Ask Haviv Anything - Episode 43: After Doha, Israel needs a new story

Episode Date: September 14, 2025

On September 9, Israel tried but failed to kill Hamas leaders in Qatar. The regional blowback surprised the Israelis. Emirati and Saudi leaders, who have long seen Qatar as a foe in the region, visited Doha to express solidarity. Criticism of Israel came not only from the usual suspects, but even from Trump administration officials.Israel, many regional allies now worry, doesn't understand its new role as regional superpower. It's still locked into the mindset of a small besieged nation, and it's acting foolishly because of it.This fallout is part of a larger story, a larger Israeli failure to tell its story in the different environments in which Israel must operate. In the West, it has lost not only opponents, but close friends as well, who are often tired of standing in the whirlwind of claims and counter-claims and hearing only Israel's most extreme voices telling its story. The government faces, too, growing distrust domestically of its war plans and intentions. And even close regional allies (and would-be allies) like the Emiratis and Saudis are growing worried.This Israeli government has never been able to tell its story, to explain its goals and aspirations for Gaza and for the region. Not to Israelis, not to Westerners, not to regional allies. It didn't matter when the country wasn't engaged in a war that has reshaped the region, but it matters now. Israel is the undisputed superpower of the region, and no one quite knows what that means. It still seems to behave like a small country under siege. It seems to be the only actor on the regional stage not to understand its own strength and newfound position.It's time for the Jewish state to take control of its story, to tell friends and enemies and everyone in between what it wants for itself and for the region, what its goals are for Gaza's better post-war future, what kind of regional order it hopes to help build with any ally who wants to cooperate. It's time to start thinking bigger and more long-term than the current war, which on many fronts has already been won.This episode is sponsored by the American Technion Society. With Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah degraded, what technologies will Israel need to defend itself in a new Middle East? Every day, groundbreaking research from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology is transformed into real-world defense tech that protects Israel and saves lives. From Iron Dome to Iron Beam, drones to satellites, and cybersecurity to supercomputers, fundamental science born in Technion labs is brought to life by visionary Technion alumni serving in the IDF and defense industries giving Israel its qualitative edge.If you love Israel and want to keep it safe, boost its economy, and strengthen its people, investing in the great minds, discoveries, and inventions that come from the Technion is a phenomenal way to make a bigger impact on Israel’s future and ensure its safety. Join us. Visit ats.org/haviv.Please join us on Patreon to support this project: ⁠https://www.patreon.com/AskHavivAnything⁠.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail]⁠.Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Hello, everybody. Welcome to Ask Habib Anything. This episode is a comment. It is September 14. I am on a North American speaking tour. I'm coming to you from a hotel room in L.A. And I want to talk about the strike, the strike in Qatar, in Doha, by Israel, attempting to take out some of the political leadership of Hamas that is sitting in Doha, that is, frankly, telling Hamas fighters in Gaza not to release hostages, that is continuing. the war that is managing and taking credit for terror attacks against Israelis. And Israel launched this air strike. Now, we now know five days after that the airstrike was a dismal failure. It took out some minor people in the delegation, not the leadership of Hamas in Doha. It killed the

son of Khalil al-Haya. But it did not actually decapitate the organization's political branch as it was meant to do. The diplomatic fallout, however, was extensive. The Americans were angry. The Saudis, the Emirates, they weren't just upset by this attack. They despise Qatar. Qatar pushes throughout the region ideologies that are illegal, literally illegal, in Saudi Arabia and Muslim Brotherhood ideologies, support for terror groups and terrorism, the actual acts of terrorism. Israel has a profound not love-hate relationship so much as a respect-hate relationship with Qatar. Qatar is the chief ideological funder of the ideologies that are pursuing Israel at every corner and with which Israel has been at war for two years on multiple fronts. And Qatar is also a mediator and an American ally.

And somebody the Israelis have felt the need to play nice with for years and years and years. And so this blowback where the UN, European governments, the American Trump administration have all suddenly been very angry with Israel, frustrated with Israel, even if they've been more polite about it or closer to Israel while expressing these frustrations as in the Trump administration, the Israelis were, I think, surprised by that blowback. But the most important blowback came from the Saudis who visited Doha, who visited Qatar on solidarity missions to show their support for the Qataris, who until four years ago they sanctioned. They literally sanctioned for what they described as support for terror and destabilization in the region. Something is happening. Something is shifting. And Israel is not really watching and understanding. what is shifting in the regional attitude toward Israel.

And what I think is really interesting about that is that it isn't bad news. Something is shifting in the attitude toward Israel that is a direct function of Israel's wild and astonishing and rather unexpected success in this broader war. Not in Gaza, but certainly with Iran, certainly with Chisbalah. Israel is in a new position. A fork in the road.

It has to make decisions about what it is in this region, how it behaves in this region, how it tells its story of its position in this region. And I want to talk about that today. Before we get into it, I want to tell you that this episode is sponsored by the American Technion Society. Technion is the marvelous, astonishing technical university, the MIT of Israel in Haifa. With Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah degraded, what technologies will Israel need to defend itself in a new Middle East? Every day, groundbreaking research from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology is transformed into real-world defense tech that protects Israel and saves lives, from Iron Dome to Iron Beam, drones to satellites, and cybersecurity to supercomputers. Fundamental science born in Technion Labs is brought to life by visionary. technion alamni, serving in the IDF and defense industries, giving Israel its qualitative edge.

If you love Israel and want to keep it safe, boost its economy, strengthen its people, investing in the great minds, discoveries, and inventions that come from the Technion is a phenomenal way to make a bigger impact on Israel's future and ensure its safety. Join us. Visit atts.org slash haviv, H-A-V-V-I-V-V-V. Folks, I love that ad, if I may, because I'm very proud of Israel, and I'm proud of Israel's technological prowess, and I'm proud of what Israel knows how to do when war comes. I also want to tell you before getting into it that we have a Patreon community,

and I want to thank our Patreon community for your stimulating debates, for your demands for answers, which help produce episodes, ideas and some of the content in our episodes and help inform our thinking. All of the content of this podcast is free. None of it's behind a paywall. It's all about getting our story out there. But if you join the Patreon, you can suggest episode topics. You get access to some exclusive content, mostly a monthly live stream where you ask me

questions directly and I answer. And you can send in questions or comments that we read following each episode. You can join our Patreon community at Ask Habiv Anything. on Patreon. And now let's get into it. The strike was unexpected. Nobody quite knew it was happening. The Israelis also went to great lengths to prevent anybody from being able to warn the Qataris ahead of time because the Qataris were obviously going to warn Hamas ahead of time. They are close allies, ideological, religious allies on top of everything else. And what ended up happening was that the United States, sent com, the American military president,

in the Middle East, has the capability to track Israeli actions in a way that nobody else in the region really can. And it saw the missiles being launched. Now, we apparently know from reports that it was from over the Red Sea, so there wouldn't be much time for the Americans to do something, to warn the Qataris. But Sentcom did see it. And Sentcom immediately called the White House, and the White House immediately President Trump called Whitkoff, and Whitkoff called the Katari. official, I believe it was the prime minister, and couldn't reach him once, and so he called again, reached him the second time. By then the missiles had already struck. So the Israelis really did everything they could, not just to hide this from Qatar's potential Middle Eastern allies,

but even to prevent the Americans from being able to give the Qataris a heads up. And that highlights the complexity of an Israeli strike on Qatar, which doesn't exist in an Israeli strike on, for example, a Hezbollah position in South Lebanon, or a Syrian military position in Western Syria. And that complexity is that Qatar is a very close American ally, a major non-NATO ally, which is a very high ally status conferred on them by the Biden administration. Al-Uded Air Force Base, the largest American military presence in the Middle East, is in Qatar, and not for nothing. The Qataris hope that the ability to have, that American military presence, protects them from any potential adventurism by much larger

states that surround them, whether it is the Israelis in terms of sheer military power. But, you know, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Qatar is a tiny, tiny little peninsula with 300,000 citizens, something like that, surrounded by much, much larger people's, much, much more powerful governments and militaries. And so it is very good friends with anyone it can be friends with. But Qatar is also one of the great advocates and funders of the radical jihadi ideology in the region through its major organ of information war, Al Jazeera. Part of Al Jazeera's function is real journalism, and a great part of Al Jazeera's function is advancing Muslim Brotherhood ideology in the region. Yusuf al-Karadawi, the preacher from Egypt, from the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, since the 60s was a Qatar.

citizen and when the new emir, Sheikh Hamad, after deposing his father in 1995 in a bloodless coup, within a year, establishes Al Jazeera and begins to platform figures like Yusuf al-Qaradawi, radical preachers who become staples and household names, sharing their vision of Islam throughout the Arab world. And Al Jazeera becomes a real revolution in Arab media. It's critical of regimes. it is critical of corruption, it is critical of the weakness of the Arab world, but always in ways that serve the Muslim Brotherhood, always in ways that serve a certain radical revolutionary branch of Islam. And so the Qataris are both close friends and profound ideological enemies of the West, of America,

in ways that are very hard for Westerners to see. I don't know why, it's not actually hard to see, but the Qataris make sure to be useful. They're also unbelievably wealthy from natural gas wealth, essentially. They have a half a trillion dollar sovereign wealth fund, and it's heavily invested in Western countries. They not only hire people who they think will be influential going forward, whether that's in British politics or in American politics, Attorney General Pam Bondi of the United

States, was a registered Qatari lobbyist before taking the position of Attorney General, or in recent years. They do that even with Israeli officials. It's hard to come to the Americans and complain about that when, in fact, there's now a major scandal in Israel about which Israeli officials and to what extent were essentially on the Qatari payroll. And so you have this country that's this very complex,

not so much an enigma, as playing all sides of a great many different conflicts, a great many different loyalties. And it hosts Hamas's leadership. It also advocates for and protects Hamas' leadership. And it has also, according to Israeli media reports that Israelis generally believe, has been telling Hamas not to release hostages at various points and helping Hamas maximize the advantage of the negotiations.

The Qataris are not on Israel's side. They're not a mediator so much as a protector of Hamas. They're simply the place that Hamas sits, avoiding Israeli strikes essentially, while the talks go on about releasing hostages. It's hard for an Israeli to have any sympathy for that or to think that that's something that they need to somehow profoundly respect. But then Israel struck, and it discovered that it had just created a huge political problem

for genuine allies, the Americans, the Emirates, the Saudis, people who, even if they don't currently say that they're allies, both Israel and they want to be allies in the future. I want to explain the nature of these concerns, and I want to explain what they tell us about this Israeli moment, as I see it. Israel looks to the Gulf states, and this is something that everybody who talks right now to golf officials, who messages them in DMs on Twitter or on WhatsApp,

here's the same thing. Israel has gone a little trigger-huff. happy. The bombings in Syria began this story. Israel taking out Hezbollah makes perfect sense. This is an enemy that vows constantly to destroy Israel. And the leader Nasrallah spent a generation, basically mocking Israel, taunting Israel, and declaring that Israel would be destroyed. The Iranian regime was arming and had parades through the streets of Tehran talking about the destruction of Israel, and spent vast money building proxies and handing Hezbollah 200,000 rockets and missiles

and production facilities for more just to destroy Israel. And so when October 7 resulted in a much broader Israeli war on that entire array of enemies that enabled Hamas to pull off in October 7, that made sense in the region. Very, very few people in the region Shedatir when the Israelis humiliated the Iranian regime,

humiliated the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, took out their leadership, neutralized their air defenses, and smashed their nuclear program. There just was not a lot of sadness in the region for that. Even people who hate Israel. Even people deeply radicalized by the Gaza War. Generally in this region, we're also afraid of Iran. And so even hating Israel wasn't a reason not to be kind of okay with the Israelis taking out the Iranians. But then something else happened.

In February, attacks on a suburb of Damascus, a Jews community living in a suburb of Damascus, triggered a lot of concern among the Druze of Israel. They're co-religionists. And then in July, what appeared to be a major offensive against the Druze in Swayda in southern Syria was underway, and the Jews of Israel essentially went apoplectic entirely understandably. Horrific images were emerging from Swayda, terrible atrocities. And hundreds of Druze young people just literally cross the border in order to go help save the Druze of southern Syria. And Israel, responding to a request from the

Druze, who are a very loyal community, very close to the Jews, serve with the Jews. My direct platoon commander in the army was Druze. I personally can reflect the views of most Israeli Jews when I tell you feel a great loyalty to the Druze. that is reciprocating a great loyalty they have shown also to us fighting alongside us in the IDF over the years. And Israel went to the skies to defend the Druze of Southern Syria. And many, many people in the region think that Israel kind of misunderstood the moment because the Jews of Southern Syria were not only victims, they were also perpetrators. Drew's militias were also carrying out a few of the atrocities that were coming out on videos.

That doesn't mean that the victims among the Jews weren't victims. they absolutely were. That doesn't mean that the Syrian government isn't led by a man, Al-Julani, who has in the past forcibly converted villages of Christians and Jews to his brand of radical Sunni Islam. It's possible for all the things to be true all at once, but it was complicated. And Jolani, in the meantime, does want a peace with Israel and also needs to consolidate power in Syria in order to have a stable state that can even make that peace. And the Trump administration is interested in him succeeding in doing so.

and the Israelis, it turns out, are interested in him succeeding in doing so. And yet the Israeli attacks meant to stop the offensive against the Jews didn't limit themselves to the Syrian forces in the south in Swayda. But they included military HQ in Damascus, humiliating the Jolani regime. A lot of people in the region saw that and said, wait a second, we understand Hezbollah, we understand Iran, We certainly understand the strikes against the Houthis. That was directly in response to Houthi ballistic missile attacks on Israel.

Why Humilié Julani? A man who's ruled Syria only since December when Assad fled and was openly discussing peace with Israel. Maybe Netanyahu had gotten a little trigger happy. And then the attack in Doha happened. A couple months later. Here's the thing. A lot of pundits from the Middle East

Palestinian analysts, for example, connected it to America's support. In other words, Doha thought it was protected by the American umbrella. It had this immense American military base. Well, it turns out the American umbrella is worthless. They tried to create that schism to push the Americans slightly further out of the region. Others, other analysts from the Gulf states, said, well, if the Israelis will attack Doha, which is not an enemy of theirs,

It's profoundly an ideological enemy, and it hosts and protects their enemies. And Israel was targeting the people being hosted, not the actual Qataris. But nevertheless, it is a violation of the sovereignty of Qatar, and Qatar is not an enemy state of Israel's. What would stop them attacking us, the Saudis, or us the Emirates? These are all voices that we heard, and I have to say I had a hard time taking these voices seriously. No, the Emirates are not next. No, the Saudis are not next.

That's patently absurd. That's ridiculous. The Israeli fantasy and dream is to have a great regional normalization, now that our enemies are weakened with moderate Arab states, with Arab states that are willing to live with us here, are willing to just have us live not on our sword every day of the week. In the Emirates, the peace is real. Israeli businesses are running, up and running, and thriving in the Emirates.

Tens of thousands of tourists. My family, going on vacation, flew through the Emirates. It's become a hub for Israelis traveling to the rest of the world. And Israelis are not about to strike them. That's not a thing. But then I was informed that the actual Emirati concern is not literally that they're next.

it's that the Israelis are stupid and this is a much smarter and more serious concern what if Israel is a one-trick pony what if Israel is actually led by a political class that can't shake off the sense of siege that has essentially that October 7 triggered that an Iranian policy of two decades triggered that Hezbollah's 200,000 missiles and rockets triggered

but which has now been shattered. Israel is no longer under siege. Israel is now a regional hegemon. If it still thinks of itself as a victim, if it still thinks of itself as a besieged polity, then it's a fairly foolish political class sitting on top of a phenomenally competent and powerful air force. That's a destabilizing combination.

What if you can't actually expect the Israelis to be smart in regional affairs? What if Israel, unlike the UAE, for example, and this is something that one Emirati analyst wrote, has extremists in its government and can't find ways in its political system to sideline the extremists in order to advance a more coherent and stabilizing foreign policy in the region? Specifically, we're talking about the parties of Bitzalas Motrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, who fantasize about kicking every Gaza and out of Gaza and returning there as Israeli settlers and building massive settlements. But what if they guide the government, they limit Netanyahu's ability to have a

more open policy toward the region? And in fact, what if the Israelis cannot be trusted to be wise? What happens then? Where does normalization? Where does this whole gambit to have this grand alliance of conservative moderate Sunnis with the Jews, where does that stand? This is not theoretical. The Emirates, the Saudis especially, who want to advance to normalization, but their population has been watching Al Jazeera report directly from Hamas, a great deal of Hamas' messaging and propaganda in this war, a great deal of the radicalizing imagery of horrific victims of the war,

war. Imagery that happens in every war, but nobody sees, including in the Arab world, images from Sudan. The focus on Gaza, the intense narrative built out of this war about Gaza, has not just radicalized young people in the West against Israel. It's profoundly and more affected Middle Easterners who see it more closely, directly, all the time, constantly, on their television through Al Jazeera, among others, but primarily Al Jazeera. The Saudis and the Emirates and the Bahrainis and the Sudanese and the Moroccans and the Jordanians and the Egyptians, they've all been saying the same thing to the Israelis. To paraphrase, to expand regional normalization, to expand the Abraham Accords to Oman, maybe Kuwait,

that was not something the Kuwaiti said, but certain Israelis off-record have said it. to expand the window for normalization. Israel had to create a political window for those who want to normalize. And how do you create a political window? You talk about, you commit to a good after-war situation, post-war, the day after, as it's called, for Gazans, for Palestinians, independence from Israeli military rule, of some kind, just enough to create the political window so that the Saudis can say this is something we're not doing against the Palestinians. But in fact, it's giving the Palestinians something. It's advancing their cause in some way.

The Emirates have, for example, pulled Netanyahu away from annexing pieces of the West Bank, and the Emirates came forward and said, the condition when we made this deal, this normalization, the Abraham Accords, when we signed on to a peace between our two nations, the way the Emirati sold it to the Middle East is we prevented the promise of annexation that Nizhenyao had in his September 2020 campaign. We headed that off. We gave the Palestinians that window.

We prevented Israeli annexation. If you annex now, you have undermined our own internal logic for this agreement and alliance. I don't think the Emirates thinks that their own national security and future strategic interests should depend on Israel and on Palestinians. But they need the political window. Is Israel capable of giving it to them?

It's not a small thing that they need that political window. It's not because they are cowards and can't just say, we're going to detach our interests from the Palestinian interests. I'm responding here to an Israeli discourse, especially in the Israeli right, that doesn't understand why they care so much. The Emirates, the Saudis, they'll welcome Asa back into the Arab League after killing 600,000 Sunnis.

Why the desperate concern in Gaza, where the death toll is a tenth of that? And the answer is actually simple. It's the radicalization itself. When an Israeli asks why the world cares so much about Gaza, when it cares so little about other conflicts, larger conflicts, conflicts with ten times the casualties like Syria,

or five times the casualties, like, just of hunger, just of hunger deaths, like Yemen. The entire death toll in Gaza five times is Yemen's hunger deaths by pretty good international estimates. And yet the Gaza war gets thousandfold coverage to anything those wars got and those wars got coverage and the Gaza war is just ubiquitous

and overwhelming and creating a new civic identity and religion in the West and in the region. Why? Sudan is underway now. There's vastly more suffering there and yet only Gaza gets the attention. And the answer is complex

but also simple. Well, Israelis are often told that the reason for this obsession with Israel, with Gaza, is that we hold Israel to a higher standard. Okay. Then why do the Saudis have the same thing? Why is the Middle East in the same way

focused obsessively about Gaza? They also are holding Israel. The Qataris turn Al Jazeera into a constant Gaza propaganda pumping machine because they hold Israel to a higher standard? Or is there something especially angering to the Muslim and Arab imagination about Israel specifically, especially radicalized Salafist jihadi ideologies of the type that Qatar propounds and offers up on the world stage. Nobody who claims that it's about higher standards and not about bigotry against Israel specifically in Jews really means it.

The Middle East, therefore, young people in the Middle East have been radicalized in their television screens and in their phone screens on only this war, because they only see this war. And this is the only war that they are asked to look at because the information environment of the Arab world is controlled by certain agendas, certain elites, certain algorithms, certain governments, powerful groups.

The Muslim Brotherhood regime of Qatar is a big one that makes sure that only the ideologically correct and convenient war is visible. And in this deeply radicalized information environment, where the Israelis have basically crashed and lost utterly the information war, those who would swim upstream against that to deepen ties with Israel, because they want the very forces radicalizing the world against Israel to lose because the radical Salafist ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood has destroyed everything it has touched in the Middle East, because they know that Israel isn't going anywhere,

and integration is better. Integration is, by the way, more moderating of Israel than exclusion, siege, and forever war. For all of those reasons, they're swimming upstream to nevertheless deepen the relationship with Israel. even at a time of anti-Israel radicalization, and they need the political window. Can Israel provide that political window? Can it say that the purpose of the Gaza war is a better future for Gaza? It is safety for Israel, obviously.

That's the number one priority of Israel. But that will be achieved in great part through a better future for Gaza. The allies, including the Americans and the British, and the Russians leveled German cities in World War II, demolished infrastructure at vast scales. But the point was to remove Nazism, no matter how dug in it was, and then build a new, better Germany, happier, freer,

as German as it ever was, but different. If that's the goal in Gaza, then all the destruction needed to remove 500 kilometers of tunnels in a 40-kilometer territory, all the demolition, all the death, all the suffering, all the warfighting is valid, morally, is validated morally. I don't mean every airstrike, I'm not getting into the moral debates about warfighting, but the fundamental idea that you can have a terrible war, but the goal is the better day after. that basic idea legitimizes a great deal of the suffering along the way.

That's true in the most moral wars that have ever been fought. Sometimes the enemy imposes vast costs and everybody has to pay them because the alternative of leaving the enemy in place is worse over the long term even than these costs. That's the political window Israel has to open. No, the Palestinians won't remain under Israeli military rule forever. Yes, Gaza will be reborn

into a new day and a new dawn without Hamas in which it is basically a beautiful coastal emirate with natural gas off the coast. Nothing except Hamas prevents that new day for Gaza. Certainly not Israel. That's the story Israel needs to tell to open the political window for these great alliances to move forward

even at a time of terrible radicalization against Israel. Instead of that power, shaping of the narrative. What we've seen from Israel is the opposite. Either total muteness, inability to say anything as some, the latest insane libel screams its way across the world, or explanations for why Israel shouldn't actually create the narrative, shape the environment, the information environment. For example, Israeli leaders have argued that the inability to explain what they want after the war in Gaza

isn't because of political limitations because Netanyahu is scared of what Smotrich and Bengvir will say or if they leave his coalition and his government could fall. It's because it's too early to say what should happen the day after. You can't, for example, and some of these points are absolutely correct, you can't get up and announce that the Saudis will come in after the war, publicly and directly. And then immediately after announcing that the Israelis plan on the Saudis coming in,

then go to a Gaza city operation that will have many deaths and terrible images in Al Jazeera. Because then the Saudis are tarred with those images, and that actually closes the ability of the Saudis, that window for the Saudis to come in after. You make the Saudis complicit in every bombing that comes after the statement. That's absolutely right. That's true. That's a valuable argument. That's an important idea. But it's not an answer to the question. If you notice, the question is not how Israel intends to achieve its goals for post-war Gaza,

which ally, when, how it, and what timetable, and who's responsible for the Israelis continuing the war or telling the Israelis that they'll take care of it, they'll clean up after the Israelis break everything. Nobody's asking that. We're not asking to explain how the goals are reached. Just what are the goals? What is the intention? Now, Netanyahu has begun to speak on this, hesitatingly to podcasts and more than any, you know, mainstream legacy media. He's begun to speak on this in English to the world, and that's a really good thing.

But it's still not a lot. It's not, Israel does not engage in the information war. As I've said several times, including on this podcast, Nizeniao doesn't even have an English language spokesman. Never mind a serious information war capability. Folks, it's not just about convincing the anti-Semitic nucleus of the organized activist organizations against us, against Israel's existence. We're not going to convince them. You're not supposed to convince them. Israelis themselves are divided on the war, on the intentions of the government. What is Israel's actual voice when Israel is a democracy with many voices?

but Israel has a tremendous number of friends and allies in the world who have faced wave after wave of libels and, you know, not all of it has been lies and libeles. Real mistakes. Real powerful mistakes that killed people. Images that are horrible, which even if that particular airstrike is justified, the image is still horrible. And even if an algorithm built-in ideological manipulation is driving the image to every phone in the West, The image is still horrible.

If Israel could just respond to the libels quickly, seriously, with good information, it wouldn't have changed the mind of anyone said against it, but it would have been a little bit easier for allies who were exhausted at the latest libel having to wait four days before something comes out of Israel that explains something. In Israel, they can say, no, this was a real mistake. We'll hold on to those friends. But we don't have that information war apparatus and 23 months of war. Haven't let anyone in government.

Ministers who do nothing. A minister of heritage. A minister of diaspora who doesn't deal with a diaspora in any way. Ministers of defense switched out for political loyalty. Nobody in politics, nobody in the leadership who has lifted a finger to deal in any way with information war. And so we have an Israel that doesn't just not tell the story of this war to allies, to prospective allies, to current allies. This isn't even a government that tells the story of this war to Israelis. I've talked a lot about how Netanyahu would go months at a time

without giving a single interview in Hebrew, not even to Channel 14, which loves him. He just didn't speak. And huge amounts of Israelis, probably half. Don't trust him on his handling of the war. They suspect that he's handling the war based on his political needs to satisfy Smotrich or Benvir, that he might be leaving hostages to rot in dungeons. I have said many times, and I still think this, that that is not correct. I think that the decisions he is, I can't specifically to speak to every decision, and it is in the nature of leadership sometimes to conflate your own need with what you think is actually, truly, honestly, authentically, you come to believe that what you happen to need politically

is also the right policy. There's no way around that. It's just a function of the psychology of politics, and it'll happen in every war with every leader. But also that Netanyahu's general vision of how to handle the hostage question has not been completely foolish or utterly malign and politicized.

But the Israelis who came to the opposite conclusion that he in fact is, Netanyahu earned that distrust, and it's a catastrophic distrust if you're worried about public morale in this country, in a country at war. The story of this war isn't being told to Israelis, and it isn't being told to Israel's friends, and it isn't being told to regional allies. And that brings me to the meaning of the Doha operation. Western allies and friends need an Israeli story about Gaza's future to hold on to. To stand in the whirlwind in a way that Israelis can scarcely comprehend because Israelis don't live out there in the world. They live safely ensconced in Israel and Israeli discourse.

Middle Eastern allies need an Israeli story to hold on to as well. But with Middle Eastern allies, it's more interesting than that. They don't just need the political window opened for normalization on the Palestinian question through a day after with Gaza or an Israeli statement about ultimately Palestinian independence being a goal. They need that. I've talked a lot about that already. But one thing they need, especially after Doha, especially after Syria, is to understand what the heck this new Israel actually is. It's this regional power of stupendous capability. 23 months ago, on various podcasts and live streams and public talks, I said again and again and

again, Israel is a country of immense power. It hasn't used or shown a sliver of its actual capabilities. If you knew Israel deeply, institutionally, you knew the culture of its soldiers, the culture of its civic society, its stability. If you knew even just a little bit, the culture, the political culture of our enemies, if you obsess about the destruction of Israel in the Middle East, if you spend some crazy percentage of your GDP on the destruction of Israel, even if you don't actually share a border with Israel or have any interest in Israel, strictly out of religious doctrine, you're probably also, that correlates very well with being a catastrophically

incompetent state. The Iranian state today is failing to provide running water to most Iranian provinces in the middle of a drought. It hasn't spent the last 25 years building good water infrastructure. It's spent its entire energies and psychology and mental bandwidth on crazy imperialist wars to destroy the Jews, on vast billions, untold billions spent on proxies, all kinds of garbage and stupidity. I said that we are strong and our enemies are weak. And October 7 woke us up. It woke us up to the self-destructive nature of the ideology on the other side of

Hamas of Chisbalah. We had always thought they were deterred because we had tremendous firepower. we discovered on October 7 that they were not deterred, that their plan was to use our firepower to absorb the destruction on their side and that that was how they were going to hurt us. We discovered, in other words, that they're totally undeterable.

You cannot deter a suicidal person. And we discovered, therefore, that we had to actually remove them. And so, I said, there will be a war in the north with Chisbalah. And there will be a war with Iran. and I didn't know if it was going to take two years or five years, but a long war has just begun. We are now 23 months later.

Even the keenest optimists, most focused and deeply aware of Israel's amazing strength. It's like when scientists talk about potential energy and kinetic energy, the potential strength was all there. and when faced with our enemies' fantasies for our future, their plans for us, the Israelis stood up and realized all of that potential and shattered Hezbollah and humiliated the Iranian regime and changed the face of the region and showed its strengths more spectacularly than any of us had ever dared hope. And now Israel's enemies are shattered. lie broken licking their wounds trying to understand trying to create for themselves a new story after this spectacular defeat these are regimes and organizations that defined themselves by the promise that they had the religious secret sauce to finally destroy the jews

now they have to explain where they went wrong not just tactically and not just strategically but religiously i should just say as an aside gaza of course has the exception. Gaza is not a spectacular fast victory with very low civilian death toll and a very high death toll of Israel's very clear targets. But Gaza is an exception for a very simple reason that is not an indicator of Israeli weakness. Chamas holds our hostages and their own population hostage. Hamas is built in Gaza for 17 years the largest, most comprehensive bomb shelter system in the history of warfare. That's what those tunnels are. And not a single Ghazin has been allowed to step foot into those tunnels into that bomb shelter system in 23 months of war. The point is for the Ghazans to die. That's the Hamas strategy. It has no other strategy, not for surviving this thing and not for

imposing costs on Israel. Now, at that scale of tunnel use, at that scale of that kind of suicidal strategy. No one has ever tried that, not even close to that scale. And so it's a different kind of war. A war the Israelis are learning. A war, Hamas itself is adapting all the time. So yes, it's different. But the costs to Gaza of that Hamas strategy, they make it hard to define the situation in Gaza as a victory for Hamas. So even there, that very choice, of that strategy is a sign of weakness. Now, whereas, Hamas survives because it is the weakest of Israel's enemies and therefore made a decision to pursue a strategy that is almost entirely centered on

civilian death. And therefore, the Israelis really are in a pickle. They really have to develop new strategies and ways of fighting wars because that really is a problem. None of that existed with Iran, Chisbalah, or the Houthis. Mass suicidal Islamism is making it stand in Gaza. It has been shattered everywhere else where it wasn't literally holding its population hostage. I think Chzbollah planned for something similar in Lebanon, but wasn't able to get it done because the Israelis moved in too fast. And now it's done. And Israel's enemies are shattered and broken. And they're licking their wounds and they're trying to understand how you forge a new story after this defeat. And that presents the Israelis with a new

problem. What does it mean to be a great power? The Israelis don't see themselves as victors, in part because of the situation in Gaza. As long as the other side holds hostages, how are you the grand victorious superpower? Yes, 80% of the hostages are home. Yes, there was never going to be an easy way for Hamas to give the last hostage over. It doesn't feel like power. It doesn't feel like we're a great superpower. It feels like we're kind of victimized and under siege by all these enemies. And we don't notice that despite the genocidal rhetoric against us, which is now expanded to a great many audiences in the West, our real world enemies on the ground are broken. And so, yes, they're not. And so, yes,

There are these factors that make us really surprised at our strengths, really surprised to find ourselves the superpower, or to discover that the Emirates and Saudis are looking at us in saying, we're so glad they took out our mortal enemies. We wish they destroy Hamas, who are another kind of mortal enemy within Sunni Islam. But what if they themselves aren't trustworthy? What if they themselves aren't competent?

What if they themselves get drunk on power? What if they themselves are so beholden to their own extremists? Remember that in Saudi Arabia and in the Emirates, the Muslim Brotherhood is illegal. It is literally prescribed. What if they're so enamored with their own extremists or their politics can't sideline their extremists in ways that make them foolish,

that make them unable to act intelligently, competently, coherently, in ways that stabilize the region? What is Israel's story as a superpower? as a country that can topple the Assad regime, humiliate chaminay and shatter Chisbalah. What is its story? When does it strike and when does it not strike? And how do you know what to expect?

It's okay to be unpredictable. It's not okay to be foolish. How do you project the one without projecting the other? How do you tell the story of the regional order you want to build together with those allies? from this position of immense strength, of new alliances. The new day in the Middle East has already arrived. We're already in the new Middle East. Qatar is hated.

And all of these shows of support and solidarity don't change the fact that the Saudis are more scared of the Muslim brothers than of the Israelis making mistakes. But we're still working from an old script. Israel has not yet realized that you don't respond to libel, to conspiracy theory, to the enemy's story, by attacking it, undermining it, challenging it, saying, no, actually you're wrong. You'd respond to an enemy's story by telling your own story, telling your own story. telling your own story of Gaza's better future, telling your own story of Palestinian independence from Israeli military rule,

because that's not forever. It must not be forever. Telling your own story of a region that doesn't have to be destroyed and demolished and failed at everything. Chisbalah was destroying Lebanon, demolishing it from within. Iran's regime is the greatest curse that country has ever suffered. telling that story of a better region a region with examples of success and strength telling the story in america of the gaza war as the story of the allies against the germans you're not going to convince the people dedicated to your destruction but you can hold on to the friends that we're losing we're not telling our story not to a story not to a

Israelis who don't know what's happening in that war, why it continues. Israelis have never experienced a war that's gone on this long, and its government refuses to tell the story. And many of its ministers are constantly dealing with the same old petty politicking that we had before October 7, when the country was at each other's throats. What is the story of this war Israelis want to know? And they don't trust because they don't hear an answer. What is the story of this war?

The Emirates want to know, after already having put all their chips down on us, bed on us in a big way, and the Saudis want to know before betting on us, and our friends in the West want to know. It's time that we tell our story. We're still going to hunt our enemies for all time. If you helped with October 7, if you carried out October 7, if you were part of the massacre that sought to be a harbinger of greater massacres still and promise more massacres, we're going to get you.

Every one of those Hamas leaders will die. But so what? That's a sideshow. We're a regional superpower now. What do we want? What do we want for the Middle East? What do we want for Israel? What do we want for Palestinians?

The weird thing about being a superpower is that if you know what you want, there's a pretty decent chance you're going to get it. So it's time we answer those questions for ourselves so that we can answer them for everybody else. Thank you for joining me.