Special Episode: Did Iran Miscalculate? - with Nadav Eyal

To help us understand what happened overnight in Israel, our guest today is NADAV EYAL, who returns to the podcast. He is a columnist for Yediot. Eyal has been covering Middle-Eastern and international politics for the last two decades for Israeli radio, print and television news.

---

Transcript

DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.

NE: Is this vision of a moderate Middle East together with Israel, inspired by the United States, is this vision closer after last night or is it further away? And the answer is, it became closer last night, and that was because of the Iranian attack on Israel. And that's their biggest miscalculation.

DS: It is 9:50 AM on Sunday, April 14th in New York City; it is 4:50 PM in Tel Aviv, where I am joined by Nadav Eyal from Yidiot, who I welcome back to this podcast for a special episode of this podcast. We normally don't push out an episode this early on a Sunday, but given events overnight, we wanted to, and we are being joined by Nadav who not only was following events overnight, but was up all night overnight. So not only, uh, do I appreciate you taking the time Nadav, but I hope you're caffeinated for this conversation.

NE: I'm doing my best as we speak.

DS: All right, so Nadav, there's a lot to cover here. I want to just start with - what, what do we know, just an update, what do we now know, what happened overnight? What did Iran, what, what was the operation that, uh, Iran conducted against Israel? How much was intercepted and how much landed? 

NE: So Iran has launched its offensive about 12 hours ago against Israel. It was combined of drones - some numbers put it at 186 suicide UAVs directed at Israel, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles. To cut a long story short, Israel, together with the US Air Force, together with the Jordanian Air Force, and in collaboration with the entire region, with the Sunni moderate countries such as Saudi Arabia and others, managed to take down 100% of what was sent to Israel, or to be exact 99% of what was sent, and was to hit military bases in Israel, mostly in the southern part of Israel, mostly an air base called Nevatim that's in the Negev of Israel. That's an Israeli air force base. And that suffered a very minimal hit with minimal damage. Generally speaking, the Israeli Air Force, together with the US Air Force and our allies across the region, managed to down everything that Iran has sent. There are no casualties in Israel besides one child, an eight year old child, from the Negev, and she was hit. We don't know yet if this was a shrapnel from an anti missile shot by Israel in order to take down an Iranian drone, or was it actually a shrapnel from an Iranian drone. She's a Bedouin, and she's hospitalized in a critical condition. She was taken to the Beersheba Hospital by her parents after that hit. And she is, till now, the only person injured in Israel as a result of this attack. 

DS: What do you interpret as Iran's military objective here? Was it to hit the F-35 squadron that's in the Negev at that base?

NE: Generally speaking, the Iranians, more than hitting a specific place, wanted to make a point. And we know that because there are more and more news items coming out as we speak, about the way that Tehran has warned the United States and other countries in the region, at least 72 hours before the attack, that they are going to launch this offensive. So they were trying to make the point that if Israel assassinates one of their high ranking generals, even in Syria, they'll be able to hit Israel back. But if you're asking militarily speaking, yeah, what they wanted to do is to have at least some degree of severe damage to Israeli IDF bases and to try to start structuring the idea that they can hit the heart of Israel. And in that, factually speaking, they have absolutely failed. Nothing they did managed to restrict the power or the response of the Israeli Air Force. And not only that, but one of the things that happened during the last 24 hours is that we rediscovered the possibility, to quote Shimon Peres, of a “new Middle East”, one in which the United States and Israel and Jordan, that has been so critical of Israel in relation to the operation in Gaza and the war in Gaza, to the extent that we thought that relations might not survive in other countries in the region - 

DS: By the way, on Jordan, I just, I just want to mention I was just with someone who's close to the, to the monarchy in Jordan, to the king, and, and he described the, the, the absolute tension, the intensity of the tension between Jordan and Israel to the point that they say there's pressure inside Jordan for Jordan to pull out of its peace agreement with Israel, that it negotiated and signed in the 1990s. Now obviously they make clear that Jordan's not going to pull out of the peace agreement, but just to give one a sense of the, how hot tensions are, and the idea that Jordan and Jordan air, air, you know, air force assets were being used to defend Israel in this environment is pretty extraordinary.

NE: It is extraordinary and I think we should not see this as a sign for the relations between Israel and Jordan but as a sign for the relations between Jordan and the United States. The Georgianians did not do that because they feel an affinity to Israel right now, they don't. The monarchy is, as you said Dan, threatened by that peace agreement with Israel. Because of the tensions within Jordan, we should always say that most of the people living in Jordan are Palestinians. They're not Jordanian. 

DS: Something like 60%, 60, six zeros, over 60 percent of the population is Palestinian. 

NE: And there are demonstrations, you know, week after week in Amman because of the war in Gaza and because everyone who has a peace treaty with Israel is considered a collaborator with Israel and with this war. And the reason that Jordan operated here is because it was seen as something that is part of the U.S. led alignment in the region, and mostly against the Iranians, that are operating against the Jordanian monarchy. So as we say in Hebrew, uh, less of the love of Mordecai and more for the hatred of Haman in this case, uh, which also applies because Haman was Persian to begin with. But what we have seen is an extraordinary ability, technologically speaking, because the way that these drones, ballistic missiles, and rockets were shot was, uh, was through various ways, for instance, the ballistic missiles, you have the defense of the arrow systems, and some of them were shot actually, you know, just on the edges of the atmosphere. And we have some photos and videos coming out of that. These are the ballistic missiles, and these are heavy duty missiles, with hundreds of kilograms of, of, uh, ammunition inside. And then you have the drones, to shoot down hundreds of drones that are floating towards Israel. So this is low intensity in terms of speed vehicle. But on the other hand, when you have hundreds of those, you need to catch them in the air. And you can always, you know, get one to escape your net. And that's also a problem. That's something that basically aircrafts did during the last, uh, uh, 12 hours. And then of course you have the cruise missiles. And for this, you need either anti-aircraft defenses that are very much equipped, or again, you need to have, you know, fighter jets doing that. And Israel and the U.S, to some extent, the Jordanians, excelled in doing so. And they supplied Israel with a hundred percent, or almost a hundred percent - I do not want to forget that girl that got hit because of this attack. But this shows you that as far as the Iranians were concerned, they said that they were aiming to military bases and not to civilian population. But when you shoot, it's such a condensed and heavily populated country as Israel. You're bound to tackle population centers anyway, and this is what has happened in this case. At any rate, this is, uh, an achievement to an extent of Israel and the American led coalition. First of all, because of your coordination, secondly, because of the technological advantage that was exposed here. And because the Iranians didn't get the kind of deterrent they were thinking about in the beginning, what did they want to achieve? They wanted to deter Israel, so that Israel would not assassinate next time that general involved in terror activities of Hezbollah in Damascus. I have to tell you, I'm not sure what Israel is going to do next time. I'm sure they're going to think about this twice. Uh, because they know what happened last time, but I don't think that Iran as of, as of itself has proved its ability to attack Israel from afar. Now I should say that Iran's incredible power to hit Israel does not lie with its own air force, with its own army, but with Hezbollah. Hezbollah, the terrorist organization that controls large parts of Lebanon, has thousands and thousands of rockets. Some of them GPS, very accurate weapons, uh, very kind of heavy with, uh, ammunition. And if Hezbollah unleashes this, it'll be very difficult for the Israelis, even with the assistance of the United States, to, to stop, you know, major hits to Israeli towns and infrastructure. This method by the Iranians, this tool of the Iranians, to an extent, it's not an independent tool. It's not that Hezbollah is just an Iranian proxy that does everything that Tehran tells it to do. But this tool of Iran was not actually used by the Iranians. They wanted to make a point that this response comes from them. It comes from the supreme leader himself that has threatened to respond for that assassination in Damascus at least three times, using his own voice, his own announcements, and they wanted to create this deterrent. And the jury is still out - what would be the result of this action? Of course, the biggest question you're going to ask me right now is what Israel is going to do.

DS: Well, I'm going to ask you that. But before I do, don't you think Iran's leadership was asking themselves that? I mean, I know you don't have a window into their internal deliberations, but, presumably, this, this elevating, escalating from hitting Israel via proxies like the Houthis or Hamas or Hezbollah versus hitting Israeli soil directly from Iranian soil is an extraordinary step on the ladder of escalation by Iran and there must have been, they must have factored in the risk that Israel would in turn escalate. So before we get to what Israel is going to do, aren't you surprised that Iran was willing to take that risk? 

NE: Look, I, I just gave, Dan, an optimistic point of view as to what we have seen happening in Israel in the last 12 hours, but I don't think that we should go into self delusions. Uh, this could not have happened on October 5th or October 6th, 2023, before October 7th. The fact that the Iranians responded the way they did after the assassination in Damascus is very much because Israel's position in the region, its alliance with the United States, has weakened substantially because of the October 7th attack. If you would have come to me, then you would have told me that Iran would have initiated and directed not only a frontal confrontation and offensive from Iranian soil against Israel, but they would also declare it. And they would make it public. And if you would have told me this, like seven, eight months ago, before the October 7th attacks by Hamas against Israel, I wouldn't have believed it. And I would have told you Dan, that if they would have done that, even in a response to an incredibly offensive, as they see it, assassination in Damascus, I would have told you, look, if they do this, this means war, and Israel is not going to stop this war immediately if, if they're going to attack us with hundreds of drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic, uh, uh, missiles. But something has happened in the region since October 7th, and it's not for the benefit of Israel. And it's also related to the way that I think the Iranians, and to an extent Hamas, within its underground city that is built underneath of Khan Yunis and Rafah in the Gaza Strip - the way that they sense the support for Israel internationally, the way they understand that Israel is now occupied with two fronts, one of them in the north, with Hezbollah, and the other one is down in the south, with Gaza and with Hamas, and it simply cannot go into a full scale war with Iran when it has its army right now directed in these two fronts. And because of that, the Iranians can allow themselves to attack Israel the way that they did last night. And I think it's very unfortunate, and I think that we should always remember, while saying that it is an incredible achievement for the U.S. led alliance in the region, and for technology, and for the Israeli air force, we should also say that it could never have happened before October 7th. And this testifies to the way that the Israeli status in the region, and the way that it is getting its backing from its allies in the West, has deteriorated in the last six, seven months. 

DS: When you say it couldn't have happened, meaning, meaning Iran wouldn't have taken such a brazen action before October 7th, but in a post October 7th world, it is seeing how Israel's increasingly isolated.  So they thought, well, maybe all these allies won't be there for Israel. 

NE: Isolated and also employed by, by the war, by the war in the South and the war in the North. So because of that, the Iranians really think that they can get away with it. And the truth is that to an extent they might get away with it. And that's where we are at today. The questions are not only what Israel is going to do, as we're going to discuss in a second, but also what is the U.S. going to do? What is the West going to do, with a country that has just attacked, you know, another sovereign country? And I should say, yeah, Israel, according to foreign sources, Israel doesn't say this publicly, assassinated that general in Damascus, but that general, his entire work as part of the Al Quds force was to direct terror against Israel. And everybody in London and Paris and Berlin and Washington knows that. 

DS: And also coordinating, helping to manage, Hezbollah on behalf of Tehran. 

NE: Yeah, of course. And because of that, everybody knows that it was a fair play. This was not an attack, for instance, against the Iranian chief of staff in Tehran. That could be declared as an act of war. This was done on foreign land. They say it was a consulate diplomatic immunity building. Israel is saying it wasn't. This was done against a military operative and his companions. So this, as far as the Israelis, we're concerned was, was fair play. And by the way, I’ve written about this, I published this as a story just three days ago, the Israeli intelligence thought that the Iranians are going to respond in a way, but it's going to be more of the same. They definitely didn't think as their main idea -

DS: Meaning through proxies. 

NE: Yeah. They didn't think is the main route of response. Or the most plausible scenario is going to be a response coming from Iran in the form of the major aerial assault on Israel since its inception. Nobody thought that this is going to be like, you know, what's going to happen in relative plausible terms. And that's one of the reasons that some decision makers are telling me, you know, if we would have seen, or the intelligence community would have told us, that this is going to be the way it's going to be played out, we might have not done it to begin with. And that's very frank of him to say. And others would say, Oh, no, no, we knew. And he was an important guy. Let me tell you something, Dan. This guy that Israel assassinated, according to foreign sources, he was no Imad Mughniyeh and he was no Qasem Soleimani. I'm not saying that he wasn't important. He was important. 

DS: Mughniyeh, just for our listeners, was the most sought after terrorist by both the Mossad and the CIA, after he was probably the most sought after, most important terrorist figure, most important target, uh, after Osama bin Laden, responsible for, for more, uh, certainly more, had more American blood on his hands, and I presume Israeli too, than anyone other than Bin Laden.

NE: Yeah. And Qasem Soleimani was assassinated by the Trump administration at the time. So, these people were considered, during their lifetime, sort of household names within the intelligence community, but not only there, also within journalist circles. Everybody knew who they were. The reason, you know, very little, a very small circle of people knew who this guy is, is because, yeah, he was important, but he wasn't as knowledgeable and as important as them. And I don't think that Israel wanted this detour, so to speak, of asking itself, are we going to go to a regional war with Iran? Are we not? Because Israel is still focused on clearing Hamas from the Gaza Strip, getting the kidnapped Israelis back, and trying to get 60, 70,000 Israelis still evacuated from the north, displaced persons. Uh, because of the Hezbollah attacks, getting them back home. Uh, so I don't think that the decision makers would necessarily decide, make the same decision if they knew that this would lead to such a full frontal attack by Iran against Israel. 

DS: So, Nadav, I know, uh, you, you and I talked about this offline, but I might as well bring it up now. You had written this column last week where you basically said a version of what you just said, which is that the Israeli, the consensus among the Israeli intelligence, even though there may have been some dissents on this, uh, point of view, but the consensus was that Iran would not respond the way it responded, and you and your column were criticizing Israel for, for clearly, you know, missing that, like, made some wrong assumptions. But buried in the column, which I, the part of the column I tended to focus on, was, um, your, which I rarely hear from you, um, was a criticism of the Biden administration. And, um, I just wanna, I just wanna, um, and you, and you, you said that part of the problem here is that the Biden administration has been really giving the region, particularly Iran, mixed signals, uh, to your, to your earlier point in this conversation, uh, as to, to the point that it would lead Iran to wonder whether or not they, how strong the US' defense would be of Israel. Now, Barak Ravid tweeted something out that I’m pulling out about 24 hours ago. So it was before the attack, and he writes here, he tweeted out, “Israel situation report: Gaza war stuck. No hostage deal in sight. Iran and proxies prepare for attack on Israel. Hezbollah continues to shell the north.” Uh, and he goes on and on, “Increasing international isolation.” That was his sort of report card as of about yesterday at this time. It sounds to me like, from the column that you wrote, which was, which was in Hebrew. So, uh, I'm just going to summarize, why don't you summarize it on this particular point, a lot of these issues here, “no hostage deal in sight, Iran and the proxies preparing an attack, increasing international isolation”. You do believe the Biden administration, I know you're not saying they're wholly responsible, but that there has been a lot of confusion sent out of Washington in recent weeks.

NE: I do. I think that the American administration has been very unclear as to its intentions in the region and its timing was very problematic. So, I can see why they are pissed off with the Netanyahu government, and we talked about that in the previous chapter. The way that President Biden has asked again and again for humanitarian assistance going into the Gaza Strip.

DS: In our last episode, you mean our last conversation about a week ago. 

NE: Yeah, and, and, and explaining to Israel that if, if there'll be famine or hunger in the Gaza Strip, that would limit the ability of the United States to support this war, and the way that the Netanyahu government has been conducting itself, and as your listeners probably know by now, I'm not going to defend the way that the Netanyahu government has been conducting itself. But I should also say that when you have negotiations for, for instance, for a hostage deal with an organization like Hamas, and you decide on a change of tone in D.C. against the Netanyahu government, and you have the Kamala Harris speech, then you have the State of the Union speech by the president, and you have these announcements, basically, not condemning Israel, but going on the verge of condemning Israel for the way it's operating in the Gaza Strip, saying, ploying with the idea of ending the war and getting the hostages back. So, starting the sentence with, we need to end the war, right? And doing all this kind of, uh, cycles around these subjects with this music, this is what Hamas hears. Hamas hears this music, and what they hear, and what the Iranians are hearing - 

DS: Meaning not, meaning for the first time, not conditioning a ceasefire on return of the hostages. For the first time with the passage of that UN Security Council resolution, and then statements from the administration after, it sounded like the priority was the ceasefire, and the return of the hostages was something everyone should pursue, but it wasn't, it wasn't, um, a condition.

NE: Yeah, so what DC is saying, what the administration is saying - We didn't change our policies. We changed our tone, and what they mean is that they still support Israel. They still think that Israel has a right to go, you know and hunt down the Hamas terrorists. But on the other hand, you can hear that when the Vice President begins her speech, she begins, with the plight of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and she gives the impression that Israel is, at least to some extent, not to say to a large extent, responsible. And you can simply compare between what the Vice President has said, and the President has said, and what they have said at the beginning of this war, or what John Kirby has said at the beginning of this war. Basically, placing the blame and the responsibility with a quasi-terrorist state that has decided to try to ethnically cleanse all the Jews living in the Israeli southern part of the country. So at the beginning, it was very clear that the responsibility for the damages, the civilian harm, for the deaths, lies with the terror organization that began this campaign, because we had a ceasefire on October 6th, and not with Israel, and as we sort of developed, and to be frank, the civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip mounted to dozens of thousands, and we should say that. And Israel is not contradicting, as far as I know, these numbers. I want to be fair about this. It's not saying, oh no, we killed much less civilians. It doesn't have, you know, a full-fledged analysis of what happened in the Gaza Strip in terms of civilian harm. So the administration has drifted away. And that has signaled something to the region. And that brings up the question that you just raised, of what is the US administration's policy as to Iran in the region? What's the plan? How are you gonna take this bad actor, fully pledged to terror, to its proxies, to the Houthis, assisting Hezbollah with weapons and arms and intelligence and sending their generals over there? And in the meantime, they have immunity because they're not, they're not in the game. How are you gonna deal with them? And the only answers that I've been hearing, Dan, is, we're gonna have an alliance of the moderate countries in the region. We might have a deal with Saudi Arabia. We might have normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia. And you know, these are really great answers and I'm not being ironic about this. These are great answers but then you need to remember that these are the answers of October 6 and October 5 just before the Hamas attack. And the reason that we're having this conversation is because Hamas attacked Israel and Hamas to an extent, to an extent, is an Iranian proxy. And they did that in order to fracture the idea that there could be a different Middle East. And the consequences of this have not fully been understood, or at least not been uttered by DC, by Washington. I don't know, how are they going to deal with the bad actors that want to spoil their plan to have a more normalized Middle East?  We have seen, they're not going to allow us to march towards the horizon of Israeli-Arab collaboration. Even if that means having more power to the Palestinian Authority, having a clear path to Palestinian statehood, they don't want that. What they want is for this to collapse, for American hegemony to disappear, and for Israel to be annihilated, or at least weakened in a way is that it will not be able to survive in the region in the long term. And the U.S. administration, and by the way, that's also true for the Trump administration, don't get me started on the Trump administration, but the U.S. administration doesn't have a policy towards Iran. It doesn't have any policy of how to tackle them long term. Now, I understand that they're blaming the Trump administration for leaving the JCPOA. I think that was a mistake. Most of the defense apparatus in Israel today, by the way, thinks this was a mistake. And, you know, I agree, but this has happened years ago and President Biden was elected 2020, we’re in 2024, one could have expected the United States to develop a strategy to deal with Iran and with its proxies in the region that is not only, we're going to sign great agreements. And have a great collaboration between Israel and its Arab counterparts. Because there is an actor here that is dead set on destroying this fabric of coexistence. And you need to do something in order to, to stop them. And I think this message has simply either not come through to D.C., to Washington, or they're not ready to be involved with it. Because it might even, you know, make you think that you need to employ force, that you need to do things that the U.S. won't want to do. What, you know, what one to do and as some American friends in D.C. told me, you know, they said to me, look, we know that as far as Israelis are concerned, you wouldn't wanted us to fight with you or for you guys against the Iranians. We understand that. We understand this is a dream scenario for you, for the U.S. Air Force to hit Iran and not for the Israeli Air Force to hit Iran, or maybe for us to do that together. But we don't think that the American public wants a war with Iran. And we're not ready. And we have, now, you know, we have Ukraine, we have other issues to deal with. So you guys are going to get the Israeli, the American backing, but we're not going to be engaged in a direct confrontation with Iran. This is the decision of this administration. And to that I say, that's an American decision. That's the American sovereignty. But what is your policy to tackle the Iranians? Because they are creating a huge amount of trouble. Let's just say, you know, loss of life, let's say the prospect of a regional, maybe a global war in this region. 

DS: Disrupted, or even just started, disruption of global shipping and, and, and massive hit to international markets just by virtue of the, of the, of the attacks they're conducting through the Houthis.

NE: Or supplying UAVs to Ukraine. So I had someone tweeting me, you know, retweeting my tweet last night that talked about Iran and its history of exporting the revolution and trying to hit Israel and death to Israel and death to America and the way that this was always seen as sloganism by the West, but it's actually, you know, a project that they have put billions and billions and billions of dollars and blood and toil and everything in order to at least get one aim, which is destroying Israel. And one of the people retweeting me is a Ukrainian. And she said, we just had an attack here and it's from Iranian UAVs. So Iranian UAVs attacked Israel last night, but they've been attacking Ukrainian cities in the last year or so. And if one does not see, does not recognize that you have an axis here, between Iran and Russia, and to some degree, other countries like Syria, and God forbid, maybe one day -

DS: And China, and North Korea.

NE: I hope that China, that we can still say that China is not totally involved with this. But if you don't see this axis, so what do you see? And how are you going to tackle that?

DS: I, uh, yeah, I supported the Trump administration's withdrawing from the JCPOA, from the Iran deal. However, my bigger crit- and, and, and the Biden administration came into office, saying they were gonna basically reconstruct the JCPOA and get it put back together again. It just seemed that Iran wasn't interested. And so once Iran is not interested, then what's your plan? To your point, what's your plan? You've got to have a strategy beyond just getting Iran back into the JCPOA when Iran is demonstrating no interest in getting back into the JCPOA. So what's your strategy? The other point I'd add, and this is a conversation for another time perhaps, but most of the people advising President Biden were instrumental in the Obama administration strategy. Cause of the same, same - it’s Jake Sullivan. It's, it's, uh, it's, um, uh, uh, Tony Blinken. It's, and we can go through the list. It's the same, it's the same group of people. They were all invested in this theory that if Iran, if relations were, with Iran were gradually normalized, that Iran could be integrated into, not the normal community of nations, but a more normal kind of interaction in the community of nations. They had this view that, that, you know, that there was an integration, there was a transition process for Iran from rogue actor, to some kind of more normal, if not perfect, if somewhat dysfunctional, a more normal participant in the international system. One thing we know is: that has failed, and it hasn't failed only because the JCPOA collapsed, if that's your argument, they've also been wreaking havoc in the region through proxies. And so if, if you had this whole theory that was effectively the foreign policy legacy of the Obama administration was, was this relationship with Iran, their theory was off. Now I'm not here to retroactively, retrospectively, uh, uh, critique them. I mean, I do do that, but I don't need to do that now. My question is, your theory was way off. Your assumptions were way off. The whole doctrine has collapsed. So what now? What's your plan? Because as you said, we're almost four years into this administration. And they just don't seem to have a plan for Iran.

NE: They did, they do have some sort of plan. Their plan was to have understandings with Iran as to the nuclear plan, and to its involvement in the region without having a formal agreement. And this is what they had. They have had, this was never, this story was never fully told, some sort of understandings and a communication with Iran. By the way, according to various publications in the last 24 hours, they do have a means of communications with this Iranian regime that has told the U.S, “Look, we're going to have an attack on Israel, we're going to attack Israel, but it's going to be rather limited. It's not going to be with all our proxies. We don't know exactly.” Again, I'm not sure that this is a good way to go as far as the Biden administration is concerned. The Biden administration - I can see why it handled itself the way it did. It, on the one hand, said to Iran, “don't do it,” trying to limit their response, defending Israel, employing everything that they had, really very impressive, kind of standing by Israel in the last, uh, 72 hours. On the other hand, first of all, uh, we should have seen this a week ago, uh, just sort of public statements. It's like they were not completely convinced it's going to happen. And on the other hand, this doesn't solve the big question that you have just put forth, and I talked about before, of a strategy to, to deal with Iran. Because, if you want to have a Saudi Israeli normalization, if you want to have a Saudi American defense plan, those who do want to have it, you need to understand what's going to happen if the bad actors in the region are going to try and derail it. What are you going to do? How are you going to deter them or to threaten them? Or maybe act forcefully, uh, uh, forcefully against them. So it's really a question, and I can again understand. I don't want to be this Israeli who says, “No, you know, you should put boots on the ground.” Yeah, I understand why Americans don't want to do that, and that's their sovereign right, but if they want to be part of the power play in the Middle East, and I know many Americans are saying we don't want to, but if you do want to be part of this power play because of various reasons, you need to understand that you, you need to have some sort of a career in policy. And I think that what the Iranians are getting from the U.S. administration in the last eight years, not in the last four years, is that they don't understand what the U.S. is doing. And that leads them to be emboldened. And we have seen them basically empowering themselves, since the Trump administration and continuously into the Biden administration. And I know that in the U.S. it's very typical to say how different our American administrations are. But as far as the Iranians are concerned, you know, if you look at the Obama administration, they signed the JCPOA. We can argue about that. That was a change of policy. But afterwards, you know, if you look at Trump or if you look at Biden, for them, that's more of the same. They're sending arms to Hezbollah. They're sending money to Hamas. They are having a growing force in the region and after Trump, uh, abandoned the JCPOA, they have some sort of international legitimacy to break all the rules as to their nuclear program. Now, their nuclear program is really the story, Dan, because look, last night, this country, and that's a, you know, it's a big country. It's an antique civilization, it's a threatening country. They sent hundreds of missiles, drones, ballistic missiles, uh, to my country in order to, to jeopardize, kill people in Israel. Now, they're working on having a nuclear bomb of some sort. I just published, a few weeks ago, an exclusive basically saying, that during the war, I'm not talking like a year ago, during the war, they made attempts to get some specific elements needed to detonate a nuclear device. So, it's not about enrichment. 

DS: During the Gaza war. During the Hamas, during the Gaza war. 

NE: So, they did some actions that were captured by what you might call Western intelligence, that hinted to their ambition to have the way to detonate a nuclear device. And that's, that's going, you know, down the road from enrichment. And I go back from at least four senior Israeli sources. Uh, I, I stopped counting after the fourth one confirmed the story to me. That was the major headline of the Friday newspaper of Yedioth Ahronoth. So for that, for the Iranians, and if you read what Rafael Grossi is saying in the, the IAEA, the Secretary General of the IAEA, you see that the Iranians are escalating. So, the question of having a plan to the Middle East, that's not theoretical. That's not an academic question. They have just, you know, made an act of war against an important ally of the United States. This would be read in Moscow, and in Beijing, and in other places. And the fact that, uh, President Biden comes to the Israeli prime minister and says, you know, according to Barak Ravid, “you know, you, you had this success” and actually tries to limit the Israeli response. This is also being read. Now I actually support the approach that you don't need to respond immediately. But the fact that the U.S. is being public, publicly leaking, that it's trying to deter Israel from operating against Iran, I'm not sure that's such a good idea, in terms of the U.S. standing in the world, it has nothing to do with me being Israeli right now. Because what does it say to Ukraine? What does it say to Taiwan? What does it say to other places that are under at least, theoretically, under the defense of the Western alliance. 

DS: So, before October 7th, Nadav, Israel, over the last couple decades, became quite accustomed to rocket attacks from Gaza, from Hamas, from Palestinian Islamic Jihad, into usually southern Israel, sometimes to reach Tel Aviv. And because of the sophistication and the innovation of programs like Iron Dome, Israel was basically able to learn to live with these attacks, more or less. And there was a, there'd be attacks, and the sirens would go off, and people would get their notifications on their apps, and they'd go to their mamads, their, their safe rooms, or their shelters, and then the, and then the, uh, rocket attacks would pass, and they'd resume life. And they'd go back to normalcy. I, there's an element of that even today, uh, even after this scary, uh, uh, operation overnight, I spoke to friends and family this morning in Israel and they said the cafes and the brunch restaurants are bustling. And, you know, we, we, we have this system in place. We have a multi-layered defense system that protects against these attacks. We used to have them protect against Gaza. Now we have them protecting against Iran apparently. And um, and then we resume. And there was this normalcy that would resume. And yet, I feel like that mindset was very pre October 7th. Or is very pre October 7th. Which is that we just return. And we don't have to respond, really. Post October 7th, I'm not sure that's the case. How does Israel not respond, Nadav? Because if they don't respond, they - Israel had come to normalize these rocket attacks from Gaza into southern Israel over a decade and a half, or whatever it was. Now we're entering a world where they're going to normalize a major attack from Iranian soil directly against Israeli soil, and shutting down all of Israel? Which is effectively what they did last night. That's, we're going to normalize that? That's going to become like the new, the new world in which Israel lived post 2007 up until October 6th, uh, 2023? 

NE: I think you're absolutely right. It's impossible for Israel to normalize any situation in which it is continuously attacked not only by Iran, but also by Hamas from the Gaza Strip or by Hezbollah through rockets. It cannot use defensive shield, and technology, as a way to defend its citizens continuously against an enemy that once it's destroyed - first of all, there's a question of resources. Last night cost Israel between four and five billion shekels. That's one night. That's more than a billion. 

DS: It's more than a billion dollars.

NE: More than a billion dollars. Yeah. And that's without counting how much it costs to the United States, and to the UK, and to other countries that were involved in this operation. So this is impossible. We simply cannot fund this kind of defense. So this is the first point that I would make. The second point is that, strategically speaking, after October 7th, it's just wrong. If Iran will get accustomed to attacking Israel from its own soil, without paying a substantial price for that, if it will not be deterred, if Israel will not have a deterrence in this region, then our ability to survive and to have those bustling coffee places in Tel Aviv will be reduced to the extent that I don't know how we can maintain our society. Because, I don't want to quote here, I'm going to quote, you know, Ehud Barak's quote about “being a villa in the jungle, right”? Uh, we have so many enemies around us that wants us destroyed. And for them, it's, it's very easy and it's inexpensive to send a rocket or even to send a UAV or a drone or even a cruise missile to Israel. You said last night, no, Israel has been frozen in time in the last two weeks, at least, waiting for the Iranian response. In that sense, what the Iranians are saying, that they got their deterrence by the Israelis being so stressed out, going out to buy generators to their homes because they thought that the electricity network might fall, because Iran might attack our power stations. Uh, Israelis, you know, thinking maybe they, they should, uh, go to their Passover, their Pesach, vacation, holiday abroad earlier, because they might not be able to fly out of the country. In that sense, Tehran got what they bargained for. They wanted to deter the Israelis. They wanted the Israelis to think twice before the next assassination. To an extent, they got that. And in order to, to try and somehow, uh, make Israeli position in the region more defensible, the Israelis need to think long and hard, hard to respond to this. Now, I expect that we will see in the next 48 hours extensive deliberations within the war cabinet. It actually has assigned the responsibility for deciding on the response to three people: the Prime Minister, the Defense Minister, and Minister Benny Gantz, who's part of this national unity government since the beginning of the war, and he's a former chief of staff, of course. And these three people need to make a decision. And most of the voices I hear right now are saying, “yeah, you need to respond, but we don't think that it might - you know, that you need to do it right now. We don't think it's a good idea for you, after the president has asked you not to respond publicly to what Iran has done. We don't think it's a good idea to do so without American backing, and you need to pick a time and place” as the famous, uh, cliche goes, just pick the right time and place. And I'll just give you a few examples. Okay, Dan? Um, you can see, for instance, uh, a mysterious, uh, detonation within a UAV factory in Iran in a few months, for instance, something that is with, uh, limited signature of the Israelis, but everybody will know that Israel has done that. You can see various assassinations in Syria, like you have seen before, basically Israel saying, “nothing has changed.” You know, “you try to launch an attack against us. You try to frighten us. We have seen that you don't have the military capability to do so, and we're just going on with our business. Which is basically targeting terrorists, whether or not you call them the Al Quds Force or Hezbollah, we're gonna do this. If they are Iranians, or Lebanese, or Hamas, if they're planning to kill Israelis and they have launched attacks against Israelis, we're gonna act the same way that the US acts when it sees this kind of of people, these arch-terrorists, and we're just gonna not gonna be deterred.” That's another option. Another option is for Israel to attack with a surprise attack in a few months from now, when it's more suitable. Why should it be more suitable? For instance, if you have some sort of ceasefire in Gaza, or you have an understanding in the north, nobody wants this whole thing to blow up, and you have the nuclear facilities of Iran. Iran is a big country, and Israel has a better air force, better aerial abilities, and there are many, many targets that Israel can hit. It's um, for the Israeli defense apparatus, Iran is really a soft target. So they have multiple possibilities to cause immense military harm to the Iranians. So many voices that I hear in Israel, I'll just give you one example, Gil Sa’ar, that is a, you know, a right wing politician, not a center left politician saying, “let's pick our time and place. Let's, let's not act too abruptly about this because now it's our choice. Now let's let the Iranians be stressed out.” And I just saw before we started conversing, those long queues, those long lines to gas and petrol stations in Tehran, because now they are fearing the Israeli response. Let them boil a bit, as they say in Hebrew, I'm translating from Hebrew, let them boil a bit with the decisions that they have made to, to attack Israel - and then respond, and have someone else say, you know, that was an Israeli response to that. On the other side, if I need to, sort of represent the other side of this argument, people are saying, “if you don't do it right now, the message in Tehran will not be clear and they, they will attack you again and again. And it will become a war of corresponding UAVs. And this is something that is much more expensive for a country like Israel. And they'll just join the Houthis and Hezbollah and Hamas, but they're a country and they have far more resources. So, you need to respond right now. Don't do, be too sophisticated about this. Respond now, respond with lethal force, respond in an unproportional way to this attack. This is an act of war coming from one territory to another territory, and if you're picking the time and place, you are actually adopting the mindset of October 6th.” So, I just structured the discussion within the Israeli military and political establishment. And the decision will be made in the next 48 hours. I have to tell you, you know, the kind of thinking that I just presented that you need to attack immediately, this was a consensus within decision makers in Israel until the Iranians attacked. And then something changed. And let me tell you what changed. First of all, everything was repelled. Every UAV was downed by the Israeli Air Force, or the Americans, or the UK Air Force, or the Jordanians. Nothing got through. So this allows you some place to maneuver. Secondly, you saw that the allies of Israel, whether Arab, American, European, they are standing by Israel. And the Israelis were surprised by that. And they were, to an extent, relieved, I'm talking about decision makers, I'm not talking only about the public - to see that the world still remembers, to an extent, who are really the bad guys. And these are the Iranians, not the Iranians, but the, you know, the Islamic Republic of Iran, what has become of, of Iran. And that's, that's a second reason, when you have your allies standing by you, and now they're asking you, “please do not attack them. Do not respond to their attack.” Then the Israeli decision makers, they're gonna, they're gonna really take some time with it. And the third reason is, to be frank, this is Pesach. This is Passover. And nobody is going to say to you that third reason. Nobody in Israel, Dan, is going to tell you from the decision makers that a holiday is coming. But Pesach is, besides Rosh Hashanah, and maybe more than Rosh Hashanah, the most important holiday in the Israeli calendar. Attacking Iran back right now would actually mean ruining another holiday for the Israelis after Simchat Torah and going maybe to a regional war including with Hezbollah. And the Israelis don't want to do it right now. And they feel that their public, their population, the Israelis, they're entitled to some time off. While fighting a war, while having the sons and daughters fight in the Gaza Strip, and fight in the north and our combat pilots, which I know some of are in the air, you know, with an indescribable workload, so, should we really do it right now? So this is one of the things that is being calculated, but not said, you know, clearly by the Israeli decision makers. And these are the reasons why it didn't happen immediately. And that was the recommendation to the decision makers, that was the consensus: “If they attack, don't wait for 12 hours. Attack immediately before you are being pressured to stop.” And the Israeli decision makers actually made the decision last night not to respond immediately. And that was the course of action. That was deliberated by the Israeli war cabinet, and it was actually rejected after the failure of the Iranians last night.

DS: Last question for you, Nadav, before we wrap, just briefly, and I know this question may not be able to be answered comprehensively now. But your initial, just gut reaction, watching events play out, knowing the sources that you're talking to, do you think Iran miscalculated?

NE: I think Iran miscalculated. Yeah, absolutely. I think they miscalculated On at least three different levels. The first level was that they thought that they might cause some sort of substantial harm in Israel and they were clearly wrong. Secondly, they didn't understand the way that the U.S. is going to stand by Israel to the extent it did. Thirdly, they didn't see how, regionally speaking, although they threatened countries in the region, Arab countries, they are part of an alliance working against them. Now, I'm returning to something I said in one of our previous chapters together, our previous conversations together. Again, if this war ends with an alliance, strong alliance, with Israel and Saudi Arabia and Jordan and Egypt, uh, led or somehow convened by the United States of America, and if we don't have Hamas in the Gaza Strip, and have most, if not all, of the kidnapped Israelis back home, then Israel has not only won this war, it's, it's even a clearer victory as to its acceptance in the region. And, the question that I might ask myself, after the night we have just had in Israel, in which I didn't get any sleep and that's the reason I've been so slow during this conversation: Is this vision of a better Middle East, of a more dread Middle East together with Israel inspired by the United States, is this vision closer after last night, or is it further away? And the answer is, it's closer last night. It became closer last night, and that was because of the Iranian attack on Israel. And that's their biggest miscalculation. And I hope our government will be wise enough, be smart, moderate, but aggressive to the extent it needs to be, in order to use this moment and leverage as much as it can to try and get the things that we need in order to make that moment become a reality.

I'm talking about assistance from the United States, international backing. More collaboration with moderate Arab countries in the region. Making this alliance a real one and not only an ad hoc operation. So there are loads of things that you can do with this, maybe even leverage this, to end the war in the Gaza Strip in a way in which you don't have Hamas controlling the Gaza Strip, but this alliance that we have seen the first signs of, in a very dramatic night in Israel last night.

DS: From your lips to God's ears, Nadav, uh, we come, we come to you for analysis, but here we're also getting some promise, uh, not just peril. So thank you for taking the time. I know you've literally been up all night, so I appreciate you taking the time as always, and we'll be checking in with you soon.

NE: Okay. Thank you so much, Dan.