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As the Missiles Fly and Then Stop Transcript
Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.
Donniel: Here in Israel, in our world, it’s as the missiles fly, because that’s our reality. As the missiles fly, they fly and stop. And both the flying and the stopping shape our reality.
Yossi: Yesterday was one of those days when Israelis stopped and asked themselves, are we losing?
Donniel: Part of what yesterday reminded me is this cycle of futility that we’ve allowed ourselves to enter into. At what point are we going to put on the table other options that we want to explore?
Hi friends. This is Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi from the Shalom Hartman Institute, and this is our podcast, For Heaven’s Sake, in collaboration with Ark Media. Today is June 9th and this episode is sponsored in honor of Robert Kogod’s 95th birthday by his loving family.
Now, for most of our listeners, the name Robert Kogod is a name. They don’t know him. There were three founders of the Hartman Institute, the institute, this beautiful place that we’re in. My father was the intellectual, spiritual founder. His initial partner was Saul Letterman, without whose partnership the Institute would have never been formed. And then a number of years later was joined by a man who called himself—he was an American, a Jew and a Washingtonian, and entered the life of the Institute and completely changed the parameters and scope of everything that we do. And he founded it together with Saul and together with my father.
And on a personal note, he was, at the time, the chair of the board as I was growing in the institute, and he was my partner. We would speak weekly. Everything that I did, everything I thought about, every struggle that I had, this was the person who I shared it with and from whom I learned. And to celebrate his 95th birthday, I remember when he was a young man, as I like to say, now that I’m so wise and old, but it’s just an unbelievable honor.
For those who don’t know, our Jerusalem campus is named in honor of Robert Kogod for us to recognize the truly seminal role that he played in everything that has and is, God willing, going to continue to happen here at the institute. So happy birthday Bob, and today’s a special podcast.
So as a Kogod Fellow, I want to add—
Donniel: That’s the name of our Research Center.
Yossi: Right. So I just want to say, Bob, happy birthday and thank you.
Donniel: Beautiful. That’s proof that sometimes short is just perfect. You see, I’m a rabbi, so we sometimes have difficulty.
Yossi: Well, as sermons go, that was very short.
Donniel: No, but as, but with Bob, I just, it’s a very, very personal, emotional thing. One of my closest friends in the world, truly, truly in the world for over 40 years. So it’s very special.
Today also, we’re welcoming Yossi back here to Jerusalem. We’re back in the studio. It’s great to be back.
Yossi: Great to be back with you face to face.
Donniel: Face to face, and so that we could do our dance and our chavruta and our learning and our talking with each other. Today’s June 9th and yesterday, June 8th was a strange day.
We’re calling the podcast “As the Missiles Fly.” I think originally it was as the crows fly, but here in Israel, in our world, we don’t have crows. We do actually, but it’s, “as the missiles fly,” because that’s our reality. As the missiles fly. But then what was special is and then don’t.
Yossi: In all of one day.
Donniel: In all of one day, they fly and stop, and both the flying and the stopping shape our reality. And it was, yesterday was just a strange day. Many people, like, outside of Israel heard and wrote me, you know, Oh my God, the fear again, the anxiety.
It wasn’t an anxious day in Israel yesterday. Like we sort of knew. We knew we were going to bomb in Dahieh. They were going to bomb us, but they were going to make sure that it wasn’t escalated too much. And then we were going to respond because we can’t let them have the last missile, nor can we let them redefine the conversation so that the law of Dahieh is the same as the law of Tehran. We can’t let them shape the discourse or that. And then we knew we would respond, but we would respond in a certain way. And then President Trump would respond and it… Sort of, it would stop.
So, you know, we’re literally, what is it 10 days away from starting huge summer programs and people are writing and my staff asked, what should we say? I said, don’t tell them anything. Just like, just wait. It’s okay. It’s like, no one’s going to cancel their flights immediately. We have hundreds and hundreds of people, rabbis and lay leaders and educators, like literally like 10 different programs.
Yossi: It’s the highlight of our year.
Donniel: Or of our North American year here in Israel. We love our Israeli brethren too. And sisters. But it’s like, what should we do? Like we knew what… Wait. It’s like, it was going to be this sort of weird day. And even on social media in Israel, there’s all these weird, strange… People are making fun of the day of a person who sits down. You know, you have to realize schools were cancelled. And if schools are cancelled, nobody goes to work. So everybody’s at home. And he’s sitting down in front of a television with a big, huge bucket of popcorn. And he’s like, he’s about to eat. And then the announcement is, it’s over. And he looks at his popcorn and he says, like, I can’t even finish my popcorn. It’s like, it was just a strange day.
Yossi: So Sarah and I landed back home yesterday. As soon as we landed, we get off the plane, step into the terminal—a siren. Sarah looks at me and said, “I knew it.” You know, just really upset that, you know, this is it? When we left, maybe you remember this, we left with the last missile. There was a siren. We’re about to board the plane. We had to go down into the bowels of Ben Gurion Airport and then re-emerge and we were able to fly out. So we leave with the last missile, and we return with the first missile.
Donniel: So what’s, it just—to get the—it’s your fault?
Yossi: I’m wondering, you know, there’s a story, there’s a metaphor in this. There’s something. But it’s like we were away for two months. The missiles are still coming. Netanyahu is still Prime Minister. So, what’s changed?
Donniel: But this day, you know, I want to frame our conversation. The missiles fell, but something else—could I use this word? Befell us? I lived in Israel long enough that I can make up words. It befell us. Something else fell on us. It wasn’t just the missiles. Something else has been happening.
And yesterday is a window into this new world that is evolving as the war progresses, as we dance between Iran and President Trump and Hezbollah and Lebanon and Gaza, something befell us. So how did this day… What does it mean?
Yossi: Look, you know, yesterday was one of those days when Israelis stopped and asked themselves, are we losing? We haven’t had that many days like that since October 7th. We’ve been on an uneven trajectory, but basically the feeling was we’re doing better and we’re in the right direction. Yesterday gave people pause.
You know, for me, I’m not there. I’m not ready to say that we’re losing and certainly not that we’ve lost. And, you know, I read these op-eds in the Times and elsewhere of people who opposed a strike on Iran from the beginning and who had almost nothing to say about Iran massacring its own people. And now suddenly, you know, they’re proclaiming gleefully, they’re proclaiming defeat. And it’s a little premature when Netanyahu proclaims victory. That’s obviously premature, but so is proclaiming defeat.
And when you try to assess where we are, it depends what your starting point is. If your starting point is where we were a year ago with what we call the 12-Day War, then it’s a catastrophe because we’ve allowed victory to slip through our fingers. We really had a momentum. We seem to have set back the nuclear program by years. The ballistic missiles, which you note, have noted in previous podcasts, are the seemingly inexhaustible, miraculous, miraculously replenished arsenal. But a year ago, it looked different, and the Iranian people had not yet risen up and not yet been crushed. And looking at the situation on all three major fronts, it was possible to be anxious but not to overdo it.
Today, again, compared to a year ago last June, we’re in a terrible situation. Our alliance with America, with Trump in particular, is unraveling. We have paid an enormous price around the world for that alliance, and now Trump seems to be unilaterally withdrawing and leaving us to pay the bill. And I don’t blame him. I actually don’t blame him because I think he’s taken this as far as he can, given the fact that he has almost no support in American public opinion, including within his own constituency, his own party. So I think he’s taken this as far as he can.
And so when you look at the price that we’re paying and in all likelihood are soon about to pay, then it’s a disaster. If your starting point is October 8th, looking at where we are compared to the day after the massacre, I think we’re still on a positive trajectory, a tremendous amount that has been achieved. The regime has been substantially weakened. They’re now pulling on their third tier of leadership and they’re down, but they’re certainly not out.
Nevertheless, I think that we’ve taken this far and the wild card for me, which is almost never mentioned in analysis about Iran and, and with this all wind down, are the Iranian people. Now I say it’s a wild card because nobody knows. Will they rise up again? Have they been permanently demoralized? My intuition, and it’s probably more hope than intuition, is that the Iranian people are also down, but nowhere near out. The regime is not out and neither is the opposition. And so this is an unfolding story.
And just as we have to be really wary of Netanyahu’s hubris and electioneering, I think we also need to be very careful about becoming too pessimistic.
Donniel: But yesterday made you…
Yossi: Made me pause.
Donniel: Made you pause.
Yossi: Yeah.
Donniel: Made you pause. Yesterday also made me pause. But I’ve been more pessimistic. Even though I’m an optimist in life, and I’ve said this on this podcast a couple of weeks ago, I felt that this war for a while is not progressing in any positive direction on any front. And when you look at Iran’s position today as distinct from it was a year ago—
Yossi: That’s right.
Donniel: A year ago in June, we had to cancel all of our programs so no one could come.
Yossi: And that’s when we were winning.
Donniel: And that’s when we were winning. That’s right. That was the 12 Day War. That’s when, you know, they’re on the verge of a deal, I believe, that’s going to rehabilitate them economically. And when Vice President Vance says this is a deal that’s in America’s interests and Israel might not like it, red lights go off. But I ask, what happened? How could we have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory?
Yossi: Possible defeat.
Donniel: Fair enough. I’ll accept. I accept, right? You know, I appreciate that. You’re right. Who knows, right? It’s like there’s a process, but it might unfold for years. We don’t know. I accept that.
And by the way, in my analysis, I’m not blaming anybody for trying. Sometimes just things don’t work. And I think it does pay to look at what were some of the decisions we made and whether we influenced the outcome. But there’s yesterday, a certain feature that I’ve been thinking about came to be focused, because what happened yesterday?
Iran on its own decided that Lebanon is like Tehran. If you bomb Dahieh, Beirut, we have a right to respond just as if you were bombing any part of sovereign Iran. Now, the fact that they are linking a ceasefire in Lebanon with a ceasefire with Iran, okay, they’re smart. That’s okay. But their ability to say, listen, if you do this, we’re going to do this, and then to do it, is remarkable.
And what really happened, when you analyzed yesterday, it reminds me of Israel on October 7th and 8th and goes back to your argument about, that Israel needs to reclaim its deterrence. Now, one of the methods that we implemented to reclaim this deterrence is that we were going to be the wild people, the crazy people of the neighborhood. You think Hamas is crazy? We’re going to out-crazy everybody, and we don’t just have Toyotas and Kolochnikos, we have F-35s. We’re going to be the crazy people with F-35s and we’re going to do whatever’s necessary. And we’re also going to fight a war in such a way that the objective of the war is to reclaim deterrence. That’s the objective, because we’re not just trying to defeat a terrorist group; we’re trying to reclaim a reputation.
And for two and a half years, we’ve been acting like the crazy people, unbelievably skilled at times, flawed at other times, making mistakes, like happens in any war, sometimes not being as careful as we needed to be. But we allowed those mistakes or we chose to bomb or to—and to inflict casualties because part of what we wanted was we’re the crazy people. You attacked us. We’re going to go crazy. We’re going to be crazier than you. Don’t start up with us. The consequences are going to be dire.
The problem is, is that we tried, or are trying, to use being crazy as a deterrence on terrorist organizations and regimes who don’t value their own life and don’t value the life of their people. So how do we deter Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran? Part of what we’ve seen over the last two and three-quarter years is that maybe with Saudi Arabia, maybe in the neighborhood at large, but amongst our immediate enemies, there is no deterrence. Hezbollah, after the peepers, they’ve reconstituted. After we dealt a horrific blow to Iran, flying in their skies as we want to, they don’t seem to be deterred. Hamas, okay, they don’t mind how many Gazans die or what humanitarian crisis there is in Gaza. It’s of no interest to them. They’ve proven it again.
So our challenge is that we are trying to use craziness to deter morally depraved people. Yesterday, you saw Iran following the same plan. And in many ways, they did it from the beginning of the war. The minute we started to bomb, they didn’t say, oh, my God, you’re hurting my interests. What did they do? They started to bomb. Everybody said, what? Are you crazy? You’re lighting a fire into the neighborhood. What, are you insane? You want to alienate the Emirates in Saudi Arabia? And they said, yeah, I’m the crazy guy. Beware of me. I’m going to shut Hormuz. What you’re going to—we’re going to huff and puff. We’re going to get really angry. Get angry. What are you going to do, bomb me some more? You’ve already bombed me. What are you going to do now? Bomb my, my, the bridges? What are you going to do? It’s just going to get worse for you.
And they proved, part of what’s happened—and you can’t understand this war unless you understand the fundamental difference between the audience that Israel has been trying to intimidate and the audience that Iran is trying to intimidate. We’ve been trying to intimidate morally depraved. They’re trying to intimidate a Western world which has profound interests, interests about the price of oil, economic interests, the well-being of their countries. And it didn’t take a lot for Iran to intimidate the United States, or at least its population.
And as a result, yesterday, they succeeded. He said basically, Dahieh’s like Tehran, and Trump had to say, is Dahieh like Tehran? Of course, it’s not like Tehran. You don’t get to set the stage. You don’t get to decide what’s what. You don’t create parallels on your own. There’s rules, Dahieh, you, this is a proxy of yours. This—the president of Lebanon states, get out of here. Who are you to—
Yossi: To Iran.
Donniel: He says to Iran, get out of here. Stop using me for your wars. I have an agenda. But for President Trump, since he wants a cease-fire, and for what? For two months now he’s proclaiming. And yesterday he also, this morning, he’s two weeks or days away from declaring complete victory, even uses this term. Did you know that? Complete victory against Iran.
We’re listening. We’re a bother right now in his plans. And their intimidation has worked. And yesterday hit home the essential problem, because it’s true. We bombed back. So we said, okay, we don’t accept your equation and we’re going to bomb you back. But we just bombed back in such a pareve way. We knew it was going to stop. And then Trump stops us. Who won? Forget the war. In the war over who’s the crazy one, who’s intimidating everybody? Our intimidation is defined as moral depravity and manipulation of America, and Iran’s craziness is something that you have to be frightened of and take into account and in that equation forget—
Yossi: It’s a great insight. It’s a great insight.
Donniel: This, this, this is a problem.
Yossi: I really appreciate the insight. If you look at the ruins of Gaza, you can really interpret the decision of the IDF to destroy much of Gaza in two ways. One was to get at the tunnels, at the infrastructure. And I think that that was a large part of the motive, but not the only.
So I think there was also another unspoken motive, which was deterrence. Much of Gaza’s going to look like Berlin 1945. Berlin 1945 deterred the Germans. It ended the war. And maybe the assumption among some of our strategic thinkers was, you know, the Palestinians have to understand once and for all the price of trying to destroy us. And that is whatever they do to us, they will get back tenfold.
But it didn’t work. And if the ruins of Gaza haven’t succeeded in reestablishing our deterrence, then the question is, is it possible to establish deterrence against our enemies? And I’m not asking that rhetorically. I’m asking you, Donniel, if that’s not possible, then what is possible? What do we do? What do we do with Iran?
Let’s say there’s a deal that’s made. And my greatest fear is that this current status quo will be broken by a deal. I much prefer the status quo. Let it continue, continue the economic pressure on the regime. It gets weaker by the day. But if Trump makes a deal and releases tens of billions of dollars to the regime, gives them a lifeline, that for me really is a major defeat. And so my question to you is, what do we do? How do we fight them? Do we not have any military option?
Because I can’t accept that.
Donniel: I appreciate that, and I don’t have a great answer. If you ask me, what should we do in Lebanon and in Gaza, I have lists of things that maybe I’ll get a chance to talk about today. When it comes to Iran, I always believe that we don’t have a military option alone. With the United States, it’ss like there was a tantalizing feeling that maybe we could achieve something.
But when I saw how quickly United States was deterred, and in many ways, you said this at the beginning when you were quoting, there are so many people who are happy to declare defeat because Trump’s defeat is their victory, right? It’s not even America’s anymore. It’s, Trump’s defeat is their victory. But also, unfortunately, Israel’s defeat is their victory.
You know, there’s this recent Pew survey, you know, if you wanted to be depressed, just, you know, read this survey on people’s views of Israel. And every few years they do it. We’re now, on average, amongst most of the civilized world, we are at about 60+% on average, 62% median of unfavorable views of Israel.
Yossi: Look at the 1/8 of the cup that’s full.
Donniel: That’s true. We are doing great in Kenya, Nigeria.
Yossi: There you go.
Donniel: Kenya, Nigeria, big, big stuff. India, we’re doing not too bad. But most people in India, it’s an interesting survey, 29% view Israel very unfavorably, while 34% view us either very or positively. But most Indians didn’t even answer the question because if you’d asked the average Indian, what’s your opinion of Israel? Like, say, who’s Israel? So it’s like, what’s Israel even there? But amongst our peers in Europe—
Yossi: I do think, Donniel, sorry, I, I just want to jump in on that because we got an e-mail, I haven’t shared it with you yet from a listener in India, a woman who’s been devoted to the podcast for three years. And I wrote her saying, I was so happy to hear from you because I have a deep connection to India, Sarah and I both. And she wrote back saying allow me to just chide you gently for never mentioning the tremendous support that you have in India.
Donniel: And I know we do. I mean it’s, yes, we do have it, and their prime ministers. It’s true.
Yossi: So I just wanted to put on record that there are two peoples in the world whose support we can depend on. That’s India and Iran, the people of Iran. That’s the irony, but nevertheless.
Donniel: Okay, fair enough. Fair enough. I’ll give you that.
Yossi: For the record.
Donniel: For the record, but India is significant because a billion and a half people, I can make fun of Nigeria, but, or Kenya. But like India, this is you know, a power and they are great friends. But still, but still, if you look at Canada, United States, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Greece, Italy, Germany, France, Poland, you got all of them and they didn’t even bother polling, you know, Russia, you know, all of them.
Sinwar was right. Keep the war going. Our defeat is something for them to celebrate.
So if you ask me, what can we do with Iran, I share your prayer. But there’s a difference between a prayer and a policy. I would love the Iranian people to still be able to stand up. I would love exploring any ways in which we could support them. I thought the economic boycott would be something that would be profoundly constructive. But in that way, we were better off last June. Iran was descending. Now they’re on, as the war is, now, we don’t know what the deal is going to be, but even if they give up their nuclear weapons, they are superpower.
Yossi: Not good enough. It’s not good enough anymore. There’s more—
Donniel: They’re a superpower. They’re the crazy people in the neighborhood.
Yossi: It’s not about depriving Iran of its nuclear capability anymore. It’s about bringing the regime down.
Donniel: But you, we don’t have that. It was never an American agenda. It was an Israeli agenda. Turns out there were various plans to do that, but those plans were nixed by the United States as they moved away from that plan. And America has a long history of reticence to engage in regime changes because they never seem to work, because you think you get rid of one, and then what happens, and then the chaos, etcetera, that was…
But leaving that aside, right now we don’t have a military option. You know, do we go back to, you know, every nuclear scientist gets bombed by a Mossad person? You know, that’s small. We could contain it. But if the result of this 40-day war and the deal that’s coming is the resurgence of this regime and their economic viability, and more than that, they have established themselves as the crazy people in the neighborhood. And Saudi Arabia and the Emirates and Qatar and all of them are watching.
Yossi: Well, we need a strategy and there are moves that we can make together with the United States, hopefully, and if not unilaterally, for example, arming the opposition, arming the rest of ethnic minorities in Iran. A majority of the country is actually not ethnically Persian.
Donniel: I’m with you, Yossi, but let’s agree that you can call it a strategy.
Yossi: It’s not the strategy I hoped for. Of course not.
Donniel: So then, I know this for you is the ultimate heresy, and I appreciate that. Israel and the United States went for it. It was the dream. Finally, we are going to remove this evil empire that wakes up every single day and prays for my demise and for the demise of the West. That’s not happening. But you know what? We don’t have to mourn it completely because we haven’t yet seen the deal. When the deal comes, we’ll talk about it.
And, and, but what’s heresy is for me to say, leaving aside Iran for a moment, you know, as we watch yesterday unfold and this little back and forth, what does that mean to you for Lebanon and Gaza is yesterday just sort of, you know, is this the new normal? Like, do we learn anything from this?
Yossi: I didn’t connect what happened yesterday to Lebanon and Gaza because I think that what we face there is in some sense distinct in terms of tactics than what we’re facing in Iran. There are two strategic threats from both Lebanon, Hezbollah and Hamas.
The first is the threat on our borders, having terrorists literally sitting on our doorstep and risking the possibility, as they did on October 7th, of actually crossing the doorstep. And so the first strategic goal there is to push them back from the border so that they don’t have access, physical access to our homes, that they can’t tunnel under our territory and that we have more or less achieved as a result of the post-October 7th war. And we’ve achieved it by creating de facto territorial buffers. We’ve resurrected some semblance of the old Lebanon buffer and we’ve created a new buffer in Gaza, and I think that that is going to be the new status quo, keeping them away from our homes the second.
Donniel: And that’s a dayenu. That’s a big deal.
Yossi: And that’s—it’s a big deal.
Donniel: That’s something, yes. You don’t want to belittle that. That’s a thing.
Yossi: Yeah, yeah. And that’s exactly what needed to be the outcome of October 7th. You do an October 7th, you’re going to get a buffer zone on the border. You will not sit on the border anymore.
But there’s another strategic threat, and you’ve raised this a number of times to which we have no answer. It was rockets, now it’s missiles.
Donniel: Yossi, you’re aging yourself.
Yossi: Well, it was rockets.
Donniel: And then missiles.
Yossi: And now, I know, now it’s I, I forget the English word. What’s the English?
Donniel: Drones.
Yossi: Drones, right?
Yossi: I was trying to buy time to find the English word for it. So what you have there really is a problem that so far has no solution. And you’ve said this, Donniel, and I have no answer to you on this. How deeply into Lebanon do we need to keep pushing before we’re out of missile range? And the answer is, we’ll have to take over all of Lebanon because we’re not going to be out of missile range.
Donniel: So this is why yesterday was important to me, because why did yesterday happen? Because we insisted on bombing Dahieh. Why are we bombing Dahieh? Because while we’re sitting and, you know, we were making fun of missiles in the rest of Israel, and we shouldn’t have. It’s not politically correct. But the people in the North, this is not a joking matter. The people in the North have had no life for months. So because drones are now attacking our soldiers and attacking cities in the North, we said there’s a new equation that if you bomb Kiryat Shemona, we’re going to bomb Dahieh, right? We said if our cities, we’re going to get your cities.
Now all the villages and towns on the border of Lebanon have long since been destroyed and a million refugees have been removed. And now we’re bombing in Tzur, it’s throughout, North of the Litani. We are bombing away. There’s multiple cities. We’ve created an equation.
It’s one thing if we said if you bomb in Kiryat Shemona, we’re going to bomb your cities. But we decided if you bomb in Kiryat Shemona or in any place in the North, we’re going to start bombing Dahieh. Now, why Dahieh? Dahieh is the headquarters of Hezbollah. It’s a neighborhood of Beirut that’s the stronghold of the Shiites.
Great. But we already know that if you bomb Dahieh, you’re not going to stop the drones. Yesterday happened, even though we know the warning. And I’m not saying that we had to follow the Iranian dictate, but we knew that if we bomb in Dahieh, what? Yes, I can see it. We are bombing their “command and control centers.” Do you know how many times the word “command and control center” has been mentioned when it came to Gaza and Hamas and Hezbollah?
Turns out maybe they don’t have any command and control centers or everything is a command and control center. But we can bomb from now to kingdom—all they have are command—I wonder, do they have toilets? No, they only have command and control centers. We’re going to get every command and control center.
And what you saw in the days before the war in the conversation in the cabinet is, we’re getting frustrated. The drones are coming. We can’t stop them. Our soldiers can’t go out during the daytime and the drones now develop night capacity. And every day another soldier or two was killed. Beautiful people. And our family is there and my colleagues are there and they’re sitting in bunkers and they go out in the nighttime and they know there’s no defence.
You know, when you’re going on Amazon to try to buy nets to stop—it’s like, you know, Houston, there’s a challenge here. This low technology, we don’t have a solution for yet. So then Netanyahu says it’s days away. We have it, it’s days away and we keep on hearing it.
Yossi: And as he let us know, he warned about this six years ago when he was Prime Minister for most of the last six years.
Donniel: So like, so you see the frustration. So what do we want to do? What we can’t do is nothing. So we’re going to bomb Dahieh. But what are you going to achieve by bombing Dahieh? And so part of what yesterday reminded me is this cycle of futility that we’ve allowed ourselves to enter into.
And I’ve said this beforehand, at what point is Israeli society? And here I don’t just blame Netanyahu, I blame the opposition as well. At what point are we going to put on the table other options that we want to explore? We now have a president of Lebanon who is openly declaring a willingness, not only to coexist, he’s declaring war on Hezbollah. Most, it’s verbal. I know. He doesn’t have the power.
Yossi: It’s worse than that, Donniel. It’s not that it’s verbal. It’s not that he doesn’t have the power. Iran, through Hezbollah, is sitting on him and will not let him move. There are no options. There are no political options.
Donniel: See here, my disagreement with you is—ahis is why I get frustrated, not with you per se.
Yossi: But also.
Donniel: Nah, not so. It’s okay. You know, you, I love. So I, you know, you can anger me, but you don’t frustrate me.
Really? We declare from the beginning there are no political options. You know who, what is it? Tal has this phenomenal statement. I’m not going to get it right, so help, correct me.
Yossi: Tal Becker.
Donniel: Tal Becker, our colleague. You know, who says that before something happens, it’s impossible, and then after it happens it’s seen as inevitable. But you need someone with a little vision to try to implement the inevitable, and we’re stuck in the impossible. I know that.
But instead of saying, okay let’s bomb Dahieh. Oh, the great celebration of before we captured the before fort. And you listen to the Israeli news about how this is really a symbol. This is not just going to really deter them, it’s really, really, really going to deter them. And if we bomb in Dahieh, it’s going to really, really, really, really, really deter Hezbollah.
Really? This is where, you’re still at this conversation? When are we going to get up and say, okay, there’s a president here and Lebanon is a mess. What can we do? Forget, you know, talking like, in, in Gaza. Who are the forces that we could start inviting? Where could we get up and say, we have no claim on Lebanon? All we want to do now is we want to help the Lebanese government implement its sovereignty. Who wants to? Saudi Arabia was involved. What do we do, instead? Just this perpetual bombing?
That’s what yesterday was. Yesterday was almost like theatre. It’s a theatre being played out, because we’re not putting any other options on the table, and that same theater is going to be played out now in Gaza. We had plans, we had plans, and one of the most interesting plans was 60% that we control. What is it, the yellow line or the orange line?
Yossi: In Gaza.
Donniel: In Gaza. What’s that? Forget the color of the line. There might be two colors. We were supposed to start building. We were supposed to start presenting to Gaza. It’s a choice. Where do you want to be? Do you want a future or do you want the past? The deterrence that we spoke about now, but in this environment, we can’t show that. So what does Netanyahu declare right after Trump humiliates him again? We’re going to go from 60% to 70%. Really? That’s your—what else are we going to do? And yesterday, yesterday wasn’t frightening. It was frustrating because that’s what we’re going to have. There’s somebody else who’s crazier than us, who the world is worried about their impact on their economy, and they have an ability to impact on the world in ways that we cannot. And as long as they’re crazy and unpredictable, they’re going to intimidate a world.
And all we have is still our attempt to try to be crazy and to walk around and justify it as a war of self-defense, which much of it is, but still, nobody’s buying it. Nobody’s intimidated by our craziness. They’re distancing themselves from our craziness. And that is not a plan. And then what you’re going to get is you’re going to get yesterday’s. They’re going to happen. It’s just the futility of it is what’s aggravating.
And it’s not even Netanyahu. You know, I have no expectations from him anymore. Bennett, Lieberman, Lapid, Eisenkot—stand up. But no, since I want to win the election, I have to win the election by being equally hopeless as Netanyahu is. And I’m sorry, that’s just not enough.
Yossi, your final thoughts on this day and on where we stand?
Yossi: I appreciate the options that you’re laying out about Gaza and I would make a distinction between Gaza on the one hand and Lebanon and Iran on the other. For all practical purposes, Lebanon is Iran because it’s under the control of Iran. And with Gaza, we do have options. They’re not great, but we can do something. And we should be renewing our efforts to reach out to the Palestinian Authority, to the Arab world.
The vision of implementing the Abraham Accords in Gaza and of taking Gaza as the first substantive project of the Abraham Accords has just disappeared. And that’s something. And here I very much agree with you, we should be putting that back on the table.
But I think we have to make a really clear distinction between what we can do there and what we can do in Lebanon and see.
Donniel: Could I just ask you? I know I promised you the last word, but I can’t. I’ll still let you have the last word. But why should you prejudge that there’s nothing to do. What does that do for you?
Yossi: In the same way—
Donniel: I’m not saying you shouldn’t be careful.
Yossi: I’ll tell you. No, I’ll tell you.
Donniel: I’m not saying, but like, try, like what do you know? Because—
Yossi: I’ll tell you, Donniel, because I have this deep frustration, the frustration that you feel toward, as you would describe it, the futility of our military options right now. I feel that same frustration toward the futility of diplomatic options that you hear in the international community over and over again, the same options and not recognizing the nature of the enemy that we’re facing.
And this is where my frustration comes from, Donniel. You see it in the media. I just read some appalling op-ed—I sent it to you—in today’s New York Times, which talks about Israel’s expansion. Israel is expanding in all directions. We’re changing the Middle East because we are greedy for territory. And no mention of the need for Israel to have buffers on its borders against the terror entities that were sitting there on October 6th. No mention. There’s no strategic interest. It’s all about territory. And I’m just sick of it.
Donniel: You know, if you actually read it carefully, because when you sent it to me, the impetus for the war, according to the article, was territorial. It’s like there was no October 7th. There’s no Hezbollah—nothing. I know. It is, I hear you.
Yossi: My frustration is coming from oh, you know, again, we’re going to start talking about diplomatic solutions with Iran, with Hezbollah?
Donniel: I hear you, but you know it’s—
Yossi: It’s just delaying the inevitable, and every time we delay it, it gets worse.
Donniel: But Yossi, but Yossi, sometimes when you don’t have another solution, it behooves you to try something else. And right now from yesterday, it just shows us—where are we going? So why not? Why not try? Are you game? Because if you say yes, we can go no.
Yossi: No, I don’t say yes, because—
Donniel: Okay, then I give up. I give up.
Yossi: Because it feeds, it feeds the delusions.
Donniel: It was your hands now—
Yossi: I know.
Donniel: The future.
Yossi: No, no, but wait, Donniel—
Donniel: And you didn’t even smile. You didn’t smile. You took me seriously.
Yossi: No, no. Because I’m taking the last words.
Donniel: Take it.
Yossi: There are two conclusions from our conversation and neither of them are good. The first is that we seem to have come to a dead end in our military options. And the second is that we’ve seemed to have come to a dead end in our diplomatic options, at least in relation to Iran and its Hezbollah proxy. Now, we may not agree with each other’s conclusions, but those are the two conclusions that come out of our country.
Donniel: Not at all. The one flaw, and I’ll still let you have the last word, is after two and a half years, you could say we’ve come to a conclusion with our military options, but you’re declaring an end to our political options that we haven’t even explored.
Yossi: So I’m going to take the prerogative of my last word to grant you the last word, and let’s end it on that.
Donniel: Fair enough, fair enough. And I’ll say, I don’t know.
But the last, last, last word is to wish Bob Kogan a beautiful birthday, a happy 95 and a continued long life. And as Bob says about himself, I am the luckiest person in the world. And may that luck and that health continue for many years. We are thankful to you and most importantly, we love you. So Bob, happy birthday and Yossi, it’s a pleasure to be with you.
Yossi: Always.
