Podcasts about Yom Kippur War

In this insightful podcast episode, Iris Rachamimov, a historian of modern European history and a visiting fellow at the Frankl Center at the University of Michigan, discusses her book project that chronicles the history of trans people in Israel from the establishment of the state to the present day. Iris delves into the personal stories of individual trans people, the formation of trans communities, the evolving Hebrew terminology related to gender variance, and the broader societal reactions to trans identities. She highlights the crises of masculinity in Israel, especially during the Yom Kippur War, and its impact on trans people. The episode also touches on the publication of Israel's first trans novel The Cut and the societal changes in the late 1990s and beyond. Iris emphasizes the importance of understanding and accepting diverse identities, advocating for the message of liberation that trans history offers to everyone.

The history of modern Israel is a story of modern miracles. It is the story of a new nation, the ingathering of Jews from all over the world. It is the story of a small impoverished nation focused on agriculture that becomes a tech powerhouse. It is the story of the Israel-Arab conflict. It is the story of a small nation surrounded by enemies that pulled off an unprecedented victory in the 6 Day War, and then almost lost it in the Yom Kippur War. Join us as we look at 77 years of modern miracles. The visual part of the talk and the presentation can be found on our YouTube channel by this link: https://youtu.be/dlbuymIRnRk?si=Aa5hZU5bdHzMiuYR

The history of modern Israel is a story of modern miracles. It is the story of a new nation, the ingathering of Jews from all over the world. It is the story of a small, impoverished nation focused on agriculture that becomes a tech powerhouse. It is the story of the Israel-Arab conflict. It is the story of a small nation surrounded by enemies that pulled off an unprecedented victory in the 6 Day War, and then almost lost it in the Yom Kippur War. Join us as we look at 77 years of modern miracles. The visual part of the talk and the presentation can be found on our YouTube channel by this link: https://youtu.be/dlbuymIRnRk?si=Aa5hZU5bdHzMiuYR

The history of modern Israel is a story of modern miracles. It is the story of a new nation, the ingathering of Jews from all over the world. It is the story of a small impoverished nation focused on agriculture that becomes a tech powerhouse. It is the story of the Israel-Arab conflict. It is the story of a small nation surrounded by enemies that pulled off an unprecedented victory in the 6 Day War, and then almost lost it in the Yom Kippur War. Join us as we look at 77 years of modern miracles. The visual part of the talk and the presentation can be found on our YouTube channel by this link: https://youtu.be/dlbuymIRnRk?si=Aa5hZU5bdHzMiuYR

How has the media distorted Israel's response to the October 7 Hamas attacks? In this powerful conversation from AJC Global Forum 2025, award-winning journalist and former AP correspondent Matti Friedman breaks down the media bias, misinformation, and double standards shaping global coverage of Israel. Moderated by AJC Chief Communications and Strategy Officer Belle Etra Yoeli, this episode explores how skewed narratives have taken hold in the media, in a climate of activist journalism. A must-listen for anyone concerned with truth in journalism, Israel advocacy, and combating disinformation in today's media landscape. Take Action: Take 15 seconds and urge your elected leaders to send a clear, united message: We stand with Israel. Take action now. Resources: Global Forum 2025 session with Matti Friedman:: Watch the full video. Listen – AJC Podcasts: The Forgotten Exodus: Untold stories of Jews who left or were driven from Arab nations and Iran People of the Pod:  Latest Episodes:  John Spencer's Key Takeaways After the 12-Day War: Air Supremacy, Intelligence, and Deterrence Iran's Secret Nuclear Program and What Comes Next in the Iranian Regime vs. Israel War Why Israel Had No Choice: Inside the Defensive Strike That Shook Iran's Nuclear Program Follow People of the Pod on your favorite podcast app, and learn more at AJC.org/PeopleofthePod You can reach us at: peopleofthepod@ajc.org If you've appreciated this episode, please be sure to tell your friends, and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Transcript of the Interview: Manya Brachear Pashman: I've had the privilege of interviewing journalism colleague Matti Friedman: twice on this podcast. In 2022, Matti took listeners behind the scenes of Jerusalem's AP bureau where he had worked between 2006 and 2011 and shared some insight on what happens when news outlets try to oversimplify the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Then in 2023, I got to sit down with Matti in Jerusalem to talk about his latest book on Leonard Cohen and how the 1973 Yom Kippur War was a turning point both for the singer and for Israel.  Earlier this year, Matti came to New York for AJC Global Forum 2025, and sat down with Belle Yoeli, AJC Chief Strategy and Communications Officer. They rehashed some of what we discussed before, but against an entirely different backdrop: post-October 7. For this week's episode, we bring you a portion of that conversation.  Belle Yoeli:   Hi, everyone. Great to see all of you. Thank you so much for being here. Matti, thank you for being here.  Matti Friedman:   Thanks for having me.  Belle Yoeli:   As you can tell by zero empty seats in this room, you have a lot of fans, and unless you want to open with anything, I'm going to jump right in. Okay, great.  So for those of you who don't know, in September 2024 Matti wrote a piece in The Free Press that is a really great foundation for today's discussion. In When We Started to Lie, Matti, you reflect on two pieces that you had written in 2015 about issues of media coverage of Israel during Operation Protective Edge in 2014. And this piece basically talked about the conclusions you drew and how they've evolved since October 7. We're gonna get to those conclusions, but first, I'm hoping you can describe for everyone what were the issues of media coverage of Israel that you first identified based on the experience in 2014? Matti Friedman:   First of all, thanks so much for having me here, and thanks for all of the amazing work that you guys are doing. So it's a real honor for me. I was a reporter for the AP, between 2006 and the very end of 2011, in Jerusalem. I was a reporter and editor. The AP, of course, as you know, is the American news agency. It's the world's largest news organization, according to the AP, according to Reuters, it's Reuters. One of them is probably right, but it's a big deal in the news world.  And I had an inside view inside one of the biggest AP bureaus. In fact, the AP's biggest International Bureau, which was in Jerusalem. So I can try to sketch the problems that I saw as a reporter there. It would take me seven or eight hours, and apparently we only have four or five hours for this lunch, so I have to keep it short. But I would say there are two main problems. We often get very involved. When we talk about problems with coverage of Israel. We get involved with very micro issues like, you call it a settlement. I call it a neighborhood. Rockets, you know, the Nakba, issues of terminology. But in fact, there are two major problems that are much bigger, and because they're bigger, they're often harder to see. One of the things that I noticed at the Bureau was the scale of coverage of Israel. So at the time that I was at the AP, again, between 2006 and the very end of 2011 we had about 40 full time staffers covering Israel. That's print reporters like me, stills photographers, TV crews. Israel, as most of you probably know, is a very small country. As a percentage of the world's surface, Israel is 1/100 of 1% of the surface of the world, and as a percentage of the land mass of the Arab world, Israel is 1/5 of 1%. 0.2%.  And we had 40 people covering it.  And just as a point of comparison, that was dramatically more people than we had at the time covering China. There are about 10 million people today in Israel proper, in China, there are 1.3 billion. We had more people in Israel than we had in China. We had more people in Israel than we had in India, which is another country of about 1.3 billion people. We had more people in Israel than we had in all of the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa. That's 50 something countries. So we had more people in Israel than we had in all of those countries combined. And sometimes I say that to Jews, I say we covered Israel more than we covered China, and people just stare at me blankly, because it's Israel. So of course, that makes perfect sense.  I happen to think Israel is the most important country in the world because I live there. But if the news is meant to be a rational analysis of events on planet Earth, you cannot cover Israel more than you cover the continent of Africa. It just doesn't make any sense. So one of the things that first jumped out at me– actually, that's making me sound smarter than I am. It didn't jump out at me at first. It took a couple of years. And I just started realizing that it was very strange that the world's largest organization had its largest international bureau in the State of Israel, which is a very small country, very small conflict in numeric terms. And yet there was this intense global focus on it that made people think that it was the most important story in the world. And it definitely occupies a place in the American political imagination that is not comparable to any other international conflict.  So that's one part of the problem. That was the scope, the other part was the context. And it took me a while to figure this out, but the coverage of Israel is framed as an Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The conflict is defined in those terms, the Israeli Palestinian conflict, and everyone in this room has heard it discussed in those terms. Sometimes we discuss it in those terms, and that is because the news folks have framed the conflict in those terms. So at the AP bureau in Jerusalem, every single day, we had to write a story that was called, in the jargon of the Bureau, Is-Pals, Israelis, Palestinians. And it was the daily wrap of the Israeli Palestinian conflict. So what Netanyahu said, what Abbas said, rockets, settlers, Hamas, you know, whatever, the problem is that there isn't an Israeli=Palestinian conflict. And I know that sounds crazy, because everyone thinks there is.  And of course, we're seeing conflicts play out in the most tragic way right now in Gaza. But most of Israel's wars have not been fought against Palestinians. Israel has unfortunately fought wars against Egyptians and Jordanians and Lebanese and Iraqis. And Israel's most important enemy at the moment, is Iran, right? The Iranians are not Palestinian. The Iranians are not Arab. They're Muslim, but they're not Arab. So clearly, there is a broader regional conflict that's going on that is not an Israeli Palestinian conflict, and we've seen it in the past year. If we had a satellite in space looking down and just following the paths of ballistic missiles and rockets fired at Israel. Like a photograph of these red trails of rockets fired at Israel. You'd see rockets being fired from Iraq and from Yemen and from Lebanon and from Gaza and from Iran. You'd see the contours of a regional conflict.  And if you understand it's a regional conflict, then you understand the way Israelis see it. There are in the Arab world, 300 million people, almost all of them Muslim. And in one corner of that world, there are 7 million Jews, who are Israelis. And if we zoom out even farther to the level of the Islamic world, we'll see that there are 2 billion people in the Islamic world. There's some argument about the numbers, but it's roughly a quarter of the world's population. And in one corner of that world there, there are 7 million Israeli Jews. The entire Jewish population on planet Earth is a lot smaller than the population of Cairo.  So the idea that this is an Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where Israelis are the stronger side, where Israelis are the dominant actor, and where Israelis are, let's face it, the bad guy in the story, that's a fictional presentation of a story that actually works in a completely different way. So if you take a small story and make it seem big. If you take a complicated regional story and you make it seem like a very small local story involving only Israelis and Palestinians, then you get the highly simplified but very emotive narrative that everyone is being subjected to now. And you get this portrayal of a villainous country called Israel that really looms in the liberal imagination of the West as an embodiment of the worst possible qualities of the age. Belle Yoeli:   Wow. So already you were seeing these issues when you were reporter, earlier on. But like this, some of this was before and since, since productive edge. This is over 10 years ago, and here we are. So October 7 happens. You already know these issues exist. You've identified them. How would you describe because obviously we have a lot of feelings about this, but like, strictly as a journalist, how would you describe the coverage that you've seen since during October 7, in its aftermath? Is it just these issues? Have they? Have they expanded? Are there new issues in play? What's your analysis? Matti Friedman:   The coverage has been great. I really have very I have no criticism of it. I think it's very accurate. I think that I, in a way, I was lucky to have been through what I went through 10 or 15 years ago, and I wasn't blindsided on October 7, as many people were, many people, quite naturally, don't pay close attention to this. And even people who are sympathetic to Israel, I think, were not necessarily convinced that my argument about the press was right. And I think many people thought it was overstated.  And you can read those articles from 2014 one was in tablet and one was in the Atlantic, but it's basically the two chapters of the same argument. And unfortunately, I think that those the essays, they stand up. In fact, if you don't really look at the date of the essays, they kind of seem that they could have been written in the past year and a half. And I'm not happy about that. I think that's and I certainly wrote them in hopes that they would somehow make things better. But the issues that I saw in the press 15 years ago have only been exacerbated since then. And October seven didn't invent the wheel. The issues were pre existing, but it took everything that I saw and kind of supercharged it.  So if I talked about ideological conformity in the bureaus that has been that has become much more extreme. A guy like me, I was hired in 2006 at the AP. I'm an Israeli of center left political leanings. Hiring me was not a problem in 22,006 by the time I left the AP, at the end of 2011 I'm pretty sure someone like me would not have been hired because my views, which are again, very centrist Israeli views, were really beyond the pale by the time that I left the AP, and certainly, and certainly today, the thing has really moved what I saw happening at the AP. And I hate picking on the AP because they were just unfortunate enough to hire me. That was their only error, but what I'm saying about them is true of a whole new. Was heard. It's true of the Times and CNN and the BBC, the news industry really works kind of as a it has a herd mentality. What happened was that news decisions were increasingly being made by people who are not interested in explanatory journalism. They were activists. Activists had moved into the key positions in the Bureau, and they had a very different idea of what press coverage was supposed to do. I would say, and I tried to explain it in that article for the free press, when I approach a news story, when I approach the profession of journalism, the question that I'm asking is, what's going on? That's the question I think you're supposed to ask, what's going on? How can I explain it in a way that's as accurate as as possible? The question that was increasingly being asked was not what's going on. The question was, who does this serve? That's an activist question. So when you look at a story, you don't ask, is it true, or is it not true? You ask, who's it going to help? Is it going to help the good guys, or is it going to help the bad guys?  So if Israel in the story is the villain, then a story that makes Israel seem reasonable, reasonable or rational or sympathetic needs to be played down to the extent possible or made to disappear. And I can give you an example from my own experience.  At the very end of 2008 two reporters in my bureau, people who I know, learned of a very dramatic peace offer that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had made to the Palestinians. So Olmert, who was the prime minister at the time, had made a very far reaching offer that was supposed to see a Palestinian state in all of Gaza, most of the West Bank, with land swaps for territory that Israel was going to retain, and a very far reaching international consortium agreement to run the Old City of Jerusalem. Was a very dramatic. It was so far reaching, I think that Israelis probably wouldn't have supported it. But it was offered to the Palestinian side, and the Palestinians rejected it as insufficient. And two of our reporters knew about this, and they'd seen a map of the offer. And this was obviously a pretty big story for a bureau that had as the thrust of its coverage the peace process.  The two reporters who had the story were ordered to drop it, they were not allowed to cover the story. And there were different explanations. And they didn't, by the way, AP did not publish the story at the time, even though we were the first to have it. Eventually, it kind of came out and in other ways, through other news organizations. But we knew at first. Why were we not allowed to cover it? Because it would have made the Israelis who we were trying to villainize and demonize, it would have made Israel seem like it was trying to solve the conflict on kind of reasonable lines, which, of course, was true at that time. So that story would have upended the thrust of our news coverage. So it had to be made to go away, even though it was true, it would have helped the wrong people. And that question of who does this serve has destroyed, I want to say all, but much, of what used to be mainstream news coverage, and it's not just where Israel is concerned.  You can look at a story like the mental health of President Biden, right. Something's going on with Biden at the end of his term. It's a huge global news story, and the press, by and large, won't touch it, because why? I mean, it's true, right? We're all seeing that it's true, but why can't you touch it? Because it would help the wrong people. It would help the Republicans who in the press are the people who you are not supposed to help.  The origins of COVID, right? We heard one story about that. The true story seems to be a different story. And there are many other examples of stories that are reported because they help the right people, or not reported because they would help the wrong people. And I saw this thinking really come into action in Israel 10 or 15 years ago, and unfortunately, it's really spread to include the whole mainstream press scene and really kill it.  I mean, essentially, anyone interested in trying to get a solid sense of what's going on, we have very few options. There's not a lot, there's not a lot out there. So that's the broader conclusion that I drew from what I thought at the time was just a very small malfunction involving Israel coverage. But Israel coverage ends up being a symptom of something much bigger, as Jews often are the symptom of something much bigger that's going on.  So my problems in the AP bureau 15 years ago were really a kind of maybe a canary in the coal mine, or a whiff of something much bigger that we were all going to see happen, which is the transformation of the important liberal institutions of the west into kind of activist arms of a very radical ideology that has as its goal the transformation of the west into something else. And that's true of the press, and it's true of NGO world, places like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, which were one thing 30 years ago and are something very different today. And it's also true of big parts of the academy. It's true of places like Columbia and places like Harvard, they still have the logo, they still have the name, but they serve a different purpose, and I just happen to be on the ground floor of it as a reporter. Belle Yoeli:   So obviously, this concept of who does this serve, and this activist journalism is deeply concerning, and you actually mentioned a couple other areas, academia, obviously we're in that a lot right now in terms of what's going on campus. So I guess a couple of questions on that. First of all, think about this very practically, tachlis, in the day to day.  I'm a journalist, and I go to write about what's happening in Gaza. What would you say is, if you had to throw out a percentage, are all of them aware of this activist journalist tendency? Or you think it's like, like intentional for many of them, or it's sort of they've been educated that way, and it's their worldview in such a way that they don't even know that they're not reporting the news in a very biased way. Does that make sense? Matti Friedman:   Totally. I think that many people in the journalism world today view their job as not as explaining a complicated situation, but as swaying people toward the correct political conclusion. Journalism is power, and the power has to be wielded in support of justice. Now, justice is very slippery, and, you know, choosing who's in the right is very, very slippery, and that's how journalism gets into a lot of trouble. Instead of just trying to explain what's going on and then leave, you're supposed to leave the politics and the activism to other people. Politics and activism are very important.  But unless everyone can agree on what is going on, it's impossible to choose the kind of act, the kind of activism that would be useful. So when the journalists become activists, then no one can understand what's what's going on, because the story itself is fake, and there are many, many examples of it. But you know, returning to what you asked about, about October 7, and reporting post October 7, you can really see it happen. The massacres of October 7 were very problematic for the ideological strain that now controls a lot of the press, because it's counterintuitive. You're not supposed to sympathize with Israelis.  And yet, there were a few weeks after October 7 when they were forced to because the nature of the atrocities were so heinous that they could not be ignored. So you had the press covering what happened on October 7, but you could feel it. As someone who knows that scene, you could feel there was a lot of discomfort. There was a lot of discomfort. It wasn't their comfort zone, and you knew that within a few weeks, maybe a month, it was gonna snap back at the first opportunity.  When did it snap back? In the story of the Al Ahli hospital strike. If you remember that a few weeks in, there's a massive global story that Israel has rocketed Hospital in Gaza and killed about 500 people and and then you can see the kind of the comfort the comfort zone return, because the story that the press is primed to cover is a story about villainous Israelis victimizing innocent Palestinians, and now, now we're back. Okay. Now Israel's rocketing hospital. The problem was that it hadn't happened, and it was that a lot of stories don't happen, and they're allowed to stand.  But this story was so far from the truth that even the people involved couldn't make it work, and it had to be retracted, but it was basically too late. And then as soon as the Israeli ground offensive got into swing in Gaza, then the story really becomes the same old story, which is a story of Israel victimizing Palestinians for no reason. And you'll never see Hamas militants in uniform in Gaza. You just see dead civilians, and you'll see the aftermath of a rocket strike when the, you know, when an Israeli F16 takes out the launcher, but you will never see the strike. Which is the way it's worked in Gaza since the very end of 2008 which is when the first really bad round of violence in Gaza happens, which is when I'm at the AP.  As far as I know, I was the first staffer to erase information from the story, because we were threatened by Hamas, which happened at the very end of 2008. We had a great reporter in Gaza, a Palestinian who had always been really an excellent reporter. We had a detail in a story. The detail was a crucial one. It was that Hamas fighters were dressed as civilians and were being counted as civilians in the death toll, an important thing to know, that went out in an AP story. The reporter called me a few hours later. It was clear that someone had spoken to him, and he told me, I was on the desk in Jerusalem, so I was kind of writing the story from the main bureau in Jerusalem. And he said, Matti, you have to take that detail out of the story. And it was clear that someone had threatened him. I took the detail out of the story. I suggested to our editors that we note in an Editor's Note that we were now complying with Hamas censorship. I was overruled, and from that point in time, the AP, like all of its sister organizations, collaborates with Hamas censorship in Gaza.  What does that mean? You'll see a lot of dead civilians, and you won't see dead militants. You won't have a clear idea of what the Hamas military strategy is. And this is the kicker, the center of the coverage will be a number, a casualty number, that is provided to the press by something called the Gaza health ministry, which is Hamas. And we've been doing that since 2008, and it's a way of basically settling the story before you get into any other information. Because when you put, you know, when you say 50 Palestinians were killed, and one Israeli on a given day, it doesn't matter what else you say. The numbers kind of tell their own story, and it's a way of settling the story with something that sounds like a concrete statistic. And the statistic is being, you know, given to us by one of the combatant sides. But because the reporters sympathize with that side, they're happy to play along. So since 2008, certainly since 2014 when we had another serious war in Gaza, the press has not been covering Gaza, the press has been essentially an amplifier for one of the most poisonous ideologies on Earth. Hamas has figured out how to make the press amplify its messaging rather than covering Hamas. There are no Western reporters in Gaza. All of the reporters in Gaza are Palestinians, and those people fall into three categories. Some of them identify with Hamas. Some of them are intimidated by Hamas and won't cross Hamas, which makes a lot of sense. I wouldn't want to cross Hamas either. So either. And the third category is people who actually belong to Hamas. That's where the information from Gaza is coming from. And if you're credulous, then of course, you're going to get a story that makes Israel look pretty bad. Belle Yoeli:   So this is very depressing. That's okay. It's very helpful, very depressing. But on that note, I would ask you so whether, because you spoke about this problem in terms, of, of course, the coverage of Israel, but that it's it's also more widespread you talk, you spoke about President Biden in your article, you name other examples of how this sort of activist journalism is affecting everything we read. So what should everyone in this room be reading, truly, from your opinion. This is Matti's opinion. But if you want to you want to get information from our news and not activist journalism, obviously The Free Press, perhaps. But are there other sites or outlets that you think are getting this more down the line, or at least better than some, some better than others?  Matti Friedman:   No, it's just The Free Press. No. I mean, it's a question that I also wrestle with. I haven't given up on everyone, and even in publications that have, I think, largely lost the plot, you'll still find good stuff on occasion. So I try to keep my eye on certain reporters whose name I know. I often ask not just on Israel, but on anything, does this reporter speak the language of the country that they're covering? You'd be shocked at how rare that is for Americans. A lot of the people covering Ukraine have no idea what language they speak in Ukraine, and just as someone who covers Israel, I'm aware of the low level of knowledge that many of the Western reporters have. You'll find really good stuff still in the Atlantic. The Atlantic has managed, against steep odds, to maintain its equilibrium amid all this. The New Yorker, unfortunately, less so, but you'll still see, on occasion, things that are good. And there are certain reporters who are, you know, you can trust. Isabel Kirchner, who writes for The New York Times, is an old colleague of mine from the Jerusalem report. She's excellent, and they're just people who are doing their job. But by and large, you have to be very, very suspicious of absolutely everything that you read and see. And I'm not saying that as someone who I'm not happy to say that, and I certainly don't identify with, you know, the term fake news, as it has been pushed by President Trump.  I think that fake news is, you know, for those guys, is an attempt to avoid scrutiny. They're trying to, you know, neuter the watchdog so that they can get away with whatever they want. I don't think that crowd is interested in good press coverage. Unfortunately, the term fake news sticks because it's true. That's why it has worked. And the press, instead of helping people navigate the blizzard of disinformation that we're all in, they've joined it. People who are confused about what's going on, should be able to open up the New York Times or go to the AP and figure out what's going on, but because, and I saw it happen, instead of covering the circus, the reporters became dancing bears in the circus. So no one can make heads or tails of anything. So we need to be very careful.  Most headlines that are out there are out there to generate outrage, because that's the most predictable generator of clicks, which is the, we're in a click economy. So I actually think that the less time you spend following headlines and daily news, the better off you'll be. Because you can follow the daily news for a year, and by the end of the year, you'll just be deranged. You'll just be crazy and very angry.  If you take that time and use it to read books about, you know, bitten by people who are knowledgeable, or read longer form essays that are, you know, that are obviously less likely to be very simplistic, although not, you know, it's not completely impossible that they will be. I think that's time, that's time better spent. Unfortunately, much of the industry is kind of gone. And we're in an interesting kind of interim moment where it's clear that the old news industry is basically dead and that something new has to happen. And those new things are happening. I mean, The Free Press is part of a new thing that's happening. It's not big enough to really move the needle in a dramatic way yet, but it might be, and I think we all have to hope that new institutions emerge to fill the vacuum.  The old institutions, and I say this with sorrow, and I think that this also might be true of a lot of the academic institutions. They can't be saved. They can't be saved. So if people think that writing an editor, a letter to the editor of the New York Times is going to help. It's not going to help. Sometimes people say, Why don't we just get the top people in the news industry and bring them to Israel and show them the truth? Doesn't help. It's not about knowing or not knowing. They define the profession differently.  So it's not about a lack of information. The institutions have changed, and it's kind of irrevocable at this point, and we need new institutions, and one of them is The Free Press, and it's a great model of what to do when faced with fading institutions. By the way, the greatest model of all time in that regard is Zionism. That's what Zionism is. There's a guy in Vienna in 1890 something, and his moment is incredibly contemporary. There's an amazing biography of Herzl called Herzl by Amos Elon. It's an amazing book. If you haven't read it, you should read it, because his moment in cosmopolitan Vienna sounds exactly like now. It's shockingly current. He's in this friendly city. He's a reporter for the New York Times, basically of the Austro Hungarian empire, and he's assimilated, and he's got a Christmas tree in his house, and his son isn't circumcised, and he thinks everything is basically great. And then the light changes.  He notices that something has changed in Vienna, and the discourse about Jews changes, and like in a Hollywood movie, the light changes. And he doesn't try to he doesn't start a campaign against antisemitism. He doesn't get on social media and kind of rail against unfair coverage. He sits down in a hotel room in Paris and he writes this pamphlet called the Jewish state, and I literally flew from that state yesterday. So there's a Zionist model where you look at a failing world and you think about radical solutions that involve creation. And I think we're there. And I think Herzl's model is a good one at a dark time you need real creativity. Belle Yoeli:   Thank God you found the inspiration there, because I was really, I was really starting to worry. No, in all seriousness, Matti, the saying that these institutions can't be saved. I mean the consequences of this, not just for us as pro-Israel, pro-Jewish advocates, but for our country, for the world, the countries that we come from are tremendous.  And the way we've been dealing with this issue and thinking about how, how can you change hearts and minds of individuals about Israel, about the Jewish people, if everything that they're reading is so damaging and most of what they're reading is so damaging and basically saying there's very little that we can do about that. So I am going to push you to dream big with us. We're an advocacy organization. AJC is an advocacy organization. So if you had unlimited resources, right, if you really wanted to make change in this area, to me, it sounds like you're saying we basically need 15 Free Presses or the new institutions to really take on this way. What would you do? What would you do to try to make it so that news media were more like the old days? Matti Friedman:   Anyone who wants unlimited resources should not go into journalism. I have found that my resources remain limited. I'll give you an answer that is probably not what you're expecting or not what you want here. I think that the fight can't be won. I think that antisemitism can't be defeated. And I think that resources that are poured into it are resources wasted. And of course, I think that people need legal protection, and they need, you know, lawyers who can protect people from discrimination and from defamation. That's very important. But I know that when people are presented with a problem like antisemitism, which is so disturbing and it's really rocking the world of everyone in this room, and certainly, you know, children and grandchildren, you have a problem and you want to address it, right? You have a really bad rash on your arm. You want the rash to go away, and you're willing to do almost anything to make it go away. This has always been with us. It's always been with us.  And you know, we recently celebrated the Seder, and we read in the Seder, in the Haggadah, l'chol dor vador, omdim aleinu l'chaloteinu. Which is, in every generation, they come at us to destroy us. And it's an incredibly depressing worldview. Okay, it's not the way I wanted to see the world when I grew up in Toronto in the 1990s. But in our tradition, we have this idea that this is always gonna be around. And the question is, what do you do? Do you let other people define you? Do you make your identity the fight against the people who hate you? And I think that's a dead end.  This crisis is hitting the Jewish people at a moment when many of us don't know who we are, and I think that's why it's hitting so hard. For my grandfather, who was a standard New York Jew, garment industry, Lower East Side, poor union guy. This would not have shaken him, because he just assumed that this was the world like this. The term Jewish identity was not one he ever heard, because it wasn't an issue or something that had to be taught. So if I had unlimited resources, what I would do is I would make sure that young Jewish people have access to the riches of Jewish civilization, I would, you know, institute a program that would allow any young Jewish person to be fluent in Hebrew by the time they finish college. Why is that so important? Why is that such an amazing key?  Because if you're fluent in Hebrew, you can open a Tanakh, or you can open a prayer book if you want. Or you can watch Fauda or you can get on a plane to Israel and hit on Israeli guys. Hebrew is the key to Jewish life, and if you have it, a whole world will open up. And it's not one that antisemites can interfere with. It does not depend on the goodwill of our neighbors. It's all about us and what we're doing with ourselves. And I think that if you're rooted in Jewish tradition, and I'm not saying becoming religious, I'm just saying, diving into the riches of Jewish tradition, whether it's history or gemara or Israel, or whatever, if you're if you're deep in there enough, then the other stuff doesn't go away, but it becomes less important.  It won't be solved because it can't be solved, but it will fade into the background. And if we make the center of identity the fight against antisemitism, they've won. Why should they be the center of our identity? For a young person who's looking for some way of living or some deep kind of guide to life, the fight against antisemitism is not going to do it, and philanthropy is not going to do it. We come from the wisest and one of the oldest civilizations in the world, and many of us don't know how to open the door to that civilization, and that's in our hands. And if we're not doing it, it's not the fault of the antisemites. It's our own fault. So if I had unlimited resources, which, again, it's not, it's not going to happen unless I make a career change, that's where I would be putting my effort. Internally and not externally.  Belle Yoeli:   You did find the inspiration, though, again, by pushing Jewish identity, and we appreciate that. It's come up a lot in this conversation, this question about how we fight antisemitism, investing in Jewish identity and who we are, and at the same time, what do we do about it? And I think all of you heard Ted in a different context last night, say, we can hold two things, two thoughts at the same time, right? Two things can be true at the same time. And I think for me, what I took out of this, in addition to your excellent insights, is that that's exactly what we have to be doing.  At AJC, we have to be engaging in this advocacy to stand up for the Jewish people and the State of Israel. But that's not the only piece of the puzzle. Of course, we have to be investing in Jewish identity. That's why we bring so many young people to this conference. Of course, we need to be investing in Jewish education. That's not necessarily what AJC is doing, the bulk of our work, but it's a lot of what the Jewish community is doing, and these pieces have to go together. And I want to thank you for raising that up for us, and again, for everything that you said. Thank you all so much for being here. Thank you. Manya Brachear Pashman: If you missed last week's episode, be sure to tune in as John Spencer, Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point, breaks down Israel's high-stakes strike on Iran's nuclear infrastructure and the U.S. decision to enter the fight. 

John Spencer, Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point, joins guest host Casey Kustin, AJC's Chief Impact and Operations Officer, to break down Israel's high-stakes strike on Iran's nuclear infrastructure and the U.S. decision to enter the fight. With Iran's terror proxy network reportedly dismantled and its nuclear program set back by years, Spencer explains how Israel achieved total air superiority, why a wider regional war never materialized, and whether the fragile ceasefire will hold. He also critiques the international media's coverage and warns of the global consequences if Iran's ambitions are left unchecked. Take Action: Take 15 seconds and urge your elected leaders to send a clear, united message: We stand with Israel. Take action now. Resources and Analysis: Israel, Iran, and a Reshaped Middle East: AJC Global Experts on What Comes Next AJC Advocacy Anywhere - U.S. Strikes in Iran and What Comes Next  Iranian Regime's War on America: Four Decades of Targeting U.S. Forces and Citizens AJC Global Forum 2025: John Spencer Breaks Down Israel's War and Media Misinformation Listen – AJC Podcasts: The Forgotten Exodus: Untold stories of Jews who left or were driven from Arab nations and Iran People of the Pod:  Latest Episodes:  Iran's Secret Nuclear Program and What Comes Next in the Iranian Regime vs. Israel War Why Israel Had No Choice: Inside the Defensive Strike That Shook Iran's Nuclear Program Follow People of the Pod on your favorite podcast app, and learn more at AJC.org/PeopleofthePod You can reach us at: peopleofthepod@ajc.org If you've appreciated this episode, please be sure to tell your friends, and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Transcript of the Interview: Casey Kustin:   Hi, I'm Casey Kustin, AJC's Chief Impact and Operations Officer, and I have the pleasure of guest hosting this week's episode. As of the start of this recording on Wednesday, June 25, it's been 13 days since Israel launched precision airstrikes aimed at dismantling the Iranian regime's nuclear infrastructure and degrading its ballistic missile capabilities to help us understand what transpired and where we are now, I'm here with John Spencer, Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, co-director of the Urban Warfare Project and Executive Director of the Urban Warfare Institute.  John, welcome to People of the Pod. John Spencer:   Hey, Casey, it's good to see you again.  Casey Kustin:   Thanks so much for joining us. John, you described Israel's campaign as one of the most sophisticated preemptive strike campaigns in modern history, and certainly the scope and precision was impressive. What specific operational capabilities enabled Israel to dominate the Iranian airspace so completely? John Spencer:   Yeah, that's a great question, and I do believe it basically rewrote the book, much like after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, where Israel did the unthinkable, the United States military conducted 27 different studies, and it fundamentally changed the way we fight warfare. It's called Air-Land Battle. I think similarly with Operation Rising Lion, just the opening campaign rewrote what we would call, you know, Shock and Awe, Joint Forcible Entry, things like that. And the capabilities that enabled it, of course, were years of planning and preparation. Just the deep intelligence infiltration that Israel did before the first round was dropped. The Mossad agents texting the high command of the IRGC to have a meeting, all of them believing the texts. And it was a meeting about Israel. They all coming together. And then Israel blew up that meeting and killed, you know, in the opening 72 hours, killed over 25 senior commanders, nine nuclear scientists, all of that before the first bomb was dropped.  But even in the opening campaign, Israel put up over 200 aircrafts, almost the entire Israeli air force in the sky over Iran, dominating and immediately achieving what we call air supremacy. Again, through years of work, almost like a science fiction story, infiltrating drone parts and short range missiles into Iran, then having agents put those next to air defense radars and ballistic air defense missile systems. So that as soon as this was about to begin, those drones lost low cost drones and short range missiles attacked Iranian air defense capabilities to give the window for all of the Israeli F-35 Eyes that they've improved for the US military since October 7 and other aircraft.  Doing one of the longest operations, seconded only to one other mission that Israel has done in their history, to do this just paralyzing operation in the opening moment, and then they didn't stop. So it was a combination of the infiltration intelligence, the low-tech, like the drones, high-tech, advanced radar, missiles, things like that. And it was all put together and synchronized, right? So this is the really important thing that people kind of miss in military operations, is how hard it is to synchronize every bit of that, right? So the attack on the generals, the attack on the air defenses, all of that synchronized. Hundreds of assets in a matter of minutes, all working together. There's so much chance for error, but this was perfection. Casey Kustin:   So this wasn't just an operational success, it was really strategic dominance, and given that Iran failed to down a single Israeli Aircraft or cause any significant damage to any of Israel's assets. What does that tell us about the effectiveness of Iran's military capabilities, their Russian built air defenses that they have touted for so long? John Spencer:   Absolutely. And some people say, I over emphasize tactics. But of course, there's some famous sayings about this. At the strategic level, Israel, one, demonstrated their military superiority. A small nation going against a Goliath, a David against a Goliath. It penetrated the Iranian myth of invincibility. And I also failed to mention about how Israel, during this opening of the campaign, weakened Iran's ability to respond. So they targeted ballistic missile launchers and ballistic missile storages, so Iran was really weakened Iran's ability to respond. But you're right, this sent a signal around the Middle East that this paper tiger could be, not just hit, it could be dominated. And from the opening moments of the operation until the ceasefire was agreed to, Israel eventually achieved air supremacy and could dominate the skies, like you said, without losing a single aircraft, with his really historic as well. And hit what they wanted with what they wanted, all the military infrastructure, all the senior leaders. I mean, eventually they assigned a new commander of the IRGC, and Israel found that guy, despite him running around in caves and things.  It definitely had a strategic impact on the signal to the world on Israel's capabilities. And this isn't just about aircraft and airstrikes. Israel's complete dominance of Iran and the weakness, like you said. Although Israel also taught the world back when they responded to Iran's attack in April of last year, and in October of last year, is that you probably shouldn't be buying Russian air defense systems like S-300s. But Iran still, that was the backbone of their air defense capabilities, and Israel showed that that's a really bad idea. Casey Kustin:   You mentioned the component of this that was not just about going after infrastructure sites, but targeting Iranian military leadership and over 20 senior military and nuclear figures, according to public reporting. This was really a central part of this campaign as well. How does this kind of decapitation strategy alter the regime's military capability now, both in this immediate short term, but also in the long term, when you take out that kind of leadership? John Spencer:   Yeah, absolutely. I mean, much like when the United States took out Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force, who had been decades of leadership of the Quds Force, the terror proxies, which I'm sure we'll talk about, overseeing those to include the ones in Iraq, killing my soldiers. It had a ripple effect that was, it's hard to measure, but that's decades of relationships and leadership, and people following them. So there is that aspect of all of these. Now we know over 25 senior IRGC and Iranian basically leadership, because they killed a police chief in Tehran and others. Yet that, of course, will ripple across.  It paralyzed the leadership in many ways during the operation, which is the psychological element of this, right? The psychological warfare, to do that on the opening day and then keep it up. That no general could trust, much like Hezbollah, like nobody's volunteering to be the next guy, because Israel finds him and kills him. On the nuclear though, right, which all wars the pursuit of political goals. We can never forget what Israel said the political goals were – to roll back Iran's imminent breakout of a nuclear weapon, which would not only serve to destroy Israel, because that's what they said they wanted to do with it, but it also gives a nuclear umbrella, which is what they want, to their exporting of terrorism, and the Ring of Fire, the proxy networks that have all been defanged thanks to Israel. That's the reason they wanted. So in taking out these scientists.So now it's up to 15 named nuclear scientists. On top of the nuclear infrastructure and all the weaponization components. So it's not just about the three nuclear enrichment sites that we all talked about in the news, you know, Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan. It's about that complete, decades-long architecture of the scientists, the senior scientists at each of the factories and things like that, that does send about, and I know we're in right now, as we're talking, they're debating about how far the program was set back. It holistically sets back that definitely the timeline.  Just like they destroyed the Tehran clock. I'm sure you've heard this, which was the doomsday clock that Iran had in Tehran, which is the countdown to the destruction of Israel. Israel stopped that clock, both literally and figuratively. Could they find another clock and restart it? Absolutely. But for now, that damage to all those personnel sets everything back. Of course, they'll find new commanders. I argue that you can't find those same level of you know, an Oppenheimer or the Kahn guy in Pakistan. Like some of those guys are irreplaceable. Casey Kustin:   So a hallmark of Israeli defense policy has always been that Israel will take care of itself by itself. It never asks the United States to get involved on its behalf. And before President Trump decided to undertake US strikes, there was considerable public discussion, debate as to whether the US should transfer B2s or 30,000 pound bunker busters to Israel. From purely a military perspective, can you help us understand the calculus that would go into why the US would decide to take the action itself, rather than, say, transfer these assets to Israel to take the action? John Spencer:   Sure. It's a complex political question, but actually, from the military perspective, it's very straightforward. The B2 stealth fire fighter, one of our most advanced, only long range bomber that can do this mission right, safely under radar, all this stuff. Nobody else has it. Nobody else has a pilot that could do it. So you couldn't just loan this to Israel, our strongest ally in the Middle East, and let them do the operation. As well as the bomb. This is the only aircraft with the fuselage capable of carrying this side. Even the B-52 stratomaster doesn't have the ability to carry this one, although it can push big things out the back of it. So just from a logistics perspective, it wouldn't work.  And then there's the classification. And there's many issues with, like, the somebody thinking that would have been the easiest, and even if it was possible, there's no way to train an Israeli pilot, all the logistics to it, to do it. The Israel Begin Doctrine about, you know, taking into their own hands like they did in Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007, is still in full effect, and was shown to be literally, a part of Israel's survival is this ability to, look, I understand that allies are important. And I argue strongly that Israel can never go at it alone, and we should never want it to. The strength of any nation is its allies.  And the fact that even during this operation, you saw immense amounts of American military resources pushed into the Middle East to help defend Israel and US bases but Patriot systems on the ground before this operation, THAAD systems on the ground before the system. These are the advanced US army air defense systems that can take down ballistic missiles. You had Jordan knocking down drones. You had the new Assad replacement guy, it's complex, agreeing to shoot things down over their airspace. That is part of Israel's strength, is its allies.  I mean, the fact that you have, you know, all the Arab nations that have been helping and defending Israel is, I think, can't be underscored under Israel doesn't, shouldn't need to go it alone, and it will act. And that's the Begin Doctrine like this case. And I do believe that the United States had the only weapon, the only capability to deliver something that the entire world can get behind, which is nuclear proliferation, not, you know, stopping it.  So we don't want a terror regime like the Islamic regime, for so many different reasons, to have a nuclear weapon close to breakout. So United States, even the G7, the United Nations, all agree, like, you can't have a nuclear weapon. So the United States doing that limited strike and midnight hammer, I think, was more than just about capabilities. It was about leadership in saying, look, Iran's double play that the economic sanctions, or whatever, the JCPOA agreement, like all these things, have failed. Conclusively, not just the IAEA statement that they're 20 years that now they're in violation of enrichment to all the different intelligence sources. It was not working. So this operation was vital to Israel's survival, but also vital for the world and that too, really won in this operation. Casey Kustin:   Vital both in this operation, in the defense of Israel, back in April 2024 when Iran was firing missiles and we saw other countries in the region assist in shooting them down. How vital is Israel's integration into CENTCOM to making that all work? John Spencer:   Oh, I mean, it's life saving. And General Carrillo, the CENTCOM Commander, has visited Israel so much in. The last 20 months, you might as well have an apartment in Tel Aviv. It's vital, because, again, Israel is a small nation that does spend exponential amounts of its GDP in its defense. But Iran, you know this, 90 million much greater resources, just with the ballistic missile program. Why that, and why that was so critical to set that back, could overwhelm Israel's air defense systems. Could. There's so much to this, but that coordination. And from a military to military perspective, and this is where I come and get involved, like I know, it's decades long, it's very strong. It's apolitical on purpose. It's hidden. Most people don't know it, but it's vital to the survival of our greatest ally in the Middle East. So it meets American interest, and, of course, meets Israel's interest. Casey Kustin:   Can you help us understand the Iranian response targeting Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, because this seemed like a very deliberate way for the regime to save face and then de-escalate. But if the ceasefire falls apart, what are the vulnerabilities for us, troops and assets in the region. How well positioned are our bases in Qatar, Al Dhafra in the UAE, our naval assets in Bahrain, our bases in Iraq? How well positioned are we to absorb and deter a real retaliatory response? John Spencer:   Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, first and foremost, you know, there is a bit of active defense. So, of course, all of our US bases are heavily defended. A lot of times, you can see things are about to happen, and you can, just like they did, they moved to naval aircraft that would have been even vulnerable in some of these locations, out to sea, so they can't be touched. Heavily defended. But really, active defense is absolutely important, but really deterrence is the greatest protection. So that has to be demonstrated by the capability, right? So the capability to defend, but also the capability to attack and the willingness to use it.  This is why I think that supposedly symbolic to the 14 bunker busters that the United States dropped during Operation Midnight Hammer. Iran sent 14 missiles. President Trump says, thanks for the heads up. You know, all of it was evacuated, very symbolic, clearly, to save face and they had a parade, I guess, to say they won something. It's ludicrous, but sometimes you can't get inside the heads of irrational actors who are just doing things for their own population.  Our bases, the force protection is heavy. I mean, there's never 100% just like we saw with all the air defenses of Israel, still about 5% or if not less, of the ballistic missiles got through one one drone out of 1000 got through. You can never be 100% but it is the deterrence, and I think that's what people miss in this operation. It set a new doctrine for everyone, for the United States, that we will use force with limited objectives, to send an immense amount of strength.  And when somebody says there's a red line now that you should believe that, like if you would have injured a single American in the Middle East, Iran would have felt immense amount of American power against that, and they were very careful not to so clearly, they're deterred. This also sent a new red line for Israel, like Israel will act just like it did in other cases against even Iran, if they start to rebuild the program. War is the pursuit of political objectives, but you always have to look at the strategic on down. Casey Kustin:   On that last point, do you think we have entered a new phase in Israeli military doctrine, where, instead of sort of a more covert shadow war with Iran, we will now see open confrontation going forward, if necessary? John Spencer:   Well, you always hope that it will not be necessary, but absolutely this event will create, creates a new doctrine. You can see, see almost everything since October 7, and really there were just things that were unconceivable. Having studied and talked to Israeil senior leaders from the beginning of this. Everybody thought, if you attacked Hezbollah, Iran, was going to attack and cause immense amounts of destruction in Israel. Even when Israel started this operation, their estimates of what the damage they would incur was immense. And that it didn't is a miracle, but it's a miracle built in alliances and friendships with the United States and capabilities built in Israel.  Of course, Israel has learned a lot since October 7 that will fundamentally change everything about not just the military doctrine, but also intelligence services and many aspects that are still happening as they're fighting, still to this day in Gaza to achieve the realistic, measurable goal there. Yes, it absolutely has set forth that the old ways of doing things are gone, the you know, having these terror armies, the ring of fire that Israel has defanged, if not for Hamas dismantled and destroyed.  It sets a new complete peace in the Middle East. But also a doctrine of, Israel is adapting. I mean, there's still some elements about the reserve forces, the reigning doctrine, that are evolving based on the magnitude of the war since October 7. But absolutely you're right about they will, which has been the doctrine, but now they've demonstrated the capability to do it to any threat, to include the great, you know, myth of Iran. Casey Kustin:   So when you talk about this defanging of the Iranian proxy network obviously, Israel undertook significant operations against Hezbollah. Over the last year, they've been in active conflict with the Houthis. How does this operation now alter the way that Iran interacts with those proxies and its capacity to wage war against Israel through these proxies? John Spencer:   Yeah, cripples it, right? So Iran's nuclear ambition and its terror campaign are literally in ruins right now, both literally and figuratively. Hezbollah was defanged, the leadership, even taking out Nasrallah was believed to have caused catastrophic consequences, and it didn't. So, absolutely for Iran, also during this operation, is sniffing because all of his proxies were silent. I think the Houthis launched two missiles because thanks to Israel and the United States, the Houthi capabilities that should never have been allowed to amass, you know, this pirate terror empire. They didn't make those greatest shore to sea arsenal out of falafels. It got it straight from Iran, and that pipeline has already been cut off, let alone the capabilities.  Same thing with Hezbollah, which relied heavily on pipelines and infrastructure of missiles and everything being fed to it by Iran. That's been cut. The Assad regime being the drug empire, support of Hezbollah to rule basically, in Lebanon, has been cut. Hezbollah couldn't come to the aid of Assad. All of these variables. And of course, Hamas will never be able to do anything again, period. It all causes Iran to have to rethink everything. From, you know, not only their own national defense, right air defense capabilities and all this, but their terror campaign, it isn't just in ruins. There's a new doctrine, like it's not acceptable.  Now, of course, that's going to be hard to fully reign in. You have Shia backed groups in Iraq, you have a lot of bad things going on, but the Quds Force, which is its job, it's all shattered. Of course, they'll try to rebuild it. But the fact that these terror proxies were already so weakened by Israel that they couldn't do anything and remain silent. Hezbollah just was silent basically during this, is very significant to the peace going forward. I mean, there, there's still a lot of war here, but Israel and the United States have rewritten the map of the Middle East. Casey Kustin:   in the hours days that followed the US deciding to engage here. A lot of the conversation focused on the possibility of triggering now broader regional escalation, but we didn't see that, and it sort of shattered that myth that if Israel or the US were to go after Iran, that it would spiral into a broader Middle East conflict. Why did we not see that happen? Why did this remain so controlled? John Spencer:   So many reasons that really go back a few months, if not years? Mean going back to the first the Abraham Accords, President Trump's recent tour of the Gulf states and his story. Turic financial deals Israel's like we talked about with the Arab nations that were part of protecting it, the fact that the so on, that very geopolitical aspect. And we saw Iran turn to Russia, because there's always geopolitical considerations. Iran turned to Russia. Said, you're going to help us out. We signed this security agreement last year. We've been helping you in Ukraine do the awful things you're doing there.  And Russia said, No, that's not what we said. And it called called President Trump. President Trump says, how about you worry about mediating a ceasefire in Ukraine? And well, so they turned to China and the fact that there was nobody again, and that all the work that had been done with all the people that also disagree, nation states like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, all those others. Those are many of the contributing factors.  But war also, I wrote this piece about, this isn't Iraq, this isn't Afghanistan, this isn't Libya. I really hate the lazy comparisons. This was contained and not able to spill out by constant communication from day one of what the goals were. Limited objective to roll back a threat to the world nuclear program and the ballistic program as well. That prevents the ability for even the Islamic regime to say, you know, my survival is at risk, I need to escalate this, right? So, being clear, having strategic clarity from Israel, and when the United States assisted, from the United States. You know, war is a contest of wills, not just between the military is fighting it, but the political element and the population element. So, you know, being able to communicate to the population in Israel and like, what's the goal here? Like, how long are we gonna have to do this? And to the United States. Like, what are our interests? Keeping it the goal limited, which all parties did.  And even, in fact, you had the G7 meeting during this and they signed an agreement, we agree Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. That is a big part of how you permit the spill out. But it does have many contextual elements of the broader, this isn't black and white between Israel and Iran. It's much bigger than that. And that, and we saw all that work that has been done to show strength through peace, or peace through strength, in all the forms of national power that have been rallied against what is chaos that the Islamic regime wants in the Middle East. Casey Kustin:   So now that we've had a few days to begin to assess the impact of both the US and the Israeli strikes based on what's publicly available. I think you wrote that the nuclear timeline has been pushed back years. We saw some reporting in the New York Times yesterday saying it's only set back months. It seems this morning, the US is concurring with the Israeli assessment that it's been set back years. A lot of talk about where certain Where did certain stockpiles of enriched uranium, and how confident can we be at this point in any of these assessments? John Spencer:   So yes, as we're talking, people are trying to make it political. This should be a non partisan, non political issue. I'm an objective analyst of war. If you just write down all the things that Israel destroyed, validated by satellite imagery. then the fact that somebody And even the spinning of words where like we saw with that leaked report, which was the preliminary thoughts about something, it isn't comprehensive, right?  So one, BDA has never come that fast. Two, we do know, and Iran has validated, like all these scientists dead, all these generals dead, all these components of the nuclear program, damaged or destroyed. The idea that somebody would say, well, you only set it back a couple months to me, it's just anti-intellectual. Look, Natanz, Esfahan, Fordo, we can debate about how much stuff is inside of that mountain that was destroyed, although 14 of the world's best bunker buster munitions, 30,000 pounds punching through.  I just think, it's not a silly argument, because this is very serious. And yes, there could be, you know, hundreds of pounds of enriched uranium up there, a certain percentage that got floated around. That's not the, the things that set the timeline of breakout. Breakout included all the components of the knowledge and capability to reach breakout and then weaponization of a nuclear bomb. There's nobody, I think, who can comprehensively, without nuancing the words say that Israel wasn't very effective, and the United States assistance in only what the United States could do, at setting this program back and actually stopping the immediate danger. Of course, Iran is still a danger. The program is still a danger, but I just think it's so political that they're trying to say that, well, you only said it back a couple months. That's like, that's ridiculous. Casey Kustin:   So as an objective analyst of war, but also as someone who's really been a voice of moral clarity and has called out the international media over the last 18 months for a lot of this disinformation, misinformation, bias reporting. Before we go, John, what is one consequence of this operation that the international media is just missing? John Spencer:   One is that, I think the international media who are debating whether Iran was literally using an opposing opinion against global thought that Iran was close to a nuclear bomb, they missed that completely and tried to politicize it to where, just giving disinformation agents that tidbit of a headline that they need. I do believe in journalistic standards, fact checking, those elements and holding those people accountable. I live in the world of experts. People on the platform X who think they're experts.  But when you have national media running headlines for sensationalism, for clicks, for you know, struggling for opposition to just political administration, we should learn to really question a single report as valid when there's overwhelming opposition. I don't know how to put that succinctly, but you think we would learn over the last, you know, 20 months of this lies, disinformation, statistical warfare, the things like that that, yeah, it's just crazy that that somebody would think in any way this wasn't an overwhelming success for the world, that this program was set back and a new doctrine for treating the program was established. Casey Kustin:   Finally, John, before we wrap up here, the question on everyone's mind: can the ceasefire really hold? John Spencer:   So, you know, I don't do predictions, because I understand wars uncertainty. It's human. It's political. It looks by all signs, because of how Iran was dominated, and how the United States showed that if it isn't contained, then immense amounts of force and of course, Israel's superiority, I believe that the ceasefire will hold. It was normal. And I made some some posts about the historical examples of wars coming to an end, from the Korean War, to the Yom Kippur war, Bosnia War, where you had this transition period where you're rolling back forces and everything. But the by the fact that Iran has said, Yeah, we agreed. We have stopped our operation. All signs for me are saying that this ceasefire will hold, and now the world's in a better place. Casey Kustin:   John, thank you so much for the insight, for, as I said, your moral clarity that you bring to this conversation. We appreciate you joining us today on People of the Pod. John Spencer:   Thank you so much.   

This week we talk about OPEC, the Seven Sisters, and the price of oil.We also discuss fracking, Israel and Iran's ongoing conflict, and energy exports.Recommended Book: Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock by Maud WoolfTranscriptThe global oil market changed substantially in the early 2000s as a pair of innovations—horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing—helped the plateauing US oil and gas market boom, unlocking a bunch of shale oil and gas deposits that were previously either entirely un-utilizable, or too expensive to exploit.This same revolution changed markets elsewhere, too, including places like Western Canada, which also has large shale oil and gas deposits, but the US, and especially the southern US, and even more especially the Permian Basin in Texas, has seen simply staggering boosts to output since those twin-innovations were initially deployed on scale.This has changed all sorts of dynamics, both locally, where these technologies and approaches have been used to tap ever-more fossil fuel sources, and globally, as previous power dynamics related to such resources have been rewired.Case in point, in the second half of the 20th century, OPEC, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, which is a predominantly Middle Eastern oil cartel that was founded by Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela in 1960, was a dominant force in geopolitics, as they collaboratively set global oil prices, and thus, were able to pull the strings connected to elections, war, and economic outcomes in nations around the world.If oil prices suddenly spiked, that could cause an incumbent leader in a country a hemisphere away to lose their next election, and if anyone threatened one of their number, they could conceivably hold back resources from that country until they cooled down.Before OPEC formed and established their position of primacy in global energy exports, the so-called Seven Sisters corporations, which consisted of a bunch of US and European companies that had basically stepped in and took control of global oil rights in the early 20th century, including oil rights across the Middle East, were the loci of power in this space, controlling about 85% of the world's petroleum reserves as of the early 1970s.That same decade, though, a slew of governments that hosted Seven Sisters facilities and reserves nationalized these assets, which in practice made all these reserves and the means of exploiting them the government's property, and in most cases they were then reestablished under new, government-controlled companies, like Saudi Aramco in Saudi Arabia and the National Iranian Oil Company in Iran.In 1973 and 1979, two events in the Middle East—the Yom Kippur War, during which pretty much all of Israel's neighbors launched a surprise attack against Israel, and the Iranian Revolution, when the then-leader of Iran, the Shah, who was liberalizing the country while also being incredibly corrupt, was overthrown by the current government, the militantly Islamist Islamic Republic of Iran—those two events led to significant oil export interruptions that triggered oil shortages globally, because of how dominant this cartel had become.This shortage triggered untold havoc in many nations, especially those that were growing rapidly in the post-WWII, mid-Cold War world, because growth typically requires a whole lot of energy for all the manufacturing, building, traveling around, and for basic, business and individual consumption: keeping the lights on, cooking, and so on.This led to a period of stagflation, and in fact the coining of the term, stagflation, but it also led to a period of heightened efficiency, because nations had to learn how to achieve growth and stability without using so much energy, and it led to a period of all these coming-out-of-stagflation and economic depression nations trying to figure out how to avoid having this happen again.So while OPEC and other oil-rich nations were enjoying a period of relative prosperity, due in part to those elevated energy prices—after the initial downsides of those conflicts and revolutions had calmed, anyway—other parts of the world were making new and more diversified deals, and were looking in their own backyards to try to find more reliable suppliers of energy products.Parts of the US were already major oil producers, if not at the same scale as these Middle Eastern giants in the latter portion of the 20th century, and many non-OPEC producers in the US, alongside those in Norway and Mexico, enjoyed a brief influx of revenue because of those higher oil prices, but they, like those OPEC nations, suffered a downswing when prices stabilized; and during that price collapse, OPEC's influence waned.So in the 1980s, onward, the previous paradigm of higher oil prices led to a surge in production globally, everyone trying to take advantage of those high prices to invest in more development and production assets, and that led to a glut of supply that lowered prices, causing a lot of these newly tapped wells to go under, a lot of cheating by OPEC members, and all of the more established players to make far less per barrel of oil than was previously possible.By 1986, oil prices had dropped by nearly half from their 1970s peak, and though prices spiked again in 1990 in response to Iraq's invasion of fellow OPEC-member Kuwait, that spike only last about nine months, and it was a lot less dramatic than those earlier, 70s-era spikes; though it was still enough to trigger a recession in the US and several other countries, and helped pave the way for investment in those technologies and infrastructure that would eventually lead to the US's shale-oil and gas revolution.What I'd like to talk about today is the precariousness of the global oil and gas market right now, at a moment of significantly heightened tensions, and a renewed shooting conflict, in the Middle East.—As of the day I'm recording this, the Islamic Republic of Iran is still governing Iran, and that's an important point to make as while Israel's official justification for launching a recent series of attacks against Iran's military and nuclear production infrastructure is that they don't want Iran to make a nuclear weapon, it also seems a whole lot like they might be aiming to instigate regime change, as well.Israel and Iran's conflict with each other is long-simmering, and this is arguably just the most recent and extreme salvo in a conflict dating back to at least 2024, but maybe earlier than that, too, all the way back to the late-70s or early 80s, if you string all the previous conflicts together into one deconstructed mega-conflict. If you want to know more about that, listen to last week's episode, where I got deeper into the specifics of their mutual dislike.Today, though, I'd like to focus on an issue that is foundational to pretty much every other geopolitical and economic happening, pretty much always, and that's energy. And more specifically, the availability, accessibility, and price of energy resources like oil and gas.We've reached a point, globally, where about 40% of all electricity is generated by renewables, like solar panels, wind turbines, and hydropower-generating dams.That's a big deal, and while the majority of that supply is coming from China, and while it falls short of where we need to be to avoid the worst-case consequences of human-amplified climate change, that growth is really incredible, and it's beginning to change the nature of some of our conflicts and concerns; many of the current economic issues between the US and China, these days are focused on rare earths, for instance, which are required for things like batteries and other renewables infrastructure.That said, oil and gas still enable the modern economy, and that's true almost everywhere, even today. And while the US changed the nature of the global oil and gas industries by heavily investing in both, and then rewired the global energy market by convincing many of its allies to switch to US-generated oil and gas, rather than relying on supplies from Russia, in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine a few years ago, a whole lot of these resources still come from at-times quite belligerent regimes, and many of these regimes are located in the Middle East, and belong to OPEC.Iran is one such belligerent regime.As of 2025, Iran is the 9th largest producer of oil in the world, and it holds 24% of the Middle East's and about 12% of the world's proven oil reserves—that's the total volume of oil underground that could be pumped at some point. It's got the world's 3rd largest proven crude oil reserves and it exports about 2 million barrels of crude and refined oil every day. It also has the world's second-largest proven natural gas reserves.Iran isn't as reliant on oil and gas exports as some of its neighbors, but it still pulled in about $53 billion in net oil exports each year as of 2023; which is a lot less than what it could be making, as international sanctions have made it difficult for Iran to fully exploit its reserves. But that's still a huge chunk of its total income.This is important to note because Israel's recent series of attacks on Iran, in addition to taking out a lot of their military leaders, weapons manufacturing facilities, and nuclear research facilities, have also targeted Iran's oil and gas production and export capacity, including large gas plants, fuel depots, and oil refineries, some located close to Tehran in the northern part of the country, and some down on its southwestern coast, where a huge portion of Iran's gas is processed.In light of these attacks, Iran's leaders have said they may close the Strait of Hormuz, though which most of their exports pass—and the Strait of Hormuz is the only marine entryway into the Persian Gulf; nearly 20% of all globally consumed oil passes through this 90-mile-wide stretch of water before reaching international markets; it's a pretty vital waterway that Iran partially controls because its passes by its southern coast.Fuel prices already ticked up by about 9% following Israel's initial strikes into Iran this past week, and there's speculation that prices could surge still-higher, especially following US President Trump's decision to strike several Iran nuclear facilities, coming to Israel's aide, as Israel doesn't possess the ‘bunker-buster' bombs necessary to penetrate deep enough into the earth to damage or destroy many of these facilities.As of Monday this week, oil markets are relatively undisrupted, and if any export flows were to be upset, it would probably just be Iran's, and that would mostly hurt China, which is Iran's prime oil customer, as most of the rest of the world won't deal with them due to export sanctions.That said, there's a possibility that Iran will decide to respond to the US coming to Israel's aid not by striking US assets directly, which could pull the US deeper into the conflict, but instead by disrupting global oil and gas prices, which could lead to knock-on effects that would be bad for the US economy, and the US's relationships with other nations.The straightest path to doing this would be to block the Strait of Hormuz, and they could do this by positioning ships and rocket launchers to strike anything passing through it, while also heavily mining the passage itself, and they've apparently got plenty of mines ready to do just that, should they choose that path.This approach has been described by analysts as the strategic equivalent of a suicide bombing, as blocking the Strait would disrupt global oil and gas markets, hurting mostly Asia, as China, India, South Korea, Japan, and other Asian destinations consume something like 80% of the oil that passes through it, but that would still likely raise energy prices globally, which can have a lot of knock-on effects, as we saw during those energy crises I mentioned in the intro.It would hurt Iran itself more than anyone, though, as almost all of their energy products pass through this passage before hitting global markets, and such a move could help outside entities, including the US, justify further involvement in the conflict, where they otherwise might choose to sit it out and let Israel settle its own scores.Such energy market disruption could potentially benefit Russia, which has an energy resource-reliant economy that suffers when oil and gas prices are low, but flourishes when they're high. The Russian government probably isn't thrilled with Israel's renewed attacks on one of its allies, but based on its lack of response to Syria's collapse—the former Syrian government also being an ally of Russia—it's possible they can't or won't do much to directly help Iran right now, but they probably wouldn't complain if they were suddenly able to charge a lot more per barrel of oil, and if customers like China and India were suddenly a lot more reliant on the resources they're producing.Of course, such a move could also enrich US energy companies, though potentially at the expense of the American citizen, and thus at the expense of the Trump administration. Higher fuel prices tend to lead to heightened inflation, and more inflation tends to keep interest rates high, which in turn slows the economy. A lot of numbers could go in the opposite direction from what the Trump administration would like to see, in other words, and that could result in a truly bad outcome for Republicans in 2026, during congressional elections that are already expected to be difficult for the incumbent party.Even beyond the likely staggering human costs of this renewed conflict in the Middle East, then, there are quite a few world-scale concerns at play here, many of which at least touch on, and some of which are nearly completely reliant on, what happens to Iran's oil and gas production assets, and to what degree they decide to use these assets, and the channels through which they pass, in a theoretical asymmetric counterstrike against those who are menacing them.Show Noteshttps://archive.is/20250616111212/https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/an-overview-irans-energy-industry-infrastructure-2025-02-04/https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/15/which-iranian-oil-and-gas-fields-has-israel-hit-and-why-do-they-matterhttps://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/17/mapping-irans-oil-and-gas-sites-and-those-attacked-by-israelhttps://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/6/13/oil-markets-are-spooked-as-iran-israel-tensions-escalatehttps://archive.is/20250620143813/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-20/eu-abandons-proposal-to-lower-price-cap-on-russian-oil-to-45https://apnews.com/article/russia-economy-recession-ukraine-conflict-9d105fd1ac8c28908839b01f7d300ebdhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/22/business/us-iran-oil.htmlhttps://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg9r4q99g4ohttps://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/04/clean-energy-electricity-nature-and-climate-stories-this-week/https://archive.is/20250622121310/https://www.ft.com/content/67430fac-2d47-4b3b-9928-920ec640638ahttps://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Oil-Markets-Brace-for-Impact-After-US-Attacks-Iran-Facilities.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/22/business/energy-environment/iran-oil-gas-markets.htmlhttps://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65504&utm_medium=PressOpshttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/22/business/stocks-us-iran-bombing.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Oilhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fracking_in_Canadahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fracking_in_the_United_Stateshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_in_the_United_Stateshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shale_gas_in_the_United_Stateshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yom_Kippur_Warhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolutionhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970s_energy_crisishttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990_oil_price_shockhttps://www.strausscenter.org/energy-and-security-project/the-u-s-shale-revolution/https://archive.is/20250416153337/https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-crude-oil-output-peak-by-2027-eia-projects-2025-04-15/https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/030415/how-does-price-oil-affect-stock-market.asp This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe

Yishai Fleisher joins Nachi Gordon for a powerful conversation that dives deep into the heart of Am Yisrael. Broadcasting from the diaspora, but with his soul in Israel, Yishai opens up about the war with Iran, his personal longing to return to the front lines, and the spiritual and political crossroads facing the Jewish people today.  From his work in Chevron and his role as a councilman in Efrat, to organizing international tours with figures like Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, Yishai shares the mission behind his advocacy for a stronger, prouder Jewish state. This episode explores the challenges and opportunities of Aliyah, the erosion of Israel's global narrative, the beauty and struggle of sovereignty, and why taking small steps—like buying an apartment or drinking Israeli wine—can anchor the Jewish future in Eretz Yisrael. It's a passionate, no-holds-barred discussion about Jewish identity, responsibility, and the road ahead. This episode was made possible thanks to our sponsors: ►Blooms Kosher   Bring you the best Kosher products worldwide.   https://bloomskosher.com   ____________________________________________________ ► PZ Deals - Download the app and never pay full price again! https://app.pz.deals/install/mpp _____________________________________________________ ► Toveedo Visit- https://toveedo.com/   Use Promo Code MM10 for 10% off! _______________________________________ ►Rothenberg Law Firm   Personal Injury Law Firm For 50+ years!   Reach out Today for Free Case Evaluation   https://shorturl.at/JFKHH   ______________________________________   ► Colel Chabad Pushka App - The easiest way to give Tzedaka    https://pushka.cc/meaningful __________________________________________________ ► Growtha - We get you more leads.   https://growtha.com __________________________________________________ ► Uri Kaufman: American Intifada: American Intifada: From acclaimed historian Uri Kaufman—whose analysis of the Yom Kippur War was hailed as a "masterpiece" by the CIA's Center for Intelligence—comes the urgent new book: "American Intifada: Israel, The Gaza War and the New Antisemitism."   "American Intifada"—Truth that cuts through propaganda. Essential reading for understanding our moment. Available now on AMAZON from Republic Book Publishers. Order now: https://a.co/d/dXoz8AP __________________________________________________ ► NRS Pay - Honest, clean credit card processing.   https://nrspay.com   __________________________________________________ ► Lalechet     We're a team of kosher travel experts, here to carry you off to your dream destination swiftly, safely, and seamlessly in an experience you will forever cherish.    https://www.lalechet.com __________________________________________________ ► Town Appliance - Visit the website or message them on WhatsApp     https://www.townappliance.com     https://bit.ly/Townappliance_whatsapp ______________________________________   ► Faith It Till You Make It Join Rabbi Ari Bensoussan's course on Bitachon sponsored by Censible Marketing! Your guide to keeping your faith in today's complicated world! www.Meaningfulminute.org/censible    ____________________________________________________ ► Subscribe to our Podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.     https://apple.co/2WALuE2    https://spoti.fi/39bNGnO Or wherever Podcasts are available! Editor: Sruly Saftlas

Yaron Svoray was born in 1954 in Israel and spent his childhood in a small kibbutz in the Israeli desert. Upon the completion of his primary education, he served in the Israeli Defense Forces as a paratrooper, seeing action in the 1973 Yom Kippur War as well as in many commando raids into hostile territories. Following his military service, Yaron conducted his undergraduate studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, later completing his master's degree in New York.In the early 80's Yaron worked as a detective sergeant in the Tel-Aviv Yamar, the Israeli equivalent of the FBI. He then employed his investigatory skills as a journalist, working for Israeli and American publications and television networks.The most explosive of his journalistic exploits occurring in 1995 when Yaron infiltrated the Neo-Nazi movement in Germany. His undercover operation received worldwide attention which resulted in a book and a movie entitled “The Infiltrator”.For the last 20 years , Yaron leads an International team of dedicated men and women who specialize in the discovery and recovery of jewels, diamonds, artifacts and personal property hidden at the end of WWII by the Nazis these treasures were found in Italy, Germany, Austria, Poland, and South America. All of the finds are given to charities and museums.https://amzn.to/4kFGtSyBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-opperman-report--1198501/support.

Sometimes insubordination within the command chain actually works. Want an example? Take the infamous 1973 Yom Kippur War, when the divisional commander of a reserve formation (Ariel Sharon) circumvented not just his superiors but also the IDF chief in order to get approval for his plan. Gross insubordination….but it worked. History favours Sharon's own narrative but the command chain had a different perspective. Personalities matter in C2: sometimes the clash of commanders can be detrimental to the campaign. Sometimes insubordination is necessary, but you won't end up as Prime Minister every time. Nate Jennings explains the context of the fight, the decisions, and the background to the big decisions.

This is the extraordinary journey of Rabbi Mendy Chitric, a Chabad rabbi based in Turkey. Born in Swat, Pakistan, and part of an 11th-generation Chabad family, Rabbi Chitric has spent the last 25 years serving the Jewish community in Istanbul — a city where Jewish life dates back 2,700 years. Originally planning to stay for just one year, Rabbi Chitric remained to answer the needs of a community facing significant challenges: assimilation, declining population, and a need for strong Jewish infrastructure. This video dives deep into Rabbi Chitric's insights on:

Rabbi Kalish and Nachi Gordon sit down for the first ever live audience podcast at the Pesach at Bordeaux program. In this dynamic conversation, Nachi pressed R' Kalish on every point:    Why no tests in Yeshiva?  Why no expulsions from Yeshiva?  Why only show love to your students?    This conversation is the clearest, most powerful window into Rabbi Kalish's vision for Jewish education (chinuch) — and his answers will challenge how we all think about education. This episode was made possible thanks to our sponsors: ►Blooms Kosher   Bring you the best Kosher products worldwide.   https://bloomskosher.com   ____________________________________________________   ► PZ Deals - Download the app and never pay full price again! https://app.pz.deals/install/mpp _____________________________________________________   ► Fresh Start Retreat   Fresh Start's intensive 7-day retreat is designed for men and women who want to understand, process, and heal from past wounds—and reconnect with their authentic self    Join us for 7️⃣ life-changing days of expert-led sessions and transformative workshops, complemented by a serene setting and gourmet kosher cuisine.

B"H On Israel's Remembrance Day, we remember heroes like Noach Bograd, who fled persecution in Russia to build a life in Israel—and his son Yechezkel, who gave his life defending it in the Yom Kippur War. Their legacy lives on in every Jew who sacrifices for Am Yisrael—whether on the battlefield or in daily acts of courage and faith. This is mesiras nefesh—the self-sacrifice that taps into the deepest parts of our soul and binds us to our people. As the Lubavitcher Rebbe taught: every Jew is a soldier in Hashem's army, spreading the light of Torah and mitzvot and building true, lasting peace. To watch Torah Thoughts in video format, click HERE Subscribe to the Torah Thoughts BLOG for exclusive written content! Please like, share and subscribe wherever you find this!

This week we talk about taxes, reciprocity, and recession.We also discuss falling indices, stagflation, and theories of operation.Recommended Book: The Serviceberry by Robin Wall KimmererTranscriptStagflation, which is a portmanteau of stagnation and inflation, is exactly what it sounds like: a combination of those two elements, usually with high levels of unemployment, as well, that can cause a prolonged period of economic sluggishness and strain that slows growth and can even lead to a recession.The term was coined in the UK in the 1960s to describe issues they were facing at the time, but it was globally popularized by the oil shocks of the 1970s, which sparked a period of high prices and slow growth in many countries, including in the US, where inflation boomed, productivity floundered, and economic growth plateaud, leading to a stock market crash in 1973 and 1974.Inflation, unto itself, can be troubling, as it means prices are going up faster than incomes, so the money people earn and have saved is worth less and less each day. That leads to a bunch of negative knock-on effects, which is a big part of why the US Fed has kept interest rates so high, aiming to trim inflation rates back to their preferred level of about 2% as quickly as possible in the wake of inflation surges following the height of the Covid pandemic.Stagnant economic growth is also troubling, as it means lowered GDP, reduced future outlook for an economy, and that also tends to mean less investment in said economy, reduced employment levels—and likely even lower employment levels in the future—and an overall sense of malaise that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, no one feeling particularly upbeat about where their country is going; and that's not great economically, but it can also lead to all sorts of social issues, as people with nothing to look forward to but worse and worse outcomes are more likely to commit crimes or stoke revolutions than their upbeat, optimistic, comfortable kin.The combination of these two elements is more dastardly than just the sum of their two values implies, though, as measures that government agencies might take to curb inflation, like raising interest rates and overall tightening monetary policy, reduces business investment which can lead to unemployment. On the flip-side, though, things a government might do to reduce unemployment, like injecting more money into the economy, tends to spike inflation.It's a lose-lose situation, basically, and that's why government agencies tasked with keeping things moving along steadily go far out of their way to avoid stagflation; it's not easily addressed, and it only really goes away with time, and sometimes a very long time.There are two primary variables that have historically led to stagflation: supply shocks and government policies that reduce output and increase the money supply too rapidly.The stagflation many countries experienced in the 1970s was the result of Middle Eastern oil producing nations cutting off the flow of oil to countries that supported Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, though a sharp increase in money supply and the end of the Bretton Woods money management system, which caused exchange rate issues between global currencies, also contributed, and perhaps even more so than the oil shock.What I'd like to talk about today is another major variable, the implementation of a huge package of new tariffs on pretty much everyone by the US, that many economists are saying could lead to a new period of stagflation, alongside other, more immediate consequences.—A tariff is a type of tax that's imposed on imported goods, usually targeting specific types of goods, or goods from a particular place.Way back in the day these were an important means of funding governments: the US government actually made most of its revenue, about 90% of it, from tariffs before 1863, because there just wasn't a whole of lot other ways for the young country to make money at the time.Following the War of 1812, the US government attempted to double tariffs, but that depleted international trade, which led to less income, not more—gross imports dropped by 71%, and the government scrambled to implement direct and excise taxes, the former of which is the tax a person or business pays that isn't based on transactions, while the latter is a duty that's paid upon the manufacture of something, as opposed to when it's sold.Tariffs resurfaced in the following decades, but accounted for less and less of the government's income as the country's manufacturing base increased, and excise and income taxes made up 63% of the US's federal revenue by 1865.Tax sources have changes a lot over the years, and they vary somewhat from country to country.But the dominant move in the 20th century, especially post-WWII, has been toward free trade, which usually means no or low tariffs on goods being made in one place and sold in another, in part because this tends to lead to more wealth for everyone, on average, at least.This refocus toward globalized free trade resulted in a lot of positives, like being able to specialize and make things where they're cheap and sell them where they're precious, but also some negatives, like the offshoring of jobs—though even those negatives, which sucked for the people who lost their jobs, have been positive for some, as the companies who offshored the jobs did so because it saved them money, the folks who were hired were generally paid more than was possible in their region, previously, and the people consuming the resulting goods were able to get them cheaper than would otherwise be feasible.It's been a mixed bag, then, but the general consensus among economists is that open trade is good because it incentivizes competition and productivity. Governments are less likely to implement protectionist policies to preserve badly performing local business entities from better performing foreign versions of the same, and that means less wasted effort and resources, more options for everyone, and more efficient overall economic operation, which contributes to global flourishing. And not for nothing, nations that trade with each other tend to be less likely to go to war with each other.Now that's a massively simplified version of the argument, but again, that's been the outline for how things are meant to work, and aside from some obvious exceptions—like China's protection of its local tech sector from foreign competition, and the US's protection of its aviation and car industries—it's generally worked as intended, and the world has become massively wealthier during this period compared to before this state of affairs was broadly implemented, post-WWII; there's simply no comparison, the difference is stark.There are renewed concerns about stagflation in the United States, however, because of a big announcement made by US President Trump on April 2, 2025, that slapped substantial and at times simply massive new tariffs on just about everyone, including the country's longest-term allies and most valuable trading partners.On what the president called “Liberation Day,” he announced two new types of tariff: one is a universal 10% import duty on all goods brought into the US, and another that he called a reciprocal tariff on imports from scores of countries, including 15 that will be hit especially hard—a list that includes China, EU nations, Canada, and Japan, among others.The theory of these so-called reciprocal tariffs is that Trump thinks the US is being taken advantage of, as, to use one example that he cited, the US charges a 2.5% tariff on imported cars, while the EU charges a 10% tariff on American cars imported to their union.The primary criticism of this approach, which has been cited by most economists and entities like the World Trade Organization, is that the numbers the US administration apparently used to make this list don't really add up, and seem to include some made-up measures of trade deficits, which some analysts suspect were calculated by AI tools like ChatGPT, as the same incorrect measures are spat out by commonly use chatbots like ChatGPT when they're asked about how to balance these sorts of things. But the important takeaway, however they arrived at these numbers, is that the comparisons used aren't really sensical when you look at the details.Some countries simply can't afford American exports, for instance, while others have no use for them. The idea that a country that can't afford American goods should have astoundingly large tariffs applied to their exports to the US is questionable from the get-go, but it also means the goods they produce, which might be valuable and important for Americans, be they raw materials like food or manufactured goods like car parts, will become more expensive for Americans, either because those Americans have to pay a higher price necessitated by the tax, or because the lower-price supplier is forced out of the market and replaced by a higher-price alternative.In short, the implied balance of these tariffs don't line up with reality, according to essentially everyone except folks working within Trump's administration, and the question then is what the actual motivation behind them might be.The Occam's Razor answer is that Trump and/or people in his administration simply don't understand tariffs and global economics well enough to understand that their theory on the matter is wrong. And many foreign leaders have said these tariffs are not in any way reciprocal, and that the calculation used to draw them up was, in the words of Germany's economic minister, “nonsense.” That's the general consensus of learned people, and the only folks who seem to be saying otherwise are the one's responsible for drawing these tariffs up, and defending them in the press.Things have been pretty stellar for most of the global economy since free trade became the go-to setup for imports and exports, but this administration is acting as if the opposite is true. That might be a feigned misunderstanding, or it might be genuine; they might truly not understand the difference between how things have been post-WWII and how they were back in the 1800s when tariffs were the go-to method of earning government revenue.But in either case, Trump is promising that rewiring the global order, the nature of default international trade in this way, will be good for Americans because rather than serving as a linchpin for that global setup, keeping things orderly by serving as the biggest market in the world, the American economy will be a behemoth that gets what it's owed, even if at the expense of others—a winner among losers who keep playing because they can't afford not to, rather than a possibly slightly less winning winner amongst other winners.This theory seems to have stemmed from a 1980s understanding of things, which is a cultural and economic milieu from which a lot of Trump's views and ideas seem to have originated, despite in many cases having long since been disproved or shown to be incomplete. But it's also a premise that may be more appealing to very wealthy people, because a lot of the negative consequences from these tariffs will be experienced by people in lower economic classes and people from poorer nations, where the price hikes will be excruciating, and folks in the middle class, whose wealth is primarily kept in stocks. Folks in the higher economic echolons, including those making most of these decisions, tend to make and build their wealth via other means, which won't be entirely unimpacted, but will certainly be less hurt by these moves than everyone else.It's also possible, and this seems more likely to me, but it's of course impossible to know the truth of the matter right now, that Trump is implementing a huge version of his go-to negotiating tactic of basically hurting the folks on the other end of a negotiation in order to establish leverage over them, and then starting that negotiation by asking what they'll do for him if he limits or stops the pain.The US is expected to suffer greatly from these tariffs, but other countries, especially those that rely heavily on the US market as their consumer base, and in some cases for a huge chunk of their economy, their total GDP, will suffer even more.There's a good chance many countries, in public or behind closed doors, will look at the numbers and decide that it makes more sense to give Trump and his administration something big, up front, in exchange for a lessening of these tariffs. That's what seems to be happening with Vietnam, already, and Israel, and there's a good chance other nations have already put out feelers to see what he might want in exchange for some preferential treatment in this regard—early reports suggest at least 50 governments have done exactly that since the announcement, though those reports are coming from within the White House, so it's probably prudent to take them with a grain of salt, at this point. That said, this sort of messaging from the White House suggests that the administration might be hoping for a bunch of US-favoring deals and will therefore make a lot of noise about initial negotiations to signal that that's what they want, and that the pain can go away if everyone just kowtows a little and gestures at some new trade policies that favor the US and make Trump look like a master negotiator who's bringing the world to heel.There's been pushback against this potentiality, however, led by China, which has led with its own, very large counter-tariffs rather than negotiating, and the EU looks like it might do the same. If enough governments do this, it could call Trump's bluff while also making these other entities, perhaps especially China, which was first out the door with counter-tariffs and statements about not be cowed by the US's bluster, seem like the natural successors to the US in terms of global economic leadership. It could result in the US giving away all that soft power, basically, and that in turn could realign global trade relationships and ultimately other sorts of relationships, too, in China's favor.One other commonly cited possibility, and this is maybe the grimmest of the three, but it's not impossible, is that Trump and other people in his administration recognize that the world is changing, that China is ascendent and the US is by some metrics not competing in the way it needs to in order to keep up and retain its dominance, and that's true in terms of things like manufacturing and research, but also the potential implications of AI, changing battlefield tactics, and so on. And from that perspective, it maybe makes sense to just shake the game board, knocking over all the pieces rather than trying to win by adhering to what have become common conventions and normal rules of play.If everyone takes a hit, if there's a global recession or depression and everything is knocked asunder because those variables that led to where we are today, with all their associated pros and cons, are suddenly gone, that might lead to a situation in which the US is hurt, but not as badly as everyone else, including entities like China. And because the US did the game board shaking, the US may thus be in a better position as everything settles back into a new state of affairs; a new state of affairs that Trump and his people want to be more favorable to the US, long-term.There's some logic to this thinking, even if it's a very grim, me-first, zero-sum kind of logic. The US economy is less reliant on global trade than the rest of the G20, the wealthiest countries in the world; only about 25% of its GDP is derived from trade, while that number is 37% for China, 63% for France, and a whopping 88% for Germany.Other nations are in a relatively more vulnerable position than the US in a less-open, more tariff-heavy world, then, and that means the US administration may have them over a barrel, making the aforementioned US-favoring negotiations more likely, but also, again, potentially just hurting everyone, but the US less so. And when I say hurting, I mean some countries losing a huge chunk of their economy overnight, triggering a lot more poverty, maybe stagflation and famines, and possibly even revolutions, as people worldwide experience a shocking and sudden decrease in both wealth and future economic outlook.Already, just days after Trump announced his tariffs, global markets are crashing, with US markets on track to record its second-worst three-day decline in history, after only the crash of 1987—so that's worse than even the crashes that followed 9/11, the Covid-19 pandemic, the debt crisis, and many others.Foreign markets are doing even worse, though, with Hong Kong's recently high-flying Hang Seng falling 13% in trading early this week, and Japan's Nikkei dropping 8%.Other market markers are also dropping, the price of oil falling to a pandemic-era level of $60 per barrel, Bitcoin losing 10% in a day, and even the US dollar, which theoretically should rise in a tariff scenario, dropping 0.1%—which suggests investors are planning for a damaging recession, and the US market and currency as a whole might be toxic for a while; which could, in turn, lead to a boom for the rest of the world, the US missing out on that boom.There are also simpler theories, I should mention, that tariffs may be meant to generate more profits to help pay for Trump's expanded tax cuts without requiring he touch the third-rails of Medicare or Social Security, or that they're meant to address the US's booming debt by causing investors to flee to Treasury bills, which has the knock-on effect of reducing the interest rates that have to be paid on government debt.That flight toward Treasuries is already happening, though it seems to be primarily because investors are fleeing the market as stocks collapse in value and everyone's worrying about their future, about stagflation, and about mass layoffs and unemployment.It may be that all or most of these things are true, too, by the way, and that this jumble of events, pros and cons alike, are seen as a net-positive by this administration.For what it's worth, too, the US Presidency doesn't typically get to set things like tariffs—that's congress' responsibility and right. But because Congress is currently controlled by Republicans, they've yet to push back on these tariffs with a veto, and they may not. There are rumblings within the president's party about this, and a lot of statements about how it'll ultimately be good, but that maybe they would have done things differently, but there hasn't been any real action yet, just hedging. And that could remain the case, but if things get bad enough, they could be forced by their constituents to take concrete action on the matter before Trump's promised, theoretical positive outcomes have the chance to emerge, or not.Show Noteshttps://www.everycrsreport.com/files/20060925_RL33665_4a8c6781ce519caa3e6b82f95c269f73021c5fdf.pdfhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariffhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/03/31/tariffs-affect-consumer-spending/https://www.wsj.com/tech/exempt-or-not-the-chip-industry-wont-escape-tariffs-a6c771dbhttps://www.wsj.com/economy/central-banking/goldman-sachs-lifts-u-s-recession-probability-to-35-ce285ebchttps://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-am-9d85eb00-1184-11f0-8b11-0da1ebc288e3.htmlhttps://apnews.com/article/trump-tariffs-democrats-economy-protests-financial-markets-90afa4079acbde1deb223adf070c1e98https://www.wsj.com/economy/trade/trade-war-explodes-across-world-at-pace-not-seen-in-decades-0b6d6513https://www.mufgamericas.com/sites/default/files/document/2025-04/The-Long-Shadow-of-William-McKinley.pdfhttps://x.com/krishnanrohit/status/1907587352157106292https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/business/trump-stocks-tariffs-trade.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/05/opinion/trump-tariffs-theories.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/06/world/asia/vietnam-trump-tariff-delay.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/06/world/europe/trade-trump-tariffs-brexit.htmlhttps://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/04/why-do-domestic-prices-rise-with-tarriffs.htmlhttps://www.foxnews.com/politics/how-we-got-liberation-day-look-trumps-past-comments-tariffshttps://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/trumps-tariff-strategy-can-be-traced-back-to-the-1980s/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/12/us/politics/trump-tv-stock-market.htmlhttps://www.hudsonbaycapital.com/documents/FG/hudsonbay/research/638199_A_Users_Guide_to_Restructuring_the_Global_Trading_System.pdfhttps://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/over-50-countries-push-for-tariff-revisions-will-donald-trump-compromise-heres-what-the-white-house-said/articleshow/120043664.cmshttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/06/business/stock-market-plunge-investment-bank-impact.htmlhttps://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-trump-tariffs-trade-war-04-07-25https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-trump-tariff-foreign-policy-6934e493https://www.wsj.com/economy/in-matter-of-days-outlook-shifts-from-solid-growth-to-recession-risk-027eb2b4https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Markets/Asia-Pacific-stocks-sink-from-Trump-s-tariff-barrage-Hong-Kong-down-13https://www.reuters.com/markets/eu-seeks-unity-first-strike-back-trump-tariffs-2025-04-06/https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/04/07/trump-presidency-news-tariffs/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/world/asia/china-trade-war-tariffs.htmlhttps://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-04-07/global-rout-carries-whiff-of-panic-as-trump-holds-fast-on-tariffshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagflationhttps://finance.yahoo.com/news/economists-fed-recent-projections-signal-120900777.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisishttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_stagnation This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe

התוכן בעת מאסרו נשאל אדה"ז כו"כ שאלות בנוגע אליו ושיטת החסידות וכו', כשבין החוקרים היו אנשים מלומדים שהתעניינו מאוד בשיטתו וכו'. לאחרי שענה על כל השאלות נשאל ע"ד מ"ש בסוף פ"א דתניא ח"א בנוגע לחילוק בין נפשות אוה"ע ונפשות בנ"י וכו', ועל זה לא ענה אלא חייך... (ובכך זה הסתיים). וביאר אדה"ז שכוונתו בזה היתה שבכך יבינו החוקרים שלאחרי שענה בהצלחה על כל שאלותיהם לא כדאי להם שיסביר להם ענין זה... אלא שלכאו' הי' יכול להסביר להם ענין זה באופן אחר וכו' – אלא ש"חיוך" זה שלו הי' ענין של שמחה ש"ממתקת דינים", וזה הי' המענה הטוב שלו ביותר. הרי שבישבו ב"טאַיינע סאָוויעט", מקום שישבו מורדי במלכות, הי' הזמן להיות ב"שמחה" דוקא! וזהו המענה לשואלים איך יושבים ומתוועדים ושמחים בעת כזו [בהמשך למלחמת יום-הכפורים] – כי דוקא עכשיו, כאשר זקוקים לענין של "המתקת דינים", הוא הזמן לשמחה, ושמחה אמיתית – הקשורה עם תומ"צ וכו'.א' השיחות דהתוועדות י"ט כסלו ה'תשל"ד ל"הנחה פרטית" או התרגום ללה"ק של השיחה: https://thedailysicha.com/?date=03-03-2025 Synopsis During his imprisonment, the Alter Rebbe was asked many questions about himself and the Chassidic approach etc. (among the interrogators were learned individuals who had much interest in the Alter Rebbe's teachings). After he had answered all their questions, he was asked to explain what he writes at the end of the first chapter of Tanya regarding the distinction between the souls of the nations and the souls of the Jewish people. To this question the Alter Rebbe didn't respond but merely smiled (and it ended with that). The Alter Rebbe later explained that his intention was to convey to the interrogators that, after having successfully answered all their previous questions, it would not be worthwhile for them to have him explain this, too. Seemingly, the Alter Rebbe could have made his point in other ways; but his smile was an expression of joy, which “sweetens judgments,” and this joy was his best response. This means that even while sitting in the Tainey Soviet, a place designated for those suspected of rebellion against the monarchy – this specifically was a time for joy! And this is the answer to those who ask how we can sit and farbreng and rejoice at a time like this [following the Yom Kippur War]: the answer is that now, when we need to “sweeten judgments,” is precisely the time for joy, and true joy – joy associated with Torah and mitzvos.Sichah from farbrengen of 19 Kislev 5734 For a transcript in English of the Sicha: https://thedailysicha.com/?date=03-03-2025

Send me a text!The culminating clash between Israel and Egypt which laid the foundation for lasting peace and, yet again, change how modern warfare was fought.Different quotes Support the showwar102podcast@gmail.comhttps://www.reddit.com/r/War102Podcast/https://war102.buzzsprout.com

By Christopher Mason, who is a Silicon Valley native currently located in County Cork, Ireland, Christopher Mason is a cryptocurrency industry insider. He is a Bitcoin enthusiast, and close follower of all things crypto. DISCLAIMER: the end of this article features an affiliate marketing link. You wouldn't need to be a crypto watcher to have heard the term "Strategic Bitcoin Reserve." It's been talked about quite a lot lately, and not just in fringe crypto publications. So, what is it? What would its purpose be? What are the chances it'll actually happen? Most people will be familiar with the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It's a large stockpile of crude oil held by the United States government, specifically, the Department of Energy. It's stored underground in Louisiana and Texas; these facilities have a combined capacity of 727,000,000 barrels. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve was created by President Ford in 1975 in response to the oil embargo of 1973-1974 (when OPEC cut off oil shipments to the United States in response to aid sent to Israel during the Yom Kippur War). The basic idea behind the creation of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve was that it could serve to soften future oil-related price shocks to the US economy. Why an United States Strategic Bitcoin Reserve? So, why a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve? Oil is an essential enabler of the US economy - without it, a large portion of economic activity would grind to a halt. But Bitcoin? It depends who you ask, but there wouldn't be many that would classify it as essential to the US economy. Senator Cynthia Lummis (R, WY) would argue through her proposed BITCOIN Act of 2024 - a bill that is being considered by the United States Senate - that a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve is vital. The bill aims to reduce US government debt without raising taxes (simultaneously strengthening the US dollar); it also proposes that the US government acquire 5% of outstanding Bitcoin (similar to the portion of global gold reserves held by the US government). U.S. President Donald Trump has suggested that such a reserve would help ensure that the US dominates the cryptocurrency market and that there is growing interest in China to do just that. Whether or not this will ever come to fruition is still quite unknown, but Trump took a potential first step toward it on January 23rd, when he signed an executive order which established a cryptocurrency working group. This group will explore new cryptocurrency regulations, the protection of banking services for crypto companies, and the creation of a national cryptocurrency stockpile. The order also banned the creation of US central bank digital currencies, which would have been seen by industry followers as a potential rival to Bitcoin. The working group is not short of heavy-hitters, featuring the Secretary of the Treasury, as well as the heads of the Securities Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The chair of the group will be David Sacks (venture capitalist and former executive at PayPal). According to the wording of the executive order, the group will "evaluate the potential creation and maintenance of a national digital asset stockpile… potentially derived from cryptocurrencies lawfully seized by the Federal Government through its law enforcement efforts." It's possible that the fund could be created via another executive order, directed at the Treasury Department's Exchange Stabilization Fund, often used to buy and sell foreign currencies. Critics of the strategic reserve concept have said that there is no utility in it; that Bitcoin has no intrinsic value. They say that the price fluctuations of Bitcoin mean that a strategic reserve would pose a risk to taxpayers and to the economy and that government purchases and sales of Bitcoin would have a big impact on it's value. The legality of transferring Bitcoin seized by the Justice Department into the U.S. Treasury is very much in question. And will creating a strategic rese...

In this episode of the Contested Ground podcast, Phil Tarrant, Major General (Ret'd) Marcus Thompson and Liam Garman discuss the fall of Bashar al-Assad and the ongoing Israel–Hamas war. They begin the podcast debating whether the unfolding Israel–Hamas conflict will have the same level of strategic significance for Israel as the Yom Kippur War or the Six-Day War. Tarrant, Thompson and Garman then discuss how the conflict has altered the balance of power in the Middle East, severing Iran's crescent of influence by weakening Hamas and Hezbollah, coupled with the fall of Assad. They wrap up the podcast examining what nations, if any, might assume the role of a security benefactor in the Middle East with a weakened Iran, and emerging open-source intelligence (OSINT) collection vectors. Enjoy the podcast, The Contested Ground team

On today's show, the second of a two-part interview with Bruce Brill, who wrote Deceit of an Ally – A Memoir of Military Anti-Semitism, NSA's Secret Jew Room and Yom Kippur War Treachery. Bruce and four other American US Army servicemen worked for the US National Security Agency (NSA) in 1973. They came to discover a true story of an Un-American Deep-State NSA Cabal in the highest echelon of Washington, D.C.'s Swamp of corruption. They came to learn that US intelligence not only knew Egypt and Syria were going to attack Israel but knew this for a certainty, knew it days in advance, and knew when the attack would commence, contradicting the US intelligence agencies' own claims that everyone was fooled and fully taken by surprise in the events of October 6, 1973, referred to as the Yom Kippur War. Of the 1300 books written about that event, not one reveals how Israel fell prey to a deception perpetrated by their American Ally that cost Israel over 2,600 lives. Brill and his colleagues realized that Israel was NOT informed of what American intelligence knew because Israel's top leaders were intentionally given false intelligence that the Arabs would NOT attack. Precisely fifty years later, this same Cabal of deception once again stepped into action and carried out its evil work before the alleged surprise sneak attack against Israel on October 7, 2023, leading to where we are today in Israeli and Middle East politics. Although the "Jew Room" term is no longer used, it has morphed in name and is still active in the NSA American intelligence community. Here is Bruce Brill to continue his story.

Please, feel free to send a text message here and give us feedback. Also, you may send a text msg or leave voicemail (425) 550-6670Shalom, I am Avi ben Mordechai, and this is Real Israel Talk RadioOn today's show, the second of a two-part interview with Bruce Brill, who wrote Deceit of an Ally – A Memoir of Military Anti-Semitism, NSA's Secret Jew Room and Yom Kippur War Treachery. Bruce and four other American US Army servicemen worked for the US National Security Agency (NSA) in 1973. They came to discover a true story of an Un-American Deep-State NSA Cabal in the highest echelon of Washington, D.C.'s Swamp of corruption. They came to learn that US intelligence not only knew Egypt and Syria were going to attack Israel but knew this for a certainty, knew it days in advance, and knew when the attack would commence, contradicting the US intelligence agencies' own claims that everyone was fooled and fully taken by surprise in the events of October 6, 1973, referred to as the Yom Kippur War.Of the 1300 books written about that event, not one reveals how Israel fell prey to a deception perpetrated by their American Ally that cost Israel over 2,600 lives. Brill and his colleagues realized that Israel was NOT informed of what American intelligence knew because Israel's top leaders were intentionally given false intelligence that the Arabs would NOT attack. Precisely fifty years later, this same Cabal of deception once again stepped into action and carried out its evil work before the alleged surprise sneak attack against Israel on October 7, 2023, leading to where we are today in Israeli and Middle East politics. Although the term "Jew Room" is no longer used, it has morphed in name only and is still active within the CIA/NSA American intelligence community. Find out more about it here in this podcast. Here is Bruce Brill to continue his story. Support the show

Purchase your own Temple/Mashiach patch: https://theisraelguys.store/products/temple-mount-patch In the wake of Bashar Assad's ousting, Israel has struck hard in Syria, launching 300 airstrikes in just a few days—marking the heaviest air campaign since the 1973 Yom Kippur War. From destroying air defense systems to sinking Syrian warships, Israel's response is nothing short of decisive.  Watch to see Ben Hilton break down Israel's bold moves in Syria and what it means for the future of the region. Watch our 4-Part Series on Sovereignty in Judea & Samaria: https://theisraelguys.com/sovereignty/   Follow us on Telegram: https://t.me/theisraelguys  Follow Us On Twitter: https://twitter.com/theisraelguys  Follow Us On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theisraelguys Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theisraelguys   Heartland Tumbler: https://theisraelguys.store/products/heartland-tumbler “Israel” Leather Patch Hat: https://theisraelguys.store/products/israel-1948-cap

For review:1. IDF Deploys into Buffer Zone with Syria & Controls Strategic Mount Hermon.On Sunday, the IDF captured the Syrian side of strategic Mount Hermon, along with a buffer zone that has existed between the countries since the 1970s. The 235-square-kilometer demilitarized buffer zone was established in the 1974 Agreement on Disengagement between Israel and Syria, which concluded the Yom Kippur War, and has been manned for decades by UN peacekeepers. 2.  IDF Strikes Syrian Military Hardware Following Collapse of Assad Regime.On Sunday, the IAF hit advanced missile storage sites, air defense systems, and planes, helicopters, and tanks that belonged to the Assad regime's military. On Monday, Israeli planes bombed at least three major Syrian army air bases that housed dozens of helicopters and jets. 3. US Strikes ISIS Targets in Syria.US Central Command said that its warplanes conducted “dozens” of airstrikes on more than 75 sites, including known “ISIS leaders, operatives and camps.”The attacks used B-52 bombers, F-15 fighters, and A-10 Warthogs.4. Russia to provide warplanes to N. Korea in return for troop combat deployment. US Indo-PACOM Commander (Admiral Samuel Paparo): Russia has reached an agreement with North Korea to send MiG-29 and Su-27 fighter aircraft to Pyongyang in return for that nation deploying soldiers to help with Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.5. Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy makes rare comment on troop causalities.The Ukrainian President said that some 43,000 Ukrainian Soldiers have been killed and 370,000 injuries had been reported, since the war with Russia began in February 2022. 6. US Military pauses V-22 Osprey Fleet following near-accident at Cannon Air Force Base, New Mexico.The pause was recommended last week “out of an abundance of caution” by Vice Admiral Carl Chebi, the head of Naval Air Systems Command.

Please, feel free to send a text message here and give us feedback. Also, you may send a text msg or leave voicemail (425) 550-6670The True Story of an Un-American Deep-State NSA Cabal operating from the offices of their "Jew Room" in the Washington, D.C. Swamp. Israeli Bruce Brill and four other American U.S. Army servicemen who worked for the US National Security Agency (NSA) in 1973 discovered that US intelligence not only knew Egypt and Syria were going to attack Israel but knew this for a certainty, knew it days in advance, and knew when the attack would commence. This contradicts the US intelligence agencies' claims that everyone was fooled and taken by surprise on October 6, 1973, and October 7, 2023.Of the 1300 books written about the 1973 Yom Kippur War, not one reveals how Israel fell prey to a deception perpetrated by their American Ally that cost Israel over 2,600 precious lives. Brill and his colleagues realized that Israel was NOT informed because they were intentionally given false intelligence that the Arabs would NOT attack. Precisely fifty years later, this same Cabal once again stepped into action and carried out its evil work on October 7, 2023, leading to where we are today in Israeli and Middle East politics. Real Israel Talk Radio - Episode 165, PART 1Support the show

The True Story of an Un-American Deep-State NSA Cabal operating from the offices of their "Jew Room" in the Washington, D.C. Swamp. Israeli Bruce Brill and four other American U.S. Army servicemen who worked for the US National Security Agency (NSA) in 1973 discovered that US intelligence not only knew Egypt and Syria were going to attack Israel but knew this for a certainty, knew it days in advance, and knew when the attack would commence. This contradicts the US intelligence agencies' claims that everyone was fooled and taken by surprise on October 6, 1973, and October 7, 2023. Of the 1300 books written about the 1973 Yom Kippur War, not one reveals how Israel fell prey to a deception perpetrated by their American Ally that cost Israel over 2,600 precious lives. Brill and his colleagues realized that Israel was NOT informed because they were intentionally given false intelligence that the Arabs would NOT attack. Precisely fifty years later, this same Cabal once again stepped into action and carried out its evil work on October 7, 2023, leading to where we are today in Israeli and Middle East politics. Real Israel Talk Radio - Episode 165, PART 1

Ari Singer grew up in Manhattan, New York, a child of two Holocaust survivors - whose stories are amazing in their own right. While his upbringing in New York was going fine - he was a student at Manhattan Day School - his parents decided to end their family's exile in 1973, and Ari, then 13, made the big move to a 25-year old country that was just weeks away from the start of the Yom Kippur War. Ari and his family have been tested since 1973 as well, but there is an infectious "let's just keep moving forward" attitude that Ari learned from his parents, and it's served him quite well. He's one of the most optimistic people Goel Jasper has ever met, and they spoke recently at Ari's home in Peduel. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/return-again/support

How did we get here? With all the arguments flying around about Israel and its neighbors, we turn to history to understand the making of modern Israel. In this three-part series on Israel, we look at how the major factions in the Middle East arose, how they operate, and what the future holds.  In this first episode, Cole and Terry discuss the founding of the nation of Israel and the ensuing wars, running up to the Yom Kippur War in 1973.  For more on the lead-up to the formation of the state of Israel in 1948, see Terry's series, The Making of Modern Israel.

Jodi Magness is a prominent archaeologist known for her extensive research in the Holy Land. Growing up in Philadelphia without a background in archaeology, Jodi discovered her passion for the field at the age of 12, inspired by a history teacher and her childhood interests in fossils and dinosaurs. After moving to Miami, she participated in a transformative study tour in Israel in 1972, which deepened her love for the country. ⁣ Jodi pursued her education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she double-majored in archaeology and general history, despite facing challenges due to the intensive curriculum in Hebrew. Her studies coincided with significant historical events, including the Yom Kippur War, shaping her perspective on the region's complex history. After completing her BA, she initially considered law school but decided to stay in Israel, eventually working as a guide at the Ngedi Field School near the Dead Sea. She later pursued a PhD in classical archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on ancient pottery from Jerusalem. ⁣ Jodi has made significant contributions to archaeology, particularly through her excavations at the Huqoq site in Galilee, where she uncovered a monumental synagogue featuring stunning mosaics. Throughout her career, she has emphasized the scientific nature of archaeology, advocating for its role in understanding human history through material remains. Jodi continues to teach and conduct research, focusing on publishing her findings from over a decade of work at Huqoq, and remains dedicated to her mission of educating others about the rich history of the Holy Land.

After a year of grief, pain, and war on multiple fronts, the Israeli psyche has been fundamentally transformed.   In this special episode recorded live on October 7, 2024, for members of the Shalom Hartman Institute Giving Society, Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi reflect on the fragility of the nation, Netanyahu's rising poll numbers, and a resurgence of existential crisis not seen in Israel since the 1973 Yom Kippur War.   Stay tuned after the episode to hear Donniel and Yossi answer questions from the live audience.   Learn more about our Giving Society, which recognizes the generosity of individuals and families who annually support the mission and growth of the Shalom Hartman Institute. JOIN OUR EMAIL LIST FOR MORE HARTMAN IDEAS Sponsor an upcoming episode of For Heaven's Sake. Click here to learn more.

Dr. Richard Schmidt is pastor of Union Grove Baptist Church and founder of Prophecy Focus Ministries. He is the speaker on the weekly TV program, Prophecy Focus and the radio broadcast, Prophecy Unfolding. He spent 32 years in law enforcement including that of acting sheriff of Milwaukee County until his retirement. He's authored several books including- Are You Going to a Better Place--, Daniel's Gap Paul's Mystery, Tribulation to Triumph- The Olivet Discourse, Globalism- The Great World Consumption and Artificial Intelligence- Transhumanism and the De-evolution of Democracy.--As many Crosstalk listeners know, Hamas, an Islamic terror organization, launched a brutal attack on the nation of Israel on October 7th of 2023. It was called Israel's 9-11. It was the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. The barbaric slaughter of men, women and children turned the stomach of the world as Hamas carried out their rampage. --In response, the prime minister of Israel declared war. It was the first time that the Israeli Security Cabinet voted to go to war against an enemy since the Yom Kippur War of 1973.--Attacks have continued against Israel from Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. Even this morning, one year later, alarms sounded once again as Hamas launched a missile barrage against central Israel. Then, in the face of all this, anti-Israel rallies have been staged blaming Israel for causing the attack against itself on October 7th. U.N. resolutions have come against Israel and now nations are threatening an arms embargo against them.

Dr. Richard Schmidt is pastor of Union Grove Baptist Church and founder of Prophecy Focus Ministries. He is the speaker on the weekly TV program, Prophecy Focus and the radio broadcast, Prophecy Unfolding. He spent 32 years in law enforcement including that of acting sheriff of Milwaukee County until his retirement. He's authored several books including: Are You Going to a Better Place?, Daniel's Gap Paul's Mystery, Tribulation to Triumph: The Olivet Discourse, Globalism: The Great World Consumption and Artificial Intelligence: Transhumanism and the De-evolution of Democracy.As many Crosstalk listeners know, Hamas, an Islamic terror organization, launched a brutal attack on the nation of Israel on October 7th of 2023. It was called Israel's 9-11. It was the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. The barbaric slaughter of men, women and children turned the stomach of the world as Hamas carried out their rampage. In response, the prime minister of Israel declared war. It was the first time that the Israeli Security Cabinet voted to go to war against an enemy since the Yom Kippur War of 1973.Attacks have continued against Israel from Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. Even this morning, one year later, alarms sounded once again as Hamas launched a missile barrage against central Israel. Then, in the face of all this, anti-Israel rallies have been staged blaming Israel for causing the attack against itself on October 7th. U.N. resolutions have come against Israel and now nations are threatening an arms embargo against them.

Dr. Richard Schmidt is pastor of Union Grove Baptist Church and founder of Prophecy Focus Ministries. He is the speaker on the weekly TV program, Prophecy Focus and the radio broadcast, Prophecy Unfolding. He spent 32 years in law enforcement including that of acting sheriff of Milwaukee County until his retirement. He's authored several books including- Are You Going to a Better Place--, Daniel's Gap Paul's Mystery, Tribulation to Triumph- The Olivet Discourse, Globalism- The Great World Consumption and Artificial Intelligence- Transhumanism and the De-evolution of Democracy.--As many Crosstalk listeners know, Hamas, an Islamic terror organization, launched a brutal attack on the nation of Israel on October 7th of 2023. It was called Israel's 9-11. It was the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. The barbaric slaughter of men, women and children turned the stomach of the world as Hamas carried out their rampage. --In response, the prime minister of Israel declared war. It was the first time that the Israeli Security Cabinet voted to go to war against an enemy since the Yom Kippur War of 1973.--Attacks have continued against Israel from Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. Even this morning, one year later, alarms sounded once again as Hamas launched a missile barrage against central Israel. Then, in the face of all this, anti-Israel rallies have been staged blaming Israel for causing the attack against itself on October 7th. U.N. resolutions have come against Israel and now nations are threatening an arms embargo against them.

Dr. Richard Schmidt is pastor of Union Grove Baptist Church and founder of Prophecy Focus Ministries. He is the speaker on the weekly TV program, Prophecy Focus and the radio broadcast, Prophecy Unfolding. He spent 32 years in law enforcement including that of acting sheriff of Milwaukee County until his retirement. He's authored several books including: Are You Going to a Better Place?, Daniel's Gap Paul's Mystery, Tribulation to Triumph: The Olivet Discourse, Globalism: The Great World Consumption and Artificial Intelligence: Transhumanism and the De-evolution of Democracy.As many Crosstalk listeners know, Hamas, an Islamic terror organization, launched a brutal attack on the nation of Israel on October 7th of 2023. It was called Israel's 9-11. It was the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. The barbaric slaughter of men, women and children turned the stomach of the world as Hamas carried out their rampage. In response, the prime minister of Israel declared war. It was the first time that the Israeli Security Cabinet voted to go to war against an enemy since the Yom Kippur War of 1973.Attacks have continued against Israel from Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. Even this morning, one year later, alarms sounded once again as Hamas launched a missile barrage against central Israel. Then, in the face of all this, anti-Israel rallies have been staged blaming Israel for causing the attack against itself on October 7th. U.N. resolutions have come against Israel and now nations are threatening an arms embargo against them.

On October 6, 1973, the quiet of Yom Kippur was shattered as Egypt and Syria launched a surprise assault on Israel, igniting one of the most pivotal conflicts in Middle Eastern history. In this episode, we dive into the opening moments of the Yom Kippur War, focusing on Egypt's bold attack across the Suez Canal. We'll explore the careful planning behind the operation, the dramatic crossing of Egyptian troops and tanks into the Sinai Desert, and the initial Israeli response as they scrambled to defend their borders. This first day set the stage for a war that would forever change the region. Join us for a detailed, gripping narrative of this crucial moment in history.

The Burn Bag will be covering the Israel-Gaza War over the course of several episodes, sourcing multiple perspectives on the conflict. The Burn Bag does not officially endorse any views expressed by our guests, but rather brings those perspectives to you, the audience, and will continue to provide a diverse array of voices on the program. In this episode, A'ndre introduces Uri Bar-Joseph, professor emeritus at Haifa University and author of the new book Beyond the Iron Wall. Together, they delve into the security failures that led to the October 7th attacks, considering why Israel's security apparatus was caught off guard and what lessons can be drawn from historical events like the Yom Kippur War. Uri argues that Israel does not have an overarching  strategy in its War in Gaza nor with its actions in Lebanon. Uri discusses the complexities of Israel's "security lifestyle," his reactions to the recent pager attacks targeting Hezbollah, the Israeli government's perceptions of Hamas, and the broader political landscape. Uri also talks about why he believes the Israeli government is averse to political resolutions and the challenges posed by settlements in the West Bank, in addition to his criticisms of Benjamin Netanyahu's handling of the war and the broader Israeli-Palestinian relationship. This insightful conversation aims to unpack the reasons behind recent events and ponder the future of Israeli-Palestinian relations.NOTE: This episode was recorded on September 19, several days before the escalation in Southern Lebanon.

Was the US intelligence community complicit in one of the deadliest attacks on Israel in recent history? In this explosive episode of The Brian Nichols Show, we dive deep into the shadowy world of international espionage and alleged betrayal. Bruce Brill, author of "Deceit of an Ally," shares his firsthand experience as a former US intelligence operative and drops bombshell revelations about American involvement in critical moments of Israeli history. Could the same deception that nearly cost Israel everything in 1973 have played a role in the devastating October 7, 2023 attack? Studio Sponsor: Cardio Miracle - "Unlock the secret to a healthier heart, increased energy levels, and transform your cardiovascular fitness like never before.": https://www.briannicholsshow.com/heart Bruce Brill takes us behind the scenes of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, revealing how he, as a low-ranking American soldier, knew about the impending attack days in advance while Israeli intelligence remained in the dark. He exposes the existence of secret "Jew rooms" within the NSA, where information detrimental to Israel was allegedly hidden from Jewish personnel. But the story doesn't end there - Brill suggests that similar tactics may have been at play in the recent Hamas attack, raising alarming questions about the true nature of US-Israel relations. The conversation takes a startling turn as Brian and Bruce discuss the potential involvement of Mossad in high-profile American scandals. From Sean "Diddy" Combs to Jeffrey Epstein, they explore the murky waters of international intelligence operations on US soil. Could these sensational stories be just the tip of the iceberg in a much larger game of global espionage? Brill's book, "Deceit of an Ally," comes with a unique distinction - it's been reviewed and approved by the Pentagon itself. This official scrutiny lends credibility to his claims while simultaneously raising questions about what information was deemed too sensitive for public consumption. The redacted sections of his book serve as tantalizing hints at even deeper secrets lurking beneath the surface. Don't miss this riveting episode that challenges everything you thought you knew about US-Israel relations and the hidden forces shaping world events. From the Yom Kippur War to modern-day conflicts, Bruce Brill's insider perspective offers a rare glimpse into the complex and often troubling world of international intelligence. Subscribe now and prepare to have your assumptions shattered! ❤️ Order Cardio Miracle (https://www.briannicholsshow.com/heart) with code TBNS at checkout for 15% off and take a step towards better heart health and overall well-being! ☕ Elevate your morning routine with Colockum Craft Coffee (https://www.colockumcraft.coffee)! Use code BNS10 at checkout for an exclusive 10% off and experience the difference of small-batch, artisanal roasts.

I got the opportunity to talk to Dr. Joseph Schlessinger, professor at Yale and cofounder of SUGEN and Plexxikon. We talked about his experience as a captain the Israeli Army during the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War and how it affected his career as a scientist and entrepreneur. We also talked about the companies he formed and his research on tyrosine kinase. ---------------------------------------------------Thanks to the sponsors:Audible: Use my link for a 30-day free trial: http://audibletrial.com/diamondgoat Newsly: https://newsly.me promo code to receive a 1-month free premium subscription: EARLYMORNING Libysn: https://libsyn.com promo code: DGDubby Energy: https://www.dubby.ggpromo code for 10% off: DIAMONDGOATOpus Clips:  https://www.opus.pro/?via=diamondgoat----------------------------------------------------------------------------------Listen on:Podcast website: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/dg-early-morning-show--5943922Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0EuhA6WyuerHtVAqcFrFeOPodcast YT channel clips: https://www.youtube.com/@dgearlymorningshowTiktok: @dgearlymorningshowApple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dg-early-morning-show/id1575451533Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/f050b86c-1dad-4bc3-b12f-6aa5fa62438c Goodpods: https://goodpods.com/podcasts/dg-early-morning-show-211830RadioPublic: https://radiopublic.com/dg-earlymorning-show-WoML4rBreaker: https://www.breaker.audio/dg-early-morning-showReason: https://reason.fm/podcast/dg-earlymorning-show--------------------------------------Check out my other stuff:Instagram: @itzdiamondgoatTwitter: @lildiamondgoatMain YT channel: youtube.com/diamondgoatTiktok: @lildiamondgoatSoundcloud: @Lil DiamondgoatSpotify: @Lil DiamondgoatMerch store: https://diamondgoat.creator-spring.com

The fact that the Gaza War caused by the pogrom of October 7th is still going on underlines the absence of truth in the search for peace. Telling the truth about what peace will really mean and the compromises on both sides needed to end war, is something very few people are willing to do. Brown University professor Omer Bartov is one of the truth tellers on the Israeli side. A veteran of the 1973 Yom Kippur War and a renowned scholar of the Germany Army's role in the Holocaust, in this FRDH podcast Bartov speaks truth about his native country and its futile quest for security by violent occupation. Give us 53:35 to explore what Hamas's October 7th outrage has revealed about the truth of Israeli politics and society.

Fifty years after the Yom Kippur War, Israel's vaunted military and intelligence establishment again failed to protect the Jewish state. What must it do to regain its reputation and deterrence? Former Israeli deputy national-security adviser Chuck Freilich joined Bret Stephens for a conversation on his recent SAPIR article, "Can Israel's Intelligence Services Be Saved?"

Russia's forceful re-entry into the Middle Eastern arena, and the accentuated continuity of Soviet policy and methods of the 1960s and '70s, highlight the topicality of this groundbreaking study, which confirms the USSR's role in shaping Middle Eastern and global history. The Soviet-Israeli War, 1967-1973: The USSR's Military Intervention in the Egyptian-Israeli Conflict (Oxford UP, 2017) covers the peak of the USSR's direct military involvement in the Egyptian-Israeli conflict. The head-on clash between US-armed Israeli forces and some 20,000 Soviet servicemen with state-of-the-art weaponry turned the Middle East into the hottest front of the Cold War. The Soviets' success in this war of attrition paved the way for their planning and support of Egypt's cross-canal offensive in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Ginor and Remez challenge a series of long-accepted notions as to the scope, timeline and character of the Soviet intervention and overturn the conventional view that détente with the US induced Moscow to restrainthat a US-Moscow détente led to a curtailment of Egyptian ambitions to recapture of the land it lost to Israel in 1967. Between this analytical rethink and the introduction of an entirely new genre of sources-- -memoirs and other publications by Soviet veterans themselves---The Soviet-Israeli War paves the way for scholars to revisit this pivotal moment in world history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Russia's forceful re-entry into the Middle Eastern arena, and the accentuated continuity of Soviet policy and methods of the 1960s and '70s, highlight the topicality of this groundbreaking study, which confirms the USSR's role in shaping Middle Eastern and global history. The Soviet-Israeli War, 1967-1973: The USSR's Military Intervention in the Egyptian-Israeli Conflict (Oxford UP, 2017) covers the peak of the USSR's direct military involvement in the Egyptian-Israeli conflict. The head-on clash between US-armed Israeli forces and some 20,000 Soviet servicemen with state-of-the-art weaponry turned the Middle East into the hottest front of the Cold War. The Soviets' success in this war of attrition paved the way for their planning and support of Egypt's cross-canal offensive in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Ginor and Remez challenge a series of long-accepted notions as to the scope, timeline and character of the Soviet intervention and overturn the conventional view that détente with the US induced Moscow to restrainthat a US-Moscow détente led to a curtailment of Egyptian ambitions to recapture of the land it lost to Israel in 1967. Between this analytical rethink and the introduction of an entirely new genre of sources-- -memoirs and other publications by Soviet veterans themselves---The Soviet-Israeli War paves the way for scholars to revisit this pivotal moment in world history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Russia's forceful re-entry into the Middle Eastern arena, and the accentuated continuity of Soviet policy and methods of the 1960s and '70s, highlight the topicality of this groundbreaking study, which confirms the USSR's role in shaping Middle Eastern and global history. The Soviet-Israeli War, 1967-1973: The USSR's Military Intervention in the Egyptian-Israeli Conflict (Oxford UP, 2017) covers the peak of the USSR's direct military involvement in the Egyptian-Israeli conflict. The head-on clash between US-armed Israeli forces and some 20,000 Soviet servicemen with state-of-the-art weaponry turned the Middle East into the hottest front of the Cold War. The Soviets' success in this war of attrition paved the way for their planning and support of Egypt's cross-canal offensive in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Ginor and Remez challenge a series of long-accepted notions as to the scope, timeline and character of the Soviet intervention and overturn the conventional view that détente with the US induced Moscow to restrainthat a US-Moscow détente led to a curtailment of Egyptian ambitions to recapture of the land it lost to Israel in 1967. Between this analytical rethink and the introduction of an entirely new genre of sources-- -memoirs and other publications by Soviet veterans themselves---The Soviet-Israeli War paves the way for scholars to revisit this pivotal moment in world history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Russia's forceful re-entry into the Middle Eastern arena, and the accentuated continuity of Soviet policy and methods of the 1960s and '70s, highlight the topicality of this groundbreaking study, which confirms the USSR's role in shaping Middle Eastern and global history. The Soviet-Israeli War, 1967-1973: The USSR's Military Intervention in the Egyptian-Israeli Conflict (Oxford UP, 2017) covers the peak of the USSR's direct military involvement in the Egyptian-Israeli conflict. The head-on clash between US-armed Israeli forces and some 20,000 Soviet servicemen with state-of-the-art weaponry turned the Middle East into the hottest front of the Cold War. The Soviets' success in this war of attrition paved the way for their planning and support of Egypt's cross-canal offensive in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Ginor and Remez challenge a series of long-accepted notions as to the scope, timeline and character of the Soviet intervention and overturn the conventional view that détente with the US induced Moscow to restrainthat a US-Moscow détente led to a curtailment of Egyptian ambitions to recapture of the land it lost to Israel in 1967. Between this analytical rethink and the introduction of an entirely new genre of sources-- -memoirs and other publications by Soviet veterans themselves---The Soviet-Israeli War paves the way for scholars to revisit this pivotal moment in world history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/middle-eastern-studies

Russia's forceful re-entry into the Middle Eastern arena, and the accentuated continuity of Soviet policy and methods of the 1960s and '70s, highlight the topicality of this groundbreaking study, which confirms the USSR's role in shaping Middle Eastern and global history. The Soviet-Israeli War, 1967-1973: The USSR's Military Intervention in the Egyptian-Israeli Conflict (Oxford UP, 2017) covers the peak of the USSR's direct military involvement in the Egyptian-Israeli conflict. The head-on clash between US-armed Israeli forces and some 20,000 Soviet servicemen with state-of-the-art weaponry turned the Middle East into the hottest front of the Cold War. The Soviets' success in this war of attrition paved the way for their planning and support of Egypt's cross-canal offensive in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Ginor and Remez challenge a series of long-accepted notions as to the scope, timeline and character of the Soviet intervention and overturn the conventional view that détente with the US induced Moscow to restrainthat a US-Moscow détente led to a curtailment of Egyptian ambitions to recapture of the land it lost to Israel in 1967. Between this analytical rethink and the introduction of an entirely new genre of sources-- -memoirs and other publications by Soviet veterans themselves---The Soviet-Israeli War paves the way for scholars to revisit this pivotal moment in world history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Ari Singer grew up in Manhattan, New York, a child of two Holocaust survivors - whose stories are amazing in their own right. While his upbringing in New York was going fine - he was a student at Manhattan Day School - his parents decided to end their family's exile in 1973, and Ari, then 13, made the big move to a 25-year old country that was just weeks away from the start of the Yom Kippur War. Ari and his family have been tested since 1973 as well, but there is an infectious "let's just keep moving forward" attitude that Ari learned from his parents, and it's served him quite well. He's one of the most optimistic people Goel Jasper has ever met, and they spoke recently at Ari's home in Peduel.

The first Arab country to sign a peace treaty with the Jewish state was Egypt. Following the Yom Kippur War of 1973, came the Camp David Accords of 1978 which provided both countries with tangible benefits. While the peace has never been warm, it has held. But since October 7, Egypt's behavior has been distressing. What's more, there's now evidence that Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has been deceiving Israel for years – allowing weapons and ammunition to flow freely to Hamas through an elaborate network of tunnels under the border between Egypt and Gaza. Helping host Cliff May understand the now-tense relationship between Cairo and Jerusalem are his FDD colleagues Haisam Hassanein and Jonathan Schanzer.

The S&P's performance after “shock events” shows, unsurprisingly, that the ones that caused no damage to the economy had the least impact on the market, and vice versa. The oil price is steady post Iranian attacks on Israel, suggesting the latter this time.While the Yom Kippur War and Oil Embargo of 1973 strike parallels with today, the global economy is less than half as reliant on oil as it was then. There are many other suppliers apart from the Middle East, and no one is talking about an embargo today. March CPI inflation at 3.5% year/year has caused concerns that inflation is beginning to trend higher again. But the culprits driving it (auto insurance and rents) are likely to come down.This episode is presented by Mark Matthews, Head of Research Asia at Julius Baer.

Welcome to The Times of Israel's Daily Briefing, your 20-minute audio update on what's happening in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world. It is day 188 of the war with Hamas. Legal reporter Jeremy Sharon and health reporter Renee Ghert-Zand join host Amanda Borschel-Dan for today's episode. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on Wednesday that Israel will open a new land crossing into the Gaza Strip designed mainly to facilitate deliveries to Palestinians of aid from overseas or from neighboring Jordan. Sharon updates us on a High Court of Justice petition from Israeli NGOs that would go much further than that to bring humanitarian aid into the strip. A group of Canadian citizens and residents whose children and parents were murdered by Hamas during the October 7 atrocities has filed an application in the Canadian Federal Court to the country's attorney general demanding the annulment of the Canadian government's decision in March to resume funding to UNRWA, the UN agency that provides humanitarian aid to Palestinians. Sharon explains the issues at hand in this case. Ghert-Zand recently spoke with Dr. Raquel C. Gardner, director of clinical research of the Joseph Sagol Neuroscience Center at Sheba Medical Center, who is an expert in the "invisible" side-effect of war, traumatic brain injury (TBI). We hear what it is and how she is raising awareness in Israel. During a site visit to Beit Halohem, a center for rehabilitating former soldiers, Ghert-Zand viewed a ceramics exhibit and was struck by the pieces created by Amnon Sharon, who was taken captive during a fierce tank battle on the Golan Heights on October 6, 1973, the first day of the Yom Kippur War. He was held and tortured for eight months and is now bringing this experience into the open through this unique PTSD treatment. For the latest updates, please see The Times of Israel's ongoing live blog. Discussed articles include: Live blog April 11, 2024 High Court gives government six days to submit answers on Gaza humanitarian crisis Gallant says Israel plans to ‘flood Gaza with aid' via new crossing into Strip's north Relatives of October 7 victims file suit against Canadian resumption of UNRWA funding Invisible traumatic brain injuries in wounded IDF soldiers may have devastating effects Israeli survivor of captivity and torture in Syria exorcises his demons by sculpting clay THOSE WE HAVE LOST: Civilians and soldiers killed in Hamas's onslaught on Israel THOSE WE ARE MISSING: The hostages and victims whose fate is still unknown Subscribe to The Times of Israel Daily Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.  IMAGE: Masked members of the so-called 'People's Protection Committees' guard a humanitarian aid truck in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on April 3, 2024. (Said Khatib / AFP)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

“Who governs Britain?” Britain in the early 1970's was a state in crisis, and by 1974, things had never seemed bleaker. Held hostage by the Trade Unions, British industry was flailing. England's sporting record was atrocious, the economy was tanking and the prospect of a miners' strike loomed large. Violence was surging in Northern Ireland, as the IRA escalated its bombing campaigns, and the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War would send oil prices soaring, with the miners on the verge on plunging Britain into darkness. By the end of the year, the British people had voted in two general elections, had a three-day week enforced on them, and the Conservative party were on the cusp of electing their first female leader… Join Dominic and Tom for the first episode of their four-part epic on 1974, undoubtedly one of the darkest and most dramatic years in British political history… *The Rest Is History LIVE in 2024* Tom and Dominic are back onstage this summer, at Hampton Court Palace in London!  Buy your tickets here: therestishistory.com Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On Legal Docket, an employment discrimination case raises questions about when courts should get involved; on the Monday Moneybeat, the economic outlook for 2024; and on the World History Book, Israel and Egypt make a truce to end the Yom Kippur War 50 years ago. Plus, the Monday morning newsSupport The World and Everything in It today at wng.org/donate.Additional support comes from Compelled Podcast, featuring testimonies like Laura Perry - who lived as a transgender man for 12 years until Christ confronted her. Available at CompelledPodcast.com or on any podcast appFrom Free Lutheran Bible College. Students learn on campus, building a firm foundation for life in Christ through an Associate's or Bachelor's degree in Bible & Ministry. More at flbc.edu/worldAnd from the New M-Div at Southern Seminary. The strongest MDiv just got stronger! The Master of Divinity at Southern Seminary is now simplified, personalized, and incentivized. The benefits to students are greater personalization, increased specialization, and the opportunity to earn more credentials in an efficient amount of time. Learn more here.

How can we create a radically different atmosphere at American universities? Easy, says historian Niall Ferguson of Stanford University's Hoover Institution--have meaningful rules about free speech, and ensure that they're upheld. As with humans, as with institutions: It's all about incentives. Ferguson discusses the current state of free speech on American campuses and how the new University of Austin when it opens hopes to safeguard freedom of speech. The conversation shifts then to the war in the Middle East. Ferguson draws on his work on the biography of Henry Kissinger and compares the present moment for Israel to the Yom Kippur War and the role Kissinger played in 1973.