One peace at a time: Gaza, Israel and Iran

Hey, Ryan Reynolds here wishing you a very happy half off holiday because right now Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of 50% off unlimited. To be clear, that's half price, not half the service. Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price. So that means a half day. Yeah, give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront.

Payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow 135 gigabytes of network busy taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com.

The Economist. Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. The story of water on Mars is complicated. First, astronomers thought water was all over the place. Then that it was utterly dry. Then the discovery of polar ice caps and frozen soil. And this week, hints of a possible ocean's worth deep in the planet's crust. And most of the world's vanilla comes from Madagascar. But as demand for the flavor and scent has skyrocketed, new sources are needed. Our correspondent sniffs around in Colombia where which has a homegrown variant that smells like opportunity. But first, Two assassinations at the end of last month put the Middle east and the wider world on tenterhooks. In Beirut, a strike killed a leader of Hezbollah. In Tehran, a seemingly more precise operation killed a leader of Hamas in what had been seen as a secure comp. Israel said it had killed senior Hezbollah.

Commander Fouad Shukr in a single strike In Beirut, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh has been killed.

In Iran, Israel has only publicly claimed responsibility for one of those brazen attacks. Iran immediately promised retribution.

Growing fears of an all out war in the Middle east with Iran and its proxies threatening to strike back against.

Israel, believes it needs to punish Israel to prevent further further instability in the region.

But the retribution hasn't been immediate. Why the delay? Surprise is one answer. But perhaps Iran's leaders are waiting for the outcome, if any, of the latest round of peace negotiations.

Mediators from America, Egypt and Qatar are gathering in Doha today to talk about a ceasefire in Gaza.

Greg Karlstrom is a Middle east correspondent for the Economist.

Israel has sent a delegation to the talks, but Hamas has not. And that is one reason among several, why there's a lot of pessimism that these talks are going to go anywhere. And if they fail, there are concerns about what that will mean not only for Gaza, but for the chances of a much bigger conflict in the region.

So let's start with today's peace talks and why Hamas isn't there.

Hamas's argument is that there is nothing left to negotiate. They agreed to a ceasefire proposal about a month ago that would call for a phased agreement. It would take place in three stages, starting with an initial six week truce. Hamas would release some of the Israeli hostages it was holding in exchange for some Palestinian prisoners being released from Israeli jails. And then they would spend that initial six week period talking about a more permanent ceasefire and then the eventual reconstruction of Gaza. So for Hamas, they have put their offer on the table. They don't want to go back and renegotiate it, and they want Israel to accept that offer, which is not that different. Different from a proposal that Joe Biden announced at the White House at the end of May, a proposal which Joe Biden said Israel had already agreed to. So if you listen to all of the parties here, they're not that far away from a deal. And then what Hamas says is that they should just start implementing that deal they've already agreed to. That is one reason why Hamas hasn't sent a delegation. Of course, on top of that, you have the deadly strike last week at a school that was being used as a shelter for hundreds of civilians in Gaza. Dozens of people were killed in, in that strike. And then last month, obviously, you had the Israeli assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas in Gaza, which has also made them reluctant, shall we say, to take part in any talks with Israel.

But without Hamas at the table, what's really going to happen at these talks then?

I think what will happen first is the Israeli negotiating team, which is led by the head of the Mossad, will present the Israeli proposal to the us, Egypt and Qatari mediators. Whatever they've been authorized to present by Prime Minister Netanyahu, they will share that with the hosts of this conference. They will then take that proposal, I think, to the Hamas political leadership, which is based, many of them, just up the road in Doha. So even though Hamas is not officially attending this conference, I think there will be some indirect talks with Hamas, some indirect participation for them. And so the hope is that this Israeli proposal will be close enough to what Hamas has already agreed to that they might be able to use that as a basis for a ceasefire. And if that happens, the idea is not only to end the war in Gaza, but. But it's also to use that as a way to prevent possible Iranian retaliation for the assassination of Ismail Haniya in Tehran last month.

And about that. We've talked on the show before about how that attack seems absolutely inevitable but has not yet come. Where do things stand with that now?

It has seemed inevitable for a couple of weeks now. And just about every night since those two assassinations, I have heard from someone in Israel or in Lebanon or in the Gulf, a contact somewhere saying tonight is the night, it's really going to happen. And then of course, it hasn't happened yet and everyone is still waiting for it to happen. No one knows when it's going to happen. The final decision about whether Iran is going to strike Israel, that is in the hands of an 85 year old cleric who is not in the habit of doing interviews or talking to the media. So we're all guessing somewhat. But I think for Iran, unless there is a deal to, to end the war in Gaza, they are going to feel compelled to retaliate against Israel. They were humiliated and that humiliation still stands. And they're still going to retaliate unless they can claim credit for pushing Israel into a ceasefire, unless they can say this threat of retaliation convince the Israeli government to accept a deal that they haven't been willing to accept for months prior. If that's the case, then I think Iran will have a face saving way to avoid striking back directly at Israel.

So if these talks then seem very unlikely to come up with anything substantive, that would suggest that Iran is perhaps finger on the button waiting for them to fall apart.

Iran is, and Iran's partners in the region are as well. And I think whatever retaliation the Iranians have in mind, it's likely to start with Hezbollah in Lebanon. They have been, I think, more enthusiastic about striking at Israel and more determined to strike at Israel over the past couple of weeks. They feel they need to very quickly avenge the death of Wad Shukr. Their military command was assassinated in Beirut last month. And so I think they are likely to be the first wave of whatever retaliation comes. And they have made it quite clear that they intend to strike at military targets inside of Israel, perhaps in northern Israel, perhaps in the center closer to Tel Aviv. The question is, once they do that, whether Iran strikes directly and what Iran does in response, whether it's something bigger than the wave of missiles and drones that they fired back in April, that barrage of 300 plus missiles and drones, whether they try to do something, something bigger than that, or whether they try to do something a bit more unconventional. And there's been talk of perhaps striking at Israeli embassies in foreign countries, Israeli diplomats in foreign countries, whether it's something like that instead of a conventional retaliation against Israel.

But the suggestion up to this point is that whatever Iran does, it will be somewhat calibrated, right? A retribution of sorts, but not a provocation to all out regional war. Or is that genuinely a concern?

It's genuinely a concern that even if it's calibrated, mistakes happen or things end up being bigger than anticipated or more serious than anticipated. But I think the logic that has held for many, many months now that Iran doesn't want an all out regional war, Hezbollah doesn't want an all out war in Lebanon, I think that logic still holds. The Iranians, I think part of the reason why they have been so slow to respond over the past couple of weeks is they recognize they're trying to walk a tightrope here. They want to do something that sends a deterrent message to Israel, that tries to deter Israel from carrying out more assassinations on Iranian soil. That means doing something bigger than what they did in April or less symbolic than what they did in April, something that actually draws blood to try and deter Israel, but at the same time not making that so big that it creates an all out regional war that is a very difficult balance to try and strike. And I think that's why the Iranians have not yet done anything.

And what are the other concerns, the forces that are shaping what you think is likely to happen in the long run here?

We've seen over the past couple of weeks lots of American military equipment coming to the Middle east, two aircraft carrier groups, a cruise missile equipped submarine, a squadron of F22 jets. All of that obviously meant to deter Iran and its allies from carrying out a big attack on Israel. We've also seen along with that a stream of American diplomats coming to the region. Amos Hochstein, who is the White House point man for Israel and Lebanon, has been to Israel and Lebanon this week. Brett McGurk, the president's top Middle east adviser, he is shuttling around the region. So there is a real diplomatic push in parallel to what's happening with the military stuff. And it's not just meant to pressure Lebanon, pressure Hezbollah, pressure Arab states. There is, I think, growing pressure on Prime Minister Netanyahu. There is a sense within the American government that if they don't get a deal done in the next few days, there is a very serious risk that this blows up into a much bigger regional war. And so they are at least talking about putting more pressure on Netanyahu than they have at any point in the past 10 months. And at the end of the day. The decision about whether or not there is a ceasefire in Gaza still rests with the Israeli prime Minister. Most Israelis want a ceasefire. The Israeli army wants a ceasefire. His own defense minister wants a ceasefire. Netanyahu is the one person in a position of power who has held this up time and time again for months. And the question is now whether he's going to do that one more time or whether he can finally be pushed into making a deal that America, Israel, and much of the world wants.

Greg, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you.

Hi, I'm Cindy Crawford and I'm the founder of meaningful beauty. When Dr. Sabah and I decided to do a skincare line together, he said to me, we are going to give women meaningful beauty. And I said, that's exactly right. We want to give women meaningful beauty, which means each and every product is meaningful. It has a reason to exist. It's efficacious. You're going to get results, and then you just go out and live your life. Meaningful beauty confidence is beautiful. Learn more@meaningfulbeauty.com.

In the late 19th century, an astronomer named Percival Lowell peered up at the surface of Mars and thought he saw neat interconnected lines across its surface. Canals, he assumed, built by inhabitants who were channeling water from the ice caps as a way to stop the tropics from turning into deserts. Weird thing. Everybody was cool with that. For a while, the public simply accepted that there was an advanced Martian race up there shaping its environment. Lowell, of course, turned out to be wrong. Mostly those surface features hadn't been made for water. They'd been made in the distant past by water. But the fascination with the idea of life on the red planet that Lowell jump started never really went away.

People are always keen on stories about water on Mars for a whole bunch of reasons, much of which have to do with whether the planet ever was inhabited by, well, life.

Oliver Morton is our planetary affairs editor and is the author of Mapping Mars. Science, Imagination, and the Birth of a World.

This week's provided them with a doozy that suggests that 10 or so kilometers below the surface there is an aquifer that is full of enough water to create a whole ocean if it were brought back up to the surface.

So are we talking a submerged ocean here, or is this ice? What's going on?

It's liquid water in the pores in the rock, and it's important to stress that it's liquid because we know that Mars has lots of frozen water and frozen soil near the surface. This is a big body or big Aquifer of genuine liquid water, like all.

Over the planet at that kind of depth or in localized places.

Unclear. The mission which produced the data that this new analysis is based on was originally conceived as something that would have a network of landers around the planet. And as costs went up and budgets contracted, it became a lander called Insight, which just went to one place. And so it really tells you about what the seismic data from that place can tell you. It might be all around the planet. There's no reason to think it wouldn't be. But you can't say that for sure.

Even still, if it's 10 or so kilometers below the surface, how does a lander on the surface know that it's down there?

The guys who did the research took seismic data from the lander and asked themselves what sort of crust we're talking about, the mid crust. So like 10 to 20 kilometres down would provide speeds for seismic waves that match what we see from the Insight lander. And they looked at all sorts of parameters and turned the question round. And the best fit that they had was one where there was liquid water filling up the pores between rocks.

So put this in context, because we have both obsessed about and heard about water in various forms on Mars before. How does this fit into what we knew already?

The glaring paradox about Mars that was only really revealed by space probes in the 1960s and 70s is that it is incredibly dry, cold and barren on the surface. And yet at the same time, there are marks on the surface that reveal that there used to be rivers, that there used to be titanic floods scoured vast regions of the planet, that there used to be lakes, and according to some interpretations, there was an ocean in the low lying northern plains. So Mars has had this mystery that no water now and significant amounts of water in the past. So where did the water go? And some of it has clearly just frozen. There's quite a lot of ice in the soils of Mars, the regolith of Mars. There's ice in the northern ice cap. And also there's good evidence that the planet has lost some of its water as it's lost some of its atmosphere. In general, as the top of the atmosphere gets hit by energy from the sun and through various processes is stripped of some atoms. But is there any significantly large permanently liquid body of water left? And the only place that might be would be in the deep subsurface. And that's why this discovery is kind of cool, because it says, yeah, you know, it looks as though there really could be an ocean's worth of water spread around the planet in a deep subsurface aquifer. And that water could have been liquid throughout the planet's history. A diminishing body of liquid water, but still a real one. And so if you imagine the planet had ever been the abode of life, then you might imagine that if any living things still remain on it, they may remain in the place where there's liquid water. Because on Earth, we're pretty clear that liquid water is something that life absolutely needs.

So how to go chasing that question, how to get to that water and look for signs of life?

Well, that's really hard. That's really hard because the water is deep down. And drilling deep is hard on Earth, where you have sort of people like Bruce Willis in the film Armageddon, who are very used to drilling deep holes into the crust of the planet in a manly way. We don't have such people on Mars, and it will be some time before we do so directly. Accessing the aquifer may be very hard, but we could imagine geophysical probes, more seismic work, and some other things which might give us a real sense of how deep and how coherent the aquifer is all around the planet. That would be really useful.

So getting away from life that was on Mars, what about the life that might be there? The Bruce Willis's of the future. Does any of this indicate that habitability is improved?

Not really. If people were to go to Mars to settle, they would have more than enough energy from their nuclear plants or their big solar power plants or whatever to melt ice near the surface for all their watery needs. I think it might speak to a subject for them to think about, because it might speak to a much richer history of Mars than we might otherwise have thought. It might mean that that ocean in the northern plains really was there once. It might have implications for where one would look for fossils. I think it just makes the story of Mars more interesting. I suppose in the very, very long future, the idea that there's more water on Mars than was thought this time last week might be handy for people or other intelligences which wish to terraform the planet to make it something wetter and more hospitable. But that's a very, very long way away. I mean, water that's 6 or 10 or 20 kilometers below the surface is really inaccessible. I mean, it would be pretty inaccessible on Earth, but on another planet it is really inaccessible. And of the things that you might want to do, use heavy industry on Mars to do, I'm not sure that drilling into such aquifers would be your first list. And also the other possibility is that if those aquifers do have some small, cryptic remnant of the Martian biosphere in them, you'd want to be pretty careful about not polluting them as well.

Thanks very much for joining us, Oliver.

Hey, it's a pleasure as always, Jason.

To get to the vanilla farm of Christian Garcia Maria, I had to walk along a mud slick track that led out of El Valle. The same is a town in Choco on Colombia's Pacific coast.

Claire McHugh writes about Latin America for the Economist.

And the path led past indigenous families who are washing in the river.

Hola.

There were some children dancing, and when I was there, a man who was slicing yellow sugar cane with a machete under banana trees. And Christian told me how growing vanilla is a product of if time and patience. It's a crop that can be quite tricky to grow. And his father started training wild vanilla vines around the cacao and avocado trees on his family's land back in 2016. And as Christian was telling me this, we were walking along, you can barely call it a bridge. It was two planks of wood suspended above a rice field beneath trees that are so tall, full of howler monkeys and toucans. And he was telling me how finally his father's efforts are now paying off. Last year, he sold 50 kg of dried vanilla beans to restaurants and ice cream parlors across Colombia. And it's a sweet deal. These pods are really valuable. One kilogram of the cured beans fetches as much as 2.5 million pesos, which is about $600. It was a surprise to me to learn that vanilla is actually native to Central and South America, those humid jungles that grow in the region. But today, it is Madagascar that provides 80% of the global supply. But because vanilla is still hand pollinated, which is very labor intensive and slow, vanilla is the world's most expensive spice, after saffron. And demand has outstripped supply for years, and now buyers are looking for new sources. And some of them are actually looking to Colombia. The rainforest around El Valle houses Vanilla planifolia. That's the most in demand species. In the past eight years, around 200 vanilla plantations, which are managed by local community councils, have opened with the support from Swiss Aid, which is a charity. And the produce on these vanilla plantations is now providing much needed income for the residents of El Valle and that whole vicinity. Choco is a very poor region. Around two thirds of the people there live on less than $3.50 a day. And the other thing that's interesting about the vanilla that grows in El Valle is, is that it's genetically distinct from the variety that's found elsewhere, and it's still pollinated by Melipona bees. And the presence of this natural pollinator gives the vanilla a very distinct scent and flavor. And now that's really interesting to people who are producing niche or luxury perfumes. And I spoke to Alejandro Hernal Perez, who is the director in Colombia for a French flavors and fragrance giant called Maine, and he recently bought some samples from Choco to test the vanilla back in the laboratories in France. He thinks the vanilla's allure lies in the green credentials as well as the vanilla wraps around the trees because it needs them for support. This provides locals with an incentive not to chop the trees down, so it stops deforestation. And that appeals to consumers who are increasingly demanding, ethically sourced and sustainable products. In order to make more money from vanilla, production will need to scale up fast. Maine say they would need at least 1 ton of high quality dried pods per year. That's more than double what the company run by the local councils expects to buy from producers in 2024. Another challenge is investment. More capital is needed for training, for quality control, and to help those local growers obtain the paperwork that they eventually would need to export. And there's barely any roads in El Choco, so getting the pods from El Valle to the world is really expensive. You know, have to rely on airplanes or slow cargo ships. But for some, the track is worth making. Alejandro Alvarez of Selava, Nevada, that's an ice cream brand based in Bogota, the capital. He's been buying beans from the Pacific since 2010, and he thinks that their spectacular flavor overrides any concerns.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow, Sam.