CNN Fareed's Global Briefing - October 29, 2023 - CNN Anchor and Senior Global Affairs Analyst Bianna Golodryga interviews Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian

 

Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good   Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Sign up here.   October 29, 2023

On Today’s Show On GPS, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET: As war unfolds in Gaza, will the conflict escalate across the Middle East? What does a pivotal US adversary and Hamas backer have to say about the horrific massacres of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7?   Amid fears of a wider war, eyes have turned toward Iran, which has supported Hamas and Israel’s other neighboring enemies, most notably Hezbollah. Filling in for Fareed today, CNN Anchor and Senior Global Affairs Analyst Bianna Golodryga interviews Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, asking how Iran could consider Hamas’s massacres a “victory,” whether Iran is seeking a war with the US and whether Hamas acted alone.   Then: the mood in Israel. How are Israelis reacting to the siege of Gaza? Do they trust their government’s handling of this war and the complex hostage crisis? Bianna talks with Israeli TV news anchor Yonit Levi of channel N12.   Finally: the crazy world of cryptocurrency and its onetime kingpin, whose trial in New York has captivated the worlds of finance and culture. Fareed recently talked with renowned author Michael Lewis, who witnessed up close the dramatic rise and fall of embattled former crypto titan Sam Bankman-Fried, the subject of Lewis’s latest book, “Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon.”

What Israel Could Face in Gaza If Israel launches a full ground invasion of Gaza as expected, its soldiers will face brutal urban combat, as military analysts have noted during Israel’s troop buildup. At Foreign Affairs, former US counterinsurgency adviser David Kilcullen writes that such an offensive “would entail horrendously difficult tactical conditions, including room-to-room combat and tunnel warfare that would lead to massive casualties. It would require fighting on the ground, in the air, and at sea—fighting that must be done in a carefully synchronized fashion. Combat will be slow and grinding, and the resulting devastation will almost certainly test international support for Israel’s invasion. Israeli war planners are almost certainly considering these operational and strategic issues as they decide whether to invade, and—if they go forward—how best to proceed.”

The Responsibility to Civilians In Gaza, Palestinian civilians face grave danger. Scenes of death and destruction have emerged steadily from the Hamas-governed Palestinian enclave since Israel’s bombing campaign began, in retaliation for Hamas’s horrific massacres of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7. As Israel appears poised to invade, commentators are urging the IDF to protect civilians as best they can.   In addition to the moral and international-legal imperatives to strive to safeguard human life, strategy and long-term endgames have been raised.   “You have to split off the population from the leadership, from the organization,” Center for Strategic and International Studies senior vice president, chair in global security and geostrategy and Middle East Program director Jon B. Alterman said during a CSIS panel discussion this week. “And I haven’t seen very many signs at all the Israelis are even contemplating that. They’re talking about crushing, crushing, crushing, without giving Palestinians a more desirable course to take. And I’m afraid that what that means is that you don’t get to the desired end state. You get to an extended war, because people are cornered and they absolutely feel they’re fighting for their very survival.”   In a Guardian op-ed, Bradford University emeritus professor of peace studies Paul Rogers warns: “Given the utter determination of (Israeli Prime Minister) Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to destroy Hamas, many thousands more Palestinians will be killed and tens of thousands wounded. If the war eventually ends, the Palestinians of Gaza are likely to be contained in a far smaller area and subject to intense surveillance. This takes us to the strategic dangers from Israel’s point of view. Instead of extinguishing Hamas, the war will result in tens of thousands more very angry young Palestinians set to join the organisation or a similar successor.”   At The Atlantic, historian and former Canadian opposition leader Michael Ignatieff urges Israel to adhere to the Geneva Conventions, even though Hamas didn’t: “The law of Geneva is the sole remaining framework of moral universalism in which two peoples can acknowledge that they are both human beings. Holding on to Geneva, despite all the temptations to do otherwise, is a vital element of the politics that could lead, eventually, to peace.”

… While Eliminating Hamas and Finding a Stable Solution for Gaza In the wake of Hamas’s horrific Oct. 7 attacks, Israel has said it will eliminate the terrorist group (and governing authority) from the Gaza Strip. Is that possible? And if so, can Israel—and the international community—find a stable solution for Gaza, after Hamas is gone?   “Israel’s political leaders need to clearly and publicly emphasize they will leave Gaza and lift the siege after Hamas has been militarily defeated and largely disarmed,” former ambassador and US Middle East envoy Dennis Ross writes in a New York Times opinion essay. “They must communicate that they understand a political resolution is needed with the Palestinians more generally. That is not a message Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now conveying, given the shock in Israel and the makeup of his government. But it is one Israel’s partners in the region need to hear—and soon. There are no easy solutions to Gaza, but there is only one path forward in this war. An outcome that leaves Hamas in control will doom not just Gaza but also much of the rest of the Middle East.”   In a Financial Times op-ed, former MI6 chief and UK Ambassador to the UN John Sawers makes a similar point, injecting some hope: “The Middle East is already changing for the better—an evolution which Hamas’s assault is trying to reverse. Israel is becoming an accepted part of the region with closer ties to the Gulf. After making a series of mistakes in his early years, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is now transforming Saudi Arabia. He has also cut funding for Wahhabi mosques around the world which removes one driver of extremism. As military action steps up, the awful humanitarian crisis in Gaza deepens and we face the risk of violence from misguided groups in our own countries, we must keep in mind the longer-term goals of stabilising Gaza and finding a path to an enduring solution.”

Israeli Intelligence: Looking Ahead, Then Back Serious questions have been asked of Israel’s intelligence and security services, as to why the Oct. 7 attacks were not anticipated. At the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Editor in Chief Aluf Benn writes in a column: “No one in Israel ever identified this horrific scenario as the enemy’s military objective. The scenarios for which the IDF prepared resembled occurrences from the last Gaza war in 2014: an incursion by a small force via a tunnel, a breach in the fence, or boats from the sea against an IDF outpost, or perhaps against a village or two, in order to kill and kidnap a small number of soldiers and civilians.”   On Andrew Schwartz’s “The Truth of the Matter” podcast at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, CSIS intelligence expert Emily Harding calls Israel’s Mossad spy agency “the best of the best” but says Oct. 7 was “potentially a failure of collection, a failure of analysis and a failure of imagination”—but that Israel’s intelligence community has more pressing tasks than backward-looking analysis. Right now it must urgently seek to locate more than 200 hostages believed to be held in Gaza, prepare for a likely urban war there, and look to the north where a threat looms in the Iranian-backed militia Hezbollah.   Does Israel’s intelligence shortcoming speak to a larger, worrisome trend in intelligence as a practice? In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, former CIA Deputy Director Jack Devine suggests it does: “The reality is that human-intelligence collection—in other words, the recruitment and use of spies—has stagnated. The U.S. and its allies have ramped up resources for technological intelligence solutions such as signals intelligence and digital surveillance, leaving spy networks underfunded. The total number of field operatives who handle spies today for the U.S., its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies and Israel is less than the number of sailors who staff a single aircraft carrier. And the players who compete in the Super Bowl get paid more a year than all the spies worldwide combined.”

Netanyahu, After Will Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political career survive the Oct. 7 massacres and the war in Gaza? In a New Yorker interview, Isaac Chotiner asks Haaretz writer, Netanyahu biographer and The Economist correspondent Anshel Pfeffer—who says Netanyahu’s popularity seems to be plummeting and suggests, bitingly, that political concerns are affecting his handling of the war.   “This is the very tragic end to the Netanyahu era,” Pfeffer tells Chotiner. “And when I say ‘end,’ it could be months and months, perhaps even a year or two. But this is the end of the Netanyahu era, and in history, in the minds of Israelis, it will forever be linked to the way in which this terrible war happened. That link will always be in the Israeli mind, and so I think there’s a chance that the next era of Israeli politics will not be focussed around a personality who dominates in this way.”

Be Careful With Words Thousands of miles from the war in Gaza, intense political disputes are unfolding over Hamas’s massacres and Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories. Antisemitism has reared its head. A six-year-old Muslim boy was stabbed to death in Illinois. A New York Times video identifies pressure to “pick a side … now” as corporations and celebrities weigh in with public statements. Harvard law professor and Bloomberg columnist Noah Feldman writes that public discussion of the war has brought more examples of “cancel culture” (in some cases directed at the left in ways it hadn’t been before). Amid all the principled opinionating—and, far more importantly, actual violence—Farah Pandith of the Council on Foreign Relations offers a valuable reminder in a short video: “Understand how vital it is” not to use language “that sets up an us-vs.-them mindset, because it actually makes an impact.”

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