Gadi Taub: ‘We should annex the north third of the Gaza Strip’

Transcripts are lightly edited. Please excuse any imperfections.

Sruli Fruchter: What do you think should happen with Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict after the war?

Gadi Taub: Let’s start with occupation. How’s that? Hello, I’m Gadi Taub. I’m a historian and author and also co-host of the podcast Israel Update. And this is 18 Questions, 40 Israeli Thinkers.

Sruli Fruchter: This is 18 Questions, 40 Israeli Thinkers. And I’m your host, Sruli Fruchter. 18 Questions, 40 Israeli Thinkers is a new podcast that interviews Israel’s leading voices to explore those critical questions people are having today on Zionism, the Israel-Hamas war, democracy, morality, Judaism, peace, Israel’s future, and so much more. Every week we introduce you to fresh perspectives and challenging ideas about Israel from across the political spectrum that you will not find anywhere else. So if you are the kind of person who wants to learn, understand, and dive deeper into Israel, then join us on our journey as we pose 18 pressing questions to the 40 Israeli journalists, scholars, and religious thinkers you need to hear from today.

Today’s guest was on our list for quite a while. We have a list of about 80 to 100 potential Israeli thinkers and it is growing every single day because we are still getting suggestions. There is so much thought coming out of Israel, so please send us your thoughts. Today’s guest was on our list from the get-go, but a friend who is currently studying at Columbia Law School said, “You have got to get Gadi Taub.” And I told him, okay, we have him. We will get him eventually. And he said, “No, you have to get him now.” So he pushed and he made it happen.

And so today’s guest is Gadi Taub. Gadi Taub is a historian, a public intellectual, and an activist in Israel, and to my surprise, somewhat of a celebrity. He has made waves in a lot of ways that will come out in the interview, and I will mention a couple here. But to focus on more of the biographical elements, he is a senior lecturer at the Federmann School of Public Policy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and he hosts Israel’s leading conservative Hebrew podcast, Gatekeeper, which I did not know, but he told me is the second, or at one point was the second-rated podcast in Israel for news or for politics, right after Channel 12, which is pretty crazy. And now he is also co-hosting with Michael Doran Tablet magazine’s Israel Update podcast.

Gadi Taub is unapologetically a right-wing conservative thinker who definitely has a bone to pick, to say the least, with progressivism, elitism, Israel’s Supreme Court, and many others. But I think he brings an impassioned and important perspective on issues that are hardly considered by Jews and Israel supporters abroad, and sometimes even within. Some of it reminded me of Matti Friedman’s article in The Atlantic. I believe it was The Atlantic, something to the effect of “Israel’s problems are not like the West’s.” A lot of what Gadi Taub talks about is that people are living with a certain sense of idealism that is not tied to reality and are endangering Israel and Israel’s future in the process.

Gadi is a prolific writer and author, and right now he writes for Tablet and the Jewish News Syndicate, JNS. Previously he had a column at Haaretz, but it was eventually removed. And you can Google this because it was a very interesting story that I only learned recently because of Gadi’s support for judicial reform. In Haaretz’s view, they could not give a platform to someone who they believed was undermining the very democracy that allowed the paper to exist.

For those who are unfamiliar, judicial reform was the biggest thing happening in Israel last year. Actually about a year ago from right now, it was a little bit underway and the gist of it, and I am trying not to be biased here because I have made my views public in The Forward. I have written about it. You are welcome to go look it up if you would like. But here I am, objective journalist, reporter, just trying to get people’s perspectives and talk about things as they are, not as how I see them. In short, judicial reform or judicial overhaul was a proposed set of changes to how Israel’s Supreme Court operates in relation to the government in terms of the limits of its power and in terms of the power the government would have over the Supreme Court. There are a lot of nuances that I am not going to get into and I am not going to try and summarize. So you are welcome to go and look it up to find out more about it yourself.

Gadi, and we get into this during the interview, was an impassioned supporter of judicial reform and definitely made a lot more enemies than he had before because of it. He embraces a fearlessness toward what he views as an establishment that has abandoned the people and Israel for its own Western ideals that will destroy the Jewish state. I am not saying I agree or that I disagree. I am saying that this, to me, seems to be the framework that he is working through when he talks and what he views to be the threats facing Israel within and abroad.

He actually has an upcoming book that he was telling me, and he speaks about this during our interview together that focuses on, I believe the title he suggested was Global Elites and National Citizens in Israel talking about the judiciary and the history of how the Supreme Court functions and how it currently functions in Israel and why he believes that it is so problematic.

This interview definitely covers a lot and it was really fun and very fascinating for me to be able to probe deeper and try to really articulate the nuances of his views and the limits of his views. If you want to hear more about his views, the best place after this podcast is his own podcast, the Israel Update, for those who speak English and are not able to access his Gatekeeper podcast, which is in Hebrew.

I love this interview. Gadi was our ninth thinker, and in a week from now, in a week from this Monday, which is today, because you are listening to it on a Monday, will be our 10th thinker, one-fourth of the 40 Israeli thinkers who we are posing our 18 questions to. So, as usual, if you have questions that you want us to ask or guests that you want us to feature, shoot us an email at info@1840.co. Be sure to subscribe and rate and share with friends and the whole shebang so that we can reach new listeners and that I can feel better about myself when I go to bed.

One last push on the email note is that aside from Gadi himself being moved up on our list because of the insistence of someone who really made a strong case for interviewing him right now, at the present moment, there are actually some follow-up questions in this podcast that I got directly from a listener who emailed and said, “Hey, you are asking about people’s views on Zionism and opposing Zionism. Here is a neat, nifty, strong follow-up question that you should be asking to all of them.” I have asked that question in this episode, and the last thing I will say before we go to the interview is that we are returning to also having our podcast and this series be a video docu-series. So check us out on YouTube if you want to watch after listening. Of course, if you want to watch us ask these 18 questions and watch this dialogue unfold in real time.

So, without further ado, here is 18 Questions with Gadi Taub. As an Israeli and as a Jew, how are you feeling at this moment in Israeli history?

Gadi Taub: I think that for the first time since 1973, most Israelis realize that the existence of the State of Israel is in real and serious danger. And what is unique about this time is that those of us who do not understand this are busy trying to fray the elements of solidarity behind Zionism and behind the Jewish people in general.

Sruli Fruchter: What do you mean by that?

Gadi Taub: There is an elite that has a dream of what it sees as progressive normality, and which sees anything Jewish, except maybe the Hebrew language, as a threat to that dream. So, in the words of sharp pundit Irit Linur, they are dreaming of a Sweden in Hebrew. And October 7 was a serious setback to that dream.

Sruli Fruchter: Can you say a little bit more about that?

Gadi Taub: I just did a piece for JNS, and I am working on a Hebrew version of it. And I find it hard to convey to people that they have been saying that the real enemy is not Hamas, it is Netanyahu and his government. And until you bring the actual quotes, people do not believe you, that this is what they are saying. In their view, Hamas is a problem we can deal with. The problem they cannot deal with is that they are becoming a demographic minority. And the way they imagine the right is not far from the way liberals in the United States imagine Donald Trump. So fascism, religious fundamentalism, even something approaching Nazism, is upon us. And those terrible, deplorable hordes are going to drown their brand of Zionism, the liberal, progressive brand of Zionism, which is Sweden in Hebrew, in a tide of backwardness and darkness.

Sruli Fruchter: What has been Israel’s greatest success and greatest mistake in the current war against Hamas?

Gadi Taub: I think that Israel’s success is the insistence on winning this war and then the insistence that this war is not another chapter in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is actually chapter two, or round two in the ongoing war against Iran. The first chapter was 2006, when we thought we were fighting Hezbollah, or most of us thought we were fighting only Hezbollah, but Hezbollah is a proxy of Iran. We did not completely understand the way Iran was planning its drive to hegemony in the region. We were all focused on the nuclear threats and therefore Israelis–If you just call an Israeli on the street and ask them what is the existential threat? It is that the Iranians will use a bomb on us. But that was not their plan. The bomb or the nuclear program is just an umbrella for a very smart plan to defeat the State of Israel with conventional weapons, and primitive ones at that.

One smart analyst or two smart analysts at the Hudson Institute, my co-host on Israel Update, Mike Doran, and his colleague … says that we thought the war is Star Wars and they were planning Mad Max. And Mad Max is capable of defeating Star Wars. So what they have been doing is they have been amassing an arsenal of rockets, the majority of which are primitive, of drones, the majority of which are primitive and therefore cheap, and planning a ring of fires. Qassem Soleimani put it around us, which will be able to defeat us in a war of attrition. And we got a very good example of how this can work.

On April 13, the night of the first Iranian attack, by the time this airs, there might be a second attack. But we intercepted, along with our partners in the international coalition, almost all the rockets. The price for Israel was $1.5 billion. I do not know how much the rockets thrown at us cost, but probably just a fraction of this. And Iran and its proxies have been amassing huge quantities of these weapons, and they are capable of exhausting us mentally, militarily, but first and foremost, economically. We will not be able to withstand $1.5 billion of defense every night.

Sruli Fruchter: So if you had to pinpoint that mistake, what would you say, in a word?

Gadi Taub: The mistakes Israel made were tactical. In this war, we should have gone first for the Philadelphia Corridor and not last for the Philadelphia Corridor. We discovered that our military is not up to the task. We discovered that we were cocky and arrogant and thought that we can rely wholly on technology and therefore relied on signal intelligence rather than human sources. And we knew nothing of what was happening there.

Sruli Fruchter: By there you are referring to Gaza?

Gadi Taub: To Gaza, yeah. We knew very little about what was going on in Gaza. And whatever information we did have, our intelligence officers dismissed. They all belonged to the Star Wars mentality and could not fathom that primitive technology and fanatic determination could defeat this machine that we were so proud of, which is the IDF. So the tactical mistake was not going for the Philadelphi Corridor, but the larger mistake was the whole defensive philosophy of the IDF.

We woke up on October 7 to discover that we do not have the right army for the wars that we are going to fight in this region. Our generals have been talking for two decades now about a small, smart army. Israelis, disappointed Israelis now say that we have a small, stupid army that is inflexible and does not understand what the task it has is. We thought that technology would solve all the problems, and we have reduced our ground forces to an inadequate force.

So if war had erupted on the north border, along with the eruption or the invasion of Hamas in the south, we did not have enough armored divisions to fight on two fronts. What we must understand now is that we need to reconstruct our army and go back to basics, which means large armed forces. You do not solve everything with cyber intelligence and sophisticated F-35s.

Sruli Fruchter: How do you think Hamas views the outcome and aftermath of October 7? Was it a success in their eyes?

Gadi Taub: I think it is not yet been determined. I think what we in the West think of the terrible price that they paid is not important to them. They are willingly sacrificing their own population. They are putting them in harm’s way. They have used all this money they received from the international community in order to build an underground terror city, but not one bomb shelter for their population. They are using their populations as fodder for their propaganda machine. And the more innocent people die, the happier they seem to be. Or they think of that as an advantage.

And we do not follow their theology at all. We do not take them seriously. You know, the West is full of that. We are full of talk about the other. We are full of talk about moral relativism and multiculturalism, but we do not take the other seriously. We just believe that they are all as multicultural as us, as liberal as us, and this is not true of Hamas.

So for Hamas, losing buildings is nothing, because they will get money to reconstruct it. Losing lives is nothing, because they believe these people are martyred and go to heaven. And so if we do not exact the price that they understand, which means, first and foremost, territory, then they will think of themselves as winners in this conflict. It could be worse if Yahya Sinwar can emerge at the end of this war, after some hostage deal, which is really a form of surrender, or the hostage deals that they are talking about now, which include withdrawing the IDF, leaving the Philadelphi Corridor, and leaving Hamas intact.

If Yahya Sinwar can get out at the end of this war, out of a tunnel, and make the V sign for victory, he will be Saladin for the next thousand years for Muslims in this area, and we would be doomed. So if we want to take seriously this war, the existential danger we face, and the ideology of Hamas, then the right thing to do will be to annex all the north of the Gaza Strip, because in their theology, the only viable reason to lay down your jihad weapons is if that endangers Muslim territory.

Sruli Fruchter: What do you look for in deciding which Knesset party to vote for?

Gadi Taub: First of all, Zionism. I think the left is increasingly post-Zionist. This is what I referred to as Sweden in Hebrew. That is not enough. So when I say Zionism, I mean the view that thought the key to normalizing Jewish existence is not to eradicate differences between Jews and others, but rather to exercise self-determination like other peoples. So the core of Zionism, and I guess my most basic demand of any party, is to adhere to this from our Declaration of Independence: “It is the natural right of the Jewish people to be like all peoples, masters of their own fate, in their own sovereign state.” That is the moral bedrock of Zionism. It is like the second paragraph of the American Declaration of Independence.

Sruli Fruchter: Which is more important for Israel, Judaism or democracy?

Gadi Taub: I think that they are intertwined in such a way that in order to reduce the Jewish character of the state, you need to reduce democracy. So long as you have a Jewish majority and universal suffrage, then Shabbat will be your day of rest. Hebrew will be your first official language, your calendar will be based on Jewish holidays, and your symbols will be drawn from the Jewish tradition. And hopefully you would also preserve the narrative on which Jewish identity for secular people is based. So in order to make this state less Jewish, you need to make it less democratic. And this is what has been happening for a long time.

Israel is hardly a democracy. It is a juristocracy. We have a situation in which the judicial branch exercises full superiority over the elected branches of government. And these people are ultra-progressives. So being progressive is being less democratic. They think that they can impose their view, which borders on the idea of a non-Jewish state of all its citizens. Basically, it is the local branch of globalism. We have that view entrenched in the court. And of course, the litmus test for that is that they are extremely lenient with everything that has to do with illegal immigration, most of which is, of course, non-Jewish, because Jewish immigration is ipso facto legal in this country. So the more you reduce democracy, you reduce the Jewish character of Israel.

Sruli Fruchter: So I am actually very curious, because we spoke about this a little bit before when we were setting up and we were chatting, you know, naturally, when thinking about the question of democracy, some people are thinking of judicial reforms, overhaul whatever people term it as. That happened about actually a year ago. This time it was underway. I am curious if you can talk briefly about how you think that factors into–

Gadi Taub: This conversation, how judicial reform factors into–

Sruli Fruchter: Your consideration about the question of Judaism and democracy in terms of which is more important for Israel.

Gadi Taub: The question of judicial reform and the struggle around it is terribly misunderstood outside Israel, because the reform that Yariv Levin laid out on my podcast, by the way, in full, was intended to democratize Israel. After years of encroachment by the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court has been gathering more and more powers and authorities. It has been maneuvering very smartly inside Israel’s political institutions, transferring more and more powers of decisions from elected branches of government to the Supreme Court. 

So the judicial reform was intended to return sovereignty to Israel’s citizens. That was clearly understood by everyone on the right. But the left, which also controls the media, portrayed this as an attack on human rights in an attempt to clip the wings of the Supreme Court. In reality, it was an attempt to bring Israel closer to other normal democracies in which the center of decision making is in electoral politics and therefore remains in the hands of citizens. But the combination of the identity of the coalition parties and the control of the narrative by the press managed to scare many Israelis into thinking that this was a plot to create a messianic dictatorship.

So you had these pictures of Smotrich and the ultra-Orthodox, and they were all conspiring to drown this bastion of human rights, the Supreme Court, the defender of minorities, in order to use the tyranny of the majority in order to create a messianic dictatorship. That was never true. This was a struggle by the shrinking left to preserve its advantage in power by making the one branch of government which represents, in terms of personalities, represents their views, and has control of its own appointments over the other branches of government. So the left has managed to impose for years its policies in many important things by controlling the Supreme Court.

The right now tried to change that anomaly in which a Supreme Court has more powers than in any democracy in Israel, and it ended up in such defeat. Now the Supreme Court has augmented its power. And I can tell you from the point of view of political science that they hold sovereignty in this country. They hold the final authority of decision on everything, including the writing of a constitution. That is, they control the rules of the game and the structure and the functioning of Israeli institutions.

Sruli Fruchter: So I want to circle back to the rest of the questions that we have, but just one brief follow up. I am curious, did you have any critique of how judicial reform was rolled out or what was proposed or you were fully supportive of?

Gadi Taub: I thought it was way too mild. I thought it would change very little, and I still think so. Had it all been implemented, the Supreme Court would have ignored half of it. That said, it was not wise to do it in a declaration of war, because that played into the hands of the other party. We should have learned from the sophisticated and sly Supreme Court chief. We do not have a chief justice. He is the president of the Supreme Court. He was for many years Aharon Barak, in which he did everything clandestinely, quietly, and he Marbury v. Madisoned us to death. Every time he did this, it was the same structure. He would yield the issue at question while nailing his authority to decide it. So at every step, he bribed the other side with a nugget and amassed more authority. 

And if you want just one example of how it went when he declared that the Supreme Court has the right of judicial review and can strike down legislation of the parliament, which is a completely novel idea that he invented, as John Marshall did, by the way, he invented for himself only less plausibly in Israel. First of all, he did it in the middle of the shiva for Rabin. Nobody was paying attention. There is a page in which there is a little title, a little story at the bottom, saying that the Supreme Court declared it has the power to strike down legislation under a huge picture of Arafat coming to console Leah Rabin, the widow of the slain prime minister. And that too, he declared that right, but did not use it. He did not use it yet. So we should have been smart enough to do it like this, not declare total war and complete overhaul, but rather start moving effectively to change the balance of power.

Sruli Fruchter: What role should the Israeli government have in religious matters. 

Gadi Taub: Very little. I do not think that it is the business of the government to intervene in religion. And when we say a Jewish democratic state, we do not mean that the state has a Jewish religion. Jewish in the phrase “Jewish and democratic” means its national character. It is like Italian, not like Catholic. So Israel does not have a church state. People do not know it because they think, I mean, England has a church state, right? There is the Anglican Church. But Israel has no formal religion and no formal state. It does have a rabbinate, and people are rarely aware of the fact that this comes from the Ottoman Empire, not from the Zionist enterprise. And this is part of a mixture of state and churches, or state and religions, not state and religion, because there are parallel institutions to the rabbinate for Christians and for Muslims. This is the millet system that we inherited from the Ottoman Empire through the British Mandate that did not cancel it and Zionism left it in place.

Sruli Fruchter: Should Israel treat its Jewish and non-Jewish citizens the same? 

Gadi Taub: It should, and it mostly does, except when there is a security risk.

Sruli Fruchter: Can you elaborate a little bit?

Gadi Taub: Yeah. People think that the Jewish state is somehow an anomaly, and they try to circle the alleged circle with the alleged square of: How do you reconcile democracy with the fact that not all Israeli citizens are Jewish and therefore it seems that some are excluded. But the issue is not religion but nationality, and we are not unique. Almost all nation-states have national minorities. Americans are prone to misunderstand this because their national identity is not based as European national identity is, on a combination of a shared past and some kind of ethnicity, because it is an immigrant society. So the American sense of unity is based on a vision of the future, not on a story about the past necessarily. But most European nations are like Israel. They are a combination of a shared past with some form of ethnic kinship. And therefore, mostly they have national minorities.

So if you go to Romania, you would have a large Hungarian minority. So how to treat minorities in nation-states? The same goes for Italy. In South Tyrol, there is a large German-speaking minority. So no one asked Italians to stop being Italian in order to create a common identity that will include everybody in a state of all its citizens that would be non-national. What European countries do is they basically follow our example. And our example says that it is not enough to grant the minority personal equal rights, but also you need to grant them the means to preserve their common identity.

So if you want it in a metaphor, in Israel, there is a whole system of schools in Arabic for the Arab population, there is no enforced assimilation. You get equal rights as individuals, and then the state provides you with equal means to preserve your identity. And if you look at what Europe did, there is a document called the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, and it basically follows the same pattern. It says equal individual rights, but the minority should get its equal share. If you have a budget for religious institutions, then a religious minority should get its equal share according to its size in the population. It should have schools in its own language and so forth. So the model is, I think, very clear, and Israel follows a beaten path. 

The problem is that the Arab minority in Israel is, in parts, larger parts than we like to admit, hostile. In May 2021, what was known as the Shomer Chomot—I do not want to use the term pogrom, although parts of it were like that. The riots that we experienced, some of which were murderous, and some of the Jews who got in the way of the riots were lynched. And they were lynched based on a Hamas-like ideology, which, by the way, the Palestinian Authority shares. So the problem is that some of the minority in Israel do not recognize the right of the majority to self-determination.

So it is a tricky question, because obviously the majority is stronger, but we are not a majority in the region, and we know now that we are in danger. And part of the problem is that Israel has been way too extravagant in its tolerance towards ideological hostility within the minority. So according to Israeli law, it is a basic law. So it is one of our semi-constitutional laws. The Basic Law: The Knesset, clause 7a says that you cannot run for the Knesset if you are active against the Jewish or the democratic character of the state. This had been used to strike down ultra-Jewish nationalists, but never ultra-Arab nationalists. 

And so we have in the Knesset parties openly calling for the destruction of the Jewish state, which is illegal, was banned by the committee on Elections, the Knesset Committee on Elections, but forced on us by the Supreme Court, which said of some of these that are verging on genocidal ideology, well, that there is not yet a critical mass for deciding that they are not abiding by the law. But we have parties that should not be in the Knesset that are openly calling for the destruction of the Jewish state, which harbor clear antisemitic views, which say that only the Jews do not have a right to self-determination, and thinking that in a democracy, it is automatic that the majority is secure. We did not move against these parties. And I think that we are letting the situation deteriorate and may eventually face a civil war now. 

Sruli Fruchter: Now that Israel already exists, what is the purpose of Zionism?

Gadi Taub: Zionism is the Jewish manifestation of the universal right to self-determination, to national self-determination. So for me, this is like asking, now that the American promise had been fulfilled with independence, is there still reason to support the Declaration of Independence? Yes, there is, because the values remain the guiding compass for the American polity, and it is the same for Israel. Our Declaration of Independence, which is an articulation of Zionism, is as valid and as important, and it still should guide us. And this project can go off the rails. It has gone off the rails, as you probably know by now, that I think by a Supreme Court, which is undermining our basic civil rights as citizens in a democracy. And so I want to point out that we should go back to the values of Zionism as articulated in our Declaration of Independence. 

Sruli Fruchter: Is opposing Zionism inherently antisemitic?

Gadi Taub: It is not if you oppose all movements of national self-determination. So if you are a globalist and think that nationalism is evil and all nation-states should be abolished, then if you think that Israel should also be abolished, that does not mean you are antisemitic. It just means you are very naive. But if you think all peoples have a right to self-determination except the Jews, and therefore all national ideologies, or most of them, or many of them, are legitimate, but somehow Zionism is not, then that is antisemitic.

Sruli Fruchter: So we have asked this question to all of our guests, and we have had a listener who emailed in asking for a specific follow-up. So you will actually be the first to get the follow-up. If someone says, “I support, in theory, the Jewish movement for self-determination, but I do not want that to come at the expense of Palestinians,” would you consider that an illegitimate form of opposing Zionism in the end?

Gadi Taub: Yes, because that means that you are opposed to Zionism in practice, because there is no way that it would not be on part of the territory which is the land of Israel. And therefore, if you are pro-Palestinian, or if you adopt the Palestinian views, then any encroachment on the Palestinian territory is at their expense and is illegitimate. I was, for many years I supported a Palestinian state because I am a Zionist, because my Zionism is based on the—And by the way, it is not—I did not invent this form of Zionism. Just to be clear, it is Herzl and Ben-Gurion and many others thought exactly that this is a universal right for self-determination and it should be applicable to the Jews.

But if you believe that this right is universal, then you cannot implement it while denying it to another people. Asterisks, except if that is necessary for your security. And I would have had a Palestinian state if there was a Palestinian partner for peace, foolishly supported the Oslo Accords, believing there was such a partner. There never was. And I also foolishly supported the disengagement from Gaza, thinking that if they do not want independence, we can force them to have their own state. By the way, also for our egotistic reasons, because the original logic of the partition resolution of the United Nations was divide the land in such a way that you could preserve a Jewish majority on one side, an Arab majority on the other, and therefore both will be able to exercise the right for self-determination.

What happened is that we discovered that we have been wrongly imagining the Palestinian national movement in our image, as if their goal was national self-determination. And it is not. Their goal is the destruction of Israel and their religious views, which I emphasize again and again, we keep ignoring is a vision of redemption in which the end of days will only come after the last Jew is dead. So if your Palestinian Authority issues that hadith, that part of the Muslim tradition—two weeks after October 7, two weeks after October 7. This is the Palestinian Authority. This is not Hamas. And when its Ministry of Religion issues directions or recommendations for what imams should be saying on the coming Friday in their mosques, and they issue the hadith, in which stones and trees say to the Muslims, “O Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him.” If that is what you issue from your Ministry of Religion to your imams, then there is no prospect of peace in the foreseeable future.

Sruli Fruchter: Which question do you think we are up to now?

Gadi Taub: Five. Seven.

Sruli Fruchter: We are halfway through.

Gadi Taub: Okay, that sounds about nine.

Sruli Fruchter: Pretty good. You are the first person to underrate it. I have had people say, “Oh, we are done.” I said, “No. No. Question four.”

Gadi Taub: No. I am acutely aware of giving long answers.

Sruli Fruchter: Is the IDF the world’s most moral army?

Gadi Taub: My friend the comedian … says, “Yes, but it is the only one in the competition.” No other army is so preoccupied with being moral at the expense of winning.

Sruli Fruchter: Is that a bad thing?

Gadi Taub: Yes, it is. If your obligation is to protect your citizens, not to be a saint, and war is often dirty, should you be as moral as you can? Yes. But you cannot cross the line into the idiotic, unbelievably mechanic ethic manual for the IDF, written by my former teacher, Professor Asa Kasher, in which he says that the lives of enemy civilians are as important as yours, and therefore, if the price of killing combatants is innocent civilians, then you should not take that action. What this means is that if terrorists are going to hide behind innocent civilians, then they will win. That is your moral code. For the Israeli army, that is a very stupid moral code.

And as my friend Dan Shiftan has said repeatedly, this war is a test. It is a test of whether barbarians can use your moral views in order to defeat you. It is a test of whether a civilized nation can win over barbarians. And if you paralyze yourself with the ethical code of Asa Kasher, then that means you are letting the barbarians win in order to preserve some image of yourself.

That said, if you look at this conflict, and I saw Kamala Harris and others saying, “The terrible price that the Gazans are paying,” price should be laid at their door. And according to international law, if you use civilians as human shields, their blood is on your hands. It is not an obligation of the other army not to attack your military targets if you put civilians in harm’s way. And after they do that, still, in this conflict, we have the lowest ratio of civilian deaths to combatant deaths in any modern urban theater of warfare.

What is recognized as the international, the accepted average is about seven to nine combat dead civilians for every dead soldier. And what we have in this conflict, according to Israeli and American estimates, is somewhere between 1.5 civilians to three civilians for every Hamas fighter. That is an unbelievably low ratio when you take into account the fact that this is one of the densest areas on the planet and that the Hamas barbarians are using their own women and children and elderly and men as shields.

Sruli Fruchter: If you were making the case for Israel, where would you begin?

Gadi Taub: I am sad that the case is not self-evident. If I had to present it now to the world, I would stand behind Netanyahu’s speech, last speech before the joint sessions, the joint session of the two houses of Congress. I think he put it exactly right when he said that this is not just Israel’s war, this is the war of civilized nations against barbarism. He alluded to Samuel Huntington’s book, The Clash of Civilizations, and he said, this is not a clash between civilizations. This is a clash between barbarism and civilization. And therefore, I think Israel should make the case that it has not just the right of self-defense, it is now fighting against a monstrous axis of terror, which has as its goal the destruction of the whole West, which harbors unbelievably sadistic and barbaric mores and values, and that we should stand firmly against them. And now, as Colonel Richard Kemp said, I think wisely, this is the war between the West and Iran, and only Israel is fighting it.

Sruli Fruchter: Can questioning the actions of Israel’s government and army, even in the context of this war, be considered a valid form of love and patriotism?

Gadi Taub: Of course, in a democratic, liberal polity, it is your obligation to speak truth to power always. But then this turned, in some circles, the ideal of self-criticism as a moral ideal has turned into the habit that self-flagellation is somehow a moral virtue. And that is very childish and stupid.

Sruli Fruchter: What do you think is the most legitimate criticism leveled against Israel today?

Gadi Taub: Against Israel or against Israel’s government?

Sruli Fruchter: Against Israel, and you can answer it however you understand the question.

Gadi Taub: So most of the criticisms leveled against Israel are dishonest now. So if I try to sift through them in my head, I do not think any of them I would consider very valid. I think Israel should take care to be faithful to its own values. And that does not mean self-flagellation. It also does not mean tying your own hands or sacrificing your own soldiers in order to satisfy a double standard of other nations. Let me point out that when the coalition led by the United States attacked ISIS, they flattened huge parts of Raqqa and Mosul from the air without ever bothering to separate civilian population from combatants. So since most of the criticism of Israel is directed there, I reject it. I think Israel is careful to preserve civilian life, sometimes too careful when it sacrifices too many of its own soldiers.

I would criticize Israel for not understanding early enough what it is that we are facing, but that can be a critique of our own government among the nations. Their double standards applied to our wars are absolutely disgusting and often motivated by antisemitism. So that I flatly reject. But I think that Israel did not understand early enough what the danger is and what its role can be. I think that we have not been vigilant enough in the face of antisemitism, and we should have called out the rot in Western academy, including our own, much earlier. I was not in the least surprised by the eruption of pro-Hamas demonstrations on American campuses. What do you expect if your saint is Edward Said for 40 years, and all your students are indoctrinated by a view in which the defense of Zionism runs against the methodological assumption of the field.

So if you go to postcolonial studies, you cannot defend Zionism unless you volunteer to be a racist and to be labeled a racist. And if everything is framed in such a way, then the whole edifice is rotten, and Israel should have stood up against it, domestically and internationally.

Sruli Fruchter: Has there been anything you have heard criticizing Israel or Israel’s government—however you want to understand the question—that you felt, even if you do not fully agree with it, that there is some aspect of it that you do think is legitimate?

Gadi Taub: Yes, I think that we have been very stupid to cooperate with the international institutions that pretend to dispense justice when what they are doing is political antisemitism. And I am sometimes embarrassed by the fact that American senators like Ted Cruz, like Tom Cotton, are better at articulating our cause than we are.

Sruli Fruchter: Do you think peace between Israelis and Palestinians will happen? I am laughing because you have kind of already alluded to this, but do you think peace between Israelis and Palestinians will happen within your lifetime?

Gadi Taub: Oh, that is a ridiculous idea. Look at what is going on in their schoolbooks. The schoolbooks that inflamed passions of Hamas are, by the way, schoolbooks from the Palestinian Authority, not from Hamas. So the indoctrination begins there. And if you look at the books I just reviewed for Tablet, a book by my friend Lital Shemesh called How Much Is a Dead Jew Worth? In which he surveys Palestinian culture. Who are the heroes of Palestinian culture? Only people who kill Jews. These are the only heroes. These are the names of the streets, the names of squares, the names of institutions, are all after Shahids, martyrs, people who kill Jews.

The Palestinian Authority has a substantial part of its budget dedicated to the families of martyrs. People who killed Jews or people sitting in Israeli jails. The longer the sentence you get, the more harm you did to Jews, the more money you get monthly take, then the schoolbooks, and you will see that even a question of physics is used in order to indoctrinate antisemitism. So you would be faced with a question, at what speed should a 50-kilo rocket fly from Gaza in order to hit Tel Aviv? It is such and such time. And then if you have your grammar lessons, then the sentences they use to demonstrate grammar, this is an actual example: “Never allow yourself to think that the occupier is human. 

So if you indoctrinate children from kindergarten playing with guns at killing Jews, then peace will not come. I will say it very minimally. This is the most optimistic that I can get. If now a 3-year-old in kindergarten is taught to play killing Jews instead of playing house, as they do, I do not know, in Western kindergartens, then, as long as this kid is part of the adult population of Gaza, there will be nothing to talk about. And all our dreams of peace have just been self-deception.

Sruli Fruchter: So I will take that as a no. 

Gadi Taub: It is a no. Yes.

Sruli Fruchter: What do you think should happen with Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict after the war?

Gadi Taub: Let us start with occupation. How is that? As I said, I think we should annex the north third of the Gaza Strip, that the price is going to be substantial. I think it is ridiculous to assume that we can transfer authority to a Palestinian Authority. I think that the idea that our not very sophisticated minister of security, Mr. Gallant, says that we will somehow nurture local authorities is not workable in the short run. So we need to completely eradicate Hamas’ military and governing abilities. And then the question is asked, who will take their place? So in the short run, definitely only the IDF. And it should be such a level of control that we can also control what is in their schoolbooks. So the only hope is stopping indoctrination. No one else will do it.

If anyone trusts an international coalition, I would refer them to Security Council Resolution 1701, which was supposed to solve the problem of Hezbollah on our north border. That is 2006, after the war, or seven, and we see what the international forces have done there. Nothing. So the first thing is we cannot outsource Israeli security. We should also dismantle the Palestinian Authority, which is a terror authority that has built an army, not a police force. We are in danger of another October 7 from their side.

And so in the foreseeable future, we should be running things until a different generation or some solution that I cannot imagine in the present is presented. But the idea that said at the beginning of this war, that Hamas is also the enemy of the population. The population supports Hamas. We have abundant evidence that a majority of Palestinians, by the way, more on the West Bank than in Gaza, supported the Hamas massacre of October 7 and were happy with it. So as long as this is the situation, this is not a population that we can again trust. That is for the near future.

The next few years later, we can start delegating local, that is, municipal-like authority, to Palestinian locals still under supervision. Because I do not think that anything remotely like a state of independence can be tried again on our borders. Because what we used—I used to dismiss when Netanyahu said it would be a terrorist state. We said, we on the left, I was on the left, said, “Ah, these right-wing pessimists clingers. They do not see optimism. They do not understand that all peoples just want to come home in the evening and hug their children and have food on the table.” So we have been underestimating religious fanaticism. 

Israel is a very small island of Western values and democracy in a huge sea of political lava, which is very dangerous. The Arab region called the Middle East, the Muslim Arabs are in a civilizational crisis, the likes of which I do not think is familiar to us from recorded history, no form of political order has survived in the Arab world. And so we have tried monarchies, Arab socialism, pan-Arabism, political Islam, nationalism, nation-states. All these forms of political order have collapsed. What was called the Arab Spring, which turned out to be the Muslim winter, is a tragedy because we then understood that nation-states are not a viable form of political order in the Arab world. And what have we been left with? Political lava, which produced ISIS, al-Qaeda, Hamas, and other fanatic sects.

So Israel, under no conditions, can have a branch of that wild growth next to our kibbutzim. And certainly we cannot leave the mountain ridge of Judea and Samaria because then there will be territorial continuity from the outskirts of Tel Aviv all the way to Tehran. That is out of the question.

Sruli Fruchter: So three brief questions on your point of annexation. When you say annexation, do you mean all of Gaza or part of Gaza? 

Gadi Taub: No, I said occupation, not annexation.

Sruli Fruchter: Oh, you meant occupation, not annexation?

Gadi Taub: No, I said annex the north third of the Gaza Strip.

Sruli Fruchter: And so in that view of annexation, what would you believe would happen with the Gazan civilians or Palestinians who are there? And then, b, will you also support Israelis moving back there, back into that annex?

Gadi Taub: Well, in the long run, yes. In the short run, I do not know. The third part of the Gaza Strip has more or less been emptied of population. It is a war zone. So the little that remains there can be gradually, maybe incorporated into Israel if this is a very small number. Other than that, the Gazans can make their new home in the south of the Gaza Strip.

Sruli Fruchter: Are political and religious divides a major problem in Israeli society today?

Gadi Taub: Yes. I think there is the problematic issue of how to integrate the Haredim, especially the extreme sector of the Haredim. We have an economic problem that we need to solve in the long run, and it has to do with the controversy over the draft to the military, because the current situation is one in which in order not to be drafted, you need to be registered as a student. And if you work, a student at Kollel, and if you are registered as a student, you cannot work because then you lose your army waiver. So we have a whole population which is basically unable to work and cannot support itself. That is one divide.

And the second very serious divide is that we have an increasingly alienated and alienating progressive elite, which you can now see rioting in the streets in the middle of an existential war, and which has for a long time constructed its own identity on alienation to Israel, Israelis and Judaism. So this is a progressive, globalist-leaning elite which identifies more with its counterparts in other nations than with its own countrymen. I have written a book about that. It was long before judicial reform or the war.

Sruli Fruchter: Which book are you referring to? 

Gadi Taub: … It is in Hebrew. It is called The Mobile and the Immobile. I am working for a long time on an English translation, along with Peter Berkowitz, who did the original draft of the translation. But things are moving so fast. So I have a long chapter on the judiciary in the book, but that was written before the struggle over judicial reform and before the war, and it is almost irrelevant now. I mean, it is the prehistory of what is happening now. So I am struggling to catch up with events. But the book that–The title that I thought I should give it in English was Globalist Elites and National Citizens.

So we have a globalist elite, which is a progressive elite, like in other places, which considers most of the other, most of the rest of us as deplorable and is attempting to distance itself from us. And that is creating a rift because that elite controls the press, controls academia, and has a large chunk of Israeli high-tech economy also in its hands. And its commitment to the common cause is very flimsy.

That said, that elite is small. It has many fellow travelers, which someone told me after I wrote the book … they are not really mobile. They imagine themselves to be mobile because I tried to define them also sociologically, as people who can make a living with their profession elsewhere. So maybe you can make a living on your laptop. So it does not matter if you are here or on a beach in Thailand, and maybe you are a university professor and you can teach somewhere else, and maybe you are not high-tech entrepreneur, and it does not matter where you live. 

So say a physician is, by this definition, Nayad, you can take your profession elsewhere, but it is not that simple, right? If you want to be a physician in Hungary now, it is not that easy to just open a clinic without speaking the language, without knowing people. So the actual class of mobile individuals is small, but it carries weight, because a lot of Israel’s elite identify themselves in that way. And they see their ideal of what a normal Western individual should look like basically demands transcending Judaism. So their concept of normality is once you overcome your Jewishness, and that is at its core, anti-Zionist, because this is a very diasporic view, right? I will blend in by minimizing all Jewish attributes of my identity. And I think since it is a small minority, but since it exercises a lot of cultural weight, it is dangerous to the common enterprise.

Sruli Fruchter: Where do you identify on Israel’s political and religious spectrum? And do you have friends on the quote, unquote, other side?

Gadi Taub: I identify with Likud. I identify as a nationalist, a democrat, and a liberal in the original sense. I abhor identity politics. I think that is a retrograde and regressive view. I respect religion. I envy people who believe because I think humans need consolation. And if you are secular, you do not have that. You know, I am thinking, where would I send my children to school when I have them? And I tend to think of a religious school, because what is going on in secular schools is Judaism is disappearing, to be substituted by some abstract humanity, general human rights and formal citizenship. So that is where I stand culturally and politically.

Do I have friends on the other side? All my friends used to be on the other side. I always had some friends on the right. I was not in the boycott camp. Many of my friends boycott me. Many of my former friends, my dearest and closest friends, mostly did not. Some radical on the other side. We have agreements not to talk about politics. That does not always work. But some friends have become actual enemies and have been really attacking me, sometimes wildly, on social media or on the press interviews. One who was my partner in editing there, I think maybe 25 volumes of a periodical we edited together had begun to slander me publicly, which is—I do not know. That is not my conception. Friendships should not be dependent on political views. But some friendships are purely political, and then they frayed. When politics drive you apart.

Sruli Fruchter: It sounds very hard. I am sorry to hear that. And our last question. Do you have more hope or fear for Israel and the Jewish people?

Gadi Taub: Hmm? Do you mean in the short run or in the long run?

Sruli Fruchter: I will let you take the question however you want to receive it. 

Gadi Taub: In the short run, I am very worried. In the long run, I think Israelis and Jews in general have not only historically shown incredible resilience, but we saw it in the aftermath of October 7. I used to think, you know, as a cultural critic, I used to think that this generation is self-indulgent. They photographed their food in order to fake glamour on Facebook or Instagram. And then this war broke out, and it turned out that they are lions. I saw this interview with this guy who lost his leg. It was on social media. It was not on television. And the interviewer, a woman, asked him, “Well, what do you want to do now?” And he said, “Do you see this wheelchair? I want to install an iron bar here with a machine gun. And I want to go back.” And you think, wow, these people, they are fierce. They are really fierce.

A friend of mine, Ran Baratz, wrote a piece called “The Spirit of ’48.” And when you look at what they say, they have this phrase. It is very emotional. They say … “Not falling short of the ’48 generation.” That is a tall order. My father lost his hand in one of the first battles of the war and remained a fierce patriot. And these people are as fierce, and that is amazing. We have a defeatist set of brass in the IDF, but we have lions for soldiers. And when things get tough, and I predict they will get tough, then these are the people we should rely on.

Because if you would let me say one ending—I do not think that this is just 1948. I think this is 1950. ’56 was the first war that we waged when we understood that Nasser, Gamal Abdel Nasser, the dictator of Egypt, was tying a noose around Israel by attempting to unite the Arab world against us and encircle us. And we fought four wars in order to break that noose. The war of ’56, the Sinai Campaign, the Suez War, as it is known internationally, the Six-Day War, the War of Attrition, the Yom Kippur War. And finally, after a sea change in politics, we managed to dismantle that noose. We are now in ’56. This is the first war to dismantle the Iranian noose that has been closing around us while we were sleeping on our watch. And we are facing what I think is at least a decade of wars until we break that noose. And we had better be ready for that.

Sruli Fruchter: All right, well, Gadi Taub, thank you so much for your time, and thank you for answering our 18 questions.

Gadi Taub: Thank you for your patience.

Sruli Fruchter: There was so much covered in this interview with Gadi Taub, and I really hope that for you and for anyone who is interested, this becomes a springboard to dive deeper and to dive further into Gadi’s thought, into those who agree with him, into those who disagree with him, and to also learn more about the nuances of Israeli discourse that are very hard to understand and to gain access to unless we are talking to the insiders and to our fortune, we are dealing with the inside Israeli thinkers. 

So thank you so much for joining us. And I should have been doing this for our other episodes, but this is my first thank you to our friend Gilad Bronstein. I may be saying his name wrong. Our friends in Israel, who edits our podcasts for 18 Questions, 40 Israeli Thinkers. And to our friend Josh Weinberg, who is recording the video series to go along with 18 Questions, 40 Israeli Thinkers, the podcast. So until next time, keep questioning and keep thinking.