America's New Forever War? Yonah Jeremy Bob on the US-Israeli Conflict With Iran

Andrew Keen (0:00)

Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.

Hello, everybody. It's Thursday, September 10th, 2026 As always, the news is full of stories about one kind of war or another in the Middle East. Oil today hit $100 a barrel, not for the first or probably the last time. As the United States and the Houthis exchange strikes, Donald Trump said, relatively honestly, unusually for him, that the Iran War won't end until after the November elections, which was an astonishing confession. British-Israeli relations are at the lowest ad for decades after a massive fight over Israeli behavior in the occupied territories. So I thought it would be a good opportunity to check in with a guy on the ground. Yonah Jeremy Bob is The Jerusalem Post's senior military correspondent. He's an old friend of the show. He's the author of Target Tehran, a best-selling book from 2023, How Israel Is Using Sabotage, Cyber Warfare, Assassination and Secret Diplomacy to Stop a Nuclear Iran and Create a New Middle East, a rather prescient book. And he has a book out this week, a new book, which he co-authored with Elliot Kaufman, In the War Room, The Inside Story of Israel's Fight Against Hamas and the Iranian Axis. Yonah is joining us from near Jerusalem, where he lives.

Yonah, congratulations on the new book, In the War Room. Before we get into the details of that, what's the general feeling in Israel at the moment? You're a man who's lived there for many years. Is there anything unusual about the current atmosphere, or is it just really business as usual, given this ongoing, almost endless war, it seems, between Israel and Iran?

Yonah Jeremy Bob (2:35)

Right, so I'm from Baltimore in the United States, so I always have two brains. I have sort of my American brain and my Israeli brain. So the American side of me understands that basically the war with Iran didn't stop, right? The United States and Iran have been shooting at each other, bombing each other, sabotaging each other almost nonstop since February 28th of this year. On the Israeli side, the war ended on April 7th. There has been one day where, for brief 24 hours, Israel and Iran took shots at each other several months ago. But basically, since April 7th, Israel and Iran have not been in direct war. Obviously, there's all kinds of behind-the-scenes fights between Iran and Israel and the proxies of Iran, Hezbollah and Lebanon, Hamas and Gaza.

But so that's sort of like a split screen between Israel is actually not the one fighting Iran right now, it's the United States that's different than usual. So from that perspective, actually it's calmer in Israel regarding Iran than it is in the United States. I wouldn't say it's calm because people are afraid that there could be another round of war at any point. But the biggest news in Israel that people are upset about is really what you mentioned, the new fight between Israel and England. It's not just Israel and England, it's England along with about a dozen Western countries, mostly European and Canada, that are putting sanctions on the West Bank in Israel, not Israel as a whole, the West Bank in Israel, but even that for Israel is a big loss diplomatically.

It sort of puts a certain stain on things. And so Israelis are hoping that through negotiations at some point, they'll be able to remove that.

Andrew Keen (4:30)

There was an interesting piece yesterday in the Financial Times, another old friend of the show, Ed Luce, the America correspondent, and I'm quoting the headline, Kushner and Witkoff's Blind Amateurism, when it comes to US diplomacy in Ukraine and Gaza. In your new book, In The War Room, I know you interviewed Witkoff.

Is there some truth to this? Well, what's the general consensus within Israel about the competence of American foreign policy, particularly orchestrated by Witkoff and the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner?

Yonah Jeremy Bob (5:17)

Yeah, so it's a mixed bag, right? I guess to their credit, they did help end the war between Israel and Hamas in October 2025, right? They were at the front of that negotiation. And Israelis, I can't emphasize this enough, it's completely forgotten now in the international discourse, but for most Israelis, a lot of the war between Israel and Hamas really was about getting the hostages back, right? There were 250 hostages, some of them came back alive, some of them came back deceased after Hamas killed them while they were holding them, and that, all of them came back. So that was something that Israelis were very thankful to Witkoff and Kushner about. Since then, they haven't done as well, right? They have not achieved the negotiation with Iran, which wraps up and ends the nuclear program. That's Israel's biggest concern, is to end Iran's nuclear program. Iran's nuclear program has been set back a lot by Israeli and American attacks in 2025 and 2026, but there are pieces of it that are still there.