Hi, breaking history listeners, this is Eli. As you can tell for my voice, I have been suffering from a nasty bout of laryngitis, but I am back in gaining strength.

Early on Friday morning, as many of you know, Israel launched a series of strikes on Iran targeting its nuclear facilities and top military officials.

I sat down for a live conversation on Friday with Haviv Reddick Gore to make sense of the

attacks and its roots over the past years and even century.

So what you're about to hear is a recording of that conversation.

We really get into some of the important context and history to make sense of this

moment, which I think will be perfect for the breaking history listeners. And do not despair.

A full breaking history episode is coming in your inbox on Wednesday. So keep an eye out for

that as well. And until then, I'll see you next time.

Welcome to Free Press Live, and I am so honored to be here with really one of my favorite public intellectuals, Haviv Reddick Gore.

Thank you so much for coming on.

Thanks for having me, Eli. It's good to be here.

So let's talk about last night.

You had a wonderful tweet in which you talked about this great line from The Hobbit

about how they lived in peace, unaware that they were being watched and protected over.

What did you mean by this line? There is evil in the world. Some of it is in ourselves,

and we are commanded to fight it within us. But some of it is outside us and must be fought where we find it.

I think I've been struck in the last 12 hours.

It started 3 a.m. It is now 6 p.m. in Israel, so 15 hours of this Israeli strike against Iran's nuclear program at the enormous...

Half of my Twitter feed is Hebrew. Half of my Twitter feed is English.

And these are radically different cultural spaces.

And the surprising thing for me has been the different understandings in these two different

...