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Episode: Chaos in Syria: a win for Israel & US? - with Yonatan Adiri

Author: Ark Media
Duration: 00:38:04

Episode Shownotes

HOUSEKEEPING NOTE:The Jewish Food Society is a nonprofit whose mission is to preserve and celebrate Jewish culinary heritage in order to deepen connections to Jewish life. As part of their annual fundraising drive, the Jewish Food Society is holding an auction to support their work. To place a bid on

any of the items up for auction (including a lunch with Dan Senor), visit: https://givebutter.com/c/JFSFallAuction/auctionTo learn more about the work of the Jewish Food Society, visit: https://www.jewishfoodsociety.orgTODAY’S EPISODE:Over the past week, we have been monitoring developments in Syria, where there has been a significant escalation in its on-again, off-again, and now on-again civil war. Rebel forces, led by Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham, launched a surprise offensive, swiftly capturing key areas in northwestern Syria, including 13 villages and the strategic towns of Urm Al-Sughra and Anjara. Two days later, the rebels had breached Aleppo, Syria's second-largest city, marking their most substantial advance in years. In response, Syrian government forces, supported by Russian airstrikes and Iran-backed militias, initiated counterattacks to halt the insurgents' progress. The intensified conflict has resulted in significant casualties and displacement.What does this tell us about major power shifts taking place in the region? Is it part of larger tectonic shifts taking place globally? And what does this mean for Israel?To help us understand, our guest is Yonatan Adiri. Yonatan Adiri is a leading Israeli digital healthcare entrepreneur, and was formerly the Chief Technology Advisor and a senior diplomatic advisor to the late Israeli president, Shimon Peres. He is the founder of Healthy.io, a digital healthcare startup, which he has been building for the last decade, and is now returning to public service. Earlier in his career, Yonatan worked as an officer in the IDF Strategic Command - including when President Obama issued his “red line” in the summer of 2012 against the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. To learn more about Yonatan’s startup, Healthy.io: https://healthy.io/

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_01
This wouldn't have happened had Iran not been hurt so bad, its proxies decapitated, and Russia being bogged down in the Ukraine. And if I'm sitting in Tehran, I'm worried. I'm worried about Syria.

00:00:12 Speaker_01
I'm worried about my hands chopped off in Hezbollah and the Houthis. And I'm very worried about Israel losing its fear factor in not coming close to my sovereign territory. The bottom line is tectonic shifts, you know, are at play.

00:00:27 Speaker_01
The earthquake or the big volcano hasn't erupted yet. Thanks for watching.

00:00:40 Speaker_00
It's one o'clock p.m. on Wednesday, December 4th here in New York City. It's eight o'clock p.m. on Wednesday, December 4th in Israel, as Israelis are winding down their day in the middle of what is yet again a very eventful week.

00:00:56 Speaker_00
Before today's conversation, one housekeeping note. As I mentioned in our last podcast conversation, in support of the good work of the Jewish Food Society and their charity auction to raise funds for the organization, I am auctioning off lunch.

00:01:12 Speaker_00
You can have lunch with me. You can bid on lunch with me if you really want to break bread and talk about the state of the world. I'm happy to do so.

00:01:21 Speaker_00
So we have a link in the show notes to the item where you can bid and there are a few other terrific items as well that are worth bidding all in the support of the Jewish Food Society, so please take a look. Now on to today's conversation.

00:01:33 Speaker_00
Over this past week, we have been monitoring developments in Syria, where there has been a significant escalation in its on-again and off-again and seemingly on-again civil war.

00:01:46 Speaker_00
Rebel forces led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, we'll refer to them as HTS, launched a surprise offensive, swiftly capturing key areas in northwestern Syria, including 13 villages and the strategic towns of Urm al-Sughra and Anjara.

00:02:05 Speaker_00
Two days later, the rebels had breached Aleppo, one of the largest and most important cities in Syria. It's actually Syria's second largest city. So this makes the rebels advance their most substantial accomplishment, at least in the last few days.

00:02:22 Speaker_00
In response, Syrian government forces, the forces of Bashar Assad, supported by Russian airstrikes and Iran-backed militias, have initiated counterattacks to halt the progress by these insurgents.

00:02:36 Speaker_00
The intensified conflict has resulted in considerable casualties and, of course, more internal displacement.

00:02:43 Speaker_00
The UN is reporting that at least 27 civilian deaths and thousands fleeing the affected areas already, and that number, of course, is from the UN. It could be

00:02:53 Speaker_00
Lower could be higher, it seems to us, based on our own reporting and individuals, officials we're talking to, that the number is higher. What does this all tell us about the major power shifts taking place in the region?

00:03:05 Speaker_00
This is what we've been trying to understand as we've been following events in Syria. Is it part of larger tectonic shifts taking place globally?

00:03:13 Speaker_00
among the different power centers and geopolitical hotspots that we've been following even outside the Middle East. And of course, what does all this mean? As we always ask for Israel, what should we be rooting for?

00:03:24 Speaker_00
Our guest today is Yonatan Adiri, who returns to the podcast. He was on several times years ago, long before October 7th. We are thrilled to have him back. He's a very successful Israeli entrepreneur.

00:03:37 Speaker_00
He was building his startup, Healthy IO, for the last decade and has recently brought on an American CEO. And he, Yonatan, is contemplating and working on his own return to public service.

00:03:48 Speaker_00
He has a long history in public service, not the least of which was working for the late Shimon Peres when Peres was president and Yonatan was his chief diplomatic advisor.

00:03:58 Speaker_00
Yonatan also earlier in his career was an officer in the IDF, where he worked in the IDF Strategic Command, and parenthetically, but not so parenthetical because it's very relevant to this conversation, when President Obama issued his red line in the summer of 2012 against the regime of Bashar Assad in Syria.

00:04:19 Speaker_00
warning Assad against using chemical weapons, which Assad ultimately did, Yonatan was tasked with tracking the president's red line and anticipating what would happen if the U.S. enforced the red line in Syria and what it would mean for Israel.

00:04:37 Speaker_00
Yonatan, thanks for being here. Thank you for having me again, Dan. It's a pleasure to be with you.

00:04:41 Speaker_00
Before we dive into the details of what has happened over the last few days in Syria, can you just sort of frame this up for us as it relates to the overall Syrian civil war that has been taking place over the past 13 years to remind our listeners how the Syrian civil war started and what has happened over the last

00:05:00 Speaker_00
dozen years plus.

00:05:02 Speaker_01
So I think first we need to start with Bashar Assad, the dictator currently still at the helm in Damascus. Assad, by the way, means lion in Arabic.

00:05:13 Speaker_01
He is the son of Hafez al-Assad, who took to the power in Syria many years ago in a coup in which the Alawite, which is a Shiite sect, a minority in Syria, took over and has been running the country since as basically a Shiite minority dictatorship.

00:05:33 Speaker_01
What erupted in 2011-2012, along the lines of the Arab Spring, was a time where the Free Syrian Army, a group of Sunni rebels, along with the Kurds from the northeast of the country, and what was then ISIS, tried to topple Assad.

00:05:55 Speaker_01
What then ensued was that Assad, you know, made a deal, if you will, with the devil, had Hezbollah joined his forces to keep him at the helm, and obviously Iran, which, you know, as part of exporting the revolution, had this vision of the Shiite crescent, and so it started to crumble, and therefore started supporting Assad.

00:06:18 Speaker_01
At that point, the American president, after what seemed to be the deployment of chemical weapons by Assad, against the rebels.

00:06:26 Speaker_01
We need to say also about 12 million people were displaced in what is the biggest ethnic cleansing in the Middle East in decades. These were Sunnis who were removed and Shiites took their place.

00:06:39 Speaker_00
600,000, just to get the numbers right, over 600,000 slaughtered. Correct. And how many millions displaced internally and externally?

00:06:48 Speaker_01
The numbers change, but about 12 million displaced, out of which about 7 million abroad, outside of Syria, about 2 million in Lebanon, about a million and a half or two in a huge refugee camp in the northwest of Jordan, Zaatar, and the rest are in Germany and other places in Europe.

00:07:06 Speaker_01
This process, after the American administration decided not to act upon its red line, opened the door to Russia. Russia always had set its targets on Tartus, the northwest Mediterranean city, harbor city.

00:07:22 Speaker_01
In Syria, it wanted to deploy its own military there and they saw this as an opportunity to step in and claim the cause for themselves.

00:07:30 Speaker_01
So Assad finds himself again making this bargain with the devil, with Iran, Turkey, and with the Russians in order to stay in power. This war then ensued, massive war crimes.

00:07:44 Speaker_01
There were, you know, footage of Russian airplanes dropping barrel bombs in order to kill the insurgency. It's important to say that back then, the rebels took over Aleppo.

00:07:55 Speaker_01
With the support of Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia, the regime managed to overtake Aleppo again. I think the most important point where this all ends is what's called the Astana process,

00:08:07 Speaker_01
in Kazakhstan where Russia, Turkey and Iran came to take their pound of flesh from Assad's sovereignty and that's how the process ended towards 2017-18 and that's how it subsided. 2018 is the point, somewhere in 2018 I recall

00:08:24 Speaker_00
We watched the normalization of Assad, meaning Assad was a pariah in the Arab world.

00:08:30 Speaker_00
Many friends of mine, contacts I have throughout the Arab world, talked about Assad in the Sunni Arab world, the way they talk about the Iranian regime, that he was just completely the enemy of the other side.

00:08:40 Speaker_00
And then something happened largely because of what he had done the previous six, seven years. And then something happened in 2018 where we saw the soft normalization of Assad within the region.

00:08:53 Speaker_01
I think the culmination was, you know, less than half a year ago, Assad was accepted in the Arab League. Returned, accepted back. Reaccepted, exactly, in the Arab League.

00:09:00 Speaker_01
Now, what happened in 2018 was that the Russians and the Turks and the Iranians enforced the ceasefire on Assad, each taking their pound of flesh. The Russians, in essence, own the northwest Syria, all the port cities, they have their own base there.

00:09:18 Speaker_01
In a way, it's sort of sovereign Russia, that area from a military perspective. The Turks call the north. Idlib and those areas where they have this longstanding conflict with the Kurds of Northeast Syria.

00:09:33 Speaker_01
And Iran, in essence, turned Syria into its backyard, through which it continued to supply Hezbollah.

00:09:41 Speaker_01
And that's what's called in the IDF, that was when the IDF initiated something that was called the War Between the Wars, which was a nickname for an Air Force campaign to

00:09:53 Speaker_01
thwart those resupply lines through Syria, which was basically, you know, the highway from Tehran for the Revolutionary Guards.

00:10:02 Speaker_00
And then just the flare-ups, like at the Syrian-Turkish border?

00:10:06 Speaker_01
Right. So, you know, so Turkey, in essence, as part of the Astana process said, this area in the border is not going to be Syrian sovereignty. We're not going to allow the Kurds, maybe in brackets to say, Turkey is fighting its war in the east.

00:10:21 Speaker_01
It's a long-standing war against what's called, you know, against the freedom of Kurdistan. And acted by the way formally, they launched an attack a couple of years back called Euphrates Peace, in which they actually incur, you know, into Syria.

00:10:36 Speaker_01
So the Turks have never stepped away after the Astana process.

00:10:40 Speaker_00
I just want to come back to something you alluded to. So there's sort of this grand bargain between Russia, Turkey, Syria, and Iran. Correct. All built around clearly protecting Assad, so keeping Assad and his regime in power.

00:10:54 Speaker_00
And so while we often talk about Iran having tentacles throughout the region, it's largely, if you look at the pattern, it's supporting non-state actors like Hezbollah, like the Houthis.

00:11:03 Speaker_00
Here's a case where Iran is completely propping up a state actor. Assad and actually relying on non-state actors to protect them, like Hezbollah. Hezbollah was effectively fighting for the last number of years in Syria to protect Assad.

00:11:15 Speaker_00
What do all these other actors have in it? What's in it for them?

00:11:18 Speaker_01
I think, by the way, what we're seeing is the coercive power of truth here, right? I mean, Assad is supposedly a state actor, but for all accounts and purposes, this was a failed state and Iran enjoyed that fact. So did Russia.

00:11:33 Speaker_01
In parallel to that, there was a war on ISIS that Iran also benefited from and in a way also declared itself as a positive actor in that context. Iran navigated this situation to its benefit. And that grand bargain held until very recently.

00:11:48 Speaker_01
And I think what we're seeing in this eruption is that the powers that were part of this grand bargain in the Astana process in 2018 are completely different actors in 2024.

00:12:00 Speaker_00
Okay, so now let's fast forward to today. Let's talk about each of these actors and how their dynamics and their relationships with one another and with their own geopolitical positioning has changed. Let's start with Russia.

00:12:11 Speaker_00
Russia's bogged down now with its own war. So talk a little about the implications for Russia's role in Syria.

00:12:18 Speaker_01
So I think the best way of looking at the change is looking at it through Ankara, right? Through Erdogan. Erdogan looks at this. 2018, he's part of this arrangement, the grand bargain. And if you will, these are

00:12:30 Speaker_01
three equal partners forcing their own interests on a failed regime. That was the picture. That's where we left it last, right? 2018, that's when it subsided. Fast forward six years, Turkey's very strong.

00:12:44 Speaker_01
It is that sort of middle ground between Russia and Ukraine. It is a very strong player in NATO, albeit less obedient and less productive as other members of NATO would want it to be.

00:12:56 Speaker_01
And it's gaining force and since 2018 has been making incursions into Syria with no ramifications from the international community or from the US. So it has kind of carved an immunity for itself. And it is indeed stronger than it was in 2018.

00:13:13 Speaker_01
Compared to Russia, which is in a significantly inferior position at this point after two plus years in Ukraine, after having to import North Korean fighters because it depleted much of its infantry in the front lines.

00:13:28 Speaker_01
And given what Israel did in, I would say, the last six to nine months in its confrontation with Iran, in essence, significantly reducing and impeding on its strategy of the Shiite crescent and of this ring of fire around Israel.

00:13:46 Speaker_01
So Iran is in a very difficult position. Its proxies have been decapitated. The logic of its $40, $50 billion worth of proxy infrastructure over the last 15, 20 years completely obliterated.

00:14:00 Speaker_01
And it itself actually proven to be vulnerable in its air defense. So, Turkey looks at this and says, okay, that's my time to, you know, reset. And I have better bargaining chips than I had in 2018, then let's go.

00:14:16 Speaker_01
So, if we want to double click on Iran, if you look, you know, kind of 25 years out, Iran has a national budget, an article, an item, which is called Exporting the Islamic Revolution. It is busy with that from an infrastructural perspective.

00:14:31 Speaker_01
This doesn't happen by chance.

00:14:33 Speaker_01
The vision of Shiite proxies or sympathetic proxies to Iran that would be supplied, trained, and influenced to support the interests of the regime in order to enhance Iran's quest for hegemony in the Middle East have been flourishing for roughly 20 years.

00:14:53 Speaker_01
The recent events unfolding, I would say since April or May this year, in which Israel decides to retaliate in Syria against one of the top military leaders that Iran sends to the front lines, subsequently the Iranian ballistic missile attack on Israel,

00:15:13 Speaker_01
And I think ultimately what unfolded in September and October has delivered a massive blow to the proxy strategy Iran supported and led.

00:15:22 Speaker_01
These are 30, $40 billion worth of investments they've made in Hezbollah, in the Houthis in Yemen, and obviously in supporting Bashar al-Assad and distancing any kind of kinetic friction from Tehran and from Iran's sovereign borders.

00:15:40 Speaker_01
If you look at it from Iran's perspective, this strategy has completely failed and it is now sort of naked from an air defense perspective and in a very precarious position.

00:15:53 Speaker_00
Okay, so Turkey's now emboldened by this new dynamic. It's emboldened by its positioning that it has now between the East and the West. Tell us what happened last week. You're referring to Hayat Akhir Hesham.

00:16:06 Speaker_01
We'll just call them HTS. HTS, the main body at work, led by Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, which is, by the way, a nice trivia fact. He took the name Jolani for himself, which is from the Golan. Oh, wow.

00:16:19 Speaker_01
Just to kind of give you a sense, Jolani in Arabic is from the Golan Heights. He wasn't born there. He has nothing to do with that. He adopted that name.

00:16:26 Speaker_01
So a week ago, the movement led by HDS starts moving southwards of Idlib and the areas in which they had the safe haven over the last few years in and around the Turkish border. It has been known for quite some time. They are profiteering.

00:16:43 Speaker_01
from that border, from smuggling and so on and building their stronghold there.

00:16:47 Speaker_01
To their east is the YPG, the Kurdish forces that previously had played a role against the Assad regime, but have tried this time to stay out and say, don't come near our enclave, near our sort of autonomous region.

00:17:01 Speaker_01
And they've storm raided southwards and in breakneck time have taken over the second largest city in Syria, Aleppo. I don't know if you saw the pictures and to our audience, Google it.

00:17:14 Speaker_01
Once they took it, the first flag that flew on top of the Aleppo Citadel was the flag of Turkey. I'm not sure Erdogan wanted that explicit message to be out there in the public.

00:17:26 Speaker_01
And you have to understand when you move north to south from Turkey to Damascus, there are three main cities on your way. It starts with Aleppo, next comes Homs, and then Hama, and then Damascus. So this movement continues, this momentum continues.

00:17:41 Speaker_01
We don't know yet, as of this time that we're recording, whether or not the counteroffensive by Assad is successful, at least at delaying this flood from arriving, you know, making its path into Damascus.

00:17:54 Speaker_01
The Russians are safe because the western cities in Tartus and Latakia are behind, if you will, or they are west of a massive ridge, which is basically a very comfortable geographic block for this movement.

00:18:08 Speaker_01
So the natural movement would be to go from Aleppo all the way to Damascus.

00:18:13 Speaker_00
So Turkey lit this fuse, right? I mean, this all seemed to come out of nowhere. And it's my understanding that Turkey activated it.

00:18:21 Speaker_01
We don't know that for a fact. But what we do know, and all, you know, all arrows point to Ankara, is that over the last year and a half, they've been pushing Assad

00:18:30 Speaker_01
to reach a new type of modus vivendi, a new type of compromise when it comes to the north and further recognize Turkey's interest in that region. And Assad refused to do so.

00:18:41 Speaker_01
And Erdogan was very open and explicit about that, that if he doesn't act on time, this is gonna reignite and so on and so forth. It's kind of like, you know, in the mafia terms, right? When somebody comes in and says, I can sell you insurance,

00:18:56 Speaker_01
And then you don't want to buy the insurance. And suddenly, a week later, somehow your shop gets burnt. So I think that's more or less the kind of informal dynamic that's happening.

00:19:06 Speaker_01
But clearly, the big benefit right now from that perspective lies in Ankara.

00:19:12 Speaker_00
And the role of the Kurds here, specifically, between Turkey and Syria?

00:19:16 Speaker_01
So the Kurds who previously, in the beginning of the civil war in the Arab Spring, have also rebelled, right?

00:19:25 Speaker_01
Because they wanted to make sure that as the rebellion between ISIS and the Democratic Army, which was the Sunni sort of pro-democracy force, and the Kurds, the three of them would overthrow Assad. and somehow kind of redivide the country.

00:19:40 Speaker_01
That was the hope back in the day around the democratic system. The Kurds right now, they want to defend themselves. They want to defend their autonomy.

00:19:49 Speaker_01
From what I'm hearing, from what we're seeing, they're not actively engaging in war going down ahead for Damascus, which by the way, makes sense. I think that they're in a very tight spot. If you think about, again, the vision of free Kurdistan

00:20:04 Speaker_01
Now, this is one of those horrible outcomes of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, you know, that we're looking at a hundred years right of division. Syria, you know, was never a real country, much like Iraq was never a real country.

00:20:17 Speaker_01
And those fault lines, division lines have really injured many and very much so the right of the Kurds for self-determination because they're divided between Iraq, Iran, and Syria with a very aggressive foe in Turkey.

00:20:31 Speaker_01
And so I think we should all be rooting for the Kurds for at least preserving their autonomy, which was hard won through fighting in 2013, 2018.

00:20:41 Speaker_00
But of those three countries, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran, in Iraq post Saddam, the Kurds, and I was full disclosure involved with this during the political transition after the U.S.

00:20:51 Speaker_00
left Iraq or gave sovereignty to the Iraqis, the Kurds were integrated into the formal national governmental leadership of Iraq, of the national government of Iraq.

00:21:04 Speaker_00
Look at people like Barham Saleh and others, who's a Kurdish leader and a national Iraqi government leader. But in Iran and Turkey, there's no such thing. The Kurds aren't integrated into the national leadership at all.

00:21:17 Speaker_00
And specifically in the case of Turkey, they're viewed by Erdogan as a threat to the national leadership. So Kurds in Syria, to the extent that they are perceived to give fuel, not literal fuel, I mean, metaphorical fuel and support.

00:21:33 Speaker_00
to the Kurds in Turkey, that is viewed as a threat to Erdogan, and Erdogan's attitude is, if Syria can't get a handle on its Kurdish problem, we'll do it.

00:21:43 Speaker_01
Yeah. Dan, you're 100% right. And I think that, you know, I come, my parents are both, one side is Iraqi, the other side is Iranian. The story of the Kurds is a story I've heard from both sides many, many years.

00:21:56 Speaker_01
And both in Iran and in Iraq, there is a sense of at least recognizing the distinct cultural heritage and nature of this nation. Turkey won't have any of it.

00:22:08 Speaker_01
Erdogan, powered by his vision for neo-Ottomanism, wants to go back to the days of the Ottoman Empire when Idlib and those areas of Aleppo were very close to the Turkish side, very much so more than they were connected to Damascus.

00:22:24 Speaker_01
And so there is somewhat of a revisionist vision that Erdogan wants to bring forward. Some of it has to do with the ethnic cleansing of the Kurds and pushing them out and delegitimizing their right for self-determination.

00:22:36 Speaker_01
A lot of it has to do with pure power politics that relates to Turkey's current position in the Middle East. They're emboldened. They are an important player on the global stage.

00:22:46 Speaker_01
And I think it's important to recognize that at this juncture in history, it seems like the future of the Middle East will be decided upon by three countries, none of which is Arab, which is Israel, Iran, and Turkey.

00:22:59 Speaker_01
So this is what's at play right now.

00:23:01 Speaker_00
Now again, just because it's confusing, because there's HTS, which is the Syrian Sunnis who are marching into Aleppo and possibly these other places. And then there's the Kurds, the Syrian Kurds.

00:23:14 Speaker_00
And what is the relationship at this moment in this fight between the Syrian Sunnis and the Syrian Kurds?

00:23:20 Speaker_01
So the Syrian Kurds are so far have been basically saying, we're not part of this war. We're not marching to Damascus. We're keeping our autonomous region safe because we understand the Turks are coming our way.

00:23:33 Speaker_01
HTS is the main force fighting this time. And, you know, when you see the videos coming out, it's very hard to understand whether or not Jolani is leading an ISIS type activity because we're seeing the headings now on Telegram. Again, I don't want to

00:23:48 Speaker_01
our viewers and listeners to kind of go in that direction, but they are sending out ISIS-type propaganda on those channels with horrible cruelty.

00:23:58 Speaker_01
It's hard to tell whether or not this is HTS's sort of main road because when you listen to those folks, they say, no, we're Sunnis, this is about us reclaiming our land.

00:24:08 Speaker_01
I think at this point, the driving force are the Sunnis with factions of ISIS that are making their way up to Damascus. It is very, very hard to predict what happens, where it stops, if it stops.

00:24:23 Speaker_01
And if they manage to get to Damascus, and you know, Iran has now forcefully argued

00:24:29 Speaker_01
that it will support the Assad regime because the last thing Iran can deal with right now, given the decapitation of its proxies, Hezbollah and its vulnerability, is a failed state that's West and no Bashar Assad in Damascus.

00:24:45 Speaker_00
Okay, so back to HTS, what is their next strategic move here? Is it just as you said, marching, unless they're stopped, but is their next move just keep marching city to city until they reach Damascus?

00:24:57 Speaker_01
If you read their communiques and listen to their, you know, sort of improvised press releases, by the way, the role of the smartphones

00:25:05 Speaker_00
They're all influencers.

00:25:06 Speaker_01
They're all social media influencers. Exactly. You know, the armed social influencers, if you listen to them, I think the thread, you know, it's been a week, right?

00:25:14 Speaker_01
So it's very hard to predict, but the common thread is city by city, wherever they arrive. And by the way, sort of a side note, What one can watch these days in Idlib and in Aleppo, the underground tunnels are just unbelievable.

00:25:31 Speaker_01
This tunnel warfare, the city under a city dynamics that were supposed to defend Aleppo, but the Assad regime and Assad forces simply fled the city. So right now the momentum is with the HDS and with their counterparts. They're moving fast.

00:25:47 Speaker_01
It's sort of like a blitzkrieg.

00:25:50 Speaker_01
And if Russia, in my view, if Russia doesn't, you know, use its air superiority very fast in order to at least block the momentum, we may wake up, you know, in the next few days with these guys already in Hama or in Homs.

00:26:04 Speaker_00
Okay, so therefore that brings me to Assad's options. It seems to me he's got four options. He's got his own army. He's got Iran, albeit a weakened Iran to your earlier point. He's got Russia, albeit a weakened Russia to your earlier point.

00:26:17 Speaker_00
And then he also has Israel, which is perhaps the most curious relationship here. But I want to go through each of those. So let's start with his own army. What is his own army capable of doing at this point to stop this advance?

00:26:29 Speaker_01
I think pretty much a, you know, kind of medieval defend the emperor type army, right? The only thing they can do at this point is defend Damascus.

00:26:40 Speaker_01
It's hard to speculate how well they can do that, but if anything, that's the only thing they're capable of right now on their own. And that's why, as you've mentioned, the predicament is, you know, he made a deal.

00:26:51 Speaker_01
He bargained with the devil, you know, seven, eight years ago. He's going to have to make a far worse deal right now, unless he turns into other parties.

00:27:01 Speaker_01
And I think there are now, as you said, he can go to Russia, which is in a very tight position and say, listen, if you don't intervene, you know, I'm not going to survive. I don't think there's anything Russia can still ask for.

00:27:13 Speaker_01
And Russia has its own interests there. So they will fight and they will try to support because they already have that enclave that they wanted. And it is indeed strategic for them because of the war, the ongoing war in Ukraine.

00:27:26 Speaker_01
Iran has the forces to send, but I'm not sure Iran can risk native Iranians dying on Syrian soil.

00:27:35 Speaker_01
That is a major issue for Iran right now in terms of legitimacy of the regime, in terms of dealing with the conflict with Israel, the decapitation of its proxies. And, you know, there's an elephant in the room.

00:27:45 Speaker_01
January 20, a new president of the U.S., and by the way, we didn't talk about what enabled part of this, which I think, you know, sort of Washington's ongoing de-escalation rationale is also at play here. And so that's Iran and that's Russia.

00:28:01 Speaker_01
A couple of days ago, it was reported that through a back channel, Assad turned to Israel and said, hey, you know, you don't want ISIS here in Damascus, can you help?

00:28:11 Speaker_01
And the answer was, if you're willing to sever your ties with Iran, we may, you know, assist. And from what has been published in the media, Assad said, I'm not willing to sever my ties with Iran.

00:28:25 Speaker_01
So just to give you a sense of how profound and intimate this relationship is between Assad and Tehran, in many ways, Assad cannot survive without Tehran's support.

00:28:37 Speaker_01
And I think Tehran is the only one who can deploy boots on the ground that are effective. Russia would use an air force, doesn't have boots on the ground in that capacity. The only one is Iran, either through proxies or through its own military.

00:28:51 Speaker_01
So I think that's a predicament where they are right now.

00:28:54 Speaker_00
So I just want to zero in on this, because it's important. One would think, and many following, this comes back to what we're rooting for.

00:29:02 Speaker_00
Many people who care about Israel and Israel's security and Israeli safety are watching these events and saying, great, here's another surrogate ally of Iran, meaning the regime of Bashar Assad, under siege.

00:29:18 Speaker_00
and the dominoes are just falling throughout the region, all to the advantage of Israel. However,

00:29:24 Speaker_00
The rebels pressing this offensive are not exactly the kind of actors that Israel would want on its own border, meaning that yes, they're Syrian Sunnis, but they are also Syrian Sunni Islamists and extremists and willing to use violence in a very orchestrated way that could become its own headache for Israel rather than Israel just having to manage the threat from a sovereign state in the form of the government.

00:29:50 Speaker_00
Syria. So that's why this has been a little perplexing for those who are looking at this in terms of what's in Israel's interest.

00:29:56 Speaker_01
Yeah. There's a famous saying from one of the Israeli leaders back in the 70s, whenever there's an eruption like that in the Arab world, I wish luck on both sides, right? And I think that's not the case right now.

00:30:09 Speaker_01
I think fundamentally, Israel dealt a very severe blow to the Iranian quest for hegemony. And that's the lens through which Israel is looking at this situation right now. Now, there are two ways to go about this.

00:30:21 Speaker_01
Is Israel sort of looking at it from a defensive play, knowing that January 20th, the Trump administration steps up? It now has a far more complex world to deal with.

00:30:31 Speaker_01
We saw China yesterday declaring they're not going to allow certain types of critical minerals for the global supply chain. So this is heating up.

00:30:40 Speaker_01
Turkey is emboldened and you know also within NATO now there's this situation unraveling in Syria but Israel has its eye on the ball which is the Iranian quest for hegemony in the region and obviously its nuclear plan and program so

00:30:57 Speaker_01
That is sort of the rationale for not getting involved and basically saying, keep your eye on the ball. There's a new American administration and Iran is in a certain position. We now need to keep our eye on the ball and be busy with that.

00:31:09 Speaker_01
So Israel can also take a different rationale and say, oh, there's an element to gain in this dynamic. So we can be more offensive and we can play a role in that.

00:31:19 Speaker_01
My instinct is, and if the publications are correct, that Israel said, if you want us to participate in the interim period, the deal has to include Iran going out of Syria. And so I think that's a fair point where Israel is right now.

00:31:33 Speaker_01
I think though, if you kind of take a step back, there is a tectonic shift occurring here because when you connect the dots on Russia, Ukraine,

00:31:42 Speaker_01
And where that's going to end, if you will, between Kherson in Ukraine and Hebron in Judea, Samaria, right? These lines are directly connected.

00:31:52 Speaker_01
The way in which Russia and Ukraine gets resolved, the way in which Syria ultimately gets resolved, will the American administration allow for Israel or arrive at some kind of an understanding of how to deal a blow kinetically to Iran's nuclear facilities and basically bring it back to its natural size in the region?

00:32:13 Speaker_01
Or is this all going to unravel? The bottom line is tectonic shifts, you know, are at play. The earthquake or the big volcano hasn't erupted yet. Well, what is the big volcano?

00:32:24 Speaker_01
It's either we have a Kenan type moment whereby there is a keen, pun unintended, thinker in the White House.

00:32:32 Speaker_00
You're referring to George Kenan about the long telegram about the threat from Russia during the Cold War. Telegram wasn't that long, but the long telegram, yes.

00:32:43 Speaker_01
Is there a thinker and a doer in the Trump team? Is there a thinker on the Trump team who has the capability to frame the world that way and come up with a modus vivendi between the U.S.

00:32:54 Speaker_01
and China, and therefore there might be sort of a, in a way, another Cold War or not? Or are we going by way of this tectonic shift ending up in an earthquake or a volcano, which would be

00:33:06 Speaker_01
a kinetic friction, either via proxy or between two camps that are now sort of evolving in the world. I think it's hard to tell. It's hard to predict. But I do think it's all connected. And I think you framed it in the beginning, and rightly so, Dan.

00:33:22 Speaker_01
This wouldn't have happened had Iran not been hurt so bad, its proxies decapitated, and Russia being bogged down in the Ukraine.

00:33:31 Speaker_00
Yeah. And the other thing that's interesting is I've made this point, this observation on this podcast conversations quite a bit over the last, certainly over the last couple of months.

00:33:38 Speaker_00
If you would have told Yehia Sinwar on October 6th, that not in a direct line, but in a indirect line from the first day of his war on Israel, the massacre, the October 7th massacre, you would be within a little over a year.

00:33:54 Speaker_00
He's dead, Mohammed Def is dead, his top deputy who built up militarily Hamas over the last decade or so and who planned the October 7th war with Sinwar.

00:34:04 Speaker_00
Hania, Ismail Hania, one of the leaders of Hamas, would be killed by the Israelis in Tehran, in the heart of Tehran. Hezbollah would be close to decimated, not entirely decimated, but largely decimated.

00:34:16 Speaker_00
Its leader Nasrallah dead, its whole leadership dead.

00:34:20 Speaker_00
Israel in having conducted a couple of very successful military operations against Iran to the point that Iran is, Rich Goldberg, the observation that Rich Goldberg made on this podcast a few weeks ago has left Iran so exposed to use the phrase, the Ayatollah has no clothes.

00:34:35 Speaker_00
If Sinwar would have thought on October 7th that this is where we would be 14 months later, And then you throw this into the mix. Now Syria, you know, up for grabs one way or the other.

00:34:46 Speaker_00
I don't think anyone could have imagined it, not the least of which the guy who was the architect of the October 7th attacks.

00:34:52 Speaker_01
First of all, I agree 100%. And maybe two quick points here. One, I refer to what happened on October 7 as an invasion. and not a massacre. I think it's important. I think you're right.

00:35:04 Speaker_01
I was part of a couple of forums here in Europe in recent months with some previous heads of state and intelligence services. They all refer to it as a massacre or terror attack and they are perplexed by Israel's response.

00:35:17 Speaker_01
And I think the nomenclature is critical here. Folks outside of Israel need to understand what happened to the Israeli soul is what happens after you've been invaded, not after a terror attack.

00:35:28 Speaker_01
You know, my wife and I, my wife comes from Switzerland, we've been in Israel for 15 years. I, born and raised in Israel, I've seen terror attacks of different kinds and different scale. We've weathered, you know, rockets, barrages and so on.

00:35:42 Speaker_01
the first three weeks after the invasion of October 7, we were walking around Tel Aviv thinking to ourselves, is there a sleeper cell? It has one of those Toyotas, right? Managed to come in here and are they kind of wandering around?

00:35:55 Speaker_01
I think that's a critical piece. What happened there was an invasion of barbaric hordes with what we kind of saw in the middle ages. And that's important in terms of nomenclature. And the second piece here is,

00:36:06 Speaker_01
I'm very optimistic vis-a-vis the future of Israel.

00:36:10 Speaker_01
I think that if you, you know, the flip side of what you said about Yehia Sanwar is Israel's strategic posture compared to say 14, 15 months ago is incredibly improved at the price and at the pain of more than 2,000 people dead of the massacre or the invasion.

00:36:30 Speaker_01
We paid a dear price.

00:36:32 Speaker_01
But I would say that the results of the campaign at this point, and God willing that the hostages will be released as part of this catharsis and building a new page, a new era in Israel, but fundamentally with a decapitated Hezbollah, with a naked Iran, as you say, and I think the most important thing, Dan, psychologically,

00:36:55 Speaker_01
The fear factor that paralyzed Israel in activating vis-a-vis Iran, when 120 airplanes came back all safe, is gone. And if I'm sitting in Tehran, I'm worried. I'm worried about Syria. I'm worried about my hands chopped off in Hezbollah and the Houthis.

00:37:13 Speaker_01
And I'm very worried about Israel losing its fear factor in not coming close to my sovereign territory.

00:37:20 Speaker_00
All right. If Tehran is worried, I see hope for optimism too. So we will leave it there. Yonatan Hadiri, thanks for coming back on. I hope to have you on again in the near future.

00:37:33 Speaker_01
Always a pleasure.

00:37:34 Speaker_00
Until then, stay safe and be well.

00:37:36 Speaker_01
Thank you very much.

00:37:42 Speaker_00
Call Me Back is produced and edited by Alon Benatar. Our media manager is Rebecca Strom. Additional editing by Martin Huergo. Research by Gabe Silverstein. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.