Ask Haviv Anything - 122: When will the war with Iran end?

Episode Date: June 8, 2026

To support our work, please consider joining our Patreon community (https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything), Substack (https://havivgur.substack.com/), or Buy Me a Coffee (https://buymeacoffee.com/havivrettiggur).And be sure to check us out on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/haviv.rettig.gur/) and TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@haviv.rettig.gur).--Welcome to our new short-form episodes interspersed with the regular interviews and lectures that dive into an often-asked question about Israel, Jews and the Middle East.Our current episode tackles the latest flare up between Israel and Iran. We ask the obvious question: will this war ever be over?If you appreciate what we do here, please consider joining our Patreon community at https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything or our Substack at https://havivgur.substack.com/. You can also Buy Me a Coffee at https://buymeacoffee.com/havivrettiggur. It helps us keep the lights on. Patreon and Substack are also the platforms where you can ask the questions that guide the topics we cover on the podcast, join our great discussions where listeners share news and valuable resources, and take part in our monthly livestreams where Haviv answers your questions live.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail]⁠.Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Hi, everybody. We're in the middle of an exchange of fire between Israel and Iran. We're recording just a few hours after that happened. President Trump is pushing on the Israelis to tamp down, on the Iranians to tamp down. It's probably disrupting the negotiations between the U.S. and Iran. And a lot of people have been asking what it all means. And it's very hard to tell what Trump wants and what Trump thinks is happening and what he plans. And the reason it's hard to tell is that he has.

done a great many feints. He's pretended to want to negotiate a peace and then actually started the airstrikes. When he's declaring most loudly that the airstrikes will escalate, that's often when we suddenly see the airstrikes stopping and negotiations beginning. Trump is a great believer in saying the thing that will help serve his interests rather than telling the truth. Now, this is a great thing for a leader facing an enemy. You don't want the enemy to know exactly what you're thinking, when you'll cave, when you'll demand, when you're willing to, you know, see things through to the end. It's a basic question of negotiations and war is a kind of politics, a kind of negotiations. And in that sense, you know, I don't mind that it's hard to tell

what Trump is doing. That's probably a very useful thing for America writ large that its administration is a little bit unpredictable, not clear always where its lines are. But in this particular case, Trump appears that his politics really, his political position, the Republican Party generally, appear to really want the war to end. And if that's true, then maybe the negotiations with Iran are exactly what they look like. There's no new round of airstrikes coming. Now, I could say that in two hours later, there's a new round of airstrikes coming. But we've seen a few leaks, for example, from the administration to the New York Times. We've seen that J.D. Vance and his people in the administration reportedly, allegedly, apparently, this is not something I know from the

inside, don't like the war. Look for ways to publicly distance themselves from the war. Look for ways to dump what they perceive or what that part of the Republican Party perceives as a failure of the war onto Israel. Look to blame Israel for tricking the U.S. into entering the war. We've seen New York Times headlines about Israeli. Espionage on America alleged, according to a report from the Pentagon that the New York Times apparently itself hadn't seen, but this is something leaked from the unnamed administration officials to suggest that the Israelis are not actually allies of America

close to America, friends with America. It looks like enough people around Trump think that the war wasn't wise, isn't going well, and won't end well for Republicans politically, that he might actually be. These are signals that suggest intent

and suggest a perception of the war that's not positive. And therefore, he's probably trying to get out of it. He said to Israel, don't bomb Dahl, Dahl, you know, escalates. Chesbala escalated Netanyahu bomb Dachia. Then Iran launched a missile strike son, Israel trying to create that new status quo. And Israel's response was to bomb Iran. And that was an Israeli attempt to say, nope, that's not the status quo. Cazzo is over here. You know, you strike us. You will be hit on Iranian soil and it'll be a petrochemical plant. And so all of this maneuvering,

Trump is now angry and telling both sides to stop. All of that is to say, it looks like Trump really does want to tamp things down. Now, it's very useful for Trump politically for this to be Israel's fault. And so it's not at all impossible to imagine that these two very wily politicians, Netanyahu and Trump, are creating manufacturing crises between them as a gift to each other. A crisis with Trump, a fallout with Trump, hurts Nizzerna going into an election that Netanyahu is not winning in the polls at the moment. But it helps Trump to have that distance appear

when he needs it to appear. And so it's possible this is a gift to Netanyahu in the exchange, because Trump can do real damage if he chooses to, to stop the Israelis from air strikes on Iran. It's possible that Trump is saying to Netanyo, I'm going to yell at you publicly, do what you need to do. Don't do too much. Don't actually drag me in again.

But the price you're going to pay is that you and I will look like a rupture. Because I need that. And then Tanya said, sure, that's entirely possible. That's what I think is happening. I can't prove it at all. So I'm just saying it could also just be exactly what it looks like. But that's what I suspect is happening because Trump, we've seen in the past, has threatened real threats that really brought the Israelis to heal. And he's not doing that now. The more important thing to know is that whatever Trump's politics are, you know, political needs are, they probably end in the midterms. If the House switches to Democrats, which, which, appears likely. He'll have budget problems with, you know, maintaining another war in Iran, etc. But that's not immediate. You know, the Iranians will provide the excuse. America and Iran have exchanged fire constantly over the course of the negotiations for the ceasefire because Iran keeps testing its limits in the strait of her moves. And the Israelis of Chizbollah exchanged fire constantly in the ceasefire in Lebanon because Iran told Chazbelat to. And so these are

ceasefires where they're still shooting in every front. But the shooting is limited. It's shooting up to an inappropriate amount, so to speak, which is how the sides think about it. It sounds odd to say that, but that's actually how all the different sides in the Middle East think about it. I don't know if Trump is genuinely angry at Netanyahu or wants needs to look like he's angry at Netanyahu. I don't know if the negotiations are going to fail. The Iranians appear to believe they have Trump over a barrel. That could mean that they have Trump over a barrel. It could also mean that because there are Mukawama ideologues, they can only ever behave as if they have Trump over a barrel. They can't actually negotiate intelligently and pull back. We know that the people in

charge of Iran at the moment are serious extremists in the context of the Iranian regime. For Israel, that's a good thing. I know that sounds odd. Again, Israel has to be able to strike for 20 years, a regime actively working to eliminate it, that has never not been actively working to eliminate it. And so for Israel, if the regime is led by Zarif or all these, you know, very moderate names that people became familiar with because diplomats fell in love with them, it's still going to be working to destroy Israel, but it'll be harder to make that case because these people will be saying the right things. The propagandistic capacity, of a dictatorship is much greater than the propaganda capacity of a democracy, always, because, you know, it doesn't matter what Trump wants. Half the White House leaks the other thing. There's factions within any government. All of that is to say, the fact that Iran talks a good game doesn't mean it isn't internally deeply divided, totally extremist, and out to eliminate Israel. And so the Israelis need the Iranians to look like what they are. And the people trying to avoid the fact that Iran really will drive forever.

wars in the Middle East until this regime falls, wanted to look like what it pretends to be under people like Zarif. So that's basically where things stand right now. The negotiations are probably going to fail. And if they're not going to fail, then it'll probably be a bad deal for America because that's the only thing the Iranians can sign on to. In some ways, the details are very important for what's in the deal. Getting that highly rich uranium out would be astonishingly important.

I mean, amazingly good thing for the world. But in other ways, it's, you know, there are all these, claims by intelligence services and governments and Trump himself that is buried so deep they can't get it out. That's obviously always ever going to be a question of time. But in other ways, it doesn't matter so much. Their capacity to enrich uranium has been depleted so greatly just because the centrifuges, at any scale, the centrifuges are destroyed and the capacity to build centrifuges. A lot of it has been destroyed, and some of the industrial base required to build those centrifuges, steel mills and whatnot are destroyed, and the Israelis are willing to destroy more going forward.

So we have to assume the Iranians are hiding installations. They've been hiding installations the whole time. Almost every major installation that the world knows about today, the Iranians were hiding until some intelligence agency off in the Mossad, but not only, discovers it. And at the end of the day, what's in the deal won't matter because the Iranians won't keep it. And what threats hover over the deal? Now, the Iranians agree to something. And if they break the agreement, what's the threat, right?

All options are on the table, Obama famously said, and nobody believed him. not the Israelis, not the Iranians, not anybody in Obama's own circle, that the Obama administration was going to bomb Iran if it violated some deal. So they'll eventually violate it. There's nothing to stop them. And then the capacity has to be reduced. The Israelis don't really care what's in the deal. They care what America will be paying for the deal.

How much money will be released for the IRGC to go back on the warpath. The Israelis are big fans of as many restrictions as humanly possible, but it doesn't ultimately matter. It's about denying them capabilities. They will never not cheat. They will never not lie. They will never not try to build nukes. They will never change from being a Mukawama ideology.

They will never pivot away from forever war and regional aggression and a takeover and proxies and missiles to actually building out the Iranian economy. Iran today could be as wealthy as Saudi Arabia and as clever technologically and innovative technologically as Israel. Nothing prevents that except this regime. And this regime will never build that. I think that the important thing is to take a step back. Don't watch the details. Many of Iran's nuclear capability is missile capabilities have been set back dramatically. President Trump, at the very least, has bought a great deal of time for a future administration on questions like its nuclear program. But when the goal, imagined goal is regime change. People who follow our podcast know that that was not going to be an easy and obvious goal. They don't fall because of bombs. You can't bomb this regime out of existence. That's something we talked about it greatly. length, days before the February war even began. But if you do set that standard and don't meet it, then even if you've accomplished a tremendous amount, it looks like failure. There is a sense, because of high gas prices and the looming midterms and all of that, in the United States,

that this was a terrible failure. And that's a completely reasonable interpretation. Whether you think it's right or wrong, it's reasonable. But it depends on a sense of the war as a specific moment as a war, as a momentary thing, it lasted a few weeks, and then it's over, and then you walk away having pocketed your achievement, the thing you wanted to get done, your goal, or you walk away without having pocketed it. And that is a perfectly reasonable American perspective. It was walking into the Middle East, accomplishing something that's in America's interest, and walking out. It has nothing to do with the Israeli perspective. It's completely different from the Israeli perspective. And the reason it's completely different is very simple. Israel is existentially threatened

by Iran. Iran has bent its entire foreign policy to seek the demolition of the Jewish state. And this doesn't look to the Israelis like a war. If this escalates into weeks of fighting, it still won't be a war. It'll be a battle in a much larger, longer ideological contest and standoff that will escalate many more times before it's over. We're not watching right now a war. We're watching the latest battle or skirmish in a 20-year war that has already lasted much longer than most people realize. I want to lay out what this looks like to Israelis. If all you follow is American news, American interpretation of things, British news, the British analysis of things, then everything looks very small, memories are very short, and the ideological

substrates and the long-term visions on the Iranian side, on the Israeli side, Chisbalah, it disappear. They're never part of the discussion in the West, and these are the deepest drivers for all sides. And so I want to get into those so that this makes sense. Now, we're not going to get into deep theology. This is quick, and we're going to try and just explain why people behave the way they behave right now very, very briefly. For those interested in the deeper theological genealogy of this Iranian regime, why it behaves the way it behaves, why it destroys the way it destroys, why it's so oppressive to its own people and so violent and aggressive across the Middle East and throughout the world, why it thinks it is a revolution against the West.

Go to episode 93, that's a two-hour dive into all kinds of different thinkers. Obviously, I don't cover the entire issue in two hours. Just a kind of, as we say in Hebrew, a taste on the edge of the fork of how deep and serious and thoughtful that regime really is and why we stand facing profound thought and political ideas that will continue to drive more war. So what do the Israelis see? For two decades, Iran has waged a deliberate multi-front campaign against Israel. It's not a series of disconnected crises, the 2006 war in Lebanon, the, you know, different kinds of the June war last year. It's one long confrontation. It's been fought through proxies, through nuclear infrastructure, missiles and

drones, technological development. And now it is shifting to periodic direct exchanges because of an escalation that Israel sought. And Israel sought that escalation because they wanted to disrupt what Iran's desired way of handling this decades-long war was, which was the slow building up of infrastructure and the slow worsening of Israeli situation and the slow demolition of Israel without ever escalating fast enough for Israeli firepower to come into play. Well, if that was the schedule and the strategy on the other side, the Israeli side figured maybe our firepower is our best tactic, our best way of actually disrupting.

We need to exact massive costs from Iran for a strategy built on proxies, built on dealing us costs, without Iran itself suffering costs. This is a long confrontation. If we walk away from this February war, having perceived ourselves to have lost it, that doesn't mean very much, because everyone knows in Iran and Israel, in Lebanon,

that there'll be another one. Remember the Nasser years in Egypt when Gamal Abdel Nasser was president of Egypt? Between 1956 and 1973, Israel and Egypt, and sometimes different Arab states that joined Egypt in the war, fought four major rounds,

four major wars, the Suez War, the Qadesh operation, as it's called in Hebrew, the Six-Day War in 67, the War of Attrition from 69 to 71, and the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Each one was called the war. Each one had a beginning and an end. Each one is taught even today in universities as a single contained entity, a single contained moment, exchange of fire, a single contained development. But they were not separate wars. They were battles in a single protracted, ideological. struggle, a strategic struggle.

Nasser's Egypt wanted to erase Israel, and he wanted to do that as part of a larger Arab project, a larger project of, as he saw it, unifying the Arab world, an Arab nationalist revival. The Arab world was backward. The Arab world was poor. The Arab world was struggling to come out of the imperial period, of the colonial period,

and an Arab victory over the Jews, over this colonialist entity, this colonialist upstart in their midst as the Arab side, as Nasr talked about it, would create a revival and would form a kind of catalyst for an anti-Western Arab revolution that would bring the Arabs back onto the world stage, powerful and dignified.

And for the Israelis, survival, therefore, didn't mean winning one war and then going off and doing other things. Survival meant winning round after round after round, year after year after year. People talk now about the triumphalism of the Israelis after 67, the tremendous victory, tripling or even more the size of the country,

of the territory under the country's control in six days. But to be Israeli at that moment, that sense of relief was enormous, but it was relief. It wasn't triumphalism. They were digging mass graves before the war began. They thought they could lose. 13,000 graves were dug in the biggest park in Tel Aviv in Yarkon Park,

literally days before the war. That's the scale of the harm they thought would be dealt to Israel if the war didn't go well. It went perfectly. But they didn't know that it would go perfectly. And so there was this palpable relief. And then just two years later, soldiers are dying every week on the Egyptian front

in the attrition war. And then two years after that or four years after that, the 73 war, which the Arabs prove that even, even though we had attained massive strategic surprise and had massive superiority in certain weapon systems and capabilities, they could surprise us and they could defeat us in the short term, in particular battles.

What happened in the Sinai, the Egyptians were enormously successful in the crossing of the canal. The Syrians totally surprised and in some parts of the Golan Heights wiped out the Israeli forces there. And so the danger was tremendous. And that's why in 73 the Israelis made a decision. They had to start dealing far more damage to the Arab side with each war. And so in 73, if you follow UN resolutions, there's good reason for the Israelis to not trust the UN like the UN or believe anything

the UN has ever said, partly because, as Abba Ibn once said, the UN is an umbrella that folds in the rain. It doesn't work when it starts raining. In other words, UN peacekeepers on your border will leave if things look like they're going to be a war, right? They don't actually protect you. They sit and watch and then form human shields for the likes of Hezbollah. Hezbollah dug a lot of infrastructure under UNFEL forces. But another reason the Israelis don't like the UN is a sense of real betrayal.

When the Arab world is invading Israel, there are no UN resolutions in those first couple of days of the 73 war. UN Security Council resolutions start to really ramp up, and I think there'll be four of them, in the last two weeks. Because in the last two weeks of that three-week war, the Israelis are bombing the Syrian industrial base, generations backward. They're exacting massive punishment. So that the next war, they're explaining to the Syrians, they're explaining to the Egyptians, will really cost you. Because this war was a close thing. after 20 years of battle after battle after battle in this long war. It was big, it was traumatic, and surviving required winning enough rounds

and absorbing enough of the enemy's punishment and eventually forcing a change in the enemy's calculation. The same logic applies today. The Islamic Republic of Iran, its founding ideology, its Mukawama doctrine, resistance doctrine, episode 93, treats Israel's elimination, or at least its permanent reduction to a besieged barely sovereign or not at all sovereign entity, the disarming of the Jews, the Islamic rule over Jews, which is really the deepest demand. It treats Israel's elimination as a core strategic goal of the regime, as a defining goal, an identity of the regime. The nuclear program, the proxy armies in Lebanon, in Syria, in Iraq, in Yemen, even in Gaza. It's complicated in Gaza.

Hamas is Sunni. And by the way, Hamas cut all ties with Iran when Hezbollah were massacring Sunnis in the Syrian Civil War. There's a gap there. It's not a simple proxy. It doesn't take direct orders and does what Iran says. The way Hezbollah does, Hezbollah will send its men to die and will drag Lebanon into endless war,

literally at Iran's order. Hamas won't. But functionally, the capabilities of Hamas were built up by Iran, the funding for those capabilities, the planning. A great deal of that is Iran. So functionally, even Hamas is a kind of proxy, certainly when it comes to facing Israel together, as well as the Houthis, as well as all the different militias in Iraq and Syria. The direct missile barrages from 2024 until now, these are all instruments of a single long-term objective,

and that objective is the destruction of Israel. We've talked about this a great deal. The basic core idea is the Jews of Israel are the weakest thing that ever pushed Islam back. And this ideology of Islamic restoration and revival that Iran's regime was born to serve sees the defeat of Israel as the first step, the necessary first step, for Islam's return into history as a powerful conquering force. So the June war last year and the February war of this year weren't sudden eruptions. They weren't new wars.

They weren't, oh my God, there's a war in the Middle East. They were tactical escalations. They were battles. They were engagements in a conflict that has been running since the early 2000s. In a conflict whose missile arsenals, whose air forces were built out and prepared for 20 years. And Israel, right about then, began to treat that Iranian threat as existential, not just, you know, terroristic. Why do I think Israel is structurally positioned to win? It can lose battles, it can walk away from this battle, not having won any of its objectives.

Israel is nevertheless structurally much, much more likely to win than Iran. Defeat for Israel means national destruction. It's that simple. If the Iranians are capable of imposing on Israel death and destruction and annihilation, they will. They won't stop before that. Iran's leaders, Iran's proxies, they've been explicit about this for decades. The Jewish state is illegitimate. It must be removed from the map.

And by the way, not illegitimate for anti-colonial Western ideological reasons. They talk about that constantly. But for Islamic reasons, when an enemy's stated goal again and again and again, including in the last three years, is your elimination, that's a tremendous military advantage because you fight with strategic serious. Israelis disagree on everything, fight in the streets on everything, and unify totally in the face of Iran. The Israeli left right now in the run-up to an Israeli election isn't putting out press releases, slamming Netanyahu for dragging the country to war, but for failing to defeat the enemy,

for not fighting the war intelligently and strongly enough. Unity driven by an understanding of the enemy's eliminationist purpose is an advantage. Also, when the enemy wants to kill you, you innovate. You always innovate under pressure. Necessity is the mother of invention. You do anything it takes to maintain qualitative edges in intelligence, in air power, in cyber, and missile defense. Because quantity favors the other side, your enemy's population is nine times larger, and that's just Iran itself, not its proxies.

Israel has the highest spending on R&D per capita on Earth. partly that comes from the culture of Israel, partly that comes from desperate need. These are huge advantages. And you also accept temporary isolation, just like Iran has a very high pain threshold. And this is the argument in episode 93, given to it by its deep ideological and theological origins, and overriding regime understanding of the world and sense of its own role in the world. Israel has a very high pain threshold, a very high pain threshold that has surprised its enemies

because their whole argument was, you're a bunch of Western weaklings, you're going to fold at the first sign of trouble. You'll never dare to invade Hezbollah strongholds in South Lebanon. Turns out Israeli soldiers will walk into anything and anywhere. Turns out the Israeli Air Force will overfly Iran, will face Russian and Chinese electronic warfare and missile defense systems that turn.

out not to be able to do anything against the Israelis, but that you only ever really find out in battle. It turns out the Jews will fight, and it turns out that they will accept global isolation and hatred, and they will accept massive economic pain. And for those who want to sanction Israel, they should probably be aware that the Israelis genuinely think their enemies in the region want to eliminate them. Now, if you understand this, you can begin to map out how the future of this conflict will go. This is, again, Iran's eliminationist rhetoric and eliminationist purpose are a tremendous Israeli military advantage.

The clarity of the stakes involved produced tremendous resilience in Israeli society. Another advantage is Israel's democracy, for all the infighting, for all the bitter arguments. Democracy self-corrects. Failures are debated in public. Nobody's going to shut up the Israelis about what they think Netanyahu did wrong. Who in Iran can have a debate publicly and openly about how a regime and a leadership has taken a country that has one of the largest energy reserves on Earth and one of the largest talent pools on Earth and driven it into the ground until its nominal GDP per capita is that of Haiti? For 47 years, it's accomplished almost nothing. It's a failure as a state and for no reason other than a regime.

and nobody's allowed to say so in Iran itself without a danger of disappearing or being murdered in the street. Well, in Israel, failures debated publicly. Inquiries are held, governments fall, doctrines are revised, Netanyahu is not doing well in the polls and he knows it, and he's desperately trying to figure a way

to please enough Israelis to survive politically. A market economy, produced by a free society, sustains a kind of tech superiority, adaptation, innovation that Iran simply doesn't have. These aren't abstract virtues, democracy, free markets. These aren't, you know, moral arguments. They're hard advantages when you face a long-term kind of confrontation that Iran is imposed on Israel.

Israel has repeatedly turned military surprises and intelligence lapses of the enemy into long-term strategic gains. It's been doing it for generations, and these are the core structural reasons why. and Iran has no feedback mechanisms that are remotely similar. The regime's only actual strategy is to be able to suffer permanently and totally. That's it. That's the strategy. And to impose suffering on its way down, it plans to set the entire Middle East on fire.

And then it went and told the Jews that it's definitely going to come and kill them all. So they have to take it down. And this is an important point. The Jews of Israel cannot be expected to sit this out. Trump is here for a couple more years. He wants the straight of Rome was opened. He needs to reach some kind of accommodation with Iran. I don't know what's happening.

I don't know if he's continuing. I don't know if he's going back to Bah. I don't know. You cannot expect from the Jews of Israel to sit by the side and let America's interests overcome the Israeli need to not eventually be destroyed by this movement that's willing to burn its own society to the ground on the altar of the destruction of Israel

for theological reasons. Iran can't ever admit this regime, not the country, this regime can't ever admit that it is failing, can't ever stop the campaign. It's literally spent too much. The costs of going after Israel in this way

have been too great for it to ever admit failure and to ever stop. And the only way this ends is their undoing. If they admit failure, if they turn around back to Iranians and say, hey, we're that regime, we're that elite that destroyed everything for you, that oppressed you, that stole your economy.

The IRGC owns half of Iran's GDP. It's a military that serves the supreme leader, not even the government, which isn't exactly an elected government. It's elected from a couple of candidates that the regime chooses. But the IRGC is a military that doesn't even pretend to be under that pretend democratic system, and it owns half the GDP of Iran. It has to ride this to the end, and it'll fail. and then its story will unravel,

and its entire justification for repression at home, and for all of its adventurism abroad, will fail with it. So there's an asymmetry here. Israel fights to survive with all the tools that democracies can bring to bear in war.

And because there's an eliminationist enemy, democracies haven't won a lot of wars lately. Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, but the enemy has never been eliminationist. It's always been a problem. political contest, what the other political side thought in your country mattered more than what the

enemy could do on the ground over on the other side of the world, in the case of Vietnam, in the case of Afghanistan. If there was an existential eliminationist enemy, the United States wouldn't pull back. It would pay the costs that are required. It would defeat the enemy. It would shatter its cities. It would rule it for five years. It would do Japan. It would do Nazi Germany, denotification in Germany. It would do what it takes, because it's an existential threat? Israel faces an existential threat. From Israel's perspective, this is a war against the Nazis. And it's going to see it through to the end, because the alternative is them seeing it through to the end. Israel fights to survive. It fights to degrade the threat. Iran's ideology

compels it to keep fighting, even when the cost becomes catastrophic for its own people, and for the societies it claims to champion that its proxies are systematically demolishing, and that's the war. And if Israel doesn't win it, that's as much of a disaster for Lebanon long term as it is for Israel. Mukawama is not conventional statecraft or politics. It prizes attrition. It demands ideological mobilization, permanent mobilization. There are no decisive victories.

There's no economic development. There's no accountability for a Mukawama leadership. And that's why it has turned Lebanon and Gaza and Syria. Syria's regime, the Assad region, could not have murdered. 600,000 mostly Sunnis, without Iran, seeing it as an important art piece of the architecture of Mukawama. Yemen, the Yemeni civil war, with almost 400,000 dead, probably a quarter million, just starved to death, including 85,000 children, was a war between Sunnis and the Shia Mukawama. And those battlefields, that destructiveness is treated as acceptable by these leaders, by these

these movements, by these ideologues. It's even useful. The dead of Gaza, Hamas has again and again and again said, the dead of Gaza are the mobilizing of the world to their cause. Will it destroy Israel? The mobilizing of the world? No, but it will create a space, a political space, in which destroying Israel is a little easier. And Hamas' plan is not independence for Palestine. These are tyrants. Its plan is Israel's destruction. And the death of every Palestinian on the altar of that plan is to Hamas, legitimate, because the goal is the redemption of Islam. And if you don't believe me, look it up, look up what it means that Hamas's charter says Palestine is waqf, is an Islamic trust. What the word Mukawama means as an ideology, what the Hamas and Hezbollah and Iranian vision for Israel

share that allows them to ally in the way that they have across a real and deep and violent and old ideological and theological gap between Sunni and Shia. Mukawama never walks away. The conflict will last round after round after round, because retreating exposes the core claim to be wrong and all the costs that they imposed on their societies for that vision turn out to be wrong. Once you have demolished your economy, demolished your society,

oppressed and brutalized your people, on the altar of this idea, the idea can never be allowed to lose or to admit losing. And the idea is an idea of sustained, resilient, tolerant, pain-tolerant resistance. And so it says,

this generation will only suffer, and the next will only, and the one after will see the great triumph. it's entirely built to make sure it is never accountable, it never does what the people want, and it never stops fighting, and it also never builds anything. That's the enemy Israel faces. That's what the Mukawah means. That is how Hassan Nasrallah talked about it, the leader of Chisbalah.

And so now we face a Nasser who, for 20 years, tried to redeem the Arabs through the destruction of Israel. But this time it's for God, not for secular nationalism. And this time it has built into it. This is its great military advantage, a willingness to suffer, a lionizing of martyrdom and mass martyrdom. Chamas are proud of what they have done to Gaza. And we face them. And it's going to be decades.

Chazbala was built for decades. It's Iran's most powerful forward arm. We've degraded a great deal of it. every last shred of it is willing to fight and die. And so it has to fight and it has to die. And there's no daylight for Lebanon until that happens. Lebanon doesn't know how to tell them to stop. Poles of Lebanon tell us that 90% of the Jews of the Christians, of the Sunnis,

want them to stop. That's a big majority of the Lebanese, some of the Shia also. But most Shia still believe in the Muqqqaamah. Most Shias believe Khadzbollah represents them. most Shia are afraid of what comes in a Lebanon after Chisbalah is disarmed because they're afraid of the vengeance of the rest of the Lebanese after what Chisbila has done to Lebanon. Syria was once aligned with Iran.

That alliance meant that Israel had to target it, and then we discovered that actually it was a regime that was very fragile, and it fell. Gaza will not rise to a new and better day, as long as Hamas rules there. That's true if the Israelis are evil people who don't ever want Gaza to prosper and rebuild. And it's true if the Israelis are good people who just really think Hamas has to be pulled out, the way the Nazis had to be pulled out of Germany, and the firebombing of Dresden was justified by that.

It's true no matter what you think of the Israelis. Trump's Board of Peace, the entire Trump peace plan for Gaza approved by the UN Security Council. With the entire Arab world looking, begging to spend money on Gaza's rebuilding, begging for it all to start, with Israel being forced by Trump. The Palestinians don't understand that this moment with Trump is a moment in which they have leverage over Netanyahu. A future democratic president set against Netanyahu fighting in Israel, whether Israel is led by Netanyahu or anybody else, denying Israel military aid or military support or even just the sale of weapons. Well, if Israel's not buying weapons from the Americans and doesn't need that supply and certainly isn't getting anything, Israel's less going to be answerable to the Americans, not more. And if sanctions come from the Americans because they go completely anti-Israel, violently, totally,

Israel's even more free of the American ability to influence them. This is a moment where Trump wants to deliver a better future. but Hamas won't give up its arms. It won't do it. And they could at this moment push back the Israelis, hold the Israelis at bay, have everyone holding the Israelis at bay. I think the Israelis want this,

but you know what? You don't have to agree with me. Trump can deliver for Gaza more than any Democratic president. That's one of those ironies that history sometimes produces. But they won't take it because Hamas is a mukawama organization. the rubble of those parts of Gaza that are pretty much demolished is a sign that they're winning. Maybe history doesn't always follow happy little arcs, and if winning is still the destruction of the Jews,

that rubble is just going to be rubble. It won't actually give them victory. Each round of escalation, as under Nasser, exacts a higher price from the Mukawama enemy, from Iran's economy from the populations that unfortunately are under the influence

of these macawam organizations under their oppressive regimes and it's an ideology that makes any kind of de-escalation or graceful de-escalation or strategic retreat almost impossible the regime needs the confrontation

survives on the confrontation the confrontation justifies its existence the confrontation justifies its domestic oppression that's why even a weakened Iran will continue to inflict damage every step of the way. It will destroy the infrastructures of the Gulf states on its way down.

The Israelis still can't let it survive. And that's it. That's the core and heart of this. The goal is to bring it down faster in ways that allow it to cause less damage. There is no ability to leave it intact. And faster is 10 years and quite a bit of damage. Every battle, every missile, every missile barrage, every proxy attack, all the wreckage, physical, economic, human that the Mukawama will leave behind among the Israelis, in the proxy territories, and inside Iran itself. All of that is the Mukawama. History doesn't tell us how this is going to end. We're going through history for the first time.

But there are patterns, and sometimes there are vague rules if you're willing to have your rules break down every once in a while. The Israelis think that they identified a rule. Nasser's whole vision exhausted itself eventually. Egypt paid an enormous cost in war, in territory, in prestige and pride, in development that was destroyed by the kind of regime, the total control regime that went to this war after war after war. And that cost of that perpetual confrontation is why Egypt pulled out. It's why Egypt made the peace first. The core, the heart, the engine of that pan-Arabist vision that drove war after war after war was the thing that first turned to peace, because the price became not worth it. It didn't look like it was going to succeed. The Israelis

were flourishing, and their military successes were growing, not shrinking. The Israelis in 56 were better than they were in 48 and in 67 better than in 56. And Egypt's economy was not. And New Soviet hardware didn't change it. The weakness of the kinds of regimes that took over the Arab world after imperialism left were too great. Those weaknesses were too fundamental and structural, those incompetent dictatorships to be overcome by new Soviet hardware.

The peace that followed wasn't great. It wasn't perfect. It was very cold. it wasn't peace, it wasn't normalization. Israelis might a little bit vacation in the Sinai in the intervening years, but certainly don't love and respect Egyptians or vice versa. There's no warmth there. But it ended the wars.

Iran's confrontation with Israel, Iran's demand to destroy Israel, Iran's demand to be allowed to forever build against Israel until Israel's elimination, and Israel to be depicted as the aggressor for wanting to escalate early rather than watch a slow escalation that eventually destroys it, is in its middle phase. It's been going for 20 years, we have to assume it'll go for 20 more. But the blows to Iran, the cost to Iran are rising, and that is the Israeli strategy.

The blows to the proxies, the cost to its air defenses, the cost to its missile production, the cost to its leadership. You want to lead Iran in this war, you probably will die. That's important to know. Go for it. if you really truly believe in the martyrdom, we suspect they do anyway. So taking them out creates vacuums, creates off-balance,

maybe we'll shape a little bit the calculations going forward. But if you're planning our elimination, you're a legitimate target. The nuclear program has been repeatedly set back and will continue to be repeatedly set back at almost any cost, because the Israelis are imagining a device set off 400 meters over Tel Aviv. And the Mukawama axis will be bloodied and dismantled and bloodied again and dismantled again until it is gone.

The threat's not going away tomorrow. Iran has missiles. Iran has drones. We're entering a period of warfare where the technology of cheap missiles, cheap drones, and is incredibly effective. We've seen what's happening with Ukraine. We've seen what's happening with the Houthis threatening the Saudis. We've seen what's happening to the Israeli military facing these cheap drones against Hezbollah in Lebanon.

now that Chisbalah has shifted to that strategy and we see what Iran is capable of doing with that cheap, plentiful technology of small attack drones and missiles in the Strait of Hormuz. There'll be responses developing. The oil will now pump not through Hormuz. Saudi Arabia pumps 7 million barrels a day

through its East-West pipeline now, avoiding Hormuz. They're probably, I assume, we have to assume if they were wise, going to put pipelines down that can carry four times that. and then the Strait of Hormuz is meaningless. The transfer moves no longer as strategic relevance.

There'll be changes. As long as they have the ideological commitment to destroy Israel, Israel will find technological responses. Israel's civilians, Israel's soldiers, there's a unity on this front, on this point, because of that understanding of the enemy that the world doesn't understand. And the entire campaign to make Israel

into the most evil thing that ever existed, even set against the enemies in the Middle East, who have fought war, wars with ten times the civilian deaths. Explicitly genocidal wars. Nobody cares. The Syria doesn't matter. The Israelis are the evil of the world.

We are basically, statistically, functionally, the last living Jews in the Eastern Hemisphere. And now they're coming for us. An Arab world whose Jewish communities emptied en masse from everywhere to the last man, woman, and child practically. Almost exactly. Jews cannot today live in Damascus or Basque. Baghdad, where they had lived for a thousand years before anyone speaking Arabic showed up in those

cities. You think it's an accident? The Jews who come from the Arab world tend to vote more hawkish in Israeli elections than Jews from Europe? Israel's destruction, the Jews' destruction, is not something the Jews have to submit to. The Jews have staying power, a stickiness, resilience. The Mukawama claims to have but doesn't. All it really has is the willingness to destroy everything. And we'll see who wins. Thanks for listening.