Transcripts are lightly edited—please excuse any imperfections.
Sruli Fruchter: From 18Forty, this is 18 Questions, 40 Israeli Thinkers, and I’m your host, Sruli Fruchter. 18 Questions, 40 Israeli Thinkers thinkers is a podcast that interviews Israel’s leading voices to explore those critical questions people are having today on Zionism, the Israel-Hamas war, democracy, morality, Judaism, peace, Israel’s future, and so much more. Every week, we introduce you to fresh perspectives and challenging ideas about Israel from across the political spectrum that you won’t find anywhere else. So, if you’re the kind of person who wants to learn, understand, and dive deeper into Israel, then join us on our journey as we pose 18 pressing questions to the 40 Israeli journalists, scholars, and religious thinkers you need to hear from today.
Right now, 18 Questions, 40 Israeli Thinkers should be at our 38th Israeli thinker, and we had that interview scheduled this week, or rather, this past week, but because of the missile fire coming from Iran that has put Israelis into high alert, into bomb shelters, and to a lot more of a precautionary state, we had to postpone that interview. And I didn’t want to leave you guys with nothing, so I thought, how better than to meet the moment of where Israel is right now since its strike on Iranian nuclear facilities and military sites and military leadership, to bring you some of the voices from past guests and what they said about Israel and Iran at that time. And I want to begin with a couple of people and a couple of our past guests who spoke about the threat of Iran over a year ago, or nearly a year ago. The first comes from Efraim Inbar.
Efraim is the president of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security and the chairman for the Department of Strategy, Diplomacy, and Security at Shalem College. I believe he was our eighth Israeli thinker. And in August 2024, I asked him about how he thought Hamas viewed the outcome and aftermath of October 7th. And Efraim essentially said, as you’ll hear in a moment, that Hamas was a smaller issue than the larger threat, which was, in fact, Iran.
How do you think Hamas views the outcome and aftermath of October 7th? Was it a success in their eyes?
Efraim Inbar: The initial success of Hamas was tremendous. They caused a huge number of casualties on our side. They were successful in apprehending prisoners, hostages, and this success was resounding in the whole Arab world. I think it damaged seriously Israel’s deterrence.
So the initial stage of the war was a great success on part of Hamas. Also, the mere war is a success of Iran because it diverted attention of Israel from the main arena of conflict, which is Iran, to a secondary arena. And Iran indeed scored a huge success.
Sruli Fruchter: So I’m actually curious because it’s a really timely point from when we’re interviewing today, I think it’s August 6th.
And obviously for us in Israel, there’s a lot looming over with Iran. You mentioned before that the attention shifted from Iran to Hamas. Do you think that attention is going to shift back to Iran?
Efraim Inbar: Definitely. There is a clear need to shift the attention to Iran, particularly because it’s advancing quickly towards a nuclear bomb.
And this is an existential threat for Israel which nobody will take care of it. It’s only Israel that will take care of this threat. And therefore, we should try to end the war quickly in order to be able to focus on the main threat to the State of Israel.
Sruli Fruchter: There was a similar sentiment from Lahav Harkov, now a journalist at J Insider.
I think she was our 16th Israeli thinker. And I was asking her about Israel and Hamas’s war and whether she thought that it would end soon. And she then began speaking about how seeing what was happening in Israel as simply the Israel-Hamas war was a very limited scope of what was really going on, which was the multi-front nature of what Israel was facing, and ultimately, the biggest threat was Iran. Do you think the war will end sooner or do you think that that is something that’s been said often?
Lahav Harkov: I think that this is a multi-front war and that none of the Iranian proxies, we haven’t talked about Iran either.
None of the Iranian proxies that are attacking us are actually going to stop until like they sort of all stop together. That that’s what they say at least, and while they could be lying, it sort of makes sense to me that that’s their plan, that’s what they’ve been doing all along. So I think that it’s just going to be at like a very low intensity what’s going on in Gaza until we wrap up in Lebanon as well.
Sruli Fruchter: You mentioned Iran and I’ll tell you this, it depends sometimes when we throw in Iran, when we don’t.
And when we started the podcast, Iran wasn’t as present of things. So I guess bonus question for everyone. Do you think the Iranian threat is being properly addressed?
Lahav Harkov: I guess my question in return would be by whom, but but I it doesn’t even matter. The answer is no.
Like it doesn’t matter, not America, not Israel. Israel’s doing a little, you know, trying now.
Sruli Fruchter: Do you think they’re moving in that direction?
Lahav Harkov: It depends on what moving in that direction means, but just to go back to why I think it’s not being properly addressed is that right now, the administration thinks that it it can’t be, the they think that the Iranian nuclear threat basically can’t be eliminated and that it just needs to be sort of like dealt with.
Sruli Fruchter: The US administration.
Lahav Harkov: Yeah. They needs to be put in a box is what Anthony Blinken used to say all the time. And I think that the box needs to be blown up.
Sruli Fruchter: Put in a box and then blow the box up.
Lahav Harkov: Right, exactly. I I just think that what we’ve learned is that they’re, first of all, they’re moving very, very quickly towards a nuclear bomb. They’re very close to breakout. Now after breakout, this is the thing that people often forget.
After breakout, they then have to turn what was broken out, the nuclear material, into a bomb, and that takes some time as well. But even the most like conservative estimates are putting them at like, I don’t know, a year. It doesn’t take that long. You know, they have friends who have turned nuclear, you know, material into bombs that who could help them do that.
So I and I I just think like that’s it, like the clock is ticking, we’re five minutes to midnight, like what are you waiting for? Like the box is not holding holding them back, right? Now we have October 7th and the proxies and all these ballistic missile attacks, right? And then Biden says to Israel, take the win. Well Israel took the win in April, right? There was like some small attack, explosion in Iran, which I guess it was an important target, but still, it didn’t deter them from doing it again. It didn’t deter them from sinking all of their proxies on us over and over again. And they’re the core of the problem, right? They’re they’re the root from which all of these branches have grown.
And if you don’t nip it at the bud, then it’s just going to grow again and again and again and again. So there’s two levels to this, which is that if they have a nuclear weapon, they’re going to threaten the whole world with it, certainly the whole Western world and Israel. And then they’re going to keep attacking Israel with their proxies if we don’t address it head on. So I I don’t want a war with Iran.
I don’t want any war. But I don’t see how we in Israel can be safe if we keep trying to avoid it.
Sruli Fruchter: Yossi Klein Halevi, a journalist, political thinker, and author from the Shalom Hartman Institute, told me a similar thing in August 2024, when he was saying that ultimately Iran is the head of the snake that is coming after Israel, and that to view our situation as a manifestation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is to misunderstand fundamentally what is happening here in the Middle East. This is, he says, a regional war.
And to end a regional war, you have to go after the root cause. And to him, that was Iran. What has been Israel’s greatest success and greatest mistake in the current war against Hamas?
Yossi Klein Halevi: I think the greatest success is that the IDF is still the IDF. I think the soldiers on the whole have fought extraordinarily well.
The camaraderie at the front has been awe-inspiring. The capacity of Israeli intelligence to surprise the enemy, for example, the back-to-back assassinations or the Israeli Air Force’s preemptive strike on the missile launchers has gone some way in restoring our faith in our capacity to defend ourselves. And I think our greatest failure has been conceptual. I don’t think we should have attacked Hamas on October 8th.
I think we should have gone straight to Iran, because we keep finding ourselves in this loop where we fight the proxies of Iran instead of going to the head of the snake. And sooner or later, we are going to have to go to war directly with Iran. We will have to preempt their nuclear capacity. And what happened in in and I understand obviously why we went to war against Hamas, but we ended up expending an enormous amount of our moral capital abroad on what is essentially a side issue of the main war.
This is not the Israeli-Hamas war. It isn’t even the Israeli-Hamas-Hezbollah war. What began on October 7th is the Iranian-Israeli war. And we’re not fighting this war on our terms.
We’re fighting this war on Iran’s terms. They’re depleting us. They’ve depleted much of our military energy. You know, we we we have reservists who have been fighting since October 8th.
And they’ve been in uniform since October 8th. And this is I believe that that when we look back on this era, we will realize that the war with Hamas was only stage one, and not even the main stage. So that was, for me, that was the main mistake.
Sruli Fruchter: So just a question on that, I’m curious.
Framing this as the Israel-Iran war, and October 7th as a function or as almost a proxy in some sense of that. Does that lend change how you view this in the context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict?
Yossi Klein Halevi: Look, this has never been only the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. This has always been a regional war. And for most of Israel’s existence, that has been the Sunni-Israeli war.
With the Abraham Accords, the Sunni-Israeli war is beginning to to end. And if the Saudis come into the peace process, then we’re really looking at a historic Israeli victory in the Sunni-Israeli war. The regional aspect of this war is being replaced by a Shiite-Israeli conflict. And our war with Hamas is is a part of that war.
But I think we make a very serious mistake, and this is certainly true for much of the West. The West really sees this as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is not primarily that. And and so the way that I I see this war is the same way that I see what I hope will be an eventual peace.
We’re in a regional war, and regional wars need to be treated as through a regional solution. There is no Palestinian-Israeli solution. It will either happen in a regional in a regional context with the Abraham Accord countries, with the Saudis, or it won’t happen at all. There is no solution to be had in a bilateral Israeli-Palestinian agreement.
We know every position on the Palestinian side, they know every position on our side. The two sides are unbridgeable. But if you bring in the Sunni world, then I think things might begin to look different.
Sruli Fruchter: And in some ways, Yossi Klein Halevi was very explicit about how Israel ought to deal with this.
Yossi Klein Halevi: I’m still a hawk and I’m simultaneously a hawk and a dove. Look, I think we should we should go to war with Iran. I think we should initiate a war with Iran.
Sruli Fruchter: There was a bit of a cute analogy by Gadi Taub, the popular political commentator among Israel’s right, where he gave an analogy about how to properly understand in his view what was happening between Israel, Iran, and the other actors in the Middle East.
He used this interesting analogy of Mad Max and Star Wars and emphasized how his ultimate fear was that Israel was not going to properly recognize the financial ruin defending against Iran would bring upon it. What has been Israel’s greatest success and greatest mistake in the current war against Hamas?
Gadi Taub: I think that Israel’s success is the insistence on winning this war, and then the insistence that this war is not another chapter in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s actually chapter two or round two in the ongoing war against Iran. The first chapter was 2006 when we thought we were fighting Hezbollah, or most of us thought we were fighting only Hezbollah, but Hezbollah is a proxy of Iran.
We did not completely understand the way Iran was planning its drive to hegemony in the region. We were all focused on the nuclear threat, and therefore, Israelis, if you just got an Israeli on the street and asked them, what is the existential threat? It’s that the Iranians will use a bomb on us. But that was not their plan. The bomb or the nuclear program is just an umbrella for a very smart plan to defeat the state of Israel with conventional weapons, and primitive ones at that.
One smart analyst or two smart analysts at the Hudson Institute, my co-host on an Israel update, Mike Duran, and his colleague, Can Kasapoğlu, says that we thought the war is Star Wars and they were planning Mad Max. And Mad Max is capable of defeating Star Wars. So what they’ve been doing is they’ve been amassing an arsenal of rockets, the majority of which are primitive, of drones, the majority of which are primitive and therefore cheap, and planning a ring of fire as Qasem Soleimani put it around us, which will be able to defeat us in a war of attrition. And we got a we got a very good example of how this can work on April 13th, the night of the the first Iranian attack.
By the time this airs, it might there might be a second attack. But we intercepted along with our partners in the international coalition, almost all the rockets. The price for Israel was 1.5 billion dollars. I don’t know how much the rockets thrown at us cost, but probably just a fraction of this.
And Iran and its proxies have been amassing huge quantities of these weapons and they are capable of exhausting us mentally, militarily, but first and foremost economically. We will not be able to withstand 1.5 billion dollars of defense every night.
Sruli Fruchter: And this issue of Iran really cut between all parts of the political spectrum. Uri Zaki, a left-wing activist who was previously the chairperson of Meretz’s executive board, which was Israel’s left-wing party, and the former founding director of B’Tselem USA in 2010, also spoke in October of 2024 about his particular fears about Iran being on the verge of getting a nuclear bomb.
Is Israel properly handling the Iranian threat?
Uri Zaki: First of all, the results show that it doesn’t. And again, the the person who led us in the last 15 years or so is the person who in his rhetoric made the fight against Iran the number one issue, but under his or within his term, long, very too long term, Iran is in the verge of getting to a to a nuclear bomb and directly attacking Israel with missiles twice. Not by proxies, directly attacking. So we’re definitely not handling it right.
I believe it was a mistake by Israel to encourage the Trump administration to drop out of the the nuclear agreement. I wish that now an American administration would understand that it’s the world’s interest to militarily end the the Iranian nuclear program or at least have an agreement that makes it impossible for them to get there. We can’t afford having a North Korea-like Iran. North Korea is a huge, huge failure by America and specifically the Bush administration.
And whoever will get a nuclear Iran on its shift, it’s a major threat to world peace. Mind you, the Iranians are now part of the attack on the Ukraine. It has an access with China and and Russia. It has, of course, its all its proxies as we see now in the Middle East.
It will be a different world if Iran has a nuclear program. So, right now, it doesn’t look very well, but there are opening of understanding, I think, around the world that we need to deal with this.
Sruli Fruchter: But of course, one of the bigger questions that many people didn’t necessarily address head on was a larger understanding about why Iran is doing what it does and how to ultimately win this war. In November of 2024, Einat Wilf, a former member of Knesset and a popular political figure on Israel, Zionism, and foreign policy, tried to answer that question.
For Einat, and throughout her interview, she really spoke and tried to focus in and home in on how ideology is the root issue of so many of the conflicts and risks that Israel faces, and that that is no different in playing out what is happening between Israel and Iran. Is Israel properly handling the Iranian threat?
Einat Wilf: I’ll say this. I’m no expert on Iran’s military capabilities, where it stands. Maybe we have an opportunity now that we should make use of.
That’s not my expertise. What I think we should have emphasized is two things. The first is look at the last century of who supported Palestinianism, because Palestinianism has always been the complete and total rejection of a Jewish state. It was supported by every anti-Jewish power for the last century.
In the 30s and 40s it was the Nazis with lasting implications. People don’t realize that Hamas’s ideology is half Nazi, half Islamist. There’s been some great scholarship done on that by Jeffrey Herf and Matthias Kuntzel. You know, today it’s such an inconvenient fact that people like to pretend that Hitler and the Mufti just had lunch once, rather than acknowledge that this was an ongoing collaboration with the same goals and the same ideology.
And the Nazis were defeated. And then the Pan-Arabists turned Palestinianism into their secular ideology, literally creating the PLO. And then this this Pan-Arabists are defeated. And then the Soviets come in.
And then the Soviets are defeated in a cold war. And after a short lull of the end of history, the Iranians become the main sponsors of Palestinianism. So the good news in all of that is I can say with a fairly high level of confidence that the mullah and Ayatollah regime will find itself on the same dustbin of history as the Nazis, the Pan-Arabists, and the Soviets. Hopefully in a cold war, that would be the better way for that to happen.
But and it’s I’m not making some religious argument here. It’s a sociological one. Societies that became obsessed with anti-Zionism, which is again, merely a mark and a respectable mask for antisemitism, are always failed societies. Anti-Zionism, to use the language of the incoming president, is the ideology of losers.
It’s ideology of societies that do not solve problems, but just try to blame the Jews for the problems. So I think it’s fairly safe to say that this will be the outcome. I hope it will be in a cold war. My deep concern is how much damage they will cause to the Jews before they head to the dustbin of history, because the Nazis, the Pan-Arabists, the Soviets, they caused a lot of damage before they were gone.
And the question whether the Iranians are past the peak of the damage or before. And I think that and I think that’s key to what we should have emphasized. We should have emphasized the nature of the regime as the heir to the Nazis, the Pan-Arabists, the Soviets. We should have emphasized, you know, people talk about the Israeli-Iran conflict, as if there’s a conflict there.
There’s no conflict. Iran’s position is death to Israel. That’s not a negotiable demand. There’s no conflict here about three islands that, you know, who who owns them, you know, an oil well.
No. Their view is death to Israel. It’s not a negotiable demand. So the conflict is us trying to stay alive.
And I think that’s what we should have emphasized more, that the problem here too is the ideology.
Sruli Fruchter: I found this particularly interesting to think about in the context of Haviv Rettig Gur’s interview in September of 2024. Haviv is a super popular journalist and political commentator who is working with Times of Israel and also somewhat independent, and I was asking him about whether he thinks that the Western media covers the Israel-Hamas war fairly. And he then went on to talk about how the lack of curiosity among journalists in his view skewed how they reported on and understood what was happening in the region.
He shared a really fascinating anecdote with a journalist who would not ask themselves why Iran was going after Israel. And for Haviv, that was very, very telling. Do you think Western media covers the Israel-Hamas war fairly?
Haviv Rettig Gur: It’s a complicated question. I don’t I don’t know what fairly means.
If an if a reporter for the Washington Post or New York Times or I don’t know what, Chicago Tribune, shows up in Israel, and their automatic take is anti-Israel, that’s not necessarily unfair. And it’s not unfair because there are thousands of dead children in Gaza. In other words, they could look at this situation, they could see the disparity in power between Gaza and Israel. The Israelis feel vulnerable in the face of a vast ring of proxies of Iran, and they know Iran is funding Hamas and so they feel vulnerable and small and weak compared to the enemy.
But Palestinian, certainly Gazans feel that weakness compared to powerful Israel. Um, and they could look at that disparity and they could look at the civilian toll in Gaza and they could say, my first duty as a journalist is to make demands of the Israelis. And that’s fair. That’s journalism.
My concern isn’t that it isn’t fair. My concern is that it’s profoundly ignorant. And it’s it’s not just ignorant, it’s uninterested in ending its ignorance. So you will you will peruse the pages of the Western press, watch the television interviews, and you will not really understand.
You will never really discover why mentally healthy people in Hamas, not sociopaths, not psychopaths, a lot of people think there is some sociopathy or psychopathy in Sinwar himself, but Sinwar alone can’t couldn’t have destroyed Gaza and couldn’t have carried out October 7. Why they do what they do? Why is Hamas willing to destroy Gaza? Question I actually asked a journalist from the United States, when I was berating them about their lack of curiosity was, Iran has no border with Israel. It has no interests in Israel. Why is it spending a vast percentage of its GDP? Why is it losing so much, incurring so many sanctions, spending so many billions it doesn’t have on destroying Israel? And when you answer that question, don’t answer it with one of these shortcuts journalists take, this sort of vocabulary to avoid answering.
For example, calling them hardline or calling them extremist or whatever. What is the actual story they think they’re living in?
Sruli Fruchter: What did that journalist answer you?
Haviv Rettig Gur: Nothing much. Nothing much. Um, that, you know, they understand and and and my theory of what the Iranians are doing, which I think is very clear, the Iranians talk about it, but also is old and is well known and is so obvious to in this region that people barely even bother talking about it, is just my take and and and they were very, very defensive.
They didn’t know why Iran is so obsessed with Israel, and they don’t care. It’s just a fact of life, and journalism is what happens after you accept that fact of life. To me, it’s fundamental, because if you understand why the Iranians are so obsessed with Israel, you understand a lot about the regime, what it thinks about itself, where this war is going to go, whether you can deter them or not. Um, basic empathy and understanding of the enemy’s sense of self and story and and and motivation.
I mean, it’s it’s you don’t understand a war without it. I don’t know why this is a complex point, right? This is ancient, ancient, this is Sun Tzu wrote stuff like that. This is not interesting wisdom, okay? Um, but there’s a profound lack of curiosity. The Western press suffers from a sense of its self as a moral, a moral vanguard.
And therefore, the fundamental question it asks in every issue and every place and every problem, every conflict, every political crisis in America, is as a moral vanguard, because I am the rabbis and priests and philosophers of my society rather than the journalist, who’s supposed to explain it analytically, I have to tell everybody what to feel and think. And that makes them into deeply uninteresting, uncurious people, uncurious people who can’t actually reflect what actually, you know, when an Israeli reads The New York Times before they get upset or not upset that the headline could have been more pro-Israel or more anti-Israel or more this or more that, they don’t see themselves in the story. They don’t see their experience in the story. The story of the protest against the government is not, haha, Bibi’s about to fall.
Which is the question I got from multiple, right, Western journalists in Jerusalem over the last week. Is Bibi about to fall? When is he about to fall? How does he fall? What’s the procedure? What’s the parliamentary process? And I said, guys, talk to the protesters. Bibi’s not going to fall because this is a fight over the Philadelphi corridor, which most Israelis who hate Bibi don’t want to leave the Philadelphi corridor. In other words, learn the people, talk to the actual experience of the people.
If they can’t see themselves in your story, you’re not doing journalism. You’re just you’re talking to a mirror and surprising yourself by your own eloquence. So I it’s not, I think that they’re unfair. There’s something much deeper there.
I don’t think they’re failing Israel. They’re failing their readers. And they’re failing their readers on vast more issues than us.
Sruli Fruchter: That all brings us to a really interesting place with this last piece that I want to bring you from Moshe Koppel, the founding chairman of the Kohelet Policy Forum, which is known as the most successful initiative of the right in the past decade by Haaretz, who spoke about how the threat of Iran is incredibly real, incredibly important, and ultimately only going to be understood about whether Israel properly handled it in the future.
And from when he was speaking in November, that could be in several months, he said, or in several years. Is Israel properly handling the Iranian threat?
Moshe Koppel: I think it’s too early to say. There’s this, uh, this legend, right, that Henry Kissinger asked Zhou Enlai, the premier of China, and he said, what is what what is he he asked him what he thinks of the French Revolution, and he said, it’s too early to say, right? Uh, so that it’s actually a legend because he wasn’t he wasn’t talking about the French Revolution.
He was talking about the French student rebellion that was just a few years before that.
But it’s a great story, okay? The point is you need to take the long view. I mean, we clearly can’t live with an Iran that has crossed the nuclear threshold. That that threat would be too great. But whether or not we’ve handled it correctly, we’ll only know a month or six months from now, or maybe a year or five years from now, when either we’ve destroyed the Iranian nuclear program completely, or when they have crossed that threshold.
And then we’ll know the answer to your question. I mean, on the whole, I think that by taking out its main proxy, Hezbollah, and its minor proxy, Hamas, and by taking out at least a good portion of its air defenses in our last attack over there, we have certainly put ourselves in a position where we have a pretty decent opportunity to take them out, especially after January 20th.
Sruli Fruchter: Of course, all of these opinions are coming from the past when we were not dealing with the current crisis that we’ve dealt with now. Israelis were not facing the barrage of missiles raining down on the sky from Iran, where buildings are being blown up and hospitals were being blown up and people are dying.
And they’re lacking the current context that would probably inform their opinion in a very different way. But I do think that at the core of all of their opinions and perspectives lie a lot of very important truths to think about and to add to our current discussions as the news continues to roll in. And wonder and ask ourselves, what is coming next between Israel and Iran? What does the future look like, and how soon will it come? So, thank you so much for tuning in to a special episode of 18 Questions, 40 Israeli Thinkers. We hopefully will be back to you next week with our 38th Israeli thinker.
Hopefully, all things permitting. But until then, please send us your questions, send us your guest suggestions, and give us a rating, give us a review, subscribe to the podcast, and please share with friends. So until next time, I’m your host, Sruli Fruchter, and keep questioning and keep thinking.
This transcript was produced by Sofer.AI.