THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION
THE CURRENT: WAR IN ISRAEL AND GAZA
Tuesday, October 10, 2023
Moderator: Michael O’Hanlon, Philip Knight Chair in Defense and Strategy, Senior Fellow and
Director, Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology
Moderator: Suzanne Maloney, Vice President and Director, Foreign Policy
Natan Sachs, Senior Fellow and Director, Center for Middle East Policy
Shibley Telhami, Nonresident Senior Fellow, Center for Middle East Policy
Molly Reynolds, Senior Fellow, Governance Studies
Host: Adrianna Pita, Office of Communications
PITA: You’re listening to The Current, part of the Brookings Podcast Network. I’m your
host, Adrianna Pita. The large-scale surprise assault launched by Hamas this weekend was the
worst attack on Israeli soil since the 1973 October war. On Monday, Brookings experts Natan
Sachs, Shibley Telhami, Suzanne Maloney, and Molly Reynolds addressed Israel's response to
the attacks, Iran's involvement, the regional repercussions, and how domestic politics will bear on
the U.S. response. Brookings Senior Fellow Michael O'Hanlon moderated this discussion. Now,
over to Mike.
O'HANLON: Greetings, everyone. My name is Mike O'Hanlon. I'm the Phil Knight chair in
defense and strategy at Brookings, and I'm here with distinguished colleagues, some of the
country's best Middle East experts, to discuss the ongoing crisis, conflict, and tragedy in Gaza and
Israel.
We will proceed as follows: we will look forward at some point to your questions, actually,
some of which have already come in. But we will begin with some opening thoughts from each of
us just for a few minutes. And there'll be at least three Brookings scholars, starting with Natan
Sachs, who runs our Middle East center and followed by Shibley Telhami, who is a longstanding
expert on the region, professor at the University of Maryland, and an expert also on public opinion
project that he's undertaken with great effect over the last decade or more in the United States and
also in the broader Middle East in regard to important events like what we're seeing unfold now.
And then Suzanne Maloney, who is our vice president for Foreign Policy studies at Brookings, one
of the country's best Iran experts, and certainly can speak to the role that Iran may or may not
have played. Well, we know they played some role, but the question is exactly what. So that will be
how we proceed. I will just say 60 more seconds of my own thoughts to frame, and then we may
have a couple of more Brookings scholars after Suzanne, and then we'll go to your questions for
the remaining 20 minutes or so, taking us up till about 12:45, I think.
I would just observe one broad analogy, which is, in reflecting on the wars of the Middle
East of the last half century or so, for the book that I wrote and published earlier this year called
"Military History for the Modern Strategist," the the example that jumps to my mind and it may not
be the only one or the best, but it is the one that jumps to my mind. Is Israel's decision in 2006 to
go into southern Lebanon, when a series of attacks of various types from Hezbollah into Israel had
precipitated a crisis not entirely unlike what we've just seen, although on a smaller scale, on
balance, to be sure. And what Israel found in the following 30 days or so of its occupation and
operations within southern Lebanon is that it could find a lot of Hezbollah weapons caches,
