Jonathan Schanzer
Iran’s Multifront War with Israel: The Latest

Jonathan Schanzer | Iran’s Multifront War with Israel: The Latest | 05.28.24

- Hi, everyone, thank you so much for joining us today. Today we are joined by Jonathan Schanzer, who is the Senior Vice President for Research at FDD, where he oversees the work of the organization’s experts and scholars. He is also on the leadership team of FDD Centre on Economic and Financial Power, a project on the use of financial and economic power as a tool of statecraft. Jonathan previously worked as a terrorism finance analyst at the US Department of the Treasury, where he played an integral role in the designation of numerous terrorist financiers.

He has held previous think tank research positions at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the Middle East Forum. Jonathan has written hundreds of articles on the Middle East, along with more than a dozen monographs and chapters for edited volumes. Jonathan has studied Middle Eastern history in four countries. He earned his PhD from King’s College London, where he wrote his dissertation on the US Congress and its efforts to combat terrorism in the 20th century. He speaks Arabic and Hebrew. And with that, I will hand over to Jonathan. Jonathan, whenever you’re ready.

• Okay, thank you, thank you very much. Great to be with everybody today, here to give an update on some of the things that I’m tracking around the Middle East. And it’s certainly been a fairly wild couple of days or perhaps week or so in terms of headlines so I’ll try to unpack everything that’s going on. I think the first thing that we just need to be aware of is the fact that there is an ongoing operation on the part of the Israelis to take the last remaining stronghold of Hamas in the town of Rafah, this is of course, the town that is on the border between Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula and Egypt.

This is the result of Israel’s military actions dating back several months now, from the decision to go into Rafah after the 10/7 attacks, what Israel did is they swept from north to South, started in Gaza City and, and the areas above Jabalia, et cetera, and then swept downward toward Khan Younis and what they essentially did is they drove Hamas into a corner up against the wall, literally up against the Egyptian border. And that’s where four or perhaps five Hamas battalions are left. And they’ve had actually several months now to prepare for the battle that is to come. The challenge of all of this is of course, that it’s not just that Hamas has been pushed to Rafah, but that in fact the Israelis were pushing people displaced by the war to the same place. And so for the last several weeks, we’ve had reports of roughly 1.4 million people that were in Rafah and so we were beginning to hear concerns being voiced by the US government in particular, that Israel needed to be very careful.

But of course, that was not the first warning that Israel had about going into Rafah. We’ve in fact been at a sort of a pause in fighting, if you will, we’ve been at an intersection now with a yellow light for, I would argue, since mid-March. That was the beginning of Ramadan back then. And the US at that point was warning the Israelis that they should not go into Rafah because of the fear of stoking some kind of religious conflict and it was for that reason that the Israelis held off.

Now, there was potentially good reason for that, primarily that we had seen in years past that Ramadan had been a time where there were inflamed tensions, and that actually we saw spillover into the military realm. Hamas has literally launched wars against Israel, 2021, the last major war between Israel and Hamas was sparked in part because of tensions due to Ramadan. So there was, I think a lot of reason for restraint on the part of Israel. But then after Ramadan was over, then we began to hear, more and more about the 1.4 million displaced persons living in tents and makeshift facilities in Rafah. So the Israelis were warned not to take any action after that. Well, then we had the drama of last week, which I think has added to the complexity.

And there you see the ICC arrest warrants that were handed down against Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, as well as Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, the International Criminal Court put them on the same charge sheet as three senior Hamas officials who were charged with all manner of war crimes, basically, anything from murder to rape, terrorism, and then once those charges are levelled, then you see Netanyahu and Gallant in there, and they’re being charged for basically siege warfare. And I think it’s important to understand that this is just not a, that what they’re being charged with, it would be hard to make it stick, but nevertheless, the ICC has released these arrest warrants and that is already putting significant pressure on the Israelis to halt whatever operations they have going on in Rafah.

Then we had the ICJ ruling that came out where the ICJ basically said that the Israelis needed to halt their operations in Rafah because of the heightened fear or concerns about a humanitarian crisis. And then of course, we had over the weekend an incident, which is still under review by the IDF, where it appeared that the Israelis fired on whether it was a Jeep filled with munitions, that’s according to one report, or that they were just simply targeting two senior Hamas officials, one of whom was identified as the chief of staff of the West Bank Qassam brigades, the so-called military wing of Hamas, but regardless, what happened was, is that whatever Israel did in firing at enemy targets, a fire spread and it led to the deaths of three to four dozen individuals in Rafah, thereby provoking questions as to whether Israel willingly, willfully engaged in war crimes.

Of course, we know that the Israelis have been extremely careful up until this point, and the civilian casualty count has been relatively low, lower than we’ve seen from the likes of the US in places like Afghanistan or Iraq over the last decade and a half or two decades. But nevertheless, I think the Israelis are likely going to have to fend off charges at the security council. And there, I think we have really interesting questions as to whether the United States is going to enact a veto, whether the United States is going to be up to the task of defending Israel. We know that the Biden administration has rejected these charges that were brought by the ICC, the ICJ, I think we’ve seen a little bit more ambivalence, of course, I think the, we have to be honest here, I do believe that the United States is responsible in part for what’s been brought against Israel, this idea of siege warfare that’s being charged against Israel, this was actually first raised by our own state Department as they were trying to prevent the Israelis from going in to Rafah.

So this incident is a, I’d say a new twist in all of this, and it’s certainly restricting Israel’s freedom of movement. It was already, as I mentioned, we’ve been at this sort of weird intersection, this yellow light in the war since March. And I think now with the ICC and ICJ involved, it threatens the legitimacy of the IDF, it threatens the legitimacy of Israel and the military operations that it’s waging. Now, I have to just note here that the hypocrisy of all of this is just glaring, it’s obviously very difficult to stomach that first of all, you have war criminals around the world, including, I mean, just notably Xi Jinping, the leader of China, who’s literally involved in a genocide of the Uyghurs in Western China. And he has not had to face justice, and here you have the Israelis responding to a brutal act of terrorism, fighting against a terrorist organisation, Hamas, that is using human shields to its advantage against Israel, we see little to no condemnation of that.

We see no acknowledgement or recognition of the fact that Israel’s fighting Iran on at least six fronts by my count, by way of proxy and the Iranians have gotten away literally with murder, more than a thousand times that. And it’s just truly remarkable that there’s just been no condemnation. And here you have the Israelis fighting what is, by all accounts, a defensive war, a war that they didn’t start, a war that they didn’t want. And you can see them getting condemned by the international system, and of course, we’re seeing now countries also rushing to recognise what they call the state of Palestine as a means of putting additional pressure on the Israelis to halt their war and perhaps to engage in kind of a final settlement in this question of a two-state solution, it does really appear to be rewarding terrorism and punishing a country that is aligned with western countries, that is allied with western countries, including the US that they have to defend themselves in these fora.

So it’s a very frustrating moment for the Israelis watching Israeli press as I do, on a daily basis, you can see that, that the country is seething over this, that they are defiant, that they want to finish the war that they started and they’re, a lot of people are saying that they just simply don’t care. Of course, I think they would care if sanctions were imposed upon Israel, and again, I think a lot of this will come down to the US its position, all of this, the US can wield its veto at the Security council and, and potentially prevent or head off any actions that may be taken to put Israel in further isolation, but this would all depend on the United States deciding to undertake such a measure in an election cycle where I think it’s fair to say that progressives here in the United States are not necessarily in alignment with the President when it comes to support for Israel. So a fraught moment, its lawfare plain and simple. Israel, I think for its part continues to engage in what I would call incremental warfare in Rafah, where they are moving slowly and methodically, but I think we all need to be aware of one thing here.

And that is that as slowly or as methodically as they move, any attack, any engagement by the IDF that leads to casualties, whether it’s one or three dozen, almost doesn’t matter. I think that there are going to be phones that are going to be on video mode for weeks to come, right? Just looking for mistakes that would be made by the Israelis that could be used as evidence in at the ICJ. Now, there is, I think another element to the Rafah operation that I do think needs to be addressed here and that is the potential role of Egypt. Now, for the last several months, I mean, I can actually recall the first time I wrote about this was for Commentary magazine back in late December, the concern about the Egyptians operating tunnels along the border with Rafah.

One could actually make the argument the Israelis made a strategic mistake in their plans to go into Gaza and to defeat Hamas that starting in the north was potentially a strategic mistake. Now I understand why they did it, they were trying to actually prevent the rockets and, and mortars from being fired from northern Gaza into Ashkelon, for example, or other southern communities, the larger southern communities on the Mediterranean coast. The idea was to try to put as much separation between Hamas terrorists that were firing these rockets blindly into Israeli territory. The further south you could push them, the safer those population centres would be. And then they moved further south as the war advanced. One could make the argument that maybe they should have started in the north and the South simultaneously, had they done that, they would’ve been able to squeeze Hamas into a place like Khan Younis while giving the civilian population opportunities to leave that territory.

And then you would’ve had the border with Israel secure, where it abuts Egypt while also securing the southern communities of Israel from the Gaza scrip and the fighting that was going on there. But instead, what’s happened is, as I mentioned, these people, the fighters and, and the civilians have been pushed to the border with Gaza, with Gaza and Egypt and we believe based on reports that we’re hearing that the Egyptians have been operating very large tunnels for a very long period of time. This is obviously disappointing, if you recall, when Abdel Fattah Sisi, the Egyptian strongman, the president of Egypt, when he came to power in 2014, it was after having toppled the Muslim Brotherhood, which was a partner to Hamas, there was no question that more tunnels were open during that time period and that the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt was very much on Hamas’ side.

When Sisi went in, he destroyed a lot of those tunnels. He flooded some of them with sewage water and destroyed a number of them. And that was what we believed happened till roughly around 2018. I don’t know exactly what occurred in 2018, but that was the moment that the tunnels began to operate between Egypt and Gaza in ways that were reminiscent of the Morsi regime, the pre 2014 era. And today, if you talk to some Israelis off the record, former officials, even a handful of current ones, they will quietly note, they’re not saying this publicly, I think there’s been one proclamation at the ICJ about this. But what we’ve now learned is that there are dozens, perhaps even as many as 70 different tunnels that are currently operating under the border. They appear to be operating with a wink and a nod from the Egyptian regime. It appears that the Egyptians may be compensated for keeping these tunnels open, and these tunnels, just to be very clear, they’ve been bringing weapon systems, probably entire, like entire weapon systems, fully built weapon systems like rockets, but other things as well into the Gaza Strip and arming Hamas.

But I think it’s also important to note here that these are also tunnels that were bringing people in and out of the Gaza Strip in the lead up to the 10/7 attacks. In other words, Egypt, one could argue was complicit in the attacks of 10/7, that they allowed these people to leave and to train. I would also note that we have seen reports, in fact, it was the president of Turkey who came out and very openly declared that there were a thousand Hamas fighters that were being treated in Istanbul, in and around the Istanbul area in Turkey. How did they get there? Because when the Israelis have captured injured fighters, they bring them into Israel for interrogation, valuable intelligence has been gleaned, they’ve been getting more and more information about the tunnels, but also about how Hamas has organised itself inside the Gaza Strip, that’s been a crucial part of Israeli intelligence gathering, I doubt very highly that they would’ve allowed for a thousand fighters to be shipped off to Turkey.

My guess is that they escaped via tunnel. And there are a lot of questions I think that this point that the Egyptians need to answer. Now, of course, all of this happens amidst reports over the weekend, very troubling reports that there was an exchange of fire between Israeli troops and Egyptian troops. As we now understand it, the Egyptians on the Egyptian side, an Egyptian soldier opened fire first. The Israelis responded in kind, they ended up killing one Egyptian soldier. Thankfully, at least for right now, the Egyptians and the Israelis are calling this an incident, they’re not calling it an escalation, they’re not talking about what happens next and so that’s actually a positive thing. It means that they’re doing their best to keep a lid on whatever happened. But I do think that it’s safe to say that tensions are higher right now.

The Egyptians took part in that action brought against the Israelis at the ICJ, the Egyptians were party to that. Remember, this is a peace partner with Israel, they get billions of dollars in taxpayer funds from the United States, they get military assistance from the US and they get intelligence cooperation from the Israelis. There’s a lot riding on all of this, and here they are taking Israel to the ICJ and engaging in acts of overt hostility, military confrontation along the border. And they have been howling about the potential for Israel to neutralise those potential tunnels along what’s known as the Philadelphi corridor, that border area between Gaza and Egypt. So we continue to see the Egyptians, they’ve actually been threatening to scuttle the peace agreement if Israel operates in the Rafah area. It appears to me that they are doing whatever they can to forestall Israel’s actions over there, because I think they will find that whatever Israel reveals, and I’m not saying that Israel would cross over into the Egyptian side, but if they’re on the Gaza side of the border and operating underground, and they’re able to identify that there are massive tunnels that are in fact going to Egypt, there is a lot that Egypt will have to account for.

It will come under significant fire here in the United States because there is no member of Congress that is going to want to continue to fund the Egyptians if they know that the Egyptians are working with Hamas. That is just, I mean, already we know that Democrats would like to defund Egypt entirely, you have a whole kind of wing of the Republican party that we would broadly call isolationists that don’t want to be spending American taxpayer dollars elsewhere if it’s money that is going down the toilet. And that’s certainly what it would look like here. So now the question is, and I think it it’s fair to ask where the Biden administration has been pushing the Israelis not to operate in Rafah and the Israelis have been pushing back saying that they have to finish off Hamas, that they need to finish the hard fighting, it would take only about three weeks, and they don’t believe now that something like 950,000 or a million people have been removed from Rafah, the Israelis are saying that the human, the risks of a major humanitarian disaster are far lower.

And we’re still seeing some ambivalence from the Biden administration. And the question I think that we have to answer is why, and maybe just maybe they’re concerned because the Egyptians would be exposed that the Camp David Accords would be imperilled by the revelation of these tunnels, by the revelation of some kind of collaboration that has taken place between Hamas and Egypt. Now, I do think that there are some questions that we need to ask ourselves here about exactly why the Egyptians have been motivated to do this. Was it ideological or was it financial? Or maybe was it a bit of both? I don’t know how to answer this because number one, we’ve not yet seen these tunnels, we believe that they’re there. And again, I think it’s important to note, we always probably believe that there were going to be, I don’t know, a handful of tunnels because it’s impossible for the Egyptians to get all of them with Sinai Bedouin and others constantly looking to make connections between these two territories for the purposes of lucrative smuggling.

But I do think there is an open question here about whether there was foreign money involved. The Egyptians have been in bad shape economically speaking, financially speaking for quite some time. And I think there is some, there are some questions then about, was it like Iranian money, was it Qatari money? Was it Hamas itself, or was it just the Sinai Bedouin? And then of course, there’s a question of who in the military, the Egyptian military is responsible for some of this, how far up did it go? All of these things we just don’t know how to answer right now. But I think there is some potential high drama looming beneath the sands of the Philadelphi corridor of that area between the Gaza Strip in Egypt, and I would say that that’s been a very under-reported component of this conflict. And again, I think, we did see that the representatives of the Israelis did talk about this among other things at the ICJ hearing. And that is, again, that’s another thing that’s looming, the Egyptians are part of it, and we believe that that will probably come to a head sooner than later as a result of the incident in which those three dozen or more Gazans were killed in what the Israelis are now calling a tragic incident.

They have not yet said that it was a mistake, but I guess we’ll find out about that soon. So that’s on the Rafah and Egypt side of things. Now that, in terms of other things that we’re watching right now, I think it’s safe to say that we are, all eyes are on Iran and for lots of reasons. But of course we know that, roughly six weeks ago, the Iranians suffered a significant loss, the Israelis took out one of the IRGC’s top generals in a building that was adjacent, it’s not, was not part of the diplomatic compound, it was adjacent to the diplomatic compound of the Government of Iran, the Islamic Republic of Iran in Damascus. And so the Israelis took out a senior IRGC figure who had been part of the planning and operationalizing of this multi-front war that the regime has been waging against Israel since, basically since October 7th or October 8th, depending on how you count it.

So the Israelis had probably what was then their kind of highest ranking kill in an unattributed attack while the Iranians, as we know, did not take to that lightly, and after a few weeks of sabre rattling, they fired some 300 missiles and drones at Israel. And as we all know, by now, 10 of those were intercepted, most of them by Israel, some by the United States, some by the Brits who scrambled jets out of Cyprus and then there were a handful that were also shot down by both Jordan and Egypt, it was a, it was, I have to say it was an important moment in the US led alliance, the defensive architecture appeared to be quite sound. The offensive side of things, however, has been decidedly not impressive. I mean, the US has not engaged significantly, not forced Iran to pay a price. And I think that is a significant reason why the, the fighting continues, those proxy battles continue. The Houthis, the Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas itself, of course, none of them have had to pay a price for wreaking havoc, whether it’s in the Red Sea, where shipping has been shut down or whether it is attacking US servicemen, as we’ve seen from the Shiite militias in Iraq and to, I guess to some extent the Syrians as well, none of this, has elicited a US response that is significant.

The Israelis did, I think, send an important message in the aftermath of that April 13th, 14th onslaught as a way of showing the Iranians that the Israelis had the kind of capabilities that the Islamic Republic should fear. The Israelis fired, what is now being broadly described as a glide bomb or a spice bomb, a standoff weapon, something that was fired from far away, probably out of Syria. And it struck a radar system in Isfahan in Iran. This is an area that’s important primarily because it’s an area where there’s a lot of nuclear programme development going on, and the Israelis were literally able to fire that weapon under the radar, in other words, the S300 or S400 systems that the Iranians operate in that area, they were not able to pick up a signature on that weapon, and so the Israelis were able to show the Iranians that they could hit things of value, and they were very explicit about where they were able to do this. And so there’s, I think a sense among the Russians and the Iranians right now, they’re probably still scrambling more than a month later to figure out what exactly hit them and how they can prevent that from happening again.

And so the Israelis were able to establish perhaps a modicum of deterrence. We’ve not seen the Iranian regime fire anything else at Israel since then, directly from the country. The problem of course, is that we continue to see that proxy war that is being waged against Israel. And I must say that when we look again back at what’s going on with the ICJ and the ICC, this idea that Israel would be excoriated and hauled before the court, when we know that the Iranians have been using their proxies, using these terrorists groups that they have funded and armed and trained over the last two decades, three decades, it’s astounding that they have yet to be held to account, it’s astounding that the US has not done much to counter any of this, there does not appear to be any price that the regime truly has had to pay since this all began. And the Israelis, for their part, I mean, I think they’ve been making it clear that they want to take the fight to the regime and to all of its proxies, and they’re being restrained by the Biden administration.

The Biden administration does not want to see a wider war break out, not during an election season, maybe not ever for that matter, but I think electoral politics is playing a significant role here. The last thing that this administration wants is for a bigger war to break out with six months left until the election, especially if the Israelis are still relying on the US for support. And of course, the US has actually threatened to withhold weapons, my understanding is that much of that is kind of empty threats, but there have been at least one or two different shipments that have been slowed up or even halted as a result of at least a partial policy enacted by the US. I think they’re not fully committed to it there at the White House, but they are certainly still trying to figure out how to restrain the Israelis from widening the war, even though the war is being widened anyway. And I think this is really the point that needs to be taken home here, is that the Iranian regime has already started a multi-front conflict.

The only reason why it has not widened significantly further is A, the US is holding Israel back restraining Israel, and this is an unfortunate trend we see now across both the Biden and the Obama administrations, this idea of appeasing enemies and restraining friends, this is not going to bode well I think if the goal is to try to establish some deterrence with the Iranian regime, we’re just simply not seeing it. And so we can see that the Houthis are not deterred, they continue to wreak havoc in the Red Sea. Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria continue to engage, Hezbollah, I mean, has fired something, more than 4,000 different rockets and drones into Israel since October 8th, the day after this crisis began. And there just does not seem to be an answer from the US and it doesn’t seem that there is an answer, in terms of a coordinated response, not from Europe, not from the international system, it raises questions about how viable this system is.

The US led regional order and the international order, as we would call it, all of these things appear to be brittle and fraying as they take the side of Israel’s enemies, but I would argue also the enemies of the West. Don’t forget, of course, that the Iranians are not acting alone, they’re working with help from the Chinese and the Russians. This so-called Axis is one that is strengthening right now while the US continues to restrain the Israelis and fail to really galvanise regional support, you’ve got potential actors that could be fighting back against some of these Iranian proxies, right? Whether it’s the Jordanians, the Egyptians, certainly the Emiratis, the Bahrainis, the Saudis, there are a whole bunch of countries out there that are ideologically, geopolitically opposed to the regime in Iran and we’ve just not seen the US use its political clout, its diplomatic clout to galvanise them.

Now, there was a moment not too long ago, just a few days ago, about a week ago now, that it appeared that maybe the tide might have turned either from a stroke of luck or from some kind of operation that has yet been claimed by any actor. And here I’m referring to that helicopter crash on the part of the Iranian government, we saw the President Ibrahim Raisi and his foreign minister both go down in that crash, neither one survived. I tend to believe that there’s no such thing as a coincidence in the Middle East, although I have no proof whatsoever that it was the Israelis or the MEK or I don’t know, some kind of Iranian dissident group, or maybe it was Azerbaijan, I mean, there’s any number of actors that would’ve wanted to see the president and the foreign minister of Iran killed. I mean, I think we can say that without question, there are many who despise this regime.

But at any rate, what we actually saw is a moment of potential, I don’t know, instability or just uncertainty, and the question really was whether the regime would begin to dial back on some of its aggressive activities. I think we can now say that that moment has passed on the sidelines of the state funeral, we saw leaders from Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, PFLP, and the IRGC, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as well as the Kurds force, which is the sort of terrorist sponsoring special forces arm of the IRGC, they all got together on the sidelines of that funeral. And they made it quite public that their multi-front war against Israel will continue. Now, we have seen the replacements that have come in, Mohammad Mokhber, who’s the formerly the, the first Vice President of the Islamic Republic, and someone, by the way, who’s been heavily involved in providing weapons to the Russians in their war against Ukraine, he has ascended to the position of interim president. And we also have Ali Bashiri Khani, who’s the now the new acting foreign minister.

They are just as hard line as those who came before. The regime, I think is certainly not looking at this as a, I don’t know, some kind of a crossroads where they have to decide whether they want to be more tempered or more aggressive, I think it’s very clear at this point that they plan to be more aggressive. Now, the big question in my mind, and here we get to the kind of strategic portion of today’s discussion, there’s the question of what is the regime strategy? We can say that they wanted to use the 10/7 attacks as a spark to animate a lot of their proxies. And I think we can look back and say that was probably successful because we can see that Israel’s fighting Iran and its proxies on six fronts or perhaps more. Then there is the question of what is the proxy strategy? One could argue that we’re seeing what could be the beginning of a war of attrition or perhaps an economic war, or perhaps both.

What I mean by that is that, Israel is continually under fire, we continue to see that various proxies from different places are firing upon Israel, and the idea is to sort of grind the Israelis down over a period of time, it’s demoralising, at least in theory, it would be, of course, when Israel knocks 99.9% or, or whatever the number is right now, it’s 99 point something of the, of the missiles and drones that have come into Israel, the vast, vast majority have been neutralised. And so the Israelis are defiant and they’re saying that the attrition strategy is not working. That said, it’s also important to note that if there’s an economic component to this, it may play in to the attrition strategy. If that is in fact what Iran is going for here, because for every missile that is shot into Israel, or every drone, it costs maybe a thousand dollars or maybe $10,000, those ballistic missiles that were fired from the regime maybe cost more than that.

But every interceptor that the Israelis use is expensive and way more expensive than whatever the regime is spending on their munitions. So for every iron dome battery that is used, it’s somewhere around $50,000 per intercept, that’s a lot of interceptions so far, and it’s unsustainable in the long term. Same goes for the arrow missiles or the David Sling, everybody probably knows here that there, Israel has a three tiered missile defence system, iron dome for the short range stuff, David’s Sling is for the medium range stuff coming out of places like Iraq or Northern Syria or Northern Lebanon. And then there is the Arrow system, which is designed for, the ballistic missiles that come from far away, like from Yemen for example, or from Iran itself. But all of those are expensive.

The Arrow system ones cost, I think somewhere around a million dollars per intercept, which again, that just does not seem feasible in the long term. So there is the potential here for that war of attrition, economic warfare campaign that the Iranians may be running. And we’re not exactly sure what their strategy is, it’s not like they’ve published it up until this point, but it’s certainly something to watch. And then there’s I think what FTD CEO Mark Dubowitz has said on multiple occasions, multiple outlets, and I think it’s worth noting here, and that is that all of this could be a weapon of mass distraction to provide cover for Iran’s weapon of mass destruction that Iran may be using this moment to draw the attention of the international community away from its illicit nuclear programme. This is of course, the programme that we, the collectively in the West, we’ve been trying to prevent now for the last, 15 plus years we had a nuclear deal and that was deemed to be a disaster by many, and then we had Donald Trump leave the deal in 2018, and that was declared to be a disaster by many.

By the way, I think those two are not mutually exclusive. It could have been a disaster to get in and a disaster to get out, we did not strike the right terms in either case. I think we really probably need to be putting more pressure on the regime no matter what the terms were in order to make sure that they agreed not for a short period of time or a period of time that would end with sunsets, we needed to have hard and fast final status, never to ever try again to build a nuclear weapon. That is unfortunately not what’s happening right now. We continue to see advances by Iran in the enrichment of uranium at levels that should not be occurring. And we’re seeing actually some disagreement among world powers, which is deeply troubling right now because you have the US challenging the Europeans.

The Europeans want to have a tough statement come out of the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Association that’s going to be meeting in the coming days that there are Europeans, I think it’s the Germans and the Brits, and maybe even the French too, who want to take a tougher line as it relates to Iran’s nuclear programme, and we have right now, according to reliable and credible reports, we’re hearing that it’s the US that does not want to take action against the regime, doesn’t want to issue tougher statements, doesn’t want to provoke the regime. And again, this now appears to be, from what we can tell anyway, it appears to be related to the politics here in the United States, not wanting to provoke the Iranians into escalation at a time where the US, this administration at any rate, is trying to keep a lid on a regional war.

I happen to think that that war is already underway. I think I’ve made it pretty clear here that Israel’s already fighting on multiple fronts. And so I don’t know if anyone can un-ring that bell, but this does appear to be what the administration is trying to do. I believe that it’s a failed strategy already, it’s a strategy that is not going to succeed because it hasn’t succeeded to this point. We see that there’s a regional war going on, we see the US sustained attacks from Iran and its proxies, we see Israel continuing to fend off these attacks. And again, it’s galling to see the international community come down like a tonne of bricks on the Israelis for what they’re doing in Rafah when Rafah cannot be decoupled from this broader regional war that Iran has waged with its proxies. And you have to see Hamas as a proxy of Iran, just as we see Hezbollah or the Houthis. I know that there is a lot of talk about the Palestinian cause and yes, there, the Hamas is it, part of its appeal is Palestinian nationalism, but what makes Hamas so effective is that it is at the same time that it is embracing Palestinian nationalism, in the way that perhaps someone like Yasser Arafat might have intended that there is a secular, nationalist component to what it does, it is also very much a proxy of the Islamic Republic.

It has been trained and armed and financed, the tunnels have been built with the assistance of the regime, the strategies that are being deployed right now are being deployed with guidance from the IRGC, from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. None of that can be denied here, it’s just really a question of where the international community, where the campus protestors, rather than focusing on the fact that Iran is destabilising and creating mayhem across the region, they are focusing on Israel’s response and really underscoring the sort of nationalist components of all of this and really making the issue about the Palestinian National Project and those that would like to see a future Palestinian state. And of course we are seeing that there are those in the international community, whether it’s the Spaniards, the Norwegians, the Irish, they’re getting behind this right now and supporting a bid for statehood. And again, I think it’s deeply misguided.

My sense is that, if we didn’t see manoeuvres like this and we didn’t see appeasement from the ICJ and the ICC and from and from the United States and beyond, and instead we saw pressure on the Iranians, that’s what would allow this war to stop if they felt that there was actually a price to pay for the chaos that they’ve created, I believe we would be watching the, a very different outcome in this war. But as long as we see appeasement, as long as we see an international community in particular a US and UN that are playing by Iran’s rules, Iran has no reason to stop this war. And that’s the concern, and I do think that, and maybe I’ll end here in just a moment, but I will just say that I think we are at a moment where a strategic vision is needed. And I think it’s something that’s needed from the Israelis and it’s needed from the US and perhaps from other western countries that have expressed their concern. And by the way, we are seeing some countries, the Germans, I think maybe the Brits appear to want to take a tougher line against the Iranians at the IAEA, that’s a good sign.

We’re also seeing that there are countries that want to designate the IRGC as a terrorist group in Europe, that is initiating out of Germany right now. Germany’s been fairly good, not perfect, but they have been a leader within the EU, that’s a post Brexit thing that I think in general we can point to that it’s the Germans taking a lead on, let’s say, on things that are more important to the US and maybe to Israel. The French have been maybe not as strong, but still potential partners here to work with. But we need to see them come together and articulate a strategy for undermining Iran in the Middle East, undermining Iran’s attempts to wage that proxy war and undermining Iran’s attempts to potentially make a dash to a nuclear weapon. This is a crucial moment, folks. I don’t know if I can overstate this, that the regime has been given seven or eight months of just a free hand in the region.

You can see the impact of all of that, it is deleterious, it is negative across the board. You can see the way in which the region is less secure, it’s less stable, trade is being ground down, the economies are definitely getting hit across the region. We’re now at a potential state of war on multiple fronts. We look at Gaza, that’s already underway, we look at tension with the Egyptians, that’s another one you’ve got, we’ve got problems between the Jordanians and the Syrians through, problems relating to drug smuggling and weapon smuggling. And we’ve seen exchanges of fire there, not to mention all of the different proxy battles that Israel is waging, not to mention what’s happening in the Red Sea and the shutting down of trade.

All of these things happening at once, we can go back to one single point of failure and that is the Iranian regime and our inability to threaten them sufficiently to get them to stop doing all of this. This is a multi-front war being waged by Iran against the Israelis, primarily the US secondarily, perhaps the Sunni regimes in the Middle East is a knock on benefit for the regime. Across the board though, we can see that it is the Islamic Republic that is the root of all of this chaos right now. And there needs to be a policy not of kicking the can down the road, not of waiting until after elections are held here, there needs to be an immediate policy that comes together that addresses this in a way that restores some semblance of balance to the Middle East. I’ll end there, I think I’ve got to almost 50 minutes here, which is I think what our target was. It leaves us about 12 minutes for Q&A and I’m very happy to take any questions that folks may have.

• Great, thank you. So the first question is, why have no states, including the US not brought an action against Hamas to either the ICJ or ICC for violating the genocide convention multiple times since October 7th?

• It’s a good question. I think a lot of it actually stems from the fact that the US is not party to these courts. We’re very concerned by the way here in the US about getting hauled before a court. First of all, I mean we have our own legal system which would enable us to investigate our own possible war crimes, the Israelis have that too, by the way, and they’re not interested in handing some other court in some other jurisdiction, the ability to restrain their activities. So the US and Israel are aligned in many ways here and there are, by the way, I’ll just say there are a lot of people here in the US I’ve talked to, former state department lawyers, former CIA lawyers, international law experts who say this is the last thing that we want to have happen where the US would be party to anything that goes on here because we don’t want to be hauled before this court either. So there are ramifications for what happens here in this case that if the Israelis are truly restrained by this, it bodes very poorly for the US the next time we’re involved in a war and, and we could potentially be restrained by this court as well. So there’s reason to not cooperate on the part of the US or other countries that take a dim view of these international fora.

• [Host] Great, thanks, so next question, has the ICJ actually issued the arrest warrants? I understood that the prosecutor has requested warrants, but the ICJ had not issued them yet. Is this incorrect?

• I don’t, I have to say, I’m one of the few people in Washington will tell you that they don’t know something when they don’t know. I know that that was a charge sheet, now I understand there needs to be some kind of an adjudication process that would, I think lead to, perhaps a formal arrest warrant, but I do not know exactly how this works. I have colleagues who are much smarter than me in this regard and I would certainly suggest that you ask folks from, who have an international law background.

• [Host] So the next question, what proportion of the Gazans displaced to Rafah are housed in tents away from any tunnels? In other words, what proportion are not human shields?

• Well, right now we can actually say that the Rafah operation to remove those that were displaced, we are looking at probably somewhere around a million people out of the 1.4. So that’s actually quite good, we’re looking at more than two thirds and apparently it’s still ongoing, the Israelis are making progress, that’s great. They’re being moved primarily to areas along the sandy coastline of Gaza. That is being done for a reason, these are areas like Rimal and Mawasi if you want to take a look at the map to see where they are. But these are the areas that the Israelis would like them to move primarily because the water table doesn’t allow for tunnels to reach these places. In other words, once you start digging in these sandy areas, the potentially would, flood the tunnels and so they just can’t get the same kind of penetration to these places.

So as I understand it, these are the safer places for Gazans to be and it’s where the Israelis are trying to direct traffic, but they may be pushing people further north as well into those population centres that the Israelis did take from Hamas, they removed Hamas from those areas. So talking like Jabalia and Gaza City and Khan Younis, it’s not a problem for those people to return as long as their homes are intact and sound. Of course there’s been a lot of damage in this war and there’s been a lot of talk about that damage, but I think at least for now, the focus needs to be just keeping those innocent Gazans out of the line of fire, clearing out as much of that area as possible so that Israel can finish off what it started and hopefully in my view, do so without intervention from some of these international legal bodies that again, I think really should not have jurisdiction here, but have somehow made themselves a significant part of the narrative in the last week or so.

• [Host] Thanks. If Palestine is recognised as a state, does that not make its inhabitant citizens of said state by definition therefore they cannot be refugees, also they cannot have a right of return.

• That is maybe the upshot of part of this, but I mean, let me just remind folks that, the PLO has already been actually masquerading as a state now for I think the better part of a decade, I want to say it was, I think somewhere around 2013 where they held their first vote at the general assembly to be recognised as a state. So they actually will call themselves the state of Palestine. The problem is that they’ve not been granted full statehood status at the security council, that’s been vetoed multiple times by the United States, and that’s what would make them the 194th country in the UN. So this, with the campaign Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority has been calling this the Palestine 194 campaign. And it’s been going on, like I said, for more than a decade now.

There is no without any full recognition of statehood and I don’t foresee that happening anytime real soon, I think the Palestinians will be, will continue to kind of exploit the narrative from both of the statuses that they have, not being a non-state and being a state. So they’ll go around continuing to call themselves the state of Palestine in some of these smaller fora at the UN and perhaps elsewhere in the international arena, but yet on the other hand say, well, we’re still not officially a state, so therefore we are still refugees and we are still in need of UNRWA services and we still in other words, continue to exploit the narrative of the downtrodden. It’s an interesting thing where they can do both at the same time. This is of course nothing new for the Palestinians.

They’ve exploited the system quite well over the years and the UN has really been a very favourable kind of home court advantage for the Palestinians, for the PLO for several decades running. We could actually argue that it goes back to the 1970s, this dominance that they have at the UN and certainly we’re seeing that playing out now, that the Palestinians are really trying to play on the international sympathy that they are receiving and pushing hard for whatever they can get on the world stage.

• [Host] Thanks, next question, how could Israel not be aware that those tunnels are being built?

• Well, it’s a good question. And those tunnels, I mean look, they had a pretty good sense of what was going on in Gaza. If you recall, during the 2021 war, they talked about the Gaza metro system that they destroyed, but they had no idea the full extent of it, I mean, right now we’re hearing that there’s something like 700 miles of tunnels, this is like a, this is more than the London underground and the New York subway system combined as we understand it. And I was actually speaking with a soldier who fought in northern and Central Gaza over the weekend, and he was actually in some of those tunnels talking about their full kind of apartment complexes below the ground with air conditioning and electricity and, and water and just an amazing amount of work went into these things and the Israelis didn’t have a full idea of the extent of it in Gaza where they had really excellent intelligence.

And I think everyone has always operated under the understanding that there were tunnels in Egypt, but that, I think the belief was that the Sisi regime was doing more to halt them. I don’t think that anyone really had a full understanding of how much the Sisi regime appeared to have turned a blind eye to these tunnels. And that’s a major problem. And I think we’re still, I think, unpacking what is fair to call an intelligence failure on the part of the Israelis. And of course we saw that on full display on 10/7, the failure of imagination by the intelligence community to believe that an attack along the lines of what happened on 10/7, that something like that would even be feasible, and I talked to some Israeli intelligence folks just to ask them questions about what exactly happened and how it collapsed. And they all basically said it wasn’t about a lack of information or a lack of indicators, it was about a lack of belief, a lack of imagination that something like this could happen. And I have a feeling that whatever was missed as it relates to the tunnels in Gaza or the tunnels in the Sinai, that it was also similar.

That it was a refusal to understand or refusal to digest the fact that there was a major problem underway here. And I think the Israelis are going to be wrestling with this for some time to come. I will say that, there have been a number of people who have announced that they were going to leave government service, that they were going to quit as a result of their own failures, I think that’s probably at this point what’s needed because there are many that failed in the system and there is I think a question of whether they should be leaving now or they should be leaving after the war ends. But we’re eight months into this war and I do get a sense that perhaps some fresh blood is needed across the board.

And I say this not because I have any dog in this fight as it relates to one candidate or another in the Israeli system, but I do believe that, the Israeli people I think are a bit hungry for a start. I’m hearing a lot of really positive things about this next generation of war fighter out of the IDF that they’ve performed really miraculously well beyond the expectations of the average Israeli. And I’m also hearing the same thing about those in the intelligence space, that there are a lot of young people with a lot of really exciting initiatives that they can bring to the Israeli system. So it’ll be very interesting to see how that all plays out.

• [Host] Next question, Hamas considers every Israeli as belligerent a member of the IDF. If every Gazan is permeated with the Hamas ideology, should the civilian population not be considered as enemy fighters?

• Look, you could make that argument, and I understand why you would, but the IDF will not, and I think it’s for good reason. The IDF is a professional military and their job is to separate the innocent civilians from hostiles. And for anyone that carries a gun or anyone that’s involved in the military activity in the Gaza Strip, Israel has the right, the obligation to treat them as hostiles, but they cannot go in treating the entire population that way. That’s, and by the way, declaring it would, absolutely, I mean it’s already some of the statements that have been made by Yoav Gallant, the defence minister and or or by Bibi or by others, where they declared that they were going to engage in collective punishment, well that’s actually, those words had been used against them by the court. And so you’ve got to be very careful here in terms of what the Israeli military or the political establishment, what they say publicly, because it will be used against them in a court of law.

• [Host] Great, do we have time for one more question then?

• [Jonathan] Sure.

• [Host] Fine, okay, follow the money. Who is following the funding of money to Palestinian groups in universities and what has been found?

• I’m following them, I’m a former treasury terror finance analyst and you can see some of the work that I’ve published. I’ve gone on television a few times to talk about it and you can find those on Instagram or on X or on YouTube. But I’ve also produced photos and other documentation of people that are adults that are on campus right now that are formerly affiliated with Hamas charities that were shut down in the United States. We can, if we follow the money and you follow the network, you will see that what is happening on campus in the United States is not spontaneous, it’s not organic, it’s being organised by adults from the outside. These are professional organisers. And right now, as I see it, there’s about a hundred days for the universities and for potentially law enforcement and state governments to get their heads on straight in terms of how to deal with this in the fall.

Because when students come back, it’s not student driven, but the students are taking part in it, they want to be part of this, or at least some of them do. Some of them truly believe that they’re engaging in activities to promote social justice. I happen to believe that they are useful idiots for Hamas and their fellow travellers, and I think at some point that will become clear to a lot of people, but for now it is still, I think, slow to register. And so there is a lot of work that needs to be done now in the universities and really across the United States to prevent this chaos from returning in the fall.

• [Host] Thank you very much, Jonathan, enjoy the rest of your day.