The War in Gaza, With Steven A. Cook

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is the war in Gaza.

With me to discuss where the situation in Gaza stands six months after Hamas's brutal attack on Israel is Steven Cook. Steven is the Eni Enrico Mattei Senior Fellow for Middle East and Africa Studies here at the Council. He's also a columnist at Foreign Policy magazine. He recently wrote for CFR.org a piece entitled, "Five Months of War: Where Israel, Hamas, and the U.S. Stand." He is also the author of the forthcoming book, The End of Ambition: America's Past, Present, and Future in the Middle East. Steven, thank you for coming back on the President's Inbox.

COOK:
Thanks for having me, Jim.

LINDSAY:
Steven, I want to begin with the state of fighting between Israel and Hamas. This coming Sunday marks six months since Hamas' surprise attack on Israel. The Israeli government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to eliminate Hamas. Is Israel succeeding in that goal?

COOK:
Well, it's actually hard to tell. According to the Israelis they are succeeding, but I will point out that as we speak, the IDF is saying that it has wrapped up a major operation at Al-Shifa Hospital in which it had killed 200 terrorists and arrested another 500. That sounds very impressive, but this is the Israeli's second major operation at Al-Shifa Hospital. They had done this back in November and had moved on to other parts of the Gaza Strip to clear it of Hamas fighters. So I think the fact that the Israelis had to go back to Shifa Hospital and that they have continued to engage in combat in the Northern Gaza Strips speaks to how difficult an operation this has been for the IDF in order to clear Hamas. The conversation in Washington and Jerusalem has been focused on Rafah, the city that is in the southern part of the Gaza Strip up against the Egyptian border, where there are approximately a million Palestinians seeking shelter in which the Israelis say there are about three thousand Hamas fighters there, and that they're planning an operation there, which will be extraordinarily difficult given the number of civilians who are sheltering there.

But I think it speaks to the problems that the Israelis have in this drawn out battle in that something the United States encountered in Iraq and Afghanistan, places that the military believes it has cleared and undermined terrorist fighters. The Israelis declared back in November that the northern part of the Gaza Strip, Hamas was no longer an organized fighting force, and they're discovering that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, they are also fighting, have continued to be organized fighting forces despite their best efforts.

LINDSAY:
So Steven, let's drill down upon that. What I'm trying to understand is what the Israeli military's theory of victory is, and I ask that because it comes against the backdrop of the U.S. experience in Iraq and an awful lot of advice given by the U.S. military early on, most notably by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, a retired four-star general, that the use of mass levels of force were likely to be counterproductive. The Israelis have largely ignored that advice. What is it that the Israelis think they're going to achieve with using such large levels of force?

COOK:
That's an important question about the way in which the Israelis have conducted these operations and what their ultimate goal is. Prime Minister Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials have talked about the destruction of Hamas. It strikes me that that terminology is really for political purposes because the Israeli public shocked and angry and vengeful and still in mourning over the events of October 7th, in which up to 1,200 Israelis were brutally murdered in this surprise attack, have demanded nothing less than the destruction of Hamas. We know from our own experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan how difficult that is. I think that the IDF, which is well led, I think the Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant, is a real professional, unlike other members of the Israeli cabinet. I think that their goal is actually similar to what the United States saw in Iraq after the Islamic State rolled into large portions of Iraq in 2014, and that is, I think at the time President Obama called it degrading and destroying.

I think for the Israelis, it is rendering Hamas unable to threaten Israeli security in the same way that they did on October 7th. That's not going to mean the total elimination of Hamas. And of course, the massive use of force that the Israelis have employed in the Gaza Strip is likely to radicalize a population where people who had not been part of Hamas or Islamic Jihad have seen extended members of their family killed in these artillery and airstrikes. So I think the Israelis have a theory that they can render these groups disorganized and unable to threaten the state of Israel without actually necessarily pacifying the Gaza Strip.

LINDSAY:
Steven, let me just drill down on that, because the Israeli military and Israeli political operations have had a history of being able to conduct targeted operations going after the leadership. Why is it they didn't choose to do it in this instance? Is it simply because of the scale of what happened on October 7th? Is it because of domestic political impulses, or is it because members of this Israeli government see this as an opportunity to accomplish bigger goals? As you know, there are members of this government that are really talking about pushing the Palestinians out of Gaza. How do you make sense of all that?

COOK:
I think it's a combination of these things. First, you're quite right. The Israelis have a history of targeted operations in Gaza, in the West Bank and beyond. We've seen this over and over again for many years, and in fact, that is what the Israelis at the time of the October 7th attacks, the Israeli military was occupied with targeted attacks on Hamas cells and Hamas leadership in the West Bank. So yes, they do this and they're proficient at it. I think that one, the scale of the attacks on October 7th and the public pressure on the Israeli government. Two, I think there's a certain amount of demonstration effect that the IDF is trying to accomplish.

LINDSAY:
That's a rather bloodless way to describe it, isn't it?

COOK:
It is a bloodless way to describe it. It's hard to capture exactly, but essentially what the IDF seems to be doing in the Gaza Strip is demonstrating to Lebanese officials and the leadership of Hezbollah in Lebanon that this is what will become of Beirut or parts of Beirut should Hezbollah escalate along Israel's northern border.

LINDSAY:
So this is to use another bloodless term about reestablishing deterrence?

COOK:
Reestablishing deterrence. And there's some anecdotal evidence that this has in fact had an impact that the scenes, the carnage, the moonscape that has become part of the Gaza Strip as a result of Israeli military operations is having an impact on the thinking of the Hezbollah leadership. And then of course, you point out to something that I think we haven't spent enough time talking about, which is that although the Israeli public is fully supportive and behind the military operations, there are government ministers and somewhere in the neighborhood of 20, 25 percent of the Israeli population is supportive of resettlement of the Gaza Strip.

Now, Prime Minister Netanyahu and his closest advisors have gone so far as to say that the IDF will have overall security control over the Gaza Strip for the foreseeable future. To me, that sounds like military occupation. They say, "No, that's not occupation. Occupation means settlements." But of course, there are ministers in the Israeli government...There's a strong settlement lobby that supports these ministers that want to bring settlements, reestablish the settlements that Israelis withdrew from in 2005 and their argument is more potent now than when then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a war hero, not a dove, withdrew those settlements from the Gaza Strip

LINDSAY:
And your argument is that having settlements in Gaza will make Israel safer?

COOK:
Safer. Yeah, their argument is until 2005, there weren't rocket attacks, there certainly weren't invasions of Hamas terrorists into Israel proper and that the reestablishment of settlements and then of course the presence, the permanent presence of the IDF to protect those settlements will make it impossible for a repeat of October 7th.

LINDSAY:
So let's talk a bit more, Steven, about where the Israeli public is. This past weekend, there were very large protests in Jerusalem against the government of Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, but I also understand that many Israelis are angry that the Israeli government has failed to bring home somewhere on the order of a hundred hostages held by Hamas and other groups in Gaza. Can you sort of explain to me those political dynamics and how it's working out?

COOK:
Actually, what we saw over the weekend, which is continuing; it began over the weekend and is continuing for another couple of days, it's a four-day protest, is the bringing together of essentially two streams of opposition to Prime Minister Netanyahu and his government. First are the families of the hostages. There are 134 hostages that are in the Gaza Strip being held, as you said, by Hamas and other groups. This is about a hundred less that have already been released. The hostage families are of the view that the Israeli government has not done enough in order to bring home their loved ones. The Israeli government says, "We are doing everything we possibly can." That Hamas is the problem here. And there is some truth to that, that the Israeli government had made a series of offers that Hamas has not been willing to agree to. Hamas's argument is that whatever the Israelis have offered have left the IDF within the Gaza Strip and does not lead to a permanent cease-fire. Obviously, Hamas wants to get a cease-fire that will preserve Hamas and the Israelis politically can't-

LINDSAY:
On that score, Steven, does Hamas have any incentive to want to give up the hostages? It seems like the hostages are a bargaining chip.

COOK:
Right. That's their only leverage here, and I think that's the problem. But of course, if you are the husband, the father, the sister, the brother, a relative of someone who's been held in the Gaza Strip after these horrific attacks in October 7th, you want the government to do absolutely everything in order to bring back your loved ones.

LINDSAY:
I understand that, Steven, but it seems that Hamas is playing a very cynical game.

COOK:
Oh, absolutely.

LINDSAY:
And it doesn't want to give up the hostages. It is perfectly willing to see the Israelis attack and kill many innocent Palestinians because they believe that's going to fuel the resistance. Am I being too cynical here.

COOK:
No, you're not being too cynical. I mean, I think that that's clearly the case, and I think that if you listen carefully to American officials, you even listen carefully to the Qatari officials that Hamas has been singularly difficult in agreeing to a cease-fire. As you point out, the hostages are their only bargaining chip. And the more that the Israelis attack the Gaza Strip, more civilians are killed, children are killed, and as this is broadcast on international television and social media, it's worse for the Israelis, and this is from Hamas' perspective, a total war and delegitimizing the state of Israel is an important part of that. 

So the one stream of protest is the hostage families. The other stream of protest is this opposition to Netanyahu that predates the war. It has diminished because of the attacks of October 7th, but it has become more prominent in recent weeks because of a controversy over whether what's known as the Haredim, the very religious...You see these young men with black hats and beards and side curls, they spend their entire adult life studying Yeshiva and they have been exempt from military service.

LINDSAY:
Why was that, Steven?

COOK:
Why was that? Very complicated why that was the case, but essentially the most cynical way of looking at this is that the parties that represent the Haredim are small, but can be the kingmakers in coalition building in Israel, and they have demanded this exemption for these Talmudic students-

LINDSAY:
But this exemption goes way back in Israeli history.

COOK:
Way, way back.

LINDSAY:
David Ben-Gurion, I believe was the one who agreed to it. But the Haredim at that point were a very small portion.

COOK:
Very small numbers. Now there are a much larger number of the population because they have so many children, so they've been exempt from military service. Now that Israel is in this military doctrine busting conflict, Israel has always wanted to fight short, devastating conflict on their enemy's territory. Now they're six months into this-

LINDSAY:
Grinding war of attrition in many ways.

COOK:
Essentially. There are manpower issues, the Israeli economy is under threat, and so the idea is that the Haredim who are now a much larger part of the population who don't contribute to the IDF should be drafted in the military and serve the state that protects them and provides for many of these actually quite poor religious families. The Haredim obviously want to maintain their privileges, are threatening to bulk the government and bring it down. Other parts of the population, more secular minded Israelis say it's only fair for the Haredim to be drafted. So these two streams of protests have come together in these four days of demonstrations against the government. It depends on the way you look at it. Is it wise for Israelis to go into an election season in the middle of this horrific conflict, but bring the government essentially paralysis for six months? This is the argument that Prime Minister Netanyahu is making. It's not a totally crazy politically cynical argument-

LINDSAY:
But he also has a self-interested reason to keep the government going because-

COOK:
Of course he does.

LINDSAY:
...if his government ends and he loses the prime ministership, he's now subject to the ongoing criminal trials against him, correct?

COOK:
Absolutely. There's absolutely the case, but also the case that Israel is engaged in this conflict on a number of fronts. And is this the wisest thing? As I said, it's not a totally politically cynical argument for the prime minister to make. On the other hand, Israel's a vibrant society, a functioning democracy. It has its problems of course, but a large number of Israelis firmly believe that they can conduct elections and conduct the war, and that they would be better off with a more representative government from their perspective. And so that's what's happening internally in Israel right now.

LINDSAY:
So how is the Israeli public making sense of what is clearly a chorus of criticism from other countries about the way Israel has conducted the war? You have referenced the fact of the television images. They're horrific...The destruction in Gaza, and we can point out that Hamas is playing a cynical role here and the rest. But the result is that Israel is clearly suffering in the court of international public opinion. Do Israelis not care? Do they care a little bit? How are they making sense of this?

COOK:
In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the Israelis, who I know who I've been in constant touch with very quickly came to the conclusion that no matter how they handled their response to the attacks that they were going to be criticized. They expected within three weeks Europeans to grow wobbly and start attacking Israel for its military operations. They expected the United States to last longer. But they're constant refrain, they're constant questioned in response to questions about the way in which military operations have been conducted. And the large numbers of Palestinian civilian casualties is, "What are we supposed to do? How else are we supposed to handle it? We are fighting a foe that is nestled among civilians. We're doing our best." Now, of course, it's only recently I think that the Israeli public has seen the full extent of the damage that the IDF has done to the Gaza Strip.

Still, it seems that the rally around the flag, if not around Prime Minister Netanyahu remains robust. Polls demonstrate that Israelis remain firmly supportive of military operations and the goals to destroy Hamas and firmly opposed to the Biden administrations and the international community for whatever that is, plans to pursue a two-state solution and revitalize the Palestinian authority. Their argument is this is a major threat, the Palestinians do not want accommodation with Israelis. They don't want a two-state solution, they want a one-state solution and the destruction of Israel. That is, I think, an opinion that has held up over these past six months. As far as there's been a lot about international criticism of Israel and Israel's isolation. It's important to point out that this criticism is, it's strong, it's important. No doubt it's having an effect on Israel, but no country has broken ties with Israel. There's only one that's come close, and that's Colombia. It's not like Egypt or the UAE or Jordan or these critical relationships.

LINDSAY:
So this is a classic case of pay less attention to what countries say and more to what countries do?

COOK:
Yeah, this isn't to suggest that governments, particularly the Jordanian and Egyptian governments, aren't under pressure from their public. There's very large demonstrations around the Israeli embassy in Amman that intensified around Israel's military operations in Shifa Hospital demanding that the embassy be closed. There's no diplomatic mission there right now, but nevertheless, to essentially kick them out, and the Jordanian authorities ended up arresting hundreds of people. So thus far, Israel has clearly taken a hit, but has relations with 165 of 195 countries and none of those have been broken, at least not yet.

LINDSAY:
And I should point out a number of the countries in the region are ideologically opposed to Hamas. They're not objecting to Hamas getting their nose blooded?

COOK:
Virtually all of them are opposed to Hamas. There's been these dramatic images of airdrops: the Egyptian Air Force, the Jordanian Air Force, the Emirati Air Force, Emiratis that established a field hospital in Gaza. This is all done in coordination with the Israel Defense Forces. It couldn't happen without them.

LINDSAY:
Okay, let's talk about U.S.-Israeli relations. Big news last week, the United States abstained on a UN Security Council vote calling for an immediate cease-fire. Prime Minister Netanyahu responded immediately by canceling a visit to Washington by some senior Israeli officials. First, help me understand what the UN Security Council resolution said and does.

COOK:
Well, I think before I do that, let me just point out that the United States has a long history in the UN Security Council of vetoing what are considered to be anti-Israel resolutions, essentially shielding Israel from censure by the UN Security Council. I can only think of one other abstention. I may be wrong. I'm just thinking off the top of my head. But what the resolution said was it called for an immediate cease-fire as well as the return of hostages. That doesn't sound so earth shatteringly anti-Israel, but what the Israelis objected to was that it did not link the return of hostages with the cease-fire. It didn't say there will be a cease-fire based on the return of hostage, just called for those two good things to happen and Israelis perceived this as a very significant shift in American policy.

LINDSAY:
Was it?

COOK:
Well, the United States had tabled a Security Council resolution linking the two specifically that were vetoed by Russia and China and the United States had worked with this new resolution to mold the language. It didn't get everything it wanted, but it got enough of what it wanted so that it didn't go with it but it abstained because it didn't have that linkage. Spokespeople for the administration, John Kirby from the National Security Council, said they did not constitute a change in American policy. Although, it's clearly a signal from the Biden administration that the United States was continuing its warnings to the Israeli government about humanitarian aid and the perils for civilians in a Rafah operation. That's why it decided not to veto something that it previously had opposed, but to abstain from something that it didn't agree with 100 percent.

LINDSAY:
Let's talk about that, Steven. I'm fascinated with the way the Biden administration has approached the issue or is approaching the issue, and it gets us back to the observation about what countries say and what countries do. The Biden administration has been ratcheting up its criticism of Israel's conduct of the war, clearly calling on the Israelis not to launch a full scale attack on Rafah in the south of Gaza without having a plan to protect Palestinian civilians. Vice President Kamala Harris has really been sort of leading the way in terms of the administration's messaging on this.

The administration has also gone out of its way to provide additional humanitarian aid to Gaza. We have the airdrops, we have the effort to build a pier so that ships can dock and offload humanitarian supplies, but at the same time, the United States continues to supply weapons to Israel. There seems to be, at a minimum, a mixed message there. And I think some people would say the administration is trying to have it both ways. But at the end of the day, what it is doing is making it possible for the government of Israel to conduct these attacks that some administration officials are criticizing.

COOK:
Yeah, indeed. At the same time, the Biden administration just went through with a very significant transfer of weapons to the IDF, including large numbers of dumb bombs which have been used-

LINDSAY:
And they're called dumb bombs because they don't have technology that allows you to guide them toward a target, precision strikes, so to speak.

COOK:
And that has led to large numbers of civilian casualties and deaths. You have to go back to the very beginning, at least in my mind, the very beginning of this conflict when President Biden made a number of very forceful speeches defending Israel, expressing solidarity with Israel, and then going to Israel to express his solidarity with the Israeli people. It's clear that the thinking behind what the president was doing was that if he gave a bear hug to Israeli officials, it would provide him with the ability to influence the way in which they conducted their military operations in the Gaza Strip. I think he underestimated how the Israelis would frame their conflict in existential terms, and that in that case, it would be much more difficult for him to influence how they conducted this war. And I think it demonstrates the limits of American influence and indeed leverage.

LINDSAY:
Steven, can I draw you out on that point because I've heard that argument made, but Joe Biden is someone who has been working on foreign policy for half a century at the upper echelons of the conversation. It could not come as a surprise to him that the Israelis might not take direction from the United States. I mean, I flashed back to a conversation that Bill Clinton had with then Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. Netanyahu was refusing to do what Bill Clinton asked, and Clinton reportedly said afterwards, "Who's the bleeping superpower here?" And he didn't use the word bleeping.

COOK:
Well, I'm getting perilously close, in my answer, I'm going to get perilously close to politics rather than policy. But I think that the president, despite all of his experience in foreign policy, has not actually objectively had a terrific record on the Middle East. I think he's had a history of actually misreading.

LINDSAY:
You think his judgments have been wrong?

COOK:
I think his judgments have been wrong on the Middle East going back decades. I also think that the president obviously thinks highly of his abilities and his insight, and maybe thought this time it would be different because he has a longer relationship with Netanyahu. He's known him for fifty years; brags that he is a Catholic guy from Scranton, Pennsylvania, but knows the Hanukkah songs and prayers better than many Jews; and things like that. That that would give him the kind of credibility necessary, but it didn't.

LINDSAY:
And I will say that Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, weighed in and was quite critical of Israel's policy. And that also hasn't seemed to have changed the calculations in Jerusalem. If anything, Netanyahu seized on it as being improper in an infringement on Israel's sovereignty.

COOK:
I'm looking forward to writing about this without, as I said, wading into the politics of it. I think it was a mistake. It's fine for Senator Schumer to voice his concerns given his long track record in support of Israel, but I think at this moment, it would easily be used by Netanyahu as shocking American interference in Israel's domestic politics. Of course, Israel's interfered in American politics, but it did not play well even with those who don't like Netanyahu. There was an outpouring in Israel of criticism of Schumer for people who said, "Look, Israel is a democracy and it's up to us when we have our elections." I also think that the way in which the press in particular has framed this as Senator Schumer, the highest ranking Jewish official in the land, as if the American Jewish community, one, has uniformly one view on Israel, and two, that the American Jewish community looks to the senior senator from New York for guidance on those views, I think was framed in a very, very odd way. And I think, again, a misread of Israeli politics. 

But I think the important point here is that as long as President Biden and Schumer and other American politicians aren't willing to actually use the one thing that the Israelis need, which is weaponry, then the United States doesn't really have the influence and leverage that it has. Leverage is notional. It's theoretical, unless you're actually going to dock the Israelis the weaponry they need. And no one's been willing to do that, and President Biden and his administration maintains that they support Israel's ultimate goal of the destruction of Hamas otherwise more October 7ths are going to happen. So now they've been caught in this situation where the humanitarian situation has deteriorated in striking and frightening ways, and they are scrambling to provide humanitarian aid and kind of pressuring the Israeli government. 

There's also a domestic American politics component of this, which is that the president did not win Michigan by more than a hundred thousand votes, and there were a hundred thousand people who in the Democratic primary voted uncommitted. So I think there's a concern there. All of these things are coming together.

LINDSAY:
Well, if you look at public opinion polls, Steven, what you see is that support in the United States for Israel's conduct of the war has gone down significantly.

COOK:
Significantly.

LINDSAY:
It's gone down particularly with Democrats and with independents, but not as much with Republicans. Putting that aside, sort of looking forward, where do you see us going? And I will note that you've talked about how the Biden administration hasn't exercised fully the leverage it has, but I'll have to note that even if it does, there's no guarantee that the Israelis will bend to Washington's will. I think that's one of the misconceptions that tends to percolate both in the United States and internationally. There are plenty of examples of countries going against and resisting all kinds of pressure because they decide that it is in their interest to do so. Remember the famous quote attributed to Ali Bhutto, prime minister of Pakistan, when Pakistan was under pressure for trying to build a nuclear weapon, and his answer is, "We'll eat grass if we have to. We're going to get a nuclear weapon." So I just want to flag that.

But where do you see this going? Because it's not clear how this fighting is going and when it is going to end. There's obviously a lot of talk about getting onto the two-state solution, but I'm not sure how realistic that talk is because it seems like everybody agrees on the two-state solution except the two parties that matter the most, the Israelis and the Palestinians. So looking forward, where are we headed?

COOK:
I think we're headed for more disaster. But let me just track back to our previous discussion very quickly. The deterioration of support for Israel's military operations, particularly among Democrats, is not surprising. Last spring, Pew released a poll that showed for the first time ever more Democrats were more supportive of the Palestinians than they were of Israel. So obviously as this horrific conflict has unfolded, there has been significant change there, although support for Israel among Republicans clearly remains rock solid. On this question of going forward, I think you're spot on, Jim, that the United States and Israel are at odds here. In fact, one of Israel's most respected military figures who's now in retirement, not a man of the center who was once part of one of Israel's storied military operations, has said, "We'd rather be alive and pariahs than accepted by the international community and dead."

And so I think that's the real issue here, and that's what I was getting at with the Israelis framing the struggle in existential terms that the Biden administration's plans for a post Gaza arrangement, negotiations for two-state solution seem separate from the objective reality on the ground, which is a grinding military operation in which, as we discussed earlier, in which the Israelis are unable to fully pacify the Gaza Strip. Lots of pressure within Israel among settlers for resettlement of the Gaza Strip, basically the Israelis establishing a tighter stricter cordon sanitaire around the Gaza Strip with a freedom of action to go after Hamas, essentially an uglier, more violent version of status quo that existed prior to October 7th. I don't see the U.S. government or any Israeli government aligned here on a two-state solution or day-after plans. And I think it's going to have an impact on U.S.-Israel relations, and I think the politics of U.S.-Israel relations have been changing anyway, and this may just be a forcing issue.

LINDSAY:
On that note, I'll close up The President's Inbox for this week. My guest has been Steven Cook, the Eni Enrico Mattei Senior Fellow for Middle East and Africa Studies here at the Council on Foreign Relations. Steven is the author of the forthcoming book, The End of Ambition: America's Past, Present, and Future in The Middle East, now available for pre-ordering. Steven, thank you very much for joining me on The President's Inbox.

COOK:
Thanks for having me, Jim.

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to the President's Inbox on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen and leave us a review. We love the feedback. You can email us at [email protected]. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for the President's Inbox on CFR.org. As always, opinions expressed on The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang, with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks brought to Michelle Kurilla for her research assistance, and to Justin Schuster for his editing assistance. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.