Ben Rhodes

Maybe they were going to bring Shalabi back from Iraq.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I think that they probably thought that the regime would collapse and that you'd have kind of a violent, chaotic situation like you kind of have had in places like Lebanon, which gave the Israeli government more freedom of action, which diminishes Iran as a threat.

Well, I mean, first of all, just on your tactical point, one of the things that happened on October 7th is the border with Gaza was less defended because a lot of the IDF was up in the West Bank defending the settlers who were terrorizing the Palestinians.

Right.

So to your point, it does deter.

Now, look, Israel is many things, right?

I mean, Yitzhak Rabin would be agreeing with you that we need to disarm these settlers and dismantle these settlements.

And we all know what happened there.

Exactly, right?

And so I think if you look at Israel today, there are different strains.

Now, there are some, you know, the Ben-Gavirs and Smotriches, these are the more extreme ministers in the Netanyahu government, but they're the finance minister and the national security minister, so not fringe characters.

Yeah, they're not marginalized figures by any stretch of the imagination.

No.

They're not subtle.

Every time and again, we've heard them say, we want full annexation of the West Bank.

We want to take southern Lebanon.

We want to take southern Syria.

We want Gaza to be ethnically cleansed, and we want it to settle that.

That is a very real strain in Israeli politics that has frankly been the ascendant strain in Israeli politics.