Trita Parsi

I think it was Obama and Romney.

And the ABC anchor asked him, Iran is the top US national security.

And I was like, how is this just accepted as fact?

But this is something the Israelis have been pushing for since 1994 or so.

But the Israelis themselves internally were not necessarily saying this.

Efraim Halevi, Pardo, Meir Dagan, three consecutive heads of the Mossad openly said, Iran is not an existential threat.

Iran is a threat, but it's not an existential threat.

Ehud Barak, former prime minister, defense minister, already back then said, to say that Iran is an existential threat is to diminish Israel's own power.

But it was a very effective talking point to push the United States towards believing that the United States needs to attack Iran or sanction Iran, or just treat it as a top national security threat because it is an existential threat.

And in New York Times and all of these papers,

It's just as religion repeated that the Israelis view Iran as an existential threat.

Never question as to whether that is really how they see it.

I wrote my dissertation on Iranian-Israeli relations, and I spent some time in Iran and in Israel interviewing top officials about this issue.

I wanted to get to the heart of the matter.

I didn't want to rely on secondary documents, and I couldn't get access to the primary documents.

Of course, they don't have that type of transparency, so I needed to sit down with them.

And one thing that always came through with my interviews with the Israelis, I had been in Iran a couple of weeks earlier, so almost every door in Israel was open for me, because in my email or letter, I told them, I just came from Iran.

I spent time interviewing top officials about Israel.

Do you have time to chat?

And they almost all did, including very senior people, including people in the intelligence community.