Jack Lew was nominated by President Joe Biden as the US ambassador to Israel in early September 2023 — a month before Hamas’s invasion and massacre in southern Israel. He arrived to take up the post a month after that catastrophe. His time here, now coming to an end with the return of Donald Trump to the White House, has been a period of terrible crisis, as he puts it, “from beginning to end.”
On Thursday, the ambassador sat down in Tel Aviv for an unusually lengthy interview with The Times of Israel — a kind of farewell conversation, laced with as much candor as his diplomatic considerations allowed.
An Orthodox Jew, Lew, 69, is a highly experienced official who worked as budgets director for presidents Clinton and Obama, then chief of staff and Treasury secretary to Obama. In our interview, he talked through many aspects of Israel’s struggles against external enemies — and the centrality of the Jewish state’s partnership with its sole potent global ally in ensuring Israel emerges intact and potentially thriving from its current multifront war.
The partnership has been militarily, diplomatically and even psychologically essential these past 15 months. It has also been marked by acute friction between Biden’s administration and the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Lew discussed the tensions at length, with nuance, his tone rarely rising but his language underlining considerable frustration. When I asked him how much time we had, he indicated plenty — which was fortunate, he added, because “I tend to go long.” (Thursday was a US national day of mourning for president Jimmy Carter, with federal offices at home and embassies overseas officially closed to the public, so Lew likely had a little more time than he usually would.)
I’m publishing the vast majority of what he had to say, and he does indeed “go long.” In doing so, it seems to me, he provided a rare, unhurried insight into the reflections, hopes and concerns of the most senior representative of Israel’s most essential international partner.
Much of what he said was fascinating, and sometimes revelatory, in terms of how the Biden administration went about its diplomatic work here, what went smoothly, what didn’t, and, especially, why it didn’t.
Without naming Netanyahu, he gave three out of what he said were many instances where he argued that the government had inflated “private and small differences” with the White House, “widened them and made them public,” with what he said were negative strategic implications: When Israel criticized the US for allowing through a UN Security Council resolution on a Gaza ceasefire in March; when Israel mischaracterized the US stance on the IDF’s planned major operation in Rafah; and Israeli assertions that the US imposed what amounted to an arms embargo on Israel when, he said, “nothing was stopped” bar a single shipment of 2,000-pound bombs.
He also lamented Israel’s failure to provide real-time responses to unfolding events in Gaza, saying he and others have urged their Israeli counterparts in vain, “on many, many, many occasions, often in the middle of the night: If you want to frame this story, get information out there more quickly, because you know there’s going to be a report out there that you think is inaccurate.”
“America has been fed a media coverage of this war that Israel has just not done an effective job countering,” Lew said. “And there’s only so much you can do through diplomatic channels to fix that.”
Public opinion in America “is still largely pro-Israel,” he noted. But “what I’ve told people here that they have to worry about when this war is over is that the generational memory doesn’t go back to the founding of the state or the Six Day War, or the Yom Kippur War, or to the intifada even. It starts with this war, and you can’t ignore the impact of this war on future policymakers — not the people making the decisions today, but the people who are 25, 35, 45 today and who will be the leaders for the next 30 years, 40 years.”
Warming to that theme, Lew pointed out that “Joe Biden is the last president of his generation, whose memories and knowledge and passion to support Israel go back to the founding story.”
Again without naming Netanyahu, he also queried the government’s approach to postwar Gaza, arguing that there is no realistic alternative to some role for the Palestinian Authority if Israel is not to become the permanent security force patrolling the streets of the enclave. And he highlighted the strategic benefits for Israel of normalization with Saudi Arabia, which he said could be achieved were Israel to move credibly on the issue of a potential demilitarized Palestinian state.
Saudi normalization remained possible, he said, “but it’s going to take leaders here willing to take some political risk.”
In that context, he added, regarding Biden, “Standing with Israel for these past 15 months, with huge opposition in the media, in parts of his own party, you could argue that it contributed to making his challenge for reelection insurmountable.”
I’ve edited the text for brevity and clarity, but the transcript that follows is pretty complete.
The Times of Israel: You were nominated before, and you started work after, October 7. This has been your period — a period of terrible crisis.
Ambassador Jack Lew: Beginning to end.
The president, when he came here on October 18, was very supportive but also worried. He warned Israel: Don’t be consumed by rage when you deal with the consequences of this. Do you think that is what has happened? Do you think Israel has prosecuted this war in the right way, or has it been consumed by rage?
That is a complicated question, that isn’t “either, or.” When I describe what Israel was like when I got here, and to some extent how I describe it now, it is that Israel is in trauma. It’s a people that have not put the trauma in the past, but it still goes on. And until the issue of the hostages is resolved, I don’t know where the healing and the closure come from.
When I got here in November, it was a little jarring to me to hear people say, Not a drop of water, not a drop of milk, not a drop of fuel [should go into Gaza] — when they were talking about feeding babies and innocent civilians. The sense of how do you define an innocent civilian? Are there innocent civilians of a community that harbors terrorists everywhere? I attributed a lot of what I heard to trauma.
The country has moved a long way from there. There are people in the country who will make the argument: Deny everything [in terms of aid], to put pressure on Hamas. But by and large, what I’ve seen over the year since then, is a country grappling with addressing an extraordinarily difficult challenge, trying to keep things from going across a line.
It doesn’t mean everything has been right. I’ve spent a lot of the time that I’m here encouraging, on the military side, to do things in a careful, targeted way; encouraging, on the humanitarian assistance side, to make a bureaucratic system and a security system work so you don’t cross over into famine or malnutrition.
Frankly, I don’t think Israel has gotten credit, and I don’t think the United States has gotten credit, for keeping the situation from crossing that line. And it’s hard: When you’re in a moment where the current status of life in Gaza is terrible, when the humanitarian needs are great, you don’t get a lot of credit for keeping things from crossing over into malnutrition and famine. But I do think you have to recognize what a Herculean effort [has been made].
The fact that I can now talk about humanitarian assistance with most people in the country and have a conversation that reflects shared values, that’s a change. There are groups of people who will say…
Including central people in the coalition. [Finance Minister Bezalel] Smotrich said yesterday, When Trump takes over, we’ll do the absolute international legally permitted minimum.
Yeah. But look, the reality is that international law on this issue is not ambiguous.
There are some things that, depending on what circumstance you’re in, look very different. In terms of the military operations, we have urged that Israel think hard about whether the value of [certain] military operations is worth the civilian risk. I’ve spent a lot of time with military leaders trying to understand how they think about that.
The explanations they give in private are much more convincing than the explanations in public. In public, the language and the body language are all designed to send a message to Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran: Don’t test us. We’ll do anything.
But in reality, there are much more measured decisions being made. You don’t hear that reflected in the way the public story is told. That’s actually damaging to Israel internationally. Not that there’d be a big acceptance of the scope of the war if it were described the way I’m suggesting, but at least there would be more of an ability to hear.
Israel isn’t showing enough humanity in its narrative– is that what you’re saying?
There’s a lack of empathy in the narrative that makes it harder for Israel to explain why it has to attack a school because it’s not a school, because it’s a fort. Why they have to use targeted munitions to reach a location that they’re quite confident has terrorists, and [where] collateral damage is limited. And how, as in all wars, all collateral damage is a tragedy. There’s ways of telling.
Israel should be saying that more?
It would be easier for people like me who are trying to explain what’s going on here — not to whitewash, not to say everything is okay — but to at least understand it in a frame that reflects the shared values. It would be a positive thing. I know that’s not something that is considered a particularly attractive mode of communication in the neighborhood, because it’s seen as showing weakness. But when the core of your support is looking to see how you’re operating on that scale, it’s not just public relations.
From the very start, really, there was criticism from America of what Israel was doing — about “indiscriminate bombings” at one point; the secretary [of state Antony Blinken] constantly spoke about there being too many civilians killed, that you have to stop killing civilians. Then there were specific things — don’t go into Rafah; end the war before the IDF would have tackled Hezbollah; don’t respond with all the things that Israel did against Iran.
And yet at the end of that period, Israel is, and [National Security Adviser] Jake Sullivan basically said it…
Jake was very clear.
… Israel’s in a better position, partly because it did things that the administration didn’t want it to do.
On each of those, the way you’ve laid them out is a bit starker than I would. The secretary has made no secret of his concern, and as a government we’ve made no secret of our concern, about the magnitude of civilian casualties.
[But] I don’t think you’ve heard the secretary or the president or Jake Sullivan ever back away from the proposition that Israel had a right and a responsibility to prosecute the war, that eliminating Hamas as a military and a governing force is a shared objective, and that the narrative can’t begin on October 8th. Hamas started the war, and Hamas continues to hold hostages, and the war is, in that sense, a just war. I don’t know if they use the words “just war,” but they defined a just war.
The questions about targeting are real. There are many questions about many incidents, as there are after every war. There’s been a process internally of looking into things that might have gone wrong in different places, that hasn’t been resolved. When the secretary says there are still questions to be answered, there are still questions to be answered. In the IDF, there are still questions to be answered. But fundamentally, nothing that we ever said was, Just stop the war.
The message we’ve stuck to, with quite a bit of discipline, is: Free the hostages, ceasefire, pathway to end the war.
Now, [as regards] our words of caution on expanding the war to more fronts, you have got to look at it in a point of time. When the advice was given most strongly was at the beginning of the war, when Gaza was completely unsettled, when the IDF was overwhelmed, when everyone, including the military planners here, expected a fierce resistance from Hezbollah. There was strong advice. It was never saying that Hezbollah is not a legitimate target.
Hezbollah expanded the war by attacking Israel starting on October 8. You never heard criticism from the United States for Israel carrying out strikes for almost a year in southern Lebanon, attacking Hezbollah and diminishing Hezbollah. At the point when Israel made the decision to go forward [more intensively against Hezbollah from September], it had already considerably reduced Hezbollah’s capacity on the southern border of Lebanon, the northern border of Israel.
There were also things we didn’t know. We didn’t know certain capabilities that Israel had [– an apparent reference to the detonation by Israel of thousands of Hezbollah pagers on their owners, among other operations. DH]. Whether Israel strategically deployed those capabilities, or circumstances led to a decision to use those capabilities at a crucial moment when otherwise they might be lost, they did have an effect on what the battle would look like.
The skill with which Israel followed up militarily — from [killing Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah [in a strike in Beirut], to taking out the fighting capability of Hezbollah, Jake in his interview recognized the importance of it.
It sounds like you looked at what had happened in Gaza, and, on that basis, would have been surprised by how effective Israel was in tackling Hezbollah.
I don’t think that it’s necessarily fair to say we would have been surprised. I think there are those in the IDF who were surprised.
At how well it went?
How well it went. We tend to look at risks in a different way. We never questioned the legitimacy of fighting Hezbollah.
If you look at the way the US has supported Israel with regard to Iran, really since October 7, from, [President Biden’s] “Don’t”; to sending two aircraft carriers, a submarine, and all of the resources around that; to having our intelligence operations working very closely together; to having the real-time joint air defense, which proved manifestly, in April and in October, the importance of alliances, the importance of coordination. I would say, from the perspective of both of our militaries, that we [learned that we] could do even better than we thought we could do when we put our resources together that way.
That is of almost infinite value in terms of having limited the damage in Israel to really negligible damage from barrages from Iran. The decision to put the THAAD missile defense system here has added to that. I check every night when the sirens go off: Who took a shot [to intercept a missile]? We’re helping in real ways.
The fact that the United States engaged with Israel on some of these issues actually had a really positive impact on how Israel advanced its own interests. I’ll give you two examples. One is Iran, the other is Rafah — a place where clearly we did have differences, but they were resolved.
In Iran, it was certainly our preference to avoid getting into a regional war. But there was an engagement [between us] that led to a planning process where Israel proved its effectiveness. Israel demonstrated its deterrent capabilities. It took out serious military targets with a minimal amount of civilian impact and without it triggering a regional war. So I would say that’s a case of having worked together to think through a very hard set of military decisions.
Going back to Rafah, because there’s no question that we did not think that Rafah should be fought the way Gaza City or Khan Younis or [Gaza’s] central camps was fought. The population had been moved south. It was densely packed. We said, You can’t fight in a space like this without having catastrophic impact, unless you move the people out of harm’s way and unless you have a more targeted approach to battle. Our intelligence and military planners worked very closely to put meat on the bones.
Now, I’m not going to say they got to 100%. I mean, the Mawasi [humanitarian area] is a home for people, but it’s got its challenges. But the [people who had been evacuated to the Mawasi area] weren’t in Rafah, and they weren’t killed in tens of thousands. There were relatively low civilian casualty numbers in Rafah.
You have not heard a word of criticism from the White House, the State Department, the Defense Department, from the United States, of the operation in Rafah
If you look at the military action in Rafah, there are places for people to move back to in Rafah, because it was a targeted and intelligence-driven military action. You have not heard a word of criticism from the White House, the State Department, the Defense Department, from the United States, of the operation in Rafah. It’s a mistake when people say, as they sometimes do, “You told us not to, and we did.” It was done in a way that limited or really eliminated the friction between the United States and Israel, but also led to a much better outcome.
You’re saying the US saved Israel from operating in a way that it was planning to operate that would have been disastrous?
I don’t want to characterize it quite that way. I think they had a different idea of how they would have proceeded. I think they went back and rethought it in a way that was very positive in terms of the ultimate impact — both in terms of the impact at the time and strategically.
More broadly, I want to go back to the Blinken stance [denouncing the........© The Times of Israel