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Episode: From Aleppo to Tehran: A Middle East on Edge

Author: The Free Press
Duration: 01:15:27

Episode Shownotes

This week marked a dramatic escalation in Syria’s 13-year civil war. Rebel factions launched their most audacious offensive in years, capturing Aleppo, the focal point of the war for over a decade. This marked the most serious challenge to President Bashar al-Assad’s government and its Russian- and Iranian-backed allies in

nearly a decade. Syrian and Russian forces are currently unleashing joint air strikes in a desperate attempt to reclaim the city. Iran has thrown its weight behind al-Assad, promising increased support to shore up his faltering grip on power. But Syria is just one piece of a much larger—and far more dangerous—puzzle. The Middle East is on a knife’s edge. Just last week, Israel and Hezbollah reached a fragile ceasefire along the Lebanon border, but tensions remain high. In Gaza, Israel has continued its operations against Hamas, who still hold 63 hostages. And then there’s Iran—the architect of much of the region’s instability—whose escalating provocations make it seem like a direct war with Israel is no longer a question of if, but when. These conflicts are deeply interconnected, and the fall of one domino could set off far-reaching consequences. The potential power vacuum left by a weakened al-Assad regime could reshape alliances and alter the balance of power in ways that reverberate from Tehran to Tel Aviv, and from Moscow to Washington. To help us make sense of these rapidly unfolding events and their implications for the region, Michael Moynihan is joined today by Haviv Rettig Gur, a senior analyst at The Times of Israel and one of the sharpest minds on Middle East politics. In this conversation, they unpack what’s going on in Syria, the root causes of tribal war and dysfunction across the Arab world, the ceasefire in Lebanon, what comes next in Gaza, the weakening of Iran, and what all of this means for Israel and the United States. If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_03
From the Free Press, this is Honestly, I'm Michael Moynihan. This week marked a dramatic escalation in Syria's 13-year civil war. Rebel factions launched their most audacious offensive in years, capturing Aleppo.

00:00:15 Speaker_03
This marked the most serious challenge to President Bashar al-Assad's government and its Russian and Iranian-backed allies in nearly a decade.

00:00:23 Speaker_03
As we speak, Syrian and Russian forces are unleashing joint airstrikes in a desperate attempt to reclaim the city. And Iran, which has long supported Assad, promised increasing that support to shore up his faltering grip on power.

00:00:38 Speaker_03
The Middle East is on a knife's edge. Just last week, Israel and Hezbollah reached a fragile ceasefire along the Lebanon border, but tensions remain high. In Gaza, Israel has continued its operations against Hamas, who still holds 63 Israeli hostages.

00:00:55 Speaker_03
And then there's Iran, the architect of much of the region's instability, whose escalating provocations make it seem like a direct war with Israel is no longer a question of if, but when. These conflicts are deeply interconnected.

00:01:10 Speaker_03
And the fall of one domino could set off far-reaching consequences.

00:01:15 Speaker_03
The potential power vacuum left by a weakened Assad regime could reshape alliances and alter the balance of power in ways that reverberate from Tehran to Tel Aviv and from Moscow to Washington.

00:01:28 Speaker_03
To help us make sense of these rapidly unfolding events and their implications for the region, I'm joined today by Haviv Retig Gor, a senior analyst at the Times of Israel and one of the sharpest minds on Middle East politics.

00:01:41 Speaker_03
We unpack what's going on in Syria, the root causes of tribal war and dysfunction across the Arab world, the ceasefire in Lebanon, what comes next in Gaza, the weakening of Iran, and what all of this means for Israel and the United States.

00:01:56 Speaker_03
We'll be right back.

00:02:04 Speaker_01
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00:02:20 Speaker_01
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00:03:54 Speaker_03
Haviv Retegur, welcome to Honestly. Thank you. Thanks for having me. There's a lot going on in the world right now.

00:04:00 Speaker_03
I mean, you look at Syria and it looks like Bashar al-Assad is on his heels and these rebel groups are making quite a bit of ground and taking over Aleppo, etc.

00:04:10 Speaker_03
You had the former head of the Ukrainian army saying, it's not speculation about World War III, we're already in it. when you have North Korean troops on the ground on Ukrainian territory, when you have Russians bombing Aleppo today.

00:04:24 Speaker_03
I mean, it's all of a piece in a way. Tell me what you what you think when you see what's happening in Syria right now, which was like, you know, that conflict started in 2011. And it's been kind of a dormant conflict since the ceasefires in 2020.

00:04:39 Speaker_03
Why now? And is it related to everything else that's happening in the world?

00:04:44 Speaker_05
It's awfully hard to take a look at Syria and not see it from the perspective of Israel, for me, because there's such vital interests and so much of Israel's safety depends on where Syria goes.

00:04:58 Speaker_05
But to try and step out of that Israeli perspective, I think that Syria is the clearest distillation of a basic truth of the Middle East, which is that the state system

00:05:11 Speaker_05
the sort of Westphalian order the diplomats constantly talk about, never really took. And it's possible to exaggerate that statement, but it nevertheless remains profoundly true.

00:05:24 Speaker_05
The Middle East is divided into essentially religious, slightly ethnic, but usually religious divides that form vast alliances across the region.

00:05:34 Speaker_05
You have the Iranian-led Shia, essentially, axis, which includes the Alawites, who are an offshoot of Shiism, of the Assad regime. Assad represents the Alawites, essentially, of Syria.

00:05:47 Speaker_05
And Hezbollah are the Shia of Lebanon who have fought with and for Assad, and the Houthis are with Iran. And for people who don't know, Hezbollah is a creation of Iran. Profoundly.

00:05:59 Speaker_05
Its earliest leadership was literally trained by the Shia in southern Iraq and in Iran.

00:06:05 Speaker_05
And so you have the Shia axis and Syria is a country that it's a little bit of a imperialist French sort of invention that kind of crosses religious and ethnic divides.

00:06:16 Speaker_05
There are Kurds, there are Alawites, there are Sunnis, there are Druze, there are all kinds of different groups. And these groups remain the deepest form of identity to which people adhere.

00:06:25 Speaker_05
And so Turkey right now has vast interests in Syria and supports another axis in the Middle East, which is the radical Sunnis or the Salafist, restorationist, sort of the Hamas Muslim Brotherhood, Qataris.

00:06:39 Speaker_03
The Americans would think of as Al-Qaeda in the past.

00:06:43 Speaker_05
Al-Qaeda is a piece of that. Al-Qaeda is a particular branch that has a particular history with the United States, obviously. But there are offshoots of Al-Qaeda that are perfectly happy to work with American allies to fight the Shia, right?

00:06:56 Speaker_05
So it's a much more complicated sort of soup. And so you have these axes that crisscross the Middle East, and you don't really have nation-states.

00:07:05 Speaker_05
In other words, the Iranian-Shia axis manifested in Lebanon as Hezbollah was, until the last three months, vastly more powerful than any other force in Lebanon, including the Lebanese state and army.

00:07:21 Speaker_03
Yeah, and the Lebanese army is a punchline, it doesn't really exist in so many ways, right?

00:07:26 Speaker_05
You know, if half of your soldiers are Shia, and if you simply don't have the weapons, and certainly not the political support, because the rest of Lebanon is so divided, to actually face down a cohesive Shia presence and military that answers to Iran and is trained by Iran, and is battle-hardened from war in Syria.

00:07:44 Speaker_05
you don't matter, you don't really functionally exist as a state army. Lebanon is not a state, and to think of it as a state will lead you to make assumptions that will constantly, you will constantly be surprised by developments.

00:07:55 Speaker_05
And Syria is the epitome of that. It is not a state.

00:07:58 Speaker_05
It is an arena in which all of these different factions, axes, vast interests, and it has often become, you know, visibly, just in the simplest way to describe the Syrian civil war at various points in the last

00:08:13 Speaker_05
13, 14 years, has been six different ways, right? It's a six-way war. And that's in the simpler times. So you would have the Turks supporting some of the radical Sunni factions. You would have Shia and Alawi working for Assad with Iran.

00:08:27 Speaker_05
You would have the Russians stepping in to support Assad, but then trying to push Iran a little bit out.

00:08:32 Speaker_05
You would have the Israelis coming in just to hold off people from their border, protect the Druze of southern Syria, because the Druze of Israel are very allied with Israel. And you would have, and it would really be six ways.

00:08:43 Speaker_05
And then of course, and it's an amazingly complex thing. And the Kurds can be allies of two factions and enemies of two others.

00:08:49 Speaker_05
And one or two factions can switch sides in terms of the Kurdish calculations of who's a friend or an enemy over the course of a single year. That's what Syria is. Syria is this chaotic soup of the Middle East.

00:09:02 Speaker_03
Is it the case with Assad now in Syria, and there's a lot of conversation about whether or not Assad will survive this. I mean, he survived in the past. Are we in a place that is much like the conversation after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein?

00:09:18 Speaker_03
and after the overthrow of Gaddafi in Libya, that, you know what, this guy's a complete rat bag. And the Mubarak and the Secret Service torture people, and they put them in this kind of vast gulag of political enemies. But he's a force of stability.

00:09:32 Speaker_03
I've heard this conversation quite a bit recently, because these people coming in, these rebels that are filling this vacuum and taking over Aleppo, will be then pushing out the already diminished population of Christians in Aleppo, which went from 60,000 to 10,000, something like that.

00:09:47 Speaker_03
And they're, as you point out, in the simplest terms for Americans to understand, they're radical Islamists, right? And is Assad the better option?

00:09:57 Speaker_03
I know from an Israeli perspective, that might be an odd question because Assad has not been, I mean, somebody who's working with Hezbollah and you have a shared border with Israel.

00:10:07 Speaker_03
I've looked into Syria from the Golan and just said, good Lord, this is how close everything is. But is it a stability thing that right now, what you might get is going to be worse.

00:10:19 Speaker_05
That debate is happening in the West, in the United States, in Washington, in Europe. That debate is happening in Israel. I'll just say my two cents. You can't get worse than Assad. You can't get more destabilizing than Assad.

00:10:34 Speaker_03
And is that from the perspective of an Israeli, or is that regional, or is that from the perspective of a Syrian, or all of the above?

00:10:41 Speaker_05
It's hard not to be an Israeli on these questions because they're so specifically focused also on... But the case is very easy to make. The man killed 600,000 of his own citizens. The man sent millions fleeing all over the world.

00:10:55 Speaker_05
The man, in order to survive, brought the Russians into the eastern Mediterranean. The man doesn't just serve at the behest of Iran.

00:11:04 Speaker_05
His father, Hafez Assad, was the only Arab leader, the only Arab state that actually openly sided with Iran in the Iran-Iraq war. And so the alliance with Iran, and it has to do with with religion. It has to do with the Alawites being an old Shia sect.

00:11:20 Speaker_05
And so Assad holds, now the Alawites are a minority in Syria. And the only way for the Alawites to maintain control is by setting different factions in this multi-ethnic polity against each other.

00:11:33 Speaker_05
So, for example, during the Syrian civil war, one of the things that the Alawite militias, the Syrian army, but essentially functions as an Alawite militia, did was to purposefully commit atrocities against Sunnis.

00:11:47 Speaker_05
And the purpose of committing atrocities against Sunnis was to force the Alawites to hold to Assad's banner because if Assad falls, the Sunnis will then commit atrocities against the Alawites. It's the only way to survive.

00:12:02 Speaker_05
It's a regime that survives by creating all or nothing conflicts within the country between the different ethnicities and religious groups. There is no imaginable destabilizing factor that could be worse than what Assad is.

00:12:17 Speaker_05
Under Assad, Hezbollah flourished and grew and took over Lebanon. Under Assad, he became a linchpin of the Iranian presence. Under Assad, as I said, Russia built its naval base in the Eastern Mediterranean. you can't be worse than Assad.

00:12:33 Speaker_05
And if some of these Salafists and Jihadists, and they're not all Salafists and Jihadists, that post-Assad Syria would also have to be tremendous influence by the Israelis, the Turks, who are forces, I think, that would more, you could make much more the argument that these are stabilizing forces, forces interested in stability, but the Kurds.

00:12:51 Speaker_05
the Kurds would be able to stabilize huge swaths of Syria as well. So no, I am of the opinion, and some disagree with me, including in Israel, that Assad is the worst possible, most destabilizing imaginable force in all of Syria.

00:13:07 Speaker_03
Let me ask you a sort of big, broad question about this.

00:13:10 Speaker_03
When you explain this and the sort of complications and all these confessional divides and, you know, what seems to an outsider like these internal fights within Islam, et cetera, I mean, is there a way to have a peaceful Middle East?

00:13:27 Speaker_03
We see it through the prism of Israel almost exclusively in America. But if you look at Lebanon, this confederation of people in Lebanon, you're talking about the Druze and the, you know, the Sunni and Shia and a big Christian population in Lebanon.

00:13:42 Speaker_03
Is there a way in the Middle East to stabilize these countries that are made up of so many disparate groups who have so many internal issues, because it seems like the forever war.

00:13:56 Speaker_03
And the forever war is not America being in Iraq or America being in Afghanistan. That's how we used it for the past 20 years.

00:14:01 Speaker_03
But it seems to me that it's never going to stop in the Middle East, because unless you solve these things, Israel disappears tomorrow. and nothing changes. It's not going to be a sea of tranquility.

00:14:12 Speaker_05
None of these issues would change, no. Yeah. But they're huge issues. Yeah. I don't like when Arabs run away to blaming European colonialism and imperialism for their problems.

00:14:27 Speaker_05
The Sunni Arab Middle East, at least, the Levant, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, were imperialized, were under the European thumb. for so very little time that that is not the source of their weakness. There are choices there. There are dysfunctions there.

00:14:48 Speaker_05
But there is one thing the Europeans did that is a big part of what you just described, and that is draw lines according to imperial interest that don't fit at all the identities on the ground.

00:15:02 Speaker_05
Israel's great advantage, Israel's great advantage as a stabilizing force, is it's not homogeneity in the sense that 20% of our population is Arab, of the citizens of Israel, there's the Palestinian issue immediately over the green line on all right sides.

00:15:17 Speaker_05
We don't have homogeneity, but we do have a kind of fundamental coherence of identity. Lebanon is five different identities, and none of them are a majority. The Shia are a plurality, but they're not a majority.

00:15:32 Speaker_05
And Syria, ditto, a minority, not even one of the larger groups of Syria, is in control, and therefore that has to be a dictatorship. And so you have countries, the stable countries, are countries with a kind of fundamental identity coherence.

00:15:46 Speaker_05
So Egypt is stable, is stable. You could have an Arab Spring that topples a dictator, but Egypt wasn't fundamentally called into question. Syria is not a real thing. Syria doesn't exist. There are different communities, different places.

00:15:59 Speaker_05
Pieces have to be reshaped if you actually want that coherence. I have to just throw in here, Europeans aren't better. and Arabs aren't dumber than Westerners.

00:16:13 Speaker_05
And the reason I say that is that, you know, Europe, until it became basically homogenous, was absolutely horrific to its minorities.

00:16:22 Speaker_05
The multi-ethnic empires fell, mostly in World War I, roughly around that time, and the nation-states that arose immediately set about homogenizing themselves to the point of mass genocides and ethnic cleansing in all directions.

00:16:35 Speaker_05
And then they achieved, essentially through genocide and ethnic cleansing, after World War II, homogeneity. And then the Europeans immediately in 1945 began patting themselves on the back for their unbelievable tolerance.

00:16:47 Speaker_05
But this period of joy and tolerance and liberalism was essentially a period of almost total, absolute homogeneity. And now Europe has imported into itself some significant minorities, and guess what?

00:16:58 Speaker_05
The Le Pen factions of French politics can win 40% in an election.

00:17:02 Speaker_05
So, we don't actually have, we are now testing for the first time, European tolerance, post-war European tolerance, because post-war you weren't testing it, they were just homogenous, there was nothing to tolerate.

00:17:14 Speaker_05
The Arab world is divided into deeply heterogeneous places that have all of these deep divides and struggles and pains. Iraq is majority Shia, but it's a small majority, and the Sunni can't feel safe, and the Kurds can't feel safe.

00:17:29 Speaker_05
How can Iraq possibly function?

00:17:31 Speaker_05
And so you have, especially when the Iranians want to control it through the Shia and the Americans have other interests and the Chinese now control the entire Iraqi oil industry, basically, and all of that moving along.

00:17:41 Speaker_05
So the Middle East has bad lines and the state system is one of the sources of the way it was imposed by Europeans on the Middle East has created a lot of this problem.

00:17:53 Speaker_03
I don't want to get lost in this. I want to get back to the news of the day. But I do want to ask you a question that I think baffles a lot of people who don't pay strict attention to Israel.

00:18:03 Speaker_03
I mean, Israel from 1948 to today, I mean, this is an old people and a recent concoction as a country, right? 20% of the population is Arab. How does that work well in Israel?

00:18:21 Speaker_03
There's people in the Knesset, there's members of the Supreme Court of an Arab. How does that work when Israel is surrounded by enemies who don't demand a couple of miles of geographic concessions? They demand the elimination of the state.

00:18:39 Speaker_03
How do you have a country with 20% Arab population that functions so well.

00:18:46 Speaker_05
The Arab world desire to destroy Israel isn't instinctive. It isn't a kind of, you know, knee jerk. It comes from a deep place.

00:19:01 Speaker_05
It comes from old ideas, old ideas about Islamic restoration and Islamic weakness and how the Arab and Muslim worlds come back into history as powerful forces and from a serious examination of the very weakness that we're talking about, you know.

00:19:18 Speaker_05
And Israel is a major piece of that story the Arab world is telling itself about itself. In other words, the fact that the Jews, the weak Jews could push us back is a sign of the great weakness of Islam and of Arabism.

00:19:31 Speaker_05
And so Arab nationalism really conceived itself under Nasser back in the 50s as the proving ground of this new Arab nationalist idea, this Arab awakening, this Arab return into history would be done, would be proven on the Jews. And it failed.

00:19:49 Speaker_05
And then there was this sort of 1960s anti-colonial Algeria inspired Arafat stuff. terrorism essentially and that failed and now we are in the testing ground of a new version of that which is testing the Islamic idea.

00:20:03 Speaker_05
These are 150 year old discourses by theologians and serious people about how Islam returns from weakness and we face around us people who ideologues, ideological movements. I'm not talking about ordinary people.

00:20:18 Speaker_05
Ordinary people can sometimes be swept up in this. Ordinary people often don't want it because they want to live their regular lives.

00:20:24 Speaker_05
But the ideological and political movements of the world that surrounds us sees us as a testing ground for healing and rising up from their own weaknesses and their own historical collapse. And Arab citizens of Israel,

00:20:41 Speaker_05
who are also Palestinians, they have multi-layered identities that depending on how you poll them and you ask them which of your identities do you prioritize, sometimes they say Arab, sometimes they say Israeli, sometimes they say Palestinian, sometimes they say Muslim, but that community, which is very big and diverse,

00:20:57 Speaker_05
doesn't have that vision by and large.

00:21:00 Speaker_05
There are some of these sort of restorationists or Salafists or various in the Arab-Israeli community, but they don't have that vision of testing the future of Islam and Arab strength on the destruction of Israel because they know us. They know us.

00:21:14 Speaker_05
They are colleagues of mine at my newspaper. My newspaper publishes in English, Hebrew, Arabic, French, and Persian. And so they're Arabs, Israeli Arabs, Palestinians in Ramallah, who work in the context of my paper.

00:21:30 Speaker_05
They are our doctors and our colleagues and our, you know, the Druze community, Arabic speaking, religiously non-Muslim, something a little different, serves in the army.

00:21:41 Speaker_05
My platoon commander in the army when I was in the infantry 25 years ago, when I was young and handsome, was a Druze. His name was Kamal, and to this day, I owe him a great deal.

00:21:51 Speaker_05
And that familiarity, Arab Israelis, unlike Palestinians in the West Bank, no Hebrew. Arab Israelis, unlike Palestinians in the West Bank, work in Israeli high tech, work in Israeli medicine, work in Israeli, learn Israeli universities.

00:22:04 Speaker_05
And that familiarity teaches them one great thing about us that they know instinctively that the rest of the Arab world around us doesn't know, which is that we are real people.

00:22:14 Speaker_05
And we're a people forged out of a refugee experience that has nowhere to go. You can't call us a colonialist project. We have no metropole. We have no place to go back to. We're not leaving. We're stuck.

00:22:24 Speaker_05
And so they're cured by that familiarity of all of these sort of insane ideological visions about us that undermine the, frankly, psychological well-being of a lot of the ideological groups and political factions that surround us.

00:22:40 Speaker_05
I think familiarity is the secret. And if they learned our story, if the Middle East knew us better, the Middle East would spend less of its treasure and less of its blood on our destruction.

00:22:51 Speaker_03
Let's talk about what's going on in Israel now. I mean, we're on, I don't know how many, a week or so into a ceasefire in Lebanon.

00:23:03 Speaker_03
Obviously, on October 7th, it was probably October 8th, if not October 7th, that Hezbollah involved itself in this war by launching projectiles into Israel and essentially emptying out the northern part of the country.

00:23:17 Speaker_03
People can't go back to their homes. And Israel responded, but then responded very sharply with boots on the ground into Lebanon, strikes and just killing the entire leadership of Hezbollah. Why did the ceasefire happen now?

00:23:35 Speaker_03
There were a lot of people that I was paying attention to who said, too soon. We need to actually really finish this job. What created the conditions for that ceasefire? And what is the situation now with Israel and Lebanon?

00:23:53 Speaker_05
It isn't one factor, it's many factors that ultimately all come to a single place. Israel's interest became clear and the interest was to not sink into a quagmire, a military quagmire in Lebanon.

00:24:09 Speaker_05
And Iran's interest clearly was also to back down from a little bit of it was because Trump won the election. Iran is now preparing essentially for a defensive few years of, you know, a Trump.

00:24:23 Speaker_05
pushed maximum pressure campaign and so Iran now needs to preserve its capabilities.

00:24:28 Speaker_03
So you think that win actually had a psychological effect on the Iranian leadership and therefore on policy? I mean people were saying, well who do you think the Russians want to win?

00:24:37 Speaker_03
And my response is, who do you think the Iranians want to win this election? They probably want Kamala Harris to win this. But do you think that has affected their behavior in a significant way?

00:24:45 Speaker_05
Yeah, it's not even a psychological question. Hard strategy. If Trump is about to massively sanction all of the Iranian oil smuggling to China, then the IRGC are about to lose their main source of foreign currency.

00:24:57 Speaker_05
And that's not a time to continue escalating the tit-for-tat with Israel. We're still waiting for the Iranian promise of massive missile attack.

00:25:13 Speaker_05
Their latest tit-for-tat revenge attack on Israel is, I have to stop keeping track, I think a couple months overdue already and has become silly and so they've stopped even mentioning it.

00:25:24 Speaker_05
Israel has total escalation dominance and Iran has to hunker down because Israel basically destroyed their missile producing capabilities or at least a significant piece of it. And so any missile they shoot, they can't replace.

00:25:36 Speaker_05
And if they continue this tit-for-tat escalation with Israel, they will begin to lose massive strategic assets.

00:25:42 Speaker_05
I am someone in the Israeli context who's very frustrated that Iran wised up, that we have escalation dominance and back down, because I would like to actually walk up that escalation curve a little until a lot more of their capabilities are gone.

00:25:56 Speaker_05
But so Trump Trump's victory plus Hezbollah's shattering very very early plus The the Israeli willingness people forget or didn't maybe realize I don't I don't know if people understood the shocking scale of what happened between Israel and Iran the Israeli spent sent a hundred and forty planes to Iran Crossing into Iranian airspace and essentially flying circles over Tehran

00:26:26 Speaker_05
Three months ago, you would not have been able to find a single policy person in Washington, in New York, anywhere in the West, who would have told you it would be perfectly reasonable for the Israelis to send 140 planes to fly circles over Tehran, and there's nothing the Iranians could do about it.

00:26:40 Speaker_05
Because the Israelis can wipe out in about three hours the entire Iranian air defense system. People like me were saying, I was not saying anything even remotely close to that.

00:26:48 Speaker_05
I was very bullish on Israel's capabilities to Iran, but I did not imagine the gap was so great. But there was none of the experts said anything like it and they would have laughed you out of the room.

00:26:59 Speaker_05
Well, that happened and the whole Middle East watched it happen.

00:27:02 Speaker_05
And so now the question is, Iran is now massively backing off into the dangerous moment now is that it feels so weak and it knows that everyone around it sees it so weak that it might actually push for a bomb. That's the great danger of this moment.

00:27:16 Speaker_05
But that mass weakening of Iran and coupled with the Israeli interest, and I mentioned it before, but it's worth just saying very briefly, Israel achieved against Hezbollah an astonishing success, wiping out the leadership.

00:27:32 Speaker_05
And I don't mean the 15 names that, you know, made the news. I mean the 1500. Brigade commanders, top leaders of Hezbollah, its capacity to seriously... And Hezbollah was much more hierarchical than Hamas. And so it matters more.

00:27:49 Speaker_05
It hurt Hezbollah more than it hurt Hamas because Hamas was so compartmentalized as a strategic point that pieces of Hamas can keep fighting in a way that with Hezbollah it's much harder.

00:28:01 Speaker_03
the operation, the serious operation in Lebanon started. And I'd heard this, you know, for years, 200,000, you know, missiles, rockets, et cetera, buried throughout Lebanon, incredibly, you know, technologically advanced, right?

00:28:19 Speaker_03
And we should be afraid of these things. It didn't really happen, right? There was that one barrage. Why not? I mean, have we overestimated the capabilities of an organization like Hezbollah vis-a-vis Israel.

00:28:34 Speaker_03
I mean, obviously Israel can know where Hassan Nasrallah is and put a missile in his pocket, you know, right exactly. They've got moles inside of the organization.

00:28:45 Speaker_03
I mean, the Pager operation, whether or not it was a tactical strategic victory on the battlefield, it was one that would scare the hell out of you, is that this is how deeply they are embedded into everything we do.

00:28:58 Speaker_03
I mean, I guess it's good to be prepared and say, look, we have to watch out for these 200,000 missiles. But did we overestimate the Iranians and their proxy in Hezbollah?

00:29:10 Speaker_05
No, absolutely not. You plan for the worst case scenario. I'm extremely grateful and proud that my people are so astonishingly, stupendously competent. But, you know, a year earlier, they were astonishingly, stupendously and unimaginably incompetent.

00:29:32 Speaker_05
You assume the worst and plan for the worst, and then only have victories. So no, I don't think we underestimated. I think we overestimate our enemies at a grand scale.

00:29:48 Speaker_05
In other words, we have enemies that at the most fundamental level are the destroyers of their own societies. These are tyrants. These are people willing to sacrifice their own populations. I mean, that's their fundamental strategy.

00:30:02 Speaker_05
Any enemy on our borders who build tunnels, are enemies on our borders who believe that as a strategic force multiplier the civilians should die for the war. And the war is a war they're planning for.

00:30:14 Speaker_05
They're sacrificing their national economy for these wars that they are then making sure that the civilians die in as a force multiplier for themselves. So these are the destroyers of their own civilization. What has Hezbollah done for Lebanon?

00:30:26 Speaker_05
Never mind the destruction of Israel. Great, let's all destroy Israel. Fine. What have they done to Lebanon? They've gutted the Lebanese capacity to be a state, to function normally. Well, if that's our enemies, then we're probably going to be okay.

00:30:39 Speaker_05
What is Iran's great strategic problem now? The Iranian strategic problem right now is that the Israeli economy is real and the Iranian economy kind of isn't.

00:30:51 Speaker_05
It's a state that works at cross purposes to the basic well-being of its population and economy because it's a kind of dictatorship with this grand vision. And so it's always going to be incompetent. It's GDP per capita is ridiculous.

00:31:05 Speaker_05
It takes on sanctions from the world because it seeks to essentially violate the NPT at a level that will annihilate the capacity of the world to stop nuclear proliferation.

00:31:16 Speaker_05
And it wants to do all these things for absolutely no reason anyone outside Iran can comprehend. There is no reason Iran isn't wealthy, competent, high-tech, beautiful country, except that regime. And so our enemies are their own self-destroyers.

00:31:29 Speaker_05
So if we think that Iran is this immensely powerful empire that we have to be constantly afraid of, we're misunderstanding the fundamental things about how economies work, countries work, history works.

00:31:40 Speaker_05
Having said that, those 150,000, 200,000 missiles A low five-figured, five-digit number of them, precision missiles, 10,000, 20,000 potentially precision missiles, could have wreaked massive havoc on Israel.

00:31:55 Speaker_05
Israel is tiny, and Israel is vulnerable, and Israel's population is concentrated in small areas on the coastal plain and a few other areas, so they can do tremendous damage. And some significant portion of that arsenal remains.

00:32:10 Speaker_05
The Israeli army moved in and basically destroyed every Hezbollah infrastructure that it found. There's very little left that it didn't find in the first line of villages from the border.

00:32:20 Speaker_05
But there's a second line where the army has operated, but not completely. And then there's a third line to which the army has not reached. And in that third line, there are a few thousand precision missiles still.

00:32:30 Speaker_05
There's still the capacity to bring down skyscrapers in Tel Aviv. The idea of the ceasefire now was based on a very simple calculation. We accomplished a huge amount at an incredibly low cost. And that's not a zero cost, it's a very high cost.

00:32:48 Speaker_05
79 soldiers died on our side and I feel those deaths and two of my wife's brothers have fought in Lebanon and that is a terrifying thing. but nevertheless incredibly low cost compared to what we thought the Hezbollah war would be.

00:33:01 Speaker_05
So we achieved that incredible amount. And now we risk falling into the Lebanese quagmire. We risk massive expense, massive costs in soldiers' lives, in the economy, in international diplomatic terms, in all kinds of different terms.

00:33:17 Speaker_05
And there's not that much left to accomplish that's easy and fast and obvious. If we want to move into Lebanon to the point where we pull Hezbollah out to the roots, That involves a massive destruction of significant portions of Lebanon.

00:33:31 Speaker_05
And we don't want that. And so we've reached a point of diminishing returns. We cut our losses, take our massive wins, and create a ceasefire in which the agreement is so amazing for Israel because we're still allowed to fight.

00:33:46 Speaker_05
It's a ceasefire in which anything defensive, which includes Hezbollah preparing infrastructures, rehabilitating infrastructures, continuing to ship missiles over through Syria,

00:33:55 Speaker_05
All of that stuff is something Israel's allowed to react to under the terms of the ceasefire agreement. It's basically a perfect situation, that ceasefire. And the timing is that the diminishing returns have arrived.

00:34:08 Speaker_05
We're going to get less for more sacrifice if we stay.

00:34:16 Speaker_03
More with Haviv Rettiguer after the break.

00:34:25 Speaker_01
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00:35:32 Speaker_02
The Credit Card Competition Act would help small business owners like Raymond. We asked Raymond why the Credit Card Competition Act matters to him.

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00:36:26 Speaker_02
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00:36:32 Speaker_03
Let's talk about Gaza a little bit.

00:36:34 Speaker_03
I mean, for those of us paying attention, you see former Defense Minister Yelon, who was a Likud party member, was a defense minister, what, a decade ago, saying during an interview that he believes ethnic cleansing is happening in northern Gaza.

00:36:55 Speaker_03
He said, you know, I no longer believe that Israel is the most moral army in the world. which is something he said he believed 10 years ago, 15 years ago, but as a result of the operation in response to October 7th, he says that's no longer true.

00:37:08 Speaker_03
Talk to me a little bit about that and about, you know, the situation now in Gaza. What has the IDF done? What have they achieved? And what do you make of the former defense minister? And again, this is no sort of dovish peacenik, right?

00:37:27 Speaker_03
Saying that ethnic cleansing is either happening or, you know, the early stages of it are going on right now.

00:37:37 Speaker_05
My read on Bogi Yalon, a man I have tremendous respect for, and as you say, no dovish slouch, a man willing to fight the wars, the bitter wars, rose up the ranks of the infantry, and a man who knows what Hamas is and is willing to destroy Hamas and pay significant costs for it.

00:38:03 Speaker_05
Bogie Alon was not saying the Israeli army is an immoral army committing ethnic cleansing in Gaza. Bogie Alon's argument, as I read it, was about this Israeli government. And what he was saying was that the army is being used.

00:38:22 Speaker_05
Each individual, he can't point to a specific operation or specific policy that is somehow the smoking gun of some ethnic cleansing policy. But what he was saying was, I hope I'm representing him correctly.

00:38:37 Speaker_05
And I have to say that I disagree with him, but I think that what he was saying was, I don't trust this Israeli government not to be enthralled to its most far-right elements.

00:38:49 Speaker_05
I don't know, he was saying, that Bezalel Smotrych of the Religious Zionism Party who openly talks about reducing Gaza's population by half by encouraging them to leave, so that we can then open up Gaza for the building of settlements.

00:39:07 Speaker_05
And Itamar Ben-Gvir, who doesn't even say things that coherently, but in fact is the most far-right you can get in Israeli politics.

00:39:16 Speaker_03
And for those who don't know, they are coalition partners. They are coalition partners.

00:39:19 Speaker_05
partners and they are the edge, the edge of the edge of Israeli politics. I mean, there's no human beings to the right of them in the population of Israel. That is the edge of the edge.

00:39:29 Speaker_05
And Netanyahu's victory was so slim, he actually lost the popular vote.

00:39:33 Speaker_05
I mean, his victory was so slim in November, 2022, that he brought in two years after saying, I'll never sit with Itamar Ben-Gvir in public, in an interview, the fact that he said that is

00:39:44 Speaker_05
gave a lot of, people like me said, that's how I know he's gonna do it, right?

00:39:49 Speaker_05
But that these people, the question becomes, you know, until recently, until the last couple of months, when a faction of, led by a guy named Gideon Sauer, formerly Kudnik, moved from the opposition into the coalition, and it's complicated, Israeli politics is always an 11, you talked about the Syrian Civil War being a six-way war, this is an 11-way war,

00:40:11 Speaker_05
But nevertheless, Netanyahu depended on the most extreme far-right faction possible in Israel, that literally exists in Israel, for his coalition stability.

00:40:21 Speaker_05
And the argument of a lot of his critics outside the coalition, in the opposition or just generally in the population, was that he's beholden to them and he will sacrifice anything to stay in power.

00:40:32 Speaker_05
And he will sacrifice fundamental moral questions and political questions and Israel's national interest.

00:40:36 Speaker_03
And that's the argument of Netanyahu's enemies. Do you think that's true, that he will sacrifice

00:40:41 Speaker_05
all of these things to stay in power. What Bogie alone was arguing was that Netanyahu is willing and is going and maybe already has begun to follow Smotrych and Ben-Gvir down that path in Gaza just for his own political self-interest.

00:41:01 Speaker_05
And that will make Israel a criminal state, a state that has committed this terrible crime.

00:41:06 Speaker_03
And to be clear about that, that would be opening up you know, large swaths of territory, and he was talking specifically about northern Gaza, to settlements. I mean, that's essentially what we're talking about, right?

00:41:17 Speaker_05
So, what is actually happening in Gaza, and then the question becomes how you interpret it, what is actually happening in Gaza is that the Israelis are creating three buffer zones.

00:41:27 Speaker_05
One is the Gaza-Egypt border, the Philadelphia corridor as it's called, where it is continuing to entrench itself, the Israeli army, and to continuing to dig for tunnels and destroy those tunnels and choke Hamas's ability to reinforce itself, rehabilitate, resupply.

00:41:45 Speaker_05
And that is something that has been happening essentially since May, June, when we went in there for the first time. And there is, in central Gaza, what we call the Netzarim Corridor. That's how Israelis call it.

00:41:59 Speaker_05
And that is a major eight kilometer wide highway, essentially, from the Israeli border to the sea that has Israeli fortifications. I mean, there's a prison for Hamas people caught in Gaza in that corridor. There are Israeli units there.

00:42:18 Speaker_03
There's a big story about this in the New York Times today. It was presented as if Israel is hunkering down and going to be there for a while. That was essentially the headline.

00:42:26 Speaker_05
It is almost certain that Israel's hunkering down and going to be there for a while. And then there is the north.

00:42:32 Speaker_05
And the north is where the Israeli army moved in to, in the north, the areas that are strategically most dangerous for Israel, where rocket fire can reach Tel Aviv. These are also areas that are traditionally the home base of Hamas.

00:42:45 Speaker_05
For example, Jabalia. The Israeli army went into Jabalia two months ago. And it was a major operation. And I forget the exact numbers, but there's something like 1,500 Hamas fighters killed and almost 1,000 caught.

00:43:00 Speaker_05
And these are people known within the Hamas hierarchy. There isn't a debate about whether or not they're Hamas. It isn't that in the battlefield there's who knows who's what exactly. Hamas don't obviously wear uniforms.

00:43:13 Speaker_05
So these are debates that are constantly happening. So, um, Jabalia was a major, major stronghold of Hamas. The army estimates that it's still, it's going to be operating in Jabalia for another, you know, four, five, six weeks.

00:43:25 Speaker_05
And in order to move in at such a massive scale, it told the civilian population to leave.

00:43:32 Speaker_05
So, it told the civilian population to leave this band in northern Gaza, moved in in a massive, with overwhelming power to chase down and including destroy tunnels underneath Jabalia, which of course destroys some significant portion of Jabalia above ground, and moved south to destroy this Hamas fortification force.

00:43:51 Speaker_05
And what does that mean? So, up until now, these are the agreed upon facts on the ground. What are these three corridors? What does Israel intend to do with them?

00:44:01 Speaker_05
Does it intend to create a safe place for the military to operate into Gaza City, into Khan Yunis, into the major cities and population centers of Gaza over time, in order to slowly degrade Hamas over two years, let's say, and finally destroy it?

00:44:16 Speaker_05
This is, for example, the American Kurdish-Iraqi strategy against ISIS, in which they took territory, surrounded and fought these bitter, awful urban battles,

00:44:26 Speaker_05
basically demolished cities in the course of these urban battles and had to slowly over about five years, that's the nature of this war, degrade, of this kind of war, degrade ISIS until they could move in. Is that what Israel is doing in Gaza?

00:44:41 Speaker_05
Or, as Bezalel Smotrich keeps saying, and the world keeps hearing from him,

00:44:47 Speaker_05
Is it, in fact, trying to clear sections of Gaza so that Israeli right-wing political factions can move in and build Jewish settlements and build, you know, new and annex and take land?

00:45:01 Speaker_05
Now, what is the likelihood that something like that would come to pass? We have polls over the last few months that tell us that the vast, vast majority of Israelis, an early poll was 90-10, don't want settlements in Gaza.

00:45:20 Speaker_05
And so Boguia alone is weighing in on that debate. The public doesn't want to sink into Gaza, to create what was once to be forever attached to Gaza, to be forever fighting in Gaza, and to be doing things in Gaza that are immoral.

00:45:37 Speaker_05
The public doesn't want that. And the public includes the majority of the coalition's voters. Is that changing? Are these politicians sort of leading Netanyahu by the nose? What does Netanyahu actually want?

00:45:48 Speaker_05
One of the great problems of this war on every front is that Netanyahu doesn't speak. Netanyahu over the last 14 months has gone three months at a time without giving an interview to any Israeli media, including right-wing media that supports him.

00:46:00 Speaker_05
That Netanyahu is not telling us, he's not speaking to us clearly about the future of Gaza. And his critics are starting to say, wait a second, why won't he speak?

00:46:12 Speaker_05
Now, either he won't speak because he doesn't want to lose those right-wing coalition partners, or he won't speak because this is his plan as well. He's signed on to their agenda. Bogielin was expressing that concern.

00:46:26 Speaker_05
He said it in a way that I think is very damaging for Israel. But the Israeli government's inability to articulate a day after in Gaza, I think, is more damaging to Israel. So that is that debate. That is what Bogiellon was saying.

00:46:43 Speaker_05
Tell me how this ends in Gaza. I mean, this ends when the sun expands and the earth is, you know, burned to a crisp in a billion years. And all of our efforts are for naught.

00:46:58 Speaker_03
I mean, do you have that attitude, honestly? Like, do you have, I mean, I know there's a certain Israeli cynicism. Do you have the sense that something like this never does really end?

00:47:09 Speaker_05
So let me say something about Gaza. Through Lebanon and Iran. Lebanon, our interest is very simple. We have this enemy called Hezbollah. It is not Lebanon. There is all the rest of Lebanon that is not Hezbollah.

00:47:27 Speaker_05
And we fought a war that was incredibly careful to distinguish between Lebanon and Hezbollah to the point where the Lebanese army obligingly moved out of any area the Israeli army asked to move into so that the Israeli army could fight Hezbollah and never have to engage the Lebanese army.

00:47:40 Speaker_05
There was just an airstrike on a Hezbollah infrastructure in the Baalbek Valley somewhere in the Baalbek area. in which a Lebanese soldier reportedly, literally this morning, was killed.

00:47:51 Speaker_05
The Israeli army put out a statement saying it was investigating the death of that Lebanese army soldier because it wants to make it very clear that it does not want Lebanese army soldiers to die.

00:47:59 Speaker_05
There is Hezbollah and then there's all the rest of Lebanon that when we weaken Hezbollah, we hope will come in and fill that vacuum. In Iran, all we have to do is break things. We don't have to worry about the rest of Iran or anything.

00:48:12 Speaker_05
We just have to break that regime and break that proxy system that's threatening us. And I say all that just to say that Gaza is a radically different kind of conflict. It's a radically different kind of war. Gaza has to be rebuilt.

00:48:27 Speaker_05
And that can't happen without Israel, but that means that also Israel has a tremendous responsibility for shaping how that happens and for making sure it happens and for making sure it happens in ways that are beneficial to Gaza, stabilizing also because that's safer for Israel.

00:48:43 Speaker_05
And so Israel in a sense owns the Gaza problem in a way that it doesn't own the Lebanon problem and doesn't own the Iran problem. And now the question becomes, how does Israel craft that future, craft that day after? You don't have to give specifics.

00:48:59 Speaker_05
This is a vast, complex negotiation. If you say too much, you hurt your own interest, you hurt your ability to actually build out that future.

00:49:06 Speaker_05
But you do have to give Gazans, Israelis, the world, the Arab partners you hope will come into Gaza to help rebuild eventually, a sense of what Israel's fundamental intentions are.

00:49:18 Speaker_05
And this government is a government, every single Israeli government in the history of Israeli governments has been a coalition of factions set against each other.

00:49:26 Speaker_05
I mean, every Israeli government has one ministry belonging to one party pursuing one policy and a different ministry belonging to a different party pursuing the opposite policy.

00:49:34 Speaker_05
And depending on the competence of the minister, that's how one policy or the other wins. This is a government with many different voices, voices that want opposite things. Who's winning?

00:49:46 Speaker_05
And what are Israel's fundamental objectives and fundamental vision? And Israel needs to articulate that. If we can, over time, hold our Arab allies, who are uncomfortable allies, they don't want to be our allies right now.

00:50:05 Speaker_05
Al Jazeera, at Qatar's behest, is driving the narrative in the Arab world about Gaza. But nevertheless, they're still at our side on the fundamental strategy questions.

00:50:17 Speaker_05
If we can hold those Arab allies to our side over the course of the difficult and painful period that it'll take to actually degrade Hamas, then they remain at our side of the rebuilding, and they will come in and help in the rebuilding, and actually do the rebuilding.

00:50:29 Speaker_05
The Israelis can't come into Gaza and then rebuild. If we can't, because they simply don't trust our intentions, then we won't have them there when we need them. And if our intentions are bad, well, that's very bad.

00:50:43 Speaker_05
That's very bad for our future and very bad for Gaza's future. So the Israeli government needs to start clarifying, speaking, saying things that the world wants to hear from them. We can't escape it. And we have to figure it out.

00:50:56 Speaker_05
And we have to show the world that we have to show Israelis that we're going to figure it out. And it's two years away, any solution to Gaza. If we build it now, and if we're not building it now,

00:51:07 Speaker_03
But you're not suggesting that there's two years of military conflict ahead of Israel? Guaranteed. Guaranteed in Gaza? In Gaza?

00:51:15 Speaker_05
Degrading Hamas is a long, long process. And the gentler you can do it, the better. But Hamas will make sure. Hamas' one hope, not even for survival, for rescue, is to force the Israelis to cause as much damage as possible while doing so.

00:51:32 Speaker_03
There are a lot of complex answers here to very complex questions.

00:51:36 Speaker_03
If you live in New York City, as I do, you can walk out the front door of any building and run into people that are swaddled in keffiyehs and sometimes even flying Hezbollah flags, which I've seen in Union Square.

00:51:53 Speaker_03
Saying that Israel is committing a genocide, it is an apartheid state, et cetera. You've heard this a million times. If you were to walk out of this building and walk into one of those demonstrations and talk to one person,

00:52:08 Speaker_03
What would you say to them that they get wrong about this conflict? And I would say Gaza, Lebanon, Israel as its fundamental existence, which is usually questioned by all these people.

00:52:22 Speaker_03
They say it was a colonial mistake and this is a settler colonial project and it shouldn't even exist. It's very hard to talk to people who have that idea about a sovereign nation in the Middle East. But how do you talk to people like that?

00:52:37 Speaker_03
They don't know enough to talk to me. What would I talk to them about?

00:52:41 Speaker_05
They are passionate enough to go out in the street. Yeah, but they're passionate about something they know nothing about. When you find someone who's passionate about something they know nothing about, something else is at work.

00:52:50 Speaker_05
It's not really about me.

00:52:52 Speaker_03
So if someone's walking down the street, you know, how many 5,000 miles away from your country, saying that your country is committing a genocide, The army that you served in are genociders that are not unlike the Wehrmacht or the SS.

00:53:07 Speaker_05
I've seen signs that... There's a wonderfully delicious overlap between the people who are distraught that Israel is committing a genocide and people who defend Assad as the great... I mean, literally these... What's her name?

00:53:24 Speaker_05
The UN person who's... Albanese. Albanese, right? She just

00:53:30 Speaker_05
liked and shared and said well said or something like that to a tweet of a far left Israeli arguing that Assad is the only thing holding Syria together and you don't have to like him to friends if Assad 600,000 dead.

00:53:49 Speaker_05
If Assad's driving of millions of people based entirely along ethnic lines, Syria in 2011 was 10% Christian, Syria today is less than 2% Christian.

00:53:59 Speaker_03
Something you would call ethnic cleansing.

00:54:00 Speaker_05
Nobody on this earth gives a shit. And those people don't give a shit. And now, because they have this vague sense that maybe Assad is anti-American, possibly, potentially, he must be okay.

00:54:11 Speaker_05
These are people who are perfectly happy with genocide, as long as it fits their little ideological peccadilloes and their little story of themselves.

00:54:20 Speaker_05
Nothing happening here, nothing happening here, has anything to do with the real people living over there.

00:54:27 Speaker_05
The progressives, in all of their deep studies of self-critical critiques of criticism, have managed to remain totally ensconced in the warm blanket of Western Orientalism.

00:54:45 Speaker_05
They get to look at all the people over there and they're still looking at cartoons. And these cartoons that they make us into are meant to serve little narratives running around in their own heads.

00:54:56 Speaker_05
And those little narratives' fundamental purpose is to self-justify their own morality. They simply know nothing at all. I gave a talk at GW at DC. A kid, one of the students, I've been doing a lot of talks with college students.

00:55:12 Speaker_05
One of the kids raises his hand at some point and he says to me, everyone on my campus is anti-Zionist. My friends aren't my friends. My professors are all anti-Zionist. I can't get a date.

00:55:24 Speaker_05
And I admired this kid because he came to a talk of mine, which is kind of a self-selecting group of kids he could probably get a date with, right? Smart kid, I'm just saying. Fly that flag in the right audience. But he said, everyone's anti-Zionist.

00:55:41 Speaker_05
And I tried to convey to him the gap between the lived experience over there and the weird moralizing discourse over here.

00:55:50 Speaker_05
And the gap has a lot to do with the word Zionist and how it's understood and what these people decided that it's this particular superstructure, their ideologues told them. I said to him, I'm an idiot Israeli. What's an anti-Zionist?

00:56:05 Speaker_05
And the kid says, an anti-Zionist is someone who thinks Israel should never have been founded. So I said to him, well, that's a really interesting argument because every other Jew in the Eastern hemisphere is dead. What? What's the argument?

00:56:19 Speaker_05
Is the argument that the Jews who couldn't get into the West as the pressure was building in Eastern Europe and in Central Europe and in the Arab world couldn't get into the West because of quotas, because of immigration quotas and laws against them?

00:56:31 Speaker_05
that those Jews should have been able to get into the West? They should have had other choices other than to become Israeli? Is that the argument? Because I agree with that. If that's the argument, I'm also anti-Zionist.

00:56:40 Speaker_05
It would have been really nice if the whole world had opened their doors to these desperate refugees ten seconds before their genocide. But it didn't. Or is the argument that those Jews should just have died. They should just have died.

00:56:52 Speaker_05
Israel is the last living Jew in the Eastern Hemisphere. Statistically, there are a few others. I apologize to French Jewry, who, by the way, are 90% Sephardi, because after the Holocaust, they refilled when every last Jew fled North Africa.

00:57:03 Speaker_05
French Jewry is an exception that proves the rule. If you don't know what I'm talking about, folks, don't worry about it. Google those words. The Jews emptied out of everywhere.

00:57:15 Speaker_05
And as the world homogenized, few places did it as completely and perfectly as the Arab world. And the Arab world is still in the process of brutally homogenizing. And the Jews found one place, one refuge across three continents, ancient communities.

00:57:28 Speaker_05
The Jews had been living in Baghdad a thousand years before the Arab speakers got to Baghdad. There were 50,000 Jews in Baghdad in 1946, right?

00:57:35 Speaker_03
Or maybe even more.

00:57:37 Speaker_05
I think in 1930, there's a poll or census where 25% of the city is Jewish. In 1960, there's 0%. 0% of the city is Jewish. Okay, it was twice as Jewish as New York. And then 30 years later, it's zero Jews, no Jews.

00:57:54 Speaker_05
Anti-Zionist Arab nationalist Iraqi Jews had all fled. Imagine if New York City in 30 years doesn't have a single Jew left of any kind. Left wing, right wing, progressive, Hasidic, no kind of Jew concern. You would know something about New York.

00:58:09 Speaker_05
The Arab world empties out. Everyone empties out. So is the argument that they should have died? In my view, and what I told this kid was either your argument is history should have gone differently. In which case, you know, I'm with you.

00:58:24 Speaker_05
It's a damn shame that Zionism turned out to be so prescient and correct. Or, your argument is, those dudes should have died, and then I would be able to sleep better at night. Well, then you're a genocidal asshole. Or, you're a Zionist.

00:58:38 Speaker_05
What's the fourth option? So anti-Zionism, that treats the idea of Zionism in this country as if it's one ideological option among many.

00:58:47 Speaker_05
Jews can be, you know, left-wing Jews, reform Jews, conservative Jews, Trump voting Jews, Obama voting Jews, Buddhist Jews. Jews can be 16 different kinds of Jews.

00:58:57 Speaker_05
So don't be the Zionist Jew because Zionism is one of those 16 options and we don't like it. So don't be. Zionism is this kind of luxurious ideological option of safe people. is an entirely Western cartoon.

00:59:11 Speaker_05
Actual Zionism is the last living remnants of a destroyed civilization in the only place where they could survive. And everyone then deciding that they are the problem with the world and have to be destroyed for redemption to happen.

00:59:25 Speaker_05
Everyone in the Muslim context, in the Marxist context, and now in Western academia. So, you know, if you want to come to the Jews of Israel and argue about things they're doing wrong, first of all, join the club.

00:59:39 Speaker_05
Second of all, there's a lot of us doing it already. Second of all, learn us, actually know something about us. These people know nothing about us. I have walked through these campuses and talked to these protesters. They know nothing about us.

00:59:52 Speaker_05
They didn't read in some ideologue pamphlet. And third of all, Don't live only in your own self-righteous cartoons. We are not cartoons. We're real people going through a real history.

01:00:06 Speaker_05
So when I walk out of the street of New York and I see a keffiyeh, first of all, well done, you found a cool way to wear a scarf. I am totally disinterested. They are uninteresting. They are boring. They don't know enough to challenge me.

01:00:20 Speaker_05
They don't know enough to talk to me. And if they actually do want to produce, to create their own moral world out of me, they're not, that's just bigotry. That's just racism. By the way, they're doing it to the Palestinians too.

01:00:33 Speaker_05
The Palestinians are not as innocent as they pretend, not as stupid as they pretend. The Palestinians are deep and interesting and have many factions and a rich history.

01:00:43 Speaker_05
and they turn them into the same shallow, more, they're the good guys, I'm the bad guys, but it's the same cartoon and it's the same dehumanizing and shrinking of us. Orientalism never died.

01:00:53 Speaker_05
It just, the progressives managed to make it into a slightly more self-righteous version of the same old Orientalism in the West. That's what I believe when I look at these people.

01:01:01 Speaker_03
And you have these conversations when you leave Israel. when you're inside of Israel, I mean, I've listened to you on the Times of Israel podcast.

01:01:09 Speaker_03
I mean, you spend your time in very specific things, you know, attacking the government and being critical of decisions that the Netanyahu administration has made.

01:01:19 Speaker_03
Whereas here, you just have to have a sort of pull the focus out and talk about the country in general. I mean, the idea of Zionism, you're a Zionist.

01:01:28 Speaker_03
I mean, I suppose if you're an anti-Zionist, that means you want the destruction of the state, because Zionism in that sense is a settled issue. He was settled in 1948.

01:01:34 Speaker_05
Yeah, when you challenge someone and you say, what the heck's an anti-Zionist? Do you mean destruction? And then they say, no, no, God forbid. We mean a one state solution for all the people.

01:01:42 Speaker_03
No, that's the same thing. Right?

01:01:43 Speaker_05
A civic democracy a la the United States. That's really sweet. But you're arguing with the Jews who survived the 20th century that they should give up their self-defense because the Arab world can contain them.

01:01:57 Speaker_05
And when I said that, right, the Arab world will just treat the minority Jews okay. Why? Because they're so beautiful and wonderful and it's so great to live in the Arab world right now.

01:02:05 Speaker_05
And there isn't a massive crisis of modernity and there isn't a massive crisis of political Islam and there isn't a massive crisis of minorities on every turn dying and being destroyed.

01:02:14 Speaker_05
And then the response from a Palestinian, prominent Palestinian activist in Washington, D.C. to my saying that was, you're a racist. What do you think, all Arabs are bad? What do you do with that? What do you mean what do I think all Arabs are bad?

01:02:29 Speaker_05
Let's go throughout the Middle East and talk to every minority in the Middle East and ask them if they can take a vote by pulling that lever on whether they should have their own self-determination and self-defense.

01:02:38 Speaker_05
You will have a hundred percent saying yes. I'm not saying Arabs are bad, I'm saying the Arab world right now is, excuse my French, a shitshow. Massively dysfunctional. Dictatorships and genocides at every turn.

01:02:50 Speaker_05
Yemen just had a war in which a quarter million people starved to death, literally, including 85,000 children. And it wasn't 100 years ago, it was in 2018. And none of those college students gave a shit. So no, I submit to you that I am not racist.

01:03:08 Speaker_05
In fact, to ignore that and totemize one specific conflict, because it tells you a story about your own morality in the West, and ignore all the vastness of human suffering, to come out in defense of Assad while worrying about Gaza.

01:03:24 Speaker_05
If the worst case scenario in Gaza, that every enemy of Israel is right about Israel's absolute mendacity and evil, is still a tenth of what Assad actually did, And Assad is okay?

01:03:37 Speaker_05
No, I submit to you that the Western moral left-wing discourse is utterly and totally compromised and that it cannot actually challenge us because it's actually about something else. And we are figures in this narrative.

01:03:56 Speaker_03
is it about, if it's about something else?

01:03:58 Speaker_03
I mean, you point this out, the 506,000 people in Syria that have been slaughtered since the beginning of the Syrian civil war, people forgetting about, not even knowing anything about Yemen, until the Houthis started raining missiles on Israel, and it became a bit more of a news story.

01:04:14 Speaker_03
But why is it Israel, then? I mean, I used to have this question, because I lived in Sweden. And I said, you know, this is a country of nine, 10 million people in about 40% of the pieces that I see in the newspaper. But you guys are obsessed with this.

01:04:27 Speaker_03
And you're very, very far away. It's very cold here. And this is prior to, you know, a huge influx of Muslim immigration. That could explain some of it. But it goes back.

01:04:38 Speaker_03
It goes back to the anti-colonial struggle, this kind of lefty stuff of the 1960s and 70s. But it's gone from Marx to Saeed Khatoub. And no one seemed to notice. But is that... Why Israel? Why the focus, that monomaniacal focus on this one country?

01:04:55 Speaker_05
I'm getting worked up here. That's why I'm keeping you. These are the fundamental questions. The answer is surprisingly simple. And I think we don't understand.

01:05:10 Speaker_05
I think the West doesn't really understand antisemitism, and mainly because it produced a lot of monuments to antisemitism, Holocaust memorials, things like that, that did their very best to avoid the lessons of the Holocaust and of antisemitism.

01:05:25 Speaker_05
Antisemitism is not hatred of the Jews. And this is really important for non-Jews to understand. The basic Jewish understanding, there's a lot of different kinds of Jews who understand very differently, very, you know, all these issues.

01:05:39 Speaker_05
But I think that the mainstream basic Jewish understanding of antisemitism is not that it's disliking Jews. People can dislike other people. You can have your prejudices. We think in intuitions based on experiences.

01:05:51 Speaker_05
If you have an Irish landlord and he treats you badly, you might have a little bit of a chip on your shoulder over the Irish and you might call the Irish drunk. That is not, that is a kind of prejudice that everybody has.

01:06:02 Speaker_05
It's a banal prejudice against other groups, against others, generally in different people. If somebody says the Jews are greedy, that's not anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is something very special and very unique.

01:06:12 Speaker_05
It is the idea, and it has a specific starting place in time, that the Jews stand in the way of the redemption of the world. It begins in early Christianity. Christianity has gone a huge path, you know, to correcting a lot of this.

01:06:27 Speaker_05
Catholicism, Protestant groups, Orthodoxy, Vatican II was a big part of that.

01:06:32 Speaker_05
But in early, early Christianity, there's a huge theological problem, which is that the Jews don't accept, don't accept the very Messiah who says in the Gospels that he has come to fulfill their own messianic arc.

01:06:47 Speaker_05
And that's a lacuna at the heart of the idea of Jesus, of the Christ. And folks, you don't have to look hard. I mean, this is St. Augustine, all the beautiful things he says about love.

01:07:01 Speaker_05
except for the Jews who shall remain, he writes, oppressed for all time as a message to my people, my people meaning Christians. The Jews must remain oppressed until they have accepted Christ.

01:07:13 Speaker_05
And this is an idea deep within Christianity that the Jews in their refusal to accept Christ, early Christianity, their refusal to accept Christ means that the redemption of the world is delayed.

01:07:26 Speaker_05
And this is what Crusaders talked about as they murdered Jews down the Rhine River on their way to the Holy Land. Part of conquering the Holy Land. They probably ended up killing more Jews than Muslims in the Crusades.

01:07:40 Speaker_05
And they talked about it as you didn't, you rejected Christ. And that holds up the redemption of the world. In Islam, there's early, Muhammad's early life and then Muhammad's later life. In the very beginning,

01:07:53 Speaker_05
He has great hopes for the Jews around him and he hopes they'll convert and he institutes rituals that are similar to Judaism, a fast and other things and they don't.

01:08:04 Speaker_05
And then he turns on the Jews viciously and this is all contained in the Quranic text. this flipping on the Jews. And there's a sense, and there's a whole doctrine which is dogmatic Islam. It is the belief of Muslims.

01:08:16 Speaker_05
And folks, not all Muslims, Islam is probably more diverse than Christianity, okay? It's big, it's complicated, there's a thousand versions of it, but it is dogma certainly in the Sunni Arab world in which I am embedded, in which I live.

01:08:29 Speaker_05
And that dogma, which comes from the very earliest years of Islam, is that the Jews received the true revelation from God, but then because they are a people who couldn't handle it, or didn't want to, or needed to warp it to their own interests, lied about that revelation, so God had to give it again in the form of the Koran.

01:08:47 Speaker_05
And so the Jews are the great liars who prevented and by not converting to Islam call into question all of these religions that take the Jewish idea of revelation and then are upset that the Jews don't adopt it and then create this sort of supersessionist idea.

01:09:02 Speaker_05
That's the heart and root of it, and you see it exactly in Marxism.

01:09:06 Speaker_05
When the Marxists come along, the Soviets especially, they are total humanitarians and individualists, and they're just breaking down all the barriers of class and property in order to create the great proletarian dictatorship, which will then be followed up by the perfect equality.

01:09:25 Speaker_05
And yet they still, the Soviets, made sure Jews knew they were Jews and knew their place. And it was literally in their passport that they are Jews. And this was Hitler's problem with the Jews.

01:09:36 Speaker_05
The Jews call into question, first of all, he thought of them as this great, right, where the communists thought the Jews were a capitalist conspiracy holding the proletariat.

01:09:43 Speaker_05
Hitler thought of them as a communist and capitalist conspiracy because they're all secretly the same thing, keeping the folk, right, oppressed. The Jews are the thing standing in the way of the redemption of the world.

01:09:55 Speaker_05
And when you understand antisemitism as that idea, which was born once, but adopted over time because it was so useful by others, that one moment invented once and regurgitated and repeated again and again whenever it was useful, and then you go to the college campus and you hear a fervent, screaming student explain to you intersectionalism.

01:10:19 Speaker_05
and explain to you that everything is Palestine, and create memes and shirts in which it's literally like a Seder plate. It's six little circles around a big circle.

01:10:31 Speaker_05
Well, the middle circle is Palestine, and then one of the little circles is police violence in Missouri. And another little circle is climate justice. And another little circle is capitalism.

01:10:44 Speaker_05
Anything I think is a problem, all of it ultimately intersects, all of it is ultimately one problem. It's all the same systems of oppression everywhere. The distinctions between different places and histories and contexts is artificial and silly.

01:10:59 Speaker_05
Ultimately, there's only one great struggle, and the heart of that struggle, the place where it is distilled in its most perfect form, is the struggle against Zionism. You know what that is?

01:11:10 Speaker_05
That is the Jews once again being the thing holding back the redemption of the world. That's what antisemitism is. This is perfect, pure, unadulterated antisemitism. The difference between prejudice

01:11:25 Speaker_05
And antisemitism, the idea that the Jews are holding back the redemption of the world, is that antisemitism feels righteous to the people screaming it in the streets. Why the Jews?

01:11:36 Speaker_05
Because they were the thing that was most useful to certain parts of early Christianity. And so they're the first archetype of this, in this secret order of being, thing standing in the way of redemption.

01:11:49 Speaker_05
And since then, the Jews have always been the most useful. the most convenient. It's already there. It's a thousand years there. Why invent when you can borrow and have that sense of old truth to it?

01:12:04 Speaker_05
And so in Sweden and in Paris and in New York and in Ottawa, Israel is this vast, desperately important thing that we all have to talk about.

01:12:19 Speaker_05
And a lot of that is also just absorbing that kind of discourse from the Arab world and the Muslim world, where Israel represents two, certainly all these Salafist and Jihadist groups and many, many beyond them, because the Jews are the weakest faction, the weakest element that ever pushed Islam back.

01:12:38 Speaker_05
They are the testing ground for Islam's return and redemption. Israel stands in the way of Islam returning into history as a great conquering power again, as the old thing that it once was, on which the redemption of the world depends.

01:12:50 Speaker_05
And so Israel must be destroyed if only to test Islam's return and our faith, part of the reason that Iran wants to destroy Israel. Which is a curious thing if you think about it.

01:13:00 Speaker_05
Iran has no reason to destroy Israel in any objective sense that anyone else can understand. But Iran wants to show the Sunni world that the Shia can do what the Sunni failed.

01:13:11 Speaker_05
Because the Shia have the piety and the closest to God, the divine grace, the faith, to accomplish the restoration of Islam to its rightful place in history. And the testing ground for that is the destruction of the Jews.

01:13:25 Speaker_05
And so at each place you go, the Western academia, because of these ideologies of the global South and these systems of oppression, are very open to these discourses coming in from the global South and uncritical of them because you're not allowed to be critical of the oppressed.

01:13:44 Speaker_05
And so the Jews, the Jews are, turned into this infrastructure for talking about grand moral narratives of redemption that validate me and it's back and it's back in its perfect form and it feels as righteous as it always felt.

01:14:05 Speaker_05
Haviv Retogur, thanks for joining us.

01:14:08 Speaker_03
Thank you. Thanks to Javid for joining me today, and thanks to all of you for listening. If you liked this conversation, share it with your friends and family, and use it to have a conversation of your own.

01:14:23 Speaker_03
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