Middle East Dialogues: Tarek Masoud in Conversation with Dan Senor
Middle East Dialogues: Tarek Masoud in Conversation with Dan Senor
ELI5/TLDR
Two weeks into a fresh US-Israel war with Iran, a Harvard professor named Tarek Masoud sits down with Dan Senor — a pro-Israel podcaster who used to work for the George W. Bush people — and basically asks him, politely but relentlessly, “can you explain to me why my son should be ready to die for this?” Senor makes the strongest possible case for the war, including the startling admission that he has had to explain it better than the actual President of the United States has. Then they spend the second half arguing about why half of young Americans, including a lot of young American Jews, have soured on Israel — with Senor saying “it’s anti-semitism, the world’s oldest hatred” and Masoud gently replying “or maybe it’s the footage.”
The Full Story
The Setup
This is the 17th and penultimate installment of Harvard’s Middle East Dialogues series, hosted by Tarek Masoud, who runs the Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. The opening joke, delivered with the kind of deadpan only an academic can muster: the series began because “things have been getting progressively better in the Middle East,” but by their own admission they are “not great at causal identification” and have noticed that the more dialogues they hold, the worse things get. Maybe if they stop, peace will break out.
Dan Senor is the guest. He ran communications for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, advised Mitt Romney, co-wrote Startup Nation, and hosts Call Me Back, a podcast Masoud says he listens to “quite religiously.” They recorded this two weeks into a new war with Iran. Masoud’s 87-year-old mother lives in a small Jerusalem neighborhood called Baka. She got on what Senor believes was the last flight out before the war began. Before she left, his sister had been having conversations with her along the lines of “No mom, being tired is not an excuse for ignoring the air-raid siren."
"Can you tell me this was worth it?”
Masoud opens with an unusually personal question. His 18-year-old son is about to join the Navy. Declan Cody, a kid from Iowa, was one of the first Americans killed in this war — an Iranian drone hit him in Kuwait. If Masoud had lost a son in World War II, he could have told himself a story about fighting fascism. He cannot tell himself that story about this one. He asks Senor, straight out, to help him build the case for why this war is worth American lives.
Senor’s first move is to turn the question around. You used World War II as the model. Is there any American war since WWII you would feel that way about?
Masoud pauses, then says no — not Iraq, not Afghanistan, not the global war on terror. His bleakest line: 23 years after 3,000 Americans died on 9/11, “a former member of the organization that committed that great crime against us rolled into power in Damascus and we celebrated it.” For any American under 40, he says, it’s hard to name a single post-WWII military intervention that “went great.”
Senor pushes back — Saddam Hussein really did gas Kurds and bury tens of thousands in mass graves — but then pivots to the actual case for the Iran war, which is worth laying out because it is the cleanest articulation of the hawkish argument you are likely to hear:
Iran has been in the business of murdering Americans since 1979. Sixty-three hostages for 444 days. 241 Marines in the Beirut barracks in 1983. Over 600 Americans killed by Iranian-funded IEDs in Iraq between 2003 and 2011. Of the four governments that are real problems for US interests — China, Russia, North Korea, Iran — three already have nuclear weapons. Iran is the only one that didn’t, and was working on it. Before the strikes, Iran’s missile program had a range that reached from Paris to Kolkata. That’s one-third of the world’s population. And Iran was producing missiles faster than the West could produce interceptors to shoot them down. “Who’s containing who here?”
Masoud’s objection is the quietly devastating kind. President Trump said last summer that the Iran nuclear program had been “obliterated.” Weaponization work reportedly stopped after 2003. So how did we go, in a few months, from “obliterated” to “we just killed the Supreme Leader in a surgical Saturday-morning strike”?
Israel’s new doctrine, explained in one sentence
Senor then lays out what he calls the post-October 7 Israeli security doctrine, and it is one of the more striking things in the conversation. Before October 7, Israel was in the deterrence business — accept that lots of people want to destroy you, and just make destroying you too costly. After October 7, the consensus from the Israeli right to the Israeli left became: we’re out of the deterrence business. When we see a serious threat, we remove it.
Masoud, who has been listening patiently, plays this forward: “Like kill the leadership?” Sure, says Senor. “Like when Naftali Bennett says Turkey is the new Iran, Erdogan is dangerous, we got to kill Erdogan?” Here Senor draws a line. He has come to make the case for the Iran war; he is not going to declare Erdogan a marked man on the Kennedy School stage. But the logic, once unleashed, is hard to contain.
Why now, and the Zoom joke
Senor gives three reasons for the timing. First, a brutal crackdown on Iranian protesters in January and February — an estimated 30,000 killed — that focused the administration’s attention. Second, Iran’s accelerating missile production. Third — and this is where the conversation briefly turns absurdist — an intelligence opportunity to take out 40 senior Iranian officials, including the Supreme Leader, who were all in the same place in central Tehran on a Saturday morning. Senor describes this as “a complete miracle that they have not figured out how to use Zoom.” The entire Iranian command structure, regime decapitation enabled because nobody told the ayatollahs about video conferencing.
Masoud presses on what happens after. He is worried about a failed state in Iran the way a doctor is worried about sepsis. Senor admits it is a huge risk but thinks the alternative — a contained but increasingly capable Iran — was worse. And on quagmire fears: the US has not moved anything like the 250,000 ground troops it moved before Iraq. There are no American ground forces going into Iran. Senor would “be shocked” if the war is still going in a few months. He wants Masoud to watch the daily Pentagon press briefings by General Caine as a scorecard.
Masoud’s counter — the “how is kind of icky” — is that by starting at the very top of the escalation ladder with assassinations (violating, he notes, a Reagan executive order from 1981), the US has guaranteed the exact Iranian response it’s now dealing with: the Strait of Hormuz closed, Dubai and Abu Dhabi getting hit with more rockets than Israel is, Gulf allies refusing to let the US launch strikes from their territory. Why not something more targeted, like the celebrated pager operation against Hezbollah?
At one point Masoud drops a line that stops the conversation cold:
“You have said more to explain why we are in this war than the president of the United States.”
Senor’s response is somewhere between a wince and a shrug: “That’s really why you brought me.”
The turn: why is young America losing patience with Israel?
About halfway through, Masoud pivots to polling. A recent Pew survey: about half of Americans have an unfavorable view of Israel, with the effect heaviest in younger generations — 71% of Democrats under 50 and about 50% of Republicans under 50. A 2025 Jewish Federations of America poll: only 37% of American Jews now identify as Zionists, and 14% of American Jews aged 18 to 34 identify as anti-Zionists.
What, Masoud asks, are these people getting wrong?
Senor’s answer: Israel is a real country, a normal country, a democracy, in a brutal neighborhood, fighting the most-covered war in history. (Think of the Vietnam War, he says, but with TikTok and Al Jazeera and a thousand channels.) Every country that has to fight for its survival makes mistakes. Holding Israel to a higher standard than any other country is, by definition, discrimination. He points to how Gavin Newsom, in an interview accusing Israel of genocide, prefaced it by saying “don’t get me wrong, Israel has a right to exist.” Senor finds this phrase revealing — we never preface statements about any other country that way. Why does the world keep granting Israel its right to exist, 80 years after it was founded, like we’re still deciding?
Masoud partly concedes — Israel is being held to a different standard, and some of that is about anti-semitism — but offers two alternative theories that Senor never fully rebuts.
The first: not every critic of Israel is an anti-semite. He cites internal Israeli critics, including former defense minister Moshe Ya’alon, who called Israel a “leprous fascist state committing ethnic cleansing,” and a former Israeli intelligence official quoted by Channel 12 saying Palestinians should be killed at 50-to-1, children included. He also brings up Netanyahu’s reference to the Amalekites — the biblical people the Israelites were commanded to annihilate down to the livestock. Netanyahu was talking about Hamas, but lots of people heard something broader. Some critics, Masoud argues, are reacting to the same things these Israelis are reacting to.
The second — which Senor labels “pop psychology” and then doesn’t really engage with — is about how Israel reads to outsiders. Masoud grew up in Saudi Arabia. When he first saw Abba Eban on television, speaking in the Queen’s English, he was floored. “Who do we have? Arafat, Mubarak.” The Israel of the 1970s, with Rabin and Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan, registered to an outsider as admirable Western center-left. Today’s Israel, he suggests, reads more as a “Levantine” country. He cites a Druze Israeli general who went on Twitter after October 7 looking like a WWF fighter and saying Hamas had “opened the gates of hell” on Gaza. That is, Masoud is saying, a very different aesthetic project from Abba Eban. Maybe some of the drift isn’t about ancient hatreds. Maybe it’s about a Western country’s slow, televised metamorphosis into something else.
Senor’s rejoinder on anti-semitism is historically pointed: the pile-on against Israel began on October 8, 9, and 10 — while Israelis were still pulling dead children out of kibbutz kitchens and picking up body parts at the Nova festival. Before Israel had done anything in response. That, he argues, is the historical signature of anti-semitism — the attacks on Jews come when Jews look weak, not when they look strong.
He offers his own diagnostic: ask anyone who is angry at Israel what they think of America. If they’re 1619-project types who think America’s founding was original sin, their anti-Israel views are part of a larger anti-Western package, and you’re not going to argue them out of it. Masoud accepts that this covers the progressive case — but it doesn’t explain the 50% of young Republicans. Senor’s answer there is that the right has become transactional about alliances, and the case for Israel as a “capable ally on steroids” — Admiral Cooper at CENTCOM now describes the US and Israel as “the two most powerful air forces in the world,” which Masoud gently notes is a wild thing to say about a country whose GDP is one-fiftieth of America’s — hasn’t been made.
The Palestinian question, which almost didn’t make it into the conversation
With time almost gone, Masoud more or less forces the Palestinian issue onto the table. Both men say they agree that some accommodation with the Palestinians is necessary. Both even agree on the principle of two states for two peoples — although Senor quickly points out that every Israeli process to deliver that (Rabin, Sharon, Olmert, Barak) failed, and that a recent Knesset vote against any Palestinian state passed with over 90 of 120 members, meaning not just Likud’s 32 seats but most of the opposition.
Masoud’s pushback is the sharpest exchange of the whole evening:
“There’s a theme in this conversation, Dan, where you take the fact that the consensus of Israeli opinion is in a certain direction as evidence of the rightness of that position. Why isn’t the response to that, ‘OK, this is a problem. Israeli public opinion is as much an obstacle to peace as Arab public opinion.’ There are two indigenous peoples who are living in that territory. And to be against a Palestinian state is as egregious in my view as to be anti-Zionist. And I don’t know why I’m the only person on the stage who thinks that.”
He then tells the story of Salam Fayyad — the Palestinian prime minister Masoud calls “frankly, the greatest politician,” a genuine non-violent two-stater. Nikki Haley once bragged to an AIPAC audience that she had blocked Fayyad from being appointed UN special envoy for Libya — a job with nothing to do with Israel — to send the message that “Palestinians don’t get a free lunch.” Masoud’s line lands hard: they are two peoples in a “Catholic marriage” with no divorce available until the end of time. The United States should be the marriage counselor.
Closing: the campuses
The audience Q&A touches Lebanon (Senor defers, says Hezbollah is easier to handle once Iran is dealt with), nuclear double standards (not really answered), and whether, if the war drags on, American Jews might face blowback. Senor says yes — he worries about that.
On campus anti-semitism, Senor surprises you by arguing the encampments aren’t the real problem. Jewish life at Harvard and elsewhere, he says, is actually vibrant right now. His worry is what’s being taught inside classrooms — tenured faculty with a worldview he doesn’t fully understand and few checks on their ability to “pass on or indoctrinate” it. Masoud, a tenured Harvard professor sitting across from him, notes the irony with a raised eyebrow but takes the point seriously.
Masoud invokes a piece of American history Senor has never heard: in 1948, three years after the Holocaust, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and a rabbi named Jesurun Cardozo — the first rabbi to conduct high holiday services in Spain since 1492 — signed a letter in the New York Times objecting to a visit by Menachem Begin, warning that the Israeli Freedom Party would be recognizable to anyone familiar with fascism and Nazism. Were Einstein and Arendt anti-semites? Of course not. They were reacting to the Deir Yassin massacre. Masoud’s point: critics of Israeli conduct are not automatically haters of Jews, and labeling them all as such forecloses the only conversations that might actually change minds.
Masoud ends with the real question he wants Senor to take home: how do Americans argue about all this — Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Palestinians — in a knockdown way, win some lose some, and still look at each other and think “that’s my countryman”? Senor’s answer is that universities need to admit students looking for real dialogue rather than encampments, and to find some way to deal with what tenured faculty teach. Masoud thanks him, notes he only got through a third of his questions, and invites him back.
Claude’s Take
This is a strange and valuable artifact. It is not a debate in the usual sense — Senor is a guest on Masoud’s stage and Masoud is trying to give him room — but Masoud is also significantly sharper, more prepared, and more historically grounded, and the result is that Senor ends up articulating positions that he can’t always quite defend under pressure. The Zoom joke is funny, but it is also doing heavy lifting: Senor’s case for decapitating the Iranian leadership is essentially “we got lucky and had a clean shot,” which is a tactical argument dressed up as a strategic one.
Senor is on his strongest ground on the history of Iranian hostility. The Marine barracks, the IEDs, the hostage crisis — these are real. His weakest ground is the gap between “Trump said we obliterated it in the summer” and “we are now at war with Iran.” He does not close that gap. He acknowledges he “can’t speak for the president” — which is to say, the president has not given an account, and Senor, a podcaster, has been left to provide one. That is an extraordinary admission buried in a polite sentence.
Senor’s framing of Israeli doctrine — “we’re out of the deterrence business, when we see a serious threat we remove it” — is, if accurate, one of the most important things to understand about the current moment, and it should be cited when people try to describe this as a one-off war. A doctrine of preemptive regime decapitation applied to any entity Israel judges hostile is not the same as the pre-October 7 doctrine, and Masoud’s quiet “does that include Erdogan?” question is the right one. Senor’s unwillingness to extend the logic where it naturally goes is telling.
On the anti-semitism analysis: Senor has a real historical point about the timing of the October 8-10 pile-on. That is genuinely anomalous and worth taking seriously. But he does not engage with Masoud’s pop-psychology argument at all, which is a missed opportunity, because Masoud is onto something. The Israel that Americans in the 1970s admired was aesthetically and politically a different country from the Israel that has been led for most of this century by the Likud right. Some of the generational shift is about anti-semitism, some is about the footage, some is about the loss of the secular Labor Zionist face that made Israel legible to the American center-left. All three things are true. Treating any one of them as the whole story is analytically lazy.
Senor’s strongest rhetorical move is the “ask them what they think of America” diagnostic. That really does map cleanly onto a big slice of progressive anti-Israel sentiment. It is not a justification for holding Israel to a lower standard, but it is a useful way to sort principled critics from totalizing ones. The problem — which Masoud catches immediately — is that it does nothing to explain the 50% of young Republicans now unfavorable to Israel, and that’s actually the more surprising number.
The most intellectually generous moment is Masoud refusing to demonize the young pro-Palestinian activists the way Senor demonizes them. The least generous moment is Senor’s insistence on treating Israeli public consensus as evidence of its own rightness — which is the kind of thing you’d never accept from an Iranian or a Russian commentator about their own country’s public opinion. Masoud catches him on this cleanly, and Senor has no answer.
One thing genuinely underlit in the conversation: neither man says much about whether Israel’s decapitation strike actually worked in any strategic sense. Senor asserts it has. Masoud asserts it has made things worse. Neither has real data yet, because neither can. Ask me in six months.
The final exchange about faculty indoctrination is the only moment where Senor sounds like a partisan who has lost the argument. A tenured Harvard professor — the one running the series, the one who just spent an hour steel-manning the war in Iran on Senor’s behalf and then pressing Senor from the left on the Palestinian question — is sitting right across from him. If that is what tenured indoctrination looks like, the republic is probably okay.