Is the Hostage Deal a Disaster? with Gadi Taub

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🗓️ 16 January 2025

⏱️ 33 minutes

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Summary

According to reports, Israel is about to sign a ceasefire deal with Hamas that will secure the return of some hostages in return to a partial Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, paving the way to ending the war. Gadi Taub, the co-host of Tablet’s popular Israel Update podcast and one of Israel’s most influential journalists, opposes the deal. He joins Liel to shed light on the Israeli government’s challenges and missteps, on the incoming Trump administration’s potential and worrying decline in support for Israel, and on how the Israeli public is reacting to this difficult and flawed deal.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there. Welcome to Ruthless. I'm Leah Liebelowitz. We had a completely different episode planned for you this week. You'll hear it next week. But then news broke that Israel had reached some kind of deal to release some of the hostages in return for a ceasefire. And obviously, that is what we're all thinking about today. It is not an easy deal to process or digest.
0:40.3	And I'm thrilled to be joined today by one of my absolute favorite human beings, Israelis, thinkers, writers, philosopher, kings.
0:48.8	He is the host of Israel Update on this year, Tablet Magazine, a podcast that I know you're already all listening to,
0:55.0	but if not, you absolutely must, together with Michael Doran.
0:58.4	He's an Israeli broadcaster, academic, although that is probably an insult to him, columnist,
1:05.0	an all-around tremendous, tremendous thinker.
1:07.2	Gaddi Taub, welcome to Ruthless.
1:09.0	Thank you, Leo, for the nice introduction.
1:10.6	How about rogue academic? Rogue academic, as if there's any other kind worth talking about.
1:16.2	Gotti, before we begin, you know, we've all seen a lot of noise about this deal. We've all seen
1:20.6	a bunch of tweets. We've seen news reports. Very, very briefly. What are we looking at?
1:25.4	What are the contours of this agreement? I'm not going to sugarcoat this. I'm very worried about this deal.
1:32.3	And what it includes is basically what President Biden tried to lock Netanyahu into back in May.
1:40.9	So it's a multi-stage deal, the details of which have been tweaked in favor of Israel's
1:50.1	position, because in May, Hamas did not agree to any of this. So since Netanya was locked into
1:58.1	this back in May, it's very hard to back out of when there is an American president pushing for it now.
2:05.6	We were all hoping that Trump would immediately when he assumed office, or as it were, before he assumed office,
2:14.1	will back Israel's full pressure campaign on Hamas and make Hamas beg on its
2:21.3	knees. Instead, Hamas is going to be able to declare half victory or at least a tie with Israel,
2:30.8	which is not what we set out to do. The details are not yet completely clear, but what we have in the first stage is 33 hostages.
2:42.0	We don't know if they are all alive.
2:45.0	The talk is at about 24 or 23 of them are alive. That would make about 60 still in Hamas's hands after the first stage.
	...

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