To M: Yeah.
Ross: —— tomorrow if they thought they could win. So, if you are in the Israeli cabinet right now, are you thinking, “We must fight back to restore deterrence and maintain fear”? Or do you think, “Iran has failed enough that it should be deterred from trying again”? What are you thinking and what are they going to do?
To M: What will they do? I don’t know, Ross. I will simply say what I have thought since the first day of the war: that Israel must ask itself what its worst enemies want it to do and do the opposite. And that’s rooted in a broader framework that I have, which is that I can write the story of this conflict for you for a long time. I wrote an entire book, “(From) Beirut to Jerusalem,” about this. Or I can write the story very briefly, and it fits on a business card: war, downtime, war, downtime, war, downtime, war, downtime, war, downtime, war, downtime, rising to 1929, if not earlier. And the difference between the two teams lies in what each did during the timeout. Israel has built one of the strongest economies in the world. Hamas dug tunnels and harbored grievances. And my point of view is that the #1 goal for Israelis should always be to hit the timeout whenever they can, as much as they can.
Now, maybe in this situation, it’s inevitable. They simply can’t. That’s what they would say. I’m not sure that’s the case. But Israel wins in downtime, and it loses in wartime, especially where we find ourselves today historically, politically and technologically in a wired social media world where when you lose on TikTok now, you don’t lose only Muslim Americans in Michigan. You are losing an entire generation. And I think Israel is in real danger right now of losing an entire generation.
Carlos: I’m wondering if maybe we could spend some of the remaining time discussing what the next timeout might look like if we get there. In January, which seems so far away, you wrote a column asserting that October 7 had propelled a fundamental rethinking of the Middle East within the Biden administration. You have described what you see as an emerging Biden doctrine for the region. Given how the conflict has evolved since then, how does the administration now view the region, generally speaking? Is there a coherent doctrine that you still see at work or developing here?
To M: Carlos, I’ll just say before I answer, I’ve been doing this my whole adult life. I’ve been following the Middle East since I was 15. I am now 70. This is the worst time I can remember and the most worrying for the whole region which is spiraling out of control.
