Yeah.

Um, so, and, you know, the, the plan to bring in, uh, Ahmadinejad, uh, to be, like, the next leader of Iran, you know, in some crazy universe could it have worked? Maybe, but, like, I think it was crazy.

Um, and I've heard the people who were behind it explain how it could've worked.

You know, if the Kurds had had full air support from the United States and Israel, then they actually could have penetrated into Tehran itself.

And if they had done that, that could have led everybody, you know, to come together, and then Ahmadinejad could have taken over.

And if they had hit the energy resources that they never hit, that would've, you know, created, you know, more falling apart among the regime.

But, like, I just don't think the regime would've quit.

So when you look at this place that Israel is at right now, is it that you look and say, "Wow, amazing opportunity, amazing potential"? Or are you concerned that this can all reignite anytime very quickly?

there's

a lot of factors here, but sort of zooming in on, I think, like the most key factors.

Basically, after Hamas has successfully invaded Israel and they're the weakest party, right? They're part of the Iranian proxy axis.

You have Iran, Hezbollah, probably the Houthis.

Hamas is the bottom.

Syrian militias may be even more, you know, threatening than Hamas.

So Hamas can beat Israel.

How long had Israel possessed those capabilities? And why did Israeli leaders decide that this was the moment to finally use them?

So the first question is like, what was the germination of this book? How did you guys decide to write this together?

For me, I started jumping into the war on October 7th.

I live in Israel.

I'm American, but I live in Israel.

And there were rockets being shot all over the place.

And we had sirens.

And I spent the first three months of the war switching from working 12 to 14 hours a day to working 18 hours a day.

And that was when President Trump, J.D. Vance, supported joining.

In Jerusalem, they were saying, why now? Why do you have to do it to us when we're in the middle of this war in 2024? And the answer they came up with was it's domestic politics at that point.

I think Eliot grabbed a lot of the nuances.

I want to sort of just emphasize a little bit of the big picture and say, By and large, the Biden administration was supportive of Israel's war and certainly compared to the rest of the world until about May 2024.

So the first round in Gaza City, the second round in San Yunis, a lot of Europeans have already turned on Israel.

The United States is still supporting them, giving them weapons without any restrictions, vetoing negative resolutions of the UN Security Council.

And the turning point is really Rafah.

We actually have two chapters about this because there was so much talk fighting and extending negotiations between the Israeli government and the Biden administration about what would happen in Rafah.

How much is this China and Russia pumping bilgin? How much of it is organic? How much of it is anti-Semitic? How much of it is something else? What is your theory of the case about how

Uh, by the way, did you feel a responsibility to report again how atrocious October 7th was? Or was that just from the point of view of what you are, a military and defense correspondent, that it was an awful mistake, there wa- there wasn't a good response by the Israeli forces, or did you want to get into the massacres and rapes, killings, and kidnappings?

W- we wanted to tell the story of the entire war.

The war started because Hamas invaded Israel on October 7th.

It started because Netanyahu failed, the military failed, the Shin Bet failed.

They all failed.

I don't...

You know, politically, people wanna put responsibility all on one side or the other side.

I mean, there's a lot there to make Israeli strategists uncomfortable.

noting that how many people have been killed? 70,000, 80,000 Palestinians?

I'm going to give a longer answer.

Yeah, there's genocide and then there's, you know, individual war crimes and then there's, you know, individual mistakes.

So somebody asked, if there was a genocide in Gaza, my answer is unequivocally no. Bret Stephens from the New York Times said it in an interview that Israel would never want to do this.

But if Israel had wanted to commit genocide, it has enough bombs, it could have bombed everybody in Gaza in a couple of weeks.

It wouldn't have tried to get all of the civilians to leave northern Gaza and move them to the south.

And then when it started to bomb the south, it wouldn't have moved them to another place.

I'm not sure whether that's a word care used ironically to block iran from getting nukes what's the outcome of this war so far when it comes to uh iran's ability to build and wage nuclear warfare

Who does the Mossad actually recruit inside Iran? who there turns and why do they turn?

I think the most important thing here in terms of like the big picture is people need to understand that Iran is a country of 90 million people where there are literally tens of millions of Kurds and Balochis and Azeris and other groups That don't really it's not just that they feel different than the regime.

It's that they basically see the regime as a different culture, a different group, almost like foreign occupiers.

And so for them to cooperate against the regime isn't even treasonous.

It's sort of in their interest.

They love to topple the regime.

They've been against the regime for decades now.

What is a great case officer? What does it look like at that level of operation against a target as hostile and against a counterintelligence that's as perceptive as Iran?

Yes.

... touched Gaza, all right? They shot from the air.

They barely invaded anything.

Even after October 7th, I'm told by basically every source on the security establishment, Netanyahu was terrified of going into Gaza.

And something changed when Netanyahu saw that the IDF was tearing Hamas's military apparatus apart.

The political apparatus is still there, but the military apparatus apart.

By summer 2024, all of the 24 Hamas battalions are taken apart.

What's your thoughts on that?