Michael Eisenberg and Adi Levanon: Israeli Resilience in Crisis | E1072

I'm so grateful to you both for joining me today. I think this is probably one of the most important shows that I've ever done. So first, thank you so much for joining me today.

Thanks for having us, Harry.

Thank you so much.

Now, honestly, I'd just love to start, we said before we don't really have, uh, a structure to this. I just wanna start by asking both of you, are your families safe? And I just wanna check in there first.

You know, my family is safe. I have two sons who've been called up to reserve duty. My son-in-law was called up yesterday. Actually, my third son, who is not on the frontline, was called up also yesterday. And, uh, I have a son-in-law who was wounded in a previous, uh, set of battles, who's gone to do res- uh, kind of, guard duty down in the south of Israel. We're all, thank God, fine. Unfortunately, as you know, Harry, I lost a cousin of mine in battle on the first day when he, he went in to protect a town called Kfar Aza, uh, which is a border town, uh, where, uh, tens of people were massacred, and he was literally the first, uh, Jeep in. Uh, and he was unfortunately killed, really in the first hour of battle. We had the funeral last night.

I'm so sorry for that, Michael.

Yeah.

Um, Adi?

Um, Michael, of course, I'm, my huge condolences to you and your family, and I'm glad everybody's safe. We are, we are safe, thank God. It's, it's, uh, I, I feel also like difficulty even answering that question because, uh, w- I live in Tel Aviv. I don't, uh, I'm not anywhere near the south. My family is fine. We left Tel Aviv because honestly, I have, I have a soon-to-be four-year-old and the idea of having her hear the sirens was just too much. You know, I, we've tried to make a game out of it, like most families, like, "Let's go downstairs," and there's a siren again, and we try to explain, but it's difficult, so we left. We're more north. Everybody's fine, everybody's safe, but, um, I think the honest answer is we're safe, but we're not okay.

I'm gonna ask a series of questions, which are probably quite basic, but I think there's a lot of things that people don't know, and they look in. Where are we now? Because we see news and we see continued attacks on both sides, and I'm just looking, going, "I don't actually really know where we are now." Can we just lay the, the f- the kind of groundwork of where are we today?

Well, first, I don't like doing numbers, but I think it's important to understand the, the size and the magnitude of what's happening here. So at this point, the equivalent, uh, in size of this massacre that's being done obviously is about, you know, over 25,000 Americans, which is eight times 9/11. Just so you understand where we are at, what we've seen, the numbers of, of casualties at this point. Um, and that doesn't include those injured.