The United States and Israel are engaged in a just and legal war against the Iranian regime, which does not, as a matter of policy, negotiate in good faith, according to Edwin Black, an investigative journalist and book author.
Black, who also hosts an eponymous podcast, spoke to JNS prior to delivering a talk, which centered on Iran and on some of the things that the pope has said about Israel, at the Saban Theatre in Los Angeles on May 11.
The author thinks that the war against the Islamic Republic is going well, but he thinks that the regime has an apocalyptic vision, in which adherents wind up in paradise.
“We’ve had these negotiations, which are completely fruitless, because the Iranians over the past four to five decades have turned protracted negotiation into a tooth-pulling art form,” Black told JNS. “They’ll do anything to buy an hour, to buy a day, to buy 30 minutes.”
“They’re on their way to making nuclear bombs to destroy humanity, because they want to destroy humanity, because they feel that on the ashes of an incinerated civilization, they will rise to their paradise,” he said.
“There is no opportunity for compromise with these guys,” Black added.
The author thinks that the ceasefire, of which he is no fan, is necessary for the Trump administration to comply with the War Powers Resolution, a federal law that requires the administration to seek congressional approval for military action within 60 days, and because the country needs to rearm.
His July 2025 book about the Jewish state’s strikes on the Iranian regime was the product of 20 years of work, Black told JNS.
“I’m on this topic every day for decades,” he said. “Even while I’m going upstairs and even while I’m going to a movie and even while I’m in an airplane and even while I’m talking to you, in the back of my mind, I am tracking what is happening next.”
“I’ve had a front-row witness to this entire process,” he said.
The Obama administration “guaranteed” that Iran would have a nuclear bomb within a decade when it entered into the 2015 nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, according to Black.
“These are cultic people. They will never agree to even a fake peace,” he said of the Iranian regime. “Even now, they are saying, ‘Well we need to enrich. We have a God-given right to enrich,’ and of course they want to take over the Strait of Hormuz and own it.”
The strait, and others near Gibraltar, Oman, Taiwan and the Phillipines are international waterways. “There will be no commerce. There will be no civilization without the free transit of goods and individuals and ideas across the international waterways of the world,” Black said.
Israel’s decision in December to recognize Somaliland as an independent country is significant, because it will provide the United States and Israel a military base that’s only a short flight away from Yemen, according to Black.
That, he told JNS, will let Washington and Jerusalem “attack threats to navigable waters.” In the end, Black thinks, the Iranian regime will be replaced by a “modern, peace-loving Persian people.”
“Just because we win the war doesn’t mean they agree we win the war,” he said. “We won World War I and Germany was devastated, but 11 years later Adolf Hitler came to power.”
“The Japanese wore their top hats and signed the instrument of surrender in 1945 and the last Japanese soldier surrendered in 1973, so there’s always going to be the 1% or the 1% of 1% with a bazooka, who is capable of firing a shot,” he added. “But then it becomes terrorism and not a terror regime, and we’ll have to deal with that as well.”
‘Need to live in peace’
Black told JNS that the talk in Los Angeles came about after he issued a video response to a comment by Pope Leo XIV. Rabbi David Baron, of Temple of the Arts, a Reform synagogue at the Saban Theatre, invited him to expand on his video comments, Black said.
Black had a lot of criticism of the church, both of its historical Jew-hatred and of the contemporary Catholic church in Chicago, where he grew up and where the pope was previously a bishop.
He called the church in Chicago “one of the most criminal and corrupt organizations in American history” and told JNS, of the pope, that “because he’s a Chicago boy and I’m a Chicago boy, I knew the deep dark secrets of the Catholic church in Chicago.”
Black sees the pope as distinct from Catholics in the pews and said that relations are “very good” between Jews and Catholics.
“Don’t confuse the Catholic community with the pope,” he told JNS. “The pope represents the church, and he doesn’t represent God. It takes a little chutzpah to say, ‘I speak for God.’”
In the wake of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks, Black thinks that Jews need not coexist with those who “spend day and night saying, ‘When will I get my chance to kill these people? And when will I get my chance to die trying?’”
“We need to live in peace, and the word of God is very clear: When people rise up to kill you, we must take measures for pikuach nefesh, to save a life,” he told JNS.
“In this particular case, we have not only saved the Jewish people,” he said. “We have saved millions upon millions of Arabs, Christians and Americans all over the world.”
