Haviv Rettig Gur

@havivrettiggur · Israeli English-language press & book authors

Haviv Rettig Gur is The Times of Israel's senior analyst, whose long-form threads on Israeli history and strategy travel far beyond the paper.

Sep 9, 2026, 7:25 PM UTC
Holy shit. Algebra is Persian. If Algebra is your problem, then your problem is with Iran. It's important to keep your villains straight. The Jews are controlling the world and eating your children. But don't you dare blame us for algebra.
Sep 2, 2026, 7:56 PM UTC
Israel.
Sep 2, 2026, 4:15 PM UTC
I think Van said it's "insane" to place an embargo on purely defensive interceptors whose function is protecting civilian areas from missile barrages. I think he also took great pains to say in the two-minute clip that it was altogether a rational and legitimate discussion to talk about conditioning offensive weapons or to demand full payment without aid. I think Zaid Jilani is either too lazy to watch a 2-minute video or he's a liar who knows most people don't check sources. On the substance, even the aid isn't an "entitlement." You buy something with that money, and keep Israel in all kinds of strait-jackets. There are lots of Israelis who also think the money needs to stop, and Israel's defense industry needs to be free of the endless restrictions -- including in sales to other countries -- that are attached to that money. And in the case of missile defense, America literally bought the systems with its "aid" money; the Israeli systems whose development America helped fund, and which no American defense contractor knew how to build, are now co-owned by American companies. So yeah, they're lying liars who live in a permanent rage-fog of selective outrage.
Sep 2, 2026, 7:50 AM UTC
That's it. This is the campaign. The left knew. The left planned it. They didn't wake him up. Everything is a conspiracy. Everyone is guilty -- except the man who led the conspiracy and stood at the head of the system. A few short comments on this campaign, as it is taking shape: 1. I'm sorry, but there is a deep betrayal here -- the kind that is hard to forgive. Never mind the failure itself. But to take the murdered, the massacre, and the amazing solidarity that arose in the days after it -- while the prime minister, who had apparently already been awake, was still struggling to function and manage the event -- to take all this tragedy, trauma, strength, and awakening, and harness them to a false persecution campaign against national heroes, just to win the election -- that is betrayal. Not betrayal in the legal sense, but in the deeper sense: a direct blow to the solidarity that holds us together and protects us as a nation. And all this for a fucking campaign. The price we are all required to pay for his political needs continues to rise. 2. No right-wing leader in Israel's history would have lent his hand to such a thing. There isn't a Likudnik who doesn't know it. 3. They would not choose this line if their internal polls showed that they were doing well.Translated from Hebrew
Aug 31, 2026, 1:14 PM UTC
I think we're long past that. The Netanyahu government knows. It doesn't care. And part of it -- mostly the Ben Gvir-Smotrich wing -- actually wants an isolated, introverted Israel. Before right-wingers rush to their defense, try to work through the specific things this government has chosen to do, the details of their failures, and then explain them in any other way. A serious exploration of how this government handled last year's hunger crisis, or the constant violence they've deliberately refused to stop (and which Smotrich has actively defended) in places like Qusra, or the endless posturing to the base with insane rhetoric that each time, bit by bit, chipped away at the ability of even our best friends to expend any more political capital on standing with us, even when they knew in great detail the nature of our enemies and the need for us to defend ourselves -- all these phenomenon were either allowed to continue or were deliberately driven by Netanyahu and his ministers. When I said these Israeli extremist assailants are far fewer in number than the anti-Israel propaganda claims but are still a real and disturbing phenomenon, that this violence is textbook terrorism and is having a terroristic effect on the Palestinian populations they're targeting -- each time I made these points, right-wingers, usually from overseas, rushed in to explain to me that it's all a mirage, a propaganda fiction, a libel. Some even offered to introduce me to right-wing Israeli leaders to hear firsthand how everything is okay and there's nothing to see here. As if I'm new here. As if I get my information from the New York Times. I know participants in these attacks. I've met and argued with planners of some of these attacks. I've watched this space for years and I have a pretty good handle on their psychology and religious ideas. And I'm telling you this is exactly what I say it is -- and the thousands of emails and angry tweets calling me "leftist" won't make the reality go away. They'll only enable this cruelty to fester and grow. Reality doesn't care about your feelings. It doesn't notice your fears. The more you try to avoid it, the harder you'll crash when reality eventually claims its due. That's Zionism 101. As I've said every time I've spoken about this, if we don't act against this phenomenon now, aggressively and urgently, the damage will only grow -- to the innocents targeted by it, to the IDF weakened by it, to our ability to hold on to even our closest friends. And then it'll grow more, and then some more. Until eventually none of you will be able to pretend there's nothing to see. I've written and talked for years about the deep and visceral bigotries of the anti-Israel campaign. It's from that vantage point that I say that this government has nevertheless done and is doing everything possible to make the bigots' claims seem reasonable even to our friends, even to people who know that our enemies are bad and know why we must defeat them. And no one in this government is even remotely troubled by any of it. Feel free to flood the comments with insults. But maybe also, if you can, try to squeeze a cogent explanation in there that actually grapples with these failures. We will be paying the costs of this folly for a long time to come. And what portion of those costs comes from the above will be our own damn fault.
Aug 30, 2026, 11:12 PM UTC
A fascinating thread of Iranians lamenting and debating the regime's Hormuz strategy. h/t @arash_tehran
Aug 30, 2026, 10:28 PM UTC
Yair is a private citizen -- and also a very public one, an influential person in Netanyahu's orbit. Likud MKs are always careful not to anger him. They once spoke in hushed tones about Netanyahu's "Byzantine court," a reference to the influence he gives family members like Yair. And Yair is as stupid and childish as his public persona suggests. And causes only harm to the country he petulantly pretends to be defending. I have lost friends in the last three years of war -- while Yair lounged poolside in the Miami sunshine. Leading opposition contender for PM Gadi Eisenkot, who Netanyahu's campaign is claiming is a weakling and a coward, lost a son and a nephew in this war -- while Netanyahu's own son tweeted angry missives from across the sea. Yair does not represent us. But, alas, he represent far too accurately the class of incompetents who lead us. On a completely separate topic, the Falklands are actually British. There was no indigenous population when they arrived, they've lived there for almost two centuries, and about 90% of the residents voted in a referendum in 2013 to remain British. Argentina doesn't actually have a case. And neither does Yair.
Aug 30, 2026, 10:01 PM UTC
Wow. The person in the video Hen points to, progressive anti-Israel activist Antoun Issa, happily partakes in raw, stupefying racism. Ancient Jewish communities emptied to the last man, woman and child into the only country that would take them in. But according to Issa, the Arabs who expelled, denaturalized them, committed pogroms and discriminated against those Jews -- are their true and only heritage, and they're not allowed to claim any other, because Antoun Issa has decreed it so. Meanwhile, the Jews who took them in, and with whom they are now integrated, intermarried and utterly at home, they're the real racists in this story. I know this is a very common take in the Arab world -- that an Iraq in which Jews cannot live is the good place, and an Israel that is the only place they could survive is the bad place. But it's the dumbest possible take you could have on this history, and the most dehumanizing. Why dehumanizing? This video demonstrates the point perfectly. To explain why Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews generally vote right-wing -- to explain their skepticism about Arab intentions -- this bigot wants you to ignore all that history and to believe instead (watch the video, he literally says this) that the only possible reason is that the dastardly Ashkenazim have injected them with an overpowering self-loathing as Arabs (which is what they really are, Antoun assures us). It's rare to see the glaring hole in the racialized progressive analysis of Israel brought to the fore in this way -- and rarer still to hear the bigotry deployed to cover for that cognitive dissonance uttered quite so blatantly: the claim that any brown person who doesn't understand their proper role in my moral cosmology must be mentally unwell. Or put simply: Arabs can do no wrong, so Jews from Arab lands who remember Arab mistreatment must be channeling Ashkenazi propaganda. In their millions. The dummies. I wonder what this racist makes of all the other minorities cleansed from Arab lands over the past century unrelated to the Israeli-Palestinian story. The 2,000 destroyed villages of Iraqi Kurdistan, the Greeks from Egypt and Istanbul, the ancient, millions-strong Christian communities of Iraq and Syria, the Yazidis from Sinjar and many more. Are they also "self-loathing Arabs" brought low by malicious Ashkenazim? Or is it only the Jews who misunderstand their story, and so a cocky progressive antizionist must be brought in to explain it to them? The sheer fucking gall of it. Progressives themselves would be howling at the racism of it if it was any other group. What if -- bear with me here, and maybe sit down for this -- the Middle East is a pretty dysfunctional place with lots and lots of bigotries and illiberal forces wreaking all sorts of havoc on just about every minority you could name (and quite a few that none of you ignoramuses has ever heard of)? What if Mizrahi Jews know their story better than you do?
Aug 30, 2026, 10:17 AM UTC
Such a fascinating and enriching book. The Middle East is often discussed in the West as a function of Western action and Western thought. The only story worth telling in a Western university classroom is a story of Western criminality and self-loathing. The usual response to that is a similarly self-centered story of Western self-love. But Syria was under Western rule for exaclty 26 years, Iraq for 15, Saudi Arabia for zero. Their story isn't a Western story. The problems of the Middle East are not a function of the West. Nor are the great strengths and remarkable dramas of the region. If all you know about these countries is endless moralizing over the short, dramatic moments of Western intervention, then the people who live in the region are just faceless backdrops for a Western story about Westerners. If you actually want to learn something about the Middle East itself, rather than using Middle Easterners to tell never-ending navel-gazing tales about Western immorality, this is the book for you. Just to be clear: there's plenty of criticism of Western folly and arrogance. But that's not the heart of the story. The story of of the Middle East is the story of its actual inhabitants. Thanks to @simonmontefiore for this remarkable new book.
Aug 6, 2026, 1:03 PM UTC
Gotta love the pivot from primary to general, when every radical suddenly becomes, ever so slightly and with plenty of plausible deniability, a moderate. Is El-Sayed a moderate pretending to be a radical or a radical pretending to be a moderate? Ignore the usual claptrap. It's reasonable to question aid. It's pretty much required in his world to accuse Israel of every crime ever invented. The surprising part is when he says explicitly that he believes in "self-determination" for both Palestinians and Jewish Israelis. He specifically says "Jewish Israelis." That's new, and it isn't the approved line of the political forces that brought him this far. In fact, as far as I know from interviews I've watched, he's refused in the past to say that Jewish Israelis deserving a state of their own. He says it here only quickly and in passing, but he nevertheless seems to say it outright. Is he just being careless? Is he creating a paper trail to satisfy different constituencies? Or is he just winking toward the center now that the primary is over?

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