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A full transcript of this episode is available below.
The War in Iran: The End? Transcript
Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.
Yossi: Evil isn’t there, it’s here. It’s so intimate. It’s on our borders. We live with evil.
Donniel: And that’s why the whole notion of when is the war imminent or not—the war is imminent when you’re living in the presence of somebody who wants to kill you. Any opportunity to destabilize them, you’ll embrace.
Yossi: That explains a crucial difference in the mindset of Israelis and Americans in this war.
Donniel: Correct.
Yossi: Americans are not existentially threatened immediately. We are. And so for us, fighting the war has consequences and ending the war has consequences.
Donniel: The challenge for what it will mean for Israelis if the war stops now, is we know that the evil is still there.
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 Tuesday, March 24th.
Before we delve into today’s episode, I want to start by thanking our really great friends, the William Davidson Foundation, for their tremendous support of the Shalom Hartman Institute’s digital work.
Yesterday, we awoke to the news that a negotiation is possibly happening to end the war. We don’t know for sure.
Yossi: Possibly, maybe.
Donniel: Possibly, maybe. There could be a whole skit and Jon Stewart did a whole skit on it. And so I won’t even try to copy him. But there’s a conversation that it’s happening. It might be happening. It looks like it’s happening. And from the Israeli political discourse, it seems that something is happening because Israel’s a little out of balance. Little out of balance. It’s trying to figure something out. So something is going on that could lead to the potential end of this round of conflict. And we want to talk about that today.
But as we’re talking about our world changing, right upstairs, we’re here now at the Shalom Hartman Institute in our studio. And right upstairs, right now, someone else’s world is changing. There’s a wedding going on upstairs. Weddings have all been canceled. They’re running them in shelters. You can’t run them in wedding halls, because who thought that a wedding hall has to build a shelter next to it? Like that’s the prerequisite for a wedding hall.
Yossi: How careless of us.
Donniel: How careless. I know you need a kitchen. You need an outside area for the canopy. You need gardens. You need all these things. You need lighting, a sound system. Who knew that you needed also a shelter? So our wedding halls are grossly under equipped for this crazy reality with…
Yossi: For Israeli weddings.
Donniel: For Israeli weddings. But the Hartman Institute, you’re allowed to have 50 people at a wedding. And this is the third wedding this week of faculty at the Hartman Institute, whose children’s weddings were canceled. Hartman Institute, we have a shelter. We have a shelter, and right upstairs in our Beit Midrash—
Yossi: We just had to provide the rest of the wedding facilities.
Donniel: The shelter we have. So we’re the perfect shul for people to pray in now. We’re the perfect wedding hall. We’re all set and so upstairs. And as we were coming down here, the bride was running in the hallways and all excited with her friends. It was just like you almost felt that we were in her world and it was absolutely beautiful. And so let’s start with…
Yossi: It is beautiful.
Donniel: Let’s start by wishing her, Ruth Kara, the senior fellow here at the Institute, her and her whole family…
Yossi: Mazal tov, Ruth and your family.
Donniel: A huge mazal tov and a great life. And so as that new world is starting, we’re being confronted with a potential new reality for ourselves. We’ve gotten used to this reality with war. We’re walking with the United States in profound cooperation. And now there is possibly a conversation. The conversation is not about giving up on the goals of removing enrichment, removing Iran’s capability to produce nuclear weapons. It includes, at least ostensibly, handing over the famous 440 kilo of enriched uranium that are still there. It speaks about missiles. It speaks about Hormuz.
But from the negotiation, from what’s… Nobody knows anything right now. And part of the experience in Israel is we’re hearing it from different statements of President Trump, which aren’t always fully consistent and not always fully articulate.
Yossi: Fair to say.
Donniel: Fair to say. And for his advocates, that’s part of his genius strategy. And for his critics, that’s part of his flaws. But either way, whether it’s a strategy or a flaw, it’s our life, as we say here in Israel. And so Yossi, how do you feel about this news of the negotiations?
Yossi: When I was walking to the studio this afternoon, I passed an apartment that had hung out a makeshift flag that combined the Israeli and American flags into one.
Donniel: Merged them.
Yossi: Merged them.
Donniel: Not like the side by side.
Yossi: No, no, no. A seamless flag as if, you know, the old joke about Israel being the 51st state, it kind of looked like that. Or no, not even that. It was a merger of two equal countries. That’s what you felt looking at this flag.
And this moment, these last few weeks, has been the high point in the history of the American-Israeli relationship. And Israelis who have been so besieged these last two and a half years, have felt so alone, suddenly were attacking Iran together. Israeli and American pilots who, according to reports, have developed this tremendous camaraderie. The planners on both sides are sitting and working together. There’s been seamless cooperation. That flag has really taken shape in this war.
And I think that one of the reasons that we’re also nervous here is we know this is coming to an end. That in this war, we have been more or less on the same page. There have been a few blips, but on the whole, we have been fighting together as allies as if it were World War II again. And Israel is now in England’s place, and there’s total harmony. And that’s been such a relief for Israelis. And we know it’s coming to an end because we don’t have the same goals in this war. Our goal at this point is regime change. Nothing less than that will be considered by the Israeli public after three weeks of running back and forth to shelters as a victory.
And so there are several layers to this. First, there’s just this emotional angst, you know, this feeling of, we’re about to part ways with our ally. We’re going our separate ways.
But there’s also a very complicated history that we have with America during our wars. And this is something that Michael Oren, who was not only Israel’s ambassador to Washington, but actually was first a military historian. Something that Michael pointed out to me, which was that America has intervened in every one of Israel’s wars and stopped us just at the moment when we were either on the verge of victory, as we were in the Yom Kippur War, and America stopped the war, or when we wanted a little more time, in the Six-Day War, we wanted it actually to be an Eight-Day War, America said it ends now and it ended. In Lebanon, the 1982 war, after the Sabra-Shatila massacre of Palestinians, America said the invasion of Beirut ends now and it ended. And then of course the Twelve-Day War in June. We had planes on the way to Iran and Trump publicly humiliated Netanyahu and demanded that he recall the planes and of course he did.
And so there’s a pattern here. For the most part, I think that Israelis felt that American intervention led to the next war. It stopped us in the middle and didn’t allow us to finish the job. We certainly felt that way in the Yom Kippur War, although in retrospect, I think that one can justify Kissinger and Nixon because by not completely destroying the Egyptian army, Sadat preserved a measure of his self-respect, remained in power, and four years later made peace with us. So it’s a complicated picture.
And so to answer your question about how I’m feeling about the possibility of America unilaterally ending this war, because we know it’s going to be unilateral. He’s not going to care what Bibi says. It’s going to be Trump’s decision.
When you look at the pattern of America’s interventions in our wars in the past, there’s grounds for feeling uneasy. So that’s one side of it. But I feel ambivalent. And the reason I don’t feel categorically against Trump ending this war is because there are so many variables here. We don’t know how much damage we’ve inflicted on Iran.
And in a way, Donniel, it’s similar to the conversation that we had a few months ago about Gaza. When is it enough? How do we know that it’s enough? Did we destroy Hamas? It turned out it wasn’t enough. Should the war have continued now? We know that the Israeli public could not sustain this war. Can we sustain two or three months of running to shelters, sometimes a few times at night? Can the world economy sustain another month of this war? And if the economy starts to crash, we know who’s going to get blamed. So from an Israeli calculus, it’s very complicated.
Donniel: It’s really complicated.
Yossi: What’s your sense?
Donniel: I’m in a strange position right now, because I also have an ambivalence, but it comes from a different place. And I don’t trust it so much. I just came back, just landed today. I spent three nights in America.
Yossi: A Donniel Hartman trip to America.
Donniel: A Donniel Hartman trip.
Yossi: A Donniel Hartman vacation.
Donniel: I was on two rescue planes, the rescue plane taking people out of Israel, and the rescue plane taking people back to Israel.
Yossi: I love that, I love that we call the planes coming back into Israel also rescue planes.
Donniel: Also rescue planes. And it was very interesting, in my connection in Kennedy Airport, the pilot and the steward asked me, I was the first one on, and they said, “Hi, welcome. How are you, sir?” And I said, “I’m tired.” They said, “Why?” I said, “I’ve been flying now for 18 hours.” I said, “18, with all the connectings.” He said, “Where are you coming from?” And I said, “I came from Israel.” And the pilot looked, he says, “What, they’re flying?”
Yossi: This was where, from Florida to…?
Donniel: No, this is, I was in Kennedy Airport connecting going down to Florida. And he says, “What, they’re flying?” And the steward said, “Yeah, not only are they flying,” he says, “I was in Miami last week and there’s people flying to Israel.” He says like, this is like, this is the most insane thing that he could think.
Yossi: And you did something even more insane—you flew out and then you flew back.
Donniel: I flew out and I flew back and the whole thing was just, so I had my phone on so that I could hear every alert that’s in Southern Israel. You can program your phone. So anytime Adina or the kids were woken, were being bombed, so even when I was there, I was constantly listening to my phone, and right in the middle of the Friday night dinner, like every good Jew.
Yossi: So you saw.
Donniel: So I still saw and Friday was a bad day.
Yossi: We had four alerts in Jerusalem.
Donniel: Friday was a bad day. So I wasn’t completely disconnected, but as we spoke about the last time, there’s this normal that you get used to and I’m not yet used to it. Right now, literally, I just landed a few hours ago. I’m not used to it.
And I remember as I was going to the airport, the minute I was leaving the house, the first siren went off and the driver had to come into my steps. Then there was another siren on the way, but I was still in my resilient mode as we’re driving. And I’m telling him, no, continue, we, you don’t have to pull over the side. And the siren welcomed me back as I landed on my way from the airport to Jerusalem, another siren. And I didn’t feel as resilient.
Yossi: It was a bit of a shock.
Donniel: The word is not shock. Remember, I don’t have such, you know, my emotions are… I’m very—
Yossi: Unsettled. You were unsettled.
Donniel: I was aware. I was aware as I was reflecting, you remember, as I coexist with my emotional and intellectual and rational at the same time, I was aware that a siren was going on and we’re trying to plan whether we stop or not stop. And, you know… But I was aware that it’s not the same, within three days, as you land back, into this—
Yossi: Isn’t it amazing how quickly we adapt? You go away for all of three days and you would adapt to a new normal, to the American normal. And you come back and suddenly the Israeli normal seems jarring.
Donniel: See, I need a siren or two, to get me back. It’s like, I was, chas v’shalom, but I just need a little. I’ll get back. It, just, so right now, when we’re reflecting on, how do I feel about the negotiations? There’s also a lot of feelings, but one of them is, I think, if… As… I don’t know if there’s a 15 point plan, I don’t know. Nobody knows yet or some people do, but it’s neither you nor I. But if it entails the things that we care about, why not? Why not? It’s true.
Regime change is not happening, but I think part of the growing recognition both here and around the world is that regime change is not something that looks like it’s going to be imminent. It’s going to take longer and therefore bombing another day or another two days is not going to make a difference or even another month. And we’ll talk about that more maybe later on.
But, so, short of the regime change, messianic aspiration, that’s not going to happen now. Just like the Jewish statement, “we want Mashiach now,” you’re not getting him now. You’re not getting her now. Mashiach is not coming now. Come soon. The Jewish Messiah always tarries very, very slow. The Jews believe in a tarrying Messiah.
So if that’s the case, part of me, again, I’m not, I don’t feel as resilient. I feel the weight. I see the wedding upstairs and I say, let’s take this round and come to an end. The same time when you mentioned that you feel that there’s this special moment that’s unraveling this camaraderie partnership, allyship, at this moment.
And I recently heard Dan Senor speak about that America has never had an ally of this intensity since the second world war, in any of its wars, ever. But part of—we’ve been talking about this, and I also experienced it again in my travels—there is an allyship, but that allyship, on the one hand, is strong in certain places, and is very weak in other places.
And so, also, one of the advantages, you know, you hear the criticisms of the war, or you know when you’re in trouble? It’s not when you listen to Tucker Carlson and everybody’s going to argue how, you know, how much does he represent MAGA and who represents and everybody has these polls and all of the above. And it seems that the MAGA base is still for the war, Republicans are divided, Democrats are against, whatever it might be.
You know you’re in trouble when you hear comedians. When it is something to laugh at, that Israel is pushing, that this is Israel’s agenda and that really not taking seriously how significant this war is for American interests. So even though there’s a sense of this moment of allyship being unraveled, that’s an Israeli sense of allyship being unraveled. I’m not so sure that there is… that it is such a common prevalent perspective. And so I’m aware of that too in my ambivalence, and maybe I don’t want to keep on testing that.
And the final thing goes back to your point, which, it’s interesting that America always stops our wars. It says something unique about our relationship, that we’re the only country that actually listens all the time. We listen, there’s something about our independence, our independence and dependence, independence as a country and dependence on America for our existence, that America knows it and we march by their tune.
And part of me wonders whether right now for a whole plethora of reasons, we know how to end our wars. I think our wars may start for well-thought-out reasons, hopefully, most of the time, not all the time. And as I’ve said before, I don’t fault Bibi or Trump for not having an absolute, clear, worked out strategy and end game.
I think wars begin for a confluence of reasons, not always perfect and they’re not always at the right time, but they begin when you think you have a chance of making a significant difference in achieving victory. And the process of the war evolves. And what are the dangers? You might have thought about Hormuz, you might have thought about economy, but you thought it might be more manageable, and it is manageable, but it’s 10% unmanageable. Like, there’s—ot’s not a science and everybody who thinks it’s a science has no idea about the chaos of war. So I don’t fault them for that.
But I don’t know if right now, because Iran is such an existential threat for us, whether we know how to end this and take whatever it is that we achieved till the next round, because if the points are true, maybe it’s time. Maybe it’s time. So I have that ambivalence, but I’m a little questioning whether that’s also because I’m not as comfortable with the current reality. I need another four hours.
Yossi: So what if Trump decides to continue the war? Would you be upset? Would you oppose that decision? See, we’re totally dependent on him.
Donniel: You see, for me, the issue is not whether we fight another day or not. The issue is what is achieved. Could I live without regime change? I think every one of us has to live with it.
Could we live without—if we get the enriched uranium or it gets buried to such a degree, this time it gets completely obliterated. Somehow the 440 kilo, we don’t destroy their nuclear capacity. We destroy the uranium. We discovered after the 12 Day War, or everybody knew this in any event, that the issue is not whether we obliterate their current capacity. The problem is their future capacity, because once you have the intellectual capacities, you can dig new holes in the mountains. You can build new centrifuge. It’ll take time. The price goes up. So therefore we need to make the price higher. We’ve damaged their missiles. All of the above, I could live with that. It’s not whether I need to fight again.
I think there is a larger issue, and if you hear the analysis, Iran is a destabilizing force in the world, and especially for Gulf nations and Gulf states. Today there’s reports denied by Saudi Arabia that MBS is telling Trump, “Keep on fighting,” because to stop now without some control of Iran would be to leave this destabilizing evil force in power to continue to recapture it.
Yossi: It’s worse than that, because this destabilizing evil force is now wounded. It’s a wounded animal, and we’ve seen how Iran has behaved in the last couple of weeks. It’s more dangerous than ever.
Donniel: I don’t think what’s more dangerous is the fact that it’s a wounded animal. What’s more dangerous is that it’s not acting like a wounded animal, is that it could be threatened, and there are no rules. The United States threatens to destroy all of their electrical infrastructure, and their response is, okay, if you do that, we’re going to destroy everybody else’s energy resources. Really? Like Israel would say, like, a normal country would feel somehow threatened.
There’s something about Iran, which the world, I don’t know, I can’t say the world is waking up to, because I don’t know what people wake up to. I’m leaving out the world, but the reality is, and I think the Gulf states feel it. So to what extent we could hamper that, whether through war or through negotiation, that’s the issue. It’s not whether we fight again another day or not.
Yossi: The West doesn’t know not only how to deal with religious fanaticism, it doesn’t understand it. It doesn’t quite believe that it exists.
Donniel: I don’t either, by the way. Forget the world. Do you believe that after everything that they’ve suffered, they wouldn’t be open to negotiations?
Yossi: Oh, I don’t think that’s their goal at all.
Donniel: See, for me, you’re living with this insanity.
Yossi: No. No.
Donniel: From our perspective, there’s an insanity which you have to adjust. So what would it mean in the midst of all of this? There’s so many ways, and by tomorrow, everything we said could change. Could you answer this? What would it mean for Israel, with this reality, if the war would stop now?
Yossi: I’ll speak, first of all, personally. I can accept an end to the war now, provided that it’s a ceasefire. And it’s a ceasefire in which other forms of warfare continue. Economic pressure, of course, intensifies. We encourage the resistance in Iran. Maybe we’ll need to start arming certain groups. This is something that, for all we know, might be happening already now. There are rumors about that.
Donniel: I want to ask, not what you’re ready for—which is an interesting list—about what you’re prepared for.
Yossi: No, no, I’ll tell you what—
Donniel: What would it mean for Israel now? Not just for you personally, but for Israeli society, in the midst of all of this conversation, in the midst of understanding the evil and the extensibility…
Yossi: It’s also, I hear you, but it’s also related to what I think Israeli society needs to feel, or at least many people in Israel. Let’s not speak about Israeli society.
Donniel: Yeah, they’re not monolithic.
Yossi: Many Israelis who see this threat clearly need to feel that the sacrifices of the last few weeks weren’t just one more round. We need to feel that there’s some momentum in this war. And by continuing the war through other means after a ceasefire, by continuing to work for regime change, it puts the last few weeks into some kind of a bearable perspective. Because otherwise, also in six months, we’re also going to be running back and forth to shelters for God knows how long?
You know, we celebrate—and justifiably—Israeli resilience. But Israeli resilience is not inexhaustible. People are resilient when they feel that there’s a purpose to being strong, to toughing it out, toughing it out for what purpose? For just another round and another round?
And here, Netanyahu made a major mistake when he promised nitzachon muchlat, total victory, first in Gaza, then in Iran. Now, again, he’s using the same language with Hezbollah. And he can’t deliver on total victory. You’re creating, you’re building expectations in the Israeli public, which will inevitably be disappointed. And you’re—rather than bolstering resilience, you’re ending up weakening it.
Donniel: Yeah, I agree with you. And I think, though, there’s another level, which is makes it even more complicated for Israeli society. And I think Netanyahu is partially responsible, but not just. And I think since October 7th, this has been accentuated.
The reality of Israelis, as distinct from most people who live in liberal democracies, is an awareness that we are living in the presence of and alongside of something that is evil. And what is evil? Somebody who wants to kill us. And part of the reason why war is such a self-evidently acceptable part of Israeli life is not that we valorize war, and it’s not that we want to capture another kilometer somewhere.
Yossi: Some Israelis do.
Donniel: Even though, okay, you know what I mean? And so the anti—
Yossi: They happen to sit in government.
Donniel: Not even. They’re part of the government. It’s a small segment of Israeli society. And you know, and Tucker Carlson will find each one of them, you know, and find the one Chabad rabbi who speaks about his desire that the goal of the war is that we should get rid of Al-Aqsa. And that then becomes the, you know, the, literally the anti-Semitic libels.
Yossi: And it’s, you know, it’s also an expression of how since October 7th, we’ve been living under a microscope. Any statement—
Donniel: Everything.
Yossi: —gets immediately amplified and used against us.
Donniel: And our enemies. So we have some of those. But it’s not that war is something that we desire. It’s the opposite. It’s so alien. Because we pay the price. It’s not someone else who goes to war for us. It’s our kids. It’s our mothers. It’s our sisters. It’s our fathers. It’s our brothers. It is such a horrific reality. It’s not that we love it. It’s not that we’re embracing it as Sparta Nation. And yes, our whole existence is to fight. But because we know that evil is there, it forces us to see military options in a completely different manner.
Yossi: Evil isn’t there. It’s here. It’s so intimate. It’s intimate. We live with evil. And that’s on our borders. It’s 50 meters away from the northernmost homes.
Donniel: That’s correct. And that’s why the whole notion of when is the war imminent or not—the war is imminent. Like, did they punch you? You know, the notion of a just war is only after you’re attacked, when you’re living in the presence of somebody who wants to kill you, any opportunity that exists to destabilize them, you’ll embrace.
But part of the problem of what it will mean for Israel to end the war—
Yossi: But wait—
Donniel: Sorry.
Yossi: I just want to sit on that for a moment, because that explains a crucial difference in the mindset of Israelis and Americans in this war.
Donniel: Correct.
Yossi: Americans are not existentially threatened immediately. We are. And so for us, fighting the war has consequences and ending the war has consequences.
Donniel:Exactly. And that’s why the critics of the war around the world who are asking and wondering, is this imminent? Does this qualify under the international standards of a war of self-defense? In Israel, the notion of imminent changes when you experience the presence of that threat, while outside when you deny that it’s there and you don’t see that evil, then you only see it after it hits you. And if it hasn’t punched you yet, then oh, then somehow you’re the aggressor.
So, but the challenge for what it will mean for Israelis if the war stops now is we know that the evil is still there. Hamas is still there. Hezbollah is still there. And I think a major challenge in Israel will be how do we shift from using our military might to combat evil to using political processes to combat that evil? And I think the case of Gaza is a perfect example to learn vis-a-vis Iran.
Everybody knows that Hamas has reconstituted itself in Gaza. They’re in complete control over the areas that they control up to the orange line, the orange line we control from the orange line they’re in control. But because we didn’t have any political processes to accompany our military processes, we lost. So, oh, we could go back and bomb again. It’s not going to change.
So the question with Iran, the regime change was a notion that military might alone could create the transformation we want. Part of what we’re going to have to do, what will it mean for Israeli society is it’s like you almost have to—you know, you remember when there were records, you had to turn over the record?
Yossi: I don’t remember.
Donniel: You don’t remember. There was a record, there were two sides of the record.
Yossi: There’s always two sides.
Donniel: There’s like, when do you turn? How does Israeli society adjust? Because we’re not starting this process.
Yossi: Yeah, but I don’t…
Donniel: President Trump is starting this process. And again, if it doesn’t achieve our goals, I’m okay. But it’s going to be psychologically hard.
Yossi: You can have temporary negotiations for temporary arrangements, but there is no political solution. And this is where I think your analogy with Gaza doesn’t hold, because in Gaza, there were political alternatives. You bring in the PA, Palestinian Authority, may not be a great alternative, but there were political options. And that in turn might have enticed the Arab world to come into Gaza. With Iran, there are no options.
Donniel: No, but everybody knows the conversation that we’re all having with ourselves, whether it has any relation to reality or not, is that we take a victory on, forget the 15 points, on five points, four points. Iran is still economically destitute. It’s still in a horrific condition. And now the next process begins. The next process of regime change led by the Iranian people.
But that leads to the final question that I want us to talk about. Let’s say we don’t get it all. You know, there’s going to be a negotiation and complete success will be declared in theory by both President Trump and by Bibi Netanyahu, in which the war not only achieved all of its goals, it surpassed any goal that anybody could have ever imagined in the history of humankind. It was the most remarkable thing that ever happened.
But we know that that’s not the case. So who’s going to be blamed? How do they justify your own ambivalence?
Yossi: Well, there are two things.
Donniel: How is it going to get played out?
Yossi: Well, there are two opposite scenarios here. One is that they’ll try to spin this as the greatest diplomatic achievement, as you put it, in history, even prehistory. And the other is that something’s going to go wrong and they’ll look for a fall guy.
Donniel: Who are the fall guys, Yossi? Let’s put them out. Well, let’s be gender sensitive. Who are the fall people?
Yossi: Well, in this case, I think we’re looking at fall guys. For Trump, the fall guy may very well be Netanyahu.
Donniel: And what would that mean? How would that play out?
Yossi: He gave me faulty intelligence. He made certain promises, assumptions. He misled me. It’s not the same move.
Donniel: We’re already the fall person in many places, so—
Yossi: For pushing Trump into war. But it’ll be the same thing.
Donniel: It’s a variation. It’ll be a variation. So unfortunately, we could be the scapegoat.
Yossi: So that’s one thing. Yes, Netanyahu needs a scapegoat.
Donniel: And he can’t make Trump the scapegoat.
Yossi: No, no, no. He can’t do that.
Donniel: He can’t accuse Trump of stopping the war too early.
Yossi: No, no, no. That’s the asymmetry.
Donniel: That’s the Zelenskyy mistake.
Yossi: You don’t. And Netanyahu knows enough not to publicly challenge Trump. But he will look for a fall guy. And it may be the Mossad. Look, there were reports this week that Netanyahu and Trump were disappointed by the intelligence assessment that they received from the Mossad. Who leaked that? Who wanted that known? Was Netanyahu possibly preparing the ground to blame the Mossad the way that he blamed the Shabbak, the Shin Bet, for October 7th? There you had a better case. But there’s a pattern here. And there’s another—
Donniel: And before you get to that last one, on this, today it was leaked. And again, we don’t know who leaked that the Mossad before the war said regime change is possible, but it will take a year. So if you picked up, it’s not yet a public conversation.
Yossi: But the Mossad is already preparing to defend itself.
Donniel: Either—we don’t know who leaked the first and we don’t know who leaked the second. And already the White House is saying, what do you mean? Of course, Trump expected Hormuz and he didn’t expect demonstrations because Trump himself said to the Iranian people, stay in your homes right now, wait. So he wasn’t disappointed. So you could see the game being played out. Who told whom what? So they’re looking for this fall guy. Who could be the last one?
Yossi: And it’s interesting, Donniel—before I try to answer that. I think that Netanyahu and Trump have been fighting this war reasonably well. There seem to be real successes and it appears to be going more or less according to plan, whatever the plan is. Where you see their dysfunctional personality is possibly beginning to emerge is after the war. In managing the blame game, in taking credit for sure and making sure they don’t get blamed.
So who’s the final fall guy? I worry it could be the Iranian people.
Donniel: Oy. The victims.
Yossi: The victims.
Donniel: Who can’t defend themselves.
Yossi: No, exactly. And we can start hearing disappointment. We handed them a golden opportunity and they missed their historic moment. I worry about that.
And there’s something else that I worry about, Donniel, which is that if this war ends up being only about the nuclear issue and maybe the ballistic missiles and not about a murderous regime that’s massacring its people, then the Iranian people will feel betrayed. And I spend a lot of time, far too much time these days, on Iranian social media, both coming from expat sources—
Donniel: But these are all anti-regime people.
Yossi: Yes, all anti-regime.
Donniel: You’re not privy to pro-regime social media conversations.
Yossi: No, except what I hear from Tucker Carlson.
So the hope that these people have placed in Trump and Netanyahu in this war and the feeling that they had before this war began of being alone in the world, which of course is so eerily familiar to us, and how moving their gratitude has been. I can’t tell you.
I mentioned in a previous podcast that Sarah hung up on our porch, the Iranian flag and the Israeli flag. And we put this up on social media. Donniel, hundreds, maybe thousands of responses. The love, the gratitude, we can’t wait to host you in Tehran, coming from not only expats, from Iran itself. I can’t wait to travel to your beautiful country with my passport. The sense of, we have a stake in Iran that’s actually deeper than strategic interests. We have an alliance with the Iranian people, and I feel this so deeply.
And you see it in Iranian social media. I saw one drawing that’s very popular among Iranians. The first frame is King Cyrus, who is the king who allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem from the exile in Babylon.
Donniel: In the fifth century BCE. 525 BCE.
Yossi: Well, thank you, Rabbi.
Donniel: 530 BCE, or, something, someone’s gonna tell me I got the years wrong. I’m close.
Yossi: Alright, you fooled me. So, uh, the first—
Donniel: No, actually, yeah. It was, the exile was in 576, 60 years after, 516 was when we were in, BCE.
Yossi: Wallah. The first frame is King Cyrus magnanimously greeting an old Jew in a prayer shawl who’s just radiant with gratitude. The second scene is an Israeli soldier extending his arm to a beaten down Iranian. Of course it’s kitsch, but there’s something so powerful in these two peoples whose historic memories go back thousands of years, and we overlap and we share similar metaphors.And I feel that this is one of those moments where, yes, we have profound strategic interests, and that’s first. But it’s not the only consideration.
Donniel: You know what you’re saying, I resonate with it. One of, we all go to war—see, we’re not a superpower. The United States is a superpower. But the discourse of going to war, not for your own interests, but because somebody else is suffering at the hands of evil has sort of been removed from our political map. You know, World War II, the United States didn’t go in until Pearl Harbor. At what point is it in your interest, or is there a notion that there’s somebody suffering who you have to come to their aid?
Yossi: Now, it’s interesting. We’re doing it with the Druze in Syria.
Donniel: A little bit, by the way, I’ve spoken to Druze, and it’s a lot of our own, there was a lot of self-congratulatory—
Yossi: Not—oh, is that so?
Donniel: Oh, absolutely. Far more complicated than the story we want to tell.
Yossi: Well, scratch that.
Donniel: Scratch that one. Again, you can tell your own stories. And even there, there’s a lot of interest. The notion that if evil is there, somebody should not let them win. And the Iranian people, they’re like the Kurds or like the Jews. Like, who stands with you? That’s part of the story of the negotiations. Bring about a solution to our strategic needs, but not to theirs.
Yossi: But whatever happens, Donniel, I hope that Jews around the world will seek out Iranian expat organizations, will stand with the Iranians at their demonstrations the way they stood with us since October 7th. And that regardless of what happens in the war, there’s another facet to the struggle.
Donniel: You know, to what extent—this is the most naive messianic statement—your messianism, Yossi, is a messianism which looks for resolutions. My messianism is that the good will prevail. Not that we’re going to win in the world, but that moral obligations will guide us.
And part of what we’re confronting in this process now is that both of our messianic aspirations might be challenged. And we’ll have to come back and think about them. Yossi, it’s a pleasure to be with you.
Yossi: Great to be with you and wonderful to have you back in the land of the sirens.
Donniel: It’s a joy, it’s truly a joy. Thank you. Be well.
