This Month on Unholy

1,000 Days, Election Maneuvers & America at 250 (Jul 2) A thousand days after October 7th, Netanyahu wants to talk unity — as Israel edges toward elections.

Bibi’s Dash to Remake Israel, Rahm Emanuel’s Warning & a Wedding to Beat the Odds (Jul 9) Trump declares the Iran ceasefire dead, and a new poll spells trouble for Netanyahu.

Espionage in Iran, Election Maneuvers in Israel — and Unlikely Football Glory (Jul 16) The US–Iran ceasefire collapses, the naval blockade returns, and Israel braces for what’s next.

Trump’s Saudi Nuclear Deal, Israeli Elections Get Real (Jul 23) A US–Saudi nuclear deal breaks overnight — and Israel finds out from the same press release as everyone else.

Likud Against the World, Democrats Against Each Other (Jul 30) Ninety days out from Israel’s election, the campaign is exposing both candidates and country.

You can find them all on Youtube, or on your preferred podcasting platform.

🎙️ Unholy Conversations — This Month’s Sit-Downs

Four extra one-on-one interviews this month, outside the regular news roundup:

Danielle Haas on NGOs, Antisemitism & Institutional Bias (Jul 7) A former senior Human Rights Watch editor on the antisemitism she says runs through the human rights world.

Jews and Football: A Forgotten Story — with David Bolchover (Jul 14) The hidden history of the Jewish players who once dominated Europe’s biggest clubs.

First Time Voters in Israel (Jul 21) Three first-time voters on the judicial overhaul, Arab parties in coalition, and the draft bill.

Rahm Emanuel (Jul 28) The former Chief of Staff and Chicago mayor on Zohran Mamdani, Israel, and a possible presidential run.

You can find them all on Youtube, or on your preferred podcasting platform.

🎁 July Bonus Episodes

Daphna Liel on Netanyahu’s Toughest Election Israel’s election is three months out, and Benjamin Netanyahu is fighting the toughest campaign of his career — not just for another term, but for how the history books remember him . Listen on Patreon

David Remnick on Gadi Eisenkot What it means when a candidate's biggest asset isn't ideology but character — the bereaved father, the Mizrahi son of the periphery, the general who walked out of the war cabinet rather than be Bibi's fig leaf. Listen on Patreon

Until next time,

The Unholy Team

Maoz Inon & Aziz Abu Sarah — The Future Is Peace Maoz lost his parents on October 7th. Aziz lost his brother — the person who raised him — after he was tortured in an Israeli prison during the First Intifada. Two days after October 7th, Aziz wrote Maoz a letter. Maoz wrote back. That exchange became a friendship, a journey across the Holy Land, and now a New York Times bestselling book. ▶ Watch on YouTube

Dr. Suzanne Maloney — Iran War: What Comes Next Dr. Maloney of the Brookings Institution joins Yonit and Jonathan to ask whether the ceasefire can hold, why the nuclear threat was never actually addressed, and what a realistic deal — if one exists — might look like. ▶ Watch on YouTube

Dr. Kochav Elkayam-Levi — The Evidence of October 7th Two and a half years of documenting the unthinkable. Kochav joins Yonit and Jonathan to walk through the 13 documented patterns of abuse committed on October 7th, the coining of a new legal term — “kinocide” — because existing language wasn’t enough, and the painful question of why so many feminist institutions looked the other way. ▶ Watch on YouTube

Franklin Foer — why fatalism isn’t a strategy for American Jews Franklin Foer declared the golden age of American Jewry was ending. Two years on — after October 7th, the Iran war, and collapsing bipartisan support for Israel — he thinks he underestimated the problem. He joins Yonit and Jonathan to discuss whether the anti-AIPAC primary pledge is antisemitism in new clothing, what a forgotten Jewish genius from Odessa might teach us, and why he refuses, loudly, to accept that American Jews have no good moves left. ▶ Watch on YouTube

🔒 Bonus episodes — for subscribers

The Rise of Gadi Eisenkot in Israeli Politics Former IDF chief of staff, now one of the most closely watched figures ahead of October’s elections. Who is Eisenkot, what does he believe, and could he actually change the shape of Israeli politics? ▶ Listen on Patreon · Listen on Apple Podcasts

Brit Milah Yonit and Jonathan get personal and go deep on one of Judaism’s most ancient — and increasingly contested — rituals. A conversation that’s harder to have in public than it should be. ▶ Listen on Patreon · Listen on Apple Podcasts

Not a subscriber yet?

Two bonus episodes every month — longer, more personal, and on topics we can’t always fit into the Friday show.

❤️ Join on Patreon 🎧 Subscribe on Apple Podcasts

Your support is what keeps Unholy going.

Best,

The Unholy Team

Forty days of war. Four weeks of a ceasefire that keeps fraying at the edges. And one very uncomfortable conclusion, delivered quietly by one of America’s most respected Iran experts: the Islamic Republic of Iran is, at this moment, strategically stronger than it was the day the bombs started falling.

Dr. Suzanne Maloney, vice president and director of the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution, has been one of the clearest voices on Iran for two decades. She has advised both Democratic and Republican administrations. When we spoke to her on Unholy this week — as live Pentagon briefings played in the background — she didn’t reach for reassurance.

The conversation opened in real time. As Jonathan and Suzanne spoke, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the US Secretary of Defense were briefing reporters on the latest developments around the Strait of Hormuz. Two ships had just successfully navigated US-escorted lanes past Iranian-controlled waters. It felt, briefly, like a small victory.

Maloney put it in perspective. The United States currently lacks the naval presence to escort 130 to 160 ships — the daily normal flow through the strait before the war. “I think it’s more likely that we’re going to see another bout of violence before we actually get to a point at which the strait is fully open,” she said. Iran responded to the US mission announcement by striking the United Arab Emirates. The ceasefire is technically still in place. The two sides are, as she put it, very much risking it.

The deeper problem, and the one that haunts this episode, is the nuclear question. Yonit quoted Tamir Hayman, former head of IDF military intelligence, who said plainly this week: the most significant threat — the nuclear program — was not addressed by the war. Maloney agreed entirely. “It is not a sea change,” she said. “The Iranians would not be prevented from rebuilding and reconstituting an industrial-scale nuclear program.”

She invoked a phrase attributed to General Mattis: targeting is not strategy. The initial strikes — technically brilliant, eliminating senior regime figures with extraordinary precision — were not matched to strategic aims that could actually be achieved. No regime change. No permanent nuclear rollback. And a new weapon that Iran had never actually used before: the power to choke the global economy by sealing the world’s most critical oil chokepoint.

Marco Rubio called it an economic nuclear weapon. Maloney didn’t disagree.

The diplomatic picture is equally complex. There is, Maloney believes, a zone of possible agreement — particularly around enrichment levels, where Iran might extend its current non-enrichment posture while formally retaining the right to enrich. The nuclear issue, despite 20-plus years of failed negotiations, may actually be the easier half of a deal.

The Strait is harder. It sits within Iranian territorial waters. Tehran wants to maintain effective control of it permanently. That is a demand with implications for every strategic waterway on the planet, and one the United States cannot simply accept. “The president, early in the war, seemed to suggest he might be amenable to some kind of American profit incentive,” Maloney noted — a hint at arrangements that would have been unthinkable before the conflict began.

And then there is the domestic Iranian picture, which offers no easy comfort. The regime has continued executing those arrested in the January protests. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi remains imprisoned and, as of this recording, in dangerously deteriorating health. Maloney put it plainly: “This war has been a huge setback for any prospect of near-term unrest against the regime itself.”

When asked who is to blame — the obvious candidates being Netanyahu, Trump, or both — Maloney’s answer was precise. She declined to lay it at the feet of an overly ambitious Israeli prime minister. She pointed to Washington. A president enamored of his ability to use force decisively. A White House that has replaced the tradition of cabinet officials who push back with a culture of option-providers. “Senior officials in this administration see their role as providing the president with options. And he is the decider. That is not how a healthy national security bureaucracy operates.”

She had warned this would happen. Long before February 28th, she told us on Unholy: if attacked, this regime will simply replace itself. Jonathan reminded her of that prediction. She accepted the acknowledgment quietly.

What comes next, in Maloney’s telling, is a regime still in power, probably slightly better positioned economically once the strait reopens under whatever arrangements are eventually negotiated. The Hormuz tax — the cost of Iranian leverage priced into oil, gas, food, fertilizer, and everything else that moves through those 21 miles of water — will be a feature of the global economy for years.

We’ve been predicting the end of the Islamic Republic for 47 years, she said. Almost every prediction has been too premature.

April was a month like no other. Here’s everything from the past month.

🎧 This month on Unholy

Bret Stephens NYT columnist Bret Stephens joins Yonit and Jonathan to take stock of what was actually achieved — and what an inconclusive ending means for Israel’s standing with a younger American generation. ▶ Watch on YouTube

Tom Holland on Iran, Israel & Rome Historian and Rest Is History co-host Tom Holland joins for a Pesach episode that puts the entire present moment in historical context. From Cyrus the Great to the Iranian Revolution to Donald Trump — why secularism is itself a religious inheritance. ▶ Watch on YouTube

Rachel Goldberg-Polin — When We See You Again She stood before the UN, met with presidents, and now she’s written a book. Rachel sits down with Yonit and Jonathan to talk about grief, about Hersh, and about the moment she learned her son had heard her voice in captivity. ▶ Watch on YouTube

Howard Jacobson — Howl Booker Prize-winning novelist Howard Jacobson joins to discuss Howl, born out of his rage and despair at the response to October 7. Why fiction can do what journalism cannot — and why being funny is essential even in the darkest of times. ▶ Watch on YouTube

Adeena Sussman — Zariz The bestselling cookbook author and Tel Aviv food voice joins to talk about her new book Zariz — speedy cooking for complicated times. Plus: what’s selling at the Carmel Market, and why getting into the kitchen might be the most sane thing you can do right now. ▶ Watch on YouTube

🔒 For Friends of the Pod

Two bonus episodes this month exclusively for our community:

Jews and Basketball — Patreon, Apple Podcasts

Women in Israeli Politics — Patreon, Apple Podcasts

Not a member yet? Join to get bonus episodes every month.

See you Friday,

The Unholy Team.

There’s a moment in this conversation where Rachel Goldberg-Polin tries to explain why she wrote her book, *When We See You Again*, and she reaches for a metaphor that stops you cold.

“How does someone who was born without sight know what the color blue is?” she says. “This book — these words — are me explaining to you my blue.”

It’s the kind of sentence that earns everything that comes after it.

Rachel Goldberg-Polin needs no introduction in the Jewish world, or much beyond it. Mother of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, murdered in Hamas captivity after 330 days, iconic face of the hostage families’ movement, a woman who stood before the UN with a number stitched to her chest and addressed a mother in Gaza she would never meet. Now she is also an author. Her memoir-in-grief was published this week. She joined Yonit and Jonathan on Unholy to talk about what it is and what it isn’t.

The first thing to understand is what this book refuses to be. It’s not a hostage story — “I was never a hostage,” she says. It’s not a political tell-all, though she could have written one. The powerful officials who promised and delivered nothing appear in its pages only as “Very Important Men” — unnamed, not protected, just irrelevant to what she was trying to do. “Naming them would have been unholy,” she says. “I was writing my Torah.”

What it is, instead, is a dispatch from inside grief so complete she describes it as being under a truck. “I have no business writing right now,” she writes in the book’s opening. “I’m writing with one finger tapping from underneath this truck.” She told her editors: you can take things out, but you can’t put anything in. There are 87 pages she cut — a document she calls “the suitcase.” They are out in the suitcase now. Not in her.

The conversation turns, inevitably, to Or Levi — the released hostage whose name means Light, who met with Rachel and Jon when he weighed 50 kilos and still had the generosity to describe Hersh in captivity. He told Rachel something she had not known: Hersh had heard her. He had heard an interview in which she described meeting the Secretary of State, and he told Or about it. “And all of a sudden,” she says, “something in me that had been dead since Hersh was dead — wiggled.”

She called it validation. Then immediately: “We failed him. We did. But we really tried. And he knew.”

Jonathan, sitting with her on the podcast, cannot let that go. “I can’t bear to hear you say you failed him.” She doesn’t walk it back. She just makes space for both things to be true.

That is, in some ways, the whole book. The capacity to hold contradictions without collapsing. Grief is loss. Grief is also a badge of love. Israel is broken. Israel’s next generation wants light. Hersh is gone. Hersh is still a gift. “God gives and God takes,” she says near the end, quoting Job. “And it was still a gift. 23 years and 334 days.”

She’s 56 years old, she mentions at one point, and she talks about her generation as the one still wandering in the desert — the ones who left Egypt but never quite shed the mentality of otherness. The next generation, she believes, will be the one to actually build something. She sees it when she speaks to young Israelis. “They want better, different, and they want light.”

There is nothing neat about any of it. The book wasn’t even finished until an editor gently told her some passages were too painful to publish. It was written in pieces — some while Hersh was still alive, some from the Shloshim, some from the darkness that came after. A jigsaw puzzle of different times, all jagged.

Musa sells his house. But he keeps the hook on the wall.

The new buyer thinks this is a small concession. Musa is in and out constantly — hanging his hat, taking his hat. Eventually, the buyer gives up and leaves. Musa never had to fight for his house. He just used a hook.

Daniel Taub heard this story across a negotiating table, from a Palestinian counterpart, during Israeli-Palestinian talks. They were arguing about Israeli security footholds in areas that would come under Palestinian control. The Palestinian side didn’t need statistics. They needed Musa.

“It was so much more subversive,” says Taub in this week’s Unholy Passover special. “And it stayed with you long after everything else had left.”

Taub is a diplomat, an international lawyer, a playwright — Israel’s ambassador to the UK between 2011 and 2015 — and now the author of Beyond Dispute: Rediscovering the Jewish Art of Constructive Disagreement. The book’s premise is simple and unfashionable: the Jewish tradition of argument is not a pathology. It’s a model. And it might be the most useful thing we have right now.

The argument he makes starts with a rabbinic legend about truth being thrown out of heaven and smashed into a million pieces on the ground. Everyone picks up a shard. As long as we remember that we hold truth — but not the whole truth — we can actually build something together.

This reframes the point of argument entirely. It’s not about winning. It’s not about being right. The Jewish concept of “argument for the sake of heaven” places the value not in either debater, but in the thing being constructed between them. “I want your side of the argument to be as strong as possible,” Taub says. “Steel man your opponent. Don’t straw man them.”

He cites Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein — two psychologists with deep disagreements — who decided to run experiments together to figure out who was right. They called it “adversarial collaboration.” Taub finds this almost beautiful.

The most practically useful part of the conversation is about families. Jonathan Friedland names the tension that most Unholy listeners know intimately: parents and children who can no longer talk about Gaza, the Seder table as a minefield, WhatsApp threads that have gone quiet or turned toxic.

Taub doesn’t pretend there’s a trick. But he has a menu. Take the conversation offline — away from the whole family, away from the group chat, where reputational stakes are lower. Start with what he calls a “gem statement”: a reminder of why this relationship matters before you get into the substance. And treat your position as a work in progress — not a verdict, but a hypothesis.

The deepest insight is about time. One of Jonathan and Yonit’s most honest conversations on Unholy — the one where they both spoke from the heart about the things most personal to each of them — happened more than a year into the podcast. “I don’t think you would have been able to do it straight out,” Taub says. “And I’m not sure your audience would have been ready for it.”

Trust isn’t a prerequisite to conversation. It’s what conversation builds.

There’s a kind of symmetry to hearing this on Passover, day 39 of the war, while Israel waits for a decision that could go in almost any direction. The Seder is itself structured argument — four children, four questions, generations of disagreement preserved in ritual form. The Jews who survived exile were not the ones who agreed. They were the ones who figured out how to argue constructively enough to keep existing.

Taub quotes Van Jones and Newt Gingrich — one of the more unlikely political friendships in American history. Gingrich told Jones: your 90% enemy can be your 10% friend.

It’s not a resolution. But it’s a place to start.

Beyond Dispute by Daniel Taub is available now. The full conversation is on Unholy — Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

In 2009, a family in Memphis, Tennessee opened a box in their attic and found letters. Hundreds of pages, written in the 1920s by their uncle David Schoenberg, who had moved from Tennessee to Hebron — then in British Mandate Palestine — to study at one of the most prestigious yeshivas in the Land of Israel.

The letters describe Hebron the way almost no one describes it now: a city where Jews and Muslims owned businesses together, rented homes from each other, lived as neighbors with something that looked, from certain angles, like actual peace.

Ten years later, journalist Yardena Schwartz read those letters and felt the floor shift. The Hebron she knew — the one she’d reported from, the one anyone who’s been there knows — looked nothing like this. She spent the next several years figuring out what happened.

The answer arrives on a Shabbat morning in August 1929. Sixty-seven unarmed Jewish men, women, and children were killed by their neighbors. Some of those neighbors were also their landlords. The details — the character of the violence, the way ordinary civilian life was weaponized — echo October 7th in ways that Schwartz describes plainly and lets the reader sit with.

But the massacre wasn’t a sudden eruption. It was the product of a year-long propaganda campaign by Haj Amin al-Husseini, the British-appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who had convinced the Arab population that Jews in Palestine were planning to destroy Al-Aqsa Mosque and rebuild the Temple. The rumor was false. It was known to be false. The British knew it. And the British did almost nothing.

When the riots finally came — starting in Jerusalem after Friday prayers, spreading to Hebron within a day — the British were unprepared and understaffed. The Palestine police force was largely composed of Arab officers, many of whom participated in the violence or stood by. Some British officers tried to stop it. They were overwhelmed.

What followed was almost as damaging as the massacre itself. A royal commission came from London, took testimony for months, and concluded — despite overwhelming evidence pointing at the Mufti — that a peaceful Jewish march to the Western Wall had sparked legitimate Arab fears. The Mufti kept his position. Jewish immigration and land purchases were restricted. The perpetrators were not held accountable.

The Mufti, if anything, became more powerful. By 1941 he was in Berlin, living in a Nazi-financed estate, broadcasting propaganda across the Arab world, recruiting tens of thousands of Muslims to fight for the Waffen SS, and heading the Arab branch of Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda. He was listed as a Nazi war criminal after the war. He was never prosecuted. He died of natural causes in his seventies.

His leading disciple, Schwartz notes, was a young cousin named Yasser Arafat.

Schwartz tells this story the way a journalist should: with documented sources, with Palestinian voices included, with a chapter on the 1994 Baruch Goldstein massacre in Hebron. The book doesn’t suppress inconvenient facts from either side. This is what makes its reception so striking.

Since publication, Ghosts of a Holy War has received no coverage from the New York Times, Time, Newsweek, Foreign Policy, or NBC News — all outlets Schwartz spent the previous decade writing for. The Wall Street Journal reviewed it. The Jewish press covered it. The conservative press covered it. Everyone else looked away.

“I think it was very clear,” she says, “because the books that they do cover are ones that tell a very specific narrative.” Her book tells a different one. Factually grounded. Unflattering to certain comfortable assumptions. Effectively invisible in the places where it would matter most.

Yossi Klein Halevi called it the one book to read to understand the current Middle East tragedy. That’s a high bar. Schwartz earns it.

The 1929 massacre didn’t cause the conflict. But it crystallized something: that the Jewish community of Palestine could not rely on any foreign power for protection, that incitement works, that disinformation is a weapon with a long half-life. The current mayor of Hebron — who led a 1980 terrorist attack that killed Jews returning from prayer at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, and who was elected, reelected, and has expressed no remorse — told Schwartz in an interview that Abraham wasn’t Jewish. He was Muslim.

The ghosts of 1929 are still very much present.

Ghosts of a Holy War by Yardena Schwartz is available now. The full conversation is on Unholy — Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

Tom Holland — co-host of The Rest Is History, one of the world’s most-listened-to podcasts, and author of landmark books on Rome, Persia, and the roots of the Western world — did not come to talk about current events. He came to talk about Cyrus the Great, the sack of Jerusalem, and why the Romans were wrong about the Jews. He ended up explaining something no one in a position of power seems to have understood: that Iran’s leaders mean exactly what they say.

“If you don’t understand the very distinctive worldview of the leaders of the Iranian Republic — their understanding of the cosmos, of prophecy, of apocalypse — then you don’t know what you’re taking on,” Holland said, with the kind of directness you don’t often get from credentialed academics. “A succession of American presidents have failed to think through the implications of people there who genuinely believe what they say they believe.”

He wasn’t speaking abstractly. He was talking about Jimmy Carter, who as a devout Christian surely understood something about prophecy and divine providence — but apparently never applied that lens to the Ayatollah. And he was talking about Donald Trump. “I don’t think he has any sense whatsoever of that dimension to Iranian identity,” Holland said. “Because I don’t think he’s ever read a book.”

That’s not a throwaway line. It’s a diagnosis.

The deeper thread running through the conversation was one that Holland has been pulling on for years: the West’s blind spot about its own secular assumptions. The elite consensus that religion is a kind of legacy system — something that more educated, modern people gradually grow out of — turns out to be itself a form of faith. “The concept of the secular is ultimately an inheritance from medieval Christendom,” Holland argued. “We all have blinkers. But the worst form of blinker is one you’re not even aware is there.”

There was more to the episode than geopolitics. Yonit asked Holland the question every Jewish listener eventually wants someone credentialed and non-Jewish to answer: what do you make of people who deny any historical connection between Jews and the land of Israel?

“It’s mad,” he said simply. “I don’t really see how that’s a credible argument.”

He then said something more interesting: that the power of Jewish continuity — the reason the Judeans survived when Carthage and every other conquered people dissolved — came not from military strength or geography, but from a collection of texts. “They had something no other people had,” Holland said, “which enabled them to retain their cultural and religious identity even though their great cult center had been wiped out.” The Romans destroyed Jerusalem expecting the Jews to disappear. They got rabbinical Judaism instead.

Two thousand years later, Tom Holland is on a podcast explaining why that matters. And somewhere in Washington, someone is still not reading the briefing.

Tom Holland is co-host of The Rest Is History podcast. This episode of Unholy is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

Day 27 of the US-Israeli war on Iran, and the contradictions are everywhere: Donald Trump declaring victory while cluster bombs fall on Tel Aviv neighbourhoods. Senior officials boasting that 90% of Iran’s arsenal is gone while Israelis spend their nights in underground car parks.

Into this surreal landscape came Jake Sullivan — Biden’s former National Security Advisor, now the Kissinger Professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School — to deliver a calm, methodical, and at moments devastating assessment of how the world got here and where it might be going.

The intersection

Sullivan’s central metaphor was geographical. Trump, he said, has driven himself to an intersection. One road leads to an off-ramp — declare victory, claim the degradation of Iran’s capabilities as sufficient, cut a face-saving deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and move on. The other road goes deeper: a ground operation, possibly a special forces assault on underground nuclear facilities at Isfahan, an attempt to physically destroy Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile.

“I think he’s testing what Iran is prepared to do,” Sullivan said. “The coming hours will be critical.” He believes Trump is hearing conflicting voices — Gulf states and senior Israeli officials urging him to press on, some inside the White House warning against going deeper into a conflict with no clear exit.

The wrong call

Sullivan was unsparing about whether the war should have been launched at all. He doesn’t believe it should have been. Three reasons, offered in sequence: no clear US objective was ever stated; no Congressional authorisation was sought; and crucially, the whole enterprise rested on a flawed premise.

“There were a lot of people in the Trump White House and around Prime Minister Netanyahu who essentially talked themselves into the idea that Iran was a total paper tiger.” The belief, Sullivan argued, was that Iran either wouldn’t or couldn’t fight back — that there was “total freedom of action.” The Strait of Hormuz, now effectively shut down by Iran, is the proof that this analysis was wrong.

The deal that Trump could have done

What should have happened instead? Sullivan’s answer was pointed. When he left office in January 2025, Iran was at its weakest in decades — and growing weaker still after the 12-day war last year. That, he argued, was exactly the moment for diplomacy, not further military escalation.

“We could have put their nuclear program in a box for the long term through negotiations.” The Biden administration tried, and never quite got there. Part of the reason, Sullivan acknowledged, was Iranian scepticism — they’d watched the US do a nuclear deal under Obama, then watched Trump tear it up. “Why won’t your successor just pull out of it?” That, he said, was not a problem Donald Trump faced. He was the guy who pulled out last time. Had he struck a deal, Iran would have believed it would hold.

The bitter irony: Trump had a unique window that Biden never had, and didn’t take it.

What China sees

Sullivan’s most unsettling passage concerned Beijing. China, he said, is watching and thinking three things simultaneously. First, that the United States is “risk-acceptant, militarily capable — wow, that’s actually kind of impressive operationally.” Second, that the US being dragged back into the Middle East is strategically convenient: China was gaining ground precisely during the years America was consumed by Iraq and Afghanistan. “Just when you think you’re out, you get pulled back in.”

And third — the thought Sullivan called speculative, but too important to dismiss — Xi Jinping may be drawing a very specific lesson. Trump has said for years that Iran has been a problem since 1979. He finally dealt with it. Something else happened in 1979: the US switched its recognition from Taipei to Beijing. Taiwan has been a “47-year problem” from Beijing’s perspective too. If bold military action is the new template for resolving old problems, what conclusions might Xi draw?

The podcast life

Sullivan is now co-hosting The Long Game with John Finer, and admits the transition from power to commentary is stranger than expected. “I still feel a lot of the stress of the old job, even though it doesn’t really translate into me having any capacity to influence events.” He was skiing the day this war broke out. Couldn’t enjoy it. His head was running permutations, assessing risks, preparing briefs for no one. The wiring, he says, hasn’t reset yet.

For a man who spent years at the centre of American foreign policy, watching history unfold from a ski slope — distracted, responsible for nothing, unable to look away — may be the hardest assignment of all.

The message arrived on Truth Social, as so many things do now. Donald Trump announced that Iran and America had been talking — two days of “very good and productive conversations” — and that he was postponing all strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure for five days.

By any previous measure of diplomatic history, this would be the moment you pop champagne. But Jonathan’s reaction, when he first read the post, was simple and telling: “Let’s see what happens.” Not celebration. Not relief. Just caution.

“I realized as I thought that,” Jonathan said on today’s emergency Unholy update, “that is such a change.”

It is. That’s the world we now live in. A potential end to one of the most volatile military conflicts in decades, and the instinctive response from the most informed observers is: wait and see.

Today’s episode — a special update breaking into the regular schedule — found Jonathan in London and Yonit in Tel Aviv trying to parse what the Trump announcement actually means. The two scenarios, as Yonit laid them out with striking plainness, are stark. Either this is the beginning of the end of the US-Israeli war on Iran — or it is Trump buying time, and military positioning, for a much bigger strike.

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The details that emerged in hours after the post added texture, if not clarity. Back-channel negotiations have been running through Pakistan and Turkey. Kushner and Witkoff — Trump’s son-in-law and trusted envoy, respectively — were involved on the American side. This matters, Jonathan noted, because “when Donald Trump is serious is when he deploys the son-in-law.” A realtor, in this reading, is more trustworthy than a career diplomat.

The Iranian side is murkier. Official Iranian state media denied any talks existed — then, in the same breath, acknowledged “regional initiatives aimed at reducing tensions.” The figure reportedly at the centre of the back-channel is Mohamed Bakr Ghalibaf, speaker of the Iranian parliament — a man Trump appeared to be casting as a potential pragmatist. Trump himself invoked Venezuela: “Look at Venezuela. That’s working pretty well.” The model on offer is not regime change but a change within a regime — someone, as Trump put it, you can do business with.

Netanyahu has a different problem. Israel never sold this war to its public on abstract threats. The case was existential: this regime, with its proxies and its arsenal, has been actively trying to destroy us for years. “Israelis will say this is yet another case where you have said we will not rest until we’ve eradicated the enemy,” Jonathan said, “and then the war stops before the enemy is eradicated.” A degraded Iran may be enough for Washington. It may not be enough for Jerusalem. And there, quietly, daylight is opening up between the two allies.

Since the war began, barely a day has passed without an attack on a Jewish target somewhere in the world. Synagogues. Schools. And last night in Golders Green — London’s most recognisable Jewish neighbourhood — four ambulances belonging to the Hatzalah volunteer service were targeted in an arson attack. Gas cylinders exploded. Windows in nearby residential blocks shattered. The claim of responsibility came from an Iranian-aligned group.

Yonit, speaking from Tel Aviv, put the larger pattern plainly: “No one is targeting Iranian students on campuses in the United States. No one is targeting Russian students. But somehow Jews always find themselves the only minority that has to pay some sort of price for the actions of a government that is thousands of miles away.”

Jonathan added the comparison that cuts deepest. After 9/11, consensus — from George W. Bush to the far left — was instant and unanimous: attacks on Muslim communities were unforgivable, full stop. That clarity, he said, “has suddenly become very foggy when it comes to Jews and Israel.”

Three weeks into the most ambitious military campaign Israel has ever launched, the country’s most trusted military analyst sat down with Unholy — mid-siren, mid-attrition — and offered a verdict that should give pause to anyone celebrating.

“Massive operational success,” said Amos Harel, Haaretz’s military affairs correspondent. “But it hasn’t been translated into a decisive victory. And I’m not sure I’d even add the word yet.”

It was a typically Harel formulation: precise, honest, and quietly alarming.

The gap between tactics and strategy

The Israeli air campaign has, by almost any military measure, been remarkable. Thousands of targets struck. Iran’s air defences degraded. Senior figures in the regime — including Ali Larijani, effectively Khamenei’s right-hand man, and Basij chief Reza Soleimani — killed in targeted assassinations that speak to intelligence penetration of breathtaking depth.

And yet. Harel’s concern is not with what Israel has achieved. It’s with what comes next — and whether anyone has actually planned for it.

“Strategy is something that limits you as a leader,” Harel said of Netanyahu, describing a long-held belief that true strategists don’t announce their plans, they improvise. “But does he actually know how to remove this regime? To topple it? I’m not sure.”

The same question hangs over Washington. Trump, Harel observed, plays things by ear. He has certain instincts about Iran — instincts that Harel considers closer to correct than those of Obama or Biden — but long-term planning is not where his attention lies. “What he has is mostly Witkoff and Kushner,” Harel said drily.

The result is a war where operational ingenuity keeps outrunning strategic clarity. Where a window opens — Larijani is locatable, South Pars is vulnerable — and the decision to strike is made because the opportunity exists, not because it fits a larger plan. “This is where tactics lead strategy, instead of the other way around,” Jonathan Freedland observed. Harel did not disagree.

The trap Trump built for himself

Perhaps the sharpest insight Harel offered was about Trump’s own predicament. In past confrontations — the 2025 Iran war, the Houthi campaign — Trump could declare victory and disengage. Not this time.

“He cannot now easily leave,” Harel said, paraphrasing a conversation with a former Israeli general. “Because this is becoming an international economic crisis.” The Strait of Hormuz — Iran’s most powerful remaining weapon — has turned what began as a regional military campaign into something with global consequences. Oil at $120 a barrel. European inflation rising. Trump asking allies to lend their ships, and hearing silence in return.

He can’t win quickly. He can’t leave cleanly. And the Iranians who have survived — Mujtaba Khamenei and others now running things from Tehran — know it. Their position, Harel reported, is blunt: we’re still standing, which means we won, and now we want concessions.

The signals Netanyahu is sending

One of the interview’s most telling moments came when Harel noted a shift in Netanyahu’s public language. A fortnight ago, the Prime Minister spoke constantly of regime change — of finishing Iran as a threat once and for all. Now, something has changed.

“He’s talking about Israel as a world superpower. About Israeli might felt everywhere in the world. He’s mentioning regime change less.” It’s the language of a leader quietly lowering expectations. Of a man who came into this war promising a historic transformation, and is now recalibrating what victory might mean before the votes are counted.

Israel is heading into an election year. And the uncomfortable parallel Harel drew was with Gaza: Hamas leadership decimated, but Hamas not destroyed. Iran’s military capability shredded, but the regime still in place. The same question, rerun on a larger stage: was the war worth it if the enemy survives?

Hezbollah, the West Bank, and the limits of force

Harel also addressed two other fronts that complicate the picture. In Lebanon, Israeli intelligence has concluded that Hezbollah rearmed after the 2024 war at a speed nobody anticipated. The movement, Harel explained, has one purpose: building weapons and using them against Israel. “This is what they do for a living.” The lesson — that military victories don’t automatically translate into lasting security — applies equally to Gaza, Lebanon, and now Iran.

In the West Bank, Israeli undercover forces killed two young Palestinian brothers — Mohammed, five, and Othman, seven, who was blind — along with their parents, as the family returned from Ramadan shopping. Harel was careful to contextualise without excusing: the situation in the West Bank has been deteriorating for years, shaped by settler violence, Palestinian attacks, and what he described as a dangerous transference of Gaza-era combat norms into a very different environment. “Soldiers are coming back from Gaza where everyone was a suspect,” he said. “That in some way was transformed into the West Bank as well.”

“A justified war, but a lot of questions about the people calling the shots”

Asked directly whether this war was necessary, Harel gave the same answer he gave after the June 2025 campaign: yes. The Iranian regime was planning worse. The uranium problem was unsolved. The threat was real and growing.

But his assessment of the people running it hasn’t changed either.

“You can detest both of them,” he said of Netanyahu and Trump. “You can decide not to vote for them and still give them credit for taking action. But that doesn’t mean they’re operating in a moral way, or that they’re telling the truth to the public, or that they know what they’re doing at this stage.”

It was perhaps the most honest summary of the war anyone has offered: justified in origin, extraordinary in execution, and increasingly uncertain in destination. As Harel put it, with the understatement of a man who has been watching this region for thirty years: “We’re in a different terrain now.”

Amos Harel is the military affairs correspondent for Haaretz. He spoke to Unholy on Day 20 of the US-Israeli war on Iran.

Thirteen days into the war with Iran and a new front has cracked open. On Wednesday night, 200 rockets launched from Lebanon toward Israel — Hezbollah, supposedly finished, supposedly buried, was back. The Israeli military’s Home Command issued a rare public apology for not preparing Israelis for the possibility. Netanyahu, who said in November 2024 that he had “pushed Hezbollah back decades,” had not yet held a press conference.

Into this complexity, Yonit and Jonathan brought in the person best placed to give a clear-eyed military assessment: General David Petraeus, former CIA director, former commander of coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, former head of US Central Command. His verdict was striking in its precision — and sobering in its ambiguity.

The Military Picture: Better Than You Think

On the tactical level, Petraeus was direct: the campaign has gone well. Missile launches from Iran are down over 90%. Air and missile defenses have been degraded to the point where not just stealth aircraft but B-1 bombers and B-52s can now operate. Over 6,000 individual targets have been hit. Regime leaders, including the Supreme Leader himself, were eliminated in the opening hours — a decision driven, Petraeus revealed, by what he called “exquisite intelligence” that created a window too valuable to miss.

The nuclear program, he assessed, has been set back by at least two years. The naval threat has been substantially reduced — around 50 Iranian ships sunk, including vessels used for mine-laying. The drones remain a problem, responsible for most of the American casualties: seven killed, over a hundred wounded.

But Petraeus was careful not to let tactical success blur into strategic clarity. The regime itself, he noted, is a million men under arms — the IRGC at 150,000, the Basij militia at 200,000, the national police at 250,000, the conventional military at 400,000. Decentralized but cohesive. And where the world had hoped for a transition figure with some pragmatism — a “Delcy Rodriguez,” in Petraeus’s phrase — what emerged instead was someone he called “a young Kim Jong-un”: the son of the Supreme Leader, wounded in the attack that killed his father, now fighting America, Israel, his own people, and possibly for his life simultaneously.

The Missile Math and the Clock

One of Petraeus’s most arresting concepts was what he called “the missile math” — the calculus of interceptors remaining versus launchers and missiles still in play. He suggested this calculation partly drove the end of the 12-day war in June, and it remains a live constraint now. The US spent over $1.2 billion in interceptors from the THAAD battery alone in those 12 days. Add in Patriot systems, ship-based interceptors, and the inventories of Gulf states, and the math becomes one of the war’s most closely watched numbers.

The Straits of Hormuz remain a pressure point with no clean solution. Escorting tankers is, in Petraeus’s assessment, enormously difficult — all it takes is one mine, one drone strike, one hit on a single tanker, and confidence collapses. The Saudi workaround — pumping oil west to Yanbu on the Red Sea — offers some relief, but the broader problem of navigational confidence in the Gulf persists.

When Does It End?

Petraeus identified a complex multi-factor equation governing when the war concludes — achievement of military objectives, US domestic politics (polls are, he noted, bad for the White House), Gulf state sentiment, China’s position, the oil price, and Israeli pressure to continue. On the last point, he was clear: Israel was going to strike Iran regardless. And Israel’s goals differ from Washington’s. Trump can declare victory and walk away; Netanyahu cannot, because his goal — regime change — hasn’t been achieved.

The new Supreme Leader, Petraeus cautioned, may prove as hardline as his father. For the Iranian Shia clerical mindset, he suggested, victory can mean raising a fist from the rubble and declaring survival a win. That is not a mindset that lends itself to a clean off-ramp.

As for China: Petraeus argued this conflict sends two messages simultaneously — the US military has formidable conventional capability, which deters; but it is also burning through critical interceptor stockpiles that would matter in any Pacific contingency, which emboldens. Both are true. Both matter.

The bottom line from one of the people who has spent a career in the room where these decisions are made: the battles are going well, the strategy is murkier, and no one yet knows what a satisfactory ending looks like.

Naomi Alderman — novelist, broadcaster, award-winning author of The Power and Disobedience — joined Jonathan to discuss Marty Supreme, nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars. It was, she told him, the most intensely Jewish movie she had ever seen in her life.

Jonathan admitted upfront that he had enjoyed her essay about the film more than the film itself. He found it episodic, more concerned with cool moments than coherent narrative — “a film for the ADHD age.” Alderman’s job, essentially, was to change his mind. She largely succeeded.

Not a Sports Movie

The first and most important reframe Alderman offered: Marty Supreme is not a sports movie that fails. It is a film about the psychological aftermath of the Holocaust that uses sport as its vehicle. Set in 1952, it places Timothée Chalamet’s Marty — arrogant, relentless, impossible — in a world still thick with what Alderman called “the humiliation” of what had happened to Jewish people. The film, she argued, opens with conception and closes with birth, bookending everything in between with a single statement: a Jewish life was created after Auschwitz, and that is the victory.

“Every Jewish life born after Auschwitz is a victory of some kind,” Alderman said. The film’s episodic structure, which troubled Jonathan, she reframed as Biblical — “What do you think the Torah is? Have you read Genesis?” The absence of the traditional Hollywood redemption arc — no final match, no triumphant win — is not a failure of craft but a rejection of what she called the New Testament narrative structure that underlies most Western storytelling.

The Honey Scene and Viktor Frankl

Much of the conversation turned on Kletzky, the Auschwitz survivor Marty plays against — a character played, significantly, by the same actor who starred in Son of Saul. In one of the film’s most extraordinary sequences, Kletzky survives the camps by smearing his body with honey and smuggling nutrition to fellow inmates. Jonathan saw in this a pure example of the best of us, drawing on Viktor Frankl’s famous line that the best did not return from the camps. Alderman complicated that, noting that Kletzky — like the Sonderkommando in Son of Saul — occupies morally ambiguous territory: surviving through collaboration with the machinery of death, doing what had to be done, loved by no one for it. The film, she argued, holds all of that without flinching.

Why Jews Have to Be the Best

The most piercing passage of the conversation was Alderman’s analysis of Jewish striving — of why it is never enough to be good in your own country, why world-class is the only category that offers real safety. She built this from the Manhattan Project: almost every top physicist who worked on the bomb was Jewish, almost all of them fleeing Hitler. They survived because other countries had heard of them. Their international reputations were their exit visas.

“If you give a whole people the awareness that this is what it takes to survive,” she said, “people work really, really hard.” That is what Marty Supreme is about. The title character doesn’t just want to win. He needs to be world champion — because table tennis of all things, at the world level, is a credential that travels. After Brexit, Alderman noted, she found herself thinking similarly: 26 of her 27 passports had effectively been removed. She needed something that would get her into other countries, because you can never fully know when a country will turn.

The Film’s Jewishness and Why People Miss It

Alderman’s frustration with much of the film’s reception was that critics treated it as a sports movie that couldn’t make up its mind, rather than as a deliberate, uncompromising piece of Jewish art. She pointed to details that reward attention: the apple-seduction scene that echoes the Garden of Eden; the casting of Pico Iyer as the head of the Table Tennis Association, connecting the film obliquely to Hiroshima and a parallel story of humiliated peoples reconstituting identity through sport; the fact that the film was released in the US on Christmas Day — “Look, it’s for you. I made this for you.”

She also offered something more personal, and more provocative: the film explains, at some level, why Israelis are like that. Why they talk over people, insist on their point of view, push to the front of pharmacy queues. “It’s a country full of strivers,” she said. The will to survive that opens the film — literally, with a sperm approaching an egg — is the same will that produced a generation who cannot afford to lose.

Eleven days into the US-Israeli war on Iran, the conventional wisdom has already hardened: air power alone has never toppled a regime, and it won’t now. The Islamic Republic will absorb the blows, close ranks, and emerge — battered but intact, perhaps more dangerous than before.

Professor Ali Ansari isn’t buying it.

One of the world’s foremost Iran scholars, a historian at the University of St. Andrews who has spent decades studying the Islamic Republic from the inside out, Ansari came to Unholy this week with an unfashionable message: humility. Not optimism, exactly — but a firm refusal to accept the predetermined conclusion that nothing can change.

“We’ve got to move away from the rigid dogma,” he told Yonit and Jonathan, “that says until a checklist has been fulfilled, nothing will happen.” Most of the confident predictions being made right now, he argued, are built on information fed to Western outlets by Iranian state media. The honest answer is that nobody really knows what’s happening on the ground.

The Hereditary Revolution

The most striking symbol of the regime’s current crisis, for Ansari, isn’t the strikes on nuclear facilities or the silenced missile launchers. It’s the succession. The Islamic Republic — a revolution explicitly founded on the rejection of hereditary monarchy — has just installed the son of its supreme leader as his successor.

“Of course it’s a weakening,” Ansari said flatly. The idea that Mojtaba Khamenei became heir because Trump killed his father is, in his view, nonsense — Ansari had been predicting this succession for a decade. What’s new is that the regime has been forced to make it official, in public, under fire. Many on the Western left who spent years arguing the Islamic Republic was some sophisticated post-modern hybrid of Islam and republicanism, he suggested, will now need to reconsider.

And on the question of whether the son is more nuclear-hawkish than the father: Ansari was blunt. “We know nothing about his views on nuclear weapons.” The confident reporting on this, he said, has no evidentiary basis.

Command and Control Is Fracturing

Ansari sees something more significant than symbolic weakness. He pointed to a concrete operational failure: Iran attacked Amman, apologized, then attacked again. That is not the behavior of a coherent military command. Missile and drone firing has dropped dramatically — partly from destroyed launchers, but partly, he suspects, because personnel are simply standing down. Getting out of the way.

Don’t mistake the current quiet for solidarity, he warned. During the 12-day war, analysts told him the same thing — national unity, rally-around-the-flag. Six months later came the bloodiest uprising in the Islamic Republic’s history. “Think Russia 1917,” he said. “People are fed up. Anyone who tells you they’re not isn’t reading the historical evidence.”

How It Could Happen

Asked to walk through a plausible path to regime change, Ansari was careful. You won’t see a unified national uprising, he said. What you’ll see is bushfires — protests breaking out in one city, then another, then beginning to merge. Leadership will emerge from the chaos. And the change doesn’t have to be maximalist: figures like Rohani and Mousavi, currently sidelined or under house arrest, may find a moment to say what many Iranians are already thinking. “We cannot go on like this.”

The double knock he’s watching for: movement in the moderate wing of the elite, combined with unrest on the street. And the inflection point that made this more possible than ever, he argued, was January — when the regime killed somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 of its own people, going into hospitals, executing people in the streets. “People who would never have called for outside help suddenly started calling for it.”

Not Iraq

To those who fear the worst-case scenario — Iran fragmenting, ISIS filling the vacuum — Ansari offered a different frame. Iran is not a colonial invention. Its borders have barely shifted since 1639. Even in 1919, occupied simultaneously by Ottomans, Russians, and British, the cultural cohesion of the Iranian plateau held. “It’s going to be rough in places,” he acknowledged. But Iran has the historical and cultural depth to survive a transition in a way that Iraq and Syria simply did not.

The Question He Won’t Answer

Jonathan put it to him directly at the end: does all of this mean Trump and Netanyahu did the right thing?

Ansari paused. “I would hesitate to go that far.” Whether this war was right depends entirely on what its aims actually are — and on that, he’s genuinely uncertain. The country was on a downward spiral regardless. But the political vision for what comes next? He’s not convinced anyone in Washington or Jerusalem has one.

He’s made that point before. It still stands.

Wars are usually sold with a story. This one, Gideon Rachman argues, keeps changing its.

One week into the US-Israeli military operation against Iran, the FT’s chief foreign affairs commentator came onto Unholy to offer something that has been scarce in the breathless coverage of the past days: a cold-eyed reckoning with what is actually happening, and why it matters that no one in Washington seems to agree on the answer.

Rachman’s central point was unsettling in its simplicity. The justification for the war has shifted so many times — imminent nuclear threat, regime change, Israeli pressure on a reluctant America, protection of Gulf allies — that it now functions less as a rationale and more as a rotating set of talking points. “If you don’t know the goal of the war,” he said, “it’s very hard to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion.”

Trump’s Changing Calculus

To understand how the US got here, Rachman traced what he sees as a shift in Trump’s psychology. The president who campaigned on ending Middle Eastern adventurism watched two military operations — the June strikes on Iran and the Venezuela operation — unfold without obvious catastrophe. The lesson he seems to have drawn, Rachman suggested, was that force works. That confidence, more than any specific strategic calculation, may explain why America found itself at war with Iran.

The irony runs deep. Trump was the politician who spent years accusing the foreign policy establishment of dragging America into unwinnable conflicts. Now, in a move that has left many of his own supporters confused, he appears to have embraced the logic he once mocked.

“There’s a total mess as to what the goal of this war is — and if you don’t know the goal, it’s very hard to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion.”

What about Netanyahu? Jonathan Freedland pressed Rachman on whether, whatever one thinks of the war’s broader wisdom, Israel’s prime minister had acted entirely rationally by his own lights. The moment of Iranian weakness, the permissive American president, the sworn enemy finally within reach — doesn’t the logic hold, at least from Jerusalem?

Rachman’s answer was frank. He said the logic was coherent but the vision was not. Israel, in his reading, has become a country that relies entirely on military superiority without a corresponding political strategy for the day after. “Various Israelis I’ve spoken to have said, if Iran collapses into chaos, that’s fine by us.” That may be understandable. It is not, he argued, a foreign policy.

The Crumbling of the Alliance

One of the conversation’s sharpest moments came when Rachman turned to American public opinion — a subject that tends to get lost in the geopolitical sweep of events like this one.

Just before the war began, a poll appeared suggesting that for the first time, more Americans sympathized with Palestinians than with Israelis. Rachman was careful not to over-interpret a single data point, but he treated it as a warning sign that the political coalition sustaining US support for Israel is under more pressure than at any previous moment. The erosion isn’t coming from one direction. Newsom has called Israel an apartheid state. Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens have shifted into territory that Rachman was prepared to call antisemitic. JD Vance is skeptical of the war. Marco Rubio has essentially implied that Israel dragged the US in against its better judgment.

“The broad bipartisan support, which was absolutely critical to Israel in the United States, is crumbling,” Rachman said. “And this war’s not going to help.”

What Could Stop It

Yonit Levi — speaking from Tel Aviv, where she had not slept in five nights, asked the question her listeners were surely asking too: what actually ends this?

Rachman’s answer was characteristically unsentimental. American casualties. Energy prices. The gas pump. The kind of pain that reaches the Mar-a-Lago crowd. None of these are idealistic levers. They are political and economic ones, which is perhaps the point — that the same president who launched this war without a clear exit is also the president most likely to declare victory when the exit arrives, regardless of what the facts on the ground look like.

“He has this amazing ability to reinvent reality,” Rachman said. “In a way, he’s better placed to get out of a war than somebody who’s worried about internal consistency.”

There was something clarifying about hearing that said plainly. Not reassuring — clarifying. The war may end not when its goals are achieved, because no one can quite agree what they are, but when the political cost of continuing exceeds the political cost of stopping. Trump will declare it a triumph. His supporters will believe him. The region will be left to manage whatever comes next.

As Yonit said when the interview ended, speaking from a city where air raid sirens had punctuated the morning: these are historic days, whether you support this or not. We have not seen even the beginning of the repercussions.

Yonit Levi: Before we get into the significance of the decision to assassinate Khamenei, can we talk about who he was and what he meant for building the Islamic Republic of Iran?

Suzanne Maloney:

“Khamenei is a critical figure in the post-revolutionary history of Iran. He was a cleric who was radicalized in his youth and became part of the revolutionary movement, served time in prison, and then later assumed the role of president of Iran… He was not considered to be a particularly powerful or charismatic figure during his eight years in that office… but that phase also did enable him to build really important relationships with the Revolutionary Guard and with the security establishment as a whole.”

She explains that when Khamenei succeeded Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, few believed he could fill the role.

“What Khamenei did over his 37 years in office was build out the institutions of the office of the supreme leader in a way that really developed a stranglehold over the state apparatus itself.”

Yonit Levi: This is a man who saw the United States building up an armada in the region. And yet, he wasn’t hiding. How do you explain that?

Suzanne Maloney:

“He had suffered an assassination attempt that cost him the use of his hand. He knew he was in his final hours. And he was determined to see through the project of the theocracy… less interested in his own survival than in the survival of the state itself.”

She adds that while Khamenei had spent earlier stages of the conflict in a bunker, he ultimately chose not to disappear.

“He was holding what was said to be a regular meeting with many of his top advisers.”

Yonit Levi: Let’s talk about Iran after Khamenei. Is this enough to topple the regime?

Suzanne Maloney:

“I wish it were up to the Iranian people… But the reality is that this is a very well-entrenched regime. It is a very well-armed regime.”

She notes that succession planning has been underway for years.

“There’s a lot of redundancy built into the system… There are plans in place. There is already a transitional council that is prescribed by the Iranian constitution.”

Her conclusion is blunt:

“I don’t think the Islamic Republic is going anywhere anytime soon. And we’re going to be at a very unpredictable and probably violent period within and around Iran.”

Yonit Levi: What would actually need to happen for the regime to begin to crumble?

Suzanne Maloney:

“There would have to be a loss of confidence within the elite levels of the regime that they can somehow persist through this crisis, and we haven’t seen that yet.”

She recalls earlier protests where thousands were killed — without defections.

“I wouldn’t expect any dramatic transformation in Iran’s ideology… The attacks have probably hardened those philosophies within the system.”

Yonit Levi: How worried should we be about the broader Shia response — talk of jihad, militias, escalation?

Suzanne Maloney:

“The dynamics within the Shia clergy are going to be very interesting… Hezbollah seems to be making a little bit more noise today, but was notably fairly placid in the immediate aftermath.”

Still, she warns:

“It’s reasonable to expect that there will be some follow-on violence within Iran but also outside Iran by those who are sympathetic to the regime.”

Yonit Levi: Khamenei spent decades preaching ‘death to Israel’ and ‘death to America’. Was this ideology performative — or real?

Suzanne Maloney:

“Khamenei was a true believer… The ideology is deeply, deeply ingrained. It’s not performative. They believe what they say.”

She stresses that this worldview did not begin with him — and will not automatically end with him.

Yonit Levi: Iranian society today — who is mourning, and who is celebrating?

Suzanne Maloney:

“There are millions of Iranians who will come to the streets to mourn Khamenei… But there are also millions of Iranians who are jubilant at the idea of his death.”

The result, she says, is unavoidable division.

“It will be a divided society for the foreseeable future.”

Yonit Levi: Is there any figure who could unify Iran now? Reza Pahlavi?

Suzanne Maloney:

“He is a very decent human being… but this is more than half a century since he has set foot in the country.”

Her assessment is cautious.

“The idea that an émigré force could land in Iran and oversee a complex transition seems a bit of a stretch of the imagination.”

Yonit Levi: Is the world a better place without Khamenei — and do we know where we’re going from here?

Suzanne Maloney:

“That’s the million-dollar question… There really hasn’t been any thinking about what the U.S. role would be in a transition to a different future for Iran.”

Her final warning is stark:

“I think we’re likely to see a sustained period of instability and uncertainty inside Iran.”

Khamenei’s death marks the end of an era — but not, at least for now, the end of the system he built. What follows is likely to be messy, dangerous, and unresolved for years to come.

In an emergency update episode of Unholy, Jonathan Freedland steps in alone — Yonit Levi having been on continuous live broadcast on Israel’s Channel 12 since early morning — to take stock of a fast-moving situation that unfolded over more than twelve dramatic hours. As the episode goes to air late in the evening, reports from Reuters suggest that Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is dead, his body reportedly found and even shown in photographic form to Israel’s prime minister. The claim follows remarks by Benjamin Netanyahu, who told the nation there were “strong indications” that Khamenei was “no longer with us.”

The day itself began with what appears to have been a coordinated Israeli–American military operation against Iran. According to Amos Harel, who joins Jonathan for analysis, the decision was taken after days of public ambiguity from Donald Trump, who alternated between talk of negotiations and the possibility of force. In the end, Trump authorised a joint strike — something Netanyahu had long pushed for, but which Washington had previously resisted.

Israeli sources estimate that roughly 200 fighter jets struck some 500 targets, primarily in Tehran and western Iran, hitting ballistic missile infrastructure, IRGC bases, and sites linked to Iran’s nuclear programme. Targeted killings reportedly took out Iran’s defence minister and the current commander of the Revolutionary Guard. While Iran has acknowledged hundreds of fatalities, it has so far remained silent on the fate of its senior leadership — beyond the mounting reports concerning Khamenei himself.

Iran’s response came swiftly but unevenly. Hundreds of missiles were launched over many hours, not in a single barrage but in staggered waves, forcing Israelis into shelters for extended periods. Missiles were also fired toward Qatar, Bahrain, and the UAE — all hosts to American bases — signalling that Washington, not only Israel, was in Tehran’s sights. Despite dozens of injuries in Israel, casualties have so far been far lower than many had feared, reflecting the significant imbalance between Iranian capabilities and Israeli–American air superiority.

The central question now is not only military, but political. Are these strikes aimed at degrading Iran’s nuclear and missile programmes — or are they designed to bring about regime change? Netanyahu has framed the moment as a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” for the Iranian people to free themselves from tyranny. Trump, speaking to Axios, has suggested multiple “off-ramps”: the conflict could end within days, or stretch longer; it could culminate in a renewed nuclear deal, or in something far more destabilising.

Harel cautions against assuming a clean or quick outcome. Regime change, he argues, depends less on air power than on whether Iranians themselves return to the streets in massive numbers — despite the regime’s proven willingness to kill tens of thousands to preserve itself. Iran is not Kosovo, and history offers few encouraging precedents. The law of unintended consequences, he notes, has a particular fondness for the Middle East.

For now, uncertainty dominates. Whether this becomes a brief, brutal confrontation, a prolonged war of attrition, or the opening chapter of a historic transformation inside Iran remains unknowable. What is clear is that a threshold has been crossed — and the region, perhaps the world, is entering a new and dangerous phase.

Yonit introduced Noreena Hertz with a résumé that reads like a map of modern power: economist, academic, bestselling author, a professor at University College London’s Policy Lab where she “leads on AI,” and a board member at Mattel, Warner Music Group, and Work Human. Hertz, Levi added, is also “the living proof that you should always surround yourself with friends who are smarter than you.”

Hertz didn’t perform. She got straight to the point.

What followed was a conversation anchored, as Levi put it, in “three or four main boxes”: jobs, Gen Z, misinformation and disinformation—plus, if possible, “a little bit of optimism as well.” The picture Hertz painted was not apocalyptic, but it was urgent. The risks, she insisted, are no longer theoretical.

“This is now moving from the realm of the hypothetical to something that we’re actually seeing happen,” she said.

“Overnight… completely shredded up”

For years, much of the public conversation about automation assumed the first casualties would be blue-collar work. Hertz argued the opposite is unfolding: the pressure is already visible in white-collar entry-level roles.

“If we look at the latest US job data,” she said, “we’re starting to see real evidence that especially when it comes to entry level jobs, companies are just hiring less… less of the young lawyers, less of the young accountants, less of the young financial analysts.”

She described a growing mismatch between education and opportunity: “The kind of jobs that young people used to until really recently go to university and really prized as the top jobs are already being diminished and degraded by AI.”

Then came the line that landed with a thud: a forecast from someone she described as “very senior” at Anthropic.

“He said to me that he believes that jobs are going to be wiped out, white collar jobs… 30% of white collar jobs, at least, wiped out within the next two years.”

Hertz contrasted that with a “senior person” at DeepMind, who “had a slightly different story,” suggesting it may not be “so voluminous, so fast,” but was nonetheless “really concerned” about the same entry-level cliff.

For Hertz, the immediate question isn’t just whether the jobs disappear. It’s what society does next.

“How will people be able to afford to buy anything? How will they be able to afford their rent? How will they be able to afford to eat?” she asked.

And then, beyond the economics: “How will they have meaning? How will they have belonging? How will they have status?”

The deepest rupture, she suggested, could be political and psychological: anger from educated people who feel the implicit bargain has been broken.

“That contract that they kind of had implicitly with the state… we’re going to study hard and then we will work and we’ll get good jobs… suddenly is overnight it seems in danger of being completely shredded up.”

Basic income—and then what?

Levi raised a policy response that has moved from fringe to mainstream: basic income. If AI companies and AI-enabled firms benefit disproportionately, should they help fund it?

“It feels inevitable that there will have to be some sort of mass distribution of money by the state to people,” Hertz said, “if we do have these levels of unemployment that we could be very reasonably looking at.”

But she immediately cautioned that cash alone doesn’t solve the deeper problem.

“Even if people don’t have to worry about having enough money to pay their rent or eat… we are back to that purpose of meaning, status, belonging, and basic income is not gonna answer that.”

Her alternative was not a single proposal but a category of proposals—large-scale public programs that give people paid roles that are socially valuable: visiting elderly people, picking up litter, or creating.

“Do we need massive public arts programs?” she asked, pointing to the New Deal-era U.S. programs “where people were hired to paint, to sculpt, to create.”

Then came the unavoidable follow-up: “Who’s gonna pay for this?”

Hertz floated several routes—again, as questions rather than finished policy:

• Should “the big AI frontier firms” fund it as a “license to operate”?

• Should governments “set up a sovereign wealth fund” that takes stakes in new AI firms?

• Should companies deploying AI fastest pay a tax used to support displaced workers?

What worried her most was less the complexity of the answer and more the absence of sustained effort to find one.

“What really worries me… is that governments are not thinking about this. They’re barely thinking about this,” she said. “And yet, we are talking about a very, very short timeframe when everything could be upended.”

Why governments aren’t preparing

Levi asked the obvious question: is this short-termism—politicians chasing the next headline—or a lack of understanding?

Hertz offered a layered explanation. First, timing: until recently, politicians could tell themselves it was a future administration’s problem. “They could probably use the argument this is going to be somebody else’s problem,” she said.

Second, expertise: “There just [are] not enough people within government who… understand what’s happening with the level of granularity that you need.”

Third, overload: in a fractured world, governments are juggling inflation, interest rates, economic shocks, and—in Israel’s case, “defense issues.”

And finally, denial—an incentive to prefer good news over downside risk. Politicians, she suggested, may find it “easier and happier” to adopt the “very positive narrative” that AI companies promote: “great abundance, great productivity.”

A gendered jobs crisis

One of Hertz’s most specific warnings was about gender. On job displacement, she argued women face a steeper hit.

“It’s estimated that three times as many women in high-income countries will lose their jobs due to AI than men,” she said.

Her argument relied on both history and job-category exposure. She pointed to the 1980s PC revolution and the quick replacement of roles like “data entry clerks” and “secretaries”—jobs “replaced first,” and “not a good story for women.”

Looking ahead, she said, “the top 40 jobs most likely to be replaced by AI” include “translators, proofreaders, marketers, customer service operators”—roles she described as “disproportionately majority female.”

Then came a further risk: even the protective strategy that helped some women in the 1980s—adapting fast—may be harder now because workplace use of tools is diverging by gender.

“Women and men are using ChatGPT… in their personal lives, pretty much the same,” she said. “But when it comes to the workplace, we’re seeing a real divide… between the extent to which women are using it and the extent to which men are.”

Hertz cited reasons given by women—lower confidence, higher risk-aversion—but added a structural factor: “Companies are investing less in upskilling their female staff… than their male staff.”

She framed it as a direct question for both individuals and employers: are women “upskilling ourselves enough,” and are companies “inadvertently perhaps prioritizing their male staff”?

What should children learn?

Levi brought it down to a parent’s anxiety: what should kids study? She mentioned her 12-year-old learning to code.

Hertz praised the curiosity, then offered a blunt assessment about coding as a profession.

“Coding itself… is not a good profession,” she said, describing what she’d been told about Anthropic’s internal use: “Whereas a year and a half ago they were using Claude for about 5% of their code… six months ago… 50%… and as of now it’s about 90%.”

Her conclusion wasn’t that kids should avoid technology—it was that they need to understand it deeply and use it wisely.

“Kids today do need to become AI ninjas,” she said. They can become assets to companies because “older people may just not be up to speed.”

But she also argued for the opposite: protecting parts of life from AI altogether.

“We need to be ring-fencing AI free time,” she said, warning of cognitive atrophy—“the Google Maps situation at scale”—where the risk isn’t just losing a skill but losing the habit of thinking.

The aim is not purity; it’s competence and judgment. Kids, she said, need confidence “to assess the AI, judge it, challenge it when need be.”

They also need resilience: “We really don’t know how this is going to unfold.”

Gen Z and AI: from essays to emotional outsourcing

Hertz’s most unsettling findings came from her research with 18-to-21-year-olds. Yes, they use AI for school—sometimes to write essays, sometimes to “outline and structure” them.

But what she found “most interesting” was how much they use it to navigate social life and decision-making.

“I had an argument with my friend… Who was right?” she quoted.

“This is what my boyfriend messaged me. What does it mean?”

And one that, she said, stuck with her: they use it “for my opinion, for having an opinion on anything.”

They asked AI whether to give money to a homeless person, how to reply to their parents, what tone to strike. Some, she said, used it “for every single decision”—from breakfast to what to wear to where to study.

Then came the line she called “heartbreaking”:

“They said that they now trust the AI more than they trust their own judgment because the AI gets it right, whereas they’re not sure they do.”

For Hertz, the danger isn’t only dependency. It’s developmental: teens and young adults build social muscles by being awkward, getting it wrong, and learning.

“That awkwardness, that getting it wrong, that making a mistake and learning from it,” she said—those experiences risk disappearing if the default becomes outsourcing judgment to a tool believed to be “neutral” and “all-knowing.”

Can there be a less worrying view?

Levi pushed for an optimistic framing: in a lonely, turbulent world, maybe it’s helpful to have “something to talk to.”

Hertz allowed that AI companions could help individuals. For “the child who is struggling with making friends,” an AI companion “could make them feel much less lonely.”

But she warned of two broader risks. First, AI companionship is “sycophantic,” designed to make you feel good, which can short-circuit the “give and take” of real relationships.

Second, a societal moral hazard: “What kind of a society will we be creating if people don’t feel a need to be there for each other because they know… it’s fine… they can sit in a room speaking to chat instead?”

Disinformation: “literally impossible” to tell what’s real

When the conversation moved to misinformation, Hertz refused to put her worry on a scale—“don’t make me put it on a scale,” she said—but she was unequivocal: it’s already here.

She cited last year’s elections in multiple countries where AI-fueled disinformation played a role, including “fake AI CNN reports” and deepfakes designed to implicate politicians.

“AI is just getting better at this stuff,” she said. “Almost getting to the point where it is literally impossible to discern the fake from the true.”

Antisemitism and generative AI: three mechanisms

Levi noted Hertz’s connection to the UK Jewish community and asked how AI intersects with antisemitism. Hertz said the impact is already “significant and very disturbing” for three main reasons.

1. Training data

   Models trained on the open internet ingest material that is “bad when it comes to truth… about Jews, about Israel, about Zionism,” including content that “actively promulgates anti-Semitic tropes and conspiracy theories.”

2. The single-answer format

   Unlike search engines that surface multiple sources, chat-style systems produce “one fact” that “seems authoritative.” That can reduce users’ awareness of “competing truths and narratives.”

3. Lower cost for bad actors

   It is “so much easier now” for extremists, ideological networks, and even nation states to generate persuasive fake content “that seems like it’s real.”

She cited examples of fabricated imagery and grotesque tropes—content she argued can appear convincing “to a mass… gullible public” and then spreads via amplification.

Hertz also argued that platform owners “don’t seem to care enough,” pointing to a study she attributed to the “American Defense League,” which tested major models with prompts intended to generate antisemitic videos. “Over 40%” produced such outputs, she said, with “Grok… being the worst.”

Her point was about capacity and will: companies can invest heavily to curb some categories of harmful content, she argued, but they are “definitely not investing enough money into trying to fix the problem” here.

Governments, she added, could apply leverage: strict liability for platform content, “huge” fines, and withholding government procurement until safeguards improve.

“Good shit does happen”

After a long stretch of warnings, Levi asked what makes the world better.

Hertz’s answer was blunt and meme-ready: “I think first, good shit does happen.”

Her strongest optimism was in medicine. AI, she said, is already improving screening and scan-reading, spotting cancers earlier, and accelerating drug discovery. “When I speak to cancer researchers… Alzheimer’s researchers… leading medics… unambiguously… there will be a net positive,” she said.

Her second optimistic area was access: a “democratization of expertise” and “democratization of support.” Legal help, financial advice, specialist guidance—services once reserved for the wealthy—could become widely available as models improve. She added education: AI tutoring could extend high-quality support beyond those who can pay for private tutors. She referenced a Harvard study finding that “AI tutors were actually better when well designed” than some classroom instruction.

She also described entrepreneurial leverage: people may not need to “raise lots of money” before assembling capabilities that once required a team.

But she ended where she began: benefits don’t cancel risk. The absence of planning and guardrails—on job displacement, disinformation, and antisemitism—remains her central concern.

“Where are the guardrails?” she asked. “Why are we not putting enough pressure on the AI frontier firms… to address not only how they’re going to get richer, but also the downside societal risks?”

Noreena Hertz’s warning was not that AI is evil or unstoppable. It was that the timeline is short, the incentives are misaligned, and too many institutions are treating disruption as a future tense—when, she said, it is already arriving.

When Holly Dagres was 13 years old, she moved from sunny Southern California to Tehran.

“Everybody’s trying to leave Iran,” she recalled. “And just as I was turning 13 in 1999, my mom… decided to move back to Iran.”

There was no orientation. No “Iran 101.”

“I had to all of a sudden wear hijab,” she said. “Nobody explained to me why the country was ruled by a crown to a turban.” At that age, she added, “I wanted to listen to my pop music and wear my shorts and tank tops… And so I actually hated Iran at the time.”

Today, Dagres is a senior fellow at The Washington Institute, curator of The Iranist newsletter and a leading analyst of Iranian social movements. The country she once resented has become the subject of her life’s work. The transformation, she said, came from separating people from regime. “I really fell in love with the people and the culture,” she explained, “and I understood that they don’t represent the Islamic Republic or the regime that’s been ruling them for four and a half decades.”

Dagres spent her formative teenage years in Iran until 2006 and traveled back and forth until 2013. That year, while she was a graduate student at the American University in Cairo, she was interrogated and threatened. “They made me sign something called a tahod nomma, or commitment letter,” she said. She has not returned since. Looking back, she believes it was “a blessing,” noting that her career — and even a period living in Israel from 2017 to 2019 — would have made future visits perilous. “To them I’m a CIA agent,” she said wryly. “I’m also a Mossad agent.”

Her unusual biography — Tehran, Cairo, Jerusalem — now shapes her analysis of a country she cannot enter but continues to follow closely.

After January 8: “A line of no return”

Asked about the recent violence that followed a communications shutdown beginning January 8, Dagres described an unprecedented crackdown.

“There was a communication shutdown,” she said. “And it was during that communication shutdown that an unprecedented massacre occurred.”

The numbers remain disputed. Human Rights Activists in Iran has reported at least 6,500 deaths and is reviewing 11,000-plus cases. The UN Special Rapporteur has suggested figures may exceed 20,000. “We haven’t seen a scale like this in modern Iranian history,” Dagres said. “Even during the 1979 revolution, the numbers weren’t like that.”

She cited historian Ali Ansari’s assessment that violence of this magnitude had not been seen “since the 1790s.”

Internet access has technically returned, but social media remains blocked. “Thirty-five percent of the most popular websites in the world are blocked in Iran,” she noted. Iranians rely on VPNs to circumvent restrictions. Even so, she believes only “a sliver” of the atrocities is currently known.

“Iranians are still in shock,” she said. “The regime has crossed a line or a threshold of no return.”

Yet shock has not translated into submission.

Weddings at funerals

Observers have noted that while street demonstrations appear to have subsided, funerals have become sites of defiance — even celebration.

Dagres, who grew up attending traditional Iranian funerals, emphasized how striking this shift is. “Funerals are very somber,” she said. “People express themselves in crying… it’s therapeutic.”

But now, she said, “I’ve seen weddings for their loved ones that will never be able to get married because they’ve been killed.” These acts of joy are deliberate. “They want to disconnect from the regime itself,” she explained, describing what she called the Islamic Republic’s “death worship” culture, with murals of war martyrs and a calendar marked by mourning.

“You can kill our loved ones,” she said, describing the protesters’ message, “but we celebrate, we honor them.”

Even on the anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, when pro-regime rallies filled the streets, dissent echoed from rooftops. “There were Iranians… chanting ‘death to the dictator,’” Dagres said. Despite the “unprecedented scale” of the crackdown, she concluded, “Iranians still remain defiant… They want the Islamic Republic gone.”

The regime’s future

Will that demand translate into regime change?

“I don’t have a timeline,” Dagres cautioned. “If I did, I’d be a very rich person right now.” Still, she believes change is likely. She referenced former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen’s estimate of five to ten years and said, “I could see that.”

The regime, she argued, has created its own vulnerabilities through “systemic mismanagement, corruption, repression,” compounded by regional developments and economic collapse. Protests have recurred cyclically since late 2017, culminating in the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom uprising, sparked by the death of Mahsa (Jina) Amini.

“The core grievances remain the same,” Dagres said. “And because they’ve not been addressed… this is why we’ve been seeing this explicit call for the ouster of the Islamic Republic.”

A key question, however, is whether security forces will defect. “Defection means different things,” she said. It might mean not showing up to work, feigning illness, or pretending to fire a weapon. Public defections may be limited, but she suspects some are occurring quietly. “It’s really too hard to say in this moment,” she said, though reports of diplomats defecting suggest “a moral rupture.”

Iranian Gen Z: “Grass through concrete”

In a TED talk, Dagres once described Iranian Gen Z as grass pushing through cracks in concrete. She stands by the metaphor.

“Iranian Gen Z is part of the globalized Gen Z,” she said. Connected through social media and satellite dishes, young Iranians dress, speak and consume culture like their peers abroad. “It doesn’t matter if you’re in Tehran, Tel Aviv or Washington, D.C.,” she said. “They dress the same. They listen to the same music.”

Illegal satellite dishes beam in Hollywood films and pop concerts. She recounted how, growing up, a girl she knew spoke flawless American English without ever leaving Iran. Young Iranians use English slang, follow global trends and seek “basic things”: jobs, freedom of expression, the ability “to go on dates and kiss their lover in the streets.”

That desire for ordinary freedoms fuels extraordinary risk. “They’re going out in the streets knowing full well they’ll be met with bullets and batons,” she said.

Pro-regime Gen Z does exist, she acknowledged, but its numbers are shrinking. “You can’t keep away young people from their curiosities,” she said. Satellite dishes removed by authorities reappear the next day. “People want access to the world.”

America, Israel and shifting perceptions

For decades, official rhetoric has chanted “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.” But Dagres described a widening gap between state messaging and public sentiment.

“You say the U.S. is our enemy,” she recalled hearing from protesters, “but our enemy is here with us.”

In the early 2000s, many Iranians were proud of the country’s nuclear advances. By 2013, under heavy sanctions, public opinion shifted. Today, she said, many anti-regime Iranians view the nuclear program as having brought “nothing but pain and suffering.”

Attitudes toward the United States remain, in her words, “probably the most pro-American in the Middle East.” She described wearing American-flag leggings in Tehran in 2013 without consequence — a stark contrast to the 1990s, when a relative was arrested for wearing an American-flag T-shirt.

As for Israel, she noted the regime’s antisemitic rhetoric and Holocaust denial. Yet internet access has allowed many Iranians to form independent views. She recalled a social media initiative titled “Iranians love Israel, Israelis love Iranians,” which sought to distinguish people from governments.

“Up until the 12-day war,” she said, “Iranians have become more pro-Israel over the years,” seeing Israel and the United States as the only actors capable of countering the regime. In the first 24 to 48 hours of that conflict, she said, “Iranians were celebrating when top military brass were being taken out.” As the war expanded, the mood grew anxious.

A city she cannot see

Though barred from returning, Dagres speaks of Tehran with affection. Asked what she would do first if allowed back, she did not hesitate: “First, obviously, I would see family.” Beyond that, she longs for simple rituals — walking down Valiasr Street, lined with sycamores; browsing the Grand Bazaar; shopping at Tajrish market.

“It reminds me of Jerusalem’s shuk,” she said. “It really warmed my heart.”

Tehran, she insists, is far more developed than many assume, despite sanctions and isolation. “I just would want to explore and take it all in,” she said. “I think I’d just be in awe that I would be back.”

Behind her during the interview hangs a photograph of her late mother in Iran. “A lot of what I did in Iran was with my mother,” she said quietly.

For now, the country she analyzes remains out of reach. But the generation she describes — the grass pushing through concrete — continues to test the regime’s foundations.

Whether change comes in five years or ten, Dagres believes the line has already been crossed.

Coleman Hughes is one of the most influential young intellectuals in America, a writer, opinion columnist, of course a podcaster with his very popular podcast Conversations with Coleman. He’s been named to Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the media category. If that isn’t enough of a list of accomplishments for you, he’s also a musician and a writer.

Yonit: We have so many things to talk about relating to the United States, to Israel, to a lot of other things. I hope it’s okay if I start with something that has been on our minds for a very long time here on this podcast — the issue of antisemitism in the United States and its spike in recent years, coming from the left and from the right. How do you look at it?

Coleman: Yeah, so I think there’s two separate things that happen at the same time. One is familiar and old and it’s from the right and it’s essentially the same emotional and psychological source from which Nazism came. However, we don’t actually have to spend that much time on that because people, Jews are familiar with it and people in general are familiar with it and the psychological causes of it.

I’ve spent more time thinking about and focusing on antisemitism from the left because people have a tougher time actually understanding where it comes from, why it exists. The result may be the same as antisemitism on the right — namely that people end up focusing all day long on Israel as if it’s the only country in the world when much bigger conflicts just in the past ten years in the same region have gone virtually unnoticed.

But the source of it is not the same. The source of it is this philosophy that you can call intersectionality or critical race theory or wokeness, which a whole generation of people on the left have adopted. It says the way you have to understand the entire world is through the lens of race, gender and sexuality.

When you look at a political situation, the first and last question you ask is, “who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed?” And the way you answer that question is racially.

For them, Jews are white people. And Palestinians are people of color. And that is all they need to know.

Jonathan: That framing answers a question we get from a lot of listeners: why is there not an equivalent storm about Iran?

Coleman: Intersectionality will say, well, that’s people of colour killing other people of colour and therefore it’s all a bit too confusing. And so people just sort of back away from it and don’t say anything.

Jonathan: I also want to ask you about what’s going on on the right. There does seem to be a shift in attitudes toward Israel — and toward Jews — with figures like Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Nick Fuentes gaining visibility. How do you see that?

Coleman: I’ve been watching what’s happening on the right with alarm over the past six months to a year and asking the same questions. Though America has been much better on the antisemitism question historically than Europe has, there has always been an element on the right in America that is antisemitic.

William F. Buckley made a point of marginalizing the antisemitism on the right when he was the standard bearer of the conservative movement. That just shows there was something there to block.

The real question is not why there is antisemitism on the right — that has always existed. The question is why is it bubbling up now?

One idea is that American media used to have guardrails. There were only a few channels through which you could rise in journalism. Those channels were guarded by elites who could decide what was simply too crazy to include.

Those guardrails are now gone. Anyone can start a YouTube channel and broadcast every day and see how the market responds. And what we’re learning is that when you remove guardrails on the right, people gravitate in great numbers toward conspiracy theories and antisemitism — which is the mother of all conspiracy theories.

Yonit: You spoke very forcefully about Israel and Hamas, particularly in your episode Israel, Hamas and the Myth of Moral Equivalence. Has the end of the war changed how you see it?

Coleman: What the end of the war emphasized is just how wrong the other side of this argument was.

Israelis in general want to build a society where people flourish, where people have rights, a democracy — a society much like the ones we enjoy in the West. What Hamas wants to build is an Islamic theocracy of the kind that if you or I were born there, we would probably do everything we could to get to the West.

Genocide has nothing to do with the number of people killed and everything to do with intent. If Israel were committing genocide, it would not matter whether the hostages came home or Hamas disarmed. But the war ended when those goals were at least partially met. That proves what the goals actually were.

Jonathan: Some American public intellectuals, like Ta-Nehisi Coates, compare Israel to Jim Crow America. Are people in the US seeing Israel the way you do — or the way he does?

Coleman: This is another reason why the Israel issue has such purchase on the American left. The American left is deeply influenced by its success in the civil rights movement.

But if you encounter a situation that looks superficially like segregation and Jim Crow but actually isn’t, you’re going to analyze it in the wrong moral terms.

In America, segregation was driven by white supremacist ideology. There was never a popular or organized black political movement seeking to take control of the entire country. There was never a “from the Pacific to the Atlantic, America will be black.”

What Hamas wants is zero-sum. They don’t want a two-state solution. They want the whole thing and they want Jews out or subjugated.

And in the African American struggle, violence against civilians was never considered legitimate. Martin Luther King was vastly more popular than Malcolm X, and peace was central to his message.

Mapping the American civil rights experience onto Israel-Palestine is fundamentally wrong — and people who do it are bound to misfire.