Conversation with Dan Senor — A Look at Israel’s Leadership, Response to the War, and Cultural Traditions

25:59And I think what we are seeing now is that's not the case. I mean, you look at the absurdity of some of the criticisms of Israel in response to October 7th. It is so utterly tragically clear that Israel is being held to a standard that these same people who are out protesting would never hold another country to. I'll put forward a series of theses and you tell me where you disagree or agree. I think America has played a vital role in this. The Biden administration doesn't get enough credit. I think Hamas was looking to do two things. One, inspire global sympathy and attention to their cause. I think they've achieved that, unfortunately.

26:36I really do. I think they've tapped into a groundswell of anti-Semitism that we didn't know was there. And two, I thought they were hoping to inspire a multi-front war against Israel. And that has not happened, largely because of two carrier strike forces sitting off the coast that are basically saying, if you do this, we're going to rain violence on you. And that is what, unfortunately, geopolitics mostly comes down to. So one, curious about how you feel about the Biden administration's handling of this and what you think about. Let's start there. The Biden administration's approach to this. I, as you know, my general political outlook would not lead me to a place where I praise, look for reasons to praise the Biden administration.

27:26And I have been very publicly supportive of and praising of President Biden in his handling of this war. And I want to take a moment on this because I think it's important. And to your point, Scott, if as Hamas was plotting this and whoever else was helping them from Tehran to Nasrallah and Lebanon to God knows who else, when they were plotting October 7th, if you would have asked them that, hey, within five days of this massacre, the commander in chief of the most powerful military in the world would not have only given an incredibly, I thought, incredibly moving address, empathizing with the true victims of this massacre, the Jewish people, in the way that he did that Saturday on October 7th, and would have a couple of days after that gotten on Air Force One and flown to Israel.

28:30The commander in chief for the most powerful army in the world. No president's ever done that. Israel's been in plenty of wars and the U.S. has done a lot to help Israel, whether it was during the first Iraq war when President George H.W. Bush, you know, provided Patriot missile technology to shoot down scuds, whether it was Nixon in 73 with its military airlift that really saved Israel, helped save Israel in a pretty dark period of the Yom Kippur war. You can go back, but a president getting on the plane and going to the war zone. And he didn't just go to the war zone. He met with the Israeli war cabinet.

29:07He sat there with Netanyahu and Gantz and Eisenkot and the entire war cabinet as though he was a member of their team. And obviously he met with families of the hostages and he did a lot on the ground. And then provided, we're still waiting for the congressional passage of this large$14 billion plus age package, but he has still provided a lot of important supplies. And then you mentioned the aircraft carriers and the 2 ,000 Marines in the region and the squadrons. And I mean, I can go on and on and on and on. And explicitly told Tehran and Hezbollah, don't even think for a moment about trying to capitalize on this.

29:49I bet it wasn't in Hamas's playbook that that's what the week after October 7th was gonna look like. And so I repeatedly say, as far as Israel is concerned, the U.S.-Israel relationship is paramount. And President Biden deserves a lot of credit. Now, I have some concerns about, I think there's a little bit of good cop, bad cop going on in the administration right now. And certainly you look at some of the things that Vice President Harris said over the last few days that I think are disconcerting. These five principles that she articulated, which are mostly unrealistic. And I think there's some in the administration.

30:24I think the administration is divided. I think there are some in the administration that are concerned about domestic politics and pressure they're getting from their left flank that they need to try to figure out how to mollify with regard to the position President Biden's taken. But by and large, the person who's holding the line on the administration's approach is the president himself. And so it's a long winded way of saying I think his support has been extremely important. What are your thoughts about normalization between the kingdom and Israel? So I think that Saudi-Israeli normalization was very far along on the eve of October 7th, much farther along than even many in the press here in the United States that were following it believed.

31:09If you look at the U.N. General Assembly meetings in September in New York, you look at what MBS was saying publicly, you look at what Netanyahu was saying publicly. I, you know, and they it was it was it was moving. It was moving fast. And I think it was going to happen before the end of this year because they wanted to get it done while Biden got consumed by the presidential election, which was going to happen next year. And the Biden administration was key to getting it done because there were going to be some Senate Democrats in any kind of defense pact between the U.S. and Saudi that was key to this.

31:40There were going to be some Senate Democrats who were critics of of Saudi that wouldn't want to go along with it, which is why Biden was key. The Biden was going to deliver the Senate Democrats. So I think it was fast moving. October 7th actually is has paused it. But part of the reason Saudi Arabia wanted to integrate or normalize with Israel is as one very prominent leader, Saudi leader said to me about four or five years ago, he said, look, we view Israel as the future. and we want to partner with the future. And why do we want to innovate? We want to co-innovate with the leading innovators in the world.

32:18Why do we have to get on a 17-hour flight to San Francisco and go to the Bay Area when we want to innovate? We have a Silicon Valley in our backyard. His words, a three-hour flight from Riyadh is Tel Aviv. Why aren't we just partnering with them on food tech, on cybersecurity, on health care innovations? I mean, it can go on and on and on. These are some of the areas they're particularly focused on. Why do we have to schlep, my word, to the Bay Area to do that? So they wanted to integrate with Israel economically and technologically. And undergirding all of this is that Israel and Saudi face a common threat.

32:59They have strategic national security, strategic reasons to work together. They have a common threat in Iran and they have a common threat in extreme Sunni Muslim Arab activism or, at worst, terrorism. In the case of Saudi Arabia, the threat is for Muslim Brotherhood. In the case of Israel, the threat is Hamas, as we're seeing. So they had a whole bunch of reasons to partner. Saudi saw in Israel not only a technology superpower and regionally an economic superpower, but it saw in Israel a security and intelligence juggernaut. And they wanted to piggyback on all of it. The big setback of October 7th is I think the Saudis look at Israel and say, huh, we thought you guys were a security and intelligence juggernaut.

33:51How does the security intelligence juggernaut completely miss this, miss October 7th? So if anything, the Israel's weakness on October 7th is what is setting back the potential for Saudi-Israeli normalization, which is why the Israelis generally believe, and the Israelis in the leadership, I personally believe, this idea that Israel needs to be tempered in its response as a way to get the Saudi-Israeli normalization back on track, I think is completely misguided. If Israel is tempered, Israel will look weak. It will look weak. If a country can unleash the attempted genocide that Israel thought and the region thought was a ragtag militia, the way it did on October 7th, it makes Israel look like a paper tiger.

34:39And a paper tiger is not what the Saudis are going to want to do business with. In the 1973 Yom Kippur War, for the first couple of weeks, Israel was completely set back, completely caught off guard and embarrassed. And then Israel bounced back. And when Israel bounced back within a matter of months, it was not only surrounding the Egyptian Third Army in the Sinai, but it was staring down at Damascus and Cairo. And they could have taken either one of those cities. They didn't. The point is, it was unequivocal. Israel's ultimate victory in 1973 was unequivocal. You go to U.S. military academies, they don't study the Six-Day War, even though the Six-Day War is arguably the more impressive war.

35:19The U.S. military academies, they study the 1973 Yom Kippur War because it's a story of bounce back, of resilience, of turning things around and how Israel did it. And what Israel ultimately did in 1973 is they exposed Egypt's military and Syria's military as the paper tigers. And it's not surprising that within less than a decade, Israel had a peace treaty with one of those two countries, with Egypt, which at the time was the Saudi Arabia of the region. It's because Israel demonstrated strength. And if you fast forward to today, I think the big risk for Israel is the IDF after what happened on October 7 looks like the paper tiger.

35:56And an IDF that looks like a paper tiger is not one that Saudi is going to want to do business with. Israel's contract with its own people was broken on October 7th because of that security collapse, and it has to repair that. But it also has to do it to repair its geopolitical position. And I think if it demonstrates that it has wiped out this Hamas threat and it has restored security and that October 7th was bad, it was a setback. But in the scheme of history, it will be viewed as a hiccup. I think we could have Saudi-Israeli normalization within a year. So just along the lines of being optimistic about how we move forward and hopefully develop something resembling a sustainable peace in the U.S.

36:39One, it feels to me in hindsight, Obama's decision to withdraw from the Middle East was a mistake. That without whatever you want to call us, the world's policemen, there was a vacuum that was filled by people who didn't represent Western interests. I don't think there's ever going to be a sustainable peace with Hamas in power, which I'm sure you agree with. What you probably disagree with is I don't think there's a sustainable peace as long as Netanyahu's in office. And that is, I just think the disassembly of the courts, the way they have approached, quite frankly, Dan, I think his approach to Hamas is, or not Hamas, his approach to Gaza has been diabolical.

37:21I mean, actually supporting Hamas in an attempt to divide the country further, that the only sustainable peace is going to be, obviously, you can't have a terrorist organization representing a government whose only amendment is the extermination of a race of people. But I also don't think it's sustainable as long as we have kind of this far right government in Israel. And I'm curious what your thoughts are there. I have known Netanyahu for a long time. I have been supportive of many things he's done over his many decades of public service. I have been deeply concerned before October 7th about some of the way his government has tackled certain issues.

38:11You mentioned judicial reform, which is one of them, but not the only one since he returned to power in 2023. I think... The Israelis are ruthless about accountability and scrutiny when there are security setbacks. Ruthless. I mean, the United States could learn something from this. If you look at what happened after the Yom Kippur War, even though Israel ultimately was successful and won the war, it ended Golda Meir's career. There was a commission of inquiry and set back the Labor Party really for a generation politically. You look at the 2006 Second Lebanon War, ended Ehud Omer's political life.

38:48I think that the idea there will be a commission of inquiry after this war and the idea that Netanyahu is going to be let off the hook I just don't buy it he was he was he was prime minister when it happened now in fairness he wasn't the only prime minister since Israel disengaged from Gaza Israel left Gaza in 2005 since Israel left from Gaza there was Prime Minister Sharon there was Prime Minister Omer there was Prime Minister Bennett there was Prime Minister Lapid and then There are many prime ministers who are all familiar with Israel's policy. But he more than anyone shaped the policy. I think just look at the politics of the country right now where public opinion is.

39:26There's no way any prime minister can politically survive something like this. This is catastrophic. As I said, it's worse than the Yom Kippur War. I can't think of another setback Israel has faced that is as bad as this. And it not only happened on his watch, but he was Mr. Security. His whole political brand was, you may not like me. You may not like me, but I'll keep you safe. Right. Well, so much for that. And so I just think this question, can he be the one? I just don't think he will be the one. We'll be right back.

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40:38Ready to invest? What if you could have an advisor that really understood you. When it comes to your finances, your business, your future, at LPL Financial, we believe the only question should be, what if you could? Pit advertisement, Anna Kendrick, is not a client of LPL Financial LLC and receives compensation to promote LPL. Investing involves risk, including potential loss of principal LPL Financial LLC member FINRA SIPC. So let's move to your book. The thing that struck me in your book, and I love this line, you said, the United States has strong institutions but a weak society, and Israel has a very strong society, but weak institutions.

41:11Say more. Look, in the United States, and you've written extensively about this, and I know your audience is very familiar with it, but I want to just spend a moment on it to establish the contrast. Israeli American society is broken. We have record levels of loneliness. We have a demographic crisis brewing. People aren't having children anymore, at least not at the rates they were, which means our population, like many populations around the world, are aging and shrinking. Most Western affluent democracies are aging and shrinking. Now, Japan is at the pointy end of the spear. I was in Japan last April, and I was meeting with some government officials who point to the fact that its population is shrinking as the biggest threat to the country.

42:00Not China. Not China. The biggest threat to Japan is they're an aging and shrinking country and aging and shrinking countries become economically busted because the younger there aren't enough young people to support older people and they become less innovative. You have a loneliness epidemic. You have a you have a mental health crisis. You have a teen mental health crisis. And I know you've written a lot about it. And the phrase I never in a million years thought I would see. And I'm the father of two teenage boys, as I know you are. The CDC comes out with this report a few months ago. There is a teen suicide crisis, just that term, a teen.

42:34Like that's a thing, you know, record staggering levels of teens attempting suicide or committing suicide. I can go on and on and on with with how, you know, longevity, deaths, deaths of despair from drug abuse, alcohol abuse and suicide at record levels. So Israel. On every one of these metrics, and this is what we lay out in the book, every one of these metrics is in is is not just doing a little better. it's in an opposite direction. Israel's population, its fertility rate is way above the replacement level. Israelis are having lots and lots of children. It's not just the ultra-Orthodox families.

43:09It's secular, hyper-secular Israelis working in tech in the coolest, hippest parts of very hedonistic Tel Aviv are having three, four, and five children. Israelis are living longer than Europeans, Americans. There's no loneliness crisis. There's no teen mental health crisis. There's a sense of happiness and optimism. Even during low points, Israel ranks the fourth happiest country in the world. And when I raise this, friends of mine who write about this issue, when they point to the brokenness of American society, they point to things like, well, what do you expect from why people are living with such despair in the United States?

43:47All they're hearing about is climate change catastrophe. Young people are only hearing about school shootings. political polarization is off the charts and you know on and on and on and on and I point out Israel has every one of those things oh by the way and they're spending all their time scrolling on their phones so it is true Americans are exposed to a lot of information about climate catastrophe so are Israelis you want to talk about gun violence I mean young Israelis almost every one of them at age 18 go to serve in the military and they know what it's like to have their lives on the lines or to lose friends and to lose loved ones They really know what violence in their daily life is about.

44:27Political polarization in Israel at times is off the charts, especially in 2023, where you had hundreds of thousands of people storming the streets every Saturday night to protest. And Israeli kids have as much access to smartphones as anyone else. So why? Like Israel has all these dynamics. It has weak institutions, as we saw in the judicial reform debate in 2023, as we saw in Israel's immediate response to October 7th. Weak institutions, weak government institutions. But the society is thriving. People feel connected to each other. They feel connected to the country. They feel connected to community.

45:06They feel connected to their families. And so how does that manifest itself? One, and I'm just going to give a couple examples. In the book, we go through a whole bunch. You can't underestimate the role of national service. So the fact that a majority of Israelis at their formative years in their lives, 18, 19, 20, 21, don't go to college. They don't, and they don't spend the years leading up to that trying to get into the best college. The sorting system in the United States is the college application process, which is all about, everything about the college application process is me. I, my performance, individual excellence.

45:44How did I do? What are my grades? What are my SAT tests? What kind of reference letters can I persuade someone? How am I better than the person on my left and right? Right. Where in Israel, if you want to serve, most people serve in the military. The goal is to get into the best units possible. It doesn't matter how talented you are. It doesn't matter what kind of individual excellence you have. If you can't work with other people, if you can't serve as part of a team effectively, if you don't understand what it means to be part of a group, if you don't have a communal mindset, you won't get admitted to those best units.

46:16And so the whole incentive system as kids are getting older, beginning with youth movements when they're young, the army when they're 18, all the incentives are about how do I perform with other people, not just me? And I will be rewarded based on how I work with other people. It changes the whole culture of the country. And, you know, we write in the book about the role of Shabbat, of Friday nights, of the Sabbath. We call it Thanksgiving every week. Now, some Jews observe it more religiously and traditionally than others, but the point is the overwhelming majority of Israelis shut down every Friday night to be with family, friends, two generations, three generations, sometimes four generations.

46:57And there's a sense that they are sharing in that experience with the people they love, and the whole country is sharing that experience. Dan Sinor is a bestselling author, the host of the Call Me Back podcast, and a co-founder of the Board of Directors of the Foreign Policy Initiative. He also serves as a partner at Elliott Management. Previously, Dan served as a senior advisor to former Speaker Paul Ryan's campaign for vice president and foreign policy advisor to Senator Mitt Romney's presidential campaigns. His new book, The Genius of Israel, The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent world is out now.

47:33He joins us from his home in Manhattan. Dan, I remember I took Ashley, my younger sister we referenced before, to Washington, D.C., on a tour of D.C., hoping that it would inspire her. And the good news was it did. The bad news is she immediately became an intern in some crazy right-wing Republican's office. And me as a deep blue progressive. And then I met you, and you were another Republican. I'm like, oh, my God, I failed. I was immediately like, this didn't pan out the way it had hoped. And now I look back on that fondly because I just think you've grown into such an impressive man. And I really also just want to say I appreciate the resilience and the courage you're showing around this issue.

48:19Anyways, Dan, I'm just thrilled to reconnect with you and congratulations on the life and the success you've built. Thank you, Scott. Obviously, that means a lot to me. I do remember your visits. And I will say as much as you felt that your sister was getting enveloped by crazy right wing Republicans, we will look back with. They seem moderate. Yeah. Quaint. That was a quaint time. Yes. The Cheney seemed reasonable. We're going to romanticize the Gingrich era of the 1990s. A hundred percent. That's the reason. All right, brother. Stay safe. Thanks. Thank you.

49:05Algebra of happiness. I am at that age where people are just dying left and right. It's just so weird. I think in your 50s, a lot of strange shit pops up and takes people out. And then if they get into their 60s, they're kind of, I don't know, their body gets set. I don't know what it is. And they live into their 80s. But I've lost a couple of close friends. And most recently, my closest friend in high school, Brett Jarvis lost his older brother, Derek Jarvis, who I believe was 60 years old, only a few weeks after his father passed. They were going to his father's service. Derek Jarvis, the older brother who'd been suffering from diabetes, went into the bathroom, collapsed, and was put on life support, and then they removed the life support.

49:49So that's a fun way to start, Algebra of Happiness. The reason I bring it up is we had a guest on Pivot talking about foster care. Obviously, people decide to take in kids who aren't biologically theirs to try and look after them and some of the shortcomings of foster care. But that's not what this is about. I effectively had foster parents, and that was the Jarvis's. My mother was a secretary. She worked in the Valley. She ran the secretarial pool, and then she worked at Southwestern University in downtown LA. And I was pretty much alone all the time. No siblings. My dad was gone. My mom was working all the time.

50:21Um, and so my kind of surrogate or foster parents were the Jarvis's and Brett was a scholar athlete. There was three brothers, Doug, Brett, and Derek. Um, Brett was my closest friend from the seventh grade through when we graduated high school and we were literally attached to the hip. And the thing that bonded us was laughter. We just had kind of a similar weird sense of humor. And there would be times I'm not exaggerating where we would be at university high school in the quad, like rolling on the ground because we couldn't stop. We just couldn't stop laughing about something. And Brett was a scholar athlete, ended up going to Stanford.

50:59I think I got a lot of aspiration from Brett. Brett was smarter than me, but not that much smarter. And we both came from middle-class homes. His was solidly middle-class. Mine was sort of upper-lower middle class. But the fact that he was going to Stanford, I think, gave me the confidence to apply to UCLA. And every Monday night, I used to go to their house for a family night. It's a warm tradition. They're Mormons. I don't know if I mentioned that. And as I look back on those six years with kind of my foster family, the Jarvis's, I was surrounded by family. I was surrounded by sports. I was surrounded by America.

51:33They're very patriotic. I was surrounded by success. They put a big emphasis on success. I was surrounded by kindness. And I was also not surrounded by alcohol and drugs. And I speak pretty flippantly about my alcohol consumption now, but I am really grateful that I ended up in an environment, specifically my friendship with Brett and my involvement with the Jarvis family, where I never smoked pot or I never drank until the age of 19. And I played instead, that void of fun and partying was filled with sports. And when I look back on that time, and I think about some of the things that I'm grateful for, and some of the things I like about myself now, I think a lot of it was those seeds were planted by the Jarvis's.

52:15And so I wanted to just say to Brett and Doug, and Doug, his younger brother, ended up coming to work for me at Profit for a good decade, that A, one, I'm really sorry about not only your father, but your brother. This family has registered immense loss in the last few weeks. But that your family just had such a wonderful and profound impact on me. So what's the learning? What's actionable from the experience I've just outlined with the Jarvis family. If you're fortunate enough to have built a life of love and family and you have resources, you know, there really is no greater gift. There's no greater expression, I would argue, of masculinity or of, I don't know, investing in the Commonwealth to become irrationally passionate about the well-being of another child's life and invite them into your wonderful family.

53:07And I mean, I just became part of this family and they didn't need to have me there. And unfortunately, I think a lot of us think that that would, I don't know, we're not as prone to do that. And that is, I think, just this tremendous investment in the universe. So if you're in a position to reach out, you see a kid, encourage your sons and your daughters to invite their friends over. And, you know, slowly but surely, see if you can make them part of your foster family. Anyways, rest in peace, Derek Jarvis, and thank you to the Jarvis family.

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