On 9 March, Pamela Paresky sat down with Gadi Taub in Tel Aviv to discuss the war in Gaza, the failures of Israel’s security establishment, and the ideological forces—both inside Israel and across the West—that have undermined the country’s ability to defend itself. This war—we don’t really understand it here in Israel, partly because of the poisonous press—but we’ve almost destroyed “the Shi’ite axis of evil,” as the Prime Minister called it. Whenever we didn’t finish a war quickly—like the Six-Day War or the destruction of the Syrian army in two days—eventually an American administration would say “enough,” and we had to obey.