Ask Haviv Anything - 125: Did Netanyahu misread Trump? With Ross Douthat

Episode Date: June 21, 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).—Ross Douthat, author and New York Times columnist, joins the podcast to discuss this fraught moment in the US-Israel relationship. We discuss Netanyahu’s role in shaping Trump’s regime-change gamble in Iran, the limits of American willingness to absorb prolonged pain, how American identification with Israel – and not just hostility or bigotry in some political spaces – makes policy disagreements feel uniquely personal and intense. We also dig into Israel’s failure to explain its wars, especially in Gaza, and the rise of conspiracism on the American right.Ross comes to the conversation shortly after interviewing Vice President JD Vance on, among other things, the strained state of the US-Israel relationship. He offers some direct advice: Israelis must argue specifics, engage the center-left, and tell their story clearly, or risk losing reasonable supporters they cannot afford to lose.--Israel became the Startup Nation by turning talent into strength. Ideas into industries.For more than a century, the Technion has trained the engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs who transformed Israel into the Startup Nation and delivered breakthroughs that changed the world.Now Technion scientists are advancing the next wave of innovation to help power Israel’s next chapter.Israel. Engineered by the Technion.Join us. Visit https://ats.org/rebuild .--If you like 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.

Thank you for joining me. Ross Douthit, columnist for the New York Times, will be joining me. We're going to discuss the memorandum of understanding between Iran and the United States. It is June 18 Thursday. I'm going to mention that again. Just so people know that these are fast-developing events, we don't entirely know all the details. But we're going to discuss what we know of the MOU, where whether Ross thinks it's a good idea or not such a great idea. He comes to the podcast shortly after interviewing

Vice President J.D. Vance, the man who's going to be negotiating the full agreement between Iran and the U.S., according to the White House's plan for how this is all going to go down. I'm very excited to have someone to discuss all of that with, who is an opinion columnist at the New York Times, a very highly regarded one. He also hosts a podcast at the Times called Interesting Times. He's the author of seven books about culture, religion, politics. His latest book is Believe, Why Everyone,

should be religious. He is also the film critic for National Review. Before we get into it, I want to tell you that this episode has a sponsor, a return sponsor. Israel became the startup nation by turning talent into strength and ideas into industries. For more than a century, the Technion has trained the engineers, the scientists, the entrepreneurs, who transformed Israel into the startup nation and delivered breakthroughs that changed the world. Now Technion, scientists, are advancing the next wave of innovation to help power Israel's next chapter. Israel, engineered by the Technion.

Join us, visit atts.org slash rebuild. I'd also like to invite everybody who is listening to us who gets a lot out of this podcast, out of this episode, to join our Patreon, our substack. If you're interested in asking the questions that guide the topics we choose to talk about, the people we choose to interview,

you do that in the Patreon community or as a subscriber on Substack. You also get to take part in monthly live streams where I answer your questions live. That's at patreon.com slash ask chaviv-anything or chavivgore.com. Those links are in the show notes. Ross Delfit, how are you? I'm a little tired, but okay. How are you? You've been on the road. Well, not exactly.

I was in New York actually conducting an interview with the vice president of the United States yesterday, and then my family and I are about to leave for a trip to the United Kingdom. So there's a lot of juggling going on in my home right now. How do you assess the U.S. Israel relationship in the wake of this war? We have seen and you've talked, you've written about dramatic shifts on the right, on the left, maybe capping, you know, years of shifts. What do you think is now the state of the relationship? Can we call it strained?

I think strained might be the right word. We can be stronger than that on this podcast. We got tough people. Well, but I don't know just how, I don't know just how strong a word to use right now. I mean, I would say that there has been essentially, a rolling transformation in U.S. public opinion about Israel, going back many years, but really, I think, accelerating in the last few years, especially later in the war in Gaza, accelerated by a lot of different forces inside the U.S. as well as events in the Middle East. And then I think the Iran war, which our government didn't want to call a war, of course, essentially brought to a kind of really sharp point

the, you know, what had been the critique of the U.S. Israel relationship in the U.S. for a long time, mostly from the left, sometimes from the right, more from the right lately than before, which is that, you know, the U.S. acts in the Middle East on Israel's behalf. And I think historically that critique was relatively weak because people could look around and see that there were just a lot of different forces in play when the U.S. was profoundly involved in the Middle East. You know, if you go back to something like the Iraq War, Israel's influence was very complicated.

Israeli elite opinion on the wisdom of the Iraq War was divided. and there were just a lot of other, you know, balls that the Bush administration was juggling as it sort of made the case for war and talked itself into the war. In this case, you had a conflict that started, in part because Benjamin Netanyahu talked Donald Trump seemingly into the idea that you could achieve regime change in Iran fairly rapidly. Now, that was not the only reason that Donald Trump decided to go to war. and Trump himself is responsible for his own decisions, right?

Nobody, nobody tricked him. But it was a, you know, a sort of unique case where you could get reporting on the run-up to the war that basically said, this was something that Netanyahu had wanted for a long time and he finally talked to the U.S. president into it. And so that then, yeah, empowered the internal critique of the U.S. Israel relationship. to a remarkable degree. The reason I say strained rather than something more than that is that from the point of view of Americans,

which I know is quite different from the point of view of Israelis right now, the worst case scenario did not happen. The worst case scenario being a global economic crisis that destroyed energy markets and tanked the U.S. stock market. And Americans are, you know, a commercial people, economic solipsists, you might say. And that scenario sort of loomed over the war once the swift regime change scenario didn't happen.

It loomed over the Trump administration in its decision making and ultimately in its willingness to cut a deal. But from the point of view of American concerns about the nature of our alliance with Israel, I think there are a lot of people who, you know, feel like this war was a mistake, but a recoverable mistake, not a scenario like the Iraq war, not a quagmire. And because of that, I think, you know, it's actually less dire, potentially, for American opinions about Israel, the Netanyahu government and so on than it might otherwise have been. Some of the clever people in Israel who understand a great deal about the U.S. Israel relationship think that this is the best possible way that this war could have ended, except for obviously tremendous easy victory in which the Iranian regime has toppled. A beautiful democracy replaces it. That was the best possible way, right? Just to clarify.

But second best is an unassailable clarity as to whether or not the Israelis secretly control the White House. And we got that. We got that. Now, hopefully, the Trump team will negotiate a much more serious deal with Iran than the MOU appears to be at first glance to at least Israeli readers. But that has been clarified. So we had, you know, the Iraq war, for example, people like Dave Smith have been running around every podcast that every young man in America watches and talking about how Nizeniao secretly actually pushed America into the Iraq war. And I was there. I was conscious.

I was an adult, a young soldier actually, in that era. And I distinctly remember that Sharon was opposed. And I distinctly remember reports in the Israeli press about pressure from the Americans that made Sharon agree. And so all of this discourse about Israeli control is something that was overwhelming the senses. Let me rephrase that. Was it overwhelming the senses? or is it a selection bias that I'm prone to because I happen to work with Jews all day?

I mean, it's all selection bias in the age of the algorithm, right? Right. The internet feed to things that either match your best hope or your absolute worst fears pretty consistently. So I don't, you know, in any situation,

I don't know how exactly to judge while staring at something algorithmically designed to feed into my psyche exactly what is going on. But I think that you are not wrong that the war created a situation. Again, because of the very active role that the Netanyahu government played in arguing for the war. And again, because this has been a longstanding policy goal of Benjamin Netanyahu, because of that, yeah, it folded incredibly. well into a narrative, a broader narrative of Israeli control and a world where, let's say, you know, the U.S. sent in ground troops or absorbed economic calamity in the service of its initial war aims. Maybe that's a world in which victory is achieved at great cost down the road,

but it's certainly a war in which those people, the people saying, you know, Netanyahu has something on Trump. Trump is afraid of Mossad, all these things like those narratives would have been turbocharged the deeper the U.S. went in. So this ending where the U.S. says, you know, look, we

did what we wanted to do. We did something that's very helpful to Israeli security and you know, we're not going to risk a global economic crisis and so we're, you know, we're making a deal and see how it goes. Yeah, that

That is a world that I think absolutely tends to undermine the most conspiratorial narratives. Do you think that in the White House Israeli security was front and center and not Gulf security and not Trump's, you know, decades of talking very explicitly about the absolute critical need not to allow Iran to ever have a nuclear program? No. No, no, no, no. I know. I think your description is basically right. I think what was front and center in the White House was that. Donald Trump conducted a very successful form of kinetic pseudo-regime change, let's say, in Venezuela,

where he was able to remove a troublesome head of government and find a new government, discover inside the existing government, a new government that was willing to cut deals with the United States, at the cost of one, you know, substantial, but just one special forces raid. And I think Trump looked at that and said, well, this is a model for foreign policy. This is a model that can handle long running challenges that the United States has faced. Trump has, as you said, he has a, you know, a kind of Reagan era perspective on Iran. He references, he was a guy who knew what car guy. island was, right? Which is not something that most people involved in U.S. politics would have

immediately at the tip of his tip of their tongues. But Trump, you know, going back to the 70s, going back to the Carter era, going back to the hostage crisis, has a kind of narrative about Iran as a bad actor and a dangerous actor and a thorn in the American side in his head. And I think that he looked at the experience in Venezuela and said, great, the mistake that, you know, George W. Bush made in Iraq was trying to affect regime change from the bottom up, take over the country, dissolve the elite, create a new elite. That didn't work. But what if we just do it from the top down? And I think that then Yahoo seemingly played on that impulse and said, yeah, we can we can absolutely we can absolutely do this. This will work, right? But I think that was that was Trump's

thinking and I think that it was driven by his sense of the American national interest and his desire to be the guy who solved the Iran issue once and for all. And also by a sense, like with Venezuela, right? What happened in Venezuela was seen as kind of stealing a march on the Russians and the Chinese. It was like, oh, you thought you had this ally over in the Western Hemisphere, but guess what? We can take them out like that. And, And why not do the same thing with the biggest power that's sort of aligned with Russia and China in Eurasia? Why not, you know, think about the knock on effects for U.S. dealings with our two major adversaries right now. If we can just snap our fingers and remove the Iranian regime.

So that's, I think that was the thinking. One of the things that I think, Netanyo's ace card that he pulled in the White House, as far as I have, God, I hope I'm not projecting. The June War, the June 2025 War, was a war in which the Israeli Air Force flying almost entirely, mostly American hardware, a lot of Israeli software, a little bit of Israeli things here and there, mostly American hardware, demonstrated that all of the missile defense, all the radar system, all the cyber, everything the Chinese and Russians had sold Iran, everything that they could deploy, were just meaningless in the face of American capabilities. And that cleared a pass. So when Sena went into the White House and said, we can do this, there were these signals that the White House really had to it, right? If the Israelis can do it with an F-35, the Americans should be able to do it twice as well with the F-35, right? And so there was a lot of intersecting data points that made it a rational decision from Trump's perspective.

What do you think of the MOU? What do you think of this deal? You've talked to the vice president now. What's your assessment about it? Sure. I mean, what he told me is available on the New York Times website and my podcast, interesting times. And he's been doing a lot of interviews. I think there's in part the vice president believes.

sincerely that there is a way that in fact in killing a bunch of people in the Iranian leadership that the Trump administration really has reached a layer of people who might be easier to work with going forward more reasonable than then sort of or at least I mean I think what he said to me was more capable of actually negotiating more capable of telling us what the Iranian government wants, which I think from the Trump administration perspective had been one of their perceived problems in negotiations prior to this war. And he thinks that out of this, there's, yeah, that there is a scenario where Iran really does sort of accept the, sort of make real the promise not to pursue.

a nuclear weapon and welcome an influx of foreign money and a return of some of their own money as a means to rebuild their economy and sort of stabilize and normalize to a greater degree than has been her to afford a case. And then there's another part of his mind which thinks, okay, if that doesn't happen, we've set their nuclear program back a reasonable amount. We've bought ourselves, you know, a certain amount of a time and it's not eternal, but maybe it's five years, maybe it's 12 years. We are going to, you know, we're going to get the straight open again. We're not pulling our troops out of the Middle East.

And this is, you know, the worst case scenario from the American perspective is that the war bought us a bunch of time to deal with it again in the future and that they're not, you know, they're not going to be threatening anyone. with a nuke in the next five years and as a sort of lower bound outcome, that's enough. And then finally, let me now pivot to my own view, which is that my own view is that vice president was,

according to all reporting, although he wasn't going to confirm it to me, obviously, but according to all good reporting, he was the person in the White House who was most against the war from the start. and for reasons that were vindicated by events, and that when you make, you know, when you go to war with an idea of what you can accomplish

that doesn't actually come to pass, you have a choice between escalation and making a less than ideal deal. And because Vance had been against the war from the start, he was put in charge of making the less than ideal deal. And this just seems obviously, a less than ideal deal to me. But the options on the table for the U.S.,

I think we're to get out, to not make a deal like this, we're basically politically untenable. The American public was not going to support a global economic crisis or a massive influx of ground troops. And it's not clear to me what the other sort of hawkish option from where we were

a month into the war was. I mean, the other thing that the war has revealed is things that people in sort of Vance his camp inside the administration had been arguing for a while, which was that the U.S. doesn't have the material to run a long war right now. We just, you know, we run out of missiles. You know, we run out of the material that you need.

We have the material to be devastating in a short war but we're not built for a long big war. And we're certainly not built for a long big war if we also are trying to deal with Russia and deter China. And that, that I think is quite apparent at this moment. And again, it's bad, right? It's not good. But you can't sort of finesse your way out of that problem

in a month of negotiations. One of the things that really struck me was that how surprised a few days before the war we put out a podcast episode that was a two-hour deep dive into the theological origins of the regime. But the bottom line is that they have this martyrdom ethos based in Shia eschatology and Leninist anti-imperialism. But the YouTube thumbnail text on that episode was bombs won't bring them down. They are built for catastrophic war. And martyrdom is part of the ethos of the regime, and death is part, and it's big and rich and deep, and it has 150 years of Muslim theology behind it. And so you have to go into a war like this with a very high threshold of pain. And they did it.

It felt that there's something, I get that the American discourse is blaming Netanyahu, but how could they not have understood this? The Israelis went into this war, willing to take on a. massive amount of pain, right? Hundreds of dead troops, missile bombardments on their cities, economic downturn. Why? Because it seems obvious that it's existential. The Americans went into a war that they didn't understand. Does the White House not understand the kinds of enemies it faces? I would ask that, I guess I would ask that question then of the Israeli government, though, too, right?

Because I could record for you a long 90-minute podcast about the ideological roots of the American regime. that I think, you know, if you believe what I said would make it clear to you that the United States of America. The Americans wouldn't, right. Yeah, if, you know, if the 12 or Shiism is built for martyrdom, American Empire is built for pursuing absolute victory under conditions where the U.S. itself is perceived to be under existential threat. Americans do not see themselves as under existential threat from the Iranian regime in the way that Israelis do. And so I don't think that maybe there was no world where bombs brought down the Iranian regime. But in that case, there was also no world where the United States was going to absorb the kind of pain that you're saying Israelis were ready to absorb. There's just no such world.

Now, I mean, you could also add, we're talking about Donald Trump here in particular, right? Donald Trump is a very unpopular president. He is not a great persuader. He's not a great legislative bridge builder. I'm using mild understatement here, right? If you go back to the Iraq War, George W. Bush spend months and months making a very public case for the war, seeking congressional approval, trying to persuade wavering Americans that this was a good idea.

And in the end, all of that persuasion didn't help him politically when the war turned into a quagmire. But he did do it, and he did have a lot of public support behind it when the war started. Donald Trump didn't do any of that. He didn't capable of that.

And again, it was very clear to me that he sold himself on the war, on the theory that maybe bombs would not. bring down the regime, but bombs plus assassinations, plus, you know, some kind of emergent Iranian opposition and or some factions inside the Iranian regime that aren't devoted to martyrdom, which may or may not exist, right? I know Israelis are skeptical that they exist. But that was, that was Trump's perception. Trump, Trump clearly from the start was not going

in, not going in intending to be in a, you know, multi-year war that required absorbing lots of pain. So I think the question for Israelis and for Netanyahu especially is knowing that, like, knowing that, knowing that you were never going to get in no world in which you were going to get Donald Trump sending in 100,000 American troops or Donald Trump accepting, you know, $8 gas prices and stock market shocks. was it worth it? Did Israel get enough out of the war? Because I think you got what you were likely to get. I think we got more than any Israeli imagined. And that was a credit to Nizeniao politically up until this moment. What I argued in the free press, for example, was 80, 20, 80 percent of the war we'd overlap. And then the Americans would bail out. They would leave the war because it would no longer be in their interest. And I have been learning this week that Nizum had no plan for that.

And as you say, he should have had this calculated in at the very beginning. We knew at some point Trump was going to leave the war. Why would the American stay for as long as the Iranians can tolerate pain? That's not a reasonable expectation. I'm sort of puzzled by the expectation either from Netanyahu or from Israelis generally that this could be sustained, right? Because I think everything I just said about Trump is apparent from public material, public conversation, from just the way he acts and behaves in. the world. He has never seen, he's done many, many unpopular things, but he has never seen one of them through in a way that destroys his approval rating or turns his own party against him.

You know, he he does tariffs to an extreme and then the bond markets react and he backs up, right? Like this happens time and time again. So I just think you shouldn't have needed secret White House insights to understand this. I also think that, in your own. you can tell me if this is wrong. Like, don't you think that part of the Israeli government believed in a version of the decapitation and Iranian people rise up scenario? Or was that always? Okay.

So that then was what they, there was an Israeli belief that you wouldn't have to fight for three years. Yeah. You put together January uprising. You put together the extraordinary. The discovery, the problem with the June 2025 war was that every. Everything went perfectly right. Now, you know, you make your best laid plans and then half of them go awry in war. War, you encounter an enemy.

The enemy surprises you. The arena is not quite what you expected. Everything went exactly right. And I think that that created a sense among the Israelis that, you know, we have a long history of pulling off unbelievable things militarily. And we could do this. And January taught us what the Iranian people secretly always wanted. And it happened to be what we always wanted for the Iranian people. My sense was that it's that signaled to people in Trump world, and I don't know if this is true of the Israelis, but it's signaled to people in Trump world, oh, the Iranians will just kind of take it. We will dish it out and they will just take it. And there, I think that was true of strikes on the Iranian military, but it wasn't true of decapitation in ways that should have been obvious, right?

because the regime, whatever its ultimate, you know, theological ambitions, the regime does, cares about its own survival. And so he was willing to do things once its own officials were being assassinated in terms of threatening the Gulf monarchies and threatening the global supply of oil and threatening a kind of murder suicide that it wouldn't have been willing to do if, you know, the U.S. and Israel had just been striking its missiles and bunkers and rockets. That was not adequately factored in. It was like, well, what will, you know,

what will the Iranians do differently if we are assassinating them instead of just bombing them? And I think it should have been clear that what they would do differently is make more existential threats. Although, you know, there's also, I mean, there's also a fault here

to be laid at the feet of the Gulf Arabs because the message Israel was receiving from some of them, obviously Kuwait and Qatar and the Emirates are very, very different actors on this but the message from some of them was go for it, do it, come on, we believe in you, right? Yes. And then they turned out to be completely useless and scared and not willing to fight back, less so the Emirates. Less so the Emirates.

Definitely the Saudis. And so they hoped someone else would do all the work and they weren't willing to do any of the work. But that message from them to the Israelis also played into the Israeli calculations. Look what we got. We got this whole array of Arab countries. waiting for us to do this thing that we're amazing at, best in the world at, and we're going to bring in the Americans out on, right? They invented all these platforms. What could go wrong? I can see how that logic would play out. Yeah. And I think in my own sort of debates and arguments

around the U.S. Israel relationship here, I often find myself emphasizing, especially to conservatives, younger conservatives who are sort of blackpilled, as we say on the internet, about, Israel, that the U.S. Saudi relationship is just as important, right? If you're, if you're trying to, like, track, why is the U.S., you know, so involved in the Middle East? Why are we getting in wars that are tough to explain to people back home? You know, what is the, what foreign power is shaping U.S. decision making? There's just, people in the U.S. should probably focus much more on our relationship to Saudi Arabia relative to the amount of attention paid to our relationship to Israel. And I think this conflict was a good example. As far as I could tell, yes, it mattered

a great deal that Netanyahu was making the case to Trump. But it also mattered a great deal that the Saudis seemed to be enthusiastic about it, or at least, you know, at least the leader of Saudi Arabia seemed to be temporarily enthusiastic about it. And that relationship, especially for Trump, right, who's someone who from the beginning of his first presidency has sort of made cultivating a kind of tough guy alliance with regimes that the Obama administration had been trying to sort of pull back from its relationship with. Like that matters a lot, I think, to what decisions Trump actually makes in the Middle East, his relationship to. the Saudis, the Gulf Arabs, and so on. So I want to take a step back from the war. The U.S. Israel relationship, I'm just going to give a tiny bit of background so I can bring in an argument that you have made,

that you made back in April in a column in the New York Times, that I found profound. I have, over the last few months, engaged a few anti-Israel voices, anti-Israel accounts on X. I have made a very simple argument, which is that the anti-Israel marches, the anti-Israel activism, the Gaza war attention is totally unique in the history of Western protests and Western politics. There's never been anything remotely like it. When I say in the United States to somebody on a panel is coming at me on the Gaza War, I have a lot, a lot of disquiet over the Gaza War. I know you do. But nevertheless, talking about the Gaza War, somebody comes and says, we have a right. to pay special attention to the Gaza War

because we fund it. We send you weapons. We send you military aid. My answer is, okay, but you had the identical phenomenon of the identical protests sharing the same vocabulary in Copenhagen and in Madrid, and they don't fund us. And in Jakarta, you had a million people marching. And in Algiers, you had a million people. And so all over the world, you have this protest movement

that there's one think tank that counted 47,000 protests all over the world. Again and again and again, hundreds of millions people have participated, it has reshaped progressive politics in the United States in a way that there's almost no other issue that does now define. It's the litmus test. You can

disagree on health care. You can disagree on minimum wage in progressive space. You cannot disagree on Israel. You can't disagree on the Gaza war and you can't disagree on Zionism, really. I mean, you'll have trouble. And so this has become a defiant. That's unique.

That's totally unique. The regularity of these protests, the duration of this movement, the sheer scale of it has never happened before. You want to compare it to apartheid South Africa? Compared to apartheid South Africa. It wasn't within an order of magnitude of what the Gaza War has received. And my point also was the Saudi War on Yemen was a war with 85,000 children starved to death,

250,000 total starvation deaths, 377,000 dead estimated. We'll never probably know the real full number. And that was done with Western weapons, American weapons. And also intelligence and logistical support. And my argument, of course, was, had it not been Jews, it would not have been possible. And so there's an anti-Semitism that's happening here. Now, I defeated with this argument everybody until you came along. And I'm going to, forgive me, it's going to take me three minutes.

I want to read from this column two paragraphs because you made a point that dives into a real deep, I think, much deeper, sense of what Israel is in the American imagination and the American moral imagination, in American political discourse. It's not just, there's definitely anti-Semitism here, but it's not just that. You, I lay this out, and then you actually quoted one of my debate with Matthew Iglesias. We discussed this, and I made this case. And then you write, Americans of a fundamentally different relationship to Jews, Judaism, Zionism and Israel than to any of the much worse governments, in quotes, that Guru is referring

to, and I was talking about Saudis in Yemen. And then you say, I say this as a child of the 90s, educated at the peak of World War 2 and Holocaust memorializing in American culture. What I was taught and what many Americans were taught is that the story of the Jews, the history of the anti-Semitism, the enormity of the Shoa and the foundation of Israel, together form one of the central dramatic streams in Western history. the Jewish experience in America linked to both the European and Israeli aspects of the story. It wasn't an incidental idea at the margins of my education.

It was a central cultural teaching. Nobody taught me in depth about the Saudi experience or Pakistani history. Debates within Islamic or African civilizations weren't treated as central to Western or American history. Those stories were understood to be outside our own, whereas the story of the Jews and the story of Israel were fundamentally inside. So part of the answer to this question, why do Westerners freak out in a unique way? about Israel policy is connected to identification, not hostility, and to the feeling that Israel is part of our zone of identity and responsibility in a way that the Saudi monarchy is not.

I want to start with one simple question. You yourself are becoming, by your own admission in your New York Times columns, more and more skeptical of the U.S. Israel relationship. Can you lay out for us that critique? And then the next follow-up will be this story, there is an element of identification. I should just also tell people, you did talk about anti-Semitism in this column.

You do think that's a factor. Right. But nevertheless, there's more. Yeah. I mean, let me say a few things, one of which is that anti-Semitism and its interaction with digital culture is 100% a powerful force

in everything that you described. And certainly when you're talking about sort of the internationalization of protests, right? Like, it's not protests in, you know, Indonesia are not about American identification with Israel, obviously. Europe is more complicated. But sort of the global style of protest and the way the Internet has enabled it. And we don't know what, like, the anti-apartheid movement would have looked like in the age of the Internet. I think it would have been bigger than it was.

I think the internet, like, the internet basically says, you know, it makes a lot of things smaller by fragmenting everything. But then every once in a while, the digital creates some kind of universal moment. And we had that with like the George Floyd protests in the United States in 2020 that were themselves connected in some way to, to anti-Israel protests. But I have been struck by and often shocked by how quickly hardcore anti-Semitism. has come back in this context. And I think that I have a just a greater appreciation than I did in the 1990s or 15 years ago for the resilience of anti-Semitism as like a force unto itself that is just really, really hard to suppress. So I just want to say that because I think it's true and I think it's part of the story that you're telling. I think you're right about it to some degree.

at the same time, yeah, I also believe a version of the story that you quoted, that there is a way in which when Westerners generally, but Americans especially, look at things that Israel does, they don't judge them the way they would judge war crimes in the Congo or war crimes in Yemen or war crimes anywhere outside the West. They judge them as if the United States was doing it ourselves. And that is itself connected. to different forms of profound identification that American culture has had

with the state of Israel in the course of the last few generations. And some of those have been liberal forms of identification that were most powerful when sort of secular Zionism was ascendant, but that sort of linger in the bloodstream of American liberalism to this day. And then there's obviously Christian Zionism

as a force among American Christians and on the political right, that is also connected to sort of deep forces in American culture, going back to the founding era, this kind of profound American identification with the Old Testament, the idea of an errand in the wilderness, all of these things. And yeah, those things just make, they lift Israel up in our consciousness and our imagination.

When times are good, they create really profound identifications, but they also create material for backlash and a kind of hyper attention to things that Israel is doing wrong that is unique. In terms of the change that you've discerned in my own columns or anywhere else, I mean, I have never been someone who writes a ton about Israel. I'm, you know, not Jewish. I'm Catholic. My feeling as an American journalist was always that there were really smart Jews on

every side of every debate about Israel. And it wasn't always. I wasn't always the right person to get to get mixed up in it. Why take the flag on X? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, well, and, you know, there's plenty of areas where I take the flag on X. Right, that's true. But there is, I've become more invested in it probably because, for reasons you're describing, it has bled into, you know, campus protest in the United States, right versus left debates,

internal splits within conservatism to a greater degree than in the past. And the change does, I guess, you know, this is sort of the argument that I make to my most pro-Israel friends. It's not just about the algorithm and it's not just about anti-Semitism. It also is very concretely about specific things that Israel is doing. And, you know, Israel is stuck in an incredibly difficult and dangerous position. And I think American conservatives have tended to basically give Israel, the benefit of the doubt in the debates over the occupation, right? That this has been sort of the American conservative perspective has been, yes, ideally,

this is not how things would be, but we can understand why Israel feels stuck and unable to find its way to a deal because of the failures of past negotiations and the difficulties of finding a negotiating partner. And we basically, you know, we're not, the Israeli occupation. of the West Bank is not something that would divide the American right, I think, in some profound way. The war in Gaza just, I think, has been different, in part because it's a war rather than an occupation. And in part, in ways that I think have some parallels with what's been happening in Iran because it seemed to be unclear past a certain point what the Israeli plan was. And I think that

there there was a transition just, you know, in my own analysis of the war, which was, I think, matched in more extreme ways by other people on the right from, you know, this is a just and necessary war and we hope it works out to this was a just and necessary war, but a war continued without a plan for victory can become unjust. That was my perception of Gaza. With Iran, it was different from the start. I just thought this is not going to work. When it didn't work in the first week, my sense was it's just not going to work, period. And so, yeah, I was to the extent that I felt like, you know, I felt like the Israeli government and the Israeli prime minister had pushed for something that they felt was in Israel's interest that I did not think was in the U.S.'s interest. It didn't, you know, didn't, didn't endear the Israeli government to me.

And both of those are just very concrete things. They're not about my attitude towards. the existence of Israel or Judaism or anything like that, I think that, yeah, I think that the war in Gaza passed a certain point became unjust. And I think the Iran war was not in America's interest. And I am there, there are two, two cases where I am opposed to what I take to be the policy of the Israeli government and that cast a shadow over my view of the U.S. Israeli alliance. I have argued that you can't, if you're going to cause the damage that you're causing in Gaza. And, you know, denazification involved the firebombing of cities. You could argue that the nature of this enemy, the tunnel system unprecedented in the history of war, by half an order of magnitude bigger than the second biggest tunnel system ever built for war, into which Hamas hasn't allowed a single child to step foot in three years, right? If you're going to fight a war that maybe you want to argue as just,

justified, but it's going to cause that scale of damage. You have to narrate the war. You have to tell the story. You have to say this is not just to cause the damage. This is denunciification, meaning I'm going to cause this much damage because that's what it takes to pull the Nazism out of Germany. But afterwards, there's going to be a great rebuilding. The purpose is a different, you know, Gaza to bring it back to Gaza, right? And Netanyahu refused to narrate the Israeli intentions. And so all you had. And not only that, of course, we had Ben-Vir and Smutrich publicly talking for two years and being the only Israelis talking, from official Israelis talking about what the purpose of the war was, about ethnic cleansing, very, very bluntly. And so for me, it has been, I've been having these Hebrew debates back home about just Israelis who are, who don't, we speak Hebrew and we don't necessarily follow the world debate about us. And there's a sense that the world's all set against us, but there's a lot of provincialism. I try to convey to people how the amount of attention the world pays to Israel is not matched by the amount of attention Israelis pay to the world. This is also true of the United States.

Yes. Let's go to the United States. I was going to use a comparison of like the Basque or something. You know, we have our own tiny little internal life and internal language and internal culture. But in fact, we're losing the Ross Douthits. And we're losing people we should not have. That's on us. The anti-Semitic campaign that sent a million people into the streets in Copenhagen convinced that Zionism shouldn't have...

The Jews should never have built a country, the last living Jews of the Eastern Hemisphere, who had nowhere else to go, shouldn't have built? That we could never have not lost. It didn't matter. And it was only a question of time because there was a radicalization happening there that's independent of our actions. But if we're losing so many of our supporters and so many people who are willing to walk a very long way, that is on us. And that failure to me counts in the Israeli column. That is an Israeli failure. Israelis have to explain it and it's a and he always refused.

How much has it just been that very pragmatic thing you're describing and a real deep sense of, again, identification as you described it as being a kind of betrayal. I guess what I'm asking is what the hell's happening on the right? Is it the same as what's happening on the left? I think it's different from what's happening. So what's happening on the left is it's many things. but in part it's also itself kind of about America where there is a America is the global hegemon. America is the last big part of Western civilization that's filled with people who are really confident in Western civilization, right? America is a country that has a lot of guilt about its own past, but has a lot of pride about its own past relative to.

a lot of countries in Western Europe right now. And the left is sort of naturally and more so under sort of, you know, what we in the U.S. would call woke conditions, right, is arrayed in persistent critique of America, the American past and, you know, a sort of a sort of prideful relationship to the American past. But it's arrayed in a critique that sometimes feels like anachronistic, right? It's like, you know, you go to the United States and you go to progressive spaces and they'll do a land acknowledgement. Have you encountered a land acknowledgement?

In Australia, I did, yes. Yes. I was very embarrassed for them because they were not giving them anything. They were just literally feeling good about being white. Exactly. Yes. So in the settler societies of North America and Australia, you have in progressive spaces, people will stand up and say, we are on the ancestral land of so and so and such and such. And they aren't giving the land back.

But also the people they're referencing the tribes and groups are small and unimportant and politically impotent, right? There's no live debate about whether you should give Manhattan back to Native Americans. There's just a kind of virtue signaling about the sins of our ancestors. But here's Israel, also a society built in ways that bonded it to America once upon a time on patterns of settlement, making the desert bloom, right? And a society that has where you can say, oh, but here's the indigenous population. And here are the settlers. And the settlers are bad.

and the indigenous population is oppressed, and the whole critique of America, you know, manifest destiny, the American past can be transposed onto that conflict, I think, in ways that are really important to understanding the intensity. I don't think it's a coincidence that sort of peak pro-Palestine sentiment on the left sort of followed from peak wokeness. It was like you had peak wokeness and it was about, you know, slavery and segregation and other things. But it was like, all right, that you need, you need an actual concrete example of settler colonialism today and it's got to be Israel. That is something that's important to understand on the left and has no, and doesn't, doesn't

correlate with what's happening on the right. I'll actually answer your question. On the right, it's much more, it's much more sort of, um, The dark stuff is much more just kind of a conspiratorial reaction against the establishment and the elite and everything sort of pious associated with it. And so it's like, oh, you know, the establishment in the U.S. has been pro-Israel for a long time and therefore we probably should be anti-Israel. There are a lot of Jews in the American establishment. Have you noticed that? Ah, well, you know, the establishment is bad.

therefore, you know, we should be open to open to anti-Semitic or borderline anti-Semitic arguments, right? Like, that's, I think, the, maybe not the heart, but an important part of the phenomenon on the younger right, especially. You've grown up alienated from the establishment of your own country, and part of that alienation is a reaction against the left, but the more alienated you get, the more you're looking for a kind of bigger narrative. and anti-Semitism is just always there as as a big as a big narrative with Israel has then becomes the actor you know the puppet master and so on and that and that that that stuff is real like I again I'll have arguments with with Zionist Zionist Jewish friends who will say oh isn't that that's just you know people overestimate how much anti-Semitism there is on the right I mean I don't know how you estimated exactly but there is a there is a there is a

is a lot of that stuff on the right. Some of it is also connected. Go on. Sorry. I just, there's so much, but Nick Fuentes would be the example, right? The sort of poster child of that feeling, that experience, that cultural shift.

Fuentes, yeah, Fuentes generationally, right, is right there. Yes. But then he's laundered by Tucker Carlson, who does a podcast with the vice president. it. And Tucker hosts Holocaust deniers. I mean, almost quite literally, a denier, certainly a denier of Nazi intentions, you know, Daryl Cooper. Where's the line drawn? How big is the phenomenon? And how big is your phenomenon of, of, of, of, I think my, I think my phenomenon, my phenomenon is the phenomenon that, uh, is, uh, is, sort of what you would want to think of as the fixable problem, right?

Yeah. But the phenomena bleed, like there's a fixable problem where sort of people on the American right or center right who had a kind of general pro-Israel default are, you know, sort of react have strong negative reactions to Israeli policies. Like most Americans aren't paying the kind of attention that you're paying to events in Israel and Gaza, right? But if you're trying to judge from afar and you're looking for heuristics, you're like, okay, this thing that happened in the war seems bad, but there's people arguing it on both sides. But, oh, over here, part of the Israeli government seems committed to ethnic cleansing. That makes me read the event through a war skeptical lens, right? Inevitably.

But I think, I mean, I've had this argument on my own podcast with, you know, folks like Yoram Hazoni, right, is the, you know, sort of would be architect of a kind of pan-national nationalism and so on. And he, you know, he wants to say, he's very concerned about rising anti-Semitism on the right. And he wants to say, no, it's separate from, or he, I think he wanted to say it's just, if separate from really concrete events. like the war in Gaza. And I just think you have to see it as this continuum, right? There's people who under internet conditions are going to be pulled into paranoid antisemitism. And there's people who absolutely aren't.

And then there's people in between who are just sort of moved back and forth by events and by their perception of events and get a little bit closer to the paranoid style if they think Israel is committing war crimes and get a little bit. close to a more mainstream reading if they don't. So I think events and policies and sort of, you know, who is seen to be speaking for Israel, all of these, all of these things matter a great deal. I think one thing Yoram said to me was, which I also think is right, is that, you know, there's certain on the right you get kind of rediscoverys of traditional Christianity,

often internet mediated, then it themselves can, you know, make anti-Semitism more attractive because traditional Christianity was sometimes intertwined with anti-Semitism, right? So there's, there's, and that's not something Israel can solve, right? Like, there are things Israel cannot magically make

the history of Catholic anti-Semitism go away so that if someone wants to become Catholic, they never encounter it, right? Like, that's not Israel's problem to solve. but how the world perceives Israeli policy towards Gaza and the wisdom of the Iran war, that is part of Israel's problem to solve. I think you laid out that those spectrum, those spectra, in a way that fits what I have experienced, I can't tell which way it's going.

And I genuinely can't tell. I had an argument about J.D. Vance, his very, very close relationship to Tucker Carlson, who for some reason can't stop talking about Jews and Nazis. You raising Catholicism is fascinating because you are a very believing. You write about it a great deal. That was what your last book was about, which, by the way, was absolutely fascinating. And a Jew can read it. It's not about Catholicism except at the end.

You are a convert to Catholicism and a believing convert to Catholicism. And you're still willing to say and also that some of this return to a kind of pietism might trigger also some of that anti-Semitism. And in that vein, I want to ask two questions to end. Tucker Carlson, I have decided. I have concluded at watching him give speeches, trying to dive a little bit into his thinking, into his critique of, you know,

piscapalianism and, you know, churches that he now says are hollowed out, tree husks that are inhabited by raccoons. The raccoons, these are the, the mainline Protestant churches of America that he grew up in, the raccoons are progressives in his analogy. And he talks about a return to a kind of pietism. He talks about the collapse of social moors, the addiction to pornography among young men that's ruining the ability to have intimacy in the American families. And by the way, that Israeli intelligence is running the largest porn sites in America, something he has said publicly out loud. I watched the podcast to make sure he actually said it, and it wasn't just a claim about him.

So a man who brings in launders anti-Semitism, you know, launders Nick Fuentes, launders Holocaust, a little bit of a clever version of Holocaust denial, a man who is close friends with J.D. Vance, who I do not suspect of being anti-Semitic, but I do suspect of politically being willing to walk with those people for political alliance purposes. I think that this man is a Muslim brother. And what do I mean by that?

The Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt had a theory. Islam is weak. Islam is backward. It's encountering European empires chopping up the Ottoman Empire coming in. And the response to Islamic weakness was we used to be powerful when we were close to God. The earliest generation of Islam were also the conquering generations, right? Islam is born as this conquering empire. Piety, closeness to the Quran, closeness to this kind of originalist pietism.

They call themselves Salafist. Asalaf is a forefather. So the forefatherist movement was what they called themselves in 19th century Egypt, where this movement really gets going. This is a movement that produced the theologians who taught Hassan al-Bano, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1920s, and which Hamas in 1987 is founded in Gaza as a Gaza branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood's main idea was,

all of our problems today are modernity. Our weakness, geopolitically, economically, scientifically, is a weakness that stems from having abandoned our original true pious religion. And if we return to religion, all things will fix themselves. And the Muslim Brotherhood, as it built out this pietistic return theology, Hamas, for example, doesn't believe it needs to free Palestine. They're not about the Palestinian independence. They believe they need to ensure that Islam can defeat this Jewish imposition

that is the weakest thing that ever pushed Islam back, showing that the pious, when they return to their piety, can overcome the geopolitical obstacles and Islam can return to be a redeeming, conquering force in the world again. That's why Hamas is willing to oversee the destruction of Gaza and think it's winning. The Muslim Brotherhood, for a hundred years, never, ever stopped talking about Jews. And it talked about Jews in these wild, you know, protocols the Al-Jouzai kind of conspiratorial ways. And it built out a whole theology of Islamic weakness and correcting it through pietism.

that constructed itself around the villain of the jew and i might be coming from the middle east and imposing a thing i've already familiar with on to something i don't understand when i look at the tucker carlson's and candace owens or maybe they're muslim brothers and by the way he's super good friends with the qatari leadership who are the biggest purveyors of muslim brother theology in the world right now through al jazeera and and officially believe in these ideas What's happening to the American Christian right? How much am I exaggerating? Does any of that make sense to you? I think that if you are looking for, if you're looking for people who are folding anti-Semitism into a kind of extremist Christian view

that involves, you know, accepting destruction for the sake of refounding Western civilization, you need to look to figures who are more obscure than Tucker Carlson. You need to look to, sometimes they're Catholic, sometimes they're Calvinist, but there are people

with those views on the American right, but they're, I would say, quite, in terms of like having a worked-out ideology that's equivalent

to the Muslim Brotherhood, I think they're quite, quite marginal. I think, I think what Tucker represent, I think what you're seeing in Tucker

is what I just described a minute ago. Tucker, decided that the elite in which he existed and worked and so on for a long time was irredeemably corrupt. And everything then is starting with the liberal elite, but then including the elite within conservatism that was in favor of free markets, in favor of a close relationship with Israel, a hawkish foreign policy, and everything you see from him, whether he's

going to Moscow and marveling at the supermarkets there or saying, yeah, maybe, you know, maybe the Muslim Brotherhood isn't so bad or whatever. But then why would he need the Jews to have invented pornography? Why the obsession? You can do all of that without being anti-Jewish or bun did some of that kind of politics. Because there is, again, I'm not, I don't want to psychoanalyze, but there is a, like, if you're going after the, if you're going after the pious. If you're rejecting the pieties, whether this is or not, this is true of Tucker, this is true as a phenomenon. When you are rejecting the pieties of the American establishment, you, like, Pilosemitism is a great piety of the American establishment. It's an incredibly powerful piety.

And so its rejection is, I think, it's like the strongest way or one of the strongest ways that you can. that you can reject any. It's like you're burning, you're burning your ships. There's no going back. We're just, you know, we're rejecting everything

and anything that the establishment considers pious and good. There was no force more powerful in American culture when I was a kid, or at least the parts that I was exposed to, then kind of anti- antisemitism, right? Like that was, that, it was, you know,

it was, it was, it was Chindler's List and Anne Frank and Elyoiselle and everybody, you know, like that, that, that was just, it just loomed really large in American culture. And I think it's the turn towards extreme anti-Israel conspiracy theories should be understood in terms of like, not a, we're consciously building up a new, you know, Christian brotherhood project or something. But as rejectionism, as we're, we're rejecting it all, including. including sort of the, yeah, the idea that, you know, Holocaust was a unique evil and anti-Semitism is a new sin. But let me say something positive, okay, to just to just. Yeah, I was just going to say, like, you ask me, you.

Well, so you, or advice for Israelis. I often, I often have these conversations, I think, with people, American Jewish conservatives who sometimes want to minimize these tendencies on the right. and I don't want to minimize them, but I also don't want to overhype them. The, you know, the, the, the, the kind of like Nick Fuentes, you know, he has these moments. He sort of flares up and gets all kinds of attention. But is Nick Fuentes really the spokesman for where the American Republican Party is going? In the next 20 years, no, I don't think that he is at all, right? is J.D. Vance frustrated with the government of Israel? Yes, absolutely. And you can see that in my interview

with him and you can see it in his public contact. He was against the war and he feels like Netanyahu talked Trump into it. And that informs like his, you know, how he thinks about the Israeli government. Does that mean that a Vance presidency would break the U.S. Israel relationship? No, it does not, I don't think. because the U.S.-Israel relationship on the American right is connected to the ways in which there is, just as there's a kind of natural, a kind of natural left-wing hostility to Israel that's also connected to hostility to America. There is a natural American conservative affinity for Israel that is connected to affinities between the American Project and Israel. And I don't think that has gone away. I think it has, this is why I said strained.

I'll end where I began. I think there is a great strain in that connection, but it hasn't removed fundamental reasons why countries that share a powerful sense of national mission and, you know, a connection to the biblical God and everything, you know, everything else. Like there's, I don't think that connection just gets snapped. It gets strained. Thank you for staying longer than we agreed. One last question.

How do you see the future of the relationship and do you have any advice to Israelis? Knowing American politics, American culture in the way that you do? I think that Israelis who are interested in the Israeli-American relationship need to figure out ways. Basically, they need to figure out, okay, what are the, there are lots of bad reasons that Americans might be turning against Israel. But what are the reasons that we can actually argue with and engage with, including not just on the right, but on the center left? You need there, you need to, you can't just say, oh, the, well, we're going to accept that the Democratic Party is going to be anti-Israel forever. I think that would be a big mistake. But you need to, you need to find ways of engagement and argument.

And you need to argue in a way that accepts that it's not the 1990s anymore, right? And if you tell people, oh, that argument is anti-Semitic, that's not a Trump card. You know, you don't win by making that argument. You win by saying, oh, no, actually, here's why you're mistaken about the U.S., you know, the Israeli role in the Iraq Corps. Do you convince everyone with that argument? No, of course not. But you have to be willing to make the argument. You have to say, okay, there are people who are getting drawn into conspiracy theories who aren't necessarily anti-Semitic or conspiratorial.

they're just reacting to events in the world and you need to go and sort of be tough-minded and have arguments with them and make the case, right? So that's my advice, I guess. Tell the story. Tell the story. Tell the story. Make the case and recognize that, yeah,

that there is a role. Policy is playing a role. It's not just algorithms and it's not just the resilience of anti-Semitism as important and real as those things are. Ralph Douthan, thank you so much for joining me. It was my pleasure. Thanks for having me.