Plain English with Derek Thompson - World on Fire, Part 1: The Houthis, Israel's Impossible War, and Worsening Middle East Chaos

Episode Date: January 12, 2024

The chaos in the Middle East is getting worse. It’s not just in Gaza. It’s not the spasms of violence in the West Bank. It’s not just the northern border with Lebanon, where Israel is braced for the possibility of a new war. It’s not the Houthis in Yemen, disrupting Red Sea trade. It's not just Iran urging on these groups. It's all of it, all at once. Natan Sachs, director of the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings, joins to break this all down and offer several big-picture explanations for why so many long-standing problems in the Middle East are getting worse at the same time. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Natan Sachs Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Did Don Draper really buy the world of Coke? Did Tony Soprano really die? Or just order more onion rings? The finales of our favorite shows can make us argue, make us cry, and make us crazy. From Spotify and the Ringer, I'm Andy Greenwald, and this is Stick the Landing, a new podcast where we'll be telling the story of modern TV backwards, one fade out at a time. Find Stick the Landing on Wednesdays on the prestige TV feed on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, everybody. This is a quick emergency update to the episode that you're about to listen to. About 24 hours after we concluded the interview that you're about to hear, the U.S., the U.K., and a handful of allies, launched an attack against the Houthis in Yemen.

The Houthis are a rebel group backed by Iran who have been attacking ships, including cargo ships, passing through the Red Sea. in this episode, you're going to hear a full analysis of a brief history of the Houthis. Who are they? Who's backing them? What do they want? How do they have the power that they have? You're going to hear all of this, but we, of course, did not have the opportunity to comment on news that broke a day after the interview.

So just know that we didn't know about this news, but I believe that the U.S. attack on the Houthis and the aftermath that we're going to see in the coming days and weeks just makes that part of this episode and perhaps the whole of the episode that much more urgent. Thanks for listening. Today's episode, the Middle East is spinning out of control. It's not just Gaza, where Israeli bombing has reset historical records for the pace of aerial destruction. It's not just spasms of violence in the West Bank. It's not just the northern border with Lebanon, where Israel is braced for the possibility of war

with the militant group Hezbollah. It's not just another Shia group, the Houthis and Yemen. disrupting a major artery of global trade by attacking cargo ships in the Red Sea and sending insurance rates spiraling up, forcing commodities and energies to be shipped around the Horn of Africa like we're back in the 1820s before the construction of the Suez Canal. It's not just Iran urging on Hezbollah and the Houthis and Hamas in a proxy war against not only Israel but also Saudi Arabia. It is all of this all at once.

On Tuesday, I told you that I wanted to do more mini-series. on this show, more multi-part series, that New Year's resolution is being met very quickly this year. This is the first of a multi-series show that we're doing on the highly chaotic, highly militant, highly bellicose state of the entire world,

starting with a cascade of crises emerging from the Middle East. Our guide today to all this chaos is Natanzax, who grew up in Jerusalem in the 1990s. Today he is director of the center of Middle East policy at Brookings. We began in Gaza,

where 2 million civilians are at risk of famine. We move on to Israel, where understandable grief and anguish is mixing toxicly with far-right politics, and where President Joe Biden has dispatched his top aides to prevent a full-blown war from erupting between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Netan Sachs, welcome to the show. Thank you very much for having me. I am so happy you're here.

I would love your help to summarize the state of all. all of this turmoil that we're seeing in the Middle East. And I think we should begin with the state of the military campaign in Gaza from the perspective of Israel. First, I would love you to start by reminding us, what is Israel trying to do here? And how close do you think they are to achieving it? Well, thanks again for having me. I wish I could say it's a pleasure, but honestly, nothing about this has been a pleasure for four months at least. This situation is horrendous.

To recap, the war's been going on since October 7th, since the Hamas invasion, basically, of southern Israel, the Israeli response was very, very forceful and continues to be so, but has changed in phase. So Israel has now even declared that it has entered a new phase, perhaps the third phase. In the beginning, we saw a massive aerial bombardment that caused enormous damage, especially in the northern Gaza Strip.

We then saw an Israeli incursion with ground troops to the north, but also the southern Gaza Strip after a while. And now we're seeing a scaling down of the operation. That does not mean an end of the operation by any means, but it means a change of phase, less ground troops, hopefully less civilian casualties. Of course, already we're saying inside the Gaza Strip a major humanitarian crisis and the winter is already upon us.

And in Israel, still hundreds of thousands of displaced people from towns and villages along the border of the Gaza Strip, but also the border with Lebanon for fear of fighting with Hezbollah, which has been heating up. The Israeli aims have been misunderstood dramatically abroad, partly because they were very badly defined inside Israel. Israel sort of vacillated between what the aims would be. It started with all the usual grandiose rhetoric that you would hear after an enormous historic trauma like October 7th, which really bears repeating was, you know, from the Israeli perspective, a historic trauma, something that we remembered for generations to come.

And so you saw the Israeli response sometimes rise to absurd rhetoric that still continues today. But if you look at the actual military campaign, the way the cabinet defined the goals to the military, and the way the military defines it, it is still expansive but much more contained, and that is to degrade and remove Hamas's ability to govern the Gaza Strip as an independent statelet and to create the military power from the Gaza Strip to attack Israel. In other words, not to eradicate Hamas from this face of the earth. Hamas is a political movement and an idea, and it won't disappear after this war for sure. But actually, the Israeli goal is not that.

The Israeli goal is that Hamas can no longer be allowed to govern a statelet bordering Israel and to amass such a massive amount of weapons and trained troops to invade Israel again with the underlying sort of impetus from the Israeli perspective being that what happened on October 7th can never be allowed to happen again under any circumstances, no matter how much criticism Israel receives abroad. And that is a very strong impetus among wide, wide swaths of the Israeli public. That was a really fantastic summary, and it retraced what makes me so torn about this conflict. I absolutely sympathize with the idea that if the government of any neighboring state invades to kill you and kills 1,200 of your citizens

and lobs rockets at you after weeks and months and states that permanent warfare is their explicit and inviolable goal, that's not an acceptable security dynamic for any country in the world. No militarized country

in the history of the world would refuse to respond to that provocation. And yet, Israel's response to that provocation has been a humanitarian disaster, a public relations disaster. I think you touched on that

when you spoke of Israel's strategic confusion and the degree to which they were confused in their communication of the strategy to the world. And it has also, I think, produced a strategic quagmire for Israel because they are leaving behind, or at least seem to leave behind, a Gaza where I worry that a radical militaristic response will breed in the destruction that is, in particular, North Gaza.

And so I wonder, on the one hand, yes, the strategy is clear to me, uproot Hamas. You cannot live with this kind of neighboring statelet, as you called it. And yet the unwinding of Hamas has been horrendous from a humanitarian and in public relations strategic standpoint. Am I seeing something wrong here? Is there anything that I've just said in my sort of tortured summary of this crisis that struck you as actually wrong? I wish I could say so. No. I think your self-torture is correct.

And self-torture is the right emotion facing all of this. And I think that's exactly the dilemma. The reason Israel enters into this complete terrible dilemma with horrendous consequences, certainly in the Gaza's trip and in Israel, is the effect of October 7th. I imagine that October 7th succeeded far beyond what Hamas imagined. Perhaps they were interested in an Israeli invasion just like this, I don't know. But regardless, I don't expect that they thought they would catch Israel so left-footed and therefore succeed to this degree, which created in Israel a day.

dynamic, which really, I know I'm repeating myself to a certain degree, but in Israel, there is, there is this sense of historical imperative. This, that almost Israel exists so that this cannot happen. That's, that's truly for many Israelis, not all Israelis, but for many Israelis, that's the reason of being of Israel is that a pogrom like this cannot happen, because if this is allowed to happen, you might as well live in Eastern Europe and allow it to happen again. And therefore, it's really hard to exaggerate the rallying around the idea that Israel cannot allow this to happen, but it did not solve in any way the conundrum that existed before. The reason Israel didn't invade before is exactly, as you say, the consequence is horrendous. That's still true

today. My great fear is that in trying to uproot what I believe in Hamas to be an illiberal, anti-democratic, authoritarian thug state. I mean, truly, I believe that Hamas is an absolutely horrendous political institution, not only with regard to its relations to Israelis, but also with regard to its relations with Gazans, whom it often steals money from and redirects, you know, international humanitarian aid to build subterranean tunnels to the military rather than build out schools and schools and hospitals, etc. But my fear is that Israel, in the process of trying to tear out a weed, is replacing that weed with a hornet's nest. that they are going to leave behind a Gaza in which militarism will breed easily.

What kind of a place will Gaza be when Israel, quote, succeeds in its mission to defeat Hamas, the political organization, not, as you said, the ideology? You touched on the point, and the real question is, how will it look the day after? Gaza is devastated, especially northern Gaza's trip, but not. only the northern Gaza's trip. And the question is, can there be a massive rebuilding effort, both physical and humanitarian rebuilding, and a political avenue forward that would allow for Palestinian agency, in particular, at some point in my mind, the Palestinian Authority in some form or another. Palestinian Authority, which governs the West Bank from Ramallah, is secular,

also considered extremely corrupted and popular among its own people, which is a major problem. but is a body that Israel statements to the contrary notwithstanding can work with and does work with every day. Can that somehow, can the authority, the Palestinian Authority somehow be shepherded into the Gaza Strip in the days after this conflict simmer down? But in the best of cases, which is very unlikely, in the best of cases where the Palestinian Authority comes into government, where funds, funding, perhaps from the Gulf, the Arab Gulf, is found for a massive rebuilding and humanitarian effort. Even in those scenarios, we are well past the tipping point in which such a number of Gazans have been killed that the radicalization, radicalizing effect in the Gaza ship,

I fear is inevitable. And not only in the Gaza Strip, Palestinians and others looking at this from elsewhere and cheered on by Twitter, or people on Twitter, I should say not Twitter, will be radicalized as well. And this is going to be a generational challenge. There's no two ways about this. This is something that we're going to be living with certainly for my lifetime. I said in a previous episode that the only path forward that I could possibly see for Israel-Palestine is something like dual regime change, that you need regime change in Gaza, but you also need regime change in Israel because there is absolutely no way that a prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is going to be the ringleader

of a true and lasting peace deal. And my belief that we need regime change in Israel was only deepened by a Times of Israel recent report, where Netanyahu reportedly said in a quiet secret meeting with far right backbenchers, quote, I am the only one who will prevent a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank after the war, end quote. So you have the leader of Israel promising in an effort to save his own back to reject a two-state solution to save himself. You have talked a lot about,

and I believe we're currently working on a book, about an idea that you call anti-solutionism, that is this rejection among the Israeli right of the idea that Israel-Palestine should be thought of as a puzzle to solve. It's almost like this group

rather thinks of it as like a chronic disease to be managed. What is this idea? What is this concept? of anti-solutionism, and why is it so important to understand when we're analyzing Israeli politics right now? Okay, so if I may be the polysider, just for a moment, I think you're talking about government change in Israel. Regime change would be replacing Israel with something else, changing the whole constitutional state. I think we're talking about government change, which I agree is absolutely essential. Netanyahu is deeply uninterested in what the administration

would push forward and is also in this political situation. that he created with the very extreme right that would not allow it. I wrote about anti-solutionism in a foreign affairs piece a long time ago, back in 2015, and I was trying to capture what the Israelis, not only on the right, in fact, not on the far right, the far right have ideas of what their solution would be. That would be from the river to the sea, one state, Israeli, Jewish, no place for any Palestinian sovereignty. They know what their plan is. And the people on the left who want a two-state solution, they know what their plan is.

It's the people sort of in the center right, and after the second intifada, that and the disengagement from Gaza, which was perceived as a failure in the Israeli mind, because of the Hamas rise, after these attempts by Israel sort of to reach peace or to reach lateral borders with the Gaza's trip and the West Bank, it was perceived as there is no solution. In a sense, Israel is stuck. And their response, I've called anti-solutionist, which was to flip the question on the head. So here come all these American...

types, who say two-state solutions, stuff like that, I admit I'm one of them. And we think, look, if we just square it this way or square it that way or pressure this person or pressure that person or if we get a different Israeli leader, you know, have government change, as you say, or a different Palestinian leader, then we can solve the puzzle. And for many in the Israeli, especially the center right, some on the right too, they said, no, you guys don't understand. This is not the Midwest where you come with enough kind of enterprise and initiatives. and you find a solution. Most problems in the world, in fact, are chronic problems. Most issues

are insoluble, and we live with them all the time, right? We have chronic issues, all of us, including death, which will come to each one of us, unless it's solved anytime soon. And we kick the can down the road. And so, and kicking the can down the road sounds absurd, right? It's a pejorative way of describing strategy, but I think for Israel, it was the strategy, and especially for Benjamin and Teniao. Teniao is a procrastinator not as a fault, but really as a position in which Israel, he's extremely pessimistic about the possibility of transforming the world, and therefore, we need to manage crises, we need to kick the can down the road, we need to, in the meantime, from his perspective, Israel needs to get stronger, and Israel needs to reach a position where

the other side, including Arab states, would feel, you know what, we want to normalize with Israel, we want to make peace with Israel in one day, maybe even the Palestinians. Now, he was to a certain degree in his mind vindicated by the Abraham Accords, normalization of the UAE and others. But let me just, I hasten to caveat. This sort of anti-solutions approach is at its best, which is not what Israel did, at its best, is basically a conservative point of view. It's saying, look, you can't transform the world without terrible unintended consequences

and therefore manage it cautiously carefully. However, what Israel, and especially Netanyahu did, was not that. They didn't keep their strategic options open, try to shift things so that time worked for you, take a conservative, cautious approach. While they were waiting, while they were kicking the can down the road, they were building settlements. They were undermining the Palestinian Authority, in part, by finding or seeking a modus vending with Hamas. They were managing this conflict with Hamas only to see horrific consequences, as we saw on October 7th.

In other words, managing the conflict this way was a folly, partly because they were not managing it seriously, and because it was managing them in a terrible dynamic with time working against everyone, against them, but of course against the Palestinians. And in that sense, it was faux-conservatism. It was not a sound conservative approach. I'm not always conservative, I should say, but you can imagine that in some circumstances, conservative would make sense. This is not what they were doing. I am really glad that you landed there because as you were talking, I was thinking to myself that anti-solutionism as you're defining it, it sounds like a kind of operationalized Burkean conservatism, like reject revolutionary utopianism and manage the world incrementally. But that's not what Israel is doing in the West Bank. Israel is pursuing essentially a de facto strategy of a one-state solution. They are removing zip code by zip code Palestinians and building settlements where they can put settlers, often radical, often violent settlers, and turning the West Bank into a kind of,

some people on the left would say apartheid. I don't know whatever the center-right definition of what the West Bank is, but certainly not anything that's Berkian and conservative. And this is where I do want to bring in a little bit of Palestinian politics here before I move on to other crises in the Middle East. I think some of that took me a while to understand about the Palestinian territories is that the popularity of Palestinian governments is flipped. Gazans dislike Hamas and residents of the West Bank dislike the Palestinian Authority, but Gazans are slightly more likely to support the PA, and Hamas is very, very popular. And October 7th was very, very popular among West Bank residents, at least according to some

surveys of Palestinians. What do you think is the best way to explain this kind of schismed dynamic of Palestinian politics, where you have essentially what some people call a kind of, you know, denuded puppet government in the West Bank and the Palestinian Authority? and then you have Hamas, which is under attack in Gaza, and each is more popular in the other territory. I think it's a symptom of the fact that Palestinians are extremely disillusioned with the sum total of their political reality.

They are extremely disillusioned. When people are that disillusioned, that unhappy, that sort of hopeless, just to a degree, in a political sense, then whatever they see, whatever they know best, they dislike the most. There are many countries in which the sitting government or the incumbency is a negative trend. I believe I'm not an expert on French politics, but in France, for example, the French president is usually underwater in terms of popularity. In the United States, we sort of used to expect them to be above water. I have to say the trend is the reverse,

not just with Biden, but before Biden, Trump, and before Trump Obama. But in France, that's usually the case. And I think that's the case in Palestinians, but on steroids. They In the West Bank, they see the futility of the Palestinian Authority, the deep corruption. I mean, personal financial corruption of the Palestinian Authority, reportedly so. I can't report myself. And in the Gaza Strip, they see life under Hamas. And they opt for anything else. If you give them a choice, they'll say, well, at least the other devil.

I would say, though, I'm not a Palestinian. So first, I should take anything I say about Palestinian politics with a grain of salt. But I'd add, if I think if people were to choose between reality in the West Bank as bad as it is and the reality in the Gaza Strip, not only since October 7th, which is absolutely horrendous, but before that, I think the choice is clear. And you might ask what the government of Gaza could have done to end it. And there is actually an answer. It could have ended the blockade of Gaza in a day by handing its weapons over to the Palestinian Authority or leaving the Gaza Strip. And in fact, it can end this misery right now in a day. It could announce it's releasing the hostages and handing its weapons over, not to Israel, to the Palestinian Authority, or leaving the Gaza Strip like the PLO did in Beirut,

and the war would be over in a second. It's not going to happen, to be clear, of course, but that's sort of the point. I want to turn to the West Bank very, very briefly, where settler violence has increased since October 7th. There was one report I read that 24% of West Bank jobs have evaporated since October 7th due to work permits being suspended between rising economic despondency and rising settler violence, should we be more concerned about a new wave of violence breaking out in the West Bank? Yes, absolutely. We should be very concerned, and it is high on the priority, I should say,

of policymakers here in Washington, there are a lot of people very concerned, not only with the northern border in Israel being kind of the next escalation of this fight, but also the West Bank. even before October 7th, the Israeli intelligence was very concerned with the outbreak of violence, but it was focused on East Jerusalem and the West Bank. It was not focused so much on the Gaza Strip, and that was part of its failure. That was part of what led to the horrific intelligence and preparedness failure of October 7th itself. It was, of course, also very concerned with the northern border of Israel, with Hezbollah, which is a far stronger enemy. And that is still true. Gaza got so much tremendously worse, but the Parakeg,

of East Jerusalem and the West Bank remain. And all the incendiary elements are all there. You mentioned settler violence, but also other things. There's also Hamas trying to gain a foothold, which has been trying for many years to gain a foothold in the West Bank. And simply a breakdown of the Palestinian Authority itself, especially in the northern West Bank, in especially a town called Janine, but not only in Janine,

we've seen a breakdown of Palestinian Authority's authority. And therefore, local cells, sometimes unaffiliated with different Palestinian factions, just local organizations taking root. They are sort of sometimes half crime syndicates, half terrorist organizations, half something else, if there are three halves or anything. And in that sense, in one sense, it's the worst of all worlds, right? You have a sort of no, no clear target, no clear address, even for Israel's enemy there, they have no clear target. And for the Palestinian authority, no clear target with whom to deal in a local way. So in short, yes, extremely. The West Bank is a powder keg.

East Jerusalem is, in particular, at different times of year. As Ramadan approaches, that will return to center stage and some Jewish holidays, that will return to center stage. We saw that in May 2021, in a major way with the evictions of Palestinian families from homes, but also Muslim and Jewish holidays coinciding. Perhaps luckily, it's hard to talk about any luck here, but perhaps luckily, those dates did not coincide this time. So now, pivoting north at the Lebanon border, Israel has been trading fire with the Iran-back group Hezbollah. Before we go deeper into the politics of the northern border, I just want to pause and have you do a brief backgrounder on Hezbollah for us. Who is Hezbollah? What do they want?

It's a great question. So Lebanon is a very complex. It's not a very large country, but it's a very complex one, with especially complex sectarian politics. So Lebanon has an overtly sectarian constitution of sorts with a division of power where the president is always a Christian Maronite Lebanese. The prime minister is always a Sunni Muslim and the Speaker of Parliament is always a Shia Muslim. And this reflects historic demographic realities where the Christian Maronite group was very large and the Sunni Muslim was second perhaps and the Shia third. That demographic reality is probably no longer true and probably hasn't been true. in decades. The Shia Muslim group is probably larger than the others by now, but everyone avoids counting precisely so that another civil war doesn't break out as it did in the 1970s with horrific consequences. So all this to say that this Shia Sunni versus Christian also,

and there are also other groups, Druze and other groups, is very important, very salient in Lebanon. I think abroad we often think that Shia versus Sunni is the most important thing in the world. In many cases, it's not. But in Lebanon, it is. very politically salient. Historically, there was another group called Amal, Hope, which was the main political group in the Shia community. In the 1980s, with Iranian backing, a second group was formed. This was also time of an Israeli invasion in the early 1980s.

And that group was Hezbollah, very much in the beginning, at least, very much an arm of Iran, which is, of course, itself Shia. It's not Arab, but it is Shia. Lebanon is Arab. and people trained both religious scholars trained in Iran, but also operatives trained in Iran, setting up a major group that has two sides to it, and this is crucial. It is both a political party. It is easily now the most important Shia political party, although not the only one.

Amos still exists. It is also a major military force, a major militia, so much so that it is by far the strongest military power in Lebanon, including the Lebanese armed forces, the Lebanese army, it is stronger than them. And so it is the most important political military faction in Lebanon with two sides to it. It also has two sides in another sense. It is an Iranian proxy to a degree. It has very close relations to Tehran. It does not hide it, of course, by any means.

It's very proud of that. It's part of the Iranian idea of exporting the Iranian revolution, and it's the most successful instance of exporting the Iranian revolution, Islamic Revolution in Iran. But it is also a Lebanese party with Lebanese considerations. It's part of the Lebanese coalition. It affects very much today who can be appointed president, who can be appointed prime minister,

how the state can be governed, and even international agreements that the state signs, Hezbollah and its head, Hassan Asrallah, are absolutely central to all of that. So it's a very formidable force. Militarily, as I said before, it's much more powerful than Hamas. it's been armed with Iranian money but also Iranian know-how and technology. It now constitutes a formidable military force north of Israel.

It's a non-state actor in a sense, but it's really a semi-state actor. If I said Hamas before had a state-let, Hamas has more than a state-led. To a certain degree, controls the state of Lebanon, which is dysfunctional, but nonetheless a state. and in that sense, it's a major political player. I'll say one last point, which is that Iran's strategy of exporting the Iranian revolution, ideology really, of exporting the Iranian revolution, Hezbollah has been a key agent of that, not only in Lebanon, but also elsewhere. It's been absolutely crucial. It was absolutely crucial in the civil war in Syria and helping the Assad regime survive.

It has been important in other places, and in particular in Yemen, in training and building up the Houthi, group backed by the Iranians and by Hezbollah, not only the Iranians, but directly by Hezbollah, and they are playing, of course, an important role right now. And what about the relationship between Hezbollah and Israel? They are sworn enemies more than it is, you know, I mentioned before, there's no chance of peace between Hamas and Israel, and there isn't, and there never was. In my estimation, for Hezbollah, it's more so. Hezbollah, you know, it doesn't really have any direct,

territorial claims of Israel, although it claims a portion, something called the Shaba Farms, which Israel actually captured from Syria, 1967, not from Lebanon. That is really a pretense, an excuse for Hezbollah to continue the fight. But it is ideologically, overtly, and explicitly, completely opposed to the idea of the existence of Israel in line with the Iranian line. There cannot be an Israel. It is not Israel. That is Palestine. The Zionist regime, as it would often refer to it, is a usurper in and simply should not exist. It's not, you know, it sounds like I'm giving you some anti-Hizbalah propaganda. Truly, this is how Hezbollah would describe it itself. And so they are implacable enemies, in a sense. There's really,

there's no middle ground in a sense. What there is and has been at certain times, not today, is a deterrence and a sort of a quiet, born of deterrence, but nothing of peace. So there's been this war of deterrence, and Hezbollah like Hamas is financially, ideologically backed by Iran. Last week, a senior Hezbollah commander was killed in Lebanon by Israeli forces. That was the second assassination of a senior Hezbollah leader in just the last few weeks. Does it feel to you like war, outright hot war between Israel and Hezbollah is inevitable? So to a degree we've been at war since October 7th, we've seen a war between Hezbollah. and Israel there's been fighting and killing across the border every day since October 7th.

But as you point out correctly, it's remained below a threshold of all-out war, as we saw in 2006. So Hezbollah, you know, the first fighting was when Israel was in Lebanon physically in the early 80s and then held a security zone, as it called, along the border where, for 18 years, a very bloody war there between Hezbollah and Israel. Then in 2006, Hezbollah crossed the border, attacked an Israeli patrol and kidnapped two bodies of Israeli soldiers, which ignited the second Lebanon war as a stone in Israel, the war of 2006, which was devastating in Lebanon but also northern Israel. And now, in the past year, for the first time since 2006, we've seen an erosion of that deterrence. Hezbollah has incurred, even before October 7th. This was probably part of the calculation of Hamas, although I can't read their minds. But their calculation was probably that Hezbollah would join the fight in a major way.

And that was only partially true. Hizbalah has joined the fight, but has joined the fight below a certain threshold. And Hezbollah and Israel have both sort of tried to maintain a bloody understanding of what the borders, what the boundaries of that fight are. This has come close, much closer to all that war just in recent days and weeks. the Israelis or someone probably the Israelis killed the head of the Radwan force which is the elite commando sort of force of the Hezbollah fighting power which was preparing for its own October 7th very explicitly. Hizbalah was talking about conquering Israeli villages in the Galilee for years now.

The Radwan force would be the one doing it just like the Nuhba force of Hamas did it in October 7th. And the second leader killed was the head of the unmanned area of vehicle group by Hizbalah, which has been attacking Israel. I'll just say, though, that unlike the other arenas, here there is room for real diplomacy. I don't mean to sound optimistic because I'm not, but here at least there are the elements that might allow for diplomatic resolution in the sense that there is a clear legal and international precedent. Hizbollah is not supposed to be deployed along the border with Israel. And the Israeli population, now there are hundreds of thousands of Israelis displaced from there, evacuated from the border,

because the Radoan force in particular is along the Israeli border. UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the war in 2006, states very clearly, the Hezbollah forces have to be deployed north of the Littani River, which is quite a few miles north of the border, and only Lebanese armed forces, the state army, can be allowed to be along the border. That's not been observed by Hezbollah. If that were returned to, that is something the Israelis have said would be their demand. And if that were met, then we could avoid, I think, an open confrontation.

The American administration is very heavily involved, actively personally involved in trying to negotiate these things. There are mediators trying to get there that absolutely does not mean they will get there. But at least we know what a return to quiet, it's not peace, a return to quiet would look like. So if it weren't enough that Israel has a hot war with Gaza in its southwest, settler incursions and violence in the West Bank, and then Hezbollah to the north, there is also Yemen, where the Houthis, another Shia group, backed by Iran, is lobbying rockets at Israel and causing mayhem in the Red Sea. So to give us a little bit of context here before I ask you to do the real heavy lifting, 10 years ago or thereabouts in 2014, the Houthis, Shiite group, also backed by Iran,

took control of the capital of Yemen. The Saudis led a coalition to take back the capital. As a result, there was a horrifically violent civil war, heavy aerial bombing that killed more than 100,000 people, famine that killed more than 200,000 people. The Yemen civil war was for years considered the worst humanitarian crisis that few people were talking about. And now, people are talking about it because the Houthi attacks are affecting trade routes through the Red Sea. So connect the dots for us a bit. How did we get from the 2014 origins of the Civil War to this moment in Yemen? So Yemen is a whole other kind of worms.

I'll do it very, very briefly. The Houthis are a Shia group, but it's a different kind of Shiism. So it's not the 12thasheism that is the sort of reigning religious faith of both Iran and many people in Lebanon. It is a different form of Shiasm. And so, yes, they are certainly aligned with Iran, and I imagine the Shiism has something to do with it, but we shouldn't overstate the sort of natural affinity, religious affinity. It also is a matter of expediency, a political expediency. It's worth remembering that Yemen was not always one Yemen. There was North Yemen and South Yemen for many years, and to a certain degree some of that is re-emerging, but it is not as simple as that. The Saudi campaign in Yemen was very, very bloody, as was the Houthi one, but very, very bloody, with an enormous humanitarian and civil toll. I should say it dwarfed what we're seeing in Gaza, but not remotely the same kind of attention. And that's not to diminish what's happening in Gaza, but it is to

say that there's been very little attention to what's happened in Yemen. Yemen is actually a big country, a very, very poor country. The United States was involved in supporting the Saudis. When Biden came in, he changed course on that. And partly for that reason, but also for others, a ceasefire was reached in Yemen. It's now expired, but it is still adhered to. So we're not seeing overt fighting in Yemen, thankfully. That's extremely important from the humanitarian perspective. But the Houthis are in place and govern much of Yemen, not all of it. And they have this access to the mouth of the Red Sea, to the Bab el-Manda, which is one of the Chokholtz into the Red Sea, which leads also to the Suez Canal, which is the second busiest war.

way in the world, an extremely central artery way of global commerce, of things you might buy on Amazon, of energy, of everything else. This is the route, certainly from Europe to Asia. This was sort of the historic Suez Canal meant that ships didn't have to go all the way around Africa. They instead could go straight through the Red Sea. Now the Houthis are threatening, the shipping, more than threatening, are firing at ships along the Red Sea, with potentially major ramifications well beyond the Middle East for global maritime trade and for economies around the world. So these Houthi forces in Yemen, they are reportedly using Iranian intelligence to target what they call Israeli ships in the Red Sea, but are very often non-Israeli cargo ships. And there was one recent

encounter where the U.S. Navy had to rescue a Maersk cargo ship under attack by the Houthis, after which Marisk, which is one of the world's largest shippers, announced that they were going to suspend all transit to the Red Sea for the foreseeable future. As you mentioned, the Suez Canal is absolutely critical for the flow of energy and all sorts of commodities between Asia, Africa, and Europe. Has this happened before? Like a de facto shutdown of ship traffic through the Red Sea because of political turmoil in the region? In one sense, yes. The 1967 war started actually with a blockade of Israel from the south, not in Balmulmandam, but by the Egyptian. is slightly north of there, a closure of the Red Sea, which Israel considered a Casus-Belie,

an act of war or a cause of war. And that was what ignited the Six-Day War, at least with the proximate cause, it's not the real cause, but behind the war, of course. And in the 1973 war, the Egyptians crossed the Suez Canal. Israel, excuse me, in 1967, Israel captured the Sinai, and so was just on the Suez Canal. In 1973, six years later, the Egyptians crossed the Suez Canal, and then the Israelis crossed back in the same war. And then we saw a shutdown of the Suez Canal, not in the Red Sea, but in the canal itself for quite a while. So we've seen a shutdown of this in the context of Arab-Israeli wars, usually Egyptian-Israeli wars. And so in that sense, there is precedent.

That was extremely damaging. 1973 was also accompanied by an oil embargo. And so we saw dramatically rising oil prices. This had political ramifications in the U.S. and in other places as well. But this is different. It's different in the sense that here it's not a state, it's really not a large, strong state like Egypt, closing, blockading, anything. This is a relatively small, not officially recognized state group,

sort of a semi-state perhaps, using relatively simple and cheap technology, not simple technology, but available, shall we say, technology, and relatively cheap technology today, including, however, ballistic missiles, I should say, used against shipping, but also unmanned aerial vehicles, which of course are much cheaper than they used to be, backed and provided by Iran, and they are able to shut down such an enormously important artery of global trade. For shipping, you mentioned Marisk or any of the other giants of shipping, for them, if insurance in any route skyrockets, whether or not this group can actually sink them, if insurance skyrockets, it becomes uneconomical,

and they will have to choose another route. And that means that really small groups with readily available means to non-state actors can now affect global commerce, which means inflation in the United States. It means anything else. This is a challenge well, well beyond this particular conflict and this particular case. Lurking behind so many of these stories is Iran. Iran has funded Hamas. Iran is funding Hezbollah. Iran is helping the Houthis in Yemen. And it's interesting because this comes after the Biden administration believed and in some corners publicly reported that they thought they had contained Iran. I'm reading now from the New York Times recent report. Quote, President Biden and his top national security aids believed in the summer of 2023 that the chances of conflict with Iran and its proxies were well contained. After secret talks, they had just concluded a deal that led to the release of five imprisoned Americans in return for $6 billion in frozen Iranian funds.

The militants that Tehran finances and arms, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, seemed relatively quiet. There's more from the report, but I'll end the quoting there. What is your analysis of why Iran seems to have done a 180, from engaging in peaceful diplomacy with the U.S. to inflaming three different groups, three different proxy wars throughout the region? It's a great question. And I think part of it has to do with its longstanding strategy. I wouldn't take too seriously how much it decided to lower the flames. You know, this agreement it had with the administration was a low-level agreement.

And Iran has been, although its ideology is, to my mind, rather extreme, to say the least, it's been extremely pragmatic, very rational, very opportunistic in its conduct of foreign policy and often very successful in its conduct of foreign policy for decades now. It is often looked for whatever opportunity you can find, and when it cannot, it will often stop short. If it sees strong resistance, if it is deterred, it can be deterred in the sense that it will then pull back as a sort of pragmatic rational actor will often do. But it's not because it has changed its mind fundamentally about its goals. It just means it will seek another opportunity in other cases. Do you believe it goes even one step further that Iran may have instructed Hamas to a chance to a chance,

attack on October 7th? Does it make sense to think of Iran as orchestrating this chaos across the Middle East? I should be clear. I don't know, and I'm guessing that it's not the case, that Iran knew about the October 7th attack in advance, really not the date of it or anything like that. They have been supporting Hamas, but Hamas is not a simple proxy of Iran. Hamas is a Sunni, Muslim Brotherhood-style group. It's very different from the Iranian ideology. It, of course, takes support from wherever it can get it, and that absolutely includes Iran. There's been a lot of support from Iran, but also from Qatar, which is a Sunni state, Arab state, and also from others when it could. So I don't think Iran is in that sense, it's not an orchestrator of October 7th,

but it certainly is heavily involved with what Hezbollah does and with what the Houthi do, and it, of course, is involved with Hamas in a slightly more indirect way. And as we've seen also since October 7th, it openly meets with Hamas leaders to discuss, you know, the access of resistance, as they call it, et cetera. So I'm not sure October 7th was an about-faced by Iran. It is, however, consistent with their long-standing strategy, which is to foment chaos as much as they can in the region with their proxies, certainly in what they consider the illegitimate Zionist entity, Israel, that will be replaced any day now they believe.

and that has not changed. There's not actually been a fundamental change. There is a decades-long standoff, an Iran that is pragmatic, that will use diplomacy when it can, that will use military force will it can. But the military force that it uses, and this has been a very consistent facet, will be via others.

It will fight till the last Lebanese, it will fight till the last Palestinian, will fight to the last Yemeni. But since the Iran-Iraq war that ended in 1988, it prefers by far not to fight with Iranian casualties. Is there a useful frame for thinking about why the Middle East is suffering so many different crises at the same time? Like one available frame to us might be that, and this is not one I'm endorsing, but one is it's all Joe Biden's fault. Joe Biden failed to manage the region, ergo it's falling into warfare.

Another frame could be that this is part of a larger decline in global order. It's not just the Middle East. Look at Ukraine, Russia, look at Azerbaijan, Armenia. Another frame could be that the Middle East is a powder keg, and tragically every year is a dice roll of chaos, and snake eyes means warfare across the region. Do you have a framework for thinking about why this is all, Israel, Palestine, Gaza, Hezbollah, Houthis, Iran, why this is all happening at the same time? I would strongly suggest this is not to do with Joe Biden, or even with a recent decline in

order. This is much to do with terrible, but much longer standing. trends in the Middle East, a lot of this terrible unrest that described, for example, in Yemen predated Biden. In fact, it mostly ended during Biden's time, although I'm not here to promote or oppose Biden. That's not my point. My point is that since 2011, when we saw the sort of beginning of the breakdown of the authoritarian system in parts of the Middle East, we also saw, tragically, the outbreak of civil wars, the worst of which in Syria and Yemen and in Libya. And there we saw enormous unrest. It also affected the rest of the region. In Libya, an enormous amount of weapons

started flowing, including to Gaza, through what was then Egypt, who was also in turmoil, has now come again under authoritarian rule much more orderly, but extremely repressive. Yemen went through, as I mentioned, a horrific civil war with enormous human casualties and a continuing humanitarian crisis to a certain degree, but at least the overt fighting has ended. All this lasted. It started at least in 2011, but I would say its roots, of course, are much older. It's a combination of a few things. It's a combination at least of two major elements. One is a dramatic deficit of good governance, decent governance, in the sense not just of democratic values, that too, but also of basic economic capability, of just providing the very basic needs. of very large and in some cases very young populations

that need jobs. And at best now, in many countries of the Middle East, they can hope for a state job, which for the individual can be good, but it's not a good way of building your economy. And this is throughout the region. Terrible governance. It's not across the board.

I don't need to paint a simple, you know, broad brush. There are major differences between countries. The Middle East is not one place. And certainly Middle East North Africa, Mena, as we often call it, is very varied. There are very different countries with different prospects for individuals. However, by and large, very bad governance, a lot of corruption. The second point is ideological battles.

The Israeli Arab conflict actually has dissipated to a large degree, not the Israeli-Palisinian one. That has always been a source of problems. But underlying a lot of what we discussed is the Iranian, Iran-Sunni, to a lesser degree, Iran-Israel, but actually more Iran-Saudi-I-Sunni conflict, which is partly ideological. You have a state like Iran that is committed to exporting its revolution and is acting upon that. It's not the source of all even in the Middle East, but its hands are in many of the problems. I mentioned Yemen before, to a large degree that was a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, to the horrific damage of the Yemenis themselves.

And that adds to all of this. There are a lot of shows, there are a lot of commentators who are very eager to place every new world event into the bucket of their ideological priors. So what I'm hearing from you is that what's happening in the Middle East right now has much less to do with the U.S., much less to do with the Biden administration of the last few years, and much more to do with longstanding duels, ideological duels in the Middle East, Israel versus Palestine, Saudi versus Iran, and regional governance failures. which make sectarian violence more likely. Anything else to add? I'll add just one point if that's not depressing enough. Climate change is going to affect the whole world, but one of the regions most affected is going to be the Middle East.

There will be swathes of the region that are uninhabitable for homo sapiens, which is us. And so we are looking at a case where the countries that are not extremely wealthy, and those are most of the countries in the Middle East, and certainly most of the population in the Middle East, will only get worse. and they will get worse in ways that may exacerbate conflict, but will almost certainly exacerbate migration flows.

That will affect Turkey, it will affect Europe. These questions of governance in the Middle East, of the ability to create a decent outlook, political but economic, at least as much important, as economic, is crucial. And it's crucial not only if you care about the Middle East or if you're from there, I was born there, but it's not only that. it's if you care about Europe

or if you care about the rest of the world this is going to be absolutely crucial and getting worse fast, I'm afraid. We did an episode maybe a year and a half ago on the second and third order effects of global warming. And this is one that I find most interesting is the effect of global warming in the Middle East leading to the kind of immigration flows

that you saw in, I believe it was 2015, into Europe, radically changed the politics, of places like Greece and Germany, which then had knock on effects on the rise of far-right movements in Central Europe. So you think, like, what is the politics of Central Europe have anything to do with, you know, the climate of the Middle East? Well, it turns out there's almost a one-to-one domino relationship, exactly. You know, you have given us a lot of, I think, intelligent pessimism. On the subject of optimism, I want to ask what you are most

optimistic about with regard to the things that we've talked about, what you think has the greatest prospects for, at least, if not improvement, than at least some kind of moderate resolution in the next year. I mean, this is perhaps like asking you to identify the warmest ice cube in the freezer, but we have Gaza, the West Bank, Hezbollah, the Houthi attacks. Should we simply expect all of these things to get worse? Or do you think that one of these crises is more likely to at least somewhat resolve itself in the next year? It's a great question, and I've not been reverting to optimism 6th, October 7th, I should say. I do think the crisis in Lebanon is in one sense the most dangerous.

There, if you saw outright fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, that could be far worse than the rest of what we've seen. But, as I said, I think there's also, there is a diplomatic avenue there. So I'm not optimistic about it, but I do think the ingredients of resolving that short of outright fighting is there. And the Biden administration, I should say, since October 7th, you know, people have focused very much on its policy towards Israel and Gaza Strip. It's got a lot of criticism, of course. I think what people miss is that a lot of what they were doing was not about Gaza. It was about Lebanon and about Iran. So sending two carrier groups, aircraft carrier groups to the region was not about Hamas. Hamas doesn't care about that. And they successfully prevented or convinced the Israelis not to carry

out preemptive strikes. There was one report of a major strike as well was preparing perhaps on October 11th. And that was avoided. And it was avoided in no small part because of Biden personally getting involved. So again, it's not about Biden, but my point is just to say that there there is an avenue. The administration has been very, very focused on it. I do think they, not just Biden himself, but people work for him in the White House in particular on this, deserve a lot of credit for limiting much larger scope, if you can imagine that. And And their, you know, optimism is too big, but I'll say that. The second point is that, you know, when things look so bleak, and especially when you look from far away,

when focuses obviously on how terrible things look, and they are indeed terrible. I grew up in Jerusalem in the 1990s, 80s, 90s, it was terrible. All the bombings, all the things, that was all true. And we lived through that. But alongside that, when things are not infighting as they are right now, there can also be real life. So right now in Gaza, things are absolutely horrendous, and in Israel, many people are displaced and terrified.

But when things calm down, when we manage to bring some kind, not peace, not beautiful peace, but some kind of quiet, life can often flourish in many ways that we underappreciate. So although the station is extremely dire and it really is, I do think there's room for people who want to make it better or at least make it less terrible. there's a lot of room to work.

There's a lot of things to be done. And I think the first thing one should try to think of, you asked me before about anti-solutionism, is maybe to get over the idea that we're going to find a perfect solution to everything, that everything's going to fall into place, and we're going to re-engineer the world into something beautiful, but not fall into the cynicism of the anti-solutionist that I was describing before. That means that you have to work day and day night

towards nudging reality in a more positive direction, even if your aspirations are slightly less lofty. Because making things better, that's a lot. And I do think it's possible. Netan Sachs, thank you very much. Derek, my pleasure. Thank you for having me. Thank you for listening. Plain English is produced by Devin Baroldy.

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