128: Iran, Gaza and the new American right, with Sohrab Ahmari

A

Foreign. Welcome to a new episode of Ask Khaliv Anything. Joining me today is Sohrab Amari, a conservative columnist, editor, author of nonfiction books. He's currently the US editor at UnHerd. He's a Moynihan Public Scholar at the City University of New York. Saurabh has a unique perspective on quite a few things happening right now in the world. He is Iranian born, left Iran with his family about at age 14. He was raised as an atheist but converted to Catholicism in 2016. He is a confidant or at least personal friend to Vice President J.D. vance, and also he's interviewed him three times as Vice President and many times as a senator. I have known Saurabh personally for many years, although we have only been in touch on occasion. We've had some public disagreements on Twitter. Now x I know that shocks anyone who follows me that I would do that, but nevertheless, I'm very grateful that he came on, that he took the time to come and speak to us, to our community about issues that worry us, and that he himself has written about a great deal. The strained US Israel relationship, the rise of antisemitism on the American right, the Iran war, larger questions of the Iranian regime, Hamas, Gaza, Lebanon, you name it. We'll get into it. Before we get into it, I just want to tell you that we have a sponsor for this episode for whom we are grateful. Julie and Frank Cohen sponsored this episode and dedicated it in memory of Those murdered on October 7, 2023. Thank you to Frank and Julie. I also love to invite you to join our Patreon community. Subscribe to our substack if you're interested in asking the questions that guide the topics we talk about. That's done at the Patreon or the substack. You also get to take part in monthly live streams where I answer your questions live. So if you find any of that interesting or useful, they're great. Very active communities. That's at patreon.com askhalivanything or khalivgur.substack.com those links are in the show notes Saurabh. How are you?

B

I'm good, thanks to, thanks for having me. And it's good to see you. Uh, we actually met in 2012, 2013 for the first time at a Shabbat dinner.

A

Yes. Where we were having. I was there for a year in New York, I should say. Um, my wife was doing a, an LLM in legal theory at nyu and I found myself bumping around New York and I, I met a lot of very smart people and thoughtful people. And you were certainly one of them. And we had some interesting discussions. Um, I. I want to just dive into it, if that's okay. Um, you have interviewed JD Vance a couple of times very recently, including week, and I want to get into that. But before we get into Iran, I want to ask something about the American political right that troubles me tremendously. I'm going to lay it out and ask you to tell me if I'm wrong, if I'm right, if you share the concern, and I want to say outright you are familiar with this world. You have written explicit essays against anti Semitism and talked about these people as barbarians, some of them to some degree, in some ways. I'm not accusing you. I'm asking you what's happening. There's a kind of chain of Joe Rogan, Dave Smith, Alex Jones, who calls Tucker Carlson a divine prophet. Daryl Cooper, Ian Carroll, Candace Owens. These are people with millions upon millions upon millions of views. Tucker has complimented Candace. Now Megyn Kelly is getting in on it. They're these smaller tributaries like Fuentes and Jake Shields, Rogan, Smith, Kelly. They give a kind of presentable Persona to it all, the mantle of respectability. And if Megan likes Candace, how bad could Candace really be? And if Candace isn't so bad, how bad could Ian Carol be? And how could Daryl Cooper be a raging anti Semite if Joe Rogan, who, you know, says about himself that he hates hate, thinks that he's a deeply righteous character? There's a kind of ecosystem and I want to just. I want to, I want to go for the throat here directly and just cut to the chase. J.D. vance seems to me to be sitting above it all, to be not understanding or pretending he doesn't understand. He gave a talk about how Republicans can't gatekeep these people. I think he was referring specifically to Tucker. And yet, you know, everybody saying that he sits over a clique that denies the Holocaust, embraces outlandish anti Jewish conspiracies, won't say a bad word about Hitler, they protect each other. They have all these conspiracy theories. There's something unhealthy happening on the right. And I have written this to you. I do not suspect JD Vance of actually believing any of this, of being anti Semitic or conspiratorial. What is this? Where does it come from? Why is he so close to Tucker and defends Tucker and hosts a podcast with Tucker, you know, right after Charlie Cooks assassination? Why does he launder this stuff? And where's this stuff even coming From.

B

So, yeah, that's a, that's a bundle of things. You know, look, you and I know each other and we sort of inhabit somewhat overlapping circles. A lot of my friendships, you know, over the, over the, like last two, three years have become strained in that kind of pro Israel world. And I get, I can get into why, but they're not all totally, completely tattered. But because of that, there's lots of people in your audience who may not know where I'm coming at these issues. So I'd like to like put my own view on, on, on, on Israel on the table first, very briefly and where I, how I came to it. And then I will definitely address what you're trying to say and what you, what you asked about. So I, yeah, obviously, as you said, I grew up in Iran and I, when I came to the us My first kind of form of political consciousness, like lots of people my age was on the, on was developed on the left, like the hard left. And part of that was a sort of hostility to Israel, although I will say that kind of left variety of hostility to Israel always tried to resist the sort of the, the, the, the figure of like the Jew as this kind of demonic being, which is part of like, that's more like right wing Judeophobia and antisemitism. Nevertheless, I, you know, it was part of my worldview because you were on the left. And then what I'm talking about here is like my late teenage years, to be clear, and then I had a kind of political awakening in my early 20s when I went to do Teach for America. It's this program. I think Israel actually has an analog. It's a program that brings young recent graduates to underserved classrooms. And you know, you're, you're placed in this completely new community after college, and you typically room together with fellow Teach for America teachers. And one of mine, one of my roommates, we got a house together, was an Israeli American. And you know, we would have political discussions obviously in the house or something like that. And you know, I, I remember one time the Iraq, and this is right after the Iraq war. I mean, this is two, we're talking about 2005 and the Iraq war had, was still, like I said, at its peak. And he and I had a ferocious discussion about it. And I said something like, you know, his name is Amir. I said, Amir, you know, we, none of this would have happened if Israel hadn't, you know, lobbied for this war. And he like lost it. He was like, actually, don't you Know, the like, you know, while individual Israeli statesmen may have said this or that, the kind of mainstream Israeli position was against the Iraq war. And so that kind of like was one of those useful awakening moments in life. And so I did that kind of. It forced me because obviously I'm confronted with contrary facts to like do a deeper reading into why Israel exists. You know, I went on the website of Yad Vashem. Somehow I scrolled my way to it and I read these stories of the righteous among the nations, the, you know, gentiles, non Jews who at great personal risk often harbor Jews, try to save Jewish lives. During the show up. And I was like shedding hot tears at this. And I walked away with several conclusions about my politics. One is a kind of horror, my own personal horror at politics of large abstractions, whatever they may be, like large ideological abstractions that make it possible for you to say, well, that was the price of history that this or that happened, you know. No, if you are a, you know, trying to put yourself in the shoes of one of these righteous among the nations, you have to think, here I am one person, there is this other person in need and facing political evil. What do I do? What concrete choice do I make? That was one. The second one was a basic secular Zionism was sort of fused into my political DNA and it's still there. You know, obviously at the time I was an atheist. Now there's a conversion to Catholicism, I'll get into that. But as a, as an atheist, we could say like, look, in the 19th century, in the eight beginning in the 18th century, in the 19th century, the world divided itself into nation states. And that process for the Jews meant that they tried to assimilate into their various nation states. They tried that. And because of antisemitism, which was taking on a particularly kind of racial and almost biological caste, beginning of the 19th century, it didn't work. The Jews tried actually existing socialism. It didn't work. So, you know, there is a kind of necessity of Israel even before, before the Holocaust, the moral necessity of there being a Jewish state. That is, if we're going to divide up the world to, into nation states, then the Jews have eminently right, sort of won the right to have one that they can call their own. So that's been part of my, that's actually a very core part of my political DNA. And so I did convert to Catholicism. But because Catholicism is different from other strands of Christianity, it doesn't have like a theology of Israel that there's, there's no eschatological meaning with which Catholics or the Church might imbue the. The story of the modern nation state of Israel, but they treat it as the year is a nation state. It's a legitimate nation state and it deserves to exist and has the right to defend itself. And that's still part of, like my baseline political view. I only say this because I'm acutely aware, as I hope, that introduction suggested, of the ways in which antisemitism can serve. My favorite way to understand it is comes from psychoanalysis and the French theorist Jacques Lacan, who gave us this concept of the suture right and of a suturing point. That is human beings individually and society is at large are full of these constitutive antagonisms. So you as a person are full of different forces tugging at you, and society is riven by these different forces that tug at you. Capitalism produces great wealth, but it also generates massive inequality, etc. Etc. And antisemitism is a classic way, is a classic suturing point. That is, rather than allowing people to confront the constitutive antagonisms and contradictions that are part of their society and taking political responsibility for them, it allows you to say that figure, the Jew, is who is responsible for all this. It kind of becomes this story you tell that neatly papers over your own society's internal antagonisms. And that's kind of the. That's my favorite theory of why antisemitism exists, at least in modernity. And I think that we are going through a period in the west when the antagonisms are getting sharper, when people feel more vulnerable and fragile than ever before. And so that kind of that story that people tell about to try to explain their own society's internal contradictions by projecting them onto this figure of the. Of the Jew is coming to the fore again. There's also the Internet as a factor, et cetera, et cetera. Now that's, I think, explains the phenomena you're talking about, you know, like the, the. The podcast bros and all that. Partly the other thing that's happening and this is our task, which is made very, very difficult because of that. What I just explained is there's also grave concern among masses of people in the democratic west on the left and on the right about all sorts of things that are legitimate, things that we should be able to criticize about Israel, about its behavior in recent years, about how its conduct of the war in Gaza, about its, you know, frankly advocacy for this war in Iran and those are like actual things of actions of a nation state, which, while legitimate precisely because it's legitimate, should be subject to legitimate democratic contestation in the West. And people want to be able to do that. And the problem is that those two things are happening in a parallel together. The return of anti Semitism as a sort of suturing point, as a way for people to explain the antagonisms in their own society. At the same time with Israel, in my view and the view of lots of people, you know, obviously an overwhelming majority of Democrats in the United States now, almost overwhelming majority of independents, and a growing share of Republicans age under 50, feel that they have serious disagreements with Israel with its, with its maximalism, maybe in the Middle east, with how it treats the Palestinians, especially in the, you know, for me, it's the west bank, honestly, weirdly enough, that, and we can get into that. The thing that sort of bothers me the most and the sort of style of pro Israel rhetoric which, you know, and I'll stop here, I promise, is I found over the past two, three years that a lot of Israelis and the pro Israel community in the United States has needlessly turned friendly critics into enemies. That is this mode where I've certainly felt it, where I'm like, hey, I'm uncomfortable with what Ben GVIR says or with what, you know, was happening in, in the west bank in terms of settlement expansion, expulsion of certain communities, these sort of quasi pogroms and pogroms, often under the eye of the idf, either acting as adjuncts to the, to the thugs, or at the very least just sort of not doing anything to stop it. Those are legitimate things. And I think the analytic task here to see where those two to, to, to sort of like to use the Ben Gurion formula, right? We should fight the new sort of mentally deranging brain rot of the new anti Semitism as though there is no Israeli maximalism and Israeli cruelty. And we should call out and critique and be able to debate that latter Israel's behavior as though there is no, you know, this kind of resurgence of we should be able to confront both is what I'm trying to say. So that's, I think I've tried to hit my own background and where I'm coming at this and try to address at a sort of a high level what I think is going on with the phenomena that you pointed to.

A

It's weird that they're happening at the same time. Why wouldn't, if you want to address a specific policy, look, when an American says the reason we are hyper focused on Gaza and totally ignored Yemen, which America supplied the weapons and intelligence and deeply integrated into the Saudi war effort in Yemen. And Yemen had a death toll that's five times bigger than Gaza and crueler than Gaza. In other words, actual mass starvation of children to a number that I think the last international sort of consensus number was 85,000 dead kids. And that didn't register on the minds of the West. And, and so in America, I'll say, why are you guys so hyper focused about Gaza? There's so many great conflicts. And by the way, the answer is not to not focus on Gaza. The answer is to seriously look, to spend Western political capital, attention, bandwidth on many, many of these places where there could be a tremendous effect to that attention. But if it's only one conflict, then is it really about conflict? And I will say this to an American and the American will say to me, but we fund this one. So first of all, that's not a hundred percent true. You fund a small piece of it. But also, you know, that relationship of funding is two way. The Pentagon loves it because it uses Israel as an R and D shop. Basically, it has all these. It's also massive American leverage over Israel which disappears, the funding disappears. And also it doesn't explain the phenomenon because the phenomenon is identical in a hundred countries in the world that have no connection to Israel. No military support, no funding of any kind. The same exact phenomena happened in Copenhagen. So when I look at the culture phenomenon and I look at how it rides right alongside the Nick Fuentes becoming laundered by Tucker Carlson, who's a friend of the Vice President, the whole, you know, there's so much to. Even the word MAGA covers vastly different and diverse groups, but that this can have that access, that this can suddenly explode at the same moment as this discussion about Gaza. People who come to me and say there's a terrible war in Gaza with terrible humanitarian costs, I don't debate them because I don't disagree with them. Because if the world is paying attention to terrible war, thank God, I'll say more than that. If the obsession with Gaza is because for the first time we're all holding these little glass boxes, these little glass squares in our hands and we can for the first time see directly and quickly the victims of war, the horrors of war, and therefore from now on the Western consciousness will explode every time there's a war and all war will be more difficult because the whole world can see everything. Then Israel is the villain in this particular round, but it Means that they'll be harder to have wars, we'll have fewer wars because everyone will see the wars. That's an amazing outcome. That's not a silver lining. That is a good turn for history. Unless it never happens again. Unless the only war that anyone will see the victims of is Gaza. Because the only war that matters is the war in which Israel is taking part. And then it's something else. It's something else manipulating the decency of millions of people, but it nevertheless isn't driven by it. And if you don't have the good luck to be bombed by a Jew, you will actually simply die and disappear and nobody will ever notice. So what if the anti Semitic thing that's rising up isn't as divorced from the genuine legitimate policy questions, which I, by the way, I'm not opposed to cutting the aid. I'm for cutting the aid. There are costs to Israel for that aid. I don't know if people are familiar with the issue. That's a different episode. But those are phenomenally important policy conversations. But what if the, the obsessiveness of it, the arrival of it at this moment, what if that Venn diagram has a lot of overlap? What do we do then? How do you understand it in.

B

Well, I, I would, I would somewhat challenge the premise there. I mean, I think lots of the, certainly on the right, the people who are tend to be critics of the US Israel relationship or want to recalibrate it tend to be the types who are also skeptical of the US Saudi relationship with the US Egyptian relationship. There is this sentence, like this American tradition of why do we fund any countries? Now, you may agree with that. You don't disagree with that. I actually have my own views which aren't those. But I think that it's worth noting that lots of the kind of, you know, Thomas Massie tykes are also opposed to funding Egypt. In fact, they will stake out claims about that as well. And they point to that to show that they're not just focusing on US Funding for Israel. The other thing.

A

No, but just, but just a kind of. But, but they, they're, they will only occasionally mention in order to not look like they're focused. The only debate is about America spends 60 billion, I think on deployments in Europe. That does not come up by these people in a conversation. Europe doesn't have a deployable military. I mean, I think Poland's army today is larger than Germany and Britain's put together. And American troops protected Europe for decades and decades. They don't think about deal with. And that's 25 times or I hope I did the math right, what they're spending on Israel, 15 times. Whatever it is, it's a lot more than. You really don't think it's about Israel.

B

I think there is another factor which was the second. I was just going to try to say some of the people who bring this up are, I try to be pretty principled about it and I don't think, again, I reject the premise that they're only doing it so that they don't look like they're picking on Israel. But to a larger point about why there is this extra investment in, in, in Israel's behavior, I would raise two additional points. One is that unlike those other partnerships, unlike the partnership with Saudi Arabia or Egypt, none of those countries hold themselves out as democratic beacons. And their moral story isn't blended into the American moral imaginary the way Israel's is. Right. So if you've been to, you know, pro Israel gatherings, AIPAC or ajc, I certainly had you see sort of the, like the two flags, the Israeli and US flags blended together and a story told, you know, as this kind of continuous sort of moral merger between the two countries over democratic values, which is, you know, and partly rightly so, because Israel is a democracy and Israel proper, I think it's a huge problem and a lot of people are now raising this, which is that it wields the power of life and death over like 5 to 7 million Palestinians in the territories who, who don't, who don't access anything like Israeli democracy yet they're subjected to Israeli power and in a kind of absolute way. But regardless, no one, no one looks to Saudi Arabia or Egypt as moral beacons. In fact, they're pretty openly autocratic states. There's, they have no the qualms about how they treat their own people or how they. But Israel is supposed to be different. And so as a result of that, you know, to my mind, when you have the, the number of people who are becoming critical of Israel that weren't that way before, 90% of Democrats, but have an unfavorable view. By some polls, easily 2/3 of independents and a bare majority of Republicans under 50 have an unfavorable view. You talk about millions of people here and I don't think it is either true or wise for Israel and its defenders to ascribe all of that to anti Semitic animus. And what happens in the febrile kind of online space, not saying that that doesn't, that's not A factor. Okay, I, I'm. Because I began my whole discourse by saying you have two parallel things happening. You have growing, frankly revulsion with Israeli behavior in the territories, in, you know, in, in its kind of maximalism in Lebanon and elsewhere at the same time as you have this resurgence of, of anti Semitism as a way to sort of neatly wrap up society's problems and not look at your own political responsibility, but on a mass scale like that. All these people, I don't think, because I know Americans as, you know, Israelis, I know my fellow Americans like the person sitting next to you on the subway. And in fact, polls show us this doesn't have deeply anti Semitic views. Right. The worst you can get is that about a fifth of Americans hold what advocacy groups describe as like typical anti Semitic tropes. But that, that's, they also hold similar tropes about, probably about black people, about Arabs, about Mexicans, about whatever. That's not the same as like hateful treatment of one people. And I think it's a very, it's a big mistake to basically look at Gaza and look at Yemen and see that there is more outrage about Gaza and therefore conclude it's all because of anti Semitism. Because I think that way lies in like even more isolation and pariah hood for Israel than it's suffering now.

A

It's an, it's such an interesting, such an interesting thing to listen to my, my Israeli intuition hearing you talk. Those polls are the same polls I've seen and I think the future is very different. Although we don't quite know what people mean when they say they have unfavorable views. If it's this government, if it's this war, if a future Israel that I don't know what somehow manages to eke out some kind of a resolution with the Palestinians, doesn't suddenly have the love come rushing back? I suspect not, but we don't fully know.

B

I think it would help havib I I so this is the thing like, look, I told you my what in my sense. Yeah, look, I, I told you why I'm very, I'm, I'm at a baseline level. I'm a secular Zionist, right? And I've, I've been to Israel about half a dozen times in different groups and, and settings, but they're basically have all been like pro Israel junkets just organized by different outfits. And here's what I'll say it look, and I'm not saying this is mass opinion because most Americans don't get to travel abroad as much As I do. But I love Israel when I'm in Tel Aviv. I love Israel when I'm in Jerusalem. I love Israel when I visit the Galilee region and the lake and all that, because it just feels like this is the homeland of the Jewish people. This is like legitimate green Israel. And, you know, yes, there are extra security measures, but who can reproach the Israelis for doing that after the various intifadas and etc. Totally fine. I. I always felt this, like, only now because things have shifted. Feel like I can say it when I. When they take you like these pro Israel junkets, they take you to like, this or that settlement, gush this, whatever, you know, at. In various levels of, like, how kind of internationally odious they're considered. Some are more than others. Some are probably places where under any future settlement they'll be part of Israel proper, whatever. There is this weird quality to that life where it feels like settler life. You know, you. It's like they're trying to like, normalize it. It's like, oh, look, he's a settler dad. Yes. He like, has a, you know, has an Uzi, but like, his kids have a trampoline. And if you're traveling with a family, your kids get to jump on the trampoline with his kids. Look how normal it is. But there is this hilltop militarized quality and this sort of sense that there are these other people who are. What is their status? Will they ever be able to have a say over what kind of military occupation rules over them? Again, I think it wields the power of life and death over. Over these people. And it feels off. Haviv? I don't know. And that's the question I wanted to point to you is as an Israeli who is in the kind of moderate band of the Israeli public opinion, do you have the same sense when you go visit these places? Like, sometimes they'll even be like, look, the mayor of the settlement and the local, like, Arab, whatever, Palestinian chief, they're working together on a project of, you know, try to like, environmental issues, address them together. They found a way to like, work together. But obviously in the backdrop of that is a state that wields the absolute power of life and death over a population that has kind of no say. And so that's my question for you, as the only one I want to ask during this whole is you as an Israeli, when you visit such places, as I'm sure you do from time to time, do you kind of feel that same thing that I'm talking About or is it or not? You think that's totally normal, too?

A

I'll tell you, just a little background before I give that answer, please.

B

I spoke a lot.

A

What the hell is a moral beacon? What the hell is a Israel's position in the American moral imaginary? I said that these are. Prejudice creates focus. And you answered in a way that makes complete sense in America. Truly complete and total sense. And I cannot quite wrap my head around it. I am a member of a country that is essentially composed of refugees with nowhere else to go, surrounded by nations and ideologies in which Jews cannot live. Even if Jews had lived there for a millennium before Arabs lived in places like Iraq. And they demand the right to continue to demand our destruction. And they have overwhelmed the Palestinian political world, the Palestinian political psyche. Hamas wins an election today in the west bank and they arm incessantly. You know what you described as maximalist. I know what you're talking about. You know you can't have Hezbollah on the border, so you raze the villages along the border. I get it. I hear that. But Hezbollah will never, not shoot from those villages ever. Not ever. The day they're not shooting is a day where they're putting in place rockets to shoot down the road. And this Iranian regime will never. It's a regime that has no border with Israel, no interests in Israel. Israel doesn't lie on some kind of choke point that this regime needs to control in order to have safe passage for its oil. Nothing. Israel has nothing. And this regime has spent 47 years obsessing to the point of it's a national holiday, Quds Day, where they have their great military. Why is that? Quds Day? Why is that Israel, the one thing that this regime has to destroy in the world in order to realize its revolutionary truth. And so we're surrounded by a world. I don't know, the Israeli position in the morality play running around in the American psyche. I mean, I know it in the sense that I've heard about it a lot and read about it a lot, but I never had it in my own head. So to me, Israelis are a bunch of people trying to figure things out. And all of this stuff describes a prejudice. We were the moral core, and now we are the now. If we.

B

Part of the moral core is the

A

right part of the moral core, there's a little place for Thomas Jefferson, I understand. But we're part of the moral core. And now if we do bad, we have betrayed, violated that great moral story of foreigners who don't know our history and don't know anything about us, but have set us up as their moral core. I can't tell you how exhausting it is to be a Jew. I am neither the great villain of this earth nor the moral core of anything. I will continue to screw up. I happen to have a very comfortable answer on the question of the west bank because I happen to think there's no path out of this that is in two states. And I happen to say that in Hebrew, in right wing Israeli spaces routinely. And they still invite me back. Military rule is unsustainable. Military rule is illegitimate. Military rule has no good and no meaning. And I, and, and if I leave and they turn into another crappy failed state like what Syria was under Assad, that's still better than me ruling them. And if that state, by the way, comes at me in a war, that's still better than me ruling them. And I say all of that and then also have to inform you that in fact most Israelis don't share the settler concept, the religious Zionist vision that this is a redemptive story of the Jewish return. You know, these people, they read the Bible and you don't have to believe in the Bible. That's not to you and me, that's to, you know, people listening in. But you know, the prophecies talk about the prophets of the Bible, talk about the worst times in all of history and the best times in all history all at once when the Jews also all returned to the land. So it's not so insane for some kind of a believing Jew to think that this is a beginning of some kind of messianic age and these people believe in it. And part of the coming of the messianic age is the possession of this territory. Now. These people are, I don't think that the people who actually believe that sentence are 20% of the settlement movement and from their fringe edges that they're embarrassed by come the thugs you talked about that produce this violence, which, I mean, I've written about it even in English about it. The free press, right? That kind of stuff. So this is bad and wrong and Smotic and Bengvir, who basically control these policies in the west bank right now because Netanyahu is a coward and do terrible damage for Israel and terrible harm to Palestinians. And it's much smaller than it looks on tv. It's much smaller than you think it is because of just the information space that you have access to. And it's still far too big for Israel to be exonerated because it's a Kind of terrorism. And terrorism could be very small and have a tremendous psychological impact on Palestinians. And for the people that are directly affected and attacked, it's obviously not small. It's significant. So I don't have any need to defend Israel on these. On these things. I think these are bad things that we need to stop and that Israel will pay a cost for and that it should pay a cost for. But I have to tell you, something is stopping me from pulling out of the west bank that is completely legitimate and that you don't have an answer for. Maybe I'll ask this as the question. Hamas will definitely take over and definitely build what it built in Gaza and definitely come after our children. Definitely. And if that's true, what could you possibly tell Israelis? Forget for a second. Morality. Morality is really fundamental and critical to a healthy society. We need morality. But just for 10 seconds, as a thought exercise, let's leave the moral question of military rule on the side. After I've confessed to being basically where you are on the question. If Hamas takes over the west bank after an Israeli withdrawal from 60%, 70%, I don't know how much it would withdraw from. It wouldn't include the huge Jewish populations in Jerusalem beyond the Green line, whatever it is, 80%, you know what 99% it pulls out of and Hamas takes over. How does that not end with a destruction of the west bank after Hamas carries out endless massacres and imposes terrible evil rule in order to build a tunnel system that'll be exactly what Hezbollah built on the border and exactly what Hamas built in Gaza. We're facing an enemy that demands our destruction. It demands it as a theological point. It is willing to destroy its own society on this demand. You can come at the Israelis and hate them for what happened in Gaza. In fact, you can believe Israelis are innate monsters for what happened in Gaza. Not you. I never say I made any claim like that. Not you. Not you. But the people out there who could. Anybody could. Huge numbers of democrats do fine. You still have a problem in Gaza of Hamas having built the world's biggest tunnel system in order to survive underground. An Israeli invasion which they sought with October 7th. And not a single Gazan child has been allowed into the biggest, most comprehensive bomb shelter system in the history of war that they built in Gaza and bent Gaza's entire economy to. We face enemies that are undeterrable, that want only endless war. And our response to that is something none of the world is willing to have a serious conversation about. That includes, what the hell, Iran and Hezbollah and Hamas actually are. Yeah. I desperately want two states. How do I get there if this is the enemy?

B

So great question. And I sort of, I knew you would pose this and I would again, typical, typical for me have like a multi layered answer. You might dismiss one and then take one seriously and we can go from there. But the first one is I think the, the growing power of the settler movement include especially its kind of messianic religious dimension undercuts the claims. Maybe unfairly, but it's just, that's how public opinion works.

A

Right.

B

Maybe unfairly or not, but the fact that, you know, they talk about we're going to destroy rings of villages in Lebanon and then they talk about we're going to build settlements whether it comes to fruition or not or yes, they're

A

evil, terrible and I hate.

B

Well, no, no, no, but I'm saying

A

that which actually do.

B

I understand that. But like that makes people. It raises a legitimate question to say, well, is it really the security problem or they want this land, is it just, you know, territorial?

A

For most people it's a security problem. Ben Gvir and Smatut represent 10% of Israeli society. If you kind of fudge the numbers and ask the question in the most expansive possible way, 20% of Israeli society, 20% of people under 40, I think it was the last YouGov poll in America don't think the Holocaust happened. 10% of Americans think that Trump should be assassinated and that's a legitimate thing that should happen. There's radical people at that ang and they'll say the worst imaginable thing, there won't be settlements in Lebanon.

B

It's not a rhetorical strategy that I've become kind of frustrated with. My friend Batya. I hosted her for a debate on Gaza at Unherd and here's what she kind of, she said to me, I can only paraphrase, but it's worth looking at that debate where she said, look, there are terrible things happening in Gaza right now, including suffering of children and civilians on a massive industrial scale.

A

That's horrible.

B

And there are Israeli cabinet ministers, including members of the security cabinet, who say really blood curdling things about what should be done to Gaza. However, and she said the fact that A is happening should not be sort of linked in any causal way with B. That is the fact that, you know, there's this sort of like, we should, we should have migration. Millions of them should leave. Like things that happen that are like the main lessons of Jewish history is like mass population transfers like that are Evil we should not the Jews of all the last should be the last people even contemplating it. Ministers openly say that. But she wanted to say. But don't like causally link that to what you see in Gaza, which is horrible but it's different. It's sort of related.

A

You can have it, I think the world.

B

But. But let me finish this point.

A

Sorry.

B

So I'm saying I hear something similar here which is, you know, yes, these people say this and it seems to be Israeli policy because you know, obviously there are these attacks on villages and members of the IDF either don't confront them or sometimes on video they are seen to be participating in them. But that's not related to what you hear from these villages, from these kind of ministers. That's just like. And therefore only the security reason is why we are not relinquishing anything in the West Bank. It's only not the land grabby reason. It defies, sorry my intelligence. I can't.

A

Those are not separate things. Those are not separate things. Holding onto land as a security reason. Land is the security. Land is safety. Your country with the size of moral not shrinking nine miles wide is security.

B

You're right. But if so there is a way you could do that without having any settlements. We control the external borders. Etc. You, you know, there are arrangements and here that was my second point is the first time I ever visited Israel, it was with the American Jewish Committee and they had us, they gave a. Have someone in the security apparatus. I can't remember it was shinbait or, or you know, massage. I can't remember someone who like briefs public facing element of the security apparatus. And this person, I mean that's a different Israel. This is like 2012, my goodness. But he, he was like, look, there is another solution which is, you know, we control the external borders of the west bank and then we draw up the drawbridges. We sort of pull up the drawbridges into Israel proper and we don't have anything to do with them. We just like boom, you do whatever. But you know, obviously we reserve the right to respond.

A

That is that was the theory of the Gaza disengagement. We pull out, Hamas takes over after we pull out, then we have a blockade to prevent them from being able to bring in major arms and weapons. And if they come at us, we shoot anyone who comes at the border because that's what borders are and that's it. And in fact Olmert after Sharon has his stroke at the end of 2005. Olmert is his number two guy at Kadima, he runs. Formerly Kudnik, right winger. He runs in the election in 2006 talking about a similar withdrawal in the West Bank. He had something called convergence plan. He wanted to pull out a 90% of the West Bank. He said it before the election. And he won the election. And he formed the election the government with the left and put the labor in the Defense Ministry. What that person was describing to you was the Ariel Sharon concept of there is no partner on the other side. The Arafats turn out to basically be Muslim brothers of various kinds who can never sign on the dotted line and finish the actual negotiation with actual peace. And so what we need to do is just get the hell out of there because we can't rule over them forever and ever. And that ended on October 7th because it ended long before October 7th, but October 7th killed it forever. I can't pull out of these places if they will be turned into. There has never in the history of war been a tunnel system built like this. All of Gaza is a vast fortress under all the civilian population. Nobody's ever built anything a fifth of this size. What do I actually do with this? If the war in Gaza is too brutal and there's no question in my mind that in some places the Israelis just did things that are not okay, by the way. It's a war. Name a war where America didn't. But you can say that. You can argue it and. And you should. People should argue that about a war. But Hamas is still in charge. I saw that debate with Bhatia. One of the things you said was this was 10 months ago at the height of the hunger crisis, which you know, was. Is a shocking incompetence on the part of the Israeli government and protect. But it's the Israeli government. I have a whole podcast episode on this. People are going to hear this and say surely not. It's an entire discourse. This is. We are led by the most incompetent people who have ever led Israel. And they talk only to the most radical bits of their base. There is no other way that they understand to talk. Netanyahu literally hasn't engaged in the strategic communication war that Hamas and the other side has been engaged in consistently and intensively for three years. And so the Israeli government has failed miserably at explaining itself.

B

And.

A

And then you can obviously argue. And in some cases I have also in its actual actions and policies. But I don't know. And I represent the vast majority of the Israeli left in this not center, not right I don't know how to get away from what the enemy actually wants and is not the ordinary Palestinian, but everyone who will lead them and what Iran invests in and Hezbollah invests in. How is the Israeli north ever going to be safe if Hezbollah is building those arsenals in the southern villages? Nobody will answer that question for me. And how do I measure the morality of it?

B

Without that, you and I have will not be able to solve Israel's kind of security moral dilemmas. What we can do, I think productively is to. You've laid out the sort of Israeli moral security dilemma. Right. What would be helpful is for Israelis to acknowledge the US Moral security dilemma as well. Right. That, you know, you have these sets of problems, including some of them that are sort of endogenous to Israel's shifting political culture. I grant you that it's. It is maybe 20% or whatever, 10%. Although I would say that just as like Gen Z, everywhere is trending. Right. I think that's true of Israel. And so it may be that the old establishment, who could, who could even speak the kind of moral language of the, of the, of the west, is, is going to be unseated. And Ben GVIR represents more the future than the past. Be that as it may, the U.S. also, as a power whose legitimacy, even in its Trumpian guise, even when we say we're not moral, still has immense moral stakes in the world. That it has to be seen as a good guy on the world stage. You can see why, not just for ordinary Americans, but for foreign policy elites. And this is happening at a bipartisan level. Right? The people who are in the, you know, Pentagon, in the, you know, Intelligence committee, these are my sources, people I talk to as a journalist. They're not all Tucker heads or whatever. They're like, you know, the security apparatus of the United States are worried about the US Image vis a vis much of the rest of the world vis a vis Israel and what it does in the territories. And so it's almost like you want the Israelis to grant us something. President Trump reportedly often says it's just become too much. He says Bibi is too much. He keeps saying too much, too much. It's like, what front are the Israelis going to give the world and their major patron, the United States, give us a little something that you're not kind of completely deaf to our concerns.

A

You know, I share with you this sense of,

B

even at the level of rhetoric. Sorry, even at the level of rhetoric, someone who comes around who's a little softer, who wasn't constantly, like, doesn't treat every critic as an enemy in the public square, in the digital public square, and doesn't talk this way about the Palestinians. You know, like it would go so far.

A

One of the most damaging moments and one of the most dangerous moments, you know, in years. We are led by the most incompetent people who have ever led us. It is an astonishing. Take the hunger crisis last year. I think I know what the Israeli government thought it was doing when it stopped the aid. It saw those protests against Hamas and it thought that by creating a sense of urgency among ordinary Palestinians, it would massively boost those protests. And the best way to get Hamas out of there is to have Palestinians do it. And so they declare, they announce the stopping of aid. And they had data, very good data, data that the UN gave us journalists, I mean, data that was publicly available, that the UN had actually this dashboard where it counted how much food is in Gaza and Gaza was supposed to have six months worth of food already inside Gaza. And so you can play this game of pretending to be, not pretending, stopping the supplies, but pretending to be planning to starve them for four months and still have a huge leeway. That was the thinking in the Israeli cabinet. And the general in charge of civilian affairs with Palestinians, the head of Kogat actually apparently said in the cabinet, we don't actually know as when does Israel ever trusted UN numbers. Now it's going to trust UN numbers on this question. We're not. We don't actually know that this is how this should go down and this, this. And then it turned out, I think two and a half months into this policy or three months into this policy, that actually, even though there was enough food in Gaza, there was not enough efficient distribution in Gaza, which should seem like a very obvious thing. People were hoarding because the Israelis just announced there wouldn't be enough food coming in. Right? It was playing with the food supply of a displaced population in wartime as a policy idea that nobody thought was a cruel, b. Spectacularly stupid. You know what? It wasn't, it wasn't intentional attempt to starve the population. You know what Israel wanted it to look like? This government wanted it to look like an intentional attempt to starve the population. As soon as it became clear because of actual prices on the ground in the markets in Gaza. And people like me and I went to, I took an, an economist study of the prices in Gaza and went with it to the Free press. And the Free press blew the whole thing up. And. And then the Israelis couldn't not notice that actually prices were skyrocketing in Gaza and so hunger was actually setting in in some places. And then they began rushing in aid and never again. Now that's what I know happened. I will walk into a space with international people, people, foreigners, people who don't like. Why would they follow in Hebrew the day to day dealings of the Israeli cabinet? And I say to them, no, no, we didn't try to starve people to death. We were stupid and callous and tried to look like we were trying to starve people to death. This is a very weak defense now. So this is the government that. Yes, absolutely. Everything you're saying, it will say the worst possible thing, it will bring the most harm. I have actually concluded, and I have talked about this on the podcast, that Ben Veer and Smaltic want Israel isolated in pariah. And the reason they want it is that in Israel that has no connections to the world in Israel isolated and pushed to the wall is in Israel where their agenda is much more easy to push through, as opposed to an Israel that is very international, very high tech and very open and very, you know, has an open conversation within itself about these problems. And still I have a problem because I'm an Israeli. What am I going to do with Hamas? You said on that podcast at Batya that they're gone, nobody thinks they can retake the place and therefore the war is really unjustified. Now you're just killing people for no reason it. And yet here they are back there. You know, I put out a podcast before the Iran war. If you read Khomeini and you read Ali Shariati and the, the, the ideological and theological run up to the creation of this regime, you will learn what mukawama means, what resistance means and what mass martyrdom and the ethos of martyrdom and the meaning of, of, of Imam Hussein's story for this regime. What do I do with this enemy?

B

First of all, on the Iran question, the first response I had is an essay I wrote in Unherd and the headline was Iran's Devastating Hubris. Right? Why devote your entire national project to this ideology of the destruction of Israel? So I get that. I think good faith critics of Israel get that there is an ideological dimension to the Iranian regime. They get that. What I think the, again, the good faith critics, and I think a lot of Americans, again, I really want to push back against the idea that millions and millions of people are now beholden to febrile antisemitism without denying that that's Part of it, I think the problem for the Israelis is the fact that they have lots and lots of great tactics, but I don't see a strategy, or at least a realistic one. And I think of all the. Vice President Vance got a lot of heat from the pro Israel community for a series of interviews he gave. Not the one he gave to me, but on the podcast circuit promoting his book where he said, a nation of 9 million cannot kill its way out of all of its problems. And this is a point that really resonated with me because I've seen over a long period of time, this tendency on. On Israel's part to be like, well, we have ninja robots and we have like, these cool Internet viruses that can go and blow. Blow shit up. And, you know, and even on. On a public policy front, it's like, okay, well, we have a bad public policy problem. We're going to just like, we're going to set up a new agency that's going to tell Israel's story. In some of these areas, there is a need for as much, a need for peacemaking where it's possible, and granting mercy to enemies who are weaker or who needn't even be enemies. I'm not talking about Iran. I know the Iranian regime constitutionally believes certain things.

A

Things.

B

But the ordinary Palestinian, as you said, is not that. And there has to be. I think part of strategy is to kind of play regional politics as a game of addition. Right. You know, don't draw hard lines for everyone. I saw an Israeli minister. I think it's the minister of Diaspora affairs, and I understand he doesn't set foreign policy, but he's like Iran, he

A

doesn't even set the diaspora policy, you

B

know, Iran over as a problem. Their new problem is the axis of Pakistan, Qatar and Turkey. Well, Turkey is a really big power and it's in NATO. And he said, he used the phrase axis of evil. Now, I think Turkish foreign policy and domestic policy is troubling on many respects and so on, but, like, you can't have omnibilicosity in every direction. Whereas over there, elsewhere in the region. Elsewhere in the region are sitting the Saudis, whom I think, notwithstanding the recent, maybe some disagreements over the Iran war and its strategy, I think the Saudis would like to bandwagon with Israel more certainly more so than they would like to do so with Iran. And they have. They're like, we have one thing which is some degree of recognition for the Palestinians that could mean all sorts of things. They have their own proposals. Others in the region are preferred. But look, the moment where I was like, whoa, I can't be as vocally pro Israel as I was like a decade ago came when I was watching an interview with the, with the uk, with the Israeli ambassador to the UK who said basically by the way, another

A

Likud MK who belongs to that same coterie that today rules Israel. Yeah.

B

But said there will never be a Palestinian state. When then you're like, well okay, at some point that's ruling over 5, 7 million people. It's, there are elements of that rule which I described that can make people very uncomfortable. Now there are other people in the world by the way, who have second class kind of status. Right. So like Shiites in Bahrain, lots of other kind of minorities of this kind, China's various minorities. But the element of like when are you going to end a full on military occupation and give these people a path to self determination? I think that's the thing that I think the Vice President was getting at is like a little mercy, a little ability to be soft here and there actually is part of a strategy. Whereas what we get, I think from Israel is just tactics, tactics, tactics. And I'd love for you to react to that.

A

I'll say two things and then ask your reaction because it ends with the question. One is in the Israeli experience, what did you call it? Omnibilicosity or something like that. Yeah, works. And what do I mean by works? We Israelis often, you know, the world often learns about the Israeli wars, The early wars, 56, 67, 73, a couple wars in between that people forget about as distinct wars. But they were not distinct wars. They were battles in a single long 20 year war. Facing Nasserism, facing this Arab nationalist idea that we break down the boundaries between Arab states drawn by European empires and we defeat the Jews. And in doing that we usher in a new age of the Arab in great dignity and you know, taking their proper place in history. And that was Nasser's vision. And he even united with Syria briefly in the early 60s as a single state serving that vision. And war after war after war after war was necessary to finally defeat that fantasy, that dream, that aspiration, that Arab, the Arab problem of modernity and weakness could be, and division and all of that could be solved through the destruction of the Jews. And so what the Jews actually had to do was for 20 years, war after war after war, fight this battle. So after the June war, one of the things that I was trying to explain in places like, you know, Western cable news was this wasn't a War, the June war was a battle, you understand that there is now a, as the Israelis perceive it, and I think as the Iranians perceive it, a 20 year war against a new Nasser, a new vision, a new idea. The idea must be killed for Israel to be safe. There's no way to do this as, you know, pushing back Hezbollah a little bit or defeating one piece of Hamas or one airstrike against the nuclear program, or even a thousand airstrikes against the nuclear program. It's about defeating and destroying the idea, Israel being the invincible, undefeatable thing. And you have to find a new way to redeem Islam in this case, as the Iranian regime perceives it, of course, restoring Islam, bringing a revolutionary, etc. So the Israelis have, have been taught by the Middle east that omnibelicosity is the only way out. We were not omnibelicos until October 7th. It's a little bit like the people who came to Golda Meir and said, why won't you sue for peace in 1969? And she said, or why don't you end the occupation and then there'll be peace. And she said, but there was no occupation until 1967 and there was no, there was no peace. The PLO was founded to destroy Israel in 64. And in fact in its initial charter was not allowed to strike the Jordanian occupation of the west bank or the Egyptian occupation of Gaza. It was only about getting rid of the Jews. So if you're an Israeli Jew, and I hope this is clear, this is the historical experience that the Middle east imposed on the Jews. We're talking here about Mizrahi Jews are more likely. Jews from the Arab world are more likely to vote Netanyahu and seek this bellicosity than Ashkenazi Jews. European Jews are more likely to vote left. But we're also here on this point talking about the left as well. People desperate for a Palestinian state, people horrified at the occupation. This is the enemy. We have to fight them until it's over, until one of us lives or dies because the enemy won't let us do anything else. Every possible policy of magnanimity, of calm, of we're pulling back of ended in October 7th. Maybe that doesn't, maybe it doesn't work. Maybe the enemy actually has to be defeated.

B

Yeah, and, but the thing is, the enemy is not as monolithic as you say, right? You had a bunch of the Gulf states already bandwagoning with Israel.

A

They were never the enemy and they're not the enemy.

B

You know, Turkey, who's now identified as enemy. Look, despite.

A

But truly that's what I understand that. But it's a whole Turkey, by the way, is an adversary, but it's not an enemy. You know, Turkey, Israel, the Israeli Greek alliance is based on having a shared adversary in Turkey. But shared adversary is not the same

B

as anyone who supplies Israel with gas. Yes, and I believe it's the Muslim solidarity that is expected of Erdogan. And despite his daily statements about Israel, he's like doing business. And you can fly Turkish Airlines, you can fly every day.

A

America has an adversary in China and not an enemy. It's not fighting a war against them. And the American economy is dependent on China completely and vice versa.

B

Well, I'm grateful you brought up China because, and I'm hitting my kind of limit on this, but I've enjoyed this conversation. But the thing is that the project that you laid out, which is the sort of ultimate defeat of the latest iteration of, you know, anti Israelism, I think it's not as unified as you suggest, but whatever. We can haggle over the details, but that, that is happening amid certain tectonic shifts in American power and in perceptions of American power, of relative American power with respect to China and what our, you know, kind of priorities should be. And there's part of the Trumpian promise, although it actually began with Barack Obama, was this idea that there are regions that are secondary to the U.S. national Interest and our national security. One of them is the Middle East. Given the rise of China and the fact that in a few years 50% of global GDP will be kind of located within the Pacific region and that in a world of scarce resources, we have to pick what we can do. The US Even just repelling Iranian attacks over the continuous war that we had basically since June 12, since June 2025 to, to the current phase of whatever the Iran war is, is running out of various key munitions such that it would endanger the US ability to defend other allies or itself in the case of some other contingency. So again, my point isn't, well, why doesn't Israel do everything that its critics in, in on the American left and on the American right wanted to do, but that, you know, I think what would be helpful in clarifying if there's anything comes out of this podcast, is for some in the Israeli decision making apparatus to sort of just be like, look, this, this, this, some things are changing. This ally of ours feels taxed overall everywhere. It has other priorities that it has to attend to. Domestic reconsolidation, industrial renewal, you Know, building up the, the interceptors or finding some other way to do them cheaper. All these problems and there's a sense in the American public that they can't do it if they're always engaged in this particular region. And therefore, although omnipelicosity may have worked for Israel in its kind of immediate post founding period, it may not be appropriate now, especially given its strength right at the end of the day, this is a nuclear state. You know, I, I, I, I really don't think, you know, that every threat should be elevated to, you know, like this flattening effect where Tucker, Turkey, Iran, it's all one big field where everything is an enemy and we have to like try to sort of kill a ninja robot our way out of it. Making peace here and there, being soft, I think would serve Israel. But I have not been able to. My most thoughtful pro Israel interlocutors, I haven't been able to get this through through. And I think it may be an impasse in Israeli political culture. It may be a result of October 7th that fully grant that possibility. But whatever it is, Israel has got into a kind of total Maccabean mode. Appropriate maybe at a tactical level, but it's dangerous, it's dangerous for Israel at a strategic level. I really believe this as someone who began this conversation saying I want there to be a Jewish state in the world that is safe and secure.

A

Look, the arguments you're making, I can see where you're coming from. I can even see the point on some of them. I've had some serious critiques of this Israeli government, of Israeli policies over the past three years, including on these issues. But then there's the one big thing. If America pulls out of the Middle east and reorients to the Pacific as it keeps saying it wants to for 20 years now, I think I've been hearing somebody say it somewhere in Washington. It's not Israel keeping America in the Middle East. I keep telling Israelis we might be going this alone. By the way, those Wars we went alone 67, we did not have American help in 56, America pushed us back, even threatened sanctions at the UN in 48 we were under an actual American arms embargo. So the Nasserist moment at the founding of Israel, when Israel was most vulnerable, was alone. And we may have to face our enemies alone again. And you say nuclear, but what are we going to nuke somebody? I mean that's not nuclear is a great thing on paper. Unless people call your bluff and you're bluffing with nukes. I'M not sure that a regime willing to destroy its own people is bluffing with nukes. I am pretty sure the Israelis, certainly Israel's neighbors, don't think it will use that nuke unless it. That's literally existential and defensive. There are real limits on Israeli power. There's an unwillingness, I think, in the west to understand that Hezbollah is the self destruction of Lebanon, is willing to literally see Lebanon destroyed on the altar of destroying Israel because of this vast religious frame that everyone dismisses out of hand, as though it's rational that Iran for 47 years has expended so much of its national capital, so much of its efforts and absorbed so much harm and so much isolation and such damage to its economy on the altar of destroying a country it has no border with and no interest set. The basic idea of our enemies is that if they're willing to mass martyr themselves, if they're willing to see what has happened to Gaza or what has happened to Hezbollah, to Lebanon, to southern Lebanon, but you know, even in order of magnitude larger, that very willingness to martyr themselves, they talk about this explicitly. This is what martyrdom means as a strategic force multiplier in Iranian discourse for decades, in the regime's discourse, then if they're willing to martyr themselves at that scale or their people at that scale, we are left powerless because what are we going to do? Kill a bunch of people? Kill more people? Look at the damage to Israel from the harm that has come from these wars. So if they are willing to sacrifice their entire populations on the altar of destroying us for this grand religious vision. This isn't Lebanon's view. Lebanon is desperate to get out from under this Hezbollah vision of things, this mass martyrdom ethos of this particular Shia Mukalomah. Absolutely explicitly. They've said it out loud. Hamas has announced. Razi Hamad said it in the week after October 7th and has said it since. That there'll be more and infinite October 7th until all the Israelis are annihilated, irrespective of the harm to Palestinians. The Palestinian cause, the Palestinian polity. I don't see in Washington an understanding of the nature of the enemy. And what that means is that if you pull out, imagine it's not your problem. You know, every American who says to me, we're in debt, we have to stop giving aid to countries, I don't ever argue with that. That is dignified, respectable, you're a taxpayer worried about your tax money. My only response to that is to thank you for everything that America has done for Israel in the past. There's nothing else I have a right to say. But if you're pulling out of the Middle east, my one warning to America is that the Iranians won't stop. You pressure Israel into pulling back and staying put and quieting down. And the Iranians will continue to attack it. They will arm until they have an opportunity to attack. There will never not be a war convincing the Israelis that the war is guaranteed, which Iranian rhetoric and Iranian armaments and Iranian preparation of Hamas and Hezbollah for war has, has done. And October 7th, of course, there will definitely be that war. Well, if there's definitely going to be that war, better on your schedule than on theirs, better before they finished all their preparations for five or 10 years than after they finished all those preparations. And now the Iranians know that if they blockade Hormuz, nobody can stop them. Nobody, nobody can blockade them back to the point where they lose their leverage. They have that leverage, and they're going to keep trying to destroy the Israelis. And the Jews of Israel are not American Jews. They didn't spend the last hundred years discovering the promise of liberalism come true and becoming the moral core of someone's moral imaginary. The Israelis are the Jews who could not get into America when America shut its doors or anywhere else on Earth. They're almost all of them, the grandchildren of refugees. They have nowhere else to go. And they're certainly not willing to ever again live at the pleasure, at the willingness of anybody else. And so Iran will come for us, and we will fight them. And it'll be more desperate because we won't have that backup of allies of America, of the West. We'll be the great villain of the world, and that's okay. We don't need to have that backup. You guys have other problems in the world to look after. And it'll look like the 1960s where we fight alone. And it might end in a 1973 oil embargo for the west or something vaguely similar in the Strait of Hormuz. And America won't have that leverage over us. It won't be supplying us, not with weapons and not with diplomatic support. And the Iranians will still come for us, so we'll still have to fight. And until, you know the vice president, who very well may be the next president, he's in the. One of the front runners, one of the, I don't know, six people in the running slated for that job until there's a serious grappling in that camp of the Republican Party with the nature of the enemy that Israel faces. I don't know what to say about that. If you say to me the Israelis are incompetent fools who just. Their only response to everything, you know, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And their only response to everything is more war. Omni belligerence. And they're sometimes callous and cruel, or even too often callous and cruel rule. I might even agree with 50% of that. It depends what you say. I might agree with 10% of it. I might agree with 75% of it. But, and by the way, for Israel's own mistakes, Israel will pay a price. But the nature of the enemy won't change. They remain, they stand there. They will cause terrible harm to everybody around. They will ultimately cause terrible harm to, to the West. They have already demonstrated that they can do that. And until that's recognized, I don't know what to do with this discourse in Washington. I can't stop these wars because Israel's not instigating these wars. What's happening in Lebanon began after the Israeli north was emptied and bombarded for a year after October 7th. That's when Israel turned on Hezbollah, not before. And this last round was begun by Hezbollah after the killing of Khamenei. Why did Lebanon have to get dragged into the Israel Iran war? Hezbollah deemed it so. And the attacks on the Iranian mainland, the, the, the, the beginning of a direct Israeli Iranian back and forth. Iran started that. Iran carried out the first missile volley because Israel attacked Hezbollah. The only thing that Israel overstepped in attacking Hezbollah was attacking the head of the Quds force of the IRGC in the embassy in April of 2024 at the embassy in Damascus. But this was the Iranian general who literally, directly masterminded every single one of those Hezbollah rocket attacks, who literally ran it. This is an Iranian general who's on the Shura council of Hezbollah, which is attacking Israel kinetically and emptying Israeli cities for six months. By the time Israel takes him out, he's a combatant commander. And that Iran responded to with a volley of hundreds of missiles on the Israeli homeland. And then there was an Israeli response. Iran escalated. Iran drove those Hezbollah attacks. Iran gave that order. And then Iran was the first to use its mainland for an attack on Israel, not a proxy. It wasn't because Israel wanted to drag Iran in. I, by the way, did think we needed to escalate to Iran because Iran was the driver here. And just to make Lebanon suffer is ridiculous and immoral. Iran had to. The Iranian regime had to pay that price. But Iran actually escalated us all into it. And it will happen again and again and again until the idea that drives these wars, these never ending wars, the idea that Israel is destroyable, the idea that God demands Israel's destruction and that nothing can happen and everyone can burn to the ground until Israel's destruction is achieved, until that idea dies, these wars won't end. And the Israelis have to turn out to be invincible. And the only way to show that is to have it actually happen. And they will turn out to be invincible. But it'll be painful in the long term. Nobody has yet explained to me a scenario where all of that doesn't happen. I don't know how to stop it. I don't know how to change them. I don't know how to not just see this through to the bitter end, because they won't stop. And I will double down on every peace, every peace process available to me. Sure. And yes, sometimes the Israelis are absolutely in the wrong, as multiple podcast episodes of mine have argued. But if I pull out of the west bank today, we need to stop those Jewish terrorists who have such a powerful effect also on how Palestinians understand what's happening to them. And I call them terrorists and I've done it in entire episodes. But if I pull out of the west bank today, it goes to Hamas and it turns into Gaza, but 16 times larger.

B

Well, that's at least we laid out the dilemmas. I think we did a good job laying out the dilemmas. I don't think we can solve them.

A

But do you think, I'll say this, the last question. Do you think American policy conversations are up to this? I'm not hearing a serious grappling with the scale of the problem in Washington, not among our friends, not among our opponents.

B

I think there is a. On the upside, I think there is a brutal honesty which sometimes cuts against Israel, sometimes it favors it. But that, you know, I think maybe to some extent, contrary to maybe to everything I've said, there's a kind of demoralization, not demoralizes and you lose your morale, but the fact that we don't talk about Israel anymore at all in that kind of elevated moral sense that when I was reading the New Republic and Marty Peretz and Leon Weasel, tier, men I admire. And so, I mean, it becomes hard to talk about Israel in those terms after the events of recent years. And that can, that, you know, it's a, it's a ding to Israel's public image. However, it can also be, I think, the basis of, of honest, more honest policymaking that's not clouded by mystification. I so here if I took away one thing from this conversation where I'm, I'm like, okay, I really feel this from haviv is like, you know, I don't want to be anyone's like moral exemplar. I just want to. I just want to live and I want to have my country. I think every. Everyone will appreciate that. Everyone who's honest and not animated by bigotry will understand that with prejudice again there's costs associated with the loss of that moral aura but it may be in the long term a springboard for actually sharper policy making. That's I think, the best I can do.

A

Saurabh, thank you so much for joining me. I feel coming away from it like we really walk through all the problems, the Gordian knots hopefully it was helpful to somebody in some way. I. I really appreciate it. No, no solutions but sometimes understanding the questions better is enough. Thank you so much.

B

Me too. Thank you. That was wonderful.