The Conflict in the Middle East Is About One Thing: Iran.
Journalist Haviv Rettig Gur joins Bari Weiss on Honestly as the war between Israel and Hezbollah heats up.
By Bari Weiss
On Saturday afternoon, a Hezbollah rocket fired from southern Lebanon struck a soccer field in the village of Majdal Shams in Israel’s north, killing 12 children.
Mourners surrounded the coffins of people killed in the Golan Heights by a rocket strike from Lebanon on July 27. (Photo by Jalaa MAREY / AFP via Getty Images)
On Saturday afternoon, a Hezbollah rocket fired from southern Lebanon struck a soccer field in the village of Majdal Shams in Israel’s north, killing 12 children.
For the last 10 months, many have warned that Israel is on the brink of a major war with Hezbollah, the Iranian proxy terror group that controls southern Lebanon. But the truth is that Hezbollah has been fighting—and winning—in Israel’s north since October 8. Since that time, Hezbollah has essentially redrawn the northern border of Israel by pummeling the border towns daily with rockets, leaving 225 square miles unlivable for Israelis and displacing around 80,000 Israeli citizens.
Israel—pounded by Iranian proxies from all directions—now faces one of the most perilous moments in recent history. The prospect of an all-out war with Hezbollah, which could very well spread to a larger, more dangerous regional war—perhaps directly with Iran—seems closer than ever.
What will Israel do? Will Israel choose to confront Hezbollah, or will it respond in a more limited way to avoid the regional escalation that the Americans so fear? How does U.S. policy, and the upcoming presidential election, influence Israel’s strategic calculation? Is Kamala Harris equipped to bring calm to the region? Or are Israelis just waiting for Trump to return to office? Is America’s current policy—containment of Iran—backfiring and inadvertently creating a regional crisis? Who will bring more calm: Kamala Harris or Donald Trump? Most importantly, should we be thinking about the war with Gaza and the war with Hezbollah as discrete fights, or are they all part of a broader war that’s already underway between Israel and Iran?
Addressing those questions today is Haviv Rettig Gur. Haviv is a journalist and writer for The Times of Israel, and he is one of the most important and insightful thinkers of our time on Israel and the Middle East.
I sat down to record this conversation with Haviv on Monday. The 24 hours since then have brought major news. On Tuesday evening Israel time, the IDF conducted a targeted airstrike in Beirut against the Hezbollah commander it says is responsible for the murder of the 12 children in Majdal Shams. The commander, Fuad Shukr, is reported to have been third in command of Hezbollah. What this means for rising tensions and the potential for all-out war is still uncertain. But in the minutes after the IDF confirmed the strike, Israel’s Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant, tweeted “Hezbollah crossed the red line.”
Listen to my conversation with Haviv click below, or scroll down for an edited transcript:
A Middle East on the Brink
The Free Press
On the devastating July 27 attack:
Bari Weiss: There’s a war that has been largely ignored by the world outside of the Middle East, the war between Hezbollah in Lebanon and Israel. That war took a dramatic and horrible turn this past Saturday. And I want you to tell us what happened.
Haviv Rettig Gur: There was a group of kids playing soccer in an elementary school league that had become very popular among Druze youngsters on the Golan Heights—and they were having a game. And then the rocket exploded right in the middle of them. There were 12 kids killed. Two dozen or so injured. Some severely maimed. And this happened to a community that really is in between all the many different players.
BW: I think a lot of people who hear the word Druze will wonder, what is that? So let’s explain for a brief moment who the Druze are. Are they Arab, Muslim, or Israeli? Who were the people on that soccer field?
HRG: The Druze are historically a religious offshoot from Islam. They have a religious tradition similar in its conception of theology to Kabbalah in Judaism. But the religion was made secret early on, because of oppression in Muslim lands. The Druze have a religious obligation to be loyal to the state that rules where they live. So in Israel the Druze are some of the most loyal soldiers of the IDF. They have reached the second highest rank in the IDF. There’s currently a Druze general serving as a Major General. And in the Golan Heights, because the Golan was captured in 1967 from Syria, the Druze there started out still loyal to the Assad regime. But younger people are feeling more Israeli after the Syrian civil war that began in 2011 shattered the country. Also, Israel helped protect the Druze of southern Syria in the Syrian civil war. So there’s a growing desire among Druze in Israel to be Israeli.
There are probably 10 or 11 villages along the northern border that have to be rebuilt. They’re simply devastated. And now Hezbollah has massacred children. And we have to show the Druze that we respect them. We Jews have that responsibility to respect them as much as ourselves. Now, I think the general feeling in Israel is that there has to be a serious Israeli response.
How the war in the north has been simmering for ten months:
BW: I don’t think many people understand that Hezbollah is an Iranian proxy group that has successfully redrawn the border of Israel at its north. Which is really astonishing. So how have they done that? Basic table stakes here. What does the war in Israel’s north look like? And what has been the fallout from that?
HRG: On October 8, Hezbollah started firing rockets at northern Israel. And those rocket barrages never stop. They have been going for almost 10 months. They’re always calculated and modulated to be less than what any Israeli response would be. Hezbollah received an order from Iran: exact as much cost as you can from Israel without being destroyed. Iran does not want Hezbollah destroyed. The reason Iran has spent billions upon billions for decades building Hezbollah into the formidable force it is today is so that in a future Iran-Israel war, Hezbollah can open another front against Israel and help save Iran.
BW: What’s happened to the people that live in these towns along Israel’s northern border?
HRG: Everybody within five kilometers was ordered by the Israeli army to leave the area. Between 60,000 and 80,000 people. Several months ago, the state admitted it has lost track of most of them. It doesn’t actually know where most of them are. They went wherever they could. At the beginning, the state took these people out of their homes and paid for them to stay in hotels. It doesn’t sound terrible. It’s terrible. Schools didn’t open, communities were displaced and taken apart. And these people have not been able to go home. While they have been gone, Hezbollah rocket barrages have destroyed sections, turning them into ghost towns on the northern border. The north is more physically devastated than the communities near the Gaza border.
On possible responses by Israel to the Hezbollah attack:
BW: After the attack on the soccer field, Netanyahu said Israel will not overlook it. Hezbollah will pay a heavy price that has not been paid before. There have been a lot of statements like this. What do you think Israel’s actually going to do? What are Israel’s options?
HRG: Everybody is watching for the Israeli response. Israel took 220 Yemeni missile attacks until one actually broke through and killed somebody in Tel Aviv. And then the Israeli response was not for that one rocket that killed someone in Tel Aviv. It was for 220 attacks. And it was a response that had a devastating effect on the main oil export terminal of the Houthi government. What Israel’s response needs to be here—it can’t be just for those kids. It has to be for the entire ten months of bombardment, of the emptying of our north, of the destroying of our towns. One thing that tells me that the Israeli response is going to be significant is that the new president of Iran had a conversation with the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and said to him that if the Israeli response is significant, if there’s a war in Lebanon, then there will be some catastrophic response against Israel—in other words, Iran is starting to swing into action to try to defend Lebanon from what is expected to be a very significant Israeli response.
How America’s de-escalation policy hinders Israel’s ability to fight:
HRG: Hezbollah has something like 150,000 rockets. There are roughly 200 villages scattered throughout the mountains of south Lebanon. Every rocket is under a home. And those 150,000 rockets are capable of setting Tel Aviv on fire. Hezbollah was built to be what Hamas is, but 10 to 15 times more dangerous. The Israeli army, and the Israeli government, the Israeli political class is looking at the war in Gaza, at how long it’s going to take to degrade Hamas and do long-term reconstruction. And they see that a lot of the Israeli reserve manpower is exhausted. I have two brothers-in-law who are in the war. One of them was gone like 200 days fighting in Gaza. They’re exhausted. So a war in Lebanon, which will be much more difficult than Gaza—Tel Aviv and cities of Israel will face rocket barrages larger than anything Gaza can produce—is something you don’t go into easily, you don’t go into quickly, you don’t go into without a few aces up your sleeve. You don’t go into without clear backing against the larger patron of Hezbollah, who will activate every asset they have in the region, meaning Iran. In other words, you don’t go into it without America. That’s the view of the Israeli leadership. And America has had one overriding priority. And that is not to allow an escalation in the region.
BW: Well, let’s dig into that for just a moment. Because winning requires escalation. So if the official strategy or insistence of the White House is no escalation, just contain the level of fighting, how can Israel win the war?
HRG: That’s exactly right. If America pressures Israel on hostage negotiations, that doesn’t bring Hamas to the table. It takes Hamas away from the table because they understand that if they wait and let Israel marinate in the American pressure, there’s some significant chance that Israel will cave to some further demand. Every time America acts in this region to lower the level of the war, the enemy looks at that and says the Americans are deeply allergic to escalation.
Hezbollah has lost something like 400 fighters, including some senior commanders, but Hezbollah doesn’t care. And certainly Hezbollah’s masters in Iran don’t care about those losses. So Hezbollah has been able to sustain this. And Israel has not had the backing of America for the larger war that would cause the kind of damage to Hezbollah and to Iran that would make them guess again.
The same exact thing is true of Yemen. Iran and Hezbollah and the Houthis of Yemen and Hamas believe that they have found a way to destroy us. And it is an analysis that is essentially based on an analysis of our government as risk averse. I think they’re right.
BW: I think the perception of Bibi in America is that he’s this warmonger. But the criticism of him in Israel is exactly the opposite. In other words, he is incapable of seeing conflicts or wars to their victorious conclusion.
HRG: He’s incapable of taking the kind of risks, the kind of decisions, and he never has been capable of doing so. He has always chosen the path of least resistance, and he’s doing it now. The Israeli army paused for a long time in Gaza because it couldn’t go into Rafah because the Biden administration was putting pressure on Netanyahu. The primary point that I’m making is that he’s just navigating political pressures he feels and not actually strategizing and thinking seriously about the future. He gives speeches as if he’s doing so, but on the ground, he does not. We have a risk-averse government, and it is restrained to the point where it can be bullied.
The tragedy of an American administration that can only see stability is that it simply cannot imagine any other interest. Iran, under the cover of America’s obsession with stability, is demolishing nations and trying to destroy us. And so we could use that American help. Not American boots on the ground, not American sacrifice, but logistical help, missile shipments, coordination. On April 14, there was this massive missile attack by Iran on Israel in response to the killing of an Iranian general. Iran launched the biggest missile attack in the history of missile attacks. And they were shot down almost in their entirety by a huge alliance of Sunni countries and Israel against Iran. The airspace of Saudi Arabia and other Sunni countries were open to Israel. Jordan actually shot down Iranian drones. All of that was made possible by America. So we need that American help.
How Israel is thinking about Kamala vs. Trump:
BW: How is Israel looking at the present state of American politics? Who does it want to win the election?
HRG: It’s an election. It’s not about Israel, and it’s not about Gaza. You want to end the Gaza war? You want to prevent a war in Lebanon? You want to end the terrible civil war in Yemen and bring the forces to the table in Yemen that have starved 85,000 children to death and devastated that country? You want to fix the Middle East? It’s about Iran and it’s only about Iran. And it will only ever be about Iran. And until you solve Iran, nations will continue to be demolished. And America has to do that.
Everything I have seen from Democrats says they cannot, will not, don’t know how. They don’t have a vocabulary of foreign policy that allows them to seriously take up that challenge.
I wish I could say that the Republicans do. Some Republicans do. Will the Republicans in power in a new Trump administration know how to do any of that? I have no idea.
But on Iran, the Democrats have failed.
There are these quotes from Obama from back in 2015 that lifting sanctions will not cause Iran to become a dominant power in the region. If there’s any power in the region that is dominant in any way today, it’s Iran. So Obama’s own predictions about his own policies have proven completely incorrect.
Everybody’s lives in the Middle East depend on ending the Iranian regime’s crusade that has so far conquered and destroyed or is in some state of demolishing four different Arab countries and wants to destroy my country and says so publicly and will not stop until somebody stops it. And if America doesn’t have a policy on that—and Democrats do not—then America is part of the problem.
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America’s Lab Rats?
By Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
Half the country thinks something has gone drastically wrong in America, to the point that it is rapidly becoming unrecognizable. Millions feel they are virtual lab rats in some grand research project conducted by entitled elites who could care less when the experiment blows up.
Consider: Our military turns over $60 billion in state-of-the-art weapons to terrorists in Kabul and then flees in disgrace?
Terrorist flags fly in place of incinerated Old Glory at the iconic Union Station in Washington as radical students and green card-holding guests deface statues with threats that “Hamas is coming” while spewing hatred toward Jews—and all with impunity?
A wide-open border with 10 million unaudited illegal immigrants?
Once beautiful downtowns resembling Nairobi or Cairo—as paralyzed mayors spend billions without a clue how to remedy the self-created disaster?
Fast food drive-ins priced as if they were near-gourmet restaurants?
In truth, this apparent rapid cultural, economic, and political upheaval is well into its third decade. The disruptions are the results of the long-term effects of globalization and the high-tech revolution that brought enormous wealth into the hands of a tiny utopian elite. Almost overnight, every American household became a consumer of cellular phones and cameras, laptop computers, social media, and Google searches.
We then entered into a virtual, soulless world of hedonism, narcissism, and the cheap, anonymous cruelty of click-bait, cancel culture, doxing, ghosting, blacklisting, and trolling. The toxic COVID lockdown and the DEI racist fixations that followed the George Floyd death only accelerated what had been an ongoing three-decade devolution.
By 2000, a former market of 300 million American consumers was widening to a globalized 7 billion shoppers—at least for those mostly on the two coasts, whose expertise and merchandising were universalized in megaprofit high-tech, finance, investment, media, law, and entertainment.
Americans of the 20th century had never quite seen anything like the mega-global celebrities from Michael Jackson to Taylor Swift, or a Bezos fortune of $170 billion, or the sorts who fly in their Gulfstream private jets to Davos, Sun Valley, and Aspen to lament the ignorance of the backward muscular classes and to plot their noblesse oblige salvation for them.
Indeed, for those reliant on muscular jobs and the production of the material essentials of life—agriculture, fuels, construction, assembly, timber, mining, and services—their livelihoods were often xeroxed abroad. Millions of their jobs were offshored or outsourced to third- and second-world countries with cheaper labor, abundant natural resources, and less overhead that made investment “wiser” and more profitable.
Anointed Americans in the “soft” or informational economy achieved levels of wealth never seen before in history. Meanwhile, Americans in the “hard” or concrete sectors saw stagnation in wages, job losses, and the erosion of middle-class life itself.
That the universities, the media, the administrative state, entertainment, high tech, and the federal government were mostly on the coasts became a geographical force multiplier of the growing economic and cultural divide—perhaps in the manner that the Civil War became not just an ideological conflict but one of definable geography as well.
Red-state and blue-state cultures followed these radical displacements in the global economy. Urban bicoastal America created an ethos and an accompanying narrative that it was blessed, rich, and all-knowing because it had been rightfully rewarded for supposedly being innately smarter, better credentialed, more worldly and—given its wealth—more moral than the losers who fell behind. The new multibillionaires reinvented the Democrat Party into a concord of the hyper-rich and subsidized poor, abandoning the now caricatured working and losing middle classes.
Indeed, a sort of atheistic, reverse-Calvinism arose. The elite left-wing, monied classes were left-wing and monied precisely because of some sort of fated reward for their obvious innate superior virtue and wisdom—even as millions fled from failing blue states to their freer and more prosperous red counterparts.
An entire moral vocabulary of condemnation followed to stigmatize those who supposedly lacked the know-how or morality to appreciate their elite benefactors—clingers, deplorables, irredeemables, hobbits, chumps, dregs, and “crazies,” to use the parlance of Barack Obama, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden. Their targets were the relics of a vanishing America who did quirky things like salute the flag, go to church, believe there were still only two sexes, honor America as always far better than the alternative, and believe they were the muscles that kept the nation fed, fueled, and housed for one more day.
The chief characteristic of the 21st century American revolution’s vast recalibrations in wealth was not just the transition from the muscular to the supposedly cerebral, but from right to left. Look at the Fortune 400. There is a pattern in the rankings—mostly progressives and rich—and the winners’ wealth is usually not created from old sources like transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, or construction.
The real multibillion-dollar fortunes in America are now in tech and investment. The hierarchies that own and manage Amazon, Apple, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Google, JPMorgan, Chase, Microsoft, or Morgan Stanley are now decidedly left-wing Democrats. That 21st century reality marked a radical change from the past. Democrats now typically vastly outraise Republicans in most national campaigns. Their philanthropic foundations dwarf those of their right-wing rivals.
Elite hard-left universities are flush with multibillion-dollar endowments in a manner unimaginable just 40 years ago. And they are no longer merely liberal but overwhelmingly woke and uncompromisingly hard left—with millions of dollars to waste on their unicorn chases of mandated equality and racist “anti-racism.” Hollywood, the media, new and old, and Wall Street are not just far wealthier than ever but far more intolerant and sanctimonious as well.
It was not just money that gave the new left-wing oligarchy such clout in the administrative state, Wall Street, tech, the media, the corporate world, and the university. It was the accompanying assurance that, unlike other Americans, the lab rats of the mostly rural or interior parts of the country were exempt. They were to be free to apply their bankrupt agendas—open borders, DEI, globalism, climate change gospels, critical legal theory, modern monetary theory, critical race theory—to distant others. They assumed correctly that they were never really to be subject to the concrete and real-life disasters arising from the implementation of their ideology.
Certainly, guilt over their largess, together with our 21st century secular update of sanctimonious New England puritanism, explain this overweening left-wing new zealotry to change the world, but largely at others’ expense. They are the descendants of Salem, who share the same superstitions and fanaticism to punish all who doubt their purity and wisdom.
So arose the idea among elites of a borderless America, where yearly 2-3 million poor and downtrodden of Latin America, and soon the world at large, could surge into a humane and progressive America—without the ossified and illiberal idea of background checks, or legal “technicalities.”
The arrivals’ abject poverty would remind the bigoted American middle classes of the need to expand their welfare state—as if a lifelong victim of the institutional oppression of Oaxaca, Mexico became a legitimate victim of white capitalist America the very moment he set foot across a now mythical border. Importing massive poverty would remind the middle classes that racism and inequality were still on the rise.
The locus classicus of this self-righteousness and contrition was emblemized when a few dozen illegal aliens were redirected toward tony Martha’s Vineyard. The locals immediately rushed to reveal to us two realities: 1) shower the illegals with food, upscale clothing, and other essentials to virtue signal their universal concern for the downtrodden; and 2) bus them out of the neighborhood as quickly as possible to where they “belonged”—either among the inner-city poor or struggling rural Hispanic communities of the American southwest.
In the abstract, open borders were what any progressive nation should aspire to; in the concrete among the architects of such idealism—not in their backyard.
Following the death of George Floyd, corporations, universities, and administrative state agencies rushed to compete to “level the playing field” by eroding meritocratic criteria such as calcified SAT tests, background checks, resumes, etc., and began hiring by race, gender, and sexual orientation.
Tens of thousands of DEI commissars and their henchmen have now spread far beyond their birthplaces in the university (where elite schools routinely restrict so-called whites [ca. 65–70 percent of the population] to 20–40 percent of incoming classes). At some Ivy League schools and their kindred elite campuses, grades are “adjusted” to ensure 60-80 percent are A’s.
Almost everything in revolutionary America has “evolved” beyond silly notions like “meritocracy” and “standards” and has instead become DEI hot-wired—from the hiring and promotion of airline pilots, selection of actors, management of the Secret Service, and the rank and file of FBI and CIA operatives to admissions to medical school, corporate boardrooms, and advertising.
In response, a dangerous underground cynicism grows commensurately. As in the old Soviet Union, so too here arises our official “truth” beside the subterranean truth that most rely on when an incompetent Secret Service hierarchy allows a shooter to take pot shots at a president’s head, or there is a sharp rise in passenger jet near misses and go-arounds, or students in mass demand exemptions from final schedules or expect amnesties when they storm campus buildings, or major corporations—like Disney, Target, Anheuser Busch, and John Deere—ostentatiously virtue signal.
In sum, we are knee-deep in an authoritarian commissariat that we do not even dare formally acknowledge. DEI, like open borders, was predicated on the idea that the good one percent who ran the country was too good to experience the trickle-down from the commissar system it imposed on others.
Ditto the top-down green revolution. We are to assume that sweaty truckers should have no problem juicing up their battery engines every 300 miles. Hispanics in Bakersfield should appreciate turning down their air conditioning when it hits 115. Lower-middle-class moms should learn the advantages of high-cost electric stoves and ovens once they are forcibly weaned off their cheap but too-hot natural gas appliances.
Meanwhile, the sales of designer Italian cooking platforms, 10,000-square-foot air-conditioned second homes (the Obamas own three), private jets, yachts, and huge limo SUVs have reached record levels. The model is John Kerryism—or the rationale that to help the uneducated, dumber, and less moral people survive global warming, the enlightened need the tools to do it. So, they must avoid messy airports, 9-hour delays due to missed connections, and the stuffy, cramped middle seat on modern commercial jets.
The idea of 100,000-200,000 legal immigrants admitted annually and meritocratically, charter schools in the inner city, beefed-up policing in our major urban areas, nationwide civic education, reemphasis on assimilation, integration, and intermarriage of the melting pot, wide use of nuclear power—all the things that might make the life of the middle class more secure, more prosperous, and more confident—are deemed corny and passé.
Again, what we got in the last quarter century was a shrill elite that subjects their Jacobin theories upon a distant other but has absolutely no intention of ever getting near the very disasters they wrought, much less suffering the collateral damage that was inevitable from their social engineering.
Or, to put it another way, they were to be our few genius white-coated researchers while we were their many expendable lab rats.
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