Noam: Hey, I’m Noam Weissman and this is Unpacking Israeli History, the podcast that takes a deep dive into some of the most intense, historically fascinating, and often misunderstood events and stories linked to Israeli history. This episode of Unpacking Israeli History is generously sponsored in memory of Leo Bernstein and also by Andrea and Larry Gill. If you want to sponsor an episode of Unpacking Israeli History or just say hey, be in touch at noam@unpacked.media.
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As you may have noticed, I sound a little bit different right now. The recording isn’t as high quality as we’re used to because I am on the road right now on the way to give a talk to an independent school. And I said I had to get on this pod with Haviv Retig Gur. First of all, thanks for being on the pod with me.
Haviv: Good to be here.
Noam: As of this recording, we’re about 10 days into this war with Iran. We, I could say, because I live in America and you live in Israel. So we are about 10 days into this war with Iran. And honestly, it’s painful, it’s confusing, it’s stressful, I’m sure more for you than for me in America who lives an ocean away from the wars that you’re experiencing in the Middle East or what some people call West Asia.
Things are changing by the hour, sometimes by the minute. Every time you think you understand what’s happening, something new happens and the picture shifts again. So like many of you listening, I’ve been reading everything I can get my hands on, watching every interview, every press conference, every analysis, listening to every podcast. And I’m not a big podcast listener, by the way, I’m not. But I listen to Haviv, I listen to Haviv. Trying to make sense of everything. I’m just trying to understand things.
So we are very much so living in historic times. I want to give you three thoughts, three just general thoughts. Number one, I was scouring my brain to think of a time in American history where the US fought fully together with another country as partners in the war. And it took me all the way back to World War II when the US and the UK fought together. In Iraq in 2003, the US was more like the exec sponsor of the war and the UK fought with the US, but not as partners.
Thought number two in terms of historic times. Israel too has never fought a war like this. Ever. Even in 1956, when Israel fought against Egypt in the Sinai campaign and sneakily was involved with France and the UK, it was much more of an Egypt-Israel war than anything else.
And number three, my third thought contextualizing this in history, this is not a Palestinian-Israeli war. This is not an Arab-Israeli war. I would argue, and I just listened to a pod with you and Micah Goodman, I’m not sure if you would agree with me on this, I would argue it’s not even a Jewish-Muslim war. Muslim Arab countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, who just expelled Hamas, Bahrain, and the UAE are very much on the Americans’ and Israeli side right now. Right now.
This is historic. When I find myself trying to make sense of something historic and complicated, truly unprecedented, and yes, I’m using that word in the Middle East, there’s really no one I would rather talk to than my friend and friend of the podcast, Haviv Retig Gur.
Haviv, it’s been a little logistically complicated trying to get in a virtual room with you, especially considering sirens and alerts telling you you need to get into your bomb shelter with your family. So I do not take it lightly at all that you’ve made time for this. I really appreciate you being here.
Haviv Gur: Noam, thank you. It’s to be here.
Noam: Here’s what I want to try to do with you today, Haviv. I want to do something that I am tempted to call a game, but ‘game’ makes it sound light or whimsical, and none of this is light or whimsical. But I do find that having a framework sharpens a conversation. The game is called, I’m calling it, Pick Your Theory. Over the last 10 days, we’ve heard a lot of different explanations for what this war is about. Who started it, what the goals are, and what it’s supposed to accomplish.
And I’m about to speak at one of the top independent schools in the United States of America, not Jewish school, to teach their fifth graders about the war. I figured before I do that, I want to cheat a little and get some wisdom from you.
So here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to throw a few of those ideas at you. Things I’ve heard from leaders and commentators in Israel and the United States. And as we go through each one, I’m going to ask you to help explain these theories and I want to ask you some questions about them. I want to understand what is serious, what is overly simplistic, what is partially true. And then I also want to know on a scale of one to 10, how true is each theory? How much do you think it helps explain what’s really going on? You ready for the game, Haviv?
Haviv: All right, I’m all set.
Noam: Okay, because you’re running in and out of shelters. Feels like it’s good to play a little game every now and then.
Haviv: It’s important, yes. And I’m a little tired. So my answers might be a tiny bit less quality than they would have been 10 days ago. But a lot of the sirens are in the night and we’ve had people sleeping over. So it’s complicated, but I’m here and I’m present and it’s fascinating and I’m excited to play.
Noam: Okay, here we go. First of all, before we get to theory number one, actually, my historical contextual framing. Do you agree or disagree with what I said?
Haviv: The unprecedented point is absolutely correct. The military analyst and journalist Yaakov Katz pointed out to me that the Israeli army is operating in English at the moment. That has never happened before. The integration is so deep that the IDF has actually moved for this war to Zulu time, to NATO time. This is the single clock that different military forces, when they’re doing something together, have to coordinate on a single clock. And the IDF has never switched from its own war clock, it’s called in Hebrew, Zman Milchama, to the NATO clock. But now it’s working with the Americans so deeply that it is doing it in English and it is doing it on the NATO clock. So that’s just one, you know, little technical logistical tidbit that demonstrates just how much this is a new thing for the Israelis.
And by the way, the Americans are watching the Israelis do things with American hardware, with F-35s, that the Israelis replace the guts and the machinery and some of the capabilities that’s all developed in Israel, the electronic warfare stuff. And the Americans are learning from the Israelis about the American planes.
And some of the things, I don’t want to exaggerate that. There are a few incredible things the Israelis figured out how to do with them with these miracles of engineering that the Americans themselves, only the Americans know how to build. But that integration and that learning from each other and operating together is absolutely unprecedented.
Noam: Yep, okay. I guess the other points you’re not sure you agree with, but that’s for another time.
Haviv: Well, what were the other points? Shoot.
Noam: I don’t know, whatever, let’s move on from them. Okay, I want to play the game with you, Haviv, let’s play the game. I said that this wasn’t a Muslim-Jewish war, that’s what I said.
Haviv: It’s definitely not a Muslim Jewish war. actually have argued that just in a cartoonish single set, it’s a two hour podcast, and that’s the shallow version of the story. But it is a single sentence, okay, version of it. This is a war against a very specific, extremely modern, deeply Marxist vision of Islam.
Khomeini explicitly borrows from the Ali Shariati’s Red Shiism ideology of the 70s. People could just type that into their search engine or favorite AI and learn what that is. And what Shariati did to Shia Islam to produce the ideology of the Islamic Republic of Iran that Khomeini then builds into a political system is exactly liberation theology of Latin America, for Catholicism, which is to recast Jesus as a Marxist social revolutionary, they recast Imam Hussein, the great messianic, not the messianic, he’s the one who died, his son is the messianic figure who will return, to recast Imam Hussein as that Marxist revolutionary.
This version of Islam, this permanent revolution, this tyrannical, static revolution led by corrupt billionaires that demands that all the people be poor while the people in charge rule them in the name of the great global revolution of the oppressed cast in Islamic terms, that’s what we’re at war with. That’s a lot more Maoism than it is Islam. In other words, no Shia from 80 years ago would recognize what this regime thinks as Shia Islam.
And in fact, most Shia don’t like this regime in this world right now. I saw somebody, some angry person on X, think it was someone from the sort of far left of the progressive movement in America, say you just killed the spiritual leader of 300 million people and you don’t think they hate you now? First of all, it’s amazing to me how many Shia don’t hate America or Israel for that. They might criticize Israel on the Gaza war. killing Khamenei is not something they’re upset about because he’s not their pope. He’s Mao Tse Tung in the Shia political terms. And so we’re at war with that. Absolutely not Islam, by no measure a majority view in Islam, but it is the view in charge in the Middle East among the Shia, politically in charge. By the way, through violence and oppression, not politically in charge because they got elected.
Noam: Right, okay, so same page on that. Let’s get to these ideas right now. That was very helpful framing. We’re gonna do probably five or six ideas. We have four to five minutes for each of these. Let’s rock these out. Okay, this is stuff that I hear and I wanna get your reaction. And I wanna remind you of the game. I wanna know if it’s serious, overly simplistic, partially true, and then I want you to, on a scale of one to 10, argue how true each of these theories might be.
All right. Theory number one, idea number one, this war is about stopping Iran’s nuclear program. This feels like an obvious one. We’ve heard Bibi talking about this for almost 30 years. Trump used this in his official remarks announcing the operations in Iran. The argument is that this war is fundamentally about preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. Is this fundamentally a nonproliferation war? How close was Iran actually to a nuclear weapon? Tell me, tell me what you think. Is this about stopping Iran’s senior program?
Haviv: Yes, absolutely. It’s about that. Yeah, absolutely. Unquestionably. It’s about Iran’s nuclear program. Nobody serious debates that. The debates are over whether it is 10% about the nuclear program and 90% other things, or whether it’s 75% about the nuclear program and 25% other things. There’s no question for Trump, for Bibi, for frankly Europe, the IAEA, the UN agency in charge of overseeing and checking and verifying that Iran is complying with its requirements under the nonproliferation treaty that it signed and many other requirements, they’re all on board with that aspect. Even if they don’t want the kinetic strikes or the decapitation of the regime or that other stuff, they’re completely on board with this part.
And they’re actually looking for 440 kilograms of enriched uranium that have disappeared. They haven’t disappeared, but nobody quite knows exactly where they are because no outsider from Iran has been tracking them. They’re in Fordow and in Natanz and split up in three or four different places. And so it’s absolutely unquestionably that. The question is how many other reasons are accompanying that?
And that by the way is a concern we’ve heard in this war from people who don’t want to see this war. Keir Starmer, still concerned about that. Chancellor Merz of Germany is still concerned about that. So that is unquestionably for everybody a concern and part of what this war is about.
Noam: Okay. So there is a quote from the U S intelligence assessment that was referenced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence saying Iran is not currently building a nuclear weapon, but it’s enriched uranium stockpiles at unprecedented levels for a state without nuclear weapons. So that’s your argument that you think it is whether it’s 10%, 20%, 30%, 50%, 80%, but there is absolutely a percentage that this is very much so about stopping Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. One to ten. What would you say?
Haviv: Yes, there’s a lot of politics around these little assessments, these little quotes on these intelligence assessments. Ignore the politics. The United States intelligence community has often assessed that Iran’s nuclear work, the engineering aspect of building a bomb, building a warhead, building a trigger, building a missile that can carry it, all of that stuff sometimes is on, sometimes is off. The United States has never assessed that Iran doesn’t want to nuke and that given the chance it won’t try for a nuke and it won’t rush to get a nuke if it has enough highly enriched uranium, the stuff that takes time and more than that over the course of the 20 years of cat and mouse games about its nuclear program with the UN, with inspectors, with the Americans, with Western intelligence, Western intelligence has repeatedly found entire vast underground installations buried in mountains that Iran was totally secretive about, including while it was committed to letting the inspector show up. There’s a huge installation in Qalam that nobody knew about until suddenly it was public and it was publicized by Western intelligence, not by the Iranians.
So we know that they secretly do work. Everybody agrees on this. I mean, most hawkish neocon bond their programming to smithereens and the most pro-JCPOA negotiate with them Obama guy, will all agree on this point that they could. What the Obama argument was, was that we can incentivize them not to want a nuke because we’re going to build them a pathway through sanctions relief, through other incentives, carrots and sticks and leaving the military option on the table. Nobody believed Obama when he said that, but he did say it again and again and again.
And therefore we can incentivize them to choose a different path. Ultimately, it’s Iran’s choice. If Iran chooses there, that’s the best way. How do we get there? And that’s a legitimate debate. I have an extremely explicit position on that debate, but the debate itself is legitimate. But no one in those debates of any kind, no European, no American, beyond crazy activist ideologues who ignore half the facts, has ever argued, including in these intelligence assessments, that somehow Iran’s nuclear program is gone.
It’s worth knowing, really important to know that there are basically on this earth three kinds of nuclear programs.
There are research reactors, reactors that produce small amounts of radioactive material for medical research, for different kinds of scientific research. These are tiny, tiny little reactors that you need one in a country or one in any 15 countries to produce enough. And then you have energy programs, nuclear energy, where you have these huge reactors that produce megawatts of electricity to supply cities with the electricity they need.
This is an enormous nationwide industrial scale program. then you have, so you have tiny and enormous, and then you have nuclear weapons programs to produce the hundreds of kilos required for a small nuclear arsenal, the thousands of kilos for a large nuclear arsenal. And they’re exactly in the middle in terms of size.
They have that many, you know, facilities and that much uranium that they can produce at a certain speed and they have an adjacent ballistic missile program to deliver the payloads. Iran’s program is far too big to be research, far too small to be energy. It is exactly the right size to be a weapons program. And nobody has ever seriously argued, who again, isn’t paid by some propaganda machine, has ever argued that it’s anything but a nuclear weapons program.
Noam: Okay, the reason for the war then, Haviv, you’re saying one to ten, ten, like this theory about stopping Iran’s nuclear program, one to ten, you’re taking this super seriously. Yeah.
Haviv: I take this reason super seriously and inside Israel, inside America, you know, when you say Israel wants or America wants, you’re talking about thousands of people involved in the planning, in the military, in the intelligence communities. So there are many voices inside the Israeli conversation on this, inside the literally just inside government in on the National Security Council in America, you have multiple different voices. There’s always some of them who prioritize the nuclear program, even if that’s not what sort of tip the scale for Trump to, to pull the trigger, right? There’s still, it’s a big part of it and it’s a significant and important part of it.
Noam: Okay, I’m hearing eight. That’s what I heard. You said eight. Okay. Theory number two. This is Israel’s war and the US got pulled in. This is a narrative that I hear often, especially in parts of American politics, specifically the large anti-war neo-isolationist movement. And they’re saying this is fundamentally Israel’s war. The United States got pulled into it.
Let me pull in a few quotes for you actually. You know, we got your buddy, Candace Owens, who says, I’m kidding, she’s not your buddy. Don’t worry. She says, do not join or remain in the United States military. Trump has betrayed America and expects you to die for Israel. There is no honor in being led by dishonorable men to your death.
Marjorie Taylor Greene says, we’re no longer a nation divided by left and right. We’re now a nation divided by those who want to fight wars for Israel and those who just want peace and to be able to afford their bills and health insurance.
Nick Fuentes says Israel dragged the United States into war with Iran.
Pretty straightforward. What is your reaction to these statements?
Haviv: I mean, so you just quoted outright insane racists. I mean, people who are very deeply concerned about the secret conspiracies of the world. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Jewish space lasers setting the California wildfires and Candace Owens talking about the Jews as a secret, as a fake people and a secret Kazarian mafia taking over the world and ruling it. we all, apparently she, I think heard something about the Frankist sect that broke off from Judaism in the 19th century. talks about it obsessively.
You’re talking about psychopaths that they are influential today in American politics, because American politics are broken and they’re broken and when things are broken, you begin to develop a politics in which instead of looking for what you do wrong in order to fix what you and your polity does wrong, you begin to look for anywhere else to project all of your failures and mistakes onto so you don’t have to deal with the brokenness internally.
And this is a kind of politics that will bring you to the current state of the Middle East. This will break your country. You will become incapable of serious accountability, responsibility, and policymaking. And they genuinely think that Israel has some secret leverage over Trump, whether it’s the Epstein files. Wow, would that be a very poorly constructed intelligence operation if everyone on earth can see all of it in development and thousands of American officials have access to it? Or some other mystical power that Netanyahu has over Trump.
That’s the blitheringly stupid and conspiratorial and self-destructive version of this story. And Tucker Carlson engages in it every day. And Candace Owens is literally nothing but this obsession with the Jews. And this is very, very much rhymes with everything we saw in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, not in terms of a buildup to a genocide, but in terms of never-ending obsession with Jews. And there’s nothing on this earth but Jews, and all communism is Jews and all liberalism is Jews and everything and everyone and everywhere is Jews and Jews are driving a world war. Hitler invading Poland didn’t start a world war, Jews started a world war. That’s how Nazis talk, that’s how Nick Fuentes talks, that’s how Candice Owens talks. I can’t say much about it except to say it’s the downfall of the American right, it is the building within the American right and incapability, incapacity to deal seriously with any question and any issue because there’s always a conspiracy around the corner and you can dump it all on and your brain can turn off and you can have no responsibility and no sense of failure or anxiety or anything else. There’s always a Jew. All I can say to these people is I’m sorry that America is going through this, but I’m watching a drunk uncle not able to see that he has an alcoholism problem.But there’s a much more serious version of this argument.
Noam: I was gonna get into that. The serious version is, let me just say my understanding as an American, we’re an ocean away from everything taking place. That’s the way we feel. Like when I speak to these fifth graders today, I’m gonna tell them, did you know that your country is at war right now? No, you don’t feel it.
You’re not running into bomb shelters. You don’t feel anything right now. Your parents may not be serving in the military. You don’t feel it because you live in the Western hemisphere.
And so the another argument looks like this that put aside the conspiratorial thinking from those. have no other way to say it than those like unserious people, unserious influential people, is that there’s a country that you’re an ally with. United States, America is allied with that has problems, serious problems with these countries that are right near it. And why is the United States of America, which is very, very far away, why are they engaged in this sort of war? And when we have many issues at home, so why are we engaged in a war in the Middle East where we don’t, you don’t even go here, you don’t even live here, what are you doing? That’s another version of the argument.
Haviv: Right. And that question, what does it do for America? Why is America spending, I forget the number, but it’s I think a billion dollars a day or within an order of magnitude of that. It’s going to be billions and billions and billions of dollars. And that’s without ground troops. It’s just an air war for America. A little bit naval, mostly air war.
And that is not just a valid question. That’s a necessary question. American citizens should never accept a war because the president tells them to. They should actually ask these very hard questions. They’re spending the money. And we have had very few, a handful, but nevertheless, American troops killed. And so if American troops are going into harm’s way, by the way, it could have been more. In other words, the American plan for war and CENTCOM’s capabilities turned out to be extraordinarily good.
And the missile defense capabilities that America deployed throughout the Middle East turned out to be extraordinarily competent. Extraordinarily successful. but it could have gone worse, right? As soon as you meet the enemy in war, the enemy surprises you, by definition almost, and so it could have gone much worse than could be a lot more dead, and asking hard questions of a war is absolutely necessary.
I mean, the insane group, the conspiratorial group they have it’s such a profound insult to America, the argument that America is so utterly controlled by an Israel that has what lever. mean, it’s just so pathetic that sent common the jet, thousands of people in the chain of command are all somehow bought and sold and nobody can speak up and nobody can leak that this is a mistake or nobody knows what this is about. Everybody seems to be on the same page. The Israelis coming to it.
So the serious one is what does this do for America? Francis Fukuyama, for example, thinks this war was foolish. He thinks that America will not accomplish what it needs to accomplish. He just wrote a piece about that in the Free Press, I believe. And that Trump has been giving reasons for the war or end states that he thinks would be the successful end of the war that are just silly, like for example, he says, unconditional surrender. Why is Trump demanding that? They’re never going to give that. In principle, they’d rather the whole country go down with them. And this regime would not give Trump that. They have a whole religious framing.
So the argument that Trump has gone to this flippantly, easily, too quickly. I’ll just say to this. And what does America actually get out of it? Now, the simple truth is America gets a lot out of this war and America felt that Iran was a genuine danger and that danger was becoming much, much more significant very, very quickly. And I can lay out that case. Now an American can still utterly reasonably argue that’s not enough what I’m gonna lay out. That’s a legitimate discussion. I don’t wanna even counter it because that’s a whole discussion. It’s not fair.
Noam: Fine, if not today, give me two or three legitimate.
Haviv: What does America get from this? The Iranian regime is fundamentally inherently anti-American. Khomeini defined the regime as anti-the-American world order, partly because he really was plugged in ideologically to the Marxist sort of interpretation of history, framed in Shia terms, and partly because he developed this whole religious vision of a gap in the world, worldwide gap between the oppressed and the oppressor, and who’s the greatest oppressor of them all? America is the great Satan from before the regime rises. This is an anti-American, anti-Western movement. It’s also anti-globalization as a cultural imposition on Iran. Iran’s DNA as a regime, as an ideological movement, the Islamic Republic of Iran, is anti-American fundamentally and will never not be. It can’t be. The religious content of their political theology is anti-America. And therefore Iran is everywhere a disruptor of America, everywhere opposed to America, everywhere stands against America in everything and will absorb vast damage just to stand against America.
For example, right now Iran has embedded itself repeatedly over the years, over in the last four years roughly, has become a major Chinese forward base in the Middle East. And what am I talking about? People can look this up, should look this up, because Pentagon planners were noticing this and this had to make it to President Trump’s desk. Is this the number one reason, the 70% reason that he went to war, whereas the nuclear program is 15%? I don’t know, but this was on his desk. Last month or two months ago, Iran and China signed a deal in which China would transfer to Iran supersonic missiles that can travel at Mach 3 and penetrate American naval missile defense systems and bring down massive strategic American warships, including aircraft carriers. And Iran was supposed to deploy these missiles in the Persian Gulf, in the Straits of Hormuz, in the northern Indian Ocean in ways that severely, dramatically, at a strategic level, limit the American capacity to protect the oil shipping lanes in the Straits of Hormuz. And the Iranians have been shipping vast numbers of missiles.
They’re a major weapons exporter and a lot of those weapons go to the Houthis of Yemen who have a chokehold on the Bab al-Mandab Straits, which is the entryway into the Suez Canal. 40%, I forget the number, 50% of all shipping from East Asia and from China’s factories to Europe passes through the Bab al-Mandab Straits. Iran geographically sits on two of the maybe 10 major choke points or even six biggest choke points of world trade.
The Trump administration has looked at world trade and become obsessed with it. Greenland was about the Arctic becoming an arena of world trade. Greenland was about rare earth metals, which exist in Greenland, are hard to get to, are expensive to get to. China has a huge monopoly almost on the world trade of rare earth metals, which are absolutely necessary for high tech. So Greenland was about that. Trump was obsessed with Panama at the beginning of his administration of the second term, if you remember. Trump has been obsessed with Venezuela, which is one of the suppliers of oil to China. Trump is now obsessed with Iran, one of the suppliers of oil, plus sits on two major choke points like Panama. Everywhere you look, is a coherent, six different disparate things all come together into a single coherent attempt to say America has abandoned over the years its understanding of the need to hold open the choke points, to hold open world trade, to protect world trade, and these, it has allowed these points, these strategic points in the world to shift over to the Chinese side of the great America-China divide of the earth, of influence in the earth, and we’re going to reclaim it.
Now in Venezuela, arresting Maduro was enough because the vice president got the message and the vice president’s playing ball with the Americans. In Panama, just complaining was enough. In Greenland, the threat produced a new agreement with Denmark. These are enough. In Iran, nothing could possibly be enough. And so regime change makes sense if your point is we may someday have a literal kinetic war with the Chinese. Well, the Indian Ocean and the Malacca Straits of Malaysia, another major choke point, most of the oil that goes to China comes through there and a lot of it comes out of Iran. And a lot of it comes out of the Persian Gulf. Preventing the Iranians from tying down a huge part of the American Navy there in case it has to rush over to Taiwan is itself a strategic question. There are these huge strategic questions on the global chessboard.
You don’t have to like Israel, you don’t have to be pro-Israel, know, none of that. Iran tried to assassinate President Trump. I mean, the assassin was caught and was just convicted or indicted or I forget what it was, but he was just in the news last week. guy trying to, excuse me, Iran literally hired to assassinate President Trump. Iran is in attempts to disrupt America at every turn in every way. And none of that’s Israel. None of that’s Israel.
Now you add to that the fact that Israel is this incredibly useful ally in the Middle East. Look what just happened. Israel needs Iran gone, this regime. America needs this regime not to be a disruptor in the Persian Gulf. Those are two enormous overlapping interests. And when you have that situation, then America goes to fly against Iran, the president decided, and where are the Israelis? Right there in the battle, front and center. Israeli soldiers on the ground, Israeli pilots in the air, Israel absorbing missiles, Israel willing to fight and having the capability to fight.
If America ever finds itself going to war with China to protect Taiwan, which the American Pacific fleet is built to do, that’s what America thinks it might be called upon to do in five years, if America finds itself there, if they had Israelis in East Asia, if they had Japan and South Korea and the Philippines willing to take Chinese damage, willing to inflict, willing to fly, willing to endanger their troops, that’s a whole different war.
So the sense in the American defense establishment that Israel’s actually useful is actually the perfect ally. That opens the window. And there’s one sense in which Israel really did open a window for the Americans to do this war, not by somehow magically with voodoo charms convincing Trump to do something against America’s interests, but Israel showed that it’s possible.
Iran has been selling to the world for a generation the invincibility of it, that it can set the region on fire, that it can destroy everything, that it can blow up everything, that if you come at Iran, Iran is going to set the whole world on fire and you can’t afford it, and it has held everyone at bay with its bluster for decades. And Israel, in June of last year, in the 12-day war, Israel proved that the entire Iranian air force doesn’t exist functionally.
It proved that you don’t have to take out all the missile arsenals. You can just take out the launchers and then they can’t launch enough to be a strategic threat. It proved that it has utterly penetrated Iranian intelligence.
The Iranian regime is so deeply hated in Iran. There was a joke that went a little bit viral on Persian internet, on Persian X, where an Israeli agent comes to an Iranian man and says, I need you to spy on the IRGC for us. And the Iranian man thinks and he says, I’ll do it, I’ll do it. And then the Israeli says, okay, well, $100,000. And the Persian thinks and he thinks and he’s worried and he checks his phone and then he says, fine, but it’s gonna take me a week to get the money. In other words, Israel doesn’t have pay them, they are willing to pay Israel to spy against the regime is how much they hate the regime.
And the intelligence penetration therefore is also astounding. And when Israel showed that the path into Iran, all the Russian air defense systems and radars in Syria, in Iran itself, none of them work. Iran has not just embedded itself in terms of buying a few missiles that could endanger American ships in the Chinese system. It literally transferred the country to Beidou from GPS to the Chinese parallel to GPS. Iran’s cyber infrastructure is now Chinese as of the last three, four years. It’s deeply embedded over there and Israel has proven that none of that has actually been able to protect Iran. And so Israel showed America in June that if America wants to embark on this, American technology, which Israel used in June, is so vastly more advanced than anything Russian or Chinese that Iran possesses that it’s safe to do so. And in that sense, yes, I think Israel is one of the catalysts for this war just because it showed what American hardware can do over Iran.
Noam: And how the US could use Israel. But you know, it’s so interesting that I was writing down your points for the United States to be in this war together with Israel. And yet I look at it like this is a history podcast, as you know, I look back at all the historical moments of different wars that Israel has fought, whether it’s 56 and winning that kinetic war, but losing the mimetic war there. And, you know, the Americans being quite unhappy with Israel. Then I look at 73 in many ways also winning that kinetic war, but losing memetically when the honor of either one politically totally in that war, Israel won militarily. I look at the war in 2023. I think that kinetically again, Israel clearly won. I’m unsure ultimately memetically whether it won that war. I think right now the jury’s still out.
But the question is in 2026, this war, when you look at the Israeli perspectives of the percentage of Israelis, and they’re the ones, you’re the ones who are running into the bomb shelters. Americans are the ones, you know, sipping on their Starbucks right now, and who are living here. Like literally, I got my Starbucks right next to me, right here. And yet Israelis overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly support this war right now. Over 80%, I believe, of Israelis are supportive of this. And yet in the United States of America, when you look at the polling, it seems to be even all of your explanations feel very like they’re good, but they’re complicated. Like you have to hear they’re complicated. They’re like you’re talking about trade and Straits of Hormuz and like a debt might give the whole chessboard you lay out brilliantly.
Well, for the typical American, it’s very hard to understand everything you just said. For a typical Israeli, it’s very easy to understand why you should be fighting this war. It’s quite obvious. you look at the polling in the United States, and if you compare, I saw this Ugov poll that with the poll taken as close as possible to the day after the action, if you look at Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq 2003, Iran 2026, around 92% of people overall within a day or so of the action supported the war against Afghanistan in America. In Iraq in 2003, 72% overall supported the war in Iraq. And yet in Iran 2026, the number is 34%.
That is a dramatic decline, dramatic. And I think that even what you described can come across as a war of choice with no clear strategic end game for the United States of America as compared to a war that is fighting an imminent threat as Americans are perceiving it. What’s your response to that?
Haviv: Well, first of all, the American public is not wrong. The skepticism is hard earned with blood and treasure. Afghanistan was a legitimate, completely legitimate war. Al-Qaeda literally attacked the US in spectacular fashion. And the regime that hosted Al-Qaeda and continued to demand to insist it would defend Al-Qaeda even after 9/11 had to be brought down and the Americans went to Afghanistan. Iraq was much harder to defend. It wasn’t, mean, I remember Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, telling the Americans and according to reports, don’t invade Iraq, your enemy is Iran.
Noam: Bibi Netanyahu was supportive of it though.
Haviv: Bibi, who was not in power, who was brought in by some congressperson to give us a talk in the Senate, and I think it was at the Senate, said, go to the Iraq War. Bibi was just citizen Bibi. wasn’t, but.
Noam: Right. the Prime Minister at the time, right.
Haviv: the sitting prime minister said Iran is the enemy, what are you doing in Iraq? Once Bush said, this is what we are doing, this is the American policy, no sitting Israeli prime minister can then go on the world stage and say that’s a terrible idea. He said it was a terrible idea quietly to the Americans beforehand. So my view is the Afghanistan war was legitimate, the Iraq war was foolish in the sense that I mean if anyone can democratize, the Americans can democratize, they’ve done it before, but they went in without any sense of what it would take to democratize there wasn’t really a deep understanding of why the Arab world looks the way it looks what are the ideas what are the cultural limitations and challenges
Noam: Wait, where else have Americans successfully democratized?
Haviv: West Germany, South Korea, Japan. The differences there,
Noam: Right.
Haviv: and these are literally natural experiments because there’s no cultural difference in West and East Germany. There’s no cultural, religious, linguistic difference between North and South Korea. One place the Americans were in charge and another place that somebody else was in charge. And the gap is literally the American gap. And they happen differently in each place, right? In South Korea, for example, it was a dictatorship until the seventies, and then transformed literally just because being so close to America and wanting to build out that economy and just the pressure of being defended by America kind of made it hard not to be democratic. And so they eventually democratized. And we saw that in multiple places where allies of America kind of democratized just because they’re close to America and it’s hard not to.
So for an American to get up and say, I’m going to democratize something. If an Israeli did that, you should laugh that Israeli out of the room and get them back on their meds because that’s a deeply stupid way for an Israeli to talk that’s not remotely within Israel’s ideological capacity, nevermind demographic, economic, military capacity. For an American, it’s not insane, but it came to the Middle East without any serious understanding of what it would actually take. The Middle East is not Japan. The Middle East is not Germany. The Middle East is not Korea. It’s a different place and has different ideas and different problems.
And so Iraq was less in the sense of directly attacking America, less legitimate war. Afghanistan was totally legitimate. Afghanistan was an utter loss and Iraq was actually quite a success. Now it’s not the success the Americans planned for. It’s not the great democracy, but Iraq came out without Saddam. Iraq even came out more cohesive state than you would expect. There was the ISIS period when American troops pulled out, but that ISIS period was defeated and forced a kind of coalescing of Iraq in a way that hadn’t happened until ISIS. And so over time, you know, history is not measured by what happens within a single presidential administration. Iraq was much less a failure than Afghanistan, even though Afghanistan was much more legitimate. But nowhere do the Americans look at these places and say, hey, we did great. Well done. You told us this is what happened. That’s what happened. It happened. No, they keep looking at the Middle East and saying everything we try screws up. Everything we try blows up in our faces.
The Pentagon built over 2000 schools in Iraq. There was a real, authentic, honest, earnest American attempt, dumping hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to make Iraq a success story. And you who failed to make it a success story? Iraqis. Why? Because they’re actually divided between religion and clan and tribe and if you don’t understand that, and Saddam’s government and regime was built on these tribes, specifically on the Sunnis in this case. If you don’t see it and understand it and build a political system for it, you’re operating out of your own little fantasy back in Washington and not on the ground in Iraq itself. And so they failed.
And now they’re looking at this adventure in Iran and they’re saying, what are the chances we know what we’re doing? And what are the chances of Donald Trump, who refuses to explain why this is urgent now, actually is doing something urgent now? And that is profoundly healthy skepticism. And well done Americans, you need to have that skepticism.
There are not gonna be troops on the ground. If there are, then I do think the American people should really get in there and say, hey, you know, I’m not sure America knows how to do this right now. And if it’s not gonna outlast the Trump presidency and then a progressive president comes in and that progressive president pulls all the troops out, you’ve just broken without building. But if it can remain a non-ground war, and if it can literally just take out Iran’s capabilities to disrupt America in the ways Iran has been trying feverishly to disrupt America for 30 years, and the only reason it’s ever failed is because of incompetence, not because it doesn’t want to literally bring down America. And if Iran gets a nuke, it’s not just Israel that’s threatened by that nuke, it’s America that’s threatened by that nuke, witnessed their ballistic missile program and what it was trying to build in terms of distances. Everything that America is doing right now in Iran makes sense. On the regional chessboard, on the global chessboard, on the Chinese American adversarial relationship chessboard, who’s gonna actually run the world order in 30 years question, it all makes sense. And the Americans are so burned by those terrible experiences the Middle East oversold things.
Now Trump just said, I want unconditional surrender. I want regime change. I want this. I want that. But then he also says different things two days later. That itself creates skepticism. I support the American people’s skepticism.
Noam: Okay, but on that point though, like you still, I still don’t understand the mimetic aspect of this, meaning the verbal aspect of this, the PR aspect of this, the storytelling around it. Americans are still, don’t understand. Okay.
Haviv: I also don’t. think, look, I’ve been watching the administration officials closely, and they’ve given a few reasons, and the reasons have cycled through different reasons at different times. And what I suspect is the story, I suspect, you know, nobody comes to me for American constitutional law. So I’m speaking here yet, obviously. And I’m a journalist, I’m still gonna speak confidently, even if I have no idea. But I wanna warn everybody that what I’m about to say is not something I know anything about.
Noam: That’s the power of the podcast.
Haviv: But I have read in American press, in the American debate on this, that there’s a very real concern that the way Trump went to war might have constitutional legal problems. Now, I cannot judge this. I don’t know if this is a political talking point that’s totally untrue, or if this is absolutely correct and if the Republicans weren’t so loyal to Trump, they would themselves be up in arms about it. I have no idea which is true. But if there is at least a sensitivity that Trump can’t say, for example, the, the Constitution demands that the President get the consent of the Senate to go to war.
Noam: Congress.
Haviv: And of course, the funding also of Congress to go to war, right? Congress has the longer term funding power and the short term advice and consent of the Senate power. And Trump has gone to what is essentially a war, in Iranian terms, it’s a war, even if in American terms, it’s a fairly simple and short operation.
Noam: Epic Fury.
Haviv: But yeah, but it’s gone to a war without that consent. Now, they apparently don’t want to try to get the consent, maybe because they don’t want to debate to limit their political options or limit the length of time they have. You don’t want to project to the enemy that it isn’t supported back home. You also don’t want to project to the enemy that you have a hard stop in three weeks. If the enemy thinks you can go for three months, the enemy is more likely to sue for peace than if the enemy knows they only have to survive three weeks and then you’re out. So for all those reasons, the Trump administration doesn’t want to go to Congress.
Now, how do you not go to Congress? Well, the Constitution gives Trump the ability, gives a president the ability to fight an urgent, immediate, self-defensive war before being able to get approval from Congress. And they want to frame it that way. Now that’s a hard way to frame it. And the reason why that’s hard to frame is that Iran, for decades, decades, decades, has been a huge thorn in the side of America, super annoying, but not more than annoying. Iran has been basically a regional threat.
Now on a regional scale, an existential threat, those missile arsenals, can set every Israeli city on fire if nobody had stopped them, if nobody had broken their launching capabilities, if nobody had taken them out. That nuclear program could have had a nuke 20 years ago if nobody had disrupted and built campaigns against it. And that would have been an existential threat for regional countries. But it probably would not have been an existential threat to America until they had an intercontinental ballistic missile with a nuclear warhead. That’s when it becomes an existential threat to America. Iran never rose to that threshold. It was only ever a regional disruptor and threat that aspired to become a great Islamic revolution worldwide that dominates and ultimately overthrows America. And so America always kind of ignored it. America, you know, sanctioned it, put some Navy in the Persian Gulf, protected the shipping lanes.
Noam: But now with the protests happening and after the June war of 2025 and the proxies being taken out by Israel.
Haviv: Right, the Israelis showed what could be done. Right
Noam: Now it’s it’s game time. you don’t get to, you don’t get to, you don’t get to like, I’m not touching you, I’m not touching you, don’t get to do that anymore. That’s the idea.
Haviv: Right, Iran’s capabilities as of the last three, four years, people should look this up. Do not trust me. Look this up. Iran’s capabilities becoming upgraded with new cyber systems, new missiles by the Chinese to transform them into part of the larger architecture, a regional spoiler of a grander global contest. Then suddenly all the pieces fall into place. Now Trump wants this war for all these reasons.
And I say Trump, does Trump personally know all this stuff? People keep writing back at me and saying, what are you giving us this grand story? Yeah, that makes sense, but Trump’s an idiot, they say. So I have no idea if Trump is an idiot. I genuinely, I don’t know. I know a lot of people who bet he was an idiot and lost to him. So I do know that. But I also know something because I’ve been following this for 20 years and I’ve had junkets, press junkets in Washington where they took all kinds of different officials and I’ve just watched this stuff and gone to security conferences over the years and met some of these American officials and sat and listened to them give speeches. And I have to tell you, even if Trump personally can’t build this strategic vision, he’s surrounded by people who can. And the China hawks include, for example, the Undersecretary of War for Policy, Colby, and they include Senator Tom Cotton, they include people who are close to the president, close to the strategic, and they are China hawks who have written books about the need to go to push back on this Chinese, expanding Chinese influence and build a new international.
Noam: We got a siren.
Haviv: I’m good, I’m good, I’m good. And built a new international security architecture, okay, that pushes back on China. These are people in the room in every move being decided by this White House. So you still, you can’t tell me that just because maybe Trump doesn’t do that, you don’t think Trump can do this. I’m not sure he can’t, by the way, but if you really think he can’t, that doesn’t mean that’s not what’s happening. And so, yes, there is a serious policy. It is an American policy following American interests.
None of these people are so dumb. None of these people just fell off the apple cart. None of these people are doing Bibi’s bidding. Bibi is doing everything he possibly can to ease them into it, to make it literally easier. And what do I mean by everything he can? Putting Israeli lives on the line, putting the Israeli Air Force at their disposal to the point where the Israeli Air Force is flying in English for the first time in its history. Everything he can. Why? Because this is for Israel and existential Israeli interests, and making it easy for America to do this thing that helps Israel and also serves a hundred different American interests is absolutely what Bibi is doing. But that doesn’t mean it’s not of vast American interest and without those American interests America wouldn’t be doing it.
Noam: Okay, so last one, you have two minutes for this one, maximum. I won’t say the name of the Israeli journalist, but the Israeli journalist who I like very much in general, he said the following, that this war is actually driven at this time by Israeli domestic politics. The quote is this, Bibi Netanyahu is giving the Israeli military in order to get ready for another massive strike in Iran, either with the US or without the US somewhere between April to June, 2026. That’s back in November, October, November. And also I’m sure he saw the timeline of 2026, elections are coming. Netanyahu is lagging much behind in the polls. The attack on Iran in June in 2025 did not bring the expected votes in the polls. All of that together, he is getting the military ready to attack. And that is why he chose to attack now. Scale one to 10.
That’s from an Israeli journalist. What’s your take on that?
Haviv: Not at all, not at all.
Noam: Wrong.
Haviv: With very smart politicians who are successful over the long term, you very quickly stop thinking of either or. Netanyahu has a political schedule that’s never not in his mind, and he has a policy schedule that’s never not in his mind, and he’s never operating only on one or only on the other. In the case of Iran, this man has thought and talked about nothing else. He has made every political compromise possible. has prostituted his every ideal. He has built out a vast Haredi welfare state. He himself, an economic liberal, does not believe in and knows is a terrible drag on the Israeli economy just to hold together a coalition with the ultra-orthodox that allows him to continue to work on Iran. He thinks his legacy is Iran. He thinks Iran is the only issue for which he was brought into this world. He thinks he is the great defender of the Jewish people from Iran.
Everything I just said right now pisses me off. I really don’t think he’s indispensable. As the old saying goes, the cemeteries are full of indispensable people. However, he genuinely does believe it and he looks around the political arena in Israel and he doesn’t see people who could replace him on the fundamental policy question of Iran.
Where I think he is actually a tremendous advantage for the question of Israel versus Iran right now, is his ability to navigate American right-wing politics with Trump, et cetera. I think he’s a little blindsided by the anti-Semitic and by the America first, and by those are not overlapping. They overlap a little, but they’re not the same people. But I’m just saying by these groups that are actually isolationist on the American right, but still with Trump, he’s definitely the man you want in a Trump world, led by a Trump America to pull this off. And we’re seeing that right now.
So maybe it’s not crazy for him to think that only he could have pulled this off in Israeli politics. He thinks this is his legacy. The elections are not what’s driving the war. “He wants a successful war because he thinks it’ll help him in the elections” is too far. He knows the elections are coming. By the way, he hasn’t won in a single poll. No one else has won a clear majority, but he also hasn’t in a single poll since this government was sworn in in December 2022.
In other words, he very well could lose the next election. Or if he doesn’t lose, he could have a minority of the popular vote, a minority kind of government, or we could go to a second run on election because there can be nobody with a coalition. All of that stuff’s possible. And I think that in as much as he thinks about that, the fact that he could lose the election means that he has to do the great and grand thing for which he was put on this earth, remove the Iranian threat to Israel now.
So the election is pushing him to go to war, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t prioritize the war. This is about Iran for him, and it has always been about Iran. And by the way, the only thing he has never compromised on in any coalition negotiation, ever, he’ll compromise the entire economy, the education system, everything he believes in, everything he believes in, but he will never compromise the grand strategic question of Iran. And he’s always kept it close and he’s dismantled entire agencies of the Israeli government to maintain his own personal control on that issue.
And so, no, it isn’t that this is a fake war to serve his election needs. If he fears this election, then he has to get the wrong thing solved right now because he genuinely doesn’t think anyone else can do it.
Noam: Haviv, thank you so much. You are a gem of a human being and always love learning from you with you. Ask Haviv Anything, one of the great podcasts out there. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. All right, see you soon.
Haviv: Thank you so much, Noam. Thank you for everything you do. I’ll see you.
Noam: Thanks for joining Unpacking Israeli History, a production of Unpacked, an OpenDor Media brand. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a rating on Apple or Spotify. It really helps other people find the show.
One more time, I love hearing from you. So email me at noam@unpacked.media. This episode was produced by Rivky Stern. Our team for this episode includesAndrew Miller, Jason Feld, and Rob Pera. I’m your host, Noam Weissman. Thanks for being here. See you next week.