EZRA LEVANT ｜ How the Abraham Accords are transforming the Middle East
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
189.59268
Summary
Rebel News' Ezra LeVant catches up with Joel Pollack, senior editor-at-large of Breitbart, who accompanied us on our trip to the Middle East. They talk about the Abraham Accords, the Arab-Israeli peace deal, and the growing Jewish community in the United Arab Emirates.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Hello, my friends. I am in Dubai, and we are wrapping up our Abraham Accords journey,
00:00:05.780
a journalistic mission, and we took more than 40 Rebel News superfans. It's been great,
00:00:10.900
so I'm going to have a good catch-up with Joel Pollack, Senior Editor-at-Large of Breitbart.com,
00:00:15.640
who accompanied us. Hey, by the way, it's such a visual feast, some of what we're doing. I'd like
00:00:20.640
you to get the video version of this podcast. Just go to rebelnewsplus.com, click subscribe.
00:00:26.240
It's eight bucks a month. I know that might not be a lot of dough to you, but it really adds up for us.
00:00:32.000
It's how we pay the bills. So please go to rebelnewsplus.com and click subscribe. All right,
00:00:38.220
Chabibi, come to Dubai. It's September 12th, and this is the Ezra LeVant Show.
00:01:08.220
Oh, hi there. I am in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. It is sweltering, almost 40 degrees,
00:01:19.540
even though it's nighttime. It gets hotter during the day. This is a city that wouldn't really exist
00:01:23.980
without air conditioning. Well, I suppose it has existed for centuries, but not the skyscrapers.
00:01:29.060
We're standing in front of a mosque, which is beautiful and historic, but it is not the norm
00:01:36.400
in this city. The norm are the, well, for example, the tallest building in the world,
00:01:40.820
the Burj Khalifa. It is like Las Vegas on steroids. It's an incredible city, and it's really coming
00:01:47.500
into its own in the last 15 years. I don't know if it's true today, but there was a point in time
00:01:52.680
when literally most of the construction cranes in the world that we're operating were in the United
00:02:00.140
Arab Emirates. That's how explosive the growth is in this country. I use the word explosive in other
00:02:06.160
parts of the Middle East. When you say explosive, you think of terrorism and war, not the United
00:02:10.660
Arab Emirates. And here's another thing. I'm a Jew, as is my friend Joel Pollack, senior editor at
00:02:16.440
large of Breitbart.com, and he's more identifiable as a Jew because he wears the Jewish yarmulke or
00:02:21.520
skullcap. And yet here we are in a Muslim Arab dictatorship. Let's be honest, it's a benign
00:02:27.160
dictatorship, but a dictatorship nonetheless. And yet Jews and other minorities, including
00:02:31.900
Christians, can walk freely here. And even much more, there are Jewish synagogues and Christian
00:02:38.020
churches here, free of persecution that you find in other places in the Middle East, and even in
00:02:42.960
places like China. We are here because this is, we're one week into our Rebel News trip, where we've
00:02:51.680
taken 40 of our most enthusiastic viewers, and we're going through Israel, and then we just landed
00:02:56.960
today in the UAE to look at the Abraham Accords. That is the peace treaty negotiated by Donald
00:03:03.400
Trump. I have to say, were it any other man or any other political party, he would have received the
00:03:09.000
Nobel Prize for solving the insoluble problem, bringing peace to Jews and Arabs in the Middle
00:03:14.520
East, something that I myself thought was impossible and intractable. I'm going to bring Joel into this
00:03:20.460
conversation in a moment. I promise you I will. But I just want to say that it was personally
00:03:25.160
moving when you fly on the Jewish airline El Al from Tel Aviv over Saudi Arabia, landing in the
00:03:33.360
United Arab Emirates. You go into the immigration line, or you're greeted by an Emirati wearing the
00:03:38.900
keffiyeh, and he stamps your passport and says, welcome to Dubai. It's an incredible feeling of,
00:03:45.480
I'll say it, I don't want to sound emotionally weepy, but it's a feeling of healing and of salving a
00:03:52.300
wound. Because I have to say, growing up, I thought that Arab countries and Muslim people
00:03:57.560
were permanent, perpetual, ancient, and non-negotiable permanent foes of the Jews. And yet
00:04:09.180
there is a warm, genuine peace that is given life to all the time. At the airport in Tel Aviv, I saw
00:04:16.920
four different flights to the United Arab Emirates, as many as to any other place. It's quite
00:04:22.540
incredible. All right, I've been talking for long enough, and you have my views on things, but I'm
00:04:27.740
excited that for the past week, Joel Pollack of Breitbart has been accompanying us. On a few occasions,
00:04:34.060
he's gone on little excursions himself, while our group in the main has gone other places. But pretty much
00:04:40.220
he's been tracking our journey. And I want to bring him into the conversation and really do an extended
00:04:44.680
conversation with him about our trip, because I think he follows the Israel and Middle East beat
00:04:51.120
more closely than I do. And I think he has a different temperament than me. I'm more enthusiastic.
00:04:57.180
I either cheer something or condemn it. I think Joel analyzes things perhaps a little bit more
00:05:03.260
neutrally than I do, which is why I think his work is so successful. I think he's very trustworthy and
00:05:09.280
reliable. So let me, without further ado, bring in my friend Joel Pollack. Joel, great to see you.
00:05:13.980
It's a little bit hot. I appreciate you stepping out of the air conditioning. I just wanted that
00:05:17.840
gorgeous mosque in the background. Well, it's just two Jewish guys talking in the steam room out here.
00:05:22.660
That's what's happening. You know, it's funny. I sent you a note today saying, are we meeting up
00:05:27.120
with you in Abu Dhabi or Dubai? That's a conversation that two Jews would never in a million years have
00:05:32.500
had until the Abraham Accords. And I'm standing in front of this mosque. And in the past, I would have
00:05:38.040
felt trepidation. I would have said, is it a mosque where terrorism is being fomented and incubated?
00:05:46.780
And instead of those feelings of fear and loathing, I have the opposite. I feel
00:05:53.420
a friendship which was offered by Dubai to the Jewish people. And I look at that now,
00:06:01.040
I guess with fresh eyes that do not have any condemnation. I look at the beautiful and ornate
00:06:07.040
history and design of it. And I think with true belief that it may well be possible for the
00:06:14.520
Abrahamic religions, Jews, Christians, and Muslims to actually coexist in a meaningful friendship. I
00:06:20.020
don't know if I'm sounding, you know, pie in the sky, but I think that the United Arab Emirates
00:06:25.720
is sort of proof that it can happen. Well, the proof is around us. And as you pointed out,
00:06:30.960
we're here. Nobody's bothering us. We're here on a street corner, two Jewish guys who
00:06:34.760
sat, maybe you sat as I did in my fourth grade Hebrew class looking at a map of the Middle East,
00:06:41.000
and there were all these forbidden countries. And some of these names on a map seemed like places
00:06:46.560
I would never be able to see or visit. And yet here we are. And I actually didn't come to Dubai
00:06:51.500
for many years because until a few years ago and until the Abraham Accords, they would not allow
00:06:56.580
Israelis into the country. And you even had a problem if you had an Israeli stamp in your passport.
00:07:00.680
That was a discriminatory policy that basically discriminated against Jews, Israelis more generally,
00:07:05.540
but particularly against Jews. And they got into some trouble over it. There were some tennis
00:07:10.080
tournaments. I believe there was a chess tournament once where there was an Israeli competitor who wasn't
00:07:14.960
able to compete because of the fact they were from Israel. And all that changed.
00:07:20.580
And it changed because the leadership of the United Arab Emirates decided to make it change.
00:07:26.280
And that's in a sense what Jews and particularly Israelis have said for decades, that there will
00:07:33.040
be peace when Arab leaders decide that the future is more important than the past. And that's happened
00:07:39.880
here. And it's not just happened with regard to Israel. It's not just a change with regard to
00:07:43.880
Jews or Christians. The leadership of UAE, if you look around us, we don't see any oil drilling
00:07:50.200
platforms or anything like that. And obviously, this is still very much an oil-based economy and
00:07:54.600
fossil fuel resources are very important. But they looked at the bigger picture, the long term,
00:07:59.260
and they said, look, we can't survive on the energy industry alone. We want to become an international
00:08:04.440
trade hub. We want to become a travel destination. We want to become a luxury tourist hub. And the
00:08:10.960
leadership of the United Arab Emirates took their own destiny into their own hands and they remade their
00:08:15.120
country. And in so doing, they freed themselves basically to remake their relationships with the
00:08:20.120
rest of the region. So that's what has happened with Israel. And the flights to and fro between
00:08:26.740
Tel Aviv and Dubai now are almost like the commute from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Israelis love Dubai. They
00:08:33.320
love the shopping. They love the nightlife. And there's a lot for Emiratis to discover in Israel as well.
00:08:38.400
It's slightly cooler. So the weather's a little bit better. But there are also so many other things
00:08:43.820
to do in Israel. Obviously, they're the holy sites. But Tel Aviv has this unique nightlife and unique
00:08:49.020
outdoor culture, art, connection to Europe, connection to many different things. And Jewish culture is
00:08:54.700
interesting to Muslims. I was in Abu Dhabi earlier today to visit the Abrahamic Family Mosque, which is a
00:08:59.660
new development that includes a mosque, a synagogue, and a church. The Abrahamic Family House,
00:09:07.220
excuse me, is what it's called. And it was absolutely incredible. The architecture and the design of
00:09:13.280
these buildings was amazing. But more than that, as you pointed out, the welcome that I received when
00:09:16.960
I went there from the Emiratis and from others who are working there who believe that we can get back
00:09:22.980
to the common Abrahamic roots of all of our faiths and get to the tradition, which is right there in
00:09:30.640
Genesis in the Old Testament, of Abraham welcoming guests. And that's become part of Arab tradition
00:09:37.060
in the Middle East. It has been for centuries. It's also part of Jewish culture. And extending that
00:09:42.700
welcome is something that we've experienced already just in the few hours we've been here.
00:09:46.960
And I've been very impressed. So I'm very glad that all of this happened. And as you said, it does
00:09:51.360
resolve a lot of feelings, I think, that you have as a Jewish person, because we care so much about
00:09:56.800
the future of the Jewish people, which is understandable, given that we were nearly wiped
00:10:00.960
out within living memory. And therefore, we care a lot about Israel's survival. And all of that seems
00:10:07.420
up in the air, as strong as Israel is, and as powerful as it has become, and as successful as
00:10:12.260
it has become, it still seems vulnerable when there's a state of war with the rest of the region.
00:10:18.220
And peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan have helped, but especially this very warm peace
00:10:22.860
with the United Arab Emirates, which is not just a peace among leaders, but really a peace between
00:10:26.480
people. It's really just changed the outlook. And we're going to see things happen in the future
00:10:32.060
that we can't believe any more than we could believe that two Jews would be standing here in
00:10:35.400
front of a mosque in the middle of nighttime traffic in Dubai talking about the world.
00:10:39.340
We are going to see things happen coming out of that relationship that I think will benefit
00:10:44.560
You raised a good point. Israel has had peace treaties in the past with Egypt, a very major breakthrough in
00:10:50.720
the late seventies with Jordan, but it hasn't been a warm peace. It hasn't been, we've been waiting
00:10:56.660
for you. Welcome Habibi, come set up a synagogue. You know, I, I saw Bahrain, it's a small Gulf
00:11:03.780
country. I don't remember it offhand, but, but there was some Bahraini leader who was holding a Jewish
00:11:09.480
Torah or something like actually like something that if you were to try that in, let's say the West Bank
00:11:15.800
or Gaza Strip, the local PLO thugs would, would beat you up or kill you. And, and it's a sign that
00:11:22.560
this isn't just some paper deal like that. That is a remarkably warm gesture.
00:11:29.800
You just reminded me of something. When we went to Bethlehem, when we were in Israel, we crossed
00:11:35.260
through the checkpoint and we're, we were into a Palestinian authority controlled area. And the driver
00:11:40.700
of our bus asked me if I had a hat. I don't know if you saw this happen, but he asked me if I had a hat
00:11:45.860
and I do have a baseball hat for the sun usually. And he told me to put it on so that my kippah,
00:11:52.960
my yarmulke would be covered. He didn't want people in Bethlehem to see that I was Jewish.
00:11:59.140
And for me to come from Israel and we had just come from the town of Hebron where we had seen
00:12:03.240
the cave of the patriarchs, the tomb of the patriarchs, this very Jewish experience. And yes,
00:12:08.700
that tomb is holy to Muslims and Christians as well. But, you know, to have that spiritual
00:12:14.100
enmeshment in Jewish faith, and then literally a few meters away, cross over into a town where even
00:12:22.540
though Bethlehem is known as the town of peace, I'm getting told by the bus driver, I have to cover up
00:12:27.240
my religious identity and I'm in the Holy Land. And it was so jarring. So that's obviously the worst
00:12:33.740
case scenario where people have to hide their faith to interact with one another. But in Dubai,
00:12:38.940
again, because the leadership has taken a very different approach and they've emphasized tolerance
00:12:43.940
and they've actually built institutions that emphasize tolerance, it wasn't always that way.
00:12:48.420
15 years ago, there was a huge controversy over a donation that Harvard received from one of the
00:12:54.560
members, I believe, of the Emirati royal family who had very staunchly anti-Israel views. And I think
00:12:59.380
Harvard returned that donation. There were some controversies over some of the anti-Israel and
00:13:04.820
sometimes anti-Semitic positions of some of the leaders in this country, but they changed.
00:13:08.940
That change happened. And once you have a leadership that's willing to change, as the Palestinians are
00:13:14.420
not, but as the Emiratis clearly were, then you can suddenly open up all these relationships and you
00:13:19.620
can build a better foundation for peace and cooperation.
00:13:22.380
You know, I think part of it is, do you want a deal to succeed? And Trump is essentially a dealmaker.
00:13:27.080
I mean, if you can handle real estate commerce in Manhattan, perhaps one of the most intensely
00:13:34.080
competitive, cutthroat places in the world, maybe you can handle Jews, Arabs, Muslims, Christians,
00:13:41.220
Palestinians. Like really, the man, like the art of the deal, he actually does know that. It's not
00:13:47.300
just a slogan or a catchphrase. The guy knows how to solve problems. I think the first thing is to have
00:13:53.540
a problem-solving mindset. You've got a point, but let me just throw you to a contrasting video.
00:13:58.820
Here is John Kerry, who was the Secretary of State, who basically said there will be no
00:14:05.680
peace deal. There will not be a peace deal if the Palestinians are dealt with first. And anyone who
00:14:11.660
thinks that Israel can make peace with an Arab or Muslim country is, and listen to how emphatic he was,
00:14:19.120
John Kerry, who's never had any real-life experience. He's been a political hack his entire life.
00:14:25.320
I can't think of anything successful he's done. He gave the whole show away to Iran in an atrocious
00:14:30.820
deal. He said, no, no, it's impossible. But he's never done a deal before, at least not one that
00:14:36.920
benefits America or the West. Here's John Kerry saying there will never be peace with the Arabs
00:14:41.240
until there's peace with the Palestinians. Take a look.
00:14:43.360
There will be no separate peace between Israel and the Arab world. I want to make that very clear
00:14:49.660
to all of you. I've heard several prominent politicians in Israel sometimes saying,
00:14:56.660
well, the Arab world's in a different place now. We just have to reach out to them, and
00:15:00.460
we can work some things with the Arab world, and we'll deal with the Palestinians. No, no,
00:15:05.280
no, no, and no. I can tell you that reaffirmed even in the last week as I have talked to leaders
00:15:12.780
of the Arab community. There will be no advance and separate peace with the Arab world without
00:15:19.120
the Palestinian process and Palestinian peace. Everybody needs to understand that.
00:15:25.020
Well, he obviously didn't want there to be peace. Trump wanted a deal because I think he believes in
00:15:30.760
peace actually, but he also wanted to be the guy to solve the once-in-a-century problem.
00:15:36.960
When you look at Trump's career and how he made his billions, it's right there in his book,
00:15:41.800
The Art of the Deal. He had a pattern in New York real estate, which was that he would look at
00:15:48.500
projects other people had started and then abandoned for whatever reason. There was one project,
00:15:54.440
the Hudson Yards, I think, where there was an Argentinian investor, a very wealthy guy who had a vision
00:15:59.240
for what this piece of property could be, but he didn't get the zoning regulations lined up ahead
00:16:04.700
of time, and so he had to abandon it. Trump swooped in and bought him out at a very low price and then
00:16:11.120
built this development and created massive amounts of wealth and value. And that is the pattern
00:16:16.980
throughout Trump's real estate career, that he finds distressed properties, takes over the project
00:16:23.040
at a very low price, and then creates something valuable. So the John Kerry perspective was essentially
00:16:28.640
the retail perspective, if you want to put it that way, of Middle East peace, that the only peace
00:16:33.840
that's acceptable is the best possible peace, which is one that includes Israel and the Palestinians
00:16:37.480
and builds out from there. And there was this idea that unless you get that, you don't have anything.
00:16:42.700
And Kerry really wanted to discourage anybody from thinking about it any differently.
00:16:46.660
Trump came into office and tried it that way for a little while. He met with Mahmoud Abbas,
00:16:50.940
the anti-Semitic leader of the Palestinian Authority, and then he realized he wasn't getting anywhere.
00:16:55.320
So he said, okay, let's try something else. And essentially, he took over the peace process
00:16:58.900
as a distressed property. And he said, let's see if we can do this at a discount. Let's go to other
00:17:05.020
people. If you allow one company to monopolize a market, you're going to pay a higher price. So
00:17:10.360
the Palestinians were monopolizing peace. Trump said, I'm going to a competitor. I'm going to go
00:17:14.260
talk to these other regimes. Let me talk to the Saudis. Let me talk to the Emiratis. Let me talk to the
00:17:17.700
Bahrainis. Let me talk to whoever else is willing to make peace. It turned out there was a huge interest
00:17:21.380
in doing so because of their self-interest. They want commercial ties to the West. They
00:17:25.460
want commercial ties to Israel. And so was it the peace that everyone hopes for still? A
00:17:31.800
peace between Israelis and Palestinians? No. But it provides a foundation for that future
00:17:35.620
peace because it shows that there's nothing intrinsic to these cultures that means that
00:17:39.960
they have to be at war. And again, if you visit the Abrahamic family house in Abu Dhabi, you see
00:17:46.700
an incredible respect for all three of the main monotheistic faiths. There's nothing in Islam- in
00:17:52.540
fact, Islam historically has been very tolerant towards Jews and Christians, both of whom are
00:17:56.540
described as people of the book. There have also been wars and so forth and lots of conflict, but
00:18:01.660
there are ideas in there that one can focus on and bring to the fore that encourage tolerance. And
00:18:07.660
so Trump basically said, I'm going to take this distressed property and I'm going to turn it into
00:18:11.260
something valuable. And it's been immensely valuable. How do you get the Palestinians on board? Well,
00:18:15.500
I think it became clear in recent days when Mahmoud Abbas made another crazy anti-Semitic statement,
00:18:20.300
basically blaming the Jews for the Holocaust. It's clear that he's in his 80s and he's not helping.
00:18:25.740
And the Palestinian leadership is basically of that generation, the old Soviet-trained generation,
00:18:30.540
the old anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda generation. There are younger Palestinians who have had to
00:18:36.300
navigate the terrible world that their parents left them. And we talked to some of them when we were
00:18:40.860
in Israel. We talked to Arab Israelis. Those are Arabs or Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship,
00:18:46.060
and they've had to move between these two worlds. But they are young people trying to build a better
00:18:49.740
future for themselves. We talked to them at the factory in Ariel, people who actually moved from
00:18:53.980
Dubai back to the West Bank to live in what we are told by the left is a horrible occupation. But for
00:19:00.540
them, it was actually a place of economic potential as long as they could work with Israeli companies.
00:19:05.020
There are young Palestinians who want a better life. And so I think once this present generation
00:19:09.020
of Palestinian leaders leaves the stage, there will be an opening and hopefully an opening like
00:19:13.100
the one we're experiencing in Dubai. Yeah, I want to ask you one last question because
00:19:18.060
I think that Bahrain and UAE and Morocco and Sudan, obviously they won Donald Trump's favor. And I'm sure
00:19:26.220
they got certain concessions directly from Trump in America. One of those rewards being just face time
00:19:31.420
with the most powerful man in the world. And I'm sure that there were bilateral things that each of
00:19:36.620
those countries wanted from America. I'm sure of it. But I think other than just some horse trading or log
00:19:43.180
rolling, as they might call it, I think it was genuinely a peace for peace deal. As in, we're going to
00:19:50.860
offer you peace. What are you offering us in return? Also peace. Whereas the other peace deals that
00:19:56.620
Israel has had, for example, with Egypt, it was land for peace. Okay, well, did you want peace at
00:20:02.220
all? Or are you just going to say you want peace until we give you the Sinai back? And I think with
00:20:06.460
the Palestinians, it has never been peace for peace. It was, what can we get by offering peace? Let's get
00:20:12.700
the most we can through negotiations, get that. And then that's the new starting point for the next
00:20:18.700
intifada. So I think that there's a qualitative difference between, I mean, of course,
00:20:24.380
the UAE wants things from Trump and America and all these other countries do. But I think what
00:20:29.740
you've described and what we've both observed is that actually peace is the payoff.
00:20:36.700
Peace is the payoff. And look, there were things that were offered to the UAE and Bahrain and these
00:20:42.380
other countries. Interestingly, President Biden pulled back on some of those commitments.
00:20:48.140
Give me an example of what those were. There was a weapons system. I think it was the F-35
00:20:52.940
new fighter jet that the United States is using across the different branches of the armed forces.
00:20:58.380
I think we were going to go into a deal. And that had to be worked out with Israel as well,
00:21:01.660
because Israel has a strategic understanding with the United States that the Arab countries
00:21:05.980
won't be allowed to have weapons equivalent to what Israel has, because Israel has no strategic
00:21:11.340
depth whatsoever. It's a very tiny country. And so they want that qualitative military edge and
00:21:15.020
equipment that they buy from the United States. But Israel basically said, we're going to make an
00:21:19.020
exception. We'll let the UAE get these weapons systems as well. For the sake of peace with the
00:21:23.180
UAE, we're not going to go to war with the UAE. And it worked out. But the Biden administration
00:21:27.020
started reneging on some of these things. And it's interesting that since Joe Biden has taken office,
00:21:31.100
there hasn't been one new country added to the Abraham Accords. When Bahrain and the United Arab
00:21:36.140
Emirates signed on, very quickly you had Morocco, you had Sudan, you had Kosovo, you had other countries
00:21:41.260
jumping in when Trump was president. Biden has not been as interested in creating these separate
00:21:48.220
peace agreements. He has reneged on some of the goodwill and some of the promises that Trump made
00:21:53.500
to other countries. And only for domestic policy reasons. Democrats, unfortunately, in the United
00:21:58.540
States today, don't really have a foreign policy. They have a domestic policy, which is that anyone who
00:22:02.460
sides with Trump, any foreign leader, any foreign country is now an enemy of the United States.
00:22:07.980
So the UAE had a really tough time with the Biden administration in the early months because the
00:22:12.060
Biden administration treated them almost as a hostile country because they had done business
00:22:16.540
with Trump. So Biden has closed down a lot of the avenues and a lot of the horse trading that might
00:22:22.940
have helped some other countries develop peace agreements. There's now talk of a Saudi peace deal
00:22:28.460
that the Biden administration is trying to negotiate. And they are bringing in the Palestinians,
00:22:33.100
apparently at the insistence of the Saudis. But I don't know that that's going to go
00:22:37.100
anywhere because the Palestinians tend to veto these agreements. I think everybody would welcome
00:22:40.780
it if there were an Israeli-Saudi peace deal. But the progress has been so slow, whereas it was almost
00:22:47.340
every week under the Trump administration, you were seeing a new country added to this peace arrangement.
00:22:52.220
I think when America is strong and when America follows through on commitments to our allies,
00:22:57.180
then more people want to be part of the peace club. When we hang back and when we say that
00:23:03.660
we don't want peace for peace, but we are willing to sacrifice all kinds of other things, we create
00:23:09.660
an incentive, as you point out, to delay a final peace agreement because people want to see what
00:23:13.420
else they can get from us. So I think Biden, for all his talk about being a diplomacy president,
00:23:20.060
he gave a speech in his first week or so in office where he said, diplomacy is back, diplomacy is back.
00:23:24.700
We've seen no diplomacy. And in fact, this can take us further afield. We've seen
00:23:29.660
the Biden administration stoking conflict in some places rather than diplomacy. So look,
00:23:36.060
the reason a peace for peace deal is more effective in the long run is it is based on mutual respect.
00:23:40.780
And that's what's happened with Israel and the UAE. Also, I got to give credit to the
00:23:45.900
Emirati government. Again, they did something very clever, which was when Netanyahu, who also did
00:23:51.260
something clever, when Netanyahu was talking about annexing Judea and Samaria, annexing the West Bank,
00:23:56.860
the Emiratis said, don't do that. We still want there to be the potential for a Palestinian state
00:24:02.700
one day. And if you back away from that pledge to annex this territory, we might have a peace deal.
00:24:09.180
So both sides, in a sense, created this trade-off where Netanyahu agreed to maintain the status quo.
00:24:14.620
It didn't cost him anything. All he did was kind of create this asset of an annexed West Bank and then
00:24:20.860
give that to the Emiratis. And they said, okay, well, now we can talk about peace. And so
00:24:25.580
there was creative thinking on both sides about how to make it easier for the other to move into
00:24:31.420
Well, Joel, it's great to have you on this trip. And I know that the dozens of Rebel News
00:24:37.820
superfans who were here have enjoyed hearing your talks on the bus. And I mean, you obviously have a
00:24:44.700
very deep knowledge of these things. And it's been fun to hang out with you. And I appreciate you taking
00:24:49.980
so much time away from work. We used to do these trips more frequently. This is actually the second
00:24:56.060
Israel trip we've done before. We have had cruises. We have events. We're getting back into these
00:25:02.300
events. I find them very interesting. They do take up time away from the office. But I think that you
00:25:06.940
learn so much. I think by being in the United Emirates, by being, for example, we had a tour of the
00:25:13.580
security fence with Colonel Danny Tirza, the retired colonel who built the things. You learn
00:25:19.420
more in one hour on the scene, a thousand little colorful details than you could by watching a TV
00:25:25.660
report or reading a book, just being there. And I think that the dozens of people on our trip
00:25:31.740
certainly feel that way. They are now going back to Canada, the US, UK, Australia. We have peoples from
00:25:37.100
all those countries. And I think in their own way, they are lay experts on the subject matter. And
00:25:42.940
some of that expertise comes from you. So thanks very much for joining us. And hopefully we'll have
00:25:46.940
you in the future. I don't want to pin you down right now, but I'd love it if you came
00:25:50.540
on future trips with us. Great to see you. You too. It's been amazing being here. And just to add to
00:25:54.540
what you just said, this isn't the kind of trip where you just go from one hotel to another. This has been
00:25:59.020
a real trip of getting out there, which is what journalism is all about. So it has allowed
00:26:02.780
the participants who are viewers and readers of Rebel News. It's allowed them to experience some
00:26:09.820
of what it's like to be a journalist and to be out in the field. And so I think it's been
00:26:12.860
valuable. And I've learned from them as well. They're very interesting and fun people.
00:26:16.140
Yeah, that's for sure. Well, there you have it. Joel Pollack, friend of ours, senior editor at large
00:26:20.300
of Breitbart.com, regular guest of the Ezra Levant Show, where we talked to him from his LA base. But
00:26:27.420
here we are in Dubai and it's only 37 degrees now. So it's cooled off tremendously.
00:26:33.100
Great to see you. And I'll be back in Toronto on Friday, looking forward to getting back to Canada,
00:26:39.020
getting back to work. I will not be in the city for long though, because I've got to cover Arthur
00:26:44.140
Pawlowski's sentencing hearing on Monday. I'm in court on Tuesday in Calgary, the Calgary police service
00:26:50.300
demanding production of our files. Derek Reimer in trial in Calgary the next day for violating the
00:26:56.860
bubble zone around the drag queen story hour. And then the next day I'm on trial again in Toronto
00:27:03.580
for my book, The Libranos. I tell you, I'm spending more time in court than I am in journalism. And of
00:27:07.980
course, Tamara Leach on trial all next week. That's rebel news for you. We tell the other side of the
00:27:13.580
story. That's our motto. But you know what we do every once in a while. It's not enough just to be
00:27:17.660
voyeurs. We have to jump in there and try and change the world, fix it a little bit. And next
00:27:23.740
week will be a mighty week for that. So I'm just catching my breath now. I've got some miles to put
00:27:28.780
on before I sleep. Thanks for joining us. Until next time, from all of us at Rebel News here in Dubai
00:27:34.780
and around the world, to you at home, good night and keep fighting for freedom.