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Unholy: Two Jews on the News

War with Iran Week II: can the regime actually fall? With Ali Ansari

Unholy: Two Jews on the News

Unholy Media

News, Yonit Levi, News Commentary, Society & Culture, Jews, Religion & Spirituality, Israel, Jewish, Judaism, Israel Podcast, Middle East, Jonathan Freedland, Documentary

4.7770 Ratings

🗓️ 10 March 2026

⏱️ 34 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Watch us on Youtube: https://youtu.be/LhbZcQUOjts Subscribe to get bonus episodes, read more about the team, and catch us on every platform we're on! > https://bit.ly/unholy-podcast As the war between Israel and Iran enters its second week, daily life in Israel has settled into a strange and exhausting rhythm. Yonit describe what it means to live under constant missile alerts: sleepless nights, families moving between shelters, and a country running on collective exhaustion. They also unpack two major developments shaping the conflict. First, the mixed and sometimes contradictory signals coming from Donald Trump about how long the war will last. And second, the sudden leadership change in Iran, with Mojtaba Khamenei emerging as the successor to his father. To make sense of it all, they speak with Professor Ali Ansari of the University of St Andrews, one of the world’s leading historians of Iran. Ansari challenges much of the conventional analysis around the war and the future of the Iranian regime. Could the Islamic Republic actually be weaker than many assume? Is regime change truly impossible—or simply unpredictable? And if change does come, what might it look like?

Transcript

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0:00.0

This is a special update from Unholy.

0:03.0

I'm Jonathan Friedland in London.

0:04.9

And I'm Unite Levine in Tel Aviv.

0:06.7

And lots, obviously, going on a change of leadership in Iran's mixed signals from Donald Trump

0:13.1

about the when this might end.

0:16.8

And also just obviously, day-to-day life is continuing under bombardment for you,

0:21.1

Yonit.

0:24.2

So we just thought we'd pull together all of that, and we're going to have a conversation with somebody who I really, really rate extremely highly as an observer of Iran,

0:28.6

who has a very sort of dissenting view compared to a lot of the sort of consensus

0:32.9

that's formulating or forming around Iran.

0:36.1

So lots to get into in this. Why don't we just start with you

0:39.2

and how it, how it is hour by hour. And I don't say day by day, but hour by hour.

0:44.3

You know, I think this is a, it's interesting because there are moments over these two and

0:47.7

half years where I think the community outside Israel and inside Israel felt the same way, right?

0:53.0

I mean, throughout, for example, the hostage ordeal, we kind of felt we were feeling the same things and perhaps throughout this sort of wave and incidents of anti-Semitism, whether it be Bondi Beach or Manchester, we kind of felt the same. Here it's a different kind of experience because however much I will, you know, yammer on and explain to you what it feels like to be under this kind of bombardment, I think it's very hard if you're not here to

1:15.2

kind of understand what that means. And I think we talked a little bit about that kind of

1:19.2

the frequency and how frequent it is this time. There are basically two differences between what

1:23.7

we're going through now and what we went through in June, the first war with Iran then.

1:29.3

One is, again, the missile novels are limited in size, but they're more frequent.

1:34.3

So you will find yourself, you know, during the nighttime every kind of hour, hour and a half,

1:38.7

having to go either to a shelter, a public shelter, or a shelter in your building, or a safe room, or anywhere else.

1:44.3

And the other thing is that Chisbala has joined the fray, which didn't happen in June.

...

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