Sneak Peek: Amit Segal on why Ben Gvir is a disaster for Israel

0:00Amit Segal: Hi, it's Dan. Over the past couple of years, Call Me Back has grown into something much bigger than we ever expected. A place for clarity, context, and honest conversations at a time when those things can seem hard to find. That's what ARK Media is all about. Building a truly independent voice, which means no one shaping what we say or how we say it. to help support our rapidly expanding operations, we created Inside Call Me Back, our members-only feed. If Call Me Back has been meaningful to you and you want to be part of what we're building, I hope you'll join us. Your contribution goes a long way in helping us show up when it matters most.

0:41Amit Segal: You can subscribe at arcmedia.org or through the link in the show notes. And to our insiders, thank you.

0:52Amit Segal: You are listening to an ARC Media Podcast.

1:04Amit Segal: Welcome to Inside Call Me Back, our members-only edition, where we open the door and let you shape the conversation. Thank you for subscribing to the show and supporting the Call Me Back Podcast, and everything we do here at ARC is very helpful to all of our work here. I want to encourage you to submit your questions at arcmedia.org. And the one thing we ask is please keep your questions short. It will increase the chance of your questions being featured on the show. Today in the hot seat addressing your questions and personal dilemmas is Arc Media contributor Amit Sego. Amit, welcome back to the inside.

1:38Amit Segal: Thanks for hosting me in the middle of August. Well, you know, politics in Israel are crazy. Politics in the United States are crazy. It's not exactly a sleepy August.

1:48Dan Senor: Absolutely. I miss those days when from Thursday to Sunday, nothing happened on the news. I think it's been a decade since then.

1:56Amit Segal: I completely agree. Okay, let's jump into our insider's questions here. Libby from Jerusalem writes, ooh, we're cutting right to it. All right, Libby writes, last week, Amit Segel published a column arguing that Benvir is a disaster for Israel. However, a year ago, I heard him say multiple times on Call Me Back that he thinks that Smoltrich and Benvier's impact is overstated. What has changed? Okay.

2:22Dan Senor: So first of all, I think the insiders knew in advance about my opinion because I think our last meeting here dealt with my lessons from October 7th. And the number one lesson was that I no longer believe in the full right wing coalition. And I meant specifically for Benvier. Now, I want to emphasize the difference between the alleged twins, Smotrich and Benkvir. So they are paired together because they ran together and because they are around the same age, coming from the settlements and promoting a very, very hawkish right-wing policy. Now, here's the difference. I would like to explain it. I do not speak about Benkvir's influence.

3:00Dan Senor: I speak about Benkvir's damage, a reputational arson. I'll explain exactly the difference. I think, for one, that a Palestinian statehood will endanger the very existence of the state of Israel. Because I do not think that between the river and the sea, Israel can allow itself to have a hostile, armed Palestinian state overlooking Tel Aviv, Netanyahu, and just five minutes walk from Jerusalem. And that's why I'm willing to pay each and every price in international currency when it comes to blocking the option, because the alternative is not to exist. On the other hand, I'm not willing to pay a single dime for merely PR campaign of Ben Gevier himself.

3:42Dan Senor: So I'm for deeds and not for bad publicity.

3:46Amit Segal: But you're not saying, because I think people could listen to what you're saying and take away from what you're saying, you don't have a problem with Ben Gevier's policies. You have a problem with Ben Gevier's style of politics.

3:56Dan Senor: My main problem with Ben Gevier is that he doesn't have any policy whatsoever. However, when you take a look at the facts on the ground, Ben Giver did almost nothing. Yes, he did change the conditions of terrorists in Israeli prisons. And I think it was a very important reform. Before October 7th, they enjoyed free phone calls, for instance. They held cell phones in the prisons, etc. But he did nothing to help, for instance, building more Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, unlike Smotrich. All he did, the reason he's an international celebrity, is not because of his deeds. which are equal to zero because he cares nothing about facts, only about the PR.

4:35Dan Senor: I have a problem with the noose pin his party members were, and he himself.

4:40Amit Segal: For our listeners, for people who don't know, so he's pushed a policy for the death penalty for terrorists and to sort of celebrate or campaign for it, he created these lapel pins with a little noose.

4:50Dan Senor: I'll give an example because this is exactly the case. I'm putting aside the question of capital punishment. Had Ben Gevier been sanctioned for promoting capital punishment for October 7th terrorists, I would fully support it. But when you cause Israel a terrible reputational damage only for wearing it without doing anything about it, we call it in economy externalities. You enjoy a little profit, a little revenue, and then the entire society pays the huge cost.

5:22Amit Segal: I have a couple of questions. One is, how do you think Netanyahu has dealt with managing Ben Gvir? Because on the one hand, I hear you and I hear your searing critique of Ben Gvir, but he's only able to be as influential and powerful as he is. I take your point, not necessarily from a policy standpoint, but in terms of the outsized impact he's having on the international scene, because he's a member of Netanyahu's government.

5:46Dan Senor: Yes, but there is a reason why he's in the room where it happens, like the phrase from Hamilton. Why? Because there was a moratorium on sitting with Netanyahu from the center-left. Post the 2022 election, for instance, both Eisenkot, Gantz and Lapid refused to sit with Netanyahu and they knew that the alternative is Ben-Givri sitting there. So they believed, I guess, they had believed that the worst it's going to be for the government or the coalition, the best is for their own good. So it's like a ripple effect. The center-left became very, very extreme in his hatred to Netanyahu. And that's why Netanyahu resorted to form a coalition that in the past he had never dared or wanted to form.

6:30Amit Segal: You said that the center-left put a ban on sitting with Netanyahu, so he didn't have a choice. Now, we had Yair Lapid on this podcast, oh, I don't know, maybe a little less than a year ago. And he claims, again, I wasn't there. I certainly wasn't privy to the conversations directly. but he claimed on the podcast that he told Netanyahu after October 7th that he would, and bring Geshatid with him, his party, he would join Netanyahu's government and give him all the cushion in the world to maintain a majority, maintain his government, so long as he sidelined Benghver and Smoltrich, that he, Lapid, could not serve alongside Benghver and Smoltrich.

7:06Amit Segal: So I know there was this ban on serving with Netanyahu, but I think that was more of a pre-October 7th phenomenon. I think after October 7th, when there was this calls for unity and there was a sense of coming together. But for some center-left party leaders, serving with Ben Gavir and Smoltrich was just unacceptable. So they would give Netanyahu a cushion, they would give him a majority, they would give him a government, but they couldn't do it alongside those figures. So is that a more accurate characterization of what happened?

7:32Dan Senor: I'm not really sure. For instance, Gantz and Eisenkot joined the coalition without having Ben Gavir and Smoltrich living it. What was the moral justification for sending Smotrich and Ben-Gavir to the opposition at the very same day in which hundreds of their supporters died in battle and few hundreds more to die in the months and years to come. There is no justification. National unity governments in Israel's history always included the main opposition party joining the current or the existing coalition. So I don't want even to think what would have happened had Netanyahu announced six hours after the massacre had begun that he's sending Ben Gevier and Smotrich out to the opposition.

8:14Dan Senor: You know the share of casualties from within the national orthodox sector.

8:19Amit Segal: Yeah.

8:19Dan Senor: It didn't make any sense. It was a populist suggestion that, in my opinion, implied that Lapid was not interested in taking part in the coalition, but to have a, you know, a very sophisticated blame game. Okay.

8:31Amit Segal: All right. I I want to go to Jake from Philadelphia who writes, and this one cuts close to the bone, so if you want to handle it delicately, that's fine. Jake from Philadelphia writes to us, I recently read that Amit Segel's own brother has attacked him publicly for criticizing settler violence. I'm curious whether Amit could say more about the type of conversations he and his family were having before it became public.

8:55Dan Senor: So, by the way, he gave a series of interviews against my op, The Gay's Bank Viewer. So it's a sort of a heated rivalry. Yeah. Okay. My brother believes that settler violence does not exist, that it emanates from the failure of the country and the army to protect the settlers. And I can't turn a blind eye to a phenomenon that, in my opinion, is both immoral and destructive for the very existence of the settler movement itself and for the state of Israel.

9:26Amit Segal: That's it for our sneak peek today. If you want to catch the full episode, please subscribe to Inside Call Me Back by following the link in the description or by going to arkmedia.org. That's A-R-K-Media.org. Your support is what allows us to do what we do here at Ark Media. I hope to see you there.