A Middle East on the Brink

Barry Weiss
From the free press, this is honestly. I'm Barry Weiss.

Unknown
To the breaking news overseas, what's being called the deadliest attack on israeli citizens since October 7.

Barry Weiss
At least eleven children and teenagers killed.

Unknown
After a rocket strike on a soccer field in Israel.

Barry Weiss
On Saturday afternoon, a rocket fired from Hezbollah in southern Lebanon struck a soccer field in the northern israeli village of Majdul Shams.

Unknown
This video is the moment the IDF says an iranian maid has bull a rocket landing near a soccer field in a druze community in the Golan Heights.

Barry Weiss
Killing at least twelve people, slaughtering twelve children and maiming dozens more.

Unknown
It immediately spiked tensions at the northern border with Lebanon, where the IDF and Hezbollah have been trading fire daily for.

Barry Weiss
Going on ten months. Many have warned that Israel is on the brink of a major war with Hezbollah. But the truth is that Hezbollah has been fighting and winning its war against Israel since October 8. For the past ten months, Hezbollah, which is the terrorist group supported by Iran that controls southern Lebanon, has essentially redrawn the northern border of Israel. Its done that by pummeling that area daily with rockets and by displacing around 80,000 Israelis, making some 200,000 sq mi unlivable for Israelis, and doing so within the sovereign state of Israel. Israel, which is being pounded by iranian proxies from all directions, now faces one of the most perilous moments in recent history, as the prospect of an all out war with Hezbollah, which could very well spread to a much larger, more dangerous regional war, perhaps with Iran directly, seems closer than ever.

Unknown
What is clear is that there is a very real risk now of escalation. The israeli military, the israeli government, government, all vowing to respond and respond forcefully to this attack. The israeli prime minister Netanyahu has already said that Hezbollah will, quote, pay a heavy price it has not paid before. Now, what that means exactly remains unclear. But the fact that we're even posing the question of all out war shows you how serious this attack is and the gravity of Israel's looming response today.

Barry Weiss
What is Israel going to do? Will it choose to confront Hezbollah, or will Israel respond in a more limited way to avoid the regional escalation that the Americans so fear? How does us policy and our upcoming presidential election influence Israels strategic calculations? Is Kamala Harris equipped to bring calm to the region? Or are the Israelis just waiting for Trump to return? And is America's current policy, which is the containment of Iran, actually backfiring and inadvertently creating a regional crisis? Most importantly, should we be thinking about the war with Gaza and the war with Hezbollah as discrete fights, or are they all part of a broader fight or a broader war, rather, that's already underway, and that is the war between Israel and Iran? Here to answer those questions and to provide unbelievable clarity, as always, is my friend Haviv Reteg Gore. Haviv is a journalist and a writer for the Times of Israel, and I think he is one of the most important and insightful thinkers on Israel and the Middle east, currently speaking today. We'll be right back.

Unknown
Hey, guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the first podcast network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the hill, to this, to that. There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your it's America on trial with Josh Hammer.

Barry Weiss
Javi Vertegh Gore, welcome back to honestly, I'm so happy to have you here again.

Unknown
Thank you for having me, Barry.

Barry Weiss
So the last time we sat down together, I don't know about you, but I feel like this year is very strange in terms of marking time. It feels like a day has passed since October 7, but also in certain ways, many years have passed since October 7. I was looking at the calendar, and the last time you and I were together was on January 29. We were at the American Colony Hotel, and the war that Hamas started on October 7 was a few months in. We had a pretty wide ranging conversation sort of sitting in the american colony hotel in east Jerusalem. We're recording today. I believe it's like six months to the day. It's Monday, July 29. That war, the war between Hamas in Gaza and Israel is still raging. And I want to talk to you about what that war looks like. But the war that has sort of been largely ignored by the world outside of the Middle east, the war between Hezbollah and Lebanon's south, a war that has, I think, sent something like 70 or 80,000 Israelis evacuated and out of their homes for the past nine or ten months. That war took a dramatic and horrible turn this past Saturday, and I want you to tell us what happened on a soccer field this Saturday in the north of Israel.

Unknown
There was another rocket volley from Hezbollah. It was fired from southern Lebanon. It wasn't clear at first where exactly it was fired from. Hezbollah itself took credit for a rocket volley. And then when Hezbollah understood the result of that particular rocket, Voli, it tried to claim that it wasn't in fact a Hezbollah rocket, but it was an israeli interceptor rocket trying to shoot down a Hezbollah rocket and falling short. As if that makes the Hezbollah rocket launch morally less culpable. But the israeli tamil interceptor missile has a payload of something like 9 kg. It's physically unable to do the destruction that we saw on that soccer field. There was a group of kids playing soccer, a young elementary school league that had become very popular among the Druze, youngsters on the Golan Heights. And they were having a game, it was a Saturday, and they were playing, and the rocket exploded right in the middle of the group of kids. There were twelve kids killed, two dozen or so. The numbers are changing. I'm not sure how many are out of the hospital already, but are injured, some of them severely maimed. And this happened to a community that really is in between all the many different players.

Barry Weiss
Yeah, I think, haviv, that there are a lot of people who will hear the word Druze and wonder, what is that? So let's explain just for a brief moment, the village, and then who the Druze are. Are they Arab? Are they Muslim? Are they Israeli? Who are the people that were on that soccer field?

Unknown
The Druze are historically a religious offshoot from Islam. They have a religious tradition that is basically, this is for the religious studies, nerds, neoplatonist. Very similar in its conception of theology to Kabbalah in Judaism. But the religion was actually made secret very early on because of essentially oppression in muslim lands. And so they have a secretive, mystical religion, which, because it's secretive, most Druze don't know its content and don't know much about it. But it has a class of religious leaders, and that class of religious leaders keeps the religion alive. The Druze have a religious obligation to be loyal to the state that rules where they live. And it's a religious obligation that's really fascinating, because it comes two parts. One is that, again, there are minority trying to survive in illiberal and intolerant space. And so loyalty to the regime is something very useful, but also religiously, it has to do with the deep connection to the land which is independent of country, state, et cetera. So the druids in Israel serve as some of the most loyal soldiers of the IDF. They have reached the second 2nd highest rank in the IDF. Every position in the IDF, short of, I believe, chief of staff, every other position. As far as I don't know if each specific job. But major general is the second highest ranked in the IDF. And there's currently a Druze general serving in that rank and on the Golan Heights because the Golan was captured in 67 from Syria. The Druze there started out still loyal to the Assad regime in Syria today. I mean, there's still great many in Majdal Shams in the village where this rocket fell are loyal to Assad. Officially. There's a little bit of an age gap, so younger people are feeling more israeli. The syrian civil war that began in 2011 and shattered Syria and also the sense that Israel helped, at the request of israeli Druze, protect the Druze of southern Syria from various actors in the syrian civil war, especially sunni islamist forces like Jabbat al Nusra. There's a growing quiet, gentle, delicate, but very clear over time, growing desire to be israeli, meaning that the acceptance that the Golan will be israeli, not loyal to Syria, and it will eventually become syrian again, that Israeli controlled third of the Golan. And so something like, I have to recheck the numbers, but it's between three and 4000 residents of mashdal Shams have actually taken israeli citizenship, which is their choice. And about, I would say 6000 have nothing. There's a big age gap. The younger ones are more likely to. So that's Mazda shops. And there's a large number of Jews in Lebanon. Some of them are close to Hezbollah. Most of them are anti Hezbollah in some one way or another. Huge numbers of Jews in southern Syria. The Jews on the Golan, there are Jews in the Galilee and within Israel. And all of this complexity all kind of comes to a head with this tragedy.

Barry Weiss
I mean, just to give a little tiny detail, I was thinking about it. There's a restaurant on the Upper west side, israeli restaurant that I always used to go to. And it was always interesting because the woman who owns it is Drew's. But post October 7, my understanding is that the restaurant has been boycotted often because she's loyal to Israel. I think one of the interesting things about this particular village and the people that live there is it's sort of like this in between place. It's like they're arab but they're not Muslim. They live in Israel, but many of them are not technically israeli citizens. They used to be part of Syria, or at least loyal to Syria. Now, you know, post Trump's policies with the Golan, they're permanently going to be part of Israel. Mati Friedman, our friend, had a really powerful column in the free press today. And here's what he said. The stricken town of Majel Shams is a reminder that the human landscape here is more complicated than many observers grasped. If this tragedy finally triggers the Israel Hezbollah war that many have feared, the druze town will have played a role similar to that of Belgium in World War One, a marginal, neutral place whose violation ignites a broader war. And I wanted you to respond to that.

Unknown
We have seen over the last couple of days a lot of different responses from a lot of different Druze. And there are a couple of druze politicians in Lebanon who have been close and loyal to Hezbollah, allied with Hezbollah, who have just in despair tried to just call for quieter, not escalating. There have been Druze in Majdal Shams saying they don't want this to turn into a war. There are other druze voices coming out of Masjid Shams saying, we demand vengeance for the death of twelve kids by a terror group that was aiming at civilians. Its problem is that it hit the wrong civilians, not that it hit civilians. There are Druze in the israeli military right now, soldiers fighting as israeli soldiers who are demanding and raging to get revenge on Hezbollah and want that war as much as more than any Jews. All these different voices, all coming all at once. And Hezbollah is a real problem because it is a plurality of lebanese politics, represents a plurality of the lebanese population, but not a majority. And the Christians are terrified of Hezbollah. The Druze are angry at Hezbollah. The different groups, the Sunnis and all the different tribes of Lebanon all believe, are all essentially terrified that Hezbollah, in the service of this foreign empire, Iran, is bringing their country into devastating war. And what happened here, if a war begins on the Druze, then the Druze of Lebanon will not sit that war out against Hezbollah. And so Hezbollah has a tremendous problem here. The Druze themselves are divided and have many, many different opinions. But there is, among the Druze, and quite a few Druze have left the Middle east over the last few decades. But it's funny, the Druze are actually, in the structure of their identity, very similar to Jews. What is a Druze? A Druze is a tribe, a biological community. They are a tribal community defined by a religion. In other words, it's both blood and religion and ideational. And that unity and that sense of peoplehood is now swinging into action. Israel has to exact a cost from Hezbollah that is enormous because Hezbollah has destroyed northern Israel to an extent that I think the west doesn't realize. One third of the homes of the city of Metula on the northern border are gone. They're destroyed. There are probably 1011 villages along the northern border that have to be rebuilt. They're simply devastated. And now it massacred children. And we have to show, if nothing else, the Druze, that we respect them, we Jews have that responsibility, respect them as much as ourselves. And so there has to be. Now, I think that's the general feeling in Israel. It's certainly the feeling among the Druze of Israel that there has to be a serious israeli response.

Barry Weiss
I want to talk about the war in the north before we get there. I want to just spend a moment talking about the way that this horrific attack has been covered. I don't know if you saw any of the photos where the bodies were not blurred out, but someone who was there described it as children being literally torn to shreds. And I unfortunately sort of came across some of those images. And it was the worst thing you could ever imagine is what I saw in those images. And yet to read the greatest newspapers in the west, you would have no idea of the devastation that actually took place on Saturday in Majel Shams. The Washington Post headline today is Israel hits targets in Lebanon. That is the headline of the Washington Post today. I want to give you a few other examples. The BBC headline read, eleven dead in rocket attack on israeli occupied Golan. Never mind that Israel doesn't occupy the Golan Heights. Hours earlier, the BBC had headlined another article about a Gaza strike that read, israeli strike on Gaza school kills 30, implying that 30 children are dead. In other words, you know, israeli victims are just dead, but gazan victims are killed. The New York Times couldn't bring itself to say that Hezbollah fired the rocket, only that Israel blamed Hezbollah for doing so. I mean, I could go on and on and on. All of the headlines were like this. There was no sense, you know, of twelve children murdered by iranian proxy, twelve innocent children murdered on soccer field, you know, by a terrorist group. And the sort of moral, I feel like moral confusion at this point is generous. But you tell me what's going on here. When I read the BBC, the AP, NPR, the Washington Post, I have to say PBS was a notable good exception. What am I seeing here? What is going on? Is this nefariousness? Is this maliciousness? Is this, you know, there's many people in the jewish community that read headlines like this and imagine a sort of anti semitic conspiracy. How do you explain the events that happened and then the sense making that follows that is so divorced from the severity and the viciousness and the evil of the attack?

Unknown
I hate to say it barry, I think, you know, these people. I don't steel man them for me. What could it possibly be? Are they afraid, you know, if they create a sense of outrageous at the attack, that they give moral credence to an israeli response? So nothing that ever happens to anything connected to Israel can ever be allowed to be too bad or too immoral.

Barry Weiss
Look, I think a huge part of what's going on here is that you say that you don't know the people that work in these places, but, you know, the type, and the type has been steeped in a very particular view of the world, a very particular view of the west and of America and of Israel. I don't believe that most of the people writing these headlines harbor some secret hatred for Israel or the jewish people in their heart. But I do believe that they have been pedigreed in a certain kind of elementary school. I can literally name the schools, high school, boarding schools, universities. I went to some of them. In the case of the universities in which they were taught that, I'll be very crude about it, that the west is sort of a imperialist, colonialist empire of sorts, that Israel is sort of a tentacle of that octopus or an outpost of a vestigial ideology of conquest and white supremacy and colonialism that should be left in the dustbin of history, and a new world is sort of on the horizon. We're on the brink of that new world. So do I think that there are people in these places who have derangements and delusions about Israel and its power and its. And sort of believe a caricature about it? I do. But I think the vast majority of people that sort of check, you know, 20 people see headlines like this before they go out into the world, or at least they used to. A lot of these places are increasingly losing money. So let's say maybe now it's four or five, but the people saying yes, okay, we're gonna go with that headline on the front page. I don't think they're saying yes because they're thinking to themselves, how do we be as unsympathetic as possible to Israel and as sympathetic as possible to Israel's enemies? I think it's like an intrinsic ideology that they've been bathing in for their entire adult lives, really, since they've been teenagers. And this is the sort of natural expression of that worldview.

Unknown
Let me just add to that catastrophic ignorance. Just astonishing, complete, total, blind in a dark room ignorance. Because everything you're saying makes a tremendous amount of sense to me. In other words, I could imagine being that person. I could imagine growing up into that. I have assumptions. A lot of my assumptions I'm unaware of. We know these things. Some of the biggest things in our lives are assumptions we're unaware of because everyone agrees with them and so nobody ever talks about them. Yes, that makes sense to me. In other words, that is an empathetic argument, assuming they're wrong, and you and I are correct, that it should be morally vital and journalistically necessary to clarify that Hezbollah killed children. And if you're not clarifying that in any significant way about when covering this story, then you're wrong. Journalistically, professionally. And so why would you be that? Why would you do that? And I think you gave a very empathetic view on that. But to link the Golan Druze to that story, because the israeli Jews feel deep empathy to the Golan Druze who do not almost entirely do not serve in the israeli army, the Galilee Druze do. And those are different communities, but deep, deeply connected and loyal to each other, but nevertheless, different communities with different geopolitical loyalties. And to just decide that, well, the Israelis feel upset that these children died, therefore, we're not allowed to feel upset that these children died. For that to be where that assumption takes you, I don't know.

Barry Weiss
Well, you do sort of have to step back and ask yourself, if you find yourself making the case that the death of children is acceptable if those children happen to fall on one side of a border, something is really wrong with the way that you're thinking about the world.

Unknown
Absolutely. And by the way, it's not unique to their side. Right. A lot of Israelis today, they look at the death toll in Gaza and they say, Hamas did it. Now, it's not untrue that Hamas did it. Hamas is. For 17 years in Gaza, Hamas did absolutely nothing but build tunnels whose sole purpose is to force the enemy to cut through civilian populations to get to Hamas. And then they carried out October 7. In other words, October 7 was two massive, horrific atrocities on Hamas part. And this is something that I think every Israeli knows and the world somehow manages to not know, which is that Hamas first atrocity was against us, but its second atrocity and its a larger one. And it was 17 years in the making. And Hamas talks openly about having planned the destruction of Gaza, about Gazans being a nation of martyrs. And Israelis say, well, the, those dead kids in Gaza are a horrific tragedy. But Hamas forced the war and Hamas built the battlefield to be this kind of war. Now, does that mean we don't mention the children. Does that mean we don't talk about children? I certainly wouldn't think the Washington Post or the New York Times would say that. In other words, by the way, if you genuinely tell us that hiding at a strategic level behind children and civilians makes you totally invincible in war, if that's the new law of war, then that will be what every war will look like going forward. These are all things Israelis say. Media doesn't take that seriously. I think the media should take it more seriously in the west, but I don't think it should take it so seriously that it forgets the children were killed and that's what's happening on the Golan. And so I look at these people and I say, I don't think their focus on some children and lack of focus on others. I don't think it's journalism and I don't think it's professionalism. It might be what you're saying. I think that's a very sympathetic view of it because these are kids who are not loyal to Israel, not part of the israeli story. Maybe they will be in a generation. They're not today. It's a complex village. It's a complex situation. These are complex identities. The Middle east is a whole bunch of different layers of tribalism and states and identities. An Israeli Arab has at least four identities that they navigate every single day of the week. Within Israeli Jews, there are deep, deep divides of identity that are fundamental to our politics. You want to understand why Benjamin Netanyahu doesn't lose elections for third years, basically, except for one. You need to look at the Mizrachi Ashkenazi divide. Well, if you're unaware of these fundamental things, if you're unaware of who these Druze are on the Golan, you probably shouldn't be writing those headlines because you don't know what it is. You don't know. And you are telling people a story that simply isn't what's happening.

Barry Weiss
Well, haviv, let's back up for a second. For those people who really paid attention after the Hamas pogrom of October 7 and have been sort of looking from time to time at the news of the war, the way that they will understand the war is the war between Hamas and Gaza and Israel. There is another war, though, that has been taking place basically since October 7 or October 8, and that is the war at Israel's northern border. Before we talk about how that war has transformed over the past 48 hours, give us just the basics of what that has looked like because I don't think many people understand that what Hezbollah, this iranian proxy group has done, has successfully redrawn the border of Israel at its north, which is really, really astonishing. So how have they done that?

Unknown
Starting very early, I believe already on October 8, Hezbollah started firing rockets at northern Israel. It's deeply intertwined with October 7 when Hamas carried out the Nuhba force is this elite force, about 1500 strong, that actually led the October 7 attack and crossed the border. Hezbollah has an equivalent to Hamas Nukhba force called the Radwan force. And the Radwan force is its sort of crack military unit. You saw it in the syrian civil war. It fought and proved itself to be a very formidable military force, especially toward the end when it was already very experienced and capable. The Radwan force has been planning for years and actually bragged about this online, posted videos on the Internet of training for it has been planning for years to carry out on October 7 to cross the border, take israeli towns, take mass numbers of hostages. It has been publicizing it, bragging about it. There are people in Hezbollah back in October who were angry at Hamas because Hamas carried out what Hamas was capable of carrying out, which is probably 20% of what Hezbollah planned for its own version of October 7. But it ruined the surprise. And so from Hezbollah's perspective, October 7 saved Israel from a much, in Hezbollah's perspective, again in air quotes, better version of that kind of an attack that the Israelis simply weren't, as we saw in October 7, simply weren't ready for. So Hezbollah is very intertwined. It's an important thing to say. Hamas itself is sunni. It doesn't take orders from Iran, but it takes everything else. It takes training, it takes weapons, it takes money, and it takes strategy. And so the Nukba force that crossed the border on October 7 was prepared. And a lot of the theory that went into that actual attack was Iran through Hezbollah, which is almost directly answerable to the iranian regime through the Revolutionary Guard Corps. That's the baseline. On October 8, Hezbollah starts in solidarity, as it puts it, with Hamas firing rocket barrages at Israel. And those rocket barrages never stop. They have been going for almost ten months. Sometimes they escalate a little. Sometimes they tamp down. They're always calculated and modulated to be less than what the israeli response would be. That would require all out war. Hezbollah received an order from Iran way back at the beginning. Exact as much cost as you can from Israel without being destroyed. Iran does not want Hezbollah destroyed because Hezbollah is raison d'etre. Its main purpose. The reason Iran has spent billions upon billions for decades building Hezbollah into the formidable force it is today, is so that in a future Iran Israel war, Hezbollah can open another front against Israel and help save Iran. So we've seen exactly that.

Barry Weiss
That strategy has been enormously successful because Aviv, tell us about what has happened to the people that live in these towns along Israel's northern border. Where are they?

Unknown
Right. So we have a rocket siren warning system, four rockets on all of our borders, and a great many interceptor missile projects and layers. Iron Dome is the most famous one. But David Sling and the arrow systems for different kinds of missiles that come in. And when you live close enough to the border, the siren sounds the radar detects and tracks the ballistics and sounds the siren in the areas that the missile is going to hit 8 seconds before it lands. If you're too close to the border, you simply don't have time to get to your safe room in your house. Every israeli home on the north and in the south and actually anywhere my apartment is required to have a room built to the specs of a bomb proof shelter, every single israeli apartment. And you don't have time to get to that apartment if you're too close to the border. Everybody within. I forget what it is. I believe it's 5 km or something like 15 seconds. Warning to the rocket landing was ordered by the israeli army. Most of them didn't have to be ordered. They fled on their own to leave the area, something like 60 to 80,000. Several months ago, the state admitted that it has actually lost track of most of them. It doesn't actually know where most of them are. They went wherever they could at the beginning. The state took these people out of their homes, tens and tens of thousands, probably up to 100,000 at the very beginning. Today it's probably still around 80,000. And paid for them to stay in hotels. Families for months living in hotel rooms is. It doesn't sound terrible. It's terrible. Schools didn't open, communities were displaced and taken apart. And these people have not been able to go home while they have been gone. The Hezbollah rocket barrages have, as I said, destroyed sections of towns. The north is more physically devastated than the Gaza envelope communities.

Barry Weiss
I mean, to be blunt, I mean, I feel like what happened on October 7 was just an absolute catastrophe on every level. For the sense that the israeli government, that the israeli military are capable of doing the most basic thing that any government or military has to do, which is to protect its people, I guess I'm wondering, watching it, how is the israeli government, how is the israeli military allowed this to become normalized? How can you say to your population, hey, 80,000 of you are just going to leave your homes for a year, and by the way, you're just not going to be able to ever go back there because we're going to have to demolish them because that's the amount of catastrophic damage that we have allowed for and failed to deter. How is that tenable in Hebrew?

Unknown
I have expressed some feelings on that question, indelicate feelings. So I want to say that as a full disclosure, but I want to try and steel man it. What Iran actually built in Lebanon just to understand Hamas strategy was the destruction of Gaza, and for good reasons. In other words, Hamas has a thoughtful, serious strategy that when you walk through it, makes sense. They're not crazy. They are horrifically cruel, but they're not crazy. And they think their cruelty is the secret to success. And the same is true of the iranian regime. Hezbollah's strategy is the destruction of Lebanon is seen by Hezbollah as a force multiplier, as part of the strategy. In other words, if Israel goes after Hezbollah, the only way to do it is to wreak massive destruction on Lebanon, which will, of course, create massive costs for Israel. Less cost than Lebanon. But the theory that Hezbollah and its iranian masters have is that they can destroy Lebanon. That's a worthwhile cost to exact those costs on Israel. That is their power. The willingness to destroy their own societies is their one huge leverage over us. It's their great advantage in war. Witness Hamas. Hezbollah was built to hold onto a rocket arsenal of something like 150,000 rockets, every single one of them buried under a village in south Lebanon. There's these roughly 200 villages scattered throughout the mountains of south Lebanon. It's this very hilly terrain, and every rocket is under a home, under a school. There just aren't any rockets out on mountaintop, somewhere where we can target them cleanly without hitting civilian infrastructure or civilians. And those 150,000 rockets are capable of setting Tel Aviv on fire. Hezbollah was built to be what Hamas is, but ten to 15 times more dangerous. And the israeli army and the israeli government, the israeli political class, looked at the war in Gaza, looked at its complexity, at the length of time it's going to take to degrade Hamas enough for there to be any kind of long term reconstruction solution. Somebody who moves in instead of Hamas. No saudi or arab peacekeeping force is going to move into Gaza if Hamas can murder them in the streets, and they will not fight Hamas for Israel. So Israel has to degrade Hamas enough before any other option opens up. And that's long. And it takes a lot of manpower, and a lot of the israeli reserve manpower is exhausted. It's just exhausted. I have two brothers in law who were in the war. One of them was gone something like 200 days fighting in Gaza, and his first child was born while he was in Gaza, and that's the reserve army. They're exhausted. So a war in Lebanon, which will be much more difficult than Gaza, where the home front, civilians, Tel Aviv, cities of Israel, will face rocket barrages in order of magnitude, if not two orders of magnitude larger than anything Gaza can produce, is something you don't go into easily. You don't go into quickly. You don't go into without a few aces up your sleeve. You don't go into without clear backing against the larger patron of Hezbollah, who will activate every asset they have in the region, meaning Iran. In other words, you don't go into it without America. That's the view of the israeli leadership. America has had one overriding priority, and that is not to allow an escalation in the region.

Barry Weiss
Let's dig into that for just a moment. Because wars require escalation, winning requires escalation. So if the official strategy or insistence of the White House is no escalation, in other words, contain the level of fighting, how can Israel win the war?

Unknown
That's exactly right. This has been a source of profound frustration for me. What I believe is the folly on the israeli side, but also what I believe is a profound folly to the point of incompetence, strategic incompetence on the american side. Hezbollah knows English, Hezbollah knows Hebrew, so do Hamas. If America pressures Israel on hostage negotiations, that doesn't bring Hamas to the table. It takes Hamas away from the table, because they understand that if they wait and let Israel marinate in the american pressure, there's some significant chance that Israel will cave to some further demand. Every time America acts in this region to lower the level of the fire of the war, the fighting, the enemy looks at that and says, hey, the Americans are deeply allergic to escalation. You know what that means? That means that if we remain under some level, it's not easy to gauge that level, but, you know, with experience, you get to understand it. If we can remain under some level of rocket fire, of damage, the Americans will keep the Israelis back, and we can do it indefinitely. And the israeli response has been fairly difficult for Hezbollah. Hezbollah has lost something like 400 fighters, including some senior commanders, including the son of the faction, the Hezbollah parliamentary faction, head in the parliament of Lebanon. Some senior commanders have been lost, but Hezbollah doesn't care. And certainly Hezbollah's masters in Iran don't care about those losses. And Hezbollah has been able to sustain this. And Israel has not had the backing of America for the larger war that would cause the kind of damage to Hezbollah and to Iran that would make them guess again. And so the same exact thing is true of Yemen. Iran and Hezbollah and the Houthis of Yemen and Hamas believe that they have found a way to destroy us. And it is an analysis that is essentially based on an analysis of our government as risk averse. I think they're right. I think that Benjamin Netanyahu has proven himself. The israeli political right is constantly warning about the terrible danger of a left wing government. I think we have that. I don't know if a left wing government would be so bad. I'm certain that Netanyahu is the version of the left that the right is desperately to not allow into power.

Barry Weiss
It's a strange split screen on Netanyahu because I think the perception of him, certainly in America, and by the way, not just among the left but among lots of people, is that he's sort of like this warmonger. But the criticism of him in Israel is sort of like exactly the opposite. In other words, he is incapable of seeing conflicts or wars to their victorious conclusion.

Unknown
He's incapable of taking the kind of risks, the kind of decisions, and he never has been capable of doing so. He has always chosen the path of least resistance, and he's doing it now. You know, the israeli army paused for a long time in Gaza because it couldn't go into Rafa, because the Biden administration was putting pressure on Netanyahu. And then two members of Netanyahu's coalition, B'tsala, Smuther, Chanita by Bengwir the far right threatened to leave the coalition, and then the Netanyahu finally gave the order because that was a more significant pressure than the pressure against going into going to Rafa. And I don't know whether we should or shouldn't go into Rafa. That's a secondary question. The primary point that I'm making is he's just navigating political pressures that he feels and not actually strategizing and thinking seriously about the future. He does pretend to, he does give speeches as if he's doing so, but on the ground in actual action, he does nothing. Hezbollah, Iran, the Houthis, this entire vast alliance into which Hamas, the Sunni Hamas, has embedded itself, even though it is a Shia alliance, thinks that they have figured out how to destroy us. We have a risk averse government, and it is restrained by a profoundly risk averse to the point where it can be bullied. America, no matter how powerful America is, it is so scared of all possible things that aren't absolute stability and status quo that you can destroy a very great deal without ever having to fear american might. American morality, american concern.

Barry Weiss
I want to get to America a little later in this conversation, both its relationship to Israel and how that might change, and also given the fact that we are facing an unbelievable election just to stay on the north for a moment, though, on Saturday, after the attack on the soccer field, Bibi said this Israel will not overlook this murderous attack. Hezbollah will pay a heavy price, which has not paid up to now. There have been a lot of statements like this. What do you think Israel is actually going to do? What are Israel's options?

Unknown
I was glad to see today that the White House, there's been a lot of leaks. The lebanese government has said that the interlocutors between them and Israel, probably meaning the Americans, maybe the French, have said that Israel will strike. Lebanon has asked that the israeli response be contained and away from cities. Specifically, they're talking about Dahiyyah, the southern Beirut neighborhood that is Hezbollah's stronghold and headquarters. Israel struck there quite forcefully in 2006. It's a city block. It can't be struck without civilian death. It is Hezbollah's military headquarters. So there's that debate and discussion. The White House publicly said today that Israel has a right of response and a forceful response. I don't remember if they used the word forceful, but it was something said in that vein. And put it this way, everything we just said is relevant to this question because everybody is watching for the israeli response. Israel took 220 yemeni missile attacks until one actually killed somebody in Tel Aviv, broke through the allies and american, and then israeli missile defense systems and actually killed somebody in Tel Aviv. And then the israeli response was not for that one rocket that killed someone in Tel Aviv, it was for 220 attacks. And it was a response that had a devastating effect on the main oil export terminal of the houthi government. What Israel's response needs to be here, and this is something that I have heard from israeli officials. Now the question is, what is the defense Minister Yav Gallant and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who were empowered by the cabinet yesterday to make these decisions? What decision are they actually going to make? I don't know. But there is a camp within the israeli government saying, we're not responding. This response can't be just for those kids. It has to be for the entire ten months of bombardment of the emptying of our north, of the destroying of our towns that led inevitably, if it wasn't this massacre of kids, it was going to be another massacre of kids and some other spot in the north at some other time. You can't bombard the north without it. That has to be the scale of the israeli response. One thing that tells me that the israeli response is going to be significant is that the new president of Iran had a conversation with, with French President Emmanuel Macron earlier today and said to him that if the israeli response is significant, if there's a war in Lebanon, then there will be some catastrophic response against Israel. In other words, that Iran is starting to swing into action to try to defend Lebanon from what is expected to be a very significant israeli response. So that's the expectation on every side that you can look at, is that it's going to be an israeli response much more significant than anything, than a tit for tat kind of stuff that we've had until now.

Barry Weiss
How is the israeli population being asked to prepare?

Unknown
People very, very close to the border are basically gone, by the way, with the dramatic exception, of course, which is the Druze. The Druze have not left the north even when they're asked to, even when they're ordered to by the army. They stick to their villages, they stick to their lands. It's part of their religion. I respect it deeply. I wish they had because those kids wouldn't be killed. But it has big, profound reasons. That isn't blame. That isn't even a little bit blame. The only blame worthy party here is Hezbollah. But most israeli civilians are not in any areas within very short reach. But as we said, the rockets are going to reach Tel Aviv, they can reach Jerusalem. Israelis are close to their bomb shelters. My family is close to bomb shelters everywhere, schools. Israeli society isn't doing anything special simply because it's more or less permanently prepared for this kind of escalation.

Barry Weiss
After the break, I ask Khaviv, who is better for Israel and for the Middle East, Kamala Harris or Donald Trump? Stay with us. Let's imagine that a full blown war with Hezbollah, not the thing that's, I mean, I think there has been a war with Hezbollah that's been going on for ten months. But let's imagine that it really, really gets much bigger. This would have, and you'll correct me if I'm wrong, but ten times the intensity of what we've seen so far with Gaza. And that's because from everything I've read, the Hezbollah today, it's a very different Hezbollah that Israel fought back in 2006, I believe it was with the second Lebanon war. You know, its stockpile is seven, eight, nine times larger than Hamas. It has hundreds of thousands of rockets and missiles. It has attack drones. It has the capacity, as we've been talking about, to strike Tel Aviv or Haifa. There was a recent report I read that estimates that Hezbollah would likely fire 3000 rockets and missiles every day if a war began, which could absolutely overwhelm this miraculous iron dome. Israelis that I know in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv talk about sort of preparing their bomb shelters for living there for weeks with their children. You know, people are saying that we're sort of on the precipice of what could be an absolutely devastating war. I don't want to say the worst in recent middle eastern history. Who knows what that would be? But, you know, I guess looking at that picture, and you'll correct me if I've gotten some of the details wrong, but let's say it's generally right, directionally right. I look at that and I wonder, is it possible that Israel would lose that war? How can it win it?

Unknown
Hezbollah has for 20 years defined victory as still existing after the war is over. So it doesn't matter what Israel does to us. It says this publicly and openly. All we have to do is to be something Israel can't do, destroy. And then because we are willing to sacrifice everything, we are willing to see every one of our children be killed. We are willing to see every one of our homes be blown up. We are willing to, by our deeds, destroy Lebanon. We are willing to walk into death. They often talk about how they love death and we love life, and that's why they're going to win and we're going to lose. And a lot of sort of Israelis take up this rhetoric and say, you see, we're better. We love life, they love death. What they actually mean is we have faith. We believe that death is just the beginning, not the end. And they do not have faith. They're a bunch of secular, I don't know what, jewish communists or something. They have these old sort of stereotypes about us that work into this kind of rhetoric. And therefore, because they're willing to sacrifice, as long as we haven't utterly destroyed Hezbollah to its roots, they've won. That's their definition of victory for the last 1314 years, Netanyahu had a very good argument that was implicit in everything he did and I think was shared by most Israelis, which was actually, they're mostly just destroying themselves. We flourish. Since 2007, when Hamas took over Gaza, our gdp per capita has doubled. We have been astonishingly flourishing and happy. We are still in this war, one of the happiest nations in the world. High rates of social capital, all kinds of stuff like that. And so, so while they pride themselves on their willingness to destroy themselves and still be standing, we have other priorities. I think there's a big democracy dictatorship standing there. So you asked, how does Israel win or whether Israel is going to lose? By Hezbollah's definition, there's no question that Israel will not win. They'll still be a Hezbollah. Hezbollah serves a foreign empire, and that foreign empire will create a new version of it on its ashes if we do destroy it, to the last fighter, into the last soldier and operative. But by our definition, can we hurt the source enough to win another 15 years of quiet, another 15 years of flourishing and happiness? I think there is actually quite a significant victory available to us. We have to stop playing Iran's game. We have to stop playing the game in which Iran wants to destroy us by the death of a thousand cuts at the terrible sacrifice of Arabs polities. I mean, arab communities, arab societies, arab civilian populations. Iran is. This is a phrase heard very often in the Middle east and often very bitterly and often from Arabs. Iran is fighting Israel to the last arab. Iran, of course, is not arab. It's Persian. We have to take the cost. We have to fight Hezbollah. We have to destroy as much of those rocket stockpiles as possible. Just understand what you just said. What do we just lay out for people? Hezbollah can set Tel Aviv on fire. The israeli government will be desperate not to allow it to set Tel Aviv on fire. If that war comes, what is the israeli government's one option? To destroy as much of Hezbollah's rocket capability as possible. What's the only way to destroy 150,000 hidden missiles buried under 200 villages? To simply go after those villages in the hope that if you can destroy in an early sweep, half, you can't preemptively carpet bomb villages. But after 30 00, 60, 00, 90 00 rockets, you can't go after stockpiles and territories and areas and infrastructures in which, you know, 150,000 rockets are hidden. The international law says you're not allowed to do that. The israeli response to the scale of war Hezbollah is capable of bringing will be also tenfold. We in Gaza, this is something that is hard to say. I don't know if people will believe that is how we fight when we are trying to be careful, if we are up against the wall, if it is existential, if our cities are on fire, what will our response look like? It's really important for westerners to understand everything I'm saying. Everyone in the region knows we know what's going on, what's happening to us, better than outsiders looking in and thinking thoughts. Okay, this is. This surprises journalists every day. 100,000 lebanese villagers fled the 200 villages of south Lebanon and have not come back. Largely, they know what is coming. If Hezbollah does that, I think that that war, it might be unavoidable if it can be of. I don't know how we game out avoiding it. I don't know how Hezbollah comes back from the precipice. I don't know how Israel doesn't eliminate the threat as the threat becomes real and active and imminent and actually is deployed against us and is starting to literally burn our cities. But if that's it, then we will have lost. We have a victory available to us if we exact the cost, not from Lebanon, not from Hezbollah, not from Yemen or the Houthis, if we exact the cost from Iran. And that cost has to be immense, has to be focused on the regime. It has to raise the cost over the long term of their perceived cost of this very strategy. And so that's where we need to be headed. That's the tragedy of an american administration that can only see stability, that simply cannot imagine any other interest. Iran, under the COVID of America's obsession with stability, is demolishing nations and trying to destroy us. And so we could use that american help. It's a whole different. Not american boots on the ground, not american sacrifice, but logistical help, you know, missile shipments, coordination. On April 14, there was this massive missile attack by Iran on Israel in response to the killing of an iranian general managing Hezbollah's rocket war against the north. And Iran launched what I think there was 350 missiles and drones. That's the biggest missile attack in the history of missiles. And they were shot down almost in their entirety by a huge alliance of sunni countries and Israel against Iran. The airspace of Saudi Arabia and other sunni countries was open to Israel. Jordan actually shot down iranian drones. All of that was made possible by America. CENtCoM was the platform on which the israeli sunni alliance flew for the very first time against this iranian aggression. So we need that american help, and.

Barry Weiss
I think we also need, to be honest, that that unprecedented moment was brought to you by the Abraham accords. That would not have happened had it not been for the Abraham accords.

Unknown
The Abraham Accords were the first serious expression of. It created close ties above the table. They had been there below where countries could act on the world stage, because several countries came to the Abraham accords. They had. They provided political cover for each other, and they needed that political cover. On April 14, it was the Abraham. The Abraham Accords wasn't the actual alliance. The alliance had pre existed the Abraham Accords, but it was the first time that they could do it publicly. You know, for arab sunni countries to publicly shoot down iranian drones headed for Israel, to publicly open their airspace to Israel, multiple countries, not one was a public defense allying with protection of Israel. That could not have been without that major step of the Abraham accords. My point isn't to denigrate the Abraham accords. It's to say the Abraham Accords represent something even deeper than just that specific treaty. It represents a very deep and large alliance against this mass iranian aggression. The Middle east is dividing into two.

Barry Weiss
Great alliances, the Sunnis in Israel and Iran in its proxies.

Unknown
Right. Not to beat the horse again, but just to say America's need not to be too involved with anything while also reigning in its own allies so that nothing escalates to the point where it feels it might have to get involved in anything is actually hampering the capacity of our alliance to actually deal the kind of damage to their alliance that will actually end some of these wars. And so these wars are only escalating because we're the side that's saying publicly we can't escalate. And that's what Lebanon represents, and it's a tragedy. And there's going to be terrible bloodshed because nobody's willing to actually threaten the head of the snake, so to speak.

Barry Weiss
I was just going to ask you about the so called head of the snake. You hear a lot of people saying Israel has no other option. Ultimately, it has to go and cut the head of the snake off, by which they mean going directly after Iran. I hear that. I understand that. I don't know what that actually means. Haviv, what does it practically mean to go after Iran?

Unknown
Exact massive costs.

Barry Weiss
Let's imagine a us administration that's behind Israel, Israel's desire to defend itself, Israel's desire to wipe out sort of the force that's behind Hamas and Hezbollah. Let's put America off the table for a second and american restraint off the table. What would that cost look like the.

Unknown
Iranian economy is very centralized. It's very state controlled. Large parts of the most lucrative industries are actually, in one way or another, controlled by the supreme leader, by the Revolutionary Guard corps. If you do terrible damage to the hydrocarbon infrastructure, we'll call it to the oil, to the gas infrastructure that it uses to ship its gas to Russia, to China. A, you hurt some of America's worst adversaries. B, you terribly and in targeted ways hurt the regime without hurting the population. The basic problem we have in actually hurting the iranian regime, or I'll put it another way, its stability is based on the fact that even though probably 80% of the iranian population hates it deeply, I mean, Iranians hate the regime so much that they are secularizing. That's why all the great iranian anti regime protests of late have been about women's headwear. They are so disgusted with the way the regime has taken over religious life and claims religious mantle for its validation that secularization becomes the great act of separation from that regime and rebuke of it. That's about 80% of the population. The problem is that 20% of the iranian population support the regime to the point where they willing to fight and die for it. And so every time you have a protest, you see these Basij militias come into the streets and beat people up and disappear people and kill people. The iranian regime is hated but stable. But it's also separate from the rest of the iranian state in the sense that you have a supreme leader who's not the elected president. Their council decides who's allowed to run for president. It's still a dictatorship, but nevertheless it is a separate entity. You have an army, the Revolutionary Guard corps. That is a separate ideological army under the supreme leader, separate from the Iranian State army controlled by the iranian government. And that apparatus, that sort of revolutionary superstructure over the state, laid on top of the state by the revolution back in 79, is eminently vulnerable to massive attack without hurting the rest of Iran. So you hurt those parts of the economy. You can destroy oil refineries. Why can't you destroy oil refineries? If they have emptied Israel's north by order from Iran, why can't we destroy oil refineries? I would like to hear an international lawyer explain to me why that's immoral or a general explain to me why that's strategically not a good idea. What's my alternative? To continue to fight. I follow social media in areas where my enemies live, where my enemies are in control. If you follow lebanese social media over the last ten months, your heart will break because they are terrified of the war. They know and believe and say Hezbollah is bringing upon them on the order of a foreign empire. The very idea that Israel and Iran should fight on the backs of the Lebanese should horrify the world more than anything that could be done to the iranian regime. The very idea that Yemenis should suffer because of the iranian order, to the Houthis to shoot at us, Iran is fighting to the last Arab, as the Arab saying now goes, and we should take the fight to Iran. Everything we have said today about what the war with Hezbollah will look like is a worst case scenario. Now, that worst case scenario might be true, and it's pretty awful, but there is a very good chance, and I tend to think that there are good reasons to think it is, what will actually happen if a war comes, that Hezbollah is a lot less competent than it pretends it has brilliantly planned out. The first three moves of the war. The very first two days or six days, there's going to be strategic surprises, not just on their side, also on ours. We're not stupid, and there might be a strategic surprise they pull out of their sleeve a month. But fundamentally, they're not actually competent. They're not actually a kind of government that feels that an army that serves, a government that serves at the pleasure of the people and that has to actually show competence in the battlefield. They're an ideological group willing to destroy their own societies because they understood that that is their one weakness. And if they can overcome that, they become invincible. Well, that doesn't make you invincible. That makes you incompetent. They have an economy that can't sustain a war much less than we can. This is true of Lebanon and Hezbollah. It's even true of Iran. And so we have the capacity to cause tremendous damage to the other side, to Hezbollah, to the iranian regime. We can do it in ways that cause a minimum, not none, in fact, quite a bit, but nevertheless, a minimum possible damage to the civilian populations. And the higher we go up that chain, the more it's directed at Iran itself, the less damage will be caused to the civilian populations around us that Iran is using to fight this war against us.

Barry Weiss
One of the things that we sort of keep circling back to in this conversation is the role of America, the role of the current White House as Israel's most important ally. And we have a strange reality currently at the moment, which Mati Friedman touched on in his piece. Let me read you a few lines. With the Middle east facing one of the most perilous moments in its recent history, he wrote, and the possibility of an even bigger war involving the great power is no longer unimaginable. It doesn't help that one of the key parties, Lebanon, hasn't had a functional president or parliament for years. Israel, he writes, is led by the least competent government in its history. And as for the US, and here's the crucial part, it's not just that no one knows who will be running the us administration in a few months. It's that no one really knows who's running it now. How is Israel looking at the present state of american politics? Who does it want to win the election? If there's a clear consensus, and there's a sense, I think, to be crude about it, that we got to wait till Trump's back in office, it looks like Trump's going to win, especially after this attempted assassination, especially when Joe Biden was the candidate. We'll just wait till Trump's president again and then we'll have a stronger hand. Well, all of that has changed in the past two weeks. Now Kamala is the anointed one. She's pulling neck and neck with Trump, maybe even slightly ahead of him at the moment. How does Bibi Netanyahu, and really, if you can give us a sense of Israelis more generally, see the pretty insane political situation here in America? And who do they favor come November?

Unknown
Okay. Without trending just in a few seconds. Seconds. So, you know, baseline something to say. Israelis don't know much or understand american politics in the way Americans know and understand american politics. So, you know, they can love Biden and also love Trump and distrust Biden and dislike Trump all at once and for reasons that have nothing to do with what, you know, we don't understand the american culture war on abortion or healthcare or gender or any of these. These are not things happening in our society. We have our other culture wars. We know how to tear each other apart just as much as you do, but on completely different things. And so just, it's important to say, you know, if Israelis have a preference, that is not instructions to Americans, including Americans who love Israel, of what to do. It is. It is a statement that we are a different society, exotic and strange, and in a different language with different priorities. So that's a BDE. The problem isn't a specific president and the problem isn't a specific policy. The problem is almost the american inability to have policy. One of the most important things to understand about how Middle Easterners see America as a force on the world stage is that we see a country that has become utterly schizophrenic on the world stage. In other words, I remember feeling this feeling back when Bush took over from Clinton, and America's foreign policy in the Middle east suddenly pivoted by, like, you know, 132. I don't know if it's 180. So 132 degrees. And then after Bush came Obama and the Obama administration's policy, before it had articulated any specific goals. What was explained to israeli officials who communicated with the early Obama administration was that it was not Bush. What was our policy, not Bush. And then when. When Trump came in and you talked to the Trump administration, the most important thing they needed to explain to us about what their policy was was that they were not Obama. And then, you know, and Biden at the beginning of his term is against the Abraham accords because it's Trump. Trump took credit for it. It's Trump's thing, so we're not for it. So he wouldn't touch it for two years. And then as his term is starting to enter the phase where you start to think about reelection, then he noticed he didn't have much to show for the Middle east, and so he took it up again. But he'd wasted two years of sitting around, not pushing the ball forward. The israeli experience and the saudi experience and frankly, the iranian experience of America, the entire middle eastern experience of american foreign policy, is that your foreign policy is. It doesn't exist. You don't have a foreign policy. All you have are domestic politics masquerading as foreign policy. Foreign policy exists only inasmuch as you can fight about it in your culture war. Anyone in the sense making elites in Washington have not been able to produce any clear articulation of what's happening in the Middle east, where the Middle east is going, where you want it to go, how the different alliances shift and move and turn. And when you ask Americans, what was the syrian civil war all about? When you ask Americans about the arab spring, how'd that go? Where are the Islamists going? Why does Turkey support al Qaeda in the syrian civil war? What is NATO ally Turkey mean when it says we're going to invade Israel, which Erdogan said yesterday, I don't even know if that was reported in the american press. There is no sense of any kind of serious expertise. There's only culture war. And so if Kamala Harris wins, does that mean that the democratic culture war against the Republicans now has to assert itself and she has to spend two years proving she's not Trump? Does that. And if Trump wins, does that mean that if Joe Biden did something that maybe is good or maybe is bad, whatever, it's going to be thrown overboard because Biden did it. We are a little bit lost at sea. What the Americans need is to stop. I'm just going to say it. Whatever. I don't mean this. You know, this. I mean, take it a little bit. Say it with a grain of salt. Stop moralizing your way through every foreign policy moment as if the only question that matters is how you feel about it morally and start seriously looking at a world with vast numbers of complex actors, layered interests, sophisticated understandings of where they're at. The Israelis in Gaza have good arguments. If you're horrified at them, that doesn't mean they don't have good arguments. That doesn't mean they're stupid. Hamas in Gaza are not extremists. That's not a word. That's not a thing. I've never talked to someone who said, oh, I'm an extremist. They have a story and a history and a vision of redemption that drives their actions. And if you don't understand it, you will behave toward them stupidly and they will run circles around you, which they have at every turn. And Hezbollah in Lebanon and Egypt. Egypt is now a collapsing, failed state for deep, profound social reasons. Social trends that are underway in Egypt, you're spending 1.3 billion, I think, in foreign aid in Egypt every year, and you have no idea what's happening there and no debate about what's happening, happening there. And so there are, you know, huge interests for America in the Middle East. China is moving into the Middle east in a big way. It has a base in Djibouti. It has an alliance now with Iran. And America is just playing culture wars.

Barry Weiss
I don't disagree with any of that. I think we can also just be a little bit, maybe more blunt, which is, you know, Bibi Netanyahu just came to Congress last week. Half of congressional Democrats boycotted this piece of Rashida Tlaib attended with a sign she was holding up that said war criminal Nancy Pelosi posted on X that his speech was the worst presentation of a foreign dignitary to ever address Congress. I mean, I don't know if you saw the speech, whatever you think of Bebe, it was, it was a good speech. You know, the idea that this was the worst presentation of a foreign dignitary to ever address Congress, and Kamala Harris, the presumptive democratic nominee, didn't show up up. So a lot of people are looking at that and just saying, let's be honest with ourselves here. Even if we like the Democrats more than the Republicans on any number of other issues, on this particular issue, the Democrats seem to have fallen or are at least sort of allowing the tail to wag the dog. They've given into this sort of anti zionist, far left extremist wing of the party there who's calling the shots. Do you agree with that?

Unknown
It's putting me on the spot. And it's putting me on the spot because, not because I mind expressing a strong opinion, but because I genuinely feel like there's so much at stake for so many different stakeholders. I have tremendous privilege. I have universal healthcare and legal abortions. And Israelis live an average of four years longer than Americans. And I am a country that on the very things tearing America apart in its culture, war has basically figured it out. And so Americans have a huge stake. The particular things I just said lean to the democratic side. They're also very conservative things in israeli society in terms of family size and policies that are very conservative and very community oriented. That would be, I think, very republican. And school choice, for example, is something a group of israeli parents can found a school with their religious outlook. I come from a country where a lot of these things are sorted out that, for Americans, really fundamentally affect their lives. So if I come to Americans and I say vote Democrat because I think they'll be good for Israel, or vote Republican because I think they'll be good for Israel, I'm coming from, I really am genuinely conscious of tremendous privilege in things that Americans prioritize other things. In other words, there's so much at stake for Americans that I. Okay, all of that was to say, I'm sorry. I mean it very truly. I really feel very uncomfortable telling Americans who I think would be better for Israel. That's one thing. The second thing is neither side is good for Israel entirely. Even if the Democrats, Kamala continues the Biden policies and basically we continue to get the missile shipments and we can continue fighting. There's Iran, and there's the escalation problem that Democrats are allergic to. That means escalation is guaranteed just on the enemy's terms, not on our terms. And that, to me, is not devastating. It's catastrophic. Democrats are insisting we lose the war. I'm not sure on the republican side, I see the kind of careful competence in the Trump administration. The Abraham Accords is such a success and best case scenario, Trump pushed it along seriously, or Jared Kushner certainly did worst case scenario, he didn't screw it up, which is a big deal. Back in the sadat begin peace of 1979, Jimmy Carter almost screwed it up by insisting that the israeli egyptian peace be turned into a pan regional peace, or it's not worth doing. And Sadat and begin had to talk him down off of that tree because he was living in this moral, american moral fantasy, which would have just collapsed the whole thing. So not screwing it up is a huge success, but it came from the Saudis, it came from the Israelis. And at the same time, there's a lot of. I don't know what Trump's policy is going to be. He's a little bit unpredictable. All of those caveats aside, my basic problem is, I'm sorry you have to say it's an election, Barry. It's not about Israel and it's not about Gaza. You want to end Gaza, you want to prevent Lebanon, you want to clean Yemen and bring the forces to the table in Yemen in a way that will end that terrible civil war that has starved 85,000 children to death and basically still continues and has crashed that economy and devastated that country more than any enemy has ever devastated that country. You want to fix the Middle east? It's about Iran, and it's only about Iran, and it will only ever be about Iran. And until you solve Iran, nations will continue to be demolished. And America has to do that. And everything I have seen from Democrats says they cannot, will not, don't know how, don't know how to talk to themselves, don't have a vocabulary of foreign policy that isn't a culture war vocabulary that allows them to seriously take up that challenge. I wish I could say full throatedly that the Republicans do. Some Republicans do. Will the Republicans in power in a new Trump administration know how to do any of that? I have no idea. But if your only issue is Iran, the Democrats have failed. And there are these quotes going around about Obama from back in 2015. Lifting sanctions will not cause Iran to become a dominant power in the region. If there's any power in the region at all that is dominant in any way today, it's Iran. So Obama's own predictions about his own policies have proven completely incorrect. And so if the Nevermind Israeli lives, literally everybody's lives in the Middle east, depend on ending the iranian regime's imperialist redemptionist crusade that has so far conquered and destroyed, basically demolished, or is in some state of demolishing four different arab countries and wants to destroy my country and says so publicly and will not stop until somebody stops it. And if America doesn't have a policy on that and democrats do not, then America is part of the problem.

Barry Weiss
Aviv Gore, as always, it's such a pleasure and so enlightening to talk to you. Thank you so much for coming back on the show.

Unknown
Thanks, Barry.

Barry Weiss
Thanks for listening. If you like this conversation, share it with your friends and family and use it to have a conversation of your own. Last but not least, if you want to support honestly and all of the work we do here at the free press, there's one way to do it. It's by going to our website@thefp.com, and becoming a subscriber today. We'll see you next time.

A Middle East on the Brink

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