Something shifted in the Middle East this past month, and if you blinked, you may have missed the full weight of it.
The Iran War — the one that began last June when Israeli jets flew over Tehran and the Saturday-night protesters in Tel Aviv suddenly became the pilots — is technically over. The strikes happened. The shelters emptied. The ceasefire in Gaza is holding. And yet, as Amit Segal told us this week on Inside Call Me Back, the uranium is still in the ground at Fordow and Isfahan, the regime is still standing, and Israelis are asking a question that has no clean answer: was it worth it?
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Here's the detail that stopped us cold. A very senior Israeli intelligence source — someone inside the community that is usually allergic to precision — told Amit that the Iranian regime will fall by the end of 2026. Not "eventually." Not "someday." By the end of this year. His reasoning: within two months, hunger will begin spreading through Iran's lower classes — the very people who were the regime's base. After 7,000 protesters killed and 25,000 arrested, the fear that kept them in line is now competing with something more immediate. You can't eat ideology.
That is the kind of thing you won't read in a wire dispatch. It's the kind of thing that only surfaces when you have sources who trust you — and when you're willing to ask the uncomfortable question out loud.
That's what Call Me Back is for.
This week, we also sat down with Ed Husain and Nadav Eyal to ask the harder question underneath the military one: what comes after epic fury? The bombs have fallen. Now what? And in our most recent Inside episode, Amit walked us through the political vision — or the alarming absence of one — among the people who want to lead Israel next. He quoted a conversation he once witnessed between Yossi Sarid, the leader of the Israeli left, and Efi Eitam, the leader of the religious right. Their conclusion: the only Israel they could both live in was the Israel of right now — because neither could survive the other's vision of the future.
That tension — between the Israel that exists and the Israel each faction wants to build — is the story of the next Israeli election, and we're going to be covering every turn of it.
Coming up: more on what the post-war moment means for Netanyahu's political survival, for the hostages still unaccounted for, and for the question of whether anyone in Israeli politics is capable of articulating something bigger than the next news cycle.
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— The Call Me Back team