In Israel’s Darkest Hour, Dan Senor Sees Reason for Hope

0:04Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word, from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know, I can roll with the punches, so let me know.

0:38Anyways, let's get to it.

0:46We're currently living through one of the darkest periods in Israel's history, but the country's strength lays in its incredible resilience, grit, and society. Dan Sanor joins me today to talk about his brand new book, The Genius of Israel, which shines a light on the distinctions of Israeli society and what other communities and countries can learn from them. It's an incredibly timely conversation, and it was a pleasure to have Dan join this week.

1:19Okay, so joining us now is Dan Sonor. He's a bestselling author, political advisor, former Defense Department official, spent some time in Iraq, if I remember that correctly. That's right. I believe you met your wife there, if I can remember that correctly. This is true. You are the bestselling author of a couple of books, Startup Nation, and this brand new book, The Genius of Israel. It's written by Dan and Saul Singer, The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World, and could not be a more timely book because obviously a lot of the things that you write about in the book, Israel is facing right now.

1:54They're at war, but there's also a little bit of an internal war going on, an intellectual civil war, if you will, in terms of where the society is going. So first off, thank you for coming on. But I want, if you don't mind, Dan, tell us a little bit about your background. Where'd you grow up? How'd you get into Iraq as a younger man? What are you doing now, et cetera? Does that imply that I'm no longer a younger man? Well, no, no. Younger than you are today. Okay. You're relevant. It's awesome. Just remember this about Life Center. You'll always be younger than me. I'll never forget Patrick McHenry, the congressman, and up until recently, the speaker pro tempore, once was meeting with me on something, and he was trying to get me excited about this member of Congress that had just been elected, a freshman member a few years ago, and he was a military vet, and he had all this interest in foreign policy in the Middle East and national security.

2:45And he goes, oh yeah, Dan, you'll love the guy. I mean, he's like a young Dan Senor. And I was like, Patrick, aren't I a young Dan Senor? Like, I'm not crazy about other people being told they're a younger version of me, but here we are. Well, like I said, you'll always have me beat. You'll always have me beat. So tell us about yourself. Born in upstate New York, Utica, New York, spent many years growing up in Toronto, Canada, never became a Canadian citizen. But my father's work brought him to Canada after he was working for the mayor of Utica, who lost his reelection. My father was out of a job and my father got a job selling bonds for the state of Israel, Israel bonds.

3:22And we moved there and I spent many years there before I moved back to the U.S. I was raised by my father was very engaged in American politics and in Israel and the, you know, the growth of Israel, the development of Israel, the investment in Israel and my mother, who is a survivor of the Holocaust. So my mother was a little girl during the Holocaust. In fact, Campbell and I took our kids with my mother and our extended family to her hometown in Kosciuszko, Slovakia this summer. This past summer, my mother's 85 now. She lives in Jerusalem. uh we took her there it it was purposes of going back to sort of it was a roots trip to kind of trace her roots and what happened to her and her family being chased out of their home and then being on the run for the for the final year of the holocaust her father was was killed tragically in auschwitz but she and her mother escaped and never wound up on the train to auschwitz and so i tell you all this just to say this is this is the water in which i swim this is the home in which I was raised.

4:23These are the people who shaped me. And so I've always had a deep engagement and commitment to American political life and public life and American foreign policy. And I've also always had a very deep connection to what I regard as America's most important ally, at least in the Middle East, and probably one of its top two or three allies in the world, which is the state of Israel. I have a lot of family that lives there. I have two sisters who live there, three nieces, three nephews, and a bunch of extended family, many of whom are on the front lines, literally and figuratively, of this war right now.

5:00And in my work in American government, I worked in the Senate in the 1990s, and then I went to get my MBA thinking I was done with politics and government. I worked at the Carlyle Group in private equity in the early 2000s. But after 9-11, when the U.S. was gearing up for the war on terror, I got drawn back into government and found there was a way for me to serve. And the Bush White House recruited me to play a role working for the Pentagon and the White House, where I was ultimately, just to fast forward, I spent some time in Doha, the U.S. Central Command Base in Doha, Qatar, Camp Asalia, and then from, which is where the war was commandeered out of, and then from there to Baghdad in April of 2003.

5:40And I spent over a year in Baghdad, living in Baghdad, where I ultimately became the chief spokesman for the coalition in Iraq, which was, as you can imagine, very demanding, very rewarding, very saddening, but also was an experience that shaped a lot of who I am today and how I think about the world. Well, I mean, it's an incredible story. You know, I had the opportunity to go to Baghdad, I think, on a civilian sort of troop support mission through Benz, the Business Executives for National Security in 2011. And you were there when it was super hot. Obviously, it was calming down by the time I got there.

6:19And so I think what people forget sometimes is when you're in a war zone, and particularly you for a year, how harrowing that actually is. You always have this veil of something bad going to happen. You'll like this part of the story. I was with George F. Mosbacher. They gave us flak jackets. They told us we're going to ride on Route Irish out of the red zone into the green zone. And she said, I'm not wearing that. And I'm going to tell you something right now, because I view myself as an alpha male, Dan. I'm like, you know what? If she's not wearing it, I'm not wearing it. And I was so chicken shit that I actually wore it.

6:52Okay. So I just want you to know that. Okay. I just want you to know that I've said, hey, hell that this bomb goes off. I've got to be wearing this thing. So, but so I appreciate your service. This country, which you have a love affair with the United States, you have also a love affair with Israel. I have been to Israel many times. I've traveled with AIPAC there. I've traveled with some more conservative groups there. I've visited Yad Vashem. I've actually been to Starot, met with the mayor of Starot, obviously gone through some of the IDF centers, had looks at the Iron Dome project and the ballistic missile attacks that are coming in, the Kasem rocket attacks.

7:29And I read your first book and it really made me want to go to Israel. particularly Tel Aviv, to learn more about what was going on in the venture capital community. And just for our listeners, and you know this, but for our listeners, there's more venture capital investing going on in Israel than all of continental Europe. I don't think people realize the magnitude of that. On an absolute basis. So you compare it on an absolute, it's not just per capita. No, no, on an absolute basis. If I said per capita. No, you didn't say per capita. I think when people hear that, they think per capita. Because I mean, you didn't say, but I think people immediately think, oh, well, it must be per capita, then you're like, oh, no, no, no, no.

8:04It's on an absolute basis. I learned from your first book. When I'm reading your second book, I'm finding that Israel has grown up and in some ways is a victim of its success and its security. Because when we are successful and secure, sometimes we separate from each other. When we're in a fight for the existential existence of our nation or our family or whatever it is, you could be arguing with your brother, but if you got to get in a trench with them and fight it out with somebody else, whatever those arguments are, you sort of forget. But your book, I think, is identifying some of the arguments that's going on inside of the country.

8:42I was wondering if you could give us a little bit of a summary of those arguments, which include the soldiers, the activists, the ultra-Orthodox Jews, but also the Israeli Arabs. Yeah. So look, 2023 before October 7th was an extremely difficult year for Israel and for Israelis and for people who care about Israel, because it felt like the country had never been more divided, not from an external threat, but from an internal polarizing debate. And at its core, the debate was about, and this is going to sound really technical, but I'm just going to say it. I'll say it quickly, and then we'll go a little deeper.

9:23At its core, it was about the balance of power within Israel's government, which is to say that Israel's Supreme Court is extremely powerful. Some would argue too powerful. I would argue too powerful at the expense of the elected government, which resides in the Knesset and its parliament and its executive branch, which is formed through its parliament. And there's been a debate brewing for some time and efforts to push back on the power of the Supreme Court and rebalance power within the government. And that came to a head in 2023. And the truth is, with Netanyahu's new government, which was formed at the beginning of 2023, or sworn in, and it was believed there was a majority of Israelis who supported reforming the Supreme Court and rebalancing the balance of power.

10:12However, on the one hand, there was support for reforms, but the sense was it should only be done through building real consensus, and it should be done gradually, not shock and awe. And the Netanyahu government came into power and they didn't try to build consensus. And I say this, many of the people in his government I'm close to, and I know the prime minister personally. I mean, I'm not, this is not, I'm not saying anything here that I haven't said to them. They moved too quickly, too swiftly. They did not have a mandate to move at the speed and comprehensiveness that they did trying to, the way some characterize it, trying to appear to gut the Supreme Court.

10:49And that was a bridge too far. And that provoked a backlash, which you're referring to. And suddenly you and I and others were looking at Israel that seemed at each other's throats. Society was coming apart. Now, there's two points here, Anthony, that we make in our book. One is we go through the history of Israel and point out that about every decade or decade and a half, they have some kind of crisis where the country feels like it's about to be torn apart. Obviously, there was the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, where half the In the 90s, where half the country blamed the other half for creating a political environment where something like that could happen.

11:21There was Israel's first Lebanon war in the early 1980s, where the protests were massive and turned violent. You can go all the way back to the 1950s, when the Israeli government was contemplating accepting reparations from West Germany for the Holocaust, and the opposition led by Menachem Begin tried to prevent that and organized, you know, what he protests, which he called for quote unquote, and I quote here, the violent overthrow of the Israeli government. So Israel has had these moments before, but I think we all tend to have a recency bias. So if you haven't seen it in a while and then you see it, you think it's the worst it's ever been.

11:56The reality is it wasn't the worst it's ever been. There was also underneath the debate about the debate over the courts, there was, as you said, these debates between these different ethnic and religious groups, debates between, and a sense of polarization between them, between, you know, what some call hedonists from Tel Aviv to Haredim, ultra-Orthodox from B 'nai B 'rach, from the tech community in Tel Aviv and those struggling in some of the smaller towns in the periphery of Israel, from Jews from the eastern part of the world and Jews from the western part of the world, that is Sephardic versus Ashkenazi Jews.

12:33There was tensions between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs. So these fault lines that, you know, when someone's talking about a movie, when people are pitching a movie idea, they always say the movie's about this. That's what it's about. But then this is what it's really about. Well, in Israel, the judicial reform, you could say that's what the debate was about in 2023 before the war, before October 7th. But what it was really about was real tensions between these groups and communities that I think came to a head through the through the debate over judicial reforms. Okay. I mean, it's a really good summary.

13:06I want to step back for people that are not as close to this as you and I are. And so I'm going to give a quick summary for listeners and then ask you if I'm right or wrong, and then talk about the allied relationship. So rightly or wrongly, I think most people are not informed on the issue. And so in 1947, we'll look a bit prior to that, the Balfour Declaration more or less gave Zionists, Jews that wanted their homeland returned, the right to go back to what was then known as Palestine. After the Second World War, there was a negotiated settlement where the Jews were allowed to return and a state of Israel was formed.

13:48And there's a great speech by Harry Truman on this explaining this dilemma. Ample land for everybody, lots of space to make this decision. But there's a group of hardcore Arabs that don't want a two-state solution because they don't really even want a one-state solution. They want the Israelis pushed into the sea. And so you've had the formation of Israel, some wars, 67 Six-Day War, the 73 Yom Kippur War, other acts of aggression, terrorism, et cetera, since the existence of Israel. And why am I mentioning all of this? There's been ample opportunity for deals to get struck. There was the Oslo Accords.

14:28There were deals prior to that. Isaac Rabin's deal, obviously, he was killed from Orthodox Jews, people on his right. So it wasn't even Arabs, if you will. And so I guess the big outstanding question for people, will there ever be peace? and what's your thoughts there? And then the secondary question is, the United States has had unstinting, in my opinion, support of Israel. I think vice president, I'm a Republican, you're a Republican. I should say the president. The president has done a great job, in my opinion. And so am I right about the summary of the situation? And where do you think we stand with them right now?

15:07So you're right that there was a proposal just before the founding of the state of Israel, multiple proposals to divide the land into, as you said, a Jewish state and a Palestinian state. And Israel accepted the deal, or the leaders who would lead Israel accepted the deal, accepted the proposal, and the Arab leaders rejected the deal repeatedly. And David Ben-Gurion, who was the leader of the Jews in Israel at the time, many around him were telling him, this is a terrible deal, don't accept it. The way they handled Jerusalem is not advantageous, to us, there was a bunch of pushback from many in the Jewish camp against accepting the deal.

15:49And Ben-Gurion said, no, no, no, no, like this is this we're going to get it. We're going to get a Jewish state. We're going to take what we can get. We can, you know, and let's let the Arabs have their state. And so he he overcame disagreement in the in the is what became the Israel camp. And then you're right in 1967, which I think is the key inflection point where Israel fought a defensive war, the Six-Day War. And Israel was left after that war with, in terms of lands that are truly in dispute, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula. And the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip were Egypt's.

16:24Both Gaza had been occupied by Egypt up until 1967. And the Golan Heights was Syria's and the West Bank was Jordan's. After 67, Israel said, and the UN passed Security Council resolutions, basically saying there should be a two-state solution that recognizes Israel's security, recognizes Israel's borders, and in return, Israel would relinquish territories. And Israel made clear from that moment on that it was ready to negotiate. The PLO at the time, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which was founded in 1964 before the Six-Day War, interestingly, so before Israel even had the West Bank or Gaza Strip, The PLO passed what was called the three no's, which was no recognition, no negotiations, no security, no nothing.

17:08We're not negotiating. So, yes, there have been these periods of negotiations. As you said, the Oslo peace process in the 90s. There was the Camp David peace process in 2000 between Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton in Arfat. There was an effort by Ehud Omer at the prime minister in 2008. Fast forward. There were all these, there was Israel's disengagement from Gaza, unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005. There were all these moments where Israel was ready to go to the table, ready to provide extraordinary concessions to get the Palestinians to yes, to get them to accept a Palestinian state.

17:44And they kept getting rejected. But even before they got rejected, Israel was in this impossible situation where at the peak of negotiation, some of the most violent outbursts, sustained violent outbursts against Israelis took place. So in 2000, for the subsequent couple of years, was the second intifada, which was when a suicide bombing campaign in Israel's major cities went on for a couple of years. Thousands of Israelis were killed. This is while Israel is trying to negotiate with the Palestinians. That campaign was launched by Hamas. So I think what you're you're net out is there's reason to be skeptical that there can never be a solution here because there's fits and starts, but they never end with, you know, a real a real implementable deal.

18:29Nothing like the Camp David Accords in the late 70s under the Carter administration, when Israel negotiated with Egypt, Sadat and Begin negotiated. The deal that they contemplated was Israel returning the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt, a piece of land that's three times the size of Israel. and Sadat flew to Israel, went to Jerusalem, the president of Egypt, gets before the Israeli Knesset, the parliament and says, I recognize Israel's right to exist. I want peace with Israel. When he made the sincere case for how passionately he wanted this mutual recognition, the deal was basically metaphorically done overnight.

19:10And so I continue to believe and Israelis continue to hold out hope that when there's a real interlocutor who's serious about delivery and can enforce a deal, that the Israelis will make extraordinary concessions. Tragically, as we're seeing in the last month, it's harder and harder to believe that could happen. Anyone who thinks, and we can talk more about it, but anyone who could look at what Hamas did to Israel in southern Israel over the last month, or what they did in those first couple of days after October 7th, and then think that those are the leaders that Israel can expect to have in control of Gaza or in control of the West Bank, leaves most Israelis today from left to right thinking there's no deal to be done.

19:52There may be one in the future, but the country, as you know, Anthony, because you've been there, is so tiny, right? Israel right now is surrounded by, and at its southern border, it has Hamas. Its northern border, it has Hezbollah, both organizations that are committed to Israel's genocidal destruction. The West Bank, at least, is led by more secular, more moderate Palestinian leaders, but there are fringe elements even in the West Bank that pose a threat. Israel can wake up any morning and not just have what it had in Gaza, had in southern Israel on October 7th, but could wake up to a three-front war with any or all of these threats.

20:25So given why who's in control of this land matters so much to this tiny country, which is smaller than the state of New Jersey, and like I said, is totally surrounded, the stakes couldn't be higher in terms of who it's dealing with. And right now, as was made evident tragically in the most barbaric ways, it has, on October 7th, it has nobody can deal with. So let's talk about that. So we have a terrorist attack. We have the beheading of babies. We have hostages being taken. And in some cases, we know that they're being tortured and some have been killed. We have 1 ,400, you tell me if I'm wrong about this, but I think it was 1 ,400 civilians killed in a surprise terrorist attack.

21:09And so the magnitude of that, if it was the U.S. population, is, you know, 20-fold? I don't know. You tell me the number. No, it would be the equivalent of what Israel dealt with on October 7th. You know, it's about 40 times the population. So between 40 to 50 ,000. Imagine 40 to 50 ,000 Americans being killed. Yeah, it would be like 40 to 50 ,000 Americans killed in a terrorist attack. It'd be like 15, 15 9-11s on one day. Okay. And I think it's important to state that so people can really understand the magnitude of what happened in the repercussion. And yet I'm finding people at my alma mater, Tufts University, places like University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University, we have people in support of these terrorists.

21:50And so how do you square that given your upbringing and background? So I'm not a Jew, you know, I'm a Goy. for those of you listening that know Yiddish, okay? I'm a non-Jew, although I am one of these few Goys that knows the difference between a Shegiz and a Shiksa. We can talk about that. Yeah, you're more legit than you give yourself credit for. I'm a Philo-Semite as opposed to an Anthem-Semite. This is true. This is true. And I'm a big supporter of the state of Israel and the Jewish people, but also because, as I said at the RJC after I got fired from the White House, Sheldon Adelson invited me there to give a luncheon talk, that you can trace our liberties right back to the foundation stone in Jerusalem, through the works of the Torah, out to the refinement of ancient Greeks, off to Rome, into the UK, out to the United States.

22:37And we've lived under Western liberality, Western freedoms, all of which are foundationally represented in the Torah. And so when you don't protect the Jewish people, you're setting off a potential domino series. Well, first it will be the Jews, and then it will be other ethnic groups, and then it will come to you. And so this is why I'm such a strident believer in this. But the question in that statement, there is a question, what the hell is going on in this country today where people can no longer discern between right and wrong? And there's a tremendous amount of moral relativism. And apparently there are students and professors at places like Cornell University that think it's justifiable to slaughter babies?

23:22So I got to tell you, I'm going to try to answer the question, but I'm going to be full disclosure. I am both, because I've been spending a lot of time thinking about this. It's deeply, deeply upsetting to me. It is shocking and it is perplexing that after, I mean, what happened on October 7th was something on the scale of like a Nazi-like attack. It was attempted, it was an attempt at genocide. It was an attempt at genocide in the most barbaric ways you can imagine. You cited some of them. We don't need to rehash them. They're just unbelievable. And they were broadcast everywhere, meaning it was clear that it was part of Hamas's strategy to record everything and broadcast it some sort of psychological warfare against the Jews.

24:16And then the last part, you know, after the Holocaust, there was in the fringe elements of academia, and I mean really fringe, there was this term called Holocaust denial, Holocaust denialism, which is there was an effort to, and it wasn't really denialism, it was more just start questioning the facts. Well, it wasn't 6 million, it was 2 million. Well, they didn't use, you know, these kinds of chemicals in the gas chambers. They really just did mass slaughter. Well, it wasn't industrial scale murder. It was just challenging and questioning as a means to chip away at the credibility of the reality of the Holocaust.

24:54What was so striking to me about October 7th is it's not really denialism. It's legitimization, that the arguments being made are not, this is awful, these are the forces of barbarism against the forces of civilization, and we need to be on the side that's taking on the forces of barbarism. No, it was, as you're describing in many corners, including on some of our most elite campuses, college campuses, it was, well, you need to understand. Yes, it was bad, but that's what I, whenever I hear the but, no, no, no, there's no but. All right. Whenever I hear the but, yes, it was terrible, but you need to understand the Palestinians live in an open air prison.

25:31Yes, it was awful, but you need to understand the Palestinians in Gaza need their own state. Yes, but, yes, but, yes, but. And the moment I hear the yes, but my head, I want, like, I want to explode. What do you mean? It's like an effort at saying there's a logic to it. And there was no logic to it. And then never in a million years did I think after what was attempted against the Jewish people on November, on October 7th, that it would be followed by Israel being accused of a genocide and Israel being the wrongdoer in this situation. Before Israel has even identified all the bodies, the protests against Israel from the river to the sea started to be chanted at college campuses.