Welcome to the Quillette Podcast, which is usually hosted on alternate weeks by me, Jonathan Kay, and by Iona Italia. Quillette is where free thought lives. We are an independent, grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

And this week, I’ll be talking about a subject that many of you have spent the last week thinking about—the war between Israel and Iran, which began on June 13 when Israel attacked dozens of Iranian targets with the publicly stated aim of stopping Iran’s nuclear program.

Since then, Iran has retaliated, and there have been casualties on both sides—though the lion’s share of the damage has been suffered by Iran, including the killing of numerous senior ranking members of Iran’s military command structure.

Destroying Iran’s Nuclear Arsenal

Israel faces two major challenges: destroying the Iranian enrichment plant at Fordow and locating and eliminating the country’s stockpile of enriched uranium. For the first, it will need US assistance.

QuilletteBenny Morris

With me to discuss this issue is Jonathan Spyer, a British-Israeli analyst who serves as director of research at the Middle East Forum. As you will hear, Spyer’s expertise is wide-ranging; which is a good thing since it’s difficult to analyse Israel’s bold attacks against Iran without discussing its previous military successes in other regional theatres, including Gaza, Syria, and Lebanon.

In fact, my guest argues that Israeli forces probably wouldn’t have had the free hand to launch their successful attacks against Iran if Israel hadn’t first neutralised, or at least seriously eroded, the capabilities of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Yemen’s Houthis, all of which Iran had once counted on as potential allies during just this kind of confrontation with Israel.

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