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--:-- Host: Kate Leinbaugh: Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Kate Leinbaugh. It's Wednesday, October 2nd.
--:-- Kate Leinbaugh: On Tuesday afternoon, Iran launched a barrage of ballistic missiles into Israel. Iranian state TV starts showing missiles flying over Tehran, flying over other cities, flying over the skies. That's our colleague Michael Amon. You see video popping up on social media from Iraq, from Syria, of these missiles going over.
--:-- Michael Amon: What you are seeing, what we are all seeing with our own eyes, is a major attack from Iran. And then what, air raid sirens go off around Israel? Air raid sirens go off across the entire country. Millions of people rush to shelters before explosions that lit up the skies above Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
--:-- Kate Leinbaugh: And I started getting text messages very quickly from colleagues saying explosions all over the sky. This was the biggest Iranian missile attack on Israel in history. It came after months of deadly Israeli strikes on Iranian allies throughout the region.
--:-- Kate Leinbaugh: Israel and its allies, including the U.S., were able to fend off the attack with minimal damage. One fatality was reported. Israel vowed to retaliate. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Iran had made a big mistake and that, quote, Israel has the greatest opportunity in 50 years to change the face of the Middle East.
--:-- Kate Leinbaugh: Nearly a year after Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,200 people, And after Israel invaded Gaza, killing tens of thousands, Iran's attack and Israel's potential retaliation risk a major escalation in the Middle East. We are on the brink of a regional war. The only thing that's missing is a declaration of war.
--:-- Kate Leinbaugh: Without a declaration of war, is it still war? It depends on who you ask, but it has all the makings of a war. It looks like a war. It sounds like a war. It's a war in all but name only.
--:-- Kate Leinbaugh: Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Kate Leinbaugh.
--:-- Kate Leinbaugh: Coming up on the show, the escalating violence in the Middle East and the risk of all-out war. CRM was supposed to improve customer relationships. Instead, it's shorthand for can't resolve much.
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--:-- Host: Ryan Knutson: Iran and Israel have been sworn enemies for decades. But much of their conflict has played out through Iran's proxies. Iran has been supporting militant groups around the region, and these groups are united in their opposition to Israel's existence.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: The U.S. has designated some of them Hamas Hezbollah and the Houthis as terrorist organizations. Iran is the architect of a loose coalition of militias that often called the axis of resistance. They are in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, really just across the Middle East.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: And Iran funds Hezbollah, Hamas, other militants. It trains them. It provides this sort of ideological underpinning of the movement, provides advice and counsel, and coordinates all these militias.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: After Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th, Israel started fighting Hamas in Gaza. And Hezbollah, to the north of Israel's border in Lebanon, joined the fight.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: On October 8th, Hezbollah starts firing rockets into Israeli positions in the north. Dozens of rockets coming in. Israel responded in kind. And a tit-for-tat battle began that basically has raged every day for the entire conflict.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: This conflict between Israel and Hezbollah and the tensions at the Lebanese border go back decades. Israel has a tortured history on the ground in Lebanon. They fought several wars there. None of them have ended in a clear-cut victory.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: It's a place where Israelis who are adults today remember body bags coming home from. And Lebanon is often described as Israel's Vietnam.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: After the last major war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006, a U.N. resolution established that there would be no armed presence over a large swath of southern Lebanon.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: But Hezbollah has been building up a military presence there. Having them on the border was always a threat to Israel. And, to be fair, having Israeli soldiers on the border of Lebanon has always been seen as a threat.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: But Israel had been saying that in the last few years, the Hezbollah infrastructure along the border had gotten more obvious. They were able to actually see Hezbollah operatives setting up tents and encampments.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: And sometimes they would even kind of wave at Israeli soldiers mockingly and sort of daring them to do something. Over the past year, Hezbollah and Israel have been in this tit-for-tat conflict with airstrikes and rockets.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: In response to all that rocket fire, Israel evacuated about 50,000 or 60,000 people from the north of Israel. They are now living all over the country with families.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Some were kept in hotels for some time. You know, they've left behind businesses. Just these are essentially ghost towns along the border.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: And what does the border look like on the Lebanese side? It is similarly evacuated. The Lebanese have fled to Beirut, some of the coastal cities.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: It's exactly the same situation, if not worse, for them, in that they've been hit by Israeli airstrikes and artillery shelling.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: And then, two weeks ago, there was an inflection point. Israel carried out a covert operation in Lebanon.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: I think when it really dawned on everybody that we've entered a new phase of the war was when thousands of pagers started blowing up in the pockets and belts and hands of Hezbollah operatives.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Multiple reports say that Israel's Mossad spy agency placed explosives in thousands of Hezbollah pagers before they detonated across Lebanon on Tuesday.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Then the next day, there were explosives in walkie-talkies, and walkie-talkies from Hezbollah started blowing up.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: And at the end of those two-day attacks you had, I think almost three dozen dead in Lebanon and thousands injured.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: And it was a shocking blow. Then after that, we have Israel stepping up airstrikes, going further into Lebanon, hitting Beirut, the capital, and then killing the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Breaking overnight, the Israeli military has eliminated its most powerful target yet. Israel says long-time Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an airstrike in the area.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: It's hard to overstate the importance in the Arab world. He was a charismatic figure, very religious very close to Iran and was seen as a real strategic thinker who maybe is the only opponent of Israel who had kind of outfoxed it over the years.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: And after taking out Nasrallah, did Israel back off? No, Israel did not back off, and quite the opposite. Israel has gone harder and harder with each day.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Breaking news overnight, Israeli troops have crossed the border into Lebanon after two weeks of heavy bombing targeting Hezbollah's leadership.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Why is Israel moving into Lebanon? To push Hezbollah off the border and keep them off. Their goal is to get to a point where they feel safe enough that Hezbollah doesn't pose a threat to people who will be coming back.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: The idea was, you know, they don't want to have another October 7th-style attack. What does Hezbollah say about all of this? Hezbollah says that they are for Lebanon and that they believe that they are defending Lebanon from Israel.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: That, you know, it is not Hezbollah who poses a threat to Israel, but Israel is the one who has invaded Lebanon several times over the past four or five decades.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: And so they are there holding the line against Israel in their view. Israel says its airstrikes in Lebanon over the last two weeks were aimed at Hezbollah and Hamas targets.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Many senior Hezbollah commanders have been killed. But more than 1,000 Lebanese people have been killed, according to the health ministry. And at least a million more people have been displaced from their homes.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Meanwhile, Israel has been bombing other Iran-backed militants. And on Sunday, Israel also struck the Houthis in Yemen? That's right. And there were additional strikes in Syria? There were.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Why? The Houthis had fired a ballistic missile towards central Israel. In Syria, Israel has been carrying out airstrikes over Syria on Iranian targets for more than a decade.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: The Israelis believe that Iran uses Syria as a way station for weapons that go to Hezbollah and also to Hamas and the West Bank.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: What's Israel's end goal? Israel's end goal is the security of its borders. And there's been, I think, a strategic shift in the Israeli security mindset.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: For the last two decades, Israel was content to have periods of calm during which neither side would fire on each other. But now they feel like that was a mistake.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: That what those periods of calm really did was allow their foes on the other side of the border to build up large arsenals and time and space to plot new attacks.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: And the October 7th attack was, you know, the cardinal moment in the shift in that thinking. And now Israel is looking at a future of preemptive wars, preemptively hitting back before a big attack happens.
--:-- Ryan Knutson: Coming up, how Israel could respond to Iran's attack. This episode is brought to you by AARP. They have reskilling courses and career tools to help your income live as long as you do.
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--:-- Host: Jessica Mendoza: With Israel launching airstrikes in Lebanon, in Yemen, and in Syria, the question was, how would Iran respond? And for a long time, it looked like they wouldn't respond.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Was that surprising? It was surprising. This axis of resistance looks to Iran for leadership and looks to Iran in some cases for protection and for their strongest proxies like Hamas and Hizballah to really be crippled and have no response is embarrassing for Iran.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: You know these are allies. And Iran tells itself tells its people that it, you know, it's a very strong country. It stands up to the United States.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: So it is surprising that there wouldn't be an immediate response. But that changed on Tuesday. That changed on Tuesday.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: On Tuesday morning, the United States said it had indications that an imminent Iranian attack was coming, a ballistic missile attack.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Wasn't sure when it would happen, but it looked like Iran was telegraphing what it was going to do and how it was going to do it.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Iran said it was retaliating for Israel's killing of the leaders of Hezbollah and Hamas. What was Iran's goal with this attack? Iran had to save face here.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And their gamble is that Israel won't respond so forcefully that it forces them to respond in the same way and basically start an all-out war.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And now we have Israel with a lot of momentum behind their back. They've just taken down systematically their biggest foe in Hezbollah, and now Iran just attacked them.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: You could imagine that the rules of the game have changed and they may want to strike back even harder. Does Israel have support for doing that? Israel has support from the United States in that the Biden administration believe in Israel's right to defend itself.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor to President Biden, said today that the repercussions for this attack will be very severe.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: So I think they have the United States support. The United States' interests diverge from Israel's in this, though.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: The United States doesn't want a regional war. The United States doesn't want oil facilities hit in such a way that it causes oil prices to rise a month before an election.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: You know, they're looking to contain this problem, you know, as much as they can in Washington. And the Israelis are in a different position.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: The Israelis see they have the wind at their back, and the conversation in Israel is about how far they can push the envelope on that right now.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Is there a risk that Israel could push it too far? Yes. These escalations work until they don't, until one side miscalculates, until one side hits just hard enough that the other side has to hit back even harder.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And then there are no rules anymore. And that's when you're at, that's when you have war. Are we there? We're not there yet, but we're moving into another level of the conflict.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: Instead of getting closer to an end, we're getting farther away from an end. There are more players in the conflict now than there were even just after October 7th.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: What have we learned over the last two weeks? We've learned that Israel can go from being very much on the defensive to being on the offense at lightning speed.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And that it can't be underestimated. That's what we've learned about Israel. I mean, what we've learned about Iran and its axis of resistance is that it wasn't as strong as we thought it was.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: And the people who pay the price along the way? Our average people in Lebanon, civilians in Gaza, you know, and Israelis who are displaced from the north, you know.
--:-- Jessica Mendoza: So, you know, regular people pay the price for that.
--:-- Host: Kate Leinbaugh: Today, President Biden said he would not support an attack by Israel on Iranian nuclear sites.
--:-- Kate Leinbaugh: Also today, Hezbollah said it was fighting Israeli forces inside Lebanon. Israel said eight soldiers died in combat, and it plans to send in more troops.
--:-- Kate Leinbaugh: Iran said it closed its airspace in anticipation of Israeli strikes.
--:-- Kate Leinbaugh: That's all for today, Wednesday, October 2nd. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal.
--:-- Kate Leinbaugh: Additional reporting in this episode by Rory Jones, Stephen Kalin, Dov Lieber, and Yaroslav Trofimov.
--:-- Kate Leinbaugh: Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.
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