And and he gave me of the best compliments ever had. He said, well, you were asking hard questions even then. So thats like the best thing you can say to a reporter is it is a great congratulations to everyone and give you a great round of applause for laura now. I am pleased to welcome three individuals familiar to us who can shed some much needed perspective live on the tragedy of october seventh and all that has unfolded since. Coauthor of the bestseller startup nation. Dan senor is a senior fellow at the council on foreign relations, former spokesman and Senior Adviser for the Us Led Coalition in iraq and pentagon adviser in qatar and adviser to prominent figures on capitol hill. Hes a frequent contributor to the Financial Times and the wall street journal. Other publications to host of the call me back podcast. And now the author of a new book, the genius of israel. Dan is joined in conversation by former u. S. Ambassador to israel thomas nides, who has balanced his distinguished professional career between finance and public service. Hes been ceo, managing director and vice chair of morgan stanley, as well as deputy secretary of state and chief operating officer of the u. S. State Department Service for which he was awarded the nations highest diplomatic honor by secretary of state Hillary Clinton and or denied stepped down from his post in israel this past summer. Their discussion will be moderator edited by bianna gologryga, a Senior Global Affairs analyst and anchor for cnn. Prior to joining cnn, she was coanchor of cbs this morning and good morning americas Weekend Edition and a Business Correspondent for abc news. Im so grateful to them all. Would you please welcome dan senor ambassador thomas nides and be honored . Golodryga. Good evening, everyone. Its good to be with you on another wise, very somber news subject that sadly i think were going to be covering for a very long time. Dan, welcome. Ambassador, should i call you ambassador . No. Yeah. Yes, im ambassador. At least for like a couple more months. He gets it. So as youve heard this is a fantastic book. So congratulations, dan and a great follow up to startup nation, which is a hit book. And so i know that it went to press before october seventh when the world literally changed. And i was thinking about how i would have conducted this interview with you if it had been on october 6th. Because there does seem to be a disconnect in the theme of this book, where a young, vibrant, healthy, happy, cohesive nation, as youve found through your research, is now in parallel with the first nine months of this year where weve seen massive protests, concerns about an existential threat to the country coming from within divisions over legislation and judicial reform, which sadly all seems quaint given the crisis that israel is now facing. So thats where i would have taken the conversation and started off from. But given the current circumstances, id like to flip it a bit and help us understand how the israel that youve discovered in this book is most likely going to deal with the war in the weeks and months to come and how they survive and come out after it as a nation. Yeah, theres a lot there. Thank you, obiano, for doing this. And thank you to streicher for hosting and thank you, tom, for being here. Tom, as i was, we were just chuckling backstage. I feel like tom is like the third coauthor of this book because his names not on that book by the way. Hes sitting there wondering why his name is on that book. But when tom was ambassador to israel, while i was traveling back and forth to israel quite a bit, both to work on this book and for work related things and to spend time with family. And tom wound up we spent too many meals together around shabbat dinner tables or shabbat lunch tables, and wed often talk about the book. And so i am grateful that he can be part of this conversation. You are right that it was almost like at every stage that we wrote this book, our publisher was saying to us, you sure this is the right time . Like, really, every stage now, sometimes their concerns were a little more superficial, like when they sat down with me to tell me that two weeks before our publication date, Britney Spears memoir was coming out and literally, thats true. You can like i know theres a lot of buyers in here who know that already. But and they were concerned that we were going to be competing with the Britney Spears memoir. I tried to explain these a different demographic. We were going after. And then they said, okay. And then they sat me down again. By the way, not to digress. And they said, do you know on your exact pub date, the exact date, our public form of publication date was yesterday. Do you know that Barbara Streisands memoir is coming out and see now i know there buyers theyre buyers of the barbra strike. See, i got a heads nodding and i still felt that we would be okay. And then at one point, they sat down to your exact point and said, are you sure you want a book to come out about the health and strength of Israeli Society and the solidarity of Israeli Society when it seems like the country is going through a cold civil war and the country is tearing itself apart and our reaction saw my coauthor and i reaction to it was big precisely because israel is going through this moment. We need to publish this book because what we thought was being lost from the commentary about israel is there is Political Polarization going on all over the world, all over the world, mostly in western affluent democracies, but all over the world and israel is no exception. But weve learned from those nine or ten months is that israel is not immune to intense Political Polarization. Tom was in the thick of things when he was ambassador to there, dealing with the various factions and parties on it. But we felt was that unlike some of these other countries, including the u. S. , israel was far less likely to tear itself apart and to enter into kind of really israelis were far less likely to ultimately be at each others throats because there were these societal shock absorbers, there were these Building Blocks of Israeli Society that just when it felt like israel was going to kind of go over the edge, it kind of pulls them back and pulls them back together. And so what we thought is we would go through the book and explain what Israeli Society has, is that most western countries do not have, and that holds the country together and even if you think its hard to believe, we say, look, this countrys been through some pretty rough periods in the past, whether it was the assassination of yitzhak rabin, where literally half the country blamed the other half for creating the political environment that led to his assassination, or go back to the 1950s when there was a deeply divisive debate, debate about whether or not israel should accept reparations from the west german government. Violent protests at the knesset calls for the violent overthrow of the government. I mean, you go to the first lebanon war where the protests were way bigger, way bigger than the protests we saw over judicial reform over these last few months. They just there was no social media. So people werent aware of of what was going on. So in every period in israeli history, you have these moments, this one was bad in 2023. But we argued theres something here that holds the country together and theres something the west could learn from. And then october 7th happened and then we watched out of this horror, this unbelievable, unbearable horror, the country actually did come back together. So what separates israel from other countries specifically democratic countries at a time of war . Because we saw in the u. S. Rally around the flag in the first gulf war, we surely saw that after 911. How does israel differentiate from what weve seen in what we experienced here in the u. S. . So we did see it after. The the first gulf war. We saw it less after 911. We saw it immediately after 911. And then it dissipated and i, i hate to start speculate on what would happen today in this political environment. Were in today. If we had a National Security shock on our country. January six was pretty close. January six was pretty close. And our and our politics seem as polarized today as they did on january 7th. But does it matter if the threat came from within, which is what we saw happen on january six . Yeah, i mean, i look yeah, its a shock to the system and you would have thought that would have been a moment where leaders say, you know, cooler heads need to prevail. This was this was an unbelievable trauma. But, look, i think the reality is what israel has dealt with post october seven. I mean, first of all, let me just and i know eric alluded to some of this, what has happened in israel, beginning with the morning of october 7th, is its its its so impressive. And i hate saying that because its half the country coming together. Its unbelievable. I mean, okay, let me just paint a picture. A month ago in tel aviv on yom kippur, a little over a month ago, there was the or im not going to get all the details. The details arent important. But but but the big picture is there was an Orthodox Service on yom kippur every year in the center of tel aviv. And there was some ruling that came down that said there could be an Orthodox Service, but they couldnt impose certain things on public property like a makita, like the divider, the gender based divider between men and women in service and other elements of an Orthodox Service and the community, the organization that put on the Yom Kippur Service still put up the makita, ended other things in violation. Apparently, of the rules and the ordinance. And they were protests and secular israelis from tel aviv came and they tore down the makita and they started getting in the face of the orthodox and the Israeli Press was history iconic like this is the depth of division that here we are on the holiest day of the year and were in each others faces like this. Weve never seen before. Weve really like this is the worst. Okay. And you you heard these conversations like the orthodox and the secular israelis or the ultraorthodox. And the secular israelis could never coexist. Okay. So then you fast forward five weeks later, six weeks later to the october seventh, israel has this massive call up, 360,000 reserves. They have there. Its been a very long time. Theyve had to call up anything comparable to that number of reserves. Its larger than the standing armies, Standing Army armies of the uk and france combined. And there was, you know, the way the idf does its call ups is they always overshoot in the call ups. They call up more than they need in normal times because, you know, people are traveling and people are overseas. Two parents, one of them, you know, theyve little kids that both cant show up. They have people working overseas. So they overshoot and call ups and they hope they get about 80 . And then the you add in there was all this concern about these reservists who were saying they wouldnt they stopped training. They wouldnt serve. So they overshot on the call ups and everybody turned out. So the turnout now in the lowest turnout is 120 of those called up in some areas, its 150 . In some parts of the country, its 180 people. So thats of people who are called up. Then there are people who werent called up, who just started showing up. And then there are people whove aged out in israeli reserves. When you get into your forties, you dont have to do military, you have to do reserves anymore. They just said, look, i know if i want to show up so that. So there was this surge in supplies, demand for supplies, because they needed to service all these people who are showing up. They didnt theyre totally backlogged backlog. The supply chains werent set up. So this community that had organized the protests against the government, the brothers in arms, and so the reservist group, all these groups that had organized all these protests for nine or ten months and then built incredible infrastructure to organize these protests against the government and, you know, you know, you were covering they were excoriating the government at 10 a. M. On saturday morning, october 7th. About 20 of them met some of the prominent people from the High Tech Community who you know, tom, they met and they said, okay, we got to help. They immediately called the ministry of defense. They immediately called the government that theyve been at war at and said, how can we help . By that evening, they had thousands and thousands of the people who are the architects of the and activists in the protests stepping up and they just started filling all the gaps to get support for these 360,000 reserves. And theyve taken on many other roles which we can talk about. And so this whole thing just happened. And then the Coverage Team are the idf is unheard of, unheard of. I mean i mean unheard of. So the haredim are completely so so were told lead a completely different life, almost like theyre not part of the state, that theres like a tribe that theyre part of. Thats not part of the state. Thats the characterization. Now, we in our book, we show that thats been actually quietly changing. Theres been some softening in the in the haredi community. Obviously, the Political Leadership is its own thing. But if the rank and file, the haredi community, there have been signs that there has been some more integration than people realize. So there was more hope. But i was hopeful that there was. And we interviewed a lot of Community Leaders who were pointing to trends and data that show that there was integration of the community. But and so im about as optimistic as anyone that that things were going to soften. I didnt expect this. Theyre trying to enlist in the idf. So so during the whole nine months of the of the judicial reform protests, one of the big issues of debate is whether or not they get a formal legal exemption that its formalized to not serve. And here they are. And now the baseline is low. So i dont want to overstate it, but it is a surge. They are showing up and they want to serve. Im also hearing stories of these temporary bases that are being put up to accommodate so many of these reserves. These like sort of impromptu, temporary makeshift bases and theyre really uncomfortable because they were put together in a couple of days near one of the bases. I know someone whos a reservist who was called up at his base like it was a dump right. Was put up overnight. There was an already a shiva nearby. And the the leaders of these shiva came to the to the base and they said, our students will all move out. So you soldiers can take the beds. So the so the soldiers can sleep in real dorm rooms, in real beds, so they dont have to sleep where theyre sleeping. And the commander of this unit said, well, where like where they dont worry, theyll figure it out. Theyll scatter. They want the soldiers to have the beds and sleep at the yeshiva. I can tell you a story after story after story. Im not i dont want to sound like totally rosy. I think once this war is over, well be back to real division. But the baseline will have changed. And i think they will be starting from a different place than they were on october six. I mean, they have to. Right. So, ambassador, youre not just sitting here to to look pretty and hes enjoying this. So i love you, dad. Talk to you. I want to bring you in. You just left office in july. Perfect timing, i might add. Went back into the private sector. And now, after october 7th, decided that you were going to go once again and try to help, given the crisis in the middle east. Can you talk about what youve been doing . I know youve met with some of the families of the hostages, and you describe this as the worst 30 days of israels history. Well, first of all, i model to be here. Its a beautiful synagogue. So im. I just went to the main sanctuary and been here before. Its gorgeous. So those of your members, youre very lucky. And at the end. Thats right. I, i felt because dans sister and his coauthor, the brother in law, live in israel, live in jerusalem, lives literally three blocks from my house in jerusalem. Yes, the residence was in jerusalem. They moved it from tel aviv. Thats a home, an issue well talk about later. And and i spent many nights talking about the title of the book. And and the reason i was so interesting in the title of the book is that startup nation, i cant even explain to you how thats become like a noun and a verb in israel. I mean, startup nation, which was the title of their first book, has changed really people how they see israel from a business perspective, a technology innovation. And i, i give these guys here the the the credit for really taking this to a whole new level and creating a whole infrastructure and a real bricks and mortar as a building in in tel aviv. Thats the sort of nation i just all of you should understand how important the role that only the book played. But the role that the dan and his team have played and really talking about innovation in israel, which is extremely important. Listen, i am i said yesterday or today on some show and i really do mean this. I think israel is going to go through the most difficult. 30 days is coming 30 days in their history and people say, well, what are you talking about . The war of independence. Young people, war, because israel is going to try to do something here which all operate in and conflict with each other. One is they have to rid they have to rid gaza of hamas. Lets make no mistake about that. Okay. Well, it is it is as important as anything that israels ever done, not only for the threat that hamas did to pay for the least of what they did, but as a deterrent for the rest of the actors in the world, especially in the middle east. To whom . My question is real strength. And no one should question israel strength. There were two. They got to get these hostages out. And as as as many of you know, i you know, ive spent time and one spent time theres theres 240 people hopefully still alive. These are grandmothers and grandfathers and children. Its and having been on th