Breaking History - Eli Lake and Haviv Rettig Gur on Why Iran's Regime Is Hard to Kill

Episode Date: March 31, 2026

What does it actually take to break a regime built on martyrdom? Eli Lake sits down with Haviv Rettig Gur — host of Ask Haviv Anything and one of the deepest thinkers on the Middle East — to assess week five of the Iran war. They trace the ideological DNA of Iran’'s Islamic Republic from the Algerian National Liberation Front to Frantz Fanon to Ali Shariati, and explain why this is a regime designed to treat its own destruction as a form of victory. Plus: what a color revolution in Tehran could mean for Sunni Islamism, Hamas, and the future of the Palestinian question. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Many promotions are available both in-store and online, though some may vary. I am so delighted to have my friend Haviv read a goal. coming back onto the breaking history feed. I think the last time we spoke was the 12-day war with Iran, and I wanted to check in with you this time around, and I have to just recommend to Breaking History listeners. Ask Kaviv Anything is really one of my favorite podcasts, and you are getting a very deep, serious intellectual dive into

not just the tactics and strategy of wars in the Middle East and things like that, but I would say kind of deep political and theological history, which is one of the reasons we cherish you as a leading light of the Republic of Letters. So thank you, Aviv. Thank you, Eli. I'm a big fan as well. I listened to the podcast, just read your piece on Israel's strange new position in the Middle East.

It's fun. We should get into that because I'm an optimist now. Okay. So we are recording on Friday, March 27th. This will be out next. This will be out a little bit later. As of today, we are, you know, we're coming into week four of the war, or rather we're going into week five of the war, I should say. How do you assess it so far?

How would you say we're doing? I think we're exactly where we thought we would be. And what does that mean? The Iranian state was not going to fall quickly. I don't know why that was ever an expectation. I don't know why. I mean, sometimes President Trump said things in that vein. So I don't blame people outside who don't know, you know, what's going on.

And, you know, on the podcast, on my podcast, we did a whole episode, a two-hour deep dive into the, you know, Marxist and Phenonian and Shia eschatological origins of this regime, basically just to argue. it doesn't fall. It's not one of those regimes where if the leader is dead, then the whole thing crumbles. It is long and resilient, and it will take a real standoff that will last a very long time for anything like a fall to happen. And the fall might not even be a fall. It might be just a replacement of one piece of the regime with the other, but we need the idea, the ideology, to lose, to drop out. We need it to turn from Maoist China to modern China. That would be something that in the Middle East would be enough in the context of Iran. I don't know if it's a good thing that China is what it is today for the world, but within the context of Iran, that would be enough. So if you understand the war,

as the reduction of the capabilities attached to the ideology, the conquering ideology, then the war is going extremely well. Iran has no defensive capability whatsoever, and we have stopped short, to my frustration, of going for regime infrastructure. In other words, We don't want to hurt the global oil supply even further, so we don't want Iran's export capabilities destroyed, but the internal capabilities of distributing gas and oil. Now, why would you want to hurt the internal capabilities of gas and oil that give electricity to 90 million people?

The simple answer is because the Iranian Revolutionary Guard car owns so much of it, and what it doesn't own other pieces of the regime, these special foundations run by the Supreme Leader, own. You have to go after that infrastructure, because that infrastructure is the core of the economy that this regime has a death grip on and will not fall without that being denied it. And so Iran has to suffer, it is chemotherapy,

to shed this thing, this regime that has demolished it from within, that has spent 47 years destroying every piece of the Iranian economy that works. There's a saying in Iran that every Iranian with talent and capability as either a martyr or an exile. Now, that's not a curse of Iranians

or still in Iran. There's plenty of Iranians with talent and capability in Iran, but you can't express it. You can't build real business. You can't do, live rich lives. You don't have an intellectual life in Iran. So there's been this massive brain drain

and, of course, this generation of leaders who are just constantly massacred by this regime every time they rise up. So how are we doing? It's going to be a really hard slog. If Trump negotiates with them and we stop now, Iran will obviously claim victory. The muqauma, the resistance axis,

always claims victory if it's merely still alive, even as it destroys its own society. But that's okay because there'll be another war. And there'll be another one after that and another one after that. The steadfast will win this. They have developed a whole ideology about how they're steadfast, and we Israelis are such pansy little westerners that we're obviously going to fall at first blush.

We have the steadfastness. We have the generational capacity. There was a pullout today. what Israelis think about continuing the war, the vast, vast majority in the high 70s, are able to continue the war, support continuing the war, and they understand what's at stake

and what it'll actually take to bring them down. So we're exactly where we need it to be and where we want it to be, and if we stop now, it'll just be worse the next round, but there will be a next round. This regime can't do anything but another round. Okay, so that was a lot, and I want to dive into it, and I think we have a slight disagreement.

We have an honest disagreement, But I think it comes from the great expression, which I love, is where you sit is where you stand, which is to say, I think that you are somebody who has mastered an understanding of the ideology of this regime. And I look at it from the context of the broader sweep of Iranian history. So in your view, and I think you're, I think by the way, you're entirely correct about the ideology and Mukawama, and I want to get into that. From my view, however, I see 1979 as a stolen revolution in that there was a much wider kind of group of Iranians that had been agitating. I would argue since the late 19th century, but certainly since the 1905 constitutional revolution, that wanted something that was like Western small L liberalism with an Iranian character and a strong kind of executive.

and that that is an organic outgrowth of kind of, I think, centuries of Iranian history and holding their leaders to a certain kind of account and how power was balanced before the 79 Revolution. I think the 79 Revolution, what we saw was a violent kind of, you know, almost as soon as the Shah leaves and Khomey, comes back in 79, you begin to see the show trials and the purges of every other element of Iranian society that was an agreement that they wanted to try something democratic. And so I hold on at times to the belief that the ideological project is somewhat alien to Iranian history,

and there is a chance to break the regime by appealing to the Iranianness of the Iranian people. and not necessarily taking or believing the Iranian leadership and the true believers in that regime kind of on their own terms, which is to say, I'm sure that there are many who embrace martyrdom, and there are many who take the kind of view that if we just survive, we win. But I'm not sure that's everyone. And I think that the lower down you go, and when you can't pay salaries,

And you have the, again, organic movement within Iran, I imagine, you know, at the dinner table of a mid-level IRGC commander and having to hear from his wife and his daughter or maybe his cousin or his uncle about some of the brutality that Iranians themselves have suffered at the instruments of repression of the state. And there is, I think, a kind of different appeal, a different tug there. So let's first start by defining our terms. What is Mukawama and how does it fit into understanding what makes the regime tick? So let's just define that first and then kind of get into that. Yeah, you also said a lot. I have a lot of thoughts. Mukawama is a – it's just the Arabic word for resistance.

But it means, for example, you would use it to describe the amount of electrical resistance in a copper wire. But in the context of political – of this political movement, it has come to mean an entire vision of history, a whole analysis of how history works. The Mukawama has its roots in two things, really fundamentally. One is the Algerian independence war, and not literally the war, but everything that war represents in Arab consciousness in the 20th century. This is a war in which the Algerian National Liberation Front, people who have listened to your podcast will know about this, but this is a war in which the National Liberation Front from 54 to 62, I think it was.

Begin this terror war against the 130-year French occupation, the colonization of French-Azeria. And this is also the war that gave us Franz Fanon's wretching the Earth, which is the philosophy behind the resistance of the Algerian revolution. Right, and all this third worldism, and the reason that college students want to decolonize the humanities and all of that, that language,

not literally just Algeria, some of it is out of the Kenyan experience and some other things, but we'll focus in just to tell the story, but there's more to the story, obviously. But there's this idea that the colonialist might be powerful, the colonialist might be many. There might be a lot, there were a million and a half French, white European citizens living in Algeria for a century when they began this terror war. And after eight years, everyone left. I mean, the entire French apparatus, the French state, the French army, everything. Now, Algeria went from being a literal voting department the French Republic represented in the French parliament

to being its own independent country. The French Republic itself fell. De Gaulle comes in with a new constitutional order, basically, all because of this Algeria challenged. And the two things the French couldn't withstand. One was the French army in Algeria won every battle against the FLN, every desert skirmish, everything. And they still lost the war after eight years. Why? Because the FLN managed to harass the exact costs from civilian populations, terror attacks against the coastal cities.

But also the French's response was brutal to an extent that shocked the French and created internal opposition within France. Probably 500,000 dead civilian Muslim Algerians from the French. French response. And the fact that then in 62, the French all get up and leave was a shock to the world system, this idea that the weak can push out the strong, that violence works against a colonialist, even if that colonialist is a NATO ally, you know, nuclear world power, nevertheless, the desert fighter with nothing but an old machine gun of some kind living in the villages of the bled of the desert,

can defeat them and push them out. It's this powerful, powerful imagery that catalyzes the establishment in 1964 in Cairo, two years later, of the PLO. And the idea of the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, is to do exactly what the FLN did in Algeria to do it for Palestine, right, to kick out this other European colonial project

called Israel. And they developed these, commando raids from Jordan, the Fiddei, and they establish places in Lebanon, and they start to hijack airliners, and they carry on an attempt to replicate what the FLN did. And the concept is the Israelis are powerful. The Israelis will win every battle. But if you just exact never-ending costs, the Israelis will eventually collapse and they will eventually leave. Because there's a huge amount of Western German

19th century romanticism here about the authenticity of indigenity which grant you know if I'm the rooted person then I can't be pushed out whereas you are you Westerner because you're technological because you're modern because you're the orcs of Tolkien

or the humans and avatar this imagery which is basically just 19th century romanticism you can be pushed out because even though you have a lot of power in physical terms, you don't have the kind of spiritual power and attachment. You don't fit the environment properly.

There's an obsessive discourse in this Mukawama world about how Israelis are allergic to olives. They are not, in fact, allergic to olives. But it's important to say that they're allergic. I don't even know that. Apparently, we're allergic to olives. We have high rates of skin cancer. That has to do with Tel Aviv.

I don't know if Yemeni Jews are the same rates, of skin cancers, the Shkinazi Jews. But anyway, it's these discourses of authenticity. And the Mukawama concept is then translated, and this is really the last step, into a religious mode, into a religious code. Oh, yeah, no, let's really drill down on this. Because let's talk about that transfer,

because that's a very important point here, because I think scholars would, I don't want to say, it's not really a disagreement. I think it's a matter of emphasis. But tell me what you mean, and then I want to maybe, push back. So this begins, there is a Muslim idea of jihad, of holy war. And many people debate about what it means, and you'll hear a lot on college campuses. Actually, it doesn't mean war.

It means a struggle with the bad parts of your inner self. For most Muslims, for most of Muslim history, it meant war. Can it mean many other things? Sure. Within Judaism, every fundamental foundational word has six versions and six different Jewish sects that all say different things. But what it means for the people we're talking about is war. And there is a deep, century and a half long conversation among the most important Sunni theologians in the Arab world. And this is something we've talked about and discussed, also at the free press, about the meaning of Muslim weakness

in the modern age. Europe shows up in the Middle East. The French begin to build out their empire controlling Syria and Lebanon. and the British from Iraq all the way to Egypt and further and the French in North Africa. And the Arabs begin to look at this, especially Muslim theologians, begin to look at this

and say, wait a second, there is a deep, shocking theological problem in the power gap between the West and the East because Islam is not a contemplative, inward-looking, spiritualist religion. It also is, it has those elements, but Islam is fundamentally a religion that believes, it needs to dominate the world peacefully or by war.

There are different kinds of Muslims, but nevertheless, this is the truth given to God, and the whole world will eventually convert, and that is redemption. And so Islam needs to be geopolitically on the ascendant. This is up until now I've said things that are mostly true of Christianity. But with Islam, it's different. It's even more so because it's born in war. It's a religion born with a prophet who is a conqueror. It's the only of the monotheistic three faiths that has.

The prophet is also a conqueror. Right. Moses, Jesus. Right. Which is not the example of Jesus, right? And by the way, and Moses is not allowed to enter Canaan. Right. So it's Joshua who leads the war for.

And King David is not allowed to build the temple in Jerusalem because he has blood on his hands from war. Right. So his son, Solomon, has to do that. And so whatever. The point is not to argue against Islam. This is a real difference. It's not a good or bad. It's just a...

In their fundamental, yes. So what that does is this, it develops this vocabulary. Geez, I teach classes on this. It's hard to do it in the 42nd version. Let me do the 42nd version. Okay. They begin to develop ideas about, the problem of Islamic weakness as a theological problem

and how you redeem ourselves Islam from this terrible power gap that we've suddenly discovered when the British suddenly conquer Egypt. And the way Islam, and one school of thought, people who, there's a specific lineage that I have a couple of podcast episodes about. A guy named Adafgani student is Mohamed Abduh, who was the... Highly recommend, we'll link that in the show. Yeah, he's the grand Mufti of Egypt in the 1890, His student, Rida, his student is a guy named Hastan al-Bana,

which should be a name known to all people today in the modern world because he's the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, which among its outgrowths are Al-Qaeda and Hamas and many others. He's the founder of modern political Islam. Yeah, certainly it's organized sense, yeah. So this theological line makes the argument that the reason we Muslims are weak is that we have abandoned our Islam, our original, true, deep Islam.

of originalist idea. How do I know this? One of the ways I know this is that the original Islam, close to the prophet, those first three generations that they call the holy generations, were this astonishingly successful conquering empire. And what did they have? They didn't have some incredible technology. They didn't have special spaceships. What did they have? They had faith. And if we return to our faith and we return to that piety of those first generations, we will retake our place in the geopolitics of the world and the redemption of the world. depends on Islam retaking its place. And so that's the foundational religious idea. It's generally called Salafism. Salaf is a forefather. Salafism is forefatherism, returning to the piety of those early generations.

And that becomes coupled with this developing in the 20th century anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist kinds of violence that are so successful in Algeria and Kenya and many other places. And what you end up getting is a kind of merger called, called basically, certainly among the Shia, mukawama. A lot of the heroes of this story are, for example, of this cleric from Syria in the 1930s, he's a Dina al-Kasam, for whom Hamas actually named its fighting battalions for him.

And rockets, yeah. And its rocket. There are a lot of these sort of heroes who are Sunni. But the apotheosis, the epitome, the apex, I've checked out my thesaurus twice today. Of this idea is probably Chazbala. Chzbollah is all Mukawama talks about it, uses the word every day of the week. It's this branch of the revolutionary guards that mobilized and radicalized the Shia of Lebanon.

I would argue with the apotheosis is the 79 Islamic Revolution. Yeah. Which is to say that the first time we've seen political Islam create a state. So I want to add a third element real quick. The Islamic Revolution in 79 does one more thing, which is bring in explicit Marxism into the story. And that is through a guy named Ali Shariati. There are these handful of people that if you go and learn them,

you know, dear listener out there in the world, you will know this world better. Franz Fanon is one of them. Rashid Rida is another. Ali Shariati is another. I would argue with Shariati, I would just as a slight, we don't know because he dies in 78. So there are some shariati followers that would say he would never have gone on, gone along with the brutality of what Khomeini does a year later.

He was explicitly anti-clericalist. Yes, right. Because to establish Khomeini? Yeah. What I'm saying is that I agree with you that Khomeini and his people around him kind of borrow, they cut and paste shalmers. Dariati to explain, I mean, there is somewhat argue that they do that to explain it to the West and the left in the West, which is to say, here we have a socialist, sociologist, and kind of somebody who is fluent in Islam, and this can kind of translate these ideas, whereas Khomeini is really uninterested in modern ideology. He's interested in what he writes in his book, the Islamic State, creating an Islamic State. However, because, we just, it's one of the great unknowns, I would say, of history, which is like, what if Shariati had lived? And what, you know, he died very young. What if he lived? Would he have joined the

resistance to Khomeini, perhaps, you know, and we would have had a better outcome? But isn't that true always with these guys? I mean, Fanon wanted a violent anti-imperialist revolution everywhere that would result in a liberated, modern, emancipated, you know, tolerant, egalitarian man. And to his credit, in the second part of Wretched of the Earth, he even critiques the idea that if you get revolution through violence, you're going to have to deal with the violent people

who are now in charge. Who did it? Yes. He himself knows the danger. And Marx himself, what would Marx have made of Stalin? I mean, yes, you can always find that defense. And I grant it to you in terms of truth. Like, if we're actually asking what is actually true, Shariati, we know for a fact that Khomeini didn't like Shariati because Shariati saw the establishment of a new clericalist regime,

the way Khomeini took Shariati's ideas and actually implemented them in Iran, as an assumption of a new version of the kind of oppression that Shariati was talking about. But what Shariati did, just in a single sentence, is he took this famous, paradigmatic moment of the foundation of Shia consciousness, of Shia self-of-identity, which is this battle of Karbala, in which in 680, I think it was, in which Imam Hussein faces the Caliph Yazid, and Yazid kills Hussein. Hussein is killed in this battle.

And the Shia belief is that Hussein was the legitimate line from Muhammad and that the next Imam has gone into occultation or has disappeared into history, but we'll come back. And this is the Mahadi, the messianic figure that will return. And what Shariati did was recast this whole story of redemption as a story that is essentially Marxist. So Hussein was represented the revolutionary impulse to throw away the evil oppressor, which Yazid represents. And all Shi'ism is actually the story of revolution. Now, Shi'ism is not a revolutionary version of Islam.

Shi'ism classically, traditionally, it's almost its... a kind of stereotype of Shi'ism up until the 70s is that it is much more the introverted, peaceful, pietistic kind of contemplative versions of Islam. We don't have a lot of examples, we have some, but we don't have a lot of Shiist empires conquering in bloody conquest all over the world. And what Shariati does was recast the old version of Shi'ism

this quiet religion of mourning of Hussein. And he says that religion of mourning was established by the powers that be, in this case the Safavid dynasty of Iran, in order to keep the people quiet. So you have to constantly mourn Hussein and have this contemplative religion, and the empire still rules you. And Shariathid called that black Shi'ism. That's the bad Shiism.

And then he said we also could have Red Shiism. He says red for blood, but red also happens to fit with, He's writing in the 60s and 70s, also happens to fit with communism. And he says, red Shiism is the revolutionary Shiism, the Shiism that says actually the heart and soul of Hussein's message, of the redemptive arc that Shia Islam has for humanity, is the Marxist heart and soul. Now, he publishes, he gives a speech, and I was just finished with this in 1971,

called Black Shiism and Red Shiism, and people should just go and read that speech. But it is a year before, I believe, or maybe after, It's a year before, I think, the publication in Peru of the theology of liberation, which is where a Catholic priest whose name escapes me at the moment articulates for the first time in a serious way what came to be called in Latin America Liberation theology, which cast Jesus exactly in this way as this Marxist figure doing this Marxist thing in history. So it's a Marxification of Shiism in exactly the same way that Catholic liberation and theologians are doing that to Jesus at the time over there. And Khomey takes this and runs with it.

After Khomeini publishes Islamic governance, which is the big trend. And then Khomeini just says, we are that revolution. We are the world revolution for all the oppressed everywhere, the heart of Shiism and everything Marxism is, and we're going to use Mukawama and all these ideologies of anti-imperial rule. and Shariati translates Fanon to Persian. I mean, it's all this one interconnected discourse. And that's what this regime is.

That's what the Mukawama is. It's this religion of this Marxist pan-global, you know, overturning of the powers that be. All power structures are one power structure. It's all intersectional. And we are the great forces that will defeat it everywhere. And just one point to make of that. That's why people think that, you know, in America, In the anti-Israel discourse in America, there's this argument

that the reason Iran doesn't like America is that America supports Israel. Khomeini didn't like America because America is the evil empire. Israel is bad because it is part of America's evil empire. It's the opposite. The thing they hate most is America because this is a deeply Marxist vision of the world. And Israel is this secondary, it's the little Satan to America's big Satan.

That's just the most understanding of the people. Homania also, I mean, Khomeini also is the first, the first public figure in Iran, starting in the late 50s, to criticize the Shah for his recognition of Israel, so that he introduces a kind of anti-Zionism, which I think plays on, you know, there is an anti-Semitic tradition in Iran, somewhat say that goes back to the book of Esther, you know, that is a, that he kind of taps into with introducing the anti-Semitic. anti-Zionism, you know, really comes full flower in the early 60s before he's exiled to Iraq. But you're right, he does have a theory of the case, which is that Israel's the little Satan and

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one thing that hasn't is that fuzzy feeling you get when WestJet welcomes you on board. Here's to West Jetting since 96. Travel back in time with us, actually travel with us at westjet.com slash 30 years. Okay, so let's kind of just tease this out. Mike, I think that we largely agree on the character of the regime built by Khomeini, the importance of Mukulama,

and how this is an important insight into understanding what it means to be at war with such a regime, because you're not fighting, you know, a rational actor that would say, oh my God, we've invested half a trillion dollars in a nuclear program and it's rubble, right? That would be for most sort of rational state actors, right? You know, defeat. They would come up with something else. But I constantly, my one question about it, and I don't know that we know the answer,

and I want to kind of ask you, and there is always, I feel, that what Khomeini introduced to Iran is alien to Iranian history. It's alien to the Shia tradition within Iran. What I mean by that is the tradition within Kome, which is their theological center, where

the equivalent of their monasteries are, and their various houses in there, and each family belongs to, or follows a grand Ayatollah. So most of the grand diatollos until 79 were what we would call quietest. They would believe that there is a role for the mosque inside of Iran. They helped the poor. They were landlords in many ways in most of the country. They owned the land. There was a kind of peasant class. They ran the schools for

centuries in Iran. But they left foreign policy. They left kind of running the country to the Shah. That was the understanding. And that was true not just for the Polavi dynasty. It was true for the Khaziri dynasty. It was for the Zan dynasty. This was since the introduction under the Safavids of Shiism, this was largely the kind of Shiism that Iranians practiced and that Khomeini was an outlier. There were other outliers, like one of his mentors, Aytol Hashani, who was very, very powerful and became speaker of the Majlis. But for the most part, the consensus position was the clerics do not rule in Iran. And so the question is, after 47 years, is there no one left who believes that?

Is that the old ways and everybody sort of accepts now that we're going to be run by a Supreme Leader who believes that he is, you know, kind of, you know, not just the leader of the country, but also something like the Pope of Shiism. Or, you know, is there a chance to sort of appeal to the historical memory of the Iranian people that this is not how it's been for most of Iranian history? I have no idea. Okay. But I'll tell you. I appreciate that honesty, by the way. And I don't either. Right. I don't know what, you know, when an ordinary Iranian in Iran, in the Persian language, sort of thinks their way through these ideas. Ordinary people don't think abstractly at large scale about things, about most things

that I'm not professionally obligated to think abstractly about. I don't either, right? I don't know if they sift this out. My impression, for what it's worth, and it's absolutely the impression of not just an outsider, but an outsider with an extreme interest. in this regime falling because it happens to want to murder my children, literally and specifically. So with that caveat, my impression is when you strip away everything that is Shiism that is shared by every other Shia, in other words, the quietest Shia, the majority Shiasmism, as you put it, and I think you're right, that was what Shiism was until Khomeini,

and since Khomeini, everything's living under this oppressive regime, so who the heck knows? But if you strip away, you take Khomeini and you take all other Shia, and you strip away, you normalize it, right, you erase all Shiasm from the Khomeini. What's actually left? What's the difference? What's the skeleton that's still there? I have a sneaking suspicion. None of it is Iranian whatsoever.

It's 100% Marxist. What is the actual difference between Khomeini and every other Shia, the great revolutionary? impulse and that all history is the revolution and that the revolution requires you to recruit 700,000 fighters from five, six different countries and send them on expeditionary forces to other countries to demolish those countries in the name of the

great revolution. That is exactly how the Soviet Union functioned. The ideology is just literally, I mean, the ownership of the economy by the state. People don't understand that the IRGC the IRGC alone, that military, that second military, that serves the loyalty to the regime rather than the state, which the regular military is, probably owns 30 to 40% of the GDP of the country, no less, including most of the energy.

And then people don't understand that beyond the IRGC, you have what are called Bonnades, which are these immense foundations, charitable foundations, with no taxation, no oversight of any kind, totally answerable only to the office of the Supreme leader, which own multiple vast industries, and probably another, I'm going to throw out, it's within an order of magnitude 20%, more of the GDP of the country. The supreme leader, just in his hand, at his typewriter, literally can make the decisions

of what happens with two-thirds of the GDP of Iran before ever having to worry about any other class of people and what they want. Again, Marxism. None of this is Shiism of any kind. none of this is the monarchies that used to exist in Iran. So my suspicion is... Well, the monarchies had a similar bunyan. I mean, there were enormous powers.

The Shah... Well, it's interesting because Pahlavi is often seen in history as the, you know, example of, you know, colonialist oppression. But he had introduced reforms that sold, that relinquished. Most of the land holdings that the Pahlavi family, through the Shah, owned. And so that you had the equivalent of land reform, which we saw in Russia in the 19th century and sort of the end of peasants in Iran, that happens really, I would argue, in the 50s and 60s in Iran. You're saying it's explainable as a feudal model rather than as a Marxist model? Well, it was borrowed.

So I look at Iran and history, I think you're right that this is a huge break. And Khomeini advertises as a break in 79. He says this is the end of, you know, I mean, we have in 73 the 2,500th anniversary of Iranian kings that Pahlavi puts together the world's greatest party. And then literally within six years, the end of the lineage of kings in Iran. And this is how they presented it. And this is one of the reasons why so many secular leftists and Marxists that are not Iranian supported the Iranian. revolution because they bought into the advertising material. But what ends up happening is that they don't restore that you don't have another

Shah, but the Supreme Leader has the powers of the Shah. So there is a kind of, you can see the echo. Like you, you know, that and and he he rules more arbitrarily, I would argue, than the Shah that he replaces, Khomeini and then later Hominay. So I'm not saying that it's a futile model. No Shah ever achieved. Yes. That's right.

So in that respect, but I want to get to something else, though, because it is, I think you're absolutely, I mean, I think you've really done a master class in explaining the ideological currents. It's anti-colonialism, it's Marxism, and it's, of course, political Islam. I want to focus a little bit on political Islam, because you're right, political Islam emerges as the answer to this question as to why are we behind, why are we subject. Why are we weak? And the answer is what they say, their great slogan, Islam is the solution. We have turned away from Islam. The Ottoman caliphate had become corrupted. It was no longer Islamic.

And therefore, which is, it's interesting that Ataturk and Hassan al-Bana are kind of existing at the same time, right? They're answering the question in very different ways. Ataturk is saying, our problem is Islam. We have to modernize and become modern Turkey. Turkey and Hassan al-Bana says no your problem is that you have you've turned away from Islam and we need to create Islamic states now in 1925 or for that matter in 2001 there is an argument or 1978 there's an argument that we haven't tried it maybe they're right maybe they're right maybe an Islamic state will work maybe this will bring back glory that has been lost to the

the Muslim to the umah right in 2026 and this is the part that I really want to drill down on how can you credibly say that this path that we have tried has restored glory when not even russia or china would vote against the resolution in the UN Security Council condemning Iran a few weeks ago when all of Iran's neighbors that were scared of Iran in the lead-up to the war, at least publicly they looked like they were trying to be on this neutral, are now talking about joining the war and are publicly saying, we hope that Trump doesn't stop. We have to continue. How can you say, when you've lost your investment of half a trillion dollars in your nuclear program, you've lost your missiles,

you've lost your Navy, you've lost your leaders, your currency is worth nothing, you don't, you have a potable drinking water crisis in a very resource-rich country. You have the failure of even the banks that were benefiting the elite revolutionary guard. You have so many signs of utter failure and humiliation. I wonder if somebody is looking at this question, where did we go wrong? perhaps at a certain point they might say Islamic governance is not the solution. I'm acknowledging there is an answer, and you've also talked about it, that when we are facing even more adversary, God is testing us. This is a test.

We have to be strong. We have to be steadfast. I understand that. And I think there are some who will say that, and clearly that's what we're getting in terms of the public messaging. But inside around that dinner table, Haviv, I ask you, I think there's a very good chance that somebody might say, I've been sold a bill of goods, the same kind of disillusionment that might have been experienced at the end of perestroika in the Soviet Union.

The same kind of disillusionment when you're like, I've been a part of this system, I've believed this theory of history, I believe that this is getting us to a better place, and now look around and all I see are the ashes. So, I mean, how would you respond to that? I do think that there is an argument that the, appeal of political Islam, the appeal of Mukwama, is different depending on what point you're looking at it.

Khomeini explicitly talks to this question of Islamic failure. And he does this fascinating thing, and he's obviously not alone, but he's the most relevant for our conversation, where he makes this distinction between two categories that are already in the Koran, the Mustadafin, the the humble of the earth, the weak, and the Mastakbirin, or the powerful and the arrogant. And these are two things, two things. There's a verse in the Quran, the Mastafin will inherit the earth, borrowed from Jesus, borrowed from Psalms, right?

Right. But the idea is that there are the humble and there are the strong, and the humble will inherit. it. And this is built deep into Islamic, also history and ideology. There's the famous battle of Badr, where Muhammad leads a force that's very small and against much more powerful forces, and he nevertheless wins the day. And this is this paradigm of, you know, you have the powerful forces of the world and the weak forces of the world, but the weak not only can triumph, Khomeini writes that they're much more likely. It is easier for the weak. For the weak,

to defeat the strong than the strong to defeat the weak because the weak are less distracted from their piety. They are cleaner. They are purer. And therefore, they are more easily capable of drawing divine intervention on their behalf. And therefore, they have no choice but to win. Once God gets into the game, it's not like, if the divine promise is on your side, nothing can possibly prevent it. And so he transforms Islamic weakness, which is such a big theological problem for so many Muslim thinkers and movements and cultures, he transformed it into a great spiritual advantage and therefore also geopolitical advantage,

where he says the Mastafin must triumph because they are the weak and therefore the pure and therefore and the humble and all of that. And so he gives a vocabulary for already facing this fact of our weakness and not saying, oh, we're weak, therefore we have to hedge and we have to be careful and we have to keep our heads down. No, we're weak. That is why we know that in our battles of buoys,

we will also triumph. And then he does one last thing. And this is borrowed from Isiddin al-Kasam and the many, many examples, and Phanon and the FLN. And that is the question of martyrdom. It's very easy to talk about martyrdom in Shi'ism because so much of Shi'ism is mourning for martyrs. And so Khomeini says the example of Hussein's death is an example of a death that in the death itself launches the millennial redemption arc of humanity. In other words, you are weak, right? The arrogant enemy apostate is powerful, whether it's Yazid or the United States.

How do you bridge the gap? Yes, I have faith and God will intervene. But what is the mechanism by which my faith changes the architecture of power to the point where I win. And the answer there is martyrdom. And so martyrdom closes that gap, the ability to suffer, the willingness to suffer, the willingness to die, the immense power that a martyrdom death, a death in the name of the redemption art has to create a new generation of willing martyrs, a new generation of fighters, a new generation of people willing to suffer. The arrogant and powerful are never able to suffer.

They're not used to suffering. They have nothing to suffer for, except their worldly strength and worldly goods. And so they have a very low threshold of pain. And they can cause a lot of pain, but they can't suffer all that much pain. And you, because you are a believer, because you don't have much in this world,

but you have immense things in the spiritual realm, you can suffer infinitely, and you can inflict pain just enough to surpass the threshold for the enemy, for the powerful. And so your ability to permanently inflict pain while suffering, far more pain than you can inflict, but you can handle it and they can't. And all the way up to and including martyrdom, which does nothing but generate a new generation of new martyrs,

that's the mechanism and strategy. And so for this regime today, what the true believers are telling themselves is, Arachee said this, the foreign minister of Iran. They got some note from Pakistan. Pakistan mourns the death of the Supreme Leader, I think it was. I forget what it was. And Arakshi wrote them back a letter and published, they publicized it on the official Twitter feed,

either of Arakshi's or the foreign ministry. And he said, in this, I'm going to, I misquote it, people can go to it, in this sublime divine moment, I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to the Pakistani people. What is that sublime divine moment as half the regime is decapitated? And the answer is, we are now doing the very thing that closes the gap of martyrdom that gives the Mustadhafean the humble

the overwhelming advantage over the arrogant and powerful. So they have a story that answers exactly that question of catastrophic failure. So a couple points. First of all, that's not a unique story to Shia Islam or the Islamic Republic of Iran. That's a story that you can see, I mean, I would never compare my hero,

Monachem Begin, to Khomeini or Aradji, But, I mean, there's a famous speech where Began talks about, we'll turn our note, well, the name of crooked noses, where he says, I live through death, I live through all this. There's nothing you can do to me. He's talking about, I think it's, you know, the German chancellor is asking him to accept a Palestinian state, and he's rejecting it. But in that, he, you know, this is somebody who lost an enormous amount, who lost his entire family to the Nazis, who lost his comrades, you know, in the uprising. And he uses that as a kind of strength saying, you can't do anything to me. I live for a cause. This is, you know, you go back to Norse mythology. This is the no greater honor than to die in the battlefield and you will be sitting closest to Odin. You know, this is the, in Valhalla. This is a human story.

And it's one that appeals, you know, you find it in some of the best hip-hop music. You know, the great album by Biggie Smalls is ready to die. So, yes, I do think that there is an appeal to it. Yet, history is filled with lots of people who would choose not martyrdom, even in revolutionary moments. History is filled with lots of people who would rather, you know, live out their days with their family. It's just a fact.

So the reason that martyrs are celebrated in some ways is because they're extraordinary because most people are not willing to do that. Even though... It goes farther here. It goes farther here. And it goes farther for Hezbalan, it goes farther for Hamas in the Sunni context. And this is all part of Mukawama. This is a word that encapsulated an immense thing.

It goes farther here because it isn't just, I personally, I mean, you know, every American SEAL Team 6 squad has, you know, young warriors willing to die for their comrades and for their country. That's the willingness to sacrifice is, is universal. But what we have here is deeper than that because it's a willingness. It's an argument that our weakness, since we can't change it, it's in fact holy. And it's what we're supposed to be. And it's how we know we're going to win because this weakness is our spiritual greatness. And therefore, sacrifice isn't just personal.

It's collective. So Hamas, for example, today in Gaza believes that Gaza is on the cusp of great and triumphant and religious victory. Now, do actual Hamas fighters believe that? Do most Gazans believe that? I am absolutely convinced that definitely not. But the true believers, the people who follow in Sinuars' footsteps, do they believe that? Yes, absolutely. And they think that their only task is survival in the ruins.

Survival in the ruins is the great victory given to overcome the evil arrogant. powers of the world. The Iranian regime thinks in those terms. What I'm saying isn't just that they're willing to sacrifice their own soldiers. What I'm saying is they're willing to sacrifice their own society. This is a regime. Like, I mean, you and I, Eli, we know a dark secret about the Jews that I'm now going to share, but I hope stays just among the listeners of this podcast. Jews are not magical. There's nothing magical about them. They are ordinary people. And every extraordinary success that Israel has had, just in the numbers, just in the economy, in the high tech, all of it is replicable. These are best practices you yourself can go and do in your country and you'll have these

results. The two countries on earth with the highest per capita of spending on R&D are Israel and South Korea. And Israel and South Korea kind of look like they would be the two countries with the highest per capita spending on R&D. If you had the high per capita spending on R&D, you'd also look like them. And so these are best practices. right so the iranian regime instead of saying wait a second maybe the jews are not magic maybe all the successful countries in the world are not magical by the way they're not all western there's a lot of asian countries that are successful Ghana is an extraordinary place compared to the rest of africa why best practices we know how to make societies happy and prosperous it's not complicated i mean it's

incredibly complicated to implement but it's not complicated to learn a seminar of three days and you can have the basic outline of a policy that will make your country better off happier, wealthier, more successful. And instead of doing that for 47 years, the Iranian regime has doubled, quadrupled and quintupled, I think I'm out of the words I know on that score, down on, actually, it is none of that matters. Iran's internal economy doesn't matter. Iranian's internal freedom doesn't matter. Our basic fundamental competence doesn't matter. All the money that Iran has spent on its nuclear program, somebody calculated that it's something like 200 times what Israel spent on Italy.

nuclear program corrected for inflation and Israel allegedly according to foreign sources nobody tells me so I can talk about it has what 90 warheads I think Colin Powell once claimed whatever it is it's succeeded and Iran spent 200 times that and failed now maybe don't fight the whole world while building a nuke that might be one one reason but the point is the found fundamental profound incompetence look at Iran's basic war strategy it has no defensive capability it has no Air Force. It actually has just about no air force of any kind. It literally can't fly against the Israelis. What does it have? The ability to burn down the economies around it, to launch

missiles and drones at the refineries of the Gulf. It has nothing else. It has nothing else. That's extraordinary. It built out a massively competent. A lot of Chinese tech went into it, repression architecture internally against the Iranian people, and the ability to burn down the world, and then just decided to start demolishing everything in sight in the name of the Great Revolution, and if you challenge them on it, they will burn everything down to the ground. It is nothing but collective sacrifice.

Collective sacrifice isn't a willingness to see a greater goal. Collective sacrifice is the goal. The martyrdom is the engine of redemption. And so this is actually, Mukawama is the self-immolation of a society. Mokawama is self-destruction. Chesbala in Lebanon has done vastly more damage, multiple orders of magnitude more damage to Lebanon than it ever did to Israel.

But in the name of slightly hurting Israel, you can destroy Lebanon. That's a worthwhile sacrifice to pay in the Mukawama calculus. And Hamas. Hamas thinks it did a great job. And this is exactly where Palestinians need to be. And if Israel pulls out of the West Bank,

it's what Hamas plans to do in the West Bank as well. So I want to, with the time we have left, I want to get to, I'm optimistic about the war. I'm not certain about the outcome, but I'm optimistic. I think that generally share your assessment. At the same time, I believe that we have to push for the maximalist definition of victory, which for me would be a color revolution or a velvet revolution, hopefully supported by Israel. in its various capabilities, including drones over the skies of Tehran, where you would see the image of hundreds of thousands of Iranians

marching peacefully to the modulus, except this time they would not be mowed down. They would take control of the institutions. To me, and I would love to get your thoughts on this, that image would go a long way in the ideological battle against political Islam. Even with Mukama, that would be the wind condition, in my view, of defeating this ideology,

because it would be the Iranian people themselves rejecting it, and it would show the powerlessness of the remnants of the regime to stop it. And that, I think, is a profound thing that happens that not, it doesn't just reorder the Shia world. I think it reorders the Muslim world. I want to get your thoughts on that.

I'll tell you where... I think a good perspective on how much of an effect this can have in the Muslim world would be the Israeli experience. It's not a Muslim answer. It's an Israeli answer. It's an outsider, but deeply within, outsider. The Israelis think they've gone through this before. And if you want to understand why this war is a multi-front war

and where it's going to go and whether the Israelis are going to stop and who's the what do the Israelis think is happening they've gone through this before in the 1950s and 60s the arab world unified unified in a dangerous way for it from the Israeli perspective because it unified around the idea of destroying Israel but it unified around a much bigger and deeper and more beautiful idea and it was expounded in beautiful ways by poets and thinkers called what is today called pan-Arabism basically under nasir of egypt um the The Arab states unified around this idea that there is a cohesive, coherent Arab nation, that the Arabs have been divided, chopped up, borders drawn between them by colonial powers,

and that if they overcame that and became the Arabness that they were, the unified Arabness that they should always have been, then they will find their place back in history, their honor will be restored, their martial prowess will be restored. It's not a terrible point in favor of this idea that the Soviets are willing to bankroll it and also hand them a lot of brand new Soviet hardware to fight wars with. And they went to war against the Jews to prove it.

And it was the 56 war. There was some skirmishes beforehand, and then the 67 war, and then the war in between 67 and 73, called the attrition war between the Israelis and the Egyptians, and then the 73 war. And with each war, the Israelis defeated them worse, and more dramatically. And Arab unity, which at one point saw Syria and Egypt,

unifying to a single state for about 10 minutes. But that was the scale of the willingness and the desire of these elites to find this pan-Arabism. Each time they met the Israelis in the desert and Tank went up against tank and the Israelis smashed their armies. Pan-Arabism had to answer for it.

And Pan-Arabism had promised that Arab nation states would prove their metal when they unified and what is the test? The test is defeating the Israelis. So when we defeated them again and again and again, we destroyed the idea of pan-Arabism. It no longer made sense to anybody because it didn't deliver.

They didn't make the Arab powerful. Exactly. All these years, all pan-Arabism really was, it was a justification for these dictators to become worse and worse and more destructive and internally repressive regimes. And they couldn't even defeat the Jews for all the suffering of the Arabs that they imposed on the Arabs. And so Pan-Arabism died. The Israelis generally think that's what's happening right now. There is this idea, and this idea has a promise.

And it's good to understand the Mukawama, because then you understand why they're not defeatable in ordinary terms. You can't just defeat them in the battlefield. That's not a defeat for them. The Mukawama tells them that is the path to victory. You'll lose, lose, lose, and eventually the French will leave, right? But they don't just mean the French in Algeria. They mean the entirety of everyone who isn't them, basically, on Earth.

But you know what we can do to these guys? And this is very similar to what you just said. We can demonstrate that not only are they catastrophically self-destructive, what has this version of Islam done to Iran? What has this version of Islam done to a country with, what, the third biggest hydrocarbon reserve on Earth? Maybe the second biggest?

I don't know. There's a chart out there somewhere. Iran should be a country with Israel levels of human resource talent and R&D, the Iranian Persian exiles populate all the math departments of the West. And it should also be a country with Saudi-level energy resources.

It should be that combination. Iran should lead this region. Iran should have an economy the size of Japan's. And it doesn't. And it doesn't because of this regime. And this is the great story. The Mukawama, the Salafism, There's a Sunni and a Shia, and there's a lot of complexity and a lot of subtlety and profound ideas,

but that the core base, this idea, this revolutionary regime, has gutted Iranian society. Chesbala is the enemy of Lebanon, and the Lebanese know it and have always known it, but now they're getting a little courageous in saying so. And Hamas and this revolutionary idea, which was signed Hajamina al-Husani in the 30s, and we see today this promise that the Jews can be destroyed, this promise that they can be destroyed on the altar of these strategies of terrorism, of the FLN, All of these promises, this is before the affalain, obviously, but it is very much an outgrowth. Hajamin is a student of Abduh and Rida, and it comes from there.

Izaddin al-Kasam is a student of Abduh. It's literally that lineage of ideas destroyed in every generation the Palestinian cause. They demolished the Israeli left by responding to every peace overture with waves of suicide bombings. This is a vision of Islam that everything it touches. You let them into Iraq, they'll destroy Iraq. You let them into, Azerbaijan, they'll destroy Azerbaijan. Everything it touches, it destroys. And we have that task to show that and to show that it's one promise,

which is that it can finally make Islam powerful enough to start winning on the world stage. And winning means the destruction of Israel, because the weakest thing that ever pushed Islam back in this vision of Islam is the Jews. So they promise that they will have a society organized, mobilized, to great revolutionary redemption arc that destroys the Jews. guess what? You're not going to destroy the Jews. The Jews will get more powerful, not less, and you will demolish your own. When that is true for a generation, maybe two, maybe three, unfortunately, it's a powerful idea.

Then they have nowhere to go, and the idea dies. And then they might notice that, you know, there are some ordinary, mundane best practices that actually build healthy countries. Well, I think, I mean, let's just say, Baruch Hashem, I hope that's true. And I do think that we are close to that. My last question to you, Haviv, is this, is what would the effect of a color revolution in Iran be on the Sunni Islamists, the Sunni Salafists? Because of course, you know, there is a very deep theological schism. There are different traditions. I respect the differences. However, the diagnosis of the problem and the broad kind of solution, Islam is the solution, are the same.

And the Islamic Republic of Iran was the successful example. I mean, there was a caliphate for a year and a half from ISIS. There was, you know, Tarabi had a moment in Sudan in the 90s. But for the most part, in terms of actual practice of Islamic governance, it's Iran that has been the pioneer. And if Iran, then whatever comes next, but it's not that, and it's no longer held hostage by the Mukawama ideology, I think that that could have a profound impact on the broader Sunni Muslim Brotherhood as well, in the sense that it would be a discrediting. Obviously, you could say, well, they would not have been able to do it without the air campaign of America and Israel. And, um, While I think there's a lot of disinformation about the role that Mossad has played in a largely organic movement in Iran of Iranians trying to get their country back, there's some truth to the fact that the Mossad is, of course, in Israel and has an interest in the success of a Velvet Revolution, which is what Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli leaders have been saying now openly.

But all of that aside, I just think that image would have potentially the – I mean, we might see – finally the process of a decline of Hassan al-Bana's project and what we've been talking about. If Iran's regime falls in a way that is demolishing of the idea of the regime, in other words, shariati's red Shiism and the clericalist tyranny that Khomeini built in its shadow, that whole thing gets swept away by Iranians themselves and that is visible, then the first thing that the Sunni side of this world, the Salafists, would experience, was a massive loss in funding, in training, and support. Now, in many places, Iran fights these guys.

Al-Qaeda, the, you know, grandchild of Hassan al-Bana, was the main fighter against Hezbollah in Syria, right? Right now, Ashara, who led Jabal-Urani-Israeli, in Syria. Although Iran also cooperated with Al-Qaeda in other periods. Has moved forces to the Syrian-Lebanese border to fight Hezbollah with the Israelis, really hoping to kill Hezbollah.

for its massacre of Sunnis in Syria, far more than they hate Israel, what used to be al-Qaeda in Syria, right? So the gap is, you know, you're absolutely right to point it out. It is, it is total, it is complete. On this question of what do we do about Islamic weakness, they share overlapping now Hamas was extraordinary because Hamas managed to embed itself in both camps. Right. And it actually, for five years, left the Iranian orbit, lost Iranian support, wouldn't talk to the Iranians because of the Syrian civil war. And then when Sinwar was elected head of Hamas again in, I forget what year it was, 2017, I think, I forget exactly, Sinwar's great vision was, no, we're back in the Iranian camp, we're back in the Shia,

Mukawama, we need this support, we need this money, and started receiving vast sums from the Iranians and training from Hezbollah and all of that. But even Hamas, Iran, there was tension. And Iran was one of the great patrons of Hamas. So that, The tension is there. But if Iran falls, a lot of that support in many, many places goes away. However, Sunni Salafism is very decentralized. Iran managed to centralize the Shia on this point,

to build out its proxy system in Iraq and in Lebanon and in Syria and in Yemen. But Iran centralized them by funding them, by training them, by arming them with, you know, why would the Yemenis have better missiles than the Germans, right? This is Iran. There is no one like that among the Sunnis. And so the Sunnis are a large number of disparate groups.

The great danger of Iran's fall is, therefore, in other words, Iran's fall wouldn't have an immediate operational difference. It would hurt Hamas, but it wouldn't hurt many of the others. The great danger is that into the vacuum of an Iran that is no longer functionally projecting power on the regional stage, a Sunni power will step in, take on, there's still value to the story. There's still value to this redemption arc vision, not the Shia one among the Sunnis, but there's Sunni versions of it, of what the Mukawwama is,

and the resistance and the steadfastness and the redemption of the weak against the strong. And all this Marxist conversation dressed up in Islamic garb, in Islamic drag maybe, I don't know what exactly it is. and that is why a lot of Israelis today are worried about Turkey. Turkey is ruled by a guy named Recep Taib Erdogan and he religiously belongs to movements in Turkey akin to and borrowing ideas from and some actual thinkers, you know, 30, 40, 50 years ago

actually crossed that gap from Egypt to Turkey and had this discourse that is kind of a Muslim Brotherhood idea. Well, there is one difference, though, which is to say that the resilience of the system that Ataturk built means that Erdogan's opponents have won municipal elections in Istanbul and I think in Ankara. And that it's not – the takeover of the state has not been as total as in Iran. That's the only caveat I would make, which is to say – Yes, but. You could see a horizon where they would – Turks themselves would say – enough of the Muslim Brotherhood.

We don't want this self-destruction that Salafism brings. Yes. The problem with that is Turkey has been sufficiently democratic for sufficiently long to be a very competent state. I don't know in comparison to Western Europe, but certainly in comparison to the Middle East.

Sure. And that means that means that Erdogan actually wields one of the few militaries that can really fight in the Middle East. Also true. While also being a Muslim brother ideologically. So Turkey's democratic impulses, the democratic side of Turkey, which is very much there. Erdogan's not part of it.

He would demolish it if he could, I think. But it also is one of the great dangers, because if he can rule something that is actually competent, in other words, Salafism hasn't had a chance yet to demolish Turkey from within. So it's not weak, so it's strong. And it's strong while also having a radical leadership. So Turkey could potentially step in and be very dangerous. That's the pessimistic view, I would say, of Turkey. No, no, I share your concern about it, and I think that you're absolutely right to point to Turkey as potentially the winner of, you know, the fall of the Islamic Republic and Iran as the sort of, you know, that will then pick up the baton of this wider McCorma ideology. I think that's absolutely right, and I think they will try and I think it will be a problem.

I'm just noting that the ability of Iran to use almost all of its resources to neglect its population, as we discussed, in order. order to hollow out the Lebanese state, in order to support Bashar al-Assad in Syria, in order to form, you know, to arm the Houthis with weaponry, as you said, better than what Germany can field, and also, obviously, to support Hamas. That is going to be harder in Turkey just because Turkey has, because the Muslim Brotherhood does not have the same grip on Turkey as homainism has on Iran. That's all. Yes, let us hope that the democratic in Turkey is stronger than the Salafist in Turkey. I use the word in its classical meaning today.

Usually sometimes people say Salafist, they mean groups more extreme than al-Qaeda. So just to clarify, people might hear the word Salafist or say, that's not what it means. That's what it used to mean, and that's how I'm using it because historically, that's what it meant. So Iran falling would be a tremendous boon to the Middle East. It would be a liberation of Lebanon. It would be a new day for so many countries. It could potentially lead to some kind of reunification in Yemen, which might even give us the hope that Yemen might one day be a real country,

a real state that can actually feed its people. So there's so much good that could come of it. Let me ask you very specific. The fact that power could step in other outcomes. And it just is kind of an Israeli-focused question on this, which is to say, I have great sympathy for what I think is the basic kind of, what I think is the basic kind of consensus position now for most of Israelis, which is you want us to withdraw from territory so it can come another base for one of these Iranian proxies. Are you crazy?

I completely understand that, and I support it. However, if you did not have an Islamic Republic of Iran, would that not open up possibilities to revive this now dormant idea in Israeli society of land for peace? or do you think that, you know, I mean, Israel's haters, the critics of Israel, more than critics, people who want to destroy Israel say they point to the extremism on the West Bank, they point to the rise of Ben-Givir and Smotrick, and they say, this is the face of Israel. I just debated Andrew Sullivan, and this was one of his points. My view is somebody, you know, I'm not Israeli, but I've been there many times, you know, is that Israel can turn very quickly because it's so democratic.

And if you had a new scenario, a new group of leaders once Benetianahu leaves the stage, wouldn't there be this opening for maybe a renewed interest, at least, in land for peace negotiations? Just as a methodological point, as someone who grew up in political journalism, when you're trying to analyze what people will do if conditions change, you always have to get drilled down to the questions they're asking, the anxieties they're facing, what it is they think is happening to them and what it is they think they're responding to. Israelis turn to the right is a response to a perception

that the other side wants to destroy them, that the only politics the Palestinians can produce at the end of the day is politics of annihilation of the Jews. There is no compromising there. There are examples that people then point to. What do you mean? Mahmoud Abbas compromised with the Israelis and even help the Israeli security state tamped down to Hamas terrorism.

and that's absolutely true. And it also caused Abbas to be the most hated leader in the history of the Palestinians. He pulls at single-digit percentages in favorability. Everybody's talking about whether the Palestinian Authority can take over Gaza afterwards, and they're all angry that Netanyahu doesn't want it. Netanyahu is not even a function here.

Gazans won't accept it. If the PA under Abbas is allowed to come into Gaza, Gazans will turn to Hamas again. It's not like, you know, it's such a hated thing, because it collaborates with the Israelis. And so even the examples where there are Palestinian leaders who will, are for Israelis examples of the incapacity of Palestinian politics, not to the incapacity of Palestinian politics to accept a compromise

that is less than the annihilation of the Jews. And that is the perception. Now you can argue that it's not true, and that's okay. And they're, by the way, serious pollsters of Palestinians that say it's much more complex, and I'm happy to discuss it. But that's what most Israelis believe, ordinary Israelis, left-wing Israelis, progressive Israelis, believe that. If Iran falls, then the powers in Palestinian politics like Hamas

will be weakened dramatically in logistical terms. Yeah, that's what I'm getting at, right. But it won't do anything in terms of narrative terms. Okay. It won't change the internal Sunni-Palestinian story drawn from Khadjami, through Izaddin al-Kasam, through, you know, the generations of Arafat and his al-Jal-Jal. model, and all of that will remain. And the central view of the Israelis as this monolithic, demonic thing,

incidentally, most Israelis believe the vast majority of Palestinians want them dead and gone. Most Palestinians believe the vast majority of Israelis want them dead and gone. Every one of them has 10,000 data points to point to when they make that argument. And every one of them is responding in that way. So to understanding people from that perspective of what they think is happening to them and what they think they're responding to, I think is the best way to understand what's happening. Iran disappearing will militarily weaken Hamas.

Militarily weakening Hamas might be a very good thing for Gaza because it's turning out to be extremely difficult to begin the rebuilding of Gaza, as long as Hamas controls every part of it, the IDF pulls out of, you know, at every moment. And an actual crowbarring of Hamas out of Gaza might become 20% more possible if the Iranian regime falls. It won't solve the fundamental problem.

of the narrative and of the experiences of the two peoples. We know that there is, I don't expect, by the way, that a Gazan who hates Hamas loves Israel or wants peace with Israel, but there is something there, which is that there's a lot of anger at this blunder, this tragic blunder that Sinwar imposed on everyone else, really in the term, I think I would say imposed on the region, but certainly Gaza. Is there an opportunity, though, for, I don't know, for Palestinian politics, their narrative to evolve? Isn't that, you know, just as, you know, Ben-Gurian evolves, right? A Ben-Gurian evolves.

In the early 30s, Ben-Gurian thinks he can cut a deal, you know, with maybe not Hajimian-Alv's, anybody. He meets with the mandarin's of Palestine, and he says, well, you know, this is going to be good for you. We're going to give you jobs. And he evolves over time and comes closer to. the Jabotinsky position as outlined in the iron wall, as you know. Is there an opportunity for something like that to happen to the Palestinians? It feels like they are stuck in a hundred-year loop. A hundred-year loop in which somebody somewhere always promises them that God will liberate them if only they kill enough Jews. And they don't understand why it hasn't worked

yet. I would say this. Look, the problem when facing a regime that is mass sacrificial, like the Iranian regime, is that the very sorts of people who would march against it, people who want their small business to thrive, people who want their kids to go to university, people who want the economy liberated from the people who physically hold in their clutches, 60%, 70% of it, people who want the country to have a free and new day

and not to engage in wars everywhere in the region at their expense, people who want their daughters to walk around without having to worry about modesty police. Those people can't march into the gunfire because of the nature of these people, which is decent people. They don't have that mass sacrificial impulse to march into the gunfire in their hundreds of thousands.

It would not take another 30,000 or 80,000 or 150,000. If millions can't march in Iran, in my estimation, the regime can't be brought down because it will kill hundreds of thousands. At the very beginning of a month ago, whatever it was, Chaminé released a statement in Persian, not to the world, in which he said hundreds of thousands of martyrs built this revolution, and we will pay that sacrifice

to prevent it from falling. Hundreds of thousands of more are willing to prevent it from falling. What he was saying was, we're going to kill hundreds of thousands. Don't come at us. That's what he was telling Iranians. That's how Iranians understood that statement. And then he went and killed 30,000. And they would kill more.

That is the mass sacrificial macawama. Hamas is that. Hamas will kill every last Palestinian because the redemption of the world is at stake because the Palestinians are the spearhead of the liberation of Islam through the defeat of this thing called Zionism, the weakest thing that have brushed Islam back. And that is the beginning of the pivot of history

after centuries of weakness that the whole world's redemption depends on. And that's the story of the Palestinians. A story of great and noble honor as the spearhead of Islam rather than the story of dispossession and weakness and humiliation. And so that's all Hamas is and all Palestinians can die for it and they're proud of what has happened in Gaza. And if it had been three times and eight times the death toll, then it would have been a better victory against the Israelis because the Israelis would be even worse off on the global stage

and the Muslim world would have mobilized more, et cetera. So how do you protest against the mass destroyers of your own society? who are perfectly willing to mow you down in almost infinite. Well, I'm saying if the Iranians, if the Iranians and... Now, Iran might reach that point, but in Gaza, you have the problem, and this is a real problem, and I don't know how to get away from it.

I don't know how to solve it. The Palestinians who might be willing just literally, they know they'll die, but they'll save the next generation by marching against Hamas and mass numbers, actually have to contend with the fact that if they do bring down Hamas, they still face an Israel that in the Palestinian view really is dominated by Ben-Vir and Smotrich. Well, this is why it's mainly the immediate horizon,

but I'm saying if the fall of the Islamic Republic can open up a political space for Israel to adapt, and then maybe, you know. I think one of the great failures of this war, the Israelis in Gaza, and also probably in Iran. I mean, luckily I said this before hostilities, again. So now I can, it's not, you know, 20-20 hindsight. But I think one of the great failures is not holding out a better future that makes it worth toppling the evil regime. That's not

exactly the problem in Iran. And Iran, the problem is that we haven't, we, Israel, we, America, we, the West hasn't made a stronger case. Not that the Iranian regime is bad for the world, but that the Iranian regime is bad for Iran and not really. Well, I don't think we need to make that case to Iranians. We need to play a huge, we need a huge, concerted, successful, powerful, focused propaganda campaign on why this regime that claims to be red Shia is actually black Shia, is actually the evil regime of the Safavids come back. For example, the fact that they're all a bunch of billionaires, all these great leaders of the revolutionary poor. By the way, I think that's being done. But that's, anyway, but, you know, the fact, it's being done, it should be done

10 times more. It should be in every speech by every world leader. And then the regime can't explain to the ordinary IRGC fighter that hasn't been paid for a month and won't be paid for another two, what it is that they're actually fighting for. That will weaken them more than bombing another 10 places and another

hundred races. So that means in in the Gaza, that would look very different. What you would need to give Gazans to create a movement against Hamas that's viable, not to create it, to have any chance of it ever forming for real. is a better day after.

You're marching in Iran against the regime for a better day after that Iranians will set. Well, what about Gaza? Israel hasn't, and this is Israel's fault, and Israel should have done it, and it's Israeli agency, and I'm a big believer in agency, in adulthood, in responsibility. If you screw it up, you own it. One of the things we screwed up is we let Smotrich narrate this war. We have a war that it's causing terrible devastation in Gaza.

You can think it's a legitimate war. You can think it's an illegitimate war. Either way, it caused terrible devastation. but we didn't ever bother Netanyahu didn't ever bother explaining that the day after this war the goal is a Gaza that looks like Dubai the goal is I think that's what

Jared Kushner is trying to do with the That's wonderful but Palestinians don't think Jared Kushner makes that has that call to me but if Israel might be able to make that call but if Israel had said that from day one and Netanyahu won't say it and he won't say it for political reasons and so Smuthrich kept saying

you know again and again and again over the last two and a half years. I'm thinking I'm thinking I'm saying after these leaders, at some point Netanyahu will not be the prime minister of Israel. And I'm saying that I think that there is an opportunity. I'm not saying it's going to happen. I just, my sense is that there is an opportunity, and I think you're absolutely right. We keep, because we don't have a sense that these regimes at their core are stories.

Right. That's what sustains them. We keep missing these opportunities. Why, when 30,000 Iranians are getting gunned down? did the world not see everything happening? Because there was a massive intelligence operation to make sure the internet it still works. Why when the people are marching?

Don't get me started. I agree. Why when the people are marching, did the airstrikes not begin? And the answer is, well, you didn't want to taint this revolution with Western. No, bring the whole thing down. That's not why, if I make it correct. It didn't happen because we didn't have the assets in place. Maybe Israel could have done it.

But I mean, I would love if Israel could do it. I don't mean to criticize a specific thing. I know a lot about Gaza. I know much less about the American buildup on Iran, just literally in terms of the day-to-day following. But if we're ready for it ahead of time, if we know what this regime is, we know what a war against it would look like.

When Sencom was told by the president, I want to get Iran, they pull a drawer, they open a drawer, and in the drawer are 16 different folios and plans and things, and they prepared these things. There's people whose full-time job is preparing these plans. These plans don't include full-on assault, narrative assault, on the narrative of the regime.

Certainly the Israeli plans on Gaza never have and need to, and need to for now. So long term, if we start to do that, yes, there's a hope. And if we don't start to do that, Hamas will survive just by saying, look how evil the Israelis are. What do they offer you? Well, if they offer you nothing, what else do you got other than us? So we need to have an offer that is not nothing and that is actually magnanimous and actually a new life, a new day, integration into the Israeli economy.

You want your own state? Well, the Trump plan plus a lot or the alone plan in some sense or another. There are Israeli plans. There are ways to do this. I don't want to rule them forever. My oldest is three years away from military service. I have four kids.

I don't want to spend 15 years knowing my kids are at checkpoints in the West Bank. It's not something I want. And no Israeli wants it. And so where is... And I say that with everything I've said before. which is there's no horizon. There is no new day. There is no way out if you really understand what the actual people's on the ground actually think and believe about each other. But therefore,

you begin to build it. A real Israeli offer would place a question, a question mark over Hamas's claims and a choice that actually lies before Palestinians. Nobody places that choice. Once you place that choice, you need a profound shift in the political culture of Palestinians to be able to accept anything like it. I don't know if that's possible. But we're not even creating the conditions to test it at this point. This war might end now because the American domestic politics is going to force a change, whatever. The war doesn't end. The Israelis, I don't think it is either. I think Trump is more committed than people are saying. Yeah, he seems to be doing exactly what he would be doing if he was more committed than people are saying. But I want to

say the Israelis think that this is the Pan-Arab War, which is to say five wars over 30 years, but the enemy finally falls. That is what the Israelis think they're doing. Don't expect it to go away. You won't have an end to the war if you just think you are finishing it and walking away. And you want to keep the straight of Hormuz open,

have a plan for that for the next round. This is going to be more rounds. And in the end, I hate to say it. I deeply apologize to all the haters out there. The Jews are probably going to win this one. Oh, yeah. I apologize. Our enemies are self-destroying.

So we might win it just on points, but we're going to win it. I'm amazed. day for Iran and the region. Qatar kicked out like dozens of Iranian generals and spies. That's amazing. Even Qatar.

Never thought I'd see the day. Thank you so much, Haviv.