McGurk: No Political Future in Gaza While Hamas Remains in Power

Our audience should know that your experience obviously is deep in the Middle East. You help stand up the provisional government in Iraq in 2004, you helped lead the global coalition against ISIS. And then ultimately, yes, you were charged with bringing the hostages home. But in the days leading up to October 7th, as you write in the book, you thought you were on the precipice of a piece of an expansion of the Abraham Accords, potentially even recognition of a Palestinian state. Do you feel like that progress in some way actually served as a motivator for Hamas? Well, it's great to be here. We don't know for sure. You know, we never saw what was the trigger for Sinjar to order that attack, which we know he had been planning and preparing for for years. Why that moment? But yet the book on October 6th, a Friday here in Washington in the white House, I had a Saudi delegation in my office, is a very complicated deal. So we still had a little bit of a ways to go. But I shook hands with Princess Reema, the ambassador, because we planned on concluding the work by the end of the year and then rolling it out in the first quarter of 2020. For Tony Blinken, the secretary of state was on his way to the Middle East to work on that. And, uh, we've been working on it for about a year. And it was just hours after that that the Hamas attack started. So I can't say there's a direct connection. We never saw that. Um, but it was tragic because we did you but you raised important point when we had the Palestinian Authority working with us on that. On that was kind of a secret negotiation, but they're working with us on it. And, you know, just a few weeks before October 7th, um, a senior Saudi official went to Ramallah, the head of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, first time in 55 years that it happened. So, you know, pieces were coming together and, um, obviously then what what unfolded hours later, uh, is the rest of the book. That was the next day. But, you know, hours and hours late at night. Did you receive? We asked and Tony Blinken, this in a recent conversation, were there any credible offers to negotiate the release of hostages within the first 48 hours? No, that was just completely untrue. And, uh, was Hamas sending various signals to the other various people saying, maybe let's begin a discussion, because, sure. What hostage takers do we just took, in this case, 251 hostages and hostage takers then set a price. It's extortionist price, outrageous price. But that does not mean there's an offer. And in fact, I. I can totally disprove that, because when we started to negotiate just for women and children, this includes the grandmothers and the toddlers and one case of baby. Um, uh, that was a very difficult negotiation. I go through it in the book and, and even once we got that deal for women and children, now the war stopped. People forget this. A month and a month after October 7th, the war stopped for eight days. And on the eighth day, I described this moment in the book because Hamas sent a message saying we're waiting for them to give the list of the of the hostages to come out the next day. And they said, you know, we're not going to release the younger women. These are women in their 20s. 30s. Taken from the Nova music Festival. From their homes include some, uh, Israeli soldiers. So, you know, let's skip and start talking about the older men. And there's a key moment in the crisis. And what do you do? It's a moral quandary. Do you keep the cease fire and start talking about the older men who are also in very bad shape, or say to Hamas, no, you broke the deal. And, you know, the Israelis that night were unanimous that if we skipped over the younger women, we might never get them out. And I think they were right. But this kind of answers the question, this idea that Hamas, after killing 1200 people in Israel, taking 250 hostages, were like, ready to just release them. It's absolutely not true. When I go through the how hard it was just to get the grandmothers and the toddlers out, well, and when you found instances of hardship throughout these negotiations, when you felt like you were running into walls, how often was it Hamas that was driving out, and how often was it the Netanyahu government so tough, irreconcilable positions after October 7th? CNN's position, he's the leader of Hamas, the mastermind. Uh, was we stay in power. We have a permanent, internationally guaranteed ceasefire. We can reconstitute our military forces, be right up in Israel's border, as Hamas spokespeople are saying we're going to do October 7th again and again. That was Hamas's position, right? Israel's position after October 7th was, uh, Hamas will never remain in power in Gaza, period. We're going to destroy their military capabilities and their they cannot be the governing entity in Gaza. So you had totally irreconcilable positions. Now, we had a number of times in which Israel did sign on to a deal. I talked to talk about those times in the book. Um, and then we would wait on Hamas for weeks for an answer and Hamas would change it. That happened a number of times. Uh, we did not have a time in which Hamas signed on to a deal. And then Israel said no. Sometimes Israel took a hard position on an issue. I describe it as, uh, uh, as unlocking a door to a hallway of locked doors. You can solve that issue. And then suddenly Hamas would raise new issues until, you know, if you go through the end of the book, uh, and extraordinary in Washington for these, you know, polarized times were in the outgoing Biden administration, joined forces with the incoming Trump administration in those final weeks, uh, to get a deal. And even then, Hamas was raising, uh, trying to raise the bar. So unlocking a door to a hallway of locked doors. So it was like, uh, what a great line. Is Benjamin Netanyahu a locked door? Can there be a Palestinian state as long as he's in office? I think two precondition. Uh, number one, so long as Hamas is whatever side of the issue you're on in this most polarizing, most complex issue. Uh, so long as Hamas is playing into power in Gaza, there's no there's no political horizon or future. So that is one. And in Israel, I know you just talk with Senator Coons about this. Uh, it's the it's the narrow, hard, right wing, uh, coalition government that makes that gives the Israelis almost no maneuvering room. Uh, the senator mentioned small church and Ben gave here in particular. Look, Israel will have an election in a couple of weeks here on October 20th, uh, 26 or 27. I'm hopeful that they can come out with a broader coalition government. The country really needs to pull itself together, uh, given, uh, the challenges are faces. Uh, but, you know, we'll see. Look, Netanyahu has been in power for 19 years. Uh, six years longer than Ben Gurion. Um, you know, I'm old fashioned. I mean, George Washington set a precedent of after eight years at a time. Time for a change. Uh, but Israelis will make that decision by the very least. If they can have a broader kind of unity coalition than what they have now. Uh, that will give a little bit more. More space. It's really important. Hope.