Israel has demonstrated that it can strike its enemies, but can it shape what comes next? In a wide-ranging and unusually candid conversation, former IDF spokesman Peter Lerner examines the violent settler rampages in the West Bank and a government he says has “empowered extremism”; the failure to turn military success in Gaza into a viable political endgame; the uncertain new realities confronting Hezbollah in Lebanon, Turkey in Syria and a rearming Iran; and the limits of military power without diplomacy and political strategy. Yet beneath it all is a bigger question: how is Israel itself surviving? Lerner describes a country exhausted by war, reserve duty and internal division, yet still driven by a remarkable national instinct to “get up and do.” With Israel approaching a potentially transformative election, this is ultimately a conversation about agency, democracy, leadership—and whether Israel can now summon the power not merely to change the Middle East, but to change itself.