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The latest episode of the Jerusalem Dispatch opens mid-crisis.
Overnight, Iran fired ballistic missiles at Israel for the first time since April, joined by projectiles from Yemen, with one striking the West Bank, and schools were shuttered. For Ruth Marks Eglash, editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Report, it was not abstract: out for a jog near Jerusalem, she watched an interceptor streak overhead before the sirens even sounded.
From there, the hosts press a sharp argument: Iran and Lebanon cannot be pulled apart. Hezbollah, they contend, is simply another arm of the IRGC, which makes Washington's instinct to negotiate the nuclear file while bracketing the proxies a strategy bound to fail, explained the Dispatch host, Calev Ben-David.
They trace the chain that lit the fuse and weigh the widening friction between Trump and Netanyahu, from a reportedly furious phone call to a war turned into an election-season wedge on both sides.
What earns the watch is where they land. Rather than settle Iran first and deal with Lebanon later, they suggest flipping it, arguing the route to a weaker Tehran runs through dismantling its proxies. The conversation closes on the question many Israelis are quietly asking after years of intermittent war: how much more can the country absorb, and whose hands should hold its fate?