Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:10] Speaker B: Welcome back to Going Underground, broadcasting all around the world from the UAE in the Gulf. After yesterday's wrapping up of a crucial Shanghai cooperation meeting in Kyrgyzstan with foreign ministers including from Iran and nuclear Russia, China, Pakistan and India. Talks took place amidst continued British, Western European and American backed Israeli genocide in Gaza and Lebanon. And of course, as this region's U.S. bases come under daily attack and Iran's allies in Yemen threaten Saudi exports through the Red Sea, the American people also learned that the Epstein War has cost not just upwards of $100 billion, but hundreds of casualties. With nearly 20 coffins publicly announced returning to the homeland, it's actually a third of a century since UK us, EU armed Israelis launched its week long Operation Accountability, killing, wounding or displacing upwards of 300,000 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians. Today, for all we know, Trump, who caved to iran in his MoU, might be on the phone with Hezbollah after he revealed he was open to negotiation in front of Lebanon's titular President Aoun. And Netanyahu has been mysteriously absent from D.C. at least until his asset, the late Senator Lindsey Graham is buried in London, is a veteran Israeli peace negotiator who served in the Israeli Prime Minister's office, President of the US Middle East Project, Daniel Levy. Thank you so much, Daniel, for coming back on Going Underground. Know whether Pickaxe Mountain has been destroyed or what sort of munitions Trump has been using. But I suppose I got to ask you right at the beginning, the trillion dollar question.
What do you think? And this might be being asked by people filling their cars up with petrol, whether you're in Bangalore or Idaho, Lebanon or Gaza, whether you're at a funeral, what is the state of the Trump Netanyahu relationship?
[00:01:56] Speaker A: First I just have to say it's nice to be back with you. But also acknowledge inflation. It used to be the $65,000 question or something like that. It's now the trillion dollar question. This is the era of Trump and SpaceX IPOs, clearly.
But when you're asking that question about the state of the Trump Netanyahu relationship, where we are is that I think there is frustration on the part of the American president. That's clear. We've seen some of the verbal jousting, some of the.
[00:02:33] Speaker B: You accept that you think it's not fair, sir, that.
[00:02:37] Speaker A: Well, here's what I think. I think it doesn't matter very much. What matters is policy.
And to what extent is the US still tethered to Israeli policy where it matters? Frustration is not policy. Expletives are not policy.
Your vice president, president saying, hey, they're running an intel operation, a co ops info operation against me. Who? What do they think they can do? Kill everyone in the region to peace.
And yet you've done a deal between them and Lebanon which serves Israel's ongoing occupation of Lebanon.
Israel is still allowed to get away with murder in the literal sense every day in Gaza. Israel does as it pleases in the west bank, and you are still fighting against Iran in a war which Israel initiated for you. So, yes, things are not going swimmingly. Things are particularly questionable when it comes to the fact that Israel's going to an election. And will Trump support Netanyahu in that election?
Undoubtedly. The Americans signed an MOU with Iran that Israel did not like. Israel's clearly losing the support of public opinion in the us There is a war inside the MAGA camp. But when you stack those things up alongside the long, long tail of decades of an American policy that has been so deferential and marinated in Israel's interests, in what Israel wants you to do, then we've still got an awfully long way to go to break that Gordian knot.
[00:04:21] Speaker B: So, so much there, Daniel. I mean, just on the Lebanon issue, since the titular Lebanese leader, not really the leader of Lebanon arguably was in Washington, do you believe that the deal was actually done by the United States to destroy the article? One of the mou, which had previously been signed by Trump in Versailles as part of the MoU with Iran, was Israel behind the scenes there.
[00:04:56] Speaker A: So you've got one deal done with Iran.
Days later, you have announced in Washington the Lebanese government, apparently so important that it restores its sovereignty vis a vis Iran, that it hands over its sovereignty to Israel. So you have the deal between Israel and Lebanon, which it's an unbelievable text, a government signing off, that another state can continue to occupy its territory until it meets conditions. And who's the judge and jury on whether the conditions are met? The state that's occupying your territory. So that's what was agreed. And let's understand this in a very particular context. Israel didn't like the MOU with Iran. Israel was trying to undermine that MOU with Iran.
The deal done with Lebanon, the B team in Washington, if you like, there's one team doing the MOU with Iran trying to get an end to that war. There's another team that didn't like the mou, was looking at ways around it, was trying to still be Israel's guys in Washington. So that second deal with, with Lebanon, I think played, played a Significant, not a unique, not an exclusive, but a significant role in reminding the Iranians that the Americans weren't serious when it came to what they signed in the MoU. You've now in the last days had the titular, as you called him, Lebanese President Joseph Aoun visiting Washington. And there's this hullabaloo around Israel withdrawing from these so called pilot zones, if it indeed sees through that tiny withdrawal in southern Lebanon. But the Israelis have turned around and told us these are outside the security zone we've taken anyway, these were irrelevant. We only took these tin areas to give them back. So it's a bit of a joke. The Lebanese are trying to say, hey, this is the beginning of something. The Israelis are being very clear. We are maintaining that occupation. So this was one of the building blocks to undo the mou. There were others.
[00:06:59] Speaker B: Yeah. You would have done a better job than the Lebanese negotiators over that plan.
Actually, actually come to me, low bar, low bar. Afshin, actually on the MoU, in fairness, if you were negotiating still as you did for the Israelis, what did you make of the JD Vance MOU that was drawn up in Islamabad? In any case, weren't you shocked that it gave Iran the right over the Strait of Hormuz, that it gave Lebanon sovereignty, that it gave Iran sovereignty?
Or is that not the way to look at the mou? It wasn't really a good faith memorandum understanding in the first place.
[00:07:45] Speaker A: Well, I think that's a, I think it's a really interesting question. I think the MOU is a not unreasonable reflection of the respective balance of power coming out of a war that the US and Israel initiated where the US got very frustrated.
The outcome that they had envisaged did not come about.
And so that MOU I think gave a basis on which not only to end that US Israel war against Iran, but also to build something different. The problem with it, the problems with it are manyfold.
But what you have is a paper of headlines and if there was an understanding of on the US side what they had committed to and a good faith seriousness of purpose in seeing this through and in saying now we're going to expand on this, we're going to put the details on there, then maybe this was the beginning of something. But that's not what we've seen across any of the fronts in which people who aren't versed in this material have been sent to negotiate on behalf of the United States, have reached these headline agreements. And then it's been all about the interpretation comes down to the Relationships of power. So in Gaza it's a terrible agreement. Israel has the power and Israel has continued and it occupies more of Gaza than when that agreement settlement, Gaza is not in the mou. But I'm saying if you look at the different agreements that the US has reached, because this is similar to the 20 point Gaza plan in some ways, what I'm saying is that these agreements lack seriousness and detail.
So the JCPOA, the original Iran nuclear agreement between the P5 1 and Iran, that's 150 odd pages with the annexes. This was two pages. You need to fill out that detail. And so what I'm saying is it comes down to is there a relationship of power in any given situation, which means that the text on paper can then be turned into something that the more powerful party seizes and uses to its benefit. In the Iran US situation, I don't think the Americans were willing to follow through what they had agreed with Iran.
They couldn't impose it on Iran because there is a different power equation there. And therefore when the Iranians saw.
But what was written in the MoU in Article 5, for instance, and Article 5 reads, upon signing, Iran will make arrangements for the safe passage of commercial vessels through Hormuz. I'm paraphrasing, Iran runs. The Americans said, well then the Americans said, no Whig. And this is as far as the Iranians. And I think anyone who objectively reads this text would say, wait a minute, the Americans then creating this passageway hugging the coast of Oman, insisting that vessels use that passageway. That's not what's in Article 5. Clearly what America did between Israel and Lebanon is an abrogation of Article 1.
The absence of unfreezing of the assets I think violates Article 10 or 11.
So you have these series of things which confirmed to the Iranians that America was not serious. And then you begin to get back into this escalatory pattern. And I think that that comes from a place where there was enough pushback within the U.S. system to that MOU that Vance took the lead in reaching closure on.
There was frustration with where things had gone. And so there was this, let's have another go at it. Let's see if we can create the circumstances for an Iranian capitulation by resuming the military efforts that we didn't do before. Of course Israel was encouraging that was feeding into that. Israel knows how also to deploy intel, whether real or cooked. So suddenly we hear news stories about Iranian assassination attempts on Trump. They know that's a great way of pulling Trump to your side, they deployed this thing about centrifuges being moved for uranium enrichment to Pickax Mountain, which you've mentioned already.
And so, unfortunately, in this current configuration, it comes down to one person, the unpredictability, the incoherence, the lack of strategy and the ability to pull in your direction a President Trump, even if he's been burned already by this war, he gets pulled back to the fire. Now, it's interesting that Israel's not part thus far at the moment that we are talking Afshin of this resumed escalation. Is that because Trump still wants to control the escalation? And once Israel comes in, Israel has a tendency to try and take things up the escalatory ladder where America perhaps didn't want to go. Is it because Trump doesn't want to be quite so exposed to the accusation that this is an Israeli war, not an American war? Israel first versus America first.
[00:13:05] Speaker B: Let's be Daniel. Daniel Levy, I'll stop you there. More from the former Israeli peace negotiator under Israeli Prime Minister Zitzhak Rabin in Ehud Barak after this break.
Welcome back to GOING underground. I'm still here with Daniel Levy, president of the US Middle East Project and former Israeli peace negotiator under Israeli Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak.
You were talking about pushback in the American system. I think that's a euphemism for the Israel lobby. But you're also talking about Israel's role.
One symptom perhaps that the whole thing is theater, is that and it relates to what you were saying about why Israel has been relatively quiet in the Gulf. The Finance minister Smotrich said let the US do things. What did you make of the fact that he said let the Americans deal with Iran, not Israel?
[00:14:04] Speaker A: Well, there's something remarkable, isn't there, about this current Israeli government, which is they talk in plain, transparent language about their actual intentions. So so much of the story of the last years has been if you read between the lines, if you look at the evidence on the ground, then clearly this is what Israel's trying to do. You don't even have to do that anymore. You just say, well, let me quote this senior Israeli figure to you. And then you get the most damning evidence when it comes to the genocidal actions in Gaza, when it comes to Israel's intentions vis a vis the Palestinians, and also on something like this. So the finance minister, Pet Salad Smotrich, has turned around and said, this is good. Let America fight this war. And I think some Americans have turned around and said, well, thank you for the clarity, Mr. Finance Minister. Now we at least know this is what we're good for.
We're supposed to fight your wars for you. I don't want to though get overly narrow on this because Smotresh doesn't necessarily, he speaks for a cohort in that system.
But I think if you go beyond what Smotrich represents, then I do think the Israeli system and the Israeli Prime Minister with his own political needs in what is already an election campaign, I think they are looking at this and saying is this another American escalation which is going to be short lived and then they're going to be back telling us you're not allowed to bomb, there's a ceasefire, we're into a deal making space, or is this going to be something that moves closer to the direction Israel wants to take this war in? And I think there's the American calculation of Israel's involvement at this stage, there's the Iranian calculation and then there's the Israeli calculation. And I think what the Israeli side wants to know before they get involved again is are the Americans going to show more resilience, more longevity, more a higher pain threshold this time around and then it's worth us getting stuck in again. And I think the answer to that is not yet known. There's also the political question, can Netanyahu get the meeting with Trump?
Can Netanyahu get that backing from Trump again? Remember this is an Israeli Prime Minister who in the first 13 months of the second Trump term had seven face to face meetings with the President, but the last was in February. So in the several months that they've been in a war together, they have not met face to face. Netanyahu desperately does not want this to be the cold shower that Zelenskyy received in Washington in February 2025. But he desperately trump back onside in the war in the election campaign and he wants that meeting at the Lindsey Graham funeral.
[00:16:46] Speaker B: Yeah, there's been flip flopping on whether there's an Oval Office meeting as regards NETANYAHU Coming to D.C. for the Lindsey Graham funeral. If the pain threshold is suitably high, what about it personally for J.D. vance? Unless I don't understand what's going on, it does appear that JD Vance really believes in certain things, certain concepts, certain political geopolitical concepts about America.
Do you think Vance is going to pay a big price for his comments for revealing Israel's sabotage attempts against a deal with Iran? And how do you think he lives in Washington knowing how Much of the lobby despises him.
[00:17:34] Speaker A: This is the fascinating thing, right?
We all assume, we have no reason not to, that Vice President J.D. vance has ambitions to go one level higher in the political office that he holds.
We all assume that one of his main contenders, if there is indeed a Republican primary for the 28 election, that one of his main contenders will be Secretary of State National Security Adviser Marco Rubio. Right? So that's the world in which we're all assuming we are operating. So the fascinating thing for me is that J.D. vance clearly sees.
He's clearly made a political calculation. He sees political advantage in a Republican political setting in taking these positions vis a vis Israel. This isn't, you know, there may well be an ideological conviction here, but he is not saying, look, so much for my political ambitions. I don't care whether I'm well placed to be president. If I say this or not, this is the Hill I'm going to die on. I don't believe that for one moment. I believe that J.D. vance is making a political calculation, that this will help him. And that, to me, is an absolute sea change in American politics. Almost irrespective of whether it comes off or not.
The fact that a leading Republican contender for the presidency has said, this is how I'm going to approach trying to get the nomination, this is going to be one of the building blocks for my candidacy tells us so much about the shift in the American political scene when it comes to Israel. We know, and that's happening on the Republican MAGA side. We know on the Democrat side that there is this contestation between those who say, listen to our voters. Listen to why Kamala Harris lost, why people weren't mobilized, enthused. One of those reasons was our appalling position on Gaza. We have to do better. We have to change. And there are others who are saying, yeah, but we're not actually going to change. Can we just pretend that we care and get on with policy as usual? So that's where Rahm Emanuel comes in, visits Israel, does a speech about the 23 state solution, pretends that the only problem here is Netanyahu. Netanyahu and pretends he's listening to voters, but he tries to keep America actually in lockstep with the lobby. All this is going to play out. What I'm saying is we are in unprecedented terrain when it comes to Israel in the American political debate. And at the same time, do not underestimate the capacity that the lobby still has to try and sway things in its favor, whether that's independent campaign expenditure. Given how money can play a role in American politics, given, given whether that is how deeply embedded in Israeli narratives American media and politics is.
There's so much that they still have going for them, but it is game on, no doubt about it.
[00:20:33] Speaker B: So assuming J.D. vance's safety, rare quasi optimism from you, Daniel Levy. I mean, I do want to get onto Iran, but the corollary to that is that's the end of the Greater Israel Project, because it could only have ever been supported by it could only have happened with the backing of the United States and a new demographic, a new sea change, as you call it in American politics, means that's the end of the kind of thing Mike Huckabee, the American ambassador to Israel at the moment, talks about.
[00:21:09] Speaker A: So, not to ruin the optimism, but I'm going to slightly challenge that because, yes, Israel cannot hold down or cannot achieve that primacy. And Greater Israel is territorial to our
[00:21:25] Speaker B: audience, that's invading Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and I don't know how far it goes. Iraq.
[00:21:32] Speaker A: Well, here I want to draw an important distinction when it comes to the territorial component. This is primarily about permanently displacing and ensuring that there is no Palestinian territory. It's a territorial Greater Israel that focuses on Palestine.
Beyond that, though, there is the the Greater Israel Project, which is where does Israel's writ extend to? Where does Israel's dominion, Where does Israel's capacity to shape and drive events? Where does Israel's primacy extend to? And that, I think, is a much bigger regional project. Now, you're right to point out that not only today, but historically, there have been those in the Zionist movement not insignificant figures and those in today's Israeli government, not insignificant figures who see territorial Greater Israel as from the Nile to the Euphrates. Okay, I don't think that is the beating heart of the Israeli political gravity here. I think that is about the permanent replacement, displacement, eradication of a Palestinian national collective realizing its rights.
Interestingly, Netanyahu harked back to some of these components in a speech just a few days ago where so the founder of part of Greater Israel was the revisionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky. I'm not going to do a long history of Zionism. He's important because so many of today's figures kind of lean on that ideology. That ideology included Greater Israel. That ideology included something called the Iron Wall against an iron fist, against all of Israel's neighbors. And Netanyahu talked about that, saying the wall is dynamic. It moves from theater to theater, including these security buffer Zones. So to go to your question, can you do any of that without America? Can you succeed in that? I think it has already hit overreach. I don't think you can without America. I think it's already proved its limitations in this war against Iran.
But one thing that we might just want to keep in the back of our minds is that perhaps Israeli leaders are saying, you know what, we can't keep America doing our bidding indefinitely. We're losing that public. America's not the power it was. Also, we don't live in a unipolar world of American preponderance, preeminence, primacy anymore. So let's use American power to tilt things as much in our favor while it's still there. If we can do that, to create chaos in Iran still, if we can do that, to push as many of the regional states into our orbit as possible, then maybe we can manage significant parts of this Greater Israel project even after America is no longer there to do our bidding. That's being attempted.
I don't think it's going to work. I think it holds great potential danger for Israel as well. But I think we should understand that that might be some of what we're
[00:24:41] Speaker B: seeing today and for the Iranian side, because we haven't really been talking about them. Do you think given that context, if you were advising their government, I mean, they presumably are looking at the domestic political fallout within the United States very closely. They're looking at trying to cope with their own opposition within Iran that believes that there's a lot of too many concessions.
Is the view on the street that we're hearing from in Iran that Iraqi and the rest are giving the United States, but at the same time the US Military presence here in West Asia is up for grabs? I mean, how would you see the Iranian position developing? Is it just now they're looking at the domestic politics and keeping this low key bombing? I mean, it's not low key bombing to the people who have been killed, clearly and those being displaced. But is that how Iran sees it?
[00:25:39] Speaker A: I can speak to the people who I take seriously, who are deep in the weeds of that.
And my assumption based on that is that Iran looks at this and it says, yes, you know, our losses are more significant, the damage to our country is more significant, the damage to our economy is more significant.
But then let's factor in what we referred to earlier. Let's factor in relative, relative pain thresholds, not absolute. In absolute terms, Iranian losses are greater. But in terms of what the respective systems can absorb I think they would still look at this and say, the Americans can't sustain this. The Americans can't sustain petrol prices at the pump above a certain level.
The Americans, we can see, they don't want to put troops on the ground with 20 body bags. Is sure for the people who lost their lives, their families, is a terrible loss for them, but it's sustainable. But not if that number could ticks up and ticks up.
What does it do to the midterms? What does it do to the markets? So I think they look at this, it's a very unpopular war with the American public.
Look at the grilling this week that War Secretary Hegseth took in the Senate. That is again unprecedented terrain. Just months into a military effort against a country that has been held up as the ultimate enemy in America for so long. And yet there he is being grilled on what the hell is going on with this war and its costs. So I think the Iranian calculation would be we can sustain this longer than them. And that has been an accurate calculation until now. The short term is that you still have an American system that doesn't seem to have a joined up strategy, doesn't seem to know what it wants to get out of this. Thought it was on a cakewalk here and it's been anything but.
[00:27:41] Speaker B: Daniel Levy, thank you.
[00:27:42] Speaker A: Thank you, Ashen.
[00:27:44] Speaker B: And that's it for the show. Our continued condolences to all those of you bereaved or affected by today's NATO nation wars of aggression. We'll be back on Monday with the former head of Israel's secret intelligence agency, Shin Bet. Until then, keep in touch by all our social media, if it's not censored in your country, and head to our channel, goingundergroundtv on rumble.com to watch new and old episodes of Going Underground TV Monday.
