April 1: “The Iranians Are Operating on a House of Cards”

An interview with Phillip Smyth

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The Big Story

The meme is that Nothing Ever Happens. But is the United States finally, for real, heading toward conflict with Iran?

We noted in yesterday’s Big Story that the Iranians were responding to President Donald Trump’s remarks about bombing Iran with threats of their own. Those threats have escalated since then. On Monday, an Iranian official told the British newspaper The Telegraph that Iran’s “top commanders are being urged to launch preemptive strikes” on the U.S. air base on Diego Garcia, while Iranian state media reported that Iran’s armed forces had “readied missiles with the capability to strike U.S.-related positions.” Meanwhile, a senior adviser to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Ali Larijani, said Monday that Trump’s bombing threats could “force Iran to move toward nuclear weapons because it must defend itself.”

Even if some of those threats are empty—Diego Garcia lies at the outer edge of the effective range for Iran’s longest-range missiles, and the idea of a successful Iranian strike on the base is improbable, if not altogether fanciful—they appear to be further angering the Trump administration. A White House spokesman told The Washington Free Beacon on Monday, in response to Iran’s posturing, that “President Trump and his administration do not take kindly to military threats” and that Iran “will face serious consequences if they do not end their work to obtain nuclear weapons.” Overnight Tuesday, the United States launched a new wave of air and missile strikes against Iran’s Houthi proxies in Yemen. On Monday evening, Trump issued a fresh warning on Truth Social: “The choice for the Houthis is clear: Stop shooting at U.S. ships, and we will stop shooting at you. Otherwise, we have only just begun, and the real pain is yet to come, for both the Houthis and their sponsors in Iran.”

The United States appears to be positioning its military assets in the Middle East in preparation for a potential flare-up. As we noted yesterday, at least a half dozen B-2 Spirit bombers, capable of delivering 30,000-pound bunker busters to target Iran’s underground nuclear facilities, have been stationed at Diego Garcia, within flying distance of Iran and Yemen. According to open-source reporting on X, the United States has also been shifting antiair and antiballistic missile defenses to the Middle East. The @sentdefender account reported on X on Monday that over the past week, “more than two dozen” U.S. military transport aircraft flights originating from Osan Air Base in South Korea had landed at Isa Air Base in Bahrain. The flights were “believed” to be carrying Patriot surface-to-air missile systems “and/or” Terminal High Altitude Area Defense antiballistic missile systems. On Tuesday, the same account reported that the aircraft carrier the USS Carl Vinson and several other ships with Carrier Strike Group 1 were transiting the Sulu Sea, in the Philippines, en route to the Middle East.

To help us make sense of these developments, The Scroll spoke with Phillip Smyth, an expert on Iran and its proxies. What follows is a partial transcription of our conversation, edited for length and clarity:

The Scroll: It feels like every few years we get a new round of predictions that the United States and Iran are on the verge of conflict, if not outright war. What, if anything, feels different this time?

Phillip Smyth: The Iranians have been doing the same thing, in terms of threats combined with offers of negotiation, for 40 years. And I think we have an administration now that sees the writing on the wall. And a lot of the commentary out there is, I think, underrating the possibility of this happening because it is completely ignoring the past year of what the Israelis have pulled off and what they’ve demonstrated about the Iranians’ capabilities, or lack thereof. It’s stunning to me.

There are too many things that are aligning that tell me, OK, there’s something on the board here, and all someone needs to do is press the button and send it off. The assets being moved from South Korea to Bahrain—I have done a lot of work in Bahrain. And whenever the United States starts beefing things up there, that tends to be a very, very direct signal to Iran. There have been reports of B-2s hitting underground Houthi facilities in northern Yemen. If I wanted to signal really directly to the Iranians with their new favorite boys after Hezbollah got wiped out, aka the Houthis, well, I would do something like that.

How do you read the Iranians’ posture?

Khamenei does the same thing every time. “Hardliners” make threats, and then “moderates” offer to negotiate. It’s like how an abusive husband treats his wife. One day it’s flowers, then he hits her across the face, then he tells her he loves her, and it was a total accident, but really it’s her fault.

The Iranians test every single administration that comes in. They always do this. And it doesn’t matter if they’re losing their shirts. They’ve lost Syria. Lebanese Hezbollah has been completely smashed to smithereens in terms of its leading commanders and a lot of its skilled combatants. Now they’re trying to rework the Houthis. And oh, by the way, they’re going to keep pushing, because that’s the old Iranian technique: (1) Pretend we have a hell of a lot more assets and power than we actually have; (2) continue the bellicosity, even in terms of launching haphazard, sloppy operations. Oh let’s hire an assassin. He might be an FBI informant? Who cares, throw some cash at it. It’s about throwing so many curveballs that you just create that inkling of nervousness and fear.

But you don’t think the Trump administration is afraid?

I like to be very rational about this, but I just have this intuitive feeling based on how the administration has demonstrated it will achieve American ends, particularly in the Middle East, going back to Trump’s first administration. Take the killing of Qasem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis in 2020. Trump was willing to do that based on a good level of direct threats coming from the Iranians, a lot of bluster.

I remember talking to Lebanese politicians when I was living in Lebanon, and the chatter was, Oh my God, if [Hezbollah leader] Hassan Nasrallah gets killed, there’s going to be a car bomb going off at every Israeli embassy. People, myself included, believed that. And what was the response? A couple of medium-range ballistic missiles. In other words, not much. The Iranians are really operating on a house of cards.

I think the Trump administration sees how genuinely weak the Iranians are and are asking, “Why do this?” If you don’t want to come to the table and you don’t want to negotiate and you keep trying to play games and you keep trying to extract more—you keep trying to play some stupid version of 4D chess—why should the United States deal with that? And why should our regional allies deal with that?

And the administration is probably assuming, based on Israel’s success of the past year, that the Iranians can’t really do much about it.

Don’t get me wrong. The Houthis could still cause a lot of damage in the Red Sea. The Iranians could still cause damage in the Persian Gulf. But I think if you’re weighing this, and if the administration is weighing this … We’ve already seen that when Hassan Nasrallah was killed—the key node in the Iranian system after Soleimani and Mohandis—that the Iranians are not really going to react all that much. They’re going to sink in, keep taking heavy casualties, keep threatening, keep playing this game of bluster, and keep doing the same stuff over and over again that’s worked with other administrations.

I think the Trump administration has assessed that there’s been a sea change, particularly after Oct. 7 and how the Israelis have handled things, and also just where the region is going. Do we need to keep tolerating this tin-pot dictatorship, which is also allied with Russia and China? Why do we need to cut a deal? They’ve already demonstrated they don’t want to cut a deal, and when they do want to cut a deal, it’s always, We’ll take 3/4ths and you get 1/36th. And I think the feeling is, well, not today, bucko.

—Park MacDougald

IN THE BACK PAGES: Gadi Taub on Bibi vs. Bar

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The Rest

→Speaking of Hezbollah being smashed to smithereens, an overnight Israeli strike in Beirut’s Dahiyeh neighborhood killed Ali Mahmoud Bdeir, a senior member of Hezbollah’s Unit 3900 intelligence unit and Iran’s Quds Force, the external operations branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Bdeir’s death was confirmed by the IDF and Shin Bet on Tuesday morning. According to a report in Ynet, Bdeir played a “central role” in a “joint terror network involving both Hezbollah and Hamas operatives” that was planning an “imminent” attack on Israeli targets abroad. His successful assassination offers yet another reminder—as if one was needed—of how deeply Hezbollah, the former crown jewel of Iran’s proxy network, has been compromised by Israeli intelligence.

→Following its targeting of Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania, the Trump administration is now planning to review $9 billion in federal grants and contracts to Harvard University. The review, which was announced in a Monday letter, will be carried out by the administration’s Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism and will investigate whether Harvard failed to comply with federal civil rights regulations in combating campus antisemitism (Columbia was hit with similar allegations, while Penn is being investigated on Title IX grounds for allowing a biologically male swimmer to compete on the women’s swim team). The amount of money under review at Harvard dwarfs the federal funding targeted at Columbia and Penn—$9 billion, compared to $400 million and $175 million, respectively—but the Harvard money is only under review, not canceled or paused as it has been at the other two schools. Still, Harvard professor, and former Harvard president, Larry Summers offered a curious defense of his institution on Monday evening:

The administration also announced Monday that it was pausing $210 million in funding to Princeton University over its “racist and antisemitic policies.”

→National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and some of his senior aides have “conducted government business over personal Gmail accounts,” according to a Tuesday story in The Washington Post. According to the report, based the Post’s review of documents and “interviews with three U.S. officials,” “A senior Waltz aide used the commercial email service for highly technical conversations with colleagues at other government agencies involving sensitive military positions and powerful weapons systems relating to an ongoing conflict,” while Waltz himself had less sensitive information, like his schedule, sent to his Gmail. In The Washington Post’s view, that’s the story. In our view, however, the story is that at least three U.S. officials are leaking government correspondence to the Post in an effort to embarrass Waltz and chase him out of the administration.

→A researcher behind an influential 2020 study that claimed that Black newborns were 58% more likely to die under the care of white doctors omitted a key finding from the paper for fear that it would “undermin[e] the narrative” that medical schools needed to recruit more Black students, Emily Kopp reports for The Daily Caller. The paper, published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences during the height of the so-called Racial Reckoning, claimed that pairing Black newborns with Black, rather than white, doctors reduced Black infant mortality by as much as 58%—potentially due to anti-Black “spontaneous bias” on the part of white doctors. According to records obtained by the anti-DEI-in-medicine nonprofit Do No Harm, early drafts of the study included the “finding” that pairing white babies with white doctors also reduced white infant mortality by 22%. This was deleted by lead author Brad Greenwood, who wrote in a comment, “I’d rather not focus on this. If we’re telling the story from the perspective of saving black infants this undermines the narrative.” Presumably, Greenwood was referencing the paper’s conclusion that the “significant underrepresentation of minorities in the health professions” was a public health crisis tantamount to denying a “miracle drug” to Black babies—a “narrative” that would at the very least be complicated by the suggestion that there were countervailing public health benefits to having white doctors. The published text of the paper said that white doctors provided “little benefit” for white newborns.

In reality, both findings are likely bunk—as Kopp notes, a 2024 replication effort found that when researchers adequately controlled for factors like low birth weight, they found no evidence that “racial concordance” between doctor and newborn had any effect on mortality. The original paper’s bogus findings have nonetheless become the stuff of liberal myth. It has been covered at least 340 times in the popular press and was cited by Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in her dissent to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which banned universities and medical schools from explicitly considering race in admissions.

→In March, while announcing federal arson charges against three people for using Molotov cocktails against Tesla cars and charging stations, Attorney General Pam Bondi warned that “if you join this wave of domestic terrorism against Tesla properties, the Department of Justice will put you behind bars.” But can you charge people for “domestic terrorism” just for using Molotov cocktails? As Kyle Shideler explains in City Journal, it’s not that simple:

Per 18 USC § 2332b(g)(5), a conviction requires that the government prove that an individual accused of terrorism committed one or more predicate crimes. Arson is one of these predicate crimes, but the statute’s terrorism label applies only to arson incidents that involve government property, interstate commerce, or certain maritime or critical infrastructure facilities.

This may seem like pedantry to those on the right, who, to paraphrase Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart, know domestic terrorism when they see it. But radical leftists know the legal minutiae well and make tactical choices accordingly. They know they can commit arson and avoid federal terrorism charges, as long as they don’t target federal property.

That’s why, Shideler argues, successful prosecutions of violent far-left activists—such as California and Georgia’s state RICO cases against an antifa cell and the Stop Cop City organizers, respectively—are best handled at the state level. There, legislators can ensure that favored activist crimes (e.g., firebombing or organized but anonymous black-bloc-style mob violence and intimidation) can be counted as predicates for domestic or political terrorism charges.

Read the rest here: https://www.city-journal.org/article/tesla-arson-fire-molotov-cocktail-terrorism-state-prosecutions?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Organic_Social

→The U.S. military has eliminated lower physical fitness standards for women in combat units, according to an order from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced on Monday. The order specifies that all fitness tests for “combat arms positions” must be “sex-neutral” and that the branches may not “establish Standards that would result in any existing Service member being held to a lower standard.” The military has struggled with fitness requirements since 2015, when it first opened all combat roles to women, and as the Obama and Biden administrations sought to recruit and promote more female officers. In 2019, the U.S. Army replaced its old fitness test, which emphasized push-ups and sit-ups, with the gender-neutral Army Combat Fitness Test, which introduced strength-based exercises such as trap-bar deadlifts, medicine-ball throws, and weighted carries and drags. But only about 52% of enlisted women in the Army were able to pass the ACFT, compared to 92% of enlisted men, and in 2022, the Army adopted a separate, lower set of standards for women and older troops.

→In yesterday’s edition, we noted that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was already regretting his new pick for Shin Bet chief, Vice Admiral Eli Sharvit. So we don’t have much to say about this Tuesday headline in The Times of Israel other than “lol”:

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Netanyahu Takes On Israel’s Deep State

The firing of domestic security chief Ronen Bar is the latest battle in the war at home

by Gadi Taub

The fight against what Prime Minister Netanyahu has taken to calling Israel’s “deep state" is now in full swing. It reached a climax on Thursday, March 20, late in the evening, when the cabinet unanimously voted to dismiss Ronen Bar, the head of the Shin Bet—the country’s domestic security service. The termination is to take effect on the earlier of two dates: April 10, or when a replacement is found. Bar is not going down without a fight, however, and has retaliated by stepping up an investigation against the prime minister’s staff.

Bar’s removal is long overdue. For starters, he is probably the person most directly responsible for the disaster of Oct. 7. Gaza is the Shin Bet’s intelligence turf, and so Bar’s advice to refrain from raising the level of alert on the night before the massacre was naturally accepted by the IDF. All remained quiet on the Gaza front as dawn broke on that Sabbath. So quiet, says former Shin Bet operative Yizhar David, who was privy to some of the relevant information, that Mohammed Deif, who commanded the invasion, postponed the attack for fear that Israel’s apparent total lack of preparation might well be a trap.

But there was no trap. Despite the accumulating signs of an impending assault nobody alerted the soldiers, sleeping soundly in their beds, or the party goers still dancing as the sun was rising at the Nova Festival, or those on guard duty at the nearby kibbutzim. The handful of tanks at the theater, the soldiers stationed in bases around the fence, and the volunteers on security duty in the adjoining kibbutzim could have stopped or at least drastically curtailed the invasion had they only been told to stay put. Bar’s advice excluded any such preparations. The theater was sedated, rather than alert.

Ever since Oct. 7 Israelis have been asking themselves: Why? Sure, hindsight is always 20-20. But why, despite the accumulating indications, was the level of alert not raised, if only to be on the safe side? And why, Israelis also ask, did the brass who were concerned enough to hold late night consultations, not wake up the minister of defense and the prime minister? Since both Bar and the then IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevy have remained consistently silent on this, conspiracy theories about acts of betrayal abound.

Now, pieces of the puzzle are gradually surfacing, and we may finally have a plausible explanation, or a beginning of one, for Israel’s startling inaction. And that explanation, as we shall see, is damning to Bar in the extreme. Which may explain why, despite his colossal failure, he is fighting to stay at his job where he can continue to control the disclosure of much of the evidence against him.

The cabinet’s decision to dismiss Bar, however, did not cite his failure on the night preceding the disaster. It cited his boss’s lack of confidence in him. Netanyahu himself made sure the move was publicly understood that way. In a video released on his social media accounts two days after the cabinet’s decision, the prime minister explained that distrust began with Bar’s insubordination in the wee hours of Oct. 7, when he decided to keep both the minister of defense and the prime minister out of the decision-making process.

This was not an isolated event. This was and still is Bar’s MO. He acts as if Israel’s internal secret service is not accountable to anyone but himself, as if it were free to operate in the shadows outside the control and oversight of Israel’s elected government. He displayed the same contemptuous spirit of insubordination when he ignored a summons by the cabinet to answer questions at the March 20 meeting that decided the future of his career. Instead, he sent a letter in which he point-blank refused to recognize the cabinet’s authority to dismiss him. The decision to remove him, he said in the letter, was tinged with ulterior motives—an allusion to the ongoing investigation into alleged ties with Qatar among Netanyahu's staff, which has so far produced no convincing evidence, as far as we know, and appears to have nothing to do with Netanyahu himself.

In other words, not only does Bar feel he is not accountable to the civil authorities, he also seems to believe that they instead should be accountable to him and that he can bully them as he pleases with contrived investigations. Bar added in his letter that he will not leave his job, and will only lay out his responses to the cabinet's concerns before "the proper forum" and according to what the “authorized judicial bodies” will decide.

Those less familiar with the surreal world of Israel's juristocracy may rightly wonder what that "proper forum" and who the "authorized judicial bodies” might be. The law, in point of fact, is very clear about the forum which holds the authority to dismiss the head of Shin Bet. The 2002 law which governs the service states in no uncertain terms that "the service is subject to the authority of the government" (Clause 4a), that "the prime minister is in charge of the service on behalf of the government" (Clause 4b) and also that "the government has the authority to terminate the tenure of the head of the service before the end of his term" (Clause 3c). In the debates leading to the final formulation of this law, Shin Bet representatives strongly objected to this language, but the legislators, and the attorney general at the time, Menachem Mazuz, insisted on strong wording, adding that the cabinet is not required to explain its reasons for the dismissal. So, clearly, the "proper forum" has already convened, and its decision was unanimous.

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So why do we have a so-called crisis? The answer is that Israel has a supergovernment that exists above our elected government in the form of a hyperactivist Supreme Court, that can overrule all and any action by the executive and legislature. Bar was instrumental in protecting the Supreme Court from the now-defunct judicial reform which attempted to limit its power. Along with other heads of security services, he refused to state that in case of a constitutional crisis, if the court moved to strike down the reform, he would abide by the law and obey the cabinet. The fear of a coup was real and it played a major role in defeating the reform. Bar now apparently expects the court to reciprocate.

Bar’s expectation is not primarily a matter of personal obligation, though. Rather, it is because Bar's insubordination and the court's boundless authority draw on the same spirit of contempt for electoral politics, and are part of the same bureaucratic power structure.

There is a direct line connecting Bar's insubordination when he helped undermine the government's judicial reform before Oct. 7, his disregard for the chain of command in the early hours of Oct. 7 when he did not wake the prime minister, and his current defiance of the civil authority to which the Shin Bet is subordinate by law. Bar, like many of his fellow progressive government employees, and many in the press and academia, has convinced himself he is here to save us Israelis from ourselves. In Bar, Israel's woke elites have found an important ally: a chief of the internal secret service, able to act in the gray areas beyond the law, willing to help protect them—indeed, all of us—from the menace of democratic politics. This mission has taken precedence over Bar's official task: protecting us from subversion and terrorism.

Bar may or may not be right to assume that the court will side with him against the cabinet and attempt to force the prime minister to retain him. It has already issued an intermediary injunction—with no basis whatever in the law—to "freeze" the cabinet's decision. But Bar, most probably, is wrong to believe this will save him. Because his MO belongs to the pre-Oct. 7 world, and that world is now gone for good.

Netanyahu seems to understand this, and consequently has proceeded with interviewing candidates for Bar's job. The video in which Netanyahu explained the reasons for the Shin Bet chief’s dismissal began with a clear declaration: "Ronen Bar will not remain head of Shabak" (the Hebrew acronym for the Shin Bet). The prime minister would never have chosen such a defiant path two years ago during the fight over the judicial reform.

In the video, Netanyahu also directly tackled Bar’s charge that there are ulterior motives behind his dismissal. The prime minister argued, based on the timeline, that the move to dismiss Bar was set in motion before the Qatar investigation began and that, in fact, the opposite of Bar's accusation is true: The dismissal was not designed to stop the investigation (which indeed it won’t). Rather the investigation was launched to preempt the dismissal. In other words, Bar has taken a page from James Comey's Russian collusion playbook: He is trying to protect himself by tying his chief's hand with a contrived investigation.

For now the investigation is formally directed only against the prime minister’s staff—much like the early days of the Russia hoax. But after Netanyahu interviewed and announced his candidate to head the Shin Bet, Bar pushed back by escalating his Qatar investigation, with a help from Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara—herself is next in line to be dismissed. Jonathan Urich, Netanyahu's close aide, was arrested on March 31, and Netanyahu himself was whisked out of the court room where he was testifying in his own trial, for questioning. The allegations against Urich, says lawyer and retired senior police officer Avi Weiss, are based on no law (Israel has no equivalent to the Foreign Agents Registration Act in the U.S.), and there is no accusation of espionage. Moreover, he says, Bar and Baharav-Miara have an obvious conflict of interest. Both are working to pressure the government that is ousting them from their positions.

That’s certainly how Netanyahu's party sees it. In a strongly worded statement, the Likud accused “the prosecution and the head of the Shin Bet” of conducting “sham investigations in secrecy under a gag order, aiming to prevent the dismissal of the Shin Bet chief.” The goal, the statement added, “is to carry out a coup through arrest warrants” and “replace the will of the people with the rule of bureaucrats.”

Democracies should not need reminders of how dangerous secret services can be to democratic institutions. Journalist Amit Segal recently exposed a directive from Bar to spy on the Israeli police force in order to track "the spread of Kahanism into law enforcement institutions." The late Meir Kahane’s Kach party is banned in Israel and is designated as a foreign terrorist organization in the U.S. Since the minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is in charge of the police, is routinely labeled a Kahanist, what the directive means in practice is that Bar is spying, with no probable cause, on a member of the cabinet to which he is supposed to answer, and intimidating police personnel into insubordination, by insinuating that adherence to the minister's directives could be considered possible "Kahanism." This behavior has raised questions about whether it is a good idea for Netanyahu's personal bodyguard to remain under Bar's command. Such concerns were further exacerbated when Nadav Argaman, Bar's predecessor, threatened to reveal information from private conversations with Netanyahu, should he, Argaman, reach the conclusion that the prime minister has decided "to break the law" (by which he seems to mean, defy the Supreme Court in the matter of Bar's dismissal).

Since the well-financed, permanent anti-Netanyahu protest movement is part of the country’s network of unelected elite power centers, it adopted Bar’s “ulterior motives” narrative from the get-go. A recent rally featured a Netanyahu look-alike holding a Qatari flag, kneeling before a man clad in traditional Qatari garb, who is handing him fake money. But that was the least surreal part of the wave of demonstrations in support of Bar's insubordination in the name of democracy. Apparently, the protesters, the left, and much of the press want to save democracy by adopting the totalitarian model where politicians answer to the secret police instead of wielding authority over it.

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Absurd as it may sound, elevating the secret police above electoral politics in the name of democracy stems from the very heart of our woke elite's ethos. Appointed civil servants imagine themselves the responsible adults in the room, boldly stepping forward to protect "the public interest" from what the public believes to be its interest—and from the elected officials the public has chosen to carry out its will.

These elites—across the security establishment, the bureaucracy, the media, academia, and the business world—have succeeded once so far in their bid to subdue the governing majority coalition and defeat its plan for judicial reform. What the protest movement, Bar, the court and the press are trying to do now, is resurrect that successful antireform coalition. Their drive is not surprising, having witnessed their extra-electoral power structure during that struggle in the 10 months that preceded Oct. 7.

But the severity of the national disaster on that day revealed the hollowness and recklessness of these elites. For Oct. 7 was not just an intelligence and operational failure of the armed forces. It was also an indictment of the antireform strategy: the scorched earth tactics that played fast and loose with our security by arranging mass walkouts of army reservists, as if we were not a nation surrounded by terrorists who clamor daily for our blood. Not least, it discredited the idea that civil servants were merely expert "gatekeepers," as they have come to describe themselves, guarding the public interest against the excesses of ignorant and corrupt politicians.

Bar proved to be the very opposite of the responsible adult in the room. The pretense that he is saving us from ourselves rings hollow after he failed at his actual job—protecting us from our enemies. In fact, there is a causal link here: Bar failed to protect us from our enemies precisely because he was too busy saving us from ourselves.

Behind Bar's self-image as a “gatekeeper” is a worldview, shared by the rest of Israel's woke elites, which consists of two complementary elements: an almost religious attachment to the "peace process" and the so-called “two-state solution," and a concurrent contempt for democracy which inherently distrusts the patriotic masses and the politicians they elect. The elites, our betters, are here to save the prospect of peace from the warmongering jingoistic hordes and their irresponsible political representatives.

The consequences of this view of Israel’s internal politics hardly stops at Israel’s borders, though—the result being a complete inversion of the observable realities of our region. Bar imagines our politicians as reckless, dangerous hawks, which also more or less requires him to imagine Hamas to be strategically moving to greater pragmatic moderation. He thinks of our government as wild and irrational, a view that is premised on imagining Hamas leaders as rational actors susceptible to economic incentives. Therefore, Bar could not imagine them starting a war, and his assessments in the months preceding the war consistently reflected that bias, even as he was haunted by the specter of Israel's government starting one.

In other words, our chief of the internal secret service had everything exactly backwards. In the face of accumulating intelligence, Ronen Bar and Herzi Halevy were busy saving us from ourselves, not from Hamas. They were eager to prevent an escalation which they thought could be triggered by "miscalculation" on the part of their civil bosses. "Miscalculation" has become their watchword to refer to the danger of overreaction to raw intelligence data, which may plunge us all into a war they assumed nobody wanted—save perhaps those evil messianic, Kahanist, proto-fascists in our own cabinet.

Based on this bias, says former Shin Bet officer Yizhar David, the late-night meetings Bar convened at Shin Bet headquarters concluded that Hamas was raising its own level of readiness out of fear of an impending Israeli attack. It’s not hard to see why a self-appointed gatekeeper would want to keep such information out of the wrong hands. Why let a deplorable, warmongering prime minister interfere with the efforts by responsible adults to delicately defuse a possible "miscalculation"?

And here, says David, lies the answer to the most nagging question of all: Why did the chiefs not raise the level of alert, or at least quietly inform the soldiers of the possibility, however remote, of impending danger? Astoundingly Bar's message to the IDF was a recommendation to leave the theater quiet, lest raising the level of alert would reinforce Hamas' fear of an imminent attack and lead to accidental escalation. They kept the raw intelligence from the IDF units around the fence for the same reason they kept it away from the cabinet: to prevent escalation.

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Bar's bid to stay on as head of Shin Bet, in defiance of the law and the cabinet, and despite his colossal failure, is wholly reliant on the antireform coalition of gatekeepers. But not only has the gatekeeping philosophy taken a massive hit, the constellation that composed it is also falling apart: the flow of money to the protest movement from the Biden administration has been replaced by the new administration's inquiry into the use of this money by the anti-Netanyahu forces; the widening of Netanyahu's wartime coalition has made this government more stable; the need a wartime prime minister has for a head of Shin Bet he can trust is obvious to most Israelis; there's a new IDF chief of staff, general Eyal Zamir, and a new chief of police who will not let the anti-Netanyahu permanent protest disrupt public life in the middle of a war. And here is one more sign of the new times: Nadav Argaman who threatened Netanyahu on TV with disclosing secret information has been summoned by the police for questioning on suspicion of attempted extortion.

There is still the confrontational, all-powerful attorney general, Gali Baharav-Miara, and, of course, the Supreme Court. They may succeed in fomenting more chaos, but they can't rewind the clock to the pre-Oct. 7 status quo. Baharav-Miara is herself operating on borrowed time, and even the Supreme Court, the most important bastion of the juristocracy, is now being challenged—in a minor way, to be sure, but still symbolically important. The Knesset has passed a law that changes the composition of the committee that appoints judges, slightly augmenting the power of elected politicians at the expense of the lawyers' guild.

Perhaps more important than all these changes is Netanyahu's decision to lead the charge against the deep state. In doing so, he is now attempting to correct what was perhaps the greatest miscalculation of his long political career. For years he thought that he could make do with the defiant upper echelons of the security establishment, including insubordinate heads of security services, and with the imperial Supreme Court, with its juristocratic auxiliaries in the executive, including a politicized prosecution. That calculation proved detrimental to Israel's democracy, to the right's ability to govern, and to Netanyahu's personal fate as a target of a politically weaponized criminal prosecution. He has now made the decision to tackle the problem at its roots, rather than skirmishing with the tentacles of the deep state over specific issues on an ad hoc basis.

Whether Netanyahu will succeed in reestablishing democratic sovereignty in Israel is dependent, to a large extent, on the outcome of the war. As things now stand, victory over the Iranian axis of evil has become the precondition for any new birth of freedom for Israel's citizens.