Jeremy Scahill

They also do have an ambition for a greater Israel.

And, you know, you had

the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who might as well just be the foreign minister of Israel.

He seems to think that when you become ambassador to a country, you're supposed to then become like a spokesperson for that country.

But he said on Tucker Carlson's show that it's perfectly defensible for Israel to aspire to or try to achieve a greater Israel that goes from the Mediterranean Sea all the way to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

I mean, then we're talking about moving into Iraq and elsewhere.

And so what has stood in the way of that project has been the resilience of the Palestinian people.

We can talk about Hamas, we can talk about Islamic Jihad, we can talk about armed resistance, but it's not just armed resistance.

It's that Palestinians, by simply being born, have committed an act of resistance against Israel because the entire project is meant to erase them from that land.

And so while Israel has had to increasingly fight an armed resistance, a guerrilla resistance in the form of, in this era, Hamas or Islamic Jihad, they also have had to contend with Hezbollah in Lebanon, which also joined after October 7th on the front.

But most of the groups that Israel has been fighting against

are what you'd call irregular armies.

They're militias, they're paramilitaries.

Yes, Hamas has shown an incredible ability to domestically produce its own weapons and its own rockets.

And of course, you know, managed to conduct these operations on October 7, with which really shocked the entire world with how

Effectively, they were able to dismantle this military and intelligence state that always were taught is like, you know, the most advanced in the world and the American study the Israelis and yet October 7th happened.

And you had dozens upon dozens of Israelis, many of them soldiers taken captive back to Gaza.

It was shocking, you know, to most observers in the world.

But the single greatest deterrent against Israel's expansionist agenda in terms of nation states has been Iran.

Iran is not Syria.