Why Israel Struck Iran First

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Speaker 6 This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.

Speaker 3 Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

Speaker 3 In much of the world, Israel's longtime Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been known above all for his opposition to a Palestinian state.

Speaker 3 And that's an opposition, of course, that's deepened since October 7th. And yet, if you really drill down, Netanyahu's true obsession is not so much Palestine.

Speaker 3 His true obsession for years has been the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Speaker 3 The Ayatollahs who have ruled Iran since 1979 have promised to destroy the Jewish state.

Speaker 3 The country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and his theocratic regime and his security chiefs all insist that Israel is an alien presence, that the Holocaust is a hoax, that Israel is the junior Satan and America the senior Satan.

Speaker 3 Iran has armed and funded proxies to fight Israel, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis in Yemen, and militia groups in Iraq and elsewhere.

Speaker 3 And in the meantime, Iran, we believe, has sought to develop atomic weapons. For years, Netanyahu has called on the world to take seriously Iran's threat to destroy Israel.

Speaker 3 And Iran seemed to maintain a position of strength, even as its economy struggled and internal protests grew.

Speaker 3 But after October 7th and the killing rampage by Hamas, the power balance in the region seemed to shift. In Gaza, Israel has devastated Hamas as well as tens of thousands of civilians.

Speaker 3 In Lebanon, Israel has dismantled Iran's proxy Hezbollah as a fighting force. In Syria, the Assad regime collapsed, leaving Iran without a powerful ally.

Speaker 3 Suddenly, Iran was weak, and sensing that weakness, Israel bombed much of Iran's air defenses, leaving it vulnerable as never before.

Speaker 3 So now the war has begun in earnest. Where it will go and how the Middle East will change is an open question.

Speaker 3 Here in the U.S., involvement in another Middle East conflict has been hotly debated, not least among Donald Trump's own supporters, as we saw last week.

Speaker 3 But in Israel, even critics of Benjamin Netanyahu are supportive of the war. So to understand the case better, I called up Yossi Klein Halevi.

Speaker 3 Halevi is a journalist and the author of a number of books about Israel and its neighbors.

Speaker 3 He's also a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, and I listen regularly to his podcast, for heaven's sake. I spoke with Yossi Klein Halevi last week from his home in Jerusalem.

Speaker 3 At the same time, Donald Trump was still threatening to join the Israeli military effort, and what might come next remained an open question.

Speaker 1 For

Speaker 3 many years, Yossi, you've been, to the best of my knowledge, an Israeli centrist. You've voted on the left, you voted in the center, you voted more to the right, depending on the candidate.

Speaker 3 You certainly seem to loathe Benjamin Netanyahu, his lack of trustworthiness.

Speaker 3 Your words. But if you've been consistent about one thing, if there's one big thing that you share with Netanyahu, it's your insistence that Iran

Speaker 3 is not only a theocratic regime that's been clear about its violent intentions toward Israel, it's that Iran cannot possess a nuclear weapon.

Speaker 1 Tell us why.

Speaker 1 The big question about Iran was always how

Speaker 1 significant is its apocalyptic theology?

Speaker 1 For me, the tipping point is the obsession of the Iranian regime with Israel. Now, this is a country that doesn't share a border with Israel.
And so why the obsession with Israel?

Speaker 1 And that obsession

Speaker 1 is relentless. It's constantly invoking the destruction of Israel as not just a political goal, but a religious imperative.

Speaker 1 And in 2015, the Ayatollah Khameni predicted, prophesied, that Israel would be destroyed in 2040.

Speaker 1 And there is a clock, a doomsday clock, that's mounted in a central square in Tehran that's marking time to the destruction of Israel.

Speaker 3 But is that in the darkest sense

Speaker 3 prophecy and theocratic mysts, or is it a matter of state policy?

Speaker 1 Okay, so that's really the relevant question. And I don't know the answer to that.
But what my

Speaker 1 Jewish intuition tells me, my deepest

Speaker 1 reading of Jewish history, is that when the Jewish people is turned into

Speaker 1 an obsession,

Speaker 1 then you need to take that seriously. Now,

Speaker 1 all these years,

Speaker 1 I relied on the Holocaust and the experience of

Speaker 1 the 1930s even more than the 40s, when the warning signs were all there. And

Speaker 1 even most Jews didn't read those signs clearly.

Speaker 1 But since October 7th, since the Hamas massacre of October 7th, my frame of reference has really shifted from the Holocaust to where it really belongs, which is the Middle East.

Speaker 1 And I've noticed that same psychological shift within Israeli discourse. You don't hear about the Holocaust so much anymore in relation to Iran as much as October 7th.

Speaker 1 And what we learned on October 7th is that we were living in a collective delusion, which was that Israel could somehow maintain relatively normal life

Speaker 1 and coexist with entities on most of our borders that were committed to our destruction and that repeatedly promised us that one day they would actually try to destroy us.

Speaker 1 And what happened on October 7th was a kind of pre-enactment in miniature of the destruction of Israel.

Speaker 3 But let me interrupt interrupt here, and by no means, by no means am I minimizing what happened on October 7th, by

Speaker 3 no question.

Speaker 3 But the circumstances in the 30s are radically different from the circumstances in 2023, 24, 25, in that Jews were powerless in Europe, which is one could say the same throughout Jewish history until 1948, until the establishment of the State of Israel.

Speaker 3 My understanding of what at the core of

Speaker 3 Zionism is, is a homeland for the Jewish people so as never to be vulnerable to that kind of destruction. Again, it has to do with autonomy.
It has to do with power.

Speaker 3 And the Israeli state is

Speaker 3 extraordinarily powerful despite the horrific

Speaker 3 events of October 7th, which was a lapse doesn't even begin to describe it, but Israel is very powerful in the region and beyond.

Speaker 1 You're making really

Speaker 1 a crucial argument.

Speaker 1 When I invoked the 30s before, I wasn't speaking so much about the threat as

Speaker 1 the sense that

Speaker 1 you could be confronted with a threat, even an existential threat, and not see the threat clearly.

Speaker 1 And that was the deep takeaway that my generation growing up after the Holocaust

Speaker 1 read from the experience.

Speaker 1 And I agree with you that the comparison of Israel's situation with Jews in the 30s is simply ludicrous, actually.

Speaker 1 And it demeans the extraordinary achievement of the Jewish people after the Holocaust in reclaiming power.

Speaker 1 And we need to own that power.

Speaker 1 But part of owning that power means that you have a responsibility to use it when you do perceive an existential threat.

Speaker 1 And so again, coming back to the question, is a nuclear Iran an existential threat to Israel? And my answer is, I don't know.

Speaker 1 But precisely because I don't know means that I have a responsibility to the Jewish people, to Jewish history, to my family.

Speaker 3 But declaring preemptive war in a state of, I don't know, is especially especially when it's led by somebody as distrusted as Benjamin Netanyahu, to say we can discuss his American partner in this in a moment,

Speaker 3 is deeply, deeply problematic.

Speaker 1 So let's leave aside Netanyahu just for a moment, and I will happily come back to what has been one of

Speaker 1 my own personal obsessions in the last few years.

Speaker 1 The very fact that you don't know for certain that a nuclear Iran would not be an existential threat for Israel, just as I don't know for certain that it would be.

Speaker 1 That

Speaker 1 is, for me, a moral imperative to protect the Jewish people and to ensure that this regime does not get the means to fulfill its fantasies, its theological fantasies.

Speaker 3 You see, as we talk, and it's Wednesday morning New York time, Wednesday afternoon your time in Jerusalem, it appears the U.S. will, in effect, join Israel in war against Iran.

Speaker 3 Now, knowing what we know about the history of foreign invasions in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in so many countries, and over so many years,

Speaker 3 don't you fear being dragged into a morass of terrible, unintended consequences like we saw in Iraq?

Speaker 1 This situation looks very different from Jerusalem than it does from New York. And I say that not to dismiss

Speaker 1 the perspective from New York, but to put it in the context of

Speaker 1 from where I'm sitting. And

Speaker 1 I well understand

Speaker 1 the perspective that you've just laid out. You have a series of failed wars, failed foreign interventions, disastrous interventions.

Speaker 1 The Israeli perspective is not Vietnam,

Speaker 1 it's not the American war in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's our own experience.
And so I remember, for example, in the second Intifada of the early 2000s,

Speaker 1 the years of Palestinian suicide bombings, we were told repeatedly that there is no military solution. to terrorism.
There's only a diplomatic solution. Now, the diplomatic solution had just failed.

Speaker 1 The Oslo peace process had collapsed. And we were faced with suicide bombing, sometimes on a daily basis.

Speaker 1 And what we proved, first of all, to ourselves, is that there actually is, sometimes there really is a military solution to terrorism and

Speaker 1 to other problems.

Speaker 1 And on October 8th, we were warned by many of our friends:

Speaker 1 don't go to war. There's no exit strategy.
Now, we can unpack Gaza.

Speaker 1 But certainly, the extraordinary achievements of Israel against Hezbollah, we've neutralized a threat that was hovering over this country for 30 years.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 we've neutralized Iran's air capabilities. They're sending missiles.
Last night they sent two missiles at Israel. Now, I'm not dismissing

Speaker 1 the Iranian capability for continued devastation, but we have drastically minimized it.

Speaker 1 If Israel had listened to our well-intentioned critics on October 8th, we would still be surrounded by the Iranian vies.

Speaker 3 I think the well-intentioned well-intentioned critics is a good phrase here because there's a lot of criticism. Joe Biden, who would certainly have counted himself as a friend,

Speaker 3 was basically incredibly supportive, but at the same time was counseling Israel from the start not to act out of rage, because he was recalling the American experience that we just described.

Speaker 3 Obama went to great lengths to put together a

Speaker 3 nuclear agreement with Iran that Netanyahu found too weak, too limited, and all the rest, but it held. It held.
Diplomacy worked with all its limitations. It seemed to work.

Speaker 3 And Donald Trump

Speaker 3 got rid of that treaty, walked away from it.

Speaker 1 Okay, so that's the conventional wisdom

Speaker 1 on the left.

Speaker 1 What you're leaving out

Speaker 1 is

Speaker 1 what was called the sunset clauses.

Speaker 1 And according to the sunset clauses of the JCPOA, the Iran agreement,

Speaker 1 which, by the way,

Speaker 1 would be kicking in just about now

Speaker 1 when the agreement was going to lapse, there would be no prohibition, no limit on Iran's advanced centrifuges.

Speaker 1 The limitation was placed on enrichment. Enrichment was going to be confined to 3% to 4%.

Speaker 1 But the problem was never only or even primarily enrichment. It was always the centrifuges.

Speaker 1 And if you have no limits on your ability to produce advanced centrifuges, then you could move

Speaker 1 enrichment, the 3% to 4% enrichment that Iran was allowed to maintain. You could within a few weeks move that to weapons-grade uranium.

Speaker 3 And I know that's the conventional argument on the, call it whatever you want.

Speaker 1 And Obama himself, Obama himself conceded the point in an interview with Jeff Goldberg

Speaker 1 in 2015.

Speaker 2 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: He did.

Speaker 3 But in other words,

Speaker 3 wouldn't you prefer

Speaker 3 the problematics of continued diplomacy and attempt to then work on yet another treaty and keep the peace

Speaker 3 and keep the peace rather than to do what Donald Trump did, which was to walk away from it, allowing Iran to act as willy-nilly and bring us to the state of even greater danger and peril.

Speaker 1 So here's what the JCPOA, the Iran agreement, would have done.

Speaker 1 It not only would have positioned Iran to within a few weeks of a nuclear bomb, but it at the same time would have led to a massive infusion of resources, of funding,

Speaker 1 that would have

Speaker 1 solidified Iran's regional hegemony, its hegemony in the Arab world.

Speaker 3 Which you presume would have been poured into the nuclear program rather than into the economy.

Speaker 1 Yes, into the nuclear program and into its terror proxies around the region. And so I would have gotten the worst of both worlds.

Speaker 1 And if you're saying, could I live with an agreement that

Speaker 1 allows Iran to be within a few weeks of a nuclear bomb, my answer is unequivocally no. Now, what Trump did,

Speaker 1 and this is a very uncomfortable position for me to be in, David, because

Speaker 1 I regard what Trump is doing to

Speaker 1 American democracy, its ethos and institutions, with the same dread

Speaker 1 with which

Speaker 1 I've related to Netanyahu's assault on Israeli democracy. We agree on that.

Speaker 1 But on this issue, on this issue, Trump was right. He was right to walk away.

Speaker 1 Iran's violations of its nuclear treaty with the international community

Speaker 1 actually began in earnest when Biden came into office.

Speaker 1 Iran was afraid of Trump.

Speaker 1 They were afraid of Trump being no less unpredictable, erratic, erratic,

Speaker 1 perhaps mad as they were.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 for that reason, even after Trump canceled the JCPOA, the Iranians were very cautious.

Speaker 1 And when Trump assassinated Suleimani, the Iranian commander of the armed forces, that only reinforced their sense of hesitation.

Speaker 1 When Biden came in, they understood that violations would actually play into their hands by reinforcing the argument that you're making, which is, you see, we need a deal because without a deal, they're going to simply cross the nuclear threshold.

Speaker 1 But that's not at all the way I read what happened.

Speaker 3 Remember, this all comes in the midst of negotiations. The United States has been talking with Iran.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 Trump seemed rather pleased that the United States and Iran were in effect in the same room.

Speaker 3 And in the midst of those negotiations, in the midst of those negotiations, Netanyahu, who bursts onto the scene,

Speaker 3 basically telling, not looking for permission, telling the United States that it's going to begin attacking Iran.

Speaker 3 And at first, Trump is, from all we know, from the journalism that we've gotten from inside,

Speaker 3 was very angry about this.

Speaker 3 But when it went well, as these things tend to do in their first days, because the Israeli military and intelligence is quite remarkable, when things started going very well, Trump, well, he liked that and he wanted to be on the side of the winner.

Speaker 3 He likes being on the side of winners, Yossi, I think you've noticed.

Speaker 1 Yeah, of course. But my sense

Speaker 1 of

Speaker 1 the progression of events here is a little bit different. Go ahead.

Speaker 1 By the time we attacked Iran, Trump had given us the go-ahead. I don't believe we would have done it without his agreement.
And as you know, there are

Speaker 1 persistent reports that Trump was involved in the deception in lulling the Iranians into thinking that an attack wasn't imminent. Now, we don't know that for a fact, though.
Trump does not.

Speaker 3 Does that sound right to you, knowing what you know about Trump's discipline or indiscipline?

Speaker 1 Well, look, yeah,

Speaker 1 Trump himself said that he had given the Iranians 60 days and Israel attacked on the 61st day.

Speaker 3 I'm speaking with journalist Yossi Klein Halevi from Jerusalem. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.
We'll be back in a moment.

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Speaker 3 This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
We're discussing the war between Israel and Iran with the author Yossi Klein Halevi.

Speaker 3 Halevi was born in Brooklyn and he emigrated to Israel as a young man. He's written a memoir about his involvement as a teenager in extremism in the group known as the Jewish Defense League.

Speaker 3 But Halevi had a kind of conversion experience and he moved to the left.

Speaker 3 He embraced a two-state solution and he came to criticize the Netanyahu government as well as the settler movement which now dominates so much of Israeli politics these days.

Speaker 3 Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. We'll continue our conversation now.

Speaker 3 You distrust Netanyahu Yossi.

Speaker 3 In so many ways.

Speaker 1 Distrust isn't the word.

Speaker 1 I get that. I get that.

Speaker 3 But why when he tells you this, that Iran is inches away from becoming a nuclear power, you believe that?

Speaker 1 Isn't that dangerously selective, I guess I'd put it that way?

Speaker 1 Just to emphasize the level of distrust that I feel for this man,

Speaker 1 I have no doubt that he is capable of starting a war for his own political needs.

Speaker 3 Aaron Powell, well, let's just pause on that.

Speaker 3 Let's pause on that.

Speaker 1 Yes,

Speaker 3 that's extraordinary. I would argue that that's been part of the reason for the length of the operation, much less the brutality of the operation

Speaker 3 in Gaza, that it is linked to his politics. Now, it's not the only reason by any stretch, but.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 the problem with attributing both the longevity of the Gaza war and the Iran strike to Netanyahu's political needs is that it fails to understand in a very basic way how Israel works.

Speaker 1 Now, in 2012, Netanyahu and his then defense minister, Eyud Barak,

Speaker 1 decided to launch a preemptive strike against Iran.

Speaker 1 The entire security establishment opposed it,

Speaker 1 and the strike was cancelled.

Speaker 1 Now,

Speaker 1 if the security establishment, which has been highly skeptical of a strike against Iran in the past, if the security establishment or significant elements in the security establishment believed that Netanyahu was

Speaker 1 initiating an... a war that would not be in Israel's national interest, but for his own political needs, we would know that and it would have been stopped.
You have the Mossad.

Speaker 1 You have the commander-in-chief of the army.

Speaker 1 These are very significant players. Now,

Speaker 1 they don't generally, they don't come out against the political echelon publicly, but they don't need to.

Speaker 3 Are you comfortable with the calls for not only destroying nuclear facilities and

Speaker 3 ballistic missile facilities? Are you comfortable

Speaker 3 with the rhetoric of of both assassinating

Speaker 3 the

Speaker 3 political leadership of Iran and regime change?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think that we need less rhetoric and just simply allow events to take their course. I think that this could play out in one of two ways.
It could strengthen support for the regime.

Speaker 1 It could rally people around

Speaker 1 the embattled regime, which will present itself as the protector of the nation.

Speaker 3 And possibly accelerate unimpeded a race for a nuclear weapon.

Speaker 1 Yes, yes, it could.

Speaker 1 Or it could have the opposite effect. And again, it's also one of those variables that we don't know.

Speaker 3 But we're rolling the dice here, no?

Speaker 1 We're rolling the dice. But

Speaker 1 David, the question

Speaker 1 before the international community from the beginning of this crisis, going back 20 years, was always, what is the worst scenario for you? For you, meaning the international community.

Speaker 1 Is it war with Iran to prevent a nuclear bomb, or is it living with a nuclear regime?

Speaker 1 And what we in Israel have long feared, and this was certainly our reading of Obama, is that when it would come down to it, the decision would be made to live with a nuclear Iran. And so Obama used...

Speaker 3 I don't agree with that.

Speaker 3 You think that Obama would have just lived with a nuclear iron?

Speaker 1 Oh, absolutely. When Obama said that all options were on the table.

Speaker 3 You didn't believe that.

Speaker 1 No one in the Middle East believed it. Not the Iranians, not the Israelis, not the Saudis.
No one believed it because there was no credible military option. There was no gun on the table.

Speaker 1 Ehud Barak once said

Speaker 1 that the way to negotiate with the with the Iranians is you walk into the room, and this is Ehud Barak, right? Not Netanyahu.

Speaker 1 You walk into the room, you close the door behind you, and you tell the Iranians, here's the deal you're going to sign. And if you don't sign it, we're not going to destroy your nuclear facilities.

Speaker 1 We're going to destroy your regime. Now,

Speaker 1 what Israel did by launching its strike against Iran is give Trump a gun on the table.

Speaker 1 My own feeling was that the way Trump should have played this from the beginning was tell Israel, take out one nuclear facility. But you can't.
Just one. You can.
Just one, and then

Speaker 1 I'll sit and negotiate with the Iranians. That's how you negotiate with that regime.

Speaker 3 And you can imagine, and we discussed this earlier in our conversation, you can imagine how that lands on American ears.

Speaker 1 We

Speaker 3 didn't pay sufficient attention to understate things radically to what the consequences of a fall in Saddam Hussein. No, you didn't have to have any illusions about Saddam Hussein.

Speaker 3 You didn't have to have any illusions about the danger he presented to his own people. In fact, he had enacted it.
I mean, he had gassed his own people to ask the Kurds.

Speaker 3 But what we didn't sufficiently understand or recognize that once that regime came down, the army was banned and the Americans were there, that that would be the greatest gift to Iran imaginable and that the death and destruction to come would be incalculable to say nothing about the status of the United States and the international scene for decades to come.

Speaker 3 What about the consequences of regime change in Iran? Are you so confident that things will go

Speaker 3 smoothly, whether in the interests of the Iranian people or no, of course not.

Speaker 1 Of course not. And the precedent that you cite is a cautionary tale and it's a crucial part of this conversation.
And I don't dismiss it. One point here, which is the crucial difference between

Speaker 1 Iran and Iraq

Speaker 1 or Afghanistan, maybe even more so,

Speaker 1 is that we know that the Iranian people, the majority of the Iranian people, do want regime change. Now, they don't necessarily want regime change this way.

Speaker 1 And that's where I agree

Speaker 1 with the hesitation here

Speaker 1 but these are not necessarily

Speaker 1 identical or even comparable situations and the other difference is that i

Speaker 1 it was always questionable about

Speaker 1 how much of a threat iraq was to the region there's very little debate about the threat that that iran poses to to the region and

Speaker 1 primarily to the arab world to the Arab world.

Speaker 1 Look what it did, right? And look what it did to Lebanon,

Speaker 1 to Syria, to Yemen. What Iran touched, it destroyed.
And so

Speaker 1 we're really,

Speaker 1 you know, history, precedent is important up to a point.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 history doesn't exactly repeat. Now, you can't ignore precedent, but you also can't be imprisoned by it.

Speaker 1 And so, when we're facing this kind of threat, this kind of regime,

Speaker 1 how useful is it to invoke those precedents? Well, I am saying that as a question,

Speaker 1 David, it's a question.

Speaker 3 I get that, Yossi, but

Speaker 3 I've given you some examples of precedents. What would be the precedent in history that you would compare a good outcome to with what you want to see happen in Iran?

Speaker 1 World War II.

Speaker 3 So we're back to the Nazis.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 you can use the Japanese if you prefer. Use Mussolini's Italy.
I mean, whatever, you know, it doesn't have to be Hitler. There are precedents that point in a different direction.

Speaker 3 I can't help thinking that

Speaker 3 the people who are in charge of all this matters.

Speaker 1 This is not Franklin Roosevelt.

Speaker 3 This is not Winston Churchill.

Speaker 1 This is not the dream team. No.

Speaker 3 The dream team. No.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 And so when I look at this, at my government, I'll leave your government aside. You deal with your government.
Thank you.

Speaker 1 Thank you.

Speaker 1 When I look at my government, this is my nightmare government.

Speaker 1 This is a government that has elements within it that are not that different from the Iranian regime.

Speaker 1 And this is a government that if it wins the next election, I will be in existential despair because this government is the greatest threat to the Israeli success story, internal threat to the Israeli success story since the founding of the state.

Speaker 1 This government could lead to massive emigration of the liberal elite, which is the backbone of what we call startup nation, Israel's high-tech success story.

Speaker 1 So I look at this government as a different kind of existential threat. And so do a majority of Israelis.

Speaker 1 And still,

Speaker 1 this war has virtually wall-to-wall support from Jewish Israel.

Speaker 3 I fear the euphoria.

Speaker 3 I fear euphoria always.

Speaker 1 I do too. Very wary of it.
I do too. And if you look at Netanyahu in the last few days, he's got his stride back.
And that worries me.

Speaker 3 That's the last thing you want.

Speaker 1 And I think he worries me. Well, yes.

Speaker 3 And euphoria also papers over some really serious

Speaker 3 political and moral questions that Israel is going to have to face to itself and in the world. And you don't have to be an enemy of Israel to say that.
You don't say that.

Speaker 1 You're right. You're right.
In fact, it's part of being a friend of Israel to say that.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 I have to make a distinction between Netanyahu's strutting and the Israeli public and the security establishment. I don't hear euphoria

Speaker 1 among Israelis who are under nightly bombardment. We are not in a euphoric mood.
There's this tremendous feeling of existential relief.

Speaker 1 But relief is not euphoria. And within the security establishment, there are constant cautionary voices.
We have a long struggle ahead of us.

Speaker 1 This is not necessarily going to go the way that it did the first few days. Yes, Netanyahu is a he's the prime minister, but he's not the only factor in the decision-making process.

Speaker 1 And again, I can't emphasize that more strongly.

Speaker 3 Well, let me ask maybe a very un-Jewish question. Let's say everything

Speaker 3 goes optimally, right?

Speaker 3 I don't even know what that would mean.

Speaker 1 That really is an un-Jewish question. Exactly.

Speaker 3 Let's say that that does happen.

Speaker 3 Again, I don't know what picture that would take, but it would be far less death and destruction than

Speaker 3 one can easily imagine, and a far less prolonged

Speaker 3 episode.

Speaker 3 Where does that leave the future of Israel? The future of Israel, in which politically,

Speaker 3 is so

Speaker 3 exhausted internally,

Speaker 3 so

Speaker 3 divided politically

Speaker 3 is the

Speaker 3 scene of so much moral questioning

Speaker 3 and criticism and isolation from the rest of the world.

Speaker 3 It's very hard to imagine being a Palestinian

Speaker 3 and viewing all this,

Speaker 3 this high drama, this high geostrategic drama. Well, meanwhile, every day I pick up the paper and another 50 Palestinians have died, or there's shooting at aid stations.

Speaker 3 This is just ⁇ this keeps going on and on and on

Speaker 3 with no end in sight. Where does this leave the country that you moved to from deepest Brooklyn many, many years ago and made your

Speaker 3 life there and cause there, and

Speaker 3 you have enormous passion and love for. Where does this leave your country?

Speaker 1 Well, so before I get to the

Speaker 1 meta question,

Speaker 1 my

Speaker 1 most severe critique of how Netanyahu has conducted the war with Iran is that he didn't end the war in Gaza first.

Speaker 1 And he should have made the deal to bring the hostages home, stop the fighting. The war in Gaza has long since become

Speaker 1 an enormous strategic and moral liability for Israel. And

Speaker 1 especially given the fact that Gaza is, in the end, a sideshow to the Israeli-Iranian war, which is the real war that began on October 7th. It was not the Gaza-Israeli war.

Speaker 1 And Netanyahu allowed it or allowed the perception abroad to be that this is primarily the Israeli

Speaker 1 Hamas war. So

Speaker 1 that's really just in terms of uh of what of what

Speaker 1 he should have done differently and uh and and it's a measure of his uh

Speaker 1 of his profound flaws as a strategist never mind a uh a moral leader in terms of uh of my own hopes my own vision for israel

Speaker 1 i believe that our long-term survival, our moral credibility, certainly,

Speaker 1 our place in the international community depends on resolving the Palestinian tragedy.

Speaker 1 I

Speaker 1 by no means place all or even most of the onus for that tragedy on Israel.

Speaker 1 Certainly the Palestinian leadership has had a major share

Speaker 1 in bringing us to this moment, but we have a major share in that tragedy as well. And

Speaker 1 it's very hard for Israelis to own up to that.

Speaker 1 My hope strategically of what can come out of this war is that

Speaker 1 when the Iranian regime falls, and I believe that it will fall in the same way that the Soviet Union fell, and you were there, you saw it happen.

Speaker 1 And I was there too.

Speaker 1 I reported from Eastern Europe in 1989.

Speaker 1 I was following the falling dominoes from Poland through East Germany and

Speaker 1 what was then Czechoslovakia.

Speaker 1 And so that's also a precedent, by the way, David. You know, that

Speaker 1 we've seen dictatorships fall,

Speaker 1 totalitarian regimes.

Speaker 1 What I hope will happen is that this regime will fall

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 there will then be an expansion of the Abraham Accords, the 2020 peace agreement between Israel and

Speaker 1 the Gulf states and Morocco.

Speaker 1 And that would include the Saudis and that would contain as a crucial component some resolution of

Speaker 1 the Palestinian tragedy.

Speaker 3 If I can interrupt, Yossi, I'm sorry, but

Speaker 1 if that happens,

Speaker 3 Netanyahu's reputation will soar, his dominance of Israeli politics will soar.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 those same components around him, and I don't want to limit it just to Ben-Gavir and Smotrich, which often happens, but a lot of people want to now see annexation of the West Bank,

Speaker 3 the removal of Palestinians from Gaza, the reassertion of settlements even in Gaza.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I fear that those people will feel incredibly emboldened.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 Well, if Netanyahu

Speaker 1 destroys

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 Iranian regime and brings peace with the Arab world, he's not going to need Smatuich and Ben Bir.

Speaker 1 And if he makes peace with the Arab world, it will be only on the basis of some resolution of the Palestinian conflict. Now, Netanyahu at this point is no longer capable of making that move.

Speaker 1 I think he's been too corrupted. Netanyahu may be able to partially mitigate his disastrous legacy by defeating Iran, but he will not be the guy.
to bring peace between Israel and the region.

Speaker 1 That will have to wait for another Israeli government.

Speaker 1 Look, my concern right now is that Netanyahu will call elections and win a decisive majority. But on the other hand, if he wins a decisive majority, he won't need the far right anymore.

Speaker 3 It's an open question. Maybe he's grown accustomed to their face.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 that's the question that I have.

Speaker 3 A lot of people want to draw a distinction between Netanyahu circa 2025 and Smocher and Ben-Gavir. And I'm not sure that divide exists as much as people would like to imagine.

Speaker 1 I'm hoping that Netanyahu is still cynical enough that

Speaker 1 he'd be prepared to ditch

Speaker 1 his loyal partners. And I think he is.
Now,

Speaker 1 if he's presented by Trump

Speaker 1 with the possibility of being the Israeli leader

Speaker 1 who defeats the Iranian regime, destroys its nuclear capability, and then makes peace with the Arab world,

Speaker 1 he will

Speaker 1 rightly have a shot at

Speaker 1 what he has claimed all along as being one of Israel's greatest leaders. Now,

Speaker 1 even saying that theoretically pains me. It's almost a physical pain for me to say those words, but after everything that he's done to this country.

Speaker 1 But if he really does that, then, you know, as we say in the Middle East, God is great. You know,

Speaker 1 strange are the ways of the Lord. And if he becomes an instrument for regional peace, then I don't think I could ever bring myself to actually vote for him, but I could live with history.

Speaker 3 Yosi, even in the darkest times, it's a pleasure to speak with you. Thank you so much.

Speaker 1 It's great to speak with you, David. Thank you.

Speaker 3 I spoke last week with Yossi Klein Halevi. His podcast is called For Heaven's Sake, and it's co-hosted with Daniil Hartman.

Speaker 3 Halevi's books include memoirs of a Jewish extremist and letters to my Palestinian neighbor. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today.
Thanks so much for listening. See you next time.

Speaker 6 The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbis of Tune Yards.

Speaker 6 The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Charina Endowment Fund.

Speaker 8 Famous Amos. It's a brand synonymous with chocolate chip cookies.
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Speaker 8 When he passed away last year, I set out to understand how he became one of the most famous black men in America and how his life and our family unraveled.

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