Breaking History - BONUS: Haviv Rettig Gur on Israel’s Strike and What Comes Next

Episode Date: June 13, 2025

The world woke up today to a changed Middle East. Israel struck key nuclear and military facilities throughout Iran. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowed retaliation. And Donald Trump urged Iran to agree to a nuclear deal. As Iran begins its counterattack with a missile barrage, we’re left with many questions. What actually happened on the ground in Iran? Did Israel’s strikes secure its safety? Does this spell the end of the Iranian regime? And what role will the U.S. play in the unfolding war? Breaking History’s Eli Lake sat down with Haviv Rettig Gur, one of today’s most insightful Middle East analysts, to make sense of all of it and discuss what could come next. This is a bonus episode. Stay tuned for a full episode of Breaking History this Wednesday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi breaking history listeners, this is Eli. As you can tell from my voice, I have been suffering from a nasty bout of laryngitis But I am back and gaining strength Early on Friday morning as many of you know Israel launched a series of strikes on Iran targeting its nuclear facilities and top military officials I Sat down for a live conversation on Friday with Javiv Reddick Gore I sat down for a live conversation on Friday with Javiv Reddick Gore to make sense of the attacks and its roots over the past years and even century. So what you're about to hear is a recording of that conversation. We really get into some of the important context and history to make sense of this moment,

which I think will be perfect for the Breaking History listeners. And do not despair, a full Breaking History episode is coming in your inbox on Wednesday, so keep an eye out for that as well. And until then, I'll see you next time. Welcome to Free Press Live, and I am so honored to be here with really one of my favorite public intellectuals, Javiv Reddy-Ghor.

Thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for having me, Eli. It's good to be here. So let's talk about last night. You had a wonderful tweet in which you talked about this great line from The Hobbit about how they lived in peace, unaware that they were being watched and protected over. What did you mean by this line? There is evil in the world, some of it is in ourselves, and we are commanded to fight

it within us. But some of it is outside us and must be fought where we find it. I think I've been struck in the last 12 hours. It started 3 a.m. It is now 6 p.m. in Israel, so 15 hours of this Israeli strike against Iran's nuclear program at the enormous, half of my Twitter feed is Hebrew, half of my Twitter feed is English. And these are radically different cultural spaces.

And the surprising thing for me has been the different understandings in these two different spaces. There is the Israeli population right now a majority supports ending the Gaza war for various complex reasons that have to do with trust in the government and with a sense of where's the war going and what can be achieved and can't you know all these little all these things that we can talk about in other words words, they're interesting, but they're not relevant here. But that same number, roughly 70, 75% support, whereas they want to end the Gaza war, they support an Iran strike and they've supported it for many, many months.

And the reason they do that is that they understand that this Iranian regime is actually evil. And a lot of people in the West don't seem to understand that. I saw this particularly ridiculous response by the British Prime Minister Keir Starmer who just put out this pablum about I've heard reports that something happened hours and hours after you know Everything what's going on? But he said there are reports that something happened and de-escalation is the you know, a most important thing right now and it was an

Like an astonishing thing to read this pablum, because there wasn't any real sense that Iran is a regime that actually destroys things and that there are people who pay deep costs without Iran's backing. Assad could not have killed 600,000 Syrians, mostly Sunnis, without Iran's backing. The Yemeni civil war that killed a quarter million people just from starvation just six, seven years ago could not have happened. And so there are costs to not facing down Iran and the refusal, this idea that all things are stability.

And the only goal is, de-escalation is a means, it's not a goal. The goal is safety and security. And sometimes de-escalation serves that goal, arguably usually, and sometimes it doesn't. And so there is evil in the world and we have to face it. And there are people in this world, and I especially think Western Europeans, but a lot of Western

elites, a lot of Westerners who look out at the world and think that whatever the kind of safety you have in America, Canada, Britain, Australia is the safety that all in the world experience just don't understand that the reason that English speakers in this world are safe, the reason that Westerners in this world are safe, is because of American power, is because after World War II America built a new world order in its image that has been the safest, most prosperous, happiest world order in the history of the world, and they're protected by that. So for example, Germany can have a GDP spent,

the percentage of GDP spent on its defense is something like 1.6%. It's now rising above 2% because of Putin. Israel's is 5%, right? And that's a whole different order of magnitude. Now, why could Germany throughout the Cold War never actually need to spend money on its defense? Because someone else was defending it.

So the world is not safe. This piece of the world that looks at us and doesn't understand why we fight is Protected it's protected and it doesn't realize it's protected exactly as Tolkien describes the hobbits They are protected and they've been protected for so long that they forgot that they were protected There's evil in the world and sometimes you have to face it down and that's what Israel is doing right now Because the Iranians will actually come to kill us. They they will do it and so we have to stop it so when When Prime Minister Netanyahu announced the strike He let slip

Information that said they had taken steps. They'd never taken before to weaponize a device. Now we've been covering, you and I, Iran nuclear program for years, and 20 years, I think, for both of us. But explain maybe what the significance of that is, because it's not a... We've known that they have an industrial size capability to enrich uranium to make the fuel for the warhead we know they have the warheads we know they have rather we know they have the missiles this step of weaponization which we assume that they knew and we have proof of that because of the raid in 2018 of the warehouse. Why was that little piece of information in your view significant?

The Israelis came to the conclusion that it's now or never. Basically one simple thing happened over the last year and some. Really since April of last year when the escalation between Israel and Iran began, you saw for the first time an Israeli assassination of an Iranian general, the general of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps in charge of destroying Israel, the guy who's remit was Syria and Lebanon. Israel took him out in Damascus and and he'd been of course the reason the Hezbollah was firing rockets at northern Israel and it emptied Israeli cities and and so Israel took him out and The Iranian response was the biggest drone attack in the history of drones something like 70 drones and another 130 missiles of various kinds

and Then in September October you had Israel taking out Ismail Hanyer the head of Hamas Who was visiting Tehran for the inauguration of the president of the the new president. And then Iran's response was an even bigger attack by genuinely dangerous missiles, some of which actually penetrated Israeli missile defense and hit Israeli cities and Israeli military bases. And so you've had this slow escalation. And it reached the point, I think,

that we basically just came to the conclusion that Israel now had to, it had, during the period of this escalation, Israel had used this back and forth tit for tat to piecemeal, slowly dismantle Iranian air defenses and to develop the possibility, by the way, some of the air defenses was in Syria and Iraq, and also back in November, the air defense systems in Iran itself to develop the possibility to carry out this major strike. This escalation tells us that the schedule that Israel actually put in place for the beginning of this began a year and some ago.

It wasn't last week. But the trigger now was that Iran has been spending almost the entirety of the Biden administration continuing to enrich uranium up to weaponization levels. So going into the Biden administration, Iran had some significant amount of uranium that was enriched to three and a half percent, which is not weaponizable. Under the Biden administration, in that period, it brought it up to 60%. It actually brought it most of the way. The way these percentages work is the amount of enrichment escalates geometrically or something like that. So if you've enriched the uranium to 60% you've actually enriched the uranium 90% of the way to a weapon. And so Iran is now sitting on a huge stockpile

of uranium enriched sufficiently to actually produce multiple bombs. And what the Mossad believes and what the prime minister said that Israel believes is that it was rushing ahead into building those bombs. Why would it rush ahead now? Because in the last year, Israel showed everybody, the region, that Iran is actually incredibly weak. Its entire air defense system had been wiped out. 120 Israeli planes in November were flying freely over Iranian airspace with nothing

able to stop them. They destroyed most of the missile factories of the Revolutionary Guard Corps. Everybody now knows the Iranian regime is fragile, is incompetent. And that means that everybody now understands that Iran has to actually get a nuke to survive as a regime. And so the very thing that made Israel look safer, because Iran was shown to be weak and incompetent, actually made everything more dangerous. And in fact, the Mossad says, Iran was actually rushing to those bombs.

And so we had to act now. Now, the other interesting thing, that component of Netanyahu's message was to the Iranian people. He said, we're not your enemy, your day of liberation is soon. We look forward to a prosperous relationship with Iran, similar to what we saw before the 1979 revolution. And this is a question from one of our listeners, one of our watchers, Becca, what is your assessment? Do you think experts at this point think there's real chance

that you could see the Iranian population rise up as a result of a partial decapitation? And this would appear to be a very serious blow to its Iran nuclear and missile programs. I'll say this. I think Israel would feel that that would be the perfect ideal conclusion to this. That would make this not a tactical success,

but a grand strategic success for the future of the Middle East and the world. However, Israel feels much more limited in a capacity to drive these kinds of dramatic changes within other countries than say in America, right, which is just enormous and powerful and capable of funding and rebuilding and all this stuff. So I don't think that's an Israeli direct specific goal of the war effort. But I have to say we know the huge swaths of this population, most of the population

hates this regime. We only know that it is a population that is undergoing fairly quick secularization and it's undergoing secularization because the regime uses religion as a mechanism of control and so secularization becomes a vocabulary of opposition to the regime. And that's why every major protest movement of the last, I don't know, five, ten years has been about women's headwear, right? Because that's the vocabulary for opposing the dictatorship. So there's a lot that's just, it is again,

6, 10 PM Israel time at 4, 45 PM Israel time on the BBC. They talked to a random Iranian on the street, a BBC reporter brought them on. And the Iranian said said hopefully in on TV Hopefully this will result in the fall of the regime. It is public it is out there Iran is one of the wealthiest countries in terms of natural resources in the world And one of the poorest nations inhabiting one of the wealthiest countries and this regime has shattered the Iranian economy Iranian society drug use is through

the roof, every social problem you can imagine is at catastrophic levels. The Iranian economy has been essentially paralyzed by a massive trucker protests and strikes over the last couple of weeks that the world doesn't report on because it's not one of those sexy issues people report on. But if you actually learn about what's happening within Iran on a regular basis, you follow couple of weeks that the world doesn't report on because it's not one of those sexy issues people report on. But if you actually learn about what's happening within Iran on a regular basis, you follow it, you discover that this regime really is the slow destruction of this nation. And I'll say more than that.

What Israel revealed in its capabilities in Iran and how much Mossad had penetrated Iran, the Mossad isn't magic. If it can build a secret factory to build drones on Iranian soil and then launch those drones at the moment of right when you pull that trigger and that took years and those drones then hit massive missile silos on Iranian soil, that's what happened last night, right? Right. You can't do that without massive deep penetration of Iranian intelligence and massive support on the ground.

And so, so many Iranians want this regime to end. I don't think they know Israel like Israel care, but Israel love Israel, hate Israel. I don't think they're in any way emotionally invested in Israel. They want this regime to end. So it is absolutely a possibility. And it would mean we don't have this thing happening every five years because this regime will never give up on its redemptionist fantasies and conquest fantasies

and the demolition of other nations around it and all these things that it has engaged in. So hopefully is the bottom line. There's good reason to think it, but Israel's not pushing for it. Incidentally, if the West now has a serious, exactly what Russia and China are doing in American elections and all of these social media influence operations, there's no reason the West can't do these things in Iran.

And it would only help the world and it would only contribute to the fall of this regime. I don't think anyone is doing it, but everyone should be doing it. So there could be a grand strategy to do this. I don't think Israel is going to take on that kind of grand strategy. Well, we don't know is, we don't know if there, there, there isn't a leader. There isn't a kind of figure other than, you know, the son of Reza Pahlavi who's in America. But I mean, I have my doubts that he's, he can organize a full kind of opposition.

But what we do know is that there is still an active movement that is a kind of leaderless resistance in Iran. And I have been arguing for years that at the very least we should have a channel to that opposition so that we can talk to them and coordinate with them and know what they want from us. And my hope is that I think that there were steps to do that in the first Trump administration. I am less optimistic that such a thing is happening in this one,

but that would be good advice if there are any Trump administration people watching this, is to find out who the opposition is and start talking to them. All right, I want to move on. I mean, just let me add why the heck not. Yes. What's the downside? And so it should be happening and it should be brazen and should be public and the whole world wants this regime gone. But by the way, if Iran gets that nuke, the Saudis are

not gonna sit by without a nuke and the Turks are not gonna sit by without a nuke. And if that nuclear regime collapses in the Middle East the Taiwanese are Going to look at China and say well, we got a solution to our China problem We need a nuke and why would the Japanese not take it in other words you're looking at the world would be Fundamentally different the day Iran goes nuclear and oh, yeah, there is an interest in bringing down this regime Well, let's talk about I'm glad you brought that up We had in our, you know, it feels like this is a hinge moment, so it's like, you know, it seems like a hundred years

ago, but earlier this week, Tulsi Gabbard, our director of national intelligence, put out a video in which she kind of went through the horrors of a nuclear exchange and said, let's start a movement. We have to make sure this never happens. And then kind of made it seem like the biggest threat to this is the provocation of warmongers to create tensions between nuclear-armed nations. I obviously disagree with the logic of it. But my question is, if you are of this view that the potential of a nuclear conflict is the worst thing and

we should do whatever we can to prevent it, why wouldn't you be cheering the Israelis tonight? You know, I got to tell you, I think that the Gaza war has shaped a lot of the discourse around Israel for the last 20 months, and that makes perfect sense. And people look at that war, which has tremendous civilian costs. And we can discuss it and we can debate it. And I have one view, and my view is totally irrelevant to this point. There are genuine, profound, and painful civilian costs in that war.

The Iran war, and by the way, I also think these costs create massive Israeli responsibility for the future of Gaza and for Israel's now controlling Gaza and territory in this new operation, which is a whole different kind of, it's not a rating war, it's a control of territory war. And so Israel now has responsibilities in Gaza that are enormous. Israel has no responsibilities in Iran. Israel only has to break the thing that is coming for it and trying to destroy it and planning to destroy it and talking constantly, including this very week, about destroying it. And it has the right to break that thing because that thing has already launched hundreds of missiles, of ballistic missiles, at Israeli cities just in the last 10 months.

And has talked for decades about the destruction of Israel. And Israel only has to do that. Now, the idea that people, because of the moral qualms about Gaza, would then look at Iran and say, how dare you, you rogue state? And this is something that one of the editors of the Washington Post tweeted, how dare you, you rogue state, attack Iran? The idea that that would be morally equivalent

is frankly a disservice to Palestinians and what they're going through and what the world needs to be paying attention to there. But also it's just telling Israelis somebody is allowed to come for you for decades and try and destroy you and tell you they're going to grind you down until you're destruction. And you're supposed to sit calmly and be polite.

In other words, if you trust in the rest of the world to diplomatically get you out of this, then you're respectable. And if you don't, you're a rogue state. That's the wrong message to tell Israelis if you want Israelis to listen to you. Iran overstepped. Iran told Israelis out loud, publicly, we're coming to kill you. It funded the October 7 attack. Hamas, we have the letters of Sinwar.

We know this. This is all stuff that's been published in Western press. Hamas got vast amounts of money and tremendous amount of training from Hezbollah and others, which is an arm of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, to actually be able to carry out October. The decision was Hamas' unseen wires, but the training and the capability is quite a bit of it Iranian. And so Iran has absolutely convinced the Israeli public that it's coming for them until their destruction, because of its revolutionary religious sort of ideology and vision. And if you tell the Israelis, sit tight,

this is not legitimate for you to fight this regime in this unbelievably targeted way, then you're telling them something that will remove you from the conversation, not get them to behave differently. So I think that the opposition to this war, because out of an instinctive knee-jerk opposition to anything Israel does ever is

Is done by people who think Israel is some kind of a moral cartoon and not real people living in the real world and Facing a real threat facing real evil these people are excuse my French hobbits Who can't imagine living in the world that Israelis actually have to deal with on a daily basis So there is no rationale for opposing this war. Incidentally, I think Constantine Kissen said it best, the British intellectual and podcaster, where he said, the worst part of World War III is going to be all the emergency podcasts that

are about to drop, right? The whole idea that this is going to be now World War three as though China is going to enter into a nuclear exchange with America in defense of Iran as though China cares about Iran this whole idea that was that was really shopped around by all these people who claim great authority Mearsheimer the professor the anti-israel political science professor in the United States was absolutely convinced Israel was going to get bogged down in Lebanon and be crushed by Hezbollah. And he said it publicly and he really doubled down on it and tripled down. He didn't understand anything that was happening.

By the way, Tan Mir-Shreimer also said there's no way that Russia would be trying to destroy Ukraine and would be like swallowing a porcupine. And he wrote it in the pages of Foreign Affairs. So, putting it out there everybody I mean this idea was pressed by mr. Mears Riemer, right? And so I Israelis don't listen to this They don't take it seriously and the people who do take it seriously take it seriously because it validates their moral feelings Not because it's a serious analysis of what's actually happening in the world

but let's go deeper of Eve because I you're getting at something, I think, that is a paradox about the threat that especially Jews in diaspora feel. There's a line, Tom Friedman recently expressed it in the pages of the New York Times, that the Israeli government is making Jews all over the world unsafe. That the opprobrium directed at Israel for its war in Gaza, at

Israel for whatever you want to say, for those who wrongly say his rogue state attack on Iran, that the Jews here who are not in Israel will pay the price. That's almost kind of reversing the logic of Zionism itself. That a safe haven for the Jews is not for the safety of the diaspora, it is actually to will harm it. But the other thing I would notice is the uptick in anti-Semitism came not after Israel responded to October 7th, but after the worst attack since the Holocaust. And so it seems like there's a kind of weird, almost a Kabuki theater thing going on. When Jews are perceived to be weak, that is when they

are vulnerable to this kind of rise in anti-Semitism. I wonder if this attack, if it is successful, and we don't know yet of how successful it will be, but if this is seen as a military success and Iran cannot really muster much of a response Will that have this kind of effect of? Damping down some of the threats to Jews in America and abroad. I Honestly don't don't know That logic is something that I would be upset at it if I understood it I honestly confess and maybe it's because you know, I went to middle school and high school in America

I that's where the accent is from but I actually have lived the vast vast majority of my life and my entire adult life As an Israeli and I don't actually understand a lot of this discourse to an Israeli the argument that Israeli actions make Jews unsafe is the argument that if you attack Jews out there in the world because you're angry at Israel, never mind that your bigotry isn't the story, the story is the Israeli action must be the problem. Now if we apply this logic to Muslim minorities in the West, we are such obvious raging bigots. The idea that just because a country like Saudi Arabia, Iran Turkey you know so many Muslim countries that have done bad things do bad things and declare themselves to be a

Representatives of Islam and doing those bad things in the name of Islam and you can come up with a thousand examples from the last five years. The idea that that then threatens Muslim diaspora, is that the problem with someone then attacking a Muslim person in America is not the Muslim, is not the attacker's Islamophobia, but is in fact something to do with Turkey, or something to do with Iran. That idea is such patent Islamophobia and bigotry

and justifying and laundering of bigotry What's sad is that jews will express this now? There's been an internalization of the if you look at israel are angry at israel and then attack a jew in in cleveland, ohio That has nothing to do with israel that has to do with them with with the morality plays running around in your head that justify you Uh being a bigot and that's all it has to do with and if if you acknowledge it and if you argue any other argument you validate the anti-Semitism and I don't understand why that's not clear. That's what I'm talking about. I'm making an analytical point. Not you, I'm accusing Tom.

I'm interested in your thoughts on this. I think that there is this Assumption from very naive people who don't know what they're talking about That if only Israel could be more reasonable than its enemies wouldn't hate it so much Whereas I think the reality is When Israel is vigilant and strong and successful it demoralizes the enemies who sadly they're always going to be people who probably... I'm of the view that anti-Semitism is just a

constant in history. And the best you can do is to show it's just not worth it. Why are you even trying? I would say there are two groups. The anti-Israel campaign, absolutely. What it hates about Israel isn't what Israel does It's what Israel is some of it comes from a very particular strain of Islamic thought that says that Israel pushed back Islam and that has to be reversed history must be reversed As part of a redemption of Islam from centuries of weakness and all this other stuff this is the Muslim Brotherhood and many of those theologians and that's what Hamas believes and that's what The Qatari regime believes and a lot of that's what the Qatari regime believes,

and a lot of people funded by the Qatari regime around the world. So yes, they absolutely has nothing to do with what Israel does. These are people who fund genocides in Yemen and Syria and Sudan and places like that, and very much are not concerned about the death toll in Gaza.

They're concerned about the wrong people being strong in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And that I absolutely agree with. But there's another audience, and that audience doesn't feel that what they believe is bigotry, is about what Israelis are. It really does feel like it's... And that's the decent people, the millions of decent people, who see of decent people who see this raging campaign don't understand it for what it is because they don't know the ideology that underlies it, this anti-Israel ideologies that underlie it, and anti-Semitic ideologies that underlie it, and really are responding to images of dead civilians in Gaza.

And so they're two very different groups. Now, if that drives you, the short answer is I'm very optimistic. We have polls of Americans that show that there's a large group, especially of young Americans, responding to images coming out of Gaza by turning on Israel. That's a bad thing, I think. And not turning on Jews. In other words, that is not directly affecting the turning on Jews. There is a radicalized, I don't know if it's fringe, it might be 10% of the American population.

I don't know the exact data and numbers. That is radicalizing and anti-Semitism sizing. Is that a word? I'm deciding to turn that into a word. Turning, you know, just raging anti-Semitic. For example, on the right you have people like Candace Owens, who has found, you know, all kinds of lizard people, conspiracies of Jews in history suddenly. And on the left you have all these other figures, Hassan Piker, the Democratic Party darling, who is this blogger who has just these very anti-Semitic

thoughts and views and statements about Jews, not about Israel. And so you have these people who are radicalizing in an anti-semitic direction. They're not representative of the bulk of American society, but they're loud, and they're increasingly violent and calling for violence and supporting violence. And when someone will burn old Jews at a protest for hostages in Colorado, they will defend that act and demand that we not notice it and focus on it and think about it. So there are two very different trends,

I think, that are happening. And I would just say that American society is strong enough, healthy enough, and can tell the difference as long as the media really does make sure to tell the difference. In other words, criticizing Israel is absolutely legitimate. Goodness knows if it wasn't, I would be out of a job. In Hebrew, I mostly just criticize my country.

And hating Jews for what's happening in Israel is utter and total bigotry and totally illegitimate. And that's pretty clear to most people, unfortunately not necessarily Thomas Friedman. And then, and America needs to stand up and do it. By the way, I don't mean that also as a joke because you have these sense-making elites at places like the New York Times who do struggle to make that distinction. The average American doesn't, but they do. And so they will allow a discourse that validates. The New York Times had this glowing profile of this Hassan Piker who

His anti-semitism somehow never came up and so Anyway, I'll stop there. It's it's a bad discourse and it's a very shallow discourse It's a very polarized and and partisan discourse, which I guess is most American discourses right now But I just want to tell for the live audience several years ago Tom Thomas Friedman wrote a very good book, From Beirut to Jerusalem. It's really later. It's latter Friedman, which is the problem. I just want to point that out. Let's, you know, we all, by the way, this, it's, we have to, just as an aside note, Aviv, I think we're around the same age. We write for a living, we think

for a living. We have to be always just aware that as we age, some of our faculties maybe leave us and it happens. Just look at Gordy Doll in the last decade. Anyway. But that's another conversation. I want to get to now the US-Israel relationship and particularly Donald Trump. There is a story, a wonderful story, I don't know if I believe it when I ask you if you believe it, that all of the tension between the Trump administration and Israel about we don't want you to do this, we're in the middle of these things, the fourth round is coming up in Oman. This really puts me in a spot,

was all an elaborate deception. And in fact, Trump was with Israel the whole time, and this was a way of kind of making sure that the Iranians were kept off guard. First of all, do you believe that? It looks like that was quite a bit of what was happening. I don't know how much it was like conscious, scripted, elaborate, but at some point they did coordinate that and there was a meeting in which the governments both released leaked to the press that they had

disagreed on whether you can strike Iran now and in fact it turns out that in that meeting they had coordinated on the striking of Iran Israel cannot strike Iran without America knowing about it. So CENTCOM can see Israeli planes even when Iran can't see the Israeli planes And so it looks like I don't know exactly how dramatic cloak-and-dagger smoke-filled room kind of scenario was but basically, yeah Okay The only reason that I doubt it is just a basic journalistic rule. If it's too good to be true, it probably is. That just struck me as the best possible explanation that this entire like last three months of like a news cycle where, you know, Tucker gonna meet with this cabinet official and you know,

all the you know the the normal Republicans are being supplanted by the restrainers and all of that for naught it was always like you know Trump a lot it was a good idea which made sense because the Iranians did try to kill him but that's interesting so you think that there is there is something to that I don't think it's a three-month long conspiracy right you know to pretend where Trump pretended to become closer to Tucker. I think it's a two-week plan where they're heading into the six round of talks, which was supposed to begin today.

Iran has officially pulled out, by the way, in the last hour. They're heading into the six round of talks in Muscat in Oman. Steve Witkoff was headed there and Trump 61 days ago said you have 60 days to block this down or I'm letting the Israelis go. On day 61 which happens to be Friday the 13th which I just think for the Trump administration might have been cute and symbolic I don't know there might be a coincidence. Also it's 613 which is the number of mitzvot. I'm not sure that's... I know. I'm just noting... Jewish mystics can find their connections.

I'm just saying, if you're into Kabbalah, it's an interesting date anyway. I'm a student of Maimonides. I'm deeply opposed to Kabbalah. That's it now. I've lost all my friends. I think that this coordination was done, I think it was probably driven and coordinated by Netanyahu, but in other words, the actual coordination of the timing, all of that, but I think Trump was a very willing participant. And I have to say, I have said repeatedly, I have said on a Free Press livestream two weeks ago, that my fear is that Netanyahu is a leader who always chooses the path of least resistance,

has refused, for example, to meet with victims of October 7, is constantly politicking, is cowardly, and is incompetent in various decisions that I disagree with that he made in the Gaza war, and I don't think he can pull the trigger on Iran. Now, I have said that, and I reflected the majority of Israeli public public opinion when saying that and I have to tell you that I was completely mistaken. On this issue which is the issue which he sees as his foundational legacy and has been talking about for 20 years obsessively constantly every day of the week and in speeches before both houses of Congress thumbing his nose at President Obama. On this issue, he has been, we now know, as of last night, he is able, he is courageous, he understands Israeli social resilience and strength of this people that are willing to go to this war with Iran that could be very painful and costly. We did not understand that we had these capabilities and that everything would go off without a hitch,

and maybe things will still turn against us. The enemy always gets to decide how a war goes. But Netanyahu was the man for the moment, and he made the decision that needed to be made. And he managed, I think, to coordinate with Trump to manage that relationship. I think Trump wanted it. I think Trump wants Israel to do the hard, the dirty work. He doesn't want American troops involved,

and he does want this regime gone. But that coordination was something that had to be built and Netanyahu built it. So it's important to give the credit in that way because this is an astonishing historic event, an historic moment. Now maybe it'll all fail and crash and burn but it shouldn't have gone this well already. And so there is really some historic things happening right now that I think are going to change the Middle East forever. Okay so let's let's let's stay on that for a second. I too have criticized Netanyahu. I thought in 2018 when he decided to allow in

two mainstream Israeli politics effectively into a kind of coalition. It's a bar Ben Gavir and Smotrik and a group of people who kind of trace their ideology back to Merkahanah. I thought that that was an absolute betrayal of the legacy of Likud and Menachem Begin and the principled center revisionist Zionism, which I appreciate. However, I do think that you're right, this decision from Netanyahu is the most important thing on his biography. And whatever you want to say about all of these other decisions, including what you said, not meeting with the families, not meeting, you know, not offering to resign after October 7th, deciding that

you could ignore Gaza and allow Qatar to kind of fund Hamas. All of that, which we would agree were poor decisions. This one, does it sort of make up for all of that for the history books? Doubling down on the exemption for service just when everyone else is turning in 300 days of military service for the ultra-orthodox of Israel, Israelis pay 20-30% higher in consumer goods than wealthier West Europeans because of all kinds of protectionist measures that Netanyahu has promised to reform for a decade. There are a thousand reasons to dislike the man.

He has said, test me on this one. And I have always doubted that on this fundamental existential thing, if an Iranian nuke detonates 300 yards above Tel Aviv, none of the rest of his mistakes will matter. Because this will be his only one mistake that matters. Right. And on this question, he appears to be someone who is coming through. Now his detractors, and by the way, it's extremely popular in the Israeli public, as I said, and his detractors will say, yeah, so great.

So you made this decision, now go home. The seat isn't yours, it's the people's and now we want someone else to fix all the other things you refuse to fix. That's a legitimate view. I'm not opposing it. I'm not saying it's right someone else to fix all the other things you refuse to fix. That's a legitimate view I'm not opposing it. I'm not right or wrong any of the other stuff. Yeah, I'm saying on the legacy on this point Yeah, yeah I mean this is the most here and I could give you all the horrible things that Winston Churchill did You know what I'm saying? I mean you can argue that you know, I mean the Dardanelles in World War one

You know his decision basically to starve like, you know, two million people in India during World War II, you can go through the list. There's a lot of bad stuff from Churchill, but he made the one big decision. He was a hundred percent right and that's how we remember him. Right. And I just wonder... This might be that decision. If this is what we're talking about now with Netanyahu. I'll tell tell you the Iranians will never again be able to say to the Middle East, we are the great and fearsome lion, we are the destroyers of Israel, we are the great Shia revolution, that the thing that the Sunnis have failed to do for a hundred years which is kick out the Jews, we will

be able to do. They'll never with a straight face be able to say that in the region and therefore the difference with a straight face going to be able to use that as validation, right? I have this deep frustration with the Western press, a frustration that makes me, you know, I don't always agree with everything I read in the free press, but I love the theory of the free press, which is there is actually a monoculture that is preventing much of elite mainstream media from actually seriously analyzing and thinking through the world. And one of those things that I have been just railing at the Western press reporters here for not doing is seriously looking at Iran, seriously looking at Iran.

Iran is a regime that has no border with Israel, no interest in Israel, and has spent a double digit percentage of its GDP on destroying a country it has absolutely no interest in. Why? What drives it? What motivates it? Now the country that the regime that helped engineer the death of 600,000 Syrians, Palestinian rights are not what motivates it to do that, right? And Gaza is not what motivates, the moral costs of Gaza is not what motivates the Iranian ayatollahs, these people who helped drive the Yemeni Savoor to do that. So what actually does? Let's assume they're three-dimensional serious human beings.

What motivates them? You will not be able to find in the pages of the Washington Post, the New York Times, the LA Times, if you go back, and all of them, excuse me for singling those out, I'm not really apologizing, you will not be able to find a serious deep dive into the basic motivations and historical experiences and ideas that built these regimes and these policies. And so it's something profoundly frustrating to watch from the Middle East how this stuff really isn't talked about in a serious way in the United States. Well, I want to now move on to when let's talk about the sort of roots of what might be the sort of strategic revolution in Israel.

We could look at October 7th, obviously, as a start date, but I'm thinking almost maybe the start date is before even Netanyahu. It's Mayor Duggan. It's the decision to go into the Mossad, and I think 2002, and say, we need to make this agency the number one priority is Iran. And I remember at the time, I'm trying to humble Bragg. He's

no longer with us. I got a chance to meet with Tigran a couple times in my trips to Israel. Very impressive, interesting guy. But at the time he would say the kind of things that Netanyahu says today, talking about how the Iranian people hate the regime. But this focus, how would you, where does this go back to? How would you, where would you, where do you start the timeline? I would, I mean I start the timeline 150 years ago. There you go, let's do that. At the beginning of what, of a process happening, not even in Shia Islam, but in the Sunni Islam, something I try to talk about a lot because I really try and help people open up a window right that they can then fact check me on chat GPT or whatever it is that people do

nowadays, but open up a window into the deep prehistory, so to speak, of Hamas, of these ideas of this obsession of the Middle East with the destruction of Israel. The obsession in the Middle East of so many different ideological factions and groups, Muslim Brotherhood groups and the Sunni side and the Shia Revolutionary groups in Iran and the proxies that it funds and supports, the idea of the destruction of Israel runs very, very deep and to them is a stepping stone on the road to a much larger vision of grand redemption and not just the redemption, not just some kind of simple messianic thing, but really the redemption of Islam from centuries of weakness. 150, 170 years ago, the Europeans

are busily dividing up the Ottoman Empire into zones of control. The British take Egypt, the French take, I believe in 1830, they take Algeria, and they're starting to just chop up Muslim lands and Muslim populations under Western imperial rule. And that begins to drive a profound self-critical examination by intellectuals and theologians and religious leaders in the Arab world, in the Muslim Arab world, who ask themselves what's happening? You know, until now, under Ottoman rule, yeah, it was decrepit, but it was 400 years of stability, basically. What the heck happened that suddenly, it turns out we come out of 400 years of not having to think about whether Islam is strong or not,

discovering that Islam is catastrophically weak and backward compared to this surging, powerful West. And that discourse was public and it was explicit and it was on the books. It's a kind of questioning of what happened to us that if you tried to say to it today in Western academia, you would be run out of town. And really, there isn't the courage

to ask these kinds of questions today in the West. But in Islam itself, there is absolutely the courage. And the answers that these people gave were pietistic answers often. It was people like Aghanim al-Afghani, this theologian in Egypt, who said, if we return to our forefathers in the original Islam, his student, Aghanim Mohammed Abduh, who said, if we in the original Islam, his student, a guy named Mohammed Abduh, who

said if we return to original Islam, the Islam of the first successful generations after Mohammed, and we return to piety, then we will find that inner core of Muslim strength. We will come closer to God because of our piety, and God will then help us take our rightful place in history and solve the geopolitical weakness and the scientific weakness and commercial weakness. And this is a discourse that produces the Muslim brotherhood that says we all return to as pietistic and built on this image of old Islam as we can, and that will drive us forward into a successful future.

And Egyptian society slowly transforms from a very open society where women walk around with pants into a much more closed society where they increasingly don't. And everywhere that these ideas, these pietistic ideas go, they're a discourse about Islamic weakness in the modern age. And they drive a kind of religious conservatism all over the place. The great concern with Islamic weakness focuses very early on already in the 1910s and 20s by these theologians, by someone named Rashid Rida who's working in Cairo and is this very very important and the most influential Sunni theologian of his day, focus in on the Zionist movement and focuses in on what would become Israel.

And the reason is that the Jews of the 1910s, the Jews of the 1890s, the Jews of that whole era are the weakest people in the world. They're these desperate refugees fleeing Eastern Europe, pathetically weak with nothing but the shirts on their backs, and they're building out a national movement that is planting powerful roots in a Muslim land. And to these theologians, that's pushing Islam back. But the problem with the Jews is that they're weak. If the British Empire conquers Egypt, okay, then that's a problem, theologically. Islam should be on top, not on the bottom.

But it's not a terrible problem because the British Empire is at least very very powerful But if the Jews can push back if the Jews of 1905 can push back Islam Then that's a catastrophic signal of Islamic weakness And so everything turns in this profoundly angry and vindictive way on on Zionism and it comes from Theologies of Islamic weakness it doesn't come from Palestinian nationalism Which at the time doesn't yet exist as an idea, as a mobilizing force. So the reason I say all of that is just to say Iran wants to destroy Israel because Israel is the weakest thing that ever pushed Islam back. And a success in destroying Israel would be a signal that Shiism is capable of redeeming Islam from this weakness in a way that's...

Right, where the Sunnis failed. Right, and so there's deep, powerful, old ideas about validity and validation and redemption and the future, if Islam's returned to its rightful place in history, on which the redemption of the world depends if you're a believing Muslim, that drive a politics that is basically genocidal. And if we understand that, they really can't have a nuke. And if we don't understand that and we think that whatever the foreign ministry of Iran put out in a statement last week is the overriding driving truth of the regime, then we're not useful to Israelis who actually face a problem of a regime that has spent, again, a double

digit percentage of its GDP on the destruction of a Country that if you don't see this religious vision you have no understanding of why it's in any way investing in the destruction of that country What I was trying to get at is is sort of this shift in Israeli strategic thinking Because this capability that you're talking about in Iran Israel has the ability to build a drone factory inside the country, the ability to know, you know, the actual schedules of its top military commanders and where they lived, like let alone the precision of these strikes apparently, that are only targeting like one room in an apartment

it's an amazing thing but that I I mean I I would say that starts maybe 23 years ago but I mean I guess but do you have any insight into that as to sort of because I think for a long time Israel's main strategic concern were, you know, obviously Egypt, Lebanon. You had, you know, the secular brand of terrorism, although it was never entirely secular, from Arafat and the PLO. There was a decision, I think, right around the millennium, after Israel withdraws from Lebanon and by the way, I recommend everybody listen to ask have you've anything's great Podcast with Monty Friedman on his on his recent book on the pumpkin flowers, which I think is a really important and unique Analysis of the original kind of Lebanon war But how do you how do you look at this from the kind of Israeli strategic perspective? Yeah

I think here's what Israelis think is happening vis-a-vis Iran and Iran's proxy system The Lebanon war was our Afghanistan I mean there was terrible terrible terror attacks coming out of Lebanon truly massacres of children Yeah, you people can Google the Malot massacre of 1974 from commandos coming out of Lebanon taking over school by the time Israeli special forces retake the school 22 kids were killed and something Like 60 wounded terrible terrible terror attacks coming constantly out of Lebanon mostly from Palestinian terror groups Not she a Lebanese that would become Hezbollah but Israel invades right because of these terror attacks and it establishes a security zone and it sticks around and it tries to

Stabilize and kind of control and kind of be safer by having a security zone in Lebanon but what ends up happening is that that presence actually creates a Massive new guerrilla enemy and by the time 18 years have come around by the year 2000 Israel pulls out and that guerrilla enemy takes over every Place Israel evacuated. So the vacuum is filled by the bad guys. It's so close to the American experience of Afghanistan that just it's history does sometimes rhyme. The lesson, the Israelis pulled out of Lebanon because they didn't know why they were still there. It wasn't providing security.

And Hezbollah had managed to, through its constant harassing of Israeli military lines, had managed to create an image of itself as basically undestroyable because it didn't need to win. It only needed to survive and continue to harass. And that would count as victory. And by establishing that as a victory condition, which guerrillas tend to do,

the Israelis could do nothing to stop them. And then the Israelis pull out and the Iranians and Hamas and, you know, Palestinian, various Palestinian ideological factions that are terror organizations, suddenly realized that they figured out how to destroy Israel, how to push Israel back, how to actually achieve this thing that they couldn't find a way to build an army that could face the Israeli army sort Of tank for tank in the desert, right? And the way you do that is you harass constantly until they finally eventually leave and so that was the strategy within Six months Israel pulls out of of South Lebanon in May of 2000 of the year 2000 by

October of the year 2000 2000 by October of the year 2000 The peace talks have broken down now They're not broken down the sense that one round didn't establish didn't get the peace So they're gonna come back for another round The round fails or at least doesn't finish and then we begin to see triggered by a visit of an Israeli politician the Temple Mount and triggered by Arafat facing protests against his sort of venal regime in Ramallah and turning that violence against Israel.

They're triggered by 16 different things that's all very complex. Libraries have been written about it. But the basic story is because of the deep lesson learned from Hezbollah in Lebanon that you can kick out the Israelis if you just harass them forever, they launch in the fall of 2000 a massive wave over three years of 140 suicide bombings known to Israelis as the Second Intifada. And this massive wave of suicide bombings really shatters the Israeli left that had said if we withdraw, we get peace because Israel had withdrawn. There were no Israeli soldiers in any Palestinian cities and they had done the withdrawing over the previous three years, right?

So everywhere that Israel seemed to withdraw from, whether it's South Lebanon, which then turned into a terrible war in 2006, whether it's Gaza in 2005, which by 2006 is a war, by 2007 is controlled by Hamas, whether it's pulling out of Palestinians towns and cities ahead of the establishment of some kind of Palestinian state of Camp David, you know, within two years everything is now blowing up in their cities and literally school buses Israel, you know doesn't have school buses everywhere the 730 a.m. City bus in Jerusalem, which would blow up regularly Was a bus with school kids on it. And so every time Israel withdrew It turned into this massive bloodshed these rivers of blood now that was driven by a conscious strategy on the other side learned in the Lebanon experience, learned by Iran-supported proxy Hezbollah.

That's what gives Iran that long-term strategic vision of siding with Hamas. Hamas and Iran hate each other. They believe the each believes the other is a deep heretic who has to convert or die. But on the question of destroying Israel Israel they will share that investment and they will join forces and so Iran very much has looked for every way possible to destroy Israel the two major paths it has found was to build these proxies that will harass and degrade and and and just hurt Israel forever and ever until eventually all Israelis leave there was once an interview I came across

on some Arabic satellite channel where they interviewed the national security advisor of the Supreme Leader of Iran. And they asked him, you really think Israel is going to be kicked out by some rockets? I mean, there's millions of people that have been living there 100 years. They're not leaving, right? And his response was, we're not idiots.

We don't think they're all going to get on a boat and leave in two weeks, like happened They're living there 100 years. They're not leaving, right? And his response was, wait, we're not idiots. We don't think they're all gonna get on a boat and leave in two weeks, like happened to the million French citizens in Algeria in 1962. We think that we will make life so unbearable and unlivable that the elites will leave. The people, the 10% of Israeli society, that's the salaried high-tech workforce,

that's this startup nation. The Silicon Valley is gonna hoover them up, right? And then there'll be the next decile, right? Who will now be the audience. And we will make their life miserable and then they will leave and slowly, slowly we weaken the Israelis until yes, we can crush them. That's the plan.

And it's a fascinating strategy and it's a fascinating theory. That was one plank. The proxy crushing and degrading and constant harassing of Israeli society until they eventually leave that's why by the way anti-israel Twitter people are Obsessed with how many Jews have left this month It's a statistic that constantly invent either sharing and if they can't share they invent and the second point they've run

They've gone for is the nukes if Iran has a nuclear capability for is the nukes. If Iran has a nuclear capability, then it has a protection from an Israeli retaliation. And it also has the ability, potentially, why not, to drop a nuke someday on Israel or deploy a tactical nuke to prevent Israel from destroying its proxies. And those are the two threads.

And when the Mossad was made the agency in charge of really beginning to penetrate and dismantle the Iranian nuclear capability. The Mossad has since, I know things that have been published, I don't know anything from within, that's why I can talk about it freely, but from things that I have read in the Israeli press, the Mossad is something like doubled in size in 15 years. The Mossad has developed brand new branches and capabilities and invested massively. A lot of the commandos that we're hearing about now in Iranian soil that have carried

out these drone attacks and that are doing operations in Iran at the moment on the ground, a lot of them aren't Israelis. And so the Mossad has built out these whole new systems and these whole new capabilities and become, and I think it's the second biggest espionage agency after the CIA in terms of budget. Now these are all state secrets. So these are all things that people have to kind of try and figure out from sort of sources. But that is what it appears to be.

And so, yes, Iran has this two pronged vision, the nuclear and the proxies. It is obsessed with the destruction of Israel because it, not because it cares one whit about Israelis, but because that is its vocabulary for talking about its revolutionary Shiism and the goals of revolutionary Shiism. And the Mossad and Israel's own response has been essentially to try to contain all these things, to try and slowly slow down the nuclear option,

to try to the nuclear program over the years, to try and contain Hezbollah, and contain Hamas, and contain all the different proxies in Syria, in Iraq, and Yemen. October 7 shattered all of that. October 7 taught us that we actually cannot contain these people. They are willing, because of this revolutionary religious vision, whether Sunni or Shia, they're very different, but they're fundamentally for our purposes the same. Because of these religious visions, they are undeterrable. Hamas is perfectly okay with the destruction of Gaza because the salvation of Islam is

at stake in this war. That's not true of Fatah, but it is true of Hamas. Iran doesn't care about the destruction of Lebanon or Syria. Hezbollah is willing to suffer the destruction of Lebanon if it means the destruction of Israel. And so they're undeterrable organizations. October 7 taught that to Israelis and Israelis now have pivoted profoundly to a brand new strategy which is threats are no longer contained, they're no longer deterred, they are removed. And that's it. That's the story. And that's the story of the Iran strike. That's brilliant by the

way. I loved that process you just gave us. I want to bring things back to the present. Let's talk a little bit more about what we know that was hit and what wasn't hit. So, I mean, maybe just walk us through what are the baskets of what has been taken out. I mean, it looks like Natanz is no more. Yeah, all the way from Shiraz to Tabriz, north to south, 10 different sites at least. Natanz is definitely struck massively. That was the main uranium enrichment facility. It is not clear how much was taken out. I mean, there are a lot of sort of OSINT, you know, open

source intelligence people on Twitter arguing that, excuse on X arguing that it's totally wiped out I don't know what their sources are. It is certainly profoundly damaged. There's a whole lot of smoke coming out of it But it's not a hundred percent clear these a lot of these facilities have been hidden for a long time They're probably we have to assume because they were on minute We've we've over the years discovered totally hidden facilities So we have to assume there are more totally hidden facilities Iran has done nothing for 25 years except try and hide nuclear facilities so

Yes, a lot has been hit some of the most fundamental stuff The big facility at Fordo, which is basically under a mountain Has not been hit and that's the kind of facility there are a few a couple of these where Israel really needs that we we believed until now that Israel really needs American help because we don't have the literally the size of ordinance that could penetrate those kinds of Facilities and destroy them from the air and so those have not yet been hit now that tells us two things it tells us one This isn't over. This isn't close to over to

Can the Israelis actually do it Trump said something really interesting today He said hey Iran, you know, I told you this would happen if you didn't sign the deal It had you didn't sign the deal and now it happened. Do you know why the Israelis were so successful? He said I'm paraphrasing badly people can look up. It was a post on truth social I think He said the reason this happens that the Israelis have the best equipment in the world. They have American equipment So even in his conversation on that even in his politicking on this He's he's still a salesman. He's still trying to sell American goods but he said this is gonna continue and and it's going to get worse and

The I don't know what to read into that. I don't know what the Israelis need is fordo what the Israelis need is Much larger ordinance to tackle some of the much more Protected sites that have not been tackled as far as we can tell in this first round And so there's a possibility that there's still an escalation ahead of us in which the United States participates, because it'd be an awful shame to absorb all the costs of this strike without actually achieving the goal. And America could make that goal happen much more easily,

I think, than Israel, even assuming Israel has the ability to actually take out the most defended sites. And then I want to ask now about... Oh, and just one last point. I'm sorry. The total decapitation of the Iranian military units. Yeah, that's what I was going to ask. I mean, the Revolutionary Guard Corps Air Force in a single meeting with the head of

the Air Force and his entire staff, general staff, was wiped out in a single bomb. That's what you're talking about. You're talking about across this national security apparatus, some of the most elite forces of Iran. The Iranian regime has two militaries. This is very important to understand. It has a regular army under the government, under the president, and then it has a Revolutionary

Guard Army, which is a full army with an air defense and a missile defense system and a Navy and an air force and ground forces. And that serves directly the supreme right and it's meant actually to protect the regime the revolutionary regime if the army ever tries to bring it down. Israel targeted both but mostly IRGC and a lot of these forces that have been you know a drone fact the guy building the responsible for producing the drones that Iran has been selling the Russians to deploy in Ukraine is no longer alive.

And so a lot of these systems have now been decapitated. That was a big part of it. Now I want to get to a question from Gabriel, which is a sort of American political one, but it's an important one. He said, how important has Trump been in making it possible for the Israelis to confront Iran properly? And do you think this would have happened under a president Kamala Harris? Trump has been extremely important. I think Netanyahu thinks that this could not have happened,

at least not as successfully, under a president Harris. A president Harris would not have happened, at least not as successfully, under President Harris, President Harris would not have agreed to allow it to go forward. It would have looked to them very irresponsible and potentially bringing about a World War III and being a dangerous escalation and all the kinds of stuff that we've seen Ben Rhodes tweet over the last few hours, which people should look up. He said things like, this is dangerous and unnecessary, all of it totally unnecessary. Which for the guy who signed a nuclear agreement with Iran,

which if Trump had not pulled out of it, now this year would be sunsetting the prohibitions on Iran actually building new centrifuges. In other words, an agreement that was fundamentally kicking the can down the road. I'm sorry, I disagreed with the agreement from day one. I know that was a big debate in America But literally the sunset provisions are all now triggered over the next this year and also over the next five years

And so the agreement would anyway have begun to evaporate Over those five years. So that guy who kicked the can down the road I don't know that he gets to complain in fairness. I think Ben Rhodes is not the guy I don't know that he gets to complain about this. In fairness, I think Ben Rhodes is not the guy. He's not the guy who kicked the can down the road. He's the guy who sold the kicking of the can down the road as if it was a solution to the nuclear problem. You're right.

He was the political messaging guy. I apologize to Ben. And he was doing it in the service of the president he worked for. And I accept that. No, no, no. He believes it. Right. But he's still.

Okay. I accept that. Go get it twisted. It's not again, you know, but right, but if we take his response to be the response of what a Harris White House would have been the instinctive intuition of a Harris White House then The Israeli strike would have been something the Americans would have opposed and as I said Israel Israel has done this totally on its own But cannot in the military side of it, but cannot do it without America knowing about it.

That is not something Israel can do. Incidentally, Israel has retrofitted the F-35s in ways that the Americans, when they sell F-35s, they sell them in way, with systems that allow America to track them. So the British F-35s and the Australians and all the people they sell them to, the Turks, America can track the F-35s,

it's part of its alliance structure It's you're not supposed to not want it Israeli f-35s have this habit of occasionally disappearing from the American radar but Because Israel puts in a lot of its own indigenous systems into it and retrofits at the Israeli f-35s can carry bombs on the wings Which the f-35 apparently wasn't designed to do so the Israelis do a lot of mods which the f-35 apparently wasn't designed to do so the israelis do a lot of mods so to speak to their f-35s however, there would not have been a way for israel to fly toward iran without sentcom with all its capabilities and and Knowing about it. And so um, I think harris could have been a real disruptor it could have warned iran to

As a way of telling the israelis don't do it and It would have been a much much more difficult thing to accomplish without Trump. That's for sure And if we actually have coordination with Trump and Trump is riding shotgun and there was close coordination in the talks Which may have been I mean there may have actually this coordination that we're seeing now Might have been coordination the whole way through we don't we don't know There certainly is that coordination in the last week ahead of the ahead of the strikes None of that would have been with Harris. And so I think that absolutely I think it's an hour would have said to you Yeah, no question. Absolutely This would not have been done doable with Harris

But I think that he would have been right when he said that what what do you think Trump means? when he says Iran must make a deal before there's nothing left. And why is he and Witkoff, why do you think Witkoff and Trump are like so intent on having the next round of talks? I mean, in some ways, I'm hoping it's just like the greatest troll of all time. But on the other hand, I think it's made, does he do you think he really believes after this pretty massive military strike that there will be more negotiations? I don't know.

Iran has said there won't be. Iran has said there won't be. I know, I know. Yeah. It could be one of two things. But where do you think that's coming from? Is it just like Trump always wants to make a deal? I think, first of all, with Trump,

it could literally just be trolling. It could just be. Right. He is capable of clever policy. Right. I think first of all, with Trump, he could literally just be trolling. He is capable of clever policy. He is. We've seen it. It wasn't a conspiracy. It wasn't an accident that looked like a great clever.

He is capable. Sometimes it's silliness. It's truly just silliness. Mara Gaza is a silly thing. Although even there, it's a silly thing that forced the Arabs for the first time in 18 months to produce the Gaza Plan, which the Arab League had not been willing to do. So I would say that there are two possibilities. One possibility is that he does actually want to get to a negotiated agreement because if he doesn't have a negotiated agreement in which the Iranians agree to dismantle

What's in fordo for example, then he might we he might have to bomb fordo and That's not something israelis might be capable of doing themselves. I I know that this is something the israelis have been talking about for years I don't know if they actually secretly have this ability and aren't telling anybody because the mossad has these things up its Leaves that are strategic we've discovered over the last 20 months again and again and again But assuming that that is not correct and the conventional wisdom that the Israelis don't have that ability The Israelis will need Trump to get it done He might want to avoid that by telling the Iranians everything's gonna going sideways for you and it's gonna keep going sideways until your regime falls or

Survive by negotiating with me and then we together both of us jointly have enrichment outside of Iran you can have an energy program not a military program and we blow up Fordo together that could be the game plan if that's the game plan that's a very wise game plan the other game plan could be he's just trying to put distance rhetorical distance political diplomatic distance between Israel and America to protect American troops in the region Iran has said publicly in the past year that an Israeli strike will lead to a massive Iranian retaliation against Forces in the last week as well. Yeah, but I think Wednesday. Yeah. Yeah

That it will be an Iranian retaliation on American forces and so maintaining that diplomatic distance is really important for them, for the Trump administration. So it could also be that, and it could be all these things at once. It could be trolling, and it could be that they genuinely think you can get a lot out of negotiations once Iran understands it has no other options. And it could also be that delaying is no longer an option. That's not the kind of game Trump is going to play. What the Iranians have basically been doing for 20 years

with diplomatic negotiations. And it could also be the distancing. All three at once could be running there. All would make sense. Okay, so I know that you have a heart out in 13 minutes. I really just quickly, what is the impact on Gaza? Let's just talk right now. What is the, I mean, if you look at it

from the perspective of Hamas, their leadership is pretty much gone. I think there's one guy left. Nasrallah, dead. Assad is in Russia. And now their sponsors in Iran are suffering this partial decapitation, and their nuclear program is at least severely damaged. What does this mean on the ground in Gaza

at this point in your view? In theory, it should mean everything. Right. But we have, in other words, there's no, Sinwar's decision to carry out October 7th destroyed the Iranian axis that had built Hamas into what it became. Hamas is not part of the Iranian axis, they're Sunni, not Shia as we said, but they're deeply

embedded in the Iranian axis. They were the only Shia group embedded in that axis and taking tremendous support, literally training together with Hezbollah and Lebanon for years and years. And Sinwar's decision to go that route destroyed the entire Iranian proxy system and might end up toppling the regime. They've not been as close to being toppled since their founding as they are right at this moment. And so if Hamas looks around, it hasn't just led to the destruction of Gaza. It's led to the destruction of everything it had all the strategic players that it had hoped um would be the axis of resistance the axis of resistance the whole resistance is shattered

and it would and it'll take a generation to rebuild if it's even rebuildable and if the Israelis don't keep shattering it which they're perfectly grimly determined to do for a generation as well. So uh yeah now is the point where you, you know, cut your losses and you take the deal on the table from the Israelis, which is the leadership can leave Gaza, Hamas disarms, and there's a future for Gaza, rebuilding by Arab states, you know, by the West. That would be a great thing for Gaza because it would also be something Israel would have a really hard time saying no to if Hamas is gone from Gaza, right? So the right thing to do for Gaza and by the way as long as Hamas remains in Gaza You can't do any of that. You can't rebuild Gaza. You can't send money and you can't send concrete and it simply is not doable Logistically if Hamas still can destroy and disrupt and rule in Gaza

So that would be the right thing for Hamas to do by any measure. The problem Hamas has is the classic problem This is one of the great thing for Hamas to do by any measure. The problem Hamas has is the classic problem. This is one of the great psychological fallacies of the human mind. It's called the sunk costs fallacy. Once you have invested so much in one particular path and you discover that that path is catastrophically mistaken, but if you've invested so much that it's basically your identity, it's awfully hard for the human mind to then say, oh yeah, no, I'm going to write this off and go in another direction. That might be the correct thing to do mathematically if you look at the spreadsheet, but it's not

actually psychologically doable. It's the sunk cost fallacy. I put so much in this direction, there's no way to change at this point. I just ride this even if it's my downfall. Hamas has led a policy and a decision that destroyed its entire regional axis, but also destroyed Gaza. And now the question is, and that's true, by the way, if you like the Israelis or hate the Israelis, I mean, the Israelis are going after Hamas in those tunnels, thousands of

tunnel entrances going to every building you can imagine in Gaza. And the pursuit of Hamas was something the Israelis after October 7 could no longer not pay the cost that Hamas set for it. That is what Israelis feel has happened. But if you have a much, much less supportive vision or view of the Israeli war effort, that's fine. It doesn't change the basic point that Hamas's decision has led now to the destruction of Gaza.

But what that means is Hamas can't now stand up and say, whoops, that was a mistake, and we're just going to go over here to Egypt, sorry everybody. That's not an option they believe is available to them, because there's simply been too much of a cost paid in Gaza itself. And so for them, it is better in their view,

and there's even social media conversations on this kind of stuff. For them, it's better in their view to just to ride it to the end, to bring it all down, crashing on their heads. It goes back to one of their kind of inspirations, what is it, the original Qasem, who dies in the forest, right,

against great odds against the British. Being chased by the British, after killing some Jews, and that death of Izzat al-Qasam back in in 35 I think spartan Arab revolt of 36 to 39 the great Palestinian revolt against the British Empire and their battalions are named for that cleric right from the 1930s yes yes the sacrifice and the death yes but they're bringing all Gaza down and without any hope that there's a dawn at the end of the great okay but but I mean just let me let me just push back slightly. I do it with great trepidation because I have so much

Respect for your for your mind, but I'm Israeli Let me let me occasionally There are moments where even in a death cult even in in a cult-like situation, such as after the dropping of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the loyalists to the emperor eventually are sort of left like, well, what do we do? And military defeat can force even the most ardent fanatics to change course.

The emperor did end up surrendering. There was a moment after the death of Stalin, it took a few years, where Khrushchev gave his famous secret speech acknowledging the excesses and crimes of Joseph Stalin. Is there a possibility now that so much of the original leadership is wiped out that somebody looking around might say, you know, I know they say this but maybe God doesn't want us to do all this. Look at what's happened. I'm just saying that the kind of intense military pressure can sometimes even force a death cult to change course. It's a very interesting question. In theory, absolutely.

Absolutely. And it's even, I would say more than that, it's not even a compromise. It's built into their theology. In other words, Hamas come out of a theological discourse, as we mentioned just a few of the names. People should actually look it up. It's deep, it's fascinating, and it's also the same theologians who produced Al-Qaeda. And so it's also worthwhile for Americans to know their own history to understand these ideas. But within these ideas is a discussion that basically talks about how in

Muslim theology, and this is not all Muslim theology, but certainly in this particular lineage of theologians, geopolitical success, the success of the first generations of Islam, which built this massive empire that inexplicably successfully conquered everywhere from India to France in three generations, basically.

The success of early Islam was evidence of divine will, of divine grace, of the truth of the Quranic revelation. It was evidence that you can't succeed in history if God doesn't want you to, because God is the master of history and built history with an arc toward a great redemption, and therefore put Islam in history to drive that redemption. And so geopolitical failure is that's why these theologians are

obsessed with the question of Islamic weakness, because it's a sign of divine will, it's a sign of distance from God, it's a sign of a lack of closeness to God that makes Muslims fail. And if it's, if Muslims come back to God, back to the revelation, back to closeness to God, the geopolitics will solve itself by the simple function of if you're in sync with God's plan for history, you succeed in history. This is considered by them to be so dogmatic. It's one of these what anthropologists I think call a big idea, which is something so fundamental we don't even talk about it, so we don't even notice it. This is just a foundation stone to how they view the world. Geopolitical success is a sign of divine will. The corollary is that geopolitical failure is a sign that God is not with you. You did something wrong that God didn't want you to do. Temporary failure is a divine test, right? Why are the Jews

powerful? Hamas says to force us to sacrifice and become worthy of the success that lies in our future. But if you actually catastrophically and consistently and for generations and forever fail, now then they'll say it took us 200 years to kick out the crusaders. Okay, fine. But in 700 years, right, if you still fail, then you have to acknowledge that maybe you're doing something God doesn't want. Failure itself is a sign that you're not correct. And that's built into their sort of basic, the basic matrix of their worldview. And so in theory, Hamas, it's not Hamas itself, it's

the rest of the Muslim-Arab world observing. If everything this Islamist-Muslim brotherhood idea touches, it destroys. In Lebanon, in Yemen, in Syria, in Gaza. Maybe it's wrong, maybe it's not a good idea. In other words, the blowback to this radical Sunni Islam, Islamist ideology from the Emirates, from the Saudis, from the conservative Sunnis, all the kingdoms, from the Moroccans and the Jordanians, that blowback is very real. And it's

also theological. It's not just political. And it's the argument that everything you touch, you destroy. So of course you are not God's Actually actualist right obviously not the action So in theory, yeah, Hamas should be able to say it's time to surrender We failed and if you don't succeed God didn't want you to succeed. That is the dogma. Every Muslim believer must believe they could say that They won't say that and they won't say that because whatever the official sort of theological foundations underpinnings that you do believe in and they think they do believe in they are willing to die. Ismail Hani before his own death lost three sons in this war and was proud of it.

So it's not they're not just sacrificing the rest of Gaza's population they're willing to die themselves and so I do think they believe this. But two things come into play. One is the sunk cost problem. They've destroyed too much and faced too much massive anger and bitterness from Gazans. There are now anti-Khamas protests in Gaza. Huge numbers of Gazans blame them for destroying their lives.

And they have been systematically massacring dissidents on social media. I mean, they've been hunting them down on camera, filming them, hunting these people down in hundreds of cases at this point. None of this makes it to CNN, but it is actually making it through all the telegram and WhatsApp channels of Gazans themselves. And they're breaking these people's bones and they're killing them and they are filming it and they're uploading it to tell Gazans, don't think that we can't come for you just because you think we're weak and underground right now and the Israelis

are winning. And so they have to now oppress Gazans violently and brutally after driving Gazans into this particular situation in which Gazans remain. And that it's getting to be a point where they're just they've lost the threat. They've lost. So maybe maybe there's a Ceachiskiy solution Where they can leave no, there's a good solution is when the remaining Hamas leaders are Shot by yeah. Yeah, you know, I mean I'm just saying at a certain point I You're right, but I'm just saying but we yeah, I don't have I don't know. I don't know if Gazans can do that

I don't know if there's another armed force in Gaza that can do that There's some of these militias that work with Israel or at least armed by Israel. I don't think. I don't know if Gazans can do that. I don't know if there's another armed force in Gaza that can do that There's some of these militias that work with Israel or at least armed by Israel I don't think they're pro-israel. The other piece to it is that Hamas says publicly openly It still is waiting for the international community to save them every single time that An international leader does not say Hamas is at fault Hamas says we haven't lost yet. Every single time, and therefore we don't have to stop,

and therefore Gaza doesn't have to be rebuilt yet, and therefore the jury's still out, and we might still win. And they say that, and they say that openly. And I think that a lot of the pro-Palestinian activist world, absolutely, manifestly, and Hamas says it explicitly, continues the war because it gives Hamas the hope that there's some other arena in which this war is actually taking place

which is more fundamental and more important. I wish they didn't think that because the Israelis are absolutely grimly determined to get them out and Gaza's future begins only when Hamas is gone. Gaza does have a future when Hamas is gone and everyone keeping Hamas thinking that they might get rescued um Puts off that future delays that future by keeping Hamas in this middle ground where they won't leave they won't liberate Gaza from themselves Well, I think we're gonna have to end it there because I know you've got to run But thank you so much. Aviv Redakur. You are a gentleman and a scholar

and I hope to uh continue the conversation with you on our my podcast your podcast for the FP. Thank you. I have to say you you should give a shout out to my podcast thank you so much I've been listening to Breaking History it's absolutely wonderful and it's much better put together and fantastically produced so people should listen to a real professional podcast. Credit to Poppy Damon and Bobby Moriarty, my producers. They do a great job. And thank you. Yes, please listen to Breaking History. Next episode is going to be on William F. Buckley's great legacy. And we've got some great ones for the summer. And we'll have you on by the way, when we address things Middle East and Islam. Thank you so much.

We'll be delighted. Thank you.