“Issue of the Week”, War, Human Rights
Israels’s Morally Impossible Situation, “A Matter of Opinion”, The New York Times, Oct. 20, 2023
As we said in our post last week, The End Of Civilzation As We Knew It Part Twenty Two: “We will be back to update, expand on and cover this story.”
Here is the next follow-up. It’s a discussion from today’s New York Times podcast, “A Matter of Opinion, featuring Thomas Friedman on Israel’s “Morally Impossible Situation”. It’s hosted by Times columnists Michelle Cottle, Ross Douthat and Lydia Polgreen.
An excerpt from the introduction:
This will be our second consecutive episode talking about the ongoing crisis in the Middle East, the possibly looming Israeli invasion of Gaza. Joe Biden visited Israel this week. Thousands have been killed. Around a million people have been displaced within Gaza. And so to push that conversation a little bit beyond our own shared expertise — awesome as it is — we’re going to do something slightly different.
Carlos is not with us this week. And in his place, we’ve asked a colleague who knows this region very well — indeed he spent his entire career covering it — to join us. And that, of course, is Tom Friedman, who’s been bureau chief for The Times in Beirut and Jerusalem, the paper’s diplomatic and White House correspondent, and he’s covered foreign affairs in his opinion column for nearly 30 years with several Pulitzer prizes to go along with all of that expertise.
And I’d just say, among people who ply our particular trade, he is the columnist who, when you imagine columnists on the phone with world leaders at a moment of crisis, you imagine Tom Friedman, because, in fact, he is. So with all of that said, Tom, thank you so much for joining us.
Here it is:
[This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.]Michelle Cottle
Tom.Ross Douthat
Hey, Tom.Thomas Friedman
Hey, boys and girls. Nice to see you all.Michelle Cottle
You as well. How’s the other coast?Thomas Friedman
Yeah, it’s a lot better. Ariel Sharon once said, when he became prime minister, there are things I can see from here that I couldn’t see from there. And that’s how I feel.Ross Douthat
From “New York Times Opinion,” I’m Ross Douthat.Michelle Cottle
I’m Michelle Cottle.Lydia Polgreen
And I’m Lydia Polgreen.Ross Douthat
And this is “Matter of Opinion.”
[MUSIC PLAYING]
This will be our second consecutive episode talking about the ongoing crisis in the Middle East, the possibly looming Israeli invasion of Gaza. Joe Biden visited Israel this week. Thousands have been killed. Around a million people have been displaced within Gaza. And so to push that conversation a little bit beyond our own shared expertise — awesome as it is — we’re going to do something slightly different.
Carlos is not with us this week. And in his place, we’ve asked a colleague who knows this region very well — indeed he spent his entire career covering it — to join us. And that, of course, is Tom Friedman, who’s been bureau chief for The Times in Beirut and Jerusalem, the paper’s diplomatic and White House correspondent, and he’s covered foreign affairs in his opinion column for nearly 30 years with several Pulitzer prizes to go along with all of that expertise.
And I’d just say, among people who ply our particular trade, he is the columnist who, when you imagine columnists on the phone with world leaders at a moment of crisis, you imagine Tom Friedman, because, in fact, he is. So with all of that said, Tom, thank you so much for joining us.Thomas Friedman
Real pleasure, Ross. Thank you.Ross Douthat
So we’re going to try and start by doing some historical context, talking about the big picture, and then get into the realities on the ground right now and what’s likely to happen. So can we step back for a moment and just try and contextualize the landscape for us?
It’s been 18 years since Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip. It’s been 16 years, I think, since Hamas took power. And obviously there have been plenty of conflicts between Israel and Hamas in that time. How is this situation different and potentially transformative, do you think?Thomas Friedman
Well, I think, first of all, is the context, and I think the context is very relevant here. This Hamas attack on Israel comes at a time almost one could say, Ross, on the eve of a normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia. And while it was not done, there was a lot of optimism in the administration and in the region that it would get done.
This would have opened the way for Israel to much wider acceptance throughout the Muslim world, Muslim countries that haven’t yet normalized, particularly big ones like Indonesia and Malaysia. So for Hamas and for Iran, Hamas’s backer, this was a strategic threat.
They had to do something that would trigger as violent and as crazy a response as they could from Israel, that would create as many Palestinian casualties as they could, that would then freeze the Saudis and the Arab — all the other Arab countries — those who have already normalized and those who might be considering it from going ahead. And I think that, to the best we can figure out the timing, that was it. And so far, it’s been working pretty peachy for Hamas and Iran.Lydia Polgreen
This was a conflict that was really frozen for a long time. And as you say, this seems to have jumpstarted it. One of the things that I’ve been thinking about is the distance between the autocratic governments that have normalized relationships with Israel and the sentiment of the populations of those countries. How do those dynamics play into this moment right now, because I would imagine that leaders of a lot of these countries, who are generally not democratically elected, are pretty nervous about what’s happening on their streets.Thomas Friedman
Lydia, it’s a real good point. The most nervous, of course, is Jordan, which 50 percent of its population are Palestinians. And pictures of Palestinian civilians being killed in Gaza, whatever the circumstances, just inflame the streets. These regimes are very fragile — all of them. They are — none of them are legitimate in the sense of being elected. And so times of stress like this particularly hits Jordan in ways that are really problematic and dangerous for the regime.
But everyone is bracing themselves for when the actual fighting starts. Israel appears to be dedicated to moving into Gaza to kill and capture the Hamas leadership. And that is going to provide incendiary video. I don’t think we’ve ever seen a conflict like this. I think this will be the front end of something that has all these Arab regimes deeply frightened.Ross Douthat
So if this all seems sort of predictable as a strategic consequence of Hamas doing this, why wasn’t Israel better prepared? Was it simply internal divisions within Israel distracting attention? Because I mean, one of the arguments I’ve seen in the last week or two is that there was just a misunderstanding of Hamas.
That there was an assumption by Israelis, by Americans, that while Hamas was obviously still a fanatical terrorist organization, it also liked governing Gaza in a fairly normal way. And obviously we can see that that was not, in fact, the case. But what do you think the Israeli thinking was that made this, again, seemingly predictable demonstration of Hamas’s power to disrupt everything sort of possible?Thomas Friedman
You know, Ross, that these things are never one thing. It’s usually an accumulation of things and misperceptions and just ways of thinking that take hold. So let’s start at 30,000 feet. From 30,000 feet, Prime Minister Netanyahu really had a very intentional policy of strengthening Hamas and weakening the Palestinian Authority. So strengthening the Palestinian group that would never recognize Israel while weakening the one that would.
He did this both so they would remain separate, so there could never be a unified Palestinian decision, and so he could go to the Americans and say, what do you want me to do? I got crazy Hamas to my left, and I have the feckless incompetent Palestinian Authority to my right. But that was Netanyahu’s cynicism.
Now, part of that cynicism ended up converging with the Qatari interests. Qatar is a small Persian Gulf state, and the Qataris like to project their power. And they’re also very sympathetic to Muslim Brotherhood movements in the region, and Hamas is one of those.
And so the Qataris stepped in with the Israelis’ encouragement and said we’ll provide civilian aid, basically — food, books, hospital equipment — over $1 billion now over the last decade to support Hamas so they will do really, Ross, what you said — be a proper governing authority and help the civilians there. And —Ross Douthat
Tom, can I just pause you and ask, is that — when you say that Netanyahu specifically was trying to strengthen Hamas, is that the sort of Qatari gambit, if you will, is that the primary way he did that? What do we mean when we say Netanyahu was trying to build up Hamas?Thomas Friedman
Let’s just say he didn’t want them to go away, and he understood he’d have to fight a war with them. I think four times over the last few years where they would fire off their rockets and Israel would bombard them. And it would always end in a ceasefire. And this became just kind of almost routine.
And as part of that routine, to get back to your core question, Israel came to believe that these guys, at the end of the day, were rational actors who would never throw the dice on everything and enjoyed governing Gaza and doling out the patronage provided by the Qataris more than actually going on a gamble-it-all, almost suicide mission to kill and take hostage as many Israeli civilians as they could across the border.
So it was really all of — that was the biggest, I think, miscalculation. I talked to Israeli security people in the last 48 hours, and one of them said to me straight out, Ross, we didn’t understand that Hamas became ISIS. And I think there was a lot of things they didn’t understand. But one was that it had become much more radicalized, but also that it was not a status quo power as it were. It remained a revolutionary Islamic power. And they misread that.
It comes in a context, though, also, Ross, of, if you think about it, Israel had five elections you recall, I think in the last, you know, six years. In not a single one of those elections was the Palestinian question, the future of the territories and a peace process, part of those elections. It’s quite remarkable.
And I made this point once to Israeli military people. I said, you were so good at anticipating, preventing and muffling Palestinian attacks on Israel through cyber means and other means, that they lost the signal in the noise. They managed to suppress through military and intelligence means what was actually percolating below so effectively that basically Israelis were in a kind of trance that this was all manageable indefinitely. We don’t need a peace process. And not only that, we can actually afford to elect the most radical Jewish supremacist government in the history of the country.Michelle Cottle
So this brings up something we were talking to some folks from the Israel Policy Forum this week. And they were saying that this is evidence that you can’t really decouple the normalization process from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And they think this is kind of a signal that that just isn’t really a viable option. I mean, is that your thinking on this?Thomas Friedman
Yeah, well, and this is what I’ve said all along. Netanyahu is always back at M.I.T. trying to win the debate against the Arab Student Union when he was a student there. And his life mission was to prove that he could have normalization with the Arab world without anything for the Palestinians, that he could have his normalization cake and eat the Palestinians as well. And my response to him was, you’re like a man who tells me that he’s adding muscle everywhere but still has stomach cancer.Michelle Cottle
So do you think this is the end of him as far as his reign goes?Thomas Friedman
I never would predict that kind of thing, Michelle. For the sake of Israel and the Jewish people, I sure hope it is. Everything he stood for is wrong, turned out, and was a big part of — again, let’s go back to the pre — what was going on in Israel before this happened.
Netanyahu was engaged in a political flight of fancy to, in effect, neuter the Israeli Supreme Court for two reasons — for the benefit of the settler movement, which wanted the Supreme Court out of the way because it was the one body standing in the way of their seizing Palestinian lands illegally, and his ultra-orthodox partners who understood and knew that the court was the one thing that was standing in their way of being relieved, formally, legally, by Israeli law from their sons having to serve in the Israeli army. Basically, Netanyahu wanted the court out of the way to dismantle Oslo and to dismantle its ability to impose its will on the ultra-orthodox.Michelle Cottle
Well there certainly seems to be a lot of rage within Israel about this toward the government. I mean, is it pretty widespread? I mean, what is your sense of how much of an impact that will wind up having?Thomas Friedman
Well, you know, Michelle, they had a very revealing incident two weeks ago when Idit Silman, who is the Minister of Environment in Israel in Netanyahu’s coalition. She’s very important because she was the minister who defected from the last coalition, basically to give Netanyahu a majority to make this government. She came to a hospital to visit wounded, early in this war, and basically was driven out by the doctors and nurses, who said, you divided us, now you want to drag us into another war?
By the way, everyone now — the head of the Shin Bet, the chief of military intelligence, and the commander in chief of the army have all come out and said, I failed, and I take responsibility. There’s only one person who hasn’t, and that’s the prime minister.Lydia Polgreen
Yeah, can I ask about the political contours? I mean, one thing that’s really notable is the way in which Israel’s politics have just really decisively moved to the right for a country that had a long history of a very powerful Labor Party. And it really is a country where the center right is essentially the center at this point and everything is sort of right from there. Do you see that overall political calculus changing as a result of these events?Thomas Friedman
I can tell you the column I will be writing next, which is that President Biden said in Israel that he’s going to offer an unprecedented financial aid package to Israel. And I’ll support that package under one condition: that Israel agrees that it will not build a single more settlement anywhere beyond the settlement blocks. Not one brick, not one nail, not one ounce of cement.
Because I will be damned if my tax dollars are going to be used to relieve Bibi Netanyahu’s political problems, that he needs the settlers for his coalition, and so he’s going to take this money and use it for that. Of course, he’ll say this is all aid. Money’s all fungible. If Netanyahu wants to fight a war with Hamas and build settlements, then he needs to pass a 50 percent tax hike at home.
And Israelis need to decide that and know that and pay for it. But I —— will not do that. And I’m going to use my every ounce of energy I have to make sure, because it’s a very simple calculation. Israel cannot get out of Gaza unless there is a legitimate Palestinian Authority. And the only way there’s going to be a legitimate Palestinian Authority is if we go back and revive the two state solution.Ross Douthat
One more question, Tom, before we jump more fully into the future and what is likely to actually happen. We’ve been talking about what Israel’s thinking or lack of thinking was, what Hamas is thinking. What is the Iranian perspective? Obviously it’s very similar to Hamas’s perspective. But Iran has not pulled out all the stops attacking Israel. Hezbollah is not, at the moment, opening a second front in the north. Just give us your sense of what the Iranians are thinking right now.Thomas Friedman
So Ross, the first thing I always keep in mind when I’m think about the Iranian thinking is that there is no Iranian thinking. It’s a government of coalitions with multiple power centers. But the way I look at it, Ross, is America now has two carrier battle groups off the coast of Israel and Lebanon. And Iran has its version of aircraft carriers. They’re called Hamas network, Hezbollah network in Lebanon, Hezbollah network in Syria, Hezbollah network in Iraq, and Hezbollah network in Yemen. So that’s how it projects its power.
And Iran, basically, is occupying four Arab capitals right now — Baghdad, Beirut, Damascus, and Sana’a. And it does this both for defensive means, as a way to protect itself from others projecting power against it, particularly Israel and America, and does it for offensive means, to condition the region.
Unfortunately, for the region, the way Iran projects its power through these networks is that it creates failed Arab states. So Lebanon has not been able to elect a president for I don’t know how long now — I think it’s approaching a year — because Iran doesn’t like the candidate. And so failed state in Lebanon, failed state in Syria, not failed state but fragile state in Iraq, failed state in Yemen. That’s how it projects its power.
And ultimately, it’s made very clear it wants to eradicate Israel because it sees Israel as the biggest regional threat to itself, the country that can project power the other way, which is why all these Arab countries have cozied up to it. It wasn’t that they discovered Zionism suddenly. And so this is a real standoff now between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Israel. And they’re very much in the picture, and they’re smart and they’re tough.Ross Douthat
All right, on that note, we’re going to take a break. And when we come back, we’re going to go further into the future and talk about what Israel is likely to do in the next few days or the next few weeks. So stay with us.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
And we’re back and trying to look ahead at Israeli strategy and what’s likely to happen next. And Michelle, I think you were ready with a question on that front as we went to break.Michelle Cottle
So Tom, in a column this week, you made the case that Israel should not invade Gaza. But what are the other viable options that you see at this point?Thomas Friedman
You know, Michelle, I wrote that column just sort of from the gut. And everyone asked me that question afterwards, including the President of the United States.
And my answer was, I don’t know. All I know is this really scares me. Let’s just look what happened this week. A hospital in Gaza was — exploded, basically. You think about it for a second, Michelle, Islamic Jihad may have achieved its greatest P.R. victory in this war by blowing up its own hospital — inadvertently, by the way. By all evidence, they launched a part of a missile barrage toward Israel, and as often happens, one of their rockets failed and landed in the parking lot of this hospital.
It immediately went around the world. Headlines everywhere — Israel attacks hospital — including in a newspaper that we know very well. And by the time the truth had a chance to put its shoes on, this inflamed the entire Arab world. Now, fast-forward and imagine that, Michelle, every day, every hour — pictures of that.Michelle Cottle
Yeah.Thomas Friedman
Because we’re talking about an urban war in a world of social networks, artificial intelligence, fake news. And that’s really what worries me. And so my own — I don’t want to — I’m reluctant to talk about how I would fight this war because it’s Israel’s war and I look at it from America’s interest. But if I were standing back, I would be, first of all, calling this war Operation Rescue Our Children. Hamas has over 200 hostages.
And secondly, I would be doing it in a very targeted way that hearkens back to the 2006 Israeli war against Hezbollah in Beirut, which was a very important conflict because what Israel did in that war was, eventually, the Air Force bombed the homes of all the officials in the southern suburbs of Beirut, and then afterwards Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, gave an interview saying, had I known then what — had I known when I started this war what I know now I never would have started it.
Because one of my rules about Middle East politics is all important politics in the Middle East happens what they say in Arabic [ARABIC]: “the morning after the morning after.” So the morning after the 2006 war, Hezbollah came out and said, look at us, [ARABIC], we won, we defeated them. Everyone heard that conversation.
The conversation you didn’t hear was, you know, Ahmed Hussein pulling Hassan Nasrallah aside and saying, what were you thinking? What were you thinking? My house is on the ground here. My car is under the rubble. What were you thinking? Now, I guarantee you that conversation is going on in what I would call Hamas-occupied Gaza right now.
And so Israel is in an impossible predicament. And I get that. It’s in a morally impossible situation. It feels it needs to restore its credibility, to show, as I wrote the other day, that it cannot be outcrazied by Hamas. But to do it now in a wired world where everyone will see everything, and where it’ll all bounce around and get amplified.
So basically, what President Biden did is he gave Israel a green light when he went to Israel. He’s given Israel a green light to fight the perfect war. The war that will go just so deep, just so long, kill just so few civilians and end up with Israel getting out just in time.Michelle Cottle
So you think he threaded that needle?Thomas Friedman
Oh, I think he’s threaded it intellectually. It’s actually delivering the perfect war in the real world where the challenge is going to come. So Israel’s got permission for the perfect war from Biden. But to actually deliver it against an enemy that will go out of its way to highlight every civilian casualty, every error — and errors always happen in wars — it just worries me a lot.
This Netanyahu government, we just have to say one thing — I’ve followed Israeli politics, I mean, since I was 10 years old. Other than the defense minister, I do not know a single member of Netanyahu’s cabinet. And if I may be immodest, I know everyone in Israeli politics. [LAUGHTER]
I don’t know a single person in his cabinet. This cabinet is so incompetent, I would not let them be waiters at my grandson’s bar mitzvah, let alone run this kind of complex war. That’s why Netanyahu had to form a National Unity government, bring in Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, two former chiefs of staff, to counterbalance the lunatics that he brought in earlier for a different project.
And let us remember, with all due modesty, Israel has not won a war against Arabs, Arab countries, Arab foes, since 1967. Keep that in mind. My attitude is, until I see a solid government with a fixed plan, with a plan for the morning after vis-a-vis the peace process, I’d just wait.Michelle Cottle
Ross, you look like you have a very troubled question to ask. [LAUGHS]Ross Douthat
No, I just — taking all of those points, I just don’t see how, under democratic conditions where the government of Israel is answerable to the people of Israel, who, for the reasons you suggest, shouldn’t show particular deference to this government, it’s essentially impossible for me to see how an Israeli government of any sort can play the long game as you describe, right?
Because, yes, say it conducts a purely surgical war in which some hostages are rescued, a bunch of Hamas officials are killed, and say that the Hamas officials who survive do wake up the morning after the morning after and say, man, probably we shouldn’t have done that because my brother’s dead, my cousin is dead, my house is destroyed, my car is buried. Say all of that happens.
From the Israeli perspective in that landscape, Hamas is still in power in Gaza. Hamas’s capacities are reduced but not at all destroyed, their capacities to do the thing that they just did — this extraordinarily traumatic murderous attack beyond anything we’ve seen for a long time. And in that scenario, even if Hamas’s leadership provisionally regrets it, we were just saying we should assume that Hamas is now more ISIS-like, right?
So yeah, maybe they have some temporary regrets. But a year or two goes by, they see another opportunity to conduct another massacre. Why would the Israeli public not assume that they would do it again, unless they are actually removed from power, which seems to me to be the sort of inescapable imperative of Israeli politics even with all the risks that you describe.Thomas Friedman
So one of the bad jokes I used to say to friends in the Israeli military when I was the Times correspondent there is Israel was always announcing that it had assassinated the number two man in Hamas. [LAUGHTER]
If I had a dime for every time Israel assassinated the number two man in Hamas, I’d be a rich man today. By the way, Ross, it’s very interesting, if you check Google, two months ago, I think, or two and a half months ago, Israel assassinated the number one and two leaders of Islamic Jihad.
And so I’m just kind of — I’m just so wary of the four most dangerous words I ever heard, in the Middle East, are once and for all. It’s just like trying to do something there once and for all in the broken landscape there is just really difficult. Israel faces hellish choices.
And I’m not trying to say — I’m not smarter than anybody here. I’m just saying if I have to flip a coin, my coin says, wait, do it as surgically as possible, frame it globally as an effort to recover my hostages, which I think everyone in the world can understand. Because there’s two groups of Palestinians out there and always have been. There are Palestinians who are ready to live with Israel as a Jewish state. They signed the Oslo treaty. I know them well. They are there and they’re real. And there are Palestinians who are dedicated to wiping that Jewish state off the map.
And what happens in our debates, Ross, is that people tend to want to downplay one and emphasize the other. So you have Israel supporters who — “they all want to destroy us, that’s all they want to do.” And you have Palestinian supporters who say, “Look, it’s all about the occupation.” And the fact is it’s complicated. There are both.
To think about Israel, I think, today, you have to hold three thoughts in your head at the same time. One is that Israel is an amazing place. What Israel has built in 100 years, in a deeply hostile environment, from science to medicine, to literature, to the ingathering of exiles, and medicine, it’s just amazing, number one.
Number two, Israel does bad stuff. Israel does bad stuff sometimes. It steals Palestinian land. It lets settlers occupy land illegally and then legalizes them. Israel does bad stuff. And third, Israel lives in a crazy dangerous neighborhood. Their neighbors are not Canada and Mexico.
Now, I have no problem holding all three of those thoughts in my head at the same time. Unfortunately, most people can’t. And so I’m always just looking in my own mind not for a knockout blow — there just aren’t any. I’m looking for the least bad that buys the most time. That’s my whole philosophy of life. Israel, do the least bad that buys the most time because there is no once and for all.Lydia Polgreen
Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting, I’ve been spending a lot of time, as I imagine a lot of my colleagues have, reading the English-language Israeli press where you see a much wider range of criticisms of the Israeli government, of the occupation than you see in the mainstream U.S. press, I think, which is fascinating.
But I’d be curious to hear you talk about what are the opportunities for the Palestinian cause just more broadly in this moment. Clearly what has been happening has not been working. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which is pro-liberation for Palestine, has essentially been painted as the equivalent of anti-Semitism. There’s been a very, very fierce push to make it so that the nonviolent resistance to the Palestinian — there’s been a lot of criticism of that.
But at the same time, crisis creates opportunity, right? We’re in a moment right now where there perhaps will be possibilities for those, as you say, who want to live in peace with Israel and want to see a Palestinian self-governing state in the region.Thomas Friedman
What I’d say is, first of all, again, one of my own personal watchwords is, I love Israelis and Palestinians, but God save me from their American friends. So I do not engage with either side because I’m just not interested in the info wars around this thing. I’m interested not to make a point but how to make a difference.
And to that point — and it really relates to your second question — with wise leadership, if the United States would now tell Netanyahu what we should have told him many years ago — not one nail, not one brick, not one ounce of cement is going to go into another settlement outside the settlement blocks that will basically prevent a two-state solution. So we’re going to have that argument right now because you have no way of getting out of Gaza, and we have no way of supporting you in the perfect war without some hope for a two-state solution.
That has to go with another bit of honesty toward Palestinians and Palestinian supporters. The Palestinian Authority is a corrupt, ineffective organization. Guess what, folks, Palestinians have agency, too. Enough of they’re occupied. There’s nothing we could do. No, they actually have agency.
And the reason we know that is they had a prime minister named Salam Fayyad. I even coined a term. I called it “Fayyadism.” Because Salam Fayyad said we’re going to build institutions. We’re going to do this just the way the Yehudis did it. We’re going to build one institution after another, root out corruption, create jobs and opportunities. And at the end, a state will have to be given to us. And you know what happened to Salam Fayyad? Salam Fayyad got pushed out by Abu Mazen, because he was jealous of him, and he didn’t want him around, and he was a little too non-corrupt. Where was B.D.S. when that happened? Where were all the Palestinian supporters on the occupation when the Palestinian leadership pushed out the most effective, meaningful, important leader they ever had?
And so if I carry around a lot of anger at all these people it’s because I do, because they don’t know anything about the history of the conflict. So I’ve had my fill of the B.D.S. people and all these people — all of them, OK? And none of them want to face up to the things they did wrong, the things they ignored. And this goes to both sides. None of them have the real interests of the people at heart and none of them are truth tellers. Have I gotten myself in enough trouble yet? [MICHELLE LAUGHS]Ross Douthat
I just wanted to ask — because you mentioned earlier that you’re obviously trying to think about this from the American perspective, not just the Israeli or Palestinian perspective, right?Thomas Friedman
Yeah.Ross Douthat
And that’s — I mean, as are we all, I think. And so my question for you is, what’s the point of maximal danger for the U.S. here in terms of those carrier groups that we have in the Mediterranean becoming involved in some way in terms of an actual regional war breaking out? What are you looking at beyond just images and info wars, what scares you the most about the next few months on that front?Thomas Friedman
So Ross, there was a moment, a week ago I believe, where a Israeli radar picked up a massive drone attack from Lebanon. And it was —Ross Douthat
Yes, we were recording this podcast —
— believe it or not, while that showed up on Twitter.Thomas Friedman
Your colleague was sitting at his computer writing a different column —Ross Douthat
Yes.Thomas Friedman
— and saw that. And I said, I’ve got a whole new problem — column to write. Because if Israel and Hamas and Hezbollah start to go after it with missiles, this is a call your broker moment. This is not a normal thing. Because that could very easily bring America in.
And once we’re in, and Putin and Xi are just licking their chops because it completely screws Zelensky in Ukraine. And the Iranians are sitting back there in Tehran. Israel has German submarines in the Persian Gulf right now. And I’m terrified that we are closer to that than people realize.Michelle Cottle
Well, now I’m terrified, too, Tom. Thank you.Thomas Friedman
I’m really sorry.Ross Douthat
But then just what prevents that? Because if that’s in Iran’s interest, and it’s in Russia’s interest, and it’s in China’s interest, is it just that it’s not in Hezbollah’s interest that prevents it? What prevents that from happening?Thomas Friedman
So what prevents it — it is, at the end of the day, the last time Iran basically curtailed its nuclear program was when America invaded Iraq, and they thought they were next. So this is a regime that does know how to calculate its interests. If Iran really thinks that it is in danger, it’s possible that they will pull back. That’s why if you ask me, I think it’s still a very 50/50 proposition.
I will be more surprised than not, Ross, if they get into this war because they have always used Hezbollah as their second strike. If we think of it in conventional nuclear balance of power terms, Hezbollah’s precision rockets were Iran’s second strike capability against Israel. The idea that they would sacrifice those for Hamas and this war and possibly invite a strategic Israeli and American response against them, it strikes me as quite hard to believe. But at this stage, I’ll believe anything.
And we live in a world now where the American president hasn’t talked to the president of China for probably weeks or months. And we’ve got a war in Europe with Ukraine that Putin is just full of revenge for finding a way to enmesh America in another war that will also burn up weaponry that would go to Ukraine. So we’re sitting on a really dangerous moment.
I just have a new granddaughter, born two weeks ago. All I’m thinking about is this world that she’s entering into and always remembering just a cardinal rule for me in the Middle East — perfect is not on the menu. Once and for all is not on the menu.Michelle Cottle
So, well, on that note, Tom, I think probably we have stolen enough of your time. Thank you so much for coming. Even if this was slightly terrifying for me, it’s extremely useful.Lydia Polgreen
Congratulations on the new grandchild.Thomas Friedman
I appreciate it very much. It’s a pleasure to be with my great colleagues. And thank you, Ross, Lydia, Michelle, thank you so much. And I should have warned you I can ruin any dinner party and I do weddings and bar mitzvahs.Michelle Cottle
Oh, excellent. We’ll be — my people will be in touch.Ross Douthat
Thank you so much, Tom. And when we come back, it will be just your three hosts and we’ll be doing hot and cold.
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We’re back. And to round out the episode, we’re going to do our weekly hot-cold. And which of my co-hosts has something?Michelle Cottle
Oh, I have one. I am hot on horror movie season. Now, you can judge if you must, but for my household, we start in October as Halloween approaches. And I basically bully members of my family into watching any kind of horror movie you want to talk about within reason. So last night, my house, it was the original “Omen.” And coming up next, “The Exorcist.”
And I view this as a way to escape the kind of real-life monsters and just have a little bit of fun that I don’t have to worry about. There’s a lot of nostalgia. I’m a child of the ‘70s. We grew up with the “Halloween” movies and the “Friday the 13th” movies that came along. That said, we don’t really do a lot of gore and slasher movies. So it needs to be more along the lines of “Nosferatu” or “Night of the Living Dead,” than your kind of “Saw” movies.Ross Douthat
“It’s all for you, Damien.”[Laughing]
“It’s all for you.”Michelle Cottle
Having grown up religious, I get particularly creeped out by anything having to do with demonic possession or satanic rituals. So that’s what really freaks me out.Lydia Polgreen
Wow. My comfort season is I’m just glad that “Great British Bake-Off” is back. I had a slightly traumatic experience seeing the film “Angel Heart” at too young of an age, both for its scary demonic stuff and also there was like way too much sex for me when I was a kid, obviously, to see. [LAUGHTER]
And so I really can’t watch scary movies at all. How about you, Ross?Ross Douthat
Yeah, I mean, I always feel like I should really like scary horror movies because it is a very reactionary genre. [LAUGHTER] And I appreciate messages like Satan — like Satan is real and misbehaving teenagers will be punished for their sins, those kind of messages. But I have a sort of — I have sensitivities. And when I do watch horror, I will literally sit in a movie theater when I have to review a horror movie and sit there with my ears covered just to avoid the jump scare.
The lesson of most horror movies, though, is don’t go seeking the devil out, right? That, I think, is the good baseline message of a lot of possession and exorcism movies. Don’t try and get your wife pregnant by the Prince of Darkness. Good, positive, family-friendly message from “Rosemary’s Baby,” right?Lydia Polgreen
That’s a notion we can all get around.Michelle Cottle
Yes.Ross Douthat
And on that note, it’s not quite Halloween, but happy late October. Thanks for joining us. And we’ll be back next week.Lydia Polgreen
See you next time.Michelle Cottle
Bye, guys.Ross Douthat
“Matter of Opinion” is produced by Phoebe Lett, Sophia Alvarez Boyd, and Derek Arthur. It’s edited by Alison Bruzek. Our fact-check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones, Efim Shapiro, Carole Sabouraud, Sonia Herrero, and Pat McCusker. Mixing by Pat McCusker and Carole Sabouraud. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer, as always, is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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