47 minute video at the link.
[Jpost] Many in Israel declared "mission accomplished" when the hostages came home. Wilf thinks otherwise and lays out a day-after plan for Gaza that no one else in Israeli politics would touch.With elections bearing down and the whole country consumed by the race, diplomat and writer Einat Wilf sat down with Jacob Laznik to make a case that almost no one else in Israeli politics is making. Running third on the Reservists—New Economic Party list, an unaligned slate polling around four seats and openly determined to blow up the country's paralyzing bloc politics, Wilf argues that the real fight isn't over territory or coalitions at all, but over consciousness.
After doing her military service as an intelligence officer in the IDF’s Unit 8200, Ms Wilf served for a time as a Member of Knesset for the labour socialists. Nonetheless, she wrote a column for years for the center-right Israel Hayom newspaper, worked as a consultant for McKinsey and with a venture capitalist firm, and has been very active in post-10/7 public advocacy for Israel around the world, so her ideas have been refined from both sides.
October 7, in her telling, was the day adversaries "emerged from physical and metaphorical tunnels to launch a global assault on Jewish life," and her central claim is that neither the government nor the opposition grasps the scale of that war of ideas, let alone how to fight it.For a writer and former politician who has spent two decades on exactly this terrain, the campaign is less about a seat than about forcing a conversation the political class keeps avoiding.
MOVING THE TOPIC TO THE GAZA STRIP
Where the interview gets passionate is Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about
oppressionand
disproportionate response...
. Wilf contends that Israel's leaders have left the single most consequential question of the postwar era: What actually happens the day after, which is almost entirely undiscussed. She then lays out a strikingly concrete alternative: Reinterpreting the Board of Peace's twenty-point framework so that "Gaza will not be a threat" means ideological disarmament rather than a few weapons stashed in a shed, and splitting the Strip into a "Gaza of war" and a "Gaza of peace" where residents must formally renounce refugee status and the right of return before any reconstruction money flows.
It's a vision that ranges from the granular, which includes cutting UNRWA cards, new documents, a new flag, to the sweeping idea of rebuilding not just a place but a people's self-understanding. Around it she threads the themes her readers will recognize: the "bigotry of low expectations," "Westsplaining," the "Zionism Is" project, and the "mass psychosis" she says drives anti-Israel activism from the Oxford Union floor to the street. Laznik, in turn, questions the logistics, the other players at the table like Qatar
...an emirate on the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula. It sits on some really productive gas and oil deposits, which produces the highest per capita income in the world. They piss it all away on religion, financing the Moslem Brotherhood and several al-Qaeda affiliates. Home of nutbag holy manYusuf al-Qaradawi...
and
...the occupiers of Greek Asia Minor...
, the risk that reopening a signed agreement reads as reneging, and the uncomfortable reality that Hamas
..always the voice of sweet reason...keeps boasting it would do it all again.
Whether you come away thinking Wilf's plan is visionary or unworkable, you'll want to hear how she answers when pressed. Watch the full interview to see where it holds up and where it strains.