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We will continue to work with the Arab states. Sunday, the president spoke with President Sisi of Egypt, and he will speak with other Arab leaders this week. And we'll keep standing by our principles and also keep giving our best advice to Israel. Have you given the Israelis a complete green light for their military operations in Gaza? I think that's the wrong kind of characterization. Israel is a sovereign nation. They don't come to us and ask us: Thumbs up, thumbs down? Green light, red light? We ask them hard questions. We give our advice as friends. We explain to them that we have been in a similar situation. I don't want to fully compare. Let's just say a similar situation, after 9/11. We were determined to go after the terrorists, and nothing was going to stop us. But we also made mistakes and we have learned from those mistakes. Can you name one of those mistakes? First of all, the overreach in terms of the extent to which the United States was engaged militarily in the broader Middle East region in the wake of 9/11, and the way that we conducted ourselves in some of those conflicts, was something that, if we could go back in time, we would do differently now. And President Biden has spoken eloquently about this when it comes to his view on Afghanistan over the course of more than a decade. But I will also say this. When the president speaks to Prime Minister Netanyahu and I speak to my counterparts, when Secretary Blinken, Secretary Austin and General Brown [chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] speak to theirs, we convey to them our deep conviction that it is both a moral and a strategic necessity to protect civilians and to permit lifesaving assistance to get to civilians. And that is a central theme of the statements that we make both publicly and privately, and one that will remain the case as we go forward. But every time US officials are asked about the disproportionate use of force by the IDF in Gaza, your answer is: 'We don't want to talk about specific strikes.' Isn't it also a matter of principle, in light of the last three weeks and past wars in Gaza? I have actually repeatedly spoken, and so has the president, as a matter of principle on the need to protect civilians and on the sanctity of every innocent civilian life. Palestinian, Israeli or anyone else. And we will continue to speak on principle. What we won't do is react to particular reports, particular characterizations. We're not going to be pulled into the role of playing a judge and jury in all of this. Is it possible to destroy Hamas?The movement is said to have between 20,000 and 25,000 armed men. And with every new cycle of death and destruction, a new generation arises. From my perspective, it is possible to secure a future in which Gaza cannot be used as a terrorist base to threaten Israel or anyone else. When the president talks about not going back to October 6, he means two things. One, that Hamas does not retain the capacity and the platform to continue to pose a strategic threat to Israel. And two, that there would be a political horizon for the Palestinian people rooted in a two-state solution. So that there is a future in Gaza and the West Bank that is one of peace rather than one of violence. I think that that outcome is achievable. It is obviously difficult. It has eluded everyone for decades, but I believe it is achievable. And I believe what has happened in the past month only reinforces the conviction of the president that we need to work towards that. And that involves working with Israelis and Palestinians but also means working toward a larger vision of regional integration with all of the key Arab countries. Have you told the Israelis that with an organization like Hamas, when you cut heads, others grow? We have seen from our own experience that the effort to go after terrorist groups requires a multifaceted approach. There is a military element to it, but not only. There is an effort to get at finances, an effort to get at underlying conditions, an effort to get at diplomatic and political resolutions to those underlying conditions, in order to produce a more sustainable outcome over time. We have been clear to the Israelis. As we have said publicly, we think ultimately the solution lies not just in military action, though military action against terrorists is a feature of the solution. But also in this political horizon that we have described. Obviously, not everyone in the current government in Israel shares that perspective. There are many who don't support a two-state solution. President Biden unequivocally, unabashedly does and has said so quite vocally in the course of responding to this most recent crisis. Several Israeli officials have said that the Gaza Strip should shrink at the end of the war, with the creation of a sort of demilitarized zone. Do you think this could help to restore Israel's security? I don't want to comment on particular options. In general, I don't think the territory of Gaza should be reduced. How to think about these questions of ensuring that attacks cannot be launched from Gaza into Israel, the operational elements of that, I would defer to others. I don't think that it makes sense or is conscionable to forcibly displace people from Gaza. And as the president has said, he thinks it makes no sense for it to be an Israeli reoccupation of Gaza. And this issue of buffer zones and so forth, I would defer that question to a consultation with a wide range of stakeholders in this, including the Palestinian people. When President Biden met with Mahmoud Abbas in Bethlehem in July 2022, he reiterated his commitment to the two-state solution. But he also said, 'The ground is not ripe at this moment to restart negotiations.' Was it a mistake to follow Donald Trump's footsteps by putting the normalization process, trade and development first, before trying to solve the Palestinian issue? Do you think the ground was ripe? If we start from the premise that the ground wasn't ripe for direct negotiations, the question is: How do you get to a two-state solution, or how do you at least preserve the possibility in the future, without having it entirely disappear from view? We had an answer to that question. It was pursuing a normalization process between Israel and Saudi Arabia that included a substantial Palestinian component. It gave political as well as economic benefits to the Palestinian people. I have not heard a better solution or a better approach than that. I think the effort to just put the two parties in a room together and get them to agree was not going to get us anywhere. So this alternative, we believe, was actually making progress or creating the possibility that you could have meaningful deliverables for the Palestinian people, that could end up preserving the possibility of a two-state solution. That is how we saw it. That is how we actually continue to see it today. The Biden administration has sent strong military reinforcement to the Eastern Mediterranean. What is your assessment of the threat posed by Hezbollah right now, after years of schooling in Syria? Do you see any fundamental difference between this organization and Hamas? There are obvious differences between them, both in terms of their capacity, in terms of their religious sect, in terms of Hezbollah's relationship to the government in Lebanon. There are some commonalities, too. Both receive an enormous amount of funding, training and sponsorship from Iran, and both represent a significant threat to Israel. And I would characterize the risk of even greater escalation on the northern border to be very real. The president has been attentive to it since the start when he said that no nation or group should look to take advantage of this crisis. And the reason that we have moved assets, including two carrier groups, is to send a message of deterrence and warning: don't. The United States has been clear about where we stand on this. And when it comes to Iran, we have been equally clear that if you attack US forces, we will respond. We did respond already. If those attacks continue [against US military bases in Syria and Iraq], we will respond again. The Biden administration is requesting more than $105 billion from Congress as part of a security package, mostly for Ukraine and Israel. Is your foreign policy in these two major crises at the risk of being blocked by a MAGA minority? I continue to believe that at the end of the day, even if the path is not entirely straight or short, there will be a strong bipartisan vote in both the House and the Senate for aid to both Israel and Ukraine. I can't predict exactly how things will shake out. But we put forward an integrated package because we think all of these pieces actually do fit together and should be voted on together. When you've been asked about the end game of American support to Ukraine, you've said Ukrainian victory is based on territorial integrity and sovereignty. And when you are asked to define victory, you say that it's up to President Zelensky to define it. But don't you think that this administration should also have its own strategy and goals in this war? We do have a strategy. Our strategy is to hold together a coalition of 50 nations to provide Ukraine support so that it can make as much progress as possible on the battlefield and that can be converted into as much leverage as possible at the negotiating table. But the Ukrainians should be the ones determining their destiny. They are a sovereign nation. America shouldn't determine it for them. We're not here to tell Ukraine how the war they are fighting and dying in every day ends. They define that. We define how we can support them in those objectives. In both cases, it is easier to say what the US does not want – a regional war in the Middle East, a war with Russia outside of Ukraine's borders – than what it wants. Is this new form of containment the very substance of your foreign policy? Well, first, I would describe it as common sense, as looking out for the fundamental interests of the American people. World War III would not be good for the American people, and a massive regional war in the Middle East would not be good for the American people. Remember: A lot of national security, a lot of defending the interests and values of a nation and its people, its allies and its partners are about defending against threats and stopping bad things from happening. And that is a big part of what we are trying to do. But we are also very much for something in both cases. President Biden went out to the Rose Garden and in the midst of this crisis, was already laying out a vision for a future between Israelis and Palestinians and the broader region rooted in something we are very much for, not something we are against. And with respect to Ukraine, he went to Kyiv in February and I had the privilege of joining him there and stood up and spoke about how Ukraine has already achieved a significant amount of the vision that it is fighting for. Kyiv stands. A sovereign, democratic Ukraine stands, increasingly pointed in the Euro-Atlantic direction. It is an affirmative vision, a vision that very few people thought was possible, when Russian tanks began rolling across the border in February of 2022..
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