‘The price to pay for attacking Iran has dramatically dropped’: Yaakov Katz on the war so far

Why did Israel attack Iran now? Is Israel trying to force regime change, or just end Iran’s nuclear program? And how is Israel able to assassinate Iranian officials with pinpoint accuracy while struggling to defeat a more ragtag foe closer to home?

We posed these questions and more to Yaakov Katz, the former editor of the Jerusalem Post, the host of “The Jewish People’s Podcast” and the author of “Israel vs. Iran: The Shadow War,” “Shadow Strike: Inside Israel’s Secret Mission to Eliminate Syrian Nuclear Power,” and the forthcoming “While Israel Slept: How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East.”

Katz spoke with Ami Eden, the CEO and Executive Editor of 70 Faces Media, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s parent company, on Monday, shortly after returning to Israel via tugboat after being stranded abroad because of the war.

The following is a condensed transcript, edited for length and clarity. You can watch the complete conversation here.

Ami Eden: What are the most important takeaways so far from the escalating war between Israel and Iran, and what’s most surprised you?

Yaakov Katz: The Iran threat is a threat that has had the potential of becoming an existential threat for a long time and Israel’s been dealing with it for 30 years in many different ways, trying to sabotage equipment and facilities, to assassinating scientists, to using cyber warfare and all these other different kinetic attacks and covert attacks — all of it meant to delay the Iranians. But a couple of things have changed over the last two years. The first thing that has changed is, while Oct. 7 itself was a disaster, and no doubt what led to it was a massive failure that Israel is still paying the price for, there’s the flip side to Oct. 7, which has been the re-engineering of the Middle East. The Middle East today is a very different Middle East than it was on Oct. 6 or Oct. 7. What I mean by that is what the Iranians did, from a strategic perspective, was they always wanted to be on the threshold of having all the pieces and components of a nuclear capability in place. And they also wanted to create their army of proxies and create a belt of fire around Israel.

This was meant to achieve two things: One is to deter Israel from ever attacking. Number two is that if we do attack, we will pay a price. But what’s happened in the two years since Oct. 7? The proxies are gone. Hezbollah is beaten back, it’s weakened. It still has capabilities, but nothing like what it had prior to this. The presumption always was within the Israeli military establishment that you attack Iran and you will get hit really hard by Hezbollah. Hezbollah is on its own coming out on its own and saying, “We’re not going to get involved” — that’s dramatic. So Hezbollah is gone. Hamas doesn’t really exist anymore. Yes, they’re still there. They have hostages. We have to deal with it, but they have no offensive capability against Israel. Assad, Iran’s ally in Syria, is gone. Right when he fell, and Ahmad Al-Sharaa took over, Israel in four days destroyed all of Syria’s strategic weapons, their fighter jets, their navy, their ballistic missiles, the Scuds, their chemical weapons. All gone. And then there was last year, in April and October, we exchanged blows with the Iranians. We destroyed the S-300 sophisticated Russian air defense systems. So when you think about this for a moment, that belt of fire, that proxy army, doesn’t exist anymore.

So the price to pay for attacking Iran has dramatically dropped.

And then there’s two other things that have also changed. One is we have developed capabilities over the years. We have more advanced capabilities today than we had in the past. Offensive and defensive. We have the best missile defense architecture that anyone in the world could ever imagine. It’s not going to be perfect. There’s no such thing as 100% and the consequences are tragic. But we’ve also developed capabilities to penetrate underground, hardened infrastructure. We do it in the tunnels of Gaza, and we’re now applying that also to the facilities in Iran. And then, of course, there’s Donald Trump, who came into office, and things changed, and we now know that there was close coordination, and a even, I would say, an act of deception, that was coordinated between Israel and the Americans to fool the Iranians into thinking that this wasn’t going to happen. So when I look at why we took advantage of this window of opportunity, that’s the answer.

Now where we are in this is we’re just in the beginning, right? And I know that’s hard to hear, because everyone wants this over but there is more to do.

The reason this will keep going is that we haven’t completed the main mission, and that is the elimination as much as possible of Iran’s nuclear program.

Is eliminating the nuclear program still Israel’s main mission, or has it shifted to regime change?   

You’re touching on a very important issue.

The nuclear program was the focus at the beginning. We heard the prime minister even say, there’s intelligence that they’re moving forward on weaponization. There was this window. We had no choice. We gave the opportunity to the Trump administration. Five rounds of talks, 60 days, wasn’t leading to anything. Something had to move. I’m not sure that we need to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. It’s important to remember in 1981 that when Israel bombed Iraq’s reactor, then Menachem Begin was the Prime Minister, the assessment in the Israeli defense and security establishment was at the time that we’d set back Saddam one year. Saddam Hussein never got nuclear weapons, right? Always we understood that there’s only so much we could do. Take out some parts of the facility of the process, kill some of the people that’s needed, set them back for a year, two, three, maybe, but it has to be followed up with something. What exactly is that follow up? Maybe it’s these reports that we’re now hearing that Donald Trump just spoke about a couple hours ago, that the Iranians are begging to come back and sit down and talk. So maybe now that they’re bleeding and they’re hurting, they’re going to be willing to really negotiate and agree to a deal that takes enrichment out of Iran, as an example, and removes the full enriched stockpile of uranium that they have, which Israel has been careful not to bomb, because that could spread radioactive material.

But I think that with the success what we are starting to see is maybe we can actually bring about a regime change. And this sometimes happens to countries who are at war, that they begin to think that maybe they can manipulate reality with their own hands. I urge extreme caution on that. I think that we should be very careful. I think that it’s very possible that maybe this will lead to the downfall and the toppling of the regime, which would be a bracha for the world, a blessing. But I also think that we should be a bit modest and have humility of what we can potentially do, because it could also have the opposite effect. It could see the Iranian people unite behind the regime, and the regime then really races towards a nuclear bomb. So we should be ready to stop potentially, when we feel we’ve done enough of the damage to the nuclear program, and stay focused on that. I wouldn’t want to see us go down a route of where we make mistakes, like we made in Lebanon in the first Lebanon War back in the 80s, or like mistakes the Americans made in Afghanistan and Iraq and other places, including Iran back in the 1950s. So we should be careful with what we think we can potentially do here.

During the Six Day War, Israel very quickly achieved “air sovereignty,” to use your term. But there were limiting factors, most notably fear of the Soviet Union stepping in to protect its client states. Now that Israel has complete control of the skies this time around, is there any limiting factor?

I think the greatest limitation and restraining factor here will be the Trump administration. So when the president will say to Israel, “Guys time to wrap this up,” that will begin to be the end or the off ramp, and it could be that more negotiations is what’s also going to lead to the end of this. And by the way, it’s in Israel’s interest. Again, Israel knows it can’t destroy everything. It knows at the most it can set them back for hopefully the longest period of time as possible, which might be 18 months or two years or less. We need the Americans to follow up with some sort of political process here, and the two go hand in hand, and it’s in our interest for that process to take place.

I just want to push you to explain your thinking on that point. If this is a sudden, previously unimaginable opportunity to knock out a regime that has as one of its foundational principles a dedication to eradicating Israel as a Jewish state, why is this a time for humility? 

It’s a good question. What is regime change? When do we hit that point? Are we going to kill Khamenei and the president and some of the other cabinet members, and then someone else will be appointed. They’re not going to be Zionist, pro-Israel, pro-West, so we’re going to kill that guy too? Or are we going to come in, take the son of the Shah, who is in exile, and we’re going to install him. These things don’t end well. This is not our issue. The Iranian people are good people and they should break free. I don’t know if that’s for us to do. For us, it is to take care of our security, which right now is the elimination of their nuclear program.

Can you put the decision to attack Iran in the context of the Israeli political discourse?

This is the most unpolitical issue in the most political and politicized country, where everything is politics. [Opposition leader] Yair Lapid has said publicly, I disagree with Netanyahu on almost everything. We are bitter political rivals. On this, I stand completely alongside him. This is an issue that every prime minister has dealt with. From Bibi’s first term in office in the 90s, we have been facing off against Iran. Everyone has seen it the same. Everyone has taken action, every prime minister, every Mossad Director, every IDF chief of staff, every commander of the Air Force. I used to be a military correspondent. I would sit in the office of the Israeli Air Force commander. I’m telling you, 12, 13 years ago, with maps out on the table, and him explaining to me which Squadron is going where – 12, 13 years ago. So it’s something that is very unpolitical.

So Israelis aren’t engaging in their usual speculation about whether the prime minister is acting to save his coalition or to avoid his legal problems?

I mean there are people who can’t see beyond their animosity towards Netanyahu. I’m no fan of Netanyahu. Anyone who’s read me over the years knows, I can be very critical, and I have been. I think, on this issue, the idea that this is being politically driven is ludicrous. There is an objective, what I described before, window of opportunity. There is intelligence that Israel has claimed to have. I believe that we do that shows they’re moving faster and forward with the weaponization. This had to be done. And for that reason, you see how everyone in the government and in opposition stands together on this.

What will happen to Netanyahu’s career as a result of this is a different question. I would predict that politically, he will see a boost. To be honest. I’m surprised he did it. I have to be honest. I wrote a piece back in December after the October clash that we had with the Iranians, in which I said, Israel needs to attack Iran now. And not that I had any prophecy. I just said I saw how the pieces had lined up, that there was a unique opportunity. But I didn’t believe Bibi would do it, because he balked at it so many times in the past. In 2010 he claimed he couldn’t get it across the cabinet. In 2012 he claimed Barack Obama stopped him. He always came up with excuses. I wasn’t sure he would have the guts to go across the finish line. And I have to say that even as somebody who’s not his fan, I think what he has done is unquestionably and unequivocally the right move for the State of Israel.

You have a book coming out in September which looks at the disastrous mistakes leading up to Oct. 7. Many people are asking how is it possible that Israel can know if an Iranian leader is flushing a toilet in Tehran, but doesn’t know that thousands of Hamas fighters are preparing to launch a surprise invasion across the Israeli border?

It’s a question that legitimately disturbs people, and it’s very troubling. I think what it really touches upon more is a question of a state of mind. And when I look at the failures that led to Oct. 7, that’s what it was.

We knew Hamas’ capabilities. We saw them training. We knew they were building up weapons. We knew they were digging tunnels. We listened to them say, “We’re coming to kill you and kidnap your people.” We saw them train for kidnapping. But we didn’t believe they would do it. We believed they were deterred. We believed it was all for show.

With Iran and Hezbollah, we always took them more seriously, and as a result, we built up the capabilities to be able to counter them. So the capabilities were there, the technology was there. We had Mossad agents on the ground in Iran building a drone factory, explosive drones that were used on Friday to take out surface-to-air missile defense systems and launchers. An incredible operation, to have that capability in an enemy country. We were able to do the beeper thing in Lebanon. We understood that we had to allocate those resources, that attention, that focus to those fronts. That was the mistake we made with Gaza. In Gaza, by not focusing correctly on it, by being in the wrong state of mind, by believing in a fairy tale that Hamas was deterred, we were distracted. And we were not giving it the right attention that it needed. And, as a result, every piece of intelligence that we got, we misread. Here, we didn’t misread.

The flip side of that question is how is Israel able to carry out an attack with such precision so far away, while in Gaza the number of civilians killed and destruction of civilian infrastructure is so much higher?

Ultimately, the way that Hamas embeds itself in civilian infrastructure is very different than what we see in Iran. Iran is a country with a conventional military that has bases and has military headquarters and military targets. The IRGC intelligence headquarters isn’t underneath the Tehran hospital, right, unlike what you see in Gaza. And as a result, you know, I think we all understand, I hope that we all understand, Israel has never had any interest in killing any civilians.

If we look back to operations that we fought in Gaza before Oct. 7, we went to the craziest lengths to avoid civilian casualties and collateral damage that we now look back and say, were we crazy? What were we doing? Being so, so careful. Look at how we get attacked, it really do anything at the end of the day. And I think we understand that that’s just because of who we are. The reason that Israel is not bombing Isfahan in a way that would really destroy the facility, is because we don’t want to see radioactive material leak out into urban centers. It’s because we care about them. I mean, I think it always really comes back to the main difference between us and our enemies is that we care more than they themselves care about their own children.

And I know that’s that’s hard to square when you look at what’s happening in Gaza right now, and I recognize that complexity, but I strongly believe that it is really still true.

Do you think what’s happening now is going to increase or lower the chances for a ceasefire in Gaza and the return of Israeli hostages?

I think it’ll increase the chances dramatically. I hope so at least. I think that a weakened Iran means a further isolated Hamas and a more constrained Hamas and a Hamas that understands that it has to be more open to ending the war, because it now has lost its patron. It has lost its support and provisions, and therefore it could meet a fate of where it’s also completely eliminated. So it might have more of an interest now in a deal. And, by the way, we heard this yesterday, there’s now some indications, maybe. And again, you know bli eyin hara, knock on wood, whatever you want to say or do, that we’re actually maybe moving forward with some, you know, positive direction now on a deal. And I’m not surprised. I mean, this is dramatic for the proxies of Iran that they now feel that they’re losing their bank, their weapons supplier, right? This is going to have an effect on them. So I’m optimistic, and I know that in the defense establishment, they’re also optimistic that this will have a positive effect.

Before we wrap up, can you talk a little bit more about President Trump and his role in all of this? Was Israel going against his publicly stated desire to give negotiations more time, or was he part of a ruse? Or both? Was Netanyahu going it alone, like Levi Eshkol in 1967, or was Trump giving a wink or a nudge unlike anything we have ever seen from a U.S. president?

Trump kept on saying, I believe a deal is possible. I’m optimistic we can get to a deal. We can get to a deal. At the same time, Israel had convinced the president that an operation was required, that an operation was needed. And I really believe that in this case, and from what I’m hearing, it wasn’t that Trump said green light — guys, go for it. But he also didn’t give the red light. And that created a gray zone that Israel could maneuver in.