Iran’s Proxy War Collapse | Why Israel is Stronger Than Ever
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20 years ago, we were watching the videos coming out of Gaza with Farfour the mouse, the Mickey Mouse version that Hamas brainwashed a generation of kids with. And those kids, 15, 20 years later, were the people that came to attack us. You can trace it right back to that.

Breaking news out of Israel this morning. Shocking hostage-taking. Hundreds of Israelis are dead. I want to bring in Israeli government spokesman Elon. What happened when a four-day court... Have you resolved this? Where does this go now? Saul Sardko, welcome to State of a Nation. Thank you, Elon Levy. Good to see you.

It's good to have you here because I know who you are. You're a friend, you're a neighbor, you're a maverick. But I think most of our viewers will not be familiar with you. And that's because you're not a journalist. You're not a public personality. This is your first interview. You are a regular citizen who has in recent months been doing phenomenal work on social media with your scathing analysis and hot takes and controversial opinions, building Twitter presence of over 45,000 followers, which is no small feat.

So my first question, before we dive into some of your interesting hot takes that I want to unpack, Saul Sadgar, who are you? I'm just a guy, Elon. I'm just a guy. I live in Tel Aviv for 14 or 15 years at this point. I'm originally from London. As you mentioned, my hobby is I write a commentary on Tanakh, which is currently coming towards its second edition. How many editions does the Bible have?

Well, this is... Two, I guess, old and new, right? The addition to the Bible, that's really a controversial topic. Israel-Gaza is nothing compared to the controversy around the additions that the Bible may not have had. But we won't talk about that. But my Tanakh is coming into a second edition. That's my hobby. I do real estate investments. And like you said, I don't know why. I don't know why...

Why people read what I write. But since October 8th, I've been posting on Twitter. And as a result, people have been following me, which is a great honor. And I hope I get to make a bit of a difference in that regard. What difference are you trying to make? Because everyone uses their social media in their own way. And what's extraordinary now about this moment, you know, Elon Musk says,

You are the media now. Anyone who has a sharp enough mind needs just a smartphone and an internet connection in order to be their own content creator and start having an impact and start reaching out. And if you're saying things that resonate with people, people will listen and they will follow and they will share and then the dollars will follow in from the Twitter monetization as well. But what are you trying to achieve on Twitter? Because it sounds like real estate investments in Tel Aviv and rewriting the Bible is enough to keep any man's day busy. Yeah.

I'm not particularly trying to achieve anything, but I was always reading Twitter as a reader for many years. Five years, I would say. I didn't post anything significant. If I ever posted anything, no one read it. So I'm not particularly... I didn't set out with a mission. But on October 8th, as things were settling down, I went on... Settling down or kicking off? Well, they were settling down. I mean...

we'd figured out what had been happening. To me, it was already very obvious. October 8th, we're only just starting to get a sense of the numbers. It took weeks, months for us to know exactly how many people had been abducted. This is true, but I'm usually an optimist. And on October 7th, I was an optimist. I knew it would work out well in the end. But I also knew... Yeah, I knew by 12, because I was looking at the videos, I knew that there was no way we were getting out of this with less than 1,000 dead. And so I was a pessimist on that day. And on October 8th,

The attack was over, more or less. It took a few days to clear the Hamas terrorists out of the Kibbutzim. They're still holding hostages. The hostages' families will tell you. But they weren't in Israel anymore. It is still October 7th. No, it took a few days to clear them out of the Kibbutzim in the south. It's true. There were still bits and pieces of battles going on, but things were more or less back under control. And the picture was a margining of the damage that had happened. And I went on Facebook and...

everyone is posting that they're looking for their friends and their loved ones many friends of mine and yours had friends and children at nova a few of them survived a few of them didn't and people were posting looking for their loved ones they were making public facebook posts at every single i don't know if you remember this but it stuck in my head and it's why i started posting on twitter every single post of someone looking for their loved ones or announcing that they're

their child had died, was inundated with thousands, tens of thousands of emoji responses, laughing and rejoicing and love and thousands of comments in every language in the world, trolling the people, mourning their dead. And for me, that's when I realized that what was happening wasn't just an attack on the Jews in Israel, but there was a concerted effort

with multiple hands all fighting at the same time to demoralize the entire Jewish nation around the world. And so I went on Twitter and I started replying to people like Owen Jones and your old friend Merti. Friend is putting a gloss on it. Well, you know, you see him on a regular basis. You probably see more of him than me. Well, sometimes I have the pleasure of waking up to see that he's been tweeting some nonsense overnight. I remember the first time it took a few weeks. At some point I...

I replied to one of those guys, I forget who, and I referred to Hamas's barbarian savages. It was Owen Jones, that's who it was. I replied to Owen Jones and I referred to Hamas's barbarian savages. I didn't have any followers, maybe I had 10 followers. And Owen Jones called me a disgusting little racist. And since then he blocked me, so I can't see his stuff anymore. That's kind. It is. It worked out for everyone. And at that point I realized...

I realized that there's a fight that has to be had. And the other side recognizes that the fight between Hamas and the Jews, between Jihad and the Jews, between the people that want to have a Middle East free of Jews and the people that want to see minorities able to exist in the Middle East is a two-handed fight. And it's really 50-50 in terms of the percentage of the importance.

And on the one side, you have the people who are the real heroes who are risking their lives. 300,000 Israeli men and women wore uniforms in this war so far. And there's another 10,000 enrolling in the army every day, approximately. Every, sorry, 10,000 every month. So 300,000. And on the other hand, you have people who are not risking their lives. People like you, actually, maybe you are risking your life. Well, I would be if I didn't have so many bodyguards when I traveled abroad. Right, exactly. So you have...

What you did is actually quite brave. I don't think you thought about it. No, we weren't really thinking in those early days, were we? No. You just showed up. We just showed up. Everyone in Israeli society showed up and asked, what can I do? We thought about, we'll deal with the consequences later. Right. And then a month later, there's protests in London and people are holding signs with your face. Yeah. Saying...

The gobbles of Gaza. That's right. The real gobbles of Gaza is that Al Jazeera producer who's staging those barbaric Hunger Games spectacles as they parade the hostages out of Gaza. He's the real gobbles of Gaza. It's shocking. They understood this from the start. They understood that 50% of the battle is the media war. And they can't defeat Israel on the battlefield. There's no way that 30,000 Hamas terrorists armed with guns can defeat the IDF with their F-35s.

They can't do that. But what they can do is they can win the media war and force Israel to withdraw, as they have done so many times before. And if they force Israel to enough draws, eventually they will overcome. That was their plan. And they've been planning it for years. That's why already a few hours after the event started, the entire Qatari-sponsored media operation was ready to go. All the Palestinian activists were protesting that same day. They were ready. We weren't ready.

We weren't ready at all. That's an interesting insight. I mean, I understand the media fight as being an attempt to delegitimize Israel, to bring global publics to think that Israel deserves to be destroyed. Their leaders will then cut off arms supplies and therefore we will not have the weapons that we need to defend ourselves against our enemies. But you mentioned something important. They're not only trying to force Israel to withdraw, they're trying to force Israel into a draw.

And what that means is that if they can keep foisting on us round after round of conflict, they hope to wear down this country through attrition by making it impossible to sustain a normal life in Israel. And that's why it's so important for Israelis now to say, no, this is the Gaza war to end all Gaza wars. This ends now with a knockout blow. It cannot end.

to the conditions that existed before. And we have another round and we end up more rockets and more invasions and more hostages again and again and again. So I'm interested in this analysis about why you started answering back to the Twitter trolls on Twitter, how this started growing your platform. But you said you were optimistic at the beginning because you had maybe a different take from the doom and gloom and Armageddon when it looked like the whole world was collapsing around us on October 7th.

And actually now there has been an extraordinary reversal in Israel's regional situation. We have gone from the darkest moment in our history to what is probably Israel's strongest moment of regional dominance in its history. No question. Hamas...

is no longer the military regime it was before October 7th. Hezbollah has been reduced from what was the world's most powerful non-state actor into a decapitated ragtag militia. The Assad regime has gone. Iran has lost its air defenses. And so I wonder, going back to October 7th, the Iranian regime had surrounded Israel with this ring of fire. It wants to watch it burn.

something malfunctions. Something goes horribly wrong for the Iranian regime. The Pages want to malfunction. No. I see what you mean. I mean, the Iranians had a strategy for how they were going to contain and ultimately destroy Israel. And that, for now, has backfired spectacularly. So I'm wondering...

Hamas backfired. So what happened? Tell me what you think went wrong for Iran and how he ended up in this situation that the dominoes from October 7th have actually led to Israel being in its strongest regional position perhaps ever.

I'm Imogen Folks, the host of Inside Geneva, a podcast where we tackle the big questions facing our planet. Can UN investigations bring more criminals to justice? Does the world need a pandemic treaty? What about climate change or refugees? Should we ban autonomous weapons? Some call them killer robots.

Get the answers you need with me and our expert guests twice a month on Inside Geneva, free with your usual podcast app. It's incredible when you look back and you can realise 20 years ago we were watching the videos coming out of Gaza with Farfour the mouse, the Mickey Mouse version, the murder the Jews Mickey Mouse that Hamas brainwashed a generation of kids with. And those kids, 15, 20 years later, were the people that came to attack us.

You can trace it right back to that. As soon as they brainwashed those people, there was no way of going back. You had 35,000 trained guys. And Iran was supporting Hamas, but Iran and Hamas don't get on that well. I don't believe, and I think the facts back it up, I don't believe it will come out that Iran knew that Hamas was going to attack Israel. Because Iranians are smarter than that. Iranians understood, for example, that if Hezbollah also joined the attack, Hezbollah would also get wiped out immediately.

which is why Hezbollah didn't join the attack. Did they? Because the assessment in Israel, we heard Yoav Galant, the defense minister who was fired, speaking in an interview to Channel 12, saying that when he was pushing for an attack on Hezbollah on October 11th, after they joined the war, Netanyahu pointed out the window at all the high-rises in Tel Aviv and said, if we do that, all these buildings are going to be destroyed. So the assessment...

Israel did not expect this war to go as successfully as it has gone. We thought the destruction on the home front would be much bigger than it was in reality. We did. But whatever destruction they could have done to Tel Aviv, it would have been over in two weeks. We all expected, I mean, we were sitting there and we thought, wow, if Hezbollah attack us now, we better go down to the basement because one in 10 buildings will fall down. That's what they're telling us. And it could have been true if they would have fired all their rockets at the same time.

They really could have done some damage. Of course, they're limited by how many rockets they can fire at one time. Andrew Fox did a great explanation on this. You know Andrew Fox. Of course, he's been on the podcast, and I would recommend anyone who enjoys these military conversations. We had an excellent podcast with Major Reserves Andrew Fox from the British Army about Hamas's manipulation of the casualty numbers. So there's a certain number they can fire. They could have done serious damage by overwhelming the Iron Dome. But for that, that's a shot that they can fire one time.

And what people don't realize is that for Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the militias in Iraq, the Seven Fronts that you talk of, all those proxies were not to destroy Israel. They want to destroy Israel, but that's a long-term plan. They want to get the nuclear bomb. The proxies that they built up were simply the outstretched arms, the tentacles, to use a metaphor, that they used to keep Israel at bay because they knew that their Russian forces

Air defense junk stands no chance against the Israeli American F-35s. So how can they defend themselves? They can defend themselves by deterring Israel from attacking them. And to that end, they built up this ring of fire. So Israel knew that the day they attacked the Iranian nukes or anything else in Iran, all those assets could be brought to bear against Israel.

causing chaos, catastrophe. So hang on, if I understand you correctly, Hezbollah, Iran's proxy army in Lebanon, has a fully planned military operation in the works to conquer the Galilee. But you're saying that the Iranian regime didn't build this ring of fire because it wanted to activate a combined invasion of Israel from all fronts. It built it...

So that that threat on Israel's borders would deter Israel from using military force to knock out the Iranian nuclear program. Exactly. Because however strong that force was, it couldn't destroy Israel. It was fundamentally a suicide force. The Hamas guys that came into Israel, they sent three to six thousand people.

2,000 of them at least left their bodies littered around the fields of Israel. It was essentially a suicide mission. The people that went on it were drugged up and knew it was a suicide mission. The people who brought you suicide bombings. It was like a suicide bombing writ large. 30,000 men can't overwhelm Israel, no matter how well armed they are. And 3,000 as a raiding party certainly can't. So the point was to build up this network of...

that would deter Israel from attacking Iran. And the problem with Hamas is they were led by genuine fanatics, people like Sinoir. And if you look at Sinoir's speeches over the years, you can see he promised this is really the tragedy. And one day there'll be an inquiry and we're going to find out why that an entire generation of leaders of the army and the intelligence community

would watch Sinois saying, we are going to invade Israel. We are going to send thousands of men. Hezbollah are going to invade at the same time. Thank God that didn't happen because they probably weren't coordinated. And they ignored it. They said, oh, no, it's going to be fine. And you can find... They thought they weren't serious. We have them contained. We'll be able to bribe them. We'll buy them off. There's a terrible video, one of the most awful videos. Daniel Hagari, an amazing man,

The IDF spokesperson, of course. IDF spokesperson. Head of the spokesperson's unit. He went on a field tour of Gaza on the 23rd of September 2023. So about two weeks before. Of the Gaza envelope. The Gaza envelope. The Gaza border area. Exactly. He went on this tour with none other than the head of the Southern Command and the head of the Gaza division. And they put out a statement, which you can find on the internet. It's still there.

saying, don't worry, everything's fine. There's no danger. It's all good. There won't be any attack from Gaza. Nothing to worry about here. We have a very good fence, a very smart fence. In reality, they knew there were 35,000 armed men on the other side of the border, and they knew there were only 300 IDF men and women on our side of the border. What were they thinking?

What were they thinking? We don't even know. And the lesson we're going to take from this war is not to underestimate our enemies. And that is actually where the difficulty begins. We trick them, you realise. What do you mean? This was essentially, what was this really, in a way? It's the kind of bargaining failure. Israel presented itself in 2023 to its enemies as being extremely weak and divided. And weak, there's no need to relitigate all the things that happened in 2023, the weekly protests.

But it looked like Israel was divided. Articles every week. It looked like it was falling apart. It looks like it was falling apart. Of course, you see, me and you, we both live in Tel Aviv. And we both know that even though the protests were passionate and people really felt what they felt, we knew that this is really 5% to 10% of the population who support maybe 20% who are on this side. And there'll be an election at some point. And this will be litigated via the ballot box at some point. And in the meantime, there are these protests happening.

And this has been happening for 75 years. It's completely standard. The protests looked powerful. You know, you light a bonfire in the middle of the highway and you put that in the newspaper every single day for a year. Gradually, it starts to build up and Israel's falling apart. But in reality, I could see these people marching past my house. And with all due respect to them, these people, the average age was 60. And I...

They all came from within walking distance of where the protest happened, because that's where all these people live. All the people that support that kind of perspective, 80% of them, live within half an hour's walk of where they held the protest. It was a brilliant strategy, and it worked, because they managed to stop the judicial reform from happening. Well done to them. But nevertheless, it gave the impression to the world that Israel was genuinely falling apart, like you said. So Hamas saw this.

Everyone saw it. Hamas saw it too. We know Hamas was watching it. Sinwa wrote about this. But I'm intrigued about this dynamic that you present between Hamas and Iran, that Iran is on the one hand funding, training Hamas, but there's a, what do you call a principal agent problem here? They've given Hamas a mission, but Hamas has a mind of its own. And then there's a question of it's the dog wagging the tail or the tail wagging the dog. And on October 7th, Hamas launches this invasion that,

We don't yet know whether the Islamic Republic of Iran knew about it in advance, was fully in the loop about the specifics of the timing, because clearly the various proxies were not coordinated, and have brought about this extraordinary reversal that has brought down the Iranian ring of fire. Now, I think the lesson that we've learned in Israel is not to underestimate our enemies. But here is where the difficult question begins.

which is who are our enemies and who are the people we're not allowed to underestimate. I read one of your analyses in which you discussed the evolution of the war and the collapse of the Iranian ring of fire. And you said that maintaining Iran's ring of fire was an integral part of Western foreign policy. What do you mean by that? It seems to have been. You remember, for example, in...

It must have been July. There was a Houthi attack. They sent a drone all the way from Yemen. A little aeroplane. Over Egypt. Over Egypt, over Sinai. Over the sea and went over, basically, Bogroshov Beach in Tel Aviv and crashed into a building not too far from where we live. No doubt. Murdered one of our neighbors. Murdered him in his sleep. Horrifying. But he wasn't the target. We know who the target was because...

we could see and you could work out exactly where the plane went from the videos. What was the target? The target was the American embassy or rather what they call now the American embassy branch. Because it did go straight over the American embassy building roof and it seemed... Straight up. It went within meters of the roof and meters of the antenna and missed it by meters and exploded on the first thing it hit after missing that. And nobody wants to talk about that.

I watched it. I looked out my window. I woke up and I looked out my window. I see a plume of smoke arising from the American embassy. From my angle, that's where it looked like it was coming from. I slept through the whole thing. You slept through the whole thing. Don't know how. It was a massive fireball 400 meters away. It was beautiful. It was just absolutely brutal attack. It was the biggest bomb I'd heard. And we'd been hearing bombs all the time. This was different. So I woke me up. I looked out the window. There's smoke coming out of the American embassy. So I go downstairs. I walk over there.

And immediately I can see. So I go to the American embassy. I see the Israeli security guards they post outside there. And I say, what happened? And they're saying, oh, you won't believe it. A plane just flew right over our heads. It flew right over the American embassy. You missed it by meters. Nobody wants to talk about it. The American government didn't recognize the fact that a ragtag bunch of rebels, people that don't have shoes, had just shot the American embassy in Israel. Missed it by meters.

Complete silence, also from Israel. For Israel, it's just embarrassing they let this thing through. It's extremely embarrassing. But you can see why the Israelis wouldn't want to be bragging about the fact. We never received confirmation, intelligence-wise, that the embassy building was the intended target. But it would at least seem, from an amateur perspective, it was the apparent target. Like it was too good not to be true, so to say. You would have to say it would be because it came out from the sea at a 90-degree angle.

and missed the building by meters, it could have hit many buildings. There are many buildings in Tel Aviv. I haven't counted them, but there are lots. There's only one American embassy branch building, and it's not the biggest building. The Americans don't want to talk about that. Why? Why? Because they don't want to aggravate the Iranians. For 20 years almost, the strategy has been...

I mean, that's changing now with Donald Trump warning that Iran will be obliterated if they assassinate him, but certainly under the previous administration. They're finding out that if you try to assassinate the president, you don't want to miss. So you think the Americans don't want to aggravate the Iranians? Things have changed now, but until January 20th, the policy in Washington definitely was appeasement with Iran at all costs. And Israel paid the price. That's why we're surrounded by a ring of fire. That's why we warped.

That's why we couldn't do anything about it. And every time there was a war and we would have tripped them a little bit and then they would build up again. And I suppose part of the question of how we shore up Israel's strategic position in the wake of the disaster of October 7th

is how we prevent the Iranian regime from rebuilding that ring of fire. The Iranian regime is playing chess and filling the chessboard with all sorts of different pieces. And as you say, Hamas didn't realize it was just a pawn and developed a mind of its own. And so I wonder how you see perhaps the conversation now changing into a recognition that the Iranian regime is not something that should be appeased or placated. It needs to be aggressively contained.

I think the question is almost moot because there's no need to contain Iran anymore. Israel, if it wants to, I'm quite sure, has the ability to do almost whatever it wants to Iran. And the fact that it isn't doing it is entirely for political reasons. I don't think Israel would have a problem dismantling anything in particular in Iran. Iran have lost, to all intents and purposes, all their valuable proxies. The Houthis are not really a threat to Israel. You know, one drone a week.

It's annoying. But it's not a major threat. When we in Tel Aviv have to wake up four times a week at three o'clock in the morning and run down to our bomb shelters, not everyone... I mean, I don't know. Do you have a bomb shelter in your apartment? I do. But it's not... Not all of us are that lucky. It's not that convenient. No, because we... But here's the difference between the way that we Israelis talk about things and the way that it's seen abroad. We will often downplay threats because...

We just want to get on with our lives. But it is important to emphasize to people who are hearing us speak in English and not in Hebrew that no, four missile sirens a week because these terrorist pirates who don't even have shoes are launching drones and rockets at us is not normal and is not something we should have to live with. But no, it's not an existential threat. Right. It's a tactical annoyance, but there's no strategic threat to us from the Houthis. Unless they're able to wear you down by attrition.

Ah, but when you're talking about a tiny group like that, we're much bigger than them. So if you have a war of attrition with someone group who is far, far smaller than you, they're going to lose simply by the mathematics of the thing. That's why it was completely correct at the beginning of the war not to attack Hezbollah. Hezbollah is a force that maybe had 20,000 men, maybe 100,000 rockets. No one knows. It hardly matters at this point. If we would have attacked them straight on, we would have gone directly into their trap and we would have fought them at full force.

Although Gallant is convinced in the version that he is telling that the beeper and walkie-talkie operation would have been extremely successful if they had knocked Hezbollah operatives out of the field right in the first week of the war. He says that operation was ready to go and we wouldn't have fallen in their trap because they had no idea that we had booby-trapped their pages. It's entirely possible. If we would have blown up all their pages right at the beginning that we would have won, to be honest, all this will have to come out in the inquiry. It will have to happen.

It is a fascinating counterfactual. Who is telling the truth? No one knows. But it is a fascinating counterfactual to imagine what would have happened if Israel had launched the Pager attack...

on day four of the war knocked out Hezbollah, what that would have done to Hamas that dragged out the war for so long because Hezbollah was distracting us on the northern border and it assumed that it had all this regional support. Imagine the counterfactual if Israel had knocked out Hezbollah as Gallant wanted right at the beginning of the war and then Hamas was forced to fight for Gaza knowing it didn't have the ring of Muslim armies it was expecting to rise up and come to its defense. That's a good point.

It could have been very different. It could have been very different. Hamas essentially destroyed the Ring of Fire. It wasn't. The IDF did it, but without Hamas and their crazy attack that has brought ruin on them and their people and all their allies, we would be in a terrible situation. It's not like the war has been a piece of cake for us. You know, we've lost a lot. But like you said, put it this way, where would you rather be? Would you rather be Israel in 2025 or Israel in 2022?

I would rather be Israel in 2022, knowing what we know now, because then we could have prevented Israel in 2023. Yeah. So we lost a lot. But if you put what we lost to the side, we lost a lot on a human and tactical level. But on the strategic level, Israel has never been stronger. Talk to me about how you see...

Israel's military deterrence against Iran now. Iran having lost its ring of fire, lost its air defenses. And you've invoked, I'm not sure I quite agree with the same reference. You say that Israel has its own ring of fire around Iran. What do you mean by that? Have I said that? Yes, you have. Oh, I see what you mean. Well, in a way... You tweet a lot of things, maybe you don't remember what they all are. Yeah, it's true. But I read through them and I picked out the most interesting points I want to challenge you on. You can look at a map of Iran and you can see that surrounding Iran are a number of Israeli allies.

You've got some of the stands. You've got Azerbaijan. It's an Israeli ally. Buys a lot of Israeli weapons. It might not be coincidence that when Raisi's helicopter came down, for example, do you remember where Raisi was flying from? No. He was flying from a meeting at the border with Azerbaijan, opening a dam. He went to meet the president in a planned meeting

That might be a coincidence. Who knows? It was a very old helicopter. I think it was. It was an old helicopter and we don't have to come up with conspiracy theories to explain why a rusty Iranian helicopter might come down in the middle of a thunderstorm. It's a very plausible, very plausible explanation. They're surrounded by people who don't like them. They're surrounded on the south by the Arab Sunni states who hate them, hate them more than they hate Israel by far because they recognize that Iran is a threat to them. They all have

Shia minorities, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Shia minorities, they hate the Iranians. Iran is isolated at this point in the same way that Israel was isolated before. And the Arab states, you have to, whatever they say, you're a spokesman, you know how it is. You've got to separate. Wow. Now you're a spokesman for all of the people of Israel. Well, citizen spokesman, a concept we invented here to try to encourage people to use their voices to speak up for our people.

It's the way it should be. You have to separate completely what messages come out of Arab states and in practice what they're doing. So, for example, Egypt has to say that they don't want Israel to control the Philadelphia Corridor. In reality, because Hamas controlled the Philadelphia Corridor, Egypt had to deal with a 10-year insurgency against Hamas and their allies in the Sinai because the Sinai became a smuggling route.

As long as Israel controls the Philadelphia corridor, they don't have that anymore. That's not a problem. Because Israel's control of the Gaza-Egypt border isolates the Gaza Strip from Egypt and makes it not Egypt's problem. That's right. The moment a terrorist group controls the other side, then it's Egypt's problem and Egypt's benefit as well when you consider how much that country has benefited from illicit smuggling and the trade in humanitarian aid.

It's a problem. And the same is going to apply to Jordan, because at some point in the next year or two, I guarantee you, the issue of the Jordan Valley is going to come up. What do you mean? Well, the Jordan Valley separates Israel from Jordan. Well, it separates the West Bank from Jordan. If you have a map, you'll see. It's part of the West Bank. It's part of the West Bank, Judea and Samaria. But it's a virtually empty area, the population outside the city of Jericho.

which has about 40,000 people, is only about 5,000 or 6,000 people. It's very barren, very dry. And it's wide. It's about 10 kilometers wide. It's deep. It's a strategic core area for Israel. At some point, just like the Philadelphia corridor separating the Palestinians in Gaza from Egypt turned out to be a critical node. And I very much doubt that Israel will ever give that up.

and that will end up being a sticking point in any negotiations in the future, the Jordan Valley is going to take the same role. Imagine that, for example, Palestinian terrorists of one form or another active in the West Bank had control of the Jordan Valley at some point in the future. Well, what's going to happen to the extremely fragile, predominantly Palestinian nation of Jordan? You go around Jordan, you've been to Jordan, everywhere you go... I've never been to Jordan. Oh, you've never been to Jordan? No.

Everywhere you go, there's pictures of the king and the late king everywhere. It feels like a dictatorship. And it is a dictatorship. And the people love the king officially. Do they like him? Really? No one knows. At some point we'll find out. There are armed groups.

No, but certainly Palestinian control of the Jordan Valley would be immensely destabilizing. It would destabilize Jordan. Because we know that the Iranian regime is already working very hard to flood the West Bank, Judea and Samaria with weapons. The New York Times has covered this extensively. This is not an Israeli talking point. And they're managing to do that despite IDF control of the Jordan Valley.

And if anyone is there other than the IDF, it would be easier for the Iranian regime to flood that area with weapons in order to try to instigate from the West Bank, from the mountains you can see from any balcony of this office block, to launch an October 7th-style attack once they're able to arm it to the teeth. But yes, it would be immensely destabilizing for Jordan as well. But why? Well, as soon as there are people on the other side of that border...

to smuggle weapons to on a consistent basis. Right now, there are dribs and drabs getting through a few guns, a rocket here and there. But if there was a border, that border would attract every jihadi from here to Afghanistan, from the Khyber Pass to Morocco, would make a beeline for that border, and Jordan would be gone. It would stop existing. Oh, fascinating. So the Jordanian monarchy have to say that they, when Israel says at some point, as they will, I've no doubt, we're going to annex the Jordan Valley,

They have to say how much they oppose it and what a disgrace it is. And they might even cut off relations and call back their ambassador. When it is what will save their regime. Wait, that is fascinating. It's the only thing that will keep them alive. That's fascinating. I really want to drill on that point because you can see that I'm still processing the point in my head. I hadn't thought of it that way. Me too, honestly. We know when the Palestinians talk about quote unquote liberating Palestine, they're not referring to the West Bank. They mean the whole land of Israel. From the river to the sea, they tell us themselves.

We know that this is not a secular nationalist project, that it has deep religious links to do with the idea that this is all Islamic land.

And therefore, I'd never thought in terms of if Israel were to embrace what everyone knows is the solution to this conflict, which is a two-state solution, because diplomats have been saying it since before they had such gray hair. Since 47, when it was first rejected. Even before. Well, even then, there was a thought that that Arab area would become part of Jordan, but never mind. That independent Palestinian state...

would become a magnet for jihadists from all over the world who see it as selling out for accepting a two-state solution and want to liberate the rest of what they see as Islamic land, Israel,

who would try to fill that region with the support of the Iranian regime in order to continue the war for the full and total liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea. And therefore, I understand the threat that that would pose to Israel. I'd never thought about the threat that an independent Palestinian state would pose to Jordan by becoming the entry point for...

for all the world's jihadist sludge trying to converge on Jerusalem. That's right. They would all come. Jordan would be gone. Jordan would be Afghanistan, be Syria. The only thing currently preventing Jordan being a jihadi wasteland like Syria or parts of Lebanon is the American base.

that straddles the border between Jordan and Syria. If it was not for that... The Atanf base. Exactly. Why? What's the strategic importance of Atanf? There aren't many roads out there in the desert. And so it's quite easy for America with a single base to block a large area to prevent jihadis, Iranian smugglers, that kind of thing, traversing the desert between Syria and Jordan. So that one base is able to protect the entirety of Jordan from the jihadis massing on their borders.

If Jordan ever falls, Israel doesn't need to worry as long as they control the Jordan Valley. They won't be able to get in. And whatever happens in the future, we don't know what will be in 10 years. It's a long border to defend. Well, you know, we can do it. You don't... Well, if we enlist the Haredim, we can. Otherwise, we might be in a spot of trouble. No, we'll be fine. You think we need to enlist the Haredim, Elad? The army says it needs 10,000 more men. Well, think about it. If they don't want to fight, how can we force them?

Oh, because you threaten them with sanctions otherwise. You threaten them either with prison or with the revocation of certain social benefits. People don't want to fight. They fight because they have to. They fight because they're raised within a system that explains to them the importance of everyone sacrificing, making a sacrifice because otherwise our country is in serious trouble because we live in a dangerous region surrounded by people who want us dead. And the Haredim too are going to have to lift their own weight in this country. I completely agree with you.

I know the Haredi society well, and it's really, it's tragedy that they don't take their role in society. I don't want to veer to that because I do want to focus on Israel's strategic situation. You were talking about, we've been talking about how the reversal of fortunes, how Israel has emerged so much stronger since October 7th, about the threats that lurk around the corner if Israel makes mistakes,

And really shows us how little strategic wiggle room we have in contrast to the vision back from the 90s about bold diplomatic initiatives that are going to totally redraw the map. We know that you try to redraw things and everything can fall apart. But I'm wondering about the long game because I want to circle back to what we said at the beginning of the conversation. Israel's enemies knew that 3,000 armed men, no matter how much cap to gun they were on, no matter how deranged and incited they

No matter how many machetes and how much barbarity they unleashed on October 7th, they were not going to destroy Israel. But the vicious psyops campaign, the war of misinformation to isolate Israel, to delegitimize Israel, that's the long game that our enemies are playing. That's the main game. Talk to me about that. Remember this. That's the main game. The main game is that. That's why they fight the way they do. They fight the way they do.

to sacrifice their own children for PR stunts. And when you say it like that, it sounds crazy. It sounds like the most sick thing that's ever been done in human history. But that's because it is the most sick thing that's been done in human history. It's incredible to imagine that a people would sacrifice their own children for PR. But that has been the primary strategy of Hamas from the beginning. They want to kill our children and they want to kill their children

Every dead baby that they can show before the cameras is a PR victory for them. It's horrific. When you say it out loud, it seems incomprehensible. It sounds deranged. It sounds deranged. But that's their game. And you can see from this that really the main game isn't on the battlefield. On the battlefield, it's almost a sideshow. And Israel, in the PR war, hasn't taken it seriously. And I think that...

Lots of criticism is made of the Israeli government and spokesman game, let's say. Apart from you, of course, you were born for the role. I told you that, no? Too kind. You were born for the role. Too kind. There were other very talented spokespeople fighting shoulder to shoulder with me at the PMO. That's true. And you saw the news about Kay Barley. That she, yes, I raised eyebrows. No, no, nothing to do with me. I wish her the best of luck. Me too. And...

That's half the war. And Israel simply did not fight that war, or it fought it at 10% power, 10% volume, let's say. And as a result, it made the real war much more difficult. And it meant people had to suffer a lot more, mostly in Gaza. And the reason Gaza now is in complete ruins is in a small part because of that. It's also because...

The world was disunited. Yeah, you hear the way that even some of Israel's more lukewarm allies will say, Israel had a right to go to war against Hamas, but the way it fights that war matters. You never hear any of the Palestinian supporters saying they have a right to resist, but

But the way that they resist matters. They never say that. But Hamas's strategy was, as you say, to try to sacrifice their own people on the altar of jihad in order to shower Israel with bad press. And they rigged the entire battlefield, the tunnels underneath children's bedrooms, the rocket launchers underneath children's beds in order to maximize their own civilian casualties because it looks bad on CNN and therefore endears Israel.

world to them and creates international sympathy and anger. And I've always been making this point that when I speak to Israelis about how the information battle space is connected to the kinetic battle space, that you need international legitimacy and weapons in order to continue fighting the real war on the ground. But you make a point that is a lot more disturbing, that it's not that the information battle space is

affects our ability to fight in the physical battle space. It's the way that Hamas has designed the physical battle space is designed to fight a much bigger information war. And that information war that is designed to delegitimize, to isolate, to turn Israel into a global pariah, that's the real long game for how they want to destroy Israel. And I wonder, to wrap up, do you think they're winning?

I think they have lost. I think they have absolutely lost. Even with all the horror shows that they've put on, what have they managed to do? They've managed to poison the views of a small number of people in the West against Israel. The anti-Semitic views held by people in Arab countries are already maxed out. You can't make them any more hateful of Israel. And if they managed to, through this entire war and all their sacrifice and their 30 years of

of building up to this. If that's all they managed to increase anti-Israel sentiment from 28% to 31% in Western countries, which if you look at the stats... It's not bad. Most young Brits don't think Israel has a right to exist. But the most young Brits would favor a dictatorship according to some polls. So maybe don't take your cues from most young Brits. We'll see what happens. We were lucky to escape, huh? Yeah. We got out just in time. It's going to be...

Beautiful. That's what I think. And in a few years time, I'm sure that some degree of peace will break out in the Middle East. We already have a certain taste of it. Saudi normalization is a matter of time. I agree. And I'm very hopeful for Lebanon as well. I think Lebanon is such a broken place. The GDP of Lebanon is one of the lowest in the world. If you look at the misery index, there's only one country in the world more miserable than Lebanon, which is Afghanistan. Afghanistan is the only place more miserable than Lebanon to live.

One of the happiest places in the world to live is Israel. They share a border. You have the happiest place and the most miserable place in the world sharing a border. And the Lebanese, I've been speaking to lots of Lebanese people. A lot of them don't hate us. Even Shia people there don't really hate us. They understand that their future lies in partnership with Israel. I'm very hopeful. And when people look back on this, and one day Gaza will be rebuilt to some extent, and all the misery and the war... After Hamas. After Hamas. And the misery and the war will be forgotten.

And they're going to look back and they won't even remember this. They're just going to see the good things. And all the sacrifice is such a waste. And so many people have died. And for what? What have they gained out of it? It's a complete failure for them. Like we said at the beginning, what did they aim to do? What was their plan? The plan was to blacken our name in the world. They knew they couldn't defeat us. To blacken our name in the world and bring the armies of the Islamic and Arab world against us.

to bring the West against us and to have the Jews sent back to Europe on boats, which is how they picture us, even though most of us are not from Europe. We're both Iraqi. That's true. I'm not going back. You can't make me. It won't happen. It won't happen. Although one day, who knows, me and you, Elon, it could be we'll be sitting in one of the souks in Baghdad. You know, there is nothing... Like our great-great-grandfathers. Nothing.

a new Middle East is around the corner and there is nowhere I want to visit more than Baghdad on a family history trip. So on that note, uh, hopefully one day peace will break out across the Middle East. We'll be able to invite the Lebanese friends you've been speaking to, to visit in Tel Aviv. We will go and, uh, sip our frappuccinos on the beach in, uh, Beirut as well. And we will look back at this absolutely horrific chapter in our history. Uh,

which we still need to get out of and bring down Hamas and bring back all the hostages. And this crisis is far from over. But hopefully, God willing, inshallah, whichever deity we're praying to, we will look back and say that this was the beginning of the end of a horrible chapter. Absolutely. Saul, how can people follow you on social media? You can follow me on Twitter. Follow me, Saul Sadko on Twitter. Saul underscore Sadko.

Okay, let's get this above 45,000 followers. Saul Sadka. I think it's quite enough already, to be honest. I have enough. Don't follow me. Don't follow. Don't follow. Do not follow our guests. It's too many. Do not. Go through the back catalogue of the other episodes of this podcast and you can follow them instead. Saul Sadka, thank you for coming on the show. My pleasure. Thank you, Alan.

And that's it for today's episode of State of a Nation with Saul Sadka. As always, if you enjoy these podcasts, please subscribe on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts. Give us a like, give us a follow on social media platforms. We're at stateofapod on Instagram and Twitter. Share the link with friends you think will be enlightened by these conversations. I certainly was. I've learned new things. It's changed the way that I'm thinking around the world. And we'll see you next time for the next episode. Thanks for joining.