- What we saw on display on Saturday was ISIS-like behavior.

This is not an organization that can be reasoned with.

It's an organization that is dead set on murdering as many Jews as they possibly can.

[upbeat music] - Hello and welcome to GZERO World.

I'm Ian Bremmer.

And today Israel is once again at war.

The fighting raging to a level not seen in half a century.

As of this taping, Israel's death toll from October 7th's Hamas terrorist attack has risen to 1,300 with an estimated 150 people believed to be held hostage in Gaza.

And so far, according to health officials there, at least 1,400 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, at least 5,000 more injured.

Among the Israeli as well as international dead from Saturday's attack are women, children, and the elderly.

Many butchered in their homes by rampaging Hamas fighters.

Israeli air strikes have targeted normally safe structures like schools, hospitals, and mosques, killing women, children, and the elderly as well.

As the world holds its breath for an all-out Israeli ground assault of Gaza to commence, one thing is clear, the worst is yet to come.

I may be stating the obvious here when I caution viewers some of the imagery in this episode, like much of what you've seen in the nightly news and social media, may be distressing.

Today on the show, I'm talking with Jerusalem Post editor-in-chief, Avi Mayer, for an on the ground account of his country at war.

And later I'll be joined by the University of Maryland's Shibley Telhami, who has been an advisor to the State Department and the US mission to the United Nations to try to get a sense of where things go from here.

But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

- [Presenter 1] Funding for GZERO World is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

- [Presenter 2] Every day all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains with a portfolio of logistics and real estate, and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com - [Presenter 1] And by Cox Enterprises is proud to support GZERO.

We're working to improve lives in the areas of communications, automotive, clean tech, sustainable agriculture, and more.

Learn more at cox.career/news.

Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and... [gentle music] - Before I get to my two guests today, I wanna talk for a minute about what this war means for the key players involved.

Hamas' shock terrorist attacks cut deep into Israeli territory.

That psychological trauma compounds the shock for millions of Israelis that their world-class intelligence and security forces, border forces completely missed this.

That's why comparisons with the 9/11 attacks on the United States are the right analogy, even if a diminished one.

Israel's weakness was in part a failure of imagination.

Now to Gaza.

Hamas has launched the suicidal war and Palestinians will pay dearly for it.

But why did Hamas move now?

In part because of their deteriorating position.

Blockaded by Israel and Egypt, the economy in Gaza was terrible and getting worse.

Meanwhile, the geopolitics were leaving the Palestinians behind.

Israel today is in its strongest geopolitical position in decades, and was on the verge of signing a historic peace deal with Saudi Arabia.

The severity of Israel's expected response, a ground invasion that will result in thousands of Palestinians' deaths, makes that politically untenable for the Saudis today.

Despite the international outcry at this growing Palestinian death toll, Israel will be politically unified to a degree that we haven't seen in decades.

After all, Hamas just carried out the worst massacre of Jews worldwide since the Holocaust.

Consequently, the recent domestic discord over Netanyahu's efforts to weaken Israel's courts will quiet down, at least until the security situation is brought under control.

Last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to form an emergency unity cabinet with centrist opposition leader and former Defense Minister, Benny Gantz.

But make no mistake, Israel's domestic political polarization will return, and Netanyahu will have to explain the spectacular intelligence and security failures that allowed this to happen.

And even if IDF forces managed to crush Hamas and Gaza, a long-term resolution to the Israel Palestinian conflict will remain as elusive as ever.

For now, outsiders, including the Biden administration, will work hard to keep this conflict within Israel's borders.

Iran, the crucial Hamas patron and arms supplier, has celebrated the Hamas attack, but has also been careful not to accept any responsibility for it.

All eyes are now on Iran-backed Hezbollah forces to Israel's north in Lebanon, much stronger than Hamas, to be sure they don't try to broaden the conflict.

This wildfire is raging and it will take tremendous international effort to put it out.

Many innocent people will find themselves trapped inside the inferno.

To talk about the human toll from inside Israel, I'm joined now by Avi Mayer.

He's editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post.

And here's our conversation.

- Avi Mayer, thanks so much for joining us today.

- Thank you for having me.

- Obviously, our thoughts with you and all of Israel following the horrifying terrorist attacks over the weekend.

Talk to me just for a second about how your life has changed over the last few days.

- Day and night have lost meaning.

I've been operating on a 24-hour cycle fairly constantly since Saturday morning.

We had no indication this was coming.

I think that's one of the most striking elements of this whole situation.

It came completely out of left field.

So there was no preparation.

No one could have known that this was coming down the pike.

But we've mobilized quickly, and we've been really, I think, rising to the occasion in a remarkable way under almost impossible circumstances, including a diminished newsroom, with several of our staff members either out on reserve duty or whose children are doing so.

Several younger staff members who have loved ones, family members, people they know who are missing, who are off in the field and reserve duty.

It's a very difficult situation in that respect, coupled of course with the constant rocket barrages, having to go down to bomb shelters every so often.

I'm in Jerusalem, which has not been targeted nearly as much as Southern Israel, but Tel Aviv has also seen quite a lot of rocket fire, and many of our staff members are there.

And they've been in and out of bomb shelters over the past few days.

Those are the circumstances where we're operating under at the moment.

- So top priority right now, have to assume, is the status of 150 plus people, lot of civilians, some not Israeli, some international, that are being held hostage on the ground in Gaza.

What do you think the right response is to get them back safely?

- Well, I think that is certainly a top priority, and I think that many Israelis whose loved ones have gone missing and are presumed being held hostage in Gaza want nothing more than to get their brothers and sisters and parents and children back home, grandparents in some cases.

But we have to remember the task of even identifying the bodies in Israel is still ongoing.

The sheer number of casualties is unfathomable.

And that's something that Israeli authorities are now grappling with.

I can tell you I was at a funeral earlier today for a young man who was killed in the attacks at the military cemetery here in Jerusalem.

They have electronic displays at the entrance of the cemetery because there are just so many funerals going on, they need to direct people to the right part of the cemetery for the funeral that they want to be going to.

And so that's the situation on the ground.

Not all the bodies have yet been identified.

There are many people about whom it's unknown whether they're dead or somewhere in Gaza, because of course Hamas will not disclose who they're holding or how many they have.

As for what the proper response is, I think there is a pretty broad consensus in Israel that the response needs to be extremely forceful, that Israel needs to do whatever it must to deal Hamas a devastating blow, one that it cannot recover from.

I think in the past there were many Israelis who viewed Hamas as the devil you knew.

We know Hamas.

They're not great.

They're a terrorist organization.

They have a genocidal charter that wants to murder all Jews.

We get that.

They've killed many, many Jews over the years.

But they're the sovereign and perhaps they'd moderate with governance and so on and so forth.

What we saw on display on Saturday was ISIS-like behavior.

This is not an organization that can be reasoned with.

It's an organization that is dead set on murdering as many Jews as they possibly can.

And so there are many Israelis who are now of the feeling that it's no longer a question of the devil you know.

It's a question of how do we get them the hell out of there as quickly as we possibly can?

And so many Israelis are now calling to topple Hamas to bring about some new reality in Gaza.

We don't know what that's going to be.

And it's certainly possible that a different Islamist organization will arise in its place.

But for many Israelis, that is a risk that they're willing to take just to take down this horrific organization that carried out such unspeakable atrocities on Saturday.

- Now, we know Israel has the capacity to secure Gaza if they wish to over the matter of weeks, maybe a couple of months max.

But that doesn't say anything about what you do with it once you've occupied it.

What is the possible outcome or outcome set for a post-military occupation of Gaza, 2.3 million Palestinians living there?

- Yeah, I mean, look, I think that there was a reality before the Palestinian authority, there could be a reality after Hamas.

Directly administering the lives of two million Palestinians is not a prospect that many Israelis relish.

And yet what we saw on display on Saturday changed everything.

I think that many Israelis are looking at this through a totally new calculus that they hadn't even considered before.

There are many Israelis who feel it doesn't even really matter what happens next, that Hamas just needs to be taken down.

And that's the bottom line.

- Israel has announced a siege against Gaza as a whole.

That will include all basic resources, gas, food, and the rest.

And that doesn't just focus on Hamas.

That of course focuses on all of the Palestinians that are living there.

Clearly that's the former, everyone in the West is gonna support Israel.

The latter is a very different story.

How do you respond to that?

- I know that the prime minister has called on those people who live in areas that are going to be affected to vacate, to go to UN protected areas.

Admittedly, there aren't many of those.

And obviously Gaza is a very small territory that is very densely populated.

I'm not sure how to say this.

Obviously the residents of Gaza are not all responsible for the actions of Hamas.

I think that goes without saying.

And it would be absolutely tragic if the human toll on the Palestinian side kept mounting as a result of Hamas' murderous actions.

But at the end of the day, Israel needs to do what it must to keep its own people safe.

That is its number one priority.

It has to be.

It's a sovereign state.

If it has any reason to be, if it has any raison d'etre, that is it, to keep its own civilians safe.

And so if that comes at the cost of bringing down Hamas' leadership and targeting Hamas' military infrastructure, which is intentionally placed in civilian areas, if that is what will afford Israel's people the security that they so deeply need, especially at this moment in time, I don't think there are many Israelis who are going to oppose that.

- Yeah, I mean, what's the phrase?

"When you're fighting a monster, don't become a monster."

I mean, clearly it is in Hamas' interests for Israel to be seen, certainly in the region and potentially more broadly, as extreme, as murderous as possible.

So Hamas is not just holding 150 hostages.

They're also to a degree holding their population hostage.

And they want Israel to take steps that will destroy civilians, right?

I mean, they want Israel to be seen.

So I mean, the question is if you're Israel, knowing that you are responsible for the security of your people, but also knowing that you are in a sense playing into a trap of Hamas' making, how do you think about that?

- I think if I'm the prime minister of Israel, and I saw the images that I saw about half an hour ago of the small bodies of children charred essentially to ash by these terrorists, these savages who engaged in this massacre on Saturday, I think my priority would be to keep my people safe, and to ensure that nothing like this could ever, ever happen again.

And so certainly Israel will not carpet bomb Gaza, although it certainly has that capacity.

It won't nuke Gaza, although there are those who say it has that capacity as well.

That is not the way Israel operates.

Israel will engage in surgical strikes in order to target Hamas infrastructure, Hamas command and control posts, perhaps Hamas leadership.

But as you say, Hamas has embedded itself in the civilian population with the intent of drawing as many civilian casualties as possible when this happens.

And that would be a terrible, terrible outcome of Hamas' double war crime of murdering Israeli civilians while endangering their own.

- So I wanna close by going back a little bit to what you said at the opening, which is that you were shocked.

I mean, Israel is surrounded by enemies.

There is, unlike 9/11 in the United States, Israel has had incredible readiness for many, many years for these sort of attacks.

And yet it came with absolutely no warning under Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Intelligence, border security, defense forces, you name it, not ready for what happened.

Do you think, not today, not during war fighting and a unity cabinet, but do you think that there will be a political price for the prime minister to pay at the end of this?

- I think that's inevitable.

There are already public opinion polls that suggest that over 90% of the Israeli public holds the government responsible for what happened.

There will inevitably be a political price to be paid.

There will, I'm sure, be a commission of inquiry, just as there was in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur war in 1976.

- 1973.

- I'm sure, '73, excuse me.

That's right.

It goes without saying that there is going to be a reckoning, and the reckoning is going to be devastating.

This was a military and intelligence failure without parallel in Israel's history.

I think probably worse than 1973 in many respects because of the civilian toll.

And so as you said, it's not gonna happen now.

This is a moment of unity, a moment of determination to do whatever we can to bring those hostages home and to deal Hamas a devastating blow.

But once the dust settles and some sense of normalcy is returned, I think it is inevitable that there will be a serious commission of inquiry, a serious reckoning, and that there will be a political price to be paid for the atrocities that we saw this past weekend.

- Avi Mayer, thanks so much for joining.

- Thank you for having me.

[gentle music] - And now for some broader geopolitical context, I'm joined by University of Maryland professor, Shibley Telhami.

Shibley Telhami, thanks so much for joining us today.

- Pleasure.

- I wanna start with the why now question.

I know you were just in the West Bank a couple of weeks ago.

You obviously saw both deep anger and despair.

Nothing is gonna justify in any way the atrocities committed by Hamas, but I'd really appreciate if you could give us a little bit of the context from what you've seen.

- I was in both Israel and the West Bank, so I visited both and got a little bit of sense of the sentiment in both places.

The surprise of course about Hamas, let's put it in perspective, is not that they did it or did it now, it's that they had the capability to do it, and the Israelis didn't have the ability to stop them.

That's really the big surprise in large part because, of course, if we knew what we now know, their ability to do it, they probably could have done it earlier.

But nonetheless, I think what they're capturing is a sentiment of despair.

They're doing it for their own reasons, of political reasons.

They're other reasons that they may have that are tactical, strategic, but nonetheless to capture the public sentiment, which we knew is pervasive in much of the West Bank and Gaza, people have been under occupation for 56 years.

And as you said earlier, this is not to justify in any shape or form attacking civilians.

In my opinion, there is no cause that justifies attacking or recklessly jeopardizing civilians.

Whether that goes for Israel or goes for the Palestinians, no cause justifies that.

But nonetheless, in terms of the sentiment in the West Bank and Gaza, there's despair.

I mean, there've been under occupation 56 years with no end in sight.

Now you have a far right Israeli government that makes no secret of its intent to claim the entire West Bank for Israel and the Palestinians not be granted full rights.

Settler violence has expanded.

People feel helpless.

Encroachment of settlements around Palestinian towns, the humiliation of everyday life in terms of the passage from one place to another.

And obviously, they were placing hope on initially the Biden administration after Trump, which obviously from the Palestinian point of view was seen to be heavily pro-Israel.

They were hoping that Biden is gonna do something.

Well, the Biden administration has not done anything to advance Israeli-Palestinian peace or the end of occupation in any shape or form.

They were hoping that the Arab states would weigh in.

They've historically claimed that they'll offer Israel full peace if Israel withdraws from occupied territories.

Well, it seemed like after the Abraham Accords that Trump helped negotiate, now the Biden administration were trying to bring in Saudi Arabia without a peace with them.

So yeah, the despair is always ripe for somebody to exploit it in a violent way.

- What do you think the response of the Palestinian people will be to all of these events?

Is it unifying, is it in any way constructive in opposition to Hamas?

Is it divisive?

Talk a little bit about your expectations there.

- Let's look at it realistically, Ian.

We know what happens in war.

We know what happens when people suffer so dramatically every day of their life.

And we saw what's happened in Israel just after the horrific attack, how people's hearts hardened so much that many in Israel are calling for leveling Gaza.

And look at the results now with thousands of Palestinian civilian being killed and wounded, and up to 300,000 as of today have been rendered homeless.

People's hearts get hardened.

And so what happened is, even if people don't like Hamas, and most people in the West Bank, and maybe even in Gaza, don't support Hamas' agenda.

They're mostly secularists.

They want a different kind of life.

It's not that they embrace them, but they want somebody to do something.

And unfortunately, their hearts harden, and we lose empathy for the other.

Everybody does.

It's painful to watch.

It's just the most heartbreaking thing for people like me who are watching this who don't differentiate between Israeli victims or Palestinian victims.

They're all victims.

Civilians, helpless civilians being killed.

It's a very painful moment.

- More broadly in the Middle East, we haven't been seeing, you talked about the Abraham Accords, there's not been much focus on the Palestinians either, whether you talk about the governments of these countries, or even if you talk about the Arab Street.

I mean, certainly I can see the Saudi Israel deal being put at the very least dead on arrival for the time being.

But beyond that, do you think the Palestinian issue now becomes structurally much more important across the region?

And if so, how will that manifest?

- Yes, in two ways.

First, you're right in pointing out that our governments may have different interests than the Palestinian issue.

And that's what drove the Abraham Accords.

It's what drove the Saudi calculus.

But to make no mistake, the Arab public still caress about the Palestinian issue.

And obviously it hasn't been a top priority for a lot of reasons.

It's not on the agenda there.

People have preoccupied with other things.

Now, this is on the agenda.

It's hard to ignore.

It's impossible.

The other way is that we can have huge expansion of violence here.

If in fact there is a ground war that brings in more homeless and more deaths in Gaza, it's impossible to keep Hezbollah out, even though Hezbollah doesn't wanna get in.

And if it's drawn in, it's a whole different size.

And it could also bring Iran.

It could also bring in the United States.

So we are talking about possible regional expansion beyond Gaza.

- Last question for you, Shibley.

What needs to happen to help ensure that the people of Gaza have some escape route, have the ability to achieve safety, because it's not going to be in Gaza?

- Well, look, this is now rhetorical, Ian.

This is just rhetorical.

Nothing is going to happen.

And meanwhile, the bombings are going on.

People aren't even getting food.

When I say it's rhetorical, because logistically, even if ultimately some passage takes place, under the bombing, it's impossible to consider.

When Hamas raided the Israeli towns across the border, the Israeli government issued, evacuate the settlements.

This is a developed country.

These are small settlements.

They couldn't evacuate.

People, they didn't have cell phones.

They didn't know how to go, where to go.

They didn't have buses.

And it took a while until the Israeli military went in.

So imagine here you have, there are no logistics.

I mean, even when you're looking at the bombings, when you talk about 300,000 people already rendered homeless through destruction, you have the ambulances are not even able to get to save them right now.

So this is all rhetorical as if to say that it absolves people by saying, "Well, get out of the way, you civilians."

Well, it doesn't absolve people from recklessly endangering them.

That is wrong by international law.

In fact, it's considered war crimes when you do that.

So I think we need to be really mindful here not to give this illusion that there's something that they could be saved if only they can get out of the way.

These are mostly refugees.

2.2 million people.

The overwhelming majority were refugees or descendants of refugees from 1948, mostly from what is now Central Israel.

And already 300,000 of them are rendered homeless again, and it's likely to rise.

- Such a tragedy.

Shibley Telhami, thank you for joining us today.

- My pleasure.

[gentle music] - That's our show this week.

Come back next week.

And if you like what you've seen, but even if you didn't and you know need to spend more time with this conflict and others, check us out at gzeromedia.com.

[upbeat music] [upbeat music continues] [upbeat music continues] [upbeat music continues] [upbeat music fades] [gentle music] - [Presenter 1] Funding for GZERO World is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

- [Presenter 2] Every day all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains with a portfolio of logistics and real estate, and an end-to-end solutions platform.

Addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com.

- [Presenter 1] And by Cox Enterprises is proud to support GZERO.

We're working to improve lives in the areas of communications, automotive, clean tech, sustainable agriculture, and more.

Learn more at cox.career/news.

Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and... [gentle music] [upbeat music]