor of these groups. What is his motivation in all of this? Or is it just a complicated mix of motivations? Because the longer he prolongs this and the broader the conflict and the clearer the lines, the better off he is. And, you know, and you can see him strengthening politically. So talk about him and his role and try and you've reported on him forever.

He has been here forever.

So to the degree that you can crawl into anyone's head, tell me what's going on in his and what his endgame is here.

First of all, I'll tell you that if you'd asked Netanyahu yourself a year ago if he would still be prime minister on October 7th or October 9th of 2024, he'd tell you, not in a million years, he wouldn't have believed that he'd survive such a catastrophe and and something that happened on his watch. But Bibi Netanyahu is truly a league of his own when it comes to political skills. And I think it has to do with the with the frequency that he strikes with his base, the ability to both listen and muster his base at the same time, to be both attentive and able to manipulate or to orchestrate his face simultaneously. That is something which I think there is no politician on earth that masters those skills the way he does, often cynically applied and most of the time aimed at his political survival. How does he do it? It's both an enigma, as it is clear as as the sun the sun in the sky. He normalized Ben Gvir to get the coalition. He solidified his coalition just a couple of weeks ago with Gideon Saar, who was one of his fiercest rivial from within Likud, then he left Likud, now he's probably coming back to Likud. And so probably that we will have no elections until 2026. This government, under whose watch this catastrophe happened, might survive till the end of its term. And that's thanks to Netanyahu's political scheming. That being said, the vast majority of Israelis say in all polls they would vote for the opposition and not for the coaltion. Even though most of Israelis would not vote for him, even though most of Israelis would opt for a hostage deal, even though most of Israelis give him poor ratings, approval ratings in the polls, they give as low approval ratings to the opposition leader, Yair Lapid, because of incompetence and because of other reasons. So if you ask me, there is such a huge gap these days between the way politics is played and the way real people in real life are feeling. Real people are afraid. Are anxious. Are, these are depressed, are worried. Are living in the shadow of uncertainty and are feeling many, many Israelis, not all of them, that the government doesn't listen. But they don't get to decide. The Knesset gets to the Senate. And until we have elections, the political reality will not change, and until political reality changes, the geopolitical reality doesn't change. Now, David, all that being said, there is a strike, a series of phenomenal military successes during the last couple of weeks starting from the pagers attack attributed to Israeli Mossad, one of the most amazing Hollywood style.

Mind boggling.

Mind boggling espionage operations that you can think of. And the airstrikes that took much of Hezbollah's rocket arsenal and the killing of Nasrallah and the killing of Nasrallah's successor. But now we are in a crossroad again. Will Israel look for a point of exit? Israel has shown in the last couple of weeks that it can get its detterance back. Now, I met a veteran, an amazingly kind and and and special kind of general at the beginning of the war in Gaza. And I've known him from before. And I asked him, listen, what happened to you guys on October 7th? And I said and he said, We just didn't show up. We were nowhere to be seen. We didn't show up. We didn't show up plus. And now in the last couple of weeks, Israel and the military showed up in the airstrikes, in the special operations, the killing of Ismail Haniya in Tehran, which Israel didn't assume responsibility for. And all of a sudden, it's another kind of Israel, but but it's on there, it's not even on the verge of a regional war. We're in the midst of a regional war, which God forbid, can become a much terrible, much more terrible war if it's a war between Israel and Iran. And nowadays, these days, these moments as we speak, Israel has to decide whether the response it will opt for against Iran will be the kind of response that ends the event or escaltes it. And in the deeper sense, Israel will have to decide whether it opts for keep exercising limited military power or for a change, realizing also the limits of military power. The war is a just war. Most Israelis would sign on because because Nasrallah thought that he can fire at will, that he can set the equation, that he could set the rules, that he can destroy more most of the northern towns on the nothern border with Israel. And he was sure that he was right and then he wasn't. Okay. But now that the Israelis inside Lebanon maneuvering with boots on the ground. Everything might change because we know how the Lebanese mud looks like because we experienced it for 11 years, for 18 years. Because guerrilla war is the kind of war in which the enemy doesn't need to win. He only needs to inflict pain and injury on us. And because for us to be able to bring the residents of the northern part of Israel back to their homes safely, a war is probably necessary, but it's not enough. A diplomatic arrangement will have to come in place. And the point qt which Israel opts for it, and it has also to do with the Americans and the kind of leverage they have, they have and so forth, is is a critical one. When and how and at which point will we understand that we manifested enough power, and now it's the time to acknowledge the limits of power. The point at which the enemy will be weak enough and we will be wise enough to get to the table. By the way, the acting leader of Hezbollah, Naim Kassem, yesterday, for the first time said they're willing, more or less, for a cease fire with no strings attached. All of a sudden, they don't connect themselves, they don't associate themselves with Gaza. All of a sudden, they don't condition upon this cease fire in the south. All of a sudden, they say, let's stop everything and talk about the details later.

We're going to take a short break and we'll be right back with more of The Axe Files. And now back to the show. There is one more turn of the wheel, apparently, which is how Israel responds to the attack from Iran. 200 ballistic missiles fired on Israel. That is the sort of question of the moment, is it not, in terms of the issue that you raised, which is does this thing escalate or is there an exit ramp? So going just returning to the, crawling back into Netanyahu's head and knowing understanding his rhetoric about Iran for ever and the fact that Iran is a rallying point politically for him? Because there's all this discussion about whether he goes after the nuclear facilities and so on. What do you think he is, he is thinking?

Obviously, I don't know. But I think the conventional wisdom is that striking the nuclear installations now is probably out of question. I cannot say for sure, but out of question, particularly in the sense that the Israelis cannot do it without the American support.

Requires American help.

'Exactly. American help in the conducting of the attack and more than that, American help in defending ourselves from the possible response to such an attack. And the Americans are not there. The last thing they need is this kind of war four weeks or less before the elections in the U.S. and and someone who is very well acquainted with the American administration told to me, even with regard to the hostage thing, they don't exert the leverage they do have, and there's the leverage they don't have, but they don't exert the leverage they do have because of political considerations, domestic considerations that have to do with the Kamala Harris campaign and the elections that are just less than four weeks away. Netanyahu is supposed, I think, two hours from now to have a telephone conversation with the president. It happens after two interesting events. One is the fact that Netanyahu grounded our secretary of defense, Yoav Gallnt. And he didn't allow them to take off to the US last night until after his conversation with the president. Probably this visit will happen eventually because Gallant has to meet his American counterpart, Lloyd Austin. Israel has to be coordinated with the U.S. This dialogue is crucial. It's critical as we speak, before Israel decides how to strike, when to strike and where to strike. And the other event that happened is the excerpts that were published on CNN from Bob Woodward's new book, in which President Biden is cited with very undiplomatic statements about Prime Minister Netanyahu. There was no love lost there, even though they both like to say that they know each other for 100 years and they're very good friends. Not anymore, I suspect. The thing is that when it comes to politics, much as the quarrel with the press and the media is an asset for Bibi, not a liability, so is the quarrel with the American administration. You know all too well. It was that way with the Obama administration. The quarrel, the debate, the tension between Bibi and the American administration was for him a critical political asset in his dialogue with his own base. And you have to bring that to account when you see and hear and listen and understand that the rapport between Bibi and the White House these days, there's one quote that comes to my mind. I remember the late Martin Indyk was the American ambassador to Israel in the 90s. He told me was that he had a message for President Clinton to Bibi not to build a semi-settlement in the eastern part of Jerusalem, the eastern suburbs of Jerusalem. And they told him, I'm sorry, I will have to decline the president's request. And Martin Indyk, I asked him how come? And he said, because I have to feed my tribe. I have to feed my tribe. This is a very sharp political observation, and there's no one sharper and more skilled from these kind of political observations than Bibi. The only one thing that I should say, just to end this point, he was forever very, very cautious when it came to launching wars and when it came to risking the troops. And perhaps he was overcautious before October 7th containing and entertaining the risk from Gaza and from Lebanon and not launching perhaps a preemptive strike. But that's another story. We would wait and see whether this cautiousness, which was so characteristic of me for years, is still there when it comes to Iran.

A couple of points. Some of those sort of, you know, I always talk about Donald Trump's feral genius. And I think in that sense, they're kindred spirits. They know how to feed their tribes and they understand that that is the source of their strength. And so the kind of conventional political rules don't apply and polite society kind of raises its eyebrows. But that's of little consequence.

And they don't and they don't have to represent their tribe or be similar to the tribe. They have to be the vessel of their tribes. Frustrations, hatreds, feelings, sentiments, envy. They don't have to be as their tribe. They have to be the vessel for their tribes' basic deep sentiment.

The other thing is that so long as he has control and as long as this war continues, it delays the official review of what happened on October 7th. Or can it happen anyway? But that's not going to be a good story for him.

If there is an investigative, formal, official investigative committee? You know, I checked the other day, David, the investigative committee that investigated the Yom Kippur War was established a month and a half after the war broke, at the end of November 1973. The investigative committee that investigated the assasination of Yitzhak Rabin was established on November 8th, four days after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. It's over a year now since October 7th. Such a committee is nowhere to be seen because the government doesn't want it, and most of the people do want to. And when the father of a soldier who was killed on October, a female soldier was killed on October 7th, stood on this stage the day before yesterday in the ceremony of the families, the national ceremony of the people, unlike like the formal government ceremony that was prerecorded. Live on television, we saw both.

Split screen kind of thing.

But fortunately, it was on different hours. And in the ceremony of the people, the one produced by the families of the victims of October 7th, when this father of this female soldier who was slain, stood on stage and said, we need answers and we have tough questions and we need answers and we need an investigative committee. The crowd applauded. And there were so many different Israelis in the clapping the crowd. You had secular and orthodox and guys from small towns and guys from Tel Aviv and your left and right and Arabs and Jews. You had so many types of Israelis and you can see it in every poll. Israelis want actions. Again, that's another point at which political reality doesn't meet the real reality. But I bet, you know, at some point these questions will have to be answered. They are so, so crucial, so important, so historical in magnitude. They will have to be answered.

You said earlier that the U.S. wasn't using the leverage that it had. First of all, what is the leverage they're not using? I guess it is, they continue to supply, the U.S. continues to supply what Israel needs. And the real leverage they have is to say, we're just not going to do that. That has political implications here. But what is the relationship today between the U.S. and Israel and what is the attitude of the Israeli people? You said a year ago, by the way, when we had our conversation, that Israel would need America's help and America's help doesn't come without some strings attached. You're saying America's not pulling all those strings, But what is the attitude toward the U.S.? I know it was very, it was quite supportive of the relationship when Biden arrived there right after October 7th. What is the attitude today?

I think most Israelis, most Israelis are grateful. Most Israelis know that it's truly an unbreakable and checkable bond. The politicians used to say and like to say, most Israelis know that it's it's for a reason and it's for a reason. There is a strategic mutual interest. Israel is a villa in the jungle. Israel is the frontier democracy in an ocean of fanatic, fundamentalist Islamic entities, not even states.

Although a strained democracy, as you describe it here.

It's it's strained. Yes. And, you know, we arrived at October 7th after the judicial overhaul with a broken politics and with an assault on our most crucial democratic institutions. But it was halted. It was halted by the people who took to the streets for weeks in a row. And they said it out loud that Israel should be a liberal democracy, a Jewish democratic state, that we have an independent Supreme Court that nowadays it helps us in The Hague with the International Court of Justice and and that we should have an independent attorney general and we should have an independent civil service and we should have gatekeepers who are not necessarily elected politicians, but they are the ones who are the most, perhaps the most important guardians of the of law and order, the rule of law and equity and civil rights and human rights and individual rights. All of that is true. Is still true, David, is still true of Israeli democracy. And I think that's part of the that's part of the bond with the U.S. I think that, I hope I hope that.

We have our own struggles. I'm not I'm not moralizing. I'm not moralizing about that. You talk about Israel as a Jewish democratic state and as a Jew, I take pride in that. As an American, I feel kinship. Can it continue to be a Jewish democratic state without some sort of resolution of the Palestinian question?

David, even those of us who truly want a compromise don't see it in the foreseeable future. Bear in mind that almost every time that Israel extended its hands for peace, be it the Oslo Accords in 1993, at Camp David in 2001, in the disengagement in 2005 and later Prime Minister Olmert 2008. Every time it was responded and it was greeted by a wave of violence. Either it was a rain of rockets or the second Intifada, which was a bloodbath of terrible suicide bombings and terror attacks. And so for many Israelis, they are disillusioned. And, you know, after all of that came October 7. Unprovoked and triggered a peaceful community. You know how many people, David, who used to drive Palestinian children to hospitals to get medical care in Israel are now kept hostage or already murdered in Gaza? Vivian Silver from Kibbutz Be'eri. She was one of the founders of Women Wage Peace. She marched with Palestinian women three days before the massacre. She was murdered on October 7th. So for many Israelis, if they still have illusions, they are not there. On the other hand, I heard Yochevet Lifshitz. She's 83 years old. She was held, kidnaped hostage in Gaza. She came back, her husband didn't. And she said the other day on television, I still believe in peace. I believe in coexistence because we need to build a bridge to the future. So when you asked me, I told you that, I know that Zionism was founded for us not to be killed anymore, for us to stay alive as individuals and as a nation. But that's not enough. There's another floor to this building, and it has to do not only with being alive, but with leading a certain kind of life. And, you know, Israel, it's a place where you can you know, you can see the finest restaurants in Tel Aviv. The young men were fighting now in Gaza and in Lebanon, they want to have a startup. They go to study Berkeley in NYU and at Yale. they want to come back and raise their kids in a vibrant society in which you can make a multi billion dollars exit in a normal society. And and I feel that the deep fear that I have is that October 7th will engrave this Jewish sense of victimhood in us, which is the very same sense of victimhood that, you know, reality validates these days, but that Zionism was supposed to rid us from. Zionism was supposed to supply us with tons of optimism instead of Jewish pessimism. Zionism was supposed not only to let us live, but to let us lead as a vibrant, successful, modern, liberal, democratic society, Jewish state in which I want to raise my kids and my grandkids. And this is the basic fear that I have these things. Because reality took us back to this sense of victimhood, of Jewish tragedy, of which we wanted to get rid of. And we need to try to take ourselves out of that. To doubt ourselves. To deal with our own demons. To try to seek a way to the future and to transform this moment of crisis into a moment of grace. Problem is A, doesn't depend only on us. The enemy has this tendency not to play the part that we expect them to play. And B that this notion is so strong. Because, David, there are images that I've seen during the last year that I wish I never saw. Images. I saw the actual footage of kids being slain in front of their father and that the terrorists enters the room and drinks coke from the refrigerator, and they beg him to let them go back to their mother house. I saw the actual footage of the young female from a kibbutz who tries to hide in the kindergarden. And they find her. They killed her. They murdered her, and they kidnaped her body to Gaza. I saw the father of a disabled 17 year old, both spirits dancing with her in the music festival. They both were murdered. There are so many images that we carry with us. That October 7th might have a destructive effect. On the kind of people we become. And that's that. That's something we have to we have to to to struggle with, to reckon with.

And the terrible irony of that is that as you think in the long term it it may prevent the accomplishment of things that could provide a lasting security. So there's a lot of. I always love talking to you because you are unflinchingly honest and clear eyed, as I said, even in the face of complexity. And I wish for you, your family, and for everyone involved in this terrible, terrible conflict peace and stability. And I don't know how we get there, but it's something that has to be pursued. So in that spirit, let me wish you a happy New Year.

Shana tova, thank you very much, David.

Thank you for listening to the Axe Files brought to you by the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago and CNN Audio. The executive producer of the show is Miriam Finder Annenberg. The show is also produced by Saralena Barry, Jeff Fox and Hannah Grace McDonald. And special thanks to our partners at CNN, including Steve Lickteig and Haley Thomas. For more programing from IOP, visit politics dot uchicago dot edu.