It’s been almost a year since Oct. 7. More than 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza are dead. The hostages are not all home, and it doesn’t look like there will be a cease-fire deal that brings them home anytime soon. Israeli politics is deeply divided, and the country’s international reputation is in tatters. The Palestinian Authority is weak. A war may break out in Lebanon soon. There is no vision for the day after and no theory of what comes next.
So I wanted to talk to David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker. Remnick has been reporting from Israel for decades and has a deep familiarity and history with both the region and the politics and the people who are driving it. He first profiled Benjamin Netanyahu back in 1998. In 2013, he profiled Naftali Bennett, the politician leading Netanyahu in polls of who Israelis think is suited to be prime minister. And he recently profiled Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas in Gaza.
In this conversation, we talk about what Remnick learned profiling Netanyahu, Bennett and Sinwar, as well as where Israel’s overlapping conflicts with Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, Hezbollah and Iran sit after nearly a year of war. Remnick and I were both recently in Israel and the West Bank, as well as near Israel’s border with Lebanon, and we discuss our impressions from those trips.
Remnick joined me for a conversation on my podcast. This is an edited transcript of an excerpt from the conversation. For the full conversation, listen to “The Ezra Klein Show.” or watch the video at the top of this page.
Ezra Klein: Who is Yahya Sinwar?
David Remnick: Yahya Sinwar is, for all intents and purposes, the leader of Hamas in Gaza and has been for some time, and at this point, the most powerful person in Gaza and the decider for Hamas, and has been for quite a while.
He’s now, so far as we know, underground and has been since Oct. 7 and communicates with the outside world and his Hamas colleagues by runner and by written message because he doesn’t trust electronic communications.
But where does he come from? What was his early life like? How do you become Sinwar?
Yahya Sinwar’s parents were from what is now called Ashkelon, which was a Palestinian village up the coast from Gaza. And in 1948, they fled to what is the Gaza Strip, and they settled there. And Sinwar, who’s now in his early 60s, was a religious kid. He grew up in a particularly religious family.
And when he was a university student at the Islamic university, he attached himself to Sheikh Yassin, the founder of Hamas. And Sinwar found himself appointed to be one of the leaders of something called the Majd. The Majd would be Hamas’s morality police and also, most important, the organization that would root out, prosecute, torture and kill people who dared to collaborate with the Israelis in Gaza. And Sinwar was known to be a particularly ruthless head of the Majd in southern Gaza. He’s from Khan Younis. And Sinwar was arrested by the Israelis and put in jail in the late ’80s. And there he remained for the better part of decades.
And in Israeli jail, he decided with a great sense of determination — because he wanted to be a leader of Hamas and was committed to armed struggle — he learned Hebrew. And he learned it perfectly. He read Israeli papers. He watched Israeli television. He became incredibly familiar with and fluent in Israeli society, language, politicians. He read memoirs of security chiefs, prime ministers and all the rest.
One thing I heard from a lot of Israelis at different levels of Israeli society was that they feel he understands them, and they don’t understand him. He’s talked about using prison as a sort of study hall in the Israeli psyche. What did he learn?
An academy, I think, is the word he used. He wrote a novel, too, by the way. He wrote a novel about his experiences called “The Thorn and the Carnation.” Obviously, it’s a very self-justifying novel. It’s not a particularly brilliant novel, but it’s an extremely interesting novel to read.
He writes it in prison and has it smuggled out while he’s in prison.
Bit by bit, yeah. We know that this novel exists because it was on Amazon for a while. And after Oct. 7, there were loud protests against Amazon. By the way, an employee of Amazon was one of the hostages. And they took it down, but it’s still floating around the internet.
And I found it fascinating. It’s not a great literary novel, but if you want to know something about Yahya Sinwar, it’s very much worth reading. And it’s a portrayal of the making of himself — how he became this political leader, military leader, terrorist, strategist, what the roots of his politics and fury are. And they’re rooted in his family’s exile, obviously as Palestinians from where they lived originally in Palestine into the Gaza Strip. They’re rooted in his witnessing close at hand the 1967 war, which everybody around him thought was going to be a great victory. And a week later, it was a humiliation. Same thing in 1973.
There are long passages about Sinwar and his schoolmates being taken by bus to visit Israel inside the Green Line, including a visit to Jerusalem. And this overwhelming experience, however romanticized in the rearview mirror, of visiting Al Aqsa Mosque and also where Salah al-Din, the great Muslim military leader and political leader who had victories against the crusaders — he asks at one point, rhetorically, in this novel, Who will be our great Salah al-Din? — clearly, at some level, at least how I’m reading it, posing himself as a possible answer to that question.
You might imagine the leader of Hamas is somebody whose experience is waging war against Israelis, killing Israelis. But his experiences, at least before prison, appear to be in killing Palestinians.
I don’t think he had any compunction about killing Israelis, too.
My point is not that he’s full of mercy, but it is to say he says to this dentist at some point that he’s ready to sacrifice 20,000; 30,000; 100,000 Palestinians in order to obtain ——
That’s right. You’re referring to a dentist named Yuval Bitton, who lives on a kibbutz and was a dentist in the Israeli prison system. And Bitton struck up a relationship or vice versa with Sinwar, and he had lots and lots of conversations with Sinwar. And so have many other Israeli visitors to those jails, and there have been numerous interviews, even semi-recent interviews with Sinwar. He is not a figure who’s one of extraordinary mystery.
I think in jail, the most important thing that happened to him that helped shape events was the increasing awareness on a tactical level that the taking of hostages was effective.
In fact, I discovered a document, thanks to the help of my colleague Ruth Margalit, in his police file that showed that he and one of his cellmates tried to engineer the taking of Israeli military hostages from their jail cells through the use of his brother, the other guy’s brother. And the plot was foiled and found out. So that was Step 1.
Then came the really pivotal Gilad Shalit kidnapping. Twenty years ago, you had a situation where members of Hamas came across the border, the fence, and kidnapped, in a raid, a young Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. One. Brought him into Gaza. And for the next five years, while Shalit was in the hands of Hamas, Israeli society was obsessed with this case. There were demonstrations on the street — not entirely dissimilar, not the same scale as that you’re seeing now. And finally, he was released for a thousand Palestinian prisoners. One of them was Yahya Sinwar.
And Sinwar is part of the negotiations over this.
He was. And he was the most hard-line of the negotiators. In fact, he was holding out for much more than a thousand.
They put him in solitary confinement.
To isolate him from the negotiations.
To be able to do the deal.
By the way, Netanyahu is the politician who released a thousand prisoners under tremendous political pressure.
And I feel like there’s a deep historical irony in this, the sort of devaluing of Palestinian life becoming a devaluing of Israeli life. He’s released because he’s not killed Israelis. He’s killed Palestinians.
Correct. But many of the Palestinian prisoners who were released were in prison for planning or the blowing up of buses or cafes — all kinds of horrific crimes.
This is one of the bits of this that I am surprised Netanyahu has survived. This whole moment goes back to a deal that confirms the value of hostage-taking in an incredibly lopsided negotiation, and releases the mastermind of the Oct. 7 massacre and the hostage-taking.
Not just Sinwar, but any number of the people released became very important figures in the Hamas leadership — some of them now dead, killed in the last year.
How has Israeli politics, society, absorbed that? How has it shifted the systems’ understanding of how to think about the hostages now?
There are so many ironies in this that we can’t even begin to count. I’m always going on about this, but I think one of the things that needs to be kept in mind is how many contradictory truths and narratives and tragedies are going on all at once. And this is one of the awful parts of this thing: There is an inability or a refusal of all sides to take on all the painful truths that are presented to them.
So if you’re an Israeli, you are not seeing what’s going on in Gaza every night, not on Channel 12, not on 13 and certainly not on 14, which is the kind of Fox News station. You’re seeing military operations. You’re seeing the military spokesman taking an embed of some correspondents into the Philadelphi Corridor near Rafah. Much more, you’re seeing lots and lots — understandably — about the hostages, about internecine political battles, street demonstrations.
The only outlet that’s publishing a lot about Gaza in Hebrew every day is Haaretz. But that’s a newspaper that now reaches a lot of people here, probably a lot of liberal readers in the United States and English-speaking countries, but it’s a modest readership.
But in Israel, do you not know or do you not want to know?
It’s more the latter.
So Sinwar now lives underground communicating by messenger. He had an extraordinarily successful lethal attack, but Gaza is destroyed, tens of thousands of people dead. In your reporting, what is his theory of this now? What is Hamas’s theory of this now? He might be fine dying a martyr, but Hamas is not going to rule over there.
Let’s be clear — Yahya Sinwar is unavailable for comment. I certainly have not talked to him for this piece or anything else. But if we accumulate all his collected speeches and interviews and look at them and review them, it’s very clear that he sees himself as a great actor in a great historical struggle in which — and he has said this not just to interrogators but to Palestinian comrades and academics who know him; I talked to all kinds of all manner of Palestinians, including people in Hamas — that he saw himself engaged in this great historical drama. And, as you said earlier, if 20,000 or 30,000 or 100,000 Palestinians have to die for the liberation of Palestine — and the liberation of Palestine also in his view repeatedly means the elimination of what we now know as Israel — then so be it.
But when you talk to some of these people, did they feel that there was a way this leads to the liberation of Palestine? If that’s the goal, what is the intermediate step here?
I think part of what distinguishes this part of the world is that there are political actors on both sides who are fantasists. Fantasists with guns. And in Gaza, not that long before Oct. 7 — a couple years before, I forget the date — there was a conference sponsored by Hamas, sponsored by Sinwar, about what taking over would look like. And there were all kinds of speeches and very specific plans about what would happen on the day after Israel was eliminated and Palestine was liberated in their terms. What should we do about the Jews? Should we kick everybody out or kill them? Or should we keep the ones that are really valuable, who are doctors or advanced computer programmers? That conference of the hereafter took place — that was on the level of fantasy.
I think it’s fair to say that when he unleashed his soldiers on Oct. 7, he might have hoped for any number of things — even deeper penetration into Israel. But it was basically a suicide mission to spark something even larger, if possible.
What he was operating from was a sense that nothing is happening. We are still here in Gaza, living the life of the oppressed. Palestine is not free. The West Bank is in the circumstances it’s in. Meanwhile, the Israelis are negotiating, through the good offices of the United States, with Saudi Arabia, the Abraham Accords, and it’s ignoring us. We need to blow this up and — in their terms — hope for the best that Hezbollah, militias from the Houthis, Syria, Iraq and maybe even Iran will join the battle and the final answer will come. But short of that, we will have exploded Israel’s sense of the status quo. I think that was what it was about.
What is happening on the northern border of Israel?
Remember, Oct. 7 was Oct. 7. That was an attack from Hamas. Something happened the next day, on Oct. 8, which is that Hezbollah began to attack northern Israel.
Hezbollah is a Shiite group, heavily militarized, infinitely more sophisticated than Hamas, infinitely better armed, and it obviously doesn’t have the sense of isolation. And in fact, in a relatively failed state of Lebanon, its power there is immense.
So this has been going on for years. Americans old enough to remember even during the Reagan administration that Hezbollah killed hundreds of Marines. It is a real threat.
But what you have right now is a depopulated northern Israel and a constant back and forth — which is, again, an absurdly bloodless word to describe what’s going on — but a back and forth that’s limited, somewhat controlled between Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and northern Israel. I know you’ve been there, as have I. Those towns in northern Israel are ghost towns. Small kibbutzim, Kiryat Shmona, other places like it, are empty, just as a lot of places in southern Israel have now been transformed.
Israel has shrunk. In a strategic, geographic sense, Israel — already a tiny state — has shrunk.
Some of the interviews I did with people who had lived up there — whose family had now been living in a one-bedroom hotel room somewhere else for, you know, seven months — their fury was palpable. And their question, which they kept posing to me, is, What is supposed to make them feel safe enough to go back? Some of these people on the border, they say, Look, I can see Hezbollah. And to me, Oct. 7 now feels like a coming attractions preview.
They can see them. I was in a little village called Metula, and without binoculars, you saw the yellow and green flag of Hezbollah. And on a daily basis, there was mortar fire, there were Israeli air raids, bombing raids. This is untenable. And it’s worth remembering, Ezra, that in the very early days, post-Oct. 7, there was a big push in the Israeli leadership to go all out on two fronts, not just against Hamas in Gaza, but in the north as well. This was a big push and, I think, an underplayed story to some degree.
Remember, the United States placed enormous military hardware in the region to head off — nothing having to do with Gaza so much as an expansion of the war into Lebanon and Iran or wherever. And I get the criticism of Biden-Harris in many ways. I really do. But it’s worth remembering that in the early days, the first weeks, Joe Biden said the following: We sympathize with you. Israel has the right to defend itself. However, don’t make the mistakes that we made.
[Archived Clip] Joe Biden: You can’t look at what has happened here to your mothers, your fathers, your grandparents, sons, daughters, children — even babies — and not scream out for justice. Justice must be done. But I caution this: While you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it. After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. And while we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.
A very clear reference to the misbegotten Iraq war and, to some extent, Afghanistan. Don’t do that. Don’t act out of a sense of rage. That was very carefully said in the first week. And at the same time, behind closed doors, there was a lot of pressure on the Israelis not to go full force into Lebanon. And a lot of Israeli political figures and military figures believe that was a mistake to have listened to that counsel.
This seems to be a mistake that Israelis now want to correct. A number of things have happened here, but one thing is that it has just been announced recently that the return of Israelis to their homes in the north is now an official war goal. There’s a very strange bit of news, where thousands of Hezbollah fighters were injured when all of their pagers blew up, suggesting that Israel has been circulating these, I guess, working pagers that then could be detonated. It’s a little hard to say what happened, but it’s interesting.
Members of the Israeli military and political class are speaking much more of going into Lebanon now. Sixty-seven percent of Jewish Israelis in an early September poll say the government should intensify its response to Hezbollah. There’s talk of Netanyahu firing his defense minister, Yoav Gallant; it’s not clear if the reason or the pretext is that Gallant has been in opposition to a full-on invasion of Lebanon.
I think Gallant also recognizes that the vaunted Israel Defense Forces proved that it was deeply flawed on Oct. 7 and that it is now exhausted. It’s suffered losses. Forget the criticism from abroad — that the idea that they’re now going to wage war in Lebanon is something that Gallant objects to.
By the way, Gallant is no superhero in my mind, but he plays an important role here. I just don’t know what’s going to happen on that, on that front. This is something that changes hour to hour.
This gets also to, I think, a deeper ideological dimension. Every single Israeli I spoke to believes the real enemy for them is Iran. And functionally every threat they face from Hamas, even more so Hezbollah, Houthis in a smaller but unexpected and significant way ——
And they don’t think it because they have a rich imagination. They think it because for years and years, the leadership of Iran has made it absolutely plain in its rhetoric — and in its actions — that its intentions, the reason for being, for the state, to some degree, is the future elimination of the State of Israel. It’s part of the national project.
Now you may be dismissive of that and say, Oh, that’s just rhetoric. That’s just for the street or something like that. But I think — I don’t know about you, Ezra, but the longer I live, the more it seems very sensible to listen to what people say, whether they’re Israeli or from Iran or from wherever. It often turns out to be quite true.
The thing that has been surprising to me on the other side of this — and I think militates against the view of Iran as an implacable, hyper-ideological adversary — has been this sort of caution on both sides about escalation. That includes with Hezbollah, which has rockets that could go much deeper into Israel and has not been trying to do primarily civilian targeting.
There was a sort of exchange between Iran and Israel. Israel committed an assassination on sort of Iranian diplomatic soil. Iran launched drones that were knocked out of the sky. And both sides stopped more or less. So on the one hand, there is a sort of tit for tat that has not exploded. And on the other hand, this to me was what Israelis felt we most did not understand about them. Because it looked to us, in America, like they are Goliath against the Palestinian David. And they see themselves as locked in an ongoing multigenerational war against a patient adversary who strikes at them from all directions using all kinds of different clients and may one day — in fact, one day soon — have nuclear weapons.
I was speaking to somebody named Hussein Agha, who was a negotiator for the P.L.O. back when, in the sort of better days. Very sophisticated guy. And he said, look, to some extent, Sinwar — and it’s a horrible thing to say, but on a pure level of consequence — Sinwar won this great victory that he had hoped for immediately.
What do I mean by that? And I say this, whatever the opposite of relish is — disgust, despair — that by shattering the Israeli sense of security, by exposing the weaknesses of the Israeli military, or the degree to which it’s overextended — that it’s not some mythological institution that could fight on infinite fronts. By arousing the fury that you see in the West Bank, rather than a kind of terrible resignation, by arousing Hezbollah and, by extension, Iran, or the other way around, into action, by tripping off a set of events in which Iran, for the first time, directly sets missiles off toward Israel, well, in Sinwar’s mind, that’s an enormous victory.
In his mind, whether he survives this or not, he makes good on this deal with himself that I mentioned in his novel, about being — however fantastical and grotesque — the Salah al-Din of his cause.
Here’s the piece of this that I found perplexing. I understand a lot of the argument — and believe it — that Israelis make about Iran. At the same time, if I thought I was facing an existential threat from a soon-to-be nuclear regional power with an imperialistic past and grand strategic ambitions and deep ties to Russia and China, my international alliances would be extremely important to me. My alliance with America would be extremely important to me. Europe would be significant to me. Other places. And at the same time that there is this emphasis on the long-term, multipronged, multilateral threat of Iran, there is this recklessness I see in Israel in terms of how it is seen internationally, in terms of how it treats partners like America.
I think the way Netanyahu has treated his American partners — not just the Biden administration, but for many, many years — has been astonishing and cynical. He has lied to and betrayed, at certain instances, for years, American presidents. And it’s unbelievable.
Bill Clinton, remember him leaving a meeting with Netanyahu, and he said out loud, wait a minute, who’s the superpower here? He wasn’t kidding around. Barack Obama, whom Netanyahu loathed, extended himself to such a degree that Netanyahu made his cynical speech at Bar-Ilan University, hinting that he might be for a Palestinian state. It was all a sham.
And I really recommend — there’s a new film about Netanyahu that Alex Gibney’s Jigsaw Productions just did. I think they premiered a rough cut of it at the Toronto Film Festival. I’ve seen it. And at the heart of it is a subject we haven’t discussed, which is Netanyahu’s motivations, his political, personal motivations for the way he’s behaving to keep himself in power.
And behind it, to some extent, are the corruption charges that are leveled against him. And he knows that the longer he stays in power the more attenuated those charges get and the more he can escape them. And you see in this film, so vividly the dismissiveness and the arrogance, the worn-outness of Netanyahu and the outlandish sense of entitlement and embattlement of Sara Netanyahu and the MAGA-like rhetoric of Yair Netanyahu, the son, who sounds like somebody who’s just never off of Truth Social, going on and on about how the Israeli people, and particularly the media, are ungrateful, and it’s like North Korean media. It is proof positive that to stay in power for too long corrupts and corrupts and corrupts until you are your worst version of yourself.
You did a great profile of Netanyahu in 1998. And you spent time with his father, which is quite rare for a journalist. Sometimes you go back and you read a piece like that and you think, my God, how this person has changed. And what I thought when I read that piece was, my God, how this person has not changed. Put aside the corruption — though I’m not saying that’s not a part of his motivations. Put aside his own politics. What do you think Netanyahu believes of the situation itself?
Bibi Netanyahu’s father, Benzion Netanyahu, was a scholar, and in some ways felt himself to be a scorn scholar of the Spanish Inquisition. He was a follower not of mainstream labor Zionism but rather a follower of what’s called revisionist Zionism — much more conservative, an ideology developed by Jabotinsky as opposed to Ben-Gurion and so on. Long story.
When you say revisionist Zionism, what was it revising?
It was revising, in a sense, what was considered mainstream Zionism. The revisionist Zionists felt that they were too compromising. And they felt the State of Israel should be not only in the West Bank of the Jordan River but the East Bank. They were essentially looking for as much territory as possible, not because they were unaware of the presence of Arabs in Eretz-Israel, the land of Israel, but because they felt that that was a menace and they needed as much land as possible. And therein lay the, the most essential difference.
At every turn, the ideology of the old man, Benzion Netanyahu, was that the worst thing you can be is a friar. A friar in Hebrew means a sucker. Oslo was the ultimate in being a sucker. He didn’t believe in even the partition plan of 1947 that Ben-Gurion accepted, however reluctantly, as, OK, at least we have a state.
Any compromise is thought to be a betrayal of the Jews and Jewish history. And all of it informed by an intense knowledge of and feeling about everything from the inquisition to the Holocaust.
Bibi Netanyahu’s brother, Yoni, was the one Israeli killed at the heroic 1976 military operation that went to Uganda and brought back Israeli hostages from their P.L.O. captors. This family history weighs on Netanyahu and shapes him, I think entirely. Without becoming an absurd psycho historian, it’s just obvious. And Netanyahu sees himself in Churchillian terms — only I have the political sagacity and shrewdness, only I have the realistic view of Israel’s circumstances in history. Only I can lead this country. And it was corrupting. It was intellectually corrupting, morally corrupting and, even on the level of champagne, cigars and ice cream, it became corrupting.
So, I think ideologically he’s the same guy. But I think he became himself — as they say about aging, you become yourself only more so. And the anti-democratic aspect of him and the lust for power allowed himself to make common political cause with followers of the worst and most extreme current of religious nationalism. The followers of Meir Kahane. And I’m talking now about Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are vile creatures. They’re thugs. They’re not just annexationists and extremists. Their background — they were in trouble with the law. Ben-Gvir couldn’t serve in the military; he was in so much trouble with the law.
The guy who runs the police forces, just to be clear.
Yeah, he runs the police forces that have a lot to do with how the West Bank is run day to day.
EZRA: Smotrich controls a lot of the finances in the West Bank.
It’s horrific. And this is Netanyahu’s latest bargain with the devil, and it’s corrosive to Israeli society. Corrosive is not nearly a strong enough word.
This is an excerpt from my conversation with David Remnick for “The Ezra Klein Show.” In the rest of the conversation, we discuss what it was like reporting from Israel and the West Bank, as well as near Israel’s border with Lebanon; Remnick’s 2013 profile of Naftali Bennett, the man many Israelis see as most likely to be Israel’s next prime minister; the shifting fault lines of Jewish-Israeli politics; why Israelis prefer Trump to Harris; and more.
You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
The post Israel vs. Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran — and Itself appeared first on New York Times.
