The Fifth Column · Kmele Foster, Michael Moynihan, and Matt Welch

One Hitter: War With Iran and Jewish Space Lasers w/ Nadav Eyal (Members Only #305)

March 2, 2026·24 min·1 clip

Nadav Eyal says Iran is responsible for 500,000 to 600,000 Syrian war deaths, triple the Israeli-Arab conflict total.

It begins mid-sickness. One host says the Iran war started while he was on the bathroom floor, which feels about right for this show: geopolitics with a fever and bad timing. The sympathy-for-the-mullahs bit turns quickly into jokes about Iranians in New York and Los Angeles, then the room snaps back to the war itself. The warning is the sober part. Israel may believe the war is justified, but wars have a habit of ignoring the ending their planners had in mind. Then the conversation gets colder and more technical. The speaker points to Israel's fast destruction of Hezbollah rockets, ballistic missiles, and GPS-guided missiles, and calls it an intelligence story that has not been told enough. The spy-movie version is the wrong picture. People imagine Mossad agents and television intrigue, but he argues the real edge is uglier and more technical: finding targets, reading systems, and hitting leaders in Iran and the IRGC before the other side can answer in kind. In that telling, the gap between advanced states and enemies without comparable cyber or tech sectors is not abstract. It is visible in who gets found. The panel keeps prodding the politics. A host recalls Netanyahu saying something like this moment lets him do what he has wanted for decades, now with Trump and America in the frame. Iran is described as weakened after October 7 and the chain reaction that followed, with defenses lowered and leadership losses mounting. Still, nobody pretends that starting the war means owning the finish. Regime change lingers at the edge of the discussion: maybe a friendlier shift inside the regime, maybe something broader. Then the free segment crashes into the paywall, with shabby subscription pressure, mispronunciation jokes, and the promise that it gets worse after that.

As heard by us

A sharp, technology-centered read on Israel's Iran gamble and the power balance behind it.

War with Iran is framed as Israel's calculated risk: a war its leaders say they need to fight, but one whose ending no one can confidently predict.

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Why you'd press play

Nadav Eyal explains the intelligence technology behind Israel's campaign to kill Iran's top commanders and gut Hezbollah's arsenal.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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