The Middle East is forever changed. We have seen Iran lose. Syria, they have basically lost their grip

of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and they have lost a lot of the power of Hamas in Gaza, and Arabs across

the region are saying themselves. The proxy system of Iran is gone.

For the Middle East, it is truly the fall of the Berlin Wall.

It's 9.45 a.m. on Sunday, December 8th, here in New York City. It's 3.45 p.m. on Sunday,

December 8th in Israel, as Israelis monitor events closely on the other side of the Israeli-Syrian border,

it is 4.45 p.m. on Sunday, December 8th, in Damascus. A lot has unfolded in the Middle East

over the past 48 hours with the fall of the Assad regime, which we will be focusing on today

with Nadavail and the implication specifically for Israel.

We will be doing other episodes in the days ahead that take a broader look at what is going on,

but today's episode is primarily focused on what this whole escalation,

crisis, development, depending on how you look at it,

looks like from Israel's perspective.

But before we get into today's conversation, one housekeeping

note, on our Thursday episode, you will notice the podcast's cover art will be slightly

changed. It's not a dramatic change, but I wanted to give you a heads up so your eyes don't miss

it next time it pops up in your feed.

Alon has been urging me for some time to agree to a change in our cover art.

We first created this cover art basically on a PowerPoint slide when we were mere children

in the podcasting world, experimenting, tinkering with launching a podcast and never got

around to updating it. I was perfectly comfortable with the old version. I'm a Luddite. I'm not

quick to modernize, but Alon has persuaded me that the time has come. We need to be running this

...