Will the War in Gaza Really End?

JUSTIN VOGT

Shira, Khaled, Dan, thank you all for joining us. I think we can all agree that it’s good that the bombardment and near blockade of Gaza have ended for now, and that the hostages have returned home, and that people have been reunited with their loved ones. If you cover world affairs and in particular the Middle East, there aren’t many days when you get some dramatic good news. And so whatever one thinks of the players involved or the prospects for lasting peace, I think on a human level it’s important to acknowledge that, especially for many ordinary Palestinians and Israelis, the past few days have offered a rare reprieve.

Having said that, you don’t have to wade too deeply into the coverage of the deal to start having doubts about its long-term viability, because it does not seem to address what any of the belligerents see as the underlying causes of this war between Hamas and Israel. And as we’re recording now on Tuesday afternoon, I think some of the good vibes from the weekend and Monday are already fading as it becomes clear that beyond the exchange of captives and this initial Israeli pullback, pretty much everything else remains unsettled.

So given that uncertainty, I’m going to start by putting you all on the spot and asking you to do the thing that most analysts really don’t like to do, which is to make a prediction. I’d like to know whether each of you thinks that, within one year, Hamas and Israel will be back at war. Are the odds greater than 50 percent or less than 50 percent? Now you have to answer. The only acceptable cop-out is to say fifty-fifty. Once you’ve all given me your answer, I’m going to ask you each to explain why. So Shira, let’s start with you. Greater than 50 percent chance that Israel and Hamas return to war or less than 50 percent chance in one year?

SHIRA EFRON

First, good evening from Tel Aviv. And it’s really good to be here with Dan and Khaled. I look forward to this conversation. Now, this is not a cop-out or playing for time. I think it’s less than 50 percent within the next year.

JUSTIN VOGT

Okay. Khaled?

KHALED ELGINDY

Yeah, thanks for having me. I would say also it’s less than 50 percent, but only slightly.

JUSTIN VOGT

Okay. Dan?

DANIEL SHAPIRO

Thanks for having me. It’s good to be with Shira and Khaled. I’d say it’s less than 50 percent of returning to a war anything like what we’ve seen for the last two years.

JUSTIN VOGT

Okay, interesting. So three very hedged but relatively optimistic predictions here. All of you think that there is a less than or maybe slightly less than 50 percent chance that we’ll return to war. Put another way, you think that there’s a greater than 50 percent chance that this cease-fire will hold for the next year. I want to ask you why that’s the case. Shira, tell me why, in your view, that’s the most likely outcome, just barely.

SHIRA EFRON

I think the key reason, it’s one word, it’s [U.S. President Donald Trump]. He seemed adamant about not stopping in Gaza and having the war. And he made it clear in his speech in the Knesset, he made it so clear that even [Israeli] Prime Minister Netanyahu beforehand tried to imply that this is (wink wink) an end of war but not really, and we’ll just do what we want to do and the United States will greenlight it. Netanyahu now admits it’s the end of the war following President Trump’s speech at the Knesset and visit to Israel.

I’ll just add another point that I think is a little bit lost to observers outside of Israel. The Israeli public for the most part at this point is against the war. The hostages, mostly the living hostages, being held by Hamas [were] a reason for many Israelis to justify why they’re still sending their mostly sons, but sons and daughters and brothers and husbands, to continue fighting. There is no real justification for people to continue serving beyond 700 days of war and risking their lives for a goal that they see now is still rather elusive: defeat of Hamas. Not that Israelis don’t want that, but it’s not as tangible as bringing back the hostages, and the living hostages did return home yesterday in a moment that was full of excitement and joy for the first time in two years in Israel.

JUSTIN VOGT

Interesting. Okay, good. Khaled, what’s your reasoning? Why do you think there’s a better than even chance that a year from now we’ll still be in something resembling a cease-fire?

KHALED ELGINDY

Yeah, I agree completely that it is really the Trump factor. And we’ve seen Donald Trump almost make a 180-degree turn from where he was when he began it seems like years ago, but it was only nine months ago when he came to power. And he came in, of course, there was a cease-fire that he pushed and tried to take some credit for, but then he made it very clear that Netanyahu was free to disregard the cease-fire after phase one if he felt like it. And at the same time, he was talking about clearing Gaza of Palestinians and building this bizarre Gaza riviera that was decidedly not for Palestinians.

And so he’s done a complete about-face in that time period. And I think that has a lot to do with the pressure and influence of Arab states, particularly after Doha—the Israeli strike on Doha—I think sort of hit home to him that, “Okay, maybe I don’t have to take everything Netanyahu says at face value. Maybe his ideas aren’t always that great.” And so there was that overreach, I think, really propelled him to pivot with the help, of course, of Qatar and other Arab states. And so I think at the end of the day, the cease-fire will hold for as long as Donald Trump wants it to. Right now it serves his interests, but it may not do that indefinitely.

JUSTIN VOGT

So the Trump factor again, but what exactly the Trump factor is is a little bit uncertain, as it always is. Dan, why did you give a similar answer? A somewhat optimistic answer.

DANIEL SHAPIRO

Well, it is tempered optimism, but I do agree with both Shira and Khaled’s characterization of Trump’s influence, very much with the turn that he made after the strike against the Hamas leaders in Doha and his sheer determination to declare the end of the war and put out a plan in a way that was sort of very unconventional in normal diplomatic terms, not really care whether people agreed with it, just to announce it and then kind of muscle it through. And obviously it came with a lot of leverage that he had on Netanyahu, who’s tied himself so closely to Trump, but also with the Arab states and with Turkey, very importantly, to use their influence with Hamas. So I agree with those characterizations and also with the fact that the hostage release very much removes the key driver of the war from the point of view of most Israelis.

Generally speaking, wars in the Middle East end messy. It’s rare that there’s a clear victory or surrender and somebody gets to determine all of the terms of the end of the war to their satisfaction. Exhaustion sets in. Certainly two years in, both societies are completely exhausted by this war. And so the promise of total victory, which was something that Prime Minister Netanyahu kept selling to his public, really became so elusive that to get the meaningful, very meaningful, outcome of the hostages released, but without all of his other terms being met—again very much under the influence and leverage of Trump—and Hamas too accepting terms that they had previously not agreed to under some pressure from Qatar and Turkey, I think is the dynamic we’re seeing.

Now, the reason my optimism is tempered is because while I think it’s less than 50 percent we’ll see a war, as I said, like what we’ve seen for the last two years, that doesn’t mean there won’t be any conflict. Israel may continue to conduct what it sees as counterterrorism operations on a limited basis, raids or a strike where they see a threat. Hamas, we know, has not been displaced from power yet, and that’s really critical. And the worry I have, of course, is that the seeds could be sown for another round of conflict.

Every previous Gaza round of fighting between Israel [and] Hamas has also ended messy, without fundamental things resolved. And when I was at the State Department on October 7 and was working on regional integration and had to somewhat put that portfolio to the side to handle the crisis and was asked to work on post-conflict planning, one of the immediate assumptions we established was that unless Hamas really is removed from power after an attack like October 7 and really disarmed in a meaningful way, there won’t really be a post-conflict. There might be a cease-fire. There might be lulls. But you could have the risk of another round lurking and [lying] in wait for the right conditions. And so I do have that concern, maybe not over the next year, but without Hamas’s removal and disarmament over the next years.

JUSTIN VOGT

I want to push all three of you on the Trump question here because you all mentioned it. And I have read many news reports and a lot of commentary that claim that Donald Trump pressured Netanyahu into accepting this deal, and you all sort of refer to some version of that. But I haven’t seen anyone explain what that means. Very simply, what I don’t know is what did Trump threaten to do or not do if Bibi didn’t play ball. I’ll start with you, Dan. Do you know what form that pressure took? Do any of us actually know the answer to that?

DANIEL SHAPIRO

What I think is somewhat unique about the relationship between President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu, and it’s really unlike any previous relationship between an Israeli prime minister and a U.S. president, is the degree to which the prime minister has tied himself and his political identity to President Trump. And he is not far from having to face the Israeli voters in an election that will occur sometime in 2026. His own popularity [has] actually very much been harmed by the war—dissatisfaction with the unpreparedness before the war, much management of the war, the seemingly not always prioritization of releasing hostages, and continuing the war for these elusive total victory war aims. And so I don’t know that President Trump had to threaten him with anything. I think in the case of that dynamic, it was enough to be concerned about public criticism, about essentially an instruction. Actually, there’s two occasions now, once during the brief war with Iran in June and again around the time of this cease-fire coming into effect last week, where President Trump over social media has just issued an instruction to Israel to cease its fire. And Israel, of course, followed up.

JUSTIN VOGT

So this is interesting. What you’re hypothesizing, Dan, is almost that unlike what we would conventionally see as a diplomatic relationship between a very powerful country and a smaller ally or even patron. What you’re describing almost sounds like Trump treating Bibi like a Republican primary candidate in a red state or something. That it’s less about withholding aid or any kind of policy threat and more about, almost like a campaign-style thing where, “If you’re running again, you’re going to want my backing, and I can hurt you with your voters.” Does that ring true to you, Shira? Is that how you see it?

SHIRA EFRON

I won’t go into the specifics of how Trump sees Netanyahu, but there’s clearly this relationship that was demonstrated during Israel’s 12-day war with Iran, when President Trump basically ordered 52 Israeli fighter jets and then he said the number, which would be otherwise classified information, as Dan knows very well, ordered them to turn back and not to strike. He also yesterday at the Knesset told the president of Israel to pardon the prime minister.

So there is this sense of freedom with instructing the Israeli government and different branches of the government to do what President Trump thinks is correct. But I 100 percent agree with Dan. I don’t think that there needs to be a threat or a leverage. What happened here, which was really interesting, and this is reportedly by a reliable journalist, that when Trump came up with his offer and Hamas gave an answer that I read Hamas’s response, and I said, well, they’re not compromising on any of their core positions. They’re saying what they said all along. They said, “We really respect what you said, but we want [the] end of war and a series of things.” We know that Netanyahu called Trump and said, “Look, they’re basically saying no. They’re saying ‘Yes, but.’” And after the “but” come all these conditions, and then President Trump decided to take the “yes” and with this interpretation basically locked Netanyahu in. And this is what’s happening here now with all the goodies that Trump gave Netanyahu, and this is including more meetings in the White House than any other leaders, including intense times where he needed the support of the United States to pass the budget here. This attack on Iran and the love for Israel and the hostages really, it’s basically a coercion through love if you want, and not through threats.

JUSTIN VOGT

Well, right. I would call it lots of carrots, but it’s not clear to me there’s much of a stick. And I think that’s important to note because I think a lot of the coverage seems to imply otherwise, that there was some sort of coercive threat. Your coercion through love or inducement is actually a lot different than the public image of Trump as this tough negotiator who’s forcing Netanyahu to do something he doesn’t want.

Khaled, what do you see here? Is there something coercive? Was there something that we’re not seeing?

KHALED ELGINDY

I generally agree, but I also disagree with both Dan and Shira. There isn’t an overt or explicit stick. There wasn’t a threat. I think maybe there was an implicit threat. I think Trump is unpredictable enough and similar enough to Netanyahu that maybe they recognize themselves in each other. And so they’re sort of close. They serve each other’s purposes domestically, but they’re not quite... I wouldn’t call it what Shira described as sort of the Biden bear hug, where you have to love them to death and then they will feel comfortable and take these risks for peace. And that approach has been a colossal failure for 30 years. We have 30 years of empirical evidence of that has never actually worked.

So I don’t think Trump was loving Israel or Netanyahu to death. I think he was saying, “Look, I need you and you need me, but I think you need me more than I need you.” And he simply bypassed him by getting out ahead of him and saying, “Here’s what it is. Here’s the plan.” And he even let Netanyahu have a whack at making the modifications that he wanted, but then he used that as leverage to lock him in. I think Netanyahu was genuinely surprised, one, when Trump pushed the plan with Arab and Muslim leaders. Second, when he accepted Hamas’s, “Yes, but.” I think he was genuinely surprised. I think he was certain that everyone would see Hamas’s, “Yes, but” [and] focus on the “but” and not on the “yes”.

And when Trump didn’t do that, he had to fall in line, but not because of a threat. I suppose it was an implicit threat. But he didn’t need to. The fact that he’s the president of the United States was enough to bring him in line. And that is something that [U.S. President] Joe Biden never did. He never used that leverage that he absolutely had, I think because he loved Israel too much. He was too emotionally and ideologically invested in a sort of mythological Israel that no longer exists, and he just couldn’t do what was needed to be done.

JUSTIN VOGT

I want to go back to this, “Yes, but,” and focus a little bit more on the “but” part of it from Hamas and stick with you for a second, Khaled. Like Israel, Hamas agreed to the hostage and prisoner exchange, but really left everything else open to negotiation. Now, it’s hard to imagine that the group will disarm or allow its tunnel network in Gaza to be destroyed, but that’s what the Trump plan calls for. Is this mostly a chance for Hamas to regroup and rearm?

KHALED ELGINDY

It could be. I think Hamas is going to take some time to figure out who and what they are now. This is a very different world. It’s a very different Hamas than the one that planned and carried out the attack on October 7. Its leadership has been completely wiped out. But even so, it still has managed to retain a kind of command and control. There is a leadership that is able to make decisions and execute them. They’re still able to recruit fighters. So it was never really in the cards that Hamas was going to be totally obliterated, but it’s going to be a very different Hamas. I think they’re going to... There’s going to be a soul-searching process. I think as part of that, there will also be some form of accountability internally, that in the same way that Israelis want to hold Netanyahu and the security establishment in Israel accountable for the failures of October 7, the security and intelligence failures, I think Palestinians will want to hold, especially in Gaza, will want to hold Hamas in some way accountable. And Hamas as a political movement that seeks popular support, they’re going to have to be responsive to that on some level. So we may find them more accommodating than we would expect.

That said, they’re going to want to pursue disarmament to the extent that they do within the context of a broader Palestinian consensus. They said as much in their “Yes, but” reply. And I think that’s wise because that gives them cover to do that, to disarm, gives them the political domestic cover, but it also puts some constraints on disarming because it’s not going to be very popular with Palestinians in general. Why would you disarm before Israel has agreed even to end its occupation and while it’s still carrying out military armed actions against us? So of course, if we give up all of our weapons, we become sitting ducks and vulnerable to this fanatical government run by [National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir] and [Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich] and Netanyahu, who openly talk about ethnic cleansing, who openly talk about pushing Palestinians out.

So it would be stupid for Palestinians to agree to completely disarm, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t some middle ground somewhere. But the idea is that they would be a completely helpless disarmed population in the face of a highly predatory occupier like Israel, I think, that’s a very tall order.

SHIRA EFRON

I think the question of disarmament [of] Hamas is really key and the sequence by which this happens or doesn’t happen. Because from the Israeli perspective, why would they take any risk, withdraw further from Gaza, and not actively use kinetic means as Israel has always done to disarm Hamas before there’s any change to the movement? Now, I think as analysts, analytically, many interesting things can happen to Hamas. The movement can split. It can change in many ways. The problem is the time. We don’t have the time for this.

And when we look at disarmament, the question is not just disarmament, [it is] disarmament and demobilization and reintegration into society. Those are big questions. And my fear is that our most successful example is the one of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Northern Ireland, and that took over ten years of a process finally complete after 30 years in the mid-2000s. So in a sense, this is where the question begins, and it’s not just the Hamas pretext against Israel or not. If we’re looking at the images from Gaza at the moment, Hamas is turning their weapons against other Palestinians who may have collaborated with Israel or otherwise. So this is a very, very, very complex question, and I think it’s going to be one of the thorniest going forward. And unfortunately we don’t have many positive precedents to indicate there’s a positive future ahead of us.

JUSTIN VOGT

Dan, do you share some of those concerns?

DANIEL SHAPIRO

I do. I think the importance and the primacy of the disarmament requirement is not only related to how Israel will react and whether it will follow through on what we want to see, which is complete withdrawal from Gaza and so forth. All of the other elements of phase two of President Trump’s plans are dependent on disarmament occurring.

All the good things we want to see—and again, we knew this as we were planning day-after scenarios during the Biden administration—getting an international stabilization force to come in to Gaza, getting reconstruction funds to start flowing from the Gulf and elsewhere to the tune of tens of billions of dollars, getting the Palestinian authority to start to have a presence and participate in the governance of Gaza in preparation for some reconnecting of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and getting Israelis and Palestinians on the road to a dialogue about their political future and the horizon that the 20-point plan says should include a credible pathway to a Palestinian state. None of those things will happen unless Hamas is reliably disarmed. As long as they hold the guns and hold the power in Gaza, I don’t see most of that getting off the ground.

KHALED ELGINDY

There is going to have to be some version of disarmament. The question is how far is that taken. What does that consist of? Who’s doing the disarming? What exactly are the weapons to be disarmed? It cannot be that there aren’t even pistols or light weapons, or you can’t have a police force. That’s not going to work. There has to be some authority with weapons. If that can be done in the context of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Palestinian Authority and the whole mantra of, “one gun, one authority,” to decommission Hamas weapons in trusteeship under the PLO umbrella and perhaps with Egyptian or other Arab supervision, that kind of an arrangement is something that Hamas might agree to.

The second point though is that disarmament as a concept is going to have to also be linked to Israeli withdrawal. That’s something Hamas is going to insist on, and it’s something that will make sense because otherwise Israel will never leave. They talk openly about remaining in Gaza forever. And so that, whether it’s Hamas or anyone else, if you’re a logical person, even if Hamas is totally disarmed, as long as there is an Israeli military presence on the ground in Gaza, some group somewhere will have an incentive to buy, create, or otherwise produce weapons to be used against that military occupation. Even if it’s not Hamas, something else will emerge. So it’s in everybody’s interest to link those two, so that if you want disarmament to happen, this is the surest way to ensure that it happens. That’s a very hard sell for Israel. That’s not going to be its obligations on Palestinians, but not on themselves.

JUSTIN VOGT

Shira, I wanted to go back to you and ask you a question about Israeli politics. You wrote recently in The New York Times that the deal represents a defeat of Netanyahu’s government’s messianic vision. You said it “directly contradicts what the government has sold Israelis for two years: the promise of total victory and the destruction of Hamas.” So tell me what you mean by that. Because to judge from the optics of the kind of spectacle in Israel on Monday, that is certainly not how the government is trying to spin this.

SHIRA EFRON

Of course, and the government has to spin this as a victory. And their victory is, “Hey, we were able to return all living hostages. Everyone said this would not happen,” but it’s not what we said. We said that if Hamas believes, and I guess they received guarantees, that the war would not resume, they may agree to do this under the right circumstances, and this has happened. There’s still implementation of the first phase of the deal. Some things [are] going to change [in] the next few hours, but so far the remains of only four of the 28 deceased hostages they were holding [have been returned]. So it’s not like Hamas is fulfilling their part, but from an Israeli perspective, Prime Minister Netanyahu, maybe not him himself, but all his coalition members were talking about voluntary migration, voluntary in quotation marks, of Palestinians from Gaza.

The Ministry of Defense set up a voluntary migration directorate with some staff. There was a discussion in the cabinet in September, working on operational plans to do this. So emptying Gaza of Gazans. There were ministers in the cabinet who were talking about resettling Gaza with the Jewish settlements going back to Gaza, but even more so. Of course, this [is] in addition to annexation in the West Bank, which is also related, a total defeat of Hamas, and a real estate bonanza in Gaza.

And so far, at least it looks, and I thank goodness for that, that President Trump put a hold on all of these things. Hamas is not going anywhere. They’re staying. They may change. It’s going to be hard work, and hopefully, Inshallah, will [be] able to transform it to a political movement that doesn’t pose threats to, by the way, the Palestinians themselves, but also to its neighbors. But Hamas [is] not going anywhere. And so far neither do the people of Gaza, unless, of course, they want to and there’s a country that’s willing to take them, which has always been the issue. But it’s not a forced smoke-them-out policy by Israel. So in a sense, Netanyahu has to spin this and say, “This is everything we wanted,” but in fact, it’s definitely not what his coalition vowed to achieve.

JUSTIN VOGT

Khaled, is that how you see it as well?

KHALED ELGINDY

On the quote, “voluntary emigration,” that was always a euphemism. Obviously, there is no such thing as voluntary emigration when Israel has systematically destroyed the entire means to sustain a society of two million people, from hospitals to roads to infrastructure to agricultural land, everything, virtually everything has been destroyed. So it may very well be that Gaza is already uninhabitable, that the two million people who live there now may not actually have a future there. That is a very, very real, maybe even probable, outcome of what [has] already taken place. So in that sense, I think Netanyahu has not failed. He and his fellow travelers Ben-Gvir and Smotrich have been wildly successful in annihilating Gaza as a place where human beings can actually live. So it may not happen in one burst, a million people over the border, but it will happen as a trickle or an exodus over time.

JUSTIN VOGT

Dan, I want to turn to you for a second and ask you a question about U.S.-Israeli relations. On Monday, Trump spoke at the Knesset, and even in his meandering style, the message was very clear that this was a win for America, it was a win for Donald Trump, and it was a win for Israel. But more broadly that the countries were aligned. They were sort of on the same team. But really to what degree are American and Israeli interests genuinely still aligned?

DANIEL SHAPIRO

Well, this relationship obviously goes back decades, and it relates not just to what happens between Israelis and Palestinians, which is important, very important, but relates to the threats that emerge from all over the region. Israel, of course, has had numerous actors in this Iranian-sponsored access. Iran itself, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, other militias threaten it. Hezbollah built a massive arsenal. Or, Iran helped them build a massive arsenal on its northern border. Iran itself was pursuing a nuclear program that could have easily produced a nuclear weapon. And we saw what Hamas did on October 7, and we’ve seen what the Houthis have done over the last two years with missiles and drones.

Those are all threats that also threaten U.S. interests and other U.S. partners. And in my judgment, that alignment remains, that we want to work together. We should want to work together to keep those threats at bay, to capitalize on, frankly, the use of Israeli and U.S. military power over the last two years that’s weakened many of those actors. But now using nonmilitary means, using diplomacy, using development, using the building out of that coalition of integrated partners that the Abraham Accords, [the bilateral normalization agreements between Israel and Bahrain, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates] represented, the [multilateral] Negev Forum [that brought together Bahrain, Egypt, Israel, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States], the possibility of Saudi Arabia normalizing its relations with Israel, all as dynamics that serve both U.S. and Israeli interests.

Now, those are not disconnected, of course, from Palestinian matters. We saw that the Trump plan, even though Trump himself has been of questionable commitment to a two-state solution as we have generally thought about it, included discussions on a credible pathway to a Palestinian state. That’s because the Arab partners that he needed to bring to this table, and Turkey and others, to help get Hamas to release the hostages, that’s very important to them. So these are dynamics that can reinforce each other if skillfully managed. But of course, that runs up against some of the challenges of domestic Israeli politics, of course, given the current government, and this uncertainty about whether Hamas is really going to be dislodged in a way that will allow the changes that we, I think, all want to see happen on the Palestinian side. So there’s lots that we still benefit from by working together as security partners and addressing these regional dynamics, but it doesn’t mean we agree on everything. And when we disagree, it’s perfectly legitimate for the United States to use the leverage we have, use the relationship, use the arguments we can bring to bear to try to change Israeli policies that we think should change.

JUSTIN VOGT

One emerging obstacle, it seems to me, is changing attitudes in the U.S. electorate. And I want to ask you all to reflect on this a little bit. The Times recently did a poll that had some pretty striking findings, including, it said, that in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks, “American voters broadly sympathized with Israelis over Palestinians.” 47 percent sided with Israel, 20 percent sided with Palestinians. Today, according to the Times, that has changed a lot. It’s now “34 percent said they sided with Israel and 35 percent with the Palestinians.” Thirty-one percent said they weren’t sure or they backed both equally. Another really striking finding from that survey to me was that 40 percent of American voters said that “Israel was intentionally killing civilians in Gaza,” which is nearly double the number who had agreed with that in 2023. So there’s the question of U.S. interests and Israeli interests in a kind of geopolitical sense, but there’s also these political realities. I wonder, what do you make of those changes and what sort of challenge does that pose both to the Israelis but to any American government as well?

DANIEL SHAPIRO

There’s no question that the traumas of this terrible war, that has caused so much suffering on all sides, are being reflected in some American attitudes. Now, we’ll see whether that persists at least in those numbers once the war is over, once hopefully we’re in a phase of some kind of reconstruction and some kind of better pathway for the future that could moderate that. But it’s something that clearly has to be addressed. In some ways, I think the fact that even the Trump administration in partnership with these Arab partners is putting on the table that all these elements are linked, that building this regional dynamic of integrated partners to address common threats is linked also to addressing the Israeli-Palestinian future in a way that meets both Israel’s security needs—and of course, they’re acute, and Israelis feel them acutely after October 7—and Palestinians’ needs for self-determination in a state of their own.

And so there’s the potential to have our own public as well as those partners in the region see that those can be combined in a certain way. So I don’t think that this is all to the negative, but it’s going to require work. It’s going to require, I think, a bipartisan commitment of that in the United States. I think it’s going to require the Israeli government and public to understand that those are linked in some ways. But I think one of the things that’s important to bear in mind as we have this debate, including by those who are now more skeptical or even more negative about the U.S.-Israeli partnership, is what would be the impact on U.S. interests and U.S. influence in the region if we were to see that partnership really go through a major decline?

And I think it would cost us very dearly with Gulf partners, with Egypt and Jordan versus the common adversaries of Iran and its axis. It would create significant openings for our competitors, Russia and China, to find footholds. So we should bear those in mind. I don’t know if that’s something that will resonate in opinion polls when people feel strong emotions as they understandably do, but those are critical strategic aspects of keeping that relationship working to our own mutual benefit, even while we try to address these other problems.

JUSTIN VOGT

Shira, I’m interested in hearing what you think of those changes in American public opinion, but also more broadly, I’d love to hear you tell us a little bit about how much that matters in Israel, both to the government and to ordinary Israelis, but more broadly about this question of Israel’s isolation internationally, or the sense that the country and its conduct of the war in Gaza has come in for a lot of criticism. How important is that to Israelis? And I’m sure you can distinguish between various groups of Israelis, but to what degree does that resonate in Israeli society and politics?

SHIRA EFRON

Of course, [Israelis feel] that Israel is a small country. It’s export dependent. It depends on investments from abroad. The relationship that gets most attention is Israel’s relationship with the United States, but in fact, it’s the European relationship that makes Israel what Israel is today. Europe is the number one investor in Israel. Israeli academia will not survive without the Horizon [funding] program of the Europeans. Israel’s also in sports activities and cultural activities connected to Europe. So definitely it is felt.

However, there is not an unbased suspicion in Israel that the motivations and anti-Israel inclinations are rooted in anti-Semitism, both on the left and right, and it’s Europe—there’s a history there. So this is something where it’s convenient, I think, for some Israelis to say, “Well, they hate us anyway whatever we do.” In terms of the region, there is this idea that they keep buying weapons from us, and once the war is over, the region will want us to integrate. I’m skeptical about this. And for Netanyahu himself, he really views, him and his advisors, they really view the international community as stretching between 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., to Capitol Hill. That’s it. That’s all they have.

And so I think this is a very limiting factor. There is an assumption in Israel, and this is the assumption that Netanyahu and [Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs] Ron Dermer have expressed in different circles, that in the last few decades, at least, Israel is always unpopular during wars, but it resurges after a war and becomes popular again. I think that this time it’s different. We have not seen pictures like that from Gaza. It’s not just the death and the humanitarian situation, Khaled, I think with me, I’m not going to go back to stuff you said. Of course, it’s not voluntary migration. Of course, Gaza is in a catastrophic condition, but it’s the basic lack of dignity for the Palestinians that I think is really heart-wrenching for people around the world to see.

And this is something that I don’t think where Israel is going to resurge, unless, of course, and we don’t know, it’s too early, there’s a different Israeli government that expresses some regrets, or at least acknowledges how badly this war has gone. And it’s too early to say.

There is an understanding in Israel that Israel turning into such a partisan issue, which it wasn’t in the past in the United States, changing views in public opinion, changes not only in the Democratic Party, in the Republican Party itself and the MAGA, where the left meets the right, in a way that it’s going to be detrimental to Israel’s security, because if there’s one thing that Israel always counted on it’s U.S. support. It’s not just the arms, it’s the access. It’s the diplomatic cover. And without that, it’s going to be very, very, very difficult for Israel. There are voices to talk about it, but in the last two years, that’s not what is front and [center].

KHALED ELGINDY

So I think the shift that we’ve seen, first of all, has been underway for a long time. It’s been accelerated and intensified after October 7. But we’ve seen these trends, certainly in the Democratic Party, this growing partisan divide, younger generations, especially not identifying with Israel in the same way that older generations had. And of course, only time will tell. But I think there is something irreversible about the trends that we’re seeing.

As Shira said, the images that we’ve seen, we cannot unsee them. You have now an entire generation in this country, but not just in this country, but all across the western world that has been politicized, if not actually radicalized by what they’ve seen in Gaza over the last 740-some days. And it’s very powerful. There’s a reason that 43 percent of Americans believe that Israel is committing genocide [according to an August 2025 YouGov/Economist poll]. It’s partly because Israel is on trial for genocide in the International Court of Justice, and that trial will go forward. And the fact that Prime Minister Netanyahu and his former defense minister both have arrest warrants. These are things that we have never seen before. Those cannot be undone. Those trains have left the station. There will be a genocide trial, and most likely it will find Israel guilty of genocide because that’s where most of the experts are. And that is something that doesn’t sit well with ordinary people. Watching people queue in line for food and being shot, not once, not twice, but every day for weeks. This is not collateral damage. This is by design.

Forty-some percent of Americans, the percentage that you pointed out of Americans, who believe that Israel is deliberately targeting civilians, that is not by accident. That’s because that’s where the overwhelming evidence is. We see it day in and day out. So that’s something I think that is irreversible. How that will play out politically, we don’t know because there’s an enormous gap between where rank-and-file Americans are and where their political leaders are on a range of issues. This is now one more.

Adjacent to that issue is the question of accountability. There will have to be accountability. We cannot simply pretend that the last two years didn’t happen or that it was somehow normal to watch an entire society be completely erased, to watch starvation being used as a weapon consistently from day one. That’s not normal, and that cannot be normalized. And so if we want to see stability in addition to disarmament, stabilization forces, aid, and reconstruction, accountability is a very, very important piece of that equation.

Otherwise, if people don’t feel like there is some form of justice, then you will get armed groups who will find their own form of justice, and there will be more motivation. The kind of trauma that has been created in Gaza and for Palestinians across the board will last for generations, not years, but for generations. So it’s really important, if we’re going to talk about stabilization, that accountability for all of these crimes that we all saw happen on some level.

JUSTIN VOGT

Can I just jump in and push you on one thing there, Khaled? Let me play devil’s advocate a little bit here. You said that this sort of thing is not normal and shouldn’t be normalized. When I’ve thought about analogies to this conflict, Shira, you mentioned the IRA earlier, the Troubles in [Northern] Ireland, the one that has often come to mind for me is Russia’s war in Chechnya. You’ll recall that in the 1990s and early [years of the 21st century], Russia was at war with Chechen separatist militants, many of whom were jihadists.

And the approach that first [Russian President Boris Yeltsin] and then [President Vladimir Putin] took was essentially to obliterate Chechnya. Grozny, [the Chechen capital], was reduced to rubble. And at the time, many people made the argument you’re making now. And I remember thinking it was quite compelling and persuasive that I should say tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed in that conflict, whether it was intentional or through total indifference, I don’t know. And the argument at the time was, “You can’t do something like this because it will come back to bite you. It’ll backfire.” In fact, today, Chechen jihadism and Chechen separatism [are] gone. The leaders are gone. The movement is gone. The human cost was massive, and the moral price was incredibly high. But it’s arguable, I think you could say that it achieved its goal. Why is that outcome unthinkable in Gaza? What would you see as the main difference?

KHALED ELGINDY

Well, we have the whole hundred-year history of the [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict to instruct us. I think if you were an Israeli leader in late 1948, you would have come to the conclusion [that] there is no more Palestine problem. It’s finished. And if you were an American official, and in fact, American policymakers did come to this conclusion, “Okay, that thing that was a problem during the British mandate, this communal conflict between Arabs and Jews, that’s not a thing anymore. Okay, now we have a humanitarian problem of all the [Palestinian] refugees, what do we do? Okay, we give them food and schools and medicine and jobs training. But the issue is finished.”

And I think a lot of people in Israel might have the same views about Gaza, especially if Gaza becomes emptied. “We’ll be done with the problem once and for all.” But it’s actually the beginning of the problem and not the end of it. I don’t know enough about Chechnya and Russia to speak intelligently about it, but everything that we know about this dynamic between Israelis and Palestinians suggests that this is going to remain. In the same way that Israelis aren’t going to forget what happened on October 7. That will be passed on for generations. And not just by the people immediately who lost loved ones or whose family members were abducted. It’s part of the collective trauma.

Now, multiply that by a thousand, and that’s what Palestinians are going to carry. The stories—the people who are growing up today in these displaced, in the tents along the shores of Gaza—that those children, when they grow up, they’re going to be telling their grandchildren these exact same stories. So this is not going to go away. Maybe in the future there can be some sort of truth and reconciliation process because at the end of the day, Israelis and Palestinians aren’t going anywhere. They are cursed to live side by side in one form or another. But the point is that some form of accountability, whether it’s these international mechanisms or it’s some truth and reconciliation, there has to be some accounting for these atrocities. There has to be.

DANIEL SHAPIRO

Listen, this has been a devastating war. It started with the devastating October 7 terrorist attacks. It became a war that followed, and I don’t equate the two, but the suffering is enormous. The suffering is real. The trauma is real. And I agree with Khaled, it will have long-lasting effects. So there’s plenty of room for good-faith criticism. And that is, I think, again, part of that responsibility in the U.S.-[Israeli] relationship with the United States to work with a partner to achieve better outcomes.

While doing that, it’s also, I think, important to recognize what they were up against: a terrorist organization that not only conducted the October 7 atrocities but was so fully embedded within the society of Gaza, including virtually every civilian infrastructure, that it’s very hard to disentangle those two, tunnels everywhere and under almost every institution, the use of schools, hospitals, et cetera. And so that was a unique challenge for any military to address. Again, not to say every decision made was correct, and there should be accountability within the Israeli military justice system where their own standards have not been reflected.

One of the critical challenges of getting the discussion of a credible pathway to a Palestinian state, something in the plan, something I support, something I think needs to be part of this, onto the table is to address where the Israeli public has moved on this question. The idea of a two-state solution was already in decline in terms of support among Israelis and Palestinians before October 7. But of course, it’s cratered for Israelis now, who understandably wonder if a Palestinian state on the West Bank or in Gaza could become the site and the launch point for a similar type of attack, but maybe affecting the whole country.

So addressing that Israeli societal concern is going to have to be part of this. And that’s why I said earlier, I think it’s going to take longer and it’s going to look different to get to that outcome that we, I think, want, which is Israelis and Palestinians both living in full self-determined [sic] and states that are at peace with each other. But I don’t think these international structures of a search for accountability, which tend to be very one-sided and not take into account the full measure of what happened, is going to help us get there. I think there are better ways to address those questions in, as I mentioned, U.S.-[Israeli] discussions and internal Israeli processes.

SHIRA EFRON

We do have to acknowledge this war, this round, started with the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, and it’s continued with the mass killing and the worst displacements of Palestinians since the nakba. One doesn’t negate the other. And we can’t compare numbers, but Dan said the trauma is real. And I think if I’m trying to connect this into the public opinion conversation that we’ve had before, it’s true that the global support for Palestinian rights has risen substantially. And even in the idea of [a] Palestinian state, and we have multiple recognitions. But on the ground, you could argue that the Palestinians are as far from a state and from effective governance of their own territory and from dignity and from the security that I too believe that they deserve, as far as they’ve always been.

And Israel, on the other hand, has become the de facto security guarantor of the Middle East. It’s changed the Middle East. It’s in a far better strategic position vis-à-vis Hezbollah, which was always Israel’s main adversary. Hamas, part of the reason that October 7 happened is that Israel always thought Hamas was not a real threat. Changes in Syria showed Iran is not ten feet tall. But on the other hand, Israel is weaker globally and isolated more than ever. And so I think for both, if we don’t turn this horrible, horrible, horrible tragedy into a diplomatic initiative that benefits both sides, which will take time. And yeah, granted the Palestinians are in a different place, this is going to be a huge, huge failure.

And I just have to add, because Justin, you played devil’s advocate on Israel’s response to the October 7 massacre, I’ve heard Israelis say that, Israeli officials and Israeli defense officials, there was a point in the way that Israel reacted to show that you don’t start wars with Israel. Definitely don’t start them the way you started on October 7.

I was against many of the things that happened, certainly against Gaza. But even when we talk about striking Hezbollah and striking Iran, those were things that I think people like Dan and I would be like, “Are you crazy? You’re going to light up the Middle East? The Tel Aviv skyline will disappear.” But the fact is that Israel has shown that with being so bold, it does change the Middle East in ways that could be for the better. That does not mean that the pain in Gaza and the destruction [isn’t] real, and this is something that Israelis... These are going to be our neighbors. At the end of the day, Israelis are not going anywhere. Palestinians are not going anywhere. The suffering of both sides would have to be acknowledged across the border for both sides, I think, to move on. And I hope we can start with that sooner rather than later.

JUSTIN VOGT

I think we’re going to close there. And I’d only want to point out actually that what’s interesting to me about the arc the conversation took was that although you all started from a place of relative optimism about this particular deal, by the end of the conversation the things we were talking about were the very reasons why we generally turn to pessimism when confronted with this conflict. And so there’s a bit of a bitter irony there that I hate to end on a downbeat, but I think it’s worth pointing that out.

Khaled, Shira, Dan, thank you all very much. We really appreciate you coming on the show.

DANIEL SHAPIRO

Thank you.

SHIRA EFRON

Thank you.

KHALED ELGINDY

Thanks for having us.