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Hello and welcome to Empire. And I'm afraid you just got me again. Anita is busy but is going to be back next week in full fetal. But I am with my old friend Kim Gattus and friend of the show. Kim, welcome. Great to be with you Willie. Kim, we last saw each other in slightly happier circumstances at the Jaipur Literary Festival. Only what a month ago I suppose, about six weeks ago. But a lot has happened in that time. And you are now not quite a refugee but you're in Airbnb displaced from your normal house in Beirut. Do you want to just take us up to speed of what's going on in the very general sense in Lebanon at the moment? It's been an eventful 10 days in Lebanon and in the Middle East, of course. Since the US and Israel launched a renewed war against Iran. A war without any legitimacy, without UN authorization, without congressional approval. Regardless of what we, you, others, millions of Iranians think of the Islamic Republic and of its oppressive regime. This war started, as I said, without any real preparation. And clearly without a proper war plan but also without a plan for the day after. And I know we'll come back to that towards the end of the show. I live in Beirut where I grew up and spent most of my life. And I have a knack for living on front lines or demarcation lines. I grew up very much on a demarcation line in a no man's land between East and West Beirut during the Civil War. On the Green Line. On the Green Line. And I live now very close to what used to be the Green Line in a neighborhood that used to be a bit of a no man's land as well at the time. But is now a lovely, popular neighborhood. But is very close to what is commonly referred to as the Southern suburbs. Which is an area where Hezbollah has a lot of support, where it operates, where it has some of its infrastructure. And I want to explain to listeners what we mean with Southern suburbs. Because, you know, we're not talking about quaint homes with, you know, picket fences and gardens, like in the US or in some parts of the UK. We're talking about the next neighborhood right after my block in essence. In what is a sprawling urban jungle that extends from the center of Beirut to the suburbs. So the suburbs are kind of part of the city. And it's a densely populated area with, you know, high rise buildings. A lot of people, not all of them from the Shia community and not all of them supporters of Hezbollah. But it is the area which is being pointed at by the Israelis as the center of there. Exactly. Yeah. Because it is very much the popular base for Hezbollah. And there was an evacuation order, an area wide evacuation order by the Israeli army. These evacuation orders come via Twitter, X and several hundred thousand people fled. And this is very difficult for people who have nowhere to go, who have children, who may already be hosting families, relatives from South Lebanon, who've already had to evacuate. So the city was jam packed with cars of people trying to find shelter outside of the Southern suburbs. My neighbors and I decided to leave our building as well, because the evacuation notice was simply too big to ignore. Strangely, we feel that we are safe in our neighborhood because it is not where Hezbollah operates. But we can hear it, the building shakes, and we chose to each leave. And you have a dog, Kim. And I have a dog, which is who freaks out when she hears shelling, when she hears drones. But I want to emphasize that we are the privileged ones, because I have the ability to rent an Airbnb. My friends have the ability to go to their relatives' homes outside of Beirut. But there are thousands, if not several hundred thousand people, who are really sleeping on floors of refugee welcome centers or crammed in an apartment of relatives, two or three families in one, and who live in the uncertainty of not knowing whether they can ever go back, and whose homes have already perhaps been destroyed. And in your case, just to clarify, you are now a little bit north of Beirut, near Byblos, in an Airbnb, waiting out the war. I mean, you may be here for a bit. Everybody has to make their own decisions about how they live through this. I happen to need to travel next week to go to the US to teach at a university there. And I have managed to... This was long planned. And I've now managed to rebook flights out, et cetera, to get through some various paperwork I have to do on the way to the US. So I'll be heading back to Beirut over the next few days to begin preparing for this trip. Incredibly enough, the airport is still open. Beirut Airport is used to this kind of stuff, isn't it? We have several motos for our national carrier, Middle East Airlines. In Arabic, people say, شوف الغار منتيارة, which means watch the airstrikes from your airplane. As you fly out, you can watch the southern suburbs being bombed because the airport is, in essence, just south of Beirut adjacent as well to these densely populated southern suburbs. So some people in my neighborhood and my building have chosen to come back home again, because nobody wants to leave home if they can't avoid it. We'd prefer to be in our homes with our community, with our neighbors, sleep in our bed. But like I said, for so many people, this is not an option at the moment. You seem incredibly calm, Kevin, despite everything. I'm amazed that you're looking sort of smart, but you're sort of half a refugee. I'm not a refugee, really. I'm not William. I could easily stay home. It's just the issue of my dog. So it's really not something to even mention when compared to the plight of other people. And like I said, I'm amongst the privilege I can afford to rent a place outside Beirut for as long as I need to. I look calm for two reasons. I try to remain professional as I report and talk and comment about the situation. But also, unfortunately, it's not my first rodeo. It's not my first war, not as a civilian and not as a reporter. And I chose as a young teenager to become a journalist because I had lived through the Lebanese Civil War and because I wanted to feel less helpless. So I wanted to feel that I could do something about it. And my way of doing something about it was to become a journalist and to try to make sense of the chaos for other people. And that has been my life mission, as a journalist and as an author. What I have found incredibly discombobulating is my recent research for my book because the echoes of history with what is happening today are just so strong. Which is what we're going to be talking to you about. Exactly. It has been difficult to write about the last 40 years and watch the next episode unfold in front of my eyes. I have lived through 15 years of civil war that includes an Israeli invasion, a Syrian invasion, Israeli and Syrian occupation and a lot of internal domestic battles and internal sign and Byzantine fighting. I then worked as a reporter and covered assassinations in Lebanon and uprisings in the Iraq war in 2003. I covered the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel war. Then I lived through 2024 war between Israel and Hezbollah again. Before that, we lived through the Beirut port explosion, the financial crisis. And now another war that's 50 years defined by war. I do worry sometimes, despite my clear, as I said, a privilege, my ability to get on a plane and travel and leave if I want to. I could live wherever I want to if I chose to do so. But I chose to stay because I want to tell the story without sounding self-important. A lot of people ask me, are you leaving or are you staying? Oh, you're staying. Oh, okay. So maybe it's okay to stay. Maybe you still believe in this country. And maybe I'm the crazy one to stay, but I still believe in this country and I stay for that. And when I leave, I always make very clear that I'm leaving temporarily because I have an assignment, because I'm going to teach, etc. Oh, Kim, we're a history podcast. It's history in the making, William. It's history in the making, exactly. But we should go back and and take a little historical view of this. First of all, I mean, just very, very briefly, for those who don't know, and it's an important part of the story, Lebanon did not exist until it was created after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and in the aftermath of the First World War. Can you give us just a quick sketch of how Lebanon came to be created and why in a sense, it is so fragile, why these different communities have to live with each other here in the manner they do? Yes, that's a whole different podcast that you should consider putting together about how the modern Middle East came into being. And I'm sure you've covered some of that. After the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, world powers, France, European mostly, France, Great Britain, the United Kingdom carved up the Middle East. Lebanon, which was Mount Lebanon before, became Greater Lebanon, was carved up. Syria was carved up. They were both under French mandate until 1943, 1946 for Syria, I believe, and they became modern entities as we know it. The French chose to carve up Lebanon in such a way that it included different minorities. So they added parts of, in northern Lebanon that were mostly Sunni and in southern Lebanon that included Shia population, which traditionally looked more towards Palestine and in northern Lebanon looked traditionally more towards the Syrian hinterland. And the dominant majority was at the time the Christian Maronites, you know, allies of France. And of course, you have the Druze, as well the Druze community and offshoot of Shia Islam, that is also part of this mosaic. And the idea at the time was that Lebanon, when it became independent, would be neither pro-West nor pro-East. And famously, Lebanese statements said, you know, that does not make a nation. De negation ne font pas une nation. It is not because we are neither this nor that, that we are something. But I really do believe that across the past decades, over time, Lebanon has become a nation. You don't hear anybody today anymore saying we want to be part of Syria or we want to be part of Palestine. Should it still, you know, become Palestine or part of Israel or etc. It is a country where communities still look to the outside for support. The Christians still look to France and Europe and America. The Sunnis look to Saudi Arabia and the Shias look to Iran. Because since 1979 and the Islamic Republic, the Shia community has become beholden to the Islamic Republic through the growth and the birth of Hezbollah. I want to make one more point. I know that very often when these conflicts happen, there is a tendency to talk about whether the region is going to split up again, whether Syria is going to splinter or Iraq is going to break up into three parts or Lebanon is going to be broken up. Oh, Persia indeed now, Iran being split. Yeah. Yeah. Or Cantons. I think we underestimate the sense of nationalism in these countries. We really do. We are not tribes with flags anymore. I don't think so. I think we really are nations. You know, we have our inner divisions and our disputes and our foreign patrons, especially in Lebanon. But over time, the sense of national identity, and I don't think I'm fooling myself, is quite strong. There are external allegiances and we'll get to that because there is a lot of anger today in Lebanon about what Hezbollah has done, which is to drag Lebanon back into this war because they decided to avenge the supreme leader of Iran. Why would you do that? Why would you want to avenge a foreign leader and drag your own country into a war with Israel? When over the last year, Israel has broken the ceasefire that has been in place since November 2024, with 2,000 strikes against Lebanon and hundreds of dead from Hezbollah's ranks and not once did Hezbollah think of avenging any of its own people. Not that we would have wanted that either. We wanted Israel to stop striking Lebanon. But why suddenly avenge the supreme leader of Iran? So that is where foreign allegiances become very problematic. But that is a lesson that other communities have already learned in Lebanon, but we have not seen that yet from the Shia community. So in Lebanon, you have the Christian community, which at some point allied itself with Israel, of course, famously in the 1980s, and collaborated with the Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon in the hope that they could rid the country of Palestinian armed guerrillas. And over time, that lesson was learned as well. With the Sunni community, and particularly we have to point out that the Christian community lost its leader at the time because Bashir Jemayel, who had just been elected president, was assassinated in 1982 in the aftermath of the Israeli invasion. Fast forward 2005, and Rafiq Haireeri, former prime minister of Lebanon, was assassinated as well by Hezbollah, Syria and Iran working together under the Assad regime. And the Sunni community, which still had a bit of a sense of belonging to Syria or looking towards Syria, suddenly rediscovered or discovered its sense of national identity. And so those two communities, the Sunnis and the Christians, have understood that their national allegiance is to Lebanon. And now the Shia community has lost its leader with the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, but we have yet to see a sense of awakening within the majority or a minority of the Shia community to feel that our allegiance is to Lebanon and we should not be avenging foreign leaders or taking orders from foreign countries. Kim, in your book Black Wave, you show how three foreign powers have in a sense impinged on the life of Lebanon, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Iran. Yes. And if I may, Syria. I mean, I don't talk about that much in Black Wave, but in my next book, which is coming out in October. Does it call the best kind of American? Yes, the best kind of American murder, war and America's undoing in the Middle East. An investigation into the murder of an American in Beirut in 1984, Malcolm Kerr, president of the American University of Beirut at the time. And through the arc of that investigation, I also unpack the story of what happened in Lebanon during the 1980s when the U.S.-Iran enmity turned violent in the wake of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon when that invasion clashed, collided with the Iranian Revolution of 1979. And it gave birth to a whole new dynamic and a regional architecture of Iran's proxy militias and its efforts to export its revolution. And in a way, it's a clash between two different visions for the Middle East, Iran's vision and Israel's vision. Let's unpack that slowly in the three elements. Let's look first of all at Israel and go back to the 1982 invasion. Just for those who don't know this history, give us a brief picture of what Israel was doing invading in June 1982. What was it trying to do and what was the effects of that invasion? So, since the late 60s, Lebanon was a base for Palestinian guerrillas led by Yasser Arafat at the time, chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, leader of the movement, armed movement he had founded called Fatah. And after having been expelled from Jordan, they base themselves in Lebanon. And from here, they launched guerrilla attacks against northern Israel, which killed both Israeli civilians and soldiers. There were many retaliations against Lebanon by the Israelis, including commando operations inside Beirut, including, for example, in 1973, famously portrayed in Steven Spielberg's film Munich, where they came after several Palestinian leaders. And one of the commando operation members was Ehud Barak, later prime minister of Israel. So there were these repeated attacks against Lebanon, including the targeting of and destruction of several airplanes on Beirut Airport, Tarmac, and then this commando operation in Beirut. And then an incursion into Lebanon in 1978, where they created a buffer zone. But that still did not protect Israel enough from the launch of Katyusha rockets from southern Lebanon by Palestinian guerrillas. Lebanon was also in the middle of a civil war, with on one side the right wing Christian nationalist faction led by amongst other Bashir Juma'il, a son of Pierre Juma'il, founder of the Falange party, the Kataheb party, modeled after Hitler Youth, with a fascist outlook. And on the other side, on the left, the majority leftist Muslim secular and religious pro-Palestinian factions, who supported the Palestinian and saw in the Palestinians and their weapons a way for the Muslim minority at the time of Lebanon to win this fight with the Christians and take more political power. The Christians allied themselves and started working first with the Syrians, ironically enough, to try to quash the Palestinians. Then they realized that the Syrians had their own ambitions in Lebanon and turned against each other. Then the Christians started working more and more with Israel. And in essence, invited this invasion of Lebanon with Ariel Sharon, the Minister of Defense at the time, who as I detail in my book, slightly misled both his own cabinet and the US government in terms of the expanse of this invasion, which was only meant to go 40 kilometers into Lebanon, which was the range of the Katyusha rockets at the time. Instead, he ended up all the way in Beirut. Culminating in the Sabra and Chatila massacres. Yes, first the siege of Beirut. The Sabra and Chatila massacre was a result of the assassination of Bashir Shrimeyel. It was a revenge action by his militia and the Lebanese forces more precisely to go into the Palestinian camps. So just to keep it sequentially, the Israelis invade, they besiege Beirut, and eventually the Palestinian guerrilla fighters and Adhafat leave into exile. They go to Tunis. And Israel and America feel like, wow, maybe this could work. Maybe this could transform the region. Push the Palestinians out. We've had Bashir Shrimeyel elected in Lebanon. There's been a standoff between military battle, rather, between Syria and the Israelis and the Bekhar Valley of Lebanon, where Syria had positioned anti-aircraft missiles and troops. And Israel won that battle. And so Ariel Sharon's vision of transforming the Middle East was unfolding according to plan. And this is where the echoes of 1982 today are so incredibly alarming, almost, because when the war started in Gaza after the massacre of the 7th of October, Benjamin Netanyahu also said, this is an opportunity to change the Middle East. So this idea of changing the Middle East keeps coming up. And the young Benjamin Netanyahu at that point was in Washington as a spokesman. He was deputy ambassador, and he was called into the State Department with his ambassador, Moshe Arendt, to listen to Secretary George Shultz, you know, remonstrate them about the terrible thing that had just happened, the terrible massacre in Sabra and Shatila, which was what also led to the Marines coming back into Beirut. They had come to oversee the evacuation of the Palestinians, then they left, and then they came back after the massacre because they felt guilty for having allowed this to happen. They did not have a real mission. They were dragged back into Lebanon and became a target for the first time of bombings in the Middle East. So America became a target of bombings in the Middle East for the first time in the wake of this Israeli invasion of 1982, when the Marines and the embassy were bombed in Beirut in 1983. Not just bombed, but it was famously a suicide bombing, one of the very first suicide bombings. One of the very first. Which brings us to the role of Iran. So we've talked, Kim, about the Israeli invasion, Sabra and Shatila and Erdogan. After the break, let's look at Iran and how Iran came to be here too. Hey, this is Michael and Hannah from Goal Hangers, The Rest is Science. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. Cancer drugs aren't developed overnight. They start as ideas in the lab, then move into testing to check their safe and work effectively. In the late 1990s, Cancer Research UK scientists began exploring a bold idea. Could the antibodies that normally trigger allergic reactions be used to treat cancer? The lab results were promising, but allergic reactions carry real risks. After years of work, an early stage trial showed these antibodies could be used safely. And for one person on the trial, their tumor shrank. 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Every book is produced with specially commissioned, beautiful artwork and especially commissioned introduction that puts the story in its context. Folio Society publishes the books we love, from Bronte to Dickens, from Margaret Atwood to Tom Holland. The books can feel like works of art in their own right. They're built around the text, the stories that last in books that are made to last. If a story matters, keep it properly. Find it at foliosociety.com slash The Book Club. That's foliosociety.com slash The Book Club. Welcome back. We're talking to Kim Gattus. We have looked at the formation of Lebanon. We've had a canter through the Israeli invasion of 1982. And we're now going to look at how Iran gets entangled into this mess to Kim. Tell us about the suicide bombing that attacked the American embassy and tell us about Iran's role in that and in Lebanon in general. So Iran traditionally has, as a former Persian empire, has regional ambitions under the Shah, but of course also under the Islamic Republic under the Shah. It was much more benign. It was through political influence, social influence, etc. But in Lebanon during the late 70s already during Lebanon's civil war, Iranian revolutionaries were training with the Palestinians in their camps to work to get the military training necessary to overthrow the Shah. Amongst these revolutionaries training in Lebanon, Iran the gamut from far left to fascist right, to from secular to Islamist. And those Islamists, of course, overcome everything when the Shah leaves and Khomeini returns to Iran. The Islamists take over and hijack the revolution. It becomes the Islamic Republic of Iran. And what I detail in my book Black Wave is how this then also launches the rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia, who were actually allies before and twin pillars of US policy in the region. But Khomeini has grand designs to be a leader beyond the Shah community, beyond Iran's borders. And he wants to lead the community of Muslims around the world. And the way to do that is to export the revolution and also latch on to the Palestinian cause, where Sunnis have in essence failed to deliver the powers like Egypt, Syria have lost more and more territory, the Saudis aren't showing up for battle. And so he decides that he is going to latch on to this cause, make it his own. And in fact, Yasser Arafat is one of the first or the first foreign dignitary to travel to Tehran to celebrate the coming of Khomeini. And he believes it's also his own victory because revolutionaries of Iran trained with him. And he says today Tehran, tomorrow Jerusalem, of course, that's not how it works because Khomeini wants to be the ultimate leader. And he doesn't trust these sort of secular wine drinking, Thai wearing Palestinian revolutionaries. He has a Islamist vision for how this is going to work out. And Kim, the Iranians base themselves in Baalbek. So what happens is first you have these revolutionaries who train here with Fatah, with the Palestinians in various camps around Lebanon in the south and the Bacar, etc. The Palestinian guerrillas leave Lebanon in 1982, in August of 1982. But even before they've left two days, literally two days after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Iran sends a large contingent of Iranian revolutionary guards to Damascus to travel onwards to Lebanon to fight, quote unquote, the Zionist enemy. Because remember, at the same time Iran is involved in a war against Iraq, which has started that war, but the Iranians have just regained territory and they've won a major battle in Khurramshahr. And they feel that the war is over and they can settle for a ceasefire. And so some of them, including Ali Khamenei, who is president of Iran by then or just soon after, decide that this is a great opportunity to expand the revolution and go to Lebanon. And if they can fight Iraq and win against Iraq, surely they can fight and win against Israel. Hafiz al-Assad, secular leader of Syria, not so keen on fundamentalism, but keen on having an ally in his own anti-imperial, anti-American worldview. He's allied with the Soviets, doesn't really want to give jets and tanks to this contingent of 600 or so Iranians who show up here. So they decide to send back most of them and leave a nucleus, a small group of people who begin the training of young Shias in Lebanon. And that forms the birth of Hezbollah. A year later, they have what it takes to wear with all the training, the explosives, we believe most probably with Syrian help, possibly with Soviet acquiescence of or some kind of Soviet assistance, maybe, to blow up the US embassy in Beirut in April of 1983, and then the Marines in October of 1983, and the French, because the goal is now not just to fight Israel, but to expel America from the Middle East. It's certainly anyone that wants to know more about Black Wave Kim's wonderful book. We did two episodes with Kim last year and get this bit more detail. But again, just to counter through it, give us a quick run through Hezbollah's tussle with Israel over the next few years. So initially, Hezbollah is very focused on or what is the beginning of Hezbollah, because the attacks against the US embassy and the Marines are claimed by some shadowy organization called the Islamic Jihad. Hezbollah does not exist yet. And you have to be careful not to confuse it with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which is born in Gaza and which does not reach Lebanon. But the Islamic Jihad organization in Lebanon is the group that claims the Marine and embassy bombings. And by 1984, we'll engage in the kidnapping of Westerners in Lebanon and the killing of various people as well. But the kidnapping of foreigners, which is a very long saga throughout the 80s that is very traumatizing for America, for France, for the UK. And their first sort of focus, as I said, is to expel America, to expel Western influence. And they're not yet that focused on fighting Israel. Because who is fighting Israel at the time? It's the leftists. It's the people who were allied to Palestinians from the Muslim side. So you have a lot of Shias who are from Southern Lebanon, who are part of the Communist Party. You have the Druze, who are part of the socialist progressive party led by Walid Jumblat. You have members of Amal, also a Shia party founded by Imam Musa Sader, the Iranian Lebanese leader who then vanished in Libya. So the battle against the Israelis is still fought by these groups. And there are suicide bombings against Israeli troops in Southern Lebanon, conducted by leftists or Syrian nationalists and including women. So this is a history that's been forgotten. It was not always an Islamist led fundamentalist Shia movement. It was a fight against occupation. It was seen as a national resistance. Over time, Hezbollah decides to take that over and they begin to kill their own. They begin to kill leftist Shias and to push the communists out of this battle so that they can dominate the battle against Israel. And by the end of the 80s, they are the sole ones fighting Israel. And initially with a measure of success, when the Israelis invade again, that they are knocking out tanks and creating quite an effective resistance. Is that right? Absolutely. They become very, very effective, targeted, very disciplined. It's a guerrilla movement. It's listed as a terrorist organization by the State Department by Israel, but it has a lot of national support in Lebanon because Israel still occupies large swathes of Southern Lebanon and it enlists people in its own proxy militia. It occasionally shells Southern Lebanon in retaliation for Hezbollah actions, etc. Kattusha rockets are still flying into northern Israel. And eventually by 2000, Israel decides to unilaterally withdraw from an occupation that has become too costly where hundreds of Israeli soldiers have been killed. And there's no clear sign yet of what is to gain from this. But before we move on to that part of the history, I want to go back to the 1980s because it's really where everybody learned their playbook for what is unfolding today in the Middle East. It is where Israel got a taste for empire, for changing the Middle East. Didn't work then. Let's try it again now. It is where Iran understood that it's a battle of wills with America and Iran has more patience and wherewithal to take casualties. And the cult of martyrdom, yeah. It's not so much about martyrdom. It's really about patience. You know, Hezbollah stops using suicide bombers by the late 80s. They don't want to waste their own men. They start using very well designed targeted roadside bombs, which then become very deadly in Iraq, of course, against the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. But it's about inflicting casualties and waiting the enemy out, the enemy being in Hezbollah's eyes and Iran's eyes America. And indeed, after the US Marine bombing and the US Embassy bombing, Reagan says, you know, first he says, you know, we're not cutting and running. And then he cuts and runs and the Marines leave. And that is the first victory of Iran and Hezbollah against America. And then fast forward to 2000, Israel leaves as well. Another victory, the result of time and patience and continued doggedness and inflicting casualties. And this is where we are today with the current war. And it was very clear to me that America and Israel would most likely fold before Iran and Hezbollah did. And we're seeing now that Trump is already, you know, thinking, well, you know, all prices above 100 and, you know, world economy is in tatters and my chances for, you know, my candidates and the Republicans in the midterms is not looking great. And Israel is starting to ask, well, how does this end? They haven't capitulated. Iran hasn't capitulated. Where does this go? And Iran is there saying, you know, we're ready to fight for a long time. So all of that was learned by all these players in the 80s. The one difference today is that Israel's military superiority is really massive. Kim, just pursue that a minute, because another perhaps another difference is that there is now a very open discussion in Israel of two things. One is undoing the Sykes Pico, in other words, getting rid of the colonial borders and setting the borders as they would wish. And secondly, this idea of a greater Israel, which was an unspoken thing. But as we saw bizarrely last month, the Huckabee, the American ambassador in Israel, saying it was fine, absolutely fine by him. If Israel just absorbs great chunks of the countries around it. Are you worried now that that's something that's going to be facing Lebanon? That we're going to see a settlement activity that we're the same way we've seen in the West Bank, that the Israelis are going to move their civilians up to the Netanyi or wherever they fancy. Are you worried about that? No. Well, what I'm worried about is military occupation of southern Lebanon a few kilometers in, but settlers, no. We already have Israeli settlers trying to move into Syria. We see that we see the beginnings of that, the territories they've seized beyond the buffer zone. Yes. Including raids on cattle and sheep. Yes, we have seen that. I think the geography of Lebanon does not allow for settlers to set up camp just south of Tyre. I mean, they'll be pummeled constantly from everywhere. I just don't think that's realistic. But I also think that, and I may be too optimistic, which is a difficult thing to do amidst this current conflict. But I do foresee something of a diplomatic outcome to all of this. I can't quite tell what the contours are. But Mike Huckabee, the American ambassador to Israel, invokes the Bible when he says, they have the right to all this land. And it doesn't just include Lebanon. It includes chunks of Syria, chunks of Egypt, all the way to the Euphrates. Whatever the Bible says, that's not the world that we live in today. And I understand that in the West Bank and in Gaza, this is becoming a reality almost. And of course, Jordan is deeply concerned about the impact on Jordan. And you could argue that nobody would have imagined the extent of the destruction in Gaza on the morning of the 8th of October, that this is where we would end up. But I would still like to believe that there are also limits to what different countries can get away with. There's no signs at all that Israel has any limits to what it can get with this administration. Trump is going to step in, I think, to wrap this up. And I think Trump is also keen to make sure that Arab countries, including especially Saudi Arabia and the UAE, remain his friends. And I would like to think, but I may be wrong, that these countries, that the Gulf, that Arab countries will also band together to put some limits to what Iran or Israel can get away with. Because Iran is also getting away with a lot at the moment. It is bombing civilian targets and sending drones against civilian targets in Gulf countries in Dubai, in Bahrain, in Qatar. And Israel is in an expansionist mode. It is in a 1948 mindset. What more can we grab to secure our perimeter? And even the Israeli opposition is saying this, it's not just Netanyahu. Yes, absolutely. And I think we all have to work hard to make sure that no one gives a carte blanche and says, well, they're not going to do it. Oops, sorry, they did do it. But I think we also have to remain realistic about what Israel can do beyond its own borders and beyond the West Bank and Gaza, which is already a lot. I think we have to remind people that what is happening in the West Bank is deeply, deeply concerning. Settlement activity and attacks against Palestinian villages and evictions are happening on a daily, daily basis. And nobody's paying attention because we're all busy with the current Israel-U.S.-Iran-Iran war, which is, again, the culmination of these 47 years of U.S.-Israel-Iran-Shadow wars, which took place via proxy during all these years and have now blown up into a very direct confrontation. But I want William to go back to a point about the 80s, because one story that we forget and which I write about in the best kind of American is Israel's efforts to stay friends with Iran during the 80s. Remember, Iran and the Shah were great allies of Israel. Israel had this policy of periphery where it would try to surround itself with non-Arab, non-Muslim neighbors, and it would make its allies with these countries or groups, so the Christians of Lebanon, Turkey, Persia, Ethiopia, etc. And the fall of the Shah in Iran and the coming of the Islamic Republic into being was a real setback for Israel at the time. And it couldn't quite believe that this would last, that Ayatollah Khomeini would rule for much longer. And they maintained contact with the Iranians and they sold them weapons throughout the 1980s, from 1980 until late in the 80s. And that's how America got embroiled in the Iran contraaffair, which was an effort to sell weapons to Iran to make contact with the moderates inside the Iranian regime in the hope that they could take over power. And in exchange for those weapons, these Iranians would put pressure on Hezbollah in Lebanon to release Western hostages. And that's precisely what happened. And so I think America and Israel also need to take responsibility for what they have enabled, right? They made it possible for this playbook to be developed by Iran, whereby decades later Iran can no longer get its proxy militias to take hostages in Lebanon, but it detains Westerners in Iran on false allegations of whatever you want, spying, dissident, whatever you want, and then monetizes them in its exchanges with the West, with America. Going back to Lebanon for a second, Iran has lost Assad and Israel is dead and now Khomeini has gone. Is that whole axis of resistance dead and finished? Or do you think that there's still life in it yet? Very, very weakened, very constrained. It's going to be very difficult for Iran to rebuild this axis the way it was in action over the last four decades. Remember, this was the work of four decades. This axis was not born overnight. It started with Hezbollah in Lebanon. And then because of America's mistakes, it grew in Iraq after 2003 with the fall of Saddam. And then it grew again in Syria, which was very much a partner of Iran in Lebanon to push out America in the 1980s. Then Bashar al-Assad became the junior partner of this venture, whereas Hafiz al-Assad was the senior partner. The senior partner, absolutely. Yeah. Bashar al-Assad was the junior partner and he in essence lost his country to Iranian influence and to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. And Qasem Sulaimani could fly in and out and walk around the battlefields as he wanted. Bashar al-Assad is gone. Nasrallah is gone. Ali Khamenei is gone. Qasem Sulaimani is gone. Hezbollah is very diminished. Iran is diminished and they no longer have a foothold in Syria. The problem we have is that no one is thinking about realistic, tangible, diplomatic initiatives to seize this moment, which has come, unfortunately, through devastating warfare and devastating human toll, to seize this moment to transform the region or to put it on a more positive trajectory. Because Israel is going to war without any diplomatic objectives. And so is America. There are no diplomatic objectives. And the language is extraordinary. I cannot believe that Netanyahu would actually publicly say, I've been dreaming about this war for 40 years. And Trump saying, glorifying and sinking battleships as being better than capturing the sailors and this kind of macho language coming out of Hexad. It's all a nightmare. Is there anything? Who's a former Fox News commentator? Fox News commentator, exactly. But real people are dying everywhere. Real people are dying around you. Iranian civilians are dying. Lebanese civilians are dying. American troops are dying. Israelis are dying. This is a lot of death in just a few weeks across this region. You've spent your career writing about this region from a position both of deep love and deep pain. What do you fear now? And is there anything that gives you hope? I have faith in the Iranian people, in their resilience, in their capacity to take charge of their country despite everything. I really do not want to believe that we are going to replace simply one Khomeini with another Khomeini and even more hardline, Khomeini by all accounts. Exactly. And off we go for another 40 years. I want to believe that Arab countries are going to put their heads together and figure out a way to put a plan in front of President Trump and say, listen, we need to figure out a way out of this that does not involve us going back to war in a year or two or three, because you went to war without a plan and now we have a wounded animal next to us that is going to continue to launch rockets at us, maybe not next month, maybe not in six months, but again in a year. The military has this capacity to talk in great victories and we destroyed the navy and we destroyed ballistic missile capacity. I remember just last year when they said we destroyed Iran's obliterated Iran's nuclear program. Turns out they hadn't obliterated Iran's nuclear program. It really requires some adults in the room to say we need to find diplomatic ways forward. I do think that unfortunately it is also going to involve continued increased pressure on Iran, economic and other. It's still possible in a few weeks, in a few months, that we will see the Iranian people rising again, but it requires them believing that the region has their back. You cannot just leave them to do this on their own. I'm not saying have their back in a military way or send in the cavalry, but just to know that they're not alone. It really requires somebody having a talking to with Benjamin Netanyahu, if at all possible, to say this cannot be the future of this region and the future of your people, to just continually go to war, war, war until victory, which is completely undefined. With all your labels, yeah. In Lebanon, I think we have some decent leadership for once. We have a Lebanese president who has had the courage to say we should just sit down with the Israelis and negotiate something that Israel has wanted, that Hezbollah has always forbidden, that Syria as our overlord previously used to forbid because they wanted to be the masters of Lebanon and they never allowed direct negotiations. Why wouldn't you have direct negotiations? Why aren't the Americans and the Iranians sitting face to face? I think it's frankly ridiculous. They should just sit face to face. You can have mediators in the room, but you should have these conversations openly and discuss what's on the table and come in with maps and your laws. Not sending random sun and laws and property managers. For Lebanon, I think there is an effort now by the president and the Lebanese prime minister to reassert Lebanese sovereignty and to wrestle the decision of peace and war away from Hezbollah and away from Iran. We are tired of being everybody's battleground, Syria's battleground, Iran's battleground, America's battleground, Israel's battleground. We are tired. I'm almost 50. I have known nothing but war in this country except for a small reprieve of the mid-90s to 2004. There must be a better way forward and America must take responsibility for what it has enabled as well with its own mistakes in this region. We are not backwards people who've been fighting for millennia. This is modern history and it is enabled by all these players. Kim Gattus, thank you very, very much indeed. Thanks for having me.
