S8 Ep27: The Path Ahead For The Middle East with Laura Rozen

[00:00:00] Life comes in waves.

[00:00:01] Give your skin a rest with Oseaa's newest innovation,

[00:00:05] College and Dream Night Cream,

[00:00:06] the first ever night cream clinically proven

[00:00:09] to reduce the effects of stress on skin.

[00:00:12] College and Dream Night Cream visibly improves lines,

[00:00:15] wrinkles, and signs of fatigue

[00:00:17] so you can wake up with a radiant complexion.

[00:00:19] Take your beauty sleeve to the next level

[00:00:22] with clean vegan skincare from Oseaa.

[00:00:24] Get 10% off your first order site-wide with code DREAM advised.

[00:01:42] Secrets and Spies is a podcast that dives those of the producers and sponsors of this podcast. Laura Rosen, welcome to Secrets and Spies. It's wonderful to have you on the podcast

[00:03:03] and certainly long overdue, I think.

[00:03:05] Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to talk to region. We've seen several skirmishes between the IDF and Hezbollah, repeated attacks by Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, one of

[00:04:21] which killed three U.S. service members in Jordan are being met with airstrikes by the

[00:04:25] U.S. and its coalition partners. including Saudi Arabia with support, reconstruction, and the Saudi condition for that is some sort of international commitment, if not Israeli commitment, to the eventual establishment of a Palestinian state. And so he's been trying to nudge that along. There's still a lot of Israeli, first of all, they still feel incredibly insecure.

[00:05:42] From our vantage point, I'm sitting in Washington.

[00:05:45] Where are you?

[00:05:46] I'm right outside it's not just Netanyahu

[00:07:01] and he's very you know good at aggregating he's a big talker. And I kind of a desk pounder kind of, and I do think that a lot of the Israeli population still, they don't want to hear that Israel's wrapping up. They don't

[00:08:20] feel like the big Hamas guys have been nailed. So, yes, he has some right wing members of this government, you know, has a very thin coalition, some far right members of his coalition who didn't serve much time in the military who are ridiculing any hostage to's, he's genuinely grateful. I think that the Israeli public from what I hear, they're extremely grateful to Biden and maybe, yeah, extremely grateful to Biden. So maybe that wouldn't behoove Netanyahu. Well, that's a perfect segue into my next question. Could not have scripted it better. So Biden's received heavy criticism from progressives and Arab Americans for the administration's

[00:11:03] support of Israel, given the IDF's conduct during the war as Biden, you know, Biden's known Israel all that time and known his readers all that time. And I think his relationship with Israel is really a profound and that, you know, he's known VB for years and gosh, even if there's someone you profoundly disagree with when they've been in your life for 40 years,

[00:12:21] I think I'm not saying that there's a fondness or,

[00:12:24] but I don't think it's,

[00:12:26] I think they can radically disagree with each other you know, we're moving the aircraft carriers to prevent Hezbollah and Iran trying to deter them from getting in the fight and giving them a little space to think out their strategy. I do think that the US also assessed, I've heard this from US officials, that Israel was gonna respond to the Gaza attack, how they were gonna respond no matter what the US said,

[00:13:41] right, they were gonna,

[00:13:42] and so you could either show support to them in public

[00:13:46] and maybe have more leverage with them in private the end of the last year. And Israel wanted another month and now we're into early February. So riots are now the pay really burning thin. And Israel's talking about a few weeks more to, you know, to do Rafa. Biden's basically talking about trying to get a hostage extended pause deal that he said last night.

[00:15:00] He hopes could be extended into something like a ceasefire.

[00:15:03] What are the administrations must have for a ceasefire? the most powerful Iranian proxy, hasn't opened in Northern Front, and its Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah shows little appetite to do so, at least judging from his public statements so far. Netanyahu likewise hasn't ordered the IDF to do anything like, you know, I'd imagine a preemptively striking Hezbollah's forces in Lebanon or like making Iran at Iran's nuclear

[00:16:21] facilities.

[00:16:23] From your reporting and conversations with sources, let's say they got an agreement a few months ago about letting fuel get into Gaza so that the UN can fuel their trucks and sanitation to deliver aid and all that, you know, water sanitation and all that. Israel didn't want to do it.

[00:17:40] They're always saying that Hamas is diverting it.

[00:17:42] I can't let it get the truth from here.

[00:17:45] But just every deal they way, I actually, Trump talked to the game, talk to the game that was not actually looking to

[00:19:00] always escalate into a big war.

[00:19:02] Well, that's a good point you think.

[00:19:03] And I think it runs contrary to the perception

[00:19:07] of many Americans. secretly gathered in Riyadh to discuss ways to involve a revitalized Palestinian Authority and governing post-war Gaza. The Palestinian Authority was famously run out of Gaza by Hamas in 2006. What can you tell us about those efforts? They're openly not secretly now. Saudi Arabia is hosting another such meeting this week now, the Jordanians and the Qataris

[00:20:22] and the Pete, the Palestinian Authority is represented there.

[00:20:27] I apologize if I forget.

[00:20:28] I think Egypt probably as well. truths on the ground, didn't have that kind of strength or presence to hold the area. And what's most interesting about the idea of Operation Ingazza is like they finished with North Gazza and then they sent tens of thousands of reserves home when they started to concentrate on Central and now Southern Gazza. And they didn't have anyone to hold it and they haven't decided who the who is because

[00:21:43] Dethanyahu doesn't like the Palestinian Authority. they're in a position to entertain a discussion about how our governments can help them with that. So I don't know if I'm going to pretend that these people aren't Hamas or, you know, if they get rid of the big Hamas, the sort of name brand Hamas people like

[00:24:23] Stenwar, or they convince them to go somewhere States, some sort of security guarantees, some sort of help with their civilian nuclear

[00:25:40] infrastructure, it seems.

[00:25:41] For Israel's Saudi normalization, Saudi Arabia openly says

[00:25:45] there are two conditions for that are an end to the war derailed or delayed, we're not sure yet. Part of that, you mentioned US support for Saudi Arabia's civilian nuclear program. Some of the discussion before had been about the Saudis wanting to enter into a formalized treaty alliance with the United States. Is that still on the board?, like the Chinese sort of helped broker that thing between Saudi Arabia and Iran. So establishing a treaty alliance with the US is kind of contrary to that. Right. I guess evidently he doesn't think so

[00:28:20] and then he can have all of them.

[00:28:22] And there's more interesting papers recently

[00:28:25] on middle powers like Saudi Arabia, to resettle the Gaza Strip. I'm not saying that people don't say it there, maybe some figures there mean it, but I think I saw an Israeli defense official several weeks ago make a comment like, you know, that would require the Israeli military to occupy it, basically to secure it. They, you know, so I don't think that's really viable. And you saw like, it was actually very tragic

[00:29:41] several weeks ago, there were like 21 Israeli soldiers

[00:29:47] killed when they were basically, Just today, Netanyahu issued an order for the Israeli military to submit a plan for how to evacuate the over 1 million Palestinians, sheltering and living in the Gaza, Egypt, order city Rafa, before Israeli military operations there. So that's the, I mean,

[00:31:01] they had not even done that. And this is a place that to do a lot as a journalist who doesn't, I can't, you know, be a fly on the wall in the calls between the US and Israeli officials. But you read these readouts and you can kind of get a sense when you read the Brazilian of them how to interpret them, how to imitate them. And there was one today between Secretary

[00:32:20] Defense Austin and Israeli Defense Minister DeLa. And Arab world along, right, to help with that part, whatever the foreign situation is. And so if that, and so if, you know, it won't be immediate, it doesn't seem like their sovereignty will be absolute anytime soon. And it seems like there's some US concession to Netanyahu's previous remarks've found this war to be particularly disturbing, and in ways I haven't felt before. Part of it is Hamas's truly breathtaking brutality that started it. Part of it's the scale of devastation and suffering inflicted on ordinary Palestinians that we've covered today. Part of it's the threat of escalation across the region. Part of it's the

[00:35:01] impossibility and ugliness of the surrounding discourse. It is so profoundly different. They don't see what we see. Does that make sense? And when you read something like that from a very great forward, sadder luck person on the Israeli side, not a Netanyahu supporter, and you see that you just don't see the Gaza, they don't see the suffering in Gaza and

[00:36:22] they don't. And whenever there's some horrible incident like some Palestinian journalists also the US administration really getting beaten up over being perceived widely perceived, especially by Arab Americans and young Americans, even not Arab Americans, but from Jewish Americans, as being over somehow feeling more, identifying more with the Israeli suffering or the Palestinian suffering. In terms of your bigger question on where does all of them at least go, gosh,

[00:37:43] I don't know, it really looks, it does feel a little bit like we may be around as the actor, if malevolent, actor in the region, that's still being a big organizing principle for US diplomacy in the region. I was 11 at the time, but we both remember post-9-11 America, well, the freedom fries

[00:39:03] and you're either with kind of trauma that we can imagine the U.S. response, Israelis don't feel in the mood to a few sort of Hollywood scenes, but in general, it seems awfully close to reality. A lot of it scenarios I have been clenched. Yeah, do you have a title for the next for this volume or is it just? So the series is called active measures so part

[00:43:02] one is the first book then this is part two and there's there'll be five Thanks for listening. fit with a custom suit from Indochino from timeless classics to bold statements. You can express your style exactly how you want. Get 10% off any purchase of $3.99 or more at indo CHINO.com with code podcast. Is there anything more satisfying than finding something that perfectly lines up with your taste and checks all the boxes like a suit from Indochino?

[00:45:42] Their suits are made to measureino.com with code podcast. Find your perfect fit with a custom suit from Indochino from timeless classics to bold statements. You can express your style exactly how you want. Get 10% off any purchase of $3.99 or more at anddochino.com with code podcast. Is there anything more

[00:47:06] satisfying than finding something that perfectly lines up with your taste

[00:48:02] purchase of $3.99 or more. That's 10% off with code podcast.

[00:48:05] His karate lessons might not turn him into a black belt.

[00:48:08] And even after band camp, he might not be the greatest

[00:48:11] musician.

[00:48:12] But with the 3% annual percentage yield,

[00:48:14] you can earn on a pen-fed premium online savings account,

[00:48:17] your goal of supporting his dreams.

[00:48:19] Thanks for everything, Mom and Dad.

[00:48:21] We'll always be worth it.

[00:48:22] Apply today at penfed.org slash savings.

[00:48:25] Federally insured by NCAA, $5 minimum to open account.

[00:48:28] To receive any advertised product,