The first time Jonathan Spyer went to Lebanon was in the summer of 2006 war when he drove a tank in Israel’s war with Hezbollah. He and I met in Jerusalem in July shortly before he was called up for reserve duty. The riveting and tragic story of his unit’s travails in a war that neither Israel’s military nor civilian leadership had prepared for is the centerpiece of his new book, The Transforming Fire: The Rise of the Israel-Islamist Conflict. Combining reporting with analysis, as well as deeply moving personal accounts, Spyer has written a brilliant book that documents Israel’s last two decades since the beginnings of the Oslo process, a period of self-inflicted Israeli delusion that Spyer wishes he had been wrong about. Instead, he saw it as a disaster from the outset. What looked to some like an Arab world ready for peace was actually a system that was undergoing a profound transformation. Part of that was the ideological shift underway in the Arab world, from Arab nationalist to Islamist, but there was another dynamic as well, driven by a non-Arab actor, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

“You have state power from above,” says Spyer, “that is, the power of the Iranian regime, combined with these popular movements from below. Iran’s is not an impressive regime—it is backward and corrupt, but has found a way to translate its ideological zeal and willingness to use violence into a successful practice in politics in a number of places. Hezbollah is the poster boy, but they’ve done it with the Palestinian movement as well. It’s remarkable what they’ve done by cutting the Palestinian national movement into two and turned the Islamist half into a client of theirs. They’ve done it in Iraq as well, even with U.S. troops on the ground.”

The same currency that enables the Iranians to practice subversion abroad is what allows them to stay in power at home, says Spyer—violence. “They wouldn’t like to hear it, but in this way they resemble an Arab regime. The Islamic Republic was always proud that it was not like an Arab state, that it had genuine sources of legitimacy, but after last July’s elections, the Iranian regime has shown its colors.”