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Hi, everybody. Please excuse the T shirt and the bags under my eyes. We were woken up at night. I'm the only member of my family who, despite multiple attempts, failed to get back to sleep. The kids are home from school. We don't know for how long. Possibly three days, possibly two weeks. Israel struck Iran. Israel struck Iran massively went after the nuclear program. We know that the Strikes were in 10 locations. Natanz being the major uranium enrichment center. Some significant portion of it is destroyed. We don't quite know how much. From Tabriz all the way in the north to Shiraz down in the south. A huge campaign, 200 planes, cruise missiles fired from Iraqi airspace. Everything we have seen in the exchanges between Iran and Israel up until now, during which Israel systematically degraded Iranian air defenses. Back in October, back in April of last year, all these capabilities that Israel showed that it began mapping out came to fruition. And the operation was astonishing. People have asked me many times, can Israel do it alone? And my answer has always been, you know, it would be long. It would be hard. Iran has competence. It has thousands of missiles it can launch at Israel. It has proxies. We don't know how capable those proxies are around Israel. Israel, but mostly it's far away. And it would require maybe potentially even boots on the ground. Folks, we discovered today that there were boots on the ground. An unbelievable Mossad drone factory within Iranian soil. Launching, producing and launching the drones from Iranian soil. Everything we saw the Ukrainians do in Russia two weeks ago, the Mossad has just upped the ante. And it's been working years to build that capability. Israel turned out to have tremendous competence, long planning, and absolute willingness to actually take the fight to the enemy. And it is definitely not yet over. So everything I'm going to tell you today is preliminary. Everything I'm going to tell you today is something to think about is something that, frankly, some of it may not be true in a week. Nevertheless, I want to share with you four thoughts. It isn't over, Fordo, one of the really major facilities that are also hardest for Israeli ordnance to penetrate has not yet been hit. We don't know if it will be. We don't know what kind of capabilities Israel has. We do know that if the nuclear program is going to be set back significantly strategically for 10 years rather than for six months, it's hard not to hit a few more of the more protected sites. So all of that comes to say that there's a lot that we still don't know, and not all of this is going to turn out to have been completely accurate. The enemy gets to big, say, in what happens in war. The enemy has also been preparing, presumably, although the incompetence of this enemy so far has surprised us, that might be a good thing, and it might just be a timing thing. They might be caught on their back feet and they might recover and we might actually face a much more significant Iranian response. I want to share with you four thoughts, and these are thoughts that I think some of them may turn out to have been slightly incorrect, but I think that they will basically turn out to be true and will carry us through however long this goes and however it ends up. My first thought is the astonishing brazenness, the unbelievable competence of the Mossad, of the air Force, of various other units that have been involved in doing this, of the Israeli security forces, and the fundamental strategy. All of these things are a function, ironically, paradoxically, of Israeli humility, of a special kind of new Israeli consciousness that I want to talk about because it matters to understanding Israel. Israel. Twenty months ago, I argued that a new Israel was born on October 7 that will not stop before the fight comes to Iran. So far, just about everything I have said has turned out to be absolutely correct in terms of how this Israeli consciousness has played out on the regional stage. The second point I want to mention is I was nevertheless wrong about one very critical factor, which was Benjamin Netanyahu. I have been arguing for almost 20 months, not so much at the beginning, but certainly by the spring of last year, that he is a politician who always chooses the path of least resistance, and one probably, potentially, I fear, not actually capable of seeing through the kind of war to demolish these Islamist ideologies and ideologues and regimes around us that seek our destruction. Israel was a country unified, capable, willing and strong, and we were led by someone who was not. I was wrong. He understood the strength of his people, the resilience of this people. He understood our willingness to take this fight to the enemy. He understood that Israelis understand that the Iranian nuclear program has to be removed because on October 7, we learned that our enemies are not deterrable when they have these ideologies of redemption. They're willing to destroy their own polities in order to destroy us. He, in this moment, showed that he was what we needed him to be. And that's something I have to say. And I owe him and I owe Israel, and I owe just myself to say out loud and clearly, because it is something I personally, and we know, many Israelis as well, have doubted up until Now, I have never been happier to be wrong. This mattered. This is the moment that mattered. And he was up to it. Point three, Iran's incompetence. And I'm going to get back to this has a reason, has a deep source, and it's the same source for Russia's incompetence in the war with Ukraine. And it's generally the same source for just about all of our enemies. It's why we keep winning. I don't know if God sits up in heaven and decides who to let give victory to in each battle. I certainly, you know, for every prophet that says God is backing the Jews in war, there's a prophet that says he's not. For example, look up the prophet Amos, chapter nine. I certainly think that there are structural, systemic reasons you don't have to go to cosmic ones to understand why our enemies keep stumbling over themselves and keep giving us the victory. And I want to talk about them because they matter for the future and they matter, frankly, for how our enemies understand this loss. So far and four to my brothers and sisters in the Diaspora, I want to tell you about Hobbits, about how to respond in this delicate moment to the Hobbits. Before I get into the nitty gritty and really try and walk through this, I want to tell you that this episode is sponsored by Brenda Yablon. I hope I pronounced that correctly. Brenda, who is sponsoring this episode in honor of the brave men and women of the idf, without whose courage and selflessness Israel would not exist for those pilots, those men and women, those Mossad agents and commandos who are far from home right now and doing the thing that our kids need them to be doing for them, for our kids to be safe. I think about them a lot. So let's get into it. The Israeli strike was unexpected. It was unexpected by Israelis. I was asked yesterday, I gave a briefing and I was asked, you know, is this actually going to end in a strike? And I said, there's too much telegraphing. Everyone was saying that we were going to strike. That's not how you do a strike. So my guess is this was leverage. This was an attempt to pressure Iran ahead of the sixth round of talks that was going to take place in oman today, Friday 13 June. It turned out to be the opposite. It turned out that the tension between Trump and Netanyahu was the show. And in fact, everything was in place for the Israeli strike and the Americans were in on it. That makes sense. Even if the Americans don't want Israel to do it. And Even if the Americans don't join Israel in doing it, Israel can't do it without the Americans knowing. Israel might be able to sneak up on Iran with its air force, you know, without Iran being aware of it over Iraqi airspace. But Israel can't traverse Iraqi airspace without CENTCOM knowing it. So that coordination needed to be there. And it turns out that it was. But nevertheless, it surprised us all. There had been talk of such a strike on and off for well over a decade. And so why think this was different? But the truth is this was different. And I want to explain why this was different and why it happened now. And this is something I've been arguing for 20 months, but I want to reiterate that argument. I've made it elsewhere, other podcasts, articles. I want to clarify this argument because I think it explains a lot of the Israeli mind. If you like Israel, great, you should know this. If you don't like Israel, you need to know this about what Israelis think is happening. There is a new Israeli consciousness, and it has already been responsible for the dismantling of Hezbollah's strategic factor, for the downfall of the Assad regime, for the humbling, repeatedly, of the ayatollahs. And it's a consciousness that is actually born not in bravado, not in self confidence, but the opposite, in a deep humility. And it's a humility that flows from October 7th. What happened to Israelis on October 7th? We thought we understood the enemy. We thought we understood that the enemy was deterred, that the enemy was contained, that the enemy was afraid of our firepower. But Hamas in Gaza had built 500 kilometers of tunnels in a 25 kilometer territory precisely because it was not deterred by our firepower. It counted on our firepower. We thought they were deterred by the fact that we have tremendous destructive capability and Hamas strategic response. And it's a brilliant one. And those tunnels are the biggest thing Palestinians have ever built. Hamas bent Gaza's entire economy for a decade and a half to build them. They are 500 kilometers of tunnels in a 25 kilometer territory. Absolutely unprecedented by almost an order of magnitude in the history of warfare. And the point of those tunnels was to reverse the deterrence. Instead of them being deterred by our firepower, we were deterred by our own firepower, because the cost to entering Gaza, to chase after Hamas because of those tunnels was made absolutely immense. In civilian casualties, in destruction. Thousands of tunnel entrances, if you want to take out that tunnel system, would have to be destroyed. Every single one of them in a building Mostly residential, but also mosque, hospitals, schools, etc. And so the cost for Palestinians in Gaza, obviously, but the knock on costs for Israel were so great that in fact, we could not imagine any threat Hamas could ever pose to us that would make it worth it for us to go after them into Gaza. And after building that unbelievably immense tunnel network, unprecedented and air conditioned and electrified, after building that network, Hamas carried out October 7, in other words, we thought they were deterred by our firepower. We did not realize that they had, through that tunnel system, managed to create a battlefield in Gaza that had deterred us because of our own firepower. What were we going to do with that firepower? Demolish Gaza in the hunt for Hamas? And then they carried out October 7th, and then we discovered not only that we hadn't understood that deterrence was a much more complex thing and they understood it better than we did. We actually, on October 7, understood that our fundamental theory of them, which is that they were deterrable by the damage that we could cause to Gaza, was the opposite. The damage to Gaza was their strategy they carried out on October 7, engineered to draw the Israelis into an invasion after building that tunnel network under Gaza. In other words, they carried out two atrocities on October 7, not one. One was against us. They murdered civilians, they murdered children. The second one was against Gaza. It was the planned drawing of an Israeli war, absolute, devoted, committed war, to get Hamas, the drawing of that war into Gaza. And here's the thing. If that sounds, if you don't like Israel, and that sounds to you like some kind of blaming of Gaza for Gaza's destruction rather than Israel for Gaza's destruction, it's the opposite. If you think the Israelis are evil, heartless monsters who would gladly destroy Gaza, then Hamas's strategy is doubly monstrous. It counted on us being that I happen to think we're good people stuck in a bad situation, facing an evil enemy willing to destroy their own polity and premising their strategy on the destruction of their own polity. But if you disagree with me and think we're evil, that makes Hamas worse. That makes Hamas foundational strategy worse. And we came away from October 7th with many, many thoughts, many, many lessons. The great trauma of October 7th for Israelis was not the discovery that Hamas would murder our kids. We knew that we all came through the second Intifada. The great discovery of was that the trauma was that we failed our people. We did not show up, we broke our bond of solidarity, our promise to each other, that is our foundational ethos. As a people, this refugee nation, that when they started standing shoulder to shoulder and fighting for each other, stopped dying in the 20th century, we broke that promise to those people. I remember October 7th like it was yesterday. And the trauma for me was sitting on my phone watching the WhatsApp groups of people I know screaming into the WhatsApp group, where is everybody? I can hear them outside our door. But the deep lesson, outside of that trauma, the deep lesson was that we were mistaken. We had totally misunderstood the enemy. We had misunderstood how they understand deterrence. We had misunderstood their willingness to destroy their own polities because they have this vast religious redemption vision that they were living in. This story that didn't make any sense to us. So we assumed it wasn't for real. It was just rhetoric. We misunderstood that it wasn't they who were deterred, it was us. And we misunderstood their willingness to seek out that destruction. And the Israel that came out of October 7th, and I have to emphasize this because this is the key point, was a deeply humble Israel. You cannot deter an enemy for whom the destruction of their own polity is their strategy. That's an undeterrable enemy. That's, by the way, why they do it. That's the great advantage, the military advantage. It makes them vastly more dangerous, even if they have tech that's much less advanced. And then we looked north to Hezbollah, to 200,000 rockets and missiles buried under the 300 villages of South Lebanon. And we said, wait a second. We have no idea what Hamas is. And we've lived next to Hamas for four decades. We have no. We have to assume that we have no idea what Hezbollah is, that we're missing the point, that we're actually not good at psychoanalyzing the enemy and determining whether they're deterred or not. And that meant that every one of those 200,000 rockets and missiles we have to assume were going to be used. They were not there, not to be used. And so Hezbollah had to be removed. Not negotiated, not deterred, not contained, removed. Israel switched from a psychology of threat containment, threat deterrence to a psychology of threat removal. And that's true on all fronts. The Israeli commandos that have been raiding southern Syria to get at arms caches for the last four months were doing that. No more allowing any infrastructure to build on any of our borders until they're a giant monster that requires a terrible war. Nothing that seeks to destroy us gets to live alongside us, because we're not very good at understanding them, at psychologizing them, at analyzing and understanding and Thinking through deterrence the way they think through deterrence. Intellectual humility has made us more dangerous than them. And the same is true of Iran. The Iranian regime genuinely believes that it is a Shia revolutionary front for the redemption of Islam. First of all for the salvation of the Shia, the validation of the Shia in the face of the Sunni, and then ultimately the conquest of the world and the redemption of the world. It believes it, it says it, it talks it, it requires this faith from its top leadership and commanders. We no longer believe that we have the intellectual chops, by the way. We think that all the Western intellectuals, the realists and the these and the that who think they know exactly what Iran is and deterrable or undeterrable, believe it or don't believe it. We think they're also faking it. We no longer think we have the ability to determine. Iranians and the Iranian leadership are people. They're big, they're complex, they're sophisticated, they're three dimensional, they're deep. And you will not understand them. So you have to believe them. Humility brings us simplicity. And that simplicity is what we saw on display last night. And the Middle east is only beginning to be reshaped because the Iran that will emerge from this war, and this war may go bad for Israel, there are thousands of ballistic missiles that could land on Tel Aviv and set it on fire. And I say it right now out loud. But the Iran that will emerge from it is an Iran that everybody knows cannot withstand. Israel can't stand up to it and will only destroy itself in the attempt to destroy Israel. It will not have nukes and there is nothing Israel won't do to make sure of it. And if it stops these genocidal religious redemptionist revolutionary wars everywhere that have killed hundreds of thousands in the Middle east already, then it will suddenly turn around and notice this idiotic regime that Iran is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, inhabited by one of the poorest nations in the world and for no good reason except deep mismanagement and oppression by this dictatorship. Thursday night marked the dawning of a new strategic architecture in the Middle East. A new simplicity, a new bluntness, a new willingness to fight. It has been building up for 20 months. It was there right after October 7th and it will be there for years to come. And it has changed everything. And now I want to dive a little bit deeper into Iran's incompetence because I think Iran's incompetence, their constant obsession with Israel's death, their willingness to sacrifice a double digit percentage of their GDP over a generation on the destruction of a country they have no interest in and no borders with and their deep, profound incompetence as a regime. I want to suggest that those are in fact deeply linked. Wanting to destroy us, that's a general rule of our enemies is a good indicator that you are the sort of entity, organization, state that can't actually destroy us. The very desire is a signal of the weakness that will prevent you from being able to do so. Tonight showed how incompetent and inept Iran has become under this authoritarian theocracy. I did not expect the attack, that's true. But Iran should have. Iran should have. It should have noticed that its air defenses were gone. It should have noticed that Netanyahu was chomping at the bit. It should have noticed that Trump was saying, I don't know if they'll attack. It should at least have secured its top leadership. The entire leadership of the IRGC air force was taken out on a single hit that was made possible by the fact that they refused to notice that they were actually utterly defenseless and rendered that way by Israel very easily. Back in October, their nuclear sites are exposed to us, the ones that are not deeply buried under a mountain like Fordo. And their military bases are being shattered. And a Mossad operation from within Iranian territory took out a huge amount of their ability to respond with ballistic missiles. And all of that was something. They could have looked at the Ukrainian attack in Russia and said to themselves, wait a second, if Ukraine can do that to Russia, what are the chances Israel can't do it to us? But they didn't because they're incompetent. Ukraine should not be doing as well as it's doing against Russia. It's a quarter the size in population. Israel is a tenth the population of Iran. And it has not only held Iran at bay, in fact shattered the Iranian proxy system, it has done so, I submit, fairly easily. It has not yet used the full might of all of its firepower because it's backed against a wall, lashing out desperately. And I think that the reason is democracy now. There have been democracies crushed by dictatorships in World War II. The Nazis went after the French. I want to make a specific point, not just generalized point, that no democracy can ever fall in a war against a dictatorship. But in the present day, if you have a regime that's anti west, if you have a regime that's obsessed with its own ideology of its own self importance, that doesn't have the feedback mechanisms, one of the Things the Russian army discovered after invading Ukraine was that a great many of the tanks that it thought it had on paper didn't have fuel and didn't have spare parts. And so they were there on paper. But in fact, so much of the money of the military had disappeared into corruption. Well, the feedback loops that democracies automatically build into these kinds of institutions prevent that. When the Ukrainians said we have a tank, they actually had a tank with all of the supply chain required to have that tank. And so it turned out that this vast Russian military on paper was a much smaller and less competent military in the actual field. That's a democracy difference. It also turns out that there are more fundamental differences between democracies and dictatorships. Solidarity. I have four kids. I'm going to send my kids to the Israeli military when they are old enough. The oldest is 14. I have about three and a half years before my oldest son is a soldier. I'm not sending them to the state to become a soldier to defend the state because I have some desperate loyalty to the state to the point where I'm willing to sacrifice my kids. The state exists to protect my kids. My kids don't exist to protect the state. So why am I sending them to the army? An army that, by the way, unlike the Australian army or the, forgive me, Australians, I like you, but you know, your army doesn't fight a whole lot of wars, unlike the Belgian army, doesn't actually, actually will have to potentially go into harm's way. And the simple answer is, because right now a lot of other Israelis have their kids in the army protecting my kids. And when I was a young man, I was in the army protecting other people's young kids. There is a circle of solidarity in which the 18 to 21 year olds protect all of us. And when it is our turn to join those ranks, we are repaying a debt. I owe the rest of my compatriots the safety of my children. And my children will serve in the knowledge that all others around them will serve to protect them as well. You can only have that in a democracy. It's much harder for an elected leader to send children to war over an extended period of time for a fantasy of his own grandeur or of a great religious redemption, as in the case of Iran. And a democracy also tends to have a free economy that produces innovation, innovation of the type that could put Israel in the lead in this new kind of war. No country on earth is prepared for the new kind of war that everyone suddenly woke up and noticed. Might be the future of war in the Ukrainian drone attack on the Russian military. No country in the world is more prepared for that than Israel. No country in the world has a more layered missile defense, more technological advances in that regard, specifically between Iron Dome and David's Sling and all the other missile defense and Iron Beam which is coming online. No country on earth is more prepared for this war. And if we were not a democracy with a free and open economy, we would not be prepared because we would not have that innovation and we would not have that economic backbone that could provide for that innovation. And finally, serving elites in the battle of Cannae between Rome and Hannibal, something like a quarter of the Roman Senate was killed in the battle. You can hate the Senate, you can like the Senate, you can hate the Roman Empire, you can like the Roman Empire. But at least when it was a republic, it very much had an elite that believed it was a serving elite. It was an elite in the service of the state. And the people of Rome republics have that. Israel has that. And you only get that in a democracy. Finally, I want to talk to you about hobbits in the Lord of the Rings. J.R.R. tolkien writes in the introduction to the three volume series. The Shire had no need of watchtowers or walls, and its peace had been maintained more by the vigilance of its friends than by any efforts of its own. Yet the hobbits continued to live as they had lived for centuries, in a state of blissful ignorance, unaware that they were being watched and protected. The Hobbits, Tolkien explains, had been protected for so long that they had forgotten that they were protected. There is evil in this world. I'm sorry that it's there, but it's there. Westerners have forgotten, many of them, that there's evil out there in the world. Not because the world has become without evil, the world has somehow fundamentally changed, but because they themselves have no experience of this evil. And the reason they have no experience of this evil across generations is that they've lived under someone's protection for so long that they have forgotten that there is an active protector protecting them from these evils. That protector, the mightiest human power the world has ever seen is the United States of America, which has led and really constructed the post war world. It has secured it. That's why America has such vast military power and forces and a navy that's bigger than several of the next biggest navies combined. America built the post war world and created in that world the happiest, safest and most prosperous time in all of human history. But that doesn't mean evil is gone and America is not always there. Evil comes from the same place it always came from. Human beings bent by visions of revenge or redemption, thinking they're righteous and pursuing bad things. The Iranian regime is such an evil, and it wants a nuke to advance these visions. And it might use that nuke because I'm an Israeli who no longer trusts my own psychoanalysis of the enemy to determine whether they're deterred. See above. And so they can't have a nuke at any cost because I now assume they're going to use it. Israel cannot rely on others. It trusts America. It coordinates with America. It believes in America. When Obama came to power, he had incredibly high favorability ratings in Israel. And when Trump came to power, he had very high favorability ratings in Israel. Israelis don't entirely distinguish the American culture wars. They don't 100% understand them. What it is that Israelis love about America has nothing to do with Republican or Democrat. It is the awareness they have not fallen into the trap of the Hobbits of being protected for so long that they forgot that they were being protected. Germany, with its 1.6% GDP spent on defense, might count as such a Hobbit until Putin suddenly invaded Ukraine. Israel's GDP is about 5% expended just on defense. Israel is not confused on that point. Israel loves America deeply, instinctively, intuitively, it understands the gift that America has given humanity over the last 80 years, a gift America may no longer want to give humanity because it has spent and bled for everybody else. And I respect the American desire to pull back a little bit on those expenses. And so the lesson for Israel is that over relying on others, over relying even on friends as mighty and as decent as America isn't safe and it isn't honorable. The one thing we can give America is to at least fight for ourselves before we come asking for support and help. We don't have the luxury as Jews of forgetting that the world isn't safe. And we have enemies that keep reminding us of that. And so we Israelis, whether you love us or hate us, whether you didn't care about us and then in the Gaza war, decided you don't like us. Nevertheless, we Israelis must take this step. We have to take out the Iranian regime's evil. It is a blight on the world and on the region. It has launched hundreds of missiles at our cities. It has talked for decades about our destruction. It has propped up Assad and enabled Assad to murder 600,000 Syrians and expel and drive out of Syria millions more. It is half of the Yemeni civil war which had a quarter million people starved to death in that country just six, seven years ago. The Iranian regime has been responsible for a destruction and internal self immolation of state after state after state in the Middle east and in the Arab world. And the Iranian regime cannot be allowed to have a nuke. And when we go after that regime and its nuclear program as the, you know, millions of anxious hobbits, people who are safe but don't understand what makes them safe and don't understand that the world is not necessarily safe just because their experience of it is a safe one, they will tweet angrily that everything's good and all war is unnecessary and if a single child dies in a single strike in Iran to take out that regime, then Israel is a vast empire of evil that has to be destroyed. We Israelis don't stand before anyone else to be judged. The only people we care about, who will judge us, the only judgment that matters to us is the judgment of our children. A generation from now, an Iranian nuke that triggers a Saudi nuke that triggers a Turkish nuke that dismantles the npt. And in order to fend off China after the discovery that America won't stop the nuclear proliferation of the Middle east begins to trigger a Taiwanese nuke and a South Korean nuke and a Japanese nuke is not a world we're going to give our children. And so we're going to do what needs to be done. And our pilots and our warriors and our clever agents and spies and cyber warriors and all these people who I don't even understand what they do, but they do it at an unprecedented and impossible and almost magical level of competence. There are heroes in this moment and we owe them everything. And we will celebrate them no matter how much tut tutting we have to face from everyone who wishes we would lose and die and go away because we cause them anxiety. In Dvarim Deuteronomy, the Bible commands the priests to speak to the people before they go to war and to remind them not to be afraid. And the priest is told to say the following. Shema yisrael atem karevim hayom lamilchama aloy vem ali rachlevchem altiru ve altachbezu veltir. Hear, O Israel, today you approach battle against your foes. Let not your heart be faint. Do not be afraid, do not panic and do not cower before them. For the Lord your God is the one who goes with you to fight for you against your enemies, to deliver you. In the Yemeni Jewish prayer book, there's a special prayer that I want to add because it specifically talks about captives, about hostages. Our hostages still remain in captivity. Return our sons from the enemy's border. Grant hope to the captives and bring the warriors home in safety. May our prayer stand before you for mercy and acceptance. Thank you for listening. I hope this goes well. I hope it goes fast. And I hope there is a new dawn for Iran, free from the shackles of a regime whose only success in four decades is the oppression of its own people. At everything else, it has failed.