Jack Lew was nominated by President Joe Biden as the US ambassador to Israel in early September 2023 — a month before Hamas’s invasion and massacre in southern Israel. He arrived to take up the post a month after that catastrophe. His time here, now coming to an end with the return of Donald Trump to the White House, has been a period of terrible crisis, as he puts it, “from beginning to end.”
On Thursday, the ambassador sat down in Tel Aviv for an unusually lengthy interview with The Times of Israel — a kind of farewell conversation, laced with as much candor as his diplomatic considerations allowed.
An Orthodox Jew, Lew, 69, is a highly experienced official who worked as budgets director for presidents Clinton and Obama, then chief of staff and Treasury secretary to Obama. In our interview, he talked through many aspects of Israel’s struggles against external enemies — and the centrality of the Jewish state’s partnership with its sole potent global ally in ensuring Israel emerges intact and potentially thriving from its current multifront war.
The partnership has been militarily, diplomatically and even psychologically essential these past 15 months. It has also been marked by acute friction between Biden’s administration and the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Lew discussed the tensions at length, with nuance, his tone rarely rising but his language underlining considerable frustration. When I asked him how much time we had, he indicated plenty — which was fortunate, he added, because “I tend to go long.” (Thursday was a US national day of mourning for president Jimmy Carter, with federal offices at home and embassies overseas officially closed to the public, so Lew likely had a little more time than he usually would.)
I’m publishing the vast majority of what he had to say, and he does indeed “go long.” In doing so, it seems to me, he provided a rare, unhurried insight into the reflections, hopes and concerns of the most senior representative of Israel’s most essential international partner.
Much of what he said was fascinating, and sometimes revelatory, in terms of how the Biden administration went about its diplomatic work here, what went smoothly, what didn’t, and, especially, why it didn’t.

Without naming Netanyahu, he gave three out of what he said were many instances where he argued that the government had inflated “private and small differences” with the White House, “widened them and made them public,” with what he said were negative strategic implications: When Israel criticized the US for allowing through a UN Security Council resolution on a Gaza ceasefire in March; when Israel mischaracterized the US stance on the IDF’s planned major operation in Rafah; and Israeli assertions that the US imposed what amounted to an arms embargo on Israel when, he said, “nothing was stopped” bar a single shipment of 2,000-pound bombs.
He also lamented Israel’s failure to provide real-time responses to unfolding events in Gaza, saying he and others have urged their Israeli counterparts in vain, “on many, many, many occasions, often in the middle of the night: If you want to frame this story, get information out there more quickly, because you know there’s going to be a report out there that you think is inaccurate.”
“America has been fed a media coverage of this war that Israel has just not done an effective job countering,” Lew said. “And there’s only so much you can do through diplomatic channels to fix that.”
Public opinion in America “is still largely pro-Israel,” he noted. But “what I’ve told people here that they have to worry about when this war is over is that the generational memory doesn’t go back to the founding of the state or the Six Day War, or the Yom Kippur War, or to the intifada even. It starts with this war, and you can’t ignore the impact of this war on future policymakers — not the people making the decisions today, but the people who are 25, 35, 45 today and who will be the leaders for the next 30 years, 40 years.”
Warming to that theme, Lew pointed out that “Joe Biden is the last president of his generation, whose memories and knowledge and passion to support Israel go back to the founding story.”
Again without naming Netanyahu, he also queried the government’s approach to postwar Gaza, arguing that there is no realistic alternative to some role for the Palestinian Authority if Israel is not to become the permanent security force patrolling the streets of the enclave. And he highlighted the strategic benefits for Israel of normalization with Saudi Arabia, which he said could be achieved were Israel to move credibly on the issue of a potential demilitarized Palestinian state.
Saudi normalization remained possible, he said, “but it’s going to take leaders here willing to take some political risk.”
In that context, he added, regarding Biden, “Standing with Israel for these past 15 months, with huge opposition in the media, in parts of his own party, you could argue that it contributed to making his challenge for reelection insurmountable.”

I’ve edited the text for brevity and clarity, but the transcript that follows is pretty complete.
The Times of Israel: You were nominated before, and you started work after, October 7. This has been your period — a period of terrible crisis.
Ambassador Jack Lew: Beginning to end.
The president, when he came here on October 18, was very supportive but also worried. He warned Israel: Don’t be consumed by rage when you deal with the consequences of this. Do you think that is what has happened? Do you think Israel has prosecuted this war in the right way, or has it been consumed by rage?
That is a complicated question, that isn’t “either, or.” When I describe what Israel was like when I got here, and to some extent how I describe it now, it is that Israel is in trauma. It’s a people that have not put the trauma in the past, but it still goes on. And until the issue of the hostages is resolved, I don’t know where the healing and the closure come from.

When I got here in November, it was a little jarring to me to hear people say, Not a drop of water, not a drop of milk, not a drop of fuel [should go into Gaza] — when they were talking about feeding babies and innocent civilians. The sense of how do you define an innocent civilian? Are there innocent civilians of a community that harbors terrorists everywhere? I attributed a lot of what I heard to trauma.
The country has moved a long way from there. There are people in the country who will make the argument: Deny everything [in terms of aid], to put pressure on Hamas. But by and large, what I’ve seen over the year since then, is a country grappling with addressing an extraordinarily difficult challenge, trying to keep things from going across a line.
It doesn’t mean everything has been right. I’ve spent a lot of the time that I’m here encouraging, on the military side, to do things in a careful, targeted way; encouraging, on the humanitarian assistance side, to make a bureaucratic system and a security system work so you don’t cross over into famine or malnutrition.
Frankly, I don’t think Israel has gotten credit, and I don’t think the United States has gotten credit, for keeping the situation from crossing that line. And it’s hard: When you’re in a moment where the current status of life in Gaza is terrible, when the humanitarian needs are great, you don’t get a lot of credit for keeping things from crossing over into malnutrition and famine. But I do think you have to recognize what a Herculean effort [has been made].
The fact that I can now talk about humanitarian assistance with most people in the country and have a conversation that reflects shared values, that’s a change. There are groups of people who will say…
Including central people in the coalition. [Finance Minister Bezalel] Smotrich said yesterday, When Trump takes over, we’ll do the absolute international legally permitted minimum.
Yeah. But look, the reality is that international law on this issue is not ambiguous.
There are some things that, depending on what circumstance you’re in, look very different. In terms of the military operations, we have urged that Israel think hard about whether the value of [certain] military operations is worth the civilian risk. I’ve spent a lot of time with military leaders trying to understand how they think about that.

The explanations they give in private are much more convincing than the explanations in public. In public, the language and the body language are all designed to send a message to Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran: Don’t test us. We’ll do anything.
But in reality, there are much more measured decisions being made. You don’t hear that reflected in the way the public story is told. That’s actually damaging to Israel internationally. Not that there’d be a big acceptance of the scope of the war if it were described the way I’m suggesting, but at least there would be more of an ability to hear.
Israel isn’t showing enough humanity in its narrative– is that what you’re saying?
There’s a lack of empathy in the narrative that makes it harder for Israel to explain why it has to attack a school because it’s not a school, because it’s a fort. Why they have to use targeted munitions to reach a location that they’re quite confident has terrorists, and [where] collateral damage is limited. And how, as in all wars, all collateral damage is a tragedy. There’s ways of telling.
Israel should be saying that more?
It would be easier for people like me who are trying to explain what’s going on here — not to whitewash, not to say everything is okay — but to at least understand it in a frame that reflects the shared values. It would be a positive thing. I know that’s not something that is considered a particularly attractive mode of communication in the neighborhood, because it’s seen as showing weakness. But when the core of your support is looking to see how you’re operating on that scale, it’s not just public relations.

From the very start, really, there was criticism from America of what Israel was doing — about “indiscriminate bombings” at one point; the secretary [of state Antony Blinken] constantly spoke about there being too many civilians killed, that you have to stop killing civilians. Then there were specific things — don’t go into Rafah; end the war before the IDF would have tackled Hezbollah; don’t respond with all the things that Israel did against Iran.
And yet at the end of that period, Israel is, and [National Security Adviser] Jake Sullivan basically said it…
Jake was very clear.
… Israel’s in a better position, partly because it did things that the administration didn’t want it to do.
On each of those, the way you’ve laid them out is a bit starker than I would. The secretary has made no secret of his concern, and as a government we’ve made no secret of our concern, about the magnitude of civilian casualties.
[But] I don’t think you’ve heard the secretary or the president or Jake Sullivan ever back away from the proposition that Israel had a right and a responsibility to prosecute the war, that eliminating Hamas as a military and a governing force is a shared objective, and that the narrative can’t begin on October 8th. Hamas started the war, and Hamas continues to hold hostages, and the war is, in that sense, a just war. I don’t know if they use the words “just war,” but they defined a just war.
The questions about targeting are real. There are many questions about many incidents, as there are after every war. There’s been a process internally of looking into things that might have gone wrong in different places, that hasn’t been resolved. When the secretary says there are still questions to be answered, there are still questions to be answered. In the IDF, there are still questions to be answered. But fundamentally, nothing that we ever said was, Just stop the war.
The message we’ve stuck to, with quite a bit of discipline, is: Free the hostages, ceasefire, pathway to end the war.
Now, [as regards] our words of caution on expanding the war to more fronts, you have got to look at it in a point of time. When the advice was given most strongly was at the beginning of the war, when Gaza was completely unsettled, when the IDF was overwhelmed, when everyone, including the military planners here, expected a fierce resistance from Hezbollah. There was strong advice. It was never saying that Hezbollah is not a legitimate target.
Hezbollah expanded the war by attacking Israel starting on October 8. You never heard criticism from the United States for Israel carrying out strikes for almost a year in southern Lebanon, attacking Hezbollah and diminishing Hezbollah. At the point when Israel made the decision to go forward [more intensively against Hezbollah from September], it had already considerably reduced Hezbollah’s capacity on the southern border of Lebanon, the northern border of Israel.
There were also things we didn’t know. We didn’t know certain capabilities that Israel had [– an apparent reference to the detonation by Israel of thousands of Hezbollah pagers on their owners, among other operations. DH]. Whether Israel strategically deployed those capabilities, or circumstances led to a decision to use those capabilities at a crucial moment when otherwise they might be lost, they did have an effect on what the battle would look like.
The skill with which Israel followed up militarily — from [killing Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah [in a strike in Beirut], to taking out the fighting capability of Hezbollah, Jake in his interview recognized the importance of it.

It sounds like you looked at what had happened in Gaza, and, on that basis, would have been surprised by how effective Israel was in tackling Hezbollah.
I don’t think that it’s necessarily fair to say we would have been surprised. I think there are those in the IDF who were surprised.
At how well it went?
How well it went. We tend to look at risks in a different way. We never questioned the legitimacy of fighting Hezbollah.
If you look at the way the US has supported Israel with regard to Iran, really since October 7, from, [President Biden’s] “Don’t”; to sending two aircraft carriers, a submarine, and all of the resources around that; to having our intelligence operations working very closely together; to having the real-time joint air defense, which proved manifestly, in April and in October, the importance of alliances, the importance of coordination. I would say, from the perspective of both of our militaries, that we [learned that we] could do even better than we thought we could do when we put our resources together that way.
That is of almost infinite value in terms of having limited the damage in Israel to really negligible damage from barrages from Iran. The decision to put the THAAD missile defense system here has added to that. I check every night when the sirens go off: Who took a shot [to intercept a missile]? We’re helping in real ways.
The fact that the United States engaged with Israel on some of these issues actually had a really positive impact on how Israel advanced its own interests. I’ll give you two examples. One is Iran, the other is Rafah — a place where clearly we did have differences, but they were resolved.
In Iran, it was certainly our preference to avoid getting into a regional war. But there was an engagement [between us] that led to a planning process where Israel proved its effectiveness. Israel demonstrated its deterrent capabilities. It took out serious military targets with a minimal amount of civilian impact and without it triggering a regional war. So I would say that’s a case of having worked together to think through a very hard set of military decisions.

Going back to Rafah, because there’s no question that we did not think that Rafah should be fought the way Gaza City or Khan Younis or [Gaza’s] central camps was fought. The population had been moved south. It was densely packed. We said, You can’t fight in a space like this without having catastrophic impact, unless you move the people out of harm’s way and unless you have a more targeted approach to battle. Our intelligence and military planners worked very closely to put meat on the bones.
Now, I’m not going to say they got to 100%. I mean, the Mawasi [humanitarian area] is a home for people, but it’s got its challenges. But the [people who had been evacuated to the Mawasi area] weren’t in Rafah, and they weren’t killed in tens of thousands. There were relatively low civilian casualty numbers in Rafah.
You have not heard a word of criticism from the White House, the State Department, the Defense Department, from the United States, of the operation in Rafah
If you look at the military action in Rafah, there are places for people to move back to in Rafah, because it was a targeted and intelligence-driven military action. You have not heard a word of criticism from the White House, the State Department, the Defense Department, from the United States, of the operation in Rafah. It’s a mistake when people say, as they sometimes do, “You told us not to, and we did.” It was done in a way that limited or really eliminated the friction between the United States and Israel, but also led to a much better outcome.
You’re saying the US saved Israel from operating in a way that it was planning to operate that would have been disastrous?
I don’t want to characterize it quite that way. I think they had a different idea of how they would have proceeded. I think they went back and rethought it in a way that was very positive in terms of the ultimate impact — both in terms of the impact at the time and strategically.
More broadly, I want to go back to the Blinken stance [denouncing the civilian casualties] on Gaza, the American stance on Israel’s handling of the war in Gaza. I’ve understood what you’ve said, but it was almost as if the United States was expecting that Israel could do the almost impossible — could defeat Hamas without civilian fatalities and casualties. The military experts would say that, relatively speaking, Israel has fought effectively in targeting the bad people and trying to minimize [civilian casualties] in an urban environment in which the enemy is fighting from schools and mosques and hospitals and so on.
The American expectation of Israel, to many Israelis, would seem unrealistic. The widespread Israeli sense would be, You, the Americans, couldn’t have done it better.
Is it your belief that if Israel had heeded the secretary’s warnings earlier in this conflict, there would have been fewer civilian fatalities?
I don’t think that the message that was delivered by the United States [regarding too many civilian casualties in Gaza] reflected an unrealistic understanding of urban warfare
I can’t speak to what the perceptions in Israel are. I don’t think that the message that was delivered by the United States reflected an unrealistic understanding of urban warfare. We have done urban warfare against enemies that are in not the same, but similar, surroundings. We actually shared what we learned in places like Fallujah and Mosul, which I think was a benefit, notwithstanding Israel’s prior experience in Gaza.
I don’t think we ever had the notion that you could get to zero. Saying “too much” doesn’t mean the alternative is zero. It’s a false simplification of what the message was. The message was, It has to be done in a way that minimizes [civilian casualties]. And I actually think the fighting reflects that [Israel took this] to heart.
In the conversations I have [with Israeli military people], people are offended [at the notion] that we think they didn’t care in the first place. I know they did care in the first place. We know that as military planners, it’s not [a case of] going out [to battle] without concern for the impact on civilians. But as the secretary has said so many times, intention and consequences have to both be kept… Your intention to limit has to be matched by an effect.
As you look over the course of the war, the impact of the fighting on civilians has certainly not gone away, but the casualty rate has gone way down. On the question of what targets merit the risk, I think there is great care given to take that into account. From the moment I got here till now, I think everyone has learned more every day about how to be more effective on the military goals and to limit the collateral consequences. I don’t think we’ve ever said you can get the collateral consequences to zero.
It can’t be an unrealistic goal to feed people so that starvation doesn’t become a source of casualties and that medical care is not available
It’s important not to confuse the things that we have raised as serious concerns — we have raised serious concerns about limiting civilian casualties; we have raised serious concerns about the need to get enough food and medical supplies in — with setting unrealistic goals. It can’t be an unrealistic goal to feed people so that starvation doesn’t become a source of casualties and that medical care is not available. I actually work day and night with COGAT on solving these problems.
With some success?
Yes. Look, the end result leaves us having to keep pushing.
But there is some readiness, there is interaction?
Yes. I have worked closely with the most senior people in COGAT for the whole time I’ve been here, and in the Defense Ministry, and in the Prime Minister’s Office. This is not just rhetoric — that we say, You have to do it. I know more detail about operational issues than most people in the government here. There have been days when the president of the United States knew the operational details [of aid supplies into Gaza], how many trucks, where they were moving, and wanted to know whether what was attempted, happened. We’re not just, like, saying, Do the impossible. We’re actually a partner, helping to accomplish things.
And you’re getting a response, there is a willingness to hear what you’re saying?
Yes, if I had to put a fine point on it, there’s been more of a willingness to get it done than there’s been a willingness to advertise doing it.

I don’t mean that in terms of external consumption. It’s a sensitive issue here in Israel — how much are they doing? When there were protesters [on the Israeli side of the Gaza border] stopping trucks from entering, I know what the IDF did. I talked to the defense minister and his chief of staff every day about it. They did things that were very hard. And they opened the road so the trucks could go in. But it’s not as if the world gave them a lot of credit for that, because they didn’t take a lot of credit.
Israel didn’t advertise the fact that it had been pushing aid determinedly into Gaza.
When your comments about how tough you are, are loud, and when you try to do the things that might meet the need softly, you end up with a partial view in the world [about what you are doing]. Especially when there are other people who are telling a story that is not aimed to give you the benefit of the doubt.
This question relates to the context in which almost everything we’ve discussed so far applies: There are over two million people in Gaza. How many of them are not identified with, supportive of, complicit, involved with Hamas?
I don’t know how to answer that. I don’t think anyone does. If you want to ask the question, “Who has actively fought with Hamas and materially supported Hamas?”, given the intelligence that’s been gathered [from Hamas databases] in the tunnels, Israel will have the ability to know much more about that.
How do you get into people’s hearts and minds? You can’t ask the questions, “Has anyone ever been sympathetic [to Hamas],” or “Do they have a family member who is sympathetic?” Because pretty soon you’re talking about everybody. So when the question of “everybody is a terrorist” comes up, that is a line of inquiry that leads to very bad outcomes. You end a war at some point with people you were fighting against, and then the civilian population. You have to focus on the people you were fighting against. If it becomes a question of defining the entire population of Gaza, there’s no solution.
So let me narrow down. The Kamal Adwan Hospital [where IDF troops operated in December]. The Israeli assertion is that this was a military/Hamas hospital, and the hospital chief was preening because he thought he would never be touched, but was basically a Hamas guy running a Hamas base. That’s way out, that’s the situation as you understand it, or you don’t know?
I can see what the level of fighting in Kamal Adwan Hospital has been. It has not been the resistance of a few isolated fighters. It has been a fierce battle. It was clear that there were significant Hamas fighters embedded there
I obviously am not on the ground, so everything I have is reflective of what I hear from the IDF and what’s out in the media from Hamas.
I’ll tell you what I’ve said to people in Washington asking me this question: To know the exact role that an individual played is beyond my ability to be the expert on, but I can see what the level of fighting in Kamal Adwan Hospital has been. It has not been the resistance of a few isolated fighters. It has been a fierce battle. It was clear that there were significant Hamas fighters embedded there, with various kinds of assets, both in terms of communication and fighting.
We are probably the only country in the world now that gives Israel the benefit of the doubt
[As to whether it was a] hospital versus a military facility, at some level, it was both. There are questions as to what kind of a hospital it was, who it treated. I don’t know all the answers to that. The challenge in fighting Hamas is they embed themselves in facilities that were schools, that are no longer schools, that are now battlefields. They use the resources of a hospital and beneath a hospital and get protection in the world’s eye because it’s not a good thing to fight in a hospital. We are probably the only country in the world now that gives Israel the benefit of the doubt.
And then we look at the consequences, and we look at the military target, and we’re very measured in what we say, because we understand that they’re fighting a very difficult enemy.
We’ll all know more about Kamal Adwan Hospital in due time. But what I see just objectively is evidence of a significant Hamas presence. Do I know what the director did and didn’t know about what was happening in his building? How can I know that?
But Israel does have to be able to answer questions of how it treats people that it detains, why it detains people. And the fact that there’s such limited access to people who are detained leads to questions never going away.
I want to ask about the hostage-ceasefire negotiations. You’ve got the secretary of state saying in the New York Times that whenever there’s public daylight between the US and Israel and the perception that pressure was growing on Israel, Hamas has pulled back from agreeing to a ceasefire and the release of hostages. But as we’ve discussed already, there has been a lot of daylight.
There are a couple of instances where we had public issues [of disagreement with Israel], but there have been many points at which the government of Israel has taken private and small differences and widened them and made them public
What the secretary said at some level has been very real: Whenever there’s daylight, Hamas takes advantage of it. What I don’t think is correct is the interpretation of what he said. I don’t think we created that daylight. There are a couple of instances where we had public issues, but there have been many points at which the government of Israel has taken private and small differences and widened them and made them public.
And the strategic effect of that has been very troubling to me. And I cannot explain it in strategic terms. There are other terms that one could explain it in.

I’ll give you a few examples. There was a point when we had been in the UN trying to get the Security Council to pass resolutions linking releasing the hostages with a ceasefire. The world was slipping away from us. We changed the grammatical structure of a paragraph linking the two together. We said our policy hadn’t changed.
And the government of Israel joined Hamas in saying, We changed our policy. Well, last time I checked, the government of the United States gets to make its own policy. Why was it necessary to say, We changed our policy, because the grammar and sentence structure were different?
You’re talking about the resolution that went through in March.
You roll the clock forward. We now have to veto resolutions. We’re alone in vetoing. We were trying to extend the period that we weren’t the only ones who were linking the [calls for the release of the hostages and a ceasefire], because we thought that was the way to get the hostages out. We thought it was the way to keep global pressure on Hamas. And I think making that a difference was a choice.

I’ll give you another example, a very prominent example. We talked about Rafah earlier. You can choose to characterize that as, We told Israel not to [carry out a major operation], or as, We described conditions where maybe it sounded like an impossibility, but when you figure out how to do it that way, it proves that it wasn’t an impossibility.
So the US administration wasn’t saying: Don’t go into Rafah. Rather, you were saying, Don’t go into Rafah in the way that you’re telling us your plan to go into Rafah?
They weren’t wrong in hearing that we were not enthusiastic about having the battle go into Rafah, with two million people, roughly, in Rafah. But we never said, Don’t go. We said, Unless you can move the people…
And we don’t think you can do it, by the way. That was also said.
Yeah. Okay.
Okay. You proved us wrong, and therefore…?
That’s good. And you never heard a word of criticism [of how Israel handled Rafah].
The third example I was going to give, in some ways is the most prominent: This question of an embargo [ostensibly imposed by the US on Israel].
We never had an arms embargo, not in May, not since. Never… We did have a public disagreement about 2,000-pound bombs
The word embargo is a pretty tough word. I did a lot of sanctions work in my career at the Treasury Department and State Department. Embargo is a word with a very specific meaning.
We never had an arms embargo, not in May, not since. Never.
We did have a public disagreement about 2,000-pound bombs. Why did that get blown into, Israel’s closest ally, that has been supporting it every day since October 7, with extraordinary flows of material and support, why characterize it as an embargo? It wasn’t.
Now, I understand that some things slowed down, and I understand that there was a legitimate difference of opinion as to whether the slowdown was policy or just bureaucracy. But nothing was stopped other than one weapon.
Now, you can say, Oh, but it’s an important weapon. That’s a conversation you can have amongst the closest of friends without a lot of daylight, to say, What are the proper ways to use 2,000-pound bombs in densely populated urban areas. To say that your closest ally has put an embargo on you, I think does more harm than good.
I’ve pushed back on that internally in circles of government. I’ve pushed back in public. These are choices you make in terms of characterizing differences. I don’t think in any of those instances we meant to create the daylight that ended up being seen by Hamas. I think that was a strategic miscalculation.
For political purposes.
I’m being careful to speak to what I speak.
The actual specifics: The United States has not delivered 2,000-pound bombs to Israel at all in the course of the last 15 months? Is there any other weaponry affected?
Everything else is flowing. There may have been periods where it was slower, but broadly speaking [it’s flowing].
In the first months of the war, we were going around all normal processes. Twice, the secretary didn’t notify Congress. It’s a big deal in the United States to go around Congress. Most people don’t survive going around Congress. But it was an urgent moment, and to send what was needed in the time frame needed, it was a dramatic step. There’s normally a complicated review process before military transfers are approved, which was short-circuited.
As you got deeper into the war, the argument for skipping all those processes became harder to defend, and if you kept doing it, could have ultimately jeopardized the ability to maintain support. Because if you go too far in working around Congress, sometimes you’re taught a lesson. So some of the things took a little longer to get out of the different review channels.
In order for the secretary to make a decision, many different offices have to sign off. Were there some people who might have gotten the message that because we’re not circumventing the process, they don’t have to rush? Maybe. Bureaucracies are bureaucracies everywhere. It happens in every government.
I think that was seen as being connected to the 2,000-pound bombs. Frankly, given the personal support that the president has shown, and not just shown — the president’s personal support is not four years in the making, it’s 50 years in the making. It comes from his heart. Given that the secretary has done everything humanly possible to help advance a pathway here for the US to support Israel and get to a better outcome, there could have been just a little bit more trust that it wasn’t what people had thought it looked like.

I can’t even tell you what a lot of these things on the list [of materiel supplied to Israel by the US] do. It’s in a level of technical detail that policymakers don’t usually get into. I know for a fact that there was no decision at the top on those things, because they don’t even know what some of them are.
The 2,000-pound bomb thing is a big deal…
Yeah, and we’ve been public about that.
… that has no relevance for [Israel’s potential capabilities when it comes to] Iran?
I’m going to be careful on how I answer the question. Israel’s military operations in Lebanon, Syria, and Iran have clearly demonstrated no diminution in Israel’s capacity to accomplish its strategic objectives.

The question of how do you make sure, going forward, that Israel has what it needs, when it needs it, has not been adversely affected. There’s been some careful decision-making… but it hasn’t affected the outcome. It’s not a policy that said, Israel will never get 2,000-pound bombs.
Who’s to blame for the fact that there hasn’t been a hostage deal? Again, the secretary last weekend placed the blame on Hamas. But privately, and our reporter has reported this from DC, there are American officials who say that’s really not the case, that a lot of blame attaches to Netanyahu, that he added new conditions, slowed down the talks. Egypt and Qatar have blamed Israel, and more Israelis than not blame Netanyahu for the fact that we haven’t sealed a deal. So what’s going on here?
This has been a hard one because the secretary has been very clear, Jake has been very clear, Brett [McGurk, the White House Middle East czar,] has been very clear, that Hamas has been inflexible and has been the reason we haven’t reached a deal. That can be true, while it’s also true that Israel has taken actions that have been challenging.
I actually think that some of the things that Israel has done have not had a material impact on whether or not there’s a deal, but have shifted responsibility in the public eye, in the way that you’re describing, because of things that are said.

Let me give you an example: where everyone is focused on the Philadelphi Corridor [that runs along the Gaza-Egypt border]. Like most issues, it’s a complicated issue. When the framework [for a deal] was agreed to [in May], Israel wasn’t in the Philadelphi Corridor. So, of course, [the framework] didn’t address it. The framework didn’t specifically address any military presence.
It’s divided between Phase One and Phase Two — what happens in Phase One, what happens in Phase Two. Phase One did not call for a complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip or from a specific place here or there. It did call for pulling the military back from densely populated areas and for starting to reduce it.
Related: Full text of Israeli hostage release-ceasefire proposal, submitted on May 27
Forcing the decision point on the Philadelphi Corridor from Phase Two to Phase One didn’t actually change whether or not you could have had a Phase One agreement, with a period of time to work through. You might have had a conflict on the Philadelphi Corridor, but you would have found out after you got quite a lot of hostages out. So the timing of putting the spotlight on that — I know it’s defended as being, We wanted to be clear. No one should misunderstand.
But you’ve also had very senior people in the government of Israel say, well, if certain things happen, if we’re confident that we know what’s coming in, if we have the ability to protect our security interests, we can imagine even pulling out of the Philadelphi Corridor. Senior ministers have said it. So why was that issue thrust in?
I do not think that’s the reason things fail.
That we didn’t have a Phase One?
Yeah. I don’t think that’s the reason.
I think the reason, and this is reflected in the things that Secretary Blinken said over the weekend: Hamas, to this day, has been very, very stubborn about information about the hostages, who would be released, and about what the terms for exchanging hostages for prisoners would be. And when we got close, the terms got tougher.
Get the world to put pressure on Hamas to stop its insistence on things that are impossible and let Phase One start, save dozens of lives, and get into the period of negotiating Phase Two. All of the attention on the Philadelphi Corridor has left an impression that is not accurate
So our strategy in July was, get these issues where they’re distracting from Hamas, get them settled. Get the world to put pressure on Hamas to stop its insistence on things that are impossible and let Phase One start, save dozens of lives, and get into the period of negotiating Phase Two. All of the attention on the Philadelphi Corridor has left an impression that is not accurate. If none of that focus had been put on the Philadelphi Corridor, I don’t think we would have seen Hamas bend enough for there to be a deal. We’re hoping this week we get there. We’re still in the process of trying to get there.
I want to be sure I understand. Even if Netanyahu had not brought up the new condition of the IDF remaining deployed on the Philadelphi Corridor, you’re not convinced that we would have got a Phase One. But it certainly didn’t help, and it certainly took some of the pressure off Hamas.
I think it distracted the attention from Hamas’s intransigence in a way that was strategically not helpful.
Why would we be optimistic now? Is there a reason? Because the secretary is optimistic. Is there something we don’t know? Has Hamas moved?
There are a lot of people in the government here who are optimistic. We’ll only know if we get to the finish line. We’ve gotten close to the finish line enough times. I live as an optimist, but I’m only going to believe it when I see it. The fact that the talks are going on in Doha, the fact that senior levels here, not the most senior level, but very senior levels, are represented there. They’re crunching through hard, brutally hard details. These are just ungodly terms of negotiation. [Setting free] people serving life sentences to save the lives of innocents.
People serving life terms who would be coming out into the West Bank, determined to stir up as much trouble as they can.
And not knowing for sure who’s alive and who’s dead, and not knowing for sure when and how they’re going to be delivered.
There are legitimate questions that Israel asks, and there are legitimate security interests that Israel is prosecuting and will continue to prosecute. I’m just saying that our focus on Hamas is a reflection of our experience in the negotiations that we’ve been part of, which is not to say that there haven’t been things done here that made it more challenging.
There’s no negotiation where it’s ever crystal clear at every moment. But our sense is reflected in the secretary’s comments. Hamas — first, Yahya Sinwar, and now, Mohammed Sinwar — have been very intransigent.
When Secretary Blinken was here [in August] at a point when we were pressing to come back to the talks with more room and a serious effort to show movement on, say, the Philadelphi Corridor, Secretary Blinken left that meeting with assurances [confirmed publicly by Netanyahu] on the key issues that the government of Israel would do the things that we thought were necessary.
He was excoriated in Israel for having believed the prime minister. The press on that visit was astounding. It was, How could you believe [what the prime minister told you]? That’s a domestic issue here in Israel, that is for the people of Israel to grapple with.
Netanyahu announced after their meeting that Israel had accepted [the latest US bridging proposal]. The Times of Israel was about the only outlet to report it. Nobody even reported it because it was deemed so not credible. It only became credible, as I recall, when the secretary at his press conference that evening said, Yes, Netanyahu has accepted.

But if you go back and read the coverage of that trip, it was astounding. It was, How could he be so naive? How could he be fooled? What I said at the time, and what I believe now, is when you’re dealing with one of your closest allies, and the prime minister says yes to three things that you ask him to say yes to, how do you walk out of a room and say, he said yes but I don’t believe him? So that’s a domestic issue here.
I felt terrible because it got picked up in the American press as, How could the secretary have believed him? And that’s very damaging. You have to be able to do business with your counterparts, where if they say yes, you say they said yes.
So in that light, the president, at the end of May, announces what was basically a proposal Netanyahu has conveyed to him and says, I hope you guys are going to stick with it. Then Netanyahu went to great lengths to say that that offer did not involve a commitment to an end of the war and the full withdrawal of IDF forces. We published the document and we don’t find that interpretation in it.
I have a reasonable memory for the flow of events. [But] I would have to go back and check to be able to answer that with any confidence.
With Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, we have two very extreme politicians at the heart of our government, and the US decided not to sanction them, but hasn’t really engaged with them. I don’t personally think that anything would move Ben Gvir. But I’m not sure about Smotrich, and he has such power and such responsibility as regards the West Bank, and such dramatic policies on issues including settlements.
On many of the issues that affect the Palestinian Authority and policies on settlements in the West Bank, we have been deeply engaged with the government. And even on issues regarding humanitarian assistance in Gaza, where the finance ministry has a role to play, we’ve been deeply involved with the government, addressing the kinds of issues that the finance minister introduces into the debate and policy space.
The question of engaging directly or indirectly is one that people can have legitimate differences of views on. I’ve offered my views in private. The fact that other people have shared my views that were offered in private is not a good reason for me to discuss it in public. But I’ve spent an enormous amount of time here engaging on the issues that he has a lot of impact on.

Objectively it is challenging to do that through intermediaries. But we’ve been pretty successful working on those issues. A lot of them have to do with financing of the PA. It’s sometimes coincidence, but having a former secretary of the Treasury here at a time when financial issues have been central has given me the ability to engage at a professional level with people.
If you look at the security considerations made by all of the security agencies, most of the things that we advocate are things that they advocate as well, because it would serve no one’s interests for the lid to blow on the West Bank in the middle of the current circumstances.
Whether it was figuring out how to keep funds flowing so the PA could pay its salaries, setting up the escrow in Norway, we’ve been deeply engaged. While we don’t sit down and negotiate face-to-face, when you’re negotiating on issues where ultimately the finance minister has authority, you’re indirectly negotiating.
I want to ask you a little about American-Israeli relations. You obviously care utterly about the nature of this bilateral relationship. Are you worried for the well-being of that relationship? And are you worried about how Israel is seen in the United States?
Watching the news in Israel, you don’t see what’s happening in Gaza… You go to the international space, it’s reversed. All you see is the civilian impact in Gaza.
Yes. I think this war has been seen through a different lens around the world than it’s been seen in Israel. Watching the news in Israel, you don’t see what’s happening in Gaza. Once in a rare while. You see an awful lot of focus on the hostages, which is totally legitimate and understandable and appropriate. A lot of focus on casualties in the IDF. Again, totally appropriate. But not the other side of the equation.
You go to the international space, it’s reversed. All you see is the civilian impact in Gaza. You don’t see reminders that it started on October 7 with a brutal attack that is still ongoing because hostages are being kept, in abysmal conditions.
So there’s two different realities out there, where I think both the world and Israel would be better off if they saw the whole picture. In America, we’ve continued to tell our public the whole story. It has been less of a radical shift than it has been in the rest of the world. In the rest of the world, it’s as if October the seventh hadn’t happened.
Do you think American media has done a good job in between those two conflicting narratives?
My impression is somewhat limited because I’ve been here… I think there has been an attempt to cover both sides. But I frequently see language like “the Palestinian Health Authority reports and the IDF claims.”
Yes, first of all, the choice of “reports” and “claims,” and also, of course, the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza is Hamas.
It’s the only data out there. I can’t criticize people for using it, but the language it’s used with has to reflect its infirmity as an objective source. I think “claims” is a little bit arch for a trusted ally. You could say they “say”.
Some of the best-resourced news channels and outlets in the world are being relentlessly credulous of Hamas claims. Now, some of those claims may be true, but many of them are unverifiable.
I think you’ve got problems in both directions here. When the government of Israel shows a picture of an outdoor market in Gaza City or Khan Younis, as if that’s typical of what Gaza looks like now, they’re surprised that the world doesn’t say, Oh, there’s no problem. Nobody believes that that’s typical. You can show 10 different photographs, and it still doesn’t prove that overall conditions are rosy.
The data being put out by the Palestinian ministries is challenged. It’s not clear, and certainly doesn’t separate between fighters and civilians.
People tend to focus the day something happens. The media that is presenting a pro-Hamas perspective is out instantaneously telling a story. It tells a story that is, over time, shown not to be completely accurate. “Thirty-five children were killed.” Well, it wasn’t 35 children. It was many fewer. The children who were killed turned out to have been the children of Hamas fighters. Not in every case, but we try to keep that information flowing, but the press moves on, the world moves on. And in policy circles, you can keep people focused saying it’s bad, but it wasn’t quite what it sounded like. In the world’s eye, the first story out there is the one that creates an impression.
We have urged [Israel] on many, many, many occasions, often in the middle of the night: If you want to frame this story, get information out there more quickly, because you know there’s going to be a report out there that you think is inaccurate
We have urged on many, many, many occasions, often in the middle of the night: If you want to frame this story, get information out there more quickly, because you know there’s going to be a report out there that you think is inaccurate.
And this reflects a point of tension between Hamas and Israel on many levels. Hamas is a terrorist organization. Israel is an established democracy. No one pays attention to Hamas’s violations of international human rights. Israel is expected, I think appropriately, to adhere to the international law that countries like ours abide by.
Hamas puts out a report without accurate data that defines a story. Israel is trying to figure out what happened and be totally accurate. And by the time they put out their data, I can send it to official Washington, but the world never knows it’s there.
You’ve urged? You’ve been in touch with who in Israel and said, Guys, where’s your side of the story?
I’m not going to say exactly who we speak to.
But I have talked to people often at 1:00, 2:00, 3:00 in the morning and said to them, When Washington wakes up, if your side of the story isn’t out there…
It’s over.
Because that’s just how the news media works.
And they just shrug?
No, they don’t just shrug. The honorable explanation is the IDF doesn’t want to say what happened until they’re sure they’re right.
That’s the IDF. What about the civilian public diplomacy?
Well, but they depend on the IDF reports, so it’s derivative. How do you speed that up? How do you find the way to say what your initial assessment is?

On October 17, 2023 (when Hamas falsely accused Israel of bombing Al-Ahli Hospital and killing hundreds), there was no civilian public official who said, “We don’t target hospitals. We’re looking into this.” Nobody even said those words. Even at the most basic level, I find [the ongoing failure of real-time public diplomacy] staggering.
America has been fed a media coverage of this war that Israel has just not done an effective job countering
We struggle with that because you ask, am I worried about America? America has been fed a media coverage of this war that Israel has just not done an effective job countering. And there’s only so much you can do through diplomatic channels to fix that. My megaphone is to the policy world, mostly. I have more impact on the public communication here than I do in the United States. It would be inappropriate for me to be trying to shape public opinion in the United States.
So that’s really an observation about modern communications in modern warfare: Hamas has done superbly, fighting that way, and that’s giving them credit for doing something very bad…
They’ve been effective, and Israel has not.
Yeah. And look, public opinion in America is still largely pro-Israel. What I’ve told people here that they have to worry about when this war is over is that the generational memory doesn’t go back to the founding of the state or the Six Day War, or the Yom Kippur War, or to the Intifada even.
You can’t ignore the impact of this war on future US policymakers
It starts with this war, and you can’t ignore the impact of this war on future policymakers — not the people making the decisions today, but the people who are 25, 35, 45 today and who will be the leaders for the next 30 years, 40 years. We’re talking in terms of what people have absorbed.
I grew up on the founding story. I remember the Six Day War. That’s not the memory that future policymakers will have. Joe Biden is the last president of his generation, whose memories and knowledge and passion to support Israel go back to the founding story.
What does that mean for the relationship between Israel and the Democratic Party?
Let me maybe take that in a bifurcated way, because when you ask me if I’m worried, I’m worried about the boundaries of both parties.
In the Republican Party, you have a growing adherence to an isolationist philosophy. For Israel to be an exception to that is somewhat perilous. If the general rule is, Mind our own business, that’s not the same as the Republicans I’ve worked with over the years on Middle East policy, who are interventionists and saw Israel as part of our presence in the world. If you don’t value our presence in the world, it diminishes how much you value your best ally in the region.
On the Democratic side, the sympathy and empathy for the Palestinian cause is broad but doesn’t lead to anti-Israel sentiment, except at the extreme. I frankly think that resolving and addressing the question of Israeli-Palestinian differences is critical for Israel, but it’s what people in the Democratic Party are going to focus on. It’s what we have focused on in terms of why we push for Saudi normalization, why we push for there being a process to recognize the need for Palestinian autonomy in the future. Treating that as something that isn’t even worthy of articulating alienates people. It’s only on the margin that it’s caused people to become anti-Israel.
Keeping broad bipartisan US support is a winnable challenge. But it has to be a goal
So you look at the arithmetic, if you lose the two margins, you need to stay bipartisan. You need the broad middle. And I think the challenge of keeping that broad bipartisan support is a winnable challenge. But it has to be a goal. It has been part of the way Israel has approached America for 76 years. The danger of it changing is one that I would and have strongly cautioned against, because you don’t know which of those two margins will end up becoming more of a challenge. You want to keep your ability, no matter what, to keep a majority.
This administration and the incoming administration appear to believe that some kind of Saudi normalization remains possible for Israel. Is that based on a sense that this Israeli coalition is prepared to do enough to bring the Saudis on board?
I’m not working directly with the Saudis on this, but I’m working closely with our team that is. It remains profoundly in Israel’s interest, Saudi’s interest and America’s interest for there to be Saudi normalization. The two threshold issues that need to be resolved in order for that to be achievable are quiet in Gaza and a pathway towards dealing with the issues of Palestinian autonomy. I don’t think it means accepting an end state, an end outcome. It may mean using language that’s very difficult here in terms of what would be potentially an outcome if the necessary conditions are met.

The necessary conditions have always been Israel’s security, Israel’s right to defend itself, and there not being a militarized Palestine state. I have tried in a thousand different ways to engage in conversation on this while I’ve been here. I think it’s a fair statement that most of the people of Israel are not ready to have that conversation. I think it’s also a fair statement that because of that, the leaders have not done a lot to prepare them for the hard choices that lie ahead.
On a strategic level, you have Saudi normalization, which is enormous. In terms of what has to be said on a Palestinian state, it’s pretty small. It has to be sincere and real. It has to be followed up by engagement, and it’s only going to work if it works.
Now, to me, saying things that are politically challenging in exchange for [attaining] things that are strategically existential is not that hard of a choice to make. I’ve tried to present it that way for months here. When I do it that way, I get people to have a conversation. I get them to stop saying, You Americans are coming around saying these crazy things.
Standing with Israel for these past 15 months, with huge opposition in the media, in parts of his own party, you could argue that it contributed to making his challenge for reelection insurmountable
But it’s going to take leaders here willing to take some political risk. President Biden has demonstrated with enormous power what it means to have the character to take political risk. Standing with Israel for these past 15 months, with huge opposition in the media, in parts of his own party, you could argue that it contributed to making his challenge for reelection insurmountable.

He did it because it was the right thing to do. And I hope there’s some attention to that, and it’s seen as an object lesson.
Just to give a little of my personal philosophy, and there’s a question at the end of it: It seems to me that here is this tiny little country with lots of people around it that want to destroy it. We let down our guard on one front, and we’re still living with the consequences, and that was actually one of the less powerful potential invaders. This is a deeply threatened country in an unforgiving region. At the same time, it has a divisive government, an extreme government, which colors everyone’s impression of this Israel, and which I think is a threat to Israeli democracy. How do you respond to that description?
As a private citizen, I have the luxury of speaking to internal Israeli politics. As a representative of the United States here, I think I can say that we have urged the leaders of this country, both in the coalition and outside of the coalition, to demonstrate through their actions and their words the importance of fighting the war in the right way, seeking the peace in the right way, and looking ahead to the future in the right way.
The fact that that is politically challenging shouldn’t be a surprise given the threats that Israel faces all around it and the divided nature of the political debate here. I think the questions of protecting democratic institutions — from freedom of expression to the integrity of legal systems — is something we’re very clear about. We speak to it not just here, but all over the world. I’m going to have to leave the “how you analyze the impact of the current players in the coalition” to a later date.
Let me try and ask you a broader question that maybe you can give a little more on. At the essence of the alliance is that it’s an alliance between two free nations, two democratic nations. Are you worried about the well-being of that relationship in the context of what’s going on with Israeli democracy? Or put it the other way, are you worried about what’s going on with Israeli democracy because of the potential impact on what is an essential relationship, an existential relationship?
I will broaden your question even more. I worry about the health of democracy in many parts of the world. It’s something that takes decades and centuries to build and can be damaged in short periods of time. That’s a great peril. That’s true in my own country. It’s true here. It’s true in many other parts of the world.
When we say it’s essential for Israel to remain a Jewish and democratic state, we don’t say the second part lightly
I do think that a core foundation of the US-Israeli relationship is the relationship between two great democracies. When we say it’s essential for Israel to remain a Jewish and democratic state, we don’t say the second part lightly.
I don’t want to write off the ability of democracy to endure either here or elsewhere. But it takes vigilance, and it takes political action.
Popular sovereignty comes down to the people. It doesn’t matter if it’s a direct election system or a coalition system. People vote. When people vote, they vote knowing the consequences. Candidates have to speak to what can get the public to say: That’s what we want. I don’t know a better system than popular sovereignty, but you do have the risk in a democratic system that people aren’t moved.
That’s where I turn to leaders. Leaders have to make the stakes clear. And that burden falls to opposition as well as coalition. And how you engage, how you unite people, how you subordinate individual interests to the interests of country — that’s implicit in all of this.

I’m an optimist. I actually, in some ways, see Israel’s system as admitting to easier solutions than other systems. If a group wants to form a different kind of coalition, you don’t have to have crazy extremes in it. There are multiple ways to get to that end. But it does take subordinating some individual issues, personal issues, and prioritizing the good of the nation, against other things that are important but not necessarily existential. That’s a challenge of democracy.
The people of Israel have shown through this war an enormous amount of resilience and a spirit of oneness as a nation. That has lasted for a long time, tested in many moments. Where it goes from here is up to the people. I certainly hope that people are not giving up on the dream.
There’s a little more I’d like to ask you, if you have time.
I actually would like to say a word about President Carter. Because today is a day when the United States is burying a president, having a funeral for a president. I’m sitting here in a country whose security was advanced by his efforts at Camp David to forge an agreement with Egypt, which went from being a hostile nation to being a nation that Israel has close ties to, if not always easy ties to; where almost a half a century later, that agreement is part of the basic security foundation of the nation.

As with all leaders, people can choose the things they agree or disagree with. But I think there should be a a feeling of thanks here for the contributions that president Carter made to Israel security, notwithstanding differences he had on many important issues.
The differences largely came after the presidency.
Regarding Iran, [which is not unconnected to the Carter presidency], should we be interested in expediting the demise of the regime? Are Israel and the United States going to have to target Iran’s nuclear facilities? Do we know where they are on weaponization? What’s your big-picture sense of this?
Obviously, I can’t speak expansively on the subject. The president has made clear on many occasions how seriously he takes the threat of Iran’s potential nuclear capabilities. We have continued to work together to understand where Iran is on that path, whether or not they’ve made a strategic decision that would speed that up.
As someone who worked on key parts of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, I think the decision to withdraw from it led to Iran speeding up the accumulation of material. But there are still a lot of other issues that have to be solved and resolved for Iran to truly have a nuclear capability.

The question of Iran’s role in the region gets back to what we were talking about in terms of Saudi Arabia. You look at the end of this war: Iran’s alliances in the region are weaker than they’ve been in decades. Its reliance on Hezbollah turned out not to be its frontline of defense. The defeat of Hamas militarily has taken another of its proxies to a place of much less regional threat. They’re left with the Houthis, who are very dangerous, and have to be taken very seriously. But if it was a circle surrounding Israel, it’s now not even quite an arc.
That cannot be assumed to be a permanent state, and it’s going to take vigilance to make sure that it doesn’t get rebuilt. Iran has got to make a decision of whether it is going to accelerate down a path that drives this to the kind of decision you’re asking about. I don’t think that that decision should or will be made before there’s a conclusion reached.
Finally, what’s the pathway for Gaza, the way ahead?
The fundamental challenge is creating an alternative to Hamas, starting with security. And that’s going to be hard. There have been a lot of conversations that have laid groundwork for ideas about how to go forward. But there’s going to have to be some willingness to deal with the question of the role of the Palestinian Authority, because as I see it, there’s no alternative workforce to do basic civil administration.
What about a security force on the ground, a force that’s not Israel?
Security is going to be the biggest challenge, because going in to do civil administration in Gaza without security is a pretty perilous undertaking. I don’t think there’s a simple solution. I don’t think there’s a solution of just one thing. But again, it’s almost got to involve Palestinians.
We’re trying to negotiate a hostage deal. Hamas is saying, we want to leverage these hostages so we survive, so we want you to end the war. Why, then, isn’t the “day after” part of the discussion? In other words, Hamas wants Israel to pull out. Okay, so Israel could be prepared to pull out if we’ve got a mechanism which involves, I don’t know, Egyptian forces and UAE forces overseen by the United States. In other words, why not build a framework so that what Hamas thinks is going to happen when Israel pulls out — that it can revive — is not what’s going to happen?
We’ve said from the beginning of the war, You should be focusing on the day after while you’re fighting the war, that you don’t win a war on the battlefield. You win an opportunity for the peace, which has to be to bring some new form of civil administration
If your goal is to save the lives of hostages, I’m not sure that going all the way to the end of final status of the administration of Gaza is the way to do that. You have to go in steps. We obviously thought the phased approach was most likely to save lives. Obviously, at the end of it are the questions you’re raising. We’ve said from the beginning of the war, You should be focusing on the day after while you’re fighting the war, that you don’t win a war on the battlefield. You win an opportunity for the peace, which has to be to bring some new form of civil administration.
There are ways to get security forces in place to address this, but it’s going to be hard, and it probably won’t be all at once, and it won’t be, like, day one is perfect. But you have got to start somewhere. And if you don’t start with some remnants of the Palestinian Security Force or a newly trained force, if you don’t have some ability to have international training and logistical support, it isn’t going to happen.
It would be a very good outcome if you could have Arab security forces as part of it. But it’s a chicken and an egg problem. They’re not going to come in and do it on their own if there’s no plan for how to hand it off to a local security force. And then the role of the PA is part of it. It’s no secret: The PA has to clean up its act and make a lot of significant reforms. But there has to be the possibility of that happening. And there has to be a pathway of how the PA can embrace what’s going on in Gaza, and maybe to have that be part of the long-term solution. None of this is perfect or easy.
I obviously can’t go into the details of the different conversations between different Arab partners and Israel and the United States, but a lot of conversation has gone into this, and there are ideas out there. You have got to go from ideas to a staged plan. I don’t think it’s any too soon to move that faster. Secretary Blinken has been pushing hard on that, even in these last months.

If there were the breakthrough of a hostage deal that got us into Phase One, that would create the impetus to take these conversations that aren’t coming to a final conclusion and force the process. Because it raises the issue of what happens at the end in a much more immediate time frame.
As for the question of who’s there if you don’t have that, I don’t think most Israelis or the IDF want Israel to become a permanent force protecting the streets of Gaza. But something has to be there. And Israel has responsibilities under international law in a vacuum and if it becomes an occupying power.
Everyone, except for Hamas, has an interest in finding a solution. It’s all connected. Hamas may dream of fighting another day. Israel may want Hamas to never be able to have a dream of fighting another day. There’s going to have to come a point where you say, it’s time to start building the future. There are no guarantees.
Israel can guarantee that an October 7 will never happen again. It can provide a security plan and protect Israel. But there’s going to have to be a process of rebuilding Gaza in an environment where you’ve defeated Hamas as a military force, an organized army. You’ve taken away their civilian apparatus. And you don’t end up having chaos in the streets. That’s going to require making progress on these issues.
Where are we on that? The organized army, Israel has defeated. Hamas as a civilian governance? Not destroyed, right?
I’m not sure that there is much civilian governance in Gaza right now. What you have is access to aid. And Israel is trying very hard to deny Hamas that ability. We agree that Hamas shouldn’t be the source of [aid], but there’s a need to tolerate a certain amount of residual capability there, because the alternative is shutting it off completely, and you can’t do that. So the idea is to get as close to zero as possible.
For the most part, the aid is not falling into the hands of Hamas, overwhelmingly not?
I don’t want to speculate on percentages. I hear people saying almost all [of the aid is commandeered by Hamas]. I don’t believe that. You can just look at the pictures coming out of Gaza. People are eating food.
Is Hamas making money in some way on things? Are they charging trucks moving through, making payments of some kind? Are they stealing trucks? There’s some of everything going on. I don’t know what the percentage is. The goal is to dial it to as close to zero as possible. To take a hard line that it has to go to zero would create a problem even worse.
There isn’t an instant solution. The challenge has to be to bring in an alternative to Hamas where there’s governing capability and some security capability behind it. The sooner, the better.
Thank you.