From Hamas to Hezbollah

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Steven Cook: I stayed within sight of an Arab village on the West Bank on the other side of the Green Line, wondered out loud, how many Hamas supporters are in that village? And then I’m sure the people in the village wonder what would happen one day if the Israeli army came there. It is hard to grasp that there isn’t a resolution to this conflict, and that’s why I got the Golden Retriever.

Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, joined as always by my co host, Emma Varvaloucas, the executive director of The Progress Network. And What Could Go Right?, for those of you who have been listening regularly, you know, is our weekly podcast where we try to look at the world through a less dyspeptic lens, through a less apocalyptic lens, through a somewhat more, what is going on in the world that we are failing to notice that could lead to a better future, rather than all the things that we are absolutely noticing that we are certain will lead to a worse future.

One of the challenges of that overall mantra, which I have repeated in various forms for the past three years, is that there is clearly a lot in the world that is going wrong, and how do you look at what’s going wrong from a less grim perspective?

And clearly one of the things that is front and center these days, no matter where you are, you would have a hard time avoiding news of the ongoing roiling conflict between Israel and Gaza, between Israel and Hamas, and over the past month, the much more escalated conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, which as we are recording this has also extended a little bit to the Houthis in Yemen.

Who knows whether that will have escalated by the time you are hearing this or not. But the point being, a lot of attention is being paid to that. We’ve done a few episodes on that. We’re going to talk today a bit about what the shape of this conflict is with someone who has been following all of this for decades.

Emma, who are we going to talk to?

Emma Varvaloucas: We are going to talk to Steven Cook. He’s an expert on Arab and Turkish politics as well as U. S. Middle East foreign policy. He’s a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of a few books. The most recent one, if you would like to check it out, is called The End of Ambition: America’s Past, Present, and Future in the Middle East.

But as Zachary said, we’re going to be talking about the current conflict around Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran. So are we ready for a difficult topic today?

Zachary Karabell: I think we’re as ready as we ever will be.

Emma Varvaloucas: Hmm. All right, let’s get into it.

Zachary Karabell: Steven Cook, it’s a pleasure to have you on the show, dressed better than me.

Although, for those of you, Steven is doing an event today, today not being the day that you’re listening to this with the Sheikh of Abu Dhabi on the high end, and therefore he’s dressed better. So, to impress the Emiratis, which I think is always, always important, you never know what that’s going to be worth in the future.

Steven Cook: I was told that a tie and shoes were required to moderate a discussion with the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates.

Zachary Karabell: I will not be wearing a tie later. I will though be wearing a much more formal outfit than the one I’m wearing now. So let’s talk about that for a minute as an entree into all things chaotic and Middle Eastern, I have been struck repeatedly since October 7th by the following.

And I would like you to, you know, agree or disagree in in much more elaborate form, which is, for most of the time growing up, anytime anything happened on the West Bank or Gaza or between the Israelis and the Palestinians, all the Arab states would get together and they would condemn Israel and they would talk about what we’re going to do and the price of oil would spike and the world would freak out and the UN would have meetings.

And while there have certainly been vast amounts of blowback about Israel’s actions in Gaza, in New York and London, and I guess there was a brief moment in Istanbul in November of 2023 and in Indonesia for a brief moment around the same time. Like, the Arab world has, it’s like, you could hear a pin drop when it comes to public actual outcry.

Maybe social media, there’s been more, certainly people express their outcry more on social media than they do in person, just that’s the world we’re living in. And even more striking has been the fact that the Abraham Accords, the peace agreements between the Gulf states and Israel have not only held, but seem to have held without almost any, without like a blink or a boo.

So what do you think’s going on there? Is it just like the Gulf states, Qatar, you know, which is trying to be neutral, have just decided that like Iran’s the real enemy here? And if Israel’s fighting a proxy war, kind of on our side with Iran, that’s kind of a good thing? Or economically, the future is with Israel, not with Islamic fundamentalism?

I don’t know.

Steven Cook: I mean, I think all of the above.

So one of the striking things about this conflict, and given the backdrop of the, you know, death and destruction in the Gaza Strip, as well as what’s unfolded in Lebanon in recent weeks, what’s been striking about this is how stable Israel’s diplomatic relations actually are with its neighbors, but mostly with its partners within the Abraham Accords.

There’s been a lot in the press and elsewhere about Israel being isolated in the globe. I’m kind of like, where? It is true that the Bahrainis don’t have an ambassador in Israel, the Moroccans don’t have an ambassador in Israel, the Emiratis do, the Egyptians have maintained their ambassador in Israel throughout, and all of these countries continue a robust dialogue with them.

And I think that the calculation, particularly among the Abraham Accords countries, has been that, one, economic development and prosperity in the region requires integration in the region. And Israel, the little country that is startup nation, you know, tech hot house, et cetera, is a drop, can be a driver of that economic development along with, you know, tied up with all these other countries.

And then of course, as you, as you articulated, everybody sees Iran as a threat. And one of the kind of stunning things about US foreign policy in the region over the course of the last decade or so is that in totality, the United States has been trying to drive a consensus in the region that includes Israel.

And then at that moment, when there is a consensus, the United States is sort of on the outside. I mean, the United States is really the one that’s calling for de escalation. It’s the Biden administration that has been looking for ways to renegotiate the JCPOA, or at least was for the first two and a half years of the, of, of its, of the Biden administration, but throughout everything that has happened, governments in the region have wanted to maintain their relations with Israel.

Even the Saudis throughout all of this has said our goal is ultimately normalization of relations with Israel. The price has gotten higher as a result of the conflict in Gaza, but they’ve never dropped that goal. I’d say, you know, there are exceptions here. The, the Jordanians have been very outspoken and very, very critical of the Israelis publicly, and there have been a lot of protests in Jordan. They’ve diminished, people are tired, the police have handled them with a certain amount of brutality, but the Jordanian foreign minister has been way, way, way out ahead of everybody and said that the United States should actually impose an arms embargo on Israel.

Now, think about it, though. Jordan is at least 65 percent Palestinian and the Royal Court is obviously worried about the instability that might overtake them given the situation in both Gaza and the West Bank. But overall, your point is a good one. Israel’s diplomatic relations, particularly with its neighbors, remains mostly stable.

Emma Varvaloucas: So aside from this relative stability of diplomatic relations, a lot has changed in the last few weeks, you know, since the attacks on October 7th. Israel has been very focused on Hamas. They haven’t shown a lot of interest in opening up multiple fronts. And then all of a sudden, you know, end of September into October, that has completely changed.

So the question is why, like what, what in their calculus that all of a sudden now there seems to be appetite, at least from the government, if not from the people, to fight a multi front potentially war, right?

Steven Cook: It’s a great question. And the easy answer to it is they don’t think that they’re going to be fighting a multi front war.

I was in Israel for a week. I came back a week ago, a little more than a week ago. And essentially Israelis, official, non official Israelis point to the fact that major combat operations are over in the Gaza Strip. Israeli military remains there. There’s a large force that’s there. They’re still in the Gaza Strip, but it’s, Hamas has been rendered a disorganized force that requires military operations against cadres and cells of Hamas, but the organization itself does not, from Gaza, represent the kind of threat that it did on October 7th.

As a result, Israel has decided to focus its attention on its northern border, where anywhere between 60, 000 and 80, 000 Israeli citizens have not been able to live in their homes because of the threat of either an October 7th style attack from Hezbollah or the constant shelling and rocket attack and the use of anti tank munitions that are being fired into buildings there. So, as I was leaving the Israelis, well, first, the entire week I was there was very eventful. We had, I had a Houthi missile strike, I slept through the air raid sirens. Yeah. It was.

Emma Varvaloucas: Deep sleeper, sounds like.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah.

Steven Cook: It was kind of incredible. I was staying with dear friends and I actually sleep in, their guest room is their bomb shelter. And I got stirred awake, and everyone’s like, “There’s air raid sirens,” and I was like, “Oh.”

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, but I’m in the bomb shelter, so why you waking me?

Steven Cook: I’m in the bomb shelter, no need to wake me up.

Emma Varvaloucas: Let me sleep, yeah.

Steven Cook: And then, of course, we went upstairs to, like, put on the news, so the whole thing was kind of very strange. In any event, two days later, we had the, the beeper attack, and then the next day, the walkie talkie attack.

And then as I was leaving, was when the Israelis hit about a dozen senior commanders of of Hezbollah, and then a week later they killed Hassan Nasrallah. This is all in an effort to reestablish Israel’s deterrent, to put the fear of God in Hezbollah, to make it impossible for Hezbollah, at least in the short run, to mount an effective response.

The debate now in Israel is whether to actually go into Lebanon on the ground. And from what I understand, the IDF high command is divided. There is agreement that Israel should press its advantage, given that Hezbollah is back on its heels, but should they continue to do that through airpower, or do they need to do that on the ground to ensure that Hezbollah gets pushed back far enough?

And they point to something called the Litany River, which is about 18 miles north of the border, in order so that they can safely return these people to Israel. Israel’s northern communities. There has been some reporting that the Israelis are preparing for a limited incursion, that there have been special forces operators in there already, and that this is to pave the way for some sort of limited operation.

Clearly, the IDF, the Israeli government, is no longer taking any advice from the United States, which has said that they shouldn’t do this. But there’s good reason, and this is part of the debate within the IDF. Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 and established a security zone in southern Lebanon between 1985 and 2000.

And they occupied that area. They lost 250 soldiers during that period. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but in Israel terms, it’s kind of a lot. And they didn’t achieve any of their strategic goals. These Israeli soldiers and their allies, they were Christian militias from Southern Lebanon that were their allies, were essentially sitting ducks and they were allowed to, and they essentially bled both the IDF and these Christian militias.

Hezbollah did with Syrian help, Palestinian groups did with Syrian help until May 2000 when then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak said enough, there’s no real strategic purpose that this occupation is serving. Let’s get out. But that didn’t provide Israel with a tremendous amount of security either. So they’re really betwixt and in between.

The real question is not the way in which the Israelis have conducted operations so far, which have been effective. It’s what’s next. Should they press their advantage with Hezbollah and maintain it? What, what do they do with Southern Lebanon if they cleared it from Hezbollah?

I think the hope is, is that The Lebanese government gets its act together. You can deploy the Lebanese Armed Forces south of the Latani River along with UN peacekeepers. Well, that was the plan after the 2006 conflict that lasted six or seven weeks between Israel and Hezbollah, and it was never fulfilled. Perhaps with Hezbollah greatly weakened, there is an opportunity there, but Lebanese politics are difficult, and who knows what can happen.

Zachary Karabell: All this reminds me continually of Colin Powell’s famous quip about if you undertake major military actions, the if you break it, you, you fix it, or if you break it, you own it.

Steven Cook: It was the Pottery Barn rule of foreign policy. If you, if you invade a country and you break it, you bought it.

Zachary Karabell: And I mean, I’m not a big fan of, you know, cause Colin Powell in many ways caved to the Iraq invasion, basically made the mistake that he was warning about.

But it does feel like Israel is kind of perpetually in that, as if they are saying because of October 7, 2023, if we break it, someone else can fix it.

Steven Cook: That’s exactly right.

Zachary Karabell: Not our problem, right? And I mean, maybe that’s true. There’s a, I mean, there’s a sort of a stunning degree of cynicism, or I suppose if you’re Israeli, realism about Israel’s shift in its policies since October 7th.

One is to just like, look, if we’re going to live in a neighborhood filled with autocracies that want to kill us, we don’t really care whether the world thinks we’re democratic or human rights abiding. We care that that group of people is lethally scared of us. And we don’t care what we have to do to make that happen.

I mean, I do feel this is kind of a, I think people have overdone “This is all Netanyahu.” I mean, there seems to be a huge consensus in Israel of just, and, you know, I guess we can bleep this out for the, but I mean, it’s basically like, fuck it and fuck them.

Steven Cook: You’re right. There’s, there’s something, what I call the other BDS, BB derangement syndrome, and that all bad things that can be attributed to Israel lay at the feet of the prime minister.

He is cynical. The trust deficit between the Prime Minister and virtually everyone in the world is huge. But yeah, I think that the Israelis have come to the conclusion, and it’s not the autocracies. They like the autocracies. They like the Emiratis. They like the Saudis. They like the Egyptians. They like the Jordanians.

That’s, that’s good for them. They like that stability. But if they’re going to live in a world where there are these non state actors like Hamas and Hezbollah and the Houthis that are being armed to the teeth by the Iranians. And they’re going to get criticized no matter what they do. They’re attacked, they respond, they get criticized, they’re attacked, they respond, they get criticized, they get hauled before the International Criminal Court, et cetera, et cetera.

It’s exactly that sense, which is like, F it, we might as well just go for it. And I think that that was part of, that’s part of it. The other part of it is that October 7th was a deep and will likely be an abiding wound. and the Israelis were caught completely off guard and they have come to the conclusion that they have to change the rules of the game and the way they change the rules of the game is going way up the escalation and risk ladder and daring people to meet them and so far, they have done a lot of damage to Hamas and it looks like they’ve done a fair amount of damage by decapitating Hezbollah.

But as you said, it’s break it and somebody else buys it. I think that, I don’t think that anybody’s really willing to let them off the hook when it comes to Gaza, even among their allies and friends in the Gulf and elsewhere, that there actually has to be something to give to the Palestinians. No one’s gonna pay for the reconstruction if the Israelis are just gonna bomb it five years from now.

So that’s, I think, I think they’ve drawn a line there for the Israelis, but the Israelis thus far have said, okay, well let the United States work it out. And the United States has been unable to do that.

Zachary Karabell: When I met with some of the government officials in Qatar and Doha, in February. This feels like ancient history, but their line then was, we will spend billions of dollars to reconstruct Gaza, but we’re not going to spend billions of dollars to reconstruct Gaza if, as you say, the Israelis are just going to blow it up again. It’s like we want, we want some assurance.

Steven Cook: The way of getting around the Israelis needing to blow it up again is there to be some sort of decent government or administration that takes it over. There’s a fight over what that looks like. The United States and others would think that that would be the Palestinian authority.

The Israelis don’t see the Palestinian authority. They see the Palestinian authority as not constructive. Let’s put it that way. And they’d like to see some sort of kind of international group come in. I think that that’s very, very unlikely. So the more likely outcome in Gaza is some version of the status quo in which the Israelis ring Gaza Strip with the IDF.

They remain in there along what’s called the Nepserim Corridor, which is the east west axis that bisects the Gaza Strip to the north and south. They may stay on what’s called the Philadelphi Corridor, which is an axis along the Gaza Egypt border, which is angering the Egyptians because it’s a violation of a 2005 diplomatic agreement between Egypt and Israel governing that border.

So, there’s really not a huge plan, and under these circumstances, not a lot of motivation from the Qataris, the Emiratis, the Saudis, and others to actually rebuild Gaza because the war would essentially have solved absolutely nothing. When it comes to Lebanon, that may be different. Certainly the Saudis and others who had supported the Sunnis in Lebanon stopped because the Sunnis couldn’t get their act together.

And that’s sort of the story of Lebanese politicians. They can’t get their act together. And the country, and it is the kind of, warlordism of the Civil War years have kind of carried over in politics in the post Civil War era. I can’t imagine that anybody’s not happy about the demise of Hassan Nasrallah and the weakening of Hezbollah.

So there is, without being sunny and totally optimistic about it, there is, in the abstract, at least an opportunity for governments to come in from both the West as well as the region to try to help the Lebanese government re establish some measure of authority and effectiveness that would be able to assert its authority at the expense of Hezbollah.

I mean, there’s lots of Lebanese who don’t like Hezbollah, there’s lots of Lebanese that do like Hezbollah, but the Israelis have done, I think, what they think is a favor to everybody, and now here is an opportunity for the Lebanese government and those who wish Lebanon well to step in and try to help at the expense of an Iranian proxy.

News Clip: Breaking news outta the Middle East, US officials are confirming NBC news that they have the view that it appears in Israeli ground, incursion into Lebanon has just begun. Israeli officials had said to the US that the incursion would be limited in scope, scale, and duration. That’s their account. U. S. officials say so far that is what they are seeing. This is days after Israeli airstrikes killed the longtime leader of Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Emma Varvaloucas: So since we’re talking about, you know, international players maybe coming in in the future here with Lebanon, Let’s talk a little bit about the U. S. ‘s role. I mean, the U. S. has been fairly impotent when it comes to negotiating anything between Hamas and Israel, faced plenty of criticism for that. Do you see that changing in the case of a future Lebanon scenario?

And do you think that the reality is going to be any different given the outcome of the presidential election? Like, is the U. S. foreign policy really going to be that different if we have Trump in the White House versus Kamala?

Steven Cook: Let me go backwards and start with that question and then we can work back to Lebanon and U.S. influence in negotiation. I just wrote a piece in Substack called The Liberal Patriot in which I looked at a Harris Middle East policy and a Trump Middle East policy, and there is a lot more overlap than our politics, polarized politics would suggest. There is, they both support the two state solution in different ways.

Trump has talked, has been bellicose and talked tough about Iran, but really only once did he make good on his words, and that was the assassination of Qasem Soleimani in early 2019. But otherwise he gave the Iranians a pass. If you just look at the summer of 2019, the Iranians interfered with shipping in the Persian Gulf, in fact took some container ships, you know, hostage for short periods of time, shot down an American surveillance drone in the international airspace over the gulf. And then this summer culminated with a drone attack on two major oil facilities in Saudi Arabia, and President Trump said, well, they didn’t attack us. They attacked Saudi Arabia. I’m waiting for a phone call from Riyadh, basically doing away with 40 years of declared U. S. policy in the region in the form of the Carter Doctrine, and the Reagan Corollary to the Carter Doctrine, which was, you That the United States would defend the oil fields of the Gulf from both external and internal threats.

And that was met with, you know, kind of bipartisan support. At the same time, then you have the Democrats, who, and the president’s maximum pressure campaign was not about regime change, it was about getting a better deal, because he fashions himself as a master negotiator. So he could get a better deal than the Obama administration did.

But maximum pressure was precisely what Obama pursued in order to get the Iranians to the negotiating table in the first place. There’s a slight difference on Iran. I think the Democrats generally believe that they can forge a better relationship with the Iranians and the Iranians are willing to reciprocate.

I don’t think there’s a lot of evidence of that. I think there’s evidence of the Iranians being accommodating in one realm while continuing malign activities in another realm as it suits them and going back and forth across the range of issues and areas. I don’t think the Republicans actually believe that.

There’s, that’s a slight difference, but no one’s been able to kind of, are willing to take on the Iranians directly for fear of a major regional conflict. And both Democrats and Republicans have talked about de emphasizing the Middle East. So there’s not as much. I mean, you’d think there were these huge differences between these two candidates on the Middle East, and there really isn’t a lot.

Now, when it comes to the United States and its ability to drive events in the region, I think that this conflict that began October 7th, 2023, I think drives home the limits of American power, especially in Gaza, Palestinians and Israelis. It engaged in what they consider to be an existential struggle.

And so no amount of American pressure or resources that are brought to bear are necessarily going to make a ceasefire happen if the parties don’t want to have a ceasefire. And clearly, Yashe Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, now the leader of Hamas, the leader of the military wing of Hamas, doesn’t feel the need for a ceasefire, even though he’s lost many fighters in the field and Gazans have suffered terribly ’cause of the war that he and others launched. One of the goals is to delegitimize Israel in international public opinion. I think that they have been very successful in that, right? By Israel, hiding behind civilians in the Israelis taking this action that has killed so many civilians.

On the other side is unclear whether Netanyahu shares this or not, but certainly people to his right want a maximal Israeli policy to defeat Hamas and will brook no compromise that would prioritize actually hostages at the expense of defeating Hamas. That is because they have ideas about using this conflict to tighten their grip both on the West Bank as well as re establish an Israeli presence in the Gaza Strip.

Now the settlers are sort of coy about the Gaza Strip, but they clearly talk about it in a way that, you know, everything we predicted around the time of Ariel Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 about it’s not bringing Israel security, about Israelis having to face extremists and so on, all of those things came true on October 7th, therefore, Israel needs to be in the Gaza Strip.

Under those circumstances, where is there a ceasefire agreement to be had? It strikes me that Israel, Hamas, to some extent the Iranians, have been maneuvering not be blamed for a ceasefire that none of them actually want to begin with. And then when it comes to, when it comes to Lebanon, it’s just made more complicated by so many different actors with so many different interests, both within Lebanon and then external actors that want to play in Lebanon to their advantage.

So I think the United States is also not in a good position when it comes to trying to bring some stability to Lebanon and Israel’s northern border.

Zachary Karabell: I mean, I think you make an important point about the, you know, this is yet another example of the waning of American influence. I mean, obviously, I think you make a good point because I agree with it, but it’s indicative of the United States has vast power resources, both military, economic, and to some degree diplomatic.

But the limit of being able to use those resources as power, kind of in the hard power fashion, the making someone do something they may not otherwise want to do, that’s kind of manifest everywhere. I mean, the fact is, no country has that kind of power anymore, or at least not for now. Many, you know, aspire to it or want it.

I think the problem sometimes with the United States and with the world and its treatment of the United States is a perception that that power remains intact and is therefore not being utilized effectively.

Steven Cook: Right. And I think that lots of people share this misconception of the United States. If you talk to leftists in Israel, they don’t understand why the Biden administration has enabled the Netanyahu government.

It’s just a fundamental misreading of what the United States can actually accomplish.

Zachary Karabell: And it’s funny, you know, you talk about the continuity of policy, which is also quite true. I always find it funny, like in various points in American history, you have a doctrine, like the Monroe Doctrine, the Carter Doctrine, then you have a corollary to the doctrine, like the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, the Reagan Corollary to the Carter Doctrine.

But I feel there’s such continuum, it really should be like, we should just keep adding on like, like, like Spanish surnames, or like the codicil to the corollary to the doctrine and the addendum to the codicil to the corollary to the doctrine, because that’s kind of where we are.

Steven Cook: It’d be very confusing to write and read.

Zachary Karabell: I know, too confusing. But so my take when I talk to Israelis and I talk to Palestinians is, there is some virtue of the perspective of not being mired in this endless or seemingly endless conflict, this particular endless conflict, not between Muslims and Jews, just between Palestinians and Israelis, that no matter what pertains, we’re all going to wake up on January 1st, 2025, and the following things are going to be true. There are going to be about 7 million Israeli Jews, there are going to be about 2 million Israeli Arabs, and there are going to be about 6 to 7 million Palestinians on Gaza and the West Bank. And no one’s going anywhere, fundamentally.

And all of them, except for the Israeli Arabs, seem to harbor some degree of fantasy that one day the other, depending on which side you’re on, you know, the other being out of the Palestinians or the Israelis are just gonna like wake up and go, you know what? We’re, we’re done. We’re just, we’re going to move like all the Gazans will just move to Egypt and all the people in the West Bank will go like, we’re being displaced and displaced and displaced by the settlers.

Steven Cook: Or the Israelis will go to like the Upper West Side and Los Angeles and Great Neck.

Zachary Karabell: Post war experiment. We had a good 70 year run. 75 maybe, but you know, who’s counting? And I do feel there’s just, and like you say that to people on the, I’m sure you’ve had this, but the immediate reaction on both sides tends to be, Oh yeah, but they did this and they did that and they did this and they did that and they did this.

Steven Cook: This drives me crazy. I, it drives me actually absolutely bananas.

Zachary Karabell: Right, so, like, where does this go? I mean, do they just all exhaust each other and continue like this? It’s, it’s one of the longer standing, Apartheid ended in South Africa, the Berlin Wall came down. I mean, I guess North Korea and South Korea remains pretty intractable.

But you know what I mean? Like, I, there seems to be, I don’t know, how do you maintain your sanity doing this, Steven?

Steven Cook: I don’t. No.

Emma Varvaloucas: I’m a second away from a breakdown.

Steven Cook: I have a, I have a really snuggly golden retriever that helps me cope with, uh, with all of this and a wonderful wife and wonderful children.

No, I think, I think you’re right. I mean, it’s obviously you’re exaggerating for fact. It’s not all Israelis and all Palestinians, et cetera, but there are people who think that there’s, you know, somehow a solution. And, and those, that’s where the dynamism is on both the Israeli and Palestinian political spectrums.

It’s on the One Staters, where Hamas attacked Israel to liberate Palestine, not to liberate Gaza, not to liberate the West Bank, but to liberate Palestine. And if you watch the footage from October 7th, it’s clear in the way, in the radio chatter that’s picked up, and the way in which these terrorists talk to each other, that they’re in sovereign Israel, but they’re talking about settlers and settlements, that this is entire thing is, is illegitimate.

And then it’s the same kind of thing with the Israelis, you know, one staters. There are some who want to see the Palestinians gone from the Gaza Strip. There are other settlers who say, well, look, you know, the, the Palestinians can stay, but they’ll have to live with a lesser status, you know, kind of in a green card situation in the West Bank.

Then there are other settlers who say, well, let’s give them citizenship. The demographics are wrong and, and the demographic advantages with the Jews between the river and the sea anyway. So there’s different flavors of this, but essentially this is a conflict between one staters on either side, which makes it particularly intractable.

The whole thing is absurd when, you know, people in the West say, well, so and so did, you know, one side did this and the other side did that. Okay. It’s a fact. Israel exists. It’s not going anywhere. It’s a fact that there are Palestinians and they’re not going anywhere. So can’t we work this out? And I think Israelis and Palestinians are kind of sick of each other. That was the logic behind the wall. The wall in Israel, the separation barrier, the apartheid wall, whatever you want to call it, was something that the left came up with as a means of separation. But then they lost the elections and the right took it up and said, well, let’s do it in a way that makes it absolutely impossible for there ever to be a Palestinian state.

And that’s actually how the wall came to look like it does rather than tracing the green line, which would have institutionalized Israel’s Eastern border. So, the conflict continues, and I have said over and over and over again, it may be one of those conflicts that defies resolution. I mean, think about all of the things.

This is bound up in history, religion, national identity, historical memory, geopolitics, land. All of these knotty, thorny issues that aren’t even well understood from the outside are now playing into this conflict that seems to defy resolution. Now, there’s good news at a, at a, on a micro level.

There are people of goodwill who are committed to coexistence. I went to a big protest in Tel Aviv and there were Palestinian citizens of Israel and Israeli Jews who had gotten together to engage in activism against the government. There are small bore things within Israel, and there are people who, prior to this conflict, who crossed the borders.

I mean, many of these kibbutzim who were attacked on October 7th had good relations with the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip and helped getting them medical care and so on and so forth. A lot of that is gone now. I mean, that goodwill, given what has happened, and, you know, friends that I stayed with live within sight of an Arab village on the West Bank on the other side of the Green Line, and have, you know, wondered out loud how many, how many Hamas supporters are in that, are in that village.

And it’s quite frightening to them. And then I’m sure the people in the village wonder what would happen one day if the Israeli army came there. So it is deeply distressing and sometimes hard to, hard to grasp that there isn’t a resolution to this conflict. And that’s why I got the golden retriever. Her name is Tulip.

Emma Varvaloucas: Oh, Tulip. Tulip, the golden retriever.

When you talk about the conflict defying resolution, you had this piece, I think it was a foreign policy, about how the conflict in Gaza is not actually as linked to the conflict in Lebanon, which might not be as linked as, you know, if other fronts open elsewhere, just because one resolves in one place doesn’t mean that one will also resolve in another place.

So is that the same when you talk about conflict defying resolution? Is that like, is In all of these cases and all of the things that Israel has gotten involved with and with the players that involve themselves with Israel, is all of that defying resolution or are you talking specifically about Gaza?

Steven Cook: No, I’m talking about the Israeli conflict with Palestinians. The Palestinian Israeli conflict. That’s what I think defies resolution. I think it is, in some ways, it’s impossible to imagine at this point a Palestinian state living side by side and in peace with Israel because the politics don’t allow for it.

I mean, even, let’s, let’s assume for a second that the most dynamic ends of the Palestinian Israeli political spectrum were not the hard right in Israel or Hamas. And let’s just assume for a second we had an Israeli prime minister and a president of the Palestinian Authority, who were interested in negotiations, and the United States, you know, had a special coordinator to oversee these new negotiations.

The problem is, is that Israel’s minimum demands for peace, the Palestinians couldn’t possibly satisfy. And the Palestinians minimum demands for peace are things that the Israelis couldn’t possibly satisfy. And those things are mirror images of each other. And that, and you get stalemate. You get stalemate.

And the United States has spent three years trying to alter the interests and incentives of the parties so that they could satisfy the minimum demands of each side. And we’ve been unable to do that because these are, the irreducible minimum demands for Israel is Jerusalem as the capital, undivided capital of the state of Israel and the Jewish people.

Palestinians say, we need a capital in Jerusalem. Israelis say, we are now going back to the June 1967 borders. The Palestinians say, we need a contiguous state. The Israelis say, no right of return for Palestinians from 1948, certainly not 1967. And the Palestinians say, we need at least a symbolic number of Palestinians coming back into Israel proper.

How does that, I mean, and those things will undermine the politics of leaders on either side. And how do you get around it? And we’ve tried. The United States has tried. You have to give a lot of credit to the peace processors. They take a lot of guff, but you know, Dennis Ross, Aaron Miller, Dan Kurtzer, the late Martin Indyk, my, my friend and former, and colleague, these, these guys put decades and decades into trying to alter the incentives and constraints.

Now they made mistakes. Aaron will talk about, you know, the United States often acting too much like Israel’s lawyers. But nevertheless, the idea was to create an environment where these minimal demands for peace were either mitigated or diminished in a certain way that the parties can make a deal. It’s never happened.

Zachary Karabell: I mean, there is certainly going to be the reality of just in terms of sheer proportionality, right? The death in Gaza. I mean, even if 15, 000 of that 40, 000 people were Hamas fighters. And even if that 40, 000 figure is exaggerated by the Hamas health authorities, it’s still, I mean, if it were 25, 000 out of a population of 2 million and 10, 000 of those were fighters.

If it was 15, 000 civilian deaths, the equivalent number, you know, in the United States would be over a million people. So.

Steven Cook: Right. It’s, it’s an unimaginable number. And the fact that people diminish it is, speaks to how we’ve lost our humanity in talking about this conflict.

Zachary Karabell: And I think that’s a real, you know, I, I argue with my Israeli friends of, can you get away with this long term?

Meaning, can you both, can you claim that you’re a domestic democracy and a regional autocracy or, or, or, or colonial, whatever, can you get away with that dual reality? And their attitude is like, look, of course you can, because many countries do. And everybody will follow their economic and strategic interests.

And it’s not like the Saudis are, you know, opening up to dissent. They’re opening up to economic life. And I think MBS, I mean, we could talk about this, but you know, what’s going on in Saudi is fascinating and it’s kind of 180 shift from the Saudi as we knew it really in a five year period, in a way that I think is palpable and real, and it’s going to be pretty significant globally going forward for the next 20 years.

Egypt’s a whole other story, right? Because it does seem like the Arab world has kind of like adopted a little bit of the Chinese model 20, 2000 onward of, okay, we figured out you can’t have no economic reform and no political reform, but if you’re not going to have any political reform, you know, if you’re going to do Tiananmen or the Arab Spring, you better have economic reform, like, yeah, like, one of the two.

Some of the countries seem to be getting away with it. I don’t quite know how Egypt isn’t falling apart, and maybe you could illuminate that.

Steven Cook: It is.

Zachary Karabell: Well, I mean, I don’t know why it’s not falling apart into utter chaos domestically. Actually, let’s talk about why isn’t Egypt falling apart. It’s 110 million people with one of the most corrupt autocratic governments in the world, bar none, whose human rights abuses, and if you’re going to have the Human Rights Abuse Olympics, they’d be, you know, they’d be up there.

Steven Cook: They’d be gold medalists. Absolutely.

Zachary Karabell: So, and, and every, and they’re, everything’s chaotic. Libya’s, you know, they’ve got a war in Sudan, Libya’s still in a civil war, Israel and Gaza. Why is Egypt not falling apart more?

Steven Cook: One of my Egypt yodas would say to me, because it’s Egypt, because it’s Umm al Dunya and we’ve always muddled through in 7, 500 years of history. I don’t think that that’s actually true, and Egypt is coming apart at the seams, and the Egyptians do, I mean, all of these countries love the Chinese model, which is spectacular economic growth without actually loosening any type of political control.

And some of those countries have the resources to do that, the Emiratis have the resources to do that, not only in terms of money, but they also, not that many Emiratis. Same thing with the Qataris. The Saudis are trying to do that with a much bigger population, which is why you see MBS granting people in his age cohort, which is 18 to 50, the ability to do things that they did when they went to college in the United States, to go to raves and movies and live like normal people, he’s building a reservoir of of political support without actually having to open up, open up the country politically.

Zachary Karabell: Let them go to raves instead of let them eat cake. It’s the new!

Steven Cook: Let them have raves. Let them have WWE. I mean, let them have whatever it is called, Super Slap or something that they bought. These two morons.

Zachary Karabell: WWE and MDMA for everyone.

Steven Cook: Exactly. Exactly. The Egyptians don’t have the same kind of resources. And so what I’d say about Egypt, it’s like, what did they say about the old Soviet Union? It could be three weeks or 30 years.

Right now, Sisi is trying to hold the country together through sheer force of the security services, which is inefficient and a dangerous place for him to be. I think the difference between Sisi and Mubarak was Mubarak understood that Egypt is a problem to be managed, whereas Sisi is actually trying to solve the problem of Egypt.

But solving the problem of Egypt requires a significant amount of force, and even that is uncertain. And it’s uncertain what he actually means by it, by this. But the whole idea of like Egypt going forward and on the move and so on and so forth, he tried to do that and is continuing to try to like demonstrate actual manifestations of this by spending huge sums of money on really stupid things like the new administrative capital, the summer capital. This smart city, that smart city, all kinds of things that Egypt doesn’t really need and only impoverishes the Egyptian people.

But right now, clearly the military has determined there’s no other alternative to Sisi. So, they muddle through.

Emma Varvaloucas: To me, it’s funny you ask that question, Zachary, because from Greece’s perspective, I’m like, the Egyptians are in Greece, fleeing the economic conditions of Egypt.

So from, from this side of the world, it’s like, they’re not really holding together so well.

Steven Cook: Yeah. I mean, there’s many more Egyptians who are trying to get across the Mediterranean. I mean, you can’t get a pizza in Rome without, you know, it’s an Egyptian who’s going to make the pizza for you.

It used to be that Egyptians went to university there. They went to, you know, Berlin for university, London, wherever. Now there’s many more Egyptians who are showing up basically as economic refugees in the southern Mediterranean.

Zachary Karabell: The China model really did work in China until it didn’t, right? Or until, until Xi decided that too much economic liberalization was eventually just inevitably going to bleed into political liberalization or, or loosening the hold of the party.

And, you know, the Emiratis are kind of there and they’re kind of not. Between Emiratis, Bahrainis, Qataris, and Kuwaitis, there’s probably about two million. And then there’s another five or six million people living very comfortably economically who don’t have citizenship. Obviously, not a model Egypt can do.

Steven Cook: My Egyptian friends, whenever they refer to these Gulf states, they say, Oh, there’s more Egyptians in Shubra, which is in a neighborhood of Cairo, than there is in all of Bahrain.

Zachary Karabell: Right. Which is true. But it does seem like, you know, democracy’s done for the time being in the, in the region and probably the time being, being a while, like years, not, not months.

Steven Cook: I mean, the one country that’s come closest to it was Tunisia and we’re almost back to where we were prior to the uprising that overthrew Zine El Abidine Ben Ali back in 2011, almost.

Zachary Karabell: And yet, I mean, it’s weird, like it’s aside from the, like in the Israel, Iran, Palestinian, Hezbollah, Houthi. The region is stable ish, right?

I mean, Syria is a disaster, but the region is not as unstable as our perceptions of it in stability would suggest.

Steven Cook: It’s never been as unstable as our perception have been. I mean, the regimes themselves have been quite stable over, over periods of time. But what’s interesting about the Middle East right now, is like there’s almost two tracks. There’s this war in the region between Israel and Iran, and Iran’s proxies, and the United States is drawn in, and others are drawn in from time to time. And then there’s this whole other thing that’s going on, where, you know, multi billion dollar deals are being struck in the, in the, in the Emirates, and the Saudis are inviting tech companies in, and there’s this focus on economic development, and so on, and that this whole kind of war thing is something of the past, and that the Saudis are looking forward to integration of the region.

And it’s really like kind of these two tracks. And even the Israelis are involved in it. I mean, you know, think about IMEC, the India Middle East Corridor comes out of something that the Israelis did with the Indians, the Emiratis, and the United States. So it is quite extraordinary to go from the kind of horrors of the war that’s been going on for a year and then to Riyadh, where there’s a lot that’s really interesting that’s going on.

That’s not an endorsement of MBS or his methods, but there is genuinely significant and it seems to be durable change in Saudi Arabia that is, as you pointed out before, Zachary, is very, very important. And is going to have an influence over the coming decades in ways that I don’t think we yet really understand.

Zachary Karabell: It’s fascinating as always to have a conversation with you. You know, you’re someone who, as I alluded to before, has seemingly had the temperature and temperament to be an informed observer in things that would drive most of us crazy over a now several decade period. I mean, you have a whole other life of having been kind of an expert on Turkey, which didn’t really end well for you. But I mean, I do think it requires, I mean, for all of you listening, it requires a certain temperament to be immersed in these debates, not because the region has been so particularly unstable, but because the way in which we tend to talk about what goes on politically in the Middle East, certainly about Israel, but about a lot of the Middle East, tends to be oddly intemperate and emotional in a way that it isn’t when we talk about like India or Southeast Asia. But there is something about Middle East politics that, that like people’s blood boils and the emotions and the hyperbole and the hysteria seems to rise to the fore much more immediately than it does for anything else that I know about.

I mean, you know, we can have like lots of arguments about Mexico and Honduras and, you know, Colombia and, but somehow those don’t usually, unless I guess you’re from those areas, rise to this level of just complete blinkered blah. And you’ve done a great job. I mean, I assume you’ve got a good job maintaining your own sanity. That’s probably a whole other.

Steven Cook: Like I said, dog yoga, nice kids, lovely wife.

Zachary Karabell: Which are kind of a la Emma and her whole practice around, you know, practicing Buddhism in one’s own life, like you kind of need, that’s a whole other thing. You have been a really cogent and calm voice about a really incoherent and hysterical subject. So I really want to thank you for that.

I encourage all of you to read his substack and his columns on foreign policy. And if you are ever at sea, try to listen to what Steven Cook has to say.

Steven Cook: Thank you.

Emma Varvaloucas: Thank you Steven.

I think the secret that we learned from all of that is that you should get a dog if you’re having trouble.

Zachary Karabell: The secret to Middle East: What’s going on is get a dog.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. I mean, despite all that, I mean, obviously this conversation, as Steven was saying, is not one where there’s a whole lot of, of what could go right, because it’s mostly going wrong insofar as Israel and the players that it’s in military conflict with.

And I did appreciate, though, very much so at the end where he talked about the two tracks of the Middle East that, like, despite the fact that, yes, there is really atrocious casualties, really atrocious loss of human life, really atrocious living conditions going on in Gaza. Now, people in Lebanon are being affected. It’s been atrocious also for Israelis.

And that is in very sharp contrast, as he’s saying, to the rest of the region where do we have a flourishing of democracy and kind of things as Americans might like want to have in their fantasies? No. But is it stable? Yes. Are we looking at, like, major regional instability? No. Do we think that Iran is going to enter into this conflict and become involved as well? Probably not, I’m going to say, not that I’m an expert in this, but it doesn’t seem that way so far that the signs are not pointing in that direction.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah. And you have hundreds of millions of, you know, citizens of various Arab states, better education, better healthcare, rising standard of living.

You know, I’ve raised Egypt at the end because that’s actually more of an exception than a rule. Obviously Syria, which the best you can say about Syria is it’s not horrific the way it was from 2014 to 2020 something. And you do have these sort of autocratic reformers, for lack of a better word, which include MBS, which include The Nahyans and Abu Dhabi, which includes the royal family of Qatar.

Again, not what, as you just said, Emma, not what American view of what a flourishing liberal democratic capitalist society is, but in many ways still providing for certain needs, hopes, dreams, desires. And, you know, I’ve talked about these questions of democracy versus X, X being whatever other models. It’s not all democracy versus like, you know, Putin and, and Kim in North Korea. Like there’s, there’s, there are shades in the middle and they’re also, you know, as obviously Americans are confronting hysterically on both the left and the right, all the sins of democracy, right? That it’s not, it’s hardly a, a utopian generating system in most situations.

So, that’s something to keep in mind in the Middle East, like we are focused on this conflict, and rightly so, but there’s also other things to focus on, and rightly so, that Steven is mentioning at the end, and that part is the more of the What Could Go Right part, meaning you can simultaneously hold the reality of just horrific loss of life in Gaza, just like we hold the reality of horrific loss of life in in the Sudanese civil war right now, or the unraveling of Myanmar, you know, there’s a, there are always these things going on in a planet that we’re acutely aware of that are just unequivocally terrible.

You can hold that reality simultaneously with all these other things that are not only not unequivocally terrible, but unequivocally wonderful. I think that’s just a challenge in a human cognitive way of like, how do you, how do you sit with both truths that seem to cancel each other out or more to the point where the horrific stuff would seem to cancel out the good stuff?

It’s rarely the case that people’s good stuff cancels out the horrific. And that seems particularly hard in the Middle East, right? And it has seemed that way for my entire lifetime. I hope it is not true for the remainder of my lifetime, whatever that, whatever that allotment happens to be, but I guess we’ll find that out.

Emma Varvaloucas: No one has a crystal ball, but Steven alluded to towards the end, you know, durable change coming out of Saudi Arabia and other places that we’re not really sure what those effects are going to be like. I mean, just from a really pedestrian point of view, I think about all the time, like how often I fly on Middle Eastern airlines, you know, and how it’s like a, it seems like a small thing, right? And like, we know that a lot of these countries are trying to do that, trying to do that to show a better reputation to the world, to get Westerners, you know, feeling more warm towards them. And that can be looked at in a very cynical way, but that can also be looked at as a way of like, okay, like the world, there is some ways that the world is still trying to join together when most of the time the narrative you hear is the world is fracturing and falling apart.

Zachary Karabell: I do actually have a crystal ball right here, which for those of you who are watching, I’m, I’m, I’m holding up. It doesn’t actually tell me the future.

Emma Varvaloucas: Does it work? No. Okay. Well.

Zachary Karabell: I mean, every now and then I’m like, you know, mirror, mirror on the wall kind of thing.

Emma Varvaloucas: Nice paperweight though.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, it’s great. I mean, it’s a good crystal ball, but I keep it there for that reason.

I want to thank you all for listening. We will be back next week with yet another guest on yet another topic. And please, as always, sign up for the weekly Progress Network newsletter at theprogressnetwork.org. It too is called What Could Go Right? Check out our weekly newsy, shorter podcast, our Progress Report, also under the moniker of What Could Go Right?

And we will be back with you. Thank you for the Podglomerate for producing. Thank you for the team at The Progress Network for scouring the world for interesting ideas that funnel their way directly or indirectly into our conversation. And thank you, Emma, as always.

Emma Varvaloucas: Thank you Zachary, and thanks everyone for listening.

Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right is produced by the Podglomerate, executive produced by Jeff Umbro, marketing by the Podglomerate. To find out more about What Could Go Right, the Progress Network, or to subscribe to the What Could Go Right newsletter, visit theprogressnetwork.org. Thanks for listening.