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After a turbulent week in the Middle East, the latest episode of The Deep Dive tackles the news that the United States and Iran are preparing to sign an agreement: one that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says leaves Israel out entirely. To make sense of what this means in the broader picture, Shifra Jacobs is joined by Yasmin Sayeh, an Iranian-Israeli strategic analyst, security-studies scholar, and Persian speaker who works to bridge academic strategy with the human reality inside Iran. Her verdict on the emerging US-Iran deal is blunt: from what is known so far, she calls it possibly the worst agreement she has ever read.
From protests to a deal
Sayeh walks through the arc of the past six months, from the mass protests and the regime’s brutal crackdown to the multi-front war and now sudden diplomacy. By her account, tens of thousands of Iranians have been killed for demanding change, yet the deal does little to weaken the regime, instead handing it the money, legitimacy, and breathing room to rebuild. She argues that even if leadership has changed hands, the ideology has not, and a diplomatic “win” risks letting Tehran present a moderate, West-friendly face to the world while repression continues at home.
The human cost behind the headlines
A central thread of the conversation is the human cost. Drawing on her reporting for The Jerusalem Report, Sayeh describes how the regime has used sexual violence as a systematic tool of fear against its own people, drawing a direct parallel to the atrocities of October 7 and Iran’s network of proxies such as Hamas and Hezbollah. She and Jacobs press on a difficult point: how easy it is for outside audiences to grow desensitized to these stories, and why testimony, even when it can only be told secondhand, still demands to be heard. For Israelis, she notes, the war never really stopped, with rockets still coming from the north.
Cautious hope and a wish for Tehran
The episode closes on a cautiously hopeful note. Sayeh reflects on the Iranian-Israeli solidarity protests she helped organize in Tel Aviv and the flood of messages she received from Iranians grateful simply to be seen. She suspects the publicized friction between Trump and Netanyahu may be political theater, and holds out hope that the deal set to be signed in Switzerland on Friday could yet hold a surprise. Her closing wish captures the spirit of the conversation: that one day soon she and Jacobs might record the podcast together in Tehran.
