On today’s episode of International Horizons, Ralph Bunche Institute Director John Torpey speaks with Jodi Rudoren, editor-in-chief of the Forward magazine, about the situation in Israel and Gaza.  She notes that Hamas’s incursion into Israel on October 7, 2023, shattered the paradigm of how Israel and even the Arab world understood what Hamas was all about.  The result has been a deep sense of shock and mourning among Israelis for those who have lost loved ones or had them taken hostage.  At the same time, some Jews reject the massive Israeli response and are protesting against it.  Meanwhile, many progressive Jews in the United States have found that their allies in social justice efforts have proven not to be on the same team when Israelis are the targets of violence.  Despite all the violence and heartache, it nonetheless appears that the conflict might lead to a political solution – the only one that will allow Israel and the Palestinians to live together on the small strip of the Middle East that they inhabit.

International Horizons is part of the New Books Network of academic podcasts. Subscribe to the RSS feed or find it on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. A lightly edited transcript follows below.

John Torpey 

The war between Israel and Hamas has divided friends and families around the world, raising difficult questions about causes responsibility and accountability. Divisions within the Jewish population over these issues in the United States and elsewhere, seem as frequent as they are among the broader population, if not more so. How do Jews think of themselves and their political commitments in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks of October seventh? What about Israel’s response, which is provoking protests and opposition from the streets of Israel to the halls of the State Department?

John Torpey 

Welcome to International Horizons, a podcast, the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly and diplomatic expertise to bear on our understanding of a wide range of international issues. My name is John Torpey, and I’m director of the Ralph Bunche Institute at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. And we’re fortunate to have with us today Jodi Rudoren, who’s editor in chief of The Forward, and has been since September 2019. She’s just she’s a veteran journalist who spent more than two decades at the New York Times, including nearly four years as its Jerusalem bureau chief. She’s also appeared on CNN, MSNBC, and other news outlets to comment on the Israel Hamas war. And as fate would have it, she also lives in the same North Jersey town where I live. So it’s great to have you with us. Thanks for joining us today, Jodi Rudoren.

Jodi Rudoren 

Thank you. It’s great to be here.

John Torpey 

Thanks a lot. So let’s start with a very basic question. What happened on October 7 2023 that unleashed the dogs of war. And what do you think was the was Hamas his aim on that brutal day?

Jodi Rudoren 

It’s interesting, John, I wrote a column a couple days afterwards that said everything I thought I knew about Israel and Gaza was wrong. And during the time that I covered the conflict intensively for the New York Times in the decade since then, we’ve been in this kind of cyclical situation, with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and particularly with Israel and Hamas, and other armed groups in Gaza, we’ve seen this is now the fifth war between Israel and the armed groups in Gaza starting in 2008, and 2009. And the thing is, though, this is totally different, even as it’s rooted in that pattern. And the reason is because of two real reasons about October 7. The first is the breaching of the fence between Israel and Gaza is a paradigm shattering event. It changes Israel’s and Israelis understanding of their relationship with their neighbors of the threat from their direct neighbors of the proximate threat and of the, I guess, in this case, uselessness of the barriers they had thought that they had put up there thinking they would contain those threads. And then the scale/scope and sheer barbarism of that attack also was something that nobody–not anybody in Israel, not anybody in the Arab world, not anybody who watches this conflict–really thought would be possible there would happen.

Jodi Rudoren 

In terms of why did Hamas do that? I mean, the best reporting I’ve seen on that is by my former colleagues, Ben Hubbard, and Maria Abi-Habib in the New York Times. And they did extensive interviews after the attack with Hamas leadership, who essentially described it as a kind of suicide mission for the movement. Essentially said, they knew that doing something of this scope and scale would unleash a response that could kind of end their own lives, but also the ability for Hamas to function anymore certainly as a political entity, but also as a as a militant or armed group, terrorist group. And they did it anyway because that’s how desperate their situation had become or how dysfunctional they are or all of those things together. So…I but I think that the key thing that we all have been grappling with, I think, for six weeks or seven weeks now really is that this thing we thought we understood, it has the same roots we understood but its condition had substantially and dangerously changed in ways that we missed that we did not really understand.

John Torpey 

Right. I’ve always had the sense that the brutality was intentional. I mean, if we think of Clausewitz and this war as a continuation of politics by other means, this is an attempt to elicit a certain response from Israel. And of course, that has been large scale bombardment of Gaza. So, I’m sort of wondering what you think about this analogy that’s been drawn between our 9/11 and October 7? And what kind of response has come from both the government, which is rather clear, but perhaps less clear is what the population in Israel is thinking,

Jodi Rudoren 

Well, I first before we get to the 9/11 analogy, I just want to pick up on something that you said about the brutality. Because I think that the motivation to breach the fence and enter Israel, and even the idea of killing a lot of Israelis, do seem to me to be, I guess, explainable within the context of the movement and its goals and the situation. But the brutality that we have seen, and I watched the 45 minutes or so film that the IDF put together of the of the images that Hamas themselves filmed in their own GoPros and also that security footage, the brutality that we see there of the way–and what we also know from other sources about rape and beheading, and the filming of one grandmother’s killing and posting on our own social media network, the attempt to cut off the head of a (I think it was a) tie worker with a garden hoe– those things are not explainable, in my view, by anything, they are barbaric and beyond really sort of comprehension. And we did not see that on 9/11, I guess it’s worth saying it. I mean, obviously, they chose a different method on 9/11; you don’t you don’t, you know, brutally abused children when you fly a plane into a building. But I do think it’s worth calling out that that particular brutality is a thing that happened on October 7, that we shouldn’t forget.

Jodi Rudoren 

In terms of the comparison, though, look, I guess I would say two things. One is, I think, similar to the way that Hamas had what would happen if it did this large-scale attack on Israel? It knows its enemy very, very well. Similarly, I think Al-Qaeda might not have known exactly what the U.S. response would be because nothing like this had ever happened before, but certainly did it knowing that there would be a massive response and that it could threaten their very existence, but that the, I guess, message or impact was in their warped minds worth it.

Jodi Rudoren 

I think the other way that people talk about this, as Israel’s 9/11 has to do with the impact on the society, as you referenced. And first of all, the scale of the loss is much larger in terms of proportion to the to the population, then 9/11, maybe 20 times the size, I think. And there’s the hostages who remain in captivity and who have been tortured and causing a hard experience for those families and everyone around them. In Israel, people have continuing to kind of live through that pain every day and the brutality. So I would say both the scope and the intensity of the losses is probably more significant on the tiny interconnected society of Israeli Jews in particular than what happened? Maybe it’s comparable to New York on 9/11. But I do think one thing that is just almost exactly the same for those of us who lived through 9/11, it was paradigm shattering. We certainly did not imagine that anything like that could happen for a while, we thought there were going to be similar attacks on American landmarks like the Golden Gate Bridge, or the Sears Tower or Ellis Island or the Mall of America. I was covering the Midwest at the time and we were like, vigilantly waiting for someone to hit the Mall of America. And so many things that we now take for granted like security at the airport and things like that are… we’re totally changed, our perception of our own security was pretty radically changed by 9/11. We of course continue to be very much buffered by two big oceans and Israel is not buffered by anything except for this defense that failed it so it’s different but similar.

John Torpey 

So I know it’s been a while since you were times bureau chief in Jerusalem, but I’m sure you have lots of great contacts there. And it’s very hard to get a sense of exactly how people are responding. On the one hand, there seems to be a lot of sense of existential crisis on both sides of the ethnic divide, and there’s also plenty of Israelis who seem to be very critical of the policy that the Israeli government has taken, of course, going back to the business about the judicial reform, but continuing in terms of the policy towards Gaza. So I wonder how you assess what people are feeling over there?

Jodi Rudoren 

Yeah. So I’m headed over there myself in about a week. So I’ll have a better answer for you when I’m not on this podcast, but you can read about it in The Forward. But look, I would say, the people I’m talking to and hearing from pretty much every day, the thing that is most common is just a feeling of anguish deep pain, fear, anger. There is both… It’s a lot of things at once. I mean, it is an incredible sense of loss; loss of like, everybody I know, knows, people who are killed on October 7, people who are kidnapped on October 7, and people who are deployed right now. Everybody knows one or more of each category. So everybody is like really in it in a way that is a little hard to understand when you live in a big country like America.

Jodi Rudoren 

Number two, just as I wrote “Everything I thought I knew was wrong.” I mean, people’s sense of how this works, how they are meant to interact with Gaza and Palestinians, what could possibly happen in the future? The things they thought they were pretty clear on now feel shaken and uneasy. People in Israel, wrongly, have been thinking they could ignore the Palestinian question for a number of years for the last five difficult election cycles, it has not been a prominent issue. They clearly know that is not the case now. And I think people are struggling a little bit to figure out what a credible endgame could possibly be to this situation, and how they’re meant to feel. They thought that existential threat was only the idea of Iranian nuclear weapons, and they now see  if there is terrorism growing in the West Bank, and Gaza, that can do this kind of damage, then they’re imagining of what a life in Israel was going to be like, it’s no longer really possible. So things are really, really pained and confused. There is also alongside all of that, a sense of resolve, and a sense of unity as happens generally in war. As I said, everybody has people on the frontlines, so there is some idea of standing behind that. And there is a lot of unity and communal support for particularly the hostage families, but also the families who are mourning people who were killed on on 10/7. And I guess the last thing is, as you mentioned, this came after a year of the most divided, open political rebellion that the country has seen in its history: A year of protests of the most right-wing government in Israel’s history, and those fissures and open debate about the country’s future and the priorities have not gone away; they have been set aside. So many of the leaders of the protest movement, the democracy movement, sprang into action on October 7, and October 8, and October 9, and have have now created this kind of volunteer civil command. They are leading the country in a very organic and day to day kind of way. And I just edited this morning a personal essay by a Jerusalemite who went on Saturday night to what used to be called a protest and now it’s called a rally. And it used to be shouting about democracy and judicial reform and it’s now quieter and about supporting the families of the hostages and those in mourning, but it contains within it a sense of “okay Netanyahu, just finish this war but we are not going to just let the country continue as it was before.” So we’ll see what happens when the when the fighting quiets.

John Torpey 

Right. So turning away now from the mood in Israel. I’m curious about what you observe in the United States? I mean, I think there’s a sort of been a sense in the protests that some people, some progressive Jews, perhaps in particular, have seen what they thought of as their allies turn out not to be exactly on the same page when Israelis are the victims. And I wonder, do you see that as a kind of major split? I mean, it’s been discussed in the New York Times that people like Jamaal Bowman or Ritchie Torres are on one side of this issue and AOC is on another. I mean, how do you assess what’s going on basically, on the American left?

Jodi Rudoren 

Yeah, I think just as there was an intelligence failure by Israel to not understand the scope and scale of Hamas is capabilities and to not see this particular plan being formed, similarly, I think that American Jews, progressive American Jews, understood that the question of Israel on the left in the sort of progressive movement, the movement that you know, around Black Lives Matter,  also the discourse around Israel on American college campuses in particular, I think we all knew that those that the relationships between liberal Zionists and the rest of that kind of progressive coalition, and that the discourse had frayed or was fraught around the question of Israel, and that the discourse on college campuses had kind of devolved in a way that was unsettling for those who believe that Israel has a right to exist as a democratic and Jewish state. We had no idea, though, how much those things were true; how broad the questions of Israel’s right to exist, were among progressives and on college campuses, and how kind of virulent the passions were, and how easily they would bleed into clearly open antisemitism that we have seen on, particularly, American college campuses. So I think we kind of knew the roots of this, we kind of understood it was going on and getting tougher and tougher, but I don’t I think we’ve all been surprised. And so that’s left a lot of Jews in places like Montclair or on university campuses like Yale where I went, or in coastal enclaves in leading institutions, it has left a lot of American Jews who do believe that Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state, but who also very much want to see Palestinian national liberation and a Palestinian state and a peace, most importantly, a peace. It has left a lot of people like that feeling quite isolated, and not sure who their friends and allies really are.

John Torpey 

So I want to get into the possible solutions or outcomes that may come out of this. But at first, when I asked what do you think explains that? I mean, a lot of this is attributed to a generational divide, a generational transformation. And it’s not hard to imagine that for younger people, the Holocaust, let’s say, or the reality of apartheid in South Africa, or in the southern United States of an earlier day are sort of abstract historically, and therefore Israel is perceived in a kind of way that may not be entirely the way people let’s say, of our age might see the situation.

Jodi Rudoren 

I guess I would put it into three big buckets. The first is that the passage of time since the Holocaust, and not just slight, but really extreme kind of prosperity and success of Jews here in America and in other places has made the idea of Jews needing a safe haven, Jews needing a nation state is not a present reality for people younger than 40 or so; it just doesn’t seem like, “What? Why would they need that?” So I think that moment in time when the urgency of it was pretty clear to everybody has certainly faded. So that’s one.

Jodi Rudoren 

The second is that this occupation of the of Jerusalem East and of the West Bank that began in 1967 as a temporary occupation, under international law until which time a settlement could be worked out, it doesn’t feel very temporary more than 50 years later. And so, again, all those folks younger than me who look at this and think, “What’s going on there? What is Israel doing, they don’t seem to be doing what they said they were going to do about it being either temporary as an occupation or about pushing forward a two state solution, they instead are building and expanding settlements, and there’s a lot of violence between settlers and Palestinians, and between the army of Palestinians.” So I think any reasonable person would look at that and think, “Hum, that doesn’t seem to be temporary, or kind of really livable with, and if you already don’t think you need a nation state, you really want to see a state that supports human rights for all its residents and all of its neighbors.” So you start to think that’s two good reasons why Israel shouldn’t necessarily have right to keep going, or needs to keep going the way it is.

Jodi Rudoren 

And then the third factor, which I feel like I knew about before, but I didn’t understand its power until now, which is sort of worldview, of the progressive left, of the Black Lives Matter and movement, this sort of framing of so many things in this kind of idea of like anti colonialism as connected to anti racism and the connection, the intersectionality, sort of philosophy of intersectionality. So what we’ve seen happen since October 7 in a more clear way than before is the projection of that framing, which I think is really about the U.S. and the problems we have in the U.S. with our own history–towards Native Americans, and towards slavery, and black people in general–it’s a projection of those things onto this conflict. They don’t make sense frankly on this conflict. I mean, half of Israel’s population is not European or white so the idea of condemning it as a white European colonial enterprise seems really off. Also, it’s very difficult to be colonial in the land that you have ancient history and most of the residents, many of the residents of Israel were of course refugees from Arab lands or from Europe when the state was founded, or before the state was founded. So this framework doesn’t really fit the situation. So one of the things we see though is this kind of hegemonic focus on that framework towards every political issue, how does this kind of class race intersectional dynamics apply to everything? And now I would now say that that is a third factor of people feeling alienated from the idea of Israel as a nation state of the Jewish people. So it’s like distance from the Holocaust, length of the occupation, and this kind of hegemonic view of the world that feels often the situation, but it’s nonetheless being applied to it.

John Torpey 

Right? I mean, your interpretation basically lines up with mine. I’m sort of curious, though what you would say about the conduct of the IDF in Gaza. On the one hand, it appears seems to be the case that Hamas is embedded among a civilian population, therefore making war crimes essentially inevitable. And the IDF is saying, “We’re doing everything we possibly can to avoid civilian casualties.” So it’s a Gordian knot kind of situation, seems to me.

Jodi Rudoren 

I mean, look, I’ve spent a lot of time in Gaza, I covered two wars there that were thankfully much narrower and less brutal than this one–although the 2014 war was 51 days of bombing and ground invasion. I’ve also spent a lot of time there not during war time, in people’s homes, and writing about their struggle, and their struggles also with Hamas, by the way. So it is incredibly painful to watch Gaza being destroyed and to watch so much death happening there. And I think it’s painful for anybody who has eyes and a heart. In terms of … it is also true that the way Hamas operates makes it very difficult to avoid severe civilian casualties or even to limit them. I guess I will say two things about it more, which is (I keep saying two things, his is my thing. But anyway) one is that the specific (I know you know this, but just for your audience, John) this specific international law on proportionality relates on collateral damage or civilian casualties is the specifics are that each strike,  each of what has now been, I think 15,000 airstrikes, but in each act of war, there should be an evaluation of whether the civilian casualties were proportional in that strike to the importance of the target for the military objective. So we have no idea. Nobody has any way of value. The question is the total number of Palestinians killed in Gaza reasonable for as a retaliation for the total number of people killed in Israel? That is not how international law works. It is about the proportionality of casualties and collateral damage to a specific strike based on the specific targeting. So it’ll take many months and expert analysis to figure that out, and Israel should be held accountable for every single strike and whether it adhered to the laws of war in that particular strike. Absolutely. And I have no doubt that there will be some instances where it will be, if not clear, I really feel strongly that there was more damage that needed to be done.

Jodi Rudoren 

And look, the stated goal of rooting out Hamas from Gaza and rescuing 200 hostages is so ambitious, that it certainly requires–if it’s a reasonable goal–a lot of damage and a lot of bombing. I think the thing that’s tricky that I find hard to sort of get my own head around, right is that it’s like a reasonable response to what happened on October 7, to think we must root out Gaza from excuse me, we must root out Hamas from Gaza. And it’s unrealistic, like it can’t work. So what do you do with that? What’s not okay is for Israel to be vengeful and to respond and to use its significant military might compared to its enemies to just respond in the harshest way possible it’s to hurt? That’s not okay! But it’s again not unreasonable to say, “Israel wants to kill every Hamas commander, every Hamas fighter and take out every tunnel and every ammunition store and every training facility.” I mean, that makes some sense given what happened. But it’s, it’s so brutal and so horrible to watch. I don’t know, it’s all those things at once, that’s how I feel.

John Torpey 

It’s an extremely difficult situation to be in at the same time. I mean, it seems to me that Israel will, without question, strong militarily, but that’s not necessarily how this war will be won or lost, if that’s the right metric to use

Jodi Rudoren 

Sometimes I think American Jews, Israeli Jews forget. The only way is to drown the Jewish people kind of “win” (and I would use finger quotes, if we weren’t on the podcast) is if the conflict with the Palestinians is resolved, though, as long as this conflict is unresolved Israel’s ability to maintain itself as a Jewish state is compromised, threatened, not realistic, there is no, in my view, the status quo is not sustainable. The reason you hear more and more advocates for the Palestinians talking about a one state solution is because it’s Palestine, it is not a Jewish state. And so anyone who cares about Israel being a Jewish and democratic state has to be focused on what would end the conflict. And the fact that the Palestinians have been not good partners to Israel to working that out is not irrelevant, but it’s kind of a side issue, because it is Israel’s need to solve the conflict. However, they need to solve it, it has to be solved or they won’t survive.

John Torpey 

Well, I couldn’t agree more. And I guess one of the things that has surprised me, at least, is the fact that the whole conflict seems to have revivified discussion of a two-state solution. Now, the two-state solution may be as appealing to some people right now as a one state solution, whatever. But I mean, the point is that, as you say, some sort of political resolution is the only way to resolve this. And I wonder, what’s your sense of the bubbling up of this kind of discussion? Or is it just too soon to tell?

Jodi Rudoren 

Um, yes, I suppose is the real answer all those things. But look, there are plenty of examples in history and you can cite them much better than I can in which a crisis, a devastating setback, a horrible turn of events yielded to something that people would eventually describe as progress. Like the crises are also catalyzers of change sometimes. Sometimes they are catalyzers of what we described as regress, right of things getting just worse and worse and worse. But there’s not a few examples. There’s a bunch of examples of where something terrible happens. And it creates space for something that looks like progress. So I think it’s not insane to think that could happen here. But I don’t see any path really towards it yet, I think. I mean, I did an event yesterday, where somebody asked this question where they asked about, what’s the credible end game? And can we get journalists to focus more on what people see as the credible end game? And I’m planning on taking that question with me to Jerusalem next week and asking people about it. I think he’s right, we have got to start talking about what is the credible endgame for this war, and then for the whole conflict, but, you know, it has felt a bit soon, I guess.

John Torpey 

Yes. Well, it’s, I mean, clearly, there’s a lot of talk about the idea that nobody has a path, nobody has a plan, and that everything will be put off until after the war. But that’s in a way, not the way we’re wars really work either. So hopefully, somebody’s thinking about this in Qatar, or in some place that we’re not necessarily paying attention to.

Jodi Rudoren 

Yeah, I mean, the two things that the most powerful people in the game have said: Netanyahu has said that Israel has to maintain functional security control over Gaza for the foreseeable future. And Joe Biden has basically said the Palestinian Authority needs to be in charge of Gaza. And neither of those two things feels realistic. Although, if they were done together, there might actually be something possible there. But so many things need to happen. And Joe Biden is one of the people that can make them happen in order for the Palestinians to step up in a responsible way supported by the Arab world and Washington in Europe to be a credible alternative for Palestinian leadership towards sovereignty, and to be engaged in a conversation about what Israeli security needs look like and how they can be met. I mean, we are so far from even setting that table for that conversation that it feels kind of mind boggling. But that is essentially where someone has to lead us to get is to a table that is about a freedom and liberation for the Palestinian people. That includes security for both them and for Israel, that Palestinians also need their security, to be assured. And that is not done by Israeli military control of their territory. I mean, that’s sort of obvious.

John Torpey 

Well, I look forward to seeing that table set. And in the meantime, I look forward to seeing violence come to an end as soon as possible. And I want to thank you so much for having this conversation with us today. I want to thank Jodi Rudoren and for her insights into Israel, the Hamas conflict and Jewish responses to it. Look for us on the New Books Network and remember to subscribe and rate International Horizons on Spotify and Apple podcasts. I want to thank Oswaldo Mena for his technical assistance as well as to acknowledge Duncan Mackay for sharing his song International Horizons as the theme music for the show. This is John Torpey, saying thanks for joining us, and we look forward to having you with us for the next episode of International Horizons.