Episode 55: The real war is not in Gaza, with Dr. Einat Wilf
Ask Haviv Anything
Haviv Rettig Gur
4.9 ⢠1K Ratings
đď¸ 29 October 2025
âąď¸ 72 minutes
đď¸ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
Trump's peace plan explicitly calls for deradicalization of the Gazan population. Countries like Saudi Arabia and Indonesia are hoping to take part in Gaza's rebuilding in part so they can help push back against the radical Islamism of Hamas, which those countries see as a larger threat to themselves as well.
Can Palestinian society be deradicalized? What might that even mean? Is the problem a religious one? A political one? Can Israel play a part, and how would that look?
We turned to Dr. Einat Wilf, a leading thinker and writer on Israel, on the conflict, on the history of the two peoples, and on Israel's foreign and education policies. Wilf has long argued that Palestinian society is in thrall to a particular ideological narrative that goes beyond Palestinian self-determination and fixates on the demand for a complete eradication of Israel - and that Palestinian ideologues and elites have been advancing that desire for generations, nearly always at the expense of Palestinian interests and wellbeing. She also believes they will continue to do so until this impulse is understood, named and tackled head-on.
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Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, everybody. Welcome to Ask Habib Anything. This is a special episode. I have on somebody who has been a frequent request of the Patreon community and just randomly people who occasionally stopped me in the street. Dr. Enat Wilf is a leading thinker on Israel, on Zionism, on foreign policy, on education. |
| 0:27.1 | I actually have been reading Enaut since I was education reporter at the Jerusalem Post, |
| 0:34.1 | very junior off on the English language margins of Israeli media. |
| 0:40.0 | The best people are there, by the way, and some of the smartest reporting is over in the English language |
| 0:44.3 | because they're not doing so many of the culture wars all day long as the Hebrew press. |
| 0:48.4 | You heard it here first, to all my colleagues in the English. |
| 0:51.6 | Anath was a member of parliament. |
| 0:53.4 | A'Nat served on the Education Committee, the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. |
| 0:58.0 | I am not going to ask her, but I'm going to guess that she was more excited in the Education |
| 1:02.2 | Committee than on all the highfalutin talk of war and peace of the Foreign Affairs and |
| 1:06.1 | Defense Committee, but I'm not going to put her on the spot on that way. |
| 1:10.2 | Education is more important, is what I'm saying. |
| 1:12.6 | And A.N. is the author of seven books. |
| 1:15.4 | She is currently a senior fellow at the Z3 Institute in Palo Alto, California. |
| 1:20.6 | And she has a PhD in political science from Cambridge, which I have to think, based on that |
| 1:26.3 | resume, she got out of sheer boredom because she wasn't doing anything else. |
| 1:30.4 | So let me just tell you before we dive in, we're going to ask the hardest questions |
| 1:35.5 | because Enat has a sort of meta vision of this conflict, which actually suggests some very specific and clear policy solutions, |
| 1:44.8 | and also many, many, many more specific ideas and solutions of flow from that larger vision. |
| 1:53.9 | We're going to dive into it. |
| 1:55.1 | I'm going to challenge it. |
| 1:56.5 | I have been accused of agreeing with a not a great deal, |
... |
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