It's Notes from America.

Notes from America. I'm Ky Wright and you're listening to our special pop-up series on the call.

Every Thursday until election day I'm calling up somebody who's smart about some particular issue that's coming up in the campaign and just trying to get some insight. This

week I am thinking about a series of troubling headlines from the past week

involving Gaza and Israel's war there and I'm just reminded of the fact that no

matter what happens the Middle East in general and Gaza very specifically is going

to be a humongous preoccupation of the next administration,

whether it's Trump or Harris.

Their presidency is almost certainly going to be defined in part by how they handle the Middle

East. So this week on the call I've hit up Arash Azizi who among other things is a contributing

writer for the Atlantic where he's been writing about these very questions.

And Arash, thanks for taking my call. Thank you very much for having me. It's great to be with you.

So as I said, we're in the middle of another week of bracing headlines from the region.

Polio is back in Gaza. The Israeli military says it found the bodies of six hostages that had been killed and that discovery led to anger and

outrage in Israel. There was a huge strike in which organizers demanded that Netnahu accept a ceasefire deal which he again refused to do.

The Biden administration meanwhile says it's making its final proposal for a ceasefire deal and if that doesn't work out then that's probably the end of US-led talks at least.

So it's not a great picture. What do you see happening in let say, the next month in the region?

You know, prediction is always hard, especially in the Middle East.

You know, we are in a very tough situation if you ask me a few months ago.

I mean I would have expected a ceasefire by now to be honest a few times over the last

of a while.

At the same time the Netanyahu government in Israel

...