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Speaker 4: Joining us now is Times of Israel journalist Haave Brett
Speaker 4: to girth have you. Thank you so much for joining us,
Speaker 4: Thank you for having me and so so the audience
Speaker 4: understands kind of where you are and the spectrum when
Speaker 4: it comes to Israeli politics. I had said at the
Speaker 4: top of the show that you were a couple of
Speaker 4: ticks to the right of net and Yahoo. But correct
Speaker 4: me if I'm where would you say that you are
Speaker 4: kind of politically just so people have the proper context
Speaker 4: for evaluating.
Speaker 5: A journalist, I'm objective Mars obviously right here. I am
Speaker 5: a big fan of some ideas on the left. I
Speaker 5: am still think two state solution is doable. I think,
Speaker 5: in fact, everything else that I've ever heard is less
Speaker 5: likely and less doable. And on a lot of social
Speaker 5: issues and cultural issues, I'm pretty liberal. Specifically on the
Speaker 5: question of Iran and the question of Israeli capabilities and
Speaker 5: the question of how this war has been handled. It
Speaker 5: is my view that the Biden administration's humanitarianism constantly pressuring
Speaker 5: the Israelis to slow down, has hurt everybody, mostly Palestinian civilians. Definitely,
Speaker 5: the hostages in the dungeons in Gaza, and Israeli soldiers
Speaker 5: have died because for periods of four months or more
Speaker 5: the Israeli army had to stop in Gaza because they
Speaker 5: couldn't go into Rafa. Things like that. There is a
Speaker 5: way to prosecute this war, and to do it slowly
Speaker 5: is the worst possible way. Israel has escalation dominance visa
Speaker 5: of Iran, and the only way to avoid a destructive
Speaker 5: Worren Lebanon I argued ten months ago is to have
Speaker 5: an exchange with Iran. So what does that put me?
Speaker 5: I'm very hawkish in that sense, but I don't think
Speaker 5: I'm actually on the right.
Speaker 1: All right, let's go with that.
Speaker 4: So we put up this first element over the report
Speaker 4: over a drop site news. But there's been a lot
Speaker 4: of reporting in the Israeli press and elsewhere about the
Speaker 4: kind of rise of looting going on in Gaza at
Speaker 4: the hands of the gangs.
Speaker 1: As we report over drop site, the.
Speaker 4: Kind of Hamas led security forces are now launching kind
Speaker 4: of a counter attack ambushed, ambushed a group of hijackers
Speaker 4: who killing at least twenty of them, it appears. And
Speaker 4: the argument that's being made by and you've seen the
Speaker 4: reporting in aw Rats, I'm curious if Times of Israel
Speaker 4: has done so reporting on this as well. But the
Speaker 4: argument that Hamas is also making is that ever since
Speaker 4: Israel took over Rafa, looting within the looting within that
Speaker 4: area has dramatically increased, and that the IDEF calls it
Speaker 4: the looting zone. The United Nations yesterday said that Kogat
Speaker 4: urged a last minute shift in the route that these
Speaker 4: one hundred and nine AID trucks took and it put
Speaker 4: them right into the sites of the hijackers. So there
Speaker 4: are a lot of suggestions both in Israeli media and
Speaker 4: from Gozans that there's some collaboration going on between between
Speaker 4: Israel and these and these gangs, these well organized gangs
Speaker 4: are now hijacking trucks.
Speaker 1: What's your understanding of what's going on there?
Speaker 5: Well, it's there's so much to unpack there. Yeah, the
Speaker 5: United Nations lost something like ninety seven trucks United Nations
Speaker 5: out of a convoy of I believe one hundred and nine.
Speaker 5: The United Nations cannot distribute aid in Gaza. There are
Speaker 5: nine hundred truckloads worth of AID sitting on the Gaza
Speaker 5: side of the Caram shaloone crossing that they simply can't distribute.
Speaker 5: When the UN is asked by journalists why you know
Speaker 5: what it would take for them to distribute, they say,
Speaker 5: Israeli protection. And when they then say to them, well
Speaker 5: why doesn't the Israeli army accompany the convoys, they then say, well,
Speaker 5: they can't accompany the convoys because that'll make the convoys
Speaker 5: a target of the other side. There is no force,
Speaker 5: no criminal gang, no clan, no family, no These are
Speaker 5: all these terms used to describe a real social reality
Speaker 5: on the ground in Gaza. There is no force big
Speaker 5: enough to take ninety seven trucks out of the hands
Speaker 5: of the UN except Framas in the certain areas where
Speaker 5: the Israelis aren't operating. So the very idea that ninety
Speaker 5: seven of these trucks are lost, the UN says something
Speaker 5: about it doesn't say who it is, doesn't say who
Speaker 5: it suspects it is, doesn't say if these items have
Speaker 5: shown up on the black market in Gaza being sold
Speaker 5: by certain parties or other parts. It's all very, very
Speaker 5: strangely vague. And then there's this argument that in fact
Speaker 5: it's not Tramas. It can't be anyone but Tramas Ramas
Speaker 5: is still sufficiently strong in Gaza to not allow anyone
Speaker 5: else to come in. The irony is that a few
Speaker 5: months back, I think probably five months ago something like that,
Speaker 5: the Israeli Army tried to build out a separate a
Speaker 5: distribution system, working with these clans, which are just an
Speaker 5: important social structure in Gazan society, that also sometimes built
Speaker 5: out organized crime syndicates, and the two AID convoys that
Speaker 5: worked with the Israeli Army. Publicly, this is known, and
Speaker 5: this is something that nobody has hidden were intercepted and
Speaker 5: massacred by Rama's forces, and so Israel hasn't actually trusted
Speaker 5: the clans to be capable of actually doing the distribution
Speaker 5: and holding their own in Gaza. There is no one
Speaker 5: in Gaza who could have taken those trucks except Tramas.
Speaker 5: Therefore my conclusion, I have not heard evidence. I've seen
Speaker 5: a lot of this desperate speculation hoping to avoid the
Speaker 5: very idea that Hamas might be the bad guys in
Speaker 5: any scenario, But I haven't actually seen any evidence that
Speaker 5: suggests that anyone else even remotely has the capability, and so,
Speaker 5: falling back on these conspiracies of the Israelis, the Israelis
Speaker 5: would love the AID to get distributed in ways that
Speaker 5: totally bypass Hamas. It would get a lot of pressure
Speaker 5: off of them, and nobody quite knows how because Ramas
Speaker 5: is sufficiently strong to continue disrupting the AID.
Speaker 1: Emily has a question. A segment was curious.
Speaker 4: Yaser Abu Shabab is the leader of the hijacking group
Speaker 4: that Hamas claims to have sent it security forces to
Speaker 4: ambush and attack.
Speaker 1: He was killed in this attack.
Speaker 4: What's the theory for why the security forces launched this ambush?
Speaker 4: Of these of these hijackers, If the hijackers were actually Hamas.
Speaker 5: That there's some chance that they were piecing together some
Speaker 5: kind of an organization that was capable of working with
Speaker 5: the Israelis, or that they needed somebody to massacre to
Speaker 5: make this case, and that's it's more likely. It's more
Speaker 5: likely than that ninety seven trucks were taken by those
Speaker 5: twenty people. It's more likely than that there is a
Speaker 5: plan nobody's ever heard of before.
Speaker 6: Well, you just mentioned something interesting in your answer about
Speaker 6: how Hamas is still and he's sufficiently strong, and I
Speaker 6: think that's a really important point, and I want to ask,
Speaker 6: I probably disagree with the argument, but is that part
Speaker 6: of because I think there are some hawkish people who
Speaker 6: will say, you know, Hamas has been basically vanquished and destroyed,
Speaker 6: and that seems to me a dishonest argument. There has
Speaker 6: been a lot of destruction, but Hamas has reconstituted itself
Speaker 6: in like northern Gaza for example, and is still there.
Speaker 6: It's still you know, in dealing with infrastructure and all
Speaker 6: of those sort of a vacuum obviously, so who else
Speaker 6: would fill it but Hamas does? This is this part
Speaker 6: of your argument as to why the humanitarianism, as you
Speaker 6: put it, of the Biden administration is insufficient and has
Speaker 6: been cruel, as you put it earlier, to the people
Speaker 6: of the Palestinians, the people of Gaza, because it sort
Speaker 6: of drags the conflict out longer than otherwise it could
Speaker 6: have been.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know, the best way I think to think
Speaker 5: about this is to distinguish the Lebanon situation from the
Speaker 5: Daza situation. In Lebanon, the Israel's supreme interest is at
Speaker 5: some point pretty soon to end it. And the reason
Speaker 5: is that it achieved a tremendous amount in Lebanon in
Speaker 5: terms of weakening Hasbel as shattering Krasbela and at incredibly
Speaker 5: low cost. And as it sticks around, and as it
Speaker 5: expands the war, and as it maybe goes deeper, and
Speaker 5: as Lebanon itself has no other Israel will start being
Speaker 5: higher cost and for much lower return. And so right
Speaker 5: now there isn't a real ceasefire negotiation process that the
Speaker 5: Israelis are interested in. Krisbelah took such a blow that
Speaker 5: Krisbelah is interested in. Kasbela's patrons in Iran feel like
Speaker 5: they're on their back feet and they're interested in so
Speaker 5: there's a real likelihood, and every one of the parties
Speaker 5: wants it, but they're trying to shape how it looks
Speaker 5: and how they defined the story of it for a ceasefire.
Speaker 5: The problem that Israel has in Gaza, the security problem
Speaker 5: Israel has in Gaza, is very very simple. There is
Speaker 5: no other rest of Gaza other than Tramas. In other words,
Speaker 5: in Lebanon, there's a lot of other factions and groups
Speaker 5: and political organizations and even kind of militias. And there's
Speaker 5: the Lebanese Army which has refused to engage the Israelis
Speaker 5: because they know Israel' that were with Resbla and not
Speaker 5: with Lebanon. All of that other rest of the polity
Speaker 5: that can step into fill the vacuum doesn't exist in Gaza.
Speaker 5: There is only Ramas. And Israel adopted a doctrine kind
Speaker 5: of learned from Afghanistan, the American mistake in Afghanistan. Part
Speaker 5: of the American mistake was something called the clear and
Speaker 5: whole doctrine, which is that they cleared a valley, they
Speaker 5: took the valley, they cleared the valley, and then they
Speaker 5: held it with a marine detachment or an army detachment,
Speaker 5: so that the Taliban couldn't regroup there. What that ended
Speaker 5: up creating was many, many thousands of targets for the
Speaker 5: Gorillas all over Afghanistan. It ended up being a major
Speaker 5: source of pain and a major obstacle to the America
Speaker 5: achieving its goals in Afghanistan. So Israel has something that
Speaker 5: Israel has the opposite of that. In Gaza. Tramas is
Speaker 5: buried underground in five hundred kilometers of tunnels. It spent
Speaker 5: seventeen years building and it's the single biggest thing Palestinians
Speaker 5: have ever built. And Tamas bent Gaza's entire economy to
Speaker 5: building these tunnels, and in thirteen months of war, not
Speaker 5: a single civilian has been documented being allowed into the
Speaker 5: tunnels for safety. And so Israel's goal is to get
Speaker 5: Ramas out of those tunnels, to engage them, and to
Speaker 5: destroy them. How do you do that. You take an
Speaker 5: area with Ramas and then you pull out, and Ramas
Speaker 5: comes back, and then you take that area again. And
Speaker 5: so literally everywhere in Gaza you've seen three, four or
Speaker 5: five Israeli entries, and each time in Israeli pull out
Speaker 5: to kind of reverse the clear and hold problem. So
Speaker 5: right now, what we're talking about is a Gaza in
Speaker 5: which Ramas has sections of its organization still underground, sections
Speaker 5: of its organization that come up and taken take control.
Speaker 5: No one else who can fill that gap. There's no
Speaker 5: serious organization with guns and popular support of any kind,
Speaker 5: even in small areas of Gaza, that can fill the gap.
Speaker 5: There is only Haramas. I haven't described to you the solution.
Speaker 5: I've just described you the problem that nobody has a
Speaker 5: solution for. Not Biden, not the left, not the right,
Speaker 5: not Nitagnallo, not progressives in America. Nobody quite knows what
Speaker 5: takes over Gaza after Hamas. And let me just say
Speaker 5: one last sentence about that, because this is fundamental. If
Speaker 5: Ramas can't be removed from Gaza, nobody knows how to rebuild.
Speaker 5: Nobody knows how to push the ceasefire forward. You can't
Speaker 5: dump a hundred billion dollars on Gaza and actually have
Speaker 5: it rebuilt if Ramas is the one passing out the money.
Speaker 5: So Gaza is a huge problem, and Tramas is the
Speaker 5: name of that problem, and there's no perfect solution for it.
Speaker 5: What the Israelis are hoping for is a long degradation war.
Speaker 5: It's going to be two years, three years, and eventually
Speaker 5: Ramas will slowly be degraded enough that other solutions can
Speaker 5: come to play.
Speaker 4: So the United States eventually said, you know what, why
Speaker 4: don't we just withdraw from Afghanistan. Hamas is saying that
Speaker 4: if Israel withdraw from Gaza, it will release the hostages.
Speaker 1: Why not take that deal?
Speaker 5: Why not take the deal that you end the war
Speaker 5: and release the hostages. Yeah, Tamas has not ever said that.
Speaker 5: It said this, by the way, the week after October seven,
Speaker 5: I mean it said it immediately. No, no, no, no war.
Speaker 5: We're fine, We're totally fine. Here's all your hostage is back,
Speaker 5: but totally end to the war. There's simply two points.
Speaker 5: First of all, that's not true. Ramas has always added
Speaker 5: massive other stipulations having to do with the West Bank,
Speaker 5: having to do with prisoners, including prisoners who are massive
Speaker 5: murderers in Israeli prisons and by the thousands. There's never
Speaker 5: been a Ramas statement that it said, just let's end it,
Speaker 5: just let's end the war. Go back to October sixth,
Speaker 5: nothing happened.
Speaker 1: Well, they buy something.
Speaker 4: They've said they would accept the framework that was put
Speaker 4: through by the NENNA, who's work Cabinet and then announced
Speaker 4: by Biden in July.
Speaker 5: Right then they say that it's an interesting thing. First
Speaker 5: of all, that's a very temporary, tiny little deal that
Speaker 5: leaves a great meant most of the hostages still in
Speaker 5: Kramas's hands. That's first of all. Second of all, and
Speaker 5: that they have occasionally leaked to the Secondly, we don't
Speaker 5: actually know. We know a lot of things. The Kataris said.
Speaker 5: They said, we know a lot of things. The Egyptians claimed.
Speaker 5: They might have said at some point, probably we know
Speaker 5: all this stuff from sort of unsubstantiated leaks that actual
Speaker 5: officials won't confirm. There has never been. I'm a huge
Speaker 5: critic of Nintagnelle. I think nintagne is fundamental strategy led
Speaker 5: to October seven, and I think he has led since
Speaker 5: October seven, fundamentally while politicking. He launched his political survival
Speaker 5: campaign on October eighth, and I feel betrayed by him
Speaker 5: as my prime minister. But there has never been a
Speaker 5: Ramas deal for him to say no to on all
Speaker 5: the hostages. There's been a deal on thirty hostages in
Speaker 5: exchange for forty two days if you pull out of
Speaker 5: the Philadelphia Corridor. Big complicated question to get into it,
Speaker 5: if that's interesting. But this idea that there's an end
Speaker 5: to the war and all the hostages come back, there
Speaker 5: has never from Tramas been a deal like that on
Speaker 5: the table. And even things that come even in the
Speaker 5: general ballpark of that have been Katari statements that nobody
Speaker 5: has ever been able to confirm. When Tramas had a working,
Speaker 5: functioning leadership, namely Sinoir, it would have been entirely possible
Speaker 5: to produce that Ramas statement. It no longer has. That
Speaker 5: is Mohammed Sinoir, his brother, the guy in charge. Nobody
Speaker 5: quite knows. So there simply isn't such a deal on
Speaker 5: the table, and the idea that you would pull out
Speaker 5: and let Tramas come back in and just retake Guza
Speaker 5: now and by the way, have this war again in
Speaker 5: three years or five years and never rebuild Gus. I mean, truly,
Speaker 5: you can think the Israelis are monsters. It doesn't change
Speaker 5: the fundamental problem of Ramas. It really doesn't change it.
Speaker 5: So if you can't, if you don't have a solution
Speaker 5: to how to install something after Tramas or how to
Speaker 5: remove Ramas sufficiently degrede it sufficiently to put something else in.
Speaker 5: It doesn't really matter what the Israelis do. There is
Speaker 5: no day after until that can happen.
Speaker 1: It feels like the Israeli plan.
Speaker 4: And tell me if you think this is an accurate
Speaker 4: description of it feels like the Israeli plan at this
Speaker 4: point is these kind of ongoing what you'd call occupation
Speaker 4: slash intervention in different areas, you know, go into particular
Speaker 4: areas and push the people out, leave there, people come back,
Speaker 4: go back in, combined with watching and maybe facilitating Gaza
Speaker 4: turn into you know, a warring faction of clans against
Speaker 4: clans and gangs against gangs against gangs, which then a
Speaker 4: divided Gaza then is less of a threat to Israel
Speaker 4: and that you just live to fight another day endlessly
Speaker 4: rather than kind of settle on a long term solution
Speaker 4: of coexistence. Is that what you see actually happening, put
Speaker 4: aside what people want, It just feels like that's where
Speaker 4: it's going.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean you phrase that in a way that
Speaker 5: suggests this is the Israeli plan. That might be kind
Speaker 5: of what everything defaults to because nobody.
Speaker 4: Can because maybe we can make progress and thinking about
Speaker 4: it by setting aside what the quote plan is and
Speaker 4: just talking about what's actually going to happen.
Speaker 5: What is actually happening is that when you remove Tramas,
Speaker 5: half of the Gazan population is under eighteen and Ramas
Speaker 5: ran the schools for seventeen years. When you the idea
Speaker 5: of removing Ramas from Gaza is a much deeper and
Speaker 5: more profound problem than the strict military problem, which Ramas
Speaker 5: built Gaza into a battlefield for a war in which
Speaker 5: it would be impossible to remove it at a scale
Speaker 5: never before seen in the history of warfare. There's nothing
Speaker 5: like those tunnels. The viet Cong built quite a few tunnels.
Speaker 5: I don't think it's twenty percent of what Ramas built
Speaker 5: in Gaza in a much smaller area. And so Ramas
Speaker 5: produced a situation in which getting it out requires essentially
Speaker 5: this kind of war. I don't mean to suggest that
Speaker 5: every single Israeli airstrike is legitimate. I'm just saying there
Speaker 5: isn't fundamentally a different kind of war if you actually
Speaker 5: want to remove Kramas from Gaza, and Ramas made sure
Speaker 5: of it. And then there's the deeper point, which is
Speaker 5: the educational, religious sort of narrative point. Ramas tells Gosins
Speaker 5: that they are not suffering for nothing. They are suffering
Speaker 5: because they are the vanguard of a great Islamic restoration
Speaker 5: after centuries of weakness, and the great war against the
Speaker 5: Jews is that fundamental war for the restoration of all Islam.
Speaker 5: To a lot of Gazins who hate Ramas, there's also
Speaker 5: a deep appreciation of that story of dignity. And so
Speaker 5: when you actually start to map out what it would
Speaker 5: mean to remove Kramas from Gaza, it turns out to
Speaker 5: be this immense military problem, an immense cultural problem, an
Speaker 5: immense religious problem, a problem that Jews can't do. Jews
Speaker 5: are not going to go into Gaza and talk to
Speaker 5: Gosins about their religion. But that's also fundamental to removing
Speaker 5: Kramas from Gaza. And so there has to be in
Speaker 5: Gaza a much larger sense of the scale of the
Speaker 5: problem and of the desperate need for the problem. If
Speaker 5: Ramas remains in Gaza, Gaza will remain destroyed no matter
Speaker 5: what Israel truly. I mean, if the Israeli Prime Minister
Speaker 5: becomes the head of the most far left progressive party
Speaker 5: in the Israeli Kannesse, there is nothing you can do
Speaker 5: for Gaza as long as Kramas rules it, and so
Speaker 5: how does that day after? Look, what is the role
Speaker 5: of the Arab States, What is the role of the
Speaker 5: Muslim world, What is the role of building out a
Speaker 5: Gaza that's different. Lebanon has a much better future ahead
Speaker 5: of it because even though it's been taken over by
Speaker 5: Chris Balad in the name of Iran, if Israel can
Speaker 5: sufficiently weaken Chris Balad, there is the rest of Lebanon
Speaker 5: that can come in and fill the gap. Who is
Speaker 5: that in Gaza? How do you build that in Gaza?
Speaker 5: And that's we're talking here about the best case scenario
Speaker 5: that everyone actually wants that. I hope everyone wants that.
Speaker 5: I hope it isn't just you know, in the West
Speaker 5: moralizing and in the Muslim world just hating Jews. I
Speaker 5: hope it's actually about Gaza. And we can put together
Speaker 5: some kind of an international coalition that frankly moves in
Speaker 5: and massively, seriously builds and deradicalizes Gaza, and then there's
Speaker 5: a real powerful argument for the Israelis getting out as
Speaker 5: fast as possible. But until there's even that awareness, you're
Speaker 5: just asking the Israelis to hand Gaza back to Hamas
Speaker 5: and that's just something that the Israeli public won't allowed
Speaker 5: to happen, never mind the politicians well in control.
Speaker 6: I'm about to queue up E three, which we can
Speaker 6: put up this on the screen and then E four
Speaker 6: so Bernie Sanders and Ryan will probably have something to
Speaker 6: say about this as well. Is pushing a block US
Speaker 6: ARM sales to Israel. There's going to be a vote
Speaker 6: in the Senate on that today, right right, That's what
Speaker 6: Bernie is queuing up today. And on that note, I
Speaker 6: want to turn to this clip of Telsey Gabbard on
Speaker 6: CBN Christian Broadcast Network talking about some of the ideological,
Speaker 6: deeper ideological questions that we were just talking about. Here,
Speaker 6: let's roll this clip.
Speaker 5: It's E four.
Speaker 7: You mentioned American taxpayer dollars.
Speaker 5: Is there a difference between funding Israel and funding Ukraine? Like,
Speaker 5: how do you see that exactly?
Speaker 8: I'm just curious.
Speaker 9: Yes, the radical Islamic extremism is what Israel is on
Speaker 9: the front lines of every day.
Speaker 10: There is a very real difference and us and there
Speaker 10: will always be with every unique challenge that we face
Speaker 10: and that unique decision that must be made. Using those
Speaker 10: two examples, are we better off increasing and escalating tensions
Speaker 10: and waging this proxy war against Russia, of which Ukraine
Speaker 10: has never had any shot at winning. When you look
Speaker 10: at what's happening in the war between Israel and Hummas,
Speaker 10: and it is a war between Israel and Hummas, a
Speaker 10: radical Islamist terrorist group. This is just the latest front
Speaker 10: of this war that's been waged for a very long
Speaker 10: time between these radical ismist terrorist groups that have been
Speaker 10: waging it militarily and ideologically. This is in our best interests,
Speaker 10: as well as all freedom loving countries and civilization to
Speaker 10: take on what is the greatest short and long term
Speaker 10: threat to freedom. He's afraid of being called an islamophobe,
Speaker 10: and it's the same reason why he is not taking
Speaker 10: seriously the need to defeat Hamas.
Speaker 6: To Gabbard obviously recently nominated to be Donald Trump's Director
Speaker 6: of National Intelligence, and the host asked her, Joe Biden
Speaker 6: just recently pausing weaponshipments to Israel, how do you see
Speaker 6: that he's on the side of Hamas at this point?
Speaker 6: And obviously this comes we're talking about this clip as
Speaker 6: Bernie Sanders is pushing to pushing two block US arm
Speaker 6: sales to Israel, And so I guess my question is,
Speaker 6: with this perspective that there's a deep ideological route to
Speaker 6: what we see in Gosen sort of Hamas filling this
Speaker 6: leadership vacuum, infrastructure vacuum over and over again. Is the
Speaker 6: response to that further military action if I mean, I
Speaker 6: understand obviously why that's an option, but is that ultimately
Speaker 6: is it worth? Is it continuously justified? If the root
Speaker 6: problem is a deep ideological is a deep ideological commitment
Speaker 6: conviction that is worsened by the military action? In some ways,
Speaker 6: that's obviously arguable, but how do you see that sort
Speaker 6: of dynamic between one and the other.
Speaker 5: Look for the last one hundred and fifty years, there's
Speaker 5: been a debate within Islam, and it's a big and
Speaker 5: profound and powerful debate that's shaped the Muslim world today,
Speaker 5: certainly the Sonny Arab world in which we are embedded.
Speaker 5: And it's a debate about Muslim weakness, the sources of
Speaker 5: Muslim weakness, and what we do about Muslim weakness. And
Speaker 5: out of that debate grows some pietistic peaceful movements and
Speaker 5: also jihadi movements, and out of that debate you get
Speaker 5: the kind of ideological movements of Ramas. You also get
Speaker 5: in the Shia sphere, this Iranian regime, this ideology that
Speaker 5: says that Islam has been weak for a long time,
Speaker 5: and this is something that really becomes a problem Muslim
Speaker 5: theologians talk about because of Western imperially some of the
Speaker 5: nineteenth century. But this ideology then says, well, if Islam
Speaker 5: is to wake up, the first obstacle it has to
Speaker 5: overcome in order to show that it is returning into
Speaker 5: history as a powerful agent in history and therefore redeeming
Speaker 5: Islam and therefore redeeming ultimately the world. Is overcoming the Jews,
Speaker 5: is overcoming the smallest, weakest thing that ever pushed Islam back,
Speaker 5: the Iranian regime. This is my message to Bernie Sanders.
Speaker 5: Doesn't fit in a little quip, you know, it doesn't
Speaker 5: fit in a sound bite. We don't need American missiles
Speaker 5: in Gaza. That's not the kind of war. Gaza is
Speaker 5: the American arsenal. The American help is about Iran. And
Speaker 5: if Bernie Sanders can't explain to us why Iran wants
Speaker 5: to destroy Israel in the first place, why does Iran
Speaker 5: care about Israel? Why is Iran spending a double digit
Speaker 5: percentage of its GDP so far, with sanctions, with wars,
Speaker 5: with the billions it doesn't have invested in all these proxies,
Speaker 5: especially Chrisbella the Jewel in its crown. Why is it
Speaker 5: trying to destroy Israel? It has no border with Israel,
Speaker 5: has no interest in it. And the answer is it
Speaker 5: takes these ideas of Islamic restorationism and it's the Jews
Speaker 5: being the first thing Islam has to overcome absolutely seriously.
Speaker 5: And if we don't take it seriously, we're gonna be
Speaker 5: surprised when they carry out in October seven. By the way,
Speaker 5: we know. We know because Chris Blah has announced and
Speaker 5: Ramas has talked about that Risbulah was planning in October
Speaker 5: seven that was much larger, and are very angry at
Speaker 5: Sinoir for ruining the surprise, so to speak. So we
Speaker 5: face enemies who will come at us no matter what.
Speaker 5: And if America chooses to then disarm us, the war
Speaker 5: is still gonna come. It's just gonna be worse because
Speaker 5: we're not gonna have precise weapons. We're gonna have blunt weapons.
Speaker 5: We can build ourselves. Well, that's my message there. You
Speaker 5: have to have that understanding of what the enemy actually
Speaker 5: wants when you're planning about when you're planning that to
Speaker 5: face them down, to have that conflict.
Speaker 4: I feel like the clash of civilizations stuff though, is
Speaker 4: actually a cover for not talking about the conflict in
Speaker 4: it was simpler just you know, territory or nationalistic terms.
Speaker 4: You can go back to the decline of the Ottoman Empire.
Speaker 4: But it's much simpler to explain the rise of Hamas
Speaker 4: by pointing to you know, a couple you know acute things, uh.
Speaker 1: One being you know, the inability.
Speaker 4: Of Arafat who had you know, who had who recognized
Speaker 4: Israel and you know, like recognize the existence of the
Speaker 4: state of Israel and was engaged in you know, long negotiations,
Speaker 4: and Hamas argued, you're being played by Israel here. Israel
Speaker 4: does not have, through the Oslo Cords or any other way,
Speaker 4: any any serious commitment to actually reaching a two state solution.
Speaker 4: And what they would point to is that immediately after
Speaker 4: Ozlo's signed, you more settlements are built, more settlements are built, more,
Speaker 4: more settlements are built.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 4: You have uh, you know, elements of the uh not
Speaker 4: including that Yah himself saying that the existence of Hamas's
Speaker 4: is extremely useful to the position of blocking a two
Speaker 4: state solution. And so I don't think you need the
Speaker 4: ideological stuff and the Ottoman Empire talk when you can
Speaker 4: actually say, like, no, the idea here was that there's
Speaker 4: a faction within the Israeli political system that opposed the
Speaker 4: creation of a Palestinian state and had the power to
Speaker 4: put obstacles in the way of the creation of that state,
Speaker 4: and is now since the election, talking about simply annexing
Speaker 4: the West Bank, you fully, and even talking further about
Speaker 4: you know, southern Lebanon being northern Israel, and on and on.
Speaker 4: But so can't you talk, can't you consider this in
Speaker 4: a much more kind of a simple way than needing
Speaker 4: to go back to the clash of civilization stuff.
Speaker 5: Exclusive I didn't talk about class of civilizations. I talked
Speaker 5: about the single biggest theological discourse in the Muslim world
Speaker 5: in the last century and a half. I can give
Speaker 5: you specific names and specific theologians, and these organizations they
Speaker 5: founded that produced this and the politics they're born from.
Speaker 5: Haramas was founded in nineteen eighty seven. Hamas doesn't go
Speaker 5: back a century and a half, but it's born on
Speaker 5: the ideas of the Muslim brotherhood, and it talks that way.
Speaker 5: If you go to its mosques, you will hear those speeches.
Speaker 5: That's the first thing. The second thing is, I'll tell
Speaker 5: you why what you call class of clash of civilizations,
Speaker 5: which is it's such a Western discourse. That's not how
Speaker 5: Muslims think of it. It's not how Jews think of it.
Speaker 5: It's not how Middle Easterners think of it. But the
Speaker 5: reason that these religious ideas matter is that I'll give
Speaker 5: you an example. You were talking about the Palestinian argument,
Speaker 5: and it's not an argument made by Hamas. It's an
Speaker 5: argument made by Palestinian diaspora elites who are trying to
Speaker 5: explain away everything that Hamas has done for thirty years
Speaker 5: to Westerners. But the argument that Israel never intended for
Speaker 5: Oslo to ever actually work out for the Palestinians. And
Speaker 5: Robbin is assassinated in nineteen ninety five by an Israeli
Speaker 5: Jew opposed to the peace process, and that actually puts
Speaker 5: the left raised. The left was about to lose that
Speaker 5: election because people were really afraid that Yes, Sarah Fat,
Speaker 5: this arch terrorist to it hijacked airplanes and launched terror
Speaker 5: attacks that massacred kids was now going to take over
Speaker 5: the West Bank, and Robbin's assassination increased the Left's standing
Speaker 5: in the polls, and they were set to win the
Speaker 5: next election. And the next election because the assassination comes
Speaker 5: in ninety six and Ramas launches a series of suicide
Speaker 5: bombings in Jerusalem in the week leading up to the
Speaker 5: election that tilt the election by the narrowest margin in
Speaker 5: the history of an Israeli election. I think thirty thousand
Speaker 5: votes to Nitagnelle. That's Nataiell's first victory is a function
Speaker 5: of Rama's terror attacks. Barak comes back, the Labor Party
Speaker 5: comes back. He's already talking about a Palestinian in state.
Speaker 5: He's a Camp David with Bill Clinton. They're negotiating shared
Speaker 5: sovereignty on the Temple Mount. There's a ninety five percent
Speaker 5: of the West Bank kind of Palestinian state. And that's
Speaker 5: when one hundred and forty suicide bombings over the next
Speaker 5: three years, the second in de foughta begin and not
Speaker 5: only Famas also.
Speaker 1: There's definitely a realmia between the kind of house takes.
Speaker 5: I want to suggest to you that the Israelis, the
Speaker 5: Israelis are not angels in this story. There are different camps.
Speaker 5: They fight constantly, and by the way, we don't have
Speaker 5: the kind of winner takes all election system that you have.
Speaker 5: You're going to be a republican for four years. Everything
Speaker 5: is going to be a republican unless Congress switches halfway through.
Speaker 5: In Israel, every government in the history of Israel, there's
Speaker 5: never been a majority party, has been a coalition, and
Speaker 5: therefore the Israeli government always works across purposes because different
Speaker 5: ideological groups are by the way, the Italian government, we're
Speaker 5: seeing this now if you're following Italian politics, the Polish government,
Speaker 5: and we re see this in these kinds of parliamentary systems.
Speaker 5: We had a government, the last government that it's Agnao
Speaker 5: ousted actually had the left wing minister of housing and
Speaker 5: a excuse me, a right wing minister of housing and
Speaker 5: a left wing minister of transportation, which means that the
Speaker 5: right wing minister of housing was encouraging the building of
Speaker 5: more settlement homes and the left wing minister of transportation
Speaker 5: was refusing to pave roads to those settlement homes. The
Speaker 5: Israeli government is multiple forces operating in different directions. If
Speaker 5: the argument is if there's an Israeli right winger in
Speaker 5: the room. Then the israel doesn't mean it. Then you're
Speaker 5: missing the fact that there was a culture war, the
Speaker 5: defining political civil war of the nineties and even after
Speaker 5: the nineties. The withdrawal from Gaza was also part of
Speaker 5: this in two thousand and five, was about getting out
Speaker 5: and creating space to the Palestinians and separating and not
Speaker 5: having an occupation anymore. And it failed miserably in rivers
Speaker 5: of blood, and it failed miserably in rivers of blood
Speaker 5: because of these religious ideas on the other side. So
Speaker 5: at some point you're going to have to deal with
Speaker 5: these religious ideas on the other side. On October seven, again,
Speaker 5: let's imagine the Israelis are the worst people in the world.
Speaker 5: On October seven, Ramas didn't just massacre Israelis. It had
Speaker 5: built these tunnels for seven teen years, and it had
Speaker 5: built them for one tactical purpose, so that anyone coming
Speaker 5: for Ramas has to cut through cities to do so.
Speaker 5: October seven was two atrocities, not one. And the larger
Speaker 5: one wasn't committed against Israel, was committed against Gonza, and
Speaker 5: it was Ramas's literal strategy. And so if you don't
Speaker 5: address why is Ramas willing to destroy Ganza, it's willing
Speaker 5: to destroy Gaza because it thinks that's so much more
Speaker 5: is at stake the redemption of Islam. Well, if you
Speaker 5: don't address that, if you don't deal with that, you're
Speaker 5: not going to fix the problem. You're not going to
Speaker 5: end the war.
Speaker 4: Israeli commentators often say that the Western progressives don't take
Speaker 4: into account Palestinian agency. It's not it, they don't give
Speaker 4: the Palestinians enough agency and judge them accordingly.
Speaker 1: But what about Israeli government agency?
Speaker 4: It's true that Hamas set up an enormous number of
Speaker 4: a gigantic tunnel network and that destroying the entire tunnel
Speaker 4: network or could require destroying all of Gaza and tens
Speaker 4: of thousands or hundreds of thousands of civilians along with it.
Speaker 4: What about Israeli agency? They didn't have to do that, right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you're gonna you're asking me or is this Israeli
Speaker 5: government or the last eight Israeli governments massively at fault
Speaker 5: for thinking that there was that you could that you
Speaker 5: could hand money over to Ramas watch it build those
Speaker 5: tunnel systems. We reported on those tunnel systems for ten
Speaker 5: years that that that was something you could just turn
Speaker 5: a blind eye to. Insider. Yeah, the Israeli crime other
Speaker 5: than you know, if you're running a country and you
Speaker 5: make a terrible strategic mistake at that scale. As I
Speaker 5: was waiting to come on, I heard the commentary about
Speaker 5: the Iraq war and Trump talking about the that's a
Speaker 5: when you lead a country and you make a mistake
Speaker 5: at that scale, Let's imagine it's in good faith. Let's
Speaker 5: imagine you believed what you were saying. You you own it.
Speaker 5: You own that mistake. And this this leadership owns that mistake,
Speaker 5: and that most Israelis will tell you to the face,
Speaker 5: and and and most Israeli still wanted gone. And I
Speaker 5: don't have it doesn't cost me anything to give that
Speaker 5: to you. I scream it in Hebrew. But the fundamental
Speaker 5: mistake they made was not believe in Ramas. And the
Speaker 5: great tragedy for Gaza is that the Israelis absolutely believe
Speaker 5: Ramas now. And so when Tramaz says we're going to
Speaker 5: destroy all of you and there'll be more October seventh,
Speaker 5: which it still says, the Israelis believe it. And what
Speaker 5: that is a disaster for Gaza and has to end
Speaker 5: or Gaza can't be rebuilt.
Speaker 4: Well, one question I've been really curious of from me
Speaker 4: is really a perspective, and I know you've got to
Speaker 4: run pretty soon.
Speaker 1: We can put up E six here. This is just
Speaker 1: one example.
Speaker 4: A reporter who works for who does work for us
Speaker 4: and some other publications last night, you know, posted on
Speaker 4: Twitter just what was becoming his nightly routine. So he's
Speaker 4: saying that, like in an apartment right next to him. Yeah,
Speaker 4: in Gaza and day there's a there's a baby that
Speaker 4: the mother he hears. He hears the mother saying of
Speaker 4: the baby, I'm going to get your food. I'm going
Speaker 4: to get you fed tomorrow, I promise. And but by
Speaker 4: the end of the night there's still no food. And
Speaker 4: I don't know if you if if people can even
Speaker 4: hear this, but what he just took a little recording
Speaker 4: of what he hears constantly, and it's it's this. It's
Speaker 4: the it's a baby who's just hungry and tired but
Speaker 4: can't get fed and can't get can't get the sleep
Speaker 4: that that the baby needs. And I'm curious from the
Speaker 4: Israeli perspective, how like does any of this. Does any
Speaker 4: of this penetrate. We're talking about two million human beings
Speaker 4: who are living through some of the most abject torture,
Speaker 4: you know, imaginable, and people who have absolutely you know,
Speaker 4: nothing to do with October seventh. Is any of this
Speaker 4: breaking through at all?
Speaker 5: Do Israelis know that the Palestinian civilians are suffering?
Speaker 1: Do they know? And how to? How to they think
Speaker 1: about that, and how do they think about their role?
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, that's a critical question. Many things are true
Speaker 5: all at once. There is a very clear knowledge that
Speaker 5: there is tremendous civilian suffering, absolutely crystal clear. That's not
Speaker 5: something anybody's confused about. There is an absolute belief among
Speaker 5: Israelis that the world's moral emotions about this are not
Speaker 5: fake so much as fundamentally driven by bigotry against us.
Speaker 5: And the reason we think that is that it's worse
Speaker 5: than Sudan right at this minute, and none of you
Speaker 5: know and none of you care. And that's something you
Speaker 5: hear from a majority of Israeli Jews, certainly, and also
Speaker 5: I think quite a few Israeli Arabs, well, probably not
Speaker 5: a majority. There's a sense that some of the discourse
Speaker 5: around Palestinian suffering has simply been untrue. There's been too
Speaker 5: much talk of starvation when there hasn't been actual starvation.
Speaker 5: And that doesn't mean they're not suffering disastrously. Families are
Speaker 5: literally for thirteen months now, moving between tent encampments in
Speaker 5: order to avoid air strikes. No summer camps, there's nothing
Speaker 5: for kids to do, there's no schools, there's no This
Speaker 5: is suffering at a serious and dramatic scale. But the
Speaker 5: invention around it of some kind of systemic system of
Speaker 5: atrocities that is purposeful, and it is not true, and
Speaker 5: is meant to satisfy and to catalyze a kind of
Speaker 5: moral religious feeling that simply has nothing to do with
Speaker 5: the reality and has a lot more to do with
Speaker 5: Israel than with the suffering of the civilians. Because again,
Speaker 5: it's not the what about ist argument, it's the simple
Speaker 5: it's the selective outrage argument. You can't only think that
Speaker 5: way and only about these things. So, first of all,
Speaker 5: they are suffering, they're suffering disastrously. And so I want
Speaker 5: to say they're not suffering as much as you think,
Speaker 5: but I don't want that to mean they're suffering. At eight.
Speaker 5: I'm just arguing they're not suffering at thirteen, which is
Speaker 5: just simply not happening. They're not dying on mass. There
Speaker 5: isn't mass starvation. There are major problems in some places,
Speaker 5: and those problems are a huge problem. I have been
Speaker 5: very I need to say that before saying I've been
Speaker 5: very critical of the Israeli government. I'd, by the way,
Speaker 5: think that there's such easy ways, easy, complicated, difficult, painful ways.
Speaker 5: But we could solve a lot of these problems. For example,
Speaker 5: if we have to move them out of harm's way,
Speaker 5: we can move them into Israeli territory. There's a great
Speaker 5: fear in the Arab world that if you push them
Speaker 5: out of Gaza, it's the next knock bit, it's the
Speaker 5: next displacement. So just push them into the negative and
Speaker 5: then what are they arguing that we're moving them into
Speaker 5: Israel and not to There are solutions. There are Israeli
Speaker 5: Arabs who volunteered for the war effort. After October seven,
Speaker 5: Tamas kidnapped and killed fifty Israeli Arabs. A Muslim girl
Speaker 5: eighteen years old, Ayisha, who is We still don't know
Speaker 5: where she is and what's going on with her. There
Speaker 5: was a coming together of Jews and Arabs, and Arab
Speaker 5: Israelis are Palestinian. They also their identity is this complicated
Speaker 5: intermingling of identities, but they include a layer that is
Speaker 5: absolutely Palestinian. And what if they ran some of that,
Speaker 5: some of that humanitarian aid on the Israeli SI out
Speaker 5: of a border for people displaced, and once you move
Speaker 5: them in, you can also check them, you can pull
Speaker 5: them out. And there are so many ways to solve it.
Speaker 5: This is a government that in many, many ways has
Speaker 5: been incompetent. I'll give you just the tiniest example. Soldiers
Speaker 5: veterans of the war. After one hundred and fifty days,
Speaker 5: they missed a school year, an entire college year. They
Speaker 5: just missed because they were off fighting a war. They
Speaker 5: come back and discover that they have back debt on
Speaker 5: the tuition payments for their dorms and something that government
Speaker 5: was supposed to pay for but never did. This is
Speaker 5: a government that has proven incompetent for Israeli civil society.
Speaker 5: Sixty thousand Israelis were fled the North the bombardments of
Speaker 5: Risbela in the North over thirteen months that shattered and
Speaker 5: destroyed cities entire like twelve Kibusim and a third of
Speaker 5: two cities are literally demolished to the point where they
Speaker 5: have to be destroyed before being rebuilt. And this government
Speaker 5: hasn't properly followed these people and provided them education for
Speaker 5: their kids and social support. We are facing a government
Speaker 5: that a lot of what you see in gods, a
Speaker 5: lot of the reasons they haven't filled in with. It's
Speaker 5: easy solutions, you know, I don't mean to excuse it.
Speaker 5: This doesn't excuse it. It's just a different kind of
Speaker 5: a crime is incompetence. It's just incapacity. So there are
Speaker 5: so many ways to deal with this better that I
Speaker 5: desperately wish Israel was dealing with it better. At the
Speaker 5: same time, I share the general Israeli view that I
Speaker 5: don't entirely trust the world's moral emotions because give us
Speaker 5: a better way to fight this war.
Speaker 4: I'm sure you saw these comments from the Jordanian foreign
Speaker 4: minister where he said, look, create a Palacinian state. Every
Speaker 4: single Arab nation will recognize Israel tomorrow and we will
Speaker 4: coexist peacefully. Just create a Palasinian state. And so you're saying,
Speaker 4: give us a way to fight the war. Differently, it
Speaker 4: feels like Israel feels like it's only way to survive
Speaker 4: is to fight forever. That it is in a dangerous
Speaker 4: neighborhood of people who want it gone, driven.
Speaker 1: By bigotry until the ideologies they.
Speaker 4: Want, they want them God, they were driven, driven into
Speaker 4: the sea, and so they have to fight forever, despite
Speaker 4: despite countries like the UE, Saudi Arabia, Jordans, on and
Speaker 4: on saying creative House stating and state we're done with this,
Speaker 4: we want to move on with this, we will recognize Israel.
Speaker 4: But why why this clinging to the belief that that
Speaker 4: war is the only path forward?
Speaker 1: And and can it? Can war sustainable?
Speaker 4: Endless war really be the basis for a safe and
Speaker 4: secure livelihood in a country that wants to be kind
Speaker 4: of western, you know, want you want to have cafes
Speaker 4: and startups and clubs, and doing that under a constant
Speaker 4: war feels kind of unsustainable.
Speaker 5: We I feel like we're on the different sides of
Speaker 5: some of these divides and that's producing very very good questions.
Speaker 5: So thank you for that really fundamental question. I don't
Speaker 5: mean that sarcastically, I mean it absolutely seriously. The simple
Speaker 5: point on the West Bank, the Israeli political left hasn't
Speaker 5: won an election since the Second Intifada, since one hundred
Speaker 5: and forty suicide bombings ended the Oslo piece process, and
Speaker 5: it hasn't really been able to tell Israeli's a new story.
Speaker 5: And what you're asking, what the Jordanian Foreign Minister wishes,
Speaker 5: was that the Israeli public public debate had another story.
Speaker 5: The Israelis currently believe that if we pull out of
Speaker 5: the West Bank, it'll go the way Gaza went before.
Speaker 5: Five years before pulling out of Gaza, we pulled out
Speaker 5: of South Lebanon after eighteen years. That was basically our Afghanistan.
Speaker 5: We moved in to take care of terrorists, and then
Speaker 5: we ended up getting stuck for eighteen years and bogged
Speaker 5: down and pulled out badly, and the bad guys took
Speaker 5: over when we left. That has turned into a disaster
Speaker 5: for us. Every single unilateral withdrawal turned into a disaster.
Speaker 5: And the attempt at a multilateral or bilateral piece ended
Speaker 5: in the Second Intifada with one hundred and forty suicide bombings.
Speaker 5: So the Israeli public and I mean voting Israeli public
Speaker 5: that to this day wants a Palestinian state, genuinely believes
Speaker 5: that if we pull out of the West Bank for
Speaker 5: a Palestinian state, it'll end disastrously in rivers of blood
Speaker 5: and we're going to have to retake it. The West
Speaker 5: Bank is the highlands that overlook all of our major cities.
Speaker 5: The West Bank shrinks us down to nine miles wide
Speaker 5: in the middle. You know, people hear about this place
Speaker 5: so much. I don't know if they understand just how
Speaker 5: tiny this little land in which Israelis and Palestinians live
Speaker 5: actually is. And so it feels existential the question of
Speaker 5: pulling out of the West Bank, and again to left
Speaker 5: wingers who want a Palestinian state, the right wingers there's
Speaker 5: even more so. And so the question of just found
Speaker 5: a Palestinian state in Godz of sure, why not? Is easy.
Speaker 5: If there wasn't a Hamance there, it would have happened,
Speaker 5: and it would never have not happened. In the West Bank,
Speaker 5: it's a whole different question. I still think a two
Speaker 5: state pieces possible. Ironically, if we do something that the
Speaker 5: Jordanian Foreign minister mortally opposes and absolutely hates, which is
Speaker 5: a kind of confederation between that state of Palestine and Jordan.
Speaker 5: What if you know, three of the West Bank. The
Speaker 5: Israelis can't be in the valley nine miles wide, so
Speaker 5: we push in a quarter of the West Bank. That's
Speaker 5: roughly what's going on in the Golan Heights. Israel doesn't
Speaker 5: control the Golan, it controls about a third of the Golan.
Speaker 5: To push back in sixty seven, the Syrian artillery out
Speaker 5: of range of the towns in the valley that they
Speaker 5: were shelling freely throughout the fifties and sixties. So what
Speaker 5: if the Israelis push up the mountain range they actually
Speaker 5: hold the high ground with the Palestinian state, but then
Speaker 5: to three quarters of the West Bank plus Gaza, all
Speaker 5: within a Jordanian confederation that leaves the Palestinian Ordanian border
Speaker 5: wide open. They have an international border that Jordanians are
Speaker 5: now the custodians of the Holy Site in Jerusalem, that
Speaker 5: they actually care about Alexa. Very little would have to change.
Speaker 5: The Palestine wouldn't be this tiny, little fractured state surrounded
Speaker 5: on all sides by this massively powerful Israel. As soon
Speaker 5: as you start seriously thinking about solutions, as soon as
Speaker 5: you solve the ideology problem that you don't want to
Speaker 5: deal with. And I understand why you don't want to
Speaker 5: deal with it does sound like an Israeli escape patch.
Speaker 5: Forgets that for a second, the Israeli scape patch, it
Speaker 5: might actually be the opp stickle to everything you might
Speaker 5: be able to yourself become Prime Minister of Israel. This
Speaker 5: will still stand in your way, and it will stand
Speaker 5: in your way. If the Israelis are evil, this still
Speaker 5: stands in the way. And so if we can solve
Speaker 5: the fundamental ideological problem, it's unbelievably easy to imagine actual
Speaker 5: political solutions on the ground that solve everybody's security problems,
Speaker 5: policy problems. We spent thirty years trying to finiggle our
Speaker 5: trying to sort of wind our way through the technicalities
Speaker 5: of the policy problems, because that's how diplomats think. And
Speaker 5: we never figured out reconciliation, and we never figured out
Speaker 5: narratives that actually allow the other side to come in.
Speaker 5: You want to know the big problem of the Israeli
Speaker 5: Palestinian conflict, There are wonderful polls of Israelis and Palestinians
Speaker 5: were some of the best poll people in the world.
Speaker 5: And there was a poll about six weeks ago in
Speaker 5: which that pulled both Israelis and Palestinians with an Israeli
Speaker 5: firm and a Palestinian firm, and they asked the same question,
Speaker 5: do you think the other side wants to exterminate us?
Speaker 5: And both sides responded ninety percent yes. I mean literally
Speaker 5: one side was eighty nine, the other side was ninety
Speaker 5: to both sides think the other side simply wants to
Speaker 5: destroy them. That's the problem, and that's what makes solutions impossible.
Speaker 5: First has to come the reconciliation. Then the political solutions
Speaker 5: are easy, as for fighting forever. Look, we're speaking English.
Speaker 5: Every conversation in English about Israel is mediated through this
Speaker 5: sense that Jews are kind of like American Jews. We're
Speaker 5: not American Jews. I was to high school in Wisconsin.
Speaker 5: I apologize for the accent I was born.
Speaker 6: Hey, hey, we can bond over that.
Speaker 5: Finally, Glendae, Wisconsin. Oh nice. We're not American Jews. We
Speaker 5: are not people who have discovered over the last one
Speaker 5: hundred and twenty years the promise of liberalism coming true.
Speaker 5: We're the other half of the Jews. Were the actual
Speaker 5: survivors of the Holocaust, were the actual survivors of thirteen
Speaker 5: hundred programs. We are the millions, we are the quarter
Speaker 5: million Jews stuck in DP camps three years after liberation.
Speaker 5: America liberated Daja and buch Involved in nineteen forty five.
Speaker 5: There's still Jews living there that nobody will take in
Speaker 5: anywhere on Earth, including the United States in nineteen forty eight.
Speaker 5: They only start emptying out in forty eight, in May
Speaker 5: nineteen forty eight, and they are those dps are a
Speaker 5: quarter of the IDF in the forty eight war. We're
Speaker 5: the Jews who had nowhere else to go in the world.
Speaker 5: And we are the Jews or whom the experience of
Speaker 5: living on our sword. Your question to me is can
Speaker 5: you fight forever? The UAE wants to not fight, that's wonderful.
Speaker 5: By the way, We've never fought with the UA, There's
Speaker 5: never been a war. The saudis wonderful. I'm a big
Speaker 5: fan of peace and normalization with everybody, but that they
Speaker 5: want it, and therefore it's possible Iran wants us destroyed.
Speaker 5: We are the Jews who came out of a history
Speaker 5: of the twentieth century in which the moment we stopped
Speaker 5: dying was when we could fight for ourselves. To the
Speaker 5: Israeli experience, everybody's living grandparents come from Iraq and Tunisia
Speaker 5: and Poland and Germany and Yemen. We are the Jews
Speaker 5: or whom the privilege of fighting for ourselves, of being
Speaker 5: able to fight for ourselves, is what redemption feels like.
Speaker 5: And so it's a great question from a Western perspective,
Speaker 5: can't we end the war? That's not an option open
Speaker 5: to us. No Jew can live in Iraq, no Jew
Speaker 5: can live in Yemen. We are surrounded by societies with
Speaker 5: an ideological commitment to our destruction. I wish we weren't,
Speaker 5: but if they say it out loud, then if it
Speaker 5: affects their policy. And if Yemen is a war with
Speaker 5: Israel really because of Palestinian rights, everything you know about
Speaker 5: the Huthis and the terrible civil war Yemen and the
Speaker 5: eighty five thousand children.
Speaker 4: Reaches sea fire and gods, and see if the Houthis
Speaker 4: lift the blockade, right, But.
Speaker 5: It's about saving Ramas, it's not about Palestinian rights. It's
Speaker 5: about the ultimate destruction of Israel. And they'll be there
Speaker 5: at Ramas society of the next war too, And so
Speaker 5: we have to We are willing to fight because we
Speaker 5: don't have another option. If the other side gives us
Speaker 5: another option, I promise you this incompetent government being what
Speaker 5: it is, and despite what you might hear, will take
Speaker 5: that other option.
Speaker 4: Well, I do think that was clarifying, and I appreciate
Speaker 4: you coming on. How you read the girls prominent Israeli
Speaker 4: journalists over at the Times of Israel Love to have
Speaker 4: love to have you back. We didn't get to get
Speaker 4: into the kind of politics of net Yahoo and Jinvette
Speaker 4: and all that that's going. That's fascinating and kind of
Speaker 4: broiling Israel.
Speaker 5: Hope you like what I have to say about that
Speaker 5: a lot more. I promise.
Speaker 1: We'll get you back after Thanksgiving.
Speaker 6: Would be a good friend.
Speaker 1: Excellent, Thanks so much, Thank you, Thank.
Speaker 6: You, Ryan. I'm really excited about this monologue that you've written.
Speaker 5: What have you got for us?
Speaker 1: All Right?
Speaker 4: So, yesterday Crystal talked about the way that revulsion at
Speaker 4: the ongoing slaughter and Gossam may have played a role
Speaker 4: in shaping how and whether people voted for Kamala Harris.
Speaker 4: As she described it, for many people, it is not
Speaker 4: exactly a straight line from I oppose this genocide to
Speaker 4: I'm not voting for Kamala, but I think she's right
Speaker 4: and saying that it effectively colors the way you see
Speaker 4: the other arguments made on Kamala's behalf through a different prism.
Speaker 4: You need the more high ground if you're going to
Speaker 4: run a campaign based around democracy and morality, and it's
Speaker 4: reasonable for people to conclude that killing tens of thousands
Speaker 4: of women and children means you've seeded a.
Speaker 1: Bit of that moral high ground.
Speaker 4: I think her point is a correct one, and you
Speaker 4: can actually take it even further, which I do in
Speaker 4: a new piece over at drop site News. I'll put
Speaker 4: a link in the description, and here's a reminder to
Speaker 4: sign up for our newsletter at drop siteenews dot com.
Speaker 4: Now Inner Monologu, which I'll also link down to the description.
Speaker 4: Crystal accurately noted that very few voters say they made
Speaker 4: their decisions based on foreign policy, something like four percent
Speaker 4: or so. But to many voters, the time, energy, and
Speaker 4: money that politicians spend on foreign wars stands in as
Speaker 4: a proxy for their lack of concern for people here
Speaker 4: at home. At the same time, the four years of
Speaker 4: the Biden administration saw a disconcerting outbreak of violence around
Speaker 4: the world. Trump himself is a mercurial and unpredictable figure,
Speaker 4: whereas Biden is even keeled, at least in public. Yet,
Speaker 4: Biden's four years were a bumpy ride of chaos, fueled
Speaker 4: significantly by the wars in Ukraine in the Middle East.
Speaker 4: Sharing the campaign stage down the stretch with Liz Cheney
Speaker 4: was a signal to voters that Democrats there was a
Speaker 4: signal to voters that Democrats felt the cost of those
Speaker 4: wars was worth it, and that would get more of
Speaker 4: the same in a Harris administration. In the post mortem,
Speaker 4: so far, the Democratic Party's embrace of a more quote
Speaker 4: muscular foreign policy, as they like to call it, has
Speaker 4: almost entirely escaped notice, but it didn't escape the eye
Speaker 4: of voters. In mid October, as Kamala Harris began to
Speaker 4: do interviews with friendly audiences, she visited the breakfast studio
Speaker 4: of radio host Charlemagne the God, where she took questions
Speaker 4: from callers. The first to come through was one of
Speaker 4: those questions that is often top of mind for voters,
Speaker 4: but dismissed in Washington as a naive misunderstanding of how
Speaker 4: the world truly works.
Speaker 1: Go to the talkback feature.
Speaker 8: My question for Kamala is why are we? And I
Speaker 8: say we because my past dollars is sending the money.
Speaker 8: Why are we sending money to other countries when we
Speaker 8: desperately need it in our own country for homeless housing resources,
Speaker 8: for whatever. That is my determining factor if I vote
Speaker 8: for Commalo or not.
Speaker 1: That's one of the reasons the America for US rhetoric
Speaker 1: resonates because nobody in America would coplain about where money
Speaker 1: was going if American citizens every day needs were being met.
Speaker 1: So what do you say to that we can do
Speaker 1: it all?
Speaker 5: And we do so.
Speaker 8: First of all, I maintained very strongly America should never
Speaker 8: pull ourselves away from our responsibility as a world leader.
Speaker 4: So interestingly, this was all a callback to the debate
Speaker 4: in Washington the last time a Democratic president had pushed
Speaker 4: through a sweeping new social spending agenda Lbj's Great Society,
Speaker 4: but coupled it with ramped up spending. On the Vietnam
Speaker 4: War press conference in the summer of nineteen sixty five,
Speaker 4: one reporter told President Lyndon Johnson the day after a
Speaker 4: bombing of North Vietnam. Quote, mister President, from what you
Speaker 4: have outlined as your program for now, it would seem
Speaker 4: that you feel that we can have guns and butter
Speaker 4: for the foreseeable future. Do you have any idea right
Speaker 4: now though, that down the road a piece of the
Speaker 4: American people may have to face the problem of guns
Speaker 4: or butter. LBJ said that the American people would be
Speaker 4: willing to bear the burden. He said, quote, I have
Speaker 4: not the slightest doubt, but whenever it is necessary to face,
Speaker 4: but whatever it is necessary to face, the American people
Speaker 4: will face.
Speaker 1: He responded.
Speaker 4: Now he was wrong, of course, and the runaway inflation
Speaker 4: produced by the war spending broke the back of the
Speaker 4: New Deal coalition, shattering organized labor and ushering in neoliberalism
Speaker 4: and the Reagan Revolution. But according to Harris, not only
Speaker 4: could the American people have both guns and.
Speaker 1: Butter, they already had it.
Speaker 4: It's good Democrats, as they hunt for the culprit that
Speaker 4: cost them the election, are getting some of it right.
Speaker 4: Dramatically expanding the social safety net at the beginning of
Speaker 4: Biden's term, letting people know that a better world actually
Speaker 4: is possible, and then letting it all lapse as prices
Speaker 4: stayed high turned out to be a political handicap. Then,
Speaker 4: instead of attacking the price hikes as the rotten fruit
Speaker 4: of greedy CEOs with too much economic and political power.
Speaker 4: The White House shot down the entire notion of greedflation,
Speaker 4: which has since confirmed as a driving factor in those
Speaker 4: price increases, and instead they outsourced the fight against inflation
Speaker 4: to a Republican FED chair who jacked up rates and
Speaker 4: with it the cost of mortgages and rent. Also, even
Speaker 4: James Carville says that maybe Bernie Sanders had a point.
Speaker 11: I think sir Sanders have some point here, and that
Speaker 11: if there were things we could have run on harder
Speaker 11: that have effected the minimum wage, it passes everywhere seventy percent.
Speaker 11: I mean, I know that President Biden with Foden harrishers,
Speaker 11: but we didn't put it front and center.
Speaker 4: Democrats are also blaming wokeness, whether it's trans girls playing girls' sports,
Speaker 4: or the word latin X, or generally the rise of
Speaker 4: a more dogmatic approach to identity politics that became popular
Speaker 4: on the left over the past decade. Now, I don't think,
Speaker 4: I don't think they're actually wrong to examine that dogmatism.
Speaker 4: And I wrote a widely read piece in twenty twenty
Speaker 4: two on how the phenomenon was destroying progressive institutions while
Speaker 4: a culture of fear and silence reigned, but it misses
Speaker 4: a key factor in order to fend off the rise
Speaker 4: of economic populism in the form of Bernie Sanders. In
Speaker 4: twenty sixteen, it was those same party leaders themselves who
Speaker 4: turned to identity politics, portraying themselves as the true champions
Speaker 4: of progressive values and deriding Sanders as a single issue candidate,
Speaker 4: that issue being the economy. Here's Hillary Clinton going after
Speaker 4: Bernie Sanders.
Speaker 8: Everything is about an economica here, Yeah, right, If.
Speaker 10: We broke up the big banks tomorrow and I.
Speaker 1: Will, if the systemic I will.
Speaker 5: Would that end racism?
Speaker 6: With that, end sexism, with that, end discrimination against the
Speaker 6: LGBT community.
Speaker 4: Now, suffice to say, we did not break up the
Speaker 4: big banks, and we did not end racism. Now my
Speaker 4: book The Squad goes over this chapter in painful details,
Speaker 4: so I won't blabor it here. But now that Democrats
Speaker 4: have lost again, it's the very same identity politics they
Speaker 4: are blaming.
Speaker 1: It's an impressive two step.
Speaker 4: In twenty sixteen, cynical wokeness was wielded to fend off
Speaker 4: a challenge to corporate power.
Speaker 1: Now wokeness is being.
Speaker 4: Thrown overboard to save the Democratic Party elite from a
Speaker 4: deeper critique of their failure.
Speaker 1: But there's a more fundamental issue.
Speaker 4: Democrats are ignoring, the one brought up by the first
Speaker 4: caller to Charlemagne by continuing to think of American foreign
Speaker 4: policy an American domestic policy as distinct the purview of
Speaker 4: experts in Washington, and the latter the concern of regular people,
Speaker 4: rather than thinking of those things intention Democrats are missing
Speaker 4: the way that their shift into a more war happy
Speaker 4: party is alienating them from voters and fueling the perception
Speaker 4: that they have no intention of addressing people's needs. It's
Speaker 4: apparently easy to forget that the working class drift away
Speaker 4: from Democrats that was underway in the nineteen eighties and
Speaker 4: nineteen nineties was reversed in two thousand and eight by
Speaker 4: Barack Obama, who ran as an anti war candidate against
Speaker 4: a party shredded by its spearheading of the disastrous invasion
Speaker 4: of Iraq. Eight years later, Trump bested Bush's brother and
Speaker 4: every other Republican contender this way.
Speaker 7: On Monday, George W. Bush will campaign in South Carolina
Speaker 7: for his brother. As you said tonight, and you've often said,
Speaker 7: the Iraq War and your opposition to it was a
Speaker 7: sign of your good judgment. In two thousand and eight,
Speaker 7: in an interview with Wolf Flitzer, talking about President George W.
Speaker 7: Bush's conduct for the war, you said you were surprised
Speaker 7: that Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi didn't try to impeach him.
Speaker 7: You said quote which personally I think would have been
Speaker 7: a wonderful thing, A close quote. When you were asked
Speaker 7: what you meant by that, you said, for the war.
Speaker 7: For the war, he lied. He got us into the
Speaker 7: war with lies. Do you still believe President Bush should
Speaker 7: be I should have been in peace.
Speaker 9: I have to say, as a businessman, I get along
Speaker 9: with everybody. I have business all over the world. I
Speaker 9: know so many of the people in the audience. And
Speaker 9: by the way, I'm a self funder. I don't have
Speaker 9: I have my wife and I have my son. That's
Speaker 9: all I have. I don't have girls. So let me
Speaker 9: just tell you I get along with everybody, which is
Speaker 9: my obligation to my company, to myself.
Speaker 5: Et cetera.
Speaker 9: Obviously, the war in Iraq was a big fat mistake,
Speaker 9: all right now, you can take it anyway you want,
Speaker 9: and it took it took Jeb Bush. If you remember,
Speaker 9: at the beginning of his announcement. When he announced the
Speaker 9: president took him five days. He went back, it was
Speaker 9: a mistake. It wasn't a mistake. It took him five
Speaker 9: days before his people told him what to say, and
Speaker 9: he ultimately said it was a mistake. The war in Iraq,
Speaker 9: we spent two trillion dollars, thousands of lives. We don't
Speaker 9: even have it. Iran is taking over Iraq with the
Speaker 9: second largest oil reserves in the world. Obviously it was
Speaker 9: a mistake. So George Bush made a mistake. We can
Speaker 9: make mistakes, but that one was a beauty.
Speaker 4: And he also beat Hillary Clinton by portraying himself in
Speaker 4: the same way as having opposed Bush's war.
Speaker 1: Mister Trump, you with a lot of these are judgment questions.
Speaker 9: You had supported the war in Iraq before the invasion.
Speaker 9: What makes yourse I did not support the war in Iraq?
Speaker 9: Ten That is a mainstream media nonsense put out by her.
Speaker 4: Now in liberals the America, first they read it a
Speaker 4: xenophobic and anti immigrant, but Trump's supporters scanned it as
Speaker 4: a promise not to waste money on wars and nation
Speaker 4: building while our own country crumbles. But the critique in
Speaker 4: that slogan and expressed by that Charlemagne caller makes an
Speaker 4: emotional link between issue that are treated as disparate and
Speaker 4: distinct by political operatives. The jarring price swings at the
Speaker 4: grocery store and at the pump, combined with the out
Speaker 4: of control wars and the surge of migrants at the border,
Speaker 4: combined to produce a visceral sense that our leaders in
Speaker 4: Washington were sacrificing the needs of regular people here in
Speaker 4: the United States. People's sense that the economy was being
Speaker 4: handled poorly by Biden was colored by the chaos overseas,
Speaker 4: and his rapt attention to Ukraine and Israel left little
Speaker 4: room for confidence that he cared what was going on
Speaker 4: back here. By pretending that the US could do it all,
Speaker 4: but then only delivering on the foreign wars, democrats set
Speaker 4: up ordinary people to view it as a zero sum competition.
Speaker 4: When Harris says, quote, we can do it all, and
Speaker 4: we do, she is offering a version of conventional wisdom
Speaker 4: in Washington, which loves to point out whenever people raise
Speaker 4: complaints like this, that wars are paid for out of
Speaker 4: different accounts than schools, or that much of what we're
Speaker 4: sending to Ukraine is in the form of weapons, not cash,
Speaker 4: which means we then get to make new weapons and
Speaker 4: every but he gets even richer. But even if that's true,
Speaker 4: most people don't consider themselves inside the we that's benefiting
Speaker 4: from all that. We just see money going towards war
Speaker 4: and our bills getting harder to pay. Think about how
Speaker 4: the overseas conflicts and the chaotic economy interacted.
Speaker 1: With each other over the last four years.
Speaker 6: Now.
Speaker 4: One of Biden's most courageous moves, in my opinion, as president,
Speaker 4: was going with the withdrawal from Afghanistan in the face
Speaker 4: of fierce military and media opposition. It wound up costing
Speaker 4: him badly. Thirteen US service members were killed amid the retreat,
Speaker 4: and the airwaves were filled with the images of Afghan's
Speaker 4: fatally swarming American cargo planes. It was chaos, and Biden
Speaker 4: never recovered from that. Now, that chaos, which played on repeat.
Speaker 4: Just as prices were rising and the COVID nineteen pandemic
Speaker 4: was easing, people were tentatively emerging from lockdown and crime surged, which,
Speaker 4: in many people's minds merged and was merged with and
Speaker 4: was blamed on the George Floyd protests from the year before,
Speaker 4: many of which had turned into riots. Now kids who'd
Speaker 4: spent more than a year out of school never recovered. Then,
Speaker 4: in February twenty twenty two, Russia invaded Ukraine. Biden assiduously
Speaker 4: resisted a negotiated end to the conflict. In June, the
Speaker 4: conservative justice on the Supreme Court undid generations of precedent,
Speaker 4: overturned Roe v.
Speaker 1: Wade.
Speaker 4: The war in Ukraine raged on. As the body count
Speaker 4: piled up and the US shoveled ever greater sums of
Speaker 4: money into the trenches. Wheat and energy prices fluctuated wildly.
Speaker 4: Prices eventually began rising at a slightly lower rate, but
Speaker 4: they rose nevertheless, and the response of the Fed to
Speaker 4: continuously raise interest rates and keep them high arguably contributed
Speaker 4: to the problem, raising the price of mortgages and rent.
Speaker 4: The migration serge at the border became too great to ignore.
Speaker 4: That too, had a foreign policy link. US foreign policy
Speaker 4: in general has produced an unstable hemisphere with heavy out
Speaker 4: migration flows to the United States. During his time in office,
Speaker 4: Biden titaned sanctions and penalties on Cuba and Venezuela, and
Speaker 4: intervened to fuel chaos in Haiti. The Three countries combined
Speaker 4: sent the bulk of migrants at key moments. Then came
Speaker 4: October seventh and the horrifying images it produced. Weeks of
Speaker 4: a relentless and indiscriminate Israeli response turned into months. Bidens
Speaker 4: and his administration took a public posture that the US
Speaker 4: wanted to cease fire, yet the attack only ratcheted up
Speaker 4: as the death count reached shocking numbers, and US weapons
Speaker 4: and financing went.
Speaker 1: Up with it.
Speaker 4: Biden's stated goal was to contain the conflict, but it
Speaker 4: periodically broke out into regional war. Shipping was effectively halted,
Speaker 4: and in October Netanyahoo, with the aim of defeating Biden,
Speaker 4: launched assaults on Lebanon and Iran, which launched their own
Speaker 4: assaults in retaliation, and the Ukraine War, with its ever
Speaker 4: present threat of nuclear catastrophe grinds on.
Speaker 1: Does that sound like we can do it all?
Speaker 11: So?
Speaker 4: I think if Emily, as you think back over the
Speaker 4: last four years, you can imagine why when confronted with
Speaker 4: Trump versus the status quo, for like, well, what I
Speaker 4: liked about Trump was that wages were growing up, prices
Speaker 4: were pretty flat, and we weren't We didn't have a
Speaker 4: whole bunch of wars going on. What I didn't like
Speaker 4: about Trump was that he's an unpredictable madman, kind of
Speaker 4: a lunatic personally. But if your alternative is all of
Speaker 4: these wars breaking out around the world and no certainty
Speaker 4: about prices and the economy here at home, immigration and immigration,
Speaker 4: then you're like, you know what, I'll take that in hindsight.
Speaker 4: So I think the good news for Democrats is that
Speaker 4: if they want to make a comeback, just stop doing
Speaker 4: all the wars. That's a big that's a big step
Speaker 4: in the right direction.
Speaker 6: And I mean even just changing like I wouldn't. I
Speaker 6: hope they don't do this because I think it's cynical,
Speaker 6: But it's so telling that they don't even frame the
Speaker 6: wars in a way that it is a pitch to
Speaker 6: the American people outside of Washington and New York. I
Speaker 6: think Joe Rogan recently was replaying this clip of Tucker
Speaker 6: Carlson confronting Mike Pence when Pence was running for president
Speaker 6: in the primary about how he sees all of this
Speaker 6: decay in America and wants to keep sending weapons and
Speaker 6: resources to Ukraine that could be spent on Americans, and
Speaker 6: Pence says almost exactly what you said at the last part. There,
Speaker 6: of course the opposite. He says, we can do it both.
Speaker 6: Anyone who tells you we can't do it both, we
Speaker 6: can't be the policeman of the world and take care
Speaker 6: of our own people has a very small minded vision
Speaker 6: of the United States. But it's not a small minded
Speaker 6: vision of the United States. It's exactly what's happening. And
Speaker 6: Democrats are incapable of responding to what Trump taps into,
Speaker 6: which is telling people exactly that, saying we are not
Speaker 6: doing it both right now. We cannot have it all
Speaker 6: right now until we start cracking down on this adventurism
Speaker 6: abroad and until we start treating immigration. It does have
Speaker 6: economic implications for people. We can debate what they are,
Speaker 6: but Democrats don't even talk about it, don't even talk
Speaker 6: about it in economic framing unless it's to say it's
Speaker 6: making us all better.
Speaker 1: All right, Well that'll do it for us today.
Speaker 6: That was so interesting.
Speaker 1: Show your Thanksgiving. Thank you. I'm glad you liked him.
Speaker 6: And you'll be in Vermont.
Speaker 4: I think we're gonna go to Vermont for Thanksgiving and
Speaker 4: maybe do a little skiing. If it snows hopefully.
Speaker 8: WHOA.
Speaker 6: All right, that'll be a lot of fun. I'll be
Speaker 6: back here with Crystal. Sackers headed off to Japan on
Speaker 6: this honeymoon, so Crystal and I will be holding on
Speaker 6: to four oral shows tomorrow and Monday and Tuesday.
Speaker 1: Wonderful. All right, see you guys soon.