Five Days Into War With Iran, Normalcy In Tel Aviv

The Bureau has been covering the war against Iran’s Islamic regime largely through American political and military sources — the strategic calculus, the intelligence assessments, the geopolitical reverberations reaching from Beijing to Moscow. But there is a different angle that comes from standing in a city under bombardment, and that is what Adam Zivo has been delivering from Tel Aviv.

We last talked when he was in Israel during the 12-day war last June. He returned to Tel Aviv roughly a week before this current campaign began, because his sources — political and journalistic — told him that what was coming would be severe.

What he has found since arriving is something that might surprise people who have never spent time in Israel, much less during a war. People at the beach. People at the cafes. An entire society that had made its psychological peace with the fact that conflict with an Islamic regime that has pledged to eradicate the state of Israel is inevitable, a matter of when, not if.

Adam walks us through the first day of incoming bomb warnings, to an increasing sense of normalcy and expectation of complete military victory for Israel and the United States. What comes next for the people of Iran is the big unknown.

He also walks us through the information war running parallel to the kinetic one — artificial intelligence-generated footage of a bomb-ravaged Tel Aviv that wildly distorts reality, the bot farms, the monetization structures on social media that reward emotions over accuracy, and the specific role of Qatar, a state that has long tried to play both sides of the civilizational divide and is now discovering what it means to be bombed by the regime it has been financing.

And we get into the deeper question — the one that will define the next decade of Middle Eastern politics: what comes after? Is there a democratic Iran on the other side of this? What is the role of exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi? And where does China fit in an alliance of authoritarian states that Israel and the United States are now, whether Washington says it plainly or not, confronting as a unified bloc?

Adam Zivo reports from Tel Aviv.

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