Amir Avivi
Subject: Defending Israel
Bio: Retired Israeli Brigadier General, Chairman of the Israel Defense and Security Forum – ISDF, and author of No Retreat: How to Secure Israel for Generations to Come
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and history. Today’s topic is Defending Israel.
Our speaker is Amir Avivi who is a retired Israeli Brigadier General and the Chairman of the Israel Defense and Security Forum – ISDF. Amir is the author of a recent book entitled No Retreat: How to Secure Israel for Generations to Come.
I want to learn from Amir about why he thinks that Israel should encourage the Palestinians to govern themselves using city states instead of a single state sovereign. In addition, I want to discuss why Amir believes that Israel’s previous negotiating position was flawed and that going forward that Israel should focus foremost seeking borders that can be easily defended with its neighbors and with the Palestinians.
Amir, please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
Amir Avivi:
My passion is how to secure Israel for generations to come. This is what I dream about and do every day. This is a people that has been expelled from its land four times: the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Romans, and the Muslims. 2000 years in the diaspora, persecuted, pogroms, and the Holocaust. We miraculously managed to build Israel. The only question that matters: what is needed to secure Israel for generations to come? There isn’t a single think tank or government in Israel that gave a clear answer to this question. This is what we do at IDSF -- Israel Defense and Security Forum. In the last six years, it has become one of the most impactful organizations in Israel, shaping our hearts and minds and emboldening Israel to win the war.
Larry Bernstein:
Core to your book is rethinking peace negotiations with its enemies with Israel’s national security in mind. You don’t have borders on a line on a map. You look and see is this a defensible border. Why hasn’t this approach been applied in the peace negotiations?
Amir Avivi:
In the army, they teach us if you want to build a plan for war, you need to do it with the right priorities. Usually when two Israelis start arguing, one minute later, one will say, “So, what’s your solution?” They don’t even agree on the problems. You cannot go to a negotiation without a clear understanding of what is needed to secure something that came from Mount Sinai.
Don’t mix up your values with problem solving. We are the people of Israel. This is the land of Israel. It’s our land. We are the ancestral people of this land, and you do not give up your values to deal with the problem.
Trying to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, when some Jew says about the land of Israel, that it is occupied by the Jews, he has sold his values. He doesn’t believe that we are the ancestral people of this land.
I am a son of a very distinguished diplomat. My father was Israel’s ambassador in Chile, Colombia, and Turkey. I am all about diplomacy, but I do not mix my values with problem solving. We cannot be expelled from our land again. We do not know the challenges in the future. The land of Israel is in a nexus between Africa, Asia, and Europe. It is also religiously one of the most important. There will always be a fight over the land of Israel. And if the Jewish people want to exist, you need to figure out what are the defensible borders.
Larry Bernstein:
Could you define the problem?
Amir Avivi:
It is managing to bridge our existential long-term needs and a solution that will not require us to annex two million Palestinians in Judah and Samaria. You have more than half of the Jewish-Israeli society saying, “They all want to kill us. They are our enemies. We need to live along defensible borders. We need to settle the mountains of Judah and Samaria. This is the Bible belt. This is our connection.” And we oppose two states. Then there is the other half saying, “Yes, but we want to be a democracy. We don’t want to annex millions of Palestinians because this goes against Zionism. We need a majority in Israel of Jews to be a Zionist country.”
The first half is right, and the second half is right but disregarding what the other side is saying. And what we do in IDSF is managed to bridge between the need to ensure security and prosperity. The nation that has been around 3,700 years needs to be able to think a thousand years ahead. The good thing about thinking long-term is it goes beyond petty politics, beyond the questions people deal with today.
Larry Bernstein:
In the recent week, there have been protests in Iran and the regime has been shooting protesters. Do you think the Iran regime is about to be toppled?
Amir Avivi:
We are witnessing now is different from the 12-day war. The 12-day war was focused on military capabilities, the nuclear sites, ballistic missiles, air defense. It was a pinpointed attack with no aim to topple the regime. It showed to the world and the Iranian people that this regime is a paper tiger. They are much weaker than what they seem. And this emboldened Europe to reestablish harsh sanctions on Iran and get out of the JCPOA, but it also awakened the Iranian people that this regime is weak. We saw Israeli airplanes flying over to Iran.
This regime cannot provide water or electricity. The currency is completely broken. Iranians want a change of regime. Everything that is going on in the Middle East, Iranians doing the buildup of Hezbollah, all these militias. There is a crystal-clear understanding in the U.S. and Israel that this regime needs to go.
Why isn’t the US attacking? And the answer is simple. U.S. is a huge carrier. From decision to action, it’s not Israel. Israel can decide in the evening and in the morning attack. The U.S. is different. In the Second World War, in December 1941, the U.S. decided to join the war. But the first attack on North Africa happened 11 months afterwards. It takes time. This regime will be toppled.
Larry Bernstein:
All governments have a thin veneer. It governs based on the will of the people. A regime’s survival depends on the population agreeing to participate. When you say that the government of Iran is a paper tiger, what does that mean?
When we think about the strength of a government, whether it controls the sky is not imperative. Many governments do not control their skies. Denmark does not control its skies. Estonia does not control its skies, but the people in Denmark and Estonia want their governments to rule them.
In Iran, I saw some videos where their security forces were shooting protestors at will. That upsets people. They do not want their kids killed. You mentioned other issues. The currency is valueless. The economy is sour. They cannot build a world for their children that makes economic, security and freedom. It’s hard to believe that a US military force will be the catalyst that topples this regime.
Amir Avivi:
It’s almost impossible to topple a regime from the air. It happened in Kosovo, but it does not happen a lot. The combination of the people’s uprisal with an attack on the regime will topple the regime. The Iranian people are determined. They cannot do it alone. They need help. And the combination between help and their resolution will bring this regime down.
We must destroy their nuclear program and air defense. But this attack will also concentrate on forces that are shooting the Iranian people. When you want to topple a regime, you must hit the leadership.
You have to destroy their symbols and the centers of control and government. It’s a whole different planning and takes time. This regime needs to fall. It’s a danger to Israel and the whole globe.
Larry Bernstein:
The axis of evil countries is weak. Iran, Russia, and Cuba are weak. Each of these nation states employ a global strategy. You got the Russians goofing around in Africa. You got the Iranians engaging with the Venezuelans and the Moroccans, but they cannot even do the most basic functions of a society. The Cubans are dark seven hours a day, and yet they are sending doctors to Namibia. What motivates their global reach when they cannot provide basic functions at home?
Amir Avivi:
One of our generals Gershon Hacohen wrote an interesting book called What is National About National Security? People tend to look at national security as if it’s something technical. No, it’s all about vision. Countries like Russia, Iran, Turkey, are very proactive all over Africa and Pakistan and different places. They culturally believe they need to go back to be empires. Turkey is all about building again the Ottoman Empire. Same goes with Russia. Iranian the Persian empire who want to go back to the glory when they dominated big parts of the world. And in the Iranian case, it’s also a religious issue. They believe every single person in the world needs to be Muslim, Shia, or be a slave to them. They need global domination. This is about religion.
In the West, there is a tendency to disregard religion. Especially about the Middle East, if you don’t understand religion, you cannot understand anything that’s going on. Religion is the major factor that motivates decision-making.
Larry Bernstein:
The Europeans specifically seem to be most oblivious to that. I don’t mean in 12th century when they did the crusades. But in France, they don’t even look at religion in statistics or collect that information. They deny religion as a critical factor. When they look at peoples around the world and say, why can’t you people just work this out amongst yourselves? They seem not only oblivious but opposed to it as a framework to analyzing the problem.
Amir Avivi:
These countries 20 or 30 years will have probably be a majority Muslims. They will go to civil wars or completely change. The problem is not what France understands about the Middle East. It is what France understand about what is going on inside France. These countries have no future. They don’t understand that. They are dead. They are done. Maybe now it is too late, I don’t know. They will learn a big lesson, what religion is, and culture is all about.
Human nature is all about culture and religion. You see today, the rise of the right-wing parties in Europe, there is an understanding that something is very wrong. President Trump talks to England, France or Spain saying to them, “Listen, guys who are destroying your countries.”
Larry Bernstein:
They were shocked and horrified by those comments.
Amir Avivi:
They will be more horrified when they’ll see is right. It’s a big problem because these groups are not assimilating. They’re not becoming part of the European culture. If you had groups coming and then the next generation saying, “We’re part of this amazing liberal democratic country.” Great, but it’s not happening. It’s the other way around. The next generation are becoming much more radical than their parents. And this is a phenomenon that is growing in Europe. It’s a big danger to these countries.
Larry Bernstein:
I want to go to your point about how they’re going to wake up one day and recognize that the society they have is not what it thought. I want to use a metaphor about Israeli society. The right and the left couldn’t agree on first principles as it related to national security 40 years ago.
During the Intifada, recognizing the Palestinians as a threat changed. The peace parties lost the Israeli public to the point of it being a trivial minority now of the population. It took some change, a threat, the lack of national security, it’s that epiphany that we’re in a different state of the world. The West has not recognized what’s going on even within Israel.
Amir Avivi:
All Israel is for peace. We greet each other when we meet with the word “Shalom,” peace. Jewish culture is all about peace, but the left didn’t bring us peace. It brought war and devastation. And the number of Israeli civilians killed or injured in the last 30 years following Oslo is 20 times more. But 30 years ago, Israeli media was completely monolithic and dominated completely by the ideas of the left.
Today, Israel has completely changed. Social media has changed everything. IDSF which I started six years ago with eight generals, and today has more than 55,000 Israeli officers, commanders, and operators has completely changed the public sphere. Today you have the voice of officers and commanders who are much more connected to reality to the needs for Israel to be secure. And now Israelis hear these voices, they are empowered by them.
Israeli society is moving strongly to the right. We have big challenges. We will deal with these issues. I do not know if France, Spain or Britain are able to deal with the huge challenges that are with them in the coming years. Israel will thrive.
Larry Bernstein:
You come from a diplomatic family, but you have a military background. There is an old expression that if there’s a military solution to an Israeli problem, they’ll take it. If you ask the Europeans, if they have a military option, they will take the diplomatic one. You are concerned about the way that diplomats are worried. The way you describe the problem, the words that you use are carefully selected. How you describe people or place, especially important, and I think that comes from your diplomatic background. I assume that your father would be incredibly careful on his word choice, and you picked up on that.
Amir Avivi:
Definitely. My father has a huge impact on my way of thinking. I’m a strong believer in peace through strength. It does not matter what peace agreements will do because the war in the Middle East, it is all about religion. If there will come a day when Israel will be weak. If the countries around us think that they can destroy us, even if we have a peace agreement, they will destroy us because religiously, Islam cannot accept a Jewish state.
Larry Bernstein:
Is it because it is in the Middle East? Are they willing to accept it if it is in Europe? I am wondering about how Islam thinks about non-Islamic nations globally.
Amir Avivi:
Both Christianity and Islam took the Jewish Bible, how strange it is. They recognized that the Jews are the chosen people of God. But then they said, yes, you were chosen, but you made so many problems God finally got upset and now there is a new covenant.
Now it’s the Christians who are the chosen people. But then came Islam and said, we recognize that the Jews were the chosen people. And then for a while Christians became the chosen people. Now we are the chosen people. But when you see the Jews rising again, and the prophecies of the Jewish people becoming a reality coming back to the ancestral home, just as the prophet said, and every year that passes, Israel is becoming stronger.
Today, it’s becoming a global power. Israel’s economy has surpassed some of the biggest economies in the world. Israeli society is 10 million people. This undermines Islam. They cannot accept a reality where their basic identity based on the idea that there are the chosen people is being undermined.
The only way for the Jewish people to thrive is to be strong and proactive. And when you are strong, then you can have peace agreements, but you must be connected to reality and alert because even when we sign peace agreements, then they will think about other ways to undermine us. It is not going to stop. We cannot be naive. We must seek peace. We must seek relationships. We are on the verge of extending the Abraham Accords.
There will be peace agreements that will extend all the way to Indonesia. But I was a deputy division commander in the Gaza Strip, and I want to give you an example. They would ask me, “Colonel, what’s going on in Gaza?” And no matter what went on in Gaza at that time, I would answer the same. I would say from the day of the Judges in the Bible, same thing, Gazans attack us, we attack them back again and again and again. Same dynamics. You read the Book of Judges, you look at today, nothing changed.
At the end of the Book of Judges, after many wars with the Gazans, including the famous story of Samson, it says, and the land was quiet for 40 years. So, our rabbis asked, why does the Bible need to state that? Every sentence in the Bible has a deep meaning. And the answer is that 40 years of quiet in the land of Israel is an event of biblical dimension. It never happened in 4,000 years. We can achieve peace and maybe it will last 40 years, but we need to build our national security in a way that takes in account that peace is never lasting.
We need a national security strategy that ensures that if there is a war and when there will be a war, we will manage to deal with this. We cannot lose a war. If we lose the war, we will not exist.
Larry Bernstein:
10/7. What motivates a leadership to put themselves in a situation where they will be destroyed? What are they doing? This does not make sense.
In retrospect, how can you explain the behavior of the Hamas leadership to pursue this attack?
Amir Avivi:
My wife woke me as soon as the war started, 6:30 in the morning. I understand after a minute that Hamas is attacking. And the first thing I am thinking is, why isn’t Hezbollah attacking? Why isn’t Iran attacking? What we envisioned in IDSF was a multi-front simultaneous attack. We knew the Iranians, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthis met multiple times to coordinate. And I thought “Maybe Iran is thinking that launching Hamas alone would be enough to disrupt the normalization with Saudi Arabia, which was about to happen. And maybe they are keeping Hezbollah intact because they do not want to lose both organizations. They do not want to take a chance on Hezbollah because that defends Iran, they need Hezbollah. Later, I heard another explanation, the fact that Israel has penetrated completely Hezbollah and that they were afraid that if Hezbollah knows about the attack, Israel will know about the attack. So maybe this is an explanation and maybe it’s a miracle.
When I saw just Hamas attacking, I said, “Okay, what are these guys thinking?” I mean, it is devastating what they are doing, but it will take a day, maybe two, maybe three. We will kill all of them on our side. We push them back to Gaza. And then what?
I realized that they believe they will survive this. They do not care about how many houses are hit or if we kill thousands. It’s meaningless to them. They believe that with all this huge underground city they have, which the Air Force cannot hit, that looking at Israel with the political system broken, five elections, Israelis fighting each other over judicial reform, army not functioning, they believe we will not be able to deal with them. So, maybe we launch some pinpointed operation and maybe months later, the world will stop us. They could have not imagined Israel fighting for two years amid pressure continuing to fight, determined to destroy them.
Larry Bernstein:
I had a podcast on urban warfare with a UK professor Anthony King, and he said that the Israeli losses will be astronomical in a city environment. I tried to push back and say, “If time is on your side, you can go house to house.” the number of Israeli casualties is so much lower than the expectation going in. Do you think that may have reflected their strategy that they thought they could make it so painful for the Israelis that they would sue for peace and not only their shock, but a shock of military analysts globally, that this was such a successful tactical approach.
Amir Avivi:
They said if we take more than 200 hostages, this will completely paralyze Israel. Israel will not be able to function. And not only the hostages didn’t stop Israel for fighting, it became the reason and the legitimacy internationality to fight. They understood that these hostages are not assisting them. They are a burden.
At the beginning of the war, we amassed 300,000 soldiers outside of Gaza. And there was a big question, are we going in or not? And the U.S. sent the experts to talk with the prime minister, the minister of defense, the chief of staff that said, “Thousands of Israeli soldiers are going to be killed. Don’t go in, cut your losses, finish the war.”
At this defining moment, Prime Minister Netanyahu invited us for a meeting. I came to the headquarters of the army, eight generals came. As we were sitting outside, I was thinking to myself, it feels to me like a Churchill moment when Churchill was elected, when the Nazis conquered all of Europe, the British army surrounded the darkest moment for the British people.
Churchill stood in the Parliament and gave this amazing speech talking about victory. They are about to lose. And he is talking about fighting on the beaches that we’re not going to stop. There is no surrender. We are going to win. And he uplifts the British people, and they go to fight five years until they win the war.
I was thinking when we go inside the room to speak to the prime minister, it is not just about giving him the right advice. It’s all about spirit. I see him sad, pale, and tired, a devastating moment for the prime minister. I said to him, “Mr. Prime Minister, I cannot even imagine how you feel. It must be devastating. But listen, you must not feel like that. You are privileged. I wish that I were sitting in your chair. You were chosen to lead Israel in its most defining war. You were chosen. All your life has prepared you for this moment.
We got a huge opportunity to change everything for Israel and the Jewish people. And the generals told him, “We know the commanders, we know the soldiers give them the command. When they go into Gaza, nothing will stop them. Amid this failure, we know what the IDF can do. Two days later, he gave the command to go into Gaza.
And from that moment onwards, we started our journey towards the biggest victory in the history of the Jewish people. And this victory will come in a few months.
Larry Bernstein:
The Israelis have won the military victory.
Amir Avivi:
Not entirely yet but we are going to finish the job.
Larry Bernstein:
Trump described the catastrophe and said, there’s rubble in Gaza. What is the path forward? There is still two million people living there. Now what?
Amir Avivi:
First, we need to finish the job. We are controlling 53% of the Gaza Strip. Hamas is controlling the rest. It is rebuilding its capabilities. It is getting stronger. I do not see any scenario where an outside coalition force goes in and dismantles Hamas. Only the IDF can do it. The IDF has prepared the plan. They are waiting for the cabinet to give them the command to go into Gaza City, the camps. The remaining places where Hamas is controlling.
First stage, we need to destroy Hamas, dismantle them, and completely demilitarize the Gaza strip will take a long time. Even in the areas Israel is controlling now, we still have not found all the tunnels.
There are areas in Gaza we have not operated in at all because there were hostages that we did not want to endanger them. But now there are no hostages alive, and we can operate freely everywhere. We need to destroy Hamas. And following the destruction of Hamas, as it was planned in the 20 points of President Trump, there will be a different government managed by the U.S. probably based mostly on the local clans. We are already working with clans. There is a clan controlling Rafah and another one controlling Khan Younis and another one controlling Deir el-Balah. So, the local clans are starting to work with Israel.
The issue of the clans, not only in Gaza, also in the Palestinian cities in Jenin, it’s a very good long-term solution. The clans of Hebron, for example, they joined together like 400,000 people and gave Prime Minister Netanyahu a formal letter saying, we want to be recognized as an emirate, like a city state, and we want to join the Abraham Accords. We want to detach from the Palestinian Authority, which is a terrible terror organization. I think a city-state is a good idea. It seems as if Israel is embracing this idea. There will be no Hamas, no Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and no Palestinian authority.
The only viable solution is built on the local clans. This is the right way also culturally to manage things like Abu Dhabi, which is a highly successful model.
Larry Bernstein:
One of the lessons you were highlighting was Sharon’s decision to allow the Palestinians to completely control Gaza meant that the Israelis were completely blind as to what was happening there relative to what was happening in the West Bank, that these IDF was embedded effectively in these towns and making it impossible to build tunnels in those cities. What does that mean going forward as it relates to disengaging with the Palestinians?
Amir Avivi:
When we started Oslo, at the beginning, we did not pull out of towns. We did not give up Philadelphi corridor with the border with Egypt. We gave the Palestinian authority control over the cities: Gaza, Rafah, and Khan Younis. We said, “You manage these places. We don’t want to be there.” And we took a decision that will turn out to be devastating. We are not operating in these cities at all, ever. We are not going in. And what happened was that they took advantage from the fact that we were not operating.
We are talking about the Palestinian Authority not about Hamas. The moment we left Rafah and they controlled it, they started building massive amounts of tunnels connecting the Gazan side of Rafah to the Egyptian side. This started in ‘94. In ‘97, I became a combat engineer officer of the Gaza division. In the two years I was in the Gaza division ‘97 to ‘99, I found 35 tunnels on Philadelphi, which they dug.
What is the lesson? We need to control the border to prevent massive smuggling of weapons into Gaza, and we need freedom of operation. Without that, Israel will not deal with the buildup inside these places.
When I talk about the land of Israel from the sea to the river, the overall responsibility security-wise needs to be Israeli. You can have local civil management, you can have Emirates, you can have trade and economy. But security-wise in this small land from the sea to the river, it is 45 miles. You can have only one entity taking care of the security of this place, and this is the State of Israel.
Larry Bernstein:
I like to end each of my podcasts on a note of optimism. What are you optimistic about as it relates to the security of Israel?
Amir Avivi:
I’m very optimistic, and I’ve been saying that from the 7th of October, at the most devastating moment. I said that night to the Israeli people on national TV, yes, it’s devastating, but we are going to win this war, and the bigger the more decisive this win will be, the greater the golden age of Israel will be the day after. In a few months, there will be peace agreements. And the Israeli economy, which is already booming. Israel will become a corridor of energy and the trade, and there will be a great era economically. Israel is going into a golden age.
On the other hand, antisemitism is rising everywhere. Many Jews will see Israel as the place to be in. And also at the birth rate, we spend a lot of time in the shelters, many babies on the way.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Amir for joining us.
If you missed the previous podcast, the topic was Getting on a War Footing. Our first speaker was Seth Jones who is the President of the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies – CSIS. Seth wrote a new book entitled The American Edge: The Military Tech Nexus and the Sources of Great Power Dominance. Our second speaker is my good friend David Susser who is the President of HEICO Distribution Group which is a leading company in commercial and defense aviation.
We discussed how to get on a war footing to compete against our adversaries by reducing delivery times for weapon systems by changing our procurement processes and outsourcing production to our key allies to reduce costs. We also chatted about the growing role of venture capital in the defense industry which is driving military armament innovation.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website
whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, goodbye.
Check out our previous episode, Getting on a War Footing, here.
