Why Israel Struck Iran First

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. In much of the world, Israel's longtime Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been known, above all, for his opposition to a Palestinian state. And that's an opposition, of course, that's deepened since October 7th. And yet...

If you really drill down, Netanyahu's true obsession is not so much Palestine. His true obsession for years has been the Islamic Republic of Iran. The ayatollahs who have ruled Iran since 1979.

have promised to destroy the Jewish state. The country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and his theocratic regime, and his security chiefs, all insist that Israel is an alien presence, that the Holocaust is a hoax. that Israel is the junior Satan and America the senior Satan. Iran has armed and funded proxies to fight Israel, Hezbollah.

Hamas, the Houthis in Yemen, and militia groups in Iraq and elsewhere. And in the meantime, Iran, we believe, has sought to develop atomic weapons. For years, Netanyahu has called on the world to take seriously Iran's threat to destroy Israel. And Iran seemed to maintain a position of strength, even as its economy struggled and internal protests grew. But after October 7th and the killing rampage by Hamas, the power balance in the region seemed to shift.

In Gaza, Israel has devastated Hamas, as well as tens of thousands of civilians. In Lebanon, Israel has dismantled Iran's proxy Hezbollah as a fighting force. In Syria, the Assad regime collapsed.

leaving Iran without a powerful ally. Suddenly, Iran was weak. And sensing that weakness, Israel bombed much of Iran's air defenses, leaving it vulnerable as never before. So now the war's begun in earnest. Where it will go and how the Middle East will change is an open question. Here in the U.S., involvement in another Middle East conflict has been hotly debated, not least among Donald Trump's own supporters, as we saw last week.

But in Israel, even critics of Benjamin Netanyahu are supportive of the war. So to understand the case better, I called up Yossi Klein Halevi. Halevi is a journalist and the author of a number of books about Israel and its neighbors. He's also... a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, and I listen regularly to his podcast, For Heaven's Sake. I spoke with Yossi Klein-Halevi last week from his home in Jerusalem.

At the same time, Donald Trump was still threatening to join the Israeli military effort, and what might come next remained an open question. Many years, Yossi, you've been, to the best of my knowledge, an Israeli centrist. You voted on the left, you voted in the center, you voted more to the right, depending on the candidate. You certainly seem to loathe...

Benjamin Netanyahu, his lack of trustworthiness, your words. But if you've been consistent about one thing, if there's one big thing that you share with Netanyahu, it's your insistence that Iran... is not only a theocratic regime that's been clear about its violent intentions toward Israel, it's that Iran cannot possess a nuclear weapon. Tell us why. The big question about Iran was always, how significant is its apocalyptic theology?

For me, the tipping point is the obsession of the Iranian regime with Israel. Now, this is a country that doesn't share a border with Israel. And so, why the obsession with Israel? And that obsession is relentless. It's constantly invoking the destruction of Israel as not just a political goal, but a religious imperative. And in 2015, the Ayatollah Khamenei predicted, prophesied, that Israel would be destroyed in 2040.

And there is a clock, a doomsday clock, that's mounted in a central square in Tehran that's marking time to the destruction of Israel. But is that, in the darkest sense, prophecy? and theocratic mists, or is it a matter of state policy? Okay, so that's really the relevant question, and I don't know the answer to that. But what my...

Jewish intuition tells me, my deepest reading of Jewish history is that when the Jewish people is turned into an obsession... then you need to take that seriously. Now, all these years I relied on the Holocaust and the experience of... the 1930s, even more than the 40s, when the warning signs were all there, and even most Jews didn't read those signs clearly. But since October 7, since the Hamas massacre,

of October 7th, my frame of reference has really shifted from the Holocaust to where it really belongs, which is the Middle East. And I've noticed that same psychological shift.

within Israeli discourse. You don't hear about the Holocaust so much anymore in relation to Iran as much as October 7th. And what we learned on October 7th is that we were living in a collective delusion, which was that Israel could somehow maintain relatively normal life and coexist with… with entities on most of our borders that were committed to our destruction and that repeatedly promised us that one day they would actually try to destroy us.

And what happened on October 7th was a kind of pre-enactment in miniature of the destruction of Israel. But let me interrupt. And by no means, by no means am I minimizing what happened on October 7th, by no question. But in the circumstances in the 30s... or radically different from the circumstances in 2023, 24, 25, in that Jews were powerless in Europe, which is, one could say, the same throughout Jewish history.

until 1948, until the establishment of the state of Israel. My understanding of what at the core of Zionism is, is a homeland for the Jewish people, so as never to be vulnerable to that kind of destruction.

Again, it has to do with autonomy. It has to do with power. And the Israeli state is extraordinarily powerful, despite the horrific... events of October 7th, which was a lapse, doesn't even begin to describe it, but Israel is very powerful in the region and beyond. You're making really a crucial argument. When I... invoked the 30s before, I wasn't speaking so much about the threat as the sense that you could be confronted with a threat, even an existential threat.

and not see the threat clearly. And that was the deep takeaway that my generation growing up after the Holocaust read from the experience. I agree with you that the comparison of Israel's situation with Jews in the 30s is simply ludicrous, actually. And it demeans... the extraordinary achievement of the Jewish people after the Holocaust in reclaiming power. And we need to own that power.

But part of owning that power means that you have a responsibility to use it when you do perceive an existential threat. And so, again, coming back to the question. Is a nuclear Iran an existential threat to Israel? And my answer is, I don't know. But precisely because I don't know means that I have a responsibility. To the Jewish people, to Jewish history, to my family. But declaring preemptive war in a state of, I don't know, is especially when it's led by somebody as distrusted.

as benjamin netanyahu to say we can discuss his american partner in this in a moment is deeply deeply problematic So let's leave aside Netanyahu just for a moment, and I will happily come back to what has been one of my own personal obsessions in the last few years. But the very fact that… You don't know for certain that a nuclear Iran would not be an existential threat for Israel, just as I don't know for certain that it would be. That is, for me, a moral imperative.

to protect the Jewish people, and to ensure that this regime does not get the means to fulfill its fantasies, its theological fantasies. You see, as we talk, and it's Wednesday morning...

New York time, Wednesday afternoon, your time in Jerusalem. It appears the U.S. will, in effect, join Israel in war against Iran. Now, knowing what we know about the history of foreign invasions in Vietnam, in Iraq... in Afghanistan, in so many countries, and over so many years, don't you fear being dragged into a morass of terrible, unintended consequences, like we saw in Iraq? This, um...

This situation looks very different from Jerusalem than it does from New York. And I say that not to dismiss the perspective from New York. but to put it in the context of where I'm sitting. I well understand. the perspective that you've just laid out. You have a series of failed wars, failed foreign interventions, disastrous interventions. The Israeli perspective is not Vietnam. And it's not the American war in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's our own experience.

So I remember, for example, in the second Intifada of the early 2000s, the years of Palestinian suicide bombings, we were told repeatedly that there is no military solution. to terrorism. There's only a diplomatic solution. Now, the diplomatic solution had just failed. The Oslo peace process had collapsed. And we were faced with suicide bombing, sometimes on a daily basis.

And what we proved, first of all to ourselves, is that there actually is, sometimes there really is a military solution to terrorism and to other problems. On October 8th, we were warned by many of our friends, don't go to war. There's no exit strategy. Now, we can unpack Gaza, but certainly. The extraordinary achievements of Israel are against Hezbollah. We've neutralized a threat that was hovering over this country for 30 years.

We've neutralized Iran's air capabilities. They're sending missiles. Last night, they sent two missiles at Israel. Now, I'm not dismissing their... the Iranian capability for continued devastation, but we have drastically minimized it. If Israel had listened to our well-intentioned critics on October 8th, we would still...

be surrounded by the Iranian vies. I think the well-intentioned critics is a good phrase here because there's a lot of criticism. Joe Biden, who would certainly have counted himself as a friend. was basically incredibly supportive, but at the same time was counseling Israel from the start not to act out of rage, because he was recalling... the American experience that we just described. Obama went to great lengths to put together a nuclear agreement with Iran that...

Netanyahu found too weak, too limited and all the rest. But it held. It held. Diplomacy worked. With all its limitations, it seemed to work. And Donald Trump... got rid of that treaty, walked away from it. Okay, so that's the conventional wisdom on the left. What you're leaving out is...

is what was called the sunset clauses. And according to the sunset clauses of the JCPOA, the Iran agreement, which, by the way, would be kicking in just about now when the agreement was going to lapse, there would be no prohibition, no limit. on Iran's advanced centrifuges. The limitation was placed on enrichment. Enrichment was going to be confined to 3% to 4%.

But the problem was never only or even primarily enrichment. It was always the centrifuges. And if you have no limits on your ability to produce advanced centrifuges… then you could move enrichment. The 3% to 4% enrichment that Iran was allowed to maintain, you could within a few weeks move that to weapons-grade uranium. And I know that's the conventional argument on the, call it whatever you want.

And Obama himself conceded the point in an interview with Jeff Goldberg in 2015. He did. But in other words, wouldn't you prefer... the problematics of continued diplomacy and attempt to then work on yet another treaty and keep the peace. and keep the peace rather than to do what Donald Trump did, which was to walk away from it, allowing Iran to act as willy-nilly and bring us to the state of even greater danger and peril.

So here's what the JCPOA, the Iran agreement, would have done. It not only would have positioned Iran to within a few weeks of a nuclear bomb. but it at the same time would have led to a massive infusion of resources, of funding that would have... solidified Iran's regional hegemony, its hegemony in the Arab world. Which you presume would have been poured into the nuclear program rather than into the economy.

Yes, into the nuclear program and into its terror proxies around the region. And so I would have gotten the worst of both worlds. And if you're saying, could I live with an agreement that... that allows Iran to be within a few weeks of a nuclear bomb? My answer is unequivocally no. Now, what Trump did, and this is a very uncomfortable position for me to be in, David, because... I regard what Trump is doing to American democracy, its ethos and institutions, with the same dread.

which I've related to Netanyahu's assault on Israeli democracy. We agree on that. But on this issue, Trump was right. He was right to walk away.

The Iran's violations of its nuclear treaty with the international community actually began in earnest when Biden came into office. Iran was afraid of Trump. They were afraid of Trump being no less unpredictable, erratic, perhaps mad as they were. For that reason, even after Trump canceled the JCPOA, the Iranians were very cautious. And when Trump assassinated Soleimani, the Iranian...

commander of the armed forces, that only reinforced their sense of hesitation. When Biden came in, they understood that violations... would actually play into their hands by reinforcing the argument that you're making, which is, you see, we need a deal because without a deal, they're going to simply cross the nuclear threshold.

But that's not at all the way I read what happened. Remember, this all comes in the midst of negotiations. The United States has been talking with Iran, and Trump seemed rather pleased.

that United States and Iran were, in effect, in the same room. And in the midst of those negotiations, in the midst of those negotiations, Netanyahu bursts onto the scene. basically telling, not looking for permission, telling the United States that it's going to begin attacking Iran. And at first, Trump is, from all we know,

from the journalism that we've gotten from inside, was very angry about this. But when it went well, as these things tend to do in their first days, because the Israeli military... And intelligence is quite remarkable. When things started going very well, Trump, well, he liked that and he wanted to be on the side of the winner. He likes being on the side of winners. You see, I think you've noticed. Yeah, of course. But my sense of...

of the progression of events here is a little bit different. Go ahead. By the time we attacked Iran, Trump had given us the go-ahead. I don't believe we would have done it without his agreement. And as you know, there are... persistent reports that Trump was involved in the deception.

in lulling the Iranians into thinking that an attack wasn't imminent. Now, we don't know that for a fact, though. Does that sound right to you, knowing what you know about Trump's discipline or indiscipline? Well... Look, yeah, Trump himself said that he had given the Iranians 60 days and Israel attacked on the 61st day. I'm speaking with journalist Yossi Klein-Halevi from Jerusalem. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. We'll be back in a moment.

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We're discussing the war between Israel and Iran with the author Yossi Klein Halevi. Halevi was born in Brooklyn, and he emigrated to Israel as a young man. He's written a memoir about his involvement as a teenager. in extremism in the group known as the Jewish Defense League. But Halevi had a kind of conversion experience, and he moved to the left. He embraced a two-state solution, and he came to criticize the Netanyahu government.

as well as the settler movement, which now dominates so much of Israeli politics these days. Yossi Klein-Halevi is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. We'll continue our conversation now. You distrust Netanyahu, Yossi, in so many contexts. Distrust isn't the word. I get that. I get that. But why, when he tells you this, that Iran is inches away from becoming a nuclear power, you believe that? Isn't that dangerously?

selective, I guess I'd call it that way. Just to emphasize the level of distrust that I feel for this man, I have no doubt that he is capable of starting a war for his own political needs. Well, let's just pause on that. Let's pause on that. That's extraordinary. I would argue that that's been part of the reason for the length of the operation, much less the brutality of the operation.

in gaza that it is linked to his politics now it's not the only reason by any stretch but Well, the problem with attributing both the longevity of the Gaza war and the Iran strike to Netanyahu's political needs is that it fails. to understand in a very basic way how Israel works. Now, in 2012, Netanyahu and his then defense minister Ehud Barak decided to launch a preemptive strike.

against Iran. The entire security establishment opposed it, and the strike was canceled. Now, if... the security establishment, which has been highly skeptical of a strike against Iran in the past, if the security establishment or significant elements in the security establishment believed. that Netanyahu was initiating a war that would not be in Israel's national interest. And for his own political needs, we would know that, and it would have been stopped.

You have the Mossad. You have the commander-in-chief of the army. These are very significant players. Now, generally, they don't come out against the political echelon. But they don't need to. Are you comfortable with the calls for not only destroying nuclear facilities and ballistic missile facilities? Are you comfortable with the rhetoric of... both assassinating the political leadership of Iran and regime change.

Yeah, I think that we need less rhetoric and just simply allow events to take their course. I think that this could play out in one of two ways. support for the regime, could rally people around the embattled regime, which will present itself as the protector of the nation. And possibly accelerate unimpeded. a race for a nuclear weapon. Yes, yes, it could. Or it could have the opposite effect.

And again, it's also one of those variables that we don't know. But we're rolling the dice here, no? We're rolling the dice. But you know, David, the question before the international community. From the beginning of this crisis, going back 20 years, was always, what is the worst scenario for you? For you, meaning the international community. Is it war with Iran to prevent?

a nuclear bomb, or is it living with a nuclear regime? And what we in Israel have long feared, and this was certainly our reading of Obama, is that when it would come down to it, the decision would be made to live with a nuclear Iran. I don't agree with that. You think that Obama would have just lived with a nuclear Iran? Oh, absolutely. When Obama said...

that all options were on the table. You didn't believe that? No one in the Middle East believed it. Not the Iranians, not the Israelis, not the Saudis. No one believed it because there was no... credible military option. There was no gun on the table. Ehud Barak once said— The former prime minister. —that the way to negotiate with the Iranians is you walk into the room—

And this is Ehud Barak, right? Not Netanyahu. You walk into the room, you close the door behind you, and you tell the Iranians, here's the deal you're going to sign. And if you don't sign it, we're not going to destroy your nuclear facilities. We're going to destroy your regime. Now, what Israel did by launching its strike against Iran is give... Trump, a gun on the table. My own feeling was that the way Trump should have played this from the beginning was tell Israel, take out.

one nuclear facility. Just one. Just one. And then, and then...

I'll sit and negotiate with the Iranians. That's how you negotiate with that regime. And you can imagine, and we discussed this earlier in our conversation, you can imagine how that lands on American ears. We didn't pay... sufficient attention to understate things radically.

to what the consequences of a fallen Saddam Hussein. No, you didn't have to have any illusions about Saddam Hussein. You didn't have to have any illusions about the danger he presented to his own people. In fact, he had enacted it. I mean, he had gassed his own people to ask the Kurds. But what we didn't sufficiently understand or recognize that once that regime came down, the army was banned and the Americans were there.

that that would be the greatest gift to Iran imaginable, and that the death and destruction to come would be incalculable, to say nothing about the status of the United States and the international scene for decades to come. What about the consequences of regime change in Iran? Are you so confident that things will go smoothly, whether in the interest of the Iranian people or Israel? No, of course not. Of course not. And the precedent that you cite...

is a cautionary tale, and it's a crucial part of this conversation. And I don't dismiss it. One point here, which is the crucial difference between Iran and Iraq. or Afghanistan maybe even more so, is that we know that the Iranian people, the majority of the Iranian people, do want regime change. Now, they don't necessarily want regime change this way. That's where I agree with the hesitation here. But these are not necessarily identical or even comparable situations.

And the other difference is that it was always questionable about how much of a threat Iraq was to the region. There's very little... debate about the threat that that iran poses to to the region and primarily to the arab world to the arab world Look what it did, right? And look what it did to Lebanon, to Syria, to Yemen. What Iran touched, it destroyed. And so, we're really...

You know, history, precedent is important up to a point. And history doesn't exactly repeat. Now, you can't ignore precedent, but you also can't be imprisoned by it. And so when we're facing this kind of threat, this kind of regime, how useful is it to invoke? Those precedents. And I'm saying that as a question. David, it's a question. I get that, Yossi. And I've given you some examples of precedents. What would be the precedent in history?

that you would compare a good outcome to with what you want to see happen in Iran? World War II. So we're back to the Nazis. Well, well, you can use the Japanese if you prefer. Use Mussolini's Italy. I mean, whatever. It doesn't have to be Hitler. There are precedents that point in a different direction. I can't help thinking that the people who are in charge of all this matters. This is not... Franklin Roosevelt. This is not Winston Churchill. This is not the dream team. No. The dream team. No.

And so when I look at my government, I'll leave your government aside. You deal with your government. Thank you. Thank you. When I look at my government, this is my nightmare government. This is a government that has elements within it that are not that different from the Iranian regime. This is a government that if it wins the next election, I will be in existential despair because this government is the greatest threat to the Israeli success story, internal.

threat to the Israeli success story since the founding of the state. This government could lead to massive emigration of the liberal elite, which is the backbone of what we call startup nation, Israel's high-tech success story. So I look at this government as a different kind of existential threat. And so do a majority of Israelis. And still, this war has virtually wall-to-wall support from Jewish Israel. I fear the euphoria.

I fear euphoria always. I do too. I'm very wary of it. I do too. And if you look at Netanyahu in the last few days, he's got his stride back. And that worries me. That's the last thing you want. And that worries me. Well, yes. And euphoria also papers over some really serious political and moral... questions that Israel is going to have to face to itself and in the world. And you don't have to be an enemy of Israel to say that. You're right. You're right. In fact.

It's part of being a friend of Israel to say that. But I have to make a distinction between Netanyahu strutting and the Israeli public and the security establishment. I don't hear euphoria among Israelis who are under nightly bombardment. We are not in a euphoric mood. There's this tremendous feeling of existential relief. But relief is not euphoria. And within the security establishment, there are constant cautionary voices.

We have a long struggle ahead of us. This is not necessarily going to go the way that it did the first few days. Yes, Netanyahu, he's the prime minister. but he's not the only factor in the decision-making process. And again, I can't emphasize that more strongly. Let me ask maybe a very un-Jewish question. Let's say everything goes optimally.

I don't even know what that would mean. That really is an un-Jewish question. Exactly. Let's say that that does happen. Again, I don't know what picture that would take, but it would be... far less death and destruction than than one can easily imagine and a far less prolonged um episode where does that leave the future of israel The future of Israel in which politically is so exhausted internally, so divided politically.

is the scene of so much moral questioning and criticism and isolation from the rest of the world. This, it's very hard to imagine being a Palestinian. And viewing all this, this high drama, this high geostrategic drama, meanwhile, every day I pick up the paper and another 50 Palestinians have died, or there's shooting at aid stations. This keeps going on and on and on.

with no end in sight. Where does this leave the country that you moved to from deepest Brooklyn many, many years ago and made your life's... Life there and cause there, and you have enormous passion and love for it. Where does this leave your country? Well, so before I get to the meta question, And my most severe critique of how Netanyahu has conducted the war with Iran is that he didn't end the war in Gaza first.

And he should have made the deal to bring the hostages home, stop the fighting. The war in Gaza has long since become an enormous strategic... moral liability for Israel. And especially given the fact that Gaza is in the end a sideshow. to the Israeli-Iranian War, which is the real war that began on October 7th. It was not the Gaza-Israeli war, and Netanyahu allowed it, or allowed the perception abroad to be that this is primarily the Israeli government.

Hamas war. So that's really just in terms of what he should have done differently. And it's a measure of his... of his profound flaws as a strategist, never mind a moral leader. In terms of my own hopes, my own vision for Israel, I believe that our... long-term survival, our moral credibility, certainly, our place in the international community, depends on resolving the Palestinian tragedy.

I by no means place all or even most of the onus for that tragedy on Israel. Certainly, the Palestinian leadership has had a major share. in bringing us to this moment. But we have a major share in that tragedy as well, and it's very hard for Israelis to own up to that.

My hope, strategically, of what can come out of this war is that when the Iranian regime falls... And I believe that it will fall in the same way that the Soviet Union fell, and you were there. You saw it happen. And I was there too. I reported from Eastern Europe in 1989. I was following the falling dominoes from Poland through East Germany. what was then Czechoslovakia. And so that's also a precedent, by the way, David. You know that we've seen dictatorships fall.

totalitarian regimes. What I hope will happen is that this regime will fall and... There will then be an expansion of the Abraham Accords, the 2020 peace agreement between Israel and the Gulf States and Morocco. And that would include the Saudis. And that would contain as a crucial component some resolution of the Palestinian tragedy. If I can interrupt, Jesse, I'm sorry, but if that happens, Netanyahu's reputation will soar, his dominance of Israeli politics will soar, and...

Those same components around him, and I don't want to limit it just to Ben Gavir and Smotrich, which often happens, but a lot of people want to now see annexation of the West Bank, the removal of... Palestinians from Gaza, the reassertion of settlements even in Gaza. And I fear that those people will feel incredibly emboldened. Yes. Yeah. Well... If Netanyahu destroys the Iranian regime and brings peace with the Arab world, he's not going to need Smutrich and Ben Greer.

And if he makes peace with the Arab world, it will be only on the basis of some resolution of the Palestinian conflict. Now, Netanyahu at this point is no longer capable. making that move. I think he's been too corrupted. Netanyahu may be able to partially mitigate his disastrous legacy by defeating Iran. but he will not be the guy to bring peace between Israel and the region. That will have to wait for another Israeli government. Look, my concern right now is that

Netanyahu will call elections and win a decisive majority. But on the other hand, if he wins a decisive majority, he won't need the far right anymore. It's an open question. Maybe he's grown accustomed to their face. Well, that's the question that I have as well. A lot of people want to draw a distinction between Netanyahu circa 2025. and Smocic and Ben-Givir. And I'm not sure that divide exists as much as people would like to imagine. I'm hoping that Netanyahu is still cynical enough that...

that he'd be prepared to ditch his loyal partners. And I think he is. Now, if he's presented by Trump with the possibility of being the Israeli leader, who defeats the Iranian regime, destroys its nuclear capability, and then makes peace with the Arab world, he will rightly have a shot. at what he has claimed all along as being one of Israel's greatest leaders. Now, even saying that theoretically,

pains me. It's almost a physical pain for me to say those words, but after everything that he's done to this country. If he really does that, then, you know, as we say in the Middle East, God is great. Strange are the ways of the Lord, and if he becomes an instrument… for regional peace, then I don't think I could ever bring myself to actually vote for him, but I could live with history.

Yossi, even in the darkest times, it's a pleasure to speak with you. Thank you so much. It's great to speak with you, David. Thank you. I spoke last week with Yossi Klein-Halevi. His podcast is called For Heaven's Sake, and it's co-hosted with Daniil Hartman. Alevi's books include memoirs of a Jewish extremist and letters to my Palestinian neighbor. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks so much for listening. See you next time.

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