Greater Israel: Is Netanyahu pursuing an expansionist dream?

0:00ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music, and more. There was a chook who was left something like 10 million pounds in a wheel. She was called Jiju, but she was rich, so maybe. Posh, like Jiju? Anyway, does that mean I can leave my car to my cat or my dad-o to my dog? What the duck is presenting Nature's Most Wanted, the intersection of animals and the law. You know, kinks being tried for murder or ducks getting speeding tickets. What the duck on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. Turn on the news, and you'd be convinced America is alone as war with Iran. But what about Israel? Not only has it launched hundreds of missile strikes inside Iran itself, it's expanding and intensifying its war. Bombing Beirut and sending troops deeper to implement what officials call the Gaza model. I'm Latika Burm. And I'm Kylie Morris. On this episode of Global Roaming, we're in search of Greater Israel.

1:20Kylie, we hear a lot about how the Trump administration is fairing. In this war against Iran or not. But we've actually heard less about Israel, something we're going to correct on this episode. That's right, because of course Israel is fighting on multiple fronts simultaneously. And while each of those conflicts might have their own rationale, so the fight against his bala in Lebanon, for example, the striking of infrastructure in Syria, and certainly the many missiles that have been sent toward Iran and the very robust effort that Israel is applying in the war against Iran and the regime. There are those within the Israeli leadership, I think, who are dreaming of a greater Israel divinely ordained. So I'm really intrigued by what the view is of the war from inside Israel. And I'm really happy that we've been able to persuade someone to come on the show today who is really one of the best, I think, inside Israel.

2:22Her name is Dalia Shindlin. She's a pollster, as well as an author and a political analyst. She knows a lot about the settlements and about the West Bank. But she also knows a lot professionally about the way that people are feeling in Israel, about the war, particularly as it continues into a fairly undefined timeframe. I'm very, very intrigued as to how long Israeli people want to be at war with Iran, particularly if Trump closes this and sells off in a week or two. Let's hear that conversation now. Dalia Shindlin. Dalia Shindlin, welcome to Global Roaming. Thank you so much for having me on the show. Now, just before we came to talk to you, you had to go to a bombshelter. You're in Tel Aviv. What's the last 24 hours been like? Well, every day is relative. The day before, for actually two nights in a row, there were no barajas aimed at the center of the country for two nights.

3:25And that was a big deal. People slept. And then most of the day, yesterday, there was nothing, which was surprising in the center of the country. But there were heavy barajas in the north and in the south. So if it's not one place, it's another. And then starting at about 9 or 9 or 9 or 30 yesterday evening, there were two barajas to the center of the country in a row in very short succession, one more at 5 o'clock this morning and one more just now at 9.25 in the morning. And so it just means that we're going back to what we were doing before the last two days, which is every couple of hours. You get an alert. You have to find a place close by where you can be protected fairly heavily protected, either a specially protected room or an underground shelter. And then you wait for the actual siren after that you have one and a half minutes before there is a danger of missile fire or falling debris from interceptions. Then you wait another 10 minutes in the shelter and then you go back to where you were before. So the whole thing can take between 20, 25 minutes and it's obviously disruptive oftentimes in the middle of the night.

4:28But this is the way everybody has been living around the country and, of course, in so many parts of the Middle East. So what is that doing from morale? How strongly support for continuing this war? Right now, as of a survey that was published yesterday from the Israel Democracy Institute, although it was actually taken the survey was taken the previous week, we're seeing that about 67% about two thirds of Israelis support continuing this war. Now that sounds like a lot and it is a significant majority, it's also a significant decline from over 80% of Israelis who supported the war in the first two weeks. And that support was primarily driven by the Jewish population. That's about 75% of Israeli society. And among that population in the first two weeks of the war, support was over 90% among Palestinian citizens or Arab citizens of Israel. Support has always been much lower about one quarter in the first couple of weeks. And that has gone down in the current survey to about 19%.

5:29Now among the Jewish population support is still over three quarters. So the weighted average is two thirds support. But what we're seeing also is a very significant drop in the number of Jewish Israelis who say they strongly support the war. So the intensity of support has declined significantly from about 74% in the first week to 50% now. That's direct evidence of falling morale. Now again, it's still a majority. But in the beginning, I think Israelis in general were whether they supported or opposed it, were certainly hoping it was going to be a short and decisive war. Despite the fact that Israel has been at war pretty much since October 7th, there's still a lingering perception that Israel can do what it had done in the past and win decisively in a very short and intense phase of war. But people have had to internalize that this war is going on. They have had to live with the routine that I just described of having their lives disrupted by needing to run to shelters and fearing very significant damage of missile fire for an entire month.

6:32I think we're on the 31st day right now, if I'm not mistaken, which is something, the combination of that level of danger and this length of time really is unprecedented. Even the war in June, which was unprecedented, was only 12 days long. Is there any clarity in Israeli society about what the intention or the goal or success looks like in this war? Well, there's quite a bit of clarity, at least let's say perceived clarity. In other words, the Prime Minister has reiterated what the goals are. Israelis pretty much get them, right? And he has said constantly, well, I mean, there was one shift of a goal which was then, in the very beginning, he talked about toppling the regime and then that was kind of modified into the goal of setting the conditions or creating the conditions for the Iranian people to topple the regime. So certainly, Israelis would have liked to see that big far-reaching goal and they realized that it isn't happening. So that's one of the things I was talking about when I said the complexities. But really, I think at the heart of this, the support is based on the intention for Israel to destroy Iran's nuclear capabilities or nuclear program

7:34because we doesn't have any nuclear weapon capabilities yet. What it has was apparently, or Israelis believe, an intention to build nuclear weapons via uranium enrichment, you know, over 400 kilos somewhere in the country and destroy the ballistic missile threat. And one of the goals that Netanyahu has talked about over the years, a little bit less right now, is incapacitating the network of Iranian allies, via militia groups around the Middle East. Israel is, of course, also at war with Hezbollah, which decided to join in this campaign, probably under Iran's request slash, pressure slash something. But when Hezbollah joined, naturally, Israel jumped on that opportunity to revive the war against Hezbollah that had begun, well, really, I'd began when Hezbollah joined in Hamas' attack on October 8th, the day after Hamas' attack in 2023. But Israel severely escalated in order to try to incapacitate Hezbollah in the fall of 2024. And there had been something like a ceasefire, but not really a ceasefire. So when Hezbollah made this fateful decision to join,

8:36that kind of became another staging ground for trying to incapacitate one of Iran's most important proxies. And, you know, Israel, I think that they certainly hope that weakening and possibly dismantling that network of militias that threaten Israel is part of this. But it has been a little bit downplayed other than the war on Hezbollah. In Netanyahu doesn't talk about that part of it quite as much. Definitely, they view the aim as trying to incapacitate, you know, the nuclear program and the ballistic program, and hoping that the regime will fall. In terms of measures of success, that gets much more complicated. It's very hard to know, and there's a lot of conflicting information. Do you think that there is a shared sense of what success will look like between the US and Israel? I mean, we're starting to hear suggestions that President Trump is looking for an off-ramp, is looking for a way out of this, and certainly trying to move toward talks. But at the same time, you have an expansion really in the Israeli campaign inside Lebanon

9:38against targets in Syria and Lebanon, and of course, in Iran. Is there a risk that Israel is left fighting this war on its own? I mean, it's too early to say, but there's no question that there are going to be some differences of the actual interests of the two sides, not least because US President Donald Trump seems to change his strategy from minute to minute and redefine his own goals from minute to minute. And so, you know, one of the most important war aims for the US right now is to open the straight of war mus, which wasn't even a problem before the war. And the most recent thing that happened over the last day or two is that Trump seems to be saying, well, actually, maybe that's not such an incredible priority and we can move ahead with our aims without that. So it's very hard to know exactly what the American aims are. Of course, Netanyahu tries to convey all the time that the US and Israel are completely aligned on their aims. But there's one thing that I think is very clear, and that's that the US really does want a short war. President Trump doesn't seem to want to get bogged down in a very long term war. It seems like one of the pads he might take is to say, well, we have caused enough damage to the Iranian regime

10:41that they will now go back to the table and we will get a better, you know, nuclear limitation deal. That's one outcome. I can't say that I'm predicting that outcome, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's the main outcome when he finds out that it's not going to be so easy to topple the regime or actually find those 440 kilograms of enriched uranium, you know, or destroy all the ballistic missiles and launchers in the country as Netanyahu would want. And the difference is that Netanyahu, as much as the Israeli public, would have preferred short, powerful, decisive wars, which is kind of a mythical image in Israel's history, like the Six Day War. But Netanyahu himself, I think, would like as much time as possible to achieve those aims, I think, you know, particularly to incapacitate the regime as much as possible, even if it doesn't fall, you know, get rid of the most important key people, top people, especially in the nuclear program as well, and, you know, destroy as many of the ballistic missiles, launchers, and materials needed to produce them. And that's something that Netanyahu doesn't seem to mind spending time on. The question of how long the Israeli public can cope with it is a complicated one

11:44because I think we'll continue to see falling more well in Israel if that's what happens. But just the fact that the public doesn't like it isn't necessarily a reason why Netanyahu might stop. So, you know, there are certainly divergences in the US and Israel. Do you have any Israel the same psyche and fear and fatigue about forever wars, like we see in the US or not? You know, you have to realize that in Israel's history, there was not a concept of the forever war, right? Most of Israel's history was very short wars. However, there are two major exceptions. One is that Israel, you know, went into Lebanon in 1982, and then occupied it for 18 years. So, you know, an occupation in southern Lebanon. And Israelis maybe don't think of that as a war, but they definitely did not like the 18-year occupation, which many people feel kind of bled the country with a slow bleed. And the other exception is the Palestinians, of course. And again, Israelis have tended to suppress and kind of deflect the idea that that is a war. But it is an ongoing militarized conflict and occupation that leads to regular cycles of escalation, each one getting worse and worse.

12:46We had seen over the last 15 years. And so, I don't know if Israelis are completely adopting the language of a forever war because they didn't have what Americans think of when they think of Vietnam. But the examples of both the Palestinians and the Lebanon occupation I think very much ought to be a cautionary tale for Israelis. And I think it's somewhere in their minds. Some of the explanation, Stalia, that we're hearing from members of Netanyahu's own government about these multiple wars is that this is a cosmic moment. They're divinely ordained. What does that mean? What are they talking about? Stalia, whose current coalition is full of religious fundamentalists. These are people who are absolutely driven by a worldview that there is a preordained redemption awaiting the Jewish people and that if the conditions have been put into place via the American leadership and October 7th, that it is nothing short of miraculous, that these conditions now allowed for Israel to escalate severely against Iran. This is a way of thinking that characterizes religious fundamentalism wherever you find all of these ways of thinking.

13:48Essentially mean that this is preordained, that the outcome is the redemption of the Jewish people and that it would be a sin to go against what is clearly God's will that Israel would do these things. But what are these things? The war against Iran is one thing. I think that the great fear of neighboring countries in the Middle East is that it involves an opportunity for expansionism and there is more and more talk in Israel about, you know, especially from the religious fundamentalists about greater Israel, about, you know, Israel keeping the positions that is held for theoretically from strategic security purposes and Lebanon and certain places in Syria as well. And then maybe leveraging that as a stepping stone towards this kind of messianic redemption. And I think that is a genuine danger because these people represent key coalition partners in Netanyahu's government and key ministries as well. They are very influential given how badly Mr. Netanyahu wants to stay in power. Dalia, the violence in the West Bank, it seems to be intensifying. We've seen videos of pogroms and the villages

14:52in the villages of Hebron, settlers burning down Palestinian homes, killing, injuring farming families, often with soldiers standing behind and not intervening. Is that escalating? Absolutely. It's gotten to levels we have never seen before. And I think that the main, you know, there are some significant differences one, but the main one is that, frankly, it's been backed by this government almost openly, which is giving directives to the IDF. And the IDF, there's some internal discord about this, in fact. But ultimately, many of the soldiers who are serving in the area are also representative of the kinds of communities who are doing this. You know, we saw that in the CNN report from last week when a CNN crew went out to investigate some of these attacks, which often happen also in the Northern West Bank in the Samaria region, as the Jewish Israelis call it. And it was the army that came out and harassed them. And said, of course, we have a right to this land. It's all, you know, all the land belongs to us. And they were wearing kind of symbols on their uniforms that indicate a messianic approach. So, you know, part of this is the real complicity of many of the forces on the ground.

15:53And I think also a real sense that the government is totally emboldened to completely dismiss and break out of any even, you know, even the hypothetical practically, you know, just nominal constraints of the old Oslo breakdown between areas A, B, and C, where by, you know, Israel's, you know, the army theoretically legitimately was in military and civilian control of area C, where they, you know, could settle. But they should never have been expelling Palestinians from there as they have been. But also basically expanding Israeli usage and settlements are trying to in areas B and now even area A. So there's a kind of unconstrained expansionism in the West Bank. But as the Israeli government doesn't even see it like that. They see it simply as Israeli land that has long been not formalized sufficiently to express the reality that it is part of Israel and needs to be settled. That's how the government sees it. And they are implementing this all the time. In fact, one of my critiques of the way this is often covered is that, you know, as absolutely, you know, devastating as this violence is just for any human being to watch what's happening

16:57and everybody should be outraged by it, you know, it's really just terrorism attacks on civilians for political aims and its classic definition. Having said that, this is the very visible, you know, an easy way to condemn what's going on when, in fact, the reality of how Israel is affecting annexation every day on the ground happens through bureaucratic means, through the transfer of powers that have long been under military occupation powers to civilian authorities like the minister of finance who is also a minister in the Ministry of Defense during these things, like declarations of land within the West Bank as Israeli state land. These are very complex bureaucratic mechanisms that are ultimately a lot more meaningful in terms of actually implementing annexation and forcing out Palestinians. So it's easy to focus on these horrible acts of violence which have gone completely out of control but remember, they are completely backed by the state, enabled and often allowed by the army and sometimes military forces even participate but also really the, you know, I think that we need to keep our eyes on how this is happening

17:57in, you know, through legal and bureaucratic means that are going to be much harder to reverse. Just finally, Dalia, there's been, of course, a human cause to all this fighting, as you mentioned, Israelis like yourself have been rushing to bomb shelters, a number of being killed by strikes. Inside Lebanon now, nearly a million people are displaced. The suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, as you describe, you know, continue well away from the cameras in a way out of focus. If Israel wants to build a new Middle East, how does it repair relations with all the people now who've been impacted by this? I don't know how easy it's going to be to repair relations with people. I think the only way people start to feel better about people that they have been in a war with, is when the wars end and a lot of time goes by when they have peaceful relations or at least non-conflictual relations to look at. I think there's no magic formula and nothing you can say. Especially, you know, for a country like Lebanon that has been so physically devastated by Israel's, you know, invasions over the years. But I think that the main thing that Israel, you know, really should be keeping its eye on

18:59something that I've been keeping my eye on is that it's going to be very hard to repair. Well, you know, first of all, Israel can't build the Middle East. Israel does not have that power. No country has the power to reshape the world. But I think that, you know, the main thing that could lead to greater stability in the Middle East is to try to strengthen states and not constantly try to weaken them. Now, I don't know if Israel, I can't claim that Israel has a policy of always trying to weaken states. But oftentimes, you see that the actions undertaken definitely have that effect and sometimes intentionally. And I think that what Israel has been doing probably simply for lack of strategic foresight is, you know, looking at countries like Syria and Lebanon and saying, well, they're either weak. And so we need to go in and do things like control, Khizballah, and disarm them. Or we don't want them to be any stronger than they are, for example, in Syria under the new leader. And I think that there's no real replacement for a centralized state that has a monopoly on the use of force where there is, you know, a top decision maker in the form of a government that can actually make decisions in partnership with Israel in the future.

20:01And there are opportunities for that now. You know, both Syria and Lebanon's governments have expressed, you know, rather extraordinary willingness to work in some sort of cooperation with Israel if not exactly, you know, warm and fuzzy friendship. And I think that Israel has, you know, a very clear choice about whether to embark on a doctrine that says we need stable centralized states in the region, they may not be nice actors, they may not be democratic actors. But that's better than having fragmented weak states that become, you know, a total ground for militias that are, frankly, uncontrolled. We had four soldiers killed in Lebanon just last night that were announced this morning. And the analysis is that Khizballah is behaving differently. They are not behaving in terms of trained, disciplined forces undertaking deadly attacks. But now they're fragmented into much less disciplined, tiny little cells, kind of undertaking guerrilla attacks, which is not surprising, considering how badly Khizballah has been weakened by the Israeli campaigns. But it doesn't necessarily make it better, right? I mean, four people were killed overnight. That's a big loss for Israel.

21:03Soldiers, I should say. So Dalia, by the end of the year, we will have elections in Israel. What is your prediction about one, the forces that shaped that in the current context, and two, whether Netanyahu prevails? Well, that's a good question, because I do not predict who's going to win elections. But I can tell you that the forces that will shape the elections will be a competition between what Netanyahu will prefer. And he will prefer to talk about Israel's very daring and spectacular military advances in the Middle East. He will talk about this more with Iran as if there have been major achievements, no matter what the actual outcome. He will also talk about having destroyed Khizballah, even though that's exactly what he said in the fall of 2024. And now we're finding out it wasn't totally true. But that doesn't matter. He will talk about Israel as a regional power. He will talk about his incredible alliance with the U.S., which allowed Israel to take on that very intensive military campaign, which was the only way to save Israel from existential destruction, all because of his leadership. That's what he will want the elections to be about. The opposition parties will want to remind the country that it was on Netanyahu's watch

22:06that October 7th happened the worst security breach in Israeli history and the deadliest day in the Israeli and Jewish history anywhere since the Second World War. Really, something Israelis will never truly recover from. And they'll want to also remind people of all the things that happened before October 7th under this government, the attempt to undermine Israel's institutions, rule of law, legitimize corruption, advance theocratic rule, which we're seeing many pieces of legislation continuing under the cover of this war, including just last week when Knesset passed a law to expand the power of religious courts. Just yesterday, Israel passed a death penalty law, which it had public support and polls, capitalizing on October 7th, but this is a really cynical move to bring Israel into the family of undemocratic countries, frankly. It's a stain on the U.S. that they still have the death penalty. Nobody should point to that as some great example, but Israelis, I think the opposition will want to make sure that Israelis remember that this government has been leading the country in such a poor direction

23:07at what Israelis consider the domestic level. Domestic level should include Palestinians because Israel controls them, but very few political parties and even in the opposition will actually be talking about the longer term issue that, of course, must be addressed if Israel is either to have democracy or peace and that is ending occupation and coming to an agreement about Palestinian self-determination statehood, but I can guarantee you that none of the opposition, the Jewish or Zionist opposition leaders will put that at the center of their agenda. If anything, only the Arab parties in Israel will mention it a little bit more prominently. Which one of those will win out? This will be a battle of the campaigns. In terms of who will win the elections, I will not predict, but I will note that right now, ever since early 2023, long before October 7th, every single credible independent poll, and I mean polls for media organizations or think tanks, excluding the polls that are working directly and exclusively for right-wing sources, all of the credible polling shows that this coalition,

24:08the current coalition does not have a majority in terms of the number of parliamentary seats they're able to win. And what's shocking is that even these, you know, what Netanyahu portrays as a spectacular war in the Middle East, has not changed that dynamic. There has been no rally effect. So anything can still happen, but just, you know, but analyzing what has happened up until now, is that very little seems to change the actual breakdown that the opposition parties have a majority in all polls, in all surveys for three years now, and yet they are so divided, and they have such a deep controversy about whether they would go into a coalition with one another. Jewish parties with Arab parties, for example, that it's not clear that they could form a government, even if they win the next elections, there could also easily be a hung result, you know, or kicking off another set of election cycles, just like we had between 2019 and 2022. Dali, it's always so good to hear from you. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. It's always interesting to hear from Daliya, Shindlan and Latika to see her, you know,

25:12having to delay beginning that interview because she was heading out to her own bomb shelter and then to run through the past 24 hours. It's a reminder that at the heart of this terrible conflict across the Middle East are many people facing extraordinary dangers and fears. Of course, in Israel, they do have the iron dome to try to prevent missiles from causing too much damage on the ground, and they do have a system of shelters. But still, you can hear the kind of the psychological burden of that, the sense that there is a question now of morale. As this war goes on, I found those figures so interesting in terms of the broad support still for the war that Netanyahu is waging, but at the same time, the longer it goes on, it does diminish. Yes, I think it was so valuable to hear from Daliya Kylie because she was able to really drill down behind that headline figure, and I think that's a good lesson for us all because you often look at polls

26:12and you see the headline figure. But actually, what I think Daliya was showing was here are the fracture points for support for Netanyahu as this war continues. And he is the trouble and the danger that lies ahead. And I don't know that we would necessarily have understood that ourselves without her terrific explanation there. And also her willingness to talk about the levels of violence within the West Bank. Of course, we know on the fringes of this conflict in Iran, in the Gulf, all this focus on the streets of Hormuz, on the gas and oil situation, on where there are other states, where there are other militias getting involved, the Houthis, Hizbala. There is a story that has been going on for a very long time, which is a harsh reality for Palestinians in the West Bank, and a settler movement that has been empowered by this government. And that is happening on the fringes of our attention currently. So it was good to hear some more detail from her.

27:14Of course, she is a specialist in writing about and talking about the settler movement and settlements in the West Bank. And an election slap bang in the middle of it all, that I thought was fascinating her final answer there, discussing those foundational forces that would drive and contextualize the choice for Israeli people later this year. And the Netanyahu messaging that this war really is about establishing Israel as a regional power, and that in itself makes it a worthwhile venture. But again, to Daliya's point, the fact that the opposition has some fairly strong arguments to make, of course, after the Hamas attacks inside Israel, which of course happened on Netanyahu's watch, but also concerns about the kind of administration he was running, you know, the allegations of corruption and the moves against the judiciary. So many aspects have fallen to the background as war wages. So it will be fascinating to watch that campaign and see what comes back to the fall.

28:21As always, we love to hear your feedback. You know where to find us, it's global.roaming at abc.net.au. Kylie, coming up, I believe tomorrow, good Friday, it's Geraldine back in our earphones. That's right. She's been off to Manley Wright as first of all, and has recorded a really interesting episode, speaking to three retired diplomats in Australia about diplomacy, about what works, and also they've shared some really personal stories about their efforts to represent Australia abroad. Oh, I can't wait to hear that one. And we'll talk next week. See you then, Kylie. See you later.