A friend sent me an hour and twenty-two minutes of Professor Dan Schueftan talking to The Owl. I watched all of it. I want to start with what he gets right, because I’m not going to do to him what I’d object to if it were done to me.
Dan Schueftan heads the National Security Studies Center at the University of Haifa. He has advised Israel’s National Security Council and taught at Georgetown. He is not a settler ideologue, he is not messianic, and he is not a crank. He is one of the most serious hawkish analysts Israel has produced, and the interview is worth your time whatever you think of him.
So let me start with what he gets right.
He refuses the word “solution.” He says most human problems don’t have one — you can only find a מענה, a response that brings a threat down to the level of a tolerable nuisance, the way good policing brings down crime without ending it. That is a serious and honest position, and it is close to my own refusal to describe how this ends.
He is right that Hamas will not disarm. He is right that Israel’s enemies are militarily far weaker than they were in October 2023. He calls this the worst government in Israel’s history. He calls Ben-Gvir and Smotrich ugly distortions. And about Jewish settlers who burn Palestinian homes, he says plainly: ואלה ברברים... הייתי יורה בהם — these are barbarians, I would shoot them.
Anyone who tells you Schueftan is simply a propagandist hasn’t listened to him.
My disagreement is narrower than that, and it comes down to one word.
Listen to how he talks about two peoples in the same hour
About Haredim (ultra religious Jews)— whom he attacks in this interview more often and more harshly than anyone else — he is careful. Repeatedly, deliberately careful. He stops mid-sentence to correct himself:
אני לא מדבר על כל מי שיש לו אמונה חרדית... חרדי שעובד, משלם מיסים ומשרת בצבא, זכותו לקיים כל אורח חיים שנראה לו.
I’m not talking about everyone who holds Haredi belief... a Haredi who works, pays taxes and serves in the army has every right to live however he sees fit.
He adds that this way of life is an Israeli invention of recent decades, that it didn’t characterize Haredi communities historically or elsewhere in the world. The problem is a structure, not a nature. And because it’s a structure, he can say how to change it: cut the money, and they will have to go to work.
Now listen to what he says about Palestinians:
זה מהותו של העם הפלסטיני. אין לו שום דבר קונסטרוקטיבי. הוא קם בבוקר בשביל להרוג יהודים — כקולקטיב לאומי.
That is the essence of the Palestinian people. It has nothing constructive. It gets up in the morning to kill Jews — as a national collective.
Essence. Not a leadership. Not a movement. Not an ideology, not Hamas, not the PLO, not a generation shaped by particular circumstances. Essence.
The half-sentence that follows — “I’m not talking about each Palestinian separately” — repairs nothing. He has already placed the thing in the national collective itself.
Why this is the hinge and not a side point
There are two different kinds of claim you can make about a group of people.
The first, about the haredi Jews, is about structures and behavior: this leadership makes these choices, this movement holds this ideology, this system produces these results. Claims like that can be argued with, tested against evidence, and changed. Leaderships fall. Ideologies lose support. Circumstances shift.
The second, about the Palestinians, is about essence: this is what these people fundamentally are. That claim cannot be argued with, because no evidence counts against it. Point to a Palestinian surgeon, a university, a negotiator, a poet, and the answer is that they are exceptions, or camouflage, or irrelevant to the collective. The claim is built so that nothing can disturb it.
Schueftan makes the first kind of claim about Haredim and the second kind about Palestinians.
And that distinction is doing enormous work, because you can grant him nearly everything else and still not arrive at his conclusion. Grant that Hamas won’t disarm. Grant that Iran built a ring of fire around Israel and has now lost it. Grant that Oslo failed and the Arab Spring went badly. None of that gets you to his position that our grandchildren and their grandchildren will be in Gaza, and that this is acceptable.
To get there you need one more premise: that nothing on the other side can ever change. Only the essence claim supplies it.
Remove it and his own framework points somewhere else entirely. If the problem is leaderships and structures, then leaderships and structures can be changed — and permanent war becomes a choice rather than a fate.
He knows how to make that distinction. He makes it for Jews, on the same page, in the same hour.
The cockroaches
The most honest thing he says is this. If Hamas rules Gaza again, fine:
אם היום הבנים והנכדים שלנו נמצאים בעזה, גם הבנים והנכדים שלהם יהיו בעזה.
If our sons and grandsons are in Gaza today, their sons and grandsons will be in Gaza too.
He compares it to cockroaches under the kitchen sink. You call the exterminator; they come back in three years; you call him again. Then he asks how many good meals you cooked in that kitchen in the meantime.
He means it as reassurance. Read it again. A man is calmly accepting war across generations — his grandchildren and theirs — on the grounds that life in between is pleasant. That isn’t a strategy. It’s a condition, and he is asking us to be content inside it.
The missing denominator
His case for Israeli success rests on data: eleventh in the world happiness index during a war, birth rates among secular and traditional women, a health system that cares about you, יש לנו פה חיים טובים — we have a good life here.
I don’t dispute any of it. My own family is part of that life.
But every one of those measures counts citizens. Several million people living under Israeli control between the river and the sea appear in this interview only as a threat to be managed. That is not a disagreement about values — it is a hole in his own evidence. A security analyst who left a population that size out of his data in any other context would be sent back to do the work again.
One question, on his own ground
He is an analyst, not a moralist, and he has little patience for moral arguments. So here is an analyst’s question, and the only one I want answered.
Two years on: is Israel safer?
Not better positioned against Iran. Safer. Fewer enemies than before, or more? More allies, or fewer? Jewish life outside Israel more secure, or less? More young Israelis staying, or more applying for the foreign passports he mentions holding himself?
He says Israel’s enemies have collapsed. Perhaps. He also says this will continue for another hundred years, and that we should be satisfied as long as the kitchen is pleasant in between.
Both of those cannot be a victory.
The interview is in Hebrew. To watch it with English subtitles on a computer: click the gear icon in the player, choose Subtitles/CC, then Auto-translate, then English. A warning — these are machine translations of machine transcriptions and they garble a good deal. That is why I’ve given both the Hebrew and my own English for every quote above, so you can check me against the original rather than against a machine.
The recording of my 3 October talk at First Presbyterian in San Anselmo is coming shortly. I’ll post it here as soon as I have it.
This essay draws on the published interview and on my memoir, The Awakening, which is coming soon.