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The Case For War Transcript
Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.
Donniel: American Jews are Americans. That’s the point. And when they look at this war, they don’t just think of it in terms of Israel’s interests.
Yossi: I can’t trust you as an ally on this. Then what’s the relationship worth anymore? And this notion that we all belong to the same project, maybe it’s not true. So, viscerally, deep feeling of betrayal.
Donniel: You know, we could win this war against Iran and lose America and lose North American Jews.
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’s Wednesday, March 11th. And our theme is, are we in an aimless, endless war? Today’s episode is being recorded live to supporters of the Shalom Hartman Institute. We’re especially grateful to those in the Hartman-Wellspring Family Circle and Giving Society for sustaining our work. To learn more about these opportunities, please check the links in our show notes.
It feels like a lifetime ago since last week.
Yossi: It really does. You know, I’ve said this before. I never know what day it is, what time it is.
Donniel: And my challenge is what year it is. You know, in our last podcast, it was called, if you remember, “The Case for War,” you and I focused principally on a number of the essential moral criticisms against the war. And those moral criticisms hit us very deeply in the opening days of the war. And that’s almost all we can think about. We didn’t talk about political criticisms of the war. We talk about where were people condemning this from a moral perspective.
And we focused on four. We picked four. We weren’t exhausting all the criticisms, but four, which we felt were particularly important from an Israeli perspective. One, which simply instinctively sees war as evil, which you called implied pacifism. The second is one which belittled the danger and the evil of Iran, relativizing evil. The third was an attack against the self-evident notion in Israel that this was an obligatory war in the Milchemet Mitzvah, a war of self-defense. And that argument was built around the notion that this wasn’t a preemptive strike; this was a preventative strike. And that’s illegitimate from the perspective of international law. And the fourth criticism just was focusing on the fact that nothing that Trump does could be morally legitimate, that his motivations are not ones that we could count on. And as a result, almost every war that he’s going to fight is going to be unjust. And that sort of taints a lot of the conversation.
Here in Israel, we were feeling this flow of moral criticisms. They made us feel vulnerable. They made us feel really lonely. Because when you’re in a war, you always want allies. And when you feel very strongly about the morality of this war, hearing them hit us in a very deep way.
Yossi: And they also made us feel judged, morally judged. And I think we both felt this is not the Gaza war. Don’t start pulling that.
Donniel: Right. It’s interesting, right. There was a simplicity. There was no politics.
But in today’s episode, we want to expand the discussion and talk about what are some of the political criticisms? What are the political components of the war? And we want to analyze some of that discourse, both for and against.
And just to remind people, our podcast is For Heaven’s Sake. And that means that while you and I unapologetically, we know, we have an Israeli perspective. What was our first podcast about this war called? “From the shelter,” or “from the…”
Yossi: Who remembers?
Donniel: But it was something, it was “Thoughts from the Shelter.”
Yossi: About eight months ago.
Donniel: About eight months ago. It hits us differently. But today we want to talk from an Israeli perspective, but we also want to give space for a North American and world perspective. We want to try to understand and, as always, try to respect other people’s perspective in the spirit of these and these are the words of the living God.
So for Israelis, this war is so self-evident. But part of where we’re sitting today is a deepened sense, not even morally, politically, that it’s not self-evident. Not for America and not for many American Jews.
And one of the things that I want to come back to later on, but which is almost a framing for today’s conversation. We could win this war against Iran and lose America and lose North American Jews.
Now, when it is a nuclear Iran, you’ve argued, everything is secondary. I’ll take—if I could defeat the nuclear dimension, that’s a life and death, to be or not to be. But part of what we’re thinking about and many Israelis are thinking about or I’m thinking about is what’s a greater danger? Another thousand Iranian ballistic missiles or losing our legitimacy amongst our most significant ally and allies in the world? And the answer there is not so self-evident to me.
Our conversation today, we want to build it slowly and try to peel it back a little more systematically and start with something that we took for granted last time because we were talking from the shelter. Yossi, how—both for yourself and give voice to what is so self-evident to 93% of Israelis: Why is this war perceived as a just war and believed to be an obligatory war, a milchemet mitzvah, across the political spectrum?
Yossi: I think it begins with the question of how do you measure time? When did this war begin? And for most of the world, this war began when was it? 12 days ago, two weeks ago, roughly, almost two weeks ago. For Israelis, this war began in 1979. It didn’t begin 12 days ago. It began when the Islamist revolution ceased power and one of its first actions was to shut down the Israeli embassy and to turn it over to the PLO. The first official visitor to the new Islamist regime was Yasser Arafat. The regime made it clear from day one that we are their enemy.
Donniel: And that’s way before the Oslo process.
Yossi: Oh, this was literally 1979. And Iran went overnight from being our closest ally in the Muslim world, one of our very few, Iran and Turkey, ironically, given our relationship with Turkey today, to becoming our most implacable enemy.
So we’ve had a long time to internalize Iranian enmity. And we’ve had a long time to listen carefully to what they actually say, how they say it, why they say it, how they frame this war that they began. And so we don’t feel that we began this war 12 days ago. It’s simply another phase of a war that’s been ongoing for many decades.
And why did we attack now? Because the regime was vulnerable. And the regime has lost its legitimacy among its own people after massacring anywhere from 30,000 to 40,000 of its own people in a span of two or three days. And we understood the Israeli public, I’m not even speaking now about the government and the strategic decision makers, the Israeli public understood, this is a good time to hit them. And the goal was very clear for Israelis. This is one more phase.
You know what, I’ll even put it in a different way. We didn’t even need an end goal, which is something that, well, you mentioned in your introduction, the absence of an end goal. I’m not sure that that really mattered, at least initially to the Israeli public.
Donniel: Can I just add also just that as we were watching the negotiations that had finally started, you know, the 12 Day War in June was supposed to give birth. The hope was that Iran would get a message. And then you see America and Iran sitting down and negotiating and we’re watching and you know, the feeling like what is it that you want? You want the negotiations to be successful or not successful?
Yossi: What did you want?
Donniel: See, part of it was—
Yossi: Did you want them to be successful?
Donniel: I’m embarrassed.
Yossi: You did?
Donniel: No.
Yossi: You didn’t! You have no reason to be embarrassed to me.
Donniel: Because I didn’t trust them. You see, it’s part of what you were talking about, this endless war. And as you saw, they kept on declaring, “we’re never going to give up nuclear enrichment.” And we’re sitting there and I was saying, so what? Okay. So we had a pause. It’s time to stop the pause. So I think there was both the weakness that you mentioned, and it was all the weakness that is increasing and increasing, plus, if after the 12 Day War, they were the same place, this is the Iran that we know. And so I think that also was part of it.
Yossi: Interesting. You’ve just answered your own question. You are a perfect measure of… Let’s say dove-ish, the dove-ish segment of Israeli society. And the fact that you didn’t want the negotiations to succeed says it all. It explains why 93% of Israeli Jews immediately support this.
Donniel: Because it wasn’t success. It was just, it was going to be some fictitious story.
Yossi: Exactly. It would have been another self-deception.
Donniel: A self-deception.
Yossi: So that’s… There’s your answer. There’s another element here, Donniel, which is when you listen to the criticism in America and around the world, and so much of it focuses on the person of Donald Trump. And I understand that. We can understand the unease.
Donniel: To say the least.
Yossi: To say the least, the outrage. But we don’t feel that here toward a prime minister whom we ordinarily, many of us, regard with at least as much suspicion and contempt as many Americans do toward Trump.
And the reason for that, I think, is because things work differently here. There’s no such thing as Bibi’s war. And I remember, you know, during the Gaza war, I would get calls from foreign journalists saying, “Well, how do you feel about Netanyahu’s war?” I said, “Well, first of all, this is my war. For better or for worse, this is, I signed up for this war. And just about the entire Israeli Jewish public signed up for it too.” That doesn’t happen here. You can’t have a prime minister hijacking the entire security establishment. And I’ll give you an example—
Donniel: I think actually in, in, in Gaza, both of us began to feel, not on October 7th, not in November, December, January, February, but by May, we were wondering what Smotrich and Ben Gvir were hijacking.
Yossi: We were, yes.
Donniel: And it started to feel like Bibi’s war.
Yossi: And then you even had the idea of Chief of Staff Zamir coming out publicly and challenging Netanyahu about invading Gaza city.
Donniel: That’s right. That’s right.
Yossi: Now that’s how things work here. There are brakes. B-R-A-K-E-S, not necessarily constitutional, not official brakes, but the dynamic works differently here. And we all know that.
And I’ll give you an example. This is a story that I heard from a very good source. In 2012, Netanyahu is prime minister and he makes the decision to attack the nuclear facilities in Iran. The pilots are reportedly on the runway. You know this story? 32And someone called President Obama, my source tells me it was Shimon Peres, who was the president at the time, and called Obama and said, “We have to stop this.” The head of the Mossad opposed it. And it didn’t happen. That’s how things really work here. And because we know that, because we know that there’s an unofficial system of checks and balances in the security establishment.
Donniel: We can go to war more easily.
Yossi: Yes. And the Americans don’t have that same trust.
Donniel: You know, like one of the differences between this week and last week is last week, it was the first week of the war. And we’re in the midst of our own belly buttons, our own experiences, our own mindset.
But as time has gone past, you know, and now it’s a lifetime, we’ve been speaking to our American friends more and more, where the conversation is not just them asking us, “So how are you?” You know, like the serious, “So how are you doing? How are you holding?” They already know we’re doing okay. Like, you know, the casual, it’s like this. So it’s like, so we could actually have room to ask them, “So how are you?”
And we heard from a lot, a lot of people in our last podcast. I think it was probably the most responses that we’ve ever had.
Yossi: I think so.
Donniel: And many of them, thank God, were unbelievably laudatory to both of us. And we shepped a lot of nachas for ourselves. You know, as I would say, my mother, of blessed memory, was smiling from the heavens. She was very happy. But we also heard some serious articulation of disagreements.
Yossi: Even anger and hurt.
Donniel: Fair enough. Yeah, even anger and hurt will always be there. And that’s okay. You know, that’s the nature of it. Because we weren’t trying to exhaust all criticisms of the war. But part of what we’ve been hearing, articulated by very, very thoughtful people and our colleagues, including colleagues in the Shalom Hartman Institute North America, is that the story that you told about the self-evidency of this ongoing conflict, that’s not an American perspective.
Yossi: Right.
Donniel: So we could quote the embassy in ’79 and we can quote the barracks in Beirut, the Marine barracks. And we can speak about the roadside bombs in Iraq. And, you know, there’s all these points along the way, but from an American perspective, it doesn’t feel like an endless conflict. And it doesn’t feel like Iran is at war with them. We feel, listen, all their proxies, every terrorist attack against us is funded and fueled by them. And the equipment that’s being brought in, all of Hamas, everything. So, Hezbollah, Hamas, these are our enemies.
But that’s not an American experience. And for them, it’s not a milchemet mitzvah. You know, we’re America, and we’re safe. Okay, maybe we’re not, and a case could be made against the nuclear Iran, but ostensibly, you’ve prevented that. You don’t need to go to war continuously to do that. Their missiles don’t exactly constitute an existential threat.
I do believe that America has interests in the Middle East and they have allies, not just Israel. But part of what happens with allies, and this is something that hit home in our recent iEngage conversation, our research team, is that allies, by definition, have dual loyalties. They do. If you’re my ally, my wellbeing is your concern, not because you love me and only because you care about me. I’m not talking about Mishpacha, family. Allies, you have interests. But you also have self-interests, which are separate from the interests of your allies.
And this multiple interest, dual loyalties, is part of the story. And I think part of the discomfort with this war is that our terms aren’t American terms. And you know…
Yossi: Are you speaking speaking about American generally or American Jews?
Donniel: No, but American Jews are Americans. That’s the point. American Jews are Americans. And when they look at this war, they don’t just think of it in terms of Israel’s interests, especially with all their ambivalence with Netanyahu and Netanyahu’s wars. They have an opinion. They don’t want to have another endless war, another regime change war. They grew up with those narratives and those failed narratives. And even if they didn’t vote for President Trump, the notion that America should not be the police-person of the world sits on them very deeply. And they’re looking and saying, okay, the nuclear thing I can understand. Missiles, you know, I’m an American.
And part of it, you know, in order to understand it, we have to go back to 2015, to the JCPOA, the moment when the deal was struck and Netanyahu comes to Congress and critiques President Obama, and the Jewish community said, you don’t critique my president. You thought just because I’m an ally of Israel, because I love Israel and care about the Jewish people, you think that I’m not an American? You don’t speak that way. I have American interests.
And so part of the problem is that, you know, “we are one”—we’re not one. And I’d love us to be one, but we’re not one. And the fact is, we shouldn’t be because we live in different worlds. And to demand of Americans or Canadians or Australians or British or French not to have a loyalty to their own country, which is not completely subsumed by Israel’s needs. I think that’s part of this story as well, but that leads to a question.
Yossi: Yeah, it’s a very important part of this story.
Donniel: But then how do you, Yossi, because I know you.
Yossi: You do.
Donniel: And I, you know, you’re like, you get hurt. One of the most important terms for you, I’ve learned over the years, is betrayal. You feel it. There’s this, do you believe that American Jews have to line up at this moment with Israel?
Yossi: So I will answer you emotionally and then rationally. But emotionally first, that’s how I work. And you, I think, work in the opposite way. First, you try to think, well, what do I think about this? What’s the rational approach here? Then you allow yourself to kind of feel the emotional side. That’s my sense of one of the differences in how we work. I have to vent first and indulge. And so I’m about to indulge.
Donniel: So this is, was this like a warning to people? I don’t know if you know now, on Apple, there’s all these movies now where they warn you now, it doesn’t matter what the PG-13, because by the way, those numbers don’t mean anything anymore. My wife and I went to a PG-13 movie the last week, and like, not one of my grandchildren would I want even to be remotely close, but they warn you, be careful, there’s going to be strobing lights or something? Like, this is, careful—
Yossi: So be careful, there are strobing lights ahead.
Donniel: There’s strobing lights, strobing feelings coming up.
Yossi: I understand American Jews criticizing us on the occupation. I understand the settlements. I understand the war in Gaza. I can disagree. We can have our disagreements. But on this, a regime that is officially Holocaust denying, that promises to bring another Holocaust, I can’t trust you as an ally on this. Then what’s the relationship worth anymore? And this notion that we all belong to the same project, maybe it’s not true. So viscerally deep feeling of betrayal.
Rationally, I’m hearing what you’re saying, but I want to add another dimension, which is that it works both ways. That they have their interests, we have our interests. And the dividing line between what we regard as existential interests and what they regard as existential interests, the preservation of liberal democracy in America.
And for us dealing with a Holocaust denying nuclear rising enemy, the dividing line there runs through Obama and Trump. 70% of American Jews voted for President Obama twice. If Israelis had had the right to vote, upwards of 70% would have voted against Obama. And the reverse is true with Trump as well. And each side regarded the other president as being a clear and present danger to use American terminology.
And we embraced Trump, the Israeli public, it’s not just the Israeli government, it wasn’t just Netanyahu. Israelis embraced Trump. And I know from conversations with friends in America that they saw that as a betrayal.
Donniel: But you did it anyway. But you did it.
Yossi: So this is what I’m trying to say, is that maybe we need to come to a new stage in our relationship. Maybe American Jews and Israelis need to approach each other as grownups and say, you know, objectively, we each have conflicting interests here. I understand, I understand why you feel that Trump is a threat to the liberal order in which American Jewry prospered and came of age. That is a kind of existential threat to you. I need you to at least understand why I regard this as an existential threat. And then we may have to go our separate ways. And then I don’t know—
Donniel: What does going our separate ways mean?
Yossi: I don’t know. I don’t know.
Donniel: You see here, that’s where I want to challenge you.
Yossi: Policy. Policy. In terms of policy.
Donniel: You see, because what if from an American—
Yossi: But in, no, not in terms of the conversation. We have to continue speaking.
Donniel: You have to realize the experience of most North American Jews is that they are stuffed with this on an ongoing basis.
Yossi: Stuffed with what?
Donniel: I want you to hear my narrative. And I know it violates yours. And I know you think it’s a betrayal, but you have to understand that I have to be loyal to my needs and my security needs, et cetera.
Whether state and religion, democracy, coalitions, war, occupation, for 30 years now, North American Jews have to live with a deep dissonance between what they care about and what Israelis care about. And they have to learn, yes, you know, and we say, but, you know?
So now, you’re experiencing the other side. You’re experiencing it your moment. And they’re saying, I want to tell you something: I don’t want this war. I feel that this war—and this is another dimension to it—I feel this war has a lack of clarity, a lack of objectives. It’s not winnable. I just, I understand.
Yossi: Okay. Okay. I hear you.
Donniel: And so they’re saying, and, so when you say, I feel betrayed, like it’s almost strange to me because how do you think every North American liberal Zionist, what we call the “troubled committed,” have been feeling betrayed by Israel for 30 years, for 20 years.
Yossi: The distinction that I hear—
Donniel: So they’re betrayed.
Yossi: Yes. Donniel, yes. The distinction—
Donniel: So we have to walk the fact that we have different interests, but this is boker tov. Like good morning. Of course we do.
Yossi: No, no. The distinction that I would draw from all of the examples you cited. And they’re all deep problems in the relationship and they need to be acknowledged and spoken about. There’s still a difference between a threat that one experiences as physical, as visceral, as, and I’ll use the E word existential.
Donniel: You mean the way North American Jews feel about, many of them feel about Donald Trump?
Yossi: Exactly. No, no. Yes.
Donniel: That’s the same thing.
Yossi: What I’m getting at is of all the examples that you cited, religion and state and the occupation. Those are all issues that are deep problems.
Donniel: I see. Interesting. I like your distinction.
Yossi: Trump is different.
Donniel: And so we betrayed that.
Yossi: We have betrayed their existential fears. And that’s the symmetry that I’m drawing.
Donniel: But it’s not—But then we have to be really careful. And I want to caution you because this is where, like, when you feel betrayed, you use the term that we have to go our separate ways. And then you, you pull it back.
Yossi: Yes, I pulled it back.
Donniel: You pull it back.
Yossi: Yes, yes.
Donniel: But you don’t feel it.
Yossi: No, no.
Donniel: Emotionally, emotionally. I know you. I know.
Yossi: Donniel, if I can’t depend on you for this, then okay. But they turn around and say, now, and this is the first—
Donniel: But it doesn’t mean we’re going our separate ways. It means that we have to understand that sometimes some of the things that we care most deeply about, like if they felt, and here, like, oh, channel my colleague, Yehuda, just what I feel he would say, even though I don’t know if he says these exact words, a bigger lover of Israel, committed to Israel, you’re not going to find. You’re just not going to find.
But his deepest sense is that there are moments when as an American, I have to give expression to my Americanness. If I felt that this decision would bring about the destruction of Israel, I would step back. But since I don’t, therefore I could allow my Americanness. And since I don’t believe—
Yossi: So let me ask you a question, Donniel. I hear you, but does each side of this relationship have a responsibility to listen especially carefully to the other side’s concerns when it is virtually wall to wall consensus?
Donniel: But here—that’s a great question. I don’t have an answer. I don’t have an answer. It’s not a self-evident—it’s not, because it’s a hard question.
Yossi: There were American Jewish organizations—
Donniel: But where there’s a lot of suspicion— I’m not worried about the American—
Yossi: There the American Jewish organizations that on day one already issued their statement, “we’re against this war.”
Donniel: I’m not worried about those.
Yossi: No ambivalence, no questioning.
Donniel: I appreciate that.
Yossi: Should we speak to our Israeli colleagues?
Donniel: But you have to realize we’ve lost a lot of credibility in Israel. You have to realize there’s a sense that in Israel, war is really politics by another means. It’s just, we’re just doing it. It’s like, it’s what we do. They don’t trust it’s on Yahoo. We’ve never attempted political solutions for things. Everything is existential all the time.
Yossi: We haven’t attempted political solutions in recent years.
Donniel: In recent years, for 20 years, almost a generation.
Yossi: Well, since Olmert, Olmert in 2009. So it’s almost 20 years.
Donniel: We’re getting up there.
Yossi: Missing Ehud Olmert. I never thought I’d say that.
Donniel: Missing Ehud Olmert. So if it was that this is truly, Israel’s about to be wiped out, then I hear you. But this notion that I have to hear you and hear you better and listen to me first, they’re hearing.
And I think part of what we have to understand is despite the fact that we’re in the shelters and despite the fact that 93% of us think this is self-evident war of self-defense, because it’s an ongoing perpetual war. And in a war of self-defense, one of the most essential things you have to ask yourself is that when there is a moment to win, you jump. And when the consequences could be horrific, you preempt the enemy’s ability to harm you. These are all self-evident.
But they know that. And I think part of what we’re going to have to do in a mature relationship is get rid of the word betrayal. It’s like, you see, I’m sure you have it with your kids. You know, I have the best kids in the universe. I understand that. But you know, what we want from our kids, that’s part of growing up. They have their interests, their needs, their time schedules, things they have to do. And I think the word betrayal might be a word that we…
Yossi: Donniel, children don’t betray parents, spouses do.
Donniel: Parents betray kids.
Yossi: Parents can betray kids.
Donniel: But kids can betray parents too.
Yossi: Eh, it’s a different move. It’s a different move. Spouses betray, and I think that’s a better comparison in our relationship with American Jews.
Donniel: Interesting.
Yossi: They’re not our parents and not our children.
Donniel: But the only difference is that a spouse, when you’re pursuing your own interests, it’s not betraying. Your betrayal in a spousal relationship is when you have an affair. Dual loyalty is inherent. We as Israelis…
Yossi: Which means an affair is built into the relationship.
Donniel: That’s, so, it may be that the marriage relationship is not the right one. Maybe it’s a different one, the family relationship, but maybe spouses is limited. Let me move this forward to another dimension now.
We started to talk about the way North American Jews or Americans—We all hear the criticisms. And as we listen, you watch the news and I’m reading these huge amounts of websites and I’m analyzing the tone, like the Wall Street Journal tone. What are you talking about when you’re talking about, you know, the oil prices, or the school that’s being bombed or the discourse? Like, where are you standing? The stock market, like, the world order is changing. All these various types of news reports. Iran has discovered America’s strategic interest. You’re looking and trying to see what is the agenda behind each one of these articles.
And part of what the overarching sense is that since nobody wants a four-year war and nobody wants boots on the ground, and it’s not self-evident, at least, doesn’t seem that the Iranian regime is going to wave the white flag that Donald Trump asked for last week, Yossi, for you, what is, is there, do you have an endgame that would qualify as dayenu for you that, okay, this was a justified war, this was a milchemet mitzvah? I explain why I’m in? When does it end for Yossi?
Yossi: Yeah, I have very modest expectations for this war. For me, the endgame is regime change, nothing less.
Donnie: Oh, boy.
Yossi: Nothing less. And it’s going to take time, I understand that. And in the meantime, we need to continue degrading their capabilities, their military capabilities, their nuclear program as much as possible. We have a window now, America is with us, for now. And every day that we’re able to continue dominating the skies.
Donniel: So when does it end?
Yossi: It ends basically—
Donniel: Or is it generations from now?
Yossi: It ends when Trump tells us it’s over.
Donniel: But then it’s not over.
Yossi: And it’s not over, of course not.
Donniel: So would you keep on bombing?
Yossi: Israel unilaterally bombing? I think we’re probably going to shift into a war of attrition. I think they’re going to hit, not necessarily with missiles, they’re not going to keep hitting us with missiles, they’re going to move to terrorism.
Donniel: Okay, but that’s what they’ve been doing all along.
Yossi: I think we’re going to see an intensification. And for me, the decisive turn will be when significant parts of the military start to defect. Now, you know, I pay close attention to Iranian expat media. And there are persistent reports of, I don’t want to call it defections, but abandonment of their posts. Many, many soldiers, not of the highest echelon, but many of the rank and file are apparently quitting. And we’re going to see more and more chaos in the regime, more and more desperation. And this has to play out ultimately on the streets in Iran.
Donniel: But when do you stop? See, I understand what you want. Everybody wants that.
Yossi: When do I stop the fighting?
Donniel: Yeah.
Yossi: I’m not asking myself that question right now.
Donniel: Interesting. You know, that scares the living daylights out of a lot of people.
Yossi: It, I, I… It does not—I see every day as an opportunity to maximize.
Donniel: See here, I’m a little different than you here. Can I just go on the record about my emotions and what were the words?
Yossi: First comes the rational approach.
Donniel: See, by me, they actually coexist. I don’t allow either to dominate.
Yossi: Oh, that’s interesting.
Donniel: At least that’s my own self-perception. Whether it’s true or not, who cares? But that’s the story I tell about myself and I’m sticking with it. I don’t just hear—it’s like they…
Yossi: And so there’s a—
Donniel: They’re constantly talking. They’re not struggling with each other.
Yossi: There’s a conversation.
Donniel: There’s a conversation. They’re allies.
Yossi: You see, my emotions in the initial stage are in no mood to talk to anybody.
Donniel: I never allow my emotions to have total control. There’s a conversation and there’s a story. See, it doesn’t bother me that this war didn’t have a clear endgame when we started. And when I call this a melechemet mitzvah, I very much—an obligatory just war—I very much relate to the reasons that you offered. I want to win. Missiles and nuclear weapons are so dangerous, I am going to preempt— years if I have to—I will constantly preempt, call it a preventative. It’s not preventative. It’s just an ongoing struggle because part of the mitzvah—
Yossi: That’s a very good way to describe this war. It’s an ongoing preemptive war.
Donniel: Part of the mitzvah is to win. A melchemet mitzvah, an obligatory war is because I have a right to live and self-defense is my right to live. And therefore, the fact that we didn’t have a clear exit strategy, I think most wars don’t have a clear exit strategy.
I think wars begin either sometimes when somebody attacks you, like on October 7th, and you wish you had done something preventative beforehand. When you’re surprised and you get punched, and then after you’re punched, what did Tyson speak about how every plan changes the minute you get punched in the face? When they punch you first, all your plans and then they’re scrambling, you’re behind, your ability to live is seriously hindered when someone attacks you first. So you attack first. Do you have a clear idea for the exit? No. You do it either because an attack is imminent or because, as you said, there’s an opportunity and that maybe I could increase my possibilities to achieve something, you know, degrade it a little more, all of the above.
I believe that this notion that there’s always clear strategies of exit, I haven’t seen, at least in my experience, not in the wars that I fought. I’m talking, my experience as an Israeli, which we’ve lived with a lot of wars in our lifetime. I haven’t seen any war which ever had a clear exit strategy. It’s like, it evolves. There’s something roaming and rolling, and what might seem clear to me last week, by this week now, and I sense this and I want to know if you sense it as well.
A lot of Israelis are, as we hear, Israel’s bombing again in Tehran. They’re not telling us everything that they’re doing, but when we’re bombing again in Tehran and again in Tehran, at some point you ask, okay, we degrade it. If we’re going to fight for another week, how much more are we going to degrade their abilities? Nuclear—that has to have a complete win. Either we get the material out—
Yossi: Which could only be done with boots on the ground.
Donniel: Or you bury it. You just bomb the crap out of it. Whatever it is, that has to be gone. But once that’s gone, here, this is the experience of an Israeli. Today, one newspaper says, Israel has already destroyed 85% of their missile capacity and within days, not two days, but days we’re going to reach 95%. Two hours later, a different newspaper reports, they’ve lost 60% of their launcher capacities. 30%, we and the Americans destroyed, 30% were not functioning, and there’s still another 30% left with another 1,500 missiles.
So you look at this and you say, gevalt, like, you know, what are we going to do here?
And at some point you ask, and I want to go back and give President Trump credit. At one point he said in the 12-day war, the military did whatever it could do. Now we might have, like you have, aspirations for regime change, and I don’t think the war with Iran will ever end unless there’s regime change. And somewhere along the line, all those statistics that only 10% of the Iranian population support the regime or whatever it might be, at the end of the day, they’re going to have to come and do what they need to do.
Now, whether this, sanctions, weakens, it’s going to be in their hands. But at some point, and I think we’re getting closer already, Yossi, as every day this war continues, we get three more missile launchers and we lose 5% more of North American Jews and North Americans in general. So some of—
Yossi: Okay. Okay. Here’s where I disagree with you, Donniel. What is the strategic goal of this war? If we define the Israeli goal, and you and I agree on this, is eventual regime change. This war is never going to end until there is regime change. There’s no compromise, there’s no negotiations possible with this regime from our perspective. It might look different from the American perspective.
So if that’s the case, then there’s a third tactical aim of this war. You mentioned two: degrading or destroying their nuclear capacity and significantly degrading their missile capacity. There’s a third element here, if we’re looking toward regime change. And that is degrading the ability of the regime to suppress demonstrations in the streets.
Donniel: How do you do that, Yossi?
Yossi: That means seriously targeting the revolutionary guard bases, the besieged, the centers of—
Donniel: I know, we’ve been doing that. They have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of soldiers and…
Yossi: No, it’s not about killing the soldiers. It’s about—
Donniel: The leadership, they’re all high.
Yossi: And it’s about creating chaos.
Donniel:
But at some point, I appreciate that. I appreciate it. You might want to go, our audience, Walter Russell Mead has a phenomenal article in the Wall Street Journal a couple of days ago. And Dan Senor had a wonderful interview with him in which he outlined all the various scenarios of—what will be defeat? And here’s the clear, what’s defeat and what’s absolute victory?
Absolute victory, everybody knows. The jackpot, regime change. But everybody knows we’re not going to achieve that. That’s not going to be achieved by continuing the air campaign for another three years. And we don’t have three with the discourse that you hear in the United States. It’s just, we read statistics. This is the least supported war in the history of the United States military campaigns since World War II. The lowest support amongst all—So we got to be careful here. So that—
Yossi: Lower than Vietnam?
Donniel: Lower than Vietnam. The lowest. It’s the lowest, the lowest of every war, even Grenada, which constituted such a phenomenal existential danger to America ranks above this war, which is quite scary.
And even Fox News is reporting on this. They’re splitting it between the Democrats and the Republicans and their statistics. Other polls are 41%. Fox speaks about 50%. And those are like, you know, everybody’s shaving a little bit. But, let’s say, that would be great. That’s an act of God. That’s like the messiah comes. The worst is just to stop, period. Now, okay, I hope you got the message. And now, like the 12-day war, pick, like, you know, God tells the Jewish people, pick, I’m putting before you life or death. Pick—we gave you Iranians, and they know that America’s not going to do it again. So pick. That’s the worst.
So now everybody’s trying to find a little thing in the middle. So Walter Russell Mead speaks about securing the Straits of Hormuz. Like you need to have some tangible victory, something. So, but we’re looking for it.
And I feel that part in Israel is like, you know, our superior minister of defense. “There’s no time limits to this.” Really? And people are realizing, our life is upended. Our life is put on hold. Our kids aren’t in school. The economy’s in shambles. The North is suffering beyond. There is a time clock. There has to be some notion that if you fight another day, you’re achieving something a little more than continuing to degrade. It needs a qualitative, not a quantitative.
And part of me is wondering whether we’ve achieved most of the qualitative. There might be a couple of more days. And then, if we have some qualitative stuff, like you got to do it now. And when I watch the American pictures of destroying the Navy, you know, there’s different navies, you know, they have their big ships and their frigates and all the above. And then when I start to see them blowing up, what do they call those little boats with an engine on them?
Yossi: Right. Speedboat.
Donniel: Speedboats, are like, everything. It’s like what constitutes the Iranian Navy? Somewhere along the line, that question’s going to come. So I think in Israel, it’s starting to be asked and America’s asked. And if we don’t answer it with some clear explanation, like Walter Russell Mead said, you didn’t explain why you went to war, but you need to find the right exit point for something.
Yossi: Yeah. Okay. But I think that to a large extent, this part of our conversation is theoretical because it’s going to be decided by Trump. And just as the 12 Day War abruptly ended when Trump decided he’d had enough, and just as the Gaza war ended when Trump decided it was enough—
Yossi: But we’re talking about how we feel. So then let’s end with, so Yossi, with all of this, you know, this podcast is a little long. We’ll just bring it to a close. So how do you feel? Now, when all, we’ve done all this analysis—
Donniel: This is the strange thing.
Donniel: I don’t know if it’s Bibi’s war and I don’t know if it’s Trump’s; this is definitely Yossi Klein Halevi’s war.
Yossi: You know, you know, it’s, we’re living such a strange existence because here we are sitting analyzing the wars of I don’t know where, we’re sitting in a studio somewhere in Pennsylvania. And when this is over, we’re going to go home and go back into our surreal lives of being awake in the middle of the night. And, you know, yesterday my wife, Sarah and I went for a walk and we live right near the Jerusalem forest. And we said, what could happen?
Donniel: Yossi, you’re supposed to call me before you make these choices.
Yossi: What could happen? You’re the last person I want to call because I know exactly what you’d say. And so we were so longing for the forest. So let’s go. We’ll make it a short walk. So no sooner are we in the forest when there’s a siren. And then we hear an extraordinarily loud boom and we look up and there it is. And we see the missile exploding.
Donniel: The iron dome took it down. The arrow.
Yossi: Yes. The iron dome took it down. The arrow. And it was an extraordinary thing. The sky turns orange and there we are in the forest.
Donniel: Because that one hit right above Jerusalem. That one, that one was right above your head.
Yossi: It was right above us. And so what do you do? So Sarah and I say, well, should we hold our heads? So stupidly, we’re sitting in the forest with our hands on our heads. And we say, you know—
Donniel: You’re supposed to lie down. You know that? The inner Donniel voice wasn’t there like, what’s going on here, Yossi?
Yossi: We leaned against—
Donniel: You meditated. Okay. I got you. You’re aggravating me now.
Yossi: We leaned against an earth wall. It was just this reminder of the strangeness of our lives. And you know, this is the first war where Jerusalem is also being targeted. Not anywhere near as much as Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv is still the front line, but we’re no longer immune.
Donniel: It’s like when terrorists attacked, Jerusalem was the front line.
Yossi: That’s right. That’s right. And every part of the country had its own particular threat. You know, the north and the south, was Katyushas and Qassams. And now suddenly the threats are converging and it’s very disorienting.
Donniel: You know, while you were taking the walk that you shouldn’t have taken, I was at Hadassah with Adina taking an MRI. And I was actually in the middle of the MRI when your missile blew up, they actually pulled us all out of, they pulled us out of the MRI, and we all go. Everybody’s quite calm, because it’s a couple floors down, but we all walk into the shelter and we’re sitting there. It’s like all your shelter friends.
Yossi: You could have stayed inside the MRI and have an additional protection.
Donniel: But it’s interesting that, you know, you get this feeling. I had this a couple of times. How do you say, nizdamen? There’s a word in Hebrew of something that just, it just happens. It’s not planned. It’s just happened. These shelters that you just happened upon. And then you have your shelter friends and you have your shelter conversations.
And anyway, I don’t know, Yossi, if this is, I sure—it didn’t start as an aimless war. Israelis never felt it was aimless. And it is endless until there is regime change, but there might be longer stops. And the difference between us Israelis and North Americans and people around the world is to understand that we have very different perspectives on it and how we make room for all of that in our broader discourse, in our frame of mind. And as you’re saying, who knows, in Israel, the ground is beginning to shift a little bit, but we still have a hope.
But we are in an endless war, but the world can’t be in our endless war. Maybe that’s part of the loneliness of what we have. Hopefully our endless war is not aimless, but that’s already a prayer. And maybe not all of that is in our hands.
Yossi, it’s a true joy to be with you.
Yossi: It’s great. Great to be with you.
Donniel: Really, really, I appreciate you. I appreciate you.
Yossi: That’s very mutual, Donniel. Thank you.
Donniel: Thank you.
