music

Welcome to the commentary magazine daily podcast today is Wednesday.

November 10th 2021 I'm John Pajor. It's the editor of commentary magazine with me as always executive editor a green wolf hi a hi John associate editor noir

Rothman. Hi Noah. Hi John. Senior writer Christine Rosen. Hi Christine. Hi John. And joining us today commentary contributor foundation for the defense of

democracies Puba scholar activist thinker and author of the new book Gaza conflict 2021 Jonathan Shanzer. John how are you doing great thanks for having me great so let's talk about your book which is a recently just just published

commentary readers will know your work over over over many years in the pages of commentary most recently and an article about the the bizarre happy talk of the Biden administration and relation to its disastrous pull out from Afghanistan but earlier in 2021 you did write an article for us called the war between the wars which essentially press it

published what was what is the topic of the book that you have now published about the Gaza conflict with Israel that took place this year and basically how it is a proxy fight that the that the

conflict in the holy land has now moved beyond an Israeli Palestinian conflict into being a proxy war between Israel and Iran can you sort of flesh out this idea and then we can go

down to the context in the book sure so I think the first thing to remember is that Hamas was born in the late 1980s and I think it would not have evolved the way that it did gaining traction among the Palestinians being able to destroy the peace process almost single handed

in the early 2000s during the second in Tafada would not have been able to do that without Iran Iran is trained funded armed the group for decades now and as that relationship has evolved the Israelis have done what they can to stop that activity but they are not able to fully and so

Hamas has engaged now in five or four rather four different wars with with Israel and it's part of a broader campaign that Hamas and his Bala and other terrorist groups have been waging against Israel trying closer and closer to Israel's borders developing new and more advanced weapons

and as this has happened the Israelis have decided to take the battle to Iran itself and we see this in places like Syria we see it in the Persian Gulf we see it in cyberspace and I would argue that what we just saw in May was one flashpoint in this broader war that the Israelis are now calling the war between war

they see ultimately the likely need to engage with Iran directly possibly in the months or years to come but they engage in these very specific fights to try to weaken Iran's capabilities or that of its proxies

I think one of the striking things about as you as you write about in your book about what happened this year was the lack of a gigantic international scandal revolving around Israel's defense of itself

that you explain that there was some of the standard issue stuff happened with media organizations complaining about targeting media organizations and all of that but the Biden administration for example with with with a few exceptions in the course of the actual conflict between Israel and Gaza very much said that Israel had the right to defend itself against this unbelievable barrage hundreds of rockets and hour

I think you calculate they calculated that was it 8,000 were used or or or I can't remember what the actual count was used in the course of the 4,000 or in the war

4,000 rockets fired at Israel to astonishingly little results because of the successes of the iron dome interception system but that but that something had changed markedly and the book goes into some description of the evolutionary changes in the perception of the Middle East pretty much from the time of the Arab Spring onward

and you and so that which which helps explain why say in 2014 when there was the previous big Gaza war the Obama administration had great deal of difficulty trying to reconcile itself to the fact that Israel had the right to its own self defense and kept intruding on the idea of Israel self defense with shuttle diplomacy

and the party on the part of John Kerry acting like there was somebody to shuttle back and forth to as Henry Kissinger had shut all during the young people or war

but that that's really not what happened here that Hamas's aggression was sort of unmistakable the fact that it was firing on a civilian population was undeniable that the fact of the act of doing this was an undeniable war crime that Israel had the right to defend itself

and what happened that made that change from 2014 to 2021 possible

Well I think a couple things to note one is that the Abraham Accords of last year absolutely leveled the playing field for the Israelis

...